Inner Work Notes

Tag: Carl Jung

  • The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

    Someone sends you a short message. Before long you have decided what it meant, what they think of you, what they would say if you brought it up, and how you would feel afterward. In your head the whole conversation has already happened, and all of it is settled. None of it has been checked with the person.

    Then you do not bring it up. Weeks go by, and you are just as sure as you were at the start. The only thing that changes is that the story in your head gets more detailed every week.

    You cannot find out who you are on your own

    You learn what you are like, and what other people make of you, from how they actually respond when you speak to them. On your own, your guess about what they would say never meets anything that pushes back against it, corrects it, or surprises you. And with nothing new coming in, you cannot tell the difference between what the other person really thinks and what you fear, or hope, they think.

    People often tell a story to make this point: a child raised by wolves. When he is found, he walks on all fours. He is clearly a human being, yet he takes himself for a wolf, because wolves are the ones he grew up among. Real cases like this are few and most are disputed, so take the story as an illustration, not as evidence. But you can see the point in any family: we learn what we are from how the people around us respond to us.

    When you never actually talk to the other person, your mind still supplies their answer. But it builds that answer out of what you already expected, so the answer can only confirm the fear, or the hope, you started with.

    Guessing comes easier than talking things over

    Left alone with a question about someone, a person does not stay undecided. They become more certain.

    “She likes me; that is why she said that.” “That tone was on purpose.” “They are talking about me right now.” The people involved may simply have been saying what they wanted to say and getting on with their day; it may have had nothing to do with you. Still, the guessing runs on and always reaches a verdict, because the one making the guess is also the one judging it.

    We are more practiced at imagining than at talking, because imagining came first: it is with us from the very beginning of life, while talking things over with another person is something we learn later. So when a conversation feels risky, the mind falls back on the older, easier habit. It plays both parts itself, so you never have to let the other person see what you feel, and you never hear an answer you did not make up yourself.

    Notice how comfortable this is. In your head, the other person says only the lines you give them, when you expect them to. Nothing catches you off guard. Nobody asks you a question you were not ready for. You guess, you have your feelings about it, and it ends there.

    The sentence that has to be said out loud

    Say you are fairly sure someone likes you, and you like them too. There is exactly one thing to do with that: go and tell them, in words. “I like you. Do you like me?”

    But you would probably rather not say it. You are afraid that if you do, the other person will run away.

    They might, if they do not feel the same way, and that hurts. But now you know something you could not have known before you asked. Asking out loud matters because it lets the other person give their own answer, which may not be the one you predicted. Until you ask, every new detail comes from you, and the relationship you imagine keeps growing with nothing real to correct it.

    The frustration you were avoiding is the one you needed

    When you finally speak, you may get an answer you did not want, and think, “I thought they liked me. They don’t.” That letdown is what psychologists call frustration: the disappointment of not getting what you hoped for.

    In that disappointment you feel, and not just know, that there is a real world outside your head. The other person turns out to have wishes and feelings of their own that do not follow the script you wrote for them. Frustration that is too great, or that humiliates you, can do real harm. But a disappointment you can bear teaches you two things: that you can survive an answer you did not want, and that the answer tells you something you can use. Meeting reality this way, again and again, is how you learn to live in it.

    D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about the “good-enough mother.” She is not a perfect mother. At first she meets her baby’s needs almost completely. Then, as the baby becomes able to cope, she meets them a little less completely and a little later. Through those small gaps, the child faces the world a little at a time, in amounts it can manage. Heinz Kohut, another psychoanalyst, called frustration of this bearable size optimal frustration. Too much frustration makes it harder for a child to accept reality; the right amount helps the child accept it bit by bit. Neither of them saw this as a parenting failure to be apologized for. A child who is looked after perfectly, one hundred percent of the time, does not mature.

    Adults need this kind of bearable frustration too, and the way to get it is to ask. If you never ask, the guessing simply goes on, and nothing in the guessing itself will ever bring it to a stop.

    Not asking has another cost that is easy to miss. Every conversation you rehearse in your head and never actually have leaves you a little more convinced that you already know what people are like. That makes you a little less likely to try the next real conversation. So, quietly, you grow less practiced at talking with people while you grow more certain about them.

    What the avoidance costs later

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung summed up what avoiding pain costs in a sentence worth keeping: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Legitimate suffering is the pain a person simply has to go through in the course of living. Neurosis, meaning lasting anxiety and other symptoms, is what grows in its place when that pain is avoided.

    Addiction works the same way. There is a specific pain — a conversation you dread, a loss, a refusal, a limit you have to accept — and instead of going through it, you reach for something that stops the feeling for a while, the way a painkiller does. That original pain had a cause, and it could have come to an end. But each time you avoid it, new problems pile up on top of it: you come to depend on what you reach for, you start keeping secrets, and all of this causes trouble of its own. So the suffering that comes later is larger than the pain you put off.

    What you use does not have to be alcohol or a drug. The phone does it. Work does it. So does a relationship that exists only inside your own head, where the other person always behaves, is always available, and has never once said anything you did not write for them.

    Asking takes about four seconds

    There is nothing wrong with a mind that runs ahead. It is a good mind and a quick one. The only trouble is that no one ever contradicts it, and ideas that are never contradicted drift further and further from what is really happening.

    So the fix is not more rehearsal. If the other person is not someone who insults or threatens you, go to them and say one sentence, a question that leaves room for their answer, and wait to hear it: “When you said that, I thought you meant ___. Did you?” They may say yes, or they may say no. Either way, you hear something you did not write yourself, and the imagined conversation becomes a real one.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Collected Works, Vol. 11, para. 129. — “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — the graduated failure of adaptation.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — optimal frustration.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow: Carl Jung on the Part You Won’t Look At

    You know someone who has never once been wrong — not in their own account of it, anyway. The argument was the other person’s fault, the job went bad because the manager had it in for them, and the friendship ended because the friend was the one who changed.

    You nod along, mostly, because arguing with a story like that costs more than it’s worth. Then one evening you catch yourself telling a story of your own the same way — every piece accounted for, every motive explained, except your own part in the thing.

    That blank spot, where your own part should be, is what this article is about.

    Why does insisting you are right leave you in the dark about yourself?

    We prefer to remember the moments when we were capable, generous, and reasonable. But refusing to recognize anything else in ourselves does not make our envy, selfishness, and cruelty disappear. We simply stop seeing them in ourselves and start noticing them mainly in other people. When we see them in someone else, they can make us far angrier than the situation calls for. Over time, the story becomes simple: I am the reasonable one, and everyone else is the problem.

    Jung called the rejected side of the personality the shadow. It contains whatever does not fit the good image you want to maintain: envy when a friend succeeds, the wish to humiliate someone who embarrassed you, or pleasure at the failure of a rival. The more firmly you insist that you are only kind and fair, the less able you become to recognize these reactions as your own.

    This leads somewhere uncomfortable. When sunlight falls on something, the stronger the light, the darker the shadow behind it. It works the same way in us: the harder you insist on seeing only your good side, the darker your shadow grows. So the people most certain of their own decency often have the darkest shadow of all, and they are the ones who do not see it.

    Does having a shadow make you ill?

    Here’s where people get it backwards. Having a dark side is not what makes a person ill — Jung was plain about that. What makes a person ill is refusing to look at it.

    A feeling you keep denying does not go away. It starts steering what you do without your noticing. Envy may show up as relentless criticism of a successful colleague. Anger may come out as sarcasm toward a family member who did nothing to cause it. Jung’s point was that once you name the feeling and admit it is yours, it can no longer steer you from behind — and you get to choose whether to act on it.

    That sounds easy written down. It isn’t. Something in us resists looking, and not out of laziness. Seeing our own envy or cruelty would break the good picture we hold of ourselves, so part of us would rather not look at all.

    Where do you look for the part you can’t see?

    If you are hiding this part from yourself, and the people around you can see it plainly, where do you even begin to look?

    Jung’s first answer was dreams.

    Jung’s school of psychology is called analytical psychology, and it puts so much weight on dreams that it could fairly be called a psychology of dreams. Many popular books about dreams have been shaped by it. For Jung, dreams were a way to find the part of yourself you have not been looking at.

    There’s a reason he started there: you do not get to choose what you dream. A dream takes no interest in which picture of yourself you would rather keep, so it can show you what you have pushed out of your waking mind, in the form of people and scenes. Unlike the stories you tell about yourself when you are awake, it doesn’t take your side.

    Do all dreams come from the same depth?

    No. Some float near the surface — you ate too late or had a difficult meeting, and your brain shuffles the day’s events and plays them back to you. Underneath those are dreams that come from your own unconscious, the part of your mind that holds what you are not aware of. These dreams draw on your own life: your history, the people in it, the business you never got to finish.

    And beneath that personal layer there is a deeper one. Jung called it the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that does not come from your own experience. In his view we are born with it, it is older than any single life, and we share it with people we will never meet.

    Dreams from this layer carry what Jung called archetypes: images that turn up again and again across many different lives and cultures. In a dream like this, a flood, a threatening animal, a ruler, or a figure waiting at a gate can feel larger than anything that has happened to you lately. You may wake with intense fear or awe and keep thinking about the image all day. For Jung, that emotional force is the sign that the dream comes from somewhere deeper than your memories of yesterday.

    Why can images from this deep layer be frightening?

    Because they carry real force. “Frightening” here doesn’t mean spooky, or even unpleasant. It means they are strong enough to swallow up the waking mind.

    The ego is the part of your mind that holds on to who you are, keeps track of what is real, and keeps what is happening inside you separate from what is happening in the world. If images and feelings from the unconscious grow stronger than the ego can handle, a person can lose their footing. At worst, they lose touch with reality and can no longer tell a dream image from what is actually happening in their life.

    The unconscious is also much larger than we usually picture. Waking awareness has limits: it can take in only what your own senses bring to it. In Jung’s view, the unconscious is not bound by that limit.

    People sometimes say they knew someone far away had died before anybody called to tell them. In his memoir, Jung wrote that before the First World War broke out, he had visions of terrible destruction. Stories like these, Jung’s included, are personal reports. They are not scientific proof that anyone can see the future, and reading them that way misses the point. The point is simpler: what lies in the unconscious is not small, and it is not tame.

    What did Jung do with these experiences, and what did he refuse to do?

    Jung never went around announcing what he saw, the way a fortune-teller might. No stage, no readings, no room full of paying strangers waiting to hear what was coming. Instead he turned inward, into what he called his confrontation with the unconscious: he watched what rose up in him and wrote it down in his own hand.

    Jung did not simply receive this way of working with the unconscious. He built it himself, slowly, and kept at it. But this kind of work has a condition: if the ego is not healthy, what rises up from the unconscious can swallow the ego whole.

    Is your ego healthy enough to hold what comes up from the unconscious?

    If you forget everything else here, keep this part.

    Here is one way to tell. If a single difficult conversation leaves you unable to work, sleep, or feel like yourself again for several days, your ego may not yet be steady enough for dream work. An ego that one hard conversation can knock over is in no shape to meet images far stronger than that. At that point, diving into your dreams is more likely to leave you confused and shaken than to help you understand yourself.

    This matters when the dream belongs to someone else, too. Dreams are fun, and that is exactly the trouble with them. A friend tells you her dream over coffee, and you have an interpretation ready before the cup goes back down. Usually it’s harmless. But if she is already close to falling apart, one confident sentence from somebody she trusts can push her over the edge. So when you hear yourself begin, “Your father in that dream stands for…”, stop there. Not at a café table, not as a remark tossed off in passing, and not from you. You are her friend, not her therapist.

    So there’s an order to this, and the order is not a formality. Steady the ego first: keep up your sleep, meals, work and relationships, and stay grounded in everyday reality. Go deep afterward. Skipping that order is how people get hurt, and the person who pushed too fast, into their own dreams or into a friend’s, almost always meant well.

    If your life is steady right now, here’s the smallest possible way into your dreams, and it’s small on purpose. Tomorrow morning, before your feet hit the floor, write down a single image from the night. Two or three lines, no more than that. Not what it meant. Only what you saw: the corridor, the water, the person who had no business standing in that room.

    No interpreting. That sounds easy and it isn’t, because your mind will hand you a meaning before the pen is back down. Let the meaning come if it wants to, but write down only the image.

    Give it a week and something odd starts happening. The same door keeps showing up. The same stranger, the same weather, the same locked car you can never get into. You’ll begin to notice the repeats — and the repeats are already saying something, long before anyone tries to interpret them.

    One more thing before you go and try it. Sometimes a week of two-line entries turns up an image that is too much for a notebook to handle: one of those archetypal images I described earlier, the kind you wake from in fear or awe and then keep thinking about all day. If a morning comes when what you have written frightens you, that is the morning to stop writing and call a therapist. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. A therapist can answer you back. A notebook can’t, and neither can I — I’m on the other side of this page, with no idea what you are facing. The order I described, steady the ego first and go deep afterward, isn’t me being careful with you. It’s the order the work runs in.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books. — the premonition of the First World War is Jung’s own account in this autobiography.
    • Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1.
    • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board