Tami Simon: Today I speak with Jim Hollis. Jim is a licensed Jungian analyst practicing in Houston, Texas, and the author of 13 books, as well as the Sounds True audio learning program Through the Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.
I spoke with Jim about the importance of realizing our real self versus our adapted self, moving through experiences of fear with courage and persistence, and what the most important questions are that we ask ourselves as we approach the end of our life. Here’s my conversation with Jim Hollis, on “Underneath the Midlife Crisis.”
Tami Simon: Jim I’ve known people who have said, “I’m having a mid-life crisis – an early mid-life crisis. I may only be 25 or 30, but it certainly feels like a mid-life crisis.” And then people who are quite a bit older, maybe they are 60 and saying, “Maybe I’ve having a delayed mid-life crisis.” So, what is the mid-life crisis? Can it happen at any age or is there a specific period in life where we say, “Oh, that person is truly in a mid-life crisis?”
Jim Hollis: Well, I think we have crisis any time that the mass that we are carrying, either the conscious map or the unconscious map that we’ve inherited from our family and culture. Whenever the map doesn’t quite fit the terrain, we’re going to feel disconnected or confused or disoriented. That can happen to any person at any stage of life. Interestingly enough, the majority of the people that I see in therapy are in their 50’s and 60’s. So they’re still going through the question of recovering a sense of personal authority. You know, “What is true for me and how do I live that in this world?” That’s an ongoing task. Many times this surfaces at what we might chronologically call mid-life, between 35 and 50, because at that time, one has become conscious enough to have an ego strong enough to really look at one’s life and say, “What’s going on here? And even when I’ve done the right things, why does it not feel right or why is there a discord within my relationship or my work?”
And secondly we’ve been out there doing it long enough to begin to see patterns. And we realize that something is going on here. Sometimes people don’t really stop and ask, “What is this about? Who am I, apart from my roles? And what is it that I really want to do with my life?” So therefore it will go underground and pop up in some other place. So it’s an ongoing life experience, but by mid-life, we’ve often had enough experience by then to realize that something is going on here and there’s a discrepancy between what I expected for my life and what I’m actually experiencing.
TS: Now you said if we don’t engage with what’s happening, it might “go underground” and pop up somewhere else? What did you mean by that?
JH: Well, whatever we don’t face consciously is not going to go away. It just goes underground. It could show up in our body as somatic disorders. It can show up in our emotional life in terms of depressions, for example, or anxiety states. Or we can be trying to treat it unconsciously through addictions or it will be spilling into our relationships, into our children. The point is, it will go somewhere. Part of my task as a therapist, and I think all of us who want to live a more thoughtful or considerate life, is to begin to read the messages that are all around us, the symptoms. From a psycho-dynamic standpoint, we welcome the symptoms because it’s a clue from our own psyche that it’s expressing a protest. For example, if one is depressed, we might say, other than biological causes of depression, why is the psyche withdrawing its support? From the places where I’m putting all my energy and where my values are? Wouldn’t it make sense to begin to ask a different kind of question? Such as, what does the psyche really want of me here and to begin to say, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and examine who I am and what’s unique about my journey and to become more thoughtful around that.
TS: So it seems that one of the things that you’re saying here, right at the outset of our dialogue, is that when “symptoms” arise…and you mean by symptoms, anything that seems off in us?
JH: Anything that is distressing enough to get our attention and perhaps is interruptive of our lives is a symptomatic expression.
TS: Ok. So when things that are distressing arise, that instead of just trying to simply get rid of them or put something on top of them, we’re engaging it and saying, “What is really going on underneath this?”
JH: Sure. It’s a natural tendency, and I think frankly abetted by the nature of our society to say, “How quickly can I get rid of this?” Rather than ask a different question, “Why has this come to me? What is this asking of me?” What do I need to become more thoughtful, more mindful?” which is a whole different set of questions. People don’t just come to see me because they were just in the neighborhood and thought they would pop in for a chat. They are there because whatever is going on their life has become sufficiently distressing and hasn’t gone away by the normal treatments. Whether it’s been medication or alcohol or simply renewed efforts. And it’s at that point that often a person feels a sense of failure and is again asking, “Why are my efforts not producing the outcomes that I want?” For example, I was just talking with someone whose basic early life experience in the family of origin was never being seen for who she was, never being valued. She had to twist herself into various contortions to sort of wrestle from people approval and affection and so forth. Here she is at age 51 still doing the same thing in her professional and personal life. And it hadn’t occurred to her that the origins of this were set up a long time ago and there is a kind of continuing set up that leaves her to continuously be looking to other people for affirmation and for support. There is a realistic level to this and if we don’t feel that our relationships are reciprocal, then we need to change them. But what was imposing itself on her life and her relationships was the old agenda and again with a lifelong continuous distress that she was never feeling seen or valued.
TS: Now I want to make sure I understand the map that you’re working with. So as a therapist and somebody who has looked deeply at these questions for a long time, when someone comes into your office and presents whatever their distressing symptom is, what is it that you believe the psyche is sending a message? What do you think is going on when people are reporting their symptoms in whatever crisis, mid-life crisis, they may be facing.
JH: Well the word “psyche” is kind of an ambiguous word but it refers to the deepest level of our being, which is seeking its own health, its own wholeness, and its own presentation in the world. And wherever it’s frustrated or thwarted, there’s going to be symbolic protest, and that is, once again, what we call “symptoms.” So what I think I would try to do is to educate people, to inform them that their symptoms have a meaning and they are not just there randomly; they’ve come for a reason. Rather than simply to rid ourselves of them as quickly as possible, which is an understandable motive, but to rather take a different attitude, and to ask the question, “What changes are being asked of me? What attitudes perhaps have to shift?” And maybe, “To what degree am I carrying out the project of other people’s lives?”
I have often worked with people we would consider extremely accomplished by external standards but inwardly have never particularly felt permission to be who they really are; permission to feel what they really feel; permission to desire what they desire with their life and to pursue that. And therefore they become maybe very adept at serving the ideas and values that were given to them by their family of origin or their culture, but again, the wedge within their own psychological reality is driven deeper and deeper and deeper. And the distress goes straighter.
TS: And so what you’re pointing to, and I think this is really interesting, in the program that you recorded with Sounds True, Through a Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, is you begin by talking about the false self that we developed in our family of origins. And you actually point to these two, you call them “shadow governments,” that rule our lives. These two different categories of adaptation that, because we felt powerless when we were young and because we were afraid of abandonment…these two categories we adapted in different ways. I’m wondering if you could go into both of these forms of adaptation in a little bit of detail and talk about how they would flower in someone’s life later, what we might see if we adapted in either of these ways under these “shadow governments.”
JH: Certainly. We all do make those adaptations, and of course our survival depends upon that. We are brought into life tiny, vulnerable, dependant, and the dependence we have lasts for years. And therefore, we have to pay attention to the experiences that we have and to what the environment seems to be saying to us about us or about the world functions out there. So the two threats to us, as you mentioned, were to be overwhelmed by the world, by a dominant personality or life circumstances, or to feel abandoned and disconnected. And so in the face of the feeling of overwhelmed, the central message that every child got, and we all got it to some degree, was “the world’s big and you are not. The world’s powerful, and you’re not.” Now how are you going to handle that? And so we all develop, for example, what are logical forms of behavior if we understand the emotional premise. In other words, we don’t do crazy things; we do logical things if we understand the emotional premise. And the emotional premise may have been true at another time or place or was even a misperception, but it gets locked in.
So, for example, in the face of a power of other around us that could be our partner or our work environment, or the world itself, our first response and the most protective would be avoidance. And so we develop all kinds of patterns of avoidance: simple avoidance, procrastination, suppression, repression, projection onto others, distraction. We live in a culture that allows people to avoid themselves by distraction and various forms of disassociation.
TS: Now Jim, I’m going to pause here for a moment because I’m not quite tracking with you. Why as an adult do I avoid because I felt powerless when I was a kid?
JH: Because early on we learned that in avoidance there was a chance of preserving our psychological integrity. We stay out of harm’s way that way. In other ways, the function of the adaptive personality, what D W Winnacot called “The False Self,” is to get our needs met as best we can and to avoid crippling anxiety and to avoid punitive actions or reactions from the world around us. So it’s, again, a very logical thing. And therefore as adults, we would have to say, “Where are the places I am routinely avoidant?” Am I avoidant of emotional intimacy? Am I avoidant of dealing with value conflicts in my work environment?
Now, the second pattern of adaptation to the overwhelming character of the world is the power conflicts. Most relationships and institutions are ridden with power conflicts, where we seek control over the other. And the third pattern, again, very logically in the face of the presumptive power of the other is compliance; give the world what it wants. So we would have to say, “Ok. Where are the stuck places in my life? Where are the places that routinely cause me problems with my own journey?” And they will be showing up as patterns of avoidance or where I get caught in power conflicts. Or where I am compliant and sort of give away the store, as it were.
Codependence is a popular term these days for good reason because all of us learned, at some level, the adaptation to the demands in the environment are going to be sort of advantageous for us, but again, at what price? When I was a child, I was told repeatedly, “You’re here to be good at all costs.” And the opposite of good was bad but from a psychological standpoint; I would say a reflexive goodness ceases to be good. And it results in a loss of one’s integrity. So the opposite of being good today, I would say, would be to be authentic. Am I an authentic person in my relationships?
In the face of the other sort of life crisis or existential dilemma that the world doesn’t meet us half-way or doesn’t meet our needs, and we have fears of abandonment, often the child will internalize that as being about “me.” The person I was just referring to a few moments ago, in terms of seeing, in her friend’s behavior or family behavior, routinely people letting her down. And part of the reason for that is that was a pattern early on in life and so that got to be an especially sensitized area for her. And therefore I will tend to identify with that and either wind up, again, in patterns of avoidance or self-sabotage to confirm that internalized negative imagined piece. In other words, we identify ourselves with a sense of deficit or people are driven to accomplishment as forms of saying, “Look how good I am or how worthy I am.” One of the clues is when they do get successes in their life and maybe in the applause of others, it’s never quite enough. It’s never really satisfying because the need it’s trying to fill runs much deeper than that.
And again, the second pattern would be the sort of narcissistic power complex where I am maybe trying to use people, consciously or unconsciously, employees, family members, children, for my own self-esteem, to make up for that deficit in the past. Or thirdly, a person is driven by an inordinate need for approval and connection. And this can be the birth of addictions because often people will transfer their emotional needs to substances, for example. We have so many food disorders and yet we live in the most abundant culture in human history. And clearly material food does not satisfy our spiritual and psychological hungers. The inordinate need for the connection with the other produces problems of another kind, too. The point being, when we look at our life history, and that’s the place to start, we have to say, “Where are the patterns? Where are the places where we are repeatedly engaged in something very familiar?” Again, the non-productive, and circular in character? Perhaps we are self-sabotaging, are harmful to ourselves or others. And at those places that you’re going to find the most archaic of defenses that were apparently necessary for the child in the past but become encumbrances in the present. And we all have them, the question is, Can we make them conscious? Can we take them on in real life if they are addressing agendas of long ago and far away?
TS: So Jim, I’m going to slow you down just a little bit. Hang with me here.
JH: Certainly.
TS: What you’re saying is, even if we had fabulous parents, all of us felt powerless kind of in a certain way and then adapted, consequently.
JH: Certainly.
TS: And that all of us were afraid of abandonment and adapted. And that every single person has created a bunch of adaptations around these two, what you call, “Shadow Governments?” Is that what you’re saying?
JH: Yes. And we had to adapt, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s part of how we survive and function. And even in the best of environments, life will bring these things to us. So I would say, of the patterns that I have just described very quickly and briefly, we all have all of them, but they will show up in different places in our lives, according to different stimuli and situations. Again, they represent understandable but archaic responses. And again, they are based on dependency and lack of consciousness of a child and tend to get locked into the adult functioning on a reflexive basis. This is what Jung meant by the concept of “the Complex.” The complex is simply a cluster of our history that’s charged with a lot of energy, and when it’s activated, it produces a familiar script, “Who am I? Who are you? And how do we relate to each other?” And no wonder these patterns show up in our lives because we’re serving the old scripts.
TS: And then help me understand how this might appear as a symptom in a mid-life crisis, that you would track back to either this fear in children that I’m going to be abandoned, or a feeling of powerlessness.
JH: Certainly. Well, one of the classic symptoms of this would be depression. And if I’ve done the right things, why don’t I have energy for my life or it doesn’t it feel emotionally satisfying? And again the answer is, because maybe what we’re doing is serving these other agendas rather than the way in which our own psychological reality wishes to be honored in the world by different kinds of choices. Or another common arena will show up as relational difficulties because it’s in the field of intimate relationships that our earliest dynamics will be most commonly produced. We can often maintain a façade at work and can filter things, but you can’t do that at home. And when you’re in a relationship, it comes closer to the original experience of openness, vulnerability, and the continuous presence of the other. It’s dramatically unfair to a relationship to impose these patterns from the past, but since they’re spilling into our lives unconsciously, we can’t help it.
For example, I might be depending on a partner for my self-worth, or I might be looking to them to compensate for something I’m not addressing myself. For example, it could lead us to heroic question in relationship, namely, “What am I asking of that person that I really need to be asking of myself?” Now usually, that question doesn’t occur to us. We would rather blame the other for their deficiencies. And rather than bring it back home and say, “What am I bringing to the table? How much of this is truly related to the present relationship? And how much of it is an old paradigm, or pattern? And where do I need to be accountable myself?” Part of my task as a therapist is to help people get to a point of saying “Well, that really is my task.” That is something where I need to be more realistic in my expectations of receiving from others.
TS: People are often critical in today’s world about “talk therapy.” Here you are with people coming in with these types of issues, and you’re talking to them. I guess one of my questions is, What do you think happens in the therapeutic encounter that helps people really resolve these old issues? And for people who are critical, the second part of that kind of approach, What resource or course of action can they take?
JH: That’s a very good question. First of all, the nature of the therapeutic relationship really is a mystery. We don’t know how it works for sure. We all know that at some level, it’s important for each of us to have truly been heard by another, to have been seen by another, to be valued by another in a consistent container, without judgment going on. And that’s not nothing; that’s something profound because it may be the first time we experience that in our lives. Secondly, the other’s perspective is going to cast light on our lives from outside the frame of our own complexes and our own self-referential systems.
For example, in my work as a Jungian analyst, we often work with dreams and most people would think that we don’t dream, but we do dream, all of us do, and it’s profound to realize that each of us has within some mode of intelligence, wisdom, insight, and investment in our well-being that our own nature produces these dreams; the tracking of which, over time, leads to an enlarged perspective. Jung said once, there’s a two-million year old person inside each of us and it would make sense to speak to that person from time to time, in terms of their life wisdom. It’s the wisdom of nature, not necessarily of our own culture.
And I think, from the standpoint of the therapeutic relationship, the real question is, “Can I get insight into my life patterns: where they come from, what they’re about, and what is really wanting to come into the world through me?” which is a different question. This is not about self-absorption; this is not about narcissism. It’s actually humbling work. If I say, “What wants to come into the world through me?” I’m really putting myself in a position of serving that. And that’s quite different than feeling, “I’m the boss and I’m running the show.” But I think when people can get a better sense of that, they find their life filled with a greater sense of purposefulness and a greater byproduct of meaning. It doesn’t spare them from conflict or suffering, or they may not find that people around them understand what they’re experiencing. But they begin to feel the validation and worth of their own journey, because I think at the end of our lives we want two things to have been true: one, that we lived our lives and not someone else’s. And secondly, that we stood somewhere in relationship to that which is larger than we. And serving the life of a soul, in whatever form you want to understand that, is one of those modes of encountering the transcendent. In doing that, I think there’s a deep sense of purpose and satisfaction that comes to one.
Interestingly enough, a lot of recent studies have tended to show the inadequacy of medication to address these questions. Recently there have been a lot of studies that have indicate that anti-depressants are overblown in terms of their effectiveness. The best long-term outcomes are coming from talk-therapy. One would have to ask, Why would that be the case? And I think that if we think of it again as a kind of informed, sustained, and disciplined conversation around the meaning of one’s own journey, why wouldn’t that be life-changing? Why wouldn’t that lead to a different perspective? When Jung said that we walk in shoes too small for us, he meant those old adaptive psychologies, and necessarily adaptive, of course. But in the end, they are also constrictive. Our own psyche wants us to step into a larger life than the one we’ve been living historically.
TS: Now you said something very interesting to me, that at the end of our life, we want to know two things, that we lived our lives and not someone else’s and that the second is that we were related to something larger than us?
JH: Yes.
TS: Let’s just start with the first one: we lived our lives, not someone else’s.
JH: There are threads that run through us all the time. The fragments of a person’s life history: “What were the overt messages that I got from mother and father?” It’s not about blaming. They were living their journey as best they could too. It’s more about understanding influence and the power of those messages. What were the overt messages? What were the covert messages? What were the things that were that were acceptable? What were the things that were not permitted? And how do they show up in my life?
The real question, it’s a very pragmatic question, if I could make those messages conscious, then the question really becomes, “So what do they make me do? Or what do they keep me from doing with my own life?” That’s where it gets to be very, very practical. And secondly, to be able to come to recognize that the messages that we get may or may not align with our essential nature and the question becomes then, “How would I know that?” And that’s where we go back to the question of symptoms. If what I’m doing is right, then my energy systems within me will support that. The feeling function will support that. Most of all, I will have a sense of reciprocity. As I invest in it, it comes back to me in a sense of satisfaction, again, not without effort, not without conflict.
The person I saw earlier this morning has been a frustrated artist, and he, in his case, understands that 90 percent of his task is to show up every day in the face of self-doubt, in the face of criticism, and to somehow wrestle with that empty canvas. And he doesn’t have to explain that to anybody; he doesn’t have to account for it; he has to say, “I’m accountable for what wants to enter the world through me. And when I do that, I have this deep sense of purpose and satisfaction that is not to be equated with a paycheck and not to be equated to people’s approval and understanding.” Those are nice things but they are truly secondary in the long-run.
TS: You know I can imagine someone listening who is saying, “I want to live my life, not someone else’s. And yet, I’m afraid. My parents are dead; it’s not about them. I get that, and yet, I’m still afraid.”
JH: Of course. Well, again, let’s remember that the human condition is mortal and we’re fragile and we’re conscious of that the whole way. The real issue is what do we do with those facts? And I think one of the most critical pieces in our life is not to judge our fear-based strategies but to recognize that we can’t afford to live within them; we can’t be contained by them. And that our life not be governed by fear, because, again, at the end of our life, I think we’ll be more afraid of not having been here; of not having shown up and that rather than the fears that we’ll have to face in dealing with the world. As Jung put it once, “There wasn’t one person, whoever came to me, who didn’t know intuitively from the beginning what he or she needed to do with their lives.” And he said, “The question in every therapy is what task is this person is avoiding?” In other words, “Where do I need to grow up? And by growing up, I mean, I take responsibility, I’m accountable for that. And I need to serve that.” And that’s more important than whatever the fears are. We can’t get rid of the fears; we can’t dismiss them. But we don’t want to give them the veto rights in the context of our lives either.
TS: How would you help somebody who says, “I want to live more of my own life, but I’m afraid that I won’t I make any money doing that?” That seems like an obvious fear.
JH: Sure. The task is that we have to pay our bills. That’s a legitimate social calling and social accountability. Many an artist has had what I call a “day job” and did their real soul work elsewhere. Nobody pays me to write, for example, and I write at the end of a long work-day. And I make my living as a therapist and a teacher, and writing was always a summons that I had to find a place for. And frankly, I postponed it for many years, too, and I think as a result of which felt a deep sense of satisfaction in that area, a sense of self-judgment. Again, I think it was John Lennon who said that, “Most of life is about showing up.” And sometimes, it’s as simple as that. I need to show up in my life and express what wants to be expressed through my life. Again that is not about narcissism, self-absorption; it’s actually humbling to do that, but the payoff is in this experience of meaning.
TS: You’ve worked with so many different people in a clinical setting. What have you found is the most helpful work in terms of helping people to move through their fears so that they can become more of who they really are?
JH: Well, I think, as you could maybe sense from our conversation today, that single biggest issue and perhaps the most unexpressed in our culture is this idea of the “soul.” And again, this is a very imprecise term. But that’s what the word “psyche” means in Greek anyhow, it’s the “soul.” What is that word about? It has to do with a summons to something larger than the adaptations and the fears that drive us. We’re not going to get rid of those. The question, again, is do we take our life on? Do we say, “This is what matters to me?” Whether it is understood by others or not, I have to somehow risk living those values and risking them in this world and no one said it was going to be easy.
There is a quote from Tibetan Buddhism that says, “And did you think the path to the Garden of Enlightenment would be easier for you than for those that have gone before you?” No, it’s difficult. But then, don’t take the journey. And then one realizes that one has thwarted whatever the project that we’re carrying for divinity or for nature or whatever metaphor you prefer, intended through us. And this is not about popularity or ambition. We need to get beyond those things. Those are pseudo-values that in the end have no real-life satisfaction. It’s more about, again, feeling from within the confirmation. This is what works for me; what feels right; this is what gives me a sense of satisfaction. And if I have to make sacrifices elsewhere, then I’ll do that in order to serve this. But the point is that I can’t forget the relationship to that transcendent summons that each of us carries from within.
TS: Beautifully said. Now, in the program, Through a Dark Wood, you talk about what it means to “tolerate the triple A’s: ambivalence, anxiety, and ambiguity.” Could you speak to that a bit?
JH: Well, they are the necessary companions of our lives. As Heidegger said once, “We’re born conscious and we’re the being-towards-death.” And what he meant in that word, he created a new word in German that meant basically, we’re speeding toward our own dissolution. So that gives us pause and certainly an invitation to thoughtfulness around it. But anxiety goes with the human condition. And whenever we step outside of the map prepared for us by others, we’re going to feel ambiguity, and ambiguity creates more anxiety. And then we have to deal with the conflict of opposites within us or our culture and that causes us to experience ambivalence. Normally, the combined effective of anxiety and ambiguity will sort of push us back into the same old same old, into the familiar, into the known, into the comfortable adaptation, and then the life is lived. So if we think of the enemies of the world, so to speak, it’s not people out there; it’s our response to these internally generated emotions, which are common in all of us. Again, to what degree do we have a sense that the life in which we’re living is the one that we’re supposed to be living?
On my computer, I have a quote from The Odyssey. This is Odysseus speaking and he says, and I quote, “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardships and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.” So what he’s really saying there is, “I’m going to go where I’m supposed to go, and nothing is going to keep me from reaching there, even if the raft I’ve been riding disintegrates; I’ll learn to swim.” That’s taking us back to your first question, often we experience crisis when the raft that we counted on is water-logged and taking on the ocean, and it’s time then to swim.
TS: Focusing for a moment on one of the “Triple A’s: anxiety.” It seems that in our culture, if someone is anxious a lot, it’s like, that’s a really anxious person. It’s seen as a negative and yet in the way that you’re describing it, it seems almost like a necessary aspect of development in order to take a risk moving forward.
JH: Sure. Without a measure of anxiety, we would not be alert to the real dangers of the world around us. We need to learn to look both ways when we cross a busy street, that’s obvious. But it’s more the crippling effect of anxiety and one of the things that I would try to do, both in books and in tapes and in therapy, is to deeply pathologize our pathology. Many times people have a strange notion that “I’m supposed to be free of symptoms; that I’m not supposed to feel anxiety; and I’m not supposed to feel guilt or shame and so forth,” and to realize that these are real human experiences and we all have them. And people that they see from afar, they’re seeing only their personas; they’re seeing their resumes; they’re seeing their outer presentation. They don’t know what they’re struggling with from within.
As I think the Philo of Alexandria once said two millennia ago, “Be kind, everyone you meet has a really big problem.” So if we remember that, I think we’re more likely to begin to look at our own emotional life with a greater degree of acceptance. Most of us, if we’re really involved in a self-inventory, and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t often do it, would not be happy with what we see. We find moments of cowardice in our life. We find moments of infidelity to the values that we espouse. We find ourselves taking the easy way in certain areas or being conflict-avoidant. The important thing is to say, “That’s part of the human condition. I still need to show up. And the question is in what areas of my life am I needing to show up, needing to be accountable? And in the end, I’ll feel better for having done that; we will have claimed a little more territory for ourselves.” We’re not living in this constricted space that our anxiety-management mechanisms create for us.
TS: The subtitle of your book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life,, is how to finally really grow up. Emphasis is on this word really. And I’m curious to know, what to you are the qualities or characteristics of someone who is a spiritual grown-up?
JH: Well, interestingly enough, that was the publisher’s subtitle, not mine, and I can live with it. And I think it’s not inappropriate. Being a grown-up spiritually and psychologically means, first of all, it seems very simplistic, it’s hard for us to get there. First of all, I’m the only person present in every scene of that long-running soap-opera call my life. I’m accountable for how it happens, for how it’s turning out. And yes there are influences upon us, forces that push us in one direction or another. But at the end of the day, at the end of a life, we are accountable for the choices we made. So being accountable is step one.
Step two, I think, is saying, “Is the summons really to address what needs to be addressed?” Jung put it this way: he said that, “The opus of life, the work of life, consists of three parts. Psychology can only help us with the first part, that that’s to give us insight. Then comes the moral qualities of the individuals.” And he sited specifically, “courage and persistence.” We need the courage to address what otherwise would push us into a corner and keep us from living our journeys. And we need to keep doing it over time; we need to persist. Many times, sticking something out, enduring and pushing through, will just take us to a different place. It’s like saying, “For the next few years or months, I will have to address this issue and if I do it in a faithful way, in a sustained and disciplined way, I’ll be in a different place.
To make an obvious point, I’ve often said to people who are reluctant to make a change in their life, “You know, you’re 50 or 40 and five years from now, in ten years from now, you’ll be 60. How will you feel at that time about the past ten years? Will you feel that you ran from this opportunity or did you allow the old management of fears take over? You won’t like yourself very much.” So now is the time in which one is summoned to address where one is and being accountable and addressing my life with as much courage as I can manage, with as much faithfulness to my values, is what it means to be grown-up. And then that is what I pass onto others; that is the person I share in my partnerships. It’s the model I give my children; it’s my role as a citizen in democracy: to show up and be who we are. It’s extraordinarily difficult to do it, but it’s worse if we don’t do it.
TS: Jim, this program is called Insights at the Edge and one of the things I’m always curious about is what the edge is that people who are teaching are working on. And in terms of this idea of being a spiritual grown up, I’d be curious to know that for you, what the edge is, what you’re working with, personally?
JH: Personally, you mean “me” as opposed to a therapist?
TS: You, Jim Hollis, the person.
JH: Well, I’m working at all the issues we’re talking about, because they never go away. I’m still asking the question on a daily basis, and frankly my work sort of asks that I ask that of myself. Where am I being avoidant? Where might I be in service to old patterns of adaptation? What new life is calling to me? Yeats wrote it beautifully once when he went through a series of changes in his life and when somebody was criticizing it, he said, “My friends have it what I do wrong. Whenever I rewrite a song, they should know that what issue is at stake. It is “myself” that I remake.” And so I think the work of remaking ourselves goes on throughout this journey, up to our last moments, and I think one of the most important things we all have to deal with is issues of aging and changes in the body and our social status and so forth. As we go through these, there will be new tasks that come up and new challenges, and I’m trying to face them with as much insight and courage as I can manage. That’s all we can really ask of a person. I think at times I might ask that maybe too much of myself, but that’s another complex to wrestle with. I guess the good news and the bad news is that we never run out of material to work with. There’s always something else that life is asking of us, a new place of growth and development, and a new place to claim territory that we hadn’t explored before.
TS: Wonderful. I’ve been speaking today with James Hollis, who has created a program with Sounds True, a six-CD learning series called Through a Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. And I’d like to thank you so much for being with us and sharing a bit about your work.
JH: Well, it’s a pleasure to be with you, and thank you in return.
TS: For SoundsTrue.com, this is Tami Simon.
SoundsTrue.com: Many Voices, One Journey.
