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#703 Chuck’s Place: The Power of Experience

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“I only went downhill skiing once in my life, Chuck, many years ago,” states a client who has graciously given me permission to share her experience. “I was with a friend who kept telling me to lean. Every time I did, I fell. I just couldn’t get what her words meant. Eventually, I shifted my weight and didn’t fall. I realized, oh, that’s what she means by lean! You’ve been telling me I need to detach for years; I think I’m finally getting it.”

Next she shared what she described as a very powerful dream. “I’m with my son, (currently twenty-four years old, incarcerated in the New York prison SHOCK program) only he’s eight years old, at a summer camp, yet it’s also the SHOCK program. He seems removed. He’s playing with other kids. I’m furious and confront him. There is no outlet for my anger. The scene changes, I’m with an old best friend and her husband who moved down south years ago. I want to vent my feelings to her, but she doesn’t want to listen. Her husband has started a small fire behind a door. I fan the flames of the fire. He gets angry and chastises me. His wife tells him to leave me alone, but he forces his knuckles against my throat so tightly it cuts off the air and I begin to suffocate. I awaken, deeply sobbing, gasping for air. My first thought: my son will die in my arms; I can’t cope with the pain.”

She went on to explain that she realized that she’d been holding onto her son, frozen in time at eight years of age, and felt terror that he’d never stand on his own as a man in this world; that he would die, a boy, in her arms.

Since the dream experience she has received two letters from her son and noticed a marked shift in her own attitude as she read his words. “I finally am experiencing what you mean when you tell me to detach,” she said. “Something is definitely different. I love him, he’ll always be my son, but I’ve let go.”

I went on to suggest to my client that she had been approached by her dream shaman, in the form of the friend’s husband. Her preparatory work of long-suffering having been completed, she was ready to be grabbed, killed, and reborn, and ushered through the rite of passage where parents release their children to be adults in their own right. This rite transformed her inner experience, a transformation far more comprehensive than a rational understanding of letting go. She is changed. Our work together had been part of her necessary preparation for this rite, but this mystical rite was performed by her own unconscious, which had determined the time and the method for this terrifyingly necessary ritual.

Jung pointed out how the modern rational world had stripped away the ancient rites of passage that once ushered humankind through the stages of life. These rites had a social context where the entire community participated and acknowledged the shifts and new roles in the community for the newly initiated. Inwardly, the initiate experienced a profound and permanent change, a recasting of self. No one in the community was exempt from rites of passage. What is left in the modern world are mere vestiges of these rites, watered down and nearly meaningless, in the form of sacraments in our various religious institutions. Jung realized that the collective unconscious inside all of us had become the home of these necessary rites of passage and, when activated, provide an experience so powerful that we can’t help but be changed by them. This is why the rational mind fears the night and sleep, where conscious control can be usurped by the powers of the deep; yet this is the healing power of the instinctual psyche, which, if held back, results in psychic disequilibrium and unpreparedness for the unfolding journey of life.

In truth, the loss of the collective rites of passage leaves the vast majority of people emotionally unprepared for adulthood, especially since a living relationship with the unconscious has been subsumed by a modern scientific focus on brain chemistry as the solution to psychic disturbance. In the absence of genuine transformative experiences, we move into adult roles faking maturity and preparedness or dallying in a prolonged adolescence of lawlessness, irresponsibility, and addiction. Ironically, my client’s son has been participating in the SHOCK program, a program within the prison system where participants are ushered into adulthood along the lines of an ancient rite of passage. Participants are taken out of society and forced to submit to an arduous period of suffering where they are subjected to the whims and irrationalities of those in control. There are no mommy and daddy protectorates, and life is not fair. If you are to succeed, you must die to your infantile fixations and become an adult, prepared to take responsibility for self in the real world.

Amazingly, as my client now reads her son’s letters, she sees a maturing man behind his words. He is no longer her eight year old boy. She has released him and he has released his dependence upon her. In the truest sense, he is completing the “graduate school of life” and despite the fact that he will be saddled with a mark on his record, much like a scarlet letter, it pales in comparison to his solid maturity, hard won, as he is fully capable of taking on the challenges of adult life. This “degree” is far more valuable, in my judgment, than a graduate degree from Harvard in the hands of an immature, uninitiated personality. Of course there are no guarantees of success in life, but if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on him.

We must all go through our own SHOCK program. Unfortunately, there are far too few societal institutions capable of providing the necessary rites of passage. However, as my client’s experience demonstrates, the collective unconscious will come forth and perform the necessary rites. However, the prerequisites for a successful transformation are often a long period of suffering, including many groundhog day experiences, as well as a softening of ego control, as ego often alienates or devalues the deeper instinctual psyche. This experience of my client’s was well prepared for, and thus was transformative. I ask that we all energetically congratulate her!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#697 Chuck’s Place: Independent Action

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In the last year of his life, Carl Jung took on the project of expressing his core ideas and discoveries at a level comprehensible by the general public in his final book Man and his symbols. Ten days before his fatal illness, he completed his chapter to this work, which includes chapters written by his closest associates. In what were perhaps some of Jung’s final written words, he states:

“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be anyone of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worthwhile for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us. Certainly the conscious mind seems unable to do anything useful in this respect. Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in face of the present condition of the world.” (p. 101)

Last week in my blog, Why BP?, I suggested that the core conflict expressed by the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is the battle between two primary instincts: hunger and self-preservation. Reason, the hallmark of consciousness, is colluding with and actually possessed by the unchecked, insatiable greed of the out-of-control hunger instinct in all of mankind. Esther Harding states, reflecting upon the hunger instinct, in her book Psychic Energy:

Modern man has sought to compass the whole of life with his conscious intellect, only to find that the power of the irrational life force has not been overcome, but has retreated to the unconscious and from that hidden stronghold exerts a powerful and often baneful influence on his life. The power of his primitive greed bursts forth in wars of aggression and manifests itself in asocial business practices, while the exclusive concern with outer satisfactions leaves his soul hungry and starving. For man cannot live satisfactorily, cannot be whole, unless he is living in harmony with the unconscious roots of his being. Yet, how can he be at one with himself while the barbaric impulses of unredeemed instinct continue to hold sway in the unconscious? It is just because the ideals we hold up before us do not represent the truth about mankind that the hopes of peace and progress they embody so constantly elude us. Yet we fear to admit this obvious fact and to relax our efforts at self-improvement, lest we fall again into chaos and barbarism.” (p. 84)

Bringing Jung’s challenge to the “single individual” to change and solve the problem of greed, requires that each and every one of us identify our own relation to greed within our psyches and in daily functioning. If we understand hunger broadly, as the instinct to consume, especially in great quantity, we might automatically associate it with the addictions: food, drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. I suggest that we extend this energetically and ask ourselves, how do we spend the bulk of our energy? From this vantage point, we might ironically look at an obsessional disorder, such as anorexia, as an out of control hunger instinct, considering how much life energy is consumed by not eating.

We might view a fixation on reading as an insatiable hunger to consume words, facts, or fantasies to the exclusion of all other needs in life. Similarly, the insatiable attachment to constantly checking facebook, email, text messages, etc, is an addiction to consuming electronic connection, a barbaric dominance of the hunger instinct. We might view preoccupation with our physical appearance as a greedy monopoly on our daily energy for life. We could view dominating habits of complaining, being cynical, or judging, as acts of avarice feasting upon our energetic storehouse.

The possibilities for greed in our daily functioning are endless, and it requires conscious reflection on our part to take an honest energy inventory and face the truth of how we allow greed to dominate and control our lives. If we can reel in our attention from the greedy mirrors around us and tackle the shadow of our own greed, we can energetically change the world. This is the essence of Jung’s final guidance to us in how to change the world, which he acknowledged was in a very dangerous place. From the same chapter in Man and his symbols, he writes:

“Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide.” (p. 101)

As I stated last week, Mother Nature has taken the lead to restore balance now, and there is inevitable and obvious destruction in this healing process. If we can cap the greed in our own lives, we put ourselves in alignment with nature’s cure, and change the world!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#663 Chuck’s Place: The Hen, the Egg & the Golden Psyche

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The alchemists, like the ancient Chinese sages who created The I Ching, studied nature to discover the fundamental process at the heart of transformation. They focused on the hen and the egg. Within the egg lies a composition of primordial liquid. Encapsulating this liquid is a tough boundary, a shell. Sitting upon the egg and providing the heat for transformation rests the hen. Thus, the combination of these three elements —prima materia, a sealed container, and heat— yields a transformation of life from liquid prima materia to a solid living chick.

Modeled upon these principles, the alchemists set up their personal laboratories in an attempt to transform prima materia into gold. Jung discovered that the procedures and findings of the alchemists mirrored his own discoveries of the inner workings of the human psyche in its quest for wholeness.

In his own research, through psychotherapy, Jung discovered that the boundaries of the human psyche far exceed that which our conscious personality is aware of. In fact, he discovered that most of what we truly are is largely unknown or unconscious to us. What we know inside ourselves as I, is but one fragment, albeit important (!), of a much greater whole. For Jung, the major purpose in human life is to seek and unify our fragments, to become whole in a complete sense; joining known and unknown parts in a process he termed individuation. Individuation is the alchemical equivalent of creating the gold and, like alchemy, has the psychic equivalence of prima materia in the form of fragments, a sealed container in the form of a clearly defined psyche with boundaries, and heat, which is generated through the containment and amalgamation of one’s fragments into a unified whole. The heat is the intense emotional pressure generated through containing the oppositions inherent in our fragments. Individuation is the outcome of this transformative process where these fragments peacefully coalesce into a unified whole in full consciousness.

The first step in the process is to know our parts. What are they?! Where are they?! The part we know the best is our ego self. It consists of consciousness, attitudes, beliefs, skills, and psychic functions that come most naturally to us, and that we find most acceptable to the world. Then there are those parts of us, those tricksterish parts —feelings, thoughts— so unacceptable to our egos and the outside world that we repress them into the shadow, the darkness within. Then there is our deeply instinctual self —sexual and aggressive energies— that, in our highly refined, civilized self may remain deeply inaccessible to our conscious life. Beyond this, we house the burdens of our families and ancestors and the traits of our genetic line, as well as the archetypal patterns common to the entire human race, at its core. All these parts, many of which we are completely unaware of, exist and influence our moods, thoughts, actions, and reactions in daily life.

Then, of course, there is the multitude of projected aspects of our self, lodged in people, places, and things in the outside world to which we are fully unaware. The first challenge of individuation is to sift through the prima materia, to collect and own the elements of the self, both within and without. We must distinguish the I from the Not I if we are ever to arrive at the boundary of the self, which is our psychic container, our egg, our hermetic vessel.

As we develop the moral courage and psychic stamina to take ownership of our parts, however shameful, frightening, fragile, or unacceptable they may be, we contain them within and clearly define the circle around the self. This is the process of sifting through the prima materia as we withdraw our projections and shed light upon our shadow, holding firmly to what is truly ours. In the process, we may discover “alien parts” that have found their way into our psychic structures, clearly not I. These may be the archetypes, which have so much energy that they can burst through our boundaries and take possession of our egos. These represent forces that we can and must interact with, be schooled and nourished by. However, we must clearly not allow them to take up residence within the boundaries of the self, as they are liable to create distorted ideas of who we are, or create compulsions that we cannot understand, or terrify us with frightening thoughts and images.

In honor of the Lenten season, I refer here to the process Christ underwent in the desert, drawing his line or circle in the sand, casting out the devils, the Not I, from the boundaries of his Self. The shamans teach a magical pass called the lifesaving pass where you stand with feet shoulder width apart, arms extended straight down at a forty-five degree angle away from the body, and swinging from side to side, with hips remaining facing front, allow the upper torso and arms to swing back and forth in a circular motion, using the downward pointed hands to carve a complete circle around the self, which seals in one’s energy. One can also create a circle by sitting calmly on the floor or the ground and make a circle around the body with whatever seems resonant. Within that circle bring objects that symbolize all the known parts of the self, including the most contentious. Representations of compulsions, emotions, beliefs about the self that do not belong within the self should be cast outside of the circle. One might include as well a candle within the circle, representing both the heat and the light of consciousness, which sits like mother hen upon her egg. The psyche itself presents images of circles in dreaming to indicate prima materia that should be included within the boundaries of the self for our contemplation. Watch for those discarded pennies in the streets of your dreams!

The containment function of our hermetic vessel is completed with a seal, a hermetic seal. We seal our psyche by holding onto our parts in full awareness, despite, at times, our excruciating discomfort with the emotions they might generate, such as deep sadness, shame, rage, hate, and, yes, even love. Love often escapes our hermetic seal in a projection of weekend blissful love, spent upon our newly discovered god/goddess, only to have us wake up Monday morning, once again disappointed and deeply disillusioned. We might have been better served containing this energy, which seeks unification within the psyche, in our internal alchemical process of transformation, resulting in deeper self-love.

The containment of the powerful emotions of our opposing parts seek to burst apart the container through the outlets of projection, distraction, acting out, and general self-delusionment. The ability to hold the truths, with all their energies within, is the key here. Let us appreciate the patience of the hen sitting calmly upon her egg.

Finally, the heat. The heat is generated by our ability to keep the container sealed, following the guidance of mother hen. To accept and retain the unacceptable in the self, perhaps choosing not to open another kind of bottle to soothe the tension within, or perhaps to decide not to gossip with a friend about an “unacceptable other,” is to remain calm and patient, presiding over and containing within the facts and energies of the self. This process of bearing the tensions of those inner oppositions results, and here is the magic, in the transformation of our inner fragments into psychic gold.

And what might that gold look and feel like?: True self acceptance, calmness, compassion, removal of another veil as the crutch of another illusion is dismissed, a deeper alignment with and knowing of the true self, and the readiness to enter a relationship from a position of wholeness. This hermetic transformation is the birth of the chick, the inner child of innocence, freed of the tensions of the old oppositions, ready to enter new life.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#650 Chuck’s Place: The Wise Ancestral Self

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Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.

We are born into this world with bodies fully formed and constructed via ancient programs of evolutionary successes and, yet, our minds begin as blank slates, orphans of our ancestral parentage. What an apparent contradiction! This is the dominant scientific perspective and, in fact, the experience of most people with the birth of consciousness, or the ego, in early childhood.

This birth of awareness, of “I,” a separate self, is at once exciting and overwhelming. Excitement comes from discovering the freedom and power of autonomy and choice. Fear springs from the awareness that our newly discovered “I” is small and inadequate, hardly capable of caring for itself in a powerful world it neither understands nor can control.

This birth of consciousness is the moment of eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The punishment for awareness of a separate self is banishment from the garden, and the charge to the ego, that separate self, is to “go it alone,” despite its inadequacy and lack of preparation. Our banishment, the birth of the ego, is our separation from our wise ancestral self. We become a blank slate, seeking, with desperate extraverted eyes, to fill our egos with knowledge, gained from trial and error or formal education, to be capable of occupying a space in this world, with some sense of legitimacy, orphans that we are. This is the plight of the ego, alienated from its wise ancestral self.

We spend the better part of the first half of life struggling to find our place in this world. We seek to discover our talents, our callings, where we belong. We burn through many false starts, trial and error careers and marriages, all the while accumulating more knowledge and clarity of who we “really are.” Regardless of our successes and failures in life, at the deepest level, we remain orphans, at best very adequate, well adapted, successful orphans, but, underneath, aware of a void. For some, this void is a deep sense of inadequacy, while for others it presents as a deep spiritual longing. Jung would identify it as the challenge of individuation, where the ego accepts its rightful but relative place as part of the all-encompassing wise ancestral self.. That wise ancestral self is present and functioning throughout our lives, it is our true guardian angel.

For example, years ago, as I stood alone on a beach in Jamaica, forcibly loading my spear gun, I inadvertently stabbed the back of the spear deep into my palm. (I wrote about this experience in The Book of Us, but I am presenting a different perspective on it this time around.) At that moment, I fainted; my ego vanished. It was overwhelmed; it knew not what to do. When my ego woke up, I returned to consciousness: I was sitting on the beach with my palm packed in a lump of wet sand. The bleeding had been fully contained and coagulated; the wound was completely sterile and healing. Who did that? Who knew exactly what to do without any intervention of consciousness? No one else was on the beach, and my ego was fully asleep.

In another example, years after that, I was driving alone very late at night northbound on the Taconic State Parkway. I fell completely asleep. When I woke up I was driving, properly, in the southbound lanes of the Taconic State Parkway! Mind you, I was not drunk, in some kind of blackout state. I’d simply fallen completely asleep. Who took over the wheel and had the sense of humor to make me grapple with the fact that I had somehow successfully made a U-turn while my ego was asleep!

These are dramatic examples that, for me, illustrate the background activity of the wise ancestral self that operates on our behalf, fully independent of our ego awareness. Yes, we think we are orphans but, the truth is, our wise ancestral self is always participating in our lives. The real issue is whether the ego is in alignment with this wise ancestral self or completely at odds with it. Psychological symptoms, such as compulsions or compulsive projections, as well as physical illnesses often reflect interventions by our wise ancestral self to influence the decisions and actions of our alienated egos. I give the following hypothetical example, using a sexual compulsion. This is not a judgment about the type of sexual play enacted in S & M play. I assume here that my hypothetical client is disturbed by their compulsion. For example, this client might be an executive with an extremely powerful, dominant personality in the world, with a lot of control over others but possessed by a strong masochistic sexual compulsion. In this case, the wise ancestral self saddles them with a compulsion that attempts to deflate a power-hungry ego by compelling it to walk around on all fours with a collar around its neck, obeying the commands of a dominatrix. If this individual can rein in its alienated inflated ego and become humble, by assuming its rightful but modest place as part of a greater whole within the psyche, then the wise ancestral self could lift the compulsion and allow balance to be restored.

The introvert has the advantage of direct contact with the wise ancestral self because the primary focus is the inner subjective experience whereas the extravert focuses outside the self, giving primacy to the object. The introvert has direct access to the thoughts and feelings of the wise ancestral self who communicates in both images and words. The artist frequently receives the images and expresses them on a canvas or in other form. For those inclined to words, there is verbal communication with various parts of the wise ancestral self. Jung called this active imagination, where the ego volitionally communicates with the greater psyche to better understand its message or point of view. Channeling, at a certain level, is written or verbal contact with parts of the individual psyche or wise ancestral psyche, what Jung called the collective unconscious. At the deepest level, channeling is communication beyond the psyche and the confines of this world.

Dreaming is a daily dance with the greater psyche. Every time we write down a dream and feel and contemplate the characters and the situations in our dreams we are connecting with and seeking greater alignment with our deeper wise ancestral self. When I write down a dream, I structure it like a poem. For example, recently, I had the following dream:

My younger son was about nine years old, and was a DJ.
His dilemma was, how to get rides to his jobs.
I offered to take him to a particular job.
It turned out that he was the DJ for his own birthday party.
I was surprised. I didn’t know about the party.
He told me he had invited Efren, my old therapist.
I thought, “Why would Efren come?”
He didn’t know anyone.

When I first wrote the dream, I was struck by the image of my son spinning 45’s, as well as the interest of my old therapist in attending his birthday party. That was the extent of my dance with my dream. I returned later, continuing to visualize the spinning record. The word circumambulation came into my mind and I researched its meaning. Jung identified the circular process of attempting to find one’s way to the self as an individuation motif, the process of walking a labyrinth; the ego’s circuitous attempts through life to find its way back to the center, to the garden, to the wise ancestral self. As I visualized the needle on the record, going round and round, making its way toward the center, I recognized that my wise ancestral self was pointing me to embrace the innocence symbolized by my young son. This was further highlighted by my old therapist’s interest in going to the party. He had once been the projection of my wise ancestral self by my younger self, then in therapy with him. This continued dance with my dream shifted both my mood and awareness and directly impacted decisions that I made that day.

The challenge for introverts is to value their inner experiences in a world currently dominated by an extraverted prejudice. The challenge for extraverts is to recognize that the outer world becomes the palette for the deeper psyche to guide and alter judgments and actions. Owning projections for the extravert is an important means to dance with the inner images and align with the intent of the wise ancestral self.

In truth, there is no contradiction between psyche and body when we are born into this world, both are connected to their ancestral roots. It remains for the blank slate ego to rediscover its wise ancestral self. For the introvert, this is most accessible within; for the extravert without, via projection, but no one is a pure introvert or extravert. With a little effort, extraverts can dance with their dreams and introverts recognize their projections.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#646 Chuck’s Place: Extraversion, Codependency or Projection?

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Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.

Extraversion, codependency and projection all share a common quality: orientation of self to something outside the self. If I find myself dominated by something outside of me it’s important to find out why. Is it normal? Is it a problem? Or is it the basis of a new discovery about myself?

One of Carl Jung’s most enduring contributions to mainstream psychology was his differentiation of personality types illustrated in the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test. Jung first identified that all individuals fall into one of two major attitudinal orientations: introversion or extraversion. Introverts consider first their internal viewpoint; extraverts consider first the external situation and how best to fit into it. Each of these attitudes is normal and apparently biologically assigned, each having their unique adaptive value, hence, each contributing to the evolution and survival of the species. For example, the extravert might act quickly and concisely, the introvert more deliberately or hesitantly. Depending on the circumstances one or the other attitude may be the better choice.

Jung pointed to the value of each of these attitudes in nature and stated that although all individuals were born with a dominance of one or the other, either introversion or extraversion, they carried the recessive trait of the non-dominant attitude, which is a necessary part of life. For instance, a dominant introvert must access their extraversion in order to navigate the outside world. Similarly, a dominant extravert must access their introversion to be in touch with their personal needs.

People who by nature are extraverts can be judged to be codependent. This mistaken classification might originate in a negative judgment toward extraversion, as an attitude that negates the needs of the self. But how could the world function if at least half of its population didn’t focus on the true conditions outside the self and act in a way to accommodate them? Extraversion is a normal, vital attitude; part of nature, evolution, survival and fulfillment.

Codependency can be seen as a forced extreme extraversion. The condition of codependency was first identified in the alcoholism field to describe the emotional, cognitive and behavioral impact of living with a dysfunctional person, such as an alcoholic, addict, or violent rageaholic. The codependent is forced, for survival reasons, to orient themselves to the needs, expectations, and demands of the dysfunctional person. Over time, this mode of functioning becomes so deeply entrenched that the codependent may disconnect from their true identity as they morph into a being focused on placating the controlling tyrant. Codependency becomes a dysfunction itself, as this entrenched pattern of behavior may be repeated in future relationships. Overcoming codependency requires detaching from extreme extraversion, i.e., taking into consideration the needs of the self as well as determining one’s true type. The codependent might in fact be an introvert who has lived a life alien to their true nature. If the codependent is truly an extravert the work becomes one of tempering the extraversion with a deeper appreciation of the self.

Another of Jung’s major contributions to psychology was his unique take on the dynamic of projection. Jung realized that the unconscious psyche literally projects parts of itself, unknown to the ego, onto others outside the self, to reflect back to the ego, like a mirror, the true inner self. If the ego can recognize the reflection as a part of itself, it can take conscious ownership of this unknown quality and take up the challenge of integrating it into the personality where it can find life in a way compatible with the rest of the personality. However, if the ego does not recognize its reflection, whether because it finds it too distasteful, disagreeable, frightening, or attractive, it becomes compulsively attached to the bearer of its reflection. The psyche requires this. The rule is: one way or the other we must stay connected to all of the parts of ourselves. Either we struggle with the painful task of recognizing, accepting, and integrating all our parts or we remain compulsively bound to others who reflect and bear our disavowed parts.

This dynamic might also be mistakenly identified as codependency, as the dominant attitude that emerges when one is compulsively bound to another is another form of forced extraversion. Whether we love or hate the person who bears our disowned or unknown part we cannot withdraw our attention and focus from them; we orient our life in relation to them. The true basis for this apparent extraversion, or codependency, is actually a projection that confounds the ability to separate or detach from a person clearly “not right for them.” The dysfunctional other, whom we cannot separate from, is housing a part of ourselves, which, for better or worse, we must reckon with or remain helplessly tied to, as we live out our wholeness in projected form.

Who are you? Remember, extraversion in and of itself is healthy, normal, vital, and dominant in half of the world population. Just as that half needs to nurture its inferior introversion, the other half needs to nurture its inferior extraversion. However, extraversion can be called upon and driven to extremes in circumstances that give rise to codependency, as well as when a part of the self is unknowingly lost in another. Only deep reflection upon inner truth and outer attachments can clarify who you are and what is in control: extraversion, codependency or projection, or perhaps a combination.

As always, should anyone wish to write, I can be reached at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com or feel free to post a comment.

Until we meet again,
Chuck