Disillusionment: Birth Pains of a New Self

Remember being a child, having your legs ache at night, and your mom said it was just growing pains?

Or maybe you remember uncomfortable groin achiness in pregnancy as bones and ligaments in the pelvic girdle loosened and shifted in preparation for childbirth.

These pains of physical birth and growth have psychological and spiritual counterparts, one of which is the process of disillusionment. Becoming stripped of your illusions can be an achy experience, one we are prone to resist or evade.

But there is opportunity for personal growth in confronting illusions and letting them go. As a psychological event, becoming disillusioned is a necessary step to emotional health. As a spiritual process, it's a chance to meet ourselves with compassion while we uncover karmic patterns and lessons.

Illusions are Self-Induced Enchantments

Illusions are misperceptions of reality created when we don't examine and share our assumptions about the circumstances we're in and the people we interact with. When we treat these untested assumptions as facts, we tend to unconsciously organize our lives around them, as if in a trance. When illusions are contradicted with the facts, disillusionment breaks the spell, but usually causes a period of disorientation as the world we had constructed falls apart.

Amy, for example, sought counseling when personality, power, and values conflicts in her church caused her to question her loyalty to a religious organization that acted one way while espousing another set of beliefs and behavorial standards. She felt crushed over seeing "the ugly hypocrisies" that came to her awareness when confronted with revealed contradictions. She felt lost and alone, as if abandonned by her spiritual community.

Amy was in a state of disillusionment in which many dearly held assumptions she'd taken for granted were implictly challenged. Such a process is painful when initiated by a disillusionment event because it is unexpected, unwelcomed, and provokes a fearful sense of life suddenly being turned upside down.

Some people unconsciously experience this feeling as if a part of themselves is dying. In counseling, Amy learned that these events were transforming her from her old, blithely naive self into a new, more conscious, more reflective one who would ultimately exercise better critical thinking to prevent the enchantment of unexamined assumptions in the future.

Grieve What's Being Lost

Disillusionment is experienced as a psychological loss, and the pain suffered is that of grief. Like other mourning processes, persons going through disillusionment grief will likely feel the classic signs of being in shock, feeling numb, disoriented, and confused when the illusion's enchantment begins to break down.

Then a period of withdrawal or denial sets in while old assumptions are flung in one's face for re-evaluation. This demand to look at things with fresh eyes is not gentle, and it is a natural tendency to resist that re-examination. We know we're in denial when we are defensive, argumentative, judgmental, unwilling to apply sound critical thinking, or when we simply withdraw emotionally from the ongoing life around us.

Next comes feelings of anger and hurt, and with that sometimes a sense of having been foolish, betrayed or abandonned. This is the stage where people most often get stuck. To use the birth analogy, when there is a failure to progress, the newborn's vital signs may plummet. In the disillusioned adult, we know our vital emotions and spirits are plummeting if we are withdrawn, sullen, irritable, or sarcastic about the disintegrating illusions as well as in further interactions with the source of the disillusionment.

Just like grief, we then usually go through a period of sadness that might be diagnosed by some as depression, although grief's sadness and depression are not the same thing. Paradoxically, it is during this period of melancholy that the most productive growth might occur.

Disenchant Your Old Self to Birth the New

The first step in birthing Amy's new sense of herself needed to be one of bringing all her illusions into the light, so they could be tested against her newly acquired facts and observations. Facing each one brought her a bittersweet sadness. She recalled a verse that gave her strength: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became grown, I put away childish things.

When Amy reached the final stage of her disillusionment grief -- acceptance -- she embarked on several projects to help her understand and honor what was lost, and stay open the lessons of the journey. She journaled her emotions until she had cried out all the lingering hurt and sadness. She spent time in therapy dialoguing with the part of herself that had held the illusions, and speaking from the newborn part of herself that had compassion for how her world had shifted and all the confusion and hurt that that had brought.

At the end of her acceptance stage, Amy performed a grief ritual designed to honor and let go of the illusions and the suffering of her disenchantment. With colored pens, she drew symbolic images representing herself at various spots on a winding road. Over the head of the first image she drew cartoon-like bubbles in which she named the illusions she had once held and had now become conscious of. Empty bubbles float over the other images in readiness for future disillusions.

She framed the drawing and has hung it over a bookcase to remind her that there are inevitably more disillusionments to come in her life, and that she has the resources to get through them, no matter how painful they are at the time.

Seeking the Karmic Lesson

With grief resolved, Amy sought to understand the spiritual lesson embedded in her disillusionment.

Through meditation, therapeutic trancework, journaling and counseling, she realized that a spiritual enlightenment was occurring. She had been given an invitation to leave behind her childhood comfort-beliefs to see the more complex mysteries of the sacred.

With much introspective work, Amy's relationship to herself and her spiritual community changed as it needed to, to accommodate this awakening.