The self-betrayal that announces the call
The opening scene of the film Patch Adams shows us something that, unfortunately, a lot of us can relate to. Patch, played by Robin Williams, is seen riding on the bus while narrating about life. He has been holding himself together for a long time using every strategy he knows, but those strategies have finally run out. Around him, ordinary passengers are dozing or reading or looking out the window. Inside him, everything he has been using to keep his sanity has stopped working. He gets off the bus and walks straight into a psych ward and voluntarily admits himself. The whole thing happens without a lot of drama, without any single external event triggering the shift that we’re aware of. Simply put, his own adaptations have turned on him, and their turning is what walks him through the door.
Based on all the medications in his cabinet, we can assume that Patch has been working through his own rupture for quite some time. Maybe you can relate. You are in the middle of doing something you have always done that has always worked, and you catch yourself doing it and can see it clearly for the first time. You watch yourself smoothing over a conflict that should not have been smoothed over, agreeing to something you do not want to agree to, or keeping your mouth shut when you should have spoken up. And then you feel something you have not felt before, a small internal recoil at your own behavior, as if a part of you is watching the performance and refusing for the first time to go along with it.
That recoil is one of the earliest signs of what I am pointing at here. Your own adaptations, the strategies you developed to survive whatever you needed to survive, have started to turn on you. What used to feel like your competence now feels like your betrayal. The very thing that kept you safe as a child, or held your marriage together in your twenties, or made you successful in your career, has become the obstacle to whatever you are now trying to become. And the recoil is where you start to notice that these strategies may no longer be your friends.
This is one of the strangest experiences of adult development, and one of the hardest to describe to anyone who has not been through it yet. The strategies that turn on you feel more like well-meaning old friends who have not gotten the memo that the situation has changed. They are still trying to protect you from threats that no longer exist. They are still running the operating system they were installed to run in a world that no longer looks like the world they were designed for. The people-pleaser in you is still trying to keep the peace with a parent who has been dead for a decade, the compliance in you is still trying to earn approval from a religious system you left years ago, and the productivity in you is still trying to prove your worth to a boss who fired you in 2011. Everyone involved in the original situation has moved on except the parts of you that were shaped by the situation, and those parts are still militantly doing their job in a context where the job is now the thing that stands between you and your continued growth.
The framework that has helped me most in understanding this phenomenon comes from a therapeutic approach that treats the human psyche as a collection of parts rather than as a single unified self. In this framework, we all have parts. A part that gets anxious when someone raises their voice. A part that shuts down when we are asked what we want. A part that overworks when we feel unsafe. A part that becomes agreeable when a conflict starts to escalate. These parts have histories. Each one developed at a specific moment in our lives to solve a specific problem we could not solve any other way at the time. They are, in a real sense, the reason we survived. And they are also, in a real sense, the reason we cannot continue to grow without a very deliberate process of updating what each of them thinks it is supposed to be doing.
The parts cannot update themselves. From their own point of view they are still doing the thing that has always worked. The part that developed at age six to keep peace with a volatile parent just keeps doing what it does on autopilot every time the volatile-parent pattern seems to be activating in your current life, even when the person in front of you is not volatile at all. The part that developed at age twelve to hide your creativity from a family that ridiculed it is still hiding your creativity at fifty, even when the people around you are actively asking to see what you can do. The autopilot is impressive in its own way. These parts have been running for decades without direct oversight, and they have kept you functioning through situations they were never designed for. But their autopilot is also what the rupture is starting to interrupt.
When the rupture is underway, you begin to catch these parts in the act. You notice yourself keeping a peace that may have been worth keeping twenty years ago, or agreeing when the real answer would have been no. At first each one feels small and confusing. But the moments start to add up, and you begin to see that a significant portion of your daily behavior is being run by parts of you that are protecting against threats that no longer exist. That realization is the beginning of the self-betrayal I am discussing here.
The betrayal is that you can no longer trust the strategies that used to be your greatest strengths. The compliance that made you a good employee is now preventing you from asking for what you actually need. The peacekeeping that made you a good spouse is now preventing you from having the honest conversations your marriage requires. And the competence that made you the person everyone leaned on is now preventing you from admitting you are drowning. Every strategy you have ever used to move through the world with any degree of success is now the specific thing that is keeping you stuck in the version of yourself you have outgrown.
This is disorienting in a way that few other experiences are. You are used to trusting yourself and you are used to your old strategies working. The reason they became your strategies in the first place is that they worked, once, in situations that made them necessary. To discover that the very things you used to rely on are now the things standing in your way is to lose faith in the person you have been for a long time. That loss of faith is what betrays you into knowing something you did not want to know. You have reached the point where you can clearly see that the version of you who has been running your life needs to be replaced by a version that does not yet exist.
The call rarely comes as a new self arriving. It usually comes the way it came for Patch on that bus. The strategies that used to hold him together stopped holding him together, and he walked into a place he never planned to enter because he could no longer keep going the way he had been going. He did not have a new self yet. He just could not keep being the old one. That is what the call looks like when it actually arrives in a person’s life. You will have the recognition that the old way of being is no longer available, and the willingness to walk into what comes next without knowing where it leads. That is all you will have at first, and that is enough to start with.
If you are in this place right now, catching yourself in the act of using strategies that no longer serve you, the recognition is more important than any immediate solution. You do not have to know what to do next. You just have to keep watching what the parts of you are trying to do on your behalf. Over time you will begin to see them as younger parts of yourself, still doing what they learned to do when you needed them most. They are still trying to help you with a map that has not been updated in decades. The way forward is to sit with each part long enough to hear what it was protecting you from, and to let it know, gently, that the danger has passed. That is how younger parts of you begin to grow up. And that growing up is how the strategies that used to run your life finally get to rest.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Why No One Asks for This
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
