Recovery, what is it? Ask one person in recovery to define it, and then ask another. Maybe you have done this before, maybe you have not, but the vast majority of the confusion begins with the definition of the word itself. Better yet, the lack of a definition in circles that bear its name. The word itself means, “a return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength.” Another definition as follows ; “Regaining possession of something lost or stolen.” However for the purposes of our talk here today, simply put, most people would say, “not using drugs” or “the ceasing of symptoms.” But then again others might say, “you can be in recovery, even if you use substances, even if you continue to suffer the symptom.” And off we go.
What follows I hope will be a journey, one of sparked curiosities, and wonder. My talk today has its roots and inspiration in a talk given by an American psychologist, one of the most brilliant of our time since William James, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, James Hillman. In a talk given in Venice, IT – Hillman returned the soul to the world, re-igniting an age old Neoplatonic concept called – anima mundi.The soul was no longer held captive within the subjective psyche of the individual, but out there in the world, in everything. This thought will be a thread we follow through out our time together.
This may already seem like a unlikely subject for this talk, however, let us begin with some ideas from another brilliant mind and thinker – Carl Jung – the founder of Jungian or Analytical Psychology. In a volume of his collected works, Aion, Jung talks about the collapsing of value systems. Briefly he explains it as such – man has lived through two phases ; the first a spiritual phase, the second a material phase. Jung through his historical tracing and studying was able to see that this spiritual phase of man begun with the advent of Christianity. Towards the end of Roman antiquity man had become barbaric ; driven by instinctual pleasure. In order for civilization to survive, there needed to be a pendulum swing – a new value system. This was the beginning of Christian consciousness.
Now man was given a doctrine, a value system, and a set way of not only being, but of thinking. Christianity split the human psyche in two and created inner division – of light and dark, good and bad, higher and lower. Why this is important for our discussion will become apparent as we continue to move – but briefly let us compare this with recovery. When one comes looking for recovery, ones life is typically in a state of dissolution ; of falling apart. Whether it be from the onslaught of emotions, or the consequences of on going substance abuse ; these individuals are looking for structure, for a container, for a road map. Similar to Christianity, a program like Alcoholics Anonymous offers a way out of ones personal instinctual failures and shortcomings ; you are powerless, it is not you, and if you believe in a higher power and live by this doctrine you can be saved from yourself.
Recovery enters into ones consciousness in just the right moment, similar to the advent of Christianity for civilization. For the next thousand years Jung goes on to provide research and study to show how civilization concerned itself with spiritual matters ; the formation of religion, the building of churches, monasteries. The main focus was towards a value system of light, grace, and kindness. It is important to remember that one-sidedness and an either/or consciousness create the need for balancing. This began to happen within the collective around the time of the middle ages and the Renaissance. The world’s value system shifted from one of spiritual matters, to one of worldly matters. Driven by the age of exploration, the scientific revolution, man became concerned with conquest. Jung referred to this phase as material.
Let us review – man has lived through two phases thus far, to Aions of time, the spiritual and the material. Why this matters for us is multiple – one, we are currently living in the next pendulum swing, through an obvious collapsing of a collective value system. Take a look on the television, read your news feed, check your tweets, all we see is disagreement, further division, and varying ideals of what a society, culture, and civilization as a whole should be. Jung warned and taught that the oncoming Aion would not be one of either/or – one or the other, but would need to be the merging of two into one. A new consciousness where man is able to see the spirit within the matter, no longer living within a split consciousness, but one that I refer to as participatory.
Jung further noted that if civilization failed to do so, we would experience a return back towards our barbarianism, individuals solely out for themselves, little consideration for man, or nature. A society driven by instinctual desire and pleasure, chasing monetary value, and teaching us all that the only god that matters is the god of consumerism. When our psyches can not keep up with the consummation of experience, it turns to addictions, to the phenomenon of numbing away the pain.We are a collective lost, no values to agree upon, no road map to adhere to. This is the time we find ourselves in, and this is the time that all of our clients are coming to us from.
What better time to discuss then how Recovery can no longer be held captive by self-help and support groups, and must be returned to the world. Recovery is the next phase of consciousness, one that is not only participatory, but that bridges the gap of spirit and matter. In what follows then, I will describe three main aspects of Recovery consciousness, story-awareness, looking beyond, and the aesthetic response. We will then explore the experience of self-betrayal and how addiction and mental health symptoms are its potential manifestations and consequences. Recovery then becomes the pursuit of returning to a life of soul, a consciousness that invites one to re-imagine the way they see the world, offering an experience of healing to all individuals, not only those who “need it”.
Recovery Consciousness
Let us begin our discussion then by laying out a few of the main ways one can move towards a consciousness of Recovery. The word itself means to “return” to “regain”, so the question becomes what does one regain by moving into a more Recovery conscious life? James Hillman states in the Souls Code, “We dull our lives by the way in which we conceive of them.” In this best selling book, Hillman introduces us to his myth of the Acorn – a myth of the development of the personality. Inherent in the Acorn myth are numerous aspects, boiled down for the purposes of this talk, we can say it is a myth which returns meaning to our individual lives.
Again, in his teacher and predecessor C.G Jung we see the important role that meaning plays in our lives. Jung states, “I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.” And, another teacher and predecessor of both Jung and Hillman, Plotinus, “We possess beauty when we are true to our own being : ugliness is in going over to another order.”
All three thinkers give us a similar directional signal, they direct us to a sense of purpose, meaning, and truth inherent within us. Not only that, but they speak to the potential consequence one becomes victim too when this aspect of oneself is not known, fulfilled, or followed. ( an important thread for the second half of this talk) Thus, the first task of entering into a more participatory consciousness as Recovery, we must begin to re-vision our lives through a sense of story, to return us to a capacity in which we can see through the mundane events of our lives, to the inherent deeper story being played out to which we are apart of.
When I use the term story, I wish for us to try to imagine it not in relation to education, or simply literature. But, let us try to think of story as something alive, something that is happening, and something in which we live out our lives through – containers if you will. Through the lens of story one begins to be able to see the events in ones life as symbolic, not merely literal. Ones images or events that were once considered pathological and signs of sickness, find legitimate homes in the likes of myth, fairy tales, and legends. One becomes aquatinted with the archetypal stories that have transcended time, to see the deeper threads these tales unveil, given them their ability to persist. One is now freed from the confines of clinical literalism, and has begun to approach the symptom, the pathology as “the speech of the soul” as James Hillman refers to it. Thus, our first move towards a Recovery consciousness is to see the symptoms of our lives as meaningful.
Healing begins to happen, and consciousness begins to shift when perception changes. What takes place in therapy if not a collaborative re-telling of ones story after all? We help our clients sift through the chaotic, ever twisting and turning events the psyche produces, and what is truly produced is a work of fiction, is it not? A new version of the way actual events from the past have played out, and with a new perspective of said events, something in the psyche shifts and consciousness enlarges. We return to the deeper meaning of our lives by returning to story. Jung famously stated that patients needed, “healing fictions.” and I agree.
Beginning to develop a sense of “story-awareness” is another way for us to imagine the merging of the spirit and matter we spoke of at the outset. Seeing through the normally pathologized and diagnosed events in our lives, we begin our next move towards a consciousness of Recovery ; looking beyond. Owen Barfield famously said, “literalism is the enemy”, I think about this quote often when pondering about how confined we are as human beings to accepting that things simply “mean” this or “mean” that. We have not merely lost, but potentially been robbed of our imaginative qualities and abilities.
The act of looking beyond continues further the first development of story-awareness and taking our symptoms as meaningful. Part of the way this happens is through the respect of the themes and images our clients arrive with. Looking beyond is a mode of reflection ; one that allows the prevailing symptoms, feelings, or images the ability to resonate interiorly, not be belittled down to a diagnoses. Let us use an example ; a young girl around college age is in your office hysterical over a recent break up. She claims the relationship was always good, until she met her boyfriends mom. Since then she felt like she was never good enough, she felt like the mother put her in impossible situation after impossible situation, yet she kept surviving, until she could no longer.
In a act of “mania” as the family then went on to refer to it, she snapped in front of his family, and stormed off. And what brought her to therapy is that she heard his mother was happy about all of this! Now, there are many ways to begin to process these events. But let us sit for a moment, let us take in the story, the characters, the plot, the drama. What tale might come to mind, what theme does one begin to sense? Might she find solace in the tale of Psyche and Eros? A love story which teaches us amongst many things the true power of the Mother, and the relationship of Mothers and Sons. Was she not being put through the same tasks as Psyche? Might she not find a way through this scenario in her own life, by looking beyond the mere disdain for her boyfriends mother, seeing herself apart of something deeper, something more archetypal.
When we are in the midst of an archetypal story, we are in the midst of our soul. Soul, Hillman states refers to, “that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.” When one develops the capacity to look beyond their symptoms, one too begins a journey back to ones own individual soul. Returning again to a question posited earlier, what does one gain by moving towards a consciousness of Recovery? One awakens to the reality of the personal, individual soul, initiating them onto a path of pursuit, of deepening into, and becoming more aware of their own depths. This leads us to our final facet of Recovery consciousness, the aesthetic response.
The aesthetic response refers to a state of awareness, a way of being and perceiving the world around us. Typically and for the most part, we live in a top-down processing culture, ruled by the mighty hand of cognition. From this stance, most of our reactions are based on prior experiences, and we do not respond / participate to the world, or the event ; we react. We look to make sense of it, literally. The aesthetic response requires that one move away from the normalized “top-down” cognitive based thinking and reactivity, towards a “bottom-up” processing. With this, awareness of a particular perception takes reign over cognitive functioning.
Robert Sardello, co-founder of The School of Spiritual Psychology has developed as a part of his work, a contemplative practice which centers around the organ of the heart and the phenomenon of silence. Silence, Sardello states is a “active presence” – something akin to the way I spoke about story previously, a container, something we live in. Let us think about the silence as we step into an empty cathedral ; it is loud, welcoming, still, vast. Compared to the silence in the car after an argument with your spouse ; its tense, heavy, clouded, tight. Silence has its own qualities, and developing an aesthetic response to ourselves and the world, leads us back to not only seeing, but sensing, feeling the beauty in the world.
Sardello’s practice cultivates what is called, “heart-awareness”. It is achieved through the following practices. First, we place our attention on the following points: 1) the space between the eyes, 2) the throat, 3) the heart, and 4) the solar plexus. This is the “heart alignment” exercise. Through the alignment, one notices the different qualities of each of the four points. It is felt physically. With these shifts comes a tingling sensation accompanied by a heightened awareness of the body. Attention is then shifted to the silence at the periphery of the body and then to the silence “within”. Attention is shifted back-and-forth between the periphery and interior silence two or three times. Then the boundary between interior and periphery is gently “dissolved”. This gesture brings one to “pure body awareness”. The third part of the practice involves one placing attention at the periphery and then the interior of the heart. After doing this several times, the boundary is again dissolved. The resultant state is “pure heart awareness”. This practice leads to a marked shift in awareness, a deepening of one’s perception of the interrelationship between self and world, or spirit and matter.
In terms of neuroscience, this practice leads one to the attending of the interior of the body, or what is called, “interroception”. When one is able to perceive their internal bodily states, new information is sent to the prefrontal cortex. This flow of energy serves, in turn, to mediate between our mirror neurons and our limbic system, according to the neuroscientist Daniel Siegel. The limbic system, home of emotional functioning plays a pivotal role in the formation of relationships, and development of emotional bonds. While at the same time, mirror neurons which are thought by many neuroscientist to be the source of empathy, form internal maps based on patterns perceived through action and awareness, again paraphrasing Daniel Siegel. In so many words, the development of heart awareness not only deepens our relationship to our emotions, but also heightens our capacity to identify those same emotions in others.
Through the practices of heart-awareness one begins to sense an opening, an enlargement of sense perceptions. One begins to feel more receptive towards the world and others, and is now able to participate in the world around them. Transpersonal psychologist Jorge Ferrer states, “It is not so much our experience of the world that changes, but rather our experience-and-the-world that undergo a mutually determined transformation.” Sardello’s work leads one into the aesthetic response, which then in turn allows the individual to feel into the images, the symptoms, their afflictions. It serves to deepen the reflective act of looking beyond, and paves the way towards ones ability to develop a sense of“story-awareness”.
So then let us review and end this first half of our discussion today. Recovery can no longer be viewed as a program for those only suffering from an ailment like addiction or any ism in the book, related mostly to the experience of abstinence. Recovery must be understood as a way of being in the world, the new phase of consciousness which all individuals are capable of grasping. As lovers of the psyche, it is our task to shepherd forth the new phase of consciousness, and begin stepping back from our concretized thoughts on techniques and diagnoses ; and begin to receive the psyche once again, learning to listen to its diagnoses, and techniques. Returning to the image is returning to soul, and returning to soul is the work of Recovery.
