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catatonickid recently published a post about facing your double, reaching a place where nothing can be explained, a place where no choice could possibly be right. She calls that the “ideal argument for healing,” or, in the quoted words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “the beginning of the process of individuation” – the joining of the separate parts of the self to form an integrated person.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about experiencing a kind of double life, I’ve been drawn to the theme of meeting one’s own mirror image as a separate being for as long as I can remember. I never understood why that should be, but every story or film I found about such an encounter simply transfixed me. The idea touched a part of me beneath awareness that felt like it was rolling in sea-like motion. For so long, I was afraid that this moving force could overwhelm me.

In dreams, meeting my double was the culmination of nightmares.
I was usually searching through locked rooms in mansions and castles until finding the one where he was sitting. He was always alone in the middle of a darkened space with his back to the door as I entered. When he started turning toward me – even before I could see most of his face – I knew he was my double and that I had to get out. The deepest fear and panic surged through me as I realized I couldn’t escape and in the next moment would be killed. In the midst of that terror I always woke up and had to wait for my breathing and heartbeat to slow down to normal.

Why was this encounter so terrifying and why was my double a Mr. Jekyll ready to savage his Dr. Hyde? Was that what awaited me if I should try to go beyond what my awareness told me who I was? Would it mean the unleashing of a monster or the beginning of healing?

I searched for possible answers, but none felt right – until I started rereading a number of essays by Carl Rogers. Here’s a passage that seemed to deal with what I felt, though not directly with the idea of the double.

Carl Rogers wrote:

An even more common reaction to the path of life I have been describing is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, destructive. It would mean to unleash some kind of a monster on the world. … I meet [this view] in almost every client. “If I dare to let the feelings flow which are dammed up within me, if by some chance should live in those feelings, then this would be catastrophe.” This is the attitude, spoken or unspoken, of nearly every client as he moves into the experiencing of the unknown aspects of himself.

Sometimes people express this concern by saying that if an individual were to be what he truly is, he would be releasing the beast in himself. … [W]hen one is truly and deeply a unique member of the human species, this is not something which should excite horror. It means instead that one lives fully and openly the complex process of being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive, and creative creatures on this planet.
- On Becoming a Person – “To Be That Self Which One Truly Is”

That sounded right – learning gradually how to release, to live, those feelings could help to diminish the fear of what might happen if I set them free. If I could set aside that terrible fear and step into the other me, instead of trying to escape, perhaps I would begin to see these separated selves not as enemies but as parts of a whole. I had spent so many years hiding powerful feelings even from myself that I did come to believe I concealed a monster that must be kept locked up at all costs. He was like the madman in the attic room that must never be opened by anyone, least of all by his keeper.

Kierkegaard wrote: “Dread is the possibility of freedom.” It is the sign that an opening into life can occur if that feeling is recognized as a step toward accepting everything you are.

And it’s true that the work I have done to get through recovery has diminished the intensity of fear about releasing the feelings I had hidden away. The dark part of me – the monster – really seems now more shadow than substance.

But as wonderful as that change has been, there is still a power about the idea of my own double that I do not understand. There is much to learn that even goes beyond recovery from depression, as critical and life-saving as that has been. So I keep searching – and I don’t know where this might take me.

I have no idea if the powerful draw that I feel to this concept is widely shared or not. Is it something that pulls at you? What have you made of it?

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About a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote a famous poem about two roads diverging in a wood: “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” He makes his choice to take “the one less traveled by.” “Oh I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted I should ever come back.”

When I faced a choice of two roads to my own future, I believed I could follow both and be one traveler. Why were there two roads? I imagined there were two sides of myself – one creative, artistic – the other public, drawn to political and social change – and I needed both to feel whole. What followed from this attempt were years of struggling and failing to balance both, searching for the fulfillment I needed but finding it always just out of reach on either path. I tried sprinting down one for a time, then leaving that to cut through a brambled mile of thickets to get back to the other, sprint down that road for a while, cut back through the less and less penetrable undergrowth, hit the other again – and so on. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I spend a lot of time between the roads in those thickets – lost.

Two lives, two careers, two destinies led to a perfect torment, a continuing inner battle about where to put my energy. If I focused too much on one path, I felt desperate that I would forever lose the second, but if I got active again on that other work, other life, I felt desperate that I would lose everything I had worked so hard for. To be on one road meant that for a time I would become that person completely and lose touch with the second self. I could not bear to lose either of those two me’s. So I spent or wasted much time in tension between the two choices, dissipating what energy I had in pure anxiety and confusion. The more I tried to follow both roads, the less progress I made on either one.

One path was a life devoted to writing and other forms of personal expression – that was me, totally me, reaching deep inside to hit the world with creative energies shaped into unforgettable stories, poems or whatever new genre I could invent. The second self was me wrapped in a mantle of social purpose, part of a budding movement to change the way government worked, to find a new place for public voices in the exercise of power. The public me, justified through a social role, came to feel more legitimate while the private writerly me was anxious, unsure, often blocked from inner creativity by skeins of winding fears. Escaping the tension usually meant following the public path because that choice removed the fear about an inner depth I could not face. The public me had to be out in the world avoiding that confusion, but whatever success I achieved felt incidental to what I felt I really wanted, what I really needed to feel myself, whole – and worthy of a place in this world.

What tied the two together was my need to fill the emptiness I felt inside. A depressive voice had me convinced that on my own I had no value as a person, and to escape that invading belief I had to reach outward to justify my life. But that was an emptiness that could never be satisfied in any way. It gave me a perverse hunger to fail, to prove that I was really that nothing the voice told me I was. It is no wonder I always felt lost in those impossible thickets, always trying to get through to something out of reach.

When I looked at those roads, the one I was on at the time was full of potholes, red lights, detours, long stretches under construction, the pavement giving out just ahead. And the one I’m not on just then is a straight sunlit road across wide open grasslands. It winds gently through the most beautiful hills I can imagine, follows stunning rivers, brings me safely to the ocean shore. The more distant it is from the road I’m following, the more beautiful it is. If I give up the tension of trying to run back and forth between the two, staying on the single path, I begin to sink into despair, convinced I will never get to that other destination, the one my soul longs for, the one I’ve always wanted to follow.

As time went on, I not only became exhausted trying to make sense of these two selves, giving each its due, trying to shift back and forth between them, I also started to see on each road someone approaching out of the hazy distance. No matter which path I was on, this figure always appeared, never quite close enough to see clearly but always moving in my direction, as if the walking motion never changed his position.

It dawned on me one day that the two roads I was trying to follow no longer diverged but were going to join, as if I had been moving steadily around two sides of a circle, destined to come in the end to the same spot. And the man in the distance who never quite arrived had to be me as well. Depression had run us both to ground. As a writer I could not break through the fear, as a professional working on public policy I was losing my grip. I had thought the problem was the tension between two lives, but in reality it was the depression that was cutting me apart. My double and I had to confront the same nemesis. If each of us could break through depression, we could get back together in the oneness I had always been without quite knowing it.

Do you find yourself thinking you’re trapped on one path or struggling horribly between two? How have you been able to resolve this, or is the tension still there?