Reflections on selfhood, suffering, care, ageing, illness, and ecological belonging
For those who want to read beyond the immediate therapeutic frame
Most people come to therapy because something in life hurts, feels stuck, or has become difficult to carry alone. The starting point is usually immediate and personal: anxiety, trauma, grief, relationship difficulties, overwhelm, shutdown, loss, illness, or a sense that old ways of coping no longer work.
This page is not essential reading before beginning therapy. It is offered for those who want to understand something of the wider ethical, philosophical, and human frame that informs my work.
What follows is a longer reflection on selfhood, suffering, care, trauma, neurodivergent experience, illness, ageing, dependency, dignity, and our belonging within a wider ecology. It is not a theory I apply to clients, and not a belief system I ask anyone to share. It is a reflective exploration of the human life arc, and of what remains worthy and dignified when the usual markers of identity begin to soften.
On this page
Where to start?
The values behind these reflections
Human life within a wider ecology
Why this reflection has two parts
A note to the reader
Part 1: From selfhood to dissolution
Part 2: The self must be held before it can soften
Final considerations
Returning to the therapeutic frame
Where to start?
Perhaps the place to start is with David Brooks’ The Second Mountain. I read the book with interest, and its central metaphor opened something much wider in me.
Brooks describes a movement from the first mountain of achievement, identity, autonomy, and personal success, toward the second mountain of commitment, vocation, love, community, service, and deeper meaning. His book offers a powerful way of thinking about the shift from a life organised around the self to a life shaped by what the self becomes committed to.
From there, my own reflections began to move beyond the book: toward ageing, witnessing loss and death, suffering, and the ultimate inevitability of dissolution from our material form of existence.
I found myself wondering what lies beyond the second mountain. And then beyond that. And beyond even that. If the first mountain is about becoming someone, and the second mountain is about giving oneself to what matters, what happens when even vocation, meaning, service, identity, and agency begin to soften? What happens as we age, as the body changes, as cognition becomes less reliable, as memory loosens, and as we become increasingly dependent on others?
These reflections became an attempt to follow the life arc as far as my mind could take it within our material form of existence: from emergence, to selfhood, to ambition, to crisis, to commitment, to surrender, to sensory immediacy, to dependency, and eventually to dissolution into the wider whole from which we came.
This is not intended as a final statement about life, death, or existence. I am sure there is more. There may be a further spiritual dimension to explore, perhaps in a separate reflection. Here, I am staying primarily with the human, embodied, relational, ecological, and material arc of life as we experience it.
The question underneath these reflections is not only what life means, but what allows a human being to remain dignified through every stage of becoming, breaking, depending, ageing, and dissolving.
The values behind these reflections
These reflections are not written from a wish to reduce human life to a theory, a developmental model, or a spiritual conclusion. They are written from a concern with what remains most deeply human when the usual markers of identity begin to soften: achievement, competence, autonomy, usefulness, cognition, memory, and control.
At the heart of this page is a simple ethical conviction:
A human being does not have to justify their existence.
We matter before we achieve.
We belong before we perform.
We remain worthy when we are no longer useful, articulate, independent, regulated, or able to give back in recognisable ways.
This matters because so much of ordinary life teaches the opposite. We are often valued for what we can do, produce, understand, manage, offer, or become. But ageing, illness, trauma, mental health difficulties, neurodivergent masking or misattunement, dependency, and death all reveal the limits of that view.
This page therefore values the self, but does not treat the self as ultimate. It values agency, while recognising that we are never fully self-sufficient. It values commitment and service, but not when they become self-abandonment. It values surrender, but not when surrender is actually collapse. It values community, while recognising that community can wound as well as heal. It values care not as a secondary or merely practical matter, but as one of the deepest expressions of human dignity.
The reflection also tries to remain truthful about suffering. It does not present loss, ageing, dependency, trauma, or dissolution as easy, beautiful, or automatically transformative. There is real fear, grief, indignity, pain, and sometimes despair. But there can also be a severe and tender truth within this: that our worth was never dependent on the things we eventually lose.
The self matters profoundly. It suffers, loves, chooses, protects, remembers, grieves, adapts, and longs. For many people, especially those shaped by trauma, chronic shame, dissociation, mental health difficulties, neurodivergent masking, or repeated misattunement, the formation of a safe and recognised self is sacred work.
And yet the self is not the whole truth.
We are relational before we are independent. We are held before we can hold ourselves. We are shaped by others before we can name ourselves. And perhaps, at the end, we return to a wholeness from which we were never truly separate.
Human life within a wider ecology
These reflections are centred on human life, but human life does not exist in isolation.
We are not only individual selves, or relational beings within families, communities, and cultures. We are also living organisms within a wider ecology. Our bodies belong to the earth. We breathe air we did not create. We depend on water, soil, plants, animals, climate, microbial life, and the fragile balance of systems that sustain us.
Care, therefore, cannot stop with us.
If the self is not separate from other people, it is also not separate from the living world. Human beings are not the only passengers on this planet. Other forms of life have their own presence, needs, vulnerability, and claim to existence. The planet itself is not merely the background to human meaning. It is the living context that makes human meaning possible.
Human life matters profoundly.
But human life is not the whole of life.
The care that protects a vulnerable person, honours an ageing body, and recognises different ways of being begins in human relationship. From there, it can widen into a broader moral imagination: one that also considers how we relate to animals, land, water, air, climate, and the more-than-human world.
These reflections are therefore not an argument against the self. They are an attempt to honour the self fully enough that it can eventually be softened, held, offered, and released without shame.
Why this reflection has two parts
These reflections are presented in two parts, and both are needed.
Part 1 follows the philosophical and existential movement from selfhood toward dissolution. It explores the first mountain, the valley, the second mountain, surrender, presence, ageing, dependency, and the eventual loosening of the separate self.
Part 2 adds an essential clinical and human caution. The movement beyond the self cannot be romanticised. For people shaped by trauma, chronic shame, dissociation, mental health difficulties, neurodivergent masking, or repeated relational misattunement, the task may not initially be to move beyond the self. It may first be to form, protect, recognise, and inhabit a self safely enough.
Read together, the two parts offer a fuller picture.
The self may not be ultimate. It may not be separate, sovereign, permanent, or final. But the self still matters. It needs to be recognised before it can soften. It needs to be held before it can surrender. It needs boundaries before it can give itself freely. It needs dignity before it can dissolve without being annihilated.
The first part asks:
What happens when the self follows the whole arc of life, from becoming to dissolution?
The second part asks:
What must be honoured, protected, and healed before such a dissolution can be safe, humane, and true?
Together, they hold the paradox at the centre of these reflections:
The self is not the whole truth.
But the self must be deeply honoured before it can be released.
A note to the reader
Different readers may meet these reflections from very different places.
For some, particularly those who have not experienced significant mental health difficulties, trauma, neurodivergent masking, or prolonged psychological suffering, Part 1 may be received mainly as philosophical or existential. The movement from self-building, to commitment, to surrender, to ageing, dependency, and dissolution may give language to something already recognised through insight, grief, love, ageing, or life experience.
For other readers, especially those who have experienced trauma, dissociation, chronic shame, autistic or ADHD burnout, neurodivergent masking, mental health difficulties, or repeated relational misattunement, the same words may land very differently. Ideas such as surrender, dissolution, dependency, selflessness, community, service, or the loosening of the self may not feel immediately liberating. They may touch places of fear, collapse, invisibility, coercion, exhaustion, or self-abandonment.
For that reason, Part 2 is not an appendix or an afterthought. It is necessary.
I invite any reader to pause with their own responses as they read. If something evokes disagreement, discomfort, recognition, resistance, grief, relief, or irritation, it may be worth holding that response gently rather than moving too quickly to reject or accept what is written.
The intention is not to impose one view of human development. It is to honour several truths at once.
The self is not ultimate.
And yet the self matters.
Surrender can be freeing.
And yet surrender can also resemble collapse if it comes too early.
Community can heal.
And yet community can also wound.
Dissolution can point toward wholeness.
And yet for some people, dissolution may feel like annihilation.
Human beings matter deeply.
And yet human life must be held within the wider life of the planet.
Both parts are therefore meant to be read together. They correct, deepen, and protect each other.
Part 1: From selfhood to dissolution
The first mountain: becoming someone
The first mountain is the mountain of becoming someone.
It is the mountain we are encouraged to climb from early life. We are asked to develop ourselves, form an identity, become competent, earn money, find status, make choices, build relationships, acquire skills, and create a life that can be recognised as successful. The questions of the first mountain are familiar:
What do I want?
Who am I?
What am I good at?
How do I become independent?
How do I make a life?
How do I become impressive, secure, desirable, competent, or happy?
This mountain is not false. It is not simply shallow. Human beings need a self. We need agency, confidence, discipline, boundaries, identity, and enough autonomy to stand in the world. Without some first-mountain development, we may not be able to choose freely, love without fusion, work without collapse, or serve without disappearing.
But the first mountain becomes a problem when it is mistaken for the whole of life.
A person may become successful but lonely. Competent but unheld. Independent but defended. Admired but unknown. Productive but exhausted. Insightful but unchanged. Free but without direction. The self may be beautifully constructed, but still unable to answer the deeper question: what is this life actually for?
Modern culture often reinforces this first-mountain illusion. It tells us to build ourselves, optimise ourselves, brand ourselves, express ourselves, improve ourselves, and make ourselves happy. We become both the architect and the product. The self becomes a project, and the project never ends.
Even personal growth can become part of the first mountain. Healing, therapy, spirituality, self-care, emotional regulation, authenticity, and insight can all remain subtly self-referential if they are organised around the same central assumption: that the purpose of life is to produce a better, happier, more fulfilled version of me.
The first mountain therefore carries a hidden burden. The self must generate meaning from within itself. It must choose its values, justify its direction, manage its image, regulate its feelings, and prove its worth. It must keep becoming.
The valley: when the old organising principle collapses
But often there comes a point when the self we have built can no longer carry the weight of meaning.
This is the valley.
The valley may come through visible suffering: bereavement, illness, divorce, professional failure, depression, burnout, betrayal, trauma, ageing, or loss. But it may also arrive quietly, as a hollowing-out from within. The life may still function outwardly, while inwardly something has gone silent. The old answers no longer persuade. Achievement no longer nourishes. Independence no longer feels like freedom. Recognition no longer feels like love.
The valley is not merely a difficult period. It is the collapse of an organising principle. The person begins to see that success cannot protect them from grief, that control cannot produce intimacy, that competence cannot remove dependency, that status cannot create belonging, and that freedom without commitment can become a form of exile.
In the valley, the first-mountain self is humbled. The self that thought it could plan, manage, achieve, and optimise its way into meaning encounters limitation. It discovers that life is not finally under its control. It discovers need. It discovers vulnerability. It discovers that it cannot author reality from scratch.
This can be terrifying. It can feel like failure. But it can also become an opening. The valley may soften the defensive self. It may expose the false centres around which life has been organised. It may make the person more receptive to love, grace, dependence, community, truth, and responsibility.
The valley asks a different kind of question:
What has broken?
What was false?
What am I being asked to see?
What can no longer be lived?
What kind of person do I now need to become?
What is my life asking of me?
The second mountain: commitment, love and service
This is where the second mountain begins.
The second mountain is the mountain of commitment. It is not simply a new form of achievement. It is a different centre of gravity. The first mountain asks, “What can I achieve?” The second asks, “What am I called to serve?”
On the first mountain, life is organised around the self: my success, my happiness, my story, my identity, my preferences, my freedom. On the second mountain, life is organised around what claims the self: vocation, love, marriage or intimate commitment, faith, community, responsibility, and service.
This is the great shift in Brooks’ work: meaning is not found by keeping every option open. Meaning is found by giving oneself to commitments worthy enough to shape a life.
A vocation is not merely a job. It is work that calls forth one’s gifts in response to a real need. It may not always feel pleasurable or rewarding. It may involve difficulty, repetition, frustration, failure, and sacrifice. But it carries a sense of necessity: this is mine to do. This is where my life meets the world’s need.
Love, too, becomes more than fulfilment. It becomes formation. Mature love is not only the search for someone who meets my needs. It is the discipline of becoming someone who can love truthfully, faithfully, and generously. It includes patience, repair, forgiveness, endurance, and the willingness to be changed by another person.
Faith, or a wider spiritual orientation, places the self within something larger than itself. For some, this is God. For others, it may be truth, beauty, justice, conscience, love, or the sacredness of life. In any form, it challenges the illusion that the ego is the final authority.
Community also becomes central. A human being is not an isolated chooser who later adds relationships. We are relational from the beginning. We are formed by being known, needed, loved, challenged, forgiven, remembered, and held in the minds and bodies of others. Community gives thickness to life. It offers rituals, shared memory, obligation, belonging, and continuity.
The second mountain is therefore a movement from autonomy to belonging, from success to service, from choice to fidelity, from self-expression to devotion, from happiness to joy.
Brooks makes an important distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness often depends on getting what we want: comfort, success, pleasure, satisfaction, recognition. Joy is deeper. Joy arises when the self is exceeded: in love, service, beauty, gratitude, faith, connection, or participation in something larger. Happiness says, “I got what I wanted.” Joy says, “I forgot myself in something meaningful.”
Yet the second mountain has its own shadow.
The ego can colonise even commitment. A person can become proud of being devoted, special through service, superior through humility, or heroic through sacrifice. Vocation can become burnout. Community can become conformity. Faith can become dogmatism. Love can become self-erasure. Service can become a way of avoiding one’s own pain.
Beyond the second mountain: surrender and presence
So the journey does not end with the second mountain.
Beyond the second mountain is the recognition that even meaning, vocation, service, and commitment can become identities. The person may begin to let go not only of success, but also of the need to be meaningful, useful, wise, healing, spiritual, generous, or good.
The question changes again.
First mountain: What can I achieve?
Second mountain: What am I called to serve?
Beyond the second mountain: Can I surrender control over the outcome?
This is a profound shift. Commitment still matters, but the person begins to see that they cannot control what their commitment produces. A therapist cannot guarantee healing. A parent cannot guarantee a child’s future. A partner cannot guarantee permanent harmony. A community-builder cannot guarantee repair. A person can be faithful, loving, skilled, and sincere — and still encounter failure, loss, misunderstanding, decline, or death.
Beyond the second mountain is therefore the movement from devotion to surrender.
Surrender does not mean passivity. It does not mean collapse, fatalism, or indifference. It means releasing omnipotence. It means giving oneself wholeheartedly while accepting that life remains uncontrollable. It means acting with care while knowing that the result is not finally ours to possess.
Beyond service is being.
Beyond vocation is availability.
Beyond wisdom is not-knowing.
Beyond meaning is presence.
Presence is different from purpose. Purpose still organises life around a story. Presence is more immediate. It is the capacity to inhabit this moment before it has to become useful, meaningful, therapeutic, spiritual, or significant.
A cup of tea. A client’s silence. A hand on a shoulder. A room after someone leaves. A tired body. A bird outside the window. A grief that does not need to be solved. A kindness that does not need to become part of anyone’s identity.
At this point, even the language of “beyond” begins to dissolve. “Beyond” still implies direction. It implies there is somewhere else to get to, another stage, another refinement, another mountain after the mountain. But eventually the very idea of progression becomes part of the illusion.
There may be no mountain.
No valley.
No heroic arc.
No final state of wisdom.
No self becoming deeper.
No self surrendering.
No self being present.
Even “being present” can become an achievement if the self subtly claims it.
What remains is not a higher state, but a closer intimacy with what is already here.
This brings us to the rawness of experience: sensation before story, contact before interpretation, life before commentary.
At this level there is colour, sound, pressure, temperature, breath, muscle tone, rhythm, texture, smell, taste, light, movement, bodily sensation. A sound happens before the mind names it as a car. A tightness arises before it becomes anxiety. Wetness gathers in the eyes before it becomes a narrative of grief. Warmth in the chest appears before it becomes love.
It is tempting to call this “raw data from the senses,” though even that is not completely accurate. Human beings never receive neutral data. The nervous system is always shaping perception through memory, prediction, emotion, attachment history, trauma, expectation, and bodily state. What we call raw experience is already filtered by the living organism.
Still, there is something important here: pre-narrative contact. Sensation before meaning. Experience before identity. Life before the self turns it into a project.
This is not nihilism. It is not the claim that meaning is false. Meaning is real, but not primary. Before meaning, there is experiencing. Before the story of a life, there is life. Before the self says “this is happening to me”, there is happening.
Ageing, dependency and dignity
And then, as we grow old, the whole structure is tested more radically.
Ageing strips away the mountains.
The first mountain weakens as achievement, status, productivity, autonomy, physical strength, cognitive sharpness, and self-direction begin to fade. The person may no longer be able to perform competence in the ways they once did. They may lose work, speed, memory, beauty, independence, social role, and the capacity to manage life.
The second mountain also changes. Vocation may become impossible in its previous form. Service may reduce. Community participation may narrow. Chosen responsibility may give way to dependence. Even the reflective capacities associated with wisdom, surrender, and presence may diminish if cognition declines.
Old age, frailty, dementia, illness, and dependency bring us to a stark question:
What remains of a human being when they can no longer achieve, choose, serve, remember, narrate, or care for themselves?
This question cuts through every conditional account of human worth.
If a person’s value depends on achievement, then the dependent elderly lose value.
If value depends on autonomy, they lose value.
If value depends on cognition, memory, usefulness, contribution, productivity, or participation, then human dignity becomes conditional.
But that cannot be right.
Deep old age reveals a truth that was always there: a human being does not have to justify their existence.
This is not only a philosophical statement. It is an ethical one. It asks how we treat those who can no longer perform autonomy, usefulness, clarity, emotional regulation, or social contribution.
What remains is dignity without performance.
Personhood before agency.
Being before usefulness.
Relationship before cognition.
Creatureliness before identity.
In deep dependency, the movement is from agency to receptivity. Earlier life asks us to choose, work, love, repair, commit, and serve. Late life may ask us to receive, to be held, to be washed, fed, turned, soothed, remembered, and included when we can no longer include ourselves.
For many people, this is terrifying. Especially for those whose identity has been built around competence, intellect, therapy, service, care, responsibility, or self-control, dependency can feel like humiliation. To need help with dressing, toileting, eating, remembering, moving, or orienting oneself may feel like a loss of self.
But perhaps this is the final exposure of the delusion of the autonomous self.
We were never self-sufficient.
Independence was always partial.
Control was always temporary.
Cognition was always fragile.
The body was always vulnerable.
The self was always relational.
Life was always given before it was achieved.
In dementia or profound frailty, life may become increasingly sensory-affective. The person may no longer remember names, but may recognise safety. They may not follow a conversation, but may respond to tone, rhythm, touch, light, warmth, music, smell, facial expression, pace, and atmosphere. They may no longer narrate their life, but their body may still settle when approached gently.
This is not less than human. It is a return to early layers of human life. In infancy, before language and autobiographical memory, we are held in the sensory-affective field of others. In deep old age, something similar may return. We may again depend on others to regulate fear, comfort, pain, orientation, and belonging.
At that point, the ethical task shifts to those around us.
When a person can no longer hold their own dignity, dignity must be held by the relational field. Other people must remember. Other people must recognise. Other people must say, in action if not in words:
You are still here.
You still matter.
You are not only a task.
You are not disgusting.
You are not abandoned.
You are not your losses.
You are still one of us.
A blanket placed properly, a face that does not show impatience, a hand held without hurry, a body washed with respect, a familiar song, a cup lifted patiently, a name spoken gently — these are not small acts. They are the remaining language of dignity.
Care becomes sacramental in the broadest sense. Not because it is grand, but because it protects dignity at the point where dignity can no longer be defended by the person themselves.
Ordinary physical acts carry existential meaning. Washing, feeding, turning, touching, soothing, waiting, and speaking become ways of affirming the irreducible worth of a person who can no longer perform personhood.
The self also becomes visibly distributed.
When memory fades, others remember for us. They remember what music we loved, what work we did, what made us laugh, what we feared, how we took our tea, who we loved, what we endured. The self was never sealed inside the individual. It always lived partly between people. Ageing and dementia make this undeniable.
When I can no longer say who I am, someone else may still say: I know you. I remember you. You are not gone from relationship.
Perhaps this is where the whole journey finally leads: not to a triumphant self, not even to a devoted self, but to a self that is gradually loosened, held, and eventually released.
First, we build the self.
Then, we give the self.
Then, we surrender the self’s control.
Then, we rest in presence.
Then, even presence dissolves into immediate experiencing.
Then, ageing and dependency reveal that even experiencing, remembering, choosing, and participating may fade.
And yet there is still life.
A breath.
A body.
A face.
A hand.
A sound.
A flicker of recognition.
A settling.
A tear.
A silence.
The self, which once seemed so solid, is revealed as temporary: a necessary formation, a useful fiction, a relational pattern, a story held together by memory, body, language, others, and time. It is real, but not ultimate. It matters, but it is not the whole.
From the self’s point of view, this gradual dissolution may look like nothingness. The loss of cognition, control, role, memory, and identity may feel like the undoing of everything that made life meaningful.
But from another perspective, what dissolves is not life itself. What dissolves is the illusion of separateness.
The body returns to the earth.
Memory returns to those who loved us.
Influence continues in ways we cannot track.
Love moves through others.
Matter returns to matter.
Breath returns to air.
The individual life, so precious and so temporary, is folded back into the larger whole from which it never truly stood apart.
This is not a sentimental thought. It does not remove grief. It does not make dementia, dependency, ageing, or death easy. There is real loss. There is fear. There is indignity. There is pain. There is the ache of watching someone disappear while still being physically present.
But there is also a severe kind of truth.
The meaning of life may not finally be something the self possesses, achieves, understands, or even serves. The meaning of life may be that life participates in itself through us for a while.
We become someone.
We give ourselves to what we love.
We learn that we cannot control the outcome.
We are brought back to sensation, dependence, and receptivity.
We are held, if we are fortunate, by those who remember our humanity when we can no longer perform it.
And eventually, we dissolve.
Not into mere emptiness, but into the nothingness and wholeness of the universe: nothingness from the perspective of the separate ego, wholeness from the perspective of life itself.
The delusion of the self is not that the self is unreal or unimportant. The self matters profoundly. It suffers, loves, chooses, remembers, creates, and grieves. The delusion is that the self is separate, sovereign, permanent, or ultimate.
The self is a wave. The universe is the sea.
For a while, the wave rises. It has shape, force, beauty, direction, and name. It may climb the first mountain of becoming. It may climb the second mountain of love and service. It may learn surrender. It may become quiet enough to feel the water moving through it.
Then the wave falls back.
Nothing is lost to the sea.
What disappears is only the separate form.
What remains is the wholeness that was always there.
Part 2: The self must be held before it can soften
And yet, this reflection needs a further layer.
Without this further layer, the first part could be misread as though the self should simply be transcended. That is not the claim. A self that has never been safely held cannot be asked to dissolve. It first needs recognition, protection, boundary, agency, and care.
When the self has not been safely held
To speak of the dissolution of the self can sound beautiful, even liberating. It can point toward humility, surrender, non-attachment, ageing, dependency, and the eventual return of the individual life into something larger than itself.
But it can also be misunderstood.
For some people, especially those shaped by trauma, chronic shame, dissociation, mental health difficulties, neurodivergent masking, or repeated relational misattunement, the problem is not that the self is too solid. The problem may be that the self has never been safely recognised, protected, or allowed to exist.
In that case, the invitation to move beyond the self may come too early.
It may not feel like freedom.
It may feel like disappearance.
The self may not be an illusion to be dissolved, but a fragile achievement still in formation. A person may first need to discover:
I exist.
I have boundaries.
I have needs.
I can say no.
I can choose.
I can feel anger.
I can be separate and still remain connected.
I can be seen without being invaded.
I can belong without disappearing.
For such a person, selfhood is not narcissism. It is development. It is protection. It is repair.
The first mountain, too, may need to be understood more carefully.
Achievement, competence, independence, control, and productivity can be expressions of ambition. But they can also be survival structures. A person may have become capable because helplessness was too dangerous. They may have become independent because dependence was unreliable. They may have become high-functioning because collapse was not allowed. They may have become useful because being needed was the safest way to remain connected.
From the outside, this can look like success.
Inside, it may be a nervous system trying to survive.
So the first mountain should not be dismissed too quickly. For many people, it represents the best adaptation available at the time. It may carry exhaustion, loneliness, and cost, but also intelligence, courage, and resilience.
The valley also needs clinical care.
A valley can be a place of reorientation. It can soften the false self and open a person to deeper truth. But not every descent is transformative in itself. Sometimes the valley is depression. Sometimes it is burnout. Sometimes it is trauma flooding, dissociation, autistic burnout, ADHD collapse, shame, isolation, or despair.
Some valleys need meaning.
Some need rest.
Some need medication.
Some need practical support.
Some need relational holding.
Some need reduced demands.
Some need careful stabilisation before any deeper interpretation is possible.
To call every collapse a spiritual passage would be too simple. Suffering does not automatically transform. It may open something, but it may also overwhelm, fragment, or silence the person further if it is not met with enough care.
Surrender is not the same as collapse
The language of surrender also needs tenderness.
There is a profound difference between chosen surrender and trauma-driven collapse.
Healthy surrender says:
I have enough agency to soften control.
Trauma collapse says:
I have no agency, so I disappear.
One may feel spacious, embodied, connected, and relieving.
The other may feel numb, unreal, frightened, frozen, compliant, or lost.
Likewise, the dissolution of the self can mean very different things. In one context, it may describe a mature loosening of separateness. In another, it may describe dissociation, depersonalisation, fragmentation, or the terrifying loss of inner continuity.
What looks spiritual from one angle may be clinical from another.
What looks like humility may be shame.
What looks like service may be fawning.
What looks like devotion may be trauma loyalty.
What looks like peace may be shutdown.
What looks like non-attachment may be disconnection.
This is why the movement beyond the self cannot be rushed. It has to be paced through the body, through relationship, through consent, through safety.
Neurodivergence, masking, and the search for belonging
Neurodivergent experience adds another important layer.
For some people, the first mountain is not simply the mountain of status or achievement. It may be the mountain of trying to become acceptable: masking, compensating, suppressing difference, and adapting to environments that did not easily make room for them.
The task may have been to mask, compensate, imitate, suppress, organise, over-prepare, tolerate sensory overwhelm, hide difference, and appear more consistent or socially fluent than the nervous system could comfortably sustain.
In such cases, the valley may arrive not as a classic existential crisis, but as the collapse of long-standing masking or over-adaptation. It may show itself as burnout, sensory exhaustion, loss of functioning, social withdrawal, identity confusion, or grief at having spent years trying to live as someone else.
Then the second mountain cannot simply mean more service, more community, or more commitment.
It may first mean a more truthful life.
A life with less masking.
Less self-violence.
More sensory honesty.
More explicit communication.
More respect for rhythm, capacity, attention, intensity, and difference.
More belonging without performance.
More relationship without forced normality.
For a neurodivergent person, the movement toward wholeness may not mean transcending the self. It may mean recovering the self that was hidden under adaptation.
Community, too, must be handled carefully.
Community can heal. It can hold memory, dignity, belonging, and repair. But community can also wound. Families, schools, religious groups, workplaces, peer groups, and professional cultures can all demand conformity. They can shame difference, punish sensitivity, reward masking, or confuse belonging with obedience.
So the question is not only:
How do I belong?
It is also:
Where can I belong without abandoning myself?
Where can my nervous system be respected?
Where can I be known without being corrected into someone else?
Where can difference be included without being made into a problem?
This matters because the article’s deeper claim is not that the self should be erased. It is that the separate, sovereign, self-sufficient self is not ultimate. But the relational self — the embodied self, the protected self, the recognised self — matters profoundly.
The self is not the whole truth.
But it is not nothing.
It suffers.
It chooses.
It loves.
It remembers.
It protects.
It adapts.
It longs.
It grieves.
It needs to be met.
The delusion is not that the self exists. The delusion is that the self exists alone.
So perhaps the more clinically careful formulation is this:
The self is ultimately not separate, sovereign, permanent, or absolute. But for a person whose selfhood has been injured, shamed, masked, fragmented, or misrecognised, the formation of a safe and embodied self may be sacred work.
Only a self that has been sufficiently held can safely soften.
Only a self that has been recognised can surrender without disappearing.
Only a self that has boundaries can give itself freely.
Only a self that has known dignity can dissolve without being annihilated.
This brings us back to the final movement of the article: ageing, dependency, and the loss of cognitive capacity.
At the end of life, the self may indeed loosen. Memory may fade. Agency may reduce. The body may need to be washed, fed, moved, soothed, and held by others. The person may no longer be able to narrate who they are.
But this should not be understood as the person becoming less human.
Rather, it reveals something that was true all along: personhood was never held by the individual alone.
We are held in others’ recognition.
We are held in the field of care.
We are held in remembered gestures, familiar songs, repeated names, gentle touch, and the moral insistence that a human being remains worthy even when they can no longer perform autonomy, cognition, usefulness, or coherence.
Care as the path to safe softening
So the journey from self to dissolution must pass through care.
Not abstraction.
Not premature transcendence.
Not spiritualised disappearance.
Care.
The care that helps a child become a self.
The care that helps a traumatised person recover a self.
The care that allows a neurodivergent person to live without constant masking.
The care that lets an ageing person remain dignified when the self begins to loosen.
The care that says:
You are here.
You matter.
You do not have to justify your existence.
You do not have to perform your humanity.
You can be held.
From isolated self to ecological belonging
And this care, again, cannot stop at the boundary of the human person.
The same movement that asks us to recognise the vulnerable self also asks us to recognise the vulnerable world. A traumatised person may need safety. An ageing person may need dignity. A neurodivergent person may need a life less organised around forced adaptation. But animals, ecosystems, rivers, forests, soil, air, and climate also bear the consequences of human dissociation from the wider whole.
If the isolated self is a delusion, so too is isolated humanity.
We are not sovereign occupants of a passive planet. We are participants in a living system. Our bodies are ecological bodies. Our breath, food, water, waste, illness, ageing, and death all belong to the wider circulation of life.
This does not diminish human suffering.
It situates it.
Perhaps, then, the final movement is not simply from self to nothingness.
It is from an isolated self to a held self.
From a defended self to a relational self.
From a performing self to an accepted self.
From a sovereign self to a dependent self.
From human exceptionalism to ecological belonging.
From a separate self to a self that can finally soften into the whole.
And if, at the end, the wave returns to the sea, it matters profoundly whether the wave was allowed to rise, to take shape, to be seen, to move, to break, and to return without shame.
The ocean may be the final truth.
But the wave still mattered.
Final considerations
These two parts belong together because they hold a necessary tension.
Part 1 follows the broad existential arc of life. It begins with the emergence of the self, follows the self through ambition, disillusionment, commitment, surrender, ageing, dependency, and eventual dissolution, and suggests that the separate self may never have been as separate as it appeared.
Part 2 slows that movement down. It asks what happens when the self has been injured, misrecognised, masked, fragmented, shamed, or never safely held. It reminds us that the movement beyond the self is not always benign. Depending on the person’s history and nervous system, language of surrender may evoke collapse, language of service may evoke self-abandonment, language of community may evoke conformity or exclusion, and language of dissolution may evoke annihilation rather than wholeness.
Together, the two parts suggest that the self is both necessary and not ultimate.
Too little self, and there may be fragmentation, compliance, dissociation, masking, collapse, shame, or loss of agency.
Too much self, and there may be isolation, control, narcissistic striving, rigidity, fear of dependency, and resistance to belonging.
A human life may therefore require different movements at different times.
At one stage, the task may be to build a self.
At another, to protect the self.
At another, to offer the self.
At another, to surrender the self’s illusion of control.
At another, to allow the self to be held by others.
And at the end, perhaps, to release the self back into the wider whole.
This is not a neat developmental ladder. Life does not move cleanly from one stage to another. We may revisit the first mountain many times. We may enter more than one valley. We may need to rebuild agency after surrender. We may need boundaries after years of service. We may need solitude after community. We may need community after isolation. We may need to become someone before we can let go of needing to be someone.
The movement is not linear.
It is rhythmic.
We rise, fall, form, break, repair, give, withdraw, surrender, return.
The image of the wave and the sea may be helpful here. A wave is not separate from the sea, but this does not mean the wave is meaningless. Its shape matters. Its movement matters. Its brief existence matters. To say that the wave returns to the sea is not to say that the wave was nothing. It is to say that the wave was always water.
In the same way, the self may not be ultimate, but it is not irrelevant. It is the form through which life suffers, loves, chooses, creates, remembers, and becomes conscious of itself for a while.
The self needs honouring.
The self needs care.
The self needs boundaries.
The self needs recognition.
And, perhaps only then, the self may gradually discover that it was never the whole story.
But the same is true of humanity itself.
Human life is precious, but not separate from the rest of life. Human suffering matters, but it does not exhaust the meaning of suffering. Human dignity matters, but it must be held within a wider reverence for the living world that sustains us. The planet is not merely the stage on which the human drama unfolds. It is the condition of our existence, the body within which our bodies arise, live, depend, decay, and return.
So the movement from self to wholeness cannot stop at the human boundary.
It must also include the more-than-human world: animals, plants, rivers, oceans, soil, air, climate, and future beings who will inherit the consequences of how we live now.
Care begins with the person in front of us.
But it does not end there.
The final dignity of a human being may lie here: not in achievement, not in usefulness, not in independence, not in cognition, not even in wisdom, but in belonging to life before all performance.
We do not have to justify our existence.
We are carried into life before we can choose.
We are shaped by others before we can name ourselves.
We are sustained by the earth before we can stand on it.
We are held, if we are fortunate, when our own holding fails.
And eventually, we return.
Nothingness from the perspective of the separate ego.
Wholeness from the perspective of life itself.
The self is not the enemy.
The self is a temporary and precious form.
The task is not to destroy it, bypass it, shame it, or rise above it too quickly.
The task is to let it be formed, held, protected, loved, offered, softened, and finally released.
The ocean may be the final truth.
But the wave still mattered.
Returning to the therapeutic frame
Most therapy does not begin with large existential questions. It usually begins with what is immediate: what hurts, what feels stuck, what has become difficult to carry, and what kind of support may help.
This wider reflection is offered only as background. In therapy, the work begins with the person in front of me, their history, their nervous system, their relationships, their hopes, and the pace that feels possible.
You may prefer to return to the practical starting point: how therapy begins, what to expect, and whether this way of working feels right.