Jung and Heavy Metals

This is a follow up to a recent program I ran for a group of business people at the Curtin Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship.

One of the benefits of knowing your Jungian psychological profile is that it enables you separate your characteristics that are innate, thus strengths, from the behaviours that have developed as part of your life journey - choices you have made and experiences you have had.

For example, I was lead to believe early in life that there was something terribly wrong with me because during my teenage years I seemed overly emotional. This was not the way for a man to be and so I gave myself a very hard time over or it and the more often an emotional surge occurred the harder the internal response.

You can imagine the relief to discover that my emotional component, my Feeling preference, was a natural, a given, a gift, not a major flaw in a pattern of psychological dysfunction. And because it was my secondary preference, my teenage years were its time to come forward, to flourish. The Feeling preference is one of what Jung called “brain function” preferences and it was the one after my major, my Intuition preference.

But there’s more. Stay with me, even if it gets complicated.

When my mother was pregnant with me, her mother was chased off the family farm by her father in a drunken rage, with an axe. Now you can’t tell me that didn’t have an impact on the baby, unborn boy. And by that time in her life, my mother had already been battling depression for over a decade.

Then, I did say there was more, after my parents were scared by the flame red scalp of the Little Jon, they took him to the family doctor and he was diagnosed with pink-disease. What’s that? Mercury poisoning. How do you get it? It was in baby food, teeth fillings and god knows what else.

Symptoms: high levels of anxiety and irritability, quick temper, depression.

Dammit! Doomed.

Let me recap for you.

I have an innate emotional component. My mother bares me in a time of high tension, grief and emotion in her family life. I am poisoned by a heavy metal that does my brain no favours.

Oh, and later, I am also diagnosed with lead poisoning.

Doomed? Nah. Why not? Because I’m human and the species has an amazing ability to shift, to grow, to change, to morph. Do I still suffer emotional surges? Yes. But now I know that one cause is biological. It’s not all psychological. And my innate emotional preference helps me find, and for long periods, maintain, an emotional balance.

There’s another gift I haven’t mentioned: humour. Without that I would have killed my father, or him me. And my mother? Same. My Wife? Yes. More about her here

Knowing my Jungian preferences - Extraversion Intuition Feeling and Perceiving (ENFP) - helps me sort out what is what, where I need help, where I need to adapt, to learn and which buttons are being pushed and why I respond the way I do.

For example, when the Esperance Port lead contamination news blew in our faces, I was enraged. Why? It was a combination of my innate Feeling preference – the immoral behaviour of the mining company responsible, clearly showing no understanding of the impact of such a lazy implementation of guidelines, on humans, birds, or the rest of the environment. And my personal experience of lead poisoning – similar symptoms to mercury poisoning with the addition of brain damage and stunted growth – and the torment, turmoil and suffering it caused.

And this is where my humour helps me. When I tell my tale of woe I always ad: Well, my brain would have gotten damaged anyway, but the thing that annoy me most is that I could have been a really big guy.