Episode 23 - Indecision
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2018
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many people have difficulty making decisions, whether large or small. Among other factors, the psychology behind the fear of making a decision can be related to fear of making a mistake, lack of motivation, suppressed anger and aggression, and difficulty accepting the limitations and ordinariness of adulthood.
The Dream:
Last night I had what felt like an important dream. I was in a big new house. In one room I was just waking up with the cousin who is closest to me. The room was dark and filled with shadows. The other room was filled with light and I saw a woman waiting for me to wake up. We had both gone to the kitchen and as she got closer she was a girl I had a crush on in high school in very much detail. In high school I was always afraid to come talk to her—now she was coming to me. She was wearing my boxers and tank top and saw me and went right to the fridge and pulled out some tea. One of her friends was there too, whom I knew but didn’t know too well. We were all talking and having fun but with me and her, we kept looking at each other, drinking tea and coffee. I had the sense that something great is coming into my life.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:03.0 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.0 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod. |
| 0:31.0 | Today we wanted to explore when it's difficult to make decisions. |
| 0:37.2 | And I think this is something that we've all seen in our practices where people come in and |
| 0:41.9 | may be very stuck over sometimes big decisions that have important |
| 0:46.7 | consequences but I think more often things that perhaps are not so weighty, but somehow it is difficult to land on a clear choice. |
| 0:57.6 | Yes, I think this shows up as a clinically significant when people come in and they feel an enormous amount of pressure and they know that they should be clear-headed about |
| 1:11.0 | Accepting a new job relocating to a new place, or honestly, even just cleaning out their attic and throwing things away. |
| 1:18.0 | Absolutely. |
| 1:19.0 | But these issues will come into the consulting room and people will perseverate about them for a month. |
| 1:24.5 | Yeah, that's a good word, like perseverative. |
| 1:27.3 | And I also think it's interesting that you landed on cleaning out the attic and you said, |
| 1:31.4 | okay, because there does seem to be some kind of overlap |
| 1:34.9 | that I don't quite understand between the sort of analysis paralysis over these little decisions |
| 1:40.8 | and stuff. Sometimes it's decisions about stuff. |
| 1:42.9 | Sometimes it's decisions about stuff. |
| 1:46.2 | Sometimes the decision-making difficulty |
| 1:49.8 | goes along with feeling that you have too much stuff. |
| 1:53.0 | Not sure what that is, perhaps we're too caught in materiality |
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