VanessaJ’s Reviews > The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife > Status Update

The work of personal growth consists of 3 parts; insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts, moral strength plays the predominant role.

When we discover that we have been living what constitutes a false self, that we have been enacting a provisional adulthood, driven by unrealistic expectations, then we open the possibility for the second adulthood, our true personhood.

Thus the middle passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self authenticity.

The person going through such an experience will often panic and say I don’t know who I am anymore. In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die. No wonder there is such enormous anxiety. One is summoned, psychologically, to die unto the old self so that the new might be born.

We can be driven by what we do not understand about ourselves.the liberating power of a Greek tragedy was that through suffering the hero came to wisdom, that is, a revised relationship between inner truth (character) and outer truth (fate), our lives are tragic only to the degree that we remain unconscious of both the roles of the autonomous complexes and the growing divergence between our nature and our choices.

“When we are born, we are handed multiple lenses: genetic inheritance, gender, a specific culture, and the variables of our family environment, all of which constitute our sense of reality. Looking back later, we have to admit that we have perhaps lived less from our true nature than from the vision of reality ordained by the lenses we used.”