Negative Mother Complex: How to hold a painful childhood with compassion.

[Music] welcome to this Union life three good friends and union analysts Lisa Marciano Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective two important issues of the day I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a union analyst in Philadelphia I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach Virginia I'm Debra Stewart a Jungian analyst and Cape Cod we wanted to tackle a difficult subject today we wanted to discuss healing from a negative mother complex what do we even mean when we talk about a

mother complex in general and specifically a negative mother complex well one of the things that comes up for me is that I think the mother complex is if you'll pardon the pun the mother of all complexes because everybody has had a mother one way or another that is such a huge and central biologically oriented as well as psychologically oriented relationship and mothers still have for the most part the primary caretaking role so the mother complex is really huge and we all have one right and when we talk about a complex in union terms we're talking

about a sort of a network of associations and memories and feelings that accrete around an archetypal core and in this case obviously the archetype would be the archetype of the mother and every archetype has a positive pole and a negative pole so there are many positive associations with mother you think of the Virgin Mary and there are negative associations for the mother two archetypal you might think of the which I think of a complex such as the mother complex that there's this great vast sort of concept of mother with those two polarities that you just

described Lisa and then it's sort of like this giant funnel we have images of mother symbolic stuff around mother and then the funnel narrows and narrows until we come down to any given person's personal mother who had very specific characteristics and was unique in all the world but she is the conduit for this much larger archetypal energy and if a person has had of really dark or even just our conflicted relationship with mom that energy goes back up through the funnel and it can be huge and and overwhelming because it's connected to the mother archetype

and that's powerful so what does it look like to have a negative mother complex I mean I think it can look like so many different things but often the red flag very explicitly is that somebody will come in and as we're taking a history doing a kind of basic evaluation of the psychological terrain that the most intense memories will often surface and so one of the clues we'll have is someone will come in and literally you know the first thing on their plate is talking about mom and then we begin to get this sense that

there's a lot of psychic landscape that's populated by a lot of intense memories of perhaps adoration but if it's a negative mother complex of suffering and they can be categorized you know in my own mind you know I think over the years it's sometimes it's the memories of neglect so we have the neglectful mother sometimes it's memories are being attacked by the mother psychologically or physically and that can be the dominant theme sometimes the mother just and the child just don't attach they just don't connect for some reason and there's just this feeling that there

are kind of two ghosts living together and then some people will have these great memories of the mother just engulfing them and sometimes enjoying it but sometimes just constantly fleeing from the overwhelming either needs or agenda of the mother and they do seem to fall in categories or perhaps following categories during stages of the analysis at least mm-hmm Joseph I think one of the things you're pointing to is that the quality of our mother complex is significantly influenced by the actual relationship with our biological or a personal mother our memories create the tone and then

they pull forward archetypal themes and it's also interesting that you have you know three kids in a household one has a really negative mother complex and one has a neutral mother complex and one has even a positive mother complex that we each kind of gather and cluster certain kinds of memories or were predisposed even to remember more negative things or perhaps more idealized things so it is this interplay of kind of temperament and external factors I I think and I think that's what makes it one of the things that makes us so hard to work

with a negative mother complex is that the relational axis and the intrapsychic axis get all tangled up with one another what part is my complex that resides in me and then there was mom who did this and who did that and who did the other thing and so those two things really are mixed in together inevitably yeah for me one of the things that I notice when working with someone with a negative mother complex is there's a way that when we have a positive a generally positive mother complex we sort of anticipate that the world

is going to open to us we enter a new situation expecting that people will like us we think that at least some of the time things are going to go our way and often the world kind of has a way of meeting those expectations that things can often just kind of come a little bit more easily my own mother complex is generally pretty positive and I remember at the end of union training sitting around to having lunch with several people and someone said Lisa you have such an easy time in training well how how did

that happen and I kind of laughed I said well I have a positive mother complex and everyone at the table just their jaws dropped open they looked at me said what is that like but there's a way that when you have a negative mother complex it just seems like the psyche throws up monsters in front of you all the time Wow that that is really powerful you know gives me pause to think about my mother complex and I would say kind of referencing your descriptions of what kinds of ones there can be there although my

mother didn't want me directly she was wounded and so what has what has happened you know along the line was my own doubts about whether the world would be welcoming or hurtful and a kind of guardedness so I think your point is a really good one and I remember sitting at that table with you to Lisa and so sort of like you know almost all of us have I think come into this field have been wounded in some way and we want to heal ourselves and help to heal other people but your description of the

positive mother complex and how it plays out is is remarkable versus the wounds that we carry from our relationship with our mother and from our mothers themselves of what kind of people they were yeah and I think it's important to say to that you know listen we've all been wounded by both of our parents always right there isn't some kind of ideal some mothers fall short know every every parent you know Jim Hollis says something like life is traumatic and your parents maybe can maybe mediate that trauma a little bit or make it worse but

that's that's about all parents can do so it there isn't some ideal that we're seeking and it isn't the case that that because your mother was a little bruised or a bruising that somehow there's some faithful error that was made so I think we're trying to lift a burden of blame from the mothers who are listening to us right now but at the same time let's roll up our sleeves and not be afraid to really talk about this symptomatically because we're dealing with it all the time one of the things that I moved to start

talking about you know is is the disappearing mother I'm thinking about scenarios that I've heard many times that something happens it could be postpartum depression where the mother kind of just fades away psychologically or even physically or the mother has a physical symptom she has migraines or she becomes sick she kind of takes to her bed and then there we have a child perhaps even a toddler who's trying to move towards the mother who's bringing their needs and wants to the mother and you know the door is gently shut as mother kind of takes to

her bed which means the child is thrown upon their own resources to adjust to that so one of the things I will sometimes see is the child will retreat to an inner world and we call this a kind of schizoid compensation the child agonizes over not being able to be soothed not being able to be attended to and some of them discover that if they just play by themselves talk to themselves and even kind of resentfully resist approaching the mother for anything they can develop an entire encapsulated world which carries them into adulthood the difficulty

with that is that adult relationships can be very mysterious sometimes they fail to initiate romantic coupling later in life because it seems a mysterious and unnecessary sometimes the self-soothing cycle shows up as compulsive masturbation it can show up as problematic relationships to food end this kind of barrier of anxiety of even looking to another person to meet one's needs so Joseph I think one of the things you're referring to is the attachment patterns that we can see in children and sometimes it's a very disorganized there's the schizoid one there are all kinds of things that

children can absorb in a difficult maternal relationship that then show up later in other relationships as problematic and that's what we look for it's sort of not just your direct memories of what was mom like where did that go inside you however the US what might be the defense's or the compensatory mechanisms that this person has employed around relationships specifically and how your self-soothe what are your relationships like you know I think I think specifically with the disappearing mother Joseph one of the things that I've seen is that there cannot I mean you you painted

this picture of this kind of encapsulated world and Deb you're you're picking up on this really important thing about these sort of patterns that get laid down you know another way that it can present is that there's this kind of fault line in the psyche that there's just a place where it feels like we just can't trust that our needs will be met and perhaps that makes us feel like we have to work very very hard in relationships to keep the other person there for us and so we're constantly spending so much energy trying to

accommodate the other person and make sure that he or she is happy so that that person will stay with us and sometimes we just don't get into a relationship at all we keep people at arm's length sometimes their we use food or substances to soothe our anxiety around relationships it goes the ways that we cope and defend and compensate our mariette so wanting to move categorically through it so we can parse it we were talking about this process of anxiety which is different than kind of dissociation or a schizoid retreat because often the ski Zoid

person isn't having a lot of intense feelings they're in it they kind of live in a cotton world that's you know very gauzy around them but then we have this other configuration where there is at least enough promise of assistance by the mother perhaps the mother is able to attend to a younger child a younger sibling a new baby and then the older children are watching that so they know that the mother is capable of providing but they're feeling neglected or in fact are not being attended to so then this clamoring sometimes even ravenous kind

of reaching and trying to tug providing behavior out and I think as adults that can show up is this kind of seeking mother in all kinds of circumstances because I work with a lot of military it's not uncommon for a summit to go into the military because the institution of the military is so overwhelmingly providing people go into becoming college professors which nowadays doesn't pay very much but to be in the alma mater to be in the world of the mother that is all-encompassing you know in Europe the professor's even live permanently on the campuses

you know I remember one of my European friends saying that you know she be in the lunch hall and she see one of her professors kind of trundle out in his bathrobe to have lunch they just lived in that world and so sometimes people will project this some to organizations and and or they get a new job for instance and there is a boss and the way that they're you know milking the teat for all kinds of comfort and all kinds of assistance there again trying to draw the mother out of circumstances in order to

manage their anxiety well and and also to get unmet needs met right so they're they're kind of constantly seeking what was never available to them or was was available to them only inadequately so let's talk about a perhaps a darker constellation where the mother as perhaps very young perhaps a very undeveloped and a new baby arrives and the mother is naive she has no idea how much the baby will need how the crying is so relentless how the mother is required to provide something constantly you know 24 hours a day for an infant and the

mother begins to feel like the child is devouring her and she begins to attack the child verbally perhaps physically or is in a constant state of hostility because the needs of the child feel like they're injuring her so that creates a very complicated constellation in the psyche of an adult mm-hmm with the attacking mother people are caught in this middle ground of having deeds because that primal part of the body is still talking all the time that million intelligence and the perception of the world is that the world is going to be dangerous it's unsafe

to have needs it's unsafe to have needs one of the things that can happen in a case like that Joseph is that the inner world becomes an unsafe place you know there's a way that we relate to the unconscious and much the same that the the mother complex can determine how we relate to our own unconscious if the way we were mothered felt unsafe the internal world might also feel unsafe too and might be full of self attack and it might be very hard to find anything soothing in the internal world let's ground that idea

of self attack in some lived moments I wonder if there's something comes to mind where the unconscious literally is kind of mobilizing against someone well it could be through self sabotaging behaviors like overeating or it could be with just kind of ruthless savaging self-talk which we covered in a previous podcast okay taking care of yourself you know that I'm fine I don't need a lunch break I'm fine to work late - of a distancing from one's own needs whether they're physical or psychological because you don't expect that they will get met you know I'm I'm

actually reading a novel right now that I'm really enjoying and I'm I'm not going to be able to spoil it because I'm only partway through but it it is a current bestseller I believe and there's a movie being made if I'm not mistaken and the title of the book as Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine and it becomes apparent pretty early on in the novel that the heroine who lives by herself in this very meager way you know she lives in this small apartment and she has this very unglamorous job and she doesn't talk to anyone

outside of her job and as the title says she you know she really sort of as is self-denying and in terms of her own need so she needs nothing she needs no one and we learned pretty early on that her mother has been monstrously abusive and although I don't know all the details yet I am led to understand that her mother's actually in prison for her treatment of her daughter so you know something has gone really wrong and the heroine in the novel has been in and out of foster home placements and now is very

much in this place that you just described Dever that you mentioned before Joseph this kind of encapsulated place of I don't need anything I'm fine I'm perfectly fine so people can create a kind of fortress and what's remarkable is even though they have their populated with these excruciating memories body memories thoughts images that there's enough life force that she goes into her she gets a job you know that that something rises up and says you know you will you will have some kind of a life no matter what odds replaced against you a very subtle

thing that I'll see sometimes frequently in our work as analysts is it people will never bring in a dream then just the evidence of an autonomous unconscious life is so unappealing is so dangerous in in in a subtle way that they communicated that dreams are not going to be brought in or not brought in sometimes for months or years yeah and the other thing that I think can happen is that people don't have memories early memories of kind of glossing over of well you know I don't really remember much until maybe I was in fifth

or sixth grade yeah absolutely I often ask what are your early memories because those are sort of nodal points of what one's relationships were like and how they shape your relationship with yourself and so when somebody says well it's sort of like a regular old household I mean we that too can be a cue that the relationship with one's inner world of memory or of your dreams and the unconscious has had to be locked up somewhere yeah there's like an impoverishment or something or there can be I don't I don't think it always appears like

that but but sometimes it certainly does all right just in talking about these different categories Joseph I'm thinking about mothers who were just ruthlessly critical all the time I mean that maybe is a particular version of the attacking mother because I think that is something that we see and of course that can really affect one's relationship with the inner world and the unconscious like we've been talking about it but also with your own body you know a lot of times especially if the mother has been critical of the person's physical appearance which happens you know

that really gets carried forward in terrible kind of self hatred of one's body or one's parents I had one client who said to me that she felt like she was being ground up in a garbage disposal all mm-hm and and not both related to the quality of her inner experience and also what it was like being mothered by her particular mother this takes me into kind of veering into what it takes to begin a healing process and what you just said Lisa makes me think about how sad that comment is to say that it felt

like being in a garbage disposal that's just awful and to be able to feel the sadness and the awfulness and to be able to shed tears over what this person and many others really did not have versus all these ways that we defend and compensate we may be able to talk about it but to let those feelings in of how hurt and rejected that that was Deb that is such a great point and I think one of the things that often happens is when I sort of reflect back like wow that sounds awful a lot

of times people with this configuration will say well it really wasn't that bad there's a lot of kind of minimizing minimizing or that sense of well you know that's just how she was that's just the way it was as if saying you know two and two make four versus being able to feel those feelings that had to be locked up and and shut away and reclaim the hurt and the grief and a lot of other feelings that for the sake of survival could it be felt at the time and that comes into such an accord

to part of analysis is that these painful feelings are thrumming in the unconscious and they're creating a kind of gravitational field that tugs and pulls on the kind of web of our inner life when we feel we have enough strength or we have enough of a an alliance with the analysts we can tolerate going down and risking feeling these things and trusting that we can metabolize those feelings now in a way that we could not have as a child I mean it's a wisdom to tuck them all away because you've got a you've got to

get to adulthood and you have to find some way to make it and that's such an important point that you know I feel those feelings well because they are in the background exerting a gravitational pull and they still take energy that is not available for as full a life as we would wish for anyone to be able to have yeah I mean really we're talking about emotional trauma aren't we it can be it can be traumatic this is that interesting pool that sometimes there are explicit traumatic memories and sometimes it takes a while in the

analysis to realize that it's the vacancy of feelings and memories about for instance the disappearing mother can be very tricky to catch because it's the absence of things that should be in the psyche versus the over potentiated distressing images that are hot in the psyche and both of those things wow it just influences so many things and it seems to me in either event in either case we're talking about reclaiming the feeling functions especially those feelings that most of us don't want to feel that we were needy or we were hurt and we felt rejected

we were little and we needed help those are hard feelings harder feelings chew allowed to come to the surface and before they felt then then our bravery or our toughness or how hard we can work or I don't need anybody like Eleanor Oliphant and one of the places that will come out frequently parental complexes is in the transference as analysts we're sitting in the room we say something a turn of phrase just an idea that comes to mind and then all of a sudden you know our client will activate in a very intense way and

then that's the first glimpse of the complex as it's being projected onto the analyst and you know it can be a bit of a gasping moment for both parties I'm thinking about this other configuration of the swallowing mother so perhaps as a child there's a mother who's narcissistic or has a lot of needs very extroverted and they're kind of engulfing the child making all the decisions constantly touching them constantly pulling them into the relationship with the mother and rather than other kinds of things and something will rise up you know in the child later on

in life to want to kind of attack all of that overwhelming an engulfing behavior sometimes that has shown up in the consulting-room is you know I'll make an interpretation and the client will become ferocious about you daring to intrude on their psychological sovereignty and then all of a sudden it's lightning bolts in the air and they don't know it's a complex they really think you have become an engulfing creature of some kind and what that is really delicate dance yeah it is it is often hot the the transference when there's a negative mother complex and

we can step in we can with all good intentions step into territory where we provoke that projection and then we're in some really difficult territory and we have to see if we can find our way back and sometimes we just cannot figure out how to break the spell it really feels like you have accidentally harpooned a whale and you're in a dinghy and it's off it's often moving but of course when you can work through that that's part of the healing right hugely and I think that this goes to your point Deb is I think

you know we're talking about how do you heal it yeah and I think one of the key ways you heal it actually is through relationship absolutely and we we talked about that and the podcast we did before this one about borderline personality disorder and I'm just thinking about those times that people are upset or angry with with me or any one of us that those feelings are so important to come out and that the client not feel that he or she has to kind of take care of the analyst by being nice and polite I

always invite people to tell me when something comes up in a session that really didn't fit or didn't sit right with them or come back the next week and say really bothered me when this happened or I said something and that we have to find room and make room for somebody's anger and for what comes up for them from their past in the relationship with a primary caretaker the mother and be able to accept and deal with and work through those feelings that this is going to be a very sturdy relationship that can hold that

stuff you know I'm not talking about outrageous and really over-the-top behavior but just that the intensity of feelings that people can have I know I've had them you know I want to clarify too that I think an analytic relationship can be a major part of healing from a negative mother complex and other relationships can play that role too yes we can luck out and really find a friend often friends because there's a little bit more breathing room in the relationship where I've had people tell me that they really had a very negative experience of their

mother and then later in life they fire this friend who is kind of this Divine Feminine full of grace person who's able to bestow a goodwill and an invitation to this particular woman I'm thinking of which brought her to an incredible softening and opening and blossoming of her heart talking a little bit more about healing one of the things I think is true and very mysterious about complexes is the way that they manifest out in the world so if we've had say a very critical mother we may meet her again and again we might have

a friend who's very critical we might then have a boss who's very critical we might then wind up having a mother-in-law who's very critical and it's like we keep on finding you know god dammit we keep on finding our mother again and again and again and we may not be aware of the things that we're doing that provoke a certain reaction from others around us that put us back in that place of that mother complex so it's like somehow the complex is really running the show behind the scenes and there's this uncanny way where people

with that same constellation of characteristics find their way into our orbit in a way that I don't have a real explanation for it but I am a hundred percent sure that it happens it's almost like the complex becomes a little bit like fate but as we know from fairy tales you can change your fate and I do think that working through a negative mother complex depending on you know the severity of it and some other factors it generally takes a long time it is not a quick fix because it's so much in the ground of

the psyche because your primary caregiver in those first weeks of life you know it's all involved in that originating neuroplasticity all the first images all the first sounds and scents and sensations in the body that's you know laying the ground so to really get in and be able to even observe that can be miraculous and then the forces that need to gather to help shift that sometimes are miraculous yeah it almost takes a lot of practice you know if you keep on sort of stepping into a minefield every time you try to say have friendship

because you always wind up provoking either acting like your mother unconsciously or finding people who treat you the way your mother did it takes some practice it takes many many efforts of finding a friend before the pattern begins to loose its grip and you start finding your way to other patterns of relating you can you can kind of create new patterns but it takes a long time this is where the idea of circumambulating something really is useful it's not a linear process it's being in it and walking around it and walking around it and walking

around it and kind of circumscribing it in a way that contains it better and then you can see it but you know I'm thinking of a quote from Jung about it takes a long time and what he says is the most intense conflicts if overcome leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed and so given a choice between those two things and a lot of examples I think in fairy tales I think I want to be really encouraging then even maybe an

advocate for healing this complex so that you whoever you are can be more we don't really solve our problems we just get bigger than our problems and I think that's the hope is that with with dreams and relationships of all kinds and introspection and perhaps therapy we grow bigger and I think of a of a sapling that has a big gash in it because somebody hacked it with an axe and that is an awful thing for the sapling but if that tree can grow up to be you know a full-grown tree that gash is not

that big a deal because the tree grew bigger than the wound that's a great image I think that speaks through it very clearly I'm thinking of another element that might be part of the healing process and this is something that I know from that I've learned from fairy tales but but also from clinical experience is that particularly in the psyche of a woman the Animas plays a big role in healing this wound and I think I want to say a little bit more about that in a minute but first I want to give some examples

in the novel that I mentioned before Eleanor Oliphant I was so tickled as a young yen to be reading this book and find out very early on Eleanor falls in love from afar with a singer in a band and she thinks he's just perfection and she begins to kind of mobilize some interests and get get a little more interested in the outside world because of this and it's such a great example of the function of the anima so he drew her out he draws her out into life and you know I I don't I had

I think I know where this is going but it you know it's it's it is that constellated power of the anima s' to to focus our libido our life energy toward a goal and perhaps help us to seek relationship and that would allow us to begin to engage these wounds and that also turns up in a fairy tale we were trying to think of a good fairy tale for a negative mother complex and the one that I wanted to share that I thought about is it's a Grimm's fairy tale it's very long which I think

is important actually and I think I'll just read the first paragraph or so it says there was once upon a time a queen who had a little daughter who is still so young that she had to be carried one day the child was naughty and the mother might say what she liked but the child would not be quiet then she became impatient and as the Ravens were flying about the palace she opened the window and said I wish you were a raven and would fly away and then I should have some rest scarcely had she

spoken the words before the child was changed into a raven and flew from her arms out of the window it flew into a dark forest and stayed there for a long time and the parents heard nothing of their child Wow yeah so so from an early age this child is sort of banished to the dark world of the unconscious Joseph that reminds me of what you said about how a child can sort of just disappear into an you know kind of a an encapsulated place now what happens next in this fairy tale is after many

years of the man walking through the forest and the Raven says hey listen I'm really a king's daughter if you do a couple things for me you can rescue me well that no matter what the task that has been set to this man and of course this goes back to the idea I was talking about before that it's the Animus who's going to affect the reconciliation or the the confrontation with a complex that would allow for healing there are these tasks set and the man can't do it and it says the Raven was filled with

grief for she knew that he had failed again finally she's off in some castle but the cat and he has to go to castle and rescue her but the castle is sitting on a glass Mountain and when he tries to climb it he just slides down and it can feel like that when you're working with a negative mother complex just a year after year it just feels like there's no progress you know I'm I think I'm wanting to sort of demystify this idea of how the Animus can come in or the are Mima it's a

part of us that isn't part of our personal history necessarily and we see it over and over and over again in fairy tales that the Prince arrives for if the protagonist or heroine is a female it just arrives out of the blue and something magic happens and so I see this as a hopeful note that there is energy in the psyche there is energy in the unconscious which young said over and over again is autonomous it has its own trajectory it has its own life and that we know that that's there and in the book

you're referencing she sees this guy in a in a band and he draws her into new life and I think we have to just include some space for this part of the psyche in the healing process but I like the fact Lee said that in in the Raven it's a long and complicated fairy tale and it is you know sort of a long and complicated process with help from the army must the unconscious and the same thing in six swans which is about the proverbial bad mother who changes six of her stepsons but they're really

her sons into swans and the lone daughter can rescue them by knitting sweaters out of star flowers and during that whole time she may not speak and apprentice sees her marries her etc and all this time she has to keep working and persevering and this arduous task of knitting these sweaters and not speaking and she goes through all kinds of trials and tribulations so I think the message here for me anyway is encouraging you can do it one of the things that the fairy tale highlights for me is that the negative mother complex shows up

differently in the psyche of the son than it does the daughter often particularly let's say if the negative mother is particularly aggressive one of the ways that a daughter can can live in that environment is by absorbing that kind of power of the feminine and she can join the mother in this darker aspect of the feminine and the two of them can still stay full of agency and still be dynamic were often the son in that environment simply becomes an object and he cannot embody or necessarily identify with this particular constellation of the feminine which

reminds me of this idea that you know he kind of is reduced to a swan he actually is regresses into kind of an animal consciousness but the daughter is still able to stay active in that role because she can still absorb some of the dynamism of the negative mother because she can identify with her through the feminine the primordial feminine archetype and that's another dimension of the negative mother it's really how different it is another dimension that I was also thinking about is that in the psyche you know there is the negative mother complex which

seems atmospheric in the psyche and then the ego often feels like the child in relationship to it but that polarity can often change and the person with the negative mother complex can be possessed by the negative mother and then treat other people like the child object so if we go back Lisa to your experience of the critical mother you know somebody who feels very criticized might walk away you know with their head hanging down feeling that there's a voice that's constantly picking at them but that polarity can easily switch around and that person can find

themselves being blisteringly critical of other people because they know what that behavior is like and they can access it yeah and your you're bringing up a good point for me Joseph that one of the things that I find is that when someone has had a particularly negative mother they often feel like whatever I do I have to avoid becoming like her and so they reject everything about that person now they might still unconsciously act it out like you're saying but consciously they can't they don't want to be anything like her and that can be a

problem because sometimes the mother even the most negative mother has some positive qualities but it's like the person can't let him or herself anywhere near those qualities so for example with women sometimes it shows up as if the mom has been particularly kind of aggressive and critical it may be very difficult for the daughter of that woman to claim any kind of aggressive capacity because even being a little bit sharp feels like oh my god I'm turning into my mother so that's a way in which it can be kept in the unconscious even though its

atmosphere is really in the psyche and coming to your idea Deb earlier that you know when the realization is placed in the center of the space the temple that Temenos and then it can be walked around but before that can happen is it has to be named often you know we might suspect wow this is a lot of negative mother in the room and then we're waiting for that opportunity you know to come in and name it and not only to name that they experience themselves being besieged by the negative mother and then it's another

transition which can be very painful for people is to catch that moment when we can talk about them acting out those same qualities and that can be just incredibly painful for people to understand how they're Co participating in this thing that they really dislike strongly and it is very difficult because it's so important that it be out there instead of in here it's been so wounding and hurtful when we can recognize it and and relate to it and relate to the parts of our complex that have become internalized in ourselves then you have something you

can work with as long as you're disconnected from it as long as it's out there and none of it is in here you're too far away from it and so it's a big process of really coming to realize what does my mother complex negative mother complex look like along with a host of other things because all I can do is work with myself I can't change what is out there lodged or distanced for me far away and can't change what happened no we cannot change the past I would also like to bring up a really

fun phenomena which is how humor is often used to deep potentiate a complex and particularly the mother complex and there is this really hilarious dimension in the gay culture called mother drag or mother camp where men will dress up other as their mothers and enact scenarios from their childhood which are hilarious and done with this tremendous amount of sincerity and if any of you were interested there is this guy named clay Weiner WEEI NER you can find this on YouTube but there's you know one one of the episodes it's just called mother's day and you

know this guy will dress up as his kind of Italian Long Island mother and enact these kind of scenes from his childhood in a way that it is unbelievably hilarious and sometimes you'll see drag queens dress up as Joan Crawford from Mommy Dearest and they'll kind of enact this kind of ferocious hilarious behavior and that's a way of actually for some men deep potentiating the negative mother and bringing it forward in a way that laughter can play some way of melting the power of these qualities you know and that brings me back Joseph to what

Deb the great point that Deb made earlier about when we were talking about the Animus just sort of arriving on the scene in the fairytale is is that something unexpected comes up from the unconscious whether it's humor or just some new surprising energy that kind of lands and and I want to just share one one story I had one person I worked with with just an incredibly negative attacking critical mother and one of the things that that happened was that that we marveled over together is that she found me she was one of these people

who always wherever she went met people who treated her like her mother had treated her and you know and I didn't and you know I always marveled by myself and often with her it's like and you found me you know that that somehow one day something new arrived on the scene and you were ready for a different kind of experience so I think you're right that sometimes the healing can kind of come spontaneously in a variety of ways well on that note it's hopeful and encouraging that healing comes in a variety of ways and let's

take a look at this week's dream [Music] [Laughter] hi this is Joseph from this Jungian Life podcast Lisa dev and I have been deeply moved by your responses to our work producing editing and distributing it involves substantial expenses and now we need your help please stop by our website this yongjian live.com and click on the heading be our patron you'll be redirected to our patreon funding page patreon helps creators connect with people who believe in projects like ours there you can sign up with your credit card to support us with as little as a dollar

a month and at higher levels of support we'll provide special episodes behind-the-scenes photos and stories and a chance to join a select pool of listeners for dream interpretations thank you this dream comes from a 35 year old woman who is a social worker and here's the dream last night I had a dream I was in a cave that had mosaic designs all over the walls they were old ancient ruins like from ancient Greece or turkey the first one was of some type of fertility goddess like Ishtar or lilith but I can't remember the details exactly

but the image frightened me and I was afraid to go inside then above the ruins there was a church it was an Eastern Orthodox Church it sort of reminded me of the Hagia Sophia a painting of the Black Madonna was hanging on the wall all the church members were women and the pastor was a woman as well I don't recall what we were talking about or what the pastor was saying but I was transfixed upon that painting that's all I can remember and she says for significant context she says there isn't a lot of that

she also volunteers that she studies young and psychology religion and mythology and in the dream she was feeling anxiety in the beginning and then calmness at the end so one of the first impressions I have which is always so fascinating as this really feels like an archetypal dream a big dream and Jung's and Jung Eun's will often notice the dreams that have a particularly mythic dynamic in it you know often seem to be signaling that something is rising up from the collective unconscious and really meeting the person and can sometimes have a very powerful effect

on their psyche there are there is a very great deal of archetypal imagery here and certainly the black madonna is very significant as an image just in the dream setting that she's in a cave with mosaic designs ancient ruins like from Greece or turkey of wonder what a fascinating and containing image of the psychic situation as it is of the interior t of a cave and mosaic designs which can be extraordinarily beautiful and they're so durable unlike let's say frescoes yeah and of course a cave is often associated with the feminine right and that's the

thing that strikes me about the dream is how much kind of feminine imagery is here I mean it's just sort of unrelenting there's a cave and then there's Lilith or Ishtar and then and then there's a church above which looks like the Hagia Sophia which was you know a church that was dedicated to Sofia the goddess of wisdom and then there's the Black Madonna and the women and the pastor are also women so we are very definitely in the realm of the feminine and the positive feminine but there is this interesting Tilos in the dream

which reminds me also of one of Jung's dreams but she starts in the cave in this primordial feminine of Lilith and Ishtar which is pagan it's ancient odd far away from us and she starts in the dream feeling anxious and then as she moves higher upward more towards a dimension of the psyche she can relate to its Christianized and then the ancient religions are kind of co-opted by Catholicism and reconfigure it in a way that blends a little bit more with existing cultural dynamics and you know the pastor is somebody who's more approachable less threatening

and also the Christianization of the d potentiates it frankly and it shifts away from I mean there is a black madonna but she's only important because the male God has kind of made use of her so there is a distancing dynamic as the dream is kind of moving forward I was thinking that the black madonna is a wonderful representation of the dark side of the feminine which i don't mean bad or anything negative but it's just there's light we having our cry of the earthy it's kind of where where the cave and the more primordial

setting go is to retain that that darkness in a more developed way but I have a tension in myself about it being more developed I think it's more familiar if we think about the initial imagery which is about fertility and Ishtar in lilith and the great fertility of the world and then that develops into the Madonna who was an eternal virgin she's not an image of fertility she's an image of purity and being uncontaminated by sexuality because the conception is divine and her virginity is intact so I think what I feel is there's a real

tension about the sexual and fertile power of the feminine that perhaps even necessarily you know is distanced or contained in the image of the Madonna because the ego doesn't know how to relate to it without anxiety but it's thrumming underneath that and in a sense is inviting her and I just wanted to reference that dream that Jung had as he was he was dreaming that he was I think in an excavation site an archeological excavation and he continued to find these openings and ladders down to deeper and deeper levels which also contributed to this idea

of this layered phenomena of the psyche and as we go deeper we become more primal my prompt more primordial I think says a hard one really to purse out without the dreamer present and contributing the meaning that she makes of of the black madonna what we know is that we are very much in the realm of the feminine and she says she was she had anxiety at the beginning and calmness at the end and I'm struck most of all by the richness of all this feminine imagery and it's multifaceted yeah it's it's many different aspects

of the feminine you know and I often note the feeling that I have was from a dream it's just what you said at the beginning Jo so there's so much archetypal imagery I'm moved by this dream and it feels like somehow there's a welcoming into this realm mm-hmm and it's all the images there are so many of them that if it feels really almost an unmistakable invitation of some kind and and you know the dreamer doesn't point to any significant transitions or kind of like real world context but I would have to think that this

dream must be marking something even if it's just a major transition in the inner world and she also says that she goes from being frightened of the of the images to being able to go inside the church which is after all I don't know maybe I'm wrong about this but we think of the Catholic Church as the Mother Church I'm not as sure about whether there's a reference there to the Orthodox Church but it's also a little bit more of Eastern it's al it's not as Western so there's maybe a newness or a nun familiarity

and again I don't know what her religious background might be but she does go in she's in the cave and she is in another container at the end I'm taken by the Hagia Sophia and the Ethiopian Catholic Church and particularly the story of the Queen of Sheba which is told in the Ethiopian version of the Bible where the Queen of Sheba has hairy legs and even sometimes it's described as having hooves and that Solomon travels to Ethiopia and introduces her to monotheism and Yahweh and the Hebraic Abrahamic religions and through his magical influence and perhaps

marrying her that he transforms this pagan primal part of her and gifts her with a human legs so ice again I'm just captured with this idea of this movement the ancient images of the feminine into this Abrahamic Lee transformed version of the feminine and I mean we could hold that as a positive thing we could hold it as a negative or a questionable thing but it's undoubtedly a phenomena whether it's again the Solomon's influence and/or the Christian missionaries that kind of you know travel throughout the ancient world but something was clearly changed by that and

reintroduced the feminine in a different form and I think about her in the end there being trans fixed upon the painting of the black madonna her inter meditation but she doesn't say that she's transfixed by the images of Lilith who is said to be by the way Adams first wife the problematic wife you know who apparently was you know wiped out of the our version of the Bible but she can be transfixed by the black madonna that that's a titrated version of the feminine that she's able to enjoy and able to begin moving towards and

in that way it sounds like you know something is opening up for the dreamer yeah I think so it's a real both and that it's in the Christian realm and it is you know the Madonna the Virgin Mary and it also is connected with it incorporates the darkness and the earthiness the primal qualities so I kind of tend to see it as a real union of opposites as an image yeah yes that seems like a good place to pause for this evening yes you've been listening to this union life from our website this union life

com you can follow us on Twitter like us on Facebook help us produce future episodes by funding us through patreon and submit your dreams or possible interpretation on another episode we'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream for today's show and hope you'll let us know what topics you'd enjoy hearing more about until next time keep living this union life [Music] you [Music]