Welcome to Metanoia Road.
Before we take the first step.
In psychotherapy, ‘metanoia’ describes a profound personal conversion or turning point; a radical transformation of character or personality. It’s a changing of mind and heart. What does this transformative path look like? What tools will we need? Philosophy and poetry; mystery and intuition; courage and curiosity—and creative expression. Join me on Metanoia Road.
Dear You—
Here I am in this liminal space between beginning and not beginning. I am waiting (working) to locate an entry point, the beginning of the road, an opening sequence of words to get me from where I am—which is here with a blank page—over to there, to you, with a letter. If I can do this well, we will all be rewarded with the key that unlocks the gateway to the kind of truth we are seeking here. Also, I need to trust myself: to attend to the tacit; to follow the intuitive clues. It’s quite a journey we are about to embark on.
The Upside-Down World—
Let’s start here. It is the 10th of December 2018. I have travelled across an ocean from one life to another and have arrived in a small, cold stone cottage by a sea loch in southwest Scotland just outside a tiny settlement of mostly ageing Scots with a scattering of children and West Highland White Terriers. Next to the cottage is a cemetery, and my neighbours are only knowable by their names chiselled onto gravestones. I sometimes run my fingers over their letters and pronounce their names out loud.
One of the first photographs I have of my new home is an accidental capture of the cottage upside-down.
On this one day, I am in the garden, crouching low to the ground so that I can capture the entire cottage in the shot. With one hand, I hold my phone with the camera app framing the scene; with the other, I hold myself just above the damp grass. And, as I press the camera button, the phone falls out of my hand and lands face down on the grass. I don’t realise a photo has been taken. I pick up the phone and take another photo.
Days, maybe weeks later, I notice the accidental photo of the inverted house.
This photo must have amused me (I’m not immune to seeing the funny side of things) but what I remember now, more than amusement, is the sober revelation or, more accurately, the recollection that I had forgotten something and here it was. This accidental photo captured a buried, forgotten truth. It’s as if I had wandered to the very far end of the town market and entered the purple tent where the fortune teller overturned a tarot card that illuminated a message so mysterious and so familiar that I cannot, once confronted, ignore its portent.
This upside-down house was strange but also familiar. Anyone can live in an upside-down house. You might be living in one now. As we journey through the stages of our lives, we encounter lessons and stories and scripts and rules from outside of us. We gather these from our caregivers, our teachers, our friends and romantic partners as well as from our cultural, social and political influencers, and we adopt them as our own. And then we forget they weren’t ours to begin with. We look outside of ourselves for things to possess and to know; for things to believe and to become. Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher and historian of philosophy, says that this external focus turns us ‘upside down and inside out’1. Turning ourselves upright and the right way around again is metanoia.
It will take a crisis—a crack in the walls of our world; a tear in the fabric that enfolds and holds us in a relationship or a place or a situation—to reveal this upside-downness to us. A crisis is a time when we are called on to reckon with our identity and place in the world. Some of the questions we might ask are: Who am I? Is it okay to be me? Can I make my life count?2 (I wish us all many crises in our lives—they are opportunities, and they open doors to personal change, to metanoia.)
Here is mine:
I had migrated to a new country, moved into a new house and the love of my life had slumped into a deep and bitter depression that had seismically disrupted our partnership. It was this, more than anything else, this witnessing of his beautiful, blazing light burn out so that he crumbled in on himself and it was my hopeless attempts at rubbing sticks together to keep him alight (or was I only helping him burn?) that, also, a year or so later, brought me to my knees.
One early April morning, I ran away from the upside-down house with my dog, Henrietta. We ran out into the open land by the loch. I heard a long high-pitched cry of pain penetrate the atmosphere. The sound of a primordial creature. It was me. I was wailing, and I was also witnessing myself wailing. Could my voice be heard as far as the next house less than a mile up in the village? I did not know or care. (Though I remember seeing Henri sitting and facing me, tilting her head to locate this strange new sound emanating from me, and I felt both comforted and ashamed.) The world around us was cinematic. Above, the cobalt and charcoal Scottish sky was sinking. Below, the land was also sinking, overwhelmed by the heavy storm. When I reached the water’s edge, I sunk into the liquefied sand and began to howl—that primitive expression of anguish and despair. It was the only language I remembered.
What was my experience of anguish? If you say the word out loud you can hear the ‘gnarling rasp to it as you twist your mouth around to say it’.3 Anguish. Here is what it felt like: it felt like the hollow dome in the pit of my stomach was twisting itself inside out.
Here is what else anguish felt like. It felt like I was tightlaced into a corset. It felt like my bones were the corset. It felt like the corset was an iron cage. It felt like this iron cage was locked so tight it took away my power to take a full, deep breath. It felt like I might never breathe again. It felt like I could choose to never breathe again.
What was my experience of despair? It was the perpetual nightmare of being imprisoned in a home with a man who was both infinitely familiar and frighteningly strange; a man I could care for but could not help. It was the experience of knowing that every single day from now until always would be the same. Despair is the place we go to when we can’t figure out a way to move through a situation. Despair was the cottage-prison I built because every choice beyond this prison was impossible. Staying was unendurable. Leaving was unthinkable, unforgivable.
Despair is a frequent feature which precedes a metanoia or conversion, wrote Petrūska Clarkson.4 She recalled the American writer and political activist Eldridge Cleaver who ‘converted to Christianity at the most profound point of discouragement and despair in his life’5. Cleaver had been sitting up on his thirteenth-floor balcony and contemplating ending his life.
Metanoia is death and rebirth—
A near-death experience, whether contemplating death from a place of despair or confronting our own imminent death from the place of a life-threatening illness can be a catalyst for a radical change of mind and heart, a metanoia. ‘It looks as if I have to die,’ wrote the English actress and singer Jill Ireland who chronicled her cancer journey in Life Wish, ‘so that I can live’. What she meant was that ‘certain lifelong behaviours and convictions had to die’ so that she could live—as her true, authentic, original self.
Metanoia is a symbolic death and rebirth. One day, you head down to the shore and sink into it (or, to use Kierkegaard’s example, you walk to the edge of a tall building or cliff) and you realise that you can choose to drown (or you can choose to jump) and extinguish yourself. This is how free you are. This is how free I was. Down there, on my knees howling, I could choose to succumb or I could choose to turn around again—and turn myself the right side up and the right way around.
Does this sound dramatic? The drama comes in the writing of this, in the tension experienced in the recollecting, first of all, of this private experience and, second of all, in the recounting for you—the effort to make you see, to bring you here beside me, to step through the page to you. There is a performance here; I am acting.6 I am using all the tools I have—memory and language—to convey what I experienced back then. Maybe you have experienced a similar thing too. If not, you will.
Down by the shore I rose up, and I had changed. No, that’s not quite true. I had not changed; change would happen over time (and the journey on Metanoia Road is a lifelong one). But I could no longer live as I had. Like Jill Ireland, I knew that ‘certain lifelong behaviours and convictions had to die’ right there on the shore. What were these behaviours and convictions? I’ll write about them in the letters that follow. My mind and my heart had cracked open and, like with a fruit, there was a seed of a self hidden there—a part of the old fruit; the potential of a new fruit.
On that day I didn’t see the potential of the seed, I only felt the pain of my broken heart. On that day, on my knees by the loch waters, I was a frightened child again.
Oh, how I remember that frightened child! A lifetime ago, on my first day at kindergarten, my teacher told my mother that I cried all day, asking for my mother—‘I want my mummy I want my mummy I want my mummy’—all day long.
Fifty years later, there I was again: ‘I want my mummy. I want my mummy.’ So, I called my mother and, for the first time in years, I told her the truth. I told her about our upside-down house. We spoke for hours that day—my phone has recorded a four-hour conversation. I was inconsolable.
On my return to the cottage, the surprise of the sun was blinding, and I couldn’t see the house at all. I imagined (with both fear and relief) that an unlikely pyromaniac might have set the place on fire. Or was it that I, in disclosing all my secrets to my mother, had built the funeral pyre in whose flames I would burn to ashes so that I might be reborn?
Clarkson notes that ‘archetypal transformational images’, such as the phoenix, ‘occur with great frequency’ in the psychotherapeutic clinical experience leading to metanoia. In the therapeutic experience, the phoenix symbolises a change of life script; a change in the stories we tell ourselves about the world. It is true, I experienced a death there on the Scottish shore.
In the mythology, it takes the phoenix three days to be reborn from the ashes of its predecessor. It has taken me (us) a little longer. ☺️
I’ll pause now.
Until my next letter,
Meet me in the comments section:
Thank you for reading this first letter. Would you like to share your response? Does the concept of ‘metanoia’ resonate with you?
Hadot, P. (1953) ‘Epistrophe and Metanoia in the History of Philosophy’, Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Philosophy, 12(4) (1953), pp. 31-36
These existential questions were posed by Erik H. Erikson as part of his ego development / life stages theory of personal development.
Brené Brown quotes the poet Ranata Suzuki describing anguish in Atlas of the Heart (p. 90)
From ‘Metanoia: A Process of Transformation’, in Transactional Analysis Journal, by Petrūska Clarkson who founded Metanoia Institute, London, where I am undertaking the MSc Creative Writing in Therapeutic Purposes.
In Christian theology, metanoia is often translated as ‘conversion’ or ‘repentance’. Religious conversion is not the sense of metanoia I explore here—but I invite all your experiences in the comments section.
It feels wrong to say I loved this, because it shows such a raw, primal reaction to your situation, but I love that you wrote it, that you were brave in sharing it, and that it touched on that part in me that recognises metanoia (even if I feel there’s a long way for me to go). Thank you 🙏🏼
Wow, Kathryn... Such clarity and vulnerability. I really felt the strait jacketed, breathless howling moment with Henri by your side. I turned my laptop upside down to look at the beautiful cottage right side up and I felt such relief. It gave me a strong sense of how nightmarish, disorientating and distressing it must have been when things fell apart... Good to have this framed as a necessary devastation on the way to a better place.