Mind Matters: Time spirals

Posted by Dr. Kayta Gajdos on February 25, 2015

Our furnace started making loud clanking noises on one of the coldest days of the year. It’s old, but not as old as we are; nevertheless, it needs to be replaced.

As with everything in life, one event leads to another. Everything in the tiny furnace room of our even older banked house had to be removed. This is where I store lots of old office records, papers and books. Sedimentary layers of chart notes, financial records, my writings, my student papers, even memorabilia—a reward card — from my mother’s dress shop. Who knew, that in 1953, her little dress shop had such things? I had forgotten! Time merges, condenses into cardboard boxes. Reading old papers, memos, notes, themes recur, and yet there is change too.

More than 40 years ago, in graduate school, I created for myself my theory of a “life map.” Years later my conceptualization was encapsulated in Charles Wakefield’s book “Healing The Child Within.” Synchronicity of thought is also part of time convergences!

The life maps, mine and his, consist of a graph with a straight line moving toward an upward point. Around this line, however, imagine a spiral. Consider the line as an individual’s life theme that defines a unique life, including psychological complexes, as Carl Jung would call them. Such complexes are our life’s theme, our life’s work to transform, or evolve to greater awareness.

What about the spiral around this theme? If we are on a journey to psychological health and wholeness, when we have a setback, we often feel like we are at square one, down at the bottom, at the start of the trajectory upward.

Instead, we are spiraling around our life theme so that when we are in the downward turn of the spiral we are still further along in our journey. And so it is, we spiral. From being on the upswing and consolidation of our learning about ourselves, and then slip again into old patterns of reactivity, old narratives. What is important to remember, is that we can be vectoring toward growth and wholeness if we choose to keep learning about ourselves.

* Kayta Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at MindMatters@DrGajdos.com or 610-388-2888. Past columns are posted to www.drgajdos.com

About Kayta Gajdos

Dr. Kathleen Curzie Gajdos ("Kayta") is a licensed psychologist (Pennsylvania and Delaware) who has worked with individuals, couples, and families with a spectrum of problems. She has experience and training in the fields of alcohol and drug addictions, hypnosis, family therapy, Jungian theory, Gestalt therapy, EMDR, and bereavement. Dr. Gajdos developed a private practice in the Pittsburgh area, and was affiliated with the Family Therapy Institute of Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, having written numerous articles for the Family Therapy Newsletter there. She has published in the American Psychological Association Bulletin, the Family Psychologist, and in the Swedenborgian publications, Chrysalis and The Messenger. Dr. Gajdos has taught at the college level, most recently for West Chester University and Wilmington College, and has served as field faculty for Vermont College of Norwich University the Union Institute's Center for Distance Learning, Cincinnati, Ohio. She has also served as consulting psychologist to the Irene Stacy Community MH/MR Center in Western Pennsylvania where she supervised psychologists in training. Currently active in disaster relief, Dr. Gajdos serves with the American Red Cross and participated in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts as a member of teams from the Department of Health and Human Services' Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.Now living in Chadds Ford, in the Brandywine Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, Dr. Gajdos combines her private practice working with individuals, couples and families, with leading workshops on such topics as grief and healing, the impact of multigenerational grief and trauma shame, the shadow and self, Women Who Run with the Wolves, motherless daughters, and mediation and relaxation. Each year at Temenos Retreat Center in West Chester, PA she leads a griefs of birthing ritual for those who have suffered losses of procreation (abortions, miscarriages, infertility, etc.); she also holds yearly A Day of Re-Collection at Temenos.Dr. Gajdos holds Master's degrees in both philosophy and clinical psychology and received her Ph.D. in counseling at the University of Pittsburgh. Among her professional affiliations, she includes having been a founding member and board member of the C.G. Jung Educational Center of Pittsburgh, as well as being listed in Who's Who of American Women. Currently, she is a member of the American Psychological Association, The Pennsylvania Psychological Association, the Delaware Psychological Association, the American Family Therapy Academy, The Association for Death Education and Counseling, and the Delaware County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Board. Woven into her professional career are Dr. Gajdos' pursuits of dancing, singing, and writing poetry.