Circles of Growth
What Does Moving Forward Even Mean?
Earlier today I heard a song lyric that said something like, “When you follow a circle, you always come back to the start.” It got me thinking how progress is often pictured as a line graph, sometimes jagged, but, one hopes, going “up” more or less consistently over time. I started contemplating that the psyche might be better pictured as a circle and that psychological “progress” could be imagined as a spiral. However, in working with my clients and my own psychology too, it seems they/we come back to certain core themes again and again, so much so that my client will exclaim, “There it is again!”
When I imagine progress to be a series of circles and spirals that take a person again and again over their psychic landscape, their “material,” their trauma, the particular ways they think, feel, behave, the kinds of associations they make, the inner patterns they experience, I see something like the Spirograph drawings I used to love as a kid. I didn’t know it at the time but drawing these overlapping circles of different sizes and colors was an early attempt at making mandalas. Mandalas, Sanskrit for “circle,” have for centuries been associated with the archetype of the Self, the ordering or containing principle of the psyche as well as psyche itself whose “center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere” (which is how de Lille conceptualized God).
This way of looking at the psyche and psychological progress helps settle and ground us. The point, in this way of looking at things, is not to get away from old injuries but instead to engage them again and again, more consciously each time, with more maturation under our belts and thereby build a more caring, more resilient relationship with them.
I think this is a hard notion for a lot of people to come to grips with. A client today felt hopeless about all the mistakes she had made in the past. I tried to help her understand that, while she couldn’t change her past, she could affect he view of those thing and recast her relationship with the past. That is where the hope lies. We don’t actually need to change the past; in forming a new relationship to our past, we free ourselves from it’s oppression and redirect our energy to living. By encountering these hurt places again and again, we become better related to them, and redeem them for better living now and in the future.