The young person’s task is to primarily emancipate from his or her original family. I have a chapter in my book, Recovery: Plain and Simple, titled, “Saying Goodbye to Mom and Dad.” The teen and early twenties, and now, even men and women in their early thirties, focus on establishing themselves in the world, and perhaps, creating a new family. The middle-aged person’s task is to discover and express their own uniqueness as an individual and to more fully develop, expand their personality, which Carl Jung defined as, “the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.” In other words, really start the unbecoming process, the cookie-cutter, programmed, indoctrinated human we’ve become. We start dropping the false-selves, and stop straying too far afield from the path, which Nature/God/Higher Power intended us to follow and become the person we were meant to be all along.
In the process of becoming a husband, wife, lawyer, teacher, millionaire, starving artist, and thus be able to meet the demands of careers and families, we end up abandoning pursuits and interests, which at one time in our lives, gave us enthusiasm, zest and meaning. In my book The Half-Lived Life: Overcoming Passivity and Rediscovering Our Authentic Self, I encourage my readers, clients and workshop participants to recall what their passions, talents and loves – before the bills and the babies, the mortgages and manias came – and turn and rediscover those all-but- forgotten and neglected sides of themselves. When they do, so many turn once again to music, painting, writing, poetry, drama and other pursuits that enthralled them. Once this happens, our center of gravity of our personality shifts into action, and this center might be called our “Authentic Self,” which is more capable of joy than our false selves are capable of attaining happiness.
By stripping away these personas during the Unbecoming process we come home to ourselves; we more deeply accept ourselves, and thus, begin to accept life on life’s terms. Some might even go so far to say they “made their peace with their God,” or “it’s the way life is.” We become a more receptive human being instead of a “human doing” and increase our ability to be less clingy to whatever comes and goes, surrendering what is no longer ours to hold on to and receiving that which is ready to come. We stop trying to force everything to bend to our will and stop thinking we know how everything and everyone should go and who should come back and when. All of this creates a greater ability to exist in the “now.” Once we stop turning the dials and pulling all of life’s levers, we meet the great giver of joy – our deepest Self.