Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta

Nisha Gupta is an existential phenomenologist, a depth psychotherapist, a creativity scholar, and an artist. She’s an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia and earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She’s also, if she doesn’t mind me saying, a bit of a rising star as an early career psychologist, having won early career awards from the APA divisions for both humanistic and qualitative psychology.

Dr. Gupta’s work centers on lived experience and the problems of form and method in the field. She is an advocate of the psychological humanities, disseminating psychology to the public as art, including paintings, film, poetry, and literary memoir, for community healing and social change. Her artwork seeks to raise critical consciousness and empowerment regarding marginalized lived experiences, such as sexual and gender oppression, creative madness, and spiritual emergencies. In psychotherapy practice, she integrates depth and liberation psychotherapy perspectives.

In this conversation, we talk about phenomenological filmmaking and what film can capture about distress, identity, time, and relationships that often elude other approaches to psychological research. We also talk about spiritual emergency and the phrase “dark night of the soul,” including the difference between those frameworks and the more familiar language of symptoms and disorders.

Dr. Gupta also shares her own experience of navigating a spiritual emergency as a clinical psychologist. We discuss what helped, what did not, what clinicians tend to miss in these situations, and what it would mean to build a better set of responses around people going through them.

Finally, we discuss liberation psychology and collective resilience, including the question of how to think about suffering when its sources are social and political, and how to avoid reducing resilience to individual “grit.”

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

 

Justin Karter: Dr. Gupta, wonderful to have you here. Thank you for joining us on the Mad In America podcast.

Nisha Gupta: It’s an honor, Justin, to be in conversation with you about such deep subject matters today.

Karter: Could you start us off just by letting our listeners know who you are? How did you become a depth and liberation psychologist, a somewhat rare identity in the field?

Gupta: I want to be intentional in how I tell my own personal story, because I’m hoping that this interview with the two of us can honor the wounded healers in our field. I’ll identify as a wounded healer, and that’s what brought me to the field of psychology.

I struggled with a lot of trauma. I will also identify as a complex trauma survivor, and I really medicated that trauma through alcohol as a youth. It got to a point where, after my father’s death, I had an overdose at the age of 20, and that’s what actually got me into therapy. Three years of therapy kind of saved me. I felt so much indebtedness to my own therapy process that I wanted to give this back.

I entered graduate school in mental health counseling in 2009, and there I became acquainted with the DSM for the first time, and that did quite a number on me. My well-meaning attempt to kind of use my own suffering, and my own way of moving through it, to help others really became injured by a manual that categorized and fixed people’s suffering into these labels of disorder.

Throughout my master’s program, I was pathologizing myself with every disorder in the DSM. I probably gave myself 15 different diagnoses, and I’m not alone in that. I think that so many of us enter the field as wounded healers. We have been through so much ourselves. We have seen ourselves get ourselves out of these depths, and we want to walk with others similarly. Then we are told we have to call our depths disorder. There’s so much shame in that.

I was thankful that the shame started to be alleviated in my doctoral program at Duquesne University. I entered a PhD program in clinical psychology, and there I became acquainted with psychoanalysis for the first time. While psychoanalysis can pathologize, I found a lot of affinity with Jung’s psychoanalysis, which tells us that the unconscious is not just the seat of all of our pathologies and traumas and aggressions and death drives, but it is almost like a mystical cosmology inside of each of us that has wisdom, that has future-focused direction, and that leads all of us to wholeness.

That started to heal some of the shame caused by the DSM for me and really started to shift my clinical work with clients beyond pathology. Seeing the mystical nature of our consciousness, Jung actually gave me that.

But then in my doctoral program, I also became acquainted with liberation psychology for the first time, and that was kind of the missing ingredient in, I think, a wounded healer’s journey, to really understand what are the root causes of wounds in us and in the collective.

At this time, India had just recriminalized homosexuality, and as a queer Indian American woman, I was so traumatized by this. It was 2013. All of my clinical symptoms from adolescence came back, and I started to understand them through the lens of sociopolitical trauma for the first time. What I could have diagnosed as social anxiety disorder, for instance, was actually just a healthy, sane response to being closeted in systems of homophobia and heterosexism.

Liberation psychology also alleviated shame caused by mainstream medical-model psychiatry and offered a path forward, because, for liberation psychology, healing comes from finding ways to change the world that traumatizes so many of us. Healing comes from forming communities with like-minded people who have been traumatized by these systems of oppression and joining in solidarity to transform them.

It is a very hopeful theory for me. That is what I do now. I want to honor our consciousness as a depth psychologist beyond pathology, and I want to build community with fellow wounded healers, which is probably all of us as a human species, to have hope that we can make a difference and change our systems to be less traumatizing.

 

Karter: I want to highlight that there is a lot of resistance here, right? You talk about bringing this complex, unwieldy lived experience into the field of psychology. There is a way that we often want psychology to answer that question for us, to provide a structure that helps us make that unwieldy experience articulable. There would have been a temptation to stop once you got the DSM language and think, okay, now it is explained somehow. But it seemed like your experience resisted that explanation.

You also did this in your research, so I want to turn to that as well. What did it mean to resist both the psychological approach to understanding ourselves and other people in terms of symptoms, and also to resist psychological research in terms of how we best represent and communicate conscious experience more broadly? How do you do that in your methods?

Gupta: That’s a great question, Justin. I’m going to go back to my wounded healer journey, because I didn’t enter psychotherapy until the age of 20, and historically, it has been stigmatized in my culture. I’m 41 now. When I was young, that wasn’t really something Indian Americans did.

But what I did turn to was poetry. I have been writing poetry since I was about nine, and poetry got me through all of my depression as a teenager. Then, after my father’s passing, which really precipitated an overdose, when my psychological suffering reached a crescendo, what I turned to, along with therapy, was memoir writing.

I joined a three-year memoir writing workshop, and I documented, in literary memoir, the year from my father’s passing to my overdose in such exquisite detail. I still have it, and I’m so glad I documented it. But there was no clinical language in my memoir. There was no symptom checklist. It was cinematic scenes of me crying in the bathroom at two in the morning and trying not to wake my college roommate up. That was what my suffering needed. It needed a poetic expression.

Then, when I became a psychologist, despite being trained clinically under a Western diagnostic system, I believed that art is what the soul needs to heal: artistic expression, artistic form, artistic honoring.

My research has always been phenomenological, in which I collect people’s descriptions of lived experience. But then I wish to express it all as art for the public, because I believe art honors the sacredness of our human experiences without reducing it violently.

I harken to Mark Freeman’s work in his book The Psychological Humanities and the way he talks about poetics and aesthetics as an ethical response to psychological suffering, where we refuse to reduce human experiences into fixed claims. Art refuses reduction and, in doing so, honors the sacredness of all our experiences, even the most painful ones.

Karter: Could you give us an example from your own work, maybe one of the films you’ve made, and say something about what it was able to represent or convey about experience that might have been lost in other forms of qualitative research, and especially in something like a survey of those same participants?

Gupta: Sure, yeah. My dissertation was a phenomenological short film about the lived experience of being in the closet as a non-heterosexual person  (titled “Illuminate,” which can be viewed on www.illuminatethecloset.org), and this was my resistance art in response to India recriminalizing homosexuality.

I interviewed five participants who identified as non-hetero about their experiences of being closeted before they ever came out to anyone else. In our interviews, I invited them to feel where the closet was in their bodies, the sensory feeling of the closet in their bodies, and then express that as metaphor, because oftentimes when we are expressing our bodily sensations, we do it through metaphor and symbolic imagery.

The participants described things like feeling their bodies frozen in ice, feeling a white porcelain mask on their face that stripped them of their identity, feeling chained in shackles in jail, just waiting to get out. But I didn’t keep them in the trauma of the closet. I also invited them to find places in their body where healing and empowerment lived.

One participant described fire circulating in their stomach. Another felt their heart heat up like a warm cup of tea, which reminded them of when their husband kisses them.

In that way, I collected this metaphoric imagery and then built a 20-minute short film to describe both the trauma of being in the closet and the healing and empowerment of coming out. What the art gave in terms of insight, that a survey or discursive writing alone could not, was these beautiful moments in the closeted experience where humanity and the resiliency of the human spirit persist despite profound oppression. The ways that queer people can take some of the worst forms of persecution and find freedom at all costs, I think, is really important.

I find that the film is actually one of suicide prevention, and I saw that after the fact. I hope that people can watch this film, and even if they are in an area where it is fully unsafe to come out, they are witnessing through this artwork that somebody moved through this experience of persecution and oppression and found many moments of resistance within the closeted experience. And eventually they found the community they needed to be able to come out in a way that feels empowering for the rest of their lives.

Karter: We can already see a little bit of the social impact of your work as well. Study after study has shown that anti-bullying legislation and gender-affirming legislation of all sorts reduce suicide risk, especially in adolescents. Yet that does not seem to stop those policies from being challenged, or even reversed, very often. It strikes me that being exposed to people’s experiences in that form might reach people in a way that statistics do not. Could you talk a little bit about the social impact of doing arts-based phenomenology?

Gupta: Well, what was beautiful about that film was that I then went into my clinical internship year after having produced it and put it out into the world on YouTube. Queer students in the college counseling center I was working with asked to work with me, and then I was the first person they would come out to after watching the film.

Then, beyond that, this is the depth psychology part. The social impact is that the film created an empathic mirror for queer people’s lived experiences that helped them feel less alone and more connected, that somebody, at least the filmmaker and the actors in the film, saw their experience and mirrored it back to them, and they were less alone in that. In and of itself, that can reduce suicide risk. I really care about reducing suicide risk. That is probably my number-one mission right now, and art can do that.

The second thing that was beautiful was that the closet is archetypal. So while my intention was to honor queer people’s lived experiences of having to closet aspects of themselves that have been shamed by society, once I became a professor at the University of West Georgia and started to share my work with students, people began to share with me their non-normative human experiences that they had had to closet, such as spiritual emergencies.

Spiritual emergency has now become a topic, a marginalized area of interest for me, because I think it is similar to queerness. These are just human experiences, and our consciousnesses are diverse. But we live in systems that tell us what is normal and what is not, and then persecute folks who live in ways or experience things that are non-normative.

The closet is a metaphor. By honoring people’s closeted experiences and showing them that they do not have to remain closeted, that there are people who will accept them, everybody can start to feel more comfortable in who they are and realize that they can be accepted and loved in their “non-normative experiences.”

 

Karter: Yeah, so much of your work here sits at that tension between self-revelation and the kinds of conditions and communities that make that possible and safe for people to do. I want to turn to spiritual emergency here. You just mentioned that. For our listeners, could you talk a little bit about what spiritual emergency is and how it might differ from our usual diagnostic language about symptoms or disorders?

Gupta: Yes, absolutely. Spiritual emergency became important to me because I experienced one and literally did not know what was happening to me. Then I had the privilege of being part of an academic community that told me what might be going on with me beyond clinical, pathologizing language.

I would say, as a wounded healer—and I keep coming back to that to honor everybody listening who might be one themselves and having to closet it, because I would like to remove the closets around this identity in our field—that I am not the only psychologist with a PhD, or tenured professor, who has had a spiritual emergency. But mine came in my first year on the tenure track, in 2018. It came just as my overdose, when I was a youth, came on the heels of my father’s death. This one came after ending a very long-term partnership, so traumatic loss can be a trigger. A lot of things can be triggers for spiritual emergencies, but trauma is one, and that became one of my interests.

The depth psychologists and psychoanalysts will say that mania is the defense against grief. I was showing a lot of manic symptoms, and I was able to contain them enough to teach at West Georgia. But then the summer came, and I kind of gave myself permission to surrender and stop trying to hold things together and be sane. With that, I believe I fully descended into a spiritual emergency.

What I would define as a spiritual emergency is ego death, in which a person’s consciousness becomes fractured, disintegrated in some form, so that a new form of consciousness can reassemble.

If you think about consciousness disintegrating, the Western clinical world would absolutely slap a disordered label onto that. But Eastern spiritual traditions would view ego death as an important step in spiritual evolution: of course, there are moments where consciousness will die so that new forms of consciousness can emerge. That can come with exceptional, extreme experiences of consciousness. For me, it was more of a mania presentation. For others, it could resemble things like psychosis.

I think that I was really privileged in going through this with a community, because I did not closet it. I just called all my friends up and told them what was happening. I got coffee with my faculty colleagues and would be like, “Hey, I’m experiencing telepathy through music.” And I would not get responses that I should minimize the telepathy. I would be told that telepathy, of course, can happen because we are part of a long body. I would be told by my faculty colleagues about the Native American concept of the longbody, where we are not just one singular person; we are connected with our ancestors and our community members in consciousness, and so telepathy is going to happen sometimes. I just learned so much while going through a spiritual emergency.

I came back in the fall semester, and I told my colleague, Dr. Simmonds-Moore, that I had experienced psychic experiences and telepathy and was scared of them. She said, “Oh, cool, we’re having a psychic who worked for the CIA come in and share her experiences of this, and of remote viewing, in a lecture next month.” Being part of a community that normalized these experiences, because I was in a transpersonal and critical psychology program, meant they all knew about this before I did.

I cannot even tell you how that changed the trajectory of my life. Because then I went into Jungian psychoanalysis, and I chose that track of support because Jung had a spiritual emergency himself. The way I moved through my spiritual emergency was through art-making, just like him. That was the way I could contain the manic energy so it would not become destructive. That was the way I could make meaning of what was happening and validate the spiritual contents, even if they were irrational. That has now led to my interest in this area. (Read Dr. Gupta’s article on integrating spiritual emergency through visionary art therapy here).

It took me probably six years to get comfortable talking about this publicly, because I still had to undo the shame. It took me six years to fully believe that what happened was not a disordered experience. That is how deeply the DSM has become ingrained in me, and probably in most clinicians.

 

Karter: There are a couple of things there that I want to highlight. One is the decision to surrender, in your language, which strikes me as terrifying, to let go without knowing where that will take you. The other is the decision to tell other people what you were experiencing, especially in a field that so often organizes itself around an us-and-them split, between those who study and treat and those whose experiences get studied and treated.

Even if your own academic community made more room for this, you are still speaking against a much broader culture in the psy disciplines. Could you say more about those decisions, those leaps of faith, and what it took to step out of that closet, to use your metaphor?

Gupta: Yeah, I think that is probably the single most important thing I want to talk about for this podcast and for Mad in America, because I am not alone in going through this as a psychologist. I did get to points of despair where, if I did not have support, things may have gone differently. Community support was everything. I was held relationally through this. When I was shaming myself, my colleagues were helping me not to.

With Ayurdhi, I would be like, “I think I’m bipolar and I have this mania and blah, blah, blah. I’m really scared.” She would just teach me about her book, about madness and subjectivity, and about the experiences of our ancestors in India, and how they dealt with exceptional consciousness. It is so beautiful.

There are people out there. That is kind of what I want to name, because I think that when any psychologist or clinician, with all these degrees and training in the DSM, is treating these “clients” or “patients,” we do get trained in a us-versus-them model. But that is not reality.

I genuinely believe nobody really enters the field of psychology to become a professional without significant wounds ourselves. I think that the people who enter the field of psychology, and the clinicians who are working with trauma, are the humans who are least defended against it.

We all have trauma. We all have wounds. Some of us cannot hold the kinds of defenses that others in the corporate world can have. Psychology becomes our path. That is how we can transmute this. That is how we can walk with others. It is beautiful. But then we have been socialized into a training system that weirdly shames human wounds.

Then, when it is time for our breakdowns (I genuinely believe all humans are entitled to at least two nervous breakdowns), when we go through ours, we are left isolated in it. That is the thing I want to say. How can we, as a professional community, rehumanize ourselves, own that we are all wounded healers, own that we are going to have at least two nervous breakdowns while we are professionals, and be there for each other?

You are asking how I was able to do that. Well, the cool thing about ego death is that it does kill the ego. I think that before, I mean, I still have an ego, but it does reduce the ego’s need to seem normal.

One of the things I was told during my spiritual emergency by a higher power was that I downloaded a message: “Everything and everyone is an instrument of the divine.” I will just repeat that: “Everyone and everything is an instrument of the divine.”

Then I understood myself to be an instrument of the divine, in that it did not really matter what people thought of me. It mattered that I stayed alive. I needed to get through this profound disintegration of my consciousness, which came with such pain. I needed to make it through to the other side because I was an instrument of God, and so are you, Justin. This is not a grandiosity thing. It is core to Hinduism that we are all pieces of God. But that became so true to me in this spiritual emergency.

I realized that I needed to make it through. How am I going to make it through? I have to reach out for support. I cannot go through this alone. The divine gave me what I needed, and so I wonder how we, as a community, can do that more intentionally for our fellow travelers when they are going through their spiritual emergencies. That is what I would love to brainstorm with you, Justin, and with Mad in America.

Karter: It reminds me of an interview we did with Neil Gong. He uses the term “the sidewalk psychotic” to call up the stigmatized trope in the United States. Often, that trope centers on claims of being Jesus, something like that. The way you are talking about this opens up the possibility of imagining a community in which somebody says that, and the response is not, “You’re psychotic, you’re a danger, and we need to move you in this particular way,” but something more like, “Yes, you are, and so am I, and so is that person. Let’s talk about it.”

I want to turn to that. I know a lot of your work now is about building the kinds of communities where that sort of thing can happen, where there is a collective holding that allows for the kind of self-revelation that can emerge out of the closeting experience you have talked about. But also a self-revelation of, here are the parts of me that do not make sense, that might be hard to see or hard to live with. Can we find ways together of holding those experiences in community?

Could you talk a little bit about how you are thinking about what it takes to build a community like that?

Gupta: Yeah. Well, first, I want to speak to the Jesus part, because that is a great example. If somebody is going through some level of awakening in which they are realizing they are Jesus, would we not want to celebrate that? I mean, I am not Christian, but I love Jesus. I think Jesus embodies everything. Jesus is the walking epitome of compassion.

When people are going through spiritual emergencies, it will often come with spiritual content. We are so quick to pathologize that and turn it negative. But what if somebody is getting in touch with their capacity for love and compassion in a way they did not even know existed? That was what happened to me.

When I was being told that I was an instrument of the divine, what accompanied that was unconditional love. I was developing an unconditionally loving witness to witness my own pain and suffering, and that has not left me. It has been seven years now, and that has permanently changed my consciousness.

By permanently changing my consciousness, I mean that I have so much self-love. I find myself so beautiful, and because I am experiencing that, I am more loving to others in my life. I can give more grace. I have no suicidal ideation anymore as a complex trauma survivor. Well, the idea of suicide will come in moments of pain, as it does for most humans. But because my life is so sacred to me, I want to keep living it for as long as I am able. That is so profound for me, to have gotten there.

It has been seven years, consistently. It is because I was told that I am an instrument of the divine. If we are going to pathologize these moments of profound resilience for people, we are actually taking away something that could change the rest of their lives positively.

Then the second question is, how do we build community around this? Another thing that was really nice is that I shared with my advisor and mentor at Duquesne what was happening to me, after the fact. Again, I still had some shame. It was still there. Then I started to slowly talk about it.

Dr. Will Adams is a Buddhist psychologist and my clinical supervisor. He was my professor of Buber and Gadamer. He was my dissertation chair as well. I shared what was happening, and he said, “Nisha, it sounds like you were becoming more sane.” He said that my process of learning that I am an instrument of the divine, and so is everyone else, is a process of becoming more sane.

I meditate with him every Friday morning now in a group he leads, and it integrates Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism. For the Christmas meditation, he said that Christmas is the story of a boy who grows up to realize he is God, then chooses to live the rest of his life with love. That is the story of all of us.

It is such a shame that we live in a structure that pathologizes these experiences. What we need to do is hold people in them, hold people through the death-and-rebirth process into a more loving consciousness. I did organically get that, so the question is how we create a structure for it.

I got it because I am part of a transpersonal psychology program and sister programs. The University of West Georgia is filled with people who have had spiritual emergencies. We just attract people from all over the world who have gone through this, which is awesome. The California Institute of Integral Studies, which is the original place where Spiritual Emergency by Grof and Grof was conceived, and so I did have friends from that program who were also helping me through this, consistently trying to get me to stop pathologizing my experience and realize it as the gods trying to help me. Then, Duquesne had enough mystical faculty and colleagues to support me.

Justin, I am going to ask you. I know you are asking me as an expert, but I am hoping this is more collaborative. How do we brainstorm, you and I together, and then the listeners: what do we do to create a structure for this in our field, to help us as psychologists, so that we do not lose people, so that we do not pathologize people, and so that we can hold our folks through this?

 

Karter: It’s a powerful question, and I think it is one many of us are wrestling with. I do not have a settled answer to it either, but I find myself thinking about the psychological humanities in a way that feels close to what you are describing. I see it as an opportunity to broaden the frame through which we view human experience, and to get our minds out of the Procrustean bed of psychology, avoiding the ways we so often cut and stretch experience to make it fit our preferred methods of observation.

Part of what is at stake, it seems to me, is that there are dimensions of experience we may barely attend to, not because they are unimportant, but because we do not know how to represent them, or do not yet have language for them. So when we find other ways to tell, story, and express human experience, we make more room. And then the field itself can make more room for those experiences, and perhaps people can find themselves in broader language, broader stories, and broader metaphors.

It seems to me that your work in phenomenological filmmaking and art memoir is doing precisely that kind of work, broadening the language through which we think about what is on our minds.

Gupta: Yeah. I’m also thinking that the classroom really makes a difference. Classrooms are spaces of social change, and ways to change norms and set norms. I’m really forthcoming about my experience, and I just talk about it as if it’s normal. Then students can actually talk about theirs.

I’m teaching depth psychology right now, and we’re looking at Jung. We just read his memoir and the chapter on his spiritual emergency, which he would call a confrontation with the unconscious. He described his experience not unlike his patients with psychosis. He went through a spiritual emergency, and we’re just talking about it in class, and it’s normal, it’s normalized.

The norms change in the classroom, and it becomes a community of grad students. Nothing needs to be closeted, because there’s beauty in this experience. That’s where the psychological humanities come in. There’s beauty here.

Why would we want to closet beauty? Even our most painful experiences can have moments of beauty that need to be honored. The more we normalize these experiences in academia, education, and training, the more everyone benefits, because then we are training psychologists, educating psychologists, not to have to hide their own humanity.

Then, when they’re working with clients in therapy, they’ll have a very different attitude. They do not have to do this whole “I’m an expert, you’re a patient.” We are all in this mess, and it is sacred and beautiful and terrifying. We have to make sure we move through it safely. We have to keep our folks alive, and we have to do that in community.

 

Karter: I want to pick up on what you said there, “sacred, beautiful, and terrifying,” because I think that as we expand our language and widen the frame, these tensions run through the whole conversation. How do we make room for madness and mysticism without romanticizing them? How do we recognize the terror and the suffering that can be there, too, without simply stigmatizing them?

And then, similarly, how do we talk about resilience in a genuinely collective way, as a matter of building a community’s capacity to hold complexity, rather than treating it as an individual obligation to have grit, to endure difficult experiences, or as some kind of neoliberal slogan of “just be resilient,” and then you will not be traumatized?

I’m wondering if you could talk a little about how you think through those tensions, and about the opportunities and risks that arise as we try to imagine new metaphors, new language, and perhaps more capacious concepts for the field.

Gupta: Yeah. I mean, I think the question comes down to this: what do we do at 2:00 in the morning when the pain is at its worst? How do we help people get through the middle of the night? That is the most concrete way I can put it.

This question was actually asked by one of my graduate students a couple of days ago, when we were looking at spiritual emergency and the dark night of the soul through Jung’s experience, and then starting to share some of our own. It was really concrete. It was like, 2:00 in the morning is the worst time. It was a really good question.

Pain, what we are talking about here is pain that can reach a crescendo. My interest in suicide prevention is in how we help folks through that, because a lot of people will want to opt out when the pain becomes too much and they feel they cannot endure it anymore, or that it will not get better. But I do not necessarily think those folks want to fully opt out of life. I think many people want to opt out of pain.

Can we, as a community, first, realize that our own psychology colleagues and students are among those who are often hit with profound pain and do not know what to do with it at 2:00 in the morning? And second, can we normalize that and strategize together about how to get through pain?

I think normalizing it is half the battle, because people just feel so alone in it. Then there is the need for a network of support. I joked that a third of humans are nocturnal and they should be on night duty. I do not think that is true. I think it is less than that. But these are the questions. I wonder what comes up for you when we make this practical.

 

Karter: What comes up for me, and this is not fully articulated yet, is a question about the tension that always seems to accompany poetic language. On the one hand, it can create a portal into experience, it can name something that was otherwise ineffable or difficult to articulate. But after a while, it becomes language. “Dark night of the soul,” for instance, may right now open up a space for thinking differently in the field. But if it becomes normalized, does it also risk becoming wooden? Does it become something people move toward too quickly, simply because it is now available language? And does the romanticization of it begin to hide some of the terror and pain that can accompany the process?

I think I am wondering about what happens to language over time, about the social life of language. How do we preserve its poetic quality, its capacity to open experience, without letting it harden into just another construct that ushers people too quickly toward fixed identities, rather than opening up possibilities?

Gupta: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. What was also coming up for me is that dark night of the soul is so poetic, but there is also a literal aspect to it, because 2:00 in the morning pain is the dark night of the soul, right?

I remember, at my worst, finding a website in 2018. It was 2:00 in the morning. The pain was at its worst. Suicidal ideation was a nine, means was a seven, and intention was zero. The pain was so bad, and I did not want to end my life, but I wanted to end the pain. I found a website, and it said, here is how you get to the morning. Here is how you stay alive until the morning. You just stay alive until the next second. I just counted second by second, and I stayed alive until the morning.

I think there is one part of this where, yes, we want the poetics of the dark night of the soul to honor the intensity and exceptionality of the experience. But we also have to ask: how do we actually help people get through the dark night of the soul? There is a need here to make practical moves so that people can survive it. I found that second-by-second approach very helpful, because it is easier in the morning. The mind does things in the middle of the night.

Again, I am talking here to our fellow psychology colleagues and students. I very much hope that somebody who might be going through this right now hears this, because the world is not making it any easier on us. We are living in profoundly traumatizing times. There may be people in our field who are feeling like they need to give up. I am addressing those folks right now.

I am saying: it really helped me to count the seconds until morning. What also helped me was telling people what I was going through, people who had the right theoretical approach, people who could get it. Find the people with the theoretical approach that gets it.

 

Karter: You’ve talked a little about your students, and it seems like part of the suicide prevention approach is this very practical question of how to get through the pain in the moment. But another part of it is being able to envision a future in which life becomes more livable.

I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the Blueprints Project, because it seems to take up exactly that question: how do we make life more livable, both collectively and individually? Could you tell us about that project and how your students have responded to it?

Gupta: I think this is my biggest critique of critical psychology, coming as a liberation psychologist and as an oppressed person with multiple intersectional marginalized identities. If the discourse remains only at the level of critique, many of us sensitive people will end up in despair. The discourse also needs to be about creativity, hope, and imagination for a better future. That is not utopian. That is not fake. That can happen right now. It happens in my classrooms every day.

I think it is important to remember that when we are talking about structures, yes, we are in large structures, but we are also in small structures, and we can shape those structures. I am actively trying to shape academia to be less oppressive through the power and leadership I do have, and each of my students has leadership in their own capacity.

I work with students across a wide range of ages. Half of my students are parents. Parenting is leadership. You are shaping the next generation, who are going to be the future leaders of tomorrow. There is a tomorrow, and that tomorrow is not only in the hands of older people with power. That tomorrow is in the hands of ourselves and of youth.

We can begin shaping that now and highlight the people who are already doing it. I’m loving what is happening in New York right now. There is a whole matriarchal culture forming politically. How can we spotlight that, and then do that ourselves as leaders?

This is what my students and I were doing last semester. I was teaching a social psychology class. I did not want to teach it because I was experiencing a lot of racial trauma here in rural Georgia. I have taught it for 10 years, but every year it gets harder. I am on an open-carry gun campus. I am the only person who looks like me in the classroom. It is a majority white and Black, and then me as an immigrant, a child of immigrants.

I just told the students on the first day, “How do we do this in a trauma-informed way?” What I am teaching you, a lot of this material was developed after World War II to understand Nazi Germany. How do we do this together without falling into despair?

What we came up with was the idea that the United Nations had called us to be a think tank, to create a new society based on the wisdom of social psychology. Every week, we came together as a think tank. I taught a couple of concepts, and then we used them to design more loving social systems. That was our goal. How do we infuse love across every social system, from parenting to education, to health care, to economics, to governance?

This semester-long class project led us to produce “Blueprints For a New Society In Which It Will Be Easier to Love,” a 200-page playbook for redesigning a more loving society through the lens of social psychology. We are calling it Project 2026 (can be viewed here: https://blueprintsforanewsociety.com/)

By the end of the semester, the students, who hold multiple intersectional identities, felt hope. That is my intention. It is a pedagogy of hope, because hope is not abstract. It is concrete. It keeps people alive. And we are not going to build a new world if people choose not to be alive.

Karter: It feels like that is a fitting place to end, on this question of how we critique and build in balance, and how we create forms of community that help people stay alive, stay connected, and imagine more livable futures. Nisha, thank you so much for joining me, and for the work you’re doing. I’m grateful for the conversation, and I look forward to checking back in with you as it continues to unfold.

Gupta: Thanks for being in community with me, Justin. It matters.

 

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