psychology

reweaving within grieving

the uncertainty within grief’s reweaving memories…

The personal story is a narrative of our unique sense of identity.  We create our identities through the stories we weave onto a tapestry that is formed against the background of our family mythologies. We pull threads from of an assemblage of recalled details from our pasts and weaved them into images that cast us in whatever role corresponds with our current situations, feelings, thoughts, or actions. The colored threads of this tapestry are often re-embroidered to reflect the creative and dynamic process of our perspectives as we shift in, out, and between various roles, feeling states, and cognitions.  As we reflect on our self-created images we are in turn affected by them; therefore, there is an unconscious re-weaving of our tapestries. ~The Meditative Journey with Saldage

shadows of squares -4

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” ~Carl Jung*

*Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychologist, and psychotherapist who founded Analytical Psychology.

memories

memory1118web

Nikon D750   f/2.2   1/800 s   35 mm   ISO 100

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. 

~William James  (The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, pg. 643)

Speaking of memories, may I introduce you to an American science-fiction film, Marjorie Prime, that was based on Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play of the same name.

reflections

…instead of a coherent personality that stretches back in an unbroken line to a first memory and looks forward to an indefinite future, we discover a self ridden with gaps and ambiguities.  Who “I am” appears coherent only because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads.

windows