Learning How to Personify Little Tom
Months ago It became clear that Tom needs to become more connected to what Jung called the feeling function. We think, we sense, we intuit, and we feel. These are the four ways that consciousness processes reality and, according to Jung, there are no more. When you begin to realize that you tend to rely on one of those four functions, such as thinking, and perhaps you see that there is a second more supportive one, such as sensation, you have made a real psychological beginning. Not exactly a beachhead, but it’s a beginning. Tom has a very fine intelligence, is quick to grasp psychological concepts, has a deep urge for psychological health, and, as every client has heard me preach ad nauseam, an urge to grow up.
Long ago (oh dear, here comes a side bar) I realized that growing up, whatever that means, is not the natural consequence of living. That is such a shocking statement! Let me repeat it please: Growing up is not a natural consequence of living. This is bad news to those of us who assume that “things” naturally get better over time. “Time heals all wounds.” “It ain’t necessarily so” as Sporting’ life sang in Porgy and Bess. In fact, psychological maturation means that we have to swim against the grain of Mother Nature’s relentless cycles. For whatever reason, She has never seemed the least bit interested in psychological growth, any more than she would push a tree to change into a rose bush or a lion to transform into a lamb. Krishnamurti saw this and urged his listeners to let go of the notion that human “progress” is an inevitable consequence of time. No one listened of course, and I think he grew weary of speaking his truth. This can be rather unsettling to those of us who believe that Time Is On Our Side and that somehow we are all on a path to psychological maturity. This is a child’s fantasy, sweet but deadly. Transformation is not a natural consequence of being good boys and girls, nor its reward. Perhaps good boys and girls do go to Heaven, but I don’t recommend that as a game plan for living in this reality. End sidebar!
In the previous few months of our work, Tom had begun facing a disquieting reality. Somewhere beneath the surface of a highly functioning ego and a successful life, existed a very angry feeling part in his interior world that seemed to be entirely locked away or disconnected from his conscious control. In particular one person in his life triggered waves of dislike that bordered on hatred. Even though he saw this happening each time he came into contact with this person, and in spite of his constant intention to remain aware, he fell invariably into that gravitational hole of unconscious anger at the very mention of this person, not to mention interacting with him/her. Sometimes he woke early in the morning, going over incidents with this person, and Tom’s heart would start beating rapidly as he felt the anger and anxiety rising.
The frustration of this persisting problem and his lack of control over his anger opened the door for a deeper psychological understanding, and as the weeks went by we began to talk about the core Jungian concept of “split off” parts that are not able to live in the light of consciousness. These parts Jung called “autonomous" personalities meaning that they “exist” independently of our conscious ego. This is not an easy concept for anyone to embrace. Even the term “split off” is jarring to our need to believe that we are one person inside, one ego called “me” - a unity of purpose, a monotheistic sense of who we are.
Who would be comfortable with the idea that she lives in a house with many more rooms than she is aware of, most of which have not been visited for years? While this is a fundamental metaphor for depth psychology, it’s still relatively unknown outside Jungian or Freudian psychology and generally regarded with suspicion. Contemporary cognitive-behavioral psychology is basically “bandage them up and get ‘em back on the battle lines.” Mother Nature probably approves.
Tom had come to recognize, but more importantly, embrace the idea that his feelings of anger resided in the young boy he used to be. Slowly he began to open his mind to the idea that that boy had not disappeared behind a veil of memory that separated him from then and now. This is a huge psychological step because his mind had to expand beyond the ego’s literal (concrete) thinking into the ability to think psychologically or metaphorically.
( Another sidebar) It has taken most of my adult life to grasp the astonishing fact that almost no one can “think” psychologically. Who knew? “Psychological mindedness” is only now beginning to emerge into contemporary consciousness. God knows it cannot develop soon enough! (This is why James a Hillman says that most of us live in the Kingdom of the Literal.) Psychological mindedness is a far cry from what Buddhists call mindfulness, but I digress.
Tom began to see that little Tom is as alive today as he was when he was three, five, or perhaps seven years old, but at some point during those years, little Tom simply froze and stopped growing psychologically.
There is a medical technique called cryopreservation where the body is frozen below 130 degrees in the hope that it or perhaps the brain can be preserved waiting for some future cure for whatever the terminal disease happens to be. Thus what has been preserved can be resurrected with a new chance to experience life once more.
How brilliant is Psyche? This is precisely what the child does when there seems to be no possible avenue to growing on in a life where pain and disappointment are relentless. It stops psychologically, with the hope of some future cure, a day when someone will come to rescue it, to thaw it out with love.
Tom had agreed in the previous session to ask himself as often as he could during the week, “What are you feeling?” He texted to say that he had been able to remember as many as three or four times a day to ask, “What am I feeling?” This was good news indeed. He lives an extremely jam-packed life from morning to night, and to hear that he was able to remember his “mantra-question” three or four times a day was gratifying, to say the least. But I had to offer a slight tweak to what he had remembered. Here’s a question for you: Did you catch his mistake? Think about it for a moment.
His assignment was to ask what are you feeling not what am I feeling. This was the key factor in his learning how to personify little Tom as a personality existing in his interior world.
There was no accident in Tom’s switching pronouns. I think most of us would do the exact same thing. If I am going to try to connect to the feeling function it makes sense that I would ask myself “What am I feeling?” So the first step in learning how to personify little Tom (or little Vic) is to go from “What am I feeling?” to learning how to connect with the living breathing child within, by asking him or her, “What are you feeling?”
Nor can this be asked from the thinking, intellectual part of the mind. “What are you feeling?” must come from a place of softness, which is the only place where true intimacy can begin. Every therapist on God’s green earth asks, “how do you feel about that?” and we usually give a fairly quick response. “I’m okay.” But who responds, “he’s okay, or she’s sad?” When do we stop and descend from the head into a soft, vulnerable heart in the body? It takes a great deal of courage to be seen.
Tom came to the next session with palpable excitement. “Every time I ask the question I see that I am feeling either fear or anger,” and he said that he felt a real shift occurring that he could not quite explain. As he reflected on that shift he said that it felt as if he is on some edge or the verge of something. I think Tom had established a beachhead.
Here are Jung’s prophetic words about the state of our contemporary consciousness, and how our culture has become a land of the literal. It points to the work we each must do to recover the soul.
““If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche, fragmentary psychic systems would never have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence. That is also the reason why our time has become so utterly godless and profane; we lack all knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it coupled with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems.” ”
To be continued.
