Therapy maintains that abuse is the most important thing in our culture—re-Memembering traumatically, but is there a way in which we can welcome back ostracized members of our being triumphantly?
Consider how your fictional-memory-character is marked or etched with sharp lines, initiation cuts. And, yes, it is important to grieve and perhaps only after the initial meeting and grieving can we hope of resurrections, converting deaths to the Risen from what can only be won at the hand of suffering.
James Hillman writes that we’ve had a hundred years now of therapy and that we’re disempowering ourselves through analysis, that the actual experience of it is a shrinking process.
We are artists when it comes to the creation of our lives, all of us, and can reframe our traumas, learn to consider these initiatory experience. Just as much as using active imagination for creation of a new story, Hillman explains how we, with our suffering have entered an imaginal world anyway, albeit it may be more socially accepted.
What people and their way of being does society consider to be “out of it?” There is no ‘Fact,’ or static/unchanging science and what is socially accepted does continue to change. Hillman urges us to leave the myth of reality, if this reality is coming from any kind of political community that doesn’t make sense, or feel right when aligned with your own personal values—it is another’s dream for you.
Begin by paying respect to your dreams. Hillman explains that every complex, every psychic figure in our dreams knows more about itself and what it is there for than you do—so you may as well respect it. Try to refrain from analyzing/shrinking your dream from pat perspectives offered by society. Yes, these can be a jumping off point, but best perhaps to let the images move into their own work of art, a collage you’re creating and yet aren’t quite aware of the effects of the finished picture just yet. Trust your own natural process of change born of your dreams, trust the wisdom of your psyche in order to rise in your strength because only You have walked and can re-trace your life, only you know the details of each bruise, each triumph, each colorful emotion!