Yesterday, we talked about creativity-choking perfection, which we’re going to tie in today with some family drama. If you haven’t read yesterday’s email, I highly recommend starting there.
In my family, there’s an emphasis on being blameless. If you can’t prove your blamelessness, then you don’t “deserve” connection and love.
💡 Can you spot the parallels with yesterday’s false belief, “You’re only allowed to do creative work if you can do it perfectly”? (We’ll get into that soon.)
There are powerful pressures in place within my family’s dynamics to keep everyone “in line.” For instance, last month, I got an angry text message from a relative, out of the blue, roundly chastising me for not answering a call from my grandma, ending with, “What is wrong with you!!!!”
For context, I haven’t been in contact with my grandma for almost four years now, a difficult, and very painful, decision I made after trying for years to improve our relationship, until I realized that I could no longer support my mental health and stay in contact.
She hasn’t respected this boundary, calling and sending letters since the boundary was set, each instance registering as a jolt, like a touch to an electric fence whenever her name popped up on my screen or her handwriting was waiting in my mailbox.
So, I eventually chose to block her number, and thus had no idea that she’d called (again) until I got my relative’s exclamation-point-laden text.
Leaving this relationship was a major no-no according to the family rules, which state that you have to silently, resentfully put up with whatever occurs in the family, your only recourse being occasional explosions of anger directed at whoever is “at fault,” after which you don’t have to apologize for your reaction because the other person “deserved it.”
Let’s tie this in with the Gemini + Venus threads.
Duality in the form of psychological splitting was rife in my childhood experience. It was impossible to reconcile experiences with family members who were both abusive and loving, so my little-kid ego split people into parts. Each person was composed of the Good Family Member and the Bad Family Member.
I unconsciously adopted numerous strategies to try and evoke the good version while keeping the bad one at bay, believing it was entirely my fault whichever one showed up to the interaction.
♊ We might think of this as a shadow expression of Gemini’s duality (albeit a necessary one to prevent my ego from disintegrating into psychosis as a kid).
As an adult, I’ve been able to incorporate more integrative Venusian energy to these dynamics, and I’m better able to accept that everyone, including myself, has an entire range of qualities, not all of them sunshine and rainbows.
Now, if we go back for a moment to the writing duality from yesterday…
—this book is amazing/this book is terrible—it’s easy to see how neither extreme is particularly helpful in sitting down and finishing a quality book, right?
But neither is it as simple as saying, “Always strive for the middle ground.”
Jung was emphatic that the transcendent function wasn’t merely a compromise between the initial duality. In fact, this often doesn’t work very well, because both sides are left in a chronically unfulfilled state. Nothing has been transformed, and we’re using willpower to mute the intensity of the tension of opposites.
Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting compromise is bad. There are situations in life where it’s the bee’s knees, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
💎 The transcendent function, which is the ability for the ego to sit with tension long enough for the unconscious to offer up a new solution, isn’t about averaging out the opposites.
It’s about allowing discomfort to exist so we can learn something—and become something—radically new.
Going back to the family situation…
…when I was stuck in the splitting stage (i.e., fracturing my image of someone into the Good Family Member and the Bad Family Member), I was attempting to avoid the tension of opposites.
A person wasn’t simultaneously “good” and “bad.” They were one or the other, and based on that categorization, I would react with patterned responses.
Later, as I became better able to see a person’s inherent duality, tension arose. Someone wasn’t purely “safe” to be around or not. Instead, they were a human who could act in unpredictable ways, and I had to choose how I wanted to respond.
⚒️ Within a single interaction, they might say something kind—and something hurtful. I couldn’t protect myself from this uncertainty by splitting them into separate halves and trying to codependently control which half showed up.
Witnessing other people’s duality began by being able to see more of my own, and this, again, brought me into conflict with the family rule of needing to be blameless.
As long as I attempted to live under the illusion of blamelessness, I could not truly see myself. My own self-image kept disintegrating into Good Me and Bad Me.
Growth isn’t simply about averaging out the extremes, as we saw with the transcendent function. Yes, it’s about acknowledging that I, and everyone else, contains both the capacity to be kind and cruel, but there’s more to it than that.
Let’s compare this to writing again…
As long as I attempted to do everything perfectly, my book could either be AMAZING or TERRIBLE, no in between.
Acknowledging that my book contained some of both, and a bunch of other stuff besides, generated uncomfortable tension.
If it was perfect, there was nothing else I needed to do. If it was terrible, there was also nothing else I needed to do because I “should” just give up.
This was an unconscious way of absolving myself of the responsibility inherent in adult life.
Existing with the tension of opposites confronted me with my responsibility as a writer. If I want to finish a book, I need to work through all of the messy bits from page one to “the end.” I can’t magically skip ahead to being a better writer; I have to write my way to being a better writer.
With family, categorizing someone as GOOD or BAD was also a way of absolving myself of the responsibility to be present in my relationships, to regularly check in with myself and clearly communicate what I need and want, and to make decisions if a relationship was in regular conflict with those needs and wants.
In other words, dealing with all the messy bits in between the extremes of so-called good and bad.
My decision to cut off contact with my grandma wasn’t a result of determining that she’s “bad.” I love my grandma very, very much, and I miss her.
But I also had to acknowledge, after many years of trying, that I didn’t have the ability to be in that relationship without falling into destructive patterns (drinking, not tending to my mental health and slipping into depression, etc).
This wasn’t a matter of finding a “middle road.” I’m not even sure what that would look like—maybe talking half the time that we used to? That “solution” was irrelevant to the issue at hand. It didn’t address what I actually needed in order to heal.
There’s much more I want to say about this, and I’ll be doing that in the Portal this month.
In one of our lessons, I share the entire text exchange with my family member…
…using it to illustrate how to distinguish your personal values from the status quo, even when there’s considerable pressure to conform.
I’ve chosen to do this only in the Portal, because these messages are pretty darn vulnerable, and that feels like a nice container in which to bare more of my soul.
So, if the connections we’ve been exploring between creativity and family boundaries are your cup of tea, and you’d like to explore them in a Jungian Magic context, I’d love to see you in the Portal.
You can use coupon code PORTALMOON to get your first month free. Expires 6/15 (next Friday).
Happy weekend. ✨
