Dr. James Hollis: How to Find Your True Purpose & Create Your Best Life

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr James Hollis Dr James Hollis is a jungian psychoanalyst and author of more than 17 books about the self relationships and how to create the best possible life some of the notable titles and topics of those books include creating a life finding your individual path as well as the Eden project in search of the magical other which as the name

suggests is about relationships he has also written about how to access our most resilient self in the book entitled living Between Worlds finding personal resilience in changing times during today's discussion Dr Hollis teaches us what questions we need to ask of ourselves on a regular basis in order to best understand who we really are and what we most Des desire at the level of vocation romantic relationships friendship and family and indeed in relationship to life's journey what you'll quickly realized during today's discussion with Dr Hollis is that while yes he is trained as a yian

psychoanalyst he is also very firmly grounded in Practical tools that is he teaches us the simple and yet practical tools that we can each and all apply on a daily basis in order to make sure that we are staying on our best path we discuss how family dynamics that we grew up in as well as trauma and attachment Styles combined with our unique gifts and indeed our shadow side as well in order to drive us down particular trajectories in life that sometimes lead us where we want to go but other times lead us astray and

when they do how to get back on track today's conversation with Dr Hollis is truly a special one in that he rarely does podcast appearances in fact we travel to him to record this podcast that's how motivated I was to be able to sit down with him because I'm familiar with his many books and his incredible teachings but I really wanted to get his knowledge collected in one format in one place and what I can promise you is that by the end of today's podcast you will be thinking differently about yourself about the people in

your life and indeed life itself before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is matina matina makes loose leaf and ready to drink ybba mate now I've long been a fan of yerbamate as a source of caffeine in part because of its high

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my discussion with Dr James Hollis Dr James Hollis such a honor and a pleasure to sit down with you I'm a huge fan of your writing and I'm excited to talk to you today thank you Andrew it's a privilege to be with you thank you let's talk about the self this is something that I think people occasionally wonder about you know who who am I we wake up every day we have some stable representation of who we are in our name most of the time and we develop a self a story MH based on what

we know about our parents our siblings our life from the perspective of yion psychology maybe psychology generally how should we think about ourselves well first of all the idea of the self with a capital S to distinguish it from the ego Consciousness that is to say my conscious presence as you and I are talking right now um is a Transcendent other it's a mystery it's um essentially governed by our instincts you know it's nature seeking its own expression and its own healing what I've seen in terms of the activity of the self through the years

it has two agendas one healing when injured and secondly expressing itself in the same way that the acorn becomes the oak tree so to speak um now the ego of course is that little cintilla of energy that we begins to Cluster we're born without an ego but then there's this sbl shards of experience between the the me and the not me that slowly accumulate almost in Tidal pools so that I begin to differentiate myself from the other my mother let's say or my father or the object that is there and you're right we are an

animal that seeks to understand as part of our adaptation to the world and so we are narrative animals we create stories about it and our stories rise out of what we're experiencing at the moment so you can see why a person bornn into a certain culture or a certain family of origin with its style of relating or disr as the case may be uh becomes the ground for defining that person's sense of self so it's important to distinguish between the self and one's sense of self the sense of self is who I think I am

in any given moment that's very fluid of course now we have all kinds of internal clusters of energy that are called complexes a ter that young ized and complexes are uh Splinter personalities he said so a person might say why did I get so upset yesterday what what came over me or I don't know what I was thinking when I made this important decision and that's our recognition that we were in an altered state at that moment that it that something within us had been triggered had sufficient energy to come up usurp ego Consciousness and

take it over actually the term that y used in in German meant possession it's a state of psychic possession temporarily you know we we joke that lovers are fools or lovers are blind so we know that people are in a certain they're caught in a certain projection onto the to the other and you know that ultimately gets um you know resolved into some sort of reality through time and and experience with that individual but in that state of being one senses that one's making the right decision and no one wakes in the morning and says

for example well today I think I'm going to do the same stupid counterproductive things I've done for decades but there's a good chance we will why because we have certain clusters of energy in us that are regularly triggered when triggered they catalyze a response in the ego that enacts that program so it affects our body it affects our our script and of course it affects our our per I of self and world so you know from the standpoint of of therapy one of the things we try to do is suggest to people you're not what

happened to you because one of our Tendencies is to internalize whatever is happening to us and thinking of that defines us of course the younger the more less formed we are uh the more we're likely to be defined by poverty or by disease or by alcoholism or or by sexism or or whatever the social constructs are into which we're born as well as the psychodynamics of the family of origin so in those circumstances uh we all have a provisional sense of self and if you have a culture that says this is who you are this

is what you're your your orders are your your marching orders here's your script and the more authoritarian the culture or or the more traumatic one's environmental situation and family of origin the more likely I'm going to be reacting to that so when I've had an experience I'm either going to repeat it or I'm going to try to run from it or maybe I'll be spending my life trying to treat it in some way that I'm not aware of um this activates many people into the healing professions by the way whether it's clergy nursing therapy etc

etc that that's often a sensitive child in the family who feels I have to try to stabilize my environment in order to uh so get things back to a a normal State whatever that might be so that then it can be there for me but of course that never quite happens you know a child can't fix a parent you see and so many people in the helping professions um are are driven there by a powerful internalized message which becomes their sense of self so it's a long-winded way of saying there's distinction between the self which

is the natural organic development of this organism you know as we're speaking it's growing our toenails digesting our breakfast mentating emoting and so forth most of that's autonomous activity it's kind of like the centipede you know you congratulate the centipede on how well he coordinates all of his legs and then he thinks well should I move this leg or this leg or this and he's immobilized these are not functions that we govern consciously although we can interrupt them consciously but something is there taking care of us it's an organic Unity and that's what you meant

by the by the self capital S our sense of self is a different matter and so one of the things that I've tried to emphasize in therapy is you're not what happened to you because we tend to be bound to our story that says either that's who I am that's what I'm defined by or I'm spending my life trying to differentiate myself from that get away from that perhaps so um again our sense of self is very provisional it evolves and and in any given moment there may be something in the unconscious that's um triggered

and of course the problem with the unconscious it's unconscious so I don't know that it's happened it's I I have the unconscious uh triggered it has the power to rise take over provisionally spin out its program and then after a while you know it recedes back into the unconscious and as I said sometimes people will stop and say well I wonder what was behind that decision or why did I choose that path or what in me is blocking me from doing what I know is right for me you know as uh Paul said in the

letter to the Romans though I know the good I do not do the good well why not well he saw it as in insufficiency of will but we know it's more than that we we know that there are unconscious factors at work that have a certain autonomy and the more unconscious they are the greater their autonomy will prove to be if they are unconscious and they're driving us sometimes into States other times traits I mean and that's a perhaps an interesting discussion in of itself is you know when what's the difference between a state of

mind and body and a trait but if it's unconscious what chance do we stand to overcome these things I mean what where how does the awareness come about can we do it on our own does it require Reflection from a trained professional and if so um you know when we become conscious of something does that immediately flip a switch or does it require constant returning to um you know seeing and uh for you know forcing the the unconscious to become conscious over and over again sure well those are great questions um f first of all

again none of us rise us saying we're going to be counterproductive today but we will because of the autonomy of those clusters of energy within us now I've said to many people who've asked that question well start with your own life look to the patterns that you have a pattern is an indication of some cluster of energy whether it's outward or whether it's inward that you're carrying with you um and we don't do crazy things we always do logical things if we understand that what we're in service to iny Ally I give you an example

I was working in a closed ward of a hospital many decades ago and there was a fellow repeatedly trying to break a window people were assuming he was trying to escape or get a Shard of glass for some nefarious purpose and no one bothered to ask him why he was doing this and he said he had the delusion that he was first of all in a locked Ward so he was caught in a you know non-voluntary situation and in his psychosis he felt that um somebody was pumping air from the room now if this door

was locked and the air is being pumped out of this room the most logical thing we would do is break through a window or break down the door so his behavior was logical based on the premise now the premise is often inaccurate or tied to one place but gets extrapolated to another one somewhere else and and then we are responding logically to that that premise so you start with your own life particularly the places where you you find these are self-defeating behaviors or behaviors that are hurtful to you and someone else and then you say

since that's not my conscious intention and yet there it is as part of my history then I have to say all right what is it within me that you know has the kind of power to take over my ego Consciousness now just to back off for a moment here I I think we're only conscious in the ego dealing with reality uh a few times during the course of a day my favorite analogy is when you get up in the morning and you step in the shower it's too hot or too cold so you change the

water temperature well that's the ego and its proper function it's being adaptive to its reality it's being protective at that moment it's achieving the optimum situation for you but from the rest of time on when that same ego is flooded by other material some of which just conscious who gets the kids today after school how do I get to the work on time Etc but underneath that are other drivers that have to do with fear-based responses or adaptive responses that um were perhaps once protective but later you know we weren't born with them but we

acquired them along Life's Highway so what was once protective often becomes constrictive later and and creates those patterns so the number one you start with your patterns um secondly and everyone sort of laughs at this but there's a certain truth you might talk to those around you such as your spouse or your closest partner or or your children and ask them about what they see in us if you can bear to hear what they have to say and to say where is it you see me being hurtful to myself or others or where is it

that I get in your face in an inappropriate way uh and they'll usually have something to inform us with thirdly we pay attention to our dreams because we don't choose to dream but sleep research tells us that we average about six dreams per night that's a lot of activity nature doesn't waste energy it's processing something and it's not just processing if we pay attention over time um you begin to realize it has a point of view another way of putting this is the psyche which is the term I would use here and that's the Greek

word for Soul by the way the the the psyche you know has its own intentionality it's omnipresent and it's commenting and it comments in terms of our feeling function you don't choose your feelings feelings are autonomous responses to what has happened you can repress them suppress them anesthetize them project them onto others but you are in the end um you know a creature that has an autonomous feeling response secondly we have energy systems if I'm doing what's right for me the energy is there the flow is there we can mobilize our energy and we have

to in life to get up and feed the baby at 2: in the morning or um you know put in our 40-hour week or whatever the requirements are uh but over time uh forcing the Energy System leads as we know to boredom and burnout and ultimately depression often with self-medication attached to that um thirdly we have dreams which comment um fourthly most importantly is the question of meaning if what we're doing is Meaningful as understood by the psyche it will support us even in the face of suffering and sacrifice and so forth if what we're

doing is wrong as seen by the psyche then over time it begins to pathologize so you take that word Psychopathology literally from the Greek it means the expression of the suffering of the Soul which I think is ratory the expression of the suffering of the Soul now that seems to me obligatory to take seriously if my soul and again that's a metaphor you know people look for the soul throughout history and you can't find it in the pineal gland for example the Soul's a metaphor for the organic wisdom of that natural being that we are

the soul is a metaphor for uh this purposeful expression of the organism it is purposeful in other words question that occupies all of us in childhood and throughout the first half of Life at least if not an entire lifetime is what does the world want of me what do my parents want from me what do my school teacher want me what do The Playmates expect of me what does the partner want for me what does the employer want all of these are reality-based encounters with the demands of the environment and and part of what we

have to do is develop enough ego strength to create a provisional sense of self and a provisional functional self to deal with those expectations but then when you've done that you know why are you still here what's the purpose are you simply here to be a creature of adaptations now without those adaptations we would be overwhelmed typically by the circumstances of our lives so we accommodate them in some way but in the second half of life and I'm using a ter very Loosely um the real question is what does the soul want of me you

know what does the psyche want of me that's a different question then the issue comes up what is it that is wishing expression in the world through me that's a different question then what does the world ask of me the people that we would most admire in history are people who in some way found and lived out what the soul was asking of them it didn't spare them from suffering sometimes even martyrdom it doesn't spare you from conflict and pain maybe isolation maybe Exile but you're fed by the purposefulness of it take that away and

life is pretty empty and of course we live in a culture where there's this enormous barrage of external stimuli well buy this purchase that do this or that the latest thing and this or that the newest shin and the more I'm seeking to Define myself through that environmental summons the more likely I'm going to be aranged from something inside all of us know it but we don't know what to do about that at some level and typically it has to hurt enough inside to bring a person into therapy people don't just walk in and say

well I was in the neighborhood and I thought I'd pop in and talk to a total stranger pay him some money and then you know walk out as a different person doesn't work that way I I've often said to people this is not about curing you because you're not a disease this is about uh making your life more interesting where you realize every morning you get up um you have something profound to address today why am I here and in service to what because if you don't ask that question you're going to be in service

to your adaptive postures from childhood as many people prove to be until the conflict within reaches that point where the suffering of the Soul Psychopathology is sufficient um I myself was cruising along in my 30s I'd achieved everything that I wanted to achieve and was enjoying my life and then suddenly inexplicably had a very serious depression and it took me a while to realize that I was asking the wrong question the first question that occurs to a person under those circumstances is is um how quickly do I get rid of this you know give me

five easy steps or a pill for that or whatever I didn't understand the real question is why has your psyche autonomously withdrawn its approval and support from the agenda that you've been addressing it was a good agenda nothing wrong with it but there was something else that was missing in this process and it took a depression like something from below reached up and pulled me down something was being pressed down down that's depression and at the bottom of that well there's always a task there's always an issue the identification of which can lead one into

a new place in one's life a different journey in my case it it led me to uh leave a very fine tenure position in Academia travel to Switzerland and spend several years there in retraining as as a psycho analyst and uh I now look upon that depression as beneficent but at the time I certainly didn't as you can imagine I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 by now most of you have heard me tell my story about how I've been taking ag1 once or twice a day every day since 2012

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in an ideal circumstance to express ourselves through some higher calling if you will but higher meaning for us or for the world hopefully both that's that would be ideal in terms of the day you know you said you you you can wake up in the morning presumably some of the residual thought processes and emotions from a dream or dreams still live within us early in the day and then we start going about our day doing the Practical things making the cup of coffee drinking the water getting some sunshine uh these sorts of things how is

it that the typical person any of us can think about segmenting our thinking and our actions in a way that we're touching into the deeper meaning of life while also carrying out a life because as you know and I know and everybody listening and watching knows that there's stuff to do we need we need to often get an education make a living tend to people around us tend to ourselves and and it becomes a a a kind of a Neuroscience problem in my mind right you know different brain circuitries for different types of thinking and

if I may it I think it also becomes a time perception problem you know the brain the human brain to me is so magnificent at setting Milestones that are like get in the shower finish the shower check the text messages talk to somebody and get about the day the Milestones become very close in and then if we're lucky enough to be able to take a walk and reflect put the phone away Etc then our mind can expand into you know gosh why am I here you know uh what about my that thing my grandfather said

to me or my grandmother said to me and you know that the ability to to place our perception in larger or smaller time bins seems very closely linked to all of this um and to the sense of mortality which we'll certainly talk about in a little bit but in in a kind of a practical way in the absence of a daily therapy session um how how do you suggest people start to segment um or um compartmentalize in a way that's functional for instance um should people set aside 15 minutes each morning to just think about

why they're on this Earth uh and why they're doing and what they're doing as opposed to just doing sure well this is a central problem of our time is is um everybody is going to say I don't have time for that I had a colleague now deceased Maran Woodman in Toronto who used to say to her clients you have to guarantee me one hour per day that you reflect on your dreams or you you journal in terms of what's going on in your life and she said always people say I don't have time for that

then she said then you you don't have time for therapy you don't you're not making any priority here for this and you're right the claims of you know woodsworth wrote In 1802 the world is too much with us getting and spending we lay waste our powers this is 1802 before the internet right with all of its claims upon us there's such a noisy Den around us we're all distracted by that you see that's why it usually takes a crisis in a marriage or depression or whatever the case may be to get people to pull out

of that and reflect upon that so I spend 15 minutes every morning before starting uh just meditating particularly working on a dream if I've had a dream and and secondly I reflect on things in the evening too because one of the things we want to try to do is to say what are the stories I'm living here you know one of them I've got to earn a living one of them I've got to do this another one I have to do that you see but but what's all that frenzy about you see that's why I

think the first half of life and I say this semih humorously is a huge and unavoidable mistake because we're living just reactively you see it's not generative it's reacting to whatever is going on around us is one's entire life to be spent reacting to things now when you're young there's only so much ego strength to to reflect upon this a number of years ago I was asked to give a talk to an advanced group of uh college students at a university on the psychodynamics of love well they were all interested about love I can tell

you right so it was a 3-hour seminar so over the first 90 minutes we talked about projection transference all these they got it they were smart kids and then we took a short break when we came back and I said now let's apply these ideas to your current or recent relationships it was like the curtain came down you know they were 1920 21 22 in that area they couldn't bear they could get the idea but they couldn't bear to look at themselves with that kind of scrutiny Flash Forward 20 years when they're 40 and their

marriage just dissolved or um you know the the relationship has hardships of one kind or another they're much more likely to be able to a have enough ego strength to bear looking at oneself secondly um there's enough life experience to reflect upon because this kind of work takes courage in the first place I have to be able to Bear to look at myself and see what's there which won't always be pretty and and secondly it's humbling because this is not about feeling great it's about being called to accountability which is a whole different matter to

be an adult is not just to have a big body it's it's to know that I'm accountable for what's spilling into the world through me you said once in one of those telling statements that haunts me in a constructive way he he said the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent so where I'm stuck as a person my children will be stuck or they'll be spending their life trying to get unstuck you see so the best thing I can do for them is to model for them you know a

life lived with as much courage as I can mobilize and as much Integrity as I can manage and in doing that it not only models it gives permission to them um one of the things I found for many people they don't really feel permission to feel what they feel desire what they desire go out and fight for what matters to them because life we learn early is conditional you will be acceptable in this family you will perhaps be loved you'll be rewarded or you'll be punished if you meet these conditions and if you don't meet

the conditions a lot of people put conditions on their on their children you know a lot of people are still living through their children um you know if you forgive the joke here there there's an old joke about Jewish Mothers the fetus is not considered full term until it's graduated from Medical School you see and that's an it's a joke about a cultural expectation and carrying someone else's unfinished business in a way in which you know is to make them feel good rather than serve what is one expression through you which is quite a different

matter so one of the things one has to do is seize permission to realize life is short um we're we're here a very brief time and the summons is to live your journey as honestly as you can and when you do it ultimately serves other people it's not selfish it's actually serving the self if you will it's not narcissistic it's not self-absorption it's it's actually humbling I would never imagined as a child that I would spend my adult life listening to people's suffering and yet that's my day job and I'm humbled to be invited into

the lives of other people it's profoundly meaningful I can't imagine living without that at the same time um it's not fun it's not pleasant but it's profoundly meaningful that's the distinction that's why of those very various sources of insight that we can have into our lives you have to ask about what is most meaningful to me as defined by the psychi not by the culture around you because what the culture says it's all about being successful it's all about making money it's about living in this neighborhood it's about buying that object and if that worked

we would know it it obviously doesn't so that's what brings us back to that humbling moment that maybe I'm not living my life sir in k guard the Danish Theologian in Copenhagen the 19th century talked about a man who was shocked to find his name in the obituary column and he hadn't realized he died because he hadn't realized that he was here in the first place now this is a carard talking in the middle of the 19th century think about the ramping up of the stimuli around us the the steady drum among young people you

take away their cell phone they experience enormous anxiety because this is their link to the world and yet it's constantly making demands upon them so again underneath all of this is we have an appointment with our own souls and the question is are you going to show up for the appointment and I thought I had but my psyche thought otherwise so it was in the midst of a serious depression that I began showing up and it was a a difficult process but ultimately proved to be I think transformative like I certainly agree that hardship for

better or worse is often the way that these things stimulate the self-reflection that's required for change there seems to be a a tricky situation whereby on the one hand I'm hearing and I agree that it all starts with being very honest with oneself about what one really wants yeah and I love and thank you for mentioning this 15 minutes in the early part of the day perhaps ideally 15 minutes at the end of the day where one takes time away from input from others of any form electronic or otherwise to just reflect on what's inside

and the messages coming up through dreams and reflection Etc uh so important um and and may I just add another pie forgive the interruption but I've often said to individuals it's not so much what you believe feel or do it's what it's in service to inside of you that's an important distinction so I may think I've done a good thing when it's really an old codependence or it's it's a way of avoiding conflict or it's a fear-driven response we have to always be asking but what was that in service to inside of me and you

may not know at first but you keep asking the question it'll it'll it'll start you know rising to the surface you begin to recognize that that's how we begin to identify some of those internal drivers that we call the complexes because again they they're they clusters of energy with the power to create a provisional personality and many times people are identified with their complex that's who I am you know I am what I do I am my performance rather than beneath all of this is a human being who is wandering through life afraid of dying

trying to avoid pain as much as possible and um hoping that someone's going to step in and make it all right I'm certainly familiar with the feeling of um recognizing what I want but being afraid that if I were to express that that it would not um would not be accepted certainly and that certainly can create problems um I'm also familiar with recognizing what I want and stating it very clearly and some people um fortunately respond in well but I think it's fair to say at least based on my experience that when we are really

honest with ourselves and with others it doesn't always land well right I mean um I pay a lot of attention probably too much to U messaging on social media in the landscape of science and health it's just kind of the world I live in um much of the time these days uh and what i notic is that there's a real gravitational pull of people to um what's called the one whatever they are influencers public figures or that that are just very clear about who they are um at least in their own self-perception but then here

in lies the the twist it seems is that what I'm hearing is that often our self-perception is not accurate that's correct and it's almost futile to try and convince people that we are who we believe we are right and I have a theory that's emerging it's not a formal theory that the internet and in particular social Med media are is borderline it weaves back and forth between sane and psychotic yes as if a borderline person would projecting either adoration or total disgust and I I warn anybody now including myself if you're going on social media

you're interacting with a borderline organism so you need to be prepared to be told in various ways sometimes subtle sometimes overt that you're terrible and you also need to be prepared for immense reward and being told that you're spectacular simply by being there that's what it is to interact with a borderline person and there's no controlling or predicting their um their flips so um in any event that's a little uh you know Theory that's emerging why wouldn't it be that way right you're the psychologist but why wouldn't it be that way because ultimately social media

is the emerging property of all these individuals um okay so you've made it clear how one way to Anchor to the self and get in touch with what's really going on inside yes reflecting on dreams reflecting on what guers to the surface journaling perhaps meditation ideally twice a day perhaps therapy as well would be ideal yes but then we move about our day and we do our best to be the best version of ourselves right and when we get positive feedback we tend to I think as you know neurobiological psychological organisms do more of that

do more of that um uh and it's sort of a bank account of sorts we're going for a net positive balance um and we tend to do less of the things that give us negative feedback except perhaps or go to social media where people seem to go on there specifically for friction-based interactions as well which is its own thing so as we move through life first half of Life second half of Life how is it that we can Orient in time as I kind of put it before how can we um Carry Out These daily

or weekly or maybe yearly Reflections in a way that really serves us well I mean do you recommend one day a week stepping away from everything do you recommend um doing Retreats of sort do you recommend that um people keep a life journal is the story and seeing how one story evolves is this useful what I'm trying to do here is um kind of uh Orient people to some practical tools because um because I think at some level we can get pulled down currents of any kind that's right and ideally we we you know stay

out of deep pathology but even if we hit the rumble strips and go back over and over again um this is this is important work right this is this is about being the best version of ourselves and Society benefits from that so are there more macroscopic things that we can do um or is it just a daily chip away two meditations ideally Therapy Journal and just anchor down um like do we ever get do we ever get to relax well of course of course um f first of all there's no formula it's applicable to everybody

in their life circumstances you know the word Psychotherapy literally means from the Greek to listen to or pay attention to the soul however you go about doing that is right for you it's up to you to figure that out and for some people be working in nature for others to be working with their hands for others it'll be through some creative Enterprise or working with their dreams or meditating or or whatever um I would say whatever helps you step out of the stimulus response stimulus response melee that we call our daily life is likely to

be helpful to you either because you rest and you restore the psyche and or you have some reflection upon it you you recollect yourself as it is right you remember the self because we get unraveled I often have the feeling of getting unraveled in life where you know this calls you and this calls you and this calls you and that calls you and you're just it's just pulling you away where from from some Center here and again this is not about self-absorption but if I'm not in connection with something abiding here my behaviors or choices

there are not going to be very helpful in the long run you see they're going to be merely responsive to the demands of the environmental circumstances one thing I enjoy doing from time to time is drawing I like doing anatomical drawings and things of that sort and I find that if if I engage in an activity that absorbs all of my attention yes even though I have zero minus one aspirations of becoming a commercial artist or something of that sort that um two things happen one I exit the stimulus response world and at the same

time it's inevitable that some insight comes later that's right what is that well I see I think that's a good example though as you said of exiting the stimulus response cycle because in that moment something in your psyche Rises to express itself through you and and you know it's your drawing it we we could perhaps read that drawing and and perhaps interpret something of it you know like the famous Roar shock for example I mean what Roar shock's an ink plot when's an ink plot not an inklot well when I confabulate a response to it

you see and that response is indicative of what is going on inside of me so that's a good example I mean for some people you know they they have those moments when they're out jogging for example or riding a bicycle or or whatever whatever ever it does listening to music there's no right path for everyone it's like find the place where you're able to be alone with yourself and if you can tolerate being with yourself and you pay attention something will start coming up you see and and ultimately ironically that's the cure to the great

disease of our time which is loneliness it's interesting that the UK and Japan now have cabinet level posts for ministers of loneliness so great is a lonely we've never been more connected in human history through our Electronic media and yet people are now isolated in their rooms talking to each other and I I saw a cartoon I probably New York or somewhere where a couple was getting married and the the minister says to the couple well text each other I do you know it was ultimately a joke about how we are so media dependent now

that we're disconnected from each other and so whatever it is that helps you link to something in here you asked this question which I I'm also haunted by in a constructive way he said we all need to find what supports us when nothing supports us and that's ultimately the cure for loneliness that there's something inside of me that knows me better than me is is working hard to bring about a healthy response to whatever life brings and it has a purposefulness to it an intentionality an expression and when I'm in touch with that I feel

that sense of wholeness and purposefulness when I'm out of it when I start unraveling so to speak and un just that's how how we get exhausted and burned out and so forth so again this is I use that word recollecting remembering it's like pulling the pieces back together again in some way so what Shakespeare said the um knitting the Ravel raveled sleeve of care you see he he was using the same metaphor of being unraveled in some way I love this notion of um spending time alone and accessing one's deepest resource for self-care as a

way to deal with loneliness because ultimately I also completely agree that stimulus response is the Hallmark of of text messaging there can be useful sure aspects of text messaging of course coordinating plans Etc and communicating but but certainly social media it's a you know we have a stimulus response device some people think of it more like a slot machine but it never actually Returns the jackpot is the is the issue um and I also think that social media can be terrific for educating and learning as well um certainly much of what I do or strive

to do I think time alone is incredibly beneficial so thank you for for highlighting that and and also that it doesn't take much you know maybe even a half hour that's right walk or something of that sort if I may what do you think happens when we exit that stimulus response mode do you think the unconscious mind is revealed a bit more to us um and I think of the unconscious mind um a a former guest on this podcast um a psychiatrist described the unconscious is kind of like the the the iceberg that's beneath the

surface all the stuff going on that we're entirely unaware of do you think that the water recedes a little bit absolutely because there's no room for the expression of of of whatever is wanting to be acknowledged within us when we're constantly responding to our environmental demands um one of the things I try to do is walk a mile every day I've gone through some health issues in recent years and so I'm sort of in a physical recovery stage of life and I mock a mile a day even though it's physically difficult uh and I find

that revelatory because that's I I'm focused on being present here rather than all of the distractions there and that's one of the things that I have found a form of meditation if you will and what comes up for me is often surprising I've talked before in the podcast about meditation clinical hypnosis something called Yoga Nidra which is a self-directed relaxation sometimes call it non-sleep deep rest Etc and without taking us on a tangent um I I raise this because we keep talking about meditation and um I think to a lot of people meditation sounds like

something esoteric to me as a neuroscientist meditation is a perceptual exercise it can be done to enhance focus by focusing on a specific location behind the forehead or looking at a a light it can be um an uh open monitoring meditation where you're intentionally not trying to focus on any one thing but it at the end of the day it's a perceptual ex it's it's a deliberate perceptual shift um much in the same way that if I decide to you know listen to an opera with my eyes closed that's a in some sense it's a

meditation it's a deliberate perceptual shift um so a deliberate perceptual shift that we're calling a meditation which I think is a great label for it that is directly aimed at better understanding the UN one's own unconscious processing so that one can then lean into the stimulus response parts of life with more intentionality with less opportunity to hit the rumble strips or go into the gutter um with a more authentic response to it you see because it's more likely to be coming out of me rather than simply being reactive I think that's the important thing what's

so important about what you're saying is that for years now we've heard about you know meditation being important as a way to uh intervene in the Ulus response process yes um and people say be responsive not reactive and it all sounds so wonderful just as sounding being gritty and resilient sounds wonderful but one of the things that's many really important here that you're raising is that there are methods to do this they almost always involve going inward or someone who can see what we can't see pointing out blind spots in us that's right well I

I think again the issue is to still the traffic inside and be present to the moment in whatever way that is that's why I said a person can meditate by work of the hands or by walking or something that pulls one out of the the cycles that are running their their little script over and over and over so there are many forms of meditating and you know ancient Traditions have revealed that too there's walking meditation and so forth and you mentioned music I think that's another example to listen to music I think takes one out

of you know nature said once without music Life's a mistake and I think what he was getting at was there is a sense in which music has no purpose except being itself so when we're really present to the music we were in the midst of being if I'm well we're at Spring right now as you and I are talking and it's beautiful in the neighborhood and so I've been watching the flowers emerge and so forth um and and simply being present to that means some of that other traffic is stilled and then I return and

the traffic resumes but maybe I have a little more of a sense of who I am and from whence I'm responding you see as a result of that reentering process you know the the Zen folks talk about being no minded I think that it was their way of talking about being present to this moment but but not consumed by the demands of this moment and that's that's a difficult thing to manage but it's essential I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors waking up waking up is a meditation app that

offers hundreds of guided meditations mindfulness trainings yoga needer sessions and more I started meditating over three decades ago and what I found in the ensuing years is that sometimes it was very easy for me to do my daily meditation practice I was just really diligent but then as things would get more stressful which of course is exactly when I should have been meditating more my meditation practice would fall off with we piing up they make it very easy to find and consistently use a given meditation practice it has very convenient reminders and they come in

different duration so even if you just have one minute or five minutes to meditate you can still get your meditation in which research shows is still highly beneficial in addition to the many different meditations on the waking up app they also have Yoga Nidra sessions which are a form of non-sleep deep rest that I personally find is extremely valuable for restoring mental and physical Vigor I tend to do a yoga NRA lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes at least once a day and if I ever wake up in the middle of the night and

I need to fall back asleep I also find Yoga Nidra to be extremely useful if you'd like to try the waking up app you can go to waking up.com huberman to try a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman perhaps we can talk about the shadow this notion of the shadow um sounds very ominous um what is the Shadow and are people aware of their shadows and if they're not how can they become aware of them and how can they work with them well a shadow was yung's metaphor for those parts of our own

psyche and our our affiliation with groups for example whether it's a religious group educational group a national identity that when brought to Consciousness we find troubling perhaps contradictory to our values or um you know inimical to our sense of self-worth or something like that for example typical Shadow issues include our capacity for jealousy and for Envy for aggression for greed etc etc uh we don't want to acknowledge those things but since when are we exempt from The Human Condition the wisest thing ever said about the shadow came from the Latin playright Terrance two Millennia ago

who said uh nothing human is alien to me now I think that's important to recognize in me I carry the entire capacity of human nature to express itself some of those forms of Expressions will be acceptable to the society or to my psychological culture and some will not be um and that's the shadow material and you know there's the personal Shadow and there are group Shadows because Nations can be possessed by Blood Lust For example or or a fashion is a shadow issue where everybody has to look the same way and dress the same way

and so forth you know the more insecure I am as a person the more likely I'm going to try to look around me for what are the clues so I can fit in be be like others therefore I'll be acceptable you see that's not a federal crime that's a very deep complex that is left over from childhood I'm not here to fit in I'm here to be who I am which at times will fit in and other times it won't but that's okay okay because I'm at least in good relationships to my myself at that

point so typically the shadow manifest as being unconscious therefore it just spills into the world through us a perfect example of Shadow issues as I mentioned before is parents expecting their children to grow up and have you know the same kind of values that I have for example same religious views marry somebody that I find acceptable etc etc well that's not really loving the otherness of the other is it it's not really loving the child for their own Journey that's them carrying some piece of their of their own unfinished business secondly uh we disown the

Shadow by projecting on some you know those people across the border they're you know they're the carrier of they're they're what's wrong with this world you see I disown the shadow in myself by seeing it in everybody else around me Yung actually said what often we find troubling in another person is because they're they're expressing something within our own unconscious um you know as a certain itinerate Rabbi said two Millennia ago um I can see the speck in your eye but miss the log in my own that's a perfect illustration What The Shadow is thirdly

one can get caught up in it that's at times what rock concerts are mass events people caught up in a mob mentality where you lose your sense of individual ego identity and become subsumed into a collective mood and you know that could be um a hanging mob for example as has happened in history too many times um and it could be a force for good or a force for evil but again the larger the group the lower the level of consciousness of the individuals in that group and then fourthly we recognize it in ourselves in

a um speech at Yale University in 1937 Yung said a person who could look at their own shadow and own it he said now has large problem because they're no longer to blame others for what goes wrong in their life they they have to acknowledge that within themselves and he said further it's the single best thing you can do for your Society this is not Naval gazing this is how you lift your unfinished business off of your partner your children take it back yourself which is a loving thing to do and a civic-minded thing to

do if you look at collectively here so how does one learn what their Shadow or Shadows well again if you're married ask your partner sure you know who will tell you immediately um what your unfinished business may be um or your children or your close friend perhaps um it shows up in dreams um you know Freud talked about a young man who's disowned what the content of his dream he says well I I don't you know fre said well whose dream do you think that was it was your dream you have to acknowledge that that

was embodying something within you so um there are many ways to recognize the shadow often consequences pile up and then one begins to realize well the only consistent person in all the uh scenes of this drama I call my life is is mAh so I have to acknowledge that that's my stuff and that's a very humbling thing that's why I say this work is humbling not not uh inflating in some way it's humbling so um again shadow work is never going to be popular because it means I'm taking responsibility and yet what else would being

human being who's responsible and adult like um do accept except responsibility you see it's one of the definitions I would say of an adult person is I I know I'm accountable for what spills in the world through me yes I'm responding to various things that happen around me but sooner or later I I'm the one bringing my stories my condition responses and something of my shadow to the mix and responding out of that now that's a witch's brew at times as you could imagine at the same time you recognize all right but that's my business

to address because if I don't it just continues what I observe in the world and what I've experienced before is that um certainly we all have Shadow sides um me everybody I mean I think that's like I think anyone that doesn't believe that is uh perhaps not of homo sapiens um you know um maybe other animals have shadows too who knows um but that when Shadows Clash it becomes very confusing because um given what you're saying very few people address their shadows and these days especially there's no need to make this political this is just

social sure um we see mob forming as you said the larger the group the lower the level of Consciousness and then it becomes even more challenging to address one's Shadow when a there's the perception of an attack mhm B that attack often times is the reflection of the other group Shadow and C people find Refuge with people who have similar Shadow yes processes so it um not to be pessimistic here but um perhaps the answer is what you referred to before is to go inward to the self work with somebody or or um somebody close

to you that that has your best interest in mind truly best interest in mind and then um try to resolve that well yes and very few people are willing to do that that's what polarizes societies polarizes groups and and so forth it's it's comforting to find like-minded people but then they're both caught in the same complex there's another way of putting that so ultimately whatever reality is it's going to wear through that and and reveal something that's uh going to be pretty disconcerting to individuals who who are caught in a collective identification that way you

know the the shadow comes because our human nature is thrust into various social situations we can't help but have a shadow you know I we we have to socialize a child we learn to use a knife and a fork and not take our siblings food and that sort of thing you learn to look both ways for you cross the street there's socialization that's important and yet the greater the socialization the more likely there's going to be an interruption I mean think about those cultures where people are forced to dress alike for some form of unity

or Conformity um um think think about where a person might have a special gift or talent but it's not appreciated in family X or Y well where does that natural form of expression go it pathologizes as depression or it comes out in compensatory dreams or projections onto someone else or or it makes the person ill you know the unlived life can make a person ill there's a sickness under death as kard talked about it you know it's it's uh it's that sickness where where the human spirit is being being repetitively violated and much in our

culture violates our spirits and and spirit is not something you will it's something that that is the quickening of life's energy and service to something and if your family or your situation imposes itself upon that uh to give a quick example my my own family of origin was one in which they were by the circumstances of decades ago unable to to attain an education my father worked in a factory my mother was a secretary and um for them life was a series of shaming events and um overwhelming events and the message to me both over

and covert is don't go out there it's it's too too big it's too much stay here and we'll take care of each other so one of the first things I did when I was 18 was left I went to college and came back for vacations but but I left psychologically at that point I something in me knew that I had to have a larger life than that and I say that with love and respect and compassion for my parents the last conversation I had with my mother before she died of cancer um her ancestor her

father she'd never known was from Sweden and I'd had a book translated into Swedish and I told her I thought that would be something that would be nice for her and and she was horrified it's like why have you written it what are they saying and I thought she meant reviewers at first and I realize that's the voice I heard in childhood she was saying you shouldn't be out there now people are going to attack you this will draw attention to you you see and her intention was protective in her last days actually before she

died she was more afraid of what people thought than whether her son was living his journey or not and I say this with grief for her and and that was the message of childhood you know it's too much out there and yet something inside quickened and said well you need to go where those airplanes are going you need to go see the ocean for yourself um you need to try to live in a foreign country and see what that's like um was I was that easy no it was doubly hard because of the messages I

had but it was just necessary sooner or later again the appointment with your life do you keep it or you not keep the appointment so that was the first meeting of the appointment was to to leave home and start the journey you know in terms of the the archetype of the of the journey first is the departure and then you have the initiatory experiences which can knock you down and then the question is do you get up and go to the next one and sooner or later something begins to change inside and you begin to

feel that this is this is the journey that's right for me it's very moving to hear because I you know we hear with that we become our parents M and yet I've never believed that um I believe that um for whatever reasons inside us that we either adopt their traits unconsciously or consciously or we resist them 180° in the other direction MH there doesn't seem to be a 90° response that's as as your example beautifully illustrates that there's something in the brain and in the human psyche that either says yeah okay like that's just the

way life is um For Better or Worse um or says no and you know I feel I'm 48 years old so I'm still learning to be a full adult um um I like to think there's some neuroplasticity left science tells us there's neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan so and I do believe that um but I feel like so much of being an adult perhaps just being a human being is about learning to stand one's ground and say no no no no no that's me and this is what's right for me and you're wrong crazy or just

different and we agree to disag agree and then there's the other half of being an adult which is saying oh goodness you might be right maybe you are right okay you're right I screwed up or I need to think at least think about this differently and and the hard work of being a human I think is knowing when you are dealing with incoming messages that are real they could be from a healthy Source or an unhealthy Source it's complicated this is why I mentioned this thing about the internet and social media in particular earlier I

do believe it's borderline I think if you were to remove the names and the um faces and you would just put that into a a a script you'd say this is a dialogue coming from a borderline person weaving back and forth across the line literally of healthy and psychotic and so as a human especially nowadays it's complicated um we don't just live in little Villages where we go okay well that person tends to kind of you know spin off and that person seems very grounded but occasionally makes mistakes too you know um and so I

feel like so much of the work of being a I said an adult but I I'm going to replace that with just a human is trying to know thyself right as the Oracle said and own thyself and and report that into the world but also to be semi-permeable and in a way that's functional is such hard work because in both cases the adoption of what we were told and what was ingrained in us and is unconscious so that we just live out the script of our parents or where we say no I'm I'm going to

leave this little town or I'm not going to live life or relationships that way at all I'm going to do it this other completely different way maybe unconventional way both have an element of reactivity in them and cly both have an element of um kind of uh um there's like a there's a Vigor behind it sure no your your point is very well taken and and appropriate because it is a paradox first of all in the Eden Project a book I wrote on relationship and subtitled the search for the magical leather there is inside of

us this infantile and understandable desire to find the right person who's going to make our life work for us who's going to take care of us meet our needs read our minds etc etc you see and the other person has that going on in them so they project that on to us you wonder why relationships get so complexed you see but the great gift of relationship if you can tolerate it is the otherness of the other produces the dialectic produces the the enlargement that comes from encountering the other I've learned so much from my my

wife and I believe she's learned a few things from me uh our ongoing dialogue because we're both similar and very different at the same time is one that has at times been conflictual naturally but most the time is a pattern of growth because we we are allowed to bring in that other perspective and see the same reality my my my wife has taught me to see some things that I wouldn't have seen before because she's has an artist Eye on the other hand there are places where you have to come up as you said against

what is Central and critical to your own well-being or your own integrity and then you have to stand for that and the wisdom to know which is which at any given time is is not in bred it's it's one of those times where we have to find that balancing point between legitimate dialogue and compromise and sacrifice in a relationship there's a place for sacrifice but at the same time there's a place where you have to say all right but I also so have to separate myself here and and stand for this on the other side

of that and you know it takes a solomonic wisdom to know always what's right but over time I think one can get a sense of of what that's about so you know again that's why we we have to individuate as individuals by definition but also in relationship because it's the otherness of the others that pulls us out of that self-referential system otherwise we get caught you know in a circular dialogue among our complexes for example as y said it's important to go to the Mountaintop to meditate but if you stay up there too long you'll

be talking to ghosts you know your your complexes will be caught in this this looping cycle and you need the other to pull you out of that into the presence of the other and it's out of that that the third comes um Joseph camel made an important distinction once he said about committed relationship he said if you're constantly sacrificing to the other um you'll grow resentful but if you're sacrificing to the project the two of you've launched to together as a friendship or a marriage or whatever form it takes you can do that in a

very constructive way you're fed by that because you're you're you're mutually committed to the project that this relationship represents and that's an important distinction I think yeah given that 50% or more of marriages seem to end in divorce these days I think that statistic still holds um do you think that can be largely attributed to uh people not arriving to those relationships with the mindset you just described people not arriving to those relationships having um a deep enough understanding of themselves prior to that or um something else I think all of the above um first

of all young people tend to marry and make babies understandably um um and then 20 years later in some way they're a different person and it's very hard for the premises that brought them together to still obtain in a Developmental and honest way you know many years later when you reach that point then there is a time for renegotiation or if need be unfortunately the dissolution of that relationship um because I had a colleague in New Jersey years ago who worked exclusively with the couples and she she talked about starter marriages and she said I

would never say that publicly because that sounded too pessimistic but she said if you're lucky your starter marriage will be a good one that will evolve and so forth but for most people that which brought them together was running from their parents or replicating their parents' relationships or uh their their insecurity about themselves therefore they bonded with someone else who was going to take care of that for them whatever it was it's been outlived their their own natural development their life circumstances have changed and then it brings about you know the necessity of some very

difficult decisions so you know marriage marriage is an institution with the best of intentions that is sorely tested over time and you know sometimes it'll survive the test in I I would not automatically applaud if someone's been married 50 or 60 years I would ask what has happened to the soul of that person in that relationship has it grown has it developed did did they mutually support each other's growth and development or did something get stuck at that point and um our our early family of origin Dynamics still dominating that relationship and from the outside

we usually don't know the answer to that question but inside you'd have to say what what has happened to this person and the same is true with parenting you know parenting is very very difficult because we'd like to think we know what's right for our own child but then they have to spend a good part of their life trying to get away from us in some way as we did ourselves you see and then you if you remember that then you're a little more likely to say you know I really don't know what's going on

here but I have to pay more attention to what I think is wanting expression through my child and and support that rather than assuming that they're going to grow up and replicate our lives and our values as I've said before given the number of people who do deep introspective work either by themselves or with a trained professional it's perhaps should surprise us that 50% of marriages do survive yeah in a in a way yes and and those that survive are not necessarily good marriages in the sense in which the person is growing and developing they

may be stuck they may be afraid of the Alternatives they may be Bound by economics for example or or cultural forms so again from outside you don't know what's happening inside the soul of that individual and it's very important for us to not judge them for that reason earlier you you described the the painful work sometimes painful work of really addressing what one wants and really getting in touch with one's Soul psyche um and how Society or we think Society might not approve of that and yet when I think about popular culture um often times

it's the people that seem to be living in their own truth that are most celebrated that's true like there's something about the the crowd I've shifted from Mob to crowd here to make it sound more benevolent but but it's still a mob that cheers on the person who really seems to be in their we say full expression or living in their truth but who just comes out and says like yeah I don't I don't really care what they're saying about me or what people think I know me I know my own goodness my own intention

my own um Mission and the people close to me do hopefully they have people close to them and we say yeah like go it's inspiring yes that's why I said earlier many of the people in history that we would admire had difficult lives but we admire them because they stuck to some value that was Central to who they were and they lived that maybe at Great cost but they live that through whatever suffering they had to to trans to experience um again from outside we don't know do we when we see some cultural figure out

there uh may maybe they're manipulative may maybe they're caught in a complex of some kind we don't know from outside you you have to say I mean one of the Shadow issues how often people will live through a celebrity or live through a pop figure in some way maybe imitate that person uh again for a child that's natural and normal on the other hand uh sooner or later you have to say but my journey is a different Journey maybe they're living there is been in my living mind and I don't mean this in any grandiose

way I don't mean that they have to go out and become something that's noted in the society but to live in accord with something that is wishing its its U expression through us that's why I said the final question in life is is what is wanting to live in this world through me rather than what do I want or what do my complexes want because they're noisy chatterers in there you know I had a a dear friend from another state right to me just yesterday and um he's in semi-retirement now and he's been dealing with

some health issues and uh he said now that I'm not distracted I have time to work on all the Goblins of the past that I left behind and he's an analyst so it's not like we get rid of these things they're lifelong this is why Yung said we can't solve these things but we can outgrow them there's a big difference you know you become larger than what happened to you for example you become larger than that voice inside of you that says you can do this but you can't do that um and over time you

know something inside of you is wishing that growth and pushing that and again pathologizes when that's blocked so so people can be doing all the right things is defined by their values and their environment and it violates something inside that's why we can be quote successful and Achieve things and it still feels empty there's no there there you know you get to the top of the ladder and you realize there's no there there and that happens so often in our culture um I I remember one of the um fiscal figures in the late 20th century

who had a personal Fortune of $400 million and he was asked what was his philosophy of life and he said well the end of life the person with the biggest pile wins and I remember thinking how infantile is that this was a smart man and Elder Statesman in his field ultimately went to prison because of some things um but that's the philosophy of the sandbox I have the biggest pile of sand I've won no you haven't won your debt and it's a pile of sand what are you talking about and yet this is what drove

the man's life and obviously drove him across enough lines that it got him into legal troubles sooner or later and again I say that without judgment I'm just saying here is an example of a very achieved person who's been living an infantile philosophy and as such something else causes him to pay greatly for that yeah I certainly can say that um despite having pursued work with a lot of vigor and career that without question friendships and relationships are the most important thing there's just no question right the uh especially when things get hard that's right

you know I I actually I actually have a list in this very book I won't flip to it now of the people that I'm just really blessed to call close friends like real friends that you can count on and to me it and I've always in my sister I have an older sister and she always said you've always been a pack animal I've always had uh U big groups of of biggish groups of friends and it's something I've invested in heavily sometimes to the expense of other things um including work and other relationships but um

but the notion that um yeah the material things or that the uh opinions of strangers would somehow fill us that to me is like the most foreign concept sure like that's that's the the most foreign concept but um but clearly some people operate on those metrics that's like of course and my guess is that they have a a um a a reward Horizon that is you know tacked to whatever it is the algorithms are that get them that thing and so it must feed some reward mechanism that hasn't distracted enough like locked into this one

mode of time perception you know just hit the mile Mark hit the mile Mark hit the mile Mark so that they're not aware but when you take somebody like that who's been doing that for a lifetime and you say wait you know you're on this track going around and around and AC crewing trophies but actually that track doesn't go anywhere doesn't lead you into the world that's right my guess is that they they just they've been doing it so long that they're like an animal that's just been you know digging a trench and in its

zo confined sure cage which is something I'm finding with a lot of the men that I see uh I happen to see right now in my practice uh several men between UH 60 and8 80 and uh one 82 um and of course they've been conditioned to work and then suddenly you know on Monday morning you have to stop and think who you are you get up and you go to work and you do what you've done all these years and then suddenly you don't do that what are you going to do you say well I'm

going to go play golf every day well okay go do that but typically within three or four months the depression comes and they'll think about well I need to get back into doing this or get doing that you see so often we find people defined by exactly that kind of mentality I've finished the first lap so what do I do run another lap and run another lap and you realize you keep coming back to the same starting point that's why I say it's not what you do it's what it's in service to inside that makes

a difference so is that person being successful by external standards yes whatever that means does that mean that their psyche is going to cooperate and give them that genuine sense of s satisfaction in something no it won't it's autonomous it's not going to get co-opted into that and soon or later you know chickens come home to roast and then you have a depression as I experienced and and or you you find your relationships are in tatters all around you so sooner or later I mean no Revelation on my part nature will Express itself and if

uh if we live long enough and then everything that we've pushed underground is be is going to be coming up you mentioned men in particular so now it probably be a good time to um ask about men in particular you wrote Under Saturn Shadow which is how I initially learned about your work and then I listen to some of your lectures online I'm still in the process of reading your um other books but um let's talk about archetypes stereotypes of men and women um with the intention of course of um better understanding what's real as

opposed to what's stereotype um so in the um let's call it the 1930s 40s 50s 60s view of men in the United States and elsewhere there was this notion of kind of like the stoic uh and work and um uh Duty and um and to some extent a fair amount of Mystique right like it wasn't really because with um fewer words uh we have less awareness at least of what people are saying who knows what they're thinking whether don't they talk a lot or not um but there was this idea of of the um the

male as somebody who did stuff maybe thought about it but didn't really talk about it much um nowadays things have changed um this is born out in the statistics on College campuses about how many people seek therapy um if they have an issue it's gone from like 15% to 85 plus% at least roughly in the statistics I've seen so um but in terms of males and their sense of Duty and how they're supposed to be in the world um I would think just the way I just laid out the little you know by all admittance

like just very Antiquated now view of maleness um that they would be thinking a lot about what's going on it would meet some of the daily practices that you talked about earlier um that there would be reflection that there would be um Consciousness there would be um uh an understanding of one's Shadow or if one were to add in the the other stereotype that went with it that they drink a lot right that was very much I'll remember my first I went to graduate school first at Berkeley before I shifted to a different place um

and I was told when I got there that it used to be that the faculty and graduate students of which at that time in the 1970s and 60s was mostly male mostly now that's changed fortunately right that they would meet every day after work to drink and then stagger home to their Partners every day and I was shocked like are you kidding me I was like no every single day so you know the the idea here is that um that was the old view now things are very different but what about the work of men

men and boys to try and understand their own psyche better what what is the uh what are the things that are specific to them that you've talked about and then we'll turn to women and then uh we'll we'll do our best to bridge The Divide in a conversation well um Ju Just to go back to our our earlier conversation for a moment you know why would those men have to drink every day and the answer is because there was some deep pain that they had to anesthetize of which they were by and large unaware or

presumably they would have the opportunity to address whatever that was um you know and I'll come back to that in a moment I've been asked often to speak about men by women's groups and by the way men's groups have never asked me to talk about women right is that right that's right you know individuals such as yourself but it's it's mostly women's groups have asked me talk about those strange creatures called men and I say imagine these three things first of all that you cut away all your close friends the women that you share your

worries about your marriage with about your children about your body your love life or lack thereof you know those people are gone forever there's no one you can share that with secondly um you have to sever your link to whatever your guiding Source may be you call it your instinct or your intuition whatever it is that's that's cut off it's not acceptable and thirdly your value as a human being will be defined by your meeting abstract standards of productivity as defined by total strangers in your culture and sooner or later no matter how much you

win today you'll wind up a loser and the thing is you hold that off as long as you can so keep running all right and women hear that and they think well that's horrible that's horrible how lonely that would be how isolating that would be and of course it is it's self arranging you know my my poor father was pulled out of the e8th grade sent to to work in the factory worked all of his life in that factory and and by the standards of his day he was a good man he supported his family

he didn't run away he he accept the responsibility but I also know he didn't live his own soul I know that and I had Clues here and there and I even saw that as a child um and and so when I started to reflect on men I I realized I had my own inhibitions about that and I was fortunately enough as a therapist I would say all right what would you say to someone who expressed these inhibitions I would say all right there there's some some fears here that you're defending yourself against what's that about

so I thought and then I had a voice in me that said but these are secret you don't talk about it then I thought well that's my duty isn't it I have to bring some of those things up and so that's what led to the writing of the book under Sater Shadow and um I suggested a number of those Secrets One is men's lives are much as much governed by role expectations as women's lives are less so today but in the past they were Ironclad right um and they the net effect of those roles was

self- arranging you know you are your function you are your duties um men's lives are governed by fear-based responses and there's a certain level of competitiveness that is essential to to men's culture women learn through the years probably out of necessity to cooperate and support each other um and and they can get through difficult things by doing that for for men it's you're always having to demonstrate your competency in one area or another and the one thing you don't want to do is be a loser you see it's a zero sum game winners and losers

and um ultimately there's a deep deep uh longing for well there's a fear of the feminine socalled that can include the feminine within hence men's estranging themselves from themselves I had a client many years ago who was sent into therapy by his wife saying you know either you go to therapy or I'm out of here so he was there very reluctantly and he walked in and he saw a box of uh tissue there a Kleenex box and he he just kind of sniffed at that without saying anything and I knew exactly what he was saying

but I acted like I didn't and he thought I'd missed the clue and so he pointed the box and sniffed again and I I said what what's this about and he said well you had a woman in here before don't you I'm not going to be needing that and I said you know every man has a a lake of Tears inside of himself and a mountain of anger in there and I said sooner or later and he said no no we have other better ways of dealing with that and I thought well our prognosis is

not very good here he he left after about five sessions because it was just going to ask more than he was capable of so there's a fear of the feminist like I have to be so much in my masculine mode of combativeness or competitiveness or expression of Competency I can't afford anything that one would undo my my shaky hold on that wheresoever you see Macho Behavior you see fear-based overcompensation is what it amounts to right you know saber raveling rattling is is always a fear-based response and and underneath there is a very deep longing you

know for the wise father for for the the person you could see some modeling from who would teach you something who would share with you wisdom he's learned along the way and so you know the condition of modern men and things have changed a great deal and I think partly stirred by the um revolution in in in the history of women you know and and their courage in addressing these stereotypes about what a woman is and what she's supposed to do with her life um required men to start looking at themselves as well so women

have done us a great favor not always recognized by men but um you know in both cases you have to say all right the message you have from family of origin and culture may or may not work for you but you're here to in a certain way deconstruct you know those expectations and and find your own path you see uh the Spanish analist Irene Deo not long to cease now talked about the difference between focused awareness and diffuse awareness and I think rather than talk about gender which is a social construct coming out of this

culture or this culture or this culture talk about those are two different modes of orientation to the world and we need both we need focused awareness that's gold directed behavior that is historically associated with the masculine and we also need this awareness of context and of relationship so this focused awareness without relatedness leads to sterility and isolation and on the other hand too diffuse without a sense of directed and purposeful Behavior you know means that one is just sort of fumbling one's way through life too I've always said to women in therapy you know to

be a man is in a sense your requirement is to know what you want and to do it but you have to do that too in what y called the Animus that is to say the so-called inner masculine or the inner focused awareness and that gold directed behavior is what moves your life forward in a purposeful way but for men it's it's about becoming aware of again context and relatedness what happens if I have the biggest pile of sand at at the end of my life well you know obviously you can't take it with you

but in the end it's only sand money is only money what was your life about that's the question women have to ask that men have to ask that and sometimes the culture is supportive in that process sometimes it's opposed to that and and then that's when you have to engage in a fight men and women have a you know a common summons here and they can be very supportive of each other as well as you know celebrate their differences and recognize um you know as men are beginning to recognize if you don't address what's going

on inside of you you're you're going to be uh simply a creature of adaptation and you're going to lose your way sooner or later um when I came back from my training in Zurich in the 70s um I would say my practice was 90% women and 10% men today it's the reverse 90% men I don't put out a shangle and say I see men or women I I see both but uh I think again it's the change is in men now they they recognize they're lost in some way the old masculine definitions are no longer

applicable you know a lot of this happened with the Industrial Revolution where Fathers and Sons work together in the same trait if you were a Tanner you tanned you know if you were a carpenter you you built houses if if you were a Shepherd you you know worked with a sheep and so forth um and you sort of learn who you are from your rubbing shoulders with the father well well today men go away to the factory or go away to the office and Sons are at home with their mothers you know and they're female

School teachers and so forth and so there's again this deep hunger for the initiatory Father the the the the supportive father in traditional cultures where there were rights of Passage they recognized the importance of separating the boy at puberty in a simpler culture yes but at puberty it wasn't initiated by the personal father or relatives it was by the elders in the tribe often wearing masks or painted faces because they were archetypal forces they were not the neighbor down the street it was like you're in the hands of the Gods now and they require you

to leave home and we're going to teach you things but we're also going to bring about some forms of isolation and suffering for you so begin to realize that you have within you the resources to undertake this journey what we have now is is a whole culture of uninitiated males who haven't left home psychologically speaking you know in the past they were simply governed by masculine roles and now as those of dissolved for many men um there there's very little sense of well what does it mean to be a man what am I supposed to

do as as a man and the answer basically is go live your life find find your path find the courage and resolve and resources to to sustain that over time but you know how to do that is there's no model for that it's it's you have to sort of find that your yourself you see and that's what brings people into therapy at times and it's interesting that I have right now this collection and it's consonant with my own stage of Life Journey too of of I only have one man under 50 and all the others

are interested in how you deal with aging and mortality for a good reason and they're also dealing with how do I Define myself other than my work and and that's where the unlived life often is coming back back in a very useful way all right although there are some things that have left and not coming back in terms of the changes in the body and that sort of thing but basically now is the time to address this emotional developmental spiritual life that is to say do you have any concept of a story that's larger than

the stories of your complexes you see doesn't mean one has to be part of a religious group it means that you have to question what quickens the spirit in me what stirs me inside what touches me where do I encounter the numinous and the the word numinous means there's something there that that causes this reaction within me so if you and I walk into an art museum let's say and you're touched by a particular painting and and frightened by it or moved to Tears by it or whatever and the other person walks by and is

indifferent which is a right well it's not right or wrong it's this here it correlates with something in here that's what caused that resonance and that resonance is your engagement with something numinous for you you don't have to know it or explain or whatever but you have to Value it and ask what is it that was touched in me and if it doesn't speak to me um Duty or convention or expectations insufficient to make it happen we can't will these things to be numinous numinosity is something that's defined by one soul and not by the

collective that's for sure and women and men in time I think will find that they have very similar goals in their life and that's how to balance my journey with the legitimate commitments of relationship on the other side and that that's why we have that wonderful word sacrifice you know not surrender sacrifice is fer to Sacred sacrificer to make sacred if you're sacrificing on behalf of a value that is right for you and for your project together then you're both served by that on the other hand and you don't sacrifice the Journey of the individual

Spirit too and again it's about balancing that as best one can and there's very little in our culture that rewards that but then the price is again the symptomatology that comes from to the surface and from a psychodynamic standpoint we don't say well how quickly to get rid of the symptoms we say why if they come what are they asking of me that's why as I I said my first question in therapy was how quickly did I get rid of this depression get back on the road you know the careerism road right and and I

came in time to realize it was my psyche saying you're on the wrong path fella you don't know it's not so much that it's wrong it's just not right for you there's a big difference here and you're going to have to find a different kind of conversation in your life and so forth and during my training I was obliged to you know do my um clinical experience I was working in a psychiatric Hospital in uh New Jersey and sometimes I was shuttling back and forth the same day between the psychiatric hospital a locked word in

the in the University campus and I came to realize the conversation in the hospital was more real somehow it was more more about things that mattered and that's what began to to you know further my resolve to move from Academia to being a a therapist you know working therapist and and and so forth so it it the point is I need to add this my way of responding to the family of origin and social context stuff was to retreat into the life of the mind I didn't realize that's what I was doing at the time

that's why the psyche had to reach up and Pull Me Under And um then I came to realize that the fears that I had in childhood were the ones I had to face at midlife the difference being I was bringing the adults capacity to the table that was not present to the child so quick example in my first week working in the psychiatric hospital I was signed to a kind of grizzled old ex-military guy who was the my mentor and without asking me he took me into an autopsy it was his you know let's initiate

the new kid kind of thing you know well I realized it was a test so I stayed cool and so forth all the while I'm seeing this human body you know cut up and so forth in a radical way and and I realized all that I had fled in childhood was right there on the table before me and it continued to perseverate in my dreams and so forth and I I was back in Zurich in my own analysis and I talked about this and my analyst said quite rightly he said when you've dealt with your

fears the fears of others will not be so threatening to you cu the the closed W I was in was at times violent and so forth and was not a pleasant situation but I could feel my own sense of purpose and gravitas in that situation after that so it's like you can run but you can't hide sooner or later what you've avoided will show up in your behaviors or your blockage in your behaviors so it doesn't go away it goes somewhere I'd like to just hover a bit on this idea that um you know on

the one hand our work is to understand ourselves and what really feeds our soul um and to try and live that forward as much as possible in a benevolent way one would hope and on the other hand anytime we are in the relational aspects of life in particular romantic relationship as we sort of framed it here yes um because I think with friendships and work relationships oftentimes it can align with the self in a different way um and it's our work to try and as you said sacrifice to to sacrifice one for the other one

for the other in a way that over time allows both to not just persist but grow and I'm also thinking about what you said earlier which was you know we should be cautious about immediately applauding the 50-year marriage because often times there's a a soul death in one or both people um and that we don't want to celebrate that and yet there's something pretty impressive about a 50-year marriage as as a um if for no other reason as an endurance event but we have to be cautious about rewarding endurance events like that because in as

much as they sound to be about love I mean there's also the endurance event of the person that was a stock broker for 50 years and got to the end and then walked out of the stock exchange or stepped out from behind the computer monitor and went oh wow I missed a lot that's right so um there's no handbook for this of you know you spend 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there ratio of 2 to one children absorb energy and when there health or other issues in a relationship then then you know energy goes

you know as well um so what's the you know what's how does one guide the rudder I mean uh does it require third- Party Support I mean I mean I've often thought this that because we evolved presumably in small villages where there was support that at closer proximity than perhaps we have now um people that know both individuals and have the best uh uh in mind for both um and for the collective I mean is there the idea that like every romantic couple should have a third- party trained counselor to guide them seems like not

a bad idea although I think people are pretty resistant to that and of course it takes resources which is always an issue sure sure well there's nothing wrong with having the third party conversation from time to time that's for sure we have to remember that what we call therapy is a relatively modern invention um how was that addressed before you're right at the Village level uh when people were living in um vit vitalized mythological systems they had a sense of relatedness to the Cosmos first of all who are the gods whe whether do we go

when we die what's this life about in other words every tribe had its story secondly what is our relationship to Nature and to live in harmony with that nature as opposed to violating it repeatingly for our own purposes thirdly who to whom do I belong who is my tribe who are my people and is that a life serving or a life supressing experience and fourthly is the mystery of individual journey by what lights do I conduct my journey and so forth and of course those mythological systems were not particularly interested in the development of the

individual but they're certainly about the individual being subsumed into the the tribal experience at least you have a sense of belonging erode that and people fall out of that into the abyss of the self as it were um you put it this way he said you know PE people walked off the medieval Cathedral into the abyss of the self in one of his letters you see and it became a cultural contrivance with the best of intention to help people find their path and deal with whatever their psyche's reaction to you know again typically not always

but typically what brings people to therapy is that their belief system or their conventional practices are no longer working for them I had a client from Houston once who said in his AA group their slogan was this isn't working for me but I do it very well that pretty much um summarizes the first step of going into 12st step is that recognition that's right and then uh you know 12st step of course provides so much more but applicable to all of us you know our our our practices sooner or later will often because they're driven

by these stories that we carry INTC psychically uh they don't work for us but we've learned to do them with certain facility and so forth and that's when the discrepancy becomes so difficult then one has to to face the you know the the fire so to speak then what matters is how am I to conduct my life in the face of these circumstances which I'm not able to solve in the old way and that's the adventure and that's the challenge and at the same time it's intim to to many people understandably so sooner or later

again one has to say is this your life or is it someone else's most people are not living their life sadly they're living reactively they're living whatever the stories were and I put stories not in the sense that they're so conscious as such as they are representing whatever message we internalized and produced a splinter narrative again when triggered it has the power to to govern our behaviors it's why again you start with your own patterns and say where did this come from I wasn't born with it pattern is something that is replicating itself as a

result of this story spilling into the world so you know what what I learned in my own life was I had put so much of my emotional distress up in the world of the life of the mind which was rich inv valuable I don't repudiate that but it was too one-sided and what I had to do was come back and face what was on the operating table in that Psychiatric Hospital the world of repressed emotion fears etc etc it's like both are true now see if you can honor both of them and when you do

something grows and develops within you to respond to that in a new way so we've been covering a lot of human universals and things that everybody should think about and address we talked a bit about things more or less specific to men um what about women what what are some of the um unique psychic challenges that um that they face and need to address in specific ways sure well first of all each woman has to examine what was the message given her by her family by her mother her family extended family expectations and role models

and cultural setting and so forth and say is is this something that supports my personal growth and development or not I mean that's a kind of inventory men have to ask that same question as well um we we have to acknowledge that biological differences suggest if you're a woman you're the one who's going to be carrying that baby and still in our culture the major responsibility for it while shared by father and mother hopefully still is something you have to attend and many women are trying to have it both ways as we know the the

career development and and being a parent at the same time I saw a survey some years ago that um a large number of women Executives all at M mbas and had all achieved you know like vice president status or something in their corporation when at asked around age 50 would you do this all again almost 100% said no it cost too much from me it cost me too much they felt something else was missing they they felt friendship was missing they felt intimacy was missing in many cases they felt parenting was missing or it had

gotten short shrift you see um as as men often face when they look at retirement they you know the old saying you on your deathbed you say GE I wish I spent more time with the office you know it's like I wish I'd done this or that I know a few scientists who to this day say that they plan to die in their office it's always a sad thing for me to hear this yeah I also know their children in many cases and that's uhh about four fifths of the time is not a good picture

that's right yeah and uh again not all right this four fifths but um because other colleagues are spectacular parents but I grew up with the children of a lot of academics and a lot of times it ain't the pretty picture that's right so I I think that um another thing that men in our time really need to learn is if you're in a relationship part of your role is supporting the growth and development of your partner and the more insecure the man the more threatened he will be by that because she might go off in

some other direction you see um and that means sharing household duties and sharing child care and so forth forth which you do to the best of your ability having a child and having two careers requires an enormous amount of juggling as we as we all know but you can do it in good faith with the best of intentions if not resentment builds and one-sidedness build so I I think for for women they still need a partner that will buy into the notion of genuine reciprocity in our responsibility to each other and to our our work

together which includes child rearing uh without which women are unduly burdened you see unfairly burdened and I don't think we've solved that one yet I think that's still open-ended in the in the culture at this point on the other hand it's it's stunning to see women grab hold of the opportunities available now uh I'm living in a retirement community as of a year ago and so many of the women that I've had din with my my wife and I have dinner with various people have said well when I was at this stage women were not

allowed to do this one woman was a scientist and she said I just wasn't recognized in the physics World until like late in my life and you forget how recently that was the case I mean that was that was a deep violation of the human Spirit Well it was routine and so many of the women that I see there who are going to be over 70 most of them are over 80 live lived in a world that was not unlike a segregated world you know just as you know I grew up where segregation was practiced

by half of this country it's not so long ago somewhat hard to Fathom um how much things have changed and yet also how much things persist that's right that's right well and you know the 60s happened and what this what happened to the 60s is a a a kind of re Resurgence From Below in both men and women some men and some women to overthrow the sort of oppressive nature of role definitions and so forth you know I mean you couldn't think of marrying a person uh in another religion for example you couldn't think of

marrying someone of A different race I mean it was the price of that meant you had to go live in anonymously in the city somewhere or you couldn't be gay for example uh the love that dare not speak its name as it was called um all of that's been radically challenged and rightly so and and yet what that does is bring about a world of great Freedom greater freedom but also ambiguity you know if this isn't right well but what's this and what's that and people are troubled by ambiguity and so therefore there's there's always

a reactive uh nature in in some individuals who are fighting that you see so again it shows up in very ious issues of of racism whether we have abortion or not or whatever the social issue may be lot of what's playing out there is the traditional role definitions versus a sense of the autonomy of the individual to live his or her journey you say I'd like to shift a bit to discussions of pathology or um asserted pathology nowadays I think thanks again to social media um or no thanks to social media um there's a lot

of use of psychological terms M narcissism projection um gaslighting clinical diagnosis I mean I I admittedly took the liberty of saying that I as a non-clinician view the the landscape of a lot of social media as as borderline and I have no credential to be able to diagnose an individual let alone the internet but so I'll be clear about my limitations um whenever possible but there are real pathologies of the of the psyche of the mind yes um I'd be curious about your view of the ones that tend to capture people's um attention the most

you know I mean uh I think we Now understand some of the neurochemical basis of certain CH psychiatric challenges schizophrenia bipolar in particular OCD particular sometimes by way of which medications they respond to or don't um but that alone doesn't allow us to understand their underlying mechanisms I think a lot of that is still mysterious but I'd love um to get a different perspective on these things which is the psychological perspective which um of course Embraces biology but um looks at it a little bit differently so um yeah what what are your thoughts about the

way that these days um these words are slung and um and what's your view about our actual treatment for these uh for these conditions both for the people suffering from them and the people that suffer because others suffer from them yeah well you're asking me to speak both as a therapist and as a citizen I think and I'll address the first one first um part of the therapist's role is to differential diagnosis in other words if a person comes in with a depression we have to try to Define what kind of depression are we talking

about there different kinds of depression is this a reactive depression it's only pathological if it lasts too long or lasts interferes with their normal functioning too much and that's a judgment call if a person's grieving the loss of something important in their life the loss of a marriage would say it's appropriate to feel uh depressed for a certain length of time until life's ches move one forward and so forth there is um um biologically driven depression which can be approached with medication although many of the anti-depressants are very limited in their success long-term therapy tends

to be more effective as various Studies have recognized albeit there's a you know an economic cause to that and then thirdly there's what you can call an intas psychic depression which is what I experienced was that you know there were certain parts of my life that had been walled off and and you know that was crying out pathology comes from the Greek word pathos which means suffering and logos which means expression of so pathology means the expression of the suffering Psychopathology is expression of the suffering of the Soul so what is it in terms of

this person's natural desire to live in a meaningful way that's interfering with her life is it biologically driven is it as function of the social context in which they live or is it some personal task that they have to address and that kind of differential diagnosis is is essential and as you said there are certain conditions that are predominantly biologically driven such as schizophrenia bipolar Etc so secondly then speaking as as a citizen you know the internet and I don't want to get lost in the internet again but it's like it's a vast Open Stage

in which whatever is unaddressed in people can can be put out there without censorship without reflection without the other being represented and you know it it allows people to to reveal whatever is going on within them uh with without genuine dialogue and of course you can have opposition but what has to happen typically is again associating with like-minded people I must be right because these other people agree with me you see so you know any of these terms can be misappropriated and and will be sooner or later so what one has to say is we

can only make diagnosis with you know observation over time it's very hard initially to to know what's really going on as I mentioned what we do or what someone does is logical what we don't know is what it's in service to inside of them and you will not get much sense of that by the internet because it's too superficial that's why it takes repeated observation and conversation for that to emerge the reason I keep coming back to the internet is I think it's where most people get their information now it's unless they're listening to this

as a podcast that's where they're going to get this information um I think what you said about um the lack of dialogue being really key I mean I think we see this now also at the level of media we have a very polarized media yes um this is an independent media channel we don't have a political stance despite what some people might assert we don't right it's about science and health information to the for everyone who is interested zero cost that's that's that's the the mission understood um when we read and see things now um

about politics but also about business about sports about celebrity about kids about culture um all too often the the labels of psychology are placed on those kids are depressed they're you know they're not just lonely they're depressed and they may very well be U experiencing high levels of clinical diagnosis of depression that that could be true so you know my concern it's a it's a real concern which is why I keep bringing this up is that uh in doing that that we both um diminish the suffering of those who are really suffering from those pathologies

yeah and we also perhaps um create a little bit of catastrophizing about you know feeling low for an afternoon um might be a great source of of stimulus to go like you know write or think or nap or Insight um and you know I load to think that in people learning terms that somehow they're getting further away from what they need no I I agree you know Lou pastur from which from whom we got pasteurization of course um reportedly put over the entrance to his office tell me not your politics or your religion tell me

only your suffering and I I always think about that in the context of therapy because everybody is a suffering Soul because you know life is difficult and then you die so have a nice day right um life is suffering and that's not that's not pessimistic that's just you know descriptive the question is what does that suffering make you do what does it keep you from doing that's the central question there is where the person is called into some accountability you know if you're depressed all right what's the task that that depression is asking of you

uh if you're anxious where's that anxiety coming from how much of that is archaic how much of that was inherited from family how much of that is what you know unique to your life and what is the task that is to be addressed there I also wrote a book called swamplands of the soul that deals with anxiety depression loss betrayal etc etc and sooner or later life is going to take us to swamplands where you find yourself really mired into something and one will feel very much victimized in that way but that's that's the passive

experience the summons is always what is the task that this visitation to the swampland is asking of you what do you need to address if if you feel that your partner betrayed you and left the marriage for example all right and took your self-esteem with that all right well your task is the recovery of self- worth because without that no other choice you make is going to be very good um and maybe that's a hard project but that's nonetheless the work you have to do so always the question what does this make you do what

does it keep you from doing and to bring responsibility back to the individual and of course some people are willing to accept that responsibility some are not and that makes the difference I had a colleague many moons ago who said she could tell in the first hour whether the person she was seeing was a big kid or a little kid because everybody's recovering child and the big kids could do the work the little kids wanted someone to tell them what to do or tell them that there's an easy fix to this um and in the

long run uh those persons going to stay stuck pretty much until something else happens in their life perhaps well to me it seems that the the litmus test is the extent to which somebody is pointing fingers at others or directing the work towards themselves regardless of who was wronged sure right one individual both individual like regardless ultimately I think what you're saying and forgive me for interrupting is that if one is asking what is the task to develop what you know to control one's anxiety to develop stronger sense of self to um to better understand

uh what one really wants and assert that um to uh set better boundaries so that um people's projections are not as um permeable to us whatever it is ultimately There's No Business of looking at what others are doing wrong in that it's all introspective and self-directed thing that's right well and you gave good examples of the kind of tasks that rise out of a person's experience now for example if a person has been subject to Serious abuse in childhood physical or emotional or sexual or whatever um it's affected their entire life well what is the

task you know it's it's it's to rest from that experience a sense of self and that one is still here to live one's Journey that's why I said at the beginning of our conversation I'm not what happened to me I'm what is wanting to be expressed in my life through me to get a person to that place take some time and repetition frankly you know the two hardest things I ever learned as a therapist and I still don't like either one of them is patience you have to sit with it over time you have to

sort and sift and sort and sift and hold this over time till something else emerges and secondly powerlessness I can't fix anybody right but we can try to promote the attitudes and behaviors that will allow that person to find what is Right From Within them because something in each of us always knows what is right for us if we pay attention and if we are willing to honor what emerges and have enough courage to address that then we can live in a different way and it's very tough in the face of subst substantial abuse for

example because it was so intrusive and so devastating it's cleared out a space in which the self seems to find no room but that's that's the task then is the recovery of a sense of self and purpose that's independent of what happened to oneself it's almost as if one needs to really understand their own story but then be able to depart from that story yeah that's why I said one has to have a larger story than what happened to you right one has to have a larger story than the story that one's culture gives you

or your family of origin gives you what is that story that's why I said my instructions and my models were to stay home and stay safe something in me hungered and I honor my teachers to this day I enter a local librarian who showed me any book she said she recognized this kid's a reader so she said to me you don't have to stay in the children's section you can go anywhere you want in the library which I I thought was like having a lot of candy I I enjoyed that and as a child I

devoured the biographies of famous people because I think I was looking for clues about how do you live a larger life I couldn't have languaged that it was just some deep urge within how do you live this life in a way that's more satisfying and I was privileged to have some people there notably teachers and the librarian who gave permission to that and and supported that and I'm and I'm grateful to them so um you know I I I think it probably would have happened anyway but much later in life but I I look back

and I realized there was something there that wanted to go as I said to see where the airplanes went what the ocean looked like what it meant to live in a foreign country what it meant to learn a foreign language you know all of those things were unimaginable to my family and I you know rest their souls um because I I I grieve the life they were not allowed to live you know I I never forget that and then it you know causes me to resolve again to stop and say all right now where are

you being blocked today by convention or your old fears or or your inhibitions or or whatever because there's there's always a summon to show up in fact in one of the books I said my motto which I think about every morning is very simple shut up suit up show up now I'm speaking to myself when I say this shut up means stop whining you know there are people who don't have food today there are people whose children are being killed today there are people don't have a roof over there you you have tons of things

shut up don't whine speaking to s suit up means prepare do your homework don't expect life just to present it to you you have to go out and work hard at something show up meaning not show off but just do the best you can step into life you know sooner or later life knocks us down death is the great democracy but you're here to live it as best you can by lights that matter within instead of what people around you are saying you know and as simplistic as that slogan is I know a lot of

people have copied it and put it on their refrigerator because it's a reminder of this is your life you're accountable what are you going to do about that I'm going let that sink in for everybody I think um shut up suit up show up is uh is um essential um I love that I love Eric's stages of Developmental maturation um for those not familiar um Ericson I think another danne right is it Dane yeah um psychologist you know set about to um kind of explain neurobiology without knowing any neurobiology and asserted that there were specific

core conflicts that infants and children young adults and adults go through um and the AG the age ranges are more uh variable now um based on life expectancy and other factors than they were originally but one reason I like um Erikson's stages of development so much is that um as a developmental neurobiologist first that's where I started out more or less um it makes perfect sense to me that the brain circuitry would be resolving certain things about interactions with physical objects and relational objects and it just makes perfect sense and and what what genius it

was to to um to superimpose on that um some ideas about what infants are doing from 0 to one and from 3 to 5 Etc rarely if ever do we hear about the maturational stages of adulthood and the core conflicts that we all have to go through um you know perhaps not exactly from age 45 to 50 or 50 to 55 or 75 to 80 and so forth but that life as it were might be a series of of um trying to make it through specific milestones and when we don't make it through a milestone

um problems arise sure sure you described the first half of life as one in which we're kind of foraging more or less for most people unconscious of how our parental influences or family influences um set about certain patterns that may or may not be healthy for us and then at some point some event comes um often times a painful event but that but it could be a joyous event like the birth of a child or something like that and all of a sudden we get hit Square in the face with the work that we need

to do would you say that the second half of life is one in which we because of our life experience and because of some awareness and yet because also our brain is yes still plastic but it takes more work than when we're kids to to modify our brain circuitry that we you know that we have to set about this juggling Act of still trying to understand the self while still bringing the self that we have into the world right we don't we don't really get to pause go to the shop and um come out a

year later in most cases um so regardless of whether or not somebody is 10 15 20 50 or 80 years old how do we know what our work is then like how do we best know like what to to focus on because it can beit be a bit overwhelming to to think about like tackling all of this sure sure well let me say first of all many years ago I was when I was still teaching at a university um I taught a course on life stages and for one of the papers I asked the students

to imagine two stages ahead of them so if they were typically 18 to 22 let's say to imagine themselves in their 40s and try to write about their in their 40s and the assignment completely failed Al although it it was made useful uh for the classroom discussion because all of them imagine in their 40s they would have this perfect marriage their adolescent children will would adore them and they would be in these satisfying careers despite everything we'd read everything we' talked about as a time of turbulence and disappointment and and and so forth and and

it was a complete failure so it it's hard for us to imagine that we too will go through these similar kinds of things but usually we do and some of this is triggered by roles in one's life a lot of it's determined by our own aging of the body and so forth so for example the last stage in Ericson's um um discussion in so-called old age is the conflict between Despair and integrity and I remember reading that when I was young I wondering what did he really mean by that now I know that in a

very personal way despair is one sees friends die one sees Avenues in your life closed that you can't possibly do that you're confronted with the unlived life or the mistakes you made you're dealing with loss of functions of the body you're you're facing your mortality and so forth and so on and how could you not despair in the face of that well at the same time there's again the summons to accountability what now is life asking of you how are you to show up today in in this changed environment you see so you know the

the stages of life you know and Shakespeare wrote about the seven stages of life I think Ericson had eight stages and again underneath this these things happen right and often one doesn't realize it one reads about it somehow it's sort of like when you're young yes mortal I understand I'm mortal but you know that happens to people out there you know it's not part of my DNA you see well it is and sooner or later life is going to unfold unless it's cut off in some way you know and uh I remember reading when I

was in graduate school um a saying in ancient Greece that I saw in several different environments and it said best of all is not to have been born second best is to have died young and I thought gee how awful that is right well I think I've understood why they were saying that if you if if you're born into the veil of Tears so to speak you're born into suffering you're you're you're born into mortality you're born into loss and so forth if you're going to live you're going to go through some of those if

you live long enough you'll go through the loss of people you love and care about you may outlive your children as I've had an experience and sooner or later you know life will take you to these difficult places and what are you going to do then who are you then and how are you going to address that and that's where the issue of Integrity came in and I think Ericson was was right on that to in to be a person of integrity means to integrate something to pull back one's stuff and and sense this is

who I am and and this is where I stand Visa this dilemma it's why I said the Practical question is how now am I to live my life in the face of this situation that's a task that comes to each of us at at some place in our life and that never goes away let's talk about death okay I've often wondered whether or not um the human brain's ability to um adjust the aperture of our time perception is an Adaptive thing because we're we to not be able to do that we would probably always focus

on the fact that at some point we are going to die this to me um is analogous to uh situation in space not outer space but um let's just frame it this way we can Orient in time and in particular under conditions of stress the our time Horizon tends to shrink we have to solve for now we get the troubling text message somebody's we care about is in trouble we need to solve for now now so the time Horizon has shrunk we're on vacation we're relaxed everything's taken care of we're fed we're rested our loved

ones are safe we're safe and all of a sudden we can Daydream right so um in the space domain um the brain can learn to navigate a small environment like this room um and in conversation we're present to this room but we can also imagine that we're just two people among billions of other people floating on a planet in the galaxies and we can expand our notion of space the space-time dimensionality of perception of the human brain is vast and it can be consciously controlled or unconsciously controlled so that's great it allows us to be

functional in a number of different SpaceTime Dimensions um it also can allow us to avoid the reality which is that at some point our time here is finite yes and the example you gave earlier of somebody who is just trying to pile up as much money to get to the y was an example I think of a a shorten time Horizon other compulsive behaviors maybe even addictive behaviors I would argue um have some component often of being a way to avoid the reality of death it's a way of packing away the fear of death because

if you can create these reward-based which eventually become punishment based in the case of addiction um milestones and and algorithms that the brain is running solve for this now solve for this now solve for this you Stave off the reality which is death is coming are we as humans meaning is it our work if we wish to be the most conscious healthy version of ourselves um to understand and acknowledge our sense of mortality I I think of the um what I consider the great commencement speech of Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2015 where he talks

about the the knowledge of one's mortality is actually in his words more or less one of the most important features of our self-recognition as humans um so that's the question and then the um the challenge becomes how often to think about it um you don't want to think about too much it can uh because it can be paralyzing it can lead I mean if we just think that we're if we acknowledge that we are indeed it's a fact just two people among billions floating around on a planet in the M then then nothing really matters

right our one can get the sense that our impact is zero but if we over um emphasize our impact thinking that everything we do like the movement of this book is going to impact molecules that then will impact you go you'd go crazy you become dysfunctional in a real way so those are the two extremes and I'll just kind of set that about and and let um for uh reflection but it in terms of our our sense of our own mortality and what that means about our sense of life seems like a pretty big topic

and I know you're writing a book about this and I'm very excited to read it when it comes out well I've actually written about it before um the Paradox here is it's mortality that makes this life meaningful if we were Immortal we would simply do this for a century then we' get bored and then we do something else for a century and then get bored and then something else for a century life is short as as Yung said that short pause between two great mysteries from whence we come we know not whether we go we

don't know the problem is the identification of the ego one of the things that's occurred is in many traditional cultures that ego was subsumed as I said into a larger story take away that story and what's going to fill that space the ego you know my my own importance my self-perpetuation the fact that people have Frozen their brains and wanting to be revived in some future um you know era is a good example of denial it seems to me um it's it's life means something because your choices are finite you don't live here forever now

when the more you identify with the ego the more threatened you're going to be by that um and and then you begin to realize all right the center of my personality is not the ego there are several things to say about this none of which is proof of anything simply observations uh and and Yung pointed this out in a essay once called the soul in death um psyche doesn't seem to recognize uh its own termination people who are overtly dying and they know they're dying and I one of my patients right now is a gleo

blastoma client who's who's not going to be here in a few months um who's acutely aware of of mortality but the dreams have to do with Journeys and crossings and things of that sort in other words as if the human psyche is not bound by time and space per se but the ego is so if there's another life it's another life you know if there's a life after this it's another life this is the only one we know about for sure and I would say in terms of the fear of death which most people don't

want to talk about but sooner or later it comes up in therapy no matter what stage of life one is involved in you know is either either there is another life of some kind which is larger than my imagination can conjure up or there's an annihilation of this ego identity either case my theories about it and my anxieties about it are rendered moot so again the more I identify with the ego Consciousness the more I'm tied into its perpetuation the less I'm identified with that the less it matters I would say to you at this

moment I'm trying to be as honest as I can about it the chief thing I worry about as I approach my mortality uh is I don't want my wife to be alone I care for her and I know there are areas where she needs my help and I want to be here for her as long as I can and my existence a little over a year ago was sort of problematic coming out of the all those surgeries so that's one reason we moved to retirement community so there' be some structure there for her secondly I

don't you know want to suffer obviously um but that's outside of my control and and thirdly I'm still curious as a human being there's so much to learn and when we're talking about the internet and its perils it's also an enormous learning tool I I love to Google up things and find out about things that used to be so difficult to learn about so I I still heavily invested in the adventure of life but I'm less and less um attached to it in some peculiar way uh it's the ego attachment you know um the German

word galenite mean is the word for serenity it's it's the condition of having let go and the only solution so to speak for our fear of mortality is accepting it paradoxically of letting go of the fantasy of the sovereignty of the ego that it's immune somehow to the Natural order of things the natural progression of things now I'm not saying that makes me wholly unafraid of death that would be delusional and it's in another way but I can say that I'm not defined by it in any way and I think you're right A lot of

people what what it usually produces is either depression and and toror of some kind or phonetic activity so the inability of a person to relativize the ego in the context of the idea of the soul and does that Soul perpetuate I don't know if I knew I would tell you I wouldn't want to keep that a secret I don't know it's a mystery maybe I'll be a conscious enough to experience it maybe I'll just be annihilated either way as I said my present speculations are just that speculations and ultimately irrelevant and again the thing we

have to recognize it's mortality that makes this life mean something because your choices matter you're here a short time what are you going to do with that precious gift you call your life what are you g to do with it I can't think of a more appropriate place to end and yet um I have still so many more questions um but I think because of today's conversation I realized that those questions are uh questions to ask of self um as I think everyone listening and watching this surely is stimulated to ask ask many important questions

of self um I must say I'm both um a bit a struck frankly because I uh you know again I'm familiar with your teachings and and work in the form of books um and it was a great wish of mine in my life journey to sit down with you uh face to face and have a conversation so um that's why I'm uh speaking more slowly today than I normally do uh my audience perhaps will notice that and if they send some emotion it's that I feel like there's just so much richness here to take in

uh for myself and for everyone listening to take in um I'm certainly going to listen to this again and and take careful notes and we we likely will put some notes and some highlights we always timestamp everything so that people can navigate back but I think there are just so many um essential prompts of the self of the soul that um people are going to be motivated to take as a consequence of of hearing your words today so uh I just really want to say thank you so much for the work that you've done and

that you're doing and continuing to do um and for taking the time to share this uh this information with us because it's it really is uh it really is the the guts like the core stuff of of being a human being so thank you so much well thank you Andrew may I just ask add as a footnote here there's a wonderful letter of poet RKA to a young man in which he said you want the answers the key is to find the right questions and live the questions you're not yet ready to live the answers

but you you ask the right questions in time if you live them honestly with as much Integrity as you can manage someday you'll live your way into their answers for you and that's what I would say h ask large questions as children we did what was the about why am I here what's what's the story what's going on here we get so inured to those questions by our adaptive necessities and we have to come back to those questions I'm still asking those questions I've do it consciously now ask large questions you'll live a large and

interesting Journey ask small questions and it gets diminished somehow another thing I say to a lot of patients when you reach a a decisive point in your life we have to make a decision one way or the other ask does this path enlarge me psychos spiritually or does it diminish me and you usually know the answer to that if you choose the larger path you're going to grow and develop it it's going to take something out of you but it'll give something to you if you don't your life gets narrower and narrower and narrower and

something inside of you knows the difference and sooner or later the psyche is going to show up with its point of view and the more we fled from that kind of question that kind of conversation the more pathology is going to erupt when we've avoided the big question so thank you for asking big questions and thank you for inviting me to be part of this conversation today it's been a privilege and a pleasure thank you so much thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr James Hollis I hope you found it to be

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joining me for today's discussion with Dr James Hollis and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]