When parts of us lose the contest with the shadow self in the ten stages we evolve into conflict with ourselves

When parts of us lose the contest with the shadow self in the ten stages we evolve into conflict with ourselves and others and head into: The ten stage: suffering. 

This is the stage of depression, failure, misery, and inertia. Here we wallow in seemingly purposeless pain. The silver lining around our cloud of parental idealisation has been stripped away, but the cloud remains intact. We still wish to be rescued by our parents and their replicated stand-ins, but we lack the requisite pain tolerance to be able to acknowledge the impossibility of this. 

Here we live in tortured ambivalence, and we spend out hours and days trying to get others to love us in the way our parents never could. Part of us wishes to devolve back into the seeming pleasure of grandiosity, but the healthier part recalls how cruelly that route already failed us.

Comments