The Gift of Shame (with Dr. Keith Witt)

Jason Lange: All right, and welcome back, guys. So I am super excited today to be joined by Dr. Keith Witt. He's a licensed clinical psychologist, lecturer, and author dedicated to studying, teaching, and creating transformative healing systems. He's been teaching, writing, and practicing psychotherapy in Santa Barbara since 1973. And he's one of the most grounded in wise men I've personally had contact with in my journey. That has really influenced who I've become as a man and a father and human being. So I'm super excited to have you here, Keith, and welcome to the show.

Dr. Keith Witt: As I said earlier, I'm very, very happy to be here with you today, Jason.

Jason Lange: Yeah, and I wanted to start with a book that the title alone, I think is a little shocking was to me and some of the guys I work with, which I know you wrote it some time ago, but the Gift of Shame. You know, talk to me about, like, what inspired you to write that and what is the Gift of Shame in your mind?

Dr. Keith Witt: First of all, I borrowed the title to a certain extent from Gavin de Becker, who wrote the Gift of Fear. He is somebody that protected, was a protector. And, you know, he found himself sitting in a celebrity's garage with a shotgun one time and thought, you know, I probably should be more systematic than this. And so he developed a business to teach people how to listen to their fear because he interviewed a lot of victims and realized that they had had premonitions and hadn't listened to them. Okay, so fast forward to Keith writing the Gift of Shame. I was reading a book by Alan Shore, a famous attachment theorist psychoanalyst. And it described the shame dynamics that happen with human beings. And specifically, shame doesn't show up. It's a later occurring emotion. There's not enough. You have to have a separate sense of self to feel shame. For instance, babies don't blush until 11 months, right? And you have a baby, your youngest, not blushing yet totally, but around 11 or 12 months. Several things happen with an infant. I mean, one, they begin to stagger around and begin to walk, which is pretty amazing. Two, there's enough of a separate sense of self that when they feel distressed, they will turn and seek out an attachment figure to calm them down. Seek them out. And three, if they experience disapproval they can have a shame emotion. They'll blush. The muscles around here will get weak, they'll look down and they'll freeze. And you can see how useful this would be from an evolutionary standpoint. Just as a kid is beginning to walk, a parent can go, no, which is a disapproval, and freeze them, you know, going over by the snake. No, they freeze, look down. And then if the parent picks them up, and then comfort zone, a securely attached kid will be back to happy, sympathetic arousal within about 10 seconds. But a little bit of social learning has taken place.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: And during the practicing period between 10 months and 17 months, normal kids in this culture hear the word no once every nine minutes. So during that time, if that can be serious, but still be a game, this is where socialization takes place. Right. Because pain, shame is an unpleasant affect. We don't like it. Now, this is also when the defenses develop. This is when. The lamp broke. I didn't do it. You know, denial.

Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Dr. Keith Witt: You know, like your brother's crying, somebody else must have bothered him. You know, projection, scapegoating. You know, you get upset, you go kick the cat. These defenses. Freud said that the defenses happened in response to anxiety. But it was really clear, as I saw these studies. No, these defenses are developing around shame dynamics. The shame is to. Don't look. You know, you. You. You freeze. You look down, don't look at me. Emotion, I want to disappear emotion. And there's a whole family of shame emotions. Mortification, guilt. I mean, people can distinguish, you know, I'm guilty about a thing, I'm ashamed about myself. But they're all part of the same biochemistry. And so if you don't have shame, you're in a lot of trouble.

Jason Lange: Right.

Dr. Keith Witt: Okay, there's. Antisocial personality disorder is not uniformly not treatable. I mean, it's hard to treat. And you don't want to treat. I don't want to treat antisocial personality. I avoid it if I can. But there's a particular subvariant of antisocial personality. Robert Harris, the guy who did this research, psychopaths, what he calls them, that have no guilt or shame. And basically, you gotta lock them up because they just will keep exploiting, exploiting, exploiting, exploiting, and they won't change. And so typical psychopath will have 50 to 200 crimes a year, for instance. And so they're crippled. And there's, you know, their brains. The Paralympic area is stunted. They have brain. You know, most personality disorders, including antisocial personality disorders, our hair, which Is something that most therapists don't know, which is crazy, but that's a whole nother conversation. And so the more I got into it, the more I went, wait a minute. Not only is shame necessary to develop a virtuous self, it's also necessary to create a moral foundation. And Jonathan Haidt's research shows that we're born with six moral foundations that demand expression. We're born, human beings are born feeling like fairness is better than cheating. Caring is better than hurting. Being loyal is better than being disloyal. Appropriate respect for authority is better than subversion of authority. Respecting what's sacred is better than profaning what's sacred. And liberation is better than oppression. Okay, These are not social constructs. These are drives. And what society does is it gives us the forms that be put on these drives. And we're always observing ourselves in the world, Our adaptive unconscious, our whole unconscious, which I call a shadow, Our whole adaptive unconscious, always observing ourselves in the world. If we observe ourselves violating a via one of our values, we'll feel a shame emotion and that shame of motion. Hey, look, don't violate your value. And when I. And, and it also says I don't want the defense comes, I don't want to look at it. Okay, so here's the, the dynamic. You know, we're going through the world, Someone disapproves of us. Usually it's a moral disapproval of some sort of usually. Or we disapprove of ourselves, which can starts around 2 years old. With theory of mind, we begin to observe ourselves and we begin to feel bad. If we observe ourselves breaking a rule, we feel a shingle motion and then we try to avoid it. You know, deny, scapegoat, or the borderline's favorite projective identification. I will take my worst side, project it onto you. And as long as I'm attacking you, I'm good. Okay, but so that's, that's the struggle. But also there's a part of us that says, no, I violated a value. Now if you can learn to be aware of this. And of course all psychotherapy, all spiritual work runs off of productive the witness. I mean, this is why the 15 to 19% of people that have personality disorders are so crippled they can't have productive self awareness or they. But they have to work really hard to have it and they can't. The miracle of human consciousness is we can all develop it. Even psychopaths can if they want. Wow. But you develop a witness that goes, oh, I'm ashamed. What value Did I violate? And then. All right, whatever it is, you know, I would. I. This morning. So my wife. Excuse. It's kind of hot here in Santa Barbara. So my wife said, I just drink. Drank a cup of coffee. My wife says, I'm not going to turn the heat on because, you know, you just created. And I went, oh, God, the heat. And then I went, wait a minute. As I felt a little ashamed. And I went, oh. I said. So that was the wrong response, Becky. And what I should have said was, oh, thank you for thinking of me and not turning on the, you know, the heater. But I didn't. I went instead, okay. And then she said, you know, she said, oh, I love you. Because that was the right thing for me to do. I caught it. And then I followed the value of, you know, making amends and realizing that that was the wrong response. Wrong mean, wrong moral. And then. And then I followed the value of be appreciative of somebody thinking of you. And then it. It worked out okay. Now multiply that by a million, and that's a human life. And the more that you can be aware of your shame. When it shows up, you go into the value. Either follow it or you refine it. And this is important because we develop different moral systems as we develop through the value mes. So an egocentric child has egocentric moral systems that just depend on, you know, mom and dad are God. They tell you what's wrong and what's right and that's it. Grade schoolers, More conformists. There's a code. Follow the code or don't follow the code. Don't cut in line. That's the code. Cut in line, feel guilty, you know, or not. More rational. It has to make sense. Pluralistic. Everybody has to be cared for. Integral. Whatever serves the moment. Each one of these transformations is a new moral system that includes and transcends the previous ones in our unconscious. That's how brains work. Brains don't give up anything associated with survival. They just add new stuff on top of it. Say I violate so I. You know, you're not supposed to lie. You're a seven year old. Yeah, all right, so you're 13 year old. And, and, or. And you're 14 year. You're. You're old. And your girlfriend says, how do you like my dress? You look at the dress. Fucking ugliest dress I've ever seen. But you lie. You go, no, you look great in that dress. What? It's. It's a more relativistic value. At 14, I mean, not just, nevermind enlightened self interest, because I want her to stay interested in me. Right? And so, you know, this is how it goes as you do that, you listen, look at it, and you either refine the value or you follow the value. Eventually it becomes a spiritual guide. You know, for me, right now, it's one of the great challenges of our, of our world right now is that this populist dictatorship thing is happening. And so every day, you know, there's only about three articles in the paper that I want to read. All the rest of it. I just read the headline about some horrible authoritarian thing that's happening someplace close, and I feel anger, and I want to reduce Trump or all those other people to whatever it is they're doing. And I feel a little bit of guilt or shame about that because that's not my standard. My standard is compassionate understanding. And so I go, okay, so what's compassionate understanding for whoever's involved? And then as I do that, I start feeling better, like I did this morning with Becky. And so now shame is a spiritual guide even more. You know, when I do Tai chi often, I'll. I'll remember something like I was ashamed of when I was like 10 or, you know, 15 or 25 or, I don't know, whatever, you were mean to her, like, something like that. And I go, so how come this is coming up now? You know, what's the interesting. Well, this is a request from my unconscious to integrate this. There's something that's not integrated or why it would show up. And so now my shame is a spiritual guide. And that's the gift of shame. Without shame, 8 billion people would never get along. Without shame, the ultra social species that is humans couldn't do anything because we're not just social, we're ultrasocial. Jonathan Haidt says we're 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. And that's 100%, you know, like we, you know, you can make a stage. It takes. It takes a hive to make a spaceship. Okay, so just take bees who just do. They construct three or four things. Take us. We construct, you know, everything, you know, that's the. And so to be able to do that, we have to engage. And the way that we engage is through very, very, very subtle social cues. Those social cues are run off of approval and disapproval. And the disapproval ones have to do with the shame dynamics.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: And that's how humans are. And that's the gift of shame.

Jason Lange: Oh, so, so cool to. Yeah, the shame is a Spiritual guide.

Dr. Keith Witt: Yeah.

Jason Lange: How I kind of interpreted that is, in a sense, one of the pathways to integrity, of constantly becoming aware of what my value is. And then do. Do I mend the situation to move towards that, or do I refine the value? But the more I do that, theoretically, the smoother things go over time as I become clear about what my values are and. And how I want to live them. So I'm curious, like, how. How do you see or how do you work with God, particularly men, when that's not working? Like, what would be the pathological version of shame that. That you see show up?

Dr. Keith Witt: There's one guy I work with, he was cheating on his wife. And so. So I said, you know, is that your value, that it's okay to cheat on your wife? I mean, you know that in your moral universe, is cheating on your wife, virtuous behavior? And he going, no, it's not. So, you know, I gave him a little rap about if you have a value, change your value, that it makes it moral to cheat on your wife or change, you know. And that was one of the reasons he stopped cheating on her. When people come in. People don't. People when they. When they come in for work. And I, you know, I do a lot of men's groups. As it turns out that a couple of years ago, one of my clients wanted to get a men's group of people. There's a lot. There's. There are there. He was trying to build a community in a local community called Montecito, where there's a lot of super wealthy people. So one great thing about being super wealthy is you can be super private. One thing that sucks about being super private is how do you develop community? You know, when you got like two acres in the stone wall between you and your neighbors, I mean, it's. And so he wanted to start a men's group. And so he said, why don't you do it? And I went, all right. So we did it. And, you know, you know how men's groups are. They're great. And, you know, and I'm a good group leader. And so they loved it. And so they said, well, we want to bring this to Montecito. And they kept asking me to do stuff. So now I'm doing four of them. I think. I think I'm going to max out. And. And this speaks to something that you mentioned earlier about how things have changed for men in the last 50 years, at least that I've seen. So within this context, I encourage people to notice embarrassment, shame, Guilt, mortification, those things. And get curious, get productive. Self awareness. And one nice thing about a men's group is that it's a moral container. Within the moral container, there is an assumed standard for being authentic and virtuous and honest.

Jason Lange: Okay.

Dr. Keith Witt: And congruent. And part of the job of the leader is to maintain the container and, you know, provide what's needed. Just like psychotherapy. But it's. It's different. Just, you know, it's easier in group because on. On one hand, it's easier because people are bringing other stuff and relating with each other and. And, you know.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: People are so gifted. Human consciousness. And, you know, these are all successful people. Their stories are awesome stories. So I love everybody being impressed with everybody. And everybody has their own wisdom. I call them wisdom groups. That's what they're called. Partly because the arc for man is boy into acolyte, into warrior and demand and wisdom. And these. These are all warrior and demand and wisdom people. And so something comes up and we look at it, and looking at it, what do you. If it's a problem, what are you doing about it? You know, there's. There's basically two forms of being in the world. You're solving problems, take care of something, and then there's drama. Victim, rescuer. Okay. If. If all you did as a practitioner is say that's drama, what would be problem solving? Oh, if that's problem solving, that's good. Less drama. You know, that's. Oh, shift over into problem solving. Oh, kind of being a victim here. Right. Kind of being a rescuer here, kind of being a persecutor here. Right. Get lunch, turn it into problem solving. Oh, turn in pro. I mean, and so within that context, the difference stands out. And rather than get. Avoid the experience with drama, like cheating on your wife or something like that, or, you know, should I. I had a. I had a bad experience with my daughter's lover. Should I tell my daughter about that bad experience? Okay, that's a moral dilemma. Bring it up in the group. Let's discuss it. You know, how it goes.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: What's. And if your reluctance is personal to tell her, go tell her. Okay. If your reluctance is substantive, serves the highest good, and not tell her, don't tell her. But that's the conversation.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: And those conversations going back to axial period, three jewels, you know, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Yeah, that's Buddha. Buddha. Nailed it, as usual. That's it. I gotta say, of all the transmitters, famous ones, he's always been my favorite. I got a Little. I got a little laughing Buddha out in my garden. Just that I can see through my window when I'm working. Just remind me, come on, Keith, keep a sense of humor. And what would Buddha do? Anyway, so this is how it shows up. And it shows up in individual. It shows up with couples all the time. Couples. So now we're talking about. Talking about how things have changed. Things have changed. You know, I came up in the 50s, 60s. Right. Okay, so who is the. Who is the man? John Wayne, James Bond. Okay, so one, don't let anybody know you're vulnerable. Two, screw as many people as you can. C, being self destructive is masculine. Says, you know, like, yeah, I'm gonna go risk my life. Whoa, that's impressive. What an impressive man you are risking your life. You know, I really didn't like it. You know, Vietnam, you know, my country, right or wrong. Sorry? My country, right or wrong never worked for me on any level. I guess I'm just, you know, not. I kind of skipped a little bit of the conformist. You know, I. I really had to, honest to God, go back and develop a healthy conformist in me as an adult because clearly, you know, that. That didn't work. And so for me, I couldn't stand it. My parents were becoming alcoholics and stuff. 1960, around in the. In the mid-60s, I was 13, 14. I stopped being a kid. I loved being a kid. And being a teenager sucked sex. Are you kidding me? So, you know, it was a racist, homophobic culture. My parents were progressives and they were racist and homophobic. Okay, all right. Well, I happen to be bisexual. All right? So, you know, I could kind of get by because, you know women, sure. But, you know, the other side, my bisexual side, I had to hide that because that was the worst thing that you could be. Anyway, I went crazy. And so my mother had borderline personality disorder. We went to a therapist who happened to be a good therapist, which was great. You realized you had to get her out of the house or me out of the house. And she was certainly contributing more than me. I was contributing nothing but shit to that family. So my dad said, let's go look at sports cars, Keith. I said, sure. So we got in our 54 Ford, took off gonna look at sports cars. We stopped in front of the Wells Neuropsychiatric Clinic. And I had a suitcase in the back, apparently. And he says, you're gonna spend some time here, Keith. So I got committed for five weeks, six weeks, I think five or six weeks. And they gave me 23, electroconvulsive therapy. Wow, 23 of them that is illegal today. Now, I, I, I heard someplace that it actually can stimulate neurogeneration. Neurogeneration. I'm hoping that's true, but, well, I'll never know. So one great thing about him is that you stop being depressed. And, you know, I was out of my family, which was crazy, and, you know, wasn't depressed. I had a, I had a clinical depression at the time, and I, it makes it go away temporarily. I lived around the world and nothing looked good to me except two things, warrior and healer. The closest I could get to a warrior was martial arts, mainly Eastern martial arts, because even though I didn't know it, I needed the spirituality. And you didn't get spirituality in boxing. Okay. And healer. And the closest I came was our therapist, who was good therapist. So I got outta the hospital, went okay three years later, had my black belt in shotokan Karate. And 10 years later I had my first license, an MFT license. Then I got a psychologist license after I got my PhD and never looked back. And that marked my development. And as a man, that worked for me, I went, okay, that's the kind of man I want to be. And there's a lot of men around that really didn't have purpose, which my therapy gave me, and didn't have a sense of themselves as the warrior, which my martial arts gave me. So I helped them with that and they loved it. And I began to see that at least for the men, if there isn't some version of acolyte and the warrior and the man of wisdom, they suffer. Now, I think there's a lot of paths to the woman of wisdom. They can go from warrior to woman of wisdom, but you know, you can go from divine mother to woman of wisdom. You can go from lover, you can go from artist. And guys can do those too. But if they're not doing the warrior to man of wisdom, they don't do that place where I have deep purpose and I have values that I'll sacrifice for. They suffer. And if you do do that and you keep on seeking out the ordeals that purpose gives you, you find yourself in those ordeals. And as you find yourself, you go, okay, that leads me to the next step, to the next step, to the, into the next ordeal. And after a while, you just, as you establish mastery, it's less about the ordeals and more about wanting to serve. Yeah, that's mana wisdom. That's the shift. And when I taught that and teach that to Men, they feel like they've come home. They feel like, yeah, that's something I've always known, I've always felt. And I've never felt quite right about it. If they haven't felt right about it or although that's why I feel right about who I am now, because I'm doing that, that's become more and more accessible as the culture has become more psychologically sophisticated. For instance, everybody now in the country, I don't care, you know, Republican, whatever. You tell them this joke. You know, the Dalai Lama goes to the hot dog vendor in New York City and the guy says, what do you want? Dalai Lama says, one with everything. Okay, all right. Nobody knew that, understood that joke in 1961 or very few people. Everybody understands it now. Being in therapy. It's kind of a mark of status now with. With teenagers and stuff. It was. It was like people were ashamed of being in therapy in the SIG. In the 70s, when I was practicing, people were embarrassed. They didn't want anybody to know. Now people. It's funny, I've been around forever, you know, I've done over 75,000 sessions in this area. But one of my clients told me last week, he said, wow, Keith. I went and was talking to my friends over at the gym, and they were talking about this therapist they really liked. Oh, it turned out to be you. Then I went out to lunch with this guy. He says, God, there's this guy that runs a men's group. I called him my sensei. And God, who is he? Turned out it was you. I mean, now everybody's all happy about it. Okay, that wasn't the case. All this stuff about denying emotion, all this stuff about gratuitous violence, you know, all this stuff about, you know, you have to identify yourself by opposition to other people. Now, this is all amber stuff, of course. This is the transformation that I've seen. The shift from. From amber to. To. To orange to green. I don't know if you're. Do people know about integral. Should I explain?

Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah. I've done some loose developmental teachings there.

Dr. Keith Witt: From formless to rational to pluralistic.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Jason Lange: Pretty good.

Dr. Keith Witt: Yeah, yeah. And so along those lines now, interestingly, since I've seen different generations, every generation kind of has to redefine what it means to be a man. And I've seen this happen. You know, there is this thing that happened, the apa. God, God bless them. I'm not a member because I don't like joining institutions because institutions are all, all have corruption in them. The one institution that I trust the most is this the dialectic. I mean, I'll join something if I have to, but I don't have to. But anyway, a while back they re upped their standards for men and boys. And in that they made two huge green pluralistic errors. I mean, big ones. Okay, error number one. They used the word when they talked about guys feeling like they had to dominate, feeling they had to deny their feelings, feeling like they needed to be non self reflective. They said that was toxic. They used that word. It's. Of course the far right said toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity was not a term that was used, but that's how it got designated. And the other thing they didn't do is they were just too chicken to give a vision of a powerful man other than a good father. They did a really good description of good father. Didn't do a good description of the warrior. We need warriors. Psychopaths need external constraint. Hey, trump those guys. They're not going to keep doing that until they get external constraint. And I'm not talking about shooting them. I'm talking about electing people who say, no, we're not going to do it. Putin, external constraint. Okay, who do we need to do that? We need warriors to do that. We need people who are willing to do that with compassion and with force. Whatever the force that is appropriate, that serves the highest good. That is beautiful. Okay, they missed that. They were scared to put it in. And so I gave a couple. I did three or four podcasts saying, look, the. The. The standards are actually pretty good standards if you look at all of them. Other things they say are good, but they miss those two things. And, you know, you know, God bless. You know, I love. I love the APA code of ethics. I follow it, and it's. It's just something that's relaxing to me. And, you know, and I'm grateful for them for doing it. And I'm grateful for them creating the diagnostic manuals. I'm grateful for them saying that homosexuality is not a disease in the DSM 3. And I'm grateful for them saying that personalities exist. We need to treat them differently. And I'm grateful for them creating a language where we can talk behaviorally about people acting badly or being distressed. Okay. You know, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I love them doing their research. And, you know, you know, like, I love research, but it's so boring to do, you know, I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it so that I can quote it in podcasts like this. Right?

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: And so they do that stuff. Thank you so much for all that stuff. Okay. And all the things we've discovered. Social psychology. Oh, God. I'm going back over Kurt Lewin's studies that he did on how environment with children creates happy children. And if you create an authoritarian environment, you turn the kids into bullies. He did research. 1937, he did that research.

Jason Lange: Wow.

Dr. Keith Witt: Yeah. Yeah. And it completely tracked what later on, parental research has shown that authoritarian missive and disengaged parents are inferior parents. Kids have problems. Native parents Engaged, you know, growth mindset, but a growth hierarchy. Hierarchies need somebody at the top, their kids do better. Okay. Completely fit with Lewin's research. 1937. Okay. That kind of stuff lights me up. It certainly fits with if you know a little bit about Gurdjieff, the fourth way. The fourth way in Gurdjieff was, look, if you want to have unity with God, take it into the world. Because up to that point, only monks could do it. Well, sorry, that doesn't work for me. And it doesn't work for pretty much everybody else these days either. And so part of that is recognizing if you continue to have productive self awareness, eventually you have to come to grips with the fact that there's another world all around us. You ever read Dune? Yeah, yeah. Okay, Dune, Tolkien trilogy were my bibles when I was teenagers. There's a part of Dune where the guy, the traitor, you gives Paul this little Bible and he said, open up to this passage that I marked for you. And Paul feels it and he goes, he's very sensitive. He goes, oh, here's another passage. It's lightly. He picked it up and it's a passage that was the favorite of Hugh's wife who was captured and blah, blah. Anyway, this is what he reads. Think you that a deaf person cannot hear? What deafness then might we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and hear? Another world all around us.

Jason Lange: Wow.

Dr. Keith Witt: We can develop those senses. And then when we develop those senses, we start seeing and hearing another world all around us. I learned this first in martial arts, because martial arts, you have to have a connection with the other world to be advanced. And we all did zazen before and after every practice. And I kept doing that. There is another world. And after a while, you keep following it, you get ashamed if you're not identifying with it. After a while you go, it's not just around us, it is us. We are the other world. We're the other world manifest in the world with each other. And I'm being manifested as a man, and so I need to be treated that. And there's like a million drives and instincts that I have to integrate. Okay, I'll do it. But they're informing me at this moment as they're informing you and all other men. And you can't deny the drives. But here's what humans do with the drives and the instincts. We turn them into art. That's what we do. And so aggression, the warrior. Yeah, you know, eroticism, the tantras love the divine feminine. We turn them in art. And that's beautiful. And all of us that do this, other therapists and coaches and healers and all that stuff, that's what we help people do.

Jason Lange: So great. I love that. Yeah. What a reframe. And just one thing I want to circle back to just for guys to get, because I really love. You outlined kind of a developmental trajectory for men.

Dr. Keith Witt: Exactly. Developmental trajectory.

Jason Lange: What are those stages that. Go over them again real quick. Just give like a turbo of those. That path for the masculine.

Dr. Keith Witt: Yeah. Okay. So, boy, hey, we're all playing. What do we want to do? Want to play at some point, not all of us, but some of us. Wait a minute. I want to be good at something. And to be good at something, I can't do it by myself. I need to receive influence to be good. The SAT people did a study on what predicted success after college. They looked at a hundred variables. To their disappointment, SAT scores didn't correlate hardly at all. The number one thing that correlated with success after college in high school was somebody chose something that they cared about, that they worked on getting better at for two years or more, that particular success. So I want to get better at something. I receive influence. So productive self awareness. I get better. Okay, that's acolyte. At that point, I've surrendered. Now it might be something egocentric like soccer or, you know, tennis or, you know, whatever. Martial arts. I mean, I didn't do martial arts for the spirituality. I wanted superpowers. That's it. But, you know, I wanted them. So I had to receive influence. And at certain point it catches and you go, I'm not just doing this. I'm becoming an embodiment of this. And I'm having to sacrifice. Now it might not be the same thing. I've had lots of things that I've been fascinated with and dedicated to and received influence about throughout my life that have felt very meaningful to me. At the time, martial arts has felt that way. I was a tap dancer for a while. I was a surfer. I had played, you know, tennis. I. You know, the through line has been healing. Being a warrior, you know, but that capacity to choose something that feels large, larger than me, sacred, pursue it, and then encounter the problems. George Leonard, when he talked about the mastery curve, says, you get better and then you hit a plateau or you're not making any better. But if you're still working and receiving impulse at some point, bam. So those. Those periods where you're frustrated, where it's hard, those are the ordeals or there's a challenge. And you take those ordeals on, you meet them, and you discover yourselves for your victories and your. And your failures. And if you collapse, you feel bad, you go, I don't want to do that again. So you train harder so you don't collapse the next time. Then you don't collapse the next time. You go, oh, yeah, okay. All right. You keep discovering yourself through these ordeals as you are serving this thing. It could be your family, could be a job, it could be an activity of some sort. It just has luminance about it. And at a certain point, you don't need ordeals anymore. You know, I'm a counterphobic 6 in the Enneagram. Counterphobic sixes are fear types that have to do the thing they're scared of. Yeah, I don't have to do things I'm scared of anymore. Okay, so you reach a point where, yeah, I'll do difficult things if it serves the higher good. But serving the higher good has become more important to me because I've made that transition in the manner of wisdom. And it always involves service. You know, if you're not giving your gift, you're suffering or you're dissociated, because we all have gifts. And so that's a transition that pretty much every more masculine person that I've known needs to embody, to feel full, to feel fulfilled. Yeah, as it's distinct. You know, there was a great martial arts movie I saw once. These two kids wanted to, you know, learn how to kick ass like everybody does when they do martial arts. Chinese kids, it was subtitles. So they went to the monastery and they said, yeah, we want to learn how to. And the guy says, well, there's 32 levels. They go, well, we want to go right to the top. He said, sure. So they escorted them upstairs. And there was five or six guys about my age, I guess, sitting around kind of looking at each other, saying something once in a while. And the kid says, this is boring. What are you going to teach me? How to kick and punch and stuff? They go, well, maybe we should go to the 31st. You know? So they worked their way all the way down where they were cleaning the toilets. You know, they had to start. Man wisdom is a particular kind of sangha where you support each other and challenge each other to live your values and serve the highest good. And when you do that, and when you do that in the company of other men, it feels magnificent. And it needs to feel magnificent. It needs to feel good. In fact, in the dialectic, if you're not feeling the pleasure of the dialectic, you're not in the dialectic. The pleasure is a demand condition of that mode of discourse.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Dr. Keith Witt: It's diagnostic. And so you don't just. You don't. So you notice as you develop, you're not just orienting around the presence of pain, like anxiety or fear or shame, you're also orienting around the presence of pleasure or the absence of pleasure.

Jason Lange: Totally.

Dr. Keith Witt: Okay. And all of them are significant. And if you can see them as significant, what you've done is develop a new sensory system that's sensing things differently. What senses do we lack that we cannot see and hear? Another world all around us. We can develop those senses and we do. And eventually that's a sense that feels the other world coming through us, which is wonderful. It feels great.

Jason Lange: Oh, I like. I just. I like that piece around, like the. The pleasure and the wonderment of it at that stage that even in the men's work I'm involved in. Right. Oftentimes, yeah. It's. It's the ordeal, it's the groundwork, it's the. But that. That feels so powerful of when we're fully engaged in that way. You know, it's. It sounds fulfilling in the ways I've maybe touched it as well. There's a fulfillment and enjoyment in enacting and living and tuning into that world and bringing it forth in this one.

Dr. Keith Witt: That's right. And in the modern world. Now, this is another thing that's different now than in the 50s, 60s and 70s. We notice that somebody's neglecting one aspect of their functioning. Physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, sexual, relational, parental. You know, there's more of a need for integrity and authenticity and congruence in this culture. Part of it is because everybody can see everybody so much. You know, you did your movie. Really? Really? Yeah. Of course. You really. And I was one of your interviewees about what would it be if we could all read each other's minds?

Jason Lange: Yeah, totally.

Dr. Keith Witt: Which has always been. I would love it if we could, because after we get over all the chaos. Okay. Now everybody's not just me is observing whether I'm living my values. Everybody is not just me observing whether I'm having radical acceptance of the present moment or not.

Jason Lange: Okay.

Dr. Keith Witt: Whether I'm having productive self awareness, whether I have integrity and authenticity. Okay. Well, that self corrects, awareness regulates.

Jason Lange: Okay.

Dr. Keith Witt: And so that's something that's different in this. In this age. And I like it. I like it because it's all connected. And so there's always something that needs attention in everybody's life. Some in your body, some in your relationship, something in your work, something in your spiritual practice. There's always something. And when it lets you know that it needs attention, give it attention. Solves the problem.

Jason Lange: Oh, that's so cool.

Dr. Keith Witt: Or drama. Yeah, go on. Yeah.

Jason Lange: Or just. It's even an interesting reframe for me. Like you're talking about. On the power of a men's group or a men's circle is. It's a conscious space for us to share our values.

Dr. Keith Witt: That's right.

Jason Lange: To speak them out loud, which in itself is clarifying. But then to get the feedback and the check in. So now that they're out there, there's people that are tracking me in. When am I on and when am I off? To help me course correct. In that same way of like. Like the gift of shame, in a sense, that's. That's a communal kind of version to track it and really matches the experiences. I've had it and the deep pleasure that actually comes with that. Like being in a group where everybody's like, we're fucking in. Here's what I want. Here's what I'm moving towards. And oops. Hey, I notice this thing in you. And rather than that being, you know, something that collapses me, it's something that's like, okay, great. Wow, you're right. I want to work that. You know, I either need to refine that. That value or take some action to actually solve the problem, so to speak, rather than just be stuck in it as I had in previous moments in my life.

Dr. Keith Witt: Exactly.

Jason Lange: So great.

Dr. Keith Witt: Well, to say that. Feel the pleasure that you feel.

Jason Lange: Totally.

Dr. Keith Witt: And we want to feel that. You want to feel that. I like being me. Okay.

Jason Lange: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm realizing that's just like such another great way. I think that, like you named it is a nutrient we need as men, that without it, we suffer. And it just. I see it so clearly now in a way I hadn't quite had that frame for it of. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about this kind of work is because it has brought it to me and it doesn't end. Like, it's more and more pleasurable as I go. It's like, oh, cool. A whole new thing here that I didn't even know I had to work on or something like that. Well, amazing. I want to be mindful of your time here, and I'm so grateful for you and all the wisdom that you brought Here, Keith, what's the best way for people to keep up with you and your work if they want to follow up with more?

Dr. Keith Witt: Well, go to my website, D R K E I T H w I t t.com drkeswit.com and you scroll down, sign up, and what you'll get is a blast. Whenever I have a podcast, you know, if I get a copy of this, I'll do a blast and a little blog. And people could, on my website could see it. Okay? Just like, I'm sure, you know, this happens to you also. Everything on my web, I did this two years ago. Everything except for one book on my website is free. You can get all my books for free. You know, you can go to Amazon, buy them if you want, but you can read them for free on my website. Except for loving completely, because I only own half of that because of. I publish it within her life. There's, you know, there's. There's 10 books, there's hundreds of videos, there's hundreds of blogs, there's classes. It's all free.

Jason Lange: It's amazing.

Dr. Keith Witt: You know, go to my website, use the material if you want to make, you know, me happy. You know, I have enough ego left. Give me a footnote. But, you know, you don't have to. I mean, I mean, it probably shouldn't feed my ego anyway, right? So. But, you know, that's just saying. But, you know, go to my website and use. Use this stuff. One thing about integral is that once you get an integral download, I mean, those of us that had it, it's a psychoactive system. And when it does, if you have mastery in some area, it expands it and you basically develop a cosmology. And so all the stuff on my website are little facets of a larger, integrally informed cosmology of psychology, healing, relationships, sexuality, emotionality, all that kind of stuff. And I. You can't describe it all at once. And so I did little parts of it, you know, in each. Each blog and each video and each lecture and each book is another part of that. And cumulatively, that's key, synergically informed cosmology that naturally fits with other people's integrally informed cosmology, and that those cosmologies fitting together and people having their conversations about it, like you and me. That's a metapsychology. That's dialectic. That's a turquoise dialectic.

Jason Lange: Awesome. I'll drop all that in the show notes. And once again, just thank you so much for your wisdom and for your guidance as well. For me as a man on my journey, it's so refreshing to have role models in terms of what that healthy masculine that they didn't define looks like. It's like great, great, great to be in its presence. So thank you so much, Keith.

Dr. Keith Witt: Thanks for having me and much love to everybody.

Jason Lange: If you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to evolutionary men. Apply.