Tami Simon: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Lisa Marchiano, Jungian analyst, author, and podcaster. Lisa is on the faculty of the CG Jung Institute of Philadelphia. She lectures and teaches widely and is the cohost and creator of the popular depth psychology podcast This Jungian Life. With Sounds True, Lisa Marchiano is the author of the book Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself and a gorgeous new book, The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire. Lisa, podcaster to podcaster, welcome.
LM: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
TS: What inspired you to tackle the feminine fire and outlaw energies as the topic of your new book?
LM: Ugh. Well, I didn’t know what I was writing when I started writing it, so I didn’t know what was going to come out the other end. But we had done this podcast on This Jungian Life. The title of the podcast is something like “Fierce Female Initiations,” and I don’t even remember how we landed on the topic, but I just remember feeling really impassioned as we were talking about it. And I just had fairytale after fairytale after fairytale.
And I even butted heads a little bit with my dear male friend and cohost, Joseph, about something. And it finished and I sort of thought, “Oh my gosh, I have a lot to say on this topic.” And my mind just started kind of running with it. And I was stringing these fairytales together and thinking, “There’s a common thread here.” And so, I wanted to explore that. I just started writing and found my way through. I was really kind of following Ariadne’s ball of thread through the Minotaur’s maze to get to the end and think, “Oh, I know what the main idea is,” but it took me the better part of a year.
TS: How did this exploration of fierce feminine initiations change you?
LM: Well, there’s someone who says, “Every theory is a confession.” And I suppose when we write, we’re always writing about ourselves. And I can say that this was a really personal book that explores themes that I have lived with my whole life. And from time to time, I’ll get a client—well, I would say pretty often, I’ll get a client who seems to have similar issues. And whenever I’m working with this client, I always think, am I imposing my views on things on her? Am I seeing that she’s living this story because this is my story? But then, it doesn’t really seem to be that way. It seems like the person’s genuinely facing these same themes.
So, I have come to understand that the themes that I cover in the book are very common for women. I wouldn’t say they’re universal, but I think many, many women struggle with finding their authority, feeling entitled to feel their anger, getting in touch with what they really desire. I certainly have faced all of those issues. And the process of exploring this topic has simply really brought this into consciousness in a new and, I kind of think, wonderful way. Something has been a little bit unleashed for me, I think. I found myself out with a friend last week and found myself just not holding back, just really saying the truth that was on my mind, even though it was uncomfortable. And I thought to myself, yeah, I guess here I am. I’m walking my walk. I found my vital spark.
TS: Now, you just referenced some of the what you call “outlaw energies” that you cover in The Vital Spark, owning our authority, claiming our anger, our desire. But there were a couple of these outlaw energies that really got my attention that you haven’t mentioned that I want to zero in on that have been personally important to me. And I would say I’m still in the process of owning them, and I think are even harder to own, for me at least, than the ones you’ve already named: shrewdness and ruthlessness.
And especially as a business person, a female business person, once somebody actually told someone else I know, “Oh, Tami, she’s very shrewd.” And what happened was I felt shamed.
LM: That’s so interesting.
TS: I felt terrible, I felt awful. And I was like, why do I feel so bad about this thing? And actually, I think the person meant it as a compliment, but I couldn’t hear it that way. I took it more as a reference that I was in the direction of ruthlessness and the whole idea of being ruthless is something that I still find difficult to embrace. And so, I want to go there. Let’s go there, and talk to me about how these are outlaw energies that will serve us.
LM: Well, a couple big questions. First of all, maybe I’ll frame it up by saying that the way I see it, there are qualities like kindness, empathy, nurturing that help us get and stay connected to other people. And those are very important qualities that we need. And the fact is that caring for other people, caring for our children, our loved ones, those are some of the most meaningful things we’ll ever do in our life. So, I don’t mean to put those qualities aside or take anything away from them, but I think that sometimes we get so focused on developing those qualities, we become very fluent in them, it’s like our native tongue. But there’s this whole other language of some of the things we’ve just been discussing that we need to get our hands around if we’re going to get and stay connected to ourselves and our own goals and our own needs.
So, I think ruthlessness is an example of a potential that we need to develop. One of the important things to realize is that I’m not saying that we should all become ruthless. Any one of these qualities is like a tool. It’s like an arrow in your quiver that you can take out and use joyfully, whether that’s being a trickster, whether that’s being disagreeable, whether that’s being shrewd or angry or desirous or sexual or ruthless. That you can decide that the moment calls for ruthlessness. And the way I think about ruthlessness is being able to do something that is going to hurt someone else that is in the interest of growth and wholeness. So, just being able to kind of do the hard thing.
I mean, I used this one example in that chapter I think where I was seeing a psychologist many, many years ago, and it just wasn’t the right fit. And I didn’t want to end the relationship because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I didn’t want her to not like me. I was kind of taking care of her. And I had this dream of Tony Soprano, and Tony Soprano could be ruthless. If there was a job that needed to be done, Tony Soprano could do it, even if it meant killing his friend. And obviously, the dream uses this incredibly hyperbolic, overwrought, metaphorical language. I mean, the dream made me laugh a little bit because it’s so over the top, but I needed to kind of get in touch with my Tony Soprano and go in and just tell the psychologist, “This is not a good fit. This is not serving me.” I mean, the alternative would’ve been kind of ridiculous. To just continue in treatment was something that I knew wasn’t right.
TS: I like this notion of a quiver, and this is an arrow in our quiver that we can use very pointedly when we need to use it. That’s very helpful. Now, you also talk about this notion that we can fall into an “innocence complex.” And this is as you’re writing and describing shrewdness. And I wonder if you can share more about that, what the innocence complex looks like?
LM: Well, I think a lot of us women spend a lot of time there, where we expect that people are going to like us, we expect that people are going to have our best interests at heart. We expect that if we play nice and we play by the rules that we’ll be rewarded, which is often not true, by the way. We can’t imagine that anyone would ever feel envy for little old us. And so, we may fall victim to people who are envious because we just have been blinkered. We’ve allowed ourselves to not see what’s really there. So, a lot of being shrewd is allowing ourselves to know what we know.
And by the way, Tami, you said that you felt shamed when someone called you shrewd. And there is a cultural reason behind that perhaps, is that shrew, which comes from the same root, is an insult for a woman. To be a shrewish woman is to be harsh and unlikable because you’re a danger if you don’t let yourself be blinded by innocence. You’re a threat.
TS: Now, in this section where you’re talking about breaking out of the innocence complex, and you’re inviting us to explore this arrow of shrewdness, you write, “We need to develop shrewdness to protect ourselves from envy.” And you were just pointing to that. And this is a section I read a couple times, because I really wanted to understand it. And quite honestly, Lisa, I’m still not 100 percent sure. I mean, if other people are envious of me or if other people are envious of anyone, what can I do about that? That’s their business. They’re off being envious. If I’m shrewd, how does that help protect me?
LM: Well, if you know that someone is envious of them, then hopefully, you will know to protect yourself. For example, not look for their approval, or not share with them anything that they don’t absolutely need to know. Because a lot of times, the person that’s envious of us is like a friend or someone close to us, a family member. And if we don’t know that they’re envious, we can go on trying to win their favor. We can go on fawning, perhaps, to try to get them to like us, which only gives them more power. If you can clearly see that someone’s behavior [toward] you is motivated by envy, then you can sort of protect yourself, put a shield around yourself. If someone’s being a little bit nasty to you and you don’t know why—and this happens all the time. I have clients who come in and tell these stories about being really poorly treated, maybe, by a family member or by a sister or by a friend, and they’re perplexed.
And let’s say it’s a sister. And so, they keep on kind of going back and calling and, “Oh, can I drop by?” And being extra, extra nice, trying to win the favor and reestablish the connection, when it’s maybe obvious to me as an outsider hearing the story that, wait a minute, she has a really hard time dealing with the fact that you’ve got a lot more money than she has, and your kids are doing better or whatever it is. And maybe you shouldn’t give her more opportunities to hurt you by going and looking for her approval. Maybe you should just pull back a little bit and let yourself know that you’re OK. And give her a chance to figure her own envy out and come back around when she’s ready.
TS: Now, you mentioned how developing the qualities of relatedness, kindness, connection, compassion—that this is second nature to a lot of us. It’s how we, women especially, relate to each other and the world. It’s how we connect and our hearts go out person to person. And then you write, “Too much kindness defangs us.”
LM: Oh, yes.
TS: I love that sentence. And when you mentioned having an arrow, an arrow of shrewdness, an arrow of ruthlessness, I guess I think of kindness as my whole demeanor. Do you think of that also maybe—and I don’t know if other people would say that, but whatever. How do we find the balance, I guess is what I’m trying to ask?
LM: It’s a great question, and it goes to this word that I use a lot in the book, which is “discernment.” It’s sort of like, if you have these different ways of relating, they might be appropriate for very different situations. So, part of what you have to do is be conscious. You have to be conscious of what’s going on. Is kindness the right thing here? Often, it is. I mean, kindness is wonderful. But is kindness the right thing to do when, as I tell the story in the book that my young client, a man was basically harassing her in a public park and she was being kind to him. I said to her, “Did you think about yelling, ‘Leave me alone!’” And she said, “Oh, I didn’t want to be rude.” I was like, “Well, that was a scary situation and he was bothering you and it could have gotten worse. So, where are your fangs in those moments?”
It’s sort of like, maybe another way to think about it, Tami, is kindness itself is great, but if it’s a duty, if it negates other potentials, if it’s a “should,” it’s a straightjacket, then I think you’re leaving yourself exposed. I mean, you’ve got to have some of these other things both to protect yourself but also to go after what you want in life, both to protect yourself and to self-actualize.
TS: The title of the new book, The Vital Spark, you use this metaphor of the central fire, that in us is this central fire, and we can have burning coals. Those coals can have been neglected for a long time. Can you talk about the metaphor of fire and how that’s underneath, in many ways, some of these quote, unquote, outlaw energies?
LM: Well, I think that part of what I’m talking about in the book does have to do with what Jung called Shadow. And I don’t use that word much in the book, because I think that I didn’t really need to, so I didn’t want to belabor that point. But Jung says that, “In the process of adapting to social roles and social norms, we cut off certain parts of ourselves.” And that can happen in the family. It’s like we’re taught by our family not to be a certain way. It also happens in the culture. So for example, one of the stories I mentioned in the book is that we were out to dinner and there were these two little 10- or 11-year-old girls, that kind of age, maybe a little younger—different families, by the way—and they both had on T-shirts that said something about, “Just be kind.” So, there is a societal message about how we have to be and what we shouldn’t be as well, although that’s not explicit.
So, what have we left aside? Jung talks about these things that get sacrificed, and he says, “But often, there are glowing coals under gray ashes.” And I just love that line. So, what are the glowing coals that you left on the floor of the lumber room that you didn’t develop as a kid? And specifically, I think a lot of times with Shadow, most of us have something we weren’t allowed to be in our family of origin. We weren’t allowed to be lazy. We weren’t allowed to be greedy. We weren’t allowed to be selfish. I’ll tell you what it was in my family: you were not allowed to be boastful. You couldn’t want to attract attention to yourself. You immediately got shamed if you did that. And so, that has been kind of a glowing coal for me is, can I give myself permission to sometimes claim some attention?
I mean, I have a podcast, so I guess I figured it out. It took me until I was in my 50s. But some people I know were not allowed to be needy or weak, for example. They had to be very self-sufficient. That might be your glowing coal, is that could you then allow yourself to experience healthy dependency. So, I think that the glowing coal metaphor is related to this other term that Jung used of the unlived life. What parts of yourself haven’t you allowed yourself to develop and what kind of energy for life is in those parts?
TS: I think one of the sections where you wrote about being disagreeable got my attention, because certainly I think I was trained to try to be agreeable and go along and be easygoing. And I loved the story you told about a friend of yours who would invite people over for a dinner party. And then, when she was ready to turn off the lights and go to bed, would shoo everybody out the door and say, “Time to go. I’m going to bed now.” And I thought, what a wonderful illustration of disagreeableness.
LM: Yes, yes, exactly. I mean, look, it’s a good thing to know how to be agreeable, right? I mean, isn’t Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People one of the most read books? It’s a wonderful thing, both because we want to be good company for those we love and because it can be sort of a tactically important thing to be able to do. It kind of greases the social wheels. But if you are always focused on being agreeable, where are you in that? And yes, my friend, Terry, true story, would invite us all over for dinner, cook us a wonderful meal—and she was in her 50s at the time. I was in my late 20s at the time, so she was much older. And she would just come out with a smile on her face and say, “I’m going to bed. You need to leave.” The first time it happened, I was floored. But after that, I was ready for it. And I thought, “How great that she can just state what she wants. She doesn’t need to worry about our reaction.”
TS: You combine in the book your own stories, stories from clients, and also, as a kind of architecture throughout the whole book, stories and fairytales. And you write how stories and fairytales are humankind’s earliest method of conveying wisdom. And at first, when I went to go read the first fairytale, I thought, “Oh, God, another fairytale.” But something happened. I fell into it and found something about the way you told the story. It was very bare bones and the images just hit me. And I loved all of the fairytales in the book. And you include a lot, you include a lot, and they’re so powerful. And they make your point so clearly. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how you chose the fairytales you chose, and then maybe share one with us.
LM: Sure. Well I suppose in probably the majority of the cases, the fairytales, I don’t want to say they chose me, but I knew that these certain fairytales told something important about a woman’s psychological development. And they are where I started. So, I had the fairytales first, and then it’s like, and what does this want to say? So, that was true for Snow White, that was true for Vasilisa the Beautiful, that was true for The Frog King. And then, as I was working with it, I did sometimes go and hunt for a fairytale that illustrates X. And so then, I was off to read fairytales. But I’m so glad that you like them and that they spoke to you. I made an effort to use the most original, the truest version of the story, the one that hadn’t been embroidered too much. And I do like it when tellings of fairytales are fairly spare, because a lot of times some of the details that come later have kind of been added. So, I just wanted to kind of get the pure distillation.
TS: No, I’m really glad you said that, because I didn’t have that word “spare,” but that’s what I was trying to point to. It was almost like in your telling of each of the stories, I got to eat the vegetable before it was seasoned and sauced and cooked, and I could barely tell what vegetable. I was just like, “Oh, that’s what it tastes like in its pure form.” And now, the other thing before you share one of the fairytales in the book, is that I was impressed by the level of naked violence, I’m not quite sure what other word to use, that many of the stories included and how it just kind of sunk in as true and right, like a storm, not like the way violence appears on television sometimes. It was different. I mean, there was nothing gratuitous. It was just like right to the point. The bone has been split, the head is rolling. I’m curious if you have something to say about that.
LM: Yeah. Well, some of the stories are quite violent, and in fact, the one that I’m going to tell is one of the ones that’s pretty violent and can be upsetting. But what is it Neil Gaiman says? He says, “Fairytales are important, not because they’re true, but because they show us that dragons can be beaten.” Am I misquoting that? There is something just so about a fairytale, even the violent fairytales. And I think that fairytales, when they were being told, of course, they’re all from an oral tradition. I love to sit down and look at a fairytale and pull out all my Jungian jargon and come up with a clever interpretation, but that’s not what they were meant for. They’re not meant to be engaged with on a cognitive, intellectual level. They are meant to go right to your gut.
And people would’ve heard the wisdom in the fairytales, even though these were not educated people, they certainly hadn’t spent years studying Jungian analysis, but they got the message. And I think they do deliver a very kind of clear psychological message that we understand even without conscious awareness. So, I think sometimes, people with young children will say to me, me, “Well, I don’t want to share scary fairytales with my kid.” And if they’re interested in my opinion, I’ll say, “Well, please go ahead.” Because I think we also understand that these are metaphors. This is a symbolic communication. It’s not really about violence per se, although sometimes they hint in that direction. And I think these fairytales of women being terribly endangered, there is a reality to that. I mean, women are especially prone to victimization by violence, let’s say. I mean, that’s just a statistical fact. So, it’s not that it doesn’t reveal something that has a reality basis, but the real message is a metaphorical one.
TS: And with that, Lisa.
LM: OK, “Fitcher’s Bird.” So, Fitcher’s Bird is a Grimm’s tale, and many people know the French version better, and the French version is “Blue Beard.” So, you may know that tale better, but I personally think that Fitcher’s Bird is by far the better tale, and I think you’ll see why.
So, there was a sorcerer who used to dress as a beggar and go from home to home. And one day he knocked at the door where three sisters lived, and he was begging for something to eat. And so the first sister gave him a piece of bread, because she was nice, she was kind. And when she gave him the piece of bread, he was able to exercise power over her and make her jump right into his basket. So, he took her back to his fine mansion, which was full of beautiful things, and she was content to stay there for a little while with him.
And then one day, he had to leave. He gave her an egg, and he said, “Now, carry this egg with you always and take good care of it. Oh, and by the way, here’s a key to that little room under the stairs. Whatever you do, don’t use the key and go into that room.” So, he left, and of course, because this is what always happens in fairytales, she used the key and she went into the room. And what she found there was a vat filled with the cut up body parts of other women. She was so startled that she dropped the egg and it fell into the bloody vat. She picked it out right away and wiped the blood off, but it was no use. Every time she wiped the blood away, the blood came back. So, when the sorcerer came home, he asked immediately for the egg, she gave it to him, there was blood on it, and he knew what happened. He said, “You disobeyed me and you went into the bloody chamber and now it’s your turn.” So, he took her in there and he chopped her up.
Then, the same thing happened with the second sister, just the same way. He knocked on the door, she gave him some bread, he had her jump into his basket, took her home, the egg, the key, the whole nine. She winds up butchered in the bloody chamber. Well, now he goes back and the same thing starts to happen with the third sister, but she’s a little more cunning. She’s shrewd. So, when he leaves her alone with an egg and a key, she puts the egg in the cupboard, and then she opens the door, she finds the bloody chamber, she sees her sisters there. She carefully collects their parts, and in that way, they come back to life, because that’s a wonderful thing that can happen in fairytales. And now, she just has to figure out how she’s going to smuggle her sisters out.
So, the sorcerer comes home, asks to see the egg. The egg has no blood on it. He’s like, “Oh, this is great. Now would you be my wife?” And she’s like, “Ah, sure, but first, you have to take this basket of gold back to my parents’ house.” So, she’s put her sisters in the basket, she covers them with gold, and she says, “Terry, you’ve got to go straight to my parents’ house, and if I see you stop—I’m going to be watching out the window—if I see you stop, I’m going to say something.” So, he shoulders the basket and he’s walking to her house, but the basket is so heavy that at one point he puts it down and one of the sisters in the basket says, “I told you not to stop. I am watching you and I can see that you’re stopping. Get a move on.” So, he picks the basket back up and keeps going.
And then, in a minute, it’s so heavy that he puts it down and then the other sister says, “What did I just tell you? What are you doing? Put the basket back on your back and get going.” So, he delivers the gold and the sisters back to their home. And then, in the meantime, our heroine has taken a skull and decorated it to look like a beautiful woman, and then she places it in the window. Then she takes off all her clothes, rolls around in honey and feathers, so that she looks like a strange bird and starts on her way home. So, she passes the guests that are coming for the wedding, and there’s this little rhyme.
“Oh, Fitcher’s bird. What are you doing here?” And she sort of says, “Yep, I’m just on my way.” And they say, “Well, where is Fitcher’s bride?” And she says, “Oh, she looks out from the window.” So, they look up and they see the skull and it looks like the bride is looking out the window. Then she meets the sorcerer, and the same exchange happens with the rhyme. And so he knows nothing, doesn’t see through her disguise, he goes home. Then, she and her brothers come and lock the sorcerer and his wedding guests in the house and burn it to the ground. And so, she rescues herself, she rescues her sisters, and she does it all with accessing these wonderful qualities like shrewdness and trickster energy and cunning and desire and ruthlessness.
TS: You write, “To understand a tale symbolically, we must squint a little and sink into the story.” And one of the things I noticed as I was reading The Vital Spark, and I was walking around the house, and I was talking to my wife and I was like, “I’m going to just keep squinting as I talk to you about all the things I’m learning.” And I thought, that’s so interesting. How come I have to squint in order to best access outlaw energy? I’m curious what you have to say about that.
LM: Because I think we have a tendency to want to approach the tales literally. And so, it’s like you have to sort of soften your gaze a little bit and get used to looking at something that is a product of the unconscious, because a fairytale is a product of the unconscious, just like a dream is. And if you are trying to understand it literally, you’re going to miss the symbolic message, you’re going to miss the psychological message. So, in some sense, I think what I’m saying is you have to sort of surrender to the fairytale. You just have to let it wash over you, which it sounds like what happened for you is that you just let yourself hear it and then see what comes up in your body, and don’t let your head get in the way.
TS: I think that squinting like that is true when it comes to understanding and appreciating the symbolic nature of the tales, but also, even in accessing my own sense of cunning and my own disagreeableness, it somehow seemed to help me to squint. Does that make sense?
LM: Let me think about that for a second. Yeah, I can see that. Because here’s the thing, is that we all have a persona. We all have this person that we present to the world, and some of these qualities may not be part of your persona at all. So, in a way, it’s a little bit like being an actor or putting on a costume or wearing a different kind of outfit that lets you be a person you’re not used to being. Does that seem to register?
TS: It is very well-said. And then, one other point I want to bring forward. I pulled out this quote from Jung, “The unconscious is also a manifestation of nature.” And you write about the unsentimental quality in nature and living, as I do in British Columbia, in the rainforest here. I can see this all the time in different ways: in animals that eat each other and animals that die in storms or bad weather or just in the process of being born and not making it into their adulthood. And I thought that was an important thing when it comes to appreciating these fierce feminine initiations, and I wonder if you can speak to that.
LM: Well, in some sense, the Goddess, the Creatrix is something like nature. I mean, that which creates, that which gives birth, that which kind of selects who lives and dies—that is a function of the Goddess. And yes, she is ruthless. I mean, I talk a little bit in the book about Kali, the Hindu goddess, which I think is a good representation of that. And that aspect of the feminine is not one that we’re particularly comfortable with in our culture. We don’t associate that very often with women. Although, I love the film that I use when I talk about that, The Devil Wears Prada, because I think that’s a pretty good image of that kind of energy in a woman. That really is in service to the larger dance of life. It’s in service to flourishing, and it is unsentimental about the fate of a particular individual.
TS: You mentioned Kali, and in the very beginning of The Vital Spark, you introduce us to Lilith. For those who aren’t familiar with Lilith outside of the music festival, like, oh, what is this? Who is Lilith? What can we learn from Lilith?
LM: Well, before there was Eve, there was Lilith. And this comes from these medieval Jewish texts. She was Adam’s first wife, and they were made from the same clay. And Adam wanted to have sex with her underneath. And she said, “I am your equal. We come from the same clay. I don’t want to have sex like that.” But he wasn’t having any of it, so she left. Then God said, “Well, I guess I’ve got to make you a second wife. Let me make this one from your rib though, so that she knows where her place is.”
And Lilith becomes this really frightening demonic figure in parts of the ancient world, that she waits at the laboring bed and steals the newborn babe and kills it. She was a seductress who led men astray. She could be incredibly destructive and angry, but it seems to me she’s been reclaimed by modern feminists, and I can see why. And I thought she was really a great image to start the book with because she, as Marie-Louise von Franz says, she’s kind of an image of the “unbridled life urge” that I think gets to this idea of our vital spark.
TS: Now, in terms of experiences and ways of being that weren’t supported and welcomed in our early life, and we can now see how useful they are. Do we get to boast a little bit more, Lisa, about you? I think you are just so brilliant and articulate, and you have a way of being extremely precise with language that I have such an appreciation for. So, I just want to take a moment and you can just bask in that energy. I’m boasting about you.
LM: I’ll take that in.
TS: But here’s one that’s hard for me, seeing that greed could have a positive application used in the right way. I mean, here I was trained in Buddhist meditation, greed is part of the problem. The last thing ever, there’s no application for that. Help me embrace even that aspect in this quest for wholeness.
LM: Well, I mean, I think about it in relation to selfishness. There’s this quote that I use in the book from the Jungian analyst, Edward Edinger, and he says the biggest problem that most people come into therapy with is they don’t know how to be effectively selfish. I’m paraphrasing. But I think that’s true. A lot of people that actually seek out therapy are kind of self-effacing, they have difficulty asserting themselves. And this is true for men and women, by the way, which are lovely qualities, right? Because what it means is they’re often tuned into the other person. So, these are exactly the kind of people that you want as your friend, because they’re not going to run over you, they’re not going to bulldoze you. They’re going to say, “Well, I kind of want Chinese, but would you prefer Indian?”
But where are those moments where it’s like, “Well, no, this moment calls for me to say, ‘I want this and I’m going to really allow myself to claim that’” And so, in terms of greed, can we let ourself feel our wants? And can we say that maybe that’s OK? Maybe we are the hungriest at the table, whether that’s the physical dinner table, and instead of saying politely, “No, no, no, it’s OK, you have more.” Maybe we get to be greedy that night and eat four slices of pizza when everyone else gets three. Or maybe it’s a different kind of greed. Maybe it’s a greed for attention or greed for even money.
Can we let ourselves know that we want that thing and determine whether or not it’s the right time for us to press our claim? Because certainly, sometimes it’s not. I think when we’re talking about greed at a kind of societal level, the way that corporations, for example, can pursue profit without regard for the planet, that’s not helpful. But that desire that each of us has as an individual to come into the world and live out our individual pattern as fully as we can, greed might sometimes serve that.
TS: I’ll offer a quote from The Vital Spark. You write, “If we don’t forge a conscious relationship with our capacity for selfishness, greed, or hardness, we won’t be able to harness the protective, positive, and growth-promoting features of these qualities,” which is I think exactly what you’re pointing to. Now, you also… Oh, please go ahead.
LM: Yeah, let me just say one more thing. The key word there too is consciousness, right? And that goes back to this idea of discernment and are you making the choice consciously when you’re going to be greedy? Like, “This is the right time. This is right. This is the right time to put myself first.” There are times when it’s right to put yourself first.
TS: Effectively selfish.
LM: We need a T-shirt.
TS: That’s right, shrewd and effectively selfish, which I think one of the questions I’m asking—and just for a moment, it’s a little edgy for me to try to name this, but I’m imagining that what might be hard for some listeners, for some women who are hearing this is thinking, “If I really embody a lot of these qualities, will I be attractive to the people I want to be attractive to?” Now, in my case, that’s not so much an issue in my life and, as a lesbian, it’s just not really driving me. But I could see that that probably is driving a lot of women. A lot of men don’t want a shrewd, effectively selfish partner.
LM: 100 percent. And I do talk about that in the disagreeable chapter, that a lot of times we feel like we have to be pleasing to men, and I think there’s a reality base to that. The thing is that, again, it has its place, but when it stops serving us or when it becomes such a straightjacket, when we feel like we always have to be agreeable, we always have to be pleasing, then we start getting really unhappy. We start becoming symptomatic and the world misses out on our gifts.
TS: When you say we start to become symptomatic, are there specific symptomatic expressions that you see are linked to the unwillingness to claim what you’re calling are these outlaw energies?
LM: Well, I think it’s pretty individual, but it can look like just a sense of emptiness. Because it could be that you are always trying to be nice, has kept you from asserting yourself in a relationship. And then you’re sort of miserable, or it’s kept you out of the field that you want to be in, because I might make somebody uncomfortable if I try to change careers. And so, you can feel frustrated, you can feel numb, you can feel empty, you can feel anxious, you can feel angry all the time, kind of bitter and resentful.
TS: You also point to one of the symptoms that can potentially occur being a lack of confidence. And I wonder if you could just make it very explicit how, when we embrace these energies, that enables us to grow our confidence?
LM: Well, in a way, confidence is sort of related to all of these qualities, and there’s a bit of a feedback loop, because it’s easier to be ruthless when you have confidence in what you’re doing. And I think being able to be effectively ruthless, for example, also gives you confidence. But the more you step toward your source, I’m going to call it—that sense of, well, this is who I am and this is what’s important to me and this is what I feel I need to do—that sense of ourselves that comes from being able to feel our feelings freely, the more we step toward that, often the more confident we get. And it’s a bit of a feedback loop, because we start getting positive resonances both from the world and from ourselves. We see ourselves be more effective, for example, interpersonally. And then, we have a little bit more confidence and maybe we can find our ruthlessness that much easier the next time. So, it’s a process.
TS: You mentioned that when you got to the end of the writing, you felt a certain dawning clarity about what the entire book, The Vital Spark, is about. Can you name that for us, when you’re like, oh, now I get it?
LM: Yeah. Well, it was really that sentence that I sort of paraphrased a while ago, that there are these qualities, like kindness, nurturing, attuned, warm, friendly, you name it, that help us get and stay connected with other people. And these other qualities actually help us get and stay connected with ourselves. And in some sense, so much of the issues that bring people into therapy can be boiled down to, “I’ve lost connection with myself. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what’s important to me. I don’t know if I’m allowed to think the things I think. I’m not sure what I think. I don’t know how I feel.” That sense of disconnection makes us very ineffective in the world and makes us pretty unhappy. And that to restore that connection requires these feelings in the book.
TS: What would you say are the capabilities of the fairytale heroines who help us see that we can reclaim these qualities? What capacities do they have that we need to have as we do this, quote, unquote, inner work?
LM: Well, in a sense, it’s this idea of kind of the inability to do otherwise. I mean, the fairytales put these young women in these terribly difficult straits, and they have a moment where they think, this is what I have to do, otherwise the gig’s up. And I think that that can be true for us too, where we reach a moment in our life where we think, if I don’t do this, the cost is going to be too high. If I can’t find a way to stand my ground in my marriage, for example, and say that, ‘I’m not OK being treated like this anymore,’ it’s not going to get any better. That this is it. The moment has come where I’ve got to stand up, whether that’s in a marriage or in a friendship or in a career situation, wherever it is. And it seems to me that all of the fairytale heroines meet that moment, this is the decisive moment when, if I keep going, the cost is just going to be absolutely too high, and I’ve got to take action. I’ve got to go from being passive to active.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Lisa Marchiano, and she’s written a book to hold, behold, and spend a lot of time with. It’s called The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire. I’m so glad, Lisa, that you went on the journey that you did and wrote The Vital Spark. It’s a gorgeous book that I think will give people lots of insights and breadcrumbs to follow. Thank you so much.
LM: Oh, I hope so. Thank you, Tami.
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