Harvard Business Review – Psychology – “Make Peace with Your Unlived-life” – December 21, 2016
There’s no statute of limitations on “identity crisis”. Oddly, our culture seems to endorse a belief that once we cross the threshold out of young adulthood, we have arrived. I get that, that’s our human drive to disavow uncertainty…so uncomfortable…and to sense a self-knowing clarity. So much error there. First, if we’re lucky and working at it, we never stop evolving. Second, who among us mere mortals is not humbled by lives not led, choices, like ghost chips, we have let sail away. Third, and perhaps most powerfully, no human is immune to the shadow-self…the parts of us that we have subjugated to cope with the demands of daily lives.
This giving up of core needs and qualities begins in the earliest weeks of life, a time we are most in need of the constant care of our caregivers, and continues. In Make Peace with Your Unlived, published in the Harvard Business Review, Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries begins by describing the internal turmoil that can happen when we become aware of lives unlived as “identity crisis”. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Who could I have been?” “What’s my purpose?” and… “What would I like to become?” These may be uncomfortable explorations, but they are fundamental to human experience.
These questions often become compelling during times of transition (“crisis”) in adult lives. But I have worked with many young children and adolescents whose attention flows naturally toward those larger explorations. We have a strong survival instinct toward inhabiting our most authentic self. This can be at odds with parental or socio-cultural ideals of us.
To live free is to live in harmony with the shadow self.
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries is the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi.