So I'm stuck, what next?
What if changing the world began not with grand gestures, but with a profound journey into oneself? What if you're reading this article because you're looking for something to help assuage pain or find a new way forward in life? Maybe you’re noticing patterns that are difficult to change, or you’re stuck in a relationship that no longer brings you to life as once it did?
I am writing this brief article because of the people and discoveries I have made along the way that helped me when I was stuck. I want to share these insights with you. I suspect that you’re reading this because you are interested in increasing your self-knowledge to effect personal change. I can help you do that through building your awareness of yourself and your world, identifying the patterns, bringing clarity to your issues and opening possibilities for transformation.
We tend to view the world—to really see it—not as it is, as Anais Nin wrote, but as ‘we are.’ This is important. We continually shape, filter, and carve our way through this world. This is the world we are submerged in; we don't truly know who we are, but we can gain insight into the person we look at in the mirror. Lifting ourselves out of this submerged state to see more clearly, though never perfectly, is what therapy is all about.
I have found that as I have got older, I have realized how little I know. That includes knowing myself, my family, my friends, and all those whom I love. This is an unnerving thought. Am I simply caught up in a story of myself, like a fly in amber, to one day be a fossil that my descendants might wonder about on Ancestry? If I look back, I realize that I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents, much less their stories. So, what does it all mean, and why does it matter?
The truth is, it matters to me, and it matters to you, and it matters to those whose lives we touch. For those of us in the whirl of this life, who find ourselves in this wild and crazy dance, it matters. It is vital to grasp it well; it hangs there in front of you—life, in all its terror and beauty, the evocative, the scary, the scared, and the hilarious. Therapy aims to help us stand back so that we might fully live and understand ourselves, allowing us to genuinely love.
So, let’s pay attention, remain open, and be bold, changing the world by beginning with ourselves. This exploration, I hope, will enrich, enliven, educate, and energize you and, by extension, through solidarity, love, and hope, also the world. So, let’s dream big, even though we’ll start small, with ourselves.
There are many wildernesses in this world: exciting, huge, beautiful places. The wild ones, the sacred spaces, the vast expanses of ice and sand.
For millions of years, they have borne witness to the development of life on Earth, and lately, we have arrived too. The mountains and hills where we feel so small yet also loom so large in our negative effect on them. Places of majesty and beauty where we can marvel at the lush greenery, the sweeping grandeur, and the wide, open spaces. Such places are often the site of revelation, adventure, challenge, and most importantly, rebirth and change. It is to such a place that I invite you.
But you won’t need a backpack or any specialist clothing, other than an open heart and mind, as we journey into the wilderness within and into the darkness we find there. As an old therapist said to me upon beginning our work together, "I have no idea what we’ll find in this labyrinth, but we’ll light torches and enter it together!" We will explore this wilderness of mind, body, and soul, asking who we are, where we are, and to what we are heading.
The key element is one of agency, of autonomy: that we are the ones driving this car. We are choosing our fate, exercising our freedom, and making our own way, as the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her poem The Journey, ‘deeper and deeper into the world.’
I’m reminded of a powerful moment in Frank Herbert’s Dune, where Paul Atreides drinks the Water of Life, a powerful chemical that makes women, who can transmute it, into Reverend Mothers (powerful spiritual and political figures). He asks whether men have tried before and failed. The answer comes back flatly, "They tried and died."
He takes a tremendous risk, a step at that point into the unknown, into the dark, perhaps into death itself. He takes the step because he must, because he needs the insight it might bring and most of all because his sense of destiny surges up powerfully within him. It leads to profound change not only for Paul but for the known universe in the world of Dune.
For us, I believe it is no less profound. Many of us, men especially, fear the process of looking inward. We often avoid it consciously, though mostly I suspect unconsciously. A lot of people will use work, sex, alcohol, or drugs to cope with life and its pain and puzzling turns. But there is another way: a way of integration, maturity, and growth. Going to the place that no one else does, the place we haven’t been before.
It takes, like Paul Atreides, a moment of courage and an ongoing determination to face the doubt, the darkness, and our demons again and again in a difficult journey of understanding, overcoming, and change. But if we can take this step and keep going, finding the strength to face our light as well as our darkness, then we can achieve a place that will not only fulfil us but also lift others too.
So, this is an invitation to transformation through inner work. Work that may at times include others like therapists, friends, or family, but essentially it is your work—your internal task that begins by taking that first brave step. Let’s go.
‘Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.’ (Jung)
Self-compassion
Jesus made it the basis of loving others, of ‘loving your neighbour as yourself’; Whitney sang about it as the ‘greatest love of all’ and the Buddha said that we deserve it ‘as much as anybody in the entire universe’! But how much do we really practice it.
We’re thinking about self-compassion, or loving yourself and how it’s either missing, slight or scorned. This is sadly true for everyone, but particularly so for men. As we approach Movember and the great focus on men’s mental health, I think we need to ask ourselves, “Do I really love myself?” As Oscar Wilde wryly noted it’s ‘the beginning of a lifelong romance’!
Therapy often must begin in this place. Why is there a lack of love, why is there a taskmaster instead of an encourager, why a relentless critic instead of a cheerleader? So often we convince ourselves that we are doomed, guilty, weak, undeserving or just plain useless, hobbling ourselves even before we have stepped out beyond our own front door. The roots of self-loathing or self-love are complicated and usually are in place way before memory even began, so we’re stuffed, right?
Well, yes and no, these elements do indeed start right back in the lap of family life, in that broiling cauldron of human frailty, hopes and failures but fortunately they are not stuck there. We take so long to even walk as mammals, a baby rhinoceros is on its feet in forty minutes after it’s born, it took me nineteen months to get off my backside! We’re dependent for so long, unaware for even longer, it can often take decades to begin to realise where we are, who we are and what we’ve come to.
‘We are’, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger says, ‘thrown into this life’. We didn’t choose it, not the place, the people or the time but here we are. Now what?
Self-compassion begins with this first truth: that what primarily formed and shaped us, the person we have come to be was not chosen by us but inherited, borne, coped with, made the best of and so we are not solely to blame. Responsibility and culpability are shared with other relational systems such as family, culture, society and world. Only in time is freedom exercised or genuinely present. Until then, it’s a mixed bag. We need to peer past the guilt to the innocent child inside each one of us – a child that needs to breathe, be heard, be loved and be embraced.
This inward listening and encouraging is to be coupled with taking the time to be kind to ourselves and the practicing of mindful, loving attention to what is going on beneath all the usual business, hustle and noise. It’s true that, as Kristin Neff writes, ‘Love, connection, and acceptance are your birthright. To claim them you need only look within yourself.’
Where might this take you? Might the most effective action for your mental health during Movember begin with having compassion for yourself?