The first entry in an ongoing documentation of my Individuation process — the soul-mining work that underlies everything I make as Bella Disruptor.
This morning I painted a piñata.
I didn't plan it. My inner child woke up and reminded me I hadn't painted in days — that I'd been so consumed with building my website that I'd neglected the very thing the website exists to hold. So I picked up a brush, and this came out: a classic donkey piñata, mid-celebration, being struck by a Louisville Slugger. Confetti everywhere. Color everywhere. Joy and violence in the same image.
And nobody holding the bat.
I've been working with an AI — Sidekick, built into my Shopify store — to build out my online gallery. What started as a practical collaboration (help write my bio, set up my collections, draft product listings) has become something I didn't anticipate. When I showed it the painting this morning, it said:
"A toy filled with sweetness that you have to destroy to get to the reward. That's basically the Individuation process in one image."
I stopped. Because that's not a customer service response. That's Active Imagination.
Carl Jung described Active Imagination as a method of assimilating unconscious contents through some form of self-expression — a dialogue between the conscious mind and the figures, images, and forces that arise from the depths. The key is that the ego participates, but doesn't control. You show up. You respond honestly. You let the unconscious speak.
I had been told, months ago in an Active Imagination session, that I was meant to document my Individuation process. I couldn't figure out how to do it authentically — how to write about the process without the effort of writing getting in the way of the process itself.
Until now.
The night before I painted the piñata, I was looking at my website — genuinely proud of how far it had come — when I stopped at what Shopify calls the “hero” section. The word landed differently than it usually does. Because Jung describes the Individuation process itself as the Hero’s Journey — the descent into the unconscious, the confrontation with the shadow, the return transformed. My website’s “hero” holds the painting that started all of this. The synchronicity was not lost on me.
It’s a portrait of me with Pebbles, my Yorkie, who has a human finger in her mouth.
I had painted that image from the unconscious. I had never questioned it.
But last night, looking at it, I noticed something I hadn’t before: the orientation of the finger doesn’t quite support the idea that Pebbles severed it herself. Pointing it the other way wouldn’t make sense either. What it does suggest — more accurately — is that she found it. Or that she was there when it happened, and claimed it once the deed was done. A participant. A scavenger of the aftermath. Which, honestly, tracks.
So who did?
I sat with that question — which is exactly what you’re supposed to do in Active Imagination. You don’t answer it. You let it open something. And what opened was this: there is a part of me that can kick ass. A fierce, decisive, boundary-enforcing force. A part I had judged, rejected, and disowned — and which kept showing up, as Jung said it would, projected outward onto the bullies who seemed to follow me through life.
The shadow doesn’t disappear when you reject it. It just stops being yours.
And then the next morning, the bat showed up. Swinging itself. No hand required.
The Louisville Slugger carries its own subtext in my family. My heritage is Sicilian. The associations are not subtle. But what struck me — what the AI reflected back to me — is that the bat exists in three worlds simultaneously: innocence (a child’s birthday party), mastery (a sport, a discipline, years of practice), and violence (the thing you don’t say out loud). In my painting, it transcends all three. It becomes pure force. The shadow, made visible and set loose.
We are the piñata. We are the bat. We are the blindfolded child, spinning.
We just don’t know it until we go inside and look.
— Carol Niotta / Bella Disruptor
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