Posts Tagged ‘shadow’
Marriage as a Path Towards Individuation
The goal of marriage is not happiness, but rather individuation, or striving towards wholeness.
This assertion is the central theme of “Marriage: Dead or Alive,” a book written by the Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig.
I believe that this redefinition of the purpose of marriage is both helpful and important. The popular myth of marriage as “a bed of roses” is misleading and destructive. This expectation leads many people to become overly self critical and despairing when their marriage goes through the inevitable rocky times.
Marriage is metaphorically a hermetically scaled container. Within it, each spouse will experience over time the full range of his or her emotions: good, bad and ugly. The entire contents of both partners’ unconscious are reciprocally projected onto the other. If one fails to recognize these projections, one comes to experience one’s spouse as demonic. However if both individuals are capable of consciousness regarding their respective projections, then there is a unique opportunity for growth and for healing.
Encounter with the Shadow
Through reclaiming our projections, we complete ourselves. We encounter the shadow side of our own nature. This is always a painful and difficult experience. It requires openness, honesty and an unshakeable commitment to “own our own stuff.” The rewards, however, are great: increased self awareness as well as an enhanced capacity for relatedness.
To quote Guggenbuhl-Craig:
“It never happens that in marriage two completely healthy people get together. Both have their neurotic peculiarities and distortions. But marriage does not have to do with one partner’s curing the other, or even with changing the other significantly; this is not possible. Through the act of getting married, one has taken on the task of mutual confrontation until death … The peculiarities of oneself and of one’s partner must be borne, accepted and integrated into the interplay between the spouses …
“The more one confronts everything, the more interesting and fruitful becomes the path to individuation.”*
*Guggenbuhl-Craig, Adolf
Marriage: Dead or Alive, Revised Edition. Spring Publications, 2001
A Buddhist Perspective on Healing: Wisdom and Compassion
My immersion in Tibetan Buddhism has influenced my perspective on the healing process. The central tenets of Tibetan Buddhism are wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom in Healing
From a conventional point of view, phenomena are incontrovertibly how they appear. At this level, healing in psychotherapy includes the kinds of work that I have described in previous blogs and radio shows. It is essential to bring dissociated feelings and memories into conscious awareness. Doing so in the context of a caring psychotherapy relationship allows the “working through,” the integration and the release of these emotions. Mourning is central to this process: mourning for both what was wounding and for what was lacking in the patient’s early life.
Another key component of the healing process is working on the patient’s “shadow” side. Trauma propagates through identification with the aggressor. It is a painful, but vital, step to recognize one’s own propensity to hurt others.
From an ultimate point of view, all phenomena are inherently “empty.” I am not qualified to discuss the Buddha’s teachings. So, for our purposes, let me just say that healing is facilitated by the cultivation of the awareness that all of our perceptions, all of our experiences, are like a mirage, like an illusion. We all construct our own “psychic reality.”
This realization is very powerful. It gives us the freedom to construe the past from multiple vantage points. We can achieve release from an identity as a perennial victim of circumstances. We can develop the capacity for what Carolyn Myss has called “symbolic sight.” We can learn to “learn from our experience” (Wilfred Bion). We can develop the potential to do things differently, to experience transformation.
Viewing life as an open field, rather than as a constellation of solid figures, liberates us from fixity, from the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.
Compassion In Healing
Compassion for others is the antidote for narcissism. Narcissism is the root of all suffering. When we fixate on an “I,” we experience ourselves as fundamentally disconnected, constricted, anxious and depressed. When we cultivate our compassion for others, we feel alive, related and infused with life energy.
Wisdom and compassion are inseparable, like the two wings of a bird. In conjunction with one another, they liberate us from suffering, allowing our spirits to take flight. The darkness of our delusions is dispelled. The radiance of our innate nature shines forth unimpeded. We are free.