A Self at Odds

My first lesson as an Aviation Ordnanceman working on F-18 aircraft was the importance of grounding the jet before beginning work on its weapons systems. Even now I instinctively look for the grounding cable whenever I see aircraft resting on a flight line.

The aircraft may appear perfectly normal, but static charge accumulates naturally. You cannot see it, yet a single spark can destroy the system and the people working on it. For that reason, no work begins until the jet is grounded.

Once grounded, the energy has somewhere safe to go. The danger is diffused, and the work can proceed.

The human self accumulates a similar charge. A person may appear competent, composed, even successful, while conditions such as anxiety, guilt, pride, or despair may build invisibly. Trying to repair one’s life while carrying that unseen charge can be dangerous. Efforts to change habits, confront guilt, or examine oneself may only intensify the instability.

The same principle applies inwardly. Before real change can begin, the self must first be grounded.

The Tension of the Self

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from being at odds with oneself. Fearing abandonment while pushing others away.  Wanting freedom, yet resisting the surrender that freedom requires. Knowing the right course of action, and quietly avoiding it.

These tensions are not rare. They are deeply human. Many people live for years with this inner division, managing outward responsibilities while privately feeling fractured. I have known this tension personally, and over time, I began to understand that this conflict was not simply circumstantial. It pointed to something more fundamental about the nature of the self.

The nineteenth-century philosopher SØren Kierkegaard described the self in a way that illuminates this tension. In his view, the self is not a fixed object or stable possession. It is a relationship; a dynamic process in which a  person continually relates to who they are, who they might become, and the conditions that shape both.

To be a self, in this sense, is to live within a kind of tension. We are at once, limited and capable, dependent and responsible, drawn toward possibility while constrained by reality. When these elements are held together honestly, a person experiences a measure of coherence. When they fall out of relation with one another, something begins to fracture inwardly.

Kierkegaard called this condition despair. Not always the visible despair of crisis, but the quieter and far more common experience of a self that cannot fully accept, sustain, or reconcile its own existence.

Kierkegaard observed that this inward misalignment does not always appear in obvious ways. Despair is not always loud or dramatic. More often, it takes quieter forms; patterns in how a person relates to themselves.

The Forms of Despair

Kierkegaard observed that this misalignment of the self tends to appear in several recognizable forms.

1.           Not knowing one has a self.

This form appears when a  person lives largely unaware of the self they carry. Life becomes a series of reactions, habits, and impulses, with little reflection on what kind of person one is becoming. The individual moves through circumstances but rarely pauses to consider the deeper tension between responsibility, freedom, and limitation.

2.           Not wanting to be oneself.

Another form emerges when a person becomes painfully aware of themselves, yet wishes they were someone else. Here the self is experienced as a burden; something flawed, shameful, or unworthy. Instead of being inhabited, it is resisted. Much of the inner life becomes an effort to escape or silence the person one believes oneself to be.

3.           Defiantly wanting to be oneself apart from dependence.

The third form appears when a person insists on becoming a self entirely on their own terms. Independence is elevated above all else. Dependence is rejected. Limits are denied. Yet beneath this determination often lies a quiet instability, because the self was never designed to sustain itself alone.

These forms of despair are not rare pathologies. They are recognizable movements within the ordinary human struggle to become oneself.

Addiction and the Tension of the Self

When viewed through this lens, addiction begins to look less like a simple failure of discipline and more like an attempt to manage an unbearable tension within the self. The self is attempting to hold together forces that exceed it.

For some, substances or compulsive behaviors dull the uncomfortable awareness of who they have become. The inner voice quiets for a time. The conflict softens. What remains is temporary relief from the strain of self-reflection.

For others, addiction becomes a form of escape from a self they cannot accept. Shame and regret create an inward pressure that feels intolerable. Numbing the mind or altering consciousness becomes a way to step outside the person one feels trapped inside.

And sometimes, addiction reflects the opposite impulse; the insistence on absolute autonomy. The individual rejects constraint, refuses dependence, and pursues freedom without limit. Yet the result is often a deeper form of bondage, where the very pursuit of independence becomes its own form of captivity.

In each case, addiction can be understood as an effort to collapse the tension of self rather than hold it. What begins as relief gradually deepens the very division it was meant to resolve.

The Remedy According to Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard says “the self is a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself, relates itself to the power that established it.”

If despair arises when the self loses its proper relation to itself, then the question naturally follows: How is that relation restored?

For SØren Kierkegaard, the answer was not greater willpower, or more careful self-management. The self cannot stabilize itself simply by trying harder to become the right kind of person. Efforts at self-construction often deepen the strain, because the very self that is divided is the one attempting to repair the division.

Instead, Kierkegaard suggested that the self becomes whole when it is properly grounded. By this he meant that a person learns to rest their identity not in shifting circumstances, emotional states, or personal achievements, but in something deeper than the self’s own efforts to define and sustain itself.

Groundedness does not eliminate tension from human life. Limits remain. Responsibilities remain. Desires and fears do not disappear. What changes is the posture from which a person relates to these realities. The self no longer carries the impossible burden of sustaining itself alone.

For those who have experienced addiction, this insight often resonates. The struggle is rarely just about substances or behaviors. Beneath it lies the exhausting effort to manage, correct, or escape oneself. Recovery begins to take root when the person no longer attempts to resolve that struggle through force of will alone, but begins to allow their life to be steadied by something beyond their own fluctuating strength.

Addiction resembles working on a fueled, electrically live aircraft without grounding. For a time, nothing catastrophic may happen. Shortcuts appear to work. Confidence grows. Yet the underlying instability remains.

Recovery begins when someone finally says:

“We don’t touch this until it’s grounded.”

That moment is not weakness. It is the beginning of safety.

Kierkegaard believed that when the self finds this grounding, the inner division gradually loosens. The person no longer needs to flee themselves, nor to dominate themselves. Instead, they begin the quieter work of inhabiting their life honestly and steadily.

What it Means to be Grounded in the Power That Created the Self

When Kierkegaard spoke of the self becoming whole by being “grounded in the power that established it,” he was pointing toward something both simple and difficult to accept: the self was never meant to sustain itself alone.

Much of modern life subtly teaches the opposite. We are encouraged to construct our identity, secure our worth, and manage our inner life through determination and control. Yet the more intensely a person attempts to hold themselves together through their own effort, the more fragile that effort becomes.

Grounding begins when a person recognizes that the self did not originate in isolation and does not endure through self-sufficiency. The self stabilizes when it rests in something deeper than its own shifting thoughts, feelings, or achievements.

Life inevitably brings tension - responsibility, desire, fear, hope, regret. When the self attempts to contain all of this through its own strength, the strain can become overwhelming. Grounding does not remove the tension of being human, but it provides a place where that tension can safely settle.

For Kierkegaard, that grounding ultimately meant relation to God; the source from which the self arises and the one in whom it finds its proper stability. To live in this relation is not merely to hold a belief about God, but to stand honestly before Him: acknowledging one’s limits, relinquishing the illusion of self-sufficiency, and receiving one’s life as something sustained rather than self-generated. In this sense, faith is less about certainty than about orientation; the willingness to live in honest dependence rather than anxious self-construction.

Faith lets the self be fully what it is, without being trapped by what it is.

The work of recovery, in many ways, reflects this movement. It is not simply the removal of substances or destructive behaviors. It is the slow reorientation of the self. Learning to live honestly within one’s limits, accepting dependence where independence once ruled, and allowing one’s life to be steadied by something greater than the self’s own effort to control it.

The tensions of the self do not disappear. Responsibility remains. Desire remains. Fear and hope continue to move through a person’s life. What changes is not the presence of tension, but the place where that tension rests.

On a flight line, no one begins work on an aircraft until it has been properly grounded. Not because the aircraft is broken, but because the energy it carries must have somewhere safe to go.

The human self is not so different.

When a person learns to live grounded in the One who established them, the hidden charge that once threatened to tear the self apart begins to settle. The work of life can proceed; not in perfect control, but in steadiness.

On Grounding the Self in Recovery and Faith

By Ginger Tudor Taylor

Further Reading

The Sickness Unto Death by SØren Kierkegaard, Penguin Classics edition, translated by Alastair Hannay.