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Relationships: Carriers of Life, Growth, and Trouble

July 21, 2015 by Jerry Ruhl

Psychological development, even among Jungians, is often viewed through the lens of individual growth. Yet relationships are the container for all growth and advancement. In fact, mature relationships are the ideal training ground for love, compassion, forgiveness, surrender, generosity, selflessness, gratitude – qualities that wisdom traditions describe as the fruit of spiritual progress. In addition, we must note that the path to individuation is seldom smooth and happy.

With any developmental path you must expect trouble, constant interference with your conscious plans. Listening with integrity and intention to the urgings of the “other”, whether in for form of a partner or the unconscious, one can no longer do just as one pleases. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung deified the inner push to individuate, referring to it as the work of the higher Self. “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

Oh my. Sharing your psychic house with someone who irritates you, at times blocks your plans, frequently highlights your shortcomings and blind spots? That sounds like the experience of marriage or a primary relationship! What better environment to have your willful intentions thwarted and your shadow elements pointed out to you – for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, so long as you both shall live. While we may frequently invoke the Lord’s name in our relationships, unlike Jung, most of us do not associate it with a spirit of divine intervention.

Let’s face it, relationships are difficult and require constant attention and hard work. They frustrate us, leave us mystified, at times drive us to the edge of madness. As Woody Allen narrates in the film Annie Hall: “A relationship is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

While many would testify that marriage is a predator of peace or society’s instrument of torture, the myth of happy relationship still dominates our culture, even in the face of a divorce rate surpassing 50 percent in the industrialized nations. Everyone knows couples who have dissolved their family after ten or twenty years of commitment. While self-help books and marriage counselors promote the idea that only happy marriages are successful, the truth is that every path to consciousness leads though dark and difficult places. Zeus and Hera, the archetypal married couple for the ancient Greeks were constantly in turmoil and quarrel. Zeus had countless sexual affairs and Hera avenged herself in a most cruel fashion against lovers of her husband. Friga, the Norse goddess of marriage, was also a patron divinity of war. The image of a strife-filled marriage is reflected not only among the gods, but also in popular stories. Why do we expect otherwise?

Perhaps it is time for change in the mythic images of committed relationship. A colleague of mine recently recounted the dream of a twice-divorced client in her late 50’s: She is in her garage when a man in blue overalls pulls up in a truck. He tells her, “I am the Holy Spirit… As he turns to leave he says, “By the way, you know you can have a relationship if you want one.” She replies, “But I am too difficult to live with,” to which the Holy Spirit responds, “You know, everyone is difficult to live with!”

The mythologist Joseph Campbell once told Bill Moyers, “When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity …You’re no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one…the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, which I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. Marriage is not just a social arrangement, it’s a spiritual exercise. (The Power of Myth, p. 6).

If relationships are so troublesome, why do we keep returning expecting better outcomes?

To return to Woody Allen for guidance: “After that it got pretty late, and, we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her, and I thought of that old joke. You know, this guy goes to his psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says, ‘Well why don’t you turn him in?’ The guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships– you know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.”

We do need the eggs. Committed relationships can be understood as archetypal containers for individuation. Jung recognized the importance of relationship, writing, “Individuation has two principal aspects: in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of objective relationship.”

What would relationship look like considered as a spiritual exercise, a journey of pilgrimage, a container for self-realization and mutual individuation? Here are some preliminary ideas.

First, unlike a vacation, a pilgrimage is a journey in which we are in service to something greater than our own egos. We expect challenges and suffering along the way. The participants aim for compassion, affection, and consideration as they go, yet they are prepared to deal with setbacks and disappointments.

To return to Jung’s stormy quote about how the divine is constantly interfering in his life –conflict moves psyche. In relationships we are working out our flaws, our gifts, what we have inherited, and what is unique to us. It would follow then that a real “soul mate” is not the perfect partner in the sense of someone being there to give us what we want or to make us happy. Happiness seems to come and go of its own accord. The more we chase it, the more it eludes our grasp. God help those folks who think they are in charge of the happiness of another person. We often have to fight hard with our soul mate because that person may appear to be the very obstacle to our becoming who we are. Precisely because they are the obstacle, they may help us to grow. Of course, a relationship also must contain care, consideration, love, and resonance, an energy that is vibrant between people.

Jung’s choice of the term “individuation” is perhaps unfortunate; he constantly had to explain he did not mean individualism—a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress without a creed aiming not at heaven but at self-centered development. Individuation is Jung’s term for a whole-making instinct. This requires that we listen and respond to “the other” with presence. In doing so, our conscious plans and desires are modified by forces hidden beneath awareness.

When people say they want deep intimacy they often envision a bottomless pool of unconditional love, trust, security, and acceptance. This is other-validated intimacy, an emotional fusion of selfhood borrowed from another and an extension of childhood.

Being intimate with another doesn’t mean you get the response you want. When a partner cannot or will not validate you, you need to be able to calm and validate yourself. Dating couples thrive on other-validated intimacy. They give each other lots of positive feedback, are on best behavior, and tend to ignore the shadow. Committed relationships require self-validating intimacy and skills for negotiating and working through trouble. Individuating relationships must stretch you, often painfully. Intimacy involves being accurately known and knowing your partner. People don’t desire partners who they constantly have to validate. Reciprocal validation is a big part of dating but not workable in a long-term, individuating relationship. The demand to constantly be there for the other starts to eventually feel suffocating. Desire fades as the urge to escape grows.

To summarize, there is no avoiding doing our own inner work, but it always takes place in relationship to an “other.” We would benefit from a deeper understanding of how individuating relationships might work. We can say that such relationships are about co-creation, and there is no growth without effort, conflicts, and struggle. As Alexis Zorba, in Zorba the Greek, exclaimed to a young man who was insisting he did not want any trouble, “Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble!”

The Healing Power of Dreams: A Weekly Discussion Group

July 2, 2015 by Jerry Ruhl

We all dream, just as we all breathe. Since ancient times people have wondered what dreams mean, where they come from, and if they have a purpose.
Dreams speak in the language of images and symbols, so we often are mystified by them. Having others to help make sense of our dreams can be extremely helpful, especially as the conscious mind may quickly forget or discount a dream’s content.

Why pay attention to dreams? Dreams can help us heal. They may communicate physical problems that the conscious mind is ignoring. They provide clues as to what is psychologically stuck or blocked. They show us how our lives are out of balance, and they provide a source of creativity and renewal. The path to understanding dreams is one of appreciation, valuing, and sharing. We can learn to approach a dream like a work of art, an interesting creation that the unconscious mind has pieced together out of experiential fragments, weaving thoughts, sensations, and emotions.

I will facilitate this discussion group, where we will share our dreams and learn to appreciate and make sense of them. Dream tending is both art and science, and we will discuss a variety of techniques.

The Healing Power of Dreams meets from 5:45 to 7 p.m., on eight consecutive Tuesdays, starting July 14 and ending Tuesday, Sept. 1. The cost is $400 for all eight sessions, payable at the first class. Members may to choose to continue the group in the fall. We meet at the Institute for Spirituality and Health, second floor conference room, 8100 Greenbriar St., Houston, TX 77054.

Enrollment is limited. To register, please call me at (937) 501-0043.

Wounded Healers

May 21, 2015 by taylorwest

by Jerry M. Ruhl, Ph.D.

Imagine that you are attending a cocktail party, replete with brie and a moderately good chardonnay. Once everyone is assembled and chattering, you get everyone’s attention by hitting your wine glass with a spoon. Assuming you are about to toast the host or hostess, everyone quiets and turns your way. You startle everyone in the room by saying, “We all are going to die.”

There is shocked silence. No one can believe their ears. This person has surely lost it, some whisper. This person has surely been working too hard. Then there are a few nervous giggles. Most cannot help but smile because death is such an emotionally-charged subject. There is collective agreement to pretend it’s not there. A person who brings up death in a context other than heroic efforts to overcome it, risks being shunned. It’s true that one does not have to be a crusader of death. Life is hard enough without having our noses rubbed in our mortality every day. However, there is an approach to death which does not push it away as something that should not be, but rather accepting it as the natural goal of life.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung suggested that we should strive to “achieve” our death. Whenever one sort of experience is upon us, its opposite must always be close by. Death is closely associated with ecstatic experience. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek and means “to stand outside oneself.” The ego becomes fearful of such experiences and thinks, “Save me from that!” The ecstatic experience is never conscious; it occurs outside of consciousness. When ecstatic possibilities arise, the ego may attempt to extinguish them as quickly as possible. When we are in great suffering, we can be sure that the ecstatic is too close for comfort. It is possible to witness and allow such experiences in others.

There are certain people who seem to have been born destined to have a particular relationship with death and dying. Perhaps they come into the world with their loyalty divided between heaven and earth, or maybe it is the result of trauma or illness. The experience of the death of a parent, a sibling, or a friend can shock and shift consciousness in profound ways. We call such people wounded healers. One of the unique features of such people is cultivation of conscious knowledge that they are going to die. Of course we all know in the abstract we are mortal, and since we are part of the human race that applies to us too. However, there is “knowing” in a compartmentalized way that no one gets out of here alive, and then there is knowing in a conscious way.

Death comes to us all — yet we do not fully believe in death. It is our inevitable future, one of the few constants of an inconstant universe — yet death is a mystery. Maybe all living beings, including humans are not designed to fully comprehend death. Certainly, our minds tend to slip over the reality of our own deaths, as if the idea were teflon coated. Recently, I have been surrounded by death, immersed in the experience of inevitable loss. Friends are dead or dying, clients are losing loved ones, even animals are expiring. Something in me is drawn to and fascinated by the strangeness of it all. Since I was very young, I have looked on death as the final frontier, the ultimate challenge, a place beyond which understanding ceases.

Death brings up such profound questions:

Where does the profound richness of life go when someone dies? Does it dissipate out into the darkness, snuffed out like a flickering flame? Does it leave the body and go we know not where? I have had too many experiences of the dead and dying to believe that aliveness simply dissipates.
When one is touched by death in a profound way on a regular basis it can contribute to a form of secondary post-traumatic stress with symptoms that make us feel moody, tragic, isolated, and depressed. Or, it can bring gravitas to our personalities, leading us into real wisdom.

People can heal and live, and people can heal and die. Healing is different from curing. Healing is a process of leading forth, wholeness, integrity. A wounded healer is one who leads forth the wholeness in others. People can heal physically, heal emotionally, heal mentally, heal spiritually. All people are wounded. People in palliative care treatment cannot cover it up the way the rest of us do. When fear is taken away people are empowered to deal with whatever they need to deal with and seek meaning in the events of their lives.

Healing is not always about getting better so much as letting go of what isn’t you. We don’t necessarily need to be more, often we need to be less. We need to let go of illusions. People can live miserable lives for long periods of time, so extending life isn’t always the highest goal in palliative care.

I would also suggest that a healer is not a person who has pat answers. In fact, people turn to wounded healers for comfort precisely because they will help hold the most profound questions rather than providing simple and generic answers. For the most important things in life — the things that involve awe, surprise, and mystery — there are no simple answers. Witnessing involves helping others hold such moments. To suffer, in its original meaning, means to allow. While we can do our best to minimize physical suffering it may be most helpful to allow what someone is feeling and not try to talk them out of it. This is to witness. This is wisdom.