Your psyche is a record of your life, and in particular, a record of the strategies you’ve learned to navigate your life.
It’s like an archaeological dig: layers upon layers of psychic sediment that tell the story of you.
Psychological complexes are akin to finding a stone ax or a flint knife in the sediment. These are the psychic tools you’ve forged and honed to grapple with life’s ups and downs.
Today, I want to bust out those itty bitty brushes archaeologists are always using in history documentaries to reveal the finer details of one of my complexes, one that was buried in a deep, childhood layer of my psyche.
When we find a buried tool or complex in the psyche, its purpose isn’t always evident. Is this a hammer? A musical instrument? A religious icon? We might need to dig around, gathering contextual clues, before it makes any sense at all.
In my case, I first became aware of various surface layers concealing the tool.
There was the layer of procrastinating on things I claimed were important to me.
There was the layer of chronic financial instability.
There was the layer of wanting to make changes that I never seemed to get around to making.
There was the layer of feeling like I could never take a break.
Working through these layers has been uneven and wholly imperfect, but lucky for me, the psyche doesn’t require perfection to surrender its treasures.
Working through the procrastination layer, for instance, has been a mish-mash of improvements and falling back on outdated patterns. Over the past couple years, I’ve developed a super simple time-tracking system that works well for me, and I’m now consistently getting the things done that I say I want to get done (like my book!).
Except.
Except for a select group of tasks that perennially gets shuffled to the next day…and the next. These tasks aren’t random—far from it. When I carefully brushed away the detritus of surface-level differences, at their core, all of these tasks related to putting myself out there, aka marketing my creative work.
This isn’t to say that I never market, but the relatively little marketing I do has taken me years to work up to. And the interesting part to me is the familiar feeling I get when I’m avoiding those tasks. Complexes are bound together by what Jung called a “feeling tone.”
When enough psychic layers had been painstakingly brushed away (i.e., I’d made sufficient surface-level changes to glimpse lower layers), there was a curious double-ended tool on a stand, like a seesaw. But what on earth was it for? And why was it buried in such a deep layer of psychic sediment?
One of the most primal scenarios all humans must learn to navigate is: What do I do with discomfort?
Part of it involves learning how to label the discomfort we’re experiencing since, after all, not all strategies are effective with all forms of discomfort. If my stomach is rumbling I need a sandwich, not a pep talk. If I’m stuck in the rain I need a roof, not a sandwich.
But sometimes we don’t have a strategy for certain discomforts, or the strategy we have isn’t well suited to the job.
Growing up, when emotional discomfort arose, whether it was fear, anger, sadness, etc., there weren’t any tools for being present with and processing those emotions—no one was modeling how to do that. Instead, people would reach for physical comforts/distractions; namely food, shopping, and sex.
That tool was handed down and handed down, if I had to guess, through many generations.
When I got my hands on the tool, the core stayed the same (this is the ancestral part of “ancestral wounds,” which is another term for complexes), but it gathered sediments that were unique to my life experiences.
When I felt emotional discomfort, there were a few adults I could go to, and their responses were almost always the same: they would give me sugar or buy me something, linking my tool with those behaviors.
This tool existed in a matrix of other tools (it’s part of a whole toolbox, lemme tell ya!), like the tool of overworking in order to prove your worth. Thrown into a giant soup pot, these ingredients swirled and combined in ways both unique and archetypal, to be recorded in the psychic sediments of my life.
Fast forward to the present.
I’ve mentioned that I’m dealing with hyperthyroidism (when you get this email, I’ll actually be on my way to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota). If I had to describe this condition purely as a felt experience it would be this:
GO, GO, GO! *slam into brick wall*
And with each successive wall-slamming, the whole system slows down another notch until I’m wading through tar.
In many ways, this feels like a physical expression of the emotional effects of living like a shark: constantly moving, moving, moving until I collapse in exhaustion.
Over the past decade, I’ve made a LOT of changes in this regard, such as selling a very busy bodywork practice, estranging from my entire family, and being mindful of what I say ‘yes’ to.
And yet.
We cannot get rid of our complexes.
But we can reveal more of them to the light of consciousness (bust out those little archaeology brushes), which then gives us more room to choose how we respond to life, rather than being impelled by unconscious forces.
These tools are part of our psychic record, our lived experience.
Pretending we don’t have them only ensures that our use of these tools remains unconscious. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
Going back to my seesaw-shaped tool, here’s what I understand of it so far:
One side carries the shark energy: go, go, go; never take a break.
The other side carries the energy of “I’ll do it later.”
The two are locked in a tug of war, the “do it later” camp kicking in when I’m too exhausted to continue, and the “go, go, go” camp forever wary of the other, fearful that the “do it laters” will drag me down into a state of permanent inertia.
Do you see how both sides, even though they appear to be opposites, are actually working for the same thing, because they are bound by the same worldview?
It’s a little slippery and tricky to articulate, but I might sum up the worldview as “limits are terrifying,” which often bleeds into the more extreme belief, “limits aren’t real.”
(And oooh boy, there are plenty of spiritual “abundance” teachings that reinforce this belief, as well as capitalist dogma that insists there can and will always be MORE.)
The “go-gos” don’t want to accept that there are limitations to my resources, especially my resources of time and energy. If I just go at it even harder, somehow, some way, I can transcend those limits.
The “laters” also reject limits, but they do so by postponing problems to a future when those limitations will have magically melted away. Later I’ll have more time. Later I’ll have more money. Later I won’t feel anxious about this.
Both of these camps are trying, in their own way, to grapple with the foundational truth that life entails limits.
Does this give you a clue as to the archetypal core of this complex?
At the heart of every complex lies an archetype, an overarching pattern of human experience. The archetype acts like a magnet around which our ancestral and individual experiences accrue.
At the heart of my complex is none other than the fear of death.
Both camps, the “go-gos” and the “laters,” are kicking up a lot of song and dance to obscure the very simple truth that, no matter what I do, I won’t be getting out of this alive.
It doesn’t matter if I work myself to the bone and finish my entire 22-book romantasy series. One day, I will die.
It doesn’t matter if I procrastinate ‘til the cows come home and never write another word. One day, I will die.
And yet…it does matter, doesn’t it? It matters very much what I do between now and my last breath. Who knows—perhaps not in a cosmic sense, but it sure as hell matters to me.
This illuminates the existential truth, if you will, of a complex.
Even though a vast expanse of our psyche is unconscious, and always will be, no matter how “enlightened” we are…
Even though incredibly potent unconscious forces (complexes) are influencing our every thought, word, and deed (and believe me, they are)…
Even though it’s impossible, in a very real sense, to be fully, consciously in control of our decisions…
We are nonetheless responsible for every choice we make (or fail to make).
Even though we will most certainly die no matter what we do, what we do still matters.
I could sum up my entire romantasy series as an exploration of this very paradox: Even though we’re fated, we still have a choice.
And choose we must.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
On today’s New Moon:
Let’s use this energy to carry out a little psychic archaeology.
Not with the aim of sanding away the imperfections.
Not to finally “fix” ourselves.
But to honor those buried tools. Not as proof of our brokenness, but as evidence of our survival. Our ingenuity. Our adaptation.
Let’s sit beside the fire of our own becoming and say: Yes, I see you. I see how you’re trying to help. Thank you.
Because when we brush the dust off these psychic artifacts, cradling them in the palm of awareness, we gain something precious.
In that space between fate and free will, between instinct and intention, we find the core—the beating heart—of our power.
The power, in each and every moment, to choose anew.
Happy Full Moon, my friend.
P.S. Did you know that you can read The Fool & the Threads of Time for free in Kindle Unlimited? Start reading here.
