Distraction and Disaster

I dropped off on reading WWRWW for about a week, but after last night I was looking for some guidance so I cracked the book open to where I left off last time. Per the eerie usual the message was exactly what I needed to hear, not just for guidance moving forward, but in explaining what happened. 

The deep work is a lot like sexual arousal. It begins from ground zero, accelerates in plateaus, becomes sustained and intense. If the plateaus are interrupted harshly, you must begin all over again. There is a similar arousal tension in working with the archetypal layer of the psyche. If the tension is interrupted, one has to start nearly from scratch. So, there are many bones on the road, juicy, nice, interesting, savagely exciting bones. But somehow they cause us to be carried off into an amnesia, to not only forget where we are in the work but to forget what the work is at all.

And then: 

We begin to understand that this process of remaining conscious, and particularly not giving in to distracting appetites while trying to elicit psychic connection, is a long process, and one that is difficult to hold to. We see the wily little dog trying his damnedest. Yet it is a long way from the deep archetypal unconscious back to the conscious mind. It is a long way down to the names, and long way back to the surface again. Holding knowledge in consciousness is hard when there are snares along the path. 

And finally: 

The little dog learns the names of the women one more time and races back to his master. He ignores the feast on the road and the enticing smells from the bush. Here we see the consciousness of the psyche rising. The instinctive psyche has learned to curb itself, prioritize, and focus. It refuses to be diverted. It is now intent.

But from nowhere a dark thing suddenly jumps out at the little dog. The black stranger shakes the dog and shouts, "Tell me those names! What are the names of the young women so I may win them." The black stranger does not care for duality or the finer points of the psyche. To him the feminine is a possession to be won and nothing more. 

The black stranger can be personified by a real person in the outer world or a negative complex within. It does not matter which, for the devastating effect is the same. This time the dog engages in unrestrained battle. Whether male or female, this occurs in outer life when an incident, a slip of words, an odd thing of some sort, jumps out and tries to make us forget who we are. There is always something in the psyche that tries to rob us of the names. There are many name robbers in the outer world also.

Forgive that you may not know all the background behind these paragraphs. If you are familiar with the book, she is deconstructing a fairytale as it relates to archetypes of the psyche. Without knowing the particulars of the fairytale, I think you can get the gist. 

For me it brings a rushing clarity to the hurricane-like emotions and memories I was pummeled with last night. It was so fierce at its peak I thought I might bash my head into something to make it stop. 

I had become distracted again from my deeper self-knowing, separated again from instinct. I had numbed down in light of Roi's recent renewals to commitment in recovery and his resulting moodiness and proclamations of wanting things to work. To compensate I attended a lot of meetings, read a lot of blog posts, and sought a therapist. All good things, but without listening to the deep instinct I was lost. I wandered off the path. 

I had extinguished the light, letting darkness and confusion come in again. I tried to find an outside source of light, exhausted myself researching the links between emotional abuse, addiction, relational trauma, betrayal trauma, PTSD, etc. Tried listening to the voices of others instead of my own. My inner predator was aligning with the outer black stranger, setting myself up to be robbed of my "names". 

Last night that inner voice was angry and wanting to be heard again, beating against the dark, screaming to be let out, to have the light turned back on. 

I'll continue to go to meetings, to go to therapy as soon as my preferred therapist has an opening, but in the meantime I have to be vigilant against distractions and name robbers, both internally and externally.