Spirituality: 3 Stages of the Psychological Transition to Meaning

In short: Psychology heals schemas and restores functioning, but it stops at fundamental questions: the meaning of life, mortality, unconditional love, transcendence. Third-wave cognitive behavioral therapies (ACT, mindfulness, schema therapy) constitute a natural transition toward these existential and spiritual questions, without resolving them. This transition, often felt at the end of successful therapy, does not signal failure but success: the patient reaches the threshold where psychology ceases to be relevant. Confusing the two domains leads to cynicism or shallow spiritualism. The key is to recognize that psychology creates the conditions for accessing meaning, without ever providing it directly, and that one must never skip psychic work to take refuge in the spiritual.

In short: Psychology heals mental schemas and restores functioning: it resolves traumas, cognitive distortions, emotional dysregulation. But it stops where existential questions begin: the meaning of life, death, unconditional love, transcendence. Third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy (ACT, mindfulness, schema therapy) naturally prepares this transition by creating the psychological conditions for its search. It must never be circumvented: skipping the therapeutic stage to shift into spiritualism without psychic work leads to cynicism or relapse. The clinical transition consists of recognizing when psychology has fulfilled its role and guiding the patient toward questions it cannot structurally resolve, without confusing psychological healing with the search for meaning.

Synthesis of the Marquet series. After traveling through the progression Person → Psyche → Spirituality with Denis Marquet (daring to desire, parenthood, loving, joy), one central question remains for many patients at the end of therapy: where does psychology end, where does the spiritual begin — and why can we not be content with one without the other? This article offers a clinical synthesis of the transition between the two, drawing on my experience as a CBT psychopractitioner, contemporary scientific literature, and several pioneering figures (Jung, Frankl, Marquet, Welwood).

Introduction: the limit felt at the end of therapy

In many successful treatments, a particular moment appears. The patient has worked through their schemas, restructured their cognitions, retrained their behaviors. The symptoms — anxiety, ruminations, repeated relationship conflicts — have receded. Objectively, they are doing better. And yet, something remains: a fundamental question, an existential anxiety that finds no resolution in classical psychological tools. "Doctor, my life is working better, but what do I do with it?"

This phrase, I have heard it hundreds of times. It does not signal a therapy failure. It signals a success: the one that brought the patient to the threshold where psychology ceases to be the relevant tool. This threshold — which I will call here the transition — is a clinical moment as important as the initial diagnosis. Poorly handled, it leads to cynicism ("therapy was useless"), to relapse, or to flight into consumer spiritualism. Well-handled, it opens onto a new maturity: that of a being who no longer demands of psychology what it cannot give.

Understanding this transition requires clarifying four things: (1) what psychology truly RESOLVES, (2) where it stops structurally, (3) what the spiritual ADDRESSES that is not its purview, (4) the golden rules to avoid confusing the two domains — and notably to never skip the psychological stage under the pretext of spirituality.

1. What psychology resolves (truly)

Let us begin by doing justice to contemporary clinical psychology. Cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT), Young's schema therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), EMDR, internal family systems therapy (IFS) — this family of tools, evaluated by thousands of controlled studies, resolves major issues:

• Early maladaptive schemas (Young): abandonment, mistrust/abuse, defectiveness, subjugation, unrelenting standards. Identified and reworked, they cease to impose their interpretive grid on adult life. For a complete mapping, see Young's 18 schemas and their emotional wounds.
• Cognitive distortions: negative automatic thoughts, arbitrary inferences, catastrophizing. Cognitive restructuring makes them visible and weakens them.
• Avoidance behaviors: phobias, social avoidance, procrastination. Graded exposure reorganizes neural associations.
• Emotional dysregulation: impulsivity, affective flooding, dissociation. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and mindfulness restore mastery.
• Traumas: through EMDR, prolonged exposure, narrative reprocessing. Traumatic memories cease to parasitize the present.

This field of action is immense. The person leaves therapy with a restored functioning: they sleep, work, love, decide, self-regulate. In the 2010s, CBT became the most recommended therapy by the French High Authority of Health and the British NICE for the majority of mental disorders. It is justified: it works. But it works within a precise perimeter. It restores functioning. It does not claim, as a science, to answer the question of why function. And it is this distinction that prepares the transition.

2. Where psychology stops — and why

Scientific psychology, by construction, is a science of functioning. It observes the regularities of the psyche, the dysfunctions, the levers of change. It measures, compares, validates. This rigor is its strength. It is also its limit.

Four questions are structurally outside its field:

a) The question of meaning

No anxiety scale, no exposure protocol, no Young schema answers the question: what does my life mean? Psychology can identify that a person suffers from an "existential void" (Frankl's category), measure its severity, identify its correlates (depression, addictions). It cannot provide the content of meaning. It can create the conditions for its search. The content comes from elsewhere.

b) The question of death

No therapy abolishes mortality. It can help diminish death anxiety (imaginal exposure, ACT acceptance, work on vulnerability schemas). It cannot give death a meaning. Irvin Yalom, existential psychiatrist, recognizes this explicitly: existential psychotherapy touches on a non-soluble human given that each person must inhabit in their own way.

c) The question of unconditional love

Attachment theories (Bowlby, Ainsworth) magnificently describe how love is structured according to early parental responses, how it can be secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized. They allow attachment wounds to be healed. But no attachment theory explains why love EXISTS. Why a parent attaches to a child who does not "serve" any direct reproductive purpose. Why mourning a loved one can be more painful than imagining one's own death. There is in love an excess that exceeds the adaptive framework.

d) The question of ontological solitude

Even surrounded, loved, socially integrated, the human being remains alone at the moment of dying, at the moment of choosing, at the moment of suffering. This solitude is not a depressive symptom to be treated. It is a human condition to be inhabited. Psychotherapy can help tolerate it. It does not dissolve it.

These four questions — meaning, death, love, ontological solitude — are what Irvin Yalom calls the ultimate givens of existence. They do not arise from a dysfunction to be corrected. They arise from an encounter to be made. And this is precisely the space that the spiritual claims.

3. The three waves of CBT: the threshold takes shape

The evolution of CBT over the past 60 years tells a story: that of a scientific psychology which, while remaining rigorous, has gradually recognized the limits mentioned above, and has equipped itself with tools increasingly close to a wisdom of life. This is why we speak of three waves.

First wave: behaviorism (1950-1970)

Skinner, Wolpe, Eysenck. Only observable behavior is studied. Emotions and thoughts are useless "black boxes". Therapy is based on conditioning (systematic desensitization, reinforcement). Powerful for phobias and certain anxiety disorders, this wave does not touch the question of meaning: it even philosophically rejects it.

Second wave: the cognitive revolution (1970-1990)

Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis. Thoughts (cognitions) matter. They mediate between events and emotions. Cognitive restructuring becomes the central tool. Cognitive therapy wins the scientific war against psychoanalysis in the field of anxiety and depression. But it remains focused on correction: correcting a false cognition, validating an accurate cognition. The question "what is a good life?" remains out of the picture.

Third wave: acceptance and values (1990-today)

Here the decisive turning point occurs. Steven Hayes (ACT), Marsha Linehan (DBT), Jeffrey Young (Schema Therapy), Jon Kabat-Zinn (MBSR), Paul Gilbert (Compassion-Focused Therapy) — all, independently, reintroduce into scientific therapy notions previously thought to be strictly spiritual:

• Acceptance of what cannot be changed (ACT).
• Mindfulness non-judgmental of the present moment (MBSR, MBCT).
• Life values as an existential compass (ACT).
• Compassion toward self and others as a lever for change (CFT).
• The "witness" or "self" state that observes without merging with its thoughts (Schema Therapy, IFS).

These notions were not borrowed from spirituality out of naivety: they were scientifically reworked, operationalized, measured. ACT, for example, is not a watered-down version of Buddhism. It is a therapy based on relational frame theory in behavior analysis, whose convergence with certain contemplative intuitions is a result, not a postulate. The notable fact: at the end of this evolution, scientific psychology has admitted, de facto, that it needed notions that only spiritual tradition had previously thematized. This is not an ideological rapprochement. It is an empirical convergence: the same levers produce the same effects, called by one name or another.

The third wave is therefore already, structurally, a transition. It does not replace the spiritual. It recognizes its clinical fertility without importing its metaphysics. And in doing so, it prepares the patient for what may come after — or alongside — therapy.

4. What the spiritual addresses — and what is not the psychological purview

The spiritual, in its non-religious sense, designates what is at stake in the encounter with the four questions identified above: meaning, death, love, solitude. It is not about adhering to a dogma. It is about encountering these questions and answering them, each person in their own way — with or without instituted religion.

What the spiritual brings

• A perspective of meaning that is not reducible to immediate utility. Happiness as performance gives way to a form of fullness, which can be called joy (like Marquet), eudaimonia (Aristotle), nirvana (secular Buddhism), or simply "deep feeling of being in the right place".
• A non-anxious relationship to finitude. Not the negation of death, but its integrated recognition — which makes present life more intense rather than greyer.
• A form of love that does not depend on reciprocity. Love as a free act, not as a contract. In clinical literature, this love corresponds to what Fromm called productive love and what positive psychology has measured as self-transcendence.
• A feeling of belonging to something larger than oneself. This experience — mystical, contemplative, or simply aesthetic in the face of natural sublime — is correlated in empirical literature with lasting gains in psychological well-being (studies by Emmons, Keltner, Haidt).

What the spiritual must NOT claim to do

It is crucial, for honest clinical work, to also state the inverse limits. The spiritual:

• Does not heal an untreated trauma. No meditative practice alone dissolves a complex post-traumatic stress disorder. It can make it more tolerable, it can prepare therapeutic work, but it does not substitute for it.
• Does not replace work on schemas. Attachment wounds, defectiveness schemas, toxic relational patterns do not disappear by the grace of a silent retreat. They were learned relationally — they must be unlearned relationally.
• Does not resolve clinical symptoms. Severe depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, disabling phobia require precise clinical tools. Prayer, meditation, or contemplation can be adjuncts. Not treatments.

Confusing these levels means producing what John Welwood (1983) called the spiritual bypass — the attempt to use spiritual practices or beliefs to avoid painful psychological work. It is one of the most frequent errors observed in "personal development" circles.

5. The golden rule: never spiritual before doing the psychological

This rule is not moral, it is clinical. It is observed empirically in patients who attempt the inverse leap, and its non-respect produces recognizable clinical pictures.

Signs of spiritual bypass

• Minimization of difficult emotions in the name of a "higher consciousness". The patient, hurt, angry, jealous, repeats to themselves that they "should rise above all this" — and locks themselves into a surface mastery that has not deciphered the emotional message.
• Disembodiment. The body, desire, ambition, combativeness are perceived as "inferior". Earthly life becomes a mere passage to endure. Eventually: depression, loss of vital impulse, sometimes somatization.
• Spiritual judgment on self and others. Those who suffer "haven't done the work". Those who are angry "have a way to go". This judgment is itself, paradoxically, a narcissistic defense against one's own unprocessed pain.
• Addictive quest for retreats and practices. The patient strings together workshops, courses, shamanic journeys, without ever letting anchoring take hold in ordinary life. It is a structured escape.
• Inability to set limits. "Everything is love, everything is one" becomes a pretext for not naming abuse, conflict, betrayal. Spirituality becomes an alibi for relational complacency.

Each of these signs has a psychodynamic clinical equivalent (defenses: idealization, splitting, projection, intellectualization). The illness is not the spiritual. It is the use of the spiritual as a defense.

What the rule implies

The practical rule is therefore simple: the transition to the spiritual is ethically valid only after substantial psychological work. "Substantial" does not mean "finished" — no psychological work ever is. It means: major schemas have been identified and partially reworked, the most massive defense mechanisms have been seen, difficult emotions have been traversed (not just "observed") at least once until their organic resolution.

From this foundation — and not before — the opening to the spiritual becomes enriching, integrating, non-defensive. Before this foundation, it is regularly an escape.

6. Marquet as an exemplary figure of the transition

In contemporary French-language literature, Denis Marquet illustrates with rare clarity how a single author can think both registers without confusing them. A philosopher and doctor of sciences, he articulates an explicit progression in his work:

• Daring to Desire Everything (article 1) — the Person — listening to one's deep desires as signals of values. A quasi-strictly clinical stage. Joins ACT.
• Our Children Are Wonders (article 2) — the Relational Psyche — moving from parental authority to presence. Stage of secure attachment, intergenerational transmission. Joins affective neuroscience and benevolent parenthood.
• Loving to Infinity (article 3) — the threshold — distinguishing fusion-love, contract-love, and conscious-love. Pivot point where psychology touches the spiritual without tipping over.
• Joy (article 4) — Spirituality — joy as a state of being beneath the circumstances. Here, Marquet explicitly assumes the transition.

What makes Marquet instructive for a clinician is that he never skips stages. He does not write Joy before Daring to Desire. He respects the order: one can only love to infinity after having dared to desire. One can only access joy if one has known how to love. The transition is progressive, cumulative, respectful of psychological work.

This is exactly the clinical golden rule seen above. And that is why his series can serve, for many patients, as a roadmap of the transition.

7. The therapist's role in this transition

Should one, as a CBT psychopractitioner, lead the patient to the spiritual? The clear answer is no. But there are right ways to accompany this transition when it announces itself.

Do not lead

The therapist is not a spiritual guide, much less a guru. Their proper competence is psychological. Any attempt to lead a patient toward a specific worldview (Buddhist, Christian, Stoic, or militant atheist) is a transgression of the frame. It uses therapeutic transference in service of a personal conviction. It is ethically disqualifying.

Recognize signals

On the other hand, the therapist can and must know how to spot the signals of a transition beginning in the patient: question of meaning that returns, therapeutic plateau with diminution of symptoms but persistence of an underlying anxiety, spontaneous interest in mindfulness, meditation, philosophical reading, etc. Naming this threshold, without pushing, is part of the clinical work.

Guide without prescribing

The therapist can suggest resources respectful of the patient's autonomy: secular mindfulness practice (MBSR), philosophical readings (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca — see notably our psychological portrait of Marcus Aurelius), authors like Marquet, Frankl, Yalom. Never a tradition at the expense of another. Never engagement in a group or school. Autonomy remains central.

Remain anchored oneself

A therapist accompanying this transition must have personally worked on it themselves. Not necessarily in an instituted spiritual tradition, but having reflected on questions of meaning, death, love, solitude. Without this personal work, the therapist risks either the bypass (projecting onto the patient their own spiritual flight), or narrow rationalism (mechanically referring every existential question to a "symptom to be treated").

8. A clinic of the threshold: four typical situations

In my practice, four configurations regularly return at the moment of transition.

Situation 1: the patient who "has everything they want". Professional success, stable couple, healthy children, solid finances. And a feeling of emptiness that grows. Classical CBT tools no longer have a hold — there is no major schema to rework, no salient dysfunctional cognition. This is the princeps case of the transition. Therapy becomes existential dialogue, exploration of deep values, questioning of the relationship to time and finitude. Situation 2: the patient in incomplete mourning. Loss of a child, of a young spouse, of a parent in a traumatic way. The mourning work in the classical sense (Bowlby, Worden) has been correctly conducted. The person is functioning. And a question remains: how to live knowing. Here psychology has done its work; the rest belongs to a spiritual register (in the secular or religious sense) that each must find for themselves. Situation 3: the mid-life patient. Between 40 and 55 years old, a shift occurs in many. The structuring projects of the first half of life (building a career, founding a family) are accomplished or lost. The question of what comes after arises. Jung spoke of individuation of the second half of life: a reorientation that structurally touches on the spiritual, regardless of beliefs. The ACT or schema therapist working with patients in this period must know that the work will, naturally, extend beyond the symptomatic field. Situation 4: the patient out of a limit-experience. Serious illness, accident, resolved major depressive episode. The experience has broken ordinary self-evidence. The person can no longer live "as before". They seek a framework of meaning. The therapist is not there to provide it — but to accompany the search without short-circuiting it through a premature return to "normality".

In all four cases, the same rule holds: the psychological tool has accomplished its work; refusing the transition now would be a therapeutic rigidity. And simultaneously: leading the patient to a particular spirituality would be an ethical transgression. The in-between is narrow, and it is there that the clinician's maturity plays out.

Conclusion: psychology as a threshold, not a terminus

Clinical psychology is an admirable discipline. It has allowed millions of people to traverse sufferings that, a century ago, would have been experienced as fate. It has operationalized the idea that an important part of human suffering is modifiable — through knowledge, work, speech, exposure, acceptance.

But it is not everything. And recognizing it as a threshold, not a terminus, is probably the most important maturity that a patient — and a therapist — can attain.

The third wave of CBT (ACT, mindfulness, schema therapy, compassion-focused therapy) is already, structurally, a recognition of this threshold. It integrates into scientific clinical practice notions (acceptance, values, presence, compassion) that have traversed the history of human wisdoms. It does so without proselytism, without metaphysics, but with clinical honesty: these notions work, and it would be dogmatic to reject them on the grounds that they resemble what spiritual traditions have always said.

For a patient, the practical lesson holds in three points:

Do not skip psychological work. Go see a therapist when suffering sets in, do the tools, traverse the emotions, understand the schemas. Without this foundation, any subsequent transition will be compromised.

Recognize the threshold when it comes. The feeling that "therapy has done its work but something remains" is not a failure. It is a success that calls for a prolongation of another nature.

Freely choose your path of transition. Secular meditation, philosophy, humanitarian engagement, artistic practice, religious tradition if it speaks — or nothing formalized, simply a more conscious way of inhabiting daily life. The essential is that it be a free choice based on real psychological work, and not a flight from it.

Denis Marquet writes somewhere that joy is not a reward for spiritual work — it is the witness that one has ceased to fight against life. One could say the same thing about the transition from psychology to spirituality: it is not an escalation, a progress, a promotion. It is the recognition, at a given moment in an individual trajectory, that the psychological tool has done what it could do, and that it is time to inhabit otherwise the human question.

For personalized support around these questions — end of therapy, existential transition, mid-life work, or simply clarification of the relationship between psychological work and the search for meaning — video sessions are open. The framework remains that of a CBT psychopractitioner: rigorous, respectful of autonomy, non-proselytizing. It is precisely this framework that allows the transition, when it comes, to be honest.

Gildas Garrec, CBT Psychopractitioner in Nantes

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Read also

• Daring to Desire Everything: Denis Marquet and CBT of Desire Acceptance
• Our Children Are Wonders: Marquet, Parental CBT and the Bond that Transforms
• Loving to Infinity: Denis Marquet, CBT and Love as a Path of Transformation
• Joy: Denis Marquet, CBT and the Spiritual Dimension of Well-being
• Young's 18 Schemas and Emotional Wounds

FAQ

What are the characteristic signs of spirituality not to ignore?

Understand the link between psychology and spirituality. The most typical manifestations are recognized in repetitive behaviors and recurring emotional patterns that impact quality of life and interpersonal relationships.

How does CBT explain the mechanisms of spirituality?

CBT analyzes this phenomenon through automatic thoughts, fundamental beliefs and avoidance behaviors that maintain the problem. This approach helps identify the cognitive-behavioral vicious circles and propose targeted intervention points.

When should one consult a professional for spirituality?

A consultation is needed when spirituality significantly impacts your quality of life, relationships or professional performance for more than two weeks. A CBT psychopractitioner can propose an adapted protocol, generally between 8 and 20 sessions depending on the intensity of the difficulties.

Recommended reading:

• Schema Therapy — Jeffrey Young
• ACT: Theory and Application — Steven Hayes
• Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
• The Art of Loving — Erich Fromm
• Loving to Infinity — Denis Marquet