Friends, welcome to the 13th edition of the "Tracking Your Wyrd" course.
In this letter, I want to take up an idea of C. G. Jung, who believed that “Behind the wound lies in the genius of a person,” which mythologist Michael Meade rewords to say “Genius hides behind the wound.” Either way you word it, both men (and I) are getting to the same idea—the inextricable nature of our genius (our wyrd) and our wounds.
Particularly our childhood wounds. You’ll remember that I refer to childhood as “on-the-job training” for our wyrd. We explored how our wyrd is trained by the characters we are drawn to, by the mentors and teachers we are gifted with, by our obsessions, by what we play repetitively, by our childhood fantasies, etc. Perhaps more importantly, our wyrd is also trained by the ways in which we are wounded as children, especially by, though not limited to, the ways in which our parents wound us. In Letter #9, we explored Meade’s idea that our families of origin quite often cannot see our gifts and thus do not support or nurture our wyrd. This is certainly one way a child can experience a wound—to not be seen or supported by their families of origin, to feel “weird,” not in the delicious and empowering way I'm using the word. But of course, there are other ways we may be wounded by childhood—neglect, abuse (verbal, physical, sexual), poverty, divorce, addiction, abandonment, absenteeism, to name a few. |
Meade believes that our genius awakens most strongly through those traumatic experiences of childhood. “Something deep in the human soul awakens when things fall apart,” he writes. It’s our Genius who awakens, that guardian of our soul, and it is our Genius who helps us survive.
Let me provide an example here, one I often use because it’s so, well, useful. Many of you will know the famous American poet, Mary Oliver, who took nature as the primary subject of her poetry and essays. Late in her life and career, Oliver explained the source of her genius. In childhood, she was sexually abused, and she turned to two things to survive the abuse—nature and literature. She began her on-the-job training then, spending so much time in the worlds of nature and literature as a young person, honing the gifts she was to bring forward as an offering, as a blessing, to the world.
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I use the word “blessing” here quite purposefully, because it has quite an interesting etymological background. From the Old French, the word blessure, one of the roots of our word blessing, is translated as wound. The wound and the blessing then are one and the same, two sides of the same coin.
This is the meaning behind the old mythological and psychological idea of the wounded healer, this idea that we can heal others because we are wounded ourselves. Our wounds help us develop a sensitivity that we can use for healing. For instance, a man with a deep father wound knows how very important a father is to a child. He’s sensitized to fatherhood in a way someone who had a good father might not be. He doesn’t take fatherhood for granted the way someone with a good father might. When that man has his own children, he may strive to become the best father he can be, righting the wounds from his childhood, offering his healing medicine to his own children, and perhaps, in the process, healing himself as well. |
Of course, this can go the other way. Wounded people can heal others, and wounded people can also hurt others. That same man could also become a terrible father, repeating the cycle of wounding onto his children. Some people don’t survive childhood wounds, and don’t thrive as adults. The wound is just a wound, not a blessing. The lemon remains a lemon; no lemonade is made from it.
But you and me, we can be the lemonade makers.
We can look into our childhood wounds, and ask ourselves these questions:
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* The lemons may have been handed to us by our parents, but we may have had great and loving parents and still suffered wounds as a child, such as illness or disease or accidents that wounded our bodies, racism or heterosexism or classism or ableism or any other -ism, abuse by relatives or family "friends" or religious "leaders," bullying by teachers or classmates or siblings (including for being "weird"), the death of those close to us, and any number of other disappointments and disillusionment and despairs. Be sure to consider those when you answer the questions above.
James Hillman argues in The Soul’s Code that all these questions require an imaginative shift from seeing ourselves as merely victims to other people (particularly our parents, in what he calls “the parental fallacy”) or to circumstances out of our control, to seeing ourselves as agents of our own fate. If we go back to the myth of Er, we imagine that we choose this life, which means we choose our particular wounds, for a reason—we agreed to allow the Wyrd Sisters to sew that wound into the fabric of our being, along with our Genius, because it is necessary. This is the meaning of “behind the wound lies the genius” or “genius hides behind the wound.”
So if we want to track our wyrd, we can track it in our wounds.
If you’re interested in a more in-depth study of how to bring your wyrd and your genius into more congruence in your vocational life, consider my course Deep Vocation: Restoring Your Soul’s Purpose, Power, and Pleasure. Click here to learn more.