What is Individuation?

As human beings, we have a primary core conflict between attachment and authenticity. As children, our priority was to remain attached to our caregivers, which means most of us have authentic aspects of ourselves in our shadow that have never been known or expressed. This translates into feeling like something is missing, yet it is still there, repressed and depressed. Depression obscures our deeper meaning inside, and too often we don’t go through to the clarity on the other side.

According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, individuation is the lifelong psychological process through which you develop your unique identity and integrate all aspects of yourself, known and hidden. This involves bringing unconscious, forgotten, rejected, or neglected aspects of your original self to consciousness, allowing you to feel more balanced and authentic. Jung believed that individuation was essential for achieving emotional maturity.

Ideally, individuation begins in the teenage years, when you need to differentiate yourself from your parents and express your own identity. Still, many teens succumb to family and peer pressure and choose to fit in. The inner pressure to individuate and become fully yourself usually intensifies more strongly from within when you are in the second half of your life, after you have tried fitting into what your family, intimate relationships, culture, religion, or social groups have expected of you, and it just is not working anymore.

Individuation is the process of becoming fully yourself. It involves healing core attachment wounds that tell you who you "should be" to belong. The aim is to actualize your unique soul essence—the Self you were born to be, before you became socially conditioned. To actualize your unique soul truth, it is helpful to identify and work with the ego polarities within - the loved and hated aspects, the parts that fit into society and those that do not.

Once your primary ego conflicts are reconciled and integrated, you can access your Golden Shadow, your true soul nature, more easily. The Golden Shadow is the greatness of your submerged soul. It hides your undiscovered gifts. Your gifts await you as you heal your emotional wounds. Your unique gifts live behind the gate of your emotional pain.

Stages of Individuation

From the Jungian perspective, the individuation process comprises four phases, although there are various ways of interpreting them within Jungian theory. Jung believed the psyche is a self-regulating system with an innate impulse to evolve and transform. He saw that the unconscious has both creative (golden soul shadow) and compensatory (dark ego-distorted shadow) components.

1. Confession

This is often considered the beginning of the therapeutic journey, when you notice vague aspects of yourself feel unfulfilled and unexpressed. This can show up as idealizing or yearning for someone or something outside of yourself, or as emotional upset, loneliness, or boredom. It can show up as anxiety as something deep down presses up to be seen, heard or felt, or it can feel like the numb dissatisfaction of depression.

Coming to depth therapy at this stage, you will be invited to verbalize previously unspoken stories, issues and memories or express them creatively through art and writing. Depth therapy offers a safe space to voice all your fears and desires. This can be seen as a phase of unburdening and gaining greater compassion for your vulnerability, paving the way for deeper introspection.

2. Elucidation

At this stage of therapy, you will be encouraged to catch yourself acting out your socially conditioned behavioural patterns, defence mechanisms, and emotional distortions and interrupt them. This is to make room for other neglected, forgotten or rejected aspects buried in your shadow to rise up to be seen and integrated. This is a time to observe how your primary conditioned ego operates to gain love, approval, security, and survival from the outside, and how it has overridden, stifled, and hidden other essential aspects of yourself that reside in the unconscious shadow.

3. Education

At this stage of therapy, you will be encouraged to use what you have learned about yourself to take inspired action for personal growth. You will be supported to make sense of your dreams, expressive art, and writing. You can start applying what you know about yourself to your relationships and interactions with the world. At this stage, you will recognize that your perception of your outer life accurately mirrors your inner world. You will be supported in recognizing when you are projecting your unhealed core wound pain onto others, and when you are idealizing qualities in others that you have disowned.

4. Transformation

Once the unknown areas of your psyche are illuminated, you will feel reconciled with your shadow and more like your whole self. At this point, spiritual awareness and growth intensify as there are fewer barriers to expressing who you are as a soul. Your soul has a unique signature, and at this point, your relational and creative passions can become more easily actualized. At this stage of therapy, you will be encouraged to stay attuned to your internal alchemy and to anchor your transformation.

With Love,

Shelley