Speaker 1: The self is the natural instinctual motive towards homeless and
Speaker 1: towards development and to the egos dismay. Part of the
Speaker 1: development includes, of course aging immortality as well. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized
Speaker 1: the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true,
Speaker 1: and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direct,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is James Hollis, an American
Speaker 1: young and psychologist. He's the author of sixteen books and
Speaker 1: a public speaker. James also has a private analytic practice
Speaker 1: and is the executive director of the Young Educational Center. Today,
Speaker 1: Jim and Eric discuss his book, Living Between Worlds, Finding
Speaker 1: Personal Resilience in Changing Times. Hi Jim, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you. Eric.
Speaker 1: I am really happy to have you on. We're going
Speaker 1: to be discussing your book, Living Between Worlds, Finding Personal
Speaker 1: Resilience in Changing Times. But let's start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. And in the Parable, there's a grandfather
Speaker 1: who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Well. I think we confront
Speaker 1: that kind of paradox in our personal lives and in
Speaker 1: our national lives at every single moment, and that is
Speaker 1: the presence of our full humanity. We'd like to think
Speaker 1: we are always feeding a good wolf, but the bad
Speaker 1: wolf is always there, and it's often operating in the unconscious.
Speaker 1: And of course the problem with the unconscious, it's unconscious,
Speaker 1: so we're not aware of what our our motives often are,
Speaker 1: what agenda we're really in service. I've often said, the
Speaker 1: folks who are trying to make decisions or trying to
Speaker 1: figure out why a certain pattern emerged in life, when
Speaker 1: you stop and work it through and keep working it
Speaker 1: backwards and asking questions, what was this choice or this
Speaker 1: behavior really in service too inside of you? And at
Speaker 1: first we may not know, or we may have a
Speaker 1: quick rationalization. But the more we ask that question, the
Speaker 1: more it begins to unfold and we begin to realize
Speaker 1: they're often other agendas and other motives that I just
Speaker 1: mentioned operating within us at all times. And this this
Speaker 1: is sort of what you meant by the idea of
Speaker 1: the shadow. We identify with our conscious life, but it's
Speaker 1: what's going on in the unconscious. None of us is
Speaker 1: an exempt from human nature, none of us is the
Speaker 1: exam from the whole human project. So both wolves are
Speaker 1: present at all times. I love that idea that both
Speaker 1: wolves are present. You are a practitioner of something known
Speaker 1: as depth psychology, and I was wondering if you could
Speaker 1: share with us just a little bit about the difference
Speaker 1: between depth psychology and some other forms of psychology. Are sure,
Speaker 1: most psychology focuses upon our behaviors, and it's understandable or
Speaker 1: the thought process by which we've got to those behaviors,
Speaker 1: and that's useful as well. But as I just mentioned,
Speaker 1: there's a vast see we call the unconscious, which is
Speaker 1: present in all of our choices, our behaviors, and our
Speaker 1: reactions to people. And so in depth psychology we try
Speaker 1: to engage the unconscious, which is by definition very difficult
Speaker 1: to do. So we pay attention to our dreams, for example,
Speaker 1: we pay attention to our symptomatology. I was recently in
Speaker 1: the hospital and a nurse was asking what I did,
Speaker 1: and she asked the same question you asked, and I said,
Speaker 1: we tried to work with the unconscious, and she really
Speaker 1: she sort of furrowed her brow and she says, oh,
Speaker 1: I get it. You work with people in comas. Huh No,
Speaker 1: not quite or maybe once in a while. But we
Speaker 1: try to pay attention to what is not evidence as
Speaker 1: as I said, we're offered in service to the shadow government,
Speaker 1: whether we oh it at the time or not. In
Speaker 1: depth psychology. Rather than say how quickly do I get
Speaker 1: rid of my suffering the internal discord, we asked why
Speaker 1: has it come? What's it about? What is it asking
Speaker 1: of me? What sort of accountability do I need to
Speaker 1: exercise in order to address this? And that's a whole
Speaker 1: different kind of agenda. There are places where altering our
Speaker 1: behaviors and some of our thought processes are useful, for sure,
Speaker 1: and all the therapists I know employ those techniques. But
Speaker 1: there comes a point where you have to say, there's
Speaker 1: another sort of autonomous energy within us, and among other things,
Speaker 1: it creates our psychopathology. In other words, no one comes
Speaker 1: into my office who was just in the neighborhood and
Speaker 1: wanted to have a chat. They're there because their previous
Speaker 1: mode of sort of dealing with their dilemmas have worked
Speaker 1: very well, and so they're looking for some alternative, maybe
Speaker 1: a quick solution perhaps, but it doesn't quite work that way.
Speaker 1: And so we we say, all right, what why is
Speaker 1: it that your syching has autonomously withdrawn its approval and
Speaker 1: support from where you'd like to to invest things, and
Speaker 1: and that begins a kind of dialogue with one's own depths.
Speaker 1: And that's why we talked about it as depth psychology.
Speaker 1: And so what are some of the ways we can
Speaker 1: begin to wade into these depths? They're not obviously apparent.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you say in the book
Speaker 1: is that it's often not about what it seems to
Speaker 1: be about. So what are some of the ways that
Speaker 1: we start to listen to our own psyche more effectively. Well,
Speaker 1: the first place to look, I would say, because we
Speaker 1: have to look at what is available to consciousness, is
Speaker 1: look at those patterns in your life which you find
Speaker 1: keep showing up even if you change your outer relationships
Speaker 1: or your geography. There are certain sorts of familiar places
Speaker 1: that you go to so frequently, particularly those places that
Speaker 1: you find injurious to your well being or perhaps even
Speaker 1: harmful to others. And then say, all right, everything I
Speaker 1: do is a logical expression of something at work in
Speaker 1: my psyche. The question then is could I work backwards
Speaker 1: to be able to see what's going on there? What
Speaker 1: produced that behavior? And even when I thought I was
Speaker 1: doing the right thing, again, where is that coming from?
Speaker 1: In me, I might be doing a good thing as
Speaker 1: I believe it to be. For example, we all developed
Speaker 1: patterns of conflict avoidance. That's understandable. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: there are times if we're going to be a person
Speaker 1: of value, we have to be willing to sort of
Speaker 1: stand for that and be present to whatever heat it
Speaker 1: brings back upon us. And you begin to look at, well,
Speaker 1: all those patterns of avoidance, and do I not find
Speaker 1: their roots in the long ago and far away in
Speaker 1: my childhood adaptations to the circumstances around me. We start
Speaker 1: trying to look at those patterns as rising out of
Speaker 1: the stories that we have working intrapsychically. And I put
Speaker 1: stories of quotes here, stories that in a sense are
Speaker 1: our understandings at the time that we provide as a
Speaker 1: way of trying to understand what's going on. So every child,
Speaker 1: for example, is reading his family of origin or or
Speaker 1: reading the world around her and coming up with stories,
Speaker 1: who are you? Who am I? What am I supposed
Speaker 1: to do here? What am I not supposed to do here?
Speaker 1: We carry those stories with us. That's another way of
Speaker 1: talking about complexes. We have complexes because we have history,
Speaker 1: and some of our complexes are useful and helpful. In
Speaker 1: other words, if you hadn't had some positive bonding experiences
Speaker 1: in your childhood, you wouldn't be able to form intimate
Speaker 1: relationships today. But on the other hand, you will find
Speaker 1: so many of those complexes operated autonomously pull us out
Speaker 1: of this moment and take us back to another time
Speaker 1: and place. We also have dreams. I'm now eight years old,
Speaker 1: and sleep research has told this, if you get to
Speaker 1: eighty years old, six entire years of your life will
Speaker 1: been spent dreaming. As extraordinary. I'm astonished by it repeatedly.
Speaker 1: Nature does not waste energy. It's obviously serving some purpose.
Speaker 1: And I think that part of what our dreams represent
Speaker 1: for us is part of the self regulatory dimensions of
Speaker 1: the psyche. In any given day, we receive so many
Speaker 1: stimuli that we're not able to absorb them a metabolize,
Speaker 1: and that's what we have to go to bed to
Speaker 1: sort of process that, whether we're paying attention or not.
Speaker 1: But also over time, if we begin to pay attention,
Speaker 1: we realize, okay, there's some kind of intelligence here. It
Speaker 1: pays little attention to my conscious desires and is trying
Speaker 1: to form some sort of responses to my life. It's
Speaker 1: a commentary. And if I pay attention that commentary and
Speaker 1: I start dialoguing with that, then I began to realize
Speaker 1: that the center of gravity shifts from simply being in
Speaker 1: response to the stimuli of the world outside of us,
Speaker 1: which will hit the same old buttons and produce the
Speaker 1: same old behaviors. I start finding some encounter with a
Speaker 1: more personal authority. The biggest project of the second half
Speaker 1: of life is really the recovery of personal authority to
Speaker 1: sort through that traffic and say, all right, of all
Speaker 1: the many voices that I have within me, which ones
Speaker 1: are coming from my own depths, which are from my
Speaker 1: family of origin, which represent the traffic that we're exposed
Speaker 1: to all the time, And can I find a courage
Speaker 1: to live those And if I do, you'll find your
Speaker 1: site views supporting you. And there other techniques that we
Speaker 1: use too. Began to undertake a dialogue. And this is
Speaker 1: not me. I just add, this is not narcissism, This
Speaker 1: is not self absorption. It actually the ultimate accountability, because
Speaker 1: it's obliging us to really address what's going on inside
Speaker 1: of me. And to the degree I don't attempt that
Speaker 1: interrogation to that degree, most of my behaviors out there
Speaker 1: in the world will either be conditioned responses or we'll
Speaker 1: be coming from that wolf you are describing my shadow government,
Speaker 1: and we all have one. So we have these unconscious
Speaker 1: processes that you're saying, these these depths within us. Uh.
Speaker 1: You often use the word autonomous processes, so it sounds
Speaker 1: like there's a variety of different things that are moving
Speaker 1: beneath the surface, for lack of a better word. There's
Speaker 1: these different things that are moving beneath the surface, and
Speaker 1: then there's this sort of conscious sense of eye. Help
Speaker 1: me understand a little bit from your perspective, who I am?
Speaker 1: Am I involved in those depth processes as part of
Speaker 1: me down there in the death ups is part of
Speaker 1: me here on the surface. How do you sort of
Speaker 1: come up and talk about the sense of eye or
Speaker 1: that part of me that's real? Well, all of it's
Speaker 1: real if you if you think about it, every aspect
Speaker 1: of it is part of who you are. But of
Speaker 1: course the egos that part of this that thinks about
Speaker 1: the eye, as you just said, it's who I think
Speaker 1: I am at any given moment. Years ago, I had
Speaker 1: a client who was trying to get her husband into
Speaker 1: therapy and he kept resistant by saying, well, I know
Speaker 1: what I think. Well, it's what he doesn't know that
Speaker 1: he thinks, or what is thinking him unconsciously is where
Speaker 1: the problem is coming from. So the conscious eye is
Speaker 1: what we call the ego, and it's very important because
Speaker 1: it interfaces with the outer world. It's my ego that stops,
Speaker 1: it stops signs, my ego that gets to work on
Speaker 1: two him. It's a necessary function that's an adaptation to
Speaker 1: the outer world. It's also that same ego that is
Speaker 1: in charge of making choices. Therefore, it's an agent of
Speaker 1: my moral system, what choices I make in this world.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the ego can easily be possessed
Speaker 1: and often is. So I think of the ego as
Speaker 1: a kind of tiny disk floating on a large iridescent
Speaker 1: ocean that we call the soul the unconscious, and it's
Speaker 1: an important disc it's it's the boat that we're in consciously.
Speaker 1: So it will help us get to our directions in mind.
Speaker 1: But it's foolish to think that it's in charge of
Speaker 1: the ocean. What it has to do, as just as
Speaker 1: we have a conversation with the external world, we have
Speaker 1: to have one of the internal worlds, and to the
Speaker 1: degree I don't have that conversation. As I mentioned, the
Speaker 1: behaviors and motivations and agendas will be coming out of
Speaker 1: the unconscious. So one of the things that Young said
Speaker 1: and you quoted in this book is that within us
Speaker 1: there's a sort of a deep these are your words,
Speaker 1: a deep resilience guided by some locusts of knowing, independent
Speaker 1: of ego consciousness, a center that produces our dreams to
Speaker 1: correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like, in addition to all these autonomous processes,
Speaker 1: is there a process that is more truly us. Yes,
Speaker 1: what you are just describing is what you call the
Speaker 1: self with a capital S. And the self is often
Speaker 1: confused with the ego. See again, the ego is simply
Speaker 1: a cluster of energy. This case, I'm talking to that
Speaker 1: cluster eric identifies as eric um. But there's the totality
Speaker 1: of the human psyche at work. It involves your body,
Speaker 1: it involves your feeling function, it involves the life of
Speaker 1: the spirit, it involves all these autonomous processes that are
Speaker 1: keeping the whole system going, and it has the purposefulness
Speaker 1: of nature. We are animals in nature, and included in
Speaker 1: that nature is the fact, for example, that we're all
Speaker 1: mort And so the ego says, hey, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I'm not impressed with that idea. I'd rather change that
Speaker 1: if I may. But you see, that's part of the
Speaker 1: nature and naturing, and that's how we get separated from
Speaker 1: the essential nature of our own nature. And so the
Speaker 1: self is essentially that guiding instinct, that guiding energy that
Speaker 1: tries to heal your wounds, that tries to make correctives.
Speaker 1: It presents this with the feeling function. You know, you
Speaker 1: don't choose your feelings. The feelings are qualitative analyzes of
Speaker 1: how things have happened. But we learned along the way
Speaker 1: to repress our feelings, ignore them, doesn't you know. It
Speaker 1: creates our dreams, it creates our symptoms. You know, many
Speaker 1: times it's the revolt of the self that has brought
Speaker 1: people into this kind of conversation where a person has
Speaker 1: to pull out and say, what's going on here? How
Speaker 1: did I wind up in this place in my life?
Speaker 1: That sort of thing. So the self is the not
Speaker 1: true instinctual motive towards homeleness and towards development and to
Speaker 1: the egos dismay. Part of that development includes of course
Speaker 1: aging immortality as well. But again we are the ones
Speaker 1: with the standpoint of the ego only that is in
Speaker 1: contradiction to nature by trying to run from there to
Speaker 1: deny that. But nature is at all times working its
Speaker 1: way through us. Here at the one you feed, we
Speaker 1: explore ways that we feed our good wolf. That is
Speaker 1: to say, how can we build up our strength, resilience,
Speaker 1: and sense of well being so that when life's challenge
Speaker 1: is both big and small come our way, we aren't
Speaker 1: completely demolished. In fact, we're able to grow because of them,
Speaker 1: and even when life's not turbulent, we can experience deeper
Speaker 1: levels of joy and awe and appreciation moment to moment.
Speaker 1: The Spiritual Habits program takes that quest one step further
Speaker 1: by applying principles of behavior change to core spiritual principles.
Speaker 1: We create a set of spiritual habits to weave into
Speaker 1: our daily lives so that we can experience the gifts
Speaker 1: of spirituality and even more profound and personal ways. I
Speaker 1: just finished the one on one Spiritual Habits program with
Speaker 1: my client Robin, and here's what she had to say
Speaker 1: about it. So now that I've finished the Spiritual Habits Coresum,
Speaker 1: reflecting on the skills and benefits that it brought to me,
Speaker 1: and I'm really happy with the things that I gained
Speaker 1: from having taken it and participated in this with Eric.
Speaker 1: I feel a lot better equipped to handle the bumps
Speaker 1: I encounter on a daily basis that are part of life.
Speaker 1: I think for a long time I had this view
Speaker 1: that life is supposed to reach an equilibrium or homeostasis
Speaker 1: and take a lot less effort from that point forward.
Speaker 1: And I've realized that the bumps and sort of jostles
Speaker 1: and jiggles that are part of everyday life are normal,
Speaker 1: and I'm a lot less exhausted by them. So I
Speaker 1: have a more balanced approach and perspective on things that
Speaker 1: come my way, and I see myself as being a
Speaker 1: lot more capable to handle what life throws at me
Speaker 1: with all the changes that are normal. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to learn more about the program and see if it
Speaker 1: might be right for you, go to one you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash talk and book a free thirty minute,
Speaker 1: absolutely no pressure call with me. That's when you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash talk, and that's exactly what we'll do
Speaker 1: we will just talk and see if the program is
Speaker 1: a good fit for you, whether it might be helpful
Speaker 1: to you, and we'll get to know each other. So
Speaker 1: I really look forward to meeting you. When you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash talk. One of the things that you
Speaker 1: talk about is that there's often you refer to them
Speaker 1: as passages or in between states. Right. That's part of
Speaker 1: the title of the book, Living Between Worlds, Finding personal
Speaker 1: Resilience in changing Times. We can talk about changing times externally,
Speaker 1: but also it sounds like there's changing times inside of us,
Speaker 1: sort of passage, which is sort of maybe something old
Speaker 1: is dying and something new is not yet been born again. Yes,
Speaker 1: when I first returned about forty five years ago from
Speaker 1: my training in Zurich at the Young Institute to the
Speaker 1: United States, and I started seeing many different people with
Speaker 1: different backgrounds, different presenting issues, different histories. One thing was
Speaker 1: in common to each of them, and that was their roadmap,
Speaker 1: which may or may not have worked well. Theretofore was
Speaker 1: presently no longer applicable to the territory in which they
Speaker 1: found themselves, their understanding of themselves, what their agenda was,
Speaker 1: or in some cases they had done what they thought
Speaker 1: they were supposed to do what life and what society
Speaker 1: asks of them, but inside it was never feeling rights
Speaker 1: or it produces a depression or something of that sort.
Speaker 1: And then I realized, all right, that's what a passage is.
Speaker 1: Something has died, something has played out, and we're in
Speaker 1: that difficulty in between. And that's where some some energy
Speaker 1: and some you know, developmental stage or self some sort
Speaker 1: of strategy of life as grown exhausted, and we have
Speaker 1: to puld attention to that in between. A lot of
Speaker 1: folks have been placed into that during our plague times
Speaker 1: that we're all going through and around this world, where
Speaker 1: they began to realize a lot of their usual distractions,
Speaker 1: their friends, their families, their outer activities, even there office space. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, so much of that was carrying a provisional
Speaker 1: sense of self. And if that was not available to
Speaker 1: them in some way, then you know, all of that
Speaker 1: unfinished business and all that's the life projected out there.
Speaker 1: King sort of rushing back as confusion, dismay, and course
Speaker 1: sometimes said depression. None of us know until we're obliged
Speaker 1: to go through something. Is there something in our nature
Speaker 1: that will always rise to the surface if if we
Speaker 1: hold that tension and stick with it. You don't put
Speaker 1: it so succinctly once he said, we need to know
Speaker 1: what supports us when nothing supports us. And sooner or later,
Speaker 1: everybody in their life reaches a point where there understanding
Speaker 1: of things it just doesn't work anymore. And of course
Speaker 1: we begin by going back and trying to revivify the
Speaker 1: old understanding, but it just gets worse. So that's that's
Speaker 1: where the new will emerge. That's where the person will
Speaker 1: have to undergo a difficult passage, because there's always something
Speaker 1: wanting to renew itself, something that is wishing fuller expression.
Speaker 1: Just very briefly, the agenda of the first half of
Speaker 1: life is to gather enough ego strength to leave our parents,
Speaker 1: step out into the world, form relationships, find a career,
Speaker 1: become a citizen, etcetera. All useful and necessary. But then
Speaker 1: at the second half of life you have to say,
Speaker 1: and why am I still here? What's important for me now?
Speaker 1: And you know, just as the question of the first
Speaker 1: half is what is the world wanted me? Then then
Speaker 1: one has to ask a different kind of question for
Speaker 1: which most of us are not prepared, and that is
Speaker 1: what is the soul ask of me. When I use
Speaker 1: the word soul here, I'm just translating literally the Greek
Speaker 1: word psyche. That has to say, what is that depth
Speaker 1: within me asking of me now? And another way of
Speaker 1: putting at is what wants to enter the world through me? Say,
Speaker 1: that's that's a different question. It's not about how do
Speaker 1: I free myself from confidence? How do I free myself
Speaker 1: from distress? How do I reach that sun met where
Speaker 1: everything is resolved? Well, dream on that time never really comes.
Speaker 1: What we really have to say is is the life
Speaker 1: I'm living meaningful to me? And if it's not, why not?
Speaker 1: And if it's not changing and undertake whatever power one
Speaker 1: has to undertake to change it. And when we're living
Speaker 1: then in accord with the developing agenda of nature, then
Speaker 1: we will feel that support that's there. And the most elusive,
Speaker 1: but most important of all of the indications that rise
Speaker 1: from the depth of the soul is that inexplicable thing
Speaker 1: called meaning. If we think we find the right partner
Speaker 1: in life, where we earn enough money, we gain power
Speaker 1: over something, we're going to have a meaningful life. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people who have done that,
Speaker 1: but they haven't experienced what they thought they were experienced.
Speaker 1: Meaning is something that is a byproduct of being in
Speaker 1: right relationship with one's own soul. And you don't manufacture that.
Speaker 1: You submit to that. And that's quite different. When you
Speaker 1: say you don't manufacture that, you submit to it. Do
Speaker 1: you mean we don't manufacture the meaning. We submit to
Speaker 1: the meaning that is coming from deep within us right
Speaker 1: or submit to the rigor the difficulty, even the suffering
Speaker 1: that one must address in order to live more meaningfully. Now,
Speaker 1: for example, through the years, I've often had to sacrifice
Speaker 1: what I would consider a normal life and diversion. You know,
Speaker 1: at the end of a work day, I see people
Speaker 1: all day in therapy and in the evenings rather than
Speaker 1: you know, watch a movie or something. I've often written
Speaker 1: because things were wanting expression through me. I was never
Speaker 1: writing for money, I was never writing for anything else
Speaker 1: except to give voice to something that I felt was important.
Speaker 1: And I was seeing in my clients or myself in
Speaker 1: the course of the day and me of teaching and
Speaker 1: writing and being in therapy has always been a calling.
Speaker 1: It wasn't what I would have intended in childhood, but
Speaker 1: it was sort of what was intended in soul. And
Speaker 1: so I find myself privileged to have been able to
Speaker 1: in a sense submit to what was wishing expression through me,
Speaker 1: because I think all of us are some kind of
Speaker 1: experiment by nature, some sort of investment by nature. And
Speaker 1: the question is what is the nature word soul asking
Speaker 1: of us? And when we conserve that, you will find
Speaker 1: of that resilience that we've referenced, and you will find
Speaker 1: a deep sense of purposefulness in your life. And when
Speaker 1: you run from it or you simply submit yourself to
Speaker 1: your old stories, one has a fugitive life. It's not
Speaker 1: a crime to have fear. Everybody has fears. The pragmatic
Speaker 1: question is always and what do your fears make you do?
Speaker 1: What do your fears keep you from doing with your life?
Speaker 1: And and then you realize where you're summoned to accountability
Speaker 1: is you can't have your life governed by fear. You
Speaker 1: can't avoid them, but you can't be governed by it.
Speaker 1: And therefore you have to throw yourself into that breach
Speaker 1: and say, you know, I'm going to have to go
Speaker 1: through what I fear in order to express what is
Speaker 1: wanting expression through me in this world. And that's not
Speaker 1: something that is grandiose, it's actually humbling it's not something
Speaker 1: that is going to make me popular. It will often
Speaker 1: separate me pull and patterns from the past. But inwardly,
Speaker 1: there's that deep, deep sense of the rightness of our journey.
Speaker 1: And when we're doing that, we can feel it, we
Speaker 1: know the difference, and when we're not, there's something inside
Speaker 1: that sickens in, sours and produces nothing good in the world.
Speaker 1: So a question for you about symptoms, because according to
Speaker 1: your writings and depth psychology, the presence of symptoms, let's
Speaker 1: just pick a symptom in this case, depression is a
Speaker 1: natural expression of the psychea commentary on how our life
Speaker 1: is going from the soul's perspective. And I want to
Speaker 1: explore that a little bit more with you through my
Speaker 1: own life and my own times of depression, because I
Speaker 1: have had experiences where, yeah, depression was a manifestation of
Speaker 1: something was wrong in my life, me not living in
Speaker 1: a certain way, and I seem to have had the
Speaker 1: opposite of that, or maybe not the opposite, but I
Speaker 1: seem to have had a different circumstance. And that different
Speaker 1: circumstance is that I appear to get visited by depression
Speaker 1: even though my life appears to be again, I'm using
Speaker 1: the word appears to be the life I want, and
Speaker 1: I'm living the way I want to live based on
Speaker 1: what matters, and what seems to happen is that depression
Speaker 1: comes in and it suddenly turns things that are normally
Speaker 1: meaningful to me meaningless, and then it will pass, And
Speaker 1: when it passes, I will go back to what appears
Speaker 1: to me again to be my normal life. Where I go,
Speaker 1: here's the things I love. I love. I love making music,
Speaker 1: I love doing this work that I do. I love
Speaker 1: this person and I love that person. But while that depression,
Speaker 1: and that's a word I'm using for it, and I
Speaker 1: sometimes not even sure that's the right word to use
Speaker 1: for it. While it's there, it's sort of drains the
Speaker 1: meaning out of everything, even things. If I try and think, well,
Speaker 1: what else might matter? My brain just goes nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: the term I've heard is antedonia. Right, Things that normally
Speaker 1: provide me joy just get sucked out of joy. So
Speaker 1: is depression all always a expression of the psyche that
Speaker 1: something's wrong or there are other instances? Are there chemical
Speaker 1: changes that our brain goes through, or say a little
Speaker 1: bit more about kind of what I just said there, Well,
Speaker 1: of course, and you're actually right in your description. First
Speaker 1: of all, we have to say their depressions and their
Speaker 1: depressions that are driven by biological sources, and there are
Speaker 1: various forms of addressing that, including some medication. There are
Speaker 1: depressions that are reactive, depression to outer lawses. You know,
Speaker 1: if you have a critical loss in your life, you're
Speaker 1: not supposed to just sort of skip gaily alone. You're
Speaker 1: supposed to say, if there's a value there, I have
Speaker 1: to greet that, greet that laws, and it would be
Speaker 1: pathologically not to do that. But you're right. From time
Speaker 1: to time we're visited by those difficult and dark times,
Speaker 1: and they are in pain. We don't always know what
Speaker 1: they mean. But one of the things we always have
Speaker 1: to ask is is this depression asking some question of me?
Speaker 1: And you're right. Sometimes they come, and sometimes they abide
Speaker 1: for a long time, and sometimes they're fairly transient. So
Speaker 1: I think we often have what I would call pockets
Speaker 1: of depression. That is, say, well, just for example, when
Speaker 1: I stop and think about the suffering in the world,
Speaker 1: I think about injustice in the world, that occasion a
Speaker 1: pocket of depression, and I consider that part of my
Speaker 1: humanity that means I'm not indifferent to the terrible things
Speaker 1: that go on in this world. Um. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, UM, I also have to find what is
Speaker 1: my role here? What is my position here? How do
Speaker 1: I go about addressing that if I possibly can? And
Speaker 1: it's again and the autonomy of the psyche, and we
Speaker 1: don't always know the answer to those questions. Sometimes we
Speaker 1: just have to say, let me sit with it. I'm
Speaker 1: speaking in Montreal about a year ago, and a friend
Speaker 1: of mine up there who was with me and Zuri, said,
Speaker 1: you know, when we would experience depression in Zurig, and
Speaker 1: I think probably all of this did being away from
Speaker 1: family and another culture, another language, et cetera. Rather than
Speaker 1: have our analysts supervisors talked to us about five easy
Speaker 1: steps to do this or that, they'd say, you know,
Speaker 1: go back to your shabby apartment and sit with it
Speaker 1: until it reveals what it wants from you. Now, nobody
Speaker 1: wanted to hear that, but I think for all of
Speaker 1: us who stuck that out, that's how we began to
Speaker 1: also find new resources in our own psyche. And it's
Speaker 1: that kind of thing that often is calling for some
Speaker 1: substantial change in some key areas. I wouldn't even started
Speaker 1: on this whole profession and this whole discipline of depth
Speaker 1: psychology without myself in my early thirties getting a depression.
Speaker 1: I'd achieved everything that I wanted in my life, and
Speaker 1: I was happy with it. I was an academian and
Speaker 1: a lovely family. But I found myself as Dante did,
Speaker 1: in the dark wood mid life, and that's what sent
Speaker 1: me to my first hour, And little did I know
Speaker 1: it was going to be moving me in a new direction.
Speaker 1: I'm not talking here for actually as much as I'm
Speaker 1: talking about how so much of my life had been
Speaker 1: living in the head and not really in the feeling function.
Speaker 1: And this was the psyche's way of reaching up and
Speaker 1: pulling me down into that place. And I would never
Speaker 1: want to romanticize them and say that was easy or wistful.
Speaker 1: It was far from it. But I think it was
Speaker 1: a move towards healing something, and it was a move
Speaker 1: towards some greater illness. So sometimes, to tell you the truth,
Speaker 1: we have to sit with it, abide it, pay attention,
Speaker 1: be open to it, dialogue with it. And I came
Speaker 1: to realize, you know, in the course of my training,
Speaker 1: that's when I began to appreciate the role of dreams,
Speaker 1: and after a while I'd be realized hate. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some intelligence in me that knows more than I know,
Speaker 1: and it's trying to communicate with me. And it's always
Speaker 1: been speaking to me. And at times I had intimations
Speaker 1: of that, but other times I just shut it off.
Speaker 1: And so my had of tube toward that source of wisdom,
Speaker 1: natural wisdom that's inside of each of us slowly changed
Speaker 1: and modifying, and the ego became less resistant and I think,
Speaker 1: less imperial in its position and far more humble. Does
Speaker 1: this work doesn't make us feel terrific in terms of
Speaker 1: the ego. It's as you put it in his memoir Memories,
Speaker 1: Dreams Reflections. Well, here's another thing I found out about myself,
Speaker 1: and it felt like a defeat. Well, why would it
Speaker 1: be a defeat except that the ego had the fantasy
Speaker 1: that it was the bombs fact, had the fancy it
Speaker 1: was in charge of everything. Well it's not. It's one
Speaker 1: participant in a very large congress of voices, intracitically exactly.
Speaker 1: I was introduced to your work via a question, and
Speaker 1: I don't know if somebody paraphrased this question of yours
Speaker 1: or if it's an exact question of yours. But that's
Speaker 1: what got me introduced to your work, and since as
Speaker 1: I've explored different parts of your work, I think questions
Speaker 1: are a big part of your work. And so I
Speaker 1: want to start with this question because I think it's
Speaker 1: a brilliant question that has helped me many times. And
Speaker 1: then I'd like to ask, maybe what are some other
Speaker 1: questions that we can be asking ourselves if we want
Speaker 1: to say, hey, let me go a little deeper into
Speaker 1: what's happening with me. And the question that got me
Speaker 1: introduced to your work was does this path or this
Speaker 1: choice make me larger or smaller? Yes, well, we come
Speaker 1: to junctures in our lives where we don't know what
Speaker 1: to do, whether to change jobs, or change relationships or whatever,
Speaker 1: and asking a question is the first way to begin
Speaker 1: to explore what's really at stake for you intrapsychically. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe the new job that offers more money, better position,
Speaker 1: whatever is really fool's goal, that it would really take
Speaker 1: you away from something that really matters to you, how
Speaker 1: much you're gonna have to trade away of yourself or
Speaker 1: or many times you say, well your desire to hang
Speaker 1: onto the owl. Is is really your insecurity at work?
Speaker 1: And you're distrusting yourself? And then you ask the question,
Speaker 1: because intuitively we always know the answer to the question,
Speaker 1: will this enlarge me psychologically? Spiritually? Is this going to
Speaker 1: diminish me? If you don't know the answer to that,
Speaker 1: you keep asking that another important question of the places
Speaker 1: where we're stuck, and everybody has some stuck places in
Speaker 1: their life. Stunt places are always blocked by some archaic fear.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we can identify the superficial fear pretty easily, but
Speaker 1: you have to start probing and saying, but where is
Speaker 1: the wiring here that leads metaphorically into my basement? And
Speaker 1: there's an archaic fear. There's the fear of being out
Speaker 1: there by myself, being abandoned, being alone, or there's the
Speaker 1: fear that this is too large for me, it's going
Speaker 1: to overwhelm me. Where is that fear? Because that's what's
Speaker 1: keeping me stuck. And many times that fear is really phantasmal.
Speaker 1: You can work right through it because an adulge has
Speaker 1: grown up in the meantime, who can take that on
Speaker 1: Whatever was overwhelming or intimidating to the child but the
Speaker 1: stuck place will continue unless we address that other kind
Speaker 1: of question. We also always have to ask ourselves this
Speaker 1: basic question as well. As you've already suggested, what I'm
Speaker 1: doing may be productive, it may be applauded by people
Speaker 1: around me, but you know, does it bring me meaning?
Speaker 1: Do I find myself growing? And it's clearer to me
Speaker 1: the psyche has two agendas at all times. One is
Speaker 1: our growth and development and what is self healing? And
Speaker 1: both of those are going on at all times, and
Speaker 1: the growth and developing parts, when it's steinied, actually injures
Speaker 1: the second. It adds to the wounding of life rather
Speaker 1: than the healing of life. For very few people, if
Speaker 1: if any, do we hear in childhood you have to
Speaker 1: sort of in time figure out what's right for you
Speaker 1: and really live that. It's more commonly the message, how
Speaker 1: do you fit in? How do you meet the expectations
Speaker 1: of people around you? What are your parents expecting from you?
Speaker 1: Those are the kinds of questions that have that sort
Speaker 1: of archaic institutionalization inside of each omist that our own
Speaker 1: and the chief deterrence for our feeling a sense of
Speaker 1: permission and a sense of freedom to move forward and
Speaker 1: make changes in life because the nature of nature has changed,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. Our body is changing every second, our
Speaker 1: psyche is changing in every second, and here we are
Speaker 1: stuck in the same old, same world. Yep. I want
Speaker 1: to ask you one or two final questions. We're nearly
Speaker 1: out of time here, and I appreciate your time. My
Speaker 1: first question is related to dream work or maybe that's
Speaker 1: not even the term that you would use, or is it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good word, dreams dream work? Do we need
Speaker 1: to know what we are really doing in order to
Speaker 1: explore our dreams? And by that, do we need to
Speaker 1: understand what all the sim balls mean? Do we need
Speaker 1: help in someone else interpreting them for us? Or is
Speaker 1: it simply enough to turn our attention sort of inwards
Speaker 1: and say, you know what, Psyche, I'm going to start
Speaker 1: listening to you, and I'm going to start just taking
Speaker 1: what comes up to me in my dreams, and I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna start taking it with a little bit of seriousness,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to pay a little bit closer attention
Speaker 1: and see what emerges for me. First of all, sleep
Speaker 1: research has told us that you know, you don't even
Speaker 1: have to pay attention to dreams for them to serve
Speaker 1: a purpose. Laboratory circumstances where people have been allowed to
Speaker 1: sleep but not dream. After a while, they begin to hallucinate.
Speaker 1: So if that material has to be worked through in
Speaker 1: some way, whether you want to or not. And secondly,
Speaker 1: not everybody is or should be on therapy. I'm not
Speaker 1: recommending that to everybody. On the other hand, when you
Speaker 1: have dreams, the ego sort of on the one hand
Speaker 1: saying oh, I know why I dreamt that that was
Speaker 1: on the telly last night. No, the psyche has no
Speaker 1: obligation to talk about what you already know about. It's
Speaker 1: a scavenger that begs, borrows, and steels from conscious life
Speaker 1: and utilize these things and maybe pulls your teacher from
Speaker 1: thirty or forty years ago, from grade store or whatever.
Speaker 1: What associations do I have here? What emotional memories do
Speaker 1: I have with that person or this situation. It's patient work.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't expect it to come out like
Speaker 1: a telex. It just tells you to do this or
Speaker 1: do that. You begin to realize over time. Everybody has
Speaker 1: a symbolic system. The best interpreter of the dream is
Speaker 1: really the dreamer, because you and I could dream about
Speaker 1: our grandmother today, but we have different grandmothers. There's grandmother
Speaker 1: Linus and that that's a common experience that we have,
Speaker 1: or some other image of that sort. But then you
Speaker 1: have a particular set of emotional experiences that rose out
Speaker 1: of your relationship, if you had one with your grandmother,
Speaker 1: And then you began to say something there is being triggered.
Speaker 1: There's some kind of analog. That is to say, every
Speaker 1: moment in life is new, but the psyche is often
Speaker 1: bringing up the analogy. Something is happening today in my
Speaker 1: life that touches on this experience with that third grade
Speaker 1: teacher or the grandmother, or whatever the image is. And
Speaker 1: if I begin to say, where is the emotional links?
Speaker 1: Where is the symbolic link, then you begin to realize
Speaker 1: these things do have meaning. And there is this ongoing commentary.
Speaker 1: And I've I've seen people, for example, who said, oh,
Speaker 1: why do I having the same kind of dream, you know,
Speaker 1: repeating the same area. It's like, well, because these are
Speaker 1: your issues, your problems, when do you want someone else's problems,
Speaker 1: in which case you'd have their dreams. So our dreams
Speaker 1: often do have recurrent motifs and do have themes because
Speaker 1: after all, they're they're tracking the life and times of
Speaker 1: the single person when they do appear wonderful. Well, thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Jim for taking the time to come
Speaker 1: on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation live. About
Speaker 1: a hundred more questions I could ask, but we are
Speaker 1: at the end of our time, so all have links
Speaker 1: in the show notes to your books and to your website,
Speaker 1: and I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Eric. It's
Speaker 1: been a privilege to talk with you as well, and
Speaker 1: I appreciate your questions greatly, and I wish you well.
Speaker 1: Thank you, be well, bye bye. If what you just
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