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Some lives cannot be repaired one small step at a time. When you have sunk far enough, what you need is a rupture, not a routine. This lecture from Academy of Ideas explores how radical personality change happens. Drawing on William James and Carl Jung, it shows that rebirth comes to the desperate, and nearly always begins with sacrifice — letting an old part of yourself die so something new can live. The descent through chaos is dangerous, but Jung’s counsel stands: every descent is followed by an ascent, like new wine poured into new bottles.
Full Video Transcript
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew, if you have not first become ashes?
How can we remake our character? Can we become another, as if born anew?
Most models of human development place tight bounds around our capacity for self-directed change, for we are a conservative creature.
We crave order and have a deep need for a stable sense of self.
Change, according to these models, is best accomplished in a gradualist manner.
We need to focus on taking small steps each day in the direction of the person we wish to become.
We need to break down our bad habits, cultivate good ones,
and over time these changes will accumulate to produce impressive results.
This approach to self-change has a lot of merit and should be the approach that most people use in their pursuit of personal growth.
But this is not the only way that we change, nor is it adequate for all situations.
For while we are conservative creatures,
we are also mortal creatures with a limited time and a limited capacity to endure suffering.
Slow and steady change works well if we have a solid foundation from which to build,
but if we have descended too deeply into our own personal hell, or if our life has become so dysfunctional that each small step
forward is quickly nullified by everything that is wrong with our life, then the gradualist approach may not save us.
Sometimes life requires radical change, not merely a change in a habit or two, but a change of such significance that it leads to what is known as a psychological rebirth.
Fortunately, this type of change is possible and occurs in more lives than is often realized.
Or as the psychologist Michael Mahoney explains,
transformation deserves our continuing theoretical and research attention. It appears to be more
common than psychologists had assumed. Moreover, we are wise to acknowledge the implications of
such transformations for our ideas about human possibilities. But to what degree can this type
of change be self-induced? While there is a lot of mystery surrounding this process, the idea of
the rapid personality transformation, or psychological rebirth, has long piqued the
curiosity of mankind. Modern psychology may not give this topic the focus it
deserves, but there are some clues we can look to regarding the mechanics of this
process which may help us unlock the riddle of our own transformation. William
James is one psychologist who spent a lot of time studying this phenomenon.
Much of what he learned is detailed in his book, The Varieties of Religious
Experience, and it is from this work that we can find our first clue as to what
leads to a psychological rebirth.
According to James,
there is a certain type of person most susceptible to a rapid personality transformation,
and it is the type of person most in need of one.
Rapid personality transformations do not occur very often to those content with life,
but instead are more likely to occur to those who have reached the darkest pits of despair.
Acute suffering, a prolonged state of depression, a pernicious addiction,
or utter disillusionment with life for the fertile soil from which the psychological rebirth is manifested.
The securest way to the rapturous sort of happiness of which the twice-born make report
has, as an historic matter of fact, been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered.
Many, however, are those who descend into a living hell,
but relatively few are those who experience the transformation of self that leads to a reaffirmation of life.
What differentiates those who remain locked in their misery from those who break free of it?
By turning to myth, that most ancient source of the psychology of man,
further clues about this process can be discerned.
For the rebirth is one of the most common themes of mythology.
Countless are the stories in which a hero or heroine is presented with great challenges
only to overcome them and in the process to experience a radical transformation in their character.
What many of these stories share in common is the element of the sacrifice.
The rebirth is only granted to the man or woman who first appeases the gods.
But we do not need a god to understand the necessity of the sacrifice,
as there is a psychological explanation for why a sacrifice can engender a radical personality change.
Sacrifice, writes Kreljung, always means the renunciation of a valuable part of oneself,
and through it, the sacrificer escapes being devoured.
The sacrifice is the difficult but necessary step of abandoning an aspect of ourself
in order to pave the way for the emergence of the new.
The sacrifice is critical in the process of rebirth for the simple reason that often what keeps us locked in our problems
is the inability to recognize that ways of life that served us in our past
may morph from promoters of our well-being to the acute cause of our suffering.
A sacrifice can take countless forms and may be as simple as the ending of a relationship,
the quitting of a dead-end job, or the breaking of an addictive habit.
The sacrifice is never easy, if it is to be the type of sacrifice that can engender a psychological rebirth.
But as Nietzsche put it,
The dying of one attitude or need, wrote Rollo May,
may be the other side of the birth of something new,
which is a law of growth in nature, not at all limited to human beings.
One can choose to kill a neurotic strategy, a dependency, a clinging, and then find that he can choose to live as a freer self.
A dying of part of oneself is often followed by a heightened awareness of self, a heightened sense of possibility.
Sometimes the mere act of sacrifice will be enough to cure what ails us.
Free from the chains of our past, we can look at the world with a new set of eyes and move forward with a new sense of purpose and energy.
A painful sacrifice can be risked with a mighty effort of the will, wrote Jung.
If successful, the sacrifice bears blessed fruit,
and the sacrificer leaps at one bound into the state of being practically cured.
Not everyone, however, will find that the sacrifice alone leads to its own cure.
In most cases, the sacrifice will initially have the opposite effect.
Instead of curing what ails us and giving birth to a new and better life order,
the sacrifice will lead to disorder, for in sacrificing an old way of being we are likely to discover that we have nothing to fill the
void. The sacrifice will have cast us down into the proverbial realm of chaos and here danger lurks.
For on the one hand, in complex systems, such as the life of man, chaos begets new forms of order, or as Mahoney puts it,
systemic disorganization appears to be an important antecedent to reorganization.
But on the other hand, there is always a risk that the chaos will overwhelm us and rather than leading to a new and better life order, the descent into chaos will lead to a psychological breakdown.
Some psychologists suggest that the psychological rebirth only differs from a psychological breakdown by the end result.
The stages that lead to a breakdown, in other words, often mirror those that produce the rebirth.
Or as Jung explains,
our control. Our goal at this stage is to experiment with novel ways of ordering our life
in the attempt to fill the void left by the sacrifice. But while novel forms of order are
crucial for the ascent from the realm of chaos, experiments with novelty are stressful and often
accompanied by intense states of fear and anxiety. If we can recognize, however, that this is a
natural part of the process and not reflective of anything inherently wrong with us, we may find it
easier to push forward despite the turmoil that surrounds us, or as Mahoney explains,
Episodes of intense emotional distress and disorder often reflect natural, and yes, even healthy,
expressions of an individual’s struggles toward reorganization. Such struggles are not always
successful, of course, but they may be viewed with substantially less fear and impatience
if they are construed as the activities of an open, developing system in search of a
more extensive balance with its world.
One set of skills that can make the difference between whether we emerge from the realm of
chaos as a twice-born, or whether the chaos forces us back to our old, or perhaps worse
ways of being, are rebalancing and relaxation skills.
Practices like meditation, physical activity, breathing exercises, and other techniques
of this nature can be crucial in our attempts to navigate the chaos into which we have fallen.
When new experiences destabilize one’s system, writes Mahoney,
it is valuable to have skills in restabilizing and returning to a sense of safety and security.
The more often one practices and refines such exercises, the more competent one feels in
risking excursions toward the edges of unfamiliar experiencing.
In the end, however, a voluntary descent into the realm of chaos is risky, even if we arm
ourselves with tools that can make navigation of this realm easier.
So knowing that a radical personality change is possible, and that a sacrifice may engender
a psychological rebirth, do we make the leap, or do we instead stick to the less risky approach
of the gradualist method of change?
This is a question each of us must face for ourselves.
But if we are already trapped in our own personal hell, the question that may be more appropriate
is whether not making the sacrifice is perhaps the greater risk.
For the realm of chaos is not only entered by means of voluntary sacrifice.
More typical is an involuntary descent into these depths.
If we persist in our dysfunctional ways, if we remain in the words of Jung, an immovable
pillar of the past, then eventually the fragile order of our life may give way to chaos whether
we like it or not.
A sacrifice of our old ways will be forced upon us.
But an involuntary sacrifice is, according to Jung, an unmitigated catastrophe.
It is more likely to result in a psychological breakdown than a psychological rebirth.
Therefore, if we feel our life is moving in this direction, if chaos and disorder are already
creeping in, we may want to take control of the process and make the voluntary sacrifice that may
save us from a more dire outcome. No one should deny the danger of the descent, wrote Jung,
but it can be risked. No one need to risk it, but it is certain that someone will, and let those who
go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods.
Yet every descent is followed by an ascent.
The vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers
change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put
into new bottles.
Source: Academy of Ideas