I have never remembered my life in stories. Other people recall childhood through events, scenes, episodes. My memory arranges itself differently—less like a timeline and more like a room full of silhouettes. Just shapes and moods and impressions, not neatly labeled or ordered. When I look back, I see figures more than moments, and many of them don’t resemble humans so much as archetypes.
But that makes sense to me now.
Children raised in chaos rarely encode memories; they encode survival.
I grew up in Vale, South Dakota—a fading town that never fully admitted it was fading. Sixty people and the remnants of a past that no one really talked about anymore: the old beet railroad, the stories of the “Beet Diggers,” the school mascot that felt more like a relic than a symbol. I was born in the same house I grew up in, and the landscape shaped me long before I had words for what it meant. Vastness. Silence. A kind of psychic emptiness that mirrored my home life.
Newell, the town we went to school in, felt huge by comparison—six hundred people. I excelled at the things that didn’t require emotional exposure: math, history, writing assignments that let me disappear into imagination. My English teacher once framed a story I wrote in second grade. It felt like the first time an adult saw something in me that wasn’t a problem or a responsibility. I held onto that moment like a lifeline.
My mother wasn’t someone you could comfortably exist around. She lived in a whirlwind of activity—scrapbooking, hoarding magazines, cutting out recipes she’d never make, hoarding every container or even pine cones even though we lived 40 miles from a pine cone national forest because it might one day be useful. She couldn’t sit still because stillness meant facing herself. I didn’t have the language for it then, but looking back through a Jungian lens, her life was an ongoing battle with her own shadow—anything she refused to acknowledge in herself erupted outward, usually as chaos.
One of my earliest memories is hiding under a blanket in a motel with my brother while she raged around the room. Not a story. A figure. The Devouring Mother. The feminine not as warmth but as storm. And when your first experience of the feminine is unpredictable and frightening, your inner anima—the emotional, meaning-giving part of the psyche—learns to hide.
Jung once wrote that without the anima, a man becomes hollow, mechanical, unable to feel the significance of his own existence. That was my inheritance.
My father, by contrast, was steady. Quiet. He drove through Dakota blizzards to get my brother to basketball games, never complained, never pushed us to become something for his pride. He wasn’t demonstratively affectionate, but he wasn’t unsafe. If my mother embodied the Devouring Mother, my father embodied the Positive Animus—the part of the psyche that offers structure without suffocation.
But even that stability couldn’t protect us from the chaos that defined our household. I watched the police take my father away once, falsely accused after my mother slammed her own face into a door she’d ripped off its hinges. The whole situation imprinted a truth that children absorb without knowing they’ve absorbed it: the world is unpredictable, and you are always on your own.
That belief shaped everything that came later.
I was a shy kid, especially around girls. I couldn’t look at them—literally couldn’t keep my eyes on their faces. Even movie actresses made me uncomfortable. The feminine had been dangerous in my childhood, so my psyche did what psyches do: it protected me by avoiding anything that resembled emotional contact.
It would take me decades to understand that my inability to feel emotions wasn’t moral failure or personality flaw. It was developmental survival. When a child grows up with a mother whose emotions are overwhelming, inconsistent, or frightening, the psyche learns to numb itself. What psychologists call dissociation, Jung might call an anima in exile.
Without her—without a functioning inner feminine—reflection dies. Curiosity dies. Meaning dries up. You become capable but empty.
Poker became my refuge. Numbers made sense. Ratios didn’t scream or throw things. I made my first half-million sitting in isolation, clicking buttons, my inner world shriveling while my bank account grew. The more successful I became, the more disconnected I felt. I had built a life on Logos alone—pure rationality, pure mind, no heart.
I was “supposed” to feel proud. Instead, nothing.
By 2012, I was playing live poker full-time (2011 Black Friday happened for online poker and I chose live poker instead of moving to Canada), and that year was a disaster. Variance crushed me. Every correct decision met the worst possible outcome. It mirrored the inner truth I hadn’t been able to articulate yet: my psyche was buckling under the weight of decades of emotional starvation.
I switched from playing no limit hold em solely to omaha 8 or better, made new comrades at the tables, found some temporary relief. But internally, I was unraveling. Mania crept in—what I experienced as sudden, explosive meaning. People around me called it instability. And sure, maybe it was. But to someone who has felt hollow for most of his life, those periods felt like oxygen.
Until they didn’t.
The collapse came, as collapses do, slowly and then all at once. My first stay in the mental hospital felt surreal, like watching someone else’s life unfold. When I returned home afterward, I found my mother inside the trailer while I walked outside it, screaming—not at anyone, just into the air—because she couldn’t find her scissors, or a magazine, or something lost in the avalanche of objects that had overtaken her living space.
That moment is burned into me.
Not because it was shocking—I had seen worse.
But because I realized: This is what happens when the psyche is never tended. This is the fate of unintegrated shadow.
It terrified me because I could feel it in myself too.
Jung said that the unconscious, when ignored, does not stay quiet. It erupts. It floods. It demands recognition. Everything my mother refused to confront devoured her. Everything I refused to confront was beginning to devour me.
My whole life, I thought success would save me.
Then I thought insight would save me.
Then I thought love would save me.
But individuation doesn’t begin with salvation.
It begins with honesty.
It begins when you turn around and face the dragon you’ve been avoiding since childhood—the monster in the hallway, the storming mother, the empty inner world, the missing anima, the swollen Logos, the shame, the loneliness, the fear that you are unlovable or unreal or broken beyond repair.
Individuation begins with recognizing that these are not personal failures.
They are archetypal inheritances.
We don’t choose our wounds.
We choose how we relate to them.
My story isn’t special, but it is human. Many people raised by unpredictable parents grow into adults who are logical but emotionally detached, successful but unfulfilled, loved but unable to feel loved. Many people know what it’s like to function perfectly while dying inside.
Trauma doesn’t always look like catastrophe. Sometimes it looks like a child who learns to stop feeling because feeling was never safe.
And healing doesn’t look like transcendence. Sometimes it looks like slowly inviting the inner world back into the body, letting the exiled anima speak after years of silence, reconnecting to meaning—not as inspiration or mania but as quiet, steady presence.
This isn’t a story with a triumphant ending. It’s not supposed to be.
It’s a story about waking up—not all at once, but painfully, gradually, honestly.
A story about becoming someone who can finally say:
“I am here. I am aware. And I am willing to feel.”