Carl Jung’s (1875 – 1961) image of the psyche and our mental health was that a self-regulating system. According to Jung, the psyche, left to its own movement, will seek its own development and balance. This natural development toward wholeness and completeness Jung called Individuation.
As we move through life, alien material in ourselves or confrontation with others in our lives can upset this balance leading to feelings of anger, distress, rage and disorientation. It is the confrontation with the unconscious and the shadow that forces us to integrate these experiences and feelings that at first might seem very foreign to us.
Other things can disrupt this natural state of balance in a more profound way – trauma or childhood abuse and neglect. These are wounds that have a deep impact on psyche’s ability to restore balance. Without years of psychotherapy or analysis, psyche’s balance might never be restored.
The need to restore balance and wholeness is therefore expressed a symptoms of mental illness according to Jung. And we can treat this neurotically i.e. acting out the symptoms of our suffering without really understanding the root cause. Or we can face our symptoms with compassion and the understanding that it is telling us that we are out of balance and need to find ways to restore it.
The etymology of the word “suffer” comes from the Latin word meaning “to bear” or “to carry” From Helen Luke , we get an image of an undercarriage which bears the weight of a vehicle above the wheels alluding to the psychological experience of carrying the weight of our sins or transgressions. If we carry the weight unconsciously, our suffering appears as symptoms of depression, anxiety or self-pity. If we are able to bear the weight consciously, then there is the opportunity for meaning and transformation.