Becoming More Fully Alive
What does it mean to become more fully alive?
We share a universal wish to live a worthwhile life. In our pursuit of meaning, we must grapple with the reality that suffering is an inevitable aspect of our human condition, and an experience to be confronted, rather than avoided. While cultivating the capacity to bear suffering is an enormous task, emotional pain holds the potential to place one in contact with the fundamental “being-ness” of our humanity, which is the very essence from which all generativity emerges. It is our treasure trove of aliveness. To be exquisitely attuned to one’s inner emotional life, to access fully and expansively the depths of one’s being, and to experience the limitless possibilities for creativity, play, and love is to be fully alive.
Many patients enter psychotherapy with a sense of emotional deadness, or a hope to feel more alive. In the aftermath of unimaginable loss, one might function exceptionally well outwardly, maintaining professional rigor and socializing with peers, though feel an inner emptiness where grief exists but remains vehemently defended against and inaccessible. The primitive agony of loss is transformed into an unlived state. Haunted by trauma, another person might feel a hollowness that renders life strangely unreal, drifting through days like a ghost, present in corporeal form, yet unable to inhabit their own felt existence. Still another might navigate daily experience in a mechanical or performative manner, where existence is merely a sequence of actions fraught with boredom and fatigue. This absence of aliveness is the present deadness. While living a life of vitality can feel distant or even unreachable, the very experience of diminished or deadened vitality suggests an already active potential awaiting discovery.
Analytic Wisdom
Relational psychoanalytic perspectives invite us into a realm of richness, where psychic aliveness can be contemplated. To be fully alive is not merely the elimination of symptoms or resolution of intrapsychic conflict; it is a lived, embodied experience of authenticity, spontaneity, and vital engagement that continuously unfolds in relationship. It involves inhabiting one’s affects, desires, and creative capacities as genuinely one’s own. It signifies feeling real and being present, being capable of “going on being” amid the full spectrum of human feeling - joy, rage, grief, despair, uncertainty. Psychic deadness, in contrast, is the inner foreclosure of vitality - an affectively flattened state. It is the mind’s protective organization against trauma and loss, but at the tragic cost of vitality.
Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s foundational distinction between the True Self and False Self forms the bedrock for understanding psychic aliveness and the developmental processes that disrupt it. The True Self arises from the infant’s spontaneous gestures - the raw, unformulated bodily impulses reaching toward the mother. Ideally, this creative reaching-out is received and mirrored by a “good-enough mother,” who provides a facilitating environment without impingement, allowing the infant to experience a continuous sense of “going on being.” When these gestures are repeatedly ignored, fraught with misattunement, or overridden by environmental demands, the infant develops a False Self as a defensive organization of compliance. Over time, the person accommodates for empathic failures by existing behind a compliant façade that functions socially but corrodes the inner landscape. In relational therapy, the therapist does not “cure” the patient; rather, they offer a new relational experience in which the True Self can risk emergence. The hallmark of aliveness is the subjective feeling of realness that only arises in a therapy relationship that can survive the patient’s unbidden expressions and the therapist’s real, and sometimes imperfect, but repairable responses.
Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen’s concept of Psychic Deadness offers a compelling portrait of the lived experience of inner numbness that coexists with a seemingly fruitful life. Deadness is not absence of emotion but a peculiar dissociation in which affects are present yet fail to touch the self. The person feels hindered by an invisible weight amid plenty. Therapy does not involve rescuing the patient from deadness. Instead, it involves discovering ways to inhabit it together, session by session, without premature interpretation or reassurance. Resistance to nothingness, or the empty, formless ground of experience, breeds deadness, while the capacity to bear and even welcome it opens space for psychic possibility. In relational practice, the therapist must be willing to lend their own aliveness by being emotionally alive when the patient cannot and importantly, until the patient can begin to grow into life. Deadness is not an enemy to be eradicated but a companion to be understood and endured until the therapy relationship itself becomes the medium through which vitality is reborn.
Psychoanalyst Sheldon Bach casts light on the subjective experience of psychic aliveness and the sense of being real, emphasizing how these feelings can be eroded by early relational traumas. Our sense of aliveness is sustained by the ongoing experience of being remembered and held in another’s mind. When one’s trust in being held is traumatically disrupted, the self retreats into states of not feeling real. The restoration of aliveness, therefore, occurs through the patient’s gradual discovery that the therapist can bear and reflect the full range of the patient’s being, deadness included, until they can begin to feel, “I exist, therefore I am alive,” in the presence of another who sees and remembers them.
Aliveness in Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
The whole analytic process is about becoming more fully alive. Relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy presupposes that the therapy relationship itself - its risks, disconnections, and moments of authentic meeting - is the primary portal through which psychic deadness yields to the embodied feeling of aliveness. Becoming fully alive, in this context, is the gradual reclamation of unlived experience. It is the vitalization of disowned parts of the self in a present-day relationship that facilitates the courage to feel, to enter into enactments - entrenched patterns of relating that are unconsciously played out in the therapy relationship - and to not only become conscious of patterns by talking about ideas, but to transform oneself through the embodied, visceral experience in the current moment of the therapy relationship. One must live in the here and now what was not lived in the there and then. The ultimate achievement is a therapy relationship that feels vital, real, and forward-moving, where both participants can tolerate and dare to embrace the full pulse of being fully alive together. In this space, to be fully alive is to risk the vulnerability of true relationality, knowing that our aliveness depends upon being held in another’s mind while simultaneously holding our own.
How do you experience aliveness?
How do you experience aliveness? In the evocative movements of fingers across ivory keys, feeling the resonance of a piano composition’s aching chords… surrendering to a descent into the depths of grief, where love is found in the piercing pain of loss. In the golden glow of morning light, sharing in mutual wonder with a giggling child… blowing iridescent bubbles that float through skies, every glistening sphere carrying the sensory symphony of delight. In the invigorating sensation of bare hands sinking into cool soil, nurturing tender shoots from hidden seeds… each delicate yet sturdy green unfurling a quiet declaration of life’s persistence. In the softening of defenses, inviting emergence of unknown parts of self coalescing into known wholeness… coming home to the warmth and ease of being. To be fully alive is to feel ever-evolving depth, fullness, and expansiveness in one’s true being.
There Is a Life Force Within Your Soul
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life.
There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine.
O traveler, if you are in search of That
Don't look outside, look inside yourself and seek That.
Rumi
