carl jung

by

Premises of being a “Friend to Yourself”

English: Object of perception in psychology

This is the skeleton of what we reviewed over three days of 1-2 hour workshop sessions (which ended last week.)  We named these the unchanging premises of being a friend to yourself.

 Everything starts and ends with Me.

Freedom to choose is here.

 I can see Me using various paradigms such as the Jungian Typology and the biopsychosocial model.

These are tools, not boxes.

 Me is never alone.

 Essence.

Essence is the part of Me that is timeless and unchanging.

 Truth.

There is our perception of reality – from the wind to the whim.  Then there is Truth that like the other premises to self-care are not dependent on my beliefs, emotions or behaviors.

Questions:  What do you think of these premises?  Would you change anything?

Self-Care Tip – Know and name your premises to befriending yourself.

Related articles – If you want to know more about any of these listed above, put the keyword into the empty search box on the top right of this page and click around.  Let me know what interests you.
by

You are Valuable. Being With You Is A Privilege. Even for You.

A scattering of "brilliant" cut diam...

You are valuable.

Things in life; status, emotions, perception of different realities change – but this will not.  You are valuable.  Any time with you, even if only in your thoughts, is an immense privilege – for me or anyone, including you.  You? Privileged to be with you?  Yes.

Have you ever lost yourself?  Have you felt the heat hit your face when your thoughts fly into a rage, words rushing out as if exploding dynamite.  Bewildering, no?  You know then.

Have you forgotten where your car keys are but do not care because you are still in bed and have no motivation to move.  Your calendar, that once excited the tap of your fingers across your keyboard, holds no interest now.  You hide, ashamed but mostly you just do not want to explain to others.  “Too much energy,” you think.  If so, you know then that being with you is a privilege.

All these things you despise are reminders that you are precious and of immense value.  You are worth anything and everything to have the chance of holding once again.  You are the reason people crossed the prairies, fought against the sun and hunted for food to survive.  You are the reason the ark survived for forty days and forty nights.  You are the reason precious metals are considered lovely.  And it is because of you that you want to be your friend.  You are valuable.

In the previous chapter, we talked about Briggs and his wife.  They did not like the condition they were in, but they valued themselves as evidenced by seeking help.  While taking their history, I gathered together the names of medications Briggs had taken, when he took them, why he took them, how long, why he stopped and what they did for him.  And then the foreboding came.  I started thinking about numbers.

Now, you know that I am not a number person.  Remember?  “Big fat F.”  (F for feeler in terms of Jungian Typology.)  But here was Briggs and when the numbers started obstructing my “F” I got uncomfortable.  That meant to me that Briggs was risky.  He could die.

In Chapter One, I asked you, “Is there any treatment you think is too extreme to consider to get brain health?”  I did not say this directly to Briggs but I said it.  In my thoughts, Briggs is so courageous to fight the cruel sun the way he does.  In my thoughts, he is why freedom and fresh flowers and hope remain.  He is valuable.  I wanted to know his answer.

“Briggs, what do you want to do now?” 

Our culture does not remember that Briggs is the reason that diamonds cost more than more.  Culture tells us that he is damaged and not so much of a treasure.  Culture says, some treatments are shameful and the value of hiding shame is more than the value of Briggs, or me, or you.  For shame.  The value of Me is more than the value of hiding shame.

We are part of culture and culture is part of us.  Knowing what we want to do when what we have done has not yet worked, this knowing begins with our culture and with our self-value.  This knowing of Me increases our freedom to choose.  Knowing the value of Me increases our courage to choose what is difficult, what takes energy and hard work and a standing up against stigma and the taking of risks.  Knowing what we want to do when starts with knowing the value of Me.

You are valuable and being with you is a privilege.

Questions:  

  • Do you know your value?  

  • If you are lost, what are you willing to do to be with yourself again?  

  • How has knowing your self-value increased your freedom to choose?  

  • How has knowing your self-value helped you decide what to do when you were or are ill?

Please tell me your story.

Self-Care Tip – Remember your value.

Related articles
by

Misrepresentation Of Self-Care Will Inevitably Be Part of Our Truth

Self-Care Tip #239 – Let the misrepresentation be.

In our efforts here at FriendtoYourself.com, we try through our limited selves, our flawed selves, our biased selves to understand self-care as well as we can.  Never-the-less, the process of the ongoing mix-and-separate leaves us ever aware that our work is unfinished.

When I say, “It’s biological,” see that there are other things in the room.  Please see the windows and doors still open.  Please know that I don’t deny that there are other senses than my own, other dimensions and other realities than what we perceive.  The reason I don’t always mention them, credit them for behaviors and emotions, the reason you don’t hear me say often enough that we are not unidimensional is that I speak about my area of experience – the brain.  It is what I do.  I am not an expert at all paradigms.

Acknowledging one reality is not a denial of the other unless… well unless other things happen, which I’m not ready to clarify.  I will throw out that maybe intention to throw them out needs to be there too.  Maybe saying that, we are in danger of being perceived to be denying other reasons.  It reminds me of Escher’s work of repeating beautiful patterns to infinity.

This makes many of us uncomfortable who are designed to be sensory aware, in the moment and  in the barn – contrasted to others who are wired to be connecting big picture concepts and grazers.  (See my blog-posts on Jungian-typology for more.)  I acknowledge this intuitive emotion response with respect and equality to any other of our temperaments, all of which are neither better nor worse than the other.  The discomfort that comes when we are out of our area of genetic-genius does not have moral quality; it just is.

The emotions will come.  We want them; the senses that interpret our reality.  We will with our sixth sense, our individual genetic  genius, our 10,000 hours of hard work and experience, with magic of what we still don’t understand and with our God – we will take care.  Of our selves, we will find a friend.

Questions:  Do you mind it?  All the bits that you don’t know about self-care still?  Do you mind the way it is misunderstood around you, projected and assuming?  How do you deal?  Please tell me your story.

Related Articles
by

The Achilles In Us All – To Our Own Demise

Cover of "Troy - The Director's Cut [Blu-...

Cover of Troy - The Director's Cut

Self-Care Tip #188 – Don’t avoid the obvious to be a friend to yourself.

Have you ever watched someone make a bad decision?  Probably, if you’ve watched anyone.  We all do make bad choices.  But a really bad one?  One that when you hear it going down, you can almost feel the hair on your neck point south.  We ask ourselves why no one stops them.  We perhaps have tried to reason, to force, to pull favors to buy them away from this choice.

If you do this, ….

Maybe weeping some.  Maybe they’ve done this same variety of bad choice before; many times perhaps.

The problem is bigger than our own selves of course.  The people in our wake, being tumbled about by our bad choices, these people suffer.  It’s irresponsible.  Sure.  Those tumbled people are responsible for there own self-care too, but they aren’t responsible to accept us back with open arms when we drive our boat over them.  We don’t connect that the reason they are back there bobbing in the water is in part because we don’t have insight into our behavior.

Brad Pitt played Achilles in the movie Troy, Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.  If you remember, he died in the end.  Movie critic, described what killed him well.

Achilles is moved by love of glory and knows that he will die young if he pursues it, but his reputation is all that counts because all he is a warrior and the best one, at that.
Self-care includes stopping the kill that our own “Achilles heel” is making on us; i.e. that (or those) big thing(s) that everyone else but us can see that in the end will kill us.

Carl Jung describes the inferior function of someone’s personality type as their Achilles’ heel.  Myers called this the shadow.  It is the part of us that has the least amount of conscious awareness (otherwise known as insight.)  This is the part of our temperament that we are not comfortable with.  Although it may strengthen with maturity, it can be the death of us if we don’t take it seriously.  We will always have it, true.  But with deliberate effort and with working no harder than what self-care has already proven to be (the kind of bleeding effort that makes us plead “Mercy!”) …then we can grow.

Then perhaps after performing the hardest work of our life, we may be fortunate enough to die from another reason in the end.  🙂  We also may be fortunate enough to have people in our lives who feel safe with us.  People who feel they can trust that we will treat the precious connection between “Me and Thee” responsibly by taking care of ourselves.

Questions:  How has your Achilles been influencing your life?  How have you helped yourself to stop avoiding “the obvious?”  Please tell me your story.

by

Hear, Be Heard, Believe and Speak In Your Language.

c. 1868

Image via Wikipedia

Self-Care Tip #187 – Say it better by saying it in your voice.  Be a friend to yourself.

We all have our own language.  I’m not talking about Hungarian or Spanish.  I’m roughly talking about Jungian typology.  We speak and hear, we are heard and we find that we believe better with it.  But we don’t all know that and so don’t treat ourselves with enough courtesy.

For example, many of us used to think that listening to emotions was silly and that using graphs and quoting studies was smart.  (Who ever heard of smart emotions or even spiritual intelligence for that matter?!)  We used to hold our breath and hope our brains would change if we despised our own wiring enough.  As if our genes would get the hint, give up their mortgage and leave town, disgraced.

Hopefully after the paternity of the genes in question was established, and if we grew a little, we noticed that there is no better way to speak than what is our own voice.

Say it.

That was lovely.  Thank you.

We can listen to the beautiful music of Celine Dion French Album, or watch the foreign film Like Water for Chocolate (Spanish: Como agua para chocolate) without subtitles, or sing the African-American spiritual song from the 1930s, Kumbaya.  We will get a partial understanding of what is intended, what is said, what is felt.  We will know that someone is desperately in love with someone else, for example, in Como Agua Para Chocolate – but not get the full story of course unless we hear the words in the language we know.  Saying that one language is greater than another is hopefully buried with Hitler.  Our temperaments speak uniquely as well by design.  They are not qualified differently from each other.  True, they are better suited for different tasks, jobs, audiences.  But that doesn’t make one smarter or dumber than another.  Regardless of the bank account any one or many may hold, there is no difference in value between them.

If we want to say something, ….  Well all I can say is this just feels right?  You know what I mean?  😉

Question:  What has helped you discover your language best?  How has it helped you understand your connections better?  Please tell me your story.

by

There is Room In Our Wanting Selves

Having another child born, our hearts somehow open up and make more love, more space where things once seemed crowed up like hobos in a boxcar.  Our time and energy does that too.  Feeling like you can’t do another thing by 6 PM?  Feeling like watching TV on the couch is an accomplishment at that point?  I’m telling you that this changes.  Do what you want.  You may not realize it yet but you want something special.  You want something that you were designed to do.   When you discover what that is, activity becomes joyful, congruent with your inner self.  Somehow there is more room in your day.  More energy that comes with no strings attached.

My husband just came home from a tech conference.  He was told by famous Silicon Valley junkies, while sitting in an audience of other wannabe’s, “Don’t do a startup.  You’ll fail.”  It was a secondary message that returned intermittently – unless you can’t sleep at night because you need to solve a problem – if you are trying to do a startup company for any other reason than for your own sanity, you won’t make it.  These people were doing what they were doing because they felt like it was their life’s nectar.  It was their pearl of great price.  Their efforts were fueled by their own genetic design.

In medical school, I used to look around me confused by the obvious natural positive responses of other students.  I looked at myself and thought I was a fake.

I looked at them and thought, “There’s the real thing.  I wonder what it feels to be the real thing.”  I know.  Sad huh?  Ah well.  Turns out I’m a flaming extrovert.  I get energy from being with people.  Being alone takes energy from me.  Wether it happens slowly or quickly, either way eventually I have to resurface and connect with someone to re-tank.  Every day when I sat down to study, I felt alone, energy sucked out of me, the ground was going to swallow me up.  And I did it still.  Ground through my long hours long enough to make it to where I belonged.  With you in psychiatry :).

Here’s the news.  We are all “The real thing!”  Yah!  We have our own greatness.

I’m not talking about opportunity to reach that greatness.  Some of that we are given and some of that we make.  I’m just ringing our bells with the idea.  If you want to read more about this, read the blog posts on temperaments.

Question:  Are you doing what you want?  Please tell me your story.

Self Care Tip #64 – There is room in your wanting self for more.  Be a friend to yourself.

by

Get to Know Yourself to Be A Friend to Yourself.

On the Threshold of Eternity

Image via Wikipedia

Let us put our efforts toward becoming who we can become, who we were wired to be, who we want to be, what gives us pleasure.

We can get beaten up by wanting.  Wanting to be someone who gets energy from being with people rather than from being alone.  Wanting to be someone who is a finisher rather than grazer.  Wanting to blend and lead and be chosen.

Some of this filters out as we age.  Aging fills our lives up with so many responsibilities that wanting to be anything more than someone who gets solid sleep hasn’t crossed our minds in a very long time.  Children get more of it right than us in this regard.  They have space to want more openly.  Our wanting muffles and cramps when we turn away from who we were genetically designed to be.

My patient came in depressed again.  Depression was familiar for him.  A psychiatrist works with a specific area of medicine.  So I get to see people after multiple medication trials before their primary physician refers them to me.  Well this patient hadn’t found lasting help from medications. He came to me with doubt.  I wish I could say we worked it out.  I can say that we are still trying.

What we are working on influences the way his genes express themselves.  We can’t change the genes but we can affect some of how and when they are activated.   We can do this by choices, such as medication therapy, sleep hygiene and exercise.  Choices are more effective when we know what and who we were wired to be.  What are our natural talents?  What are we interested in?  Feeling inner congruence when we are doing something points the way for this.

In Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says

“the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work.”

I don’t know if Mr. Gladwell recognized how closely his thoughts harmonized with Carl Jung‘s regarding temperaments.  Doing what is natural for us recruits our best through the path of least resistance – our interest, our attention, our creativity.  Rather than forced effort, drudgery and dragging feet, time looses some heaviness as we get caught up in inner and outer congruence.

Intuitively, we all surmise that when this happens, we have less stress inside and outside of us.  Ah.  What a relief.  This is what my patient is working on and when he is able to say he is doing what he wants to in life, he is less hopeless and panicked.

Self Care Tip #40 – Get to know yourself to be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Have you been using these tools?  Have they made a difference for you?