Tammie: You’ve said that "a lot of the pain and the dis-ease that we experience in our lives comes from our lack of support." In what ways do you see us most effectively healing from this lack.

Tom Daly: It is my belief that much of the pain and dis-ease we experience in our lives comes directly from the disconnection from the non-human natural world that I spoke of in the previous question. This pain is heightened by a lack of support that is symptomatic of our culture. We currently have the idea that we can deny and hide from that which causes us pain. That belief makes it very difficult to question ourselves at a deep level. We are taught that we are responsible for our own pain and that it is up to us to fix ourselves by taking drugs (both legal and illegal), working harder, eating more, taking exotic vacations, and generally doing anything but looking at the source of the pain.

One very deep paradox in this is that vast numbers of us now make our livings by treating the symptoms of stressful modern society. If people were healthier and were blessed just for being alive then we perhaps we wouldn’t need the prozac and cocaine, the big new car, the trip to Bali, the therapy sessions, the vitamins, the cosmetic surgery, and the self-help books. I often reflect on how much my own work depends on other people’s pain and dissatisfaction with life.

As Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, said, "You can never get enough of what you don’t really need" . We will never get satisfaction in the ways we are trying to get it. What I believe is missing in the equation of modern life is what we most desire...love ...support...blessing...being seen and heard and taken seriously.

My answer to the question of how to deal with the pain created by living in this society is to change our ideas about how to get and give love and support. I believe that if we all got the love and support we both need and deserve, many of our problems would evaporate. And with them, as I suggested above, so might some of our biggest industries. What keeps this economy growing is the creation of artificial need. If we lived lives more filled with love, the pain would diminish, but the engine that drives our economy would also diminish. There are many forces that keep that engine going. Love doesn’t fit in the modern economic equation. A shift to an economy of love and compassion would require a massive "birth-quake" that you have described.

I teach a number of processes that help people feel more blessed for just being and that has been the focus of my work for the past decade. Paradoxically when people feel blessed and supported they often feel more grief about the way the world is going. So in the short run their pain increases.

Part of the process I teach is that when we feel the pain, we can also transform our resistance to it. When the resistance to whatever is causing the pain is diminished, the pain is first more manageable and then becomes something else, often the experience of love and connection. Accepting this particular paradox is, to me, an important part of becoming an adult.

When we feel our pain and acknowledge it, the healing can begin. When we can counter the tendency to deny it and suppress it and be with others who feel it, when we can honor it and let others know when we sense it in them, when we can remember grief is something we must share, then we deepen the connections between us and we can then feel the blessing of it.

I am not sure why we came to be so afraid of grief, but I believe it has to do with our forgetting that grief is an expression of love. When we label it as pain, we try to avoid it and that sends it into shadow. The way to bring it out of shadow is to feel our grief together and remember it as love and connection.

Many of our deepest wounds can become gifts when we can allow ourselves drop into pain knowing that we are supported and blessed in the process of going there. Obviously if we are shamed for our tears and view them as a sign of weakness then we are not going to be willing to go to that place.

For me, men’s work has been a long and difficult process of creating a safe place for men’s grief and tears, and ultimately for love and compassion.

Tammie: After closing my psychotherapy practice in Maine, and having an opportunity to step back and think about the process of psychotherapy, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom of James Hillman, who points out that a significant amount of what therapists have been trained to see as individual pathology is often an indication of our culture’s pathology. I’m wondering what your perspective is on this.

Tom Daly: Jim Hillman has shaped my thinking on this as well. I certainly agree that we have for too long over-looked the collective aspect of neurosis. Hillman sees us spending a lot of time on introspection and that for the most parts seems to have made us less politically and socially active. In my private practice and in my Trainings, I always stress the link between the personal and collective. It is not a question of the personal vs. the political but how can we be effective in both realms.

What interests me about Hillman’s inquiry is how we can bring the inside out. If therapy simply makes people more conforming to the mainstream values then we all lose. If on the other hand we help bring out the best in each individual, then the result will probably be a more vital and active person both personally and politically. I have no doubt that an individual or small committed group can bring about profound change. I definitely believe that individual choices do add up and make a difference.

Our anger, our pain, our joy, our fear, is all influenced by our environment. We can’t solve our problems only by talking to our therapist, we must also talk to our families, to our neighbors, and to our national, state, and local politicians. We cast our vote about everything by who we are. Every act is consequential, how we treat our friends, how and what we eat, the way we pray or don’t, how much time we spend or don’t spend with our family, where we go after work, how much water we use to brush our teeth, it all makes a difference.

As much faith as I place in individual choice, I’m not convinced that we can make the changes we want simply as the sum of many individual choices. We are, I believe, at the point where individuals are not smart enough by themselves to make the wisest choices. The systems are too complex for any individual to process the data and make choices for the good of the whole. The time of the lone ranger leader is past. The answers we need are in the "field" and in the shadows. And we haven’t been so good at looking there. In fact we are trained not to look beyond ourselves and most trusted allies.

We all need to develop a new skill of sensing this field wisdom. If we don’t, we will continue to be torn apart by shifting individual, group, and nationalistic self-interest. My guess is that this shift to greater group awareness will be one of the next "BirthQuakes".