A great deal of my personal work for the last several years has consisted of reconciling things that are in apparent opposition.  This is a mental act that has been described throughout history and across the globe, notably in Buddhism and Jungian studies.  It is a skill that involves taking two seemingly antithetical notions, finding their common ground, and in doing so, discovering a third path that joins the opposers and leads away from the conflict, what Buddhism calls The Middle Way.  It can be a difficult skill to implement, depending on the nature of the opposition.

When one’s psyche has been fractured by trauma in the manner in which my own has been, there can be many things in opposition, and they must all be reconciled, or in therapeutic terms, healed.  Some things were easy to reconcile, and that was the work that my early days in therapy were filled with: the low-hanging fruit, as it were.  It was necessary work that laid the foundation for the later reconciling of much more difficult oppositions within my psyche, ones that required a great deal of time and energy to analyze for the clues to their common ground and even more time and energy to fuse them, yielding a path.

In my current therapeutic work, I don’t really have any low-hanging, easy to pluck fruit anymore.  Now I’m having to climb the tree to get to what I want and need, and this is a tree the branches of which are covered with thorns.  These are admittedly damaged parts of my psyche, but ones that have been serving a self-protective purpose for a very long time, so they see themselves as being very important.  As such, they are very resistant to any kind of change to their roles, which they see as being vital to my survival.

This means I’ve been engaged in inner battle with myself as of late, attempting to logically negotiate with aspects of my psyche that are essentially delusional because their vision of the world is darkened by trauma.  I’ve reconciled and thereby fused so many broken pieces of myself that what’s left has somewhat aggregated into a distillation of some of my most negative feelings and memories.  This part of myself is all emotion with zero logic, making it almost impossible to rationally engage with.

I frequently find myself at a loss as to how to manage this part of myself.  I see it as something of a final challenge to overcome before I can get to the good stuff that lies beyond it: I just can’t figure out how to overcome it.  All I have at the moment is a short list of things that I know for sure do not work in my efforts to tackle this challenge.  Getting mad certainly doesn’t work.  In fact, that seems to feed its energy.

At the moment, I mostly manage it by hiding it and doing my best to keep it inside where no one else can see it.  This means that my life has become divided between a dark inner existence and a lighter outer one, and the longer it stays that way, the more different they become.  I sometimes feel split in half between my inner and outer selves.  In Jungian terms, I believe I have come up against what he referred to as “the shadow”, a place in my psyche where I have shoved everything about myself I don’t want anyone else to see, along with parts of myself I decided to deal with “later”.

Well, it’s “later” now, and my Shadow’s closet is bursting forth with skeletons that somehow need dispelling, either by destruction or transformation.  I’ve done all of the easy reconciliations: now it’s time for the hard ones.  I am once again reminded of video game strategy, where the game doesn’t get easier as you progress up levels: it gets harder, to match your increasing skill level.  Sure it’s hard to play, but you’re also a fucking badass with huge perks that has become extremely hard to kill and is essentially death on two feet.

The thing about the Shadow is that it doesn’t just hide unwanted things, it hides good things that you’re afraid to bring forth for whatever reasons.  In my case, my Shadow hides a nasty temper for one thing, but it also hides an amazing singing voice that I will allow no one but my husband to hear, and even then very quietly and only occasionally: he has never heard a full-throated beltout from me.  No one has.  I suspect these things are related somehow in a way I have yet to ascertain.  Perhaps the nasty temper at least partially comes from things that are unvoiced.  Express one, and maybe the other will diminish.

At present, these are the opposites I must reconcile: my Shadowy inner self, and my brighter outer self.  Neither is a true reflection of my real Self, they each present a projection that is designed to protect that real Self.  I feel that if I truly want my real Self to be what the world sees, I must reconcile and heal my dark and light parts so they no longer feel the need to hide either themselves, or Me.

That means conquering a lot of fear and mistrust of the world in general, something I find very difficult in this day and age in the country I live in.  I have literally been frightened out of my mind and wits over the last several years.  I now have to carefully gauge what kind of person I may be talking to before revealing certain things about myself.  I feel constantly cautious, if not downright unsafe, depending on where I am and who’s around me.

The reconciliation of opposites is something for which the principles of alchemy can be easy applied.  In my case, my worldly fear and mistrust is hindering the psychological reaction that needs to take place between my inner and outer selves so that they can merge and create something new.  Those selves are no different than different chemical compounds that need to be mixed in a very particular way in order to achieve the positive result of a stable reaction and a new compound, and not an explosion.

In the reality of therapy, self and otherwise, this means treading lightly in sensitive psychological territory where there is damage.  The number one rule of therapy is “don’t cause further trauma”, and unfortunately it is all too easy to do just that in the course of attempting to help oneself.  In the case of successful healing, one must also leave sufficient time for that healing to settle into the body and psyche.  One doesn’t go jogging once a broken leg has been set and cast, you have to wait.  The mind and soul are no different.

I learned the hard way about inadvertently causing myself further trauma about a year ago when I engaged in some internal dialogues with some very dark aspects of my psyche.  Regrettably, it had the effect of somewhat waking them up and making them conscious, which meant that those dark aspects were right up not only in my own face, but the faces of the people around me.  I was very unpleasant to deal with sometimes, and my head was full of darkness.  While I gained valuable information about those parts of myself, it was a difficult time that I probably should have handled differently.

I did the right thing following all of that and let myself rest psychologically.  I had clearly poked a bear and needed to let it settle back down.  I’ve been able to use the knowledge I gained positively in my analysis of those parts and correlating dialogues.  As such, my inner and outer selves are more closely aligned with one another, though still in opposition.  Their common ground is easier to see, which will eventually make it easier to find The Middle Way and escape the constant conflict between them.

I’m looking forward to eventually being a person that no longer feels the need to hide.  I look forward to singing in front of people, and hopefully hearing them compliment my voice.  I hope that I am not the only person who thinks I sound good.  I also look forward to being the kind of person that doesn’t care if anyone else likes my voice and sings anyway, just because it makes me happy.  Something tells me that a voice raised in happiness is always beautiful.

I’m looking forward to no longer being divided.  To no longer feeling as though I’m being torn in half by my own psyche as I move through life.  I look forward to being whole, which is the goal of Jungian psychology, rather than being a cracked jumble of fractured pieces that often barely holds itself together.

All of that will take a great deal of patience, understanding, compassion, and kindness, though.  Not to mention measures of self-love and self-forgiveness I have heretofore been incapable of.  These are also things I look forward to.  I briefly touched these things earlier last year when I did some major work on myself and had a revelation, but something shifted in the weeks and months afterward and I lost touch with those nice feelings for reasons I’m still unclear about.  Maybe the part of me that hates myself just wasn’t ready for self-love, self-kindness, and self-forgiveness, or believes that I am unworthy of them.

Until I tackle this personal hurdle, the alchemy of reconciling my inner and outer selves will remain beyond my grasp.  However, I suspect that once I master the trick of actually loving myself with compassion, the darkness surrounding the Shadow will abate somewhat and it will no longer feel such a deep need to hide Me.  Likewise, my brighter, outer self will no longer feel the need to wear a mask when around others as it does now.  My inner and outer selves will begin to match each other, and I will no longer feel split down the middle.

Then The Middle Way will be clear and obvious, and easy to follow since I will no longer be at war with myself.  This is what I look forward to the most: an inner peace that shows through to the outside without the fear that has come with hiding myself.  It’s natural and understandable that I became this way after the various traumatic events of my life, but those events are in the past, and the people who hurt me are dead.  The only way they can still hurt me is if I allow their ghosts to live rent free in my head in the form of bad memories.  After nearly 7 years of intensive therapy, it’s gotten easier not to let this happen, but it’s still a frequent problem I have to deal with.

Nevertheless, I am not done healing yet.  There is still damage to fix and a mess of psychological baggage to clean up, though far less than there used to be.  When I look at my “inner house” where my inner self “lives” in the landscape of my mind, it continues to improve, with more trunks unpacked and their contents distributed throughout the house as time goes on.  This represents the ongoing process of sifting through my mental baggage for its trash as well as its treasure.  The house itself is in good working order and structurally sound, representing a healthier psyche, especially when compared to the past.

I do not know if the process of reconciling my inner and outer selves is something I should tackle deliberately, or simply allow it to happen in its own time in a more Taoist fashion: to “do by not doing”, as the Taoists say.  I have found over the last several years that by allowing my subconscious to offer my conscious self information when it thinks I’m ready for it, I suffer less and accomplish more.  Conversely, when I force the issue, bad things can happen.

For such an important task to my psyche, I believe allowing the process to occur naturally would be best, and fastest.  I am often surprised by just how quickly my mind will process trauma and render healing if I give it the right tools and enough time to prepare.  I do not imagine this will happen overnight, and will in fact likely occur over weeks, months, or even a year or more, perhaps without my even noticing at first.  I suspect the first sign of healing this final divide will be an irrepressible desire to sing.  I look forward to finding an outlet for my voice, in more ways than one.