Fate and Homecoming
Sometimes our relationships are the source of continuous ups and downs. We are hurt yet we keep coming back again and again to the same dialogue, hoping for something different but finding the same results. What’s going on?
This also brings up the question of how you manage resurfacing triggers that happen in your relationships. Do you self-medicate? Defend and fight? Suffer from eating compulsions? Suffer in depression and anxiety? All this endless repetition is where CBT/DBT therapies fail us and relational therapies step in for deeper analysis and change.
I am trained in Jungian Analysis, a form of intersubjective, relational therapy. In psychoanalysis, we take a deep dive into your life experiences, and by doing so, we encounter the common threads weaving the tapestry of your life together. So, we explore the connections between the past, and how early relationship dynamics are still living-through within your relationships of today, and we analyze those unhelpful patterns for change.
Essentially, the hungry ghosts from our past experiences are still living within our unconscious, fed by the dysfunction in our current relationships. Our role, our purpose in life then, is to release those ghosts from our underworld, finally laying them to rest. Only then are we freeing up our psychic energy for new ways of being in the world, for appreciating life with our loved ones, and finding alignment to our higher selves. Not serving the hungry ghosts anymore. In depth therapy we call this process of growing more into ourselves, individuation.
Therapeutic modalities are changing to reflect something we knew all along: Our status as relational beings is crucial! We learn and grow through relationships, whether they are with our parents, therapists, with our friends or lovers. Our inner attachment system forms as a result of these relationships and we continuously add information into the system, making adjustments over a lifetime. I came across a quote recently that inspired me to write:
“Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper functioning of memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, memories need to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it. ”
Vital to this process this concept uniting memory and wholeness is discernment. As encounters with friends or our therapist polish our mirror… as we reminiscence on past experiences, we are returning memories to our consciousness for us to have choice in what we hold within our self-image. That is why relational therapy, in its essence, is a Homecoming. It is Homecoming to our very Identity and our higher Self: Linking our Self to purpose, Soul, and Cosmos. The Greeks knew this when they named the mother Goddess of Fate, Anake, translated to “Necessity.” Our fate becomes what is necessary in our lives, our purpose, our identification. We spin it into the tapestry of our lives as the Greek Fates spun their spinning wheel of time. Is it time to give analysis a try to connect into your wholeness?
