"Honouring the gods" - including all of our psychological parts

 27 July 2025

 “What you resist not only persists but will grow in size.”

- Carl Jung 

 In Ancient Greece there were a multitude of gods and goddesses and all of them were worthy of worship. People may have had their own ‘favourite’ gods but it was understood that it was unwise to ignore any particular god or goddess. If you did there would be trouble.

 This idea is illustrated in the myth of the Furies, who were the Graeco-Roman goddesses of vengeance, who lived in the underworld and ascended to Earth to pursue the wicked. They would often torment the people they targeted, driving them to madness.

 When the Ancient Greek character Orestes was acquitted of murdering his mother the Furies threatened to bring famine to Athens. They were only appeased when the Athenians offered to build an altar for the worship of the Furies. 

 Symbolically, this suggests the importance of honouring all the parts of ourselves. The Furies stop persecuting people when they receive appropriate honouring. Just as if we fail to honour, or accept, all our parts we lay ourselves open to some kind of ‘persecution’.

 Carl Jung

 This idea was taken up by psychological thinkers such as Carl Jung. He said that when we are in psychic pain we need to look at what parts of ourselves we may be excluding.The goal of psychological work, he said, was not to become ‘good’ but to be ‘whole’. It was Jung who came up with the quote at the top of this article, often shortened to, ‘What we resist persists’.

 This way of seeing human development appeals to me because I see a lot of people coming to therapy trying to get rid of aspects of themselves that they don’t like, or even hate. They are wanting to eradicate, say, their anger, jealousy, depression, anxiety.

 Of course, all those emotions can cause problems in our lives and it is natural to want to be less prone to anger, anxiety or depression. But to simply try to rid ourselves of those emotions or experiences can miss the point. 

 What really helps, I believe, is being able to see these uncomfortable, and sometimes frightening, emotions or experiences as potentially necessary. In other words to honour them. This does not necessarily mean unthinkingly expressing the anger, jealousy or melancholy, but rather becoming curious about what they are communicating to us about our life.

 As with the Furies, when we can give non-judgemental attention to a part of ourselves that is difficult or feels threatening, we may be able to discover a deeper meaning. 

 In his book Care of the Soul psychotherapist Thomas Moore says: “If, as a therapist, I did what I was told I’d be taking things away from people all day long. But I don’t try to eradicate problems…rather, I try to give what is problematical back to the person in a way that shows its necessity, even its virtue.”

Accepting legitimate experiences

Moore gives the example of a woman who came to him seeking to become less ‘dependent’ in relationships. In the therapy there is an exploration of what ‘dependence’ means to this woman, what her associations are with the word and the behaviour, and how she has always seen it as somehow ‘bad’ compared to being ‘independent’. She is able to explore how being ‘dependent’ in not always ‘bad’, how it is a legitimate experience that is often part of the human condition but that it also has a shadow side, such a ‘neediness’, inferiority and loss of control.

 Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman, in their book Embracing Ourselves, argue that we are all made up of different parts, or ‘energy patterns’. We tend to identify with some of these parts but unconsciously reject or disown other parts. They note that it is often the things we hate in other people that are the parts of ourselves that we have rejected.

 They tell the story of the Ancient Greek king Pentheus, who was raised to worship the god Apollo. The qualities that Apollo represented included rationality and order. Pentheus had the god Dionysus, who represented passion, chaos and instinct, thrown out of his kingdom. But then Pentheus ended up being killed when he tried to halt a Dionysian drunken gathering. 

 The lesson of the story is that when we try to exclude or reject a particular emotion or energy pattern, often because we judge that it is harmful or not deserving of validation, we end up being ‘punished’ in some form by the excluded energy. 

 Stone and Winkelman say: “The evolution of consciousness does not demand that we live out each of the energy patterns with equal fervour. It simply requires that we be committed to discovering all of them within ourselves and honouring each one. 

 “Each must have its shrine. A rational, intellectual, Apollonian man does not have to be fully comfortable with Dionysian, expressive energies. He does, however, have to acknowledge and honour them so they do not turn against him.”

The Shadow

This is similar to Jung’s idea of the ‘shadow’, that there are parts of ourselves that we hide or deny, either consciously or unconsciously. The problem is that it takes a lot of energy to suppress these parts and often they end up being projected onto others. So, for example, someone whose sexual expression is in their shadow may find themselves criticising people who are more at ease with that energy. Or someone who likes to think of themselves as kind and generous may deny the part of themselves that is selfish and instead see it only in other people. 

 We can see this theme, of honouring all our parts, in many myths and fairy stories. The theme can also be seen in our dreams, where our unconscious is able to draw our attention to aspects of ourselves that we are not giving attention to. 

 It can, however, be a difficult journey to accept all our parts, with Jung warning that “the medicine we need is always bitter”, but it is a journey well worth embarking on.