← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
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- [00:04]
Narrator
Welcome to Jung on purpose with CreativeMind, hosted by Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado, creators of the NeuroMindra coaching method based on Jungian psychology, non dual spirituality and social neuroscience. Join us each week as we explore personal growth for purpose seekers and the incredible inner journey of becoming your true self. Let's get started.
- [00:34]
Deborah Maldonado
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Jung on Purpose. I'm Deborah Maldonado.
- [00:38]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
And I'm Dr. Rob. And today we're continuing our series On Purpose and of course, from the Jungian perspective. But today we have a special one because we're talking about the Father archetype and how your personal relationship with your father plays into how you approach your purpose and whether you find it or not. So it's a juicy topic and we appreciate you tuning in.
- [01:02]
Deborah Maldonado
Yes. And before we get started, I do want to remind you, if you're watching us on YouTube, click the button in the corner and subscribe to our channel. If you are listening to us on one of those podcast services, don't forget to subscribe. Enroll for our to get every episode and make sure you're getting those notifications so you don't miss an episode. And also it helps us, does us a favor, helps us get more listeners and more people having access to this information. So let's talk about today. Is the Father archetype, the father and its impact on living our purpose?
- [01:34]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So the. Well, let's start with purpose. Let's define it so that we have a baseline from which to approach this wonderful topic. So purpose is a deep inner sense that your life has meaning and direction beyond personal goals, outside of expectations. Now this is important. It's outside of your kind of those personal goals that you have for yourself, your career, your. Your profession. Because a lot of people mistake purpose for profession. And there is a connection, of course, and we'll talk about that. But purpose is really something internal. It's a.
- [02:09]
Deborah Maldonado
Can you read that again? Because that was so powerful.
- [02:12]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So purpose is a deep inner sense that your life has meaning and direction beyond personal goals or outside expectations.
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Deborah Maldonado
That is so brilliant.
- [02:24]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, because that is a good definition to hold on to when you think about your purpose in life. It's not your career, it's not a certain job or profession. It's something deeper.
- [02:37]
Deborah Maldonado
And so when we talk about, you know, what purpose is, many people confuse it to be a career choice or a service they're doing for others. Like, my purpose is to help others, or I suffered from this, and my purpose to help others who suffered from that. And that could be included in your purpose. But the true purpose really isn't reliant on other people. It's really that sense of. You feel that sense of meaningless because there's a lot of people that like to help others. And the ego gets all attached to. I am the great healer, I am the great guru and the all knower teacher. And it's not really a purpose if the ego is depending on the outside for acknowledgement and approval and praise even for it. And we all get caught up in it. We're human beings, we all want to be people, to be grateful for what we do for them. But then it's that slippery slope where we get so attached and then it takes away the magic and the meaning of the purpose because we get. Feel like we're over functioning to make sure everyone's happy in our purpose career, such as coaches and therapists and massage therapists, people that do especially do work that help others, nonprofits. I could see that where it becomes exhausting and then you feel like you need a break and you know, and then it, it loses the, the intention that you originally had and it clouds it with, with all the ego stuff. So when we think about the father, our father, how, how is that related to us choosing or identifying what our purpose is?
- [04:09]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So let's start with the biographical father, as sometimes it's called, meaning the person that was a parent to you or different people. Right. Because for me, for example, my grandfather played a big role in a father figure for me. And so when I think about fathers, I often think of him as well as my biograph father. The person that gave birth to me or, you know, played with me.
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Deborah Maldonado
He gave birth. Wow. Your culture is very unique.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah.
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Deborah Maldonado
He, he gave you the seed.
- [04:44]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. I mean, whether we like it or not, we carry 50% of our father's genes, which means we're flesh of his flesh, bones of his bones. Right. All that kind of stuff.
- [04:57]
Deborah Maldonado
So innately we automatically have that father has an impact on us genetically.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Absolutely.
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Deborah Maldonado
Both the parents have impact, affect us genetically.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. And from the Jungian perspective, that means we inherit, inherit a lot of, well, 50% of the archetypes from, from the father directly, meaning that lineage of father. I love this. Some of the genetics, the way they think about it is if you think about your father's father and his father and just kind of go down that Y chromosome lineage back to ancient times. Right. You kind of get a sense of this, that direct line of where you come from anyway.
- [05:37]
Deborah Maldonado
And so when you say archetypal Father, just so people understand the archetypes, is that we're passing down the idea of father and what a father should be from generation to generation.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, there are cultural definitions as well, that we're born into a certain culture, we use a certain language, a certain religious or lack of rejection of religious systems that still plays a role in the cultural context that we're born into. So there's a lot of influences going on, but here we want to look at purpose in particular for the individual, for you, and the role that the father plays in that. Now we're going to look both at the personal father or the biographical father, as we may call it, and the archetypal father. So hang on. Right. And. And we'll try to define these as much as possible.
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Deborah Maldonado
Well, I'd like. I'd like to start just before we go into the personal. Is that the. Yes. We get all that genetic material, the assumptions and archetypal images of what a father should be, and then we also have the universal archetype of the father that's by all mankind, of all the fathers that ever lived. And then also this powerful archetype is not personal. It's. It's like kind of a thing of its own. And so when we're born, we project that father archetype, all that information from generations and cultures and not only our, our generations, but humanity, onto this father, this little human person that is carries, like, we have these assumptions that we expect from our human father. And so that sets us up for this kind of challenging relationship with our earthly father, whether they were great or not, because of that projection.
- [07:26]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yes, that's, that's the bigger picture. But let's begin with the simple structure of the family, family unit. So you have a mother, obviously, and you have a father, whether that father, again, is your biological father or your stepfather or somebody like an uncle or a grandparent grandfather, it doesn't matter, because we have that archetype of father, whoever takes care of us in that regard, as far as giving us rules, structure, protection, sense of order, that's our, Our father, our father figure.
- [08:08]
Deborah Maldonado
A sense of power too, right?
- [08:11]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, a sense of power. So let's, let's think in terms of that biographical father in relationship to agency. In other words, you're going to get a sense of your personal power from your relationship with your father and what you observe and kind of how you interpret that relationship that you have with your father. What kind of rules, what kind of discipline do you receive or lack of? Right. All that goes into your sense of agency. Now, agency, it's kind of a strange word, but all it means is your will, your sense of I can do things in the world. In some psychologies, this is called sense of efficacy. In other words, you feel like, yeah, I can do things for myself. I can go out into the world and build something, make something of myself. So that's really an important piece, of course, because we're talking about purpose. If you don't have that sense of efficacy. Efficacy, easy for me to say. Or that, that strong will, right. Or. Or that strong ego, like Jung might say, then you're. You're not able to build your. A life for yourself. You always. You always doubt yourself. Now, this has a lot to do with whether your biographical father has found and is living his purpose or not.
- [09:32]
Deborah Maldonado
And so when we see. Let's say, well, let's talk about first our relationship with the father. And regardless of the purpose idea. So your relationship with your father is basically symbolic of that father archetype we talked about, but also a symbolic of your relationship with your own power, your own will. So a supportive father, an encouraging father, you will tend to feel most likely. And there's always exceptions to the rules. Feel this sense of, I can do it. I can accomplish things. Like, almost like you borrow your father's faith in you to do the things you want. Obviously, not everyone had that supportive father, especially our generation. The father was pretty much not really in many families, not in charge of raising the children. So they were kind of working a lot. Then other times, the father could be very critical and very demanding or controlling of the child. And then what the. What the child is receiving about their own power is that I can't be trusted with my power. I don't trust my own judgments. I don't know how to take action or being even overly dependent on the father to guide you. So it's. That there's a lot of layers to it, but it's really thinking about the father, as, does he give us permission to have faith in ourselves, in the world? Or did he say, give us a sense of mistrust in ourselves and doubt that we have the ability? And it's such a deep impression that happens early on. And then sometimes we forget about it. And then when it comes to living our purpose, when we're at that midlife or the potential years, when we're looking for meaning, it's like, do we have the courage to make a change? And that comes back to that early life. Do I have agency in my life? Or do I feel like I have to depend on my paycheck or depend on someone else or not take a risk because I don't trust myself or to even choose a different path? And so all that comes down to how that relationship with the father was. And it's that layer of experience.
- [11:39]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Absolutely. That whole psychology, of course, of family systems and relationship with parents is fascinating. And really, we don't know that much about it. I mean, there are some good models for working in coaching and in therapy, but there's. They're still sketchy. They're still kind of very subjective. And we have to go on an individual basis. But in general, right. What we're talking about is kind of this transmission of purpose. Is there a sense of agency? Is there a sense of you're here to do something important with your life? And often if that is not there, right. It's. A father doesn't have it in his own life. It's difficult to communicate that to the child because even if they. They say it, they're not doing it themselves.
- [12:30]
Deborah Maldonado
Like, do it. Do what you love. But he's complaining about his boss and not his Same company for 20 years, which is very rare. But also, too, I'd love to talk a little bit about projection and the perception of criticism. It really comes down to, your father might not have been very critical, but there was a perception that they were criticizing you. So that's just as real as if they were. And so when we think about our parents, we only see like, a sliver of who they are. And then we make judgments and assumptions of what they feel about us, how much faith they have in us. And then we. We never, you know, we make these assumptions and build our life on those assumptions when the parent could not have that. We have, you know, a person, a father who's like, wants the best for their child. The child may feel like, my father's always criticizing me. I'm never enough. And so one of my. I had a few clients that were men, and especially for men, this really affects the men because they look to the father as like a model for them. Where women look for the mother. You typically. But they're, again, exceptions to every rule. But a lot of the men that I work with have worked with in the past. They. Their father that have been critical. They tend to not want to succeed because they want to hang on to the bitterness. And like, we really would get to that point, like, why aren't, you know, you're. You're trying to make change in your life. You're trying to move forward, but they sabotage it all the time. And I'm like, well, what would be the, what would be the downside of you really being successful? And they'd always say, then my father wouldn't have been such a bad person. And so we have this like complex relationship because if you have resentment for your father and then you won't succeed, so you could hang onto that resentment. And it's like, if I do succeed, then I have to let it go. And it's such a weird, irrational thing to do. But that's how we build our life. So the father, especially for men, can be very impactful. And that sense of, that, you know, the ability to see and I think the projection is so, so powerful that we, we believe things about our parents that aren't actually true until we ask them and we confront them. And then they're like, no, I never thought that. And you're like, you live your whole life thinking they believe something that wasn't true.
- [14:39]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. And of course this gets at the cultural piece that in our culture there's this idea that our parents screwed us up. Now we're not saying they don't have an impact. Look, you know, we're acknowledging that there's a powerful connection between agency or sense of purpose and the relationship with the father. But there's more to it as we'll see. People get stuck on this idea that because the culture affirms that if your parents screwed you up, you're going to be screwed up for the rest of your life and you're going to need therapy and you're going to be a failure or not find that sense of purpose in your life. Then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because that's the way consciousness works. Whatever we believe to be true comes our reality. It's like we're creating our own narrative. And so it's an important piece to understand that we can look at our family history and our relationship with our fathers and in relationship to purpose, but that we can also transcend it. And so that's where the archetype comes in because it leads us to this deeper understanding of where does the relationship with the father come in and what is the deeper psychology of that?
- [16:02]
Narrator
You've spent years building success and achieving what others would only imagine. But yet something deeper is calling. A desire for work that's meaningful, transformative and rooted in who you really are. At CreativeMind, we train professionals to guide others through real psychological transformation using Jungian principles, Eastern spirituality and social neuroscience. No cliches no surface level tools, just depth, structure and purpose. Our ICF accredited Jungian Life Coach training program provides a profound professional training in small cohorts that includes personal transformation with a dedicated coach and powerful tools to help you guide others in a deep, lasting transformation. Step into that next chapter of your personal and professional evolution. Join us by visiting visiting creativemindlife.com and speak to an admission specialist today. That's creativemindlife.com.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
So Jung talks about an archetype, a father archetype, that predates our relationship with our father. In other words, we're born with it. It's an innate process. So let's define the archetype first and then we'll look at what does that mean for the father. So an archetype is a universal pattern or model of behavior and imagination, behavior and imagination that exists in every human mind. In other words, as soon as you're born, these archetypes are already there. Now, the father. If we have a father archetype, just like we have a mother archetype, what we're going to do is project it unto our parent, unto our biographical father or our grandfather.
- [18:01]
Deborah Maldonado
Or would it be safe to say that all archetypes are unconscious? And then the world is like the symbolic representation of our internal world in these different archetypes, like the mother, the king, the hero, all that.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that's right. That's. That was Jung's view, right? That we, we are symbolic creatures and we experience the world in this symbolic way when we're unconscious. We believe the world to be outside, external, independent of our mind. That is an illusion. It cannot be independent of our mind because the way we perceive the world is through the mind. And so what we are doing is we're participating in our own life through perception, just merely perception. So now think of becoming conscious of that. And that's what the aim of purpose is to, to realize that you are the creator of your life. Because if, if you think of purpose is coming from the outside, then you get fooled into that idea that profession or work is somehow your purpose, that whatever you end up doing, that, that is somehow your purpose. There's something to that. Of course we want to address that. But purpose has to come from within. You have to understand that there's a calling from within, what people might call the soul or the spirit or the self, like Jung says, that is guiding you from the inside. And if you look.
- [19:26]
Deborah Maldonado
So it's your spiritual guide, the father archetype.
- [19:29]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's right. That's right.
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Deborah Maldonado
So, and so instead of using your father as a guide to tell you about power in the world, about purpose in the world, about vocation, about, you know, your will, your agency. You start to, you can now as a. In midlife, you could start shifting the, the taking back the projection and moving inward and finding your own sense of power. And like I said, you could spend the rest of your life blaming your father for the things you don't have in your life. And like, I, believe me, I've done plenty of that. And it just kept me stuck. I was like in a soup, a spinning soup of just rearranging the furniture and finding another way to like, work on that angle of my relation to my father. And it was just not getting me anywhere. And the Father archetype helps us transcend the personal and really tap into. Because we're not a personal being. We're, we're, we're a universal being. And so it really gets in touch with who we really are.
- [20:24]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, it's a great alternative to the idea that if my parents screwed me up, I'm doomed. You don't have to be. Because if you understand that the Father archetype is within you and you can tap into it, then you have the Source within you individually and independent of the external Father. Which means you can create a relationship with this internal archetype directly through intuition, through dreams, through peak experiences like, you know, people talk about psychedelics or, or just, you know, spiritual experiences that connect you to that inner spirit within you.
- [21:04]
Deborah Maldonado
So how does that guide, how can someone access that guide to live their purpose? That's the question.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, so it is a journey.
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Deborah Maldonado
It's not like, oh, here's my Our Father archetype. I'm done. Let me hang out with him. And I don't need to do any other work on myself.
- [21:20]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, yeah. Because if we think about how life evolves, we, we first build this Persona, this ego, and Jung says, and, and we over identify with it. We start to think, this is who I am. That's why the profession becomes so important and we think that is our purpose. If I'm a doctor, I think, well, that's, that's how I help people. And therefore that is my purpose. Yes, it's, it's an expression or it can be an expression of purpose, but the purpose has to be rooted in that self. In other words, in the relationship that you have with the Father archetype within. So what is that? In religion, we see it as the spiritual Father, the sky God, who, you know, kind of intercedes on Your behalf protects you, guides you in life and gives you that mana personality that we talked about in one of our podcasts. It gives you that spiritual power in life, but it's coming from beyond the ego self, beyond the individual personality.
- [22:26]
Deborah Maldonado
So just like when we're younger, we project the father that we project everything outward and we project the power onto and our source of power based on that relationship and our lack of power based on that. So when we think about purpose, it really isn't what you do because you could do anything for your purpose, but it's how you do it. And so you can be a doctor and save millions of lives, but you can do it from a place where you. You are dependent on everyone telling you what a great doctor you are. You needing rewards, feeling almost like you need to keep, like having, you know, being recognized in the industry and, you know, driving yourself, working really hard a feeling. If you're working harder, you're all these lives to save, which is a beautiful thing. But then you're. It doesn't really feel meaningful in the way that if you know that you are the source of that, the source of power is within you. And it's not your character that's actually acting out as the doctor. It's. It's this, the power within you that's flowing through you that's giving you the power. You don't need anyone else to tell you you're a great doctor. You don't need the people to acknowledge you and thank you for your service. It comes from a place of. And I think actually this is where you could truly be the best at your. At your is because you're not. You're not using just your ego to create from. You're actually tapping into your spiritual power where you're divinely guided to do the work you need to do. And you're not in that fear, grasping for attention. Just like the projection of the Father, you take that power back. You can project that into your. Your career, your father outside into your career. So it's really an internal sense of the source of meaning comes from within, not through what you do. What you do is how you express it versus how you get it. So I think that would be a better way to think about it. Like, the job doesn't give you your purpose. Your purpose gives you the job in a way. Right? Your true purpose.
- [24:24]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, the. The true purpose is an important piece of individuation because then what it allows you to do is be motivated from that higher purpose is, like you said, the divine Inspiration, or if you're an atheist, you can think about the collective unconscious guiding you from within psychologically so that you don't have to believe any. Anything in the spiritual realm, but understand it as, this is part of life. Right. To. To transcend my limited ego self and find something that is a much larger calling and gives purpose and meaning to my life.
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Deborah Maldonado
And we could say you can find, like your meaningful work is important because you want to spend your life doing it. You don't want to have, you know, just do it on the weekends and have a job. And I'm going to live my purpose only on the weekends. So if you could find a profession that brings you income, that has meaning and purpose, that's the best, because then you get to do it all the time and it's not like something like a hobby for you. I'm going to do my purpose on the weekend or in the evenings when I have time.
- [25:29]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yes. Yeah. So the. It's a simplified way of talking about it, but it gets the main points across, right? That, yes, we have a biological, biographical father that we need to. In other words, we don't need to live from that point of view merely or solely from that point of view, that if my father was absent or, or my father was an alcoholic and they messed me up, that I'm doomed to live through that for the rest of my life. That there's an alternative to that. And that alternative comes through understanding the archetype, the father archetype that is inherited in us. In other words, it's. You're born with it, you don't have to acquire it, you don't have to do anything special to receive it. All you have to do is tune in, do that inner journey of inner work, as we call it, of individuation that connects you to it, and you find the inspiration from within. So whatever you didn't receive from your biographical father, you can receive now from that internal father archetype.
- [26:35]
Deborah Maldonado
And you do need to do shadow work first around that. All those projections, your own assumptions of what that relationship was, the agreements you made with yourself, the identity that you crafted, the Persona that you crafted because of that relationship. And then as you peel back the layers of the falsehoods and the assumptions, you start to see that what's underneath is the ego. And its defenses are this beautiful spiritual power that's been kind of underneath pushing you. And it's almost like the part of us that feels unsettled in life, like when we feel unsettled and we feel the Meaning is missing. It's like almost like the father archetype is like. It's like a whisper or a push or a. Like a compulsion to move toward. Not a compulsion, but more be like a compelling. To move you towards something more. It's like there's something in me telling me I need to do something differently. And I don't know what that is, but it's just knowing that that discomfort is really, really a sign of growth and an invitation for growth.
- [27:39]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah.
- [27:40]
Deborah Maldonado
And I'd like to say one more thing about the father. If we had a terrible father that, or like a father that wasn't optimal, most of us can find something wrong, is that maybe them being the way they were gave us the like, like, almost like, invitation for us to look deeper into life. And the challenges that we had with our relationship with our father invited us to do the inner work that led you here or led you to explore that. And if they were the perfect ideal father, I wonder we'd ever look inward. You know, the difficulties in life are really there to help us look, you know, turn inward. So it's almost like that idea that everything is useful.
- [28:19]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Absolutely. And I'd say regardless of whether you had a great family life with your father or a great relationship or not, it's a good idea to do this inner work, especially after you. After 30, 35, because you want to be free. In other words, you don't want to be beholden to the ideas and the conditioning that came from that biographical family situation, that personal narrative. There's nothing wrong with it. It was important at that time. But like Jung says, what was true in the morning of life is a lie in the second phase of the day, in the afternoon of life. So we have to reinvent ourselves and recreate ourselves. That's part of the human journey. That idea has been lost in modern times, but we see it still in mythology and in the stories that we tell now in the movies. Right. In the hero's journey that we see in. In Star wars or Harry Potter or whatever movies we're watching. The hero's journey story is still there. It's a metaphor for the internal journey that we have to undertake. We have to conquer our own demons and reinvent ourselves, find our true. Our true purpose in life. And that only comes from that archetypal father that is within us.
- [29:47]
Deborah Maldonado
I love that also. To feel like we're all. We're all equal, like we all have the potential, no matter what happened to you. Jung says that it's whatever happened to you. Doesn't matter that you're free to create your life. And we're all free if we're willing to accept. And it's not like, brush it aside, what happened? You need to examine it, but you don't need to hang onto it forever. You need to, like, be able to know that there's another iteration of you ready to emerge. And no matter the darkness or the lightness you had early on, we all have that potential within us. Not one person is spared from that. So it's an invitation. All right. Well, great topic as usual, Rob. We will see you next week on Jung On Purpose. And again, don't forget to subscribe. We'd love to see you here every week. And we'll be back with another great episode next week.
- [30:37]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
See you soon.
- [30:37]
Deborah Maldonado
Take care.
- [30:40]
Narrator
Thank you for joining us for Jung on purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast before you leave and join us each week.
- [30:51]
Deborah Maldonado
We'll see you soon. Sa.