All right. Welcome to the Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast, Discover, Heal, Grow. I am here with Corey Gamberg, who’s the executive director of the Rockland Recovery Treatment Centers.
We’re going to talk about some ways that depth psychology and some of the more experiential and somatic medicine overlaps with 12-step and drug alcohol recovery. Corey, thank you so much for being with us today.
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me.
Can you tell me a little bit about your role in Rockland? I’ve seen your stuff on LinkedIn. I’ve enjoyed some of the things that you’ve posted.
You’re coming from a similar perspective to us at Taproot, same stuff we talk about on our podcast. I’d really like to hear from you how you do that work and what that looks like.
Yeah. Thanks for responding to some of the posts. Some of it’s a little daunting to post, I think.
I love it.
I was like, I’m off the wrong way for people sometimes, but.
You got to get over that, man. You got to get over that and just throw it out there. If you build it, they will come.
Yeah. There’s been a lot of good feedback. Within Rocklin, so I’m the Executive Director of the Rocklin Recovery Group, so I oversee multiple outpatient facilities that we have.
We operate substance abuse and mental health treatment centers in Massachusetts. And I think over the course of the last five years or so, it’s been a mission of ours at that company to try to be on the cutting edge of substance abuse treatment of kind of what’s coming next. I’m a big believer that, just to jump right into the Jungian stuff, as far as individuation goes, everything individuates.
So as a person moves through individuation, so does phenomena. So the experience of addiction itself individuates. The experience of recovery itself individuates.
And you can kind of see that a lot of the example that I use for a lot of people is, I’m a drug addict who comes from the OxyContin era of drug addicts. And that’s not really something that we see as much today as we did 15 years ago. You know, heroin and fentanyl are very different.
In my area, at the very least, the increase in people using different drugs like methamphetamine has increased”
And that’s become something that 10 years ago, you didn’t see as much. So addiction is changing and the landscape is changing.
And with that, we need to find new ways to meet that for recovery. And that’s a big part of the work that we’re trying to do at Rocklin. You know, where to from here sort of thing.
Yeah. Can you say that? Because a lot of like what I wanted to do, it’s interesting, like you never really lose the bad reputation from the people who are wanting to kind of criticize you for being forward thinking, even when research catches up with what you’re doing.
But when we opened, which was not that long ago, I mean, it was five years ago, you know, people kind of acted like I was crazy for doing brain spotting. Now brain spotting is like almost kind of ubiquitous in our area. The EM, even the EMDR practitioners have kind of switched over.
But I’m seeing kind of the eating disorder world and the treatment, resistant trauma world and the addiction and recovery world change a lot and blow up. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that 12 step is discarded or “gotten rid of. It just means that we have kind of new brain based medicines, new understanding of neurology, new understanding of cultural and anthropological metaphors that need to come into this thing to keep it alive, to keep it relevant.
You know, and can you say some things about what you’re seeing about where the industry was that wasn’t great, where the industry is going now, and maybe what the future of that looks like as, you know, because, you know, when you’re a part of a business, part of that is staying relevant and meeting the need of what’s happening. You know, you can’t rest on your laurels and it looks like you’re very forward thinking in what you do. Could you kind of talk about some of the strengths, weaknesses of how we do that in America and the profit motive of healthcare?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’m someone, I’ve worked in treatment in one position or another probably since 2011 or so. And in that time as well, I’ve been a part of starting some nonprofits that, you know, assist family members through the experience of addiction.”
So I’ve seen a lot. I think my experience has always been as a person in treatment, as a person working in treatment has always been faced with, you know, traditional 12 step approaches, evidence based practice, CBT, DBT. And that was kind of the bread and butter to your point, you know, over years EMDR and different sorts of modalities have come into play.
I think something that’s really big right now is the IFS modality. I think a lot of people are taking to that. And interestingly enough, that’s just, in my opinion, depth psychology with clinical language.
And, you know, so it’s interesting to see as far as the question of where are we going? It’s evident to me that we’re going to a place that has more depth. We don’t, we’re not responding to kind of surface level, let’s polish, let’s polish this up and get through this and move on.
We’re not responding to that anymore as a collective.
Do you think there’s cognitive and behavioral implications of like behavior is all that’s relevant? So as long as you’re not doing drugs, you’re good. As long as you’re going to church, you’re good.
As long as you’re lifting weights in the morning, you’re good. As long as you’re eating your broccoli, you’re good. But not looking at how old is that part of you that wants to use, or how old is that part of you that doesn’t feel understood.
Where does it come from? Where is it in the body? Do you feel those earlier CBT attempts to fuse the 12-step with CBT is avoidant for the lack of a better word, avoidant of a more whole or more threatening psychology to our system?
I probably would. I probably would. I think that even now, I think that, and this is a big part of the work that I’m doing on a personal level, recovery just has to be more than that.
“Recovery just has to be more than the cessation of symptom and the change in behavior and not using. Because as someone in recovery for so long, obviously, I’ve seen a lot of people who do that sort of thing, like go to church, go to the meetings, they live that way of life, but they’re still struggling with all these underlying more deeply rooted issues that just changing behavior doesn’t touch. And then to that point, I think that then immediately a relapse or some sort of behavioral regression is immediately seen as a failure.
And in that mindset, it just creates this very shame based recovery world, I think. Yeah. And again, just to kind of go back to that previous question, I think we came from a place where it was much like that, grounded in changing your behavior, just don’t use.
And now we’re moving to this experience where I see people in their early 20s. And you can’t really speak to them from that sort of 12-step mountaintop, this sort of idea of sit down and shut up and this is what you’re going to do.
“This generation, this new generation of people suffering from addiction, it’s just not responding to that because they’re longing for something deeper.
And this even happened within my community where I would say Jung probably was a very unknown figure minus his mention in the big book and some people’s knowledge of him.
But he was the only one that responded to Bill W. Like I mean, he wrote seven people. And Freud didn’t write him back.
Jung was the one who kind of gave him that time.
You’re talking about Roland Hazard. Sorry? So the story with Jung and Aya, the story starts with this guy Roland Hazard.
And he writes to Freud and he writes to Adler. And those guys kind of they don’t respond to him at all. And Jung is the last.
Hey Corey.
I think the video is frozen. I’m not sure if you can hear me.
Oh dear. Okay. Technical difficulties.
We will try and reconnect and go from there.
Hey, Corey, I lost you for a minute, and you froze, and I lost audio. Can you hear me?
Sorry, man. Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?”
“I’m so sorry. Let me, we’ll just keep recording, and then I’ll fuse those together. If you want to just kind of go from the, he writes Adler.
I think that’s the last thing that I got. I apologize.
No, no problem, dude. So, yeah, this guy Roland Hazard, he writes Freud, he writes Adler, and they both don’t respond, and Jung is the last one he writes, and Jung is the only one who responds, and he says, okay, man, if you can come out to Zurich, that’s cool, I’ll work with you, and, you know, they work with each other for a year, and, you know, the story goes is as soon as he left Zurich and got on the crane, he was drunk, and he calls Jung back or he contacts Jung, and there’s this real humbling moment on Jung’s part where he goes, okay, well, I kind of misdiagnosed you. I thought you were a hard drinker, but you’re what people call a real alcoholic, and the only thing that’s going to help you is some sort of spiritual experience or spiritual transformation, essentially.
So go home and find that. And…
“Is that the letter where he says Spiritus ex spiritum, the replace spirits with spirit?
No, so that’s the letter he writes to Bill W.
Okay.
And that’s like, that’s kind of, that’s probably 10 years past this story when that letter actually gets written, yeah.
That’s the one I’m familiar with, so I don’t know the Roland Hazard stuff.
Yeah, Roland Hazard is kind of the guy who really helps the AA become AA because he comes back to the States, he joins the Oxford group, which is kind of its precursor. He gets sober through the Oxford group practices. He meets Abby Thatcher, who’s Bill W’s best friend.
Abby Thatcher meets Bill W and the story goes. But without Jung, we really don’t have this idea that spirituality or some sort of spiritual experience is the answer or one of the solutions for addiction. So, it’s just interesting that a lot of people aren’t familiar with him or weren’t familiar with him in the community that I was in.
“And then over the last probably seven or eight years, he’s become prominent in a multitude of ways, not only in the recovery communities, I think, but also in the collective, which really speaks to something of greater depth as well. So to that point of when you’re forward thinking, people kind of think you’re crazy, but then eventually they catch on. That’s kind of what happened with Young.
And even when we opened Rocklin and we started talking about Young, it wasn’t something that even clients who were coming in for treatment were really familiar with. And it’s introducing people to an entirely different perspective and way to move about psychological life.
And to jump in some of the hard questions of AAA or some of the sticking points people have with it, when you say spiritual experience, I mean, do you mean that I have to see an angel? Do you mean that I have to go to church? Do you mean I have to make contact with a deep part of myself I don’t understand?
What do you mean there? You know, that spirituality is essential for recovery. Could you speak to that?”
“Yeah, I mean, I think it means so many different things to so many people. And beyond like spiritual experience, I really like what AA’s text says about the psychic change. And taking that from a psychological point of view and breaking it down etymologically, you know, we’re looking for a soul perspective, a soul transformation.
So the way that I see the world. So to me, you know, a spiritual experience is when something happens to me that has happened so many times, yet I can experience it prospectively and embody it in a totally different way. I don’t react in my old behavior.”
“I don’t react in my old thinking. I’m able to see something happening to me and respond in a completely different way that allows me to find more meaning in that experience versus some sort of resolution to it. And I think that’s something that’s really hard for people in the treatment world to understand when they work with people is how to hold space for clients versus needing to offer them some sort of resolution to what they’re bringing up because a lot of times it’s just about putting some voice to the experience and getting some distance and perspective on it that shifts the way you relate to it.”
Yeah I talk about like why a lot of the stuff that is brain based works. IFS is probably the most well known kind of repackaging of some of those things. But I think the trick is the metacognition that these parts of self feel like they are possession like they’re all of us like they take over whether or not we admit that that’s happening you know that that’s what’s happening and then repressing them through a cognitive or behavioral intervention or more avoidant intervention you just white knuckle it through life until you never even if even if you make it you know to the end of your life and that thing never does flare up and make you deal with the shadow or make you relapse you’re still taking that energy and avoiding it in a way that I think does damage and what the metacognitive parts do is they let you experience that without being overwhelmed by it without even having to identify with it directly you can have sympathy without over identification and and that those networks in the brain are at tension they are at odds but we need all of them and yeah what these are doing are letting us know those parts of self without them possessing us essentially yeah 100% I agree with that yeah it’s interesting because you know IFS is growing like I saw that you had done some training at the Chicago Union Institute yeah which is probably where 50% of our web hits come from yeah that in New York is like happening a couple thousand a month but like people get angry with me for saying that you know I like IFS but that if you’re gonna do individual therapy it may not be the best way to go to sink $15,000 under that because what shorts is doing a lot of that is putting Jung and the post Jungians together with Fritz Perls the experiential stuff and people will send me hate mail about that and I’m like man this is in the introduction of his book like I haven’t even gotten to the controversial stuff yet and he’s telling you you know like this is him but I don’t know I mean I see it as like a model that takes a lot of these perennial philosophy and then trains people to do it and facilities quickly you know with a universalized language but without the amount of work that it takes to kind of learn a lot of these things that take you know 72 years to learn some of the time I don’t know if you could speak to that when you’re saying like where the industry is going and and kind of what’s getting popular and why you know.
Yeah I mean I think that to me you know working with an individual in treatment or someone who’s pursuing you know recovery or substance abuse treatment it’s it’s a journey man and it’s it’s an unfolding and to work with them it can’t be something quick we can’t do a quick fix so you have to take the time I’m a very psychoanalytic thinker so it you know therapy is about sort of the retelling of my story and I think that that’s the area that we need to move the industry in is bringing people in to see that you know their their struggle with addiction or their struggle with alcoholism is not some sort of moral failing it is not something that makes them different from another person it’s a sole event you know addiction is this sort of promethean rupture in the psyche this this desire to transcend and grab that fire and also feel divine in myself you know to Young’s point. So I think that you know working with people one-on-one needs to for the industry to really progress and survive and be useful and in a big way it needs to understand that the process is not a 30-day thing it’s not a 60-day thing that you might.
But the research says that the recovery, could you speak to people that are thinking whatever comes after that ellipses? Usually the clinical psychology grad school student that has just taken their research 101 or 201 class and sends me hate mail. Could you tell them why that research isn’t maybe not relevant as somebody who is an executive director and also in recovery?
Yeah I mean I deal with this all the time where we’ll hire clinicians that are 26 years old who get a master’s degree and then they come out and they think everything is cookie cutter and like this is how you work with someone and then you do this and then you do this and there’s it’s not touching anything you know it’s not touching anything of the real wound of why this is happening you know to this idea that behind the behavior of addiction there is an image and the work really needs to become this would be a real Hillman piece of it but the work really needs to become identifying the images behind the behavior of addiction you know the images of descent the images of rupture the images of longing and exile and these are the things that then need to kind of be amplified in the individual’s experience and revisioned into their mythos and if they can do that and that doesn’t happen in four weeks doesn’t happen in six weeks you know that’s a real down-and-dirty process but when that happens we have seen especially at Rockland “lasting recovery but also recovery that looks totally different you know these are people that pursue the 12-step process but understand it as a practice simply of grounding and a way to kind of organize and hold their their suffering for a period of time but not live there and I think that’s a big piece of where recovery is going in the future where the industry needs to go in the future AA and that 12-step model is is great for that grounding experience but it’s not a place to live in and I think that’s been the dominant mode of thinking for a lot of people in the addiction space.
Well and one of the things that I think is well I’m trying to think of how I want to like set that question up but I’ll just give you three pieces of something and then see how you want to fit them together. One of the things is I get a lot of calls of a certain type and I’ll say you know when I when I get somebody who’s saying that they’re having a dissociative disorder that is just flaring up all of a sudden and they don’t know why and they’re starting to drink alcohol more they’re starting to have some kind of symptom more is y’all ask like what age are your kids because so and they’re like what what I’m like you know what happened to you and you’re at that age because so much of the time it’s like if if I’m a woman and I have a sexual assault or an abuse and then at seven and then my child is right about to be seven especially if the child’s female your body starts to almost give you that thing to start to understand in order to protect your child you know I see that happen a lot. One of the things that happens with with addiction I think is people are like, man everything’s going good like I’m going to church I’ve got this non-profit I’m doing this I’m doing this I’m doing this but I’m like feeling this overwhelming whatever and you know it was an alcoholic or you use you know IV drugs but I’ve been in recovery and that’s good and whatever I always I’m like how long have you been in was it “three years because it seems like that three-year mark is where you know all of the technique and the skill and the cognitive parts of like how not to use drugs or how not to participate in the behavior that you’re in recovery from or there and established but then all of a sudden there’s this.
The original problem that put you there is back but you don’t really want to go back to your old solution but all of a sudden the problem is a problem and you’re trying to deal with it and that’s like where the real trauma work can start where like brain spotting and the Jungian lens of the soul is like such a helpful thing and so that I love getting those phone calls because I know that person is just so ready. Can you say anything about that?
Definitely. I mean, I think that that is so accurate. It’s funny.
It’s so funny because I usually think that it’s around like this four to six year mark that that really starts to happen for people. So and I talk about that and that happened in my experience. You know, like I believe that the 12 steps are a it’s a mythology and mythology is can be thought of as a psychic container.
You know what I mean? It holds our suffering. It gives our suffering context.
It gives my suffering language. It gives my suffering ritual. And that’s what being in AA does.
And so for that three year period of being in AA that four year period, you know, everything is able to be held within that mythology. And then that exact thing happens where you kind of take a step back and the formulaic aspect of what you’ve been doing and the rigidity of what you’ve been doing, it starts to confine and something in you is trying to grow beyond that. And we don’t have places for those people to go that don’t want to return to use, but also can admit that what they’ve been doing really isn’t working anymore.
And a lot of times, especially in the 12-step community, it’s kind of met with dismissal, like, oh, you’re overthinking it. Maybe your ego is getting in the way or you’re heading towards a relapse. And how frustrating is that?
Because for someone who’s done, quote-unquote, done the work and changed behaviors and changed thought patterns and going through all of this stuff, they’re simply saying, I can’t identify with that mythology anymore, and so I need to find the next container. And the work that I’ve been doing, I really categorize this period of recovery as post-recovery work.
It’s not walking away from recovery, but it’s changing the way we understand it, to your point. It’s moving away from formula and rigidness, and it’s moving into more of trying to deeply understand the roots of the problem in the first place. Now that I’ve had some time away and I’ve stabilized, I can do that work.
And I’ve had this experience where a lot of friends of mine will go five, six, seven years, and then all of a sudden they’re out and they’re relapsing, and you ask them what happened, and a lot of them said they felt this way, but they couldn’t speak to it. They didn’t feel like they had someone who was going to be there to hold that because it was going to be met with some aspect of or experience of that dismissal.
What’s frustrating is a lot of those people are not saying they want to relapse, they’re not having any desire for that, and it’s almost like the community pushes them that way because they need to interpret everything as this need to use again. That becomes the language that they’re almost offering somebody. I think the fusion of 12-step and the Jungian thing, it’s not either or, it’s making a bigger container.
Every epoch, every cultural cycle, we have to do that because the culture is different, the addiction is different, the drugs are different, the cultural factors that make up the human psyche and the waters we’re swimming in are different. Of course, these methods have to change. The idea that, well, this is randomized controlled trial, so it’s 100 percent if you do this, you have the best odds.
I don’t really believe that that is a dynamic of a model of research and clinical practices as we need.
Absolutely. It’s just the same thing. I think about Hillman’s book a lot.
We’ve had 100 years of psychotherapy and the world is getting worse. I think about that in relation to AA sometimes. I wouldn’t say that it’s getting worse, but we’ve had 100 years of AA almost.
Where are we going now? Is it still meeting the times? To your point, its language works for what it works for, but then it starts to fall short.
Again, to your point, how many people have we lost trying to fit themselves into that container once they outgrew it? And that’s a bad thing to think about.
Yeah, and I think outgrowing it doesn’t mean that you can drink or use drugs occasionally. I mean, it doesn’t have to mean what a lot of the people who are scared by this kind of thing means. It means that the soul continues to grow, and a lot of times there’s no plan to ever use again.
It’s not a good idea to ever go back to partial recreational use of anything. That isn’t the distinction. It is that there is a bigger model where we can continue to have containers for people that are further and further along.
You’ve written a lot about James Hillman, who was, I guess he was a Jungian analyst, even though he got out of Zurich with fire and later said, I’m not an analyst, I’m not a clinical psychologist when he was being fired in Texas, so I don’t know what to call him. But he was an interesting guy, he was a good writer. Can you talk about how Hillman’s kind of imaginal archetypal psychology informed some of what you do or just his ideas?
Yeah, definitely. And real quick, I just want to say to that other point, I think part of the goal of recovery is to have that growth experience. It is to move on eventually and not stay put.
So just to end that question. You know, Hillman to me is kind of like my psychological forefather. It’s really wild.
I just, I stumbled upon his work for the first time probably in around 2017 or so. I picked up the Souls Code. I really wasn’t in a place to read it.
You know how that happens with books. You know, your psyche picks it up, but it’s not really the right time. And it wasn’t until probably more closer to COVID and the 2020 timeframe where I had downloaded the volume of his biography, the first one by Dick Russel, and I walked around my apartment complex every day listening to it.
And the more and more I listened to it, it’s just so much related to my experience within the Recovery Collective, you know? Like he kind of came into the Jungian world and then as he progressed through it, he kind of found the same juncture that we’re speaking of, you know? This is the old way and it’s kind of cracking and what’s going to come next?
I think that Hillman opened so many doors for people in this current climate, you know? I think he was a man ahead of his time and I think his time is coming and his time is probably, you know, now in some fashion because, again, we’re hungry for new perspectives and new ways to think. And the way that he talks about returning soul to psychology and soul as a perspective, soul as something you can kind of embody, not some sort of thing that you have.
It’s a way of thinking.
And psyche and soul being different. John Beebe would point out about Hillman too, that they’re not the same thing. Yeah.
Maybe some overlap.
Yeah. And so for me, I think bringing some of Hillman’s ideas into the addiction space started for me. It’s kind of funny.
Like in Revisioning Psychology has this chapter about basically this process of seeing through, seeing through something into its archetypal roots. And that’s kind of what happened. His work led me to look deeper through the recovery experience.
And beyond that, kind of again, try to conceptualize this next phase of what recovery is for people when they outgrow that initial container. And it’s helped me to sort of bring mythopoetics into the addiction space and allow people to understand the addiction process as initiation, but also as a living myth for them. It’s part of their story.
And, you know, do this with introducing certain stories like Prometheus or Persephone and Tantalus. And again, just finding these new containers for people to conceptualize their suffering through beyond a clinical model or some sort of research, you know? Yeah.
Go ahead. Homan is an interesting figure to me because he’s one that I couldn’t get away from, like I kept bumping up against. A lot of him, I think, is not quite finished, you know?
Like a lot of the things that he puts out as finished works, he was more in the process of something than he was willing to admit. I’ve talked to Dick Russell on here, his biographer. Hopefully, we’re going to talk to him again later this year when his next book is coming out.
I’ve talked to David Tacey, who is an analysis and an astrophysicist. He’s an admirer of a lot of his work and also a critic of a lot of his work. A critic, yeah.
I’ve talked to Lawrence Hellman, who is James Hellman’s son and also working in astrology and psychology and industrial organizational psychology too. He was somebody who I kept seeing my own worst angels in, like the part of myself that I was afraid of. Because I think that there was a element of Hellman that was driven mad, a little madness he mastered later in life, but by his ability to see through time beyond his own life, and the inability for his whole life to contain the expansiveness.
We all hit that. The reason that I mentioned that is not to opine on Hellman a ton, but I think a ton of recovery work that is embodying, that is soulful, that is good, is helping people come to terms with these frustrating and impossible limitations of life that are human. The body, the temporal thing that we have to sit through.
I’m thinking of Simone Weil, the mystic, that says, well, you should approach an addict like somebody who is trying to eat God. That this person is trying to contain all of it in a way that isn’t possible, and to really reconnect and know that it’s not a taking in, and it’s an emptying yourself of to really make room for something else. Could you say anything about that?
Or I mean, that’s a very open statement.
Yeah. I think I would agree that Hillman had this way of seeing through the events in his life that made his grounded life, his literal life a little chaotic for sure. I think that in my experience, it really opened up not necessarily kind of my darker sides of my life, but Hillman really opened me up to see how expansive my life could be, or how expansive I was as an individual.
And coming from such a kind of structured recovery experience and world, that was really freeing to me. But I agree in the sense that it’s hard to start with something like that, that someone who’s looking to get sober, really coming off the streets or right off of a run, it’s really hard to grasp any of this imaginal sort of deeper rooted material.
But I think what’s really important that I do with people in the early stages with them in relation to Hillman is really trying to kind of talk about the idea of pathology, and this idea that we psychopathologize everything. I’ve listened to some of your episodes where you guys talked about evidence-based research, and we psychopathologize everything. I had this instance with my son who one day was just pulling out his ears a lot.
I was with someone and they said something and I said, well, maybe he’s just going to be a musician. Maybe there’s something peculiar about the way he’s listening.
The rhythm of it, yeah. Yeah.
We don’t need to say that there’s something wrong, but we need to try and honor this thing that’s happening. I talk about that with people’s experience of depression a lot. When you experience depression, from a Hillman’s perspective, I would say if you work with it a little bit and embody the depression a little bit, you realize certain things like when you’re depressed, you watch different movies, you eat different food, you listen to different music and you might dress differently.
Through that experience with depression, you’re able to gain a perspective through that lens that you weren’t able to gain through your ego’s perspective prior. In that way, the depression is actually a gift. It’s actually the soul trying to tell you something.
If you break down that word, the psyche logo, psychopathology, or psyche pathos, that is the love of the soul. A symptom like depression is the soul’s way of loving us into seeing something about our lives that we cannot see from ego consciousness. Understanding that is very freeing from this idea that there’s something wrong with me.
And I think that is so important for people to understand. And that’s why I think Hillman’s time is sort of coming, because I think people are ready for something like that versus this idea that I’m sick and I need to get on this medication and I need to do this for the rest of my life.
Yeah, and also I think seeing a static end goal as this place that we get to is always gonna let you down. Yeah, another issue I have with the biomedical model is that, like you’re saying, it turns every symptom into a problem, or into not even a problem as much as a finite thing. And I think that you should get under it and see it as a dynamic force that is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always you and a part yourself that you can learn to hold.
And that when we turn things into an objective metric, like, you know, we can look at a white cell blood count in a hard science like biology, but we can’t really do that with psychology, like a lot of the people that want to turn us into a computer or, or just an inevitable result of computational genes are trying to do. We need to be able to see these things as the soul speaking, the soul crying out, as dimension, you don’t even have to do transdimensional forces, but just dynamic forces that need to be understood. Ultimately, can probably only be understood by the person who is the one having the soul that is an analysis.
I think that to that point, there is a rhythm to suffering. I think that’s such a thing that I talk about with people in recovery, which is this idea that you’re in this process now and you’re sober, and you’re helping other people and you’re showing up, it by no means means that you’re not going to suffer. Like heartbreak is going to happen, relationships are going to end, jobs are going to end, and it follows this rhythm of Persephone.
The idea is you’re always going to return to the underworld, and we’re all going to return to the underworld, and we need to learn how to move through the underworld without grasping for the fruits. The fruits for people in recovery or drug addicts are relief, and comfort, and all these things. We need to learn how to maneuver the underworld in a participatory way, not in a defensive way.
Absolutely. I think that’s another thing that Hillman really brought out in me that changed my life, which was I need to participate with my emotions, not defend myself against them.
Yeah.
And that really opened up a whole world for me.
Yeah. Have you read all three volumes of Hillman’s biography? I haven’t read them.
Kind of like psychotically, yeah.
Yeah. So Dick Russell, when I interviewed him, it wasn’t out yet. He said that there was kind of a forgiveness of Jung when Hillman found The Red Book and that a lot of the anger that he had, he kind of let go of because he saw that as this descent and return that he was wanting psychology to have.
And he saw that Jung had done that himself to kind of have the framework that he later built. He just didn’t think that the kind of archetypal realm that he was descending into with The Red Book was something everyone needed to do. It was something he wanted to glean insights from and inform his writing.
But Jung had this idea of descent and return, which Campbell takes and makes the hero’s journey for pop psychology and screenwriters. But there’s this idea of that you go down into this place that is the descent into hell or the descent into the underworld, or ultimately the parts of yourself you don’t understand, and then you come back. But that you do that enough that the ego kind of becomes porous to where it’s unafraid of it, and it’s not a rigid boundary that just cracks and becomes psychotic, or just needs to crack and dissociate, or crack or lose itself in addiction, but that it becomes this porous boundary like a cell wall that can let unconscious contents in.
But it’s still a filter. It’s still there. We have to have that individual identity.
We have to have that ability to turn off a lot of ourselves because we can’t just be this expansive ball of energy of all we are. Could you say some about maybe that reforming the process? Because I think the biggest risk I see when somebody is telling me that they’ve finished with addiction work or something is that they view it as a destination where they’re done and they used to feel this way and they won’t feel that again.
On a certain level, you’ll always feel that way. It’s being able to go down and descend into that and then learn something from it without using, and without ultimately doing anything that is turning you off or being destructive.
Yeah, and I think that’s kind of what I meant with the example of depression. It takes a period of time before you can participate with something like that in that manner. And I think that’s really the process of that initial period of recovery.
It’s helping the ego gain enough strength to be able to do something like that. And I think that’s an immensely important piece of the work. People who are jumping into the descent or archetypal or Jungian work too soon, they risk that idea that the ego isn’t strong enough to hold the contents that they meet or that arise.
But I think to your point, that’s what I meant with the idea of depression. We have to go into it and not be afraid of it and kind of see that the more and more I have that experience, one of the ways I think about it metaphorically is when I assign to depression that it’s mine, it gets sort of trapped in the body, and that’s when we experience what I think collectively we understand as depression. When this phenomena arises and it comes to me, for whatever reason, if I immediately trap it and I say, well, my depression has gotten really bad, I can’t come to work today, it actually exasperates the experience of depression.
Yeah.
If the phenomena comes to me and I realize this is something visiting, there’s a purpose for this happening and I work with it for a little bit and I do some writing, and maybe I, like I said, watch some movies or eat different food or whatever, dress differently or listen to different music, and I get to some resolve of what the depression was trying to get me to see, the phenomena, I feel like, leaves, and then I find myself, I’m okay again, I came out of that, I’ve risen up again from this experience, and now the next time it comes, I have to do the same thing because it’s going to come again, and it coming again does not mean failure, and it doesn’t mean regression, and honestly, it just means we’re human, it just means we’re alive, that these phenomena, these psychic phenomena that you can’t see, that you can’t grasp, they come when they’re ready, and like Hillman’s point, behind every symptom, there is a God almost. So what God is coming to me right now and why?
So the question that people always direct at the Jungians to start to put a head on some of this stuff is technique. You’re talking about a map, you’re talking about a process, you’re talking about throwing the baby of out with the bathwater of research and clinical psychology and the biomedical model. What do you want to do?
What does recovery look like? Because I think for most people that have your perspective, the actual 12 step model doesn’t really need to change that much. It just needs to prepare for where we’re not white, knuckling it through the early stages of not using and kind of point towards another doorway.
What does that door look like and what’s on the other side? And how do we build that? How do we do that?
And how do you do that to your work?
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big pieces about that is like, you know, I kind of feel like Hillman would call it the aesthetic response. You know, it’s part of it is starting to have these little moments where you try to find the beauty and what’s right in front of you and appreciate what’s in front of you and see it as alive. You know, so you start to take more concern about the way you keep your home.
You start to take more concern about the way you decorate your office. You start to take more concern about the way you’re eating and the food you’re eating and you try to see beauty in it and you try to see it as psyche, you know, kind of his idea of I’m a Mundi and this idea that everything we’re doing is affecting us psychologically. You know, I love what he says about office spaces.
You know, if you if you go into your office and it’s bright fluorescent lights and there’s nothing on the walls and it’s all white, there’s no healing that’s going to happen there. Or even when he talks about you know, working with a married couple, he would say, let’s not even talk about your marriage, but tell me how you decorate the living room. And if there’s just trash everywhere and everything is chaotic, then that’s affecting you just as much.
So I think part of what we need to do in recovery is return to some aesthetic appreciation of being able to see the beauty in the world and that, you know, it’s affecting us just as much as we’re affecting it.
Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned the fluorescent lighting. One of the first episodes, I talked to the architect Leon Kreer about New Urbanism, his work with New Urbanism. And at the time, I didn’t even know that was going to be a podcast and was kind of, or that I would do one and I was kind of wrestling with Hillman because there were parts of them that I really liked and there were parts of them that kind of scared me about myself.
And Kreer, off mic, like in our conversation at the end, was like, oh, yeah, you remind me of this guy that I met in Zurich when you’re talking about that, because he didn’t know Jung, but I probably said a Jungian idea or something. He was like, James Hillman. I was like, oh, OK.
And he was like, yeah, he told me that American architecture, European architecture draws the eye upward. Everything is pulling you up because it wants you to contemplate God. But Americans come in and they put a drop ceiling and fluorescent lighting because capitalism needs you to stare down into hell.
I don’t think Hillman ever wrote that, or at least I don’t have never seen a recording of him saying that, but he did tell it to Korea and Zurich at one point.
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And I but I do think that’s that’s so much of it, right?
Like Hillman would say to that recovery, I think Hillman would say recovery is so immensely bound in monotheism and the perspective of Christianity. And it really is from the 12-step perspective, you know, and the idea is all about, you know, kind of transcending, you know, I transcend resentment, I transcend behaviors, and I get above that, and I don’t act like that anymore, and I reach purity, and that’s just, you know, I think to the point we were talking about earlier, that sort of perspective or that sort of myth doesn’t hold forever. And we need to prepare people for the fall of that, and the ability to kind of go down and hold things soulfully, and hold things from a sort of perspective of depth versus transcendence.
Well, and even somebody like Hillman, who was just obsessed with bringing back a polytheism into psychology and wanted a return to the Greek mystery cults and getting away from monotheism, I don’t think he saw monotheism or a singular self as a problem. He saw them as containers and that sometimes you need this type of container at different points of the journey, and other times you need this type of container. And that there were places where that top-down, traditional hierarchy, you know, putting God into one box instead of lots of little boxes, or the divine, the self into one box instead of lots of little boxes was not allowing for a greater ritual to happen.
You know, like, if you do and you look at, there’s lots of places where I think Eddinger, Edward Eddinger, puts Jung better than Jung puts himself, because Jung wasn’t quite settled with what he was trying to say. I mean, Hillman’s the same, where it’s like he kind of opened up a conversation, where there’s some things where I don’t know that he ever said them perfectly by the end of his life, or at least not, you know in a book. Maybe he was saying that to somebody else.
But if you look at the through lines and what he’s calling to come back into recovery, to come back into psychology, I think are an animism and a sense of ritual. An animism in that I can turn my own ego down enough to hear the world talk to me, to let my house be alive, to let the sword that I’m making be alive. You know, that you’re turning down your own identity enough to hear the identity of the world and re-insolving that in a way you’re never going to get there through an objective science that’s going to say this is the reason why you don’t like the planet on fire, this is the reason why Black Rock and hedge funds are probably the wrong path.
You know, because a spreadsheet can’t do that in a way that a re-insolvent of the world through animism can.
Same thing with ritual, you know, I think that’s interesting, like I was only to interrupt, but it was making me think, are you familiar with the work of Robert Sardello?
Yeah, I’ve encountered him a little bit.
So you know, that’s sort of really Robert Sardello’s practices and some of his sort of contemplative work was really the segue for me into that ability to experience that sort of animism again and this idea of getting out of that top-down response from a phenomenological perspective and basis. And, you know, it’s funny that they did a lot of work together when they were in Dallas at the Dallas Institute for Humanities. And a lot of, you know, to your point about Edinger and Young, a lot of what Sardello is doing is sort of taking Hillman and putting it in a more kind of structured context of more maybe, I don’t know about academic, but more refined way almost.
He definitely was going to play politics with institutions way more than Hillman ever was going to. Yeah.
Yeah.
He was not going to carry any water for anything that he didn’t have complete respect for.
And I think too with Hillman, like the idea of what you said about the self, you know, I don’t think he was against the self. I think he was against the Jungian community making the self this goal to reach through analysis. Like you go into analysis, you individuate and you reach the self.
And that’s, you know, Edinger’s sort of, you know, ego self-access. And that I think makes a lot of sense. But again, to that experience of rhythm, I just think you come in and out of that.
You know, you experience the self and then you move around and you mess up and then you come back and you work with the self. And that’s sort of more spirallic way of being in the world is much more, I feel like, how Hillman honored the self versus those traditional Jungians as sort of like this endgame, you know?
He definitely hated the literalism of the institutes that just takes over in the 80s. And I think probably rightly so. I mean, the people that I like left the institutes at that point to pursue an experiential and a somatic medicine like Arnie Mendel with Process Therapy or Sidren Halston with Voice Dialogue, which in some ways is a more intuitive form of IFS, I think.
Yeah.
And I think that Hillman’s experience, again, like we were saying at the beginning, kind of his experience in Zurich really mimics what we’re saying about the recovery experience, you know, like, and it kind of comes up against to like, you know, with Hillman, the Pu’erh Senex work is so, is so vast and it’s such an intricate part of his thinking. And that’s sort of what we’re up against, you know, like when the Senex becomes too one sided in this rigid, formulaic, repetitious approach to recovery, you know, it breeds that Pu’erh shadow that needs to kind of just run out and jump out the window or, you know, kind of jump up and scream, I’m not going to do this. I’m going to go find something now.
And we need to honor that impulsivity as creative energy that the Senex has kind of been pressing down, you know, and that was what he was up against in that period of time when he was sort of director of studies and trying to bring these new things to the Institute. Like, what’s that story in the first volume about playing softball, you know, like he started bringing baseball gloves and softball and he would, you know, say, and this was so crazy, he would say, that, you know, they would have better discussions there than in any sort of lecture hall. And then I was in Chicago at a weekend teaching with an analyst named Dennis Merritt.
And one of the first things he said was, you know, I was in there in the 70s and we would play softball with James Hillman. And the way he was just like, that’s what he remembered from 1970, you know, playing softball. And to Hillman’s point, he would say that in that softball, Eros was there.
And from that platonic standpoint, you need Eros to teach anything. And so how can we look at that in the 12 steps is, I would say that AA has lost its level of Eros. There’s not enough anymore.
And so the teachings start to lack. You know, the communities start to become hierarchical. They start to become, you know, well, that’s that guy.
He sponsors all these people. Or this is the old timer who’s been here for 20 years. Let’s listen to him.
They don’t have that experience of Eros anymore. And I think that’s what, at his best, he was trying to bring out and show people. And, you know, I think it kind of backfired on him in a couple of ways.
But, well, when you’re having an affair with a patient, you might have too much Eros in your psychoanalysis. You know, Elmer is a perfect guy. I mean, also, the ethics was not modern.
You know, there are a lot of it wasn’t like he’s doing that today. But there were a lot of things that are pretty wild in his biography, you know, in his life, you know. And I think he would be the first one to tell you that.
Oh, definitely. Definitely.
Yeah. Yeah, I wonder, you know, we talk about animism being, you know, the re-enchantment of the world. But to me, ritual is where you willfully and intentionally take parts of yourself that you want to change externally, you externalize them.
You know, in Western esoteric magic, that maybe is through, you know, burying a duck egg or putting these little figures on a board. But in art therapy, it’s through art and hypnosis. It’s through, you know, or guided meditation.
It’s through turning these pieces of you into an image. And then the important part of the ritual is modifying this image externally so that you have more power over those pieces of self and then reclaiming them. And I think that that ritual and animism are two of the things that Hillman wanted to come back a lot of his take on a polytheistic psychology is trying to do that.
Could you say anything about those things in your work or how they show up? How you kind of use them if you do it all?
Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say specifically. I’m trying to think if we, you know. I mean, with animism, I think I try and work with people, especially from not necessarily a external standpoint, but as far as internal phenomena, always trying to understand what’s happening to them as something that’s alive.
And putting a face to the experience of depression, putting an image to the experience of addiction, and letting it sort of amplify itself into something bigger. I think that to your point about ritual, man, we’ve lost it, you know? And that’s sort of the experience that I feel like people come up against again in the recovery space, which is the rituals, you know, there’s a famous quote, I forget by who, but it’s the rituals remain long after the reason is remembered, or long after the reason is forgotten.
You know, so we just keep doing these things, but they almost feel empty.
Ritual can be good and it can be bad. And it’s just like religion when it’s not alive anymore, just like routine or tradition or, you know, there are 12 step programs I think that are alive, that understand the concepts you’re talking about. I mean, sometimes I tell people who think a certain way, I want you to go to this church on this day, because that’s where you’re gonna find your people.
Whereas if you go at three o’clock, I don’t know that you will.
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I think just, I think part of that is trying to push people to seek out ritual and to understand the importance of ritual in their life and then let them create it. You know, I think that’s part of the problem is, you know, people need to find space to develop their own rituals and find and attach meaning to them instead of being told this is the ritual you need to do.
I think that works for a period, but really what we long for is a personal relationship to the way we move through life and, you know, the rituals that speak to say, my daemon might not speak to someone else’s. And so a lot of the work I think that recovery in its next, you know, evolution will be about is helping people develop their own rituals versus putting them into old rituals, no longer working.
Yeah. Well, that’s beautiful. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up?
I want to be respectful of your time and not take you, you know, over your lunch break. What all is anything that we don’t touch on you feel like is important for or we have enough there to go ahead and release this on the Internet and trust that people will reinstall the world without it?
Yeah. I mean, I think what’s important is we kind of said it all throughout is we’re not saying anything bad about 12 Steps or traditional recovery in that way. We’re just saying that inevitably it does lack.
And what we need to find is where people can go in that moment or experience of lack instead of pushing back on them to do more work or putting them in a position where they feel like they’re failing because something is awakening them and arising in them. And I think-
It is not always the desire to use. Even if you tell them that, they may mistake it for it. But a lot of times it is dying of old things and a hunger for a new thing that we can’t yet see.
It’s just the next initiation. It’s the next moment in that person’s development and then in that person’s becoming. I think that’s the most important thing to think about in the evolution of what’s coming is that, how do we hold space for that experience?
Thank you. That’s beautiful. If people want to find out more about what you do, I can include any link in the show notes, but what would you like them to check out?
An article, a book, your business on LinkedIn, what would be a good thing?
Yeah, they can definitely check out the LinkedIn profile. And from there, they can check out, my website is depthrecovery.org and it sort of introduces Hillman to the recovery space, Jung to the recovery space and has a bunch of writing and some general ideas of a different approach to this issue.
Well, thank you. That’s gorgeous. I will link to the LinkedIn page and then from there, you can check out some of Corey’s other stuff.
Thank you so much for getting on with us today.
All right. Thanks, Joel.
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