29/12/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17UzTLRM5w/
James Hollis in an interview on the Keep Talking Podcast- on being a recovering nice person, and stepping into new roles for oneself..
He says: "many of us were raised to be nice all the time, and nice means accommodating whatever is demanded in your environment. If you are nice in all directions and its a reflexive niceness - sooner or later it will violate your own personhood, and sooner or later is will violate the expectations of your own soul.
Just the capacity to say no to someone "no I do not want that", or "no I am not going to allow you to do that to me" - are moments where one is not being nice, but one is being very real, one is being authentic.
The opposite of a reflexive niceness is not evil - its called authenticity. Reflexive niceness is a protection, an old protection, its what we actually call co-dependence. There is a power differential, and the power is always in the hands of the other, never within me, and therefore I don't have the right to say no I don't want to do that. I have to co-operate with you.
As Jung said: "Neurosis is the flight from authentic suffering", so suffering either way - if you have inauthentic suffering, you will be hit with a depression that comes from the unlived life. If you risk and step into life more fully, you will have a lot of anxiety, but thats preferable to depression, because depression ultimately steals from us our capacity to engage life, and to grow and develop. We can stay stuck in all our patterns, our avoidances, but sooner or later something shows up and pathologises."
“Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while . . . sometimes for a long while, sometimes a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion. (As a friend advised me in Zurich, “When in doubt, administer chocolate.”) Yet the way forward threatens death—at the very least, the death of what has been familiar, the death of whomever we have been.”
The daily confrontation with these gremlins of fear and lethargy obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression, for each is aroused by the dilemma of daily choice. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk the next stage of our journey, and depression our companion if we do not. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.
James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.
Art: Johann Heinrich Füssli
