Vibrant Jung Thing: Jungian Images and Reflections

The Symbolic Power of Home, Part 1: Michaelle Jean

2010-03-16T14:52:53-04:00

I think that many Canadians' imagination and empathy has been caught by news stories of our Governor General, Michaelle Jean, who has been in the news here quite a bit this week.

Her Excellency is herself a native of Haiti who came to Canada at age 11 in 1968. In the last few days, she has returned to her homeland in the wake of the devastation, as an emissary of hope and solidarity.

Michaelle Jean has been both very strong, and also very apparently in grief over the loss of human life and destruction in her homeland of Haiti and her home town of Jacmel. It is very clear how moved she has been, even shaken to the core. Yet in the midst of that she has delivered a clear and unshaken message of hope for the future. Clearly she is a very remarkable woman.

Her experiences should cause us to stop and reflect. It is hard for those of us who have not been through such an experience to imagine what it would be like to see one's home, the place from which one sprang, facing such devastation, to face the death of many whom one has loved, and to see the places of one's youth endure such damage.

Horrific as these experiences are, they teach us an incredible amount about the psychological significance of home... to ourselves -- and to every human. It is the nature of human beings that we need a place to belong, a place that is fundamentally ours, where there are others to whom we are bound by ties that never break. The very bond with the land where we come into being is a very powerful one. The place that brings us to life marks us, shapes us, never truly lets us go.

Modern people tend to downplay the importance of place, and to feel that one country, one city, one house is interchangeable with another. This is particularly so in suburban places, like Oakville, Burlington or Mississauga. Here we often tend to think in terms of houses and the land they are located on as badges of particular social status or as arrangements of convenience, rather than as a fundamental reality that touches us in the deepest places in our being, in what we might very well call our soul. But increasingly, environmental psychology is demonstrating to us the unshakeable importance of place.

This is a matter of particular psychological importance for nations like Canada, the United States and Australia, which are predominantly immigrant cultures, or particularly mobile. The immigrant retains a psychological bond to the soil that brought him or her to life. That bond is not easily broken, and may be a matter of great personal significance to the individual. To come to terms with that bond, and to come to terms with the particular character of the new homeland may be a major piece of psychological work.

For Jungians, there is another dimension, also, to the symbolism of home, and that is an archetypal dimension. For the deepest and true home of all of us is the Self, the core of our being. Ultimately, it is only by connecting with one's true identity and the unique reality that each of us is, that we can really come to feel at home in the world, and in our lives.

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections on the archetype of home. What does the symbol of "home" mean in your life? Where is home for you, a place that you associate with your own fundamental identity?

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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PHOTO CREDIT: © Konstantin32 |Dreamstime.com

VIDEO CREDIT: © 'A' Morning Video, 2010 | http://www.atc.ca/ottawa

Women, Men and Marilyn Monroe

2010-03-07T21:21:28-05:00

Few people have gripped the imagination of popular culture in the era since World War II like Marilyn Monroe. An iconic and fateful figure for both women and men. A figure combining elements of both the erotic goddess and the cautionary tale. Her story is disturbing. In some important sense, she will not leave us alone.

A recent book, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli sheds light on the last period before her death at age 36 in 1962. However, a CBC network television program, The Passionate Eye last fall aired an even more informative documentary, Marilyn: The Last Sessions , which described the last sessions that Monroe had with her psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson. This psychiatrist allegedly engaged in a wide range of boundary-violating behaviour, including seeing Marilyn twice a day, and involving her in his family life. I wonder whether Greenson did not himself fall under the spell of the archetypal child-woman symbology that our culture had already imbued on Monroe.

Even today, Marilyn Monroe is an unbelievably powerful symbolic figure -- for both men and women, and on all kinds of levels. In her persona and public image, Marilyn represents a female figure who is essentially conformed to the will of men. In her whole bearing, in her breathy-voiced, man-pleasing manner, she represents a very powerful manifestation of the "anima woman", a woman who is so permeated on the unconscious level by her need to conform herself to the inner image of woman in male fantasy that it takes over her entire outer presentation. A woman who lives out her entire life in this mode is very often headed for a tragic outcome. Such seems to have been the fate of Marilyn, the fatherless girl who so deeply yearned for male approval and love.

Marilyn is clearly a powerful image of male-dominated womanhood, and is a tragic figure for women. What is not so often seen is how destructive a figure she can represent for a man, if she embodies a man's "anima", which is to say that receptive dimension of a man that enables him to relate to women and the feminine. How could a man dominated by such an image really have anything but contempt for his own receptive, feeling "feminine" dimension? Or anything but pity or contempt for the real women who occupy his life -- if he sees them through the image of Marilyn, the child-woman?

Is the Marilyn Monroe type of feminity the only way in which our society or individuals in it can access the feminine? If it is through "Marilyn lenses" that we view the world, how can we have any feeling connection to the feminine parts of reality -- nature, the earth, our own feeling and relational dimensions, even those parts of ourselves that are receptive, gentle and creative? If feminity can only be imaged as an absence of the masculine and its strength, then we are doomed to perceive only half of the world.

Our culture is desperately yearning for the healing that the feminine can bring, but that healing is nowhere to be found in the tragic symbology of the female pushed into a mold created by the male. In his 1975 film based on the "rock opera" Tommy by The Who, avant-garde film director Ken Russell captured our dilemma with a certain bizarre eloquence..."You talk about your woman..."

Tommy - "Eyesight to the Blind"

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections on Marilyn Monroe specifically, and, more generally on the place of femininity in our culture. How has the way our culture treats the feminine impacted you? I think that this is a very important matter, and I'd very much like to share with you about your views.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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PHOTO CREDIT: © Konstantin32 |Dreamstime.com

FILM CREDIT: "Tommy", Directed by Ken Russell, © Columbia Pictures, 1975

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Here in the Middle Years of Life: Is That All There Is?

2010-02-28T21:00:31-05:00

The great jazz artist Peggy Lee performed the following beautiful, highly disturbing yet haunting song in 1969, at midlife, in her 50th year:

I doubt that questions get much more real than those in this song. And the question that Peggy Lee sings about here is of the type, that, for many people, can become achingly urgent at the middle of life.

For many people, especially in our tumultuous times, the middle years of life can come to feel like an endless process of coping with chaos. It can feel like life has become a time of just responding to one crisis after another: issues with maturing children, issues with the health of parents; job issues; issues of financial security. At times, life can come to seem endlessly wearying, and very much as if there is nothing to it, but "just going through the motions". From such a place, for very many people, there can come a deep heartfelt cry: "Is this really all that there is to my life? Is this all that I get?"

This moment, the moment of this question, is highly important in the life of the individual. This is true, even especially true, if the time when this question arises is filled with depression, anxiety -- even despair.

From experience with clients, I can almost guarantee that there will be no canned, pre-packaged answer to this question that will slake the desperate thirst of those who ask such a question. Only an answer rooted in the individual's life will bring any peace, any hope, any meaning -- any sense of value.

By an individual answer, I mean one that emerges from the very depths of the individual. Not something that the individual's intellect or conscious mind has cobbled together, but something that emerges from the very depths of the person, from what they most fundamentally are. Something to which they can say "Yes!" with their whole being.

It is the task of good therapy (and of Jungian analysis) to assist the individual in finding the symbolic dimension that conveys meaning, to find the deep story or myth of an individual's life. There are many in suburban places like Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga for whom the question "Is that all there is?" has become urgently real. I invite you to enter into the therapeutic journey inward, to find your own inner treasure.

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections from readers. Have you had the experience of wondering in this way "is that all there is"? How has that question affected your life? If you were willing to share this important and personal part of your life, I'd be deeply interested to dialogue with you.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Beyond Cookie-Cutter Psychotherapy

2010-02-22T21:15:00-05:00

In recent years, there have been certain strong and notable trends emerging in the field of psychotherapy. Some have been very valuable, but some, unfortunately, have not been for the better.

In many cases what's on offer doesn't seem to be anything that really helps people deal with their own personal uniqueness, or the individuality of their lives. Nothing that really helps people to truly feel at home and alive within their own skin.

For instance, cognitive behavioural therapy [CBT] undoubtedly has some aspects that render it useful. By attempting to change peoples' thought patterns, it does offer a very valid tool for people caught in obsessive thought patterns, or patterns of behaviour, for instance. The relief that it provides in this way can be of great benefit to many people. Yet, in my clinical experience, many people who go through a course of such therapy are left with the feeling that, at the end of it, there is something important missing.

I believe that this is because of the emphasis in CBT on purely rational thinking. There is an underlying belief in CBT that all that is really significant is the conscious mind, and that, if only the individual can be trained to think about their life situations in a reasonable, rational way, then everything will be OK.

But not everything in human life is purely rational. In fact, if rationality were all that we had in human life, our lives would seem dramatically impoverished. For instance, consider the following.

If you have ever been in love with someone, is the manner in which you look at them and think about them purely rational? If you did look at them that way, thinking about that person as just a purely biological entity, for instance, a primate of the species homo sapiens composed of various amounts of certain organic compounds, which interact in various complex ways, would you still be able to love them? I think that it is likely that you would not.

Similarly, are you really capable of looking at yourself that way? As a bundle of chemicals, and metabolic and neural impulses? Or as something that is like a variant of your laptop computer? I think that it is much more likely that you look at yourself as a person, as a whole.

Attempts to reduce human persons to bundles of physical processes are nothing new in philosophy and psychology, or for that matter in medicine. They have been going on for hundreds of years. A famous example, which many people find quite chilling is found in the 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner.

Skinner advocates that decision-makers move beyond "outmoded" ideas of human personhood to govern the world with a sophisticated combination of classical and operant conditioning that would supersede such "obsolete" notions as viewing humans as free and autonomous agents and as having human dignity. Thinkers like Skinner are very often trying to reduce human persons to something more understandable and manageable, but they never quite seem to be able to capture the essence of what it is to be human.

In addition, please consider the whole added dimension of the human unconscious. Here is an entire realm of human existence that is never going to be reduced to simplistic notions of goal-directed rationality. And it is in the symbolic material that emerges from the unconscious, found in the realms of art, literature, mythology, and religious expression that the deepest and profoundest expressions of what it is to be human are found. Can these dimensions of life be reduced to causal and rational explanations? Not really. You can try, of course, but only at a terrible cost: the price to be paid is that our very humanity goes missing.

In the words of the famous poet of the self, Walt Whitman, "Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul." When it comes to therapy, it's essential to find a mode of therapy that honours the richness and intricacy of your own deepest being...

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections from readers. Have you had experiences of therapy that really honoured your uniqueness, your freedom and your dignity? On the other hand, have you experienced forms of therapy that have not done so? I'd be very interested to dialogue with you about this important subject.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Between Childrens' and Parents' Needs: the Generational Anxiety Sandwich

2010-02-15T18:21:36-05:00

In this post, I would like to write about something that may have a sense of "taboo" about it.

For many of us in the present day world, a powerful struggle goes on in our middle years. There are greater and greater demands on our personal reserves of compassion, empathy, time, energy and money. These resources are streaming out in two directions, both towards our children, and also towards our parents, and possibly other aging relatives, who are living to a greater age than ever they have in the past.

As many people in their middle years try to meet the needs of the younger and older generations, they find themselves nearly impossibly stretched.

In such a climate, it can feel almost impossible to meet the needs of others. In addition, many people end up feeling like callous ingrates if they give any consideration to their own needs as people. "How can I consider myself?" one often hears people in this position say, "My parents gave me so much. I owe them so much--everything!"

The really difficult thing is when the inner complex gives such guilting messages to an adult child, when the parents have actually not been kind or supportive to their children. I experience this as a very frequent occurrence in my practice. Many times, people who have been seriously emotionally or physically neglected by their parents -- or worse -- are the very people who respond in the most dutiful and self sacrificing manner.

And then again, it is often those same people, dutiful to their parents, who turn around and are completely self-sacrificing to their children. And sometimes those children can be every bit as demanding unreasonable and narcissistic toward their parents as their grandparents are toward them. And often that same mass of guilt and obligation that whips these people into unreasonably self-denying behaviour toward their parents will do the same when it comes to their children.

The particular psychological forces that bring this about are as individual as the people involved in the situation. Very often, in dealing with these situations, healthy ordinary people need therapy to get to the root of the problem, and to free themselves from the crushing guilt. Guilt can be an extremely powerful emotion and motivator, and it is often necessary to confront it in the safe environment of therapy to be able to remove its power.

The other hugely difficult component of these intergenerational binds is that they often lead to enormous amounts of anxiety. This can prove as difficult, if not more so, than the guilt. However, what I am going to say next about that guilt may prove surprising, even shocking!

Which is, that it may actually be quite a good thing that the individual is experiencing the guilt! "Wow, Brian" you might be thinking, "what a horrible thing to say! ...Speaking of callous!... How can you possibly wish anxiety on already-burdened people?"

Now, I don't wish anyone unnecessary pain, and, all other things being equal, I would wish that no one would have to deal with excessive anxiety. But in a situation like this, I believe that it is often the case that the anxiety has a psychological purpose. Simply put, the intense anxiety makes us aware that there is a conflict, and that the status quo is simply untenable for the individual.

It may be that the guilt is intense for such a person, but the anxiety shows us that there is tension, that the needs of the self are not willing to just continue being put on the shelf and denied. The complex of guilt and obligation within us may spur us on to utterly altruistic self-destruction...but that complex is not all that there is to us. There is the part of us that recognizes that the purpose of human life is to become the person who is latent within us, that that is why we are here in this life. That part will allow us to make some compromises, but it will not allow us to completely sell ourselves out -- not without our paying a very dire, wrenching psychological price.

It's easy for many people to feel a strong impetus to self-sacrifice, but, psychologically speaking, it's important to realize that there may be very real limits to the degree to which we can put our own needs on one side to care for and meet the needs of others.

This awareness might lead us to face an even more fundamental questions like, "How do I begin to live my own real life?" and "What is meaningful to me?" These questions takes us to the very heart of Jungian analysis, and true depth psychotherapy.

I'd gratefully welcome comments from readers on these issues, which affect very many of us. How have you experienced the "generational sandwich"?.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Does February Bring Any GIfts?

2010-01-31T19:33:20-05:00

"April is the cruelest month" wrote the poet T.S. Eliot. When I first read that line as a teenager, my thought was, "Obviously, this poet wasn't a Canadian!"

Anyone who has consistently lived through winters in places like Oakville, Mississauga or Burlington will probably tell you that "the cruelest month" is either January or February. I suspect that many would vote for February.

For many people, February can seem very bleak. The year-end holidays are far behind us. There is no major holiday to lighten our hearts, although we do now have "Family Day". Snow or brutal cold --this year we have little of the former and plenty of the latter--can turn trips out into an ordeal. The days are lengthening, it's true, but, at least in our part of the world, long strings of overcast days lead many people to feel starved for sunlight.

Does February bring us any gifts? How could it?...

One of the most difficult aspects of this time of the year can be that we tend to feel shut in, and shut up with ourselves. This can mean that we are left with what I often term the fundamental question of ourselves. That is, with how to be who we are and feel good about it. How to actively accept and cherish our lives, rather than just seeing ourselves as "one in a million".

Many of the things into which we pour our energy at other times of the year are just not available now. Our response to that can be to curse the luck and hang on grimly until spring. Or, we could use the time to really encounter ourselves.

Here are some things that might be helpful to think about at this time. They've proved valuable to me, so I leave them with you for your consideration:

Have you ever told yourself the story of your own life? To sit down and actually write your own life story can be a truly revelatory thing to do.

Have you ever thought about what the happiest time in your life was? Have you ever thought about what was the saddest?

Who are the three most significant people that you have encountered in your life, other than parents or siblings. Why are they important to you? What does that tell you about yourself?

In what do you put your faith? This might be a formal religious belief, or a personal spirituality or philosophy, or it might be something quite different. What you fundamentally value can tell you a tremendous amount about who you fundamentally are.

It may be that, as you live with these questions, they take on a fundamental importance that leads you to want to explore new dimensions of yourself, with someone "on your side" to witness your journey. Certainly that was my experience, and that is what initially led me into psychotherapy and Jungian analysis.

I'd welcome comments below from readers on how any of these thoughts relates to your lives at this time of year.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Identity and Anxiety in the Film, "Up In the Air"

2010-01-22T07:15:00-05:00

Make no mistake, moving is living. -Ryan Bingham

"Up in the Air", directed by Jason Reitman, stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. Clooney's character Ryan Bingham is a full-time corporate down-sizer whose life consists of an endless stream of business travel ("322 days last year"). He moves from place to place, letting people go from corporate roles when their employers cannot stomach doing it. He has no permanent attachments to people, a desolate and hollow single bedroom apartment he never sleeps in, and he has accumulated 10,000,000 airmiles...

Up In the Air Official Website

Ryan Bingham's life is in airports and hotel rooms and is filled with constant movement. The stability and security in his life, his secure base, is found precisely in those things that others find impermanent and impersonal. His finely orchestrated and choreographed travel routine, his mechanized method of moving constantly from place to place gives him re-assurance, and in an odd way a sense of belonging. Which is good, because Ryan has no permanent connections to anyone in his life.

Ryan also has a budding career as an motivational speaker. His message: "Make no mistake: your relationships are the heaviest components in your life.... The slower we move, the faster we die."

Ryan is completely identified with his corporate role. His aircraft-bound life is an appropriate symbol of his existence on a deeper level. In the terms of Jungian psychology, Ryan, like Christopher McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild is a true puer aeternus ("eternal boy"). He floats above life in his social self, and never puts down roots into the deep soil of his genuine self. And he is danger of discovering that his life is tragic because there he has no remaining way to turn back.

In its own way, this is a very disturbing and provocative film, but it's a very good one. It raises the question for each of us about how connected we're willing to be to the real substance of our lives.

I'd welcome comments below from readers on anxiety, identity and work.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Seeking for Depth

2010-01-18T07:00:00-05:00

In recent years, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on what are called "brief psychotherapies" by the therapeutic profession.

The emphasis has been on providing very short courses of psychotherapy to individuals, with an eye to providing concrete definable "results" with respect to narrowly defined issues. In large part, the movement to this type of therapy has been driven by pressure from insurance providers, who have sought to keep costs down by focusing on achieving measurable progress on specific, very focused issues. By keeping therapy short, the inscos hoped to return people who are off work back to the workplace in the shortest feasible time that is compatible with the safety of the client.

It may well be that the brief therapies and "solution-focused" therapies are quite successful in acheiving their defined goals. However, that is not the point that I want to pick up in this particular post. Rather, I want to ask a bigger and more fundamental question, which is implicit in the following quotation from Jungian analyst Mario Jacoby:

...any psychotherapy founded on depth psychology should focus above all on the question of who we really are above and beyond the distortions provoked by the way we were brought up or by the society we live in. Becoming conscious ultimately involves an unbiased experience of the 'true self'. The self in the Jungian sense is rooted in the unfathomable domain that has rightly been termed the unconscious.

Mario Jacobi, Individuation and Narcissism,

(London; Routledge, 1990), p. 96

The type of psychotherapy Jacobi is describing is rooted in fundamental questions of depth. The question that forms its basis is, quite simply, "Who are you?" It does not accept any glib or shallow answer. It also recognizes that who we fundamentally are is something that we will never be able to just size up intellectually. It's much deeper than that -- a matter that we can only experience, and never exhaust.

While brief therapies may provide concrete value, there is a whole other level upon which we need to encounter ourselves, and there be healed. For many people, it is that deeper level where the need is urgent.

I'd welcome comments from any readers on experiences of their own depth, in therapy or outside of it. Are there moments when you feel that you have really experienced yourself?

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Exploring Liber Novis: Jung's Red Book

2010-01-15T08:00:00-05:00

It has been some months now since the publication of Carl Jung's famed Red Book, the book of images and text that he wrote during his formative crisis and encounter with the unconscious during the years 1913-1919. I've had a copy of the Red Book for some time now, and have been exploring its richness in some depth. This voyage of exploration will go on for a very long time, I expect. To really plumb the depths of the Red Book is a feat not lightly or easily achieved.

In my opinion, the Red Book shows the true genius of Carl Jung. There cannot have been many human beings who have had the courage to enter in so deeply into their inner lives as he, and to really confront the unconscious in all its dimensions. Through years of inner crisis he sought to understand the depths of the Self.

Jung emerges from this inner journey with a clear message: there are forces in the unconscious that are seeking to bring us to wholeness; there is a wisdom in our depths that the ego can only just barely start to comprehend. If we can have the courage to let go, and to open ourselves to our depths, there is a unique life in each of us, that is striving to become, and always has been. This is not an easy journey, and it is not one about which glib and facile things should be said. But for some, it is only by embarking on this inner journey that reality, life and meaning can be found.

Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.

-C.G. Jung

Chief Curator of the Rubin Museum of Art Martin Brauen, left, and Felix Walder, right, the great-grandson of Carl Jung, inspect Carl Jung’s famous “Red Book” after it’s arrival at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009. “The Red Book,” was displayed to the public at the Ruben for the first time on October 7, coinciding with the first-ever publication of the book by W.W. Norton & Company. (AP Photo/Rubin Museum of Art, Stuart Ramson)

Jung's Red Book has now been published by W.W. Norton & Company. It is a major source for Jungian psychology, and a book that contains many of the treasures of the soul of Carl Jung. Here is the URL for the Red Book's page on Amazon.ca:

http://bit.ly/5Lr5hu

I'd be interested in comments from any readers about your encounter with the Red Book, or with any of Jung's other works. How have Jung's writings impacted you?

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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Job, Identity, Anxiety

2010-01-13T08:30:00-05:00

I don't know what might motivate an employer to choose to lay people off 3 weeks before Christmas. However, judging from the calls I received from clients and potential clients prior to the New Year, there were quite a few employers who took such action this year.

Having been on the receiving end of such news myself in prior times, my thoughts and very best wishes are with anyone who had to confront that reality this holiday season. Here's to better times and a better job market for all.

This is difficult for people all on its own -- just dealing with the economics of job loss. However, when it's compounded by issues of identity and self-worth, it can become incredibly painful, to the point where it is almost unbearable.

It's all too easy for all of us to allow our identity to become completely bound up with our social role and with others' expectations of us, especially where work is concerned. In his writings, Jung warned incessantly of the dangers of becoming over-identified with the social self, the "persona" as he called it.

Today, for many people, the pace of work simply increases and increases as organizations make new demands on their employees. More and more consideration, energy and time is demanded by the workplace, and, for many, there is intense and endless anxiety about work, about whether one's job is stable and sustainable, about relentless change, and often about the endless political complexities of workplaces where resources are scarce and communication and leadership are inadequate for the task at hand.

You might think that these factors would lead individuals to be less and less identified with work, but in an odd way, the effect seems often to be just the reverse. Even though work is fraught with anxiety, people become strangely identified with their work role. Perhaps it's precisely because so much effort has to be put into keeping working life on an even keel, and so much worry and anxiety keep pulling individuals back to confronting their work.

However, it's essential for each of us to hold on to the realization that I am not identical with my work role. Don't allow work to consume the substance of your life.

Easy to say, but doing it is often not as simple as that. Often it is not just the identity at work that confines us. It can be just as much about the way that we are perceived in various social settings, and in the community at large, through our work roles, as it were. Very many of us are powerfully addicted to the drug of success. Or, perhaps more accurately, we are highly invested in being seen as a success, perhaps to such an extent that all of our self-esteem and self-respect is riding upon it.

This gives rise to some fundamental questions:

What really is it for me to be a success? How will I know when I get there?
Who gets to say whether I'm a success? Me, or some outside authority to which I've given the power to say whether I've made it or not?
Is it what I own that makes me a success, or is it what I am?
And simply, am I over-identified with my work role? How do I understand myself independent of it?

Don't let your work keep you from your life. Don't let it persuade you that it is your life. Don't let it keep you from your vocation, what it is that you are really meant to be and do.

I'd be interested in your comments about how you experience work, and how you understand yourself and your identity independent of your job, and, as always, any other comments that you might have.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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