Part Two: An Invitation to Descend
Those cracks in our Gatsby shells we spoke about? It's time to explore them.
[Part Two of a Twelve-Part Series: A Roadmap to Freedom]
Although I was spiraling into a black hole of addiction at 23 after my father’s death, I managed to keep my life together on the surface: I had a good job in commercial real estate, wore nice suits to work, paid my taxes, and kissed my girlfriend on the forehead when I returned to our apartment late at night. But I was living a secret life. Most days, around lunchtime, I’d take the 6 train to downtown Manhattan, spending the rest of the afternoon in shitty, Irish pubs getting drunk until my friend Cub got off of work. Then the two of us would buy coke from his building’s doorman, and spend as many hours as we could in his room, blowing lines, smoking cigarettes until the drugs ran out. Rinse and repeat.
One weekend, my girlfriend and I went out to visit her parents at their home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Mayor was coming for dinner, and there was a lot of good, red wine to drink. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I took it slow — I always watched myself around her family — but this night something remarkable happened: After just a few glasses of wine, I blacked out. I woke up the next morning in my girlfriend’s childhood bed with a wicked headache. I was naked, the bed was stripped and she wasn’t there. I knew something horrible had happened.
Without going too deep into the details, let’s just say my carefully built shell was obliterated that night. Everyone - including the Mayor of New York City - watched me get alcohol poisoning and projectile vomit all over the house.
“You need to go to rehab,” my girlfriend said. She was mortified. And so was I. Part of my Gatsby affliction was the need to appear infallible. So that significant crack in my outer shell triggered a lot of disorientation and shame. As Denis Johnson wrote in Jesus’ Son: “No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.”
We see similar falls from grace play out a lot in the press: Will Smith’s slap heard round the world at the Oscars earlier this year comes to mind. (Smith - a classic Gatsby - is clearly a reflective dude who has done lots of work on himself. But his rage remained behind the scenes. Until it didn’t.) And all of us have experienced them in our every day lives, too: Maybe we receive a call from a collections agency about unpaid bills. Maybe our partner finds our porn stash. Maybe the cops just discovered the bodies in the basement. (I kid.)
In any event, we are confronted with a problem we know we need to take action on. And while the standard Gatsby response to an affront like this would be another elaborate cover-up —perhaps even more highly fortified than before— for our purposes here, let’s explore the road less traveled: The road of full ownership. The road of the intentional descent.
As Gatsbys, we’re all covering up a core loss. This pain exists deep within us, like a dark abyss. And as we avoid it, it grows in intensity. Carl Jung called the mass of unexamined material where our losses live our Shadow.
To keep our shadows at bay, we employ certain strategies of coping. Drinking and drugs were a strategy to distract me from my demons. The more pain that tried to surface, the more booze and coke I needed to drown it. Eventually though, my coping strategy overpowered me: dumping me right on the doorstep of the abyss again. I’m betting for Will Smith, the same pattern occurred: his rage was a coping strategy for a childhood loss (he writes in his memoir that he once contemplated killing his alcoholic father) but his Oscars outburst dropped him right back into the shame and pain he’d been avoiding.
It’s pretty incredible how it all works. (Whoever designed this whole life thing is a genius!) We are constantly pointed in the direction of our own healing. Yet, since we’re never taught this key detail, we mistake the abyss as something we need to get as far away from as possible.
Actually, it’s the opposite: if we’re willing to explore the abyss, to peer inside our own darkness when it appears even momentarily— we’re given massive gifts necessary for our evolution. As one of my coaches Bryan Reeves says: “Before we rise, we must descend.”
Okay, so now for the descent:
Remember those cracks we didn’t want to look at last time around? Well, armed with a slight reframe, they become doorways. And, if we’re really brave, we can step towards them—perhaps even putting our hands on the knob and giving ‘em a little turn. When we do, we’ll find that behind these doors are staircases, leading down. Into what? Well, into our darkness. Into the shadow of everything we’ve never acknowledged about ourselves and our lives.
This stage of the journey has many names. Robert Bly, author of Iron John, calls it “Ashes work.” Connor Beaton of Man Talks - in an ode to Jung - calls it Shadow Work. Ancient Greeks call it katabasis — a journey to the underworld. Twelve Steppers call it a Searching and Fearless (!) Moral Inventory.
However you hold the upcoming descent, know it won’t be glamourous. This is “Man in the Mirror” time. (I’m asking him to change his ways!) And our choices are clear:
Hesitate at the threshold, and we risk remaining flimsy men, our house-of-cards-like egos leveled effortlessly by even the most minuscule of life’s many and never-ending challenges: a long line at the store, an angry partner, a traffic jam…
But accept the invitation, and we have the opportunity to strip our psychic foundations down to the bolts, pouring new concrete and establishing an unshakeable platform for the future - one that is strong enough to handle whatever life can toss at it — from parenting to a pandemic.
Descent work is, at its best, anticipatory work: Before life can deliver one of our worst fears to our doorstep, we’re going to pick that same fear up willingly and examine that fucker from every angle. Heroic, no? Yes. And necessary. “If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it,” Jung writes. But left unexamined, everything remains dark. The abyss owns us. We have no chance.
To do this heroic work, a guide is helpful, if not essential. You’ll need someone in your corner who has descended before, who has died on his or her own sword: A coach, counselor, teacher, therapist, mentor, sponsor, shaman, or spiritual advisor. They can direct us towards the dark corners that need the most attention and witness us in our process of reclaiming our most ignored and unlikeable parts.
Questions to consider at this stage include:
What have I been lying about to myself?
What am I afraid of?
What are the things I am most ashamed of in my life?
What are my regrets?
What do I wish I’d done differently?
Where are my deepest emotional wounds or scars? / Where have I been hurt?
Who has hurt me?
How have I hurt myself? / What are my addictions?
How have I hurt others?
I remember being assigned a counselor at my first rehab. His name was Rich and he was an ex- heroin junkie from Brooklyn who wore nice slacks. Rich had seen all the mind tricks and games of slippery addicts like me—a fact that used to drive me crazy. I couldn’t get away with anything!
I realize now that Rich was the first person who really showed me my shadow. And that’s a big reason why I’m still thinking and writing about him all these years later. Now, as a coach when I sit down with a potential client for the first time, I can see all the things Rich must have seen back then: I can see the blind spots, I can see the potential pitfalls, I can see the places a client might trip before he does.
And make no mistake, we will trip. The cosmic joke about Gatsbys doing shadow work is that although we’ll try to make a perfect show out of this, too, we will falter. We will see something we think is so ugly about ourselves it makes us want to run in the other direction.
I ran for six years from the shadow Rich showed me before I was willing to sit down and do a proper descent in 2015 with the help of another therapist. And that was just the first tour through Hades. A good portion of us will get one glimpse of our shadow and never return to the threshold—at least until things get really desperate.
Remember: When staring down your own psychic swamp, the desire to look for just about any other option than getting muddy is normal. No one tours through hell for shits and giggles! So here in Part Two, we’re just dipping a toe into the water, gaining a little awareness about the road to come. We can smell the danger, and it’s both nauseating and enticing, like anything worth doing. But we aren’t quite ready for all the riches this dark lair has to offer. So look around, get a lay of the land. But don’t plan on staying long. Not yet anyway.
(Part Three will be published on August 8th.)
Part Two: An Invitation to Descend
Captivating and inspiring, the story we as men not only want to hear deep down, but need to hear. There’s hope when diving into our own self created pit of despair. A re-examined man is one embarking on the road to freedom. Thank you for sharing, and inspiring.
Fuck, why do you have to be so real! Now I have to go look behind door number 1!