I had planned to let Monday (Inauguration Day) come and go quietly until one of my clients told me she desperately needed help countering the foreboding sense about the near future.
If you are still trying to understand what is happening but also want to live your life with a sense of peace, love, and joy, this recent blog post shares my reflections about the bigger picture and practical strategies for navigating stress and relationships during this chaotic time: Navigating Election Aftermath: Processing Emotions, Setting Boundaries, Countering Violence, and Rebuilding Community.
Since the election, some people have awakened enough to overcome their addiction to fear-based conspiracy theories by finding truth and community grounded in love and tolerance. Others protect their sanity by setting new boundaries, keeping people in their lives, but loving them from afar.
On the other hand, too many have succumbed to their unquestioned rabid instinct to inflict cruelty onto others through actions of their own or by supporting oppressive policies. They are unconscious of the root of their suffering, straying further from the truth of who they are, which is love. The need to scapegoat others as the source of all their troubles intensifies, but the vampire’s thirst for blood can never be satiated.
Back to this post.
Personally, I plan to ignore the formal historic moment on Monday. Instead, I will reflect on the irony that on the day our government is officially sold to billionaires, we also celebrate the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. Unless you intentionally expanded your understanding of the civil rights movement beyond what you learned in high school, you likely were indoctrinated with a watered-down understanding that conveniently left out the fact that Dr. King exposed another sinister enemy: classism.
Whether you voted for the incoming administration or not, your head might be spinning from the past seventy-six days, which have been filled with dramatic proclamations, jaw-dropping threats against allies, and intentional disinformation meant to undermine faith in our institutions even more. These tactics are designed to distract from what is being planned behind the scenes by very rich people who have lost their minds, morality, and sense of humanity. For example, the CEO of Nestle recently called the idea that water is a human right, "extreme."
Even my framework of understanding current events through a depth psychology lens feels shaky right now. I have been comforted by a naive assumption that the inevitable outcome of the dismantling will be a new paradigm to save our species and the planet. Still, I realize there is no guarantee we will survive.
My thoughts and emotions are swirling, but writing and sharing them with you might help us illuminate the treasure hidden in them. One of us might gain a new insight, shifting our perspective and allowing us to see an option we couldn’t see before.
Things will worsen before they improve, but here’s how we can accelerate the process to the breakthrough of a new paradigm for how to live as humans.
Step One – Become Conscious of Your Energy
Like attracts like—it’s a physics law and a psycho-spiritual law. Our thoughts prompt emotions, emotions prompt thoughts, and they coalesce as frequencies beamed out into the world. What comes back matches the frequency.
Emotions are felt in the body, and we use feelings (words) to find meaning in the emotion. This happens on a personal level but also at the collective level, which is why certain psychological states can be contagious. In fact, research shows that we are the average of the people we surround ourselves with.
Most of our thoughts (about 60,000 per day) and emotions (about 200 per day) are unconscious, repetitive, and negative, leading to confusion about why certain things happen to us. For example, a coworker says something that triggers you at work. Your heart beats fast, you start sweating, and you desperately want to respond, but you shrivel up like a helpless child. You try to brush it off but unintentionally snap at your spouse when you get home.
It will sound like a cruel joke, but the conflict at work was meant to get you to explore and resolve a deeper issue. Until you figure it out, you will likely find yourself in that situation repeatedly, which can wear you down after a while. This can lead to identifying as a victim, which sets in motion the need to find someone else to blame.
What does this have to do with the collective challenges ahead? Your energy is either feeding and fueling the collective regression, neutralizing it, or contributing to the emergence of a new paradigm based on a specific vision or at least preferred human values.
As I wrote in the blog post mentioned above, the propensity to accept and commit violence is spreading. Violent rhetoric is violence and so is the obsession with controlling women's bodies. This is the opposite of love, which is the evolutionary urge that will save our species if it’s not too late.
Exploring what the growing number of violent individuals might be mirroring back to us can help disarm and neutralize the emotional reactions on both sides. Part of the answer is that they are projecting onto others what they are not conscious of in themselves. Your emotional reaction, though, is about you, and finding the root of your reaction helps disarm the monster that connects the violent person or people to you. Healing your wound makes you more available energetically for other people to get their whits about them.
For example, for decades, I was triggered by oppressive religious language, especially that of a misogynistic nature. Mere words would heat up my whole body, causing me to feel the ancient collective fear of being murdered that many women still feel in their bones. I recently was able to mostly disarm that in favor of my power to respond more effectively to these words. I no longer am easy prey for people seeking to intimidate me through their words (“own the libs”). They are the weak ones who have fallen for the false idea of strength. Instead, I can ask probing questions about the root of their obsession.
Here Are Some Reflection Questions:
Do you expose yourself to enough people and information to elicit peace, love, and joy? If not, how can you increase the average of who you are by changing that up a little?
What monsters in yourself and others are you feeding through your emotional reactions to people who trigger you?
Do you find yourself easily convinced that groups of people are responsible for the problems of the world, for example, that independent women have destroyed the family rather than corporate America? If you answered yes, don’t judge yourself. Instead, reflect on how you feel like a victim and try to find the deeper thing that bothers you.
If you’re a member of a scapegoated community, reflect on how you can disarm your fear of those who seek to harm and oppress you. For these people, you are a symbol of bravely living authentically when they cannot. You mirror back what is missing in their lives. What this means is that you have great power where they do not.
Many people in marginalized groups are exploring and healing wounds that are disarming their emotional triggers. They are becoming empowered and unafraid of those targeting them. I sense that one reason for the increase in man-on-man bullying might be that fewer women are susceptible to being triggered by men. That monstrous energy in unconscious people must constantly find new targets.
Step Two – Find Your Role
Not all want a better, fairer world, but most do. Wealth inequality in our country now approximates levels preceding the Great Depression and the French Revolution. We have been here before, but not exactly.
At its root, Patriarchy is not as much about men and women as it is about systems based on scarcity, hierarchy, and ranking. One’s sense of identity is based on being on top, which is subjective, unstable, and not merit-based. Constant comparison and ever-changing benchmarks induce anxiety, which is then labeled as a personal issue instead of caused by the systems in which we live.
Today, the same mega-company owns other companies that sell products containing unregulated, known toxins. The same mega-company owns other companies that develop unnatural, patentable drugs to treat the diseases caused by these toxins. Do you see the problem here? These companies depend on your accepting the profit motive at all costs and your being permanently sick.
This is by design.
These are the systems that are begging to be dismantled, but without knowing what will replace them, we experience anxiety and depression on a collective scale. We also become susceptible to the lies told by the offenders who profit by exploiting our fear and confusion.
Whether you mean to or not, you are either slowing down or accelerating the process of getting to a new paradigm that wants to take hold, one based on justice and fairness. Things are falling apart, but without consciously playing a role, you are giving permission to the rich and powerful to entrench corruption permanently. By choosing not to play any role, you are obeying in advance, as warned by Timothy Snyder, Historian of 20th Century Europe and author of On Tyranny.
I say, let’s not wait for the bread lines or for seniors to die in the streets.
What can you do?
Once you begin the adventure of exploring your emotional reactions and discovering the deeper problem, your brain will work better. You will see options and answers you couldn’t see before. Repressed energy will be released, and freed-up energy can be focused on designing a better future for you personally or collectively.
The Healer Role
Certain people are well suited to hold space for others to heal wounds or to encourage self-reflection. Some of my clients are finding that this is the role they want to play. They’ve done enough personal work to notice situations where they are no longer triggered but more curious about why people hold certain intolerant views.
If this is you, the best way to back someone into self-reflection is to set aside the need to defend your views in favor of asking questions out of genuine curiosity. You are not accepting bigoted views. Instead, you are using a strategic approach to inspire self-reflection. Your emotional neutrality will disarm and even surprise people who are expecting you to react and defend yourself. Many people are unconscious of their own suffering, and when we disrupt their expectations, a space opens for new insights to emerge from their unconscious.
You keep posing questions like these:
Do you know where that belief or thinking came from?
What is your earliest memory of hearing that?
What is your earliest memory of experiencing that?
Did you ever question that belief or thought?
What if you found out that’s not true?
I once listened wide-eyed to a psychologist back a homophobic, bigoted man into vulnerably sharing that, as a child, he was made fun of simply because he loved skipping down the sidewalk. There it was, the wound he didn’t realize he had, so it could never be healed, and instead, he continued to suffer and project his own self-hatred onto others.
The Warrior Role
At first, I was excited about the resistance movement that quickly took shape after the election. However, I started noticing that it’s still mostly driven by anger, tinged with fear, and a sprinkle of despair. While anger is a great spark to light a fire under people’s butts, unless it transmutes into something creative, it will perpetuate what is being resisted. The war on poverty hasn’t worked, and neither has the war on drugs.
The idea behind non-violent resistance is neutrality, which has a higher frequency to accelerate the consciousness-raising process. If we do not devote equal parts of energy towards minimizing the damage and suffering that is coming while imagining the new paradigm, we will become stuck in perpetuating the resistance. So, resistance is necessary, but being conscious of what you might be projecting through your role as a resister might make you less effective.
A depth psychology framework can help you explore your personal unconscious enough to disarm some of the automatic patterns of thinking and reacting that might prevent you from turning anger into vigilant movement towards a future based on deeper human values. Healing personal wounds opens us to the archetypal realm, where we become vessels for creative intelligence. We become less ego-driven, which makes us more effective warriors in the fight for a new future rather than against what we don’t want.
Your goal is to become a conscious warrior, not a reactive one.
The Visionary Role
The need for vision is a spiritual tenant. We can circle back to the natural law that “like attracts like.” If we simply fight against what we don’t want, we will continue to attract circumstances that we must fight against. There is an obvious lack of vision at the collective level right now. On the other hand, every paradigm shift is rooted in agitation at the grassroots level.
For example, one community’s urban garden feeds hundreds of people without regard for financial ability. Its model is anti-capitalist. New community networks are forming to meet neighbors' needs, including creative housing arrangements. Growing numbers of people are being more deliberate about where they spend their money. Some are turning away from Amazon and towards local businesses like Bookshop.org, which supports local bookstores. There is so much going on locally that we cannot see. Another example is therapists and healers who are detaching from insurance companies that stifle and even work against healing. Still, small businesses are popping up marketed as anti-capitalist.
I’m known for emphasizing to my clients that their individual self-reflection is combined with that of millions of other people. They just can’t see it yet. Personal insights are coalescing, and soon, a new paradigm will bubble up to the surface of the collective.
Just like the 1980s, which ushered in momentous progress for women, new versions of archetypal ideas about what it means to be human will usher in a new age soon.
How quickly it comes depends on you, me, all of us!
The Armageddon is an Inner Conflict
Some people are so unconscious that they are stoking the fires of a literal civil war between Americans. The destructive imperialist urge has returned, too. But Armageddon is not a literal fight against each other people or countries. This is a lie, a literalization of a spiritual text of a dream that has never been fully interpreted, even by the smartest theologians.
Still, the degree to which so many people remain unconscious about the roots of their own suffering and despair due to helplessness about the world around them is fueling a literal drive to destruction. The final battle occurs within us, leading to a new world outside us.
We experience this personally when our personal life falls apart (divorce, loss of job, death of a loved one, addiction), and we’re forced to reconcile inner wars. The phase of suffering can feel eternal until there is a moment of psychological and spiritual breakthrough, the death of an old perspective, and the rebirth of a healthier version of us. We come out the other end, led by a light that shines in the darkness. We become aware of deeper truths that guide our path, and along the way, we find our authenticity, the truth that we are love itself.
For an excellent depth psychological perspective on the Book of Revelation, read Robin Robertson’s Beginner’s Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation.
For a less academic thought experiment, read my blog post: The Hidden Meaning of the Film Aquaman.
C.G. Jung suggested a hundred years ago that the final frontier was not the expansive darkness of space or the ocean's depths. Instead, the most meaningful final frontier to explore is the darkness of our inner world. The faster we do this as individuals, the faster the new paradigm will emerge to save ourselves and the planet.
Since science already affirms that mysterious unconscious forces influence up to eighty percent of who we are and what we do, then doesn’t it make sense that the answers we seek are inside us, not outside?
My mission is to arm you with a framework to develop a deeper relationship with your inner world, which exists within the context of the larger collective society and world. As you become unleashed as the authentic version of yourself, bravely overcoming systems that indoctrinated you to feel separate, not whole, the world changes.
Resources.
My book Your Soul is Talking. Are You Listening? is an excellent place to start learning the language of your unconscious. You can purchase it on Bookshop.org or listen to me read chapters for free on the Dose of Depth Podcast. Here’s Chapter 1, "The Discovery of You."
Here are some guided meditations to help with anxiety, anger, and other negative emotions. They include active imagination to help you have a dialogue with your inner world.
Meander my blog and podcast platforms for various articles that bring concepts to life through stories, conversations, and education.
If you are ready to begin a more intense experience, visit my services page and free exploratory chat here. Based on your needs and desires, together, we will design a personalized program.
Thank you for being a self-reflecting human!
Dr. Deborah Lukovich