Carl Jung in the Introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower

I have often seen individuals simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. It was repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so did indeed become different. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain-top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it, one is now above it.

– Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I have experienced “panicky outbursts of emotion”, quite recently as well.

I’m also proud of myself that I feel like I’ve made it out of the valley, albeit for only 48 (or maybe 47… or 46! weeks out of the year) Some of my family are still in the valley.

When I read Jung, I find things that help me transform my anger into pity. It wasn’t easy to get out of that valley. I remember a moment in time when I decided: “No! There is nothing wrong with me! I do not deserve to be treated this way by my father!” despite his repeatedly and consistently over many years telling me that there was something wrong with me every time I was angry with him.

Jung continues:

However, since we are both valley and mountain with respect to the psych, it might seem a vain illusion to feel oneself beyond what is human. One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness, which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which takes the affect objectively, and say, ‘I know that I suffer.’ What our text says of indolence: ‘Indolence of which a man is conscious and indolence of which he is unconscious are a thousand miles apart’, holds true in the highest degree of affect also.

– Carl Jung

I’m sometimes ashamed that I turn 43 in just days and I still find myself “in the valley” and swept away in a tidal wave of emotion. But I’m largely out of the valley and I’m also proud of myself for climbing out because I can easily imagine how some people never make it out.