The balancing of the opposites within us is ongoing work as we grow and seek wisdom and emotional maturity, on that quest of being able to hold, honor and make sense of our feelings (feminine) and then express them or give them a positive channel into the outside world (mascline/Mars function). This may be a development that is blocked inside of us in some way or meets challenges due to our conditioning and those forces we meet in our parents that disallow our wholeness.. And it is one that can be influenced by collective factors, such as the long history of demonization of the feminine in a patriarchal society.
What does this mean on an individual level.. Well as Marion Woodman notes in her book The Maiden King : The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, in our society the lack of positive mothering and positive fathering can wound and impoverish so many of us and immediately my fingers types this out as my mercurial mind swings around I think of the damaged generation of doomed youth led to bloodshed on the fields of Europe and most certainly this was far far later war in the history of humanity, but still it was one that saw a rising tide of blood unleashed such as Jung experienced in the dream I shared about in a recent post. In fact sharing this all with Kat in therapy yesterday I was crying mostly for my Mum and the impact of that loss of a father on her and all of us, as I shared with her the dream as well as the writing I had done about the blood red rising sun. I immediately saw then that scene from the movie Regeneration, I also shared on a post and with Katina few weeks ago where the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen meet in a darkening field with a red sunset in the background..
How painful for a generation to be left alone without fathers and for the mother’s who bore them and how much wounding and a ferocious desire to survive came out of that time, especially for my own family.
I think in many ways my Mum being left without a loving father meant her Mum had to become harder and more masculine just to keep making ends meet with no help at all from anyone. My Nana savaged Mum a lot and Mum did not know how it was at all to experience any form of tenderness which then calls to mind the times she would leave me alone at home if I was sick with a plate of Jatz crackers and a sound recording of Peter and the Wolf to listen too.. The wolf is instinctive and hungry animal and in the recording the orchestration is overpowering, to think my young consciousness became steeped in that rather than behind held, cared for,contained and nurtured hurts and makes sense of later injuries where the feelings had no out only via damage to my body.
The lack of a positive father can be felt too when he does not stand up to the mother and protect the child while instilling the child with a sense of value and worth through present and engaged mirroring.. My brother got a little more of that but even he was brutalized by Dad in many ways, none intentionally which makes sense of why he has shunned my sister and I when we have been highly emotional (or in his words ; irrational). Our feelings made no sense to him as he is not really in touch with his own.
When we have these inner deficits of a negative mother and father inside it can be almost impossible for us to develop in many ways. And come to think of it a man not cherished in the right way by his mother may turn hostile to the female at the same time as he may see his own mother being brutalized or her feminine feelings dismissed as ‘crazy’ by her husband. My own father did not do that so much.. When Mum got into her frenzies he just walked away laughing, which – later in life – Mum told me drove her into even more of a frenzy and in a vain attempt to get her power back she would give him the silent treatment and make us pass messages back and forward.. Not a good example of how to handle feelings, tension, frustration and conflict.
Now I look back and see how uncontained I was was it any wonder that I reached for addictions to fill in the void and felt a kind of terror at the same time as I had no way of knowing how to draw close to and trust anyone at all.
Lately I recognise that nasty inner tormentor/persecutor figure that lived inside of me and see how it showed up in dreams.. In one dream it appeared as a huge nun with a big black habit, a set of keys attached to a belt on her massive waist and behind her and behind glass was a class of children all locked up in stocks. At the time I had this dream a lot of feelings had began to burst out in therapy but I was feeling the call to go back home to Australia, my Mum had an injury, my older sister was in crisis due to abuse and in the dream I had the choice to steal the keys from the Nun and liberate the children but I could not do it and so I came back to Australia several times only to be put down at times for my feelings or treated cruelly and without any shed of empathy in my struggle or grief.
In the myth about the Maiden King that Woodman unpacks in her book a young man called Ivan is stuck with a pin in his neck by a tutor and then he has to go on a journey to liberate his own trapped and badly damaged inner feminine.. Ivan is not just an archetype that applies to men but to women and men cut off by the pin in their neck from the inner feeling dimensions.. And so it can take many of us a lot of pain too to break out of this kind of stranglehold in the majority that is approved by our society. As I think about the tutor sticking a pin in the neck I think of my friend Gary’s struggle with a shut down and often hostile to difference education system that he speaks a lot about in his blog Bereaved Single Parent. This is also voiced in the following quote spoken by one of Woodman’s clients in the course of her therapy :
I never learned anything that had to do with me.. School was a bore but for specific teachers.
There is a lot more I have to write on this subject, as Woodman makes some clear differentiations of how an inner negative unloving mother can turn hostile to expression of our true selves, this perhaps relates to a lot the Complex PTSD therapist Pete Walker has written about the blocking power of the inner and outer critics that tends to try to sabotage our early attempts to make peace with, express and come to terms with chaotic and undifferentiated feelings within us we fear may not be acceptable or may end in destruction if they are allowed a channel out.
So instead so many of us chose the fawn, freeze or emotional arrest option as well as the turning around and internalizing of the angst against our true selves… The rage we may have to feel to break out of this stranglehold is most surely not our own but in fact seems to reach generations back.
Carl Jung believed that the major work of individuation would send us mad it if it was not pursued at a critical time in our psychological evolution. And so it is we have to contain at times very overpowering feelings in order that we can civilize them and come to peace with them.. Which calls to mind some more words from the poet Rilke
are not our demons really just angels in disguise.. are they not just rejected parts of ours seeking our love, containment and understanding?
These are not his direct words but its goes something like this, the things we reject or other reject inside of us or them are in the end those shadow forces that may end up leading us to either a personal or a collective breakdown..
Many women.. collude with their own power principle and with the men in their lives in destroying their own femininity… It is as if the devil himself is saying “You’ll never get away from me.. You sold your soul to me years ago and you are mine.” The woman is then more frightened than she has ever been and in deep despair. Her body may be wracked with pain. This is the moment when she and her (therapist), or priest, or very dear friend, must release all the love they possibly can to accomplish the birth :
“Loving her (the inner wounded child) is holy for me.”
Marion Woodman : The Pregnant Virgin : A Process of Psychological Transformation
Emerging From The Dark Night 