The oddest thing about my psyche, and maybe yours, is that I am capable of keeping a secret even from myself. I think nothing speaks to Jung's central concept of "the unconscious" quite like this dynamic, where there is an independently operating self (he would have called it a "complex," but not in the Freudian sense) that is not even known to my waking mind. Or that only partially emerges at times and then gets shouted down, denied, argued with, ignored, dismissed, and denied. It's a form of self-anosognosia, like Dunning-Kruger but for the self. We assume confidently that, of all the people in the world, we know ourselves best, and this is often a serious delusion.
In this case, the visit to the city of memories revealed that a dark, mostly hidden, sense memory, "soft animal" (only very, very human) continued to hold on to the secret hope that "we" would still be together somehow. This astonished me. I honestly had no idea, in my daylight mind, that any part of me was harboring this idea of a future partnership. If anyone had asked, I would have honestly said, oh, no, I've accepted the ending, and moved on. It's sad and all, sure, and it was lovely, but yeah, I got it, I'm done, I've moved on.
This sorrowful, attached, dark human beast/man in me is far from that, however. And the encounter also taught me that I have not been listening, obviously. Instead, I have been treating this hidden shadow ful of hope the way an exasperated parent treats a hopeful child, who is obsessed with something they can't have. He's not swayed by reason, by dismissal, by exasperated frustration, by exhortation. He is inconsolable and not swayed by anything that my daylight self can bring.
So I had to find some way to deal with this Other man, heart-centered, sense memory drenched, emotion, blood, dark and hidden, deeply bewildered and sorrowful. I sat on a rock looking out at Lake Kabetogama and realized I could just listen to him. I could leave space for him to be heard. I guess it's a little like that "inner child" work, but, in this case, an inner beastman. The soft human animal of my body, but much more than that as well. Deepest primal cellular self, resonant with the anima.
He and I are beginning a relationship. He's requested I continue to keep his fondest hopes and wishes hidden from the world. He's torn to bits, forlorn, bleeding, and angry in a lot of ways, and it turns out I haven't been listening to him for a long, long time, not just since December 2018 or whenever. There's a very profound lack of trust. I still have the tendency to respond from my daylight mind, and be dismissive, or try to reason with him. He runs back into hiding if so. It's like coaxing a feral cat out for food. I have to practice simply leaving open space and only watching and listening. Essentially irrational, he believes, or even knows, a great many things I simply do not. In our estrangement, he's largely written me off. There's a lot of mistrust and resentment there that's well-earned by daylight me.
But I am beginning to learn. He knows what he wants, he knows what he loves. Why do I keep exposing him to heartbreak, confusion, absence, abandonment, loss and longing? That's one of his aching questions. My daylight self jumps to strategy, explanation, reassurance, dismissal. Sometimes exasperation. He makes me feel like a fool. That isn't his fault. I even find myself asking him the same question: why have you led me into so much heartbreak? But in this fissure between daylight me and this dark beastman, I finally get a clearer picture of my complicated grief. The "complex" nature is actually a complex, tat is, twofold self: day and night. For years I have been able to "move on" by simply abandoning him, making a project of forgetting him, and vaguely hoping he would just go away.
This is no longer a working option.
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