West Sussex Counselling and Psychotherapy

02/03/2025

Facebook,Meta, Meta for Business please stop these people posting on my page, I cannot change it from public and being harassed by posts from all over the world and from people who are NOT my friends or friends of friends

17/12/2023

04/12/2020

When we scapegoat, we project what is dark, shameful, and denied about ourselves onto others. This “shadow” side of our personality, as Carl Jung called it, represents hidden or wounded aspects of ourselves, “the thing a person has no wish to be,” and acts in a complementary and often compensatory manner to our persona or public mask, “what oneself as well as others think one is.”
..Sylvia Brinton Perera in her book, The Scapegoat Complex, writes: “We apply the term “scapegoat” to individuals and groups who are accused of causing misfortune. This serves to relieve others, the scapegoaters, of their own responsibilities, and to strengthen the scapegoaters' sense of power and righteousness. ...Scapegoating means finding the one or ones who can be identified with evil or wrong-doing, blamed for it, and cast out of the community in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness.”
..The tyrannical force of scapegoating, with its cruel thrusts of accusatory judgments, can also erupt in our own backyards. This closer-to-home variety of scapegoating is especially important to note since we may find ourselves condemning bullies and world leaders while denying our own inclination to split off and project fears and anxieties onto our intimates and neighbors. The scapegoat-victim in families is often the “black sheep,” the child who, like the ancient sacrificial goat, serves the miserable role of carrying the unconscious shadow parts of her parents. These children may present with psychological problems and exhibit addictive or self-destructive behavior, but a deeper look into family dynamics points to a lack of awareness of the influence of parents’ unconscious feelings.

Carl Jung believed that scapegoating revealed something fundamental about our psyche. He maintained that we all have a “shadow” side to our personality. As he wrote in Archetype and the Collective Unconscious, “The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself.” Our shadow aspects cause us anguish, and much of our mental energy is enlisted in the denial of our perceived imperfections, but we cannot see our shadow aspects except through projection. In Alchemical Studies, Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making darkness conscious."

“It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow ...The world will never reach a state of order until this truth is generally recognized.” —Carl Jung.

--Dale M. Kushner (From the article, How Facing our "Shadow" can release us from Scapegoating.)

art | Andrey Remnev

21/11/2020

Believe in yourself and there will come a day when others will have no choice but to believe with you."

Oscar Wilde
1854-1900, Writer and Poet

29/06/2020

10/06/2020

I could rant about this image for days! It is often easier to diagnose ADHD than to address trauma-based behaviors. Easy and right aren't the same thing.

* Young children who experience trauma may have symptoms of hyperactivity and disruptive behavior that resemble ADHD.

* Trauma can make children feel agitated, troubled, nervous, and on alert. These behaviors can be mistaken for hyperactivity.

* What might seem like inattention in children who experience trauma might actually be symptoms of dissociation (feelings of unreality or being outside of one’s body) or the result of avoidance of trauma reminders.

* Among children who experience trauma, intrusive thoughts or memories of trauma (e.g., feeling like it is happening all over again) may lead to confused or agitated behavior which can resemble the impulsivity of ADHD.

https://www.nctsn.org/resources/it-adhd-or-child-traumatic-stress-guide-clinicians

29/04/2020

How can we know ourselves by ourselves? We can be known to ourselves through another, but we cannot go it alone. That is the hero's way, perhaps appropriate during a heroic phase. But if we have learned anything from the rituals of the new life-form of the past 70 years, it is just this: we cannot go it alone. The opus of the soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realise ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for the soul is paramount, and where eros may move freely--whether it be in analysis, in marriage and family, or between lovers or friends.

- James Hillman

art | Anne Magill

26/10/2019

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