Dealing with Guilt's Contradictions: a lecture and workshop

“Dealing With Guilt's Contradictions”
by LAWRENCE STAPLES, MBA, Ph.D.

LECTURE:
Friday, April 24, 2009 7:00 - 9:30 P.M.
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $15 Others - $20
Full-time Students - $10 2 CEUs

This lecture presents an unconventional view of the role of sin and guilt in our lives. In common parlance, the words “good” and “guilt” do not belong together. Personal and clinical experience, however, have repeatedly confirmed for Dr. Staples the useful role that sin and guilt can play in our psychological development. Examples might include divorces, giving up family-approved careers, or expressing qualities previously rejected as unacceptable, such as selfishness or the contra-sexual side of ourselves. Dr Staples concludes we MUST eat forbidden fruit and bear guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential.

WORKSHOP:
Saturday, April 25, 2009 9:00 A.M. - 1:00 P.M.,
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $55 Others - $65 (lunch included)
Full-time Students - $33 (no lunch) 3.5 CEUs

Guilt is a major cause of depression, anxiety, paranoia and suicide. This view is not widely held among medical and mental health professionals. Long before the advent of the DSM, Lady Macbeth's guilt-induced decline into mental disorder and suicide dramatically and accurately portrayed the psychological damage that guilt can inflict on the human psyche. While the more common presenting symptoms of anxiety and depression can be extremely painful and dangerous, we bear those feelings more easily and with less threat to ourselves than we can bear our feelings of guilt, felt as indisputable evidence that we are bad, that we have somehow sinned. Guilt and self-esteem cannot compatibly share the same house at the same time.

In this workshop, participants will learn to distinguish the psychological from the religious definition of sin and guilt, and will learn ways to detect guilt's presence, understand its meaning, and assuage its pain.

Lawrence H. Staples is a Jungian analyst and licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, and is a member of NAAP, the American Boards for Accreditation and Certification, IAAP, AGAP, and the Jungian Analysts' Association of the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. His special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, creativity and guilt. Lawrence's publications include Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

Available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Creative Work & Mirroring: Reclaiming the Shattered and Ragtag Pieces

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of Guilt with a Twist
and The Creative Soul

If we can by various means obtain sufficient mirroring, we can become more comfortable with the guidance that our feelings and interests can provide. We can overcome or, at least, ameliorate our fear of intimacy. And we can further the process of self-building by engaging our creative work at increasingly deeper levels. To complete the building of our self, however, we must also sin and bear guilt. What is needed to complete the building always lies in the forbidden territory, outside the fence in the shadow. Truly creative work takes us to this forbidden zone in our thoughts and feelings, if not in our behavior. Prometheus entered the forbidden territory to steal the fire humanity needed. Hercules stole the apples of the Hesperides. Rosa Parks broke the laws of her community. We must go to the pile of rejected stones and bring them back if we are to create our selves. This bringing together of all our stones into a single, unified structure is the end of a process of at-one-ment. As indicated previously, the underlying meaning of atonement, when broken down, is “at-one-ment”, a yearned-for feeling that fuels development. The idea of gathering together all of the scattered pieces we need to put our selves together is captured in the following poem written by a patient who had fallen apart at midlife.

Shattered Bottles and Ragtag Pieces
of Broken Hearts and People

Sometimes I feel like a bottle
That some angry drunk has hurled against a barroom wall
And smashed to smithereens.
And all those once related pieces scatter in a mess of shards
Whose chaos mocks a former wholeness,
Which vanished when it burst and fell.
Some things are, perhaps, worth pasting back together,
Some things, perhaps, are not.
Is it worth it?
That’s hard to answer in the absolute.
It depends on the pair of shoes you’re standing in
Or the pair of eyes you’re looking through.
It depends, quite frankly, on whether you’re the bottle or the shard,
Whether you’re the angry drunk or some sensitive aesthete
Who looked with horror
As exquisite shape and form were suddenly reduced to artless rubble.
Through the bottle’s eyes, yet another ox is gored.
It’s no abstract question of shape or form.
It is something closer still.
It’s a question of being a bottle or of being something else.
Shape or form or beauty mean nothing
When to be or not to be is the crucial question.

And shards, perhaps, would have a different stance.
For a shard, it’s nothing special being connected to a nearby shard.
They’re content to lie in desultory piles
In haughty isolation

That feels no need to touch or clasp adjacent things
To gain some sense of who they are.
A shard’s a shard. And that is that.

And now,
Through Love’s warm eyes appears another view
That has no special ax to grind with drunks or bottles or shards.
Love is love,
An ever-centripetal tendency that will not rest
Till shattered bottles and ragtag pieces of broken hearts and people
Are drawn once again and gathered in the place
Where first they started
And, at last, must dwell again.
Love is a completer of circles.
And with its caring hands picks from the barren f1oor
Each sharp but scraggly splinter,
And searches insistently for the neighboring pieces,
Which it patiently fits and joins till the puzzle is once again complete,
Even if it take to eternity.

This is a poem of at-one-ment, of atonement, of reunification. While love, as pointed out in the poem, is a beautiful tendency that brings at-one-ment, we cannot forget that there would be no opportunity for love to do its work if angry, hateful shattering had not preceded it, just as there would have been no world to create if chaos had not preceded it. Creativity requires both.

Available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Beauty Least Expected

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of The Creative Soul
and Guilt with a Twist

Only in retrospect can we experience “sins” and flaws as something of real value. It is like finding something beautiful among the detritus of the psychic attic. It is like finding a Picasso and thinking initially that it was just a piece of old canvas. It is hard to dispute that there actually is a way of looking at flaws and sins that could make us grateful for them. Seeing that our flaws and sins are valuable is actually a fortunate insight and a numinous moment. It is an insight that comes from a prismatic view that reveals the full spectrum of our being in all of its varied colorations, both light and dark.

We cannot become whole until we perceive the value in the unacceptable opposites sufficiently to take them in our sinful embrace. Creativity helps us accomplish this embrace, as it demands some kind of intercourse of the archetypally masculine and feminine opposites. The opposites are always aspects of a single, deeper unity.

In this life we are never free of the conflict of opposites and the inner tension generated by attraction and repulsion. The conflict of opposites is the biggest problem we confront. We can diminish the natural conflict between the opposites, but we cannot eliminate it. In fact, to be entirely liberated from this conflict is to be dead; it is the dynamic tension between the opposites that generates consciousness and the inner electrical energy that we call life. This tension brings life and its difficulties at the same time. The tension that brings us life, which we want, also brings us stress, which we do not want. As in most things human, to repeat Freud’s oft-used phrase, we wish to have our cake and eat it, too. We wish to surrender our life’s difficulties without surrendering our life. And as if it were not enough to know that we must suffer if we are to live, we eventually learn that increased consciousness also brings increased tension. The more aware we become of previously unconscious opposites, the more tension we must bear.

The safest place is a point between the opposites. There lies a sanctuary, a temporary place of refuge. Creative production helps us find that place because the process of creating leads us to the place where creativity dwells. Drugs and alcohol, money, power and other external stimulants are poor substitutes for finding that place. The advantage of creative production is that we need not go elsewhere. We do not need to leave the house to find a church or a sacred place or a drink or a fix. Our safe haven lies between our ears and within our hearts, in our own creativity.

Also available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.