“A night full of talking that hurts…”

Posted March 3, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Uncategorized

“A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets. Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.”  Rumi poem translated by Coleman Barks

Thinking about “a night full of talking that hurts,” and the difficulty in knowing how best to proceed with the work by day, I continue to try to find the words and images that can guide us to the discovery of the disconnect and the return of felt relationship with the lost others within. This level of recovery, evidenced in one’s increasing capacity to re-member painful relational failures, with their depth of emotion, is necessary to being seen. As long as one is hiding something from one’s self, others will be suspicious about what is really going on behind the mask, wall, protesting, denial.

Getting back into the boat consciously is about choosing to prepare one’s self for dropping into original scenes of overwhelm, with enough support to enable us to tell the story with the full range of emotion. This can occur spontaneously with the help of our inner guide, who holds us and helps us bare witness of the episode; more often, it can occur in unusual openings, as in “a night full of talking that hurts.” Therapy is one place to practice finding these openings and dropping into the emotional connection and flow of water that seems to come with healing the split.

In terms of practical applications, paying attention to the dream time is a great way to explore the possibility the guiding Self within is real and at the ready to help us integrate the entire life trajectory. Compiling an inventory of known episodes of upset is a simple way to catalogue specific scenes of relational failings which, averaged and generalized over time, comprise the Experiential State. In her work with Skeleton Woman I believe Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls these archaic wounds to loving stories.

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Getting Back into the Boat

Posted February 18, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Complexes and More, Initiation, Soul

When we become aware of having been triggered, activated, constellated, possessed, dispossessed, dissociated, or disconnected in some important way, how can we think about getting “back into the boat?”

This image, suggesting we have somehow been knocked out of the boat, brings forward earlier references to the impact on psyche of episodes of trauma and emotional/physical overwhelm. What I am signifying as wounds of overwhelm.

These human experiences have been described as the psychological basis for the mythological motif of death and rebirth.

From Egyptian mythology, Edward Edinger has observed: “When the child Maneros witnessed Isis’ terrible loss and grief upon seeing the dead Osiris, this awesome sight was so intolerable to Maneros that he fell out of the boat and drowned.” We too are vulnerable to losing balance, falling overboard and drowning in the face of intense emotion. It is how we are wired.

From the conceptualization of the ego-Self axis, such wounds symbolically knock the 110 voltage wired ego temporarily out of the boat of consciousness, and drop down into the deep waters of total psyche, in the realm of the Self. Here, they remain as if in suspended animation until the conditions are favorable for their re-integration. These are the original encapsulated episodic memories which form the nuclei of our complexes. On a side note “suspended” is misleading in terms of these are not energetically inert bundles of split off trauma. Their energies are not diminished by time and space.

Depth work is about helping us to get back into the boat with a new relationship to the reality of the waters of the unconscious, the unseen world. It is about discovering a way to re-connecting to those very experiences which, for our survival at the time, necessitated the disconnect.

Getting back into the boat consciously means choosing to open one’s self to suffering directly the images and affects generated by the original wounding experience. By definition, when these wounds of overwhelm are sufficient to knock the ego out of the boat and into the unconscious, the wounding itself evokes archetypal energies via a match with its associated collective, primordial scene. The ego is challenged to bring such scenes back into consciousness.

Years ago I was introduced to the idea that if you want to know about what has been initiatory for a person, you just need to inquire about “when did death come into your life?”

After a long opening night, hearing a hundred personal stories about first confrontations with death, I shared mine, and was then afforded a week in deepening in that exploration.

While I had never forgotten the details of my own near actual drowning experience, I was able to see then, 30 plus years later, how intensely overwhelming that confrontation with death was for me; how it had changed me, and how it was present in my work at that time, and informs me today.

The short story is that I recognized then my intense interest and evolving skill in helping others who required hospitalization in an acute psychiatric inpatient ward, could be seen as a reflection of my own initiatory encounter with death. Recognizing this possibility for the first time, a “name” came to me spontaneously: I was He-Who-Talks-About-Deep–Over-There. I was able to connect the intensity of my interest, dedication, and seemingly inexplicable capacity to sit with the most psychotic, anxious, depressed, and overwhelming experiences of others, my deeply felt resonance with the mystery present in primary process, the non-ego realm, to my ego’s efforts to look out, not within me. My connection with the depths, though largely unconscious to me at the time, was providing some critically important glue in my ability to trust the meaning of the dynamics present in the patient’s compensation-decompensation-recompensation cycle . While we may not be able to understand it yet, it can be understood from a drive to healing perspective; it is not accurate or helpful to reduce the action to evidence of pathology. It is psyche attempting some form of corrective adjustment.

This focus on the other enabled me to be present with this level of experience in the unique energetic field of the inpatient setting, without opening to my own terror and anxiety associated with my encapsulated trauma. This would be an aspect of my partial cure adaptation. My work with inpatients was about supporting them in finding their way back. Back into the boat.

I am pulling together the story about what happened next. It is a bit unusual in that the actual sequence of events have a strikingly mythological, dream time quality.

During that week I realized I needed to find a way to revisit and complete the initiatory cycle. The thought occurred to me, if/when I was able to do so, what might my new name be? What came to me at the time was: He-Who-Talks-About-Deep-In-Here-Now. While I do work out of a talking cure modality, I would place the emphasis today on being present with the full range of emotion. Something like One-Who-Is-Fully-Present-Inner-Outer-Above-Below.

What do you think? Should we practice being fully present? I believe so. Let us make preparations together to get back into the boat of consciousness, the place of re-membering.

 

 

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A Dream Time Case Study: Identifying a “Terrestrial Canalization” Complex

Posted February 16, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Communications from the Dream Time, Complexes and More

This was an interesting dream in that it so vividly introduced a very specific complex, at least in terms of its name! It has been sitting in my private posts  will offer my personal reflections at some point. At this point, I am posting dreams which stand out in one way of another. My hope is to encourage your interest in dreams as communications from the Guiding Self.

March 27, 2010 Dream: “Seminar setting with an analyst teaching via a case. I was orienting to a screen with images, which I then realized was a modern overhead projector, showing diagrams from a text book. The analyst seemed older, but with dark hair and was prominent, but not known to me. His name was something like Bonaventuri, Italian sounding; with his shade style glasses, black tops and and clear bottom rims, he looked a bit like Marcello Mastroianni, from a 1960’s movie. The conversation, didactic at that point, got a little quiet and hard for me to hear; the analyst was surprisingly relaxed, in fact reclining on the green grass next to the podium. He had his head propped up on one hand and elbow. I asked if he could talk a little louder for me. He did so while standing up and began in earnest to orient me to the case at hand, a man with a complex demonstrating what he called a ‘terrestrial canalization.’

Next he pointed to the screen, which was now more of a blueprint or architectural drawing depicting the first floor of a house. It was a schematic, showing traffic flow, ie: kid’s play movements, as if observed and recorded over time, each signified by a stylized curved arrow symbol. These arrows showed the repeated movements, typically as if a child would duck behind a chair, moving from right to left. These multiple movements, all in the same direction, he explained, were the traces which were the indication the children had grown up in a house where the father suffered with an activated terrestrial canalization complex. The picture revealed a dozen or so arrows, all as if capturing the data from a time lapse study, and pointing to the evidence that an unseen power was guiding the movements of the family in a particular way. He observed this patterning was the basis for recognizing the presence of a terrestrial canalization complex.”

Waking reflections: The dream time naming of the complex seemed familiar, and marvelous. Could it actually exist? I have dreams about the origins, function (teleos) and healing of splits and complexes quite regularly. Upon waking, after recording it and pondering on it, I decided to Google terrestrial canalization and was surprised and gratified to find a number of hits. Psyche can be so playful! The particular one which caught my eye, in the top handful of hits, was a research paper discussing primate evolution and scapula differentiation. Plains dwellers vs jungle dwellers show critical distinctions; in short, primates evolving on the plains tend to be dedicated quadrupeds. In contrast, jungle dwelling evolutionary process pulls for a greater range of motion and differentiation of forelimb function; a shift in the scapula canalization is what enables, is required, to accomodate reaching up and overhead movements, necessary for climbing and bipedal walking. I played with the idea the dream might be showing me my upbringing was ruled by a dedicated quadruped, a plains dweller who was not evolved enough to move through the world upright? Funny, if not true!

And what about the analyst? Was he a little too relaxed, chill? A grasshopper slacker not an ant fable image? He was pretty cool, carried a deep understanding of psyche, and was teaching with the help of schematics, which is definitely a core part of my work. I thought about the detail of needing to ask him to speak up for me, and how this worked in the dream to increase our engagement in the work at hand. Back to the analyst presence, I also associated to my first pair of black rim glasses in the 1950s; Buddy Holly died ten miles from my home town about that time. I will share more at some point but the idea is play and reflection, trying on the scenes, images, and affects; opening to seeing what sticks, what doesn’t.

I recognized canalization as a real word, but didn’t remember Jung’s discussion of the canalization of libido (which was familiar to me) until my analyst referenced it the next week. Jung used the phrase canalization of libido to “characterize the process of energic transformation or conversion.” He discusses it in the context of analogues, such as a water wheel on a stream, which enables one to convert the stream/libido into a more differentiated, directable, power resource. How do we develop/evolve a healthy relationship with our full blessing of libido? (CGJ, CW Vol. 8, p. 41.)

In reviewing this offering, which has been in unpublished status for 13 years, I now see I need to update it and offer more reflections. But for now, I a

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Everyone is a patient, everyone a psychotherapist?

Posted February 11, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Soul

“Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul–searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements that we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time in so far as we are involved with soul-making. The idea here is that if we are each and everyone a psychological patient, we are also each and everyone a psychotherapist. Analysis goes on in the soul’s imagination and not only in the clinic.” James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, page. xii

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The Cross…

Posted February 10, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Uncategorized

“The cross, or whatever other heavy burden the hero carries, is himself, or rather the Self, his wholeness which is both God and animal … the totality of his Being, which is rooted in his animal nature and reaches out beyond the merely human towards the divine. His wholeness implies a tremendous tension of opposites paradoxically at one with themselves, as in the Cross, their most perfect symbol.”  CG Jung

This quote is striking to me in the way such a few words could suggest so much. Jung’s formulation of the Self is most challenging. How can we orient ourselves to such a mysterious reality? Where do dreams come from? I am thinking this image has the ego carrying the Self, and struggling to do so. Can we recognize contributions from the Self reliably? How can we open to the Guiding Self?

This is the opening quote in the essay on Ave Marie, excerpted from a work by Jenny Koralek, published in the latest Parabola: Divine Feminine. My apologies for not having the Collected Works volume and page number.

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Love and Power (Psychology Today article))

Posted February 3, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Uncategorized

This is the opening of a 12 page discussion about intimacy and power.

“Power infuses all relationships, but today there’s a new paradigm: Only equally shared power creates happy individuals and satisfying marriages. Increasingly, it is the passport to intimacy. …

Shared Power Is the Only Power

Although many people associate power with manipulation and coercion, contemporary psychologists and philosophers have forged a new power paradigm: They view power as the capacity of an individual to influence others’ states, even to advance the goals of others while developing their full self. It doesn’t require observable behavior, let alone force.

If a woman is as influential as her partner is, then a relationship lasts, says John Gottman. But if he’s much more influential than she is, the relationship doesn’t last. For the dean of relationship researchers, an “interlocking influence process” is at the heart of a balance of power. “It’s really about responsiveness to your partner’s emotions. If you have power in a relationship, you have an effect on your partner with your emotions. That’s a good sign for the long-term stability of the relationship and the happiness of the partners. But some people have very high emotional inertia; they weigh a lot emotionally; it’s hard to move them.” See Love and Power

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Source: James Hillman on Psychological Faith & Soul-Making

Posted January 29, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Soul

This is a beautiful description from James Hillman:

“The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul… Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life.

Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the imagination as the only incontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt.

Soul making, as work on anima through images, offers a way of resolving the dependencies of transference. For it is not the therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my soul beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as bridge. The shaping of her amorphous moods, sulfuric passions, bitter resentments, and bubbles of distraction into distinct personalities is the main work of therapeutic analysis or soul-making. Therefore, it works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagination. It discovers and forms a personality by disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands.”

From Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50

For more notes/quotes on Hilman’s view of soul work, check out:  “Talking About Psychology – James Hillman”

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My First Remembered Dream (1955)

Posted January 24, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Communications from the Dream Time

In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Jung talks about his first dream and his decades long discovery process, with a key piece coming to him 50 years later. This got me thinking about my first remembered dream and my own unanticipated opening in understanding 50 years later. The shift in my appreciation of its energy and meaning stems from the idea dreams offer both a look backwards, bringing forward the earlier conditions, a reductive function, as well as glimpses into our anticipated future developments, the prospective function; reductive and prospective. I believe I was four or five at the time.

The dream (1955): “I was very happy and excited about my first day on as a fireman. After dinner it was time to get some sleep before our first call. We all processed upstairs to get into our beds. They were neatly organized in two rows, opposite each other. My assigned bed was on the far end of the bunk house. Each fireman’s gear, overalls with boots attached, was positioned at the end of his bed, just right for jumping into them and sliding down the fire pole at the far end of the room. I stood next to my bed, taking in the order and the importance of what we were doing. It was a wonderful moment. As we all sat down on our beds, it seemed everyone was looking at me. I was very happy. Then, as if choreographed, each fireman reached under his chin and in one movement, all pulled off their human masks, revealing their true identities: they were actually vibrant wolves, grinning with exceptionally long snouts full of big sharp teeth! In that instant, I thought they were going to make a meal of me! Terrified, I woke myself up screaming. Both of my parents, startled awake by my screams, came running into the room. They tried to comfort me, reassuring me it was only a nightmare.

I don’t remember ever talking about the dream with them again.

In my 20’s and 30’s, working with psychiatric inpatients and psychiatrists’ inclined to interpret dreams from a Freudian bent, I revisited this dream from the perspective of age appropriate unconscious rivalries with my father and mysterious imaginings of my mother (See: castration anxieties and vagina dentata). This psychoanalytic perspective reflects the reductive aspects of the dream.

50 years later, I received a lovely gift: The Wolf Ritual of the Northwest Coast, an ethnography published in 1952.  As I reflected on the role and meaning of the Wolf Ritual for these peoples, from my own now direct knowledge of rites of passage, I was struck with the profound notion that what I had experienced as a nightmare at the time could also be seen as a dream time encounter with the Wolf Clan elders. Surprised and delighted, I pictured them coming to welcome me into the powers! This interpretation is an example of the dream’s prospective function. From this perspective, my young witnessing ego, terrified by the hiddenness of their true natures revealed(?), their toothy wildness(?), assumed the worst. Surely they were now going to eat me. However, in the manifest dream they didn’t make a move to threaten me. They did reveal their true natures. They were relaxed and smiling. They were full of power. Had a wise elder presence been available to guide me in accessing my imagination, might I have been able to see past my initial terror and begin to see them as allies in Nature? What if in dreaming the dream onward, I had been able to identify with my wolf nature?

What if, as Carl Sandburg proclaims in opening of Wildnerness:

“THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood-I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go….”

Sandburg goes on to claim a whole menagerie of wild creatures, because “the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go…”

For a beautiful shapeshifting image variation on this theme, see the the Inuit poem Magic Words:

“In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal
could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language…(continues)”

It is interesting to consider this dream from these very different, both and more perspectives.

From the prospective function perspective, the dream foreshadows my relationship with nature, alerting me to the Wolf Clan. For a macro level perspective on opening to this transrational world, see Jerome Bernstein’s formulation on Borderland consciousness.

Ernst, Alice Henson, The Wolf Ritual of the Northwest Coast, University Press, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 1952.


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Microfractures in Communication: So What’s the Big Deal?

Posted January 17, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Uncategorized

One of the most important concepts to get working in your own language is captured in this single powerful quote within a  quote:

“… microfractures in communication between patient and analyst are vital because they allow the transference to become ‘the engine of analysis, by contributing raw material from the patient’s internal world and history’.” See  Wilkinson on Microfractures

This observation applies to the transference arising in our personal relationships as well. We all need a way to recognize the raw material which will find a way to present its bill, as Alice Miller observed.

Emotionally charged reactions to what might normally be considered small breakdowns in our communication point directly to the raw material of unfinished emotional business.

In a blur moment, the hurt or offense taken by one or both parties at some level can be understood or seen as an out-picturing of an experiential state scene.

The quote suggests these unintended ruptures, in letting the raw material into the space we hold together, become the engine of the analysis. These are the grist for the mill. While we can always try to do our best, planning for the inevitable microfractures that will show up allows us embrace the blur with awareness and curiosity, not negative judgement. What can we learn about ourselves, each other? (see discussion on getting one’s buttons pushed)

This is another way to understand the positive aspect of “healing only occurs in the blur.” We need to support the necessity of going there with enough consciousness to gain our freedom from the unconsciousness driving the re-enactment of the wounding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Skeleton Woman Video

Posted January 13, 2016 by chuck bender
Categories: Uncategorized

I first came across the story of Skeleton Woman in Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It came up this morning in conversation and I wanted to post this link to a lovely hand rendered short movie directed by Edith Pieperhoff:  Skeleton Women

This is a very easy way to drop into an important piece of work for all who would feel. Estes offers it as teaching for couples with an emphasis on the idea we can’t really become intimate with each other without/until, we can survive an encounter with Skeleton Woman, representing the third between us, carrying all of our archaic wounds to loving. As in a dream, “she” is not primarily symbolic of the woman in the work, rather, she is standing in for deep feelings and our relational nature. Something like that. I would say symbolically speaking we have all experienced the opening scene. Check it out…

My thanks to the man who found this version and shared it with me.

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