Growing up, many of us learned a disembodied way of living. It’s a tragedy really. The rich world of embodied awareness is severed from our way of experiencing. We then miss out on all manner of feelings, sensations and intuitions which would otherwise add to the richness of life. The implications are huge: without embodied awareness we are left wearing a kind of cognitive straightjacket which prohibits our authenticity without us even knowing. Deep down, we might feel like something is missing. Big decisions can be difficult, as we attempt to make sense of the world, who we are and what we want, through compensatory processes. We might over-rely on thinking, and often unknowingly privilege the preferences of others and society in general. For this reason, the compensation may look very successful, but it’s a functioning that misses key information. Our felt needs, our emotional longings and our deepest desires aren’t things we deduce cognitively. We need to feel them in our bodies. Indeed, without that embodied awareness, we miss out on a sense of self.

Children are born connected too, even immersed in, this embodied and free-flowing state. As development takes hold, the environment and sometimes traumatic experience, can sever that connection. When in therapy, embodied awareness is rekindled, it can be a truly wondrous thing. It’s an internal blossoming that often leads to profound changes in living.

I was certainly someone who needed to recover from this culturally normalised disembodiment. Through psychotherapy training and other professional development, I began to learn that consciousness dwelled in the body. And, as I undertook various modes of trauma work, my embodied awareness didn’t just return, it continued to increase and to deepen. Eventually, I began to realise that authentic spirituality was an embodied experience.

But as I grew to know this injury to greater degrees, an injury I’ve come to know as the body/mind split, I learned also how complex and far-reaching an injury it is. And that it doesn’t just affect individuals. It is also an injury to group, institutional and collective consciousness.

yet another psychotherapeutic divergence

While the body/mind split in psychotherapy has historical roots, it was always, to some degree, a caricature. The post-Freudian analytic tradition became progressively more verbal, more interpretive, more disembodied; the body was implicitly demoted to a vehicle for the mind’s more interesting contents. Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was marginalised partly because he refused that demotion, insisting that character was held in musculature, that the body was not backdrop but text. What followed looked like a clean divergence: talking cures on one side, body-based approaches on the other. But the picture was never that simple.

Body-based psychotherapies have a particular place in my heart. But as I developed my practice toward trauma therapies, Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory and Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor therapy showed me something unexpected. I began to find these approaches were both developmentally aligned and could be integrated with analytic thinking.

Getting past caricatures of Psychoanalytic approaches similarly resolves. Californian analyst Thomas Ogden’s work sits squarely in the analytic tradition yet is saturated with bodily presence — the analyst’s reverie, the texture of the session, what is felt before it is thought. I’ll explore some other analytic theories later; but suffice to say analytic work can be filled with embodiment. And, to be fair to critics, I’ve seen more than a few occasions when it is anything but.

While locating embodiment within analysis, and linking embodied approaches to analytic theory helped me personally and clinically, I am curious about the stubbornness of the body/mind split in therapy culture.

Based on all I’ve said you won’t be surprised to hear generalisations like “I’m a bottom-up therapist” don’t sit well with me. Indeed, I am particularly riled when, because I work analytically, I am assumed to be in some “mind first” camp. But it’s curious when someone operating from another paradigm makes that assumption.

This got me thinking some more: about moments when we don’t know, but think we do. Discussing this with a mate offered a suggestion: “You’re talking something akin to an AI context window. When an AI gets something completely wrong, it’s often because you knew something implicitly, but the AI had no idea”.

It’s a helpful analogy. And it raises a broader question for psychotherapies; what if every therapy tribe has an unavoidable context window? What if over application of top/down, bottom/up dichotomies amplifies context window bias? To challenge a popular therapy meme about the truth of the body, what if sometimes, the body lies?

when certainty opposes wisdom

The desire for simple answers is prolific in our culture. When it comes into psychotherapy practice, it can be a seeking of a particular kind of comfort zone. It might be diagnostic (“I know what’s going on”) or methodological (“I know what to do next”). Such certainty usually runs out of road, even if for a time, we do know.

Certainty can mean laziness. There’s a comfort of having a philosophic or clinical framework which we slip on easily, like a comfy shoe, which might sanctify our diagnostic and methodological prowess. It’s the kind of certainty that leads to a case being labelled “clinically resistant”, or us taking a case to supervision baffled as to how it’s all become so stuck. In such cases, it might just be that our context window is missing something key, and that our own certainty has played a part.

To my mind, human psyche’s are complex and often contradictory. Holding onto certainty, session after session, or case after case, can lead to a hyper-certainty which can prevent a more free-flowing process in the room. And the deeper one is working in a relational process, certainty may well hold back the work. Instead of certainty, we need wisdom, alchemy, life force, whatever you want to call it, to bring to the surface that which is quite often, completely unexpected.

Coming back to the body, what if like any approach, the “wisdom of the body” has to have its shortcomings? What if approaches which centre the body, could also benefit from considering other ways in, to achieve a robustness of view?

to regulate or not to regulate

So I’m going to step through some examples of approaches which might stifle a deepening of the relationship.

The first one comes up a lot: “I ground and regulate my client before any work can start”. Sounds good, right?

Well, if applied dogmatically, this thinking could overlook many underlying dynamics. From an analytic perspective, the client may be stuck in a pre-oedipal transference, one where the well meaning regulation of the therapist, might keep the client stuck in dependence. The impulse to heal may be present: where the therapist’s intervention is driven by their own parallel anxiety. This might mean the attempt to assist may be sending a message that the unbearable feeling is indeed unbearable.

In difficult developmental environments, clients might “learn” to use dysregulation as a way of attaining care. This might sound strange, but in some family systems, this approximation for love, a concerned carer, might have been all that was available. In such a case co-regulation or other problem solving can be evoked from the therapist in order to avoid growing up into their own self reliance. But those difficult feelings, and methods of self regulation, might actually need to be encountered by the struggling individual, so a more autonomous ego can develop.

And yet, sometimes when our patients are particularly regressed or dysregulated, we do need to help them find solid ground — especially where safety is in doubt. To never do so may be a dogma in itself. The practitioner then has to plot a course which accounts for all this.

you can’t always “trust your gut”

Consider a fictitious example: imagine a client facing a decision about leaving a relationship. The “gut feel” — the embodied sensation when the decision is faced — might be pointing to fear, which the client’s interpretation is to leave the relationship. Unpacking and exploring that sensation might reveal a flight response, related to a projection rather than anything to do with the client’s partner at all. The feeling, if followed without separating from the projection driven response, could be reinforcing an old attachment dynamic.

Another example, a client who is dissociating. At face value this might result in numbness, or a sense of day-dreaming — interpreted literally, the client is simply changing their mind or having a pause. But combined with information within the relational field (dissociated states often evoke altered states in the countertransference), or the thoughtful mind of the therapist who tracked the trigger point, a deeper understanding can emerge. The pause, when thought about, can be seen as a different sort of wisdom: the body-mind’s trauma response. Developmental trauma states often became dissociated, precisely because attentive care wasn’t available. In that environment, dissociation was a kind of wisdom.

As a final example, imagine a client who feels compelled to dance in the session, believing it is a way of expressing and “clearing” their trauma. While such expression might clear a particular affect state in a particular moment, the practitioner working with complex trauma may examine their countertransference to understand what’s taking place beneath the surface. A compulsion to dance or move, especially with vigour, might point to a manic defence, or some other form of autoregulation developed in infancy. Healing such states requires a very different approach. If the impulse is taken at face value and not thought about, the developmental trauma may remain in place.

Of course, we all work differently — based on our own clinical development, our training and our supervision. It’s not my place to encourage a singular way of working; that would fly in the face of integrative practice. My case is more to advocate against the type of methodological certainty which makes us uncurious. And as is my bias, I’m particularly interested in stoking curiosity about relational depth.

what the theory already knew

Bion’s concept of beta elements — raw, unprocessed experience that hasn’t yet found symbolic form — is useful here, as a way which links relationship and dissociated material. Pre-symbolic material sits in the body because at the time of the original experience, the mind wasn’t yet capable of receiving it. The therapeutic task is to create conditions in which that material might eventually become thinkable.

But knowing this conceptually isn’t the same as being able to work with it. The theory describes the territory and that certainly helps. But the practitioner’s own depth of personal development — whatever form that takes — is what gives the relationship access to this material in the room.

Winnicott described what he called primitive agonies — the unthinkable anxieties of very early life: falling forever, having no relationship to the body, complete disorientation. States lived through before there was a self capable of knowing they were being lived through. The autonomic nervous system is active from very early life — there are threats here, but they are of a different order entirely. Not environmental danger in the ordinary sense but the raw archetypal dread of existence itself: annihilation, dissolution, the infantile terror that Klein mapped as paranoid-schizoid experience. Pre-personal territory, prior to any coherent self that could be regulated back to safety. What this material requires is a particular quality of containment — a mind capable of holding what the infant’s mind could not yet hold for itself.

This matters to our discussion. A client carrying something like falling forever is very unlikely to arrive with that as a reported experience, sensation or symptom. It might appear as a particular quality of absence in the room — an intuitive pull in the therapist toward something formless and as yet, unthought. Detection requires something closer to what Bion called reverie: a receptive quality of attention that can hold what hasn’t yet become experience. As I say, that capacity develops through the practitioner’s own depth of personal work — through having sat with their own unformed material long enough that formlessness becomes recognisable. And in my experience, it’s greatly informed by the therapist’s own embodied awareness.

Once detected, the work can draw on whatever the material actually needs. Pat Ogden’s reorienting technique — guiding the client toward a felt sense of ground in the body — can offer a genuine resolution of the specific somatic content of the agony. This is a corrective experience in the most literal sense: not uncovering ground that was always there, but providing, perhaps for the first time, the experience of being held. For that very young part, the ground wasn’t there. The somatic intervention gives it what was genuinely absent.

neither top/down nor bottom/up

None of this is an argument against somatic work, or polyvagal theory, or careful attention to nervous system states. The question is what we’re doing when we reach for them — whether the material calls for it, or because something in us needs the steadiness of a known technique.

Every modality has a shadow. The analytic practitioner who stays in the head. The somatic practitioner who stays in the body. The polyvagal-informed therapist who keeps their client within the window of tolerance so carefully that growth can’t happen. These aren’t criticisms of approaches. They’re descriptions of what happens when a way of working becomes a protective strategy. And we should be cautious: we don’t always know from outside a paradigm what a paradigm is actually doing. The need for humility applies to us all.

Attending to our countertransference is perhaps where this integration is most alive in practice. What arrives in our body in the room — the tightening, speeding up or being drawn in, the sudden tiredness, the unexpected image — is neither top down nor bottom up. It is both simultaneously. When we are attuned to ourselves, cognition and sensation co-arise. This is key. It’s when we hold that position, we’re at the precise point where clinical wisdom can get in.

Every context window: be it a framework, a paradigm, or AI chat, has its limits. What we can’t see from inside, we simply can’t see. The solution isn’t a better framework, it’s a willingness to notice that stuckness, to get curious, to notice ourselves, to move the relational stance.

Wisdom isn’t top down — a mind directing an unruly body. Nor is it bottom up — sensation rising to be decoded by a thinking mind. The body contains the mind. The two were never separate. Wisdom is what becomes possible when we stop insisting on the distinction — when we can receive what arrives through the whole instrument. And without holding onto whatever “sort of therapist” we might be trying to be.

Of course, that capacity develops slowly, through depth work and reflection. Through supervision and clinical “mistakes”. It’s a confidence that doesn’t need certainty. Simply, a willingness to remain present to what arises and follow it, wherever it needs to go.

Thanks for reading. If you’re an integrative psychotherapist in London and interested in deepening your practice around the topics discussed in this post, you might be interested in “Unlocking Transference and Countertransference”, a workshop I am running in April as part of my Relational Depth series.

For further details visit https://jaredgreenpsychotherapy.com/integrative-practice-workshops-in-london/.

What’s love got to do, got to do with it?
What’s love but a second-hand emotion?
What’s love got to do, got to do with it?
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

The defensive energy of Tina Turner’s 80s hit song, points to a deeper truth: that like an interpersonal magnetism akin to gravity, an unseen force brings humans toward each other in ways which often rub against our more self protective instincts. The plea in Turner’s voice to avoid pain, can’t help but point to an undeniable appetite for emotionally intimate connection, an appetite which can’t be explained through mechanism alone.

This tension runs through psychological circles. In our secular culture, psychological processes are often reduced to cognitive or biological frameworks. Distance is maintained from anything metaphysical or potentially “woo woo”, in order to maintain rationality and social acceptability. And yet, as many therapists of many persuasions come to know, it’s the relationship which heals. But how can we think about “the relationship”, without reducing its mystery? How can we experience “love” in the consulting room, whilst maintaining professional ethics and safety?

I recently came across an article on Aaron Balick’s substack about the “The Hidden Mystical Life of Carl Jung”. As I read I was stirred by this very tension: attempting to understand the nuances of (Eastern) consciousness through a (Western) academic lens, I left a comment, pointing to alchemy as the missing link. Aaron’s invitation to elaborate in my own post was, it turns out, simply irresistible.

the freud-jung split lives on

Balick’s article catalogues Jung’s mysticism largely through the phenomenon of the occult, and Eastern philosophy. This examination, while valid in itself, begs us to ask: can transcendent experience be understood through academic psychology? Or do we have to engage with deeper questions as to the nature of consciousness: a discussion which through its very nature transcends divides of east and west. But before we explore that, we do need to look at how Western psychology has wrestled with this territory.

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Freud established the materialist position early on, reducing “religious” experience to neurosis and dismissing mysticism as “oceanic feeling” rooted in infantile regression. For Freud, any encounter with the numinous required explanation through personal psychology—projection, sublimation, or pathological regression to pre-rational states. This reductionist approach maintains its influence in contemporary psychology, where transpersonal experiences are often pathologised rather than curiously examined. The upshot: while they can be pathological, and even dangerous (which I’ll talk about shortly), that doesn’t mean the content arising from such states isn’t also psychologically meaningful.

Jung’s willingness to engage with this territory was in part informed through his mother’s dual personalities and the spiritualist traditions of her family. Jung’s own ten-year confrontation with the unconscious solidified his understanding of the nature of consciousness. The product of these years were the Black Books (his personal journals) and the Red Book (Liber Novus) which became the foundation of his life’s work. Where Freud saw psychological phenomena pointing to conflicts in the personal unconscious, Jung recognised what he termed the psychoid—dimensions of psyche that operate beyond the purely personal, touching both psychological and physical reality whilst remaining autonomous from ego consciousness. I would argue that his exploration of texts like the I-Ching and the Secret of the Golden Flower weren’t simply academic exercises, rather attempts to find ways of explaining his own experience, and to make aspects of psychoid aliveness accessible to the Western mind.

And this is key, there are many critiques of Jung’s philosophy, it’s either too “woo woo” (the reductive argument"), or too “spiritual but not religious” (the desecrating argument). These critiques come from a place of misunderstanding the historical context of Jung’s collected works. The “scientific” framing of his work had to protect the developing field of analytical psychology from attack from reductionists, whilst at the same time preserving a sacred core that maintained a direct relationship with the psychoid. I’d like to think his Black and Red books were that insurance policy, while other texts such as his seven sermons to the dead and various alchemical texts he identified, also provide pathways of experiencing the psychoid through mythopoetic and imaginal routes respectively. These pathways are important, as they provide an alternative to direct experience, which can be overwhelming to the psyche. I’ll return shortly to alchemical imagery, but first, a word of caution.

the dangers of direct archetypal experience

The alarm provoked in Jung’s colleagues around his confrontation wasn’t entirely misguided. Jung’s experience between 1913 and 1919 bore hallmarks of psychotic process—intrusive autonomous imagery, loss of ego boundaries, voices experienced as genuinely other. His capacity to navigate this material without complete dissolution likely owed much to his existing ego structure and professional grounding. Direct archetypal experience—through active imagination, psychedelics, or intensive spiritual practice—carries genuine risk of psychic overwhelm, particularly for those whose egoic functioning remains undermined by developmental trauma. In those cases, transcendent experience is compelling, it bypasses often intolerable developmental injury.

Complicating this is that foundational ego formation is intricate and long-term work that some disciplines ignore, either because higher states are positioned as being entirely transformational or because the intricacy of ego development isn’t understood by that tradition. It also takes an experienced practitioner to hold a firm yet kind view to those tempted toward bypass, as well as the holding capacity to go into the depths. In summary, the mystical and psychotic occupy adjacent territory; the difference often lies in the container’s strength and capacity to metabolise what emerges.

why the image is so important

While I intend to explore therapeutic relationship in this post, first I need to explain the role these images play. First, alchemical images - particularly those from the Rosarium Philosophorum - warrant our attention not as historical curiosities but as living symbols that communicate directly with psyche. Such images work through what Jung called the imaginal realm - that intermediate space between mind and matter where “subtle bodies” manifest in both mental and material form. When we allow ourselves to dwell with an alchemical image, something shifts that no theoretical explanation alone could achieve.

The medieval alchemists knew this; their elaborate illustrations weren’t diagrams explaining chemical processes but contemplative focal points designed to activate inner transformation. Through “rigorous solitude” and “preoccupation with the endless obscurities of the work,” the alchemists discovered how imagination could bring “into being things that apparently were not there before” (CW 13 ¶220). The image works on us rather than us working on it - bypassing rational defences to address soul directly.

the alchemy you already know

The nature of the image and its direct effect on soul, help us to understand the numinous nature of the therapeutic relationship. I daresay all of you reading this have experienced states of grace: where something unthought and unknown is exchanged in the consulting room. In a Jungian sense, these are moments where the transcendent function causes a new awakening, in a humanistic sense, a true I thou moment.

Whichever terminiology, such moments are evidence of the alchemical process in action. This challenges mainstream therapeutic culture’s materialist assumptions. Many prefer to locate transformation in neural plasticity or corrective emotional experience rather than acknowledging participation in something genuinely numinous. Yet many practitioners working at depth know that the most profound shifts often emerge from encounters with what feels like an autonomous wisdom is arising from the relational field.

But alchemy is not just happening in the consulting room, it’s woven into the fabric of life itself. Just as the body mobilises to expel a splinter - inflammation drawing attention to the wound, immune resposes rejecting the material - psychological distress often signals where authentic self is attempting to push out inauthentic adaptations. Symptoms, or even crisises, can function as consciousness asserting its integrity, to attempt to wake us up to what we cannot see.

DNA is another useful metaphor. The strands of life moving apart (alchemy’s separatio), coming together (coagulatio). The result, new life is born, or in the case of our work, psychological transformation and consciousness evolution takes place.

the alchemical container

Let’s return to the Rosarium Philosophorum’s woodcuts. Now I don’t intend to deconstruct each of the twenty images on this post, there are many excellent online resources which do this, rather I am working with a few to illustrate this loving nature of relationship.

The mercurial fountain, filled with liquid quicksilver and founded on three legs, is the foundation image of the Rosarium series. It invites the viewer to begin to understand the nature of the transformational process, the necessity of containment, and the alchemical goal: the integration of the cosmic (represented by the tension between sol and lunar) with the earthly, represented by the downward flowing liquid. The steam breathing double-headed serpent, perhaps representing the haze that arises from psychic depth resulting in an unseeing or unconscious place which we begin from.

The medieval alchemists understood that transformation requires a sealed vessel—the vas hermeticum—where dissolution and reconstitution can unfold safely. In therapeutic work, this container is created through professional clinical boundaries, and a commitment to staying present with whatever emerges, however uncomfortable or unexpected.

a blank canvas, or emotional nakedness?

In this image, the King and Queen disrobe before one another, stripping away the garments that represent what we might call a professional persona, or the “blank canvas” of clinical objectivity. The professional facade encompassing social identity which is necessary, but might also house various defensive structures. The “nakedness” is vulnerable human presence—neither idealised nor defended. It isn’t literal but psychological: the willingness to be seen in one’s actual state rather than a curated appearance.

Our culture often mistakes professional boundaries for emotional distance, suggesting depth therapists maintain a careful persona that can inadvertently recreate the false attunement at the core of developmental trauma. The “therapeutic niceness” that avoids genuine encounter, the carefully modulated responses that prioritise safety over authenticity—these are a form of clothing. Yet transformation requires moments when both participants risk being genuinely present rather than professionally correct. This doesn’t mean boundary violations or inappropriate self-disclosure, but rather the capacity to meet another human being without the protective shield of technique. The nakedness of the alchemical figures represents this willingness to be known—defensiveness shed not recklessly but thoughtfully, and within the safety of proper containment.

toward a relational union

The conjunction shows the King and Queen in intimate embrace within the alchemical vessel, their union creating something neither could achieve alone. This image represents that genuine transformation requires genuine intimacy. Not sexual, but the erotic as fundamental life force—an aliveness that is exchanged only when both discard persona and are prepared to be real. If working developmentally, we might think of this as a skin on skin connection between the caregiver (therapist) and the infant (regressed patient). Yet, before we can relate in that way, we must disentangle adult erotic feelings which have fused with that early life need.

Here we encounter a difficult territory: therapeutic trainings can lead to a pathologisation or at least, a misunderstanding of erotic transference. Rather than recognise it as the psyche’s attempt to reach toward the depth emotional contact of transformational encounter, it can be seen as difficult or unwanted. What we actually need to develop is a bifocal presence. On the one hand, we must ground and mentalise the erotic, maintaining professional containment. At the same time, allowing the emotional side of the intimate exchange to affect us deeply.

This is difficult interpersonal territory, and if not handled with skill and professional clarity, can lead to difficult ethical situations. Too much permeability risks overwhelming, or colluding in something actually sexual, but too much structure prevents transformation.

The conjunction represents that precise relational circumstance where two people can touch psychologically without either dissolving or remaining defended. Love—not romantic love but the force that moves through authentic encounter—becomes the agent of change.

so what has love got to do with it?

This is what Turner’s song protests against whilst simultaneously revealing: something undeniably alive happening that refuses reduction to simply “professional alliance”. What does love have to do with therapeutic transformation? Everything and nothing, depending on how we understand love.

If we mean sentimentality or positive regard, then perhaps not so much. By that definition, depth transformation conflicts, feelings that can feel distinctly “unloving”, from despair to rage and hate, are required. A depth container allows difficult feelings, including genuine honesty from the therapist, which might help along the processes of dissolution. They might, help a part of the patient to die and be reborn, alchemy’s mortificatio.

But if we understand love as a fundamental life force, and the “erotic” an intense and titrated administration of that love, then it’s the essential ingredient. Love as the mysterious and hard to explain “something” that emerges between two humans who commit to staying present to the fullness of what might emerge.

From time to time, I find myself in situations in the consulting room where I can’t find love. Early in my career, I’d attribute this to something about the patient, something in the field which can’t be overcome. Time again, I’ve found upon examination, that something in the field is constellating and part of that misconfiguration is my shadow. Viewed in this way, it’s our own capacity to love our woundedness which enables us to be present to the wounded other.

Another example that love has everything to do with it.

I’m curious about your experience with this territory. How do you navigate the tension between professional boundaries and authentic intimacy? What taboos have you encountered in your own practice or training? The comments are open.

Not so many sessions ago, I remember being ‘hit’ by a flush of hot wave. A somatic one at least. A tightening in the throat, a slight but palpable panic in my base, an uncharacteristic speechlessness. That hot wave would visit me, time and again, when I had to encounter taboo and bring up my fee.

I have come to understand that I am not alone in facing that wave. Indeed when working with other therapists I often see see how widespread the impact of this taboo, especially in Britain, is for our profession. The fee set many years ago, and never revisited. The client who demands the lowest fee, but spends recklessly when in a Dionysian spree. The dogmas that make money something to be shameful of, or antithetical to “healing”. I hear talk that trainings skim the surface of money: the focus is on holding and compassion, attachment and relationship, but often: the depth of money is overlooked. In part because it can slip into institutional and cultural shadow. To look at it, requires that we acknowledge power, status and class. And often, that’s a huge can of worms, which many don’t want to open.

But if we bring this examination back to something personal, we can step out of the collective taboo. While the culture places money at its superficial and reductive centre, a depth examination requires something different though provocative. Money implicates many aspects of psyche: from self worth and status, to how we might prop up our own psychic wounds. To examine it means we must look at our own developmental story, but also our intergenerational roots. And then, we have to be prepared to look at how money lands in the contemporary value systems that we might have unwittingly adopted.

When we do this, how we encounter “the fee” in a professional situation changes dramatically. That hot wave, can be transformed. I’ll come back to some practical aspects, but to get at the heart of the archetype of money, we need to start at the beginning.

money as sacred exchange

From a depth psychological perspective, money operates as what Jung might have called, a “living symbol” - a manifestation of an archetype which by its very nature, is laden with energy of the collective unconscious. Money, like Self, God or individuation, is also a “mediating” symbol. That is, it carries with it both the associations of an archetype, but also has a transcendent property: it is a symbol which itself bridges opposites. In the case of money, inner values and outer currencies are collided and through that bridging, a numinous quality develops. This grants the symbol particular potency. Especially, when we are unconscious of how some of its dimensions land within us.

Money’s ancestry lives deep in the archeological record. Forty thousand years ago, on the windswept coast of what we now call Tasmania, Indigenous women gathered shells from cold water beaches. But these weren't random collections—each shell was carefully selected, its opalescent surface speaking to something deeper than mere decoration. Strung together into necklaces, these shells became vessels of value that flowed through tribal relationship, binding community, honouring women's wisdom. Similar patterns emerge across cultures: clay tokens shaped like grain found in ancient Mesopotamian ruins, copper crosses that carried both prayer and price across Central Africa. These objects weren't just economic —they were spiritual bridges. Everyday objects which reminded those trading that they exist on a material plain, which is also sacred.

As civilisation developed through cultural and industrial revolution, the deep rooted relationship between currency and relationship was severed. Technology and capitalism has reduced money to a number, to commodity, to something quite devoid of essential meaning or ethical value. As therapists, it seems to me our calling is to do something different. To again remember the true value of the relational exchange. But to do that, we need to unpick our own relationship with it. Due to how cultural embedded money is, and its deeply rooted symbolic history, chances are all of us carry some unconscious material in our own money complex.

money as nourishment

There are numerous psychodynamic ways of thinking about money. Too many to explore in a brief post like this. But one lens is through the metaphor of nourishment - or how we experienced taking in and receiving, as well as what it was like to share and to give. Margaret Mahler’s “symbiotic phase” I think provides a useful starting point of this thinking, in our first few months, where infant and caregiver are deeply bonded, we absorb and somatically store, a relationship with what it is like to receive. An attuned, responsive care environment means we internalise abundance and having. Inconsistent or anxious attunement might mean we develop a complex of scarcity. These developmental injuries become energetic portals where intergenerational material might enter our individual psyche. It is often the case, what we carry from our own infancy may in some way be part of an ancestral story.

Unpicking such developmental material is delicate and powerful relational work. In the workshops I’ve run on money and the fee, I’ve seen time and again how doing so results not only in individual change, but also a shift in how we encounter the topic in the consulting room.

power, privilege and the ethics of exchange

Before we get onto the clinical side of this post, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: we can’t talk about money unless we talk about power. Reflect on this and we first must see our own material around power, hierarchy and superiority, but pretty soon into that, our systemic positioning becomes relevant. This is both “material”, necessarily subjective and murky, but also objective. Money, as I’ve pointed out, draws from both.

When an £80 therapy session represents 30% of someone's weekly income (as it would for just under half a million Londoners), we're not just providing a service—we're operating within a system that makes psychological healing primarily accessible to the economically privileged. This isn't a comfortable truth, but it's one we need to reckon with if we're to work ethically with money.

Then there’s the softer side of power, which is also present in the consulting room. We often decide who accesses our services, influence the pace and direction of sessions, our interpretations and boundary statements can carry an undue weight, which might be unconscious.

These are real considerations and one’s which we mustn’t avoid when working with the fee. But, we also mustn’t be shy of tackling these topics and working toward fairness in the exchange of our work. To do both, we have to be sensitive, humble and do our own work about our position within relational and social systems.

the fee as an ongoing clinical agency

If I (bluntly) synthesize messages I’ve picked up around “the fee” along my career, both directly and indirectly, they might be something like:

1. Just calculate the fee you need to cover expense and a wage, then tell your clients that’s what it is.

2. Set the fee at intake, but never review it. (This one, to be fair, is more through omission: the imperative for fee reviews often isn’t explicitly taught).

3. Don’t set your fee too high - you might alienate clients.

4. Don’t set your fee too low - clients wont be motivated to work.

5. Charging for therapy grates up against healing, so we should charge little.

I could go on. When I look at this list now, I get a certain chill. All of these ideas, to some degree, I took on board at one time. But now it’s clear to me, that none of them encapsulate what I have come to know about the healing potential of the fee. The meaning that it represents, to both parties, and, perhaps most significantly, the clinical efficacy that comes about when we work with the fee in a relational way. This is what I refer to, as an “ongoing clinical agency”, that the fee becomes a symbolic summary of all manner of relationship dynamics. From commitment, to fairness, to a shared self esteem which values and respects the work.

Setting the fee at the beginning of the therapy, and reviewing it regularly, either through an annual cycle or when situations emerge, become intimate opportunities to explore how each party is relating to the fee, what might have changed on either side, and if necessary, how the fee might need to change to reflect that.

Failing to work this way, I now see, can lead to many conscious and unconscious disturbances in relationship. Unconscious power dynamics, persecutory projections, fearful anxieties, might be in place if the fee is too high or the client hiding a financial distress. If the fee is too low the therapy might be perceived as unsafe, either through parental projection or because therapist is actually carrying a financial anxiety. When these dynamics are discussed and resolved, and a fair fee is set, the container is often renewed and strengthened. In might be that a fair and responsible care-giver is experienced, sometimes for the first time.

integrating to practice

So what does healthy money integration look like for therapists? It's not about becoming comfortable with capitalism or pretending systemic inequalities don't exist. Quite the opposite. It’s about staying in contact with reality, and developing in oneself what James Newell calls a "cohesive financial self"—a self which is sufficiently free from any money complex to operate wisely and responsively around financial matters. It involves personal exploration, perhaps using developmental, creative, somatic, or archetypal “ways in”: whatever works for you. But then, it is about bringing that transformation into relationship in the work.

When on our way toward this as practitioners, then the “hot flush” moments dissipate. Perhaps they never go away entirely, but we can observe them, have some idea what’s being hit upon and in this self-deepening, we make an authentic discussion about the fee more possible.

Ideally we’ve become comfortable with our own value as professionals, but also are separated enough from complexes of greed and power which might lead us to overstep, or wounded healer and guilty complexes which might push us in the other direction. In that way, we’re able to navigate such discussions with objectivity, in service of the work and with true compassion.

Workshop Opportunity: This integration work isn't easy, which is why I've developed an experiential workshop to explore these themes in depth. "Exploring the Psychology of Money in Therapy" combines archetypal exploration, developmental understanding, and practical application to encourage a more conscious relationship with money.

returning to the sacred

As I prepared this post, I kept returning to the beautiful symbolism of the seashells of the Tasmanian Indigenous women. Their necklaces evidence of systems of exchange that honoured both materiality and spiritual meaning, whilst drawing from an intrinsic belonging to the world of which we are all a part. Perhaps our current money struggles stem not from some personal failing, but from a broader desecration: we’ve lost connection to the relational and to that earthly whole. To what we might call soul, on personal and planetary levels.

I find the Jungian idea of temenos useful to help make sense of the sacred in the therapy space. The word evokes associations of both the sacred in a religious or ceremonial sense, but perhaps more importantly, as a container for transformation. In this sense, every therapy and every session, becomes infused with an ancient ritual not quite on a sea shore, yet surely one of trust, reciprocity and mutual nourishment. The fee then, is more than a transactional payment for services. It symbolises the exchange of something hard fought for, stemming from ancient tradition, and in that, quite sacred.

When we can sit with both sides: the financial and the sacred exchange, the practical necessity and the archetypal, something shifts. Both in the relationships we hold dear, but in our own psyche’s and in the collective split between money and meaning. It might even be, a step toward rekindling the idea that humanity itself is sacred.

"Transcend your ego." "Get out of your own way." "The ego is the enemy of enlightenment."

If you've spent any time in spiritual wellness culture, you've heard these memes. They're the elevator music of the spiritual marketplace - a seductive promise that one can take an express journey from the messy, wounded humanity of our shadowy basements to a penthouse of spiritual perfection. But what if, at deeper levels of psyche, this rush to transcendence is precisely what keeps us trapped in the patterns we're trying to escape? And what if, in offering this express elevator, important elements of psyche, and therefore elements of our own potentials, healing and otherwise, remain trapped in that place the rest of our ego doesn’t want to be?

In my practice, I frequently see this promise at play: people who've done years of meditation or spiritual practice, or have had profound consciousness experiences, yet infantile states and attachment issues remain. Perhaps they’ve found compensation in external circumstances, or through relationships, or an ideal. Sometimes they speak the language of non-attachment or oneness, while remaining deeply attached to their spiritual identity. They might preach love and light while collective shadow territories - power, money, sex, and issues around difference - remain unexplored. This is not to shame or to pronounce myself as better-than, healing journeys are indeed complex and individual, rather, I wanted to look at ego, spiritual bypassing, and cast some light on this shadowy area – an area which if tackled, can lead to profound healing.

the seduction of spiritual bypassing

The spiritually materialist view might be that “ego is bad” or egoic material ought be cast off, in favour of more transcendent or non-attached ways of being. I disagree. First, egoic obstacles need to be processed, not ignored. They point to a necessary difficulty: problematic psychological structures and ego states which have come about as a response to developmental trauma and adversity. Trying to transcend something that was never properly formed is like trying to build a house without a foundation. The deficiencies of the house though, are easy to spot. If the house comes across as pristine, there might be inflation going on: fuelled by spiritual energies but which are a defence to the underlying wound. The house might be laced with anger or envy: which point to all manner of unresolved complexes, the envious attack a signal that the attacker has incomplete work which they can’t stand to see demonstrated in another. A house on a faulty foundation often creates a personality that is fragile, which dismisses challenge, and demands absolute power and admiration to prop things up.

We are then in the territory of the guru complex. A powerful archetypal configuration which not only compensates for an unresolved wound but also configures a system around it which attracts others who will feed into the illusion, while sacrificing their own maturation. We need not look very far on the stage of global leaders to see this psychology playing out, nor the catastrophic consequences when it does.

John Welwood, a psychologist and Buddhist practitioner, first introduced "spiritual bypassing" in the 1980s to describe the tendency to use spiritual ideas, practices, and experiences to avoid or prematurely transcend unresolved psychological development. He observed this pattern particularly in Western spiritual communities where Eastern non-dual teachings were being adopted without adequate attention to the depths of psychological foundation.

Like many psychological concepts, this is a matter of levels. Particularly as when we do some psychological transformation, spiritual experience can become more accessible. This can provide a sense that we have reached a state of transcendence, but that transcendent buzz can mask deeper complexes still needing aid. To use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, some exiles are still unfound and stuck in trauma, while protector strategies may still be at play, which make a spiritually grounded ego unavailable. Tell-tale signs of a spiritually developed ego are relational availability, genuine open heartedness, a grounded and purposeful potency and the capacity to contain difficult emotional states. To again borrow from IFS, such a personality is mostly living in Self.

But there’s also a more dangerous side to bypassing. For some, traumatised psyches combined with archetypal energies can be psychologically destabilising. For practitioners this presents a particular challenge: how can we work safely with such cases?

the eggshell ego

When I think of fragmented trauma states, I often think of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme: enter Humpty, an egg-man who sat on the wall and had a great fall. When he shattered, "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." This is how we might be inclined to approach fragmented ego states: we try to reassemble the pieces through force, through masculine effort, through spiritual practices that promise to fix what's broken. But the wisdom of the fairy tale lies in its recognition of failure. The king's men - representing the approaches of force and control - cannot repair what has been fundamentally broken. The shell cannot simply be glued back together. What's needed isn't reassembly but rebirth. And rebirth requires something the king's men don't possess: the capacity to hold, dissolve, and incubate, and allow transformation to emerge from within.

This leads me to Wilfred Bion’s work Learning from Experience. In it, he transmits and explains a metabolic capacity to hold difficult experience. He is describing a developmental environment where the caregiver can receive and transform the infants’ raw emotional projections (beta elements) into more digested material (alpha elements), building the infants own capacity to contain. In this way, the depth relationship of a well contained therapy, through attunement and mentalisation, provides the incubation necessary for first, the dissolving of the old, and in time, the formation of a new shell. A shell which can contain the often very difficult material which spiritual bypassing seeks to avoid.

beyond inflation and collapse

In patients who are spiritually bypassing and also hold unprocessed developmental trauma, we’re likely to see an oscillation between inflation/avoidance and collapse/hopelessness. The alternative to these is to stand ground in the murkiness of our unprocessed material, so that a deeper process of transformation may occur. This sounds obvious on paper but requires an adept practitioner to contain.

In alchemical terms, what's required is a genuine nigredo - the blackening, the dark night that precedes any authentic transformation. This isn't a brief workshop experience, a transcendent escape, or a passing dark mood. We're talking about months, sometimes years, of deep reckoning with our shadow material. And for it to fully benefit ego development, it must be experienced through the attachment system and therefore through relationship.

This dissolution is terrifying for the part of us that has built its identity around being "spiritual" or "evolved." It means facing the shame filled and vulnerable places in our psyche, it might mean acknowledging relational inadequacies, when we’ve been dishonest, manipulative or power-hungry. In essence, it’s allowing for us to walk the earth along with all of humanity: characteristics which often don’t fit with an inflated spiritual self-image. It means looking into the taboos that our culture often begs us not to examine. It means acknowledging that our deepest gifts and our deepest wounds are two sides of the same coin.

allowing for archetypal experience to be grounded

A patient who is spiritually bypassing can be a confronting thing for a practitioner to sit with. But this is often a key part of the relational dynamic, hence the path to healing. In my experience, those who are spiritual bypassing often split off the parts that are terrified, furious or desperately malnourished, to continue their spiritual bypass path. Countertransference in the consulting room then becomes a key diagnostic tool. It’s our job to take that beta element on board, to think about it and hold it in mind, and when the time is right, bring it back to the patient in a more digested (alpha) form.

In complex presentations, this can be quite challenging. Narratives and trauma states can in themselves be highly complex, and ego defences (IFS protectors) can try very hard to keep therapeutic closeness at bay. Traditionally there can be a call to work very slowly with such defences. In my experience, IFS techniques such as un-burdening can transform these defences quickly. But there’s a catch: protective strategies often re-emerge or can elude the awareness of the therapy – but tend to again reveal themselves when the time is right.

Dissociative states are another “watch out”. These can be difficult to spot and can sometimes be confused with higher (healing) states of consciousness. Learning to discern the two is part of the art of psychospiritual practice. The key is to learn to recognise whether the numinous sensation emerging is part of an attunement which serves the healing of the ego-Self axis, or if it is doing the opposite: escaping a painful crack in ego’s shell.

the case for ego

The wellness culture's rush to eliminate ego misses a fundamental psychological truth: As Jung explained, consciousness is "the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego," and "in practice we can only become aware of psychic contents by means of the ego." To say we need an ego is one thing, but to say we need a strong, flexible ego is also true if we are to survive in the world, look after ourselves and our loved ones, and to get the nourishment and resources that we need. This is especially true for those undertaking demanding healing work.

From a spiritual development perspective, we need ego to be healthy and nourished precisely so we can transcend it consciously rather than defensively. As Edinger says, we can follow the individuation urge, which “promotes a state in which the ego is related to the Self without being identified with it."

I’m all too aware that identification with Self is a seductive space, and that this attitude is often a defensive reaction to childhood adversity. I’m also aware of the deeply nourishing transformation of taking spiritual energies into psychic depths, so parts who once felt unworthy, are finally able to sit at the table of our egoic identity. In this sense, the most profound spiritual development may not look like transcendence at all, rather a human being who can show up and be fully present to whatever life brings. Carrying wounds and gifts with equal dignity. This sort of presence requires not the elimination of ego, but its careful cultivation in service of something larger than ourselves.

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References:

Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Heinemann, 1962).

Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 96.

C.G. Jung, cited in "Carl Jung On Becoming Conscious," CW 6, par. 700

One of my pet hates in the therapy world is when unnecessary splits are left cleft, often inflamed by tribalism. In mind-centric circles, embodied knowing can be unremembered, neglecting important sources of insight and healing. For some body-based practitioners, interpretation is “too heady” as if felt experience can’t also be thought about. Splits such as these certainly exist, but tightly holding to any one side is reductive, and limits the range of movement in integrative practice.

We need psychological splits. Sometimes they protect us from something unbearable. Sometimes they help us cope with environmental conditions which can’t be tolerated at a certain developmental stage. But when they go on too long, or are solidified as identity (or dogma), they can become problematic.

surface shadow vs. developmental depths

As psychological mindedness has proliferated - and let’s be clear, this is very much a good and consciousness raising thing - “shadow work” has become a therapeutic holy grail. And yet, I feel curious about the assumption that shadow work happens at an individualised and accessible level. My clinical experience says something different: what we find through self-examination is only the beginning.

The truth is shadow work reveals itself progressively through layers of consciousness, and the work can last as long as a lifetime. Accessible personality insights though profound, or dare I say gratifying, can leave the deeper developmental structures untouched. Not because surface insights aren’t valuable, but because they can create the illusion of completion when we’ve only begun to map the territory.

Through my work I’ve begun to see some generalisations in the way shadow might be encountered. At the surface level, we might recognise our tendency toward people-pleasing or our hidden anger. Deeper, we encounter the early relational patterns that created these adaptations. Deeper still, we meet the familial and cultural templates we inherited unconsciously. At the deepest levels, we sense archetypal and cosmic inheritances that connect us to collective human experience. And although these levels sound linear in the way I’ve described them, the true experience of discovery is anything but.

As I’ve become more engaged in the Jungian world, I’ve been curious about a particular tension around Jung’s own legacy. Most notable is the systematic de-emphasising of Jung’s mystical side - initiated by Jung himself, then perpetuated by Jungian institutions attempting to maintain empirical credibility in academic circles.

This split is slowly being reintegrated, particularly since the Red Book’s publication in 2009, which unequivocally centred the mystical aspects of Jung’s life and work. But the underlying question remains: what do we make of Jung’s period of psychosis?

One camp argues this was unresolvable trauma - in particular infantile rage he couldn’t process - that prevented him from integrating destructive shadow, undermining the psychological foundations of his broader philosophy. Another sees it as the archetypal infusion that became the raw material of his life’s work.

To me: both arguments hold weight. We can learn from the developmental wounding he was arguably unable to resolve, while also gaining from the cosmic wisdom he accessed through direct archetypal experience. The split dissolves when we stop choosing sides.

beyond shadow eradication

Reflecting on this discussion got me thinking about different ways of seeing shadow. I’ve found Avgi Saketopoulou’s thinking around traumatophilia especially useful in this regard, not least as trauma is often in shadow, until it is examined. Saketopoulou suggests that the goal of “healing” trauma can disregard what happens when we become open and interested in trauma and its consequences, and that identities and meanings made from trauma, might be a form of transformation. I am onboard with this perspective to a large degree, in particular in that it centers a co-created therapeutic relationship as the meaning making vehicle, rather than societal expectations or a (possibly conservative) theoretical paradigm. At the same time - and in my experience, an open mindedness toward what is not yet known, what one might call a respect of shadow, is also required. Depending on the depth of shadow awareness, something which seems core and even desirable at a certain level, might actually be ripe for revision, or even anti to authentic individuation at another.

An example to illustrate these levels: consider a male client who comes to therapy wanting to resolve toxic masculine traits. One approach might be to encourage him toward empathy and reflection. A depth perspective offers a twofold approach. First, to truly understand the power hungry anger which grips his psyche in those “toxic” moments, whilst simultaneously looking for the powerless wounded part which makes that response necessary. Working this way, the masculine core can be unpicked — it’s good and it’s bad discerned. The reconciled psyche then has an awareness of toxicity which had been in shadow, but also a self acceptance, which shores up confidence and autonomy.

the shadow of therapeutic certainty

Alongside individual shadow, our groups, paradigms, modalities and institutions also have their own. Some, in my view the more ethical ones, make intentional efforts toward understanding shadow. Not that we can ever eradicate it, but we can be curious and attempt to move toward it. I have written before about the need for ongoing personal development work for therapists, and I guess I am coming around to that again in this post. Stints of working deeply, along with necessary breaks from such work, are vital if we are to continue understanding our own undesired content. The link being, we tend to be drawn to groups which have collective shadow where our own shadow can hide.

This sort of deep self examination work is limited if we do it alone, or, do it in a philosophic or political echo-chamber. Ego creates shadow, and so does a group. And, if we rely on that like minded vehicle as the agent of change, how can we expect for the shadow to really be revealed?

This requires us to think broadly about our development, to look outside of our own paradigms and institutional bubbles, and to be ever wary for when we, our colleagues or institutional dogma becomes too certain about rightness.

More globally, in this era of metacrisis, a sociocultural re-examination is being called for. That, I would argue, is clear. Activism is certainly a necessary part of that examination, but every activism contains a shadow. This might be a grandiosity about one’s own centrality to change, or an unconscious identification with a movement’s supremacy. If we’re inclined toward decolonisation, we might ask where is the colonist inside of us? Where is our own misogyny, and greed? Where does our cultural supremacy reside? If we can stay present to how these parts play out in our own psychic lives, our stance towards others often changes dramatically.

beyond healing toward loving

As I was working on these ideas, a Richard Rohr reflection arrived with synchronous timing. He wrote: “The divine notion of perfection isn’t the exclusion of imperfection, but the inclusion of imperfection. That’s divine love.”

If we are to love ourselves - and our clients - fully, how can we not admit to ourselves that which we find difficult, shameful, or unacceptable? When we do this, we let in not only the light of self-acceptance, but something far more nourishing: the recognition that our wholeness includes our brokenness.

This is shadow work as spiritual practice rather than psychological repair project. The more shadow we unearth, the more light we allow to enter. Not everyone has the same appetite for this discovery, nor the same resources to enter that journey. But we, as healing professionals, have an obligation to consider the full magnitude of possibilities when working with clients.

We have to know shadow most deeply so we can know our light most fully.

the ever-deepening spiral

Shadow work isn’t a destination but an ever-deepening spiral through developmental levels. What seems like core authentic material at the personal level might reveal ancestral patterns at deeper examination. What feels like profound archetypal insight - even divine awareness- might still require grounding through developmental repair if it is to exist ethically in the world.

Each revelation doesn’t invalidate previous truths but adds layers of complexity and, paradoxically, simplicity. The angry activist discovers their inherited colonial patterns. The empathic therapist encounters their familial legacy of emotional caretaking. The spiritual seeker meets the developmental wounds that drove their transcendent seeking.

This is why, across all levels, integration trumps elimination. The goal isn’t to become someone without shadow, but someone who can dance with shadow consciously at whatever level it appears. Not someone who has transcended their developmental history, but someone who is always learning to more fully love their whole story - personal, familial, intergenerational and cosmic.

Perhaps this is what Jung meant when he spoke of individuation: not the creation of a perfect self, but the integration of all selves. Not the elimination of darkness, but the marriage of light and shadow in service of something larger than either alone.

In the end, the deepest shadow work might be learning to love what we cannot fix - in ourselves, in our clients, and in our world. This isn’t resignation but recognition: that wholeness was never about perfection, but about the courage to include everything that is.

It was with great delight that I settled into the fourth season of Couples Therapy when it was released late last year. I find Orna Guralnik’s clinical stance - combining intelligence, fortitude, compassion and honesty - quite masterful. I also admire her courage: displaying one’s professional self publicly opens up possibilities of criticism and attack. But most of all, I find the way her practice engages contemporary cultural issues: challenging, informing and even (occasionally) validating of my own practice.

A case which caught my eye was a polyamorous triad, grappling with boundaries, envy and power dynamics in their relationship(s). One of the defining features of Guralnik’s work was to challenge the contemporary language the three used, which, it turned out, masked complex emotional dynamics. The excavation revealed great tenderness and vulnerability, and ultimately resolved undue power imbalances.

One phrase each of them used was to “hold space”. What they meant in real language was to listen meaningfully to each other. But somehow, using the phrase in the way they did, glossed over that meaning. It became a bit throwaway.

As a phrase “hold space” has many cultural associations, from wellness influencers who use it in their content, usually to mean to “centre” or to “validate”, but as Guralnik’s three illustrate, it has also become a meme. As such, its become abstracted from its original context. It’s meaning then, quite clearly, has been diluted.

All of this made me wonder, now that “holding space” has “gone viral”, and as is the case with many cultural waves, it has crept into therapy. As such, we might need to re-examine it in this new context. Hence I’m asking, do psychotherapists actually “hold space”?

An aside: I am aware my recent posts increasingly critique popular and “insta-therapy” concepts and misconceptions. Full transparency: this is part a response to what seems to create engagement. It’s also part due to my trickster-cum-cynic - a part of me that likes to scintillate. For humour and attention, sure, but also to raise awareness of something which might otherwise go unseen. I honour my trickster and trust these examinations will be taken with both the goodwill and the reflective intention, with which they are offered.

What does “holding space” actually mean?

One of the defining moments of therapy training is when one begins to see clients in a private capacity. This phase of professional development can be quite challenging, as a therapist’s capacity to “hold space“ outside the shelter of the training environment is being built. Even using this phrase in quotes makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable. I can’t marry up the now flattened meaning of the words with the complex psychological and practical transformation which occurs in a practitioner around this time.

Therapists do of course, learn how to hold all manner of things. First and foremost we learn to hold ourselves. This is a critical aspect to clinical presence. We need to be aware of our own emotions in relationship in order to attend, but also to notice what the relationship constructs in us. If we work with countertransference, this is key diagnostic information. We also learn to hold projections. Clients will make of us whatever they need to. It’s easy to buy into a positive projection, or to indulge the impulse to “resolve” a negative one. The art of holding is to take a middle ground, thinking about what ought be done with projection, in order to best aid the clients process. Finally we also have to hold our clients material. We have to listen, get alongside, and react authentically and in a considered way to what they bring.

So we hold ourselves, projections and client material, but do we hold space? Well that’s a different question.

The space between

“Space” might mean many different things. There’s the physical space, the emotional space of the relationship, the metaphysical space. Where shall we start?

The immediacy of boundaries, defining temporal and physical space, is perhaps the most obvious beginning. But don’t let the obviousness disguise the nuance.

I often find myself saying to supervisee’s “you’re not holding the client, the frame is”. This is an important distinction: when an artist frames a painting, the frame holds the work, a similar thing is true for therapy. We negotiate and maintain boundaries, but the boundaries are there, in both minds. If a client breaches a boundary, or asks me too, I might ask “do you remember our agreement?”. It’s easy to slip into an authority position in such situations, and sometimes we need too. But the important recognition is that in a relational piece of work, authority isn’t the starting point. Indeed, in relational work, both are in the container of something bigger, which brings me to my primary criticism of the idea of therapists “holding space”. Does the phrase implicate a position which is prone to inflation? Isn’t it more that we together, participate in a relationship?

Many psychological theories aim to provide a way to think about the mystery of relationship. I simplify here, but safe to say the idea of didactic relationships, between two objects, is best used to understand the inner world of states and processes. This is the traditional object relational idea, Kleinian theory let’s say. Where baby perceives mother as an object and, introjects that object, and over time is able to sustain more complexity in that object composition. Humanistic thinking shifts focus to the contact edge of relationship, as illustrated through Buber’s concept of the I-Thou, where the raw and authentic experience of another is paramount, ruling out pathologising and encouraging non-judgemental acceptance.

The relational turn in psychoanalysis integrates these movements to some degree. A relational analyst or therapist might co-create an understanding of the clients inner world, whilst exploring how outer world phenomenon, co-arise alongside internal dynamics. The relationship too becomes the “primary instrument” of the work, bringing attunement and co-regulation, as well as making conscious through interpretation and mentalising. What is being forged, is a third/other. The shared relationship itself, which has its own processes and states, boundaries and, healing potentials.

In my view, it’s that co-created, third/other which holds the relational space. Sounds quite different to the meme, no?

Lets get metaphysical for a moment

Working from a psychospiritual perspective, introduces further dimensions. But let’s be careful not to get sucked into any exceptionalism here: when working with higher states of consciousness, that’s always a risk. The truth it seems, is that many tribes of psychotherapy work with interconnectedness. The Group Analysts with their “matrix”, to Gestalt therapists and their “relational field”, Jungians with their “working from the field” or “collective unconscious”. Despite understanding interconnectedness at different degrees, mapping via different traditions or models, and certainly using different language, there are some common elements which are relevant to our exploration.

I’m often asked “how do you therapists remember so much ”. The truth I want to say, is, that we don’t. This might sound strange but it seems to me, the relational field provides what’s needed, when it’s needed, through whatever level of consciousness is available at that time.

Let’s say a client is sharing, and my felt sense quickly leads me to something I haven’t yet thought. Now I have a choice, to indulge the spontaneity of Self, or to sit with and process this a little, to see what happens. Neither is right or wrong.

To illustrate, say the client is talking about their family trauma in general terms. I have a felt “ancestral urge”, pointing at “maternal grandmother”. And while I have a quite specific intuitive direction of travel, my memory hasn’t yet connected whether we’ve even spoken about that grandmother before. So I think it’s better to wait and hope for some synchronicity. Maybe it does: say the client starts going that way, or a bird lands on the windowsill, leading us there. Maybe my memory returns something useful. If that doesn’t happen, then I might tentatively offer: “doesn’t this sound like your grandmother”, and even “no, the other one”.

I hope this somewhat convoluted example connects some of the dots. We’re operating at multiple layers, all of the time. Dancing between them is the art of “holding space”.

So who is holding space?

I always get a bit nervous using the G word. It can bring up all sorts of projections, from “religious nut” to “toxic patriarch”. Over time though, I’ve found it important that I do.

God, as I see them, isn’t an overbearing vengeful authoritarian as some might preach. I’m more inclined toward the Jungian thinking, that Self is, God manifest in our individuality, a link to the eternal, present within. In that sense, we might see Self, as the I, the seer. Then, ego as the vessel, the do-er.

When we’re working with clients it seems quite clear to me, we’re working between those two states. Our own godliness in Self and our ego, which hopefully, is sufficiently free of its own trauma and unmet needs, nourished by our own rich living and reflectivity, to be an able and humble do-er of the seers work.

If that’s what is meant by “holding space”, then yes, I’m right onboard.

I love when the words of a wise one roll around inside, like an emotional lozenge, slowly giving up more and more nourishing nectar. Recently, Eckhart Tolle popped back into view, reminding me of a graceful, wise voice I often turned too about a million years go in my twenties. This quote in particular, kept on giving:

Love and joy are inseparable from your natural state of inner connectedness with Being.

Tolle uses a capital “B” to differentiate being and Being, I contend that, similarly to Jung delineating self and Self, Tolle is nodding toward the transpersonal or divine aspects of human nature. This got me thinking of the true(st) nature of being. It got me thinking about our cultural resistance to being in favour of it’s metaphysical opposite: doing. And then, as is far too often the case, it got me thinking about how this might be relevant to therapy.

In professional circles, “being vs. doing” opens up all sorts of controversy. Many claim that therapy isn’t really about doing at all, rather it’s about presence (clinical speak for being). There is quite a lot of truth to this, but it can go too far. If applied universally, an emphasis on presence can inadvertently be an endorsement of lazy therapy, or of therapy that isn’t prepared to burrow into the tricky and lesser-visited recesses of the psyche. And yet, if we’re focussed only on doing and never on being, then we’re committing another clinical sin: of being formulaic or cut off from deeper states of consciousness and relationship. And we certainly wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

what does ‘healing’ really mean?

So it seems we’re talking, yet again, about false binaries. Or when over-simplification of a quite nuanced topic leads to an idealogical trap. A further case in point; the addiction to action (doing) and ignorance of presence (being) has made its way into therapy via social media and commercial imperatives, as a preoccupation with “healing,” in particular, that now familiar trope "healing trauma."

The unmentioned nuance here, is that when working with trauma we rarely remove it. Indeed, the key ingredient to working with trauma, especially the developmental type, is accepting that it is there and then being deeply present to the traumatised part. This is vital when we sit with parts that result in severe psychic disruption or personality disorders. Such parts are often full of anger, shame, or have socially unacceptable impulses. We “heal” these parts, when we can stay with them, rather than trying too hard to “fix” them. Indeed trying too hard might end up being an inadvertent collusion with dissociative processes that push those parts back into the void.

True attending is far from “healing”, as we might think of say, healing a broken bone. Instead, it is a re-integration that takes time and relationship. There are many flawed attempts to bypass this process that show up in practice. That it can be “transformed” with an affirmation, or imagined away with an ego driven visualisation, or behaved away in response to a directive, external other. Instead, to heal at depth, the wound needs to be bought into the transformative light of consciousness which means, bringing that traumatised part into a true connectedness with Being with a capital B.

When we carry trauma, from dark things that happened to us, or to our family or culture of origin, those shady parts can be quite something. Such injuries, often times infused with archetypal and ancestral material, can be nothing short of devilish. In this case, the therapeutic relationship becomes pivotal. It’s the therapeutic relationship, and the attentive, even co-regulating presence of an other who in themselves, offers a deep connectedness to Being. This way of working is very different to the simplistic and often sanitised world of insta-healing. This way of working, is very difficult to achieve on a screen alone. And this way of working can be difficult to find, as practitioners with a developed quality of Being are often in high demand and limited supply.

I’ll come back to the nature of healing relationship shortly, but first, how can we square the alluring promise in Tolle’s quote - of connectedness with joy and love - with the murky realities of unbanishable trauma? Well to talk about that, lets dive into a warm, salty sea.

the sponginess of being

To explore further, let’s think about a sea sponge, living in that sea. These wonderful creatures grow in nutrient rich waters, trapping grit in complicated webs of tissue, some finely porous. If the organism’s structures were too loose or open, the gritty goodness of the sea water would pass right through.

Metaphysically, human beingness is a bit like a sea sponge. While the spark of life is in us, that light resides in the creature of our embodied sponginess. The light occupies us, but is only realised in close proximity of the tight gaps in our sponge. The more trauma and dissociation we have, the looser the gaps, and the light can’t be metabolised. The more capacity to metabolise the light, to relate and to know it, the more we can realise our true nature. In that sense, relatedness to our natural state is at its most, when we can hold and make use of the light that’s within us. Traumatised and dissociated parts (the gaps) contain unrealised aspects of our light. Though they are in us, they remain unavailable to our usual states of being.

Good therapy reduces the size of those gaps, because good therapy means we first know and eventually, learn to love our traumatised parts. The implication is if we wish away trauma, we wish away part of our light. This can happen when we are overly headstrong in our determination toward love and joy. When we strictly impose ideals of positivity and healing, which obscure rather than know our trauma, we have to ask: what aspects of our true nature are we abandoning?

being real in (cosmic) relatedness

Perhaps the most important part of Tolle’s quote is the phrase “inner connectedness”. So much is made of connection in our culture. Usually, the notion of connection is external and usually, sadly, it’s quite superficial. Contrast the connectedness of mother and baby with the connectedness of social media networks to feel into the distinction I’m making.

Inner connectedness is a different lens on relationship. What if we didn’t abandon those innocent parts, and instead cultivated a relationship with them? To a certain extent we can choose to feel into such states at any time, but what if those parts of us were so well known, and connecting with them was so habitual, that being with them was just an everyday part of our spongey existence? What psychospiritual properties might become more available, and how might our relatedness and our nature, change?

External relationships are still of great relevance, in fact they are the key to the development of such internal connectedness. Most often, it’s in close relationships where our joy and our love can exist, and also, where it can be forgotten. When we fall from our true nature, toward something reactive or narcissistic, it’s often in our closest relationships where this felt. In moments such as these we are being called to rekindle that relationship with Being, and find away back to authentic love and joy. It takes effort, but the muscle can be built.

Close relationships are also where we can learn to first find, then habitualize this inner connectedness. Good therapy encourages us to be with difficulty and tenseness, so the reactivity which takes us away from such Being can be worked through. But close relationships like therapy also provide perhaps the most powerful of all healing potentials. And to explore that, I need another metaphor.

I think about the profound healing relationships in my life (therapeutic and otherwise), as a little like the sun, moons and planets of the solar system. Two important forces exist, the gravity which pulls together, and then, the light (in all its seen and unseen wavelengths) which is transmitted between. This can feel nebulous, but think about the way significant others have been pulled toward you in life. This is the gravity, pulling toward healing. How many do we remain in orbit with? And what’s the nature of that orbit? Then, there’s the light transmission which is also, quite ineffable. The most obvious of light is joy and love, care and delight, light that is transmitted through emotions and relational contact - but what about the more subtle? These unseen wavelengths are perhaps the most spiritually significant when it comes to the healing power of relationship. We feel it in our bodies, yet also from beyond. It’s a movement that’s inward and upward, yet downward and outward. Such relationships often appear in dreams and other states of consciousness. They can nourish us, but also are prone to dynamics and abuse, so must be ethically grounded and regarded as sacred. And yet, despite and perhaps because of our desecrated world, we need such relationship now more than ever.

That’s because, when you sit with a wise one, be they teacher, spiritual director, therapist or guide, the most intimate of transmissions is underway. For in the light they offer through love, what’s being nurtured is the capacity to live from your own state or connectedness with Being.

Sun and moon.

Planet to planet.

Being to being.

That’s real, Self realisation. Imbued with a certain quality of love.

And, its a joy to behold.

Early in my training I remember saying to a colleague in a supervision group that I didn't feel the positivity they were offering was genuine. The facilitator gave me short thrift: reflecting that I wasn't able to take in the compassion on offer. At the time I took the supervision as gospel, dismissing the inner sensation that had led me to make the comment.

More recently I’ve been seeing Instagram ads for BetterHelp. Picture a 20-something client talking about how great therapy is, exclaiming that “if I don’t think the therapist is right, I just hit a button and get a new one”. This button sounds to me like the therapeutic equivalent of a block button, which means it has the potential to be used as a narcissistic defence. Hit it, and the projection laden “other” is gone forever.

What unifies these vignettes is the expectation of therapists, to be “nice".  This is an expectation not of outcomes, or of professional robustness. Rather it's an expectation of the style of interpersonal interaction, perhaps an expectation which confuses therapy with ordinary relationships, or conflates compassion with efficacy. And while lots of writing exists on the topic, it seems to me the complexity of this expectation is rarely spoken about. Almost as if in institutions and in our culture, there are a lot of unconscious assumptions about how a therapist “ought” to be.

Now, I am not claiming that BetterHelp's "change therapist" mechanism is all bad: It might help connect clients with the therapist that is right for them at that time. But like all things in life, something being somewhat "good" doesn't rule out that it might also be somewhat "bad". In fact, the good in both of these vignettes is so self evident that it hardly needs emphasis. What I’m exploring is what, in both, might be missing. And that's what got me thinking: when is "nice", not what it seems? And how might an expectation of “nice” actually be anti-ethical to psychotherapy?

When is nice not what it seems?

Let’s return to the example from my training group. I should start by saying that the supervisor of course had a point. Taking in can be difficult for those of us who grew up where goodness might have been untrustworthy.

To learn to discern what is truly good from bad, to move beyond superficially rejecting or naively accepting, is a bit like building a muscle. A very helpful internal praxis toward this goal is to pay close attention to oneself when something is being offered. If we can learn to use the thinking and feeling functions together (that is, when we think about our feelings), we can generate insight and relational intelligence. In the case of the training group, the words the colleague offered conjured thought, and overlaying that across feeling states, allows for a triangulation of sorts. In retrospect, I can see I did detect a discrepancy. And this is key, when a feeling sense doesn’t align with the meaning of the words being said, we may well be detecting something inauthentic.

There’s a but. And its a rather big but. The truly murky area is deciphering what’s going on with our feelings. Over years of self-development I have learned the feeling that something being offered isn’t quite right, might be a projection (an aspect of early environment that lingers in my unconscious) or it might be that I’m detecting through the relational field that the offering is compromised. There is only one way to distinguish these feelings, and that is through self-awareness. If we have a "good enough" grasp on our own "stuff", we can separate ourselves from what might be coming in externally. And this is where it gets really interesting: when we get good at unpacking and analysing the disturbances in attunement we can pickup all manner of insight: from insincerity in the giver, through to collective dynamics that might be at play.

This is why for depth therapists, ongoing personal development work is not optional. We have to get to know the residues of development which live on in our feeling based evaluations, and might even spill over into projection inspired rationalisation. The therapeutic imperative: the more we know ourselves, the more we can be available to others. Then, the more we can rely on feeling as a source of therapeutic insight.

In clinical environments this discernment is very useful. If working with attunement (an umbrella term for when we work closely with the energy of the in-between of the therapeutic dynamic), we can quickly detect a persona or a false self, because that false way of being relates to a way we have had to unlearn in ourselves. Through this contact through presence, we can also detect the authentic being of the client. A being which, although sat in front of us, might have been disowned by the ego of the client. This opens up a very healing potential in depth therapy: to find a way, often through painstaking work, to allow the treasure of that disownedness to come into the room. When we work in this way, we can make room for the clients true self, which can alleviate the terrible pain of parental mirroring which may not have been attuned to that individual uniqueness.

In this sense, I am rather critical of “therapeutic persona” or perspectives which advocate the demonstration of certain qualities, deemed desirable by that paradigm. These I fear, though perhaps giving everyone a superficial sense of niceness, often recreate the false attunement which is at the core of developmental trauma and attachment injury. Indeed, my sense is that in most cases it’s better to be “real” than “nice”. This of course doesn’t mean being rude, flippant or unprofessional, just in case that needed to be said. But it does mean being prepared to engage in relationship in a way which at times, might not be what the client wants to hear. It might not necessarily be what the client might think of as “nice”.

This doesn’t mean that compassion isn’t a key ingredient in therapy. After all, it was Freud who declared that “Analysis is, in essence, a cure through love.” The question we are really asking is, how real is that compassion? And is the compassion being used for healing, or to sublimate something that needs a more nuanced attention, if we are to be relationally real.

So how do we think about "realness" in a consumer-driven therapy marketplace, when therapeutic block buttons are at our clients fingertips?

Being “real” without breaking the mill

The therapy world runs on stories. Many times I’ve been told that the art of our craft is transmitted through oral tradition. As such storytelling in supervision, trainings, and case reviews, are core. Obviously we protect the individual cases (I like to use generalisations, rather than specifics), and sometimes the generalisations are so oft shared they get distilled down into something of a meme.

One of these is the suggestion that messiness (rupture) in therapy is “grist for the mill”. There’s truth in this, that relationships being challenged and stretched is often where the growth is. A colleague recently remarked “yeah it’s all grist to the mill, until the mill breaks”. And I think this is a very important build on the original meme. The relationship can indeed break if we overstep, trigger a potent complex, or worse, violate a boundary. And I think dynamics like BetterHelp’s block button - have lowered the threshold of that mill. To be fair, it’s not just BetterHelp, it’s also a factor of the culture at large. Which, at the same time as becoming more “therapy aware”, has also become more driven toward superficial answers, and a desire to move as rapidly as possible toward “healing”, where healing might mean feeling “better”.

Now what's wrong with that you might ask? Well, let me bring in another meme: “Sometimes we have to get worse before we get better”. This is quite true of depth or psychodynamic approaches which invite us to look at painful wounds. Re-processing such trauma requires that it is re-experienced, this time in a safe and knowable way. Often, in the case of relational traumas, those difficult feelings are actually only able to be revisited in difficult relational situations. And therapists that work deeply with relationship are skilled at bringing such "negative" feelings into relationship.

But what if the client doesn't want to feel those sorts of feels? What if our culture, is becoming less and less tolerant of awkward or difficult moments such as these? And what does it mean if some therapy tribes collude with this cultural trajectory, and consciously or otherwise, avoid necessary awkwardness?

Are those of us being "real" in a little bit of trouble here?

I think we'll be okay. But it does put us on a bit of a tight-rope between two opposites. At one end, we can adopt a persona of constant affirmation and “niceness”.  On the other, brutal honesty which ruffles, ruptures and takes no prisoners.

The answer of course, lies somewhere in between and, importantly, is dynamic. The tension needs to be navigated, based on the strength of the relationship, and an artful appreciation of what is needed in a given moment. And, if we work “from the field”, we are also informed by the inspiration of the healing force which lives inside us.

So how might we think about the strength of relationship? In my experience, many therapists have an implicit sense of what the relationship can take. This might be based in part on the feeling tone in the room and perhaps the duration of the relationship. But we can also be misguided. Perhaps we are caught in a dynamic, protecting an unconscious need of our own. Perhaps we are scared, or conversely, overconfident. Or, perhaps, our training paradigm has blind spots which have led us to think we have to avoid working with the relationship in the broadest of ways. Such paradigm masks can be pervasive, and sometimes worn unknowingly.

The antidote to this is a preparedness to take measured risks and to wisely call upon an unusual honesty. At first this may sound at odds with the pervasive cultural idea of therapy, it might even sound reckless. I’m not advocating for unsafe work. Instead, I am suggesting an ongoing assessment of the clients capacity for reality. It means developing an understanding of the level of tolerance a client might have for the “negative”: which might involve difficult feelings, being challenged, and working with difference. Eventually, in a deep therapy, the client may need to have their dominant world view called into question. Often psychological dysfunction is a result of deeply held belief that doesn’t line up with something even deeper than that: our essence. When the time is right, we have to be prepared to curiously go toward such soul limiting beliefs. To bring such assumptions into the light is a kind of honesty, with a soulful purpose behind it.

Along the way of a developing therapy relationship, moments emerge to understand our clients level of tolerance. I suggest to start relatively early, but in a very gentle way. One might offer a curious sigh, or a simply “I wonder if there are other ways of thinking about that”, as the need arises. Doing so may evoke a catalyzing moment which clarifies if the client is open and able to engage in discourse, or if they might just defensively shut down. More importantly, if we think about the feeling tone in this moment, it may well reveal dynamics which might already be in the room.

As this exploration in relationship continues we might begin to identify and potentially make tense areas conscious with the client, examine them in supervision, or try to understand how they might relate to other complexes and defences. It doesn’t mean arguing, shaming or needing to be right, but it might mean holding onto our differing perspective. Alongside this, always monitoring the capacity of the relationship to be able to think together, even if doing so is outside of what our increasingly factional society might consider “nice”. This is the sort of working which Wallin describes as “maintaining freedom of movement”. And what is pivotal and often misunderstood, is when the relationship grows to allow this realness, it becomes more trustworthy, not less.

Indeed as we become more familiar with our clients personality structure, it might be this way of working becomes pivotal for the healing process itself. For example, narcissistic structures often lead to a thin-skinned reactivity. If we hold such a client too gently for too long, we take away the chance of helping them grow a thicker skin. If we are too nice, some part of their soul remains unable to exist in the world.

Nice moments in the now, or toward a greater good?

The spirit behind this blog is to encourage expansive thinking about culturally-linked dynamics of the moment, and in the case of this section, how those dynamics emerge in the consulting room. A post alone is certainly not going to change the culture, the therapy world, nor a therapy practice. Similarly, as therapists we all work in our own way, based on our individuality, our training, our supervision and the cases we grow through.

My hope is that these words might sew a seed of reflection, and inspire the confidence to think about the true purpose of our craft. The original meaning of the word psychotherapy (literally, to treat the soul), is quite different from the superficial and socially accepted impulses toward feeling “better”. If we loose sight of that original purpose, then maybe we have some of our own soul searching to do.

I have a few years under my belt now, but I feel well short of any sort of mastery. I’m still learning from rupture and the ensuing repair, still wondering why I said certain things. I’ve come to accept these sometimes difficult reflections are a part of the process of our work. What heartens me is when from time to time I hear from a departed client or group participant that something “provocative” I said, or a difficult moment we traversed together, ending up being the pivotal point of reflection they returned too. It seems such grit can fuel the mill well after the therapy ends.

Indeed a “not nice” moment is often the seed for change that without necessarily knowing at the time, was exactly the healing that was needed.

There seems to be a new tide rolling in, in the sea of the culture wars. I don’t know if you’ve detected it, but of late, I’ve heard more recognition of the shadow of social activism. “X (institution/individual) has been captured by Y (movement/ideology). Or “X movement tends to shut down all debate”.

Of course, sometimes these arguments are mere deflections, made in an attempt to shut down a movement toward human betterment, often as an attempt to maintain a grasp on status-quo power, or simply out of ignorance. But other times, there’s some truth in the recognition. After all, any of us can get caught up in a dogma. Usually to the exclusion of deeper understanding, and alongside that, a deeper recognition of our shared humanity.

I find it to be quite an expansive idea that groups operate like a psyche. In this sense, a group might represent a family system, made of parts that in Donald Kalsched’s language, form a kind of democratic (or not) power sharing arrangement. In both the family or government metaphors, the group might contain a leader, or even a tyrant, perhaps some subservient parts, a truth teller, and when the seas get choppy, a scapegoat. I’ll come back to that idea later, but the pressing thought in my mind, relates to our own belonging in groups. Be they families, institutions, movements, political parties or academic peer groups. Given that such groups generally require some sacrifice of individuality in order to belong, we might well ask some clarifying questions to quantify that sacrifice. Can there be belonging, without adhering to dogma which limits free thought? Can we participate in a shared goal, while maintaining, or even nurturing, our individual realness? And can that realness be taken onboard, toward a more expansive whole? Perhaps most scintillatingly, when might a group become a narcissistic circus and why on earth would it need a scapegoat?

Let’s start by looking at how to recognise a circus. I soon run out of the fingers on one hand when I count the times in the last year I’ve realised I’m in a situation which might fall into some of these categories. My list isn’t exhaustive, and its no doubt flawed, but I hope provides some space for thinking.

1. Challenge isn’t allowed. In such a group there’s often an overt shutting down of any challenge which might impact structural power. But sometimes, the shutting down is unconscious, enforced by a powerful feeling tone that makes it feel as if pointed questions can’t be asked. Put another way, the inner or outer authority never peels back the invisible cloak of what is unspeakable or worse, the leader shrouds the group’s authentic functioning with a reinforcement of that cloak. This one really gets me - mostly because such silencing often unduly affects minorities - including epistemic minorities. Most hurtfully, when minorities include cultural or archetypal dimensions such as is the case around race, sex, gender, spirituality, sexuality and social class, the unconscious forces can be tremendous and painful.

2. Group-think pervades. I often see this on social media, when a “normal” person asks an “influencer” a strange question: “hey, what do we think about X”. Asked in this way, the inference of the “we” is that there’s an automatic and unthinking subservience to group belief. In institutions, you see individuals unable to make their own mind and inevitably, undue power amasses with the (thought) leader. Through this submission, the individuals capacity to think is not nourished or encouraged. Indeed, individuation is side-lined, in favour of infantilisation.

3. External influence is discouraged. Flawed systems such as these rely on leaders for big picture thinking, and as such, limit external sources of thought to those that don’t threaten group ideology. In effect the external is shut out, usually to protect against flaws being revealed. And let’s face it, every value system has flaws.

4. Certain individuals are idealised. When groups rely heavily on the leader, or a particular group of those deemed the “inner circle”, those in “lesser” positions need to idealise the leader(s) in order to maintain a very specific group dynamic. The idealisation might be based on something sound: perhaps the academic leader is well read or published, the organisational spokesperson has a much needed charisma, or the spiritual leader has a palpable energetic rawness; but these positive qualities are not the problem. The problem is when the idealisation of goodness prevents seeing shadow of various kinds; from the inevitable badness which we all possess, to flaws in the groups way of thinking or functioning.

5. Certain individuals are scapegoated. Each circus needs a sacrificial lamb (or two). But let’s not confuse our metaphorical bovidae. According to the myth, the purpose of the scapegoat is to exorcise the group from a deistic debt. In groups like these, the scapegoat plays a similar role: carrying some quality the group can’t contain. I was in a seminar recently where a very valid (but challenging) question was asked and the leader immediately invalidated the question with a hyperbolic slur. It was quite astounding, but the unthinking and unseeing in the crowd erupted with glee. The scapegoat had been banished and the narcissistic circus could go along with its business.

The last two points are quite important when we think about “realness”, (note I’m not using the word “authentic” here, it’s too loaded). If we don’t make these dynamics conscious, we can make the inordinate sacrifice of our own “realness”, as we might end up chasing the idealisation of the group, to avoid being scapegoated.

These “negative” attributes of groups must be balanced alongside what might be a normative range of group functioning. To illuminate, let’s consider the much maligned concept of individual narcissism. Our culture has “cancelled” narcissism, framing it as toxic and pathological. Yet narcissistic traits are a part of the ego functioning which allows us to be in the world, to assert our needs and make a difference. No entrepreneurial venture (no business, no blog), could succeed without some narcissistic impulse. It becomes damaging when the narcissistic tendency overrules logic, risk assessment, care for relationships, or an eye toward a greater good. Similarly when a narcissistic pursuit is compensating for an unconscious injury, then it's likely to end up quite the circus. Applying this back to groups, it's necessary to form a group belonging, to have shared values and understanding, even to create hierarchies, for the group to have a life. The question becomes: is this group functioning for itself, or for a greater purpose? Is the group purpose in touch with an ethical, grounded reality, or has the lack of external challenge left it, disconnected, blissfully living out its end days. And finally, are group members, or the group itself, using a grandiosity to defend against an unbearable injury within the group, or themselves?

What is called for in such circumstances is a kind of group maturation. One where the errors of a distancing from reality can be encountered. Where internal dogma's can be adjusted, willingly reflecting on shortcomings and mistakes. And where discourse can be invited, such that grounded and robust values and directions can be found. In this way, the need for idealisation and scapegoating fades, and instead an inner democracy might be established which invites inclusivity. No doubt dynamics would continue to exist, but they could be contained and worked through. And what’s more, the individual’s individuation needn’t be corrupted, by a group which cannot see value in difference.

A utopia, maybe. But a circus, surely not.

What good comes of being with darkness? It's hard to avoid right now, as we are bombarded daily with images of unspeakable tragedies. Human actions that can only be described as evil, while long-standing instabilities creak ominously toward escalation. Sometimes these darknesses seem unthinkable, even unspeakable. And it can be difficult to stay with heartbreaking images and the suffering they connect us to. So maybe it’s not so surprising that when our capacity to take in is maxed, we look away.

Alongside these terrors are some which are hardly acknowledged. There was a recent spate of headlines about Mark Zuckerburg constructing a bunker complex on Hawaii. One of the headlines exclaimed “what do they know?”. It’s quite infantilising really, as if “they” (whoever they are) have some knowledge we don’t. The truth is many of us know, it’s just that some newspaper editors would prefer to keep us in the dark. Meantime when BBC nature speaks on climate realities, the Telegraph is quick to call it out as “Gloomy”, without acknowledging that it sounds gloomy because it is?

I'm no longer surprised when our culture at large, dismisses the potential of significant changes to our lives due to climate change. I hear those ringing the bell of warning, that life and human systems might collapse, dismissed as alarmist. I do however find the avoidance of these dark possibilities to be psychologically intriguing. What I want to explore in this post, is what, outside of the obvious, takes us away from darkness? And why, especially on matters related to climate, is it important that we counter this avoidance?

Psychological defences to unthinkable darkness

Our capacity to sense the world is much less than the sensory information which is available to us. This is why we project: If we observe less and generalise more, we can get along just fine. We generalise on basic survival assumptions, and can then focus on what seems important in the moment. In so doing, we use a lot less energy to process sensory information. Also, the psychological defense (sublimation) which initiates dissociation is a kind of psychic circuit break. It is there to protect us from psychological overwhelm. In short, if we can't or don't need to know, make sense of, or truly take something in, the psyche has plenty of ways of avoiding. Especially if the topic is too big, or feels less immediate.

Other factors stop us seeing reality, some are based on choice, some more unconscious. In part this is guided by projection. In early life we project an idealised nurturer onto mother and an idealised protector onto father. These vary in individuals and often are at odds with the objective experience of our parents, but that’s another story. In part projection can fall into line with the idealisation, because we need to belong in order to survive. We might learn it's better to put ourselves as dependant, not to challenge collective assumptions, and to avoid raising and speaking about matters which might jeopardise our standing in systems of power. If such projections aren’t challenged, we can project a kind of adherence onto society. And those dynamics can filter what we can and can’t see. What we consider “individual” perspective and voice is very much curtailed by the norms of the group and the culture that we are a part of. Unless we make those adherences conscious and then, we can actually choose.

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As a culture we like to live above a semi-permeable membrane that keeps light above the surface and darkness and grit below. We like to feel good, think we are good, and keep things simple. It’s an addiction of sorts, where we get hooked on good feelings and develop allergies to things that feel uncomfortable.

On top of this, we are conditioned to "buy-in" to our economic system and think of it as (mostly) good. This buy-in is influenced by the promise of status and money, rationalised as stability and prosperity. When this belief structure is encased in another construct which many hold dear — career — it can become ego foundational, entrenched and almost unshakeable. As well as limiting what we can see and hear, psychologically it prevents us feeling the underlying anxieties of our predicament.

This buy-in is much less pervasive in generations who weren’t alive in the 80s, who haven’t had as much economically derived dopamine to get hooked on, and for whom the promise of a prosperous future is quite the stretch. I’ll come back to the implications of this later.

In the mean time, what happens to this darkness we don’t want to look at? Well, it doesn’t go away. Indeed when we ignore darkness it shows up somewhere else. Except for one small difference: it gets a whole lot darker.

Disowned darkness erupts

Jung wrote this in the 1930s, but it is strikingly relevant today.

“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Englightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. If anywhere, fear of God is justified in the face of the overwhelming supremacy of the psychic.”

(CW 17, para 302)

What Jung is speaking of here is a product of the discovery he termed the collective unconscious. This concept proposes that disowned thoughts and feelings aren’t erased, rather they are amassed in an archetypal matrix of psychic connectedness. Down there they become infused with all manner of darkness. This is key — the collective unconscious is like an archive, amassing in the underworld since humanity emerged from the primordial swamp. What is disowned then becomes infused with various motifs from the depths of Hades, only to re-emerge in the individual psyche as disruptive complexes. They can also erupt collectively, at a group or global level. Indeed, Jung had a dream which predicted their emergences as the global wars in the first half of the twentieth century and it seems a similar emergence is happening now.

Another, perhaps more relatable way of thinking about this is that this eruptive force is charged every time one pole in a tension of opposites is chosen over another. Say we want to see ourself as good, then we might push our badness away, only until we have an altercation with a friend, which surfaces that the badness is still in us. In this case, the friend reflecting back what one doesn’t want to hear about oneself is the re-balancing of opposites. Quite often the re-balancing makes more mess than if the badness had just been held in mind all along.

Through this lens we can see that groups, collective cultures, even the planet as a whole as a kind of living thing. Not literally a biological organism, rather an intricately connected set of systems which takes on something of an aliveness when viewed in the whole. This is close to the principal of Gaia theory, and similar to the Jungian idea of anima mundi, or world soul.

This connectedness is observable collectively when violence or revolution erupts simultaneously across multiple regions, or when political swings are mirrored across continents. The interconnectedness of unconscious process and anima mundi may also help to explain why many believe dreams can be precognitive, it also validates transpersonal ways of knowing.

This systemic connectedness has always been known. Mythical belief structures projected the causation of various eruptions onto vengeful gods. These days we’ve largely done away with such magical thinking, but we could see a vengeful scuttling if turmoil spreads in economic, geopolitical, and ecological systems, as is predicted. This takes us to another question, how do these systemic happenings show up inside of us? And, in a time of darkness, how might the systemic effect on world soul be playing a part in our mental health crisis?

Climate crisis: A darkness of anima mundi, a darkness in us

To most who understand climate science, it is understood that if we aren't able to make sacrifices around how we collectively choose to live and don't challenge existing economic assumptions about consumption and growth, that we will see catastrophic and irreversible impacts to the biosphere. The question really isn’t “if”, it is “how badly”, and “when.” And given the current trajectory, the “how badly” looks pretty catastrophic.

If we pause for a moment and dwell on that possibility, then the darkness of the world can be felt inside of us. Dwell a little longer and that darkness begins to change form. I believe this is a sacred reflection. It is to pause from the distraction of our desecrated world, and to allow the dangers of the climate crisis to be fully felt. Only then can we see that such danger affect at the deepest levels of psyche, including at the level of anima mundi. Put another way, the soul of the world lives in each of us because we and the world are one. And that world soul is in crisis.

Depth psychotherapies do not see soul as an external or purely metaphysical phenomenon. Instead it is understood that soul is observable, felt, and subjective. It is also the most subtle and sensitive part of psyche. In this sense, our soulfulness is protected by the psyche and is often unknown to conscious awareness. We have to purposefully seek it out, which is why deliberate and contemplative reflection is so important.

If you feel up to it, take a moment to pause on this, to see what’s inside of you, at a deeper level than you usually make time for. And if you can, notice what takes you away from it. To help you reflect, you might dwell with the words: the world is in crisis, the world is in me.

In the climate group I facilitate in London, we have tried to make some space for these feelings. One of the most difficult has been the near psychotic terror which exists in relation to climate. It is a profound and very troubling set of feelings, akin to infantile feelings of the loss of a carer, and the subsequent fear of annihilation. Although this sounds like an analytic idea, it's also an ecopsychological one. In our infantile, merged state, we contact our dependence on mother. Beneath our modern day abstraction from nature, the truth of our dependency on Mother Earth is still felt.

Such undercurrents are defended against which makes them ripe for psychic eruption. We’ve termed them “climate grief” or “eco-anxiety.” I prefer to think of them as a crisis in earth soul. A kind of psyche-shattering heartbreak, laced with grief, anger and intergenerational regret. It is usually only seen when we enquire deeply, though it can also break through defences. It breaks through more readily in those more vulnerable, including those who are distressed and the young, who have more years to live exposed to what is to come. If we don’t let it show up in a conscious way, then it shows up in the collective, as an eruption of darkness.

As depth psychologists we might interpret our global metacrisis as evidence of these eruptions. But before we can see them in the individuals that we treat, we have to get past what is at the surface. Many times, what we see first are the attempts to numb the pain, perhaps through addiction to substances, sex, or screens. Sometimes, it’s when externalities such as status, money or relationships, loose their numbing capacity and can no longer keep the difficulties down. And sometimes they emerge as a psychiatric diagnosis or a murky confluence of anxiety, meaningless and depression.

Diagnostic categories such as depression or anxiety are common, but too simplistic. Similarly, more specific psychiatric or behavioural diagnostic categories, whilst often capturing something important of the lived experience of suffering, tend to be superficial and overly individualistic in understanding psychosocial causation. We have to get into the pith and the symbolism of the presentation to know what is occurring and what is needed. Each client is different, so the manifestation will be unique in every case, but some general themes are around. I often see that in flattening the value of Mother Earth, we are flattening a rich, life-giving and connected aspect of ourselves. Similarly, our sense of agency or participation in the system can be marred by nihilism or powerlessness, which in turn might be inspired by unconscious guilt and regret of how we and our forbears have got us here in the first place.

We can see these energies in action individually, but also collectively. The attempts by distorted power to hold onto dead-end paradigms through economic or military force is palpable and terrifying. As is western society becoming disenfranchised with government, as positive qualities such as justice and honour, are increasingly thin on the ground.

We might ask what can we do? The answer to that lays at many levels. Of course, our culture advocates action in the face of challenge, and this isn't bad. Moving toward a personal reduction in carbon emissions, and influencing others, institutions and governments toward change certainly has its place. But there is also something vital which can be done through inner work. To face reality is to encounter that which is psychologically unpalatable. To encounter such darkness, Jung suggests that we cultivate an "imagination for evil."

Developing an “imagination for evil”

I am shifting away from Jung’s use of the word “evil” to “darkness”, partly for creative consistency but also because, although “evil” is quite accurate, some might find it counterproductive. That said, the word “imagination” is perhaps the most important word to interpret, so let’s start with that.

To my mind, Jung is asking us to develop an imagined voice, which uses creative imagination - an intuitive, playful inner fantasy. This is important, for if accessed correctly as an unforced intuitive spark, creative imagination allows us to bypass our thinking defences. Both personal and collective unconscious material becomes available to this process, which means when imagining our darkness, we are tapping into collective (cultural, ancestral and instinctual) as well as personal (infantile fantasy and other suppressed memory) unconscious material. This is particularly important for those with an eye on social activism, as encountering such material personally has a small, but authentic impact at the collective. This impact is energetic and also relational, which I will come back to shortly.

Over time, and ideally within a robust therapeutic relationship, or with a similarly safe supportive other, this once dispossessed darkness becomes a dynamic internal resource. The relationship is important, for it is difficult to see ourselves clearly alone. For those familiar with depth work, it’s a little like developing a specific sub-personality or a part, and engaging with that part in various circumstances to continually develop greater self awareness and more authentically engage with the world.

Through this part, we might look to locate the misogynist (or misandronist), the power-hungry, the racist, or the warmonger. Analytic traditions wax lyrical about “murderous rage” and “sexual predation” as ways into more instinctual aspects of this disowned part. In the case of our relationship to climate, we might locate the greedy part, the part who puts self unreasonably above other, the part who is wedded to social status and power. I know first hand locating these parts can be quite difficult, partly because we are living in a society which normalises them and also as ego will resist. After all, ego fears bringing darkness into light as it fears loosing its will, freedom and power. And as far as ego is concerned, what was put into darkness, was put there for a reason.

For those of you who work with clients, working this way has a "multiplier effect." It does require a commitment to become comfortable with our own darkness. But when we do, we can then authentically ask clients about their own. In working this way, we not only help enhance a clients emotional resilience, potency and self control, but also bring them to question their own use of interpersonal power. It might be useful to think about this as a multiplier of your own impact on the world. That through relationships, radiants of consciousness develop can go on to aid others, and through them, further radiants grow out.

The dawning of an authentic transcendence?

Thanks for staying with me, especially on a topic that can be heavy. There’s a little light coming, I promise.

When we are prepared to sit with our darkness, to truly get to know it and integrate it into our self image, we are making room in our psyche for good and evil to co-exist alongside each other. This takes psychological strength, but it leads to multiple benefits, both internally and through relationships.

This is the territory of the transcendent function, a cornerstone concept in Jungian psychology. For when we invite the dark and the light to co-exist within ourselves, we are holding the tension of the opposites. In this way, deepening understanding of our darkness is vital to expand our internal container. What does this mean? Well, a wise woman once told me if we can bring light to our deepest, most precious, sometimes dissociated parts, then we are making it possible for those parts to have a relationship with the divine. This in turn, brings the possibility of transcendence to those parts. And in so doing, we are healing trauma and simultaneously evolving and expanding consciousness within ourselves.

This is very different to an idealised transcendence, sometimes present in spiritual circles, where harmony and love are idealised, and certain aspect of human darkness are ignored.

When we deepen both our light and dark, we become more capable in the world, more able to remain present to others, and more able to remain true to ourselves in difficult situations. This has a real and profound affect on those we come into contact with. It transmits a certain quality of love, which in itself, enlivens and awakens.

It also is enlivening and awakening the spark of consciousness that dwells, for a while at least, inside of us. A light that, if we are able, we might take toward the dark, and illuminate a small part of the world that we can know.

The 2024 dates for the climate group I facilitate have now been set. You can see the dates via the link below. If you’re in or near London it would be great to see you there, to (perhaps?) spread a little light.

More details

It has been a rough few weeks on the global stage. It seems that everyday another tragedy emerges that brings with it huge amounts of grief. A wise man once told me that grief is the price we pay for having loved something. In psychotherapy, we sometimes think about the build up of loving as “attachment”. In this respect, I often find myself saying to clients that sometimes we aren’t aware of how attached we are to something until we risk losing it. And while it’s obvious we can attach to a person, we can also attach to a group, to an institution, or even an idea or a movement.

I realised just how attached I’d become to the outcome of Australia’s “The voice” referendum on indigenous parliamentary representation, when I saw the vote was defeated by a 60% majority. On hearing the news, I was baffled — as an Australian living overseas I’d started to think the country I’d left in the naughties had matured. But the confusion also came from a more heartfelt place — as an empathic human, I find it difficult to express in words how I imagine an indigenous person in Australia might feel at this result. Is heartbreak a good place to start? Or maybe, yet another heartbreak that’s been numbed, by a lifetime of such hurt? Of course I can’t claim to know that feeling. But I can know that I, with some distance from that lived reality, felt quite a painful loss.

Working with grief we know that after shock comes a stage of bargaining, the intellectual inquiry of “what happened” and “why”. After I saw the news I reached out to a few Australian friends and trawled Twitter to understand the “why?”. My articulate and insightful sister said “we’ve got some drongo’s in this country” (she meant the no voters). Media savvy mates proclaimed “the Murdoch empire piled on the fear”. Twitter spewed forth more rebuke: “we can’t represent one group above others, in a representative democracy”. This one, at least at surface, felt worthy of further inquiry.

The facts are, that the referendum would have enacted, if endorsed, a non-binding advisory committee, to voice the concerns of First Nations Australians to parliament. This phrase (First Nations) is important. It recognises the construct of nationhood is itself a product of colonisation. It recognises the breadth and depth of indigenous cultures, including those all but wiped out by my forbears. The advisory committee would have been powerful symbol which modified the founding documents of the country. The change would have begged us to question the assumption of British settlement: that no nation existed. “Begged” being the operative word. Because what’s being asked here is a plead to the heart as well as the mind. And that’s where the argument that “no other group gets representation” becomes completely unstuck.

The truth of the matter is that no other group in Australian society has been so bloodily abused. Vilified, murdered and disenfranchised in the most horrendous of ways. Historically this is unquestionable. And yet it seems this referendum result indicates that for many Australians, the bloody facts remains unspeakable. At first, that might sound strange, so bear with me.

In my work in groups, I am often struck by the unconscious silencing of racial issues. Many times I’ve witnessed a plea for being seen or heard, from a non-white person. A plea which will go unheard by a mostly white group. This is despite that such groups are usually filled with well meaning participants who are usually quite psychologically aware. It’s almost as if a spell of “unspeakability” is cast, and the group unconsciously complies.

Many who understand unconscious group dynamics have written on this. But the shorthand is, we operate unwittingly and automatically in group situations, including in the “big group” of society. Powerful instinctual forces come into play, these include adhering to powerful or dominant paradigms, kept in place by strong feelings of fear and guilt. When the mob rule (the dominant paradigm) is threatened, these instinctual forces demand that we “protect the tribe”. But on a more individual level, we are attempting to maintain a belonging to that dominance. To this end, concepts and memories, even the real-time sentiment from others, that might undermine this dominant paradigm become taboo. And in order to maintain supremacy, we don’t speak about them. You might recognise this feeling driven dynamic in your own institutional and familial groups.

In a bigger group of society we can also be unconsciously silenced. Think through the feelings of taboo that might be around on topics like gun control, the royal family, abortion or climate. Some things are hard to speak about. A recognition of this automatic censoring came up when I was listening to an otherwise insightful BBC radio 4 piece on the Australian referendum. In it, the correspondent listed the reasons for which First Nations Australians are subjugated. All manner of disservice, including the stolen generation of 1960s were mentioned, but the correspondent did not touch on the colonial genocides and massacres, or the decimation of First Nations spirituality through the forced removal from land. I was shocked at what I didn’t hear. I replayed that part of the episode twice, trying to understand how the core wounds which underly race relations in Australia, could not be mentioned.

Of course I can’t know why. It might have been a valid editorial or journalistic decision. Then again, it might have been the full bloodiness of the history remains unspeakable, or in this case un-broadcast-able. I felt angry for a moment, then I remembered all of the times when in a group I’ve done the same thing. Unconsciously gone with a dynamic of silencing, which at heart, is white supremacist.

It takes strength to face reality and to begin a process of reconciliation. Historical recognitions are a necessary part of resolving uncomfortable histories which persist into the here and now. But such recognitions force us to embrace uncomfortable truths. This requires a great inner strength: to see how we descendants of white colonisers carry the perpetrator within ourselves. This means we must face our own pain, shame and guilt. This in itself is difficult, perhaps more-so as it can feel like a betrayal of some tribal rule. And there’s a certain truth in this betrayal. For we must recognise those colonising tendencies live on in our relationships to greed and power — and that’s an unpalatable recognition — that has big implications, for individuals, for institutions and indeed, for nations.

My hope and my prayer is that someday, and hopefully someday soon, that which for now remains unspeakable in each of these contexts might shift. We are all indigenous to one earth, and while we continue the silencing of what we have done to one another, we deny what has been done to the oneness of humanity. The silencing shows up as perpetuating inequalities and the denial of experience. But the silencing also denies the chance to grieve. And in so doing, we deny the chance to heal.

As therapists we are trained to understand transference. A type of “projection”, specifically in the clinical space, transference is the meaning a client makes of their therapist, based on generalisations informed by the client’s own life experience.

Often times, what provokes these generalisations is non verbal. For example, the physical presence of a large human male may evoke all manner of feelings, from desire, to contempt, or even terror. Other times a phrase, an intonation or a particular word can evoke certain meanings and associations. Whatever the stimuli, therapists who work with transference are tuned into these evocations. What is particularly intriguing is when a word starts to bring with it a new or unexpected transference, which appears to be a result of changes in the broader culture.

Around five years ago it became that if I used the word ‘authentic’ a new transference would come at me. If I used the word, clients and some colleagues might assume I was absorbed by a progressive political agenda or that I meant a sexuality or gender identity. What I actually mean by “authentic”, is something quite different to these cultural meanings. I fear though, that my understanding has become somewhat idiosyncratic, even slightly revolutionary in our culture.

You see, I see “authenticity” as being attuned to yourself. On a level deeper than identity, behaviour, culture or labels. Authenticity isn’t something that can be fully known or is concrete. It’s ever-deepening and at first it’s often fleeting. Quite necessarily, it’s also incredibly subjective.

Let’s explore.

Psychoanalytic musings v. cultural superficiality

The modern war cry of “living as your authentic self” is perhaps a good place to start exploring how the culture is operating around this topic. So let’s begin our examination where many modern explorers might start.

It doesn’t take a particularly trained eye to see that these definitions are quite superficial. They quickly relate to broad terms such as “personality” or observable expressions, such as things we do (interests, abilities, mistakes) or aspects of conscious identity (beliefs, values, ideals). This observable bias is quite problematic. It implies that authenticity is definable, and can be observed by another. This is probably not a huge surprise, in a day and age lived with an orientation to social media perception. Where tribal identity has become intrinsically linked to personality. But it dismisses much subjective nuance. It dismisses that even if we don’t demonstrate, or even necessarily know something about ourselves, that it may still be part of who we are.

The conflict between externally perceived identity and an innate sense of self is a problem which psychoanalysis has attempted to solve for since it’s inception.

Freud, in his seminal theories, posited that human personality could be thought about as having three broad components. One of these was the superego, which is a categorisation which captures that we internalise family and cultural values. If we are unconscious of this, we may have unknowingly sacrificed aspects of who we truly are in favour of the opinions or values of those around us. This can be psychologically troublesome, as values held within superego can often be in conflict with those that are instinctual (belonging to the id), or in some cases, conflictual with our individual identity (the ego). In our time, where cultural tribes often adopt pop-psychological tropes, superego can be particularly pernicious.

Jungian thinking, understands the tension that exists between the person life has led us to be (the ego) and the being we are at an eternal or soul level (the Self). In the first half of life we often believe that we are our ego. However, the Jungian notion is that there is also a transpersonal and transcendent aspect of individuality. It is in the latter half of life that we are called to realise the Self in both our identity and how it is expressed through the choices that we make.

Winnicott paid close attention to the quality of the infant care environment. He understood that there are innate aspects of personality, including “undesirable“ emotional states, such as rage, narcissism and intolerance. They are made undesirable as the infant environment didn’t allow them to be expressed. Before we even have words, we begin to develop a false self, which is an adaptation which we think will be well received by a care environment. This leaves aspects of the true self unconscious, and possibly without expression, except in uncontrolled moments. So when you express your rage or narcissism in therapy, a therapist who works with this concept will likely be very welcoming of those states. They are welcoming in aspects of your true self.

There is something that unites, all of these perspectives. In each, a distinction is made between the intrinsic (either a biological inheritance, or something more essential/spiritual) and the adaptive. This is important as it recognises that the personality which is demonstrated or expressed every day, is an adaptation. It is only when we choose to see personality as constructed and instead we attempt to unearth the innate, that we are exploring what depth psychological perspectives might call “authentic”. To differentiate this, I’ll use the phrase “depth authenticity” when referring to this more psychologically minded definition.

At this core level, we are in a territory which is necessarily vague and somewhat ineffable. This is in part because depth authenticity is not a concrete, literal thing. It is a state of self-relatedness that, like many depth phenomenon, is best described metaphorically. When we are in depth authenticity the vibration of the Self, is in accordance with the vibration of our day-to-day ego. This is far from a behaviour, or an identity, it is a state of being. And as such, it isn’t a destination. It is a state we can drift in and out of, as life progresses.

The philosopher and psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist, who explores consciousness and neuroscience, makes a similar point regarding the paralleled idea of purpose. He suggests a sense of purpose isn’t a discernible behaviour we undertake, or a fixed vocation, rather it’s a state of vibratory alignment. He essentially suggests, that consciousness will tell us through feeling, when we are in alignment with our purpose. In my words, we’ll feel a cosmic yet grounded resonance which, at least for a moment, calmly but unequivocally sings “this is why I’m here”, when we’re in that purposeful alignment.

The intersection of trauma, depth authenticity and ‘healing’

Psychologically speaking, we find this state when our unconscious identifications and traumas are sufficiently resolved, that egoic adaptations which distanced us from Self, are no longer necessary. But to be clear, the traumas I’m speaking about are not just the typical shock trauma type that our culture is familiar with, I’m speaking also of the subtle, developmental and often pre-verbal traumas which psychoanalysis has long been concerned with. The concern is for a reason, working at this level has the power to bring about potent changes in personality, unlocking depth authenticity that has hitherto been masked. In fact, psychoanalysis can reach depths that might be causal in creating confusion around sexuality or gender identity. Some psychoanalytic thinking frames some gender identities as possible trauma responses, without labelling them as dysfunction, or of needing repair.

This is a complex and nuanced area, but an important one. The question we might end up asking, is to what extent does trauma (or its resultant personality formations) require our healing attention, and to what extent might a creative use of a traumatic injury now be intrinsic to an individuals life and choices?

The simple answer to this question is that there is no answer. Each individual must make up their own mind, and each therapy must be prepared to enter into that process of examination and determination together.

I have learned to hold an open mind when someone uses a phrase like “authentic self”. I have come to see the idea and the energy around it, as an important space. A space which is often fighting against oppression, and making space for what may well be an aspect of that individuals innateness. But nuance is everything, so when someone says their “authentic self is x”, I might silently hold the words “right now” in mind, without judging or validating that identification. To be clear, this doesn’t mean challenging nor does it mean affirming. It simply means being open, present and non judgemental, to what’s in front of you. But importantly, doing so in an honest relationship, without colluding with any concretisation that the client may be caught in.

Context is everything in such situations and challenging what might be an important transitional or ongoing identity, would be counterproductive and perhaps unethical. Instead we need to maintain that open space, surfacing and exploring the dynamics around such identifications. And if we do come across situations where identifications have become concretised, we need to get very curious. In working through these blocks, we can allow a more free flowing alchemical process into the space.

This in itself can be difficult work. As Klein pointed out, very early disturbances often lead to adult splitting and otherising in the paranoid-schizoid position. Holding the open space means being prepared to be attacked. To this end, the relationship must be strong enough to hold negative projections. But often, holding and working through the defensive attack is an important and formative part of the development of something more - dare I say it - truly authentic.

The privilege of depth authenticity, at a time of deep global challenge

The cultural perception of authenticity as a superficial concept, although limited, is quite understandable. Our culture is in tumultuous times, with plenty of stormy seas ahead. This environment stirs up infantile complexes full of anxiety and one of the defences to that anxiety, is to attempt to simplify, concretise and control. Across our globalised cultural landscape, between the work of Hollywood, the Kardashian’s and now TicTok, superficiality has become the norm. This makes staying alive to the vagaries of depth authenticity, a challenging proposition!

There’s a more socio-economic consideration too. Depth exploration, such as long-term psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, takes time and money. It’s not accessible to everyone, and not everyone is inclined to make the commitment to such a nuanced and prolonged self-examination. There are of course other ways to similar destinations and individual choice about how far to examine. To my mind the real question we are left with is who get’s to say what authenticity is? One response that comes to mind, is that the journey to authenticity is as long as a piece of string. We never really reach an end, we just run out of road, in one way or another.

Like sunflowers growing in a field, there is a universality to being human. We are all dependant on the Earth, we all grow toward the sun. There is however, an awful lot of difference within the patch. And that difference is what makes us interesting and drives forward the creativity and evolution of our species. My fear is that authenticity made observable, labelled and superficial, might actually mean more conformity and ultimately, more banality.

Psychoanalytic perspectives were developed at a time of great social upheaval. Both Jung and Freud, while far from saints, were disturbed by the horrendous potentials of different world wars. It could be argued that the legacy of both of their contributions is an avenue toward inner work which has the capacity to drive further collective transformation. Humanistic and Transpersonal perspectives hold similar values: that in unlocking human potential in the individual we are contributing to a broader evolution of consciousness. I think this is true, but we also have to remain grounded in reality and connected to the limitation of individual contributions. If we can hold that tension, then we are able to see that the emergence of depth authenticity in an individual is making an incremental difference to humanity. Depth authenticity, when activated, tends to send loving radiants of truth outward, affecting the whole.

As a therapist who works at depth, I can say from experience, that’s there’s a beautifully numinous moment when an aspect of depth authenticity emerges. It is often both hard fought for, and joyfully received. It’s an authenticity that needs no label, or validation and often no interpretation. When an aspect of the eternal is making its way into the world, it’s an undeniably authentic moment. And that is, I think, an authenticity worth fighting for.

Along the eastern edge of the Australian continent lies a mountain range which white explorers called “the great dividing range”. So called because it divides the narrow, wet coastal zone from a largely desertified interior. This great divide was a treacherous barrier which prevented explorers from understanding the make up of the whole continent.

In our culture, many find the great divides of postmodern culture war issues also to be be treacherous. The reasons for this reticence are mixed and often quite valid. The ruptures themselves can carry distortion. There can be much fear. Fear of causing unintended harm, of what might happen if we do speak, or, a more unconscious fear as we feel a compulsion to speak on issues we don’t fully understand. There’s a darker source of the reticence too: we humans like to resist change. Especially change which means reevaluating an entrenched world view, or possibly sacrificing one’s own status.

In this post, I’m exploring the particular cultural rupture around race and decolonisation. I’m looking at both postmodern deconstructionist perspectives, and also, perspectives which uphold the unity or oneness of humanity. Many see these perspectives as two sides of a great divide, as if the landscapes on either side are intrinsically opposed or worse, a threat to each other. My sense is that both perspectives can operate together and indeed, holding onto that divide, from either side, deepens and intensifies the chasm.

To help bring the sociocultural toward something which, as therapists or self reflective individuals, we can work with psychologically, I will further explore the historical dynamics through psychological lenses.

But to begin, let me tell a story.

From a colonial genocide, arises a national psyche

When I was 16 years old, in my secondary school library, nestled under a mountain just beyond the southern extreme of that great dividing range, I came across a crumpled book in the Australian history section. Thumbing the pages I realised that I was encountering a part of my history which I had never known but always felt. The book described the "The Black War", a colonial conflict I have now come to know as the Tasmanian genocide. Between 1800 and 1870, almost all of the indigenous people's of Lutruwita, (the indigenous name for Tasmania), were either massacred, died from introduced diseases or starvation, were forcibly adopted into colonial homes, or were otherwise dispersed. The culture, including an ancient Earth based mythological spirituality, was decimated. The indigenous way of living, in harmony with the stark temperate island of my birth, was devoured by the British colonial project. The colonisers valued seal pelts, whale blubber and over time, the pastural settlement of swathes of native grassland for sheep farming to fuel wool mills in the north of England. And they valued all of this, above the lives and culture of the people who were already living there.

Those people, living breathing human beings, were deemed “primitive”, a convenient categorisation to justify the colony. And with each wave of migration and expansion my ancestors took over the native grassland, starving the indigenous people of their kangaroo hunting grounds and further severing the intrinsic connectedness to land. Settler massacres were scarcely policed by the colonial authorities whilst human specimens were shipped back to London for study. European place names such as “Suicide Bay” and “Niggerhead rock” mark massacre sites. Chillingly, some of those names are still in place today.

I feel great shame and sorrow for the crimes of my forbears and what it did to the peoples of Lutruwita. Alongside that, I feel a fury toward the power structures of the time which transported my ancestors there, effectively as white slaves. And while it is tempting to think of these horrors of being only in the past, to do so I feel, fuels this great and unresolved divide.

This is because the impact of this tragedy lives on in the structural and collective dynamics of Tasmania, and Australia, just as the history of the colonial era lives on in the structural and collective dynamics of all post colonial societies. Enmeshed in capitalistic assumptions and class structures, the colonising ideal is so foundational and pervasive, that it is almost unseeable. Until recent social movements highlighted concepts such as “privilege” and “structural racism”, they lived underground, unknown to all, bar those who felt their prejudicial impact everyday. And now, with the awareness stirred up, the great divide has been surfaced. It’s a divide which not everyone can see, nor wants to see. And yet, the surfacing of this divide is where we as a culture are.

On Lutruwita, the genocide was almost complete. As I understand it, only a small population of indigenous peoples live on, all of them descended from mixed racial ancestry. It is often said that “history is written by the victors” - so perhaps no surprise that growing up, the massacres were not discussed and certainly not part of the taught history. While perspectives on Australian convict era history have been revised in the last fifty years, even today in some circles, historians calling out settler violence are labelled as anti-ethical to a nationalist-colonial identity, based largely on an idealised heroic masculine symbol: the convict/settler. Reconciliation between white and indigenous peoples is in process, such as an initiative called “the voice” which aims to constitutionally recognise indigenous perspectives, but such efforts are not without divisive controversy.

Psychologically, social structures, including historical ones, can live on inside of us as intergenerational trauma. The most heartbreaking aspect in the case of the Tasmanian genocide is of the course the indigenous culture: shattered, dislocated and understandably enraged, and yet, determined to repair itself, raise awareness and seek amends for what’s gone before.

In my lineage, it is the trauma of being part of the perpetrator class. This “victorious” role might sound free of trauma, but the legacy is an unconscious shame of the atrocity. Galvanised by the cultural pride of the convict/settler, the shame is pushed down into the cultural unconscious. Further supporting denial, a symbolic, if not literal “blood oath” is folklore in Australian colonial history, where settlers may have conspired to cover up atrocity. This oath lives on as a pressure within whites to not speak up, to not look at shame. To instead, maintain a status quo and to protect the masculine ideal of which a culture is predicated. The pressure is, to make all of this unspeakable.

External histories, internal psychological structures

Racial prejudice has been understood by a variety of psychological theories. Many have written on this, a basic summary is that we are wired to look for difference (threat) on a kind of tribal evolutionary level. Racial attributes represent highly visible markers of difference, hence are ripe for “splitting” (making good or bad) which is a psychological process which allows us to rid our self image of aspects we find intolerable. This leads to the unconscious creation of self (desirable) and other (unwanted) psychological parts. The unwanted contents are projected onto the “other”, so in the case of racial stereotyping, we can project out what we carry of the past. This might be our white history (aggression, invader/coloniser guilt and/or shame) or it might be the racist assumptions of blackness our forefathers held (sub-humanness, objectification or threat). We see strong reactions across racial divides all the time in our culture, evidence of these psychological mechanisms in action.

Jungian Analyst Fanny Brewster, in her work the Racial Complex explores how historic racial trauma is passed down through generations, not as some external politic or philosophy, but by extending Jung’s cultural complex to recognise that cultural values such as supremacy and self-dispossession, are also aspects of psyche which live within. They are within us, though they come from beyond our personal experience. These cultural objects are combined with our own tendencies to split and otherise, evoking unconscious and powerful instinctual reactions. We are beginning to understand how these intergenerational transmissions occur: via epigenetics, repeating developmental experience, and more broadly through the influence of culture.

In the case of Tasmanian and Australian society, the idealised colonial masculine takes hold as a symbol of colonial survival. Then, as the nation forms, this idealised masculine is transferred to soldiers during war, and football stars during peacetime. Now it’s important to hold a bifocal perspective here: the masculine image I’m describing is not entirely bad, and has certainly contributed to nation forming. But to dismiss the shadowy side, is to see only half the story.

In his excellent work Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas Hübl describes collective culture (and trauma) as being mostly invisible “because we are swimming in it”. In the case of the Tasmanian genocide, the persecutor/victor dynamic is not detectable because it is almost universal. A similar function is also true in the case of British structural power. Elite and class domination in culture, media and government is endemic and mostly, it is white. What’s more, detecting it requires willingness, education and a fair amount of psychological strength. It’s no wonder the entrenched power structures are so vehemently resisting a direct assault on that divide. It’s no wonder, so much of this, at least to some, remains unspeakable.

Colonialism as a distortion of the archetypal masculine

To frame these collective and cultural external dynamics within an internal psychospiritual model, we may consider the distortion of masculine and feminine principals – these principals are archetypal energies, configurations of consciousness, which exist in all psyches. And I can’t emphasise enough, that these energies exist separately from sex or gender. We might consider that the coloniser mentality inflates the masculine principal (capitalist extraction) over the feminine (connectedness and belonging to a shared ecosphere).

There is no doubt the archetypal masculine can and has done great good. The manifestation of this archetypal energy includes human advancements in science and technology, in exploring the world, and in infrastructure - from homes that protect us from the elements, to great civilisations. At the same time, it’s been responsible for nuclear weapons, for wars and genocide, and via capitalism, for endangering the biosphere through unfettered burning of carbon. In this sense the masculine is operating in distortion. And through this, the feminine is also distorted. It becomes something to take from, it is idealised and objectified and diminished, or not recognised at all. The universality of the feminine principal, in all humans and of the planet herself, becomes unspeakable.

Archetypes always have a negative pole, the masculine in distortion can be overly dominant or even psychopathic. In addition, the masculine works best when it’s in harmony with the feminine. The harmonious role is, in part, one of guardian and protector of the feminine. Not to take a patriarchal stance of diminishing female power (see my earlier statement, separating biological sex and the archetype), rather to say that at any particular level of consciousness the two energies must be in relationship. At a planetary level, economic systems must be in relationship with both masculine and feminine, not as was the case in colonialism or extractive capitalism. such a balance would demand an ecological stance, which values the feminine and therefore demands that we consider the preservation of the biosphere in all that we venture.

Considering this archetypal energy is important as it then allows us to trace historical influences into our own, present day psyche. Indeed, when we encounter the manifestation of the masculine principal and its distortions in ourselves, in therapy, in our groups and in our organisations, we are working to encounter historical ills of colonialism and beyond. This work is deep and often challenging. It invites us to embrace our own internalised aggressor and extractor, to look at our own greed, our own distortions around competition, and our own need for power over others, either through individual action, or in maintaining an unconscious collusion with a powerful class. In surfacing this and choosing differently, we can tame the distorted energy and reorient toward a masculine that is more attuned. An archetypal masculine configured toward discernment, sacrifice and the protection of life.

We can see this retuning happening across the world, where distorted masculinity in men being called out in business, government, sports and media. The recent downfall of an Australian military “hero” was a powerful symbol of this transformation. The problem, it seems to me, is that the masculine is being criticised, sometimes even vilified, but not replenished. This leads to all manner of problems, some of which, I hope to write on in future posts.

To transform or to suppress?

Returning to my original problem, we might look then at how this transformation is emerging in psychological disciplines. In particular, how perspectives of transcendence and the unity of humanity sit alongside this great cultural divide.

To reflect on this, consider that every social movement bring goodness, and its own complexities. The new-age movement of the 1960s bought to the mainstream the possibility of a oneness of humanity, yet failed to develop personal morality which would counter capitalistic greed or sexual shadiness. The movement existed at a different time, without the fast pace of social media or the pressure of possible ecological collapse - in a sense the context wasn’t as furtive in a day to day sense, and as such, the collective traumas less insipid and prevalent.

In our era, anti-racist social movements, while pointing to important recognitions of systemic disadvantage and real world and ongoing violence and subjugation, evoke powerful emotional responses on both sides. This can be seen as a distortion of a moment, a reason to dismiss change, or we can see it as a complex dilemma that needs our attention. The dilemma is how can we sit with these emotional responses, give them the space to be seen, and with time, for a natural transformation to eventually emerge.

When these difficulties emerge, numerous psychological strategies can be evoked to avoid. By far the most prevalent in my experience, is a silencing. Topics unconsciously deemed “unspeakable” by the collective are completely avoided. More visible are unconscious collusions and defences. Anger and denial spill over to maintain power structures. And intellectual defences can be evoked to rationalise away from the unspeakable divide and often to defend one’s own systemic power. Perhaps the most common in psychospiritual circles is an idealism, “that we are all one” as if cultural complexes don’t exist. While at the level of the eternal there is an inherent oneness to humanity, the danger is in clinging too tightly to this, we dismiss anti-racial movements as “a world gone mad” without ever engaging in the power distortions we carry through our own cultural and institutional inheritance.

So, can we sit with the divide, withstand the tension, without resorting to a for or against? This, I fear, has become a rather revolutionary idea in our current world where the once decades long ebb and flow of sociocultural movements has become compressed into unthinking moments, where a defensive tribalism demands an immediate conclusion as to whether the other is “with or against”. This “friend or foe” assessment occurs in society at large, on social media particularly, and also within psychological disciplines themselves. Yet, when we suppress debate and feeling to adhere to simplistic narratives, we continue the intergenerational oppression. We hold on to the divide, because we’ve found it insurmountable within ourselves.

I would see this frequently in my culture of origin. On the rare occasions the racial genocide was brought up, very quickly, it would be dismissed. The tribe spoke. It wanted unconditional immunity, from any prior wrongs. And if I wanted to belong, I too made these matters unspeakable. It takes great courage to look at past mistakes, it requires a commitment to self exploration, a comfort with mess and making mistakes. And yet, as I shall now explore, it offers the possibility of great reward.

Beyond old divides, toward new evolution

For those of us who have travelled into our own inner divides, it is easy to fall into a belief that “we’ve done the work”. That our “wound” was discovered during our initial training and then, is something that can be maintained within a known frame. This sounds good, and allows us to occupy a position of the knowledgable therapist. Of course, this position is a trap. The truth is that we are all, always, discovering. The antidote to this trap is a willingness to re-examine. In the case of race, class and power, the focal point for that examination must be to look inward, at distortions of the archetypal masculine and the impact this has had our relationship with the archetypal feminine. When these dynamics can be explored, we might find shame and avoidance. We might find an immaturity related to sacrifice. We might find grief and rage, for past failures and current injustices, some of which we have and do perpetuate. And over time, perhaps, a movement toward an inner reconciliation.

Importantly, as expressions of consciousness evolve, and as society grapples with the deeper subtleties of power, we must re-engage through that emergent frame. We need to remain open to cultural movements. To withstand the distortions they inevitably carry, in order to find the good they also contain.

Journeying toward transcendence, through not away from the difficult divides, provides for a new and profound opportunity. Instead of fuelling the divide, could we fuel further inner and outer reconciliation?

The destination of this journeying, is what Ken Wilbur refers to integral (teal) stage of consciousness evolution. That is, a movement beyond the postmodern (green) stage, but one which includes the necessary lines of development to authentically move to the teal. The postmodern stage cannot be bypassed. It is asking us to look at lines of development around ethical, emotional and spiritual intelligences. In this respect, the divides surfaced by post-modern social movements must indeed be the subject of our introspection, and at the same time in order to maintain an integral perspective, we must balance the tension between the various post modern movements. We must work through what each of them brings up in our own psyche, then we must integrate that energy. Hopefully, and eventually, to arrive at a more pluralistic perspective. This approach reinforces the idea that collective change happens through individual psychological work and lines up with the Jungian idea that the most effective form of social activism is personal shadow work.

We can do this work by looking at how we live our lives and the assumptions we make around race and power, but also in the lives and assumptions we may have inherited from our forebears. This examination doesn’t need to be performative, nor an immediate call to action or activism. At least, not as a starting point. Psychologically, the activism is an internal one: to look our own ancestral masculine in the eye. To recognise how he lives on in us, through our actions and relationships to power, race, sexuality and ethics. To embody him, and to offer him a seat at the table of our own wholeness, so his actions no longer live in shadow and can instead be integrated into a greater whole. In this way, other energies, including the archetypal feminine, are resurrected from shadow, where they can facilitate integration and aid deeper, more resilient and rich living.

Psychologically, we might consider the end state goal of this work to be an archetypal masculine who is willing to sacrifice power and who recognises the overt and the subtle ways he keeps another in darkness. More broadly, it is the development of an ability to hold tensions between knowing and not knowing. In allowing, and not responding, and in staying with moments of tension and difficulty. These characteristics at first may seem abstract to the work of this divide, but relate to a balancing of the tension between archetypal masculine and feminine functioning. The meta-question which is being asked, is can the masculine act not for individual benefit, but toward a greater good. To use power for others, and to return the archetypal masculine to its harmonious position of guardian and protector of the archetypal feminine. And in that, can we again begin to recognise the life giving value of the archetypal feminine.

This, clearly, would benefits those around us. It could contribute to a lessening of the burden placed on racial minorities. Extrapolated globally, it could decrease the burden placed on the biosphere. Getting there is work, but it might be seen as the penance for the deep burdens etched by colonialism.

This penance also has an inner reward. For in bridging this divide, we are seeking a return to wholeness which heals the devastating split between our inner masculine and feminine inheritances. This divide, in men and women alike, keeps a painful wound cleft. It denies our own capacity to heal and to love wholly. It not only keeps the other in darkness, it denies a brighter light within ourselves. For in bridging the divide, we are seeking to again know the beauty of the human whole, in ever deepening truth. And in that, we might again know, in body and in mind, that the mother of creation and the planet herself, are not of across the divide, but in fact, are of the other that lies within.

Having grown up on a particularly treacherous coast of the Tasman sea, I know what it is like to be knocked from my feet by an overpowering wave. On one of the rare days where air and sea were warm enough, our family would venture to an ocean beach. Inevitably, I’d get properly dunked by a surprise set of waves that just kept coming. For a moment, I’d not know which way up, as sand and salt would scour my body and fill my shorts with grit. Usually, thanks to instinct and the little surf safety I’d been taught, I knew how to right myself. And usually, despite finding I was further from shore than I’d like, I got a bit stronger and a bit wiser from each righting.

One of the main provocations to write this post was a metaphorically similar scouring I would see, either in my own work or in that of a supervisee (a therapist who comes to me to reflect on their practice). In some way, an unexpected wave had come into the consulting room, leaving a sense of powerlessness and uncertainty.

Now uncertainty and not knowing are bread and butter in the therapy world. We are encouraged and trained to be with both. Increasingly however, the unknowing is amplified by some unusual dynamics. External and divisive cultural ruptures (I’ll call them “culture war issues”) are increasingly coming into the room, and bringing with them a minefield of clinical dillemas. Activism and public debate is informing opinion and that opinion becomes distilled into anxiety provoking therapeutic “rights and wrongs”, which are oftentimes at odds with training paradigms. Some of the collective challenges, the pandemic for example, also cause real-world anxieties in therapists lives. And looming alongside all of this, is the often unacknowledged shadow of the ecological crisis.

To make this minefield just a little more complex, training institutions, supervisors and professional associations are all crashing around in the same stormy sea. This means that often, the “righting” is haphazard, dogmatic or non-existent, and unlike the righting of my childhood surf, sometimes there isn’t much strengthening or wisening going on.

So the question I am posing is how can we respond to a set of external situations which, like sets of ocean waves, have the capacity to overwhelm? When currents are moving quickly, and institutions and clinical approaches may not be keeping up? But let’s start with a little more on what these waves are made of.

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A time of collective trauma (and responses)

There’s no doubt that we are in a time of unprecedented change. A confluence of crises are in flow, geopolitical simmerings threaten to boil, horrific wars in multiple continents, pandemics, the mass movement of peoples, the disruption of social, legal and political institutions and certainties. Increasingly severe weather related events are already taking lives, and already affecting water and food supplies across the globe. And all of it, is likely to get worse.

Ecopsychological thinking tells us that these systemic disruptions are symptomatic of a broader pressure affecting the web of ecological and human systems that we rely upon. We are interconnected and interdependent. And the very foundation of that interdependency is the biosphere. In short, humanity and nature are not separate, although the western mind and western culture have tried to separated them.

Each systemic disruption in isolation might then be seen as a “canary in the coal mine”, a warning of systemic strain. And while our governments and media focus largely on immediate disruptions that might affect short term social stability, consumption and economic growth, the crisis is actually systemic and, frighteningly, it risks being total. Ultimately the system which might fail, is the system of life on Earth.

This realisation hits hard. And yet, it is the reality that we are in. It is the defining and mostly unspoken collective trauma of our time. And in my experience, it’s rarely bought up in therapy sessions and rarely acknowledged in therapeutic institutions.

Instinctual responses to trauma can be classified into three groups, freeze, flight/fight, and fawn. Let’s look at each of these in relation to our current plight.

Freeze

Freeze is an excellent trauma response if your predator’s sensing may be based on movement, or if struggling against danger might cause unnecessary pain. In the case of our systemic challenges, it’s a common though not particularly helpful response. We freeze when confronted with situations which are overwhelming, where we feel powerless, or have no hope. In this case, agency seems of little use, so we give up.

Around culture war issues the giving up appears as a following of dogma, or sometimes as a blinkered choosing of one side or the other. A giving over to the powers that be, or in some cases, the mob. In the case of climate, it looks like nihilism. Around climate you’ll hear it as “there’s nothing I can do, so I’ll just enjoy myself till the end days” or “I’ll be dead when the (fires/heatwaves/floods/droughts) get really bad”.

I feel climate denial fits into most of these response categories, but in the case of “freeze”, it’s not necessarily an active denial of the situation (though it can be), it’s often a denial of the psychospiritual implication. I’ll come back to this later, but if we’re genuinely in touch with the felt reality of what our economic system may destroy, nihilism becomes much more difficult.

Fight/Flight

Unless you are planning to move to Mars, there’s really nowhere to run from this one - though it doesn’t seem Elon got that memo. We can (and do) fly from reality. In another form of denial, we may numb ourselves, or otherwise distract. In my view, some of the adjacent culture war issues of our era are actually flights from the reality of climate. The anxiety is too much so we invest in identities, paranoia’s or belief systems which provide a preoccupation or a promise of panacea. Similarly, our culture provides plenty of opportunity to fly from reality through numbing: social media, porn, the old staples of drugs, alcohol, shopping and work. In increasing numbers we’re drawn to these strategies. And as many of them are perpetuated by consumptive capitalism, they feed further into the unsustainable nature of our economy. There really is a madness to it!

Fight shows up plenty as a response. We see it in intergenerational blame, othering of social classes or other countries who “aren’t responding” to climate. And of course, we see it in activism. Activism in itself isn’t bad. In fact it seems to me it’s quite necessary to attempt to awaken from denial and collusion. But at the same time, activism can be used as a defence to reality, it can become a calcified opposition, furthering rupture at a time when humanity desperately needs to come together. It can become all-consuming and idealistic, making the movement itself unsustainable or out of touch.

Fawn

Now, for perhaps the most controversial of my interpretations. We can dance a collusive deal with the economic system, the predating source of threat in our current malaise. And yet, we can convince ourselves that somehow, scientific genius and some miracle of market-driven advancement will save us. Defensive fawning with the source of threat is recognised in abusive and coercive relationships. And while ingenuity is certainly going to be necessary as economies (hopefully) transform toward a sustainable tomorrow, that doesn’t mean the utopian fantasy of continued growth and consumption, isn’t also a defence to reality.

In a coercive relationship, the perpetrator is often “relied” upon by those trapped in their web. This might be for practical support, or a false sense of psychological strength. Denial of the abuse is a way of holding onto that reliance. It’s no surprise then, that we see how those most attached to economic power are also ready to deny the real possibility of systemic collapse.

Finding solid ground

I’ve stretched this trauma metaphor quite some way. And to be clear: I’m not suggesting these musings reflect an actual psychosomatic trauma response. Rather, I’m using the metaphor to think through a situation. And the purpose of such an exercise is to look toward resolution.

When working with trauma it is often the case we see the trauma defence, before we see the underlying pain. Traumatic feeling is indigestible, often unknowable, by definition. We treat trauma by unpacking, reprocessing and ultimately releasing. the same applies to our collective situation. The central premise here, is that we must actually find and then feel the emotional impact of reality, rather than acting out the trauma defences. Feeling, when known and processed provides the very foundation of selfhood. It also opens the door to what Joanna Macy calls active hope. That is, a hope that doesn’t exclude reality.

Similarly, following a culture war issue “debate” at it’s mainstream surface, rarely is enough to know reality. With our fragmented media and divisive politics, sense checking reality is required, by allowing complexity, nuance and seeking out challenging and opposing standpoints. Such skills are sadly lacking from our education system and often our media. So again, we have to find that ourselves. But holding the tension of oppositions, grappling with reality, again allows a solid feeling of knowing (not dogma) to emerge.

To go back to the surf: when we find the bottom of our feeling, our foot hits the sandy bottom of the sea. Then, we can find the right way up. To get in touch with the feelings of reality is a sometimes difficult process. But as I’ll now explore, it’s worth it in many ways.

Know thyself

To know a feeling in a processed way, is to have an adult relationship with that feeling. This means not identifying with it (not becoming the feeling, or being a victim to it). Another helpful psychoanalytic perspective is that we must separate from distortions (projections, obsessions, denials) related to the feeling. In the case of external realities, we have to look at our own personal history around the issue and importantly, how this taps into our own unprocessed developmental trauma.

This can get complex quickly, so a simplified example. In the case of climate, say we feel hopeless. Getting into that hopelessness might reveal a childhood experience of maternal neglect (earth and mother sit alongside each other quite closely, in archetypal terms - after all we are dependant on each in different ways and at different stages in life). The trauma lives on in a projection, where we experience unprocessed feelings of hopelessness such as a child might have toward a neglectful mother. The job then is to separate the developmental trauma away from our relationship with the present day climate emergency. In this way, the external situation may still be severe and frightening, but not cause the same hopelessness as it might when mixed up with the residue of the neglect.

An additional dimensions which is important for therapists in particular, is that we are participants in the same systems as our clients. As Covid showed us, we are also susceptible to the same collective trauma responses. With work, we can, and most of us did, process our Covid responses. Staying awake to reality then takes on an additional, professional imperative. And if our training, supervisory or institutional networks aren’t providing it, we need to find it elsewhere.

It gets worse before it gets better

Hold on, there’s another unpalatable dimension to this. When we begin to venture into the depths of our climate related feeling, we find a lot of difficult stuff. The anxiety you turn away from when you glance headlines of 40°c London summers is just the beginning. There’s grief, rage, sadness, melancholy, all waiting to be discovered. But this rediscovery is also a reunion. Most of us, would have unconsciously and necessarily distanced ourselves from the feelings of climate reality, usually as children, and usually because care givers can’t reflect or hold the difficult feelings themselves. This distancing is an abandonment of an aspect of self Freya Matthews calls the ecological self. Reconnecting with lost aspects of our individual makeup is the cornerstone of authentic psychological development. And in the case of the ecological self, it’s a reconnection with a particularly important aspect. It’s the aspect of our innate humanness that never lost sight of our unity with nature, and often holds some of our most moving and alive psychospiritual capacities.

The stillness within

The westernised mind tends to consider action to be valid only if it’s objective, rational and external. “Anxiety is dissipated when we take action” or “stop focussing on difficult feelings” are common tropes. Both of these suggestions fail to correctly locate us in relationship with what we have control over. Individual or collective action might be necessary, but moving toward action in order to solve a feeling state, is a mistake. Mostly in such cases, the feeling just gets pushed down. Destined to re-appear against a new stimuli in the future.

Instead, focussing on and transforming the feeling, unhooks us from the emotional impact of the external reality. As well as unhooking, we’re also becoming wiser and stronger, just like when righting oneself in the surf. This is appealing to the westernised mind because we can become more resilient. But from a psychospiritual perspective, there’s a much deeper, much more compelling reason.

The deeper we know ourselves, the more of our developmental injury we can unhook from, the more we relate to the world in an unhindered way. I spoke earlier of our ecological self, but this is just one exiled aspect waiting to be reclaimed. As more and more trauma and adaptation is resolved, we can begin to experience our true nature, maybe one day, we can experience our true nature in wholeness.

This might sound ineffable, but it’s really not. Every tradition has a way of acknowledging this self who exists free from trauma, or other familial or sociocultural adaptation. Some might call this a transcendent or higher self, a Transpersonal self, or a Self (note the capital, denoting the Jungian kind). Depending on your philosophy, you might consider this you to be the divine in you.

Obviously, this is still you, as it’s always experienced through you. But it’s subjectively actualised as a specific state of being, it’s a form of emotional and energetic resonances which are ancient and eternal. In knowing this part of ourselves, we reconnect with nature, and our connectedness with all beings. In this way, we find a stillness beyond any storm. An eternal source of being that survives any wave, for it is the wave.

And it’s the source that if enough of us can turn too, perhaps humankind will find the right way up.

Processing the feelings thrown up by turbulent times can be difficult - especially around climate, and especially if we’re doing it alone. Starting Summer 2023 I am offering a small reflective group, specifically to look at these feelings. Held in Kings Cross in central London, more information is available via the button below.

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In Shakespeares’ famous soliloquy, Hamlet debates the merits of continuing to face life in all its rub, work and suffering, versus the temptation of an everlasting (though existentially limiting) sleep. To be or not to be, isn’t just asking whether we choose life or death, but I feel, whether we engage thoughtfully and actively in life, despite the inherent difficulties of doing so.

With 20:20 hindsight, it’s easy to see that prior to the pandemic the question of online working was under-explored amongst psychotherapists. Back then, I heard two opposing views: that online working is “no good”, conversely, that it’s “exactly as good”. Then, I didn’t think much about it, though now I recognise I was probably biassed toward the embodied relating of physical presence. Importantly, and as is often the case, when bias goes unchecked it becomes an unconscious worldview. It becomes, in effect, a little death. A death to thinking.

That all changed when the pandemic lockdowns necessitated an overnight shift to online working. The adjustment was massive and I know many colleagues struggled with the technology and the isolation. There was little evaluation of nuanced implications as we simply had no choice, and little clinical experience to draw upon.

The “return to normalcy” was less sudden and less total. There were calls for a full return, but across the board this didn’t eventuate. In my practice and the practices I supervise, a more organic emergence took place, based on the needs of individual cases and the practical considerations of the therapist. What seems to have stabilised now, is a more hybrid way of working. And in that stability and with more critical reflection, some interesting patterns and considerations seem to be becoming clear.

Paradigm bias

As we began to emerge from lockdown, I attended a seminar on online working, attended by many psychoanalytically oriented therapists. I have to admit being shocked at the primacy of mind in the presentation. The central argument seemed to be that in meeting on screen, therapist and client still relate through seeing, hearing and speaking, so then the same relational experience is had. The argument glossed over the embodied aspects of relating, and didn’t account for what is excluded through the camera’s frame. To be fair, the mostly analytic audience picked up on this in the discussion, but the initial paradigm bias was striking.

Similarly, I’ve heard therapists who work from a psychospiritual perspective, suggest that when working online, intuitive knowing is equally as available as it is when working in the room. To my mind, this is a gross generalisation, and fails to recognise the subtle embodiments that contribute to transpersonal ways of knowing, some of which I will explore later.

I have also seen many proponents of working online, and can imagine those practicing manualised therapies, may only consider practical and behavioural dimensions. In this way, online and offline formats can seemingly be equated: the same worksheet is competed, the same words spoken and thoughts and feelings expressed. But again, such an examination is only looking at what’s going on in the therapeutic relationship at a superficial level. Indeed, in some ways of working, and at some levels of relating, these determinations may well be quite valid. The point I am making is that whatever paradigm we are working with, is likely to bring bias and assumption. Reflecting from an integrative perspective, and sitting with as many dimensions of to be and not to be as possible, is where we can remain truly alive to the question.

Institutional and personal blindspots

I’ve eluded above that there was a call to return to “normalcy” when lockdown restrictions ended. Such calls I feel, failed to understand the enormous shift in lifestyles and preference that occurred throughout the pandemic. Evidence of this is how widespread “TWATS” (those working in-person on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) have become in many organisations our clients work. Clients have moved countries or cities, shifted timetables around to fit in with changed employment expectations. In many cases, returning to the old “normal”, simply wasn’t possible nor desirable. At an ethical level, we should note that the calls to return in some cases, were cried out by economic “masters”, who sought out some benefit of their own. Power isn’t always bad, but acknowledging the bias of those who might benefit, is important to avoid unconscious manipulation.

Personal blindspots may also have contributed to an avoidance of return to the post lockdown world. Newsflash: therapists have our own “stuff”. We might be colluding with a clients fear of return, because working from home is convenient. We might underestimate the unconscious fear we carry, since the collective trauma of pandemic and lockdown. We owe it to our clients and the work we do, to become as aware and as free from such unconscious material as we can. In this way, we can remain alive in relationship with them.

Examining relationships in zoom and in the room

The hybrid way of working has provided the opportunity to contrast the experiences of online and offline working, noting how the same dyad (i.e. client, therapist relationship) may show up differently. My examination here is by no means complete, but reflects some key aspects of my thinking, and the thinking of the many colleagues who I have discussed it with.

The container and the online frame

The most fundamental consideration for safe and effective therapy is the container. Maintaining safety of the container in the online format is an extra demand that the therapist must think about. Can the relationship consciously process the implication of a client joining the session from an intimate space such as a bedroom? Does the therapist know when the client forgets to shut the door? And how does the risk of being overheard by a colleague, partner or parent, affect the quality of the work? This is an additional dimension to an already big job of containment. It’s important to think this through, as in some cases, working online might not be safe or effective enough for the work.

We also might consider how the video format alters the frame. Even the best webcam and screen cannot capture all of the clients body language, or every detail of the room. To mediate this, we might setup the camera to capture some of the torso, without reducing the clarity of facial expression. We might also work with what is (consciously or otherwise) bought in, or left out of the frame. Such work can be fruitful, but can’t completely emulate the 360° visual attention of being in the room.

The screen as attachment mediator

The title of Susie Orbach’s 1999 book The Impossibility of Sex connects us to an important limitation of online working. The screen not only mediates physical proximity, but also the possibility of physical contact. While such contact might already be precluded by ethical boundaries, the impossibility introduced by the screen brings a deeper, less rational distance. We might ask, is the fear of violence or sexual violation truly available, when separated via a screen? In my experience it might be there in mind, but the rawness, hence the evoked emotion of projective fear or desire, is greatly lessened.

This is particularly striking when working with younger or dissociated psychological parts who might not recognise the therapist on the screen, as the therapist they know. The sense of trust can be subtly diluted, as the two dimensional image doesn’t convey the entirety of the embodied relationship. Especially to parts who may desire, or fear, skin on skin closeness. This it seems, is surmountable in an online format with focussed and attentive work. We might imagine the physical closeness, or have the client find words to describe the desire or the fear. We might process trauma that these parts carry. But, in my experience, when a dyad returns to offline working, aspects of these experiences which have not been processed can emerge - sometimes with great fervour.

The counter-side of this is the enhanced intimacy of being with a client, (usually) in their home. This can bring a level of comfort and relaxation that actually enhances relational intimacy. At the same time, some of the ritual and separateness of attending the therapists office in person is lost. Again, no clear winner here, just further considerations and differences of which to attend.

Relational presence: a transpersonal phenomenon

If we return briefly to the mind-centric thinking of the psychoanalytic meeting I mentioned above, we come across an incorrect, though pervasive assumption. To paraphrase, it is to assume that all embodied affect is stimulated by what is seen, heard and thought. This is the “mind as computer” paradigm, a caricatured “central processing unit” with various “input and output” devices. Any embodied practitioner knows that the bodymind is much less centralised, and much more of its own autonomic intelligence. Any practitioner who works “from the field”, or with a highly attuned presence will also know the stimulation of affect, and more broadly “transpersonal knowing” arises from our introverted sensations. That is to say, deep within, we have a knowing which is without.

In Jungian terms, we might consider this the access point to archetypal realms or the collective unconscious. But transpersonal knowing can arrive into awareness from any of a number of dimensions of consciousness. To use the work of Ken Wilbur, we can see that the archetypal and the collective are aspects of the causal level of consciousness. If we considered the energetics of the physical body, then we are operating at the subtle level of consciousness, where we come across the concept of the centaur or bodymind. It is here that we meet an important distinction of what constitutes relationship in the offline world. For contact at the subtle level, despite being a non-seen realm of consciousness, is in part, related to physical proximity. Wilbur’s thesis is that the subtle body extends about a metre (give or take) from the physical body, and my experience tells me the same.

These concepts are perhaps confusing, so an example might help. I was walking down the street recently. and although I didn’t at first see it, I became aware that a frightened black cat had pounded down the steps of a terrace house. If I slowly replay the moment, I recall very clearly a sensation in my leg. It was not physical contact (extraverted sensing), rather an energetic disturbance which I noticed in my leg (introverted sensing). If I extrapolate, I believe the cat’s subtle energy field had met mine, and in that moment, my body communicated the frightening presence of another being. In a sense, my leg was frightened by the cat, milliseconds before I saw, heard, or even discerned the presence of the cat.

We tune into this subtle awareness all of the time, though we might not be aware of it. Walking into a crowded tube car on London underground’s northern line on a weekday morning is particular evidence of the subtle. The unspoken sense of dread in the collective energy of the car is often palpable. Conversely, the vibe of a lively car on a Friday evening is often times infectious. We are collective, interconnecting animals, and it is in part through this subtle level of energetic communication that this interconnectedness occurs.

Then, we have to consider, what bioenergetic communication is missing when we aren’t in the room? This is not to say that there’s no embodiment, because clearly working on screen captures empathic resonances which originate through seeing and hearing, or are communicated at the causal level. But some aspects of energetic rawness, experienced at the subtle, require actual proximity.

So to zoom, or to room? What’s it to be?

You’re probably not expecting me to offer a binary response to this question, and I’m not going to. Though I would say, that I expect any practitioner who works entirely and exclusively in one format or the other may well be deadening some possibility within their practice. The most important thing is to consider the issue broadly, and if possible, from multiple dimensions and dimensions outside of your dominant worldview.

In all things, understanding the tension of the opposites and what is gained or lost along that tension is what’s important. In the case of online working, I’ve noticed in my internal processes, that I am beginning to develop a felt sense for when there’s something excluded by the screen. When this happens, I suggest, encourage or insist that we spend some time working in my physical office. In every case so far, this has resulted in an uncovering of an emotional dynamic which was hiding. And, importantly, the now conscious dynamic can be worked with once we’re back in the online format.

So returning to Shakespeare. To be or not to be, is indeed the question. The answer however is never to answer it. To instead stay alive, with the grit and the rub, to the those beautiful questions, that don’t require a terminal answer.