Facing Your Feelings: Avoidance or Encounter?
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2021
- While we welcome “good” feelings, we often try to banish “bad” ones like sadness, fear, vulnerability and shame. We may deny them by trying to “think positive.” We may attribute them to political wrongs or even the barking dog next door. If emotions have nowhere else to go, they become symptoms, complexes, and even physical illnesses. Avoiding negative emotions simply causes them to go underground and express themselves in disguise. Jung says, “Our emotions happen to us; affect occurs at the point at which our adaptation is weakest and at the same time exposes the reason for its weakness.” So what is calling for encounter instead of avoidance, displacement or somatization? Feelings are information-they do not necessarily mandate action, nor do they originate externally. Notice them, name them--and look to your dreams, for the unconscious compensates nightly for what consciousness avoids. Something may be pursuing you.
HERE'S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:
"I saw a bride in a white dress sitting behind a small table in a candlelit, cave-like room. Her groom was standing/waiting across the room. It was an arranged marriage but of their own volition. The bride stood up as a signal that the marriage would occur. They looked into each other’s eyes and knew the marriage was right. This part of the dream seemed to be in close-ups of their eyes and lasted what seemed like a couple of minutes. The sense of certainty seemed to have been there, either two weeks before or after the marriage."
REFERENCES:
Inside Out. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_...)
Linda Leonard. On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship. a.co/d/7U7RjTg
Hilary Jacobs Hendel. It’s Not Always Depression. a.co/d/dnLxg8N
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#jungian #dreamanalysis #analyticalpsychology #dreaminterpretation #jung
This new age spirituality that focuses on positive thinking, it's actually the biggest bypassing technique to avoid feeling your emotions and truly healing.
I agree. I think it's difficult for people to conceptualize and balance the processes of manifestation (where feeling precedes the materialization) and the healing process or just plain life (which evokes all kinds of feeling and pulls so much energy from us). Successful elders will show us the way in this regard, but even there it's hard to detangle socioeconomic privilege from successful navigation strategies.
During a Goethean Science class, I learned that emotions started getting a bad rap by Grecian philosophers who emphasized logic and distrusted and delegitimized the senses as sources of information. It was all tied up into taking divine power from the matriarchical societies that did not have written language. Leonard Shain talked about this in Alphabet and the Goddess.
I feel the ego is healthy when in service to the spirit, which exists in the moment and is tied to instinct, because psychic information beyond the ego framework comes in the moment.
This episode brings to mind the therapy modality called "IFS therapy" = Internal Family Systems Therapy. It focuses on the idea that you have parts that carry feeling that wants to be acknowledged. When it isn't it tends to create somatic symptoms until it is. It's not guaranteed but many people have stated that after doing these sessions the physical ailments improve and sometimes disappear all together. I myself have experienced this phenomena with a debilitating issue with plantar fascitis. I had done everything possible over several years only to have it worsen to the point of being booked for a cortisol shot and specialist appt with a surgeon. I did 2 sessions where this part stated its connection to my foot issue. I started to notice an improvement a few days after the 1st session. I didn't believe it at first but my foot issue has completely cleared up with no shot or further intervention on my part. It took me quite some time to believe this but I have since started using it to help me with many emotional issues I've carried forward from a very traumatic childhood and a massive belief that says I shouldn't show anger or even feel it. This was proof to me that the body and mind are VERY intimately connected!
W. J
Thank you - I had never heard of that therapy. I suffered from plantar fasciitis as well so I understand the pain of it. I too came from a severely abusive background.
"The body keeps the score" -Bessell Vanderkolk.
I'm exploring dissociated parts of myself (emotional and memory) using a "storytelling" method similar to the IFS methodology, hoping to transcend my schizoid defenses. Congratulations on your success with anger and plantar fasciitis and thank you for posting your experience, it inspires hope and confirms the effectiveness of the theory.😊
Thank you three so much for adding such grace and quality to UA-cam land. Always great content, enriching my life and encouraging my journey.
A small correction: Milarepa was not a monk, he was a yogi. He did not take sexual abstinence vow, in fact he had at least a "girlfriend" over several years (he lived in solitude most of the time) and that story is reflected in his so called Songs.
Hey Joseph! Your voice sounds still muffy. Seems your throat isn't all too well.. take care and wish u a speedy recovery!
Re-framing fears in a different context will work for some people in losing neurosis . Fears can be turned into fascinations, elevators are fun 😉
i like this
I am loving this podcast, and this episode especially speaks to me. Thank you. I must push back a bit on your seeming to put Quakerism in the same basket as part of mechanisms that lend themselves to suppress uncomfortable emotion. It's too bad that the wider culture is ignorant of Quaker practice and sees it as something repressive or staid. It really is an action of *encountering* emotions, even dark or unruly ones, and embracing them. Not unlike meditation, it is NOT, however meditation, but rather a way of encountering oneself as it is and becoming more whole. I am not a Quaker--I'm a religious Jew--but I was part of Quaker Meetings for Worship for many years, and they have all my respect. I think Jung would have appreciated Quakerism. Thanks again for this AWESOME podcast. I am a devoted fan.
Making emotions/feelings into concepts to be verbalized is one of the weaknesses I see in the conflict resolution model Nonviolent Communication (NVC).
I think that gap is where the arts come in. For example orchestras composed of Arabs and Jewish people or improvisational dance circles because the feelings have to be felt and integrated with new experiences of positive felt connection. The process starts with language but isn't completed by it.
Very insightful episode. Everyone should learn this in school. Thank you :)
I love the last analogy with the man who offered his demons tea. I really reminds me of the work that I do with my own shadow by Tsultrim Allisone called “Feeding your Demons.” I know you all are familiar, but for the audience, it’s a meditative practice where one can make their shadow/ “demons” their allies instead of their enemies. I have helped me tremendously.
Nietzsche wrote of that also:
"Would you offer your hand to the ghost that frightens you"?
Thank you for that resource, I will check it out, it sounds very relevant to my own process. I was struck by the "tea" metaphor also and wondering how I might use it in forming an alliance with my own archtypes (a "vampiric" anima and a "giant" sadistic Superego "protector" with a fiery lash, and probably others I haven't met yet, oh my!)
@@siyaindagulag.Thanks for posting that, I don't remember hearing that quote before, though I've listened to several audio books. Mind posting which book it's from? This relates to something I'm trying to work on right now, but my "ghost" seems to want more than just a hand 😉.
Marriage like this is also under the theme umbrella of death dreams... Marie Louise Von Franz wrote a whole amazing book about them
Love these topics
Some of us are taught that anger is violence by our family of origin. Inner child healing therapy helped me to express all those repressed feelings from childhood. I believe some of my IBS since my 20s was a result of this. My chakras were locked up too.
What methods were effective for you?
Great episode, thanks.
"...you can't bury a worm."
-Stephen King "Lisey's Story"
Kudos to Deb for the reference to the "skirted suit" as an emblem of "feminine empowerment" as actually being repressive of Feminine qualities- it seems to me an unhealthy adoption of Feminine disguise for unhealthy Animus expression in a culture that doesn't honor the Feminine in Her own Right and sphere, and it causes even worse reactionary countercurrents (MGTOW, among many others) IMHO. Could it have anything to do with millenia of hyper-rationalism and Masculine-centric approaches to building society without regard for the stabilizing elements of Feminine nurture and renewal? Hmmm.🤔
"Life or Death, Ronin !?, me AND you, or me OR you? CHOOSE!"
-excerpt from "The Book Of Ronin "
Feelings are not facts …
And people are not robots, so actual human beings (not just as we know them in this highly repressive society but as we are in our natural state) are primarily emotional, and there is a lot of information in that. We humans don't even like humans who limit their knowledge to facts because they are pawns to the system and battling natural law and Truth.