Tag Archives: Carl Jung

Embracing the Hanged Man: Lessons in Stillness

“The highest virtue does nothing; yet nothing needs to be done. The lowest virtue does everything; yet much remains to be done.”
—Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 38)

The Hanged Man tarot is an image of an archetype embodied throughout time. He hangs not by punishment, but by choice; note the ease his face embodies. One foot bound, the other free, his head illuminated in a quiet radiance of inversion. The Hanged Man does not fight the ropes, nor the cross he is upon. Seemingly, he yields, seeing that illumination only comes when perspective breaks. In the stillness of that surrender, the noise of the world falls away, and what remains is unbearable silence – the kind that reveals truth.

Our age, too, dangles upside down, though few may wholly comprehend or admit this. We call it progress, yet everything familiar feels inverted. Conviction, shame, and guilt have replaced curiosity; outrage masquerades as moral vision, and stillness is mistaken for weakness. We so often seek power over strength, forgetting that one conquers while the other endures. The collective ego writhes, demanding movement even though motion only tightens the noose upon our brittle necks. We have confused suspension with stagnation (or perhaps innovation and progress), forgetting that pause is the only doorway through which transformation enters.

One interpretation of the Hanged Man is that he symbolizes the alchemy of perspective. To hang is to see differently…not from the lofty gaze of superiority, but from the humility of inversion. When the world turns on its head, the false becomes obvious: the illusions of fear, the idols of certainty, the addictions to control, the misguided notion that perpetual ascent equals evolution. It is in falling, or rather being hanged, that we are invited to encounter reality without the masks we built merely to survive it.

Yet this surrender terrifies the modern psyche. We are taught to act, to fix, to do for others until the day we die. The incongruence of it all killing us long before we are even dead. When confronted with paradox, we reach for labels rather than silence. We want answers before any sincere question has ripened. We want redemption without crucifixion. To hang is to endure the unbearable middle: between death and rebirth, knowing and unknowing. It is a paramount stage that our culture has forgotten how to inhabit, yet one the soul requires to remain whole.

There is wisdom in reversal. The suspended figure reminds us that consciousness matures not by addition but by subtraction. Meaning is not created by collecting truths, but by letting false ones fall away. Yet our collective religion is productivity. We measure worth by movement and confuse noise with vitality. In such a climate, the act of hanging, of not participating in the frenzy, of stillness, becomes rebellion itself.

Jung wrote that “…there is no coming to consciousness without pain” (CW 17, Para 331). The Hanged Man embodies that axiom in image form: consciousness requires the unconscious ego’s crucifixion. The man who hangs is not destroyed; he is inverted, stripped of his illusions of mastery. He is humbled. His suffering is not passive; it is willful, a kind of offering to the deeper Self, because something must always be sacrificed in order to gain. What looks like helplessness from the outside is sacred discipline within.

Perhaps this is what our world fears most: stillness that exposes what the noise conceals. We fill the void with commentary and consumption, terrified that silence will show us what we have become. Yet silence is the only thing that can restore vision. The Hanged Man reminds us that salvation is not found in the clamor of certainty but in the humility to hang, to wait, and to eventually see again.

We keep banging our heads against what feels like a brick wall, until one day, we realize it was only drywall all along.

Suspension is not defeat; it is initiation. It is the psyche’s descent into the womb of transformation. The world hangs, as we all do on individual levels, in the liminal space between collapse and renewal. Whether we awaken or asphyxiate depends on whether we can stay in the tension long enough for meaning to emerge. To stay within the building that we hear creaking all around us, water pouring out from its crevasses, aware of its impending fall, is the ultimate test of the skill of stillness.

To hang willingly is to trust that the rope is not strangulation but tethering: a thin line between the false and the true. Perhaps, like the Hanged Man, we must surrender our obsession with being upright, good, and correct before we remember what it means to stand at all.

What, dear reader, might you see differently if you stopped struggling to stay upright?

“Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.”
—James Hollis (What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life)

The Myth of Janus

“Paradox…reflects a higher level of intellect and, by not forcibly representing the unknowable as known, gives a more faithful picture of the real state of affairs.”
—Carl G. Jung (Collected Works, vol. 11, para. 417)

Every breath is both a birth and a death. The myth of Janus embodies this concept: life is never one thing, but two faces staring in opposite directions. We are living, and we are dying, in the same breath. The Western mind often wants purity and finality. It wants ‘good’ without ‘evil’, healing without wounding, certainty without ambiguity. That fantasy collapses the human psyche into split halves. Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, refuses that split. He faces both directions at once, holding the key to wholeness. He is the patron of paradox.

The Janus Myth in Brief

Janus is Rome’s keeper of beginnings and passages. Doors, gates, city boundaries, marriages, births, departures, returns. January takes its name from him because a new year is a doorway. Ancient Rome pictured him with two faces: one looking back, one looking forward. He carries keys in many depictions, a reminder that he presides over the opening and the closing. The Temple of Janus stood in the Forum with doors that were kept open in times of war and closed in times of peace. Even Rome knew that the state of the doors told the truth about the soul of the city.

Janus is not a warrior, nor a lover, or trickster. He is a custodian of transitions. Where other gods dramatize a single domain, Janus embodies a relation. He is the god of ‘between’. And this ‘between’ is precisely what we as humans, fear most. We would rather be hot or cold, married or sworn off, saint or sinner, than endure the ambiguity of paradox. The in-between is a liminal space where our categories collapse. It is a space as terrifying as death itself.

To live here is to accept the entirety of the past with all its pain, and to accept the absolute unknown of the future. It is to admit that wars are often fought in the name of religions that promise heaven while wounding the innocent deemed ‘other’. It is to face the paradox that in the same breath we may long to heal everyone and secretly hope for absolute destruction. The paradox is that we want to simultaneously, help and to hurt. Janus holds this mirror up to us and refuses to let us look away.

The Logic of Thresholds

A threshold is not a neutral hallway. It is charged. To cross a door is to accept the risk of what lies beyond it. You leave what you know, and you step toward what you cannot guarantee. This is why transitions feel spiritual, even to the nonreligious. Weddings, funerals, births, diagnoses, reconciliations. A threshold shakes the illusion that life can be arranged into a straight line. In truth, it is a spiral: dizzily dancing upwards and downwards. Janus teaches that every entrance is also an exit. Every gain has a cost. Every yes is also a farewell.

Thresholds within human existence are also archetypal. Life is not a fixed role, but a series of evolving ones. The warrior was once the innocent. The sage, once the fool. Archetypes are not replaced but transformed through experience, through rituals that demand mourning and rebirth. Consider the transition into parenthood. As a woman, the maiden transforms into the mother. The archetype of the mother was always latent, but it is the embodied passage of giving birth that brings it fully into form. And yet, the maiden does not vanish; she remains as the youthful feminine within, though she can be eclipsed if the shadow takes over and the mother becomes devouring…consumed by regrets of an unlived life.

For a man, the threshold may look like the puer aeternus (the embodiment of the eternal boy) confronted by fatherhood. A child coming into existence always demands evolution on behalf of the parent(s). Thus, either he matures into the archetype of the father, growing also into the mentor, and perhaps king, or he clings to the fantasy of what might have been; in this clinging, he remains trapped in nostalgia and refusal…dominated by thoughts of an unlived life that then get passed down to his child as complex inheritance.

When thresholds are rejected and one is dominated by their shadow (i.e., the hidden reservoir of all that is denied or suppressed), archetypes twist into distorted caricatures. The innocent becomes a puer aeternus or a puella aeterna: where the man-child clinging to fantasy and the maiden becomes the devouring mother consumed by regret. What should have been a passage instead hardens into a prison. A threshold refused, and therefore never crossed.

We are always in transition, even when we imagine ourselves to be standing in solidity. Nothing is fixed. Archetypes cycle through us, demanding death and rebirth again and again. To embody Janus is to embody this liminal space, to accept that our roles are thresholds rather than permanent abodes. To truly become a king or queen within one’s own being is not to claim absolute sovereignty over life, but to hold the doorway open – to face both the past that shaped us and the unknown future calling us forward.

Note that thresholds also require consent. Nobody can choose for you. You can stand at the door for years, angry that the hallway is not a home…or you can find the key that has been in your pocket the whole time. The door opens from the inside.

“And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”
—T. S. Eliot (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets, ll. 145–147)

Time, Memory, and Forethought

Janus’ two faces are a type of discipline. One face contemplates what has been, the other attends to what is about to be; in other words, one looks to memory, the other to possibility. Human wellbeing requires both. If we cannot face the past, we are condemned to repeat it; we become the personification of the ouroboros (the snake devouring its own tail), endlessly circling the same patterns. If we cannot face the future, we cannot choose. The paradox is that both faces must look from the same head.

To live well is to stand where memory and possibility touch…holding both without collapse. The past demands mourning, the future demands courage, and the present demands that we accept both at once. Every beginning costs an ending. Marriage buries the single self. Parenthood buries the maiden or puer. Healing buries the version of us that needed the wound. This is not cruelty but rather metabolism: cells die so the body lives, seasons turn so the world renews.

When either face is denied, archetypes twist – refusing responsibility for tomorrow and consumed by yesterday. To embody what Janus represents is to accept that memory and forethought are thresholds and not escape routes. The work of being human is to carry both with conscious strength.

Enduring the Paradox

Carl Jung reminded us that “…one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” (Alchemical Studies, Collected Works 13, para. 335). This is precisely the wisdom Janus demonstrates. His being is a commandment for the human condition. To live fully is to face the light and the dark together, to know that we are both at once.

The Taoists expressed this through yin and yang. Each pole containing a seed of its opposite. There is no light without shadow, no birth without death, no joy without suffering. Janus, like the yin–yang symbol, insists on integration. The Western fantasy of purity – life without death, good without evil, happiness without struggle – is a delusion that flattens existence.

Our culture has trained us to perform certainty. We brand, we declare, we signal purity to our chosen tribe. This is not moral strength but rather, developmental anxiety.

Comfort, particularly in the West, has become king. We imagine a life free of conflict as the highest good. Films and cultural narratives reinforce this: the happily-ever-after, the story that ends with bliss without acknowledging what must be sacrificed to get there. This saccharine delusion is not authentic. It is not soul, not real. It ignores the necessity of struggle, of death, and of sacrifice. Something must always be given for something else to grow.

In archetypal terms, the innocent cannot remain the innocent forever. To mature is to evolve, like the Fool in the tarot journey who stumbles forward, passing through the Major Arcana, through trials, suffering, and paradox, until wholeness begins to take form. Naïve bliss must be shed, and comfort left behind. Colin A. Low’s book, Playing the Fool, embodies this maturation of the self perfectly.

Though, if we refuse this calling to evolve and do not hold the dualities of existence with reverence, the shadow becomes king…but a grotesque king. The monster within rules our being, and we project it outward, forever seeing the fleck in another’s eye while ignoring the needle lodged in our own. The myth of Janus reminds us that to truly cross the threshold into wholeness, we must hold both faces together. We must endure the paradox.

“Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on earth can keep it down. A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth…”
–Carl G. Jung (Collected Works, vol. 12, para. 18-20)

The Work of the Psyche

Depth psychology names this work directly: the task is to consciously hold the tension. Joy and grief. Fury and tenderness. Fear and longing. Strength and vulnerability. The goal is never to amputate the ‘unwanted’ pole. The goal is integration. When we split, the disowned side does not vanish. It sinks underground and rules us from there. A person who disavows hatred becomes passive aggressive. A culture that rejects mortality becomes obsessed with youth. A clinician who cannot bear ambiguity becomes a technician, not a healer.

Janus invites a different stance. Stand in the doorway. Feel the pull of each side. Do not rush to resolve it prematurely. Wait until a third element begins to appear…not a compromise, but transformation. A new form born from the pressure of the two. This is the alchemical secret, the union of the opposites. This is how the psyche matures.

Paradox in the Therapy Room

I had often heard from clients: “I want to change right now” and “I am terrified of losing who I am.” Both are true. Another client once said, “I love my child more than life” but also, “I miss the person I was before I became a parent.” Both are true. Someone else confessed, “I despise him for what he did,” and “I still love him, and it’s killing me.” Again, both are true.

The task of therapy is not to pick a side. It is to help a person remain at the doorway long enough for a deeper truth to emerge. Janus is present here as well with one face holding the grief of what has been lost and the other gazing toward the possibility of what might yet be born. In that in-between space, where both truths coexist, something new begins to take form.

Thus, the work was not about erasure or resolution, but about reverence for paradox. To sit with a client, soul to soul, was to resist the urge to simplify, to bear witness while the psyche strains against contradiction. Transformation does not come from choosing one limb and amputating the other. As noted in the previous section, it comes from allowing the tension itself to reshape us. The paradox that once felt unbearable brings us to the beginning of a new life.

Janus and the Modern Self

We live in a time of chronic thresholds. Careers shifts. Evolving identities. Communities fracture and reform. Technology remakes our mirrors daily. The temptation is to manage all of this with a rigid self or a formless one. Either way, we are lost. This myth counsels a third way: to stand in a doorway without collapsing. Keep both faces open. Learn from what has been. Choose what must be. Move with the grief and with the joy. Everything flows and is not in an absolute state. Thus, refuse to be torn apart.

To be human is not a curse, nor a crown. It is to stand at the breakpoint of the unconscious and find the strength to face what we would rather deny so we can evolve. This strength is not for power or conquest, but for courage – the courage to simply be. To endure paradox, to integrate the shadow, and to carry both light and dark as our truth. Wholeness is not triumph, but the strength to live as we are, alongside nature as it is.

In closing, are we – are you – brave enough to hold the tension of paradox? To meet the monster within and let it teach us – or will we keep blaming the world as we rot within our own unbroken cycles?

“In my end is my beginning.”
—T. S. Eliot (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets, l. 208)

The True Burden of Sisyphus: A Jungian Interpretation Beyond Camus

“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.”
—Laozi (Tao Te Ching, Verse 78)

Sisyphus might be the most quoted myth in the modern world. Clients often brought him up in therapy sessions – the myth mentioned casually when describing their exhaustion, and pop culture trots him out as the shorthand for futility. “I feel like Sisyphus…” people often say; otherwise meaning, life is a never-ending cycle of shit and it’s crushing me. But what they usually do not realize is that they are repeating the myth on its most superficial level. They have absorbed the cliché but not the depth.

When myths are misunderstood, their archetypal lessons remain hidden – and we repeat them unconsciously. The irony here is excruciating: in reducing Sisyphus to cliché, we reenact his punishment…repeating the myth exactly, without transformation.

The Story Retold: Trickster, Ego, and Punishment

Do not be fooled: Sisyphus was not a tragic victim. He was a king: sly, arrogant, and addicted to the belief that he could outwit life itself. He betrayed Zeus by exposing his affairs and murdered guests under his own roof, violating the sacred laws of hospitality. When Death came for him, Sisyphus chained him, thinking he could cheat the inevitable. For a while, no one could die. But Ares, god of war, stepped in – for what is war without death? Even the gods themselves grew tired of his games. Despite this, Sisyphus still thought he was clever enough to bend existence to his will.

This is not only a story of futility, it is a tale of hubris. A man who thought the world was in the palm of his hand, but who was riddled with the same unspoken dread men carry now: shame, doubt, anxiety, panic about the unknown. Work, worry, and war dominate modern men just as much as they dominated Sisyphus. The only difference is that he had the arrogance to think he could trap death, whereas we simply pretend it is not there.

This was a tale about a man dominated by an unconscious ego…the refusal to accept limits, the refusal to respect forces greater than himself. Zeus, in this tale, is more than a tyrant, himself; he is the archetypal Father Complex, punishing the son who dared defy him. Death, too, is not just a character but the great initiator into the reality of human limitation. To attempt to defy such forces without knowing them is to be bound to their shadow forever.

Sisyphus wanted the world, but he remained unconscious of the complexes that ruled him; the invisible hands guiding his fate. And so, he received exactly what the unconscious gives when it is ignored: endless repetition, no transformation, no way out.

Although, Sisyphus is not some distant mythic man…he is all of us. He is every human who thinks that the grind is proof of their strength while quietly rotting inside. Every human who believes the right job, the right person, the right paycheck will silence the gnawing fear that it is all meaningless. He is every human who refuses to look at the unconscious forces shaping them…and, in turn, ends up repeating the same cycles, over and over, until the rock rolls back and crushes him again.

“The symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous products of the unconscious.”
—Carl G. Jung (Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1, p. 261)

Complexes, Death, and the Omnipotent Father

To reiterate, Zeus, in this story, is representative of the archetypal Father Complex: omnipotent, punishing, quick to assert dominance. He is the “daddy in the sky,” and while not literally Sisyphus’ father, his role is deeply paternal, punishing the son who dared defy him. But this ‘Father’ is not just Zeus…it is the internalized patriarchal voice that rules the psyche. Carl Jung noted that complexes are not mere ideas but feeling-toned groupings of representations that take on autonomous life, acting like splinter personalities within us. They dominate, punish, and repeat across generations. Zeus is a god, but also the symbolic representation of the psychic weight of tradition, culture, and paternal inheritance.

One of Sisyphus’ greatest offenses was the violation of hospitality. In Greek culture, this was no small act, as it may be viewed from some other societal standpoints. Hospitality was sacred and overseen by Zeus himself. To welcome the stranger was to honor the gods. To betray a guest was to betray the divine order of reciprocity, which holds human life together. Symbolically, this act reveals the truth of an unconscious ego at war with itself. When a man is possessed by complexes, every person becomes a mirror of what he cannot face inside. He cannot trust. He cannot see humanness in others because he has already severed friendship with himself. Everyone has a motive, everyone is a threat, and so relationship itself is destroyed. In killing the guest, Sisyphus killed the possibility of genuine recognition. He made himself untouchable, believing that if he could kill, he could not be killed. But this is a mask of superiority covering an inferiority complex.

Complexes run in dynasties, whether divine or human. Zeus inherited the same possession: his father, Cronus, swallowed his children to protect his throne (power), just as Cronus’ father, Uranus, forced his offspring back into the womb so they could never live…so they could never threaten his power. As I have noted in my previous writings, this is again what Jung meant when he wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” When a father complex (or any complex for that matter) is left unexamined, it replicates itself endlessly within a person’s life, but with different masks.

Sisyphus, then, is not only punished by Zeus. He is punished by the archetypal Father within. To try to trick Death, to defy the Father, without becoming conscious of what these forces represent, is precisely what leads to suffering. Death here is not simply the end, but the most profound of limits…the archetype of finality, the shadow of life itself. And like the unconscious, Death cannot be outwitted.

Allegorically, Death is also the great initiator. It tears us from the illusion of omnipotence and forces us into humility. By chaining Death, Sisyphus arrested his own initiation. He froze the cycle of life, just as modern men freeze their own growth by trying to avoid limitation…whether by burying themselves in work, numbing with substances, or clinging to illusions of control. They believe they are kings, but inwardly they are enslaved.

To refuse death is to refuse life, because death is the silent partner of every breath we take. Jung suggested that life moves toward completeness and that death is part of what makes wholeness possible. To avoid this reality is to remain in repetition, condemned to roll the same rock again and again.

“Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life.”
—Carl G. Jung (The Soul and Death, Collected Works, Vol. 8)

Camus and the Trap of Resignation

Albert Camus famously reinterpreted the myth of Sisyphus. He argued that we must imagine Sisyphus happy – that defiance in the face of absurdity is enough. As he put it: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” In other words, we humans long for meaning, yet the universe has nothing to give us.

For Camus, the “only serious philosophical question,” is whether, in the face of this silence, one should commit suicide. His answer was no. Instead, he called for revolt. To live passionately, defiantly, and freely, without appeal to religion, metaphysics, or some higher meaning. To keep pushing the rock, grinning through despair. He concludes: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This idea is a powerful one. It is rather stoic in its refusal to collapse and admirable in its courage. But it has always struck me as nihilistic resignation…the voice of someone who sees the cycle, feels the weight of endless repetition, and decides to push anyway, convinced there is nothing else. Perpetually muttering: what is the point of anything, when nothing really matters?…I will put on a smile anyways, I guess.

That, however, could not be further from individuation. Where Camus describes the rock, Jungian theory would have led us to understanding how we might confront the unconscious forces that created the rock to begin with. Camus left us in revolt; Jung leads us into transformation. When we realize the shadow within (i.e., the complexes dictating our lives), we may then desire not defiance, but atonement. Not the endless loop of Sisyphus, but a conscious descent forward, like that of Hercules.

Jung, Tao, and the Flow of Individuation

Camus resigns us to rebellion, to rage against the machine…against the void. But Jung invites us to move beyond the performance of revolt and into meaningful alignment, which is where I stand. Not as resignation, but as awakening to the deeper order of the psyche. As Jung noted, synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) are an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see them. Thus, the unconscious – and life itself – is not a chaotic void to fear, but a hidden matrix that speaks through symbols and meaningful coincidences. When we are attuned, these moments seize our attention and demand integration, not passive observation met with a fake smile of acceptance.

In Taoist terms, this is the Way: the Tao. It is the flow of nature that dwarfs every ego. Laozi voiced in Verse 8 of the Tao Te Ching: “One who lives in accordance with nature does not go against the way of things. He moves in harmony with the present moment, always knowing the truth of what to do.” It is not passivity; it is effortless alignment. The Tao does not push, nor does it struggle. But it is unstoppable…like water that erodes rock without effort.

This concept of effortless action (i.e., wu wei) is what Sisyphus never knew. He grappled with forces he never understood. In depth psychology, the path away from Sisyphus and his perpetual rolling, is not rebellion, but evolution. It is bringing those pesky unconscious complexes into conscious recognition: noticing their script, and turning toward the deep current of what Jung called individuation, which is the psychic process of becoming whole.

This is not spirituality as another escape… quite to the contrary. It is the acknowledgment that the locus of control must shift inward before integration can flow outward. As within, so without. Money, status, even rebellion: they all remain empty if we continue to ignore how they are propelled by blind complexes. But when we begin to live in accord with the Way within, or in other words, when we recognize synchronicity as the psyche stepping forward, then outward transformation may follow.

“Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective states of the observer.”
—Carl G. Jung (Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 1952)

Men Today and the Sisyphean Cycle

I constantly heard echoes of Sisyphus in my male clients: “What is the point? I’m exhausted. I hate this system I was forced into.” They grind away at jobs, chase money, and live out the script of the car, wife, status – yet none of it fills them. It is a bottomless pit they are attempting to fill because the rock they are pushing is not the work itself, but the unconscious patterns they refuse to face.

They are dominated by complexes, repeating cycles inherited from familial roots and cultures before them. They believe they are free, but in truth they are rats in a cage, failing to see that the door they have been trapped behind is not even locked. Many admit it: “I know my shit, but nothing changes.” And here lies the tragedy. Awareness without integration is just another turn of the rock.

One client once said to me, “I work because I need to prove I am worthy of love.” The crushing weight of that confession is not in its uniqueness but in its universality. Again and again, men drag themselves under the rock of worthiness, convinced they must earn what has already and always been theirs. But here is the truth they cannot yet bear: they have always been worthy of love…simply by being. No effort was needed. None is needed still. Yet they keep pushing.

Sisyphus lives on, not in myth, but in every man who confuses the grind for redemption, who mistakes endless labor for proof of his worth. And like Sisyphus, they are crushed not by fate, but by the complexes that remain faceless.

“The eternal boy lives in all men, regardless of age. He is that part of us that resists limitation, that resists the hard truths of time, mortality, and consequence.”
—James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, 1994, p. 15)

The Opposite of Hercules

Contrast Sisyphus with Hercules. Hercules also faced divine punishment, but instead of wallowing in shame or trying to cheat his fate, he consciously chose to take on the immense burden of his labors. He hurled himself into the abyss of atonement, not because he thought he could “win,” but because somewhere within him – under the immense weight of guilt and grief – knew that meaning and forgiveness towards one’s self, only comes through conscious suffering. That is courage. That is individuation. To face life with conscious awareness that it is indeed, a tragedy.

I dissected this myth in depth in my previous essay on Hercules. In the essay of The Myth of Hercules Explained, his Twelve Labors are revealed not as mere feats of glory but as a descent into the unconscious. They represent a path toward wholeness.

Sisyphus, on the other hand, embodies an element of the puer aeternus: the eternal boy who thinks he can outmaneuver life, who wants freedom without responsibility, who ends up in endless loops of meaninglessness. He is perpetually chasing externals, believing they will fill the internal void…secretly hoping that all of his pains and sacrifices will pay off one day to get him to a place that is reminiscent of that displayed in the novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. And thus, in that futile pursuit, he burns, not at the hands of fate, but by the fire of his own refusal to face the unconscious powers that rule him.

The Mirror of Sisyphus

The truth is that unhappiness Sisyphus’ faced was wholly self-imposed. He refused mortality, refused limits, and refused the unconscious. He wanted the world but did not want to face himself. And so he repeated forever.

Sisyphus is a warning and a mirror. He shows us what happens when we refuse the call to individuation, when we deny death, and try to trick or mask the complexes that shape our lives instead of integrating them. Camus imagined him happy in revolt. But revolt without transformation is meaningless. At best, it is the mask of a smile stretched over despair.

It is no wonder that in the modern age most people invoke Sisyphus rather than Hercules. Hercules hurled himself into conscious effort, seeking atonement and refusing to be ruled by the unconscious. Sisyphus, by contrast, rejected the call entirely. He assumed he was above it all, that the world was in his hands – something to bend to his will. But it was not. And so the weight remained, the rock rolled back, and the cycles repeated endlessly, until death itself demanded acknowledgment.

Even the wisdom of the Tao whispers the same truth: water erodes stone not through defiance but by flowing with what is. Jung found that what remains unconscious rules us as fate. Together they reveal the same reality. Resistance breeds repetition. Awareness opens the Way.

Thus, the question lingers, sharp and uncomfortably close: Who are you modeling your life after: the man who faces his labors and finds meaning, or the one who lives in illusions until the end of time?

“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
—Carl G. Jung (Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works Vol. 12)

How Belief Shapes Reality: The Science of the Placebo Effect

“We do not possess a body; rather, the psyche inhabits the body and makes it live.”
— Carl G. Jung (Psychological Aspects of the Persona (Collected Works, Vol. 7, para. 389))

I want to preface this piece by saying I am not a religious person. I do not believe that there is some magic daddy in the sky – quite the contrary actually. However, I do believe in the religious experience that draws so many to religion. I have felt it for myself. I also understand that there is more to this world than what we can measure. To assume there is no higher power at all would be, in my view, painfully naïve.

So, I ask you, dear reader, to enter with open eyes and an open heart, because we are about to go into territory that may (or may not) rub you the wrong way. Regardless of the emotions that may arise, my hope is that this will provoke thought and inner reflection.

Let us now dig in.

The Placebo Effect: Proof That the Divine Lives Within

What if the most powerful medicine you could ever take wasn’t locked away in a pharmacy with an ungodly price tag? Not prescribed by a white coat. Not manufactured in a lab. What if it was already inside of you, quietly waiting for your permission to work?

Science calls it the placebo effect, and as a forever-student of the human mind and this strange, beautiful existence we call life, I find it extraordinary. Philosophy calls it the power of the mind. Mystics have called it the divine spark within. Hermeticism recognizes it as the principle of “As within, so without” – the idea that your inner state shapes your outer reality.

Think about that for a moment: your inner state may be shaping the very reality you not only perceive but experience. That’s not just a nice idea to let swim by your mind…that is a holy-shit moment. No matter the label, the knowledge is the same: your perception can transform reality – not just in your thoughts, but within your body. Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal’s notable TED Talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend, touches this same notion: how we perceive our realities is the manner in which our life takes shape.

Belief That Heals

What the placebo effect is not about is “fake pills fooling gullible people.” That is the tired, cynical take from those who are not yet wholly able to see that belief itself is an active force.

For what the notion is about is something far more extraordinary: the measurable, biological changes that happen when you decide something will help you. The mind sets an intention; the body fulfills it.

Let me be clear here: this is not referring to the watered-down notion of the “Law of Attraction,” which reduces the complexities of existence to little more than wishful thinking. The laws that govern mind, matter, and meaning are far more intricate. Life does not bend itself to our desires because we pasted affirmations onto a bathroom mirror or onto the white board next to our desk. It responds when we are aligned. When the conscious and unconscious are in active dialogue, when our inner architecture supports the reality we are building.

Consider a 2015 study on participants with Parkinson’s disease. After more than twelve hours without their medication – symptoms raw and unmasked – participants were given a treatment they were told was either worth $100 or $1,500. The twist? Both treatments were identical placebos. MRI scans revealed improvement in symptoms with both “drugs,” but the expensive one worked better. How could this be? Because the mind had already decided it was more powerful. The body simply obeyed. It was not the drug. It was the mind.

From a Jungian lens, this is the psyche creating meaning and the body responding to that meaning. Symbolically, the “expensive drug” functioned as a talisman: an object imbued with the authority of healing and thus, carrying the weight of transformation. But this is not magic in the sense of bypassing reality; it is the psyche in its proper role as the architect of lived experience.

True creation is not about summoning wealth or power as a substitute for the work of the soul. The unconscious is not satisfied by material trophies. The real “right path” is revealed in synchronicities that signal alignment between the inner and outer life: moments when the Self (the archetype of wholeness) moves us closer to individuation. That, not the accumulation of external symbols, is the highest aim of life.

“The spirit is the life of the body, seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit — the two being really one.”
— Carl G. Jung (The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man (Collected Works, Vol. 10, para. 195))

When Labels Change the Body

In another study, participants were given identical pills labeled in three different ways: plain generic, enhanced generic, and branded. Every pill was inert. Yet anxiety levels and blood pressure shifted depending on the label affixed to the bottle. It did not matter that there was no active ingredient. What mattered was the story the mind told about what it was receiving. The label was not a superficial detail – it was the carrier of meaning.

This is Hermetic law in action: The All is Mind. Matter follows meaning. The label operated as a symbol, and symbols have power because they bypass the conscious gatekeeper and speak directly to the unconscious, where archetypal associations live. “Branded” signals authority. “Official” signals legitimacy. “Real” signals potency.

From a Jungian standpoint, the label functions like an archetypal mask: an image that shapes expectation, and through expectation, shapes physiological reality. It is not mere packaging; it is the psychological architecture that scaffolds the body’s response. The rhetoric – its authority, legitimacy, and promise – works first upon the mind, and the body answers in kind.

The takeaway is clear: perception is not a passive lens through which we watch life unpredictably unravel itself. It is an active sculptor of our experience…chiseling reality to match the patterns we believe to be true.

The Spiritual Dimension

Placebo research has revealed something many in the scientific community once dismissed outright: spirituality itself can amplify the effect.

A 2011 literature review found that individuals with a spiritual orientation often respond more strongly (both psychologically and physiologically) to placebo treatments. Faith, prayer, ritual…these are not idle gestures. They are deliberate, symbolic acts that anchor belief and direct the psyche’s capacity for self-healing.

In 2021, another study demonstrated that when participants believed they were drinking water from Lourdes (a Catholic pilgrimage site associated with miraculous healing) their brains responded in measurable ways. Functional MRI scans showed increased connectivity in the brain’s salience network and decreased activity in regions linked to cognitive control, suggesting that religious belief can literally reconfigure neural processing to support a healing state.

And in 2024, physician K.R. Sethuraman made the case that belief-based forces (including the placebo effect, the Hawthorne effect, and spiritual conviction) account for more than half of the healing dynamic in many contexts. Modern medicine, he argued, has flattened “evidence-based” into a narrow synonym for pharmaceutical intervention, ignoring the very cultural and psychological mechanisms that have supported healing for millennia. We trust the authority of the prescriber more than we trust the innate intelligence of our own bodies…until we don’t, and then even the “proven” treatment may fail to work.

From a mystical standpoint, none of these findings are surprising. In Hermetic philosophy, ritual is the art of fixing intention into form, impressing the inner state upon the outer world. In Jungian psychology, ritual functions as a symbolic vessel, a structured space where the unconscious is invited to participate in the aims of consciousness. The placebo effect thrives in such vessels because they bridge the psychic and the material, dissolving the false boundary between inner meaning and outer event.

Now, this all does not mean a clinician should impose their beliefs onto a patient – for this goes against our code of ethics. But it does suggest something profound: when an individual engages a belief system that resonates at the deepest level of their being, the body responds as though the directive came from the soul itself.

Open-Label Placebos: Healing Without Deception

One of the most intriguing developments in placebo research is the rise of open-label placebos: treatments openly identified as inert, with participants fully informed, “This is a placebo.”

Common sense would suggest this disclosure would wholly dismantle the effect…and indeed, in some cases it does. But in others, the opposite occurs: merely understanding how the placebo effect works, and consciously consenting to engage with it, can still produce measurable improvement.

This also challenges the assumption that belief requires ignorance to be effective. It suggests that the conscious mind, once aware of the mechanism, can choose to collaborate with the unconscious rather than being tricked by it. In such moments, the placebo becomes less a deception and more a deliberate act of self-participation in healing.

From a depth-psychological perspective, this is a prime example of what Jung called the transcendent function: the meeting point where conscious awareness and unconscious forces interact to create something new. Here, that “something new” is the healing process itself, arising not from external substances but from the psyche’s capacity to mobilize the body in service of meaning.

“The patient will get well if he can be made to see his illness in a light that has meaning for him.”
— Carl G. Jung (The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings (Collected Works, Vol. 18, para. 398))

Belief as Biology

At its core, the placebo effect dismantles the false boundary we have drawn between “mind” and “body.” Your beliefs do not merely color your mood, they reorganize your biology. They alter neurotransmitter levels, modulate immune function, and change pain perception. An inert pill can trigger the release of dopamine. A sham surgery can produce measurable improvement in joint mobility. A sugar pill can lower blood pressure.

If this is so, the placebo effect is not a parlor trick or a failure of reason. It is proof that the body answers to the psyche. Hermetic philosophy would say that spirit impresses itself upon matter. Jung would say that the psyche is the master architect of experience, shaping not only our inner landscapes but the physical realities we inhabit.

Perhaps this is the most unflinching evidence we have that the mechanisms we chase in the external world are already alive within us…awaiting recognition and command.

The Inner Healer

Ancient traditions have always known this. The yogi who slows his heartbeat in meditation until his pulse is nearly imperceptible. The shaman who draws illness out through song and ritual. The mystic who experiences the presence of God in every breath.

These are not romantic embellishments. They are cultural acknowledgments of a force modern neuroscience is only beginning to map: the self as healer.

In Hermetic Kabbalah, the human being is a microcosm of the divine – a living conduit through which higher planes of mind, spirit, and archetype descend into the material. In Jungian psychology, the Self holds the blueprint for balance, and the body responds when we align with it.

Carl Jung wrote, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” The placebo effect is modern medicine’s reluctant concession to a truth it has long sidelined, that the power to heal is not solely delivered from without, but also arises from within. Modernity, in its obsession with external solutions, has buried this understanding beneath the authority of prescription pads and clinical protocols. Yet it quietly remains in every instance where meaning mobilizes the body to restore itself.

“The individual who gains self-mastery gains the whole world.”
— Manly P. Hall (The Secret Teachings of All Ages)

So, What Do We Do With This?

The placebo effect is not a license to reject medicine or replace treatment with naïve optimism. It is an invitation to reclaim the authority you have ceded to external systems. To stop underestimating the role you play in your own healing. In creating your own existence.

It is a reminder that the stories you tell yourself are not incidental; they are the architecture within which your body operates. Faith (whether placed in science, spirit, or self) is not merely a sentiment. It can initiate measurable, biological change.

You do not need to choose between science and soul. In truth, the most enduring forms of healing occur where the two meet…in that space where meaning directs biology, and biology confirms meaning. The placebo effect stands as living proof of what mystics, healers, and depth psychologists have understood for millennia: the source of life is not only above or beyond. It moves through you.

It is you.

“Man’s mind is a mirror of the Universe, and his heart is the throne of the Divine.”
— Manly P. Hall (Lectures on Ancient Philosophy)

Unlocking the Power of Dreams in Therapy

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”
— Carl Jung (General Aspects of Dream Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 8, para. 505))

Beyond Behavior: Why Dreams Matter More Than Compliance

The field of clinical mental health counseling overly privileges observable behavior as the golden standard, largely because it can be assessed through our five senses. Yet we ignore how subjective even behavior is: What I view as “appropriate,” another may find unacceptable. We can offer a general spectrum for functional behavior, but at the end of the day, behavioral analysis often turns into something few are brave enough to call by its real name: manipulation.

We manipulate children, adolescents, and adults to adhere to behaviors that we deem acceptable. By “we,” I mean clinicians en masse, armed with interventions that make people more palatable to the world, but not nearly more whole. This is especially visible in the rise of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) services for individuals with autism. ABA does not aim to deeply understand; it chisels away at the individual’s uniqueness so they might fit into a narrow mold crafted by society. It may help some who are overwhelmed by severe symptoms, but for many others on the spectrum, we could and should be asking better questions.

Now, what gets missed when we only look at the surface? Well, everything. A person’s dreams, defenses, distortions, complexes, archetypes…none of it is visible in behavioral checklists. And yet, those are the things that contain the essence of who we are. Dream analysis is one such approach that actually honors this depth, and it is the primary focus of this essay.

The Symbolic Language of the Soul

What are dreams? This question echoes endlessly through the halls of academia. Some settle on the view that dreams are meaningless…mere flickers of random neurons. But others, including myself, argue that dreams are not only meaningful, they are essential.

Dreams are the language of the unconscious soul. They do not speak in bullet points or diagnoses. They speak in images, metaphors, distortions, and riddles; they speak in symbols: a language that most modern clinicians have tragically, long forgotten (and have little interest in learning) how to read.

Contrary to common belief, dreams do not simply reflect external events. The psyche is far more clever and complex for that kind of spoon-fed narrative. It weaves what we have witnessed into tapestries of meaning that reveal the truth of our inner lives. A monster in a dream is not just a scary image, it may just be the shadow self: the rejected and disowned part of our psyche we’ve exiled to protect our conscious ego. Dreams force us to confront what we have avoided. They demand our attention….or else, we forget under the guise of “I don’t dream.” Unless we heed to the call, the call becomes muted.

To reclaim symbol interpretation (as a clinician, and as a human) requires that we first do the work ourselves. If we dare claim to help others, we must help ourselves first. Dream journaling and analysis are perhaps the most powerful tools we have for integration. It is how we make the unconscious conscious. It is how we reclaim what we have buried. Moreover, it acts as a fundamental benchmark in examining our own and our clients’ progress along their path to individuation.

Personal Dream Example: The Devil Behind the Clock

Here is a personal anecdote to my time utilizing dream analysis: When I was four years old, I had a recurring dream.

I was at my aunt’s house: a place that, in waking life, felt safe and loving. In the dream, however, something was wrong. I was sitting on the couch in the living room while my mom and aunt talked in the dining room. A large grandfather clock stood nearby. And behind it… was the Devil.

The depiction was exactly as I had seen him in a Christian movie growing up: red skin, horns, sinister. I cried, pointed, and ran to my mother. She didn’t even turn around. She waved me off with intense irritation. My aunt barely looked up. I was desperate, in agony, as this evil figure crept toward me. But I was dismissed and being overtaken.

Jungian Interpretation:

This dream, like many from early life, was not random. The devil behind the clock was not simply “evil” in the religious sense, it symbolized the forbidden, the repressed, and the terrifying unknown. In the context of a rigid, hyper-religious upbringing, he embodied not only projected fears around the body and sexuality, but also the unspeakable trauma that was taking root in my psyche.

The two women – figures who were sources of comfort and safety in waking life – were not villains in the dream. Rather, they represented a feminine energy that was emotionally unavailable, disconnected, and fragmented. Their dismissal in the dream was symbolic of a larger absence: the absence of grounded, attuned feminine containment. They did not betray me in waking life, but their dream counterparts portrayed what my psyche felt in that moment of crisis: alone, unseen, and forced to face the shadow without an emotional mirror.

This was the beginning of my inner rejection of the feminine. Not out of hatred, but as a survival mechanism. My mother (herself animus-possessed) modeled a way of being where logic, control, and emotional suppression were used to navigate life. Her feelings were powerful but unspoken, guiding her from beneath the surface. And so, I followed suit.

The dream encoded the psychic conditions that formed the early architecture of my inner world:

  • The growing dominance of my internal masculine (animus) as a protector and suppressor
  • The repression of my intuitive, feeling-based feminine qualities
  • The emergence of a mother complex shaped not just by relational dynamics, but by the archetypal distortion of what the feminine had come to represent for me: danger, denial, disconnection

This dream revealed the symbolic moment when the feminine was unconsciously exiled within me, and not out of blame, but out of necessity. It marked the beginning of fragmentation… and, much later in life, the very clue that would lead me back toward integration.

Reality Is Subjective: The Limits of Perception

There is such a thing as objective reality, however, no human can experience it. Everything we perceive is filtered through layers of lived experience, cultural imprinting, trauma, emotional valence, ego defenses, and complex structures buried deep within our unconscious. This is why even people raised in the same household often have drastically different interpretations of their past. We each wear unique perceptual lenses and no two alike. What we call “normal” or “abnormal” becomes a judgment passed through a very narrow filter. And so, if we hope to help others, we must first admit that we cannot see clearly. We must own our subjectivity. Only then can we begin to understand the symbolic logic of another’s psyche.

Dreams as the Roadmap to the Client’s Inner Cosmos

If each person carries a private myth; in other words, one’s unconscious is a rich, symbolic architecture and it is no longer helpful to impose a generic model of healing upon the individuals we work with. Instead, we must become curious. We must become guides of dreams. As a clinician, I do not “decode” a client’s psyche like a puzzle. I ask questions. I help hold the lantern while they descend into their inner world. The dream leads the way.

Clinical Dream Example: The Assault Nightmare

A male client once came to me terrified of his dreams. Night after night, he relived scenes of sexual assault, but in these dreams, he was not the victim. He was the perpetrator.

This detail tormented him. In waking life, he had been assaulted as an adolescent. The trauma left him paralyzed with shame, plagued by a profound inferiority complex and a deeply wounded mother complex. Sleep offered no refuge. Instead, it cast him in the role of the very force that had once violated him.

Understandably, he feared what these dreams said about him. But as our work deepened, and we dared to interpret the dream symbolically rather than literally, something far more human, and far more tragic, emerged.

Jungian Interpretation (Male Psyche, Symbolic Violence, and Trauma Integration):

The dreams were not about desire or cruelty. They were a dramatization of an internal psychic war. His unconscious had cast him in the role of the perpetrator; not to shame him, but to illuminate the depth of his fragmentation. What had been done to him was so shattering, so annihilating, that the only way his psyche could begin to metabolize it was to invert the trauma: putting him in imagined control of the very violence that once rendered him powerless.

In Jungian terms, these dreams symbolized the domination of this client’s psyche’s internal masculine function (rigid, disconnected, and tryrannical) over the anima, the inner feminine principle that governs intuition, emotion, and relational depth, because there was an incongruence between the dualities within him. After his assault, his psyche could not afford softness, so, it adapted. The anima was not safe to express, so she was buried. And in his dreams, she reemerged not as a figure of beauty or connection, but as the one being symbolically violated. This was not a literal drama. It was a psychic mirror reflecting how thoroughly his own inner feminine had been suppressed in order to survive.

These dreams were not signs of pathology. They were signs of readiness. The unconscious had begun to reveal, through dark imagery, the deeper truth: that what had been lost could now be reclaimed. The symbolic violence pointed not to moral failing, but to the soul’s attempt at re-integration.

What appears as horror in the dream world is often, in truth, the first flicker of psychic rebirth.

A Reaffirmed Commitment to the Depths

I have been working with dreams for many years through a Jungian lens, and over time, my appreciation for their psychological necessity has only deepened. Dreams are not just curiosities or byproducts of sleep. Over the decades, I have come to learn that they are essential dispatches from the unconscious. And interpreting them is not a technique to be memorized, but a far more sacred practice, one that requires presence, humility, and depth.

Dream analysis, especially when working with another person’s dream, demands a level of emotional insight and attunement that many clinicians are simply not trained to wield. One must not only understand symbols intellectually but feel into them empathically and tune into the psyche of another without overlaying it with one’s own projections. There is a great deal of intuition involved, as well as a kind of inner spaciousness: a willingness to listen to what is unsaid, to notice what appears behind the veil of the image…to look far beyond the mere surface.

This is not easy for everyone…far from it in fact. Those with a Sensing-dominant personality type, for example, are often more attuned to what can be observed through the five senses. Their cognition is rooted in concrete reality. And while this has tremendous value, it can make dreamwork more difficult because the dream speaks from beyond the veil. It emerges from the invisible layers of the unconscious and from the mythic architecture we carry within. It requires us to see in the dark, and to trust that what we cannot touch may still be real.

Closing Thoughts: Why Dream Analysis Should Not Be Optional

We are not blank slates. We are stories: myths, images, and memories tangled in archetypes that stretch back to the beginning of time. To understand someone (and I mean truly understand them) we must move beyond behavior, beyond diagnoses, and beyond surface language. We must comprehend the narrative folding that resides within. Thus, we must go inward.

In closing, dreams are not an accessory to therapy. They are the deepest expression of the Self calling out to be known. They are how the unconscious speaks when the ego is silent. And they offer what behavior never can: truth – truth that is symbolic, personal, and transformative.

What are your dreams asking you to witness?

“Every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone, just as the dream is ultimately yours alone. Even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you.”
― Robert A. Johnson (Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth)

Exploring the Mythic Dimensions of Sexuality

“Our sexuality is never merely physical—it is mythic. It is the place where our complexes meet our archetypes, where our hunger for transcendence collides with our fear of dissolution.”
— James Hollis (The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other)

A Return to the Soul of Sex

I recently wrote the following reflective paper as part of my graduate training in human sexuality. While it was originally intended as a personal academic submission, I have chosen to share it here because it touches on themes that I believe need to be spoken of more honestly, more symbolically, and more soulfully. The true essence of sex was lost long ago and has been buried beneath the pollutants of inadequate social standards and shallow scripts that we have inherited throughout time. Thus, I encourage its come-back that is no longer dripping in taboo and shameful disgust.

It is a common misconception that sex is simply physical. To the absolute contrary, it is psychic, mythic, and raw. Below is my original piece, unedited in content, written from that liminal space between scholar, seeker, and clinician-in-training.

Journal #1: Understanding Sexual Development

Upon reflecting on my own sexual development and the shaping forces behind my internal “sexual script,” I am struck by how deeply both the elements of evolution and experience have etched themselves into the narrative. Gagnon and Simon’s Sexual Script Theory resonates with me in that it acknowledges sexuality not merely as a private, isolated phenomenon, but as a relational, symbolic, and socioculturally embedded experience (1973). It echoes a notion that I wholly believe that is no human arrives at their sexuality tabula rasa. Rather, we are inscribed with a primal blueprint, one that is then sculpted by our biology and then layered with meaning, shame, fantasy, myth, trauma, and desire through our individual lived experiences and in turn, our inner world.

As someone high in openness and agreeableness, I approach sexuality with a deep sense of curiosity and respect. My views of sex are not through a moralistic or binary lens, but instead through one that honors complexity. I believe that what consenting adults choose to engage in is not only their choice and business but is also, more often than not, an expression of deeper, symbolic truths, whether that be wounds seeking healing, fantasies expressing power dynamics, or mythic archetypes emerging through the body. Even practices like consensual non-consent (CNC) are rich with meaning. Thus, I see sexual kinks and sexuality as a whole, as a reflection of the psyche in motion. I find both (sexuality and the psyche) to be beautiful, endlessly fascinating and worthy of exploring through a symbolic lens.

However, I do hold strong boundaries around harm – a rather commonsensical approach. Pedophilia, for instance, is a domain where my openness narrows. While I acknowledge that urges are not chosen, and while I also believe that behavior is not always fully conscious (often influenced by unresolved trauma, psychological possession, or overwhelming emotional states, or what may also be called the Shadow aspect of the self (Jung, 1959)) it does not negate the reality that children cannot consent. The neurological and emotional development of a child ensures this, and any sexual exploitation of a minor represents a violation of power and innocence that I cannot condone (Seto, 2008). My moral compass is anchored in the principle of harm and the centrality of consent, which remains the non-negotiable line in both clinical work and ethical reasoning. That said, I reject the idea that individuals should be flattened into their worst behavior or vilified without psychological inquiry. I do not believe in ranking sins as if some are redeemable and others are not. Every individual has a story, and sexuality does not arise in isolation and is shaped by biology, psyche, environment, developmental trauma, and cultural imprinting (Buehler, 2021; Levine, 2003). To dehumanize someone is to sever the possibility of healing, and in doing so, we often reinforce the very cycles of shame and unconscious compulsion that fuel these behaviors in the first place. Thus, I believe the ultimate task of the clinician is to hold space for truth, even (and especially) when it is difficult, and to meet individuals at the level of soul; not to excuse harm, but to understand its roots and help prevent its repetition.

Culturally, I come from a long lineage of sexual suppression. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household where sex was cloaked in shame, spoken about in hushed tones, and governed by strict rules. It was not presented as something sacred in the empowering or life-affirming sense, but rather as something to be feared, controlled, and weaponized. It was surrounded by anxiety and silence (rarely was it discussed except through judgment or moral warning) and made explicitly clear that it was to only occur between a man and a woman within a heterosexual, physically committed marriage. There was no room for curiosity, nuance, or safety in those conversations. Desire was treated as dangerous; however, while the purity pill was perpetually force-fed, I was at the same time, taught to think critically, even if only within a narrow framework.

That early exposure to disciplined thinking ultimately allowed me to question what I had been taught. As I grew older and approached the realm of sexuality on my own terms, I began to see how disconnected these teachings were from the actual landscape of human experience. I came to reject purity culture and be drawn to the erotic, to the symbolic, and to the mythic dimensions that often emerge in sexual experience. My own experiences of love and sex have been transformative. They have mirrored archetypes such as the forbidden fruit, projections of the anima and animus encountering one another, and the longing for both union and ego dissolution (Jung, 1969). Sexuality is never just about sex, it is a story told through bodies, reactions, and silent scripts, often written in response to the very systems that tried to silence them.

Becoming a therapist who can work with sexuality, especially as a future sex therapist, feels like a calling that merges my personal openness with my professional identity. People have always confided in me about things they have never told anyone: fetishes, affairs, traumas, confusions. In those confessions, I never recoil. I lean in and not because I am titillated, but because I am reverent of how socially taboo and vulnerable that realm is for many. To be able to sit with someone in that space, without judgment, is an honor that I have never and will never take lightly.

Buehler’s (2021) reflective questions led me to notice how even my own comfort edges, albeit, while broad, still exist. I am less reactive to unconventional practices than I am to societal ignorance and hypocrisies surrounding sex. That tells me something: my bias is toward liberation. Through this conscious awareness, I must then be mindful to not impose this bias in sessions, even if it is cloaked in “progress.” Some clients may come from deeply religious frameworks or desire more traditional relational structures. My task is not to lead them toward my values but to help them discover their own authentic alignment.

In Jungian terms, sexuality is the shadow’s playground. It is where the unconscious speaks in moans, rituals, projections, and resistance (Hillman, 1972). If clinicians want to understand one’s inner world, we must listen to how clients speak about sex… or don’t. There, we will find roots to shame, power, longing, and the archetypal struggle between control and surrender.

If I were to illustrate my sexual development as an image, it would be a labyrinth. Not to be confused with a maze where one gets lost, but a sacred path inward: winding and looping through layers of masks, sharp exhales, and meaning. At the center there is not an answer, but rather, a mirror. Much like all sacred mirrors, it asks only one thing: the courage to look.

References

Buehler, S. (2021). What every mental health professional needs to know about sex (3rd ed.). Springer Publishing Company.

Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973). Sexual conduct: The social sources of human sexuality. Aldine Publishing.

Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Northwestern University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1969). Archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.

Levine, P. A. (2003). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Seto, M. C. (2018). Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children: Theory, Assessment, and Intervention (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.

Closing Reflection

What strikes me now, after rereading this piece (and a few others in academic journals and post-modern feminist magazines, whose pages somehow manage to be both self-righteous and self-referential), is how even the most ‘progressive’ conversations around sexuality remain steeped in judgment, veiled beneath the illusion of liberation. It is no longer a matter of sin, but of social acceptability, dictated by ever-shifting ideological standards. As long as a behavior fits neatly inside a shiny identity label, it is celebrated. But if it challenges our comfort zones, or if it cannot be hashtagged or politicized, it is discarded, condemned, or pathologized.

We have traded purity culture for progressive purity. We still rank sins. Still choose who is worthy of understanding, and who is not. And we still fail to ask the deeper questions and to really think.

Sexuality is not a checklist. It is not a gender, nor is it a slogan. It is soul-stuff: a living current of paradox, shadow, trauma, desire, repression, and longing. Sexuality is not meant to be safe. It is meant to be sacred.

Sex and sexuality is another area in which I am tired of the flatness: of the empty performances of sexual liberation that still revolve around control. Of the cowardice in our discourse, the refusal to sit with what disturbs us, and the rejection of anything that does not come pre-approved by an ideology from either side of the track.

We do not heal by policing people into silence, nor do we grow by judging which wounds deserve compassion. We do not and will continue to not understand sex — truly understand it — until we stop moralizing and start listening.

Life is nuance. Truth is contradiction. And something as sacred, as revealing, and as volatile as sex deserves better than dichotomous thinking. It deserves uncensored honesty.

“Sexuality is the strongest instinctual force that we experience. It carries both the danger of possession and the possibility of transformation. The question is always whether one is possessed by the instinct or is able to relate to it consciously.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz (Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche)

EMDR: Modern Rituals in Trauma Healing

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain… One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung (CW 13, ¶335)

This post will be a little different from my usual writing. It leans more academic in tone because I want to reflect on one of the most widely respected tools in trauma therapy: EMDR.

For those unfamiliar, EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It has gained endorsements from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Department of Veterans Affairs, and even the World Health Organization. Its place in the clinical world is well established, and its benefits are experienced by many.

What follows is not a dismissal of EMDR’s value but a reframing of how it may actually work. While EMDR is best known for its use of bilateral stimulation (BLS), I propose that the deeper source of its healing power is something more timeless: the direct confrontation with trauma.

To be clear, I fully acknowledge the growing body of research supporting EMDR’s efficacy (Lee & Cuijpers, 2013; Shapiro, 2018). My aim is not to strip away its credibility but to look at it through a symbolic lens. As a clinician-in-training steeped in trauma-informed care and depth psychology, I wonder whether the field has misattributed its effectiveness. Are we focusing so much on the method that we overlook the ritual act at its core?

The Hypothesis: Exposure, Not Eye Movements, Is the Active Ingredient

Let us first dive into the research: EMDR leads to significant symptom reduction in trauma survivors. However, when the role of bilateral stimulation is isolated, the findings become a bit murky. Davidson and Parker (2001) conducted a meta-analysis and found that eye movements did not significantly enhance outcomes beyond exposure alone. van den Hout et al., (2011) observed that while BLS may slightly reduce vividness and emotionality, it appears non-essential to successful treatment.

This brings us to a question that many researchers have asked, but few clinicians or educators seem willing to face directly. Is it wholly the eye movements or the repeated, structured confrontation with trauma that promotes healing?

Here is what has not been explored deeply: the symbolic and psychological function of BLS. What if BLS serves more as an emotional buffer, something that helps to regulate discomfort rather than reveal truth? What if the real healing lies not in tracking a therapist’s fingers, but in walking through the fire of memory without turning back out of fear?

Talk Therapy’s Avoidance Problem

In many graduate counseling programs, students are taught to be trauma-informed by emphasizing non-intrusiveness. Do not push. Do not retraumatize. Do not make the client uncomfortable. While well-intentioned, this approach can backfire. In our effort to “do no harm,” we may do nothing meaningful and cause harm in and of itself. We sit quietly, hoping the client will go deep on their own, while silently colluding in their avoidance.

This avoidance can, moreover, mirror the client’s trauma and merely perpetuate a trauma loop. A sense of being abandoned, unseen, or emotionally unheld in their darkest moments. The therapist’s inability to bear witness to pain perpetuates the very repression that trauma thrives in. If we cannot make space for and hold the heat of a client’s story, how can they ever trust themselves to come to face it with courage?

EMDR as Modern Ritual

Looking through a Jungian lens, EMDR is less about BLS and more about a ritualized descent into the unconscious. It mirrors ancient rites of passage found across cultures. These are journeys into darkness, chaos, or death to retrieve something vital: a lost part of the Self. In this way, EMDR becomes a modern ritual that guides clients into the symbolic underworld to reclaim what was fragmented.

Now this is where the controversy deepens… What if BLS is not a catalyst, but a distraction? A rhythmic soothing agent, not unlike a lullaby or a pacifier, that makes the journey more bearable but less potent. Yes, the bilateral tones and eye movements can regulate the nervous system. But perhaps they also cushion the intensity of the experience. And maybe, just maybe, that is where a fundamental problem lies.

Hypnotherapy: Another Descent-Based Modality

Take hypnotherapy. Dismissed by many for its pseudoscientific reputation, hypnosis also facilitates an altered state of consciousness. It invites a trance, a softening of ego boundaries. Like EMDR, it opens the door to unconscious material. When paired with cognitive-behavioral therapy, hypnosis has been shown to enhance trauma treatment outcomes (Kirsch et al., 1995; Valentine et al., 2019).

From a depth perspective, hypnotherapy is not about control or suggestion. It is about a symbolic descent into the abyss. It is Dante, led by the image of his Beatrice, the guiding archetype of the inner feminine, through the underworld toward integration. It is Persephone, reclaiming her agency. These are not techniques. They are myths made real. What unites EMDR, PE, and hypnotherapy is quite obviously, not their form, but their demand for emotional honesty.

What Actually Heals

When clients wholly come to face their trauma, not just remember it, but feel it fully, symbolically, and viscerally, that is when the inner alchemical transformation begins. These methods succeed not because they are gentle, but because they ask something of the client that many modalities do not: to return to the wound with open eyes.

The client becomes the mythic hero. The one who chooses descent. And the therapist, if they are willing, becomes the witness, the anchor, and the soul guide.

What Needs to Change

If talk therapy wants to remain relevant in trauma work, it must stop pathologizing emotional intensity. Too often, strong emotions are seen as something to avoid or regulate rather than engage with. But it is precisely within these intense emotional states of grief, rage, and fear, that the deepest healing potential lives. Avoiding them keeps both therapist and client circling the wound rather than entering it.

Therapists must be trained not only to avoid harm, but to tolerate discomfort: their own and their clients’. The ability to stay present during emotional upheaval is not optional in trauma work. It is essential. A therapist cannot guide someone through the storm if they are only willing to stand on the shore.

What heals is not comfort, but honest confrontation. True safety is not the absence of emotional risk. It is the presence of someone who can stay steady when everything else feels like it’s falling apart. That is what clients need. That is what trauma work requires.

Revisiting “Do No Harm”

It is important to pause and address what may already be rising in the minds of many readers. The ACA Code of Ethics states that clinicians must avoid harm. Non-maleficence—do no harm—is one of the foundational principles of our profession. It is often cited to justify cautious, client-led, non-intrusive approaches, especially when working with trauma.

But we must ask the harder question: what does “harm” actually mean when it comes to trauma?

Are we being wholly benevolent when we avoid stirring the inner wounds of our clients? Or are we, under the guise of caution, participating in something more insidious? When a therapist avoids a client’s trauma, when they softly reassure, “You don’t have to go there,” while that trauma silently erodes the client from within, is that not a form of harm? Is that not abandonment by another name?

In our effort to be kind, we may become complicit. Complicit in avoidance. Complicit in shame. Complicit in preserving the very suffering we claim to treat.

Let us also be honest about something else: there are far more bad therapists in the world than there are good ones. This not cynicism, it is reality. And the tragedy continues in that nearly everyone believes they are one of the good ones. But sincere trauma work does not come from being “good”. It comes from being whole.

Only those who are themselves on the path to wholeness (not perfection and not performance) can embody what trauma-informed care actually requires. This is not just a clinical posture. It is a way of being. One must be able to sit in the fire with another human being without retreating. That is what heals. Not credentials, not compliance, and certainly not the illusion of safety.

Thus, if we, as clinicians, shy away from that confrontation, we teach our clients to do the same…and nothing changes. The trauma goes on repeating. But when we consciously aim to walk with them, into the depths, through the fire, with eyes unaverted, something ancient stirs. Not just recovery, but resurrection.

“Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.”
— James Hillman, (Pan and the Nightmare, p. 65.)

References… for your viewing pleasure.

Davidson, P. R., & Parker, K. C. H. (2001). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR): A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69(2), 305–316. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-006x.69.2.305

Kirsch, I., Montgomery, G., & Sapirstein, G. (1995). Hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 63(2), 214–220. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-006x.63.2.214

Lee, C. W., & Cuijpers, P. (2013). A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in EMDR therapy: Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 241–268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2012.11.001

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Valentine, K. E., Milling, L. S., Clark, L. J., & Moriarty, C. L. (2019). The efficacy of hypnosis as a treatment for anxiety: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 67(3), 336–363. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863

van den Hout, M. A., Engelhard, I. M., Beetsma, D., Slofstra, C., Hornsveld, H., & Houtveen, J. (2011). EMDR and mindfulness: Eye movements and attentional breathing tax working memory and reduce vividness and emotionality of aversive ideation. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 42(4), 423–431. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2011.03.004

Breaking the Mask: Embracing Authenticity in Therapy

“The persona is a mask which makes people believe one is somebody. It is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be.”
— Carl Jung (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 7))

The Death of Goodness: Why I am writing this at all…

I have stayed quiet for a long time. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I became accustomed to staying in the shadows. Observing. Analyzing. Simply being a wallflower. There was comfort within the discomfort of it all.

I am a therapist-in-training, a mother, and a woman shaped by both compliance and rebellion. For years, I have carried a growing dissonance between what I know in my body and what I see in the world around me and especially within the clinical realm.

We say we care about healing. We say we care about wholeness. However, what we reward is fakeness. Blind obedience. Faux goodness. Polished language. Correct affiliations. Emotional tone regulation. Smiles.

We have, moreover, been told to be safe. Kind. Neutral. Do not say too much. Do not feel too much. Oh, but don’t forget to empathize. And one of the single most important pieces: Do not think too much…best yet, not at all. We are to make sure everyone is comfortable, even if we and our clients are disintegrating inside. Internally ripping our faces off, screaming into the abyss of our minds that fails to pierce through the veil of our lips.

And I have become tired of it all.

Exhausted by the pretense that goodness equals wholeness. That if clients are able to be “socially acceptable” and “independent,” they are healed. But they aren’t. Not truly. It is rather, the opposite, and that is now why this website exists.

This space is not for performance nor to reinforce the shiny persona of the perfect clinician or the healed mother or the spiritually poised woman. I am not writing for applause or even in the hopes that the world will even wake up; I am writing because if I don’t, I will suffocate under the weight of what has been left unspoken — not just within me, but that resides under the overbearing weight of the performance we have all abided by for much too long.

I have seen too many people break under the lie that goodness will save them. For it won’t. It always has been and always will be a mere mask. And masks are useful…until they begin to rot from the inside because it was mistaken for an authentic sense of self.

Goodness Over Wholeness: A Cultural Delusion

The clinical world, for all its talk of self-awareness and integration, often operates on a fundamentally disintegrated model. We are taught to repress the parts of ourselves that might make others uncomfortable: rage, shame, complexity, ambiguity, and paradox. We call that “professionalism.” Some even call it “trauma-informed.” We say it’s for safety. No, it is to merely maintain an illusion. Clinicians are some of the most messed up souls around, yet we act as though we have all of the answers (now whether we consciously admit to this or not is a whole other story).

What it really is that we as clinicians and clinicians-in-training have mastered is avoidance. And in that avoidance, we do the very thing we claim to treat by dissociating. We become “well-behaved” monsters: smiling, credentialed, abiding by ethical codes. Hollowed out. Half-alive and barely living.

We have traded soul for approval and mistaken emotional compliance for mental health. We call ourselves “helpers” while living inside systems that are terrified of anything raw, messy, or real. And then we have the gall to wonder why the world is collapsing and find some external force to blame all of our problems on…the crux of these problems that really reside within.

The Monsters We’ve Become

We imagine that monsters are violent, loud, and cruel. Grotesque and malicious. Wholly one way without an inkling of goodness within them. However, the true monsters are often those who believe they are good while being completely unconscious of the damage they do; the nuance of this complexity lacks any acknowledgment, whether in training programs, intellectual circles, or mainstream pop culture.

Monsters include the therapists who smile while pathologizing difference and judging each client by the diagnosis they were labeled by. The educators who punish emotion under the guise of order. The activists who rage for justice while secretly feeding on ideological purity and power. And yes — they are all of us. Me, you, and your friend’s sister’s cousin twice removed.

We are all susceptible to the spell of goodness. But why? Because goodness feels safe. I mean, it has gotten us this far, hasn’t it? We are no longer worried about outsiders raping and pillaging. Nor about having our neighbor turn on us simply because we are in some way different from them…or are we?

Now, what about this wholeness I spoke of? Wholeness asks us to face the parts of ourselves we have exiled: the shadow, the shame. The parts of us that wanted to punch the person that nearly crashed into us, scream at the system we feel is suppressing us, or collapse in the grocery store and cry because we are just so tired of pretending to be okay.

This blog marks the end of my performance.

Where We Go from Here

I do not have a formula. I do not have an endpoint. But I do have a voice, and a deep ache for truth. If you too are tired of being “good” and living in a world that tries their damnedest to collapse reality down to a 2D version of itself — black and white, good and evil — but still want to be whole…you are not alone.

If you feel more like a monster than a saint some days…you are also not alone. And if you are willing to question the very ground, we’ve built our “helping professions” on — then welcome!

This is not a safe space. It is a sacred one. One that while perhaps infuriating you, will also make you think. Sacredness begins not with perfection, but with brutal honesty. As the late psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung noted, what we do not face, we become. And what we refuse to name, we are destined to act out. Thus, wholeness is born when the mask is torn, and the monster is finally met.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung (Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13))