Bonus Sample: The Ruthless Sovereignty of Kelly Brogan
Matthew and Julian have to thank Kelly Brogan for hanging out on an episode of Aubrey Marcus's podcast, where she lays bare the emotional avoidance and cruelty that conspirituality attempts to sublimate—or dispel the guilt of.Here's the pull quote for the ages:So when I am sick, right, chronically sick, what do I get? I get compassion built in to my life from others who pity me. Right? And who offer me that surrogate hit of love. I get to say no without having to actually learn to assert my boundaries and express my desires in this clear, indirect way because of course, I'm limited by my illness. I can't do that. I get to say no all the time. I get to experience the validation of this felt sense of wrongness and brokenness that's always lived within me out of all my patients told me that the first time they got a diagnosis, they felt like See, I knew something was wrong with me. Yeah. And it's like, you know, ends up being like the prison number you know, that's put on their vest, but it feels in the moment like it's somebody's finally seeing their hurt. And when, you know, we end up over identifying with that wound with the cancer diagnosis with the, you know, the mental illness…She goes on in the episode to say: "victim consciousness is the only human pathology."
Show NotesPremka MemoirIf you want to STAY SICK, Don't Watch This | Dr. Kelly Brogan MD on Aubrey Marcus PodcastLesson 136: Sickness is a defense against the… | ACIM
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Thank you.
So when I am sick, chronically sick, what do I get?
I get compassion built into my life from others who pity me and who offer me that surrogate hit of love.
To say no, without having to actually learn to assert my boundaries and express my desires in this clear and direct way, because of course I'm limited by my illness.
I can't do that.
I get to say no all the time.
I get to experience the validation of this felt sense of wrongness and brokenness that's always lived within me.
All of my patients told me that the first time they got a diagnosis, they felt like, see, I knew something was wrong with me.
And it's like, you know, ends up being like the prison number, you know, that's put on their vest.
But it feels in the moment like it's somebody finally seeing their hurt.
And when, you know, we end up over identifying with that wound, with the cancer diagnosis, with the, you know, the mental illness.
There it is.
It's so infuriating.
It's amazing.
And it's thick, too.
So what I've done is I've got the transcript here and we can take a look at it because she goes so fast.
Through, I would say, about 50 years of ideology.
She's a really good distiller of Louise Hay, of The Course in Miracles, of Marianne Williamson, of The Power of Now.
She's really, really good.
So, just sentence by sentence, first of all, she conflates compassion with pity.
She says that the whole premise, I mean, well, let's go back before that.
She asks the question, when I am sick, what do I get?
Do you recognize this construction in kind of pop psychology?
What is this from?
I've heard this before.
Oh, it's the work.
It's Byron Katie kind of stuff.
It's, it's that you have chosen to be sick because you want something.
Unconsciously, you know that you're going to get something out of it.
It gives you some advantage.
It's not, you're not actually victimized.
In fact, you're getting something out of it.
You're just doing it in a dishonest way.
Right.
And that's, that's Byron Katie.
Okay.
But Byron Katie has an antecedent that she copped a lot of her stuff from.
I mean, I do think you're absolutely right, but I'm wondering what else comes before that that's related to.
Well, I don't know if it's the Christian science notion that everything is already perfect.
Yes, and so any illness is really a failure to accurately perceive God's divine perfection because everything is God and therefore everything is perfect.
And so you are to blame, and then maybe the next step is, well then why would you be Why would you be willfully creating that distortion?
It must be because you think there's something in it for you.
I don't know who else you might be thinking of.
Yeah, I'm just, I mean, I guess you're right that Byron Katie is the most sort of cogent formulator or the one who really psychologizes that next step, right?
Yeah, because Byron Katie on more than one occasion is willing to sit in front of a room full of people and Answer questions where people are actually challenging her and saying, no, no, no, absolutely the person standing in line to go into the gas chamber should be able to say it's a beautiful day.
Right, right.
Otherwise, you know, they just don't get it.
They don't get what I'm teaching.
They don't get what I'm teaching, but they also don't understand that because they've put themselves into that position somehow, that their job is to now understand why and to understand what the payoff is.
This is another word that comes off.
I've heard in that discourse is, okay, so you're upset because your husband is cheating on you.
Well, what's the payoff?
Yeah.
I've heard that in pop psychology, sort of new age circles as well.
Yeah.
Totally.
Yeah.
And maybe this, maybe this goes back to like Est.
Maybe it goes back to like the encounter groups.
Right.
And that, and that's somehow part of, part of, you know, and the transactional analysis kind of stuff that if that, that you're playing a role, you're getting right.
Cause transactional analysis is that whole like parent child.
It's the, it's, it's either you're coming from a parent place or a child place.
The child feels victimized.
The child felt disempowered.
Right, exactly.
The parent is judging and authoritarian, but the healthy place to be is the adult who recognizes I have agency and I must be getting some kind of payoff out of pretending to be the child who's victimized in this situation.
Right, exactly.
I mean, her dances around parent-child dynamics are pretty constant, so I imagine that might be an influence.
So what do I get is her question and then she answers it for herself with a conflation between two things.
She says, I get compassion built into my life from others who pity me.
This blows my mind.
This sentence, I get compassion built into my life from others who pity me.
What the fuck is going on there?
I mean, I understand that you either don't understand what compassion is or what pity is, but within the same sentence, To equalize those two things is extraordinary.
What do you make of that?
Well, I mean, I hear a defensive posture that essentially says that the longing that someone might feel
For relational empathy, compassion, even pity, I don't necessarily have a negative connotation with that word, from others because you are suffering, that there is something about that that is inherently shameful or immature or dishonest and that if you were really sort of
Awakened or self-aware enough in the way that she's alluding to, you wouldn't need that.
And you wouldn't sort of play these games to get that.
That needing compassion is a sign of being less than.
That's what I hear.
Right.
And so to me, that's the kind of philosophy that someone spouts if they're deeply, deeply conflicted about ever I mean, this is a caregiver by profession.
Yeah.
needing care.
Although, I mean, this is a caregiver by profession.
I imagine that some of the criticism that she's had of her training from Cornell and MIT is that the clinical coldness and the distance and the sort of alienation and the prescriptive protocols and the best practices that all interrupt, you know, doctor-patient relationship are all very...
They obstruct a kind of compassion.
Yeah, that they're reductionistic, they're cold, they're lacking in good bedside manner, etc., right?
Right, but she's talking just about other people here.
I can understand problematizing compassion when you're criticizing a patriarchal or an authoritarian system, right?
That it could have this feeling of, yeah, pity, or you need to be saved, or condescension, right?
But surely, the notion that you would feel for a person who is ill, and that that would be a natural response, and something that should actually happen between human beings, And when it happens between human beings, it leads to care.
