Yes, total agreement on all points. What Jungian analysis has taught me, additionally, is that for me at least, the path to wholeness leads through real-time experience of buried pain. Taking the full impact now, as a grownup, washes so much away. In the case of the above post, just getting to know Nakul a little better drove home the emotional massiveness of the abuse I suffered. I’ve always known, intellectually, but it didn’t really hurt. I’d walled it off so it wouldn’t, and in so doing also encapsulated the lies that caused the pain…

Since writing this post, I’ve been on an extended high of sorts, in a real creative whirlwind, and I think I know why: the evil inner critic is gone, or at least went into hiding. It had to, because what hit me in the bathroom put the lie to any claim to legitmacy it had: the inner critic is a FUCKING NUTBALL PSYCHO SADIST!!! I don’t have to listen any more, just like I don’t have to answer every phone call. I have wanted this to be “over” for so goddamned long, but it wouldn’t go away until I felt it. Stupid karma! No way do we ever get a refund.

This shit stops with me, not because I will it, but because the energy is transmuted. Hah!

I empathize and sympathize with your personal history, too: denial of talent, squelching of opportunity, parental dysfunction, the whole sorry mess, is in my background too.

Something that has helped me is an insight from (very many years!) of therapy, in groups with people whose personal histories were far more damaging than ever happened to me. I would be listening to some horrific story of abuse, and awestruck that the victim was sitting there in front of us, grappling with that history, and that I was hearing them say, essentially,

“I can’t undo what was done to me. But I can make sure it fucking stops with me.”

I learned from those people, to begin to apply the same lesson to my own life history. Whatever was done to us, whatever resentments and regrets we are doomed to carry to the grave, we can begin to say “the shit stops with me.” We can make the choice to heal, and to put good energy out into the world.

And if the youngsters, the ones who come after us, the ones who (because of our own resolution not to replicate the shit) reach the kind of artistic completion that we can’t, because of age or damage, then at least we are putting good energy out into the world.

And we can’t ever know upon what distant shores the ripples of that good energy will be felt.

Peace, brother.

Steve

You’re also right about the backside of “old.” Jungian analysts don’t generally even like to mess with people who aren’t at least in their 50s. The ruts have to be deep enough to really feel them!

(And Nakul, if you’re reading this, don’t worry a bit. I’m fine. It’s just that getting to know you better has helped me to understand myself a little more. Just get out there and have a freaking BLAST!)