Creative people have got it right. They understand that the best way to protect and nurture an emerging creative idea is to keep it to oneself. The reluctance to share a nascent piece of music, script, poem, or painting is a healthy way of insuring that one’s own unique combination of conscious and unconscious energies will be devoted to the new creative project.

Our human relationships are such a creative project. But instead of a poem, painting, script or piece of music, what we are protecting and nurturing is our emerging psychological health. In Jungian terms we are fostering individuation.

I like to think of this process as protecting a tiny new plant shoot from scorching sunlight. It holds the promise for providing future abundance yet right now requires tenderness and patience if it is to flourish. And much of it is hidden beneath the surface of the soil, in the shadows. Similarly, in fairy tales and folklore trolls, great craftsmen, live in the shadows. They burn up or turn to stone in direct sunlight. This is a useful metaphor. Even though these figures carry tremendous practical knowledge and creativity, they are forced to live in the shadows.

The parts of our self that we don’t like and don’t want to know about (the content of our shadow) are like these fairy tale figures. We use any number of tactics (usually outside of our awareness) to avoid coming face-to-face with them. For instance, a person who is constantly angry and bullies other people might avoid his shadow by using denial (“I’m not angry”), repression (“I never get angry”), or projection (“that person is always angry”).

Normally we think that we are supposed to share our thoughts and feelings with another person, family, or group. To be sure, sharing in an unfiltered way can be a beautiful method to create honest communication and promote intimacy, and is the backbone of many effective therapies.

Here we are working it a little differently. Through attentive stillness when around others we can observe  influences from collective ideals and expectations. This includes feeling the judgment within other people’s opinions. Even in the most loving circumstances such an encounter can impede one’s openness toward hosting difficult inner psychic material that is wanting to be known. As Marie-Louise von Franz writes, “Silence protects the content of the unconscious against collective misunderstanding externally and in oneself as well.”*

We know from family systems work that even the slightest change in one of the family members can upset the group equilibrium. Pressure is then applied to force homeostasis- to make the person conform to the ‘acceptable’ behaviors. C.G. Jung said it is like a flock of sheep that bitterly resents that one sheep who wants to walk alone.

Relationships are great places to practice silent inner attentiveness. They tend to trigger a tremendous range of highly personal experiences we have tried so hard to ignore. These moments provide opportunities to bring curiosity, acceptance, openness and love to the tender shoots of our shadow material. This may include depression, anxiety, rage, guilt, shame, loneliness, hurt, and many other ‘negative experiences.’

(Let me illustrate this with the following example. It is an amalgam of many cases over many years so as not to violate any client’s confidentiality)

I was working with a young designer who grew up in a strict religious family in the Northeast. From the time she was born she received the message that only her happy emotions were acceptable. It was also drilled into her that in her family the thoughts and feelings of her parents were always right and what mattered most. These must be accepted and adhered to. As a child the healthy part of her rebelled, of course, against this. She was angry- for a time.

She learned to repress the anger in order to receive love because another rule in her family was that one was forbidden from expressing anger toward anyone. In her innocence she concluded that the rage she felt meant she was unlovable. So it went underground, becoming unconscious. The natural longing to fully express herself as a small girl morphed into symbolic self-punishment as an adult. It showed up as physical symptoms. Among them were hair pulling, constipation, and frequent sore throats. She felt these most strongly when she was with her family.

We collaborated on strategies for silent observation when she went for visits home. It yielded a number of insights that were useful to her. First, she got to see how the prohibition of anger functioned in her family. She noticed that under a veneer of control the family system carried tremendous fear, carried especially by her mother. Part of it was fear of losing social standing within the community. She began to realize how these collective pressures were negatively affecting her mother’s own individual self-expression. Second, she got to observe her unconscious desire to help her mother feel less afraid. She did this by abandoning her own passions and strong emotions and taking on the persona of “the good girl.” And third, she began to see that when she accused her parents of being horrible evil-doers (when she was projecting) she was really trying to disown her own repressed feelings of despair and rage.

This process helped her create the witnessing self needed to host the fullness of her own authentic experiences. In accepting her disowned feelings of rage and despair she began to consider that she may be lovable just as she was. The symptoms eased up.

Silent observation is by no means a habit meant to avoid participation in family or civic life. Just the opposite. In attending to the fullness of one’s inner world the responses to the outer world can be more genuine.

Practicing attentive silence gives fleeting, budding moods and thoughts a chance to be noticed, and the possibility for new tender parts of our self to be protected and nurtured within our awareness. As von Franz writes, “Such work strengthens consciousness and the feeling of responsibility for oneself” because “keeping the discussion within, and not allowing disruptive (external) forces to bring it into the open, is one of the ultimate vital battles in the process of individuation.”*

This work of individuation is the work of the hero. Its fruition is an unshakable inner courage to accept our self exactly as we are and avoid projecting too much of our own unconscious material onto others. When we have done enough of our own inner work the people around us are freer to blossom and thrive.

References

*Franz, M-L von (1993). The feminine in fairy tales. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications