Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - How Anxiety Can Lead to Growth

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

In this week's episode of the podcast, we interview Dr. Kirk Schneider, a psychologist, psychotherapist, and author of, Life-enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World. Dr. Schneider is a practicing psychotherapist and director of the Existential-Humanistic Institute, a psychotherapy training institute. As a former mentee of the great existential psychologist Rollo May and a self-described existential-integrative psychotherapist, he has made significant contributions to the fields of humanistic psychology and existential psychology throughout his career.  By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.25 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Dr. Kirk Schneider. He is a still practicing psychotherapist and he has written a book called Life Enhancing Anxiety. Interestingly, I get a lot of books that are sent to me. But the first person that reviewed your book is someone I've had on the podcast, Nancy McWilliams, who I think highly of. And she wrote this provocative, brilliant, and paradoxically comforting book belongs in the library of anyone who cares about the fate of humanity. And so I think it's a very timely topic. I've been thinking about anxiety this year. we've done some episodes on anxiety and I think that your existential approach someone who's been in therapy yourself extensively it sounds like in the book and been through hardships

which you're very open about I think we'll talk somewhat about those if you're open to it yes I am and so I was thinking it's a it's a really a timely topic in a day and age in which we don't really want to do the deeper work and look at what is going on on a kind of like an existential level, right? So I think you would call yourself more of an existential, existentially oriented psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Is that correct? That's a good way to put it, David. Yeah. Or you could, I call myself existential integrated. So I try to the person where they're at from, you know, a variety of bona fide approaches, but within an overall existential or experiential context, meaning that I try to make available a deeper level of

context if the person is ready and willing to go to that deeper level. Yeah. It seems like we live in a world where people easily find distractions, easily find ways of pushing down emotions. There's so much white noise, so much things vying for our attention. And your book resonates with me on the level of how do we look at and tolerate not only our own emotions, but other people's, and especially people who have very different maybe experiences than we do. Yeah, I mean, I think we're experiencing skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression

precisely because we have failed in many ways as a society to address the deeper, what I would call life-enhancing anxiety prior to these extremes that we're now experiencing that would have preempted or perhaps even prevented the extremes that we're suffering with now, because they get to, you know, more substantial issues as far as well-being than what we're living with now in a sort of quick-fix, instant result world where we skip over those deeper anxieties. namely the capacity to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence. I know that's a mouthful, but basically I'm talking about a whole cultural shift, actually, where we address that kind of anxiety, life-enhancing anxiety right from birth,

right from the point where we encounter otherness and difference and how we handle that. So another way to put life-enhancing anxiety is helping us to live with and make the best of the contrasts and contradictions of living, which start right from the beginning when we're thrown into existence. Yeah. You talk about Odo Rank, this idea of birth anxiety. Exactly. And tell me a little bit about what that means to you or what that's taught you about this experience of anxiety. Well, I really think Otto Runk put his finger on the pulse in regard to anxiety with his landmark book, The Traumae book, The Trauma of Birth, which actually Hearded significantly from his teacher, Freud.

He was secretary for Freud for 20 years, but that book was a significant challenge in the psychoanalytic community at the time and has been so ever since. But basically, I think Brunk was trying to recast psychoanalysis in existential terms. by going back to the pre-edible crucible of birth. He was saying, Rock was saying that he thought that basically the source

of virtually all our subsequent anxieties and traumas began at birth with that radical shift between relative non-being and unity to sudden abrupt being and pandemonium when the child, of course, gets ejected from the womb and has to deal with different people and a radically different setting, colors, lights, I mean, all kinds of things that bombard us at that moment. And the whole question is,

how does the child deal with that psychology of difference? as Ron puts it. And that can set the whole path of the person's development toward either being able to live with that difference, to make something of that difference in terms of, you know, being able to inquire into it, to venture into it by being more open to people or ideas or places,

or it could set us on a path of, you know, great terror, fear, if that's what we're met with by the parents, the caretakers and the culture, which is too often the case, unfortunately. I think that how we're met is so. critical and unfortunately I think in our society and many societies like ours we are met more with a fear-based approach to the idea of difference in that which is other rather than a more you know love-based or courage-based approach to that which is other and of course trauma can you know bring us back into that sense of helplessness and groundlessness that we i think we all begin

with but uh it can be even worse if we don't feel held at in a supportive way right from the start yeah so you talk about the still face experiment as kind of like this uh iconic image of a child whose mother goes from being playful to non-reactive. And it's actually one of my favorite pieces of research that's been done as well. I've read his book, Edtronic's book, which is very scientific but also very illuminating, isn't it? Yes, and very human. I think it's an amazing set of experiments that actually have been done, as I understand it, as early as two hours after the birth of the child.

Generally, we think of it with toddlers, but or, you know, an infant maybe a year old, but it's actually been very close to the birth process itself, which I think lends even more credence to this idea of trauma, of birth, a sense of groundlessness and helplessness at the beginning, especially if the child is not well supported. So that experiment generally involves the mother of the child in two conditions. One where she is resonating, is responsive to the child, is mirroring the child's, you know, exploration of her and the world.

And the other one where she is instructed to go deadpan with the child. child just show a you know a passive face indifferent and how quickly those children decompensate. It's so striking. I'm sure you've seen the videos. I see it as like the child goes through phases where at first the child is trying to reconnect with the mother in a playful way and then in an angry sort of fight and flight way screeching and biting its hand at one point and then eventually the child goes into this

dissociative looks away kind of the body posture looks like very chaotic and so I see it as like the child almost goes into a dissociation which I think is that that experience of anxiety that you're talking about that really disorienting anxiety, right? Very much so. I mean, you think how close that that seems to be to what we call dissociative states, especially by people who have been severely traumatized, that they literally, well, they figuratively and literally go somewhere else to avoid the overwhelm of that helplessness that they experience, you know, before the lack of support, the lack of responsiveness.

I just think it's a very powerful window into the, you could say, the template, the sort of oar ground, as Ron puts it, and calls it Ur-R-unxed, that we all experience at some level, but have different ways of coping with. Again, depending on the parental and cultural matrix that were met with. And those experiments show very powerfully what can happen when one doesn't feel supported, when one lacks the internalizations, the support of internalizations, that can hold and help the child to feel, you know, greater capacity to self-soothe.

And, you know, it's just, again, the deterioration is very rapid and understandably at those early ages because the child lacks those internalizations and those tools, you know, to handle the shock of, you know, the chaos of their experience. with a good holding environment as Winnicott so beautifully talked about as well. Yeah. You talk about some of that early trauma for you being the death of your brother, which I can imagine was just absolutely devastating. You were, I think, two and a half. He was seven.

Right. And your mother subsequently, it sounds like, went into a pretty deep depression. Yes. And I imagine, you know, you yourself felt that stillface maybe from your mother. I don't know if that's consciously something you've processed or thought about. I know you've done. It sounds like at the age of like six or so, you did some psychoanalytic child work, which actually I read the appendix in which your psychoanalyst recalls or summarizes

the early work and it seemed like he became kind of a holding environment for you. Yes. Yeah, I'm wondering if you want to speak to this or tell the story or, you know, what's coming up for you as you think about this.

Well, it's very well put, David. I went through a show as my parents certainly did, and my mother certainly did. When I was about two and a half, my seven-year-old brother was overcome by a series of diseases that maybe could have been addressed today. I think chickenpox attacked his heart, and on top of it, he got pneumonia. And my parents actually went to the extent, we lived in Cleveland, but they went to the extent of placing hands. him in Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, one of the best in the country. And he suffered apparently for about 10-half months before he died.

So, yeah, my mother was away a lot. My father was, you know, relatively stable, given the extremity of the situation. but he was actively working. He was actually a humanistic educator. He was at that time a high school teacher, math and science, but was deeply immersed in books by people like Maslow and my eventual mentor, Raul-May, Carl Rogers, the early founders of humanistic psychology,

I was sort of worn into that. Yeah. Work and thinking. I think the child analyst you had said that he was quoting some analysts. Yeah, my dad was quoting Eric Fromm. Oh, which made me curious what his background was. But, okay, he was a very, he was an intellectual. He was curious.

He was. He was a curious person. I'm sure we have a lot of those, we have some of those listeners who, you know, don't, they're not psychologists or psychiatrists, but they're the serious, curious, you know, they're wanting, they're wanting to dig deeper, right? They're wanting to go past pop psychology, you know. Yeah, definitely. Well, he eventually became a professor of education, and he did his dissertation on creativity in kids. Oh. You have an idea of what he brought to the table. I mean, he was a extremely important relationship with him and with my mother.

And my mother was unusual, too. She became a television and radio spokesperson in the Cleveland area, which was quite pioneering for women in the late 50s, early 60s. So she was quite a courageous person, and she actually sought out an analyst herself at the time of my brother's death, which was very unusual. we lived in a working class, middle class. In any case, she asked that analyst to refer a child analyst to me because I was really floundering. Even three years later, at age six, I had a lot of terrors, a lot of terror of death and dying, of germs. I was hypochondriacal in many ways. at night terrors

where I envision witches and monsters invading my room and attacking me and I had a lot of fears of my mother I think understandably on retrospect now of how she may have been associated with

somehow with the death which sometimes children fantasize as well as themselves being associated somehow know, but, and she and my dad had very different philosophies of child rearing as I go into, as the psychiatrist goes into in his notes in the book. My father exposed me, he was kind of quite of an adventurer type and he, and very athletic too.

He exposed me to some early experiences that she thought were a little, a little rough especially for a very small child. Horror films, right? Scary movies. Scary movies, yeah. It sounds like that fascination has continued throughout your life. That's true. It became those movies in science fiction actually became, I believe, a way of working with

and to some degree working through a lot of my own terrorists. also with elements of fascination and wonder. That's something I was going to say before is where I part with rock is I wouldn't call that template of anxiety just the trauma of birth, but the drama of birth because I think birth contains not only initial elements of shock and terror, but also wonder and discovery. So the support of holding environment can help to amplify the wonder and discovery part

because it helps the child build internalizations to be more comfortable with that which is other, again, and different, and enable one to develop the seeds of inner freedom to begin exploring these very jarring experiences. And that's a lot of what this psychoanalyst was able to bring. to me on retrospect as I look back at that. He was an extremely important figure for me because both my parents in their own ways and as much as they tried, you know, desperately to be helpful.

We're not winning out. But he struck me as a very seasoned person who had been through a lot in his own life. I guess I had that feeling even as a little kid, but who clearly wasn't like avoiding that, but who clearly was able to become more than his own difficulties and struggles that felt evident to me in my encounter with him.

So he was a great model in that way of somebody who could deal with, great upheaval and he gave me the freedom to say or feel anything that I wanted and helped me to begin questioning what was going on, inquiring into it. So all these risks that he was able to support me to pursue in the relationship between us and in my own mind as I was dealing with all this turmoil. were very important seeds, I believe. So it helped me to move from a place of,

you could say, abject terror and paralysis in many ways, to incremental intrigue with my situation and even wonder, beginnings of wonder, as to what was kind of ripped open in my world at a very early age, you know, huge questions about about life, what is this about and death and how do we, how do I live given these huge challenges? And that led me also to an interest in science fiction. And we had wonderful television programs at the time like outer limits and

Twilight Zone that, you know, brought very strange and different scenes. people front and center that activated my struggling mind, both terrified me, but also somehow comforted me to feel that I guess I identified a lot with the characters in those shows, but also the fact that those shows had these redeeming parts that brought out the kind of the amazement of strange creatures or wild, you know, adventures into outer space, of thinking outside the box, so to speak. So I think all of that, along with my father's promotion of my own creativity, like with encouraging me to come up with my own stories and we, a lot of stories and skits on the

tape recorder together and that kind of thing. I had a whole stable of characters that I would draw from as a kid, like an actor's studio. Oh, what a wonderful, what a wonderful father. It was a wonderful father. Yes, it really was. That was, I think that was noted by the analyst in that sort of summary is that he allowed you both to say what was on your mind, but also if you were angry to kind of like act out some of the anger, your mom wasn't that big into that, which is kind of a normal, it's probably a pretty normal divide. Like, I allow my kids to be a lot rougher with me than my wife enjoys them, you know, watching them. I'm like, no, like, baby tigers fight all the time. Like, that's like, you know.

It may be a male, female thing in part, you know, in those days as well, it was maybe even more sharply divided in terms of conditioning. But I think she brought an important dimension to the relationship as well. And, you know, recognizing maybe having a little bit more of a sensitivity to how life can be overwhelming a time. and you can't do everything at once. You can't, you need to be somewhat cautious about what you're doing and reflective. I think the psychiatrist brought out how they sort of brought these, in some ways, contrasting but complementary child-rearing ideas.

Yeah. and so I have both in me for better or worse. Yeah, and it sounded like your mom also found improvement from her own work, you know, doing her own therapy. That was paramount for your upbringing as well, that she was able to transition from the depths of, you know, despair and loss over, you know, your brother to like coming out the other side and finding new life. Well, she lost her firstborn.

Yeah. That psychiatrist, that analyst's note, made me even more aware of how central he was to her life. And he even says in there that as much as she loved me, I was secondary somehow as the, as the second born. So I would imagine that the shattering for her was, you know, just even greater, in part because he was the firstborn. And I'm sure she had invested so much hope and promise in him.

I mean, seven years is a long time to be with a child. Oh, absolutely. I can have a seven years. year old, it would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. Yeah. I'm a son also and it was now 28. So I tried to keep my own, you know, early beers at bay, but certainly had a lot of concerns about him growing up.

But also, I related to my dad and taking him on a lot of adventures and realizing how important that was that he learned how to, you know, dive into the ocean, which we have here at, it's 52 degrees and boogie, boogie and biking and biking together and going skiing up in Tahoe together and blizzards and all kinds of crazy. Yeah. Kind of crazy hills and Fasca. That's interesting. Yeah. I sometimes post this on like Instagram, like getting my kids to go in my cold plunge with me. I built like, because we live in Florida, so it's not cold.

But for some reason, like, I just like yearned for the cold, you know. So I built this cold plunge so the kids will come in with me, which it takes a lot of bravery, actually, because it's 45 degrees or 40 degrees. or 40 degrees, you know, and then we'll have friends over and try to get their kids to do it too. And it's fun. Talk about primal anxiety, right? It's getting in cold, cold water. And facing that together with your dad, where your dad is calm and your dad is like, okay, you're not going to die.

That's right. And that sort of calmness being overcoming that anxiety, right? That's right. That's right. Well, I think of Kohut here and the whole idea of transmuting internalization. You know, being able to be with your kid or being in situations where you may be floundering, but the person with you is able to plunder with you and in some way deal with it. It should be such an important learning. So Cohut transmuting internalization. Here's your quote that I pulled out. Is the point at which patients begin to experience the therapeutic see as supportive, resilient medium,

one in which therapeutic ruptures, stormy sees, of conflicts between the analysts and the patient, can still be worked out and transformed despite the most profound anxieties. When I read that, I was thinking about clients who, it's like they imagine if they tell me this one thing, that will be the end. That will be the end of our relationship. And I meet them with appreciation and curiosity and awe. And, you know, that happening over and over again leads to that sort of transmuting internalization that they can bring forth. even anger or frustration that they feel towards me, you know. And then that furthers that as well, right? And so it's beautiful. Thank you. I mean, I do think that sea metaphor is very apt here. I mean,

again, back to the birth template, it is like a wild plunge into a vast unknown sea where we meet all kinds of new creatures and new places and without the equipment really to negotiate that plunge to learn to swim. That's a lot of what I think these very pivotal figures in our lives, whether their parents or caretakers or psychotherapists, provide, is that sort of that guide in that sea that help us acquire tools to be able to swim better. I just want to say that I think presence is so key to all of this, but that is probably the most important dimension in my view of what was healing for me and for my own clients that I've found over the years.

And I think the research bears this out as well for many people that although technique can be very important and interpretations, understanding what's going on can be very important. As a bottom line, it's that relational bond, that connection, and that, again, sense of being met by a supportive, of relatively free human being themselves. That is so critical to helping the patient or client acquire a similar kind of foundation within themselves. It's that foundational healing that I have found to be so, such a gift in my own life. I'm only through this early analysis that I had at six,

but then I had another critical one in graduate school. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be worth talking about a little bit. And I want to come back to this idea of the guide and the presence. You talk about Anne who kind of provided this adult holding space. She was your adult therapist when you were an adult now. And it seemed like you were having.

significant panic. And so, you know, for those of us who are listening, who are like, well, are we talking about, like, what level of anxiety are we talking about, like, because we're talking about, you know, potentially looking at the positive aspects of anxiety, like life-enhancing anxiety. And I think, like, the people who go from, like, the pop culture reactivity of, like, don't be anxious, see it as, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's like immediately you're going to see it as that. It's like, no, you're talking about something very different.

You're talking about, on one hand, severe anxiety or panic. So you are talking about the extremes. You're not talking about like a mild case. And you're talking about the therapy as a journey and the presence and that holding environment as the cure to that. that's exactly right yeah i mean i think i suffered some kind of major regression at that point it was a series of events that reactivated my early trauma over the death of my brother got something to do with my father visiting at the time i was in in georgia i was very far away

from the home you know i was at that very vulnerable age of close to 21 which is like the age of onset of psychosis often. I mean, it can be that, you know, that crucial crossroad where if there's enough stress and one has enough of a disposition of fragility, it could set off that kind of condition. Well, thankfully, I didn't go into psychosis, but I had a very, turbulent night from a convergence of events. Another part, another event was the very revered professor of mine invited me slash challenge me to work at a local asylum in the town. And I think,

and I was reading R.D. Lang and I was very immersed in psychotic process, et cetera. And I'm sure all of that was stirring in me. Anyway, it culminated in that night where it was like a funnel of terrors, very primal terrors. Again, that sense of brownlessness and helplessness, the bottom is born. And I woke up physically shaking. I was beyond my father's help and his girlfriend, who was actually a year older than me. That's a whole other story. I could tell that was another story. That partly activated me. I mean, she was a nice person, but, As I say, this was a convergence of events.

And I just intuitively called a peer of mine, a classmate who happened to be blind. And I just trusted her somehow. And she came over. And she did two things that were crucial for me at that point. She said something that might sound a little trite to some people. but it was crucial for me. This two shall pass. She said in a very centered way,

and she gave me the name of Anne, Dr. Anne Guston, who I saw soon after that meeting with Debbie Hazleton. Actually, I think she's still active in the South as a healer. but she she provided that kind of holding at that yeah crucial

I thought it was going off the cliff yeah and then that started about a nine 10 month journey with Dr. Beston now was that like once a week or twice a week like how intensely were you seeing that therapist

I think it probably was twice a week during most intense times okay generally weekly, as my recollection. But there was a lot of, there was a lot about, again, holding and presence. Yeah. And was solid like a rock,

like my earlier analyst was too. And maybe even more than him, I had the sense that she had been through a lot of storms in her life. She shared some of that with me. And again, in a supportive way and not in an overwhelming way at all. Yeah. But she also had humor. She was lively.

She was probably a, quote, corrective mother experience for me to some degree at some primal level because that was some unfinished business around ambivalence about my mother. Again, that brought a lot of. of anxiety at that time, but she was somebody who really valued presence. And she not only would encourage me to say, think, feel anything in her office with her. But to the degree I could outside of the sessions. So, you know, when I was beginning to feel the panic come on or anxiety come on in my classrooms or wherever, to try to stay with it and allow it, feel it,

allow it to sort of play out to the degree I could so that I could see what unfolded, rather than reacting right away, which I was doing before. I was fighting it. I was, you know, clamming up or I was becoming kind of paralyzed in a way by certain, you know, fears. So that was the greatest gift of the work was for helping me to cultivate enduring skills to hold and work with

the most difficult, strange experiences that were coming up. And I was having some perceptual issues too, like I would notice every word that my professors were saying instead of the whole gestalt, you know. Like, yeah, every, it's like you weren't filtering. It wasn't filtering, right? You weren't filtering, yeah. It's a, your brain was in a stress state. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You mentioned how she would track the most minute nuances and shifts. that would come in the course of your meeting. I'm someone who studied microexpression. I have a training course for it, actually, that I put professionals through. And I think that that's another level of attunement, you know, to be able to like notice small shifts

in someone that you're trying to help. Yes. Call attention. You'd call attention to how I was holding myself. not just what I was saying, but how I was saying it. I was holding myself, my facial expressions, our here and now contact, if there was something that was off-kilter. But at the same time, attuning to my capacity to work at those levels, too.

That's a really important piece in all this. her humility about the subconscious processes. And I developed a huge humility about those processes, too, of having gone through the horrors that I went through at the time. So that served as a powerful check on, you know, going willy-nilly into these things, but having a kind of sobriety about my own pace, integrate as I could.

And it was probably the greatest gift I was ever given because it's lasted for, I'm 66 now, and I was 22. So I'm talking of 44 years of a new lease on life. I mean, a greater, much greater inner freedom to, to within. Oh, yeah. And how you mentioned, like, how to be bodily present. Yes. It was an embodied experience. And you even mentioned, furthermore, these was what turned out to be the 40-year relationship with my wife.

And it sounded like she was Catholic, but you weren't. And so you had differences in spiritual practices, but you were able to be different and be present with each other, which made it work. Am I reading in too much here? No, no, no. You're right on. I mean, I think we're extremely blessed. We've been together for close to 40 years. We've been married for 33 or so.

Yeah, I'm sure that that earlier experience of working with radical difference, otherness, et cetera, helped me to not just tolerate, but actually enjoy and appreciate the differences that my wife, you know, brought to our relationship. She, I mean, she was brought up in a very different environment, not only Catholic, but a Lithuanian background. You know, I was a kid from Cleveland, a Jewish background, secular. She was brought up, I wouldn't say Orthodox, but it certainly was. religious. Yeah. And also there were differences in terms of her parenting, her parents' lineage. They were refugees from Lithuania who were attacked by the Soviets, attacked by the Nazis,

had a different perspective on all of that background. Of course, my lineage and relatives, dealt with the Holocaust in the World War II. But it was a whole different situation in Lithuania. And anyway, there were major issues we didn't even realize we needed to delve into more deeply.

And we did that in large part through a lot of conversations about this, some very uncomfortable, not even realizing again how uncomfortable they'd be. and we actually went to a therapist for several sessions before we got married, especially to address how we would raise a child.

That's good. All that was really critical, and we came to agreeable places around that. We've been very happy with each other. Yeah. That's great, yeah. It sounds like that was really meaningful. and you know the thing that I was thinking about when I read that was lately there's been some tweets from people like oh if someone's a conservative I won't see them as a patient or if someone is a man I won't see them as a patient I only see women and there's this even in psychotherapists there's this kind of reactivity towards not seeing the other which you kind of address as well like so how do you what would you say to someone who was kind of of the mindset, like, I'm not going to see the other anymore.

I'm just going to go and take care of my tribe. Well, if we're talking about therapists, I can understand it to some degree if somebody is really attuned to their trigger points, and they don't want to impose that on the patient. So they have a pretty good idea of where they're more comfortable. But you're talking about people in general who feel really polarized. This is a whole area that I've also been very focused on in terms of supporting and encouraging people to engage in bridge building dialogues in sometimes uncomfortable conversations. with each other. Do you feel like it's like from your sort of view, has this changed over your lifetime?

Like have people become more polarized? Oh yeah. I think so. I mean, in the seas, there was certainly a lot of polarization. But there's something different now, right? Like I even feel it more in the last like five years. Like something has shifted. The way that I think of it is actually artificial intelligence, which has driven this.

Interesting. The tech companies are vying for your attention, and they're competing with each other. And they have found that if they put in front of you, your own clan, your own curiosities, then they can obtain your attention better. And so, you know, TikTok probably was the strongest algorithm that I've ever seen when it first came out. Like, it really honed me down to like, like, I was after a couple weeks of watching it, no dance videos. I was watching all news, all independent thinkers. And then slowly I noticed it change on YouTube and Instagram has kind of had to follow suit as well.

To the point that if I look at someone's For You page on. Instagram, I can tell you a lot about that person. Yeah, no, I think you're right on with that. I mean, I think advertisers, corporations know a lot about manipulating our primal fears as well as desires. I would highly recommend anybody interested in this whole topic to see Century of the Self. It's a BBC production. about the beginning of advertising. It addresses, it, it's about association, you know,

and it actually goes back to Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who started on Madison Avenue. And he would, you know, pair very primal scenes of, achieving some kind of at least illusion of power and control like having women smoking cigarettes who are suffragettes with people who are struggling in some way

as these women were. Yeah. Yeah, and I would say, okay, so like the whole hero's journey, right? Because I think in the best sense, when you mentioned guide earlier, I imagine the patient as going on their own hero's journey, right? And in the best sense, our presence is the help of the guide, allowing them to dive into their unconscious and dive into their fears, right, in a way. Do the inner work. Do the inner work, okay.

But I think that this psychology has been hijacked more successfully by corporatism. And so self-help is largely by something rather than – and I see another layer of this, which is in the psychotherapy community. I mean, this is happening right now. Better help just got in trouble for selling emails, IP addresses, or I think it was IP addresses, initial forms that people were filling out to enter into better help. And they were selling it to meta and they got fined a very small amount for this. I mean, a company that made like a billion dollars got fined like a couple million dollars type of thing.

And other companies are doing it as well. They're selling our data, right? And it's like this is psychotherapy. This is happening in the psychotherapy community as well now, which is really, really sad so that, you know, big corporations can target you very specifically for your unique fears. Well, this all plays into an extremely archetypal seduction process that's been going on since the dawn of humanity, right? Which is our search for the Holy Grail, for the answer, you know, for the quick fix. And we especially seek that if we're feeling helpless and groundless.

If there's some situation like we're in today where we've got such extreme ideological polarization, we've got tremendous amount of estrangement, racism, the pandemic. I mean, you know, there's so much upheaval today. I think people feel very, and in many ways, understandably, helpless and groundless. And so they're desperate for that answer or for something that's going to activate their dopamine, right, and make them feel rewarded. And we now are in a place where we can bring that holy grail within seconds, you know, instantly, through nets, etc., like you're describing. And, again, corporations, advertisers are very. attuned to this.

And so my whole point here is that we've become more and more accustomed to again the quick fix and instant reason. And not having to do the inner work that for many of us

I believe is necessary for a deeper healing for a stronger foundation. upon which one can feel more free to pursue enduring a gratification, like in relationships, in creativity, in discovering things about other people and other places, you know, cross-cultural discoveries, etc. And this is a major problem.

And I think a number of us depth-oriented psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health folks, need to make people more aware of in the culture. It's going to take a cultural shift to work our way out of this. A shift toward slowing down, you know, more even time alone, or one is less distracted and can look into questions like, what really matters about my life and about the lives of those around me? How do I really want to live this time and space that's fleeting so quickly as I've become more aware of our human condition?

The deeper, the bigger questions, again, the life-enhancing anxiety. being able to develop that life-enhancing anxiety, you know, which can lead to a greater sense of freedom and an ability to experience life in its fuller, richer dimensions that I would call a sense of awe in many ways, the humility and wonder or sense of adventure of living that we're missing out on in so many levels. today because we're skipping over the work that's necessary to do to engage that. I see even like there's tons of psychotherapies that have popped up, you know, like this is going to be a 10-session fix. I was just having a conversation with William Miller, who was once into brief psychotherapy and then they had someone come out and test it and they found it was no better than anyone else's psychotherapy was no faster. And so he kind of switched gears towards focusing on like,

okay, how do we help individual therapists connect better with their clients over time, you know? And how do we help them? How do we test that that is actually happening? And that's what the research points do, that we need to cultivate those skills. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I've had patients

because I send them to this like, okay, they're going to this EMDR therapist, and then they come back to my office and spend like seven sessions or something that they did with this person. They said, you know, I think it was helpful, but I don't, like, I just wanted to tell my story. Like, I felt like the person really wasn't listening to me.

And not, you know, not to rag on any person's practice or how they're doing psychotherapy, but, like, if the patient, like, and I've heard this from so many patients, like, oh, they made me do this, like, tapping thing, which I was like confused on why I was doing it and like they tried to explain it and like they tried to tie it to the brain. But like I really just wanted them to listen to me. And I hear this from so many patients like, oh, like I just wanted like to tell my story and

you know, essentially like empathy. They're saying it in different ways. Yeah. And and I don't paint these things with a broad brush. I mean, I call myself an existential integrative therapist because I do think for some people at sometimes certain even, you know, short-term or programmatic or medical interventions may be helpful. It depends a lot on the client's desire and capacity for deeper change. However, that said, I agree with you. I think it's a tragedy. How many people are being short change in our country by a more technical, shorter-term, you know, symptom-focused kind of therapy, whereas if they were presented with an availability to a deeper, more searching, exploratory kind of therapy, their lives may be significantly improved for a longer, a longer term,

and they may be able to get at the deeper issues they're struggling with, you know, beyond, let's say, lack of sleep or eating problems or, you know, negative self-statements, et cetera, but the whole question of how are they living, know. How do they really want to live? How are they willing to live? These are the two pivotal questions of a more existential in-depth therapy is how are you presently living and a whole-bodied reason to that? And then following that, how are you willing to live? Okay, so as you say that, I'm thinking to myself, like those are the things that these marketing companies have realized, right? And they're trying to add meaning into these material things.

And so it's like people are, I think people at a root level desire these things. They desire that deeper meaning or deeper purpose. But it's like most of the answers that are portrayed to them are like, therefore buy this thing, you know? Right, right. Well, people, naturally desire meaning, et cetera, but they don't want to do the work that it often takes to get that deeper meaning. And I think the advertisers recognize that. And if they can give them the illusion of some kind of meaning through, I don't know, images or emojis or, you know, something that just makes a person feel even at the surface.

this level that, you know, they're happy. That that's enough. But, yeah, it's a big challenge trying to convey to people that generally to be deeply fulfilled in life and to pursue really rewarding relationships or projects, you've got to work for them. I mean, I don't want to sound like the old Calvinist. You pull yourself up by your bootstraves, but I do think there's something to having to get down and dirty sometimes.

And like you were saying before, you know, let your kid take a plunge into the cold water and then support him, work with him. So one thing I think about, and it's kind of a, I don't know, someone's probably written about this, but when it came to me, it felt like it was my own thing when it came to me, you know, type of thing. But I'm sitting with these clients day in and day out, and I'm like, what they're really going through is vulnerability, fear deconditioning. It's like as they are exposing parts of themselves in therapy, their transference, you know,

any thoughts that are fearful, they're fearful of rejection, they're fearful of abandonment. It's the same thing of like if I wanted someone to overcome the fear of getting on an elevator, it would be progressive, it would be stepwise, and then they would do it. And they would do it again and again and again. And it's kind of a behavioral, like, why does the type of depth work that you're talking about work?

It's like it's fear deconditioning over time of vulnerability, through connections. I'm sorry, that's one way to put it is exposure therapy, right? It can be seen at a very cognitive behavioral, overt measurable level. And I think there's something to that at deconditioning. But I am talking about something that doesn't just have to do with surface changes because an intervention is introduced

from the outside that will then sort of help the person to make a behavioral change or recondition their behavior or even their thinking. But I'm talking about a whole body experience, a whole body shift, where the agency comes from the individual's discovery process. of how they truly want to live, how they're truly willing to live. And that's going to be the most solid, in my view, and the most enduring. Because it's coming from that person's own searching and exploring

and blood, sweat and tears and realization, this is how I got to live my life. It's not because a technique necessarily helped them shift or some chemical move them in a position that's different than what they were. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that clarification. I think it is a lot deeper.

And I think it ties into the larger, this larger story, kind of like that Victor Frankel, like I emailed you. Yeah, that was a beautiful. It kind of reminds me. of his work of like yeah they're when you find something so meaningful like that's what you cling to right it's like what is going to carry you through a concentration camp type of thing because i mean not that we're going to go through a concentration camp or hopefully we don't in our lifetime um but we will go through cancer we will go through deaths we will go through um awful you know awful things

Well, people like Frankl and Stephen Hawking and Maya Angelou, I believe they set the bar for finding the more of who one is beyond one's very narrow burdensome identification or just situation. I mean, Franklin in the death camp, finding, tapping into his inner freedom to connect with the smile of his wife in the midst of that, you know, depravity, being able to see and feel her smile and really expand that, deepen that, bring that into his whole body experience of his current situation as much as possible

and how supportive that was, maybe even healing for him in that situation. Or how does Stephen Hawking, his dying of ALS, connect with the cosmos in that expanse? way. I mean, a guy who's so totally confined and can barely even speak and yet finds great freedom and imagination and adventure in inquiring into, delving into questions of cosmic significance, you know. Maya Angelou, who was raped at seven years old, found the more of the more of who she was in the library, in her local library, by reading people like Langston Hughes, other African Americans who suffered tremendously in their lives,

but again, presented models of people who were able to hold and work with their own turmoil in a, you know, very creative, even heroic ways. And that was something that she could internalize and help her move beyond place of total disability and degradation. So, yeah, I mean, these are people

set the bar in a way. It's like if someone's in the midst of that, you would never tell them, like, oh, you just need to get to this new place, you know? but inevitably by being present in the midst of their suffering in the midst of the heartache, in the midst of the despair, the agony, the trauma, that presence does lead to those new pathways often.

Yeah, yeah. And I think most of the people who find that ability to become more present to tap into the more of who they are beyond their big. victimization, let's say, do so through what Ellis Miller calls a helpful witness, whether it's a parent or a caretaker or a therapist. It's somebody who can provide that modeling, that extra strength, that knowledge that one can survive and not only survive but thrive through the struggle. So it's... Yeah, the guide. When I said presence, I was thinking the presence of the guide, right? The presence of, which I think, yeah, it's like learning to be present with your own

emotions as well. I think that I do think that the guide is helpful in that journey, though. It's like we weren't meant to be isolated. We weren't meant to be alone in this world. We're meant to be connected with other people. And, you know, in no time in history is anyone in Ireland and survives successfully, you know. And so... Well, think about it from the drama of birth standpoint. I mean, we're... As Ernest Becker, the great cultural anthropologist put it, we're abandoned on this planet.

We're abandoned on this planet. I mean, you know, We're specs in a radically vast and unknown cosmos, and we need each other to help each other to cope with this crazy human condition that we're thrown into. Otherwise, how do we develop skills to deal with it? Beautiful. Well, kind of bringing this to an ending, I think that's a good kind of final thought, but I'm wondering if there's any other sort of thoughts that you have lingering that you definitely wanted to put out there.

Well, just that people really reflect on how they may be manipulated by the quick fix instant result culture. that we live in and whether that kind of lifestyle, the lifestyle of speed of appearance and packaging, instant gratification is really what they're wanting out of the short span that we have. Just taking some time to look at what. What deeply matters about your life? And how are you willing to live it? First, how are you wanting to live it? But then, how are you going to put it in action?

Are you willing to put it into action? And there certainly are places and people that will foster that. I'm a huge believer in the kind of depth experiential therapy that I described to you before. But there are other ways of attaining that through, for example, reading, you know, as Maya Angelou did, and finding others who have described their own struggles and stories. maybe friends or particularly attuned mentors seeking them out, and slowing down in one's life, taking stock. In the book, I have about 19 examples of ways to foster this sense of life enhancing anxiety

that may be helpful, you know, around, areas of slowing down recognizing the preciousness of this fleeting time and space that we have. How are we going to tap into it? Attempting to be more open to wonder and surprise rather than just going to each situation as if we're going through motions or routines, the same old person, the same old meeting, etc. with expectations that just take over the situation, but trying to be open to what can happen and what is evolving, and what are you bringing to what's evolving too, being more open to our relationship to something much greater than ourselves.

Again, that vast cosmos that we're all floating in to some degree can be harrowing and terrifying, but it can also be liberating and expanding and can be, can lift us out of these narrow places, narrow identifications, help us feel like we're participating in something much greater than ourselves. That's what spirituality and essentially religion, I think, is about, that recognition that one is small and fragile, yes, but one also is capable of great transcendence and self-creation and can bring those qualities to one's own life and to the betterment of our world as well. I think I'll stop there.

excellent thank you so much for coming on and i know people who have gotten this far have appreciated this conversation that's my journey yeah and um no i think it's uh it's been good it's been good to have you on and i um i appreciate you taking the time so thank you thank you we'll leave it that for today