Latest / This Jungian Life Podcast / SPEAKING TRUTH: Is it Venom or a Cure?

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SPEAKING TRUTH: Is it Venom or a Cure? · This Jungian Life Podcast

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  Speaker 1: so much.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: Hello, fellow Jungians, and welcome back to our podcast. Today,
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: the three of us take on the idea of speaking truth.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: We're all familiar with the famous adage, speaking truth to power,
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: but most of us don't know where the idea originated
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: and the deep spiritual hope it initially carried. Most of
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: us have never considered the essential differences between truth, facts,
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: and reality, which creates so much confusion. that were often
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: left without firm ground to stand on. Today, Will revealed
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: the ways that sometimes truth can be a Trojan horse
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: filled with hostility, how facts are weaponized when infused with
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: the spirit of accusation, how psychological insight can link us
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: with inner truth even if it initially makes us sick
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: to hear it, and how truth acts so differently in
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: the Cassandra Complex and the Scapegoat Complex. At the end,
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: we analyze a dream submitted by a listener that exposes
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: the power of the archetypal death mother and a final
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: image of hope to move beyond it. So I think
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: taking on this topic of speaking truth evokes an enormous...
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: social context that has gotten a lot of steam, this
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: fantasy around speaking truth to power. And I think many
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: people don't really know where that came from. And there's
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: been a real concept creep about that. I think there's
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: much we can say about the difference between truth and facts.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: I think there's much we can say about speaking truth
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: as a kind of Trojan horse, that under the guise
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: of speaking truth, people can deliver cruelty. They can deliver
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: all kinds of antisocial impulses. And it's masked with, well,
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: I'm just somebody who likes to tell the truth. So
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: I thought I would just start with that phrase, speaking
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: truth to power. And just because I think most people
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: don't realize it, that That phrase was popularized by the Quakers.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: And part of the great mission of speaking truth to
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: power in its origination was a plea for peace, but
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: not for interpersonal or social conflict that the Quakers had
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: traditionally been conscientious objectors when they were drafted often in Korea, Vietnam,
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: They would go and volunteer to work in the medical environment.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: They would courageously go and drag wounded soldiers off of
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: the fields. They would not carry a gun as part
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: of their holding to their own sense of values and truth.
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: But somewhere around 1955, they published their first pamphlet where
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: they specifically said, Speak Truth to Power, A Quaker Search
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: for an Alternative. to violence. And this hope that speaking
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: to power was not going to frighten people in power,
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: but was going to open their hearts. Because the truth
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: that they were hoping to deliver was, for them, the
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: truth of compassion, the truth of forgiveness, the truth that
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: human beings can exist in a kind of peaceful discourse
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: And it was not designed to tear politicians apart or
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: destroy people's reputations. It was to try to open something up.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: Because the fantasy of higher truth is that higher truth
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: has a corrective, medicinal, and healing potential. Now, one could
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: argue whether or not that worked. But the spirit of
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: it lets us know something about the delivery because the
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: information that we wish someone to take hold of and
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: the spirit that is infusing what is said makes all
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: the difference, I think.
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: I didn't know that, that that was sort of the
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: back story behind that phrase. And what I find moving
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: about it Is the spirit of kindness a spirit of
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: a kind of reconciliation, a gentleness, the compassion that you
• 6:56
  Speaker 4: talked about? I'm thinking about how now it has become
• 7:00
  Speaker 4: somewhat weaponized of, well, I'm going to tell these authorities
• 7:06
  Speaker 4: this for their own good. They need to know. And
• 7:10
  Speaker 4: is that truth or is that... Like a Trojan horse,
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: it looks good on the outside. It purports to be
• 7:20
  Speaker 4: something that it's not. But that inside, it's really a
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: vehicle for competition or aggression or dominating, winning.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Well, and I think we're right into the obvious question
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: that gets begged as soon as we bring up this
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: topic is, what is truth? And how do you know
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: what truth is? And so adding to what you guys
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: were just saying, I mean, I think that the belief
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: that we have truth is a kind of inflation. So
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: anytime you think that you have the truth, whether that's
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: a religious truth or a political truth or even an
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: interpersonal truth, there's some inflation around that. And I think
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: that if you, you know, you can lean into that
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: and go very, very far, and then you become a
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: proselytizer and a zealot. But I think we always have
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: to be a little bit cautious about believing that we
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: have the truth. And this phrase comes to mind, which
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: I appreciate, of intellectual humility, which means almost kind of
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: cultivating doubt. There's some lovely... balancing point between letting ourselves
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: know what we know and being able to share that
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: in a way that is meaningful, not deny what we know,
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: but at the same time always hold it a little
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: lightly so that we're ready to be corrected or have
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: our minds changed somehow or, or open to new input.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: Well, I think, um, Even that shift of attitude is,
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: I think, wonderful to step back and create some space
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: between stimulus and response, frankly. I'm sure that this is
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: the truth and it's mobilized in me and I want
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: to send that truth out across the dinner table to
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: Aunt Betty who always gets my goat or to the
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: politician or the school board or a spouse. So there's
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: lots of truths, right? There's lots of facts that we know,
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: but not all of them become a kind of screaming
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: missile that's moving across time and space. So just as
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: you're saying this, to step back and regard the plan,
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: you know, the plan of attack by truth and be
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: able to ask, what's the fuel in this missile? Even
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: if the missile is correct, Aunt Betty talks too much,
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: and that's a fact. But what's fueling the missile is
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: that I'm an introvert, and I just can't stand that
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: people don't shut their mouths once in a while and
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: just breathe. Or maybe the content of what Aunt Betty
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: says is so upsetting to me subjectively because I've got
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: an issue about the topic. That's the fuel. But it's
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: going to come across the room like, you always talk
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: all the time over Thanksgiving. That's a very benign example.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: There are much more heated things that happen. I get
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: fired across a holiday dinner table than that.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: And out in the collective of people, you know, writing in,
• 10:53
  Speaker 4: firing things, tweeting, I don't know what it's called these days.
• 10:59
  Speaker 5: Exing.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: Exing, yes.
• 11:01
  Speaker 4: But I like, you know, if we're the fuel in
• 11:04
  Speaker 4: the missile that purports to be truth, but it's attacking.
• 11:11
  Speaker 4: And I like what you were saying, Lisa, about holding
• 11:15
  Speaker 4: it lightly. And Joseph, what you said about taking a
• 11:22
  Speaker 4: pause between the stimulus and the reaction or response. And
• 11:28
  Speaker 4: the lens I would add to this is, what are
• 11:32
  Speaker 4: you feeling? As if you're feeling activated, annoyed, frustrated, angry, impatient,
• 11:41
  Speaker 4: a hundred other things, then you're not holding it lightly.
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: And you might need to take a little more time
• 11:48
  Speaker 4: between what happened and how or if you're going to respond.
• 11:54
  Speaker 4: Is it really necessary to snap at Aunt Betty? Does
• 11:59
  Speaker 4: that help her? Does it help the interaction around this
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: purported Thanksgiving table, let's say? Does it help you? So
• 12:10
  Speaker 4: I'm also opening up the you know, what I need
• 12:14
  Speaker 4: to do because I'm activated versus do I really want
• 12:18
  Speaker 4: this to land with, with aunt Betty? Uh, do I
• 12:23
  Speaker 4: want to affect her? How do I want to really
• 12:25
  Speaker 4: impact her? And then in that case, what might be
• 12:30
  Speaker 4: a more empathic or even just strategic comment or intervention of,
• 12:38
  Speaker 4: you know, oh, aunt Betty, you know, uh, Come in
• 12:41
  Speaker 4: here into the kitchen with me for, you know, get
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: her away from the table for a minute. But, you know,
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: are we really in choice?
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. You know,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: I want to pick up on the Aunt Betty example
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: here because, Joseph, you mentioned facts. And I think there
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: is kind of a difference between the facts and truth
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: because facts are, well, first of all, you know, very fungible.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Facts are fungible. But they also are context dependent. And
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: the fact that Betty talks too much is actually an opinion, right?
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: It might be our truth, but there isn't maybe an
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: absolute truth on that. And I'm thinking about sort of
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: applying this to collective problems. And I'll pick up something
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: that is very controversial and about which I know very
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: little because that is probably an easier place for me
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: to go in some ways. But let's look at... immigration.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: So there are very strong feelings about it that tend
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: to be very polarized. But my guess is that if
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: you really dug down into it, if you read lots
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: of good quality writing on it from across the political spectrum,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: if you went down to our southern border and spoke
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: to migrants coming across and spoke to border guards and
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: If you talk to the social services people in the
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: cities that are providing services for the new immigrants, if
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: you really did a deep dive, you might find something,
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: I think, approaching truth. And it would be very layered
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: and complex, and it would be hard to summarize it
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: in just a few words. Well, maybe not. Maybe you
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: could summarize it in a sentence or two, but it
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: would be a sentence or two with just a lot
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: of information. And I want to say kind of deep
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: listening behind it. I believe that in many of these
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: complex topics that plague our collective today, you can find
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: something like truth behind. but it requires an open mind
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: and a lot of deep research and a willingness sometimes
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: to have your mind changed. But it's not easy to find.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: And I think one of the great problems actually that
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: concerns me greatly is that in the collective today, we
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: don't have a kind of arbiter of truth. So I
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: don't know, 30 or 40 years ago, It used to
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: be that we basically felt that the mainstream media, the CBS, NBC,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: and ABC, because before the age of the 24-hour news cycle,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. And
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: you basically got more or less the same story no
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: matter where you went. And there was an effort to
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: cover all sides of something. Now, I'm not saying that
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: that meant that these reports were truthful, but I do
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: think that as a collective in the United States, say,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: we all felt like we basically knew what the truth was.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: We might have different opinions about what was going on,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: let's say, in Vietnam, but I don't think that there
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: were wildly different versions of of what we understood to
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: be true. And of course, what we did understand to
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: be true was to some extent doctored and covered up,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: and now we know more. But the sacrifice of that
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: kind of collective sense of at least we're all dealing
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: with the same facts, I think it's a little dangerous.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: It worries me. I'm really.
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: thinking about how we create narratives. We're meaning makers, we're storytellers.
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: We take what we observe, sense in any way, and
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: make meaning out of it. So it's always a narrative,
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: or almost always. We just have to string things together.
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: And I'm thinking about how sometimes they do these experiments
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: where they have a bunch of people witness the same thing.
• 17:08
  Speaker 4: And people saw different things. And whether we have or
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: have lost, as a collective, a sense of a common
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: narrative that, you know, maybe most people in America agreed
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: that Walter Cronkite could be trusted. And how much do
• 17:27
  Speaker 4: we infuse narratives with our own subjectivity, passions, beliefs, claims
• 17:35
  Speaker 4: to moral authority?
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: That's interesting. I found myself thinking about that Kurosawa film, Rashomon,
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: where the same event gets told from all these different
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: ways and it's totally different. Maybe what we had in
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: the age of Walter Cronkite is we had someone telling us,
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: this is the version, this is the correct version. And
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: although it may not have always been true, it had
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: this utility that we all had the same truth, I guess.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think maybe what we're saying is, you know,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: sort of this bedeviling question, what is truth? And is
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: it ever really knowable or discoverable about sort of an,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's different kinds of truth. Like there's like
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: a religious truth. That's something totally different. But just even
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: truth in terms of like world events that we might
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: all need to comment on or have an opinion on.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's just been such fraying around that. in
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: recent decades to a somewhat alarming degree, I think. And
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: I think this is part of the influence of social
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: media we're going to have to contend with as a species,
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: what it's done to truth, even while acknowledging that truth
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: itself is slippery.
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: Multiple realities.
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: I find us going back and forth, not necessarily saying
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: it explicitly, in this dance between truth and fact. So
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: maybe we can go back to that and toy with
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: that a little bit. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: So just in terms of defining, facts, generally speaking, are
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: about an objective reality. There's statements, there's an attempt to
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: be objective, but also they are verifiable. Not all things
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: that people say are truth can necessarily be verifiable and
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: that They can be proven as true or false if
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: there is enough logical or empirical evidence that's provided. Facts
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: tend to be specific and concrete. They're related to very
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: specific details or data points. Often, and this is very important,
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: in terms of this movement from the Age of Enlightenment,
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: this separation of truth and fact was a central tenant
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: of the Age of Enlightenment, is that facts are independent
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: from beliefs. That whether or not someone believes in a
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: particular fact does not change it. People can believe or
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: not believe in gravity, and yet gravity is still verifiable.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: And that facts can be empirically verified, that many people
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: can observe them consistently, it can be experimented with, and
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: it is consistent in itself. And this is very much
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: part of the world of scientific inquiry. And there's even
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: a different etymology. The etymology of the word fact is
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: different from the etymology of the word truth, although we
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: do get them mixed up in our culture, which is
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: not a good thing. That in Latin, the word fact
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: comes from factum, which means a thing done or performed.
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: And so consequently, it is the concreteness of it. And
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: we get the word factory from the Latin factum. Because
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: it's a place where things are done and they are
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: manufactured and they are objects that are put together and
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: something comes out at the end. And it doesn't require
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: any belief or fantasy or subjectivity. It's a factum. So
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: the etymology of the word truth apparently comes from Old
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: English and even Norse language. And it means faithful. or trustworthy,
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: or that the speaker is honest.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I looked up the etymology too, Joseph, and I
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: found much what you said. And I think one of
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: the other words, faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, veracity, pledge, covenant,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: good faith. And I thought, yes, that somehow it requires
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: a bit of faith to find the truth. Because as
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: you're making this excellent point that it's it isn't the
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: same as a fact and there is an element of
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: faith in it.
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: My sense of reading it was that it has much
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: to do with the speaker. The speaker has a relationship
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: to the listener. There's an implication that the speaker of
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: truth has a certain commitment to the wellbeing of the
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: person who is listening. You know, someone, may, may, may
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: come up. Let's say, you know, it's the 1600s, you know,
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: and a doctor who is full of goodwill says, you know,
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: the truth is that you have, you know, this bileless
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: humor and, you know, we're going to, we're going to
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: put leeches on you. And if that doesn't work, we'll
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: do a bit of bleeding.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: And that in the, well, but seriously, you know, it's
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: a great point.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: There is a faith. There is an absolute alignment with healing,
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: with hope, with the well-being of the person that they're
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: speaking to, and that because the other person feels, hopefully,
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: feels held in the goodwill and the beneficent attitude of
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: the physician that we're like, well, okay. Where the Age
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: of Enlightenment was so helpful to all of us is
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: that When this was subjected to an empirical fact-based analysis,
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: we don't know whether people really got much better unless
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: they had some kind of a hematocrit excess problem in
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: the blood that may not have been helpful at all
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: to people. So factually, it was a real problem. But
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: in terms of the faithfulness and the beneficent intention, there
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: was truth there. in it, rightly so.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, yeah. And I think it's a great differentiation.
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: So truth often involves a subjective interpretation. It often has
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: a more philosophical lens to it, and it involves a personal,
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: often moral and existential understandings. It has to do with
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: interpretations of life and reality, which goes dead to what
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: you were saying about the narrative. It often has a
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: more abstract and broader lends to it. A statement like
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: freedom is essential to human flourishing, and that will be
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: taken as a truth, but it is a philosophy, and
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: it has an ethical context that is a narrative that
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: sits well.
• 24:49
  Speaker 4: What I'm thinking about now goes back to what you
• 24:53
  Speaker 4: said at the beginning, Joseph, about the Quakers and the
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: compassion that with which that phrase speaking truth to power
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: was infused and the associations with the root meaning of truth,
• 25:12
  Speaker 4: of goodwill and faithfulness and so on. So there's a
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: relational component to truth. I may have my own truth
• 25:24
  Speaker 4: about whether I believe something or hold to some value.
• 25:30
  Speaker 4: But when I put it out to other people or
• 25:34
  Speaker 4: an other person, where am I in that relationship? Am
• 25:42
  Speaker 4: I taking into consideration what my own inner state is,
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: that it's a basic state of a kind of kind
• 25:53
  Speaker 4: neutrality and an awareness of how I may impact the other?
• 25:59
  Speaker 4: And then how do I frame it? And it's a
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: reiteration of what I said before, but I'm thinking about
• 26:07
  Speaker 4: what we have internally between us and us, so to speak,
• 26:14
  Speaker 4: and then what we do interactionally and relationally. And I
• 26:19
  Speaker 4: think that's where what purports to be truth gets to
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: be pretty sticky, right? is we think we have to
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: put it out there and communicate it, whether it's our
• 26:33
  Speaker 4: mythical Aunt Betty or something on social media, and that
• 26:38
  Speaker 4: we lose sight of the fact that there's a relationship.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Well, I think part of the problem with social media
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: is there is no relationship. I agree.
• 26:48
  Speaker 4: And yet there is, and that some public figures that
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: have been excoriated and hounded and And criticized. Somewhere out there,
• 27:00
  Speaker 4: there is that public figure.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: There's a real world effect.
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: Exactly. Can you imagine what the effect on this public
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: person might be to have hundreds or even thousands of
• 27:16
  Speaker 4: people righteously proclaiming the truth about him or her? And
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: it impacts them.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: So I want to maybe flip what you've said a
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: little bit, Deb, and just poke into kind of almost
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: the opposite place. Because I'm also thinking about the subject
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: of truth for me as I was considering this topic
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: this week really made me think about what we do
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: as therapists. Because in some sense, truth is essential to
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: the project of psychotherapy. And there's a question about finding
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: the truth, finding the truth for the client, and that
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: part of what we do, hopefully, is create a space
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: in which that can be queried. You know, what is
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: the truth for this person? And I do think that
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: that could be a way of describing a large part
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: of what we do in therapy is kind of hunting
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: around for that person's truth. But then there's also a
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: slightly more specific way, I think, that truth comes up
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: and something I've just been thinking about. Someone the other
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: day shared with me a quote, and I wish I
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: could give it attribution, but I don't have all the
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: chapter and verse on it, but it was, It was lovely.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: He's talking about psychotherapy. The person said that psychotherapy cures
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: by truth. It is a truth cure because it is
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: where you confront the truth about yourself that you may
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: have been defending against. And in that sense, part of
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: what the therapist or the analyst does is reflect back
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: a truth to the person. So if we as the
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: therapist are afraid to share a truth that we know
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: about the person, then we are arguably not very helpful
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: to that person. And I'm, I'm going to use a
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: somewhat extreme example, which is loosely based on a very
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: old case, but I'm fictionalizing it massively, but this is,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: you know, would have been something that happened decades ago anyway.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: So I had a client who was, sort of a
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: middle-aged man and he smelt. He didn't shower apparently or
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: do laundry very often. And it wasn't a little smell.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: It was deeply, deeply pungent. And, you know, you knew
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: when he walked into the clinic because you could, I mean,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: from the time he opened the door, the kind of
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: the whole, it was a relatively small clinic and the
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: whole place smelled. I knew before I opened my office
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: door that he would be sitting in the waiting room
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: because I could smell him. And he was, you know, not,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: as you might imagine, not a very high functioning person,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: but he was looking for work. He was hoping to work,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: you know, in a kind of service job. And he
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: was a little confused as to why he was not
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: very appealing to potential employers. And so I had this dilemma.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: Did I deliver this truth to him? You know, Karen
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: Morota writes about this in one of her books. She
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: says that as adults, you know, kids tend to give
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: each other very crude feedback like, oh, you're bossy or
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: you smell or whatever. but we stop doing that at
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: some point. We develop kind of social graces and then
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: we don't share that kind of feedback with one another.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: So we will sometimes get people in our practices, and
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: this is an extreme example that I'm using with this guy,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: but there are other times too. We see maybe something
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: that someone is doing interpersonally because it's happening with us,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: let's say. Let's say we have a client who comes
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: in and we can't get a word in edgewise. And
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: then this person is dismayed because their personal life is
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: not going well and they don't have a lot of friends.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: And we're sitting over in our chair thinking, I know why,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: you know, but do we share that with them? And
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: what Morota says is that the consulting room is one
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: of the few places where we can get this kind
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: of very basic real life feedback on how we are
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: coming across to other people. And that it really is
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: the analyst's job to find a way to deliver that.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: So back to my hypothetical case about the man who
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: didn't smell very good. It was very difficult for me
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: to bring this up. And it felt like information that
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: would be genuinely useful to this person. Not only would
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: it be useful to this person, but it did matter
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: to me. Because it was difficult to sit with him
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: in a closed space for 50 minutes. I'm thinking about,
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: you know, we've been talking about how sharing truth, we
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: can turn that into kind of a weapon. But I
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: also want to say that we don't do ourselves or
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: each other any favors when we hold back too much either.
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: I think that really beautifully, Lisa, you brought up two domains,
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: and I'm going to keep using this metaphor of truth
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: and fact, because I think it's so helpful to me.
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: So there are times when, as an analyst, we can
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: be factful. And factful information helps, ideally helps the client
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: orient to what is in the outer world, which includes
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: other people, the other person of the analyst. So to
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: be said, excuse me, but I've been suffering greatly It
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: seems that you're not bathing before you come to the session.
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: It's distracting. It makes it difficult for me to concentrate.
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: I'm concerned about other people's experience that come into the
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: office afterwards. I'm concerned about your health, for that matter,
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: that there are consequences to not being hygienic. And what
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: is your relationship to this information? Truth, from a psychoanalytic standpoint,
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: I think has more to do with linking the ego
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: to awareness. lost information in the unconscious. So the psychoanalytic
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: interpretation could be, and I have done this actually, is
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: to say, so-and-so, I'm thinking about the fact that your
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: mom decided to leave the home when everybody was very,
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: very young, that you and your siblings wound up actually
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: raising each other as dad was at work all the time.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: One of the things that we learn from our mothers
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: are how to bathe, how to brush our teeth. Many
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: of us later in life have memories. Like, you don't
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: leave the house without brushing your teeth or brushing your hair,
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: or you take a shower every morning. And so what
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: I'm suspecting is that when you look inside yourself, that
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: there is a blank space, that there is not a
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: figure that says, you know, sweetheart, you have to take
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: a shower before you go to school. There's no way
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: out of it. You have to do that. And so
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: Because there is that lacuna, that means that you and
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: I need to sit down and make a plan as
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: if you had a really wonderful mother giving you good
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: advice in there. And here's some things that we can
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: think about. So that could be a kind of psychoanalytic truth.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: There's something missing in the unconscious, and it requires knowledge
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: and an understanding of that. And there are also facts
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: about the implications of this in the outer world. Of course,
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: there are other examples of things that are split off
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: in the unconscious, which are, I think, a little more
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: dramatic than what I was saying or more difficult to
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: bring forward. But from a psychoanalytic standpoint, truth is that
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: the fullness of the experience has not been splintered, and
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: falseness is the partiality of the experience, the splitting of
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: the experience, which then leaves us confused.
• 35:41
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking about, to complicate things even more than they
• 35:46
  Speaker 4: already are, the difference, or is there a difference, between
• 35:51
  Speaker 4: truth and reality? The difference between, you know, this client
• 35:58
  Speaker 4: who was unhygienic. Is there a truth about that? It
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: might be about the lack of an internal good enough
• 36:08
  Speaker 4: mother relationship. that has become internalized and says to this person,
• 36:14
  Speaker 4: take care of yourself. You are important. You know, how
• 36:18
  Speaker 4: your hair looks and whether your clothes are clean matters
• 36:21
  Speaker 4: because you matter. That might be a truth. And then
• 36:27
  Speaker 4: there's the reality, which is this person's body odor is
• 36:34
  Speaker 4: impacting the therapist's And one might, by extension, well imagine
• 36:40
  Speaker 4: all kinds of other people with whom he came in contact,
• 36:45
  Speaker 4: including prospective employers. And that the reality, as there's a
• 36:52
  Speaker 4: science fiction writer, Philip Dick, who says reality is that which,
• 36:56
  Speaker 4: even if you don't believe in it, doesn't go away.
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: And so I'm thinking, here's a reality that needs to
• 37:04
  Speaker 4: be That simply needs to be addressed, stated, recognized, acknowledged.
• 37:13
  Speaker 4: This is the what is. And of course, there's a
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: subjectivity to it. That if I were the therapist, I
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: would be affected. That matters too. So again, there's that
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: relational component of how do we impact each other.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: There's this phrase that comes up for me a lot
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: about letting ourselves know what we know. And I think
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: it probably comes up for me because I think throughout
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: my life I've struggled with that sometimes, you know, where
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: I've known something and then I let myself not know
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: it because it's inconvenient to know it somehow. It's going
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: to make someone else uncomfortable or I'm going to have
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: to make a change. And so, again, this is another
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: thing that sometimes we do in therapy is that we
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: help someone know what they know. You know, Mark Winborn,
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: our colleague and our teacher, has a book, put it
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: in the book list. It's a book on interpretation. And
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: there's this part in it that I really like where
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: he talks about supervising relatively new therapists. And he'll say
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: to them sometimes as they're going through a session, what
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: did you know at this point in the session? And
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: when he asked the question that way, The supervisee will
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: be able to say, well, you know, I knew I'm
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: making this up. I knew that he was really angry,
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: but wasn't in touch with his anger. And then Mark
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: will say, well, why didn't you say that? And I
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: love that thought that at any moment we could sort
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: of say, what do I know right now? You know,
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: and tying it to what you said, Deb, what is
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: the truth at this moment? What is the truth that
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: I have in my hand? What is the reality?
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: And then can you let yourself hold on to it?
• 38:59
  Speaker 4: And, you know, really it goes, I'm going back to
• 39:02
  Speaker 4: what you said before, Lisa, about holding it lightly, that
• 39:06
  Speaker 4: in the consulting room, you know, as a therapist, I
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: might know any, I know how I feel. I know
• 39:16
  Speaker 4: that this person has body odor. I know these things,
• 39:20
  Speaker 4: but I'm holding it. I hope I'm holding it lightly.
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: and that my intention is for the client. This is
• 39:32
  Speaker 4: something that if I reflect on it or provide some
• 39:36
  Speaker 4: information that I hope he or she will be able
• 39:41
  Speaker 4: to use.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: But let me take it outside the consulting room for
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: a minute because let's say there's a very similar dynamic interpersonally.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: Let's say that one person always finds herself accommodating herself,
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: let's say to her partner. At some level, she knows this.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: She knows that her partner is being boorish or unkind
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: or kind of routinely cruel. And she keeps on not
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: letting herself know that. And we could flip the sexes.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: This happens in both directions. And she just sort of
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: kind of lets it continue. And at what point do
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: you share your truth? And I agree with you. I mean,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: you want the other person to be able to use it,
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: but sometimes it is a matter of protecting yourself. And that, frankly,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: might be with a client. I mean, sometimes clients treat
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: their therapist terribly. And it might be very important to
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: share the truth of your emotional experience with someone.
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: Either in the consulting room or interpersonally. And the hope
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: is that it would influence the system positively.
• 40:50
  Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: That the other person might be able to make use
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: of it, but that it would also allow a more
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: authentic relationship.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: Even if it's wounding. I mean, I'm saying this because
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: this is an incredibly difficult thing for me to do,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: by the way. Yeah.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: Well, again, all words are Trojan horses.
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: The spirit that infuses what is spoken has an enormous
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: influence on the likely effect that it may have when
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: it comes to the ego of the other person. Because
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: we could have 10 people say the exact same sentence,
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: and one person is delivering it as an accusation, another
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: person is delivering it out of a sense of vicarious
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: shame on behalf of the person. Another is seeking to
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: improve the adaptation of the person. Somebody else thinks of
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: it in a different way. So depending on the spirit
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: that comes with it or is delivered through the words
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: influences very much how the psyche is going to experience it.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: And that goes much to Jung's saying that there is
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: an ego to ego communication But there's also an ego
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: to unconscious communication, that our words also are speaking something
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: quite different to the unconscious of the other person. So
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: if there is an intent to heal, an intent to help,
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: or an intent to make room for the self, which
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: is a whole other question to subject things to, really
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: influences how the information is going to be likely received.
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: and metabolized by the other person. I'd like to say
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: that the idea of knowing something has to do with
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: it coming into the perception of the ego. Just as
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: you were saying with this supervision experience, there's a dialogue happening,
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: a dialectic happening in the analytic session, and something comes
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: into awareness for the analyst, which strikes them as relevant
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: and strikes them perhaps as factual. But it has to
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: be subjected also to the sense of what is the
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: likely effect, the utility of speaking this or putting it
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: in the session. How might it facilitate or not the
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: healing process? But I do take what you're saying, Lisa,
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: that there are all kinds of realities in the universe,
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: by the way. And reality is often the word we
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: use for almost cosmic reality. I mean, there are things
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: that are happening in certain parts of the galaxy which
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: are real They're happening, but they're not in the realm
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: of knowledge in as much as I have no perception
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: of them. I have no relationship to any number of realities.
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: And of course, reality also has to do with various frames.
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: Our friends that are quantum physicists tell us, you're not
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: perceiving reality at all. That actually color doesn't actually exist
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: in the universe.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: Joseph, do you have friends who are quantum physicists?
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: I have friends that like to talk about it. Light
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: tickles your eyes, which tickles these brain center. And then
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: we decide that, oh, these various stimuli look like red
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: and blue and pink, but nothing other than human brains
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: and eyeballs report color. So in a way, there are
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: other realities within which You know, we're just adding subjectivity
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: into the great mix of things. So reality, facts, truth,
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: and knowledge, or the knowing of something, I think it's
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: so important that we don't mush them all together. It's
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: important for us, but also I think it's important for
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: other people because they need to ask themselves these questions
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: of differentiation. What I might notice is I want to
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: verbalize this sentence. And I want to verbalize it in
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: the direction of that person over there. Is this about facts?
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: Is it about subjective truth? Is this something that just
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: came into my knowing? Do I actually believe that I
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: have some revelation about ultimate reality? And what is the
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: effect that I am hoping for in the psyche and
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: in the responsiveness of the other person? That just that
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: space between stimulus and response, And to ask those questions,
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: what is truth? What's reality? What's knowledge? What are facts?
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: What is my intent? The time to just run through
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: those questions would have, I think, an enormous positive impact
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: on what is finally delivered and how it's delivered and why,
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: the understanding around it. And we're exploring these differentiations.
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: So that requires consciousness. Just as you said, to know
• 46:15
  Speaker 4: something means that it's in consciousness, it's in our awareness.
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: And all of those dimensions, facets, if you will, of
• 46:26
  Speaker 4: where am I coming from, what's a fact, what's this,
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: what's that, requires that we as speakers be conscious of
• 46:38
  Speaker 4: of what we're feeling, what our intent is, how do
• 46:42
  Speaker 4: we deliver the message, and that's in the relational realm.
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: But then there's also the realm you were talking about, Lisa,
• 46:52
  Speaker 4: of how do we know something that we haven't really
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: wanted to let ourselves know? How do we talk to
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: ourselves about... this or that or the other thing, which
• 47:07
  Speaker 4: is a huge part of what psychotherapy can do is
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: to help somebody really know their own truth about bad
• 47:19
  Speaker 4: habit or substance usage or a persistent relational dynamic that
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: goes on everywhere that this person goes. So how do
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: I become more aware of what's going on between me
• 47:38
  Speaker 4: and me. It's a lot. This is a really big task.
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: It's a lifelong task for all of us and goes
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: exactly to what Jung was talking about, that our task
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: is to hold as much consciousness as we possibly can.
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: And related to that, Deb, and also what you were
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: saying before, Joseph, you know, there's this truth that we often,
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: truth that we often share with people in therapy, that
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: there's what happens and then there's the story you tell
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: yourself about it. And that just goes to the desire
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: to create a narrative. So let's say that we're supposed
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: to meet a friend for lunch and she calls and
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: cancels last minute. And that's what happened. That's just the fact.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: That's the truth. But we make up a story about
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: that either, oh, I guess my friend was just really
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: busy today or she doesn't like me or that bitch,
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: she always does this to me, whatever it is. But
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: we create a story and you can really watch yourself
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: do this. I mean, if you set an intention for
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: yourself to notice the stories that you tell yourself about interactions,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: and this kind of goes to cognitive behavioral therapy, you
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: can really see yourself creating narratives, some of which can
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: be comforting, like, oh, I guess my friend was just
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: really busy, and some of which can really generate distress.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: She must really not like me. And so you do
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: have to kind of pay attention to the stories that
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: you generate. And this makes me think of the work
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: by Byron Katie. if you're familiar with her she has
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: these four questions that she invites you to ask when
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: you have a kind of upsetting interpersonal issue or you're
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: working on something and the first question is is it true?
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: and the second question is Can you absolutely know that
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: it's true? So if your friend canceled lunch, you know,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: and you assume it's because she's unhappy with you, well,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: is it true? It's like, well, I know I think
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: it's really true. Well, can you really know it's true? No, no,
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: I can't unless I ask her. It's interesting that what
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: we feel is often taken to be true, right? We
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: assume our feelings are true. And our feelings are important,
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: but they are not always true. So there's something about
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: relating to our emotions, taking them seriously, giving ourselves space
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: to have them, but not assuming that they are true.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: So again, to go back to this silly little example,
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: If we're upset because our friend canceled lunch, okay, we
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: have our feelings. But we can't assume that that means
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: that our story is true.
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: And this is betrayed in language so frequently when people say, well,
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: I feel like she didn't call me because she doesn't
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: like me. But we're starting with a feeling, but we're
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: actually ending the sentence with this kind of narrative belief structure.
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: but it gets all mushed around. What I'm feeling is
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: that I feel rejected. And I'd like to think about
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: the feeling of being rejected and the history of being
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: rejected and my complex about being rejected, which lives in me.
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: The fantasy that this person is having an experience that
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: motivated their behavior is totally different.
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I would even say, Joseph, that when we
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: start a sentence with, I feel like, Or I feel that.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: That's actually not a feeling. I feel like she was
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: trying to insult me. That's actually a thought. That's not
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: a feeling. And you can ask yourself, is that true?
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: Exactly. But the fact that we start with the word
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: feeling suggests unconsciously that there is a feeling underneath it
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: that is a Trojan horse. Every time someone says, I feel,
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: and then they state a thought, it's a Trojan horse.
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: So there's a feeling. hidden inside of the thought, which
• 52:03
  Speaker 3: is you don't like me. But open up the Trojan
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: horse in the middle of the night and all these
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: soldiers come out, which attack your self-esteem at night, you know,
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: and tell you that you're unloved and no one ever
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: loved you and, you know, you don't look very good
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: and all these other things. Then they climb back in
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: the horse when you wake up and it still looks
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: like it's about the other person not liking us. It's
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: a wonderful distinction.
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: Feelings and feeling language is very different.
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: It's one of the biggest things I think we can
• 52:37
  Speaker 4: probably all work on. I do get to have my
• 52:41
  Speaker 4: feeling of feeling hurt or feeling rejected or just disappointed
• 52:49
  Speaker 4: because of the last minute lunch cancellation. And it's very
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: hard to just.
• 52:57
  Speaker 4: Allow those feelings, especially rejection, shame, sadness, left out, vulnerable.
• 53:07
  Speaker 4: We don't like to feel those things. And so it's
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: much easier to create the narrative, a thought about the
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: other person and how we're put upon or picked on
• 53:24
  Speaker 4: or whatever it might be. to put it out there
• 53:28
  Speaker 4: rather than just saying, gosh, I was really looking forward
• 53:33
  Speaker 4: to being with this person. And I do have my self-doubts. And,
• 53:39
  Speaker 4: you know, this is the third time this week that
• 53:43
  Speaker 4: something's happened where I've felt not attended to or not
• 53:48
  Speaker 4: wanted or blown off or something. And sit with ourselves
• 53:53
  Speaker 4: about that rather than going to a narrative, which then
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: becomes the truth. And it's a projection.
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: We are using the truth-telling as a way of throwing
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I do
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: want to save some time to talk about two familiar
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: complexes that that also have something to do with the
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: idea of truth. And one is the scapegoat complex and
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: one is the Cassandra complex. And they're both rooted in
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: kind of ancient mythology as well as ritual beliefs. So
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: in the scapegoat complex, it's said to come from ancient
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: traditions of ritualistically taking a goat, literally accusing the goat
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: of the sins of all the people in the tribe,
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: and then sacrificing the goat in one way or another,
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: often driving it into the desert or sometimes sacrificing it.
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: Sometimes the goat would be accused, you know, you did
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: this and this. So it's a way of expiating a
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: kind of conflict inside of the tribe. The Cassandra complex
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: comes from the Cassandra myth where Apollo is wooing this
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: beautiful woman, Cassandra, and offers her whatever she would like
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: if she would only become his lover. And she puts
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: him off and puts him off, puts him off and says, oh, fine,
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: you know, give me the gift of prophecy. So he
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: gives her the gift of prophecy. Obviously, it doesn't kick
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: in right away because she immediately says, you know, now
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: that I have prophecy, I don't think I'm going to
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: really be interested in being your lover. And then Apollo
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: turns around and says, well, I can't take anything back,
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: but I'm going to tell you that no one will
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: ever believe you. Now, when Cassandra is turning him down,
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: I don't have the sense that her prophecy is kicked
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: in yet because she's going to have a really difficult time.
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: As we see, she sometimes floats in as an ancillary
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: character in various Greek dramas where she literally just comes
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: on stage for a minute, says something, everybody agrees. disregards her,
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: she shrugs and she walks off stage and she's always
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: telling exactly the truth about what's going on. How this
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: shows up in the culture, which I think is so important,
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: is that people who have a scapegoat complex and it's
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: really woven centrally into their character, have an innate curiosity
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: in the pathologies of other people and in the pathologies
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: of systems. Because inherent in the energy of the scapegoat
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: is the seeking out of sin, the seeking out of
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: what's wrong. Now, one could say that this is also
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: every physician, in a sense, is seeking out what's wrong
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: and then trying to identify it and address it. But
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: scapegoats are often treated rather badly in their personal lives
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: because while physicians often can be venerated, but both are
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: looking for what's wrong. And here's the difference, is that
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: the scapegoat discovers what's wrong, speaks it as an accusation.
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: And there is a fantasy that accusing the person of
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: what's wrong is somehow a solution. Accusing the system of
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: what's wrong is a solution. And often the accusation is
• 57:40
  Speaker 3: the end of the interaction. Once the other person receives
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: the accusation and shows any sign of distress, then the
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: archetype of the scapegoat has happened and something is now infused.
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: The other person and the scapegoater temporarily feels that they
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: have expiated something dark. And they've also done something significantly helpful. Now, often,
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: scapegoaters who are in our modern world are constantly accusing
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: other people or systems and then find themselves alienated. They
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: wind up getting fired from jobs. They wind up losing
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: relationships with people who they care about. And part of
• 58:28
  Speaker 3: the cognitive distortion is that the scapegoater believes that their
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: accusations should be rewarded, which gives them this boldness in
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: constantly accusing people of things that they perceive are incorrect
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: and sometimes might even be quite truthfully assessed. But it's
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: the fact that the information, the identification of the problem
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: becomes a Trojan horse and inside the Trojan horse is
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: this incredible accusation and the placing of all forms of
• 59:05
  Speaker 3: the accusation, removing it from the person and the community
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: and funneling it into the other person through the energy
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: of accusation. And most people's psyches and organizational psyches heartily
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: resist that process of accusation. The physician, on the other hand,
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: We want a physician to tell us what's wrong. We
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: like pay them big bucks. I feel terrible. I want
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: to be probed and scrutinized. I want to be told
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: what's wrong. And the physician says, well, here you go.
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: This is wrong. But if a physician accuses us of
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: the diagnosis, we often will never see them again. Because
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: that's not why we're here. Because accusing me of having cancer,
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: let's say, That's not medicine. That's a Trojan horse. What
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: is anyone supposed to do with that? We want the
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: physician to come with accurate information and then offer healing,
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: offer solutions, offer resolution, offer care. The scapegoat almost never
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: offers a solution, offers care, never speaks what they have
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: to say with compassion or a desire to even stay
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: in the situation. Because often the truth, when it's an accusation,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: is thrown and then the scapegoat wants to back off
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: just the way the tribe would accuse the goat and
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: then throw the goat out into the wilderness and run
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: back to the camp. You don't want to be around
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: anymore once the accusations have been laid. The doctor says,
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry, this is the problem and leans in, ideally,
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: holds on. holds the person close to the healing process. Now,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: the Cassandra myth is a little different, and this is
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: another difficult piece, is when somebody has a deep sense
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: of what is wrong or what is true that has
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: not been revealed, you know, the prophecy, but something about
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: the way that the information is conveyed is so inconsequential
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 3: to the listener. that it is disregarded. And the truth
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: tellers are left in this state, often the state of
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: helpless horror, as they watch the terrible consequences unfold. And
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 3: so there is, and something is broken in that complex
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: where the truth telling of the individual is, it's interfered
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: with in some way I don't know that I fully
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: understand the psychodynamics about how that Apollonic curse leaves a
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: Cassandra truth-teller void of any impact. And it may have
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: something to do with the rejection of the self. If
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: we take away the social interpretation of Apollo wanting to
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: date her, and we think of Apollo as the self,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: which many ancient worlds did, that the self comes to
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: the ego and says, I wish to be close, and
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: I will share my vast perceptions of you. And then
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: Cassandra says, oh, that sounds great. I would like to
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: harvest everything you're telling me, but I don't want to
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: be burdened in any way by the presence of the self.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: It's more of a Promethean piece. Give me all the facts,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: get out of town, get away, leave me alone. I'll
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: do whatever I want to do with them. And then
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: that disconnect from the deeper strata makes the truth seem ephemeral, perhaps.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 4: What I'm thinking about is in this duality here that
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: you've proposed, that the scapegoat has to do with the past.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: The accusation is about something that some other person has done.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 4: Like in Lisa's fictive example, the friend that cancels at
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 4: the last minute for lunch. And that the Cassandra complex
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 4: is about the future. You know, that if you keep
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: forgetting to fill the car up with gas, you're going
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 4: to be on the road somewhere and run out and
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: you won't like it. And I don't believe I do
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 4: that or I don't believe that that's what will happen.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 4: I think I do really monitor the gas level or
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 4: I think I have enough gas to get to where
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 4: I'm going and then I'll fill it up. So there's
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 4: a sort of predictive quality that I can imagine is
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 4: very easy for a listener to deny. If you don't
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: turn the heat down on the stove, you're going to
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 4: burn whatever's in the pot.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 5: No, I won't.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 4: But I like the juxtaposition of past and future.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think what they maybe both have in
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: common is that there are different ways that we ask
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: others to hold uncomfortable truths for us that we don't
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: want to have to reckon with. And then we can
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: reject the person who's holding the uncomfortable truth, whether that
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: relates to the past or the future.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 4: That's really nice. I think that's right. We're asking someone
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 4: else to hold an uncomfortable truth for That is making
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 4: us uncomfortable. Whose uncomfortable truth is it really?
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: I think that works really, really, really well. The last
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 3: bit I'll just quickly... We solved it. We solved it.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: Which goes back to the analytic piece, which is the
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: bivalence of quote-unquote truth. And this was such a wonderful
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: thing that happened in early Jungian training. The Jung Institute
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: was founded in... Jung himself was very ambivalent about that
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: occurring because he didn't want his ideas to become systematized,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 3: but it happened and it was going to happen. And
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: he was involved with it, of course. Within a short
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: amount of time, the training analysts began to report that
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: the trainees would frequently have dreams that they were being
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 3: bitten by serpents. And this happened so frequently that the
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: training analysts began to feel like if you didn't have
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: that dream, something was probably not happening correctly in the
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: training process. And someone came to Jung and said, you know,
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: everybody's having these dreams. What is this about? And Jung
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: apparently said in this sagacious way, he's like, ah, yes, yes, well,
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: of course they are. You see, because the snake is
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: a symbol of wisdom, but it is also the bringer
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: of suffering and pain as it is, at least in mythology.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: And so what's occurring is that the wisdom around the
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: nature of the unconscious, as well as the wisdom that
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: is delivered in a correct interpretation, bites the ego and
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: injects something into it, which at first makes the ego
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: feel unwell. We often don't want to know things that
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: we've been defending against. That's why we're defending against them.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: The unwellness could be a flush of anger, a fever
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: of anger, or a chill of fear or a disorientation,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 3: a wooziness about who am I and what's real around here.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: But the venom also facilitates a breaking down of the ego,
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: And then in the re-coagulation of the ego, the new
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: information is then integrated, which is interesting because venom actually
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: is the beginning of the digestion process of the serpent,
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 3: that it paralyzes the creature or maybe even kills them.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: But it also is full of enzymes that begin to
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: break down all the tissue so that then when the
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: snake gobbles it up, it can take it in. So
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: the biting of the serpent is the interpretation, the wisdom,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 3: the information that both makes the ego feel unwell, begins
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: to dissolve it, and also brings it in contact with
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: something about itself that is true subjectively, that needs to
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: be held onto.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: And just to take your metaphor a little further, Joseph,
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: maybe it is true sometimes that truth dissolves defenses. And
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: it can even dissolve a place maybe where our ego
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: is too rigid. So there can be a real medicine
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: in truth. That if it's delivered in the right way
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: or in the right time, it dissolves our defenses.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 4: And in the right dosage.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: Which brings us full circle to the intent of the
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 3: Quakers in their publication of their pamphlet. speaking truth to power,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 3: that it was not about accusation, and it was not
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 3: about trying to injure someone, and it was not about
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: virtue signaling. That the truth for them is that human
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: beings should carry, for the Quakers, a Christ-like system of value.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: of healing and forgiveness, of unity, love, relationship, and that
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: this communion of love extends to all humans, all people,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: regardless of borders or political or geopolitical conflict. And so
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: the truth was the testimony of that field of compassion
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: and for them, Christian love. And that was the truth
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 3: that they wanted people in authority and power to hear,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 3: which brings us, as you had said, to truth in
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 3: service to wholeness and healing, whether it is political healing,
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: individual healing, societal healing. And maybe that's the real purpose
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 3: of truth.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 5: And that might be time to switch to a dream.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 5: Today's dreamer is a woman. She's 42. And she's a
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 5: theater practitioner and part-time theater professor. She's entitled her dream,
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 5: What Can Be Saved? And here's the dream. I was
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 5: walking around outside the home I grew up in, in
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 5: East Tennessee. It had snowed and there had been a
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 5: deep freeze. I came across a scarlet macaw that had
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 5: frozen to death. I noticed the bright, brilliant red of
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 5: its feathers against the white snow and ice, but it
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 5: had clearly died of the cold. There was no life
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 5: left in it. As I walked around, I found two
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 5: more dead, frozen scarlet macaws. I intuitively knew that due
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 5: to climate change, their migration patterns had been disturbed in
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 5: some way, and that's how they ended up in North America,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 5: so far from their homes. Then I came upon a
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 5: patch of grass covered in snow where my mother was
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 5: doing some sort of gardening. or tending to the yard.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 5: Here I found a tiny baby scarlet macaw, also half frozen,
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 5: but still alive. It was bright red like the adult
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 5: birds I'd found, but moving around slightly. Like baby birds
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 5: newly hatched, it was sort of ugly and desperate looking,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 5: but also so fragile, helpless, and lovable. I wanted to
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 5: protect it and save it. I knew it would die
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 5: if I didn't intervene, but my mom was acting unfeeling
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 5: and cold. Without words, she seemed to express that it
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 5: was a pest and that it should just be ignored.
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 5: I felt her unspoken message to me was that I
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 5: should not see it, pretend I didn't see it, and
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 5: also should not acknowledge its suffering or the earth's changes
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 5: that were causing these birds to go off course and die.
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 5: For context, she says, I'm a mother of an almost
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 5: five-year-old daughter. Since becoming a mom, I've been struggling with
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 5: complicated feelings toward my own mother, wishing she could be
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 5: more emotionally supportive, and also remembering times from my childhood
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 5: of feeling unsupported or unseen. Sometimes she was very present,
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 5: but other times checked out and conflict avoidant. I'm also
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 5: starting to long for a second child, but I fear
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 5: I'm too old to go through that journey of pregnancy
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 5: and baby rearing again, and I worry I might have
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 5: trouble conceiving this time around since my fertile days might
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 5: be dwindling. Professionally, I also feel stuck between continuing what
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 5: I've been doing for 20 years or starting all over
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 5: with something new. She says that the main feelings in
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 5: the dream were deep grief for the dead birds and
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 5: for the changing earth, love and affection for the baby bird,
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 5: wanting to save it, but not being sure if I
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 5: could or even if I had the right to intervene
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 5: with forces of nature. I also felt sad about how
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 5: if I did save it, it would likely be a
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 5: bird in captivity and would probably never be free. And
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 5: she adds, The setting was outside of the home I
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 5: grew up in in Tennessee. I often dream of this home,
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 5: though my parents sold it a couple of years ago.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 5: In real life, this part of the country doesn't get
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 5: much snow, but it just had its biggest snowstorm in
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 5: 30 years. I live in Chicago now and accustomed to winter,
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 5: but don't like it. Like many people, I worry about
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 5: climate change and wrestle with the existential questions it brings up.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 5: I don't think I have strong associations with scarlet macaws,
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 5: though I had a recent conversation with my daughter about
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 5: how parrots are able to speak human language.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: Well, it's one of those dreams that you have an
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: immediate feeling reaction to. At least that was true for me. Yes.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: The frozen birds in the snow. And of course, you know,
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: it's not uncommon to dream about animals in distress. That
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: is a fairly common type of dream. And always very poignant.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: And if you want to take a page from Deb's book,
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: we could start right with the setting. She's outside the
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: home she grew up in. So we're back in the
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: sort of childhood complex. And it had snowed and there
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: had been a deep freeze, which we associate with sort
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: of a lack of feeling or kind of frozen feeling.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: There's a lack of emotional warmth. And then, of course,
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: there's the juxtaposition between the bright red of the scarlet
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: macaw and the frozen, the snow and ice, the white.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: So red is a color that's kind of associated with
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: life force, with vitality. And that exists here, but it's
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: in contrast to this frozen environment.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 4: Yes. And the frozen environment extends to the mother. where
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 4: she says, my mother was acting unfeeling and cold, which
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 4: really kind of highlights what you were saying about the
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 4: significance of the cold and the snow. That the emotional
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 4: tone here is the cold that freezes the bright life
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 4: of the scarlet macaws who have somehow gone off course.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 4: That climate change Cold in its broader sense, emotionally as well,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 4: and overall atmosphere of cold has caused these lovely, bright,
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 4: alive-looking birds to go off course in their lives, except
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 4: for the baby bird, who's kind of scrawny and ugly,
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 4: and its feathers haven't all come in, and it's lovable.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 4: And I'm connecting that with her self-query about and ambivalence about,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 4: do I want another child, new life?
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean, I think it's very interesting. Of course,
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: the big thing is the baby bird.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: And the question is, how does she relate to it?
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: And she has the right impulse. She feels loving toward it.
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: But there's this real question mark at the end of
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: the dream. It's not at all clear what's going to happen.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: Is she going to ignore the baby bird or not?
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: I don't know that we know. It's one of those
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: dreams that doesn't have a really clear resolution. It's like
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: it poses a question. What are you going to do
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: with this? Are you going to ignore it or not?
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: And of course, we would wonder, what are you ignoring
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: in yourself? Or what are you in danger of ignoring?
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: And we could look at the mother in the dream
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: as this might be commenting on her actual relationship with
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: the outer mother. But of course, we could also see
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: it as this is how the mother complex functions in
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: her psyche. It serves to cut her off from an awareness.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: It goes back to what I was saying before about
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: kind of not letting yourself know what you know, that
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: there is this vulnerable baby bird who needs tending. And
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: there will be some compromise because if you pick it
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: up and take care of it, it's going to be
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: in captivity. But arguably, that's better than letting it freeze
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: to death.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 3: I find myself thinking about the myth of Demeter. I'm
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 3: very struck by the winterscape, the adult dead macaws in
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: the snow. And then there's an image of the mother
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 3: tending a small patch of grass, but that's where the
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 3: one living... baby macaw is still alive, but barely, and
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 3: is in the tiny patch that the mother is willing
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 3: or capable of being interested in, even though it's still
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 3: early winter. In the story of Demeter and Persephone, Demeter
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: is this goddess who brings the spring and the summer
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 3: and the fruiting of things and the beauty of the
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 3: natural world, fecundity, growth, Her child, young child Persephone, is
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 3: taken off into the underworld by Hades to be married
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 3: without her permission and kept there. Demeter being separated from
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: her daughter, falls into such a state of absolute and
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: total despair and grief, and that the world falls into
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 3: a kind of endless winter. Nothing grows, nothing fruits, nothing
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 3: can survive. And finally, the gods who are invested in
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: all of this try to broker a deal so that
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 3: Persephone can at least at some point visit her mother,
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 3: When Persephone does, the spring and the summer come beautifully alive.
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 3: And when Persephone goes back to the underworld to be
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 3: a queen, ostensibly, Demeter falls at least into just a
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 3: season of grief and wintering, but not an endless wintering.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: And so it begs a different question, a possible question
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 3: about the mother, the biological mother, as well as the
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 3: mother complex. Why is the mother caught in a wintering?
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: the mother within her and the mother around her? And
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 3: is there some trouble around this alienation of the mother
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: and the child? I would lean into this more as
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: perhaps a dream about the biological mother's psyche, that the
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: mother archetype within her mother's psyche is caught in something
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 3: of an endless winter because she is somehow alienated from
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 3: the Persephone within her, that her biological mother has lost
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 3: touch with her own core, her own youthful, ebullient, young,
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: innocent self. Now, when there is some vestige of the
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 3: young part of the mother is nearby, there is at
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: least a patch of grass, but there is some interference
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 3: in the way that the mother's psyche is structured such
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 3: that she gives enough so that the baby is half alive.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 3: But what I would suggest is that the mother cannot
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 3: delight in the return of Persephone. There is something in
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 3: that particular relationship of feeling the relief of the return
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 3: of the child. And if I were to make that intra-psychic,
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: I would say that the biological mother somehow is deeply
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 3: ambivalent about her own inner child, her own capacity to
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 3: embrace renewal, the spring time of things in herself. And
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 3: it begs the question of why is that? Why is
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 3: the mother's psyche caught in too much of a winter?
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: And that even when the daughter returns, when the new
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 3: life returns, new potential in all its forms, with a
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: biological mother, there is some way it cannot be tended properly.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 3: So thinking about this in a multi-generational way, that if
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 3: the mother's psyche is interfered with so that her own
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: birthing potential is caught ever in a wintering, that things
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 3: are only allowed to grow a little bit before they
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 3: are frozen, and they're frozen as the mother stays in
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 3: this world of iterative labor. She's scratching at the frozen ground,
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: getting a little patch of grass. How might that be
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 3: passed onto the biological daughter? How is that alive intergenerationally?
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 3: And that this dreamer may be invited to do a
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 3: piece of intergenerational healing work.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: I want to take it in a slightly different direction.
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: What I hear, and I'm kind of interpolating here a
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: little bit, is ambivalence. So it sounds like the mother
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: was somewhat ambivalent, or at least that's how the dreamer
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: experienced her. Sometimes she was very present, other times she
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: was absent. And I suspect that this dreamer is somewhat
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: ambivalent about her experience of mothering. Because if you have
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: a child relatively late, as the streamer did, and you
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: think you might want a second child, you kind of
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: get on it right away. At least that was my experience.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: You know, kind of whether or not I wanted, you know,
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: whether or not I actually felt ready. It's like, well,
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: it's time. We're going to do this before, you know,
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: the window closes. And that's okay. The streamer obviously didn't
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: feel that way. But now she's starting to yearn for
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: a second child. And she's not sure she's really, I mean,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: of course, there's a question about whether or not she
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: would be able to conceive. But that aside, do I
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: really want to do all that again? So there's ambivalence
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: around mothering. And so I think the dream might be
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: speaking to that in part. So I'm seeing it more
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: as a kind of intrapsychic dream.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 4: I'm also thinking about, will our dreamer be mothered herself
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 4: As a mother. In the dream, the dream ego's mother
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 4: is scratching away in the cold in a little patch
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 4: of earth, but there's snow all around. And then there
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 4: is the worry about the climate and mother earth. And
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 4: what's going on with climate change that causes these birds
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 4: to go off course? So how is the mother also
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 4: cared for and attended to and supported in the dream
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 4: image of the mother doing the gardening and for our
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 4: dreamer having another child? Mothers need to be mothered by
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 4: families and neighbors and their own mothers, etc. How do
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 4: we support mothering? And will she be supported?
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 3: I think all three of us are saying the same
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 3: thing from different lenses, archetypally, in terms of inner object work,
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 3: outer object relations. So, yes, I think we're all landing
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 3: on this, how multifaceted the struggle is with being a mother,
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 3: the mother archetype, the intergenerational realities of this, and And
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: the mythology around all of it. The good news is,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 3: generally speaking, when somebody begins to dream about a particular
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 3: kind of problem, it's a signal from the self that
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 3: the self thinks it's time to grapple with the problem.
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 3: And so it comes before us.
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 2: You've been listening to This Jungian Life. From our website, thisjungianlife.com,
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook,
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 2: help us produce future episodes by funding us through Patreon,
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 2: and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode.
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: We'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: for today's show and hope you'll let us know what
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: topics you'd enjoy hearing more about. Until next time, keep
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 2: living this Jungian life.