The Heroic Journey: Unleashing your true self

You are presented with an opportunity, but you hold yourself back. You tell yourself that now is not a good time because life is too complicated or that you’re incapable and unable to accept the challenge. The narrative you have told yourself about this opportunity prevents you from moving forward with important plans, living out your dreams and becoming the best, truest version of yourself.

Over time you may notice you tell yourself this same story again and again – preventing yourself from answering your calling as new opportunities arise, leaving you feeling stagnant.

You have not yet become the hero of your own journey. You have not yet overcome adversities in a personal heroic journey filled with challenges, lessons to be learned and opportunities for growth.

The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell, an American writer and literature professor, noticed similarities in the journey heroes and heroines tend to take in fictional stories. They begin with a separation or departure from everyday life, move through some sort of initiation and finish with a triumphant return.

Departure. Stories tend to begin within the protagonist’s mundane day-to-day life. An opportunity for separation or departure from normal life occurs and the hero accepts the call to action. ​​They begin an adventure that is full of challenges and come across helpers or guides who provide assistance along the way.

Initiation. Over the course of the journey, the protagonist is confronted with trials – this is the initiation. Through this process, they move from being an average person to a hero by prevailing over the challenges. Oftentimes, they realize that what they needed to succeed was actually inside them all along.

Triumphant return. With a new found awareness and sense of fulfillment, the character, now a hero, returns to where they began. However, this person is now wiser and changed, able to share their triumphant experiences with others. More importantly, they now incorporate a new chapter in the story within themselves.

Your Own Hero’s Journey

What you are witnessing in these heroic adventures, whether in movies or novels, parallels your own life. While the specifics of your life are of course different, your path also requires you to leave behind the everyday, face down new challenges and return a stronger, more self-actualized version of yourself. Whether it’s deciding to take on a new career opportunity, start a family or move beyond the limits of your current life, you are the hero in your own journey.

Donald Winnicott was a psychoanalyst who believed that our true selves develops during early childhood experiences. A child requires “good enough parenting,” allowing the child to have healthy spontaneity that lays the foundation for the creation of one's own rich personal experience. Childhood experiences that do not support the development of a true self, may result in what Winnicott called as the formation of the “false self,” in which one lives with the priority of meeting the expectation of others rather than themselves. 

The false self prevents one from centering themselves in their life’s journey. They make choices based on the narratives crafted by others’ views and needs, rather than their own.

Beginning the Heroic Journey

The Hero’s journey is quite literally the journey of your life. Until you answer the call to follow your own true bliss, your own call to adventure, you are not living as your true self. Maybe your true passions have never been discovered or pursued. Or your true self was dampened and unaccepted by others, leading you to live as a shell of a person and not your authentic self.

As your guide, a therapist can be present, supportive and provide you with a sense of security as you explore the depths of your pain and the joy in uncovering your true sense of self.

With the right guide, these false narratives that play out can be rewritten. I truly believe it is an honor to be a witness to one's story and journey. It requires answering the call to adventure, venturing into the depths of the pain and the unknown, facing challenges and returning more whole and truer.

Your heroic journey continues on, allowing you to answer the next call to adventure, wiser and with a new found awareness. 

The question is, do you live in fear and avoid the call to your own journey, or do you accept the challenge and go on with courage and compassion?