This YouTube interview (Robert J. Strock and Dr. Ken Blanchard, recorded c.2010) explores why people who achieve external success or who are engaged in psychological work can nonetheless feel empty. The speakers note the difficulty of integrating spiritual practice with psychological therapy—each community can resist the other's methods—and identify a recurring client theme: after accomplishing worldly goals and attending to feelings, people still report a sense of incompleteness and ask "is that all there is?" This feeling of emptiness is framed as a paradoxically healthy sign that deeper issues remain to be addressed.
Robert One of the things that I think we both noticed is that if somebody is really very deeply into their spiritual journey, it's sometimes hard for them to deal with any emotional issues or things that they're working on. In the same way where you get people in the business world who, you know, finally might want to deal with some aspects of their human side that might be getting in the way of their success, but they get scared if you start to push them spiritually. Have you noticed the same thing?
I think that would be a very nice understatement.
Yes.
It's very difficult to cross pollinate between the spiritual and the psychological fields. It's almost like being from a different world or a different club or a different fraternity or sorority. And so individuals that have come that are very immersed in the psychological world really believe that being in touch with their feelings or expressing what their feelings are or their needs seem to believe oftentimes that, that's enough, that's it, that's enough. I've arrived at a pretty good place. And really, for those people that, let's say, are a bit more sensitive, it will result in a deeper feeling of emptiness or a feeling that something's missing. And that seems to be the common ingredient that I see in most of the people that I work with. That even though I've really done everything right, even though I succeeded at a lot of things that I sought out to succeed at, I still feel something like empty or incomplete. And there's this feeling of, isn't there more? You know, that song of is that All There Is seems to be one of the signs of health. And it's a very ironic twist that when somebody doesn't feel good, when they've accomplished the things that the world has taught them to accomplish, it's actually a very healthy sign.
