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 Place: Erasing Personal History

Erasing personal history…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

At one point, Don Juan Matus abruptly threatened the continuation of Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic apprenticeship by challenging him to immediately disengage from all his attachments and habits of daily life, thus erasing personal history, a prime tenet of a shaman’s advancement. For instance, Carlos was encouraged to immediately dissolve a lucrative tie dye tee shirt business partnership, which he did within a few hours.

Erasing personal history means ending the control of an identity, rooted in past associations, that continues to define one’s present life activities and sense of self. When I was in Castaneda’s world, I experienced people taking this insinuation to change to the extreme, completely leaving their daily lives, even changing their names, to free their energy to be employed in a totally new way.

This radical form of dissociation from the past is more a metaphor than a practical and effective form of achieving desired change. As a therapist, or spiritual guide, I approach such an intent for new life through the experience of changing one’s past self, and thereby, altering one’s present and future selves. Changing one’s past self is indeed erasing the hold of one’s personal history.

To change the past self we must fully revisit it. The power of suggestion is extremely powerful and can indeed change the present self, at least temporarily, through the power of dissociation. However, our wholeness requires us to fully associate with ourselves, which requires full acceptance, not dissociation, from our past self, and all it has experienced.

When we encounter our past self we must be willing to feel the fullness of everything it has experienced. This includes its feelings, bodily sensations, and beliefs, particularly around powerful experiences that overwhelmed its capacities and froze its further development.

The presence of the past self’s frozen state is experienced in what is called a trigger. When we are triggered our past self eclipses present self adaptation, as we become locked in our frozen past. Often, we expect others to respect our triggers, controlling their speech and behavior so as to protect us from experiencing the sting of our triggered, unsettled younger self.

Relationships are often tasked to avoid each other’s minefield of triggers. Sometimes this is considered an act of true love. How ironic. For triggers, once resolved, are the gateway to new and fuller love of self and other.

When the present self is fully able to be present to the experience of its past self, we begin to change the past. For one thing, this very act of showing up establishes a new fact of the past: Whatever was experienced in the past no longer has the power to shut one down.

When the present self is fully present for the past self it is also no longer alone. This alters its isolated experience of the past, as the present self becomes a true traveling companion to the past self’s journey.

When the past self relives its frozen moments, it is encouraged to  express its innate reactions that were previously suppressed. Words and agency come on line and metabolize a prior silent scream. The body breaths deeply as it expands beyond its habitual, frozen in time, stance.

In a dream, I am back in an old neighborhood under great siege of winter storm. I am confronted by an intimidating, rageful acquaintance. His threatening silent glare intensifies as his eyes bulge. I force myself to speak, refusing to accept this frozen encounter. A portion of my past self is changed in that moment.

Dreams often present us with dramas that are permutations of our frozen moments. With consciousness we can send our present ego self into dreaming with the intent to act where we were once previously frozen. Ego advance in dreaming generalizes to ego advance in waking life.

Often, the cognitive understanding of frozen moments in time is highly distorted for defensive reasons, or developmentally hampered by the age at which the traumatizing event occurred. The developmentally matured and advanced present self can be extremely helpful in broadening the scope of the past self’s experience by exploring factors unavailable to the younger self. This can considerably alter the past self’s identity, which then contributes a changed foundational stone to the present self’s state of being.

A fully transformed younger self no longer lives in the prison cell of its frozen past. While this in no way erases the facts of its prior experience, the younger self is no longer emotionally or cognitively conditioned by it. Its freed energy is liberated to rejoin its wholeness of being.

Thus, the past becomes fully recovered, resolved and revitalized for new life. The fully matured past self delivers its evolved gift to the present and future of self. This is how to truly erase personal history.

Erasing,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Getting To Know Our Parts As Probable Selves

Wholeness is accepting all the parts…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

I spent a training weekend with a virtual Susan Brown, LCSW and EMDR psychotherapist. This event coincided with my reading the book Seth, Dreams And Projections Of Consciousness, published posthumously in 1986, two years after the death of its author, Jane Roberts.

Susan Brown addresses the integration of sub-personality parts work with classic EMDR therapy as applied to treating addictions. For her, the multiplicity of fragmented parts that we become when separated from our wholeness of Self, through traumatic encounter, continue to serve our healing quest for connection with, and restoration of, our lost wholeness of Self.

Susan counsels that we value, accept and respect all parts of Self with equanimity, regardless of their apparent dysfunctionality. Wholeness, once again, requires acceptance of everything that we are. Her intent could be characterized as a modern day shamanic soul retrieval, where the adult self is brought into living connection with its lost parts, as the overall personality is restored to healthy balance and cooperative oneness.

Carlos Castaneda highlighted this shift in modern shamanism by insisting that we are now all our own redeemers. We must all become our own Naguals, or High Selves, as Susan Brown might characterize them, and assume central responsibility for the healing and individuation journey to our true wholeness of Self.

The therapist or shaman is a facilitator but does not assume responsibility for retrieval of a lost part in the underworld of the unconscious. The evolving relationship between adult self and High Self, and its variety of part personalities, is the magic and centerpiece of healing in this empowered journey of recovery.

Seth, the entity whom Jane Roberts channelled, explained that probable selves represent living permutations of the life we are currently in. These sub-personalities, or parts, are intimately connected and interactive with the life we are currently living, though they are completely autonomous and may be functioning largely outside of our conscious awareness.

For instance, Jane Roberts, and her husband Rob, had once travelled to Maine for a vacation. One night while there, they went to a night club and were drawn to sit opposite a couple whom they experienced as bitter, disgruntled versions of their future selves, miserably shut down and disconnected from their creative cores.

Seth explained to them that their present selves had created, or birthed, these versions of themselves from the shadows of their fears. As opposed to mere psychological projections, these beings were actual entities, with lives of their own, seeking their own resolutions.

This synchronistic encounter with their probable future selves served all four beings well, as their connection spawned many possibilities and reflected knowledge extremely useful to the making of decisions that would go on to change their future lives.

We all have our personal astral network of probable selves that we interact with, largely in dreaming and through the practice of, what Jung called, active imagination. These connections are real, living connections that exist as parts of our greater wholeness, regardless of our awareness of them. Just as we have neural plasticity networks in the brain, we also have, what I would term, the astral-plasticity to grow through greater awareness and connectivity with our probable selves.

Astral-plasticity utilizes lucid dreaming, where present selves volitionally encounter their probable other selves, meeting with the intent of respect and offering the opportunity to share and gain knowledge gleaned from their separate lives lived.

Astral-plasticity also generates the merging of healing intentions, wherein separate lives move beyond being unconsciously, compensatorily related, to being joined in similar healing intentions at different dimensions of Self.

I have suggested, in previous blog posts, that our current world crisis is reflecting a chaotic macro-encounter between the presently embodied World Self and the probable shadow self of past generational decisions, still alive and well on the astral plane, all demanding a physical replaying to reach a higher level of global Self-realization. We have at present slipped into a probable World Self that resembles Gotham City of Batman ilk. The advanced prefrontal cortex of current world civilization is becoming increasingly entranced by its limbic ancestors, all seeking a new world order.

Rather than pass the buck, through solidarity with the repression of prior generations, we are being called upon to live with the misery and lament of what appears to be irreconcilable differences. Accepting the role of taking the hit for the greater whole, by embodying these epic challenges, offers us the very real option of once and for all healing the deep splits that have perennially haunted human history. It also requires that we fully experience and reckon with the genuine threats to our current world’s survival.

Our best opportunity for healing rests in our capacity to summon our adult Self, with its ability to exercise its free will in the service of the greater good. Furthermore, we have the resource of our probable part selves, alternate selves who appreciate our efforts and contributions toward their own evolution and whom support us in ours. How critical it is that we get to know and make peace with all our parts. Ultimately, as Susan Brown points out, all parts matter!

Where to start? Set boundaries, but treat all parts with compassion and respect. Every part has a story to share that weaves together the mystery and wonder of Self.

Weaving,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: The Refined Love Of Total Acceptance

Refining love…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

In his journeys in infinity, Robert Monroe experienced a perspective of our world as a colony that refined the commodity of love, which he called loosh. This, he discovered, is why we are here, that the real reason for our sojourn through life in this world is to refine love. But how do we do that?

The notion of refining love suggests a developmental process for love, spanning its first coming alive in gross matter, at physical birth, to its subtly refined pure, spirit-energy state at physical death. Refined love is the one thing you really can take with you! Furthermore, the energy of refined love is the fuel for total acceptance, the key to wholeness. Everything that is, is part of the whole. If you cannot accept something, you cannot be whole.

Our world provides the ideal framework for this refinement process. Psychology teaches us about the absolute necessity for an infant to attach to a secure love object to move forward into life in this world. Rene Spitz, an early pioneer in attachment theory, discovered that institutionalized babies, separated from their mothers beyond three months, sank into what he identified as a progressive anaclitic depression, which often resulted in failure to thrive and death.

To survive and thrive in this world we must attach. Our emotional attachments in this world are the playing field for the refinement of love. Ironically, to achieve the maximum refinement of love required for it to transcend physical death ultimately requires us to completely detach from the physical dimension and all the objects we have loved. Many departed souls struggle with this challenge on the astral plane, especially if they haven’t reached that level of physically letting go during the dying process.

The primal necessity for attachment to a secure object can be transferred to a host of objects, including one’s physical body. For example, rhythmic rocking behavior in children enables a self-soothing behavior that somewhat autonomously satisfies the need for comfort from a secure other person. Freud illumined fixation upon particular erogenous zones of the body as serving similar self-soothing functions. 

Attachment to screens, even in very young children, can provide a sense of primal connection with an energetically vibrant and stimulating other. The pleasure derived from food and substance can serve as a displaced soothing interaction with a secure love object.

As Gabor Mate suggests, addiction is persistence of attachment to any object or habit that offers soothing connection, in spite of its destructive consequences. From this perspective, the task of recovery is a refinement of love that withdraws the outer projection of maladaptive connection into the ability to truly love the self.  

Psychiatrist and pediatrician, Margret Mahler described the achievement of object constancy as the internalization of the outer primary love object into a stable inner sub-personality that can soothe the child from within. Thus, if mother is not in the vicinity, the internalized mother image can bring calm and reassurance that she will return. Emotional object constancy refines love into an inner ability to love and accept both the good and the bad of self and other.

Emotional object constancy is also the foundation for the adult self, as the parenting functions of emotional regulation are now in the inner hands of the growing personality. The greatest challenge for the adult is to refine its critical judgment of itself, and others, into total acceptance of everything and everyone. Love is all-embracing.

To accept and love all, does not mean that boundaries are not necessary. We can love people who must be stopped. We can abandon people physically who must assume responsibility for themselves, yet we can still love and accept them with equanimity. Total acceptance is wholeness, even when some parts of the whole may need to occupy different places for the overall balance and welfare of the whole.

Perhaps the most challenging arena of acceptance is self-acceptance. When we recapitulate our lives, we are asked to completely accept everything we have done and that was done to us. This is not about seeing someone’s potential bright side to find greater acceptance of their dark side. This is full-on acceptance of the total truth, in its full ruthlessness, of what we have done and what has been done to us. This is acceptance completely devoid of shame and blame.

The shamans of ancient Mexico imagined the force behind our loosh/love colony to be a great Eagle that consumes the experience of our refined love journey to enhance its own evolution. The Eagle grants souls continued love journeys in infinity, once they arrive at total acceptance of their complete love journey while in the sojourn of human form.

The journey always continues and love lives on.

Refining love and acceptance,
Chuck 

Chuck’s Place: In And Out Of Changing Times

Who is dreaming whom?
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Why do we gain so much benefit from a brief moment of rest? When we close our eyes to the outside world and drop into daydream we enter what Seth, whom Jane Roberts channelled, called, psychological time.

Psychological time demonstrates Einstein’s theory of relativity par excellence, as, in but a moment of measured physical time, a whole lifetime can be lived, in dream time.

At one time in my life I practiced extreme dream recall. I would awaken after a few minutes of sleep and record my dreams, which could take an hour or more to record. After a few nights I had to abandon this practice, as I’d experience little restorative sleep while I produced volumes of dreams from such brief blocks of physical sleep time.

What I did discover from this experiment was, indeed, the relativity of time. Our favored construct of living life according to outer time is actually a very slow playing field for our ego’s waking existence. When located on the fuller spectrum of our inner energetic life, waking life moves at the speed of molasses as contrasted with the rapid river-speed of the dream plane of psychological time.

Have you ever noticed upon drifting into daydream that you are casually engaged in conversation with unknown people, in unfamiliar life dramas? Who are you and who are those beings? Actually, you have opened the door to your fuller self, who lives life in many time zones or on other planes of existence.

The closest plane of existence to the solid physical plane of waking life has been called the astral plane, where souls, both still living in physical bodies, as well as what we call departed souls, commingle and interact, either consciously or in deeply entranced states.

The astral plane has many levels. Initially it serves as a greeting station for souls who have completed life in a physical body. During this initial adjustment period, souls recapitulate their just-completed lives.

Some souls remain in a state of purgatory as they reckon with desires, regrets, resentments, losses and unfulfilled needs. Some souls enter bardo states of deeply creative dreaming where they seek resolution and completion of unresolved issues from human life. Some souls remain so deeply attached to their prior life in physical form that they spend extensive time fixated upon life on Earth.

When souls are fulfilled, having evolved emotion and attachment into the purity of refined love, they may then advance to the higher rungs of the astral plane. At its most advanced levels, the astral plane is the launching pad for life beyond illusion.

Souls, like us, who have not yet left life in physical form are visitors in the astral plane during dreaming. Much of waking life is actually the physical reliving of life already lived in dreams on other planes of our existence. Often, what we recall as dreams, reflect interactions on the astral plane, though most of these encounters are lost to waking consciousness.

When we experience a deja vu moment, or a synchronicity, in waking life, it’s actually an awakening moment to an interaction already lived in dreaming that is now crossing over to be lived in waking life.

Our subconscious mind for our present life in human form has a full-time job operating the systems of the physical body while our consciousness is mentally engaged in its pursuits for waking life. In sleep, that subconscious mind, or energy body, is freed to rejuvenate itself and journey into the astral realm, which is more akin to its faster energetic speed of existence.

In these journeys in infinity, the energy body might encounter departed souls struggling to accept their changed energetic condition and living circumstance. Sometimes we are able to help them move on from their confused state into their new energetic life. Sometimes we encounter loved ones who have departed human form and are able to share intimate moments of connection and communication with them.

Sometimes we may encounter souls with whom we have travelled in prior incarnations, discovering lives and themes which lend clarity to   our circumstances and goals for our present life. Sometimes these astral encounters reveal to us unborn potentials, ready for birth in our daily lives. These might be new careers, relationships, and hidden talents seeking fulfillment.

It is my hypothesis that human evolution is moving toward greater integration with the astral realm. When I see the rapidly unfolding dramas on the Earth plane, I see collective movements, problems, and political structures from prior times in human history that gravitated into the astral realm and have now returned.

Have not the holocaust, the current status of Israel, leanings toward a dissolution of democracy in America, and in much of the world, and stirrings toward the restoration of monarchy in Russia—all issues from prior generations—reappeared and quickened at a frenetic pace on the current world playing field? Hard to not conclude that there is an infiltration of old unresolved astral issues seeking resolution in current human life.

Human life is at a monumental crossroads in terms of how it chooses to reconcile these pervasive states of polarization. We are being asked to relive and resolve ancient struggles in the light of a new day. The solution of repression is no longer available to us. We must reconcile with our wholeness, which is both rational and irrational.

And so, in these changing times, we must all bring integrity into the daytime and into the night sea journeys of our dreams. We must be receptive to guidance that resonates the truth. We must provide guidance to, and set limitation upon, that which would seek to overrun our conscience, our balance, and our health.

Human responsibility and choice are critical to celestial solution. Changing times call for greater consciousness, greater conscience and greater love for ALL.

And remember that love leads, but is not dismissive of, hate.

In and outside of time,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: True Healing Of The Child

Healing the child self…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Alice Miller’s books, on the impact of child abuse and neglect, evoke deep compassion for the wounded inner child. Healing from childhood trauma requires deep sensitivity and respect for dissociated child parts, along with their experiences of abuse and neglect.

Ultimately, complete healing requires full acceptance of everything one has experienced in life. With trauma, this includes releasing the full sensory and emotional discharge of stored reactions to the traumatic experience. With healing, those memories are no longer traumatic; they trigger no emotion or sensation. They are completely neutral.

Mentally, one is challenged to dispel beliefs that one was responsible for causing the traumatic encounter. Here one truly needs to accept that indeed they were a victim in an experience that was not of their making.

Healing also includes a vastly enlarged perspective of the experience, which includes the motives and circumstances of others involved in the traumatic experience. Ultimate healing also requires complete emotional neutrality toward one’s perpetrator.

To acknowledge one’s victim status is critical to healing and, yet, one cannot heal if one holds onto the victim status as an enduring identity. An enduring identity as victim reflects a personality construction with the wounded child in control of, what Winnicott called, the false self. This self is seen as false because rather than mature through the normal developmental stages of childhood, it mimicks adulthood while secretly dedicating itself to adaptive behaviors that protect the child from anxiety.

The false self is a commandeered adult ego state whose charge is to defend the child from any discomfort. The false self employs its resources to bury, in the physical body, the memory and impact of trauma, as well as to develop a rigid body armor to stave off the challenge of the outside world.

The false self often develops competency in a profession, which provides security for the child, but behind this seeming successful adaptation to life is a sense of self as a phony, threatened to be discovered at any moment.

I refer to this child state that controls the false self as the uninitiated child because it has failed to complete its rite of passage to advance beyond its victim status. Rites of passage are purposeful traumatic practices that societies once used to help children successfully advance into real adulthood. All trauma requires full recapitulation to complete passage into real adulthood.

Failure to advance can fixate the child in a narcissistic worldview of entitlement, protection and revenge. In her book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Alice Miller describes Hitler’s horrifically abusive childhood, that, left unprocessed, was projected outward in a ruthless quest for revenge.

These same dynamics are blatant in the cult of the child that serves the power drives of uninitiated charismatic leaders, who promise revenge upon the reigning adult authority figures in the present world. These extreme childish expectations of entitlement and protection have opened the floodgates of legitimization for the uninitiated, who blindly support these irreverent child heroes.

These extreme examples simply underscore how this developmental challenge of achieving true adulthood is the salient issue for the human race today. The hallmark of true adulthood is the acceptance of full responsibility for one’s entire life, including all experiences of victimization.

This in no way takes responsibility away from those who have victimized others. They must and will be held accountable for their actions. They will never be able to advance spiritually unless they fully feel the pain they caused and recapitulate all the pain of their own lives. These are the prerequisite rites of passage.

Ultimately, like Job, we are faced with accepting the fact that life is not fair, despite the echoes of our childhood socialization.

Ultimately, we are challenged to accept Buddha’s assessment that life is suffering. Earth School is a playing field for the suffering of attachment and loss.

The full mastery of Earth School is to arrive at the place of love, most especially for all those who had roles in our traumatic rites of passage.

Become the child acorn that advances beyond its protective shell, delivering its vitality to the mighty adult oak it was always destined to become.

Ultimately, the child’s destiny is to grow up and into its adult self, who awaits beyond its rites of passage. To that adult, bring a matured innocence, willing to journey freely in and, perhaps someday, beyond this predatory universe.

Mature the self, mature the world,
Chuck