See the Old Self-Destructive Patterns
Don’t you have to ask from time to time, “Why does my life keep working out this way?” or “Why are my relationships always ending?” or “Why don’t I feel good about my life when I am trying so hard?” If a person hasn’t asked these or similar questions, then he or she remains blissfully unconscious and may deserve what keeps happening. Jung once observed the only unforgivable sin is to choose to remain unconscious.
When we finally admit the obvious to ourselves, namely, that we are the only consistent player in that long-running soap opera we call our life, we begin to become conscious and possibly accountable. One of the best ways to get a sense of what is happening to us, through us, what is occurring in the unconscious, is to identify our patterns. We don’t rise every day expecting that we will do the same dumb things, the same self-destructive things we have been doing for a long time, but chances are if we are still conscious at all at the end of the day, we will have done precisely that, repeated our self-destructive patterns. But why?
Recall from our earlier discussions that from infancy to the present moment, we “read” the world around us for messages about the world and about ourselves. This phenomenological reading is, of course, contingent on so many variables: the varieties of the world presented to us, our specific cultural and personal contexts, the models around us, and elements unique to our genetics, character, and disposition. Thus, the identical external event can be internalized quite differently, messaged differently, from person to person. But those readings become our maps of the world, our marching orders, our understandings of self and world, even our contracts with the world. They are, of course, highly variable, ideocentric, prejudicial. They serve as the lenses through which we see the world, interpret it, and get our instructions. Thus, we become servants to, even prisoners of, our maps, our instructions, our marching orders.
For one person the core instruction seems to say: “Hide out; don’t be seen. You don’t matter. Don’t expose yourself to risk.” That core message, repeated daily, leads to a fugitive life, a life of diminished possibilities and continuous disappointments. For another person, the core message seems to be: “Step in; assume responsibility. You are charged with fixing the other, putting out the fire.” Such a person often later sees his or her life has been in service to the troubles, the pathologies, unfinished business of others, rather than to his or her own life. For still another, the core message is translated as: “Become a star; be outstanding. You have to make up for the unhappy life of your father or your mother. Your life doesn’t matter. What matters is how you rescue them from sadness, from loss, from bitterness.”
The organism that we are is quite conservative in its operations. It prefers predictability to the unplanned, the known over the unknown, and the familiar over the foreign. Sometimes something bursts inside of us, wanting to live, wanting to become in the world, even as it is opposed by other agencies that overrule, veto, and distract, until the impulse passes, the desire is drained. Clinging to the present, with all its predictable ends, is very seductive. One of the reasons for this self-sabotage arises from free-floating anxieties that whisper in our ear such sweet nothings as: “You are not up for this. What makes you think you can do that? It will lead to isolation and loss of the love and understanding of others. You will be all alone. You will fail, be ridiculous.” We all know those voices. If we don’t hear them consciously, we may be sure that they are still being whispered to us through the unconscious.
I recall a client who was going through a very difficult dark night of the soul. He had lived a very productive life, when judged by the expectations of his tribe. He had been faithful to the values of his family and religious training, yet he was pulled underground by a near-suicidal depression. If he had done all the right things, if he did what he was supposed to, why did he suffer this Job-like hour, this grievous appointment with darkness? In the middle of this night-sea journey, he had a dream in which he was descending into the depths of a body of water. He could breathe underwater and be conscious of the descent. Images of his history flashed by him. He then saw at the bottom of the sea a skull image that said, “And then came the great turning away.” And then he awoke and puzzled over this strange, vatic message. What turning away? What was the meaning of all that?
As we wrestled with this dream, what came to him was an early vocational calling, but at a key moment in his early years, he suddenly shifted his career and chose a safer path. Looking back on that turn in his life, he asked himself why he had made that choice, and the only answer that made any sense was that he was responding to fear when he demurred, stepping away from his calling toward a more conventional channel. What fear? What was that about? In the end, the best we could make conscious was that the fear had to do with the need for acceptance, for consensual support, and the debilitating fear that he was not up to the challenge that his vocation would have demanded of him. And so, without “choosing,” he chose, as we all tend to choose on any given day. He chose the safer path, the lesser journey, until finally his psyche registered its autonomous dismay and weighed in with its perspective. In doing “the right thing,” he had done the wrong thing, and so do we all on many occasions. We choose the strongly ingrained, we follow the paradigms, and we stick to the known, even when the known leads only to ennui, boredom, depression, anesthetizing treatments, or chronic divertissement.
Without the autonomy of the unconscious, the larger part of our being, without its registrations, evaluations, and critiques, we would never know what was right for us. Hardly anyone deliberately sets out on a false course, a life-denying aversion to the spirit’s summons, yet many have done this, over and over.
Recently, a woman whom I have seen for two years acknowledged her chagrin. She still feels like a little girl, following the script expected of her, even as she has a position of high responsibility in a midsize corporation. Why does she still feel like a little girl, despite her significant responsibilities in the work world? Something inside her, and in many of us, still clings, still feels provisional. We presume if we follow our scripts, do the right thing, and do what we are supposed to do, we will be led to a place of well-being. We believe we will experience reward, satisfaction, and truly be a big person, as we presume so many others to be. Being a big person, however, means more than walking around in a big body and playing big roles in life. In the face of such compelling, mostly unconscious, messages, we recall that most commonly we serve them, play them out, and they in turn create those pernicious patterns. Or we run from them, spend our lives seeking to compensate — “anything but like my mother” or “I won’t repeat my father’s life” — but we remain defined still by that “other” we wish not to be, an other that exercises an inordinate shaping influence in our lives. Or, thirdly, we seek to “fix” the problem, alter the tapes, employ anesthetizing anodynes of various kinds, live lives of distracting frenzy, or fix the problems in others (a common stratagem of those in the helping professions).
The first adulthood is still largely governed by the power of the messages, the models we observed and internalized, and the instructions we receive from family of origin, institutional religion, cultural contexts, and the like. Can we say such an adulthood, however sincere, however “successful” in its fulfillment of these messages, is a real adulthood or the journey we are really supposed to live?
The second adulthood comes only when a person, for whatever reason, is called to accounts — a sinking marriage, an affective storm, a moment of terrifying emptiness at three in the morning. Yet this hammer blow begins the possibility of a turn to a second, different kind of adulthood. A second adulthood is not a simple transformation into a different person, a metanoia from which the river flows in a quite different direction. The old order, the familiar scripts, hang on. They have enormous staying power, which is why simple behavioral changes and cognitive shifts are so seldom lasting. What one finds is that the perduring power of the old cannot be underestimated, for it is a de facto reflex whose purpose is protective, even if its outcome is constrictive. It takes an enormous amount of suffering, resolve, or life-changing circumstances for one to awaken sufficiently to take on these tyrannical powers of repetitive adaptation and service to anxiety management. If there is such a thing as the soul, then it is the soul that ultimately tips the balance toward change, toward a more authentic stance in the world. Jung observed that a neurosis is always found in the flight from authentic suffering. Naturally, no one wants to suffer, but Jung’s observation suggests that there is a distinction between authentic and inauthentic suffering.
History is replete with examples of people like us who have gone through this death and rebirth process. I have experienced it and witnessed it in dozens upon dozens of analysands through the last four decades. There is no going forward without a death of some kind: a death of who we thought we were and were supposed to be; a death of a map of the world we thought worthy of our trust and investment; a death of expectations that by choosing rightly we could avoid suffering, experience the love and approval of those around us, and achieve a sense of peace, satisfaction, arrival home. But life has other plans it seems; indeed, our own souls have other plans. And there is a terrible price to pay for ignoring or fleeing those intimations and summons to depth.
Recognizing the self-destructive patterns in our lives, those places where we sabotage ourselves through avoidance, adaptation to the collective, or flight into the trivial, the conventional, the acceptable, is only the beginning. Those psychic reflexes, those complexes, will be with us the rest of our lives. So often I have heard people complain that their dreams keep coming up with the same motifs, the same images, and so I have had to respond, “Would you prefer someone else’s dreams, someone else’s problems?” Or people will berate themselves for not getting past a certain problem or feel that their work has been in vain when an old issue rears its ugly head in an unexpected way. These moments are inevitable. I called them “hauntings” in a recent book because we live in historic structures with spectral presences of all kinds, friendly ghosts, pernicious ghosts, the ghosts of other people, times, and places, with congested paths ahead of us.
Recognizing the patterns, especially the self-destructive patterns, is the first step. Then comes taking them on, for the rest of one’s life. Taking them on requires risk, courage, perseverance, and showing up more days than not. Some days the possibility of a larger life wins; other days the ghosts win. One has to know that every day is a war between the constrictive colloquies of history and the invitation to the high seas of the soul. But such a venture is what our life is about, what real adulthood is about, and what the journey of the soul demands.