Just weeks before I returned with my wife to teach in a university in China, I found myself needing to escape from the confines of my clothing. It had been a hard summer, issues with my aging and dying mother who was being stubborn. I knew that before I could return to Canada after another year teaching Education classes in China, my mother would die. She knew it and I knew it.
I so desperately wanted answers to questions that had plagued me since my childhood, yet she had built a wall around herself and the past. There was no way I could breach that wall. And it was my frustration with these psychological fences behind which we hide and deny that took me one day into the countryside, to the wide open spaces that characterise the Canadian prairies, a place that I captured above in a photo.
Fences on the prairies are most often not too substantial – an occasional post and three widely spaced wires such as I found myself leaning against that hot summer day in 2011. Yet for their flimsiness, they are effective in keeping one in or out according to the intentions of the fence builder. Well, sort of effective. The truth is if I want to get to the other side of the fence all I would have had to do is to was hold the top wire down and step over; or, I could have separated two of the wires in order to slip through the larger opening. The fence does work for the rancher in keeping his cattle from wandering off into valuable crop land, as well as keeping the herd together.
We build fences in our heads trying to keep our secrets safe from others. We even build fences within our psyche to hide uncomfortable memories, and shady stuff about ourselves, from ourselves, like my mother had done. We bury the dark things we want to deny under layer upon layer of barbed wire, behind high solid walls that are layers as wide as they are tall. But for all of our efforts, the hidden and denied garbage finds ways to slip out unknown to our conscious ego. Often we don’t even realise that something has slipped out. It is only when others around us question our statements or actions that we find ourselves first denying doing these things and then wondering “Where did that come from?” Of course, we only ask ourselves this if we are open to learning more about ourselves, and willing to learn unpleasant truths.
If one looks at one’s relationships, one sees the denied shadow buried behind the psychological fences, projected onto others. Our responses to others are triggered by what the self sees as its shadow projected. Imagine the confusion that others face when they are held in too high or too low esteem given the circumstances of engagement. A man treats a woman as a goddess and places her on a pedestal. It is a position that no mortal woman can hold for too long before getting angry as the pedestal doesn’t give her the needed freedom to be herself. A man treats another woman as an evil witch though having no basis for so treating her. In both situations, the man is projecting his repressed anima, his soul both dark side and light side onto others, others who are just as human, just as flawed and perfect as the man unconsciously projecting his inner, hidden and contained complexes.
The higher and thicker the walls of containment, the bigger the explosion and disruption of our outer life. The work of therapy is to begin discovering the fences and carefully taking them down so that the stuff contained can make its appearance in a safer environment. Making its appearance, aspects of the shadow, the unconscious can be integrated into a healthier version of self.