Guest post by Charles Hall
February 6, 2023
Guest post by Charles Hall - join us for “Disability as the Human Experience” on February 11, 2023
When I was five years old, I was in a hardware store with my Dad. He was holding me when a lady walked up and said, "You and your wife must have been horrible people for God to have punished you with a child like that.”
I'm never going to have hands, a face that looks normal or be able to speak as clearly as others. God knows I tried through countless operations, but at 62, the medical knowledge when I was growing up was nowhere near where it is today or where it will be 20 years from now.
It took me 50 years to put the pieces of my life-puzzle together so that I felt good about myself in a nearly integrated way. I say “nearly” because I want more.
Speaking about the issue of disabilities is always an issue of dichotomies and paradoxes. Everything that I say about “disabilities” can, at some point, be contradicted because the issue is so large and complicated. And because so many disabilities are invisible or unseen by others. The "real disability" keeps us from being the person we were meant to be, no matter our circumstances. It comes back to our Individuation journey, a never-ending process. The physical might never go away, seen or unseen, but who we choose to be can transcend the physical to the spiritual.
One simple aspect of being disabled that is so often overlooked is that we all have the same psychological issues or needs. As in so many Grimm’s Fairytales, every individual needs to have the opportunity to “go out” into the world and find their way to the best of their ability. This is individuation, a human truth no matter who you are. My definition of a disability is anything that keeps us from doing, or trying, or feeling good about ourselves. I use the issue of disability as a metaphor because it matches my inner and outer “being.”
Satya asked a question in the community forum one day, “How did you get introduced to Jung?” But, for me, it’s the re-introduction to Jung that stands out. My inner life begins anew over and over; thus, at each metamorphosis, Jung takes on a new form, a deeper meaning.
I was in an extraordinary high school class in Dallas, TX, in the 70s called “Man and His Environment.” It was a three-hour-a-day class focused on the humanities. Our first year introduced us to anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, or books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and In True Blood by Truman Capote. I was in the class for two years. In the second year, my emphasis was on psychology. Each semester we had a major project in which we decided on the subject, formulated a hypothesis, and then defended it in front of the class. These four semester-long projects have defined my life. My first was On Death and Dying. I met the chaplain who introduced Elizabeth Kubler-Ross to her first dying patient; he is mentioned in the forward to her first book. My second was on Parenting the Disabled. The issue of disability is my passion. The third was entitled “How Art Enhances Education. And my fourth and final project was where I became totally immersed in Carl Jung was on Reconciling Science and Religion.
I was a Junior in High School with an incredible intellectual life but no inner life. I was living as a disabled individual proving to others all that I could do in the physical realm. This work was transformative for me. In college, I spent some time at The University of Dallas where I had professors like Robert Romanyshyn. The Dallas Institute for Humanities was beginning during this time as well, where people like Thomas Moore and Robert Sardello taught, and my mother was involved. At another University, my Episcopal Chaplain was very Jungian-oriented. He introduced me to my first Jungian analyst, who had studied with Robert Johnson and John Sanford out of San Diego. I was 24 at the time and worked with her for five years. During this time, I sobered up at 26 and found myself in the middle of Jungian Therapy, Family Systems, Adult Children of Alcoholics (working closely with John Bradshaw and others), AA, and the beginning inner work on the Archetypes influenced by Hillman.
From 1987 to 1990 since I had no job, I could read extensively about Jung. I was reading writings by Jung, June Singer, Jean Houston, Edward Edinger, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson, John Sanford, and more. At 30, I decided to return to school, focusing on finance and accounting. I needed to prove to myself and others that I could survive in “the real world.” Sadly, for the next 20 years, Jung and my inner work took a back seat. After leaving the corporate world, I began a company that hires approximately 20% of the workforce with some form of disability. My life has had many turning points. This last one was when I was integrating disabled individuals into the non-disabled world. Somehow what I was doing in the outside world integrated itself into my inner world and life for the first time in my life. Today I have a life that I could only dream about for years. At 61, I am still totally sober and committed to Jung.
Guest post by Charles Hall - join us for “Disability as the Human Experience” on February 11, 2023