The Taproot Podcast - 🏺Living on the Inside of History - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

🌟 At every age, we anticipate feeling different, but do we truly change? Join us on a journey through adulthood, realizing that grown-ups are simply larger children. 🧒👨👩🧓 #AgeIsJustANumber #Adulting 💑 My partner and I grew up together, only to find ourselves puzzled by the seeming irresponsibility of adults our age. We pondered the existence of "adult police." 🚔😮 #AdultingDilemmas #GrowingUpTogether 🌍 As time passes, we struggle to accept that the world around us evolves, bringing unforeseen changes. What if our society, culture, and norms can never be the same again? 🔄❓ #ChangeIsInevitable #EverChangingWorld 📚 History teaches us valuable lessons, but we often detach ourselves, believing that these events are reserved for others. We long to learn from the past while remaining exempt from its consequences. 📖🧠🔍 #LearnFromHistory #Detachment Join the conversation about #existentialism, #history, #time, #therapy, #depthpsychology, #existentialtherapy, #irvinyalom, #growth, #selfhelp, #ancienthistory, #jung, #philosophy, and #psychology. 🌌📚💭💡 #PodcastDiscussion Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast 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] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services. #Jung #Therapy #psychology #EMD #DepthPsychology #anthropology #sociology #philosophy #mythology #psychology #psychotherapy    

Living on the Inside of History. This article was originally published on September 30th of 2020 through the GetTherapyBirmingham.com blog and addresses some things that are timeless and will continue forever, but also some things that were happening during the time the article was written. I'm just now getting around to recording it for the podcast and for YouTube. I hope that it's something that you enjoy. From Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men. Not only are they commemorated by columns and

inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone, but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. At each age in our life, we think we will feel different when we have grown bigger or accomplished more. Throughout our life, we think that we will become something different at a later date. When I am 16, I will be so confident. When I am married, I will be happy. When I am 30, I will be responsible and I will feel so old. When I have children, I will be happy. When I am 30, I will be responsible and I will feel so old. When I have children, I will be self-assured.

Of course, when we reflect, we discover that this is not the case, and in fact we feel exactly the same. Wherever we go and whatever we achieve, we take ourselves with us. In large part, adulthood is discovering that adults are just larger children. My wife and I began dating in college and became adults together. I remember a conversation I had with her years ago when we were just becoming young adults and she was confounded that people our age could act so irresponsibly, Yet, they were allowed to do all these adult things, like join the workforce, marry, and have children. I have always felt like someone would not allow this,

she told me. You thought they were adult police, I told her. Even though I sometimes wish that there were adult police, I have come to accept the fact that they do not exist. Just as we cannot believe that we won't be different as we age, we also refuse to believe that the world will not stay the same. We can accept by 30 or 40 that fashion changes and that we no longer know what music is cool. We cannot accept, however, that things that are not allowed to happen continue to happen all around us. Things happen to our democracy. Things happen to our perception of the world. Things happen when our values are not having the effect that we were told they would.

Things happen that mean society, culture, and our norms may no longer return. Big things, permanent things, things that mean the world is different and cannot be righted. These are all old problems and old stories. They are just not our stories. We myopically believe that these things are allowed to happen to other people, but not to us. We study these things happening in history, but not to people like us who are just living our lives. The end of empire and the end of an age are only allowed to happen in books.

These history books are about the same planet that we live on, but we feel a detachment. We want to study the lessons of history while being exempt from its laws. Over and over in the past year, I have watched clients realize that they are living on the inside of history. It is something that they all knew intellectually in their brains, but had not accepted in their hearts emotionally. They knew that these realities were true intellectually, but could not bear to feel the emotional implications of their truth. We all have a tendency to pretend that we are exceptions to history, or even worse, the protagonist of history. The drive-by chuggers once sang a song. The line is, the secret to a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits. But history has no happy ending

because history has no end. Louis C.K. once told a joke, is there life after death? Of course, it's just not yours. C.K.'s point is not about whether or not there is an afterlife, but about our own natural solipsism. The question of life after death only matters to us because it will be our life after death. If it is someone else's, then we do not care. Maybe all of the dead folks in the history books that you were reading felt the same way. Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian whose quotation opens this article, wrote a first-hand account of political upheaval and imperial decline into reactionary politics and cultural decay. He wasn't writing the ancient history of his culture, but the contemporary account of history as it unfolded around him.

He wrote with the understanding that the moment that he was in would one day be, well, history. If you haven't read it, you really owe yourself the favor because it is one of the most personally affecting works the ancient world has to offer. I'll resist the urge to quote the text a dozen more times if you will take my word for the fact that much of the text could be articles in the New York Times today. The oft-used quotation that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it seems to have missed the point of our history as I read it. We are doomed to repeat it, literate or not. History repeats because people repeat,

and people have to learn these lessons for themselves, with their own lives. Some lessons cannot be learned intellectually, but need to be understood through a felt emotional experience. We cannot learn it from books because we mistakenly believe that those books are about other people, not us. The only way that we can learn history is to have the humility to realize that we are the people in the books and that our time outside of those books is brief. This is an important lesson to teach our patients. As therapists, we are often guilty of allowing ourselves and our patients to get so caught up in the routine of the day or whatever thing that we happen to be thinking, feeling, or working on that we never look at our lives on the outside and ask why we are here.

An existential lens to chart one's life can be a powerful gift. Often, patients that do not look to history will view it as a cage and tell themselves, this is what I have to do, or this is what I have to be. In therapy, I see so much psychopathology stem from clients attempting to solve the problems of our current place in history. They take all of the responsibility for fixing the world, and I hear, I don't know how to fix this, over and over again while I sit in my chair. We want all of the power or none of it. If I am not allowed to see the solution, to lead the revolution, to be the savior, then I don't want any part.

This is just the messiah complex. Either I get to save the whole world, or I feel hopeless and I don't want any part. This is just the messiah complex. Either I get to save the whole world, or I feel hopeless and I retreat into nihilism. This inclination is not adult, and it will stop us from being effective at anything. The truth is that we all have some power, just not a lot of it. Our ego does not like these limitations to self-expansion. We have to accept the modicum of power and responsibility that we do have. We all have some responsibility for what we leave behind in the world, but saving society is not our job. Our responsibility is our mindful contribution to history, and that is ours alone.

If we had infinite time, maybe we could learn all of the lessons of history and transcend time. Yet, history has no certainty for us, and it has no end. It is important that therapists and patients learn how to sit with both the mystery and the symmetry of time. Things will repeat, but not on our terms, and not for us. This poem is called Memory Palace by William Gibson. When we were only several hundred thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring,

set clockwork running, imagined gridlines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines to finding the soul. Bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper's dreams together. You see, so we've always been on our way to this new place. That is no place, really. But it is real. It is our nature to represent. We are the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps, and if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days and the parchment's territory of our maps with the land spread out before us, then never mind. We have always been on our way to this new place that is no place really, but it is real. The sight of ruins invokes a somber melancholy in us because it is a subtle reminder that we are not special, just because we are existing right now. It asks us to give up our

sense of entitlement to feeling that our culture, our religion, or our life is wholly unique and special. At some point we must trade our naivety for wisdom, and this is painful but necessary. We must give up our right to self-importance if we are ever to discover what actually makes us unique and important. There is no agreeable absolute meaning to human life. We must become unstuck from our present time if we ever want to simply stop just existing and then decide what the purpose of our existence is. We do not get to choose the time that we are born into or how much time we are given. The best thing that we can do for this state of history is to examine ourselves and decide what it is that we want to do with our time here, and what we want to leave behind. We are all given one unique thumbprint to leave on the walls of time, but that is all. The world does not need another accumulated average of all the cultural,

familial, and social norms that you were told to embody. Instead, you must learn to discover what you truly want to be underneath those things. History needs you to see beyond these things if we are ever going to make a positive contribution to the state of the world. This is an excerpt from The Eden Project, In Search of the Magical Other, by James Hollis. When one has let go of the great and hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one's own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, not this person nor any other can ultimately give me what I want, only I can, then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.

The only way to discover your thumbprint is to learn how to know yourself. We must examine ourselves honestly and without fear. On the surface it looks like we make so many choices, but beneath these we are only ever making one choice. Will you become what you want to be, or will you run from this task? Is it too scary to be hurt or judged? Is it too hard to fail? Is this task too immense? Something deep within you is truly unique and special, but it is not the protective parts our ego clings to to make us feel special.

History is running an experiment with us at every moment. We can either run the experiment to the end, or we can give up. We cannot run another person's experiment. At every moment, we choose to discover who we really are and what we can contribute. That, or abandon the mission. We see many choices, when in in truth it is only one. Are you brave enough to become yourself or will you run from that calling? I'm going to close with an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the streams and the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current, where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand, polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world and its becoming, maps and mazes of a thing which could not be put back, not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man, and they hummed of mystery.

Thank you for listening. If you would like to read more articles or subscribe to our mailing list, you can check out the website at gettherapybirmingham.com. Again, that is gettherapyBirmingham.com. Again, that is GetTherapyBirmingham.com.