Using Synchronicity for Emotional Growth
Synchronicities in therapy can stimulate healing and growth.
Posted September 26, 2025 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Synchronicities can be dismissed as quirky experiences, an anecdote to trot out at a dinner party, but they can also be profoundly transformative and healing. It’s for this reason that synchronicity-informed psychotherapy informs my clinical practice. As a refresher , synchronicities are events in the external world that coincide in a meaningful way with the internal world of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories, and dreams , but not due to causal reasons.
Depth psychotherapy informed by synchronicity provides a wider and potentially less judgmental lens for understanding and conceptualizing what patients bring to therapy by considering how synchronicities may influence their life . In other words, synchronicity is woven into the session and considered meaningful not only for the message it may offer, but also for the actions it may inspire.
Seeing the Signs: Emotional Growth via Meaningful Coincidences
For instance, a continuous theme for a patient of mine was her chronic medical condition and her struggle to find a romantic partner. She feared her medical condition made her undesirable, and each failed relationship elicited anxiety and grief . She grieved the loss of her boyfriend(s) but also the imagined future where she was a beloved wife, medical condition and all. She cycled through hope and despair with each new romance, desperately wanting the relationship to work and feeling crushed when it didn’t. She became increasingly convinced that her condition drove each partner away, which intensified her internalized self-hatred and bodily disdain, making her withdraw from potential partners, medical care, and a full life.
As a spiritual woman raised Catholic, she was inspired to conduct a ceremony that included St. Raphael, the patron saint of both healing and finding a spouse. During a time that preceded online shopping, she sought a St. Raphael medallion and thought it would be easy to locate within her Catholic community. But it wasn’t. She searched and searched, and this mirrored her experience of finding a partner and living with her condition: It was riddled with obstacles.
Feeling defeated, she held the ceremony anyway, without the medallion. Shortly after, she booked a spa weekend for a mental reset. Three days before, she met a man who interested her, but she couldn’t tell if the feelings were mutual, which rekindled her preoccupation about this issue. My patient was anxious and aggravated when all she wanted to do was relax. Upon checking into her room at the spa, she was awestruck and comforted to discover the main painting in her specific room was of Archangel Raphael (aka, St. Raphael).
Moments like these can serve as meaningful coincidences that foster self-awareness, emotional healing, deeper connections between ourselves and the world around us, and, for some, spiritual growth. And, indeed, discovering the painting in her room felt meaningful to my patient, but it stirred foreign feelings and behaviors, and she felt stuck trying to put the pieces together. She feared I would imagine she was having delusional or psychotic thinking and initially dismissed the experience. I encouraged her to stay with it. Within the safety of our relationship and work together, we explored a possible narrative. I invited her to learn more about St. Raphael and to let her imagination roam freely about this experience and her associations with it.
I drew on my knowledge of her development, associations, fantasies , transference , personality , therapeutic needs, and the symbolic meaning of St. Raphael to help her arrange these puzzle pieces. Together, we explored her feelings about the synchronicity and what it evoked in her. “Healing!” she exclaimed. “Like St. Raphael is saying, healing is possible. Make room for it. It is right here in my bedroom—in front of my eyes—if only I will look. He’s accompanying me and telling me to partner with him and follow a path of healing.”
Identifying Old Patterns and Paths of Healing
I asked my patient what “following a path of healing” might look like. She discussed that it involved taking productive actions, and not recoiling and withdrawing from both medical and psychological care as she often did. It meant opening up to intimate relationships. She mused on how St. Raphael guides physicians and reflected on her patterns of noncompliance with her physicians. As in her intimate relationships, she imagined her medical team also felt negatively about her due to her condition, and she would withdraw from effective treatments that improved her quality of life. Exploring this internal narrative together became part of her process of emotional growth and underscored the importance of self-awareness and empathy as essential facets of healing and resilience . Reflection on her experience with the painting also highlighted the importance of recognizing small signs of progress and moments of hope, even when future outcomes remain uncertain, as these too are essential for emotional growth.
My patient’s moment of synchronicity with the St. Raphael painting came to mean that she needed to own, but not become overly identified with, her medical condition and her need for healing. It affirmed she needn’t be excessively worried about what would happen with the man she met and his feelings about her condition, if she could approach him and her condition with sustained consciousness and commitment to her continued healing. As she began to identify how her responses to disappointment and fear shaped her experiences, recognizing the recurring patterns in her behavior and emotional reactions became a milestone in her emotional development. We explored what approaching dating from a more relaxed place would look like, which shifted her fantasies about her body and attractiveness , as well as her concrete dating and health behaviors.
Synchronicities open our minds to think flexibly and symbolically. There’s space for something new to emerge. But also, synchronicities develop our capacity to tolerate, and even appreciate, the all-too-frequent irrationalities and paradoxes in life. My patient ended up marrying the man she met three days before going to this spa with the St. Raphael painting! To this day, she marvels about this synchronicity because people pray to St. Raphael for spouses and healing (of note, her medical condition is vastly improved).
At the time of our work, synchronicities were meaningless, strange coincidences that were inconsequential. In the depths of her anxiety and despair, this particular synchronicity broke through her defenses and got her attention . And, although she was a lifelong Catholic who believed in prayer, she had found synchronicities at odds with her belief system. Experiencing this synchronicity initiated her into learning to relate to synchronicities through our synchronicity-informed psychotherapy. She came to think of synchronicities as prayers in action.
Her appreciation for the power of synchronicities certainly didn’t erase her medical anxieties nor previous heartbreaking grief from failed relationships. Instead, it fostered wonder and curiosity, invited questions, and slowed down her tendency to judge and obsess over things she could not logically understand. She could now receive the wonder and joy of this union—it was the new image she was painting—and this lived side-by-side with her medical anxieties and grief from losing previous relationships. Developing the ability to respond thoughtfully to emotional triggers, rather than acting reactively, became a sign of her growing emotional maturity and resilience.
Synchronicity, for this patient, opened the door and midwifed her to embrace healing, hope, joy, and peace. It kindled her openness to feeling and imagining a broader range of emotions and ideas that improved her health. And her gratitude , in turn, for these synchronistic moments helped her heal past emotional wounds and cultivated her ongoing emotional and spiritual growth.
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Helen Marlo, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Psychology at Notre Dame de Namur University, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a certified psychoanalyst (C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco).
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.