Existential Crisis is Real: An Answer to the Question, "Who Am I?"
- swaggertherapy
- Apr 3
- 23 min read
The Boil-Down: Most people in recovery from trauma struggle to be at peace in the present. Many individuals surviving subtle trauma, or those who deny having a traumatic past, don't know how to be here-and-now either. Still others feel like they have a sense of peace or "okayness" in low-stress moments and even under familiar duress--until something challengingly unfamiliar or life-changing comes along. In this article, I offer an existential way to survive crisis. Along the way, I offer the reader some of my story of survival.
The Details: The term crisis is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as "a crucial or decisive point or situation, especially a difficult or unstable situation involving an impending change." An existential crisis is collectively defined by top web search results as a period of inner conflict where a person questions the meaning, purpose, and identity of their life, often accompanied by feelings of anxiety, despair, and confusion. I saw no references to shame, but I would certainly add that to the commonly experienced symptoms. The level of distress can be crippling. And while it is entirely human to go through an existential crisis, integrated trauma theory would characterize it as regressive. In the throes of such a crisis, we do not fully function. At the same time, such a crisis presents the opportunity to permanently raise personal functioning to a higher level.
Let's glance at another model of human functioning as we begin this examination of crisis. According to Practical Psychology, Erik Erikson coined the term "identity crisis" in his theory of child development. Identity crisis is said to initially occur during adolescence, the fifth stage of development in Erikson's model. Simply put, Erikson attributes this crisis to role confusion; when we don't establish a secure sense of what our roles are, we enter a crisis that, if not resolved, could repeatedly resurface throughout life.
Similarly, people carrying traumatic shame, wrestling with insecure or unhelpful attachments, or overwhelmed by mental and emotional symptoms might respond to their given situations ineffectively, very differently from Terry Real's "functional adult." According to Relational Life Therapy (RLT) developed by Real, it is common for a developmental adult to participate (particularly in relationship space) not as a functional adult, but rather as a regressive version of themselves referred to as the adaptive child. In adaptive child mode, a person is more likely to fall back into strategies acquired when we stopped being the helpless wounded child and found some agency and empowerment in our lives, commonly during pre-adolescence or adolescence. However, adaptive child strategies will produce ineffective results in adulthood (blaming self, blaming others, getting defensive, brooding, muting one's own voice, anxiously overachieving, getting drunk, running away, gossiping, binge-eating, etc.).
Visiting one more concept, this one from Colin Ross's Trauma Model Therapy (TMT), should drive us to the point of this article. According to Ross, even subtly traumatized children engage in a subconscious illusion known as the locus of control shift. This illusion brings a sense of power and hope to the helpless child who avoids overwhelming powerlessness by ingesting the myth that bad things are happening to her because she is bad. The myth that the parental abuse or neglect is her fault allows her to attach to adults whom she cannot actually get to "love her right." The cost of the locus of control shift is shame. Survivors of trauma are commonly intolerant of distress and struggle to manage their own stability or self-protection. They are at risk for more frequent and severe existential crises than other people.
On the foundation of integrated trauma therapy, I now identify one of the most common but ineffective human strategies: we base our sense of okayness on things we don't control. This is a pesky cousin to the strategy of being driven through the day on the fuel of negative emotions. We wake up on time and get ourselves going because of anxiety over the work report or graduate school paper that is not done. We might feel better when we've turned in our work, or maybe we continue to worry ourselves sick about the boss's response to the work report or the grade we might get on the graduate school paper.
Oftentimes our lives are naturally well-structured, or we have intentionally assembled spaces and connections which work well for us when we need to unwind or when we are looking for moral or social support. This structural network becomes part of our identity. A series of adverse events or even one significant change in our lives can steal our peace by encroaching on our secure places and creating obstacles to those human connections. One widely-known and globally felt cause of such crisis was the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, people lost their music concerts, Broadway shows, theater movies, and face-to-face hangouts (in addition to the bewilderment provided by the uncertainty regarding whether we would catch the virus and how we would symptomatically respond, as well as helpless horror at the possibility that loved ones would die quarantined out of reach, behind hospital walls). A horde of overwhelmed humans clamored for the remaining spots on therapists' now-virtual appointment calendars. People who had previously managed their stress reasonably well were suddenly at a loss for how to keep from feeling suffocated by anxiety, hopelessness and loneliness. Our collective "okayness" had been dependent upon structured lives which, during the pandemic, could no longer be maintained and could not be recreated. In the absence of the status quo of our previous habits and routines, we were faced with either languishing or learning new ways to exist.
Commonly, a human life is disrupted by developmental or situational events beyond human control. Many of these events are unpredictable and random. Others we may see coming but cannot prevent. In some cases, perhaps in our own myopia or self-defeat we missed an opportunity to elude an oncoming hazard. Perhaps it's simply a downturn in our performance of some life role. Any of these phenomena can attack a person's sense of self.
Some aspects of role identify present a transience in our ability to control them; other aspects never were under our control. One person might usually be able to "key in" data with sufficient speed and accuracy at her employer's student loan finance center--until chronic arthritis increasingly interferes with that skill. Another person might demonstrate initiative and efficiency in his information technology job, but he has a boss who doesn't like him. A third person might have just won the national diving championship, and now they look upon their anti-climactic future with nihilism. A fourth person may be losing an entire friend network in a divorce. While it is predictably human to place our "okayness" in role identity, it is a risky, arguably adolescent strategy. Performing noble or admirable roles, excelling at academics or athletics, displaying impeccable spelling or organizational skills--it is often the case that such striving began in an attempt to gain the approval of an attachment figure who wasn't "loving us right." Even if this negative energy got you as far as CEO or brain surgeon, you are at elevated risk for an existential crisis. Dependence on external events or environments to bring you peace will eventually be ineffective.
Here I offer a solution to the barrage of intrusive questions one may face upon finding oneself in an existential crisis. The questions may include: Why am I here? Why is this happening to me? What should I have done differently? What should I do now? What's the point? Science-based therapeutic interventions can answer these questions, or more accurately, facilitate your ability to answer such questions for yourself. One crucial way to permanently transcend your current level of functioning is to begin by answering the question: Who am I independent of all roles? Embodying the answer to this question will restore enough balance to get us through an existential crisis; moreover, it can resolve existential crisis long-term, since this solution does not depend on role identity.
The task of answering "Who am I?" does not have to be mind-bending, but it likely requires an internal paradigm shift. The term paradigm shift was coined by physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who identified a cycle of stages for any scientific discipline. In Stage 1, there is no consensus among scholars on a budding field of thought, theories are bursting from their cocoons and flying all over without the stability of empirical support, and there are many arguments over fundamental ideas. Stage 2 ushers in real scientific understanding and processes; this stage is what we usually see when we look at a scientific discipline, and the stage is stable. But models tend to drift, and certain phenomena arise that can no longer be set aside as "anomalies," and an entire discipline enters Stage 3: Crisis. Yep, crisis. The most basic "truths" can end up back under the microscope. As little as once per century, the resultant scientific revolution leads to a long-term "paradigm change" in a field of study. When that happens, the new fundamental underpinnings are adopted as real and true. Confronting an institutional groupthink to create such a change can be costly, even deadly; Galileo underwent inquisition by the church for his vocal support of the Copernican model of the solar system--the idea that Earth and other planets actually revolve around the sun (conventional wisdom of his day believed that the sun revolved around the Earth).
An internal paradigm shift is likely to be almost as cataclysmic in its own way. The resistance might indeed come from social pressure. I spoke at great length with a woman who concluded that her conformity to her social group, which was dominated by alcoholic subculture, was making her sick. Excessive drinking made her very depressed. By simply drinking club soda instead of eight cocktails a night like everyone else, the woman lost her friend group and ended up having to leave her marriage (her husband was also a fixture of the same group of friends). There is often internal, "intrapsychic" resistance. A man had always thought of himself as a rural, Catholic businessman. After a backlash for questioning the church, he left the church and took his family to the city. He survived this major transitional crisis by believing in himself as long as his new business flourished...until several years later, it didn't. His internal story became so rigid and critical (I'm a failure as a Catholic, a son, an entrepreneur, and a father) that the man was now at great risk for taking his own life. Begrudgingly, almost violently, he slowly let go, deconstructing his rigid definition of self. He started over in business, and chose to let himself live again.
The ultimate healing is the meditative "I am." This article's solution is brought to you by the unlikely marriage of ancient spirituality and mental health science. There has been a revolution toward a paradigm shift in the discipline of mental health recovery; however, major factions in the arenas of psychiatry and psychology have not come along for the ride, still enmired in the biomedical model, single gene/single disease theory, and stagnant, reductionistic models of psychotherapeutic "intervention." Beyond all that idealogical entrenchment, I stand here with you, applying answers supplied by one of the common factors in brain science therapies, including integrated trauma therapy: letting go. Perhaps the most flexible, resilient answer to "Who Am I?" can be found on the inside. In my experience, there is more than one path to this solution, but multiple paths can be braided together for even stronger results.
Perhaps you have had the experience of something or someone appearing to you in your mind during severe stress, or during therapy, a dream, meditation, or prayer. Multiple therapeutic models used at my office guide the client directly to the place in the mind where such internal lifelines reside. This place in the mind (I have heard it referred to as the wise mind or peaceful mind) is strong in self-advocacy, and invariably calm as long as we are not in immediate physical danger. As I mention in the Eyes Wide Open article on wellness and well-being, one operational definition of mental/emotional wellness is to achieve zero on a ten-point subjective units of disturbance (SUDs) scale, while arriving at seven on a seven-point subjective self-validation scale. The "peaceful mind"--the part of your mind where your internal lifelines live--is almost always at "zero" and "seven." Specific therapeutic or esoteric exercises are designed to connect you with this place in the mind.
Once you are there, letting go at a neural level is achievable. When we let go at a neural level, changes in the mind are far more than just a sort of liturgical behavioral recitation (think of Saturday Night Live's Stuart Smalley played by Al Franken). These exercises not only create changes in the images, verbal cognitions, moods and body sensations we experience in the mind; they also create changes in the human brain--measurable by methods used in research physiology and neurology.
What exactly are we behaviorally and neuroplastically letting go of? Suffering. Symptoms. The idea of parting from our suffering is not new; for instance, mystic George Gurdjieff prompted followers to engage in "The Work," one goal of which is to release one's relationship to suffering. The neural hack provided by "brain science" therapies like EMDR shuttles us through a neural "wormhole" to a place where it's far less difficult to let go of depression, anxiety, shame, guilt, self-doubt, self-hatred, and angry contempt for others. Closets in the mind which for years were crammed full of memories of physical danger, violent loss, emotional trauma, abuse, neglect, failure, betrayal and rejection can be quickly cleaned out and brightly carpeted with safe, peaceful, relaxing images. The childlike locus of control shift mentioned above (I'm bad, it was my fault, etc.) permanently and almost spontaneously reverses itself during such clinical exercises. While I emphasize the importance of seeking a course of such potent therapy even for subtle trauma, I also want to encourage readers to pursue the balance and fullness of "zero and seven" between their therapy sessions and spiritual lessons or meetings. Let me do that by painting a multi-layered picture of how I personally seek existential peace.
I have engaged in extensive recovery through therapy. Starting by entering couples therapy in 1996, I have pursued wellness by being the client in behavioral health treatment off and on for twenty-nine years. The paradigms employed by my therapists have included Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), brainspotting, and Relational Life Therapy. The techniques I use on myself outside of therapy are heavily influenced by the above--the work of Francine Shapiro, David Grand, and Terry Real. They are also infused with ideas from Christianity, Buddhism, self-hypnosis, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET), the teachings of Esoteric Mystic George Gurdjieff, the shame research of Brene Brown, and even components of the CIA's "Gateway Experiment." For me, this process of recovery through therapy is a hike, not a permanent camping site. It is ongoing; I am by no means "finished," nor do I ever expect to be. To be clear, I have attended no more than seventy or eighty therapy sessions (an average of maybe 2.5 sessions per year, most of them in the last fifteen years) in those three decades, but I make robust daily use of what I have learned.
I persistently seek existential peace. Every human alive will encounter more than one existential crisis. It will likely involve role identity. It may involve immediate safety, perhaps a close encounter with death and mortality. Whatever the case, the crisis will contain both loss and opportunity. Many people will try to pretend the crisis isn't there. Others will flounder and stagnate in the self-justified overuse of regressive avoidance strategies with toxic side effects--many with the naive endorsement of their social groupthinks--you know, the ones poisoned by narcissistic gravity. However, we have more options than those just mentioned. We have the option of leaning into the crisis, embracing the struggle with a growth mindset. To quote Jason Mraz: "I reckon it's again my turn..to win some or learn some." In the process, we can permanently change our relationship to suffering, by separating from it. The antidote to existential crisis is existential peace.
I employ the structure of "focus vs. notice." In order to achieve existential peace, it is top priority to help yourself be present--be "here now," without judgment. A key way to achieve this is to just notice events and feelings without being tied to them, instead focusing on something neutral or positive--anything from a safe place image to the movement of the breath. Being here and now without judgment is known as mindfulness or mindful awareness. Most of the techniques I use facilitate mindful awareness whether the source refers to it by name or not. So I focus on my breathing while just noticing/acknowledging my stress, pain or anxiety. Or I focus on safe place imagery--a river bank with a specific landscape, a pit fire, and my nearby grandfather, while creating visual distance from my symptoms and the sources of my stress or shame. I take unresolved problems and visually place them on a raft, then chartering an internal replica of my son's remote control watercraft to tug or barge those burdens to the opposite side of the river. My problems are still there, still in sight, but at that point I have separation from them, and it makes a difference. It is very important to our health and well-being to understand that we are NOT our problems. We are NOT our symptoms. Gaining internal visual separation, with practice, leads to emotional separation from those problems, which produces symptom relief. Peace. (By the way, bi-lateral stimulation or BLS is a staple for me during any therapeutic exercise, because it connects me with a place in my mind that is most logical and most at peace. It makes the results a lot faster and a lot more far-reaching.)
Sometimes "letting go" is a fist-fight. There are times when stressful external events are so burdensome or so out of the blue that it feels like a knock-down, drag-out brawl getting free of my suffering. There are oppressive life challenges that seem tailor-made to glue themselves to our worst fears, our unresolved traumatic injuries or our insecurities. While I have known plenty of rewards, blessings and victories in the last fifteen years, nearly every successive year since 2010 (the year of my divorce) has been more challenging than the last. The difference is in my "functional adult" resilience; either I am already stronger in the area of the new challenge, or the new challenge pushes me to develop even greater strength. Several major events in the past year severed the moors to which I had been mindlessly secured. Lest I be carried out to sea, I have had to persistently swim across powerful riptides to take myself back to shore. I have good health and no one close to me has died, but my life stability has been compromised enough that I have needed high doses of self-regulation again and again, to regain a sense of peace amidst big transitional stress. Be ready and willing to put in the reps to reclaim your peace. I needed hundreds of reps of internal therapeutic exercise in one five-day period just to prevent panic attacks and get enough sleep. Repetitious self-regulation is best practiced in between crises, so that our recovery and restoration habits are in good condition when trouble shows up.
Our resilience is built upon the survival of those who went before us. Perhaps you're aware of the testable (testing is ongoing with more research needed) theory of epigenetic transmission; the idea is that the transmission of mental health symptoms, among many other phenomena, from generation to generation is not merely due to environmental factors (e.g. the way our parents treated us while raising us), but due to biological factors. The subject of much discourse and debate, this idea suggests that my father's trauma can have an influence on my DNA which may affect what I'm ashamed of or afraid of, or what depresses me. While scientists continue to pursue answers about this, I tell myself Brene Brown would say that stories about ancestors and their challenges and losses are part of our stories, and that our stories are directly connected to our survival and self-refinement, as well as our fears and our shame. Brown's research has a lot to say about the importance of owning our stories. In the following paragraphs, I would like to mention the suffering of survivors in my family who went before me. I was not there for these events, so I can only rely on the veracity of these stories as they were told to me, often by the survivors of the stories.
My maternal grandfather's own biological father took him to the train depot in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska when my grandpa (Jim) was just a boy, and told Jim that he had to leave on a trip for a very important, serious reason. He encouraged Jim to be good and look after his sister. Having lied to his young son, Jim's father then boarded the train, got off on the other side before the train left the station, and went to get drunk. My Grandpa Jim caused mischief riding on the back of downtown trolleys, trespassed on the south end of Memorial Stadium to watch Bugeater football games (such kids were referred to as "knothole clubbers"), and had to fight off a gang of young Germans from Russia in the North Bottom when they tried to hijack his horse and cart. When he tried at age fourteen to protect his stepsister from physical violence, Jim was severely beaten by the offending stepdad and either ran away or was sent away by his mother, to a woman in Havelock district who took in boarders. He showed up under acute stress, having defecated himself. The woman took him in and gave him a bath, a change of clothes and a place to spend the night. As a young adult, my grandpa became a troubled gambler.
Eventually, the kindness of a minister led to Jim's conversion to Christianity and the decision to become ordained himself. My grandfather became a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, well-known and (often, but not always) loved from Oklahoma to South Dakota. He was a gentle, receptive, longsuffering (if heavily codependent) partner to my Grandma Grace. By the time I knew them, Grandpa Jim provided the (sometimes scarce) income for the house, did the laundry, and donned an apron every day in the kitchen, handling the lion's share of the chore labor inside the house and out in the yard. I have several memories of following him around and noticing the tools he kept in the garage. Once when we came upon a garter snake, he quickly killed the reptile, discreetly disposing of it and telling me, "if your grandmother hears about that snake, she won't sleep for a month." He never laid a finger on me, but on one occasion he offered to beat me with a belt as he had done to his own children (including my mother) when I was physically terrorizing my younger male cousin. I immediately "straightened up," marveling with wonder at the way Grandpa Jim had threatened corporal punishment without making me feel unloved or ashamed.
My paternal grandmother and grandfather violently lost a child when the "suicide" rear door next to which she was seated came open; my preschool-aged aunt Diane fell onto the highway and was struck by an oncoming car. My dad's father had to lift Diane's lifeless body and carry her back to the car. My paternal grandma was understandably and outwardly apoplectic, to the extent that she refused to enter the house until my grandpa had removed all of Diane's furniture, photos, clothing and toys--every tangible reminder of the child they had so tragically lost. The second-born of eight children, Diane was all but erased from memory between about 1949 and 1968. Her name was not (and not to be) mentioned. My aunts and uncles were vaguely aware of the nebulous mystery of some blood relative named Diane, having no idea she was actually their older sister.
My paternal grandparents were devout, church-going Christians. Kenny was a deacon and Margaret played the organ for Sunday services at the tiny church co-founded by Margaret's parents. Grandpa spent years working very hard as a pig farmer; later he had Milking Shorthorn cattle which he eventually gave up to become a machinist. When his coworkers went on strike in the 1980s, the owners shut the plant down, forcing my grandfather into retirement a couple of years early. He was emotionally unavailable to my dad, aunts and uncles for their entire upbringing. Grandma remained a matriarchal fixture of her church, renowned and beloved for her stewardship, particularly toward female parishioners and Vietnamese immigrants. The year I (the oldest paternal grandchild) was born, it is said that my Grandpa Kenny actually drove seventy miles to Minneapolis where my Grandma Margaret was attending a religious women's retreat. He did this to announce that he was ready to talk to the family about Diane; Grandma must have acquiesced that it was time to do so. My memories of my Grandpa Kenny were of a connected, kind, gentle, affectionate, emotionally available attachment figure. Grandma Margaret mostly showed love by doing. I have fond memories of chocolate chip cookies and fizzy colas poured from recyclable glass bottles into (now vintage) glasses filled with ice cubes. I also recall invariably noticing Grandma's bedside lamp still lit in the middle of the night--especially when cousins and I would stay over in sleeping bags in the adjacent living room. I knew she had stayed up praying, and occasionally overheard the low tones of her conversations with God. When I was a child, her way of praying troubled me; it reminded me less of someone at peace, and more of the story of Jesus' sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane. I also remember Grandma Margaret taking a yardstick to my sister's behind for climbing on rusty old harvest equipment at about age six.
My father was Diane's brother, the oldest of those eight siblings. He was born into respectable poverty; Kenny and Margaret inherited virtually nothing, married young, and worked very hard for little money. Indoor plumbing was a luxury. When my father Garry and his sister Diane were the only children and as young as four and three respectively, they were playing outside in an old army tent with the much older boy who had set it up in the yard. With Grandpa gone and Grandma working inside, this teenage boy violently sexually abused Garry and Diane. (The day I graduated with my master's degree, my dad and I were sitting alone when he turned his head toward the wall, quietly disclosed this sexual abuse for the first time, and stated the name of the perpetrator.) Perhaps a year after both children were abused by the neighbor boy, Diane was killed in that car accident, leaving my dad as the only surviving member of this secret club for sexual abuse survivors. The second smallest student in his classes growing up, Garry was bullied by other boys; episodes of surreptitious rage surfaced. He followed one bully on the route home after school and beat him with an implement like a large stick or a baseball bat. Spending the lion's share of his free time re-enacting cowboy western movies and television shows on his horse, Duke, Garry also shoplifted from the grocery store and experimented with fire-setting. He eventually channeled his energy into organized sports including football and wrestling.
As he came of age, Garry was known for gregariousness and horseplay, also embracing the very serious task of standing in as leader and attachment figure for the younger siblings whose father, Kenny, was emotionally out of reach. His ordination as a minister in 1974 christened a calling that would span fifty years. Before and after launching that career, he needed a series of dozens of second jobs from which he chronically quit or was fired, but he was consistently a very hard worker. In "the ministry," my dad was adored for his leadership and stewardship, spending long stints of time well-liked by so many of the people he met. However, he seemed threatened by authority and struggled to collaborate well with others when he was not in charge. In intimate space, my dad was impatient and controlling, willing to escalate to emotional violence such as beratement, or physical violence or threats thereof to quash resistance. In 1980, a heated conflict with long-standing elders of a nepotism-fortified church board led Garry to relinquish his papers to the denomination which had ordained him and to which his family had belonged since the founding of his grandparents' tiny church. Often toxic and ineffective behind closed doors with his wife and kids, Garry was venerated by his brothers and sisters, and valued by the community for his tireless work and caring leadership. He finally found vocational stability, maintaining his pastoral positions at two churches concurrently for the last twenty-five years of his life. He very effectively and safely connected with and nurtured hundreds of children and performed hundreds of weddings for young couples of all walks. My father may have traveled for as many as a thousand hospital visitations, officiating what must have seemed like another thousand funerals before his own death in 2018.
There are many more stories of survivorhood in my family, but the survivors are still alive, and I think they would say that those stories are not mine to tell in any detail. Without further identifying any of the participants, I can count no less than seventeen family members who encountered sexual abuse and incest as children and rape as young adults. At least four were troubled by relationships with partners who suffered from severe dissociation. Like millions of other families, mine survived world wars, combat, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Cold War, the atomic bomb scare, racial unrest, and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. Loved ones were killed in car accidents, were permanently disabled by polio, or lost their jobs. Babies were stillborn, died of hydrocephalus right after birth, or were killed in gruesome accidents. Adults lived in crippling chronic pain due to work injuries or medical or dental conditions doctors could diagnose but had no effective way of treating.
I carry the DNA of human beings who have dealt with the kind of hardship I will probably never know. Although these people who precede me in the family tree have passed on untold pain, fear, shame, and ineffective strategies for living, they have also transmitted to me the strength to pick up from failure or even tragedy and carry on, the ability to hope and laugh and connect and express love along with seemingly undying commitment to what matters. They have left me a trodden path frosted with enough lamplight that I can choose when it's necessary or wise to follow in their footsteps.
What You Can Do: Even when it feels as though a person has not taken a significant step toward survival in her entire life, the next step is probably not the first step she will have intentionally taken to be well. Build on what you have. Take the next step. Every survivor has a drive deep within them to grow away from pain, fear and shame, toward peace and self-acceptance. Healing tends not to be linear, but for the sake of simplicity we can think of the tasks of mental and emotional healing in a basic sequence, understanding that everyone needs to repeatedly and recursively revisit each set of tasks.
Having brought yourself into acceptance that you have healing to do, one primary "task set" entails self-regulation. See if you can be alone with your thoughts. When upset (in the absence of having any severe stressor directly "in your face"), are you able to quickly calm yourself down? Reliably reaching zero on the ten-point SUDs scale is an early priority in grief/trauma/behavioral health recovery. A companion to reaching a calm "zero" is reaching seven on the self-validity scale. How much and how often do you fully accept yourself as a worthy, capable human being? What about on days when you made a mistake or did not perform well in a given role? One can sub-define integrity as maintaining a "full seven" self-worth equally in moments of good and not-so-good role performance--as a parent, employee, friend, fellow commuter, etc. Becoming familiar and comfortable with who you are independent of all roles will aid you in repeatedly achieving and maintaining this "balanced (calm) fullness." (Using myself as an example, I tell myself that independent of all roles, I am a human being standing on the bank of a river next to my grandfather and my younger selves...alternately, I am a human being with three loves: the earth, the arts, and love itself.) Such "I am" practices introduce us to the ability to peacefully exist through crisis or exist without crisis, even when our families, friends, jobs, and stressful circumstances are not cooperating.
Once you feel a basic proficiency at self-acceptance and regulation of your inner thought-feeling experiences, a second set of tasks will involve coming into acceptance of painful, shameful things that have happened to us and things that we ourselves have done. There is integration of the bad that has happened to us with the good that has happened to us, and integration of what "bad" things we have done with the good things we have done. In order to integrate all of this, there is an often difficult acknowledgement of loss; following this, there is a simultaneously symbolic and neural "letting go" of the shame and emotional pain accompanying all of these negative past events.
Overarching the two sets of healing tasks described above is a third task set that sees progress in stumbling fits and starts. In the process of routinely practicing a "zero and seven" balanced fullness, along with letting go of pain/shame so we can integrate the wisdom of our accepted losses, we are learning to live like survivors instead of victims. I consider this synonymous with becoming Terry Real's functional adult. We achieve awareness and acceptance of what harms have been visited upon our inner children; in the process, we come to understand the hurt they carried for us as well as the childlike (once brilliant but now wildly ineffective) strategies they developed in order to protect us. From all of this we then set them free, opting to protect them from all adult hurt and responsibility. Thereafter we the functional adult fulfills promises made to the "inner children" by living driven by principles, not by stress or negative emotion. As you feel yourself making progress in the first two task areas of healing and recovery, you will be brought face-to-face with the tasks of "phase three."
A noteworthy minority of survivors have scaled this skyward healing terrain without a professional guide. Through self-help in the form of books, classes, podcasts and layperson's groups, a percentage of these people profess to have behaviorally or philosophically or esoterically or spiritually recovered with little or no help from an expert therapist. If you find yourself daunted or unsuccessful, or if you're just starting out, make no mistake; I advise you to engage in a brain-science-based trauma/grief psychotherapy with an experienced professional who understands trauma-driven recovery and practices the above habits themselves. Preventing or coming through existential crisis is a "serious inquiries only" endeavor, but it leads to a peace that remains within reach--a relief considering the unrefined alternative of chronically having our peace stolen by shame from the past or constant fear of the future.
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