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From Therapy to Social Change
We believe that insights and practices from the realm of therapy can contribute to a better world for all. At least, that's our hope... In an era marked by climate crisis, conflicts, and escalating inequality, any positive contribution is surely welcome. But what, more specifically, can the fields of therapy, psychology, psychiatry, and mental health offer to create a more equitable, sustainable, and flourishing world? This is the question we aim to explore in this podcast series.
Hosted by Mick Cooper, Professor of Counselling Psychology and author of 'Psychology at the Heart of Social Change' (Policy Press, 2023), as well as a father of four, and John Wilson, a Psychotherapist, Educator, and Co-Director of Onlinevents, we will engage in conversations with a diverse array of therapists, writers, and other perceptive and influential individuals.
We aim to delve into the depths of the human psyche while connecting it to current social and political issues—all with energy, enthusiasm, and a touch of humour, we hope!
Sponsored by Onlinevents: https://www.onlinevents.co.uk/
From Therapy to Social Change
Kirk Schneider in Conversation with Robbie Curtis: Addressing Primal Fears to Bridge Societal Divides ahead of the 2024 US Election
Can understanding primal fears reshape our polarised society? Join us for an interesting conversation with Kirk Schneider, an esteemed psychologist in existential-humanistic existential-integrative psychotherapy. Kirk shares his groundbreaking concept of the "polarized mind," a state driven by primal fear and anxiety, and reflects on how his upbringing, political interests and the US' response to the Iraq War shaped his thoughts on societal issues. Drawing insights from Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, he emphasises the importance of addressing our inner lives and existential struggles to foster a more harmonious society.
In navigating some of the complexities of modern life, Kirk and Robbie delve into the tension between contemporary diversity and the nostalgic longing for simpler times. We discuss the allure and pitfalls of quick fixes versus the desire for a more contemplative existence. By exploring Emmanuel Levinas' ideas on recognizing shared vulnerabilities, we discuss the necessity of creatively engaging with diverse perspectives to bridge our societal divides. We also explore shedding light on the underlying fears that drive polarisation and the importance of addressing them to foster coexistence.
Finally, we explore the political landscape through the lens of liberalism and conservatism, examining some of their tendencies and the dynamics of polarisation. By sharing practical insights from bridge-building dialogues, like those from the Experiential Democracy Dialogue and Braver Angels, we discuss tools that might be helpful in fostering understanding across ideological divides. We finish by discussing the role of fear in shaping reactive behaviours and the transformative potential of connectedness and embodied presence. Our hope is that this conversation might support appreciation for the power of meaningful, emotionally restorative interactions.
This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents
Kirk, it's so wonderful to see you. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us at TASC. It's a real privilege. I was thinking about how to introduce you. I've got just a couple of ideas. So you're the psychologist, a leading spokesperson for contemporary existential humanistic and existential integrative psychology. You're adjunct faculty at Saybrook University and at Teachers College, columbiaumbia. You're the co-founder and current president of the existential humanistic institute, um. You've authored and co-authored so many books, um around the polarized mind, um existential integrative psychotherapy, awakening to awe um and most recently, on life enhancing anxiety, key to a sane world. Um. And then one of your most recent projects is the experiential democracy dialogue, hosting multiple hour conversations that are absolutely fascinating on various um difficult and controversial topics that they're just so captivating. So it was it's. I'm so grateful that you've accepted my invitation to come have this conversation for our podcast.
Kirk Schneider:I'm very glad to be here, robbie, and I really appreciate your group and our audience here.
Robbie Curtis:Fantastic, thank you, yeah, yeah. So I wonder if we could just start talking about kind of the polarized mind and kind of your journey to arrive at that as something to write about, from kind of existential and humanistic ideas, to then your your work on that topic yeah, that's, that's been a very long, long brewing uh idea for me.
Kirk Schneider:uh, I've, I've really been interested in politics since I was a little kid.
Kirk Schneider:My father, in particular, was very, very tuned into the political scene and we had many, many conversations about it through the years, my mother as well and I guess I felt at a certain point maybe it was around the time of the Iraq War the US got involved in Iraq, where it seemed that the country, the US, just moved into a very reactive and reactionary position and, you know, pervasively lost a sense of the complexity of the situation. I mean, it was a horrible event in our history, no question about it. Some 3,000 people got killed. But I thought the way our president at the time handled it and other officials around him was very disturbing, how they closed ranks so quickly, coming from a fear-based position rather than a more deliberative and presence-based position, and went right to war, basically, and in a rather, you know, slipshod way, because they went into a country that, as it turned out, had very little to do with the fomenting of the violence in 9-11, meaning Iraq.
Kirk Schneider:And in any case, I felt increasingly that our existential and humanistic therapy and ideas were very relevant here, especially around dealing with fear can co-create a more presence-based and vital world. And it just seems to me, that seemed to me that we were sort of confining the riches of our approach to working with individuals to the consulting room, et cetera, and it had so much more application. And that was the time where I was beginning to think more and more about how our theory could inform an understanding of what's going on here. And so I was beginning to develop the idea of the polarized mind and the experiential democracy dialogue which came out of that as well, and the polarized mind being basically the fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view. And it seemed to me that it had a very psycho-spiritual, psychosocial basis to it that clustered a lot around our inquiries, around fear, and especially primal fear, which I would call anxiety. Yeah.
Robbie Curtis:The primal terror of the unknown, which is rooted very, very deep in our emergence into the world yeah and I came around to auto rank's ideas as being one of the most useful elaborations on that concept yeah, could you talk a bit more about what rank said and and how that's relevant, especially today, and how polarized we are?
Kirk Schneider:Yeah, well, rank really moved us toward the beginning, beginning, beginning. You know, our evolutionary sort of primitive reactions to danger, which make a lot of sense, and of course a lot of psychologists refer to that as the basis for how we react in an aggressive, violent way, in a very narrow way. But Brahm points out that even before that we're all born and we're most vulnerable, most impressionable, way before, prior to ancestry, when we are emerging from that radical shift between relative non-being and unity with the mother, with the cosmos, to the sudden abrupt being and chaos that we come into. Yeah, and that seemed really fundamental in terms of our existential problem. As Ernest Becker puts it, it's not only this or that wound that's the problem, it's life that's the problem. And we all deal with that, I believe, at some level. Of course. Course Becker really predicated his work on Ronk, ronk and Kierkegaard. But I found so much richness in Ronk's notion there because it seemed to me it had so much to do with this primal terror of the unknown, the radically unknown. Yeah.
Kirk Schneider:We were just ejected into the world. Of course Heidegger talks about this as our thrownness toward death, thrownness into existence. Yeah, this is when we begin to discover differences. This is Knoxville's psychology. Discover differences, this is foxhole psychology of differences and of difference. Uh, differences in ourselves, from how we were in the womb and that passive, receptive mode, and suddenly we're dealing with all kinds of impulses and fears and feelings that we had before, differences between ourselves and our parents or those who receive us, the broader world and, of course, the whole question of how those differences are held, how they're worked with by the parental system and by the culture.
Kirk Schneider:And unfortunately I don't think we've been all that good at providing that holding environment you know, as Winnicott talks about, we haven't been that good at addressing inner lives and that really intimate core wound wound you could say yeah of, uh, grappling with the human condition.
Kirk Schneider:It's extremely existential in that sense, even though it sounds freudian in some ways. I mean, it is also to some, to some degree Freudian because it does relate to our roots and our backgrounds. But it's not just there. Ronk's point was much broader, that it's every moment, it's every day and throughout the life cycle that we're working with this problem of sort of being orphans in a vast unknown universe yeah, that's fascinating grapple with that.
Kirk Schneider:So the sense of helplessness and groundlessness is critical here yeah but we, how we negotiate that, how, how we met by the parental and cultural systems to work with that, to develop the presence yeah centeredness to work with it, the skills to work with it or not, and then how we carry that through in our unfolding lives.
Robbie Curtis:And I wonder if that seems so relevant right now in 2024.
Robbie Curtis:And a lot of us have looked towards the November elections and look at a lot of polarized minds and there's a real sense of the unknown of the other. It feels like that that they're going into their separate communities and they're they're not really talking to each other. Um, I was reading an article you said you wrote the other day and you said you you described it as a plea for civic engagement. Before it's too late, I wonder if you could, maybe could you talk a bit about what prompts you to write the article and maybe how it feeds into those ideas and what your major concerns are right now well, I I wrote that because I feel that we we're increasingly losing touch with those skills that could be so critical to helping us work with our terror of difference, of the other yeah and of that which is disconcerting, disorienting, uh, we're, it seems to me we're even more alienated from those capacities, uh, as we move toward this increasingly technocratic world where we're increasingly reliant on the machine model for living quick fix, instant result model for living, if you will.
Kirk Schneider:So where is there room within that to cultivate those kinds of skills, to become more present? By present I mean the holding and illuminating of that which is palpably significant within the self and between self and world. Yeah, that takes a good deal of time. You know, the quick fix model, the cell phones, the texting, etc. The fast paced world, pressure to put bread on the table too. I mean, economically we're also strained and that feeds this, this need for everything being quick and distracted, being distracted or, on the other hand, uh, being desperate for entertainment. And it allows us to zone out, you know, get away from presence, uh, as such presence to our machines, unfortunately too often. So I think we're moving more and more in that direction. I think we're also, at the same time, we are opening up to the complexity and diversity of contemporary life.
Kirk Schneider:Contemporary life, there are clearly movements toward embracing multiculturalism and the complexity of trying to live more openly and more consciously with each other, but also, I think, recognizing the problems of the past, the problems of tradition. In many ways, this is the whole movement toward postmodern, poststructuralist sensibility. You know where traditions are no longer working or they're being discredited. You know we're seeing old monuments being smashed yeah, literally, because so much of our past was hateful and oppressive and polarized and dehumanizing For other reasons, not because of the machine model so much, but I think we've always been preoccupied with a sort of the Holy Grail. You know the answer. We're looking for it in religion and ideology and so on. It's just because of our tech capacities. It's that much more seductive now that we gain this illusion of power and control. So, but there aren't these competing forces in our world and you're seeing that in our current elections here in the us, I think to a degree, those who want to go back and have that simple, traditional sort of approach to living as as they see it, where things are black and white and much more clear, good and the bad, et cetera. And then you have, you know, the liberals, many of the liberals, embracing the complexity, embracing a culture that's more fluid, et cetera. It's more fluid, etc.
Kirk Schneider:So, as a result of that part of the struggle, the part that is embracing more of the complexity of the postmodern, breaking out of convention and tradition, you have a backlash that reinforces, I believe, the oversimplified backward glance, if you will, the premodern. So the more we press toward the postmodern, the more, in many ways, there's a backlash toward the premodern and more of these primal kind of reactions against, you know, a quickly moving, quickly changing world, and some of that, I think, has kernels of truth and validity to it. It is attempting to say, hey, wait a minute, let's not get so hung up on our cell phones and our fast paced lifestyles. Hung up on our cell phones and our fast-paced lifestyles, let's let's get back to a little bit more of the contemplative, you know, world of the small town the farmer, um, uh, more, you know, plain, kind of earthy genuineness in some ways.
Kirk Schneider:But I see problems on both sides, major problems so. But the upshot is that, in both directions, home in on this problem of the quick fix, instant result for living in too many ways they're oversimplifying and, uh, losing, uh, the recognition that we are both. This is our huge problem. We are both extremely fragile, yeah, waif-like beings before the vastness of cosmic mystery and and at the same time, we are incredibly resilient, risk-taking, bold, curious, fascinated. Yeah.
Kirk Schneider:Who are participating and are open to participating in that which is greater than ourselves as part of our evolutionary movement, and if we're not holding these paradoxes, which we've rarely done throughout history anyway, and it's more and more difficult now because of those reasons I laid out, I think we're increasingly in trouble. I think that's why it's a race against time. That's why I believe the message that we absolutely have to address the underlying fears that are driving people toward the polarized mind and narrowing perception, if we're going to have a chance at substantive change yeah, substantive, uh abilities to coexist with one another. Not only coexist with one another, not only coexist with one another, but hopefully, ideally, to actually discover with one another, see life more as an adventure rather than a kind of routine or just a surface show.
Kirk Schneider:Or a lot of reactivity because we can't handle, we don't have the equipment to handle that in primal anxiety.
Robbie Curtis:Reactivity that leads to violence and dehumanization from what you've been from what you've been saying, it really it reminds me of kind of what emmanuel levin has right about, about welcoming the other and about being open to different perspectives and not having.
Robbie Curtis:You know, this is the truth, this is the way to go. But actually being able to hold different perspective is a real challenge for a lot of people. In our, as you say, a quick fix, oversimplification culture, they'll be able to say, well, I agree with you in lots of things, I don't agree with lots of things, and that's and that's okay, rather than putting people in boxes and that that just feels so crucial, given you know what, what there's, the selection that's looming and we a real, a plea, as you call it, for really coming together and realizing that fundamentally, you know we're worried about the same things in lots of ways and we're not not that different and, if we come down to it, a lot of our fears that will take different guises, but they're often about the same things, just in different ways yes, as this, uh, this terror of being helpless and groundless without mooring seems to me to be a cross-cultural, very commonly human experience.
Kirk Schneider:And of course there are different styles and ways of coming into the world with that sense of groundlessness and helplessness. And we we have, you know, in some ways a kind of rude, you know uh, sterile setting for that, with the doctors and the harsh lights, the noises of the hospital or whatever, and other people might do it in the fields or in more naturalistic settings. But I think it's hard to get around the idea that when we start off we're all pretty pretty darn fragile and vulnerable and shocked Shocked, the tunnel we come out of and come into, and then the world that we suddenly open up to the difference we come into. So that's another piece to this that I think, at least at deeper levels, could relate to all of us. And the question is how do we creatively address that? What modes do we use to help people find at least some tools to work with that basic crucible?
Robbie Curtis:I remember you've written about how polarisation can skew conservative and I wonder if there are maybe people or ideas from the left that are more conducive to that openness, to a saying of accepting people in their own circumstances and realising that people don't just get their opinions out of nowhere, that there are limitations and there are circumstances that cause these issues we're having that maybe the left maybe understands in a sense that can bring to these conversations.
Kirk Schneider:Yeah, my personal experience and the evidence indicates very strongly that conservative folks tend to identify more with authority and with a kind of more rigid framework for seeing the world more black and white good and bad and framework for seeing the world more black and white good and bad and you know are just generally less open in many ways than people you might call liberal.
Kirk Schneider:On the other hand, I think that the liberals can sometimes their dark side or shadow side, can be that they're too radically open in a way, or maybe naive about what it means to and I think Nietzsche touched on this too naive about what it means to break apart the traditional and the sort of safe and familiar and and come into the radically unknown and how that can lead to a kind of nihilism and a sort of helter skelter mentality that that maybe gains in breath but loses in depth in some ways, because who can handle that degree of openness and of almost aimlessness in terms of living?
Kirk Schneider:So there's these sort of two basic forces, but, yes, generally speaking, it's been a kind of liberal sensibility that has brought much of psychology and these bridge-building dialogues to the fore in recent years and that are attempting clarify how can we learn from each other, how can we live and let live, as opposed to drawing hard lines between each other. And I guess I would see this form of liberalism as moved toward what I call fluid centered, where there is a great deal of fluidity, there's a great deal of flexibility and evolving in the moment, openness to often uncomfortable ideas, feelings, conversations, but with a sensitive recognition or sensitivity to the problem of our fragility as well, that these things can't, and probably shouldn't happen overnight, it takes time, and that it often takes a structure to foster these kinds of transformations in people.
Kirk Schneider:Yeah, that's why the experiential democracy dialogue, which is a one-on-one approach to conflict mediation, does have a pretty strong structure to it as do bridge-building dialogue approaches like Braver Angels, because we found that these kinds of conversations can develop very quickly if they're just people just jump into them, yeah, without preparation, without a recognition of of again, how, how powerful those core wounds are, how far they go back and into our fundamental relationship to existence, to the groundlessness yeah, I was.
Robbie Curtis:I was going to ask about those dialogues, that they're a fascinating listen. Um, I suppose, just just building on what you've just said, are there particular things that you've kind of taken from those facilitations and things you've learned from that process of organizing and then facilitating those dialogues that are useful for us and, you know, if we are having our own dialogues with people we disagree with, that might be really useful.
Kirk Schneider:You're asking if I have examples.
Robbie Curtis:Yeah, I suppose just examples from those dialogues and just kind of what you've learned from that process and just, yeah, the process of your own, maybe your own dialogues with more conservative people as well.
Kirk Schneider:Yeah, definitely. First of all, I would reinforce the point that there's a parallel here between depth therapy, existential and experiential therapy, and these kinds of dialogues around the need for some degree of containment, structure and also recognition of how powerful self-protections are, and that's what I was getting at earlier, meaning we need to respect those needs for self-protection and this is what has worked for people for a long time, even though they're probably not working and they're breaking down in the present. But it's not a great idea to go in like a bulldozer and knock those down. So that as background.
Kirk Schneider:Yeah, I've had numerous meetings. In particular when I was a trained facilitator for Braver Angels, we had these alliance meetings, which are meetings within a community, so we'd meet at each other's homes. We'd meet at liberals, conservatives, and some of these folks were pretty hardcore in their stances. You know they identified with Trump or they identified with Biden or the progressive left in a very strong way, and it could be pretty tense, but the fact that people opened their homes to us was just something like beginning to open one psyche to another.
Kirk Schneider:Again, the parallel, the depth therapy, Sharing a meal together. So there's actually something palpable and tangible there that we're eating and eating is an intimate engagement to a degree. I won't get into all the gestalt business about ego, hunger and aggression, but I mean I do think there is a symbolic, powerful element to that. We're breathing on each other, we're opening our mouths to each other, we're digesting together, digesting together, and we're also putting our best foot forward. We're taking a risk. People might not like our food, people might not like the environment that we've created for them.
Kirk Schneider:So all these things are part of the soup, I would say, of these amazing encounters that we had at people's homes, and what I would find is that, through the dialogues and we would go through our structure we had in dealing with a particular issue of that day, what we would find, I would say significantly more often than not, is that by the end of our hour and a half or so, two hours together, we didn't usually make changes in terms of ideology. So we pretty much maintained our own stands with our ideology, and this is even over repeated times meeting with each other. We would do this over several years, but what did shift was a sense that I could connect with this person. You know, themes came out, kind of unexpected themes, maybe something about their house or their painting you noticed that you liked. They had a roommate that seemed very friendly that came out, or something about their backgrounds. Sometimes we would engage in personal anecdotes, stories.
Kirk Schneider:It was almost the incidentals that would lead to a humanizing of those contacts that were very unexpected, at least for me and I think a number of people that people from very different walks of life and different creeds could by the end maybe even hug each other you know that certainly happened or began to be friends with one another. Some of us became more friendly because we ran workshops together too. For the larger public right that was one of the uh outcomes of these alliance meetings is running workshops. Um, collaborating together brought this up as well. So so it's a lot around a shift in in many cases toward feeling like I could be a friend of this person or at the very least I can sit with them and be present to them right and and relate to some of the things they were talking about too, because that that was one of the questions or one of the exercises in the framework was are there any kernels of truth to what your partner believes?
Robbie Curtis:challenging for a lot of people. I I can imagine.
Kirk Schneider:Very, very but growthful. I think there's a really important sort of template for what could be, and that's the reason why I feel so strongly that these kinds of approaches need to be much more available and scale to help people address what I call emotionally impoverished relationships. That's at the bottom of a lot of what's driving the polarized mind could you talk more about those, those relationships?
Kirk Schneider:yeah, I. I, as I was speaking about before, it seems that there are fewer and fewer places where kids and adults can take the time to really work with, stay with work with, stay with that which is different, uncomfortable in themselves and between themselves and others, and that has a lot to do with our socioeconomic structure and systems. I was alluding to before the emphasis on the quick fix, instant result, the seduction of an oversimplified view of life, the seduction of staying with one self protection, when I never learned that that could be a problem until a crisis came up, and then they reacted like a loose cannon. So there's a profound lack of what I would call emotionally restorative relationships, of what I would call emotionally restorative relationships.
Speaker 4:In our country and I think in many societies like ours.
Kirk Schneider:by emotionally restorative relationships, I mean relationships where people feel heard and seen and they get at the root of their problems. And again you can see how parallel this is to what we might call existential depth psychotherapy. These sacred spaces, working spaces, sanctuaries, you know, non-dogmatic sanctuaries that enable people to go really deep and to connect that which really matters about their lives and the lives of those around them.
Robbie Curtis:And I believe that we should promote that on many levels, from child rearing to the educational system, to the work setting, to the spiritual and religious settings, to the spiritual and religious settings, to the diplomatic and legislative sense as well yeah the idea that's that keeps kind of coming around my head is is the idea of time, that it's such a privilege that we have an hour to talk about things and just to to really go deep into some of these topics, whereas from what, from when I read and people, I know that a lot of people that do live in impoverished circumstances just don't have time because they have to spend so much time cooking or doing so many different things that they just don't have the time to just decompress, relax, maybe invest energy into people because they've got so many other things to do, because life is so hard for particularly people in poverty but all sorts of marginalized communities across the globe, that that that is, that it's almost lucky us that we can really listen to people.
Robbie Curtis:But I wonder if that's as, as you know, we we help, we support people out of poverty and we you know, we we do our activism there that people have more time that they can actually listen to each other and listen to other points of view that they wouldn't have had.
Kirk Schneider:That's. That's why, robbie I, I strongly agree. We need a major change in our socio-economic system to provide precisely the kind of safety nets and supports that could help people have more of the time, to provide some kind of universal healthcare, provide much greater access to education and quality education, to provide people with job training, people with job training and just a basic level of living that I think some of the Nordic countries are pursuing, some kind of a social capitalistic culture that blends the best of both and gives people more time for the kind of thing we're talking about. On the other side, I believe that psychology and psychotherapy and those of us as healers really need to focus much more on addressing the social conditions and not just the individual, to to address these, these major problems. So that's why I call for a national core of mental health providers, national core of depth healers. That's really what I'm talking about.
Kirk Schneider:I say national core of mental health providers but I mean providers who are willing and able to to be available for in-depth, longer-term services to people throughout the land, throughout the world, to the degree possible, and especially in underserved areas. But that availability is huge. That's, I think, a big part of why many people, especially in underserved areas, do end up stuck in their emotionally impoverished relationships because the mental health services, especially the more in-depth ones, are just not there, and if they are there, they're way out of somebody's price range. So I think we need to find a way, maybe partly through volunteerism, partly through government subsidy, private donorship, to mobilize, as if this is a five-alarm fire, which I do believe it is. Yeah.
Kirk Schneider:And have something on par with the Peace Corps or the Marshall Plan to you To address the fundamental problem, I believe, that is driving the polarized mind and human destructiveness, which is that primal terror of that which is different, other and unknown we lack the equipment to work with, to work with. Obviously, this is a very long-term project, especially to address all those levels I talked about before, but we can certainly begin by rallying such a group. We're considering this kind of mobilization with the Corps of Depth Healers, which is a YouTube channel, started as a YouTube channel that I have started and now have collaborated with a graduate student named Tyler Gamlin who's helping me to develop it further. We are planning to begin with some initial meetings with like-minded folks who are doing this kind of bridge-building work to see how we might expand our network.
Robbie Curtis:And if people want us to get involved with that, would your website be the best place to go?
Kirk Schneider:It's the YouTube channel at this point.
Robbie Curtis:The YouTube channel yeah.
Kirk Schneider:I think that's a good start, and this is, as I say, just a beginning, so there isn't a lot of information about it yet, but the next couple of months we plan to bring this out on a smaller scale initially, and then more broadly. But we are building a website as well, which should be available soon and that will have updated information on the core of depth healers. Yeah, sounds very exciting um the existential movement is also certainly a part of this, yeah, movement toward applying these principles to social crises.
Kirk Schneider:So it's a very important piece here absolutely I'm.
Robbie Curtis:It's so encouraging to see what Emmy's doing in that field. I wonder if we could just kind of as a last topic. There's so much richness in what you shared, so I'm deeply grateful. We've kind of touched on it before, but if you were talking to Democrats or perhaps more progressive people that were listening to this podcast, that really struggle to understand the Republican point of view and why someone would vote for someone like Donald Trump, could you give us an account of maybe kind of touching on what you were saying about kind of going back and how we can empathize with and understand conservative voters right now?
Kirk Schneider:Well, I think people can try to work within a dialogue format such as the experiential democracy dialogue. Maybe ask a partner, maybe even a partner who's also skewed very much left, but are willing and interested in discovering more about their own primal reactions. Remember, this is a self-discovery process as well as a relational process. Yeah.
Kirk Schneider:And the two partners could role play, could attempt to role play, let's say, a person who identifies with Trump and go through the phases and each of the phases are designed to help people to see each other more as human beings rather than just labels or stereotypes, and then to see what emerges from that process after they go through the six phases. What have they learned about themselves? What have they learned about the other and the position of the other? What have they learned about the other and the position of the other? And does there seem to be any shift, any shift toward some common ground or maybe just less feeling of wanting to be violent person with that other or wanting to just dismiss them and, you know, put them in a put them in a really dehumanizing category, or just avoid thinking about that other side. I'm not saying that there isn't a value sometimes to some of these strategies. There is.
Kirk Schneider:But in the long run those strategies are not going to be addressing the problem. We'll be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as I'm fond of saying because I think it's so relevant to what is happening today. We're dealing so much with externals and even external change and maybe in a positive way, in certain ways, not helping people to address their inner experience or their whole body experience of their identification with a particular stance, then we're not providing the tools that I believe are necessary to longer-term change and into substantive change and substantive abilities to be with each other. We'll be skimming the surface with each other. Performative.
Kirk Schneider:they'll be much more performative than really feeling each other yeah and from there attempting to discover with one another and also form more informed boundaries with one.
Robbie Curtis:There's been a lot of research. I'm just thinking on relational depth and about that openness and collaboration of working together. That just seems impossible. Just seems impossible. If you're so polarized and you're you're skimming which is such a great image you're not, you're not going into anything deep and you're not open to learning from the other and that's just, yeah, fascinating. Um, you mentioned earlier about kind of you know, people have other strategies. I wonder if you could maybe just give us an insight into maybe your own experience of polarization if you ever, if you reflect on a time when you were particularly polarized on a particular issue and kind of your process to maybe overcome that and and what that was like as an experience for you great question.
Kirk Schneider:Uh, for sure I, I am and I have been very polarized. I am and I have been very polarized and that's a lot of where my own philosophy has come out of Having seen and being very disturbed by how rigid I could be, how narrow I could be. A lot of that began with early childhood trauma, which I've described in other places in depth. But I've learned very personally how trauma, how primal wound, primal terror of the unknown, of the groundless, of feeling helpless, can lead to all kinds of cover-ups From, you know, from dissociation to angry, to rageful outbursts. Rageful outbursts, destructive outbursts, to hateful approaches to myself, to others, to definite biases, prejudices that have been carried through the culture as well, are transmitted through generations of my own family that just get inflamed when I'm more scared. And I think this has been shown a lot in research too, especially with terror management theory and related research. You know when we're scared, you know when we're scared we're as far away from deliberation and presence as can be. We're very much in that fight and flight mode we're very much in.
Kirk Schneider:I'm very much in a defensive, reactive stance rather than responsive, and so I've tracked that, I've seen it, I've worked with it in my own psychotherapy very in depth. I feel that those have all been great gifts. I'm by no means resolved with it and it comes out every now and then when I throw something at the television or, you know, hit my hand on a hard wall or yell. I don't do it too often, I don't yell at people, but you know, just defensive reactions. And this, by the way, this can happen very much on an individual as well as social level.
Kirk Schneider:I mean, I believe the polarized mind is integral to what we call psychopathology. It's these defensive stances that we take as individuals, whether they're highly constrictive, depressed positions, withdrawn positions, reactive, inflammatory positions, you know identifying with drugs that bring us into those kinds of arousing, and you know grandiose kinds of sensibilities or certainly positions of narcissism, et cetera. It's again going back to that core problem. It's again going back to that core problem. Can you work with the fear? Can you stay with it? Can you take some time with it, often with a helpful witness, and come more from a place of connectedness, uh, reoccupation of one's embodiment, of the problem?
Kirk Schneider:yeah rather than fragmentary yeah, coming from a part.
Robbie Curtis:That feels like a really wonderful point. To end on that embodiedness, and a really positive point, I just want to say I'm so grateful. Thank you so much again for coming to talk to us at TASC. I found our discussion really enriching. I've learned so much from it and so much to take away. I'm sure all of our listeners will be feeling the same. Thanks so much, kirk.
Kirk Schneider:It's been wonderful thank you very much, robbie, for creating this opportunity you know, and for uh for fostering these kind of opportunities in our world today. You're you're one of the people who we need for that, thank you so much wonderful.
