Longing for the Feminine: Reflections on Love, Sexual Orientation,

Individuation, and the Soul

Diane Eller-Boyko & Fran Grace

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00332925.2017.1350800

Pages 289-316 | Published online: 06 Oct 2017

Abstract
This article is a collaboration that represents several years of dialogue about our topic, alongside
the individual depth work done by each of us to overcome the negativities that often poison
collaborations and feeling connections: envy, enmeshment, and passivity. It is the unique
expression of two women working together in a co-creative process pulsed by feminine
principles. Diane is a Jungian analyst and has spent her life close to the unconscious. Fran is a
writer, educator, and lifelong student of mystical paths. The article gives an account of Diane's
longing for the divine feminine and the particular meaning it has for her as a lesbian in this time
of global upheaval. In particular, her story highlights the psychic suffering that individuals go
through when their same-sex attractions and love orientation are judged as psychologically
“immature” or religiously “sinful.” Neither Christian-based “conversion therapy” nor Jungian
analysis turned Diane into a heterosexual woman. Her story reveals the benefit of Jung's depth
psychology even as it underscores the singularity of every person's individuation process. The
article's unusual format is a tandem of Diane's first-person sharing of her soul's journey and
Fran's witnessing of the journey's profound significance. We found that both voices were needed.
Truth requires not only the one who lives a journey with courage but also the one who witnesses
it with a loving heart. Ultimately, we see the personal journeys of gays and lesbians as significant
to the larger context of the evolution of human consciousness.

Introduction: The Calling from Within

" There was a primal calling from within. It was a soul longing for the divine feminine. From
early on, the divine feminine was imaged as the arms of a woman.” Diane Eller-Boyko begins to
tell me about her journey. We are sitting in her living room in two comfortable chairs near the
fireplace—a feeling of ancient warmth. The room is filled with greenery that thrives in the
afternoon sunlight. It isn't lost on me that she herself is thriving in the “afternoon,” as C. G. Jung
called the second half of life. “This house is a hundred years old,” she tells me. “It has weathered
many storms and earthquakes.” I'm quite sure this is a self-revealing statement.

Diane lives just a few miles from where she grew up. The distance in miles is short, but the inner
journey she traveled from that place to this one has been far indeed. “Worlds apart,” as they say. I
notice a few outer hints of the inner journey—Persian rugs, horse paintings, figures of the
flowing feminine. I sense it is a place where the masculine and feminine exist in harmony. I see
the vaquero cowboy hat that hangs easily on a hook next to the elegant shawl. Hers has been an
individuation journey, the process of becoming herself, an undivided whole. Diane tells me,
“Individuation became my priority after I discovered the works of C. G. Jung, over twenty years
ago.”

According to Jung, few people ever embark on this opus. After listening to Diane, I understand
why. The cost is everything that we think we are, in order to become what we've always been:
our true self. Each turn of the wheel is excruciating. Attachments to pleasing others and
conforming to collective norms have to be sacrificed. False identities are ground down. But, then!
Liberation to be one's true self. The individuated person, Jung says, “can be and act as he [or she]
feels is conformable with his [or her] true self” (Jung, 1966, par. 373, p. 225). In esoteric terms,
individuated wholeness is a hint of “the face before we were born.”11 This Zen koan is the title of
a book by Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Face Before I Was Born: A Spiritual
Autobiography (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2009a Vaughan-Lee, L. (2009a). The face
before I was born: A spritual autobiography. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center. [Google
Scholar]). He has specialized in the area of dream work, integrating the ancient Sufi approach to
dreams with the insights of Jungian psychology.View all notes

Diane says, “For me, individuation is a lifelong process that has taken me on a journey to become
‘a woman unto myself.’ Now, I want to give something back.” Self-discovery is never for oneself
alone, as Jung emphasized. The transformed person returns to society to make a contribution
forged out of her or his singular existence. It is through this avenue that the collective
consciousness evolves.

Sitting across from her, warmed by the fire, Diane continues to tell me about her inner calling: “I
didn't know what the image meant—the arms of a woman. But now I see that it was an archetypal
image, a calling to connect with the divine feminine and to return to the feminine principle,
which Jung termed eros. There was nothing in my outer life—family, church, school—that felt
resonant with this deep inner longing, and so as a child, I felt different.”

I take a look at her bookshelves: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Sufi poets, Christian
mystics, and many books on the feminine. Not one of these books would have been in her
environment as a young person, yet she found what she needed. Her story confirms the esoteric
teaching: The soul that truly seeks is given what it needs.

Biographical Highlights
Diane has served in the fields of health and psychology for over forty years. She began her
professional life as a registered nurse and spent several years working in a hospital emergency
room. As a psychiatric nurse, she treated a wide variety of patients across the mental health
spectrum, including those with severe mental illness. After completing her master's in social
work degree and receiving her license, she began to work as a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist.
In 2011, she became a certified Jungian analyst and has a private practice in Redlands, California.
She is also a guest instructor in the Meditation Room Program at the University of Redlands,
where she offers workshops on Jungian dream work.
She is a woman connected to her instinctual feminine. “My daily life is in tune with the rhythms
of nature—up with sunrise, down at sunset. My bloodline includes a

Jean Bourdichon, Leaf from the Hours of Louis XII, c. 1498–1499. Tempera and gold on
parchment. Leaf: 24.3 × 17 cm (9-9/16 × 6-11/16 in.). From the collection of The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.

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Cherokee great-grandmother, and I've always felt the stamp of the indigenous inside of me. I feel
deeply connected with Mother Earth.” Diane is an introvert who stays close to the quiet of the
soul:

In the first half of life, I was caught up by the fast pace of our culture: academic degrees, social
life, travel, raising kids, all the activities. Now I prefer to have a quieter life. I'm in the season of
life to slow down, be more inward. I enjoy puttering in my garden and caring for a variety of
plants. One of my hobbies is to buy withering plants on the discount shelf at Lowe's and revive
them.
The mother of two and grandmother of four, Diane sums up her current way of life: “I try to
move between the inner and outer worlds in a balanced way.”

Personal Encounter
Several years ago, an email landed in my inbox with numinous force. In the email, someone
named Diane Eller-Boyko, a local Jungian analyst, was inquiring about our Meditation Room
Program at the university. We began the program in 2007, one of the first contemplative learning
environments in the country. In addition to academic courses in contemplative subjects, our
program offers free public classes in yoga, meditation, and contemplative prayer. In her email,
Diane wrote that she would be interested in offering a workshop on Jungian dream work, as she
had found dream work to be helpful to people searching for a way to access their soul life. When
we met in person, it was the instant recognition of a soul friend. We knew that what we learned
from each other wasn't meant for ourselves alone. It had a purpose that pointed beyond itself.

I find that to encounter Diane is to be with someone well along on the individuation journey. She
lives from the soulful root of herself and finds it natural to nourish that root in others. This is the
space in which the soul can hear itself.

The Journey of the Soul

When the soul speaks, what does it say? As an analyst, Diane's vocation is to listen to the story of
the soul. “Every client has a story. It isn't the story of the ego that I'm most interested in, but that
of the soul. We are all born with a soul, a true Self, a God-given nature that gets covered over by
an ego personality. And then it's our work to return to that innate imprint of the soul and live out
its destiny. When I'm with my clients, I listen for the cry of their soul—that ‘still small voice’
that's in all of us but muffled.”

Each of us has a sacred story. In spiritual literature, it is the story of the soul's return to its divine
source. In the opening of his masterpiece, Masnavi, Sufi poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
speaks of the soul's journey in terms of a reed cut from the reed bed. Out of the pain of
separation, the reed makes its lonesome cry. Anyone separated from what she or he loves knows
the desperation of this cry. It is the Sufi's longing to “go Home,” the Christian's unio mystica, the
Platonic return to the one. The “journey of a soul going Home,” says Sufi teacher Llewellyn
Vaughan-Lee (2006 Vaughan-Lee, L. (2006). Awakening the world: A global dimension to
spiritual practice. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center. [Google Scholar]), “is our greatest
contribution to life” (p. 14).

Yet, the sages say that most of us are not conscious of the soul's condition of separation; we do
not hear even our own soul's cry. In the words of Jesus Christ, “Straight is the gate and narrow is
the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). In Sufi wording, most
of us have “forgotten” who we are; we live our incarnation without realizing why we are here,
which is “for the sake of love.” St. Teresa of Ávila, the Catholic mystic of Spain, was matter-of-
fact about this point in The Interior Castle. She said that few souls ever approach the threshold of
the “interior castle” and enter within. The distractions and pleasures of the outer world are too
enticing (Teresa of Ávila, 2004 Ávila, T. (2004). Interior castle. E. Allison Peers (Trans.). New
York, NY: Doubleday. [Google Scholar], pp. 6–7).

Those of us drawn to the inner life often feel different, as if we don't belong in this world. Diane
felt this inner tension early on.

I was a free spirit, always exploring, often getting into trouble. I questioned things: Why this?
Why that? I probed and pondered. Religious dogmas didn't answer my soul's longing. As a child,
I was conditioned into a belief system that said God was judgmental and punished people for
“getting out of line.” This induced a fear of God in me. It was legalistic. There were rules about
everything—when to worship, what to eat, how to pray, what to wear. I was caught in an
impossible dilemma. I was a free spirit, but I also wanted to be close to God. The message was:
You have to make a choice. And, so, I sacrificed parts of my nature in order to be “right with
God.”

Instead of healing the pain of separation, religion exacerbated it. Diane shows me a picture of
herself as a child—intense, serious, and standing apart from the group. The picture is a visual
presage of her calling to individuate. She remembers,

I felt different, and a bit lonely. Especially in adolescence, there was no one I could talk to about
my deepest thoughts and feelings. It seemed that who and what I was didn't fit into the box.
Church life was a conditioning not only of beliefs about God but also about gender. Girls were
supposed to be a certain way—sensitive, relatable, “proper,” nurturing, submissive. But I wasn't
that way! I was told that I was unrelatable, unfeeling, bossy, too much to handle. I loved going
outside, climbing trees, riding motorcycles with the neighborhood boys, pushing the limits,
probing, and exploring. I didn't have the traits that come naturally to most girls at a very young
age. For me, purses and dolls were of no interest—much to the distress of my family. I felt alien
from the collective. Simply put, I longed to be loved as I was.

We all want love. Especially we want to be loved as we are. If we did nothing but say “Yes!” to
the in-breaks of genuine love and joy into our life, then we would be far along on our spiritual
path! Sometimes love shows up as a great love affair, sometimes as a vocational or creative
calling, sometimes as the raw need of a child or animal reaching out to us for safety. Oddly, we
hold back. We don't want to get hurt. We don't want to be bothered. We are afraid. We want to
play it safe. Our reason kicks in and talks us out of it.

Diane says, “I worked hard to heal the wounds that held me back from love. Finally, at age sixty,
I was willing to take the risk that love required of me. It broke my heart wide open—there was
nothing to say but Yes!”

Falling in love is a common experience and, for some people, the only self-transcendent
experience they will have. They finally say, “Here is my heart—take it!” Love temporarily allows
an experience of going beyond oneself. For a moment, finally, the pain of separation is eased.
There is an experience of the oneness with the divine for which the soul longs. Robert Johnson
(2008 Johnson, R. (2008). Inner gold: Understanding psychological projection. Kihei, HI: Koa
Books. [Google Scholar]) wrote of romantic love as “a deep religious experience, for many
people the only religious experience they'll ever have, the last chance God has to catch them” (p.
18). Indeed, it is through human love that most of us have the chance to heal our deepest wounds.
In the words of the Sufi saint, Jâmî, “Never turn away from love, not even love in a human form,
for love alone will free you from yourself” (cited in Vaughan-Lee, 1999 Vaughan-Lee, L. (1999).
Love and longing: The feminine mysteries of love. Personal Transformation, Summer 1999.
Available at: https://www.goldensufi.org/a_love_and_longing.html. [Google Scholar]).

Sexual Orientation and Love

How does our sexual orientation serve this spiritual longing for love? What if we have a sexual
love attraction for people of the same sex? I am interested to talk with Diane because of her
lifelong quest to understand her same-sex attractions. I think her journey can help us to
understand this dynamic that is so fraught with polarized reactions. Whether we ourselves are gay
or bisexual, or whether we are the family members and friends of those who are, or clergy or
therapists or educators—there is a lot to learn from a person who has gone in-depth into this
particular dimension of human experience. The gift of being a minority is the capacity to bring
consciousness to what the majority overlooks.

Diane's journey illumines the soul value of embracing one's sexual orientation. For most people,
sexual orientation, whether gay or heterosexual or bisexual, is not ultimately about sex. It's about
a love potential for bonding, companionship, family support, and the great human task of loving
and being loved. Love has the potential to expand and heal a person more than anything else in
life. Diane sees her sexual orientation as an expression of her soul's capacity for love. She tells
me: “Jung speaks to the heart of the matter in one of his writings. He wasn't necessarily speaking
of homosexual union, but his words meant a lot to me when I came across them. He said that
sexuality is ‘hallowed’ when it's an expression of love”:

Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed.
Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit
of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled.

I trust that these remarks will have made it clear to you that I pass no sort of moral judgment on
sexuality as a natural phenomenon, but prefer to make its moral evaluation dependent on the way
it is expressed. (Jung, 1928/1970, par. 234–235, p. 112)

In many mystical traditions, human sexual intimacy is a symbol and even a form of training for
the unconditional surrender of the soul before God. Esoterically, sexual energy is an expression
of kundalini, the life force within the spiritual centers that takes a person to God. Rather than
repressing sexual energy, mystical texts advise us to work with it as a potent medium for spiritual
transformation, whether we choose a celibate or sexually active lifestyle. “The more sex power
the human being has, the easier he will reach God or Truth,” said Bhai Sahib, Sufi master in
India, to Irina Tweedie, a middle-aged Russian woman from England, who was very familiar
with Jung's work (Tweedie, 1986 Tweedie, I. (1986). Daughter of fire: Diary of a spiritual
training with a Sufi master. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center. [Google Scholar], p. 497). Bhai
Sahib guided Tweedie to refine, not reject, the sexual energies. In her 800-page book, Daughter
of Fire: Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master, she passes on his teaching: “A man who
is impotent can never be a saint or a Yogi. Women too can be impotent. The Creative Energy of
God which manifests itself in its lowest aspect as procreative instinct is the most powerful thing
in human beings, men and women alike” (p. 149). Bhai Sahib taught her that women carry a
sacred “substance”—Virya Shakti, the creative energy of God—connected to their role as
nurturers and caretakers of the earth. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, spiritual successor to Tweedie in
the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi lineage, says that this “substance” in a woman “has to do
with her creative nature and is thus related to her sexuality” (cited in Hart, 2013, p. 99).

Diane sees a link between these esoteric teachings and the alchemical texts that Jung diligently
studied. She explains:

In alchemy, Jung said that they call this sacred substance or creative energy of God “the life
Source or glue of the world, a medium between mind and body and the union of both”
(1944/1968, par. 209). For me, eros is a substance that signals through my feelings when my
body and spirit are in alignment, and when this occurs I feel a oneness with life. I see now that,
when we are aligned in body and spirit, our sexual orientation is an embodied means through
which we can experience eros, the substance of love. Human love mediates divine love and
unleashes our creative potential. In this sense, love heals.

However, gay and lesbian people are often told to repress their sexual energy and love potential.
They are told, “You can be gay, but don't act on it.” This is a rejection of the life energy and
creative potential within a gay person. As a college educator, I encounter daily the existential
agony of LGB young people. I see the suffering that stems from telling a young person to repress
his or her erotic attractions. If a young person is taught that his or her basic love orientation is
“sinful” or “perverted” and should not be “acted upon,” how can this not be damaging to his or
her core?

For spiritually oriented people like Diane, human love is a window into divine love. How else do
we return to the source except through the human circumstance that we ourselves embody? As
Diane sees it, her soul chose a lesbian sexual orientation for the unique spiritual service it would
bring. She tells me:

My understanding is that, before physical birth, every soul is given the option as to how it wants
to live this earthly life. The soul consents to certain lessons and ways to serve. I think I chose to
be gay. Perhaps this was the surest way to set up being rejected by family and society. The
human rejection urged me towards divine love, for there was nowhere else to turn. From the
deepest wounds of my life, I have been opened up to the most mysterious dimensions.

As Diane is speaking, I think of this basic teaching from various spiritual traditions: The soul
chooses the circumstances and genetics of its birth for the purpose of its spiritual evolution and
that of others. Buddhist and Hindu teachings refer to karma. Christian writer Roy Mills (1999
Mills, R. (1999). The soul's remembrance. Seattle, WA: Onjinjinkta Publishing. [Google
Scholar]), in Soul's Remembrance, recounts his unusual pre-birth memory of how his soul
selected his parents and his life experiences, including the painful one of being abandoned by his
birth mother. He saw that we consent to our family, religion, culture, and biological traits,
because our soul wants to serve and to grow. When we come into this realm, as the esoteric
traditions tell us, veils are put over our pre-birth existence. Our earth-bound souls take on
amnesia. We forget where we came from and why we are here. This is necessary as a means of
respect for our free will. We can get hints about our soul by looking at the recurring themes of
our life. For Diane, the quest for the divine feminine is an undeniable theme of her life. She
explains:

When I read Jung's words, “Find your myth and make it your meaning,” the arms of a woman
finally made sense to me. This was the numinous image that hinted at the mythic theme of my
life. The arms of a woman suggested that I was longing for something inside myself, a lost piece
of me that Jung would call the Self. As the organizing archetype of the psyche, the Self appeared
to me through feminine imagery. At birth, everyone has an original sense of wholeness, but then
it gets covered over. The journey of life is to return to that wholeness. For me, the journey was
always compelled forward through feminine archetypal imagery.

Childhood Trauma
For much of her life, however, Diane and those around her saw her longing for the arms of a
woman as stemming from the wound of a childhood trauma, not her soul. In later life, she was
told, “You became a lesbian because you were traumatized and wounded.” In other words, they
saw her natural way of bonding as a pathology, not a path.

The trauma happened in Thailand, where Diane spent her first few years of life. Her parents were
medical missionaries from the United States who went to Bangkok to serve their church. She
recounts:

There were trellises going up the walls of the missionary compound that I liked to climb. My
favorite thing was to climb trees. The tree is a powerful feminine archetypal symbol that followed
me the rest of my life. A tree is rooted in the earth yet reaches for the sky. As an introverted
intuitive type, my challenge has been to stay grounded in the practical life and not fly into the
ethers. Looking back on my childhood through a Jungian lens, symbolically I wanted to climb
into arms of the Great Mother and have an earth-based experience of the divine feminine. Who
knows? It was fun and I felt free.

When Diane was five, she had a painful, traumatic accident that changed everything.

One day, I climbed up the tree and a branch broke. I crashed down hard onto a concrete curb and
fractured my hip. It was an acute situation—I might never walk again. My father was a physician
and took all the right steps without delay. This medical community that I was born into was very
knowledgeable about physical health. I probably owe my survival to them. My father used a
military friend's ham radio system to communicate with surgeons in California. Back then, in the
1950s, it was difficult to communicate across the world, with no Internet, cell phone, email,
texting, Skype, or Facebook, and we had no access to a landline. But he got through to a
California surgeon who gave specific instructions on how to build a square-shaped, metal traction
that would hold my fractured hipbone in place with sandbags and pulleys. I traveled on my back,
with my legs perpendicular to my body, all the way across the world from Bangkok to Los
Angeles in a double-propped airplane.
Diane's journey across the world made newspaper headlines. “Brave” was the word used to
describe her.

Once landed, she was taken to the hospital for surgery in order to save her capacity to walk. After
the surgeries, she was put into a body cast. She recounts the experience of isolation:

Obviously it was a trauma. Not only the physical trauma to my body as a five-year-old child, but
also the trauma of being rushed away far from the safety of home, taken suddenly from my
mother, immersed into a hospital environment, then put into a body cast. I couldn't move without
the help of others to carry me from place to place. I think it imprinted a feeling of being trapped
and isolated, where there had been none. It also imprinted fear. I had been a curious and free-
spirited child. And then I was cast out from the tree. Voices of caution took up residence in my
psyche: “Play it safe. Don't be curious. Don't go off on your own. Something dangerous will
happen.” And it has been a long journey to return to my natural trust in the joy of being my free-
spirited self.

Trauma and suffering often contain unexpected gifts. Survivors of cancer, concentration camps,
tornados, near-death experiences, paralysis, and other acute experiences often say they were
taken to a deeper dimension of themselves. Diane agrees:

In that body cast, a deeper part of my psyche opened up—the archetypal realm of the collective
unconscious. I couldn't move and so the adults carried me out onto the patio to get fresh air. In
their busyness, I was left and forgotten. I was alone in this helpless state. As a child, this was
terrifying: “Did they leave me out here to die by myself?!” A personal spirit came to my rescue.
It emerged from my unconscious to protect me from the terror of abandonment. Before I read
Donald Kalsched's book, The Inner World of Trauma (1996), about the personal spirit that comes
in during trauma, I had come to call this archetype a “demon lover.” Its self-protective message
was seductive: “You don't need anybody but me. I'll take care of you. You can't trust anyone else.
They'll just hurt you.” This archetypal defense mechanism allowed my psyche to survive the
trauma, but its destructive side was that I isolated myself from people and closed off my heart. In
the process of healing, I've had to shed this defensive mechanism layer by layer. Each time a
layer loosened up, I had to go more deeply into that original wound of the trauma and face a
visceral terror of being annihilated. Psychically, it felt like I was going to die. Without the
defense mechanism of the demon lover, there was the feeling of being lost in darkness.

Diane says that her “saving grace” was “the archetypal sacred image of the arms of a woman”:
“This was the image of the divine feminine that gave me a compensatory feeling of being
contained and whole, rather than psychically dissociated and fractured.” For Diane, the divine
feminine represents the archetype of the Self. According to Jung, the Self is the ultimate
archetype because it “expresses the unity of the personality as a whole” (1921/1976, par. 789)
and “might equally be called the God within us” (1917/1966, par. 399). When the self-protective
demon lover wanted her to isolate herself and close off from people, the divine feminine kept her
heart open so she could make connections with others and heal the relational side of her
humanity. She tells me, “It has taken decades to work through this intrapsychic process initiated
by that early trauma. I had to recognize, personify, and integrate these archetypal energies in my
psyche. Here I mean the demon lover and the divine feminine.”
She sums up: “In longing for the divine feminine, I climbed up that tree as a little girl. The tree
symbolized the arms of the Great Mother. When I was cast out and broken into pieces, this set
into motion my primal quest to return and heal my connection to the divine feminine, which is a
connection to the earth, my body, and love.”

The Truncating Effect of Homophobia

After the tree accident, Diane recovered her physical capacities. She grew into an athletic young
woman. But her inner life was crippled:

I felt disconnected from myself. I didn't know why I felt this way. It was like a depression or
angst. I understand now that it was because I couldn't express love or live a vital part of my
nature. I had the constant image of being close with a girlfriend. It was my natural way to reach
out for love, my only hope for some kind of relief. But this longing and need had to be rejected.
This compartmentalization created a split in the psyche; in psychological terms, it's called a
neurosis.

“Perverted” and “sinful” was the message that Diane received about her longing to connect,
bond, and love. She remembers:

I wanted to bond based on my natural attractions, like anyone. Because the longing for
connection was oriented in a same-sex direction, it was judged and I felt ashamed. Religion said
that homosexuality was sinful. This continuous wounding created a psychic schism between
religion, my soul, and my natural need for love. It caused me to isolate myself.

I ask Diane if she'd ever been accepted by a religious leader. Tears come to her eyes. “Only at age
61 did a religious leader affirm my love relationship with a woman. It was a Sufi teacher. He
said, ‘Oh, good! You have a companion who can share your intensity and passion.’ It was
remarkable to have my love recognized in this way, as wholesome and beneficial.”

When Diane was growing up, no one affirmed her potential and need for love. In the 1960s and
1970s, same-sex attractions were silenced and shamed. She couldn't talk to anyone about her
deepest feelings. As a teenager, she heard the word different and knew it referred to homosexuals.
She felt ashamed. “I was aware that religion referred to people like me as ‘perverted.’ This was
devastating to my soul.” Even the national news media presented homosexuality as pedophilia
and sexual predation. Imagine having one's natural feelings of love and attraction equated with
criminals, rapists, and child molesters! She found no role models, no imagery that was affirming
of people with same-sex love attractions. Diane is clear:

Without models that affirm one's self-image and love potential, there is pathology. The pathology
I had to heal from was homophobia, not homosexuality. Homophobia split my psyche apart. I
couldn't be whole. I showed the world only one part of myself—my persona—and I hid the rest
because I knew it wouldn't be accepted. I was cut off from the primal, core part of myself that
loves, reaches out, and expresses myself. I felt truncated and hard to access on a relational level.
For me, the lack of external supports (family, religion, culture) that could affirm my lesbian
orientation created a psychosocial vacuum. Destructive forces quickly filled it—inner forces such
as self-hatred and self-doubt. My adaptive responses led me to compartmentalize and disassociate
from my most basic feelings. It has taken a lifetime of deep inner work to retrieve my sexual
orientation from the shadows into which a rejecting culture cast it.

As Diane shares, I am reminded of the research I've been doing over the last decade on the power
of love. The findings of this research reveal that love is what heals. Love is what unites. Love is
what makes something meaningful. Love is what gives color to the world. Places void of human
love are gray and dull; literally, the thermodynamics are different in places that lack human love.
I had my first glimpse of such a colorless atmosphere at age 15 when I traveled to what was then
known as the “Eastern bloc” countries behind the Berlin Wall. It was 1980. The atmosphere felt
heavy and despairing. There was no color. People appeared lifeless to me, as if the flame of life
had been snuffed out by the “iron curtain” ideology that prohibited individual expression.

Psychologically, this dynamic is similar for a human being. If a wall is built around the heart of a
human being with views such as “That's wrong, sinful, perverted, and evil,” then that person is
cut off from his or her life energy, colorful essence, and innate love potential, resulting in a
truncated existence. This is a tragedy not just for the individual but for society as a whole. Why?
Because love is the source of life, of beauty, of healing, and of wisdom. When homophobia cuts
people off from their hearts and souls, then the world loses the creativity and love potential (eros)
of over 250,000 million individuals (World Psychiatric Associates, 2016, p. 1).

Eight countries apply laws that condemn homosexuals to death. Seventy-two countries view
homosexual “acts” as illegal (Carroll & Mendes, 2017 Carroll, A., & Mendes, L. R. (2017). State
sponsored homophobia. Geneva, Switzerland: ILGA. [Google Scholar], p. 8). Homosexuals are
considered criminals even in modernizing countries such as India. New laws with harsh measures
against homosexuals were passed in Russia, Uganda, and Nigeria in 2015. Homosexuals were
one of the groups targeted for mutilation, enslavement, and death by the Nazis. Homophobia is
pervasive in the collective psyche and distorts the perception of even sincere and intelligent
people.

Diane knows from personal experience: “Homophobia is what shatters families, leads to
isolation, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and suicide because it demoralizes the human
spirit. I suffered all of those effects.” She internalized her religion's hatred of homosexuality. “In
terms of the religious right, I believed in its message: ‘God didn't create you this way. If you act
on your feelings, it's a sin.’ I tried to pray away my being a lesbian. With these anti-gay religious
messages, I began to feel that there was something deeply wrong with me.”

I wondered how she could survive without any support. “My primary support came through the
Self-affirming images rising up from the unconscious—the arms of a woman, the horse, the tree.
They supported me to heal the broken connection between the ego and the Self.”

Diane is able to speak of the suffering consciously, not as a victim, but as a participant in the
perseverance of her own soul. Despite the odds, she did not give up on her life. As she talks about
the pain of rejection, I think of some of my college students. Diane was a teenager in the 1960s.
Fifty years later, in our own time, the rate of suicide is five times more likely among LGB young
people (Centers for Disease Control, 2016, p. 1). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people
(LGBT) often experience hatred and rejection from the very people who are supposed to love
them: family members and religious leaders and their community members. I have met many
LGBT young people, ages 12–18, who have been kicked to the street by their own parents. They
are homeless or isolated due not to economic poverty but to a poverty of love. One Christian
mother told her teenager, who was a student in my class, “I'd rather you be dead than be gay.” Is
it any wonder this young person attempted suicide several times?

A Split in the Psyche

Like many young people today, Diane's first step to escape the pain of homophobia was to leave
home. She moved to a larger, more progressive city where there was greater acceptance of gay
people. She finally had the freedom to live as a lesbian, but there was a cost: “The choice to love
a woman automatically took me into the margins where I was on my own, without family or
cultural or religious supports.” She kept her lesbian life hidden from her family for many years.
She dated men and tried to appear in a way that her family would approve. Eventually, Diane
entered into a committed partnership with a woman she loved.

The relationship was very fulfilling and healing. She loved me in my uniqueness as an introverted
and intense individual. At the time, we were both social workers. She was earthy, natural, feeling,
accepting, humorous, and light-hearted. Quite the opposite of me! She represented love and
acceptance, an expression of the feminine for which I had longed. We bought a little house, had
dogs, cats, and a garden. She reconnected me with my roots: my love of plants and putting my
hands in the soil. I had grown up with the love of trees, an orchard, and horses on a ranch, but
that side of me had gotten lost. I had focused on getting degrees, academics, working as an ER
nurse and social worker, all the marks of outer success. Her love reconnected me to lost parts of
myself.

As beautiful as the relationship was for Diane, she kept it a secret. She feared being fired from
her job and rejected by her family. She lived a double life, a split existence.

When Diane's family realized that she was living with a female love partner, they sent letters
telling her that she was “living in sin” and not in line with “God's design.” She recounts an
incident with her mother: “One time my mother came to visit me, and I told her that I had chosen
to be with a woman. We were outside of my house, standing on the street as she was leaving. She
looked at me and said, ‘Well, if you choose that, then I will have to disown you.’ And she got
into her car and drove away.” How did Diane bear this rejection?

Somehow I knew it was not the heart of my mother, but rather her dogma. It was a very lonely
road living in a gay world alone, without my family. But, of course, this is what I would later
understand to be my path of individuation. I had to separate from the herd in order to become my
own person. Being gay turned out to be a major opportunity for growth.

In her late thirties, Diane's inner conflict reached a crisis point. Her mother was diagnosed with
cancer. Diane wanted to make peace with her mother before she died.

I wanted the acceptance of my mother and the family and the collective. My longing was, “If only
I could get them to love me.…” My mother was dying of cancer, and I knew that if I came back
“into the fold,” it would give her peace of mind. I made a bargain with God: “If I come back, will
You then heal her?” I was overcome with a longing to reconnect with my family. And I longed to
be close to God. However, to be close to God, I believed I had to sacrifice being a lesbian. I had
to leave my female partner in order to be acceptable in the eyes of God and my family.

Diane's mother showed her some brochures, saying, “I found something that might help you.”
The brochures explained “reparative” therapy, also called “conversion” and “ex-gay” therapy.
Reparative therapy is rooted in the religious belief that God created only heterosexuals, not
homosexuals. It relies upon a Freudian developmental approach and diagnoses homosexuality as
“arrested development,” stemming from trauma and bad parenting. In sum, homosexuality is a
“wound” that can be healed. Diane remembers how she felt back then, over twenty-five years
ago:

At the time, I was excited by the idea. I was desperate for acceptance, to fit in. Reparative theory
said that I could be healed, become a “normal” woman. It seemed to make sense,
psychologically, that I was taken away from my mother prematurely during the tree trauma, and
that my same-sex attractions were nothing but an attempt to find a surrogate mother. I was told
that, once I healed my mother wound, I would no longer be a lesbian and, in fact, would be
attracted to men.

Reparative therapy gave her hope that she could bridge the divide between her two core needs:
love and religion. Diane had always wanted both a love relationship and closeness with God. She
longed to live as a whole human being, not suffer a split psyche. At different times of her life,
either her spirituality or her sexual orientation had been forced into a closet. Reparative therapy
promised that she could become “whole.” She could have a deep relationship with God and enjoy
a “healthy” expression of her sexual and love life. She was told she had an inborn “heterosexual
potential” that could be matured through marrying a man.

All I can say is that I thought it was God who demanded it. At the time, I pushed away my same-
sex attraction by taking a theoretical approach. Influenced by reparative therapy, I called my
same-sex attraction a “mother wound” and saw it as a psychological problem. I was an earnest
seeker who believed I had to give up this female partner for God. And my mother was dying of
cancer—which made it feel like a life or death decision.

Diane was hopeful. Under intense psychic pressure, she made the decision to leave her female
partner of ten years and marry a man. “I had to marry a man; that was the only way to be
‘normal’ and to be acceptable in the eyes of God and my family. I told myself, ‘You can love a
man. You may not have all of the amorous feelings that most women have, but through Christ
and through this healing, you will be given the ability to love him.’ It was very painful to leave
the natural love relationship I had with my female partner in order to connect to Jesus, God, and
Christianity. I was forcing myself into an alien mode of expression, but I believed it would work.
I was determined!” Diane's saving grace was that her partner remained her closest friend. She lost
the partnership with her female partner, but not her love.

Diane returned to her family's church community and married Michael, a friend from college:
I remembered him as a jovial human being. He was extraverted, outgoing—my opposite in terms
of typology! There was a genuine connection. For some reason, he adored me. As someone who
had never felt like I belonged, this attention felt good. Looking back on it now, I imagine we had
some kind of bond, which you might call a karmic commitment. For me, there wasn't the
romantic attraction or erotic feeling. I've never had amorous/erotic feelings towards a man. But,
with him, I felt friendship and meaning. I was honest with him about my lesbian life. We both
had faith that reparative therapy would “fix” me. At first, I thought that if I connected to my
feminine soul, I wouldn't be gay any more. I thought that this inner work to integrate my own
feminine elements—surrender, receptivity, nurturing, softness—would “cure” me of wanting a
love relationship with a woman.

Journey into the Archetypal Feminine

Two years into Diane's marriage, she was pulled down into the unconscious. Her former female
partner, now age 48, died of cancer. “It absolutely devastated me. I can still remember the chill
that came over me when the doctor said to us, ‘I have a bit of bad news for you.’ She moved in
with my husband and me, and we took care of her. I drove her to chemo, we did everything we
could, but it was too late. Within six weeks, she was gone. My world fell apart.” The loss of her
closest friend, her heart companion, plunged Diane into a void. “To tell you the truth, in that
moment, I didn't want to live. She had been the spark for my soul. She represented love. Without
her presence, my soul felt lost to me. Several years later, after I began Jungian analysis, I realized
how much she had carried the archetype of the Great Mother.”

With little will to live, Diane cried out to God for help. A flicker of feminine imagery started to
come up from the unconscious. Before she even knew what they were, she was drawing feminine
images as she scribbled pictures with her two children.

When I learned about Jung's method of active imagination, I pulled out one of those pictures I
had drawn with my kids. It appeared like the head of a mummy. There were two determined
streaks of blue across the mouth and two eyes that desperately pierced me, as if to say, “Help me
speak. Tell my story.” It has taken years for me to tell the story of the feminine that was
“mummified.” Silenced by convention. At the time, I wasn't aware of my truth, let alone able to
speak it. Now I'm able to tell the story of how the feminine in me and the feminine in history
were silenced, and how I came to remember her. Active imagination bridges the personal and the
mythic collective unconscious. This image of a mummy was not only of my personal past, but
also carried the weight of human history.

Diane's most vivid encounter with the feminine came at her lowest point, just after her former
partner's death, when her psyche was in upheaval. Forces from the inner world were breaking
through her ego structures, and there was no one that she could talk to and feel understood. She
was in traditional therapy, but it stayed on the conscious level and lacked the means to relate to
the depths of the unconscious. She felt like she was going crazy.

I was sitting on the edge of my bed. I was mentally unraveling and needed help. The only lifeline
I had was my therapist, so I called her. When her voicemail came on, I hung up. I felt hopeless
and totally alone. At that moment, suddenly, I had a waking image of a feminine figure standing
at the foot of my bed. She mysteriously appeared wearing a silken dress. It was a very comforting
vision. She danced for me. It was like a liturgical dance. So graceful and fluid. I was mesmerized
by the circle of light around her. For a split second, I questioned my reality. The thought popped
in my mind, “Oh great, you really are going crazy.” But I had enough sense to know that, if my
ego could ask that question, I wasn't insane. I allowed my eyes to follow her. She dropped her
outer garment to the floor. It was luminous and flowing. And then she disappeared, but I still saw
her. The image of her was imprinted in me. I followed her and saw her dancing at the edge of the
sea, barefoot and free. I felt at one with her. I heard her say, “Diane, step out of your old ways of
being a woman. Come with me, and be transformed.” I stepped out that day in faith that she
would lead me home to myself.

It was a turning point for Diane. “She was a hologram of my wholeness. I was given the gift to
see an expression of my own soul/Self, and now I needed to get to know her. This image
conveyed a strong compensatory message to me. It was the bridge that connected my conscious
ego to the unconscious archetypal feminine realm that would lead me toward wholeness.”

Diane knew that the experience was significant, so she went in search of books to help her
understand:

I came across the female Catholic mystics. When I read Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias (1990), I
found a woman who'd had mystical experiences of the divine feminine. I think she was the first
person in the Middle Ages to talk about religious experience in terms of the feminine archetype.
And when I read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle (2004), her metaphor of the “interior castle”
gave me the first image of the inner journey and its many stages. Their writings comforted me.

Her study of the female mystics led Diane to retreat centers. Having left her family's church by
this point, she felt relieved to find contemplative Christian communities that cared for the soul.
Encountering Jung was a watershed.

I was on a silent retreat at a contemplative Catholic center, browsing the bookshelves of their
library. My eye caught the title Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1961/1989). I pulled it
down and read Jung's chapter, “Confrontation with the Unconscious.” This was it. I finally found
hope. There was someone who had been there! Someone who had gone down into the depths and
could explain the mystical sphere in a psychological way. Jung's map of the psyche was
expansive and multidimensional. It was liberating for me to encounter it. I had always been a
seeker. Early on, I'd had a longing for something deep. I wrote poetry as a teenager, full of
melancholy and questions about life. When I came upon Jung, his language of the soul resonated
with me. His writings honored the spiritual dimension and the depths of the human being, and it
had none of the dogma with which I'd grown up.

Diane found a Jungian analyst and began her depth work. She hoped to discover the meaning of
her lifelong same-sex attractions.

Jungian analysis introduced the idea that perhaps my erotic attractions for women were a longing
to integrate my shadow qualities surrounding the feminine principle, and ultimately, to connect
with the archetypal feminine. This was the profound she who had come to me in that waking
vision. This approach led me to work with my attractions to women symbolically. I took from
Jung that, if I worked with my sexual attractions symbolically to connect to the divine feminine,
then I would become heterosexual. While I was married to a man, I spent twenty years pulling
back my projections onto the women to whom I was attracted. I worked with my libido and my
attractions to women internally.

Through this inner work of containing her libido, Diane became conscious of her projections onto
women. Certain women, she noticed, pulled up a projection of the mother.

For instance, I became conscious of my need for “mothering” and aware of my “abandonment
wound.” In Jungian terms, this anguish stemmed from a “mother complex.” Getting conscious of
this complex, I learned to work through the suffering of abandonment and to stand on my own
two feet, not be emotionally dependent. My sense is that the primal separation from the mother
goes further back than my personal history, into the archetypal realm. I believe it goes back to
ancient times. And my loving a woman has been an attempt to heal the legacy of silence and
return to the source of those ancient times, that is, the Great Mother.

Diane also became conscious of the “shadow sides” of her personality that needed to be
integrated. “In my case, I had rejected and repressed my feminine nature, a major part of my
personality. Through education, career, and religion, I had long identified with logos, and I
needed to integrate the feminine side—eros.” By working closely with her dreams, Diane saw
where she was out of balance.

The psyche is a self-regulating system, and our dreams will show us where we are out of
alignment. My dreams revealed this neglected side. An example of a shadow dream was when a
dark-haired seductress came into a church and took my hand. She led me out into the woods
where women were dancing and expressing themselves freely. This dream image was the
opposite of my heavy conditioning of church and culture that disconnected me from my body,
nature, and heart. This dream showed that I needed to loosen up, get in my body, dance, and “be
free.” Eventually I was able to let go of the old conditioning and integrate my sexuality and the
physical expression of love—but this took twenty years.

Another shadow side that Diane integrated was that of speaking. “The fact that I am doing this
interview, actually, is possible only because of the decades of inner work. I have come out of the
shadow of silence to share the truth of my experience. I tend to be a very private, introverted
person, and here I am speaking about myself. The work has been to heal the mummified feminine
who told me twenty years ago, ‘Help me speak. Tell my story.’”

Still, all of the Jungian work did not give a clear answer to her burning question, “Can a lesbian
be ‘whole’?” As Diane read Jung's Collected Works and Jungian literature, she found little direct
guidance about homosexuality. To a large extent, Diane had to go it alone, find her own way.
Several of the women close to Jung, who were influential Jungian thinkers and writers, had been
unmarried women who lived with women, but they did not disclose much, if anything, about their
personal lives or sexual sides. Jungians tend to be private about their individuation process—and
for good reason: Each person's path is individual. The work is to stay tuned to the guidance of our
own psyches, our inner wisdom, rather than look to the experiences of others as guideposts for
our unique journeys. Diane continues to share her journey:
I often felt alone in my quest to understand. Jung suggests that loneliness doesn't come because
we don't have friends. We're often lonely because it's hard to communicate our inner experiences
that are important to us. We may have thoughts and feelings that sound crazy and unacceptable to
others, because of collective standards of thinking. I was alone even as I sought to understand my
sexuality in the process of Jungian analysis. The idea I had in reading Jung and talking to
Jungians was that heterosexuality was the ideal and that, if I could heal the connection to my
feminine, then there would be wholeness as a heterosexual woman. This was the suggested
framework that Jung presented at that time. Even great thinkers are products of their time. In all
my research among Jungians, I was helped by studying the perspectives of others, but ultimately,
I had to answer this profound question in my way.

Going through her analysis, Diane kept asking herself, “If I am a woman who loves a woman,
can I ever become psychologically whole?” The struggle was intense. Ultimately, she had to
reclaim the sanctity of her natural orientation. The conditioning of “homosexuality is perverted”
held her in its iron grip throughout many years of her analysis. Even after she shed the religious
and cultural belief that homosexuality is a sin, Diane still had to work through the implication of
Jungian theory that her same-sex attractions might be merely unintegrated shadow aspects or
merely feminine imagery related to symbolisms within the archetypal unconscious.

The fact remained that twenty years of Jungian depth work and marriage to a wonderful man had
not transformed her into a heterosexual woman. She had integrated her shadow aspects. She was
connected to the archetypal feminine. And still she was a lesbian.

The process helped me to reclaim my spiritual roots and ultimate identity as a unique individual
person who happens to be a lesbian. People in search of support for their soul need a therapeutic
method that at least starts with a basic respect for the patient's own reality and inner sense of her-
or himself. Jungian analysis gave me this mechanism. Through the process of Jungian
individuation, I worked with my complexes. I got to know my shadow parts. I integrated the
masculine and the feminine, to a large degree. After twenty years of deep inner work, I have
come to a place of Self-acceptance to feel whole as a woman wired to love women. I've spent my
life trying to make meaning out of my love for women and my longing for the divine feminine. I
am now sure that my loving a woman is not a case of “arrested development.” Being a lesbian
has afforded me a certain kind of individuation path, one that was uniquely my own. Homosexual
imagery is an image of the Self, a soul image, and she has been wooing me towards her my
whole life. The outer female lover functions as a soul image for me, much as the anima does for
the heterosexual man. My psyche was never activated in the same way by an outer man. Yes, I
worked through the animus projections onto men, but they never carried the same numinosity and
eros as I felt with women.

What about Jung's “marriage of opposites”? Does the union of the masculine and feminine
aspects of oneself require a concretized heterosexuality—that is, a physical union between a man
and a woman? Diane has given this area much thought:

Even though I decided to marry a man in my 30s, I think of Jung's “marriage of the opposites” as
an intrapsychic union that is also possible within the context of a same-sex relationship. Every
woman has to come to know and integrate her inner masculine aspects. As a lesbian married to a
man for twenty-five years, I worked to integrate my masculine without feeling the amorous bond
with him that a heterosexual woman feels towards her husband.

So, then, is Jung's contrasexual theory not appropriate for gay individuation? Diane's experience
leads her to conclude that the psyche of people with same-sex attractions is not structured
differently than those of heterosexuals simply because of their outer choice of love object.

I can only report for myself that, although the contrasexual component in my psyche—that is, the
animus—went through a transformation, it was not a soul image. Rather, my soul image has
always been feminine. At first, the animus I encountered was the conventional voice that
suppressed my feelings. My husband and I held the same conventional beliefs. Then as I began to
see things differently, the animus helped me to differentiate my feminine feelings as my own. I
was forced to become conscious of who I am versus who I thought I should be. This new
masculine helped me fight to stand up for my distinctive nature rather than fall inert. The inner
masculine was crucial for me in relating to the unconscious. However, my soul image was always
feminine.

Ultimately, Diane's soul was longing for the divine. She came to see her love for a woman, like
any human love, as an avenue to the Self, and not as an obstacle.

My longing was always to connect with the Self imaged as the divine feminine. This is the
eternal part of me. According to Jung, the Self is the part of the psyche that organizes and directs
the rest of the psyche, including the ego, conscious mind, personal unconscious, and other
elements of psychological being. For me, the Self has always been imaged as the divine
feminine—the arms of a woman, the tree, and the horse.

Early on in her Jungian analysis, Diane worked with the feminine imagery in her psyche by
visiting goddess sites in France and England as another way to connect with the archetype of the
Great Mother. Intuitively, she was in search of her. Although her Christian background labeled it
“pagan” and therefore “heretical,” Diane felt a soulful resonance to these historic places of
reverence for the divine feminine.

My conditioning made me fear that I was veering off into heresy! In my religious upbringing, no
one ever referred to the goddess Sophia or the divine feminine. I'd heard of “paganism,” and it
carried a note of heathenism that made me feel as if I'd lost my way, as if I were rejecting God. I
wasn't rejecting God. I was longing for the feminine face of God. At that point, I had a pivotal
dream in which I heard the word Theophilus, which means friend or lover of God. The dream
affirmed that I was a friend of God and in good hands, even as I walked an unknown path.

For many years of Jungian analysis, Diane deepened her connection with the feminine through
dream work, enjoying nature, riding her horse, creating art, gardening, and raising her children.
She worked hard in her individuation process to integrate the feminine elements of receptivity,
caring, and nurturing into her conscious life. But it was only when she fell in love with a woman,
at age sixty, that her heart fully opened and she experienced her innate wholeness. It was an
embodied wholeness—body, mind, heart, and soul.
After twenty-five years of marriage, I had to surrender my ego ideals to the Self. The love in me
that opened up for this woman was so powerful that it broke down all of the conventional ideals
and psychological theories. It dissolved my attachment to any idea of being “normal” and/or
heterosexual. It ignited the spark in my soul, allowing me to stand before God and the world in
Self-acceptance. I had learned from Jung that an encounter with the Self leaves one feeling
vitalized and enriched, and that's how I felt with this experience of love. It had a sacred
dimension, as if I were encountering life's deepest mysteries, such as the interconnectedness with
all of life. I could feel her joyous dance and see her sparkling beauty shimmering in all of
creation.

Through this human love with a woman, Diane experienced a transformation:

I will give you an example of how numinous and transformational it was for me. Soon after I met
this woman, I was thrown from a horse. I was lying in bed for weeks with broken ribs and a
cracked scapula. She was not able to be with me while I was convalescing—we were not yet
together—but I had a dream that gave me the felt presence of the substance of love that had been
released through our connection: I am lying on the ground in a green pasture and all of a sudden
this beautiful golden illuminated horse comes close and nuzzles me with love. It is shimmering
with golden love. The golden love is like a substance circulating all around the horse and within
it. I reach out to touch it but wake up in severe pain.

Diane explains her sense of the dream:

The horse is a symbol of the Self. It exudes immense power yet also exquisite gentleness. Love is
the golden substance of the heart. When I met this woman and fell in love with her, I connected
with eros and its golden substance within my heart. I reached out to the horse in the dream, only
to wake up to the pain of my situation. At the time, I was still married to my husband. I was
suffering not only from the physical pain of the horse accident, but also the guilt and fear of
possibly leaving him. I couldn't imagine my life without him, our marriage, our home, and the
“normalcy” of a heterosexual life. In the image of the horse, I was given a foretaste of the love
that would bring Self-acceptance. Love was the golden substance that was needed to purify and
heal me. It soothed, united, and reconciled the war and opposition that were going on in my
psyche about leaving my marriage and facing the pain of homophobia head-on.

This is the great work of divine love that often comes through human love to heal our wounds, to
awaken the heart, to obliterate false ideas. In Sufi tradition, divine love is the “golden substance”
hidden within the heart. “I surrendered to the feelings in my heart,” says Diane, “and there was an
awakening of eros, a sacred part of my nature and my capacity to fully love another being. This
love has freed me from the purely mental attempt to make a psychological theory about
lesbianism. I no longer have to stand apart from human love. It has freed me to passionately
engage in life more robustly, more intimately.”

Love with a woman allowed a further flowering of Diane's individuation process. Being able to
accept her individuality and embrace her lesbian orientation gave her a renewed vitality.

The sexual union with my female partner helped me to connect with my body after decades of
living in an androcentric culture that separated body and soul, spirit and matter. Loving a woman
also brought forth my creative expression from the shadows. Love has made it possible for me to
embody a spectrum of behaviors obviously unique to my individual nature. I believe that our
individuality is charged with vitality and realness when we develop ourselves in alignment with
the Self, instead of self-consciously creating a persona with ego ideas concerned with self-
protection and social approval.

Diane becomes very animated when she speaks of the need for gay and lesbian people to “solve
their lethal ambivalence and be themselves!” She believes that the world needs gays and lesbians
to embrace their innate love orientation. “We need their creative potential and inner beauty to be
released from the shadows. When gays and lesbians forge love relationships that are in alignment
with the Self, then the collective culture is blessed. In my case, because I am in alignment with
divine love through this love relationship, I am a better partner, better mother, better friend, better
analyst, better teacher, better neighbor, and even a better friend to my former husband.” For
Diane, human love unexpectedly became an avenue of spiritual purification.

Now this love has taken me to another level that I hadn't anticipated. Doing what love does, it is
purifying me and softening my heart. Love is the quintessence of divinity and has the power to
purify us. For example, to incarnate eros truly, I've had to be purified of the shadowy poisons of
dependency, attachments, jealousy, envy, and competition. The love relationship with a woman,
in alignment with my true nature, strips me of the “will to power” over another. Jung says,
“Where love reigns, there is no will to power, and where the will to power, is paramount, love is
lacking” (1917/1966, par. 78, p. 53).

Purification is a spiritual process. Shortly after falling in love with the woman, Diane devoted her
life to a spiritual path. “This kind of human love has the power to take the soul to God,” she says.
Human love revealed a path to the beloved. It raises the question, How does Jungian
individuation relate to the spiritual quest? Diane explains:

Individuation signifies psychological wholeness. It is the prerequisite, you might say, of a

spiritual path. Individuation means you have been liberated from your conditioning and live as an
authentic human being, not in passive conformity to collective belief systems. You have become
conscious of all of the darkness within you. You are humble enough to know that even the
collective shadow (e.g., Hitler) exists within you. You cannot judge others any more. Then your
heart is ready for love, for surrender at great depth. And this, of course, is an ongoing process.

As I listen to Diane tell of her journey, I presume that her individuation has paved a path for
others, especially gays and lesbians, whose experiences do not fit easily into the most prominent
psychological frameworks created many decades ago by heterosexual men (Freud, Jung, Frankl,
Adler). Diane, however, is cautious. She doesn't view herself as a pathfinder.

I am speaking of the individual path not as a framework for others, but out of the tentative
insights I have come to on the basis of my own lived experience and sitting with clients for three
decades. Others will need to discover the truths given by their own journey. Each of us has the
burden to extract the meaning that comes forth from our own unique existence. Theories are
helpful but not final. Sometimes our actual experience doesn't fit into a theory. The work of an
analyst is not to apply the theory but to listen to the unique message of a psyche and to support
the analysand to trust that message.
Coming Out
After nearly twenty-five years of marriage, separation was necessary. Diane and her husband
Michael did a “release of vows” in the very garden where they had become engaged. “We
relinquished our rings to each other, let go of the roles of husband and wife, and affirmed our
commitment to be friends, parents, and grandparents. It was not an easy process. Many couples
would have ended up as enemies. This gives a hint of how love becomes unconditional when it
supports each other's soul journey.” As an observer to their process, I was reminded of a scripture
I heard growing up but rarely witnessed in real life: “Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things” (I Corinthians 13).

She also reunited with her family; they have welcomed her same-sex partner into their midst.
Recently, Diane took another a major step:

I withdrew my public statements that affirmed reparative therapy. Twenty years ago, I did an
interview with a leader in the reparative therapy movement and became a spokesperson for their
method of “curing” homosexuals. I had married a man and was, by all appearances, living a
heterosexual life. My case was treated as a success story for reparative therapy. My interview was
quoted in books, articles, blogs, and posted on websites that claimed lesbians could be “cured.”
The “ex-gay” organizations neglected to put a date on the interview; thus, visitors to the websites
could assume that my story was still current. I asked the organizations to remove my interview
from their websites.

I am no longer ex-gay or involved in reparative therapy. In fact, I see it as harmful because it

neglects caring for the heart and soul of a client. It rejects the love potential of a client. Love is
what heals people. When the therapy actively seeks to quash in the person his or her natural
tendency toward affection, bonding, and love—what could be worse?

As she speaks, Diane becomes impassioned, dropping her usual reserve.

We cannot fix people who are not broken, nor cure people who are not sick! I owe amends to the
LGBT community for any harm that was caused by my statements and actions. I am on record in
books and on the Internet as having said that I believe women can transition out of being a
lesbian. I need to correct that statement. After more than twenty years of intense inner work and
research, I no longer believe that gays and lesbians need to change their sexual orientation.
Psychologically, I no longer believe that homosexuality is a “wound” or a “broken condition” in
need of repair.

Wounded, broken, perverted. Even though Freud did not view homosexuality as an illness or
vice, his psychosexual theory identified it as arrested development. This theory was later used by
proponents of conversion therapy to try to change gays into straights through electric shock,
severe medication, brain surgeries, and other violent techniques. The basic premise is that
homosexuality is a changeable condition, stemming from childhood factors.

It's quite obvious that a trauma or a certain style of parenting does not make a person gay.
Otherwise, children in the same family who have the same parents or who suffer the same trauma
(e.g., molestation) would all be gay. Recent research points to a biological basis for same-sex
orientation (Soh, 2017 Soh, D. (2017). Cross-cultural evidence for the genetics of homosexuality.
Scientific American. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cross-cultural-
evidence-for-the-genetics-of-homosexuality/[Crossref], [Google Scholar]; Savic & Lindstrom,
2008 Savic, I., & Lindstrom, P. (2008). PET and MRI show difference in cerebral asymmetry and
functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 27. Available at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/27/9403.full[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). The Position
Statement on Gender Identity and Same-Sex Orientation, Attraction, and Behaviours by the
World Psychiatric Association (March, 2016) gives this summary:

Over 50 years ago, Kinsey et al (1948 Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W., Martin, C. (1948). Sexual
behaviour in the human male. Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders. [Google Scholar]) documented a
diversity of sexual behaviours among people. Surprisingly for the time, Kinsey described that for
over 10% of individuals this included same-sex sexual behaviours. Subsequent population
research has demonstrated approximately 4% of people identify with a same-sex sexual
orientation (e.g., gay, lesbian, and bisexual orientations). Another 0.5% identify with a gender
identity other than the gender assigned at birth (e.g., transgender). Globally, this equates to over
250 million individuals. (World Psychiatric Association, 2016, p.1)

Diane no longer sees her sexual orientation as pathology:

I do not see lesbian love as stemming from an unresolved mother issue or arrested development.
Most people, men and women, have a mother wound. A mother complex or mother wound
doesn't make a person homosexual, or else we'd have a whole population of homosexuals. The
projection of the mother plays out endlessly in many relationships. Psychologically, the tree
accident left an abandonment wound because it took me suddenly away from my mother at an
early age. Many people have an abandonment wound. It isn't the cause of homosexuality. The
wound will express itself according to the unique makeup and orientation of that person. The key
is to realize that we can't fill a psychological gap through an erotic projection. Those of us with
an abandonment wound have to heal it in ourselves. Another person will never fill the gap.

People in the reparative therapy camp criticized Diane's change of mind, even sending an email
that said, “I'm sorry you have lost your reality bearings” and other cut-downs. However, she sees
her change of mind as the fruit of individuation. In the pursuit of truth, inherited dogma and
personal opinions are inevitably left behind. This is not weakness but humility. It takes humility
to admit, “I see things differently now.” Diane is not alone. There is a growing recognition of the
harm done in the name of reparative therapy. Diane tells me:

Recently, reparative therapists that I knew from the 1990s are under fire for unprofessional
conduct in their practices. These include some of the therapists who helped to establish the
National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). They continued to
view homosexuality as a disorder or mental illness, even after the American Psychiatric
Association removed this view from its diagnostic manual in 1973. I interfaced with NARTH for
many years. Until recently, my interview was on their website as a success story for the
reparative therapy approach. Some of their techniques have been exposed as damaging and
bizarre.
She is referring, as an example, to the landmark court case in which the judge awarded victory to
six plaintiffs who claimed that the Jewish conversion therapy organization, JONAH, committed
consumer fraud by promising to “cure” gay clients. (JONAH is one of the ex-gay organizations
that featured Diane's interview on its website.) The extensive court documents cited in Michael
Ferguson, et al., v. JONAH et al. (Superior Court of New Jersey, June 25, 2015) point out the
harmful effects of the therapy. Simultaneously, reparative therapy has been banned in several
cities and four states.

Professional organizations have come out against reparative therapy. Treatment now focuses on
addressing the suffering that stems from homophobia. In March of 2016, the World Psychiatric
Association (WPA), the world's largest body of psychiatrists with members in at least 118
countries, issued its Position Statement on Gender Identity and Same-Sex Orientation, Attraction,
and Behaviours:

WPA believes strongly in evidence-based treatment. There is no sound scientific evidence that
innate sexual orientation can be changed. Furthermore, so-called treatments of homosexuality can
create a setting in which prejudice and discrimination flourish, and they can be potentially
harmful. The provision of any intervention purporting to “treat” something that is not a disorder
is wholly unethical.

Diane sees reparative therapy as a denigration of the feminine. In the name of a theory, reparative
therapy cuts individuals off from their hearts and souls.

Valuing the feminine side is an avenue that leads to wholeness for people of all sexual
orientations. Rationalism has cut us off from our own soul depths and from having a direct and
immanent experience of the divine feminine. Reparative therapy is a modern iteration of this
obliteration of the heart and soul. Jung said that all of us—of all genders—have to integrate our
irrational yet noble, feeling feminine side.

The Role of Gays and Lesbians in the Renewal of Feminine

Consciousness
Diane honors the soul and its mysteries. She wonders, What is the meaning of being gay or
lesbian? What purpose does homosexuality have in the ongoing evolution of consciousness? It
isn't just a political issue of “gay rights” and “marriage equality.” Isn't it also a catalyst in the
evolution of consciousness? Diane puts it this way:

I believe gays and lesbians are at the forefront of the shift to honor the feminine values that have
so long been repressed. These individuals have the potential to contribute to the survival of our
species by helping to birth a new world in what appears to be a collapsing civilization.
Homophobia, rooted in the fear of the feminine, would extinguish the feminine from the
collective standard. The feminine, the domain of eros, is the element that brings forth life and
love. How does my lesbian orientation serve to restore the feminine to its rightful place? How do
I, as a lesbian, help to balance human society? In what way am I called to embody greater
harmony with the natural world and the cycles of creation?
As we talk, I realize Diane's courage to say “Yes!” to love is not only for herself and her partner,
but also for Mother Earth.

Perhaps this is why I have been called to live as a lesbian. My individual psychological work has
always been related to the feminine. The feminine gives us an experience of the divine immanent
in the here and now. The feminine is what connects us with the beauty and magic in the earth. As
we connect to the feminine, we connect to our own hearts and to each other. And from our own
hearts, we connect to the heart of the world. It's primarily through love that the connection is
made to the soul of the world, and then the earth has a chance to be healed.

There is a pressing need in the world today to reawaken the healing and transformational power
of the divine feminine. Its emergence, primarily through love—Jung called it eros—can set a new
direction for human community. Our culture honors the masculine to a fault. Strength is fine, but
weapons of mass destruction? Doing one's best and aiming for excellence are fine, but the endless
striving to win, to compete, to achieve? It's out of balance. Diane is well aware of the negative
effect.

In many women, including myself, there has been a neurotic split from our authentic nature.
Feminine nature is not fast-paced and competitive. Feminism has opened the door for women to
become whatever they want—almost!—but if they choose to use this freedom to carry out only
masculine goals, then they will feel a split in their psyche. Depression and chronic fatigue
syndrome afflict so many women. Being fully in our feminine nature is the most liberating
avenue. Here I speak not of the conventional feminine role that silences or constricts women, but
rather the feminine that is instinctual, close with the earth and its medicines, tapped into the
power of the heart, intuitive, and in service to the divine feminine. The real feminine is potent.
She is the central nourishing wisdom that springs forward from the heart as feeling, not from the
mental wisdom of the head that has been so valued by patriarchal society. Our feminine side
knows the “primal power that comes from the still center of ourself” (Vaughan-Lee, 2009
Vaughan-Lee, L. (2009b). The return of the feminine and the world soul. Inverness, CA: Golden
Sufi Center. [Google Scholar], p. 52).

The alchemists spoke of sacredness in matter—that is, of the presence of God or the creator
within the world of creation. Everything has the light within it. The feminine knows how to blow
on this spark in matter. We encounter it in nature, stories, music, art, caring for others, loving
kindness, listening, quietude, prayer, dance, creative expression, relationships, seeds, growing
and cooking food, and dream images.

The feminine, as Jung described it, is the principle of relatedness. It makes possible our dawning
awareness that we are all one. Here, boundaries between masculine and feminine are softened. A
new paradigm of partnership and mutuality becomes a universal reality, which is what we need in
this time of global change. Diane sees her love relationship as an example of a “new paradigm of
partnership and mutuality”:

My loving a woman not only has individual meaning. It is also in keeping with a cultural process
of healing the feminine. For me, this meaning behind loving a woman is found in recognizing the
transformative power of what Jung termed eros, which you might say is love. Eros, he said, is
“psychic relatedness” and is the domain of the feminine. The masculine domain is logos,
“objective interest.” Both eros and logos are needed, yet it is eros that he called the “great binder
and loosener” (Jung, 1928/1970, par. 254–255). It is eros that holds the capacity to evolve
humanity.

Culturally, women who are conscious of themselves and who live the truth of eros—their
interconnectedness with all of life—can change the structure of consciousness. To the extent that
women can access their feelings and intuitions, live the truth of the heart, to this extent
humankind is loosened up from old ideas and will evolve. For Diane,

Two women who live as loving partners, tuned into the psyche, do this in a unique way. Thus, to
be a woman loving a woman gives me deep meaning. It goes beyond personal fulfillment. It feels
like I am cherishing and stewarding the substance of eros, which is needed to evolve human
consciousness. Ultimately, eros is the passion that takes us to God, that quickens the journey of
the soul back to its source.

Diane believes that gays and lesbians embody a quality of love that is unique and helpful to the
evolution of consciousness:

By coming out and choosing to validate our human love, those of us who live as gay and lesbian
pay a social price, but we develop an inner strength to live according to our divine nature. By
going within to heal our shame and resentments, we have the potential to find something sacred
within ourselves. We can become models for a deepening of the heart, for more tenderness and
joy, and for a greater acceptance and tolerance of diversity. It's a process we have to go through:
to marry the opposites of masculine and feminine within us. Then a real balance between yin and
yang occurs. A new Self-acceptance is born in each of us, grounding us in the core of our being.
All of this is foundational to experiencing real love. If we don't get caught up in trying to
conform to heterosexual life, and if we go through this process of integration, I think that we can
bring a wellspring of creativity and power that will help to realize a shift in collective
consciousness.

During the period that Diane and I had these conversations, Americans witnessed the worst mass
shooting in our country's history. The killer targeted people having fun at a gay nightclub in
Orlando, Florida. He was influenced by a religious ideology that condemned homosexuals. In the
aftermath, there was an outpouring of love for the victims and the LGBT community. However,
the hatred was also evident. A Christian pastor lauded the killing from his pulpit, saying that
homosexuals do deserve to die, and the more the better. Churches refused to hold funeral services
for some of the victims because they were gay. As Diane experienced growing up, the message of
religion to gays and lesbians has often been this: “Your way of loving is sinful. You are not
allowed here.” Yet, for Diane, this oppression is not a dead-end but a doorway:

Gays and lesbians are among those helping to herald in the feminine values of the heart. After the
Orlando shooting, for example, one sees how the feeling values of love and compassion are
coming to the fore at this time in history as a compensation to the savage laws of a patriarchal
society. The recovery of feminine values is the key to the transformation of our world culture.
This key can unlock the unconscious bondage to the regulations of patriarchy that are rooted in
willful separation from the earth and nature and from one another. Gays and lesbians have a
function to register this cruelty that stems from separation. Many have been banished from
families and churches. Expelled, they have had to learn to forge their own communities of love
and make a connection with the divine feminine who weaves, connects, heals, and creates. As the
slogan that came out of Orlando goes, “Love, not hate.”

As Diane speaks, I remember. Throughout history, the oppressed of society have often born the
burden of truth-telling and the vision of renewal. Society doesn't always appreciate a fresh
perspective. In our own time, the gay issue is fraught with ideological fervor on both sides. How
to expand beyond these narrow frames to envision the significance of sexual orientation for
individuation? Its place in the evolution of consciousness itself?

A fresh perspective comes from listening to the soul. In Diane's story, I encounter a person who
has honored her soul to a rare degree. It's not an opinion she gives. It's not an agenda she pushes.
It is, simply, her journey of individuation, offered here to the collective. I believe her journey
reveals the power of love to heal the pain of separation, to live the truth of our wholeness, and to
trust the gift of our oneness in all of its purposeful diversity.

Notes
1 This Zen koan is the title of a book by Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Face Before I
Was Born: A Spiritual Autobiography (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2009a Vaughan-Lee,
L. (2009a). The face before I was born: A spritual autobiography. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi
Center. [Google Scholar]). He has specialized in the area of dream work, integrating the ancient
Sufi approach to dreams with the insights of Jungian psychology.

FURTHER READING
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[Google Scholar]

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[Google Scholar]

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[Google Scholar]

 Vol. 6. Psychological types. (1921/1976)

[Google Scholar]

 Vol. 7. Two essays in analytical psychology. (1917/1966)

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[Google Scholar]

 Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W., Martin, C. (1948). Sexual behaviour in the human male.
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[Google Scholar]

 Mills, R. (1999). The soul's remembrance. Seattle, WA: Onjinjinkta Publishing.

[Google Scholar]

 Savic, I., & Lindstrom, P. (2008). PET and MRI show difference in cerebral asymmetry
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[Crossref]

[Google Scholar]

 Soh, D. (2017). Cross-cultural evidence for the genetics of homosexuality. Scientific

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[Crossref]

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 Vaughan-Lee, L. (1999). Love and longing: The feminine mysteries of love. Personal
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[Google Scholar]

 Vaughan-Lee, L. (2006). Awakening the world: A global dimension to spiritual practice.

Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center.

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 Vaughan-Lee, L. (2009a). The face before I was born: A spritual autobiography.

Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center.

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 Vaughan-Lee, L. (2009b). The return of the feminine and the world soul. Inverness, CA:
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 von Bingen, H. (1990). Scivias. Mother Columba Hart & J. Bishop (Trans.). New York:
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Additional information
Author information

Diane Eller-Boyko

Diane Eller-Boyko, R.N., L.C.S.W., is a certified Jungian analyst with a private practice in
Redlands, California.

Fran Grace

Fran Grace, Ph.D., serves as Professor of Religious Studies and Steward of the Meditation Room
program at the University of Redlands.