Searching for Soul: A Survivor’s Guide

Foreword

A century ago, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others breaking new ground in the field of psychoanalysis were forming somewhat similar theories about the unconscious part of the human psyche. On one thing they could all agree: if more people could diminish their suffering through an exploration of their unconscious, the world would be a happier and healthier place to live. So much progress was made in the ensuing hundred years that today most people value (if not urgently) a need for self-awareness in their own lives. We have also learned by now that there are dozens of ways to achieve self-awareness and that not all of those ways require the expertise of a therapist or a facilitator (of which I am one). If ever a book described the joys of living life as a result of coming awake—especially when the author had been cursed and desperate and blessed with her need to find the meaning of her self and her life—it is this book.

Searching for Soul is timely, arriving at a seemingly long historical moment of collective problems that cast their pall over all of us individually. Yet Bobbe Tyler’s story is uplifting and encouraging. She believes that we must all participate in our lives fully conscious of our personal principles and values—first to find our own specific meaning and then to live with it in joy, because in living thus we change the entire world for the better. It is rare that one conscious person will change the world all at once, but I agree with Bobbe that at the very least each self-aware individual has the power to change the life of anyone who is in her or his orbit.

As an art therapist and an author, I have dedicated my life to sharing the healing power of writing with my books; Bobbe’s work is a wonderful example of the results that can be achieved by writing about one’s experiences. As I read her life story unfolding layer by layer, my heart was touched. The rigorous honesty and pleasing humility with which she looks into the mirror that is the written page inspires self-reflection. Though individual and personal, this is a universal tale of a woman finding herself by living the examined life so worthy of her work and by learning to accept the mystery of what is.

Bobbe delves deeply into spirit and psyche as she follows a labyrinthine path through the many phases of her life. Speaking to women and men of every age, she writes of the search for her spiritual center during her troubles with marriage, of addictions (her father’s and her own), of loss and learning in relationships, of a beloved sister’s shattering problems with schizophrenia, and finally of the wisdom and aging that became the keys to her happiness. Yet the circumstances of her outer life serve only as a backdrop for a long, rich story about her inner life—how her psyche, fragile and abandoned to begin with, was transformed over time into the inner strength and beauty that mark her life today.

Her wise words inspired me to contemplate the cul-de-sacs in my own life, moved me to go deeply into myself and contemplate where I have been, where I am now, and where I am going. Some books appear at exactly the right moment in a person’s life. I hope this is one of them for you, dear reader, and that Bobbe Tyler’s story will lead you to write your own. May you treasure the wise counsel and healing words in this volume as much as I do.

Lucia Capacchione, Ph.D., A.T.R.

Art therapist and author of

The Creative Journal: The Art of Finding Yourself and Recovery of Your Inner Child

Preface

For as long as I can remember I have searched for and read books just like this one. They were the straws I grasped to keep from drowning, the voices that prayed with me in the night, soothed my fears, and made all the difference in the world. Books like this were my manna in a time when there were fewer distractions in our culture; television, the Internet, cell phones, and iPods had not yet come along to divert one from the serious business of individual survival. Had that not been the case, I—who was shy and introverted and utterly lost as a child—would surely have foundered on the shoals of so much collective time-consuming culture. As it was, I searched for, or was given, or lucked into always just the right book—the one whose story told of possibilities I could not have imagined, of loneliness conquered and the happiness I might one day feel. As I grew older, the authors of my survival became my family of choice. My tribe. My delight. My uncommon wealth.

I have always been a writer, yet before I could tell my own story, I first had to live my life. Not until my Gordian knots had all come unloosed and I was finally whole and healthy in mind, body, and soul would I be qualified to write what was my lifelong burning desire—one of those just right books that used to regularly save my life. The book is in your hands today because synchronicity influenced destiny to set my story telling in motion. As part of her research into the nature of wisdom, a friend pressed a set of life review questions into my hands—The Harvesting Wisdom Interview—and asked me to respond to them; her only instruction was, Take as long as you like and go as deep as you can. I knew soon enough that I was writing an intimate discourse on self-discovery, a re-creation of an inner journey whose full meaning and substance would be revealed to me when I had finished my work. And so it was that in exchange for my considerable time and effort, I now enjoy a rare and valuable gift: my life—fully deciphered, whole, and comprehensible in all of its layers. Probing my past, plumbing my depths, I set about reliving the peaks and valleys of my story from seventeen different starting points and discovered that it was not just my story but your story, too. By diving as deep as I could go into the heart of my own particular darkness, I found again and again the essential meaning and purpose of every life. We are unique, so our stories will always be different on the transparent surface of life, yet the deeper I probed—beyond the particular to the level of soul—the more I was certain we are all one at our core.

I was stunned to find so much rich and complex material stored up in my psyche waiting to be expressed, but then I am surprised every day by what happens in the process of self-discovering awareness. It is thrilling to feel one’s consciousness enliven and expand—one sees and understands and feels ancient, burdensome things falling away, leaving one lighter than air. I have never felt so free. With my friend’s permission, the questions are included in the book as an appendix. They are not as simple as they seem; it will take you longer to answer them than you thought, but I assure you the results of your efforts will quietly change you inside and out. Take as long as you like and go as deep as you can, and I can promise you this: the day will come when you know yourself more completely than you ever thought possible, and on that day you will hold your soul—like a precious jewel—in the palm of your hand.

Acknowledgments

My grateful and greatest thanks to Roberta Forem, without whose Interview questions this book would not be; to Dr. Lucia Capacchione, invaluable friend and publishing mentor; to Carla Riedel for her prepublication editing and story-teaching skills; to my faithful, endlessly patient readers, whose criticism and encouragement kept me writing, no matter what: Christine Wagner, Viktoria Holm Kramer, Peter Kemble, Catherine Haller, and Shirley Partridge. Special thanks go to Ohio University Press/Swallow Press director David Sanders for his enthusiastic response to the manuscript’s content and to managing editor Nancy Basmajian, who untangled my prose and unmixed my metaphors with singular skill—and to the many unnamed others in the village it took to make this book.

Finally, I wish to thank the many authors whose names appear in the endnotes for their collective wisdom and merciful assistance with my life.

one

What do you mean?

Perhaps she told herself, kneeling there, that I would have to stop and think, to question my own position: ‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him, O Lord?’ What were we here for, what were we doing, what was the meaning of our lives?

—Paul Elie

They were young in years, yet ripe enough to assume the heady, first-time excitement of pilfering. According to a plan conceived only minutes before the caper was on, my daughter, her best friend (older by a year), and my son (youngest of all and happy to be on the team) filched a lipstick apiece from our local drugstore. One at a time those brazen little bandits did their part of the dirty deed, then sauntered to and through the exit door and raced away—celebrating the success of their first notable heist all the way home.

The store owner, a decent, thoughtful man who knew my family nearly as well as he knew his own, had witnessed the mischief and opted not to humiliate the children in front of customers who might have known them (and me). Assuming rightly I would wish to handle the incident myself, he approached me the next day when I came in for coffee and discreetly unreeled the whole sordid story. I thanked him for his kindness and opened my wallet to pay for the stolen goods, but he waved it away: No, no, not necessary, he said, I’m sure they won’t do it again. I insisted he allow me to pay: some things are a given. Yet, as I lingered over my coffee thinking of ways I should approach my kids later that day, I felt the old fear and trembling of my early childhood and the possibility of doing them harm. On my way out, I told the owner I would be back later with my children in tow to submit their apologies, and asked if he would assist me by accepting their remorse with an appropriately measured response. Of course, he said. "Don’t be too hard on them, though," I added instinctively—but I needn’t have worried; he would do it right.

When I confronted them with their no longer secret secret, though, would I do it right? I used the time before they came home from school to soften the edges of my disappointment about what they had done. They were too young to deal with my first reaction, the one based on adult values that say stealing anything at all—even the seemingly insignificant—puts one’s very soul in harm’s way. The act defines you as a thief without honor, and that’s not all. Until consciously brought to closure, it is possible that the lingering consequences of a hurtful act not yet repented will hang around in your psyche to remind you of itself for as long as you’re willing to live with it. Many years ago, I discovered that someone close to me was a not-sopetty offender, and since stealing necessitates the twin sin of lying to establish one’s innocence, I could never, down deep where it really matters, trust that person again. My wish—my need—is to forgive and forget when someone is less than honest with me, especially if some sign of atonement follows close behind the lie. But my experience is that when my unspoken but critically important assumption that you and I share similar principles is proved wrong, something (in me) breaks and the relationship changes.

But how could I preach hellfire and brimstone to my kids for stealing a lipstick when, given their ages (seven and eight maybe), they had done nothing more radical than to test the limits of their daring and courage in a spontaneous, thrilling, terrifying, and fairly harmless rite of passage? Too many years have passed now for me to recall my actual words to them before we all returned to the scene of their crime. I can only hope I made my case effectively without being overly harsh. My father was much too severe with my sister and me about such things, so all of his lessons were lost in my more immediate need to defy him by yielding not one teardrop in exchange for the belt-marks he left on my bottom. Besides, I knew beforehand how mortified they would feel while facing the man they knew more as a friend than as someone who would squeal on them, so I felt a great tenderness for them in their predicament. Who among us hasn’t stood fully exposed under a klieg light shining the truth on an indiscretion? My guess is that my kids gave up any further thoughts of crime, if indeed they’d had any, as they stood that day before their executioner. Years later, they all regaled me with some of their teenage adventures—like racing cars on Mulholland Drive and dipping into drugs—which they had managed with good sense and great success to keep from me altogether. (God, did I ever thank you for that?)

What gives meaning to my life only now seems easy enough to discern. Truth, you may already have learned, is primary. If you don’t tell the truth, your word is meaningless, and so, I guess, are you, in the sense that I’m not gonna hang out with you—because what’s the point? I learned much about truth from my father. He once fooled me in jest, when, at age seven or so, I asked him the meaning of a word I needed to know for school. When I used his definition and was roundly teased for being light years off the mark, I felt so humiliated—and betrayed—that I never did forgive him for lying to me. When I was seventeen, I became engaged to my friend Johnny—a really nice guy I knew damned well I would never marry, but whose ring (with its itty-bitty diamond) I wanted to show off to my friends. Scared to death by what I had done, I wanted out, so, compounding my treachery, I concocted a story to persuade that really nice guy that our breakup was his fault. When I admitted to my father what I’d done, he insisted that I go "right now" and tell Johnny the truth—no, not on the phone, face-to-face. I shook with shame as I apologized to Johnny for telling him a serious, hurtful lie, but afterward I felt clean—and light as a feather—for the first time in weeks. Gathering up courage to save my soul wasn’t easy to do at seventeen, but all credit goes to my father in this instance, for teaching me—in one lesson and for all time—a principle that quickly became deeply meaningful to me.

So I learned that both your word and mine have to be rock solid before I can feel good about either one of us. After truth come many more civilities— tolerance, generosity, compassion, and humility—that matter a great deal to most of us. They are the better qualities of our nature that make us respectable human beings, give meaning to our species, and keep civilization more or less afloat. Looking back, I would say that what gave meaning to my life evolved. It was cumulative. What seemed important in the books I read, the people I met, and my own life experiences moved in and out of favor with me, changing as I changed, until the values that grew strong in meaning to my life simply took up permanent residence as parts of my identity. Early on, depending on the set or sets of life skills I was practicing at the time, I would have said that what gave my life meaning was my education, my marriage, mothering my children, or advancing my career. All of them lent meaning because my intentions—to do well and make a difference—had been in each case worthy. But these were life roles, after all, and life roles, even the most important ones, come and go, wax and wane—they have lives of their own, so in one sense their meaning to a life is temporary. They all enlarged my worldview, increased my curiosity, and expanded my consciousness. But there came a time with each of them—usually after I had gained proficiency or was forced to abandon a role altogether (both my marriages, for example)—when my interest and energy and happiness had peaked and were waning and I would know it was time to move on. Always I would find—or it would find me—a new and different challenge ready to launch me on another adventure. Over the years, I got used to the rhythm of that process. I understood it, came to count on its predictability, and was quite content to think that what gave meaning to my life was this ongoing process and it would continue to renew my interest and my energy—and my happiness, of course—all the way to life’s end. I was wrong. Jungian analyst James Hollis says:

Depression at midlife is very common. It seems that there is a necessary and inevitable collision between the false self, reflexively cobbled together as a reaction to the vagaries of childhood, and the natural self [the person we are meant to become]. This collision of opposites is suffered as a neurosis. Those who choose to remain unconscious of the task their suffering signifies will remain stuck.¹

When I read those words, I was fifty-two years old, and something had shifted in me that was effectively stripping me clean of the happiness I had worked so hard to achieve and had come to believe was mine to keep. It had started with feelings of anxiety, turned dark, and settled in as a pervading sense of dread. It seeped through every crack in my psyche, absorbing light and defeating the power of my will. I could find no cause. My mind trolled for anything that could fix me, arcing a search in all directions and sweeping my past for clues: I was pretty much cobbled together as a child, no doubt about that—a mass of tangled wires in search of a motherboard comes to mind. But post-childhood, I had spent ten exceedingly grueling years under repairs in therapy—straightening wires, rebuilding some parts, uncrossing circuits, and such. So when sanity finally arrived (they said), I pronounced my self and my work done—she’s a go. So might this really be a midlife crisis? I thought those happened in one’s forties; I thought I had circumvented mine.

I took another look: I was married and divorced for a second time in my forties. The happiness part hadn’t lasted—again, though I had been certain we could overcome the thousand different ways we were so different. Soon, I was offered a terrific job in the most important film company of that era, which at the time was located in my favorite city! I accepted, of course, and in a matter of weeks the haunting sadness of another failed marriage had lifted. I was thrilled, challenged, busy, and happy again—for a couple of years. Then everything in my life upended. At first, only a hint of something gone wrong, followed by increasingly ominous signs—the dread I mentioned, and finally the incontrovertible fact: I was in thrall to a sickness that was slowly killing my spirit and draining energy from every body part. Before long, I was spending too much time by myself—too frequently with a glass in my hand, my thoughts fixed on the once-solid lines of my biography sliding off its pages. All that had once given meaning to my life was floating away, disappearing into the drab gray of days passing by without notice, one indistinguishable from the next. Every part of me—save the solitary, barely breathing instinct taking note of the whole pitiful process—was lost in the throes of a great ennui. One does not forget such a time as that, nor will the mind’s eye soon lose its image of the flat, ashen vastness that was my prison: a place without walls or horizon, extending into infinity.

I found respite only in the workplace. My job was complex, requiring focus, precision, and a pleasing personality. Like a robot programmed to simulate a human likeness, I went through the motions—acting out the days, returning to what little was left of myself at day’s end. I had pursued happiness all my life as a goal of learning well and trying my best: Why had happiness never lasted? What had gone wrong after all my work to get life right? What deep hole in me required so much more than I could feed it? And why, after all my years of therapy, could I not find the mercy to spare myself this unrelenting self-flagellation? These were the questions that dogged the hours I spent at home, to which my answer was always the same: I was suffering the fruits of all my failures with a full-blown depression. But even then, without Hollis to teach me otherwise, it would not have crossed my mind that I was stuck in a midlife crisis I had not circumvented, but denied. And that last divorce? It was only one piece in a sack full of denial that I would need to drag out of my unconscious and shine a light on, because the long con was over.

Ironically, the fear that my mind might succumb to its paralysis helped to keep it alive. I knew just enough about depression to realize that I had no time to lose in finding a remedy. Yet, was it even possible to compel my incredibly resistant mind to overcome its own inertia? I would need to work at a depth of psychic pain completely unfamiliar to me—fathoms below where I had once considered myself to be done. If not now, though, said my fear, perhaps not ever. Slowly, then, I heaved myself to my task—which this time around was not about doing more therapy; it was about me finding me in places no one else could go. Hollis, again:

There is a thought, a recurrent fantasy, perhaps, that the purpose of life is to achieve happiness. After all, the Constitution of the United States promises ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’²

Jung has argued with this myth, as follows. ‘Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness.’ Our goal is not happiness, which is evanescent and impossible to sustain; it is meaning which broadens us and carries us toward our destiny.³

I began by collecting my questions: Who am I really? Why do I suffer still? What gives me pleasure? What shreds my heart and makes me grieve? Why, at the most astonishing times, does my heart refuse grief altogether? Where lie my deepest, truest feelings—and why those? Do I care enough to do this work? Is there a reason to care? Does anyone else care? Is it meaning I’m missing, or something I don’t yet know how to name?

Exploring them one at a time, I could find only half-answers to any of them, because the elusive central meaning of my existence belonged at the heart of them all. I could know what gave meaning to my life, but not the meaning of my life. For example, I loved my children more than I could measure, but I never confused my love for them with a belief that they were the central meaning of my life. Doing so, I knew, would put our relationships at risk. I spent many years being the sole caregiver of my mother, whose greatest unconscious need had been to turn her entire life over to me for safekeeping. Feeling stuck in a role with no exits for what seemed like an eternity, I was determined that my own children would never repeat my experience. I surrendered them to their lives each time it seemed appropriate—or, as with one child, when it was not my decision to make. They knew they meant the world to me, so I taught them what I believed: Your lives are yours to make and should always come before mine. It was a pretty radical teaching at the time, yet I believe it was and still is the best I will ever do for them.

What else . . . I hadn’t loved my parents deeply since my childhood, intuiting at a young age the necessity to protect myself from them, so little positive meaning had survived my parent-child relationship. In my thirties, I made a self-induced foray into organized religion, motivated by an intense need to search for the larger meaning of my life. It failed utterly to change my outlook, and I crashed back to earth like a rocket out of fuel. I had always cherished the love and companionship of friends and believed that they would add meaning to my life for as long as we lived. Yet, while friends can enhance my life, they cannot give that other kind of meaning that supports and sustains a life when the dark nights of the soul begin to have their way. What does one do when faced with those great estrangements— the death of a friend or the loss of a child, existential loneliness or terminal illness, or a depression that hovers over a psyche like death itself? These were circumstances I imagined could break a person apart unless one’s inner strength was tough and enduring. So how was I to seek this glorious meaning, so far beyond my ken? When hope had been my talisman, I could fully imagine finding my way to it. Was it merely hope to think I could overcome my suffering—or was hope the essential prerequisite for success, I wondered? But when hope began to die, I began to question whether I had believed so deeply in my quest for meaning because it was at least something to believe in.

My mind had refused to read or write anything more than a shopping list for months. Not to find pleasure in doing these things that had always brought me so much delight was a frightening prospect, at first—until even fright became no more than a yawn. Those lifelong pleasures had once meant so much to me; they had inspired my imagination, fed my curiosity, filled so many of my needs for self-expression. Gone now. Could I resurrect enough wit to do the work ahead? It was crucial to make my life matter to me again: I had to try. So I picked up my books, committed my brain to taking instruction, and daily recorded my thoughts. I read—almost exclusively in psychology (where I met Jung and Hollis and many other gifted teachers), and then, in a seamless and natural transition, I found myself reading extensively in the spiritual wisdom of the ages. I made no intellectual or deliberate decisions about whom and what to read; I simply moved in whichever direction my healing took me and at whatever pace my mind would allow. Picking through the notes and bibliographies of one book would set me on the trail of a dozen more wherein I found the wise minds and teaching hearts who counseled me through my confusions. Digging deep into their treasure began a process of renewing my energy and ordering my mind, of lifting the gloom and resurrecting hope that I might finally beat this rap. And I wrote—to nurse my flatlined feelings back to life. First I wrote the hard, heavy words that image despair and anger and self-pity. Later, with a lighter hand, I wrote about my awakening desires, future possibilities, and the growing optimism that was signaling my recovery. Just so, I persisted on my journey of no certain end—head down, mind open, and absorbing as much as I could, given my circumstances. I was trusting the process, but warily—trying not to count the days or predict any outcomes—carefully keeping in mind T. S. Eliot’s cogent counsel to wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.⁴

But I was healing, and I knew that my healing was structural. No longer a facsimile of myself, playing all of my parts in