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PHThe word metanoia is when you have to build something new from the broken remnants of your past. It’s when a drastic change or a crisis forces you to look at the world differently and to change direction. It’s an epiphany, a revelation, or a fresh start. Metanoia literally means changing your mind. But this is not some humdrum changing your order at a restaurant.
This is an existential root-and-branch change in your being. The Christian Church Father Tertullian saw it as a kind of conversion experience, and metanoia appears in the Gospels a lot, and it’s often translated as repentance. It was seen as a rejection of the old life and a positive commitment to a new and better one.
Jung took the idea of metanoia and folded it into his wider psychoanalytic theory, and Jung believed that there is a kind of healing or growth that occurs after any trauma or rupture. Jung even argued that there was a kind of global metanoia after the horrors of World War Two. We are all familiar with the idea of the midlife crisis, and Jung argued that some time around our 30s, we are presented with the second half of our life, and we have to decide how we want to go on, and who we want to be.
Metanoia is when somebody’s betrayal forces you onto a happier path. It’s when you fall off the horse, and when you see the light. It’s when you fall down, broken and defeated, only to get back up again, stronger for it. Metanoia is the phoenix rising from the ashes. The light after the dark. It is the healing that happens after any great trauma.
@philosophyminis
