Vibrant Jung Thing: Jungian Images and Reflections

Does February Bring Any GIfts?

 "April is the cruelest month" wrote the poet T.S. Eliot.  When I first read that line as a teenager, my thought was, "Obviously, this poet wasn't a Canadian!"

Anyone who has consistently lived through winters in places like Oakville, Mississauga or Burlington will probably tell you that "the cruelest month" is either January or February.  I suspect that many would vote for February.

For many people, February can seem very bleak.  The year-end holidays are far behind us.  There is no major holiday to lighten our hearts, although we do now have "Family Day".  Snow or brutal cold --this year we have little of the former and plenty of the latter--can turn trips out into an ordeal.  The days are lengthening, it's true, but, at least in our part of the world, long strings of overcast days lead many people to feel starved for sunlight.

Does February bring us any gifts?  How could it?...

One of the most difficult aspects of this time of the year can be that we tend to feel shut in, and shut up with ourselves.  This can mean that we are left with what I often term the fundamental question of ourselves.  That is, with how to be who we are and feel good about it.  How to actively accept and cherish our lives, rather than just seeing ourselves as "one in a million".

Many of the things into which we pour our energy at other times of the year are just not available now.  Our response to that can be to curse the luck and hang on grimly until spring.  Or, we could use the time to really encounter ourselves.

Here are some things that might be helpful to think about at this time.  They've proved valuable to me, so I leave them with you for your consideration:

Have you ever told yourself the story of your own life?  To sit down and actually write your own life story can be a truly revelatory thing to do.

Have you ever thought about what the happiest time in your life was?  Have you ever thought about what was the saddest?

Who are the three most significant people that you have encountered in your life, other than parents or siblings.  Why are they important to you?  What does that tell you about yourself?

In what do you put your faith?  This might be a formal religious belief, or a personal spirituality or philosophy, or it might be something quite different.  What you fundamentally value can tell you a tremendous amount about who you fundamentally are.

It may be that, as you live with these questions, they take on a fundamental importance that leads you to want to explore new dimensions of yourself, with someone "on your side" to witness your journey.  Certainly that was my experience, and that is what initially led me into psychotherapy and Jungian analysis.

I'd welcome comments below from readers on how any of these thoughts relates to your lives at this time of year.

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

Identity and Anxiety in the Film, "Up In the Air"

Make no mistake, moving is living.  -Ryan Bingham

"Up in the Air", directed by Jason Reitman, stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick.  Clooney's character Ryan Bingham is a full-time corporate down-sizer whose life consists of an endless stream of business travel ("322 days last year").  He moves from place to place, letting people go from corporate roles when their employers cannot stomach doing it.  He has no permanent attachments to people, a desolate and hollow single bedroom apartment he never sleeps in, and he has accumulated 10,000,000 airmiles...

Up In the Air Official Website

Ryan Bingham's life is in airports and hotel rooms and is filled with constant movement.  The stability and security in his life, his secure base, is found precisely in those things that others find impermanent and impersonal.  His finely orchestrated and choreographed travel routine, his mechanized method of moving constantly from place to place gives him re-assurance, and in an odd way a sense of belonging.  Which is good, because Ryan has no permanent connections to anyone in his life. 

Ryan also has a budding career as an motivational speaker.  His message: "Make no mistake: your relationships are the heaviest components in your life....  The slower we move, the faster we die."

Ryan is completely identified with his corporate role.   His aircraft-bound life is an appropriate symbol of his existence on a deeper level.  In the terms of Jungian psychology, Ryan, like Christopher McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild is a true puer aeternus ("eternal boy").  He floats above life in his social self, and never puts down roots into the deep soil of his genuine self.  And he is danger of discovering that his life is tragic because there he has no remaining way to turn back.

In its own way, this is a very disturbing and provocative film, but it's a very good one.  It raises the question for each of us about how connected we're willing to be to the real substance of our lives.

I'd welcome comments below from readers on anxiety, identity and work.

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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© 2010 Brian Collinson

Remembering and Renewal

New Year's Eve and the New Year, with all its joy, and its bittersweet recollection of another year gone by, will soon be here.  Another year of memories, and another year of living behind us, with everything that entails.

For many, 2009 couldn't end too soon.  A year of stress and economic uncertainty like practically no other in recent memory. For many, changes in their lives with which they would rather not have to grapple. And yet, for many, 2010 approaches with signs of hope.

Is there any possibility of renewal for each of us, in our individual lives?  Here is a song that I think beautifully describes new life that can arise from our own depths, sometimes from hidden places of which the conscious ego is unaware.

Blackbird

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Easy or hard, you have now made your journey through 2009.  What is stirring in you at the beginning of this New Year, that might be "only waiting for this moment to arise"?  Is there any indication in your dreams at this time?  What might they show you?

My very best wishes to each of you on your individual journey to wholeness, especially at the turning of the year,

Brian Collinson

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

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2009 Brian Collinson

The Holly and the Ivy

Once again the Holidays have rushed to be upon us.  It often seems that, once we hit the first day of December, the calendar somehow catapults us forward through the month of December and into Hanukkah, Christmas and then the New Year. 

It's a busy time, full of a combination of demands upon us, social times, and a tidal wave of various and sometimes conflicting emotions.

It's a season that emphasizes joy.  Consequently, people who are going through a range of very common difficult human experiences can find this season particularly hard.    

For the recently divorced, separated or bereaved, the holidays, with their emphasis on family togetherness, can be a brutally difficult time.  Living with the reality that a relationship that once promised love and acceptance is no longer there, and often, dealing with limited access to children at a time of the year that may have had particularly intense connections with children in the past can be a particularly difficult emotional experience.

For many people, even encounters with relatives at this time of year can also be ambivalent or difficult.  It can be painful to realize that relationships with family members, that should be filled with closeness and trust are in fact much more tentative and superficial.  Where in earlier times, connections with relatives may have been much closer and warmer, now geographical distance and time constraints keep us much more nearly at arm's length.

Yet there is another character to this time of year, when the days grow short, and we long for the return of light and warmth.  This is a season which possesses an archetypal character and which has held significance for people probably just about as long as there have been people and they have been noticing their environment.  I think here of the words of an old carol of the season:

The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

Refrain:

Oh, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer,

The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir.

These are lines well known to many who come from the Christian tradition, as they come from a famous carol, "The Holly and the Ivy".  This carol actually has pre-Christian origins and may well date back over 1000 years. I believe that this carol points to some of the transpersonal meaning and significance of this season. 

For many centuries, people have always taken the evergreen holly and ivy indoors during the winter in the hope that the occupants of the house would survive difficult conditions just like the hardy holly and the ivy. The colours of the Holly and Ivy, green and red are traditionally associated with the winter solstice.

From very ancient days, people have always met the solstice with courage and hope, and faith in the return of the sun.  For us, too, these holidays call us to recognize that within ourselves which is evergreen, perpetually living and growing, even in those seasons and times when the warmth and light of life can seem very far away indeed.  In Jungian terms, to find this evergreen part of ourselves is to find the permanent and indestructible core of our unique personhood, the Self.  It is at that place within us that we touch the divine. 

I'd be very interested in your comments about how you approach the Holiday season. Are there symbols in this season that bring you life joy and hope?

My very best wishes to each of you on your individual journey to wholeness, especially in this Holiday season,

Brian Collinson

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

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2009 Brian Collinson

Work and Boundaries

This week I spoke with a very large number of people who are confronting serious boundaries issues in the workplace.

I don't mean facing sexual harassment, or things like that -- although that's common enough, unfortunately.  I mean situations where people are being asked, or more often told, to put up with working arrangements that take working life right inside their private lives.

Often these situations have to do with expectations around availability that completely obliterate the distinction between personal and private life. For instance, it seems that more and more people are expected to carry Blackberrys or pagers and to keep them on 24 / 7.

If you look on the web amongst thinkers who are identified as "advanced thinkers" or "those ahead of the curve", you may find justifications being put forward for this kind of thing.  You can find people saying that the division between personal and work life is obsolete.  That in the new era, people don't need to make that kind of a distinction anymore.

Maybe that explains the man I saw today on a hiking trail.  He was talking animatedly on his cell phone, and completely ignoring his wife and children.  The wife and kids didn't look too happy about it, but he didn't even seem to notice.

The plain fact of the matter is that work is a fluid, like a gas.  It will expand to fill the space you give it.  If you don't want it to take everything -- including your soul -- you have to establish boundaries.  If you don't have boundaries around your working life, you either are -- or are in great danger of -- becoming a workaholic.

You cannot possibly find your own individual path if you don't spend some time with yourself, alone, exploring yourself.  That's the only way to really, truly see yourself.  If a person keeps letting work have more and more of themselves, they run the risk that soon there won't be anything left inside of them but work.

Here are some very concrete actions that you might think about to establish your boundaries in the workplace:

1.  Cut the Electronic Tentacles

Think carefully about how you might keep some of yourself and your privacy free from electronic intrusion.  You might want to cut out answering your cell phone or Blackberry during meals. Maybe you need to free up specific blocks of "me" on the weekends when you're "electronically unavailable".  Consider keeping computers laptops and Blackberrys out of your bedroom, the family room and the dining room.

2.  Priorize...For Real! 

This can be a very important skill: developing the ability to decide what's most important -- and just accepting that there is less time than tasks that demand to be done.

3.  Get Real About Your To-Do List -- And Make Sure that Your Needs Are On It 

The endless to-do list isn't an efficiency tool -- it's a tyrant.  Decide on a small, reasonable number of things to put on the list.  Make sure that your own needs for growth and for fun don't get left off the list.

4.  Take a Very Hard Look at Your Own Motivations 

It's easy to blame an employer for letting work take over my life.  Oftentimes, employers do overload their employees, particularly in hard economic times.  However, there may be motivations that I have, and parts of my personality that help ensure that I'm continually behind the 8 ball.  Do I have an identity other than my role at work?  Do I use work to avoid facing things and relationships in my life?  Do I face overwhelming anxiety when I don't work?  Do I regard my over-busyness as a badge of status? It may be very important to address these kinds of issue with a therapist, and as soon as possible.

I'd be interested in your comments about the challenges you face in keeping boundaries intact in your life -- and the solutions that you may have worked out.  

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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© 2009 Brian Collinson    

Can I Get a Witness?

Some of you will recognize this phrase from R and B music; some of you may recognize it as a phrase used in the black church.  But it's a phrase that has an awful lot to do with psychotherapy!

A lot of people come into therapy because they need someone else to simply see and acknowledge the reality of their lives.  This is a very basic human need.  We all need someone, at some point, to see us, really see us, the way that we actually are, rather than the way that we might seem in all our social roles, and amidst all the pressures that we find in our lives to be what it is that others want us to be.

To have someone to whom we can actually tell our story.  Just as importantly, maybe more importantly, to tell our story with someone to witness it...  To finally have the chance to do that can be one of the most important and precious things in human life.  I certainly know that is the gift that my therapists gave to me.  I know that it is a precious thing for many who come into therapy.

I invite you to tell your story, to someone who really knows how to listen and who is not burdened with a lot of preconceptions about who you are.  You way well surprise yourself with who it is that you really are!

I'd be interested in your comments about the times in your life when you have felt really seen, heard ... witnessed.  

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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© 2009 Brian Collinson    

Looking Good... Feeling Empty

Out here in suburbia, great pressure is often placed on people to "look good".  People feel all kinds of pressure to keep their image in the finest order.

We get the message that it's important to keep your grass well-cut and your garden well-manicured.  It's important to drive a car that makes you look (and feel) like you're successful and upwardly mobile.  It's important that your kids wear the right clothes, and belong to the right after-school activities.  When you go to your yoga class, you should be sure to have the right mat and outfit...

And people do look good!  My, do they ever!  A walk down Lakeshore Road in downtown Oakville, my town, will surely convince you of that.  To the extent that having good stuff and doing all the "right" things can give you a good life, boy howdy, we suburbanites have got it down!

If that was all it took, we suburbanites would surely have the best lives imaginable...

So, if that's true, why do so many people seem to feel that they're "just going through the motions"?  How is it that I hear from so many people that, at times, life can just "feel hollow"?

To a certain extent, we all have to bow to the necessity of looking good, if we want to make our way in the world.  There are social conventions that we have to live within, if we want to have a job, get an education and do all the many things that we have to do to make our way.  To choose an extreme example, showing up naked to a job interview would be career-limiting, to say the least!

However, just fitting the idea of others about "how we should be" isn't enough for a fulfilling life -- even if those "others" are lifestyle advertisers who spend untold billions to influence us to remake our lives around their products.

Sooner or later in life, we are going to be strongly confronted with the question of what is really ourselves.  If we really take that question seriously, it can be the beginning of the greatest adventure in life.

When I feel empty in my life, it is not a curse.  It can actually be a gateway.  That which is empty wants to be filled.  At least if I'm aware of my own feeling of emptiness, I can start to seek out what makes me feel full, what makes me feel real.

For a significant number of people, that's where the journey of therapy begins...

I'd be interested in your comments about your journey, and about what is meaningful or important in your life.  

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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© 2009 Brian Collinson    

Other People?

Here's a reflection-provoking quote from Jung on how we tend to see other people.

"Everybody thinks that psychology is what he himself knows best  -- psychology is always his psychology, which he alone knows, and at the same time his psychology is everybody else's psychology.  Instinctively he supposes that his own psychic constitution is the general one, and that everyone is essentially like everyone else, that is to say, like himself.  Husbands suppose this of their wives, wives suppose it of their husbands, parents of their children, and children of their parents.  It is as though everyone had the most direct access to what is going on inside [him or her], was intimately acquainted with it and competent to pass an opinion on it; as though his own psyche were a kind of master-psyche which suited all and sundry, and entitled him to suppose that his own situation was the general rule.  People are profoundly astonished, or even horrified, when this rule quite obviously does not fit -- when they discover that another person really is different from themselves.  Generally speaking, they do not find these psychic differences as in any way curious, let alone attractive, but as disagreeable failings that are hard to bear, or as unendurable faults that have to be condemned.  The painfully obvious difference seems like a contravention of the natural order, like a shocking mistake that must be remedied as speedily as possible...."

"The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man" in Jung, C.G., Hull. R.F.C., trans.,

Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, Vol 10, second edition, 

(Princeton: University Press, 1989), para. 277

Jung highlights for us one of the very greatest dangers in our relations with other people: that we will see them as just like ourselves when in fact they are hugely different.  This is a trap that each of us falls into numerous times a day, very often without being aware of it.

I invite you to think about the people in your life.  Do you see them as more similar to yourself than they really are?  Can you be open to their psychology, their way of perceiving their lives?  Can you acknowledge who they really are, without a sense of threat?  This can be quite a challenge -- and an ongoing one with which we're never quite finished.  Yet the process of taking back our projections on others is a key part of individuation, of becoming ourselves.  Unless we can do this, we find ourselves fated to go round and round on the same old merry-go-round of relationship, never really knowing others or that part of ourselves that we have never lived, and have not yet acknowledged.

As always, I welcome your comments and your thoughts on relationship and "the other", 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

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© 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

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© 2009 Brian Collinson