In All Disorder, A Secret Order

Musings on Self-Trust and the Divine Perfection of Bad Decisions

               “In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.” - Carl Jung

In my work as a practicing intuitive, my focus is helping people build and strengthen self-trust so that they can better heed their internal guidance systems. Our world is better when we feel more connected to and in tune with what we already know deep within. Based on observation and firsthand experience, self-healing is the path of true healing.

Everyone’s road to developing and strengthening self-trust is different, and in this space—In (Higher) Self, We Trust—we’ll explore via personal narratives, the theme of self-trust, why it matters, how it can be difficult at times, but also imperative. As the outer world becomes more uncertain and there’s widespread distrust in a whole array of institutions, it feels extra important to root into our own knowing, weaving this strand of data into our everyday lives.

For the astrologically inclined, my north node (destiny point) is in the sign of Scorpio (power, mediumship, abuse, transmutation) and resides in my fifth house (full-throttle theatrics), so it’s not much of a surprise that my path to building self-trust has been over-the-top dramatic at times a la “All the world’s a stage….”

There is a central personal story behind my firm belief in developing self-trust: After being burdened by a family member with a secret so devastating it felt like—and actually was—life-or-death for nearly a decade, I fell into strange circumstance after strange circumstance, including many with unhealed healers. I then became one of those myself. Unwittingly, I was reaching outward and in the process, growing a healthy sense of self-trust, which is eventually what made healing possible.

Knowing what you can’t know, traversing the precarious line between what you feel deep in your bones and what you can psychologically handle, is a tricky place to exist. It may sound dire, but I believe this knowing / not knowing can play out in ways that may be normalized, and therefore seem like not such a big deal, but are consequential nevertheless. Pamela Birrell and Jennifer Freyd, authors of Blind to Betrayal, write, “Sometimes ignorance can preserve the relative bliss of the status quo when knowledge would inevitably lead to chaos. Ignorance is bliss when it allows you to survive.”

I don’t believe this kind of survival is sustainable, though others might disagree. Sometimes, when we can’t face the chaos that true knowledge threatens to bring (on inner and outer levels), we create a different kind of chaos—one of distraction, entertainment, and lessons, lots of lessons. That was my path.

With each illogical choice, I found kernels of healing intention. This is the human condition. Even with the most self-sabotaging of behaviors, there’s often an underlying desire for life, love, and connection. Foolish and wise at once, I effectively learned to hold earth-bound reality alongside spiritual truth, trusting myself more and more in the process. This may not be everyone’s path, but hey, it is a path.

Many of these decisions I made during this time made no sense to me rationally, though they did speak to what I’d call the higher Self, the eternal, knowing witness that resides within all of us. The more screwed up things seemed, the more I’d start to wonder, What’s the higher Self wisdom happening here? It helped. How do I know it was my higher Self and not some fictional, after-the-fact justification for finding myself mired in easily avoidable absurdity?

Let me illustrate the answer with an example. Months after my family member’s secret blew up my life and I saw no way out, I made a conscious decision to travel to Mexico with Eva (not her real name), my Jungian therapist-astrologer and her other clients. This was definitely not the smartest decision, not when I had plenty of firsthand experience of Eva being flaky and unreliable, especially when other clients were in the mix. I’d been on this same trip—an astrology retreat—with Eva a couple years prior and felt horrified when I learned that a) her other clients were also on this trip (but seriously, how did I not see that coming when she posted pics of herself and a client on a belly dance shoot in Morocco?); b) one of these clients, Nina, started telling me about specific placements in my astrology chart, thanks to information Eva had divulged without my consent (a taste of my resultant, uptight mental chatter: I have Pluto in the fourth, what the hell was Eva thinking sharing my personal info with a stranger?); and c) the masseuse on that trip was Eva’s boyfriend, whom she joked was proud of his “Scorpionic stinger” sometime before disappearing with him into their beachfront cabana and leaving us to awkwardly talk amongst ourselves.

By the end of that trip, Nina joked, “Oh, my god. This is like What About Bob? only in reverse.” She was referring to the Bill Murray-Richard Dreyfus movie in which a therapist’s patient stalks him on vacation. I laughed. Nina wasn’t wrong.

When the second trip rolled around two years later, I had recently returned to therapy with Eva to deal with the secret that had shattered me. One-on-one therapy with Eva was enough of a risk. I wasn’t about to go back to Mexico with her. It was too precarious a time to mess with my already tangled-up psyche. No way, no how.

Then one day, I suddenly felt a clearing. Of course I should go. Taking this trip made no rational sense but I trusted my inner guidance enough, at least in this matter, to listen. It wasn’t a question, even. I was going to Mexico.

That is an example of higher Self guidance. Some part of me was knew that I needed the absurdity of Mexico with Eva, even though it made no sense. Even though I came home predictably outraged over the New Age drama, I also knew on some other, divine level that I’d received exactly what I needed. Plus, it’s not like I could say Eva had behaved out of character; she behaved exactly as she always had. We all knew that dealing with her whims was the price of admission to her quirky world, a price most people were willing to pay, myself included.

Later, I’ll share the story in full (complete with a heated argument over an abandoned “ritual,” a word I didn’t even know how to define in this context at the time), but what’s pertinent here is that trusting in higher Self wisdom eventually helped me see a spiritual perfection in the chaos that unfolded. There were threads of grace woven throughout situations that otherwise made no sense.

Ten years later, I was long over Eva’s perceived transgressions, when I uncovered a journal that had been at the center of the controversy with her. I was only half-surprised to find it contained absolute gold, gold I would not have if not for Eva, gold that helped me close the loop once I finally broke my family member’s secret nearly a decade after the fact. In the end, not only was there a method to my madness, but to hers as well.

Developing self-trust leads inevitably to taking full responsibility for our lives—the good, the bad, the wicked, the weird, the wonderful. Maybe others have a different experience, but in my case, that process of self-inquiry and staying in my own lane has not always (or ever?) been easy or pretty; regardless, I want more. Taking responsibility for our precious, time-limited lives, what could be better? It took a decent amount of time for me to understand that Eva’s betrayal and lack of responsibility reflected my own self-betrayal and lack of responsibility when it came to harboring the awful secret. That was much harder to accept than a flaky therapist being…flaky.

In this space, I’d love to hear your self-trust building stories, too. When have you had it, lost it, and/or recovered it? When have you recognized the higher Self genius of taking non-sensical leaps? Where have you found “a secret order” in disorder?

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