Is cooking anything like personal transformation? In this series, an imaginary chef cooks beef bourguignon for an equally imaginary panel of thinkers: Jung, Campbell, a pair of behavioral researchers, an anthropologist, a management consultant, and St. Augustine. They compare what happens when a human being changes who they are to what is occurring in the kitchen. In this installment, the braise reduces over three hours, and the panel finds that relapse is not failure, that no transformation is ever truly private, and that the people waiting at home should be going through their own transformation. [If you’re joining mid-series: Start from the beginning →] ReductionDUPONT: Now I put the meat back in the pot, bring it to simmer, then cover and cook low and slow for three hours. I am concentrating. I am driving off everything inessential, everything that can become steam. What cannot become steam stays. Watch the color deepen, yes? Taste it every few minutes, not to fix it, but to understand where it is. MODERATOR: I found that when an addict enters recovery, they almost always relapse again and again. Each relapse is another lesson and each subsequent try gets them a little further. People think they can decide to stop using drugs one day and that’ll be the end of it. But the real moment of decision occurs every day or several times a day. That’s what they mean by “One day at a time.” It’s impossible to decide once and for all. PROCHASKA and DICLEMENTE: This is perhaps the finding from our research that did the most to change clinical practice, and was also the most resisted. Relapse is not failure. It is a stage. When we mapped the actual trajectories of the people we studied, we found that most people cycled through the stages many times before achieving stable change. They were not going backward. They were going around. Each cycle typically carried them further than the last. The spiral is the shape of change, not the straight line. What relapse tells us, if we read it rather than just mourn it, is which part of the process wasn’t finished. The person who relapsed under social pressure hasn’t solved the social problem yet. The person who relapsed under stress hasn’t built the coping architecture yet. The relapse is diagnostic. It points precisely at what the reduction hasn’t driven off yet. JUNG: The alchemists called this repetition the circulatio, the repeated cycling of the material through the same operations. The material was heated, cooled, dissolved, and heated again, not because the first pass failed, but because transformation requires multiple passes. The psyche does not give up its contents all at once. It releases what it is ready to release, reconstitutes around what remains, and must be heated again. What looks like relapse is, very often, the second or third circumambulation of the same complex. Each time, it is slightly less defended. CAMPBELL: The road of trials is rarely a single trial. The hero fails, is rescued, or rescues himself through something he did not know he possessed, and then faces the same dragon in a slightly different form. The repetition is structural. What the myth is doing is burning off, as your chef would say, everything that cannot survive the encounter, until only what is essential to the hero remains. You cannot know what that is in advance. You only discover it by surviving what tries to destroy it. TURNER: The Ndembu understood that the liminal period had to be long enough to do its work. An initiation cut short produces a man who is neither boy nor elder, and such a man is dangerous to himself and to the community. The reduction cannot be hurried. The elders knew this; they built the time in. What your therapeutic culture struggles with is that managed care does not bill for circumambulation. BRIDGES: Every client who relapsed taught me something I should have already known, that endings are rarely as complete as they feel. A person leaves a marriage and thinks the ending is over. Then a yearning for the marriage returns at three in the morning for the next two years. The Neutral Zone doesn’t end when you announce it has ended. It ends when it ends. The reduction is finished when there is nothing left to drive off. Not before. MODERATOR: (Aside) I am fond of Bridges, and his hard-won practicality is a relief in Jung’s alchemical mists. But I notice that he has now invoked the Neutral Zone in almost every section of this conference. He is completely right that the middle passage is the process and not the obstacle. But it’s like he found one true note and played it beautifully for thirty years. The granularity of transformation, what is actually happening during those months or years of not-knowing, what is being driven off and what is forming in its place, is supplied by everyone else at the table. Bridges tells us that the wilderness exists and that we must not flee it. Jung, Campbell, Turner, and Augustine tell us what lives there. AUGUSTINE: I have great sympathy for your addicts, and more than sympathy, recognition. I did not fail to change because I lacked will. I had will in abundance. I failed, repeatedly, because the will that was trying to change was made of the same material as the will that kept returning to what it had always wanted. Each attempt did teach me something. Each failure showed me, with increasing precision, exactly what I was. The reduction is humbling in a way that nothing else is, because it shows you not the self you aspire to become, but the self you actually are. What is driven off, I came to understand, was not only the sin. It was the self-deception about the sin. That took considerably longer to evaporate than the behavior itself. MODERATOR: Augustine, you’ve just described something my clients almost never anticipate: that they may change the behavior well before they change the story they tell about themselves. The drinking stops before the drinker does. AUGUSTINE: Precisely. And a man who has stopped drinking but is still, in his own estimation, a man who drinks, will find his way back to it. The reduction must reach the self-understanding, or it has only reached the surface. GarnishDUPONT: I blanch pearl onions and brown them in butter with a pinch of sugar until they are copper-colored and glossy. I quarter and sauté mushrooms in butter until they give up all their water and begin to brown. The garnish must be prepared with the same care as the braise, but separately, and at its own pace. If I add them too early, they dissolve into nothing. Too late, and they are raw intrusions. The garnish is not decoration, it is essential to the dish. But both must be ready to come together. MODERATOR: The one going through changes should not be the only one going through changes. In the case of the recovering addict especially, his loved ones must be prepared to receive him as a person in recovery, as someone different from who he was. If they cannot do that, they will pull him back into the old shape by treating him as the old person. Can a transformation survive a community that refuses to transform with it? TURNER: Anthropologically, this is the critical question, and the answer is almost certainly no. Among the Ndembu, the reincorporation of the initiate into the community is not a private achievement. The whole community participates in the final rite. They must receive the new person with new eyes, and this requires preparation on their side. A community that has not been ritually prepared to receive a transformed member will do what communities always do with anomalies: they will classify the person back into the old category. If the initiate returns, and the aunties call him by his childhood name, the work of the liminal period will unravel. The ritual solves this by making the community’s transformation structurally simultaneous with the individual’s. MODERATOR: Victor, your framework is perhaps the most practically useful at this table. You can tell us exactly how to structure a ceremony that actually means something. I find myself wishing we put on such ceremonies at moments we currently leave unmarked, like a divorce, a coming of age, or a rehab. But I have another concern. The Ndembu elders knew when the boy was ready because the community decided when the boy was ready. That is a luxury we do not have. A marriage may truly begin three years before the wedding, three years after, or never. A widow may complete her grief in a month or in a decade. You give us the architecture of transformation. What do you do about the clock? TURNER: (Lighting his pipe) You are identifying a real cost of modernity, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The Ndembu did not ask the boy when he felt ready. The community made that determination collectively, based on signs they had been reading for years. We have lost that capacity almost entirely. We no longer have elders who watch that closely, communities that cohesive, or rituals with enough shared authority to compel participation. What we have instead are ceremonies that have kept the shell and lost the substance. A wedding in which nobody believes the vows are binding. A graduation that marks the end of tuition rather than the beginning of anything. A funeral that rushes the mourners back to work on Monday. MODERATOR: So the ceremony without the belief is merely theater. TURNER: Worse than theater. Theater knows it is theater. A hollowed ceremony pretends to do what it no longer does, and the participants leave feeling that something was supposed to happen and didn’t, without being able to say exactly what. That vague disappointment is, I would argue, one of the minor griefs of modern life that nobody has properly named. But a ritual does not have to be perfectly synchronized with the inner transformation to do real work. It creates a public marker, a before and after that the community can organize itself around. Even if the inner transformation comes later, the ceremony holds the space open for it. It says to everyone present: something is changing here, and we are witnesses to it. MODERATOR: (Aside) He is right, and I was being too quick with my skepticism. The ceremony that precedes the transformation is not a lie. It may be a promise. What I still believe, and what Turner’s framework cannot fully account for, is that the promise can go unkept indefinitely, and the community may never know. The Ndembu had ways of detecting an incomplete initiation. We mostly do not. We take the wedding ring as evidence of the marriage. CAMPBELL: The return is the most underestimated stage of the hero’s journey. We love the descent, the ordeal, the dark night. But the hero who returns changed faces a community that stayed the same. The myths are full of this problem. Odysseus returns to Ithaca and is not recognized. The recognition requires a test, and the test is as demanding as any he faced in the underworld. The world the hero left does not automatically become the world the hero can now inhabit. That world has to be built, and it takes two sides to build it. JUNG: The transformation of one person in a closed system exerts an enormous pressure on everyone else in that system. The wife of a man undergoing individuation is not an innocent bystander. She is being asked, without her consent, to release the man she married and accept someone she may not yet know. I have seen transformations succeed entirely within the consulting room and fail completely at the kitchen table. The unconscious of the family resists change as fiercely as the individual’s ego does. Sometimes more so, because the family never agreed to go through a transformation at all. BRIDGES: In my experience the spouse is often dealing with her own ending, and nobody has told her that is what is happening. Her husband is in the Neutral Zone, which is difficult enough. But she is also in one, because the person she organized her life around has become someone she doesn’t fully recognize. That is a real loss. She hasn’t lost him to death or to another woman. She has lost him to growth, which is supposed to be good news, and which is therefore very hard to grieve. I had to start working with couples because I kept watching successful individual transitions collapse the moment the person got home. PROCHASKA and DICLEMENTE: We have data on this. Social support is one of the strongest predictors of sustained change, but only if that support system adjusts to the new behavior. A recovering alcoholic whose friends still go to the bar, whose spouse still leaves wine on the counter out of habit, whose family still defines him by his worst years, is fighting on two fronts simultaneously. The environment has to change. We call this stimulus control, deliberately restructuring the surroundings to support the new behavior rather than cue the old one. The garnish, as your chef puts it, has to be prepared for a different dish than the one they’ve been eating. AUGUSTINE: My mother, Monica, had prayed for my conversion for thirty years. She wept so persistently that a bishop once told her, somewhat impatiently, that a son of so many tears could not be lost. But when the conversion came, she had to learn something she had not anticipated: her son was no longer the project she had organized her love around. He was, at last, himself. I do not think she found that entirely simple. She died shortly after my baptism, which I have always thought was not entirely a coincidence. She had completed what she was here to complete, but I have wondered, in quieter moments, what it would have cost her to live alongside the person I became rather than the person she had been trying to rescue. MODERATOR: What you’re all describing suggests that transformation is never truly individual, even when it feels utterly solitary. The garnish is not secondary to the dish. It is part of what makes the dish complete. But it has to be cooked on its own terms, at its own temperature, and introduced only when both sides are ready to meet. The garnish is ready, the braise is finished, but Chef says the dish is not yet ready to eat. What could be left? Why is he keeping us waiting? Return and find out in Part Four: Sit, Serve, and Digest. End of Part 3What Beef Bourguignon Can Tell You About Personal Transformation is a four part series. 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