The Unappreciated Gift

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“If you don’t accept your whole life in all its chaotic entanglements you don’t live it, so how can you become conscious of it?  ~ C. G. Jung, The Visions Seminar

To accept our whole lives, what a monumental task.

Sometimes this means taking responsibility for aspects of ourselves we are ashamed of, sometimes the task is to develop aspects of ourselves that have been suppressed or neglected.

And sometimes the call is to learn to appreciate gifts that we have devalued.

I’ve almost always experienced my intuitive capacities as a burden, one that isolated me from groups of people who easily took direction from each other, who enjoyed the relational comforts of norms they had constructed and signed off on for the sake of togetherness. While I felt utterly unable to simply defer to the judgement of those around me if it didn’t resonate with my inner sense of necessity, value, or direction. My own hunches, leadings screamed too loudly in my ears, and I could never subvert my inner compass to merely conform to what authorities or peers saw as essential or obvious.

My intuition constantly asserted its own rhythms and necessities, forcing its imperatives upon me, demanding that I march out of step with the rank and file around me. I often blamed it for isolating me, for relentlessly leading me away from the crowd.

I learned early that ignoring my inner guide was not an option. Any attempt to override it would prove to be at least miserable if not disastrous. If following the beat of my own peculiar drummer was lonely and uncomfortable, refusing to follow it resulted in suffering for myself and others.

This often required that I face formidable challenges entirely alone, without the comprehension or support of company or community. Sometimes I hated its ability to derail what might have been perfectly pleasant (if superficial) social connection.

But the latent and subtle unspoken demands to conform, to defer to convention, the jockeying for status, expressions of passive aggression and microaggression, the sensation of psychic deadness or collective avoidance of all that interested and felt real to me almost always proved to be more that I could tolerate.

Often intuitive pay offs would only show themselves in the long term, leaving me recoiling from near-term interactions and situations that had nothing obviously wrong with them, yet.

Or else it sent me off in a direction that everyone else saw as weird or risky, pointless, out-there, or simply uninteresting.

I was very clear that relying on my intuitive experience had literally saved me and others from many a grave danger. Those who loved me and whom I loved would often placate me early in our relationship, only to come to trust my hyper-attuned pattern recognition as they watched the pattern unfold and repeat and bash them on the head over time. I learned to be patient with my most intimate relationships knowing that they would come to trust me and my noisy hyper-developed gut response eventually.

But I never liked this about my life. I learned to harness it, to offer it up to others professionally, to  make a living from it, and came to respect its authority over me, but in taking up the work of psychotherapy I often felt as though I was corralling a troublesome and weird personality trait, one that made the consolations of normality inaccessible to me, and that made me far lonelier than I wanted to be.

So, it wasn’t suppressed, and it wasn’t underdeveloped. It was leading me around by the nose and I didn’t like or appreciate it very much. I imagined all the people happily following the established norms, with plenty of company had somehow won the big door prize, and that I had ended up with the consolation prize, the year’s supply of SPAM hiding behind door number three.

But recently in the wee hours of the night a few weeks ago, I woke up and the scene had flipped itself upside down, as this thought presented itself:

“I have over the course of my life found access, from within myself, to facts, which eventually prove themselves, and that have been useful, even essential to myself and others. What an extraordinary gift to have been given.”

And in case you think I am bragging, I am telling you that this “gift”, this capacity, has nothing to do with me, with any choice or effort I have made, and was nothing I even wanted.

Nor is it a “gift” in the sense of being special or “gifted.”   It came from some place beyond, above or below me, and came flooding into a vacuum, and filled it. I know now that it wouldn’t have emerged if I had been raised my mature intact adults, if I’d had a normal life or education or neuropsychological scores, if I’d had a common cancer, if I hadn’t buried so many of my dearest friends so young, if I had traveled with a large, warm, supportive community who understood me easily.

This inner, living compass rose up explicitly and precisely because I did not have those things, to carry me through, to protect those around me. It was a compensatory “gift” that grew out of the losses I’ve survived.

It accompanied me through those losses. It did not create or exacerbate them. It was my parent, my company, my community as well as the way for me to serve and show love to my community.

And I thought of all the various kinds of blatant, obvious gifts that I have seen and named in those who come to work with me, and how often they do not recognize these gifts, and cannot claim them – who see them as threats, burdens, sources of shame or alienation – or as traits that may target or expose them  - instead of as sacred and unique portals where they can love and be loved, as the source of the very best stuff they have to give.

This is a kind of “shadow” work too – to come to terms not only with our weaknesses, but to forgive our strengths for burdening us with responsibilities we do not always choose, to accept our whole life, and to learn to be truly thankful for the gifts we have received.