The Taproot Podcast - Therapy Round Table

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Join therapists Joel Blackstock, Alice Hawley, and James Waites as we dive deep into the fascinating intersection of trauma therapy, psychology, and everyday life. Our roundtable discussions explore everything from clinical approaches to the psychology behind pop culture, spirituality, and the human experience. Whether you're a fellow trauma therapist or just curious about psychological perspectives, we offer authentic conversations that challenge conventional thinking and explore the depths of consciousness and healing. Subscribe for new episodes where we unpack topics like dragon energy, the psychology of true crime, therapy representation in media, burnout in helping professions, and much more! #TraumaTherapy #MentalHealthPodcast #PsychologyTalk #TherapistConversations #ConsciousnessExploration #DragonEnergy #TrueCrime #TherapyCollective #BurnoutPrevention #JungianPsychology #AnimismDiscussion #TherapistsOfYouTube #MindfulnessMatters #TraumaInformed #HolisticHealing

Wounded in similar ways, wounded in similar ways. It sounds like something that a hippie would say, but the truth is we're wounded in similar ways. All right. Welcome to the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, the only podcast about therapy on the internet that is cool and gets it. Alice Hawley, what do you do to stick it to the man? Well, primarily, um, I

do therapy for one thing. James Waits, do you see through the lies of society? Yes. We need like some gnarly like Gen X rap rock to to lead us in here. If you all have any suggestions, I'll throw that at the beginning. Like, yeah, yeah. So welcome to the Taffy Therapy Collective Podcast. We're gonna start doing some kind of roundtable discussions. And for the first one, we thought it would be fun to just kind of talk about topics that we may do during those we do Consultations as a practice and a lot of the conversations that come up in consultations were like hey, what's going on in society?

What's going on in therapy? How are those things interacting? Are kind of interesting and would make really good podcasts, but you can't record the consultation for a couple reasons One of them is because like every other question is about how to use something in our EMR and that wouldn't make for great podcasting. But hopefully we can bring just kind of, cause you know, our audience is generally like trauma patients, trauma therapists, and kind of trauma nerds interested in the psychology of different things. And we hopefully can get into some interesting topics.

So this one, if you hear something you like, leave a comment. And maybe that will be an episode soon. So we can go through different things that might make for a good roundtable discussion. I don't know. I was thinking about having like the y'all's perspective or therapists talking about like

therapy and movies, therapy and TV. Because it does seem like that's changing a lot, like that old kind of paradigm where HBO would have a show like The Sopranos are in treatment, where somebody would just be in sort of like a relational, you know, more rogerian kind of like talk therapy with a little bit of psychoanalytic stuff and maybe some CVT suggestions forever. That just seems to be going away. Like there's a little bit more nuance in how screenwriters are talking about it, but there's still screenwriters. I was watching that show, The Pit on HBO. Have you all seen that? Oh, I've seen an episode. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's okay. But it was like, just something that was like on in the background when I have to do

Excel sheets. And, but, and it's clear that they had like medical advisors that were like making sure they didn't put like the, you know, the IV bag upside down or something. But they couldn't really change the script. And there are some things about hospitals and cycles just like, okay, I see what you googled, and then didn't understand how that actually works. Like, I don't know, for example, there's a scene in the beginning where one of the people's like, or no, it's like,

in the beginning of one of the episodes, but it's like further into the season, but this, they're, they're trying to talk on like, sort of like every liberal talking point, like they're talking about gun violence and hospitals being overwhelmed, and like the healthcare system failing and like all these things that like, I think are probably good to talk about. Um, but some of the, some of the stuff, especially around mental health is like, now you kind of got to understand how this works a little bit better.

Um, like there's a guy that comes in and they're like, why are you homeless or something? And he's like, oh, well I'm homeless because I can't afford my schizophrenia medication. And they're like, okay, well, it needs like, yeah, I went 40 years of marriage and hard work, but then I lost my job. So I smoked crystal meth and I got the schizophrenia from the crystal meth. And you're like, no, you can't get schizophrenia 40 from like, you could get an anxiety disorder, but schizophrenia like that isn't you don't catch it's not catching, you know, and then they and then the doctors are either like, like a social worker comes in and you can tell they've heard that assertive community

treatment teams exist, but they don't quite know like what those are. And she's like, Well, all you have to do is ask the emergency room and they'll just bring you your Sarah quill into your homeless encampment. And like one of the ER doctors is like, Yeah, that's a great idea. Why don't you just I'd like to be the one who does it. Can I just leave the ER on shift and like, go bring this guy medication weekly? And they're like, yeah, problem solved.

It's like, no, like this isn't like yet. Should work that way, probably. But this is this is not this is not the way. So anyway, I think that would be an interesting one. Any any other like trends you'll see on on like TV movies with With the therapy and and mental health care, especially I don't have y'all seen the penguin like the show on HBO Yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah Batman Sopranos. It was better than I thought it was gonna be Yeah, did you did you see the the EMDR?

Sessions I think that oh, yeah, that's right. right yeah like I don't know the comic stuff so who is that like who is the lady like what is her villain is she in the comics or something I know she's a niche villain I think she's like I mean she might be very big I am I've been removed from the DC comic world a good bit but I just like that machine he had I like that light the light EMDR machine where you didn't have to use his hands. Is that- It's just the light device, isn't it?

Like it's the bar that goes back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. All that, when I trained at EMDR, like I haven't done EMDR for probably three years because brain spotting just kind of replaced that almost entirely for me. But yeah, most of the practitioners that did EMDR all day,

they were pretty purist. EMDR providers tend to be kind of culty some of the time. And like they would just do it exclusively for every session. And that's what they told us is like, and good bit like this was huge it felt like I don't know though the bar it probably some Hollywood stuff there like I don't think most therapists because you just need the eyes to move it doesn't really the further it is away though the longer heads yeah yeah I don't know else what do you notice any any therapy and my I mean my TV content is pretty off, off the off the beaten path. I mostly watch like that's the best guy and reality, really bad reality to me. But it pops up in there, too.

Yeah. But I mean, the stuff about, I don't know, the true crime stuff is always like appealing to my like, you know, the part of me that like works with victims and kind of loves the psychology of the abuser and That's a good point Could you put your mic a little bit closer? You're just a little a little pinched. It's kind of hard to hear you I think noise cancelling is kind of gravity. I can edit that line out Yeah Yeah, that's that's a good point. Like I don't know. Yeah, go ahead. That sounds great.

I like I I've seen like a couple of write ups on like true crime is getting big because of mental health issues like true crime is consumed primarily by women, which like I watch a lot of true crime too. So that's not, you know not entirely true, but I think it is kind of women that drive the consumption of it. But it does seem like a way that mental health gets brought up a lot. Yeah, I've talked about it with clients. I personally noticed a trend of a lot of my trauma victims really like all the true crime and serial killer stuff. And that's for sure I relate to it. So it's kind of interesting. And they're always like, I hope I'm not a bad person or something.

It's like, no, you're just trying to get control of what happened to you on some level. It may be a safer way of doing that kind of, because a lot of the, I mean, positive and negative behaviors associated with trauma patients are like people going back into an environment to try and get mastery over it. And I mean, do you see good ways or bad ways that it affects people?

I mean, certainly if you're in trauma, like watching that stuff can be triggering. Like when I was a tide of traumas, like I couldn't go there. But then that was one of the first things that kind of came back as content that I can actually like ironically watch. But I think that, yeah, I think, I think it can help a lot. And a lot of the content, I think, coming out recently is following maybe the trend of recognizing the psychology of the abuse dynamic.

Yeah, the psychological violence are more than that. The documentaries about the Gabby Petito case. And it's just like women relate to that so much. I don't know if you all, I mean, but it's in a, like in a, she's, do y'all know what I'm talking about? Yeah. I'm not familiar with that one. The van lady or the van couple, is that right?

Yeah, she was, she's like 20, I mean, young 20s or something, I'm gonna get it wrong, but yeah, she was like off to do like a social media tour Yeah, I did don't know Netflix. That was awesome. Yeah, and there's two there's a new one Yeah, yeah, so it's a young 20s girl who kind of gets like creative type who's Kind of trying to embrace the world and then she gets consumed by this like very controlling Abuser but was putting out like all this social media content that seemed like everything was perfect but

she was really isolated with him in this van traveling in all these really remote places and he was like violent with her in the background kind of thing and but yeah there's a lot of kind of that kind of content that I think I I don't know, I mean, I find it fascinating. Yeah, that may make a or either those together, TV, movies, and then even True Crime itself may make it like a fun kind of episode. Yeah, and kind of the component of like how what you're saying, like it's a safe way of processing, like it being like just the anxiety that you can process like, or, you know, kind of like the high that like dopamine high that comes with like the trauma and like victimization and stuff. It's like you can access that in a safe way though, where you like, know it's all going to be okay, like you're going to be okay, even in spite of people watching.

Yeah, yeah. I think, too, like there's such a celebrity culture in America that just when people are like, oh, this celebrity is famous and beautiful and they have the same thing happened to me to them as me that there's something about that that is comforting to like Americans specifically. I don't know. That sounds like a fruitful topic. James, you got you got one that you got me thing that you floated a couple like the yoga breathing episode. James wants Alice to lead us in some like a big, you know, and we y'all done some stuff on animism a good bit. Um, but I like that topic, but I was laughing because I guess a little bit regarding as dragon female energy. So you want to get James once again to the new age stuff. Is that, I was told to ask, I was told to ask Alice about dragon. I mean, I can go there. So a client of yours asked you to ask Alice about female dragon energy. Is that right?

Just to clarify. I was looking it up and I'm still confused on Google. Is that the dragon energy of the female or female dragons? You're not going to understand it. You're just not going to understand it. understand it. You're just not gonna understand it. Um, it this. So this is this is like the energy. It's like this archetypal energy of this is how and there are a lot of people who have different relationships with this energy. But it's basically this idea of kind of, I mean, it's sort of a little like a Phoenix kind of analogy where it's a direct like a to me a dragon is like a trans, like your dragon energy is like the trauma

that you've transmuted into kind of your power. So it's like this really like what would otherwise be this kind of like reptilian like oriented like in terms of like how your brain reacts, part of your part of you becomes like your power. And so there's this feminine like divine feminine idea of like that's sort of this energy that's been in, you know, in oppression for a long time and it's coming out as like dragon energy. And so that's like sort of where the where the connection is. And then different people

connect with maybe like particular dragons. So there's, you know, you can take it, but that's like what I think is what that's about maybe and in the most like, you know, I think it's empowering is what empowering stuff is what you're talking about. But definitely off the beaten path. But I think if it's off the beaten path and that generally I think you're there. I would love a whole hour old dragon energy. I'm not laughing because it sounds crazy.

I'm laughing because I could see where it is powerful and thinking about that and the beauty behind that. We think this is ugly dragon, like I was thinking of Shmaug in the mountains gold. He's a really pretty dragon, but there's a schmuck you know in the mountains gold and but it's really he's a really pretty dragon but there's a lot of things there a lot of meaning a lot of yeah sort of more like wake up the female dragon wait it uh can I'm not a big game of thrones person but I picture it's more of like a Daenerys with her dragons kind of vibe.

Oh, the game of dragons. And then ignore, like, I can't remember what happens at the end of that, but something. You ever read... When the dragons die and things. Have you ever read Edward Eddinger or Eric Neumann, the like kind of post-Yogium guys? I have not, not a lot. No. A lot of the anthropology, I mean reading Edwin, reading Eric Neumann not a lot. No, a lot of them a lot of the anthropology. I mean, reading Edward reading Eric Neumann is a slog.

Again, Lee heard me listening to an audio book one time. It was like, what on the what in the world? Because they like you have to like look up all of this dated language. Like he talks about like oreboric incest and all this stuff for a long time, which doesn't have anything to do with actual incest. It's like the self rejoining the self. Right. Whatever you have to be familiar with like very outdated biology to understand his metaphors. But one of the things that he's doing with like the where a lot of that stuff comes from, like when you hear Jordan

Peterson talking about like, you have to slay your dragon and write it. And he doesn't even really know his sources. He just sort of absorbed this stuff in the Jungian circles in Canada in the nineties. Like there was some of those post Jungian guys, there's this idea that in culture that there was like a female, like a matriarchal culture before civilization. And then as cities developed, it became like a more of a patriarchy and that there was a goddess cult beforehand where you get like, which like for a long while they thought all of that was like disproven. And now that's kind of coming back into modern archeology.

Like with the multiburate culture and all of these kind of like proto-mythological civilizations, they're saying like, there was this maternal thing where women and birthing and like especially very heavy women are depicted a lot. So we think that they were like, yeah, big women are able to do more babies. This is the point of civilization.

And then that is replaced by kind of like a king and priest class when you get cities. And so a lot of what he talks about is that that's reflected in mythology. So like Babylonian mythology that you have Tiamat, that it's this big dragon goddess, and then the male hero goes out and kills that goddess and builds civilization. And it happens in Egyptian or like all of it is what they were saying, what Neumann is saying is that that maternal like goddess cult is being described as being overthrown by the city structure and these hero myths of the early society. And so like a lot of, and they thought it was bad, it was out of balance that we needed sort of a masculine and a feminine and an active and a passive principle and just a society governed by the hero myth and the great man theory of history was doomed to fail because it had no, it was

too hebristic and had no humility and had no sustained interest in sustainability which I think that's why people are gravitating to that kind of thing now is that a lot of those things are probably true and You know the problems that the world is facing is making them kind of go back to that So when you hear about the divine feminine and like the writing that dragon a lot of those things I think that's where the scholarships coming from but most of the people talking that stuff online, I don't think really know the history or the sources. They're just, it's an appealing idea, which you don't have to. I mean, perennial philosophy, long story. I mean, you can take it or leave it, but a lot of people with extrasensory, you know, gifts, like channel this stuff themselves, like independently. So there's also also, there's a component of there are,

and like I said, you can like take it or leave it, but I'll just like, there's a whole, there's kind of like, this is where the dragon energy, when you're talking about kind of the uncovering of like that, the old matriarchies and the old ways, like that all coming is like this collective energy force of like that dragon energy coming into the collective of like uncovering like that old matriarchal ways

and like collapsing like in a tower moment, like all the divine masculine, like constricted corporations and structures and society and abusive stuff. Yeah, no, I can see why that would be like a very helpful kind of mythological framework. And I mean, you bump into the same thing that you do with like all depth psychology and perennial philosophy

is it's like people who don't know each other continue to discover this stuff independently. So is that an evidence basis for it? You know, archetypes or something, you know, people have that for a long time. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. And I'm very interested in it because there's a certain level, like, if you're actually interested in, in like this random niche and come from a scientific background, you start realizing, like,

the statistics don't really make sense as to why there are all these disparate people coming up with sort of like parallel and similar stuff. So there's there's a component there like where I'm very interested in consciousness, you know when it comes to psychology like consciousness is like kind of the cutting edge of like maybe where psychology is going in my mind, but So it kind of intersects with all that What Stephanie consciousness is the majority of what this podcast is about. But the yeah, like I think that's a lot of people who are more kind of intuitive and like empathic and want to engage with that stuff as like their personal myth. I think are less reticent to learn the history of those ideas because because a lot of them are old men, white men writing about them.

But like an argument in my mind to do that is, it actually does give you a basis and evidence to say, well, if the white brotherhood in Hungary is coming up with, which that's his name, it has nothing to do with being white, and all of these different mystical people are coming up with these same ideas and there's no interaction, then doesn't that give you sort of a framework

to see them as more psychological ideas that are inevitably gonna be discovered by humans and not just ideas that we need to fight about the veracity of them, if they've come up for 2,000 years fairly consistently. But- But maybe it's this information that we need to fight about the veracity of them, you know, if they've come up for 2000 years fairly consistently. Yeah, but maybe it's this information that we're accessing at a different level of consciousness. Yeah, and a lot of those regions of the brain that show up as reptiles are like the part of the reptile brain too, you know, which is sort of an interesting. Exactly, exactly. And that's where yeah, and I think that's where we get to like,

we could talk, we could talk at some point about like narcissism and like how I think it's like the reptile reptile brain and let's do dragons let's do dragon episode this sounds good I want to talk about the parietal eye the little brain structure we get from our reptilian ancestry where dragons yeah probably dragons but lizards and sharks have like a clear scale can I I just make dragon jokes? Yeah, yeah, please. You can. I'm not going to do them here. OK. We're not animus.

Some crazy dragon jokes. All the dragons are leaving the audience. For clarification, I do want to know, like, how do you start that conversation with... About dragons? Well, yeah, but I mean, just kind of like, yeah, remember my dragon energy? Like how do I go if I'm looking for that or if I'm, you know, if I'm interested and curious, you know, what do I do?

How you kind of learn about it? Yeah. I think definitely, you know, meditation, honestly, like if you meditate a lot on it. And that's where it's like you kind of hit those higher levels of consciousness. And this stuff kind of gets downloaded into you. But there are a bunch of people who talk about it. Kaya Ra is a spiritual kind of teacher that I really like who talks about, who talks about dragon energy, but I don't know, it's very, very divine feminine oriented. So I'm not sure that I would. I'll think about it. Where's where's the good research?

When I think you have to talk to a psychic. Yeah, okay. Well, there's ways into this stuff. I think like both directions I mean, there's very metaphysical personal, you know You just emptying your brain and things are kind of downloaded into you but there's also like a lot of kind of anthropology and archaeology and other stuff too, like there's you know, I don't see those things in tension, but It seems like a lot of the media about that makes you sort of pick a side. I don't know.

Right. It shouldn't. Yeah. Well, this can be considered like dragon work, you know, like shadow work. But just wanted to. I mean, it's a type of you could definitely use it as a type of shadow work. You know, if it's something that I wouldn't necessarily like. I mean, yeah. If it's something that I wouldn't necessarily like,

I mean, yeah, so yeah, dragon work is like shadow work, kind of getting in touch with that which kind of empowers you out of your trauma. And it sort of just becomes like almost this kind of like friend that you make, that's like your power source that's behind you. And kind of this energy, this flavor of energy that you can feel like, when you're really in that, after you've like kind of this energy, this flavor of energy that you can feel like, you know, when you're really in that, after you've like transmuted a trauma, like really healed from

it and integrated it, there's like, it doesn't just go away, you kind of have this like strength that's like there, that's a different flavor of energy than you've had before. So it's kind of like that almost is like that dragon energy where it's like you kind of transmuted and make it into your power Um, yeah And um, what is it? There's a lot of like method poetic, um, like yungi and men's movements in the 80s that um

Sometimes like we're criticized as being like patriarchal or whatever But most of them like if you look at them The people were really kind of like men are getting toxic and bad in the 80s and Robert Moore and blind, a lot of people eating those. I think we're trying to sort of like basically treat PTSD in ways when the biomedical model was sort of at its height in psychiatry. And there's a lot of stuff there too that I think also can apply to men about like realizing that you sort of have to give up control to have control. And Robert Moore's got a lot of books on writing a dragon as kind of like this task of individuation.

But I mean, ultimately at the base of that, like a lot of things we talk about, you're learning to tell your intuition from your trauma because they come from the same place of the brain and they're easy to mistake one for the other. They feel like this kind of subcortical energy that can possess you, you know, if you don't have a better relationship to it. Yeah, I should, I should too say that, like, when I'm talking about divine feminine energy, I do, I am referencing like that, like the divine feminine energy that's like present in everybody, like, no matter your gender or your sex. And so it's like that in everybody in the two of you as well like that divine feminine energy is like is like your your feminine dragons are up are awakening too. So oh no.

Or yes. Yes. But and in the collective you know it's not just it's not just among women but it empowers I mean it's certainly and like that's women are the art type of, you know, what we're talking about. So it's interesting to like fantasy has this like obsession with dragons, but they also create this problem just from like a plot perspective of like you can't really do anything with them. Like Lord of the Rings is missing the dragon after the Hobbit, because if you have a dragon, it just makes like the whole battle pointless, you know?

Like Game of Thrones sort of hits that problem. Like he has to like retcon something about smog, or he's like, well, Gandalf actually wanted them to get rid of smog, because it was like the last dragon and he didn't want the shadow to get it or something. Like he has to come up with a reason why dragons can't participate in like the big thing. And I mean, like Game of Thrones kind of has that problem

where they're like trying to wrangle armies and like get, you know, re Renaissance era like swords and stuff. And then the dragon is just like an F 16 like it is. It doesn't nothing matters really. Once you have the dragon. So James, you're talking about animism. You have a podcast we did them on the difference in ritual and animism and kind of ritual magic type. Yeah, I think that was a couple months ago, right? I think so. I don't know.

Time. Yeah. I just tap into the ancestral plane and then I don't remember, you know, most of the episodes because it's two in the morning and I'm exhausted. No, it's just something I'm interested in and just kind of getting back to that. I think there's a lot of good things that we think about when we think about animism, the more of a, I'm not saying that's what you're saying, I'm asking. Well, kind of. Yeah. And then like the, the whole, uh, I think, uh, I lost there. I'm lost, but you, you kind of, you're going down the path that I was thinking about, for sure. Where, how did you encounter it?

Or what were you thinking? Uh, actually, uh, I have a couple of clients that are just very interested in it. Um, and I'm like, is that like a personal religious practice or just like as a concept as a concept and kind of both. And so crosses over until I talk into tantric yoga or tantra, which like invites you to see everything in your world as like divine, like can be a way to connect with the divine, like tangible stuff, whereas a lot of like spiritual perspectives and or philosophical perspectives kind of are more aesthetic and get you to disconnect from everything. Tantra kind of is one of is one of these that kind of like connects

you with the physical stuff. And but yeah, animism is yeah, very kind of along those same lines, I think I think yeah, right What are the ideas that are coming up for you in therapy or that you're looking at james when you're thinking of like i'm just Trying to think of how to kind of structure an animism episode or what that would uh, I mean Going to my note. It's kind of like the um, kind of like reconciliation of faith and Like whether the christian god and but being able to see that God everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And then rest, you know, people wrestling like I kind of that reconciliation piece like reconciliation piece where they lost faith coming back into faith, but the new faith is more of like open. It's here is around me. But that they still see that and feel that God, that same God that they saw before, but in different things. It's about wrestling with that. And I think it's pretty neat. And it goes deeper than kind of exploring that with them. But it's kind of bringing that to their attention that I don't, they feel

guilty that they're outside of nature and just feel God and I'm like, in the in see God and everything and in people. And so they feel they wrestle with that. They wrestle with that like an easy feeling of like, can we do you know, can I just allow? Yeah, because like, you know, your God is a, you know, man God, you know, is he physical? Is he not? All those things. And so it's kind of like, again, they're seeing they're feeling this, the president of this God that they knew before lost faith, and then they get back, you know, that faith, but now it's more present in everything. And so it's confusing. That I remember in comparative religion school, really like kind of resisting that urge to put things into the categories of monotheism and polytheism when they were

explaining that and I was just going through it like yeah but what religious tradition is alive where these things are as separate as you're trying to make them I mean there's you know Hinduism which most people would say is polytheistic some of the earliest Vedas are the guy going to ask the gods like how many gods are there really needs like 900 and then he's like then he's like, no, really, how many are there? And Vishnu is like, okay, fine, it's 30. And he's like, no, but really, how many are there? And he's like, it's five.

And they just manifest as more as you need them. And he's like, no, really, how many are there? And it's like, there's one, it's just me. It's all me. You know? And then there's tons of, you know, Christian mystical traditions where you see other people, you know, finding like Gnosticism,

you're finding like the spark of God and other people and like actualizing that by putting it together and building community. Like you can't do that alone. You're seeing the world is sort of alive and like the presence of God. So it's like, I don't know. I get that if you treat it like a country club

and you're like, I'm just gonna drive my chromed out SUV to the mega church and then I'm gonna go to the Cheesecake Factory and, and it's religion as a country club, like, yeah, okay. But when the tradition is actually participatory and sort of breathing, are those things ever separate in anything? I mean, I'm thinking of like the Aztec story where they all get they all get down to, like having started with a mystical tradition that

Was based in this idea that we are all one and we are and you are God and we're all God Mm-hmm and then it then it gets taken over by like a structure of religion that kind of squelches that and it's like no you can't like actually like we can't With God we can't tell him that and like then And then the masculine structures come in and squelch it. But it starts with that kind of realization that people have had over time, like of that same kind of click that your individual clients are having, too,

of that click of like, whoa, we're one. And how does it feel walking around? What is the walking around effect of really living that? how does it feel walking around like what is it? What is the walking around effect of like really living that? What does it feel like? Well, and even Buddhism which is is pretty You know most traditions of Buddhism are pretty atheistic like they're skeptical even of consciousness and say it's this kind of illusion that has been Created but even they have this idea that like you see the divine in one spot intensely so that you can learn to see it everywhere. You know that is the point of the encounter and trying to what is it it may be apocryphal but I've read it a couple times there's that story where the Spanish conquistadors are

like making the Aztec warriors like smash the temple and there's like the stone figures and they smash it and they're like yeah look your gods are gone you have to be Christian now and they're like these are just rocks. The gods have been dead forever. And the conchisters are like, what? Yeah, no, the moon god, this is just, these are pieces of her body. And chaos is always in this cycle. And we just have to sort of do these rituals

to remind ourselves that it works that way. And the Spaniards have no comprehension of that kind of cosmology. You know? Yeah. They were in a different realm of consciousness and it was kind of, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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One of the more frequent things that patients and people in the randomized controlled trials that Hardy conducted report is that they feel more themself, more focused and more effective at getting things done, which can result in all of us having a little bit more time. Yeah. Well, um.

They didn't stop to ask. What other, what other stuff? What are their topics? You know, would be things that you kind of see like emergingly relevant or you just like want to say the profession. I mean, half the things that I write are just like, I'm angry that everybody at school said it worked this way and everybody else, you know, practices are structured this kind of traditional way.

And we're just like, No, it doesn't work that way. Like, we need to go back to a lot of the things that we used to know works better, that we forgot. And even if they're not popular. I don't know. I mean, some of the stuff that I write is it's really about other providers, not, you know, individuals, but just movements and psychology, you know, and the way we apply it clinically. and psychology and the way we apply it clinically. Any big topics or things you feel like would be helpful, James, like, yeah. Yeah, I'm just, well, obviously it's a lot of how, one of the biggest things is like,

yeah, provider burnout is huge right now, whether it's mental health professionals, whether it's physicians, anything, a lot of people who are just providing a service to people. It's trying to get back to the basics of why, you know, why do we do this? What are we in the same path over and over again, as a profession, you know, we do the same things that people burn out before us have burnt out on and, you know, we see ourselves doing it, but how do we, you know, stay and how do we maintain? So kind of exploring that and what we do, what we can do. There's a lot of stuff on that. You know, I've been doing a lot of mindfulness

based stress reduction work with a lot of people that's been really effective in kind of showing them that you got to take back control of something and sometimes that's your body and um and that that kind of alleviates some of that that tension at work but a lot of these things are just around systems and organizations that can't change and that's the biggest thing as well and so it's kind of big relationship talks with inside their organization that helps with that trust but that that stuff is important to me and something I'd like to continue to discuss. A lot of James's practices about medical burnout, executive burnout, kind of helpers, healers, and decision makers, you know, the strain on them. That'd be interesting. Do you see much of that, Alice? I'm not sure your kind of client focus.

Also, I'm not sure your kind of client focus. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit for sure. And I think, but not as much like medical burnout per se. I do see other practitioners, though, so of counselors and social workers. So that stuff does come up. But I think it is, yeah, it's interesting, I think. I think it happens everywhere, but I mean, me and James both worked in a hospital

before we did this. But the thing that I would see was like, they would do a talk or something, but they're like, this is the problem. Everybody knows it. We need to get back to this thing that is self-evidently good. And everyone would be like, yeah, we should do that.

And then you'd go into these meetings and they're like, but the problem that they're all talking about is bureaucracy or the effect of bureaucracy, which sort of tries to, it does two things that I think are like evil and no, no exaggeration. Like I think are evil. Like one, it sort of deflects like all accountability so that no one is at fault. And you, you never can solve the problem because like everybody participated in a little bit Which I don't think is like a good structure and then like to like a lot of bureaucracy I think what it does is like it makes it to where you're taking things that are self-evident and then you're trying to find like empirical

Structures to replicate them or to measure them and you can't't. Like the thing you're trying to do, like competence, you know, a lot of the time is just like not something you can have a checklist for. And what I would see a ton of time is like we'd have the meeting where they talk about the effect of over your, your bureaucratization of these things, and then be like, yeah, this is bad. So let's fix it. And everyone's like, yeah, and they agree and then when you But the only solution is more of the thing that did the problem like you can never just be like Hey, if we all know this is true. Can we just know it and move on? It was like no, but we had to prove it and have a checklist and a screener like that

Look guys, this is just 65 questions to ask somebody to find out if they have anxiety and it was like I I know that Like I know if they have anxiety and it was like I I know that like I Anxiety and by question 30 they're gonna have a lot more, you know like you do you see that at all cuz that that's kind of what I Saw not I don't want to pick on health care because it's not just a health care thing I think it's a human thing. I mean we just talked about it in religion. So it's it's it's everywhere Yeah, well just an example. I had a massage on Friday. It was awesome. And, uh, but I was, you know, I kind of asked, how many, how many bodies do you see before you just have to call it quits in a day? And they're like, four. I'm like, four, you can give four massages and you're done like physically. But they're like, no, that's also mentally like, yeah, so it's, and then, but their, their capacity was at least, you know, like eight bodies a day or, you know, six bodies a day,

but it's gentle down to four. And I think that's what we do is, as professionals in this, right, is that we somehow pull back because we start listening to our bodies and our minds and we're like, we went from, and then we don't take a step back and how do we get from eight to four? You know, we do that and then But yeah, it's outside of the medical that's that's my point is this kind of it's anything that provides a service to someone and in some aspect We're finding the same thing over is how it's decreased capacity and that could be a lot of factors And some of those factors that definitely want to explore. Yeah, that's fascinating. I Don't know how she got a topic or anything that you feel like would make a good episode Hmm. I like this stuff. We're talking about

That's just Yeah, I'm trying to think trying to think what else I mean, I'm kind of we kind of hit on it Like I mean, I think a lot of stuff about like personality disorders and complex PTSD To me maybe I don't know I don't know how much we can get at like, you know I see complex PTSD as being like sort of more of a systemic issue yeah For I mean the arty lang thing of like it's a normal reaction to the world. It's like, yeah, you're it's not insane to be insane in an insane world. RD Lang stuff.

Right. And then I think a lot and then I think a lot of society is just walking around with this baked in trauma from just like how our society is built in and having to and this is like where people feel like they have to like fit into these boxes and molds and do things in disparate particular ways, and that's burning people out. You know, it's like that. But yeah. So I don't know, stuff like that, I think is really where my head's at a lot of the time, I'm trying to think what else. Yeah. What about you? Yeah. How do you see that in your practice? Like the, um, the, just the kind of, cause I see people who come in and they all feel like they're universally not able to deal with something that's just like bad and overwhelming and just being like,

no, I can't deal with that either. And I also talk to, you know, 20 people a week that are saying the same thing. So you're not alone with that. But there's something about the culture that makes us feel alone. Like if you're, if you're having an issue or you're having a problem, that it's not something that everyone else has had. And I think it is. A lot of that is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I'll just say that to people. I mean, I think a lot of the people who seem to have it all together are actually the people that if you got inside their heads, you wouldn't want to be that person. I think they're all people who've had to just really, a lot of people who've had to really fit themselves

into a particular box. And those are the people that a lot of people are kind of venerating or putting up on a pedestal. And it's like, those are the people that a lot of people are kind of venerating or putting up on a pedestal. And it's like, those are the people who are doing things in this certain way that like, if you do that, you're going to get completely burned out. Because it's somebody else's. It's just this very static way of being. Does that, yeah. Yeah. Show me a hero and I'll show you a tragedy, I think is the Fitzgerald line. The what about LLM's AI? I'd like to do one on that. The effects of that on I think when the I don't know if it sounds like you listen to that animism episode James a while ago, but one of the three lines in that ritual and animism episode

that I did based on some of the qualitative stuff tracking the way psychosis shows up to the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. There's these like is like the brain has been relatively modern for a 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. There's these like, the brain has been relatively modern for a long time, like about 2 million years it didn't change. Yeah. So the way that consciousness changed was around things like technology and culture, civilization, and then the unconscious being the sort of compensatory mechanism to help us balance all of the forces we don't notice but need as a counterbalance to whatever civilization has done to consciousness like in any era.

And a lot of the stuff in that episode is about how the metaphors that we can draw through technology change the way that we think about consciousness and ourself. Like there's that meme joke that made the rounds like a couple months ago where somebody was like, you know, like clocks are invented. And then the person's like, God is a clock, or, you know, or buildings are invented. And people are like, God is an architect.

And then, you know, like whatever the internet is invented and people are like, oh, God is a network. Like, but there is something to that. And I think LLMs probably are going to, I'm not a huge fan and I think things like chat GPT will probably fall apart and take a chunk of the economy with them. I don't know if that, I don't know when that will happen.

But, and it may be not, but I just don't see like a ton of, you know, I'm not like an enthusiast kind of tech bro there, but I do think that something like that, just being a part of something that we will be interacting with every day in five years is inevitable. At this point, like we like it or not, like we all kind of have to rely on the latest thing. It's hard to unwind the clock.

But I think that changes the way that we think about ourselves in ways that are important and sometimes nefarious, but also sometimes opportunities for interesting stuff. Like for example, you know, the AIs, they're not AIs. They're basically like search engines that just are predicting the next word in a sequence based on a very complicated algorithm. So that you're getting somebody who said something like what you're trying to say put into a blender

with a whole bunch of other data that's being marked as high quality. And one of the things that does I think is it really separates like what humans can do from what their calculators, basically. And I think that the one thing that's kind of good there is it's like all of the people who are really proud that they had all this information and ability to just regurgitate traditional hierarchical stuff, that isn't a skill that I think is useful. And now that LLMs can just do them in a second, I think that that maybe is a part of like

the structure of our culture that is being seen as like not human, as like a calculator, like not the point and that the intuition and the emotion and the ability to make connections that a computer can't make is maybe gonna be a little bit more celebrated. I'm trying to like find a ray of sunshine in the LLM thing But does that make sense? Like I don't know it seems like there's some places to go with that. Yeah

I was I've been guilty the last, you know week on that trend of Studio Ghibli Type cartoons from photos, you know and adding chat you see recreate some and I was in last week, you know, it melted kind of some of the chat GBTs like servers because people are just doing it often. But then I just, you know, it was kind of realized that like Miyazaki, you know,

founder, Stio Ghibli is just anti AI. It's like, it's take, it took a year for me to, you know, do this one scene, draw it out and animate it and then I don't I haven't seen what if he said anything recently about this trend, but you're just thinking about that of like Yeah, it's something so small just like recreating a photo It's kind of just counter to some by these core thought about the thing itself And now I feel bad about it Have you ever seen the clip of Miyazaki like going to the computer school like a couple years ago for like their thesis or whatever?

It's pretty it's pretty painful to watch because he tradition he's like very he's kind of a difficult guy and Won't comment on his own work and when he does it tends to be like kind of misdirection almost like yeah but there's like a clip where there's these PhD students at a Japanese technical university and they're like this algorithmically does whatever and they've made like some kind of zombie with no head but it's like walking with its legs or some there's walking with its like arms and it's like this mutant creature and there it's like for a video game from camera and they're all like really proud

of Miyazaki's just like if you want to make horrible things like this go ahead but I think and But yeah, he is not, and he ends with him kind of saying, I think humanity's lost faith in itself. Like we're kind of trying to create something that saves us instead of saving ourselves. And I think that was almost 10 years old, that clip now. I'm sure he's not a fan of his work being able to be, for you to be able to plug in. You know? I don't think he would be happy about that.

I'll be the dissenting voice because I actually really like Chat2PG. But I think, but I have some beliefs about I have some views there because I think it I think you have to already have like know a lot in order for it to be useful in the way that it can be very useful. It's like you have to know exactly what you're what you're trying to find and like, I don't know it it's, it's interesting though, once you get it to kind of. No, I think that's true is you have to know what it is. I mean, I use I use quad AI and chat GBT all the time. They're great for organizing information. They're great for summarization. I think they can't make intellectual leaps or kind of ideological connections between information in the way that a human can. or kind of ideological connections between information in the way that a human can.

What if it can? What if it can? What if it does? Yeah. Are we in trouble then? I think they'll get better at it. But the problem right now is that like, they're not really generative.

They're iterative because they're discovering things that were connections somebody else already made. Even if it doesn't know why that was there or who to figure it out, it's there in the probability of language. Yeah. But they're essentially kind of like probability management engines that are going to be designed to mess with the probability of language or code based on something else that already exists. But without training data, without a vacuum, they can't really do anything, you know, in the leap of consciousness. And I don't know, maybe this is a bigger episode, but all of the theories of consciousness that I like, like Demacia and Gozniaga and the older kind of like

Jungian people, it's about it being a result of like opposing forces that do not get along and have these contradictions that can't be resolved logically and so we need like a metaphorical or a symbol based system in order to like understand it and I think It's that computers have multiple inputs that disagree a lot of the time But what they don't have is like a second layer of understanding that can get outside of language to help understand the limitations of language I think that's something that is uniquely human that you need a very layered processor to do that. I don't even know how you would code something like a subconscious, you know,

but maybe, maybe that's a bigger, bigger episode. Yeah. That's a whole big, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of, a lot there for sure. I think Alice is going to side with the Terminator. That's what that was. No, I think that as long as you're in the light, as long as then you're fine, it's going to be fine. It's going to be like it can only augment, I think,

what we can do. I think there's terrible stuff that's, but I think it's, it could solve cancer like that, like stuff like that. I mean, and there's things like that once you realize like how it can consolidate like research and all this stuff that, like, it could take it like three days to do that, to like analyze all the research ever and be like, here's how to cure herpes. No, I think that's it. I think the database is for like the law and for like published research, that's where those will shine.

Cause they can sort of like filter the information and discard what's not helpful very quickly in a way that even the search engine can't. It is funny though that all of the when those came out like immediately all of the like big political like Harvard Yale figures started trying to cancel each other because it came out that like all of their PhDs were just like plagiarized basically when LL ones were invented you could detect that super quickly and they all tried to cancel each other for like a second. And then they moved on because they realized like,

you can't cancel everyone in academia who did plagiarism because it's everybody. It's kind of like when the opposite team wants to impeach the other people's president, and then they're like, or not impeaching, but like do legal stuff. And then the system's kind of like, yeah, no, we don't do that at that level because we can't actually prosecute a president

because then, I don't know. Well, that sounds good. I know you'll get some other stuff coming up we can wrap up unless you all have anything that, anything else to kind of throw in? that um anything else to kind of throw in? I don't think so I mean I think it'll be fun. Yeah. Sounds good anyone want to take the lead on any of those or have like uh anything that jumps out you want to do next next month we can uh we'll see we'll play right here. Yeah we'll

play right here I definitely want the dragons. I want the dragon stuff. You know, all right. Maybe the dragons will be the next one. We'll look on a dragon episode. Oh, gosh. Real spiritual. I don't know if y'all are ready for how we that gets. You never know. You know, probably dragging all the way down. I'm like the comic relief. So you know, I'm just here for the fun times. I thought that was me. Oh, this might be Solomon. It's Solomon for sure. Oh, I've got one. I've got one that I forgot about until now. So when you have a kid, you find yourself reading like the same children's book,

like 900 times until they get tired of it. And I think it would be really funny to do like a children's book episode where you like, because what happens is like they become this mystical tome that like it becomes like a Buddhist meditation of reading like path of bunny, like Oh my god, so many of them though. But like to do like a children's book podcast where you just like wildly overanalyze like these things like Pete the cat, cat you ever seen Pete the cat? Yeah, it turned into like this industry where it has all these other characters and stuff

But the original book is just that the cat's buttons are one by one taken away And as the cat's buttons are taken away It just walks along and sings its song and it doesn't care and even at the end When it all of its buttons are taken away, it still has a belly button So it is content and like analyzing that like a retelling of the book of Job or something Analyze the giving tree let's do that. Yeah, or One of my favorites that I rediscovered

What is it? I feel the top scuffy the tugboat is One I don't know that one. It's an old like one of the old like golden books But it's a tugboat a toy tugboat who gets is one of the old like golden books, but it's a tugboat, a toy tugboat who gets taken. The man at the toy store took, takes it home to his son who then plays within the bathtub and the tugboats like this is the best kind of life a tugboat could have.

And then he dreams bigger and ends up getting the boy puts him in the stream and then he gets washed out to stream. And then he keeps saying, this is, and everything along the river keeps getting bigger and bigger and more industrialized and he's sailing along and doing his little toot toot but then there's big big ones eventually he ends up back at the water and he's about to go out to sea and then there's the man and the little boy right at the end of the dock like there to there to like get him right at the end of the dock, like there to, there to like get him right at the end. It's like a very, I don't know. There's so many children's books that I like read

and I'm like, whoa, that's, it's actually very, very profound. Yeah, it does sound like a dissolution under the integration of consciousness. Yeah, it really is. Cause he's all of a sudden like, oh, it's kind of scary out here. Like, but I'm just going to toot my tugboat horn

and keep going. Wow. Yeah. I think that'd be a fun episode. Maybe we have to wait till James has kids. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe. I don't know. I love kids. I've worked in preschool often over a long time. I swear there's like a whole subplot that's implied in Curious George Goes to the Hospital, where like, I think the man in the yellow hat maybe has like a child on the side or like an unknown, like there's too many coincidences in various George Goode hospitals. So we don't have time to go through that one. Yeah. Betsy, the girl at the hospital, she's the only one in the whole series that has the same color tie as the man in the yellow hat. Her dress is the same as his tie with the dots.

Wow. Gosh, you are going really down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole there. as the man that her dress is the same as his tie with the dots. Wow. Gosh, you are going really down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Yeah, there's some there's some great posters, like, because they're very like, I guess they're written in the 50s or 60s. But like, there's like so much that there's like these posters on the outside of the hospital to say, come get your leg leg x-rayed right now in this hospital. Like, it's just an advertisement for people on the street. Let's go get up. Yeah, they did that.

They threw x-rays around like my godmother could remember when just to be like high tech, when you would go to the shoe store, they would x-ray your foot just to be like, oh, we have to get the fit right for your boot or whatever. X-ray your foot. Yeah, completely. Yeah, there was no reason it was live. It was like you put it into a box. It wasn't even a film x-ray. So just tons of gamma radiation for no reason. Yeah. Just like, yeah. When did you say that was? She was old.

I mean, she passed away. So I don't have to look it up, but I did Google it. Like there was a period where they to upsell you. They would be like, oh yeah, this shoe is best for you. No, for real. I mean, good shoes are like, you know, one, two, three, four, five. You can't like, like, you don't need to x ray the boats. And then they came up with like, like the metal thing that you just measure your feet

on. That was the advanced technology. Well, it's been great connecting and we'll look forward to getting into these. We'll kind of continue to do some of the interviews and then hopefully once a month or every two weeks we can connect and do a roundtable, you know, and sometimes bring a friend. We should do a D&D episode on like the collaborative storytelling and then have a Kearney back on because that Halloween episode with the psychology of death, that was one of the more the and all of the October ones. We could do another version. The artwork in my office that's like a formaldehyde bottle came from a listener who drew it from that episode.

There's something on the side of it that... Yeah, but that's what it is. They sent it. What were the other ones? I don't remember. I guess I don't ever see the release schedule. You were saying there are other October episodes? You mean the Scary Stories ones? Yeah, I think I don't ever see the release schedule. You were saying there are other October episodes. You mean the scary stories ones? Yeah, I think some ghost ones. Oh yeah, we could go there.

Yeah. Yeah, we definitely, I'm glad we've got multiple contributors now. We need to do, this October we'll do like a cool, like ghosts and hauntings episode. Anything paranormal in there. Yeah. Sounds good.

Yeah. Well, thank you guys so much. Check out the website at www.gettherapybirmingham.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you know, we sell the the t-shirts and the bumper stickers and stuff, but those are mostly at cost. But what would be really helpful, and it might help you out too, as I recently found out that I'm the heir to a kingdom in Africa, but I can't afford the taxes on the inheritance. So I think that if you guys want to go to our Patreon for just a thousand dollars, you know, I can give you a million if you'll just go ahead. Parody, parody, please don't do that. We don't have a Patreon. So it doesn't matter much. Yeah, anyway, like I'm a child. People are gonna like set up a Patreon now. Yeah.

Oh, no. Yeah, I think they have to have my banking information. But yeah, so anyway, thank you guys so much and we will see you next week. All right. Bye, guys. Bye. 🎵