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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PHOTO CREDITS: © Lukyslukys|Dreamstime.com 

© 2010 Brian Collinson

Coraline: The Real, the Ideal and the Substance of our Lives

Coraline is a recent movie, ostensibly geared to children.  Nonetheless, it tells a story deeply rooted in the realities of soul.  In that sense, its story is of deep relevance to all of us.

The film itself is something of a visual wonder.  It is an exercise in 3-D stop motion photography, giving a film experience that certainly I have never had before.  It's a very rich and imaginative world that is created, based on a story of fantasy and science fiction writer Neil Gaiman.

Coraline is a girl of about ten years of age, whose family moves from Michigan to "the Pink Palace Apartments", a big pink house near the mountains.  She is undergoing a difficult time accepting some of the realities of her life.  Her parents seem totally absorbed in their work as writers, and both the house and the environment in which she lives seem uninteresting and lacking in vitality.  Even the food she has to eat seems singularly boring and unappetizing.

In the midst of the house into which her family has moved, Coraline discovers a portal into another world.  In that world she discovers her "other Mother" and "other Father", who are, in essence, perfect, and geared to meeting all of Coraline's needs.  All the inhabitants of this world are more vivid, more interesting, more what Coraline would want them to be, with the one odd exception that they all have doll-like eyes made from buttons. 

Everything in this tiny parallel world seems ideal, and Coraline is highly tempted to flee to it to live in the realm of her "other Mother" forever.  But then she learns that the price of admission for entry to this world: she must give up her own real eyes, and have a pair of doll-like button eyes sewed into her eyes in their place, and then she will be imprisoned in the witch's world permanently.  With the help of an unusual cat, she is able to escape the witch's realm, and free her real parents from her grip. 

Like Coraline, sometimes the outline of our own real lives is something that we would rather not see, and in which we would rather not live. Perhaps we don't find it meaningful.  There can be a seductiveness to seeing things in our lives as the way that we wish they were, rather than the way that they are.  We willingly make the trade, and give up our own real eyes for illusory eyes that willing get caught up in the spider's web of illusion.  It is not without significance that the witch mother, seemingly so ideal, turns out to be a monstrous spider who devours the souls of her victims.  The ancient eastern symbol for Maya, or illusion, is the spider's web.

It's the cat -- the ancient symbol for authentic feminine instinct -- that is Coraline's aid and guide out of the witch world.  Through the earthy reality of the cat, Coraline finds her way back to her reality, which, once the seduction of "the ideal" or "what could be" is removed, turns out to be much more vital and alive than at first appeared.

It often takes real courage to give up our illusions and to live in the real non-idealized world that we actually inhabit.  It can take real strength to engage that world, and really dwell in it, rather than allowing fantasies of idealized possibilities to keep us hovering above our real lives.  We all know people whose lives never get grounded, who are always flitting from one idealized goal or dream to another, but who are never able to actualize any of their dreams or realize any of their aspirations in the real world.  Perhaps we recognize those tendencies in ourselves. 

The spider-witch can keep us so caught up Maya web to such an extent that we never materialize our projects, never really go after the things we really need in our lives, and perhaps we are never satisfied with our lovers, children or friends, and we always are looking for the "next great thing".

An important part of therapy can be finding ways to get "down to earth", and to really grapple with the lives and the selves that we actually have.  Like Coraline, we have to free ourselves from the witch's enchantment, and really live -- right here, right now.

I highly recommend this wonderful, charming movie!

My very best wishes to each of you on your individual journeys to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca ; Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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CORALINE

Directed by Henry Selick; written by Mr. Selick, based on the book by Neil Gaiman; director of photography, Pete Kozachik; edited by Christopher Murrie and Ronald Sanders; music by Bruno Coulais; production designer, Mr. Selick; produced by Mr. Selick, Bill Mechanic, Claire Jennings and Mary Sandell; released by Focus Features.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Dakota Fanning; Teri Hatcher Jennifer Saunders; Dawn French; Keith David; John Hodgman; Robert Bailey Jr.;  and Ian MacShane.

PHOTO CREDITS:  ©  LAIKA

© 2009 Brian Collinson 

 

The Unlived Life

We all live our lives, and in the course of just "getting through" our lives, we all have to make decisions.  With each major decision that we make, we open a door and walk through it.  We also close at least one door, perhaps several.  Sometimes that closing of the door is forever.  Sometimes we cannot go back and make the choice again.  The river of our life moves on, and we cannot easily reverse the flow of time, and head back upstream.

Whatever the choices are that we make, we are closing off options that we could have taken.  Sometimes these options call to us, beckon to us, despite our having left them behind.  Sometimes we leave them behind, and don't think of them.

But we can reach a point at which our unlived life comes back to us.  Consciously, or sometimes unconsciously, we can begin to feel the weight of what might have been if only we had made different choices, if our luck had gone slightly differently, if we had seen things just a little bit more clearly.  When I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw a painting, which seemed to me to capture this feeling with a great deal of eloquence,  American artist Ivan Wright's That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door).  For me it evoked all the "doors" that we do not open, and all the feelings -- hopeful, melancholy, grieving -- that are associated with them.  As clients remind me constantly, there are so many choices that could have been made, each with the seductive aura of possibility surrounding it.

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