What is this site about? Bad poetry? Yes, but it's really about individuation and differentiation, for which one popular name is "midlife crisis." I've been having mine, thanks, and a very messy process it has been and no doubt will be. However, instead of buying a sports car and having an affair I went into counseling, did dream therapy and wrote poetry. The poems are an ongoing record of the places I've been on this journey. I'm not done with individuation, according to the shrinks and counselors one never is, but I've just done a big piece.
I'm also writing this because I'm pissed. The shrinks and counselors say that differentiation is terribly hard and painful and that our culture doesn't support it (I agree on the latter) and they act like it's some special thing that the ordinary person won't and can't do. I think their egos are too big. I think that it can be supported and it doesn't have to be that hard: but no one is really writing a good map. So, another name for this site might be "Jung made easy" or "Differentiation for Dummies," me being one of them.
Why am I pissed? When I first went to counseling I saw three different counselors in the space of a short time, mostly because the one I really wanted was out of town for 6 weeks. All three mentioned individuation. The third one, the one I wanted, actually laughed and said, "My, aren't you right on schedule!" That comment has stuck like glue. I hate to be predictable AND I had never heard of individuation. Why would that make me so mad? Because I'm a family practice doctor, for goodness sake, and supposedly had been trained in a reasonable amount of psychiatry. Currently that would mostly consist of "how to give out pills", but that is another topic. So here I was, early 40s, apparently entering an ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE stage of my mental processes and I had never even heard of it. So, I think the word needs to get out. I used to get in trouble all the time in medical school for simplifying jargon -- I got scolded by a resident 4th year for describing a prostate exam as "squishy" instead of "boggy". I didn't care, because that resident had not earned my respect. I feel very good about trying to simplify Jung's ideas.
What it comes down to is deciding whether to have a conscious midlife crisis or an unconscious one. Both choices suck, but I think that you will come out the other end in better shape if you choose a conscious one.
Yours,
Red Paw
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1 comment:
I think that there used to be a simpler process of moving from one stage of life to the next.
When I was in my twenties, reeling from the divorce I never expected to go through (let alone initiate!) I read Gail Sheehy's Passages - and then Pathfinders, which focused on those important transitions in life. I like the model of life as having a shape, a reasonably expectable progression.
I love the idea that humans don't stop growing just by turning 21, that adulthood is not a status but a process.
It seems more human. More forgiving. More - reasonable?
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