1.  Acceptance: Accepting a complex means fully admitting its existence, power and emotions.  It doesn’t mean welcoming it, loving it or embracing it.  Acceptance is the first step, and deciding how to relate to it comes later.  However, acceptance of and paying conscious attention to anything that has been previously unconscious will begin to change it.  Acceptance is the first step in Eros contra Eros.  It doesn’t mean we abandon our capacity to be tough with or aggressive toward a complex.  It means we hold these capacities in check until we see a conscious need for them, which actually turns out be rare.

2.  Amplify: Amplifying the complex means to write down everything that I feel or that comes to mind about a complex.  It includes all the irrational, nasty, unpleasant feelings with no censorship.  This step is like the “Morning Pages” Julian Cameron explains in The Artist’s Way, except I do it whenever the emotion of a complex is seizing me or when I am working on one.  I write down everything I’m feeling, which generally is being overly furious, overly judgmental or overly despairing about how unfairly I’m being treated or misunderstood or not appreciated.  I write how I’m feeling about my wife, parents, analyst, or whoever in just the way it comes.  This allows me to accept and experience my emotions and clear the sludge out of my psyche.  It also distances me from the feelings because they are out of my mind and expressed concretely on paper.  This procedure helps me get a more objective perspective on what I am experiencing and better insight into where it is coming from.

3.  History: Step three is to write a history of the complex.  This history begins the process of seeking to understand it.  Whenever we meet new friends or lovers, we usually begin the relationship by telling our story and listening to theirs in an effort to know them and be known by them.  Go back as far as you can remember with the complex.  Is it a family complex, a complex in the culture you grew up in?  Did it come to you through one of your parents?  Is it truly yours; that is, based on your wounding, or is it one you inherited because someone passed it on instead of working it out?  What were the early emotions around the early wound?  What kind of situations have activated these emotions over time and strengthened the complex?  These questions are examples and the best ones are the ones you think of.  Writing a real history helps us have compassion for ourselves and to realize these complexes may have once served to help or protect us.  Most people do about one to ten pages.

4.  Name it and give it an image: Adam, the Biblical ancestor of humankind is given the task of naming all of the creatures.  In symbolic terms God has given him the task of distinguishing them consciously.  Name is a symbol of becoming conscious of the exact nature of whatever is being named.  Go with whatever name comes to mind and don’t make this a laborious process.  The name that quickly comes to mind is likely to be the one rooted in your unconscious and therefore the most helpful one.                                     Our imagination gives images to or personifies intense emotions and experiences all the time.  An image often helps open the door to our interior life.  Giving a name and an image (such as Churchill calling his depression his “black dog”) requires conscious attention and is the opposite of repression.  Giving a complex or the strong emotion it evokes a name and an image helps us differentiate from it even more.  They confer a separate identity on the complex, which moves it further into the field of our imagination where it has more distance to travel in order to come back and take us over.  The fact of bringing our imagination into play is one of the first steps in transforming a complex from destructive to creative.

5.  Journaling: Step five is to examine the activity off the complex in my life through journaling.  This means recording how it affects me and the events in my life every day.  The kind of journaling I am referring to in this step is “Journaling as Inner Exploration,” the title of Chapter Five in Sacred Selfishness. In this kind of journaling we are creating and recreating ourselves.  We are bringing together being engaged in life and reflecting on the life we’ve experienced.  In the case of our complexes, we are reflecting on the thoughts, emotions and images they generate throughout the day.  On their own, these reflections will begin to lead us into transformation.  We can start by simply recording daily events, noting the feelings they evoked in us and then asking ourselves if they are related to our complex, then how and why.  Reading Chapter Five again might be helpful.

6.  Dialog: Step six is to dialog with the complex or one of the major emotions connected to it.  Dialoging is part of what we call Active Imagination.  Active Imagination gives both form and voice to parts of our personality that normally aren’t heard and it sets up lines of communication with them.  It means actively expressing ourselves, in writing, in order to help get differentiation and then “actively” listening to ourselves.  And, we must listen in a way that is seeking to understand our complexes and emotions.  We are not trying to get them to go away, shut up or to leave us alone.  We don’t attack them unless they attack us and if they do, which is rare, we need to take them quickly to an analyst or therapist.  As we learn to talk with our emotions and complexes, which may even be expressed as an illness, we learn to listen to these features in ourselves and understand the parts they play in our lives more clearly.  Chapter Six in Sacred Selfishness, “Dialoging as Interrelating,” reflects my journey of working through and into Active Imagination.  It is truly Eros contra Eros.

7.  Staying aware of the complex: Step seven is to put a special section or box in your journal to remind you of this complex every day.  We want to hold it in our awareness, to see how it’s affecting us, how we are affecting it, what it is trying to teach us and how our deepening relationship with it is changing us and our lives for the better.  Some people also include a short meditation on the complex to help them stay aware of it.