Behind Rising Joy
The Theory Behind Rising Joy
(And Why I’m Telling You Now)
Have you ever been told that falling apart means something is wrong with you? That the anxiety, the sleeplessness, the days you can’t find your footing, are proof you’re failing at this?
I was told that too. Not by doctors. By the version of myself who still believed a good life was supposed to feel steady.
So I want to tell you where the idea at the center of Rising Joy actually comes from, because it isn’t mine. I didn’t invent the notion that unraveling can be the mechanism of growth rather than the opposite of it. A Polish psychiatrist named Kazimierz Dąbrowski built an entire theory around it, back in the 1960s, after watching people come through the wreckage of World War I. Some came out broken. Some came out more whole than they went in. He spent the rest of his career asking why.
He called it the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Yes, disintegration, the same word we use for things dissolving, burning, washing away. He meant it literally. He believed that before a person can build a truer self, the old self, the one built from other people’s expectations and your own unexamined habits, has to come apart first. Not fall apart in the sense of collapse. Come apart in the sense of a structure being dismantled so something more honest can be built in its place.
Dąbrowski’s translator and closest scholar, William Tillier, has spent decades making the case that this theory asks us to look at anxiety, depression, and crisis differently. Not as malfunctions to medicate away as fast as possible, but as signals, sometimes, that a person’s internal architecture is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do under pressure. He’s also careful, and I want to be careful here too. Dąbrowski never said every crisis leads somewhere higher. He believed it takes something more: a real, sustained willingness to sit inside the discomfort and ask honest questions about who you are and what you actually value, instead of rushing to feel normal again. The disintegration opens the door. Walking through it is still up to you.
Maybe you’re wondering what any of this has to do with a woman in her fifties or sixties, standing in the wreckage of a marriage or a career or a version of herself that quietly stopped being enough. Fair question. Dąbrowski built his theory mostly around gifted children and highly sensitive adults. He wasn’t picturing us.
But here’s the thing. Sal Mendaglio, one of the most respected scholars still working with this theory today, has spent years arguing that people shrink it too small when they treat it as only a giftedness tool. He’s said plainly that it was never meant to be boxed into one population. He’s the one who’s told other researchers, in print, to go looking for what this theory has to offer outside the world it started in.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m not claiming Dąbrowski had midlife women in mind when he wrote this. He didn’t. What I am saying is that the mechanism he described, the falling apart that precedes something truer, doesn’t seem to care how old you are or what kind of ending brought you to it. A career ending. A marriage ending. Kids grown and gone, leaving a silence you don’t recognize. Your own body changing in ways nobody warned you about.
These are our version of the wreckage. And I think we get to ask the same question Dąbrowski asked. Not why did this happen to me, but what wants to be built from what’s left.
This isn’t a theory I’m going to hand you cold, the way a textbook would. I’m going to keep translating it, piece by piece, into what it actually looks like to live it. The levels. The overexcitabilities, which is a clinical word for something you probably already recognize in yourself, that heightened way of feeling, sensing, and questioning that made you exhausting to some people and exactly right to others. I’ll get into all of it as this space grows.
For now, I just wanted you to know the ground you’re standing on isn’t sand. It’s real thinking, tested and argued over by real scholars for sixty years. I’m just the one who’s lived it and is willing to say so out loud.
You don’t have to have a name for what’s happening to you. You just have to be willing to stay in the room with it a little longer than feels comfortable.
Come sit with me a while. There’s more to build here than either of us can see yet.