From my journal for May 8, 1996
Woke early. I have angry rejoinders to my brother going through my head, so thought I would just write them down. Actually, I think he did me a service with his stupid, patronizing, officious letter because it’s roused my own anger. After the first bit of numb misery — I just wanted to die — I started fighting back and now I’m actually feeling much better.
My brother sent me a letter criticizing me in many ways. I don’t know how he knew I was an Enneagram 4. I think I must have told him, because the types are determined by a long and personal questionnaire.
“this is not easy reading.” i.e. you are a coward if you won’t read it. “fours are so self-involved, as a defense against emptiness which they equate with abandonment,” Wait a minute ! I really was abandoned.
After dealing with a lot more criticism, I finally say “this is all your imagination, it’s your story about me, it has no resemblance to my actual experience.” I don’t remember if I ever actually said anything to him.
So what have I been doing this winter? [more anger at my brother] — what was this winter all about, and the experience of extreme abandonment, isolation, hopelessness, terror, for which death appeared as an unattainable relief, what did all that mean?
Interestingly I don’t mention the Paxil episode, which was surely the most intense experience of the winter, and actually affected me into the summer when I began to be unable to sleep more than 90 minutes at a time, lost weight, and finally had to start taking a tranquilizer to calm myself down.
But in May, I’m writing about interesting experiences that I’m having that I think are part of the “dark night of the soul.” The “she” at the beginning is a writer named Penny Lewis. I tried to track down Penny Lewis and her book, figuring she must have been a Jungian therapist, but only found one, who was much too young and whose book was published in 2013, much too late for me to have read it in 1996. A lot of what I quote sounds like a lot of what is described about “descent” and “soul” in Bill Plotkin’s book.
Later, she [Penny Lewis] quotes Jung as saying “the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.” p168 I had trouble understanding his way of describing the process, but this last statement rings true. It certainly describes my experience this last winter, and that gives me hope that what seems to be the death of the ego is in fact a door to the Self. I’ve read the paragraphs three times and they still don’t make any sense to me except for the idea that the Self is much bigger than the ego (“all-encompassing”) and forces it to confront “problems which it would like to avoid.” and, I suppose, to which there is no solution within the domain of the ego. But the Self has power to force a revolution which must happen in a different (and higher or wider) dimension, accordingly the ego must experience itself as the “victim” of the Self. Lewis says “Archetypal energy will break loose archaic resistances in patients and free them to proceed further in their individuation process.” p168 I surely hope this is true for me.
I simply don’t know if I was able to “proceed further in [my] individuation process.” Maybe I’ll find things as I go on reading my journal. Maybe it will turn out to be what I wrote in June 1996.