When Your Identity Shatters: A Therapist’s Journey Through Suffering
What if the moment your entire identity falls apart isn’t a breakdown but a sacred initiation? What if the culture that taught you to pathologise your pain has stolen your capacity to transform through it?
For over 28,000 hours, Dr. John W. Price has sat knee to knee with people in their most debilitating shatterings. As a Jungian psychotherapist with a doctorate in depth psychology, he doesn’t just understand suffering intellectually. He has walked through the fire himself, and it’s that lived experience that makes him one of the most compelling guides for anyone navigating identity crisis, spiritual awakening, or the terrifying process of becoming who you actually are.
In this profound conversation, Dr Price reveals why tying your self-worth to your net worth creates a dangerous trap, how “sacred refusal” becomes an act of devotion, and why the moments when everything crumbles are actually the gateways to transformation our modern world has forgotten how to honour.
The Man Who Lost Everything to Find His Calling
Dr. Price’s path to the therapist’s chair began on stage. From age six, music was his calling. He was self-motivated, wild, rebellious, smoking in the boys’ room while dreaming of guitars and record deals. By his mid-twenties, he had signed that deal and was touring nationally, living the dream he had fantasised about since childhood.
Then everything came crashing down.
The birth of his son, the collapse of an unhealthy relationship, and the sudden weight of single fatherhood shattered every identity he had built. He weighed 35 pounds less from stress, found himself in court battles, and sat in a therapist’s office feeling completely lost. “I had a shattering of an identity,” he recalls. “My whole life dream was disrupted.”
But in that therapist’s chair, working with a brilliant woman named Charlene who introduced him to Buddhist meditation, something shifted. Dr. Price realised he didn’t just want healing. He wanted to offer it. That moment of recognition sent him back to school, this time as a ravenous student pursuing a master’s in clinical psychology and eventually a doctorate in Jungian depth psychology.
Why We Pathologise Our Own Initiations
One of Dr. Price’s most powerful insights centres on how our culture has lost the capacity to recognise transformation for what it is. “Because our culture doesn’t really have an orientation to initiate us into this kind of process, we pathologise it, and we think that something is wrong,” he explains.
When your identity crumbles, when the life that looked good on paper suddenly feels unbearable, when you can no longer perform the role everyone expects of you, our society tells you something is broken. But Dr. Price sees these moments differently. They are sacred shatterings, initiations that ancient cultures would have honoured with ritual and community support.
The problem for so many high achievers is that they have tied their sense of self-worth entirely to their net worth, their title, their role. When that foundation shifts, they don’t just lose a job or a relationship. They lose themselves. “How do you actually trust the fall rather than resist it?” becomes the central question.
Sacred Refusal and Living Mythically
Drawing on wisdom from his mentor Richard Rohr and Jungian analyst James Hollis, Dr. Price introduces the concept of “sacred refusal.” This is the practice of stopping performance, of refusing to comply with systems that don’t serve your soul. “Any win for the self, or the soul, is experienced as a death by the socialised ego,” he teaches, quoting Hollis.
This is why leaving family systems feels so terrifying. Why creating your own journey requires walking into the wilderness of the unknown. Why individuation always costs something.
But the alternative is living according to control-based systems, whether religious, political, economic, or corporate, that keep you performing and compliant rather than transforming and free.
Dr. Price’s vision is one of resurrection. Not just personal healing, but remembering that life is a sacred text, not a self-improvement plan. We are stories within a story, and transformation isn’t about getting better. It’s about experiencing life more completely and fully.
Three Golden Nuggets
Every Emotion Is a Teacher – Stay with what hurts long enough to hear its wisdom.
Refusal Is Devotion – What you stop performing becomes sacred space.
Live Mythically – See life as a sacred text, not a self-improvement plan.
About Dr. John W. Price
Dr. John W. Price is a licensed psychotherapist, Jungian scholar, and host of The Sacred Speaks podcast. He holds a Master’s in Clinical Psychology and a Doctorate in Jungian Psychology, and serves as President of the Board at the Jung Center of Houston. With over 28,000 clinical hours and 800,000 podcast downloads, he guides people through grief, identity collapse, and spiritual awakening.
You can watch the video of the conversation on YouTube
Find Out More About Dr. John W. Price
Website: www.drjohnwprice.com
Instagram: @thesacredspeaks
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSacredSpeaks