Looking into the Past – Grounded in the Present
It’s another beautiful day with sunshine and warm, not hot, weather. I am looking forward to the afternoon round of golf followed by couples’ night golf. I am busy with final touch ups in the basement as my family will be coming home in a week, our first full family reunion in two years.
Today’s photo was taken last week, a photo of a home long-abandoned looking from the inside to the yard now overgrown with trees. Thirty years ago I remember sitting at the table by this window enjoying coffee and fresh home-made bread, cooked on a wood stove. The past does hold some good memories. But, one can’t live in the past. It is important to live in the present. The window is clouded with the effects of time. The sharp contrasts have gone allowing colours to blend rather that stand in stark opposition to each other.
Complexes have a way of keeping us in the past. I think of the father-complex in particular for myself. Most of the time, my actions have been unconsciously fuelled by doing the opposite of what my father would have done. Of course, there is some merit in this when the opposite produced better relationship results. However, sometimes the blindness of my actions which were acted out of the father-complex, resulted in unfavourable results. I had painted my father into an all black corner not giving him his due as a real man. There was much that was good as well. But, an activated complex doesn’t discriminate very well. It took a long time to accept my father as a carrier for both good and bad, to allow him the honour of being a human, fallible. In doing this, I opened the door to myself to be human.
As individuals, we are not meant to be well-balanced, sober servants of collective values. We are not meant to be sane, safe or similar. We are, each of us, meant to be different. A proper course of therapy does not make us better adjusted; it makes us more eccentric, a unique individual who serves a larger project than that of the ego or the collective norms. (Hollis, Celebrating a Life, 2001, p. 109)
James Hollis speaks of following one’s inner voice as it calls us to be individuals, calls us to follow our personal path, not the paths of those who came before us. It isn’t only through therapy by which one can escape the grip of complexes which keep us unconscious to the nature of our “self.” There are other paths as people have been able to become aware of themselves for thousands of years before Carl Gustav Jung appeared. That said, therapy does provide a grounded guide for those who would otherwise fear too much to take the journey.
