By Hailey Shafir, LCMHCS, LCAS, CCS
A couple of months ago I wrote about the signs that indicate you’re living a provisional life, or a life that serves as a temporary stand-in while you wait for the ‘real thing’. If you missed that post, you can still find it here. Essentially, a provisional life is one that you live inside but don’t feel ‘alive’ in, leaving you feeling chronically dissatisfied or with a nagging feeling that something is missing and once you obtain it, your ‘real life’ will begin.
Today we are going to dive into why and how a provisional life is built.
Root Causes of the Provisional Life: How it’s Built
A root cause analysis is important when we encounter a problem as pervasive as a provisional life. Without this analysis, we can’t be sure that our ‘solutions’ will really resolve the issue, instead of just treating the symptoms. The independent causes are probably very specific to you, your history, lived experiences, and psychological makeup, so fill in the requisite blanks as needed. Instead of focusing on individual causes, I am instead going to describe a more universal set of stages that describe how (and why) a provisional life is constructed.
1. You don’t know enough about yourself
It’s difficult to talk about the provisional life without discussing some of the related ideas of the man who coined the phrase: Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology, the provisional life is intrinsically linked to the concept of Puer Aeternus or the ‘Eternal Child’. The gist of Jung’s thinking on the Puer Aeternus (or the Puella Aeternus for us girls,) was that some of us grow taller without really ‘growing up’ psychologically. Jung believed that a provisional life is the natural outcome of this – it’s impossible to know what kind of life you really want when you don’t know the kind of person you are.
To Jung, psychological development is the process of becoming individuated, or learning enough about ourselves to be both independent and connected to others and the world. Individuation is a lifelong process, and it requires a consistent (and considerable) effort. This is especially true in our modern age. Today, we don’t have many authentic pathways to self-knowledge and development, so many of us are stuck somewhere in the Puer/Puella stage, never having learned or been given the tools to really understand who we are, how we are designed, and how to find our place in the world.
While all of us have an inner child that preserves our playful, wide-eyed and innocent qualities, we also need a more responsible and mature adult to be in the driver’s seat. Otherwise, we risk splitting ourselves in two as we pretend to be real and grown up in the world, while inwardly not feeling real or grown up. Over time, the chasm between the person we really are and the person we pretend to be grows and grows. In the empty space between, many kinds of neuroses can manifest, like insecurity, anxiety, depression, and addiction (the ‘symptomology’ of a provisional life). We also try desperately to fill these spaces with things we think will make us, and our lives, feel more real – money, property, important titles, fake friends, social media avatars and all the other provisional things.
Qualities of the Puer/Puella:
o You haven’t done a lot of deep reflecting on yourself, your life, or your future
o You’ve gone with the easy way or ‘path of least resistance’ on big life decisions
o You often feel unfairly constrained by important commitments and responsibilities
o You get really excited and eager at the start of something but can’t maintain interest or will
o You secretly feel empty inside & lack things/people/pursuits of ‘substance’ in life
o You keep making the same mistakes over & over, in life, work, and/or relationships
o You get really exhausted from having to pretend or put on an act all the time
2. You relied on templates to design your life
There are many societal and cultural templates that exist to tell us what we should do when we’re in the early stages of making our own way in this world. It’s the reason most of us studied for the SAT, went to college, chose ‘stable’ careers and stayed in them a while even if we hated them. The modern life template also strongly suggests things like marriage and kids at 30-ish, and a house, a dog and kids – in that order. Sometimes, the templates we used were more personal in nature, like choosing majors, careers, or partners based on the examples or expectations (explicit or not) of a parent.
Essentially, this can mean overriding what we really think/feel/want to do in order to conform to the social pressure to think/feel/do what ‘most people’ or ‘successful people’ or ‘people like us’ do. Those of us who followed these templates want to believe we were the ones designing our lives, but we can’t deny that cultural influences and social pressures may have played a part. When the template played too big of a part, we end up with a life that doesn’t really feel like ours, and one where we don’t feel able to be our true selves. This only becomes more true as we grow (even the Puer grows, just more slowly), in the same way your too-tight pants feel more uncomfortable with each pound you gain.
Qualities of the templated life:
o You have big regrets about major life decisions, and wish you’d followed your gut
o Most of your major life decisions aligned with what others told/expected you to do
o Conforming has cost you some essential part of your authenticity or individuality
o One of your bigger fears about making a major change is worrying what others would think
o You often feel confined by/within the structures and rules of your life, career, or relationship
o You realize you looked around/outside instead of looking within to make a plan for your life
o You solve most problems with tested methods, sound expert advice, or self-help books
3. You became too externally focused
We’ve all been tricked by the idea that we’ll be happy “if…” or “when…” we reach a certain goal, attain a status, or change a certain circumstance. Research is pretty clear that this isn’t true, and that external improvements have only a very temporary effect on our sense of well-being, after which we quickly return to baseline. Inherently, most of us know this, and can think of personal examples in our own lives where it was true. Being too externally focused means paying too much attention to appearances, social status, career, and the physical, material, and other observable ‘evidence’ of a full and happy life.
When we place ‘happiness’ outside of ourselves, we actually endanger it because we surrender our psychological autonomy to the whims of circumstance and chance. This kind of thinking usually leads to provisional living – casting our ‘happiness’ far into imaginary futures where we don’t have the problems we do now. When we cast happiness into the future, we also decide to sacrifice our opportunity to experience it right now (the only moment that really exists!).
On some level, doing this is our ongoing commitment to suffer through the drudgery and lifelessness for a bootstraps promise of a better one later. The more we make our psychological state contingent upon our outer circumstances, the more doomed this plan becomes, and the more we cast our happiness into the future, the less available it is to us now. While there are certainly some circumstances we will be rewarded for suffering through, not all suffering is virtuous… some is just unnecessary, self-inflicted, or even insane (doing the same thing over and over and expecting a dif result).
Qualities of an external locus of control:
o You set goals that you think will make you feel happier or better once you achieve them
o You care too much what others think and how they perceive you, your life, and choices
o You constantly compare yourself and circumstances to that of others
o You only feel good about yourself when you’re ‘productive’ or ‘successful’
o You’re so focused on the future that you are rarely present in the here-and-now
o You need to do, buy, consume, or be entertained to boost your mood
o You suffer through because you believe it will improve, even when it’s delusional
4. You didn’t want to face the truth
Lives aren’t built overnight, they’re built incrementally, one decision at a time. The thing about decisions (even big ones) is that they’re not as definitive or temporal as we pretend. Most decisions can be unmade – we can back out, have a change of heart, go a different way, but it often requires more energy to undo something than to do it. Undoing things can also be scary, upsetting, and disappointing to us and also to others (i.e. career change, divorce, firing someone, or admitting guilt). This adds to the difficulty of undoing and makes the option of denial seem a lot more appealing.
Denial is almost always involved in the construction of a provisional life, especially one that’s years or decades in the making. Inevitably, there were lots of signs, symptoms, and inconvenient facts along the way that were trying to tell us the truth, but a truth that required some undoing. These could include the untaken advice or warnings that still haunt us, incompatibility signs, persistent recurring problems, or endless nagging feelings we ignored. Even physical or mental health problems and addictions could be included in the list of warning signs ignored, dismissed, or denied.
Truth is inherently benevolent in nature, but its benevolence is only unlocked by acceptance and initiative. Without this, it just becomes an increasingly threatening pest that we try to exterminate. The less truth something contains, the more provisional it is, and the more it will be pestered and inconvenienced by reality. Denial, essentially, is a refusal to accept life on life’s terms and a subsequent attempt to bend and distort reality to our terms. When your heart and mind disagree, it takes a lot of work to get them in accord, and sometimes it’s easier to try to change our mind to appease our heart. At best, it’s a temporary fix.
Qualities of denial:
o You become defensive to any sincere feedback that conflicts with what you want to think
o You avoid real, difficult, and honest conversations related to issues that overwhelm you
o You distract yourself or stay busy to ‘stay out of your head’ or avoid overthinking
o You’re quick to dismiss facts or information that conflict with/threaten your view
o You have a history of sweeping things under the rug & going along to get along
o You haven’t tried to find a root cause or pattern in the problems you keep having
o You develop cover stories or selective narratives to talk about the provisional parts
5. You found the perfect scapegoat to blame it all on
Inevitably, the more we ignore the truth, the more persistent and forceful it becomes in its efforts to reach us, wake us, and set us in another direction. This means that over time, the problems in the provisional parts of our life get bigger and harder to deny. In order to protect ourselves from hard truths and the accountability they demand of us, we need to find a suitable scapegoat. The scapegoat needs to be big and bad enough to sufficiently explain (and excuse?) the scope of the problems, and it also needs to be far enough away from our locus of control to allow us to remain its victim or slave.
Scapegoats allow us to remain innocent, but there is a steep cost involved in using them. A scapegoat is problematic largely because it hinders awareness, accountability, and positive action. Since awareness, accountability, and action describe the process of growth and change, scapegoats keep us stuck. Since nothing alive stagnates, the scapegoat is actually regressive in nature, and we risk sliding further backwards into the Puer – where life is just a collection of things that happens to us.
It’s important to realize that scapegoats don’t need to be people – they can also be circumstances. If you were to fill in the blank of this statement: “My life would be perfect if __________ wasn’t a part of it anymore”, you can probably locate your scapegoat(s). They may things like chronic illnesses, financial problems, or places and conditions where you live or work. I’m not suggesting these aren’t ‘real’ problems, only that it’s worth considering they may also be convenient scapegoats and excuses that are keeping you stuck.
Qualities of scapegoating:
o There’s always a good excuse or explanation for your mistakes and problems, and it’s not you
o You still blame your parents, childhood, or distant past experiences for current problems
o You overidentify with a diagnosis or deterministic label that ascribes you victim status
o You blame your current unhappiness on one person/situation you claim you cannot change
o You constantly complain about something but make no sincere effort to change or improve it
o You have a lot of anger, bitterness, or resentment towards a certain person or circumstance
o You have already constructed a mental argument as to why this does not apply to you
In Closing
The root causes of the provisional life are difficult because they always implicate us, detailing our consistent involvement in the design and construction process. While this is upsetting to realize at first, it offers a much more hopeful prognosis for the future. After all – once you reverse engineer something, you have the information needed to deconstruct, renovate, fortify, or build something different. Even still, I will write one more blog in this series to distill the remedies a little more clearly and specifically, so look out for that in the next month (or two, lol). Until then, take good care and reach out if you need to!