“Sitting in our suffering (and sometimes in a suffering that cannot be fully resolved), perhaps we have been wounded in a way that our body is permanently changed, where something has happened to us psychologically, and the brain can’t find its original state. In this case, Suffering the realities of what has happened to us, and finding a way to bear the reality of who we are now, is an incredible (and sometimes Herculean) task.
Jüng speaks about this when he speaks about the “transcendent function,” that as human beings suffer what might be intolerable experiences, there is a function inside of us that tries to capture the sometimes unimagined suffering and encapsulate it in a symbol.
And it’s in the symbol (and interacting with the symbol and working with it) that slowly over time the anger and the suffering becomes bearable and has a place to live in the psyche so that it doesn’t blight the entire landscape of a persons life.
This is a really deep and difficult process. “Who am I, that this is happened to me?“ This is a wound that is often unnamed, or even a secret, or it may be transgenerational. But unless we can go back to the wound itself, and state what it is, the process of reconciliation and forgiveness with our Self will not be able to take place. And it takes us back, in a long and difficult process sometimes, back to the place of: What is the injury? Who hurt you? How deeply were you hurt? What were the circumstances?
Most people who have experience trauma come to recognize that their inner world has been altered, as well as perhaps even their physical bodies. And the way forward is to take that fully in hand, and to do whatever work is necessary to mediate the ongoing influence of that matrix that has been constellated inside of us.”
~ Joseph Lee, “This Jungian Life” podcast, episode 202
[Art: Luke Sammons]
