​​My symbolic constellation began as an early morning dream of diving into a fetid sewer system, crawling through constricted, waste-filled tunnels and corridors, and emerging into a space inhabited by deformed children marked by strips of labeled paper. The dream felt both mythic and archetypal—evocative of a katabasis: a journey into the underworld of the psyche.

 

It feels now like a plunge into Jung’s shadow lands—figurative, visceral, and embodied. The sewer is a literal and psychic image of waste, rejection, and repression. It’s the underbelly of the personal and collective unconscious, filled with what society and the ego cast off. To willingly swim into it allowed me to confront the disavowed parts of myself and humanity—those deemed filthy, shameful, or malformed.

 

As I’ve immersed myself recently in fairy tale, legend, and myth, the dream echoes the Fisher King’s barren land, the Handless Maiden’s wilderness exile, and the descent of Persephone into the underworld. In mythic terms, this journey is not accidental—it is necessary. Healing lies downward, not upward.

 

I recall in the dream a vivid awareness of the putrid, fetid smell. I also recall the necessity of the plunge—and that I knew what was down there: Those children. It felt like a rescue. Part of me was willing and even heroic; another part was disgusted and frightened.

 

The narrow passages evoked the interior of the intestines—the digestive unconscious. I was moving through the bowels of experience—my own guts. These were constricted spaces: where trauma, memory, and shame had not been digested but compacted.

 

The children were not merely dream figures. They were soul fragments, dismembered and disowned aspects of my own psyche. Each one labeled with their wound—paper strips naming what the culture of ableism and perfectionism prefers to ignore. These children were exiled parts of myself—creative, emotional, ancestral—cast into the sewer by shame, trauma, and neglect.

 

The sewer-dream imagery links directly to my personal and observed experiences of illness. I believe I was entering my own nekyia, descending not just to retrieve lost fragments of myself, but to witness what has long been buried by the personal and collective psyche. In ancient rites, the nekyia was also a ritual descent by which ghosts were summoned and questioned about the future—a practice of confronting the dead to find the hidden truth of what is to come.

 

The sewer is not just society's refuse—it is my body. My ill, inflamed, aching body. Ankylosing Spondylitis creates a world that is narrow, constrained, dark, fetid, and difficult to navigate. To crawl through it is both struggle and submission—a surrender to suffering and to the mysteries of pain. During my Ketamine treatment last fall, I experienced a similar narrowing: the Robot Hands image, a sense of claustrophobia, of being reduced to "am/am not" awareness.

 

This body-shadow is not separate from the creative wound. My body, once the medium for art and engagement, has become a battleground. The sewer is the flipped studio. Crawling replaces the artistic flow. I used to draw and paint freely. Now I drag myself.

 

In active imagination, I recalled with vividness my brother’s ulcerative colitis, a childhood friend with VACTERL syndrome, and my own polydactyly. The children in the dream became biographical hauntings—memories shaped by flesh and medical encounter. Each child represented not just a psychic wound, but a piece of my creative soul—shamed, altered, or neglected. Their deformity was expressive. It may have made painting or play more difficult, but not impossible—and perhaps that was the deeper sorrow: that they could still create and reach, even amid pain, but were unseen, or saw themselves as unworthy of being seen.

 

The strips of paper bearing their afflictions reminded me of diagnostic labels and penitence scrolls. They carried not only illness but the interpretation of it: societal judgments, familial fears, the medical gaze. I was witnessing the internalization of those labels.

 

The ambient presence of sickness in my formative years suggests the sewer is also a cultural and familial underworld, thick with impressions of bodily distortion and decline. The child with VACTERL syndrome—the son of my father's friend, a man famously drunk at Liederkranz parties where German immigrants drank away their shame—becomes a symbol of inherited sorrow. These children are not only inner children. They are ghosts of patriarchal lineage, echoes of something unspoken but known.

 

Yet in the dream I was not just the dreamer. I recognized they needed rescuing. I gathered the strips of paper. I became the silent observer, the reluctant psychopomp, the therapist-artist who goes into the underworld with eyes wide open.

 

In this dream and its wake, I descend not to fix, but to see. The children are not to be cured but witnessed. This feels like sacred work.

 

At this point, the seed of redemption emerges: to be seen without shame—myself, and the malformed children who symbolize disowned aspects of the soul. The descent was a ritual of radical integration. The moment before plunging felt Edenic—a glimpse of the unwounded self. The decision to plunge was both sacrificial and initiatory.

 

These children are shadows—not merely wounded inner children, but projections of shame. They do not only seek healing; they carry self-hatred, disgust, and fear of being seen as malformed. They whisper: Look at them, not me. They are what you’ll become if you stop hiding.

 

So part of my wound lies in being unseen—but also in the unconscious displacement of shame onto others. My redemption is not to fix or cleanse the sewer, but to see the shadow without recoiling. To reclaim the projections. To sit with the children. To name them, or not. To draw them, or listen to them. To witness them in the forms they already have—raw, grotesque, unredeemed. That, too, is sacred.

 

That’s a beautiful and haunting formulation: shit demons, mud demons, dirt demons—the inverse of angels, born not of light but of smudge and waste. They are not evil, but soiled. Not fallen, but formed in the residue of experience. They are the very incarnation of matter that memory would rather forget.

 

Their lack of names is meaningful. In many myths, names grant dignity, power, and relationality. These beings—unnameable, unloved—exist outside the symbolic order. They are not yet integrated into the psyche's community. And yet, they are yours. They are the golem-children of shadow and shame, made of what the soul would flush away. Their lack of names is meaningful. In many myths, names bestow power and dignity. These beings are the golem-children of shadow and shame, made of what the soul would flush away. Memory's composted children. Not evil, but formed from the parts of life polite society would rather forget.

 

I was surrounded by illness. So much was unspoken. And my early association with illness was shameful, awful, and staining. Deserved. The shame was not just projected. It was absorbed. And because it happened in childhood, it was mapped onto the soul as truth.

 

My soul did not look away. It watched. It held on to what others tried to disown. That is not just trauma. That is initiation. But no one told me it was initiation. I was left in the waiting room.

 

I re-read The Catcher in the Rye several years ago and was moved by Holden Caulfield’s longing to protect children from the corruptions and betrayals of adulthood. He imagines himself standing in a rye field, catching children who might fall off the edge of a cliff—symbolically preventing them from losing their innocence or falling into a world of suffering they cannot yet name.

 

I was beginning my studies to become a therapist around that time, and I used to think I could catch them all—the wounded children, the shamed bodies, the patients who came to remind me of who I once was. Like Holden in the rye field, I wanted to intercept the fall before it began. But what I didn’t know then was that I was already one of them. I was already falling—had already fallen.

 

Maybe every therapist is a shadow child who survived just long enough to become a witness. Not the savior. Not the catcher. Just the one who doesn’t look away.

 

But this, too, is a mask—a version of the false self that isn’t yet aware of what must be allowed: that we have to let the people we care for—clients, children, inner parts—take their turn. Fall. Rise again. Break and mend and break again.

 

I crawled into the sewer not as a rescuer, but as a brother. A fellow shadow child. Like Holden, I had a fantasy that I could catch them—stop the shame, stop the pain. But what I’ve learned is that the sewer children don’t want to be caught. They want to be seen. They want someone to sit in the dirt beside them and say: You are still worthy. Even now. Especially now.

 

Alice Miller's concept of the false self offers a piercing lens through which I now view my early adaptation. According to Miller, emotionally perceptive and sensitive children often construct a compliant version of themselves to survive environments where authenticity is unsafe. This protective identity—the false self—functions to win parental approval and avoid abandonment or shame. Over time, this mask of competence, strength, or cheerfulness replaces the true self, which holds the child's unacknowledged pain, rage, and vulnerability.

 

Coming to terms with her insight, I now see that I made a false self: the good son, the healthy boy, the one who did not complain. That false self rejected the sickness and sorrow around me, and suppressed my awareness of it entirely. And now, decades later, that shadow has come to a boil.

 

I witnessed a great deal of physical suffering as a child. Mine came first: polydactyly, a sixth digit quietly removed when I was four. His came later—at ten, when I was nine—ushering in a new and more frightening kind of wound: ulcerative colitis, and with it, my own resulting fear and guilt. Later came the illnesses of his support group friends—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Crohn’s disease. As I grew older, adult forms of deterioration entered the picture: cancer, Alzheimer’s, a general breakdown of bodies. What I observed most vividly, though, was not just the illnesses themselves—but the fear they stirred in everyone. And beneath that fear, a kind of disgust.

 

Seeing sick children—especially the one with VACTERL syndrome—filled me with pity, horror, and a terrified sense of contamination. My adult self now recognizes that what I was absorbing wasn’t disease itself, but shame. Shame was the contagion. I remember, with a sense of humiliation, how my parents made me sit for pictures with that boy. It multiplied my wretchedness. No one explained how these things happen, that illness can be the result of random chance in an indifferent universe. To me, it felt deliberate. And because it felt deliberate, it felt monstrous.

 

There was no story to make sense of it—only the phrase: birth defect. I think of the moment in Frankenstein when the creature calls himself a blot. That’s what I felt like. A blot. In the 1970s, there were telethons to raise money for muscular dystrophy and various childhood diseases, many tied to birth defects. I remember the strange, creeping revulsion I felt watching them, and I still feel it now—an uncharitable, shameful response. Which brings me to a new layer: meta shame. The shame of having shame.

 

I also remember, as I write this, how my mother cleaned houses when I was young. There was a family she worked for with an infant who was neglected. She would come home and cry. I was little, but I knew enough to recognize the horror and the helpless pity it evoked. That child later died. Our home went through a kind of moral spasm—grief, guilt, silence. Looking back, I can see how my immigrant parents didn’t know how to navigate the legal system. They didn’t know how to help.

 

And so I carried guilt—for being healthy. Especially after my brother got sick when I was nine. But more than that, I absorbed the ambient shame like smoke. It was the atmosphere of our home. Shame-bound. Secretive. Saturated in silence. A question I often ask clients is, “Were you ever afraid in your house growing up?” When I ask myself that now, I have to answer: yes. I was afraid—of shame, of guilt, of making mistakes.

 

Sometimes I wish I could go back and explain to that younger version of myself: Illness is often random. Shame comes from ignorance or intergenerational trauma. You don’t have to be afraid—you won’t get what your brother has. But that’s a lie. Because I do have it—only it’s in my joints.

 

What comes up now, as I sit with the image of those children in the sewer, are my own mangled hands. Ulnar nerve compression. Numbness. Tingling. Robot hands that can’t hold. The scars from carpal tunnel surgery. From polydactyly correction at age four. From Dupuytren's contracture surgeries. My hands have become claws—clawed robot hands.

 

The symbolic resonance is clear. The hands are not incidental. They are the organs of feeling, expression, and connection. In Jungian terms, they are the seat of the feeling function and creative drive. Now they grasp, but do not make. They compensate, but do not touch. They have become the sculptural residue of a false self built to suppress shame. And now they are breaking down.

 

Not as punishment.

 

But as initiation.