I recognize myself in Bill Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul. He sets out a developmental psychology and talks about how if you miss a certain stage, you’ll need to go back and re-integrate it. And that much of our culture is stuck in a state of un-integrated adolescence, and that is the reason for all the problems related to over-resource use. The answer isn’t moralized attempts to curb ourselves though - the answer is to finish the stages we missed. Finish them, integrate them, heal them.

This idea is something I’ve been pondering for awhile - ever since I noticed that when I get depressed I revert to things I did as a teenager - staying up really late for instance. I also notice that I watch a lot of TV and play computer games.

I also have noticed that when I was blogging on Tao of Prosperity, I stopped soon after I was mentioned by a NYT blogger. A hint of success, and I quit. Western pop-psychology would diagnose this as “self-sabotage”, but that really doesn’t explain anything. What is the reason behind it? I think it has to do with this adolescence in me that isn’t finished. That part of me doesn’t want me to go on to “grown up” things until it has been properly experienced and integrated. In a way I am “holding myself back”, but for a good reason! That’s what is missing in pathological diagnosis - that most symptoms have a meaningful purpose. They aren’t random. They tell you what they need if you listen.

My symptoms seem to be telling me this:

Stop. Stop and be present to this point in time. Stop being about the future and be about the present. Go back to the point in time where you first stopped being about the present, and allow yourself to catch up. Go back to the point where you decided you had to be important to be loved, and take a deep breath. Where are you? Take another deep breath. Let yourself move around in this space. What do you want? What is missing? Feel the size and shape of it. Focus on this. Focus on me. I am still here. If you ignore me, I will remind you.

I am more convinced than ever that listening to the symptoms is the way to heal them. And listening is an active process - it requires an intuitive kind of empathy. If you want to heal something, or understand it, go into it. Be present to it. Let it speak to you.

Healing is a process of recovering parts of yourself that you didn’t know were missing. You are bringing unconscious material to light; therefore it is a process of continually unveiling a mystery. This is, I think, why I pursue it - because I want to know what is there, what is behind Door #2.

Each recovered part also gives me a new lens on the world. As I release old attachments and conditioned responses, I see more of the present world I inhabit. I become that much more alive. I’m not just discovering myself, I’m discovering interactions, relationships, the entire landscape I am part of. As each bit of energy is freed from maintaining an identity or protecting a wound, I have that much more bandwidth to take in my surroundings. I want to see that much: I want to recover my sight. I want to regain my ability to be open and present, to know the wonder of what is before me.

I haven’t been blogging much recently. I am not sure what entirely is up, but it has something to do with re-evaluating what it is I am doing for joy and which to appease a fear. What do I want from blogging? To share, to create? Or to be liked, to be thought of as wise or interesting or somehow special? I’ve started to process my fear of being alone, of not belonging, of being forgotten and unnoticed. My motivation to create is suspect: I look at it reproachfully and it slinks away.  It is slumbering, being transformed. It’s hard to tell what will emerge from the cocoon.

I’ve longed for a genuine and pure desire to create something - something I could really get behind. But barring that, I’ve tried on various options that seemed like they might be the real thing, if I knew what that was. What I’ve really longed for is to be more in touch with who I really am - and I think the fear of not being acceptable, and my panic to find a way to ensure acceptability and legitimacy, kept me from accessing that actual information. This wasn’t conscious before, I just kept passionately trying different things, hoping that one of them would suddenly transform me into a person with a sense of purpose.

I have a sense now that it’s developmental. A sense of purpose, a true adult sense of purpose, not a panic faked one, arises out of a grounded consciousness at a certain developmental stage. I’ve observed in myself a certain arrestedness in adolescence - unfinished business. My latest theory is that as I resolve and integrate that developmental stage, and let all the parts of me catch up to my adult self, then the  grounded sense of who I am and what I want to create will arise out of that. And I won’t have to fake it, because I’ll know it, and it won’t be messianic, like my teenager brain imagines it needs to be, it will be healthy and normal-sized and fit into my life.

I just grew up kind of unevenly. Healing is a lot about finishing the growing up process - integrating the uneven patches, finding what was missing and adding it back in.