‘Keep One Foot in the World & One Foot Outside Of It’

Good advice not just for therapists, but for everyone.

“If you want to be helpful to your clients, you must try to live with only one foot in the world, and the other one outside of it.”

said the late Dr David Jansen, my wise and wonderful psychotherapy teacher and mentor at the Jansen Newman Institute (JNI) in Sydney, in the first week of our degree.

Right at the start of our postgraduate degree in individual and family/relationship psychotherapy, David insisted that we think of our role in broader, systemic terms, and that we took into account much more than our clients’ (or our own) individual psychology and challenges. David wanted to nurture therapists who could understand complexity and that everything in the world is inter-connected and interdependent. David was clear that at JNI they were not interested in training mental health ’technicians’ who treated suffering humans as mechanics treat malfunctioning cars.

David’s suggestion that we try to keep only ‘one foot’ in the world was a warning. People’s psychological problems are almost always caused by the world around them, by their environment (human and physical), not by some internal ‘malfunction’. David understood that if therapists are too caught up in, or are too invested in the affairs of the world—if they live with ‘both feet in the world’—they would fail their clients. If therapists are too caught up in the world, they are likely to be more invested in their own survival and have little interest in changing the world for the better. If, as therapists, our primary loyalty is to the world and to our own survival in it, we would collude with the world and struggle to be the allies that our clients need us to be. As an experienced therapist and psychotherapy teacher David knew how little interest most therapists tend to show in political or social issues and he wanted to change this.

If therapists are too much ‘outside the world’, if for example, they are too invested in ‘new age’ escapism to the exclusion of worldly reality, they also risk being useless to clients. Few people who were abused as children, who were or are victims of war, injustice, crime, poverty, betrayal or domestic abuse would benefit from being told that they ‘chose’ their experiences in order to ‘fulfil their destiny’. If you say something like this to a suffering person when they are still suffering, it is not only insensitive and incredibly unkind, it also shows a lack of willingness to meet them where they are.

Whether it is true that spiritually we choose our lives, no one knows for sure. I am a spiritual person. But I have no idea whether this is true or not. I have no memory of choosing in some other realm or existence to be born to the parents who abused me. I know that if I had a chance to go back in time and change where and to whom I was born, I would do it in a heartbeat. When people have a chance to integrate and heal, they inevitably find their own meaning and purpose in what was inflicted on them and the suffering it caused them. But to get to that point they need to have strong allies who can accompany them on their difficult journey. They need people who can join them in their nightmares and in the horrible places they’ve been to and who can sit with their pain, fear and despair. They do not need to hear that they need to ‘move on’, or ‘let go’. This only tells suffering humans that they are as alone, as misunderstood as they have always been. No one heals or integrates without allies.

Do you know anyone who hasn’t already tried to ‘move on’, ‘let go’, reason or think their way out of uncomfortable feelings, meditate, eat, smoke, lose weight, garden or exercise their way out of uncomfortable feelings, even get a pet, renovate or have a baby…? There are as many ways to ‘cope’ as there are people.

All human beings do the absolute best they can with what they have and know how to do, and given the level of brain development and integration that their childhood circumstances and life have helped them achieve. Some people’s best is truly awful, but they are still doing their best. (This is not an excuse for harming self or others of course! An explanation/a reason is never an excuse).

I live with one foot in the world. I am engaged, up to a point, with what is on the news, with mundane and boring things like my bookkeeping, banking and paying bills, renewing insurance and all the other things everyone has to do in the world the way we have constructed it. I live with the rest of my species, not in a cave in a remote mountain somewhere (although I admit the prospect is occasionally tempting…).

I do not like the way we have organised our world. I think it is mostly absurd, wasteful, soulless, cruel and uncaring. But I need to know what my clients are dealing with in the world, so I can understand and meet them where they are. I need to know that injustice cruelty and abuse are real, that they happen everywhere. I need to see without avoidance that most harm to children and young people is inflicted in their families or other contexts that are supposed to be safe. I know and can see clearly that bad people get rewarded in the world, and that good people often don’t. Only if I am sufficiently present in the world, I can truly believe my clients’ testimonies and stories and have any chance at all of helping them.

In an attempt to be ‘in the world’ I make an effort to read, or at least scan the headlines from a large number of news outlets every morning. The real story about what the world is like is not in the content of reports about chronic government corruption and abuse of public trust. It is not in the details of climate change doomsday predictions and how our politicians are doing nothing about it. It is also not in the stories of how the rich always profiteer from the latest disaster at the cost of the poor, whether it is PPEs or the cost of energy. The real story is also not in the headlines about the victims of the latest war that we know is just one of the many ongoing proxy wars waged by a war-addicted, greedy militaristic West bent on taking whatever it wants. The real story is behind all of this content, and it is always the same.

Mainstream media are not there to inform us about what is going on. The media are not ‘ours’ and neither are they for us or our benefit. Corporate media, the most popular media, are money-making entities trading in the most profitable commodity there is: human emotions. No matter what article I read, and no matter what media outlet it is, I can’t help but notice that in one form or another, I, the reader (consumer) am told what I should feel. The most trendy and profitable feeling of them all, the most highly peddled and promoted, and the most coveted commodity by media consumers is fear. But fear of what? Fear or everything. It doesn’t matter what we are afraid of, as long as everyone is afraid.

I can almost see the peddler with his cart walking slowly down the street chanting: ‘Fear for everyone! Come and get yours! Don’t miss out! If you have fear you’ll belong!

If you are not already one of the majority of people living with chronic anxiety — because of childhood trauma, or just insufficient neural integration to cope with adult life and its challenges — corporate media will find something for you to be afraid of. Fear is like a consumer product in an economy that for decades now has had oversupply of stuff we mostly don’t need, that hurts us and our environment, but that are peddled as necessities, as ‘must haves’. They’re shiny, they’re pretty, and most of all if you get yours you will ‘fit in’ better.

Fear is hiding even behind things that pretend or promise to help us. You can find it behind the next ‘how to look young’ advice, what you should wear so that you get the right look — seriously, unless you are a celebrity followed by paparazzi, who cares what any of us wear when we leave the house? Fear is behind advice on what you ‘should eat to lower your cholesterol’, or the next exercise fad.

On the surface there is nothing wrong with offering useful advice on a variety of issues in life. But if it is fear-motivated, then it defeats its own purpose. No one is going to be well if they exercise because they are afraid to die, or if they eat good food but live in chronic fear of getting cancer. Fear has a devastating impact on our bodies and our psychology. (Now I risk sounding like I am telling you that you should fear living in fear… But bear with me please).

No one can win reading what passes as news these days, except of course those who own the media outlets who laugh all the way to the bank. Sex used to be the big seller in almost every industry, but thanks to improved attitudes to women’s and children’s rights and better legislation, the media cannot sexualise as much as they used to. So fear it has to be. When you buy what the infotainment media offer these days, you are buying fear.

(I sometimes wonder how these so-called journalists who make a living from this repulsive fear industry sleep at night. When they are old and on their deathbeds, are they going to look back with satisfaction on a life’s work of scaring people to death?)

Fear is good for my business. More fear, more stress, crises and breakdowns mean increasing and sustained demand for therapy. It is good for a private practitioner like myself. Except I have ethics and am not a profiteer, so this makes me profoundly uncomfortable. A world that profits from fear inevitably turns therapists into profiteers.

Living with only one foot ‘outside the world’ means living with a fearless, more objective and expansive perspective on life. While fully aware of the world and its evils, we don’t completely lose ourselves in it. Being partially ‘outside the world’ enables us to care about everyone and everything and to see a greater purpose for ourselves and others. It allows us to have a vision that is bigger than our petty human concerns and fears and to consider other possibilities and other ways to organise our human affairs. With one foot ‘outside the world’ we know we can change everything if we choose to. It also gives us the motivation and energy to act as agents of change.

David’s advice goes to the heart of the chasm between the uninspiring and bleak reality we live in, that we are all mindlessly creating and repeating, and the reality we can have if we broaden our perspective and vision. This chasm is real, but not inevitable. It is a direct result of having two incompatible brains that are not well connected: our ancient mammal/limbic brain and our much newer and incredible executive brain. To be fully human and move forward from the rut we are in we must integrate the two brains. If we don’t, then when we are triggered into fear, our limbic brain will always take over and shut down our executive functions. When this happens, all we are is frightened, angry or frozen, reactive mammals who can’t see beyond their own noses.

Integration is precisely what we do in therapy. We help clients create better connections between our reactive fear-based mammal brain and our ‘higher’, more spiritual, expansive, present, wise and compassionate executive brain. Better connectivity stops the limbic brain from taking over, even when we are afraid. We can stay present and not lose the plot, or ourselves, even in the face of a threat. The limbic brain continues to act as our protector, but the executive is now in charge of making our decisions all or most of the time.

Living completely ‘in the world’ means living out of our mammal, fear-based, reactive instincts. Trying to live completely outside the world, is trying to live out of our executive, ‘higher’ brain, while ignoring or pushing the limbic brain away. It doesn’t work.

I want to see a world that does not need therapists anymore. Therapy and therapists are just a stopgap at the point where we are now as a species. We have to work both on our inside, on integrating our brains, and on the outside. We need to create a world that fosters and supports integration, especially in children and young people so they can avoid unnecessary suffering in their future.

The obsession with fear drags everyone into their limbic brain. It does not encourage any other way of life and ensures we are trapped forever in a fear-based, dog-eat-dog world. And for what? So that the predators of our species survive, never mind everyone else. Limbic logic dictates that the more you hoard and the less you share, the better your chances are of surviving. This is what human predators do. We cannot allow them to continue to dictate to the entire species how to run our world. Every human deserves to grow to their potential and be everything they can be. So we need to work on our inside and on the outside. One foot in and one foot out… Thank you David!

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Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition, and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that would not suffer us to lose our way. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Compensation’. Essays, First Series (1841).