by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
It’s Possible You’re Going Mad But You’re Probably Just On the Verge of Growing REAL
There comes a point in many people’s lives where everything starts to feel inexplicable, strange, and weird:
When it starts to happen then the things that once mattered don’t seem to matter anymore, the goals you’ve spent years chasing suddenly feel empty and unreal, and your identity begins to feel a little too ‘loose’ around around the edges – kinda like you’ve borrowed somebody else’s clothes and only just realised they don’t fit.
It’s only natural when this happens that you start questioning everything:
- Questioning your relationships.
- Questioning your career.
- Questioning your beliefs, your habits, and even your own thoughts.
Sometimes you might even catch yourself questioning your sanity and wondering if you’re finally losing it or going mad.
This article is about the short answer to this question which is:
Probably not.
What’s much more likely is that you’re waking up and starting to cultivate some REAL awareness.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Going Mad or Waking UP?: What We'll Cover In This Article
- It's Possible You're Going Mad But You're Probably Just On the Verge of Growing REAL
- Awareness, Madness, & The Threshold Between Two Lives
- What Does "Going Mad" Actually Mean?
- Your Interpretations of Reality are NOT Reality Itself
- Why Awakening Can Feel Like Madness
- The Real Problem Isn't the Unknown
- Resistance and Control
- The Unfamiliar Is Your Teacher
- Completing the AAA Cycle: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action
- You're Not Losing Yourself
- The Final Word On Going Mad: Welcome to Your Next REAL Season
Awareness, Madness, & The Threshold Between Two Lives
One of the inescapable truths about life is that it has seasons and whereas sometimes those seasons change gently – almost without us noticing – at other times they arrive like an earthquake.
When the earthquake starts shaking you, it’s always doing so to see if anything real remains and it usually looks like this:
One day you’re living out a version of yourself that feels safe and familiar; the next, it feels like the floor has disappeared beneath your feet and you don’t even know who you are or what life is anymore.
The ‘good’ news is that these kind of ‘earthquakes’ usually occur when we’re approaching a genuine transformation into realness and we’ve reached the threshold between the familiar and the unfamiliar:
The familiar is comfortable because we know who we are and where we stand but the unfamiliar is uncomfortable because it takes that certainty way.
This uncertainty can feel terrifying because we don’t know where it will lead us and is one of the reasons so many people mistake the start of an awakening for madness.
What Does “Going Mad” Actually Mean?
Obviously, genuine mental illness exists, and so if you’re experiencing severe psychological symptoms or are worried about your literal wellbeing, then it’s important to seek appropriate medical support (which is not what this website is about).
We’re talking about in this article is a much more universal experience of the maddening experience that comes with awakening to awareness.
A simple way of defining it is:
What you once thought was real no longer appears to be and so your grasp of reality feels uncertain.
Perhaps your beliefs no longer work, perhaps your self-image doesn’t feel grounded in truth anymore, perhaps the values you’ve organised your whole life around suddenly seem empty and meaningless, or perhaps the future you’ve been building no longer feels like one you actually want.
In short, everything that once gave you certainty begins dissolving and having no real weight to it…it’s no wonder it feels unsettling but this isn’t necessarily reality disappearing and a sign that you’re slipping into madness.
Actually, it’s most often just a sign that your interpretation of reality is disappearing.
Your Interpretations of Reality are NOT Reality Itself
From the perspective of Realness, the experience of feeling our familiar interpretations of ourselves, the world, and reality start to slip away has two deeply connected causes.
Let’s look at them both quickly now:
1. The Ego Is Built to Protect You
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become disconnected from themselves but when it does happen it always happens for a reason.
The reason we develop the ego in the first place is because when we experience unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity), we naturally create ways of protecting ourselves from the painful emotions that have become too much to face directly.
Instead of feeling our feelings (“you gotta to feel it to heal it“) we build an identity that can help us to avoid doing so and so the ego arises as an image of ourselves that seems safer than who we really are.
The ego isn’t evil and it’s not your enemy – like we said, it’s simply a filter between you and life which performs the function of protecting you from experiencing emotions it ‘believes’ would overwhelm you.
The problem with this is that in order to keep that protection in place, it has to hide very REAL parts of who you actually are and these hidden parts become your shadow self.
Over time, the more energy you invest in maintaining this false identity, the further you drift from your authentic nature and feel dependent on the unreality you’ve identified with.
The ego gives you survival but when reality creeps back in to invite you back to real life it can feel like you’re “going mad”.
2. The Ego Creates Interpretations Instead of Reality
Once the ego is in charge, it starts constructing a complete interpretation of reality in order to keep itself in place by developing beliefs like:
- “I’m only valuable if I succeed“.
- “I have to keep everyone happy”.
- “If people knew the real me, they’d reject me”.
- “I always have to stay in control“.
- “I can’t trust anybody”.
- Etc. etc. etc.
These beliefs don’t arise because they’re objectively true but because they help the ego to maintain its hold by giving us further reasons to avoid facing the underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma that created it in the first place (once we face it, it dissolves and the ego can take a more REAL form – even though, ultimately, the ego is the opposite of reality in any form).
Initially, these unreal beliefs and interpretations of life in reality provide comfort by explaining uncomfortable truths about life away and making life feel predictable and under our control (which keeps the initial pain of returning to reality at arm’s length).
This may work in the short to medium term but it’s a flawed strategy because reality always ‘wins’ in the end because it never goes anywhere (what’s real is always real).
What this means is that life will always keep presenting experiences that contradict the ego’s interpretation in the form of relationships exposing our blind spots, ‘failure’ exposing false or misplaced confidence, ‘success’ exposing empty goals, loss exposing unhealthy attachment, and even love exposing our vulnerability and showing us the areas where we need to grow.
In short, there’s NO ESCAPE because, eventually, our interpretations stop ‘working’ because they were never reality itself – they were just maps and, when the map no longer matches the territory, confusion and ‘madness’ follows.
Why Awakening Can Feel Like Madness
When the familiar structures of the ego begin collapsing, we begin to panic and think that we’re going mad because the beliefs that once organised life stop making sense:
- Old motivations disappear.
- Old ambitions lose their pull.
- Old coping mechanisms stop working.
We’re just swimming out to sea without knowing what waves are going to come our way next.
Because nothing new has fully emerged yet from the uncertainty and unfamiliarity yet (which it always will with the passing of time – if you TRUST) then you’re no longer standing on the old ground but you haven’t reached the new shore either.
The feeling of going mad is what happens when you’re stuck on the threshold between identities, stories and worlds.
This is unquestionably an uncomfortable place to be and is a bit like moving into a half renovated house and trying to act like it’s all perfectly ready to be lived in even though the walls have been knocked down, vital pieces of furniture are missing, and there’s dust over everything.
It only starts to make ‘sense’ again when you realise that what you’re looking at is the process, not the result:
Transformation often looks like destruction before it starts to look and feel like real growth again.
The Real Problem Isn’t the Unknown
What you need to know is that it isn’t the unknown isn’t that causes suffering and a feeling of madness but your resistance to it (the unknown is actually just a blank canvas that we either project our fear or trust into):
Resistance occurs because – even as it begins falling apart – the ego still desperately tries to maintain control by endlessly whispering things like:
- “Figure everything out” (when this is impossible).
- “Don’t let go” (when letting go is the way forward).
- “Get certainty” (when there really is none).
- “Fix yourself” (when you’re not broken).
- “Become the old version of you again” (when you’ve entered a new season and can’t go back).
All of these kind of whisperings – and any like them – are asking you to go against life instead of stepping up and working with it.
In other words, you’re trying to solve tomorrow’s problems using yesterday’s identity and then wondering why nothing works and you feel like you’re going mad.
Resistance and Control
Whenever we feel like we’re “going mad” in this way, then, two main emotional and mental habits are usually operating beneath the surface and holding us back from REAL life:
Resistance
Resistance is essentially just (attempts at) fighting reality:
This is usually and unconscious process but it shows up as refusing to let go of all the familiar things we’ve mistaken for who we actually are:
- Our conditioning.
- Our identity.
- Our roles.
- Our certainty.
- Our need to always know and be ‘right’.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The ego believes these things keep us safe but in reality they’re what most often what keeps us stuck.
Control
Control is refusing to surrender to what life is trying to teach us:
- Instead of listening to life, we try to manipulate it.
- Instead of trusting life, we force outcomes that we were seeking because we couldn’t trust in the first place.
- Instead of growing real, we cling to the past and the wound it left us with.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The irony here is almost painful because it shows us that the tighter we grip, the more unstable everything feels, and the harder we try to control life, the more out of control it eventually becomes.
The Unfamiliar Is Your Teacher
If you want to let go of that feeling that you’re going mad and start to get in touch with the sanity of your realness again then start to change the way you see the uncertain and unfamilar.
A powerful reframe is as follows:
Instead of treating uncertainty like a threat then choose to treat it like a teacher.
This doesn’t mean enjoying every uncomfortable moment or tricking yourself into pretending suffering is pleasant (unless you’re into that) – it simply means becoming curious instead of defensive.
Here’s a powerful journal prompt if you want to get started after reading this article:
“What is life trying to show me that my old identity couldn’t see?”
That single question changes your relationship with uncertainty because – all of a sudden – you’re no longer trying to escape the unfamiliar and shift into starting to learn from it.
Really, this is the essence of awakening and stepping into AWARENESS.
Completing the AAA Cycle: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action
This is where the Realness framework that I use with my coaching clients becomes practical – to make use of it yourself then whenever life starts dissolving those familiar old structures and you feel like you’re going mad, then remember the AAA Cycle instead: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.
Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego
Awareness begins when you really pay attention and start to notice what’s actually falling apart:
Is it really your life? Or is it just your interpretation of life?
Question the beliefs you’ve inherited, question the identity you’ve built, and question the assumptions you’ve never examined before but live according to every day:
Awareness isn’t about finding new answers but about seeing through old illusions and UNLEARNING anything unreal that keeps you from yourself and life in realness.
Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow
As the ego loosens its grip, the parts of yourself you’ve hidden in the Shadow Self begin returning to the surface to be integrated into the whole of you are.
Instead of pushing them away again, Acceptance marks the time for you to welcome them again:
- Feel the shame without becoming it.
- Feel the grief without resisting it.
- Feel the fear without obeying it.
Your shadow isn’t trying to destroy you but to complete you and so even though integration always feels less dramatic than the symptoms of repression, it’s infinitely more powerful because it leads you back to the truth (the opposite of powerlessness and despair).
Action: Trust Yourself and Life
Finally, when you have raised Awareness and cultivated Acceptance then you can start to take real Action from a place of trust instead of fear
Trust means that you embrace forward momentum and that you don’t need every answer, don’t need a perfect plan, and don’t need certainty – you simply need enough courage to take the next honest step and to do your best and let go of the rest.
Realness grows through movement – not through waiting until you feel ‘ready’ (which is just the ego making you buy into the Illusion of Stasis).
Trust isn’t believing life will always go your way – it’s just about knowing you’ll become more real whichever way it goes and that you can always trust yourself to do what you CAN do and trust life to do what you CAN’T do.
If you want to go deeper into trust and growing real then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
You’re Not Losing Yourself
One of the biggest misunderstandings about awakening is thinking you’re losing yourself which is why it feels like you’re “going mad” (which you hopefully realise is not the case now if you read this far).
Actually, you’re not going mad at all – you’re just ‘losing’ what was never really you in the first place (which is ‘good’ news because what’s real is always real):
- The masks.
- The performances.
- The borrowed beliefs.
- The protective strategies.
- The outdated stories.
This loss can feel frightening because the ego interprets it as death which – in a sense – it kind of is as you complete the cycle of one season of your life and step into the next (a kind of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ you’ll go through many times in this life).
Either way, something infinitely more alive is being born: the REAL YOU.
The Final Word On Going Mad: Welcome to Your Next REAL Season
If life currently feels uncertain because your old identity no longer ‘fits’ or all that was once familiar seems to be dissolving into uncertainty then take a deep breath and realise that this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going mad (anything is possible, of course!).
What it most likely means is that you’ve reached the end of the road for the current version of your ego and that life is inviting you into a new season – one that requires less pretending, controlling, resisting, and being unreal.
You’re stepping over the threshold into trusting life more and this always feels uncertain because you’ve never crossed over into this way of being before.
This is what makes it unfamiliar and slightly maddening but every meaningful transformation begins in a place just like this where your AWARENESS is going to be be raised, you’re gong to cultivate ACCEPTANCE, and then start taking real ACTION.
You don’t need to rush to rebuild the prison you’ve just escaped by mistaking uncertainty of failure or confusing awakening with madness because reality can’t take your sanity away – only affirm it.
The more willing you become to let go of what isn’t real, then the more naturally you discover what is and that’s the beautiful paradox at the heart of every genuine transformation:
You don’t become somebody new – you simply stop pretending to be somebody you’re not because what’s real is always real.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you feel like you’re going mad and you want a sanity check then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you tune back into your realness.
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