The “Back to Basics” Trap
OCTOBER 20, 2025
“Returning” looks backward. Growth looks forward. Challenge, disruption, and pain aren’t detours, they’re the raw material of transformation.
Next time you catch yourself longing for “the old you” or “the past circumstances” pause. Ask instead: “What new potential is demanding to emerge through me?”
Everyone wants to “get back.”
Back to basics. Back to normal. Back to who they were before inflation, global instability, the loss, the failure, the pain….(the list goes on and on)
But what if the whole idea of going back is the problem?
Carl Jung wrote,
“Stop trying to return to who you were before the abuse. The chrysalis cannot become a caterpillar again. The goal is not recovery but metamorphosis.”
That line hit me like a truth I already knew but didn’t want to admit. Because once life breaks you open, breaks your company open, there’s no rewinding. The only way out is through… and the only real direction is forward.
The language of “returning” often keeps us tied to the past. It assumes that our best was before the breakdown, before the problem, before the disruption. But a caterpillar can never go back. Once it enters the cocoon, everything it “thought” it was begins to dissolve (literally). What used to define it: its body, its movement, its way of being all melts away into chaos. And out of that chaos, pardon the cheesy analogy here, wings.
We may spend our lives chasing a return… But life, by design, keeps inviting us to transform. To allow the metamorphosis.
Here’s the paradox: metamorphosis doesn’t erase essence. The butterfly is not a caterpillar anymore, but it still carries the caterpillar’s DNA. Transformation doesn’t mean abandoning yourself. It means remembering what’s essential and shedding what’s not.
The caterpillar crawls. The butterfly flies. Both are true to their nature, but only one lives into its fullest potential.
Likewise, our goal is not to restore some earlier version of ourselves, but to live into who we really are: beyond survival, beyond returning, beyond the story of what happened to us or our business.
So how do we metamorphose?
Shift your frame.
Stop reaching for the past. Ask not “How do I get back?” but “Who and what is emerging through me now?”
Embrace the in-between.
The chrysalis is not the end, it’s the sacred chaos where identity dissolves so essence can take shape. Don’t rush it. Sit inside it.
Seek growth, not comfort.
Neuroscience tells us what Jung intuited: the brain rewires through struggle. New neural pathways form in the discomfort. That’s not suffering. It’s the architecture of transformation.
Reclaim essence, release identity.
What’s true in you never dies. Everything else is compost.
Because maybe the goal was never to get back to who you were.
Maybe it was to grow into who you were born to be.
Key Idea
The goal isn’t to get back to who you were, it’s to become who you could be. “Returning” looks backward. Growth looks forward. Challenge, disruption, and pain aren’t detours, they’re the raw material of transformation.
Takeaway
Next time you catch yourself longing for “the old you” or “the past circumstances” pause. Ask instead: “What new potential is demanding to emerge through me?”
Build your Movement
Where in your life are you trying to crawl back into being a caterpillar, when you’re meant to fly?
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