Carl Jung on Getting “Stuck”
I have to confess a frequent case of feeling “stuck.” Stuck for motivation, stuck as to understanding the trajectory of my life, stuck accepting life as it is in the moment. I take full responsibility for the deal I made as a kid – namely that I would swallow the feelings that came up, trade them in as it were for what was behind door #2, a future where I would right all the wrongs and achieve victory over the things that plagued the adults around me. I didn’t know I was doing it. I was just trying to survive. And the plan worked. It saved me from harm and kept a roof over my head. The problem, and it’s a big one, is if so much of the present as a child was mortgaged for some future “righting of the ship,” then the future carries a pressure to be something it is not – some sort of knight in shining armor.
Everybody’s reason for getting stuck varies, but no doubt it’s a universal theme and has been since the beginning of time. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote of how often it came up during his practice:
“For so called normal people, “I have no ready made life philosophy to hand out to them. In the majority of my cases, the resources of consciousness have been exhausted; the ordinary expression for this situation is: “I am stuck.” It is chiefly this fact that forces me to look for hidden possibilities. I know only one thing: that when to my conscious outlook there is no possible way of going ahead, and I am therefore “stuck,” my unconscious will react to the unbearable standstill.”
So apparently be of good cheer. There is a force that sets us straight. It’s our unconscious and we need only find ways to listen to it.
Personally it has rescued me from so many bone headed maneuvers that it has almost seemed like a direct line to God. And if it is, it still surprises me that the unconscious is not mentioned more as a “healing agent” in religious circles.
Jung’s favorite way of tapping into the unconscious of his patients was to look at their dreams (to read about that in an earlier post click here). But his real goal was to get people to develop a relationship with themselves to handle the pressure that comes with the second half of life. As he put it, one no longer needs to educate his conscious will, but in order to understand the meaning of his individual life, he must learn to “experience his own inner being.”
Hmmm, experiencing the inner being, what would that look like? I’ve had some luck with a few things: walks with the dog, free flowing stream of consciousness journaling, setting the music player on shuffle, seeing what songs generate a strong feeling, and then 12 step meetings seem particularly set up for revealing the unconscious musings. Of course it doesn’t hurt to shut down any addictive behavior. Not that it’s always in my control, but a lot of compulsive habits can be shut down for a time. That seems to help remove the clouds over the mythic paradise just long enough to hear the message and take some action to get unstuck.
