TAMING YOUR INNER CRITIC: Turn Self-Attack into Self-Awareness
This Jungian Life
Our inner critic—that voice constantly tearing us down—can stem from difficult childhood experiences, negative cultural messages, or even powerful archetypal forces deep within us. While healthy self-assessment involves honestly owning our mistakes, feeling genuine regret, and making amends, the harsh inner critic keeps us stuck in cycles of self-hatred and shame. Sometimes, beating ourselves up can actually be a sneaky way to avoid openly engaging a problem or soberly accepting responsibility. The trick is to slow down, get curious, and talk back to that voice—to have an honest inner...
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SHARK: Elemental Symbol of Our Will to Survive and Ravenous Hunger for Experience
This Jungian Life
Primeval, silent, relentless—the shark announces itself as its fin slices the water. In that instant, ego’s barriers shudder and give way: you’re not anxious; you’re utterly alert, stripped of distraction by a force both familiar and uncanny. When you stop battling that raw terror and honor it—offer a silent libation of attention—the predator becomes a protector. Here, in the shark’s unblinking gaze, you meet the stranger in your depths, the animality you once fled, now guiding you to face what you’ve long denied. Read along with our dream analysis ....
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MOTIVATION: What Happens When Your Get-Up-and-Go Leaves Without You?
This Jungian Life
Motivation rises from conscious and unconscious dynamics. We can reason with ourselves to take logical action while our libido flows with its own intelligence. When these two aspects align, we find ourselves acting decisively and effectively with remarkable freedom. When we’re at odds with the secret intelligence of the unconscious, we can find ourselves uncomfortably suspended. As we honor the autonomy of Psyche and cultivate a curious friendship with it, we can discover a creative collaboration that sets us in a fresh direction aligned with the Self. Read along with our dream analysis ....
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Sibling Rivalry: Archetypal Conflicts and Shadow Dynamics in Families
This Jungian Life
Sibling rivalry can bruise and build in equal measure. On the hard side, the older child feels toppled from the throne, the younger scrambles for a foothold, and both learn how quickly envy, resentment, and score-keeping ignite—whether over a parent’s extra hour of attention or the larger slice of birthday cake. Those early contests can calcify into adult grudges that surface in estate negotiations, workplace jockeying, or mismatched relationships. Yet the same daily friction teaches useful skills: we sharpen empathy by reading a sibling’s next move, develop a theory of mind through...
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Mandala Archetype: How the Self Turns Chaos into Cosmos
This Jungian Life
Mandalas are Psyche’s way of drawing a compass for you when life feels off-kilter. Jung noticed that these circular patterns—whether they appear in Navajo sand paintings, Tibetan yantras, or last night’s dream—pull everything back toward a stable center he called the Self. The rim defines where your ego ends; the cross-lines and repeating fours help you locate sensation, feeling, thinking, and intuition in relation to your core. By “walking” the circle, even in imagination, the ego learns to orbit rather than hijack the organizing center, and the usual tug-of-war between instinct...
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House Dreams: Schematics of Your Psychological Functioning
This Jungian Life
When a house turns up in a dream, it isn’t a staging background—it’s an architectural X-ray of your inner life, drafted by the dream maker overnight and delivered to your doorstep at dawn. Floors chart levels of awareness, locked doors expose repressed material, intruders crash in as disowned traits, and every leaking pipe or crooked stair announces a personal attitude in need of repair. In this episode, we’ll teach you how to read the blueprint with the same clarity you’d bring to structural engineering, and your dream will hand you a working map for shadow work,...
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Ready for the Real Snow White? The True Tale of Envy, Murder, and Retribution
This Jungian Life
Ever wonder why “Snow White” still hooks us after all the Disney glitter flakes off? This episode strips the tale down to its psychological wiring: murderous envy of the mother shadow, malignant innocence, the unforgiving “mirror” inside that only answers the questions we’re brave enough to ask, and the dangerous alchemy that transforms three lethal mistakes into mature authority. You’ll hear why the dwarflike bits of half-formed masculinity in all of us mine gold from the unconscious, how raw instinct often finishes the work refined methods can’t, and how real agency...
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Forging the Upward Thread: Why Do We Create Religions?
This Jungian Life
The religious function is part of who we are — as natural as needing food or love. It’s the inner drive that pushes us to find meaning, to touch something larger than ourselves. Jung saw that if we don’t tend it, it doesn’t go away; it twists itself into addictions, compulsions, or a kind of soul-sickness. Religion, in the deepest sense, isn’t about belief systems. It’s about real encounters with the Self — the larger reality inside us that humbles, heals, and reshapes us. Dreams, symbols, and moments of awe are how Psyche keeps that connection alive. Without them,...
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Trauma Can Be Rewritten: The Use of Art to Reimagine our Past and Grant Us New Life
This Jungian Life
Viviane Silvera animated 30,000 of her hand-painted images to explore how traumatic memories are formed, stored, and ultimately transformed. Her animated documentary, SEE MEMORY, traces the intimate story of a young woman caught between past and present; her film captures the fragmented texture of trauma and the healing that becomes possible when painful memories are witnessed. In our conversation with Viviane, we explore her process of recovering lost memories and how opposing perspectives can constellate new attitudes toward trauma. We discuss cutting-edge findings on the way the brain...
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How to Develop Your Inner Guidance: Charting a Path Through the Current Chaos with Jung’s Insights
This Jungian Life
Today you'll learn about inner guidance--the quiet, built-in compass that surfaces when we pause the outer noise long enough to feel what rings true inside. It is less a mystical oracle than a subtle convergence of bodily signals, emotional undertones, and intuitive "hunches" distilled from our lived experience. When we meet a decision with open attention—neither forcing a rational verdict nor surrendering to raw impulse—this inner faculty sorts, weighs, and hints at the direction that aligns with our deepest values. Acting on it demands two skills: discerning authentic signals from fear...
info_outlineThis is Shadowland, a new podcast experience from This Jungian Life that explores the lives of people who work and take refuge in the hidden places of our culture. Lisa, Deb, and Joseph collaborate with songwriter Wells Hanley, creator of I Wrote This Song For You podcast, to bring insight, compassion, and understanding to the darker side of human experience.
Nietzsche wrote, “I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
In that spirit, we meet Kay, a 21-year-old single mother who works throughout the American southwest as a self-described prostitute. We explore how she found her way to that life, what she aspires to, and how she holds the complicated tensions between herself, her clients, and the current culture.
Here’s Kay’s dream that we analyze:
“I am in a pet store with my best friend and my daughter, who is in a stroller. The woman proprietor went in the back. I saw an alligator in a cage eating a piglet and looked at my daughter’s stroller -- she wasn’t in there. Then I am somewhere running through halls trying to find her. I see a lot of kids about her age running around [but she isn’t among them]. I think she is in the ventilation system because she likes to crawl around. I tell someone to hide the weed that’s in my car so we can call the police.”
We shared this interview with Wells Hanley, who was moved to create a song for Kay. We hope you’ll be as touched by her story as we were.
You can support Wells Hanley’s creative work by becoming his patron here: https://www.patreon.com/iwrotethissongforyou
His website is here www.iwrotethissongforyou.com/
SONG: PART OF THE PLAY
music and lyrics by Wells Hanley © 2020.
I will listen
receive you
affirm you in every way
And I will hold you
but as I’ve told you
it’s just part of the play
I will undress you
and then impress you
we’ll make a game of predator and prey
I’ll be unrestrained
but as I’ve explained
it’s just part of the play
She is hiding in the walls
she is watching through a screen
She is frightened to come out
so she lingers there unseen
calling, “Mama, help me!”
I’ll be your Echo
a kind of mirror
your missing Helen I am willing to portray
And you may long to claim me
but you’ll never tame me
I’m too refined for that cliché
You see, my heart is never part of the play
See her high above the crowd
see her fall into the cage
See her flee into the walls
as she steps onto the stage
crying, “Mama, help me!”
You call me princess
tell me I’m beautiful
I’m not immune to the things you say
But when the curtain falls
I walk these empty halls
and even though I can never go, I can show you the way
and I will swear that everything’s ok
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
about what you’ve seen or about what you’ve heard
There’s a fat, hungry beast in need of a meal
so don’t ever share
no, don’t tell a soul what you feel
Music and Lyrics by Wells Hanley © 2020.
Singer: Ali Thibodeau at https://linktr.ee/deaueyes
RESOURCES:
Learn to Analyze your own Dreams: https://thisjunhttps://thisjungianlife.com/join-dream-school/gianlife.com/enroll/
REFERENCES:
The Book of Symbols, published by Taschen
Kalsched, Donald. The Inner World of Trauma