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Signs Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: Contempt is a cold, distancing attitude that writes someone off
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: as beneath respect and not worth engaging. As a defense,
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: it takes feelings we don't want, like shame or fear
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: and hurt, and projects them onto someone else, turning our
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: psycho-spiritual problem into a blanket judgment of another. The personal
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: cost is significant. Interpersonal connections thin out, curiosity dies, and
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: empathy There's a strange somatic whiplash effect, and some research
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: suggests that the contemptuous person suffers from strange physical tensions.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: And as we would imagine, contempt ruins relationships. For the
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: person on the receiving end, it humiliates them, lowers their
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: standard in the entire community, and invites others to pile
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: on and drags down their performance and mood. So today,
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: We're going to explore the psychology of contempt.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: I have often thought of contempt as the relationship shredder.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: You just get your claws out and rake them down
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: another's face or a group or an idea. One is
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: not so much angry as superior anger. unfeeling, as you mentioned,
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: the distance, and that the other deserves that kind of
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: scorn and condemnation. They are beneath decent treatment. They are
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: beneath any kind of concern. So it sort of embraces
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  Speaker 2: a lot of feelings. It can embrace disgust, it can
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: embrace disrespect, of all those things that make us absolutely polarized,
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: far away from and utterly unrelated to the person or
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: value or group that is being treated with contempt. It's
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: powerful and And it's dangerous not only for what it
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: can do to another, but what it does to the
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: person who is feeling the contempt.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, it's a poison that hurts anyone who touches it
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  Speaker 3: from any perspective.
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  Speaker 2: In contempt, we have lost our humanity. If someone, if
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: we're angry with each other, even if we're enraged or
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: we're tearful and we're protesting, all kinds of things have
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: feeling and human feeling in them. With anger, we're often
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: trying to sort of turn up the heat so that
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  Speaker 2: the other person will hear me and pay attention to me.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: Right, it's a change maker, yeah.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: Exactly. But with contempt, it's the assumption of worthlessness. And
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  Speaker 2: for me, what is... The hardest part of contempt is
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  Speaker 2: that eros is gone.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
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  Speaker 2: Love is gone, and the person is engaging in power.
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  Speaker 2: That when love is gone, we turn to power, and
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  Speaker 2: it is a very poor substitute. It is.
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: Now, in our efforts to define love, contempt and even
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: differentiate it from many other negative emotions, which was difficult
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  Speaker 3: in parsing through this in preparation, I found a clinical
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: survey that people use. It's called the Dispositional Contempt Scale.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: There's several statements that may or may not relate to you.
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  Speaker 3: Please read each statement carefully, consider each one by one,
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  Speaker 3: and indicate on a scale of one to five how
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: you actually think, feel, or behave. So I find this
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  Speaker 3: interesting because they're descriptive statements that we could then assess ourselves.
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  Speaker 3: I tend to disregard people who fall short of my standards.
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  Speaker 3: I often lose respect for others. Feeling disdain for others
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  Speaker 3: comes naturally to me. I often feel like others are
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  Speaker 3: wasting my time. All in all, I am repelled by
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  Speaker 3: others' faults. Others tend to give me reasons to look
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  Speaker 3: down on them. I often feel contempt for others. So
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: that's a bit of it. Scaled one to five, if
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: the number gets a bit high, then we might have
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: a disposition that leans towards that attitude. So one of
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: the things that I think is unique about contempt is
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  Speaker 3: that the contempt feels like a pre-existing position that we
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: then carry out into the environment and we wind up
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  Speaker 3: assessing the waiters and deciding where they're contemptuous or we
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  Speaker 3: carry it into the department store and we find reasons
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  Speaker 3: to devalue or dislike others because of their underperformance, for instance,
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  Speaker 3: or This person fell short and that person fell short.
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  Speaker 3: So if we've got an eye, which sometimes they call
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  Speaker 3: it the jawedest eye, the yellow eye, and we look
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  Speaker 3: upon the world, can we find reasons to think ill
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  Speaker 3: of people or at least exaggerate those reasons until we
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  Speaker 3: can then justify taking the stance that they're worthless?
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  Speaker 2: It's such an awful, I'm thinking about your example of
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  Speaker 2: a waiter who doesn't bring the right thing or some
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  Speaker 2: other mishap or somebody in a department store or the
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  Speaker 2: proverbial stories about the plumber that comes and doesn't do
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  Speaker 2: a good job and the darn thing leaks all over
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  Speaker 2: again or he left a big, oily, awful mess. It's
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  Speaker 2: such an awful attempt at self-protection. And it's so much
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  Speaker 2: about ego. The I in any of those scenarios is
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: better than. Instead of feeling upset or disappointed, I ordered
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  Speaker 2: this meal and It's really not good. And it's not
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  Speaker 2: even hot. And I was looking forward to it so much.
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  Speaker 2: And I am really disappointed that it's an attempt to
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  Speaker 2: deny those feelings. I went into the department store and
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  Speaker 2: I really wanted to buy, you know, a special scarf.
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  Speaker 2: And I went in because I knew they would have
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  Speaker 2: plenty of them and it was worth you know, my
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  Speaker 2: favorite aunt on a special birthday and the person isn't
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  Speaker 2: interested in showing these things to me and I look
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  Speaker 2: forward to it and I'm disappointed. Or they don't have
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  Speaker 2: enough selection and I go, oh, this store. I'm never
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  Speaker 2: going there again.
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  Speaker 3: Well, but I think that the contempt sprays something onto
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: the person What you were, I think, talking about, Deb,
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  Speaker 3: is staying close to the specific thing. Like, I'm disappointed
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  Speaker 3: that the meal was cold, which is different from feeling
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  Speaker 3: that the waiter has no value and I have no
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  Speaker 3: respect for them because they transported the cold food to
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  Speaker 3: my table. So I think that if... As you're saying,
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  Speaker 3: if we stay close to the actual object and we're
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: not gunning for the people around it, then we could
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: have something legitimate to try to address. Well, the food
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  Speaker 3: is cold. Maybe you could heat it up. Or I
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  Speaker 3: am really disappointed they had nothing in my size. I'm
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: wondering if your store can get that in stock for
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  Speaker 3: me versus feeling like the person who is working at
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  Speaker 3: the store is wasting my time. and that they're useless
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  Speaker 3: or worthless because I couldn't find something in my size.
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  Speaker 2: It's a disappointed expectation. We go to a restaurant, we
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  Speaker 2: expect to have hot food or tasty food or the
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  Speaker 2: right kind of food. That's the deal. We go to
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  Speaker 2: the department store in order to buy whatever it is
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  Speaker 2: we went in to look for. And they don't have
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  Speaker 2: any selection or they don't have it in your size.
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  Speaker 2: And they're, quote, supposed to. That's what a department store
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  Speaker 2: is for.
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  Speaker 3: Versus having a more generous a more understanding feeling, or frankly,
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  Speaker 3: just complexifying the moment. There's many reasons why that food
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  Speaker 3: came cold. There's many reasons why they may not have
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  Speaker 3: that sweater in your size or why that plumber ran
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  Speaker 3: out of the house before cleaning up the big grease
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  Speaker 3: stain that was left on your cabinet. But it isn't
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  Speaker 3: as simple as they are substandard and beneath concern. or
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  Speaker 3: should it be dismissed?
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  Speaker 2: So the roots of it, you know, I think we're
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: touching on that, of, you know, the department store is
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: supposed to have merchandise. So that's a value, that's an
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: established transactional value. Then there's a sense of violation. I
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  Speaker 2: have been violated. I'm a paying customer and I get
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: this excuse for a meal?
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  Speaker 3: Ooh.
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  Speaker 2: So when we feel hurt, disappointed, violated, and we can't
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  Speaker 2: afford to feel those feelings, we move into contempt. Oh,
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  Speaker 2: I'm not hurt. I'm not vulnerable. I'm not disappointed. I
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  Speaker 2: don't feel wronged because you, whoever that you is, some
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  Speaker 2: poor hapless person perhaps in a department store, are beneath consideration.
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  Speaker 2: It's a way to avoid human feeling, my own and
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  Speaker 2: the other person's and the imperfect world we live in.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Right, so contempt in those examples cools off the hot anger,
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  Speaker 3: but it also walls off empathy to limit further injury
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  Speaker 3: or entanglement. So, If we feel like our anger, our
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  Speaker 3: vulnerability to the circumstances too much, contempt cools us off
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  Speaker 3: and walls us off. And in that very young place
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  Speaker 3: inside of us, it feels like a solution. Like if
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  Speaker 3: I don't expect it or if I just expect shit
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  Speaker 3: in this circumstance, well then I'm not going to be
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  Speaker 3: injured or entangled because that's what this is all about.
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  Speaker 2: You know, it takes me to, I mean, John Gottman,
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  Speaker 2: who's a marriage and relationship guru, calls the four horsemen
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  Speaker 2: of the apocalypse. I never get them all right, but
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  Speaker 2: there's anger and criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness, and contempt.
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  Speaker 3: I think those are five horsemen, but we'll go with five.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, thank you. Math is not my strong suit either.
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  Speaker 2: It takes me to contempt as another relational serious sign,
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  Speaker 2: which is cut off. Yeah. Of now I have cut
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  Speaker 2: off from, you know, this situation, that service person, maybe
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  Speaker 2: somebody in my personal life. I'm like, that's it, then
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  Speaker 2: I'm done. I'm done. That's it. There's no point talking
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  Speaker 2: to him.
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  Speaker 3: So there's a dismissal energy, but I think the contempt
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  Speaker 3: is before we dismiss them, there's this veneer of very
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  Speaker 3: negative feeling.
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  Speaker 2: Eye rolling.
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  Speaker 3: Over the person, eye rolling, huffing. Teenagers are often very
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  Speaker 3: contemptuous of their parents.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 3: And that's in service to kind of pulling away that
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  Speaker 3: if they thought the parents were all wise or smart,
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  Speaker 3: maybe they'd never take risks on their own. But mom
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  Speaker 3: and dad, oh, you know, they are God.
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  Speaker 2: That's a good one because, you know, if you really
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  Speaker 2: react to that and say, wait a minute, what did
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  Speaker 2: you just do? It's sort of like, oh, my God,
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  Speaker 2: you're not going to make a big deal about that,
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  Speaker 2: are you? So it's a real gotcha. It's very good.
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  Speaker 2: But there's also sarcasm. name-calling, mockery, open mockery, and that favorite,
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  Speaker 2: which is the joke, quote-unquote, that has a little barb
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  Speaker 2: in it, the little gotcha joke.
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  Speaker 3: It's not that funny.
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  Speaker 2: And then if you say, hey, whoa, hold it, wait
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  Speaker 2: a minute, they say, oh, come on.
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  Speaker 3: I was just joking.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Boy, contempt is tough stuff. The more I circle around this,
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: I'm kind of wanting to change our topic for the week.
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  Speaker 2: This is toxic. It is really toxic. And it enables
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  Speaker 2: the person expressing contempt to completely not only cut off
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  Speaker 2: the other person in this condemnation, but to cut off
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  Speaker 2: contact with one's own shadow.
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely. Because in that moment, the person is projecting
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  Speaker 3: their own disowned, incompetencies or shame or something like that
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  Speaker 3: and then by putting it all in the waiter let's
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: say as the example i was a waiter by the
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  Speaker 3: way for a lot of years when i was working
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  Speaker 3: my way through college so it's all their problem they're
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  Speaker 3: the the failing one and i'm the evaluator over here
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  Speaker 3: who can discern what a failure you know that other
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  Speaker 3: person is and yeah feel quite satisfied with that. And
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  Speaker 3: often contemptuous folks like to communicate that. It's not simply
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: in their own minds that they're feeling contemptuous, but they
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  Speaker 3: will seek out alignment with other people to all kind
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  Speaker 3: of pile on to that errant waiter over there in
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  Speaker 3: the corner.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness. You know, what I'm thinking about, though,
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  Speaker 2: is the polarization. Mm-hmm. One person is good, superior, justified, right.
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  Speaker 2: And the other person, of course, is, as I say,
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  Speaker 2: beneath contempt, worthless, devalued, etc. So we have a real
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: good-bad split, which takes me to what one of the
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: early psychologists, Melanie Klein, called the need in development to
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: attain the depressive position, that it's thought that really little kids, babies, toddlers,
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  Speaker 2: who have, you know, judge everything according to whether they
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: like it or don't like it, you know, when mommy
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: is pleasing me or, you know, Uncle George is dandling
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: me on his knee, that's good. And when somebody says no,
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  Speaker 2: they're bad. I know that because I don't like it,
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  Speaker 2: and that's the only standard that a toddler has to
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: measure anything by. And what eventually occurs is the ability
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: to really think about the other person as an other.
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  Speaker 2: That mom or Uncle George or my teacher or anyone else,
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  Speaker 2: it has good days and bad days. things that work
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: well for me, things that don't, things I like, things
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  Speaker 2: I don't. And I'm attached to the whole of that person.
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  Speaker 2: My parent, my relative, and authority figure. That things are
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: not good, bad, right, wrong, black, white. They're an awkward,
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  Speaker 2: difficult combination of all kinds of things. And yet we
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: regress to that when we are contemptuous of someone because
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: we've gone right back to that early stage of polarization.
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  Speaker 2: I am displeased, therefore I make that person the bad,
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  Speaker 2: the all bad object.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly. So if we stay in that Kleinian model, the
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  Speaker 3: manic position is when the child is howling for whatever
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: it is they need. And Klein imagined that the infant
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: believed that their cries conjure the mother to then do
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: whatever is required, obviously.
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  Speaker 2: And they do.
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  Speaker 3: And it creates a kind of omnipotence inside of the child,
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  Speaker 3: an omnipotent expectation, and also reinforces, as is true when
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: you have a little baby, that their fussiness or their lamentations,
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: their cries, should be responded to by the people around them.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: At a certain age, as she was saying, Deb, the
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: child has to realize that the parent is an autonomous
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: being and is choosing to help them or not based
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: on a number of things. and that they have to
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: establish a functional relationship to negotiate for the things that
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: they need.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: And usually by being nice and the other things that
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: we do to be pro-social and get our needs met.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: So I think you're quite right that the contemptuous uprising
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  Speaker 3: of devaluing the person, I think there is a very
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: young fantasy that the person's disdain will somehow act upon
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: the other person and force them to provide something that
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: they may autonomously not wish to or be unable to.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: That's an interesting point, and I want to go back
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: for a second and grab hold of a great word
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: that you put out there, omnipotence. Mm-hmm. Because I think
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: you're right. I think contempt is striving for omnipotence. And
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: that my power will, my omnipotent power of disdain, that
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  Speaker 2: I have the power to destroy. Of course, it's not true.
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  Speaker 2: But you do have the power if you use contempt
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  Speaker 2: to destroy a relationship. Mm-hmm. You will not destroy the person,
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: one hopes. Although we have all heard stories from friends
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  Speaker 2: and certainly in our consulting rooms of kids that were
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: treated with contempt. Sometimes, you know, not in a particularly
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: overt way. Of all the kids, she's just not the
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: smart one. Yeah, of course. You know, yeah, she never
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: gets good grades. She's just not that smart.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: Or I think more pernicious is, you know, the daughter
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  Speaker 3: is a beautiful 16-year-old girl. She's a knockout. She's dressed
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: to the nines and she's walking out of the house.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: And mom says something contemptuous about how she's dressed. Really?
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  Speaker 3: You're going to leave the house in that?
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, it makes me tear up.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Because you're also pointing to contempt infused with envy.
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  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Snow White's evil queen stepmother. We feel the mother in
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: that case feels bad, feels less than to see this
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: beautiful 16-year-old going out. Maybe the shoes are a little
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: over the top and the shorts are short. She's young.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: She's 16. She's loving her body.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: I mean, we could even dislike the clothing and have
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: a conversation about the shoes.
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: But it's when the daughter becomes an object of contempt.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: Then we're in dark water and the relationship.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: We're also linking it to shame.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: The way shame is getting moved around. Yeah.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: Exactly. That Both contempt and shame are about the essence
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: of the other person, not about what that person is
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: wearing or did or made a choice. You know, it's
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: like shame and guilt. You, whoever the you is, are
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: somehow tainted and awful in your essence. And that's contempt.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: It's not just that you... You, whoever the you is,
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: you know, behave badly or the plumber who left the
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: oily mess under the sink. It's essence of that person.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: But if we look at that disdain scale, it's really,
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: it's not about objects. It's about people. I disregard people.
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  Speaker 3: I lose respect for people. I feel disdain. Other people
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  Speaker 3: are wasting my time. I'm repelled by other people's faults.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: It's all about the person and not about the shoes.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: Like if it was just about the length of the shorts,
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: you might be like, listen, sweetheart, I love you, but
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: you're not going out in those hot pants, you know?
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: And then we would have to engage with that person.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: Maybe our proverbial teenager would be angry. Maybe we'd get angry.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: But it's not, The same as contempt.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: Right. There might be a war about who's going to
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: be in charge. But if a power struggle, I get
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: to pick out my own clothes. You'll never leave the
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: house in that outfit.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: Like, yes, it's a power struggle. But if contempt moves in,
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: then there's something darker that's going on. Having conflict is normal.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But what we're talking about in that instance, your
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: vignette of the teenager. is the scapegoating and the outcast
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: of you, young woman, are really beneath connecting with. It's
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: a global pronunciation. If you go out looking like that,
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: you're all over bad. Instead of a 16-year-old who has
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: pride in her body and a certain sense of power
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: about her beauty, and maybe displaying it in a way
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: that we think is really inappropriate. But what are we feeling?
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: What would that parent be feeling in order to express contempt?
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: A cutoff from her own memories of once having felt
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: that way herself, perhaps, or didn't feel that way as
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: a teenager and never had access to that kind of
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: body pride. Our own shadow is always there somewhere, and
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: we think we're doing it to the other person, but
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: we're also doing it inside.
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: Right. That's the turnaround that we hope people would engage
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: in from a Jungian standpoint is to be able to
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: then ask, Why am I looking down on this person?
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: And this brings us to a dream that Jung recounts
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: when he was trying to explain compensatory dreams. He was
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: working at the Brookhoseley, and he had a dream that
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: one of the patients was seated high, high above on
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: a rather magnificent crown, and Jung was way at the bottom,
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: you know, under her feet, kind of looking up. And
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: he was mystified by the dream. And then what he
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: realized is that this particular patient who was indigent and
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: schizophrenic and terribly compromised, Jung realized that he had been
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: looking down on the patient and that the dream maker
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: flipped the situation around. So he was the one who
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: was being looked down on, forcing him to then reflect
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: both on his unconscious attitude but on what it feels
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: like to be looked down on, how significant that is.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: So it's a thing that any of us could fall into,
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: fall prey to. I think we're concerned about contempt when
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: it becomes the dominant attitude and the dominant way that
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: a person's ego is evaluating what's going on around them.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: But we can get caught into being the one who
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: looks down upon. And as you said, Dad, there may
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: be many reasons why people believe they have to elevate
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: themselves at any cost. And one of the costs is
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: to have any kind of a horizontal relationship with other people,
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: to be held, to be intimate, to be disclosing. That's
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: all abandoned as soon as we elevate ourselves and everybody
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: is beneath us. You know, is anybody allowed on that platform?
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: that you're standing on, are you the only one a
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: mile up in the sky? And you're looking down on
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: the little people below. I mean, maybe it gives you
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: an enhanced sense of something or other, but when you
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: turn around, if you're the only one up there, that's
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: a chilling reality. Yeah.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: It's a terrible dehumanization on both sides of what the
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: recipient feels or could feel, but what the person expressing
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: contempt is also cutting him or herself off from of feeling,
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: a connection, connection with ourselves, connection with the other, connection
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: with all the nuances of feeling. They've all been banished.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: The one person is up on high in an arrogant,
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: unfeeling state cold, judgmental, seemingly justified, righteous place. And the
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: other or a group or a value has been consigned
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: not only to the, not to the trash heap, but
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: to the sewer.
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, get rid of this. Just sweep it away.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: I think it might be, I'm thinking about this in
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: relation to hatred, but hatred has more more energy in it,
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: more sharpness than contempt.
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, hatred is a desire to destroy something, I think,
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: or someone. Anger, I think, is triggered by a sense
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: of unjust harm, and then that motivates a kind of confrontation.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: Healthy anger is change-seeking, ultimately. Disgust, I think, is triggered
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: by a perceived contamination of some kind, and that pulls
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: us into avoiding or expulsion. But contempt is often triggered
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: by a perceived global inferiority, that they are all inferior.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: And then the whiplash, which is the secret payoff, is
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: if they are all inferior, then I must be universally superior.
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: because I can so easily see how inadequate everyone else
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: is for whatever reason that I can find. And believe me,
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: it's easy to find things to complain about. We've all
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: been at dinners like this where it's like an incredible dinner,
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: but there'll be one person who's going to say something
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: contemptuous about the thing that strips the value out of it,
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: that makes it not good enough. makes it inadequate.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Well, you've hit on another one of contempt's cousins, as
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: it were, which is complaining. And I think complaining has
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: in it an implicit request for empathy, of the dinner
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: wasn't good, or I didn't get... served until everybody else
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: was served and it was all cold. How come this,
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: you know, why doesn't so-and-so ever come over anymore? There's
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: a wish for the other, a wish to have felt
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: loved or pleased or served. We want a connection that
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: didn't happen, that I or whoever, you know, really wanted
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: to have happen. I'm missing something. And of course, you know,
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: everybody carries on about complaining and shouldn't complain and don't complain.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: I am kind of in the place of at least
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: complaining is a request for connection. I wanted this and
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: I didn't get it. I still want something else. If
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: we could just look below the surface. And maybe when
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: complaints do not get addressed, do not get heard, do
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: not get answered, the complainer turns to contempt of, well,
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: I didn't care anyway. I didn't want to go to
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: that party. I would never go to a party at
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: their house.
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: Right. That there's something wrong with the people throwing the
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: party and who would possibly lower themselves to be associated
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: with those folks.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: The more we walk around this, I can just feel
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: how affected I am. It is just so sad. It
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: must be one of Dante's seven circles of hell, or
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: nine circles. I can never remember exactly how that's structured.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: But it's just such a loss of our basic... human empathy,
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: fellow feeling, flexibility, and basic characterological ego strength that we
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: hope when we've reached, let's say, young adulthood, that there's
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: enough sense of self here. not to take everything so personally,
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: that it's okay. Accidents happen. You know, I did so
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: much for those neighbors down the street. They invited all
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: kinds of people and not me. Can we just feel
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: hurt and left out and without going to that cold, razor-sharp, non-relational,
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: awful place of contempt.
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: The person who's predisposed to contempt, I think, also has
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: a kind of scorecard, a kind of ranking system inside themselves.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: It's not always clear where they got it from, but
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: they are constantly evaluating everything around them, scoring it up
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: in a certain way and finding it deficient and inadequate.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: That's your dispositional scorecard.
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: That's right. That on a scale of zero to 10,
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: you got a 0.5, you know, based on whatever secret,
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: often secret criteria that nobody really knows. And I think
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: often the person who's predisposed to contempt, they're not even
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: totally sure about what their scorecard is. So one of
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: the examples I think that shows up in mythology is
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: a play called The Bacchae. And in that play, the
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: god Bacchus or Dionysus is approaching one of the cities.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: I think it's maybe, is it Thebes?
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Sure. Somewhere in Greece.
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: Pentheus is the king there, and he finds the Dionysic
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: rebels just contemptuous. Sentuous, contemptuous, problematic, instinctual, exactly. And so
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: he orders all of the followers to stay in the city.
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: He orders the gates to the city locked. And he's
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: really sure that he's going to keep that contemptuous, drunken
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: fella Dionysus Bacchus out of his nice orderly city. And
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: then what happens is that in the blink of an eye,
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: Dionysus is suddenly strolling through the city and comes upon
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: Pentheus and just starts chatting with him. Pentheus has absolutely
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: no idea that this is a god. And after a
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: few minutes, Dionysus has taken all his clothes off, dressed
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: him in the ritual garments of the Bacchae, And then
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: it's kind of leading him out of the city to
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: participate in the woods with the other maenads who mistake
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: him for a deer and rip his head off. In fact,
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: his mother does that when she is in a divine frenzy.
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: So it's one of those ancient object lessons, at least
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: relative to the gods, that to feel contempt for one
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: of the gods is a very dangerous proposition.
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: There's the arrogance that Pentheus says the king, and the
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: king is often a symbol of ego. In charge, I
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: got this, what I say goes. When ego arrogates to itself,
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: all authority, all power, all judgment, all everything, and then
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: what happens? The polar opposite occurs.
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: That the God just takes him over.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that calls up the great Jungian word enantiodromia,
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: which was a word in my very first Jungian seminar
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: when I was like, first time I ever ventured in
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: and I read this word and I was like, oh
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: my gosh, I think I'm in over my head. But
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: it is the idea that, from ancient Greece, that it's
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: not just the pendulum swinging from one side to the other,
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: but that one extreme actually creates in itself the seeds
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: of its opposite. So if we arrogate to ourselves all
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: kinds of power and rightness and egotistical judgment, it will
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: take us where the King Pentheus went, into raw awful
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: instinctual realms. We will land in the opposite.
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: Right. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: That the thing that we find so repugnant in other people,
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: so diminishing and inferior, is often the object of fascination
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: inside the individual.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: We are land I am landing, on a square called humility.
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: Which would be the correction.
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: And when we have, if we have contempt, we are
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: not in a place of humility. You know, it's the
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: old saying, pride goeth before fall and all that stuff,
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: or The example you use of Jung's dream of the
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: woman who was looking down on him. And he recognized.
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: He could learn from the dream. The other archetypal example,
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: I think, is Yahweh talking to Job.
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: A very sad story where poor Mr. Job has definitely
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: become an object of contempt.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: Well, he's been objectified because he's a pawn in a
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: contest between Yahweh and Satan. And so they put him,
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: he goes through all kinds of awful trials and tribulations.
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: And finally, Job sort of says, you know, I really
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: want to, I don't understand this. I want to find
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: out why. And it's a very long dialogue. And, you know,
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: the Lord answers. and says out of the whirlwind, Who
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: up your loins. I will question you, and you'll declare
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: to me, Where were you when I laid the foundation
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: of the earth? And so it goes.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: How dare you question me, Yahweh says, and then gives
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: him a good comeuppance.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: But it has effect. And I think there's a lesson
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: in this for all of us that if we can
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: stand in the presence and say, why? Here I am.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: Job is willing to engage. And Yahweh restores to Job,
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: you know, all that had been taken away, his family
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: and his wealth and so on. And according to Jung,
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: man transforms God as God transforms man. And I think
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: that is what we must do if and when we
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: are treated with contempt, is to be able simply to
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: be present and say, what is going on here? I
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: am engaging with you. Job reached out to engage with
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: the mystery, with the greater power. And that is hard
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: to do.
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: It is. Edinger, who's another wonderful post-Jungian writer, he writes
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: a lot about archetypes and the relationship between archetypes and ego.
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: And in one of his interviews, Edinger brings forward the
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: idea of the offended God image. and how if the
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: ego is weak or does not have a proper understanding
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: of its relationship to the archetypes, that the archetype of
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: the offended God can rise up in an individual and
• 42:59
  Speaker 3: possess them with a kind of transpersonal energy. And Edinger
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: uses the case of road rage, where he says that
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: a person is possessed by Yahweh and offers himself as
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: an agent of divine justice.
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: And calls this onslaught of instinct forward, chasing down the
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: person that did some infraction or perceived infraction on the highway.
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: Feeling contempt and rage and righteousness and this absolute certainty
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: about the punishment of for the person that, you know,
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: beeped their horn and frightened you for a moment there.
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: That is a great example because of the inflation is
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: taking on God-like powers. I am entitled to inflict humiliation
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: and pain and punishment on you. I remember being caught
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: in this one time. My husband and I were driving.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: To this day, I have no idea what I did.
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: My husband's kind of nodding off a little in the
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: passenger seat. I'm driving along, and the car in front
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: of me slams the brakes on, and we're on a highway.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: And so I slammed my brakes on. My husband, of course,
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: is jolted into full wakefulness. And it was just an
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: awful thing. If I tried to get around him, he
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: wouldn't let me go around him. He did it again.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: To be the object of that kind of arrogation to
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: oneself of that kind of power is just terrifying.
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: So the solution is that we have to wrestle with
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: the onslaught of this power. And Edinger likes to talk about,
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: you know, Jacob wrestling with the angel, that something inside
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: of us, if we're educated a bit, has to refuse
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: the identification with that wrath or that contempt and to
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: wrestle with it. He also says something that, I love
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: Edinger's writing, intense affect's are manifestations of the greater personality.
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: One should never take responsibility for intense affect. It falls
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: from above or roars from the depths. The task is
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: to suffer and wrestle with it and not become it. Now,
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: sometimes it's really big and maybe the person that's in
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: the car with us is yelling at us saying, will
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: you stop doing it? Like it's obvious that we're possessed
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: by something. Contempt is a less fiery energy. It's a colder, icier,
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: you know, stiletto-stabbing energy. So it can be a little
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: more hidden than road rage. But if we think about
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: it as an upwelling of something archetypal, that we are
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: entitled to more than we're fairly entitled to, frankly, that
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: other people have no independent reality beyond what we think
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: they should provide to make us happy, that the world
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: has simply become some kind of a breast that's designed
• 46:40
  Speaker 3: to just meet our demands, and if it doesn't, well,
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: then it has no utility. What good are you if
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: you're a dry nipple? What good are you if you
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: can't give me what I want when I want it?
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: in the way that I want it, at the right
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: time that I want it, in the right proportion that
• 47:00
  Speaker 3: I want it, with the right wrappings around it, smelling
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: just the right way, and on and on and on,
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: because the endless conditions that the contemptuous mount onto everything
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: makes it pretty sure that nothing's going to ever fit
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: that bill.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: And it is... An incredibly regressive place. All those things
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: that you just said are, you know, it's like the
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: four-year-old who just wants his way. But it's kind of
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: iced over, as in cake icing and cold ice, iced
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: over with a kind of judgmental veneer of superiority. And
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: that makes it even worse because then it's hard to penetrate.
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: And yet, what has really been damaged is the person
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: who's so cut off from fellow feeling, from empathy, from
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: a humility, from connectedness, relationship. That's a lot to lose.
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: There's a great cost of being contemptuous. It can even
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: make it difficult to want to leave your house sometimes.
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: That if your assumption is that everything I'm going to
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: encounter is going to smell bad, taste bad, feel bad,
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: and leave me frustrated, what's the point? So it's an
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: attack on optimism. It's an attack on even the hope
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: that something might be pleasant for you. But contempt ruins
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: the ability to feel pleasure in something, even something simple.
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: But I think we should, as the good Jungians that
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: we are or want to think we are, the other
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: side of contempt, does it? It must have some kind
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: of usefulness, some kind of effect, some other side other
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: than just, all the things we've been talking about that
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: are destructive.
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: It's got to have a payoff or else why would
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: people do it?
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: And you were the one earlier, and I think we've
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: all experienced this, who said, well, studies show that it
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: can improve short-term performance.
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: There are definitely some I don't want to say benefits,
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: but there is a telos. It's trying to accomplish something.
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: And that's true that our symptoms are our best attempts
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: to solve something inside of us, which is something you
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: were leaning into as well. We are trying to make
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: something different through our contempt. So, When we use the
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: word telos, it's a central concept for Jung that everything
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: is moving purposefully. It might be doing it in a
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: very inelegant way. It might be doing it in a
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: way we might regret upon reflection. But energy is always
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: trying to accomplish something. So from that standpoint, contempt might
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: be a way to protect something. our boundaries, that we
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: may feel that we are too vulnerable, as you had
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: said earlier, too alone, too diminished, and so then contempt
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: can rise up as a way to kind of wall
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: ourselves off from further injury or emotional entanglements. If we
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: haven't found a way to face our own shame, our
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: own inadequacies or failures, The reason we split and project
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: is that the ego hasn't attained enough muscularity to be
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: able to wrestle with our own failings. And so we
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: keep pushing them to other people and then we feel
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: contempt for them as a way of pretending that it's
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: not in us.
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: And I think it's trying to power the other person
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: or people It's a power play. That if one person
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: can berate another with that coldness and contempt, that it could,
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: you know, in that reactive place where the person is
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: hurt or shocked or surprised and, you know, all the
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: rest of it where they go, okay, I'll get on it.
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: I'll do it right away. Oh, okay, okay, okay. But
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: it's only a short-term solution and it's the kind of
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: thing that can breed And then we have a vicious
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: cycle in the offing, perhaps.
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: And we can also notice in ourselves, everyone, that we
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: can have temporary periods of contemptuousness. And one of the
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: ubiquitous examples is when we are trying to detach from
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: something that we used to invest in, like a job.
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: So you just got a notice they're going to lay
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: you off in two weeks. Everybody who's just gotten the
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: notice they're going to get laid off immediately starts contemptuously
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: devaluing the job and the corporation. Oh, my boss is
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: such a blah, blah, blah, and that company, it sucks.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: If you only knew everything that was going on during that.
• 52:57
  Speaker 3: And so we can feel contemptuous of the thing that
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: we have to separate from Because it's more painful to
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: feel pulled away from something that we love or something
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: that's highly valuable.
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: And I'm thinking of a couple of times with people
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: where when after a long struggle with a family member
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: or a boss or someone in personal life has failed
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: to reestablish connection or change or anything, I wonder if
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: contempt can be a sign that this relationship has just
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: gone cold. And by having that feeling, it gets us
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: to detach. We start to give up on the relationship.
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: No point in negotiating. I think it may still be
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: kind of a masquerade, but it could contain information that
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: this is over.
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: Could be. Although it would be more elegant if we
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: could just acknowledge that there's no energy left, there's no motivation,
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: rather than having to aggressively strip value out of another person.
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: But Life isn't always that elegant.
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: And I'm just wondering if it could be an initial
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: stage of separating. Like your example of the notice that
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: people are going to get laid off and that some
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: people might react just that way of, well, who needs
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: this job anyway?
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: They're all jerks and this company thinks that we have
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: to leave and it could be part of a process.
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: of having to leave and then later on feeling the loss,
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: missing the colleagues, worrying about getting another job. But it's
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: worth one way or another. I think when we feel contempt,
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: it's a call to self-reflection. What am I experiencing here?
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: What does it mean? what is this feeling trying to
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: tell me? It's like we always talk about with dreams.
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: Something is trying to tell us something.
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: If we were to notice any of our very strong
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: feelings of any kind and to be able to turn
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: in with curiosity, huh, what's active? What's on the move?
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: Can I talk to it? Can I imagine it in
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: some way? Yeah. The last bit around content that might
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: be worth talking about is that when we have an
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: undeveloped capacity for deliberation or we feel an exhaustion around deliberation,
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: we may rise up and feel contempt for the other
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: options to free ourselves up from constant equivocation. So I'm
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: just gonna go to this college And part of helping
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: myself choose this one college is I'm gonna feel contempt
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: for the other 10 colleges I got into so that
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: I don't have to keep evaluating all the innumerable options
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: so we can strip energy out of the competition, leaving
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: ourselves one narrow channel to walk down. And there's a
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: certain economy in that, again, these things all, by the way,
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: happen unconsciously. Nobody chooses to be contemptuous. It's something that
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: breaks upon us. But that's a time sometimes we'll hear
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: or feel contempt, and it may be in service to
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: just getting us to move in a single track on
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: something instead of holding everything in equal value. Yeah.
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: And hopefully it gets us to move toward toward ourselves
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: through introspection, toward empathy, engagement, deliberation, negotiation. So hopefully it
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: can nudge us into a more human and more connected
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: place with ourselves and with whatever in the external world
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: we're wrestling with.
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: And with that....
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's go to a dream.
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: And before we go to a dream, I'd like to
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: mention that we do have Dream School where Deb and
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: Lisa and myself do meet with students live various times
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: during the month and provide very varied ways of approaching
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: dream interpretation so you can learn how to interpret your
• 58:19
  Speaker 3: own dreams and the dreams of your buddies around you.
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: It is endlessly fascinating. It is worth every hour you
• 58:28
  Speaker 3: might put in to learn it. It's an incredibly rich process.
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: You know, I met, along with Lisa, some of our
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: new dreamers. We have an orientation. And I'm aware every
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: time that we do this of just how rich all
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: the offerings in Dream School are. Just go over and
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: take a look at the website and click on a
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: whole bunch of stuff and just see what jumps up
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: in you and at you from the more of yourself
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: that dream work can offer you.
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. So our website is thisyungianlife.com. J-U-N-G-I-A-N, life.com. Right up
• 59:14
  Speaker 3: in the banner, you'll see a little bit for Dream School.
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: And if you click on that, your whole world might change.
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: So with that in mind, I will read the dream
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: we're going to interpret. A 40-year-old female who works as
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: a part-time accountant and is transitioning to full-time photographer shares
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: this dream with us. I walk into a funeral in progress.
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: There was an elderly woman at the front of the
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: ceremony laying on a table. It wasn't a bed and
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: it wasn't a coffin. She was still alive. The room
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: was dimly lit. A teacher from my children's school was
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: at the front speaking to the woman laying down while
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: holding her toddler in her arms. The child was facing
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: out towards the woman lying down who I think was
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: named Sunny. Sunny was saying how she made all these
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: bad choices for herself and that's why she's dying. She
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: shouldn't have smoked all these years. As she was expressing
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: her regrets, she was covering her face with her bony hands.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: The teacher is reassuring her, saying, We love you so much.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: You mean everything to us, and we don't care about
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: your bad choices. Look at your grandchild. He loves you
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: more than anything. I walk into the room and immediately
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: start to try to record this on my phone. It
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: feels important for me to document. My husband is there
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: with me. A Hispanic man walks over to my husband
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: and has a brief conversation with him and then walks
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: over to me. He says it was very disrespectful of
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: me to barge into this private ceremony and immediately get
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: out my phone. I realize he's right and feel embarrassed.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: He was respectful but very stern. I go sit down
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: at a table and continue to watch the ceremony. For context,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: she writes, I've been beating myself up lately for having
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 3: a hard time with motherhood. I have a wonderful husband
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: that helps and does all of the things but I
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: am the default caregiver about 95% of the time. I've
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: recently been overwhelmed by it after homeschooling for a year
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: due to COVID. Her main feelings in the dream were shame,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: vulnerability and sadness.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: My first reaction is not about the dream, but about motherhood.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: And I love Lisa's book for addressing all those feelings
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: that none of us want to have but do about
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: being mothers. It is the hardest job in the world
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: is to be a mother, especially homeschooling during COVID. I'm
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: just feeling a lot of it. of empathy and kind
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: of wanting to validate that, yeah, it's hard. And to
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: be the default caregiver 95% of the time, oh my goodness,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: it's time to get out of the house. Have a
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: change of pace, change the channel, something. But let's go
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: to the dream. Something is at, here's a funeral. That
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: is the dream setting.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: So, She walks in. She believes the funeral is in progress.
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: And as she enters, there's a feeling of ceremony and
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: a living woman is on the table, which, by the way,
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: I would probably call an altar. But because it seems
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: like there's a strange religious dimension to this.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: It's a ceremony.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 3: It's a ceremony. And she's still alive. The room is
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: dimly lit. So when in a dream things are dim,
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: that there isn't so much ego awareness, that there's something
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: that's more of the unconscious that's probably present there. Now,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: we immediately have this pair of opposites right from the beginning.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: This is a funeral, but the person hasn't died yet.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 2: And her name is Sunny.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: And she's rather sunny. So death and life, the child
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: who's somewhat newly born, and the prospect of mortality are
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: living in the same room. And if we didn't catch it,
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: bringing the child towards the woman who may be nearing
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: death is this bringing together of these opposites of eros
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: and thanatos, of love and death, coming together in this
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: woman's psyche, which is a really powerful moment if we
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: saw this played out in a movie, which often actually
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: it does, where somebody is dying and a child is
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: brought to them to interact with, perhaps to bestow a
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: blessing even. It does something to our soul to see
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: this combination of forces.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: And I think these opposites kind of culminate in the
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 2: opposite about the bad choices and the teacher saying, we
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 2: love you so much. There's a coming together of the
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: ego says, oh, I shouldn't have smoked. She expresses regret,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: covers her face. And the opposite is the teacher reassuring
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: her You mean everything to us. We love you. We
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: don't care about your bad choices. Your grandchild loves you.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: The child, the new beginning, the new life, young life.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: That's a very powerful combination of opposites. The bad choices,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: the regrets, being met with love and the child that
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: represents new life. And then our dream ego. It's always
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: interesting when the dream ego is an observer somewhere. We'll
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: get that to a minute. But the dream ego gets
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: that this is important to notice, important to record, is interested,
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: it's important to document, and her husband is there too.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: So there's another... kind of coniuntio, a meeting, a pairing,
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: man and wife. So, Joseph, what do you think about
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: observers in dreams? Sometimes people are watching a movie or
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: something on TV or standing outside a crowd or, in
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: this case, the funeral.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: Well, I think that Sometimes, for instance, the perspective moves
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: from third person to first person and back again, that
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: I'm the one having the conversation and then maybe halfway
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: through the dream, I'm on the ceiling watching myself have
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: a conversation. So I think that the dream maker is
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: very generous in terms of helping us titrate our exposure
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: to unconscious material. Some unconscious material is so powerful that
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: the dream maker puts us in the audience, so to speak,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: when we're watching it because we can take a sip
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: of it. We need the distance and breathing room. Sometimes
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: we need to be right in the middle of it
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: in order to have an adequate impact. So she starts
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: with a distancing gesture. Oh, where's my phone? I think
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: if I just film this, that'll be the right way
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: to approach it. So which is a distancing move? And
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: then there's a correction that somebody comes forward and says,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 3: this is disrespectful, this is not the right time to
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: be distanced. And then the dream ego feels embarrassed because
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 3: she recognizes he's right. So the medicine in the dream
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: for me is this clarity that this tension around end-of-life
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: remorse and love, that that's something she may need to
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: lean into more fully rather than take a photograph or
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: a recording of. What do you think?
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that it's well said and that the
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: medicine in the dream is to be engaged in a
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: feelingful way, which at the end of the dream is
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: exactly what happens. I sit down at a table and
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: continue to watch the ceremony. And she's doing that in
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 2: her association, too, of the regret. She says, I've been
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: beating myself up for having a hard time with motherhood.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: So that's a form of regret, but it's a little judgmental,
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: a little moralistic versus... motherhood is hard. And I am
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: having regrets. And she did homeschool during COVID. And there's
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: also love and a kind of forgiveness. There we are
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: in our humanity. with all our faults and foibles and
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: our hearts and connections.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: This is also a dream without a very clear lysis,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 3: that this is kind of like, you know, act one
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 3: of the play where something very important and profound has happened.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: It's still in motion. What's happened is she's figured out
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: her position is to watch the ceremony and to ponder
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: it And we don't know where the ceremony is going
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 3: to go. It's like a basket of factors has shown up.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 3: But we don't quite know how Sunny is going to
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 3: take this all in yet. I mean, she's declared she's
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: faced with terrible regret and shame. She's hiding her face.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 3: The teacher comes and talks about love. And so those
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 3: two energies are next to each other. And now she's
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: going to stand and watch. And we still have, you know,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 3: act two, which is how are those attitudes going to
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: work on each other? We don't know yet.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: I think the polarity there of the woman for whom
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: this funeral is in progress, it's dimly lit, it's a funeral,
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: but the woman is named Sunny and is alive, may
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: reflect those two parts of our dreamer. that have those
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 2: same positions of something that is not really well alive
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: and is lying on this altar, that something is dying,
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: needs to die.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 3: Needs to be sacrificed, maybe.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: And there's a ceremony around that and yet is maintaining
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: a persona of sunny and upbeat and alive and So
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 2: some things here that, for all of us, are asking
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: to be paid attention to, understood, and integrated. And I
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: like your idea that this is act one. So she
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: can dream the dream on, you know, and then what happens?
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 3: And I like your comment about the sunniness, though, because...
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: here's a woman on the table or on the altar
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 3: that's kind of produced a problem. She has these end-of-life regrets,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: and it seems by her gesture that she's ashamed. But
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: nobody actually addresses that. That there's a baby that's brought over, says,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: we don't care about your bad choices, we love you,
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: love you, love you. But nobody's creating space for the
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 3: woman to say, but tell me about your regrets. Tell
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: me about your burdens. Let's not be so sunny all
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: at first. Let's go down with you into the shadow,
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 3: into the pain, and then let's see whether we can
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 3: beckon you back up into life so the introduction of
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: love in this moment can seem or can have a
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 3: silencing effect. Like one of the things my supervisor told
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 3: me really early on is when a client starts crying,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 3: do not shove a box of tissues in their hands
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: because that's a metacommunication that you're telling them not to
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: have that feeling. Like keep the tissues to the side.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: They know where they are. If they want them, they
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: can get them. But don't interfere with the emergence of
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 3: feeling because this woman wants to talk about her regrets.
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 2: Yes, she does. And I think that's where I started
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 2: was with a wish to validate how hard mothering is
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: and that we do have regrets. That just goes with
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: the territory. And in the dream, that the sunny is
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: the false front for the regrets. Tell me about your regrets.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the bad choices that are troubling you. Let's talk.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Rather than wafting them away, there is, as you
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 2: always say, Joseph, so much medicine in a dream like this.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: Something has come to you that is profoundly, has a
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: profound ability to be helpful. Thanks for listening. To submit
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: a dream, suggest an episode topic, or join our mailing list,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 2: visit our website, thisunionlife.com. If you enjoyed this episode, give
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: us five stars and a good review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
• 1:14:14
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• 1:14:18
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• 1:14:28
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