The Escape Artist
Whenever someone tells me “I only feel really alive when I’m xxx”, I think, “ok, so most of the time you don’t feel really alive!”
Today we meet the Escape Artist. This guardian comes to the rescue when reality is boring, confining, depressing, or just too much for us. Ultimately, the Escape Artist is running from inner deadness. By escaping, it brings us back to life for a moment.
The escape artist fixates on the next escape and obsesses over the details of the escape-world. Escapes can take the form of substances, sex, extreme sports, travel, video games, or anything obsessional or underground. They are physical or psychological escapes, or places where we venture out near the edge to flirt with novelty and danger.
Some escaping is healthy and growth-inducing, like a miniature hero’s journey. However, without proper integration, our escapes usually grow and become more frequent until they threaten our very well-being.
Escapes have an additional function. If we can’t express our authenticity through the regular channels, then we need to find an alternate venue where we can. Our outsider- or escape-identity is where we find our authenticity and aliveness, essential aspects of ourself that we repress in our day-to-day social-identity. Our underground identity is often the only place where we let ourselves play, especially if we haven’t found a way to play in work or love relationships.
The issue comes in that the escape artist invests the majority of its authentic life-force in escapes. It avoids or underinvests in the dull-but-important aspects of life. These are the bread-and-butter activities that compound into real-world success and happiness.
If we live for escapes, we hold back our authentic life force from our true livelihood and love relationships. Deprived of energy, they gradually wither on the vine.
Left unintegrated, our escapes don’t compound to create value. Worse, they undermine the bigger unfolding of our identity and life structure.
In the healing process:
The escape artist has an authenticity issue in main-stream life. Something has blocked authenticity from flowing down the larger channels, forcing it into side-streams. If we can understand what blocks the main channel of life, we can dislodge it and the stream will ROARRR!! with power.
Likely, as therapy becomes more important to the escape artist, it will start to resemble main-stream aspects of life, and the escape artist will desire to escape it. This is a critical moment in therapy. There is an opportunity here to understand what is happening in real-time, verbalize the pattern, and increase the amount of authenticity that is allowed to emerge in the main-stream. Escaping therapy will only strengthen the pattern of avoidance that has pushed the escape artist to the fringes.
An important aspect of the escape artist’s healing is to integrate the various streams of life. Something important is happening in the side-streams that deserves to be part of the main-stream. With increased acceptance and robust vulnerability, the main-stream identity can become more complex, more idiosyncratic, and more radical.
The more abnormal we make our normal identity, the less we need to escape it.
Ultimately, the escape artist has an emotional core that is greatly compressed or completely disavowed. It has lost the continuous sense of vitality, feeling, and resonance that enliven everyday activities. It has to chase extreme experiences in order to feel something. By reconnecting to the core, the escape artist will find that the escapes naturally lose power over the system, and building life structure becomes more and more energizing and appealing. Integration will naturally take place as feeling returns.
In particular, I’ve noticed that regular cannabis use significantly lowers the potential energy of the overall system. It has a dampening effect on motivation and life trajectory. If a client is using a lot of cannabis, there’s usually nothing that can move things forward more effectively than decreasing cannabis use.
To work with the escape artist:
Escapes may be healthy, adaptive, creative and important aspects of your self-care. If this is the case, escape at will!
Notice when the escape artist begins plotting a destructive or avoidant escape and see if there’s any way to increase our authenticity, use our voice, bring in playfulness, or adjust the facts of our life, so that we don’t need to escape.
Employ harm-reduction to moderate the more damaging aspects of escapes. This will help to reduce any shame associated with escapes.
Deepen our somatic, mindfulness, and self-care practices so that life becomes more connected, energized, and enlivened.
