Compromise and concealing our true selves - the story of the Selkies

In these monthly reflective blogs I take a look at life through a Jungian lens. Carl Jung studied many cultures through their stories and myths to see if any archetypes (characters) transcended through them; he found that across them all we share very similar archetypes, their traits and their journeys. We have a collective ancient wisdom that has guided us for generations - this is our shared inheritance. I explore how we can use these to help us navigate our contemporary world.

I spent a week this summer on the Isle of Skye, where water, sea and land merge and the boundaries between all three seem less settled, shifting with the weather and the tides. The sense of uneasy, but beautiful, boundaries put me in mind of the stories of Selkies that are found throughout coastal Scottish communities (and Irish and Scandinavian ones). Seal-women who are able to shape-shift into human form by shedding their seal skins.

The stories repeat like a paisley pattern across the Scottish coast; sometimes the woman falls in love with a fisherman, sometimes she is tricked into marriage. Almost always she rediscovers the seal skin that has been hidden from her and returns to the sea. In the versions recreated for children she visits her family every year, but in the less edited versions she is never seen again, or is spied at a distance, looking on.

When we take a Jungian approach to exploring stories we quite often think about who we are in the stories and who the other characters are, but sat on Skye remembering these Selkie stories, I was struck by how different parts of our own selves can complete the cast of this tale.

For many of us, there will be real resonance in that complicated tale of compromise, trying to keep a part of yourself hidden away and then re-finding it. Watching the sun set over the Outer Hebrides, suspended somewhere between the water and the sky as light sank into sea, the theme of having a place in two worlds – one foot in sea and one onshore as Shakespeare wrote – felt close. Those desperately difficult choices we face throughout life – to take up our own skin, but walk away from other things we love – are all there in this simple tale, repeated again and again all over the coastal communities of Scotland.

It left me with questions, which I will share with you. What is the seal-skin that you have hidden from yourself? What is a part of you that you have concealed in order to live on land? If we lean into that idea that we are playing all the parts in this story – why did you hide it? What are you – in the role of the husband hiding that key to freedom – frightened of? What do you stand to lose? And, because fairy tales are not full of simple happy endings – what do you love that you have to walk away from?

Perhaps my favourite character who occasionally crops up in the retellings of this story is the daughter who sees where her father has hidden her mother’s seal skin, and tells her, mother where to find it, knowing that she may lose her mother through the same act with which she frees her. Is there a part of you brave enough to help another part to freedom, knowing that something will be lost as well as found in such an exchange?

These are not easy questions. But sitting in the land that brought forth the story that asks them, watching the constant exchange and change between land, sea and sky, I know that the best answers don’t come from the easiest questions.

Hello! I’m Katie, the author of the blogs and an executive and leadership coach. I specialise in psychodynamic coaching using a Jungian approach, as well as person-centred coaching. You can find out more at https://yellowrattle-coaching.com/