Am I Channeling Carl Jung?

Why do I keep returning to the door
I learned to fear before I learned my name?
What am I hoping to find beneath the floor?
Why does each poem go back there just the same?
Jung called it shadow: what we push away.
Is mine the anger I was taught to hide?
If I invite it in, what will it say?
And can I hear it without taking its side?
I wrote of learning silence in a house.
Did silence keep me safe, or leave me small?
Do I still go quiet as a mouse
When no one here is angry after all?
I wrote of wearing calmness like a coat.
Who taught me how to fasten every seam?
When hurt comes near, why do I clear my throat
And speak as though I’m safely in a dream?
Why does my pride arrive prepared for court
With every slight arranged to make its case?
What does it guard when it cuts kindness short?
What fear is hiding underneath its face?
I wrote that thought could make a fortress last.
Was learning then a shelter from the pain?
When I explain each detail of the past,
Why does my heart still walk into the rain?
I studied how a person comes to be,
The mind, the soul, the habits we repeat.
Did all those years of study help me see,
Or keep me from the feeling at my feet?
Jung listened for the parts a life concealed.
Do I keep hearing them beneath my page?
Is there a grief I’ve carefully not revealed,
Or fear I’ve called good sense for half an age?
Why do I read a silence as a sign?
Why do I search a face for coming rain?
Whose old voice sounds so much like mine
When I tell myself I must endure the pain?
What do I make of that boy on the field,
Still waiting for somebody to draw near?
What did he learn when no one asked him how he’d healed?
Why does his silence still live in me here?
I speak of love, then turn and guard the gate.
I ask for closeness, then prepare to flee.
Is this the shadow Jung asked us to face:
The frightened part I will not let be me?
And what of all the good I set aside?
The softer self I feared the world would bruise?
Is there a gentleness I learned to hide
Because I thought that I would have to choose?
Would Dostoevsky’s man beneath the ground
Know why I argue with myself at night?
Do I build proofs where no proof can be found
So I can say I’m right instead of frightened?
Why does this question follow all I write?
Has something pressed its shape into my soul?
If I can name the thing and bring it light,
Must I still feel it to become more whole?
I think of Maslow and the life I sought.
Is growing more than reaching some clear height?
If all I’ve done is learn to master thought,
Who holds the hurt I keep outside my sight?
Am I, like Jung, pursuing what I miss
When I mistake the mask for all I am?
Can I hold both the wound and joy in this,
And stop condemning one to save the man?
I almost sign this page, then change my mind.
Must I give strangers every private name?
Can I leave those I love and hurt behind
The curtain, yet speak plainly of my shame?
Can I ask the question without scorn?
Can I meet the boy and not demand his proof?
What part of me was waiting to be born
While I stood outside myself beneath the roof?
Please help me understand what’s going on inside.
Not just the story, but the ache beneath.
Can I sit with what I used to hide
And let a feeling pass without a speech?
I think I’m on a path that Jung once knew:
To meet the hidden self, not win a fight.
My steps are mine; his questions help me through.
Could I be growing whole by facing night?

…

DCG

“The most self-aware person in the room is often hiding the deepest pain.
People who were emotionally neglected as children become the biggest intellectualizers in therapy and the healing journey. They get stuck overanalyzing over and over, but terrified of feeling anything in their body.
They might walk into a therapist’s office and get told, ‘Wow, you’re so self-aware. Seems like you got it all figured out.’ But instead of relief and validation, they feel hollow instead, because what’s actually happening is a defense. It’s the suppression of the grief, the anger, the shame, the anxiety that never got to cycle through to actually release.
You see, a child’s first instinct when they are neglected is to cry out for help, to reach for connection. But when that call keeps getting ignored, they learn something else instead: that their cries don’t work. And so they go into the prison of their mind instead. They suppress the feeling, they disconnect, dissociate, and intellect becomes the only safe place left.
And it sure fools everyone, including themselves. But what’s underneath is a nervous system that actually collapsed. It’s the belief that feeling emotions puts them in a helpless and hopeless situation.
The intellectualization isn’t really making them smarter. It’s just trauma that’s still in control, and it costs them dearly: relationships that never really feel safe, a body that never gets to relax and loosen up, years—maybe even decades—understanding themselves so perfectly while nothing actually changes underneath.
But eventually, like all coping mechanisms, it starts to break at the seams: random bouts of crying, reactivity that they can’t explain, numbing out, avoiding hard conversations, or having hard conversations that immediately turn into explosions.
Now, if this is you and you want to get out of this, you have to go beyond the mind, and that’s a journey into the body, into the nervous system, into the parts that you never got to develop.
So one quick move that you can do the next time that feelings come up inside you is to place a hand—a soft hand—on where you notice it in your body. And there’s a lot of science backing this up now: just stay with it for at least 60 seconds and ride it out. Let the feeling happen. Short window, but big impact.
You might find out that you actually move through the feeling and get to the other side without having to suppress and overthink.
— mindfulness