It was recently Mother’s Day in the US, and it can be a difficult holiday for many people. Nurturing, caring and intimacy are rarely neutral topics, making them a magnet for complexes.
In my last postI embrace complexes – emotionally charged clusters of life experiences that are connected to them archetypes– it affects how we feel and how we react. Sets are largely outside of our awareness, shaped by early and ongoing personal, relational, and cultural experiences, and influencing the way we think, feel, and respond. They can change into different permanent forms.
How are complexes formed from past experiences?
In our modern culture, the terms “moving on” and “moving on” are thrown around a lot, but the underlying dynamics are not widely understood. When we “feel” or “nervous system becomes irregular”, often means that an external stimulus activates one of our complexes.
Complexes develop for various reasons. Because the psyche is dissociable, it can fragment in the face of pain, and the experience of dissociation continues to “live its life” as a whole. The pain is not registered or processed, and the psyche combines memories, physical sensations, emotional responses, and core beliefs related to the pain. Complexes can arise at individual, cultural and universal levels.
Jung noted that caregiving unconscious and the cultural unconscious influences the unconscious of the child. Children absorb unspoken fears, conflicts, values, and relational patterns before they consciously understand or encode them. For example, physical, mental, emotional or cultural deprivation can contribute to complex formation.
On a related note, we can identify with ourselves or react to ourselves care experiences, inner promises, such as: “I will be like my mother” or “I will never be like my mother.” Our answer is polar and can lead to complexity. Complexity theory also identifies how complexes arise without active effort on the part of the caregiver. In other words, it’s not always something the parent did or didn’t do, not just one specific thing attachment style which developed between parents and children.
Where and when will we see the complex?
Complexes are found in various arenas:
- Internal processes including images and fantasies
- Dreams
- Interpersonal situations, including relationship patterns, arguments, and conflicts
- Mood
- When the ego loses energy, for example, from stressfatigue, illness, pain, alcoholor drugs
- Cultural, social, political and historical movements, practices and institutions
The interesting thing about a complex is that it is not “healed” or “remedied”. Jung’s complex theory was fundamentally concerned with how we should learn to deal with our complexes. By developing conscious and varied relationships with them, we discover ways to integrate and manage their influence in our lives.
Identify triggers and emotional complexes
Identifying and understanding the characteristics of the complex is important because it informs interventions. In short, as with many psychoanalysisthe material must first be made conscious because emotional triggers are often rooted in the unconscious. Below are 10 salient features of the complexes:
- Coherence: They cluster around a central theme, such as “mom”, “dad”, “drop” and “injury.”
- Autonomy: They “have a life of their own”, i.e. they are not autonomous or responsible rational selves. If you’ve ever said, “I don’t know what came over me,” it’s probably a complex that’s coming to the surface.
- Effect: packages feelings and psychic energy, complexes can include intense bodily sensations and feelings, such as pain, shame, angerpanic, or anxiety.
- Energy: They gain energy, build tension and build, find evidence after activation.
- Personality: They express themselves, including through facial expressions, body languageposture, tone of voice, dreams, wishes, jokes and slips. Behavior can change and make someone look like a different person.
- Reactivity: The slightest stimulus can trigger a strong reaction. An inappropriate comment can cause a huge backlash.
- Inductive: Complexes with magnetic attraction cause additional reactions in others. Someone with an abandonment complex can influence another to forget them.
- Repetition: Familiar patterns of behavior are replayed and repeated within complexes.
- Resilience: They persist and remain resistant to change.
- Lack of Empathy: They have an absolute character that cannot consider other’s point of view and lack empathy.
Important unconscious readings
So what does it look like in humans? In a previous postI discussed the patient he was struggling with romantic relationship because his partner was not “the person he envisioned for marriage”.
His mother was a housewife and his partner career– focused and joked that he was “allergic” to housework. The tension he felt around the image of his “woman” and the reality of his partner hinted at his unconscious image.Representation of shared relationships that are generalized» as well as the mother complex.
She described her mother as “perfect. She did everything right.” He spoke of her in such glowing terms that she felt inhuman to me. When I asked him to explain the details, his mind went blank, he became angry and declared, “I don’t know what to say if you don’t get it. I couldn’t ask for a better mother.”
Reactivity, strong emotions, inability to keep his subtleties and change in his position, tone of voice and face were evidence that we are in the same complex. I was now “imperfect” who didn’t automatically know and was trying to understand his mind. I could not handle this relationship exchange at the time, but we could when his complex was not so active. As with most psychoanalysis, the material must first be informed by the relational process.
I kept and maintained my sick mother complex, and we became curious about her mother complex, exploring her associations at a pace that respected her defenses. What were his images and connections with “mother”? Realizing my mother complex, my patient created more pauses. Instead of reacting reflexively, when her complex appeared, she acted from a place of strength. She chose how she wanted to appear in her romantic relationship and determined what was important to her in a partner outside of it. childhood “ideal.”
