by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Your Realness is ALWAYS Calling You Back Home to Wholeness.

You’re walking near a cliff edge and your brain suddenly blurts out “What if you just jumped?”; you’re driving on the motorway and for a split second you imagine swerving into oncoming traffic; you’re standing on a train platform and the thought pops up out of nowhere, “You could just step forward and see what happens“.

Are you losing your mind or are these impulsive and unusual moments just part of the human experience?

Though these moments may seem unsettling, strange, and wildly out-of-character, they’re also incredibly common.

Psychologists have often dubbed them “intrusive thoughts” but there’s another name for this phenomenon that’s much older and a lot more poetic:

The Call of the Void (or, in the original French, L’appel du vide).

In this article we’re going to explore the hypothesis that the call of the void isn’t always just a simple malfunction of the mind and that – more often than not – it’s a message from a ‘part’ of you that’s been silenced for too long.

If you start listening to this message and embracing this ‘part’ of yourself then you can finally grow REAL.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The calling of the void is often just the real you calling you back home.

The Call of the Void: What We Cover in This Article

Your Realness is ALWAYS Calling You Back Home to Wholeness.

What Is the Calling of the Void?

The calling of the void describes a sudden, strange impulse to do something risky, dangerous, or outright absurd from the point of view of who you’re currently identifying yourself as being (because of the mask of ‘ego’ that you wear – which we’ll get onto in a second).

The most famous example of the call of the void is when you’re standing in a high place and you feel the call of the void telling you to take a leap (often called “high-place phenomenon”).

This doesn’t mean that the call of the void is always about suicidal urges in the clinical sense, though – it’s more about the bizarre flashes of thought that seem completely disconnected from your day-to-day personality or values but, at the same time, still manage to carry a weird sense of truth or urgency with them (like you need to change your life…NOW!).

In the conventional psychological world, they’re often dismissed as random neurological misfiring or misunderstood anxieties but over here in the world of realness – where truth is about wholeness, not fragmented performance for the sake of conforming – these whispers from the edge can (and do) mean something more.

What the call of the void is really about is very simple:

It’s not trying to end your life – it’s trying to end the current version of your life by shocking you into waking up.

When You’re Living In the Void, You’ll Hear Its Call

It’s important at this point to make a distinction here between “The Call of the Void” and “The Void” itself:

In my writing on this site and in my books, The Void is the sense of disconnection we feel when we’ve built a life on ego-driven assumptions and performance, shame, and self-fragmentation – when we abandon the real in favour of what we think the world wants or what our ego believes is safe and so we drift into a state of restless disconnection from the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality.

It’s numb. It’s noisy. It’s unreal.

When we live our lives out in the void for too long – living what Thoreau called those “lives of quiet desperation” – then a very real part of us – often unconscious – begins to rattle the cage in order to bring some truth back into our lives and to reconnect us to ourselves and the natural drive towards wholeness that would always be unfolding if we didn’t block it mentally and emotionally.

Enter the Call of the Void that we’re focused on in this article:

These moments are like inner earthquakes – not the Big One that flattens the whole city, but those pre-tremors that shake the shelves and make you question your safety. They’re unsettling by design.

Because nothing disrupts ego like the raw, unfiltered invitation to face your Shadow and grow real again.

The Shadow’s Whisper: “Be Real Again”

Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.

The call of the void isn’t your fate but it is your unconscious trying to get your attention and until you give it this attention it will keep directing your life – sometimes in ways that don’t make any ‘sense’ whatsoever to who you think you are at the level of your conscious mind (which, again, we can call ego here for the sake of simplicity).

When we experience these surreal thoughts, it’s often because the identity we’ve crafted – the “character” we believe ourselves to be in the dreamworld of the void – no longer works for us in a way that feels bearable. The tension between the ego (the mask) and the Shadow (the disowned truth) has reached boiling point and so the great Shadow Dance is about to come to a culmination (if we don’t get in the way).

The call of the void isn’t just a bunch of intrusive thoughts because your brain has ‘misfired’ or had some kind of a problem – it’s what happens when your SHADOW SELF is whispering to you from beneath the surface of your life (it’s asking you to let your Shadow Life come to the surface).

It’s whispering to let you know that:

“You’re playing small”

“You’re out of alignment”

“It’s time to finally do something real before it all ends”

Of course, that whisper doesn’t always sound particularly poetic or even nice – in fact, the less you listen to it, the crazier some of things it says might seem and so it will often show up in crude or chaotic ways.

But it’s not the content of the thought that matters – it’s the message underneath it (which is always the same):

You’ve been asleep. Now it’s time to wake up.

The Call of the Void: Self-Destruction as Self-Resurrection

In Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World, we talked about how self-destruction is self-resurrection:

In other words, those moments where we ‘accidentally’ hit rock bottom or end up sabotaging our lives aren’t about bowing up our own lives recklessly but about recognising when something in us needs to die so that something real can take its place.

When we ignore this call for too long – when we suppress the Shadow and cling to outdated versions of ourselves (ego) – life will often do the demolition work for us:

Relationships fall apart. Careers lose meaning. We wake up and realise we’ve built a life that doesn’t even feel like our own.

Just like Carl Jung said up above: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.

The call of the void is the early warning system:

Ignore it, and the Shadow gets louder until you self-destruct and self-resurrect in the aftermath.

Listen to it and your rebirth into realness begins right away.

(But, of course, this doesn’t mean you have to jump off a building or do anything else fatally risky – it means you need to realise that the current version of yourself could probably be a lot more real and take the calculated risks to get there through real action).

The Calling of the Void as a Symptom of Misalignment

The calling of the void isn’t always dramatic or suicidal in tone – sometimes it’s more subtle but still very powerful when it comes to the transformation it can bring:

A desire to quit your job that ‘suddenly’ pops up out of nowhere (really it’s been going through the process of seeing the unconscious become conscious).
An urge to scream in the middle of a dinner party (because deep down you realised all along that these are not your ‘peeps’).
A feeling that something big has to change, or else (because you know down their in the shadows that you’re not being authentic or real with yourself and that we’re all going to be dead one day).

The common denominator in all these cases is that these thoughts are out of character.

But maybe that’s because the character itself is the problem:

When we live lives shaped and motivated by ego – trying to appear strong, successful, desirable, whatever – we suppress the parts of ourselves that don’t ‘fit’ so that we can be ACCEPTABLE to the world without ACCEPTING ourselves.

These suppressed ‘parts’ become Shadow aspects and – even though we may think that they’re hidden behind the mask of ‘character’ – they will try to re-emerge and the more you suppress them, the louder they get. It’s a bit like pushing a beach ball underneath the water only for it to eventually come surging up from beneath the surface.

In this sense, we can say that the calling of the void is not an anomaly, brain misfiring, or anything else that tries to explain away our realness – it’s the natural consequence of misalignment.

In other words, it’s just your system trying to rebalance and put your back on track with that natural drive towards wholeness.

Why Anxious People Hear the Call More Often

If you’re an “anxious person” you might have found that you experience the call of the void quite often -probably more than most people do (which may be why you’re even reading this article in the first place).

You’re not imagining this – it’s actually something that studies have verified:

For example, a 2012 study from Florida State University found that people with high anxiety sensitivity reported more frequent “high place phenomena” (those impulses to jump from heights, even when they had no suicidal intent).

Why?

Because anxiety pulls us out of the body and into the mind – into interpretations and identity rather than truth and realness. This aligns with everything we’ve said about the Shadow Dance between the ego and the shadow because, the more we live in the mind, the more fragmented we become and the more our Shadow self needs to intervene to course-correct.

In a very real way, anxiety is a by-product of disconnection from realness and the constant friction that this brings because of the negative feedback we keep getting from reality when we filter everything through the ego (which is unreal) yet still try to cling to it.

The call of the void is the Shadow’s way of trying to bring us back home to the present where the natural drive towards wholeness keeps unfolding, real life keeps flowing, and – most importantly – we feel safe, regulated (at the level of the nervous system), and connected.

So… What Do You Do About The Call of The Void?

Here’s the part where we get practical because this article isn’t just about glorifying chaos (although chaos can be pretty cool sometimes) – it’s about understanding the signal that the call of the void asks us to tap into and using it to grow real.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Don’t Panic. You’re Not Broken.

Almost everyone hears the call of the void at some point in their lives. It doesn’t mean you’re suicidal or mentally ill or even just plain-ol’ broken. Instead, it’s often a sign of deeper awareness trying to break through the noise and wake you back up to your REAL life.

2. Ask: What Part of Me Is Dying to Be Seen?

Instead of obsessing over the content of the thoughts that the call of the void brings, explore the context of your life a the time it happens: What in your life feels out of alignment? Where are you performing or pretending? What feels fake or forced? What is emerging that would allow you to be more real if you acted on it?

3. Take Calculated Risks

No, this doesn’t mean swerving into traffic or jumping off that bridge – but it does mean mixing things up:

Start a new project or finally finish that novel. Tell the truth to the people that need it but that you’ve been keeping it from. Change your routine. Get out of your comfort zone.

There’s a reason the void calls you toward risk and it’s because your life has gotten too safe, too small, too controlled, and too unreal.

That’s not how we’re made to live and it’s why you probably feel like you’re in the Void and so the call of the void (really, the call of TRUTH) is calling you back home.

4. Ground Yourself in the Body

Most of these “call of the void” thoughts are exacerbated when we’re overly cerebral and caught up in our head about things.

Come back to your breath, your sensations, and the body’s natural rhythms by trying to regulate your nervous system (so you’re not stuck in fight-or-flight which keeps us in the void and disconnected from truth).

Try grounding exercises, cold exposure, or breathwork, for example – anything that shifts you out of your head and into reality.

5. Do Shadow Work

Journal about your intrusive thoughts and look for patterns:

What values or ideas do they threaten? Who would you be if you acted on them (in metaphor, not literally)?

Often, these thoughts point directly to the parts of you that are longing to be integrated and that you have psychological barriers to facing.

The calling of the void is showing you that your not living your own life.

The Calling of the Void: The Final Truth

The calling of the void doesn’t mean you’re crazy – it means you’re being called back home to yourself and life and if you take the (metaphorical) leap by taking a risk on yourself then you’ll be rewarded with your real life.

Let’s be honest, in a world that rewards numbness and surface-level success, feeling anything real can be terrifying but it’s also the only way forward because when we start listening to the parts of us we’ve banished, we begin to live lives of substance rather than performance and the empty restlessness of the void.

The next time the void calls, don’t flinch – listen. Not to the command but to the cry beneath it.
Because the truth isn’t trying to destroy you.

It’s trying to set you free (although it might p*ss you off and make you miserable in the short-term as you battle to let go of your illusions in the face of it).

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start working on yourself and growing real then book a free coaching session with me to start moving forward right away.

Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.

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The Calling of the Void: Why Your Darkest Thoughts Might Be Whispering the Truth