What I learned from Jung,
and this is probably the most profound thing I learned.
I think of all the things that I know.
Values aren't created, they're discovered.
And they're discovered through a consultation with the parts
of yourself that you're not conscious of, that you're not fully conscious of...
that aren't fully articulated elements of your primary personality.
You have to discover what your values are, and you're informed about that, well,
partly by other people who will object if your values aren't appropriate,
but certainly by a dialogue with yourself and with your conscience.
That's a very important thing to know.
It's part of the reason why I think that you need to tell the truth because
you're forced to negotiate with yourself, to operate properly in the world.
And if you've warped yourself,
let's say or some elements of yourself by engaging in self deception and lies,
and you're not now, because of that, you're not who you could be
and you don't live in the world as you should live in it.
Then when you discuss with yourself what your value should be,
it will be as if you're discussing it with someone that you can't trust.
That's not good.
You can't afford that.
Life is difficult, and it contains many pitfalls,
and unless you're careful and you sort yourself out properly and you aim high
and walk on the straight, narrow path, you don't have a hope of understanding
where you should be and at what time, when the crisis hits, and the crisis will hit.
So you want to get all those little sub personalities in line, if you can.
It's part of the reason, for example,
why Jung thought you had to integrate your shadow, which is the dark part of your character.
He thought that was necessary or would go and have a little autonomous life
of its own, maybe manifesting itself, for example, when you're angry or drunk
instead of integrated into the rest of your personality like a properly
disciplined player in a complex and sophisticated game,
because tragedy can strike and it strikes children, and apparently you're quite
attached to your children and so aren't very...what would you say?
Soothed, by the realization that something terrible could happen to them.
Now,
first of all, I might say you might want
to go talk to somebody professional about this because maybe you're depressed more
than you should be, and maybe you have an anxiety disorder.
I'm not saying that that is not
a diagnosis, and I certainly couldn't derive that from what you said.
But it's one of the possible things that could contribute to this constant worry.
Or maybe you're physiologically ill and less resilient than you should be.
Maybe you're not eating enough.
One thing I would recommend to begin with is to make sure that you just try this.
I know it's surprising advice, but try to eat a big breakfast for, like two weeks.
See what happens. See if that drives the worry down.
Now, then the next thing I would ask is, when does it happen?
Are these dreams?
Are these thoughts before you go to bed? Do you wake up in the middle of the night
with these visions running through your head?
And again, this has to do with food. Is it more likely to happen if you're hungry?
That's something worth checking out, because the next time you get worried
in the middle of the day, you might try eating something.
I would recommend something high protein, high fat rather than high carbohydrate,
and just see if that helps, because that might indicate that some
of your worry is a consequence of hyperglycemia.
And that's a lot more common than people think.
So if it's dreams and visions at night,
one of the things you can do that's counterproductive is take one of those
fantasies that's torturing you and that you're suppressing because you
will be suppressing it and let it play itself out.
You see what's happening is that the parts of your mind, the parts of your brain,
the parts of your psyche that are alarm systems,
so that's the anxiety systems, they're trying to think something through.
And they're using fantasy to think it through.
Right? And so this is actually a form of thought that's torturing you.
Because it's reasonable for the parts of your brain
that are on the outlook for negative occurrences to think:
Well, what if? What if? What if? That's what thinking is.
And sometimes you think positively, what if, and sometimes you think negatively.
Well, you're in all likelihood doing everything you can to escape
from these thoughts when they make themselves manifest.
But all that does is make the systems
that are producing those thoughts even more likely to produce them,
because now they think, the alarm system thinks, oh, well, here's a danger,
which is basically the vulnerability of children.
And I'm trying to present the active agent, the person who I inhabit
with evidence of this potential threat as a good alarm system should.
And it turns out that they're so afraid
of the message that I'm delivering that they won't even listen to it.
Therefore, the situation must be much more dire than I suppose.
And I'm going to have to amplify and increase
the emotion of my statement and the repetitiveness of the thought.
And so that's just not helpful at all.
Because what you've done is you've taken a worry and you've now recategorized it as
a worry that's so terrible that you won't even think about it.
And so now the alarm systems think
that you're being chased by... He who can't be named.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And a good allusion to something popular in culture.
And so they're just going to be screaming nonstop.
So what do you have to do?
Well, man, this is counterproductive, but I'll tell you, it works.
There's a couple of things you could do, you could start by bringing to mind those
fantasies, sit down somewhere, take some deep breaths,
try to calm yourself down a little bit and let those thoughts come forward.
You know what they are, and then watch them like you're watching a movie.
Even if it's a horror movie, watch them.
Let the whole fantasy play out and see what comes out at the end.
It's going to be frightening to do this.
Now, look, even if the vision is quite
horrific, the entire thought is quite horrific.
You have now indicated to your anxiety systems that you have enough courage
to face the worrisome event, and just that alone should be helpful.
Now, you may have to do this multiple times and you might have to do it with all
the thoughts, and you'll know that you've done it enough when doing it starts
to become mundane when all the emotion goes out of it.
And if you're particularly frightened, that might take a long time.
Now, the other thing that you might really consider
this is something you can do as an adjunct is you should think about what
you would do if this would happen, if this happened.
As if it happened in real life, and to take even the worst case situation...
Let's say that you received the news that your child was hit by a car.
Well, you could receive news like that.
And then the question is, what would you do?
And what should you do?
And the answer is you don't know.
You think that that would kill you.
You think that that would be unbearable and the end of the world.
And it's not surprising that you think
that, but it's not helpful because people have to live through
catastrophe and you have more than one child, apparently.
And I would presume as well that you have
a spouse and other people that love you and need you.
And so it isn't good that you would fall apart and die like in an apocalyptic dread
if something happened to one of the people that you love, because then you would
leave all the other people breathed of you as well.
And that's not helpful.
And so if your child was hit by a car, well, what would you do?
You have to think it through you'd grieve, you'd go to the hospital,
you'd have a terrible time, you'd have a terrible year, and that would be that.
And you'd have the funeral and you'd have
the loss of the child and all of that would be awful.
But people lived through that.
And maybe you could have an aim.
An aim would be that if that happened, your determination would be to live
through it so that you could be there for the rest of your people,
and so that you wouldn't fall apart and collapse because the death of someone
and the subsequent utter collapse of a person closely associated with them.
That second event does not improve the first one.
It makes it worse, and it's incumbent upon you to develop the psychological strength
to be able to tolerate what it is that your anxiety alarm systems are
tormenting you with, and you might think, well, that's impossible.
But it's not impossible because people live through catastrophe,
and they do that in large part or no small part by discovering that there are darker
and stronger forces within them than they might be willing to appreciate.
And that one of the consequences of integrating those forces is that you
have the strength and the cruelty in some strange sense to endure, right?
To dare continue to live, even if the unthinkable happens.
And it's no simple matter to think of that as a moral step forward.
But people are called upon to be strong
and strong in the face of the worst catastrophe.
And your psyche is tormenting you with precisely that.
It won't let you go.
It'll shake you like a dog, shakes a rat.
It won't let you go until you deal with it.
You deal with mortality,
even the mortality of your children, and you find within you what would allow
you to withstand that, damaged or not, to withstand that.
You do that by letting yourself
go where your thoughts take you, even though you don't want to.
That's a trip into the abyss.
That's a trip into the underworld.
Those are best taken voluntarily.
You're being dragged down there by forces that are beyond your control.
And the mythological motif is that those who are pulled into the underworld
by forces beyond their control do not come out, not come out easily.
It can be the end.
So you go there, courageously.
And so if you're a parent, one of the places you have to go
courageously is to that place where your children are ill or dying or deceased.
You have to do that.
You haven't grown up until you have done that, even though it's a terrible thing.