What if social media scrolling was the latest version of the mythical Labyrinth? An elaborate, confusing structure intended to keep the Minotaur (you) from escaping. Jane Clapp is a Toronto-based Jungian Somatics teacher who left social media because she knew it was making her sick. Her answer to the question “WHY is it making me sick?” tapped the deep wisdom of concepts like archetypes, complexes, and the collective unconscious. That twitchy anxiety we feel from all the FOMO and YOLO isn’t an accident. It’s proof that technologists and advertisers are succeeding in tapping our deepest desires to keep us trapped in the labyrinthine scroll. This one went to places we weren’t expecting and we can’t wait to hear what you think! You can find Jane here: https://www.janeclapp.com/ Jane has a pre-recorded webinar “Social Media: Your Body and Your Psyche:” https://www.janeclapp.com/products/socialmedia Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Dzi40SHcEcFobVrw3ZPBe Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Jane Clapp on Escaping the Social Media Labyrinth
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. If you're listening to this, you're not hearing the complete unedited version of this conversation. If you want in on that, you can get it by becoming a TMST plus member. Just head over to our website at tmstpod.com and click support. All right. Enjoy the show.
[00:00:24] Jane Clapp: Algorithms are archetypal. So if we think of it like how advertisers for decades have been tapping into Jungian archetypal images to activate archetypal energies and behaviors that exist in all human beings. Algorithms are archetypes, but you can't see them. They're amorphous. They live in the psychoid unconscious.
[00:00:46] You can't touch them. You can't observe them. You only see them in their manifestation, but they're even more difficult because they don't always reach that symbolic level of imagery where you can observe it in front of you. And so I realized that these algorithms that are controlling us are archetypal.
[00:01:04] They're tapping into all of our shadow material and they are designed to take us away from our connection to source.
[00:01:19] Laura McKowen: Hey, everyone. All right. Are you ready for a conversation that completely exploded my mind? A few months ago in my newsletter, I asked people if they knew anyone who quit social media and was talking about it openly, publicly. I got back a bunch of names and one of the names that came back with Jane Clapp. When we started researching her and preparing, I got so psyched right away. I was just drawn to her, but I had no idea how much our conversation would mean to me.
[00:01:53] We do start talking about why she left social media, but it goes way deeper than that. Jane is a Toronto based Jungian Somatics teacher. If you don't know what that means, you're not alone. She's basically pioneering a field. She began in the wellness industry decades ago, and over the years has accumulated more training than most doctoral students, I would say. She studied somatic psychology, Reiki, and many other bodywork and coaching methodologies. Eventually she made the massive commitment to become a Jungian analyst, which is no joke. It's a 7 to 10 year process. She's in the advanced stages of that pursuit right now, and is working to combine somatics, which is a field of bodywork and movement studies that is used to help people integrate things like trauma and essentially regulate their nervous system.
[00:02:48] As you'll hear in our conversation, she sees her commitment to the work of Jung as more of a calling than a job or a career. The way she integrates so many disciplines and then applies it to our regular lived experiences is amazing. And as you'll hear, Jane left social media and shocker, she's really clear that she's gotten healthier as a result. Using Jungian theory as a lens, she digs into the ways social media is tapping into deep subconscious parts of us.
[00:03:18] And for me, I knew social media felt bad, and I have a lot of ideas about why I've talked about it a lot. I've written about it a lot, but Jane offers a much deeper view that completely resonated with me. And these ideas can be applied to really anything you put your energy into, not just social media.
[00:03:40] This conversation was a real moment for me. I'm sure you'll hear it come through in the conversation. It finalized my commitment to leave social media by confirming my intuition and grounding me back into the deep wisdom of concepts like archetypes, the collective unconscious, body and nervous system wisdom and the crone phase of a woman's life, which is definitely where I am now. I so hope you enjoy this. All right. Have at it.
[00:04:21] There goes, Mikel. Okay. Now it's just us two. It's so great to meet you. Thank you. I've loved exploring what of your work I can find and you actually were recommended to me by several people in my community. When I asked them for examples of people who were staying away from social media or talking about their relationship with it, at least, you came up.
[00:04:50] Jane Clapp: Hmm. Well, it's funny now that you can't read as much about my work because I used to be so available everywhere. It's interesting.
[00:05:02] Laura McKowen: What's that been like to see? And when did you step back?
[00:05:04] Jane Clapp: I would say I started experimenting with really longer breaks in early 20, 21. And then I dropped Instagram, I guess it would have been like late February. I deleted my account and I didn't archive it. I'm like, I'm done.
[00:05:22] Laura McKowen: I’d love to hear it personally. And I know people would love to hear about what made you realize that you needed to leave. And then what it's been like.
[00:05:33] Jane Clapp: I've lived with anxiety and complex PTSD my whole life and also not having family of origin backup and being a parent on my own. Like, I wouldn't say I'm a single mom because her dad has been involved her whole life, but, you know, supporting myself, running a studio. Trying to create some financial security. It was a place of safety for me in terms of being able to expand what I was doing and I knew that with my business background, that was a really smart thing to do.
[00:06:10] So it gave me a sense of safety to be able to reach out to people, to connect with people all over the world. It felt like there were so many possibilities that weren't available to me without that, but with the heat of the pandemic and the heat of George Floyd's murder, I could feel the volume and the intensity of social media crank up quite substantially. Almost instantly.
[00:06:38] Laura McKowen: I remember my body. I wasn't sleeping for weeks last summer and a lot of my anxiety was the volume of what was going on there.
[00:06:54] Jane Clapp: For sure. I was also afraid of like, was the bottom going to fall out? I've spent most of my life feeling like I'm swinging on a trapeze, and I've done that for fun, but without a safety net under me, no. Building this social media following and knowing I could go there to sell things, to talk to people, to find work. It created this sense of the safety net. My daughter's 17. She just went away to university on the east coast of Canada, a plane ride away. I have a partner during the pandemic we've all been hanging. We all hung out pretty tight. And I realized how much time I was just hypervigilant on my social media. Checking who was pissed at me, checking who I needed to answer, checking what boundaries I needed to set. And I'm just like, wow, there's something really wrong here. And the level of stress that I'm feeling, how much of it can I take control of?
[00:07:56] And this is not who I want to be. You know, my daughter, I don't know how many times she asked me to put my phone down or knew I wasn't listening to her when she was talking to me and the shame I felt because of that. And I know too, it did come from a place of fear. I would say my predominant emotion when I would go on social media was fear. And I'm like, this is taking me away from my connection to source, to the God inside of me, to what is most important, to changing the lens that I see the world through and so it was a confluence of things. The other thing that was happening was, I'm now an advanced candidate in terms of my Jungian training. And so I was entering my exam period in the spring and I couldn't sit still and read a book. I'm like, you cannot dabble in Jung. I see people occasionally write about they're dabbling. I'm like, you cannot dabble in Jung. You have to sit down and be confused for a lot of the time and time until it sinks in.
[00:09:06] I couldn't sit still and read a book. I thought I had a learning issue that I couldn't sit still and read a book. I would pick up my phone, every freaking 30 seconds like, this is not right. I'm like I have to somehow dig in. So when I dropped my phone, it took me about three weeks to be able to sit still and start reading. I could take it in bite-size amounts before then. So that was a big thing too. I'm like, I can't actually learn, learn. I can't sit with complexity. I can't sit here and read really complex language. My neuro-plasticity was really negatively impacted by that constant checking of social media. It seems like a shitty complaint to have because so many people are just surviving, but just surviving. Right? I don't want to be a jerk about, oh, poor me.
[00:10:09] Laura McKowen: No, but that's your reality of work, it's not as though you just experienced it when you work. For me, all 24 hours a day. I would dream about things. I would wake up in the middle of the night. It was never not there.
[00:10:34] Jane Clapp: Never. Always. First thing, I would pick up my phone. I look at my phone, right. I've done some 12 step work in my life and the first thing you do in the morning, they say, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear, Laura.
Laura McKowen: Yes, please do.
Jane Clapp: You can fuck up your day from your bed to your toilet, right?
Like you can fuck up your day. So I'm like, what am I doing? As soon as I wake up am I connected to myself? Am I connected to gratitude for actually waking up and being able to breathe again? Like, what am I thinking about? The first thing I think about, the first thing I'm doing is I'm exposing myself to what is called in Jungian work, the collective unconscious.
[00:11:25] Laura McKowen: Oh God, I'm freaking out because you are saying everything that I have felt and more, and I've said a lot. I've talked about this a good amount. I've written about it a good amount, but you're like inside here expressing it in a way that I haven't felt before and I'm kind of freaking out. It's just so true. I feel it in my body like pure resonance. Just, yeah. Okay. So I didn't want to cut you off because it's hilarious that I'm thinking this is different than what I want to talk to you about because of course it's connected, but you were saying you were tapping into the collective unconscious right away.
[00:12:13] Jane Clapp: I describe it with, it's like a labyrinth where you go into a labyrinth and it's meant to keep you in the labyrinth for as long as possible. Then you couple in my work because I've really specialized in the impact that trauma has on the body and now more of the psyche and the spirit these days. They bring you in and they try to keep you disconnected from your core sense of source inside of you for as long as possible.
[00:12:40] I would sit on my phone, like scrolling or looking at posts or doing my quote work and I could feel my heart rate increasing. I could feel my nervous system get more and more dysregulated. And all the people I was interacting with, I had no boundaries. Their energy was going and I'm very sensitive, a very, very sensitive person, good and bad to the energies that exist around me.
[00:13:08] And I'm not built for that. I am not built to have that many people coming into my energy field in a day.
[00:13:19] Laura McKowen: I don’t think anyone is. That's actually something that I've written about. My circle of concern became way too big. Like the world, big. That labyrinth metaphor is so perfect.
Jane Clapp: There's a myth, a Greek myth, that talks about that. Theseus goes into the labyrinth and the only way he finds his way out is with a golden thread. Well, algorithms are not meant to help you find your way out. They're meant to keep you stuck there as long as possible and they feed off of fear and scarcity and discourse. Dis-course. If we look at the origin of the word, this disease, dis. Disconnection. The thing about trauma and bringing together the algorithms, people are already going into social media, if they are living with the effects of trauma, with a very tenuously flipped on prefrontal cortex, right?
[00:14:35] A little like wavering, right? Borderline being able to keep that kind of prefrontal cortex executive functioning on. Algorithms are designed to flip your lid and to keep it flipped for as long as possible. And if I'm actually a quote unquote trauma expert and I understand the impact on the psyche, then I can't really participate in this.
[00:14:59] Basically algorithms are meant to colonize your psyche. They're meant to colonize your psyche, that's what they're meant to do. They don't care about you. They don't care about your wellbeing.
[00:15:15] Laura McKowen: No, you're non-human. You're at number. Avatar. That's what I mean. We want this avatar and that's all you are. Oh, got her. Put her in there. Keep her going.
[00:15:29] Jane Clapp: Yep. I had this amazing course with someone in my Jungian program, and we talked about how advertising really manipulates people's psyches. And I'm like, hey, guess what Jungians, have you studied frickin algorithms because this is next level.
[00:15:47] I want to get the word out in the Jungian world as well, because there's so much conversation about the collective unconscious, the colonizing of the psyche, what that does in terms of making people project shadow onto each other. You know, it's those people over there who have the darkness in them, so to speak.
[00:16:07] I don't know how it can be a healthy place in the long-term. Some people use it in a way that might be helpful for them, but in all my research, I have not found any data that has confirmed that there's a net benefit on a mental health level. And Instagram is at the top.
[00:16:29] Laura McKowen: Really? Because of the visual?
[00:16:30] Jane Clapp: How fast the images come to you and because they speak on a more symbolic level than language level. They go in faster. They activate as complexes, you know, these like autonomous splinter psyches that we have in us. They activate them really quickly because it goes in through symbolic image instead of language. It's automatic. It's so fast.
[00:17:00] Laura McKowen: We're going to keep this thread going right into your work. So you decided to get off and not just say, leave your account floating there and not touch it, because it felt out of integrity with who you were to have anything up there? Did you sort of waiver on that decision at all or once you were clear, were you kind of clear?
[00:17:20] Jane Clapp: Well, what I did is I deactivated my account and I canceled it. And then what Instagram does is they give you another 30 days to actually cancel it. So you lose everything. So, during that 30 day period, I work with a business coach. I worked through it with my analyst, therapist. I put a lot of thought into it. I'm like, I don't trust myself. I do not trust myself that I can go back into it and not get hooked again. And I want to make the shift. I actually want to withdraw my membership in the wellness worlds and the somatic worlds. I revoke my membership. I don't [00:18:00] want to participate. There's something really off right now. I don't know what it is. And there's amazing somatic practitioners out there for sure, but how it's manifesting on social media and how people are losing their own sense of what's right for them versus like, oh, we don't meditate anymore because I'm like what? I work with practitioners who have lost their center because there's this mass, these tides that shift and carry everybody on social media.
[00:18:28] So I wanted to revoke my membership in that world in some ways, because I also know that being a white woman leading in trauma, it's time to step back. I’m stepping back. People who can speak to collective trauma better than me in public spaces. Please go take my place, go for it. Yes. I wanted to actually go into the rite of passage that happens as a Jungian analyst when you go into stage one exam. So I needed to pass into that liminal space and I'm still sort of in it. I'm not doing any podcast interviews. I'm saying no to most invitations to show up in public spaces.
[00:19:11] Laura McKowen: Oh, you're speaking directly to my soul. So what's it been like? What was it like when you revoked your membership card and what's been the experience?
[00:19:23] Jane Clapp: I noticed that I just started studying things that I knew would never fly for me to talk about on social media. I started nerding out on things like liberation theology and Christian mysticism. I'm not a religious person and diving into areas that I know I never would have been able to speak about on social media, because I feel like I edited all my activity through this lens.
[00:19:54] Laura McKowen: Did you experience any kind of scarcity, or lapses where you think, oh, I'm gonna become irrelevant?
[00:20:11] Jane Clapp: Obviously all the time. I think part of my job is to become less relevant if I'm really in my work. I am 48 years old. This isn't the time. This is the time where my inner world has to become as important or more important than my outer world. That's what's supposed to happen at this point in my life. Being relevant, what does that mean anyways? I'm relevant to the people, to my analysis or clients I'm working with. Those relationships are so intimate and powerful. Who do I need to be relevant to? Like who I know, what, like, what is that about? I have a publisher ready to look at a book proposal. I'm like, I don't have anything to say. That urge to constantly produce and stay relevant is so fear-based.
[00:21:10] Laura McKowen: Oh, yeah. And it never ends. It's endless, it's a goalpost that never stops moving. Having achieved things as I'm sure you have, almost immediately after the moment where you feel like, yes, this is exciting. I did it. Almost immediately, if not at the same time, you think. for now. What's next?
[00:21:40] Jane Clapp: Totally. And I mean, what had to happen this year for me is what would be called the sacrifice of the ego. Not necessarily in Eastern terminology where my job at my stage in life, if I'm really in my work as a Jungian is to start to listen to myself with a capital S more than my ego.[00:22:00]
[00:22:02] So that my soul is really driving the bus a lot more, or self or whatever you want to call it. My higher self. And that part of me wants to be in communion with my environment and my life in a much more meaningful way. I was doing a lot of work in trying to commune with my environment differently. I live on a rail path in Toronto and it's an urban center, but there's this path with nature, like urban nature that seems to survive. And I remember for months I was like, I'm going to see something beautiful on my way to work, I'm going to see something beautiful and inspiring on my way home.
[00:22:49] And every time I did because I wasn't looking at my phone, I wasn't thinking about social media. And I remember walking with my daughter who is a remarkable human. Like, I like her as much as I love her, if she wasn't my daughter. She started pointing things out because she just got used to hanging with me. We had a lot of time together being in lockdown and we'd go for walks and I would just point things out to her that I wouldn't normally notice. I started noticing she was taking a wonder in how the wind was shaking this particular type of tree. She looked up what kind of tree it was and started going through the city, looking for this type of tree.
[00:23:33] I'm looking at her. I'm like, wow. And she told one of my friends a few months ago that she sees the world differently in part because I'm seeing it differently now. She's always been a deeply thoughtful human being, but I am so grateful that we had this time together before she left home.
It brings tears. Like,
[00:24:02] Laura McKowen: I mean, my daughter's 12. And so we're in different areas of that time, teenagers. My daughter's at the beginning of entering that stage and your daughter's sort of wrapping that up and just left home. I feel in my heart what you're saying. She's always bugging me to get off my phone. It was way worse when I was on Instagram and social media, but it's still more than I would like. So I love that you were able to show her that.
[00:24:42] Jane Clapp: Well, the depth and the beauty in the moments that I get to experience because I'm not addicted to social media, I can't even tell you. And it's a daily commitment to connect with all the blessings I have in my life in a way that was impossible before.
[00:25:03] There's one story that I think says a lot about the shift. I remember there's a river called the Humper river and Toronto and in late summer, early fall, you can see the salmon jumping. And last year I went with my partner and my daughter and I had my camera out because I was going to film it and I was going to find something wise to say about it and post it on social media. I was that person.
[00:25:36] Laura McKowen: We’re all that person.
[00:25:37] Jane Clapp: I was looking through my phone last year, watching, I caught a salmon jump and then I had something deeply philosophical to say about it, but I thought I was really smart at the time. I went back a couple of weeks ago, maybe to the same place and I was just watching and it didn't even cross my mind to film it or to capture it. Every time the salmon jumped out, I'd just scream in excitement. I'd be like, oh my God. And, and it's entirely different. I'm not trying to capture moments, to reproduce them. Nobody knows where I am in the world. It feels so good. If I go on vacation, nobody knows where I am.
[00:26:26] Laura McKowen: No, you actually just get to be there instead of performing being there. Yeah. That's great.
[00:26:44] Mikel Ellcessor: Hi, I'm Mikel. I'm the executive producer of Tell Me Something True and I co-created the show with Laura. We built TMST and our online community with the hope of creating a sane spot on the internet. We're really passionate about the ad-free nature of this work. Our belief is that this project works best if we're not hustling to keep advertisers happy, and we keep our attention on you, the TMST community, and this is where you can play a major role. TMST plus is the membership group that helps to keep this podcast alive. Whether it's through a monthly membership or a one-time contribution, TMST plus members are vital to this experiment. As a TMST plus member, you get to join Laura for member-only events, send in questions for the guests, hear the complete unedited interviews and connect with other TMST community members. You know, sometimes we feel like we can't make a difference in the world. With the TMST plus membership, you can be keeping this space alive and thriving for a one-time gift, or for as little as 10 bucks a month. You can find the link in the show description, and then please head over to tmstpod.com right now to support the show. And thanks.
[00:28:13] Laura McKowen: Well, let's go to where I wanted to start. We're now a half-hour in and I just I'm eating this up, but, okay. So you're a Jungian analyst?
[00:28:30] Jane Clapp: We have to use very particular language. So I'm an advanced candidate with the Ontario association of Jungian analysts, which means I'm seeing people for Jungian analysis under supervision. Some people take 10 years to do this training. It's very long. People do it because it's a calling. It's not like a regular psychotherapy training program. So I'm in stage two. I work with clients now. I've had a clinical practice working with people somatically and through movement for many, many years.
Laura McKowen: And so what was your training for that?
Jane Clapp: Oh, lots of different things. You know, I started as a personal trainer. I studied functional movement. I studied yoga with my now past teacher, Diane Bruni, 10 Segretti touch therapy, fascia, fascial stretch therapy, Reiki, so many different things. You can go to my website and read all about it.
[00:29:35] Laura McKowen: No I’m just curious and to give people kind of a taste. Okay. So you are well steeped in this somatic therapy and then I'll let you finish.
[00:29:46] Jane Clapp: Yeah. So I started training as a Jungian analyst over two years ago. The thing about the Jungian training program, to be an analyst, you have to have a hundred hours of Jungian analysis to apply. Then you have to have 150 hours of analysis to pass into stage two.
[00:30:11] Laura McKowen: Wow. And then you have to be working with someone?
Jane Clapp: No, myself. I have to be analyzed. Well, I'm still a patient. Yeah. And then now they call it in analysys and then I have to have another 150 of personal analysis too. Plus many hours of supervision and work. So it's not something people do for money, you know. It's because I would say the Jungian approach coupled with my understanding of trauma and the neurobiology of trauma has been one of the most de-pathologizing things I've experienced. Meaning I realized that a lot of what I experience is part of being a human being on the planet, but also that I'm not a problem to be fixed.
[00:31:10] That there's something really powerful in our psyche that is self-regulating and wants us to come into wholeness. And a lot of the work is about following that. There's a real focus on if you need to emotionally separate from your parents. That's important. It's really about finding out who you are and finding a way to interact with the collective in a way that you are choosing.
[00:31:38] So it's sort of like stepping away from the masses and trying to find out who you really are and then eventually returning, but much like a fairy tale, if you think of the stories of the hero's journey.
[00:31:55] Laura McKowen: Well, Jung has a lot to say about the unconscious, but has said that until we bring what is unconscious into consciousness, it will direct our life and we will call it fate. And so it's like this hero's journey, to me, it's bringing all this stuff that's on, in the unconscious to consciousness, through experience. Like we have to go through the experience of it, not just learning about it, that's the hero's journey and it can happen in a million different ways.
[00:32:20] Would you, does that sound true in a very brutalized, summarized fashion?
[00:32:22] Jane Clapp: Yeah, and some people see the hero's journey as a very, like a quote, more masculine approach. The other thing about Jungian work that people don't necessarily talk a lot about is that he believed that people came into Jungian analysis in the second half of life. It was really about a religious crisis of like, and religious, not meaning like, what is my religion? It's sort of like, where is my meaning? What do I have to carry me in my suffering? Where do I find meaning? How do I shift into feeling? Being in more dialogue with myself, with a capital S? And how that really changes us. So a lot of what I'm interested in in terms of soma and psyche and faith is how all those three things interact with one another.
[00:33:23] How do we really have a direct experience of God? God as source, creator of the universe. How do we feel that in our body? How do we learn how to be our true co-regulator? How does that become where we go in times of suffering and pain?
[00:33:48] Laura McKowen: It seems like a very unexplored territory.
[00:33:53] Jane Clapp: I'd say.
[00:33:56] Laura McKowen: That’s incredible and seems so… what an extraordinary thing to commit yourself to, an extraordinary process of discovery and learning and teaching to commit yourself to.
[00:34:09] Jane Clapp: This isn't new, what I'm talking about. If you look at Christian mystics, if you look at mystics of any tradition, what they're talking about is what's called the original participation. Owen Barfield talked about this. It is a direct experience of faith. You are not disconnected from it. You are in it. If you think of like Richard Rohr's work about the body and sexuality and-
Laura McKowen: What about Carolyn Myss?
Jane Clapp: Yes. She's with the program too, that he runs, right? The CAC? Edward Editor is sort of, he's now obviously passed, but he's brilliant around really dissecting religion as particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition and how we are so disconnected from it and that's so harmful to us. How harmful it is to us as human beings in general, to not have this direct experience, to feel it's out there. And so this idea that it's out there is ultimately what keeps us very overwhelmed and dysregulated because it's the original God of the God of Zeus, right?
[00:35:24] Meets out punishment and reward versus creation, beauty, love, what's life-giving that we don't feel like we're a part of, and circling back to social media, that's what it's meant to do.
[00:35:40] Laura McKowen: Yeah. You don't feel your body in social media. And the other part is not just that you don't feel your body. If we don't have the sense of faith and meaning as a felt experience inside of us, we will go seek it outside of us.
[00:35:54] And I think a lot of what our disease is seeking outside of us as individuals, and not in a connected way and in a community around a shared faith or a shared understanding of meaning. And like, it can be attached to anybody, any influencer, any person, anybody who says they know the way, which is like anybody right now, right. Or politics, like that becomes people's religion and faith
Jane Clapp: False gods.
Laura McKowen: So, my question is with archetypes, what do they have to teach us? Can you explain what archetypes are?
[00:36:40] Jane Clapp: Archetypes are human inherited modes of functioning and patterns of behavior.
[00:36:46] Laura McKowen: Can you repeat that one more time?
[00:36:47] Jane Clapp: Archetypes are human inherited modes of functioning and patterns of behavior that you can't really see until they take the shape in symbolic form or in some type of action or behavior.
[00:37:01] Laura McKowen: So is it fair to say we act them out?
[00:37:04] Jane Clapp: We act them out, yes, but they also can take forms like the mother archetype, the father archetype, and the many different types of mother and father archetypes that can exist. Right. The wicked stepmother, you know…
[00:37:20] Laura McKowen: What would be a form of acting them out?
[00:37:24] Jane Clapp: An archetypal event would be a graduation, birth, death.mDoes that help?
[00:37:31] Laura McKowen: Yeah, that helps. So, and then inherited, that seems like an important word. Inherited meaning?
[00:37:36] Jane Clapp: Yeah, they're just like the soup we're born into. According
[00:37:42] Laura McKowen: According to Jung or whomever, why are they there? Why archetypes?
[00:37:48] Jane Clapp: Why? That's a good question. Why are they there? Well, they just are there. They're just present. There isn't necessarily a why.
[00:37:58] Laura McKowen: What can we learn from them then? Or what's the value in studying them?
[00:38:02] Jane Clapp: I've had one supervisor say that everybody's born with an archetype deck of cards.
[00:38:08] Laura McKowen: Is it true that every archetype has very simply stated, uh, positive and negative.
[00:38:16] Jane Clapp: There you go. Yeah. Positive and negative poles. Yeah, exactly. Okay.
[00:38:21] Laura McKowen: So if it gets to spin out into the negative pole, you gotta zap it so to speak or bring it back to center so that it's not ruling your life.
[00:38:31] Jane Clapp: Studying what archetypes are present in our society can be really important. Like the scapegoat archetype, the other archetype, the group archetype. We can observe on a collective level, what archetypes are really getting charged up and impacting the way that we're interacting with one another and how that's powering up collective complexes. Right?
[00:38:58] And so that can be really powerful on a broader level. Yeah.
[00:39:07] Laura McKowen: Do you feel as though, or do you believe as though that as individuals, we participate in the collective and can influence it depending on our own mode of being?
[00:39:21] Jane Clapp: We can't not participate in it, right? There's no way we can't. We're always bringing our participation.
[00:39:30] Yes. But part of what is making the unconscious conscious is really trying to determine how we aren't going to participate or how we are going to participate in the collective. I think that's sort of our job is to become conscious of how we're participating in the collective and how we choose not to, or how we choose to and start to take responsibility for how we're showing up in relationship with other human beings.
[00:39:58] And that's sort of the deeper work, right? Some people say that Jung’s work was in some ways like antifascist, but you know, there's serious and legitimate criticisms of his work as well. I identify as post-Jungian, so really taking hiswork and what was problematic and making sure I apply it in ways that are less harmful.
[00:40:26] Laura McKowen: Getting sober is the sort of maybe biggest example that I have personally of becoming conscious to my own patterns and how I participate in the world. You said social media addiction. I view it very much that way. Like how do you view addiction in archetype terms or in collective unconscious or Jungian terms?
[00:40:49] Jane Clapp: Possession of a complex. Yeah. It's actually like a possession of a complex that overpowers your ego and starts a complex. Again, a complex is like a collection of ideas and images constellated around an archetypical core that share a similar feeling tone. Some people think complexes are created due to trauma. I don't know about that. I think all human beings are complexed in different ways. You know, inferiority complexes, money complexes, sex complexes, mother complexes.
Laura McKowen: Like they always negative in nature?
[00:41:31] Jane Clapp: Not at all. Not always. Yeah. Complexes aren't always negative for sure. Because if they have the archetypal core, they have a positive and negative charge. So addiction is basically, a complex has dominated your consciousness and taken over, much like possession. If we go back to the theory of possession in religion, it's not that dissimilar. Something else is running the show.
[00:42:03] Laura McKowen: That's right. Well, and it's all your power exists outside of you, both spiritually and physically. Really. Okay. I could keep going down there. Where else do you see Jung folded into our culture where we wouldn't necessarily see? This might be too big of a question, where we don't necessarily see it because the way I see Jung’s work is like Mikel brought up, our producer brought up, that it's a lot like Shakespeare. It's like, we're never not really swimming in his work and interacting with him. Let's put it that way, interacting with him and his ideas, Shakespeare that is, and I think that's kind of the same if Jung’s work is valid and true in a lot of ways in which I believe it is. We don't see it. It's what's familiar becomes invisible, or we don't even have the language for it. We don't really know. It's just become part of the way that we live.
[00:43:05] Jane Clapp: What people don't understand is he was measuring people's complexes through something called the word association experience, which was also inspired by Pierre Shanae's work, where he was measuring people's physiological reaction to words to see what complexes were present.
[00:43:22] Myers-Briggs came from Jung’s work. Originally it was changed and adapted. The word association experiment can also be tied to the lie detector test, which is interesting.
[00:43:39] Laura McKowen: Because it's measuring physiological responses to words.
[00:43:43] Jane Clapp: Yeah. And think about advertising as I mentioned, working on an unconscious level. Images are really tied to, again, like how you can influence the unconscious, because Freud only looked at the unconscious as a place of repression, but Jung split into personal and collective and then psychoid, and really saw how we were swimming in a collective soup in the unconscious as well. So it's all there. I mean, those are great examples. Just a few to sort of paint the picture of how this actually plays out.
[00:44:14] Laura McKowen: Can you explain synchronicity as Jung saw it?
[00:44:26] Jane Clapp: Yeah, it's like a casual event that corresponds to an inner experience, an inner subjective experience. Something objectively happens kind of around you, but it's causal. You can't explain why it's why it happens. It can happen in an event, or it can show up as a symbol in your life somewhere.
[00:44:51] Laura McKowen: I think some of this stuff, the reason some of it is, like anything that is powerful and carries a lot of power, it can be very difficult to describe in plain language or impossible so I wouldn't expect you to have these, like tied up answers. So we talked about the collective unconscious. He's popular with folks who, and there's this increasing number and sort of increasing level of conversation around this. People are doing neuroscience research into the way psychedelics could be used to treat people and that he, I believe, said psychedelics could lay bare a level of the unconscious that is otherwise accessible only under peculiar psychic conditions. What was he talking about?
[00:45:45] Jane Clapp: He was talking about, I believe, numinous experiences, numinous experiences. What would like an experience of awe and rapture that is nonvolitional that puts you into this state of feeling into something much bigger than you.
[00:46:04] So Lionel Corbett is a Jungian who talks a little bit about psychedelic experiences. The problem is, you know, I have friends who take people on journeys. The problem is, is that coming into contact with that level of unconscious material, particularly from the collective or objective psyche, it can be way too much for people to integrate. It can put people into states of psychosis, which they can't come out of.
[00:46:34] Laura McKowen: Especially if you're high neuroticism already, right? In the trait neuroticism, right? Or like you don't have a strong ego center to be able to integrate this material afterward.
[00:46:41] Jane Clapp: It can be really tricky. Like I've worked with folks who have had really negative psychedelic journeys because they weren't screened properly. They weren't with somebody who had proper integration. They were in groups that were too big and there's too much energy floating around in the room. There is, you know, I've heard of unwanted sexual contact. I don't think some people think that maybe young women have been super excited about these fast, intentional journeys into the collective unconscious. The red book is all about his breakdown after Freud and his confrontation with a collective unconscious and how he had to work really, really hard. It stings having one foot in reality. He had to do a lot of work to not fall deeply into it. So, it can be incredibly powerful.
[00:47:44] I have dear friends and colleagues who I would trust taking people on those kinds of journeys. And then a lot of people are using it without proper preparation and screening. So I don't think it's something I would mess with.
[00:47:58] Laura McKowen: Yeah. And it's so new. It's such a nascent field, but I think looking at it as a fast-acting thing is maybe where I'm skeptical.
[00:48:08] Jane Clapp: I'm skeptical of anything that seems fast acting well. I have a fellow Jungian here who does this and they really assess someone's ego strength. So the issue with trauma is not that there isn't access to the unconscious, it's that it's constantly pushing up against a weak ego center that too much is coming up. It's not that there isn't access in the collective unconscious, or unconscious, it's not a benevolent place.
[00:48:36] You don't know what you're gonna come in contact with, is a really good way to put it. You don't know, it's so vast. You don't know what you're going to come in contact with. So there can be experiences where people have numinous experiences where they find a way to connect with archetypes that are deeply nourishing and supportive.
[00:49:01] But how do you know what you're going to meet, you don't know. And so you could meet demons or angels, like how do you know what you're going to do? And I mean that figuratively, so I'm not against it at all, but I do not think it's for someone who was like borderline holding themselves together, necessarily. With that being said, I know that folks like Gabor Mate, who's worked with them.
[00:49:30] People who are really at the end of their rope in terms of being able to survive their addiction have used ayuascha and other plant medicine to create these openings for people. So I'm not an expert in psychedelic journeys, but I do think there needs to be deep integration work afterward with people who understand the complexity of the psyche.
[00:49:56] Laura McKowen: Well said. You mentioned ego strengths. So we typically talk about ego as something that's bad, to get rid of.
[00:50:02] Jane Clapp: Oh no, that would be more Eastern. And like, that would be more persona to me.
[00:50:07] Laura McKowen: So, explain that. I think it's beautiful to think of the ego as something that we should seek to have to build an appropriate level of health for and with.
[00:50:18] Jane Clapp: Okay. So the ego is the center of consciousness, but not the entire personality. It's concerned with reality testing, a sense of who we are, continuity of time, kind of the capacity to discern. It's the gatekeeper of what we pay attention to that comes up from the unconscious, unless it's overpowered by a complex.
[00:50:45] Ego isn't like how proud you are of yourself in Jungian terminology. It would be, if we were looking at the window of tolerance model as strong ego would imply a wider window of tolerance.
[00:50:59] Laura McKowen: Explain that. I don't think most people will know what that means.
[00:51:01] Jane Clapp: Oh, the window of time, I just stepped into another. That's why I'm like not reading. Like now I have to find a way to speak intelligently about this. It's okay. It's sort of like your capacity to manage, stay present and not become overwhelmed and dysregulated and your autonomic nervous system, essentially.
[00:51:26] Laura McKowen: Yes. So there's a window of what we can tolerate, what our nervous system can tolerate.
[00:51:35] Jane Clapp: The ego strength could mirror, like how narrow or wide your window of tolerance is.
[00:51:42] Laura McKowen: Yeah. Can a window of tolerance be expanded?
[00:51:45] Jane Clapp: Of course. I mean like safety stabilization is always first. If someone has a very weak ego strength, you're not gonna dive into memories about their childhood. Like you're not going to dive into even with dream interpretation because that's a large part. I don't touch dreams when people are really overwhelmed. If that dream looks like it's going to be disturbing or have high emotions attached to it, unless it looks like there's some nugget in that dream that could be really supportive and resourcing for them, I'm not going to touch it. That's not going to help them. I'm going to be focusing on ego strength first.
[00:52:27] Laura McKowen: I like that. I think a lot of people in early recovery, I've also had a lot of experience with the 12 steps, and I think there's some really beautiful spiritual wisdom within them.
[00:52:40] Jane Clapp: Bill Wilson was inspired by Jung’s work. You know that right?
[00:52:44] Laura McKowen: I know. I know that comes through a lot, but one of the ways, one of the things that either got communicated poorly is the 12 steps and the sort of book of Alcoholics Anonymous carried through the fellowship was this idea that your ego was your enemy and that your ego needed to be left at the door, so to speak.
[00:53:15] I don't see a lot of people coming into recovery with these big egos. Like they're pretty, they're pretty smashed. So I think, and maybe, I don't think that's actually what Bill Wilson meant or what was actually meant to be communicated. I think what they were probably talking about was more along the lines of what you're talking about, that disconnecting from the persona and a lot of the protection mechanisms that we probably have that people have in place to keep their ego safe. I think about that a lot, especially as it relates to women.
[00:53:59] Jane Clapp: Oh yeah. Well, white guys, right? He was originally talking to white male alcoholics and in the 12 steps it, have you seen Dr. Jamie’s book? A trauma-informed 12 steps. Ooh. Oh my God.
[00:54:16] Laura McKowen: I definitely need to read that for my book I'm writing.
[00:54:19] Jane Clapp: She's brilliant. Dr. Jamie, trauma-informed 12 steps. I think anybody who has a history of trauma, who's trying to work through the 12 steps should absolutely have that book as their buddy a hundred percent.
[00:54:35] Laura McKowen: That's wonderful. Thank you. I'm so glad you mentioned that and so many people that listen to this are in recovery and struggle with aspects of AA as I did. I think that will be really helpful. All right. So we'll start near the end of the conversation, and this is a good segue into what we were just talking about, individuation. So like the integration of an ancient unconscious, I don't know if that's exactly the right word with our modern consciousness or the current consciousness.
[00:55:13] Jane Clapp: I would say individuation is like the process of becoming who we were kind of meant to be in the world and the unifying of opposites. And so that we come into wholeness. So that means knowing our shadow better and being able to be with it and hold that too. So individuation is more about the coming into wholeness of who we really are, but that doesn't mean like all of our shadow parts are gone. It just means we're aware of them. And actually being able to come into a fuller expression of who we truly are in our essence.
I was just talking about this today in a class that the idea of individuation when it's in, it falls into more Western capitalist hands, it's more of that individualism versus into individuation. Individuation is also about coming back into connection with an inner God image, a sense of being part of a greater whole. That's a really important aspect of individuation that I don't think the word implies.
[00:56:23] Laura McKowen: I mean, individuation as I see it, is first-year part of a whole. I study the chakras and stages of development there, and it's the third chakra. After you've established roots, stability, safety, the most basic concerns of physical. Being able to be alive, staying alive, family, home, belonging to a whole. And then as you move up and later in life, I'm sure psychologically is when we individualize, we don't individualize when we're babies or toddlers, we individualize as a process. And so I think that just echoing what you say about the way we think about individuals or individualism, especially in the west is as if it's a mutually exclusive relationship. You're either an individual or you're part of a group.
[00:57:32] Jane Clapp: And it has to be both to be healthy, right? Because as soon as the group archetype is dominant it means that the individual's capacity to think and discern for themselves is negated and not valued, but we always have to be in a place of discernment. Otherwise, we just get swept up in whatever's going on in the collective. And do we really want to participate in all of that? We have to be able to decide for ourselves where our center is and stay in our integrity as well.
[00:58:05] Laura McKowen: Just to close the loop on where we started. Where have you landed with social media? Are you relieved? Are you grateful? Are you like, thank God I did that?
[00:58:23] Jane Clapp: Are you like getting off of it? Like getting off? Oh!
[00:58:28] Laura McKowen: Yeah. What's your work experience been like?
[00:58:32] Jane Clapp: Like afterwards? Yeah. Like, am I still making enough money to survive?
[00:58:39] Laura McKowen: Yes. And what's been surprising about it or?
[00:58:45] Jane Clapp: Yeah. I'm really happy that I went off. I'm extremely grateful for it as well. And for that experience that I was able to meet the people I did. I'm so grateful that I had it when I did. And I'm equally grateful that I was able to, first of all, afford to step away because I have a big, a strong newsletter list, which helps me communicate with people.
[00:59:16] So I'm grateful for it in the past. I'm grateful that I was able to step away and that I've had enough support and solidity to be able to stay steady and all of that. I don't see it getting better. I see it getting worse for people. I see it devolving quite quickly and I don't think it's going to be a healthy place for people to be in the long-term. I think we're going to see massive change within the next couple of years around understanding it as like the new smoking, so to speak, for our bodies on our psyche. So I agree, but I also have a lot of compassion for people who really need it to survive. Like yeah. And I really state that with humility and non-judgment that it is essential for a lot of people to survive.
[01:00:04] And, even for some folks, that's our only social interaction. I totally get why you need it. And so it's not a black or white, either or thing for me in terms of it's good or it's bad, but I don't see it getting better. There's addiction centers in the US opening up just for internet and social media addiction.
[01:00:27] Laura McKowen: Yes. I know. is there are programs like there's, it's kind of funny, cause it's called Talkspace program, which is like a digital app I opened up for social media addiction. But yeah, I mean, yeah. Where can people find you?
[01:00:47] Jane Clapp: You can find me not on Instagram. You can find me at janeclapp.com. It's kind of liberating, right? Yeah. Make myself scarce and see what happens.
[01:01:10] Laura McKowen: Oh, I love it. I love it. This feels like a very serendipitous conversation and I have to thank my community for this. I sent out newsletters and they came back here with your name. I'm just so grateful.
[01:01:34] Jane Clapp: Well, thank you. Whoever said my name, I'm really happy to connect with you, Laura. And I'm super excited that you are on this cutting, leading edge of things as well. Thanks so much. Take care of yourself.
[01:01:54] Laura McKowen: Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMST head on over to tmstpod.com and become a member. Members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations, previews of upcoming guests, invites to join me for members-only events and access to our members-only community where I hang out a lot, especially now that I'm not on social media. We decided from the beginning to make this an independent project, we don't have sponsors and we don't run ads.
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