The Skeletons in Your Mind

Working from home over the last few months has given me more of an opportunity to reflect on some of the trailblazers that made their mark in psychology over the last century. The one that stood out most to me in my readings was Carl Jung- one of the early psychoanalysts and collaborators with Sigmund Freud. Jung was very well known for contributing new concepts to psychology that invoked a sense of imagination and symbolism, and simultaneously, an appeal to science and rational skepticism. Jung is probably best known for developing a framework to understand our conscious and unconscious by looking at it through a prism of archetypes and symbols as well as looking at our own past events to understand the present.

Jung has stood out to me over the last month or so because his prescription for living a strong and healthy life wasn’t to look back and reframe your negative experiences into positive experiences or to find a silver lining in the gloomy clouds of your past. Instead, it was to look back at the parts of yourself- your negative experiences and identity- that you have been denying, embarrassed by, or avoidant of. Then, once you have done this, the goal was to integrate these parts of yourself into who you are, which in turn, would help to establish a sense of wholeness and betterment. It took me a while, even as someone who is a mental health professional, to begin integrating the parts of myself that I didn’t (and still sometimes don’t) want to be there or didn’t want to accept. For me, it always felt like counterintuitive advice that confronting something that makes me feel uncomfortable would have any effect except to make me feel worse. And yet, there are a lot of stories out there where this confrontation “with the abyss” is applied in the context of a hero faced with hardship, and as a consequence, undergoes transformation and atonement.

See the Hero’s Journey:

It’s a difficult task to take ownership over qualities or experiences that we tend to cast out of our own consciousness. “I can be anxious, my pride can get in the way of my relationships, I’ve done things to hurt the trust of people in my life” are just a few examples of qualities that are harder to integrate into who we might be. Doing this kind of work often invites discomfort and emotional pain that accounts for why we haven’t voluntarily confronted these parts of ourselves to begin with. Confrontation with others is already difficult but a confrontation with the self can feel like being lost and alone at sea amidst fog and rough waters.

One way that you can practice this kind of integration is to write down one part of who you are that is harder to say out loud. As an example, you might be the type of person who is painfully uncomfortable with silences in conversation. As an exercise, you could begin by asking yourself why that is. What belief do you have about yourself that makes silence uncomfortable? Do you feel like you are failing unless you can keep the person in front of you talking? Have the people in your life taught you to internalize silence as inadequacy? If so, acknowledge this part of yourself, search for meaning in this, write about it, and keep it in mind the next time you’re faced with silence in your life.

As a final point, which comes directly from Jung, remember that the process of integrating and accepting is work that is lifelong, and that often looks nonlinear, especially when you consider how frequently unconscious forces can rear its head in a series of different situations in your life.

***Written by Matthew Evans LCSW #95384 for Meridian Counseling. Matthew Evans works as a therapist in Santa Monica, CA and enjoys watching movies, learning and relearning things,  and going on long hikes in Angeles National Forest. He is also an avid proponent of the  “treat yo’ self” philosophy.