How To Handle the Parts of Yourself That You Wish Didn't Exist | Satya Doyle Byock
Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist and director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, discusses Carl Jung's concepts like shadow work, dream work, and the collective unconscious. She offers practical exercises to help listeners balance their desire for safety with their need for meaning and purpose.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Introduction to Carl Jung and His Influence
The Challenge of Summarizing Jung's Expansive Work
Defining the Shadow and Its Role in Wholeness
Jung's Concept of Synchronicity
Explaining the Collective Unconscious
Applying Jungian Ideas: Reclaiming Life Force
The 'Two Selves' Exercise: Stability vs. Meaning
Jungian Concepts and Their Parallel to Internal Family Systems and Buddhism
Dream Work: Purpose and Practical Application
The Therapeutic Value of Making the Unconscious Seen
Satya Doyle-Byock's Book and Resources
6 Key Concepts
Shadow (Jungian)
The shadow refers to parts of ourselves that we are not conscious of, encompassing both what we perceive as our 'dark side' and a vast amount of our creative potential. Bringing these unseen aspects into consciousness helps individuals become more whole, moral, and creative.
Wholeness (Jungian)
Wholeness is achieved by integrating the ignored or repressed aspects of our own minds, which are naturally cut off from the conscious mind. It involves recollecting parts of the self pushed into the shadow by societal or family systems, leading to a more complete and integrated self.
Synchronicity
Synchronicity is defined as a meaningful coincidence, an a causal relationship between matter and psyche that cannot be explained by conventional cause and effect. These experiences often have profound emotional and life-changing impacts, suggesting a deeper layer of meaning in existence.
Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious is a shared, timeless, and archetypal layer of the human psyche, distinct from the personal unconscious. It connects individuals through universal patterns of mythology, history, and storytelling across cultures and time, providing a wellspring of shared human experience.
Libido (Jungian)
In Jungian psychology, libido refers to the life force of a person, a dynamic energy that drives an individual's psychological development. The focus is on uncovering this life force and understanding where a person is headed, rather than solely on recovering childhood traumas.
Dream Work
Dream work is considered the 'royal road to the unconscious,' providing nightly emanations from the unconscious mind. Dreams serve as diagnostic data, akin to blood work or x-rays, offering information from unseen psychological spaces that helps understand a person's inner state and promotes mental well-being.
9 Questions Answered
The shadow refers to parts of ourselves that we are not conscious of, including both our perceived 'dark side' and a huge amount of our creative potential. Exploring these unseen aspects and bringing them into consciousness helps us become more whole and moral.
Wholeness is achieved by getting in touch with and integrating the massive parts of our own mind that we typically ignore or repress. It involves recollecting aspects of ourselves pushed into the shadow by societal training or family systems, leading to a more complete self.
Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence, an a causal relationship between matter and psyche that cannot be explained by typical Western understanding of cause and effect. These experiences often have profound emotional and life-changing impact, suggesting a deeper meaning in the world.
The collective unconscious is a shared, timeless, and archetypal layer of the human psyche, connecting individuals through common mythology, history, and storytelling across cultures and time. Unlike Freud's subconscious, it's not just repressed personal experience but a universal wellspring of shared human patterns.
Jungian ideas focus on uncovering a person's 'libido' or life force, helping them reclaim ignored parts of themselves and find their unique life path. Tools like dream work and exercises like 'the two selves' facilitate this process of integration and self-discovery.
Dream work is considered the 'royal road to the unconscious,' providing emanations of the unconscious every night. Dreams are like diagnostic data (similar to blood work or x-rays) from unseen spaces, crucial for mental health and understanding one's psychology.
To begin dream work, keep a journal and pen by your bed and write down your dreams in the present tense immediately upon waking, before looking at your phone. Even capturing tiny images can help more dreams emerge and connect you to your unconscious.
Making the unconscious feel seen brings a deep sense of relief, similar to attachment or relationship work. Many symptoms arise from a lack of witnessing or listening to our deeper, unseen selves, and bringing presence to them can often resolve these symptoms.
This common dream theme often suggests an internal civil war where your conscious self is striving towards a goal, but another part of you is actively interrupting or sabotaging that goal. Until that unseen part is given space and attention, these dreams may persist.
15 Actionable Insights
1. Explore Unconscious for Wholeness
Spend time exploring parts of yourself that are not in the light (the shadow) and bring them into consciousness to become a more whole, moral, and creative human, and improve relationships.
2. Integrate, Don’t Repress
Instead of avoiding, repressing, or suppressing aspects of yourself, aim for relationship and integration with them over time to achieve a full self.
3. Witness Your Unconscious Self
Bring presence and attention to your deeper, unseen unconscious self, as making it feel seen and witnessed can lead to deep relief and often resolve symptoms that arise from a lack of listening.
4. Map Your Inner Selves
Use two pieces of paper to fully describe and name your ‘wild/meaning-seeking’ side and your ‘civilized/safety-seeking’ side, giving each a complete personality (relationships, clothes, music, home) to foster relationship and balance between them instead of constant tension.
5. Define Ideal Inner Balance
Create a second pie chart to define the ideal balance of power you intuitively desire between your ‘wild’ and ‘civilized’ inner selves, recognizing that a 50-50 split may not be ideal and that both parts contribute to your wholeness.
6. Assess Current Inner Balance
Create a pie chart to visualize the current balance of power between your ‘wild’ and ‘civilized’ inner selves over a specific period (e.g., a week or month) to understand who is currently driving your life.
7. Adjust Actions for Inner Balance
Compare your current and ideal inner balance pie charts, then identify specific, actionable steps (e.g., a trip, daily practices) to integrate both sides of yourself and bring your actual balance closer to your desired ideal.
8. Approach Shadow with Curiosity
Instead of focusing on ‘bad’ or ‘dark’ aspects of your shadow self in a moralistic way, approach them with curiosity, like getting to know characters in a novel, to bring them into conversation and foster understanding.
9. Understand Through Causes/Conditions
View your own past mistakes and those of others through the lens of causes and conditions, which fosters compassion and understanding, allowing you to approach difficulties without unnecessary rage, while still taking responsibility.
10. Resist Without Vilifying Opponents
Apply the lens of causes and conditions to people you disagree with, even political opponents, to resist their actions without vilifying them, fostering understanding without condoning harmful behavior.
11. Start a Dream Journal
Keep a journal and pen by your bed and write down your dreams immediately upon waking, in the present tense, before looking at your phone, to capture the stories unfolding in your unconscious and potentially alleviate unnameable moods.
12. Capture Any Dream Fragment
If you have many dreams, write down just one; if you have none, pay attention for a week and write down even a tiny image, as capturing a small piece can often lead to more dreams surfacing.
13. Identify Dream Themes
After recording several dreams, review them to identify recurring themes, images, colors, characters, or locations, as this awareness can lead to small revelations and enhance self-understanding.
14. Resolve Internal Sabotage
If you frequently dream of being late or not arriving, consider that your unconscious might be revealing an internal conflict where one part of you is sabotaging a conscious goal; address this inner ‘civil war’ by giving that interrupting part time and space.
15. Embrace Meaning in Coincidences
When experiencing meaningful coincidences (synchronicity), allow for the possibility that they are meaningful rather than dismissing them as mere chance, as this can add sacredness and importance to your life.
6 Key Quotes
We don't get enlightened by imagining figures of light, we get enlightened by taking the unconscious and making it conscious?
Dan Harris
By being in the darkness, stepping into the darkness, you actually, you see what has been buried there all along. And you bring it into the light.
Satya Doyle-Byock
The way out is through, you need to see clearly your own inner nonsense so that it doesn't own you as much.
Dan Harris
Very often, so many of the symptoms that are showing up are the byproduct of a lack of witnessing or listening. And if we can actually bring presence to our own deeper selves, our unseen selves, very frequently symptoms on their own begin to resolve.
Satya Doyle-Byock
Jung is hard to place in a few tidy boxes. His work has infiltrated culture and psychology and pop culture in ways that I think most people have no real idea about.
Satya Doyle-Byock
The problem with that is that synchronicity often carries with it quite life-changing and extremely impactful and emotionally important experiences for people. And when the materialist approach simply casts them aside with an irrelevancy, it actually steals from people's lives often something that was really quite important.
Satya Doyle-Byock
2 Protocols
The Two Selves Exercise
Satya Doyle-Byock- Get two pieces of paper and create an entire personality for each of your two sides (e.g., stability/civilized vs. meaning/wild).
- Give each side its own full life, including names, relationships, clothes, music, living situation, and home.
- Create a pie chart showing the current balance of power between these two sides in your life.
- Create a second pie chart showing the ideal balance of power you intuitively know you're trying to achieve (which may not be 50-50).
- Compare the two charts to diagnose how out of balance things are, and then identify steps to integrate both parts more fully into your life.
Basic Dream Capture Practice
Satya Doyle-Byock- Keep a journal and a pen next to your bed.
- Upon waking, try never to look at your phone first thing in the morning.
- Write down your dreams as much as you can, in the present tense, as if you're telling a story.
- If you have many dreams, write down just one; if you have none, pay attention for a week and try to capture even a tiny image, as more may show up over time.
- Once you have several dreams, look for recurring themes, specific images, colors, characters, or locations.