Dr. James Hollis

But that's the passive experience.

The summons is always what is the task that this visitation to the swampland is asking of you.

What do you need to address?

If you feel that your partner betrayed you and left the marriage, for example, and took your self-esteem with that, all right, well, your task is the recovery of self-worth because without that, no other choice you make is going to be very good.

And maybe that's a hard project, but that's nonetheless the work you have to do.

So always the question, what does this make you do?

What does it keep you from doing?

and to bring responsibility back to the individual.

And of course, some people are willing to accept that responsibility, some are not.

And that makes the difference.

I had a colleague many moons ago who said she could tell in the first hour whether the person she was seeing was a big kid or a little kid because everybody's a recovering child.

And the big kids could do the work.

The little kids wanted someone to tell them what to do or tell them that there's an easy fix to this.

And in the long run, those persons are going to stay stuck pretty much until something else happens in their life, perhaps.

Well, and you gave good examples of the kind of tasks that rise out of a person's experience.

Now, for example, if a person has been subject to serious abuse in childhood, physical or emotional or sexual or whatever, it's affected their entire life.

Well, what is the task?

You know, it's to wrest from that experience a sense of self.

And that one is still here to live one's journey.

That's why I said at the beginning of our conversation, I'm not what happened to me.