By Dr. Mindy Nettifee
Depth Psychology Researcher and Poet
In my early thirties, my boyfriend of nine years and I decided to get married. There was no proposal, no ring, just a series of casual-then-increasingly-not-casual conversations in which we generally agreed it was time to move forward. Marriage seemed like a logical next step. My sudden openness to this came as a surprise to me. I had previously been sure that marriage, in general, was not something I wanted to be a part of. While I was a cisgender woman partnered with a cisgender man and monogamously so, I identified as bisexual and queer. At the time, gay marriage was still illegal in the state of California, where we lived, and it didn’t feel right taking part in something others couldn’t. The institution of marriage itself seemed unrepentantly rotten, unhealed at its patriarchal core.
Even setting those reservations aside, however, I felt split. One part of me, the part I most identified with, truly loved this man, this kind, moody guitarist I had mooned over all through my twenties. We had some serious issues: he had cheated on me, he tended to shut down emotionally whenever conflict arose, and he had a lot of growing up to do. But I had a lot of growing up to do, too. I wasn’t perfect, and I didn’t need him to be perfect either. We had come through so much together, and I could not imagine my life without him. This part of me wondered whether a ceremony formalizing our commitment to each other might actually be what was missing: a catalyst for growth.
Another part of me, a shadowy, shy part, saw things differently, and would sometimes rise to the surface dramatically. I would walk into the living room and see this grown man playing video games, and it was like a fog lifting. I would suddenly know with total, sobering clarity that while I loved this person, I did not fully trust him. I didn’t feel safe with him or understood by him, and I did not want to have a family or a future with him. Not only should I not marry him, I should leave; I should stop compromising. It was not about finding someone perfect, but it was about finding someone perfect for me. He wasn’t.
When I consulted these conflicting parts in turn, both felt right, both felt instinctual. Which one was the voice of my intuition, my deep inner knowing, and which one was the voice of my fear? I had no idea and no way of finding out. So I erred on the side of preserving the relationship. To quell some of my reservations, we decided not to get an official marriage license; we would have what everyone could have, a commitment ceremony. As the date of our planned ceremony approached, the struggle between these parts of myself amplified. I overrode my hesitancy in the way many nervous brides do—with champagne. We had a lovely, joyous, irreverent wedding in the hills of Ojai with all our family and friends. And then I waited for all my parts to settle, for the inner voices to relax, for my fears to subside.
They didn’t. My sense that I had made a terrible mistake got steadily worse. I kept busy. I poured myself into work. I exercised diligently to manage my anxiety. When that wasn’t enough, I started smoking cigarettes here and there, did a little day drinking. I made increasingly elaborate meals, his favorite meals. I doubled my efforts in the bedroom. I gratitude-journaled like never before. I was a working artist at the time, a performance poet, and something told me to begin planning a tour and pour all my free time and attention into it.
On the day before I was set to leave on this month-long tour that would take me up and down the West Coast, then to Arizona, then to Hawaii, I got a brief email from my partner’s mother. It was about three months past our wedding now, and she wanted to know what county we had filed our marriage license in, to put in some sort of official family record. She said she had asked her son already, and he had claimed not to remember and told her to ask me about it. I was instantly furious. Why had he lied to his mother? Why didn’t she call him out on this obvious lie? Like, why wouldn’t he remember where we had filed our marriage license, if indeed we had filed one? Why had he put me in a position to either further the lie about the marriage license or tell his mother that he had lied to her? The voice, the shadow voice, surged. I felt something like a foreshock before an earthquake.
I knew a big, life-altering fight was coming, but I didn’t want to have it and then leave town. So I pressed pause. I told myself the fight could wait. I would not confront my partner about the email until I returned from this tour. In the meantime, I would get some space to process, and maybe my anger would burn through its fuel a bit. Smart. Logical. I went back to my to-do list. I think I started packing a suitcase with merch. And then this really small thing happened.
My partner had given me a solar-powered rainbow maker as a gift. It hung from the living room window, and when the sun was shining at the right angle, its colorful gears would turn, which would then turn attached prisms that would cast little rainbows all around the room. It was a gift I had specifically asked for, and I loved it. I loved rainbows! As I was packing for the tour, the sun was streaming through the window, and the rainbows were dancing. All of a sudden, I heard this small sound, like a snap, and looked up to see the rainbows had stopped moving. I went to investigate what had happened, and there it was, broken; one of its gears, the little pink one, had just snapped. I immediately felt some foreboding. It meant something, but I didn’t know what exactly.
The next morning, I kissed my husband and left for the tour, haunted by his mother’s email and the broken pink gear. I was touring with two other poets, one I knew very well and loved and one I hardly knew at all but instantly liked. We called ourselves The Whirlwind Company. We started down in San Diego and performed poetry each night in a new city. Each day we drove for hours, talking and singing in the car with the windows rolled down. It was fall, and as we headed north, the weather began to turn, the leaves aflame with reds and oranges and golds. It was mostly a perfect escape. But in quiet moments my troubles lingered; wherever you go, there you are. I would ruminate on my situation, my potentially-marrying-the-wrong-person situation, and feel sick to my stomach. But for the first time, the shy, shadowy voice began to dominate. For the first time perhaps, I allowed myself to imagine leaving, not just for a tour but leaving the relationship. It was such a painful thought, I could only stay with it a minute at a time. But each day, I could stay with it a little longer.
There was also something new and wild and alive in me, something awake that felt unaffected by my troubles. Maybe it was just the medicine of distance or the effect of breaking away from familiar routines. I had an energy I hadn’t felt in a long time. When we crossed the border from California into Oregon, it was like I was leaving a state of being behind. I felt looser, freer. This awakeness was now even more awake. That’s when I saw it—one of the largest rainbows I had ever seen in my life, love-beaming across the entire highway like the smile of some ecstatic god. It was fat and bright and achingly beautiful. We all agreed it was a sign, a blessing that our time in Oregon would be great, and we cheered as we drove under it.
A few miles down the highway, another rainbow, this one wider and brighter, appeared. I squealed and let out a cry. A few more miles and yet another rainbow appeared, this time a double, like a chord and its harmonic, like a power ballad of color. My heart was bursting, and I could no longer drive. I pulled off the road so one of my tour mates could take the wheel, and I could melt down safely on the passenger side. We saw close to forty rainbows that day, driving the Interstate 5 corridor through the center of Oregon. I was so drunk on rainbows and beauty I could no longer speak. I thought of that little rainbow maker and its snapped gear. The metaphor was clear: my current relationship had a broken gear. Even if I could fix it, there was something relatively small and manufactured about its joys, I could see that now. If I was willing to be brave and leave the life I knew behind, following the call of this other voice, this wild knowing, something bigger, something more beautiful, something much more real awaited me.
Nothing happened immediately. I had to finish my tour despite my deepening realization that I needed to change course. Also, my newfound intuitive clarity didn’t make the changes ahead less excruciating. Imagining hurting this person I loved, imagining letting everyone down was terrifying. And even after I returned home from tour, I still couldn’t act. I had all these other instincts to contend with—instincts to stay safe, to stay loyal, to avoid pain, to be sweet and nice and prioritize the needs and feelings of others. Every time I felt the courage to speak, it felt like the gas and the brake were being hit at the same time. My throat would close up. I would start to leave my body a little. Then I would back off, breathe, and wait another day.
I finally went to see someone I trusted—an acupuncturist who always seemed to know very detailed, very personal things about me just by feeling my pulse. Her sense of what was going on with me was always uncannily accurate. It felt like a final intervention to all my inaction. I believed that if I was actually going crazy and doing something self-destructive, she would know; she would check my vitals and frown and give it to me straight. Instead, when she felt my pulse that day, she reported that for the first time ever, everything seemed completely in balance. I went home that day and had the first of several devastating conversations that would completely undo my life.
I was unprepared for how difficult it would be intentionally hurting someone I loved and how scary it would be to go out into the world alone, without a partner, without a home, having alienated my friends and family. In spite of my strong sense that I was doing the right thing, I still felt a lot of shame. All my social and cultural conditioning was still a part of me. That epic host of rainbows had liberated me from playing it safe and small, but they couldn’t completely scrub my psyche of its old survival strategies of submissive appeasement. I felt heavy with selfishness. I was carrying the disappointment and disapproval of others, some of it real, some of it imagined. I was also grieving but felt undeserving of sympathy or compassion. I pushed through because I had to. My intuition told me I must, even though there would be very little evidence, for years, that everything was going to be okay.
I can say now, unequivocally, that following that shadowy, intuitive voice over a decade ago radically changed my life for the better. Since then, I have properly and wholeheartedly committed to an incredible life partner and devoted myself to study and work in the fields of somatics and depth psychology, helping other people find and fix their own broken gears. I was not aware of the extent to which I was not being true to myself until I started listening to that voice and following it, and even then, it was a slow unveiling.
In the West, we have a way of talking about this kind of profound split from the self in terms of the conscious and the unconscious. We use light as a metaphor for awareness and the conscious mind, tying it to our embodied experience of vision. An idea can be illuminating or brilliant. When we understand something, we say, “I see.” Similarly, we use darkness as a metaphor for the unconscious. When we refer to work with the unconscious, we might call it shadow work. This darkness is only in reference to our lack of awareness, not its ultimate value. We can repress awareness of our dark side, sure: the parts of us that we judge as ugly or deviant, that aren’t the real us, our meanness and jealousy and arrogance. But we can also repress awareness of our best inner resources, our power and talent and confidence. If you live in a family or culture where you aren’t allowed to shine, you might repress all that shininess to survive.
Unconscious complexes and defenses are extremely powerful forces and upset our notions of agency. Depth psychologist Donald Kalsched calls our unconscious defenses our “self-care system,” in wise acknowledgment that their ultimate purpose is self-protection, and we should speak about them respectfully, as defending ourselves against our defenses won’t get us anywhere. Once these defenses form in response to frightening or painful experiences, they are capable of driving our behavior beneath the level of our conscious awareness in both creative and destructive ways. They can cut off from conscious awareness any memories or feelings or inner conflicts that are too overwhelming or threatening. They can also drive us back toward wholeness. What I experienced in my early thirties was an eruption from my unconscious, the surfacing of a part of me that my defenses were keeping at bay because it threatened the safety of the status quo.
In the months before my doomed wedding ceremony, I had published a collection of poems called Rise of the Trust Fall. Yeah... Poems bore eerily familiar titles like “In Our Bedroom, Before the War,” “Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know What to Do,” and “To the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” the latter of which was about a woman who escapes the man who wants to marry her and ends up stuck in a snowdrift(!). My intuitive knowing that my relationship was ending was still hidden from me, buried in the unconscious. While I wrote these poems, I was not aware that they reflected my own reality. I thought they were just creations. That’s how it works: if something is unconscious, it doesn’t matter if you’re staring right at it, you won’t see it. Or you might see it for a fleeting moment, and then—blink—it’s gone. You’ve forgotten it.
My reckoning with my own experience of the unconscious–conscious divide led me to want to learn more about human psychology, though that desire, too, arrived like an irrational impulse. I was a poet by profession, and if I wanted to do some graduate study, the logical choice would have been to pursue an MFA in creative writing. But every time I considered that seriously, my whole being would resist. Luckily, I had found a question that served as a kind of key for accessing my intuition, that part of me untouched by social conditioning: What would I do if I didn’t have to explain it to anybody?
This question led me to the next intuitive move: pursuing a doctorate in depth psychology with a specialization in somatics. I wanted to know more about the mysteries of neurobiology and the mind–body spectrum. My intuition guided me throughout my studies. While its impulses almost always initially seemed irrational and in direct contradiction to what I thought I knew, they always led me in the direction of greater creativity, growth, understanding, and wholeness. I learned to trust them, or rather, I learned how to negotiate with the parts of me that did not trust them.
Here’s how I’ve come to understand it. There is a radical physical intelligence in me, a bodily wisdom. When I am connected to myself in this way, I can clearly sense what’s not right for me, what doesn’t feel safe or good, and where I feel a boundary or a no. I can also feel what is right for me, what’s a yes, what might be beneficial to my well-being and my growth. It is limited to the present moment—I cannot accurately sense something far in the future—and it’s limited to addressing questions that can be answered with yes/no/wait. What I call my intuition is entangled with my physical intelligence. It can signal me through sensations felt in my body: a physical urge to contract or pull away, a physical urge to go toward, a little squeeze of affirmation in my inner ear, a shiver up my spine. It can also signal me through my imagination or my dreams, sending me images or ideas that directly transmit their meaning.
When the pink gear snapped, that was what depth psychologists call a synchronicity—a moment when an inner event and an outer event meet—and it amplified the emerging voice of my intuition so it could finally break through my defenses and be fully felt and heard. It’s not that all pink gears mean something. Rather, I was a poet. Metaphor was a strong channel of perception for me in a way that, at the time, body sensations were not. So the pink gear of a rainbow maker snapping followed by an encounter with a host of real rainbows had the effect of getting through to me; it was a sign of what I already, deep down, knew to be true for me.
The more I learned about the psyche and the body and its complex personal and collective layers, the more I came to respect my struggle to distinguish intuitive knowing from conditioning or fear. My ability to connect with myself in this way had been compromised by a great deal of trauma and abuse in my early life—sexual abuse, poverty, and struggling caregivers, just to name a few. Defending myself in any of these cases by fighting or fleeing was not possible. The strategies my unconscious self-care system employed to survive were what was available to me as a child: sweetness and easiness, submission to and appeasement of those in power, and dissociation into my imagination. While they allowed me to survive, they shaped me fundamentally. I came into adulthood with almost no sense of what my own needs were, how to sense a boundary, or how to defend a boundary when it was challenged rather than overriding it to avoid conflict with others. The part of me that wanted to stay in that relationship, to stay safe, that couldn’t ever imagine leaving or hurting someone else, even if my needs weren’t being met, that was all that old survival physiology.
It took me years of therapy and somatic learning to heal enough and develop enough to feel like I could reliably discern my intuition from the fear of past trauma and conditioning—especially because my intuition is regularly urging me in the direction of uncomfortable or frightening growth edges. But neuroplasticity is real; healing and changing even very deep patterns is possible. I was so moved by what I learned in my own healing process, by everything I discovered about the body and intuition, I began training as a somatic trauma therapist in addition to completing my doctoral studies. My dissertation research focused on the impact of trauma on the voice and expression—our ability to know what’s true for ourselves and be honest. I now get to accompany people through their own journey of healing and reconnection with their own intuition and power and voice.
What continues to fascinate me is how intuition connects us to something larger than us and can guide us beyond the limits of our current conscious knowing. While I was following one intuitive impulse at a time, having no idea where it would lead, I experienced the seeming magic, over and over, of intuitive timing. The Greeks called it kairos time, meaning the opportune moment. It’s very different from linear chronos time that gives us clocks and calendars and five-year plans. Kairos is a nonlinear, spiraling, tidal kind of time. Chronos helps us follow through on a conscious agenda; kairos helps us move beyond that agenda. For example, I had no idea when I set out to study depth psychology and somatics that I would end up studying trauma and the voice, but I happened to be in the middle of my dissertation research on this subject when Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement surged. Where just weeks before there had been little public discourse about post-traumatic silence and what it takes to overcome it, now it was everywhere. It was as if I had timed it intentionally, but I could not have.
Our personal and collective trauma is so great, its roots so deep. We have a lot of healing and evolving to do as a species if we have any hope of surviving ourselves. The time of consequences and unraveling is already here. The gear has snapped. We won’t get where we need to go with what we already know, by approaching knowing itself in the same ways. I am speaking of us Westerners, living in a culture that values the objective, rational mind (the rational white male European mind) above the feeling, sensing body. As we open up to intuition, as we develop and refine our sensitivity and attunement to our own bodies and the bodies of others, we tap the intelligence of the natural world, and something bigger and wilder than just ourselves: we tap the wisdom of the whole. It might feel like we are following rainbows, and we are.