How to Find Your True Purpose & Create Your Best Life | Dr. James Hollis

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  The Self is not the same as your sense of self

  Hollis, a Jungian analyst, uses the capital-S Self for the autonomous organism that digests food, heals and grows the way an acorn becomes an oak. It has two agendas: healing when injured and expressing itself. The ego is a small center of awareness built up from early experiences of "me" and "not me." Your sense of self is the fluid story you tell about who you are, shaped heavily by family and culture. A core message from his therapy work is "you are not what happened to you."

• 02

  Complexes temporarily take over the ego

  Following Jung, Hollis describes complexes as charged clusters of energy, or splinter personalities, that get triggered, take over conscious choice and run an old program. Jung's German term meant possession. No one wakes up planning to repeat decades-old self-defeating behavior, he says, but we do. The behavior is logical given its premise: a psychotic patient he saw breaking a window believed air was being pumped out of his locked room.

• 03

  What was once protective becomes constrictive

  Many patterns began as adaptations to childhood circumstances and were helpful then, but they restrict adult life. Hollis notes that sensitive children who tried to stabilize a troubled family often go into the helping professions: nursing, clergy, therapy. A child can't fix a parent, so the internalized mission never resolves.

• 04

  First half of life: what does the world want of me? Second half: what does the soul want?

  Early adulthood is spent building enough ego strength to meet parents', teachers', partners' and employers' expectations. Hollis semi-humorously calls the first half of life a huge and unavoidable mistake because it's lived reactively. The later question is what wants to come into the world through you. He stresses that this is not about age: it often arrives through a crisis in a marriage, career or mood.

• 05

  Psychopathology means the suffering of the soul

  Hollis reads the Greek literally. When we push our energy against what the psyche wants, the result over time is boredom, burnout and depression, often with self-medication. Meaningful work, by contrast, sustains people even through sacrifice. He treats depression as a signal with a task at the bottom of it rather than only something to get rid of.

• 06

  The shadow: what we disown in ourselves

  The shadow includes jealousy, envy, aggression and greed, and also group shadows such as national bloodlust or fashion conformity. It shows up when we live it out unconsciously, project it onto others (the speck in another's eye), or get swept up in crowds, where the larger the group, the lower each person's consciousness. Hollis quotes Terence: "nothing human is alien to me." He cites Jung's 1937 Yale lecture: owning your shadow is the best thing you can do for society, because it takes your unfinished business off your partner and children.

• 07

  The greatest burden a child bears is the unlived life of the parent

  Hollis quotes Jung: where parents are stuck, children will be stuck or spend their lives getting unstuck. The best gift is to model a life lived with as much courage and integrity as you can manage, which gives children permission to feel, desire and fight for what matters to them rather than living by conditional love.

• 08

  Relationships grow through the otherness of the other

  In his book The Eden Project, Hollis describes the childlike wish for a partner who will read our minds and meet our needs, a fantasy both people project. The real gift is the friction of encountering someone different. He cites Joseph Campbell: sacrificing to your partner breeds resentment, but sacrificing to the shared project of the relationship nourishes you.

• 09

  Men's lives are governed by roles and fear

  In Under Saturn's Shadow, Hollis argues that men's lives were as role-bound as women's. He describes a culture of competition, fear of being a loser and fear of the feminine, including the feminine within. Wherever you see macho behavior, he says, you're seeing fear-based overcompensation. When women's groups ask him to explain men, he tells them to imagine losing every confidant, being cut off from their intuition, and being valued only on strangers' standards of productivity.