Are You Holding Yourself Back? (Monthly Solo)

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In this month’s solo episode, I spend some time thinking about why psychiatrist Phil Stutz observed that I’m holding myself back. And why I have a hard time with the idea of marketing, or promoting, my own work. I also share more about Phil’s concept of Part X—which gives you problems that you don’t need, and solutions to those problems that only make it worse. I think about how my own Part X has changed; and why it’s currently trying to convince me that I’m too good, too righteous, too pure…to be fully engaged. And, how, when we put ourselves in motion—when we go for something, even if we get knocked down—it’s an opportunity to truly grow and learn (which Phil would call an opportunity to “meet the father”).

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True and False Magic

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

So for those of you who listened last week to my episode with Phil Stutz, you would've heard him tell me that I need to be 10% more evil. Now, Phil has said variations of this to me as we've worked on this book, and he's told me that I need to become more famous. He has told me that I need to be a bigger name dropper. He has told me that I need to definitely brag, and every time he tells me this, I laugh, obviously, and then I think about it because it makes me so uncomfortable that I recognize there's something there for me.

So for those who didn't listen to last week's episode and don't know who Phil Stutz is, very briefly, Phil is a psychiatrist. He's the co-author of The Tools and Coming Alive, which he wrote with Barry Michaels, who's another incredible therapist. And Phil is the subject of a Netflix documentary called Stutz. What makes Phil remarkable in my mind is that in some ways he's in his mid seventies now. He has Parkinson's, bad Parkinson's, which makes it difficult for him to sit and pound out work the way he might have earlier in his career, which is how I came to work with him on true and false magic, which comes out tomorrow. And we did this book together. And it's interesting. I'm usually buried in the acknowledgements, if at all. I don't really care about being acknowledged because, well, for a number of reasons, if I'm doing a memoir, it's someone's story.

It's really not mine. There's typically no ego involvement for me when I'm structuring someone else's work. This book was different, and when Phil said he wanted to give me a coauthor credit, I was very touched and moved. And it's interesting, this is the second time I've worked with a man. I wrote a book with a man. The book was never published, but this is the first time I've worked with a man that's interesting. But yeah, he really wanted it and it's really Phil's work. It's his model. It's the way that he understands the universe and the role of, he would call it God, but higher forces or that when you're in flow, when you put yourself in motion and feel like you are moving forward when there's wind at your back and doors are flying open and things are happening quite magically, that's really the experience that he is describing and what makes Phil's work so important and powerful.

He would laugh at this, but in some ways he's one of the forefathers of coaching because, and he writes about this and he talks about it in the Stutz documentary, but he was a psychiatrist who worked on Rikers Island. Sort of a long story. We tell it in the book, it's interesting. He had his own private practice in New York before moving to LA and then he came to be known as working with all these, a lot of actors, a lot of creative screenwriters, etcetera, and also titans of industry. He's very revered because he takes these big heady concepts, these things that are ephemeral and impossible to pin down these feelings, and then he translates them into very actionable tools that get you going, building your life force. It's so mundane, and yet so many of us want to skip it. But his point is first you have to build a relationship with your body.

And yes, that means getting up, walking around the block, then you have to build relationships with others. That means calling your mom, making a plan with a friend, responding to emails or texts, and then you build a relationship with yourself. But that's the drive shaft of the life force, which is your primary way of, you could call it getting in touch with your higher self, getting in touch with the universe, whatever it is. But that many of us just want to cognitize that process and think about these things rather than doing anything to achieve them. So Phil is known for these really practical tools. He's kind of the first coach, and just to sort of put a bow in the beginning of his practice as a psychiatrist talking to people, he just felt like he was giving people nothing. This is the gross metaphor, but it works.

It's like being called into a building, a plumber, and then leaving shit all over the floor. You open people up, sometimes you get them probing, and then you offer no solutions, no way forward, nothing. So Phil is really known for these tools and these incredible drawings, and he just hasn't been as prolific as theoretically he could be primarily because of his health and also because of his own part X. And this is what makes the book really interesting. And as we were landing the plane on it and getting it through and ready to be published, he was having a huge amount of anxiety about it, not feeling like it was done or that it was imperfect. And I was like, this is sort of the point. First of all, you're saying that you need to contend with the three domains for the rest of your life, which are uncertainty, pain, and the need for constant work.

So for you to say, I'm certain that this is comprehensive and complete and perfectly articulated, undermines your entire sense of the universe. And also we're writing this as an ongoing practice and protocol that you'll have to keep doing for the rest of your life, and you are not exempt or exonerated from that either. And so for this to be sort of finished when we're talking about things that are ineffable like God or we call it the why in the book, then wouldn't it be kind of a joke if you thought, oh, this is perfect, this is it, this is complete. That's said, I do think it's a pretty tight process slash protocol. So it's called True and False Magic. And working with Phil originally it was supposed to be just a fun little jaunt to do a workbook out of The Tools, and I thought it would be really fun to work with him.

And then I went over there and met with Phil and Sara y, who is his assistant, who is wonderful, and I can't wait to see what she does. And it was a fun project because Phil's in his mid seventies and I'm in my mid forties and sad is in her twenties. She's a single mom who was in the process of becoming a therapist when she got that chance to work with Phil. I'm not sure what she will ultimately do, but I'm so happy to have met her as well. And she played a really important role in this. And I don't know, there was something magical. The whole book rests on the premise of threes too. And so there was something really magical about the three of us pulling this together and in the most non-linear interesting process that I've ever been part of, and we did it over, I don't know, 20 sessions, 30 sessions. So I recognize that was a really rare privilege to get to spend time like that with Phil, which is why when Phil tells you to be 10% more evil, you listen in some way. And he's obviously been a close observer of mine.

The Part X is similar to shadow the Carl Young concept, although Phil would really talk about himself as a disciple of Rudolph Steiner and not young, he thinks Carl Jung is too tectonic, just makes me laugh. But Part X is this concept that's an avatar, and he would talk about how Part X is an avatar of impossibility, but I like his description of Part X versus shadow. And again, I'm writing a book about shadow because it gives your shadow or a version of it a shape, and it gives it a personality really and a name. And so you can start to distinguish yourself from it and understand, oh, that's my Part X, and I think there's a meta Part Xs a work in our culture, and then there's our individual Part Xs or the manifestation of Part X or that part of you. He would talk about Part X is giving you problems that you don't need to have and solutions to those problems that only make the problems worse.

So an easy example of that is that he would say, oh, let's say you have a little bit of anxiety. Your Part X would say, okay, this is a really big problem and your Part X would make you really anxious about that anxiety. And then would say, I know I have a solution. You should go and get a prescription for Xanax. And then suddenly 10 months later you're using a lot of Xanax, right? So Phil would say, that's your part X and it's this constant companion in our lives that takes shape. And he would say, part X is there's something inside you that doesn't want you to live, be happy or survive. It's working against you and you must be proactive in dealing with it. Let me read a little bit more. I think it's helpful. This is from true and false magic. There's a force in the universe, which I call Part X that does not want us to know who we are or what we are capable of.

Part X is a devious force that weakens us and makes it impossible to develop our potential. This force wants to take the free part of the human being, the part that's resourceful and can recover well and has a broader consciousness for its own uses. Part X doesn't want to kill that part of you. It wants to appropriate it. In the old days, they would call it eating someone's soul. So there's that part of you, and I'll give you an example of what Phil is talking about with me so that you can draw comparisons to your own life. But what Phil's point is that my Part X in this particular phase of my life, and I would say four years ago my Part X was convincing me, and this is in some ways part of On Our Best Behavior, but my Part X was convincing me that if everyone didn't like me or think that I were the kindest person walking Los Angeles, that I would die.

And that my primary job to ensure my survival was to make sure that everyone had a good experience of me. Which as I'm saying this sounds insane, but there was a part of me, particularly at that point in culture where I thought, if someone doesn't like me, they're going to destroy me. That's a dramatized version of it. But as we know, trying to control the way other people feel about you is really not a good use of your time, nor is it under your control. And yet that was an example of an earlier shadow encounter that I didn't really realize was running my life until I said it. And I was like, wow, that is a wild operating manual. But that would be an example of Part X, my Part X convincing me that that's how I needed to use my energy, and that's not a good use of energy.

So now as Phil was explaining to me, and some of this is probably off tape, my Part X is convincing me that I'm too good, too righteous, too pure, too above it too market my work or do anything to help this podcast or my newsletter or my books grow. I refuse to campaign on behalf of myself is really what it comes down to. And so I'm looking around and I'm seeing all of these other podcasts, books, et cetera, whatever, just have this incredible success become huge influence grow. And obviously I want that. I'm clearly jealous, envious, this goes back to my book, and yet I refuse to participate. I'll just stand on the sidelines and sort of criticize everyone else and judge everyone else and condemn them for their tactics. Phil was really calling me out on that and saying, that's your part X saying, oh, you're too good for this.

Oh, if this weren't supposed to happen, then sort of the divine would make it happen. And all that self-righteousness, which I didn't want to see in myself, but is absolutely true. And so he was saying to me, you're Part X. You're being lazy and you're exonerating yourself from fully engaging in the world by hanging in the corner of your bedroom, which is to be fair, friends where I like to be and where I want to do my podcast and I don't want to do it on HD video in a studio and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I kind of needed that rude awakening because also the podcast is at an inflection point where I'm no longer in a network, the show as of a week or so ago, week or two ago, and I'm out on my own, which in some ways is really thrilling.

And I've been wanting this. And it's also terrifying because I've mentioned before, my friend Emigre talks about this as an employee mentality, but I have an employee mentality. I love having a boss. I love looking to someone else to tell me what to do and to be the adult in the room so that I can just make content, just make the thing. I don't want to market the thing. And so being out on my own and fully responsible for all the costs of production, not just some of them, and for the success of this show, it's a totally different experience. And to be fair, I do need the show to grow. I do need to find a wider audience. I do need to make it a viable undertaking. I would here you can hear my Part X, I would do it for free. This is actually true.

This is how I do the primary research for my book and I love it. I do feel like this is my calling, interviewing people, maybe less so rambling into the mic by myself. But thanks for staying with me and reading, synthesizing, pulling apart the stories we tell about who we are, putting them back together with the help of my co-conspirators. And I'm being called to show up for myself in that way. I'm going to come back to this. I think that this is big for other creatives and I would widen and broaden creatives the way that Phil does. Anyone who's making anything in the world is creating. And Phil would say creativity is the actual antidote to evil. It's not goodness. It's staying in forward motion and creating not in a hustle culture way. He would say, God doesn't give a crap about what you create, doesn't care if you have a bestseller, doesn't care if you get a Gagosian show, doesn't care if you make a million dollars. God just cares that you are engaging fully in life and staying in motion and creating.

So this is maybe too personal of a story to tell, but what are we if we're not friends across the radio waves? But I was thinking about this too in the context of my oldest who just went through the middle school application process here in LA, which is my God feels like college so competitive. I heard a statistic that I don't know if this is true, but that only one in eight boys this year got a placement in a private school. And there are a lot of reasons for this. One, I think that at this particular age, there are more boys than girls. I don't have the census or the birth numbers, but also in general, public school tends to be a harder ride for these boys and less of a compelling choice than it is for girls. And there are some fantastic girl schools in LA that pull a bunch of girls out of the application mix.

And I think it can depend year to year. But this year is really hard for boys. And it was hard when they were young too, trying to get into elementary school. Max went to public school at the start and it was not the right choice for him. And it ended up being more traumatic. So going into middle school and our middle school, 1700 kids, it's really big school. I think it's a really highly rated school, but Max just felt like he couldn't do it. And we took a long shot approach and cast a really wide net and applied to schools that are outside of the desirable target for our west side cohort and skipped a lot of the really competitive schools. And even so we are in good shape, but it was not a slam dunk. And what's so interesting about the experience has been, and watching other parents reel is the natural, you go immediately below the line immediately and just blame and self blame and shame, but just the way that the language becomes we language at this age, these guys are 11, 12, and it becomes about we got waitlisted, we got rejected, which is interesting.

And to be fair, I wrote two to four original essays for all six schools and Max had to write original essays for each school. And my God, it's a scene. As one friend said, I feel like I'm finally in an Atlantic article about the meritocratic rat race and was, yes, it feels like a parody and it also feels so intensely real and everything hinges on it. And is your kid possibly going to be happy if they don't get their number one school? And yeah, we definitely didn't get that. It is what it is. And this is where my Part X comes in. I am not the most well connected person, certainly in Los Angeles, and I am certainly far from the wealthiest. So you are dealing with people who can cut substantial checks. I don't know how common that is, but it's definitely part of it.

Or when you go below the line, you go into that headspace certainly. And there's that part of me right now that's like, why didn't you campaign for your child? I know some people and who offered to write letters or try to put their fingers on the scales for us, and I demure because it didn't feel right. I couldn't tell them with authority that we would say yes. And I didn't want them to have any egg on their face because I feel like you have to play those cards carefully. And I wanted to see what would happen as authentically and organically as possible because one of the driving forces of this process was making sure that he ended up in a school that would see him and want him just as he is. And so it goes back to what I was saying about the podcast and anything that you create because you're working with these twin desires, which is see me make this successful, make this work, make this happen.

And I don't want anything to influence the perception of whether this acceptance letter or this success with a podcast book, et cetera, is gamed, campaigned for or manipulated because then that theoretically cheapens it. And so I guess what I'm trying to get at is this intense longing to be recognized and for things to quote unquote just happen as you want them to happen, but having what you want to happen align somehow with worth and value and just natural respect and recognition. And that's not the world I don't think that's the world that we live in right now. I think that we're living at least, or maybe we're seeing it's so transparent, we're coming to the end of it so that it can all explode. What we're seeing is not necessarily a meritocracy, not necessarily let the best woman or man win, but instead we're seeing algorithm hacking and who can cut the best promos and get the most followers, all these words, followers, influencers, brands.

They're so bad. They're so bad, right? When you actually think about it like you brand cattle, followers, influencers, they're all so bad, honestly. Again, this might be my part X, but yeah, that's I think what anise creator wants, right? You don't want to have to run the Oscar campaign. I heard that Anora, I think that film, I haven't seen it yet, that costs 6 million to make and they spent $18 million on the Oscar campaign. But you want to believe that the Oscars are immune from all outside influences, right? You want to take out all these variables, all of these extra forces that I think have been long convincing us that we live in some meritocracy or that the right thing always wins. And so you want to in some ways take them out so you can actually understand the quality of something rather than it's campaign.

I don't know, this is all stuff I'm probably quite redundantly trying to understand and work through to little or no avail. So you might not relate to exactly what I'm experiencing, which is, I don't know, probably the most LA media example, but I'm hoping that you can extrapolate and apply this to other parts of your life. The things that you insist should just happen and that maybe aren't happening that require you to take action, move forward. And again, this isn't about driving towards any specific outcome. Then you would be in the realm of certainty and everything about all of this is uncertain. The only certain thing is that it's uncertain. But I think Phil would say that you can't then exonerate yourself by not participating. I haven't asked him about the school situation by the way, and I'm not suggesting that he would say, not campaigning for your kid is not being evil enough. I stand by it. However, I dunno. These are the things I'm thinking through

Before I left Phil, we were talking a bit more and we were talking about the experiences in my life and generally the experiences that happen to all of us that feel like they force us off our path. And he has a name for this. It's called the Tense. We write about it in true and false magic, but these moments where you get knocked off. And then part of what building that life force that I mentioned, where you build your relationship to your body, your relationship to other people, your relationship to yourself, it's getting back on the path and making the decision to keep moving forward. So we were talking about this and he gave me a printout. I don't think he will mind me sharing it. This is not from the book, but this is about this concept of the father. And throughout our time together, he would talk to me about how I had met the father and would continue to meet the father.

And these are the events that happened in your life that you so desperately don't want. You would never choose them. And yet you look back at them as the most meaningful or the most significant departure points or gearshift moments in your life. And when you're in them, you hate them, but they can be mined. So I'm going to read to you about the father. The Father symbolizes the force that drives the universe. This force expresses itself in our lives as time. That's why he's called Father Time. The Father rules two areas of our lives, one discipline which is nothing more than the correct relationship to time. Our time is finite and discipline keeps us from wasting it. And two fate, all the events of our lives come to us within the flow of time ending with the final event of death, which is why Father time looks like the grim reaper.

In that sense, the Father causes everything that happens to us. Time is the absolute in our lives. So when a caveat there, Phil, that apparently time is not fundamental, but it's a concept for another podcast, but we are all equals in time's face. It passes at the same speed for everyone because he rules time. The father is the ultimate authority. There's an ought to being in his presence. Psychological problems, our addictions, egotism, attachment, superstitions, our ways of trying to avoid the powerlessness we feel on the face of the Father. The most extreme form of powerlessness is our fear of death. The secret of serenity and creative power is to have a good relationship to the Father. This means accepting your fate since the Father is the author of all that happens to you. This becomes difficult when bad things happen, especially things that feel undeserved or that are unexpected.

This becomes easier when you understand that the Father has a purpose in our lives to force us to grow up. Defeats, attacks, disappointments, even illnesses all have that purpose, although it can be hard to see it at the time. From the father's point of view, it's precisely the most difficult events that make us grow up the most. We all have a childish, primitive part of us called Part X lives in a dream world of its own illusions and desires. It wants immediate gratification, the sense it's always right and the glory of living in the adulation of everyone around it. Part X wants to be the most important thing in a universe that it controls besides being impossible. Its goals hurt us because they separate us from the forces in the universe that make us alive and let us create the adversity that the Father causes has the purpose of destroying Part X.

When we lose our sense of specialness, safety, importance and certainty, our Part X illusions are shattered if this doesn't kill us and usually it doesn't. We see we can live without these illusions. At that point we discover a more inner indestructible part of ourselves that's traditionally called the higher self. It's the source of real courage and of boundless creativity. This doesn't happen by itself. The fathers applies the adversity, but it's up to us how much we learn from it. It's just as easy to feel like a victim, which makes Part X stronger to the extent Part X is a child. Then the process of replacing it with a higher self. It's a process of growing up in a spiritual sense. In the ancient world, this process of growing up and getting adult powers was called initiation. Originally it was done at a specific time in a person's life through tribal rituals.

The rituals have the purpose of symbolically killing the ego of the child or adolescent, often done with physical markings on the body. Initiation was not open to everyone. In today's world, initiation is done by the father himself. The context isn't a tribal ritual, it's the events of your life as they unfold. Anyone is eligible as long as they learn to see a higher meaning behind the adversity in their life. So I would say thinking about the Father in the context of what I'm talking about and Phil telling me to be 10% more evil. I think what his saying too is that by holding myself back, by refusing to play the game, I'm cheating myself of opportunities to meet the father. And that holding back in any way is a form of laziness or self absolution. And that just making my podcast episodes and putting them out there and just hoping is not actually engaging in any real way with life.

I don't know what this means. As I think about the future of the show and what I want, this isn't crisis point or anything, but it is a forcing mechanism if I choose to let it be. And I think that that's maybe what I'm being called to do, which is, okay, what am I up to here? What do I want that's outside of hanging out in the corner of my bedroom, but what does that really look like? Is what I want personally different than what I want? Collectively are the two at odds And they might be, and I might need to accept something different for myself. I don't know, honestly, maybe you guys have answers or thoughts for me. And I also, I don't want to sound like a delusional freak that thinks, oh, I can, again, I think this is bigger than me in terms of, oh, just watching our collective and feeling like everything is manipulated and everything is being hacked and everything is out of control and chaotic.

And I'm not suggesting that I'm the antidote to that or that more listeners on this show is the antidote to that. Think I'm just speaking with a bunch of people who are like, what is happening and how did we get to this point where only the most outrageous, the most clickbait, the most fear-based content works. I was looking at, I won't say the podcast, big podcast, but we'd had the same guest and I was watching the way that he was promoting the episode and it was like a CSI episode. This is with a woman who is sort of a foremost researcher in menopause and he cut it like it could have been on Law & Order SVU. And I was like, is that what's required? And maybe that is, I don't know. And can I live with myself if I feel like I am manipulating my audience?

And is that the antidote? But I also want to acknowledge what Phil is saying, which is don't go self-righteous and smug and holding your nose at everyone else. It's a real conundrum. Maybe not that interesting. But I will say, I think that for anyone who's thinking about creating something, putting themselves out there and then expecting it to happen, it doesn't seem to work like that anymore. And I completely understand the impulse of wanting to be recognized, that there's some purity in what you're creating and that it should naturally work. And I also want that to be the world. It's not the world. And so I think you have to take an appropriate response. And yet I want the exemption too. I want to be exonerated from that. And I want it to be like, no, you're special. You're special. We see you. You don't have to play this game.

I want to leave you guys with something more satisfying than that. But I guess that's sort of the point. This is an endless, endless process. None of us are exempt, none of us are exonerated. The only way to go back to what Phil gave me in this tool, the father and this concept, the secret of serenity and creative power is to have a good relationship to the father. This means accepting your fate since the father is the author of all that happens to you. So go for the big fate. I guess that would be my parting advice. Put yourself in motion, go for it. Get knocked down. Those are the opportunities to learn and grow and don't hold back. And I think I need to take my own goddamn advice. Alright, friends, I'll see you next time.

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