The Dark Knight of the Soul.

Jung referred to it as  "The Dark Night of the Soul"... I jumped in, up to my eyeballs.. for the past 5 years when I embarked on training to become a psychotherapist (a decision that didn't come lightly). As it required a deep surrender, to the self-shattering and tumultuous dance between letting go & holding on, old & new, pain & joy.

I found moments of enlightening awareness, ecstatic joy, and belly-aching laughter at my distorted wounds.

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/dark-night-of-soul

Journey of the wounded healer

After many many moves, I landed here, a solid stone house in the forest. Swapping people for wild animals.. wolves, boars, owls, bats, snakes and eagles as well as my more friendly fluffy fellows of course...

.. alone in stillness, sh*t surfaced. Twice I found myself shovelling through the debris of remains of broken waste pipes & when perpetual rain burst in through the front door, flooding the house, nowhere to run, no one to hide behind. A sweet metaphor indeed...

A mirror into the murkiest corners of my psyche. I said yes, to all the layers of pain, grief, torment, heartache, loneliness, abandonment, wading through it, observing it, sometimes felt like I might get swallowed up… after many moons, I hit the bottom, sat quietly & embraced it all. The shameful awkward parts in deep acceptance.

I believe that to truly work in the relational & healing depths of therapy, in the i-thou with another, you can only go as far with anyone, as you have gone with yourself… journey of "the wounded healer" C.Jung

Relational therapy & Emotional inheritance.

Relational therapy, sometimes referred to as relational-cultural therapy, is a therapeutic approach based on the idea that mutually satisfying relationships with others are necessary for one’s emotional well-being. This type of psychotherapy takes into account the ways in which social and familial factors relate to the relationships in a person’s life.

Galit Atlas explores this well in her work! Loss and trauma are ubiquitous, yet we are often unaware of their presence in our individual and family histories, much less how they affect us present-day. We carry them in symptoms, dreams, and patterns that seemingly lack explanation yet haunt us for much of our lives. The key to working through them may lie in uncovering ungrieved losses and making connections between past and present. Author and psychoanalyst Galit Atlas addresses such phenomena in her new book, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma (Little, Brown Spark, 2022). She shares experiences from her work with patients that illustrate the healing power of verbalizing unspoken traumas, as well as her own journey to put words to what was never mourned. In our interview, we talk about how the book came about and what it taught her about loss and love. This interview is for anyone who feels perplexed about their experience and curious to understand themselves better.

Galit Atlas, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City. She is a faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is a faculty member of the National Training Program and the Four Year Adult Training Program of the National Institute for Psychotherapies in New York City. Dr. Atlas has published three books for clinicians and numerous articles and book chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York Times publication “A Tale of Two Twins” was the winner of a 2016 Gradiva Award. A leader in the field of relational psychoanalysis, Dr. Atlas is a recipient of the André François Award and the NADTA Research Award. She teaches and lectures throughout the United States and internationally.

Self Psychology

The theorist most identified with the self-psychology movement is Heinz Kohut (1913–81), who viewed the development of a cohesive and positive sense of self as the motivation of all patients (Wolitzky, 2011). Unlike traditional Freudian theory, which considers narcissism as pathological and as something individuals typically move away from in the interest of pursuing love of others, Kohut saw narcissism as developing in either a healthy or unhealthy way. He viewed the development of love of self as being separate from love one develops for other objects and suggested that a love of others is not necessary to lead a fulfilling life (Eagle and Wolitzky, 1992). By making this claim, Kohut brought into question Freud's stance that individuals are driven by instinctual (or sexual) gratification (Kohut and Wolf, 1978). According to Kohut, healthy development is dependent on the ability of a child's parents to provide what Wolitzky (2011) terms ‘adequate empathic attunement’ (p. 90).

Failure of parents to provide appropriate empathy is seen as the source of most psychopathology. However, intensive therapy can reproduce the essential elements of the patient's early environment in order to make up the inadequate environment. The goal of therapy is not to interpret unconscious conflict but to help the patient to develop or strengthen one's sense of self. The experience of being fully understood by another person is seen as curative, in that it allows the patient to resume healthy growth.