“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering” – Carl Jung.
I agree with Jung, though I would say neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity. I say that because we tend to contract away from not only pain but also aliveness, sexuality, joy, open awareness and a number of other intense experiences. One of the things I like about Jung’s understanding is that it characterizes neurosis as an activity of intelligence (which is not synonymous with wisdom). It’s not pathological; it’s not some pattern that blindly got put into place.
Neurosis is not something that happened to us. It’s what happens when we say, “I would actually prefer to not feel this incredibly difficult, vulnerable, disturbing experience right now, so I am going to try to go around it. I will distract myself. I’ll be self aggressive. I’l get very activated. I’ll get involved with parenting, with work. I’ll learn to meditate and be calm. I’ll exercise.” We might try to get out of our immediate experience of intensity through any number of ways, and basically they all work in the short term. In the long run, neurotic habits have a counterproductive effect. Why? Because we are not dealing with the truth of our lives. Avoiding our difficult experience doesn’t make it go away.
In addressing neurotic or unnecessary suffering, the approach of traditional Western psychology is to address specific life issues, one after the other, trying to find the source of the dissatisfaction in repetitive, historically conditioned patterns. Is there a problem in our marriage? With our boss? Are we too invested in our kids’ success? Perhaps it would be more direct to increase our willingness to consciously participate in any form of experiential intensity.
Central to this effort is learning to recognize and challenge our life long aggression toward our vulnerabilities and instead learn to practice kindness towards them. When we approach our neurosis not as “wrong” but as our best out of date effort to take care of ourselves, then our neurosis actually becomes more available to work with. So rather than attacking each life issue as if it were a problem, my intension is to invite awareness, presence and kindness to all of our experience, without exception.