Troll
The troll destroys real values. Trolls often have no blood. If they had blood we can tend to think it is the blood he has sucked out his victims. He has the blood his victims lacking. The troll has stolen or attracted all life and emotion away from the human realm where it belongs, and thus brought people into a state of possession. Trolls represent those things which represent those things that we cannot touch lest we lose ourselves. Like some people say, “I can’t do that because when I do that… I can’t stop.” The trolls’ many heads signify the undirected dissociative force of the emotions.Sibylle Birkhäuser-Oeri & Marie Louise Von Franz, The Mother Archetype in Fairy Tales
Pale
People who are possessed, be it by some religious or political fanaticism or something else, are often physically pale. It is though they literally have no blood. And they certainly have no blood in the sense of having no warm feelings, no normal human affects. You cannot make them laugh, you can’t even make friendly contact with them. Their vitality is drained by their fanaticism. Therefore, they can’t enjoy life. They have no private life, no moments of joy, and because of that they lack enjoyment of life.Sibylle Birkhäuser-Oeri & Marie Louise Von Franz, The Mother Archetype in Fairy Tales
Published by Professor P
My name is Paityn Masters, my friends call me P. I am queer, Pisces, & an ENFP. I am trained as a psychotherapist, and my roots were as a youth pastor. As a psychotherapist, my specialty is in trauma and complex PTSD. I met my best friend and my cosmic partner, Jenni McCullum in graduate school. Together, we began discovering the spiritual world and the psychic gifts that had laid dormant in our psyche. We both went through a wild initiatory process that joyfully and sometimes even painfully expanded our capacity to both SEE and to HEAR, beyond the limits of the five senses. We are both intuitives, and Jenni is also a medium. As traditional psychotherapy frowns on the mystical modality, we had to start our own practice, and sacrifice licensing in order to answer the Call. Fortunately, we found our theoretical home in a branch of psychology known as Depth Psychology, that has its roots in the discoveries made by C. G. Jung, and seeks to study the soul rather than behavior, and sees the whole person on a spiritual level first—then works down to personality, family influence, upbringing, biology, heredity, physicality, status, image, and complexes.
We see symptoms as more than something to eliminate, we see them as messages from the Soul. Psyche means Soul, but not many people know this, because our culture can’t seem to get beyond its dependence on the “safety” of the logical/rational mind. “Whenever you are in the realm of Soul, things will always go over your head. The statements of the conscious mind may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of the statements of the soul: to begin with they always go over our heads because they point to realities that transcend consciousness.” (C.G. Jung, Answer to Job).
Healing means “making whole,” and many either think they are already whole, or fear they’re broken beyond repair. Healing involves the courage to look at the wounds that caused the brokenness to begin with. Symptoms are a huge help in identifying not only the injury but also the gifts one possesses. Marion Woodman said, “the wound is where the God enters.” So, we look at pain and trauma from the standpoint of Soul Making.
I speak of God in my writing quite frequently, and like Soul, God is something that transcends our ability to conceptualize what that means. When I say God… I mean the God that I have discovered within… the same one that is within you. Folded up within each of us is the entirety of the cosmos. How we relate to our inner world determines how we will relate to everything. Our primary wounds and our deepest wounds are in the realm of relationship—beginning with the way we relate to our own inner selves. We are wounded in relationship and so we must be healed in relationship. That’s one of the things that we hope to do in our work here in this earth school. We hope to hold up a mirror so you can see your true nature, the image of your soul; reflection brings about insight, knowledge, and Wisdom.
View all posts by Professor P