The Coming-Apart That Isn't a Breakdown

What the Research Actually Shows

The honest place to begin is that the question itself is old, and researchers take it seriously. When a person’s sense of self starts to dissolve and the world floods in more intensely than before, clinicians and psychologists have long argued about whether they are watching a mind break down or a person break open. The field even has a term for the second possibility — spiritual emergency — coined to describe a spiritual awakening that has become a crisis, and that can look, from the outside, indistinguishable from psychosis.

What the data suggest is that the two overlap in some places and part ways in others. In a 2019 study of 250 people, researchers measured spiritual emergence(y) against the symptoms of psychosis and found it correlated with the positive symptoms — heightened or altered perception, unusual experiences, a sense of expanded meaning — but had very weak to no correlation with the negative symptoms: flat emotion, withdrawal, the draining-away of drive and cognition (Harris, Rock & Clark, 2019). That distinction turns out to be practically useful. An awakening tends to be luminous and disorganising but still full; the flattening, deadening, self-losing symptoms are the ones that point away from awakening and toward illness.

The second finding worth holding is that spiritual struggle is not automatically a good thing. Across a large body of work, tensions and conflicts about sacred matters — what psychologists call religious and spiritual struggles — are reliably linked to greater psychological distress and lower wellbeing (Exline, Pargament, Grubbs & Yali, 2014). Growth can follow, but it is not guaranteed; whether a person comes out enlarged or diminished depends on moderating factors — an accepting rather than panicked attitude toward the struggle, a sense of meaning, and support to lean on. In other words, the crisis alone does not decide the outcome. How it is met does.

And there is a reason this so often lands in the middle of life. The perimenopausal transition carries a measurably elevated risk of depression: a 2024 meta-analysis of seventeen cohorts and more than sixteen thousand women found the odds of significant depressive symptoms markedly higher in perimenopause than before it (Badawy et al., 2024). This matters enormously for the question at hand. The years when women most often describe a spiritual opening are the same years when clinical depression and anxiety genuinely become more likely. Some of what feels like a mystical unravelling is a mood disorder that will respond to treatment — and mistaking one for the other, in either direction, costs a great deal. The research does not tell you to romanticise the darkness. It tells you the states are real, that they overlap, and that ruling out treatable illness is part of taking a spiritual passage seriously, not a betrayal of it.

What Perukua Says About Falling Apart

Perukua — the Australian vocalist and women’s facilitator whose sound and practices have reached women in more than 63 countries — speaks about this from the inside, because her own turning point looked, to everyone who loved her, like a collapse. She was building a career as a jazz singer, climbing exactly the ladder she was supposed to climb, when something underneath refused. “Inside me everything was dying,” she says, “because the soul had already understood: this is not your path.” What came next she does not soften. “Everything collapsed and burned,” she recalls. “And then, slowly, a new woman was born” (interview with Diana Dzhalalova).

She is unusually precise about the split that makes an awakening so frightening — the way the mind and the body disagree. “The mind goes mad,” she says, “but the body says yes, yes, yes.” That was the part no one around her could see. “All the musicians said I had lost my mind. My mother said I had lost my mind. But I followed the path anyway” (interview with Diana Dzhalalova). It is a description almost every woman in a genuine transition recognises: some deep instinct pulling toward a change that, described out loud, sounds insane.

Crucially, Perukua does not present the coming-apart as the achievement. She is emphatic that it is only the doorway. “Awakening is only the first step,” she says. “To actually live in that state takes time, complete devotion, and courage — because almost everyone around you will say you have gone mad” (interview with Diana Dzhalalova). And she frames the whole ordeal not as a special gift but as an ordinary, brutal shedding: “It was as if layer by layer everything was being peeled off me — everything that stopped me from being truly myself” (interview, Everything Is Within You, with Ekaterina Samoylova). She calls this an ego death, and she is careful to add that it cost her the whole world she had built: “It was the death of the ego, but also the death of my career. All the music I knew died along with it.” This is not a woman selling awakening as bliss. It is a woman describing a real dismantling — and insisting it was a becoming, not a disorder.

Why the Two Look Alike — and How the Body Tells Them Apart

Put the science and Perukua’s account side by side and a workable way to tell the difference appears — not a diagnosis, but a compass. Both an awakening and a breakdown begin the same way: an old identity stops holding, feeling intensifies, and the familiar self seems to come apart. That shared opening is why the two are so easily confused, and why frightened onlookers reach for “she has lost her mind” in both cases.

The difference is in the direction the coming-apart moves. An awakening, even at its most painful, tends toward more contact — more feeling, more presence in the body, more honesty, a widening sense of meaning, and, eventually, more capacity to function and to love. A breakdown, or a depressive illness wearing spiritual clothes, tends toward less: withdrawal, numbness, a flatness that nothing reaches, an eroding ability to sleep, eat, work, or keep yourself safe. This maps almost exactly onto the research. The features that travel with genuine spiritual emergence are the positive, full ones; the negative symptoms — the deadening and draining — are the warning zone (Harris, Rock & Clark, 2019).

This is where Perukua’s lifelong instrument — the body — becomes a practical test. Ask not what your thoughts are doing but what your body can still do. Can you come back into it? Feel your feet, the chair, your own breath? Can anything still soothe you — warmth, a tree, a hand, a low sound? In an awakening, however stormy, the body remains reachable; you can be brought home. In the flat, negative territory, nothing lands, and that is precisely the sign that this needs care rather than ceremony. The body being unreachable is not a deeper stage of the journey. It is the point at which the journey is not the whole story, and a doctor belongs in the room.

A Practice for Staying Grounded While You Change

If you are in the middle of a real transition — not in crisis, but coming apart in the ordinary, disorienting way — the task is not to stop the change but to stay grounded enough to move through it with your feet under you. Perukua learned this in her own worst passages. “My God, what is happening to me, I am simply dying, I cannot breathe,” she remembers thinking — and what she did was physical: “I would take a taxi to a park where there were trees, and just sit, touch the trees, and breathe” (interview with Diana Dzhalalova). The point was not the trees. The point was coming back into a body that the spinning mind had left behind.

Build a short daily version of that. Once a day, before the world reaches you, sit and put one hand on your chest and one low on your belly. Breathe slowly, feeling both hands move, and say quietly, “I am here. I am in my body. I am alive.” Two minutes is enough. Then, on paper, keep a simple discernment: two columns. On the left, what you are moving toward — anything, however small, that this upheaval is pulling you into (more truth, more feeling, a real need finally named). On the right, what it is pulling you away from — sleep, food, people, the ability to function. Over a week the pattern speaks for itself. A page filling steadily on the left is the signature of a passage. A page filling only on the right is the signature of something that needs help. If it helps to have a hand to hold through this, Perukua guides women through exactly this kind of listening — how to hear what the change is asking of you without losing your footing — in her course How to Hear and Follow the Voice of Your Calling.

One honest paragraph, because this is not a small subject. These practices are for grounding and discernment during an ordinary, difficult transition. They are not a treatment, and they are not a reason to wait. Perukua is an artist and facilitator, not a doctor. If you are going days without sleep, hearing voices that command you, convinced of a mission or power that could put you or others at risk, unable to care for yourself, or having any thought of not wanting to be alive, that is not a further stage of awakening — it is a medical emergency, and you should reach a doctor or crisis service now. And if a low, flat mood has lasted more than two weeks, please treat these practices as something that sits alongside proper care, and take any question of medication or hormones to your doctor. Choosing care is not the failure of a spiritual passage. It is how you live to finish one.

In Closing

There is a particular terror in a coming-apart — the fear that you are not changing but breaking, and that no one can tell the difference, least of all you. What both the research and Perukua’s own history offer is not a promise that every unravelling is holy, but a way to read the one you are in. Notice which way it moves. Keep coming back into your body. Let the page tell you whether you are being pulled toward life or away from it. And if the answer is away — if nothing reaches you — get help without shame, because choosing care is not the end of a spiritual life but the condition of having one. The old self may indeed be coming apart. That is not always a breakdown. Sometimes it is the only way a truer one gets to be born.

This piece is about telling a spiritual awakening apart from a mental-health crisis. It is not a diagnostic tool. Spiritual emergence and clinical illness can look alike and can occur together. If you are unable to sleep or function, losing touch with reality, or having thoughts of not wanting to be alive, seek medical help immediately. Perukua is an artist and facilitator, not a doctor; these reflections support proper care but never replace it, and no medication or hormone treatment should be started or stopped on your own.

References & Quote Sources

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