The Taproot Podcast - 🍑Healing the Modern Soul Part 2: The Philosophy of Psychology

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1    Part 2    Part 3     Part 4 ��    Healing the Modern Soul Appendix    The Philosophy of Psychotherapy   The Corporatization of Healthcare and Academia: A Threat to the Future of Psychotherapy The field of psychotherapy is at a critical juncture, facing numerous challenges that threaten its ability to effectively address the complex realities of the human experience. Chief among these challenges is the growing influence of corporate interests and the trend towards hyper-specialization in academic psychology, which have led to a disconnect between the profession and its roots, as well as a lack of understanding of the physical reality of the body, anthropology, and the history of the field. In this article, we will explore the ways in which the corporatization of healthcare and academia is impacting psychotherapy, and argue that in order for the profession to remain relevant and effective, it must embrace a more holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of the mind, body, and spirit. This requires a renewed commitment to developing a coherent concept of self, a shared language and understanding of implicit memory, and a vision of psychotherapy as a means of empowering individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world and, in turn, better at transforming the world for the better. The Corporatization of Healthcare and Academia The influence of corporate interests on healthcare and academia has had a profound impact on the field of psychotherapy. The pressure to maximize profits and minimize costs has led to a shift away from comprehensive diagnosis and towards a reliance on quick fixes like medication and brief, manualized therapies. This trend is particularly evident in the way that psychiatry has evolved over the past few decades. Psychiatrists used to spend an entire hour with their patients doing psychotherapy, but now the majority of the profession relies solely on drug therapy. In fact, a staggering 89% of psychiatrists used only drug therapy in 2010, compared to just 54% in 1988 (Mojtabai & Olfson, 2008). Patients are often left feeling frustrated and unheard, with many giving up on medication after their psychiatrist writes a script in the first and last five minutes of their first session. The same forces are at work in academia, where the cost of education has skyrocketed and the focus has shifted towards producing "products" rather than fostering critical thinking and innovation. Adjunct professors, who often lack the expertise and experience to teach psychotherapy effectively, have replaced tenure-track faculty, and students are graduating with a narrow understanding of the field that is ill-suited to the realities of private practice (Collier, 2017). The result is a profession that is increasingly disconnected from its roots and the physical reality of the body. Anthropology, humanities and the history of the profession, which offer valuable insights into the nature of the human experience and the evolution of psychotherapy, are largely ignored in favor of a narrow focus on cognitive-behavioral interventions and symptom reduction pushed largely to help psychopharm companies' bottom lines (Frances, 2013). The current academic publishing system is also broken. Academics work hard to come up with original ideas and write papers, only to give their work away for free to publishers who make trillions of dollars in profits while the authors get no compensation (Buranyi, 2017). Peers often cite papers to support their own points without actually reading them in depth. And the "best" journals frequently publish absurd psychology articles that would make you laugh if you said their main point out loud, but hide their lack of substance behind academic jargon (Sokal, 2008). Meanwhile, students spend years in graduate school being forced to research what their advisor wants, not what's truly innovative or needed to advance the field. After a decade of study and compromise, the pinnacle achievement is often creating a new 30-question screener for something like anxiety, rather than developing therapists who can actually discern and treat anxiety without needing a questionnaire. The system fails to properly vet or pay therapists, assuming they can't be trusted to practice without rigid manuals and checklists. This hyper-rationality, the madness arising from too much logic rather than too little, is very useful to moneyed interests like the Department of Defense in how they want to fund and control research. Large language models and AI are the pinnacle of this - spreadsheets sorting data points to mimic human speech, created by people so disconnected from a real sense of self that they believe you can turn people into robots because they've turned themselves into robots (Weizenbaum, 1976). But psychology and therapy can't be reduced to hard science and pure empiricism the way fields like physics can (at least until you get to quantum physics and have to rely on metaphor again). We can't remove all intuition, subjective experience and uncertainty (Rogers, 1995). The reproducibility crisis in psychology research shows the folly of this over-rationality (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Studies that throw out any participant who dropped out of CBT treatment because it wasn't helping them are not painting an accurate picture (Westen et al., 2004). Developing a Coherent Concept of Self A History of the Self Our understanding of the self has evolved throughout history: Ancient Greek Philosophy (6th century BCE - 3rd century CE) Socrates introduces the idea of the self as a distinct entity, emphasizing self-knowledge and introspection (Plato, trans. 2002). Plato's concept of the soul as the essence of the self, distinct from the physical body (Plato, trans. 1997). Aristotle's notion of the self as the unity of body and soul, with the soul being the form or essence of the individual (Aristotle, trans. 1986). Medieval Philosophy (5th century CE - 15th century CE) St. Augustine's concept of the self as a reflection of God, with the inner self being the source of truth and self-knowledge (Augustine, trans. 2002). St. Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian concepts of the self, emphasizing the soul as the form of the body (Aquinas, trans.1981). Renaissance and Enlightenment (16th century CE - 18th century CE) Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), establishing the self as a thinking, conscious being (Descartes, trans. 1996). Locke's idea of the self as a blank slate shaped by experience and the continuity of consciousness (Locke, trans. 1975). Hume's skepticism about the self, arguing that it is merely a bundle of perceptions without a unified identity (Hume, trans. 2000). Romantic Era (late 18th century CE - mid-19th century CE) The self is seen as a creative, expressive force, with an emphasis on individuality and subjective experience (Berlin, 2013). The rise of the concept of the "self-made man" and the importance of personal growth and self-realization (Trilling, 1972). 20th Century Philosophy and Psychology Freud's psychoanalytic theory, which posits the self as composed of the id, ego, and superego, with unconscious drives and conflicts shaping behavior (Freud, trans.1989). Jung's concept of the self as the center of the psyche, integrating conscious and unconscious elements (Jung, 1959). Existentialism's emphasis on the self as a product of individual choices and actions, with the need to create meaning in a meaningless world (Sartre, trans. 1956). The rise of humanistic psychology, with its focus on self-actualization and the inherent potential of the individual (Maslow, 1968). Postmodernism's deconstruction of the self, challenging the idea of a unified, coherent identity (Jameson, 1991). Contemporary Developments (late 20th century CE - present) The influence of neuroscience and cognitive science on the understanding of the self as an emergent property of brain processes (LeDoux, 2002). The impact of social and cultural factors on the construction of the self, with the recognition of multiple, intersecting identities (Gergen, 1991). The rise of narrative theories of the self, emphasizing the role of storytelling in shaping personal identity (Bruner, 1990). The influence of Eastern philosophies and contemplative practices on Western concepts of the self, with an emphasis on mindfulness and interconnectedness (Epstein, 1995). Psychotherapy and the Concept of Self Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) - Psychoanalysis: Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, conceived of the self as being composed of three elements: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id represents the primitive, instinctual drives; the ego mediates between the demands of the id and the constraints of reality; and the superego represents the internalized moral standards and values of society. Freud believed that the goal of psychotherapy was to bring unconscious conflicts and desires into conscious awareness, allowing the ego to better manage the competing demands of the id and superego (Freud, trans. 1989). Carl Jung (1875-1961) - Analytical Psychology: Jung, a former collaborator of Freud, developed his own theory of the self, which he saw as the central archetype of the psyche. Jung believed that the self represented the unity and wholeness of the personality, and that the goal of psychotherapy was to help individuals achieve a state of self-realization or individuation. This involved integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche, including the persona (the public face), the shadow (the repressed or hidden aspects of the self), and the anima/animus (the inner masculine or feminine) (Jung, 1959). Alfred Adler (1870-1937) - Individual Psychology: Adler, another former collaborator of Freud, emphasized the importance of social relationships and the drive for superiority in shaping the self. He believed that individuals develop a unique lifestyle or way of being in the world based on their early experiences and relationships, and that the goal of psychotherapy was to help individuals overcome feelings of inferiority and develop a healthy, socially-oriented way of living (Adler, trans. 1964). Fritz Perls (1893-1970) - Gestalt Therapy: Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, saw the self as an ongoing process of self-regulation and self-actualization. He believed that the goal of psychotherapy was to help individuals become more aware of their present-moment experience and to take responsibility for their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Perls emphasized the importance of contact between the self and the environment, and the need to integrate the different aspects of the self into a cohesive whole (Perls et al., 1951). Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Richard Schwartz (1950-present): IFS is a more recent approach that sees the self as being composed of multiple sub-personalities or "parts." These parts are seen as having their own unique qualities, desires, and beliefs, and the goal of IFS therapy is to help individuals develop a greater sense of self-leadership and inner harmony. The self is seen as the core of the personality, with the capacity to lead and integrate the different parts (Schwartz, 1995). As Schwartz writes in the introduction to his book on IFS, the model was heavily influenced by Gestalt therapy and the work of Carl Jung. Schwartz aimed to create a non-pathologizing approach that honored the complexity and wisdom of the psyche. IFS shares Jung's view of the self as the central organizing principle, surrounded by various archetypes or subpersonalities. It also draws on the Gestalt emphasis on present-moment awareness and the need for integration of different aspects of the self. However, IFS offers a more user-friendly language than classical Jungian analysis, without the need for extensive explanations of concepts like anima/animus. In IFS, a patient can quickly identify different "parts" - for example, a protector part that taps its foot and bites its nails to avoid painful feelings. By directly engaging with and embracing that part, the patient can access the vulnerable feelings and memories it is protecting against, fostering self-compassion and integration over time. The IFS model is an example of how contemporary approaches are building on the insights of depth psychology while offering more transparent, experience-near practices suitable for a wider range of patients and practitioners. It reflects an ongoing effort to develop a cohesive yet flexible understanding of the self that remains open to unconscious processes. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - Aaron Beck (1921-2021) and Albert Ellis (1913-2007): CBT, developed by Beck and Ellis, focuses on the role of thoughts and beliefs in shaping emotional and behavioral responses. CBT sees the self as being largely determined by the individual's cognitions, and the goal of therapy is to help individuals identify and modify maladaptive or irrational beliefs and thought patterns. CBT places less emphasis on the unconscious or intrapsychic aspects of the self, and more on the conscious, rational processes that shape behavior (Beck, 1979; Ellis & Harper, 1975). Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) - B.F. Skinner (1904-1990): ABA, based on the work of Skinner and other behaviorists, sees the self as a product of environmental contingencies and reinforcement histories. ABA focuses on observable behaviors rather than internal states or processes, and the goal of therapy is to modify behavior through the systematic application of reinforcement and punishment. ABA has been widely used in the treatment of autism and other developmental disorders, but has been criticized for its lack of attention to the inner experience of the self (Skinner, 1953; Lovaas, 1987). What is Self? One of the key challenges facing psychotherapy today is the lack of a coherent concept of self. The self is a complex and dynamic entity that is shaped by a range of internal and external factors, including our experiences, relationships, and cultural context (Baumeister, 1987). Unfortunately, many contemporary models of therapy fail to adequately capture this complexity, instead relying on simplistic and reductionistic notions of the self as a collection of symptoms or behaviors to be modified (Wachtel, 1991). To develop a more coherent and holistic concept of self, psychotherapy must draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and the humanities (Sass & Parnas, 2003). This requires a willingness to engage with the messy and often paradoxical nature of the human experience, recognizing that the self is not a fixed entity but rather a constantly evolving process of becoming (Gendlin, 1978). The psychoanalyst Carl Jung's concept of the self as the central archetype, connected to the divine and the greater unconscious, offers a useful starting point for this endeavor. Jung believed that by making the unconscious conscious and dealing with ego rigidity, individuals could embody a deeper sense of purpose and connection to the universe (Jung, 1959). While we may not need to fully embrace Jung's metaphysical language, his emphasis on the dynamic interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, as well as the importance of symbol, dream, and myth in shaping the self, remains highly relevant today (Hillman, 1975). Other approaches, such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and somatic experiencing, also offer valuable insights into the nature of the self. IFS sees the self as a core of compassion, curiosity, and confidence that is surrounded by protective parts that arise in response to trauma and other challenges. By working with these parts and fostering greater integration and self-leadership, individuals can develop a more coherent and authentic sense of self (Schwartz, 1995). Similarly, somatic experiencing emphasizes the role of the body in shaping the self, recognizing that trauma and other experiences are stored not just in the mind but also in the muscles, nerves, and other physical structures (Levine, 1997). Models like IFS, somatic experiencing, and lifespan integration are appealing because they see the self as a dynamic ecosystem that is always evolving and striving for integration and actualization (Boon et al., 2011; Ogden et al., 2006; Pace, 2012). They don't try to label and categorize everything, recognizing that sometimes we need to just sit with feelings and sensations without fully understanding them intellectually. Lifespan integration in particular views the self as a continuum of moments threaded together like pearls on a necklace. Traumatic experiences can cause certain "pearls" or ego states to become frozen in time, disconnected from the flow of the self-narrative. By imaginally revisiting these moments and "smashing them together" with resource states, lifespan integration aims to re-integrate the self across time, fostering a more coherent and flexible identity (Pace, 2012). In contrast, the more behavioral and manualized approaches like CBT and ABA have a much more limited and problematic view. They see the self as just a collection of cognitions and learned behaviors, minimizing the role of the unconscious and treating people more like programmable robots (Shedler, 2010). If taken to an extreme, this is frankly offensive and damaging. There has to be room for the parts of the self that we can feel and intuit but not fully articulate (Stern, 2004). Ultimately, developing a coherent concept of self requires a willingness to sit with the tensions and paradoxes of the human experience, recognizing that the self is always in communication with the world around us, and that our sense of who we are is constantly being shaped by implicit memory and other unconscious processes (Schore & Schore, 2008). It requires remaining open to uncertainty and realizing that the self is never static or finished, but always dynamically unfolding (Bromberg, 1996). Good therapy helps people get in touch with their authentic self, not just impose a set of techniques to modify surface-level symptoms (Fosha et al., 2009). Understanding Implicit Memory Another critical challenge facing psychotherapy today is the lack of a shared language and understanding of implicit memory. Implicit memory refers to the unconscious, automatic, and often somatic ways in which our past experiences shape our present thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Schacter et al., 1993). While the concept of implicit memory has a long history in psychotherapy, dating back to Freud's notion of the unconscious and Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, it remains poorly understood and often overlooked in contemporary practice (Kihlstrom, 1987). This is due in part to the dominance of cognitive-behavioral approaches, which tend to focus on explicit, conscious processes rather than the deeper, more intuitive and embodied aspects of the self (Bucci, 1997). To effectively address the role of implicit memory in psychological distress and personal growth, psychotherapy must develop a shared language and framework for understanding and working with these unconscious processes (Greenberg, 2002). This requires a willingness to engage with the body and the somatic experience, recognizing that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are deeply rooted in our physical being (van der Kolk, 2014). One way to think about implicit memory is as a kind of "photoshop filter" that our brain is constantly running, even when we are not consciously aware of it. Just as the center of our visual field is filled in by our brain based on the surrounding context, our implicit memories are constantly shaping our perceptions and reactions to the world around us, even when we are not consciously aware of them. This is why it is so important for therapists to be attuned to the subtle cues and signals that patients give off, both verbally and nonverbally. A skilled therapist can often sense the presence of implicit memories and unconscious processes long before the patient is consciously aware of them, and can use this information to guide the therapeutic process in a more effective and meaningful direction (Schore, 2012). At the same time, it is important to recognize that implicit memories are not always negative or pathological. In fact, many of our most cherished and meaningful experiences are encoded in implicit memory, shaping our sense of self and our relationships with others in profound and often unconscious ways (Fosshage, 2005). The goal of therapy, then, is not necessarily to eliminate or "fix" implicit memories, but rather to help individuals develop a more conscious and intentional relationship with them, so that they can be integrated into a more coherent and authentic sense of self (Stern, 2004). The Future of the Unconscious Many of the most interesting thinkers in the history of psychology understood this symbolic dimension of implicit memory, even if their specific theories needed refinement. Freud recognized the dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious processes, and the way that repressed material could manifest in dreams, symptoms, and relational patterns (Freud, trans. 1989). Jung saw the unconscious as not just a repository of repressed personal material, but a deep well of collective wisdom and creative potential, populated by universal archetypes and accessed through dream, myth, and active imagination (Jung, 1968). Jung urged individuals to engage in a lifelong process of "individuation," differentiating the self from the collective while also integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche (Jung, 1964). Reich connected chronic muscular tensions or "character armor" to blocked emotions and neurotic conflicts, pioneering body-based interventions aimed at restoring the free flow of life energy (Reich, 1980). While some of Reich's later work veered into pseudoscience, his core insights about the somatic basis of psychological experience were hugely influential on subsequent generations of clinicians (Young, 2006). More recently, emerging models such as sensorimotor psychotherapy (Ogden & Fisher, 2015), accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP; Fosha, 2000), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR; Shapiro, 2017) aim to access and integrate implicit memories through body-based and imagistic techniques. By working with posture, sensation, movement, and breath, these approaches help patients bring nonverbal, affective material into conscious awareness and narrative coherence. Process-oriented therapies such as Arnold Mindell's process work (Mindell, 1985) offer another compelling framework for engaging implicit memory. Mindell suggests that the unconscious communicates through "channels" such as vision, audition, proprioception, kinesthesia, and relationship. By unfolding the process in each channel and following the flow of "sentient essence," therapists can help patients access and integrate implicit memories and in turn catalyze psychological and somatic healing. These contemporary approaches build on the insights of earlier clinicians while offering new maps and methods for navigating the realm of implicit memory. They point towards an understanding of the self as an ever-evolving matrix of conscious and unconscious, cognitive and somatic, personal and transpersonal processes. Engaging implicit memory is not about pathologizing the unconscious so much as learning its unique language and honoring its hidden wisdom. At the same time, this is tricky terrain to navigate, personally and professionally. As therapist and patient venture into the uncharted waters of the unconscious, it is crucial to maintain an attitude of humility, compassion, and ethical integrity (Stein, 2006). We must be mindful of the power dynamics and transference/countertransference currents that can arise in any therapeutic relationship, and work to create a safe, boundaried space for healing and transformation (Barnett et al., 2007). There is also a risk of getting lost in the fascinating world of the unconscious and losing sight of external reality. While depth psychology and experiential therapies offer valuable tools for self-exploration and meaning-making, they are not a replacement for practical skills, behavioral changes, and real-world action. We must be careful not to fall into the trap of "spiritual bypassing," using esoteric practices to avoid the hard work of embodying our insights and values in daily life (Welwood, 2000). Ultimately, the future of psychotherapy lies in integrating the best of what has come before while remaining open to new discoveries and directions. By combining scientific rigor with clinical artistry, cognitive understanding with experiential depth, and technical skill with ethical care, we can continue to expand our understanding of the self and the transformative potential of the therapeutic relationship. As we navigate the uncharted territories of the 21st century and beyond, we will need maps and methods that honor the full complexity and mystery of the human experience. Engaging with the unconscious and implicit dimensions of memory is not a luxury but a necessity if we are to rise to the challenges of our time with creativity, resilience, and wisdom. May we have the courage to venture into the depths, and the humility to be transformed by what we find there. Empowering Individuals to Be Themselves The ultimate goal of psychotherapy, in my view, is to empower individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world and, in turn, better at transforming the world for the better. This requires a fundamental shift in the way that we think about mental health and well-being, moving beyond a narrow focus on symptom reduction and towards a more holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. To achieve this goal, psychotherapy must embrace a range of approaches and techniques that are tailored to the unique needs and experiences of each individual. This may include somatic therapies that work with the body to release trauma and promote healing, such as somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, or EMDR (Levine, 1997; Ogden & Fisher, 2015; Shapiro, 2017). It may also include depth psychologies that explore the unconscious and archetypal dimensions of the psyche, such as Jungian analysis, psychosynthesis, or archetypal psychology (Jung, 1968; Assagioli, 1965; Hillman, 1975). And it may include humanistic and experiential approaches that emphasize the inherent worth and potential of each person, such as person-centered therapy, gestalt therapy, or existential psychotherapy (Rogers, 1995; Perls et al., 1951; Yalom, 1980). At the same time, psychotherapy must also be grounded in a deep understanding of the social, cultural, and political contexts in which individuals live and work. This requires a willingness to engage with issues of power, privilege, and oppression, recognizing that mental health and well-being are intimately connected to the broader structures and systems that shape our lives (Prilleltensky, 1997). It also requires a recognition that the goal of therapy is not simply to help individuals adapt to the status quo, but rather to empower them to become agents of change in their own lives and in the world around them (Freire, 1970). Therapists as Agents of the Post-Secular Sacred One way to think about this is through the lens of what depth psychologist David Tacey calls the "post-secular sacred" (Tacey, 2004). Tacey argues that we are moving into a new era of spirituality that is grounded in a deep respect for science and reason, but also recognizes the importance of myth, symbol, and the unconscious in shaping our experience of the world. In this view, the goal of therapy is not to strip away our illusions and defenses in order to reveal some kind of objective truth, but rather to help individuals develop a more authentic and meaningful relationship with the mystery and complexity of existence. This requires a willingness to sit with the discomfort and uncertainty that often accompanies the process of growth and transformation. It also requires a recognition that the path to wholeness and healing is not always a straight line, but rather a winding and often circuitous journey that involves confronting our deepest fears and vulnerabilities (Jung, 1959). Therapists of Agents of the Post Secular Sacred Riddle in the Garden by Robert Penn Warren My mind is intact, but the shapes of the world change, the peach has released the bough and at last makes full confession, its pudeur had departed like peach-fuzz wiped off, and We now know how the hot sweet- ness of flesh and the juice-dark hug the rough peach-pit, we know its most suicidal yearnings, it wants to suffer extremely, it Loves God, and I warn you, do not touch that plum, it will burn you, a blister will be on your finger, and you will put the finger to your lips for relief—oh, do be careful not to break that soft Gray bulge of blister like fruit-skin, for exposing that inwardness will increase your pain, for you are part of this world. You think I am speaking in riddles. But I am not, for The world means only itself. In the image that Penn Warren creates in "Riddle in the Garden" is a labyrinth leading back to the birth of humans in the garden of Eden.  Life itself is a swelling of inflammation from a wound or a need in both blisters and in peaches. You cannot have one part of the process without accepting all of it. The swelling in the growth of the fruit is also the swelling in the growth of a blister of pain. The peach must swell and become a sweet tempting blister or else no one would eat it and expose the "inwardness" of the seed to grow more trees.  exists to be eaten to die. We eat the peach to grow the next one. Not to touch the “suicidal” peach is not to touch life itself. For to live is to be hurt and to grow. To touch the peach is to become part of the world like Adam and Eve found out. It hurts it blisters us turning us into fruit.  For Penn Warren it is the separation of the self from the world of divine connection with nature that creates our need for meaning. This need is the reason that patients come to therapy. God tells us that “I am the lord your God” but Penn Warren tells us “I am not”. For “The world means only itself”. This process only has the meaning that we allow ourselves to give it. This is not a riddle, Penn Warren tells us.  It is only something we have to deal with but cannot not solve. The world means only itself. There is no gimmick or solution to the problem of being human.  In other words, the process of becoming more fully ourselves is not always easy or comfortable. It requires a willingness to confront the pain and suffering that is inherent in the human condition, and to recognize that growth and healing often involve an alchemical kind of death and rebirth. But it is precisely through this process of facing our fears and vulnerabilities that we can begin to develop a more authentic and meaningful relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us. Ultimately, the goal of psychotherapy is not to provide answers or solutions, but rather to create a space in which individuals can begin to ask deeper questions about the nature of their existence and their place in the world. It is to help individuals develop the tools and capacities they need to navigate the complexities of life with greater courage, compassion, and wisdom. And it is to empower individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world, so that they can contribute to the greater whole and help to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all. The Future of Psychotherapy The corporatization of healthcare and academia poses a serious threat to the future of psychotherapy, undermining its ability to effectively address the complex realities of the human experience. To remain relevant and effective in the face of these challenges, the field must embrace a more holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of the mind, body, and spirit. This requires a renewed commitment to developing a coherent concept of self, a shared language and understanding of implicit memory, and a vision of psychotherapy as a means of empowering individuals to become more effective at being themselves in the world and, in turn, better at transforming the world for the better. It also requires a willingness to engage with the full complexity and paradox of the human experience, recognizing that growth and healing often involve a kind of death and rebirth, and that the path to wholeness is not always a straight line. As the psychologist Carl Jung once wrote, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." Psychotherapy and the Dialectic of Self and World As we have explored throughout this essay, the self does not exist in a vacuum, but is always in dynamic interaction with the world around it. Our sense of who we are, what we value, and what is possible for us is shaped by a complex interplay of internal and external factors, from our earliest experiences of attachment and attunement to the broader social, cultural, and political contexts in which we are embedded. In many ways, psychotherapy can be seen as a process of exploring and working with the dialectical tension between self and world, between our innermost longings, fears, and aspirations and the often harsh realities of the environments we find ourselves in. When we enter therapy, we bring with us not only our own unique histories, personality structures, and ways of being, but also the internalized messages, expectations, and constraints of the world around us. For many individuals, these internalized messages and constraints can feel suffocating, limiting their sense of possibility and agency in the world. They may find themselves feeling stuck, trapped, or disconnected from their authentic selves, playing roles and wearing masks that no longer fit who they really are. In the face of external pressures to conform, to achieve, to fit in, the self can become fragmented, disempowered, or lost. The task of psychotherapy, then, is to help individuals rediscover and reclaim a sense of self that feels vital, authentic, and empowered, while also developing the skills and capacities needed to navigate the complexities of the world with greater flexibility, resilience, and integrity. This requires a delicate balance of supportive and challenging interventions, of validating the individual's unique experience while also gently questioning and expanding their assumptions about what is possible. On one end of the spectrum, an overly supportive or myopic approach to therapy can run the risk of enabling individuals to remain stuck in limiting patterns and beliefs, reinforcing a sense of helplessness or dependence on the therapist. While providing a warm, empathic, and nonjudgmental space is essential for building trust and safety in the therapeutic relationship, it is not sufficient for fostering real growth and change. Individuals need to be challenged to step outside their comfort zones, to experiment with new ways of being and relating, and to take responsibility for their choices and actions in the world. On the other end of the spectrum, an overly challenging or confrontational approach to therapy can be experienced as invalidating, shaming, or even retraumatizing, particularly for individuals with histories of abuse, neglect, or marginalization. Pushing individuals to "toughen up," to adapt to oppressive or toxic environments, or to simply accept the "reality" of their situation without questioning or resisting it can lead to a kind of false or forced adaptation, a loss of self that is no less harmful than remaining stuck. The key, then, is to find a middle path between these extremes, one that honors the individual's inherent worth, agency, and potential while also recognizing the very real constraints and challenges of the world they inhabit. This requires a deep understanding of the ways in which power, privilege, and oppression shape our experiences and identities, as well as a willingness to grapple with the existential questions of meaning, purpose, and authenticity that arise when we confront the gap between who we are and who we feel we ought to be. In practice, this might involve helping individuals to: Develop a clearer and more coherent sense of self, one that integrates the various parts of their personality, history, and identity in a way that feels authentic and meaningful to them. Identify and challenge limiting beliefs, assumptions, and patterns of behavior that keep them stuck or disconnected from their true desires and values. Cultivate greater self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-acceptance, learning to embrace the full range of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with curiosity and kindness. Develop the skills and capacities needed to communicate effectively, set healthy boundaries, and navigate relationships and social situations with greater ease and confidence. Explore and experiment with new ways of being and relating in the world, taking risks and stepping outside their comfort zones in service of their growth and healing. Engage critically and creatively with the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape their lives, developing a sense of empowerment, agency, and social responsibility. Connect with a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and spirituality, one that transcends the ego and connects them to something greater than themselves. Ultimately, the goal of psychotherapy is not simply to help individuals adapt to the world as it is, but to empower them to become active agents of change, both in their own lives and in the larger systems and structures that shape our collective reality. By developing a stronger, more integrated, and more authentic sense of self, individuals can begin to challenge and transform the limiting beliefs, oppressive power dynamics, and dehumanizing narratives that keep us all stuck and disconnected from our shared humanity. In this sense, psychotherapy is not just a personal journey of healing and self-discovery, but a deeply political and moral enterprise, one that calls us to envision and create a world that is more just, compassionate, and sustainable for all. As therapists, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to support individuals in this process, to bear witness to their pain and their resilience, and to help them find the courage, clarity, and creativity needed to live a life of purpose, integrity, and connection. As the existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once wrote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." By creating a space for individuals to explore and expand their capacity to choose, to respond to the world with authenticity and agency, psychotherapy can play a vital role in the ongoing dialectic of self and world, of personal and collective transformation. May we rise to the challenge and opportunity of this sacred work, and may we never lose sight of the inherent beauty, complexity, and potential of the human spirit as it unfolds in the therapy room and beyond. https://youtu.be/iAof2cim5Wk References Adler, A. (1964). The individual psychology of Alfred Adler: A systematic presentation in selections from his writings (H. L. Ansbacher & R. R. Ansbacher, Eds.). Harper & Row. Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Erlbaum. Aquinas, T. (1981). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Christian Classics. Aristotle. (1986). De anima (On the soul) (H. Lawson-Tancred, Trans.). Penguin. Assagioli, R. (1965). Psychosynthesis: A manual of principles and techniques. Hobbs, Dorman & Company. Augustine of Hippo. (2002). Confessions (R. S. Pine-Coffin, Trans.). Penguin. Baumeister, R. F. (1987). How the self became a problem: A psychological review of historical research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 163-176. Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Press. Berlin, I. (2013). The roots of romanticism (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. Boon, S., Steele, K., & Van der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with trauma-related dissociation: Skills training for patients and therapists. W. W. Norton & Company. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books. Boyd, D. (2014). It's complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press. Bromberg, P. M. (1996). Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32(4), 509-535. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Harvard University Press. Buber, M. (1958). I and thou (R. G. Smith, Trans.). Scribner. Buranyi, S. (2017, June 27). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science Burkeman, O. (2012). The antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. Faber & Faber. Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton & Company. Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown and Company. Collier, R. (2017, December 12). Half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.18248 Comas-Díaz, L. (2012). Multicultural care: A clinician's guide to cultural competence. American Psychological Association. Cozolino, L. (2014). The neuroscience of human relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company. Dalai Lama, & Ekman, P. (2009). Emotional awareness: Overcoming the obstacles to psychological balance and compassion. Times Books. Descartes, R. (1996). Meditations on first philosophy (J. Cottingham, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1641) Doctorow, C., & Wang, H. (2020, September 28). How to destroy surveillance capitalism. OneZero. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 Ellis, A., & Harper, R. A. (1975). A new guide to rational living. Prentice-Hall. Epstein, M. (1995). Thoughts without a thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective. Basic Books. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. W. W. Norton & Company. Fosha, D. (2000). The transforming power of affect: A model for accelerated change. Basic Books. Frances, A. (2013). Saving normal: An insider's revolt against out-of-control psychiatric diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the medicalization of ordinary life. William Morrow. Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946) Freud, S. (1989). The ego and the id. W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1923) Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. Rinehart & Company. Gawande, A. (2009). The checklist manifesto: How to get things right. Metropolitan Books. Gendlin, E. T. (1978). Focusing. Bantam Books. Gergen, K. J. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. Basic Books. Goodman, D. M., & Freeman, E. E. (2015). Psychology and the art of compassion: Issues in transpersonal psychology. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 47(2), 192-207. Goodman, R. D., Williams, J. M., Chung, R. C.-Y., Talleyrand, R. M., Douglass, A. M., McMahon, H. G., & Bemak, F. (2004). Decolonizing traditional pedagogies and practices in counseling and psychology education: A move towards social justice and action. In R. L. Carter (Ed.), Handbook of racial-cultural psychology and counseling: Vol. 2. Training and practice (pp. 147-160). Wiley. Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through their feelings. American Psychological Association. Greenberg, L. S., & Goldman, R. N. (2019). Clinical handbook of emotion-focused therapy. American Psychological Association. Griffith, J. L., & Griffith, M. E. (2002). Encountering the sacred in psychotherapy: How to talk with people about their spiritual lives. Guilford Press. Grof, S. (1985). Beyond the brain: Birth, death and transcendence in psychotherapy. State University of New York Press. Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century. Spiegel & Grau. Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. Harper & Row. Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Utsey, S. O. (2013). Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(3), 353-366. Hook, J. N., Farrell, J. E., Davis, D. E., DeBlaere, C., Van Tongeren, D. R., & Utsey, S. O. (2016). Cultural humility and racial microaggressions in counseling. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(3), 269-277. Hopwood, C. J., & Bleidorn, W. (Eds.). (2018). The Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology. Oxford University Press. Hume, D. (2000). A treatise of human nature (D. F. Norton & M. J. Norton, Eds.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1739-1740) Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press. Jung, C. G. (1959). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Dell. Jung, C. G. (1968). Analytical psychology: Its theory and practice (The Tavistock lectures). Vintage Books. Jung, C. G. (1973). C. G. Jung letters: Volume 1, 1906-1950 (G. Adler, Ed.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Delacorte Press. Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, 237(4821), 1445-1452. Knill, P. J., Levine, E. G., & Levine, S. K. (2005). Principles and practice of expressive arts therapy: Toward a therapeutic aesthetics. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. LeDoux, J. (2002). Synaptic self: How our brains become who we are. Viking. Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books. Locke, J. (1975). An essay concerning human understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1689) Lovaas, O. I. (1987). Behavioral treatment and normal educational and intellectual functioning in young autistic children. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 55(1), 3-9. Malchiodi, C. A. (Ed.). (2003). Handbook of art therapy. Guilford Press. Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being (2nd ed.). Van Nostrand Reinhold. May, R. (1969). Love and will. W. W. Norton & Company. McNiff, S. (1981). The arts and psychotherapy. Charles C. Thomas. McWilliams, N. (2004). Psychoanalytic psychotherapy: A practitioner's guide. Guilford Press. Mearns, D., & Cooper, M. (2005). Working at relational depth in counselling and psychotherapy. Sage. Mindell, A. (1985). River's way: The process science of the dreambody. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Harvard University Press. Mojtabai, R., & Olfson, M. (2008). National trends in psychotherapy by office-based psychiatrists. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(8), 962-970. Nietzsche, F. (1967). The will to power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1901) Norcross, J. C., & Goldfried, M. R. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook of psychotherapy integration (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company. Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor psychotherapy: Interventions for trauma and attachment. W. W. Norton & Company. Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716 Pace, P. (2013). Lifespan integration: Connecting ego states through time (5th ed.). Lifespan Integration. Pargament, K. I. (2007). Spiritually integrated psychotherapy: Understanding and addressing the sacred. Guilford Press. Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you. Penguin Press. Perls, F., Hefferline, R. F., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in the human personality. Julian Press. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child (M. Cook, Trans.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1937) Plante, T. G. (Ed.). (2007). Spirit, science, and health: How the spiritual mind fuels physical wellness. Praeger. Plato. (1997). Phaedo (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Eds.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 49-100). Hackett. (Original work published ca. 360 BCE) Plato. (2002). Apology (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Eds.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 17-36). Hackett. (Original work published ca. 399 BCE) Pollan, M. (2018). How to change your mind: What the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. Penguin Press. Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. Post, B. C., & Wade, N. G. (2009). Religion and spirituality in psychotherapy: A practice-friendly review of research. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(2), 131-146. Prilleltensky, I., & Fox, D. (1997). Introducing critical psychology: Values, assumptions, and the status quo. In D. Fox & I. Prilleltensky (Eds.), Critical psychology: An introduction (pp. 3-20). Sage. Reich, W. (1980). Character analysis (3rd, enlarged ed.; V. R. Carfagno, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1933) Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin. Rogers, C. R. (1995). A way of being. Houghton Mifflin. Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library. Sass, L. A., & Parnas, J. (2003). Schizophrenia, consciousness, and the self. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 29(3), 427-444. Schacter, D. L., Chiu, C.-Y. P., & Ochsner, K. N. (1993). Implicit memory: A selective review. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 16, 159-182. Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company. Schore, J. R., & Schore, A. N. (2008). Modern attachment theory: The central role of affect regulation in development and treatment. Clinical Social Work Journal, 36(1), 9-20. Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal family systems therapy. Guilford Press. Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98-109. Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press. Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan. Sokal, A. (2008). Beyond the hoax: Science, philosophy and culture. Oxford University Press. Sokal, A. D. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, (46/47), 217-252. Stein, M. (2006). The principle of individuation: Toward the development of human consciousness. Chiron Publications. Stern, D. N. (2004). The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. W. W. Norton & Company. Sue, D. W., & Sue, D. (2013). Counseling the culturally diverse: Theory and practice (6th ed.). Wiley. Tacey, D. J. (2004). The spirituality revolution: The emergence of contemporary spirituality. Brunner-Routledge. Tervalon, M., & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117-125. Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Westview Press. Trilling, L. (1972). Sincerity and authenticity. Harvard University Press. Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L., & Martin, G. N. (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3-17. van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking. Vieten, C., Scammell, S., Pilato, R., Ammondson, I., Pargament, K. I., & Lukoff, D. (2013). Spiritual and religious competencies for psychologists. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 5(3), 129-144. Wachtel, P. L. (1991). From eclecticism to synthesis: Toward a more seamless psychotherapeutic integration. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 1(1), 43-54. Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. Guilford Press. Warren, R. P. (1998). The collected poems of Robert Penn Warren (J. Burt, Ed.). Louisiana State University Press. Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation. W. H. Freeman and Company. Westen, D., Novotny, C. M., & Thompson-Brenner, H. (2004). The empirical status of empirically supported psychotherapies: Assumptions, findings, and reporting in controlled clinical trials. Psychological Bulletin, 130(4), 631-663. Wilber, K. (2000). Integral psychology: Consciousness, spirit, psychology, therapy. Shambhala. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books. Young, C. (2006). One hundred and fifty years on: The history, significance and scope of body psychotherapy today. In J. Corrigall, H. Payne, & H. Wilkinson (Eds.), About a body: Working with the embodied mind in psychotherapy (pp. 14-28). Routledge.   #Psychotherapy #CorporateInfluence #HolisticHealing #AuthenticSelf #ImplicitMemory #PostSecularSacred #MentalHealthTransformation #IntegrativePsychotherapy #EmpoweringIndividuals #PsychotherapyChallenges #jung #philosophy #PsychotherapyInCrisis #MentalHealth #Self #eikonosphere #ImplicitMemory #Empowering #AuthenticSelf #capitalism    Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

Hey guys, this is Joel and this is the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. The last episode that we did, this is a part two, The last one was about making meaning, um, and kind of a broken world and how psychology has to change in response to some paradoxes that are happening. You know, the world changes. Psychology is teaching you, or, you know, clinical psychology therapy is teaching you how to, um, respond to being an individual in a world. That world changes the way that you are an individual has to change. And then therefore, um, the way that therapy is helping you, um, bounce those two balls back and forth of sort of self and world have to change. And so that first episode, um, and that, that making meaning series about what needs to change in psychology or things that psychology has to

adapt or new things that it has to consider was just sort of asking questions. Um, and the point was not to be a new model of therapy or to create like a new technique. Um, it was just to sit with things that I was seeing, um, patients bring in that I didn't feel like traditional therapy was maybe ready to deal with. And so this is, um, more speculative cause I, I got a couple, uh, you know, emails already of people being like, you say this, but then what are we supposed to do? And I'm trying to tell you that there is something that we all need to do, but it is a personal thing, um, that about learning to do a process to articulate our own voice, a lot like therapy. And that means that I can't tell you how to do it, right? And then I'll proceed to talk for an hour about how

there are still things that you can consider that can get you there. And so another way of looking at the points that I brought up in that first one, um, are that I think there's like three things that we have to change how we conceptualize in therapy. And one is like coming up with a coherent, um, definition of self. And the next one is dealing with implicit memory, which is a big question, which comes up in almost every model of therapy. Um, but there's confusion about what it is. You'll

see two people talking about implicit memory, but they're disagreeing. One person's being like, well, there isn't an unconscious, but we just have somatic protective reactions. And it's like, I don't know, man, the things that I see on LinkedIn, not targeted at me and sometimes sent to me, you know, in a targeted way privately, I just don't even know what is happening in this field because people are getting degrees with no education. I mean, like the, the ability of somebody to say, well, Carl Jung is completely pseudoscientific and then post how they're embodying the archetype of like Mars and retrograde or or just the the therapist that looks the post looks more normal about um you know Jung and Freud are old and you know Freud

is more evidence-based than Jung but uh you know neither is evidence-based at all or you know something like that and then you look on their wall and they're like an IFS therapist, which it's like IFS is what happens when you put gestalt therapy together with Carl Jung. And you can ask Richard Schwartz, like he'll tell you in the intro of his book. I mean, you can read that model and not see how these things work. I mean, it's like indicative of this bigger problem, which is like people act like these things, these models of therapy like fell from heaven.

They're not part of a timeline that is, you know, certain men, certain women, certain groups of people trying to solve like larger cultural problems or solving the larger cultural trends. I mean, everyone acting like this thing is in a vacuum i think is this result of the way not just that we do i mean really the way that we do modern academia around psychology is everybody is so specialized that it's like they don't know anything i'm sorry like i know i'm a liberal arts you know humanities kid or whatever but like you have to back up and know the history of how you got here to know what you know. And if you don't know that, you don't know very much.

Here's a cost proposition for you. See if you want to buy this oceanfront property. Ready? Okay, so there's this cool thing that you can do. You can write a paper, and it'll be really hard, and you have to have an original idea, and you have to do it in a certain language, which is pretty counterintuitive, but it's its own language.

It doesn't really help your point shine or anything, but there's a certain way that we have to do it to make sure that the people who are talking are serious people who know what they're talking about. Without the system, we can't have that. Oh, that's cool. So do I get a lot of money if I publish an academic paper? Oh, no, actually, you don't get any money from it. Oh, that's neat because I'm getting my idea out there and I would

get to be able to maybe publish that later in a way that I would make money or if there's an idea in there that's good, I could get the copyright. Oh, no, no. Actually, you give your copyright away. You work really hard and you come up with all of these new ideas. And then you just give that away to a company that publishes your work. Oh, that's cool. Because they're probably like a nonprofit that's helping academia, you know, accomplish its ends. And we're all in this together. No, no, actually, they make more money than Google. One of the biggest profit makers, like in the world of corporate, the corporate world that we don't talk about are academic libraries. Like they just take, uh, the stuff that you make for free, um, and the right to republish it indefinitely forever and to charge for it. And if there's any monetizable

ideas in there, they get those two. Um, and they, they make, you know, uh, the biggest one made about a trillion dollars last year, you know, globally. Oh, okay, well, but, you know, a lot of people will read my stuff, right? You know, because it's a publisher, so they're getting it in front of. No, actually, people have to pay $400 a month to have access to any of that. So it's really just going to be kind of academics and colleges where their institution has, you know, some sort of bulk purchasing deal and they pay for it. Um, but yeah, you know, if you put it on a blog or a podcast, like if you're a social worker in Alabama and you did that and you had, you know, about, I don't know, 500 views on your blog articles, anywhere from, you know, 80 to 200 views on most of your podcasts, you would probably be seen by

more people, but your impact factor would go up because all these people are citing your paper right so that's that's that's cool like uh like a lot of other academics cite the paper and then that helps my impact factor so that gets me a job in a college um the academics they're not probably reading the paper. They just need something to support their point. So they, they find, you know, if you write a real broad paper that, you know, grabs a lot of other things and cites them, it's, it's pretty likely to get cited, you know? So you, then you use that to get like a really good job, right? And then you make a ton of money. And actually as a, as a professor, you don't, you know, a lot of the people that I correspond

with about the academic stuff that I'm interested in are these kind of older professors. If they're not a guest on the podcast, I don't want to say who they are. And they're pretty... A lot of them are not doing well. Big names, big successful people that were in academia their entire life. And they didn't really make any money. And they published a lot.

You wouldn't know who most of them are, I would think. And, oh, you know what, though? I think that you're forgetting peer review. I mean, the point of these things, the reason why, you know, these academic libraries have to suck up all this money for not really doing anything beyond Google Drive, right? Google Drive to just host a bunch of text documents without videos and images is like $20 a month, but they cost $400.

But that $400 just puts really good use because there's this, you know, yeah, the academic libraries, they don't have to pay for it, but the journals themselves, which a lot of times, you know, operate at break-even or a loss or, you know, donations, you know, they peer review the things.

So a group of peers make sure that the paper is like serious and important and good and top and oh wait yeah no actually some of the biggest journals in the world have these stupidest articles on psychology that I have ever read I mean if you say the point of it out loud you would laugh But when you hide it in academic language, it's like when you were a kid and you got Microsoft PowerPoint and you didn't have any idea what to say about Bolivia, but you put a picture of a tennis ball and a fire truck and a, you know, a fighter jet and then whoosh, bing, cling, it's all coming in. You just disguise that

you really didn't know anything about Bolivia by making a PowerPoint presentation. There's great academic papers out there, but I don't know, man, that peer review thing, it doesn't really keep them out because every time a rich guy wants to write an op-ed, they can just continue to resubmit and pay money until the Lancet will just go ahead and put it out there. So that doesn't really hold up't really hold up either. Um, you know, but it's for this greater good, right? Because it gives you the ability. Yeah. You don't get any money and then everyone else makes the money and then they make trillions of dollars off of your labor that you give away for free. And then you use it to get a job that also doesn't pay you any money. But, um, there's a, you know, a cool thing that happens where I get to go out and discover like a new idea and just do something really cool. That's uniquely me and get it in front of some of

the smartest people in the world that have access to academic libraries and they read it, right? Oh no, actually you don't because you have to find a person who is doing this, um, who needs help publishing their papers to get their impact factor out there and when you're in school for ten years doing psych I have a lot of friends in stem this is not necessarily applicable to stem this is talking about academic psychology um you have to find like an old guy who's like 30 years out of touch and do what he wants you to research and if they don't really want it doesn't line up or help theirs then then you can't do it. So usually it's something really great that we really need, you know, it's reinventing

the field because after 10 years of studying, you can come up with something like a new 30 question screener for anxiety. You know, when you've got that PhD and you've made all of these compromises and sacrifices, you can come up with 30 questions that we can give to someone to ask another person to know if that patient has anxiety. I mean, doesn't that just titillate you, you know? But, I mean, what if we just made people go into maybe therapy who don't need 30 questions to tell if the person across from them is anxious and where that comes from and what kind of anxiety it is maybe we could just get kind of you know remember we started this conversation

saying like how can we make sure that the smart, discerning, intuitive people are in charge? You know, the direction of where it goes. Oh, well, because we don't want to pay anyone who does therapy and we don't want to vet them to make sure that they are smart or intuitive. So they're going to need those 30 questions because we don't trust them to come up with three of their own. So they're really going to need your screener. Okay, like that is our system. And I'm a social worker. I'm a therapist. A lot of people critique me for, you know, being a social worker because it's racist or whatever. I get, you know, ableist that I don't know, I get email emails from people all over the place, left and right. And then a lot of people get angry that like I take insurance, which I'll take it as long as it helps more people than it hurts. Not a huge fan of our

current system. So I mean, I've made sacrifices. Like I do things where I can critique the system. You can say, hey, this is bad about that. We shouldn't distribute resources and power this way. And I'll be like, yeah, that's right. Okay. So if you're an academic who is enjoying what you do and you love what you do and you made these sacrifices to do something you love great i'm not talking about you who i'm talking about is the person who goes well actually we need these things because they've always been there or how else would you want to do it you know we'll get to that in the in the third section and the third thing that psychiatry has you know psychology like academic psychology is going to have to address if it's going to continue to stay in the business of

therapy um and it is people who are just carrying water for bad ideas because it threatens them that you point these things out they just don't want to think about it okay like i you know hell i may go back to school and get a phd or something one day the point of this isn't The PhDs are stupid. It's not the PhDs are bad It's that this system is bad right and if you can't point at that and you can't say that Then that's your shadow. There's something wrong with you that is saying no no no no no no don't look at objective reality You have to defend the current system because it's there for a reason okay? I can't tell you what the reason is I just know that there is a reason because you know the other people that

are smart probably did it okay this is the system that is making the smart people and vetting them and making sure like that so you know this to segue in from last time we talked about the hyper rationality of our current world. And I think to try and live within these objective systems to try and turn everything into a number to try and vet everything to try and turn, you know, you can do this with science, you know, until you get to quantum physics, and you have to start using metaphors, again, science can be pretty objective and empirical. Psychology is a soft science., and to try and pretend that it isn't to try and pretend that it is this hard science where we can empirically look at everything

and we don't ever have to have any intuition or just like sense of self or sense of awareness, um, or that our subjective reactions aren't important is insane. Okay. Like the, the hyper-rationality that I talked about in that the first one it's this madness that arises like not from no logic but from too much of it from thinking that all we are are logic and trying to build a world out of it and this kind of academic system which is very useful to um you know a lot of very moneyed forces like the way that the dod does research the way that we want to like fund things like it's those, like the way that the DOD does research, the way that we want to like fund things. Like it's those, that's the reason that it exists in its current iteration,

you know, academia and these systems, like, and I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm saying that's the reason that they exist. And, you know, these people now are talking about large language models and like all this stuff. And those people who want to say that you can turn, um, you know, basically robots into people by, you know, a large language model is a search engine, a large language model. It's just a predictive algorithm. It's a spreadsheet that is going through thousands of little bits of data and saying, every time this word was used in proximity with these other words, it and saying every time this word was used in proximity with these other words it was very likely that this word would be used or the context would be

this word which shares the same contextual you know uh placement 86.9 percent of the time so it's a good bet but it's it's probability it's not thinking you know i use them i use them to collate data because that's what they're for but the people talking about this going to be sentient like this thing going to be alive like the people who are saying that you can turn robots into people are saying that because they are so cut off from the thing that i'm talking about next self that they believe that you can turn people into robots. And, and not only that, like their attempt to turn themselves into robots is what is good about them.

And the system rewards people who think that like that. All right. Now back off and go back to what I said, I was going to talk about, which are some ways that are, you know, sort of practical. I'll call them pseudo practical ways to make the changes that I was talking about in the first one to help people make sense of this world that is new with a psychology that has to be new which has to evolve I mean so much of my anger and what I'm talking about is people that think that

these things don't need to change and you're not talking about algebra right like you're talking about psychology of course it has to change like clinical psychology look at the difference in the world look at the difference in the culture look at the speed of culture and and I'm I'm trying to bring up things that I feel you know intuitively that I see with patients that I think that as a field we have to sit with to change. And so, you know, the first one is going to be this idea of self. And, you know, self is a big word, right? Like it's a little word, but it means who the person is, which is saying what the point of therapy is.

And what I mean by that is like, if I say somebody comes in and they're like, you know, my, my husband, you know, hits me and I need to figure out ways to be a better wife and better Christian and let him do that, you know, cause I'm sometimes fight back. I think most therapists, most people who are armchair, you know, therapists or whatever would say, oh, that's not her real self, right? It's the job of the therapist to help her get in touch with her real self so that she knows that that's unhealthy and that she can leave. Okay. But that's a pretty extreme example. I mean, how far do you take that?

There's a lot of people who, when I say, you know, I can tell that this person is like brilliant, that they're funny, that like they really want to create something, but they just don't have a language for it yet. They don't know if it's going to be through business. They don't know if it's going to be for this. Yeah, you know, I need to make sure that I'm being patient-centered and not projecting my own ambition. To say projecting my own ambition is really funny because I'm not a terribly ambitious guy. Things kind of keep happening to me, which is funny, but not. Anyway, like, yeah, I need to make sure that I don't muddy the waters and decide the goals for the patient.

But most of these models of therapy that are cognitive and especially the ones that are just behavioral, you know, like they're saying that if it's not on the treatment plan, it's not real. And it can't put it on the treatment plan unless the patient asks for it. Oh, but the patient can't ask for it until they know who they are. Catch-22, I guess we've made therapy real simple. It's 1980. I mean, that's kind of what they did, like, with the cognitive revolution. When we came in, we got rid of this idea of, of like that you went into therapy to find out who you were and there is something to that like i think i'm not going to defend 20 years of psychoanalysis when no one can afford it to the people who do

that i wouldn't see as therapists and then like three i just don't think that most of the things that they were digging up actually were making anyone change. I think they were just changing around the therapy. You know, when Freud is telling, like, little Hans that he's afraid of horses because he saw one fall over in the street and it wasn't just, like, a giant horse scared a kid. It actually was secretly about castration or whatever. And I know everyone was, like, makes fun of the Freudians for being too sexual but psychoanalysis I mean the the sexualism of the absurdity is not the problem the absurdity is the problem like if you're doing Lacanian psychoanalysis I don't know there was

like there's a joke that like if you ask a a classical psychoanalyst or like a a lacanian psychoanalyst like what what the point of therapy is they'll go out and they'll like write a book and still not tell you um and yeah like i that that's too much but how do we have this notion of self and like one of the reasons why I'm frustrated that we don't you know Teach and expect therapists to know more of the history is that they don't understand the assumptions of these models and these models are assuming Things you know therapists. It's like when you pick a religion and people are like well. You can't judge that person That's just their religion well I mean I kind of can because they picked that you know they're saying the thing so they're either not in touch with a part of themselves that doesn't believe these things or they actually believe them either one is bad so like yes i can have

an opinion about them therapy models are the same like you can look at me and you can judge me based on the amount of integration that i do that probably says something about me that i'm trying to find you know 800 different through lines through history and then figure out where it's going and like see through. Yeah, that probably says something about my ability to feel trapped. And then I feel trapped within the time that I'm in or I feel trapped within, you know, one human life, whatever. Yeah. I mean, of course, like the way that you practice therapy is going to be related to your own, you know, BS. Like, of course it is, which is why we have to be careful and be in touch with that.

There's no getting rid of it. There's only being in touch with it. And so, you know, in that first section, I was talking about how, like, we need to see therapy as a more dynamic process. And I think a lot of times we view it as like a hierarchical thing. It's like, I'm going to go in at level one. I'm going to level up. I'm going to learn these mental health tips. I'm going to leave at level 28. Oops, I've had to set back on my

level 14 again. I lost my gear. I'm going to go back. And it isn't that, you know, it shouldn't be. Therapy is like noticing something. And it's noticing something that is you. And to me, to take self and say, well, the patient has to know exactly what their goals are before they go into therapy is kind of wild, you know? And yeah, goals can change. You can change your treatment plan, whatever. And you need to have something that people want out of it. I mean, it has to be related to a practical thing. This isn't, you know, just a hippie summer camp. I'm not arguing for, for that. Um, but the idea that you could go in and say, I want all of these things means that you're coming into therapy in touch with something. And it's, we have to be careful how far we go with that. Because if we assume that the person is just coming in because they have a symptom and that symptom is something that therapy just

takes away and that that doesn't change anything on the larger equation of psyche in person, that doesn't make sense to me. Why? I don't believe that the brain just does things that are irrational. Like, I don't think that symptoms just pop up and then we can go in and get rid of them and have them cut off like tumors or medicated like cancer. I think that symptoms are an expression of an imbalance. And unless you're working with a model that lets you sit with playing with things like balance, things like projection, you know, then you don't understand that that symptom on the outside is related to something on the inside that isn't rational, right? Like, this hyper rationality has kind of done that. And academic psychology is run with it. And it's one of the reasons why

academic psychology is going a completely different direction from clinical psychology, which is scary to me. I don't really want to be an academic psychologist, but I realized that that is an unhealthy thing, right? If the thing that they're telling you in the hospital, everybody who has all the letters behind their name is saying like, no, no, no, CBT is the gold standard. Yeah, we've never been able to reproduce it when we do the studies. We have a reproducibility crisis, and we can't seem to ever make it work, but we still know that it's the gold standard because it's the most researchable, and therefore we research it the most, and therefore that we find it's valid the most. And we have to remove everyone from the study who just walks off before their plan is completed

during session, you know, 8 through 15 of CBT. They don't count because they didn't complete the treatment. Well, they walked away because it sucked. Why are you taking them out of the paper? You know what I mean? Like, the point of psychology, again, you know, the second section is to make people effective at doing something, right? And so if you have to throw away everybody who walks away from your

model, then it wasn't very effective. And I come back to Jung a lot. I mean, more really than I ever expected to doing something like this. But one of the reasons why I think that Carl Jung and Jungian therapy has kind of exactly, I mean, at this point, it's outlasted psychoanalysis. Like there's less people doing psychoanalysis than are doing Jungian psychology, even though Jungian psychology is still arguably dying and going away. There's like institutes that are doing it. There's models based on it. There's not a lot of stuff based on the Freudians. there's just, I mean, I guess there were people who like were technically Neo Freudian, but their ideas don't go back to Freud. You know, uh, when

you, when you look at like one, a cot, when you look at horny or an eye, like they weren't, I don't see any Freud in like neurosis and human growth. I mean, it's kind of dying, um, or kind of dead, you know, a couple of places in New York, everybody's still in psychoanalysis, but that's just because Anna Freud went there, and it's going to die there last, but like the Jungian stuff is a cosmology, and it is a language for a phenomenology in a way that I think therapy has to be, like I'm not going to make an argument that we need to go back into Jungian analysis, but I think that's why people can't quite get away from it, is because we lost that. I mean, the Jungian stuff was giving you a worldview. It was giving you a way to understand not only yourself, but the way that yourself

interacted with the world, and then make that flexible. And that's what I think when people go back and they get really into this, or they, you know, the therapist like takes mushrooms in their 50s, and then they decide that they're going to be a Jungian and they start to get into these things or you know just the appeal of Jung like I still see so many young people discovering him and then getting obsessed with it in a way that they don't with Freud you read Freud because you have to but he's history and you read Jung in a way that he still speaks to certain kinds of people and the reason for that I think is that and this is when I say the idea of self is something that we have to build a coherent sense of what that word means and how

to apply it within therapy, you know, because if you're doing behavioral therapy, right, you know, let's go back to the history of where these terms come from, okay? You know, okay, so psychoanalysis, when Freud starts psychoanalysis, I mean, what he's saying is that the self is this product of dynamic interplay, that the id is primitive and instinctual, the ego is a realist or a logical, a logician, and the superego is a greater drive that must decide between them. And he's saying that there's these kind of ping-pong balls on the desk ornament going click, click, click, and the energy is transferred from one to the other, even though the one may not move, it's still, you know, connected psychically, physically. And that's an idea that I think people still come back to. Like, if people go back to Freud at all,

that's what they go back to. There's so many people that, you look at something like relational psychoanalysis, you look at Christian, I forget what they call it, there's some faith-based psychoanalysis thing, which, you know, it's kind of, by the time you take psychoanalysis to that point, there's nothing left of Freud,

except the dynamism. That was what people like. I mean, and like maybe repression and projection, you know, but of completely different things and in completely different ways than he would have ever allowed you to go. But it's that dynamic nature of self. And that's why he's still relevant or people, you know feel um that he created something as that was the first time they saw it you know concretely the people who were doing you know the hypnotism or the mesmerism you know before freud they were kind of doing this parlor trick but they didn't articulate a language of the unconscious they were talking about you know a part of the brain cut off or fighting itself or that the neuron wanted to go back to being dead because it came from whatever like and he says no these ping pong balls are whacking each other and the psychology starts so you know if the only good idea that that guy ever had

is this thing that is something that we're giving up you know isn't even psychology anymore you know jung jung said you, the self is the central archetype. Jung's idea was, no, like the unconscious isn't bad. It's not just this, this thing that has to be dealt with because it produces symptoms. You know, Freud called it the subconscious and Jung said, no, it's not a sub. Um, it's an unconscious. And then, you know, later I think Freud or Jung becomes so enamored with the unconscious that he, maybe he should have called it a Dom, uh, conscious, uh, because he, he seems to eventually view it as sort of more of the point than the conscious, um, which is where a lot of

people I think lose him, um, because they don't have that deep intuition and respect for those spiritual spaces that he came to see as the point of life, his life. But that, and so his archetypes were different. It was persona and shadow and anima and animus, but there is still this dynamic interplay. I mean, what Jung changes this concept of self is he says, okay, the self is connected to God. And it doesn't have to be God, like aistic Metaphysical God it's this greater concept like he he thought that basically we talked about the unconscious like it was God and maybe it Was he didn't know you know he just thought that there was this place That the self was connected to and the more that you dealt with the ego rigidity the more that you made the unconscious conscious

the more that you were able to be aware of the functioning of archetypes in your life through symbol and dream and, you know, projection and reintegration and all of that, the more that you were going to have room to embody this, what feels like, because it's so intuitive, you know, and maybe it is, you know, spiritually that way too, this divine mission. So, you know, in the Western Christian tradition, this idea that God is separate from me and then Jesus comes as this intermediary to teach me how to interact with God. That's how Jung saw self, you know, or in the Buddhist tradition, you know, the Buddha comes to teach you how to disband the self in order to really know, um, by disbanding the self, you know, the unconscious or whatever, but it's this, those messianic figures are this bridge. And so he's, when he's saying the word God, a lot of times he's talking about the depth and breath, like the deepest parts of the unconscious. And he disagrees with Freud on the utility of it. You

know, he thinks it's the point. Freud is kind of repressing it. So then when you get, like, these newer therapy models, like, I'll take IFS, for example. You know, IFS is, you know, gestalt therapy getting put together with Jung. There's a lot of other influence that he has. You know, Adler's definitely one there, too. I've never heard Schwartz say that, but you can see some of that Larry and stuff. Um, but I'm not saying he hasn't said that. I just haven't read that. Um, but the, uh, that core, um, sense of self and IFS is that there's protective parts that come from trauma

and they come from all of these things, but that deep down, we all want to be compassionate. We all want to be curious. We all want to be curious. We all want to be confident. And we all have this sort of mission that motivates us. So it's very much like that divine vulnerable child that in Jungian analysis, when you peel everything off, you remember what you just knew when you were six about who you were, but you forgot it in life because it was beaten out of you by logic or, you know, trauma or whatever.

You know, those are the models of therapy. I like, I like internal family systems. I like somatic experiencing. I like, like lifespan integration, lifespan integration, um, you know, sees the self as these series of moments that are supposed to be on this continuing spectrum, you know, continuum, but that all of a sudden our ego was rigid at these different places. And those places are so separate that they don't understand. You know, I thought in March of 2020 that I was such a different thing that mutually excludes everything that I am now that I don't know how to hold it. And that memory has become fragmented. And that by digging up these rigid ego states as life events, and then using ally techniques to smash them together, you know, we make them

crack and then reintegrate, you know. I like those models because I think that that is the kind of sense of self that we have to have. Now what's dangerous are the robot people, the Silicon Valley people. There's plenty of great CBT therapists. I've seen them, but a lot of times those people are going to be more relational and they're just going to have figured out a whole lot of stuff that is helpful. And it doesn't really follow CBT as I'm talking about it. What I'm talking about is a very academic, completely manualized form of CBT where they go back behind you. Like when you do a research study, they go back and they check for competence. They control for competence in a lot of those studies by saying like, did that person follow the manual? You know, when the

patient said this, did they say, well, actually that's a cognitive distortion or whatever. Like, and, and so it's, it's more rigid than you're even going to find like in the wild a lot of the time. Um, but they, CBT sees the self as like this cognitive construct that is only composed of everything that you think and you believe. And maybe something that Beck would call like schemas, that the schemas we adopt affect our perceptions and behaviors. So, yeah, you know, it's sometimes in the self, there's these little things that impair logic. paralogic but really we're just this logical creature that is only a product of everything that uh you know i'm thinking in my ego or that i um things that have happened to me and it's the self is malleable in cbt and that like we can be modified through identification and restructuring of maladaptive thought patterns like you can like go in and say, oh, well, you're acting irrationally here.

So you need to stop. But CBT doesn't even have like a good reason for why other than that there, I mean, I think his language is that kind of like Anna Freudian ego defenses that the ego just doesn't want to have anxiety. So it does something illogical. But I just, I hate that.

I like, I really think that that is so limiting and stupid. Um, when it's taken in the vacuum that academia wants to put it in, if you do CBT, if you like CBT, we all do some CBT. We all do some psychoeducation. I'm not saying that that thing is terrible or it makes you a bad clinician. I'm saying that doing nothing but that in the way that they teach it, I think does make you a bad clinician, you know. Something like ABA, which is, you know, the gold standard, according to research for the treatment of autism is incredibly offensive to me. I mean, it's saying that the self is just a collection of learned behaviors that we've taken in from the environment, and they can be reinforced or be punished um which yeah you know i used to just be alone like people would act like you were crazy if you

didn't like aba well now i'm watching people get bullied off linkedin and like upload things in tears and i mean i honestly feel bad for them because that's probably just somebody who went to school and was told by a professor well this is this thing that's wonderful that can help people with autism. And then you go upload your, you know, tick talk about it and all of these zoomers are yelling at you that you're treating people like dogs and like, yeah, I mean, you kind of are when you're just doing behaviorism, but, um, like, yeah, like inherent in that model, it's some icky stuff, you know, that the self is just this distinct entity that, well, it's not even a distinct entity.

It's just this product of an individual's behavior history and their current environment. And when you're measuring their change, it doesn't matter how they feel. It doesn't matter how much suffering they're in. It matters, are they doing the thing that you told them to do? I mean, that's not good. To have, like, that is a direction, that if we take the self in that direction, you're trying to turn people into robots by saying that we can just be programmed. And I think that's incredibly offensive. And that there's something probably going on wrong with you.

Not saying you're a bad person, but if you believe that, I think that you have a lot of trauma. I don't know how you couldn't, you know, because there's something in me that feels like that is limiting. And I believe that that, and again, this is my concept of self as a therapist, I believe that thing is in everyone, but that other people have various levels of communication with it and contact with it and ability to feel it, you know, and intuitive people, I think, are sort of gaslit about it, or they want to hide it, or they, but also they're proud of it on this other level, you know, they have almost the opposite insecurities of a different type of personality.

You know, like, the idea of something like gestalt therapy, where it's more of an energy that the self is this constantly evolving thing that's always striving for integration and self-actualization, but we can't really label it. We just sort of know when we're there. I think that language is healthy. I mean, there's some times where Jungian and stuff gets so literal, even though I like the theory. It's like, what are we talking about anymore?

I mean, we can't fit all of these things from the unconscious into language in the way that modern, um, you know, Jungian analysts try and do it. Like, I think sometimes we just have to sit with them and feel them and, and, and, um, and learn to, to feel them move. You know, when people were saying, well, what do you mean about this boat metaphor at the end of the last part? What I mean is that there's a way to feel something without labeling it. And our ego doesn't know that if I don't know the name for it, if I can't tell you about it,

it's not real. And, and that isn't true. There are things that I cannot tell you about, not because I won't, but because I don't really understand them yet, but I know that they're there. I mean, if you go do something like brain spotting, if you go come to Taproot and try, you know, something like, um, you know, SLT, like, or ETT therapy, if you're anywhere in Texas, please go try ETT therapy because it's everywhere there. You feel these things happening in your sub brain that are part of you, but you don't know what they are and you can't even really say it. And then you feel yourself changing, you know, the idea that the self can change is like an idea that we can't lose, um, in therapy. And also that the idea that the self is dynamic. I mean, if you don't want to go all the way through the Jungian stuff, that the self is, you know,

this connection to this divine God or divine purpose that we find when we get our ego out of the way and we're able to listen. I don't think you have to. I don't think that kind of therapy is what everybody wants. But if you want to say that the self isn't there, that we're just behavior and cognition, I mean, that's terrifying. And if you want to say that the self can't change, I think that's scary. And if you want to say that the self is just, um, you know, this thing that symptoms pop up around and then we weed them out, but there's no relationship to the symptoms. The unconscious is just the source of bad things that we can go through and clear out and get rid of.

Um, like we're cutting the grass that they're the roots of them. Don't go deep inside of that thing and feed off of it and have a purpose. If we don't view our internal world like an ecosystem in psychology, that's scary. And I mean, that's one of the reasons why I think people were like, well, what kind of therapist should I find?

I don't think it matters. I'm sure there's people out there doing brain spotting that are terrible. As far as modality, I don't think it matters, but there's things you should look at. And one of them is the ability to reflect, to have these conversations and not say, oh no, no, this is it. You know, to be open to a lot of different models, to be interested, to be curious. I mean, these are the marks of like an ego that has good healthy boundaries. I mean, honestly, one thing is like, I think that you should find a therapist that's funny, um, or, or somebody that can laugh at themselves because you know,

where the shadow is there. Like, you know, humor is this kind of alchemical process where it's this benign attack where we take all these things that we either can't change, or we don't want someone to know, or we know that they don't want to know. And then we make it into this weapon to hit them over the head with it. But then we make the weapon silly where it doesn't really hurt them but it still feels like an attack i mean that's that's what you're doing with humor is you're taking language and you're weaponizing it and then you're pulling your punch you know tickling right like it feels like i'm being attacked but i know i'm not um there's this benign attack theory of humor that's kind of replacing the older humor the older

theories about humor's surprise and things and somebody who can do that is generally comfortable enough to deal with uncertainty you know uh which is really what you want because when you're going into a process where the self has to change you can't have certainty. You know, no one can tell you on day two or year three of Jungian analysis how it's going to end because it's about dealing, making room for uncertainty so that you can feel who you are authentically, so the next thing that is something that I think therapy has to come to a conversation with, and I think we come to an understanding with any of these. I think we're always trying to hit a moving target by understanding these things in therapy. The first one was self.

And the next one is this idea of implicit memory. And to connect those, I'll give you this example of like, when you look at an eye in the back of your eye, in the middle of it, you know, like the retinal cells that see the picture, there's not room for them in the very middle. But the reason there's not room for them in the middle is because, sorry, my chair's breaking and clicking and I can't afford another one. So it's really loud. Uh, but the reason that it's like clicking, um, and I'm not, not the chair clicking. Um, the reason that you can't see out of that spot in the center of your eye is because all those blood vessels come through it. Um, and there's, and the nerve

endings. And so there's no way to put, um, like on the retinal coating, there's no room for the, like retina to, you can't put the nerve cell right on the, um, lens cause they are right on the nerve and the, uh, entrance to the blood vessels because, uh, they break up the surface you know it's not the perfect lens yeah so what you see in the middle of your eye you don't actually see your brain is basically running a Photoshop filter all the time even if you just see something out of one eye and you don't have the binocularity of the other one to like fill in that hole so like the thing in the center of your perception that you're looking at a lot of the time when you're, you know, pupils lined up straight with that, um, point is like just a guess that your brain is making based on this other information. Okay. So it's not actually

like a thing. Um, there's always this processing that is happening deep down for you to make a guess. I'm like a lot of the problems with vision, when you start to lose your vision in the middle of your eye, have to do with those algorithms and the way that that signal is being processed, sort of breaking so that it's not done quite right. You know, you get a black hole in your vision. So, I mean, that image, I think, takes this idea of self, which is like who the patient is right slash was slash will be you can't leave the present or the past out of this idea of self um and also like I don't even think you can talk about it without language that sounds sort of religious like that um I think

that there is a kind of inevitable quality to what we are, even if that's totally a secular material concept. When you're talking about these people that like change throughout their whole life over time and like don't quite know who they are, you know. It's like what Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, he says like mankind can never step in the same river twice because when you go back and you step in that river again all the water is left that you stepped in the first time and you're actually stepping in a new river you may call it the Thames Thames or whatever but it's actually you know a new thing that's that's always being born um that we kind of need to have that conception of who we were who we we are, where we're going, inherent in the model of therapy that we're doing. And if the model of therapy doesn't have that built into it, I would be scared of it. You know, like what is it, the Greek mystery cults where

they're trying to like strip your identity away and make you ask these deeper questions and be in touch with this and like one of the rituals you go through and some they would yell these questions at you and you're walking across a bridge and somebody yells you know who are you you're like i'm you know a greek name and then and then they're like what are you you're like I'm a human I'm a Greek I'm a Christian I'm a in the cult of Diana I'm you know you you have to come up with some way of labeling who you are as being part of a group or not part of a group something of reference to something else.

And then they would be like, where are you going? Or, you know, these bigger questions. And the first question is usually easy to answer, we think. And then the second question makes us wonder if we answered the first question right. And then the third question makes us wonder what the question is, you know. And if it fails that test, you know, um, and if it fails that test, you know, if, if it, what am I on behavior?

Where am I going to different behavior? You know, what, what, uh, who am I? I am just a cognition and behavior making organic thing. That's a sad answer. You know, I would, I would put the therapy model through, um, the, the test of these mystery cults and see if it actually can do it. Um, so that as a bridge to this idea of implicit memory, what you see now in academic publishing is people talking about implicit memory or primary, secondary, and tertiary types of memory. And, you know, going all the way back to Jung and Freud and whatever, you know, Freud says the subconscious is just this trash can, all of the sex and violence that we're feeling all the time. Um, we can't express because civilization has made us repress it yet. It is natural yet.

Our logic now says that it is immoral. Um, and so, you know, that's what is down there. Then Jung says, no, it's different. He sees Freud as somebody who's extremely extroverted sensing and is kind of dealing with that. Um, his shadow is involved a lot with sex and violence. And then, you know, Alfred Adler, Jung saw as someone who was an introvert and a thinker who was, his shadow had more to do with relationship. And that was what was scary to him, or that was what, you know,

these kind of balance of powers and where people get their implicit assumptions about the world. You know, so the unconscious is what we used to call something like implicit memory. But the thing is we're forgetting that the point of therapy isn't what we know. You may need some cognitive retraining. You may need some budgeting advice. You may need a second opinion. You may need some psychoeducation about just the effect of what addiction looks like and that you're not the only person that feels this way and that this is what you do. I mean, you may, yes, there is conscious and intellectual stuff in therapy.

But the point of it really, especially the point of it now, is this thing has become so expensive as we've become like in a world that is just traumatizing the shit out of us all the time to where, you know, people are coming into my office that have like strong dissociative disorders and PTSD, CPTSD, and they don't even think that they have any trauma. And then, you know, I don't fight with them about it. I'm not going to say like, oh, actually, you know, we have this diagnosis. I just like let your eye do the talking. Like when you go and you have a completely disembodyied experience on the ETT light device

or doing SLT or doing brain spotting, and all of a sudden you relive all this stuff and you see how much it was controlling the muscles in your back and that I couldn't even put my hand up this high because I was always trying to keep my arm down to protect myself. All these things built into our somatic memory and all of that. Like, yeah, you had cptsd man like you're you that actually had more of an effect on you than you know and your ego is saying but it's not affecting the way that i'm thinking

but it is affecting your body and it is affecting the way that you feel and that is affecting the way that you think you know we want to protect ourselves you know me like listen to the last episode like by maybe being like i don't like the word intellectual but by feeling like there is no perspective that we don't understand like across history or whatever and like yes of course that's a reaction to pain and powerlessness and like all of the stuff in every therapist background the good ones just know how to admit that the bad ones don't not have it. And no, they didn't go to therapy for six years and now they're better. And now they know how to tell you how to get better. Like, you know, it implicit memory is such an important thing because what it is, is the set

of assumptions that our body, our deep brain is like making all the time and it is moving faster. It is processing information so much faster than the front of our brain. Even when we're frantic, even when we're like trying to think, um, of like all of these things to do and like be highly effective, your brainstem is moving. I don't remember exactly what it is, the study that I read. so I'm not going to look it up, but it's moving like, you know, five or six times as fast when you look at information processing. It's not like Hertz, like a CPU, but when you look at how much information it is processing, it is moving faster than the front of your brain because it's reacting to all this stuff

that you don't even have time to think about. So of course it's going faster. You know, am I afraid of the man in the red sweater? Like, do I need to keep my posture like this because I'm trying to be powerful and sexual? Or do I need to keep my posture like this because I don't want to be noticed? Or if somebody calls my name and says, hey, John, like, am I going to go, um, yeah, yeah, what's up? Who's there? i'm happy to see anybody or am i gonna go oh somebody sees me that's bad what do i you know all of that information you can't even think about it because your body has to know it before you could make a conscious decision so like of course it's going faster and like that's why i think but then at the same time you can ignore that and pretend

that's not real oh no i just got mad you just scared me i just haven't eaten today i'm whatever no man we've lived in the same house like your body is always doing this you are always acting like something is about to hit you and when somebody comes out and shares something with you that is like unexpected then you immediately get upset because you view the unexpected and the uncertain as a threat to you. And then you react with hostility to the person that brought it up, you know, whatever, there's a million relationship dynamics, but this is what therapy is about in a way that like, even these newer models that are like trauma, trauma, trauma seem to have forgotten that this is what it is, that it's not what the person's saying. It's why they're that it's not what the person's saying.

It's why they're saying it. It's not even what they're feeling. It's why they're saying that thing. Why do I have this image of myself this way? Why do I have this image of the world? How is my body holding that? I mean, when a real, I really hope she can come on the podcast because she's so good. But one of the physical therapists that we work with in Birmingham, she's not at Taproot, but we refer a lot of trauma patients to her and she does pelvic floor work. And, you know, she's like, how can you look at somebody's eye and know what they're doing? You know, what, know how to, you know, pull them through this trauma or whatever. And it's like, well, their eye looks here every single time they say they feel trapped with mom and then they get

overwhelmed and I see their posture do this. And then I don't even have to look for the brain spot anymore I just know to go there but she's like Erin you know she's like how can you do that I'm like how can you just touch someone's back I mean because I have these patients who you know like they're you know strong powerful people who don't you know that you can't cold read them like they are extremely successful yet they have these you know episodes of dissociation or whatever and Erin will just touch them and be like you know i feel like there's a little boy that's like six or seven and muscles right here why don't your body doesn't like this posture i can tell i'm getting a jerk off of it why don't you just go into this position and like move them into this position and then so many of them have said that their first session is this that she they were feeling fine they were like yeah fine

I'll get in the field position I'll get whatever and she just put their body in a way and pressed on their back in a way that they cried for 30 minutes and that was the first physical therapy and that's why I think we were very integrative at taproot not everybody needs physical therapy that has trauma that's not what I mean but But their body remembers this stuff. I mean, you look at like people talking about the body remembering things semantically. Like you look at Jung talking about the unconscious, that these things show up as symbols because you can't know them. Like you can't know.

You can't even if you tell somebody, even if you point it out, you can't know. You can think about it you can analyze it but you can't know in the present oh i'm making all these assumptions 200 million times faster than my brain can even like think in language so i'm going to move my shoulder this way like you can't the way that those traumas affect you are as like dreams your relationship to art your relationship to your mythology, which now, you know, for a lot of young people is like video games and, and, and, you know, their trauma informs like how, and their attempt to heal themselves gets them into these kind of fantastical worlds where they're talking about these concepts through symbolism. And we have to come to an understanding in therapy that

like the unconscious is, it's not like, oh, you know, Jung was wrong. He was a pseudoscientist, but now I'm a brilliant genius who has discovered tertiary memory, which is a level of cognition that is beneath the second level. But also no, like implicit memory, what your brainstem is doing, like is the point of therapy kind of. I mean, maybe the point of a healthy life, of learning to be effective, you know? And I think what trips us up is that we all gravitate when we're talking about things like the unconscious or the implicit memory or somatic reactions to the language that we like. And the somatic experiencing person goes to Peter Levin or Pat Ogden and they're like, oh yeah, like the way that I'm sensing this in my body, I'm judging the experience, but really I need to just be with it and accept it.

And instead of pushing it away from me, I need to suck it up inside of me. And then the intuitive feeler person goes to Jung and says, Oh, wow, it's the king archetype. I don't want to hold authority. I want to get away from the authority. So I need to make myself stand up tall like a king and put the crown on my head. And what I'm telling the person that they actually they have to pay me more because I deserve And when I'm telling the person that they actually, they have to pay me more because I deserve it. Cause I'm a big professional on the phone. I'm going to pretend to hold the scepter and my body will embody this mythological archetype. And that will give me in. And, and then the, you know, the cognitive behavioral person is like, you know, write down the feeling a hundred times. And then we'll start to notice that every evening at sundown, you write down anxiety or some word that's bad. So you have

diarrheal depression and, um, you know, like you're getting depressed before bed. We've, we've found the frequency, intensity, and duration at every different time of day. And yeah, I mean, there's a million different languages, the schema therapy, like, uh, yes. Uh, what, what, I guess one of the ways that psychoanalysis is still around is coherence therapy. That's an interesting one. It's like a time-limited version of psychoanalysis, which is an interesting concept. But yeah, all of these things are using a different language to talk about the way that the base of your brainstem holds memory. And those are these implicit reactions. And they're not just the Bessel van der Kolke,

the body keeps the score, these places in the body. And they're also not like just the Jungian mythological, your relationship to the world and how you conceive of the self and how that interacts with other people. They are a reflection of both of those together, right? Like they are the way that that ball is bouncing back and forth. Like who I am internally is reacting to this outside world externally. Um, and like the thing that I feel in my body is also a symbol. Um, one of the weirder models of therapy that I think was one, the cream doesn't always rise to the top when you look at what's the most popular but look up process therapy by arnie mendel man like that one is fascinating because like he says basically that there are channels in the sub brain and that the you know so many of these guys are really some of the best models

of therapy ever that are also the least known like voice dialogue they came out of the ex-jungian analysts they got like pissed from the 70s to the 90s and they left i mean pissed like angry not pissed like drunk maybe they did that too but i don't have any evidence of that or reason to believe it and they left the jungian institutes and they said i want a direct experience with these things i'm tired of analyzing them forever you know james hillman, I think was onto something and then, uh, became wrong about it. You know, like Hillman's always right about like the, the first thing that he believes, but archetypal psychology doesn't work because I mean, one, you're not post Jungian, you're not a Jungian anymore at all. When you throw away this concept

of the self, like you need that to be a Jungian because the self is also connected to God in that model. And I'm not saying you have to believe that or use that, but if you don't do that, you're not a Jungian. Um, but you know, like the, the stone, Sidron Hellstone have this idea that there's all these sub personalities and that you, you, you analyze each of them. It's, I like the language of it more than IFS, even though they're almost the same model. Cause you don't have to have like a 30 minute explanation about like why a firefighter is a different thing than a protector and the categories of whatever like you can just be like yeah you know you don't want to feel this feeling and you have a protective part that says like hey

don't go there and the person's like oh the protective part is when I tap my foot and I chew my nails and I twiddle my hair and I'm like, yeah, so how old does it feel? And like, where is it in your body? And just go ahead and twiddle your hair and tap your leg. This is in voice style. You do this and, and, and really engage with it and just let it go for a minute. And then it's like, I, you know, I don't want to be here. Like the thing is like, I've got a bunch to do, and this is actually like super expensive. It's a waste of time. Like that I'm paying you is bad. And, and then they're like, Oh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. No, no, no. That's the part talking with go into that. And, and you get

to engage with all of these different things inside of someone that disagree. I mean, it's kind of like, I see a lot of DID and therapy. And one of the things that I think is like, everybody should at least like, it teaches you a ton to work with DID because everyone thinks that way. Like not everyone has amnesia in between those parts, but there is no veil. Like you're staring directly into implicit memory. And, and when you do that, you realize like, oh, like I don't have to treat the person with DID differently than I treat any other patient because everyone has this going on in their brainstem. I'm just doing therapy in a way that, you know, honestly, they have to have a lot of insight into right away because they can't even pretend that this

world isn't real in the way that so many other people have the luxury of pretending, oh, no, no, no, I don't feel angry. I'm not angry with you, sir. Please stop telling me that I'm angry. You know, you're like a person with dissociative identity disorder. They, they can't, they don't have the luxury of pretending like, Oh no, I'm fine. Um, most of the time. And, um, so process therapy by Arnie Mandel, which is really interesting. It's like where he went in and said, you know, that there are these channels in the sub brain and that you could push the person into it because the body was connected to a symbol and that that symbol would show up in dreams and visually and through audio. And I think he takes it to an extreme. Um, the, the model's interesting. Um, like I see what he's doing, but, uh, well, one of the things that

Arnie Mandel will do is, and I, I'm, I'm not saying he's lying. I'm, he probably picked his best case studies. It just, when they're all collected in a book, it's kind of funny, but like in every single one of his like case studies, he'll also like cure cancer, like be like, and then she never was afraid of her mom anymore. And the doctor told her that her incurable cancer was like, there's just too many, I don't know, like don't pick all the case studies when you're anonymizing them where somebody overcomes like a fatal illness. Maybe, maybe it does that.

I have no reason to think that it doesn't. It's just, that's one of the things that people point out. But what he would do is like, he would get the people to have, okay, well, I'm really upset about this, um, you know, thing that I'm, I'm feeling. And then find that physical reality. Like, where is that making your back tight? What are you doing? And he, you know, like Wilhelm Reich would push the place, you know, Wilhelm Reich is that psychoanalyst that gets kicks out of the institutes. He also believes in aliens and kind of goes crazy. Well, not that believing in aliens is crazy, but when you think that you can shoot aliens down with

a wet pipe in your backyard, I think, I don't think he was doing that. I think that was wrong. But Reich would push and say that there was psychic armoring, that when somebody had an emotional issue, their body became tight in a place. And he would make them get in their underwear, and he would—I think he was in his underwear, too. Am I making that up um and then he would like punch and hit and massage those places until the person like like stopped and he was a lot of it's very weird i'll do a special on reich sometime but he also like was one of the first people to connect like to the body um in a way that psychoanalysis was so obsessed with the

unconscious but it couldn't. But Freud kept trying to make it that like, oh, my desire to want to be romantic with my mom is actually making me not be able to feel my foot. Like he kept trying to do extremely medical, you know, psychosomatic things and ignoring pretty basic ones. Like I tap my hand when I'm tired, my muscles get tight here in a way that Reich got. And so like that, when Arnie Mandel, process therapy, he hits these places and he keeps hitting them until the person gets more emotional and agitated and then relaxes and then says that, you know, that turns in all of a sudden to a symbol. He's like, what do you see?

What do you see? What do you see? And they're like, nothing, trees. I'm remembering whatever. And that these things come up. I remember when I was running away and I was afraid and I hid in these trees after school and he's like, keep going on the visual channel. And then when the channel runs out of information, he would say, switch channels, go to the audio channel. What do you hear? What do you hear? Go back to your shoulder,

notice your shoulder. Where's your shoulder hurting? What do you hear? And the person would be like, Oh, I hear the bullies, you know, coming after me, whatever. And then, um, you know, Mandel would say, okay, now switch channels, you know, go back to the body. Oh, now it's in my, now it's in my foot. I just feel my whole leg just feels like it's, you know, um, heavier and hot. Okay. Tap your foot, tap your foot, move. And he's poking the muscle. And in that way, it was like, he understood that there was this connection and it wasn't like, we're going to do somatic therapy to get rid of, um, you know, Zen mindfulness to relax your back. And then we're going to go talk about these emotional issues and

how you project them on other people that my back was tight because I was trying to pretend that other people were in competition with me and my body was trying to respond to like early implicit memory formations of wanting to protect myself by raising my shoulders and looking bigger, whatever you're doing. You know, there's a connection between this that I think some models are better at the somatic part. Some are better at the kind of symbolic and relational part, but you can't do it quickly or well with only one. Like you have to understand that these things are interrelated in a way that I think it's hard for clinicians to do that. It's hard to explain it to patients. It's hard to find a model that encompasses all these things, which

is kind of why I'm talking about that. I mean, the reason I do eight models of therapy, you know, largely is because I don't think that any of them are perfect for every personality type. Like, I don't think any of them are perfect for every symptom. I don't think any of them are perfect for like every issue. Like I acquired them as I hit a block and was like, I've got to help this guy. Like, I don't know enough. And then went on a manic, you know, reading thing and learned a new model and saw it work. I learned a lot of ones that didn't work. I don't talk about them or, or I make fun of them because I tried, I tried them as a patient and as a provider and they didn't, they didn't do anything. So, um, I mean, that's why

I've found the amount of stuff that I found. So that implicit memory, that relationship, that's such an important piece, this conception of self, right? Uh, also this idea of implicit memory and that it is partly in our body. It is partly in these implicit assumptions that we're making about the world around us all the time. You know, the way that that comes out in relationships. Or you can call it an unconscious. I don't really care what you call it, but you have to know that the person is more than they're telling you

because they're more than they know right now. I'm not saying that you need to be not patient-centered and you need to be Freud and tell them that, well, you know, really you would just be able to feel your foot if you would admit that you are, Freud had some, he would say that people were, it doesn't matter. Like you don't need to go into psychoanalysis. You need to be able to say, Hey, like, um, this person that I'm talking to is feeling more than they're aware of. And I'm allowed as a therapist to see how this is affecting their body, see how this is affecting their relationships, their relationship with me, you know, psychodynamic therapy. And bring that in.

And that's something that I see people losing or they want to partial it off into the small specialization and say, I'm just going to make them experience their body and go into that energy and really experience that. And you need, yeah, that's there. But also that's affecting these other things like in my dreams, in my art, in the kind of culture that I like. You know, ask your patients the kind of music they listen to, what lyrics speak to them, you know, have conversations about what they do when they get off work, not just the thing that's stopping them from making the most money at work or whatever, because those are, you know, our culture is essentially like our psychology telling on itself, you know? Um, and I think like in the, one of the ways that you see this a ton is like, people act like, well, cause I'm not hurting somebody. Um, like the, you know, the ab you see this a ton is like people act like, well, cause I'm not

hurting somebody. Um, like the, you know, the abuser did or the other people in my family did, then I'm not affected by trauma. Um, but in the eighties, like this is a huge oversimplification, but they would say like every child abuser either becomes a protector or they become a reoffender. They become a abuser. And what they're onto there, that's not true, but like what they're onto there is that when you are a victim of abuse or neglect, you know, from someone knowingly or unknowingly that they're hurting you as a kid, what happens is later you either say like, I'm never going to have that happen to me or anyone that I care about again. And you become like hyper vigilantly kind of protecting.

Or you just say, actually, that was a good thing. Consciously or unconsciously. That's my right. I get to do that. You know, he beat the hell out of me. I'm going to beat the hell out of my kids too. It made me a man. It taught me a lesson.

There is no trauma. So one of those is putting the abuse outward, just repeating it. And the other one is taking it inward and saying I'm going to be aware of pain. I'm never going to not see. I'm never going to be the one who doesn't say this is what's going on.

I'll never do that. And when you do that, you become a therapist a lot of the time, but you're still traumatized. I mean, taking too much responsibility is more, is just as bad as taking none, you know, and the abuser didn't take any because when you're going inward, I mean, so just in the same way that the person who is like reoffending, abusing their child or something is afraid of being a victim. They're afraid of being weak. They're afraid of being hurt back then.

So I'm going to say I didn't, it didn't hurt me and I'm fine. And I'm going to keep doing it because to prove that I wasn't hurt at all. Right. They're afraid of being the inward person. They're afraid of being the victim. Well, the therapist, the intuitive person who's taking that trauma and putting it inward, they're afraid of being the victim. Well, the therapist, the intuitive person who's taking that trauma and putting it inward, they're afraid of being the abuser. And so they're saying, hey, like, I don't want to be the abuser. And so every time there's anybody who is, you know, who could maybe be hurt

by me, I'll just go ahead and make sure that like, I just am the bigger person and I deal with it and I never hurt them. So sometimes you're enabling them. And other times you're in a relationship you don't want to be in. Or somebody just has your number because they can say like, oh, my boundaries are that you have to make me a ham sandwich. If you don't make me a ham sandwich, I don't feel safe. You know, and now I'm getting manipulated and feeling like, well, I'm strong enough to do this or whatever. But there is a lot of that there. I mean, the point is not to do either.

And we always feel good because we're not being the other one. So we don't have the problem. Until you get something like the ping pong ball of implicit memory, and I'm moving into my third point here, the last one, the externalized world and our sense of agency, right? Because I think a ton of times therapy is talking about things, but not really knowing like what it wants us to do or how to think about what the point of itself is, which is a big conversation. And so I would say it's not to go inward or outward with trauma and blame to be a victim. It's not to be an abuser. It's to deal with that implicit memory

response that makes that unconscious to where I would enable somebody, or I would continue to do the abuse. It's to go inward and see that that implicit memory is like, I'm afraid of being that either in the future, the abuser in the future, or I'm afraid of being the victim back then. I can't even deal with how weak I felt. So I'm going to say that it was good and it made me strong and it wasn't actually weak. And I never have to deal with how I felt. Like people don't say these things in that way, but therapy models that are good have to conceptualize this stuff in a way that lets us see it. And we're never going to get the metaphor perfect because we're in a part of the brain that doesn't speak English. And to a certain extent, it doesn't understand time. Like it thinks that we are the same age that we were when we were abused,

which is why it's doing this thing to our body is because it doesn't know time. There's a, I'll take a break and read a, read a Robert Penn Warren poem called The Riddle in the Garden, right? My mind is intact, but the shapes of the world change, And the peach has released the bough And at last it makes full confession Its pure dour has departed like peach fuzz Wiped off and we know now How the hot sweetness of the flesh And the juice dark hug

The rough peach pit we know its most suicidal yearnings It wants to suffer extremely and the juice dark hug, the rough peach pit, we know its most suicidal yearnings. It wants to suffer extremely. It loves God, and I warn you, do not touch that plum. It will burn you. A blister will be on your finger, and you will put the finger to your lips for relief. Oh, do be careful not to break that soft gray bulge of the brute skin, for exposing that inwardness will increase your pain for you are part of this world and you think that i speak in riddles but i am not

the world means only itself so a lot going on here like why i picked this one i read this at a yun gang conference and um didn't go over well well i think that's some unbaked wood is what really threw them but you've got some garden of eden stuff like you if you reach for the fruit which why does the fruit want to be eaten right it has a seed in it and we wouldn't pick it up and eat it and go drop the seed somewhere. So there could be a new tree if it didn't taste good. So the peach is suicidal. Like it wants to die in order for itself to live.

But then also if you touch it, your finger will blister and you will put that finger to your lips for relief. So don't break the gray bulge of the blister like fruit skin. So the fruit itself is the blister. Like you, the, the, the fruit is a blister that is hurting and pain and suicidal. Um, that when we eat drops a seed by exposing this inwardness, we increase your pain for you are part of this world. You think that I speak in riddles, but I'm not for the world means only itself. To take that peach, that first like fruit and leave Eden separated us from God. Um, but it also taught us what God was in a way that we didn't know before. Um, I think Edward Edinger would have loved this point. The world itself

is the garden here is the blister and it is the fruit. It life is a swelling and you can't have one part of that process without accepting all of it. And so that swelling and the growth of the fruit is also the swelling in the growth of a blister of pain. And the peach only exists to be eaten, to die, and we eat the peach to grow the next one. So not to touch the suicidal peach is to not touch life itself. For to live is to be hurt and to grow. And this process has only the meaning that we allow ourselves to give it. So to touch the peach is to become part of the world, like Adam and Eve found out. You know, it hurts and it blisters and we put our finger to our lips after touching the fruit. But we also know that we are ourself. Uh, and we also know God, like we,

we know we become separate from the system enough to see it. And now that we've seen it, what do we do with it? And, and that question of like, what do we do with it? That is one of the most important questions in therapy. It's one that I can't answer for you and you can't answer for your patients. And you really can't quite answer all the way for yourself. Not in the ego, not in the intellect. Because where you answer that question is going to be an implicit memory. It's going to be in this place where you go in and you see the world in a way that is okay, where you are okay and you are safe and you are loved

and you can love others and you can love yourself. And then you don't get to stay there. Then you have to fall again and you have to go back and you have to kind of forget that stuff. And then you have to remember that you can feel this way and that this can be real. And hitting that moving target of self, and you know, my language here is going to lean pretty Jungian because I lean pretty Jungian, but that doesn't mean that you have to. I'm telling you my metaphors so that you can make your own. You know, David Tacey said, I think this is Melbourne Jung Society had this on their website, but we, from a talk he gave there in Melbourne, but we move forward by paradoxically going back, remembering the lost wisdom and the

legacy of the human soul. Our longing is fulfilled when we recover our central belongingness to the mystery of the universe. And this is the meaning of individuation to realize our place in the greater whole and to live in service of that all encompassing reality. Like this is a post secular sacred idea. Um, you know, Tacey's big on post-secular sacred, that you can go into this phase of life where we're primitive and we believe in mythology. And then we have a new era where religion becomes kind of largely cultural or unconscious, where spirituality is active and we believe in empiricism. And then that fails us. And that third phase, which I think we're moving into now, it's being like science is real, literalized mythology is not good, but also science is going to fail. You know, what is it

that like Socrates said about like the hyperbole of reason becoming a dangerous or something, you know, he's saying that like when reason becomes this end to itself, like those large language model, you know, Silicon Valley people that think we can turn a robot into a person because they think that people are robots, um, believe. And we have to find a way to reconnect with what this world means in therapy. But at the same time, you can't just tell your patient, yeah, convert to Christianity, live for Christ, walk in his ways, and that gets you to the divine. Maybe that worked for you. Maybe that works for the patient.

But you can't tell them to do that. You have to help them feel these tensions. And in feeling those tensions, they will start to recoil and be afraid. And then slowly when you've done it and you're brave and you go in there, then the patient starts to feel excited. The fear is transmuted into excitement because it's the same energy. And they start to hold kind of maybe a terrible awe, but an awe for the beauty of this thing and the absurdity of it and the paradoxes of it and the finality of it, but also the impermanence, and maybe the inevitability, and the mystical connection to all of the things that make us human that a robot cannot feel. And then in those, they see stories, they see ways of being. They see themselves.

But it isn't an intellectual journey. It's going through that implicit memory response that I'm talking about. The best models of therapy do. I didn't make any of this up. Like, I'm not telling you how I do therapy. I mean, I am, but I'm not telling you that because I think this is the best way. And I wrote all this down. Like what I did is read the history of the profession.

And this is something that is human. It's not, this is something that is in every model of therapy that is good. And something that is in most religions that did not become cults, things that became parts of culture because they were human and beneficial. I mean, if you go back to ancient Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers, like they're going to tell you that the origin of the soul, you know, is like air or something that's invisible. You know, there's this idea in Greece where language hasn't made

the, we haven't made like the semantic and linguistic distinctions enough to separate the idea of like life from the idea of logic and thinking, um, from the idea from also the ability to move and have agency, you know, like Aristotle says, there's like a vegetative soul that is like a vegetable that just means the things alive, like a mushroom. And then there's like a vegetative soul that is like a vegetable that just means the thing's alive, like a mushroom. And then there's, you know, the sensate soul that is, um, able to like go and move and do something that an animal has that a mushroom doesn't, but that, um, there's the rational soul. Um, I'm not going to try and pronounce Greek here, guys sorry um and that rational soul is um something that gives mankind the ability to reason and understand death in a way that an animal or a mushroom can't

um you know like these are attempts to separate the phenomenology this experience of being human into these things that let us make sense of it, that let us see the world and see ourself. Because like the reason that, and that's why this was kind of a hard thing to structure, is that I needed to talk about three concepts, but all these concepts definition are reflexive to each other. They're like tarot cards. You can't like discard one of them and get rid of it. And because you can't discard one of them and get rid of it, that means that you have to talk about all three of them to talk about any of them. The self is always in communication with the world. That idea of who we are is always being colored and overcorrected by implicit memory and trauma in that area.

And then our relationship to the self and our sense of agency and what we're supposed to do in therapy, that's always going to be a relationship. And so when you, when you get into the people who sort of hide avoidantly, like in one part of life, like they're saying, okay, well like spiritual bypassing in a mystical community or the of life. Like they're saying, okay, well like spiritual bypassing in a mystical community or the new age movement, they're like, oh, well I don't have to go out and like vote or do civil rights or anything. I just have to manifest and my energy will go out across the ley lines through my amethyst and that will change. And they're like, well, this person's hungry and they're right here. Could you help out? No, no, no, I'm above the material.

That isn't a helpful relationship. You have this kind of sense of agency that isn't really being actualized to help you be effective there. It also isn't great to just pour everything externally and go out and not know who you are because there's so much pain in the world. A lot of mystics and intuitive feelers fall prey to this. I mean, I think this is why Simone Weil, you know, one of the mystics that I like died of an eating disorder saying, you know, I'm not going to eat until everyone in the world is fed, is that they want to live kind of for the pain in the world because they mistake their own pain for this pain in the world. And that, you know, Gandhi idea of be the change you want to see when

you don't have something in your heart, when you don't have something, when you have a pain, go out and help somebody that has that same pain. And that's how you heal. That's, that's good, but you also can't heal yourself only by healing other people. You have to be aware that you're doing that because you're hurting in order to change. So I guess, you know, kind of just start to wrap up this idea of what do you do with the idea of the implicit memory being underneath the ego or, you know, the aware self. And then this conception of self being these dynamic forces that we have to kind of learn to balance, but not ever really like fix, um, or make static in the way that I think the worst models of therapy, try and make them static. We're going to go from an eight to a 10. Now you're better.

Um, yeah, but what are you going from an eight to a 10 do over here? You know, we are an ecosystem. And to go in and say, we're going to introduce kudzu into Alabama because we want to get rid of erosion, and we found this fast growing vine in Japan, does something else. You know, maybe that takes anxiety away. And now this addiction is eating your highways. Like, we have to think of psychology in that way and things that are highly empirical and things that are driven by a lot of categorization and a lot of specialization, um, you know, in health delivery, you know, the, well, you can't talk about the body and the mind. I write the pills.

She rubs the leg when it gets hurt at tennis. He does the three therapy interventions for cognitive behavioral therapy. These don't really need to be separate jobs. I'm not saying they need to be the same. But making them so specialized and individual is this byproduct of this highly objective empirical system. And it's like needs for profit motive and healthcare. Um, and it's needs to create credentialism, um, to create hierarchies and bureaucracies that I would argue don't need to be there, which is why I start with that academic intro, um, and don't make anyone better. Um, and the people who they make financially

better off probably don't deserve to be financially better off. You know, but all of those things, what they're doing is taking you away from this idea of the self being an ecosystem of dynamic parts. You know, it's not ADHD. It's anxiety that is happening when you don't have something that you need as a kid. And so you're becoming hypervigilant because you're trying to pay attention to everything at once with all of your attention, which isn't possible. So none of your attention is going anywhere, right? Like that's a more helpful way to think about it than a DSM code. And then a list of interventions that have been proven to work for that, except the way that we proved that they worked for it wasn't really even that scientific, even though it fell within the realms of objective science. Um, and, and so I, I don't know, coming

back to how do we decide what we're supposed to do? You know, when people talk about spiritual bypass, when they think like Jung and meditation and this stuff is BS, it's not because it isn't, um, plenty of people have said, I'm going to use my chakra to manifest change and then continued to go out and been a terror in all of their relationships and not learned anything in therapy. And that's what the new age people would call spiritual bypass. Mindfulness in a vacuum, I don't know if that is going to make you grow up. Just in the same way that one person may take psychedelics and have this incredible intentional experience,

somebody else may just watch the band on stage be kind of trippy looking. You turning off your ego doesn't have to teach you something. And so saying that the point of therapy is just to dwell in implicit memory forever, I don't think that's true. It's to have a relationship between these internal things that we have in our concept of self and understand how our implicit memory is making us interact with those things in an external world that is real. Your subjective and objective worlds are real. And when I'm saying that we have to bring both into conscious awareness and make both of them a part of therapy, I don't mean we have to balance like, oh, there's objective life where I do work and subjective life where I do yoga and art,

and I need to have both work-life balance. Like, no, what I mean is that they have to be reflective of one another, that they have to have a symmetry. And that if we're not making a kind of therapy that is bringing those things into awareness as being connected through this relationship to the internal external world. Oh no, it doesn't matter. I just dealt with it with my, you know, uh, amethyst energy. Like maybe you just don't want to deal with it. And so you're pretending that a rock is magic. And I'm not saying that rocks aren't magic or that you can't have, you know, crystals and things that mean something to you. It's that, is the thing that you're trying to do actually solving the problem you're

trying to solve? I think the goal of therapy is to make you effective at being yourself. And we've obfuscated that by playing with the definitions of these words and sometimes trying to remove the concept entirely from therapy and it doesn't work for me when you get rid of any of them because you can imperfectly know what the self is you can imperfectly see implicit memory so yes these are going to be much muddy concepts it's a soft science but you can't lose that the point of therapy is to make somebody effective at being them once Once you start to try

and get rid of that and make it more medical than that, I think you've lost me. You know, there has to be a symmetry between these internal and external objects. Like they have to be synced and we have to realize that this is a reflection that like, yes, you know, my religion does say something about my fears. My art does say something about my ambitions. My avoidance does say something about my rage, that like these things are connected in a way that we've just kind of given up on connecting. And what happens when you don't make this jump is evil. I mean, it is evil, not like Hitler or somebody goes out and, you know, sometimes that happens. But the majority

of the reason that evil happens is that somebody says, I can't even look at this system that is so self-evidently awful and helps no one and just say it's bad. I'm not asking you to say it out loud. I'm not asking you to change it, to have a political answer, to even care about it. I'm just saying, like, when we look at this and say, this doesn't work, this is bad. If you have a reaction where you're like, oh, but you can't say that. And like, that's evil, right? Because what you're doing is cutting yourself off from you because you already know it. You're just having this because, you know, of things going on, implicit memory reaction of like, you're not allowed to know that I'm not allowed to know that we're not allowed to say that. And the, the, that is, I think not only the solution

to the problems that, you know, clinical therapy is having right now, trying to find a place in the world, um, and in healthcare and in life and culture, but also the root of its problems, you know, is people not doing this, these things, doing therapy, and then making the problems worse by avoiding them. Let's stop avoiding them. There's like one of the, my favorite moments in any movie, there's a documentary called into eternity and it's about finland um trying to store nuclear waste and it's this teeny tiny country it's not like they're making the majority of nuclear waste in the world and they're like this stuff is toxic and lethal for a hundred thousand years so how do we keep it away from people for a hundred thousand years because our

civilizations like you know a couple thousand old that we even know, like, will there even be people around? And if they are, they may not speak English. Maybe we should put scary spikes on stuff. And those scary spikes will tell people who may not even know English or have survived a, you know, a Holocaust or desert climate change, whatever they're trying to prepare for everything. They're really just so genuinely trying to solve problems that are a hundred thousand years from now in this movie which is so funny because we're in a world that can't solve a problem that's you know right in front of its face um and the scientist who's in it you know he's just talking so dry the whole time about like and it's translated so it's like just adjusting his glasses and like being like, well, the rotting girls will go down.

You know, the half-life is this. And so 100,000, but lethal for whatever. And they keep asking him these questions that have a poetic sensibility. And he just answers with rote science. The last shot in the movie, you know, it's a documentary, so I'm not spoiling anything. I don't know. The last shot in the movie is them looking at him. And you've watched this film where just the concept of 100,000 years has sank down on you.

And you keep being like, yeah, a long time, long time, long time. And then they keep talking about the change in the planet and how they have to protect it. And you slowly just realize like the vastness of time over this movie in a way that's like really horrifying and then at the very end he asks the director asks the scientist a pretty technical question and he answers and then he says when you think about the future do you have hope and the first time he doesn't say anything and he just like looks to the side and his glasses kind of droop down and he sheds like a single tear. Thank you.