As information generated by our Western culture gets passed around, whether by word of mouth, media or meme, it takes on a life of its own, like a game of telephone. Pretty soon all of us are in a panic because we think we don't exercise enough, eat well enough, play well enough, and sleep well enough. Bombarded daily with this stuff, we are stunned into forgetting that much of what passes for information is flawed, incomplete, biased, or funded by those with ulterior motives. Wait long enough, and what was "true" yesterday will turn 180 degrees (eggs are bad, eggs are good; hormone therapy is safe, no it isn't, etc.) Economics drive our "truths" to an abysmal degree, as Upton Sinclair pointed out. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," he said, "when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
So when it comes to analyzing the emotional or spiritual aspects of personhood, there's no shortage of books, articles, workshops and well meaning others to tell us what's going on. Some of it can be helpful and even life or sanity saving, for sure. But what happens if your experience doesn't match up with "information" you find in the outside world? What do you do if you're an anomaly, or in a minority for whom there is little or no validation in the form of resources?
If you're like me, you make it your mission to find the exceptions, to find your truth somewhere else out there in the world. Whether this is in the form of another person who has had similar experiences, or some article in a magazine read by few, or in a piece of art, music or whatever – you seek out these needle-in-haystack, precious kindred souls and thank god for the grace of the finding. (This is one of the fabulous things about the internet; our access to potentially helpful resources increases tenfold.)
All of this is a long way of saying that after an extensive search, I finally found an answer to a question I've had for ages: why do some transitions - periods of liminality and limbo - last for so long? In the case of my own midlife psycho-spiritual experience, the only helpful piece of information I recall is from William Bridge's first book, Transitions – a fleeting comment about one client of his who felt in the dark and out of sorts for ten years. That's not much for me to hang onto!
But here's something I can hold onto, and even chew on. It's from a little book called In Midlife, by Jungian analyst Murray Stein. This book gets quoted a lot if you dig past the surface of midlife literature. I've had it for years, and probably even read this passage a couple of times without remembering it. Maybe these graceful "findings" are all about timing – about how things pop out at you when you are really ready to know:
"At certain critical moments in life, the psychological effects of losses or of defeats are greater than they are at other times; they signify more, and they have the effect of 'splitting the block' in a fashion and to a depth that they would not have done at other times. This is not altogether a function of the magnitude of the loss. Sometimes the term of liminality that results from loss … is only short-lived, relatively a mere flash of altered consciousness; at other times it takes hold and dominates consciousness for years. Why is this the case? …
"To this point I have discussed liminality only diachronically, as a [linear] segment within a span of time, preceded by the segment separation and followed by the segment reintegration. Here liminality is viewed as time-bound and clearly limited in duration. But a full discussion of liminality must also see it synchronically, as a permanent dimension or depth of the psyche, a 'layer' that threads through all time and occupies a space in every period of life. At a certain psychological level of things, we are always in liminality, floating and unfixed to identfications, betwixt and between (p. 47) …
"At midlife a person runs into a period when the liminality that is produced by external facts such as aging, loss of loved ones, or the failure to attain a dream of youthful ambition combines with the liminality that is generated internally by independently shifting intrapsychic structures, and the result is an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, one that often endures for years. At this point, diachronic and synchronic liminality come together synchronistically. "Synchronism" is defined in Webster's Third International Dictionary with an image that aptly portrays this kind of cooperation of forces: it is 'the condition of excessive rolling obtained when a ship's rolling period is equal to the wave period, or to one-half the wave period.'
"When these two motions coincide … the ship's natural roll becomes excessive. This is midlife liminality. Always the ship is rolling, and always some liminality is present within the psyche. Always, too, the sea is rolling: life throws up crises and failures that prove our limitations all the time. But when these two motions get together, and the force of each is great enough, they produce a degree of rolling than can reach excessive proportions…
"We do liminality … an injustice if not outright violence by limiting discussion … to the perspective of chronos, if we understand time only in the linear sense, diachronically. [Victor] Turner observes that the experience of liminality includes an altered sense of time, 'in and out of time,' as he puts it… Liminality, so frequently and classically imaged as wanderings in the desert, contains a different experience of time from that of ordinary diurnal ego-consciousness. (p. 50)"
Doesn't solve the problem, does it? But it sure goes a long way toward making me feel less confused and alone. I'll take it!
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