How to Fix My Life? Some Bad News — and Some Good News…

“How to fix my life? ” is a huge question in our time. Self help books, TED talks, gurus on Oprah or Dr. Phil — all are devoted to answering this question.

We live in a time when there is a great obsession with trying to get our lives right, and finding the magic secret that will make us who it is that we really ought to be. It’s not really surprising that we think like this. We live in an era when our ingenuity and our technology have solved so many problems.

Only a hundred and fifty years ago, most people got around on foot or on the backs of animals. If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to go and see them face to face. Now everything has changed! Shouldn’t we expect the same kind of powerful fixes for our own personal lives, perhaps with issues like anxiety and depression?

First the Bad News: No Silver Bullets

It can be tempting to expect that the answer to “how to fix my life” should be as simple as buying a new car, or a new suit of clothes. However, the truth is,that the self-help gurus who have simple formulas for making your life or my life better are not really giving enough weight to how complex we are as creatures, or how complicated life can be.

There can be lots of talk of “re-wiring the brain” in this or that way, and change in the brain is possible, but it doesn’t usually come quickly. When it can occur, it requires quite a bit of time and effort. Experiences that have affected us very deeply, like experiences of the mother-child bond, or experiences that are difficult and overwhelming, that we call traumatic, have a profound effect on us that is not easily removed or erased. Many of the things that shape us as human beings remain with us, in some form, throughout the entirety of the human journey. We cannot expect some surgery to remove them as if they were a ruptured appendix.

What Do We Do With the Hand We’re Dealt?

WhIle we might be able to change some factors in our lives, and in our personal psychologies, there is much about our selves and our situation that we simply cannot change.

We have to accept that we have come to the place we are in our lives as the result of the action of many different factors. These factors include genetics, environment, family, cultural and others in combination with any experience that the individual may have had of trauma. We are who we are, in the particular place and time that we live in.

Life can be a real struggle if we cannot accept our own real lives. People can end up running from themselves in so many different ways, and yet never really be able to get away or escape.

We have to start by playing the hand we’ve been dealt. This life we’ve been given is the one life that we have: it defines who we are. It’s our starting place, and we can’t pretend that it’s not. If we can accept the hand we’ve been dealt, then perhaps we can start to play it. That might mean coming to greater understanding of who we really are, finding things we can change in our lives, and maybe finding ways to connect with others who can help us feel grounded and valued in our lives.

The Good News: Self Acceptance and Self Compassion

One of the very best things we can do for ourselves, as C.G. Jung frequently emphasized, is to actively work on bringing ourselves to a place of fundamental acceptance of who we really are.

It might sound very odd to say it, but to the degree that we can accept ourselves for who we are, we actually bring a profound kind of change into our lives. That might not seem at all like an answer to the question of “How to fix my life?” However, it is about a deep change in our relationship to ourselves.

The on-going work of understanding and accepting ourselves in /a-midlife-transition, and living out of who we really are, is not an instant change or a magic bullet. However, if we stay with it, it is something that we can experience as deeply healing.

One very good starting point for this journey to wholeness can be a willingness to talk openly about ourselves in the context of therapy, and to work diligently toward self-understanding and self-acceptance. The real heart of the human journey, as Jung tells us, is the journey of individuation, the journey to become more and more who we are and to live that out in the world. To do this requires a fundamental kindness toward, and acceptance of, ourselves. The ongoing work of moving toward this goal is the very heart of Jungian /a-midlife-transition.