Deborah Maldonado (3:10)

And I'd love to read a quote from Jung if you want that. An understanding that remains purely intellectual does not touch the deeper layers of the psyche. Collected works volume.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (3:21)

That's right. It doesn't go deep enough. Now, there are different models, of course, just to be fair. And some models, they don't worry too much about the unconscious mind. They say, you know, why? Let's just focus on what we know and how we can understand things and make those changes. And if it works for you and you, you're saying, yeah, that's the way I've been working and it's working for me, of course. Continue. Do not, you know, you know, do not kind of be discouraged by our, by our talk. We're simply talking about a Jungian model, which is based on depth psychology, would see insight simply as the surface. Right. That we're thinking through things. And in our. And the Jungian model, the waking state is governed by the ego. So the ego has a lot to say about our situation. It's more than happy to tell us where we're off and where we went wrong and where people failed us and all that. I mean, the ego loves the narratives, right? Yeah, it'll say, yeah, let's talk about that. But it has a lot of defense mechanism. And one of its defense mechanisms is to project and to kind of put the blame externally away from yourself, away from itself, essentially, because it is the center of our conscious life.

Deborah Maldonado (4:41)

Is it like a self preservation? It's a self preservation. So the stories that'll feed you and the insights will feed you is you're like that because that person was bad, but you're good and you're the victim of this crazy thing. And, you know, I'm not saying that most people, you know, had, had, you know, terrible times in their life, but it tends to want to protect you from that self examination and taking responsibility in some way.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (5:07)

Yeah, yeah, that's right. It has a very primal, primitive almost mission to defend itself and protect itself. Very, very biological, very primal. That's why we' such survivors as human beings is why they. There's 8 billion of us on the planet and growing because we're really good at protecting ourselves, making sure we survive. That's the ego. So in working, let's say, with self inquiry, where we're, we're actually asking questions about our life and the way it played out and really examining those things. If we stop at that ego level, most of the time it will be based on projection. That it will. And rational too.

Deborah Maldonado (5:53)

It's like so rational, right?

Dr. Rob Maldonado (5:55)

Rational, yeah. That it wasn't my fault. It'll find a way to make it that you were a victim. Somebody did this to you, somebody played you bad. If things had been different, you would have done great. Those kind of things. Which is, again, we see that it might help the individual. Of course, often the, you know, people that get the label and they say, oh, you know, my therapist or my doctor told me this, had ADHD or something like this. Now they say, now I understand why my life is the way it is. Nothing wrong with that. Of course, those are useful. But if you want to do real work, if you want real transformation, you're going to have to go beyond that ego defense layer of the psyche.

Deborah Maldonado (6:42)

And so for me, like, understanding how the child, like most of our patterns were stored before we were nine. Very. Across all disciplines, a lot of people agree, even neuroscience agrees with that. A lot of our, you know, condition patterns, there's like a, you know, growth spurt in our brain. But when we're children, when we're really little, we don't have like that rational, even intellectual understanding. So we're purely, and Jung says this, we're, we're purely emotional. And so we're feeling and being in the space and the environment we're at. And, and basically we all know, emotional, sorry, irrational. So we're really irrational beings just trying to survive. And so we start wiring ourselves to survive, but it's from an emotional state. And Rob always says the emotion really locks you into your patterns and the emotion is really what's going to set you free. So if you're just working on that intellectual level, the cognitive level, you're not really dealing with the emotional level, which is unconscious. You can feel emotions consciously, but the root of that emotion is unconscious.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (7:46)

Yeah, very unconscious. It's deeper in the psyche. Yeah. If we look at early childhood experiences. Let's simplify it, right? If you do something that pleases the parents, you get rewarded by that. You're a good girl, you're a good boy, by kind of attitude or just the feeling, Right. That that's what really feeds you. So we can think of the reward as an emotional reward and vice versa. If, if you do something Wrong, bad. There's tension or punishment or withholding of love and affection. That is an emotional experience as well. But it's, it's to reduce the behavior, right, to punish you in a way. And so we're conditioned early on emotionally, not intellectually, not.

Deborah Maldonado (8:35)

And don't we can make connections that aren't really rational connections when we're kids too?

Dr. Rob Maldonado (8:40)

What do you mean?

Deborah Maldonado (8:41)

Well, this is a really great example. I was, I remember when I was little I used to go into my dad's room and parents room, they were in bed together and I was like three or four and I would just always be like so happy, go lucky and go in. And I teased my father about his nose and I called him big nose. It's just a memory I remember and he was just kind of laughing along with me and I'm like, you're a big nose. And they're just being funny. And then later on that day, I got in trouble for something and I thought, see, don't be careful what you say. You teased him, you disappointed him and now you're in trouble. And it's because I called him, I was teasing him and being playful and then I started to withdraw and so the child made this all up. And then later in life I asked my mom, I'm like, do you remember that day? And she said, she said you were always climbing on stuff and freaking him out. Like I was always climbing at that age, like going on the banister and hanging and you know, we had like a lot multi stories so always putting myself in danger and my father was always like, you know, pulling me down. And so it had nothing to do with each other. But as a child I connected it to this very close, fun relationship. And then something broke and so I must have done something wrong. And so it's very irrational. And then throughout my life that I'm sure I have some template around not hurting people or saying the wrong thing. Well, I know I do. So it's just really from that innocent day, the memory I remember, but just connecting those two also understanding that connection doesn't change anything. I have to really work with that feeling of what, what is that feeling I had of disappointment being a disappointment or breaking the rules or being in trouble. Like what does that feel like? And oh, I could feel it in my body right now just talking about it. So we have to like examine that deeper, deeper aspect, the emotional aspect.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (10:28)

Yeah, that's a good point that you make of. Because let's say in working with that, that memory, right? And that Experience it helps to have insight first, but not to stop there. Right. Because if you have insight and you think, well, okay, that kind of fixes it because I understand where my predilection to please people comes from. That is not going to change the pleasing pattern. It's simply going to change the way you see it, the way you understand it. That's insight.

Deborah Maldonado (11:00)

And you could probably think, well, I'll just go and act like I don't care what people think and have that. A lot of people put being unattached and, and again, intellectual operating and changing behavior to break the pattern is not. I mean sometimes it does a little bit, but it doesn't really get to the root.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (11:18)

Yeah. I see it as distinctly different than learning because learning operates on the similar principles. Right. That you can observe somebody being punished, for example, for something and you, you don't have to repeat that error yourself. You can learn from observation as a kid that if somebody leaves the toys out and somebody trips over the toys, you're going to get punished. So I won't do that. You learn it simply by social observation. But the emotional component, often, especially in when we're children, it doesn't have kind of a cognitive piece, kind of an intellectual understanding to it. Like you said, we make connections with things that don't really have a connection. You know, you were climbing up on the banister and you got spanked and, and then you used, you thought, oh, it's because I teased my father, something like that. Right. And that connection remains in the mind then as that's the cause. That's the cause of it.

Deborah Maldonado (12:18)

Like intimacy is dangerous because something might say, don't say. You have to be careful what you say and don't get too close.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (12:26)

Yes.

Deborah Maldonado (12:27)

Yeah. Like don't trust. Right. That, that intimacy. So yeah, that was my love life in general for so many years.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (12:34)

So in depth psychology, because the aim is, is not simply to change the behavior, it's to integrate the psyche.

Deborah Maldonado (12:43)

Yeah.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (12:44)

That's the ultimate goal in, in, in, in depth psychology. So it's not merely to, to have the individual experience a change in the response to a certain situation. Let's say to stop being over pleasing with other people. That's the aim in some models. And that's all right. Of course, like I say, that helps you get by and change your patterns. Great. But in depth psychology, the aim is to integrate the psyche, meaning to where you really have a cons in situations so that you're not simply trying to fix the over pleasing or is that bad thing yeah. And say I'm gonna substitute it with standing my ground and setting boundaries.

Deborah Maldonado (13:30)

Okay, so you're saying the learning. I just want to say this is really important, the learning. I never heard you say this before, but I love this concept that many of us and I've, you know, been doing before. I had a coach, I did my own self help, which took me in circles for many years. I was trying to learn a new way to be. And so I think we're, we're taught this. I think that's part of our first part of life. We're taught, let's I learned from my mistakes and then I'm going to try a different behavior and then I'll be better. And that means like change my attitude or use different communication styles or. I remember in the, when I first got into like looking at dating advice, people don't do this on a date and don't do that. And if you learn to act a certain way, you know, and, and not go look for the red flags and all those things, you can learn to change your behavior. But it's not a transformation because it's just having the ego learn. Like the ego's just learning better ways to cope and manage their life. Like ego management.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (14:29)

That's a good way to see it. Yeah, yeah, you're, you're, you're adding to the arsenal of ego defenses and acquiring one more and saying, I'm gonna change my routine and act more self assertive or anything like that, or be careful.

Deborah Maldonado (14:46)

More of what, how much I reveal about myself so people don't hurt me and protect myself. And yeah, a lot of that ego's what seems like insight and rational plan of action is the ego's like, okay, we're gonna keep her or him in their little comfort zone still.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (15:03)

Yeah. So in a way, you know, in Jung's work there's a period of deconstructing the ego. And we can think of deconstruction as dismantling the defense mechanisms. So yeah, I'm going to fix myself and act in this other way. We're saying no. What is the root cause of that feeling that arises of me having to please others or being compelled to please others when I, at the conscious level, I know I don't want to do that, but yet the situation just kind of pulls it from me. Right. And that's really our experience that's closer to our real experience is that we appear not to have a choice in the situation. Jung says that's the autonomous complex, this kind of learning that Happened emotionally and intuitively and kind of socially. Right. That just imprinted in our mind so powerfully that now we have to act this way. It compels us to act like. Forces us to act that way. So it's a tricky thing to dismantle that. All right? To be able to dismantle, not to get rid of it, not to push it away. We're not denying that it's useful to me or, you know, it somehow helped me survive and adapt, but we're simply saying, now I'm ready to consciously make a choice in these situations that call for human interaction. You know, instead of going towards the automatic response of pleasing others, now I can. I can hold back, I can think it through and decide for myself in a conscious way. What's the proper response here?

Deborah Maldonado (16:48)

Well, and the pleasing is just a symptom too, isn't it? Like, you're. You don't want to just keep changing. Working on the symptom level as well. Well, I worked on my pleasing, so it's really about, what if I go deeper to what's underneath that in the psyche? That's what Jung talked about, like, beneath even the shadow. Like, what is the drive? That's. That's, like you say, the complex. That's automatic. I think for me, I did not even know the feeling that was driving me. Like, there's a. There's a feeling that we feel on a conscious level. And maybe when we feel rejected or when we feel like almost for some reason, it feels like a compulsion, like a habit, but it doesn't have a feeling to it. You just feel this, like, need to do something. Like motivation, I guess it would be called. And then, like, later on, as I got deeper and did Jung's work, I understood, oh, there's a feeling here that I wasn't even aware of that's been driving. And so that's what we're really getting at. Is that the deepest driving feeling?

Dr. Rob Maldonado (17:45)

In a way, yeah. So we're looking for structural change, not merely cognitive insight. Because cognitive insight is good. Yeah. We are understanding the situation better. But often we're still helpless in the face of the. These powerful ego defense mechanisms. Because they're really powerful. They're meant to be powerful, and they were meant to protect us. Now why are they protecting us that way? Anything that in nature, anything that helps us survive, it says, nature says, let's keep that because it helped you get through the day. In other words, it helped you adapt, survive. And so it's very biological, very primal to. To dismantle the defense mechanisms, right, to, to break them down in a creative way, let's say in a transformative way, so that we can change the structure of the psyche. That requires us to drop the good and bad, temporarily at least, because good and bad, that judgment that comes from the ego, it operates very simply. Does the ego see this as being good for me, that it's going to help me adapt, survive, move forward? Or does it see this as being potentially bad for me, that I might not be able to survive, et cetera? Now think of what it, what we're doing there. Anything that's unknown for the ego is bad because it's, it's unknown. Meaning I can't predict it, I can't control it. So it says, if you can con, if you know how to survive and you know how to get to the next day, just follow that. It says, you know, why, why mess with uncertainty when you don't have to? You can just keep on doing your old habit. And it, you know, you, it's like.

Deborah Maldonado (19:27)

Putting additions on your house. The broken house with the foundation that's kind of rotting, but you keep putting on the building up the, you know, like extra wing or, you know, maybe I'll put a little deck in the back or maybe a new front, front steps and a porch in the front. And you know, that'll, that'll solve everything. And, and what we're the, what Young's work says is let's just knock down the whole house and unlearn everything so we can really be who we are. Not everything. And we're not getting rid of anything. We're just letting go of our attachment to being a certain way.

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Deborah Maldonado (20:30)

Social neuroscience.

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Dr. Rob Maldonado (21:14)

Yeah, so, so back to kind of the way we're working is we're reverse engineering. We begin with the Insight. Yeah, we want, us, we want to have that insight as to what was the conditioning about. And we can, we can see it, most of us can clearly see it in our past history. Then the next question though, because we don't stop at insight, is what is the core emotion that's holding that in place? So it's a simple question. Something like this. What would happen if you don't Please then you know.

Deborah Maldonado (21:48)

Well, for me, I remember one of my, one of my first coaches asked me, what would happen if you never got married, never found the love of your life in this lifetime? And I was like, all that energy, no, like I can't let that happen. Was all that heaviness and all that fear and anxiety about being alone for the rest of my life and never finding someone.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (22:09)

I was, I think we all have that one.

Deborah Maldonado (22:11)

Yeah, I know, but we were, but I was creating from that place. It was like, I wouldn't want to look at that part. Like, oh, I don't even want to look at it. I don't want to. I'm just going to keep believing and being positive and you know, forgetting, you know, pushing that away because it's so fearful. But when I pulled it in front of me and really looked at it and just stopped fighting it, I opened it up and saw what was inside of it and it was like nothing. But if you keep it unconscious or you keep suppressing it and not want to look at it, I don't want to even entertain that that's an idea and it's going to run our life.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (22:46)

And this is precisely the reason why insight is not enough. Insight will only change our understanding of our behavior, but it will not change the behavior pattern itself for real structural change, meaning that you're able then to decide how to act in, in adult situations, you have to get at that emotion and then accept it. In other words, instead of trying to fix it, it's not about fixing the emotion, but about understanding it and accepting that, oh, this has been building me the way I've been experiencing the world and has given me a lot, but in a kind of, in a limited way. Now we're ready to take the training wheels off the bike and say, I can drive it myself, right? I can navigate my life in a conscious way.

Deborah Maldonado (23:42)

I always say that. For me, I used to read a lot of self help books. That's how I did my personal development, by myself, without a coach. And I read so many books and I would read through them and I would be like, this makes a lot of Sense, I understand, oh, I must be codependent, or, oh, it's related to my father. And this makes so much sense. But nothing changed. And I always tell people, read. If you, if you read a book, especially the pop psychology, they water everything down. You read a book and it doesn't challenge you in any way, and you read it through and you're like, it confirms everything I believe in. And you want to find things, teachings that challenge what you believe, and then you know you're on the right track, because when the ego resists an idea, you know that it's. It's hitting up against that part. So, litmus test. Think about the last book you read. Did it stretch your mind or did it just confirm what you already knew or made everything seem rational and soothe you in a way? Or were you, like, knocked off your feet and blown away and that's what you want. You want to be. And then also if you're mad or angry or resistant to that idea, that is exactly. You're in the right place. But you. It's just like being around people that disagree with you, help you understand yourself better. Being around, yes. People will just lead you to no growth at all. We always need a little friction for growth. We can't just. Wouldn't it be nice, though, Rob, if you could just read a book and magically your life will change one day. Sort of a magic machine that does that for us. So I think a great. We're going to talk about this on the next episode of really Get Into Where Change Happens. But we talked about emotion, so that's a great exercise. Rob, think about what happens if you don't act out your pattern. Like, if you know your pattern. I want you to sit with a feeling of what would happen if you didn't act out that pattern. What would your compulsion. You didn't give in to that compulsion. And then just kind of think about those insights and bring them here next week for our next episode of Where Change Actually Happens. All right, see you next week, everyone. Thanks for joining us.

Dr. Rob Maldonado (25:50)

See you soon.

Deborah Maldonado (25:50)

Take care.

Podcast Host / Narrator (25:52)

Thank you for joining us for Jung on Purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast before you leave and join us each week.

Deborah Maldonado (26:04)

We'll see you soon, Sam.