How to become a serious problem to yourself

Bad trips and how to get out of your own way

I once slipped in the rain and hit my tailbone so hard that I knocked myself into the underworld.

I was 25, freshly divorced, and way too skinny. I slipped while running in the rain, on the slick concrete of my wet porch. I lay on the porch stunned and staring up, wiggling all my fingers and toes until I could pick myself up. Somehow, my skull was spared from the bottom stair.

Frankly, I probably had an unconscious desire to fall because I was so damn tired of my slutty, wreckless, codependent self. Something had to change.

I had been crying and crying to my therapist earlier that week about all the ugliness in the world until she tired of me and suggested meds.

I reflexively declined and set about trying to solve my depression; my boyfriend nursed my undiagnosed concussion and later became my husband.

Healing the brain is a spiritual journey as much as it is a neurological one, but an oracle appeared on my path to guide me: Papa Carl.

That’s what me and my best buds call Carl Jung. Lol.

He suggested that the only way to help with all the dark and terrible and heartbreaking stuff in this world (that made me want to die) is to stop acting like a victim, take radical responsibility for all of my own pain, and integrate all the nasty parts of myself into a powerful, individuated whole.

I became a serious problem to my old self, because I had to finally had to own my bullshit, like the stinking, miserable knapsack that it was.

I finally acknowledged that I was the problem, and the following decade became a journey of unpacking all of my gnarliest, persephonic sludge. In the vacated space, a new version of myself unfurled: raw and pink, tender-aching with gratitude for all the sweet little things.

What a trip.

I’ll share the passage that helped spark my transformation; it’s a rule to live by, a bitter medicine when all feels lost:

“If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.

Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts.

He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against.

He lives in the ‘House of the Gathering.’

Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.

He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”

—Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, 1938