Vibrant Jung Thing: Jungian Images and Reflections

Between Childrens' and Parents' Needs: the Generational Anxiety Sandwich

In this post, I would like to write about something that may have a sense of "taboo" about it.

 For many of us in the present day world, a powerful struggle goes on in our middle years.  There are greater and greater demands on our personal reserves of compassion, empathy, time, energy and money.  These resources are streaming out in two directions, both towards our children, and also towards our parents, and possibly other aging relatives, who are living to a greater age than ever they have in the past.

As many people in their middle years try to meet the needs of the younger and older generations, they find themselves nearly impossibly stretched.

In such a climate, it can feel almost impossible to meet the needs of others.  In addition, many people end up feeling like callous ingrates if they give any consideration to their own needs as people.  "How can I consider myself?" one often hears people in this position say, "My parents gave me so much.  I owe them so much--everything!" 

The really difficult thing is when the inner complex gives such guilting messages to an adult child, when the parents have actually not been kind or supportive to their children.  I experience this as a very frequent occurrence in my practice.  Many times, people who have been seriously emotionally or physically neglected by their parents -- or worse -- are the very people who respond in the most dutiful and self sacrificing manner.

And then again, it is often those same people, dutiful to their parents, who turn around and are completely self-sacrificing to their children.  And sometimes those children can be every bit as demanding unreasonable and narcissistic toward their parents as their grandparents are toward them.  And often that same mass of guilt and obligation that whips these people into unreasonably self-denying behaviour toward their parents will do the same when it comes to their children.

The particular psychological forces that bring this about are as individual as the people involved in the situation.  Very often, in dealing with these situations, healthy ordinary people need therapy to get to the root of the problem, and to free themselves from the crushing guilt.  Guilt can be an extremely powerful emotion and motivator, and it is often necessary to confront it in the safe environment of therapy to be able to remove its power.

The other hugely difficult component of these intergenerational binds is that they often lead to enormous amounts of anxiety.  This can prove as difficult, if not more so, than the guilt.  However, what I am going to say next about that guilt may prove surprising, even shocking!

Which is, that it may actually be quite a good thing that the individual is experiencing the guilt!  "Wow, Brian" you might be thinking, "what a horrible thing to say!  ...Speaking of callous!...  How can you possibly wish anxiety on already-burdened people?"

Now, I don't wish anyone unnecessary pain, and, all other things being equal, I would wish that no one would have to deal with excessive anxiety.  But in a situation like this, I believe that it is often the case that the anxiety has a psychological purpose.  Simply put, the intense anxiety makes us aware that there is a conflict, and that the status quo is simply untenable for the individual. 

It may be that the guilt is intense for such a person, but the anxiety shows us that there is tension, that the needs of the self are not willing to just continue being put on the shelf and denied.  The complex of guilt and obligation within us may spur us on to utterly altruistic self-destruction...but that complex is not all that there is to us.  There is the part of us that recognizes that the purpose of human life is to become the person who is latent within us, that that is why we are here in this life.  That part will allow us to make some compromises, but it will not allow us to completely sell ourselves out -- not without our paying a very dire, wrenching psychological price.  

It's easy for many people to feel a strong impetus to self-sacrifice, but, psychologically speaking, it's important to realize that there may be very real limits to the degree to which we can put our own needs on one side to care for and meet the needs of others.

This awareness might lead us to face an even more fundamental questions like, "How do I begin to live my own real life?" and "What is meaningful to me?"  These questions takes us to the very heart of Jungian analysis, and true depth psychotherapy.

I'd gratefully welcome comments from readers on these issues, which affect very many of us.  How have you experienced the "generational sandwich"?.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2010 Brian Collinson

Job, Identity, Anxiety

I don't know what might motivate an employer to choose to lay people off 3 weeks before Christmas.  However, judging from the calls I received from clients and potential clients prior to the New Year, there were quite a few employers who took such action this year.

Having been on the receiving end of such news myself in prior times, my thoughts and very best wishes are with anyone who had to confront that reality this holiday season.  Here's to better times and a better job market for all. 

This is difficult for people all on its own -- just dealing with the economics of job loss.  However, when it's compounded by issues of identity and self-worth, it can become incredibly painful, to the point where it is almost unbearable.

It's all too easy for all of us to allow our identity to become completely bound up with our social role and with others' expectations of us, especially where work is concerned.  In his writings, Jung warned incessantly of the dangers of becoming over-identified with the social self, the "persona" as he called it. 

Today, for many people, the pace of work simply increases and increases as organizations make new demands on their employees.  More and more consideration, energy and time is demanded by the workplace, and, for many, there is intense and endless anxiety about work, about whether one's job is stable and sustainable, about relentless change, and often about the endless political complexities of workplaces where resources are scarce and communication and leadership are inadequate for the task at hand.

You might think that these factors would lead individuals to be less and less identified with work, but in an odd way, the effect seems often to be just the reverse.  Even though work is fraught with anxiety, people become strangely identified with their work role.  Perhaps it's precisely because so much effort has to be put into keeping working life on an even keel, and so much worry and anxiety keep pulling individuals back to confronting their work. 

However, it's essential for each of us to hold on to the realization that I am not identical with my work role.  Don't allow work to consume the substance of your life.

Easy to say, but doing it is often not as simple as that.  Often it is not just the identity at work that confines us.  It can be just as much about the way that we are perceived in various social settings, and in the community at large, through our work roles, as it were.  Very many of us are powerfully addicted to the drug of success.  Or, perhaps more accurately, we are highly invested in being seen as a success, perhaps to such an extent that all of our self-esteem and self-respect is riding upon it.

This gives rise to some fundamental questions:

• What really is it for me to be a success?  How will I know when I get there?
• Who gets to say whether I'm a success?  Me, or some outside authority to which I've given the power to say whether I've made it or not?
• Is it what I own that makes me a success, or is it what I am?
• And simply, am I over-identified with my work role?  How do I understand myself independent of it? 

Don't let your work keep you from your life.  Don't let it persuade you that it is your life.  Don't let it keep you from your vocation, what it is that you are really meant to be and do.

I'd be interested in your comments about how you experience work, and how you understand yourself and your identity independent of your job, and, as always, any other comments that you might have.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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PHOTO CREDITS: ©Photovibes| Dreamstime.com

© 2010 Brian Collinson

Mother, Father, Family

Here's a quote from Jung on the key importance of the mother, father and family archetypes:

How is it then, you may ask, with the most ordinary everyday events, with immediate realities like husband, wife , father, mother, child? These ordinary everyday facts, which are eternally repeated, create the mightiest archetypes of all, whose ceaseless activity is everywhere apparent even in a rationalistic age like ours.... The deposit of mankind's whole ancestral experience--so rich in emotional imagery of father, mother, child, husband and wife... has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic powers.

Carl Jung, "The Structure of the Psyche", in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Second Edition, volume 8, paras. 336-337, Princeton: University Press, 1969

So pretty clearly, Jung thought that coming to terms with the mother, the father, and the family was a matter of very great psychic importance. How does our experience of father and mother impact us? What is its particular significance?

As with most things in the realm of the psyche, we can say that the answer to that question is going to vary immensely from individual to individual. However, we can be sure that a person's individual experience of parents and siblings--their family--is going to have an immense impact on how the individual feels about her- or himself, the world, and his or her place in it. That experience is going to have a profound effect on everything from very mundane, ordinary, every day events right up to and including a person's deepest and most expansive religious and philosophical principles. Because, among other things, it is going to have an immense bearing on what the psychologist Erikson referred to as basic trust.

It can require a very major effort in a person's psychotherapy to understand the impact of that person's father and mother on their psychic development, in all its complexity and dimensions, positive and negative. We can't open all that up in one blog post. But here are a few questions to be thinking about:

The Mother and Father Archetypes in the Psyche

• The bond with the mother is the earliest bond, and the one with the greatest impact on a child. It has a great deal to do with the feeling of belonging in the world, and feeling good about oneself, about one's own being. How has your experience of your mother left you feeling about your life, your value, and how welcome you felt in your family -- and in the world?
• The bond with the father is deep, but has a rather different character than the bond with the mother.  At its most fundamental, it has to do with how we feel about ourselves, also, but it has an aspect to it of how we feel about our ability to be effective and capable people who can get what we want and need from our lives.  How has your experience of your father left you feeling about yourself as an agent in the world?  How has it left you feeling about your own power and ability? 
• If I am a woman, how did my relationship with my mother make me feel about myself as a woman? If I'm a man, how did my relationship with my mother tend to make me feel about women?
• If I am a man, how did my relationship with my father make me feel about myself as a man? If I'm a woman, how did my relationship with my mother tend to make me feel about men?
• Was I able to be myself in my family?  Or did I learn to pretend to be someone else, someone more acceptable, perhaps?  Someone tougher, or more capable?  Or "less emotional"?  Or someone invisible, or someone "who doesn't have needs"?  Or more "masculine"?  Or more "feminine"?  Or did I get the message that I could just relax and be myself? 

This can be an intensely emotional area for people. Not without reason did Jung call these "the mightiest archetypes of all". Exploring the painful territory around this part of one's life has led to many a journey to healing in therapy. I know that to be true of many of my clients, and I know it to be true in my own life.

I'd be interested in your comments about the impact of the parental archetypes in your life. How did you internalize your parents and your family?

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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PHOTO CREDITS: ©Gary Woodard| Dreamstime.com

© 2009 Brian Collinson

Complexes

It may come as a shock to realize it, but a human being is not just one solid big lump of personality, with unified intent and will.  This is what most people choose to believe, but the psychological truth is quite different.  

In each of us there are many parts, many elements that go into the composition of our personality, of what it is that makes me "me".  Jung called these elements in the psyche complexes,for some technical reasons that we don't need to go into here.

I think that nearly all of us will have had the experience of finding ourselves in the grip of a mood or a way of thinking that seems odd or strange, or where we feel that "something had a grip on me then", or where we feel "not ourselves".  We can feel this associated with strong emotion or with a sense of compulsivity.  Sometimes, it can have what I call a feeling of "time warp" about it, where we even feel ourselves back at some point in our past, feeling a long familiar emotion.  I know for a long time, when confronting bosses or employers, used to find myself feeling like I was 10 years old, sitting across the dinner table from my father!  Such a feeling reaction is a sure sign of the presence of a complex.

The trouble with complexes is that they can end up taking us places, in our emotions and thinking, that we just really don't want to go.  We can find ourselves over-reacting, or locked into rigid ways of thinking, or compulsively doing things that we just really don't want to do and that "just aren't me" in the truest sense of the word.

So what's to be done?

Well, the surprising paradox is that there are good things to be found in our complexes, as we come to understand them, and the pervasive effect that they have on our psyche. Freud said that the royal road to the unconscious is through dreams.  Jung disagreed with him at this point: for Jung, the royal road to the unconscious is through the complexes. And it is in the unconscious that our real life is waiting for us.

Real psychotherapy engages us with our complexes, whether they concern our father, our mother, money, cleanliness, social phobias, addictive behaviour, authority figures religious complexes -- whatever.  It's only by having the courage and fortitude to bring our complexes into the light of day, usually in therapy, that we can begin to diminish their power, and to feel the energy behind them begin to re-animate our lives.

Do you know where your complexes are?  Are you willing to take them on, to really look at them, and see the places in your life where they really run the show?  It can be humbling to do this, but it can also make us feel vastly more alive.  

To paraphrase, better the complex you know than the complex you don't!

Thank you to those of you who suggest possible topics for my posts , and how expressed an interest in a post on the topic of complexes.  As always I welcome your comments, and I look forward to dialoguing with each of you.  

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca 

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

Get "Vibrant Jung Thing" posts delivered to your email using the "FeedBurner" box in the left column!

PHOTO CREDITS:  ©Photon75 | Dreamstime.com; ©  Dononeg| Dreamstime.com   

© 2009 Brian Collinson