The Vital Spark is now out in the world in print, ebook, and audio. Narrated by me!
The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire
“The task force members found commercial surrogacy to be "indistinguishable from the sale of children" and unanimously agreed that public policy should discourage it.”
Book unboxing! So excited to get my author copies of
@WhenKidsSayT
When Kids Say They’re Trans! Come to our FREE webinar on Sunday, August 27 when you pre-order!
@SashaLPC
@stellaomalley3
I’ve just heard another story from an acquaintance about a therapist encouraging someone to cut off contact with her parents. This is such a fraught and complex area, but I have thoughts. Here goes.
A few years ago, something wonderful and unexpected happened to me. As I became concerned about what I saw happening to children and young people who were distressed about their gender, I met many smart, principled, brave people. One of these was
@SashaLPC
.
Most of us have parents who tried to be “good enough.” James Hollis has said that life is traumatic, and parents can either mitigate or intensify that trauma. None of us make it to adulthood without some wounding experiences.
Our parents certainly did things that were wounding at some point. This is rarely abuse. Most of the time, it is the more ordinary, inevitable, and perfectly human ruptures in attunement. Weathering these ruptures will mold us, make us resilient, and shape who we become.
We cannot do this while remaining focused on what our parents did or didn’t do for us. To believe that everything that is wrong is our parents’ fault infantilizes us.
But they are wounding nonetheless, and we will need to come to terms with them.
We all must separate psychologically from our parents if we are to become the fullest version of ourselves possible.
First, of course, there are times when a parent has been so horribly abusive or is currently so difficult to contain that it makes sense to have no contact. However, I think these cases are unusual.
Evaluating these wounds – understanding where our parents let us down or hurt us and how that has affected us – is an important part of gaining self-understanding. The path to psychological growth means acknowledging the ways in which we were wounded.
Monstering our parents prevents growth in other ways as well. We are usually similar to our parents. If we are our parents’ biological child, we may have much in common with them.
If exploring our childhood through the lens of our woundedness is a necessary step toward psychological independence, it is not sufficient. We must move beyond grievance to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives.
All things being equal, being in contact with our families is better for everyone – as long as we maintain good boundaries. If your therapist encourages you to cut off contact with your parents without extremely good reason, consider that this may not be in your best interests.
Making a parent out to be the villain makes it harder for us to accept those parts of ourselves that we have in common with that parent. For this and other reasons, we must move beyond guilt and blame if we are to grow toward wholeness.
Every therapist has had an adult come into therapy claiming they had a perfect family and everything about their childhood was great. That is a sure sign that the person is defending against something too painful to acknowledge.
For most of us, this process begins during adolescence but continues throughout our twenties and even thirties. This process takes time. Part of it involves acknowledging parts of our childhood that were wounding.
...The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.” ~C. G. Jung
Clients may need help setting good boundaries with parents who are intrusive, demanding, or controlling. But care must be taken that therapist and client don't collude in creating a black and white narrative that paints the parent as “toxic” and irredeemable.
“The solution is to help young people see that the label of anxiety is a starting point to challenging themselves and being brave, not an endpoint that will dictate their limitations for ever.
It keeps us trapped in a black and white world where all of the “bad” is out there and we can protect ourselves if we just stay away from it. In truth, the world is complex. People are complex. We are complex and so are our parents.
And now we've written a book together! It's a special friendship that can give birth to so much creativity. I'm very proud to call them my friends and very grateful for their friendship and wisdom.
"But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it...
What is the role of the therapist in Jungian analysis? Apparently, Jungian analyst Marie Louise Von Franz used to say something like the following to her patients:
Sasha, Stella, and I became friends. Really good friends. Our WhatsApp group chat is the most active thing on the phone. When I faced challenges in my personal life, long walks talking to Stella helped get me through.
She reached out to me after reading something I wrote. I was so impressed by her intelligence and courage. We would speak many times before we would finally meet in person, but in our phone calls and online interactions, I came to admire her wit, liveliness, and fire.
Clients often need help from therapists identifying relational patterns in their family of origin that may have been maladaptive. Doing this work can bring up previously cut-off feelings of hurt and anger, and it's important that these feelings have plenty of room and validation.
During this time, I also became aware of
@stellaomalley3
. At first, I just knew her from afar and I was a bit starstruck. I kept hearing her name everywhere, and anytime I read something she wrote, it resonated with me deeply.
In the 2017 film “Lady Bird,” the titular character comes to accept and understand her mother’s fervent love for her even though her mom is flawed and held back by her own limitations.
Book unboxing! It is a genuine thrill to hold the physical book in your hands after working and working on it for months. This one is special to me. It’s very personal.
When something funny or outrageous happens, there is no one I would rather share it with than Sasha. The three of us have traveled, conspired, presented, argued, dined, laughed -- and even successfully completed an escape room.
You know that awful feeling of loss and disorientation you feel when you finish a great book that has had you thoroughly engrossed? That’s where I’m at today.
And how do we listen to it? And what if the patient is working against this part of himself? This is why good therapy involves more than just "support." Confrontation may also be required.
There are therapists who believe you have personal agency and therapy is about helping you to change.
There are therapists who believe you are a helpless victim of external forces and therapy is about affirming your victimhood.
Choose wisely.
The psychodynamic psychotherapist has a serious charge – to side with the patient’s urges toward health, even when the patient may be consciously working against these very urges.
NEW EPISODE — Three Voices, One Song: Lessons in Friendship
The essence of friendship is found in its linguistic root: ‘to love.’ Cicero wrote, “Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.” In modern times the art
Thrilled to be offering a weekend of workshop for parents of gender questioning kids with
@stellaomalley3
and
@SashaLPC
. We’ll be in Annapolis at the end of September. Tickets just went on sale.
Snow White is one of the fairy tales I discuss in my upcoming book about women's empowerment. I see it, in part, as the story of a young woman getting over an innocence complex that doesn't serve her.
"But Zegler and Gadot are merely parroting modern talking points about stories that have been with us for centuries. Stories that have stayed with us for centuries. Because they mean something to us. Because they matter."
My latest for
@amspectator
Photographer Joel Sartore captured this footage of a Horsfield’s tarsier at Taman Safari in Indonesia.
It's a carnivorous, nocturnal species of tarsier living in Borneo and Sumatra.
[📹 joelsartore]
In her memoir, Marsha Linehan, the creator of DBT, records that her own years-long mental anguish resolved after a mystical experience: “all of a sudden the whole of the chapel was suffused with a bright golden light, shimmering all over” (p. 102).
This plan is often largely unconscious and may be at odds with habitual, conscious attitudes and behaviors. According to Weiss, it is the therapist’s job to understand the “pro-plan” and avoid colluding with the “anti-plan.”
BOOK COVER REVEAL
"In this raw coming-of-age memoir, Rob Henderson vividly recounts growing up in foster care, enlisting in the US Air Force, attending elite universities, and pioneering the concept of 'luxury beliefs'—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class
That’s a pretty good summation of how I see my role when working with an analysand. But it’s also more complicated than it seems. What is that part that knows what is right for us?
As analysts, we are listening and trying to discern – what impulses arrive from the deep self and are in the interest of long-term flourishing? And what impulses derive from defensive structures or outmoded ways of functioning?
Chef Mike Solomonov is the nicest guy I know and has done so much to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and always sees the humanity in everyone.
Protestors in Philadelphia came to his restaurant to protest, just because he’s Jewish:
This is a truly special book. We don’t become mothers in order to find ourselves. We take a leap of faith and unwittingly embark on the greatest adventure of our own lives. How lovely to bring it into focus. Well done
@LisaMarchiano
Wolf pups begin howling as early as 3 to 4 weeks old. As they get older, they learn to use their howls to coordinate with other pack members.
This is what it sounds like.
[📹 Certified Floof]
SHAME ON YOU
@GWtweets
!
These horrific terror-supporting statements were projected onto the library at George Washington University, one even named for Jewish donors.
This disgusting solidarity with the murderous terror by Hamas against Israeli civilians should NEVER be
Even though Freud remains my main man, this quote from Jung is among the wisest in the whole of psychoanalysis:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
NEW EPISODE — HAGITUDE: Sharon Blackie on the Power of Aging
Sharon Blackie calls us to the ancient archetype of the Hag as a figure of unapologetic emergence from cultural pressures that lock us into outworn roles and limiting beliefs.
Drawing upon her transformative
Careful listening helps. Noticing a patient’s reaction to our statements and interventions is another way to pay attention to this. Dreams are communications for the client’s unconscious that can also point us in the right direction.
In his 1993 book “How Psychotherapy Works,” psychoanalyst and researcher Joseph Weiss put forward his theory that people come into therapy with a plan for how they know they can get better.
We’ve long known that cosmetic surgery was contraindicated in cases of body dysmorphic disorder. “One [patient] said to me, I had my surgery so people would love me,” he says. “That’s not a surgical problem; that’s an emotional one.”
Weiss points out that our patients will sometimes do things that are not in the interest of the “pro-plan” – the deep urge to heal and self-actualize, and that the analyst must be prepared to interpret such behavior when appropriate. How can we know which is which?
Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
“Researchers trained 120 volunteers to suppress thoughts about negative events… not only did these become less vivid, but the participants’ mental health also improved.”
“When people feel insecure about their social standing in a group, they are more likely to use jargon in an attempt to be admired and respected,” Judith Butler, much?
"Smart people respect simple language not because simple words are easy, but because expressing interesting ideas in small words takes a lot of work,"
@DKThomp
writes:
Funny story. In 1979, I had a choice between typing and Latin. Boy was that a good choice! Who knew then that typing would become obsolete! Latin, however, is eternal.
@jk_rowling
Will we be meeting Strike’s half sister who is the Jungian therapist in the next book? You teased that and I’ve been anticipating her greatly!
You've probably seen this painting before — it's Ophelia by John Everett Millais, from 1852.
But what you probably don't know is that people once thought this kind of art was dangerous.
In fact, Ophelia is one of the most radical and controversial paintings of all time...
Woman of the Day astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin born OTD 1900 in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, whose 1925 doctoral thesis was rubbished by Princeton astrophysicist Henry Norris Russell for proposing that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. Four years
Lots of good stuff in this article. They got a lot right, from over diagnosis to the subjectivity of mental health symptoms to the fact that therapy is not usually a quick fix.
Today's the Day!
BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
My two-year investigation into why the generation that received the most wide-ranging mental health interventions is doing so poorly.
And most importantly: How we fix it.
Available NOW:
I've received some great reviews of my new book Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction and I really value this one. Lisa understands Jung's vision like few others. Thank you
@LisaMarchiano