Chapter 4
Sacred Wounding
Sacred Wounding
"Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without a solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of it,” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally . . . the Self manifests.
In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while." --Marie Louise von Franz: Interpretation of Fairy Tales, New York: Spring Publications, p. 4).
In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while." --Marie Louise von Franz: Interpretation of Fairy Tales, New York: Spring Publications, p. 4).
When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of their place in the world often disintegrates, and they temporarily "fall apart," experiencing a type of depression referred to as existential depression. Their ordeal highlights for them the transient nature of life and the lack of control that we have over so many events, and it raises questions about the meaning of our lives and our behaviors.
For other people, the experience of existential depression seemingly arises spontaneously; it stems from their own perception of life, their thoughts about the world and their place in it, as well as the meaning of their life. While not universal, the experience of existential depression can challenge an individual’s very survival and represents both a great challenge and at the same time an opportunity—an opportunity to seize control over one's life and turn the experience into a positive life lesson—an experience leading to personality growth.
It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely than those who are less gifted to experience spontaneous existential depression as an outgrowth of their mental and emotional abilities and interactions with others. People who are bright are usually more intense, sensitive, and idealistic, and they can see the inconsistencies and absurdities in the values and behaviors of others (Webb, Gore, Amend, & DeVries, 2007). This kind of sensitive awareness and idealism makes them more likely to ask themselves difficult questions about the nature and purpose of their lives and the lives of those around them. They become keenly aware of their smallness in the larger picture of existence, and they feel helpless to fix the many problems that trouble them. As a result, they become depressed.
Yalom (1980), who is perhaps the most widely read current Western writer on existential psychotherapy, describes four primary issues of existence (or "ultimate concerns")—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure—that is, humans do not enter a world that is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure, which we ourselves create. Thus, we have social customs and traditions, education, religion, governments, laws, etc. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, we will never completely know that person and no one can fundamentally come to know us; a gap always remains, and we are therefore still alone. The fourth primary issue, meaninglessness, stems from the first three. If we must die, if in our freedom we have to arbitrarily construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what absolute meaning does life have?
People are most often affected by existential issues as a result of their own experience of puzzlement from trying to understand themselves and the world, which then generates feelings of aloneness and existential depression. The people who worry over these issues are seldom those in the lower reaches of intelligence or even in the average range. In my experience, existential fretting, or for that matter rumination and existential depression are far more common among (though not exclusive to) more highly intelligent people—those who ponder, question, analyze, and reflect. This is not surprising since one must engage in substantial thought and reflection to even consider such notions. People who mindlessly engage in superficial day-to-day aspects of life—work, meals, home duties, and chores—do not tend to spend time thinking about these types of issues. Brighter individuals are usually more driven to search for universal rules or answers, and also to recognize injustices, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies.
Other characteristics of gifted children and adults also predispose them to existential distress. Because brighter people are able to envision the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world falls short of their ideals. Unfortunately, these visionaries also recognize that their ability to make changes in the world is very limited. Because they are intense, these gifted individuals—both children and adults—keenly feel the disappointment and frustration that occurs when their ideals are not reached. They notice duplicity, pretense, arbitrariness, insincerities, and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. They may question or challenge traditions, particularly those that seem meaningless or unfair. They may ask, for example, “Why are there such inflexible sex or age-role restrictions on people? Is there any justifiable reason why men and women ‘should’ act a certain way? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing but then do the opposite? People say they are concerned with the environment, but their behaviors show otherwise. Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? They greet you with, ‘How are you?’ when they really don’t want you to tell them the details of how you are. Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? And with our planet? Are others really concerned with improving the world, or is it simply all about selfishness? Why do people settle for mediocrity? People seem fundamentally selfish and tribal. How much difference can one person make? It all seems hopeless. The world is too far gone. Things get worse each day. As one person, I’ll never be able to make a difference.” These thoughts are common in gifted children and adults.
Dabrowski implied that gifted individuals are more likely to experience existential depression; several concepts within his theory of positive disintegration explain why gifted children and adults may be predisposed to this type of depression (Mendaglio, 2008b). Fundamentally, Dabrowski noted that persons with greater “developmental potential”—an inborn, constitutional endowment that includes a high level of reactivity of the central nervous system called overexcitability—have a greater awareness of the expanse of life and of different ways that people can live their lives, but this greater developmental potential also predisposes them to emotional and interpersonal crises.
Persons with heightened overexcitabilities in one or more of the five areas that Dabrowski listed—intellectual, emotional, imaginational, psychomotor, and sensual—perceive reality in a different, more intense, multifaceted manner. They are likely to be more sensitive than others to issues in themselves and in the world around them and to react more intensely to those issues. To the extent that they have intellectual overexcitability, they are more likely to ponder and question. Their emotional overexcitability makes them more sensitive to issues of morality and fairness. Their imaginational overexcitability prompts them to envision how things might be. Overall, their overexcitabilities help them live multifaceted and nuanced lives, but these same overexcitabilities are also likely to make them more sensitive to existential issues.
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10554.aspx
For other people, the experience of existential depression seemingly arises spontaneously; it stems from their own perception of life, their thoughts about the world and their place in it, as well as the meaning of their life. While not universal, the experience of existential depression can challenge an individual’s very survival and represents both a great challenge and at the same time an opportunity—an opportunity to seize control over one's life and turn the experience into a positive life lesson—an experience leading to personality growth.
It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely than those who are less gifted to experience spontaneous existential depression as an outgrowth of their mental and emotional abilities and interactions with others. People who are bright are usually more intense, sensitive, and idealistic, and they can see the inconsistencies and absurdities in the values and behaviors of others (Webb, Gore, Amend, & DeVries, 2007). This kind of sensitive awareness and idealism makes them more likely to ask themselves difficult questions about the nature and purpose of their lives and the lives of those around them. They become keenly aware of their smallness in the larger picture of existence, and they feel helpless to fix the many problems that trouble them. As a result, they become depressed.
Yalom (1980), who is perhaps the most widely read current Western writer on existential psychotherapy, describes four primary issues of existence (or "ultimate concerns")—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure—that is, humans do not enter a world that is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure, which we ourselves create. Thus, we have social customs and traditions, education, religion, governments, laws, etc. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, we will never completely know that person and no one can fundamentally come to know us; a gap always remains, and we are therefore still alone. The fourth primary issue, meaninglessness, stems from the first three. If we must die, if in our freedom we have to arbitrarily construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what absolute meaning does life have?
People are most often affected by existential issues as a result of their own experience of puzzlement from trying to understand themselves and the world, which then generates feelings of aloneness and existential depression. The people who worry over these issues are seldom those in the lower reaches of intelligence or even in the average range. In my experience, existential fretting, or for that matter rumination and existential depression are far more common among (though not exclusive to) more highly intelligent people—those who ponder, question, analyze, and reflect. This is not surprising since one must engage in substantial thought and reflection to even consider such notions. People who mindlessly engage in superficial day-to-day aspects of life—work, meals, home duties, and chores—do not tend to spend time thinking about these types of issues. Brighter individuals are usually more driven to search for universal rules or answers, and also to recognize injustices, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies.
Other characteristics of gifted children and adults also predispose them to existential distress. Because brighter people are able to envision the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world falls short of their ideals. Unfortunately, these visionaries also recognize that their ability to make changes in the world is very limited. Because they are intense, these gifted individuals—both children and adults—keenly feel the disappointment and frustration that occurs when their ideals are not reached. They notice duplicity, pretense, arbitrariness, insincerities, and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. They may question or challenge traditions, particularly those that seem meaningless or unfair. They may ask, for example, “Why are there such inflexible sex or age-role restrictions on people? Is there any justifiable reason why men and women ‘should’ act a certain way? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing but then do the opposite? People say they are concerned with the environment, but their behaviors show otherwise. Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? They greet you with, ‘How are you?’ when they really don’t want you to tell them the details of how you are. Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? And with our planet? Are others really concerned with improving the world, or is it simply all about selfishness? Why do people settle for mediocrity? People seem fundamentally selfish and tribal. How much difference can one person make? It all seems hopeless. The world is too far gone. Things get worse each day. As one person, I’ll never be able to make a difference.” These thoughts are common in gifted children and adults.
Dabrowski implied that gifted individuals are more likely to experience existential depression; several concepts within his theory of positive disintegration explain why gifted children and adults may be predisposed to this type of depression (Mendaglio, 2008b). Fundamentally, Dabrowski noted that persons with greater “developmental potential”—an inborn, constitutional endowment that includes a high level of reactivity of the central nervous system called overexcitability—have a greater awareness of the expanse of life and of different ways that people can live their lives, but this greater developmental potential also predisposes them to emotional and interpersonal crises.
Persons with heightened overexcitabilities in one or more of the five areas that Dabrowski listed—intellectual, emotional, imaginational, psychomotor, and sensual—perceive reality in a different, more intense, multifaceted manner. They are likely to be more sensitive than others to issues in themselves and in the world around them and to react more intensely to those issues. To the extent that they have intellectual overexcitability, they are more likely to ponder and question. Their emotional overexcitability makes them more sensitive to issues of morality and fairness. Their imaginational overexcitability prompts them to envision how things might be. Overall, their overexcitabilities help them live multifaceted and nuanced lives, but these same overexcitabilities are also likely to make them more sensitive to existential issues.
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10554.aspx
Illustration by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People by Monica Brown
Psychology Today - Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Frank Cadogan Cowper (1877–1958), Our Lady of the Fruits of the Earth
The Grail Serves the Self
Why are we still fascinated by stories of the Holy Grail told long ago in the courts of medieval Europe? It’s my belief that the Grail myth persists throughout the centuries like a recurring dream that must be brought fully to consciousness, understood, and resolved. As mythologist Joseph Campbell said, the quest for the Grail is “the founding myth of Western civilization.”
The Grail is a sacred vessel as old as creation. A rounded container, it belongs to the family of symbols – bowl, cauldron, vat, well, cup or crucible – which are all images of the divine feminine, the Mother Goddess whose womb holds the waters of life, found as far back as the Neolithic era and in cultures from ancient India to classical Greece. In Celtic myth and legend, this hallowed icon of Western spirituality has its origins in the magical cups which have life-giving and protective properties and more often than not, these cups belong to goddesses or female spirits.
In the tales of King Arthur, the first part of his kingship deals with the triumph of the Sword as he and his knights successfully subdue the warring factions and achieve law and order throughout the realm. But when the Sword has fulfilled its function in the outer world, it must be balanced by the Grail. This sacred vessel lies hidden in a castle surrounded by a Wasteland: a barren and blighted country which can only be restored to life when a worthy knight discovers the castle of the Grail, asks a ritual question, and heals the wounded king of this land.
"The best way to get rid of the pain is to feel the pain. And when you feel the pain and go beyond it, you’ll see there’s a very intense love that is wanting to awaken itself."
--Deepak Chopra
Why are we still fascinated by stories of the Holy Grail told long ago in the courts of medieval Europe? It’s my belief that the Grail myth persists throughout the centuries like a recurring dream that must be brought fully to consciousness, understood, and resolved. As mythologist Joseph Campbell said, the quest for the Grail is “the founding myth of Western civilization.”
The Grail is a sacred vessel as old as creation. A rounded container, it belongs to the family of symbols – bowl, cauldron, vat, well, cup or crucible – which are all images of the divine feminine, the Mother Goddess whose womb holds the waters of life, found as far back as the Neolithic era and in cultures from ancient India to classical Greece. In Celtic myth and legend, this hallowed icon of Western spirituality has its origins in the magical cups which have life-giving and protective properties and more often than not, these cups belong to goddesses or female spirits.
In the tales of King Arthur, the first part of his kingship deals with the triumph of the Sword as he and his knights successfully subdue the warring factions and achieve law and order throughout the realm. But when the Sword has fulfilled its function in the outer world, it must be balanced by the Grail. This sacred vessel lies hidden in a castle surrounded by a Wasteland: a barren and blighted country which can only be restored to life when a worthy knight discovers the castle of the Grail, asks a ritual question, and heals the wounded king of this land.
"The best way to get rid of the pain is to feel the pain. And when you feel the pain and go beyond it, you’ll see there’s a very intense love that is wanting to awaken itself."
--Deepak Chopra
Tending Psychic Wounds
Embracing the Family Shadow
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman describes "the archetypal figure of the Wounded Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that the illness and the healer are one and the same" (76). In the essay "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar" in Senex and Puer, Hillman explains that the act of healing is not "because one is whole, integrated, and all together, but from a consciousness breaking through dismemberment" (234)
Embracing the Family Shadow
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman describes "the archetypal figure of the Wounded Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that the illness and the healer are one and the same" (76). In the essay "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar" in Senex and Puer, Hillman explains that the act of healing is not "because one is whole, integrated, and all together, but from a consciousness breaking through dismemberment" (234)
TRAGEDY & TRAUMA IN YOUR TREE
Beyond Shock, Shame & Blame
There is not only the issue of the traumas in our ancestral lines, but those we are poised to pass down to our descendants. The wound may be physical or psychological, but is likely psychophysical. Wounds and scars help forge our character. Sometimes we meet through the wound; we share a common wound. If experience is not coming from the body it is not known. Where does your character and calling come from?
Only the wounded heal, but wounds don't heal the way you want them to, they heal the way they need to. What is being wounded? What is being healed? Dreams provide important clues. Consciousness is altered through the naming and healing of psychic wounds - the part of us we do not know. The multitude are images or voices of the dead, that figure as they are personified.
The multitude of voices speak. Who are the dead and what do they speak? We are cut from the dead by what we have buried. The dead are the daily encounter with what has been buried, burned, drowned, denied or forgotten on purpose that appear in hunches, omens, intuitions, cautions, warnings, etc. -- the moments of holding back, not doing -- myths and pain. Myth is the ongoing fantasy concurrent with our behaviors and gives us the immersive sense of reality.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you ~Rumi
To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the "thorn in the flesh" is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Par 208.
The term 'soul-making', coined by John Keats is applied by James Hillman referring to a practice through which individuals: slow down and deepen their connectedness to themselves, others, and the world. It emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations. It embraces and prioritizes woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. Psychic numbing is denial. In other words, soul-making occurs every time we look more closely, more feelingly at the individuals and ancestors peopling our lives and the ideas, afflictions, and ever-present prospect of death which together give substance and meaning to our hours and days.
The Journey Home
Many writers and others have explored what it means to find your roots and the essence of what makes you, you. Whether it’s due to time’s mere passing or a conscious choice to leave your home behind, for many, there is a perpetual sense of being drawn simultaneously toward the past and the present. During transitions in people's lives, they often start asking themselves who they are and where they came from. Finding family origins is a start in determining your genetic base. Finding your roots also may help to find long-lost kin.
In this perpetual tug-of-war between now and then, finding the footing to develop a sense of home is difficult, if not impossible, particularly for those who may find themselves stuck between cities, states, or countries. It may take a map of family locales and migrations.
Beyond Shock, Shame & Blame
There is not only the issue of the traumas in our ancestral lines, but those we are poised to pass down to our descendants. The wound may be physical or psychological, but is likely psychophysical. Wounds and scars help forge our character. Sometimes we meet through the wound; we share a common wound. If experience is not coming from the body it is not known. Where does your character and calling come from?
Only the wounded heal, but wounds don't heal the way you want them to, they heal the way they need to. What is being wounded? What is being healed? Dreams provide important clues. Consciousness is altered through the naming and healing of psychic wounds - the part of us we do not know. The multitude are images or voices of the dead, that figure as they are personified.
The multitude of voices speak. Who are the dead and what do they speak? We are cut from the dead by what we have buried. The dead are the daily encounter with what has been buried, burned, drowned, denied or forgotten on purpose that appear in hunches, omens, intuitions, cautions, warnings, etc. -- the moments of holding back, not doing -- myths and pain. Myth is the ongoing fantasy concurrent with our behaviors and gives us the immersive sense of reality.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you ~Rumi
To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the "thorn in the flesh" is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Par 208.
The term 'soul-making', coined by John Keats is applied by James Hillman referring to a practice through which individuals: slow down and deepen their connectedness to themselves, others, and the world. It emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations. It embraces and prioritizes woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. Psychic numbing is denial. In other words, soul-making occurs every time we look more closely, more feelingly at the individuals and ancestors peopling our lives and the ideas, afflictions, and ever-present prospect of death which together give substance and meaning to our hours and days.
The Journey Home
Many writers and others have explored what it means to find your roots and the essence of what makes you, you. Whether it’s due to time’s mere passing or a conscious choice to leave your home behind, for many, there is a perpetual sense of being drawn simultaneously toward the past and the present. During transitions in people's lives, they often start asking themselves who they are and where they came from. Finding family origins is a start in determining your genetic base. Finding your roots also may help to find long-lost kin.
In this perpetual tug-of-war between now and then, finding the footing to develop a sense of home is difficult, if not impossible, particularly for those who may find themselves stuck between cities, states, or countries. It may take a map of family locales and migrations.
- Where do you come from? Tell us about your hometown, your parents, your family history, or anything, without which, you wouldn’t be you.
- Finding your roots often means exploring the past. If you’re writing fiction, experiment with time travel (into the future or past).
- If you could speak with anyone from your past, who would it be and why? When were they alive and what were they like? What did your grandfathers do for a living?
- Dig a bit deeper and postulate on the idea of genealogy. At what point are we all connected? What do you think that means in our relationships with others?
Reconnecting
GENOGRAM & GENOMAPS
The family tree may be a trauma archive.
The word family comes from the Latin word familia which means household. This seems to be fitting since they both seem synonymous. A family is a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head or a group of persons of common ancestry. A household is those who dwell under the same roof and compose a family or a social unit comprised of those living together in the same dwelling. We also include the influence of extended family.
Just as we might draw a genealogy to see the effects of genetic illness, substance abuse, or mental illness in a given family, we can also use such mapping to identify emotional relationships, infidelities, relationship problems, dysfuncitonal families, certain psychosocial or epigenetic influences on our health and self-awareness of our psychophysical being. It may even include in utero wounding as well as wounded emotions or spirit.
While in the womb, unborn children may absorb a variety of wounding experiences from toxic blood chemistry to stress and shared dreams or nightmares. In their spirits they may react with defensiveness, dissociation, emotional unavailability, resentment, aggression, unprincipled behavior, self-harm, self-wounding, distrust or withdrawal and grow into adulthood expressing attitudes still lodged in their hearts. Shame is a relational wound and can only truly heal in, by, and through relationship. This may result from:
A genogram is a family tree diagram, family map or history that uses special symbols to describe relationships, major events including divorce, and the dynamics of a family over multiple generations. You can easily see where the problems are in each generation. A genogram is an elaborate family tree with psychological and medical issues worked into it.
ACCEPTING DARKNESS IN SELF & OTHERS
An in-depth genogram will show family relationship strengths and weaknesses, along with divorce, untimely death, geographical displacement, incest, gender roles, violent death, handicaps, attempted suicide, chronic illness, disease, mental illness, etc. Death cannot be tamed, so there will be painful separations and unfinished business.
A genogram diagrams and records information about a family for at least three generations. It is a snapshot in time that illuminates family patterns. Some of the problems are obvious; others, less so -- Illegitimacy. Incest. Stolen inheritances. Criminal Acts. http://www.genopro.com/genogram/emotional-relationships/
A genogram helps us change perspective on the past. A genogram is simply a psychologically informed family tree. You construct a genogram by using symbols to represent your parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, grand parents, etc. going back several generations as you have information. Each family member is represented by their own symbol (males by squares, females by circles), and lines are drawn between each family member to indicate their relationship with the other family members represented.
Lines connect spouses, and parents to children. Psychological information is appended to each symbol to indicate what is known about that family member's mental and medical history (so, for instance, if your grandmother was alcoholic, you'd write that down next to her symbol on the genogram. If your great-grandfather was known for having a quick temper and an anger problem, you'd note this next to his symbol).
Families change over time as members are married, divorced and widowed, and as they are born or die. Solid lines are used to connect currently existing marriages, while broken lines are used to connect former marriages. Ex-spouses and deceased family members are all represented, but with their symbol crossed out (to indicate their death). Dates of important events (births, marriages, divorces, deaths) are indicated, and when possible, the cause of death is recorded.
The genogram is a diagnostic tool, and as a method for helping families recognize patterns in their past and present. When properly constructed, the genogram presents your family's psychological history in a single graphic image, making it easy to visualize how your family's history (your cultural history writ small) has affected your personal history.
Our ancestry influences more than just our physical characteristics - it can also have a profound effect on who we are as people. The success of TV shows like "Who Do You Think You Are?" has prompted a massive interest in people tracing their family roots. But researching into our forebears' lives can often unearth turbulent and disturbing histories. Destructive patterns include divorce, abuse (emotional, mental, physical, spiritual); hostility; control; manipulation; domination; revenge; unforgiveness; bitterness; anger; depression; labeling family members as outcasts or failures, and family secrets.
The past 250 years has seen more change and upheaval on a global scale than at any other point in history. The legacy of the holocaust, of slavery, indentured servitude, multiple revolutions, industrialization, genocides, internment, torture, culture shock, poverty and wealth, two world wars, the current Long War of interminable global skirmishes, food degradation, and climate change has seen a massive migration of peoples across the world.
Wounds are held and passed in families as belief systems -- wounds to masculine logos and feminine eros, affect ego strength, emotional life and attachment. A family system carries the wound of its tribe. Or its father or mother. A core wound can result in pathologies, such as narcissism, psychopathy, or attachment disorder. Triggers from past wounds can be transmitted for 3 to 4 generations.
Almost all families know of one or more recent ancestors whose lives were turned upside down by these events. Discovering more about our forebears, and identifying inherited traits, can help us realize our potential and assist us in overcoming obstacles that hold us back.
If you think an ancestor may have had one of these traits but you aren't sure, add it to your diagram with a question mark. The psychological-wound traits and traumas in this checklist are organized in these groups:
Our Ancestral Continuum takes us on a journey through the labyrinth of our own ancestral legacy. As we explore our family tree, we can begin to see ourselves as just one strand in a never-ending tapestry of history and emotion, personality and achievement, birth and death, that is the eternal chain. (O' Sullivan) Ancestors live forth in the present generation.
GENOGRAM & GENOMAPS
The family tree may be a trauma archive.
The word family comes from the Latin word familia which means household. This seems to be fitting since they both seem synonymous. A family is a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head or a group of persons of common ancestry. A household is those who dwell under the same roof and compose a family or a social unit comprised of those living together in the same dwelling. We also include the influence of extended family.
Just as we might draw a genealogy to see the effects of genetic illness, substance abuse, or mental illness in a given family, we can also use such mapping to identify emotional relationships, infidelities, relationship problems, dysfuncitonal families, certain psychosocial or epigenetic influences on our health and self-awareness of our psychophysical being. It may even include in utero wounding as well as wounded emotions or spirit.
While in the womb, unborn children may absorb a variety of wounding experiences from toxic blood chemistry to stress and shared dreams or nightmares. In their spirits they may react with defensiveness, dissociation, emotional unavailability, resentment, aggression, unprincipled behavior, self-harm, self-wounding, distrust or withdrawal and grow into adulthood expressing attitudes still lodged in their hearts. Shame is a relational wound and can only truly heal in, by, and through relationship. This may result from:
- Conception out of wedlock, conception in anger, rape, incest or adultery, or conception in a drug-dependent relationship
- Mother had miscarriage or abortion before this conception
- Threatening illness of mother or fetus, mother anorexic or bulimic (fear of gaining weight)
- Coming at a wrong time in the parents’ lives (marital difficulties, poverty, inconvenience)
- Being the “wrong sex”
- Experiencing intense emotions from the mother (fear, anger, rejection, verbal abuse, etc.) or fighting in the home environment
- A difficult birthing experience (breech birth, cord wrapped around the neck, unusually painful delivery, caesarean birth, induced labor, baby early or late in coming, etc.)
- Being put up for adoption or parents who considered adoption
- Attempted or failed abortion of fetus
- Death of a parent or abandonment by one or both parents
A genogram is a family tree diagram, family map or history that uses special symbols to describe relationships, major events including divorce, and the dynamics of a family over multiple generations. You can easily see where the problems are in each generation. A genogram is an elaborate family tree with psychological and medical issues worked into it.
ACCEPTING DARKNESS IN SELF & OTHERS
An in-depth genogram will show family relationship strengths and weaknesses, along with divorce, untimely death, geographical displacement, incest, gender roles, violent death, handicaps, attempted suicide, chronic illness, disease, mental illness, etc. Death cannot be tamed, so there will be painful separations and unfinished business.
A genogram diagrams and records information about a family for at least three generations. It is a snapshot in time that illuminates family patterns. Some of the problems are obvious; others, less so -- Illegitimacy. Incest. Stolen inheritances. Criminal Acts. http://www.genopro.com/genogram/emotional-relationships/
A genogram helps us change perspective on the past. A genogram is simply a psychologically informed family tree. You construct a genogram by using symbols to represent your parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, grand parents, etc. going back several generations as you have information. Each family member is represented by their own symbol (males by squares, females by circles), and lines are drawn between each family member to indicate their relationship with the other family members represented.
Lines connect spouses, and parents to children. Psychological information is appended to each symbol to indicate what is known about that family member's mental and medical history (so, for instance, if your grandmother was alcoholic, you'd write that down next to her symbol on the genogram. If your great-grandfather was known for having a quick temper and an anger problem, you'd note this next to his symbol).
Families change over time as members are married, divorced and widowed, and as they are born or die. Solid lines are used to connect currently existing marriages, while broken lines are used to connect former marriages. Ex-spouses and deceased family members are all represented, but with their symbol crossed out (to indicate their death). Dates of important events (births, marriages, divorces, deaths) are indicated, and when possible, the cause of death is recorded.
The genogram is a diagnostic tool, and as a method for helping families recognize patterns in their past and present. When properly constructed, the genogram presents your family's psychological history in a single graphic image, making it easy to visualize how your family's history (your cultural history writ small) has affected your personal history.
- Patterns of illness and addiction, or particular temperaments that have been transmitted through the generations tend to leap out at you. It puts your own depression or anxiety into better context when you realize that your grand father, aunt and several cousins deal with the same problems, for instance.
- Various family traumas can cross the generations by influencing the attitudes that parents in families teach their children, and how they cope. If you're upset at your immigrant parents for not having assimilated enough to your native culture, it may help you to realize how much difficulty they went through to come to a new country. It may help you even more to realize that they may have come not simply for economic opportunity, but to escape persecution in their home lands. Some of your anger, may be related in some way to their own, for example.
Our ancestry influences more than just our physical characteristics - it can also have a profound effect on who we are as people. The success of TV shows like "Who Do You Think You Are?" has prompted a massive interest in people tracing their family roots. But researching into our forebears' lives can often unearth turbulent and disturbing histories. Destructive patterns include divorce, abuse (emotional, mental, physical, spiritual); hostility; control; manipulation; domination; revenge; unforgiveness; bitterness; anger; depression; labeling family members as outcasts or failures, and family secrets.
The past 250 years has seen more change and upheaval on a global scale than at any other point in history. The legacy of the holocaust, of slavery, indentured servitude, multiple revolutions, industrialization, genocides, internment, torture, culture shock, poverty and wealth, two world wars, the current Long War of interminable global skirmishes, food degradation, and climate change has seen a massive migration of peoples across the world.
Wounds are held and passed in families as belief systems -- wounds to masculine logos and feminine eros, affect ego strength, emotional life and attachment. A family system carries the wound of its tribe. Or its father or mother. A core wound can result in pathologies, such as narcissism, psychopathy, or attachment disorder. Triggers from past wounds can be transmitted for 3 to 4 generations.
- Some families provide higher nurturance for their members (fill more physical + psychological + spiritual needs) than others.
- Low-nurturance ("dysfunctional") families are caused by (a) adults inheriting [psychological wounds and ignorance] from their ancestors, and (b) societal ignorance and apathy about this inheritance.
- Parental wounds and ignorance promote unwise child conceptions and abandoning, neglecting, and abusing (traumatizing) young kids. This promotes psychological wounds in the kids who grow up and repeat the cycle..
- Family trees of significantly-wounded people have specific traits. Some traits are symptoms of early-childhood caregivers' wounds, and other traits are traumas that cause and/or amplify psychological wounds.
- Low-nurturance childhoods tend to reproduce and spread down the generations, until a wounded adult hits bottom and intentionally stops the inheritance cycle via personal recovery.
Almost all families know of one or more recent ancestors whose lives were turned upside down by these events. Discovering more about our forebears, and identifying inherited traits, can help us realize our potential and assist us in overcoming obstacles that hold us back.
If you think an ancestor may have had one of these traits but you aren't sure, add it to your diagram with a question mark. The psychological-wound traits and traumas in this checklist are organized in these groups:
- Child-related traumas and symptoms,
- Relationship traumas and symptoms,
- Health-related traumas and symptoms,
- Behavioral wound-symptoms,
- Social, financial, and legal trauma, and...
- Other traumas or symptoms
Our Ancestral Continuum takes us on a journey through the labyrinth of our own ancestral legacy. As we explore our family tree, we can begin to see ourselves as just one strand in a never-ending tapestry of history and emotion, personality and achievement, birth and death, that is the eternal chain. (O' Sullivan) Ancestors live forth in the present generation.
EPIGENETICS
Your life experiences and those of your parents, grandparents, and great grandparents directly affect your genes and resulting behavior. Everything we do affects our epigenetics. The food we eat, the choices we make, the environment we live in, and, basically, our entire lifestyles all contribute to our epigenetic variation and its influence on our future generations.
Epigenetics, in a general sense, is the bridge between genotypes and phenotypes—changes in gene expression without changing the genome Diet, chemicals, and various experiences including childhood maltreatment, drug abuse, and severe stress can cause methyl groups to become attached to genes.
Epigenetic mechanisms, which involve DNA and histone modifications, result in the heritable silencing of genes without a change in their coding sequence.These epigenetic changes can be passed down from parent to child and on to grand and great-grand children. Epigenetics suggests that traumatic experiences in our past and ancestry leave molecular markers on our DNA. Inattentive maternal care causes changes in DNA.
Epigenetic mechanisms, which involve DNA and histone modifications, result in the heritable silencing ofgenes without a change in their coding sequence. The study of human disease has focused on genetic mechanisms, but disruption of the balance of epigenetic networks can cause several major pathologies,including cancer, syndromes involving chromosomal instabilities, and mental retardation.
This suggests that Jews and Japanese whose great-grandparents were in concentration camps, Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived brutal civil wars and genocidal massacres, and adults who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents, all carry with them more than just memories. Our experiences and those of our forebears are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue on our genetic scaffolding.
The DNA remains the same, but the psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited. You might have inherited not just your grandparent's eye color and freckles, but also their predisposition toward depression caused by the neglect they suffered as infants and young children. On the other hand, if your parent or grandparent, who was born to a maltreating family, was adopted at an early age by a nurturing, supportive, and loving family, then they and you will be privy to an epigenetic boost; strengths and resiliencies are also passed on.
Harsh parenting methods, methods grounded in power and control, methods that are shaming, blaming, and critical only serve to reinforce negative expectations and the unresponsive stress-response system's reset mechanism. Parenting methods grounded in a focus on relationship and connections of an emotionally meaningful and joyful nature may reset the stress response system by its epigenetic effects. http://www.center4familydevelop.com/Epigenetics.pdf.
Your life experiences and those of your parents, grandparents, and great grandparents directly affect your genes and resulting behavior. Everything we do affects our epigenetics. The food we eat, the choices we make, the environment we live in, and, basically, our entire lifestyles all contribute to our epigenetic variation and its influence on our future generations.
Epigenetics, in a general sense, is the bridge between genotypes and phenotypes—changes in gene expression without changing the genome Diet, chemicals, and various experiences including childhood maltreatment, drug abuse, and severe stress can cause methyl groups to become attached to genes.
Epigenetic mechanisms, which involve DNA and histone modifications, result in the heritable silencing of genes without a change in their coding sequence.These epigenetic changes can be passed down from parent to child and on to grand and great-grand children. Epigenetics suggests that traumatic experiences in our past and ancestry leave molecular markers on our DNA. Inattentive maternal care causes changes in DNA.
Epigenetic mechanisms, which involve DNA and histone modifications, result in the heritable silencing ofgenes without a change in their coding sequence. The study of human disease has focused on genetic mechanisms, but disruption of the balance of epigenetic networks can cause several major pathologies,including cancer, syndromes involving chromosomal instabilities, and mental retardation.
This suggests that Jews and Japanese whose great-grandparents were in concentration camps, Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived brutal civil wars and genocidal massacres, and adults who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents, all carry with them more than just memories. Our experiences and those of our forebears are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue on our genetic scaffolding.
The DNA remains the same, but the psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited. You might have inherited not just your grandparent's eye color and freckles, but also their predisposition toward depression caused by the neglect they suffered as infants and young children. On the other hand, if your parent or grandparent, who was born to a maltreating family, was adopted at an early age by a nurturing, supportive, and loving family, then they and you will be privy to an epigenetic boost; strengths and resiliencies are also passed on.
Harsh parenting methods, methods grounded in power and control, methods that are shaming, blaming, and critical only serve to reinforce negative expectations and the unresponsive stress-response system's reset mechanism. Parenting methods grounded in a focus on relationship and connections of an emotionally meaningful and joyful nature may reset the stress response system by its epigenetic effects. http://www.center4familydevelop.com/Epigenetics.pdf.
ROOTS OF BEING
Healing the Soul Wound
This last unity has to be found, and this will happen only if the person is wounded in his innermost being, most often by someone chosen by fate to be the hammer, because as a rule he can’t do it on his own. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Pages 276-279.
"How many thousand of my poorest subjects / Are at this hour asleep!
O sleep, O gentle sleep, . . ." "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." --
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquyShakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquy
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquy
In Shakespeare, the entire kingdom is snoozing away peacefully but, alas, Henry cannot seem to fall asleep. It's not fair that the god of sleep should reward the commoners with rest when he, a king, is deprived of slumber. Even a sailor who's aboard a ship during a terrible storm gets to sleep so why is the king still awake on such a calm night? Henry concludes that kings don't get any sleep or rest because they're burdened with weighty matters. However, the "crown" can also weigh heavy on anyone who finds the effects of such heritage active in their psychophysical being.
The biological family, the physical manifestations of family, the family of sweat nd egg and sperm and tears, is a ghostlike specter in our tradition. Many people have violent or traumatic ancestry. Witchburnings, catastrophes, atrocities, accidents, illness, deprivation, war horrors, physical and sexual abuse, plague, famine, massacres, murders, infidelity, incest, criminality, mental illness, substance abuse, and potential skeletons lurk in our inherited subconscious closet.
We even embody the imaginations of our ancestors in ways that frequently diverge sharply from the habitual understandings we have unconsciously absorbed from the cultures in which we were raised. New awareness can engender unexpected new vitality and wonder or abject terror. But one thing has changed: you have many more alternatives than your ancestors.
Being overwhelmed by the burden of a hyperactivated unconscious can feel like being crushed, torn apart, or drowned. Even the transformative power of the psyche appears first as a monstrous or numinous threat as it targets the old ego which must dissolve or "die" for the new personality to arise. Dreams may reveal we are threatened by archetypal powers that bring disintegration, pain and fear to the ego.
We may not recognize the source of our pain and dysfunction. But we can feel threatened with dissolution or tendencies to split by the past as well as the future. The conscious and unconscious tend to attract one another, as dreams of threatening snakes may show. The danger may manifest as being swallowed by the monsters of the unconscious. Myths express the sucking and suffocating aspect of water by populating it with monsters, dragons, or other water creatures.
Character archetypes may battle with one another as subpersonalities beyond conscious will, with both functional and negative sides. Like instincts, they are not going to go away, but forcibly insist on their value and importance. They may create blunders, guilt, revenge, imbalance, fixations, inflations, rage, avarice, envy, strange abilities, self-delusion, and obsessions in the personality and power centers in the psyche.
Tragic Divisions
There are huge numbers of direct descendants from Norman, Plantagenet, Angevin and other noble lines, leading back into the mists of prehistory. Royal lines, in particular, are full of clandestine plots, temptations, manipulations, wrath, vengeance, rebellion, murder, betrayal, double-binds, infidelities, rape, incest, psychopathy, madness, and split loyalties. Count the ways: torture, hurling from heights, dismemberment, beheading, suffocation, strangulation, poison, hanging, flaying, burning, etc. Bloody dynasties have fought throughout history to maintain their ascendancy. Historically, we have often been threatened by the domineering power of others.
The ancestors had a terrible love of war. Often we have kin on both sides of warring factions or nations. They inflict nefarious acts upon one another, from suppression to extinction of lines. Some things we learn in genealogy may be hard to accept, feeling more of a burden than a blessing. Sometimes we already had glimpses of such ancestral traumas in our dreams. Any symptoms or "ghosts" of the past can be transformed into "ancestors" who positively impact thinking.
PSYCHIC NUMBING IS DENIAL
A wound that happens to an ancestor can affect other family members not only through imprinting into the DNA of everyone down line, but also through wounding the family soul. Each person has a soul, and each family also has a soul. When an ancestor has unresolved trauma, it imprints onto others in the family. Often the most sensitive person in the family will carry the feelings of the troubled ancestor.
Roger Woolger claims, "our culture has few such practices for releasing the dead, with the result that many of our energy problems, obsessive issues and persistent complexes often turn out to be old or ancestral spirits energies trying in vain to speak or act through us to resolve unfinished issues not of our, but their making."
If the "Grail" serves anyone, it serves this psychically autonomous "First Family", which can be viewed as field of potential playing out unconsciously through our psyches and corporeality. It is a quest for our essential nature. The Grail serves the Grail family as an composite intergenerational hereditary entity. That said, most also carry quite ordinary lines of descent which outnumber hereditary royal lines for most.
Remediation
Why is there a puzzling absence of recognition of, or even reference to, family in our inner work and spiritual life? Why the troubling lack of family involvement and resource? The psyche is inherently tribal. The vast body of cross-cultural investigations such as, Campbell (1988) or Eliade (1978) makes this clear. The family first receives the archetypal projections of the emergent Self. The family is the necessary catalyst for the developmental appearance, sequencing, and empowering of these archetypal media both biologically and psychospiritually.
Of course, the family presence is pervasive in the healing process. We often dream of family and ancestral interactions, reactions, and abreactions; these dreams often relate to our inner process. The family -- the whole family, including all of the ancestors -- is always within us. We cannot escape family and its influence. Family broods over us from conception to death; family midwives the soul; family makes or breaks our quest for meaning.
Restoration
We have no choice in involving or excluding the family in our self-exploration. Working on three or four generations sends us back to the unconscious. Epigenetics has revealed the intergenerational effects of trauma. We can go beyond what is transmitted consciously from generation to generation, bringing to light what is transmitted intergenerationally. Because it is never verbalized, it remains hidden and unassimilated, including family secrets. It can manifest in the form of pain, illness, silence, body language, failures, slips, bad fortune, and other existential difficulties. But the "knowing self" carries that truth."
Healing the Soul Wound
This last unity has to be found, and this will happen only if the person is wounded in his innermost being, most often by someone chosen by fate to be the hammer, because as a rule he can’t do it on his own. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Pages 276-279.
"How many thousand of my poorest subjects / Are at this hour asleep!
O sleep, O gentle sleep, . . ." "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." --
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquyShakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquy
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquy
In Shakespeare, the entire kingdom is snoozing away peacefully but, alas, Henry cannot seem to fall asleep. It's not fair that the god of sleep should reward the commoners with rest when he, a king, is deprived of slumber. Even a sailor who's aboard a ship during a terrible storm gets to sleep so why is the king still awake on such a calm night? Henry concludes that kings don't get any sleep or rest because they're burdened with weighty matters. However, the "crown" can also weigh heavy on anyone who finds the effects of such heritage active in their psychophysical being.
The biological family, the physical manifestations of family, the family of sweat nd egg and sperm and tears, is a ghostlike specter in our tradition. Many people have violent or traumatic ancestry. Witchburnings, catastrophes, atrocities, accidents, illness, deprivation, war horrors, physical and sexual abuse, plague, famine, massacres, murders, infidelity, incest, criminality, mental illness, substance abuse, and potential skeletons lurk in our inherited subconscious closet.
We even embody the imaginations of our ancestors in ways that frequently diverge sharply from the habitual understandings we have unconsciously absorbed from the cultures in which we were raised. New awareness can engender unexpected new vitality and wonder or abject terror. But one thing has changed: you have many more alternatives than your ancestors.
Being overwhelmed by the burden of a hyperactivated unconscious can feel like being crushed, torn apart, or drowned. Even the transformative power of the psyche appears first as a monstrous or numinous threat as it targets the old ego which must dissolve or "die" for the new personality to arise. Dreams may reveal we are threatened by archetypal powers that bring disintegration, pain and fear to the ego.
We may not recognize the source of our pain and dysfunction. But we can feel threatened with dissolution or tendencies to split by the past as well as the future. The conscious and unconscious tend to attract one another, as dreams of threatening snakes may show. The danger may manifest as being swallowed by the monsters of the unconscious. Myths express the sucking and suffocating aspect of water by populating it with monsters, dragons, or other water creatures.
Character archetypes may battle with one another as subpersonalities beyond conscious will, with both functional and negative sides. Like instincts, they are not going to go away, but forcibly insist on their value and importance. They may create blunders, guilt, revenge, imbalance, fixations, inflations, rage, avarice, envy, strange abilities, self-delusion, and obsessions in the personality and power centers in the psyche.
Tragic Divisions
There are huge numbers of direct descendants from Norman, Plantagenet, Angevin and other noble lines, leading back into the mists of prehistory. Royal lines, in particular, are full of clandestine plots, temptations, manipulations, wrath, vengeance, rebellion, murder, betrayal, double-binds, infidelities, rape, incest, psychopathy, madness, and split loyalties. Count the ways: torture, hurling from heights, dismemberment, beheading, suffocation, strangulation, poison, hanging, flaying, burning, etc. Bloody dynasties have fought throughout history to maintain their ascendancy. Historically, we have often been threatened by the domineering power of others.
The ancestors had a terrible love of war. Often we have kin on both sides of warring factions or nations. They inflict nefarious acts upon one another, from suppression to extinction of lines. Some things we learn in genealogy may be hard to accept, feeling more of a burden than a blessing. Sometimes we already had glimpses of such ancestral traumas in our dreams. Any symptoms or "ghosts" of the past can be transformed into "ancestors" who positively impact thinking.
PSYCHIC NUMBING IS DENIAL
A wound that happens to an ancestor can affect other family members not only through imprinting into the DNA of everyone down line, but also through wounding the family soul. Each person has a soul, and each family also has a soul. When an ancestor has unresolved trauma, it imprints onto others in the family. Often the most sensitive person in the family will carry the feelings of the troubled ancestor.
Roger Woolger claims, "our culture has few such practices for releasing the dead, with the result that many of our energy problems, obsessive issues and persistent complexes often turn out to be old or ancestral spirits energies trying in vain to speak or act through us to resolve unfinished issues not of our, but their making."
If the "Grail" serves anyone, it serves this psychically autonomous "First Family", which can be viewed as field of potential playing out unconsciously through our psyches and corporeality. It is a quest for our essential nature. The Grail serves the Grail family as an composite intergenerational hereditary entity. That said, most also carry quite ordinary lines of descent which outnumber hereditary royal lines for most.
Remediation
Why is there a puzzling absence of recognition of, or even reference to, family in our inner work and spiritual life? Why the troubling lack of family involvement and resource? The psyche is inherently tribal. The vast body of cross-cultural investigations such as, Campbell (1988) or Eliade (1978) makes this clear. The family first receives the archetypal projections of the emergent Self. The family is the necessary catalyst for the developmental appearance, sequencing, and empowering of these archetypal media both biologically and psychospiritually.
Of course, the family presence is pervasive in the healing process. We often dream of family and ancestral interactions, reactions, and abreactions; these dreams often relate to our inner process. The family -- the whole family, including all of the ancestors -- is always within us. We cannot escape family and its influence. Family broods over us from conception to death; family midwives the soul; family makes or breaks our quest for meaning.
Restoration
We have no choice in involving or excluding the family in our self-exploration. Working on three or four generations sends us back to the unconscious. Epigenetics has revealed the intergenerational effects of trauma. We can go beyond what is transmitted consciously from generation to generation, bringing to light what is transmitted intergenerationally. Because it is never verbalized, it remains hidden and unassimilated, including family secrets. It can manifest in the form of pain, illness, silence, body language, failures, slips, bad fortune, and other existential difficulties. But the "knowing self" carries that truth."
SACRED HERITAGE, SACRED WOUNDING
The Family Is the Essential Psychospiritual Initiatory Vessel
When we tell stories about the family without judgment and without instant analysis. . . family history is transformed into myth. Whether we know it or not, our ideas about the family are rooted in the ways we imagine the family. That personal family, which seems so concrete, is always an imaginal entity. Part of our alchemical work with soul is to extract myth from the hard details of family history and memory on the principle that increase of imagination is always increase in soul. --Moore 1992, 32
The family is where the imagination seeds. The term "Family Constellations" was first used by Alfred Adler in a somewhat different context to refer to the phenomenon that each individual belongs to and is bonded in relationship to other members of his or her family system.
It is the environmental release mechanism for the activation and unfolding of the imaginal soul within us at birth. The hovering, brooding, incessant nurturing of the bio-archetypal Mother and Father validates not only the body and its awakening sensorium but also, much more profoundly, the psyche and its awakening spirit-eros. The mediation of the family helps us see not just the phenomenal outer world, but the noumenal inner world as well.
The family is the purest vessel of our destiny. More than the temenos of analysis, the sacraments of religion, the most transcendent of experiences, it is family that births us, develops us, procreates us, and buries us. We can never be more or less to life than what has been bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Regardless of the pain and travail it may create for us, family is the grail within which the sacred nectar of our physical and psychic DNA is carried from one generation to the next.
We can deepen our exploration of the ancient ancestors as a moving force of experience at work in our contemporary psyches. The ancestral field appears to function non-locally in that their influence is not space-time dependent, nor from what we can tell, are they subject to any causal limitations in the outer, natural world. Each manifestation of form appears in the world through a consolidation of the informational content of a DNA or archetypal blueprint, then congeals into a recognizable pattern.
We learn about the various archetypal configurations through these patterns. Our lines are incredibly rich in information. The pattern, which can change, is a manifestation of the information contained within a field and is not in and of itself autonomous. The understanding of field phenomena, including resonant pattnerns, depth, numinosity, coherence, and synchronicities, may help us to translate and convert unconscious behaviors into opportunities for greater understanding.
In the Red Book, Jung writes: “When something long since passed . . . comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” The ancient ancestors are now coming back into the world through dreams, bringing a new energy – a revitalization of the psyche both individually and collectively. Jung deeply valued the archaic levels of human consciousness and often encouraged his patients to make contact with the “the two-million-year-old” man or woman within. He claimed “most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.”
From the point of view of contemporary individuals divorced from the ancestral psyche, Jung is an important guiding light, especially for Westerners and modern and postmodern people everywhere. He elucidates a path which can be seen as leading through a potentially far-reaching psychological and spiritual transformation process. Jung’s path of individuation is new for reasons similar to some of the comments articulated above; that is, there is an ascent and descent of consciousness and the goal of life is the Self, or divine fulfillment. Moreover there is a strong emphasis on archetypal or cosmic realization, which relates individual transformation to the collective.
Jung had a visionary experience just prior to his death, where he saw the following words engraved on a great round stone: “And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness.” He then saw “a quadrangle of trees whose roots reached around the earth and enveloped him and among the roots golden threads were glittering.” Spiritual realization involves the spiritual mutation of the roots of being, and a transformed relationship of the fully surrendered individual to the cosmic Self and the attainment of Wholeness and Oneness, a highly individuated reflection of the Transcendent One.
Mother initiations call us to the healing of our own mother wounds and attachment issues, to look at how we have been, or not been, mothers to ourselves, to our children, and/or to our creations. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, the wounding with our own mother may be profound. Through Mother initiations, we are called to discover and heal the wounds that came from our conception, birth, the attachment issues with our mother, and other mother figures, as well as conditions that may have been passed down to us through our matri-lineage. We sometimes ‘carry’ the emotional burdens, wounds, unfulfilled dreams, and unfinished business of our mothers and ancestors.
When the mother archetype is constellated, it may also bring up issues related to sisters and grandmothers, as well as catalyze issues with close women friends. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, a woman may not know how, or be able to, take care of her own physical needs, be in her body, form an attachment to others, or nurture a child. She may feel incompetent, or be narcissistic and deny her child her own individuality and experiences. The shadow aspect of the Mother can cause a woman to be absent physically and/or emotionally from her children, ineffectual, controlling, demanding, clinging, devouring, manipulative, or guilt-inducing. She may simply not know how to take care of her children on a very basic physical or emotional level due to her own lack of healthy mothering.
The Family Is the Essential Psychospiritual Initiatory Vessel
When we tell stories about the family without judgment and without instant analysis. . . family history is transformed into myth. Whether we know it or not, our ideas about the family are rooted in the ways we imagine the family. That personal family, which seems so concrete, is always an imaginal entity. Part of our alchemical work with soul is to extract myth from the hard details of family history and memory on the principle that increase of imagination is always increase in soul. --Moore 1992, 32
The family is where the imagination seeds. The term "Family Constellations" was first used by Alfred Adler in a somewhat different context to refer to the phenomenon that each individual belongs to and is bonded in relationship to other members of his or her family system.
It is the environmental release mechanism for the activation and unfolding of the imaginal soul within us at birth. The hovering, brooding, incessant nurturing of the bio-archetypal Mother and Father validates not only the body and its awakening sensorium but also, much more profoundly, the psyche and its awakening spirit-eros. The mediation of the family helps us see not just the phenomenal outer world, but the noumenal inner world as well.
The family is the purest vessel of our destiny. More than the temenos of analysis, the sacraments of religion, the most transcendent of experiences, it is family that births us, develops us, procreates us, and buries us. We can never be more or less to life than what has been bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Regardless of the pain and travail it may create for us, family is the grail within which the sacred nectar of our physical and psychic DNA is carried from one generation to the next.
We can deepen our exploration of the ancient ancestors as a moving force of experience at work in our contemporary psyches. The ancestral field appears to function non-locally in that their influence is not space-time dependent, nor from what we can tell, are they subject to any causal limitations in the outer, natural world. Each manifestation of form appears in the world through a consolidation of the informational content of a DNA or archetypal blueprint, then congeals into a recognizable pattern.
We learn about the various archetypal configurations through these patterns. Our lines are incredibly rich in information. The pattern, which can change, is a manifestation of the information contained within a field and is not in and of itself autonomous. The understanding of field phenomena, including resonant pattnerns, depth, numinosity, coherence, and synchronicities, may help us to translate and convert unconscious behaviors into opportunities for greater understanding.
In the Red Book, Jung writes: “When something long since passed . . . comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” The ancient ancestors are now coming back into the world through dreams, bringing a new energy – a revitalization of the psyche both individually and collectively. Jung deeply valued the archaic levels of human consciousness and often encouraged his patients to make contact with the “the two-million-year-old” man or woman within. He claimed “most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.”
From the point of view of contemporary individuals divorced from the ancestral psyche, Jung is an important guiding light, especially for Westerners and modern and postmodern people everywhere. He elucidates a path which can be seen as leading through a potentially far-reaching psychological and spiritual transformation process. Jung’s path of individuation is new for reasons similar to some of the comments articulated above; that is, there is an ascent and descent of consciousness and the goal of life is the Self, or divine fulfillment. Moreover there is a strong emphasis on archetypal or cosmic realization, which relates individual transformation to the collective.
Jung had a visionary experience just prior to his death, where he saw the following words engraved on a great round stone: “And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness.” He then saw “a quadrangle of trees whose roots reached around the earth and enveloped him and among the roots golden threads were glittering.” Spiritual realization involves the spiritual mutation of the roots of being, and a transformed relationship of the fully surrendered individual to the cosmic Self and the attainment of Wholeness and Oneness, a highly individuated reflection of the Transcendent One.
Mother initiations call us to the healing of our own mother wounds and attachment issues, to look at how we have been, or not been, mothers to ourselves, to our children, and/or to our creations. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, the wounding with our own mother may be profound. Through Mother initiations, we are called to discover and heal the wounds that came from our conception, birth, the attachment issues with our mother, and other mother figures, as well as conditions that may have been passed down to us through our matri-lineage. We sometimes ‘carry’ the emotional burdens, wounds, unfulfilled dreams, and unfinished business of our mothers and ancestors.
When the mother archetype is constellated, it may also bring up issues related to sisters and grandmothers, as well as catalyze issues with close women friends. When the Mother archetype is in shadow, a woman may not know how, or be able to, take care of her own physical needs, be in her body, form an attachment to others, or nurture a child. She may feel incompetent, or be narcissistic and deny her child her own individuality and experiences. The shadow aspect of the Mother can cause a woman to be absent physically and/or emotionally from her children, ineffectual, controlling, demanding, clinging, devouring, manipulative, or guilt-inducing. She may simply not know how to take care of her children on a very basic physical or emotional level due to her own lack of healthy mothering.
Sacred Wounding
The Unhealing Wound & the Grail
Unhealed, Unconscious Wounds
Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.
~ C.G. Jung; Letters Volume 1; Page 179.
Our Tree tells us that our ancestor, 'Bran Fendigaid (Bran the Blessed ) was the Celtic prototype of 'Bron' -- the Rich Fisher or Fisher King. 'The immediate prototype of Chrétien's Fisher King has been recognized .. as Bran the Blessed, son of Llyr, the principle figure in the mabinogi of Branwen.' Loomis; The Grail, from Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. He makes his first appearance in the twelfth-century 'Roman de l'Estoire du Graal' by Robert de Boron.
An angel announces that the vessel should pass into Bron's possession after Joseph imparted to him the secrets of the Grail, the words of Christ to Joseph in prison. Bron thenceforth would be called the Rich Fisher because of the fish he had caught, and he too, was to go westward to await Alain's son, to whom the vessel and the grace must be given. The three custodians would signify the Trinity. After Joseph told the secrets to Bron, the Good Fisher departed to the land where he was born."
According to Chretien de Troyes, Joseph gave the Grail the 'Holiest af all Holy relics,' to his brother-in-law, Bron, whose mission was to carry it into the far west to the 'Vaus d'Avaron.'
The Fisher King is called 'King Fisherman' in the Perlesvaus or High History of the Holy Grail
The legends of Bron, 'The Rich Fisher,' and Bran, 'The Blessed,' corespond in more ways than can be allowed for by coincidence. A long list of the most eminent Arthurian scholars including Heinrich, Martin, Nutt, Rhys, Brown, Nitze and Loomis all agree in regarding 'Bran Fendigaid' as the Celtic prototype of 'Bron' - the Rich Fisher or Fisher King.
In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King, or the Wounded King, is the latest in a long line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin and incapable of moving on his own. The location of the wound is of great importance to the legend. In most medieval stories, the mention of a wound in the groin or more commonly the "thigh" is a euphemism for the physical loss of or grave injury to one's penis.
In medieval times, acknowledging the actual type of wound was considered to rob a man of his dignity. The substitute terms "groin" or "thigh"told any medieval listener or reader the real nature of the wound. This wound was considered worse than actual death because it signaled the end of a man's procreative ability to propagate his line. For the Fisher King, the wound negates his ability to honor his sacred charge.
The Fisher King is impotent and unable to perform his task himself. He also becomes unable to father or support a next generation to carry on after his death. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. All he is able to do is fish in the river near his castle, Corbenic, and wait for someone who might be able to heal him. Healing involves the expectation of the use of magic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat. This is Percival in earlier stories; in later versions, he is joined by Galahad and Bors. (Wikipedia)
A contemporary man’s whole sense of self-worth and potency in this world is often based on his own and others perception of his masculinity-sexuality. James Wyly (1987) discusses that the central core to most men is "his phallus, his libido, his sense of potency and ability to potentiate his own destiny, to create himself in accord with his inner image". The Parsifal myth is a medieval "man’s story" of restoring unity to misaligned masculinity and for men to start filling the emptiness that results from adherence to collective sexual values.
The wound to The Fisher King, via a spear through his testicles (to the tenderest part of the male anatomy), signifies a wounding to man's sense of potency and his self-esteem. The wounding in this "private part" of himself will not heal and equates to The Fisher Kings "Fall from Grace" (the noble part of the king has fallen from grace). He is metaphorically expelled from the Garden of Eden (The Holy Grail).
Interestingly, The Fisher King only gets relief from his pain when he is fishing, meaning, doing reflective work on himself. The Fisher King’s kingdom has been laid to waste, the meadows and flowers are dried up and the waters shrunken. The suggestion is that any malaise to the king is mirrored in his kingdom. This implies that if there is a wound to the "kingly-inner man", then the whole personality [his whole world] will be troubled! As if by magic, whenever the Fisher King is healed the lands surrounding the king will be healed instantly. http://www.menweb.org/woundedmasc.htm
The Unhealing Wound & the Grail
Unhealed, Unconscious Wounds
Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.
~ C.G. Jung; Letters Volume 1; Page 179.
Our Tree tells us that our ancestor, 'Bran Fendigaid (Bran the Blessed ) was the Celtic prototype of 'Bron' -- the Rich Fisher or Fisher King. 'The immediate prototype of Chrétien's Fisher King has been recognized .. as Bran the Blessed, son of Llyr, the principle figure in the mabinogi of Branwen.' Loomis; The Grail, from Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. He makes his first appearance in the twelfth-century 'Roman de l'Estoire du Graal' by Robert de Boron.
An angel announces that the vessel should pass into Bron's possession after Joseph imparted to him the secrets of the Grail, the words of Christ to Joseph in prison. Bron thenceforth would be called the Rich Fisher because of the fish he had caught, and he too, was to go westward to await Alain's son, to whom the vessel and the grace must be given. The three custodians would signify the Trinity. After Joseph told the secrets to Bron, the Good Fisher departed to the land where he was born."
According to Chretien de Troyes, Joseph gave the Grail the 'Holiest af all Holy relics,' to his brother-in-law, Bron, whose mission was to carry it into the far west to the 'Vaus d'Avaron.'
The Fisher King is called 'King Fisherman' in the Perlesvaus or High History of the Holy Grail
The legends of Bron, 'The Rich Fisher,' and Bran, 'The Blessed,' corespond in more ways than can be allowed for by coincidence. A long list of the most eminent Arthurian scholars including Heinrich, Martin, Nutt, Rhys, Brown, Nitze and Loomis all agree in regarding 'Bran Fendigaid' as the Celtic prototype of 'Bron' - the Rich Fisher or Fisher King.
In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King, or the Wounded King, is the latest in a long line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin and incapable of moving on his own. The location of the wound is of great importance to the legend. In most medieval stories, the mention of a wound in the groin or more commonly the "thigh" is a euphemism for the physical loss of or grave injury to one's penis.
In medieval times, acknowledging the actual type of wound was considered to rob a man of his dignity. The substitute terms "groin" or "thigh"told any medieval listener or reader the real nature of the wound. This wound was considered worse than actual death because it signaled the end of a man's procreative ability to propagate his line. For the Fisher King, the wound negates his ability to honor his sacred charge.
The Fisher King is impotent and unable to perform his task himself. He also becomes unable to father or support a next generation to carry on after his death. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. All he is able to do is fish in the river near his castle, Corbenic, and wait for someone who might be able to heal him. Healing involves the expectation of the use of magic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat. This is Percival in earlier stories; in later versions, he is joined by Galahad and Bors. (Wikipedia)
A contemporary man’s whole sense of self-worth and potency in this world is often based on his own and others perception of his masculinity-sexuality. James Wyly (1987) discusses that the central core to most men is "his phallus, his libido, his sense of potency and ability to potentiate his own destiny, to create himself in accord with his inner image". The Parsifal myth is a medieval "man’s story" of restoring unity to misaligned masculinity and for men to start filling the emptiness that results from adherence to collective sexual values.
The wound to The Fisher King, via a spear through his testicles (to the tenderest part of the male anatomy), signifies a wounding to man's sense of potency and his self-esteem. The wounding in this "private part" of himself will not heal and equates to The Fisher Kings "Fall from Grace" (the noble part of the king has fallen from grace). He is metaphorically expelled from the Garden of Eden (The Holy Grail).
Interestingly, The Fisher King only gets relief from his pain when he is fishing, meaning, doing reflective work on himself. The Fisher King’s kingdom has been laid to waste, the meadows and flowers are dried up and the waters shrunken. The suggestion is that any malaise to the king is mirrored in his kingdom. This implies that if there is a wound to the "kingly-inner man", then the whole personality [his whole world] will be troubled! As if by magic, whenever the Fisher King is healed the lands surrounding the king will be healed instantly. http://www.menweb.org/woundedmasc.htm
SACRED WOUNDS
Everyone carries them—scars that define and shape our psyches. Sometimes they are physical, but most people carry scars that are invisible. How we approach this part of our humanity largely effects how we treat our fellow man. It has been said many times that “hurting people hurt people.” This wounding has caused wars, inquisitions, bloodshed, genocide, famine, fear and lots of pain -- the crazed and driven agendas of the past. This is the shadow side of morality, at best, and pathology, perversion or pure evil at worst.
It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows there is a problem. This applies to our loss of rootedness in our genealogy and the wisdom of our ancestors. The Fisher King was charged by God with guarding the Holy Grail, but incurred an incapacitating wound for his sin of pride. For too many, the Holy Grail is more money, more sex, more power... and the wound remains, gets bigger and deeper.
"The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man-and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being." -C.G. Jung
Inextricably enmeshed in the life of every woman is a constellation of autonomous energy that Jung called animus, her masculine side. As a woman develops psychologically, animus changes, appearing and reappearing as child or adult, lover or enemy, king or slave, animal or spirit. All these manifestations of animus energy are reflected in her experience of masculinity, both in herself and in others.
Just as we have a personal unconscious and a transpersonal or collective conscious, we carry our own wounds, but also those of our predecessors. The Archetype of woundedness is described in the Grail Quest, as the never-healing Fisher King Wound. The wound of the Fisher King is the "mother complex" (Sanford). It can be an emotional blow to our masculinity or femininity. The question remains, "Whom does the Grail serve? Why is this man not allowed to be healed of his great wound?". A voice sounded in the silence: "The Grail serves the Grail King!"
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32791264/The-Fisher-King-Wound
Both men and women can have the wound: The wound is a double wound; symbolically the wound in the mouth is the fear to speak one’s truth, and the wound in the genitals by a fire brand corresponds to the wound of fear of God. Each of us, just like the young prince, yearns for spiritual guidance as well as for a connection to his God, to Spirit, to his Source. At the same time, we each fear the death and transformation that we must experience to do so.
Our fear makes us afraid of God. Our need makes us yearn for God..Fear holds us in our ego, insecure about ourselves and our power. Our need for Unity, on the other hand, creates a death wish which might take us into communion with the Source; this death wish is symbolic. In actuality, the need is for dissolution of the ego..Dissolution of the ego allows us to lose consciousness--in effect, to merge into the Borderland of Souls. Loss of ego also creates an incapacity to deal with the fear and insecurity of the ordinary world.
Fading into the Unconscious creates a “wasteland” out of the King’s Kingdom in the outer world while at the same time the King’s world becomes an inner world of fantasy and illusion. On the positive side, delving into the unconscious—fishing in the woodland lakes—provides an opportunity to the King for healing and regeneration of the soul, his imagination, his creativity, and his sexuality.
For us, the lesson is that the fear that holds us in egoic consciousness also blocks us from the realm of the Soul and all that implies--imagination, creativity, the archetypal Gods and their mythic adventures from all past histories. The Wound of the Fisher King is thus a Wound of the Soul creating the painful feeling of being separated from the Source.
His “Fisher King wound”, Johnson stresses, separates a man from his anima -- his inner feminine or “feeling function.” It is his relationship to his inner feminine that gives meaning to his life or deprives him of that meaning. Losing this “meaning” is death to a man..His relationship with his “inner woman” or his “outer woman” is “the Grail” symbol in the Legend of the Fisher King! The Grail, a cup, is a symbol of the feminine. Cups contain water -- a symbol for emotions! And the Grail in particular is a cup which holds the blood of the Son of God -- which is the Life Force.
Robert A. Johnson extends the lesson to the Western culture: "our story is telling us that a dreadful mistake occurred when our culture took the view that spirit is to be attained by the suppression of nature and instinct. Spirit can attain its divine heights only with the power of nature of provide the strength for its fulfillment. Only too often the cultural man kills his natural man and nature replies by making the cultural man impotent...The fisher king wound is to be seen on the face of almost any man who passes on the street; the ache of life, the anxiety, dread, loneliness, the corners of the mouth pointing down--all are summed up by the fisher king wound."
So, what’s a wounded person left to do? For some cultures, to be wounded is a rite of passage which leads into adulthood. My sacred wound is always open, always fresh, never a scar.
Our sacred wound is a very significant event in our lives, something traumatic, painful or deep… the memory of which informs your instinctual reactions.
The wounding is generally brought about as the result of a stupid, careless, thoughtless accident.... so there is normally no one who can be blamed with purposely, intentionally, maliciously wounding us. The wounding was generally done by someone close to us...., someone we thought well of and trusted. So the wounding is a wounding of trust.
Just as the hero may need guides and assistants to set out on the quest, oftentimes he or she must have powerful guides and rescuers to bring them back to everyday life, especially if the person has been wounded or weakened by the experience. The point of this work is to establish a relating and relationship with the wound. Time is thus essential to the healing of our betrayals. Time reveals the Larger Story, hidden to primal consciousness, in which we must play a part.
The point is NOT to get rid of the wound. Sacred psychology is the process and practice of soulmaking; and soulmaking, as you may have discovered, is not necessarily a happy thing. Critical parts of it are challenging.
Our genealogy is our Larger Story. As seed making begins with the wounding of the ovum by the sperm, so does soulmaking begin with the wounding of the psyche by the Larger Story. Transformation occurs in the discovery of the Larger Story. Often that means that the healing cannot happen for a long time, not until the context is larger, until the Pattern that Connects is manifest.
Betrayal, of all the woundings that may be suffered by the soul, can be the greatest agent of the sacred. This wound has always had an awful and luminous quality surrounding it. It marks the end of primal, unconscious trust, and forces upon us those terrible conditions that accompany the taking of the next step. . . . The condition of this trust has been a subtle and powerful binding that blocks the fullness of the greater consciousness needed to respond to new situations - situations that cannot be met within the old conditions.
Trust always contains the seeds of its own betrayal; the taboo implies and requires its own transgression. Betrayal allows for the coming of reflection and therefore of consciousness. . . . The loss of primary attachments permits the entry of the "gods," the entry of the More, of insights and knowings that you could not assimilate before. The message of betrayal is always that things are much more then they seem. . . .
The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time. When we fail to do this, we tend to repeat the same old story over and over again. . . . Ultimately the refusal to accept the opening offered by betrayal leads you to self-betrayal. You betray yourself in belittling your deepest hopes, values, ambitions, and story. . . . The supreme disease of betrayal is paranoia, All human actions and affairs are seen under the rubric of betrayal as the constant for everything all of the time. . . .
Soulmaking requires that you die to one story to be reborn to a larger one. A renaissance, a rebirth, occurs not just because there is a rising of ancient and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached. In this wounding, the psyche is opened up and new questions begin to be asked about who we are in our depths. These powerful questions need not lead to alienation and withdrawal, but can lead to the seeding of the world with the newly released powers of the psyche. A Larger Story is revealed by the wounding. . .
The sacred wound is the wound that each of us has. No one is exempt. We all have the experiences of trauma, from others, by the circumstances of life, and by ourselves to ourselves. Mainly what we’re taught is how to master ourselves so that we don’t have to be with the trauma. But we’re not really taught how to both enter into the trauma and, even more significantly, create from the trauma. In order to create from any pain or any wounding, we actually first must relate with the wound, to feel it for a decent period of time, and to bring a quality of warmth or kindness to it. It is in the healing of the pain that our genius can emerge.
The healing of the sacred wound requires something known as the sacred journey. It is the journey we are all already on, but we don’t always hold our wounds with this kind of reverence, and as a result, the journey lacks a quality of reverence. And when we don’t hold our sacred wound with a quality of reverence, when we hold it as something that needs to be overcome, we essentially push it away. When we dishonor the wound, the world around us appears robotic, lonely, random, or, either mildly or very much a place of suffering. In other words, the way we regard our wounding has a direct effect on how we see the world.
In our betrayal, the other becomes the instrument of God, bringing us to a tragedy that needs our ennoblement in order to understand it. And the only way to be ennobled and to forgive truly is through love. In giving much more than one thought one could, one discovers that one has much more still to give. This is the mystery and miracle of love, and it changes the very fabric of reality, the very structure of our lives.
When we hold the wound as sacred, as the teacher, the priest, the father, the mother, the friend, the lover, then we begin a new, sacred journey with ourselves. When we regard our suffering as good news, we don’t need to destroy it, to overcome it, we get to meet it. And by meeting and relating with it, we get to deepen, widen, and expand to include more. The wound calls us toward our evolution, and it is our evolution, our transformation that is the genius we bring into the world. The wound calls us toward Mystery.
The Wounded Healer is the person who has gone through suffering, sometimes great, and as a result of that process has become a source of great wisdom, healing power and inspiration for others. In fact, the archetypal wounded healer undergoes a transformation as a result of their wound, their suffering and pain. They can actually transcend it, and successfully lead themselves to a path of service.
It is as if the wound itself helps you drive yourself to an inner journey that becomes the transformation itself. One strips away the selfish, ego-based feeling of being all alone in our wound and expands to see others and how if one chooses a different role, one can help. The Wounded Healer is often the Victim - He who must suffer the wounds of life to understand. Do you set yourself up to be a victim?
The retrieval of soul, then, is the reinstatement of soul in all its imaginal complexity and fragmentation, its meanings and meanderings. If the psyche protects against splintering, it is also prone to splintering its protection. Perhaps, then, we need to 're-vision' soul retrieval by viewing it not only as a reintegration of the personality, but also as the reinstatement of polytheistic soul that is at the heart of the 'I-Thou' of human and Cosmic life.
We are not alone and that our struggles, darkness and suffering. In a mythic context they have an innate purpose and direction - a healing restoration of the individual to his/her place in the overall mythic scheme and boundless mysterium of the Cosmos.
It is precisely here that the shaman's power to retrieve soul must meld with the therapist's ability to discern whether reunification is helping or stifling the death-in-life of the elusive butterfly of soul. Key myths provide a metaphor and universal context for wounding and healing. Through identifying with a particular mythic protagonist, we can find a way out of the debilitating fear, loneliness, anguish, or sense or meaninglessness that can be triggered by pain. It is when these avenues of 'mythic contextualization' are blocked by pathological dissociation and its accompanying chronic fragmentation of the ego, that shamanic intervention can be helpful.
Everyone carries them—scars that define and shape our psyches. Sometimes they are physical, but most people carry scars that are invisible. How we approach this part of our humanity largely effects how we treat our fellow man. It has been said many times that “hurting people hurt people.” This wounding has caused wars, inquisitions, bloodshed, genocide, famine, fear and lots of pain -- the crazed and driven agendas of the past. This is the shadow side of morality, at best, and pathology, perversion or pure evil at worst.
It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows there is a problem. This applies to our loss of rootedness in our genealogy and the wisdom of our ancestors. The Fisher King was charged by God with guarding the Holy Grail, but incurred an incapacitating wound for his sin of pride. For too many, the Holy Grail is more money, more sex, more power... and the wound remains, gets bigger and deeper.
"The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man-and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being." -C.G. Jung
Inextricably enmeshed in the life of every woman is a constellation of autonomous energy that Jung called animus, her masculine side. As a woman develops psychologically, animus changes, appearing and reappearing as child or adult, lover or enemy, king or slave, animal or spirit. All these manifestations of animus energy are reflected in her experience of masculinity, both in herself and in others.
Just as we have a personal unconscious and a transpersonal or collective conscious, we carry our own wounds, but also those of our predecessors. The Archetype of woundedness is described in the Grail Quest, as the never-healing Fisher King Wound. The wound of the Fisher King is the "mother complex" (Sanford). It can be an emotional blow to our masculinity or femininity. The question remains, "Whom does the Grail serve? Why is this man not allowed to be healed of his great wound?". A voice sounded in the silence: "The Grail serves the Grail King!"
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32791264/The-Fisher-King-Wound
Both men and women can have the wound: The wound is a double wound; symbolically the wound in the mouth is the fear to speak one’s truth, and the wound in the genitals by a fire brand corresponds to the wound of fear of God. Each of us, just like the young prince, yearns for spiritual guidance as well as for a connection to his God, to Spirit, to his Source. At the same time, we each fear the death and transformation that we must experience to do so.
Our fear makes us afraid of God. Our need makes us yearn for God..Fear holds us in our ego, insecure about ourselves and our power. Our need for Unity, on the other hand, creates a death wish which might take us into communion with the Source; this death wish is symbolic. In actuality, the need is for dissolution of the ego..Dissolution of the ego allows us to lose consciousness--in effect, to merge into the Borderland of Souls. Loss of ego also creates an incapacity to deal with the fear and insecurity of the ordinary world.
Fading into the Unconscious creates a “wasteland” out of the King’s Kingdom in the outer world while at the same time the King’s world becomes an inner world of fantasy and illusion. On the positive side, delving into the unconscious—fishing in the woodland lakes—provides an opportunity to the King for healing and regeneration of the soul, his imagination, his creativity, and his sexuality.
For us, the lesson is that the fear that holds us in egoic consciousness also blocks us from the realm of the Soul and all that implies--imagination, creativity, the archetypal Gods and their mythic adventures from all past histories. The Wound of the Fisher King is thus a Wound of the Soul creating the painful feeling of being separated from the Source.
His “Fisher King wound”, Johnson stresses, separates a man from his anima -- his inner feminine or “feeling function.” It is his relationship to his inner feminine that gives meaning to his life or deprives him of that meaning. Losing this “meaning” is death to a man..His relationship with his “inner woman” or his “outer woman” is “the Grail” symbol in the Legend of the Fisher King! The Grail, a cup, is a symbol of the feminine. Cups contain water -- a symbol for emotions! And the Grail in particular is a cup which holds the blood of the Son of God -- which is the Life Force.
Robert A. Johnson extends the lesson to the Western culture: "our story is telling us that a dreadful mistake occurred when our culture took the view that spirit is to be attained by the suppression of nature and instinct. Spirit can attain its divine heights only with the power of nature of provide the strength for its fulfillment. Only too often the cultural man kills his natural man and nature replies by making the cultural man impotent...The fisher king wound is to be seen on the face of almost any man who passes on the street; the ache of life, the anxiety, dread, loneliness, the corners of the mouth pointing down--all are summed up by the fisher king wound."
So, what’s a wounded person left to do? For some cultures, to be wounded is a rite of passage which leads into adulthood. My sacred wound is always open, always fresh, never a scar.
Our sacred wound is a very significant event in our lives, something traumatic, painful or deep… the memory of which informs your instinctual reactions.
The wounding is generally brought about as the result of a stupid, careless, thoughtless accident.... so there is normally no one who can be blamed with purposely, intentionally, maliciously wounding us. The wounding was generally done by someone close to us...., someone we thought well of and trusted. So the wounding is a wounding of trust.
Just as the hero may need guides and assistants to set out on the quest, oftentimes he or she must have powerful guides and rescuers to bring them back to everyday life, especially if the person has been wounded or weakened by the experience. The point of this work is to establish a relating and relationship with the wound. Time is thus essential to the healing of our betrayals. Time reveals the Larger Story, hidden to primal consciousness, in which we must play a part.
The point is NOT to get rid of the wound. Sacred psychology is the process and practice of soulmaking; and soulmaking, as you may have discovered, is not necessarily a happy thing. Critical parts of it are challenging.
Our genealogy is our Larger Story. As seed making begins with the wounding of the ovum by the sperm, so does soulmaking begin with the wounding of the psyche by the Larger Story. Transformation occurs in the discovery of the Larger Story. Often that means that the healing cannot happen for a long time, not until the context is larger, until the Pattern that Connects is manifest.
Betrayal, of all the woundings that may be suffered by the soul, can be the greatest agent of the sacred. This wound has always had an awful and luminous quality surrounding it. It marks the end of primal, unconscious trust, and forces upon us those terrible conditions that accompany the taking of the next step. . . . The condition of this trust has been a subtle and powerful binding that blocks the fullness of the greater consciousness needed to respond to new situations - situations that cannot be met within the old conditions.
Trust always contains the seeds of its own betrayal; the taboo implies and requires its own transgression. Betrayal allows for the coming of reflection and therefore of consciousness. . . . The loss of primary attachments permits the entry of the "gods," the entry of the More, of insights and knowings that you could not assimilate before. The message of betrayal is always that things are much more then they seem. . . .
The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time. When we fail to do this, we tend to repeat the same old story over and over again. . . . Ultimately the refusal to accept the opening offered by betrayal leads you to self-betrayal. You betray yourself in belittling your deepest hopes, values, ambitions, and story. . . . The supreme disease of betrayal is paranoia, All human actions and affairs are seen under the rubric of betrayal as the constant for everything all of the time. . . .
Soulmaking requires that you die to one story to be reborn to a larger one. A renaissance, a rebirth, occurs not just because there is a rising of ancient and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached. In this wounding, the psyche is opened up and new questions begin to be asked about who we are in our depths. These powerful questions need not lead to alienation and withdrawal, but can lead to the seeding of the world with the newly released powers of the psyche. A Larger Story is revealed by the wounding. . .
The sacred wound is the wound that each of us has. No one is exempt. We all have the experiences of trauma, from others, by the circumstances of life, and by ourselves to ourselves. Mainly what we’re taught is how to master ourselves so that we don’t have to be with the trauma. But we’re not really taught how to both enter into the trauma and, even more significantly, create from the trauma. In order to create from any pain or any wounding, we actually first must relate with the wound, to feel it for a decent period of time, and to bring a quality of warmth or kindness to it. It is in the healing of the pain that our genius can emerge.
The healing of the sacred wound requires something known as the sacred journey. It is the journey we are all already on, but we don’t always hold our wounds with this kind of reverence, and as a result, the journey lacks a quality of reverence. And when we don’t hold our sacred wound with a quality of reverence, when we hold it as something that needs to be overcome, we essentially push it away. When we dishonor the wound, the world around us appears robotic, lonely, random, or, either mildly or very much a place of suffering. In other words, the way we regard our wounding has a direct effect on how we see the world.
In our betrayal, the other becomes the instrument of God, bringing us to a tragedy that needs our ennoblement in order to understand it. And the only way to be ennobled and to forgive truly is through love. In giving much more than one thought one could, one discovers that one has much more still to give. This is the mystery and miracle of love, and it changes the very fabric of reality, the very structure of our lives.
When we hold the wound as sacred, as the teacher, the priest, the father, the mother, the friend, the lover, then we begin a new, sacred journey with ourselves. When we regard our suffering as good news, we don’t need to destroy it, to overcome it, we get to meet it. And by meeting and relating with it, we get to deepen, widen, and expand to include more. The wound calls us toward our evolution, and it is our evolution, our transformation that is the genius we bring into the world. The wound calls us toward Mystery.
The Wounded Healer is the person who has gone through suffering, sometimes great, and as a result of that process has become a source of great wisdom, healing power and inspiration for others. In fact, the archetypal wounded healer undergoes a transformation as a result of their wound, their suffering and pain. They can actually transcend it, and successfully lead themselves to a path of service.
It is as if the wound itself helps you drive yourself to an inner journey that becomes the transformation itself. One strips away the selfish, ego-based feeling of being all alone in our wound and expands to see others and how if one chooses a different role, one can help. The Wounded Healer is often the Victim - He who must suffer the wounds of life to understand. Do you set yourself up to be a victim?
The retrieval of soul, then, is the reinstatement of soul in all its imaginal complexity and fragmentation, its meanings and meanderings. If the psyche protects against splintering, it is also prone to splintering its protection. Perhaps, then, we need to 're-vision' soul retrieval by viewing it not only as a reintegration of the personality, but also as the reinstatement of polytheistic soul that is at the heart of the 'I-Thou' of human and Cosmic life.
We are not alone and that our struggles, darkness and suffering. In a mythic context they have an innate purpose and direction - a healing restoration of the individual to his/her place in the overall mythic scheme and boundless mysterium of the Cosmos.
It is precisely here that the shaman's power to retrieve soul must meld with the therapist's ability to discern whether reunification is helping or stifling the death-in-life of the elusive butterfly of soul. Key myths provide a metaphor and universal context for wounding and healing. Through identifying with a particular mythic protagonist, we can find a way out of the debilitating fear, loneliness, anguish, or sense or meaninglessness that can be triggered by pain. It is when these avenues of 'mythic contextualization' are blocked by pathological dissociation and its accompanying chronic fragmentation of the ego, that shamanic intervention can be helpful.
(c)2015 Iona Miller
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
iona_m@yahoo.com
http://ionamiller.weebly.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
