The Many Deaths of Ivor Williams

A vision of necessary endings

Firstly, a quick note to say hello to all new subscribers! 🙇🏻‍♂️ Many of you come via the wonderful

Casper ter Kuile

. I write on a semi-regular basis, and do so when I feel like I have something important to share. Some pieces are like this - into some murky waters - while many others are more lighthearted, with some low-stakes ways of engaging with mortality. It’s about taking the deep with the shallow.

Stick around, and let me know what resonates…

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Over the past year, I've had a series of vision-like experiences with a boy at the bottom of a well.

They’d been happening mostly in my psychoanalysis sessions, where I slowly learned to tune in to this wee lad, standing calf-deep in stagnant water, often wailing, crying for attention.

When I finally reached him, I discovered something odd: he didn't want rescue. He just wanted to be left alone.

The revelation in the vision was that he was being kept alive when he shouldn't have been. He was, in fact, tortured in that place.

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In months-long process, I went through to compassionately meet him, to soothe him and ultimately let him lie down, which taught me something truthfully hard about letting go.

In deep dialogue and safety with my analyst, I’ve discovered that I had been holding on to some things in life believing they're important to keep alive. But all this has done is keep me stuck and held in place way longer than I should be.

So I’ve been discovering that the kinder, more compassionate thing to do is to gently, lovingly, soothingly lay things down to rest, to eventually die.

At the time I wrote in my notes:

I've been keeping him alive this whole time, feeding him... keeping him trapped, suffering... But it's so cruel to keep him alive. He's tormented. He's crying out to be let go. To rest.

This boy at the bottom of the well was, of course, me. My younger self.

But this wasn't about rejecting my childhood self, burying him in haste, or covering him up. It was something different.

I've had to recognise that I'd been keeping parts of my childhood alive in me, confusing this with the idea of staying childlike.

I thought staying childlike meant maintaining playfulness or naivety or joy, but that wasn't true for me.

Instead, I was keeping a difficult childhood raw, in the present, ready to affect me in my relationships, in my life.

So while I'd objectively grown into an adult, psychologically I hadn't.

There was a large, hidden, unconscious part of me that was still very much that boy stuck at the bottom of the well. I'd been sitting in that stagnant water for decades, looking up, watching life pass by through the small aperture at the head of the well.

The boy I was keeping alive wasn't the joyful parts of childhood - it was the traumatised, vigilant parts that were never meant to persist into adulthood.

As I came to understand:

I hide parts of myself to be accepted... I cut myself off from my own body…

When I finally let the boy rest - placing a blanket over him, let him lie down and close his eyes - I expected death to be a single moment. Eyes closing, breath exhaling.

But I've discovered something else. Psychological dying isn't a single moment.

The psychological dying process is like the birthing process. It happens in waves of increasing intensity.

The little psychological deaths we experience in life - a childhood ending, a relationship disintegrating, a job being left - are like Braxton-Hicks contractions.

They are the practice runs for what it feels like to really die.

Our ability and willingness to relax into these Many Deaths becomes preparation for a larger transformation.

Throughout my therapy, I kept having to choose again and again not to "feed" old patterns that I thought were good for me, but kept me stuck. It was incredibly hard not to return and feed - or keep alive - that boy in the well. It was a hard choice to keep making, but in reality it meant I could face different choices in the rest of my life:

• Each time I told a family member "I don't want that. I want this" instead of staying silent.

• Each time I shared my vulnerable feelings with my wife instead of keeping them shamefully separate.

• Each time I stayed present with difficult emotions instead of cutting myself off.

These were the many, small deaths. The practice rounds for a larger letting go. It’s a bit strange, because it reveals a paradox: I've been learning to release a part of myself I've carried most of my life, and in that release, something new emerges. A more whole experience of myself.

I am a chrysalis. I am my parts, dissolved. Flexible, loose, constituent. I am in the process of letting go of what is not needed. What makes me unsafe, that manifests danger, that keeps me in the past.

This dissolution wasn't comfortable, but it was wholly necessary.

So the challenge now is that I have to resist the desire to become rigid too early. To form myself back into the previous shape. To dare be something new, but more myself, but it requires a continual letting go. A strange paradox no?

Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.
– Tilopa

I'm sharing this murky experience of visions and transformation because I want to illustrate how crucial it is to let things die when their time comes.

At key points in life, we must move beyond who we were.

Sometimes this happens effortlessly. You don't even notice the skin being shed, the weight off your shoulders.

Other times it requires tremendous support - in my case, two years of intense psychoanalysis following six and a half years of psychotherapy. So if you struggle with letting go, I'm not suggesting this is easy.

But I feel it's important to share this because we need stories about how growth is painful, how it cannot simply be framed as purely positive.

Maturing into an adult is difficult because it requires seeing and accepting we're no longer who we used to be. Many things that once helped us no longer help us - in fact, they can harm us.

We all carry parts of ourselves that we keep alive for the wrong reasons, parts that no longer serve our growth or present lives.

It takes tremendous bravery to step into change, to step into the present and the future. The past is a comfortable place, but it's not a place we can actually live.

In my last session I wrote in my notes:

Now I'm free to do and feel something different... The situation, the response, the context of whatever it was that stopped me, that made me want to not express how I really feel when I was a child... it's changed. I'm not that child anymore. I'm free to do it differently.

The boy in the well has finally been laid to rest. And in that death, I'm finding a new, different kind of life.

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Thanks for reading.