One of the advantages of being familiar with passage rituals is that they make it clear that the ending involves a symbolic death. When the new mother in the seminar shouted, “I am falling apart!” she was telling the truth—the “she” that she had hitherto identified with was disintegrating. Because of her view that disintegration meant malfunction, she assumed that what she needed was a way to repair her life; but she quickly came to see that no mere fixing up of things would suffice. All that good advice she kept asking for was beside the point, for her real need then was to find out how to
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