Transcription of Dr. Stephen Aronson for the show Viewpoint, #96
Dr. Lisa: There are lots of different ways to see the world and there are people who spend their time helping us see the world in different ways. One of these people is Dr. Stephen Aronson who is a psychotherapist with Mental Health Associates of Maine which is right here in Portland. Dr. Aronson has a very eclectic background and training and has been in practice since 1971, so we’re pretty privileged to have you here in the studio today to talk to us about the way that we see the world and the way that we can enrich our experience in the world by trying to take a different view. Thank you for coming in.
Stephen A: You’re welcome. Thank you for the invitation.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you decide to become a psychotherapist?
Stephen A: Well I think it came naturally. When I was a young person at school all my friends seemed comfortable talking to me. I didn’t think about it at that time, but from an early age was always interested in mystery, in discovering what lay behind apparent reality. The greatest mystery of all seemed to be consciousness.
I think without knowing it moved me in that direction and out of a number of fields that I could have enjoyed, psychology seemed to give me the greatest flexibility.
Dr. Lisa: When you say that you had an interest in consciousness, was this something that developed while you were in school or is this something that you had a sense of before you even began getting an education?
Stephen A: What came first was the attraction to mystery. It always seemed to me that there was more to life than the material world around me. There must be something that lay behind this, and something that was behind us. I was attracted to all the things young people were attracted to in that situation, spent some time looking at extrasensory perception and flying saucers and ghosts and lost civilizations. As I matured, it moved towards the mystery of how do we know anything? What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of existence? There has to be something behind it.
I could see that the tree was inherent in the seed. The entire pattern for the tree was in the seed. Just add water, dirt, and sunlight and it exfoliates out of that tiny little seed. It seemed to me that we exfoliate from somewhere into our life and into our bodies and we’re motivated to do what we do and what we don’t do by patterns within us, much of which we don’t know anything about.
I could see within myself that there were hidden patterns. The question of who am I and what is my purpose here? What kind of responsibility do I have for being alive? Gradually became more predominant and as I become an adult it could become more articulated that way. Looking back I see a trail of bread crumbs that led me to this place.
Dr. Lisa: Did you start having these questions about who you were and what there was behind, what was behind, what was behind, what was behind, did you start having questions when you were younger?
Stephen A: Yes, I had these questions when I was a boy.
Dr. Lisa: How did that feel to be living in a world where a lot of people didn’t really have those types of questions?
Stephen A: The same way it feels now. As most people tell me.
Dr. Lisa: Are you any closer to the answers?
Stephen A: I am for myself, or at least I have sufficient additional meaning to keep me happily on the search without being frustrated.
Dr. Lisa: You do have this very eclectic background. Cognitive, behavioral, Ionian, transpersonal, and many other things I think that you have got an education in and an experience with. How has this all lent to a greater understanding within yourself of the bigger questions and the bigger answers, perhaps?
Stephen A: Well, one analogy that comes to mind is the Hubble telescope. There’s many different instruments in it, so if you look at the universe just in terms of visible light you get one picture. If you add infrared you get another. Ultraviolet you get another. Radio waves you get another, and the composite begins to build and build and deepen and deepen. Soon you see more and more what is there that you couldn’t see without the extra instrumentation.
I think we are just like that. We need to learn to look at ourselves. When Socrates, whoever his teacher was, advised to know thyself. I understand he didn’t come up with that, but he just got the credit. How do you know yourself? Our senses direct us into the world outside of us. Where life seems to be and all activity seems to be and where we’re going to find fame, wealth, and happiness. Yet all our experiences of life are inside of us. They’re in our mind, in our heart, in our sensations.
We seem to live outside but we don’t really. We live inside and we have all these impressions and vibrations coming from the outside through our senses to tell us what the world is around us, but our hopes, our dreams, our expectations, our thoughts, our feelings, our aspirations, the nasty parts of us, the saintly parts of us, that’s all inside. That’s all invisible and that’s who we are.
To know yourself you have to look at that. You have to … our senses help us observe outside in the world, but to know yourself you have to observe yourself and there are no sense organs that we know about for seeing inside and yet we do. We can see our thoughts. We can see our feelings. We see our contradictions, our hopes and our fears if we’re looking. If we know how to look.
All of these experiences helped me develop a variety of instruments, you might say, or attitudes or ways of paying attention inside my heart and my mind and my body looking into my past and the interpretation I made of it, which has changed over the years. You can change your past. It’s just a story. My aspirations and fears about the future which were just fantasies and have no reality. All of that has helped me develop the multi-layered understanding of this pattern that I know as Steve, inside this body I was born into. That gives me a very different sense of myself and my direction with what seems to be the world around me because it’s really experienced only in the world within me. In each of us there’s a world onto ourselves.
Dr. Lisa: That sort of groundlessness is a challenging thing for, I believe, this culture probably many cultures where we are always striving to achieve some sort of solidity. We’re always trying to find some sort of sense of security of who we are and identifying things about ourselves that can help us create more, I guess validity is the word.
Stephen A: Right.
Dr. Lisa: How do you work with this groundlessness in yourself and in people who come to see you in your practice?
Stephen A: Paradoxically it turns out not to feel groundless. It feels much more solid and it’s the outside world that seems much more impermanent. You get a house, you lose a house. You get a car, you lose the car. You’re young, then you’re old. You have a job, then you don’t have the job. People like you, then you don’t like you. What is permanent outside? Whatever I think outside is my interpretation of it. If I change my mind about something, it changes. Whatever it is didn’t change, but my experience of it changed because I now have a different attitude.
What the world out there is depends on what I think it is and feel it is. If I come to see that how I’ve come to those conclusions maybe might have been accurate at one time, but isn’t now or might be modified by a different perspective, or maybe it was because I got conditioned to think of certain things in a particular way and now I don’t. My world changes, but it changes because I’ve changed as a person in my heart, and mind, and my attitudes.
From the ordinary outside viewpoint, where everything is material and has a solidity for our senses. It seems groundless, but from the inside there’s now a sense of solidity about myself that was never there before.
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that we know is a side effect of some of these medications which we call psychotropic medications, is an interesting disruption of the dream state. The dream state has been something that I know Young and Freud and others have used for a while to actually examine our lives and bigger patterns and maybe even patterns of things that we don’t remember.
When we use medication that disrupts the dream state, are we somehow disrupting these clues that we could be using to figure out what’s going on in our lives?
Stephen A: I once read a quote attributed to some rabbi who said that an unexamined dream is like an unopened letter from God. Of course we don’t pay much attention to dreams anyway, most of us. Most therapists do not use dream work. The question is really out of my field I just know what I’ve read about levels of sleep dreams and that insufficient REM sleep is not so good.
To the degree to which it’s disrupted, it’s probably not helpful but most people don’t pay attention to their dreams anyway. If they have one once in a while one wouldn’t know how to interpret it.
Dr. Lisa: Well, and we’ve become a sleepless nation regardless of use of psychotropics. I mean we’ve become a nation that doesn’t necessarily go to bed on time, doesn’t have very good sleep throughout the night. Given this possibility that dreams are an unopened gift from God, if we’re not sleeping well enough to dream then we actually can’t receive this gift.
Stephen A: One would presume that would follow. I think in many ways one of the downsides of our technology is that we can change our natural rhythms. We don’t have to go to sleep when the body wants to.
Dr. Lisa: What about some of these very basic human instincts that have somehow become mislabeled as bad or evil. On this show we don’t talk a lot about sex, but that’s a very primal drive. That is something that we need for procreation and yet it’s become associated in most situations with something bad or evil and it does become something that people want to not think about and not deal with because there’s so much shame associated with it. Do you think that this is one of the reasons why people are perhaps not as connected to one another as they could be because of shame around things like this very basic human connection?
Stephen A: That’s an interesting idea. It certainly is another way that we artificially, through imagination, distort natural processes. How can we imagine the kind of creative energy inside of biological material that can create a human being? We all carry this energy somehow within us. We don’t know how it got there. We have no idea what it is because we don’t know what we are or how we got here either. Under certain conditions it produces another human being, as I said, sort of exfoliates out of somewhere into the fetus and then out of the womb and into the world and begins to grow and grow and just like a tree. Then it does stuff and then after a while it gets old and shrinks and the body dies. Tremendous mystery.
It appears that humans have more pleasure from the sexual act than animals, so when we’re looking for stimulation to distract us that’s a very powerful one. Plus, at certain points in life it is an overpowering drive. Surely for men and surely for women when they’re of the child bearing age. If it hasn’t been damaged emotionally or mentally by shame messages, or guilt messages, or sin messages, or abuse, emotional or physical or sexual, then it has a natural flow, or ought to.
In those cases where those are the factors that come into play and unfortunately for large numbers of us they are there. Then it gets very confusing. As I said earlier, reality is what I think it is, so if I think that breathing is bad I’ll feel bad about breathing. If I think that sexual energy is bad then I’ll feel bad about experiencing it, but good luck. You’re not going to stop breathing and you can’t stop experiencing sexual energy. It’s got to go someplace and if doesn’t find an appropriate expression it’ll find an inappropriate expression. If it doesn’t find an external expression then it’ll make us sick inside. I shouldn’t be having these feelings. Well, you’ve got a body. You’re programmed to have these feelings at certain points. What are you going to do about it?
It’s very unfortunate that in some cultures and in this one in particular, we’re so hypocritical and dualistic about it. At the same time the traditional messages are restrain yourself. The popular culture is pouring out messages to the opposite. Hypersexualizing everything, and then surprised that we have difficulties with this. On the other hand, it’s a very mysterious and amazing process and it releases such potent emotional energies and psychological energies that if appropriately contained within an appropriate relationship it can produce a tremendous health and bonding.
It’s often misused for power. It’s exploited for various things because, I guess, like money, people want it. There’s nothing wrong with money. It depends on how it’s used. Sex is a natural process. It depends on how it’s used.
Dr. Lisa: When these feelings get maybe have, I don’t want to say dysfunctional exactly, but perhaps there are some dysfunctional associations of sexual feelings. Can people tend to project things onto other people outside of themselves because they’re so uncomfortable with whatever it is they’re feeling inside, but they just want to get rid of it? They’ll look at somebody outside of themselves and they’ll start to assign some sort of blame or some sort of story to somebody else when it comes to sex.
Stephen A: I would say yes it’s a projection whether it has to do with sex or anything else. We see all sorts of behaviors and attitudes around us all the time that are different from our own, but we don’t personally get offended and emotionally charged up and judgmental or want to do something about all of them. There only certain of them.
The pattern for me is the different for the pattern for you. Why is that? Because it’s a projection of the pattern within me. Why do certain people volunteer to be censors? None of you should look at that stuff. I’ll take the burden on myself. Really, well thank you but why are you doing that? Looking at the pattern of one’s judgments and prejudices and also attractions, it is a way of reading an x-ray of parts of your inner world on the outside screen. For instance on the positive side, why do we have certain heroes and not others? Why are your heroes different than mine? Because I see in that person or in that story something that resonates with me. I would like to be that. Why? Because I’m already programmed to be something like that, and I’m not that yet but that’s in the direction of what I’d like to be. Otherwise, why would I have that attraction?
Same way if there’s something particularly personally repellent to me and I’m really going to take a public stand. Now, I’m not talking about cruelty. I’m just talking about behaviors that don’t harm people. I don’t like the way that person lives. I don’t like their politics. Well, what’s it to you? All right so you don’t like it. In any given moment we have all sorts of preferences. We have intellectual preferences, emotional preferences, physical comfort preferences. No moment gives us gratification over all those preferences. Some come closer, then we want to hold on to them. Then they go and we think they’ve been stolen.
Usually we never get everything we want in a given moment, but it’s not the fact that we don’t get our preferences that creates a loss of energy or an explosion. It’s my objection to the fact that I’m not getting the moment that I expected. What’s going on here? I expect it. I want it. There’s something wrong. I’m not getting it. Return this moment to the sender, to the factory. Give me another one.
Again, maybe this comes back to the friction we were talking about earlier. That the inability to tolerate the delay of gratification, the inability to actually see that payment is necessary first if you want something of value. They can’t just charge it. I mean you can if it’s a material thing, but not if it has to do with learning something or changing your feelings or developing a relationship, anything of a nonmaterial nature. You can’t have it when you want it. You got to earn it.
You want to learn Chinese? Study for 10 years. You want to learn medicine? Study for at least seven years. You want to learn anything you really got to work at it. If you want to become a more brave person or more tolerant person, you got to work at that. You have to see the places you’re not brave and not tolerant and figure out what you’re going to do about that. It takes time.
This builds up friction. If I see the discrepancy between who I really am at the moment and how I’d like to be, that’s uncomfortable. Now that could either be an inspiration to just go back to work or it could make me get angry at someone for depriving me, or if I can make them look smaller, then the difference isn’t so bad and I can feel better, or I can just lie to myself rather than face that tension.
Dr. Lisa: What about the idea of a group projection where an event happens and people chose to see it a certain way and yet it’s really not that way, it’s some other way and eventually it could be proven that they were incorrect? Why would an entire group of people see an event one way?
Stephen A: They share a mindset. Groups are like psychic organisms in a way. People who think the same way will just naturally seek each other out and mostly for benign reasons, sometimes creative reasons. Like attracts like and we tend generally to gather with people who we feel are like us. If I have a particular kind of prejudice I may gradually find myself surrounded by people who share that because people who don’t make me uncomfortable. I exclude them or they exclude me, so after a while there’s a whole group of us. We’re a certain kind of mind set and if you get someone in that group with charisma who can act as leader, and most people are followers. Then they will take there issue and project it.
It’s the same as when I was talking about earlier. The world is what I think it is. If I believe X, Y, or Z about a certain person or group, I believe it. I can find others who believe the same thing. The more one has invested what self-image in particular belief or system or point of view, to back down means a diminishment of myself because I think I’m my image and that my image gets stuck to where I live, my bank account, my car, who my friends are, and my belief system. Which policies I go along with, which political party I belong to, and that becomes me.
Anyone who doesn’t agree with any of those things is directly attacking me. I’m not going to tolerate that. Nor will I admit I’m wrong. That would mean I would mean I’d have to change my image of myself. That’s too painful. I’ve worked too long to build it up.
Dr. Lisa: In the situation of people who are say falsely accused of a crime, you don’t necessarily have an entire group of people who were being led by somebody charismatic to convince the group that this crime has occurred or not occurred. Sometimes you have people with very disparate viewpoints and they all somehow believe the same thing until eventually, they are disproven. Why does that sort of thing happen? If you don’t have one unifying person or you don’t have a group of people who all feel the same way.
Stephen A: Well that’s happened to me because the evidence I was looking at looked persuasive. Maybe later I find out there was more evidence that wasn’t presented, or there’s another point of view I didn’t see. Maybe I realize that I’ve done something similar, even in secret and if I’m honest with myself I can see I’m not a bad person, but I see how I got into that pickle so maybe that could happen to somebody else too. Who am I to pick up the first stone?
We’re all just struggling along here trying to figure things out. Usually the more certain I am the more wrong I prove to be later because things are usually more complex than that.
Dr. Lisa: What if you’re the person who’s falsely accused?
Stephen A: Well that’s a real growing experience, but we’ve all experienced that. At some point in our life somebody important or several people important have made a judgment about us that wasn’t fair. I didn’t do it. Why won’t you listen to me? Yeah, it doesn’t feel good, but I think it happens to everyone. If we can learn how to use uncomfortable experiences to be less identified with our image, less concerned with what people think, and also recognize that we make the same mistakes. It’s hard to be tolerant of someone who’s misjudging me, but if I’m honest I’ve misjudged people. I didn’t do so with bad intentions. I just got it wrong. Sometimes they’ll come around and apologize. Sometimes they don’t. That’s life.
Somebody said to me recently that they realized that resentment was the cup of poison that they drink everyday thinking it’s going to make them better.
Dr. Lisa: In the final analysis I guess, reality is fairly subjective and we’re all walking around with our own different versions of reality and we’re all trying to understand where we’ve come from, where we’re going, where we are right now. These intersecting realities, this intersecting sort of groundlessness that could possibly lead to groundedness. Perhaps it can just help us to be a little bit more compassionate and less judgmental towards everyone else. If we know that there is this subjectivity that occurs.
Stephen A: Wouldn’t that make a better world?
Dr. Lisa: It would make a better world, yes. Dr. Aronson it’s been a pleasure to have this conversation with you. How can people find out about Mental Health Associates of Maine or the work that you’re doing?
Stephen A: They can look at the website Mental Health Associates of Maine here in Portland. Just Google it. Their phone number is 773-2828, and I believe an operator is standing by.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Dr. Stephen Aronson who is a psychotherapist with Mental Health Associates of Maine. Thank you for helping us take a different view of the world and ourselves for this time period that you and I have been talking. Hopefully people will go out into the world and continue to try to take a different view.
Stephen A: Thank you. It’s been an interesting experience. Nice talking to you.