Anam Cara

Psychology and Self-Absence: Talking Ourselves Out

Our culture is fragmented; the old shelters are gone and the sever of the cold breeze of isolation is everywhere. This has made our desire for belonging all the more intense. We search continually for connection. Today many people find this in therapy and psychology. If you find a wise guide to lead you on the inner quest, you are a fortunate person. It is dangerous to open your self to another in such a total way. Opening your soul to an unworthy guide can have negative consequences. When you really tell how and who you are, you offer your listener a key to the temple of your life. You allow that person a huge voice in your conversation with yourself. Listening is such an underrated activity. In fact it is hugely subversive. Because when we listen deeply, we take in the voice of the other. The inner world is so tender and personal, and the voices that really enter assume great power.

I like to think of psychology as soul-searching: you search your soul and you also search for your soul; and, of course, on the quest your soul is searching with you. The journey has diverse paths, and different voices surface suggesting a real adventure and the possibility of awakening and healing. Good soul-searching refines and heals your presence. It helps you to belong more honestly to yourself. If you are driven by needs and inner forces of which you are unaware, then your behaviour and actions are not free; you only partly belong to yourself. To bring these subtle forces into the light helps change their negative control over you.

The magic of psychology is how powerfully it underlines the effect that awareness can have. When you come to know yourself, you come home to yourself and your life flows more naturally. As you become more integrated, your integrity deepens. You inhabit the heart of your life; you become the real subject of your life rather than its target or victim.

When the wall came down in Germany I remember meeting a friend who had been in Berlin that week. She said, “Man erlebt sich als reines Subjekt,” i.e., in Berlin in those days “You experience yourself as pure subject.” This was a lovely statement of the immense personal power of feeling, thinking, and seeing that is in each of us. When the run of life and possibility is with you, you feel as if you are riding a wave of energy. Unfortunately, much of the time we are not gathered in the grace of such inner fluency. More often than not we are split asunder within, one part fighting against the other. To learn the art of being the subject of your own life and experience enlarges your spirit.

It would be great as we grow older to become more free and fluent. You often see old people who have grown into this grace. Though their bodies are old, their presence is as majestic and swift as a ballet dancer. They have somehow entered the mystery of true unity. They are at one with themselves. It is interesting to hyphenate the word “atonement,” the religious ideal, as at-one-ment. This unity is the heart of all belonging; without this hidden unity of everything, no belonging would be possible. The unity is also the secret. Elsewhere that now holds the presence of those who have vanished from our lives; it ensures that absence is not vacancy.

Good soul-searching helps you to sift the past. Often you only begin when you find yourself in crisis. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word “krinein,” meaning “to decide” or “to sift.” When you take time to search your soul and its past you will know more clearly what belongs to you and what does not. When you sift your soul, you are better able to identify the host of various longings you carry. When you listen to your longings coming to voice, you can discern which horizons they have in mind. You understand that to pursue certain longings would probably destroy you. Certain voices would love to seduce you.

It is interesting that at the source of the Christian tradition, in the Genesis story, the future of creation is determined by longing. The desire to eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil caused the rupture in creation. When Adam followed his longing, its immediate effect was the loss of the ideal belonging of Paradise. In Christian mythic terms, the perennial tension between longing and belonging is to be traced back to this fracture. Expelled as we were from the harmony of Paradise, our belonging will always be fractured and temporary. Our longing will be permanent and full. Towering over the Greek tradition is the longing of the wanderer to return home. The huge longing of Odysseus is going in the other direction. He is already an exile, he wants to return to the belonging of his home and homeland. The true search for soul brings longing and belonging into a creative tension of harmony. Mediocre therapy could haunt your soul with absence by reducing each inner presence to a function.