Follow Your Myth

This article contains some spoilers for the Foundation series on AppleTV.

I like to think that psychotherapy is in part, about trying to understand the narrative of one’s life. 

This is not such a simple thing because our narrative, as we explore it in psychotherapy, involves following the many threads that are woven into the fabric of our life. 

Together these woven threads create a picture, a tapestry or a mural.  

This is an imperfect one-dimensional metaphor for the reality of our life, which is more complex, more dimensional, and carries real feelings intertwined in those threads.  It also does not consider the changing nature of that tapestry, which can sometimes transform in the time frame of a session, a day, a month, or more slowly over the course of years.  

Visually, I feel the image of the painted wall from the Foundation series on AppleTV captures some of the essence of what I’m talking about today. The painting is referred to as the Mural of Souls. 

The name too captures the essence of this article. 

The mural is a moving and intertwining of pigments and strands that create an ever-moving image or rather the narrative.  The pigment itself moves on the wall, some future concoction of paint and engineering together, that I wish I had access to in my own art studio.

For a Depth psychotherapist pulling on threads in one’s tapestry, the mural – usually involves exploring that moving landscape of the unconscious, one’s psyche which can be translated as mind, or soul.

We tug and ask, where does this thread lead? 

What does this thread touch upon in your mural? Why does the color fade here, and then drift and disappear altogether, fraying the image and making it fuzzy? Why does it become so muddied in some areas when we reflect back on the past?  Why might we not see the imagery present in our mural, just as Dawn could not see what was before him in Foundation. 

Where might we be colorblind in our lives, unaware of the mural we weave?

This is partly why a psychotherapist wants to know those stories people hold and may have an interest in the stories we forget. You may think it’s impossible to know what stories we may forget, but we look for clues.  We look for the blind spots.

We ask questions. 

We excavate little pieces of one’s past, like an archeologist revealing a mural buried at Pompeii.  

We may also look for clues in behavior and find insight in dreams. 

This is because we as humans are operating at different levels of our consciousness. We may be having conscious experiences during our everyday life, but we may have unconscious reactions to those experiences.  

When we sleep, we process some of what we experience, and this is us operating at another level of our consciousness or the unconscious. We may exhibit behavior in our lives though that is also an indicator of our consciousness in that we may have unconscious drivers for that behavior, which we seek to understand.  

I am speaking right now in the most general terms, without getting into specifics of what I am talking about.  

I am painting a picture with broad strokes, but part of discussing things in broad strokes is that it allows the reader, to fill in some of the details.  In that way this article becomes an exploration of consciousness. A communication between me writing, and the reader who may feel as though images float up from that narrative tapestry of their own, filling in a few details. 

In short, the stories we tell, and the lives we live are a collection of experiences, and the value we may assign to those experiences. Some we are aware of and others we are not aware of.

TAKEAWAYS

We receive takeaways from our experiences, and these takeaways may also be inherited from past generations.  We often are not aware that we are receiving takeaways.

These takeaways though come to us in different ways, two such ways are being delivered to us overtly, as in we are taught something like, “we don’t cheat on tests in this family” or simply, “thou shalt not steal.” 

On the other hand, there may be covert takeaways if things are not discussed, such as “it’s okay to cheat.”  A covert message in a family is one that is delivered, without using the wording of an overt message.  

More insidious though is if the covert message is wrapped up in something that makes us feel badly and defective when we cannot live up to a family belief. 

These types of things become part of our internal belief systems and they affect the narrative of our life.  A theme in the narrative may become, “you can’t trust the world, it isn’t safe” or in another family it may become, “look how wonderfully miraculous the world is”. 

This difference in messages can allow us to feel safe or the opposite to lack trust in our experiences, in others, in the world, or sometimes the very nature of the universe.

FORMS & ARCHETYPES 

Indulge me while I talk about where some of our tapestry may come from before getting back into where more personal threads can be seen – or skip ahead to the next section!

Form is the word that Plato used for those oldest of images we carry within, but Plato was not using language like unconscious or collective unconscious at that time – although he showed remarkable insight into the human psyche.

Gabor Betegh, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, has an essay, Plato on Philosophy and the Mysteries. Here he wrote of Plato’s relationship with what he called divine forms quoting Plato as saying;

The ultimate goal and achievement of philosophy is to lead us to the knowledge of the eternal, transcendent, divine Forms. (1992).

A reframing of divine forms, eidos, would not come for nearly 2400 years when psychologist Carl Jung wrote on these topics. 

Jung would also take the idea of forms and expand on this with the explosion of psychological understanding that took place around 1900. Sigmund Freud wrote about the divisions in our consciousness as the Id, Ego and Superego seeing the parts of the psyche as contained within one, the Self.  

Jung on the other hand embraced Plato’s divine forms and would go on to describe the collective unconscious which he describes as the repository of shared consciousness between humans. Jung wrote in The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (1954).

Archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos. For our purposes this term is apposite and helpful, because it tells us that so far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with archaic or—I would say—primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest times. (p. 18)

Jung felt the truth in Plato’s words and developed his psychological theory based in part on Plato’s understanding of psyche.  He brought into focus the eidos, and referred to it as archetypes. 

In doing so he offered up a new map of what we call the Self, which involves the conscious mind, the unconscious,and the collective unconscious – which is where the eidos, or archetypes live within us.

PERSONAL & SHARED ARCHETYPES

Some forms and archetypal imagery that I am looking at in sessions may go back to very personal things from someone’s life. They may often seem mundane or even simple to the person telling me a dream, or a story.  I find in them clues to the narrative and one’s personal story, I track them and take note.

These personal stories may be full of the normal or even traumatic challenges of our youth. Often how we orient to them is where the story takes on shape.  I’m looking for the thread of the narrative and those Forms that Plato spoke of.  The archetypal foundational bricks in our unconscious that we form our sense of self around.

I am also looking for how these things may come up spontaneously for us in our youth.  

Is there an old car in your past that you remember feeling safe in the backseat while mom or dad drove?  Is there a window seat in your childhood home where you read books?  Is there a treehouse in your mind that you still climb?  

TREEHOUSES OF YOUR MIND

The following example was shared by a client who gave me permission to share this image.

My client told me of a large tree overlooking a river, at a safe distance from his house.  He built an actual treehouse that had three levels. Each level had significance and purpose. He was telling me about his orientation to the world in an important way that I reflect on being intertwined with his journey and his soul journey.   We talk about the different levels of the tree-house in sessions and sometimes come back around months later again to amplify the image.

Intertwined with this image is an archetypal tree of life, a nurturing central tree that offers safety, and holding.  It presents a latticework, a framework up in its fractal branches.

I remembered that Matthew McConaughey in his book Greenlights, also wrote about a treehouse that was so important to him that he built as a kid. He talks of stealing wood and nails to build it. 

Is there part of McConaughey that returns to that treehouse in his mind?  Is there some significant metaphor bound to the stealing of nails and plywood? Was he taking the parts he needed from others to build a latticework that perhaps his family failed to provide somehow?

Was it in part about defying his dad and finding himself? What does it say about his resilience?  Why are we so often drawn to trees when we need a foundation, a lattice to support our vision?

In my mind, these things are a latticework of the unconscious projected outward into the world, like most things we create.  

They are begun so early that they feel significant, even as it may also feel mundane.  

Still, for others, there may be a beach littered with shells and smooth stones that you can still feel under your feet. A rope swing in a tree, or on a front porch. Perhaps a bubbling creek where fireflies light the evening. Maybe there is a fairy mound with lush grasses. Maybe it’s a soccer pitch or an old wall you bounced a ball against, or an old camper that you traveled in with your grandparents. 

It may be a private safe place, or stuffed animal, or a state of mind.

Sometimes, when I talk about these things with clients – I can see the expression change on their faces as they connect with some safe place, or sometimes a not-so-safe place inside.  

I can see that I’ve cast a small stone in the mirror lake of their past and made ripples, things begin to move, and a story may come up.  A little chip of a Pompeii mural is revealed, a thread from the tapestry, a hint of an archetype.

Other times the past is closed to me though, a door in a haunted hotel that is firmly shut that is not to be spoken about. 

I am familiar with doors like this, and although I can conjecture what might be behind those doors, I can’t force a door, and I can’t make any assumptions about what is on the other side.

ANCESTRAL THREADS IN THE TAPESTRY

Our narrative is written not just by the things in our past, but this latticework of influences that surrounds us also comes from our ancestry.

We may be carrying beliefs, values, and ideas that come from a distant past, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t always a great thing.

This is to say that the way we perceive ourselves and our story may come from a past that we don’t remember directly. 

These things extend back into our ancestry.  These may be beliefs or behaviors, that influence us, or we have adopted from our family culture. 

Again, this may be a good thing, like a family gathering to celebrate holidays being a tradition.  It may also be something that is less helpful, a lack of trust that we carry. Perhaps a feeling that maybe the world is unsafe in some way, or perhaps that there is always danger just around the corner.  It could be trauma from war, famine, or disease that lingers still in family history. 

Recently, I was looking at my own family ancestry with my brother Ron who has been researching our Italian heritage along with my sister Liz. 

We used Google Maps and Streetview one late night, to find the home of our great-great-grandfather Giovanni Valente in the little village of Serra, Italy.  We could virtually walk through the streets and see the village piazza. We could read the placards at the church looking for clues to the past.  

Up the tiny winding road where Giovanni lived is a red wall and dark door that could be hundreds of years old. 

It is a tiny home, built into the ruins of an ancient castle. 

My brother Ron rushes onward online making connections and finding family through birth and death records.  He finds marriage records that are stained by water and time and we try to decipher and piece bits together.  We decipher words and I try to enhance in Photoshop what I can.

While he finds one breakthrough after another in rapid succession – I wander through churches trying to find records of orphans. I become stuck on why Giovanni was abandoned, and why he doesn’t have the name of an abandoned baby which was so common at the time in Italy. That to me is also information, it is a clue.  Maybe it speaks to clues in our family history, clues about things we carry.

I wonder how that impacted the generations that were to come. Do we still carry echoes of this abandonment?  

Are there threads of this in our lives?  Can you feel the texture, and the color and how those threads and colors may be present? 

I feel like I can almost remember the hardship of Giovanni’s life, the culture they grew up in, not just in Italy, but the family culture. I feel like I can still hear some of the things they may have believed in. 

What are the overt family values they spoke of? What were the covert family values that were not spoken about aloud?  Did they feel safe?  Did they struggle with feelings of abandonment?  Did they feel connected to the community of the tiny village of Serra in ways we cannot comprehend in our spread-out cities and families in the US?

Did they read books? Could they read? Did they value hard labor over intellectual pursuits? What did they do in this tiny Italian village? It is not unlike where I am sitting near the creek in Boulder County, looking out the windows to the rolling foothills of the Rockies. 

Is that itself a coincidence?

KNOW THYSELF

I am talking about personal things in my life and talking about the threads in lives of others to underscore some of the points I’m trying to make in this article today. 

The point of trying to track these things, these pieces of our narrative is to understand where we come from, and what we struggle with.  We all know the quote by Socrates, Know Thyself.  This is part of that process, trying to understand that narrative, that mural, the threads of that tapestry, and the things we forget.

We are not only the sum of our parts, but we carry with us many generations. 

We also carry with us things that may not be in our linear memory, these things that happened during our attachment years that still influence us in our lives.  It may seem impossible to know things that are outside of linear memory, but the clues are there in the mural of souls. 

There are memories recorded by other parts of our brain that we may not be able to access. They too are there and are expressed in other ways, such as in our behaviors, our addictions, or the pain we carry.  They may come in the critical and ruminating voices we may experience with depression, or the anxiety that wells up at times.

We are on this journey and somewhere in that unconscious world of ours, we are weaving that Mural of Souls that is not just our lives but has pieces of the past as well as the things we have brought into the mural in our lifetime.  

We are weaving pieces for the next generation as well, and this is not a bad thing, this is how we live. We share our culture, values, memories and these are handed down to future generations. 

The goal is to figure out which things we want to leave behind or whether we should eliminate a particular thread from the fabric of our tapestry.