Me and my mother complex
Whatever this reality is often appears as a dream-like play in which there seemingly is no I nor other. Yet, sometimes, the imaginary curtain of duality is pulled up again to show where there still is work to be done.
Because the sense of me in a world that is separate from me means that this Self that is boundless, ungraspable and unidentifiable is ironically caught up in an identity. An identity that might be imaginary, but still bears unconscious and unfelt pain to be made conscious. For it is only when completely felt and understood, that the magic spell of duality is broken into “Did it really happen, or was it just a dream?”
Lately, I’ve been caught up in such a cycle. Ever since our little boy is born, the relationship I had with my wife took a bit of a turn. Instead of only being partners, we became parents now too. Which unfortunately meant that the archetypal father and mother were now activated in our family dynamic.
In the beginning, all my suppressed unconscious anger towards my mother was projected onto my wife. And vice versa.
I was treated by my mother as a sort of prince, which gave rise to a bit of a wanting-to-be special complex as I’ve written about earlier. But when I got my first girlfriend around my teens, my mother spontaneously cut off all affection towards me. In retrospect, I think she couldn't handle sharing me, a thing you often see happening when sons of over-attached mothers get into a relationship.
Although she blamed me for the strange immediate turn in our relationship, it severely hurt me. But I could not deal with it then, which is probably why I have to deal with it now. For I still sometimes feel myself creeping out of connection with my wife out of fear of feeling the same pain that I felt then. And there is nothing that the little I can do about it.
It’s funny how it goes. Whenever my wife shows too much affection, something in me blocks. And poof, this perspective which is often dream-like becomes very real. I become identified as this boy that still carries the pain. And my wife is dreamt up to be the one that inflicted that pain, so unconsciously, my heart shields itself from her.
Rationally, it doesn't make sense in the slightest. But seen through an archetypal lens, it’s quite clear what is being enacted. Whenever the inner child’s pain gets activated, the mother archetype co-dependently arises and takes the shape of my wife. I see it happening over and over again, but when completely identified, I become this raging boy whose anger originally aimed at his mother, is now aimed at the one carrying the mother archetype, which is my wife.
But the mother archetype runs a bit deeper than one’s actual mother. On the highest level, the Great Mother is the feminine half of the Godhead. On a physical level, the earth is in many traditions regarded as a feminine archetype of acceptance, nurturing, being carried by life itself. When a child isn't lovingly embraced and trusted by its mother, the consequence often is a lack of basic trust in life.
Because of my over-nurturing and then spontaneously cut-off relationship with my mother, I haven’t been able to build a strong sense of this basic trust in my childhood, a term coined by A.H. Almaas:
Basic trust is a nonconceptual confidence in the goodness of the universe, an unquestioned implicit trust that there is something about the universe and human nature and life that is inherently and fundamentally good, loving, and wishing us the best. - A.H. Almaas
Whenever the projection grips me, I feel my right toe contracting and unable to make contact with the Earth. A phenomenon I often see in my therapy practice. Traumatized individuals who didn't have the fortune of loving parents never learn to trust the Goodness of life. As a consequence they often dissociate upwards, towards the heavenly realms. This ironically increases the chance of them having all kinds of mystical experiences and even of a full-blown non-dual awakening while still feeling unsafe in their physical bodies. They have yet to regain their deep trust in the Goodness of life.
Lack of basic trust manifests through all layers of our being. On the physical layer, the body could reflect this through not being able to plant the feet firmly on the ground. The feet, especially the solar plexus point in footreflexology or acupressure point Kidney 1, are the channels through which the grounding and nurturing energy from Mother Earth can enter the body. Another more extreme example I quite commonly see in my practices is that people can’t feel their body at all. They simply have never learned to.
On the energetic later, this is often related to a blocked root chakra at minimum, but I’ve seen clients in which all chakras are still lying dormant. This leads to a highly distrustful perspective in which the outer world, as a reflection of one’s inner state, appears as violent and severely unsafe.
In that sense, the best we can give our children is that we do our own healing work, or, in Jung’s words: To live our unlived lifes. For it we do not, the unconscious patterns that we fail to integrate in ourselves are simply transmitted to our children. A child who has been nurtured in loving care never in learns to trust life, thereby making it much easier for them to evolve into the unique soul they’re meant to become.
It’s truly marvelous to me how the physical body reflects one’s unconscious themes. If one follows the symptoms, as James Hillman puts it, the symptoms will tell the story of the soul. In that sense, the body is a brilliant manifestation of one’s unique soul, which in turn is a brilliant manifestation of the One unknowable. Just like the archetypal forces in us, the inner child, mother, father, romantic partner and the Daimon or Higher Self. We can all take them very personal, but in the end, each of them is a manifestation of the One. Just as we are.
The problem is that we sometimes forget. Or I do. Sometimes it all feels so utterly real. Sometimes it truly feels as if my wife deserves my rage. That she limits me, symbolically strangles me, to then cut me off without any apparent reason. Or that she’s constantly critiquing my every action.
And in a sense, it is real. We carry powerful manifesting capabilities. And whatever beliefs or fearful parts reside in the unconscious have a tremendous effect on the way we experience apparent reality. For whatever is believed gets manifested, dreamt up, as the outer world. And the separate self, which carries the related pain, gets dreamt up with it.
So when the little boy in me that still carries the pain is triggered, a separate I is created that simultaneously dreams its wife to play the exact same role as his mother did. And abracadabra, she does.
That's the uncanny trick that reality pulls over and over again. And that's why doing a bit of mindfulness might not be enough. There are highly realized beings who clearly speak from the one ungraspable consciousness and yet act like complete dicks.
This shows that there is a difference between diving deep in one’s psyche, to truly get to the bottom of one’s individual being by shedding light on all that is unconscious, and simply abiding in presence. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but I do say that the soul, our inherent uniqueness through which the ungraspable One can experience itself does matter. For it shows exactly where the natural manifestations of the One can not yet shine through. And by natural manifestations I mean Love, Compassion, Friendliness, Selflessness and so forth.
"We don't have a life just to be enlightened, that's only half of it. The other half is how to live a fulfilled life. How can the divine live in this world, in all its mysteries and all of its treasures as an individual life?" - A.H. Almaas
These qualities arise naturally. Not by doing anything to attain them, but by shedding light on all painful and paradoxically imaginary karmic patterns within us that keep them from arising.
So here I am, struggling with my mother complex, knowing its all a marvelous dream-like display of epic proportions, and yet being sucked into it as if it's utterly real again and again.
Perhaps the Creator made its dream so vivid that he sometimes forgets its a dream himself. Oh, the irony…
