Episode 208 FINAL

I feel like you guys are getting a deeper glimpse into how special this program is, how aligned so many of the individuals are, and I was so excited to have Nadia on because I've been talking about this PhD. I've been talking about depth psychology for the whole first year of this program, and yet I haven't had any episode on what is depth psychology beyond just.

So I am, I'm so excited for you guys to get this introduction, and Nadia was the perfect guest to have on, to introduce us to this field in a way that I think really clarifies how it is so different from conventional psychology. A little intro to Nadia, Nadia Rae Brackett is a licensed depth oriented psychotherapist.

I also wanted to make sure I mentioned in the intro that she is is offering a free 30 minute alignment call for one-on-one clients and organizations who are interested in working with her further. So I'll make sure that link is in the show notes below. So with that, please enjoy this conversation with Nadia Rae Bracket.

Well, Nadia, welcome to the Accrescent Podcast. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. We're kind of giggling because I'll have already shared this in the intro, but you and I are in our, our PhD program together. We've been in a cohort for a, a little under a year now, but it's kind of funny.

I know. I'm like blushing. I'm so excited to have you on though. I mean, you know. Everyone in our cohort is doing such amazing things. I could have every single person in our cohort on the podcast. Um, but I'm so excited to have you on one. You are the first guest I'm having on to even talk about depth psychology and introduce this field to the audience.

So no pressure, but uh, that is gonna be really exciting for me 'cause my audience has known I'm doing this program and I've talked about it in snippets. But I think to be able to really help people understand what is it, how is it different, I'm really excited to offer that to them. And then we're gonna talk about Enneagram a little bit, um, which also I'm excited to dive into.

And to that end, I, I think it'll be nice really to hear your perspective on it, because you, you actually do have, you know, therapy, psychotherapy background. I am not coming from that field. I kind of got into this circuitously and don't have that therapy background training. So I, it'll be nice for me to even be able to hear from your perspective of like, I'm assuming there was a time that you were maybe practicing therapy more traditionally and then you got into the depth psychological lens.

I was looking for a therapist and I went to the Psychology Today website and looked at every therapist in my area that, uh, was listed and I only resonated with one person. And I called her and she's like, well, I just now have an opening, like one of my clients just finished up work. I have one opening, it's this slot.

And this is opening my eyes and my heart and my soul and my mind to something that I had always felt like was possible but didn't have any grounding or knowledge of it or, um. I didn't have a place to have the vocabulary to ask for it exactly. Like I, mm-hmm. I didn't have it right. But being in that therapeutic space, I was like, wow, this is what I wanna do.

And so I kept saying to my therapist, well, I wanna be a therapist, but I want to go to a school that is more holistic and is much more about soul, and I don't even know if that exists. And she was like, well, I'm not really supposed to give advice, uh, but you should look into the school called Pacifica.

And so this is year six of depth oriented work, and I actually don't really have a lot of experience outside of it other than when I was in my practicum training to become a therapist. I worked at a family systems agency, which focused on suicide prevention and intervention for. Kids and adolescents, so, mm-hmm.

I bring this depth oriented work to our sessions, but it's not quote unquote therapy. But I tend to get ahead of myself and I did already today, which is, so, I'll backtrack us too. Give us a little bit of your origin story. You said you found this depth practitioner 10 years ago. Is that what led you into therapy?

And Wow. Yeah. And I mean it's, it's beautiful in that sense, right? Uh, it's still prison, so there, there's another conversation to be had, but comparatively to the United States, you know, there's just such a difference in how people are treated. And it was actually in the Dutch prisons that I got to learn about somatic therapy for the first time.

They had a somatic therapist there and I got to do no way. Yeah. And I got to do somatic interventions, um, with incarcerated folks like me doing it with them and doing group activities and, and trust building activities. And it was so. Eyeopening and so lovely. And so when I came back to the States, I was like, I can't work in prisons.

And also I was at this crossroads of graduating from my undergrad and going, I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know what I want to do. And so I found myself in therapy and it was through that therapeutic experience that I was like, oh, this is my path. Oh, I love that. Wow. I actually didn't know the, your history and having been to Netherlands, that's so amazing.

Yeah. It's such a good question because I feel like depth psychology is so elusive, right? Yeah. Completely. Like we all have a different definition and what is it? And you know, the more that I practice it, the less I know and the, the less concrete my definition becomes. Um, but really depth psychology is this study of soul, right?

And mm-hmm. And psyche means soul. And so psychology is really about tending to the soul. And I think that is what depth psychology and depth practitioners really take seriously a soul tending. And so, you know, we work a lot in terms of the unconscious. We're in dialogue with the unconscious all the time.

Wanting to be this concretized science and this, this linear science. Mm-hmm. And, um, stick so much to the conscious realm that it misses all of the rest of what's living around us and in us that we can't name, but we know exists. Yeah. I sometimes have described depth psychology as holistic psychology.

And he takes us back to. Exactly what you just said. Psyche means soul. And so psychology in its earliest, earliest origins was about the soul and helping people really, I think, understand what's going on in their soul, what's misaligned for their soul, what's weighing on their soul. And then, but I think this is what helped me understand it so much, how we started to get away from that, at least what was presented in this book is in the early days, psychology was really kind of touted as this like woo woo unscientific practice.

And hard to measure. Yeah. So it's this deeper level of tending, and I completely agree. I think it, it encompasses a lot. It's kind of a broad field, and also the way any of us might describe it could be so different. I, I love that soul tending and it's, I think it's like that combination of what is my soul needing?

Um, and really, I, I almost think of us as like translators of we're here to help you be able to spot and translate all of this communication that's coming from your deep inner self, your soul, and the collective unconscious. Yeah. I think that so much of what gets communicated through our body is not just sensation to be regulated from like a polyvagal standpoint, right?

And so we're paying attention to the way that our body feels in any given moment. Um, any sensations that arise when you wake up from a dream, what do you remember about the dream and what was the feeling in the dream, right? Uh, when you watched movies as a kid, like what was the Disney movie you gravitated towards?

Mm-hmm. We don't need to. Right. There's a mystery to life, to psyche, to the collective unconscious. Right. That we will never touch and mm-hmm. We can't quantify the unconscious. Right. And so. In that regard, I really, and I think we share this together, like I have no desire to be seen as a scientist. It's like, uh, depth work is an art form as we're easing out of summer, whenever we come into a seasonal change, I always like to do a number of different cleanses, and for me, quarterly parasite cleansing is a staple in my wellness habits, my wellness routine.

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So check the show notes below and use discount code. Leann 10 for a discount, a checkout. I wanna go a little deeper into. That difference between, I think cognitive behavioral therapy is a lot of kind of the basis of a lot of modern psychology, modern therapy, and I'm, I'm not even discounting that. I think that absolutely has a place, having intellectual conscious, practical understanding and tools to help us in the present day is incredibly important.

In, in my opinion, that is like inflicting and creating even more wounding because the unconscious, in my opinion, is only ever here to protect us and guide us. And sometimes it's working off of faulty premises, but I think there actually is a lot of emotional bypass that's happening in these kind of cognitive approaches that do us a disservice into that deeper healing and that deeper tending.

Right. And I think you're, you're speaking to that where it's like, if we don't actually believe that and we are just telling ourselves from this cognitive lens to change our thoughts, change our mind, or just override the fear, right. Or whatever it is, there is a disconnection between psyche and body.

And what he would say is that when we're with the tension long enough, a new attitude, a third appears, it emerges out of the unconscious. And so, so many of the things that we are struggling with from this cognitive lens, we think that I have to make a decision and it's A or B. Mm-hmm. Right or wrong, black or white.

And we get into that ego fixation. And a CBT therapist might say, okay, well let's make a decision or let's change our thoughts around the decision. And myself as a depth oriented practitioner would go, well, why don't we stay with the tension and build capacity to be with the tension just long enough to see what may appear.

Mm. Inner self is kind of that unconscious outer self is more of our cognitive mind, but it's rather than I am experiencing something uncomfortable, what can I do to get out of that as quickly as possible? You know, that's maybe more the CBT approach, the depth oriented approach might be more like, huh? If that discomfort could speak, what would it say?

And to be fair, I also think there's a world in which we swim in that too much. Yeah. And then also like have to be able to pivot ourself out and go, I can't just, I can't just stew in these thoughts and feelings all day long. I do need to be able to function. And that's why I think they're all relevant.

Absolutely. And yes, you speak to the other side of it where we can kind of swim and be a little bit indulgent in the unconscious. Um, and that's very real too. But yeah, you know, uh, our thoughts. Are not our thoughts because they're our thoughts, right? We don't just manifest our thoughts. They don't start there, right?

It's this bottom up approach where it starts with sensation in the body, right? Mm-hmm. It's the first access point we have, and to me that is, oh, there's, there's maybe something right from a polyvagal term or stance. It might be like, oh, well, your body feels as though there's a threat. Mm-hmm. Right? Great.

Let's follow it. Let's amplify it. Let's be with it, right? Mm-hmm. And so much of, uh, a top down approach of therapy is just let's make sense of it. Okay. Check the boxes and let's move on. And depth work is amplifying, right? Yeah. I, I joke so often that depth therapy isn't meant to make you happier if you are trying to be happier.

You know, that's almost precedence over feeling better. And what I find time and time again is when we bring an awareness to some of the things going on in the unconscious, even if it's not totally quote unquote resolved yet, or even metabolized yet, I find clients can experience an immense amount of peace just from being able to acknowledge and witness what is going on deeper.

Absolutely. There's a contentment in being able to know that you can be with. All of the sensations and all of the motions, right? Mm-hmm. Happiness is fleeting. It's, it's temporary, but there is this contentment and knowing like, oh yeah. No matter what happens, I will be okay. Right? I can hold this. Mm-hmm. I can be with this.

I don't know if you find this in session, but when we instead of try to go, Hmm, that's a quote unquote negative sensation or a negative thought, let's override that immediately as quickly as possible. When we go to your point, you used one of our terms, which is amplify for the audience. That means like if I'm feeling this pressure in my chest, amplifying, it means like, let's look at it deeper.

And so when we, I love that when we bring awareness to, you know, we're talking somatically right now, that that constriction in my chest, that heaviness. It's so common in sessions that then that person is like five seconds later, oh my goodness, this memory from when I was six years old just surfaced out of nowhere.

Right. And I think in, in maybe a more kind of traditional therapy perspective, those might be dismissed as kind of, huh? That's random. Weird. Okay. Back to the present thing. We're focusing on in depth psychology, we would go, this is all, this is it. Whether it's a memory that's surfacing spontaneously or visuals, imagery, sensation, you know.

Right. And just deeper, deeper, deeper. Right. And so much of the work, and so much of the work I do with clients is helping them gain capacity to feel the thing. Because the thought around feeling the thing or the fear around feeling the thing is worse than feeling it. The resistance we build up. There's sort of this just very unconscious, foreboding, something bad will happen if I feel that thing.

And now we start to go, okay, so that's why. That's what your unconscious is protecting you from. Yeah. Great. Can we work on 100% sitting with that? Yeah. And just little by little, right? It's like our defenses are really helpful. They've kept us alive, they protect us. If we didn't have ego defenses, we could not survive this world.

If it felt too intolerable in the past, of course we're going to resist it, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that's okay. And as a, as a therapist. I'm like, yep, great. Like we can work with the at, at the speed that the slowest part of you feel safe to work, right? Mm-hmm. It's just about where does our intention go and how do we help our bodies and psyches move towards and titrate the experience of going into the dis discomfort and then safely coming back out and grounding and slowly learning [00:33:00] that that feeling isn't going to kill us.

Mm-hmm. We're not going to get swept up by the ocean if we put our toes in. Right. It's like it's really helping. It's just helping it feel safer where there's probably been no safety to feel that thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And it completely changes the way I think we dialogue with ourself when we're in those kind of tough or stickier resistant moments.

Again, it's the difference between. Oh, I'm what? Whatever it might be. Oh, I'm, I'm disassociating again during this party. Oh God, I hate that I do that. Oh my God, brain, you're, you're so stupid. Right? We know we shouldn't do that. We know we're safe. Just be present. Come on, get over it to, oh, right. It, it might shift in depth orientation to, okay.

I might be here to say that there are more tools available to me than just this, but even just cha completely changing the way we dialogue with ourself in those moments, I think is so powerful. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I, I feel like so much of the discourse right now in pop psychology or what I see on Instagram is this notion that your nervous system just wants to protect you.

Sometimes it is actually a no or sometimes it is actually unsafe and this is part of the work I do with clients too. I'm sure you do as well, where it's like, let's work on helping discern what is a true like no in the body versus what is an old historical no that keeps us from capital S self versus when is it capital S self that maybe is saying no or maybe saying yes.

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And again, there's a time and a place for everything. But I am really so much of the mindset of like, before I try and take myself anywhere, can I just witness where I'm at and what communication might in that? And maybe the communication is coming from a protective part that is maybe like projecting or misreading the situation.

We want, we want to attune to and dialogue and work with the body specifically too in, I think healing specifically in trauma healing. But it can't just stop there, right? If, if my nervous system is dysregulated, I think this all goes back to the unconscious it, it is dysregulated because there's some, usually I find like a belief or a narrative that has gotten ingrained in the psyche and so we can be regulating with nervous system tools and products and technologies and treatments and services all day long.

And also everything has a shadow, right? We have shadows and as individuals and as a collective. And it's not something to shy away from or to make it mean that we're somehow bad or wrong or that we need to like hide from the world or, or whatever. And this, this is another thing that I see so often is that there's so much talk around.

Shadow is bad. Mm-hmm. Right? And shadow is just shadow. The shadow in, in depth terms is really the place in the unconscious where all of these parts of ourselves that the ego has deemed unlovable go, right? Mm-hmm. And so it's just this like bag that we carry where we start stuffing all these parts in from the time we're a little kid, you know?

Mm-hmm. If we didn't have those attachment needs met, we'd die. So the first thing to leave is authenticity. When we feel like it's the thing that threatens our attachment needs getting met. Mm-hmm. Right. And so, so much of our authenticity and those like bright, young, innocent parts of ourselves go into the shadow as well.

The shadow is a lifelong reckoning, you know? Mm-hmm. It's not something that we can just tap into immediately and solve and move on. Therein lies the problem. Yeah. With so much of the psychological world today, right. This like cognitive left brain, overly masculine part of the collective psyche that wants to solve.

Yeah, exactly. That allows us to, it'll forever and ever. Completely. Completely. But to that end, and I could see why one though might be drawn to a more CBT type approach because it seems so structured and so, oh, well this is your problem, so this is what we do about it and da da da da dah. And I actually can empathize and resonate a lot with how, from the patient or client perspective that feels safe.

Yeah. I come to you, I tell you my symptoms, you give me a diagnoses, and once you've done that, you have a manual that tells you exactly how to deal with that. And that actually can be something that consciously or unconsciously makes me feel much safer in this work. A part of me wants to know there's a very linear, clear path.

And you know, like, that sounds so nice in theory. Right. And this is stuff that I still struggle with. Mm-hmm. And I'm sure you still struggle with we're people, we have egos. Mm-hmm. We have minds that want to know. It's just about being in relationship with, knowing that that isn't all of what life is and, and challenging that, right?

You know, kind of long form format. But I think that's like a beautiful introduction. Great. That even, even if people don't totally know exactly what is going on, they're getting that sense of the soul and the psyche. And this is just a completely different depth and level and approach to tending and relating to your inner self.

Yeah, so it's, it's funny because I'm a type five and type fives are known as the investigators, and one of the core things that keeps fives away from showing up in the world is feeling like they don't know enough. And so I'm laughing that that's, that's my ego story and narrative, right? And calling myself out right now.

So what I love about it is that it's a circle with nine points on it. And just coming from a Jungian lens immediately, you know, Jung talked about the archetype of the self, which is unity and wholeness, and, and who we actually are. That transcends our conscious mind, right? And that really the whole point of union or depth oriented therapy is coming home to that capital S self, right?

But in the 1960s there was a man named Oscar Zo, and he was a Bolivian philosopher, and he was the one that kind of put the Enneagram together in modern day and brought it forward. And he really talked about how the Enneagram is not. A personality test, right? We have things that we take all the time or the, the quizzes that give us these results and kind of tell us who we are.

And it, it makes sense because every type has a vice. Like a deadly sin, so to speak. Right? And it makes sense in terms of who we are. We're born into this life with little souls, right? We're already who we are, right? The Enneagram isn't what happens to us, it's what we're born into. That also kind of gets fixated as a [00:50:00] young child because if, if the symbol is this whole circle, really the impression is that we're all of them, right?

Mm-hmm. And even in this symbol, you see all of the dots connect to each other. All the lines connect, right? Mm-hmm. But it's really about where have we gotten fixated and where have our egos and our defensive structures gotten fixated? And there are nine different ways that they get fixated. I have done so much research over the years into different nervous system tools, techniques, modalities, and honestly, the Apollo neuro wearable is the one that I come back to again and again.

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It can support an uplifted mood. Apollo is something I use every single day to support my nervous system, to make sure that I'm giving my body gentle safety signals all throughout the day to help me be more resilient, to help me recover faster, to help me sleep deeper. And it's something that I recommend to clients all the time because it's so gentle.

I was like, I have a hard time with a lot of. Personality tests because I don't feel like they're actually able to distinguish between, is this who I inherently am or is this who I adapted to be because of trauma? And I think sometimes they can put you in a box when you take that test and you go, oh, well, I'm just, whatever it might be.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the thing I love about the Enneagram is that it paints this picture of where we've boxed ourselves. Mm-hmm. And that shows up through our ego fixation. Right. And so, you know, there, there are nine types. Maybe I'll quickly go through them real fast. Yeah. The one is known as the archetype of the reformer and their virtue is serenity.

Three, the achiever, their virtue is truthfulness, and their vice is deceit. Four, the individualist and their virtue is equanimity. Passion or vice is envy five, which we're thinking you're a five. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. We need, we need to actually figure this out. I'm also a five. We're known as the investigators or the observers, and our virtue is non-attachment.

Eight is the challenger. Virtue is innocence. Vice is lost. Nine is the peacemaker, virtue is action, and vice is sloth, which in the Enneagram is kind of, I know everybody gets an animal. No, it's really, it's really about like emotional and psychological, um, numbness so often. Oh no. Mm-hmm. That was a really good test for me.

And our Enneagram type shows us where we lose connection to that. Mm. And how we get stuck and rigid and fixated and away kept away from capital S self. Yeah. When you explained it to me that way, that was the first time I even got interested in the Enneagram. Mm. Being able to understand it from that perspective I think makes so much more sense.

I know we're kind of coming to the end of time here, but if you can. And then maybe we'll have to have a part two. 'cause I always try to squeeze way too much into an episode. Oh my gosh. Well, I spent like 10 minutes going through each of the,

How do you bring Enneagram into client sessions? How do you find this being impactful or insightful? How does this, how you know, this is obviously a tool you really value and find brings value to your clients and the work and what does that look like? Well, I feel like in depth psychology, we have so many access points to the unconscious through things like dreamwork, active imagination, sand tray, all of these really cool, valuable tools.

Because if, uh, because if you're a five, you're viewing things outside of you as taking so much of your energy. I can't tell you how many times I wake up and I'm like, okay, I have four calls today. What time can I take a bubble bath tonight? Okay. I'm holding off for that moment. Right? Yeah, completely. And so much of my energy is fixated on this Aris quality.

Mm-hmm. But it's just the center of the conscious psyche. Right? Right. And so the more that we can build, um, ego strength to be able to witness ourselves without thinking, this is who I am, this is who I'm not, I like this, I don't like this. Right. The more that we can soften those defenses, the more we can come back into our truth, the more that unconscious can come forward, more soul can come forward.

So it's really, um, it helps kind of meet that ego self access. Mm-hmm. And I would say that, you know, I'm using the Enneagram or thinking about the Enneagram in every single session I do with clients, always. Yeah, it's just a lens that sheds an insight. Tell me if this is right. 'cause almost what I feel like I hear in that is it might be an easy way to map patterns.

Absolutely right. And, and what I say is that everyone is so unique and so different. So you can have a hundred fours or a hundred sevens in a room and they're all going to act different, but they're all going to struggle with the core thing that they struggle with. Mm-hmm. And so what I say is that when I'm in the room with somebody and I have them take the Enneagram test our, you know, before our first session, tests aren't always accurate.

That's a really beautiful way that still holds the bio individuality of each person while allowing us still to observe those bigger patterns. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, we could go on and on and on, but I wanna be respectful of your time, especially as the two fives here. Well, Nadia, thank you so much.

Just for the audience, where can they find you? Where can they reach out to you? We'll make sure it's linked in the show notes too, but just so they can hear it here. Yeah, if you wanna reach out, I'm on Instagram, Nadia Rae Brackett, or you can go to my website, nadiaraebrackett.com. I love it. Thank you so, so much.