As a nineteen-year-old in 1981 with my brain hijacked by the movie Pumping Iron, my psyche riddled by body dysmorphia, my dreams centered on following the footsteps of other teen bodybuilding greats Rudy Hermosillo, Ron Teufel, and Tom Platz, and full of disgust for adults who allowed their bodies to look like tomatoes with four toothpicks sticking out of them, I entered Mr. Teenage San Francisco at the city’s famous Mission High School where I won second place and emblazoned an indelible template for my personal body ideal that has informed my dreams over the decades. Just last week, for example, at the age of sixty-one, I dreamed I was at the beach with my nineteen-year-old ripped version of myself. While soaking in some rays with my family, my wife Carrie and my twin daughters, Natalie and Julia, the Hall-of-Fame wrestling coach Tom Hazell who works at the college where I am employed told me to go home, find my brown Speedos, the same ones I wore in Mr. Teenage San Francisco, and enter the local Mr. Redondo Beach Contest. Because I was darkly tanned and surprisingly “ripped,” to use Coach Hazell’s language, I rushed home to look for my Speedos. I found them in the back of my closet, but alas they were tattered, hole-ridden, and covered with a greenish patina of mold, unsuitable for posing in, and I woke up relieved that I had been spared the embarrassment of posing in a pair of 42-year-old Speedos.
I was relieved on one hand, but on the other hand, those Speedos, in a state of decay, felt like a dream metaphor for some part of me that has undergone a form of moral disintegration. My thoughts jumped to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which an eternally good-looking man has a painting of himself hidden away that shows the true decomposition of his monstrous soul. I wonder if we all have some kind of Dorial Gray hidden away somewhere, a Jungian Shadow that embodies the parts of ourselves that bring us shame and horror. I am grateful that I have the awareness to cringe at my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, for the other option, ignorance, would only allow those weaknesses greater strength so they could dominate me. Better to be appalled by my Inner Dorian Gray than to fail to acknowledge its very existence.
I have a question: Is this Inner Dorian Gray the same thing that religions call “sin”? And what do I mean by “sin”? When I hear that word, I think of the time a childhood friend and I were celebrating Thanksgiving in the mid-1970s when his father undercooked the turkey so that it was a bluish color, mottled with blood vessels, and stringy in texture to the point that it was like eating turkey sushi. My friend and I would politely take bites of the half-cooked turkey, sneakily expel the food into a ball, and put the masticated turkey golf balls behind the dining room curtains. We hoped that my friend's parents would never find the turkey clumps and that perhaps their cat would find them and eat the evidence, as it were. Of course, we were wishcasting. The fact of the matter is that the turkey balls would rot and decay behind the curtains. I suppose sin is like that. We hide our misdeeds behind some curtain and hope to distract ourselves, but eventually our misdeeds will be exposed.
I see a connection between those rotting Speedos retrieved from the dark recesses of the closet and the turkey golf balls behind the drapes. We can try to ignore this inner rot, but we do so at our own peril. Therefore, managing our Inner Dorian Gray, be it a pair of decomposing briefs or mephitic turkey balls, is one of the great primary struggles of human existence.
I’m not sure “manage” is the correct word for addressing our Inner Dorian Gray. What does it mean to manage, address, or confront our internal demons?
To get a better handle on this question, we may want to consult the documentary Stutz in which the actor and filmmaker Jonah Hill shows some of his therapy sessions with Phil Stutz. Hill’s stated purpose of making this movie is to share Stutz’s Tools and wisdom necessary for propelling us forward and freeing us from a life lost in the emotional weeds or what Phil Stutz calls the Maze.
Part of the documentary’s appeal to me is its acknowledgment of a demonic inner life that afflicts us, an interior Dorian Gray, if you will. Writing for the Netflix website Tudum, Amanda Richards presents the film’s companion article titled “Deep Dive: Want to Change Your Life? Start with Stutz’s Tools from Jonah Hill’s Therapist.”
Richards points out that Stutz is not a passive therapist who merely sits back and listens to his patients; rather, he engages with his patients and asks them, “Why are you here?”
I have to tell you something that sounds a bit crazy to me. When I first read the words, “Why are you here?” I misread them in a sort of “Freudian slip” so that my malformed brain interpreted the question like this: “Where are you?” Where am I? I am in my closet holding a rotting pair of Speedo briefs. I am behind the curtain trying to deal with the stench of putrescent turkey balls.
So to answer the original question, “Why are you here?” I have to imagine that if I were one of Stutz’s patients, I would tell him that I am a man who lives an exterior life that has its own absurdities and challenges and who at the same time has this interior life that is analogous to the painting of Dorian Gray, the monster on the canvas. I would tell Stutz I don’t know how to deal with this Monster. Is it sin? Is it evil? Is it something I should conquer? Is it something I should accept and learn to live with?
“So that’s why I’m here, Dr. Stutz. I have a monster inside of me, and I suspect that makes me both normal and abnormal at the same time.”
In Stutz’s care, to learn what to think about my Inner Monster and how to deal with it, I would need to learn the Tools. These Tools have the following distinguishing characteristics: First, they move you forward resulting in an immediate change in your inner life. Second, they direct you to recognize that your crises are opportunities for change and growth. Third, these Tools are best learned visually through illustrations. Therefore, Stutz has Jonah Hill use a lot of visualization cards.
After defining the Tools and explaining that the purpose of the documentary is to chronicle Phil Stutz’s life and to show how he helped Jonah Hill, Amanda Richards presents an important outline of Stutz’s therapeutic philosophy.
The first thing we need to do is become grounded in the Aspects of Reality, which rests on three pillars: pain, uncertainty, and constant work. Being fully human means embracing this truth. To deny that life is pain, uncertainty, and constant work is to embrace some alternative universe of Hakuna Matata, the dream of a malformed narcissistic child. Failure to acknowledge the three pillars of Reality has grave consequences.
The second thing we need to know is that to be fully human and alive, we need to be full of the Life Force. The Life Force is either strong or weak inside us depending on our relationship with three things: Our relationship with our body, our relationship with others, and our relationship with ourselves.
Amanda Richards observes that feeling lost, depressed, and stagnant are debilitations that can be improved by bringing out your Life Force. Only by strengthening your Life Force can you figure out how to move forward. I notice that forward motion is very important to the therapist. He seems to believe that the purpose of being a human is to move forward, to grow, to change, and to evolve. The opposite of this evolutionary journey is being stuck in your emotional weeds or what Stutz calls the Maze. In this regard, many of us are like Dante’s narrator, lost in the Woods.
To disavow you of any notions that Phil Stutz is one of those cheery and annoying therapists who rhapsodize about self-actualization and creative visualization and how we should embrace the Life Force, Stutz warns us that there is a big monkeywrench that the human condition throws at our objective to evolve into our Higher Selves. This big monkeywrench is a dark demonic force that resides in our psyches. Stutz calls this dark force Part X. It is in Stutz’s words the “invisible force that keeps you from changing.” Or as Amanda Richards explains, Part X is the “villain on the journey of your evolution as a human.”
Part X is what is lacking in so many therapies and self-help books. Based on my observation of evil in this world and the evil I see inside myself, I can only take seriously those therapies, philosophies, and religions that acknowledge this demonic inside us.
Part X is called the Resistance in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, in which the author warns that all creative pursuits will lead to an inner battle between the part of us that wants to create art and the part of us, the Resistance, that wants to shut down not only our art but our personal growth. The Resistance makes us experts at procrastination and nihilistic despair, the voice that says nothing matters in this world.
Paul reveals in his Epistle to the Romans that he had a very keen grasp of Part X or what he would call sin. He writes that he was a slave to his compulsions and dark impulses. When he wanted desperately to be his better self, his evil anti-self would take over and dash all his dreams of being good. His repeated failures to be good caused him frustration and self-loathing, a condition that only gave more energy and power to his dark compulsions. He was lost in his own emotional weeds, his own Maze if you will. He saw his pathology was not abnormal but universal. He, therefore, had contempt for those competing philosophies of his time, such as Stoicism, which promised self-improvement by using free will to achieve self-discipline and self-denial. For Paul, unless we could address sin, or what less religious-minded people might call Part X or the Resistance, our aspirations to cultivate our better self would be in vain. For Paul, we had to have faith and spiritual rebirth. For Phil Stutz, we need to use the Tools. While one approach is religious and the other is more secular and humanistic, I see some crucial parallels between Paul’s religion and Stutz’s therapy. For one, we have to see that we are lost in the Woods. For two, we have to abandon the dangerous notion that life is a selfish consumer experience where we go on a dopamine-fueled feeding frenzy of thrills and pleasures to find some kind of hedonistic nirvana. In truth, life is pain, uncertainty, and constant work, and embracing these Three Pillars of Reality gives us meaning in life. For three, we must focus on what’s really important in life. We have to abandon our idols and focus on our relationships with our bodies, our holy temple; our relationship with others, treating them with honor, love, and respect; and ourselves, giving ourselves the same honor, love, and respect.
There is a lot of love in the documentary Stutz. There is a point in which Jonah Hill looks at his therapist and says, “I love you.” The therapist repeats those words back to Jonah.
According to Amanda Richards, once you figure out the Three Aspects of Reality, how to connect with your Life Force, and how to acknowledge your inner demon Agent X, you can then learn to use Stutz’s Tools. The first is the String of Pearls. Each action you choose to make for the day is a pearl. You decide what pearls to put on the string. You choose to either do your kettlebell workout in the garage or use that time watching Friends reruns. You choose to have a Mediterranean seafood salad for lunch or a bacon-cheeseburger. You choose to waste your time looking for expensive timepieces you don’t need on eBay or reading Amanda Richards’ helpful article “Deep Dive: Want to Change Your Life? Start with Stutz’s Tools from Jonah Hill’s Therapist.”
But be warned that even your best-intentioned pearls will be sullied with a dark spot, a “turd.” Acknowledge this imperfection and keep doing your best to string the most beautiful pearls you can throughout the day.
As you string your pearls throughout the day, be careful not to ignore or avoid your Shadow because you do so at your own peril. Your Shadow is the part of yourself that you find less than flattering to your self-image. In fact, your Shadow brings you shame. You feel it best therefore to hide it. Thinking about the Shadow, I am reminded of those rotting Speedo briefs from my dream and that memory of hiding masticated turkey balls behind the curtains and placing them on white shag carpeting.
Perhaps more importantly, my personal Shadow has something in common with Jonah Hill’s. Both Hill and I are keenly interested in body image. Hill was known as a fat actor in the movie Superbad and resents being fat-shamed and being branded a certain archetype. Having a fat self-image is a source of shame. I feel Jonah Hill’s pain. In 2003 after my wife and I had been dating and indulging lavishly at restaurants for two years, I gained close to fifty pounds, and my wife captured an image of me with her camera. I am sitting down and eating a giant bowl of popcorn with melted chocolate kisses inside the bowl. There are streaks of chocolate on my wrist, my fingers, and my fat cheeks. My eyes have a sad expression as if the shame of succumbing to my gluttony has eclipsed any pleasure from this ravenous eating experience. The photo, which my wife has digitally downloaded on her computer, gives me a sense of shame. That fat man in the photo is my weak, undisciplined, unhinged, self-destructive self. He is a testament to my failure as a human being. He contradicts the image I have curated since I was thirteen to myself and the world: The self-disciplined bodybuilder and runner-up of the Mr. Teenage San Francisco.
According to Stutz, I should not run away from my Shadow. I should “honor it and engage with it.” Otherwise, the Shadow will rebel and cause a big shitstorm. I need to learn to placate the Shadow, not by patronizing it, but by lovingly embracing it. I need to be sensitive to its needs and find out how I can meet those needs in a productive way.
Amanda Richards points out that we should not confuse the Shadow with Part X. She writes: “The Shadow and Part X aren’t quite the same: Think of Part X as your doubts and deepest fears, and the Shadow as the by-product of believing whatever Part X tells you.”
Part X tells me that I am a damaged, needy Man-Baby who wants to eat constantly because I am essentially a baby forever thirsty for breast milk. The Shadow is that fat guy in the photograph, my Man-Baby revealed to the world. In that one Reveal, the Man-Baby destroys any image I had of myself and others of the Disciplined Muscle Man. I am not a man harnessed by a higher purpose and self-possession. I am an unhinged Man-Baby and I can at the drop of a hat fall down the rabbit hole of my compulsions.
“Thanks, Part X, for that cogent self-analysis. You have helped me achieve levels of shame, hopelessness, and depression I never knew I could attain.”
As you can see from the above, I have a rather acrimonious relationship with Part X and I have over the years learned to be sarcastic with it. Wrestling with Part X is “constant work,” one of the three Aspects of Reality that Stutz has his patients address in therapy.
In contradiction to the Aspects of Reality is a debilitating fantasy of perfection, what Stutz calls the Snapshot or the Realm of Illusion. My marriage, my body, my life in the suburbs, my “intellectual life,” my car, my expensive timepiece “hobby,” my amateur piano playing--none of these things will meet my ideal. If anything, these fantasies of perfection speak to a way of running from my Shadow and creating a mythical Anti-Shadow, what I call my Hero Self, an aggrandizing facade to conceal the shame I have for my Shadow Self.
I wonder about St. Paul’s Shadow and Hero. He referred to a thorn in his side that he begged to be removed but God said the thorn wasn’t going anywhere and that God’s grace was sufficient. Paul also explained his self-destructive compulsive tendency that he regarded as a universal affliction, mankind’s enslavement to sin. After his conversion, he wrote eloquently about perfect love, humility, and charity, but I wonder, especially in The Acts of the Apostles where he is portrayed as a fearless hero, and in his epistles where he contradicts his call to humility by reminding us over and over that he is the truest and highest of all the apostles and publicly castigates Peter, that Paul is a man who may not be as heroic as he wants us to believe, that he is a man who works hard at curating the Realm of Illusion about his saintly status but who in doing so comes across as someone who in spite of his conversion is saddled by neediness, his Part X, and his Shadow. I say this as someone who acknowledges that Paul is a unique genius and that he has influenced Western culture more than any figure in the last two thousand years. I say this as someone who cannot conceptualize my Inner Dorian Gray and the dream of my rotting Speedo briefs without framing them in Paul’s notion of sin and the human tendency to be so lost in our emotional weeds that often we’re too lost to even recognize that we’re lost.
This idea of being tamped down in our emotional weeds is in Stutz’s therapy called being trapped inside the Maze. The Maze is the result of Part X, which tells us that we can’t move forward until we get payback for all the injustices that have been done to us. As Amanda Richards writes: “Stutz says the Maze is the by-product of Part X’s dirty work. It’s the visualization of a futile quest for fairness and reason that keeps you stuck in the past and puts your life on hold as you cling to anger and resentment. The Maze keeps you lost in the emotional and psychological weeds.”
Forgive me for returning to Paul, but the idea of moral disintegration embodied in those decaying Speedo briefs points to him again. Paul strikes me as angry and resentful that his followers might hold the other apostles, the ones who knew Jesus in the flesh, in higher regard than Paul who never saw Jesus in the flesh. Paul wants to make it clear that his direct communication with Jesus’ resurrected spirit makes him superior to the other apostles. He is the direct line to God. Do you want to know what God is thinking? Forget the other apostles. Go straight to Paul. There is an egotism in Paul’s writing that seems to inform his anger and resentment for not being heralded as much as he believes he should be. Forgive me for sounding harsh in my judgment of Paul. This religious genius responsible for defining sin for two millennia haunts my dreams.
Paul is a man full of contradictions. Just as much as he comes across as an embattled egotist who hasn’t gotten his due relative to the other apostles, he is such a powerful writer who can also cut through life’s BS and give succinct wisdom. His understanding of Jesus’ life becomes a model for our purpose for living in this world: We renounce our ego and serve others and in doing so we cultivate our Higher Self. This understanding of our purpose in life is in direct contradiction to the egotism, vanity, greed, lust, and consumerism that have misguided the powerful and nonpowerful alike since the beginning of time.
Whatever Paul’s weaknesses and whether or not I have been fair in my assessment of them, he wants us to love in the manner of Christ. Not surprisingly, love is a big part of Stutz’s therapy. Stutz emphasizes Active Love. This is the act of connecting with those who have wronged us through forgiveness and compassion and allowing love to bridge us between those people so that both parties can be healed by love. Active Love is the only way to escape the Maze of bitterness and resentment.
While Active Love and forgiveness have Christian parallels, there are components of Stutz’s therapeutic philosophy that may not jibe with St. Paul’s religion. For example, there is the notion of Radical Acceptance. As Amanda Richards explains: “According to Stutz, Radical Acceptance is the antidote to judgment — judgment of yourself, of others and of what could potentially happen in the future. It’s not about approval either. Instead, it’s about accepting all parts of yourself and allowing them to exist.” Whereas Paul hates the thorn in his side and the Shadow that causes him to do the opposite of what his better half wants to do, Radical Acceptance is based on neither judging nor approving our worst perceived selves but accepting all these parts and integrating them into our existence. Whereas the integration of the flesh and spirit into one human being may be the aim of Stutz’s therapy, Paul’s religion dictates a dichotomy, a battle between the flesh and the spirit. Perhaps Stutz’s philosophy is more aligned with Taoism, which observes that in life things don’t always end up being like they seem initially and that a non-dualistic spiritual philosophy such as Taoism may more closely resemble what Stutz is working on in his therapy.
Closer to the spirit of Christianity is Stutz’s emphasis on gratitude, what he calls the Great Flow. To counter the negative voice of Part X, we need to develop the habits of gratitude. As Amanda Richards writes: “Think of your unhappiness as a black cloud blocking the sun. How do you penetrate that cloud and let the light in? According to Stutz, the way through is with gratitude. Gratitude gives you the ability to break through any haze of negative thought, and the Grateful Flow is about creating concentrated gratitude in your own mind.”
I am grateful I have the privilege of reading and contextualizing my crazy dreams in the wisdom of Phil Stutz and St. Paul. I am grateful for my family, the joy I experience from my amateur piano playing, and my kettlebell workouts, and too many things to mention. Believe me, this listing of things I’m grateful for doesn’t sound like me. Usually, I’m a big complainer and a whining cynic who invests a lot of energy in exaggerating my woes, but seeing Jonah Hill’s Stutz has caused me to put on the brakes for being a malcontent. His documentary has made me frame my struggles in a new way, and for that I am grateful.
