I was one of those kids who held onto a baby blanket for a very long time. Mine had a name, Shoosh, which is what I started calling it before I could talk. Shoosh gave me comfort. Nobody was gonna take Shoosh away from me (ever!)
With early trauma including abandonment and emotional neglect, it made sense I looked for ways to comfort myself beyond what was “normal”. If someone had tried to take those things away too soon, without giving me any other ways to cope, it would have felt devastating. Of course, eventually, I let go of my baby blanket. It would be weird if I hadn’t by almost half a century old, huh?
Yet throughout life, many of us hold on to old, tattered coping mechanisms. This may look like emotional patterns or addictions; ways we react under pressure that hurt more than help. We may resist leaving the comfortable constriction of toxic, outgrown, or unsustainable relationships. Or we grip onto careers, communities, cultures, and belief systems that at one time gave us support but now make it hard to breathe.
Sometimes we’ve held onto these things for so long, it’s as though they have woven into our very identity. They’ve become integral to how we view and interact with the world around us. Maybe we don’t know who we’d be without them, or even how we’d survive.
Life has its ways of letting us know it is time to let go. First, we get gentle hints and nudges. If you’re anything like me, you ignore them and grip harder. The situation grows more and more ridiculous. Eventually, we are forced to look at reality, which may appear like a spaced-out forty-seven-year-old haplessly dragging around a baby blanket. It may feel like death to let go, but we realize there is no other choice. The outgrown identity has to pass on so our true selves can finally live.
In Jungian psychology, psychic death, or ego death, is something like a reset button that gets pushed during a period of intense suffering. By that time, we’ve already hit every other button, including “avoid”, “distract”, “fantasize”, “deny”, and “excuses”. As the final straw, we take the nuclear option, and low and behold, it liberates us. The ways of being we couldn’t imagine life without are blown to smithereens, and suddenly we can see clearly. Our consciousness shifts. Without the ragged baggage collected over the years, we are light and free.
We remember who we are. And it feels amazing.
And yet, we cannot sugarcoat the process. It is a lot to let significant parts of our lives die. We may find ourselves in existential sadness or terror, where the loss seems bigger than us and we feel we cannot survive without the attachment or coping mechanism. (This is a sign we have triggered a wound from a very young time when we were dependent on others for survival.)
This was very much my experience. As with Shoosh, there were threadbare, ridiculously outgrown things I was ready to drag to the grave. Trying to do things differently felt like death. I would shut down and dissociate every time I tried to change. I constructed an elaborate web of excuses to hold together what I saw as my only means of existence. It took time, persistence, support, self-compassion, and professional help for me to get to and through the reset. (Multiple resets really.) All of this was hard, but you know what? It was exponentially harder to be stuck in patterns that restricted my soul’s growth.
In the end, we learn nothing stays the same and it isn’t meant to. As we let go, we open space and energy for something new to sprout and flourish. By leaning into expansion we do so much more than survive. We become what we always were meant to be.
May we honor the cycles of life enough to release what is dying. May we value our soul’s purpose enough to release what cannot grow with us.
Here for the whole messy, beautiful process,
Jennifer
P.S. If you’re looking for further support, I’d be honored to be a resource for you. Contact me for a no obligation 15 minute chat.
addiction, coping mechanisms, CPTSD, ego death, emotional patterns, letting go, psychic death, surrender