Individuation – Just the Tarot

The Tower Card – Anatomy of a Nervous Breakdown

Exploring the healing side of The Tower card through a Jungian perspective.

As Above, So Below.

As Within, So Without.

— The Kybalion

Most discussions of The Tower card in the Tarot focus almost entirely on what is happening in a person’s outer world.

And that’s understandable. It’s a dramatic card.

When The Tower appears, we think of events like divorce, losing a job, bankruptcy, foreclosure, the collapse of a relationship, or some other sudden upheaval. The outer destruction can be breathtaking.

But as the old Hermetic principle suggests, whatever is happening in our outer lives is also reflected in our inner lives.

When the structure of our exterior world collapses, something often collapses inside us as well.

That inner destruction is what we used to call a nervous breakdown.

Everything we believed to be true is suddenly called into question. Relationships with people we trusted crumble into dust. Beliefs we held dear for most of our lives are revealed to be false. The future we thought we understood disappears.

We find ourselves psychologically adrift. We have lost our place in the world, and we cannot seem to figure out how to get back to normal.

In Jungian terms, The Tower can be understood as the sudden and sometimes catastrophic dismantling of a rigid psychological structure. An outgrown persona, a false framework, or a collection of deeply held illusions can no longer withstand reality.

Something has to give.

And the symbols contained in The Tower provide a remarkably clear roadmap of that process.

THE CROWN

At the top of the tower is a crown, blasted away by the lightning strike.

Psychologically, the crown can represent the sovereignty of the conscious ego—the part of us that believes it understands what is happening and has things under control.

To put that more plainly, we all have to believe in ourselves.

When we get up in the morning, we need to believe that we are sane, that the world is reasonably predictable, and that what we do during the day will make sense and help keep us safe.

That is the everyday ego.

It goes to work. It pays the bills. It buys the groceries. It makes appointments. It solves problems. It deals with all those other human beings who are out there trying to do exactly the same thing.

Most of the time, it does a pretty good job.

But what happens when our predictable, manageable world completely falls apart?

What happens when we discover that our partner has been cheating on us? What happens when we lose the job we thought was secure? What happens when our finances collapse, our health fails, or something else occurs that simply cannot be fitted into the story we have been telling ourselves?

That wonderful daily wizard—the ego—suddenly doesn’t look so powerful.

The part of us that we believed would always keep us safe, solve the problem, and keep the car between the white lines suddenly has no idea what to do.

There is an old expression heard in twelve-step programs:

“My best thinking got me here.”

That is the crown being blown off the tower.

The Tower Poster – 13 X 19 Inches – Available on etsy

THE LIGHTNING STRIKE

And the moment we finally realize that we have really and truly lost control can feel like being struck by lightning.

It comes as a sudden flash of recognition—a crisis of the mind.

We may have spent months or even years denying that anything was seriously wrong.

“No,” we tell ourselves, “my partner couldn’t possibly be cheating on me. Those secretive phone calls and motel receipts don’t necessarily mean anything.”

Or perhaps we keep telling ourselves that we are just a little short financially this month.

Yes, we were short last month too. And the month before that. But things will turn around. We just need to tighten the budget a little more.

Until suddenly the truth becomes impossible to avoid.

We realize that we have been lying to ourselves.

And we are in real trouble.

That is the lightning strike.

The illusion doesn’t gradually fade away. For one terrible instant, we see through it.

And once we have seen the truth, we cannot completely unsee it.

THE FALLING FIGURES

The two figures blasted from the tower can represent the parts of ourselves that can no longer remain protected inside the old psychological structure.

We cannot hide in our intellectualizations and rationalizations anymore.

We built this magnificent structure called “my life.”

It protected us. It gave us an identity. It told us who we were, what mattered, whom we could trust, and what tomorrow was supposed to look like.

Now we have been thrown out of that safe little nest.

We are in psychological free fall.

There is nothing to hold on to because the things we once held on to are precisely the things that are collapsing.

But there is another way to look at those falling figures.

They are being grounded.

Literally.

They are falling out of an artificial structure and back toward the earth.

Toward reality.

The experience may hurt like hell. It may scare us half to death. But if we survive the fall, we have something we did not have while we were safely locked inside the tower:

The possibility of starting over.

Because now we have to.

THE GOLDEN SPARKS

Look carefully at the Waite-Smith Tower and something else is falling alongside the two figures.

Twenty-two golden drops or sparks surround the tower.

There are several ways of interpreting them. From a Jungian perspective, we might see them as psychic energy released when an old structure breaks apart. Spiritually, they can suggest something even more intriguing: illumination arriving in the middle of catastrophe.

The card is not simply about destruction.

It is about the destruction of a structure that can no longer contain who we are becoming.

At the very moment our old world is falling apart, new possibilities are appearing.

That doesn’t make the destruction pleasant.

It doesn’t mean we should pretend that loss isn’t loss, or pain isn’t pain.

But it suggests that destruction and creation may sometimes be two parts of the same process.

We cannot discover who we really are while clinging desperately to an identity built from fear, illusion, habit, or other people’s expectations.

The curse of The Tower is that everything we believed in may be falling apart.

The blessing is that we are finally free to discover what remains when it does.

And from there, we can begin again.

INDIVIDUATION

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with The Tower is that it feels like an ending.

Our world has been blown apart.

But psychologically, the ending may only be one stage in the process Carl Jung called individuation—the lifelong process of becoming a more whole and authentic individual.

As I said at the beginning, we all need a coherent story about ourselves in order to function.

But when that story becomes increasingly dependent upon denial, rationalization, self-deception, or an identity we have outgrown, maintaining it requires more and more energy.

Eventually reality catches up with us.

Eventually the false edifice comes tumbling down.

Jung used another wonderfully complicated word that is particularly appropriate to The Tower: enantiodromia.

Put very simply, it describes the tendency of something pushed too far in one direction to produce movement toward its opposite.

Psychologically, what we refuse to acknowledge does not simply disappear. The more rigidly we cling to one side of ourselves or one version of reality, the more pressure can accumulate in what has been excluded.

Eventually something breaks through.

In the language of Tarot, lightning strikes the tower.

When we become stuck in our own falsehoods—in the stories we tell ourselves and sometimes everyone around us—life has an uncomfortable way of getting us unstuck.

One way or another.

The false structure is burned down to its foundations so that something more authentic can eventually be built in its place.

And that may be the most important thing to understand about The Tower.

We naturally stare at the lightning.

We stare at the flames.

We stare at the people falling through the darkness.

But the destruction is not the entire story.

The Tower is also the clearing of ground.

Something false has ended.

Something real can now begin.

Yes, the burning tower is what catches our attention. But the deeper message of The Tower may be the healing that becomes possible after the destruction.

Introverts, Extroverts, Neon Nose Rings and Being True to Our Selves

The difficulty of being seen and heard as an authentic person.

There’s an interesting – and somewhat paradoxical – psychological principle which is that THE MORE WE BECOME OURSELVES, THE LESS LIKELY WE ARE TO BE UNDERSTOOD BY OTHER PEOPLE. That may sound a little grim, but there’s a lot of truth in it.

By way of an example, I’m a male. In a very basic sense, I have NO idea what it’s like to be a female. I can empathize with females, I can understand their political, emotional and social issues, I can be a strong supporter of feminism. But I can’t understand, on a primal level, what it’s like to be a female. There’s a whole slew of experiences in there – growing breasts, having your first period, prom dates, motherhood, etc. – that just aren’t a part of my being-in-the-world or my personal history.

I can take that up a notch and say that I’m an American male. So I would definitely NOT understand what it’s like to be an Indonesian female. Or I could say that I’m an older American male, so I would really, really not understand what it’s like to be a young Indonesian female.

The more different we are, the less we understand each other.

There’s also a very natural human drive called individuation, where we want to become separate, unique individuals. We see it most clearly in adolescents. For the first ten years of their lives they’ve been nothing more than extensions of their parents and their families. Suddenly, as puberty approaches, they want to dress differently, act differently, and explore new ways of thinking. They are compelled to differentiate themselves from their parents and if that means they get a neon nose ring to prove they’re different, so be it.

Although it’s less obvious, that drive to be, “different,” continues into adult life. In the United States, we mainly express it through our adult toys and our clothing. We talk about someone making a unique, “fashion statement,” or we’ve got a friend who drives around in a rare, restored 59 Chevy, or we raise Venus Flytraps . We take a lot of pride in our uniqueness and tend to denigrate being, “a part of the herd.”.

For some people, though, that drive to be different, to fully express themselves as unique individuals, can have a downside to it as well. The reason for that is that we also have an equally strong drive TO BE HEARD, not just to be seen. To be understood. To have meaningful conversations and interactions with other human beings who really get what we’re feeling and thinking.

As Michael P.Nichols put it in, “The Lost Art of Listening,”

“Few aspects of human experience are as powerful as the yearning to be understood. When we think someone listens, we believe we are taken seriously, that our ideas and feelings are acknowledged, and that we have something to share.”

That transaction of communicating and being understood and validated assumes that we have some common ground with the other person. The more that we have in common with the other person, the more quickly and easily they’ll understand what we’re saying. If the only language I speak is English and the only language you speak is Spanish, we’re not going to do much meaningful communicating. If you’re from New York City and I live in a small town in the mountains, we are NOT going to rock and roll.

It’s really a simple ratio: the more we’re alike, the more easily we’ll communicate. The more that we’re different, the more difficult it is to communicate.

So what happens if you’re not just different, but radically different from most people? So different that you share very little common ground?

Here’s an example from the Jungian personality types. We know that some people are introverts and some people are extroverts. The more introverted we are, the less likely we are to understand how extroverts see the world, and vice versa. Then take that up a notch by looking at an introverted personality type called the INFJ. Only one percent of the people in the world share that personality type. Take it up another notch by looking at males who have the INFJ personality type. Only 0.5 percent of the people in the world share that person’s personality.

That means that if you are a male INFJ personality type, over 99% percent of the people you meet will NOT understand how you process and view the world. That’s not a lot of common ground. That’s not even a pebble.

Or suppose you’ve taken a radical spiritual route such as we see in the Tarot card, The Hermit. You’ve intentionally withdrawn yourself from the world and consciously sought another path like meditation or extreme solitude. After a few years of that kind of a lifestyle, there isn’t just a minor rift between your vision of the world and the way the average person sees it, there’s a giant, fucking chasm.

The more different you are, the less people will understand you.

Now, experts tell us that there’s a sort of an arc in that process that eventually leads people who are very different back to understanding that, on a spiritual level, we’re all the same. Marsha Sinetar in her book, “Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics,” says that pursuing your true authentic self will inevitably lead to greater compassion and empathy with other people. People who are largely detached from society eventually reattach on a much deeper level.

But . . . until that happens, until we reach that point of reattachment, it can be a very painful ride. There can be the realization that people we really care about just don’t understand us. The feeling that we don’t fit in, not anywhere. There can be a terrible hunger to have just one person meet us on common ground. There can be a severe sense of loneliness, isolation, and, yes, not being heard, a despairing feeling that we will never have a real friend or lover.

Put another way, being true to yourself is not for the faint hearted. If the average person moves into an isolated cabin in the woods with no phone, no neighbors and no social media, he’ll go nuts in very short order. Being true to yourself and your unique perceptions of the world can feel very much like living in that isolated cabin, even in the middle of a very busy city.

It requires a strong ego structure. It requires the ability to enjoy emotional solitude, rather than seeing it as a curse. It takes a lot of resiliency. More than anything, though, it takes an ability to ferociously believe in ourselves. Not to criticize others or try to force them to share our visions, but to say, “I am me. I have a right to be here. I have a right to be my own unique expression in the world. I hope that someday you’ll be able to see me. I hope that someday you’ll be able to hear me. But the most important thing is that I can see me and I can hear me.”