the long way home
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” – Carl Jung
“There is no place like home.” — Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz
As I sit here preparing to write, I am struck by an image in the periphery of my gaze. From my daughter’s bed, my focus drifts out the window on this gloomy January morning. The sun is not yet up. If it were, I would not be finding it anyway. The clouds have been thick for days, like the soft gray wings of a thousand geese landing on frozen fields. What strikes me is a reflection that appears to be coming from the outside in. If I search too hard, the reflection disappears. When I allow my gaze to soften, the image returns. Just outside my daughter’s window is a rainbow, reflected on the glass. While there is no sun outside to create this prism, within her room is a painted wall, a windowpane, a lamp light and alchemy of my own vision. This mirror reflection is symbolic of the concept I seek to illuminate. When allowing for new perspective during the darkest times, our human heart gains access to its deepest healing and most brilliant opening. Like a camera aperture widened to accommodate for less light, the lens of our human heart will often expand to allow for the situation before which it stands.
During the early days of this pandemic, my daughter, Lily, and I did what so many of us found ourselves doing. We got creative. Last spring, we decided to lay new images on her bedroom wall. Above the rolling green hills, we painted a bright luminous rainbow, with an arc curving towards the window on one side and landing in a perfect cotton cloud on the other. As I glance at the brilliant moving arc, I imagine the thousands of rainbows like this I must have drawn when I was little. My mind then dances towards the journey of Dorothy, with her quest to find Oz. We can all recall her longing to go “somewhere over the rainbow” when she was lost, without her home. I then begin considering the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, intonating a treasure to be discovered only after a magical or heroic journey into unknown lands. Alas, I travel far back in my own journey and arrive at my high school ambition: “To find the X that marks the spot and discover the treasure within the chest.” While I will always be a seeker, I do believe that over the past year I have gotten much closer to understanding just what I was seeking to uncover all along…
As a licensed clinical therapist, I have had the vantage point of witnessing the journey of many children, adolescents and adults as they grapple with their most difficult emotions and harrowing journeys. Whether supporting a man through the loss of a 30-year marriage, a young mom having to face a terminal diagnosis, or a child unable to believe she is lovable due to her too-young trauma, I have found myself accompanying many a human soul into the darkness. What sustains me in this work is witnessing the alchemy that can happen in the deepest, darkest places. As if by magic, a treasure is ultimately revealed when the client is granted enough grace, time, and safe space to allow for the pain to be felt and transformed.
During this past year, I have witnessed a collective period of darkness. In this statement I include my clients, my friends, my family, and myself. We are recently connected by common themes of struggle, or often even a dark night of the soul, no matter how uniquely personal our own journey into the abyss. During these difficult times, we have been faced with many walls. Sometimes we were facing the walls of our own home. Sometimes, we were faced with the walls we had built around our own tender hearts. What strikes me most during the past year is the ways we have been forced to sit within these walls—and I mean really be present--with no outlets or ability to escape or hide. From within these walls, a dark fertile soil has been cultivated for the depth work of the psyche to germinate. When one cannot go outward, one is forced to go deeper.
Simultaneously, the external walls that once held all of our modern constructs are crumbling to the ground before our eyes. These walls contain structures ranging from our work spaces to our government to our schools and, ultimately, to our ideologies. While losing our bearings may feel frightening, it also allows for a freedom to explore more options within our own depths and preferences. Here, in the midst of our darkest most disorienting moments, I am astounded at the unprecedented rate of psychological growth I have seen.
When forced to sit in the seat of ourselves with no escape, the shadow inevitably will rise to the surface. This, my friends, is one of those strange times when the hard thing can ultimately be the best thing. Carl Jung, the grandfather of modern depth psychology, identified the shadow as the part(s) of ourselves which we have learned to either disown, discount or deny. The creation and suppression of our shadow results from younger personal experiences wherein some innate human character trait was discounted, punished, or reflected back to us as wrong or bad. From the early experience of shame, an innocent part of the child within us becomes frozen in time-- stuck within a wall of our own heart’s secrets. The past year has forced us to dig deeper, revealing the personal and collective shadow qualities that have been hidden for years, and often tracing back to multiple generations before us.
To give you a clue as to your own shadow, consider the traits you strive not to show. Imagine a word someone could use to insult you, or the qualities you find most vexing in others. It is not that you actually ARE dominantly this quality unbeknownst to yourself, but that you have not ever allowed yourself to have a fair or human amount of this trait. Instead, it is hidden in your own psychological shadow. Thus, when this trait needs to arise in ourselves or others, we are often “triggered” to either flee ourselves or fight with the other.
The positive potential comes when the shadow qualities and corresponding feelings eventually seek to be re-acquainted. By compassionately allowing for more awareness and acceptance of our shadow, one becomes more fully embodied and empowered. Because of its unconscious and strongly displaced qualities, the shadow contains immense power. The shadow is feared because it is unknown; ignorance breeds fear within ourselves and often is the source of fear, resentment, rejection and even hatred towards others as well.
I am also convinced, however, that within our own shadow lives our most powerful and original personal gifts to the world. When I was a therapist in training over 15 years ago, I was initially drawn to working with 2nd grade children, as they were to me. We often played in the sand tray, a therapeutic tool that allows children to project their unconscious world outward using sand and objects. As the child creates the scene, he or she begins to gain more access to unconscious material and mastery of their place in the world. The therapist’s job is to hold space, ask questions, and serve as a safe observer or container for their psychological process.
I recall experiencing chills one afternoon as I witnessed a 7-year old child bury a small golden treasure box deep in the sand, yet again. Above the buried treasure was a sand scene put on display, showing human soldiers battling an army of animals and creatures. The battle split the sand tray perfectly in half, with the treasured buried deep and smack dead in the middle of the battle line between soldiers and animals. What struck me most about this session was an emergent pattern. This was the fourth different 2nd grade child to create this same exact scene. The treasure, the battle, the timing: it could not possibly be a coincidence…
As I did my own research, I learned that age 7 is when our brain further myelinates, and we begin to see the world more in terms of polarities, (i.e. right vs left brain). The brain divide also creates the developmental time during which children begin to see how others in the world look at them. With brain splitting, children are more able to comprehend being seen by the world versus looking out from their own inner lens. They also loose the original grasp of the holistic mind and world view, which generally speaking allowed them to hold space for opposites such as good vs bad or logical vs creative, with no judgment, labeling, shaming or bias from the outside world. This buried treasure box, I purport, contains the censored and shadow.
These children were sending me messages, both personal and universal, about the collective unconscious. Within each of our inner child lives a buried treasure box containing the parts that must go into hiding for fear of being shamed, hurt or destroyed. The act of hiding the shadow is an act of desperate self-preservation. And this is good news. In the buried child’s treasure lives the raw potential for alchemizing our earliest wounds into our ultimate healing. begins the process of losing and then one day re-discovering each of our X’s that mark the spot.
Another significant part of brain development at this time is the clear delineation of certain neurological functions to specific parts of the brain. The right brain, generally speaking, represents the present-moment, creative, holistic, and visual processing; The left brain is responsible for linear time, language acquisition and more logical or mechanistic thinking. Some purport that years of Western schooling, with an emphasis on linear time and language processing, over-emphasize the left-brain development. If the inner treasure is buried at the time the brain divides, it makes sense that the unearthing of the shadow would also help us to access our more holistic way of processing information, reconnecting us to a time when right and left worked together in balance and wholeness.
As I look out at this pandemic-induced stormy world, I cannot help but be struck again by the likeness to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz yet again. The original stage is set with Dorothy’s home being picked up and plunged into a maelstrom of currents so unsettling that up and down cannot even be made sense of any longer. As we are tossed along these disorienting times with structures being dismantled, reassigned and placed back in new ways, we are faced with living in a dream-like narrative. Each of us must discern a new sense of home, where the light as we once knew it is coming from different directions. Often times, the direction is inward, and back to our origins in so many ways.
Much of my recent work with adult clients, not surprisingly, has centered around inner child work. Most current client issues, presenting in the form of a relationship, work or other life trauma or stressor, will find a narrative tacked to some original experience from childhood. When I do this work, I take my clients into a meditative state and using guided imagery, felt senses, and visual images. Eventually, the client arrives at a place in time when their child-self felt alone or scared. As we work into the experience (the mind does not know the difference between the imagined world and literal one), I invite the adult self to meet the child self, eye to eye and heart to heart. From there, the adult self asks the frightened child self what he or she needed most. Every single time, similar to the theme of the sand tray sessions, the experience is the same. Each and every client, speaking through tears, explains that they heard the small child in their memory ask for one simple thing: a hug.
This universal healing request for a hug speaks volumes to the loneliness and shame our inner children must have felt by not being held in this unconditional way. Interestingly, during the pandemic I was often struck by how many people wanted, needed, and missed hugging others. It seems we were all needing more than ever to feel that feeling of heart to heart reassurance and unconditional connection. Perhaps this is another reason and indicator that the inner child is calling out to so many of us for healing like never before.
Whether accessed through the shadow or inner-child work, we all possess a stowed away child part within our own hearts. This sweet young part of us waits patiently, seeking simply to be loved and accepted unconditionally. We must first, ourselves, extend compassionate self-acceptance to our own younger, more vulnerable parts.
What if these dark times have actually been a gift to reclaim what was almost forgotten. This treasure was once lost, buried so deep within ourselves that we had been seeking the entire world outside of us for a clue as to how to travel backwards. We meandered and traveled, seeking and enjoying this modern world we call home. Only by the grace of a perfect storm, wherein so many lives and structures have been lost forever, was the true road map to our treasures revealed. Within the homes of ourselves, with nowhere left to go but inside, we were able to find our true light.
The light has been there all along, a golden thread connecting us to our true Home inside. This golden thread connects us to the buried youngest parts, if only we have the courage to dig deep. This is the place of the child dreamer, lighting up the dark within the treasure cave of our hearts. This is the little one who knew who we were, what we believed, and what we wanted, before the world tried to show us ourselves.
Only by losing sight of it all, and being tossed into the sea of our own storms, are we able to emerge knowing, like Dorothy, that the answer was in us all along the way. Once she discovered her own powers within her all along, Dorothy’s black and white world became technicolor-a living, breathing rainbow world. You, like Dorothy, my friend, have had it in you all along. From the inner heartscape of my walls to yours, from my tiny vantage point in this upside-down world to yours, I say to you: welcome Home.