The Taproot Podcast - Alex Monk on Trauma and the Supernatural: Working from the Curse Position

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Exploring the Intersection of Trauma, Psychotherapy, and the Supernatural with Alex Monk Check Out Alex's Book ajnd Website: https://alexmonktherapy.com/ Alex's Daimon article he mentions: https://alexmonk.substack.com/p/the-daemonic-divine In a fascinating new podcast episode, psychotherapist and author Alex Monk delves into the complex relationship between relational trauma, unconscious phantasies, and experiences of the supernatural. Drawing upon his groundbreaking book "Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy," Monk introduces the concept of the "curse position" - a psychological state in which individuals feel trapped by a sense of chronic misfortune and self-sabotage. Throughout the interview, Monk illuminates how developmental trauma can interact with a "daimonic uncanny," leaving individuals feeling haunted and helpless. He shares rich case illustrations and draws upon fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, anthropology, and esoteric philosophy to outline a framework for understanding and working with clients who struggle with uncanny experiences. Some of the key topics covered in this wide-ranging discussion include: The role of unconscious phantasies in perpetuating the "curse position" How therapists can navigate the tension between "magical thinking" and "magical consciousness" The potential for engagement with the supernatural to be a source of empowerment and healing for trauma survivors The importance of therapists cultivating the capacity to tolerate uncanny and irrational experiences in the consulting room The historically conflicted relationship between psychoanalysis and the occult Monk's work offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on the interplay between trauma, altered states of consciousness, and culturally marginalized experiences. He advocates for an approach that neither dismisses the ontological reality of uncanny phenomena nor romanticizes "magical thinking," but rather meets clients in the full depth and complexity of their lived experience. For therapists interested in learning more about working at the intersection of trauma and the supernatural, this episode is a must-listen. Monk's innovative framework has implications for clinicians of many orientations who are grappling with how to integrate spiritual and anomalous experiences into trauma-informed treatment. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, this conversation will challenge you to expand your conception of the possible and re-examine your assumptions about the the role of the uncanny in psychological healing. Tune in to discover a cutting-edge approach to one of the most overlooked dimensions of trauma treatment. Key Phrases: trauma and the supernatural, curse position, relational trauma, unconscious phantasies, daimonic uncanny, magical thinking, magical consciousness, uncanny experiences, anomalous experiences, psychoanalysis and the occult, spiritual bypassing, dissociation, mythology in psychotherapy, mythic reality, esoteric philosophy, spirituality in treatment, haunted states, self-sabotage   Alex Monk on Facebook Alex Monk on Twitter     Soundcloud  Alex Monk Bandcamp   Taproot Blog Page: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/unraveling-the-e…the-supernatural/

here with alex monk he's a therapist that's got a book trauma and the supernatural On eagle's wings and fly if we got the video i was trying to do a little bit of prop comedy i was going to get some american stereotypes and show up in a cowboy hat and with a donut or something i don't have a gun but uh you know i'm not sure do um is are those your associations you know as a as a londoner yeah i think so yeah yeah the usual stereotypes i think yeah okay your book's fascinating and um you've got kind of an interesting perspective that I imagine cuts a little bit of the grain most places. A lot of the stuff that I'm into that I feel like is kind of inevitable and coming back into clinical practice is sort of controversial or not controversial but maybe poorly understood um could you give us a precursor just to kind of your background maybe how you got into therapy the kind of therapy you do and then that how that leads you into the your interest here and i mean it's interesting to me like the book that i'm the suspicious of is the one that's like i figured everything out and here is a system that integrates all things and never again will there ever need to be an innovation.

And I distrust that kind of book a lot more than the person who's sort of honestly fleshing things out and hashing them out to see what they think themselves. And you can sort of see the author teaching himself as they're teaching the audience because it feels collaborative. It feels honest. And a lot of times those ideas are a little bit more timeless and universal. So I'd just love to hear about how you get there. Yeah, so, well, I guess my background was, I mean, my first degree was English literature. So I've always enjoyed reading and creative aspects of life so I also have a interest in the

art so very much visual art and I'm not a trained artist but I'm always been enjoyed painting and drawing and anything related to the arts and um i've also been a musician for a long time a performing musician um what kind of music um i guess it would be a kind of experimental folk folk music psychedelic folk um quite a lot um kind of like the the freak folk stuff of the 70s throwback that kind of world yeah yeah that's right and there was there was also um kind of like the the freak folk stuff of the 70s throwback that kind of world yeah yeah that's right and there was there was also yeah kind of like bert jansch that kind of thing john renborn and those sort of pentangle that kind of stuff but also in the states you may know bands like espers or six organs of admittance that kind of thing um so you're taking me back to like 2005. exactly so that is that

the new weird america kind of stuff. yeah you know i don't think i've ever met another person that was into that scene. i was very into that scene in college. it wasn't cool then and i haven't heard about it since or at least where i was you know. that was the college rock days where like every song had to be it had to be like an american with a fake english or australian accent it was like i am an english major my adjectives have lots of favor oh my narratives rail swell and that was like all that you could play on the radio yeah absolutely yeah so so so that was a very particular scene, wasn't it? Yeah. So, yeah.

Is it still out there? Are you still making it? Still doing music. I mean, not so much, especially when I was the last, well, kind of COVID came along. So that meant like performances were kind of cut, you know, weren't happening. And at that time, I was also writing writing my book so I haven't really done anything to be honest I've done a couple of gigs but I generally haven't done much so but I still like to kind of pick up my guitar and stuff but yeah it's um it's just time really um so yeah I've in terms of you know in terms of that but yeah I've been doing've in terms of, you know, in terms of that, but yeah, I've been doing some painting a bit more, you know, so more visual arts stuff. And so yeah, so I so that was the kind of

background that I sort of have come from. So I studied that, I guess, and I've always been interested in psychology and then I decided to study integrative arts psychotherapy which is basically a way to integrate the two for me that's why I decided to take that particular master's program and from which I graduated and then I went into generally in private practice I was working as part of a psychiatrist psychiatry practice for a while but that that the the psychiatrist retired so that was that so I've been since in in private practice and I kind of got the idea, you know, the idea of the curse position that kind of came organically, I guess, through reading Mark Fisher a lot, you know, his stuff, particularly the book Ghosts of My Life. of my life um and then obviously psychoanalysis um and i have a a strong interest in as you can probably gather from the book in spirituality as well and what i'm calling in the book magical consciousness broadly um western esotericism the occult and how that kind of feeds into trauma as well, the numinous, all of these kind of areas and kind of building it around this idea of the cursed position and how more broadly the supernatural relates to the practice of psychotherapy and the, and you probably got this from the book the kind of prejudices that we find when it comes to spirituality and as as as clinicians that we may

project on to our clients or our patients right so yeah because of our own um our our own religious beliefs you know conscious or unconscious yeah exactly unconscious, conscious or unconscious. Yeah, exactly. Unconscious or conscious or unconscious. Yes, it may be a religious belief, which is of a particular, you're a member of a particular organized religion and then you project that onto somebody else or one of your clients, or it could be a particularly strong,

atheistic or materialistic belief that can be experienced as reductive or patronizing. Yeah, I see both of those would be damaging. I mean, Europe, like Britain, is going to be a little bit more post-Christian than the US is. Do you see, you know, religious practitioners that don't disclose it or something? Well, I guess that would depend on um well

obviously um if you know there you're into territory of conversion therapy uh which is particularly um uh toxic uh pernicious um I but of course it depends on what your modality is and what the relationship is with a particular client as to whether you're going to disclose that or not um but yeah i think that obviously these unconscious uh projections are are important that's why we go into psychotherapy ourselves right yeah yeah i mean i think um i usually lean yung usually lean in some of my conceptualizations and that whole idea that if the religious function is not conscious, that it will be projected and used unconsciously. And every time somebody calls me like a pseudoscientist because I do brain spotting or somatic therapy or something on LinkedIn, I'll look at their profile and it'll have like all of this like wildly religious and conspiratorial right-wing stuff while they're like what you're doing is not evidence-based and it's like you know you you see this kind of obsession with logic and reason empiricism inside of therapy a lot of times you know there's those those things get projected elsewhere so it's um i don't know it's interesting but you're

saying also that somebody could be atheist and secularizing of somebody who's having a genuine kind of embodied experience and then they feel condescended to and that's damage. safe don't we um so we don't want to start idealizing um psychotic you know experiences as the numinous um which because there is obviously a crossover between the numinous and the and psychotism and it can be very difficult to differentiate between the two um but at the same time we we don't want to kind of denigrate somebody who has a particular spiritual or numinous experience, which really means something to them, you know, some particular kind of synchronicity, which, you know, which can be very powerful. And somebody says, oh, well, you know, that's, you know, it may not be that some of the therapists kind of openly says, oh, God, well, you know, that's just a coincidence, you know, but they may, you know, it could just be a kind of raised eyebrow says oh god well you know that's just a coincidence you know um but they may you know it could just be a kind of raised eyebrow or a slight movement of the body you know which can kind of indicate some sense of suspicion perhaps and um so i think it i think it is a it's important to explore these areas with with just with curiosity and openness isn't it and um yeah so that we don't kind of

patronize or infantilize people yeah no we're just a silence sometimes i think the person brings something up about their spiritual practice or their you know faith multiple times and the therapist just leaves it there whereas anything else that a patient brings up over and over i mean the first lesson you know a lot of times in therapy schools if it comes up several times engage with it ask questions even if you don't know what it is yeah but they're kind of afraid to go there or afraid to follow the patient yeah and i think and i think and that's a really that's a really um a really interesting area and i think and again a difficult area because I think if you you know if somebody's coming to therapy they're coming to therapy because they they're having difficulties with

something they're suffering right that's why they go to therapy right most of the time almost all of the time and so I think we if somebody has a particular experience, it's something that can be looked at from a spiritual perspective, you know, in terms of its connection, say, to the Jungian's biggest self, you know, in terms of a larger cosmological sort of constellation of reality, if you like but it also um may also they also need to speak about their relationship to their caregivers and what it means from that perspective and it and it will also have meaning and i think so i think in therapy we don't really we we need to have curiosity and so if there is a sense that there's something which is off limits then obviously I think that's something that needs to, and it keeps coming back, then obviously that's something that needs to be addressed, isn't it? And some of the language around the curse position that you're describing reminds me of James Hellman talking about constellation, which is taking that from astrology, but he would talk about as a way of not pathologizing somebody and making things more of like a system of forces that we're trying to find equilibrium would say,

you know, this part of you is constellating, you know, this thing in the world, meaning that it's temporary, that it's just a part of you, you know, helping them get distance on something,

even while experiencing it, you know, in a profoundly affecting way. Could you say a little bit about why the language of the supernatural is useful you know why bring that into therapy and how you see it help you know clinically um do you how do you mean by bringing in the language of the supernatural well a curse right i mean the curse is always a medical condition so yeah yeah which dsm number is that or icd-10 or whatever there yeah so i guess yeah so with the curse i think so if i mean freud's called had came up with something similar called i don't

sorry i don't know this kind of particular you know i know a little bit of hillman but i don't know that particular idea of the constellation but um fre across this idea, came up with this idea called fate neurosis right where you have this what he calls like a demonic, demonic psychological entity if you like which keeps coming back and repeating and a person keeps having these kind of events that keep happening which are kind of inexplicable you know they just keep having bad luck and bad things keep happening to them but it's like well but it can't even really be attributed to anything in particular so but like I think this was later on in Freud's career. So he'd kind of abandoned the whole kind of real trauma and replaced it with the unconscious fantasy, right? So by this stage, he wasn't really looking

at trauma. So that's where I kind of brought in, brought, if you like, brought back in a way, think of it in those Freudian terms, bringing back the trauma as a means of explaining this repetition compulsion. The reason for the curses is because the way that the person experiences this repetition can seem like a supernatural entity, as if this inexplicable thing that keeps happening to them. They experience it as if it's outside of them, you know, as if somebody has a special power or some entity has some particular supernatural power to cause this person misfortune. So hence the curse. And it has some parallels with you you see or what you

saw during the um the witch trials um in the early modern period where you know people are accused of being witches and and are cursing uh their neighbors and so forth right so it's something like some but but the the kind of phenomenological kind of nature of the psychological experience feels a bit like that. So it's very, very, very powerful. So that's the connection with the kind of the supernatural rather than it just being a purely materialistic phenomenon. well i think uh anybody who does any sort of practice that works with dreams i mean you definitely see um there be pretty traditional kind of like curses and monsters show up um you know and like a lot of times if i have a patient who is thinking about making a big life change to get healthy maybe they don't want to drink anymore or they're gonna do something but it is you know i in

the back of my head i'm saying okay the unlived life of the parent though no one in your family has done this or you were raised to feel like this is not something that you deserve or can do then you know i'm and i'm that's in the back of my head two weeks later when they start to have dreams about you know a werewolf gene in their body or you know a vampire looking in the window these things watching them whereas it's like does it feel like you're cursed does it feel like you're haunted like you can't get away from this thing that's somehow in you you know epigenetically yeah absolutely yeah and and epigenetically kind of um feeds in i guess doesn't it to the intergenerational aspect of it the

intergenerational aspect of the trauma which of course we're we're not conscious of we don't know what what our ancestors have passed down to us and like you know those those kind of ancestral elements can appear in dreams as well um those or those familial um kind of constructs or you know objects whatever language or metaphor you want to use to represent them they quite they do they do stalk the unconscious and um that was another another book that was a big influence on me was my work was uh i probably know this is quite famous the donald cowshed's book uh yeah yeah i was going to ask if you had read a similar yeah the inner world of trauma so yeah and you know i was thinking trauma in the soul was the one that i don't know

that one actually i've only read uh that one uh the inner world of trauma trauma in the soul has a lot of possession and angels and things showing up you know it's like yeah yeah so um so yeah that definitely where you've and and so i i think these kind of yeah these entities in the deepest layers of the unconscious that's very kind of cow shit as well um but it is interesting because you also have that in psychoanalysis as well because melanie klein talks about the the deepest layers of the unconscious, you know, in a similar way to kind of Jung did, which you wouldn't kind of expect from Melanie Klein, that, you know, below the unconscious there's a deeper layer

where we have these kind of entities which are kind of coming up. And she calls that, you know, but in in melanie klein's terms this isn't related to an archetypal system it's related to an archaic mother you know an archaic relationship with the mother right so but it is there are some interesting crossovers and and i can't remember where i heard this but um somebody once said that the reason why you get these weird crossovers with Jung and Klein was because they're built, you know, they were basically next door to each other at one point, their training institutes. So yeah, so you've got this kind of weird, and also you have that in the, still today in the training, one of the Jungian trainings

here is very Kleinian anyway i'm going off they also work with psychotic yeah i mean i think a lot of times when you're working with schizophrenia you see deeper layers of the psyche it may take years to get to you know just in talk therapy at the surface level yeah absolutely absolutely so but i think i think with, in terms of the curse position and this archaic unconscious is very important because it's the archaic unconscious which can actually, which actually is related to the spiritual or the numinous experience, right?

To the synchronicities that we have, the dreams that we have that mean something to us and and again coming back to cal shed i can't remember it's a long time i read since i read that book but i think he's saying and i'm sure jung would have probably agreed with this that you know that there was there's a healing isn't there that that that that's that's where we can find the healing from those deepest elements of the unconscious. It's not coming from the ego, it's through this unification as much as possible. But where I sort of differ from Jung, and againpal system, I kind of I I go along with that up to a point.

But then I feel I kind of diverge from it in other ways, because for the first reason is because I feel like sometimes it's very becomes very much you experience can is in danger of becoming universalized a little bit through these archetypes and the archetypal system and through the collective unconscious um and can take away from very unique subjective experience set um and secondly i think that i and it's interesting because you had a guest on your show i can't remember the gentleman's name sorry but he was talking about the aztecs it was very interesting i've only said james maffey yeah yeah yeah he was he was great really interesting and he was talking about the symbol um you know and you were kind of talking about the Jungian analyst and all of this, and like, I think that, and our sort of Western perspective of art, and he's saying no, for the Aztecs that wasn't art actually,

and so it's our sort of, and this isn't only Jung, it's across the whole of psychotherapy really, you know, this kind of, and perhaps we can say Western, modern Western culture as a whole, the fixation with the symbol, the need to symbolize, we always kind of need to, as he said, your guest said, re-present rather than present, right? So that was very, very interesting. And I think, again, coming back to what I was saying earlier about being reductive in psychotherapy, we can be in danger of again of doing that if this sort of oh so this means this or this means that or this is that you know and the interpretation becomes like the the cage that you can't see outside of and i think hillman talks about that doesn't he and dream and the underworld like our our need to interpret dreams right we need to kind of row back on that a bit and kind of see the dream for

what it actually is, what it's telling us rather than interpreting it through a sort of symbolic structure. Yeah, and Hillman had an interest in turning, you're talking about the monism of Jung being kind of threatening for that to be monadic and that everything goes back around to, you know, some source. I mean, Hillman broke that source apart into almost a polytheistic way that, I mean, I think he never really found a language for the system. Like he had a critique, but he never really built the system to kind of implement that perspective. And I think that conversation is still kind of happening with the post

Jungians. A lot of them are more experiential or somatic. I mean, the most interesting models to me are the people that left the psychoanalytic and the depth psychology institutes, you know, in the 70s and 80s to make more kind of embodied and experiential models. Those people didn't have a whole lot of influence then, but I see their stuff coming back now. Yes, I can imagine with all the kind of, because with all the trauma literature as well, it's kind of empirically proving or, you know, proving that this was, you know, valid, right, essentially. Well, valid is a weak adjective, but yeah. Yeah, perennial maybe.

I mean that, you know, people notice this phenomenologically. Now we have tools to kind of understand it neurologically but it's the same information you know it's a new discovery yeah yeah so could you give some ideas of like just for the people listening where that's kind of a heady concept like how you implement this in the room not a case study necessarily unless you want to you know anonymize longer um yeah one more generic but could you talk about like you know when you're working with the curse position here's where you define things here's where the person gets out and here's here's the technique maybe yeah so so i think well obviously it depends on what the the presentation is but i think broadly um my approach is an integrative one.

And what I mean by that is that I be thinking about what the meaning of the curse is for the particular individual, what that means to them. And does it have, is it purely that they see it as a psychological aspect of themselves or do they actually see it as coming from the outside do they see it as an external or supernatural threat to the person and so I'd be looking at it from those perspectives and I would be exploring it through the relationship so I'd be working very much through a psychodynamic frame working with the relationship how the um what working with my own countertransference working with my own experiences of the person who's sitting in front of me and if there is a particular traumatic element to it, then I may or may not use EMDR, which can be very, very helpful with traumatic experiences, particularly with, well, with relational or developmental trauma, as you know, right? So, but I think it's very important to think about how to help the person to think about how that they're identifying with the curse.

Right. So because the curse position is very much a place of powerlessness, helplessness. And there's this sense of something very aggressive, which is continually coming back to the person which is haunting them so so first of all explore somebody's obviously somebody's family history and where they think this may be coming from what what does the curse mean to them but then also to think about their own their own aggression what they angry about, what's causing the rage, because often there can be, with the curse, there can be very strong internalised object or entity, which is very attacking, psychoanalytically a super ego,

which, you know, you're useless, you're rubbish, you're not going to do anything, you're not going to achieve anything in your life so to to enable the person to think about what that might mean to them so it might be like you were kind of saying like it could be a neglectful or an abusive parent that they're identifying with um and through and through their identification with that particular um internal object if you like, that internalized parent or caregiver, they're destroying their own lives, right? They're kind of just tearing themselves to pieces. an addiction or it could be through damaging relationships or it could be by protecting an internalized perpetrator of of abuse you know so that they keep kind of going back to

the abusive caregiver and they keep kind of going along with that so i think is with in terms of treatment in my experience the internal world is shifted by what the person does in the external world so if they if if they if therapy can help somebody to go back to through the through the positive relationship through with the therapist right through the experiences of having if you like a good object yeah that they've kind of internalized through the therapy then they can start to kind of stand up to people you know the bullies in their life they can start putting boundaries up in their lives you know and start to say no to people they can start to develop and in their lives, you know, and start to say no to people. They can start to develop and then start to develop more healthy relationships, which are not only based on, say, self-destruction or transgression.

They can be based on cherishing other people, tenderness, care, all of these things. And then they can start to to do that and then that that then calms down this kind of harsh kind of cursing um super ego in there and and and so i think when it comes to exploring the spiritual aspects of somebody's experience that that then can the once they've gone through those stages then they can really think about the spiritual aspects of their lives as something which is much more grounded that they can participate in. of see um you can see um spiritual experiences as a kind of way to avoid all of the things that i've i've been talking about um yeah so i think so i think that's in in the broad brush strokes that's the way i kind of work really yeah so i mean i i think an another thing um is i think you say this in some of the marketing materials for the book, but that this doesn't even though, you know, a lot of times, you know, people need to clarify that in therapy, but this is just kind of an open-ended language where we

can have a conversation that's useful, you know. Absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, obviously you will come, there will be conflict, there's conflict in the therapeutic relationship that will come up. I mean, if somebody feels that they are cursed, right, they're not going to have, you know, whether the curse is a metaphor or if they think they actually are cursed, you know, either way, they are not going to be seeing you as a benign object right as a therapist so

i think as a therapist you have to hold a lot of kind of negative transference right and you need to be able to explore that with curiosity with the person and yeah they may think that you're you know that you have a you know they could have all kinds of fantasies around what kind of belief you have you know whether you're whatever the color of your skin whatever clothes you wear right however whatever your accent is etc etc and they've come to you for a reason right there's pre-transference they've heard things about you they'll have ideas when they come into into the room so all of these things are important aren't they yeah usually um it's the the freudians that give me a pushback for being too like woo if i write something or whatever they'll say like you know well this this isn't evidence-based or this is too out there but

evidence-based from freudians yeah that's okay i I've seen Jungians try and hide behind it too, which is always kind of funny. Okay. The depths of phenomenology, except science is useful, you know, when we want to not look at something. But what is it? I don't... There was somebody that I was talking to at a conference,

and are you familiar with Eric Byrne game theory? Yeah, the transactional analysis, yeah. Yeah, where he's putting Freud together with John Nash, at a conference and um are you familiar with like eric burn you like game theory yeah the transactional analysis yeah yeah where he's like putting freud together with john nash i guess game theory and and uh right yeah psychoanalysis but you know they were they liked that background and they were saying like okay what's wrong with talking about a curse like what is a curse right what is bluebeard about right you know domestic abuse what is you know and i'm blanking the name but the myth where the daughters are dancing all along and they look drowsy and the dad's saying what's wrong and they can't talk about what's happening at night and their shoes are worn out on the bottom because they're dancing all night long

and he has to figure out why they're going into the fairy world and break it like what you know what is this about you know danger to your children this secret you know a secret thing that's affecting the house that you can't see that you know as a father you're supposed to be able to protect your daughters you know like this is this is just like the games we play like you're coming in you're saying what is the problem how do i fix it what is the riddle or the game to get out of to get out of this thing and you know when people are saying what's the point of talking about these things in in kind of mythological language i think i was talking about marie von franz or something and it was like because it's the same thing as the patient knows how to play this game they're continuing to play the same game that they

learned in their family consciously or unconsciously we're helping them get out that's what these myths are about too you know bluebeard is how do you you know that you kind of know the domestic abuse is there but how do you continue to make enough contact with your yourself have enough pride as a woman have enough assertiveness to get out of the situation and ask for help or to explore you know look at the thing that you are afraid of before it kills you it's all the same thing to me you know, look at the thing that you are afraid of before it kills you. It's all the same thing to me, you know. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think when the, I mean, the myth thing is an interesting one clinically, isn't it? Because I think if the person has to bring in, I mean, the patient that has to bring in their own myths, right, whatever it might be, it might be any, it could be a Netflix show.

It could be, you you know that they're talking about the you know um oedipus rex or whatever you know any and any anything in between those things right um and i think sometimes i've i've thought oh it'd be great what a great idea to bring this i might mention this kind of myth and i'll kind of feel quite young and kind of intellectual and i've done that and actually it's like and it's fallen flat you know it means nothing and it doesn't have any bearing on that person's kind of deep uh psychological material right so so i've really kind of been conscious not to kind of bring that in. Yeah.

But yeah, definitely. I think with von Franz, you know, that's the kind of genius of Jung and von Franz, isn't it? That if you can get, if you do have that sense of mutuality about the myth, if they can really kind of, you know, and that kind of Pinkola Estes book as well about the wolves, if you can really get into that, find a way to get down in there with the person, then it's absolutely brilliant. But I think that takes real skill to kind of be able to do that,

that's what I mean. What about anime and video games? I mean, I see that be the mythological system of everybody under 30 who comes in. because a lot of the a lot of the anime i know or the video game i know and then some of them i don't i don't really have i have you know if it's if it's not 10 years old i probably don't know what it is um but when they're talking about it you know they're telling you like yeah so there's two brothers but one brother's cursed and that brother is bad but he's really the real hero because whatever and it's like i don't know the story but it's just like this is mythology like these are yeah i do know the story even though i don't know this video game so i think maybe coming in and being like let me teach you

about edifice is is that kind of dry my bow ties you know spinning around and they're confused about you know but uh mythology is is uh is there you know whether or not you see it you know it's not absolutely absolutely yeah that that but that kind of yeah that fusty sort of uh analyst or therapist is is kind of yeah not not not not a thing to be desired these days i think we have to find ways of kind of well there's nothing new about that right of connecting with our our clients right sure so and but i mean a lot of the book is about taking this beyond metaphor that it doesn't have to represent like it may be a metaphor and that it isn't a metaphysical reality but it isn't a metaphor and that this is a reality that we're dealing with in the room because the

person feels this way you know can you say anything about that kind of phenomenology and what you write? Yeah, could you just say, open that up a little bit more so I can kind of... Well, I think a lot of times people, there's an insecurity in that people feel like, well, you know, and I feel I get a little bit of that. I understand a little bit of it, but there's, because even on here, it's like I don't want to over-qualify things sometimes in case it's somebody's first episode or whatever. I get a little bit of that. I understand a little bit of it, but there's a,

cause even on here, it's like, I don't want to over qualify things sometimes in case it's somebody's first episode or whatever, but you have a lot of times we say something and we feel like we have to pick between, well, here is the metaphorical interpretation of this. This isn't really real,

but there's a psychological reality that the curse is describing. And then over here where we're saying i believe in magic i'm gonna bury a duck egg at mcgnite and burn sage and i think that this is just as empirical as um kind of behavioral therapy and i and i think sometimes trying to to talk about the metaphysical reality of the world like i'm a therapist not a priest if you're bringing a reality into the office, I'll inhabit it with you in almost kind of a shamanic way. And we'll be there together. And I'm not really trying to qualify or think about what,

what that is. You know, I'm not going to encourage something dangerous. I'm going to recognize, you know, an ego dissolution that's maybe leaning towards psychosis in a, in a way to help you. But that is the experience.

I'm not encouraging it i make i'm validating it and then participating in it not absolutely i don't know this is that too open absolutely no no no no absolutely i think it's uh i think in the world we live now particularly there is such a closing down of of curiosity and and holding the tension of of not knowing um and of you know where if somebody asks you you know do you believe in this or not you know and it becomes like a binary do you believe in god yes or no you know this this kind of question. Do you, you know, do you believe what I'm saying to you? And as a therapist, we have to believe what our clients are telling us, right? We have to, we can't be kind of thinking that what they're telling us is a lie. But on the other hand,

we're also thinking at the same time what does what does this mean and we need to find a way to explore with our clients the meaning of what they're telling us and whether that is that they've actually been to the woods that day and they've seen a fairy um you know or or that they've actually just broken up with their partner and or they're having problems at work, you know. You know, these kind of experiences with a fairy, say a fairy sighting, are we just going to dismiss this as psychosis or are we going to think about what that means to that person

without kind of becoming over-an and making a project um an interpretation of it um and just holding that open um i don't think there's anything problematic about that unless we you know obviously if that particular person has um problems you know is is um very unwell and they're having psychotic episodes and we're concerned about that person, then that's another matter and we have to think about that, right? It's coming back to what I said about risk and safety. But it may not be that. It may simply be that this person has had an incredible experience. They've had this numinous experience. They've seen something in the woods. They've seen this fairy in the woods it me it really has changed their life it's changed their whole reality and let's think about that wow what

an incredible thing that happened to you you know um so yeah i think we have to hold all of all of those things open you know but the but the person i think but the other thing about that is that obviously clients can have a sneaking suspicion as well that the person is just saying yeah i believe you or oh how interesting you know or i validate your experience and and there's a sense of artifice about that right there's a lack of sincerity you know trust in the relationship has to be built it's not just validate your experience is a terrifying phrase that's gonna make me head for the door yeah so you know what i mean right that that that's kind of hard one isn't it

that that's hard one from the therapist um and and that takes time so so yeah i think it can be taught or you think it can be taught? Or do you think we just look for students that know how to do it and then give them a language for it? I think, no, I think it can only come really, it can be taught a little bit, but it also through our own, obviously we really need to have our own therapy. That's the most, that's how we learn to be therapists, I think, through having our own experience of therapy. So that's how we learn to be therapists i think through having our own experiences of therapy so that's like number one through supervision super important

number two and also through experience i guess in our own life experiences our own experiences maybe of um you know of synchronicity or the uncanny or weird stuff happening that cannot be explained through kind of material explanations and kind of accepting that um all of those things are are very important you know we're trying to you know perhaps writing down our own dreams you know the more we understand about ourselves the better right so that we can kind of but yeah i would say and but the most important thing is is relationship isn't it with with the person yeah yeah and you you talk about the kind of western esoteric magic influence and a lot of your work uh do you look at anthropology much you know well in yeah i mean in the book there's a there is a chapter in the book um where i'm looking at

these because i'm exploring um there's a chapter i can't remember chapter eight or nine where i'm talking about the evil eye yeah so there's quite a lot about because i wanted to think about aggression um and in in relation to the curse because as I was saying earlier when you were asking me about treatment how we work with the curse you know is and how how the person's identifying with the aggressive you know such an aggressive thing to be cursed or curse somebody it's a terrible thing you know putting pins in a voodoo doll you know it's awful making an image you know a poppet of somebody and you know and burning it or whatever you do you know it's it's nasty isn't it so there's a real aggression there so i wanted

to explore that um through a more kind of through anthropological research um So I was looking at that through examples in Ethiopia with the Buddha, B-U-D-A, the Buddha people and their relationship with another tribe there, which, and there's a lot of conflict and essentially it's really, another tribe there, and there's a lot of conflict. And essentially, it turned out to be a really helpful example of how to think about aggression and how that relates to the supernatural. Okay, so how that relates to agency. Because if you think about, because it seemed to me, anyway, looking at this anthropological research of the Buddha people, that the hyena became a very, was a symbol, again, there's the word symbol, a representative or a carrier of the curse, right?

So the hyena embodied all that was evil and was like that could cause harm um and probably a scary thing there's probably you know some evolutionary biological reasons why you absolutely that's dying is going to bring bad stuff to the village it's going to eat your baby here absolutely so but there's this kind of but but the Buddha people also have a very strong relationship to the supernatural in terms of their capacity to shapeshift. So they themselves can actually ride these hyenas and to shapeshift themselves and they're very connected to the spirit world this other um tribe which i can't remember the name of they were very threatened by the buddha people um and because of their their putative supernatural powers right so but the but the buddha people were very much a disenfranchised population, right?

They were disadvantaged compared to the other tribe, whose name, again, I can't recall. So they were very dominated by this other group of people, right? So it was something along the lines of colonialism. You might look at it in those terms. And their means of pushing back against that was through their capacity to shapeshift to identify with the aggressive aspects of the curse and also we see this with and again this is in the book I thought Emma Wilby who's a historian in the UK. Her book is just brilliant, really helpful,

because it was thinking about how, very much in terms of witchcraft and the witch trials in the UK, how it's always seen as taboo for the witches to actually genuinely be cursing, right? To actually genuinely be cursing, right? To actually genuinely be doing that, to using kind of quote-unquote black magic, right? Because, and she says that it's become taboo because there's something uncomfortable about women's aggression.

So men don't like the fact that these, you know, so like, because of course these these women the width of the witches were forced to confess to things that they didn't do yes absolutely but on the other hand what she's saying yeah okay but why is it still taboo though to think about the fact they might have done that and that kind of still exists around today so there's something about that that aggression so but that aggression can be powerful and it and so you can get really that that can be a source of agency and i think it was and if you look at again at those that in in the cases of witchcraft they did they we can perhaps you know obviously i don't know but i'm imagining that that could have been a source of agency right a source of empowerment and that can be also for our our clients as well if they

can find a vehicle to express all of the rage that they feel about their trauma whether it's towards the therapist with this towards whether it's through other means however they do that that there's something very important about that and uh it's exploring that in the therapy so yeah well i mean a lot of the the things that like i hear you say in the book where you're talking about um they're they're more the kind of cultural and sociological thing of like we take our anger um and we put it in a magical belief system or a series of hierarchies and rules and order or some some sort of you know system that we have to inhabit and that a lot of therapy is pulling it back and saying no you you are angry you do have this agency and pulling it back into the individual out of the system

you know yeah by reflecting on it um i was wondering more when i said anthropology about like the kind of evolutionarily or biological you know precedent for for some of these things um like you know looking at um the neolithic you know religion or something where a lot of these things i think were more embodied you know it's not like we look at it as um we look at it as like the people who say like oh well, well, you shouldn't think that way or something. It's like, no, we, we do think that way. You know, we did for a long time. We now have the ability to think multiple different ways, but sometimes we have to go

back into the old way in order to heal the process because that's where the thing problem was coming from. Like I do a lot of complex PTSD and especially dissociative disorders. And so a ton of what I'm trying to explain there is like, you know, we've made these processes unconscious because our brainstem is handling them for us, basically. So that intuition is coming from the same place as our trauma response, because they're all just ways that we've learned to basically offload, you know, passively all of this other processing to something else. And so when I say,

you know, my head hurts, it feels like a curse, like this is just happening to me, but it's my head. You know, if I really do somatic work and I feel the tension and I feel what I'm doing and my emotional response, you know, I can go back and take over that old thought process that was just offloaded to when I see a man in a red sweater every morning, when I go to work, this activates this old trauma and my body gets tight. And this is what I have to do with these emotions. And I don't have any control of it. This is just something that my body does, you know, in a, in a paleolithic society or something, you know, when we're semi-conscious or coming into consciousness, we're unloading

all of this information into the environment. You know, the river is alive. The rain cloud is thinking for me, it's telling me that I need to go to this you know it was this older way of being and if you work with psychosis or something you see that happening again and it and and like yeah you're not functional it's not the goal isn't to be there but kind of being in that experience where a lot of our um cognition is offloaded to the environment and embodied and we're thinking very magically you know i don't think it's does that making sense i mean i don't mean to be far in the woods with your idea like i think the way that it's taught in school by the cbt people when you learn that is that there was a group of cavemen that was like we don't have science yet and so what we need to do is think that there's a cloud that if we light this meat on fire is going to bring rain which wasn't it it was

a huge relationship with the environment where it was thinking for me i see this this means this and a lot of your work it kind of reminds me of that sort of early thing of put part of your consciousness back in your environment do a ritual and then bring it back into your own head and then have that that i don't know i've talked too much i apologize no no no i'm thinking yeah i mean i think that uh from that sort of anthropological lens i think i'm i say again in there in there in the book about uh you know james fraser's work in the golden valve and how that's problematic because we have this kind of idea of animistic consciousness first, then magical as part of magical consciousness, going through to religious consciousness, and then through to science, which is the apex, you know, it's the pinnacle of what we can achieve,

and isn't it amazing what we've done and sort of through this progressive cycle. And in that, along the way, we've kind of repressed so much of that early way of being in the world, you know, through that animism and through having that relationship with, as you say, with nature through the river and the trees so that we can actually, so if you do see a fairy in the woods, it's going to be obviously a lot more normal in those terms. And I think, you know, I think the more attuned we become to those kind of ways of being in the world, you know, so if we do take a walk in the woods on our own, for example, maybe it's dusk or and we look at a tree, but it kind of looked alive, you know, and it's that sort of, you know,

those liminal areas of reality, which are so important and that we just dismiss through this kind of materialistic way of being in the world as if, you know, that's the kind of the best way to be. And it becomes very, very boring and reductive. And I think that's, I also mentioned in the book about this, you know, this artist like Austin Osmond Spare, who talks about the, you know,

going back and finding this simplicity, simplicity you know he really reveres simplicity so he kind of reverses the evolutionary cycle so he's saying we should go back kind of to the simplicity of the amoeba right kind of draw upon that um and you know there's also obviously the the the child if you, the child is compared in this kind of Fraser's terms in the Golden Bower or in Freud's terms also as this kind of, and there's this sort of developmental kind of line, if you like. But the child is compared to this animistic animistic period do you see what i mean so they were just kind of children they didn't really know what they were doing they were seeing fairies in the trees you know uh look at those silly people but actually you know what spares spare was saying is you know that's that kind of the simplicity of the child is what we should

kind of be aiming for you know rather than kind of just dressing it up in all's that kind of the simplicity of the child is what we should kind of be aiming for, you know, rather than kind of just dressing it up in all of this kind of nonsense, really. And so if you and if you look at for if you look at Freud's model of repression, you know, it's all about how we've repressed our, our sexual aggressive drives, right? And we kind of they can't be incorporated into the ego fair enough absolutely there is that going on but and he's kind of pointing at that's the reason why you have this weird stuff going on because it's down to this sort of repression but actually what i'm saying in the book is like yeah but you've also repressed this animistic consciousness

and that's why i mean freud writes in the essay the uncanny about his own uncanny experiences and he's wondering why he's having them is well you know i think that's that's a good reason why right because you're kind of saying that there's that they're just part of this this this part of history that's dead but you can't you can't kill that off as you're saying in the depths of the psyche in the depths of the brainstem it's it's still there you know well i think freud too you know said that like he wants to reduce everything down to sexuality because he's saying that everything that the first impulse that we have evolutionarily is

going to be you know mate selection and you know the the most dominant thing passes on its genes or whatever but we have multiple levels of the brain other than natural selection that were designed to solve other problems you know we it didn't just start with that and then get bigger and bigger and bigger and better at it there's actually three or you know depending on how you want to sort them, multiple competing drives, like in consciousness, of which sexuality is only one. Yes. So go on, go on.

No, that's it. Just to reduce it down to that is, you know, how do you do that? Yes. And I think that's where the, you know, the work of Yak Pansip comes in, doesn't it? And Mark Solms, I know, the psychoanalyst who's re-translated the the collected works of freud has kind of um incorporated that into into the the inter-psychoanalysis so i think that's a that's a really helpful update as well so that you've got those um it's not only about those two you know it's not about the life and death instinct it's also about the it's also about our curiosity our seeking and our fear and our panic and

all of that and and also that's you know bringing back to mythology again you know coming back to the curse position you know if you think about pan you know and the kind of the panic that pan sort of causes, but it's by being in touch with our internal pan, if you like, which can really help us to get in touch with those more animistic, primitive parts of ourselves, right, which can be really helpful for healing. Yeah, and the only way i think to be um to heal them and to be present with them is to quit thinking about them you know metaphor is still thinking it's still me getting distance between this thing and me that's right but it

isn't real in this other way that's threatening and it really has to be something that you um that you go back into and just feel um who knows where it comes from i'm not pretending to know but you do have to feel it in order to go through it. Yes. And I think that's the great value of, you know, because I really value the weird, you know, I really value the uncanny of, you know, these kind of strange experiences that we cannot explain. You these are sources of mystery you know um and like arthur macken the the writer says you know well everything ends in mystery that's what's written on his grave you know and i just love that because it's all about that these things are offerings aren't they they're windows into that that kind of mysterious world i mean and we

see this with writers as well you know we see that you know when i was a child i remember the lion the witch in the wardrobe you know this kind of these portals into into other worlds we need to have that kind of um connection with it but that doesn't come through um a contrived means of finding it kind of just happens through kind of unpredictable strange experiences a lot of the time and all but also importantly I recently wrote was writing a short essay on this about this called about relational presence because we can feel with we often have these kind of experiences where like you and i are now we when we're

speaking to other people or when we're with people that are close to us we have um because with affect is so important the emotions are so so important for having for experiences of the supernatural or spiritual they're often in communion with other people or with animals or with plants or with nature that's that these are all really really important for healing aren't they getting off and also getting out of this kind of um getting off the phone you know and getting out into the world and allowing ourselves to dream and experience states of reverie you know and daydreaming rather than, like you're saying, just this kind of cognitive prison

that we can easily get stuck in. You can't think your way out of a myth. I mean, I think the overly interpretive mythographers are the ones that I'm a little suspicious of. The ones who realize that we are part of it are a little bit more interesting. Yes, yes, it's kind of getting away from this as if mentality isn't it is that what you're saying is there anything else that that you want to um kind of touch on from the the the book and i think we gave people probably a pretty good overview of what you know where to get going with

it um or your other work you know yeah well not really i guess what i'm trying to think about what i've been trying to think about for a while is how we is like how in the modern world how we can incorporate you know a theory of mind which incorporates these realities you know you have um so that it doesn't become reductive it doesn't become as if so that we can um in in psychotherapy particularly because that's obviously our profession how we can do that um and i guess we have all sorts of interesting sort of ontologies now don't we we'd like things like panpsychism and and um all kinds of um all kinds of other ways of seeing reality um which you may or may not agree with but i think it seems that things are opening up quite a lot aren't they

um all of the different kind of subcultures if we call them that like within our culture um shamanism um paganism etc etc that we can lots of interest in witchcraft in tarot and um so i think it's it's a very very exciting time um so yeah how i suppose when we're thinking about the mind how can we think about spirit you know how do we you know are entities part of our mind or i mean it's the eternal question isn't it or are they or are they did they have their own agency you know and i think we can we can have both you know i think that we can have the entities which in our in our in our minds right but we also have entities which have their own agencies that we can't apprehend and that we don't know. And sometimes that can be uncomfortable for people to think about, I think.

Yeah, very, very uncomfortable because it's disembodying. It's taking away the certainty that, I mean, I think a lot of therapy at the root is making people be, one, admit, and then two, become more comfortable with the fact that we have very little control. And a lot of the symptoms are trying to pretend that we have more control than we do yeah or something if you ever looked at uh like uh that idea of the post-secular sacred david tacy writes about it a lot um but it comes from you there young had this idea that they were kind of going to be these three epics that earlier you know there was this you know spiritual literalism that the myth the the magic was just real and that you participate in it and and then that was overthrown for this kind of age of modernist science where the only thing that was

real was the objective and the subjective was kind of gone and that eventually that would fall apart because what we were observing was going to become so vast and complicated that we couldn't completely understand it objective anyway and then there would be this what he what tacy says is a post-secular sacred where people say okay but quantum physics you know but you know um these huge abstract systems are also something that we don't really understand so there is a it's useful to have sort of a metaphorical definition of god it's useful to bring back some of these ideas and um to have a little bit more kind of poetry and subjective experience

which yeah yeah yeah i think i think there is a yeah i don't know David Lacey's work at all but Tacey that's it sorry David Tacey yeah um I don't know his work but I think there is that tendency isn't it um and which um we can easily fall into to kind of we need to sort of again there's that word validate sort of validate our experience by oh look in quantum physics you have this you know and this is what they they you know it's kind of it's proven and then you end up all you end up doing is undermining your own kind of experience or your own ontology you know and i think that that that's kind of you know why why do you always have to seek something else? And I think, you know, say, for example, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, his writing is great.

And he sees psychoanalysis as a form of art, you know, as a kind of poetry. And he's not kind of looking for it to be any more than that. But there's something about that poetry and that art that heals. Do you see what I mean? So I think if we can kind of just settle a bit with what we have and kind of explore that and be okay with that, we don't always kind of need to validate it with this kind of external other, you know, that always knows better. It's very Lacanian, isn't it? This other that knows more than us you know uh yeah do you ever you ever build a computer

or uh anything in the you know or probably of the age where that was a possibility i would be completely useless at that no i haven't i i very much like synthesizers um and messing around with like you know that kind of knob twiddling as it were you know just like but the actual you know the the understanding what's under the hood i wouldn't have a faintest idea i'm afraid yeah well there's some like uh i was you know old enough to actually that your computer came in several boxes and you put it together but that like the um of when I used to be an EMDR clinician, now I do primarily brain spotting and ETT. But one of the models of the same idea of consciousness I use for people who have that language is like, you know, you have your CPU, which is the central process. I know what that is. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's really good at doing any kind of random calculation. So it can do a lot of very different things. You open a Word document, you open a video, you open a web browser, and then you have your GPU, which is able to do calculations really quickly that just have a couple numbers different, but millions of those incredibly quickly. So if you want to see the light reflecting off a gun and a first person shooter or physics, water moving, where, you know, it's doing a spreadsheet of problems incredibly fast, but it's not flexible. You know, the CPU offloads all that to it. And that's kind of getting deeper into the brainstem, you know, where you've got this thing that has

just learned. I'm not going to think about men make me uncomfortable because dad and this and all these compounding associations. So that when I'm around the situation, my back does that, you know, I'm not thinking about that. I'm just in my noticing triggers, they're happening. And it's going, I could, you know, drop down into that level of consciousness and think about it, if I was willing to turn, you know, the CPU off. And yeah, and the further down you go, the weirder it gets. I mean, now you have computers with these, you know, AI chips, essentially, where they're doing so much, you knowreferencing a lot of these like LLMs and generating models have these vectors where they're pinging so many data sets that there's no record of what they actually did. Like we can see what they did, but we don't know. We can't like, I can go through the GPU and say, okay, there's a bug. The background didn't render. So let me go through 10 spreadsheets in an hour.

I can find what was wrong with an LLM. It tells you something and you don't know why I told you that no one knows there's no record it's a black box you know and so like those are the kind of levels of consciousness for me is it's like eventually you do get into this black box thing where you know you know during brain spawning a ton of times people feel like well i didn't know what this yeah this is the incident well this other thing is familiar and it's terrifying and it's deeper than the incident but what is it and then later they're oh this was fourth grade or something you know when you process it and then they get to these places that just feel disembodying and terrifying like they're like this isn't me like i don't understand what this is and you know sometimes

people have a kind of poetic understanding of like oh this is how mom felt when i was in the womb you know she was afraid like this isn't even my emotion this is what i felt when I was in the womb. You know, she was afraid. Like, this isn't even my emotion. This is what I was told to feel as I was growing up. And, you know, of course, you could never prove that. You know, no one could ever come in and say, well, yeah, epigenetics works this way. Like, there's no way to study this. But it still, I think, is valid if people are getting better

and having some kind of self-knowledge that maybe is not intellectual knowledge. You know, I don't't know the professions are afraid of that post the 80s and margaret and thatcher margaret thatcher and reagan come in and everything has turned into this kind of objective metric in health care and it is very much at war i think with good trauma therapy in a way that you know we're still having that fight yes yes no i mean and again i was thinking about the intergenerational aspects as you as you were speaking about the cpu and just like and also the cpu becoming a you know kind of representing the the high levels of dysregulation that can happen in trauma as well as the person gets out of their window of tolerance you know their cpus are 90 or whatever

you know um but that there's something quite terrifying about that that sort of erasure of the mechanisms that lead to something um there's something really frightening about that actually and that that right kind of like makes me think about the unconscious you know and the layers and the layers and the kind of the depths of it that we just don't know about you know yeah and i'm not a techno utopian that thinks we're going to download our brain onto a computer and live on a server or something that just isn't uh any it didn't strike me at all but i think that the i think that the uh the metaphor there is kind of useful and just understanding how information is processed. Yeah,

absolutely. Well, is the book, the beginning of, you know, a greater model, you know, as the next, you know,

the, the ritual or the totem or the, you know, whatever is the next book on another metaphysical thing, or is it more, this was just kind of something you're chewing on and your career goes, you know, onto the next thing.

Do you view it as kind of a piece of something how i think i think it is i think it is the beginning of something um i suppose at the moment i'm doing some writing on my sub stack at the moment um just uh so i wrote um an essay recently called the demonic divine which so is is really thinking about a bit more about the curse in relation to numinous experience and how the curse is very much a person is in a kind of subjective prison, if you like. And ominous comes from the word omen right and in I don't know if you've read Rudolf Otto's the idea of the hominous yeah I'm familiar with the origin of numinous I was going to ask you if

we had longer why why you chose him yeah so yeah so basically he he thought well you've got omen ominous so he thought well not why not numen numous? So he came up with a numinous. And what's really interesting about that is that the numinous, it brings a person into a more objective realm rather than this kind of subjective prison. Okay, so I'm thinking about how the numinous can be a kind of cure in terms of helping somebody to think about or have a different experience with their own reality, if you like. So, yeah, so I suppose I'm thinking more about if, from that perspective, how I can think about in terms of spirituality in terms of healing um yeah here a spiritual so the numinous mystery the uncanny synchronicity all of these kind of things and how so building on what i'm saying in the book about

magical curse consciousness less about less about the actual curse itself and more about um those areas instead yeah so yeah moving moving towards towards healing and um thinking about the role of art particularly and um and spiritual experience that's fascinating yeah i don't know i i would love to to have you on to talk about that when you get there. Okay, thank you very much, Joel. Cheers. Yeah, I'm kind of of the opinion that a lot of philosophy and psychology, if not all of it, and mythological anthropology maybe,

is just sort of fighting about object relations. That people are like, well, we have this inner world that doesn't match the outer world. Which one is valid? Well, the outer world feels real through spiritual experience. So the inner world is more valid than the outer or where does the outer world come from? Can they harmonize?

How much can they harmonize? Why are they different? You know, it's just... Yeah. Well, these are eternal conversations and it would be kind of hubristic, I think, to think that we can kind of solve those um because there are those tensions there aren't there um and it is very very difficult and and again a lot of

our work with clients is trying to help them to pass out in some way what it what are those things you know get a better understanding of the outer and the inner sure the subjective and the object objective as much as is possible yeah and holding the tension without knowing i mean my exactly even if i have a you know deterministic knowledge it isn't something that is relevant to the patient you know but it's their experience and their relationship with the that tension you know yeah 100 absolutely well i really appreciate you coming on. We'll definitely point to,

what do you want us to point to the book on Amazon and the website? Great. That's great. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. And then what is, what is the web address? I don't have that in front of me. I've got, well, actually. So the web address is alexmonktherapy.com. Okay. Well, thank you so much. And if there's ever anything I can do for you, let me know. We'd love to have you on again as new things come out.

Thanks very much, Joe.