V. From Shadow to Flesh and Blood

Or, the Elected: Part a

“‘When the dead person cries, it is a sign that he is on the road to get well,’ said the Crow solemnly.” ― Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

There’s a thread running through the past few letters that points to certain contrasting strong emotions as being a catalyst to change. Huxley for example spoke of the “pains and terrors” and the “fear” of the Numinous experience, but also its “intense beauty” and “deep significance”. Whitaker spoke of hate and anger in therapy, but in the context of caring. Bateson pointed to the “panic” of the rock bottom experience, but in the context of an awe-inspiring experience of the larger system and an appreciation of its beauty. And recent research on psychedelics points to the challenging experience of facing difficult emotions such as anxiety and grief as key to its transformative influence, but only in the presence of feelings of “inter-connectedness”.

These mixed emotions though appear to be a not just superfluous but necessary to this larger process, and must spring from some depths, from a genuine encounter of a kind - and its effects not immediately soothed away.

And that confrontation will not only likely be (partially) unpleasant, but also fatal for some parts of ourselves. It pushes us back up against ourselves and Jung’s line that “the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego” is particularly pertinent to this.

It involves running up against the limits of a particular way of being and understanding the world.

But what is the upside?

The opportunity to at last take on the shape of a person, and finally hear one’s own voice.

Which is how the process almost always begins. The minute one has a question, is the minute one has a chance.

But first one has to - perhaps risking everything - be punched in the face, and wail under all the weight of the world. Then and often only then can what is dead rise up, and shadows at last turn to flesh and blood.

———

One reason the tale of Pinocchio has withstood the test of time is perhaps because his longing is relatable to creatures not fashioned from blocks of wood. That dreaming of becoming “a real boy” is not consigned only to those in fantasy, that a sense of being little more than a whisp of wind, a wafer or a shadow is not uncommon.

While this is perhaps basic to humanity - or at least perhaps the “civilized” kind - when chronic and severe this is generally brought on by the blows of fate. Blows which leads to a throttling of bottom-up perception and self-related information, and a growing hyper-awareness of others - all while one’s own symbolic inner life and sense of self shrinks into bare perceptibility.

In extreme cases, such a person gets kicked outside of what the rest of us are pleased to call reality into a shadow realm in which the present and the self barely exist - and instead the past and distorted caricatures of other people loom so large that near everything else is obscured.

This is not a state in which growth is possible. It is a living death, and the worst of all common fates: existence as a shadow haunted by ghosts and terrorized by exaggerated monstrosities of human beings.

——

Carl Rogers talks of a young child who “pulls his sister’s hair,… and solemnly intones, ‘Bad, bad boy” as an example of an early root of entering this shadow state.

“[The infant] gradually learns that what ‘feels good’ is often ‘bad’ in the eyes of others… He is introjecting the value judgment of another, taking it in as his own. To that degree he loses touch with his own organismic valuing process. He has deserted the wisdom of his organism, giving up the locus of evaluation, and is trying to behave in terms of values set by another, in order to hold love…

He learns to have a basic distrust for his own experiencing as a guide to his behavior. He learns from others a large number of conceived values, and adopts them as his own, even though they may be widely discrepant from what he is experiencing. Because these concepts are not based on his own valuing, they tend to be fixed and rigid, rather than fluid and changing… [and] because the center of our lives now lies in others, we are fearful and insecure…

…This fundamental discrepancy between the individual’s concepts and what he is actually experiencing, between the intellectual structure of his values and the valuing process going on unrecognized within him – this is a part of the fundamental estrangement of modern man from himself.”

This is obviously exacerbated by trauma of all kinds, not just threats to receiving love.

In contrast, in the mature person, Rogers says the valuing process is “based on this particular moment, and the degree to which this moment is experienced as enhancing and actualizing. Values.. are continually changing…”

“This person values experience in that it is highly differentiated…It is his own experience which provides the value information or feedback…

He sees that not all trees are green, not all men are stern fathers, not all women are rejecting, not all failure experiences prove he is no good.

He is able to take in the evidence in a new situation, as it is, rather than distorting it to fit a pattern which he already holds.

…it appears to be true that when a client is open to his experience, he comes to find his organism more trustworthy. He trusts the totality of himself… [and] when inner changes take place in the attitudes and self-concept of the person, then changes begin to show up in...inter-personal behaviour.”

—-

But is this true?

It appears so - time has been quite kind to Roger’s diagnosis of the problem (as is generally the pattern for the great thinkers), although of course it is a tad more complicated (as is also the pattern).

But people, as Rogers posits, are not born shadows. They become them, and mostly through passing through inferno after inferno, through experiences of horror. And not just those involving the loss of love - though that is often central, but also loss of feelings of scarcity and lack of safety.

After which (stop me if this sounds familiar), the tendency is for their present experiences to be continually overshadowed by past horrors such that they barely have access to new bottom-up perception. Particularly perception and memory involving themselves - they become both small and near invisible (i.e. shadow-like) to themselves.

Their ability to define and differentiate who they are attenuates, and therefore they become much more susceptible to being defined by others because others begin to loom large in comparison. And they become psychologically rigid and inflexible, which inhibits processes of self-expansion and relationship satisfaction, inhibits change within relationships, and increases the chances they’re going to keep paying every month for that subscription service they never use.

——

But the kinds of experiences which I’ve been slowly examining provide an opening out of this state.

And an ensuing ability, as Rogers notes, to see the world in full color and experience oneself as a totality. Suddenly the “elusive obvious” begins to reveal itself, and the self-reinforcing patterns begins to unravel - the tendency to only see what confirms your frame loosens.

And - this is the crucial part - one can at last ask a real question. An urgent question. A question that you can ask and actually hear.

As psychoanalyst Edgar A. Levenson puts it, “Once the patient stops listening to you and starts listening to himself talking to you, change becomes possible.”

Another analyst, Claudia Sheftel Luiz, tells the story of a (derived from a composite) patient “John J” who shows up in therapy wanting to be a “better man” (a kind of goal as typical as it is ineffectual). He was about to get married but was cheating on his wife regularly with a variety of different women. He wanted to stop that.

What’s the way forward?

“I wanted him to talk freely so I could get to know his inner landscapes, and he wanted to set an agenda, solve his problems, and become a better man. Fix it and forget it.

Now certainly, we were in agreement about one thing: John J and I both knew something wasn’t right. Houston we have a problem. But where we differed was that whereas I wanted him to delve into his inner world, he just wanted to solve the problem. He believed that if he could just borrow my psychological way of thinking and my mindset for a few quick sessions, he might very well succeed.

This struggle between John J and me is the same struggle we all have within ourselves when we become crazed. A part of us delves into our emotions where we feel, process and analyze things. But another part of us doesn’t want to delve in there at all. It’s not comfortable there - especially when it’s negative. We want to do what John J did: try to be practical and fix things. We think: if we can just be practical and reasonable, use our common sense and stop indulging our emotions, we can move ahead. We want to drive the boat; stay in control.

…unfortunately, when we are really crazed, trying to get coaching that offers solutions and common sense can be like painting over mold…”

After six sessions in which he focused on the “practical”, John J. thanked her and left. Several months later though, he called back. His wife had left him - “somebody texted her a picture of me in a room with a woman. It’s over. The father said he’s gonna get me fired”. He had gotten punched in the face. He was crying, but at last he had a real question: "Why is this happening?”

——

This may appear at first to be a dark vision - and to some, unnecessarily so.

Cannot radical change be a simple, iterative process? Can’t we just meditate, write gratitude journals, get a massage and ascend peacefully into the clouds?

Not if you want it to have a shot at lasting, because any substantial and sustainable change is going to require a (certain kind of) shock to the system, and in a certain kind of context.

This is why so many attempts to change, to grow, to shift from what one knows is a dead end way of being and thinking to something else fail.

The gargantuan investment of resources required for substantial change is not something that’s going to be easy to “nudge” whole being into doing. Just as your brain will not accommodate new information if it can get away with assimilation, so too with your ontology. There must be near inescapable evidence that the former is necessary, and then and only then can the million and a half processes necessary for deep change to occur begin. We are inherently biased towards conservation of energy, towards maintaining homeostasis, even if the exact place at which one’s homeostasis rests is sub-optimal or even incipient.

The negative emotions in the things we’ve been talking about are essentially messages - that this is not working.

A message which appears to most effectively get to a person after long periods of low level stress, followed by the confrontational moment we’ve focused on.

Rock bottom does not come out of nowhere, generally speaking. There’s a long road down. No one who is perfectly happy and satisfied seeks out God with the intensity required to actually find him. Contrary to some portrayals, the worried well generally do not attend therapy - it takes an average of 10 years after the onset of symptoms for someone to actually go, at which point they are typically a mess. Many of those we’ve spoken of only received therapeutic psychadelics after a long battle with illness, particularly cancer.

Recent research suggests that this long struggle before an intense encounter is not an optional part of the process but a required one. Because after long term suffering, the body begins to realize its current strategy - “a type of resilience one might call ‘fortitude’, ‘passive coping’ or an enhanced ability to endure adversity and thus, ‘get by’” isn't doing it:

meeting stress with an intention to merely endure may not be an optimal long-term strategy. For example, efforts to suppress and thereby avoid, stress may not be conducive to the revision of (potentially problematic) internal models, such as those linked to cognitive biases in depression, for example. Thus, it seems reasonable to ask: does there not exist an alternative adaptive mechanism, sufficiently different to the stress avoidance/mitigation strategy just described, perhaps one that becomes triggered when adverse conditions surpass a critical threshold of severity and/or chronicity such that mere endurance is not enough?

And then they ask if maybe this mechanism isn’t a giant secret, but written about and acted upon across history:

Is it possible that humans have intuited how to hijack or ‘hack’ their own physiology for the purpose of self-development?

Obviously these are rhetorical questions - the tragic irony is that sometimes the answer to suffering lies in embracing and even pursuing yet more suffering - but crucially it's not just any kind of suffering, nor is it suffering alone. There appears to be a common structure and sequence of a kind involved in such shifts, and these particulars are going to be the focus moving forward.

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Click here to continue to part b.