The Choice That Defines All of Us

One night, when I was still a full-time marriage therapist, a couple was arguing in my office about where to put their new television. He wanted to put it in the living room. She was adamantly opposed to it. They'd been fighting about it for days. Mid-conversation, something drew my attention. I interrupted and asked him to describe the room in their house he was calling the living room. He did. His wife waved nonchalantly. "Oh, that's not the living room,” she said, “that's the family room. I don't care if you put it in there." Problem solved, because there hadn’t been a problem in the first place—there’d been a misunderstanding.

They told me I was a marriage genius. I told them my wife might beg to differ.

What if the most urgent problem in the house of our humanity isn’t that we have a problem but a misunderstanding? What if we simply aren’t clear about the two rooms within us, nor in which room we are hanging our identity?

We didn’t start with two rooms in us. In the beginning, we were an open floor plan—one wide open space I call the Soul. There are no locks on the Soul’s doors, nor any curtains on its floor-to-ceiling windows. In the great room of the Soul, there is essentially nothing separating us from everything else, and there’s so much natural light. Originally, we inhabited the fullness of our Soul, and we were in direct contact with creation. Participating with it, not hiding from it. Collaborating with it, not fighting it. Experiencing it, not analyzing it. In the beginning all was well with our Soul.

Then pain happened.

There are the big-T traumas: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, criminal neglect and all the other neglects between criminal and painful. There are the small-t traumas too. Abandonment. Loss. Rejection. Bullying. Marital conflict. Divorce. Alcoholism. Financial desperation—really, desperation of any kind from the big people who are supposed to be the calm and steady center of this whole thing. And then there are just the ordinary pains of existence: feeling unseen and misunderstood—in other words, loneliness. Or the haunting sense that if we were only somebody else, something more, somehow different, we would be better loved and everything would be okay—in other words, shame.

The first time our pain happened, we forgave and forgot. The tenth or hundredth or thousandth time it happened, we decided to do something about it. However, we can’t hide from hurt by adding locks to the doors of the Soul, nor by putting curtains on its windows—that’s just not how the Soul works. The great room is meant to be in connection with all things, not protecting against them.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, so out of necessity the Soul constructs a new room in the center of itself.

My family has an actual room like that in our house, underneath the basement stairs. You get to it through the closet in the downstairs guest room. At the back of the closet is a tiny door with a knob. You have to duck to enter, but once inside there’s enough room to stand up and move around a little. Not much, but a little. We go there when we feel unsafe, mostly when tornado sirens go off.

The Soul’s safe room is its lifelong pain management project. Everything before the commencement of that project we call childhood. Everything after is essentially our adulthood. Some of us have been adulting since we were eight. Seven, even. Or six. Or five. “When did you tuck away your childhood for good?” my spiritual director once asked me.

When, indeed.

This panic room has been called by many names in the last century. Thomas Merton called it the false self. Richard Rohr refers to it as the ego, or the small self. I simply call it the Self.

When a Soul hunkers down in the panic room of the Self for long enough, it forgets about the rest of the house in which it once lived. It assumes the Self is all there is, so it settles in and starts to decorate the tiny space. It even hangs its identity there, amongst the three protective personas that are crafted within its confines. Sure, it gets a little cramped and crowded in there, but it’s also a little less painful. At least until those three personas become more problematic than the pain from which they are supposed to be protecting you.

Then, we have a choice. We can double down on identifying with our Self. We call that a midlife crisis. Or we can become aware of who we once were and slowly, bravely, vulnerably step out into the expansiveness of our Soul once again. We call this a midlife awakening. It’s our second childhood.

Every day offers us another choice.

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This is a rough draft excerpt from the book I’m writing along with our loveable community of paid subscribers. I’m sharing it with you because the concept is foundational to humaning, and I hope it will enrich your understanding of next week’s post about gratitude!

P.S. Speaking of paid subscribers, they’ve teed up an amazing conversation for our Human Hour on Friday. We’ll be discussing one of three topics they’ve suggested. Here they are:

1. How to traverse the chasm from a bread-winning job to doing what interests you most. Kelly, how have you done that over time? What wisdom does the group have to share about their own transitions?

2. How to let go of possessions, a relationship, or anything else. How do we relinquish attachments, get better at being instead of doing, and see growth as subtraction rather than addition?

3. How to know when to say no. When am I no longer doing something from love but from obligation and guilt, and how do I know when obligation is reason enough to do something for someone?

If you’d like to join us, make sure you’re a paid subscriber and then go to the Substack Chat thread here and click on the link in the replies to register!