Some of us wake up one day to realize that we have been living someone else’s life. We leave parts of ourselves in the realm of the shadow, which may sneak in on us through unconscious behaviors, tensions in our relationships, various addictions, and neuroses.
On our third episode, Zurich-trained Jungian analyst and registered psychotherapist, Christina Becker (@JungianPath) talks to us about our unconscious. She even guides us through a live dream interpretation. Christina shares her journey into becoming an analyst, a calling that came to her when she was in India in search of meaning in her life. Besides psychotherapy, Christina has a background in music and is currently a consultant for the nonprofit sector. She is also the author of the book The Heart of the Matter: Individuation as an Ethical Process. After all, authenticity is about the heart – the meeting place of the individual and the divine.
Highlights:
- Depth Psychology
- Individual and Collective Shadow
- Functional vs Dysfunctional Personas
- Dreamwork
- Recurring Dreams
Resources:
- CJ Jungian Institute Zürich
- Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas
Listen:
A Kernel of Truth, inspired by this week’s episode:
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Adrian
Welcome Christina.
Christina
Thanks. Nice to be here.
Thal
What was it that attracted you to your current calling?
Christina
Great question. Uh, I was thinking about that. It, it actually started when I was about… I think it was about 20 or 21, 22, so a long time ago. And my former mother in law gave me my first book on Jungian psychology and it started a lifelong journey of just engaging with the material and understanding. There was something about Jung that was so intriguing and engaging for me, I think, and I’ve thought a lot about this and I think it had something to do with how he looked at every aspect of the human condition, you know, our, the way we pray or the way we worship our rituals, our dream life, how we organize in societies, you know, all, all of that. And it was, um, it was just so deeply, deeply fascinating. And so I think mainly my journey started just for me because I was really interested in, you know, I went into a Freudian analysis at the beginning and then I uh, but was continuing to read and, um, and at some point I had this idea that I would like to train and I was at a point in my other career which was just a little lifeless and meaningless. And so I thought, well, what would I like to do? And um, and I decided to go to Zurich, um, just just train and just actually to see whether that was going to be my calling.
Adrian
What were you doing at the time?
Christina
Yeah for sure. Um, I was, and I still am, actually, I was a, mainly a consultant for Arts and Communications, nonprofit arts and culture organizations in Ontario, in Canada, and I was quite successful at it and did projects all across the country. Had my own business. Um, and I thought to myself, do I really want to do this for the rest of my life? You know, it’s, it was, it was a time when the arts community was out of money, there wasn’t a lot of energy. So what was going on was, uh, you know, people were really struggling, people were getting low pay, it was just a really difficult time in the whole community and I think there was this need to think about something new for the community and I just got to be really onerous and boring. So I, so I decided to take actually about four years to really give myself the permission to decide whether I would what I was going to do next. And that was when I was about 36….37. So, um, and decided a trip to India that I would, um, and I would go to Zurich and at least to see if this is what was, uh, what, what I wanted to do and it turned out that it was so, so good.
Adrian
What drew you to India when, when that moment came? What was the original motivation?
Christina
Well, we, we’d always, I was married at the time. We always wanted to, um, go to India and so it was kind of like a spiritual pilgrimage. So we went and um, you know, did like, you know, the whole country in like four weeks, five weeks. Um, it was quite, it was quite amazing. And I remember quite distinctly in um, when the decision came and I think that’s how the psyche works, you know, we, we have these moments, these liminal moments where something kind of breaks through and I’m in a bus up these windy roads in southern India and there are all these tea plantations on the side and we’re going up and up and up and, and um, and of course there’s a big cliff on one side. It’s kind of half. And uh, you know, at some point I just, I was just there and it was just really quiet and I just say what do I want to do? And what came up like just from the depth was “I want to train, I want to go to Zurich”. So I’m told that was in 1995 and I think I went in my first semester was October ’97.
Thal
And so before deciding to train, you’ve always been reading Jungian… like always engaged with …
Christina
Yeah, in an analysis and reading and working on my dreams and fascinated about just the journey. Yeah.
Adrian
Yeah, we can go so many directions. I’m thinking about ….because I’m really curious about those early years the training. So maybe we can explore that a little bit. Talk about what the training was like because you lived there while you were studying.
Christina
Yeah, I came in the first half of the program. I uh, came back, um, between semesters, so I lived there for three, four, five months at a time, came back for a couple, three months and then went back. So that was the first half of the program. Um, and then I took a year off, um, mainly because my marriage fell apart and so we needed to do, um, you know, sell the house and do a number of things like that. And then I went back and lived there for two years. I loved being in Switzerland because of the landscape. It’s a beautiful, beautiful country. Um, and the training was wonderful and I met so many different people from all over the world who I still know and connect with every once in a while, which is fantastic. It’s really important to understand, I think a how Jung created Jungian psychology if in that valley of Lake Zurich because you do feel like you’re in a little protected valley and Zurich is a very small city, uh, and the lake is beautiful and it’s easy to get around.
Adrian
It sounds like an idyllic learning experience.
Christina
Well…. Yeah, mostly idyllic [laughing], the important thing I think about. That’s why I questioned about idyllic because I don’t know whether it’s totally idyllic. Um, the, the idea is that if you’re removed from your regular routine home family, work business, you know, all of that, that you get, um, you get a deeper and richer experience of the psyche. And so that, that idea of being in a kind of a monastery kind of feel is both challenging and very enriching and so you get a certain depth that you don’t quite get and, and you have some certain challenges that you don’t quite get either if you’re just doing your training. I’m like you’re commuting or something like that. So people who have done a training in Zurich have a particular experience. Well, um, and the training has changed a little bit. So this would be a, um, an indication of training at a particular time where, um, you’re in a foreign country that you don’t necessarily know the language very well and, uh, and you’re away from your support networks. Um, so it, it does, you know, people get a little depressed, they get lonely, um, you have to kind of rely on your own resources, find things to do, especially in off semester like, so second half. But anyways. Yeah.
Adrian
So for those who may not be familiar with depth psychology, would you care to maybe explain how it might differ from the common ideas around what psychology is?
Christina
Yeah, for sure. Um, that’s a big subject.
Thal
It is. And I was thinking about the intersection between art and science in Jungian psychology. Especially you come from an arts background.
Christina
Uh, I’m actually doing some research on that around, uh … So, you know, one of the things that Jung kind of emphasized is the psychology that we have come to know is like a psychology without soul. And I think that is where the intersection lies between the spiritual path and the psychological path. So, you know, and this happens, you know, it was the major rift between Freud and Jung and the rift was that Freud, you know, talked a lot about the drives and the instincts and repression, which was really, really valid. However, his perspective suggested that if you could uncover what you repressed when you were a child, then everything was going to be right as rain. And Jung felt that there was something really much stronger in that and that there was gonna be a, um, there was something that moves us through life which he identified as the soul. So, um, and that I think is the major difference with a depth psychology. You’re looking at what’s underneath the surface, not just about, you know, what happened to us when we’re kids, but how do we make life meaningful? How do we make, how do we live a fulfilled life? How do we, um, how do we live the life that we’re meant to live according to some deeper energy that is actually moving us forward in whatever way that it wants to. And that would be this essence of individuation. So, uh, so I think that with this movement back towards science, quantum physics and the new sciences, which is a, we’re a psychology energy psychology, all of that starts to move towards a more of an integration of what was split along time ago because if we actually look at the origin of the word psychology, it is the study of the soul psyche, right? And that’s what the original humanist, how they use that. And so we’ve forgotten. There’s a quote that I often use. I’m using it in my book is like you have to pity poor psychology first it lost its soul, then it’s mind, then it’s behavior and now it’s having trouble with its attitudes or something like that. So, you know, there is um, you know, modern psychology which has tried to rational, which has been aligned with the medical model only go so far. And um, and I think there’s a movement back towards a deeper, deeper understanding of what contributes to a life well lived.
Adrian
To be fair, I mean, even for myself, you know, the word soul, pretty loaded word and, and if you know, sometimes it could actually be a barrier, but when I hear it and the way you’re describing it, it’s almost sounds synonymous with “depth”.
Christina
Yeah, for sure.
Adrian
Like a life that lacks soul is a life that lacks depth. And that to me actually is what makes this conversation very relevant. Um, uh, personally, three years ago was when I decided to leave my industry to go ask some of these bigger questions. And um, I remember two things really stuck out soon after I quit. One of them was, was I remember reading about the article, this famous article about a palliative nurse that spent her, a lot of her work around patients that were dying. They were terminally ill. And so she wrote, I believe in article which later became a book about the top regrets of the dying. And it just jumped out at me that the number one most common regret was people feeling like they didn’t live a life true to themselves and rather they lived one that others expected of them. And that just put into words a lot of the experiences that I was going through and then starting to realize that I wasn’t alone. That actually, this is what seems to me like a cultural thing of the modern times. And which is why this whole conversation around soul and depth is now becoming at the forefront of, you know, a lot of my personal conversations with friends and family. Why do you think that is? This meaning crisis that we seem to all be experiencing in different ways, be happening right now?
Christina
Well, actually, it’s not just happening right now. It’s been a long time coming. It’s been a long time coming. And um, and you know, I’ll, you know, if you ever want to read about, um, you know, the philosophical read Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche. The first couple of first couple of chapters like talk totally about this. And it is, I’m kind of a, you know, an arm chair, philosopher [laugh]. So I, um, it has to do with, um, the, the split between science and religion and a very rational intellectual view point, a causal view point of how the universe works, which kind of arose, um, you know… Like Descartes says, you know, I think therefore I am. Well, that’s not all that we are. So there is a certain kind of mindset that happened in, you know, after the age of the enlightenment, you know, um, early 18 hundreds or so, um, where all of a sudden we, human beings thought that we were the center of the universe and that the ego was the center of the universe. And so every problem that we have, including the environment, you know, our relationship to our body’s relationship to our children all come from this…. egotistical, I hate to say, western attitude where, the ego is paramount over everything else. And so that has. And that has created an incredible, a void in terms of meaning and depth. Um, so, you know, for most people the connection to God, or to some kind of spiritual pattern, uh, has become dogmatic had actually, you haven’t, religion doesn’t actually answer some of those soul-questions. And Jung talked about the fact that we are inherently spiritual. We want meaning. That’s how astrology got evolved because, you know, we want to see our place in the universe. We want to understand our relationship to what this is, you know, why am I here? Like, what’s, what’s going on here. Right? And so that was why he talked about, um… There’s a great quote which I will find a in a minute, uh, about, uh, what he said in terms of his last last letter, which was, you know, um, you know, his greatest aim was to say that life, that our philosophy our religion is in a lamentable state because we’ve lost this, this connection with ourselves. So I think that, um, you know, I think part of the crisis is also a crisis of human consciousness as a whole, that is shifting. And we’ve been shifting for a long time, 20 years, maybe 30 years. Um, it may take a while for the entire species to kind of start to look at life in a different way, but there’s lots of evidence with this kind of unity consciousness that a lot of people are talking about where, um, we, uh, we are part of the whole, we are part of the one and if we’re part of the one in a holistic way, just like the indigenous people speak about then we have to have respect for other people, for our animals, for the environment, right. It’s, it’s a whole, it’s a whole mindset. Does that, does that answer your question? I tend to go off on that.
Adrian
Yeah, yeah. If not…. you know, maybe I wasn’t really hunting for a singular answer, but what helps is to actually complexify the question a little bit more to understand. Yeah, there’s a lot of dimensions to this thing, you know, whatever you want to call it, “meaning crisis”, “first world problems”. I think often people joke about first world problems, but to me that is the same connection to these, these existential crises that people are experiencing
Thal
In many ways there are people who have some sort of an allergic reaction to the word “spiritual”, the word “God”. And um, and I think it’s also part of the meaning crisis and the way we use our language and the way we use words. So what do you see your role in this sort of current collective meaning crisis?
Christina
Well, that’s actually kind of interesting cause I see that I’ve got kind of three roles. One of the things that I’ve been very conscious about is using social media to put forward messages of positivity, compassion, um, things that are relevant to everyday but are really positive. Reframe from, you know, engaging in twitter wars or anything like that. So I always choose things that, um, that feel uplifting for me that are really important for me. So, um, uh, because I think that, that, um, those kinds of messages are really, really important right now. In terms of my personal work, like in terms of my work with clients, uh, you know, trying to get them to engage with themselves and to understand themselves and to connect with themselves. How did they feel? What do they need? What are their desires? What are the obstacles in terms of living their individuation? Which is, um, a word that indicates living the life that they’re meant to live. And that’s a very practical, very concrete kind of thing. You know, some people, um, you know, want to write or some people have children or you know, want to travel or, you know, it’s just, it’s anything that actually fulfills us or enriches us where we kind of go, yeah, like I really get a lot of energy by doing this thing and that’s how we then contribute to society because then influences our lives and our relationships and all that kind of stuff. And I think the other thing is in my writing. So I do a monthly blog and I try to, uh, I try to synthesize what’s going, uh, like a topic and try to bring Jung in, but always try to do it in a way that I hope in, in supports people’s journeys. Like it opens their minds a little bit or little perspective or something like that. So recently I’ve written about my trips to Peru. I’m just wrote a yesterday on the whole political rhetoric, which I felt really important that I needed to talk about that and because also Jung has written about that and I thought it was really important to share what he had talked about and you know, and he had talked about it in connection with Hitler and World War 2 in Germany. So, you know, it’s a little scary because that same kind of energy is what we’re watching south of the border. Now, whether it was what it turns into, we don’t know. But, um, I felt that was important to, to write about, but not in a way that I’m not in a way that is attacking, but in a way that brings clarity and light and perspective. And I think that’s actually, that’s, that’s how I see, that’s how I see my role.
Adrian
You’re touching on quite a few things I’m really curious about with technology and culture. The word coming to my mind is “shadow”. This is the shadow of our technology, which is actually a term that, that Jung popularized in relation to the psyche. I’d love to hear a little bit about, you know, for people who aren’t familiar, how you consider the “shadow” and how you work with it in your practice.
Christina
Well the shadow, just as an idea, is anything that is in us that we find unacceptable for whatever reason. I mean, it usually gets, it gets born when we’re growing up and we’re trying to be who we are and we get a message that says you can’t be that because it’s whatever. And my image is always that part of ourself goes into a closet and it’s all like thorny, dusty and all that kind of stuff and kind of sits there for a good long time. And by the time the door opens, it’s pretty ornery, right? Um, so, but that could be a positive thing or could be a negative thing. It all depends on… Lots of people have really great positive characteristics and strengths and gifts that have been put in the shadow because of how they grew up. Because there’s always intense emotions around the shadow, it’s always a little tenuous to kind of start to approach it because as soon as you approach it, you’re going to have some intense, intense emotion like shame or guilt or fear or something like that. And so, um, so needing to approach that is a very important, uh… how you approach it is actually really important. But once the, once those parts of ourselves actually come and get integrated, then we feel more life because that energy that has been locked away for such a long time also draws life energy away from it so that a, we don’t have it available. So the same thing can be said for collectives or groups. So as soon as you kind of get into “Oh, that’s not us, that’s not”, you know, that “we’re like this” and then the collective shadow gets projected onto another group of people. Um, and I, I wrote about this in my book, ‘The Heart of the Matter, Individuation as an Ethical Process’ which I wrote about in the early 2000s. And in fact, it’s still true. But you can see certain western countries, you know, project the “evil other” on to some of the eastern countries. And so they have to eradicate that evil in the other, right? But it’s all psychological because in fact, they’re trying to eradicate whatever they’ve projected their own thing onto the other. And for me it seems so evident that while the United States is fighting terrorism in other countries and saying terrorism is bad, meanwhile the number of gun deaths in that country is like phenomenal. Like last night there’s like another 12 people who were killed because somebody has a gun. So there’s something about not attending to what’s in one’s borders. Literally both a group and an individual. That’s a country, that’s a company, right? And then it gets projected out and then you start to fight it outside of yourself, but not attending the what’s, what’s inside.
Thal
Yeah. And become trapped and like polemics. What causes an individual to turn to their shadow finally, if they’re lucky enough?
Christina
Well, life just doesn’t work. It just, it just doesn’t work. Um, or the same problems keep coming up over and over and over again. Um, I mean, the shadow is usually the same gender. So for men it is, uh, you know, other men for women, it’s other women, and so if you have, continual issues with people of the same gender, you’ve got pretty clear that there’s a, there’s a shadow aspect there. I think it’s usually the crisis in one’s life that sends people into therapy and then they have to deal with the shadow just as a consequence of that. That’s just the way it goes. Right. That’s just how the process works.
Adrian
So usually when the shit hits the fan, people start to pay attention to…
Christina
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, so you’ve lost a job or you’ve lost a relationship or you know, something’s happened in your environment that all of a sudden that comes up as a huge wakeup call. Um, and they kind of go, oh, okay, there’s something really not right here. I’ve got to figure that out because I, I don’t know what it is, but there’s something I’m not doing for the life I’m not living. Right?
Adrian
Yeah. I want it to continue a little bit of that thread with technology. I think it was 2013 that was the year where the “selfie” became the word of the year. And so we’ve collectively invented this terminology right, to represent this behavior, this tendency for us to want to create and construct a social persona and the whole idea of a persona I never realized actually has roots to Jung as well and how the idea emerged in psychology. Um, can you talk a little bit about how the persona, in today’s world can be functional or dysfunctional in the way that we’re contributing to it?
Christina
Great question. We do need a persona. We have to have a persona, but I think that you made there a really important key distinction, which is, is it a functional persona or it’s a dysfunctional persona? So the, the idea of persona, yeah Jung coined it and it means ‘mask’ and it comes from Greek theater, right? Where the Greek actors put on a mask. So there’s something about the acting and something about role. So when we’re in our persona, we’re in our role, so, uh, and usually roles define profession or parents or societal relationship or whatever. So, you know, our role, my role as an analyst is different than my role as dog owner or neighbour or friend or daughter or a sister, right? I have those roles. So often society defines what those roles are and so we can, we can align with that or not. So the functional persona is where the persona actually aligns with the personality. So there’s a sense of integrity. So who I am in my role is not disconnected from who I am as a person. It’s just, it’s a recognition that I have a role in this particular context, especially professional roles. I have a role in a professional context which has certain expectations and obligations and things like that. And I need to fulfill that. Um, where the dysfunction comes in was where the persona is disconnected from our individuality and our identity. So then we just act like we’re expected to. And so many, many people do that, like they make decisions because of what other people think they should do or what society thinks they should do. You know, well, I have to have a, you know, get a university degree and get married and have a house in the suburbs, two car garage and you know, two and a half kids, you know, that’s the kind of the collective trajectory. And if you buy into that, which, you know, but then it doesn’t really reflect who you are, then you’re just acting out a role that is disconnected and that’s dysfunctional. So, um, I often lead an exercise and one of my classes where I ask people to list all of the roles that they have in their life and then do, reflect on does that really reflect who they are and then have and then have a discussion about that. So the other interesting thing is that the persona and the shadow are always linked or kind of like two halves of the same coin right, so we’ve got the outer face of the persona, but the inner shadows. So what, what you’re trying to put forward, and in one’s life, if it’s disconnected from your identity then it’s going in the shadow.
Adrian
That’s fascinating. Does an example come to mind?
Christina
Yeah, I was just thinking that! Poor Tony Clement right? Our MPP or MP who, got himself into a little bit of a mess. Couple of people actually, politicians, you know, have a certain role. They’ve got a public role and meanwhile the shadow just gets unearthed and they have to resign. He was in some kind of sexting kind of thing and he got lured into this relationship, which, um, it just came out in the news and meant that he had to resign. And he’s a prominent cabinet. Well, he’s not an in cabinet anymore, but he’s a prominent federal politician that uh, because he let his shadow out of the bag and wasn’t able to understand what that was going to be is now in deep trouble.
Adrian
So you talked about, um, the persona as a social mask, which is different from but it has a relationship with the identity behind it or the personality, um, from what I understand with a lot of Jung’s ideas was how the personality also is not singular or fixed. And that we have many dimensions to that. I’d love to hear you elaborate a little bit about that, the idea of a multifaceted self.
Christina
Uh, could you elaborate on a multifaceted?
Adrian
I mean, just personally I used to just think I was just one self. I mean my sense of self to me for as long as I can remember, felt very fixed in sort of a central figure in this story. And, and only recently discovering that well actually there seems to be many characters that are at play here in this drama.
Christina
For sure. Yeah, for sure. And, and yeah.
Thal
So maybe in line with that, distinguishing between self with a small ‘s’ and Self with a big ‘S.
Christina
Yeah, for sure. Um, so we do have many characters in our psyche, um, and Jung called them complexes. And so the theory is that they are kind of self contained, autonomous energy systems in our psyche that have a tendency to act out and get us into trouble. So that’s at the level of the personal unconscious. And so how the complexes arise out of our own psychology. So like a complex would be a probably experienced as some kind of compulsion where you feel like you’re compelled to do something but not necessarily in a good way. Um, but we also have energies that are much broader and more spiritual or deeper and one could say, um, they are archetypical. Although I, I really resist using the word archetype will because I think that it is so fraught with misinterpretation. I like the word universal better and so, you know, then our psyches then use some of these big images as a way to capture something that’s really important for us. So like images of the Great Mother, right? The Goddess images or um, or Wise Old Men kind of images and so you can look at film. So one of the reasons why films are, so we, we with them so clearly is there’s something in the image this to so touches us. So like Lord of the Rings,
Adrian
Gandalf the Grey.
Christina
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then you’ve got the other side too. So you’ve got, um, you’ve got the evil characters, right? Which is about the other side, which are just interested in power. Right? So you’ve got all of that. Part of the work is to understand our inner landscape and to understand who our characters are in our psyche. And the dreams are wonderful to bring those up. You know, they kind of outline the landscape, but you could also do an active imagination, which is a technique that Jung developed a which you could also cultivate an inner dialogue or an inner landscape of characters which you could go to and have conversations with. That was how he developed the Red Book.
Thal
Is that a form of meditation?
Christina
It can be… different people do different things. Sit with meditation, uh, wait until something happens, follow it and keep, you know, write it down. Um, and uh, and then just see where it goes. So it’s a kind of, it’s not a meditation per se, because in meditation you’re trying to stop the thoughts, you’re just trying to let the thoughts come and then you let them go. But in an active imagination, if something comes up, you want to follow it and see where it takes you. Um, and that will then also give you a sense of your inner landscape, right?
Adrian
Since you brought it up- dreams, I know is a big juicy area to explore within union psychology. Um, why study dreams? Why explore them?
Christina
Well, they are from a Jungian perspective, they are the way that our soul speaks to us. It’s a way for the soul to say, okay, I’ve got something to say about this. I’ve got something to say about your life. I’ve got something to say about this relationship or whatever it happens to be. And so that is, I think, the key method of depth. Like from my perspective, we can only go so far to understanding what our own personal psychology is by talking, you know, we can only get so far, but when we throw the dreams in, we get such a different perspective and a richness that allows us to really engage with ourselves in a very poignant way.
Adrian
I have a feeling that perhaps a lot of listeners have maybe not considered dreams or, or maybe even devalue as something meaningless or random. Um, how do you generally approach that type of skepticism around dream and dreamwork and using the content?
Christina
Yeah. Um, usually we just work on a dream. And the proof is in the pudding. And um, you know, there is such a joy and enrichment and “holy crap”, when you’ve worked on a dream and something just opens up and the person gets something that they hadn’t gotten before, it’s just like the whole body changes, the face changes and they just go, “oh” and then they just caught something, right? Something has really clicked for them in, in a way that all came from just from talking about a dream. And so, um, it’s an education process, let’s put it that way. It’s m and a, and I’m still a little surprised when people kind of go, oh, I just, it’s just about this or I had this dream because, you know, I had pizza last night or whatever. Right? But in fact, Jung said there are no silly dreams, only silly people who will look at dreams. Now that’s his energy. But there’s some truth to that because this is a message from some place that we don’t really know where it exists….That is in our best interest. And so why not pay attention to that?
Thal
Yeah. Like some people refer to dreams as the garbage of what happened during the day.
Christina
Yeah, right. Yeah.
Adrian
Would it be okay if I shared a silly dream of mine from last night?
Christina
Oh how about that? [laugh]
Adrian
I’m just thinking, do I remember last night? Actually I do.
Christina
Synchronicity.
Adrian
One of the segments, at least.
Christina
Are you prepared?
Adrian
Yeah. I’m happy to share it because I’m curious, but also kind of confused too. So as a side question, I’m curious about recurring dreams because there’s a theme it seems where I find myself in a hotel and so it happened last night where I entered a hotel and I think I was meeting some friends then we go into this suite and I was dressed nicely like in a dress shirt and nice clothes but fairly sweaty. Like realized that I should clean myself before whatever it is that we’re doing after. So I asked the group is it okay if I run to the washroom, just have a quick shower. And so I go into the washroom, close the door and actually lay out all my clothes there, a little damp and sweaty and I remember laying my underwear down and it was orange and spraying hydrogen peroxide to disinfect the crotch area. So I don’t even know what sort of, you know, like, because I’m telling it and then the rational part of me is like, “that’s so silly”. Like why, you know, that’s not a good way to clean your underwear, right? [laugh]
Christina
No, totally. Um, but it’s interesting because as you said, you even told the dream, you know, we can’t evaluate the dreams from our, from our, our waking life perspective. It just doesn’t work, right, because the dream speak to us in a totally different language. So, um, I don’t know about the crotch that would require a little bit more in depth discussion about that. But however, um, you know, hotels are often an image of transition. It’s a temporary location. So, you know, I would, I would explore with you what, you know, where are you, are you in a kind of a temporary space maybe related to your friends, maybe you’re questioning your relationships with friends. Maybe you’re saying, I’m not sure about these friends, that kind of stuff, um, because there’s something you’re. But there’s something that you’ve entered into this relationship with your friends… that’s slightly dirty, right? That needs to be cleaned up. So there’s an element of the shadow, you know, what needs to be cleaned up in terms of your relationship with this group of people. Um, and so that’s kind of where I would start to explore with that and you know, we would go into the associations with these friends and who they are. Do you have any sense about who they are and why you’re seeing them and all of that kind of stuff.
Adrian
And to all my dirty friends out there right now listening are all self conscious after hearing this. Nice. [laugh]
Christina
Did that have some resonance for you?
Adrian
Totally. What stood out for me was…. I actually didn’t link how hotels are transitional temporal places and so that already has a level of metaphor that is quite powerful for sure. Considering where my current life….
Christina
Yeah, for sure. And I could, I, you know, I could just imagine that, you know, your shifting professions, it sounds like you’ve been in the corporate world for awhile and now you’re in training to be a therapist, totally different group of people. That in and of itself is a transition. So the psyche is kind of reflecting that you are in a temporary place, you know, things are changing, you know, you’re away from your home, which is your way from yourself in some way. Um, so that makes it, that makes a lot of sense. And so then, um, and I also know that with lots of people who go into training to be therapists, all of a sudden they do find that their previous friendships don’t quite… Like there’s the, there’s a shift, right? It’s like the people that you really liked before, just, they’re okay, but somehow they’re not speaking to you in the same way as….
Thal
Which can be a difficult shift.
Christina
It can be a difficult shift. Yeah, exactly.
Adrian
How do you, how do you know when to look at a dream literally? Because sometimes it can sound very literal, like direct connections to day-world. And then other times, like this example was very metaphorical, symbolic.
Christina
Well, the dreams always speak metaphorically. Always speak metaphorically. Um, there are occasions where there’s an energetic thing. There’s a quality of a dream that you actually look at and kind of go “Yeah, I think there’s something…” especially around, um, premonitions and I’m like, if loved ones have died, there’s a quality about those dreams that you just kind of go “I think there’s something else going on here”. It’s not just about a complex or not just about about what’s going on it, it’s just, it’s hard to describe it. There’s an energetic thing related to that. Yeah.
Thal
A liminal space.
Christina
Well, it’s, it, it has a, yeah, it has that kind of liminal kind of other worldly kind of space. Like I can hear it as soon as, uh, as soon as I hear a dream that has that quality about it, but, but I can’t, it’s not fair to jump to conclusions about that. Right? Because you still have to treat it subjectively. And it’s really hard to know. It’s always, whether a dream is objective, but it’s still symbolic. It doesn’t really speak literally, but it’s still symbolic, but it may have an outer indication of an objective, some kind of objective reality that you need to have something that you don’t know of. So for instance, actually this is a perfect example and this is a dream from Jung. He had a client where the client was a businessman and was just getting involved in a pretty big business deal and he had a dream where he, uh, had to wash his, like washing his hands of dirt, like over and over and over again and couldn’t quite get it clean. And the interpretation was that at some level, his psyche, he acknowledged that the deal that he was in wasn’t great. It was getting his hands dirty, right? That there was something about something about the business deal that just wasn’t right, you know? And at some level he, the businessman acknowledge” that there’s something wasn’t right, but his conscious mind when let him deal with him, let him accept that. Right? So the dream had to come and say, “Hey, wait a second here. There’s something, there’s something up here, there’s something where it’s you’re not really paying attention to and you need to pay attention to that because this is not necessarily a good action to follow”. So the, in some ways that reflected an outer situation where, um, but it was also about, so it was like a warning dream.
Thal
Um, so there are different types of dreams then, right? Like the ones that are more anticipatory and ones that are warning even ones that are recurring and initiatory dreams. But there are people that don’t dream. What about that? And also on the other side of that are people that have um, crippling nightmares. How, how do they deal with that?
Christina
Well, I think everybody dreams, it’s just a question for remembering. So we all dream, so it’s just we just don’t remember. Um, and there could be lots of reasons for that could like what you eat if you’re using substances, they could suppress the memory, the recall. Life is going pretty well. There’s not really too much to think about. Recurring dreams are dreams that the dream maker is saying, “okay, you’re not paying attention, I just have to keep telling you, telling you to tell you”. And so that’s why the recurring dreams kind of come up. And if we really don’t get the message, the dream maker will deliver a nightmare and the nightmare will wake you up literally like, just like I wake up. So think about that as like a, you know, you wake up and kind of going, oh my God, right? There’s a consciousness that the dream makers saying, like, hitting you over the head with, with you really have to pay attention to this. And that’s kind of what nightmares are. Because nightmares, what they do, is they, um, they, it’s whatever the enter the other energy is in your psyche is so confrontative to the ego’s identity and self perception that the ego can’t fathom, like at all integrating this part because there’s so much emotion attached to it. So fear, shame, you know, whole bunch of stuff. So, um, so you could get a, a dream that comes in where, you know, classical, like there’s a, uh, you know, there’s something chasing you. And so that’s what people will do. They’ll often say, well, you know, this thing is chasing me. This dark man is chasing you. It’s chasing me and it’s a recurring dream. And I kind of go, well, what are you running from?
Thal
Hmm.
Christina
Because that’s how you turn it around, right? It’s like, it’s like whatever it is in your psyche that’s chasing you, watch to connect, like wants to be known, wants to be heard, wants to be felt. And the egos going “nah, I don’t want anything to do with that”, right? So in fact, it gets turned around to say, well, what are you running from?
Adrian
That’s pretty cool. Like what came out of that is, is a question, not an answer that you’re able to extract from the dream, but actually a question to bring into focus. When I get those dreams of being chased, it’s often, um, I can’t actually run as fast as I normally do. I’m in molasses. [laugh] It’s like, wait, I know I can run. I used to do track.
Christina
So there’s something really sticky that’s gumming up your works. [laugh]
Adrian
Yeah. Gotta clean those shoes.
Christina
I’m mindful of the time. So do you have any closing questions? I think it might be neat to kind of close it up.
Thal
Yeah, I did have a closing question I was thinking about. So Jungian psychology, is finding some kind of a resurgence in social media. Carl Jung’s quotes are everywhere and the term shadow and persona complexes, introverted, extroverted, um, which all come from Jungian thought are always used in the mainstream. How do you feel about, um, maybe things taken out of context or moving away from the tradition maybe. Like the connection between the form of Jungian psychology and the meaning behind it, the formless?
Christina
Well, I think the essence of Jungian Psychology is so universal that it’s not really…. can’t really be considered a discipline on its own because the essence of it is just about being human, right? And so you’ll notice that one of the analysts that I, um, worked within Zurich, had a wonderful, wonderful image that has stayed with me and she said, you know, Jung’s thoughts are like a polymer bath, right? It’s like this big vat of ideas and intuitions and writings and stuff like that. But in the vat it’s all liquid. But we each kind of take our strand out of it and as soon as we pull it out, that becomes uniquely our part that we’re exploring, it solidifies. And so I think, I think that’s why there are so many analysts that do other things, you know, they’re environmentalist, there’s professors, there’s, you know, I’m consultant, you know, um, musicians, all sorts of things because, because the ideas, Jung’s ideas need to be brought into the world because it’s just so universal. So, you know, there’s so many psychotherapies that have are originally you can trace right back to Jung. Um, and that’s really fantastic. And that each person has brought in…. Like IFS you can trace right back to Jung, um, you know, Parts Work, um, you can trace right back to Jung. Uh, psychodynamic psychotherapy you can trace right back to Jung. Um, so I think, you know, I think we have to be open to adapting to new ideas and new sciences and new ways of thinking of things while being true. But, and it’s a story and it is actually easy to be true to the original idea because the original idea is truth and is universal. So it’s like there’s no break as long as you remain truthful, but language may change. But there are certain ideas that are universal that, um, we can, you know, remain adhered to, we can find resonance to. I do find, I do find a little bit of an issue with people using the word archetype because it is so fraught and the way that Jung originally anticipate or used the word is not something that you can just kind of throw around and say, oh, that’s the archetype of… No, no, no, right, because archetypal energy is big intense energy that overpowers the ego. It’s collective energy. It’s even deeper energy. So psychosis is often an influx of archetypal energies. Schizophrenia is an influx of archetypal energy. If you think about all of the fantasies of schizophrenia, you know, it’s all archetypical, like it’s, you know, the Nazis or Jesus and stuff like that. So that’s the flood and that flood of archetypal energy, a huge, huge energy, you know, swamp says so it’s not something that we want to be playing around with, right? We want, we need to have a tremendous amount of respect for him. We have to have a proper relationship to it or we can go mad. And that’s, you know, that’s just, we’ve seen that, you know, you know, time and time again in so many different places where people have breaks, psychotic breaks.
Thal
Absolutely.
Adrian
Christina. Yeah…mindful of your time. I feel like there’s definitely gonna be a part. We’ve opened so many files. We’re not ending the conversation here. Um, but yeah, thank you for your time today and for starting the conversation.
Thal
Thank you so much. It’s an honour. Thank you.
Christina
Thank you. Okay.