Jung on Clarity

Psych With Mike

For most, the goal of therapy is to increase your self-understanding. The only way to truly do this is through honest self-reflection.

https://medium.com/perennial/the-discipline-of-clarity-according-to-jung-630e8434252f

Transcript:

you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page at psych with mike now here's psycho welcome into the psych 0:19 with mike library this is dr michael mahana i'm here with mr brett newcomb and intern michael 0:25 hello again good morning how are you guys doing great you guys are i guess i guess i should say consummate 0:32 professionals yes i think you could basically say that you can say i've always said the 0:37 shenanigans that were going on before we turned the mics on were 0:43 raucous and and then the mic goes on and you guys are like i'm much more well behaved when the 0:49 camera is on it's the sunday paper rule never put it in writing unless you want it to end up 0:54 in the sunday paper exactly true don't say anything that you don't want somebody to shout with a megaphone 1:01 in the local mall yes dear yeah although now malls are 1:07 empty yeah going out of business it's amazing so how can the economy 1:13 be running so hot and yet have just facilities that sell 1:20 stuff going out of business left and right there's this really cool new invention uh came out in the 90s or 1:25 something called the internet and uh people what's this internets that you speak of well everybody has a box in 1:32 their house and when they get sad or lonely they get on the box for several hours and advertisers show them pictures 1:39 and then they buy things for dopamine hits this is it's it's great it's going to be the next big thing i think al gore 1:45 had something to do with that did he invent it actually all right i think amazon has had a lot 1:51 more to do with al gore mm-hmm with the changes that you're talking about yeah so happy i could support jeff 1:58 bezos riding into space he's flying that phallic symbol all the way to the moon 2:04 oh jealous we're along for the i am jealous because i want to go to space but i'll never have that kind of money 2:11 so i'll miss it by just a couple of of years probably like like 2:18 three years after i die space travel will be affordable that i could have done it but i'll be dead well 2:24 now you've spoken it and manifested that into the world so that's your own fault so yeah i got 2:30 nobody to blame but me so i wish i could be more clear 2:37 i do too but i struggle with that you've been telling this 2:42 story all day well this 2:48 use your words yeah uh uh you've been talking about this phenomenon all day where i will start multiple sentences 2:56 and build this large narrative rather than just answer a simple question 3:02 and i feel like that uh this subject is very apropos for that 3:10 it's a reflection of reality now yeah so i have for the last year 3:16 been really really into reading jung so reading original young 3:22 like not reading things but one of the things that i was kind of like reading the bible yeah you actually read the 3:28 bible or just read stuff people say is in the book exactly yeah right because 3:35 i feel like there's a lot of literature out there in psychology which there obviously is 3:41 but what happens if you go back and you read the original stuff that the original 3:48 person like if i decided that i wanted to be a jungian therapist call myself a union 3:54 therapist then the psychoanalytic community here in st louis would say well you can't be a jungian therapist 3:59 because you haven't gone through our classes and been officially sanctioned 4:04 by us but the truth is how many of them have read jung 4:09 jung's original work probably not very many of them they've read a lot of stuff that people have said about jung just 4:14 like i feel about heinz kohut a lot of people have read a lot of stuff that peop that that people have said about 4:20 heinz kohut but how many people have gone back and actually read heinz kohut's original work so i've really 4:26 been trying to pay a lot of attention to jung's original works 4:31 and one of the things that that i am very aware of is that a lot of the 4:39 a lot of what i think people think they know about jung is not accurate 4:46 say more okay so uh young so the the the types that jung 4:55 came out with and and that now are manifested in the myers-briggs or are 5:01 you know explored through the myers-briggs there's very little of what jung 5:08 originally wrote that actually supports that 5:15 so that doesn't mean that what the myers-briggs tests is necessarily 5:21 wrong but i don't know that jung would have 5:26 necessarily supported the myers-briggs in its current 5:31 iteration i don't know maybe he would have but it didn't exist when he was 5:37 alive and so we don't know what he thinks about it but a lot of people would tell you that 5:43 the myers-briggs represents essentially the principles of jung's type typology and 5:52 maybe it does i don't know i don't know what young would think about that but i do know that he was very specific about what he 5:59 what you're talking about the distinction between the manifestation of his theory yeah 6:05 and the origination of his theory and your argument is if you go back and read what he originally wrote 6:11 then you have a clearer understanding of his thoughts exactly but as i understand it when 6:16 when he wrote this stuff it was coming out of his intellect not scientific experimentation 6:24 um brilliant man conceptualized these things wrote them 6:30 down the myers-briggs is someone else taking that and trying to interpret it or 6:36 develop a mechanism that would evoke it when clients take a test right 6:43 so they're not the same thing but they may be different facets of the same diamond 6:50 yeah that's a political scientist and you hear it's that we're saying that law is the manifestation of philosophy 6:57 but the philosophy is not born to the end of law most of the time yes 7:03 got that so one of the things that jung wrote about 7:09 that i would like to explore is this concept 7:14 of clarity so i sent you guys an article about uh jung's thoughts on clarity and so i 7:21 would just ask you what was your guys's thoughts or reflections about that 7:29 michael you wanna sure um i have always looked at young's clarity 7:36 going back to stoicism right marcus aurelius know thyself um and i think 7:42 there is a lot of wisdom in this and how we interpret this and how we can use 7:47 this uh to better our lives or to to connect with people around us 7:52 um i in my everyday job right as an engineer 7:58 i will get into uh not tiffs but uh confrontations with a teammate of mine 8:05 because he's very wordy right and the more words he uses the less i understand about what he's actually saying 8:13 and i think young's argument here is if you don't know yourself how can 8:18 anybody else know you and to get to the point where you can other people can know you or you can 8:25 enact that get really deep with yourself and understand what your you are what 8:30 your convictions are and what you want them to be um i think there's wisdom in that i also 8:36 think there's always some understanding that you even like knowing them knowing them is different than 8:42 choosing them and you can do both you can do both 8:47 so what would what would you say is the difference between the knowing and the choosing i would say that knowing a 8:54 conviction that you currently hold for for example my father is relatively 8:59 religious yes he knows that conviction of himself but it wasn't until much 9:04 later in his life that he really wrestled with his own faith um that did he choose that 9:11 conviction oh i got you himself so you could be brought up in a family where a conviction were indoctrinated into you 9:17 and it could be something like racism you could have been indoctrinated into a racist 9:22 family and you could have that as a part of you but you hadn't ch chosen it and 9:29 then if you actually look back and and at yourself critically and say is this an aspect of my personality that i want 9:36 to embrace you could choose not to you could choose to change yes i think young falls in that camp as well not only can 9:43 you choose to change but you have a responsibility to make the choice it falls back in that 9:49 stoicism or even back to the aristocracy of i have the responsibility of knowing 9:54 myself of understanding this philosophy in myself because eventually as a human being or a 10:00 member of society i should i need to make the choice 10:06 okay i thought you had something but uh so for me this is 10:11 from the psychodynamic perspective the real distinction between what they call 10:17 catharsis and cathexis so catharsis is the evocation of a strong emotional reaction 10:23 cathexis is like an epiphany understanding into the true nature of a thing and 10:29 i have always believed that cathexis is the goal of therapy at least for me 10:36 if i'm going to go to therapy cathexis is my goal and i try and create cathexis 10:42 for my clients but i've had a lot of people tell me that capexis is could be 10:48 could be a goal but is not a necessary goal of therapy so do you guys think 10:53 that better personal understanding is a required goal of therapy or should 11:01 be an expectation of therapy or do you think that just alleviation of symptomology 11:07 is the goal or the point of therapy 11:16 so i think that depends on if we're talking about therapies and intellectual exercise in this field of study 11:21 or if we're talking about what the client coming to see you is hoping to achieve 11:26 because they're the ones that get to decide so it's really in service to what the client's 11:32 goals are it should be but then there's also a pure intellectual 11:38 description that you can buy into as a therapist but i don't think you can impose it on 11:44 the client i had i had dinner this week with an uh old friend of mine 11:52 who is struggling with some things in her life right now and she was saying i was raised lutheran 11:57 i feel these shoulds about how i should be certain ways 12:04 and i'm discovering at this point in my life i don't want to be that way and so i'm feeling guilt about it she said talk 12:09 to me about guilt and i said my personal belief because i'm not doing 12:15 therapy with her so i'll talk more about what i believe with her 12:22 is that guilt the feeling of guilt is an imposed script 12:27 that was internalized inside you in your early childhood messages that you were given to try to 12:33 control your behaviors your options and your thoughts remorse is something totally different remorse 12:40 is something comes out of my own personal sense of integrity to be the person i 12:46 want to be as i understand it requires me to behave this way think this way feel this way 12:54 so if i'm not behaving in a way if i idealize myself for instance this is a good christian 12:59 how do i understand the message about christianity in christ i said well you should behave this way 13:04 okay so i want to behave this way but then i'm walking through the mall and i see somebody that i immediately just 13:10 want to go slap i have a visceral sense of antagonism to this person i don't 13:16 know where it came from i just feel it that primitive part of me wants to go punch me in the nose when i recognize that the christian part 13:23 of me or the the integrity part of me is saying wait a minute a good christian 13:28 wouldn't have those feelings you wouldn't respond to those people what the hell is wrong with you you're a sick person so then i'm in conflict 13:36 internally between the person i'm now seeing myself to be and the idealized person that i would wish to be 13:43 so what i try to explain to my friend is i make a distinction between feeling remorse if i did or didn't do something 13:50 i drive down the highway and these people are standing on the side of the road with homeless signs and little children a woman a man and a couple 13:57 little children and i think i can't believe that the city hasn't run 14:02 them off they're interrupting traffic it's dangerous they shouldn't be there then i drive half a mile on i think what 14:07 if they're really homeless well if those little kids are hungry you got some money you could have given them what's wrong with you you're not a 14:13 good person so i get caught up in those conflicts so then i ask myself who do you choose to 14:19 be do you choose to be a person who tries to help the downtrodden if so 14:25 how do you do that do you support a food pantry do you 14:31 support a homeless shelter do you physically go down and cook meal i mean what do you do to say well i'm helping 14:38 and then can you discriminate between that and passing somebody on the highway with a 14:44 homeless son as as a matter of personal choice so we get into the shoots and what i told 14:50 my friend is the way i try to distinguish this with clients who are suffering from this 14:55 is can you make a distinction between the have two shoulds and the chooser shoots the behavior may be the same the 15:01 visible behavior i'm going to put twenty dollars in a pot somewhere the have to should 15:07 if i listen to that and i do it i'm go the way the way i'll know i'm going to 15:12 feel resentful and angry the choose to should i'm going to feel good about it because my superhero will 15:18 come in and give me an atta boy oh you did the right thing you did what we wanted to do so i try to make the distinction between 15:24 the have two shoulds and the choose to show but so then the only way that you can know the difference between the have two shoulds and the choose two shoulds 15:31 is to find this clear clarity absolutely which brings us back full circle so i 15:36 want to go back though and ask you a question about why i was listening to this well actually let's go to our break and 15:42 then we'll come back and i'm going to ask you a question hey brett if you were going to 15:48 tell somebody to check out something on the internet to 15:53 help them with their mental health what would you tell them i tell them listen to psych with mike why would you tell 15:58 them that because it's probably one of the most easily listenable experiences you can have that 16:05 will give you information that's useful for a whole spectrum of concerns that 16:10 people have i agree and i have actually been told that 16:16 by at least a dozen people several of whom were not married to me and some of 16:22 them didn't even know me that's amazing that is amazing it's when when we get 16:27 that kind of feedback from people it is so incredibly 16:32 humbling and overwhelming for me it is for both of us yeah so we really 16:38 appreciate it and as always if it's friday it's side with mike [Music] 16:44 okay we're back and and so the question that i wanted to ask you is so do you conceptualize guilt as an 16:53 external message and remorse as an internal message no uh i conceptualize guilt as an 17:00 indoctrinated message okay so but that's what i mean the the the the it's coming from outside the message is coming from 17:06 outside originally yeah but i've internalized sure sure yeah yeah okay yeah but but remorse has to 17:12 come from inside right for my own developed sense of integrity the person that to be the husband that i want to be 17:19 requires me to behave this way and not behave that way so even though 17:25 the primitive me may want to behave that way right the chosen me 17:30 shouldn't it's a should is it a have to should is it coming from my religious training as a child or is 17:37 it a choose to should come into my sense of grown-up integrity i walk this path because i choose to walk this path it 17:43 makes me feel better about me so would you would you say that remorse yes is more a function of clarity yes 17:51 yes okay because i think that's really helpful when thinking about you know 17:56 we've all treated individuals who are sexual abuse surprisers right and we've 18:02 always had and we've had we've talked about this multiple times you come to thanksgiving i got to go to belong to 18:08 you belongs to the perpetrator and but i think that that's a great way to be able to present that to the 18:15 client to say you feel guilty but do you feel remorse so that's what you have to do you have to break up the script that 18:21 they've internalized and offer them the option to write a new one right because if you feel guilty 18:28 then that's pressure that's coming from you from outside from other members well the rest of the family still wants to 18:34 keep the imagery in place and so they're going to be really devastated if you out uncle joe at thanksgiving dinner you 18:41 ruined our thanksgiving right and so if i say to the client let's not focus on your guilt let's 18:48 focus on your remorse where's your remorse comfort my remorse comes from that i couldn't protect that little girl 18:54 my remorse comes from that my other people in my family didn't protect that little girl and so that wouldn't be 19:00 remorse that would be anger oh well i mean it could be yeah i mean if if johnny didn't protect 19:07 susie i don't own any of that it's regret okay it's really rewarding okay okay yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i 19:13 think is that they're both rooted they both gain power through shame yes both guilt and remorse and 19:20 even regret all three gain their power through an unspoken shame yeah but who's right but where's the shame 19:26 coming from is it coming from an external message or is it coming from an internal message a whole personal integrity so that's the conversation i 19:32 want to have with the client what is your sense of integrity not my 19:38 judgment not my external observation saying good girl bad girl but what do you see when you look in the mirror what 19:43 do you hear in your head and i think that's what jung was suggesting in the 19:48 article about clarity of self-awareness self-perception uh 19:54 self-examination michael you were gonna say something no okay so so uh uh 20:04 have you ever used that terminology though in therapy i would like for you to have more clarity 20:11 no yeah i haven't either no um have you ever conceptualized it that way in a way 20:17 that you were aware of i don't know okay because i think i do 20:24 that i think i do and i don't know that i ever used the word clarity but it is 20:31 i tend to be fairly socratic and you know there's a whole 20:38 controversy in psych how should you be so should you teach in therapy or should you let the 20:44 client come to their own conclusions and i tend to be more socratic and that's 20:50 just how i am and so i know that about myself but i want people to genuinely come to an 20:58 understanding of themselves not one that i've 21:03 given them or projected on to them but one that they internally believe is true because i don't think you can make 21:10 accurate choices about your behavior and how you want to be if you don't understand that so what 21:16 i try to talk about a teaching moment what i try to do is teach a client that 21:21 words matter and that it's really important if we can get to the manifestation of the script that 21:26 they hear in their head what are the words that you hear with my friend what she was saying is i hear should 21:34 and so i said could you work on changing every time you hear [ __ ] in your head 21:39 stop and say will or won't i should take my friend to dinner 21:45 stop and say i will take my friend to dinner this week or i won't take my friend to dinner this week and let that 21:51 go and re-script the words you hear in your head because i believe if the script is 21:58 rewritten the message changes we find that there's a powerful effect 22:03 um this reminds me a lot of uh danny kahneman again right uh danny kahneman and amos tversky have this whole idea of 22:10 framing as a language frame yes right and they would say people are much more effective at quitting smoking if they 22:16 say oh i'm not a person who smokes right right or i'm not smoking today right yeah you 22:23 say you if you pull that into your identity as a person uh it was much more powerful 22:31 so if you okay so then that's a choose to sure so so we're focusing on this idea 22:40 of clarity when we're we're connecting it to those choose to shoulds 22:46 well the clarity comes as young says the clarity comes from self-examination and self-reflection 22:51 so when you can examine this the language of the script 22:57 then you can edit it to your liking right okay so now 23:03 this is kind of blowing my mind but okay so uh one of the things that that we 23:10 struggle with in therapy all the time is the client who is struggling to be able 23:17 to conceptualize themselves as a good person or a bad person so 23:22 using what we're talking about here how how do we apply that to help the 23:29 client with that kind of struggle 23:36 do you understand what i'm saying i think so i think my approach to that would just simply be to ask them for more clarity 23:44 definition of how they experienced them as bad how they experienced themselves as being 23:50 bad and unworthy and so what they will tell you is they've had this behavior that behavior or they'll tell you that 23:57 their church says they should do this that the shoulds from other message points and then you start to take those one at 24:03 a time just examine them where does it come from is that yours do you own that or somebody hand you that well i think 24:09 that coming from you know the the old albert ellis kind of rational emotive therapy 24:14 you know messaging unconscious self-talk uh that a lot of what i see 24:22 as the affliction of our society in in western culture is 24:29 unworthiness unlovableness that people are carrying from those pre-verbal years 24:36 and that we go go back to we were talking in a previous episode about the 24:42 unthought known that we've learned from michael garanzini and that that is one of those 24:48 really profound deeply rooted unthought knowns i am unlovable and that you know 24:57 looking at this idea of clarity what i would say to that client is what makes you 25:03 unlovable is this a message that you've internalized from your environment 25:10 if you really believe that about you what is it about you that you think 25:16 so the way i understand guaranteeing you used that in connection with something called attachment theory 25:24 your ability to have attachments to make relationships to be connected um 25:30 a lot of the pain that people experience and the dysfunction that they experience comes from their feeling of 25:36 not being securely attached not being safely attached 25:43 and so you have to spend enough time to get to that messaging 25:49 what did you hear and learn about your worthiness to be 25:54 attached about your expectation that you will be abandoned right uh cast out 25:59 because you're unacceptable and that didn't come into your head the incident that you 26:05 were born right as a tabula raza blank tablet that was written by someone on the wall 26:12 you know like the biblical message about the finger of god writing a message on the wall somebody wrote that on your wall can we 26:19 examine it can we possibly edit it and if we can 26:24 what does that suggest to you right about relationships about self-acceptance about self-worth 26:31 because if you got a message from your family of origin from your primary so i 26:37 think this is what i believe is that you are born into a family that this family 26:42 demonstrates appropriate emotional regulation to you you internalize that 26:48 if that message of a regulation but the the the effectiveness of that 26:53 internalized process is really based on the extent to which you feel secure and attached and so when you don't have good 27:01 secure attachment in those early years it's going to be really really difficult to develop effective emotional 27:07 regulation later in life and so then now you're an adult coming to my office 27:12 telling me that you don't feel loved and what i'm wanting to say to that person 27:18 is where is that coming from if we look at if we go through a process of 27:24 delineation to try and figure out clearly where that message comes from from 27:30 inside you where do you see yourself being unlovable and and you know clients will 27:36 always have examples well you know this person says the messages they were yeah they're exactly 27:42 i was just going to say i saw this movie once yeah yeah they're they're but they're all messages it's not an actual 27:49 real intrinsically felt kind of thing and so then when we get to the heart of that and and we we 27:56 say okay this sense of unlovableness isn't coming intrinsically from you 28:04 then i think that it comes back to what michael's talking about with this identity internalization if that's not really 28:10 your identity are you willing to now challenge that and reject this idea of 28:16 unlovableness in favor of some identity structure that's more congruent with 28:22 what you truly see about yourself i think for me that is that is the the 28:28 core of this idea of clarity it's the theory is that clarity is the 28:34 groundwork earlier you mentioned is should the goal of should one of the goals of therapy 28:40 be getting a client to know themselves and we said ultimately it depends on what what are 28:46 the goals of this particular client but that has to leave me wondering can you do 28:53 work with a client without that level of clarity i think you do have to reach a certain point of clarity with a client 28:59 either understanding the messages that they're receiving understanding um the dialogue within themselves 29:05 understanding the propensities within themselves um and then additionally finally their convictions right so 29:11 that's a great question michael my experience the presenting problem that brings 29:16 somebody to therapy is almost never the underlying problem that's causing real difficulty in their life 29:22 but if you don't appear to address the presenting problem and make progress with the presenting problem you'll never 29:28 get the opportunity to go beneath that so it is a dance that again the therapist is challenged 29:35 to track at a existential level and at a superficial 29:41 level to keep the client secure 29:46 and uh wanting to come back feel good about 29:51 what they're getting out of coming to therapy and it's a real challenge sometimes and 29:57 you know the the idea of clarity is a spectrum right and so if you're doing 30:02 cognitive behavior therapy somebody comes in and says i'm always late to work so we're going to do cognitive behavior therapy to identify why it is 30:10 that you're always late to work and you know we identify all of these unconscious self-talk messages you know 30:18 like oh i have more time or i you know i i need to eat a good breakfast all these things and then we we you know modify 30:26 those so that you're more on time that really isn't getting to oh i was 30:33 unloved as a child but it is getting to a level of clarity that is dealing with 30:39 that very specific symptomology presentation so yes we always are going 30:44 to be working on clarity because there's just no other way to be able to do therapy you can't 30:51 get change if you don't work on that process of clarity but my question is 30:58 you know are we and i don't want to say disservice because it always does always have to be 31:03 with the client but for me psychotherapy is good really really foundational 31:09 psychotherapy is a deeper process that does get to that point of cathexis at 31:15 least for me that's at least a part of my goal now i'm not going to force that on a client that doesn't want to go 31:21 there but i am always looking for the avenues for 31:27 what helps me to clinically understand that 31:32 individuals process that that that process of catheters more what are you laughing 31:38 about i'm sorry i when you said i'm not going to force that on the client i flashed i remember 31:43 one time working with a family the mother had lost her cool because she had gotten up 31:49 at four o'clock in the morning taking these three kids to six flags and she wanted to ride a particular ride 31:55 that they didn't want to ride and she lost it and went in this whole diatribe about i got up at four o'clock in the 32:02 morning i drove several hours to get here you're going to write every right out here and you're goddamn going to have fun 32:09 so that's where i flashed when he said i'm not going to push that on my client here's your interpretation of reality that i insist you had what you wanted 32:15 was the recognition you wanted yes you did that's awesome yeah did i get that did they ride the ride 32:22 yes and they cried the whole time nobody had fun 32:27 all right that sounds like a good place to uh leave it for today we would really love it if you would go 32:34 to the youtubes and find psych with mike and subscribe to the show there you can also go on to the 32:41 apple podcast site and find psych with mike and leave us a comment and a rating that always helps people find the show 32:47 and we really appreciate that as always the music that appears inside with mike is written and performed by mr benjamin 32:53 the clue and if it's friday it's cycling