Dr. James Hollis

Jung put it this way, he said, you know, people walked off the medieval cathedral into the abyss of the self in one of his letters, you see.

And it became a cultural contrivance with the best of intention to help people find their path

and deal with whatever their psyche's reaction to.

Again, typically, not always, but typically what brings people to therapy is that their belief system or their conventional practices are no longer working for them.

I had a client from Houston once who said in his AA group, their slogan was, this isn't working for me, but I do it very well.

but applicable to all of us.

Our practices sooner or later will often, because they're driven by these stories that we carry intra-psychically, they don't work for us, but we've learned to do them with certain facility and so forth.

And that's when the discrepancy becomes so difficult, then one has to face the fire, so to speak.

Then what matters is how am I to conduct my life in the face of these circumstances, which I'm not able to solve in the old way.

And that's the adventure.

And that's the challenge.

And at the same time, it's intimidating to many people, understandably.

So sooner or later, again, one has to say, is this your life or is it someone else's?

Most people are not living their life, sadly.

They're living reactively.

They're living whatever the stories were.

And I put stories not in the sense that they're so conscious as such, as they are representing whatever message we internalized and produced a splinter narrative.

Again, when triggered, it has the power to govern our behaviors.

That's why, again, you start with your own patterns and say, where did this come from?

I wasn't born with it.