No Choice but to Choose: Making Life Changing Decisions

Posted: September 16, 2024

I’ve written on the subject of “life changing decisions” a number of times in the past. Yet I think it’s such a vitally important topic that I’m returning to it in this blog post. In a huge variety of ways, hard decisions are something with which clients continually wrestle.

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There are endlessly many pathways in our lives that can lead us into making life changing decisions. There are an untold variety of experiences in life that can take us to the place where we just have to make a decision that is going to have big consequences for the whole future direction of our lives.

Two big areas where people confront the reality of making life changing decisions are in the sphere of career, and the sphere of relationships. For many individuals, the realm of career or life vocation poses enormous questions about who we really are, and what we really want. The same may be said about the choice of whether to enter a potentially life-changing relationship such as a marriage, or, for many people, what can be an extremely hard choice about whether to stay in a relationship with someone who has been a life partner, and possibly someone with whom the individual has created a family.

These are often situations where a great deal of emotion and strong feeling within us is swirling around and buffeting us at the same time as we are trying to think our way through the situation, and establish some kind of clarity about the decision.

The Ego and Making Life Changing Decisions

Our ego is very involved in life changing decisions. When I use this term, I’m not using it in the way we do when we say “he or she has a huge ego”, meaning he or she is full of themselves. The Society of Analytical Psychology informs us that, for Jung, the ego is the centre of our conscious awareness of existing and of our continuing sense of identity.

This ego part of us, our everyday awareness, may have a very difficult time with making a life changing decision of the type we have been describing. In fact, the greater and more significant a choice is, and the more there is at stake, the more difficult it may be for the ego to find its way.

So what can we do? How do we find our way through the maze of making life changing decisions?

Listening for the Voice of the Self

When we’re in such a place in our lives, it may be absolutely essential to go carefully through all our reasons, all our feelings and all our options. However, even after we have done this thoroughly, we may still find ourselves at a loss as to how to make a decision.

This is where Jungians emphasize the importance of the Self, the name that Jungians use for the greater sum total of the human psyche, which includes both the conscious and the various unconscious elements of the the whole of our personality. In cases of great importance to the whole human being, such as making life changing decisions, Jungians stress that the impetus for the decision must come, not from the ego, but from the Self. To truly hear the voice of the Self, we must listen to the whole of ourselves, conscious and unconscious. Often we must also wait with patience to hear the voice of the Self. This may mean hearing the voice of our dreams, and may include discovering what our depression and anxiety might have to tell us about our lives, and about what is really important.

As we’ve seen before, listening to the voice of the Self may mean that one becomes, in his words, “the victim of a decision made over your head or in defiance of the heart”. We might find that what the Self, the entirety of our personality directs us towards is quite a different direction that what the ego would want.

Life Changing Decisions, and a New Path

When we have to make life changing decisions, it may often be that we need to listen to parts of ourselves that might be quite unfamiliar. The ego might not even be aware of them. Yet, finding that voice of the greater Self may be absolutely crucial.

At such a time, it may be invaluable to seek the help of a supportive and insightful depth psychotherapist, who can help us with the process of developing “inner ears” to listen to the voice of the greater personality. This process involves being attentive in new ways to our inner reality through such means as following our dreams, and engaging in active imagination. It also involves cultivating deep genuine compassion for ourselves, and treating all of out inner reality with great respect.

There are key times in our life journey when it is of incalculable value for the ego to seek to create space for the voice of the Self. When the ego seems to have come to the end of its resources, and it is hard to see a way forward, that is very often the time when the Self beckons us to pursue new directions, if we can have the humility and courage to follow. At such times, the insight and support of a compassionate Jungian analyst/depth psychotherapist may be genuinely life altering.

With very best wishes for your continuing personal journey,

Brian Collinson

Registered Psychotherapist and

Certified Jungian Analyst (IAAP)

Certified Clinical Anxiety Treatment Professional