The Inquiry Department
A new column invites readers to bring their deepest questions out of hiding
There are questions we learn to carry alone.
The quiet, aching ones that surface in the night, or in the wake of a loss, or at the edge of a life transition we didn’t ask for. Questions about meaning, grief, identity, connection, faith, fear, purpose, and the strange ache of being human. Most of us are never taught what to do with these questions—only how to hide them politely.
That’s where I come in.
As a trauma and grief therapist, writer, and long-time student of both psychology and mysticism, I have spent years studying the places where clinical understanding and spiritual instinct meet. I call this work depth work, and it is from this devotion that I’ve become, in essence, the Depth Responder—someone who helps you explore the inner terrain you’ve been navigating without a map.
In this column and in the coming podcast “The Self Inquiry Sessions— Real, Here, Now”, you are invited to bring the questions you’ve been afraid to voice out loud. The ones you scribble in journals, whisper to no one, or tuck behind your daily functioning. Think of this space as a blend of your therapist, the ideal parenting guidance we didn’t receive, the insight of a spiritual teacher who isn’t asking for you to follow their ways—just asking for your sincerity.
Here, I will hold your questions with the reverence they deserve. Not with diagnoses or dogma, but with contemplation, poetic clarity, and grounded psychological insight. Together, we will explore how consciousness widens, how wounds become wisdom, how grief becomes initiation, and how spiritual longing becomes direction rather than despair.
Send me whatever your soul is wrestling with.
Your curiosities, your heartbreak, your confusions, your awakenings, your thresholds.
No one should have to drown alone in their existential questions.
Welcome to a place where the deep end is finally safe to enter.
— Paula Santos, LP
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