Do You Feel 'Triggered?' You Probably Activated a Complex |
What Is the Unconscious
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Complexes form in the face of pain that splits off.
Complexes are autonomous, living a life of their own.
Living with a complex means building tolerance and choosing responses instead of reacting.
It was recently Mother’s Day in the U.S., and it can be a complicated holiday for many people. Nurturance, care, and closeness are rarely neutral topics, making them magnets for complexes.
In my last post, I covered complexes—emotionally charged clusters of lived experiences, linked to archetypes—that influence how we feel and react. Complexes are mainly outside our awareness, shaped through early and ongoing personal, relational, and cultural experiences, and influence how we think, feel, and respond. They can congeal into a variety of enduring patterns.
How Do Complexes Form From Past Experiences?
The terms “getting triggered” and “being dysregulated” are used frequently in our modern culture, but the underlying dynamics are not widely understood. When we “feel triggered,” or our “nervous system gets dysregulated,” it often means that an external stimulus is activating one of our complexes.
Complexes develop for a variety of reasons. Because the psyche is dissociable, it can fragment in the face of pain, with the split-off experience continuing to “live a life of its own” as a complex. The pain wasn’t registered or processed, and the psyche groups together memories, bodily sensations, emotional responses, and core beliefs related to that pain. Complexes can form at the individual, cultural, and universal levels.
Jung noted that a caregiver’s unconscious and the cultural unconscious influence the child’s unconscious. Children absorb........