Tag Archives: sexual instinct

Chuck’s Place: Terror of Woman

Shed light upon the fog of projection… stay with the truth…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

My intentions for this blog are: (1) to offer knowledge that might be helpful to those working through PTSD, and (2) to provide a greater context to a core problem of humanity that is of particular relevance to understanding and resolving our current Earth crisis. This crisis has reached a point where none should hold back their piece of the puzzle, as all pieces of that puzzle are needed to solve our current woes and launch us into health.

The TV show Grey’s Anatomy offered a boldly graphic and accurate presentation of Acute Stress Disorder, experienced by a woman immediately after a rape (Season 15, Episode 19). This blog is a contribution toward the complete healing of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the typical clinical progression of such a trauma, due to violence inflicted by another. At a certain point in that healing journey, understanding the objective reasons for the perpetrator’s actions is helpful in clarifying the truth that it really wasn’t my fault.

My Irish biological father was a violent alcoholic who beat my mother throughout her three pregnancies. When mother and I were as one, in symbiotic union in our journey through uterine space, we both absorbed the shocks of my father’s rapes and many physical blows. I was born with PTSD locked in the marrow of my bones, as well as in the subtlest dimensions of my Soul.

It would be my destiny, my karma, to locate the cure for PTSD in this lifetime, a deeply personal affair. PTSD would prove to be my worthy opponent in this lifetime. A worthy opponent, in the shamanic world, is that which most forces one to wakeup. Outwardly, in my chosen career as a psychotherapist, many have trusted me with their own frozen selves, the legacies of their own abuse. Within the shaman’s world I was led to recapitulation, the tool central to the complete healing of PTSD.

But beyond healing, what is the true etiology of man’s violence—in its many forms—toward woman? Today it is discovered that mass murderers hate women. Jeffrey Epstein clearly had an absolute need to completely control teenage girls. What was he so afraid of?

In my personal case, my biological father hailed from deep Irish culture, whose perennial ally has been alcohol to dream beyond the felt tyranny of the Mothership, England. An ally, in the shaman’s world, is a spirit that grants access to other worlds but also exacts a high toll in exchange. That same ally also gives license to the shadow’s rage at its impotence to rise above its child prison. Many a ‘good’ Irish woman hides the true deeds of absorbing the rage unleashed by the drink.

My biological father’s mother suffered from migraines and insisted my father be the one delivered, as priest, from the family to the Church. He opposed her will with the help of his ally, alcohol, and displaced his rage upon my mother, the intimate mother replacement in his life, his wife. His ally eventually tricked him into early death. Such is the fate of the refusal to reconcile the forces within the psyche with consciousness.

My adoptive Russian Jewish father, my one true father in this lifetime, venerated my mother, to a fault. Both Mother Russia, which had been his family’s home until the pogroms, and his Jewish matrilineal heritage sanctified Mother, regardless of their patriarchal dominance in practice.

Freud recognized the overarching power of Mother for son. He little understood woman, but he knew of the primal attachment and attraction between mother and son. Freud also never really valued the world beyond the nuclear family. For a son, the oedipal complex, the wish to fully unite with mother, was the single most important fact of life.

A wife, like civilization itself, was but a sublimated second best for mother. Man can erect towers, but even they limply compare to union with mother. For Freud, the confirmed atheist, Mother truly was god, and her power, he believed, was transferred by man onto all subsequent permutations of her, especially in his relationships with women.

When Freud met Jung, he crowned him his prince successor and desperately begged him to promise to uphold, as dogma, what he was convinced was the eternal truth of the oedipal complex. Jung’s  mother had had long psychiatric hospitalizations in his youth. Though she was an object of mystery for Jung, she was primarily an object of fear. Jung’s psychology was transcendent, reaching beyond the foundation of the family nursery. He saw a son’s primal journey to individuation as the hero’s battle for deliverance from dependence upon the mother, and the mother’s world.

For Jung, the psyche deepened beyond the nuclear family, into the depths of the collective unconscious. Ironically, both he and Freud remained chained to tortured relationships with their wives in their lives. Freud indulged in a hidden affair with his wife’s unmarried sister, who lived in their home. Jung indulged in a blatant polygamous life, with two wives (only one actually legitimate), which he publicly displayed and foisted upon his family at Sunday meals. Neither man could bear the tension of their projections upon woman without splitting themselves in two.

Freud’s theories of woman’s psychology dominated clinical practice for decades, forestalling the validation of women’s recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, relegating them instead to mere childhood sexual fantasy. Jung never publicly explored the impact of having been sexually assaulted in his youth. Nonetheless, their personal journeys into the depths of their own psyches, and the theories they generated, shed invaluable light upon the psychology of man and his core terror of woman.

Freud captured the omnipotent power mother possesses over her infant and growing son. She is the source of life, source of nurturance, source of need gratification, source of love, source of desire, source of pleasure, source of ultimate security, source of soothing, source of entitlement, and yet, source of ultimate frustration via the oedipal complex.

Mother is the most important and most desired person in the world to son. Though his oedipal crush will not be fulfilled, his longing and rage toward her for disappointing him, or toward the power he feels she wields, is often defended against through violence toward all women, who represent subsequent molds of mother, throughout life.

Jung traced the roots of the archetype of mother to matter itself; the primal substance of all things physical in the world. All human life issues from the womb of mother. Mother is the only one who can give life. Mother is nature herself, who both giveth and taketh life. Man can never conceive or deliver life. Mother’s power is primary.

Men, from primitive times, have been fascinated with but terrified by woman’s primal power. Taboos restricting women and protecting men from contact with menstrual blood or menstruating women still survive in modern India. Menstruation, with all its emotional variabilities, threatens man with nature’s destructive, uncontrollable, and unpredictable power.

The true reason for the Inquisition was man’s attempt to control the creative primal power of woman that threatened the controlling patriarchal dogma of the Church. That same terror was the true reason for Hillary Clinton’s surprise 2016 defeat: Man’s terror of being dominated by the primal power of woman.

Man’s relation to his own primal power of sexuality, and its urgency for contact with woman, confronts him with his own nature. Mastering the irrational power and energy of the body’s sexual instinct requires a deep soulful journey; it’s not a simple business transaction.

Gaining control of and building a mature relationship with the sexual instinct is often forfeited, in exchange for demanding and expecting a woman/girl to perform to immature male fantasy. Here, control rules the roost á la Jeffrey Epstein.

Desire for, yet terror of woman—who is experienced as both a goddess who quickly overwhelms his potency, as well as a mother prototype who embodies his oedipal residue—often prompts a man to violence to overcome the supreme power projected onto woman.

Violence castrates a woman’s imagined power, making her  touchable, and it titrates oedipal intimacy down to manageable proportions. This is often the reason for preference of teenage girls and children to adult women, who can only be encountered with full-out violence.

Most women have no clue of the supernatural powers ascribed to them. The mystery, for most girls and women, is why they are targeted.  The truth lies almost completely in the projected imagination of the perpetrator. Her body is a blank slate for the man to act out his superimposed inner drama. That’s what it means to be an object. You really don’t exist at all. Not because you don’t have value, it’s simply that your person has been typecast in another person’s play, and you have no say.

Our current Earth crisis is man’s absolute patriarchal holdout to control, exploit, and fully dominate Mother Nature. Obvious to many, however, is nature’s growing impatience with such hubris. Young people have begun their own alchemical processes to free gender ship of its archetypal bindings, with the reconfiguration of gender assignments into he, she, and they, and beyond. Oh, what androgynous beings we are and may be!

Individually, all are empowered to reconcile their spirits with their human bodies. All bodies are composed of matter. All genders contain father mind and mother body. Mind over matter simply doesn’t work anymore. Nor does projecting one’s inner confusion onto others. All must grant matter the respect and place it is due, as well as be guided by its leadership.

Mother Nature is shifting the balance of power by forcing us into true respect and valuation of each other as the only course for survival. Begin with the self; love and care for the body. Get to know its true powers, needs, and wisdom and let them co-lead the way. It’s the only way to go.

Rather than imbue woman with the supernatural powers of an ally and subdue her with violence, may man accept woman, like matter itself, as his worthy opponent who offers him his greatest opportunity to wakeup.

With gratitude,

Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Animal, Ego & Heart

From trunk to heart…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Modern civilization values highly its rational ability to be in control of its animal self. But what happens if a seventeen-year-old teenager drinks too much and the desire body of his human animal self takes charge of his decision making ego and aggressively tries to rape a girl? Should he be held accountable for his behavior?

Most people would say yes. Some would blame alcohol excess, hormones, or the seductive impact of the girl. Few would simply dismiss the encounter.

Our civilization’s approach to reckoning with its animal self, with its powerful instinctual energies, is to expect its mental body, the ego, to keep its animal self in line. This is particularly emphasized at a level of society that values perfection as a major qualification to  become, say, a Supreme Court Judge.

Civilization, as is now clearly being revealed in such highly regarded moral institutions as the United States presidency and the Catholic Church, has quite overinflatedly judged its prowess at containing the impulsive instinctual side of its animal self. Repression or suppression does not transform or raise an instinct to mental obedience, in fact, quite the contrary. The animal, tucked away in the shadows behind a squeaky clean persona, gains in energy and waits for its opportunity to pounce, a frequent occurrence at a college frat party.

As Robert Monroe, in energetic form, recently explained to Jan: “Always the sexual drive is dominant in men, and when present needs to be dealt with.”* Dealing with it in a blackout state is often highly traumatic to the recipient of its fury and can haunt a woman for a lifetime. Is there an alternative way for men to elevate their animal drive to human consideration?

Jung discovered mental programs that attempt to govern our animal impulses and contribute to our humanness, allowing us to rise beyond the nature of our primate relatives. Perhaps the most primary is the incest taboo, which is essentially universal, spanning all peoples on our globe. Though in many cases this innate taboo fails to control men’s sexual drive, it nonetheless has allowed for the stabilization of the family unit as a relatively safe building block for civilization.

Other innate archetypal programs that address the instinctual energies of adolescent males are the initiation/puberty rites of many ancient civilizations that, when properly enacted, result in a real transformation of the irresponsible/dependent child into a respectful mature adult. Modern civilization has either watered down these rituals to the point of meaninglessness or abandoned them altogether, with the result being a preponderance of uninitiated men, inadequate to safely channel their sexual drive.

Effective initiation in our time is largely a solo journey, as our civilization has largely locked the minotaur of its sexual self away in the labyrinth of the repressed unconscious, preferring to project its darkness on the evil other, who should be removed from our borders. This of course allows the real shadow to act out with impunity at the highest levels.

Perhaps the reinstitution of group puberty initiation rites will someday happen in some modern but meaningful form, but for this to happen society will first have to face the true status of men’s beleaguered sexual instinct and be willing to seriously address its  need for transformation and integration into humanness. There are signs of this today in the consciousness raising effect generated by the Me Too movement with its takedown of exploitative men. But it cannot solve the transformative/maturity issue at the crux of the problem, to say nothing of the grey area of human sexual exploration that can hardly be deemed abusive.

Nonetheless, the transparency of Me Too is shining a needed light on the sexual shadow that leads to a more honest reckoning with the massive hidden acting out of men’s inadequately matured sexual instinct. Punishment, however appropriate, will not result in transformation.

Real human maturity requires the heart. Maturity below the heart stops at power and control; truthfully, right where we are now. To rise to the heart, we must advance beyond the compulsive entitlement of our narcissistic instinctual desires. In a country that now sets the standard for the world as me first, instinctual drives are unlikely to rise to the level of combining sexual drive with true human love and consideration for another. We just aren’t there yet.

Nonetheless, the rising feminine, be it in the Me Too movement or in political activism, is being mostly promulgated by the ultimate feminine herself, Gaia, Mother Earth, who is absolutely insisting that mankind take respectful care of her body and come together as an interdependent whole to face the real deficits in human maturity by rising to the true heart of the matter.

Let’s see what happens,

Chuck

*Jan wrote a blog about this encounter on The Recapitulation Diaries Facebook page.

Chuck’s Place: Meet the Animal—A Twist

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I was six years old. Powerful rhythmic music filled the room. A young woman, Rita was her name, and my older sister broke into a violent hip swaying pelvic dance—the Twist! I was overcome with dizziness and fear. I hid in the closet.

Rolling force of nature…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Today I understand that experience as my first conscious encounter with what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called the Rolling Force, the primary vibrational energy behind life that shapes the reality we live in. In this instance that vibration manifested in the Kali-like physical body movements of Rita and my sister.

What I was to learn from this encounter was how overwhelming this  expression of the rolling force of animal rhythmic abandon was for my tender child spirit. In effect, my human spirit, or growing sense of ego identity and consciousness, was extremely fragile and needed to ward off the disintegrating effect of this rolling energy of nature. The key was to be able to maintain control over this flow at all costs.

My retreat to the closet allowed me to stop my exposure to the flow of energy, to separate my consciousness from the raging, twisting river of dance energy that threatened to drown me. This was spirit triumphing over matter. And so it begins.

Our evolving species has fixated its awareness upon a consensual reality of mind over matter, or spirit over nature. Within ourselves we prize the rational goal-oriented mind over the instinctual animal we are encased within. We joke about the animal we are, like the comedians among us who are proving to have taken it too far.

The consequence of this disidentification with the animal is a complete miscalculation of, and unrelatedness to, the power of its instinctual energies that flow within the human body and are essential to human life.

Sexual desire, for instance, is an essential component of the human animal. The human spirit, as ego, must deal with its instinctive hormonal promptings yet has no clue as to how or what to do with it. To truly relate to this instinctive energy is to encounter the Twist!

How does mind get comfortable being taken on a ride by an impersonal force of the body? How does consciousness hold on, channel, remain responsible and related with its instinctual, rhythmic self? Tall order for a spirit that just wants to exploit this instinctual energy without a real relationship with the body.

The present outing of the sexual behavior of powerful men clearly evidences the abusive use of control to obtain some measure of twisted sexual release by exploiting the bodies of both women and men. Outings of these behaviors must continue, yes, to bring justice to crime, but even more fundamentally to give credence to the dire state of immature relatedness to the sexual instinct in modern culture. The consequence of this dissociation and hubris is quite apparent: aberrant sexual behavior.

The powerful raging rivers of opinion and outrage that flood the gates of social media run the same risk of miscalculating the power of thought (spirit) over instinct. Nature always prevails.

The young boy in the closet has spent his life building a relationship with his rhythmic animal partner. Shortly after his encounter with the Twist he was to experience the same vibrational shattering in a pure spirit meeting while his body lay frozen in deep sleep. Rhythmic vibrational contractions permeate life in the body as well as life in the spirit.

In physical life our opportunity is to partner our spirit consciousness with the sensual rhythm of our animal nature. This is the key to the mastery of intent and manifestation. The abuses of control and power are really maladaptive attempts to solve the riddle of who we really are and form some form of relationship with our mysterious other.

What the abuses currently reveal is the underlying terror of powerful men to connect with their mysterious other in a genuine meeting of respect and love. This is indeed the greatest challenge of life in the body.

That little boy continues to learn how to meet his partner in love and the Twist. Perhaps a partnership with our younger other is the place to start.

Twist and shout,

Chuck