Battling the Gods

In the Jungian program I’m enrolled in, the students are encouraged to practice the methods with each other in coaching sessions. Recently, I was in the role of the coach and working with a mother whose adolescent son has epilepsy complicated with co-morbidities. (She gave me her permission to share this experience.) 

This became what we call a “shadow session” where we explore an emotional trigger to discover a bit of what’s been hidden in one’s shadow, with the ultimate goal of integrating the parts of ourselves that were disallowed in childhood and relegated to the darkness, pushed as far away from consciousness as possible. According to Jungian philosophy, this is the path to wholeness, and the rewards of this process of shadow illumination and integration can include deep self-awareness and “a profound balance of mind”; a sense of knowing one’s purpose; and generally more vitality, more Life.   

We spent a little time in the beginning defining the trigger as the condition itself: her son’s epilepsy. As I guided her through the session and witnessed the deep pain, frustration, and anger that accompanies her in her experience of parenting this child that she feels so driven to understand and seek a cure for, while also attempting to make sense of why this is her lot in life, it occurred to me that it might be useful to liken epilepsy to a god. 

This proved really fruitful in illuminating the impossibility of the task she’d set for herself. This condition has consumed much of the past decade+’s worth of her family’s resources, robbing them of so many of the typical family experiences she’d envisioned. While her incessant determination to make it go away is understandable, it’s also, ultimately, futile. “Just who do I think I am?” she asked at one point. 

We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases... -C.G. Jung

I don’t know about you, but I can relate to this mom’s obsessive drive to understand her son’s affliction, and her belief that it’s her job to find the thing that would alleviate the pain and suffering it causes him (and her.) She’s been told by doctors that even if they’re able to discover why her son has this condition, this knowledge would do nothing to address his symptoms. I suspect we may attach so strongly to this Mama Bear approach because it gives us something to do, a sense that we aren’t completely helpless in the face of an unfair and tragic circumstance. 

The feelings of rage and agony that inhabited this woman during the session were so very familiar–I see them time and again among my clients. And of course, I remember being consumed by them myself; they represent a mother’s impotence to fix her child’s experience. Mothers today seem compelled to curate perfect childhoods for their offspring with immense intention; and trust me, I know how strongly influenced this drive is by the judgment of others and the expectation that we’ll  “produce” high-functioning citizens of the world. Is it possible the gods feel the need to remind us that we are not gods ourselves? 

You may be wondering what in the world I mean by “the gods”? 

Photo by zanck FL on Unsplash

Jung identified numerous universal archetypes, recognizing that they’ve accompanied us throughout human consciousness and provided necessary frames through which to interpret our experiences. When we relate to them in a healthy way, we understand how much they impact us and that a conscious relationship with them is in our best interest. Prior to modernity’s rationalism, knowledge of certain archetypes—which were captured through descriptions of the gods—helped us to comprehend and to submit to reality, to make peace with our limitations, and to adapt to painful circumstances rather than lose ourselves, our potential, our humanity to impotence and hopelessness; to a dark void of meaning.

One of the signatures of American culture is our fight. Our “never give up” and “never say die” attitude pits us in a constant battle against reality. Even the New Age movement continues this thread with ideas such as “you create your own reality.” While it is true that we often limit ourselves through identification with negative self-images and beliefs…it is not true that we can simply wish any reality we want into existence. -Chris White, The Invisible Vulnerability of the Mature Heart

This quote is from an article on futility and adaptation. It’s written for parents of small children, but I highly recommend it for all parents. And I’d encourage you to think not only of your children’s experience as you read about the importance of submitting to reality–but your own as well. Are you also engaged in a futile battle with the gods? 

To clarify here, I don’t refer to “the powers that be” as the gods. The archetypes reside in us all, yet few of us recognize when we’re in their grip, overidentifying with these “autonomous psychic contents” and surrendering our free will. I intend to expand on this topic in future essays, but maybe consider when it feels like something else is driving you, rather than feeling like you’re calmly behind the wheel, with a clean windshield and decent visibility—and a good sense of when it’s safer to just park the car. 

We will dance with these archetypes throughout Life. Jung (and his devotees) recognized them as inherent in the human experience.  They play with our lives and demand our attention. Because we’ve come to deny their existence (God is dead and Scientism rules,) they visit us as physical, mental, and emotional symptoms, often pestering, even torturing us until we engage with them–or medicate ourselves so as to quiet them enough to tolerate this world.

What’s the point of all this archetypes and the gods talk? I believe our children have much less agency than we want to believe they do. Adolescence comes with its own set of archetypes that each of us must grapple with as we transition into adulthood. Yes, our children must transition. This is the function of adolescence; it’s a period of intense and painful metamorphosis from childhood into adulthood. And it’s messy. There are all kinds of invisible forces working on our children, dragging them in various, even perilous directions–but inescapably into transformation.

Somewhere along the way, we came to believe that if we parented with careful intention, we might be able to skip the mess. I know I believed this. I totally bought into the misguided belief that I could prevent my children from experiencing too much of the typical adolescent pain, and thereby avoid the pain it would cause me to witness. (And it doesn’t help when it seems others are able to accomplish this exact thing. I shudder to think of what the gods have in mind for these families.) Wise cultures have formal rites of passage that function to help contain the archetypes that would seize our children during this period of their lives.  

My point here is that I think our children have about as much control over the grip of a trans identity as my classmate’s son has over his epilepsy. They can’t just decide one day to put it down or let it go. They must grapple with the forces that seized them in the first place and this is a necessary process to develop the capacity for what today’s adulthood will demand of them. If our inability to tolerate the mess this causes drives how we respond to what’s happening, we’re likely to just prolong the natural processes that must take place. The gods will always have their way. 

So then, what is our role as parents? Do we just step back and watch our child suffer with their demons? (Demons are archetypes as well; I look forward to exploring the link between demon and daimon in a future essay. Our daimon will also have its way with us.) Our children need a container–like that of the rite. I think our job is to resource ourselves so that we can tolerate the mess and be the wise, stable presence that our children need us to be as they wrestle with the forces that are working on them. 

This is harder than ever in today’s world. We’re so out of sync with reality, and in our delusion that we can somehow control it (in a Godlike way?) and escape the suffering the gods will inflict, we invite even more pain. There are few guides out there to help us as moms know how to ease our identification with the Mother archetype, the part of us that is driven to invite dependence and sacrifice our own needs for our children. Identification with this archetype is crucial to develop the necessary healthy attachment when our children are young, but our culture is ill-equipped to support us to let go of our role as protector–or frankly, through any phase of womanhood. 

There are other parts of ourselves that we can tap into and strengthen to facilitate this transition that is as much ours (from mother to matriarch) as our child’s (from adolescent to adult.) Support, guidance, and resources for mom to do her individuation work are what this situation calls for, in my (not so humble?) opinion. 

If instead, in our fear and intolerance of the way the messiness makes us feel, we try to slay our adolescent’s demons for them, I think we may send a dangerous message. We reinforce their sense of fragility and prolong their dependence (as well as our own dependence on their dependence–again an extended identification with the Mother archetype that I doubt is healthy for either mom or adolescent.) 

The good news here may be the same as the bad: archetypes are integral to the human experience. They’ll cause us pain while they also provide the comfort and strength to tolerate that pain. They’ll invite us to discover our own incredible capacity and humble us when we think too much of ourselves. They’re unavoidable yet exquisite. They’re both the dark and the light. 

If we think we can escape them, they’ll certainly torture us. If we think we can kill them, they’ll make sure to remind us who the mortals are in this game of Life. Where we have some free will here is in how we relate to them. We can accept their invitation to master our dance steps, or we can engage in a battle we’re almost certain to lose.