What I Learned from a Fairy Tale About Personal Transformation

In the absence of rituals and initiation rites, many of us feel called towards danger, fear, and suffering

Illustration of the giant and the youth by Albert Weisgerber, 1910

In my first years of college, I would often sit at my linoleum desk in my dorm room and stare into the distance. I was locked in a riddle: trying to make sense of this cultural obsession with academia and the expected journey for privileged young people like myself. In class after class, I was learning nothing of practical value and very little about who I was as a person. I liked what I was studying, but couldn’t envision a future beyond graduation.

At the time, my country was on an unstoppable march towards multiple wars in the Middle East, the justification for which I knew to be bullshit. I felt no meaning in what I was doing, and juxtaposed against the obsession with power and militarism outside, everything began to feel increasingly meaningless. I was already approaching burnout, already wrestling with existential questions that wouldn’t abate for years.

After months of this dissociated confusion, I took a leave of absence from school. I began to travel to—as far as the official declarations were concerned—some of the more dangerous parts of the world. These were countries where civil wars were just on a ceasefire, or decades of violence from drug cartels made it unwise to travel alone. But I felt an instinctive pull to go “into the darkness,” an inexplicable desire I could only explain by saying that I needed to get out of my head and do something other than study and prepare for an eventual future that I couldn’t imagine.

I had very little money and lived as cheaply as possible. And within those unfamiliar places, I entered even more unfamiliar territory. I found volunteer work in prisons and disaster zones, pushing myself harder emotionally than I ever had, and in a way that I’d never seek out today.

Indeed, after my third trip, I was quenched of my thirst to understand danger and injustice in my body. By that point, the work I had done and the places I had visited had entered my bones and changed me. I experienced some of the most beautiful connections to other human beings that I’d ever felt, and I stepped out of academia into the shadow of embodied living. I thrived and felt joy in a way I never had before. And then, I felt some of the greatest terror I’ve ever known as well.

I got what I’d been looking for. Finally, my dissorientation was not just conceptual. I’d encountered the struggle, no, the genuine fear that I’d inexplicably sought and headed home to heal.

“The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn Fear”

Years later, while I was still trying to shake what I’d imbibed out of my body, I found a Grimms’ fairy tale that read me my life: The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn Fear.

Here was a young man, the title explained, who had left a comfortable home in search, irrationally, of fear. I sat on the floor where I’d stood when I opened the book and felt a portal open up through its pages. It told me the story of my quest, my wounds, and ultimately, how to get better.

At the start of this fairy tale, we meet a young man whose father wants him to do something practical to “earn his bread,” but the only thing the youth wants to do is “learn how to shudder.”

This shuddering that compels him is a physical gesture. He observes it in his friends when they hear a ghost story, and in his older brother when he walks through the churchyard at night.

“I should like to learn how to shudder,” the youth tells his father. “I don't understand that at all yet.”

Sitting on that worn library carpet, I understood him instinctively. But it wasn’t until I later, as I studied the history of rites of passage, that I could really grasp what the Grimms’ boy and I had both been seeking.

Everyone around us had been nudging us towards Stability and participation in the economy, but something else, unnameable, demanded our attention. We were seeking embodiment, a sense of aliveness, a reason for being on earth. We were, unwittingly, in search of a symbolic death and rebirth. No one had even told us that we would long for this, let alone how to make it happen.

Adulthood isn’t meant to follow childhood like one fluid, uninterrupted climb. As global mythology teaches us, there was always supposed to be some kind of quest, or ritual: some event to host the transformation of the self. We were supposed to be introduced to the gods and to ourselves. These were rituals designed for psychological transformation; a young person was meant to die to their childhoods, tap into greater resources within themselves, and be reborn as an adult. We were meant to be shaken out of a life of relative dependency on others to one of psychological maturity and self-reliance. These rites involve trials and tests, encounters with terror, and a discovery of previously unknown resources within.

Without these rites, many people are left floundering, left to sort out the personal transformation on their own or live in private, perpetual doubt: Am I really an adult? Have I truly grown up?

Is this all that life is for?

When our communities and cultures fail to introduce us to the deeper layers of ourselves and our sense of purpose on this earth, those same initiatory rites of death and rebirth arrive on their own, and typically quite painfully.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell put it this way, many decades ago:

There is something in these initiatory images so necessary to the psyche that if they are not supplied from without, through myth and ritual, they will have to be announced again . . . from within.

Indeed, when culture no longer hosts rites of passage, the initiation necessary for psychological growth seems to happen through individual or collective crises instead.

And boy, are we in the throes of that now.

Of course, the call doesn’t show up for all of us at the same time, and for some, it arrives as a genuine life and death struggle that transcends symbolism. But it does show up. Sometimes it arrives as a longing for something that can’t quite be named, or an inexplicable hunger for a battle or war; sometimes it comes in the form of an addiction that must be survived, or as burnout after the commitment to a linear life drops one to their knees.

One way or another, the initial event is just the beginning. First, we’re forced to our knees, then into cocoons to prepare, slowly, for rebirth as different creatures than we were before. We long to become the best versions of ourselves and to feel that our lives on this earth have meaning.

In Carl Jung’s famous BBC interview from 1959, he spoke with urgency about the antidote to a gnawing feeling of emptiness that so many modern people feel: “When I think of my patients,” he said, “they all seek their own existence.”

We are repeatedly sold the idea that to live in the “real world” is to emphasize financial and emotional stability. To be a true adult is to participate in the expectations of one’s career and familial responsibilities. To seek meaning, on the other hand, is something rather sappy or new-agey, something for rich people to ponder while everyone else struggles to survive. Meaning, we are told, is an indulgence, a privileged pursuit. But that cynical view doesn’t hold up to history, nor the reality it purports to represent.

Cultures and religions worldwide have long sought to make sense of our existence on Earth and how to support individuals in maintaining a relationship with the gods, the sun, and the stars. Meaning was embedded into daily rituals—and still is for many people everywhere. It wasn’t supposed to be an afterthought or a reward. It’s the dominant culture today that has stripped us of this longing and asserted the absurdity that stability is king. No, stability is meant to serve. Stability should be the container for a sense of connection, joy, thriving, intimacy, love, abundance, and God. Stability cannot be the beginning and end on the road of life.

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life,” Jung declared.

Ultimately, when I was in my early 20s, the symbolic death that I’d unwittingly sought was achieved. However, without a cultural understanding of this process, I was left in purgatory trying to put myself back together again. I needed to find a way out of the trauma and into a new life, an embodied life that brought me joy, fulfillment, and a greater sense of purpose.

The youth in the Grimm’s fairy tale ultimately found what he was looking for too, but not in the way he expected. After three encounters with ghosts, corpses, and haunted castles, none of which scared him at all, he received remarkable gifts, including wealth and the king’s daughter as his wife. Yet, having never felt fear in any of those trying encounters, he hadn’t learned to shudder. It wasn’t until his new wife took an entirely different approach that things shifted: tired of hearing him complain about his unfulfilled desire, she stripped off his clothes while he slept and poured cold water over his naked body. A baptism! The man awoke laughing and thrilled. “I know what it is to shudder!” he shouted. “I know what it is to shudder!”

In the end, it wasn’t danger that either he or I sought. We both needed the journey of fear to get us there, but that was just a step along the way. Ultimately, it was all about a deeper connection to our bodies and instincts. We needed struggle, yes, but what we really needed was rebirth: the experience of being alive in adulthood, and an understanding of why.

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.

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August:

• Men’s Group | Sunday, August 24th, 10-11:30am PDT / 1-2:30pm EDT | Discussion of Archetype #1– Father Sky: The Cosmos Lives! in The Hidden Spirituality of Men

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