I was so outwardly focused on my own anticipation and expectation of others that I dampened the voice from within so that it was barely a whisper with no sense of agency. I was quite adept at anticipating and meeting others’ needs and normalizing them over my own. I accepted things I should not have and lived without a sense of inner comfort or safe harbor, instead choosing to embark on boats where other people were at the helm.
Personal Development
Intuitives must engage with and deepen into the body’s knowing, enter into conversation with the body and be open to its revelations. Coming into relationship with the body has opened channels to the depths of my being, making me conscious of the guidance within, informing me of my innermost needs, and allowing me to accept the paradoxes of the inner world.
The competent, professional, independent persona that I had painstakingly crafted over my entire adolescence and adulthood was taken from me. The woman who had climbed the ranks to become a successful executive at the pinnacle of the corporate world, with her glamorous jet-setting lifestyle, was gone. I had experienced an enormous personal defeat and, having no recourse left, I realized I had reached rock bottom.
My mother is a ghost now. She died the last day of 2016. She was the person nearest and dearest to me for much of my life, yet it seemed we never quite understood and accepted each other unconditionally. She haunts me as an unfulfilled spirit when I have anxious thoughts, or fearful premonitions, or self-admonition, but also in old sayings, endearing quirks, and the names of flowers and trees. And she inhabits my dreams, mostly as an unhappy child.
I now better understand the odds against all of this: a male, Caucasian physician, living in the firm grasp of an ESTJ cultural weltanschauung awakens to the soul’s desperate pleading late in life. That the soul seeks to live forward something alien, foreign, and predictably destructive is now so comprehensible. Nothing heroic is here, merely a journey of survival.
Suppression of my intuitive function has appeared symptomatically in the loss of my voice, both in dreams and while performing as a vocalist. On a broader level, my voicelessness has materialized in interpersonal difficulties, such as a hesitancy to advocate for my own perspective, impostor syndrome, and a distrust in my instincts and intuitions.
I was in the grip of my own unconscious, projecting the shadows I was grappling with onto the work environment around me. I felt compulsively gripped by a desire to “fight the evil empire.” At my darkest point, I disregarded the fact that I did not have all the details and simply projected my personal beliefs and limited perceptions onto every decision made.
The constant tension and accompanying fatigue in my waking life might be seen as the price I paid for the maintenance of a persona that had outlived its utility. The executioner lurking in the demonic position grew potent in the shadows, but the inferior function was rising. Energetically, a talisman was constellated, signifying a burning away of an inauthentic outer mask.
We harken back to the Conques tympanum’s division of cosmos and chaos as Jung thereby affirmed the value in engaging with all four functions so as to address our human challenges and set matters in order. Just as Christ was the arbiter of human souls on the Conques tympanum, we may engage our inner self to negotiate the chaos within our own psyche.
Many clients enter treatment because their psyche is “failing” to accommodate itself to their one-sided will. They are cut off from the self-regulating functions of their unconscious and the resulting symptoms have induced so much suffering that they are forced to stop their plans, enter therapy, and work through the blockage. The power complex wants a better hold on the psyche.