Phil Stutz: Working with Hidden Forces
Phil Stutz is the creator of the Tools. You might know Phil from his bestselling book of the same name, or its sequel Coming Alive. Or you might know him from the Netflix documentary Stutz, which is a profile of him as a beloved psychotherapist who doesn’t practice in a particularly traditional way. What you might not know is that Phil is actually a psychiatrist—he received his MD from NYU and then abandoned the standard approach, feeling like he wasn’t helping patients at all. He created The Tools for exactly that: To provide practices for people to move through life’s obstacles, rather than just listening to them talk about them. Ad nauseum. One of the things that I love most about Phil’s approach is the way in which he uses the spiritual, or what he calls “Higher Forces.” Foundationally, he believes that a beneficent universe will move in as soon as you put yourself in motion, unlocking creativity and growth. His latest book, Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, is a beautiful collection of essays about aging, hard times, and obstacles. It’s equal parts moving and practical, much like Phil himself. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM PHIL STUTZ:
Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You
The Tools Website
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: So I know you obviously are influenced by Carl Jung and shadow work and spirituality, but it's not Jungian, right? Or when you practice, is there that element to it too?
PHIL STUTZ: Jung obviously was a genius, and he saw things other people didn't see, especially that was basically 1900 thinking which was fairly, I don't want to say crippled, but it was limited. Anyway, we go two ways with this, when I learned Jungianism, which it was up until that point was the best thing I had learned, the most effective and the most connected to reality. So, once I saw that, I studied it, and I loved it. It changed your whole relationship to your dreams, for one thing. It also gave people the idea that there were generic forces, or archetypes, you call them, that were like floating out there and they applied to everybody. Nobody had said anything like that before, so props Dr. Jung. However, I felt like where he stopped was where we had to start. And the reason for that was Jung, I think by nature, but also just the times, it was very passive. So, it was a time of science, but science didn't supply what was needed here, because it's like, if you're up to here, you're doing well, you're doing well, there's a gap, and you have to jump over that gap, and the gap is the difference between understanding something, which is like cognitive and intellectual, versus doing something, which means you have to have an impact on the world around you.
I haven't found that the Jungians... And I don't want to characterize a whole, you know, million people or something, but I haven't found that not only didn't they know how to do that, they weren't interested in doing that and the Jungians had this thing, basically it said, if you analyze the unconscious, and you have some relationship with the unconscious, that's all you need to do. The unconscious will then resolve its own problems. And that's a form of self regulation I just don't believe. I've never seen that work in anything, in psychotherapy, in business. Wherever you look, the idea of self regulation didn't work too well. So, and I'm no great altruist or anything, but it was driving me nuts because I felt we would get right up to the edge of something and we had no way to jump over.
ELISE: Yeah.
PHIL: so anyway, so that was one part of it. I think another part of it was the there were currents running through society and the biggest one, which may surprise you, was the ascension of the female. It was just starting then, you know, let's say early 20th century. And I believe there's certain things where the time has come, and at that point, they're going to be, like, the ascendancy of women is going to happen anyway, no matter what. The question is, is it going to be a good thing or a bad thing? It's hard to imagine it could possibly be worse than the way the males have fucked it up. But the whole idea of using the unconscious in a focused way, with focused goals and focused tools, that was new. I can't say that I'm a genius and I figured out it. It just unfolded, you know, piece by piece by piece.
ELISE: Yeah. I work with a Jungian. So and I love the system, but I can also understand how and I see it in myself how we all get stuck in our stories. And when really we need the moral of the story, right, or the underlying pattern unlock so that we can move forward. And as you were studying, and as you were treating patients, were you hearing a universality of story, I mean, is that essentially where the tools came from? That we're not that different? And many of us share the same essential patterning?
PHIL: Yes. I would say definitely. And that itself was a huge breakthrough because it forced you to think about these things in a different way. If everything is connected on some level, and even if you can't quite figure out what the level is, it changes the whole world, and you're going to see, the world's going to change so much in the next 10 years, it'll be more than the last 10 years of it, it seems even possible. And so, there are two parts to it, so one is the Jungian part of interpreting the unconscious and what goes on in the unconscious, and kind of hypercharging it, and the other thing is tools, and here's the story with tools, at least as far as I'm concerned, which are, the tools are the only thing that can bridge that gap from what you think Your inte intellectual, cognitive impression to something and what you're gonna do about it. Any philosophy starting in the 20th century, any philosophy, not just mine, if it doesn't end with an action, it's not a real philosophy. Now in 1600, you wouldn't say that, but in the present time, that's required because it's an action oriented universe, and it's an action oriented populace, you could say. So that, I mean, it's much more complicated than that, but that's at least the starting point for me. The other thing about it is that the patients love it, they just love it and I think that's because it was allowing them to do things that they didn't believe they could do, that actually seemed impossible. Now, should I go into Part X?
ELISE: Yeah, yeah, please. Let's talk about Part X.
PHIL: okay, so you have the whole thing laid out in terms of where you need help, the changes that have to be made, you know, et cetera, and yet, especially the first half of the 20th century, it wasn't working too well. At age 65, Freud realized that psychoanalysis was failing, and he said, My system is bogus. He called it the death instinct. He said, we all have an instinct built in not to grow, not to change. Now, I hinted at that, but this is the first person to make a theory out of it. As I told you, I don't believe in self regulation anyway. I've never seen it work once. But it seemed at least for it to be possible, for a human being to take their evolution or their direction in life or whatever they thought their mission was and have some agency in it.
ELISE: Yeah, I mean, I think Part X deserves a long explication, right? But is it equivalent to the shadow in some ways?
PHIL: Part X is the shadow when it's been treated badly. The shadow is not a bad thing, even though it comes out as sometimes as inferior, harmful, weak, and very badly injured, but that in and of itself means nothing unless you understand the genesis of it. So what that means is, you know, the best way to say it is self-esteem, why are people so insecure? The people I treat, there's no logical reason for them to be insecure, but they do. Now, the reason they feel insecure is everybody, me, you, Carl Jung, if he was alive, everybody feels insecure and everybody has a part of themselves that they regard as inferior. Now, so, what happens, if there is this part of you that you think is inferior, the weak spot, something you're ashamed of, etc., it's one of these things where if you believe it's true, there's a part of the human soul, we call it part X. It doesn't want you to have any kind of forward motion, doesn't like it, it wants to render your life failure. It wants you to never re change your potentials. And it wants you to hate yourself, which is the biggest thing. So, the genesis of the tools came from the idea, we have to be active about dealing with this. We called it Part X but that doesn't tell you anything, it's just an X. Although it's amazing how many X's there are now in popular culture. Anyway, so, it was something in each person. Part X is the shadow when you stop taking care of it. So you have North and South America, that's permanent, that's unchanging. So that's like a vertical line, here is North America, down South America, but you also have a horizontal plane. In that plane, it's the relationship between your shadow and you, or the lack of such that dictates, if you treat your shadows badly, it becomes a war, basically. But, this is very important, the terms of the war is not for anybody to get shot or get killed. In some ways, as bad as that is, there's a clarity to that. Part X is something that works on you most of the time when you're not aware of it. You're seeing or experiencing a part of yourself, but it doesn't want you to win, it wants you to lose. And that's very freeing for people because they feel less guilty. The idea that there's somebody out there that doesn't like me, that's trying to Prevent me from moving forward.
ELISE: It seems like almost a ternary system. I don't know if you would think about it like that. But if you think about how and we can talk about higher forces as well, because I love that that's a dimension of your work, that's very important to me, but it almost feels like it's like higher forces, part X is like pace setting or blocking or stopping, and then the tools, rather than a stasis or a locked binary of paralysis, that the tools allow someone to move forward. And through that resistance to grow, change, set a new story.
PHIL: yeah, 100%. You can even go a step further than that and say, The purpose of the tools is to counteract Part X at the moment when they're trying to block you. And it has to do with possibility and impossibility. Part X is the avatar of impossibility.
ELISE: Yeah.
PHIL: Part X saying it's impossible. You can't do that. Don't even think about it. Another way to describe that is Part X gives you a problem that you really don't need to have, and then it gives you a solution to the problem that makes it worse, if that isn't the devil, I don't know what it is.
ELISE: I want to talk about manifestations and I want to share a story from a tools workshop, Which blew my mind. So I went as an observer more than a participant and it was for creatives I think it was for screenwriters or the like. And he was talking about the inability of so many people to put their creative work into the world. They'll just take it almost to the finish line and then stop. And then he asked everyone in the room, he said, raise your hands if when you do the dishes, you have to leave a pot. And it was amazing. Everyone's hands went up and my husband, he's not a writer, but he's a creative. And that's a classic Rob Fismer move is to let something soak but in that moment, it was in a beautiful illustration of how everyone, Regardless of the content or the material, it's like the same thing that knocks them down or shuts them down right at that moment before they're complete.
PHIL: This is so important, so one thing you're mentioning is the universality, once you have the idea of forces, which it Most people can't really fully accept, but once you have that going, a connection, even if the connection is World War VI, everybody is subject to the same forces, that's number one. Number two, everything you do for your personal benefit, you want to write a novel, it doesn't matter whatever you do because you want to do it or you want a relationship with a certain person, et cetera. If that does not also have a piece of good stuff for the whole world, for the whole world population, it's very hard to succeed at it. Now, what's going on now to an unprecedented degree, the part X is getting stronger.
The book that's coming out now is a compilation of ideas and stories, a lot of stories, and it's very helpful. But the book was written, not all of it, but most of it was written 25 years ago, 30 years ago. what does that mean? How can that be? The world is changing. The tools haven't changed, the philosophy hasn't changed, the world has changed. And that's where dealing with now becomes urgent. It's not a hobby or a speculative philosophical argument. Why is it so urgent? Because the universe, to be healthy, needs to be in one home, if you want to call it a cosmic family, whatever you want to call it, but X's job, so to speak, and part of its power to shatter the universe, or the human universe. And, you know, you can see it, the first time I think there was human growth was the virus. Because you can see people couldn't even leave their houses. It was a fractionation, it was like the sun was shattered into a million different pieces. But there was something good about that if you had tools, because if you don't have tools, you have nothing.
When you're in a situation where your understanding has reached as far as it can go, then you have to have something that you can do next. And if you don't, you're wasting a tremendous opportunity. So, and the tools, we ended up with so many of them and you think, yeah, there's probably a lot of repetition. There really wasn't. We had at least 40 solid tools. And the book is constructed so that you can actually do research on yourself. Because there's so many tools and stories in there, you'll probably be able to find at least one, some people will find ten, that applies to them. You say, well, why can't they read it in a book? Because this is tailored to be doable or actionable right at the moment. And on top of that, we don't train people to try and win. That's not the goal. We train them to be disciplined enough to stay in the process.
ELISE: To stay engaged, ultimately. Do you think That there's a cultural part X and then a personal part X or that. Yeah. The essay on ageism was so beautiful and the way that I think you write about how the way that we're essentially polarized to value youth versus Old people and wisdom. It's interesting to see it in this particular moment in time as well the schism and the inability to reconcile that, right? And then you write about how you know you could talk about that as a cultural shadow or big cultural part X we live in a very ageist culture, and then it trickles down into the personal, right, where we come to despise our own aging process.
PHIL: The thing about aging, obviously it also has to do with death, and there's a very strong instinctual drive now to get them off the playing field altogether. See, there's two universes . Universe 1, value is denominated by numbers. And if value is determined by numbers, what do you end up with? Money as being the arbiter of everything. Universe 2 is completely different than that. Universe 2 value is not a thing, you can't grasp it and take it home with you. It's the ability to create systematically is what Universe 2 is about. And it's the only thing it cares about. So, I tell patients, all the time I tell them this. You have to decide which universe you want to be in, and then you have to choose it over and over and over again.
Anyway, just to go back to the tools, the tools were working as part x. They will not keep working unless you keep using them. And once they work, even once, all of a sudden things began to seem possible. If this isn't having an effect on you, and that's probably within 10 weeks, it's not 10 years, if it's not having an effect on you, you should fire me. And this is how I got into the whole thing with the tools and trying to come up with ways that would break free of the limitation. Anything that's numerical is, by definition limited. It is not that the world is what it is. It's not that. It's that your mind is absolutely encased and trapped. Can I draw a picture?
ELISE: Yeah, please.
PHIL: Now this, what I'm drawing, I'll show it to you in a second. That's called a birthday cake.
ELISE: Yeah, I was gonna say.
PHIL: and it has three tiers. So the bottom tier is faith. Now, and this is very specifically, not the same thing As proof, which we'll get to in a minute. Faith has to be chosen. There's no way it can be proven. If you're trying to prove it, you're putting yourself back in universe one, which thrives on proof. That's the first step of the of the birthday cake. Now the next step is action. Which just means, just what it says, because you have faith, you see?
ELISE: Mm
PHIL: so the next one is action, then if you have enough faith to take an action, there's no guarantees of anything at all. If you have that faith, then you become confident. Now most philosophies and people say the opposite. They want to have faith. And then, they only want to take action when they already have experienced a series of positive steps. But life doesn't work like that.
ELISE: Yeah.
PHIL: So, the choice of having faith then it allows you to act, which means it allows you to do things that ordinarily you wouldn't do, you wouldn't want to be able to change too much. And then you become a confident person.
ELISE: Yeah, isn't this sort of the tool of forward motion to that, if you have faith that there's a beneficent, higher force universe, and there's something that's trying to come through you, that if you start to move forward...
PHIL: yes.
ELISE: Things will start to happen.
PHIL: 100%. We just call it the law of forward motion.
ELISE: Yeah.
PHIL: See, the whole universe is moving all the time, so if you're just neutral, you're already losing. Just to say even with the thing, it requires time and time. there's a counter birthday cake, now, this other birthday cake, this foundation, It's not faith, it's doubt. So, I doubt everything until it's proven to me. And that's proof. And proof is the abandoned worthless stepchild of someone demanding, who believes in nothing until it's true. And it was incapable of really looking at the world differently. So for most people, it's a fight between these two worlds. Now what happened, and I think it happened about 2020, but it was near the pandemic, was the rules changed. What's the difference between before and after. By the way, that difference is when we made the documentary. If we would have made that documentary 10 years ago, people would have come to see, but it touched some kind of nerve. And it touched the nerve because it was a very convincing way, and that's what gets you to have faith, to be open to it, and from there you get the idea that two human beings, any two, can force a bond between and once you have a bond, then anything becomes possible, human beings do have superpowers, they do. Only if they use those powers in a corrective setting, is the best way to say it. I believe women are much more capable of making that leap. I'm not saying, you know, the men can't, they can't do it. To go back to universe one, which is very competitive, it's very materialistic, women are cynical and skeptical about materialism, at the end of the day, they know on some level that they have something that the males don't have, which is they have direct experience of the most powerful force in the universe, the power that can create life.
ELISE: Mm-hmm.
PHIL: And you know, some of the stuff they do now to raise the level of opportunity for women is good. I mean, that's the external part. The internal part is to go all the way back to the beginning of whatever this is. It's to act as if they have faith in this creative process because if they don't, we're going to be a blip on the screen.
ELISE: It's interesting to think, just being a woman and thinking about the creative process too, that there's some inherent understanding that a creative system is ternary also, just thinking about the tools in that context, that there are these two forces that come together so a third can emerge, whereas I don't think men, they're just a single force. And so maybe that's why it's so accessible. And I get that we live in a cynical, secular, highly materialistic culture, but as someone who works with creatives, maybe not exclusively, but many creatives, it's interesting that that idea of higher forces would be difficult just because anyone who I think has been in flow or been in a state of high inspiration has to recognize that something else wants to come through them. Is that not a felt experience for most of the people you see?
PHIL: You know, I would say for half of them, it's a fairly common experience. For the other half, they want it, they like having it, but women also, what I find is they have a natural respect for this whole thing that men don't really have. A male mostly, not 100%, but mostly wants dominance. And it's all me, me, me, me, me, and it has to be, it's about dominance. Women don't view that sort of power as really so great. See, see this triangle?
ELISE: yeah, yes.
PHIL: Okay, so that's a picture of a dynamic. In chemistry, it's a symbol for change. The lower left of that triangle is one point of view about anything. And the lower right side is the opposing point of view. Evolution and also survival requires us to somehow put the two together, and you can't just say we'll be compromising, be nice to this next person. You have to actually participate in this. And when you participate, you end up up here.
ELISE: Yes. Yeah, on top of the mount on top of the triangle.
PHIL: Yeah. So, this is way the universe moves. This is the way it creates, there's even a tool for that. You want me to teach you the tool?
ELISE: Yes, please.
PHIL: What would you say is a troublesome habit that you have?
ELISE: Oh, I would say I have a self soothing habit to do data entry, like compulsive tracking, like a self soothing waste of time, I can spend hours just Making lists. It's not a good use of my time.
PHIL: I agree with you, because I do the same thing, probably with a different subject matter. So this is called Category 3. So close your eyes, and see yourself, and feel yourself in that position where you're addicted, you're compulsive, you have to have it, you're attached, and try to make the feeling of it as extreme as you possibly can. Okay, good. Now erase that. Now I want you to create the opposite feeling, even if you don't feel it very much, of complete letting go of anything and everything that's not efficient and just let that part of you expand. Okay, stop. Now we're going to do the same thing again, but I want you to do it so you just go from point one to point two, you know, back and forth. That's good. Now I'm going to tell you to do something. Don't do anything until you hear my voice. But once you hear my voice, I want you to do what I ask you to do as immediately as possible. Okay. Okay. Now, that was good. Open. Do you feel anything?
ELISE: Yeah, that's very somatic for me. Like I can feel sort of the anxious attachment in my chest and then the release into space, it's very much in my body.
PHIL: Okay. So that's called category three. And usually, let's say, category one is usually something angry and category two is usually something, you know, passive. But you can cut the pie in any way you want to. The point is, You need a way to interweave those two extremes, and that you can't do by thinking. It's a complete waste of time. If you're a meditator, it'll help you a little bit. But what you need to do is when you find yourself looking for the purpose of today, you know, what came out, when you find yourself in a position where you're too far Into one state or the other state, you wanna use category three as fast as you possibly can. So you're combining two things that are opposites. Now, do you know what you get when you do that?
ELISE: Flexibility or expansion. Relief.
PHIL: Relief is good. That's probably the most, but what you're actually feeling is flow
ELISE: Hmm.
PHIL: and flow is the force in the universe. There's a lot of other tools that are similar, but at the beginning, it's just good to do something that people can feel, you know, I look at it like there's two centers of wisdom, one is here in the third eye. Most of what you get from the third eye area is worthless. Not everything. Mostly everything.
ELISE: I'm curious to know why the third eye, what you get in the third eye, you think is worthless.
PHIL: The third eye is the center of intellect, logic, concise boundaries. You know, there's a clarity to it, and it's very good. It gave us science, but for important human decisions, it's worthless. It doesn't help. Why doesn't it help? Because nobody, when they have to make a decision ever has enough information. It just doesn't work that way. It would be nice if you did, if I said, well, we have a new job. Would you like to make 400, 000 or 400 million? That's not a decision. And just to show you how the circle part works, there's a cycle, it's called the instinct cycle, and I hope you don't mind these pictures.
ELISE: No, I love them.
PHIL: You see the circle?
ELISE: The circle with the four numbers around it. Yeah.
PHIL: that's called the instinct, instinct cycle, and the way it works is, point number one, which is in this row on the left, is basically you're using your instinct. I want to buy this stuff I, I want to send my child to some, some kind of a vacation or I don't want to be friends. It doesn't matter the features of the format. Your instinct, your intuition is telling you to do this. And again, it's the same thing. If it's instinct, there is no proof. There's no bottom line to it. And again, that's because it's an uncertain universe. So that's station one. Station number two is decision. I know what I feel, so I'm going to let myself be guided by that, even if I don't feel particularly confident in it. Number three, which is action. Now people say to me, why do you need that? You already decided to do it, to take the action. Why do you have to have action twice? And the answer is very simple. People tell themselves a million things they're going to do, but they don't do them. So this whole undertaking sucks, unless you take it to its completion. Now, its completion is station four. The key note there is taking the consequences. It's not being right. It doesn't matter. You have to be able to take the consequences. And be willing to take the consequences of your decision making or of your commitments over and over. Now what happens if you do that is you might think well, somebody else seems to have better luck than I have but whatever it is, that doesn't matter because the reason it's called a cycle is it has to be repeated over and over and over, and the person who wins is not the person who's right the most times. It's the person who works the cycle the most times, which is totally different, and it's just another version of the birthday cake.
ELISE: Yeah. And I can see how it becomes a spiral and has forward motion as you're taking action at a higher and higher part of that triangle or mountain. So thank you for your book. It's beautiful. And thank you for all your work. It's an incredible contribution to the world of psychotherapy, to imagine a more active state, because people need, as you talk about extensively, they need tools, they need to be able to move and not just rehash.
PHIL: Yeah, you know, when I first started, started in this, in the very first year, I thought this, the whole thing was arranged so people wouldn't change. It was arranged specifically so you couldn't change. And it's so easy to do that because if a patient comes to you with a dire need, or somebody's really abusing them, all you have to do is nothing and just sit there and you've destroyed the person.
ELISE: it's true.
PHIL: That's not therapy, that's life.
ELISE: So as Phil mentioned, his newest book, Lessons for Living, is a series of essays. Many of these essays he wrote decades ago and revised, as he says, “only ever so slightly,” which gives you a sense of how these tools are quite dynamic but they continually to evolve and move and change as we do across time. Here’s one moment from the book, Phil writes: “The great paradox is that it is not winning, but losing, that reconnects us to higher forces. This is so antithetical to how we see the world that at first it seems insane. But if you focus not on what is lost but on the state that loss puts you in, it makes sense. In an attached state, you’ve made the thing you’re obsessed with into your ultimate reality. Regardless of what that thing is, your attachment to it puts you into a world where there is nothing higher than a thing. Attachment traps you in this world without higher forces. Only if you lose the thing are you freed from this empty world. Only then can you enter an alive world made of spiritual forces, not objects. That’s the secret of loss: it allows you to gain a whole world.” And we didn’t get a chance to get into it, but what I hear in Phil’s work and when I’m engaged with the tools, it is this, I kept talking about a ternary system, meaning three parts rather than a two-part binary of good versus bad, right versus wrong, which is how our reality is often structured and keeps us stuck between two poles. And I think the tools are so special, and this idea of higher forces and part X, which is effectively the shadow or the unconscious, which is a pace setter to our progress, and in many ways slowing us down so we can metabolize what’s to come through us, but what he is articulating are really tactical ways to navigate a system so that you don’t get stuck in is this right or is this wrong? Or who is right and who is wrong? Who’s the victim or the villain in all theses scenarios? But to instead, to quote Ken Wilbur, are looking to transcend and include. In the tools there’s this third force, this ternary system, of reconciliation so that you are meeting the friction and that friction is what compels you forward. I think it’s quite beautiful and metaphysical and I hope for many more books from Phil.
