I have been thinking lately about the ways we come to understand our lives through the slow unfolding of experience. Phenomenology has a word for this. It invites us to pay attention to the world as it is lived, not as it is categorized or diagnosed. It asks us to notice how meaning rises up from the inside of a moment, shaped by memory, identity, culture, and the quiet stories we tell ourselves.
My mom and I were walking around St. Vinnies recently and she told me about a dream she had recently about a huge tree with these branches that stretched so everywhere. She said the tree felt alive in a way that was almost overwhelming, like it was breathing with her. She didn’t know what it meant exactly, but she felt compelled to tell me about this dream after I mentioned my theory in social work class where I’ve been exploring the application of using phenomenology and postmodernism as frameworks for clinical assessment. It became a kind of symbol that she asked me to weave into my assignment somehow and it got me thinking about symbolic interactionism and the importance of meaning-making through our stories. She never tried to interpret it in this strict way but I could tell that she was on to something. She just let it be what it was (that seems to be mom’s way), simply a moment in her dream that mattered to her.
Phenomenology would say that the meaning of the tree is not in the tree itself, but in her experience of it. The branches reached outward because something in her life needed that sense of expansion? Or maybe they reached outward because she simply felt small at the time? Or maybe the dream was just a dream. The point is not to decide which explanation is correct. The point is to honor the meaning that emerges when a person reflects on their own experience.
In clinical social work, this matters. When someone sits with me and shares a story, I’m not there to decode it like a puzzle – although I sure do try. I’m learning how to be there to witness how they make sense of their world. A humanistic approach reminds me that people are not problems to be solved. They are meaning‑makers. They are interpreters of their own lives. They are, in a way, philosophers of the everyday, at least I like to see them that way.
Sometimes a client will describe something that seems small on the surface and if I listen closely, I might hear the beginning of a pattern, or catch something that stands out as something to follow up on with curiosity. But the meaning is theirs, not mine. My role is to create a space where they can explore it without fear of being corrected or misunderstood. I think this is one of the most beautiful parts of the work, even if it is also one of the most delicate and difficult.
When I think about my mom;s dream now, I realize that the tree has become part of my own landscape of meaning. Not because I inherited the dream, but because I inherited the idea that our inner worlds are worth paying attention to. The images we carry, even the strange or confusing ones, can tell us something about who we are becoming. Maybe that is why phenomenology feels so natural to me. It trusts that people know something important about their own lives, even when they don’t have the words for it yet.
In practice, this means slowing down. It means asking questions that open rather than close. It means being curious about how someone experiences their world, not just what happened in it. And it means remembering that meaning is not a fixed object. It growsand shifts and branches out. Much like the tree in my mom’s dream. Sometimes it reaches toward something less obvious, something just beyond our immediate understanding.
I think we are all doing this, in our own ways. We’re reaching, interpreting, and making sense of things that don’t always make sense. And maybe that is enough. Maybe the work of being human is not to find the one true meaning, but to notice the meanings that arise in us, and to let them guide us toward connection, toward understanding, toward each other.
