Signs Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope
This Jungian Life
Contempt feels like a gut punch. It’s a cold, distancing act that devalues a person even as it avoids solving a real problem. The contemptuous are full of shame, fear, or hurt, so they recreate those feelings in others to evade their own issues. Unlike anger (which tries to correct an injustice), disgust (which avoids what feels contaminating), or hatred (which seeks destruction), contempt asserts superiority and cuts off relatedness. It shows up in eye‑rolling, sarcasm, mockery, and a habit of judging others as beneath one’s standards. Whether you’re struggling to survive it...
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SEPARATIO: The Alchemical Secret That Ends Confusion
This Jungian Life
Alchemical separatio is the skill of sorting out your mind. You separate what belongs to you—your complexes, habitual triggers, and painful memories--from what is happening in the world around you. In the laboratory of your life, you separate present triggers from older wounds, and literal facts from symbolic meanings. This is part of your essential self-ordering instinct. As you bring more and more of yourself into conscious awareness, a delightful calm will tell you you’re on the right path. Join us and learn how to gain the profound clarity necessary on the path of Individuation. Read...
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LUCID DREAMING: How to Make the Most of a Magical Opportunity
This Jungian Life
Lucid dreaming is an interesting ego state when we are dreaming and regain full self-awareness. Being awake in the dream world can be useful, but imposing a rigid agenda can undermine the Dream Maker’s attempts to educate and help us. Each dream is crafted to incrementally expand our awareness and acceptance of unconscious factors we need in order to grow. When we wake inside a dream, we can lose track of that important attitude and may use the dream as our playground—most people try to fly and miss significant opportunities. If we can achieve a non-grasping clarity, lucidity can deepen...
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Shadow, Evil, and Individuation: Jung’s View of the Devil
This Jungian Life
The devil archetype carries three qualities: it promotes bestial violence of every kind, it tries to convince us that the material world is the only reality, and it fools us into thinking we can spiritually ascend through intellect alone. On a personal level, it gathers our disowned infernal traits—envy, rage, greed, and the wish to dominate —and seduces us into believing those qualities are virtues. Once we face our own devilishness and grant it a symbolic form, we can assume a choiceful stance. Lacking that, we try to evacuate our own evil by projecting it onto others and then...
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Horror as a Mirror: What Netflix’s MONSTER Makes Us See
This Jungian Life
The new controversial Netflix series MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story offers a window into the devouring mother archetype, a transformation fantasy gone horribly wrong, and the human capacity for monstrous behavior. Gein’s crimes inspired the Hitchcock movie Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs. It challenges the audience to confront its fascination with evil and begs the question, where do the monsters hide in our own Psyche? To help us wrestle with these questions, we’re joined by Joey Pollari—actor, musician, director, editor, and the man who plays Anthony Perkins...
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SUBLIMATIO: Jung’s Alchemical Method of Turning Problems into Archetypes
This Jungian Life
Do you get overwhelmed by intense feelings and old patterns, feeling stuck because you can’t make sense of what’s happening, and reacting on impulse instead of pausing to choose a steady, thoughtful response? Jung’s alchemical insights will help. Sublimatio is an old alchemy term for heating a solid so that it turns directly into a gas, rises, and then cools back into a solid higher up. As a psychological metaphor, this happens when we discover an archetypal image or idea that adds a fresh perspective on an old problem. The vapor becomes a solid again when we apply the new attitude to...
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People Pleasing Is Making You Sick!
This Jungian Life
People Pleasing is a compulsive strategy that disavows your needs and surrenders your agency. It begins in family systems that only reward compliance, which produces a false self. If your soul is constantly devalued, you may develop dependent narcissism with a covert contract: “I’ll keep you happy, and you’ll keep me safe.” Healing comes when you identify your true experience—notice whether you feel drained, tense, or obligated versus calm, interested, or genuinely willing. Give yourself permission to pause before agreeing. Say, “I’ll think about it,” step away to check...
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If Looks Could Kill: The Death Mother Archetype
This Jungian Life
Some mothers attack life in their children. They crush appetite, joy, curiosity, and initiative. They call it love or duty. It is not love. It is domination dressed as care. She withholds warmth to make the child obedient. She intrudes when the child needs space and vanishes when the child needs help. She shames tears, punishes play, mocks ambition, and polices the body. She turns boundaries into punishments and favors into chains. The Death Mother archetype is ancient and modern, requiring careful confrontation to free the parent and the child from its destructive grip. Today, we will help...
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Projection and Play: What Dolls Do to Psyche
This Jungian Life
Dolls are human stand-ins that invite projection and play; children use them (including action figures and Barbies) to try on identities and develop imagination, then later withdraw the projection as the figure becomes inert again. Icons and idols differ because their meaning is fixed and not for play, which limits imaginative engagement. The healthiest use of dolls is symbolic—relating to them without collapsing into literal belief—while overly realistic “reborn” dolls, talk-box toys, and similar literalizations can narrow imagination, blur symbol and reality. Across history, dolls...
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MYTHS: Maps of the Collective Unconscious
This Jungian Life
Think of myths as the dreams of an entire culture. Those stories reside in the collective unconscious and influence all of us throughout our lifespan. Mythic patterns shape our attitudes, and when we recognize them, we can link our personal experiences to the universal. When you’re panicking, you’re under the influence of Pan; when you’re sunk in gloom, you’re on a night-sea journey like Odysseus. Jungians’ call linking the personal to the universal, amplification: take a symptom, link it to a myth, and you’ve shifted it from “my private defect” to “a shared force,” which...
info_outlineJung was particularly interested in the second half of life, perhaps because after his own midlife crisis he found himself so surprisingly generative. We tend to spend the first half of life oriented to familial values and cultural norms for success.
Education, work, partnering and child rearing are some of the mile markers for speed and distance on the road of life—until midlife strikes. We may then discover that worldly successes feel flat, or blame discontent on bad breaks.
Although dramatic lifestyle changes at midlife are the stuff of story, malaise at the midpoint is psyche’s signal to attend to unlived inner life. It is time for meaningful encounter between ego and unconscious, worldly rewards and true fulfillment, obligation and freedom. Midlife crisis is a call to deepened feeling and the unique meaning of your life.
Dream
I am walking with a group of my "clients" (developmentally disabled people). I have to work to keep the group together as some straggle here and there. I'm responsible for their well being so onward we go. I look on the ground/sidewalk and see a small round brown object which looks like a tree nut. I pick it up and upon closer inspection realize that it is of animal nature rather than plant - and alive. As I hold it in the palm of my hand, it morphs into a tiny creature, tinier than my pinky finger. I can't just leave it there so I slip it into my pocket and keep walking, trying to keep my rag-tag group together.
After a while I look into my pocket to check on it and it has grown some and looks a bit like a fetal kitten. It looks unwell and I think it might not live. We continue to walk. The third time I look into my pocket, the creature has turned into a baby bird with black, red, and white feathers. The bird is in tremendous suffering with its stomach cut open and a look of horror, pain and grief on it's face. I feel these emotions too and think, "Oh no! It's going to die.” I keep it in my pocket and try to soothe it, but still we keep on walking.
Toward the end of our escapade, I look into my pocket a fourth time. This time the bird is fully grown and leaps out, startling me. Now the bird is pure white, luminous with three round feathers on slim stalks atop its head. Among its body feathers are multicolored zinnia flowers sprouting along with the feathers. It hops into a landscape planter along the sidewalk and establishes itself amid the vegetation.
I back away in shock, completely amazed. I pull out my cell phone to try to take a picture of it but can't because a survey keeps popping up on the screen of my phone, preventing me from using the camera. I curse and search my bag for another phone and finally do manage to snap a pic, but I still don't know what to make of it.