When Crises Initiate
I don't know exactly when it happened.
The part that surprises people most when I talk about it is the fact that I can't point to a single moment and say: there. That's when something changed. We're trained to expect transformation to arrive like a scene in a film: a diagnosis, a collapse, a turning point with a date attached. Mine didn't work that way. It moved through the body and through the mind, and by the time I understood something had shifted, it had already been happening for a long time.
I've lived through crisis in a way that touched everything — physically, psychologically, in the roles I held and thought I could depend on. There are conditions I still carry that haven't resolved and may not resolve. And somewhere inside that, I came to understand something I hadn't chosen to learn: that no one on the outside has the authority or the capability to rescue me. Not because help doesn't matter. It does. But because there is a layer that only gets met by connecting, relating and listening to my own body, and trusting what it tells me, even when it tells me things I'd rather not hear.
That's what I mean by initiation. Not a single dramatic threshold, but a forced apprenticeship in listening. And here is the part that still moves me: it was in the experience of being left alone with something no one else could hold that something else began to take shape. Call it a capacity. Call it a kind of inside attunement I hadn't asked for and wouldn't have chosen. And out of that came a clear pull in the way Carl Jung describes it as “freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do“: to be with others through this kind of process, so they wouldn't have to walk through it alone.
What I want to be honest about is this: none of it could have been planned. Whatever new structure was forming in me — whatever new way of being in the world was trying to emerge — I could not have written its outline beforehand. It doesn't work like a goal you set and then achieve. It requires something much less comfortable: trust in a process you cannot see the end of, and trust in your own capacity to heal, even when that capacity is taking its time.
I think this is the piece we underestimate most, particularly in the corporate world of coaching, where so much is built around setting goals and tracking progress. Development doesn't necessarily work like that. It can't be scheduled. It asks something harder of us than achievement — it asks for openness and courage, for a willingness to not-know what's coming, for long enough that something genuinely new can be born, rather than the old self rearranged into a slightly better version of itself.
There's a word in educational theory that I keep returning to, as it’s close to my educational journey in the tradition of Hans-Christoph Koller's transformatorische Bildungstheorie. It asks the same question I'd already been living, showing up in academic language: how does something genuinely new come into being in a person? Not more of the same. Not a better-organised version of what was already there. A real shift in how someone relates to the world and to themselves. Koller's answer, in short, is: Through the experience of a crisis so total that the routines a person has always relied on — the patterns of thinking and acting that used to work — stop working. Something breaks. And it's precisely in that break, not despite it, that a new way of being emerges.
Barry Goddard, in his work on Chaos Shamanism, calls this the Chaos point — and he's reaching, deliberately, for an older image than Koller's: the Chaos of Greek cosmology, the formless gap that exists before any order does. Not chaos as mere disorder, but as the necessary condition order is born from. Nothing is organised yet. Nothing has taken shape. And it's only from inside that ungoverned space that a new shape can emerge at all — never as a rearrangement of what came before it. Life initiates us, in this view, whether we ask for it or not. We don't get to choose the timing, and we rarely get to choose the form it takes. We also don’t get to choose whether we stay open to what's trying to happen in us, but if we have the capacity and resources, something new can develop.
I find it striking that a contemporary educational theorist and a framework built on far older cosmology are, in their own languages, describing the same event from two directions. Koller isn't writing about spirituality. He's writing about how real learning — the kind that changes a person, not just adds information to them — actually happens. And yet the shape of his answer lands in the same place Goddard's does: the old structure has to fail before the new one can be born. No shortcut skips the failing.
I want to be honest about why this matters to me as much as it does. Because the alternative to working through the Chaos point isn't neutral. In the traditions Goddard draws on, the person who cannot make it through their initiation illness sometimes doesn't survive it. Koller, working from an entirely different discipline, points to something just as stark: crises that go unmet can end in suicide. This isn't theoretical for me. I know what it costs when a crisis doesn't find its way through, and that's a large part of why being with people through their own Chaos point matters to me as much as it does.
And I want to be precise about what "being with" means here, because I don't think of it as guiding. Guiding implies I know the path and I'm walking ahead, showing the way. I don't. Nobody does; that's the whole point of a process that produces something genuinely new rather than a known destination. What I do is relate to the person going through it. I stay. I don't leave them alone with it. That's a different thing entirely from leading someone through a passage I've already mapped. It's presence through something unmapped, together.
I don't have a tidy resolution to offer here — which feels right, given everything I've just said about resisting the pull toward premature closure. But I can tell you what I've come to trust, both from what happened to me and from what I've since watched happen in the people I sit with.
The new that's trying to be born in a crisis cannot be rushed into existence, and it cannot be planned into existence either. It has its own timing, and that timing is rarely the one we would have chosen. What it asks of us is something quieter and harder than effort: a willingness to stay in the not-yet-knowing, to keep listening even when listening yields nothing for a long time, to trust that a body or a life in crisis is not simply broken but is, in its own slow and often unrecognisable way, trying to reorganise itself around something new.
This is not a process anyone should have to do entirely alone. Not because someone else can do it for you, but because being accompanied through the not-knowing is different from being alone in it. That difference may be everything.
If you're somewhere in your own Chaos point right now — whatever shape it's taking, however long it's already lasted, however far you are from anything that looks like resolution — I want you to know that the absence of a clear answer isn't a sign that nothing is happening. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's the sign that something real finally has room to form.