I suspect that parenting is more difficult than ever because of the proliferation of expert advice everywhere one turns. Advice can certainly be helpful. There are those who have done this before, who figured out things that can be helpful. There are scientists who have studied children and their behavior. There are therapists who have spoken with dozens of parents, so have an enriched context for understanding.

However, sometimes sources are untrustworthy. There are political agendas that drive the way we see certain issues, such as the impact of daycare on a child, or the benefits of preschool. Older parents or even therapists have their own biases, or may simply never have seen a situation quite like ours. Research often creates an incomplete picture, and in any case, the population level information that research yields may not be relevant to the unique person that is our child.

As a therapist, it can be easy to assume you know the right thing for someone else. When I work with parents, my orienting goal is to help my client attend better to her own intuitions about her child. “What do you think is going on?” I’ll ask. “What do you think you ought to do? What is your gut telling you?”

There is an exception to this, however. Most of us judge our children with the same overly harsh lens with which we judge ourselves. If a mother comes to me despairing that her child can’t seem to manage himself, I often try to help her see the strengths the child is manifesting in his unruliness. Whatever the problem, there are usually a number of ways of coming to understand it. Some of these are going to be more pathologizing, and some less. In the case of our kids, often our negative assessment of ourselves – and them – can override our intuition.

The Scottish fairy tale “The Stolen Bairn and the Sidh” can be instructive about how precious our own knowledge and instincts are when it comes to mothering our children.

A poor young woman was out wandering with her infant son. She laid him down for a moment while she went to fetch him some water, but while she was gone, two members of the fairy folk known as the Sidh came and took the boy away. The mother was distraught. She asked everyone she could what had happened to her child. A wise woman in the village discerned that he had been stolen by the Sidh, and advised the mother to give up her search, for no one ever returns alive from the fairies’ realm.

“I will not stop until I have found my son,” the young mother said. At last, the wise woman told the mother that she might have a chance of gaining back her child if she were to sneak into the fairy realm on a particular night. “Remember, the Sidh cannot produce anything themselves, but must steal and beg everything. They want to own all that is rare and precious.”

“But I am poor, and own nothing!” cried the young mother. “What can I offer them?”

Nevertheless, she did as the old woman suggested. She gathered eider down from ducks at the seaside and made a cloak as soft as a cloud. She found bones along the shore bleached to brightest white, and used these to make a harp. She had nothing to use for strings for the harp, however, so she plucked her own golden hairs and strung the instrument with these.

By stealth, she was able to sneak into the fairy kingdom. The Sidh were so delighted with her cloak that they agreed to take her to their king if she would give it to them. When the fairy king saw the harp, he had to have it. He agreed to give the woman back her child in exchange for it.

When the king played the harp, the Sidh were so spellbound by the beauty of the music that they didn’t even notice the mother escape with her child.

This beautiful tale uses the eloquent language of symbol to show that what our children most need is what we alone can offer them. Our love, our knowledge of them, and our instincts about them are uniquely ours, and cannot be replaced by the dictates of any expert, no matter how wise.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Sasha entered treatment with me when her back pain became unmanageable – and nothing else she had tried was working. Sasha was trained as an opera singer, but had stopped performing when pregnant with her daughter. Though she had intended to go back to music in a professional capacity after her child was born, one thing after another got in the way – her husband’s job required them to move; she had difficulty finding reliable childcare; and then another baby came along. It had been more than four years since Sasha had performed, and as she admitted to me tearfully, she had begun to think she never would again.

Being a mother can indeed interrupt a creative life. When others need so much from us daily, it can be difficult to find the time and energy to invest in our creativity. In an article entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mom, the author quotes a photographer, who explains that she has not been able to pursue her art since having kids.

There are moments when I feel like I’m dying a little more every day. I feel like a fish that’s been caught and then abandoned on a dock, lying there, flopping and gasping, each gasp weaker than the last.

Sasha, too, felt as if a part of her were dying. We wondered together whether she could reclaim her deep connection with music while continuing to mother. Is it possible to mother and live a creative life? Could it ever be that motherhood could feed a woman’s creativity?

Sheila grew up the only daughter of an alcoholic single mother. Her mother was harshly critical, and Sheila suffers from crippling doubt. The first time she ever experienced a sense of trust in her own creativity was shortly after her daughter was born.

“The first person who ever gave me any confidence was Crystal, because I could see that what I did by instinct was working,” Sheila told me. Being a mom to Crystal was not a panacea that restored Sheila’s creative self to her once and for all. However, it did begin a process that years later led her to work in a creative field that fed her soul.

The novelist Fay Weldon found that being a mother put her in touch with her own wellspring of creativity. In a 1978 interview, she stated that “the process of being pregnant and then of having the baby and getting up in the night only puts one more in touch with the fecund part of one’s self. …It reminds one that there is always more where that came from and there is never any shortage of ideas or of the ability to create.[i]”

In our work together, Sasha was eventually able to find ways to honor the importance of her creative life. Though it was difficult to hold the tension between investing in herself and being present for her children, she found that doing so paid off. She felt more at home in her body, and capable of accessing joy once again.

What makes the difference between mothering that helps a creative process versus one that hinders it? Might it sometimes be a little of both? I recently explored this topic further in a podcast episode of “Launching Your Daughter.” In it, I discuss some additional case examples, and talk about creativity in motherhood using the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin. ” I hope you like it!

[i] Nina Winter, Interview with the Muse, Moon Books, 1978, p. 40.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Last time, I wrote about how becoming curious about our inner life – and helping our kids to do the same – can be helpful in managing difficult emotions. Relating creatively to our inner life brings other benefits as well. When we cultivate openness and acceptance toward our thoughts and feelings, we develop a capacity to engage life symbolically.

One of Jung’s great insights was that psychological growth requires that we separate ourselves from thoughts and feelings. Our conflicts, problems, and difficulties are a part of us, but we are not them. When we remain in identity with inner contents, we do not allow them to change and transform.

Identity versus Separation

Identity does not make consciousness possible; it is only separation, detachment, and agonizing confrontation through opposition that produce consciousness and insight (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9i, para 289).

This is partly why the mental health field has encouraged a shift in language when speaking about diagnosis. When we say, “I am depressed,” it gives the sense that depression defines and limits us, whereas “I have depression” underscores that depression is just an aspect of self.

“There are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own lives,” Jung wrote in his autobiography. “Thoughts [are] like animals in the forest” (Jung, 1989, p. 183). Our conscious self encounters myriad thoughts and feelings that have been spontaneously generated by the unconscious. It is indeed a bit like wandering through a forest and finding various animals there with us. It doesn’t make sense to judge the animals in the forest and determine that they shouldn’t be there. It doesn’t make sense to deny them and pretend they don’t exist. It also doesn’t make sense to overvalue their significance. The thoughts and feelings that inhabit our inner forest are unlikely to represent an ultimate truth, or to have more inherent value than something produced by conscious thought.

Taking Feelings Seriously, Not Literally

When we become too attached to a particular thought or feeling, we overvalue it, and this can lead us to respond too concretely. We fall into the fallacy of emotional reasoning, wherein we conclude that our feelings prove that something is true. This can lead to us trying to fix the immediate problem, which can in turn subtly reinforce a too concrete understanding. When this happens, exploration of our inner experience is prematurely foreclosed.

If our seven-year-old child is beside herself with terror at the thought of sleeping alone in the dark, we can acknowledge the seriousness of the feelings. We can encourage her to take them seriously, even while we help her not to take them literally. One father I knew gave his daughter a “magic pebble” to keep under her pillow that had the power to defeat any monsters. His creative, respectful intervention contrasts markedly with another family I know of who took their son to a psychologist because of their child’s nighttime fears. Unfortunately, the psychologist gave the child a diagnosis, which reified the symptom. This did not help the child to creatively meet the developmental challenge he faced.

The Symbolic Life

Responding concretely to emotional distress closes down opportunities to be curious about the symbolic element in the experience. For example, when our teenager falls into a depression after having a first love relationship end, we may feel pressure to do whatever it takes to help end his suffering, particularly if we sense he is slipping into a genuinely dark place. Before we rush to set him up with someone else or reach for a medicalized solution, we may want to remember that some suffering opens us up to our inner life, orients us toward ultimate meaning, and teaches us wisdom. If we can hold our child’s suffering as an initiatory plunge into the depths, he may be better able to experience it that way, even if we don’t explicitly speak of it in these terms.

A fairy tale image can serve to amplify the distinction between an orientation that is overly concrete, versus one that is more expansive and symbolic. The image comes from the Russian fairy tale “The Frog Princess.” In the tale, the three sons of the Tsar have all been given instructions on how to find a bride. The two older brothers find beautiful noblewomen to wed, but Ivan, the youngest son, is paired with a frog in a swamp. The two older brothers mock Ivan for his homely bride, but she displays some unusual qualities.

The sons and their brides are invited to a ball, and Ivan’s frog wife arrives in the form of a beautiful woman. At dinner, she tucks small bits of food up her sleeve. The two other brides think this is a bit strange, but not wanting to be impolite, and desiring to emulate the beautiful woman, they do likewise.

After dinner, the frog-girl dances with Ivan. As she does so, she occasionally waves arms and lets fall a bit of food. The bits of food turn into a garden with a golden pillar on which sits a tomcat singing and telling fairy tales, and a park with a lake inhabited by swans. When the other brides wave their arms to drop bits of food, bones are flung across the room that hit the tsar in the forehead.

According to Jungian analyst Marie Louise Von Franz, dancing and creating the beautiful fantasy world are…

an aspect of creating the symbolic life, which one lives by following up one’s dreams and day fantasies and the impulses which come up from the unconscious, for fantasy gives life a glow and a color which the too-rational outlook destroys. Fantasy is not just whimsical ego-nonsense but comes really from the depths; it constellates symbolic situations which give life a deeper meaning and a deeper realization….The two other figures take this too concretely (Von Franz, 1996, p. 103).

As parents, we can enrich our own lives – and those of our children – by avoiding responding to distress in a manner that is overly concrete. While of course there are times when concrete action needs to be taken, we can provide our children a more expansive sense of their inner lives by being sure to honor feelings and keep one eye on the symbolic aspect of the experience.

To learn more about how fairy tales help us understand ourselves better, join my mailing list.

References

Jung, C. G., & Jaffe, A. (1989). Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books.

Jung, C. G., Adler, G., & Hull, R. F. (2014). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Franz, M. V. (1996). The interpretation of fairy tales. Boston: Shambhala.

Image by Viktor Vasnetsov – Scanned from A. K. Lazuko Victor Vasnetsov, Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1990, ISBN 5-7370-0107-5, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=215931

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.