Cracks in the Familiar World
Sometimes change is not chosen. It happens.
The world suddenly stops responding in its usual way: words lose their force, goals lose their appeal, relationships lose their stability. Everything seems to remain in place, yet a shift is felt in the air. Old structures — both inner and outer — begin to crumble.
This is how a crisis begins — not as a catastrophe, but as a deep demand of the psyche for reconstruction.
Jungian psychology views such periods as essential transitional stages — moments when the unconscious speaks. We can no longer live on our former foundations because the inner architecture of the “I” has changed.
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When Meanings Collapse
Many come to therapy saying: “I don’t understand what’s happening to me. Everything seems fine, yet there’s a kind of emptiness inside.”
This state is not simple fatigue. It is the loss of symbolic connection with one’s own life. What once carried meaning — work, relationships, achievements — no longer resonates.
The psyche no longer “believes” in the world we have built.
Jung called such periods a second birth: a moment when a person encounters the limits of the old personality and hears, often for the first time, the call of the deeper center — the Self.
Externally, this may look like crisis, apathy, loss of motivation, irritability, the sense that “nothing fits.” Internally, it is the beginning of the psyche’s work to renew the worldview.
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The Call of the Unconscious
When the inner world demands change, it does not speak in words.
It sends signals — through dreams, bodily symptoms, sudden emotional surges, strange coincidences.
A client dreams of a ruined house. Another begins to cry “for no reason,” even though nothing “terrible” has happened.
For an analyst, these are not random fluctuations — they are the language of the psyche expressing what cannot yet be understood.
The psyche is searching for a new order.
For the old to die, it must be recognized.
For the new to arise, it needs space.
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Holding On When Foundations Are Crumbling
In such moments, people often say: “I feel like I’ve lost the ground under my feet.”
And this is not a metaphor — it is a literal bodily sensation: the world feels unstable, decisions become difficult, even simple actions require effort.
Psychotherapy becomes a temporary support, a space where the transition can be endured.
Not to restore “how it used to be,” but to understand who one becomes when the former way of being is no longer possible.
The task of the analyst is not to provide answers, but to help the person hear their own.
Sometimes a single image, a sentence from a dream, a single moment of honest self-contact becomes a new point of inner grounding.
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Encountering the Shadow
Any transformation requires meeting what was previously repressed.
This isn’t always pleasant.
In therapy, a person may encounter irritation, anger, shame, envy, fear — feelings they have learned to bypass.
But it is precisely this encounter with the “shadow” that initiates true transformation.
We stop fighting inner figures and begin to see them as parts of ourselves.
As Jung wrote, one does not become whole until one integrates the shadow.
This is not a slogan — it is a practice. Acceptance creates space for new breath.
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The Unconscious as Co-author
Across many years of analytic supervision, I observe the same pattern:
the more deeply the therapist trusts the process, the more freely the client’s psyche moves.
The unconscious is not an enemy, not chaos, not a “system failure.”
It is a wise co-author that moves toward wholeness.
Even the destruction of old forms is its way of restoring living movement.
When the inner world demands change, it is important not to wage war against it.
Sometimes this means allowing oneself not to know where everything is heading.
In analytic work, this state of uncertainty is often the most fruitful.
It is precisely here that a new symbolic order begins to form.
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How New Meaning Emerges
After a crisis, one rarely returns to the previous world.
One becomes different.
But this “different” does not negate what came before — it absorbs, transforms, and re-shapes it.
Jungian therapy does not aim to “fix” the inner world.
Its task is to help a person see how the psyche itself moves toward renewal — through images, dreams, new connections, and through the simple act of being present.
Sometimes meaning returns not through dramatic revelations, but through ordinary moments: the smell of morning coffee, a beam of light on the floor, a conversation in which life is felt again.
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Symbolic Thinking as a Path to Wholeness
When we live only rationally, we lose contact with deeper layers of the psyche.
But the life of the soul is symbolic — expressed not in logic, but in images.
In therapy, a person gradually learns this language: to see not a “symptom” but meaning, not a “failure” but a transition.
Symbolic perception makes life multidimensional. Pain stops being an enemy — it becomes a messenger.
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Allowing Yourself to Become Other
When the inner world demands change, resistance becomes futile.
One can only choose: remain in the old order or risk trusting the process without knowing what follows.
This path is always individual.
Yet anyone who has lived through a crisis knows: life afterwards becomes more authentic.
Less predictable — but more alive.
Perhaps this is an adult form of faith: not faith in stability, but in the capacity to remain in motion.
