Waking Up
We are born into a world that makes no sense to us as infants, driven as we are by basic physical needs: hunger and comfort. Gradually, with “good enough” parenting, we learn to expect that our needs will get met: we’ll be fed and changed, perhaps not as immediately as we’d like, but . . . “good enough.” Little-by-little, we start to experience cause-and-effect, develop a sense of personal agency if the limits set by our parents aren’t too restrictive and the consequences of violating these limits aren’t too punitive. We embark on a journey of discovery, delighting in the pleasurable experiences afforded us by our senses: colors and shapes, textures and smells, sounds that soothe or excite. We also learn that there are experiences that are painful: noises that are too loud, physical pain from having our bodies injured—punctured, or cut, burned or hit. We gradually learn how to avoid pain if possible and seek pleasure, develop a sense of “belonging” by imitating our caregivers and being rewarded by their approval as we learn to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of this strange new world.
Many of us grow up believing that there is a script we will follow, that Life will unfold and all we need to do is follow others’ expectations of us, take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves to us, and take our place in society.
For those who have essentially allowed “Life” to happen to them, their part being to react, the fulfillment of the pre-ordained destiny of graduating from high school or going to college, getting a job, marrying, having 2 children a dog and a house in the suburbs becomes a reality.
I realize that I am only describing a segment of society, excluding the disenfranchised, privileged, prodigies or outliers.
These are people to whom success is fulfilling their pre-ordained destiny, ending with retirement and death. A life wonderfully portrayed in the film “The Truman Show.” Nothing particularly wrong with this life, but essentially flat and two dimensional.
In my work as a psychotherapist, one of the most gratifying experiences for me has been to escort a client from their two dimensional world into a three dimensional world of possibility, personal agency, self-discovery.
Sometimes this “awakening” is forced upon a person, sometimes freely chosen after a personal insight disrupts their belief in the inevitability of the status quo. Sometimes these changes are thought of as a mid-life “crisis.”
Not infrequently the “jolt” that forces someone to change is the loss of a job, especially a job that they’ve had for decades and is essentially closely tied to their sense of identity, of who they are. Even if it’s been a job they don’t particularly like. To ask this person what they “like” is to be met with blank looks, a sense of panic, a freezing and inability to take action. They’d never stopped to ask themselves what they “like” aside from the fulfillment of what was expected of them by society and by themselves. And being successful in achieving these expectations.
To be able to witness the awakening of someone who essentially had been living a life on “automatic,” sleep-walking from one day to the next, one season to the next, is to have the privilege of accompanying a self-discovery second only to that of the infant discovering their world. There’s often fear, fear of the unknown, without the prescribed script the person is faced with writing their own, taking risks, sometimes failing at first in their initial attempts to shape their own lives.
The rewards, however, are great, as self-knowledge and attunement with who they authentically are is discovered.
And a whole new world of possibility opens up to the awakened self.