5 Reasons We’ve Forgotten Our Psychospiritual Nature and Purpose
What if you knew that you arrived in this world with a purpose and were already equipped with everything you needed to fulfill your purpose? Not a detailed set of instructions or a list of accomplishments to check off, but an innate blueprint containing your natural abilities, emotional needs, and the potential to express who you are meant to be.
It’s an interesting thought, especially when you consider how much time we spend trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do with our lives. We consult career counselors, take personality assessments, read self-help books, ask friends for advice, and occasionally wonder whether the universe is trying to tell us something. We’re remarkably good at looking everywhere for answers except within ourselves.
Before you dismiss the word psychospiritual as something mystical or a little too woo-woo, let’s be clear about what it means. We’re not talking about something separate from our physical existence or disconnected from how human beings actually develop. Our psychospiritual nature is rooted in our biology, our brain, our nervous system, and the psychological capacities that develop through experience. Our emotions, instincts, natural mental functions, and physiological responses all contribute to how we experience ourselves, relate to others, and pursue what gives our lives meaning. We’re psychological, physical, and spiritual beings, and these dimensions of our existence are interconnected rather than operating independently.
Think about it. We’re born with a brain equipped to learn, adapt, form relationships, experience emotions, and develop extraordinary abilities. Our nervous system responds to experiences of safety and threat, our emotional needs motivate our behavior, and our brain changes through neuroplasticity as we practice different ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. These aren’t abstract spiritual concepts. They’re fundamental aspects of human development. From my psychospiritual developmental perspective, this psychological and physiological equipment provides the means through which we nurture our innate potential and express our purpose. The spiritual dimension concerns the deeper questions of who we are, why we’re here, and what gives our existence meaning, while our psychological development determines how effectively we’re able to live in alignment with those answers.
Yet most of us have never been taught to think about our development this way. We know we’re supposed to look after our physical health, develop our intellectual abilities, and establish some level of financial security. But developing our authentic self and the psychological capacities needed to express our purpose? That rarely appears on anyone’s list of important life milestones.
Here are five reasons why.
1. We Were Taught How to Succeed, but Not How to Know Ourselves
From an early age, we’re introduced to and judged by the milestones we’re expected to reach. We go to school, get an education, find a job, establish relationships, and eventually become responsible adults. Somewhere along the way, we also learn that getting there before everyone else earns us extra points. We’re encouraged to develop skills, build careers, and become productive members of society, but we receive surprisingly little guidance about understanding our innate emotional needs, recognizing our natural abilities, or discovering what gives our lives meaning.
We become skilled at answering questions about what we want to do, what we hope to accomplish, and where we see ourselves in five years. Yet ask someone who they are beneath their roles, responsibilities, and accomplishments, and the conversation often becomes considerably more interesting.
We’ve confused preparing for life with developing the self who is supposed to live it.
2. We Mistake External Approval for Inner Fulfillment
There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of being told we’re doing a great job, receiving a promotion, or achieving something that makes other people admire us. Unfortunately, the feeling rarely lasts as long as we’d like, so we’re soon looking for the next accomplishment to reassure us that we’re doing well. Our adaptive persona is particularly fond of this arrangement. It has learned to obtain emotional security through approval, achievement, acceptance, and meeting expectations. Every time we succeed, we receive another little reminder that we’re okay.
The trouble is that the momentary relief of having our worth affirmed isn’t the same as satisfying the innate emotional needs of our authentic self.
We can become highly accomplished, respected, and successful while remaining disconnected from the very experiences that would nourish our natural development. We keep achieving more, assuming fulfillment must be waiting just beyond the next milestone, without stopping to consider whether we’re even traveling on our own path.
3. We Think Spirituality Is Separate From Everyday Life
Mention spirituality, and people often imagine meditation retreats, religious practices, mystical experiences, or someone sitting peacefully in nature. Those experiences have their place, but our psychospiritual nature isn’t something we access only when we step away from everyday life. It’s expressed through how we use our natural abilities, satisfy our emotional needs, relate to others, make choices, and pursue what gives our lives meaning.
Our psychological and spiritual development aren’t separate journeys. Within my developmental model, our innate purpose provides direction for our growth, while the development of our psychological capacities allows us to express that purpose in the world. We can have profound spiritual insights about who we are and what matters to us, but if we haven’t developed the emotional regulation, self-awareness, autonomy, and other psychological capacities needed to act on that knowing, we’ll continue relying on the familiar behaviors of our adaptive persona.
This is the knowing-doing gap. Our authentic self knows, but our adaptive persona keeps running the show. And no amount of spiritual insight automatically changes a lifetime of practiced behavior.
4. We’re Too Busy Being Who Everyone Else Needs Us to Be
Most of us don’t wake up one morning and consciously decide to abandon our authentic selves. We simply become busy living. There are children to raise, partners to support, parents to care for, careers to manage, and responsibilities that seem to multiply whenever we aren’t paying attention. We become exceptionally good at recognizing what everyone else needs, often before they’ve even asked.
Meanwhile, our own interests, emotional needs, and development are quietly moved to the bottom of the list. We tell ourselves we’ll have time for those things once life settles down, although life has a remarkable ability to keep finding new reasons why now isn’t a convenient time. Eventually, we can become so identified with the person everyone depends on that we forget to consider who we are when nobody needs anything from us. We even feel proud of how successfully we’ve fulfilled our responsibilities, and much of what we’ve done deserves that pride. But helping others fulfill their purposes doesn’t automatically mean we’re fulfilling our own.
Our authentic self needs nourishment and opportunities for development, too. It cannot flourish indefinitely on whatever attention is left over after everyone else has been taken care of.
5. We Expect Our Purpose to Arrive as a Sudden Revelation
We’ve romanticized the idea of discovering our purpose. We imagine a moment of extraordinary clarity when everything suddenly makes sense and we finally know exactly what we’re here to do. A magical “aha” moment. Occasionally, people do experience dramatic awakenings. More often, remembering begins with a quiet realization that something in our lives no longer feels right. We become interested in something we’ve neglected, question choices that once seemed sensible, or recognize that the life we’ve worked so hard to create doesn’t provide the fulfillment we expected.
And sometimes life is considerably less subtle. We stay too long in a job that no longer reflects who we are until we’re fired, or remain in a relationship that no longer supports our development until the other person ends it. What we weren’t willing to reconsider ourselves is suddenly taken out of our hands.
Either way, awakening doesn’t usually arrive with a complete set of instructions. Remembering who we are meant to be takes time because we’ve spent years, sometimes decades, developing an adaptive persona that has become our familiar identity. We need opportunities to recognize our authentic needs, rediscover our natural interests, and develop the psychological capacities that allow us to act on what we’re beginning to know.
We also need to resist our familiar impulse to ask everyone else what they think we should do. After all, relying on other people’s expectations to define our direction is often part of what took us away from our authentic path in the first place.
Remembering Who You Are Meant to Be Is a Developmental Journey
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about purpose is that we expect to discover it as though it were a missing object. We imagine that once we find it, we’ll finally know who we are and everything else will fall into place. But our purpose isn’t missing. Our conscious connection to it has been overshadowed by years of adapting, meeting expectations, and developing an identity organized around maintaining security and approval.
The seed of our potential is still there. What it needs is our attention, emotional nourishment, and the experiences that allow our authentic self to develop.
This is the central message of my upcoming book, Remembering Who You Are Meant to Be: The Forgotten Self, the Persona, and the Journey from Self-Protection to Wholeness. I explore our psychospiritual nature from a developmental perspective, explaining why we can spend so much of our lives becoming the person others need us to be while neglecting the very self we were born to nurture. More importantly, the book explores how we awaken to our innate purpose, reconnect with our authentic self, and develop the psychological capacities needed to live from that knowing.
The journey isn’t a straight line. We find our way back to our authentic path, reconnect with what matters, and begin making choices that reflect our purpose. Then an old fear is activated, someone needs us, or a familiar obligation pulls us in another direction, and we find ourselves following the adaptive path again. Rather than criticizing ourselves for losing our way, we need to recognize that remembering is an ongoing process of awakening, learning, and developing the capacity to return to ourselves.
As you reflect on these five reasons, consider how much of your life has been directed by what others expected of you and how much has been devoted to nurturing your authentic self. What interests have you neglected, what emotional needs have you set aside, and what parts of yourself are still waiting for the opportunity to develop?
My invitation is to stop searching outside yourself for the answer to who you are meant to be and begin paying attention to what’s already within you. That’s the journey I’ll be exploring in my upcoming book, and I hope it encourages you to begin your own journey of remembering.