Sometimes we get slammed with life tragedy, trauma, or grief so difficult and so prolonged that we finally fall to our knees in surrender to, “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
Whatever it is that we have always done to get by, to overcome, or maybe even to bypass, just isn’t working anymore. In whatever way we have seen ourselves, be it as a strong person, a “weird” person, a bad or good person, or any other of the many ways we can see ourselves, we are lost now, in a fog so impenetrable that we seem unavailable to ourselves.
Sorrow is thick in its oppressive shroud. Anger is rage that cannot seem to attain any level of justice or fairness. Anxiety has now become fear so overwhelming that we seek and fail to find a cave deep enough to hide in. Emotions are not just unregulated now; they are self-defining. We have lost any sense of self in a miasma of raw emotion.
But from a Transpersonal or Jungian perspective, the psyche is always leaning toward wholeness. What could this possibly mean in the face of such a seeming irretrievable sense of self? Well, first, it means that there is still a “you” in there. And that “you” is your psyche—a deeper, less logical but more ordered power that is constantly, over a lifetime, working to unite consciousness with unconsciousness.
“Yeah, blah, blah, blah,” you say. “Who cares about some deep thing inside of me, when I cannot even seem to find my feet?” Well, what if you knew that not being able to find your feet is part of the very process necessary to finding your wings? What if you knew that being lost to any sense of self was the very pathway necessary to finding your Self (with a capital S)?
First, let’s clarify that we are not saying anything like that cliché, “everything happens for a reason.” Reason is quite unreasonable when it comes to these horrific life challenges. We are not looking for logic or reason. We are looking for “you,” the very essence of who you are. The very thing you seem to have lost.
That “you” has lived out of certain lifelong patterns; certain coping mechanisms—whether effective or ineffective; certain ways in which you might define what you have previously called a personality. It’s who you think you are.
Some think of this as, “that’s just how I was raised.” Others think of it as, “I’m a self-made person.” Still others think of it as, “that’s just who I am.” Of course, there are many other ways of thinking about who we are. That’s just a few very obvious examples.
But what if there were more to living than just those patterns and mechanisms? If that were so, if you really believed that it was possible to find a deeper sense of self than you have previously known, would it be worth it to consciously begin that journey?
If so, that journey might begin with learning how to sit with those raw emotions in a way that doesn’t even try to name them. Just sit with them. Don’t try to convince them to go away. Don’t try to understand them. Don’t try to evaluate them as, in the common vernacular, “positive” or “negative” emotions.
And maybe you can’t take in the whole thing at once. Probably not. But just the hem of the garment. Just sit with it for thirty seconds, one minute, or five minutes. Then, rather than you naming it, it begins to name itself. It begins to tell you things you didn’t know. It begins to clarify things you thought you knew. It begins to reveal other suppressed or even repressed emotions. And as you do that, you are beginning to find a thread of that garment that is “you.” A thread that will carry you to a deeper place within, where, even as you are sitting with really difficult emotions, you also find a sense of peace.
That peace is not meant to make the emotions “go away.” It is meant to sit beside them, validating their actuality. And each validation has a way of carrying you even deeper.
When we refer to sitting here, we are not talking about physically sitting down, though some may choose to do it that way, maybe a few times a day. What we mean is that we are allowing the emotion to be heard, and to give us its authentic message from the Self to the self.
But we live in a “feel-good” society. Where the goal is to “feel better.” Where we are told, both overtly and covertly, that our sense of self will be attained by “overcoming,” by “facing,” and “dealing with” it. And so, it seems that sitting with our emotions without naming or judging them is counterintuitive.
Of course, there is more to finding a Self than just allowing ourselves to really be with our emotions. But as we do that, and as we continue to do that, we begin to also, very naturally, even organically, do other work, such as shadow work, dream analysis, and creative work.
When we get to that awful place in which we now have to fall to our knees and say or scream, “I don’t even know who I am anymore,” we have reached a place that the psyche can use to help us find a deeper Self. One that, though it may experience tragedy, trauma, and grief yet again, will continue to go deeper into a greater and greater sense of Self.
Bottom line: If we have to go through this stuff, we might as well get something real out of it.
