In April 1964 I met a man who changed my life forever. I was twenty years old, in my senior year at U.C. Santa Barbara, when I took a class from the world-renowned philosopher Paul Tillich. Tillich defined religion not as a set of beliefs or practices, but as the human experience of being “ultimately concerned.” This concern is what defines a religious person. His idea of God was not a being, but the ground of being. For Tillich, the ground of being could mean the Big Bang, the Universe itself, or a universal God.
He rejected the traditional theistic notion of God as a being that moves around the Universe doing great things and worrying about, interfering with, and scolding human beings. Rather, Tillich conceived of God as a symbolic object of the universal human concern for ultimate questions of meaning and purpose. God is thus outside our Universe and is a symbol for the answers to our deepest questions, but the answers always elude our grasp.
Tillich said,
“Every serious thinker must ask and answer three fundamental questions. First, what is wrong with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of our alienation? Our dis-ease?
Second, what would we be like if we were whole? Healed? Actualized? If our potentiality was fulfilled?
Third, how do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness? What are the means of our healing?”
I have spent the last sixty-plus years of my life delving deeply into these three fundamental questions and know it is a life-long journey and particularly relevant to the times in which we are living now, which have resonances with Tillich’s times.
Tillich had been among the first group of professors and the first non-Jewish professor to be dismissed by Hitler for opposing Nazism. The Nazis suppressed his book The Socialist Decision (1933) and consigned it to the flames in Nazi book burnings. In late 1933, he fled Germany with his family to the United States, where he became established as a public intellectual, holding positions as professor of philosophy, at numerous universities.
Meeting Dr. Phil Stutz
I never thought I would meet another intellectual with the practical wisdom of Paul Tillich, but that changed when I learned about Phil Stutz. I’ve been a psychotherapist specializing in men’s mental, emotional, and relational health for more than sixty years. But until November 13, 2022 I had never heard of Dr. Stutz. That was the day I received an email from my colleague, Brian Johnson, creator of Optimize and the Founder + CEO of Heroic. Brian shared information about a new documentary film called Stutz by well-known actor Jonah Hill (Moneyball and The Wolf of Wallstreet.) Brian said,
“I love Phil Stutz. He’s my coach, my Yoda, and my spiritual godfather.”
I learned that Phil Stutz is a psychiatrist who felt psychiatry as practiced was mostly limited to treating symptoms, not the underlying causes of our problems. He has become a healer/coach working with some of Hollywood’s most elite actors and executives over a 40+ year career. He’s also the bestselling author of, The Tools, Coming Alive, and most recently True and False Magic: A Tools Workbook. I watched the Netflix documentary and bought the books.
“Why are you here?”
That’s the first question psychotherapist Phil Stutz asks every single one of his patients, including Jonah Hill, whose documentary focuses on the therapist he says changed his life. Unlike many therapists whose primary approach is to sit back and listen, Stutz prefers to take a more active role in the process: He says his goal is to find out what his patients truly want and give them tangible steps to get there.
Watching the film for the first time introduced me to a man who is clearly a master at helping people, but he is also a man who is all too human and isn’t afraid to share his vulnerabilities, including his challenges with Parkinson’s disease, which he developed in 2006.
I felt an immediate resonance with his life and his work. We were both born in New York City, me in 1943, Phil Stutz, 1948. We both had challenging childhoods which contributed to our professional work as healers and writers. In the introduction to his book True and False Magic he says,
“I’m not special. I never thought I’d be a public figure or bestselling author. In fact, for the first stretch of my life, I didn’t even think I was intelligent. I had the perfect parents to perpetuate an ignorance about who I was, because they didn’t know either. But oddly, their dismissiveness kept me on track. Left to my own devices, I would have become a writer. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and I didn’t want to be persona non grata in my family, so I obliged.”
I could have written these lines myself. Like Phil, I worked hard in college, got good grades, and was accepted into two excellent medical schools, one in New York, the other in San Francisco. I chose U.C. San Francisco, partially because they offered a four-year, full tuition fellowship. But mainly because I imagined that if I completed medical school and became a psychiatrist, I could understand why my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping pills when I was five years old.
As I wrote in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound, my father didn’t die. Instead, he was committed to the state mental hospital in Camarillo, north of our home in Los Angeles. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to keep it from happening to other families.
Phil’s father wanted him to become a pediatrician, because he had lost a child — Phil’s younger brother who died of a rare kidney cancer when Phil was nine and his brother was three. Phil defied his father’s wishes and went into psychiatry. I defied my father’s wishes when I left medical school and went into social work. Most everyone thought I was crazy to give back four years of scholarship money and leave medical school, but I felt called to follow a different path.
“I loved working with people,” said Phil, “but right from the beginning I knew something was missing. I quickly discovered that the go-to position in treating psychiatric patients was a combination of psychotherapy model, which I didn’t believe in at all, and medication, which sometimes worked well and other times made things worse.”
I could have written these same words, as well. When I left medical school and went into social work, I developed my own way of helping people. Since learning about Phil Stutz I often imagine what it might have been like if we had attended university together and been working on the three questions that Paul Tillich called upon us to explore:
- What’s wrong with men, women, and society?
- What would we be like if we were healed, whole, actualized?
- How do we move from brokenness to wholeness?
Phil Stutz: God Reveals Himself in Three Domains
One of the things I’ve most valued about Dr. Stutz and his work is that he offers practical ways to tap into the power of what he calls “The Life Force” and the “God-spirit” and combines them with practical guidance for healing. We all have our own conception of God and the way that God-spirit reveals itself. I very much resonate with the way Dr. Stutz describes it:
- God reveals himself in three domains. Each domain contains some aspect of God, and each domain has its own demand.
- You can’t access the powers that God wants everyone to have, and you cannot really experience reality, until you contend with the three domains. Dr. Stutz call them “The Three Big Unavoidable Realities of Life.”
- The first domain is pain. Pain is any event in which you meet the universe, and it hurts. The universe is not designed for your comfort. It is designed to support you by pushing you forward. “Forget about avoiding pain,” says Dr. Stutz. “It’s impossible and it is the first gift of God.”
- The second domain is uncertainty. The universe is in constant flux, constant motion. Everything is changing every second. Our desire to be certain about important things in our lives is a trap. It’s not a bad thing that we’re not privy to the rules of the universe. As the wisdom of 12-step recovery programs says, “Let go, and let God.”
- The third domain is constant work. Most of us work for money and many would retire if we won millions in the lottery. Most of us want to know ourselves and hope that someday we will reach our goal. Yet, “We live in a universe that is always moving,” says Dr. Stutz. “Everything is constantly changing and shifting. Constant work is our gift from God and all life on planet Earth.
“The three domains, in combination, unlock real magic, not fake power,” says Dr. Stutz. “Once you learn to move through pain, you will gain the ability to expand; once you develop faith, freely chosen, to contend with uncertainty, you will gain the ability to decide and create; and once you embrace constant work, you will gain the ability to be infinite. The height of the function of God. That’s the definition of creativity. That’s real magic.”
In future articles I will share other things I’ve learned from my own work over the last sixty-plus years and from what I’ve learned from Dr. Stutz and his work. If you appreciate articles like these I invite you to visit my website and subscribe to my free weekly newsletter.
