Joseph Kreydt

Tag: psychology

  • Gods, Demons, and People with Faces

    Gods, Demons, and People with Faces

    WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR TILL WE HAVE FACES BY C.S. LEWIS

    I read, as part of a book club, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. As I read, I was reminded of a very different book I’d read for a book club a couple years before: Rene Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. In both of these, I am reminded of grief, the irrational facts of experience, the importance of forgiveness, and a couple mental health practices.

    In chapter eight of Till We Have Faces, the narrator-protagonist’s beloved sister, Psyche, is taken as a human sacrifice to her village’s goddess. The narrator-protagonist, Orual, felt tremendous grief, and C.S. Lewis wrote it with incredible precision.

    For many days after [Psyche was taken away] I was sick, and most of them I do not remember. I was not in my right mind, and slept (they tell me) not at all. My ravings—what I can recall of them—were a ceaseless torture of tangled diversity, yet also of sameness. Everything changed into something else before you could understand it, yet the new thing always stabbed you in the very same place. One thread ran through all the delusions. Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one. And now, finding me heart-shattered for Psyche’s sake, they made it the common burden of all my fantasies that Psyche was my greatest enemy. All my sense of intolerable wrong was directed against her. It was she who hated me; it was on her that I wanted to be revenged. Sometimes she and Redival and I were all children together, and then Psyche and Redival would drive me away and put me out of the game and stand with their arms linked laughing at me. Sometimes I was beautiful and had a lover who looked (absurdly) a little like poor, eunuch’d Tarin or a little like Bardia (I suppose because his was the last man’s face, almost, that I had seen before I fell ill). But on the very threshold of the bridal chamber, or from the very bedside, Psyche, wigged and masked and no bigger than my forearm, would lead him away with one finger. And when they got to the door they would turn round and mock and point at me. But these were the clearest visions. More often it was all confused and dim—Psyche throwing me down high precipices, Psyche (now very like the King, but still Psyche) kicking me and dragging me by the hair, Psyche with a torch or a sword or a whip pursuing me over vast swamps and dark mountains—I running to save my life. But always wrong, hatred, mockery, and my determination to be avenged.

    The beginning of my recovery was when the visions ceased and left behind them only a settled sense of some great injury that Psyche had done me, though I could not gather my wits to think what it was. They say I lay for hours saying, “Cruel girl. Cruel Psyche. Her heart is of stone.” And soon I was in my right mind again and knew how I loved her and that she had never willingly done me any wrong, though it hurt me somewhat that she should have found time, at our last meeting of all, talking so little of me, to talk so much about the god of the Mountain, and the King, and the Fox, and Redival, and even Bardia.

    Soon after that I was aware of a pleasant noise that had already been going on a long time.

    ”What is it?” I asked (and was astonished at the weak croak of my voice).

    ”What is what, child?” said the voice of the Fox; and I knew somehow that he had been sitting by my bed for many hours.

    ”The noise, Grandfather. Above our heads.”

    ”That is the rain, dear,” he said. “Give thanks to Zeus for that and for your own recovery. And I—but you must sleep again. And drink this first.” I saw the tears on his face as he gave me the cup.”

    Gods or Biases

    Isn’t it strange that Orual projected all of her anger, about the victimization of her sister, onto the victim, her sister? Perhaps that strangeness is why humans blamed such things on gods. Perhaps they truly are caused by gods.

    These days, we use psychological terms like projection and cognitive bias and splitting to describe Orual’s irrational thoughts and feelings. Whether they’re gods or biases, they’re part of our humanness. It is clear that we are not entirely rational beings. That irrationality can serve a good purpose, but it can also serve evil.

    Scapegoats and Sacrifice

    The polymath philosopher, Rene Girard, posited that every culture is born out of sacrificial offerings. To put it briefly, human relations become tense when shared resources become limited. That tension builds up until, finally, the group (that seemingly single-minded entity that is a crowd of people) spontaneously chooses a scapegoat. The scapegoat might be an actual goat, or another animal, or it might be a human being. It’s usually something that has blood. The tension that has built up between members of the group is, almost magically, released when murder is committed. That is the function of the scapegoat, to take all of the tension upon itself, releasing it from everyone else in the group.

    It’s strange enough that this actually works (it actually resolves terrible societal problems), and that it has been practiced in almost every culture in human history, but to add to the strangeness, the crowd experiences a common hallucination. The scapegoat becomes the scapegoat when the crowd sees them as a monster, or something less-than-human. Then, after the murder or scapegoating occurs, the victim is often venerated as a god or goddess, something more-than-human. Girard claims that every god and goddess was actually, at one point, a sacrificial victim.

    That’s exactly what happened in the beginning of Till We Have Faces. Psyche was first seen as beautiful, and people started believing her touch could heal them. But then, a plague came over the land, and people started blaming Psyche’s touch for spreading the plague. The plague, along with famine, generated tension among the people. That tension needed somewhere to go. Psyche, who was seen as more and/or less than human, became the scapegoat.

    This strange dance of perceiving a person as a god and then a demon and then a god, and so on, can be seen in individuals as well.

    Splitting, Scapegoating, Not Seeing

    Orual’s relationship with Psyche mirrored the arc of the villagers. In the beginning, Orual’s love for Psyche was something akin to worship. She said, “I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.”

    But, after Psyche was taken away, Orual stopped seeing her as perfectly good and, instead, saw her as a perfect enemy.

    In many mental illnesses, like Borderline Personality Disorder and depression, but also in mentally healthy people in situations that are highly stressful or emotional, psychologists have identified a common cognitive bias they call splitting.

    Splitting is a useful mental tool, often a defense mechanism. The person who is splitting sees another person or situation as entirely good or entirely bad; entirely one thing or another. They become blind to complex, nuanced realities. They see only gods and demons. In a stressful relationship, for example, one person might see the other as perfect for a while, and then, all of a sudden, they see the other as pure evil.

    By seeing someone as only good or only evil, they defend themselves from the uncomfortable, conflicting emotions of a relationship between two flawed human beings.

    To put it simply, if I see my ex-girlfriend as a demon rather than a human, it’s easy for me to write her off and not have to look too closely at the painful emotions and experiences around the relationship.

    It looks a lot like what Orual was doing in her grief over the loss of Psyche. She couldn’t handle the irrational fact of experience that our dearest loved ones can be taken from us in an instant, so she turned her dearest loved one into an enemy instead. It makes more sense for an enemy to be taken. It’s more bearable that way.

    Here, I want to be careful not to vilify splitting, or other cognitive biases. They are never entirely good or evil themselves. Splitting can be extremely beneficial and even necessary. The crazy thing about scapegoating is that it actually works. It actually resolves the weird psychic-plagues that groups of people experience. And in Orual’s case, by splitting, she could shelve certain feelings about the loss of her sister, perhaps so she could work through them slowly or one at a time.

    She couldn’t handle loving her sister while she grieved, so she didn’t. But when the time was right, the splitting needed to be seen through. It was good while it served a good purpose, but it ultimately prevented her from seeing with clarity. Like medicine, it treated the problem, but it also had its side effects.

    When Orual’s mind began to clear, she became aware of “a pleasant noise that had already been going on a long time.” The sound of rain on the rooftop was a beautiful part of life that she lost because she failed to see the true reality in front of her.

    Of course, we each need to come around to these things in our own time. But we must also be aware that, by seeing the world through cognitive biases, like splitting, we remain blind to many good things.

    Ultimately, and most tragically, splitting results in seeing another not as they are, a human being, but as something far greater or far less. That’s the only way scapegoating actually works.

    If a human sees another human as they are, as a human, then scapegoating and sacrificing cannot be justified because humans are not only incredibly complex and impossible to fully comprehend, but we are also children of God. We have a very particular and special element of consciousness within us. If we are aware that exists in another person, then murder can’t be justified. On the other hand, if we only see a monster or a demon, then murder makes perfect sense.

    As long as we fail to acknowledge that not everything in life makes sense, that is, as long as we cling to our cognitive biases to make sense of an often irrational reality, we must murder (even if only symbolically) and commit sacrifices to maintain that fragile notion of a sensible, fair world. There’s a beautiful innocence in the belief that everything can be made sense of, that every question can be answered, but it also reeks of blood.

    To be clear, the problem is not in believing that the world can make sense. Perhaps the world does make sense. There’s good evidence to suggest such a thing. The problem is in believing that we can make sense of the world. We are only human. We must live with mystery. If we fail to accept that, then we must offer blood sacrifices in order to uphold the illusion that we can make sense of it all.

    While surrendering our cognitive biases, once they’ve served their purpose, is essential for mental health, it is also an essential piece in how we view and treat others.

    Inquisitiveness and Mindfulness

    That leads me to the final piece of this essay, in which I would like to share two practices that cannot take grief away, but can offer moments of reprieve in the midst of it, can help us to suffer no deeper than is necessary, and can open us to seeing and accepting the humanity in others.

    First, going all the way back to chapter one in Till We Have Faces, we see this stoic-like Greek man, the Fox, who mentors Orual and her sisters. The Fox is like a grandfather to the sisters, but he isn’t related to them. In fact, he is a slave, taken in war, taken from his homeland, his community, and his family. He has every reason to be miserable, but he manages to keep his spirits up.

    Orual says this about the Fox:

    He had all sorts of sayings to cheer himself up with: “No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city,” and, “Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.” But I think what really kept him cheerful was his inquisitiveness. I never knew such a man for questions. He wanted to know everything about our country and language and ancestors and gods, and even our plants and flowers.

    What really kept him cheerful was his inquisitiveness. C.S. Lewis wrote that back in 1956, and psychologists have verified, time and again, that inquisitiveness is essential to mental wellness.

    In terms of cognitive biases, like splitting, a mindset of inquisitiveness enables one to ask questions without demanding answers (like why or how a person behaves the way they do) and come to an understanding that a person is rarely purely good or purely evil.

    In terms of life, inquisitiveness opens a person up to wonder and experiences of beauty, truth, and goodness. Those experiences nourish our souls. They give us reasons to keep going, to keep seeking.

    Long before C.S Lewis wrote Till We Have Faces, Saint Francis of Assisi said, “O Master grant that I may never seek so much…to be understood as to understand…Make me a channel of your peace.”

    Perhaps Orual could have used some of the Fox’s inquisitiveness, some of Saint Francis’s seeking, while she was grieving. She might have, at least, treated the spirit of Psyche more fairly if she had sought to understand her instead of labelling her. She might have noticed the rain a little sooner. And she might have found some ease even while she grieved.

    But in order to pause her ruminations long enough to be inquisitive, she might have needed a mental breather. The second mental health practice I want to mention is meant to provide that.

    Our instinctive minds are at ease when there is no immediate threat to our lives. When we can pull our minds out of our ruminations of the past or the future, we can experience the present moment. Rarely, in any given moment, are we in grave danger, and so by focusing on the present, we can give some ease to our minds.

    If Orual could have brought her mind to the sound of the rain, instead of waiting for her mind to stumble upon it, she might have had a moment or two of solace. In those moments, she might have sought understanding, instead of blindly blaming Psyche. A moment of clarity can work wonders.

    Yet, I think it was okay that Orual grieved and did not understand. I think she needed that for a while. The tragedy wasn’t that she saw through distorted lenses while she grieved. The tragedy was that she continued to see through distorted lenses long after she’d grieved, after the distortions no longer served a good purpose.

    Nonetheless, some reprieve can be found in releasing one’s thoughts of past or future, and grounding oneself in the present. For that, there is a well-documented grounding technique, often called the 5-4-3-2-1 Method, aimed at gaining that same clarity that Orual experienced when she noticed the rain.

    The technique reduces anxiety and rumination by grounding the person practicing it in the present moment. It’s very simple. Name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. By doing that, you anchor your mind in the present moment.

    Life doesn’t always make sense, but the present moment usually does. Most of the time, in our culture anyway, the present moment is a safe place. Perhaps by rooting ourselves there, and then taking an inquisitive approach toward life, we can give ourselves, and others, a lifeboat when things get hard.

    More than that, perhaps we can surrender old cognitive biases that no longer serve our God-given purpose, biases that not only make our own lives more difficult but might even lead to unnecessarily scapegoating and sacrificing other humans or animals. Maybe then, we can treat our loved ones more fairly.

    The Ultimate Scapegoat

    Maybe then we can see beyond gods and demons, to the one true God who made himself the ultimate scapegoat, the “pure victim, holy victim, spotless victim” who, rather than requiring a sacrifice, sacrificed himself to atone for all of our tensions and biases and sins.

    So often, when we see a flawed person, we label them so that our world makes sense. But humans are too complex to be made sense of. Labeling someone makes us blind to every part of who they are that doesn’t fit that label. This is tragic because humans are always a great deal more than any label other than their name.

    “The human being is always unique and unrepeatable, somebody thought of and chosen from eternity, somebody called and identified by his own name.”

    Saint John Paul II, Urbi et Orbi, December 25, 1978

    Christ points the way beyond labels and splitting and biases. We must see the flaws of others (like their own tendencies to split or label), and we must admit those flaws are not all they are. Those flaws are parts of a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. We must, as Christ did, see those flaws and make the self-sacrifices (sacrificing our comfortable view of a world that always makes sense) necessary to forgive them, to see the whole person beyond them.

    “Forgive them, they know not what they do.”

    Jesus Christ, after his crucifixion, before his death

  • Drawing for Mental Health

    Drawing for Mental Health

    I read a lot. A few books, maybe ten, have revealed something so helpful that I believe they actually improved my life. One of those books is an art book–not a self-help book, not a psychology book, not a philosophy book, not a theology book, an art book. The book is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I want to explain why I believe the method of drawing taught in the book is a powerful tool for mental wellness.

    In the field of Psychology, especially the Psychology of Mindfulness, researchers have identified two modes of the mind: being mode and doing mode. The mind is in doing mode when it is focused on accomplishing tasks, solving problems. It’s in being mode when it is focused on the experience of the present moment, not trying to accomplish or solve anything.

    Both modes have important functions, but in a culture hyper-focused on work, success, status, wealth, and power, the doing mode often dominates. A person can become so obsessed with identifying and solving problems that they forget to spend any time experiencing the present moment. Because of this, their mental health deteriorates, their life feels meaningless or painful. Keeping the mind constantly in doing mode is especially toxic when a problem cannot be immediately solved.

    When the doing mode mind encounters a problem that can’t be solved right away, it ruminates. It wants to keep thinking through possible scenarios and solutions over and over. This is very useful when there is a serious problem to solve and a person needs to find the most efficient and effective solution. But it can be detrimental if it starts identifying every little discrepancy or every little piece that’s slightly out of order as a serious problem.

    A person can become stuck in the excessive rumination of the doing mode. That certainly disrupts one’s sense of peace, but it can get even worse. It often manifests as neuroses like anxiety, obsessive-compulsion, ADHD, or even depression. It becomes a vicious cycle.

    Switching the mind into being mode can disrupt that cycle, giving the person a shift in perspective or at least a few moments of peace.

    Those moments of peace aren’t the only good thing about being mode. Being mode means experiencing the richness of the present moment. If reality is important, then experiencing the present moment is important. Living in the past is living in a memory, which is not the most realistic representation of an experience–memories become distorted and skewed. Living in the future is living in a prediction, which is not the most realistic representation either because the mind often makes unrealistic predictions.

    The most realistic experience we have is the present moment. Reality happens in the present moment. It’s good to experience it sometimes. As the wise Ferris Bueller famously said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Stopping and looking around is what the mind is doing when it’s in being mode.

    Getting the mind into being mode is one of the main goals of mindfulness training, and the evidence of its benefits for mental health keep stacking up–reductions in anxiety and depression, lower blood pressure, and improved sleep. But mindfulness training isn’t the only way to get the mind into being mode.

    The whole idea of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is to draw exactly what you see. To do that, you have to stop and look. You have to look intently. You have to notice the lines that separate parts of what you see, the angles of those lines, the distances between the lines, their colors, the colors within their bounds, the lightness and darkness of the colors, etc. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is about seeing what’s in front of you not as a symbol or a word (for example, beginning drawers often draw noses as triangles or eyes as circles) but as it actually is.

    Seeing things as they actually are can be difficult. The left side of the mind interprets what we see into symbols so that the mind doesn’t have to put so much energy into understanding what is happening, and instead can use that energy in doing mode, solving problems. The exercises in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain are designed to switch off the left side of the brain, allowing the right side to take the reigns.

    I believe that drawing this way, like practicing mindfulness, switches the mind into being mode. And the more one practices doing that, the more able they are to switch the mind into being mode on demand.

    Not every creative outlet can boast such positive mental health benefits. The massive number of artists with mental health issues is evidence of that. My own experience has been the same. I’ve been creative for almost my entire life, but I haven’t always been mentally healthy. Drawing with the right side of the brain, though, seems special. Not only does it get the mind focused on the present experience, it shows us that there are ways of being creative that can promote mental health.

    This is great news. For many of us, especially those of us who enjoy being creative, drawing is a fun way to exercise our mind’s being mode.

    The bad news is that sitting down to draw in the first place isn’t always easy. In a world so full of distractions, focusing on drawing what you see for a few minutes can be difficult. The benefits, though, are real. It means being able to experience life instead of getting lost in negative thoughts about what has happened or what might happen.

    I highly recommend giving Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a try. Just read a couple chapters and you’ll start to understand how to do it. Then, if it’s too hard to draw for fifteen minutes a day, start with five. After a while, your ability to focus your mind on the present moment will strengthen. And the benefits of doing that, of switching the mind into being mode, are numerous. The peace of a focused, present mind is just a couple drawings away.

  • How Imagination Can Heal Your Heart

    How Imagination Can Heal Your Heart

    Have you ever imagined something so vividly that it felt real? As a child, my imagination could make me feel awe—or send me into a spiral of fear.

    I’ve been blessed—and cursed—with an active imagination. I think it may be one of my most powerful traits. As a young child, I would imagine eternity. The effect was an eruption of awe and nausea. After a few years, I stopped allowing myself to imagine it because the feelings were overwhelming.

    Other times, I would create a panic in myself by imagining that the clank of a heater was a kidnapper climbing a ladder outside of my bedroom window or that some evil presence was about to burst into my basement. Or, full of enthusiasm, I would imagine myself pulling off new skateboard tricks on a halfpipe or owning my own ski resort.

    I am well-acquainted with the trials and tribulations of an active imagination. As I’ve grown and gained more control over this faculty, I’ve begun to wonder if it is more than just a tool for fantasy or daydreaming. Perhaps it can transform us. What if the mind could become a place of soothing and healing?

    The Immersive Power of Imagination

    Unlike ordinary thought, which might analyze or recall, imagination has the power to immerse. It’s a way of living an experience in one’s mind.

    Could it be possible to heal our inner wounds through this faculty? If emotional experiences wire the mind to expect the world a certain way, and we can create emotional experiences with our imagination, then can we use imagination to rewrite the patterns of fear, rejection, or despair that have shaped us?

    How Core Beliefs Are Formed

    In her book Learning Love, Attachment Theory expert Thais Gibson, PhD, states that “the subconscious mind [where one’s core beliefs are stored] is programmed through repetition and emotion. The relative proportions of these components affect the intensity of the program.”

    In other words, our core beliefs about ourselves, about the world, about whether or not we will succeed in life, etc., become our core beliefs through repetitive emotional experiences.

    For example, if I get bit by a dog, I will probably have a strong emotional reaction—I’ll be angry at the dog—but it probably won’t change my core beliefs. I probably won’t start believing, deep down, that dogs are evil or out to get me. However, if I get bit by dogs many times, and experience a strong emotional reaction each time, it’s very likely that those experiences will shape my deeply held beliefs about dogs. I will believe they often attack, that being around an unleashed dog is very dangerous, etc. On an even deeper level, I may start to believe things like, “I am unsafe when I leave my home.”

    Core beliefs are tricky. A core belief isn’t just something I say out loud, like, “yeah, I’d agree with that.” Core beliefs run deep. They shape our perceptions, emotional responses, and behaviors. I might not even be thinking about a dog, but as soon as I sense one is near, my shoulders might tense and my heart might start beating faster. I may not even realize that the dog is the reason for it. That is the nature of core beliefs.

    Rewriting Core Beliefs

    But, according to Gibson, our core beliefs can be reprogrammed by repeatedly experiencing situations that disprove the belief, and the more emotional the experience is, the more impact it will have on the core belief. Research on neuroplasticity supports this idea. We’re learning more and more that the brain is malleable, shaped by repeated experiences and thoughts.

    Even if we throw out the science—even if our core beliefs can’t be changed—I can tell you from my own experience that taking time to imagine positive outcomes is immediately rewarding.

    Reimagining a memory can bring back all of its emotions. Imagining a possibility can stir the heart as if it were real. This is the power of imagination—to create not just ideas, but experiences within the mind. And these experiences, when chosen wisely, may hold the key to healing.

    This understanding of core beliefs leads us to a fascinating possibility: if experiences shape our beliefs, then deliberately imagined experiences might reshape them too.

    Healing through Imagination

    As I read through Learning Love and put some of Gibson’s suggestions into practice, I found two of my own ways to imagine positive emotional experiences that have been particularly helpful in shifting my mood when I’m in the grips of negative thinking. I want to share them with you in hopes that they will help.

    Method 1: Music

    Music has a powerful emotional effect on me, and I just so happen to play guitar. So I wrote a song about a moment I remembered from years ago that disproved one of my own faulty core beliefs—a core belief that was hurting me rather than helping me. I can’t give you scientific proof, but singing that song felt amazing. I felt a real sense of relief from some shadowy oppression.

    Method 2: An AI Chatbot

    I often bounce ideas off of an AI chatbot. It has been incredibly useful in helping me to not only discover my faulty core beliefs but also to role-play experiences that disprove those beliefs. I often struggle with “I am rejected,” one of the core beliefs that Gibson lists in her book—a list she adopted from psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck’s research around core wounds.

    As a way of combatting this belief, I role-played a few experiences of acceptance where I might have normally expected rejection because of my faulty core belief. As I typed my replies in a mock conversation with the chatbot, I imagined the experience happening—the laughter, the eye contact, the excitement, the acceptance.

    Time will tell whether this practice leads to lasting change, but the immediate effects are undeniable. My mood is much lighter after imagining such an experience. Just as imagination once amplified my childhood fears, it can now amplify my capacity for healing and growth.

    A Challenge for You

    Now, you don’t need to be a musician or to use artificial intelligence to imagine positive experiences. I don’t think it really matters how you go about it. What matters is that you imagine details, creating a rich emotional experience. But I don’t want you to take my word for it.

    I challenge you to take five minutes today to immerse yourself in a positive imagined experience—one that brings gratitude, awe, or joy.

    I invite you to try this today. Take five minutes to imagine a moment that would fill you with joy, gratitude, or love. See how it feels.

    Perhaps this is what it means to be “transformed by the renewal of your mind.” When we heal our minds, we transform our hearts—and with that, we become forces of good in the world.

    “A good person brings forth good out of a store of goodness…”

    Matthew 12:35

  • The Life-Saving Power of Happy Memories

    The Life-Saving Power of Happy Memories

    A family friend once lost his son to suicide. When I saw him at a reunion a few months later, he wasn’t just surviving—he was living. Someone asked how he stayed so positive, and he said simply: “I focus on the good memories.”

    Sometimes people act happy even when they are suffering tremendous pain. But my friend didn’t seem to be acting. Maybe he’s just a good actor, or maybe there’s some real truth in his answer.

    What if happy memories aren’t just nostalgic but essential for our wellbeing? The Brothers Karamazov, Harry Potter, and psychological research, all suggest recalling a happy memory as a powerful tool.

    The final speech in The Brothers Karamazov may be my favorite scene in the entire 350,000 word novel. Alyosha, often seen as the novel’s spiritual heart, offers this wonderful piece of advice.

    “You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

    While The Brothers Karamazov suggests carrying a positive memory, Harry Potter illustrates its power. In The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry is attacked by Dementors. Professor Remus Lupin explains how these dark creatures work.

    “Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory, will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself – soulless and evil.”

    The best way for a person to break free from the hypnotic clutches of a Dementor is The Patronus Charm. The charm is cast with a chant that only works if the caster is focusing, with all their might, on a single happy memory.

    This idea of remembering positive experiences is also echoed in psychological research. Much like the Patronus protects Harry from the Dementors, recalling happy memories can reduce depression and dampen stress responses. One study found that recalling happy memories reduced depression in adolescents with a history of trauma. Another showed that such recall dampens the stress response. In this second study, researchers compared the use of happy memories to the use of neutral ones. The happy memories showed clear benefits over neutral ones.

    It looks like my friend was onto something. There is good evidence, in fiction and science, that focusing on happy memories comes with real benefits.

    I like to keep a memory of my grandfather handy for when I need a little boost. When he was nearing his death, my parents encouraged me to play guitar for him. I only knew a few basic chords at that point, but I managed to stumble through a couple of punk rock songs. To my surprise, my grandfather beamed with joy and praised my meager expressions. That memory, small yet sacred, is like a light that guides me through darkness. What about you? Is there a memory you hold onto that lights your way?

  • Our Bodies Are Not Just Avatars

    Our Bodies Are Not Just Avatars

  • A Catholic Man’s Thoughts on Carl Jung’s Ideas

    A Catholic Man’s Thoughts on Carl Jung’s Ideas

    On Jungian Shadow Work

    If you’re looking for mental health guidance, I highly recommend reading Jung, but in addition to or even before reading Jung, I recommend finding a therapist who can prescribe the right kind of therapy for your specific trouble. I personally have found Dialectical Behavioral Therapy along with Catholic Mindfulness practice to be extremely helpful. In addition, I have enjoyed Inner Child Work. It feels kind of wishy-washy to me, but it makes some sense and many people find it beneficial.

    Doing shadow work is okay, but it is like outdated medicine, in my opinion. It is like getting leeches to let blood to heal muscle pain. It’s what they used to do, but now there are better ways to treat muscle pain, like physical therapy or Aleve.

    That said, we should all strive to know ourselves, including the unconscious parts of ourselves, the things we do on autopilot, our shadows.

    The problem with shadow work is that it is dangerous and there are far easier and more effective ways to get to know our shadows and ourselves. These include science-based mindfulness practice, cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies, Catholic examination of conscience and confession, and journaling.

    I don’t have much else to say about shadow work. I have done it. I don’t regret doing it. But it was excruciating and I have since come to believe that there are better ways of discovering myself. I am a huge fan of both mindfulness practice and examination of conscience.

    Jung’s Influence on Mindfulness Practice

    Jung wrote of needing to accept the parts of ourselves that we see as evil. This is also an aspect of mindfulness practice.

    Release of shame was another great Jungian idea. In fact, this idea comes from something greater than man. Christ died on the cross in part to express that he, God, loves us in spite of our most shameful sins.

    Mindfulness is also concerned with seeing one’s automatic thoughts and breaking the chains they form. This aligns with Jung’s idea of looking at one’s unconscious self. When we can see those automatic/unconcious thoughts, we can transcend them and determine whether we should give them any merit or simply let them pass like a leaf in a stream.

    On Jungian Archetype Theory

    Archetypes, in my understanding, are rough personifications of virtues and vices. Take the book King Warrior Magician Lover for example.

    It discusses four, supposedly masculine, Jungian archetypes. Really, these are discussions of what the Catholic Church calls the cardinal virtues.

    The king archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of justice. The warrior archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of fortitude. The magician archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of prudence. The lover archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of temperance.

    The similarities are enough that I felt a little slighted after reading the book and finding that the authors never once mentioned the cardinal virtues. But maybe they came up with these archetypes independently of the virtues.

    The two shadow sides of each archetype presented in the book are simply the extremes to the mean. This idea aligns with Aristotelean ethics which states that each virtue is a “golden mean” between two extremes.

    The king’s shadow sides are the tyrant and the weakling. The tyrant is the excess of justice, overreaching. The weakling is the deficit of justice, allowing others to overreach, not setting or enforcing boundaries.

    The warrior’s shadow sides are the sadist and the masochist. The sadist is the excess of fortitude; over-ambition, presumptuousness, and stubbornness. The masochist is the deficit of fortitude, cowardice.

    “The Masochist projects Warrior energy onto others and causes a man to experience himself as powerless.”

    Moore and Gillette, King Warrior Magician Lover

    I will not beat a dead horse by expounding upon the extremes behind the magician and lover archetypes. It is clear that the archetypes align with the cardinal virtues. However, that does not diminish the value of the book or the archetypes.

    The reason archetypes are worth looking at, even though we already know about virtues, is that they give personified examples of the virtues, and they show how the virtues and vices overlap and interact. For example, the trickster archetype is primarily a personification of the vice of intemperance. In order to protect oneself from the manifestation of this archetype, one must exercise not only temperance but also prudence, and possibly several other virtues as well. The virtues interplay with one another, they lift one another up. The archetypes more fully express this by personifying the virtues.

    For this reason, study of the archetypes is not only interesting, but can also be useful. That said, I much prefer the writings of the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, who wrote about virtues and provided very good human examples of them, to the writings of Jung or his disciples. Additionally, I much prefer gaining knowledge of the archetypes by reading myths and good stories which happen to be more entertaining and often less confusing than a scholar’s analysis.

    The archetypes describe, by way of gods, the vices which can rule over us if we’re not careful. We must aim to the one true God, and then the virtues in us will be aligned to their golden means; the archetypes in us will mature to their ideal forms.

    Archetypes make great characters in stories and good heroes, but we must not forget that they are simplifications of true humans. They ignore the multitude of complexities in the human as individual. Nobody really fits an archetype or a documented personality (e.g. the Big Five/OCEAN profile), and humans are always changing and growing anyway, so to label someone with a trait or an archetype is to disregard a huge portion of their humanity.

    Jung’s Worst Idea, IMHO

    That brings me to my biggest disagreement with Jung, and the thing he gets tragically wrong: he sees God as an archetype rather than a living being. If God is merely an archetype, then I cannot find a good reason to go on living. If God is merely an archetype, then none of the archetypes have any meaning because the world is only meaningless matter.

    Jung’s Best Idea, IMHO

    Jung was often stating the importance of knowing oneself. We must know ourselves so that we are not doing things unconsciously. If we do something unconsciously, we can’t make a moral judgment about it, and if we can’t make a moral judgment about an action before we do it, we are liable to allow ourselves to commit evil actions.

    Moral judgment can also be clouded by things like anxiety, depression, and attachment. We must overcome our neuroses, which Jung indicates is possible, learn what we value, and envelop our lives in virtue. In order for any of this to happen, we must know ourselves.

    How Jung’s Ideas Finally Made Sense to Me

    Jung is very difficult to understand. His ideas are complex and build on top of one another. It is easy to misunderstand one, then understand several others based on that one, then realize you misunderstood the base one and subsequently misunderstand the others that are built on top of it.

    I exclusively read Jung and his disciples for quite some time. Through that, I began to understand his ideas, but I also spent a huge amount of time in thought, contemplating the ideas. Still, I couldn’t quite piece everything together. I started asking questions that I couldn’t find the answers to on Quora or reddit.com/r/Jung.

    I found there are tons of people out there who think they know what they’re talking about in regards to Jung’s ideas, but really they are fools who have only read a couple blog posts. Nonetheless, I did find a couple sensible minds out there who helped me a good deal.

    Finally, it was when I began reading ideas similar to Jung’s, but from people who likely didn’t even know of him, or from people who completely reworded his ideas into concepts of their own, that I started to understand his ideas on a new level.

    An example of the former is the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of Hitler’s greatest enemies. An example of the latter is the therapist and author, Jasmin Lee Cori. When I read their ideas and saw how they were similar to Jung’s, when I made those connections I really started to understand Jung’s ideas.

    The Best Outcome of My Own Shadow Work

    I think the best thing Jung and shadow work taught me was how fortunate I am to have not lived during a time like the Holocaust in the mid-1900s.

    Through introspecting my psyche and my actions, I realized my own inclination to value myself based on how others value me. This often lead me to seek acceptance from others above moral righteousness.

    Many times, I have sought acceptance instead of morality. If I had lived in Germany in the mid-1900s, I might have been a murderer in order to be accepted by my peers and neighbors. That is a terrifying thought and I gasp in relief that it is only a thought.