Take Responsibility

Recognizing Patterns

“...it is one thing to locate a difficulty in life and to address it. It is quite something else to realize these difficulties form a pattern..The road to taking responsibility for ourselves begins with the recognition of these patterns, and of our role in creating and falling into them.”

Carl Jung

During the lead up to World War I, Carl Jung had dreams about “a tide of blood” engulfing him and spreading across Europe. It was the beginning of his understanding that “nothing had happened to me which was not in a sense also happening to the life of my time.” He developed his theory of synchronicity, “acausal, meaningful coincidences,” as a result of those dreams. In other words, there is a connection between what goes inside us, and what goes on outside us. They reflect one another.

We are looking at a very different world right now than we had just five years ago. The rise of authoritarian regimens has created a climate of paranoia, anxiety and fear. We have seen this before—unfortunately, too many times before. It is a pattern that seems to recur when there is a permanent underclass; a large contingent of humanity who are struggling for survival, and a small upper class who control all, or almost all, of the wealth. I saw this in the few trips I took to Central America in the 1990's. One family might own the paint franchise for the entire country, for instance, or the soft-drink franchise. Mostly the descendants of conquering Spaniards, they enjoyed lavish life-styles, sent their children abroad for education, and ran the government. On the other end of the spectrum, the native people were still washing their clothes and bathing in the rivers. They had no schools for their children. No money went into infrastructure to alleviate their poverty and provide a means of moving up the ladder. Those countries are so devastated and dangerous, it's not surprising that caravans are forming below our southern border. The same is true of other poor countries—in Africa, for instance. Decimated by war and tyranny, the people push north in hopes of simply surviving.

We recognize the patterns that recur in our world and in our lives, but we have a harder time recognizing our responsibility for them. The rich do not want to give up their privilege and the poor become ever more desperate. The privileged can shut down the government for weeks or months, and millions of people down the line, who have no power to challenge that, become ever more desperate. These conditions almost always lead to revolution. It is a pattern that we seem determined to repeat.

Patterns will recur until we change what we are doing. For instance, a person like myself, who grew up in an alcoholic family, is far more likely to marry an alcoholic than a person who didn't. A person whose father used a stick rather than a carrot, will be likely to do the same—they will use punishment to dominate others. We recreate the pattern until we wake up and see it. A country in which poor people are constantly and permanently disenfranchised, will not prosper. To change the outcome, whether in our personal lives, or in our country, we have to take responsibility for what is happening and do everything we can to change it.

Whether the pattern belongs to our personal life, or our communal life, we are the ones who can change it. In fact, we are the only ones. But first, we have to own it, see how we created it, and then devise a path out. We are responsible for the pattern, and we are responsible for changing it. We can do it, if we pull together instead of apart.

                                                    In the Spirit,

                                                        Jane