- Think of a horse,
a 650-pound, eight-foot tall beast,
and a rider sitting on top of the horse,
holding the reins.
The horse is an animal,
and the rider, of course, a learned human.
The two work towards their goals together,
a destination, a task to do,
a journey to experience.
This idea is a metaphor
for how we as humans live and make decisions.
We're certainly more than this,
but it's still a useful way
to think about ourselves, our behavior,
and how we make decisions in society,
at work and at home.
I think of myself as the rider,
the way I think most people would.
We are our language centers
and there are ways we can gain more control
over the instincts and parts of ourselves
we may not know well,
and these parts are sometimes inaccessible to us.
I'm a programmer,
so I think about self-work
and working on your own mental health
as about turning a non-deterministic process
that you wouldn't normally have access to,
and then being able to place strategic
if statements in there to allow you
to make more intentional choices.
On the one hand, you could think of it
as giving the rider more control,
but it's actually more about integration.
A rider can make better choices
when it is more in touch with the horse, not less.
Things should be less of a struggle.
They should be a dance,
a grand internal dance that gets better and better.
That's what I want for you.
Let's get started.
The famous psychologist thinker, Carl Jung,
talks about the shadow.
And I think meeting your shadow might feel like this.
- We have the exact same briefcase.
- Soap.
- Sorry?
- I make and I sell soap.
The yardstick of civilization.
- [The Narrator] And this is how I met-
- Tyler Durden.
- Tyler Durden in "Fight Club" is one shadow personified.
It exists within you even if you don't acknowledge it.
These are actually parts of ourselves,
but they happen to be the parts we judge,
we find aberrant,
and we don't want to acknowledge it.
Jung says, "No one can become conscious of the shadow
without considerable moral effort.
To become conscious of it
involves recognizing the dark aspects
of the personality as present and real.
This act is the essential condition
for any kind of self-knowledge."
For me, I discovered one thing
that was in my shadow was that I wanted power.
I craved it, I desired it,
I truly needed it,
and it was a part of my shadow.
I didn't accept that.
I grew up in a household and family system
where power was actually prized,
but because my father was an alcoholic
and often not successful in his business pursuits,
it was stymied back to back to back.
And I grew to hate this need for power.
Yet, simultaneously, it was a part of me all along.
Even if I despised it,
I did acquire the need for it.
Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior
of others or the course of events.
And when I was young,
and especially because I was an engineer,
it was perfectly acceptable
to passively allow that part of me
to not express itself.
But it caused me problems.
When I was co-founding a startup in 2008,
I didn't think I needed the power that a CEO title
or full equal ownership would give me,
and so I gave it up.
I gave up that CEO title
and a significant percentage of ownership in that company,
simply because I didn't know myself well enough
and it cost me.
It cost me big.
I made this mistake a few more times in my career
before realizing, no,
I'm going to let this part of me express itself.
I want power.
Not for the same reason
my father may have wanted it,
but I want it,
so that I can set things right when they go wrong.
And that was an important part of me
growing into a leader and manager.
Power hunger, madness,
all kinds of things that you don't want to face.
These are all a part of us,
and there's a piece of you right now
that you're not accepting.
Jung says, "You wanted to accept everything,
so accept madness too.
Let the light of your madness shine
and it will suddenly dawn on you,
madness is not to be despised and not to be feared,
but instead you should give it life."
Whatever your madness is,
find out what it is,
because until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
What Jung pointed out a hundred years ago,
psychologists are still making breakthroughs
around even today.
Here's Richard Schwartz,
the inventor of Integrated Family Systems,
talking about how these different parts of us
play out in our everyday life.
- Basic idea is that we're all multiple personalities,
that people with that diagnosis
aren't so different from all the rest of us,
except that their systems
got really blown apart by the horrific trauma they suffered,
but we're all on a spectrum like that.
One basic conviction is that, again,
we're all multiple personalities.
I've got 'em. You've all got 'em.
They're all valuable.
There aren't any bad ones,
sort of the Will Rogers of the phenomena.
I've never met a part that ultimately I didn't like.
And that they need more access to this self,
because they lose trust in its leadership
when bad things happen to you.
- As I did more inner work,
one of the things I realized was that
when I was not acting my best,
not my highest and wisest self,
well, it often happened
because I was hijacked by some part of me
that was just not properly integrated.
That's when my horse overrides my rider
and does something unexpected.
Jung too discussed these as complexes,
little consciousnesses within ourselves
connected to things that we're not aware of.
He said in "A Review of Complex Theory,"
"Complexes behave like Descartes' devils
and seem to delight in playing impish tricks.
They slip the wrong word into one's mouth,
they make one forget the name of a person
one is about to introduce,
they cause a tickle in the throat
just when the softest passage
is being played on a piano at a concert,
they make the tiptoeing latecomer trip over a chair
with a resounding crash.
As one might expect on theoretical grounds,
these impish complexes are unteachable."
In Internal Family Systems,
Schwartz talks about three different types of parts.
Exiles are the younger parts of self
that hold emotions, vulnerabilities,
and trauma that is yet unprocessed.
We've all got them.
Managers are sort of the rider of the horse and rider.
They help put the exiles aside,
so that the functioning part of self
can go on with life.
And firefighters are extreme versions of managers,
acting impulsively to make any pain or hurt go away.
When you see dissociation, disconnection from others,
or self-destructive behaviors like addiction,
these are the firefighters clearing the self
away from the exiles
and the pain that's unaddressed and unintegrated.
When I worked with my therapist,
she actually uses a somatic approach
to try to identify where these different parts exist.
And it's through connecting with these specific feelings
in my body am I able to connect,
and then ask questions,
and re-experience those parts of my life
I've shoved away.
Everyone has those,
and they pop up in your day to day
in all sorts of ways.
Self-acceptance is the key.
Here's Alan Watts reading from the works of Carl Jung.
- "And so acceptance of one's self
is the essence of the moral problem
and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life,
that I feed the beggar,
that I forgive an insult,
that I love my enemy in the name of Christ.
All these are undoubtedly great virtues.
What I do unto the least of my brethren
that I do unto Christ.
But what if I should discover
that the least amongst them all,
the poorest of all beggars,
the most impudent of all offenders,
yea the very fiend himself,
that these are within me,
and that I myself stand in need of the arms
of my own kindness,
that I myself am the enemy who must be loved.
What then?
Then, as a rule,
the whole truth of Christianity is reversed.
There is then no more talk of love and long suffering.
We say to the brother within us, "Raca,"
and condemn and rage against ourselves.
We hide him from the world.
We deny ever having met
this least among the lowly in ourselves,
and had it been God himself
who drew near to us in this despicable form,
we should have denied him a thousand times
before a single had cock had crowed.
Healing may be called," Jung says,
"A religious problem.
In the sphere of social or national relations,
the state of suffering may be civil war,
and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue
of forgiveness and love of one's enemies.
That which we recommend with the conviction
of good Christians is applicable to external situations.
We must also apply inwardly in the treatment of neurosis.
This is why modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin.
He is sorely beset by his own bad conscience,
and once rather to know how he is to reconcile himself
with his own nature,
how he is to love the enemy in his own heart
and call the wolf his brother."
- Can you call the wolf within you your brother?
If you deny yourself,
then there's no way to fix the situation.
You are doomed to call this fate.
The world, I've discovered,
and I think you know too,
is a broken one,
and all of us have been through some moment in life
that we just hold off and shove in the corner.
There are parts of us we refuse to acknowledge.
It's too ugly.
We don't want to believe that is us,
or it's something that happened to us we wish we could undo.
Sometimes it's even a choice we made
that is too painful to think of.
I used to be confused about these things
and wonder how I got here,
but increasingly now I know I have a way
to find the source of it and I can do better.
There are people out there, therapists,
friends who can help you with this.
Your brain, your human experience,
these are all things that, with introspection,
you can change and you have direct access to it
if you ask just the right questions
You're not alone and you never were.
And if you turn within,
you will find such true power
if only you were to look.
I believe in you.
Let's go get it.
So that's it for this week.
I wanted to spend some time talking about mental health,
because, to be honest, I'm just a seeker,
and I'm trying to understand more about myself,
so that I can be better to the people around me.
Like any engineer,
I try to notice when there are bugs and flaws,
log them, prioritize them,
and figure out how to fix them.
It's impossible to be perfect,
but it is possible to get better.
I try to live life by Postel's law.
It's a law that governs internet protocols,
like the web and email,
and it says be lenient in what you accept from others
and be strict in what you put out.
If we all live by that law,
we'd all be better off, more connected,
kind of like the internet, knowing yourself,
your horse and your rider,
being able to integrate your exiles, your shadow,
and just plain reprogram your default runtime.
That's how we get there.
If you thought this was useful,
please consider getting therapy and exec coaching,
because it's the only way
I was able to overcome a lot of the trauma
I had in my life growing up.
And not only that,
I feel like it let me thrive.
Thanks again for watching all the way to the end,
and I'll see you next week.