How Love Can Turn to Hate in Relationships

Debra Maldonado  00:25

Which is not my favorite topic, but they go hand in hand which a lot of people don’t realize.

Robert Maldonado  00:30

Jung didn’t think of love and hate as opposites, he thought the opposite of love was power. But when you ask most people, what is the opposite of love, they invariably say hate. We’re gonna go with hate.

Debra Maldonado  00:48

We’re gonna talk about the dynamic of romantic relationships, why we’re drawn to people that make us hate them or feel this conflict with people that we fall in love with, then all of a sudden, we despise them so much. How can we have those two opposing forces with one person? Why that happens? Then also we’re going to talk about Jung’s theory on the Anima/Animus, the archetype of love on a soul level and how you can transcend those love/hate relationships and have real lasting love. A very popular topic with our audience, and my favorite topic.

Robert Maldonado  01:31

We’re also thinking of doing a certification on romantic relationships, or as a relationship coaching.

Debra Maldonado  01:41

We’ll be doing one for our graduates of life coach training. We’re really excited about bringing those people who’ve graduated, give them a specialist in this specific area, which is really exciting.

Robert Maldonado  01:55

From my perspective, it’s such a needed skill to have to be able to coach people through this thing we call falling in love, falling out of love, getting over relationships, etc.

Debra Maldonado  02:10

People need more than just dating tips. When I first started doing personal development, it was all about acting the right way, make sure you pick the right person, look out for red flags. Don’t make any deadly dating mistakes, don’t say the wrong thing on a date or don’t wear the wrong thing. It was so much pressure, basically building up the persona. It really doesn’t help someone because on the inside, they’re still the same person, they still have the same thoughts and feelings, they’re interacting. We’re going to talk about why we keep attracting the same type of person or the same pattern in relationships. Let’s first off start with what is Jung’s theory on love?

Robert Maldonado  02:52

It’s a big topic, we might have to do a part two on this podcast. In a nutshell, we can think of Jung’s ideas as archetypal. If you asked him about love, he’d say it’s an archetype you’re dealing with. The archetype is the Anima/Animus, which we’ll talk more about, projected onto the beloved person.

Debra Maldonado  03:27

When we say archetype, can you describe that for people? There’s a lot of people use that term.

Robert Maldonado  03:34

The way we use it in a functional way, in a coaching model, is that it means the way the psyche organizes our experience around a certain topic. How does a psyche organize our experience of love and romantic love? It organizes and structures that experience through the archetype. The archetype simply means the original pattern or the original form that then plays out in these patterns.

Debra Maldonado  04:08

What I love with Jung’s work, he talks about the personal unconscious, which is our personal experience. The archetypal, which is the collective, really is this thing we’re born with, beyond the surface of our human experience in our current life. We’re born with this wealth of knowledge and information that we operate on, the psyche operates on, it’s like the fuel underneath all the personal aspects of our life. When we fall in love, it feels like a really incredible force that you cannot stop. It’s like a wave when you see that person. It’s just so intense. Most of the time it is the most irrational person you should be with. You meet this really nice person who looks great on paper and you feel no emotion at all, it’s kind of flat. Then you meet someone who’s completely off nothing on your list, and they’re like the dream boat. Everyone around you is saying “What do you see in this person? Are you sure you like this person?” You’re just overtaken by this archetypal energy. When he talked about this archetype, that’s what he was saying.

Robert Maldonado  05:27

You’re possessed by the archetype. Essentially, it takes over your psyche. The ego’s pushed out of the way. This archetype now dominates your psyche. You’re acting in a foolish way. Sometimes like a mad person possessed by this idea of this other person. You want to be with them, you want to think about them 24 hours a day. You want to write poetry to them, give them music, chocolates, anything.

Debra Maldonado  06:07

Two people are caught up in it. When it’s one sided, it’s really weird because you feel like you’re pursuing that person and they’re not interested. But when two people are caught up in it, it’s like that honeymoon stage they talk about. It’s playful stage you’re in, you can’t stop thinking about that person. A lot of times I’ve worked with single people, for over almost two decades. Some people are really particular and barely guarded. So what you’re really saying is that they don’t even allow that animus, they don’t even let that irrational love overcome them, the ego basically suppresses it, where they’re trying to make a logical decision in love. They end up not feeling any connection with anyone. Would you say that would be a suppression of the Anima/Animus, a lack of connection or development of that?

Robert Maldonado  07:26

It would depend on the person’s personal evolution, how far they’ve gotten in their individuation process, as Jung would say, how well do they know themselves. Because if a person doesn’t know themselves, they’re usually projecting the shadow. The shadow is not the Anima/Animus, it’s an archetype that a person has to deal with before they are ready for love. Ideally, the person who is a good candidate for real love, for really experiencing the fullness of the archetypal love, would have to undergo shadow integration first, because the shadow essentially keeps you in your ego state, in your persona, where it’s all about you. It’s essentially about your experience, protecting yourself. To let another person in when you’re building your persona ego is scary for the ego.

Debra Maldonado  08:45

Could a person have a temporary moment of insanity, Animus seeping in, and then catch themselves really quick and shut down and sabotage?

Robert Maldonado  08:54

Precisely. That’s why young love rarely works out because it’s premature. They’re experiencing the Anima/Animus, but unconsciously.

Debra Maldonado  09:05

It’s underdeveloped, they haven’t developed a relationship to the spiritual aspect of themselves a soul in them.

Robert Maldonado  09:12

The depth of the love is there. But often the infrastructure required to make that relationship work is not there, the emotional maturity, the cognitive understanding is not there, and least of all the social structure for people to stay together and do something together in their lives.

Debra Maldonado  09:34

It makes me think about the first love. We always have that first love in our life. It seems so special because we haven’t learned heartache yet. We’re more open to that Animus but we haven’t matured so it never lasts. It’s that bittersweet experience of having that first love. It’s an innocence that we have, that first expense of love is an innocent approach to the Anima/Animus. We have that first heartache that it doesn’t work out, then we start putting up the walls and the boundaries.

Robert Maldonado  10:11

There’s also this another perspective that initial heartbreak is designed to break our ego structure a little bit so that we’re not so sure of ourselves, we start to ask questions. Am I really able to make these choices to pick the right person? Often people get stuck there because they think “That was too painful. I’m not going to risk that, again, I’m going to protect myself by either pushing people away, finding faults in the people that come into my life, or being very picky or being very argumentative with them.” We drive them away.

Debra Maldonado  11:13

We think the other person leaves us but we end up doing this. Causing arguments, being difficult. They leave us and then we say “See, everyone leaves me.” It’s interesting that we think we want love consciously, we go out there. Many people I’ve worked with get into that new relationship, and it brings up all this, what Jung would call the shadow. We start to see all incomplete places in us, things that we haven’t really resolved within our own personal life show up in that relationship. We don’t want to face it, we’ve been pushing it away for a reason. The intensity of Animus or Anima pushing you together is like forcing you to look in the mirror, and it’s very uncomfortable. At first, it’s this shiny, beautiful person, then it becomes very uncomfortable. I’ve seen many women get so scared. When are they going to call? Where’s this going? Then all of a sudden it’s over. It’s like a crash and burn relationship. They said “It’s really weird, I feel relief now. Even though I’m heartbroken that this didn’t work out, it was so much work to date this person, because I was always questioning myself.” It’s like a magnifying glass. It is work. A lot of people think the myth of love is that when you fall in love, everything’s perfect, they just do everything you want them to do.

Robert Maldonado  12:54

The biggest myth is that it’s unconditional love. If you look at romantic relationships, they’re totally conditional. You have to behave a certain way in order to make the relationship work. It’s not unconditional where anything you do is fine. We’re blinded to those things when we fall in love, we feel that it’s unconditional. Because it’s coming from us, we’re experiencing the archetype from within. To us it feels like I’m in heaven, I’m experiencing the divine through this person. That’s projection. A lot of people think that by projection we mean that it’s not real. No, it’s simply the mechanism, there’s got to be a mechanism because this person that was a few weeks ago a stranger is now the center of your life’s. This would be an internal shifting happening in the psyche that just overrides a lot of the rationality and the ego structure.

Debra Maldonado  14:15

I remember one time we went to a Buddhist center in Denver, and the guide said to us, he was the teacher at the time. He said there’s three types of people: I love you, I hate you, and I don’t care. He said the I love you and I hate you were the same person. When there’s a lot of energy of love, there’s a lot of potential for hate. You see this with celebrities. You project all this “I love this celebrity”, then they do something bad, then “I hate this celebrity”. We tear them down, then we build them back up again. They come back, and we’re rooting for them again. When they reach the top we want to tear down again. It’s a cycle that we all go through within relationship too. We fall in love so deeply. Then when it’s not matched, or all of a sudden we start to see our own shadow in that relationship where we don’t love ourselves enough, then we start to hate that person. Or they leave us, then we really hate them. How could you love someone so much and then in a flash had that love turned to hate. It’s the same energy, your mind starts to flip its story around that person and what they mean.

Robert Maldonado  15:29

From the individual perspective, you’re saying “I’m giving you my best in love. If you don’t love me the way I want you to love me, or what I expect, shame on you.” That starts that resentment. Resentment is like a light form of hate. It has the potential to turn into real hate and even aggression, we know from statistics, violence in marriages and relationships is rampant because people don’t understand these principles. They’re projecting all these expectations onto the other person and expecting the person to fulfill these unreasonable expectations because they’re coming from deeper archetypal elements in the psyche. We’re just humans, we’re going to be fallible, we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to disappoint each other. That disappointment often leads to that resentment and that hate.

Debra Maldonado  16:38

When we think about that resentment and hate, it’s really a mirror. Everything we hate about that other person is what we resent somewhere about ourselves. The ego can’t take all that hate and criticism, so it has to find a way to project it, we will not survive if it starts seeing this as me. It’s a way to move out that energy. When I used to do hypnosis, and I used to have people imagine their ideal partner, in my office, they were sitting in front of me, they would all cry when they were meeting that partner. There was so much emotion there. We have this really incredible tenderness that happens in ourselves. It’s almost overwhelming for us to feel love. Just as much as feel hate. I think when someone really likes us, and they come on too strong, the defenses naturally come up because you can’t even trust it. How do you let someone in your life? How do you transcend — I don’t want to say bypass but transcend that kind of fear or the ego’s fear? How do you really have a true connection and get the ego out of the way so you can really feel it?

Robert Maldonado  18:03

Ideally, if we were restructuring society and romantic norms in order to make it work, we would have people undergo the shadow process first, integrating their own shadow. What that means is they have to face what they unconsciously push away about themselves because that’s in the unconscious. As long as it’s in the unconscious, it’s projected unto the other person. Usually because the partner in the relationship is a convenient target for projection. They’re the ones that get the projection of the shadow, when a person hasn’t done their shadow work. It’s the other person’s fault, obviously. If it’s not my fault, it has to be this other person in my life. They take the brunt of the shadow projections. When a person integrates their shadow, they’re no longer projecting, that love experience can be a real transformation. Jung says that chemistry that happens, transforms both people, and everyone is the better for it.

Debra Maldonado  19:22

Because you’re being your true self in that moment.

Robert Maldonado  19:26

Exactly. You’re not projecting your shadow.

Debra Maldonado  19:29

For those people who don’t know what shadow is, I think we need to define that. Early in life we’re supposed to build up the ego. Jung talked about the second half of life where we let go of the ego. It’s a natural process we all go through. The first half of life is really building up this persona, this mask that we interact with the world. We learn to be liked and nice and get along, we have our little things that happened to us along the way, so we learn this mask works better, and this mask works better. I don’t like this aspect of human personality, so I reject that. In our family life, we often say “I don’t want to be cruel, I don’t want to be critical, so I’m gonna put that in my shadow.” Basically, it’s unconscious repression. We end up going to relationships, as Chris Rock would say, bringing our representative, not our true self. We’re trying to uphold this persona. You go on any of the apps, what you see is Persona. Then you’re looking for another Persona who matches your age, your looks, your education, your income level, your personality, you think “Let’s find someone I’m compatible with.” Meanwhile, this unconscious part of us is still there, it hasn’t gone anywhere. When we meet that person, we match up on that persona. Then the shadow, which is the things we reject about ourselves, we start to see it in the other person because this part of us wants to live with us, wants to be a part of our life, it’s not separate. It’s a calling for integration. Integration doesn’t mean healing it or getting rid of it. Integrating means actually accepting both sides of the coin, just like with love and hate, they’re two sides of the same coin. It’s all parts of ourselves, we cannot possibly be in an intimate relationship with perfection. You have to be raw, it has to get ugly, it has to get vulnerable, that messiness is what brings people close. It’s the opposite of what we assume. We assume if we do everything right, people won’t reject us. But actually, if we do things wrong, and someone who really loves us accepts those really unsavory parts of ourselves, that’s real love. Because it’s really not who we are, it’s just conditioned patterns.

Robert Maldonado  22:00

Let’s talk about what we learned in applying Jung’s model in coaching people through relationships. What was your experience?

Debra Maldonado  22:12

I remember you showing me when I first started doing love coaching years ago, and my book Let Love In came out, it was all about more cognitive, behavioral, and you said “You should check this out.” I had heard about Jung, but I never heard of anima/animus. You showed me a video on it, and I said “Rob, can you teach a class with me for the single people in my group about this?” As soon as you introduced it, people were blown away, I was blown away by it. It just takes this whole dating tip behavior, thinking positive, building up the ego aspect of love coaching to another level where you’re really working on the soul level, helping people have meaningful connection with themselves, their own soulfulness, so they can connect with someone else. For me, it was so beautiful, our clients loved it because we started applying active imagination and visualization for them to connect with this archetype and see it in dreams. It just became a more whole-rounded experience to approach love that they weren’t conscious of. That’s the key. I think a lot of people try to make rational decisions in love, try to figure out why do I keep hitting the same patterns, but the Animus in dreams — or Anima — really gives them the clues and gives them the information that’s missing on a conscious level.

Robert Maldonado  23:41

I was surprised because we were trying to stay close to Jung’s model of individuation, of shadow work, of Anima/Animus. But society has evolved, people have changed the norms of romantic relationship and how it’s done. Courtship, bonding, and pairing is changed completely. Now a lot of things are up in the air. But what I’ve found was, and this was surprising on both aspects, that the model still works. The deeper psychic structures are still in place. People still project the same way. They still go through the shadow work in very similar ways as Jung described. But the Anima/Animus appears different.

Debra Maldonado  24:41

It’s not just the traditional woman or the traditional man.

Robert Maldonado  24:46

Of course, he was working with people, or started working with people in the Victorian era, up into the— I think he passed away in ’61 or some time around there. Things have changed a lot.

Debra Maldonado  25:04

Relationships are different. There’s always been gay relationships but now people are more out, living their true self versus trying to conform to society and making that hidden because 100 years ago it was really not as acceptable. Now it’s more welcoming, there’s more liberal society. Then also transgender. We’re dealing with a lot of different types of feminine and masculine. Women are taking on more masculine roles in business and maybe leading the household, while the man stays at home or helps the woman with projects. It’s a different dynamic, women are really coming into power. When we think about the Animus, it has a different quality than the knight on a white horse that’s going to come and rescue you like Prince Charming. It becomes a force that the woman can harness and use in the world, balance out the relationship where the husband isn’t the sole container for all her masculinity. In the Victorian times, you see the woman like “I can’t step over the water, put the coat down.” Women can’t lift things and all that stuff. Now we’re just so different. These social roles of masculine and feminine ideas, that anima/animus were talked about in different circles. Now we were going to a different level.

Robert Maldonado  26:38

What persists, what’s still there intact, is that these are universal archetypal forces. What works for us in applying it in a coaching model, has been this idea that they’re more like yin and yang, universal forces that humans embody. We were created out of that model of the universe that operates on this duality. But the way individuals manifest it and experience it is very unique. Jung continually talks about a tension between our individual experience of the world and the universal archetypal elements. They are not going to be identical in each one of us because we’re individuals playing universal patterns. That’s the contradiction that a lot of people have trouble with. They want it to be either individually: what I’m experiencing is the truth and the way it should be. Or it’s archetypal, everyone should experience it that way. But it’s somewhere in between. It’s maybe a third element that comes in that is a combination of those two things that we get to experience, universal archetypal elements in our own individual way.

Debra Maldonado  28:18

When we say a woman has the unconscious element in her as the Animus, and the man has the unconscious Anima, the feminine in him, the symbol we were talking about doesn’t necessarily mean that man is going to see this goddess woman, and a woman’s going to see the knight. It could have a more ambiguous, androgynous looking character.

Robert Maldonado  28:45

We let the unconscious guide us. Working with our clients, we let the unconscious emerge and tell us what’s going on in the unconscious because it’s like a mirror effect, whatever is going on at the conscious level, whatever the person is aware of the unconscious is playing the opposing role. If a person is very rational, very put together at the social conscious level, their unconscious is often very artistic and expressive, it balances that individual out.

Debra Maldonado  29:23

Would a woman have an Anima in her unconscious? Because we would say, according to Jung’s theory, Anima is the conscious of a woman and Animus is the unconscious.

Robert Maldonado  29:40

Again, it would be an individual case, it simply would balance out.

Debra Maldonado  29:46

If she rejected femininity and was manly, she’d probably put the Anima in and embody the Animus?

Robert Maldonado  29:53

That’s right. As she approaches the unconscious through dreamwork, through working with emotions and triggers, what would arise would be the balancing component.

Debra Maldonado  30:09

When we think why is romantic love around, besides having babies, this force within us is our soulful self beyond our personal history, beyond the personal unconscious. This deeper self is pushing upward, it’s trying to be realized, be a part of this conscious experience. We’re not conscious of it. It’s not unconscious of itself, it’s alive and autonomous. What we want to do is connect with it. It’s always going to push us toward itself. What will happen is that projection is a way for us to see it out there, then draw us in and try to get us to turn in, even though it’s projecting outward. It’s a way to create this dynamic outside, so we can basically come to terms with our own soul. Because we can’t really look inside without the external, it is a way for us to work through it. The purpose of relationships, if we’re not going to have children, why would we have a relationship, why bother? It serves the personal growth.

Robert Maldonado  31:24

If we think about a basic relationship, or a traditional relationship between a man and a woman, they’re both projecting on each other. The man is projecting his anima unto the woman and experiences this woman to be beyond the normal experience of life. She’s not ordinary person. The woman is projecting her Animas on to the man. Jung called this the soul image. The Anima/Animus is the soul image, you’re experiencing your soul in the three dimensional reality of our life. Why would we need this is because that’s the only way we would allow somebody into our life completely, where they were a complete stranger just a few months ago, now they become part of you. The only way to do that is if you have that soulful experience of falling in love.

Debra Maldonado  32:44

What interferes with that is if you haven’t integrated your shadow, it’ll first be this amazing connection. It could last one night, it could last months, it could last a year. Then you get married, and all of a sudden, they leave the toothpaste off, or you hear them blow their nose or something very benign, and all of a sudden they trigger you. They come home late from work and your mind is thinking “Oh, no!” You’re seeing more of your shadow. The reason we don’t leave and have that powerful force that keeps us together, forces us to work with our shadow. But we have to be conscious that it’s not communicating to the other person “Please don’t do that.” It’s looking within yourself and saying “Why does this irritate me?” Because everything that irritates us about others is showing us something about ourselves. Understand that and then be in a relationship where I could say to you “I’m really triggered right now when you did that, let me work through, I know it’s something in me, I want to investigate it.” But to be honest with you about it, and you can be honest with me, that’s a soulful relationship. That’s where you’re not just projecting and resenting, telling your girlfriends or your parents how you are treating your husband or wife, you work with it directly. If people don’t, they end up getting divorced, they end up finding someone else to project that Animus or Anima onto, and they move on. It’s like serial love people, they fall in love, stay there for a while, then find someone else when things get too difficult.

Robert Maldonado  34:24

That’s another big misperception or myth in modern culture. They believe a romantic love is that initial stage of infatuation. That’s the way they define romantic love, this infatuation with this other person you are putting up on a pedestal and projecting all this divinity onto them. That’s one stage of love or romantic relationships, but it’s meant to go in a progression towards higher stages.

Debra Maldonado  35:02

It’s supposed to evolve, and when it doesn’t, when it’s going through that dip of the loss of that infatuation, people think it’s over. But that’s really when the good stuff starts to happen. Because in the friction of the shadow work, you’re actually going to go deeper and more intimate with someone than if you just said “It’s gone, I gotta find someone else who gives me that feeling again.”

Robert Maldonado  35:25

People say “I fell out of love” because that initial Infatuation is not there anymore. It’s like those rockets that go in stages. The initial one is meant to get you into orbit. But that’s just one stage of it, then you’re supposed to evolve into a more of a commitment, a more mature relationship.

Debra Maldonado  35:52

Where are we now with love and hate? What are we doing in the world and how can we look at that dynamic of love and hate and grow from it and learn from it?

Robert Maldonado  36:06

Things are up in the air in a lot of ways. Society’s changed so rapidly now that few people have been able to keep up with really what’s going on in culture and in gender issues. Men and women, how do they relate? How do you deal with these other gender identities? What is the psychology of all that? But in general, what’s happening is that these crisis points, these rapid points of change, are opportunities for us to really think through and redefine how relationships should be done. It’s up to all of us to think these things through, what do we know from psychology? What do we know from philosophy? What do we know from the Greeks, from Hindu scriptures about what’s going on in this thing we call love and hate? How do we deal with it? Because if we’re not aware, these forces will play out through us. Like Jung says “They’re autonomous, the archetypes will come in and make a wreck of your life if you’re not consciously relating to them.”

Debra Maldonado  37:29

A lot of our audience are teachers, and coaches, and thought leaders wanting to help others, a lot of people in personal development. When you become well known or a leader, your people will love or hate you. They can love you, they get so infatuated with you, they think you’re the best teacher in the world, best coach in the world. That can turn to hate as well. Both of them mean you care. If you think you hate someone, or you think you love someone, there’s that flip side that’s there all the time. The key is that when we’re in that love/hate dynamic, it’s attachment. Our ego’s attached to something, it’s thinking that the person can give me something I don’t have. When we don’t get it, we get resentful. Any relationship can have that love/hate dynamic. You love your parents but then you hate them at the same time, you resent them when you’re teenagers. I’d rather have someone hate me because I know they really care than have someone not care. Like “I don’t care about her”, have that benignness. It’s more when someone has a really strong emotion towards you. There’s love there too.

Robert Maldonado  38:55

That has a lot to do with the archetype itself. All archetypes according to Jung have a light and a dark side. Not a positive and negative. On the conscious rational level we’re always used to thinking in terms of black and white, good and bad. But the archetypes are beyond that. They’re part of the unconscious, which is the opposite of rationality. It’s more instinctual, more intuitive. They don’t operate on the dualistic principle, but they do have those universal forces at play meaning they are creative and destructive. At once, at the same time, they contradict each other. But that’s the power of the archetype. Jung says that’s what gives them the power.

Debra Maldonado  39:45

Is it like a frenemy? Anyone you’re close to, anyone you built an intimate relationship with, you can’t always love them. You can’t always think they’re perfect, there’s always something that’s going to irritate you, they’re going to let you down, that’s just part of being in a real relationship.

Robert Maldonado  40:07

It’s the real relationship, which is an archetypal universal force that you’re dealing with. The best we can do is understand that and be in relationship with the archetype itself. The way the relationship is going to play out externally between you and your partner has a lot to do with the way you relate to your anima/animus. That relationship that you have with the archetype is reflected outward, you experience it in your romantic relationship. But it’s really an internal experience that you’re having, your readiness for love, your fear of it, your respect for it, your relationship with it, all that is playing out in these romantic relationships.

Debra Maldonado  41:01

Love and hate go together. You have to integrate your shadow to really have a true experience of love. You can’t do Shadow Work on your own, you absolutely need a coach to do that. You can’t see yourself, it’s just too hard, it’s too difficult, your ego will trip you up and try to bypass and try to do an intellectual understanding of it. Then you’re still back to square one. You really need a coach for that. Having the tools to understand the Anima/Animus and how to work with that within your own psyche. But recognizing that when you’re falling in love with someone, you’re seeing your soul and that other person is your own soul is being projected. It’s one, it’s not separate from you. You’re seeing yourself as a mirror. Everything you love and hate about someone is pointing to parts of yourself.

Robert Maldonado  41:54

I have a quote by Robert Johnson, Jungian analyst who wrote “He”, “She”, and “We”, three different books on relationships. He says most men get their deepest conviction of selfworth from a woman, wife, mother, or if they are highly conscious, from their own anima. The woman sees and shows the man his value by lighting the lamp. That explains what’s happening. In order for a man to be lit from within, he needs that external projection, that external presence of the woman to see his light because the woman can see it in him where he can’t. But that experience of connecting with his anima brings it up. It’s already within us. Just as for a woman, the Animas, the soul image’s already within her, but she also needs that experience of love to become a light into the world. We do not light a lamp to put it under bushes. The old proverb says we light the lamp to show the world the light, so people can see.

Debra Maldonado  43:34

That’s beautiful. I’ve heard too that for women, it’s easier to connect to her Animus because she has more masculine qualities on the conscious level, she has more access to it than a man. So the man actually needs a woman more than a woman to find their soul? Is that true?

Robert Maldonado  43:55

I’d say it’s equal but you worked a lot more actually on relationship issues with people, your experience might be different.

Debra Maldonado  44:09

It’s easier for a woman— I worked with men and women, it seems easier for a woman to connect with that Animus. Women I worked with are high powered, career women, successful, they’ve made a life for themselves. They’re not like in the Victorian time who need someone to put a coat over the water. But men don’t have an aspect of femininity they can identify with in most cases, unless they’re an artist. I found that artists and creative men, it’s typically easier for them. For the left-brain man it’s harder to connect to the I. He needs that other woman more.

Robert Maldonado  44:52

The culture has moved so far in the opposite direction, the paradigm is more on neuroscience and looking at the external so much. We’ve lost touch with our nature, our psyche, our dreams. But that’s our work. We are here to emphasize that we don’t need to abandon science in order to understand the unconscious mind. They’re both useful. They’re just simply different aspects of our psyche.

Debra Maldonado  45:24

When someone says they found their soulmate, they really found their soul. They’re rediscovering their own soul.

Robert Maldonado  45:35

The only way you can really love and have a deep connection with another human being, is if you have that love from within you with the archetype, or it’s with that relationship with the Anima/Animus.

Debra Maldonado  45:49

It’s the dynamic between you and the Animus dictates the dynamic between you and the outer Animus. If you’re having an outer Animus experience with a man, you know that your relationship within is different too. Great topic, this was wonderful. Next week, we are going to be talking about shame and the root of shame and how it’s actually not a bad thing to have some shame but how it runs our life. It’s the root of the ego to reject shame and try to avoid it at all costs. We’re going to talk about how to work with that emotion, how to have healthy shame, but also feel more empowered when you feel that shame and how to deal with it in a less fixing way and more of an empowering way. We will see you next week on Soul Sessions with Creative Mind. Thank you for joining us and don’t forget to subscribe below here and not miss another episode. Take care, everyone.

Robert Maldonado  46:56

Stay well. 

Debra Maldonado  46:59 

Bye bye.