By the time I reached my teens, the hypocrisy and fear I felt were too much. I stopped going to church altogether. Those years became a spiritual wasteland. But in my twenties, two unexpected gifts entered my life: Jungian psychology and teachings of spiritual masters from India. Both reawakened the longing planted in my Catholic roots. Both helped me begin to heal trauma and rebuild a spiritual center. Still, something was missing. In my thirties, I became a psychotherapist. The deeper I went into both psychology and spirituality, the more I sensed an absence at the core. That’s when I discovered the Christian mystics—Brother Lawrence, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, and The Cloud of Unknowing. Their voices felt like living water. Slowly, the fragments began to come together. My path has been, in many ways, a prodigal one—wandering far, only to find myself being led home. I never set out to write a book about that journey. But one day I began dictating thoughts into my phone, unsure why. Day after day, the words kept coming until it became clear: this book wanted to be written. Carl Jung’s concept of the “God-image” opened the door. I came to see that mending a distorted God-image is the very foundation of spiritual and psychological renewal. Other kinds of work are needed to strengthen the ego and help us care for the wounded parts of ourselves; but it is the restoration of the God-image that reaches into the deepest root of our being. This book, "Healing the God Image," is the fruit of that discovery and an invitation to experience a God not of fear, but of love.