Category Archives: Chuck’s Blog

Welcome to Chuck’s Place! This is where Chuck Ketchel, LCSW-R, expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Currently, Chuck posts an essay once a week, currently on Tuesdays, along the lines of inner work, psychotherapy, Jungian thought and analysis, shamanism, alchemy, politics, or any theme that makes itself known to him as the most important topic of the week. Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy page.

Chuck's Blog

#667 Chuck’s Place: The Foreign Installation

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There is a preponderance of energy this week, pushing upward through the hardness, the murkiness, the silt, the nigredo of the earth, traveling its path to new life, to flowering in the brightness and warmth of the sun. This energy that bursts forth is nature itself, our deepest roots, and our conscious challenge is to harness and channel it safely into life. For this we need the sacred containment of our awareness and our physical bodies peacefully brooding, like the hen upon the egg, awaiting maturation and readiness for life. The major protagonist to this containment is the mind, what the shamans call the foreign installation.

When shamans view the human body in energetic terms they see swirling energy at different centers within the body, with one exception. In the head they see an energy that moves horizontally, in a rapid back and forth motion. For shamans, this energetic pattern is alien to the body; hence, they have named it the foreign installation. Many people recognize and experience this foreign energetic presence in the form of obsessive thinking, which bounces back and forth in the brain or gets stuck in a thinking loop with no exit, often experienced at 3 AM, initiating hours of senseless perseverative activity, allowing for no further sleep.

The goal of all meditative practices is to eliminate this obsessive quality of the mind, to free it up for concentrated thought or emptiness, and to be able to clearly channel the intent of the higher self. Shamans call this coveted state inner silence. In inner silence the internal dialogue is eliminated and the channel is opened to direct knowledge.

Buddha, as he sat beneath the bodhi tree, discovered that direct knowledge or enlightenment was achieved through the practice of remaining still while the conjuring mind presented intense scenarios that beckoned emotional attachment. This is the 3 AM scenario. Buddha was able to not fall for these enticements to engage his energy in illusory concerns. He was able to not grasp at these scenes; grasping, in the Buddhist sense is attachment, which engages and drains the energy and life force in empty imaginings, in illusory reality.

Like Buddha, we are all confronted with countless concerns through the incessant sales pitches of the foreign installation, the ultimate salesman vying for our energetic attachment through worry and obsessive thinking, gateways to illusory living at every moment of the day. How can we resist such a pervasive onslaught! Christ, like Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, instructs us in this dilemma in his own encounter with the tree, the cross, where he achieves his own stillness and ultimate enlightenment. If we understand dying for “the sins of mankind” as a metaphor for achieving non-attachment to the conjurings of the internal dialogue, Christ demonstrates how challenging it is to not attach, literally being nailed to a cross to maintain stillness amidst the pulls of this world. In Greek mythology, Odysseus binds himself to the mast of his ship, his own sturdy tree, to avoid the fateful lure of the conjuring Sirens. And who are these modern Sirens? They are Worry about those we love. They are Fears of illness, of ruin, of death, an endless sea of possibilities; empty imaginings, sensuous enticements, presented in living color upon the inner screen of the foreign installation, beckoning attachment.

The lessons we glean from heroes such as Buddha, Christ, and Odysseus are:

1. to remain aware that the conjurings of the foreign installation are all illusions seeking to trap our awareness, drain our energy, and engage us in false reality;

2. to remain still, like the tree; don’t budge; don’t attach; don’t worry or fear. Though you cannot control the incessant presentation of illusory sales pitches, you can choose not to give them your attention;

3. to exercise great restraint, as the conjurer is masterful, the offerings are plentiful, enticing, and terrifying.

I suggest the practice of shifting awareness back to the body, our own sturdy tree in this life, and placing our intent upon softening, going deeper and deeper into energetic calmness and stillness, regardless of how loud the band of the conjurer plays its songs. Keep bringing awareness back to the body, going deeper and deeper into the stillness.

The shamans do say that, eventually, the foreign installation leaves, if it is persistently provided no energetic sustenance through our attachment to its enticements. The key though, is perseverance without attachment to the outcome. Sometimes the foreign installation goes dormant for a while, producing a true sense of accomplishment. Beware though of attaching to this. This is one of its traps, as it awaits that moment of success to return with a vengeance, entrapping us in defeatism and a return to the dominance of the incessant illusory world conjured by the internal dialogue. Do the practice with no attachment to the outcome!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#665 Chuck’s Place: Black Gold

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When challenged with the question, “Why so much focus on alchemy in your writing, Chuck?” my truthful response is: Carl Jung, that Master Shaman, spent decades of his life unearthing and sifting through the rich black earth of this ancient system to empower us to decipher the gold in our thoroughly modern dreams. Modern Alchemy 101: sift through the nigredo, the blackness in your dreams, and you will find your gold. Before I elucidate on a dream from last night that Jan is allowing me to “expose,” I first need to discuss a homework assignment I was given this week.

A client, who was reading an early blog I had written on blackness, America Chooses the Black Doll, assigned me to read Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of tackling Ms. Morrison, I assure you, she is as dense and playful in her writing as Jung is when writing on alchemy. In this work, she makes a compelling argument for the need to shed light upon the cultural context of blackness in America, to fully realize its unconscious influence upon all American authorship.

Morrison reflects upon Marie Cardinal’s autobiography, The Words to Say It, where Cardinal describes her initiation into madness, triggered in the midst of a jazz improvisation at a Louis Armstrong concert. Morrison questions the automatic, uncontested assumptions of this encounter with blackness and the onset of madness. Morrison draws attention to the automatic acceptance of these things —black people—black music—mental chaos—madness— as being associatively linked and the unconscious projection of them into American literature.

Taking it beyond literature, I would argue that we are absolutely stymied in America by this dilemma. Is there not a very strong attempt to play upon this automatic unconscious assumption with blackness by associating Obama with madness, as the devil incarnate? If we don’t shed light upon these projections we become a country paralyzed by apocalyptic fear.

The issue here is to separate the ancient symbol of blackness from its projection onto people of color. The contrasting symbols of white and black, day and night, light and dark, visible and invisible, yin and yang, are so ancient that they long precede awareness of race. These symbols exist in the depths of the collective unconscious and present themselves in dreams, impervious to political and social correctness. It remains for the conscious individual to decipher the true meaning and personal relevance of these symbols in dreams. Blackness, or the nigredo as the alchemists named it, symbolizes unknown material; black is in the dark, where things are unseen and therefore unknown. In order to arrive at the highest value, always considered to be gold, one must go into the unknown, the darkness of the self and redeem that which lies there, either because it has been rejected or because it has, more significantly, yet to be discovered. The nigredo, in this context, is that which lies in the darkness. The nigredo is universal to all races because all people have parts of themselves hidden in the dark and, similarly, because it is unknown, it is equally unsettling for all races. Racism is a collective attempt to escape this inner tension of reckoning with one’s unknown self, the nigredo, by ridding oneself of its threat, by assigning it to and projecting it upon another race, and maintaining power over that race to keep one’s fears in check.

One can hardly escape the current obvious, unabashedly, in-your-face attempt to seduce white America into avoiding facing the truth of what lies hidden in its own darkness by projecting its nigredo upon Obama and ridding itself of its own curse. Toni Morrison is right to draw such attention to the archetypal implications of blackness being automatically and unchallengingly projected upon human beings. The symbol is not the object. The symbol in the dream is ancient, archetypal, and personally relevant. Own it, and take the personal journey with it. We use Jan’s dream to illustrate this.

In her own words: I am standing on 42nd Street outside Grand Central Terminal in New York City talking to a woman who says she has just won the Lottery, a winning of several million dollars. “So, I didn’t win?” I ask. “Oh well, I guess it just wasn’t my turn.” And with that I turn and walk into the cavernous main hall of Grand Central Terminal where the vast space is lined with row upon row of black toilets, with no lids. The toilets are packed tightly together and there are perhaps fifty or so rows of them interspersed with black metal folding chairs. I have to go to the bathroom, “a crap,” so I begin walking up and down the aisles of toilets looking for a place where I can comfortably sit down and do what I have to do, but there is absolutely no privacy here. People are sitting on some of the toilets and I can hear farting and peeing sounds. They are reading, smoking, and talking to others sitting next to them or opposite them, as if it were nothing unusual, but I just can’t allow myself to be so exposed. I think up all kinds of reasons why I should not just sit down on a toilet like everyone else, such as: There is no privacy here! There are too many men sitting in this row! How can that woman sit there like that! Don’t people have any sense of privacy? This is too intimate! Finally, I decide that I will “just hold it” and, upon deciding this, I walk out of the terminal. As soon as I walk outside I get into a car with Chuck and our daughter Erica, who in the dream is a happy and bubbly thirteen year old. I am driving. We travel into the countryside over winding, hilly snow and ice covered roads. People are driving way too fast for the conditions and several times I have to make some quick maneuvers so we don’t have collisions. Erica is very impressed with my driving skills but even so we are eventually forced off the road by an oncoming Cadillac that sideswipes the driver’s side mirror and sends us hurtling into a snow bank. We exit the car, leaving it stranded in the snow, grab three round flying saucer sleds from the trunk and begin walking up a steep ice and snow-covered road. We arrive at the top of the hill and decide to sled down the other side, but the snow is so wet and sticky that we are unable to slide down without getting stuck repeatedly, so we abandon our flying saucers and walk the rest of the way. At the bottom of the hill, Erica points to a blurry picture of a nutcracker painted on the road —like a logo of the nutcracker from the ballet The Nutcracker Suite— barely visible beneath the thick ice that is covering the road. As we continue walking along, I see that a railroad bridge crosses over the road far ahead and that there is a railroad station off to the left. “Look, a train station!” I say with great relief. “We are taking that train!” Chuck says, firmly. As we get closer I see that the station name is Warwarsing. I joke repeatedly into Chuck’s ear, saying that we are in “War-Washing! War-Washing! Get it? We are in WAR-WASHING!” I know that we can take the train back to Grand Central Terminal, and as we walk into the station to buy our tickets I wake up.

Jan does not win the lottery, i.e. the gold! No, you have to work for it. The work begins at Grand Central—an allusion to a directive from the SELF. “Grand” suggests something greater than the ego; “Central” shows it to be at the center of the personality. Grand Central is also the meeting place of many old tried and true paths. Evidently the SELF is directing Jan into a scene that captures many people’s worst nightmare in dreams, a vast public unisex restroom without partitions. The nigredo is identified by the black toilets, the black chairs, and, obviously, that which is concealed inside the body! The nigredo points to that which is unknown or concealed, and requires work. The work here means exposing oneself to the truth of that which is unsettling and unknown. The dream is placing obvious emphasis on EXPOSURE. The SELF wants the nigredo exposed, not discretely flushed away. Jan balks at this request, choosing instead to take her own heroic journey, symbolized by the accompaniment of the innocent, bubbly, youthful Erica, avoiding the blackness and going off into the white snow.

As it turns out, all of Jan’s efforts at transcendence in pure whiteness fail, including the flying saucers—an inflated attempt to win her wholeness, symbolized by the round saucer that flies. The nutcracker, beneath the ice, is a reminder that the real nut has yet to be cracked. Ultimately, we end up at the Warwarsing station, where I, representing Jan’s inner masculine guide, as animus, insist we take the train back to Grand Central. The WAR symbolizes taking on the tension of exposure within the self, encountering internalized judgments, inhibitions, unacceptable facts, etc., symbolized by all the characters hanging around the terminal in this dream. The WASHING symbolizes separating out the elements of nigredo, sifting through “the crap” and discovering that which has been hidden. In this dream, the path to be taken is an ancient one leading back to Grand Central. An inflationary avoidance, however heroic, could not achieve reconciliation.

Thank you, Jan, for fulfilling your dream’s request: exposure to the world! Through this act Jan owns her own nigredo, which becomes the source of acquiring her own gold through facing her own inner truth. I hope that this dream illustrates the symbolic meaning of blackness with its golden potential, which is the alchemical process, obviously relevant in understanding the dream of a modern person. Additionally, along with Toni Morrison, I hope that this article furthers an appreciation for the archetypal symbol of blackness, in all its richness, that must be differentiated from unconscious projections onto outer objects.

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

#661 Chuck’s Place: Compassion is Ruthlessness

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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.

Shamans define ruthlessness as the place of no pity. In their nomenclature, the place of no pity represents a shift of the assemblage point where one enters a different reality, which is far more comprehensive than ordinary reality. Shamans assert that the familiar world of ordinary reality is fixated on the position of self-pity. From this place of self-pity we cling to the archetypal roles of family, long beyond actual necessity. We fund these archetypal roles of mother, father, child, spouse, etc., with all our available energy, leaving no energy for life as a separate being on a solo journey of awareness; the journey we are all really on.

We pity the self that ultimately must die alone and so we cling to the illusions that spin what the Buddhists call the Wheel of Life. To quote Esther Harding, from her book Psychic Energy:

When, before his enlightenment, he was meditating under the Bo Tree, he [Buddha] asked himself: Why are there these endlessly repeated lives? Why do people, and animals as well, go on with the senseless round of birth and suffering and death? Why does life continue exactly the same—why do men not outgrow this barbaric and immature stage? His meditation grew deeper and deeper, until at last he had a vision that revealed the answer. He saw the wheel of life, consisting of the endless round of existences, of births and deaths and rebirths, of heavens and hells, and the earth with its many faces.

Buddha saw the illusions we cling to that construct and maintain the world of what the shamans call ordinary reality, a world that strictly adheres to an endless round of living our repetitive archetypal roles.

Buddha arrived at the place of compassion for beings who cling to their illusions. Compassion is not pity. Compassion is the acceptance, without judgment, that all beings must cling to their illusions and go round and round again in their cosmic Groundhog Day,* until they are ready to awaken. That is, to take personal responsibility to face the true nature of reality beyond the archetypal roles; to allow themselves to let go, to detach from the pity that clings to the illusions in a childlike grasp for safety and security. Buddha saw that all must arrive at that place individually. No one can take another’s journey. No one can give another enlightenment. That will always be an individual task. Only when an individual is finally ready will they take the journey, the solo journey, devoid of archetypal props. Compassion, then, is loving all who cling, but remaining unattached, fully stalking the place the shamans call ruthlessness.

Ruthlessness completely stares down pity. Ruthlessness fully allows all beings to be what they truly are: independent travelers on an infinite journey. Ruthlessness sees beyond; it detaches from all the archetypal bindings, lovingly allowing sons, daughters, parents, husbands, and wives, etc., to fully take their journeys. Ruthlessness is compassion. Ruthlessness remains unattached to the illusions; it gets out of the way of others taking the journeys they must. Ruthlessness is compassion without pity. With ruthlessness we stalk the position that lifts the veils. On the one hand, ruthlessness is a loving acceptance of wherever another may be on the wheel of life and, on the other, it is standing as a beacon to the evolutionary journey beyond the wheel.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

* Refers to the Bill Murray movie.

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#658 Chuck’s Place: Your Family is Not Your Family

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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 with instincts ready to ensure our survival. A baby is preprogrammed to attach to its parents, to be nurtured and cared for, to ensure survival. Though our soul may choose the family we are born into to present a specific set of challenges necessary for its evolution, a baby has no choice over who its family members are. At the point of birth a baby is a blank slate with a psychic program, what Jung calls the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which are activated and direct the infant in the process of attachment. Hence, the deep emotional process of attachment, which is experienced so personally, is in fact quite impersonally driven. A baby will attach to any appropriate caregivers.

The same impersonal instinctive process is activated in parents when they have a child. Many a mother may exclaim: “I immediately fell in love the instant I saw my child!” An inner maternal archetype is activated in this mother, releasing powerful energy experienced as love, and projected onto her infant. However, in truth, this mother has no clue who this child really is. I am not intending to be offensive with this statement, as it can be argued that a deep relationship is already in place prior to birth. However, a relationship of consciousness with a separate being is simply not yet possible. There is as yet no real personal relationship; the child has yet to discover its personality separate from the mother. A separate entity with full consciousness of self will evolve over time.

Inborn, archetypal processes, quite impersonal in nature, are programs preserved and activated in the collective unconscious to exert a guiding influence and sufficient energy to form and stabilize a family unit. Our human process is no different from that of birds or any other species that instinctively carries out a set of inborn patterns to bring a newborn into the world, i.e., the building of a nest and the feeding of a helpless being.

Relationships and feelings within the family are prompted by specific archetypes. Hence, in truth, a child’s “love” for its parents is largely impersonal, not really a function of an actual conscious relationship. A parent’s love is also largely archetypally driven. Children are programmed to need, love, and idealize their parents. I do not mean to suggest that children and parents don’t get to know each other and love each other as real people; however, a large percent of the bond between parent and child is a function of a collective instinctive program. If the actual parents are what Winnicott * called “good enough” then children will have little difficulty following their instinctive archetypal imperative to “love thy parents.” If a parent is not “good enough,” there results an interruption in an archetypal developmental process that may result, ultimately, in the child growing into adulthood with deep issues of insecurity, anxiety, and depression. For this child/adult it is likely that adult life will be burdened with powerful concerns around parental failures in childhood. However, the actual issue resides within the psyche of the child/adult in its ego’s relationship with parental archetypes whose energies have yet to be harnessed by the ego in a positive way.

Although an adult may seek reparative relationships in adulthood to resolve this archetypal dilemma, this often results in the unfulfilled childhood needs being acted out in adult relationships, leads to endless confusion, and is rarely successful. Equally, an adult child may continuously seek to have its needs met by its family of origin, which in fact can become a lifelong problem, regardless of how old everyone becomes. In therapy, clients with these issues are encouraged to take the hero’s journey, the inner journey, to obtain their birthright in a new relationship with their inner archetypes, fully birthing into adulthood. At the adult stage, a relationship with actual parents cannot solve a grown child’s issues. As adults, we must assume responsibility for ourselves as adults, even when we really don’t feel like adults. That is what makes the inner journey a heroic journey: the journeyer takes on frightening tasks, seemingly beyond its ability, and in the process accrues successes that ultimately transform the hero into a genuine adult.

The truth is, there may in fact be little or no real relationship with actual family members. Real adult relationships can only happen between equals, not with people who use power and position, based of their archetypal roles, as the dominant feature of interaction. The truest relationship between a grown child and a parent would be one based on genuine friendship, affection, and appreciation of each other’s unique identities and journeys, not one based on need and expectation. If we want to have a real relationship with our parents or grown children we must shed the ancient archetypal roles that have become outdated and inappropriate to the essence of life: our soul’s journey. Nobody owes anybody anything. We are all adults with individual destinies to fulfill. Though we once may have shared a powerful bond, personally felt, impersonally driven, once necessary, our real reason for being here is to discover and master our individual challenges. If we can arrive at a place of mutual support and appreciation of each other’s challenges, assuming full responsibility for our own lives, regardless of what did or didn’t happen in the time when the family was deeply connected as a unit, then we can truly have relationships with family beyond the family, when the possibility for real relationship actually begins.

I close with Kahlil Gibran’s poem On Children taken from The Prophet, which captures the essence of what I have attempted to express today.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: Read about Winnicott in Wikipedia.