How to navigate an impasse - you know, it's a portal
Being kind to the old versions of you, grappling for control, titrate, new mythologies
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Onto the article 🌀
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I recently said to my husband that I wanted a personality transplant. This was obviously in jest, but there was a part of me that was nodding and seriously considering that option, as I’ve been feeling particularly sick of myself. A personality transplant was my shortcut solution to overcoming the impasse that had me feeling stuck between where I was within myself and where I wanted to be.
I’ll often hear this complaint from my clients as well, of feeling stuck at an impasse. Sometimes this will be at the beginning of our work together. They come to therapy with symptoms that manifest in various cognitive, behavioural and somatic clusters - different flavours of depression, stress, anxiety, and rage.
Consciously or unconsciously, they know that there’s something in an old pattern that is immobilising them, but they need help to recognise it.
Sometimes an impasse comes well into the therapeutic process. Insight and awareness have burgeoned. But new knowing isn’t translating to new being. Self-understanding will only take you part of the way. Navigating the impasse may take a leap of faith. Paradoxically, into an unknown.
So impasses can be reframed as threshold moments. Portals into a new life1
Impasse as building pressure
I appreciate how this dictionary definition of a physiological threshold describes it not as a place but as a minimum level or intensity of energy needed for something to happen. Like a necessary amount of pressure or tension needed to push you through. The right moment to push during labour is an obvious parallel here.
Psychologically, a threshold symbolises the point at which you shift from one state of being to another. You could say that you need to reach a particular threshold of psychic / feeling intensity to help you “cross over” and initiate a change of state.
And archetypally, I imagine threshold moments as the portals that mark the transition between one life chapter and the next. In Passage Work2, these moments of impasse may more or less line up with an age that marks the beginning or end of one 7-year cycle and the next. Its a major moment.
Impasses, then, can be thresholds to transformative-change moments. A call to lean into some physiological and psychic pressure as you get close to the edge-thing, a willingness to stand the intensity as you teeter… before letting yourself fall-open into the new.
This sounds more dramatic than it sometimes is. Many of you may have experienced the slower cumulative changes that happen when you keep moving into the tension points before they become explosive or feel diabolical. (See the purpose of ‘review’ in this article on change). It can happen a lot that your new life isn’t something you recognise until you reflect back
Impasse can be an indicator of a final desperate grappling for control
My desire then for a surgical removal and replanting of one version of me with a different me is an indicator of intensity! and that I’m at a new edge. This intuitively feels like an emergence threshold from my mid-life passage (and early prep for the crone years). Bring it on! I can't be more excited to enter and be the me that enjoys the second half of life.
I’m witnessing the last gasps of the first-half-of-life me. So my frustration and desire for a quick surgical fix is because the old pattern and persona are still grappling for relevance - the me that takes things too seriously, that worries, that sits in the wound and suffering is being reviewed. And it's all bubbling to the surface.
This me has been operating more covertly in the undercurrent for decades!, but has been revealing itself with more force in the last 6-12 months. Disrupting my sleep, annihilating my relationships. It has so many questions …
Who would I be if I didn’t worry? If I didn’t orient toward pain, how would I see myself, others and the world? It’s worked for me.
If I didn’t identify as a wounded healer, then how would I navigate the world? What would this mean for my life and relationships? Could I still do therapy???? What would I write about?!
Titrate both ends - between old-you-next-you
But when you are trying to transform the psyche, going at it with impatience and a knife can have the effect of the older part doubling down. So I can afford it more compassion for the process of transforming it. I see how exploring the Chiron myth may offer keys to restructuring this me within my psyche and will revisit this myth in a coming post.
And then also, rather than excise it, it pays to work the other end. Look for clues-keys! for a new way of being at the same time.
What might be trying to meet you from the other side, beyond the impasse?
For me, the simple answer here is joy, and its dancing partner, love. And I wonder how universal this might be as the doorway through. (🗝️: What might it look like, feel like to operate from the heart centre?).
What are the clues and indicators in your life for this possibility?
For me, it’s been signalled through the memory of a holiday, when I truly (truly!) let myself enjoy each moment, dropped almost ALL obligations, and kick-started a new phase of healing.(🗝️: How have I radicalised obligation and responsibility?)
Through the trickster visiting me in my dreams, stirring me up enough to move beyond safety (🗝️: How might being disruptive, wrong or bad help me?)
And through a range of ‘out-of-character’ choices, behaviours, and shifts in routines that have been emerging in the last few months. Who is this person that says and does these things?
(🗝️: What does this new me like, dislike, value and find meaningful?)
I realise this has been a me-centric story but I’m trusting that this can act as a catalyst for your own contemplation. Maybe there’s a newer, reworked version of ‘wounded healer’ that’s emerging that is more dynamic and co-creative.
To be continued…
Mendy xx
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I write about this more in this article on the Stages of Change, which mirrors the archetypal phases of initiation