Holding the Frame

Not sure if you’ve read George Orwell’s 1984, but I think about that novel a lot these days. It's pretty deeply Jungian in its bones. Orwell wasn’t guessing at the future; he was paying close attention to the psychological and relational patterns already present in his time and indicating that history repeats itself when unexamined. You might've heard Jung's quote: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Anyway, what feels unsettling about the book isn’t the drama of control so much as the intimacy of it —  the way people slowly begin to doubt their own perceptions and the the quiet reshaping of memory. Orwell seemed to understand that domination rarely begins with force. More often, it begins with confusion, with a gentle but persistent loss of trust in one’s own inner knowing.

They say that "evil" is the ongoing choice to turn away from reality when it becomes inconvenient, threatening, or costly to acknowledge. It’s what happens when power, certainty, ideology, or self-protection matter more than aliveness, dignity, or truth.

From a Jungian angle, evil emerges when the shadow is denied. What we refuse to know about ourselves doesn’t disappear — it leaks out sideways, projected onto others, acted out unconsciously. When a person or a culture insists “this darkness is not mine,” it almost always finds someone else to carry it.

It’s a strange time to be alive, in part because so much of this now happens without one single source (though we certainly have some villainous characters). But it moves through newsfeeds and phrases, through certainty delivered at high speed, through systems that leave very little room for pause or reflection. We’re surrounded by information, yet often longing for meaning. We may be connected with many electronically, yet we're often overstimulated and disembodied. Even "rest" can feel tethered to productivity.

What feels most disorienting to me is how quickly the collective nervous system seems to swing between urgency and numbness. And so many feel alone in it. There’s an expectation to care constantly and visibly, and then a quiet shame when exhaustion inevitably follows. Orwell seemed to sense that the deeper danger isn’t fear alone, but the slow normalization of this kind of psychic strain, until clarity itself becomes unfamiliar.

I think part of why I feel this so strongly is because my grandparents grew up on

farms — their lives shaped by weather, land, animals, and forces beyond human control. That kind of reliance on the physical world forms a different relationship to reality. There’s more surrender in it, more humility, more listening. You learn that not everything can be optimized or controlled, and that showing up consistently matters more than being loud or certain.

As a therapist, I see how that same grounding shows up in the relational field of presence — to witness, to be attentive without controlling, to hold space with care and steadiness. I may not be living off the land like my ancestors, but when I read, write, or sit with a client, I enter a landscape of ideas and experience where what is cultivated matters. In that space, images, like a window pane, don’t tell us what to think. Finding our way back to that centered place simply lets the world — and our understanding of it — come back into view.