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"Stories Told, Stories Untold, Stories that tell Us" - An Evening with James Hollis
Jung Institute 5/18/12
We track the movement of the invisible through forms in the visible world. Dream images, for example. Story is a verb, not a noun, and is storying through us.
We each need to find our story. One person who models this is the lone survivor of a European town where all other Jews were massacred. He hid in the forest and returned after the war to find the Jewish cemetery had been intentionally shattered by tanks. He
made it his life’s work to reassemble each fragmented headstone,
like a vast series of complex jigsaw puzzles.
We are both carriers and products of stories. These stories can particularly be
seen in our relationship patterns.
Hollis offers the example of his friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Steven Dunn. Dunn
lived to mid-life believing that his father was a drunk who had gambled away the family savings.
Late in life his father confided that he had given their savings to his father-in-law who needed the money for his mistress. He took the blame, kept the secret, and drank. Now informed, Steven was then free to see how the family
mythology was built on a lie. His father had told the lie to protect the
reputation of his father-in-law and in so doing had ruined his own, and then
lived the story of a ruined man.
Avoidance of conflict means avoidance of growth. It
(the real issue) is not about what it’s about. It’s linked to a deeper
story.
When are we not willing to risk something for what’s
truly important to us? How do we get permission to be who we are?
How do we confront that story? What are the stories
that are playing out in your life?
Hollis uses the book (also turned into a movie) The
Reader to illustrate the idea that almost everyone has a pathological secret
around which we create
our lives to conceal.
In The Reader, some of the
surprising and underlying plot twists eventually reveal why the female character
consistently affirmed
her signature on a Nazi prison camp authorization. Her deepest shame, and what she will go to any lengths to
hide, is that she is illiterate. Learning to read while in
prison, she then discovers the truth about the holocaust, and on the day of her prison release, hangs
herself.
A complex, says Hollis, is simply a charged cluster of
our history of story. It’s a splinter story. One’s own history is the
embodiment of story.
“We believe ourselves to be conscious and every once in
a while we are.” Hollis
“How much of my life is my choice?” he asks. “We do
logical things based on the story we’re in service
to.”
Would we say these stories are worthy of our lives?
Therapy is a re-storying (reframing) of events. Symptoms are pictures that
stand for us.
“Our task is to continuously be defeated by ever larger
things.” Rilke
Bigger stories can crush the small ones we’ve even
unconsciously clung to.
Questions to ask ourselves:
What is the story that nature or divinity had in mind
when it invested in me?
What stories bind me to repetitive
behavior?
What story actually wants to come through
me?
We’re a multiplicity of stories, so if you think your
life is boring it’s simply a failure of imagination not to see
otherwise. Self is a verb. Self is always selfing the story you’re
in service to.
Hollis discovered his central story was: “Don’t go out
there; it’s too scary.” He described the hard life of his parents and his
experience in the depression to explain why this story made perfect
sense.
His parents wanted a better life for him, which they saw
as working for the phone company. Somehow during his college years he had a
breakthrough. A philosophy instructor offered him an independent study
course.
The instructor then explained that independent study
meant that he could choose his subject and research it on his own. Excited at
the prospect, the young sophomore (which he noted combines the terms sophia and
moron) walked through the campus bookstore actively searching for something
compelling. Suddenly his gaze fell upon a particular book and he realized that
was it, that was what he wanted to write about. He then held up that book, now
after so many decades, rubber banded together, but still featuring Dr. Carl
Jung’s face on the cover.
While we want to live with certainty (which many
obsessive compulsive or addictive behaviors revolve around) reality presents
ambiguity. The more you are able to live with ambiguity, the more you are
likely to live a more interesting life.
Don’t be too attached to your models. You’ll have
better questions as you grow. The models are just
metaphors.
Questions:
What large story of the soul wants to be told through
me?
Of what am I unconscious?
Remember, we track the invisible as it moves through the
visible world, i.e., our history, our dreams.
“The window of consciousness is narrower than I would
have thought,” says Hollis. Invisible forces are continuously at work. “If
economic experts can’t
plan a national economy, how can you
or I plan our
lives? Yet you have to try.
Jung’s theory of how we change: Three parts: Insight,
courage to face what we uncover, and endurance. Psychology can only help with
the first.
Hollis defines addiction as a reflexive anxiety-managing
system. On one level, he likens it to habit. We get upset so easily over small
provocations, traffic, for instance. It’s anxiety at
disorder.
If the water level were rising in the room, and we
couldn’t see it, we would still be unconsciously reacting to the invisible. If
the level fell back to normal, our anxiety level would also lesson and we might
remain unconscious as to why.
To break addiction requires one to become more skilled
at bearing the unbearable, psychologically speaking. This is why new habits are
generated through recovery programs.
We tend to accept that our well being is about going
along with existing stories, as in the case of Stephan Dunn.
