The Drama of Dysfunctional Selves
Why self-improvement is a sham and why we never truly evolve, resolve or heal
“Shiv. One other thing that I’ve been pondering about: you seem very much about not being a victim to your situations. But that requires awareness above your situations and your difficult emotions. Does that ever get tiring to you? Don’t you ever feel like just relaxing and being human just like everyone else? lol”
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As a spiritual writer I am always hyperaware of how my words influence the minds and lives of my readers. Although, I do not claim any mantle of authority, I know that the clarity and conviction with which I write can assume the voice of authority in other people’s minds and can portray an image of mastery. It is a necessary risk of the work that I have willingly assumed. I try and balance my writing (not always successfully) to reflect different facets of my life and mind so as to banish any notion that a reader may form that I have achieved any sort of mastery at this thing we call life.
I have not mastered anything. Not my work. Not my relationships. Not my writing. Not my perception of self. When I have a good day, it is more a matter of serendipity than of strategy. And if I have a good week, month, year - then that is an act of grace not gumption.
If there is a single capacity I have developed that is worth mentioning, it is the willingness to see myself as I am, not how I want to be. I am not claiming to have mastered this either. Sometimes, I fail at this too. But it has come to be one of my most reliable and consistent perspectives.
It is also one of the most challenging to maintain. Because it must be done without an agenda.
Self-awareness is easy. Self-awareness without succumbing to the need to manage, modify, improve or control the self that one is aware of - is the hard part.
To witness the broken bits, the ugly bits, the messy bits, the underdeveloped bits, the inconsistent bits, the downright frustrating bits - without wanting to change, tweak, remove, edit, enhance, ignore, deny, invalidate them in any way - or on the flip side, without wanting to assert, validate, protect, defend, justify, rationalize, analyze or explain why they exist in any way - but to simply SEE them, to bear witness and let them be without judgment, guilt, shame or a sense of failure - to coexist in harmony with this dysfunctional cast of demons, shadows, imposters, wounded children and incomprehensible nebulous energies that inhabit my psychic space…this is the challenge.
The being human without wanting to be a better human.
There is nothing more tempting than wanting to heal a hurt, to soothe an anger, to quell a fear, to reason with a grievance. Or alternately, to validate a hurt, to justify an anger, to substantiate a fear, to defend a grievance.
But to watch the hurt and simply let it hurt. To witness the rise of anger and simply acknowledge its rage. To observe fear spike and simply be arrested by it. To watch a grievance silently weave its spidery web over the mind without intervening.
Every instinct within us screams NO! If we see it, we must fix it. We must support it. We must solve it. Or we must learn to transcend it.
We must change. We must improve. We must enlighten. We must liberate. We must mature. We must progress. We must heal. We must resolve. We must evolve.
Yet, all these are lies we feed ourselves to cope with the enormity of who we are, the diversity of selves, benevolent and malevolent, that animate our expression and the multitudinous contradictions they produce through their interactions.
We do not evolve. Only the awareness of oneself grows.
Nothing ever resolves. Traits, behaviours and attitudes simply go dormant until they are necessitated.
Our demons are not waiting to be liberated. We are not their saviors. Nor are we their victims. Demons do what demons do. They are agents of chaos. Whether we are aware of them or unaware of them they remain our demons. Whether we love them or detest them they remain our demons. They are inherent to our psyche.
And yet, from their chaos and entropy arises an unpredictable order and emergence. It happens by itself. Completely mysteriously.
These cycles of chaos and order, of entropy and emergence, are infinite. They do not cease. I have witnessed this time and again in my own experience.
Therefore, I do not view the self as an improvement project that begins with incompletion and evolves towards completion. The chaos does not need to be ordered. The entropy does not need to be reduced. The demons do not need to be tamed. The jagged edges don’t need to be smoothed out.
All is purposeful and yet what that purpose is, is beyond this writer’s limited comprehension.
What I do sense most deeply and resonantly is that the self is fundamentally whole and indivisible from the outset. Which means even when it doesn’t feel whole, it is whole. The thorns are as much an aspect of that wholeness as are the buds. The demons are as much an aspect of that wholeness as are the angels. The hurt, fear, pain and suffering are as much a part of that wholeness as the harmony, joy, comfort and flow.
Nothing is wasted. Nothing is a mistake. Nothing is out of place. Nothing is broken.
Only perception makes it so.
And perception clarifies as awareness of these multitudes grows.
When we stop viewing ourselves through the lenses of “problems” and “fixes”, “false selves” and “true selves”, “wounds” and “healing” but simply bear witness to all of it - then we stop becoming the “saviours” and the “jailers”, the “victims” and the “tyrants” of our selves.
When I suffer, I see the suffering as a “chaos cycle”, and when I am harmonious I see this as an “order cycle”. Yet, these cycles are infinite and they have nothing to do with what I want, need or hope for. They are universal. Not personal. They afflict all things and all beings in existence.
From once believing that I was the director of this drama of dysfunctional selves to realizing that the drama is not controlled by me and that I am in fact situated in the audience - there has been a strange kind of freedom in that.
Not the “I have transcended the human drama” kind of freedom (which I think is rubbish). But the “I am not running this show, the show is running itself” kind of freedom.
Even to call it “freedom” is a sort of romanticization of this state and will be misleading to the reader. It is an existential relaxation. Like a tight fist somewhere deep within my gut, that I never previously knew existed, has loosened its grip. I am still the recipient of the full onslaught of all the facets that arise within me. I am still the benefactor of the angels and the bitch of the demons that inhabit me.
But when there is nothing that needs doing about it, my energy and awareness become freed up to observe it, study it and learn from it.
With nothing to do, somehow things get done.
Carl Jung spoke of individuation as the process of integrating the various disparate facets of self and shadow into one seamless whole. However, I have come to realize that this integration is not an action. The self is not a jigsaw puzzle that needs to be painstakingly pieced together in order to produce a complete singular picture.
Rather it is already a whole and complete picture. The jigsaw is already finished. We are not required to lift a finger to move or correct a single piece of it.
Individuation is simply the perception of the self as whole. Of seeing how each piece of the puzzle no matter how beautiful or hideous, beneficial or harmful, harmonious or painful is exactly where it belongs - needing no intervention.
And the feeling that emerges when all the parts are accepted is the sense that “I am exactly where I belong”.
Even in my joy, I am whole. Even in my suffering, I am complete.
It is all the same singular self.
Including the angels, demons and all the rest of the cast of misfit characters in this tragicomic production called “Me”.
Beautiful piece, Shiv. I resonate very much. I see clearly that everything goes together, the light and the dark, in an unfathomable way. My own past as a raging and often violent drunk seems as perfect to me now as the sober Joan who emerged from it.
I wouldn't exactly agree that self-awareness is easy. In my experience, we are often totally unaware of many of our habitual patterns. We don't see them until we do. And in my experience, psychotherapy, meditation, and somatic work all seemed very helpful in revealing and undoing them. Did "I" do any of this? I can't say yes or no. This bodymind person did do all these things, but the urge and the ability to do them came from I know not where.
I also wouldn't say we don't evolve. In my experience, the universe, biological life, and human life and consciousness does seem to evolve. It seems to me there is a natural desire to heal, to fix what is broken, to undo patterns that bring forth suffering. No? As I see it, the trick is, we can't "do" any of this through goal-oriented force, but more through the not-doing and acceptance of what is that you describe so beautifully in this piece. And we never reach a place of final perfection where everything is neatly resolved.
To take one example from my own life now, I would very much like to be able to talk to people I disagree with in an open way without getting triggered and becoming defensive, angry, tight, offensive, etc. And I often fail. Am I able to be open in this way at will? No. But the aspiration is there, and at the same time, there is an acceptance of how I am, which is sometimes angry and defensive, and a recognition of this as impersonal weather that is in some sense as perfect as it is and inseparable from the whole, just like my drunken past.
Anyway, it's a great article. Paradoxically, helpful to all of us. 😎🙏❤️
I love this article. Thank you. It reminds me of a Sydney Banks quote; ‘if the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.’ Sitting with, even noticing, so-called fear, grief, shame etc continues to feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable but these experiences that once were called ‘weakness’ are gradually feeling easier in my bodymind tg.