As always, the purpose is not to defeat the complex but to slowly transform it into a valuable quality. In the case of jealousy, the good part might be effective dependency that does not hurt you. But it could take a long time to transform raw jealousy into gracious vulnerability. And the complex may never go away completely but rather remain as a source of further deepening. A young man recently told me about his helping complex. He lives in San Francisco and walks the streets almost every day. If he has money in his pocket, he canāt help giving it all away to people on the street begging. Sometimes, to avoid the problem, he does not bring money with him. The man has a helping complex that arrives when he encounters someone in need. He canāt not help, even though heās giving away money he needs. This complex is especially difficult because his action looks like a good deed. As is always the case, a therapist has to be careful not to get caught in the apparent virtuousness of the behavior. Is it not always good to give money to the poor? What should his therapist do? Donāt tell the man he has to take care of himself and ignore people who want money from him. Trying to will the complex away only makes matters worse. Suppressing the complex often looks benign, but itās really a heroic attack on this fragment of psyche. Anyway, plain willpower is no match for it. A complex may have roots that dig deep into the psyche. You canāt just extract it. Instead, you could see this āproblemā as an opportunity for this manās life to expand. You might ask him to tell you in detail what happens when he feels compelled to give away his money. Just to describe the problem in general terms is not enough. You need a narrative, images, details. When you hear the full story, you may notice certain subthemes worth pointing out and discussing. The clue to a complex may be something small and easily overlooked. Thatās why you have to be sharp and catch tiny clues hidden to an ordinary eye. Suppose you were to ask this man what happens when a street person approaches him. He says, āI feel like Iām privileged and donāt deserve to have money in my pocket.ā You ask where that idea came from. āFrom the nuns at school. They taught me that itās good to be poor and bad to have money.ā You say, āBut you donāt have much money.ā āIt makes no difference. Compared to the man on the street, Iām wealthy.ā So here we have material for conversation, and the therapist can take this material deeper by deftly steering the discussion. For one thing, childhood is in play. He mentioned the nuns at school. And we just discussed the child archetype in some depth. Maybe this man has to develop a more adult attitude toward money and replace his childhood story with a more mature one. Religion also plays a role with its moral demands. They can last a lifetime. He may also need some spiritual maturing, an assessment of values he picked up from nuns when he was a child. This could be a project in itself. So we have rich material for opening up this personās money complex and his need to help. There is no single-statement solution, but the narratives that could emerge, added to a dream or two, should be enough to make progress with the symptom. A complex does not puff up and blow away, it unravels, showing what is inside it and giving you material to work with.