Puzzles, Patterns & a Collective Unconscious
Puzzles - I’m told that my favorite pastime as a toddler was doing them.
Apparently, I would master them so quickly my father would mix several together.
I returned to a stash of jigsaw puzzles in the early days of lockdown - and now there’s an app on my phone. I still enjoy the distraction and the satisfaction when the last key pieces fall into place.
The work of my day job is to help discern, identify, and decode the origin and impact of behavioral patterns in our professional lives.
Getting clarity about them in my own life is the ongoing work of recovery from decades of self-doubt.
An introduction to the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) in the early Eighties while training in career development was an invitation to bring this fascination with puzzles into my work life.
I learned that there is a simply discernible rhyme and reason to human behavior - in much the same way as sorting edges, colors and textures.
Curious, I went on to explore the personality patterns identified by the Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung in the early 20th century. It was this work that later informed the development of the MBTI.
Helping people un-puzzle things at work was satisfying - particularly in the moment every manager (or parent) delights in while watching ‘the penny drop’.
It was fulfilling to invite clients and teams to imagine and develop new ways of communicating - while providing a framework for understanding those who may view the world through a different lens, and interpret language perhaps not understood as the speakers intended.
That same course of study brought me to Jung’s description of a “collective unconscious” - and the common archetypal images that populate the fairy tales, literature and dreams we share across cultures.*
What I have come to appreciate is that families also share a ‘collective unconscious’.
We have patterns, frames of reference, and shared narratives that inform the attitudes, behaviors and choices that are common to us - our grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren and likely theirs.
One can go on to extend that shared orientation and worldview to our neighborhoods, villages, regions, counties etc.
Which brings me back to the origin of and my passion for the use of #Memoir and #Storytelling.
Why do our stories matter?
They simply inform.
And they inform in a way we cannot imagine or predict.
They provide data about what often goes unmentioned or unspoken. There are bits of our stories we don’t think are special or unique. Some of which may catch us by surprise.
Two examples -
On healing personally:
In a recent expansion of the #Memoir exercise as introduced by Julia Cameron in It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again (2016), I began to pull together photographs of the places I and my family have lived.
There were photos of my mother & father’s first apartment, the suburban house which I came home to and the next house, kitted out to reflect the life of the successful executive my father had become. The collection was as it had always been. I’ve seen them all many times over my seven decades.
Viewed from my current vantage point - nearly the age my parents were when they died (1980 & 1996) - I saw something I’d never seen before.
The fashionable 1950’s modern household which reflected my mother - her taste, her energy, her painting - and I assume her enthusiasm for her young marriage - had all but disappeared from the ‘proper’ affluent abode in the Manhattan suburbs where - without a job, a driver’s license or friends - she disappeared.
Does it matter?
Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women - is an exploration by Maggie Scarf of the developmental work we must all do - men and women - to be fully formed as adults.
We all ‘grow up’ - in spite of ourselves. Scarf, explores the developmental milestones - and ‘necessary losses’ that we experience in our Teens, Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties and Sixties.
Few of us escape this life without an experience of depression - either our own or that of a loved one. Scarf maintains that -
Depressions of the various decades do reflect underlying issues and concerns of that decade of life: what a depression is about has everything to do with an individual’s place in her own existence where she is in terms of life stage. (author’s emphasis)
So whether that memory - and that new perspective - “finishes” the business of a fractured relationship with my mother or finishes the business of properly mourning her - I don’t know.
I do know that I remember her differently now. I’m more compassionate and forgiving. And a floodgate of different, positive, memories about her has opened.
On understanding my worldview:
I live in medial space. I am an immigrant to Ireland - and yet a citizen of the Republic. I live in a border town - and when my business was based just 15 miles north of here in the UK - my status was that of a ‘frontier worker’.
I was also subjected to an ‘education campaign’. Neither Irish Republican or Unionist, Catholic or Protestant - and admittedly ignorant of the history of conflict here - many deemed it their civic duty to educate me about precisely who were the good-guys and who were the miscreants.
Like it or not, I learned to discern what names were Catholic or Protestant, what schools and sports were similarly categorized (I did question what transubstantiation had to do with hockey/rugby/cricket) and which Belfast neighborhoods were “safe” to visit with American tourists around the 12th of July. (One person suggested that if I could see the cranes, I’d be fine.)
What was and is clear is that I am ‘the other’.
“Othering” is something that comes naturally to humans - but tends to run rampant in post conflict societies - or those - as in America - dealing with the ‘unfinished business’ of healing old wounds.
It is still shocking to me that to the natives of Northern Ireland and the border region, Protestant or Catholic is as easily discerned as race in America.
But why was I so impatient - to the point of rage - when Irish, British and Northern Irish people were as intolerant of immigrants as many often are?
“To the point of rage” is key. I don’t know the source of this quote - but here’s why:
If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.
Anger arises from an incident or at a moment. Rage has its origin in the past.
And long before I was an immigrant - I had the experience of it in my bones. Or rather as a part of my familial unconscious and early life experiences.
Both of my parents were first generation Irish and Italian Americans reared in both the ethnic and multi-ethnic neighborhoods of New York. Their friends and peers were Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, most often, first generation as well.
Most of the grandparents in the tribe from which I sprang spoke other languages or had accents and many had numbers tattooed on their arms.
I now live among people who have been emigrating for three centuries (250,000 in the Eighties and just as many between 2008 & 2012). Most everyone knows someone who had to leave for work.
And yet - few have ever known or lived among immigrants here.
That ‘aha moment’ - the perspective - still leaves me prone to anger sometimes, but not rage.
I’m also more compassionate and more able to engage in thoughtful, respectful and hopefully transformative conversations.
Storytelling reveals us - to ourselves and to others. It invites us to shed our armor - to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
Back to Jung and archetypal stories.
I was recently reminded that when David stepped up and volunteered to fight Goliath - King Saul removed his armor.
And Saul dressed David with his garments, and he placed a copper helmet on his head, and he dressed him with a coat of mail…and David said to Saul, "I cannot go with these, for I am not accustomed." And David took them off. (1 Samuel 17:38-39)
An ancient story complete with a contemporary reminder that courage requires vulnerability.
Not weakness - rather the strength that comes from being authentic and assured - when we’re ‘comfortable in our own skin’.
Care to investigate your story?
You can follow our work at your own pace right here, join a facilitated group or book a call to learn more.
*All of which is fodder for another discussion on another day. If it interests you - do explore the work of Carol Pearson and Joseph Campbell - whose books Hero Within - Six Archetypes We Live By and Myths to Live by are excellent places to start.
