You can order my e-book, “Truth Be Told,” here. It is available for immediate download. The audiobook is also available for preorder. It will be released on September 1, 2024.
Please note that at this point there are no hard copies available of the book; it is an e-book only.
Footnotes for audio book listeners:
1 Requisite disclaimer that I am not a psychologist at all, but rather a curious and psychologically-minded coach, scholar and researcher.
2 Names and specific details about clients have been changed throughout.
3 Brad Blanton, “Radical Honesty” (1994)
4 https://jennapacelli.substack.com/p/connecting-to-your-authentic-self
5 See, e.g., Nadine Strossen: “Hate” (2018)
6 “The Social Dilemma,” (2020 film)
7 This is not to completely do away with the heritability of personality traits (in this case, particularly “agreeableness.”) It is to bring nuance to that often far-too oversimplified conversation and to interrogate how nurture can and does play a role as well. See the discussion in chapter 3 for more on the question of “nature vs. nurture.”
8 Melody Beattie, “Codependent No More” (1986)
9 There is a vast, vast interdisciplinary literature out there about how and why our bodies “hold on” to early survival fears. It is not the task of this book to survey that literature and render a decisive verdict on any of its specific claims. I am simply taking as my point of departure that it is a literature worth taking seriously and engaging with in a spirit of epistemic humility. See my website for additional information and a bibliography: www.jenhowk.com/truth
10 “Couples Therapy” on Showtime, Season 2, Episode 7.
11 This quote is attributed to Einstein but appears to be a…well…simplification of what he actually said, which was:
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” (“On the Method of Theoretical Physics” The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford 10 June 1933)
12 “Why then should Darwinian fundamentalism be expressing itself so stridently when most evolutionary biologists have become more pluralistic in the light of these new discoveries and theories? I am no psychologist, but I suppose that the devotees of any superficially attractive cult must dig in when a general threat arises. ‘That old-time religion; it’s good enough for me.’ There is something immensely beguiling about strict adaptationism – the dream of an underpinning simplicity for an enormously complex and various world. If evolution were powered by a single force producing one kind of result, and if life’s long messy history could therefore be explained by extending small or orderly increments of adaptation through the immensity of geological time, then an explanatory simplicity might descend upon evolution’s overt richness. Evolution then might become ‘algorithmic’, a surefire logical procedure, as in Daniel Dennett’s reverie. But what is wrong with messy richness, so long as we can construct an equally rich texture of satisfying explanation?” Stephen Jay Gould, “More Things in Heaven and Earth” (2000)
13 As should be clear by now, agreeable is as agreeable does. Agreeableness (or any of the big 5 traits) is not exclusively an immutable characteristic baked into an unchanging DNA cake.
14 For classic comic relief on this theme, see “Are we the baddies” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
15 https://www.instagram.com/kellybroganmd/reel/C4Bk2RsJhup/
16 “Long live the struggle! Forever!”
17 Bonnie Raitt is a goddess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW9Cu6GYqxo
18 If the reference is lost on you, see “Fatal Attraction” (1987). No bunnies were boiled in the making of this book.
19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAb2_-uv41Y
20 There is a documentary about a tragic car crash, one of the most deadly in New York state history—“Something’s Wrong With Aunt Diane”—that affected me deeply. It is, at root, a story about a “perfect” mother whose secret alcoholism to manage her early trauma and abandonment led to unimaginable tragedy for herself, her children, and many other innocent people.
21 https://youtu.be/h3c_D0s391Q?feature=shared
22 Russell Brand, “Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions” (2017)
23 See Chapter 3, and jenhowk.com/truth for more resources.
24 See, e.g., “When a Bad Metaphor May Not Be a Victimless Crime” and other research by Boroditsky and Thibodeau; “Are You Thinking Clearly” by Frankel and Warren.
25 Boroditsky, Lera (2011). “How language shapes thought.” Scientific American. Boroditsky’s research includes multilingual controls to sort out genetic and environmental influences as much as possible.
26 He didn’t invent the concept, but there is a good explanation of this on the instagram account of @awakeningwithbrian.
27 CG Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14
28 Parker Palmer, “A Hidden Wholeness” (2004)
29 “Addiction to Perfection,” by Marion Woodman (1982)
30 The whole mind-body connection and the psycho-social aspects of physical ailments is, again, too big a topic for me to properly get into here and yet another book. But there is a variety of interesting work on this and some of it quite legitimate—this is not entirely the realm of woo-woo. For especially thought-provoking research, see “Sight and Blindness in the Same Person: Gating in the Visual System” by Strasburger and Waldvogel; Gabor Mate’s book “When the Body Says No,” and Suzanne O’Sullivan’s work on psycho-somatic disease (esp. “The Sleeping Beauties.” More resources at www.jenhowk.com/truth
31 Robert Firestone, “The Fantasy Bond” (1985)
32 In my interview with Adam Sud, we discuss how his diagnosis of ADHD tracked him into a debilitating addiction to stimulants and food. You can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnJ6yX52VjY
33 Carol Adams, “The Sexual Politics of Meat” (1990) and “The Pornography of Meat” (2004)
34 “The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness” by Suzanne O’Sullivan (2021)
35 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26468893
36 See eg Jonathan Shedler, “Where Is the Evidence for ‘Evidence-Based’ Therapy?” https://jonathanshedler.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Shedler-2018-Where-is-the-evidence-for-evidence-based-therapy
37 Stephen E. Hanson, “Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia” (2010)
38 Iain McGilchrist, “The Master and His Emissary” (2009)
39 “There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.” (McGilchrist, 2009)
40 I have adapted the original example from the book slightly for clarity. “The Master and His Emissary,” p 278.
41 “Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it],” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.”
42 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x8A9WvQV_w
43 Robert Johnson, “Inner Work” (1986)
44 From “Couples Therapy” on Showtime, Season 3, Episode 1.
45 The original source of this diagram is unclear, but perhaps it comes from Christopher Vogler, “A Practical Guide to Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces”
46 C.G. Jung, CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche: The Stages of Life
47 https://archive.org/details/Popcornarchive-citizenKane1941_gi6kh
48 The original draft of this book included a chapter on free will, but ultimately it didn’t quite fit, and I will expand on it in a future book. I have a few thoughts on the subject in the note on free will in the appendix.
49 https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/seyer/files/plato_republic_514b-518d_allegory-of-the-cave.pdf
50 https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/
51 https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-red-herring-of-free-will-in-objective-idealism/reading/