The Taproot Podcast - The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 5: Casting New Gods from Forgotten Bars of Gold

Starting point is 00:00:00 I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Bunks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides

Starting point is 00:00:31 and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is please at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel belted radios and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone. Well I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman

Starting point is 00:01:02 because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say I'm a human being god damn it My life has value I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore! I want you to get up right now.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Get up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore! Things have... I'm sorry. But I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible. Jew, Gentile, Black man, White.

Starting point is 00:02:12 We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich. And can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. For those who can hear me I say, do not despair. victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.

Starting point is 00:03:42 And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers, don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men machine men with machine minds and machine hearts you are not machines you are not cattle you are men you have the love of humanity in your hearts you don't hate only the unloved hate the unloved and the unnatural soldiers don't fight for

Starting point is 00:04:19 slavery fight for liberty in the 17th chapter of Saint Luke it is written the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness, you the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world! A decent world, that will give men a chance to work,

Starting point is 00:04:50 that will give youth a future, and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise! They never will! Dictators free themselves! But they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress

Starting point is 00:05:20 will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite! Athens, 399 BCE. Socrates holds a cup of hemlock, a poison that will kill him if he drinks it. And his students beg him to flee. The guards would look the other way, he could escape to Thessaly, he could continue to live. Instead he drinks. Not because he's suicidal, not because he's defeated, but to prove something that he can't prove any other way. The daemon is real, the inner voice that's guided him all of his life, the thing that tells him when he's about to screw up, the thing that knows his rational mind doesn't. It's not madness, it's not delusion, it's the most real thing there is.

Starting point is 00:06:16 That's what civilization has to be built on and what he made a career passing on to the youth of Athens. It's so real to him that he'll die for it. In his last words, I owe a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, because death is the cure, not for life, for the illusion that we are only what we can measure, count, and define. 2,400 years later, we're still arguing about what he died for, and we just use different words now. We call it the unconscious, or intuition, or implicit memory, or predictive processing, or the default mode network. But it's the same thing, there's something in us that knows, and everything depends on whether or not we will listen. Here's the thing about human nature. We keep discovering the same truths and forgetting them

Starting point is 00:07:02 on purpose, and every culture finds shamans, every culture finds warriors, every culture discovers that we're multiple beings trying to coexist inside and outside of our heads, in the individual and in society. And then every culture forgets, let's talk about why. Depression, anxiety, dissociation, ADHD, even psychosis, we treat them like bugs in the code but what if they're features? Take sickle cell anemia. One copy of the gene gives you malaria resistance. Two copies kills you. Evolution kept it around because, in malaria zones, the trade-off was worth it.

Starting point is 00:07:41 Depression might be the same. Researchers like Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thompson argue that depression forces analytical thinking. When your ancestors faced complex social problems, the ones who could withdraw, ruminate, and problem solve, they survived. And the ones who stayed perpetually cheerful, they missed the danger signals. And so they're not your ancestors. They're dead. ADHD in a hunter-gatherer society, you know, you want someone who notices everything every moment, who can't ignore stimuli, who is always responding to other stimulation that other people deem as irrelevant, who's

Starting point is 00:08:11 always scanning for threats and opportunities. That's not a disorder. That's your scout, your early warning system. Anxiety, that's your risk assessor, the one who says maybe we shouldn't eat those berries or that wrestling might be a predator. Without anxious people, the tribe dies a preventable disaster. And when psychosis, you know, every culture has people who hear voices, who see visions, who experience reality differently, and we call them shamans, prophets, oracles, and they had, they heard patterns that others couldn't, and they brought

Starting point is 00:08:42 them back information from the edges of consciousness. There are people who have a genetic predisposition to have the indirect pathway in the brain, this mechanism that is supposed to filter out information be wider open so that they are hearing and seeing and acting on unconscious patterns that other people don't see. There is a world that is real to them and there's a world that they can show you if you listen. And the problem isn't that these traits exist, the problem is that we built a world that doesn't know what to do with them. Here's how it used to work. You know, every tribe needs warriors, they guard the boundaries of the culture, they guard the boundaries of the rules of the society,

Starting point is 00:09:21 and they maintain order, and they say this is how we do things the rules are there to help you everything else is chaos and they're inherently conservative because they change might mean death to that system and that is what they protect and every tribe also needs shamans they cross the boundaries they go into darkness literally or figuratively they bring back new information new possibilities they say what if we tried this? They protect the future because they are guiding us towards what we could be. And the visions that an intuitive is seeing are not something that is real, yet. Warriors without shamans become rigid, brittle, dead. Cultures of warriors don't

Starting point is 00:10:01 last. You know, Athens is more flexible of a society and more victorious of one and more memorable and meaningful than Sparta. Shamans without warriors become chaotic, groundless. They can go insane. A healthy tribe has both and crucially, they need each other even when they drive each other crazy. Sound familiar? Because it should.

Starting point is 00:10:24 It's the dynamic that we've been tracking. You know, Freud was a kind of warrior, Jung was a kind of shaman, CBT was a warrior in depth psychology as a shaman, evidence-based practice as the warrior, and somatic mystical approaches of the shaman. The problem is that the evidence-based paradigms in this country, of the US. They're no longer scientific. People are pretending that they should be treated as something that is looking at science, but there's a million reasons why the actual systems that are supposed to safeguard science have become pseudoscientific. And the tragedy of modern psychology is that we let warriors win completely. We exiled the shamans, we over-identified with the ego, we became an

Starting point is 00:11:04 empire, and we became a profit motive, and we became an overly objective and an overly literal culture. And one of the things that that does is that the profit motive is now in control of science, which it is inherently at odds with. And so now we're a tribe with no one to hear the voices at the edge, no one to knows what to do with them, no one to dream the new dreams, no one to say depression might tell us something. Because I'm talking about a societal level of these things here, but in the actual therapy room it works the same way because these things are also alive in your own head. When you say, feel the depression, where

Starting point is 00:11:42 is it in the body, what does it change? How old is it? My conceptualization, my interpretation, my analysis is not going to be as correct as someone's actual direct experience of what that feels like. And the process of them discovering why it is there is what makes them grow. Not just not feel sad, not just have the depression go down, going all the way through it and discovering the rich world that it can explain about why I am the way that I am, why I think the way that I think, what I'm actually trying to do with my life. Aldous Huxley called it the perennial philosophy, the truths that keep showing up, the same insights, but they wear different costumes. We're multiple, we're not singular. You singular. Plato believes in reason and spirit and appetite.

Starting point is 00:12:28 He believes in a tripartite soul. He says, why is it that people are different? Why is it that in the same man there are disagreements when a singular entity should have a singular motivation yet men do not show up as platonic forms? Freud has the ego, the sup ego, and the id. The IFS has managers, firefighters, exiles, and self. Neuroscience says that there are multiple neural networks that are in constant negotiation, and we can feel these things and recognize them in our

Starting point is 00:12:57 cultures and in our mythology and in biography. Healing what happens through integration. You can't kill your shadow, you can't think your way out of trauma, you can't medicate to meaning. You medicate symptoms. And sometimes the symptom is something that is there for a reason that you do not need to examine. And other times it is there for a reason that you do. Direct experience trumps theory. Socrates says, know the self. The Buddha Buddha says come and see or come to believe. You know every effective therapy has this feel it to heal it and a lot of these earlier systems were a type of therapy. You know the body remembers everything. There are ancient

Starting point is 00:13:40 rituals, there are sacred dances, there is ritual movement. Reich had character armor, you know, the latest book to repackage a lot of those insights is The Body Keeps the Score or something like Eastern Body, Western Mind. It's also a fantastic book. Consciousness is bigger than the individual. The indigenous, the idea that we're part of the web, you know, Jung had the collective unconscious, but the modern neurology shows mirror neurons, shared trauma, epigenetics, inherited family shadows. And something like the Dresden experiment that showed that people who were born in the womb are still reacting to emotions that their mother felt, like hunger, that they don't remember. That's a World War II experiment, where babies who were born into a first world

Starting point is 00:14:25 wealthy environment but the mother had been starving while she was pregnant all had weight problems because little switches had been turned on to get them ready for the world that they were coming into before they even were born. It said get food, you know, get too much food because it is scarce. And those switches are still there whether or not we want to look at them. You know, what's happening now, what we call in philosophy, this period would be the metamodern.

Starting point is 00:14:58 It's after the postmodern, but because we're in the middle of it or in the early beginning, we don't really know what it is and there's a lot of controversy about how to write about it. You know, we're sort of oscillating between the postmodern doubt about grand narratives, wanting to deconstruct everything, and then the sincere belief and the certainty of vast movements and grand narratives of modernism. And we're oscillating between

Starting point is 00:15:25 those two things. And you get a lot of weird stuff when that happens. You get an inability to analyze systems because it's sort of two systems happening at once. You get this ironic detachment between the individual and the truth. You get this, you know, radical, sincere belief at the same time as like really heightened irony and a distance from belief. And this is sort of Jung's tension of opposites, but now it's happening culturally, not just individually.

Starting point is 00:15:54 We need heroic narratives from modernism, but we know, we also need to know that there are constructions which comes from postmodernism. We crave meaning and we can't turn that craving off, but we have to see through meetings, which is the postmodern. We want to believe, but we can't unsee the machinery. And there can be this third way of knowing

Starting point is 00:16:15 that we will build. You know, there isn't, this isn't a problem to be solved. It's just an inevitable result of the last thousand years. And the increasing technological metaphors that we're able to make as technology is in this light speed. You know, real therapy has always been shamanic. You know, not in this new age like I did at ayahuasca wants kind of way, but in a real ancient way. The therapist is one who crosses between worlds, who retrieves lost parts, you know, lost parts of the tribe and people, but also lost parts of the patient in the individual mind.

Starting point is 00:16:51 They speak multiple languages at once, somatic, symbolic, and literal, and they hold space for transformation, and they have faith to know which language is needed at that time, and which language the patient needs to learn to speak. I'm not a fan of mythopoetic everything. A lot of what I do is psychoeducation. A lot of what I do is CBT. It's just that I hold that as one tool among many. And we need to bring back that kind of integration.

Starting point is 00:17:19 You know, this is what Socrates was doing. It's what the mystery schools in Athens taught. It's what indigenous healers knew, and it's what Jungcrates was doing. It's what the mystery schools in Athens taught. It's what indigenous healers knew, and it's what Jung rediscovered. And not everything old is good, but a lot of things that are independently useful, society will reinvent. A lot of the new science can help us build newer categories

Starting point is 00:17:39 because we do need categories for mental health. We do need something similar to what is essentially the biomedical model that puts things into these categories. But one of the things that might be useful is to take the idea that modern neuroscience has discovered that there are different types of memory and that trauma is not recorded on a videotape in your head. It isn't like, you know, you're at the cookout

Starting point is 00:17:59 and a firework goes off and then you see the videotape of Vietnam play and then somebody goes, Bill, Bill, are you all right? And then you're back in the present moment. Not all trauma is recorded like a videotape. There's explicit and declarative memory. There's implicit and procedural memory, what your body knows, how to ride a bike, how to dissociate, things that you don't think about. With explicit and declarative memory, this is what happened to me. You know, CBT does work there. A lot of those things we are conscious of and a type of therapy that focuses on ego consciousness is good

Starting point is 00:18:29 at treating them. There's emotional memory, what you feel, your amygdala, your pre-verbal memories and also your pre-conscious emotions. Emotional memory is very important for therapy and it's one of the things that CBT misses because we feel the emotion before we're thinking about it. By the time I'm thinking about it, it's gone. I need, or my ability to deeply access it is gone. I need to change the way that a patient holds their body. I need to change the way that I reflect the emotion back and say, you looked really angry there. You know, a lot of memory is state dependent. You know things in certain states that you don't know in others, and you need to prepare somebody just because they're not dissociating or having the symptom in the room

Starting point is 00:19:09 doesn't mean that it's not there. It's not only the time that you can measure things. And there's also, you know, collective and transgenerational memories that are kind of older than us, that I don't think that we have complete ownership of or that we can work with in a very literal way. Sometimes we just need to feel our history, feel the journey of our people, feel the journey of our soul, of our ancestors, and that is okay. It isn't a replacement for, you know, anti-psychotics.

Starting point is 00:19:37 It's not a replacement for psychoeducation when somebody doesn't know how to be in the world, but it is an important part of life And these different therapies work on different memory systems like DBT is great for relational trauma emotional memory But sometimes somebody relates fine They're just having flashbulb re-experiencing and a relational type of therapy is not the right way in for them You know EMDR or brain spotting were designed to treat acute flashback experiences EMDR or brain spotting were designed to treat acute flashback experiences. You know, extremely rigid parts of self that we were conscious of but that won't change. But they're not probably the best way to teach a relationship or a way of communicating over

Starting point is 00:20:16 a long period of time like DBT can. You know, parts work for complex trauma is about analyzing how all of these systems respond differently at different times and that they all represent different needs that we need to integrate and we need to hold and we have to validate if we're ever going to do anything with them. The real crime of the evidence-based practice paradigm is it pretended that there was one model of therapy that could just do everything and that all therapy should be the same and then everyone got better in the same way and the better models tend to not do that. There's this meta-modern oscillation that is

Starting point is 00:20:47 speeding up. We can't go back to modern certainty and we can't stay in post modern paralysis. We're being forced to learn something new and how to hold this paradox, how to be multiple, how to dance between worlds is an important place for psychotherapy to sit if it wants to be relevant, if it wants to be helpful. And this is why therapy is having an identity crisis. The old certainties of CBT fixes everything, of the brain as a computer, this modern postmodern critique that nothing works, it doesn't lead anywhere. We need a metamodern therapy that is evidence-based and mystery-friendly. We need scientifically rigorous and actually scientific research methods that also can account for things that are subjective and be somatically wise.

Starting point is 00:21:29 We need individual healing and we need systemic awareness. We need ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience. And we don't need to mistake one for the other because they're not the same thing. We're not picking sides. We're holding tensions. Robert Moore used to say of archetypes, these things want all of you, they want to become all of you, and they do, and it's your job as an adult and a therapist to hold them at bay and to relate to both. We have to be shamans and warriors. You know what actually works? It is being seen, being felt, being held, meaning making, integrating parts, feeling feelings, moving

Starting point is 00:22:06 trauma through the body, connecting to something bigger. And this means that we're not just being analyzed, we're not just trying to be understood by the therapist, we're not just trying to get through it, we're actually trying to go into the heart of it, and we're not having meaning imposed And we're not killing parts of self that are bad and we're not thinking about things We're actually feeling them and we're not just talking we're actually experiencing And we're not just getting individual fixes We're connecting to something that is larger and there's the seeds of all of these things in people who didn't quite put them together

Starting point is 00:22:45 or understand all of them. In Freud and Jung and Reich. You know, every effective therapy does some version of this. They just call it different things and they use different doors, but they're all going to the same place. And recognition that we're multiple beings in multiple types of bodies with multiple types of memory living in multiple overlapping realities Trying to learn to dance together is an important realization. It is the perennial philosophy. It's what shamans knew It's what Socrates died for that beneath all of that There is a central thing that is self-evidencing that we can just experience, but we can't really rationalize And what we keep forgetting, but we can't help but also remembering and rediscovering.

Starting point is 00:23:25 It can't go away but it also can be pushed to the fringes of society in our worst times. You know the people running these things, health care, academia, policy, they're the last people who should be. You know in tribal terms like we gave all the power to warriors with no shamanic training. They're people who fear the unconscious, deny multiplicity, worship measurement, mistake profit for health, and confuse control for everything. And confuse understanding or analysis, diagnosis for healing. And our evolutionary history had safeguards. Shamans and warriors used to balance each other.

Starting point is 00:24:05 Elders held wisdom, you know, communities held individuals, nature held culture, and we broke all the safeguards. We let all the warriors, we let the ego run everything. We exiled shamans. We pretended that the base of the brain, the brainstem, didn't exist. And we turned elders into inconveniences, we shattered communities and we became atomized and we declared a war on nature as an externality that was unimportant and then we wonder why everyone's depressed. If you're still debating whether or not the unconscious exists or the body holds trauma or if we are multiple selves that are sort of all interacting to create this experience

Starting point is 00:24:44 of cognition that is an inherently slippery thing. If emotions are real or relevant, if integration beats domination, if relationships heal, then you need to leave the field. And it's not because you're wrong, it's because you're a warrior trying to do shaman work. You may just not be able to learn something that you need to know if you're ever going to help somebody in the therapy room. You know, the baseline for real therapy is that emotions are bio-physiological processes. Trauma lives in the body. We're naturally multiple parts of self, parts of memory. And integration is the goal. And direct experience actually matters, not just logical understanding. And that mystery is real.

Starting point is 00:25:25 You have to know that you don't know everything if you're going to have any of the curiosity that gets people better, yourself and others, and not believing this. You have to know this from experience, from practice, from intuition, from the daimon that spoke to Socrates, from sitting with thousands of hours of human suffering and transformation. And remember Socrates with the hemlock? He didn't die for that idea, he died to prove something beyond his ideas. There's a way of knowing that can't be argued, measured or proven, only lived, only trusted, only followed, even into death. And that is the diamond. It is the inner voice. It is the shamanic function. It is the thing in us that knows. But it doesn't know how or why it knows and sometimes it can't explain it.

Starting point is 00:26:10 But we can recognize it when we see it and every culture discovers it, names it differently, builds practices around it, and then forgets when the warriors take over and the ego takes over and the objectivity reigns. And then it remembers and then the forgetting becomes unbearable and We are at the unbearable part right now and middle health is collapsing and the Warriors approaches are failing and the shamans are returning from Exile not to take over but to restore balance One of the dangers of this time though is that all crazy people are not shamans Only some of them, right? Like there are a lot of people who are out there talking

Starting point is 00:26:46 about their trauma as this metaphor and they are being mistaken for therapists, for thought leaders, for cultural figures that are making a call back to an older way of life or the unconscious, but they're really just trauma dumping their experience through metaphor on you and people are mistaking this as this shortcut. They haven't really done their own work. And until you do your own work, until the therapist has done their own work, you can't tell them apart. This metamodern moment isn't just choosing between warrior and shaman, it's remembering that we need both and we always have and we always will.

Starting point is 00:27:20 And evolution doesn't make mistakes. If depression and anxiety and dissociation, even psychosis, survive millions of years, they serve functions and they need to be understood as functions of self. Because evolution itself is an incentive structure, and to pretend that it isn't is kind of wild. It's kind of crazy. These, you know, essential functions, sacred functions even. You know, the mistake was building a culture that can't use them, that medicates them, to make us more profitable, that CBTs them, that pretends that they're bugs instead of features. And the future of therapy isn't new techniques, it's remembering why we need shamans.

Starting point is 00:27:58 And then those techniques will come from there. Things like brain spotting, things like QG brain mapping, polyvagal nerve stimulation, neuromodulation, that can use these innovations to understand how we can use modern science to interact with ancient wisdom and why we develop multiplicity, why it shows up in different philosophies, in different anthropological lenses, in different sociological lenses, in modern marketing. If advertising understands something better than psychology, there is an enormous problem with who's doing what and what they're doing it for. Let's do another cold cut

Starting point is 00:28:35 back to Vienna in 1920. Alfred Adler is walking past a church while Freud and Jung and then their disciples would be having a pissing contests, you know, up until today. Jung was trying to heal the father and Freud was trying to kill him, slash become the most perfect version, or the godfather, if you will. And Alfred Adler was doing something else entirely. He's walking past a church in his old neighborhood, and something's wrong. This should be terrifying. As a child, he ran past the cemetery that used to be by the church twice daily and his heart was pounding and certain death was chasing him. And the graveyard by the church had shaped his entire psychology. His theory is about compensation, about overcoming

Starting point is 00:29:15 weakness through will, but when he goes back home as an adult there's no cemetery. And he asked the locals. He checked city records. There's maps going back a century. There's nothing. There's never a graveyard there, there never was. But the terror was real, and the running was real, but the cemetery was imagination, it was metaphor, it was a child's mind creating a concrete metaphor for an abstract fear. Just like the US had done with the Satanic panic, just like so many things that everyone does. This is what separates Adler for both Freud and Jung. He realized that our most formative memories might be complete fabrications.

Starting point is 00:29:48 They're not lies, they're metaphors, because the psyche doesn't record events, it records cosmology. And while Freud was hunting for a primal scene, and Jung was mapping archetypes, Adler understood there's no point in analyzing what mom or dad literally did, because what you remember might never have happened, and what might have happened might be impossible to actually remember. And the memories are emotional metaphors. The stories that the psyche tells itself about what it feels like to be alive. And so Adler developed what actually works in therapy. Not the mystical depths

Starting point is 00:30:21 and not the analytical dissection. The stuff that CBT accidentally does right when it works. And his psychology exists because most of the things that we assume, that we associate with psychotherapy come from Alfred Adler, even though he's one of the least remembered. You know, relationships matter more than theory. That encouragement beats interpretation. relationships matter more than theory, that encouragement beats interpretation, that present choices matter more than past traumas, and that you work with people, not on them. Everyone is trying to overcome something. These were all things that Adler did long before Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir and all the people who reset them. And all those evidence-based techniques that CBT claims it invented? Adler was doing them in 1910, without worksheets, without pretending the mind was a computer,

Starting point is 00:31:09 just human to human, helping people rewrite their metaphors, and training other people to do it in ways that survived. That survived the cognitive and the behavioral revolution, that survived up until now. And cut to Phoenix. You know, 1970. Milton Erickson is paralyzed from polio. He's colorblind, he's tone deaf, he's sitting in his wheelchair, he's become the most influential therapist and nobody can actually imitate him. Why? Because his technique was pure intuition. It was developed from a lifetime of being trapped in a body that didn't work and he

Starting point is 00:31:40 learned to read people like books. A graduate student walked into his office, a PhD candidate. Dr. Erickson, you know, I know you don't like smoking but I've taken up pipe smoking, you know, as I've enrolled in the program and I'll smoke outside, you know, after we meet. And Erickson doesn't like to lecture about health but instead he starts describing the awkwardness of a friend that he had that would smoke the pipe. You know, if you blew it down, he wouldn't know where it was going, and then he should have blew it up, and then it was in his face. And the guy's bored to tears as Erickson just drones on for 40 minutes. You know, the ritual of packing the pipe, tamping the pipe, lighting the pipe,

Starting point is 00:32:19 relighting the pipe, storing the pipe, disassembling the pipe, all of these things, he walks through how awkward they are, and how they don't really mean anything and that when you think about them they're not fun to do. And the guy, the graduate student, the PhD student doesn't realize that he's being hypnotized and slowly, methodically, Erickson deconstructs every element, you know, not attacking, just observing, that they're not, they don't really have to be attached to a central narrative. And until the student realizes, you know, later, that he doesn't actually like smoking. He liked the idea of smoking because he associated it with the serious scholar with his pipe and about maturing into academia and a persona that he's trying on.

Starting point is 00:33:00 And when he leaves and tries to light the pipe, he realizes that he can't do it anymore, but that he's still himself. And, you know, by the next session the student can't even put the pipe in his mouth. He's thrown it out. You know, I heard this guy tell that story when he was close to 80, you know, if not that old and he had been, you know, mentored by Erickson. You know, and this metaphor collapsed and he became a bigger thing. And this is what Erickson understood.

Starting point is 00:33:24 Symptoms aren't just problems, they're blocked creative potential. And they're the psyche trying to grow but not knowing how. They're needing a bigger container, a bigger containing metaphor. And right now our culture needs a bigger containing metaphor. You know Erickson had one patient who came in and she said, she was angry, everything was gray, it was black and white, there was no point to anything, she was going to be depressed, she had seen all of these therapists, her husband wants her to go on a trip, and it's going to be awful. And Erickson says, yes, your trip with your husband will be terrible, the airport will

Starting point is 00:33:54 be gray, the flight will be miserable, it will all be black and white like you're describing, everything will be an inconvenience, everything will be a line, everything will be bleak, you know, just as you expect, but that's not where you're going. On this trip you're going to wait and you're going to wait and you're going to wait and you're going to wait and you will see one thing that is not black and white. You're going to see one thing that is color and she says, how do you know? And he said, I know, you know, come back and fire me and I'll refund your money. This is what you're going to do. You're going to walk through every part of the trip and you're going to see everything black and white and then there'll be one thing that is a bright vivid color and it will

Starting point is 00:34:25 possess you and that is what the trip is for. So come back and let me know what it is that you see." And he didn't know what she would see. He didn't know that she was gonna see a bird, that she was gonna fall in love with ornithology, that that would define the rest of her life, that would pull her out of her depression and give her a greater purpose, you know? But that color was a parrot and it broke through the depression like lightning and she becomes a different thing. She transforms her entire life. And Erickson didn't prescribe birds.

Starting point is 00:34:54 He didn't prescribe what the thing that was colored was. He prescribed looking and he gave her a bigger container for her experience even though he didn't know what that container was. He could still sit with the uncertainty of becoming big enough to contain her uncertainty. And this is what we need in the metamonad. This is what we need now, not smaller definitions, not tighter diagnostic categories, not more precise worksheets. Bigger containers, metaphors that can hold our expanding experience as the individual

Starting point is 00:35:22 end of society, because we're breaking out of the old containers. Nation states can't contain global problems, individual therapy can't contain systemic trauma, scientific materialism can't contain consciousness, and old stories can't contain new realities. And what we need is what Adler discovered. Our memories are metaphors so we can rewrite them. We need what Erickson knew. People aren't broken, they're stuck. They don't need fixing. They need bigger stories. And they certainly don't need you to tell them what to do, even if they're asking for that. But here's the hard part. You can't fake intuition. You can't work your way to wisdom. You can't

Starting point is 00:35:54 pretend you're Ericsson if you haven't done the work. The work is ongoing, but the main central alchemy of the work is this. It's separating your own intuition from your own trauma because they come from the same part of the brain and they feel the same. When you're in flow state, both of them possess you in a way that feels authentic because trauma feels like intuition but it's not. Trauma says, danger is everywhere, you have to feel this emotion or you can't feel that one. Intuition says, feel whatever you want, walk wherever you want.

Starting point is 00:36:24 Yes, there is danger but you still are safe. And if you're in this field, student, therapist, human being trying to help, and everything looks gray, everything feels stupid and pointless, you're probably right, the system is stupid, the worksheets are pointless. But like Erickson's patient, you need to look for the bird, the thing in color, the self-evident truth that breaks through the gray and lets you help people and help yourself. Maybe it's a client who transforms despite your terrible training. Maybe it's a technique that works even though it shouldn't work.

Starting point is 00:36:51 Maybe it's a realization that what actually helps people has nothing to do with what you're being taught. And when you see it, trust it, even if you don't understand it, especially if you don't understand it. Because even if it scares you, because it's in those times that we're the most trapped, the most stagnated, that we develop the most powerful intuition, the only trick is not lying to yourself that you're free when you're not. Not pretending you're healed when you're actually wounded, and not making your woundedness

Starting point is 00:37:17 this persona of self, of either victimhood or authority, like so many people in this profession have done. You're neither. You're both. And no, not mistaking your trauma for wisdom. And the first step is admitting that something's wrong. We're not home. We're lost. And Adler knew that, and Erickson knew that, and the metamonarch moment knows it. And so many people right now don't. We need bigger containers, bigger stories, rooms for all of our parts to dance. Not because it's easy, not because it's necessary, because the old containers are breaking and

Starting point is 00:37:45 we can't build new ones, or if we don't build new ones we'll drown in fragments. And that's what makes you a good provider, not following protocols, not measuring outcomes, but holding space for the bigger story to emerge and being the midwife to metaphors, even if you don't know what's being born, especially then. You know, people on the edges hear voices and the body does keep the score. And you know, there is a perennial philosophy that is perennial and it keeps coming back

Starting point is 00:38:12 because it's true, but it's not true like two plus two equals four. It's true like the sun rises true. It's true like children need love true. It's true like don't feed your infants water. You know, true like we are all going to die and we have to deal with that because we do. True. You know because that energy goes somewhere if we don't deal with it. It's the kind of true that you can't prove. You only know it and you live it and you have to pass it

Starting point is 00:38:38 on to those who are ready to hear. The future of therapy is ancient and the healing that we need is what we've always known and the truth that can't be killed because it was never born. And it can't even really be spoken. Or maybe it just can't be explained. Maybe it can't be taught. It can only be felt. It just is like the diamond and like the sunrise and like the voices at the edges that are calling all of us home. Dull roots with spring rain Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow Feeding a little life with dry tubers Summer surprised us Coming over the storm-burger sea

Starting point is 00:39:37 With a shower of rain We stopped in the colonnade And went on in sunlight Into the Hothgarden And drank coffee and talked for an hour Been gar kinder rassen, stamm aus Letternes Deutsch And when we were children staying at the Archduke's, my cousin's He took me out on a sled and I was frightened He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight and down

Starting point is 00:40:06 We went in the mountains, there you feel free, I read Much of the night and go south in the winter What are the roots that clutch? What branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images where the sun beats And the dead tree gives no shelter The cricket no relief and the dry stone no sound of water only There is shadow under this red rose

Starting point is 00:41:00 Now I'll show you something different from either your shadowed morning striding behind you or your shadowed evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust Fresh wet de wind De high mat zu Many rich kind Woveless dew You gave me higherths first a year ago, They called me the Hyacinth girl. Yet when we came back, Late from the Hyacinth,

Starting point is 00:41:34 God in your arms, full in your hair, wet. I could not speak and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, And I knew nothing looking into the heart of life The silence, oh the lid I smell Madame so-so stress, famous clairvoyant had a bad cold Nevertheless is known to be the wisest woman in Europe With a wicked pack of cards He has said she is your card, the drowned Phoenician sailor

Starting point is 00:42:15 Those are pearls that were his eyes, love Here is a bella donna, the lady of the rocks, the lady of situations Here is the man with three staves and here the wheel And here is the one-eyed merchant and this card Which is blank is something he carries on his back Which I am forbidden to see, I do not find the hand man Fear death by water, I see crowds of people walking round in a ring Thank you if you see dear Mrs. Iquathone Tell her I bring the horoscope myself

Starting point is 00:42:50 One must be so careful these days Unreal City Help! I'm not going to take it anymore! I'm mad as hell! I'm not going to take it anymore! Unreal city, under the brown fog I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!

Starting point is 00:43:17 I had not thought the way I fed and downed So many sighs, short and infrequent Were exceeded And on so many sides, short and infrequent, we're exhaled Each man fixed his eyes before his feet Float up the hill and down King William Street To where St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours with a dead sound On the final stroke of nine, there I saw one I knew And stopped him crying, Stetson you were

Starting point is 00:43:46 with me in the ships at my lay that corpse you planted last year in your garden has it begun to sprout will it bloom this year or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed or keep the dog far hence that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again. You, hypocrite lector, Monsamblable mon frère. The care she sat in like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble where the glass held up by standards, wrought with fruited vines From which a golden cupid unpeeped out

Starting point is 00:44:31 Another hid his eyes behind his wings Doubled the flames of seven-branch candelabra Reflecting light upon the table As the glitter of her jewels rose to meet it From satin cases poured in rich profusion in vials of ivory and colored glass, unstoppered lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, ungwent powdered or liquid troubled, confused,

Starting point is 00:44:59 and drowned the scents in all, disturbed by the air that freshened from the window these ascended and fattening the pro-launch candle flames flung their smoke into the lacquer carrier stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling hugh sea wood fed with copper burned green and orange framed by the colored stone in which sad light a a dolphin swam above the antique mantel was displayed as though a window gave upon the sylvan scene the change of villimal by the barbarous king so rudely forced yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with invulnerable voice and still she growled And still the world she sees Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug The brush her hair spread out in fiery points Glowed into words that would be Savagely still

Starting point is 00:46:17 My nerves are bad tonight Yes, bad Stay with me Speak to me Why do you never speak? Speak, what are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking, think.

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The Taproot Podcast - The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 5: Casting New Gods from Forgotten Bars of Gold

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