Discover + Heal + Grow🔭❤️‍🩹🌱 : A Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast

April 30, 2024 · transcript

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Healing the Modern Soul Appendix The Philosophy of Psychotherapy

The Corporatization of Healthcare and Academia: A Threat to the Future of Psychotherapy

The field of psychotherapy is at a critical juncture, facing numerous challenges that threaten its ability to effectively address the complex realities of the human experience. Chief among these challenges is the growing influence of corporate interests and the trend towards hyper-specialization in academic psychology, which have led to a disconnect between the profession and its roots, as well as a lack of understanding of the physical reality of the body, anthropology, and the history of the field.
In this article, we will explore the ways in which the corporatization of healthcare and academia is impacting psychotherapy, and argue that in order for the profession to remain relevant and effective, it must embrace a more holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of the mind, body, and spirit. This requires a renewed commitment to developing a coherent concept of self, a shared language and understanding of implicit memory, and a vision of psychotherapy as a means of empowering individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world and, in turn, better at transforming the world for the better.

The Corporatization of Healthcare and Academia

The influence of corporate interests on healthcare and academia has had a profound impact on the field of psychotherapy. The pressure to maximize profits and minimize costs has led to a shift away from comprehensive diagnosis and towards a reliance on quick fixes like medication and brief, manualized therapies.
This trend is particularly evident in the way that psychiatry has evolved over the past few decades. Psychiatrists used to spend an entire hour with their patients doing psychotherapy, but now the majority of the profession relies solely on drug therapy. In fact, a staggering 89% of psychiatrists used only drug therapy in 2010, compared to just 54% in 1988 (Mojtabai & Olfson, 2008). Patients are often left feeling frustrated and unheard, with many giving up on medication after their psychiatrist writes a script in the first and last five minutes of their first session.
The same forces are at work in academia, where the cost of education has skyrocketed and the focus has shifted towards producing "products" rather than fostering critical thinking and innovation. Adjunct professors, who often lack the expertise and experience to teach psychotherapy effectively, have replaced tenure-track faculty, and students are graduating with a narrow understanding of the field that is ill-suited to the realities of private practice (Collier, 2017).

The result is a profession that is increasingly disconnected from its roots and the physical reality of the body. Anthropology, humanities and the history of the profession, which offer valuable insights into the nature of the human experience and the evolution of psychotherapy, are largely ignored in favor of a narrow focus on cognitive-behavioral interventions and symptom reduction pushed largely to help psychopharm companies' bottom lines (Frances, 2013).

The current academic publishing system is also broken. Academics work hard to come up with original ideas and write papers, only to give their work away for free to publishers who make trillions of dollars in profits while the authors get no compensation (Buranyi, 2017). Peers often cite papers to support their own points without actually reading them in depth. And the "best" journals frequently publish absurd psychology articles that would make you laugh if you said their main point out loud, but hide their lack of substance behind academic jargon (Sokal, 2008).
Meanwhile, students spend years in graduate school being forced to research what their advisor wants, not what's truly innovative or needed to advance the field. After a decade of study and compromise, the pinnacle achievement is often creating a new 30-question screener for something like anxiety, rather than developing therapists who can actually discern and treat anxiety without needing a questionnaire. The system fails to properly vet or pay therapists, assuming they can't be trusted to practice without rigid manuals and checklists.
This hyper-rationality, the madness arising from too much logic rather than too little, is very useful to moneyed interests like the Department of Defense in how they want to fund and control research. Large language models and AI are the pinnacle of this - spreadsheets sorting data points to mimic human speech, created by people so disconnected from a real sense of self that they believe you can turn people into robots because they've turned themselves into robots (Weizenbaum, 1976).

But psychology and therapy can't be reduced to hard science and pure empiricism the way fields like physics can (at least until you get to quantum physics and have to rely on metaphor again). We can't remove all intuition, subjective experience and uncertainty (Rogers, 1995). The reproducibility crisis in psychology research shows the folly of this over-rationality (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Studies that throw out any participant who dropped out of CBT treatment because it wasn't helping them are not painting an accurate picture (Westen et al., 2004).

Developing a Coherent Concept of Self A History of the Self

Our understanding of the self has evolved throughout history:

Ancient Greek Philosophy (6th century BCE - 3rd century CE)

Socrates introduces the idea of the self as a distinct entity, emphasizing self-knowledge and introspection (Plato, trans. 2002).
Plato's concept of the soul as the essence of the self, distinct from the physical body (Plato, trans. 1997).
Aristotle's notion of the self as the unity of body and soul, with the soul being the form or essence of the individual (Aristotle, trans. 1986).

Medieval Philosophy (5th century CE - 15th century CE)

St. Augustine's concept of the self as a reflection of God, with the inner self being the source of truth and self-knowledge (Augustine, trans. 2002).
St. Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian concepts of the self, emphasizing the soul as the form of the body (Aquinas, trans.1981).

Renaissance and Enlightenment (16th century CE - 18th century CE)

Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), establishing the self as a thinking, conscious being (Descartes, trans. 1996).
Locke's idea of the self as a blank slate shaped by experience and the continuity of consciousness (Locke, trans. 1975).
Hume's skepticism about the self, arguing that it is merely a bundle of perceptions without a unified identity (Hume, trans. 2000).

Romantic Era (late 18th century CE - mid-19th century CE)

The self is seen as a creative, expressive force, with an emphasis on individuality and subjective experience (Berlin, 2013).
The rise of the concept of the "self-made man" and the importance of personal growth and self-realization (Trilling, 1972).

20th Century Philosophy and Psychology

Freud's psychoanalytic theory, which posits the self as composed of the id, ego, and superego, with unconscious drives and conflicts shaping behavior (Freud, trans.1989).
Jung's concept of the self as the center of the psyche, integrating conscious and unconscious elements (Jung, 1959).
Existentialism's emphasis on the self as a product of individual choices and actions, with the need to create meaning in a meaningless world (Sartre, trans. 1956).
The rise of humanistic psychology, with its focus on self-actualization and the inherent potential of the individual (Maslow, 1968).
Postmodernism's deconstruction of the self, challenging the idea of a unified, coherent identity (Jameson, 1991).

Contemporary Developments (late 20th century CE - present)

The influence of neuroscience and cognitive science on the understanding of the self as an emergent property of brain processes (LeDoux, 2002).
The impact of social and cultural factors on the construction of the self, with the recognition of multiple, intersecting identities (Gergen, 1991).
The rise of narrative theories of the self, emphasizing the role of storytelling in shaping personal identity (Bruner, 1990).
The influence of Eastern philosophies and contemplative practices on Western concepts of the self, with an emphasis on mindfulness and interconnectedness (Epstein, 1995).

Psychotherapy and the Concept of Self Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) -

Psychoanalysis: Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, conceived of the self as being composed of three elements: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id represents the primitive, instinctual drives; the ego mediates between the demands of the id and the constraints of reality; and the superego represents the internalized moral standards and values of society. Freud believed that the goal of psychotherapy was to bring unconscious conflicts and desires into conscious awareness, allowing the ego to better manage the competing demands of the id and superego (Freud, trans. 1989).

Carl Jung (1875-1961) -

Analytical Psychology: Jung, a former collaborator of Freud, developed his own theory of the self, which he saw as the central archetype of the psyche. Jung believed that the self represented the unity and wholeness of the personality, and that the goal of psychotherapy was to help individuals achieve a state of self-realization or individuation. This involved integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche, including the persona (the public face), the shadow (the repressed or hidden aspects of the self), and the anima/animus (the inner masculine or feminine) (Jung, 1959).

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) -

Individual Psychology: Adler, another former collaborator of Freud, emphasized the importance of social relationships and the drive for superiority in shaping the self. He believed that individuals develop a unique lifestyle or way of being in the world based on their early experiences and relationships, and that the goal of psychotherapy was to help individuals overcome feelings of inferiority and develop a healthy, socially-oriented way of living (Adler, trans. 1964).

Fritz Perls (1893-1970) -

Gestalt Therapy: Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, saw the self as an ongoing process of self-regulation and self-actualization. He believed that the goal of psychotherapy was to help individuals become more aware of their present-moment experience and to take responsibility for their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Perls emphasized the importance of contact between the self and the environment, and the need to integrate the different aspects of the self into a cohesive whole (Perls et al., 1951).

Internal Family Systems (IFS) -

Richard Schwartz (1950-present): IFS is a more recent approach that sees the self as being composed of multiple sub-personalities or "parts." These parts are seen as having their own unique qualities, desires, and beliefs, and the goal of IFS therapy is to help individuals develop a greater sense of self-leadership and inner harmony. The self is seen as the core of the personality, with the capacity to lead and integrate the different parts (Schwartz, 1995).
As Schwartz writes in the introduction to his book on IFS, the model was heavily influenced by Gestalt therapy and the work of Carl Jung. Schwartz aimed to create a non-pathologizing approach that honored the complexity and wisdom of the psyche. IFS shares Jung's view of the self as the central organizing principle, surrounded by various archetypes or subpersonalities. It also draws on the Gestalt emphasis on present-moment awareness and the need for integration of different aspects of the self.
However, IFS offers a more user-friendly language than classical Jungian analysis, without the need for extensive explanations of concepts like anima/animus. In IFS, a patient can quickly identify different "parts" - for example, a protector part that taps its foot and bites its nails to avoid painful feelings. By directly engaging with and embracing that part, the patient can access the vulnerable feelings and memories it is protecting against, fostering self-compassion and integration over time.
The IFS model is an example of how contemporary approaches are building on the insights of depth psychology while offering more transparent, experience-near practices suitable for a wider range of patients and practitioners. It reflects an ongoing effort to develop a cohesive yet flexible understanding of the self that remains open to unconscious processes.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) -

Aaron Beck (1921-2021) and Albert Ellis (1913-2007): CBT, developed by Beck and Ellis, focuses on the role of thoughts and beliefs in shaping emotional and behavioral responses. CBT sees the self as being largely determined by the individual's cognitions, and the goal of therapy is to help individuals identify and modify maladaptive or irrational beliefs and thought patterns. CBT places less emphasis on the unconscious or intrapsychic aspects of the self, and more on the conscious, rational processes that shape behavior (Beck, 1979; Ellis & Harper, 1975).

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) -

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990): ABA, based on the work of Skinner and other behaviorists, sees the self as a product of environmental contingencies and reinforcement histories. ABA focuses on observable behaviors rather than internal states or processes, and the goal of therapy is to modify behavior through the systematic application of reinforcement and punishment. ABA has been widely used in the treatment of autism and other developmental disorders, but has been criticized for its lack of attention to the inner experience of the self (Skinner, 1953; Lovaas, 1987).

What is Self?

One of the key challenges facing psychotherapy today is the lack of a coherent concept of self. The self is a complex and dynamic entity that is shaped by a range of internal and external factors, including our experiences, relationships, and cultural context (Baumeister, 1987). Unfortunately, many contemporary models of therapy fail to adequately capture this complexity, instead relying on simplistic and reductionistic notions of the self as a collection of symptoms or behaviors to be modified (Wachtel, 1991).
To develop a more coherent and holistic concept of self, psychotherapy must draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and the humanities (Sass & Parnas, 2003). This requires a willingness to engage with the messy and often paradoxical nature of the human experience, recognizing that the self is not a fixed entity but rather a constantly evolving process of becoming (Gendlin, 1978).

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung's concept of the self as the central archetype, connected to the divine and the greater unconscious, offers a useful starting point for this endeavor. Jung believed that by making the unconscious conscious and dealing with ego rigidity, individuals could embody a deeper sense of purpose and connection to the universe (Jung, 1959). While we may not need to fully embrace Jung's metaphysical language, his emphasis on the dynamic interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, as well as the importance of symbol, dream, and myth in shaping the self, remains highly relevant today (Hillman, 1975).

Other approaches, such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and somatic experiencing, also offer valuable insights into the nature of the self. IFS sees the self as a core of compassion, curiosity, and confidence that is surrounded by protective parts that arise in response to trauma and other challenges. By working with these parts and fostering greater integration and self-leadership, individuals can develop a more coherent and authentic sense of self (Schwartz, 1995). Similarly, somatic experiencing emphasizes the role of the body in shaping the self, recognizing that trauma and other experiences are stored not just in the mind but also in the muscles, nerves, and other physical structures (Levine, 1997).

Models like IFS, somatic experiencing, and lifespan integration are appealing because they see the self as a dynamic ecosystem that is always evolving and striving for integration and actualization (Boon et al., 2011; Ogden et al., 2006; Pace, 2012). They don't try to label and categorize everything, recognizing that sometimes we need to just sit with feelings and sensations without fully understanding them intellectually.
Lifespan integration in particular views the self as a continuum of moments threaded together like pearls on a necklace. Traumatic experiences can cause certain "pearls" or ego states to become frozen in time, disconnected from the flow of the self-narrative. By imaginally revisiting these moments and "smashing them together" with resource states, lifespan integration aims to re-integrate the self across time, fostering a more coherent and flexible identity (Pace, 2012).

In contrast, the more behavioral and manualized approaches like CBT and ABA have a much more limited and problematic view. They see the self as just a collection of cognitions and learned behaviors, minimizing the role of the unconscious and treating people more like programmable robots (Shedler, 2010). If taken to an extreme, this is frankly offensive and damaging. There has to be room for the parts of the self that we can feel and intuit but not fully articulate (Stern, 2004).

Ultimately, developing a coherent concept of self requires a willingness to sit with the tensions and paradoxes of the human experience, recognizing that the self is always in communication with the world around us, and that our sense of who we are is constantly being shaped by implicit memory and other unconscious processes (Schore & Schore, 2008). It requires remaining open to uncertainty and realizing that the self is never static or finished, but always dynamically unfolding (Bromberg, 1996). Good therapy helps people get in touch with their authentic self, not just impose a set of techniques to modify surface-level symptoms (Fosha et al., 2009).

Understanding Implicit Memory

Another critical challenge facing psychotherapy today is the lack of a shared language and understanding of implicit memory. Implicit memory refers to the unconscious, automatic, and often somatic ways in which our past experiences shape our present thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Schacter et al., 1993).

While the concept of implicit memory has a long history in psychotherapy, dating back to Freud's notion of the unconscious and Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, it remains poorly understood and often overlooked in contemporary practice (Kihlstrom, 1987). This is due in part to the dominance of cognitive-behavioral approaches, which tend to focus on explicit, conscious processes rather than the deeper, more intuitive and embodied aspects of the self (Bucci, 1997).

To effectively address the role of implicit memory in psychological distress and personal growth, psychotherapy must develop a shared language and framework for understanding and working with these unconscious processes (Greenberg, 2002). This requires a willingness to engage with the body and the somatic experience, recognizing that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are deeply rooted in our physical being (van der Kolk, 2014).

One way to think about implicit memory is as a kind of "photoshop filter" that our brain is constantly running, even when we are not consciously aware of it. Just as the center of our visual field is filled in by our brain based on the surrounding context, our implicit memories are constantly shaping our perceptions and reactions to the world around us, even when we are not consciously aware of them.

This is why it is so important for therapists to be attuned to the subtle cues and signals that patients give off, both verbally and nonverbally. A skilled therapist can often sense the presence of implicit memories and unconscious processes long before the patient is consciously aware of them, and can use this information to guide the therapeutic process in a more effective and meaningful direction (Schore, 2012).

At the same time, it is important to recognize that implicit memories are not always negative or pathological. In fact, many of our most cherished and meaningful experiences are encoded in implicit memory, shaping our sense of self and our relationships with others in profound and often unconscious ways (Fosshage, 2005). The goal of therapy, then, is not necessarily to eliminate or "fix" implicit memories, but rather to help individuals develop a more conscious and intentional relationship with them, so that they can be integrated into a more coherent and authentic sense of self (Stern, 2004).

The Future of the Unconscious

Many of the most interesting thinkers in the history of psychology understood this symbolic dimension of implicit memory, even if their specific theories needed refinement. Freud recognized the dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious processes, and the way that repressed material could manifest in dreams, symptoms, and relational patterns (Freud, trans. 1989).

Jung saw the unconscious as not just a repository of repressed personal material, but a deep well of collective wisdom and creative potential, populated by universal archetypes and accessed through dream, myth, and active imagination (Jung, 1968). Jung urged individuals to engage in a lifelong process of "individuation," differentiating the self from the collective while also integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche (Jung, 1964).

Reich connected chronic muscular tensions or "character armor" to blocked emotions and neurotic conflicts, pioneering body-based interventions aimed at restoring the free flow of life energy (Reich, 1980). While some of Reich's later work veered into pseudoscience, his core insights about the somatic basis of psychological experience were hugely influential on subsequent generations of clinicians (Young, 2006).

More recently, emerging models such as sensorimotor psychotherapy (Ogden & Fisher, 2015), accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP; Fosha, 2000), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR; Shapiro, 2017) aim to access and integrate implicit memories through body-based and imagistic techniques. By working with posture, sensation, movement, and breath, these approaches help patients bring nonverbal, affective material into conscious awareness and narrative coherence.

Process-oriented therapies such as Arnold Mindell's process work (Mindell, 1985) offer another compelling framework for engaging implicit memory. Mindell suggests that the unconscious communicates through "channels" such as vision, audition, proprioception, kinesthesia, and relationship. By unfolding the process in each channel and following the flow of "sentient essence," therapists can help patients access and integrate implicit memories and in turn catalyze psychological and somatic healing.

These contemporary approaches build on the insights of earlier clinicians while offering new maps and methods for navigating the realm of implicit memory. They point towards an understanding of the self as an ever-evolving matrix of conscious and unconscious, cognitive and somatic, personal and transpersonal processes. Engaging implicit memory is not about pathologizing the unconscious so much as learning its unique language and honoring its hidden wisdom.

At the same time, this is tricky terrain to navigate, personally and professionally. As therapist and patient venture into the uncharted waters of the unconscious, it is crucial to maintain an attitude of humility, compassion, and ethical integrity (Stein, 2006). We must be mindful of the power dynamics and transference/countertransference currents that can arise in any therapeutic relationship, and work to create a safe, boundaried space for healing and transformation (Barnett et al., 2007).

There is also a risk of getting lost in the fascinating world of the unconscious and losing sight of external reality. While depth psychology and experiential therapies offer valuable tools for self-exploration and meaning-making, they are not a replacement for practical skills, behavioral changes, and real-world action. We must be careful not to fall into the trap of "spiritual bypassing," using esoteric practices to avoid the hard work of embodying our insights and values in daily life (Welwood, 2000).

Ultimately, the future of psychotherapy lies in integrating the best of what has come before while remaining open to new discoveries and directions. By combining scientific rigor with clinical artistry, cognitive understanding with experiential depth, and technical skill with ethical care, we can continue to expand our understanding of the self and the transformative potential of the therapeutic relationship.

As we navigate the uncharted territories of the 21st century and beyond, we will need maps and methods that honor the full complexity and mystery of the human experience. Engaging with the unconscious and implicit dimensions of memory is not a luxury but a necessity if we are to rise to the challenges of our time with creativity, resilience, and wisdom. May we have the courage to venture into the depths, and the humility to be transformed by what we find there.

Empowering Individuals to Be Themselves

The ultimate goal of psychotherapy, in my view, is to empower individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world and, in turn, better at transforming the world for the better. This requires a fundamental shift in the way that we think about mental health and well-being, moving beyond a narrow focus on symptom reduction and towards a more holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit.

To achieve this goal, psychotherapy must embrace a range of approaches and techniques that are tailored to the unique needs and experiences of each individual. This may include somatic therapies that work with the body to release trauma and promote healing, such as somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, or EMDR (Levine, 1997; Ogden & Fisher, 2015; Shapiro, 2017). It may also include depth psychologies that explore the unconscious and archetypal dimensions of the psyche, such as Jungian analysis, psychosynthesis, or archetypal psychology (Jung, 1968; Assagioli, 1965; Hillman, 1975). And it may include humanistic and experiential approaches that emphasize the inherent worth and potential of each person, such as person-centered therapy, gestalt therapy, or existential psychotherapy (Rogers, 1995; Perls et al., 1951; Yalom, 1980).

At the same time, psychotherapy must also be grounded in a deep understanding of the social, cultural, and political contexts in which individuals live and work. This requires a willingness to engage with issues of power, privilege, and oppression, recognizing that mental health and well-being are intimately connected to the broader structures and systems that shape our lives (Prilleltensky, 1997). It also requires a recognition that the goal of therapy is not simply to help individuals adapt to the status quo, but rather to empower them to become agents of change in their own lives and in the world around them (Freire, 1970).

Therapists as Agents of the Post-Secular Sacred

One way to think about this is through the lens of what depth psychologist David Tacey calls the "post-secular sacred" (Tacey, 2004). Tacey argues that we are moving into a new era of spirituality that is grounded in a deep respect for science and reason, but also recognizes the importance of myth, symbol, and the unconscious in shaping our experience of the world. In this view, the goal of therapy is not to strip away our illusions and defenses in order to reveal some kind of objective truth, but rather to help individuals develop a more authentic and meaningful relationship with the mystery and complexity of existence.

This requires a willingness to sit with the discomfort and uncertainty that often accompanies the process of growth and transformation. It also requires a recognition that the path to wholeness and healing is not always a straight line, but rather a winding and often circuitous journey that involves confronting our deepest fears and vulnerabilities (Jung, 1959).

Therapists of Agents of the Post Secular Sacred Riddle in the Garden by Robert Penn Warren

My mind is intact, but the shapes
of the world change, the peach
has released the bough and at last
makes full confession, its pudeur
had departed like peach-fuzz wiped off, and

We now know how the hot sweet-
ness of flesh and the juice-dark hug
the rough peach-pit, we know its most
suicidal yearnings, it wants
to suffer extremely, it

Loves God, and I warn you, do not
touch that plum, it will burn you, a blister
will be on your finger, and you will
put the finger to your lips for relief—oh, do
be careful not to break that soft

Gray bulge of blister like fruit-skin, for
exposing that inwardness will
increase your pain, for you
are part of this world. You think
I am speaking in riddles. But I am not, for

The world means only itself.

In the image that Penn Warren creates in "Riddle in the Garden" is a labyrinth leading back to the birth of humans in the garden of Eden. Life itself is a swelling of inflammation from a wound or a need in both blisters and in peaches. You cannot have one part of the process without accepting all of it. The swelling in the growth of the fruit is also the swelling in the growth of a blister of pain. The peach must swell and become a sweet tempting blister or else no one would eat it and expose the "inwardness" of the seed to grow more trees. exists to be eaten to die. We eat the peach to grow the next one. Not to touch the “suicidal” peach is not to touch life itself. For to live is to be hurt and to grow. To touch the peach is to become part of the world like Adam and Eve found out. It hurts it blisters us turning us into fruit.

For Penn Warren it is the separation of the self from the world of divine connection with nature that creates our need for meaning. This need is the reason that patients come to therapy.

God tells us that “I am the lord your God” but Penn Warren tells us “I am not”. For “The world means only itself”. This process only has the meaning that we allow ourselves to give it. This is not a riddle, Penn Warren tells us. It is only something we have to deal with but cannot not solve. The world means only itself. There is no gimmick or solution to the problem of being human.

In other words, the process of becoming more fully ourselves is not always easy or comfortable. It requires a willingness to confront the pain and suffering that is inherent in the human condition, and to recognize that growth and healing often involve an alchemical kind of death and rebirth. But it is precisely through this process of facing our fears and vulnerabilities that we can begin to develop a more authentic and meaningful relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us.

Ultimately, the goal of psychotherapy is not to provide answers or solutions, but rather to create a space in which individuals can begin to ask deeper questions about the nature of their existence and their place in the world. It is to help individuals develop the tools and capacities they need to navigate the complexities of life with greater courage, compassion, and wisdom. And it is to empower individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world, so that they can contribute to the greater whole and help to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all.

The Future of Psychotherapy

The corporatization of healthcare and academia poses a serious threat to the future of psychotherapy, undermining its ability to effectively address the complex realities of the human experience. To remain relevant and effective in the face of these challenges, the field must embrace a more holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of the mind, body, and spirit.

This requires a renewed commitment to developing a coherent concept of self, a shared language and understanding of implicit memory, and a vision of psychotherapy as a means of empowering individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world and, in turn, better at transforming the world for the better.

It also requires a willingness to engage with the full complexity and paradox of the human experience, recognizing that growth and healing often involve a kind of death and rebirth, and that the path to wholeness is not always a straight line. As the psychologist Carl Jung once wrote, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

Psychotherapy and the Dialectic of Self and World

As we have explored throughout this essay, the self does not exist in a vacuum, but is always in dynamic interaction with the world around it. Our sense of who we are, what we value, and what is possible for us is shaped by a complex interplay of internal and external factors, from our earliest experiences of attachment and attunement to the broader social, cultural, and political contexts in which we are embedded.

In many ways, psychotherapy can be seen as a process of exploring and working with the dialectical tension between self and world, between our innermost longings, fears, and aspirations and the often harsh realities of the environments we find ourselves in. When we enter therapy, we bring with us not only our own unique histories, personality structures, and ways of being, but also the internalized messages, expectations, and constraints of the world around us.

For many individuals, these internalized messages and constraints can feel suffocating, limiting their sense of possibility and agency in the world. They may find themselves feeling stuck, trapped, or disconnected from their authentic selves, playing roles and wearing masks that no longer fit who they really are. In the face of external pressures to conform, to achieve, to fit in, the self can become fragmented, disempowered, or lost.

The task of psychotherapy, then, is to help individuals rediscover and reclaim a sense of self that feels vital, authentic, and empowered, while also developing the skills and capacities needed to navigate the complexities of the world with greater flexibility, resilience, and integrity. This requires a delicate balance of supportive and challenging interventions, of validating the individual's unique experience while also gently questioning and expanding their assumptions about what is possible.

On one end of the spectrum, an overly supportive or myopic approach to therapy can run the risk of enabling individuals to remain stuck in limiting patterns and beliefs, reinforcing a sense of helplessness or dependence on the therapist. While providing a warm, empathic, and nonjudgmental space is essential for building trust and safety in the therapeutic relationship, it is not sufficient for fostering real growth and change. Individuals need to be challenged to step outside their comfort zones, to experiment with new ways of being and relating, and to take responsibility for their choices and actions in the world.

On the other end of the spectrum, an overly challenging or confrontational approach to therapy can be experienced as invalidating, shaming, or even retraumatizing, particularly for individuals with histories of abuse, neglect, or marginalization. Pushing individuals to "toughen up," to adapt to oppressive or toxic environments, or to simply accept the "reality" of their situation without questioning or resisting it can lead to a kind of false or forced adaptation, a loss of self that is no less harmful than remaining stuck.

The key, then, is to find a middle path between these extremes, one that honors the individual's inherent worth, agency, and potential while also recognizing the very real constraints and challenges of the world they inhabit. This requires a deep understanding of the ways in which power, privilege, and oppression shape our experiences and identities, as well as a willingness to grapple with the existential questions of meaning, purpose, and authenticity that arise when we confront the gap between who we are and who we feel we ought to be.

In practice, this might involve helping individuals to:

Develop a clearer and more coherent sense of self, one that integrates the various parts of their personality, history, and identity in a way that feels authentic and meaningful to them.
Identify and challenge limiting beliefs, assumptions, and patterns of behavior that keep them stuck or disconnected from their true desires and values.
Cultivate greater self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-acceptance, learning to embrace the full range of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with curiosity and kindness.
Develop the skills and capacities needed to communicate effectively, set healthy boundaries, and navigate relationships and social situations with greater ease and confidence.
Explore and experiment with new ways of being and relating in the world, taking risks and stepping outside their comfort zones in service of their growth and healing.
Engage critically and creatively with the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape their lives, developing a sense of empowerment, agency, and social responsibility.
Connect with a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and spirituality, one that transcends the ego and connects them to something greater than themselves.

Ultimately, the goal of psychotherapy is not simply to help individuals adapt to the world as it is, but to empower them to become active agents of change, both in their own lives and in the larger systems and structures that shape our collective reality. By developing a stronger, more integrated, and more authentic sense of self, individuals can begin to challenge and transform the limiting beliefs, oppressive power dynamics, and dehumanizing narratives that keep us all stuck and disconnected from our shared humanity.

In this sense, psychotherapy is not just a personal journey of healing and self-discovery, but a deeply political and moral enterprise, one that calls us to envision and create a world that is more just, compassionate, and sustainable for all. As therapists, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to support individuals in this process, to bear witness to their pain and their resilience, and to help them find the courage, clarity, and creativity needed to live a life of purpose, integrity, and connection.

As the existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once wrote,

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

By creating a space for individuals to explore and expand their capacity to choose, to respond to the world with authenticity and agency, psychotherapy can play a vital role in the ongoing dialectic of self and world, of personal and collective transformation. May we rise to the challenge and opportunity of this sacred work, and may we never lose sight of the inherent beauty, complexity, and potential of the human spirit as it unfolds in the therapy room and beyond.

https://youtu.be/iAof2cim5Wk

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#Psychotherapy #CorporateInfluence #HolisticHealing #AuthenticSelf #ImplicitMemory #PostSecularSacred #MentalHealthTransformation #IntegrativePsychotherapy #EmpoweringIndividuals #PsychotherapyChallenges #jung #philosophy

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TRANSCRIPT 🔗

hey guys this is Joel and this is the tap therapy Collective podcast um the last episode that we did this is a part
0:20
two the last one was about making meaning um and kind of a broken world and how
0:26
psychology has to change in response to some parad es that are happening you know the world changes psychology is
0:33
teaching you or you know Clinical Psychology therapy is teaching you how to um respond to being an individual in
0:40
a world that world changes the way that you are an individual has to change and then therefore um the way that therapy
0:47
is helping you um bounce those two balls back and forth of sort of self and world
0:53
have to change and so that first episode um and that that making meaning series
1:00
about what needs to change in Psychology or things that psychology has to adapt or new things that it has to consider
1:06
was just sort of asking questions um and the point was not to be a new model of
1:11
therapy or to create like a new technique um it was just to sit with things that I was
1:17
seeing um patients bring in that I didn't feel like traditional therapy was
1:23
maybe ready to deal with and so this is um more speculative cuz I I got a couple
1:30
uh you know emails already of people being like you say this but then what are we supposed to do and I'm trying to
1:36
tell you that there is something that we all need to do but it is a personal thing um that about learning to do a
1:42
process to articulate our own voice a lot like therapy um and that means that
1:48
I can't tell you how to do it right um and then I'll proceed to talk for an hour about how
1:55
um there are are still things that you consider that can consider you can get
2:00
that can get you there and so another way of looking at the the the points that I brought up in that first one um
2:07
are that I think there's like three things that we have to change how we
2:12
conceptualize in therapy and one is like coming up with a
2:17
coherent um definition of self and and the next one is dealing
2:23
with implicit memory which is a big question which comes up in almost every model of therapy um but there's
2:30
confusion about what it is you'll see two people talking about implicit memory but they're disagreeing one person's
2:35
being like well there isn't an unconscious but we just have sematic protective reactions and it's like I
2:41
don't know man the things that I see on LinkedIn not targeted at me and um
2:46
sometimes sent to me you know in a targeted way privately I just don't even know what is happening in this field
2:53
because people are getting degrees with no education I mean like the the ability
3:00
of somebody to say well Carl Yung is completely pseudoscientific and then post how
3:05
they're embodying the archetype of like Mars in retrograde or or just the the therapist
3:12
that looks the post looks more normal about um you know Yung and Freud are old and you know Freud is more
3:19
evidence-based than Yung but uh you know neither is evidence-based at all or you know something like that and then you
3:25
look on their wall and they're like an ifs therapist which it's like
3:30
ifs is what happens when you put gestal therapy together with Carl Yung um and
3:37
you can ask Richard Schwarz like he'll he'll tell you in the intro of his book
3:42
I mean that you could read that model and not see how these things work I mean
3:47
it's like indicative of this bigger problem which is like people act like these things these models of therapy
3:53
like fell from heaven they're not part of a timeline that is uh you know certain men certain women C certain
4:00
groups of people trying to solve like larger cultural problems or solving to larger cultural Trends I mean everyone
4:06
acting like this thing is in a vacuum I think is this result of the way not that
4:12
just that we do I mean really the way that we do modern Academia around psychology is everybody is so
4:19
specialized that it's like they don't know anything I'm sorry like I know I'm a liberal arts you know human's kid or
4:24
whatever but like you have to back up and know the history of how you got here to know what you know and if if you
4:29
don't know that you don't know very much you know I mean here's a here's a a cost
4:36
proposition for you see if you want to buy this oceanfront property ready okay so there's this cool thing that you can
4:42
do you can write a paper and it'll be really hard and you have to have an original idea and you have to do it in a
4:49
certain language which is pretty counterintuitive but it you know it's it's its own language it doesn't really
4:54
help your point shine or anything but there's a certain way that we have to do it to make sure that the people who are
5:00
talking are serious people who know what they're talking about you know without the system we can't have that oh that's cool so do I get like a lot of money if
5:05
I publish an academic paper oh no actually you don't get any money from it oh that's neat cuz you know I'm I'm
5:11
getting my idea out there and I I would get you know to be able to maybe publish that later in a way that I would make
5:17
money or you know if there's an idea in there that's good I could get the copyright no no no actually you give your copyright away you work really hard
5:23
and you come up with all of these new ideas and then you just give that away to a company that publishes your work oh
5:29
that's cool cuz they're probably like a nonprofit that's helping Academia you know accomplish its ends and we're all in this together no no actually they
5:36
make more money than Google um one of the biggest profit makers like in the world of corporate the corporate world
5:43
that we don't talk about are academic libraries like they just take uh the stuff that you make for free um and the
5:50
right to republish it indefinitely forever and to charge for it and if there's any monetizable ideas in there
5:55
they get those too um and they they make you know uh the biggest one made about a
6:01
trillion dollars last year you know globally oh okay well um but you know a lot of people will
6:08
read my stuff right you know because the they're it's a publisher so they're getting in front of now actually people
6:14
have to pay $400 a month to have access to any of that so it's really just going to be kind of academics and and in
6:19
colleges where their institution has you know some sort of bulk purchasing deal and they pay for it um but yeah you know
6:27
if you put it on a blog or a podcast like if you're social work in Alabama and you did that and you had you know
6:32
about I don't know 500 views on your blog articles anywhere from you know 80
6:37
to 200 views on uh most of your podcasts you would probably be seen by more people but your impact factor would go
6:44
up because all these people are citing your paper right so that's that's that's cool like uh like a lot of other
6:53
academic site the paper and then that helps my impact factor so that gets me a
6:58
job in a college um the academics they're not probably reading the paper they just need
7:04
something to support their point so they they find you know if you write a real broad paper that you know grabs a lot of
7:10
other things and CES them it's it's pretty likely to get cited you know so you then you use that to get like a
7:17
really good job right and then you make a ton of money and actually as a as a professor you don't you know a lot of
7:23
the people that I correspond with about the academic stuff that I'm interested in with these kind of older professors
7:28
if they're not a guess on on the podcast I don't want to say who they are um and they're pretty a lot of them are not doing well
7:35
you know big names big successful people that were in Academia their entire life and they didn't really make any money um
7:43
and they published a lot you would know who most of them are I would think and
7:48
uh oh you know what though I think that you're forgetting peer review I mean the point of these things the reason why you
7:55
know these academic libraries have to suck up all this money for not really doing any anything beyond Google drive
8:01
right Google drive to just host a bunch of text documents without videos and images is like $20 a month but they cost
8:08
$400 um but that $400 just put to really good use because there's this uh you know yeah the academic libraries they
8:14
don't have to pay for it but the journals themselves which a lot of times you know operate at break even or a loss
8:20
uh or you know donations you know they uh peer review the things so a group of
8:26
peers makes sure that the paper is like serious an important and good and top uh
8:31
oh wait yeah no actually uh some of the biggest journals in the world have the stupidest articles on psychology that I
8:39
have ever read I mean if you say the point of it out loud you would laugh but
8:44
when you hide it in academic language it's like when you were a kid and you got Microsoft PowerPoint and you didn't have any idea what what to say about
8:51
Bolivia but you put a picture of a tennis ball and a fire truck and a you know a fighter jet and then whoosh Bing
8:58
cling it's all coming in you just disguise that you really didn't know anything about Bolivia by making a
9:03
PowerPoint presentation there's great academic papers out there but uh I don't know man that peer review thing it
9:09
doesn't really keep them out because every time a a rich guy wants to write an OP ad they can just continue to
9:16
resubmit and pay money until the Lancet will just go ahead and and and put it out there so that doesn't that doesn't
9:22
really hold up either um you know but it's for this greater good right because
9:27
it it gives you the ability yeah you don't get any money and then everyone else makes the money and then they make trillions of dollars off of your labor
9:33
that you give away for free and then you use it to get a job that also doesn't pay you any money but um what there's a
9:39
you know a cool thing that happens where I get to go out and discover like a new
9:45
idea and just do something really cool that's uniquely me and get it in front
9:50
of some of the smartest people in the world that have access to academic libraries and they read it right oh no actually you don't because you have to
9:57
find a person who is doing this um who needs help publishing their papers to
10:03
get their impact factor out there and when you're in school for 10 years doing
10:08
psych I have a lot of friends in stem this is not necessarily applicable to stem this is talking about academic
10:15
psychology um you have to find like an old guy who's like 30 years out of touch and do what he wants you to research and
10:21
if they don't really want if it doesn't line up or help theirs then you can't do it so usually it's something really
10:28
great that we really need you know it's Reinventing the field because after 10 years of studying you can come up with
10:34
something like a new 30 question screener for anxiety you know when
10:41
you've got that PhD and you've made all of these compromises um and
10:46
sacrifices you can come up with 30 questions that we can give to someone to
10:51
ask another person to know if that patient has anxiety I mean doesn't doesn't that just uh titilate you you
11:00
know but I mean what if we just made people go into maybe
11:07
therapy who don't need 30 questions to tell if the person across from them is anxious and where that comes from and
11:13
what kind of anxiety it is maybe we could just get kind of you know remember we started this conversation saying like
11:20
how can we make sure that the smart Discerning intuitive people are in charge you know of the direction of of
11:25
where it goes oh well because uh we don't want to pay anyone who does
11:31
therapy and we don't want to vet them to make sure that they are smart or intuitive so they they're going to need
11:37
those 30 questions because we don't trust them to come up with three of their own so they're really going to
11:42
need your screener okay like that is our system and I'm a social worker I'm a therapist
11:50
a lot of people critique me for you know being a social worker cuz it's racist or
11:56
whatever I get you know ableist I don't know get EMA emails from people all over the place left and
12:01
right and then a lot of people get angry that like I take insurance which I'll take it as long as it helps more people
12:06
than it hurts not a huge fan of our current system so I mean I've made sacrifices like I do things where I can
12:13
critique the system you can say hey this is bad about that we shouldn't distribute resources and power this way
12:19
and I'll be like yeah that's right okay so if you're an academic who is enjoying
12:24
what you do and you love what you do and you made these sacrifices to do something you love great I'm not talking
12:29
about you who I'm talking about is the person who goes well actually we we need
12:35
these things because they've always been there or how else would you want to do it you know we'll get to that in the in
12:40
the third section the third thing that Psychiatry has you know psychology like academic psychology is going to have to
12:47
address if it's going to continue to stay in the business of therapy um and it is people who are just carrying water
12:53
for bad ideas because it threatens them that you point these things out they just don't want to think think about it
13:00
okay like I you know hell I may go back to school and get a PhD or something one day the point of this isn't that phds
13:06
are stupid it's not the phds are bad it's that this system is bad right and if you can't point at that and you can't
13:12
say that then that's your Shadow there's something wrong with you that is saying no no no no no no don't look at
13:19
objective reality you have to defend the current system because it's there for a reason okay I I can't tell you what the
13:24
reason is I just know that there is a reason because you know the other people
13:29
that are smart probably did it okay this is the system that is making the smart people and vetting them and making sure
13:35
like that so you know this to segue in from last time we talked about the hyper
13:42
rationality of our current world um and I think to try and live within these
13:47
objective systems to try and turn everything into a number to try and vet everything to try and turn you know you
13:54
can do this with science you know until you get to quantum physics and you have to start using metaphors again science
13:59
can be pretty objective and empirical psychology is a soft science and and to try and pretend that it isn't to try and
14:07
pretend that it is this hard science where we can empirically look at everything and we don't ever have to have any Intuition or just like sense of
14:14
self or sense of awareness um or that our subjective reactions aren't important is insane okay like the the
14:21
hyper rationality that I talked about in that the first one it's this madness that arises like not from no logic but
14:30
from tooo much of it from thinking that all we are are logic and trying to build a world out of it and this kind of
14:36
academic system which is very useful to um you know a lot of very moneyed forces
14:42
like the way that the dod does research the way that we want to like fund things like it's those that's the reason that
14:48
it exists in its current itation you know Academia and these systems like and I'm not saying it's all bad I'm saying
14:54
that's the reason that they exist and you know these people now we're talking
14:59
about large language models and like all this stuff those people who want to say
15:05
that you can turn um you know basically robots into
15:11
people by you know a large language model is a search engine a large language model it's just a predictive
15:17
algorithm it's a spreadsheet that is going through thousands of little bits of data and saying every time this word
15:24
was used in proximity with these other words it was very likely that this word would be used or the context would be
15:30
this word which shares the same contextual you know uh placement
15:37
86.9% of the time so it's a good bet but it's it's probability it's not thinking
15:43
you know I use them I use them to colate data because that's what they're for but the people talking about this going to be sentient like this thing going to be
15:51
alive like the people who are saying that you can turn robots into people are
15:56
saying that because they are so cut off off from the thing that I'm talking about next self that they believe that
16:04
you can turn people into robots and and not only that like their attempt to turn
16:09
themselves into robots is what is good about them and the system rewards people who think that like that all right now
16:15
I'll back off and go back to what I said I was going to talk about which are some ways that are you know sort of practical
16:22
I'll call them Pudo practical ways to make the changes that I was talking about in the first one to help people
16:27
make sense of this world that is new with a psychology that has to be new which has to evolve I mean so much of my
16:33
anger in what I'm talking about is people that think that these things don't need to change and you're not
16:39
talking about algebra right like you're you're talking about psychology of course it has to change like Clinical
16:46
Psychology look at the difference in the world look at the difference in the culture look at the speed of culture and
16:52
and I'm I'm trying to bring up things that I feel you know intuitively that I see with patients that I think that as a
16:58
field we have to sit with to change and so you know the first one is going to be
17:05
this idea of self um and you know self
17:10
is a a big word right um like it's a little word but it
17:18
means who the person is which is saying what the point of therapy
17:24
is and what I mean by that is like if I say somebody comes in and they're like
17:29
you know my my husband you know hits me and I need to figure out ways to to be a
17:35
better wife and better Christian and let him do that you know because I'm sometimes fight back I think most
17:40
therapists most people who are armchair you know therapists or whatever would say oh that's not her real self right
17:46
it's the job of the therapist to help her get in touch with her real self so that she knows that that's unhealthy and
17:52
that she can leave okay but that's a pretty extreme example I mean how far do
17:57
you take that there's a lot of people who when I say you know I can tell that this person is like brilliant that
18:03
they're funny um that like they they really want to create something but they
18:09
just don't have a language for it yet they don't know if it's going to be through business they don't know if it's going to be for this yeah you know I
18:15
need to make sure that I'm being patient centered and and not projecting my own am to say projecting my own ambition is
18:22
really funny because I'm I'm not a terribly ambitious guy um things kind of keep happening to me which is is funny
18:28
but not um anyway uh like yeah I need to make sure that I don't muddy the waters
18:34
and decide the goals for the patient but most of these models of therapy that are cognitive and especially the ones that
18:41
are just behavioral you know uh like they're saying that if if it's not on
18:47
the treatment plan it's not real and it can't put it on the treatment plan unless the patient asks for it oh but
18:52
the patient can't ask for it until they know who they are Catch 22 I guess we've made therapy real simple it's 1980 I
18:58
mean that's kind of what they did like with the cognitive Revolution when we came in we got rid of this idea of like
19:06
that you went into therapy to find out who you were and there is something to
19:12
that like I think I'm not going to defend 20 years of psychoanalysis one no one can afford it two the people who do
19:17
that I wouldn't see as therapists and then like three I just don't think that most of the things that they were
19:23
digging up actually were making anyone change I think they were just changing around the therapy you know when Freud
19:29
is telling like little Hans that uh he's afraid of uh horses because he saw one
19:35
fall over in the street and it wasn't just like a giant horse scared a kid it actually was secretly about castration
19:41
or whatever and I know everyone was like makes fun of the Frans for being too sexual but
19:47
psychoanalysis I mean the the sexualism of the absurdity is not the problem the
19:53
absurdity is the problem like if you're doing lonan psychoanalysis um I don't know there was
19:59
like there was a joke that like if you ask um like a a classical psychoanalyst
20:07
or like a a leanian psychoanalyst like what what the point of therapy is they'll go out and they'll like write a
20:13
book and still not tell you um
20:18
and yeah like I that that's too much but how do we have this notion of self and
20:25
like one of the reasons why I'm frustrated that we don't you know teach and expect therapist to know more of the history is that they don't understand
20:31
the assumptions of these models and these models are assuming things you know therapists it's like when you pick
20:37
a religion and people are like well you can't judge that person that's just their religion well I mean I I kind of can because they picked that you know
20:44
they're saying the thing so they're either not in touch with a part of themsel that doesn't believe these things or they actually believe them
20:50
either one is bad so like yes I can have an opinion about them therapy models are the same like you can look at me and you
20:56
can judge me based on the amount of integration that I do that probably says something about me that I'm trying to
21:02
find you know 800 different through lines through history and then figure out where it's going and like see through yeah that probably says
21:08
something about my ability to feel trapped and then I I feel trapped within the time that I'm in or I feel trapped
21:14
within you know one human life whatever yeah I mean of course like the the way that you practice therapy is going to be
21:20
related to your own you know BS like of course it is which is why we have to be careful and be in touch with that
21:25
there's no getting rid of it there's only being in touch with it um and so you know in that first section I was
21:32
talking about how like we need to see therapy as a more Dynamic process and I
21:38
think a lot of times we view it as like a hierarchical thing if like I'm going to go in at level one I'm going to level up I'm going to learn these mental
21:43
health tips I'm going to leave at level 28 oops I've had to set back I'm at level 14 again I lost my gear I'm going
21:49
to go back and it isn't that you know it it or it shouldn't be therapy is like
21:56
noticing something um and it's noticing something
22:01
um that is you and to me to take self
22:08
and say well the patient has to know exactly what their goals are before they go into therapy is kind of wild you know
22:15
and yeah goals can change you can change your treatment plan whatever and you need to have something that people want out of it I mean it has to be related to
22:21
a practical thing this isn't you know just a hippie summer camp I'm not arguing for for that um but the idea
22:30
that you could go in and say I want all of these things means that you're coming
22:36
into therapy in touch with something and it's we have to be careful
22:43
how far we go with that because if we assume that the person is just coming in
22:51
because they have a symptom and that symptom is something that therapy just takes away and that that doesn't change
22:58
anything the larger equation of psyche and person that doesn't make sense to me why I don't believe that the brain just
23:04
does things that are irrational like I don't think that symptoms just pop up and then we can go in and get rid of
23:10
them um and have them cut off like tumors or or medicated like cancer I
23:16
think that symptoms are an expression of an imbalance and unless you're working with a model that lets you sit with
23:22
playing with things like balance um things like projection you know then you
23:28
don't understand that that symptom on the outside is related to something on the inside that isn't rational right like this hyper
23:37
rationality has kind of done that and academic psychology has run with it um and it's one of the reasons why academic
23:43
psychology is going a completely different direction from Clinical Psychology which is scary to me I don't
23:48
really want to be an academic psychologist but I realize that that is an unhealthy thing right if the thing
23:54
that they're telling you in the hospital everybody who has all the letters behind their name is saying like no no no CBT
24:00
is the gold standard yeah we've never been able to reproduce it um when we do the studies we've we we have a
24:06
reproducibility CL you know crisis and we can't seem to ever uh make it uh work
24:13
but we still know that it's the gold standard because it's the most researchable and therefore we research
24:18
it the most and therefore that we find it's valid the most and we have to remove everyone from the study uh who
24:24
just walks off before their plan is completed during session you know 8 through 15 of CBT they don't count
24:32
because they didn't complete the treatment well they walked away because it sucked why are you taking them out of
24:37
the paper you know what I mean like the point of psychology again you know the
24:43
the second section is to make people effective at doing something right and so if you have to throw away everybody
24:50
who walks away from your model then it wasn't very effective and I I come back to Yung a
24:56
lot I mean more really than I ever expected to doing something like this but one of the reasons why I think that
25:02
Carl Yung and yian therapy has kind of exact I mean at this point it's
25:07
outlasted psychoanalysis like there's less people doing psychoanalysis than are doing yungi and psychology even
25:13
though yungi and psychology is still arguably dying and going away there's like institutes that are doing it there's models based on it there's not a
25:19
lot of stuff based on the freudians um there there's just I mean I guess there were people who like were technically
25:26
neopian but their ideas don't go back back to Freud you know uh when you when you look at like wott when you look at
25:32
horny horai like they weren't I don't see any Freud in like neurosis and human
25:38
growth I mean it's kind of dying um or kind of dead you know a couple places in New York everybody's still in psycho
25:45
analysis but that's just cuz anif fry went there and it's going to die there last um but like the the yian stuff is a
25:54
cosmology and it is a language for a phenomenology in a way that I think therapy has to be like I'm not going to
26:00
make an argument that we need to go back into do yian analysis but I think that's why people can't quite get away from it
26:05
is because we lost that I mean the yian stuff was giving you a worldview it was giving you a way to understand not only
26:11
yourself but the way that yourself interacted with the world and then make that flexible and that's what I think
26:17
when people go back and they get really into this or they you know the therapist like takes mushrooms in their 50s and
26:23
then they decide that they're going to be a yungan and they start to get into these things or you know just the ke of
26:28
Yung like I still see so many young people discovering him and then getting obsessed with it in a way that they don't with Freud you read Freud because
26:35
you have to but he's history and you read yung in a way that he still speaks to certain kinds of people and the
26:42
reason for that I think is that and this is when I say the idea of self is something that we have to build a
26:47
coherent sense of what that word means and how to apply it within therapy you
26:53
know because if you're doing behavioral therapy right you know let's go back back to the history of where these terms
27:00
come from okay you know okay so psychoanalysis when when Freud starts
27:06
psychoanalysis I mean what he's saying is that the self is this product of dynamic interplay that the ID is
27:12
primitive and instinctual the ego is a realist or a logical logician and the
27:18
super ego is a greater drive that must decide between them and he's saying that there's these kind of pingpong balls on
27:25
the desk ornament going click click click in the energy transferred from one to the other even though the one may not
27:31
move it's still you know connected psychically physically and that's an
27:39
idea that I think people still come back to like if if people go back to Freud at all that's
27:46
what they go back to there's so many people that you look at something like relational psychoanalysis you look at
27:52
yeah Christian I forget what they call it there's some faith base psychoanalysis thing which um you know
27:58
it's kind of by the point by the time you take psychon analysis to that point there's nothing left of Freud except the
28:06
dynamism that was what people like I mean and like maybe repression and projection you know but of completely
28:13
different things and in completely different ways than he would have ever allowed you to go um but it it's that
28:19
Dynamic nature of self and that's why he's still relevant or people you know feel um that he created something as
28:26
that was the first time they saw it you know you know concretely the people who were doing you know the hypnotism or the
28:32
mesmerism you know before Freud they were kind of doing this parlor trick but they didn't articulate a language of the
28:38
unconscious they were talking about you know a part of the brain cut off or fighting itself or that the neuron wanted to go back to being dead because
28:45
it came from whatever like and he says no these pingpong balls are whacking each other and the psychology starts so
28:52
you know if the only good idea that that guy ever had is this thing that is
28:57
something that we're giving up you know isn't even psychology anymore you know
29:02
Yung Yung said you know the self is the central archetype yung's idea was no
29:08
like the unconscious isn't bad it's not just this this thing that has to be dealt with because it produces symptoms
29:15
you know Freud called it the subconscious and you said no it's not a sub um it's an unconscious and then you
29:21
know later I think Freud or Jung becomes so enamored with the unconscious that maybe he should have called it a Dom uh
29:28
conscious because he he seems to eventually view it as sort of more of the point than the conscious um which is
29:34
where a lot of people I think lose him um because they don't have that deep intuition and and respect for those
29:41
spiritual spaces that he came to see as the point of life um his life but that
29:48
and and so his archetypes were different it was Persona and Shadow and anima and animus but there is still this Dynamic interplay I mean what Yung changes this
29:55
concept of self is he says okay the the self is connected to God and it doesn't
30:02
have to be God like a deistic metaphysical God it's this greater concept like he he he thought that
30:08
basically we talked about the unconscious like it was God and maybe it was he didn't know you know he just
30:13
thought that there was this place um that the self was connected to and the more that you dealt with ego rigidity
30:19
the more that you made the unconscious conscious the more that you were able to be aware of the functioning of
30:24
archetypes in your life through symbol and dream and um you know projection and reintegration and all that the more that
30:30
you are going to have room to embody this what feels like cuz it's so intuitive you know and maybe it is you
30:36
know spiritually that way too this Divine Mission so you know in the Western Christian tradition this idea
30:44
that God is separate from me and then Jesus comes as this intermediary to teach me how to interact
30:50
with God that's how Yung saw self you know or in the Buddhist tradition you
30:57
know the the Buddha comes to teach you how to disband the self in order to
31:04
really know um by disbanding the self you know the unconscious or whatever but it it's this those Messianic figures are this
31:12
bridge and so he's when he's saying the word god a lot of times he's talking about the depth and breath like the
31:18
deepest parts of the unconscious and he disagrees with Freud on the utility of it you know he thinks it's the point
31:24
Freud is kind of repressing it so then when you get like um these newer therapy
31:29
models like I'll take ifs for example you know ifs is you know gestal therapy
31:34
getting put together with Yung there's some a lot of other influence that he has you know Adler's definitely one um
31:40
there too I've never heard Schwarz say that but you can see some of the Adar and stuff um but I'm not saying he
31:47
hasn't said that I just haven't read that um but the that core um sense of self in ifs is
31:54
that there's protective parts that come from trauma and they come from all of these things but that deep down we all
32:01
want to be compassionate we all want to be curious we all want to be confident and we all have this sort of mission
32:07
that motivates us so it's very much like that Divine vulnerable child that in yungi
32:12
and Analysis when you peel everything off you remember what you just knew when you were six about who you were but you
32:18
forgot it in life because it was beaten Out of You by Logic or you know trauma
32:23
or whatever um you know those are the models of therapy I like I like internal family systems I like sematic
32:29
experiencing I like like lifespan integration lifespan integration um you know sees the self as these series of
32:35
moments that are supposed to be on this continuing Spectrum you know Continuum
32:41
but then all of a sudden our ego was rigid at these different places and those places are so separate that they
32:46
don't understand you know I thought in on in March of 2020 that I was such a
32:51
different thing that mutually excludes everything that I am now that I don't know how to hold it and that memory has
32:56
become fragmented and that by digging up these riged ego States as life events and then using Li techniques to smash
33:03
them together you know uh we we make them crack and then it reintegrate you
33:08
know I like those models because I think that that is the kind of sense of self that we have to have now what's
33:14
dangerous are the robot people the Silicon Valley people there's plenty of great CBT therapists i' I've seen them
33:22
but a lot of times those people are going to be more relational and they're just going to have figured out a whole
33:28
lot of stuff that is helpful and it doesn't really follow CBT as I'm talking about it what I'm talking about is a
33:34
very academic completely manualized form of CBT where they go back behind you like when you do a research study they
33:41
go back and they check for competence they control for competence in a lot of the studies by saying like did that person follow the manual you know when
33:48
the patient said this did they say well actually that's a cognitive distortion or whatever like and and so it's it's
33:54
more rigid than you're even going to find like in the wild a lot of the time um but they CBT sees the self as like
34:02
this cognitive construct that is only composed of everything that you think and you believe and maybe something that
34:09
Beck would call like schemas that the schemas we adopt affect our perceptions and behaviors so yeah
34:16
you know it it's sometimes in the self there's these little things that impair logic but really we're just this logical
34:22
creature that is only a product of everything that uh you know I'm thinking
34:27
in my ego or that I um things that have happened to me and it's the self is
34:34
malleable in CBT and that like it can be modified through identification and
34:39
restructuring of maladaptive thought patterns like you can like go in and and say oh well
34:45
you're acting irrationally here so you need to stop but CBT doesn't even have like a good reason for why other than
34:51
that there I mean I think his language is that kind of like anian ego defenses that the ego just doesn't want to
34:57
anxiety so it does something illogical um but I just I I hate that I like I I
35:04
really think that that is so limiting and stupid um when it's taken in in the vacuum that Academia wants to put it in
35:11
if you do CBT if you like CBT we all do some CBT we all do some psycho education I'm not saying that that thing is
35:19
terrible makes you a bad clinician I'm saying that doing nothing but that in the way that they teach it I think does
35:26
make you a bad clinician you know um something like ABA which is you know the
35:32
gold standard according to research for the treatment of autism is incredibly offensive to me I mean it's saying that
35:37
the self is just a collection of learned behaviors that we've taken in from the environment and they can be reinforced
35:45
or be punished um which you know I used to just be alone like people would act
35:50
like you were crazy if you didn't like ABA well now I'm watching people get bullied off LinkedIn and like upload
35:56
things in tears and I mean I honestly feel bad for them cuz that's probably just somebody who went to school and was told by a professor well this is this
36:02
thing that's wonderful that can help people with Autism and then you go upload your you know Tik Tok about it
36:08
and all of these Zoomers are yelling at you that you're treating people like dogs and like yeah I mean you kind of
36:14
are when you're um just doing behaviorism but um like yeah like
36:21
inherent in that model is some icky stuff you know that the self is just this distinct entity
36:28
that well it's not even a distinct entity it's just this product of an individual's Behavior history and their
36:35
current environment and when you're measuring their change it doesn't matter how they feel it doesn't matter how much suffering they're in it matters are they
36:41
doing the thing that you told them to do I mean that's not good to have like that
36:47
is a direction if we take the self in that direction you're trying to turn people into robots by saying that we can
36:54
just be programmed and I think that's incredibly offensive um and that there's
36:59
something probably going on wrong with you not saying you're a bad person but if you believe that I think that you
37:06
have a lot of trauma I don't know how you couldn't you know because there's something in
37:11
me that feels like that is limiting and I believe that that and again this is my
37:18
concept of self as a therapist I believe that thing is in everyone but that other people have various levels of
37:24
communication with it and contact with it and ability to feel it you know and and intuitive people I think are are
37:30
sort of gaset about it or they want to hide it or they but also they're proud of it on this other level you know they
37:35
have almost the opposite insecurities of a different type of personality you know like um the idea of something like
37:43
gestal therapy where it's more of an energy that the self is this constantly
37:48
evolving thing that's always striving for integration and self-actualization but we can't really label it we just
37:54
sort of know when we're there um I think that language is healthy I mean there's sometimes where yungan and stuff gets so
38:01
literal even though I like the theory it's like what are we talking about anymore I mean we can't fit all of these
38:06
things from the unconscious into language in the way that modern um you know yian analysts try and do it like I
38:12
think sometimes we just have to sit with them and feel them and and and um and learn to to feel them move you know when
38:20
people were saying what do you mean about this boat metaphor at the end of the last part what I mean is that
38:25
there's a way to feel something without labeling it and our ego doesn't know
38:31
that if I don't know the name for it if I can't tell you about it it's not real
38:36
and and that isn't true there are things that I cannot tell you about not because I won't but because I don't really
38:42
understand them yet but I know that they're there I mean if you go do something like brain spotting if you go come to Tapo and try you know something
38:49
like um you know SLT like or ET therapy if you're anywhere in Texas please go
38:55
try ET therapy because it's everywhere there you feel these things happening in your subb brain that are part of you but you
39:01
don't know what they are and you can't even really say it and then you feel yourself changing you know the idea that
39:07
the self can change is like an idea that we can't lose um in therapy and also
39:14
that the idea that the self is dynamic I mean if you don't want to go all the way through the yungi and stuff that the
39:20
self is you know this connection to this Divine God or Divine uh purpose that we
39:27
we find when we get our ego out of the way and we're able to listen I don't think you have to I don't think that
39:32
kind of therapy is what everybody wants but if you want to say that the self isn't there that we're just behavior and
39:38
cognition I mean that's terrifying and if you want to say that the self can't change I think that's scary and if you
39:44
want to say that the self is just um you know this thing that
39:49
symptoms pop up around and then we weed them out but there's no relationship to the symptoms the unconscious is just the
39:54
source of bad things that we can go through and clear out and get rid of um
40:00
like we're cutting the grass that there the roots of them don't go deep inside of that thing and feed off of it and
40:06
have a purpose if we don't view our internal world like an ecosystem in Psychology that's scary um and I mean
40:15
that's one of the reasons why uh I think people were like well what kind of therapist should I find I don't think it
40:21
matters I'm sure there's people out there doing brain spotting that are terrible um as far as modality I don't think it matters but there's things you
40:26
should look at and one of them is the ability to reflect to have these conversations and not say oh no no this is it you know to be open to a lot of
40:33
different models to be interested to be curious I mean these are the marks of like an ego that has good healthy
40:41
boundaries I mean honestly one thing is like I think that you should find a therapist that's funny um or or somebody
40:47
that can laugh at thems because you know where the shadow is there like you know humor is this kind of alchemical process
40:54
where it's this benign attack where we take all these things that either can't change or we we don't want someone to
41:00
know or we know that they don't want to know and then we make it into this weapon to hit them over the head with it but then we make the weapon silly where
41:06
it doesn't really hurt them but it still feels like an attack I mean that's that's what you're doing with humor is you're taking language and you're
41:13
weaponizing it and then you're pulling your punch you know tickling right like it feels like I'm being attacked but I
41:19
know I'm not um there's this benign attack theory of humor that's kind of
41:24
replacing the older humor the older theories about humors of surprise and things and somebody who can do that is
41:31
generally comfortable enough to deal with uncertainty you know uh which is really what you want because when you're
41:38
going into a process where the self has to change you can't have certainty you know no one can tell you on on day two
41:45
or year three of Y gain analysis how it's going to end because it's about
41:50
dealing making room for uncertainty so that you can feel who you are
41:55
authentically not who you think you were when you came in and that's something that is really
42:02
important too so I I think so the next thing that is um
42:11
something that I think therapy has to come to a conversation with I don't think we come to an understanding with
42:17
any of these I think we're always trying to hit a move Target by understanding these things and therapy um the first
42:23
one was self and the next one is this idea of implicit memory and to connect those I'll give you this
42:30
example of like when you look at an eye in the back of your eye in the middle of
42:35
it you know like the retinal cells that see the picture there's not room for
42:40
them in the very middle but the reason there's not room for them in the middle is because sorry my chair is breaking
42:46
and clicking and I can't afford another one so it's really loud uh but the reason that it's like clicking um not
42:56
not the chair clicking um the reason that you can't see out of that spot in the center of your eye is because all
43:01
those blood vessels come through it um and there's and the nerve endings and so
43:07
there's no way to put um like on the retinal coating there's no room for the like retina to you can't put the nerve
43:13
cell right on the um lens because they or right on the nerve and the uh entrance to the blood vessels because um
43:22
they break up the surface you know it's not the perfect lens yeah so
43:27
what you see in the middle of your eye you don't actually see your brain is basically running a Photoshop filter all
43:34
the time even if you just see something out of one eye and you don't have the binocularity of the other one to like
43:39
fill in that hole so like the thing in the center of your perception that you're looking at a lot of the time when
43:46
your you know pupils lined up straight with that um point is like just a guess
43:52
that your brain is making based on this other information okay so it's not
43:57
actually like a a thing um there's always this processing that is happening
44:02
deep down for you to make a guess and like a lot of the problems with vision when you start to lose your vision in
44:08
the middle of your eye have to do with those algorithms and the way that that um signal is being processed sort of
44:15
breaking so that it's not done quite right you know you get a black hole in your vision so I mean that image I
44:21
think takes this idea of self which is like who the patient is Right slash was
44:27
Slash will be you can't leave the present or the past out of this idea of self um and also like I don't even think
44:35
you can talk about it without language that sounds sort of religious like that um I think that there is a kind of
44:42
inevitable quality to what we are even if that's totally a secular material
44:48
concept when you're talking about these people that like change throughout their whole life over time and like don't
44:55
quite know who they are you know um it's like what heraclitus the Greek philosopher he says like mankind can
45:01
never step in the same river twice because when you go back and you step in that River again all the water is left
45:07
that you stepped in the first time and you're actually stepping in a New River you may call it the Tams Tims or
45:12
whatever but it's actually you know a new thing that's that's always being
45:18
born um that we kind of need to have that conception of who we were who we
45:25
are where we're going inherent in the model of therapy that we're doing um and
45:31
if the model of therapy doesn't have that built into it I would be scared of it you know like what is it um the the
45:38
Greek mystery Cults where they're trying to like strip your identity away and make you ask these deeper questions and
45:44
and be in touch with this and like one of the rituals you go through and some they would yell these questions at you
45:50
and you're walking across a bridge and somebody yells you know who are you
45:56
you're like like I'm you know a Greek name and then and then they're like what
46:02
are you you're like uh
46:08
I'm a human I'm a Greek I'm a Christian I'm a in the cult of Diana I'm you know
46:16
you you have to come up with some way of labeling who you are as being part of a group or not part of a group something
46:23
of reference to something else and then they would be like like where are you going or you know these bigger questions
46:30
and the first question is usually easy to answer we think and then the second question makes us wonder if we answered
46:35
the first question right and then the third question makes us wonder what the question is you
46:42
know um and if it fails that
46:47
test you know if if it what am I I'm Behavior where am I going to different
46:52
Behavior you know what what uh who who am I I am just a cognition and behavior
46:59
making organic thing that's a sad answer you know I would I would put the therapy
47:05
model through um the the test of these mystery Cults and see if it
47:10
actually can do it um so that as a bridge to this idea of implicit memory
47:17
what you see now in academic publishing is people talking about implicit memory
47:24
or primary secondary inter tertiary types of memory and you know
47:30
going all the way back to Yung and Freud and whatever you know Freud says the subconscious is just this trash can all
47:37
of the sex and violence that we're feeling all the time um we can't express because civilization has made us repress
47:43
it yet it is natural yet our logic now says that it is immoral um and so you know that's what
47:52
is down there and Yung says no it's different he sees Freud as somebody who's extremely extroverted sensing and
47:59
is kind of dealing with that um his shadow is involved a lot with sex and violence and then you know Alfred Adler
48:07
Yung saw as someone who was an introvert and a thinker who was his shadow had
48:13
more to do um with relationship and that was what was scary
48:18
to him or that was what you know these kind of balance of powers and where
48:23
people get their implicit assumptions about the world you know so the unconscious is what we used to call
48:29
something like implicit memory but the the thing is we forgetting that the point of therapy isn't what we know you
48:35
may need some cognitive retraining you may need some budgeting advice you may need a second opinion you may need some
48:41
psycho education about just the effect of what addiction looks like and that you're not the only person that feels
48:46
this way and that this is what you do I mean you may that yes there is conscious and intellectual stuff in therapy but
48:53
the point of it really especially the point of it now is this thing has become so expensive as we've become like in a
48:59
world that is just traumatizing the [ __ ] out of us all the time um to where you know people are coming to my office that
49:05
have like strong dissociative disorders in PTSD cptsd and they don't even think that they have any trauma and then you
49:12
know I don't fight with them about it I'm not going to say like oh actually you know you have this diagnosis I'm just like let your eye do the talking
49:19
like when you go and you have a completely um disembodying experience on
49:24
the ET light device or doing SLT you're doing brain spotting and all of a sudden you relive all this stuff and you see
49:30
how much it was controlling like the muscles in your back and then I couldn't even put my hand up this High because I was always trying to keep my arm down to
49:37
protect myself all these things built into our sematic memory and all of that like yeah you you had cptsd man
49:45
like that actually had more of an effect on you than you know and your ego is
49:50
saying but it's not affecting the way that I'm thinking but it is affecting your body and it is affecting the way
49:57
that you feel and that is affecting the way that you think you know we want to protect ourselves you know me like
50:05
listen to the last episode like by maybe being like I don't like the word
50:10
intellectual but by feeling like there is no perspective that we don't understand like across history or
50:16
whatever and like yes of course that's a reaction to pain and powerlessness and like all of the stuff in every therapist
50:23
background um the good ones just know how to admit that the bad ones don't not have it and know they didn't go to
50:29
therapy for six years and now they're better and now they know how to tell you how to get better like you know
50:36
it implicit memory is such an important thing because what it is is the set of assumptions that our body our deep brain
50:43
is like making all the time and it is moving faster it is processing
50:48
information so much faster than the front of our brain even when we're frantic even when we're like trying to
50:54
think um of like all of these things to do and like be highly effective your brain stem is
51:01
moving I don't remember exactly what it is the the study that I read so I'm not
51:06
going to look it up but it's moving like you know five or six times as fast when you look at information processing it's
51:14
it's not like hurts like a CPU but when you look at how much information it is processing it is moving faster than the
51:20
front of your brain because it's reacting to all this stuff that you don't even have time to think about so of course it's going faster you know am
51:27
I afraid of the man in the red sweater like do I need to keep my posture like this because I'm trying to be powerful
51:33
and sexual or do I need to keep my posture like this because I don't want to be noticed or if somebody calls my
51:39
name and and says hey John like am I going to go um yeah yeah what's up who's
51:44
there I'm happy to see anybody or am I going to go oh somebody sees me that's bad what do I you know all of that
51:51
information you can't even think about it because your body has to know it before you could make a conscious
51:58
decision so like of course it's going faster and like that's why I think but
52:05
then at the same time you can ignore that and pretend that's not real oh no I just got mad you just scared me I just
52:11
haven't eaten today I'm whatever no man we've lived in the same house like your body is always doing this you are always
52:17
acting like something is about to hit you and when somebody comes out and shares something with you that is like
52:22
unexpected then you immediately get upset because you view the unexpected
52:27
and the uncertain as a threat to you and then you react with hostility to the person that brought it up you know
52:32
whatever there's a million relationship Dynamics but this is what therapy's about in a way that like even these
52:38
newer models that are like trauma trauma trauma seem to have forgotten this is what it is that it's not what the
52:44
person's saying it's why they're saying it it's not even what they're feeling it's why they're saying that thing why
52:51
do I have this image of myself this way why do I have this image of the world how is my body holding that I mean
52:57
really I really hope she can come on the podcast cuz she's so good but one of the physical therapists that we work with in
53:03
Birmingham she's not at tapro but we refer a lot of trauma patients to her and she does pelvic floor work and you
53:08
know she's like how can you look at somebody's eye and know what they're doing you know what know how to you know
53:16
pull them through this trauma or whatever and it's like well their eye looks here every single time they say they feel trapped with Mom and then they
53:21
get overwhelmed and I see their posture do this and then I don't even have to look for the brain spot anymore I just know to go there
53:27
but she's like Aon you know she's like how can you do that I'm like how can you just touch someone's back I mean cuz I
53:32
have these patients who you know like they're you know strong powerful people who don't you know you can't cold read
53:38
them like they are extremely successful yet they have these you know episodes of dissociation or whatever and Aaron will
53:45
just touch them and be like you know I feel like there's a little boy that's like six or seven and muscles right here
53:52
why don't your body doesn't like this posture I can tell I'm getting jerk off of it why don't you just go into this
53:59
position and like move them into this position and then so many of them have said that their first session is this
54:04
that that she they were feeling fine they're like yeah fine I'll get in the field position I'll get whatever and she just put their body in a way and pressed
54:11
on their back in a way that they cried for 30 minutes and that was the first Physical Therapy you know that's why I
54:17
think we we're very integrative at tap rot not everybody needs Physical Therapy that has trauma that's not what I mean
54:23
but their body remembers this stuff I mean you look at like people talking about the body remembering things
54:29
somatically like you look at um Yung talking about the unconscious
54:35
that these things show up as symbols because you can't know them like you can't know you can't like even if you
54:41
tell somebody even if you point it out you can't know you can think about it you can analyze it but you can't know in
54:47
the present oh I'm making all these assumptions 200 million times faster than my brain can even like think and
54:54
language so I'm going to move my shoulder this way like you can't the way that those um traumas affect you are as
55:00
like dreams your relationship to Art your relationship to your mythology which now you know for a lot of young
55:07
people is like video games and and and you know the their trauma and forms like
55:13
how and their their attempt to heal thems gets them into these kind of Fantastical worlds where they're talking
55:20
about these Concepts through symbolism and we have to come to an
55:26
understanding in therapy that like the unconscious is it's not like oh Yung was wrong he was a pseudoscientist but now
55:32
I'm a brilliant genius who has discovered tertiary memory which is a level of cognition that is beneath the
55:38
second level but also no like implicit memory what your brain stem is doing
55:43
like is the point of therapy kind of I mean maybe the point of um a healthy
55:49
life of being learning to be effective you know um and
55:56
I think what trips us up is that the we all gravitate when we're talking about things like the unconscious or the
56:02
implicit memory or sematic reactions to the language that we like and the sematic experiencing person goes to
56:08
Peter Lin or Pat Ogden and they're like oh yeah like the way that I'm sensing
56:15
this in my body I'm judging the experience but really I need to just be with it and accept it and instead of
56:21
pushing it away from me I need to suck it up inside of me and then the the intuitive feeler person goes to Yung and
56:28
says oh wow it's the king archetype I don't want to hold Authority I want to
56:34
get away from the authority so um I need to make myself stand up tall like a king
56:39
and put the crown on my head and when I'm telling the person that they
56:45
actually they have to pay me more because I deserve it because I'm a big professional on the phone I'm going to pretend to hold the scepter and my body
56:51
will embody this mythological archetype and that will give me and and and then
56:57
the you know the cognitive behavioral person is like you know write down the feeling a hundred times and then we'll
57:03
start to notice that every evening at sundown you write down anxiety or some word that's bad so you have dial
57:10
depression and um you know like you're getting depressed before bed we've we've found the frequency intensity and
57:16
duration at every different time of day and I mean there's a million different language the scheme of therapy like uh
57:22
uh what one I guess one of the ways that psychoanalysis is still around is coherence therapy that's a that's an
57:28
interesting one it's like a Time limited version of psychoanalysis which is interesting concept but yeah all of
57:34
these things are using a different language to talk about the way that your the base of your brain stem holds memory
57:40
and those are these implicit reactions and they're not just the Bess Vander Ki the body keeps the score these places in
57:48
the body and they're also not like just the yian mythological your relationship to the world and how you conceive of the
57:54
self and how that interacts with other people they are a reflection of both of those together right like they are the
58:02
way that that ball is bouncing back and forth like who I am internally is reacting to this outside world
58:08
externally um and like the thing that I feel in my body is also a symbol um one of the weirder models of therapy that I
58:17
think was one the cream doesn't always rise to the top when you look at what's the most popular but look up process
58:23
therapy by Arie Mandell man like that one is fascinating because like he says
58:30
basically that there are channels in the sub brain and that the you know so many
58:36
of these guys are are really some of the best models of therapy ever that are also the least known like voice dialogue
58:42
they came out of the ex yian analysts that got like pissed from the 70s to the
58:47
90s and they left I mean pissed like Angry not pissed like drunk maybe they did that too but I don't have any
58:52
evidence of that or reason to believe it um and they left the Yi institutes and they said I want a direct experience
58:59
with these things I'm tired of analyzing them forever you know James Helman I think was on to something and then uh
59:06
became wrong about it you know like helman's always right about like the the first thing that he believes but
59:12
archetypal psychology doesn't work because I mean one you're not post yian you're not a yian anymore at all when
59:17
you throw away this concept of the self like you need that to be a Yan because the self is also connected to God in
59:22
that model and not saying you have to believe that or use that but if you don't do that you're not a yungan um but
59:29
you know like the the stone cidon hell Stone have this idea that there's all these subpersonalities and that you you
59:35
you analyze each of them it's I like the language of it more than ifs even though they're almost the same model because
59:40
you don't have to have like a a 30 minute explanation about like why a
59:46
firefighter is a different thing than a protector and the categories of whatever
59:53
like you can just be like yeah you know you don't want to feel this feeling and you have have a protective part that says like hey don't go there and the
59:59
person's like oh the protective part is when I tap my foot and I chew my nails and I twidle my hair and I'm like yeah
1:00:06
so how old does it feel and like where is it in your body and just go ahead and twir your hair hair and tap your leg
1:00:12
this is in voice style you you do this and and and really engage with it and and just let it go for a minute and then
1:00:18
it's like you know I don't want to be here like the thing is like I've got a bunch to do and this is actually like super expensive it's a waste of time
1:00:24
like did I'm paying you is bad and and then they're like oh I'm sorry I shouldn't have said that no no no that's the part talking we go into that and and
1:00:32
you get to engage with all of these different things inside of someone that disagree I mean it's kind of like I I
1:00:38
see a lot of didit and therapy and one of the things that I think is like everybody should at least like it
1:00:45
teaches you a ton to work with theid because everyone thinks that way like not everyone has Amnesia in between
1:00:50
those parts but there is no Veil like you're staring directly into implicit memory and and when you do that you
1:00:57
realize like oh like I don't have to treat the person with the ID differently than I treat any other patient because
1:01:03
everyone has this going on in their brain stem I'm just doing therapy in a way that you know honestly they have to
1:01:09
have a lot of insight into right away because they can't even pretend that this world isn't real in the way that so
1:01:15
many other people have the luxury of pretending oh no no no I I I'm I'm I don't feel I don't feel angry I'm not
1:01:21
angry with you sir please stop telling me that I'm angry you know like
1:01:26
a person with dissociative identity disorder they they can't they don't have the luxury of pretending like oh no I'm
1:01:32
fine most of the time and um so process therapy by Arie Mandell which is really
1:01:38
interesting it's like where he went in and said you know that there are these channels in the sub brain and that you
1:01:45
could push the person into it because the body was connected to a symbol and that that symbol would show up in dreams
1:01:52
and Visually and through audio and I think he takes it to an extreme um the
1:01:58
the model's interesting um like I see what he's doing but uh well one of the things that aren't even Del will do is
1:02:05
and I I'm I'm not saying he's lying he probably picked his best case studies it just when they're all collected in a
1:02:11
book it's kind of funny but like in every single one of his like case studies he'll also like cure cancer like
1:02:17
he'll be like and then she never was afraid of her mom anymore and the doctor told her that her incurable cancer was
1:02:22
like there's just too many I don't know like don't pick all the case studies when anonymizing them where somebody
1:02:28
overcomes like a fatal illness um maybe maybe it does that I have no reason to to think that it doesn't it's just
1:02:35
that's one of the things that people point out but what he would do is like he would get the people to have okay
1:02:41
well I'm really upset about this um you know thing that I'm I'm feeling and then
1:02:47
find that physical reality like where's that making your back di what are you doing and he you know like Wilhelm Reich
1:02:52
would push the place you know wiel Reich is that psycho analyst that gets kicks out of the institutes he also believes
1:02:58
in Aliens and kind of goes crazy well not that believing in Aliens is crazy but when you think that you can shoot aliens down with a lead pipe in your
1:03:05
backyard I think that I don't think he was doing that I think that was wrong um but he would Reich would push and say
1:03:13
that that there was psychic armoring that when somebody had an emotional issue their body became tight in a place
1:03:19
and he would make them get in their underwear and he would I think he was in his underware too am I making that up um
1:03:24
and then he would like punch and hit and massage those places until the person like like stopped and he was a lot of
1:03:31
it's very weird I I'll do a special on Reich sometime but he also like was one of the first people to connect like the
1:03:39
body um in a way that psychoanalysis was so obsessed with the unconscious but it couldn't um but Freud kept trying to
1:03:46
make it that like oh my desire to to want to be romantic with my mom is actually making me not be able to feel
1:03:52
my foot like he kept trying to do extremely Medical you know psychosomatic things and ignoring pretty basic ones
1:03:59
like I tap my hand when I'm tired my my muscles get tight here in a way that Reich got and so like that when Arie
1:04:05
Mandell process therapy he hits these places and he keeps hitting them until the person gets more emotional and
1:04:11
agitated and then relaxes and then says that you know that turns in all of a sudden to a symbol he's like what do you
1:04:16
see what do you see what do you see and they're like nothing treez I'm remembering whatever and that these
1:04:21
things come up um I remember when I was running away and I was afraid and I hidden these trees after school and he's
1:04:27
like keep going on the visual Channel and then when the channel runs out of information he would say switch channels go to the audio Channel what do you hear
1:04:33
what do you hear go back to your shoulder notice your shoulder where's your shoulder hurting what do you hear and the person would be like oh I hear
1:04:39
the bullies you know coming after me whatever and then um you know Mandel would say okay now switch channels you
1:04:45
know go back to the body oh now it's in my now it's in my foot I just feel my whole leg just feels like it's you know
1:04:52
um heavier and hot okay tap your foot tap your foot move and he's poking the muscle and and in that way it was like
1:04:59
he understood that there was this connection and it wasn't like we're going to do sematic therapy to get rid of um you know Z mindfulness to relax
1:05:06
your back and then we're going to go talk about these emotional issues and how you project them on other people that my back was tight because I was
1:05:13
trying to pretend that other people were in competition with me and my body was trying to respond to like early implicit
1:05:18
memory formations of um wanting to protect myself by raising my shoulders and looking bigger or whatever you're
1:05:25
doing you know there's a connection between this that I think some models are better at the sematic part some are
1:05:31
better at the kind of symbolic and relational part but you can't do it quickly or well with only one like you
1:05:38
have to understand that these things are interrelated um in a way that I think it's hard for clinicians to do that it's
1:05:45
hard to explain it to patients um it's hard to find a model that encompasses all these things which is kind of why
1:05:50
I'm talking about that I mean the reason I do eight models of therapy you know largely is because because I don't think
1:05:56
that any of them are perfect for every personality type like I don't think any of them are perfect for every symptom I don't think any of them are perfect for
1:06:02
like every issue like I I acquired them as I hit a block and was like I've got to help this guy like I don't know
1:06:08
enough and then went on a manic you know reading thing and learned a new model and then saw it work I learned a lot of
1:06:13
ones that didn't work I don't talk about them or or I make fun of them because I tried I tried them and as a patient and
1:06:20
as a provider and and they didn't they didn't do anything so um I mean that's
1:06:26
why I've found the amount of stuff that I found so that implicit memory that relationship that's such an important
1:06:31
piece this conception of self right uh also this idea of implicit memory and
1:06:40
that it is partly in our body it is partly in these implicit assumptions
1:06:45
that we're making about the world around us all the time you know the way that that comes out in
1:06:50
relationships or you can call it an unconscious I don't really care what you call it but you have to know that the
1:06:55
person is more than they're telling you and they're because they're more than they know right now I'm not saying that you need to be not patient centered and
1:07:02
and you need to be Freud and tell them that well you know really you would just be able to fill your foot if you would admit that you are what Freud had some
1:07:11
he would say that people were it doesn't matter like you don't need to go into psychoanalysis you need to be able to
1:07:17
say hey like um this person that I'm talking to is
1:07:25
feeling feeling more than they're aware of and I'm allowed as a therapist to see how this is affecting their body see how
1:07:30
this is affecting their relationships their relationship with me you know psychonomic therapy and bring that in
1:07:37
and that's something that I see people losing or they want to partial it off into this small specialization and say
1:07:43
I'm just going to make them experience their body and go into that energy and really experience that and you
1:07:49
need yeah that's there but also that's affecting these other things like in my
1:07:56
dreams in my art in my in the kind of culture that I like you know ask your patients the kind of music they listen
1:08:02
to what lyrics speak to them you know have conversations about what they do when they get off work not just the
1:08:08
thing that's stopping them from making the most money at work or whatever because those are you know our culture
1:08:13
is essentially like our psychology telling on itself you know um and I
1:08:19
think like in the one of the ways that you see this a ton is like people act
1:08:24
like well cuz I'm not hurting somebody um like the you know the abuser did or the other people in my family did then I
1:08:31
I'm not affected by trauma um but in the 80s like this is a huge oversimplification but they would say
1:08:38
like every child abuser either becomes a protector or they become a reender they become a abuser and what they're on to
1:08:47
there that's not true but like what they're on to there is that when you are a victim of abuse or neglect you know
1:08:54
from someone knowing ly or unknowingly that they're hurting you as a kid what happens is later you either say like I'm
1:09:02
never going to have that happen to me or anyone that I care about again and you become like hyper vigilantly kind of
1:09:09
protecting or you just say actually that was a good thing um consciously or
1:09:15
unconsciously um that's my right I get to do that you know he beat the hell out of me I'm going to beat the hell out of
1:09:21
my kids too it made me a man it taught me a lesson there is no trauma so one of those is putting the abuse outward you
1:09:28
know just repeating it and the other one is taking it Inward and saying I'm going to be aware of pain I'm never going to
1:09:35
not see I'm never going to be the one who doesn't say this is what's going on
1:09:40
I'll never do that and when you do that you become a therapist a lot of the
1:09:46
time but you're still traumatized I mean taking too much responsibility is more
1:09:52
is just as bad as taking n you know and the abuser didn't take any
1:09:58
because when you're going inward I mean so just in the same way that the person who is like reoffending abusing their
1:10:04
child or something is afraid of being a victim they're afraid of being weak they're afraid of being hurt back then
1:10:11
so I'm going to say I didn't it didn't hurt me and I'm fine and I'm going to keep doing it because to prove I wasn't
1:10:16
hurt at all right they're afraid of being the inward person they're afraid of being the victim well the the
1:10:22
therapist the intuitive person who's taking that trauma and putting it inward
1:10:27
they're afraid of being the abuser and so they're saying hey like I don't want to be the abuser and so every time
1:10:34
there's anybody who is um you know who could maybe be hurt by me um I'll just
1:10:40
go ahead and make sure that like I just am the bigger person and I deal with it and I never hurt them so sometimes
1:10:46
you're enabling them and other times you're in a relationship you don't want to be in or somebody just has your
1:10:52
number CU they can say like oh my boundaries are that you have to make me a handam sandwich if you don't make me a
1:10:57
ham sandwich I don't feel safe you know and now I'm getting manipulated and feeling like well I'm strong enough to
1:11:04
do this or whatever but there there is a lot of that there I mean the point is not to do either and we always feel good
1:11:11
because we're not being the other one so we don't have the problem until you get something like the pingpong ball of
1:11:16
implicit memory and I'm moving into my third Point here the last one um the the
1:11:21
externalized world and our sense of agency right because I think a ton of times therapy is talking
1:11:27
about things but not really knowing like what it wants us to
1:11:34
do or what it how to think about what the point of itself
1:11:39
is which is a big conversation and so I would say it's not to go inward or outward with
1:11:45
trauma and blame to be a victim it's not to be an abuser it's to deal with that implicit
1:11:52
memory response that makes that unconscious to where I wouldn't enable somebody or I would continue to do the
1:11:57
abuse it's to go Inward and and see that that implicit memory is like I'm afraid of being that either in the future the
1:12:04
abuser in the future or I'm afraid of being the victim back
1:12:09
then I can't even deal with how weak I felt so I'm going to say that I it was good and it made me strong and I wasn't
1:12:15
actually weak then I never have to deal with how I felt like people don't say these things
1:12:22
in that way but therapy models that are good have to conceptualize the stuff in
1:12:28
a way that lets us see it and we're never going to get the metaphor perfect because we're in a part of the brain
1:12:34
that doesn't speak English and to a certain extent it doesn't understand time like it thinks that we are the same
1:12:40
age that we were when we were abused which is why it's doing this thing to our body is because it doesn't know
1:12:49
time there's a going take a break and read a read a Robert pen Warren poem
1:12:54
called the riddle in the garden right my mind is intact but the
1:13:01
shapes of the world change and the Peach has released the bow and at last it makes full confession
1:13:09
its pureur has departed like peach fuzz wiped off and we know
1:13:16
now how the hot sweetness of the Flesh and the juice dark hug the rough Peach
1:13:22
bit we know its most suicidal yearnings it wants to suffer extremely it loves
1:13:28
God and I warn you do not touch that Plum it will burn you a blister will be on your finger and you will put the
1:13:35
finger to your lips for Relief oh do be careful not to break that soft gray
1:13:40
bulge of the brute skin for exposing that inwardness will increase your pain
1:13:46
for you are part of this world and you think that I speak in riddles but I am
1:13:53
not the world means only itself so a lot going on here like I
1:14:01
picked this one I read this at a Yung gang conference and um didn't go over
1:14:06
well well I think that Sone bod is what really threw him but you got some Garden of Eden
1:14:13
stuff like you if you reach for the fruit which why does the fruit want to
1:14:18
be eaten right it has a seed in it and we wouldn't pick it up and eat it and go drop the seed somewhere so there could
1:14:25
be a new tree if it didn't taste good so the peach is
1:14:30
suicidal like it wants to die in order for itself to live but then
1:14:38
also if you touch it your finger will blister and you will put that finger to
1:14:44
your lips for Relief so don't break the gray bulge of the blister like fruit
1:14:50
skin so the fruit itself is the blister like you you the the the fruit
1:14:56
is a blister that is hurting and pain and suicidal um that when we eat drops a
1:15:03
seed by exposing this inwardness we increase your pain for you are part of this world you think that I speak in
1:15:10
riddles but I'm am not for the world means only
1:15:15
itself um to take that peach that first like fruit and leave Eden separated us
1:15:22
from God um but it also taught us what God was in a
1:15:28
way that we didn't know before um I think Edward Edinger would have loved this PO the world itself is the garden
1:15:35
here is the blister and it is the fruit it life is a swelling and you can't have
1:15:41
one part of that process without accepting all of it and so that swelling in the growth of the fruit is also the
1:15:48
swelling in the growth of a blister of pain and the peach only exists to be
1:15:53
eaten to die and we eat the peach to grow the next one so not to touch the suicidal Peach is to not touch life
1:16:01
itself for to live is to be hurt and to grow and this process has only the
1:16:07
meaning that we allow ourselves to give it so to touch the peach is to become part of the world like Adam and Eve
1:16:13
found out you know it hurts and it blisters and we put our finger to our
1:16:19
lips after touching the fruit but we also know that we are our self
1:16:26
uh and we also know God like we we know we become separate from the system enough to see
1:16:32
it and now that we've seen it what do we do with
1:16:38
it and and that question of like what do we do with it that is one of the most important questions in therapy it's one
1:16:45
that I can't answer for you and you can't answer for your patients and you really can't quite answer all the way
1:16:53
for yourself not in the ego not in the intellect like because where you answer that
1:16:59
question is going to be an implicit memory it's going to be in this place
1:17:04
where you go in and you see the world in a way that is okay
1:17:13
where you are okay and you are safe and you are loved and you can love others
1:17:19
and you can love yourself and then you don't get to stay there then you have to
1:17:25
fall again and you have to go back and you have to kind of forget that stuff and then you have to remember that you can feel this way and that this can be
1:17:33
real and hitting that moving Target of self and you know my language here is
1:17:39
going to lean pretty Yan because I BL pretty Yan but that doesn't mean that you have to I'm telling you my metaphors
1:17:46
so that you can make your own you know David tacy said I think this is Melbourne y Society had this on their
1:17:52
website but we from a talk he gave there in Melbourne but we move forward by
1:17:58
paradoxically going back remembering the Lost Wisdom and the legacy of the human soul our longing is fulfilled when we
1:18:05
recover our essential belongingness to the mystery of the universe and this is the meaning of individuation to realize
1:18:11
our place in the greater ho and to live in service of that all-encompassing
1:18:16
reality like this is a post secular sacred idea um you know tacy's big on
1:18:22
postsecular sacred this you can go into this phase of life where we're
1:18:28
primitive and we believe in mythology and then we have a new era where religion becomes kind of largely
1:18:34
cultural or unconscious where spirituality is active and we believe in empiricism and then that fails us and
1:18:40
that third phase which I think we're moving into now is being like science is real literalized mythology is not good
1:18:48
but also science is going to fail you know what is it that
1:18:55
like Socrates said about like the hyperbole of Reason becoming a dangerous or
1:19:03
something you know he's saying that like when reason becomes this end to itself like those large language model you know
1:19:10
Silicon Valley people that they think we can turn a robot into a person because they think that people are robots um
1:19:18
believe and we have to find a way to reconnect
1:19:25
with what this world means in therapy um but at the same time you
1:19:32
can't just tell your patient yeah convert to Christianity live for Christ walk in his ways and that gets you to
1:19:37
the vine maybe that worked for you maybe that works for the patient but you can't tell them to do that you have to help
1:19:43
them feel these tensions and in feeling those tensions they will start to recoil
1:19:48
and be afraid and then slowly when you've done it and you're brave and and you go in there
1:19:55
then the patient starts to feel excited the fear is
1:20:04
transmuted into excitement because it's the same energy
1:20:09
and they start to hold kind of maybe a terrible awe but an awe for the beauty
1:20:16
of this thing and the absurdity of it and the paradoxes of it and the finality
1:20:25
of it but also the impermanence and maybe the inevitability and the
1:20:32
mystical connection to all of the things that make us human that a robot cannot feel and then in those they see stories
1:20:40
they see ways of being they see
1:20:47
thems but it isn't an intellectual Journey it's going through that implicit
1:20:53
memory response that I'm talking about that the best models of therapy do I didn't make any of this up like I'm not
1:21:00
telling you how I do therapy I mean I am but I'm not telling you that because I think this is the best way and I wrote
1:21:06
all this down like what I did is read the history of the profession and this is something that is human it's not this
1:21:13
is something that is in every model of therapy that is good and something that
1:21:20
is in most religions that did not become Cults things that became parts of
1:21:26
culture because they were human and beneficial I mean if you go back to ancient Greece the presocratic
1:21:31
philosophers like they're going to tell you that the origin of the Soul you know
1:21:36
is uh like air or something that's invisible you know there's this idea in
1:21:42
Greece where language hasn't made the we haven't made like the semantic and linguistic distinctions enough to
1:21:48
separate the idea of like life from the idea of logic and thinking um from the
1:21:54
idea from also the ability to move and have agency you know like Aristotle says
1:22:00
there's like a vegetative soul that is like a vegetable that just means that thing's alive like a mushroom and then
1:22:06
there's you know the sensate soul that is um able to like go and move and do something that an animal has that a
1:22:13
mushroom doesn't but that um there's the r rational Soul um I'm not going to try
1:22:20
and pronounce Greek here guys sorry um and that rational soul is um something
1:22:26
that gives mankind the ability to reason and understand death in a way that an animal or mushroom can't um you know
1:22:36
like these are attempts to separate the
1:22:41
phenomenology this experience of being human into these things that let us make sense of it that let us see the world
1:22:48
and see ourself because like the reason that and that's why this was kind of a hard thing to structure is that I needed
1:22:54
to talk about three concepts but all these Concepts definition are reflexive to each other they're like tarot cards
1:23:01
you can't like discard one of them and get rid of it and because you can't discard one of them and get rid of it
1:23:06
that means that um you have to talk about all three of them
1:23:13
to talk about any of them the self is always in communication with the world
1:23:18
that um idea of who we are is always being colored and overcorrected by
1:23:24
implicit memory and and Trauma in that area and then our relationship to the self and our sense of agency and what
1:23:30
we're supposed to do in therapy that's always going to be a relationship and so
1:23:36
when you when you get into the people who sort of hide avoidantly like in one
1:23:42
part of life like they're saying okay well like spiritual bypassing in a mystical Community or the New Age
1:23:48
movement they're like oh I don't have to go out and like Vote or do civil rights or anything I just have to manifest and
1:23:56
and my energy will go out across the lay lines through my amethyst and that will change and they're like well this
1:24:01
person's hungry and they're right here could you help out no no no I'm above the material that isn't a helpful
1:24:08
relationship you you have this kind of sense of agency that um isn't really
1:24:14
being actualized to help you be effective there um it you know it also
1:24:20
isn't great to just pour everything externally and and go out and not know
1:24:25
who you are because there's so much pain in the world a lot of Mystics and intuitive feelers fall prey to this I mean I think this is why Simone V you
1:24:32
know one of the mystics that I like died of an eating disorder saying you know I'm not going to eat until everyone in the world is fed um is that they want to
1:24:42
live kind of for the pain in the world because they mistake their own pain for this pain in the world and that you know
1:24:48
gondy idea of be the change you want to see when you don't have something in your heart when you don't have something
1:24:54
when you have a pain go out and help somebody that has that same pain and that's how you heal that's that's good
1:25:02
but you also can't heal yourself only by healing other people you know you have to be aware that you're doing that um
1:25:11
because you're hurting in order to change so I guess you know kind of to
1:25:17
start to wrap up this idea of what do you do with the idea of the implicit memory being underneath the ego or you
1:25:23
know the A Ware self and then this conception of self being these Dynamic forces that we have to kind of learn to
1:25:29
balance but not ever really like fix um or make static in the way that I think
1:25:35
the worst models of therapy try and make them static we're going to go from an8 to a 10 now you're better um yeah but
1:25:41
what are going from an 8 to a 10 do over here you know we are an ecosystem and to go in and say we're
1:25:49
going to introduce Kudzu into Alabama because we want to get rid of erosion and we found this fast growing vine in
1:25:55
Japan does something else you know maybe that takes anxiety away and now this addiction is eating your highways like
1:26:02
we have to think of psychology in that way and and things that are highly empirical and things that are driven by
1:26:09
a lot of categorization and a lot of specialization um you know
1:26:16
in health delivery you know well you can't talk about the body and the mind
1:26:23
you have I write the pills she rubs the leg when it gets hurt at tennis he does
1:26:30
the three therapy interventions for cognitive behavioral therapy like these don't really need to be separate jobs I'm not saying they need to be the same
1:26:37
but making them so specialized in individual is this byproduct of this highly objective empirical system and
1:26:44
it's like needs for profit motive and healthare um and its needs to create
1:26:49
credentialism um to create hierarchies and bureaucracies that I would argue don't need to be there which is why I
1:26:55
start with that academic intro um and don't make anyone better um and the
1:27:01
people who they make financially better off probably don't deserve to be financially better off um you know but
1:27:07
all of those things what what they're doing is taking you away from this idea of the
1:27:15
self being an ecosystem of dynamic Parts you know it's not ADHD it's anxiety that
1:27:20
is happening when you don't have something that you need as a kid and so you're becoming hypervigilant because you're trying to pay attention to
1:27:27
everything at once with all of your attention which isn't possible so none of your attention is going anywhere
1:27:33
right like that's a more helpful way to think about it than a DSM code and then a list of interventions that have been
1:27:39
proven to work for that except the way that we proved that they worked for it wasn't really even that scientific even
1:27:45
though it it fell within the Realms of objective science um and and so I I
1:27:52
don't know coming back to how do we decide what we're supposed to do you know when people talk about
1:27:58
spiritual bypass when they think like Yung and meditation and this stuff is BS it's not because it isn't um plenty of
1:28:04
people have said I'm going to use my chakra to manifest change and then continued to go out and been a terror
1:28:10
and all of their relationships and not learned anything in therapy me that's what the new age people would call
1:28:15
spiritual bypass um mindfulness in a vacuum I don't know if that is going to
1:28:21
make you grow up um just in the same way that like one person may take psychedelics and have this like
1:28:27
incredible intentional experience somebody else may just watch the band on stage be kind of trippy looking you know
1:28:33
like you turning off your ego doesn't have to teach you something and so saying that the point of therapy is just
1:28:39
to dwell in implicit memory forever I don't think that's true it's to have a relationship between these internal
1:28:44
things that we have in our our concept of self and understand how our implicit memory is making us interact with those
1:28:51
things in an external world that is real your subjective and objective worlds are
1:28:57
real and what I'm saying that we have to bring both into conscious awareness and make both of them a part of therapy I
1:29:02
don't mean we have to balance like oh there's objective life where I do work and subjective life where I do yoga and
1:29:09
art and I need to have both work life balance like no what I mean is that they have to be reflective of one another
1:29:16
that they have to have a symmetry and that if we're not making a kind of therapy that is bringing those things
1:29:23
into awarenesses being connected through this relationship to the internal external world oh no it doesn't matter I
1:29:30
just dealt with it with my you know amethyst energy like maybe you just don't want to deal with it and so you're
1:29:36
pretending that a rock is Magic and I'm not saying that rocks aren't magic or that you can't have you know crystals
1:29:43
and and things that mean something to you it's the is the thing that you're
1:29:48
trying to do actually solving the problem you're trying to solve I think
1:29:53
the goal is of therapy is to make you effective at being yourself and we've obfuscated that by playing with the
1:30:00
definitions of these words and sometimes trying to remove the concept entirely from therapy and it doesn't work for me
1:30:06
when you get rid of any of them because you can imperfectly know what the self is you can imperfectly see implicit
1:30:13
memory so yes these are going to be much muddy Concepts it's a soft science but you H can't lose that the point of
1:30:21
therapy is to make somebody effective at being them um once you start to try and get rid of
1:30:26
that and make it more medical than that I think you've lost me um you know there
1:30:32
has to be a symmet a symmetry between these internal and external objects like they have to be synced and we have to
1:30:38
realize that this is a reflection that like yes you know my religion does say something about my fears my art does say
1:30:44
something about my ambitions uh my avoidance does say something about my rage that like these things are
1:30:50
connected in a way that we've just kind of given up on connecting and what happens when you don't make
1:30:57
this jump is evil I mean it is evil not like Hitler somebody goes out and and
1:31:03
and you know sometimes that happens but the the the majority of the reason that
1:31:08
evil happens is that somebody says I can't even look at this system that is so self-evidently awful and helps no one
1:31:15
and just say it's bad I'm not asking you to say it out loud I'm not asking you to
1:31:21
change it to have a political answer to to even care about it I'm just saying like when we look at this and say this
1:31:27
doesn't work this is bad if you have a reaction where you're like oh but you can't say that and what like that's evil
1:31:35
right um because what you're doing is cutting yourself off from you because you already know it you're just having
1:31:42
this because you know of things going on implicit memory reaction of like you're not allowed to know that I'm not allowed
1:31:47
to know that we're not allowed to say that and the that is I think not only
1:31:54
the solution to the problems that you know clinical therapy is having right now trying to find a place in the world
1:32:01
um and in health care and in life and culture but also the root of its
1:32:07
problems you know is people not doing this these things doing therapy and then
1:32:13
making the problems worse by avoiding them let's stop avoiding them um there's
1:32:19
like one of the my favorite moments in any movie there's a documentary called
1:32:24
into eternity and it's about Finland um trying to store nuclear waste and it's
1:32:30
teeny tiny country it's not like they're making the majority of nuclear waste in the world and they're like this stuff is
1:32:35
toxic and lethal for 100,000 years so how do we keep it away from people for
1:32:41
100,000 years cuz our civilization's like you know a couple thousand old that we even know like will there even be
1:32:47
people around and if they are they may not speak English maybe we should put scary spikes on stuff and the scary
1:32:53
spikes will tell people who may not even know English or have survived a you know
1:32:58
Holocaust or desert climate change what whatever they're trying to prepare for everything they're really just so genuinely trying to solve problems that
1:33:04
are 100 thousand years from now in this movie which is so funny because we're in a world that can't solve a problem
1:33:10
that's you know right in front of his face um and the scientist who's in it
1:33:15
you know he's just talking so dry the whole time about like and it's translated so he like just adjusting his
1:33:22
glasses and like being like well the rot Anders will go down you know the halflife is this and so 100,000
1:33:28
but lethal for whatever they keep asking him these questions that have a poetic sensibility and he just answers with
1:33:35
Road science the last shot in the movie you know it's a documentary so I'm not spoiling anything I don't I don't know
1:33:43
um last shot in the movie is them looking at him and you've
1:33:49
watched this film where just the concept of a 100,000 years has s down on you and
1:33:54
you keep being like yeah long time long time long time and then they keep talking about the change in the planet and how they have to protect it and and
1:34:01
you slowly just realize like the vastness of time over this movie in a way that's like really
1:34:07
horrifying and then at the very end he asks the director asks the
1:34:13
scientist a pretty technical question and he answers and then he says when you think about the future do you have hope
1:34:20
and the first time he doesn't say anything and he just like looks to the side and his glasses kind of droop down
1:34:26
and he sheds like a single tear
1:34:34
[Music]
1:34:47
[Music]

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