Forgiveness Fills an Empty Womb

Raindrops pelted my office windows like pebbles. I stood there watching the tiny mounds of water cling until, unable to hold on any longer, they slid down the dotted windowpane like teardrops. This is the first day of spring? The voice in my head had a tone of disgust. I was grateful to be in the comfort of my office and not out in the rain navigating the streets of my small New England town. March was in reverse. She was roaring out like a lion and not b-a-a-a-ing out like a lamb.

The weather I was witnessing from my office reminded me of November. I imagine November in the New England of today can be just as dismal and dreary as it was in Melville’s New England. Seems that Novemberish weather nudges me to nostalgically recall Ishmael’s words in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Yes, it was a “damp, drizzly November in my soul.” The hope of spring was nowhere to be seen as I opened the door to my waiting room to find Jennifer. From what I knew of Jennifer, I was certain the weather in her soul was that of a drizzly and dismal November day.

Before coming to see me, Jennifer’s abdomen had swelled up over many months as if bearing new life. She had so wanted to get pregnant. She sat before me looking forlorn. Her despair hung as heavy as the thick velvet Victorian draperies framing the windows of my office. For months Jennifer had appeared to be carrying a child. Why was her womb empty? The analytic dictum I had heard in my training echoed in my mind: “Make the unconscious conscious!” What hidden hurt was underlying the conflict between her obvious wish to be pregnant and her inability to get pregnant?

“I want a child so badly!” Jennifer began. “I don’t know what’s wrong! Joe and I have been to specialist after specialist but nothing works.” She was beyond discouraged; she was drenched in despair.

“Sometimes our emotions can affect our body,” I said trying to prepare her to explore the emotions underlying her false pregnancy. This had been our first exchange during our first meeting. We spent the next few sessions discussing her dreams and her feelings.

She had a dream that she associated to her favorite film, Gone With The Wind. Jennifer’s auburn hair was reminiscent of the red earth of Tara. She was a romantic who was as fiery and feisty as Scarlett O’Hara. Jennifer had a Scarlett O’Hara toughness about her that hid a soft heart.

As I looked at Jennifer in our session today, I could see her kneeling in the dirt as Vivian Leigh had in GWTW. I could hear her as Scarlett defiantly shaking her fist to heaven and vowing: “As God is my witness, I won’t starve and I won’t let any of my kin starve . . . I’ll never be hungry again!” Only, her vow was for a baby.

And like Scarlett, Jennifer could easily tell herself, “I won’t think about that now. I’ll think about that tomorrow . . . After all tomorrow is another day!”

Today, in what was our fourth session, I decided to have her use a therapy technique to bring out her emotions more intensely. She was talking about her feelings as if she were talking about someone else. There had been a cool distance that she maintained from her emotional pain.

“Close your eyes,” I began. “Now imagine you could speak to the spirit of the baby that would have been born to you and Joe if you hadn’t had an abortion.” Yes, she had gotten pregnant once. But she was not yet married to Joe when this pregnancy had happened. In fact, it had happened when Joe was not yet divorced from his first wife. He pleaded with Jennifer to get an abortion. Fighting against every fiber of her being, she went and had the abortion.

She hated herself for going along with Joe. She felt God was punishing her. “I don’t want to do this!” she said through clenched teeth. Jennifer opened her eyes. Her eyes full of fire, she stared at me with an unwavering defiance; she was prepared to fight me every step of the way.

I encouraged her to experiment. “I know that doing what I ask makes you very uncomfortable. Just try it out and really express your feelings fully.”

“I don’t want to express my feelings about this!” she yelled. Her eyes were beginning to fill with tears.
“Imagine this baby,” I gently nudged her, “and say what has been hidden in your heart all these years.”

“I’m so sorry I didn’t have you. I hate myself for going along with Joe. Please forgive me! Oh my God, please forgive me!” She sobbed uncontrollably as she spoke to the spirit of the baby she aborted.
“Jennifer, it’s not the baby’s or God’s forgiveness that you need. You need your own forgiveness. Now see the younger you and speak to her as you would to one of your nieces. Imagine what you might say to comfort her for going along with Joe. Remember how you loved Joe and how confused you were. It seemed to be the right thing at the time.” I coaxed her to forgive herself. She needed to rip out her guilt by its tight-fisted roots gripping the soil of her soul.

Her heart had opened and released the poison of self-hatred. Within a few weeks, Jennifer was pregnant. Her pregnancy was short-lived and she miscarried in six weeks. This happened again. She became pregnant and miscarried after eight weeks. She became pregnant once again right away. And in a few years, she gave birth to two beautiful children: a boy and a girl. That was her heart’s desire to have one of each. Years later, when I heard from Jennifer again, she told me her children were now grown, had attended college, and were happy and healthy young adults.

• Today, reflect on the power of forgiveness. Consider how Jennifer’s repressed words of guilt and self-hatred had permeated her flesh and prevented pregnancy. Once she released the words of self-hatred and replaced them with words of forgiveness, she was ripe with child. Words of anger at herself became the flesh of an empty womb and words of forgiveness, the flesh of a full womb.

Somewhere between Freud and Jung . . .

Somewhere between Freud and Jung lies the truth. Although I entered graduate school with a penchant for Jung, I grew to appreciate Freud as I trained in psychotherapy with children, adolescents and adults. In working with children in the non-directive medium of play therapy, I observed the truths of Freud. And I came to appreciate the child in the adult interfering with adult happiness.

Freud revealed how the obstacles to fulfillment in love and work stem from our childhood psyche. His psychology was based in our body and its biology. He helped us make sense of our sexual proclivities in bed and showed us the source of our perversions. He based his findings in the universality of the body. Quoting Napoleon’s “anatomy is destiny,” Freud described how a boy’s development differs from a girl’s.

Jung showed us the universal elements of mythology. He helped us see what the soul has in common despite differences in culture and differences in the time period in which we’re born. The soul’s striving is the same. Nonetheless, we are body and soul, spirit and matter, and as a soul inhabiting a human body, we must take into account both sides of our nature in helping our soul find its freedom to love and to find fulfillment in life.

David Hart’s compassionate listening helped my soul to evolve. Looking back, I can see he took me as far as he could; he had his limits imposed by his adherence to Jung’s theory and by where his soul was in its evolution when he saw me. However, in dreams following my analysis, his mere listening presence, and not profound interpretations, allowed me to access repressed pain. The pain I’d blocked out had hampered my happiness as an adult.

There are two things that David Hart said to me before I set off for graduate school. He said, “Don’t get so caught up in your patients’ growth that you forget your own.” He told me about sitting in Jung’s parlor with the other candidates in training. Jung cautioned them, “Learn your theories well and then forget them when you are in the presence of the miracle of the living soul.”

As I present some of my most unusual cases, you will see how words spoken soul to soul and heart to heart become the flesh of healing. After all, Freud and Jung had come up with the talking cure. My own analysis and my study of various depth psychologies as well as my own clinical experience had revealed to me the healing power of words.

Nevertheless, it was in my own practice that I discovered how the words of acceptance, compassion, and empathy can become the flesh of healing. The penetrating power of insightful words could help a fragmented person become whole.

Philip, one of my teenage patients started his session one day by telling me: “They told us that life is a conversation.”

“Absolutely,” I said. He was quoting the trainers from the weekend workshop he attended. It was given by what was called the Forum: a late 1980’s version of what was first called est.
Life is not about the events that befall us but is about the inner conversation we have about what happens around us. However, from my clinical experience, I realize there is a conscious conversation and an unconscious one. It was the unconscious one, composed of repressed emotions, that did the most damage.

In the recently released book The Body never Lies, Alice Miller uses the lives of famous people—writers, artists, dictators—to demonstrate the devastating effect of repressed emotional pain. In example after example, she reveals how repressed and denied childhood suffering can lead to illness, disease, and premature death.


It was in a small New England town that people sought me out for therapy to relieve their suffering and, in a sense, their persecution. New England is the land where the Puritans sought relief from their religious persecution. It is also where Hawthorne and Melville delved into the dark depths of the human heart. After my time there, I discovered what darkness and suffering are hidden behind the facade of those black-shuttered, white-clapboard homes.

In the next blog posting, you'll meet Jennifer: a woman who desperately wanted to get pregnant. She taught me most poignantly about the body’s response to the repression of intense emotions. Jennifer showed me how words hidden in the unconscious, the dark depths of the heart, can become flesh of an empty womb. . . .

• Today, consider the power of the words that you think and speak can have on your health and the health of othrs. Such common thougts as "this situation is EATING ME Up INSIDE" have an immediate physioligical impact on your body. Your body and nervous systmecontract, your breath may become shallow and rapid, jaw clenches, and your heart rate may elevate as well as your blood pressure. Over time such repetitive patterns of thought may show up in stomach/digestive problems. when this happens the words hidden in the symptom is "I can't stomach this!"

Words of Fear Become the Flesh of Paralysis

Words become the flesh that forms on the bare bones of our lives. From my years of clinical experience, I have come to see the psychological significance to Saint John’s description of how the Divine became incarnated in the flesh of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word . . . And the Word became flesh . . .” The words we use do indeed become flesh.

In the beginning of any creative endeavor, there are our words. Sometimes our initial words are in picture form: the proverbial picture is worth a thousand words. Our vision is fleshed out in reality.
It would not be until I had been in private practice for a while that I would see another way that our words become flesh. Buried words laden with painful emotions had an insidious way of becoming flesh. There, in the presence of David Hart, a student of Jung, and while studying the theories of some of the venerable fathers of psychoanalysis, I learned about the power of our words. I would learn how the words in our heart can become the flesh of physical symptoms.

I had my first glimpse of this phenomenon in the form of combat neurosis. Words of fear became the flesh of paralysis and blindness for D.W. Jones, a young soldier. I had been in basic training with him. He went to Vietnam and was sent home after he developed combat neurosis. Just like other soldiers with combat neurosis, D.W. was unable to return to battle because he was unable to do so. In this case it was a paralyzed hand, the hand with the trigger finger. And he also developed hysterical blindness.

When D.W. was examined medically, the doctors found his eyes showed no damage that would interfere with being able to see. But D.W. could not see and he was not faking it. The trauma of combat had rendered D.W. paralyzed by words of fear hidden in his heart. Repressed fear dictated his paralysis and blindness.

Years later I was faced with this same kind of thing when a police officer from the police department of a small New England town was referred to me. A big strapping man, Ron had not been afraid of anything. He and his partner fashioned themselves to be like the characters depicted in the 1970’s police drama Starsky and Hutch.

Then one day, he found his gun hand partially paralyzed. He had been on the force for nearly twenty years. His wife had just had a baby. He was fearing that his luck might be running out. Now that he had a wife and baby, he was not so fearless. Ron was about to retire from the force to start a new career. Again, I was witness to how words of fear could become the flesh of paralysis.

• Today, experiment with uncovering and releasing the words of stress hidden in a physical pain. Recall times when you had a stress-related physical pain, e.g., headache, back pain, neck pain. Try silently speaking to the pain, saying, "Stop huring me like this!" Keep repeating tis phrase. Then look through the pain and see who or what situation it is that you could say these same words to and trust what comes to mind. Once you have identified an external source of pain, try silently saying, "I hate how you hurt me by_____. And that's because, I'd love it if you would_____."

From the Classroom to the Consulting Room

Destiny directed me to the door of Dr. David Livingston Hart in the summer of 1973. It was ihearing of the detour that his destiny took in 1945 that I began to see how words become flesh.

During our first meeting, I was interviewing him about the prospect of my becoming an analyst. At that time I was teaching psychology and philosophy in high school, and I had been reading all the books by and about Jung that I could get my hands on. Jung’s words compelled me to consider a career change. In order to qualify for training, one had to have 100 hours of analysis with a certified analyst.

David Hart was eminently qualified. By the time my destiny directed me to his door, he had been a training analyst for many years. And, in addition to training personally with Carl Gustav Jung, the master himself, he graduated magna cum laude with a doctorate in psychology from the University of Zurich.

Listening to David, I suddenly saw how words can redirect our life, and become the flesh of our destiny. And now, looking back, I see that it was words in books by and about Jung that redirected my destiny from the classroom to the consulting room.

As David told me the story of how he ended up in Zurich after the war, I noticed how his hair and features reminded me of an older J.F.K. , had our revered president lived longer. And, as he spoke, I kept thinking, This man was taught by Jung himself!


David Hart described the events leading up to the moment when destiny called. The waves were lapping up against the small boat he was riding in on his way home from the South Pacific. He decided to return home by way of mainland China and on across Asia. Here he was now heading home on a slow boat from China. Only now he was on the famed Ganges in India; he had heard the fables of Indian saints dipping people in its obviously unclean waters and healing all sorts of infirmities.
Since David had begun to make his way home, he had been reading whatever he could find. The Integration of the Personality, a book by Jung, is the one that had captivated him. The words in the title described him after the war: he was in search of a unity within himself in what was still a divided world.

There were still a few hours of daylight left as the boat that David Hart was on docked in Benares for the night. Sitting by the river, he dined on a steamy bowl of Indian curry, and he continued reading. Jung’s words spoke directly to his soul. He read where Jung referenced the ancient wisdom of the shamans who believed all disease was due to a loss of soul. And the treatment was the restoration of the soul.

The river’s murky waters mirrored David Hart’s mood. Yes, the war was over, but his future was unclear. What kind of world was this?

Newsreels all over the world displayed the hauntingly horrifying images of those menacing mushroom clouds billowing in the sky over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What kind of world was this? A soulless world? The title of Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul suggested where we were before and after the war.

A generation who came to be called the Baby Boomers was born in the wake of war and grew up under the mushroom-cloud threat of nuclear war. People built bomb shelters in their backyards and stocked them with cans of food. In elementary schools all over America, this generation—my generation—huddled in school halls when sirens sounded signalling air-raid drills. Little children got on their knees with hands clasped behind their heads and waited. . . .

• Today, reflect on how the words you once read in a book or heard from a mentor or friend became a determining factor in the direction of your life.