Phyllis Leavitt: The United States of Love
Reconstructing the Narrative of a Nation.
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Today, our search lands us in conversation with Phyllis E. Leavitt, a psychotherapist and author whose insights into the human condition challenge us to reflect on our own lives and the oh-so-moral fabric of our national well-being.
Phyllis lovingly explores the pitfalls and possibilities of the human condition. With a career spanning over three decades, she has been a quiet force in the field of psychology, focusing on the impact of family dysfunction and the transformative power of healing.In her latest book, "America In Therapy: A New Approach to Hope and Healing for a Nation in Crisis," Phyllis extends the intimate lessons from the therapy room to the vast complexities of a nation in conflict. She invites us to consider how the healing of personal trauma and dysfunction within families could be a blueprint for national and collective recovery.
Through her narrative we are invited to reexamine the intertwined paths of personal and societal health. Phyllis argues that the decline in our collective mental health poses the greatest threat to our survival—as individuals and as a society. Her call to action is not just to heal but to transform how we understand our own roles within the broader human family.
Phyllis’ work is a clarion call to awaken to the cycles of pain and violence that ripple through our lives and across our country. She believes profoundly in the power of psychology not only to interpret the world but to change it—offering hope, fostering peace, and nurturing love in places we might have thought impossible. With her, we explore what it means to bring an entire country to therapy, to heal not just in private rooms but in public spaces and policies. Fellow searchers, today on the Infinite Search, we explore the heart of Phyllis’ message: a vision of America renewed through the healing principles of psychotherapy, inviting each of us to participate in reimagining and reconstructing the narrative of our nation.
Guest
Phyllis E. Leavitt is a psychotherapist and author addressing the complex layers of family dysfunction and its far-reaching impacts on mental health. Phyllis's insights are drawn from over three decades of clinical experience focused on abuse, trauma, and recovery within family systems.
After earning her Master’s Degree in Psychology and Counseling from Antioch University in 1989, Phyllis co-directed the innovative Parents United sexual abuse treatment program in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before transitioning to a full-time private practice that spanned more than thirty years.
Today, Phyllis’s work extends beyond the therapy room into public discourse and literary contributions. Her latest book, "America in Therapy: A New Approach to Hope and Healing for a Nation in Crisis," reflects her deep-seated belief that the lessons learned in personal healing are integral to national and global wellness. This book, alongside her earlier works "A Light in the Darkness" and "Into the Fire," which chronicle her personal healing journey, offer profound insights into the healing processes that foster safety, peace, and love.
Now retired from active practice, Phyllis lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her husband, focusing her energy on writing and speaking engagements. Her work is a beacon of hope, advocating for a collective path to recovery that heals the wounds of violence and nurtures a cycle of renewal.
You can learn more about Phyllis's visionary approach to healing and her writings at:
www.phyllisleavitt.com
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Transcript
[00:00:00] John: Today, our search lands us in conversation with Phyllis E. Levitt, a psychotherapist and author whose insights into the human condition challenge us to reflect on our own lives and the oh so moral fabric of our national well being. Phyllis lovingly explores the pitfalls and possibilities of the human condition With a career spanning over three decades, she has been a quiet force in the field of psychology, focusing on the impact of family dysfunction and the transformative power of healing.
[00:00:30] In her latest book, America in Therapy, A New Approach to Hope and Healing for a Nation in Crisis, Phyllis extends the intimate lessons from the therapy room to the vast complexities of a nation in conflict. She invites us to consider how the healing of personal trauma and dysfunction within families can could be a blueprint for both national and collective recovery.
[00:00:53] Through her narrative, we're invited to re examine the intertwined paths of personal and societal health. Phyllis argues that the decline in our collective mental health poses the greatest threat to our survival as individuals and as a society. Her call to action is not just to heal, but to transform. To transform how we understand our own roles within the broader human family.
[00:01:16] Phyllis's work is a clarion call to awaken to the cycles of pain and violence that ripple through our lives and across our country. She believes profoundly in the power of psychology, not only to interpret the world, but to change it. Offering hope, fostering peace and nurturing love in places we might have thought impossible.
[00:01:38] We'll explore what it means to bring an entire country to therapy to heal, not just in private rooms. But in public spaces and policies, her voice is a testament to the courage it takes to move from insight to action and from individual healing to collective transformation. Fellow searchers, I'm excited to explore the heart of Phyllis's message, a vision of America renewed through the healing principles of psychotherapy, inviting each of us to participate in reimagining and reconstructing the narrative of our nation.
[00:02:13] Phyllis, thank you for joining us on the Infinite Search. It's a true privilege to share this space and time with you today.
[00:02:20] Phyllis: Thank you so much john for having me here with you today. It's really my honor and privilege to be talking with you.
[00:02:26] John: I'm really excited to talk around this idea of this relationship between the collective identity that we find ourselves in as a nation or as maybe even a planet and that sort of really personal relationship that we tend to go through in our lives as a healing process or as a way of finding ourselves In this sort of search of meaning and of existence and, starting off from the beginning, I'm curious, roots of our work that each of us choose to do in our lives, they're often found earlier, they're in the soil of our childhood.
[00:03:00] And I'm curious if there is this relationship that you find with the work you do today. And that relationship that you had with the people that you trusted in your life, the communities that you lived in, what was that like for you growing up?
[00:03:15] Phyllis: Yeah, I think that's a very apt question because for sure my career did grow out of my early childhood experience. I lived in, what appeared to be a pretty normal middle class family, but in fact I experienced sexual abuse as a little girl and I had buried all of those memories and
[00:03:38] I was very much a mystery to myself growing up.
[00:03:43] I felt very deeply that something was wrong, but I had no idea what it was. And so I just attributed that to myself. There's something wrong with me. I'm a flawed person. And that just expanded out to I'm unlovable, I'm invisible. And for so many people, and I know this from my personal experience and from my work with hundreds and hundreds of clients over the years, that, trauma in childhood, and especially if it happens with people that, you know, and trust.
[00:04:13] Or even if it doesn't but it has a lasting effect on most of us that is very difficult to deal with in terms of the level of pain or self doubt or negative feelings about oneself, which I carried quite a bit into my life. And. It wasn't until I was in my 30s and I already had three children by that time that I really knew that I had to find some way to get help because I had really hit my own very deep depression of, and rock bottom place of depression and anxiety and just feeling completely lost, but also knowing, and I think I want to say this because I know so many people have this experience knowing that there was something more inside me and that there was a life force that was just aching to get out and be expressed in the world and tons of, love inside of me that wasn't finding It wasn't finding reception or, a place to really flower in the world.
[00:05:13] And I went to therapy for the first time and I started taking out books on psychology and all of a sudden I began to make sense to myself and I was starting to have memories. So that's really where it began for me and
[00:05:27] it was life changing for me to unearth what had happened to me and know that what happened to me was not who I was, it was just something that happened to me.
[00:05:36] And and that's a very big distinction, I think, for people to know that no matter what happens to you, no matter how painful it might be, it's not who you are and it doesn't just have to determine who you are. So I did a lot of deep work, and I became a psychotherapist myself, and the big ahas that I had that led to the book that I wrote were that, I think often when people are traumatized Early on, or any time in their life, really, you feel very alone with your pain.
[00:06:08] And we live in a society that I think honors and lauds looking like you have it all together and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and that kind of thing. And I saw how important it was to be able to for a person to have their pain in a safe place and work their way through it without shame, without being rushed without being judged.
[00:06:29] And and I brought that to my work and I, that was fortunately what was also brought to me.
[00:06:35] And so the big ahas were that I'm not alone, I wasn't alone, that there are millions of people who, unlike me, don't have access to any help or understanding of what's going on with them, and they remain a mystery to themselves with a wide variety of symptoms that could be not just anxiety and depression, but it could be addiction, it could be people pleasing, it could be being driven it could be It could be anger.
[00:07:01] It could be aggression. It could be, it could be,
[00:07:03] we have all kinds of symptoms when we don't get help for the pain that we have endured. And then the big aha after that really was which is the foundation of my book is that we all, Live in many family systems, not just our family of origin, but our communities are family systems.
[00:07:23] Our schools are family systems. Our workplaces are family systems. They all operate on the principles of family dynamics and our government. Is also operating on family dynamics and they're either healthy or they're not healthy. They're either loving and supportive and tolerant and committed to nonviolent conflict resolution or they're not.
[00:07:47] And so I began to look at America through the lens of are the family dynamics of America healthy or are they not? And how are they not? And what is the effect on us if they're not? And that and knowing that they're not some of them,
[00:08:02] John: What was that moment that you made that connection between those two ideas between that sort of personal and the political, just to say that,
[00:08:10] Phyllis: don't know. It was a long time ago. I had the idea for this book a long time ago. And and I think what it was really the connection. I don't know if there was a moment or so much as it was a growing sense of connection, but When I realized that I wasn't alone and that I had become very symptomatic myself from pain that I had endured at the hands of other people then I knew that there are people all over the world who are symptomatic not just from abuse in a family, but abuse in a community or from war or from discrimination or poverty or injustice. And that. They're symptomatic.
[00:08:51] And I blamed myself for my symptoms because I had no other way to understand myself. And as a society, what I saw was that we blame our most symptomatic members of the human family. We blame them for their symptoms, for their addiction, for their crime, for their aggression, for their failure to thrive, for their sometimes powerlessness and helplessness to protect the people around them for their greed for their, whatever it is when psychologically,
[00:09:23] I really began to understand that our symptoms are the sign of where love is missing, where support is missing where true belonging to a healthy system is missing.
[00:09:36] And we compensate in ways that are. We, psychologically, we call them defenses, and our worst behaviors are defenses against the pain of not feeling loved, not belonging, not being safe, not being provided for, and not being treated with justice and equality.
[00:09:57] John: I, I love what you say. I wholeheartedly believe with that just the way that mental health therapy impacted your life, it's impacted my life in maybe similarly profound ways. And those ideas around guilt and shame, I think, I grew up in poverty and it was, I, You just blamed it on yourself.
[00:10:16] The addictions that you saw everywhere were the people couldn't help themselves. And I think that there's something profound in that idea of a family systems and the dynamics that, that families hold. I'm estranged from my family and I'm working towards repairing those relationships literally as we speak right now.
[00:10:35] And just, it's the impact that can happen from mending those relationships. I think that there's something really interesting in what you're saying with this idea of love. And that's what's missing, when I look to corporate culture I work in branding and brand design and something I've noticed a lot, maybe it's dissipated a little bit lately, but there was this language and tone of voice around, the corporate family, and you could see the missing or the desire for this sort of connection that, or the language for that connection, even though it was inauthentically applied and in so many ways.
[00:11:11] You could still see the truth behind it, that there was a need for that or create for that sort of, there was a desire for that relationship to be in relationship in a loving way. I'm curious how these sort of core concepts or family are applied to how you look at a society, like as a nation, right?
[00:11:30] Phyllis: Yeah and you steer me if I'm off course for what you're asking, but what I have learned over all the course of my own experience as a client, and of course many years working with so many people is that the main thing that brings people pain is some injury to love and belonging.
[00:11:50] And along with that is safety and being provided for it and all the things that go along with love and belonging. And that we suffer to the extent that love and belonging are injured or missing in our lives. And I've never seen that not be true for one client, any client that I've ever had or myself.
[00:12:07] And The answer lies in recreating love and belonging. That's how we restore ourselves to being and to being contributing members who are safe and loving and caring members of society.
[00:12:21] And yet love and belonging are completely absent from all political discourse, and I call that a mental health issue that what we know in the field of mental health helps restore people to safety and to be thriving and becoming their fullest selves in the world is restoring them to love and belonging with safe people.
[00:12:45] And and yet we're a nation that seems completely. Still invested in defenses in our defenses and our investment isn't in love and belonging for every human being, which is really the clearly and so simply, but it's almost hidden in plain sight this understanding that it is the access to peace.
[00:13:07] It is the access to wellbeing. And it's where we need to invest ourselves. And we know this from the work that we've done in our individual offices. Not that anything is perfect. I'm not a perfect human being. We still all have our triggers, our frailties, our blind spots, but we can heal to the place where we are safe for ourselves and other human beings.
[00:13:33] And even if that progress is not perfect. Two steps forward, one step back at some points, which is what it means to be human. But we can learn the skills to restore ourselves to love and connection when we lose it. And this, and I don't see this happening. On a national level in policy or practice, we see some of the dynamics of the most dysfunctional families playing out where certain whole segments of the population are targeted for blame and abuse and neglect where there's so many things we could say about it where there's such economic inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality and all of these dynamics cause people massive pain. And they become symptomatic, and these are the things we have to understand, that people become symptomatic and then when they act out, it's a normal response to an abnormal way of being treated.
[00:14:33] John: I think you, you bring up some interesting ideas to not just to answer the question, but to create some space around it too of what is that root cause? What is that root? I thought about my own family traumas and my own healing journey, and I had to go back and heal myself as a child and say, Hey, six year old John, I got you.
[00:14:53] You may not have been able to be taken care of back then, and that was true, and it sucked, but that's not today. And I got your back, and I'll take care of you. I'll be your dad. I'll be your mom. I'll take care of you. Where is that root in terms of a collective nation? As a nation, how do we frame that conversation?
[00:15:11] Phyllis: I get asked that question a lot and I don't think there's 1 answer and probably people in different fields would answer that question differently. But from a psychological point of view that comes out of my experience And again, I wouldn't say that there's one answer to the question, but one of the things I think we need to realize is that some of the paradigms that we have lived under as human beings, maybe from the beginning really need to be shifted in the world that we live in today, which is a very different world than our ancestors lived in.
[00:15:46] And what I mean by that is you know, as animals, we have had to compete to survive. That's just the nature of being a mortal being in a body that needs, protection from the elements and food and protection from any aggressors. And so we live in a paradigm of competition and we have come, this is one answer to the question.
[00:16:12] There's probably, there's many, and I don't know how many I'll get to, but what has happened for the human race at this point in human history is that the ways we can compete to survive have become lethal to all of us. The ways that we are endangering our whole habitat with chemicals and cutting down rainforests and pollution the ways that we've made that we've used our incredible creativity and intelligence to survive, have reached a tipping point with weapons of mass destruction that can destroy life as we know it.
[00:16:48] And so I think we have to reinvent the way that we look at the paradigm of competition and cooperation and the, so the models that we've been living on. During the 1 of them, and I talk about several of them in my book, and I don't know how many we'll get today to today, but really needs to be reworked.
[00:17:10] So we've just gotten ourselves to this tipping point in our own evolutionary process as highly intelligent and very relational human beings where our creativity has also opened up the possibility of our own destruction and extinction. And so I think we have to rework those paradigms.
[00:17:31] So if we look at the family model the emphasis for so much of human history, and certainly in America, this model still persists, is like the individual is to succeed, the individual person, the individual business, the individual governing it. Official, whoever it is, this, the focus is on them having success and we've outgrown that model.
[00:17:58] The model that we need to evolve our psychological consciousness into is a model of what I call, and I didn't make up this term sovereign unity, which means that there's a relationship that is ongoing that is constantly being reworked between the good of the individual and the good of the whole, the good of a country and the survivability of the planet earth if you will.
[00:18:26] So I think that's one of the big things. We're just we're living in paradigms that no longer serve us that might have worked or might have seemed acceptable in the past, but they don't work in the world that we live in today.
[00:18:39] War actually needs to be known as obsolete. And we haven't quite gotten there.
[00:18:45] And so for me, I'll just I want to throw this in because it's the psychological piece is that what we want for ourselves. As individuals, I don't know anybody who wants war in their life. I don't know anyone who wants to be bombed out of their home or displaced from their country. I don't know anyone who wants to be targeted as inferior and mistreated or, the recipient of massive injustice.
[00:19:14] I don't know anyone who wants their Children to be kidnapped and put in cages. And yet we allow and condone these things to happen to other people. And that gap. Between the love and belonging and safety and provision that we all want for ourselves and what we allow and even vote for to happen to other people is not an ideological divide. It's a sign of mental unwellness.
[00:19:44] If I don't practice for other people what I preach for myself, that is a sign of mental unwellness. And we're being led to believe that these are, all these policies and practices are ideological positions, when in fact they're signs of collective mental unwellness and that whole going back to what I said about competition and cooperation, the whole idea of the part in relationship to the whole and the whole in relationship to the good of the part is where our mental health needs to take us, just like in a family. In a family, we expect that the welfare of everyone is a consideration, not just the welfare of one person.
[00:20:30] John: What I'm hearing is that there's this real need for reframing what it means to have maybe both personal health and collective health, that there's that, that interdependence between the two. And that maybe the personal is obliterated in that sense. I don't know.
[00:20:45] Phyllis: What you bring up is such an important issue, and it really is the foundation, actually, of my book, which is in the field of psychotherapy and psychology today, we understand so much more than we ever did about the impact of family systems. In the very beginning of looking at a person's psychology, we saw people as an island.
[00:21:09] They were either good or they were bad, or they were mentally ill, or they were mentally healthy, or they needed tweaking in this area. But what we know from the field of psychology now is that you cannot separate the mental health of the individual from the mental health of the collective family that they're a part of.
[00:21:29] And originally we looked at that as the family of origin. What are the dynamics in the family of origin? What are the role models for men and women? What are the role models for how conflict is dealt with? What are the expectations? What are the rewards and punishments for, behaviors?
[00:21:47] How are people provided for? There's what are the moral values if there are and what are the expectations for individuals in the family and as they leave the family and that conditioning, if you have abusive parents, if you have neglectful parents, they impact the psychology of the people that they have control over their children or their spouses, for better or for worse.
[00:22:15] And we know that now. So you can't really separate a person's mental health from the mental health or ill health of the family systems they live in. And. Today, we understand that the family systems are not just the family of origin, they're the community, their schools, their businesses, their higher institutions, and their governments, and they're all family systems.
[00:22:40] And if they're operating on abuse and neglect, even for some people, even if you're not the direct target of abuse and neglect by a government, you're still affected by it. And I can tell you that from my own experience that and I've said this many times, but it just really stands out to me on when the 2016 election was happening and the year before that, and then after that.
[00:23:06] I never in my entire experience as a psychotherapist ever had one client come to therapy and talk about the politics of our country and how traumatized they felt by what was going on until that election cycle. People were up at night and afraid that we were going to become a totalitarian country and lose our democracy and lose our right to vote and whatever else, people were really frightened of.
[00:23:34] And and that doesn't mean that they were even specifically personally being targeted, but what they were witnessing was traumatic. And we know the same principle from family dynamics. When there's abuse in a family, Even if you're not the person being abused, you are definitely affected by witnessing it and by, and especially if you feel powerless to do anything about it, which so many people in our country feel today, powerless to change some of the dynamics that are hurting so many of our, I say, our brother and sister human beings.
[00:24:11] John: It's an incredible sort of logic to think around in, it puts me back to this sort of space where we're talking around. Culture and in economics for me is what I'm thinking of. And, you keep, I keep hearing this word competition and, if I think back to what's the ground of our culture it's how we define our value, and how we trade our value and exchange our value.
[00:24:35] And, I'm curious what does the world look like without that sort of idea of competition like that?
[00:24:42] Phyllis: I think it looks like we really take care of one another just like we would want to be taken care of. If you think of just a family, you would want everyone to be fed. We would say that if in a family system, one child was being fed and one child was on starvation rations, we would say that family was mentally ill and disturbed. And yet we allow this and condone this. in our country, in our communities, and in our world. So it would look like we take care of one another. And the interesting thing is that we're, I think, All safer when we take care of one another. It's those of us who we don't take care of, who we target, who we leave in poverty or discriminate against because of the color of their skin or their gender or their religion or their economic status that we create victims who are then going to act out some of them on us.
[00:25:42] And then we're like, Oh, Wow, there's all these bad people in the world instead of what are we doing as the family of America or the family of humanity that is impacting people in a way that they become harmful to us. So the more we take care of one another, whether it's with good housing or education or providing food or a living wage, or, Or respect for our differing religions and genders and talents and whatever actually the safer we are. I think many people really don't understand that, that they're still in a mindset of, I have to conquer you to survive. I don't care about the impact on you as long as I'm okay.
[00:26:27] John: Instead of I need to take care of you in order to survive, because in order to survive, we all have to survive.
[00:26:37] Phyllis: I really think that's where we are in the history of the human race. And we might not have even known that 100 or 200 years ago. But I think that's where we are now. I think about like planet earth as this ship, right? We could sink it. I don't mean the earth itself, but with pollution or a third world war or nuclear weapons or whatever we do, we could sink it for human beings.
[00:27:03] We're on this ship together.
[00:27:05] John: So then, there's this idea of being completely overwhelmed with, Some of the stuff that you see in the news and just that sort of sense of paralysis that can come from experiencing things that are completely out of your control. How do we go from that state to getting unlocked and unfrozen from that state into one of action.
[00:27:26] Personally I have this viewpoint that it's going to come from both sides. It's going to be a leadership change and it's going to be a grassroots world. And we'll meet in the middle somehow.
[00:27:36] Phyllis: I agree that's exactly I think that it's that the microcosm some of the larger institutions and the macro sorry, the microcosm of us as individuals and the macrocosms of our larger institutions and governing bodies are inextricably intertwined right now, and it is going if it's going to need to come from both directions.
[00:27:59] And in answer to your question, and I, and that's a really important question, because I think a lot of people really do feel just powerless and I'm just going to take care of myself because there's nothing I can do here. And I think that there is something we can all do, and I think we all need to feel like there's something that we can each do.
[00:28:19] First of all, we can really commit to healing our own wounds and and for people who are afraid to reach out for help or feel like they should be able to do it on their own or are in denial of their own dysfunction, I just want to say that there's no shame in asking for help, there's no shame in becoming vulnerable or crying or actually feeling the depths of your own pain.
[00:28:45] And it is the access to healing and we can all be those safe people for one another. Not everybody is in this country anyway, is going to have access to actual therapy. I wish that was one of the things that we were funding. And we can advocate for that, but we,
[00:29:02] you don't have to be a therapist to be a kind, safe, listening ear for another person. And even if you're not that, we can all be someone who affirms other people's goodness or their strengths that you helped me with my child. Just acknowledging each other, bringing basically, bringing that love through us to other people and to ourselves as much as humanly possible on a daily basis, smiling at people, acknowledging them, being friendly, being generous, being, giving our time, whatever it is that a person feels called to do, no matter how small of a scale you think you're operating on, maybe it's just with your family and your friends.
[00:29:57] It all matters. It all counts. Every bit of love we put out into the world regenerates itself. We don't know the ripple effect that our kindness or our compassion or our listening ear can have through the people that we impact and that can change our voting choices. What we advocate for in the world one of the things that I've also said over and over again is, I have never worked with anybody, and I've worked with lots and lots of abuse and neglect, stories that are really hard to believe of some of the horrible things that people have endured.
[00:30:34] I have never worked with anyone who's made that healing journey who has become a perpetrator themselves.
[00:30:42] When we get a chance to heal, we become more loving. We become more kind. We become more considerate. We become more compassionate to the pain that other people have. I've never seen that not happen.
[00:30:55] And whatever work you do in your own life, whatever work I do, we do, we all do in our own lives, matters. And it has an impact. And I think that's where we find our true power.
[00:31:08] John: Yeah. I love that. This, so I'm going to back up for a second. There was a show I'm watching. I'm not a big sports fan, but there's this coach that I was watching a documentary about coach Jimmy V and he's a very down to earth, was a very down to earth person. And he said this thing that, and I've heard this from since I was a child that ordinary people do extraordinary things.
[00:31:34] It's not that extraordinary people do extraordinary things, it's that what makes it extraordinary is that it was an ordinary person just like me and you and every other person in this world that's exactly the same, that there's, that there were all just human beings and that's what our life is for.
[00:31:50] Phyllis: Absolutely. And we are all ordinary human beings. We are all and the way that we categorize people as above and below, superior and inferior is part of the problem. We're all basic human beings who need love and belonging and need safety and being cared for. And we're all equal on this planet.
[00:32:13] On this boat that's sailing through space, we're all equals. And I think that's very hard for the powers to be to digest.
[00:32:21] And that's part of the paradigm shift that needs to happen. We all have a right to be here. We're all equal in value. We're all equally lovable. And if we're all treated that way, we become safe contributing human beings for each other.
[00:32:35] John: It's in the small steps, right? I'm curious if you have any anecdotal stories, any personal stories that you could think might shed light on this sort of idea that it's the personal that creates the political in that way.
[00:32:47] Phyllis: I probably have a couple of stories. One of them is that when I was in high school, I had a teacher who, and I don't remember anything that she said to me. At all, but she was my English teacher and
[00:33:01] I just remember her somehow conveying to me that I was a really good writer and I had always, even before I had her in high school I had started writing poetry when I was young and I just was always drawn to writing, but her seeing me made a difference.
[00:33:22] Somebody reflecting back a talent or a strength or a gift that I had made it more real for me. And I think that's one of the things that we really can do for one another in terms of our strengths and gifts, whatever they are. Another one was, so that was a really big one and that really goes along with what I'm saying.
[00:33:43] We can all give this to each other and it's really good food for human beings to be seen and acknowledged. I can't even stress that enough. We know that babies need that mirroring in order to develop. But we never actually stopped needing that mirroring. So that's 1 thing that I would share that was just, it was a small thing, but it was very impactful.
[00:34:06] And I've never forgotten her. And another really important story that of something that happened to me was when I was in my early 20s I was in a spiritual group and I had a friend who had gone to India to meet a guru. And he had suffered getting dust in his eyes in a way that was excruciatingly painful when he was on one of the trains in India.
[00:34:30] And by the time he got to the guru, he was just in enormous pain. And he, that's all he could talk about when he actually got, to sit in front of this guru and ask a question. And he shared the story with me when he returned. And so he said that what the guru told him was. Don't resist the pain.
[00:34:48] The more you resist, the more it's going to hurt. And I heard that as a life lesson when he shared that story with me. And it stayed with me. This thing of don't run from your pain. Allow yourself to feel it. Don't resist. And I had some very powerful experiences when I was really in that dark night of soul in my thirties when I went to therapy.
[00:35:14] I have a very clear memory of sitting in my kitchen by myself, my kids weren't home, and feeling the enormity of the pain that I was going through, and just breathing with it, and breathing with it, and saying, yes, I will move through you, not that I will stay here, but I will move through you, but I will allow you to, I will allow you to move through me rather than me try to damn you up or resist you or block you out.
[00:35:42] And it passed. And that's been a principle that I have this principle of surrendering to what is. Even if it's really painful and then holding for the highest good and moving toward the highest good that I can reach out of that, not despite it, or as opposed to it, but how can I transform that by being with it and then moving through it and transforming it into whatever my essence wants to express or be in the world.
[00:36:15] So those are. Two stories for me.
[00:36:18] John: Thank you for sharing those and the space between pain and and action, I think is really what defines a person in their life. And I'm curious, we're starting to wrap up in this conversation and I'm curious. What was that moment for you where you were able to surrender? Like, why did that happen for you?
[00:36:39] Phyllis: It's a good question. I don't know if I know the answer, but the thing that comes to my mind right away is that I had exhausted every other possibility. Nothing else worked. I had lots of compensations in my life. I loved my children. I, I had a practice by that time. I was starting to work with people.
[00:36:59] And nothing that I had done actually really worked except and this idea of surrender that came from the story that I told you stayed with me. And it actually was the key.
[00:37:12] John: In my own personal journey, have felt similar things. As we move out of this conversation into the world, What is your vision for that future? You have a book coming out July 2nd. We'll have show notes and all of that stuff after our conversation that'll give where to find it and all of that sort of stuff. But I'm curious. What's that vision for you?
[00:37:32] Phyllis: I'll say a couple things. One of them is, there's a quote by Martin Luther King that really speaks to me very deeply, and that is, it was something like, and I may not quote it exactly, but it was something like, The choice, my friends, is not between violence and nonviolence. The choice is between nonviolence and nonexistence.
[00:37:53] And I love life. I love this earth. I love my children. I love humanity. I don't love everything that humanity does, but I love humanity and I want to see us thrive and survive. I want to see a world that where we really understand that we have a choice in the dynamics that we play out with one another, we have a choice to be loving.
[00:38:21] We have a choice to make this earth sustainable. We have a choice to bring back ourselves back from the ledge of nuclear annihilation or chemical, and climate change and chemical pollution. We have a choice and and I hope that my book is one piece, one small piece of a large movement to help educate people about how we can do that.
[00:38:45] And part of that is, is really exploring and exposing the dangers we face if we don't.
[00:38:52] John: Life's choices are up to you, how you act and what you do the actions you take as a, as an individual, they affect our society as a whole. And I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for the actions that you take in this world to heal yourself and your community and hopefully this planet too, because I think that we have a bright future too.
[00:39:17] Phyllis, thank you. I really appreciate it. I really
[00:39:19] Phyllis: Thank you. I really appreciate you and your time. Thank you.
[00:39:25] John: Phyllis E. Levitt is a psychotherapist and author addressing the complex layers of family dysfunction and its far reaching impacts on mental health. Phyllis insights are drawn from over three decades of clinical experience focused on abuse, trauma, and recovery within family systems. After earning her master's degree in psychology and counseling from Antioch University in 1989, Phyllis co directed the innovative Parents United Sexual Abuse Treatment Program in Santa Fe before transitioning to a full time private practice that spanned more than 30 years. Today, Phyllis's work extends beyond the therapy room into public discourse and literary contributions. Her latest book, America in Therapy, A New Approach to Hope and Healing for a Nation in Crisis, reflects her deep seated belief that the lessons learned in personal healing are integral to national and global wellness.
[00:40:16] This book. Alongside her earlier works, a light in the darkness and into the fire, which chronicle her personal healing journey. Offer profound insights into the healing processes that foster safety, peace, and love.
[00:40:31] Now retired from active practice. Phyllis lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband, focusing her energy on writing and speaking engagements. Her work is a beacon of hope advocating for a collective path to recovery that heals the wounds of violence and nurtures a cycle of renewal. You can learn more about Phyllis's visionary approach to healing and her writings at www. PhyllisLevitt. com. That's www. P H Y L L I S L E A V I T T. com.