Gwen Ewan

In real estate, it is said that there are three important factors to consider in buying a property – “location, location, location”. In other words, the context of a property is crucial. Similarly, a person’s relationship to their context – their personal location, or their place in the world – is crucial to the development of a coherent “self” and thus to their daily functioning.

In The New Manual for Life, Ben Wong and Jock McKeen wrote that in order to survive in an unpredictable world, children “gradually build up memories of where they wish to be in relationship to [the] objects” in their world. Thus locating ourselves is a developmental task that begins early and continues all of our lives. In the face of the profound insecurity of life, we struggle to locate ourselves and make a world for ourselves.

The ‘Mini-Mental Status’ exam of psychiatric practice (used to establish whether a person is ‘sane’ or ‘psychotic’) includes an assessment of how an individual is ‘located’ in three dimensions – time, place and person. Again, location, location, location. To the degree that a person is not located in those three dimensions, they will have difficulty functioning in the day-to-day world.

We can get a clearer understanding of location by looking at dislocation. Dislocation is influenced by many factors including such stressors as lack of sleep, pain, drugs (both street and prescription), or emotional upheavals like bereavement.

Time dislocation is probably the most familiar to people. For example, how often do you hear someone say “Is it the 17th today?, or “Oops, I wrote 1998 on this check instead of 2008”? Dislocation as to place is less common, but certainly many of us have had the experience of thinking we are on one street then realizing that we are on another. Or, believing for a moment that we are in our own bed at home before realizing we are in a hotel in a distant city and that the bathroom is to that side of the bedroom, not this.

The least common in most people’s experience is dislocation as to person – that is, the loss of a sense of “who I am”, of identity, of personhood. The classic example of this is the individual who insists that they are Napoleon or God. I have not encountered this outside a Mental Health Clinic or hospital, but I do remember giving my original surname after 10 years of using my married name. And many people remember occasions in Haven courses where they discovered that some part of their identity no longer fit. I once watched a young man stand up for himself, and in doing so, redefine himself as a ‘strong’ person rather than the ‘weakling’ that he always thought that he was. He re-located himself. In this sense, dislocation as to person is not so unusual.

In working with this young man, we first helped him to locate by encouraging him to ‘ground’, and to be well connected to the leader of the course and the circle of fellow participants around him. With this location of safety, he made the transition from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’ – a transition that included a period of dislocation that allowed room for growth.

This is a good example of how our location as to person is tied closely to boundaries. Boundaries, of course, are how we define ourselves. Boundaries are how we locate ourselves in relationship to the objects and people in our world and define who we are. The more we are grounded, settled in our selves, settled as to who we are, clear in our boundaries, then the more we are located. Being well located is associated with feeling good about ourselves, low anxiety and good functioning. This is a state conducive to moving ahead in life – working productively, achieving our goals, having settled and satisfying relationships. This is a launching place from which we have the security to risk and to grow. Growing often requires risk, a step into the unknown, before we can redefine the self and our relationship to the objects and people of our world.

Thus, personal location is not static. It is moving, flexible, a rhythm; this is the dilemma and the challenge of living.