Josh Mortensen (00:02.224)

Okay. Robert Tyminski, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Robert Tyminski (00:07.312)

It’s good to be here with you Josh, I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Josh Mortensen (00:12.056)

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve spoken, as I was telling you before, I’ve spoken to a lot of people in the Jungian world, and just the, I don’t know, the framework or the model of looking at the human psyche and then on a broader scale, the collective psyche, looking at various topics through that lens has helped me to learn a lot about myself and kind of figure out what the heck is actually going on in the world. And you’ve written this book, it’s called

psychological effects of immigration. obviously immigration is a very pressing topic of conversation right now. something that we’re kind of grappling with it both from a of a philosophical perspective, but also from a practical perspective. And so I thought it would be really interesting to dive into this topic with you.

Robert Tyminski (01:06.126)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (01:07.248)

But for you though, your background is in, I guess your professional background is in Jungian psychology, correct?

Robert Tyminski (01:16.118)

Yeah, I’m a little bit of a hybrid though. So I trained here and I’m in San Francisco and I trained in a program called the Doctor of Mental Health program which was psychoanalytically focused in the 1980s. So back then that meant we read Freud and we read a lot of what was called ego psychology and object relations theory.

And so it was really a great program. It was at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco in the medical center. so I sort of was interested in becoming an analyst. And for a variety of complicated reasons, I ended up with a Jungian analyst. And that was really a

experience and I after I finished my training I was the head of a school for children with emotional disturbances and that included a lot of kids who had like urban trauma and some who were on the autism spectrum and then a whole other segment of kids who for one reason or another usually because of violent behaviors couldn’t be

educated within what we think of as a mainstream public school. And I did that for 12 years, which I always tell people is six years too long. then when I finally finished there, I went into private practice and started my analytic training, which I finished almost 20 years ago now.

Josh Mortensen (03:05.101)

Yeah. So with, I guess just in the psychological world in general, do you, do you have a sense? I guess you’ve probably analyzed yourself enough. Do you have a sense of what drew you there in the first place? Was there like an inherent curiosity there? Yeah.

Robert Tyminski (03:19.532)

Yeah, you mean to-

to Jung or analytical psychology? Is that what you’re asking about?

Josh Mortensen (03:28.88)

Well, I could see how eventually you ended up there, but I guess just from the very beginning going into psychology in general, was there just always a curiosity there to understand the human mind or to help people?

Robert Tyminski (03:35.407)

okay.

No. Well, so I grew up in upstate New York and my father was the town councilman. And so when I was a child and through all of my teenage years, he had this position. He also had a full-time job working in a factory. so because he was councilman, that meant that our phone rang off the hook.

This is before there was a voicemail. And people would call about, if I really want to narrow it down, their garbage not being picked up in the bad weather causing either flooding or snowstorms. And so I would be at home and answer the phone a lot. And so I got used to talking with people and trying to calm them down. And so I think actually that was my training to go into psychology.

Totally not intentional, I don’t think. I was kind of a science guy in high school and didn’t study. I did study some psychology in college, but I really kind of went, I would say, a little bit of a meandering path, which I think most psychologists sort of do.

and particularly depth psychologists. I think in that way it’s a somewhat common story but my particular starting point was probably answering the phone and dealing with all these people who had varying degrees of anger and frustration about something.

Josh Mortensen (05:22.02)

That’s pretty funny actually. you just kind of, it was kind of like the universe gave you this opportunity to say, like here’s a particular skill set that you might have.

Robert Tyminski (05:32.63)

Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. There’s nothing like, and then, you know, I’d help out on his campaigns and there’s nothing like being in a small town and having people slam the door in your face. so, so you knew those people, right? And, and so it wasn’t like it was, you weren’t going to see them again. It wasn’t like you were dropping into canvas for a candidate. These were people, you were your neighbors. So, so I, I learned a lot from that.

Josh Mortensen (06:03.228)

I could imagine a lot about rising to a moment to have to do something you may not actually want to do and then also facing that kind of rejection. It’s got to be a kind of formidable experience. What about then from a Jungian perspective, when you did come across, you said you had this analyst when you came across Jung and obviously it’s a slight, like it’s a very different way of approaching the psyche or the human experience. Was there something particularly that jumped out to you that kind of like helped you to

continue down that track.

Robert Tyminski (06:35.046)

Yeah, I think there were two things. So part of it was I knew I wanted to keep studying, you know, whatever it would take to become an analyst. so in the 1980s, this is a little bit of history here. I’m a gay man and I was out and it wasn’t possible as an out gay man to train at a Freudian Institute to become an analyst.

because being gay was considered a form of psychopathology. so, so I, you know, that made me, gave me, obviously that was one door that was kind of closed. And so I, I didn’t, I started reading Jung and did a, I had a Jungian supervisor and analyst during my training. I liked working with her a lot. She, she really,

And it just gave me a lot to kind of chew on. And then I started reading more young and then I started an analysis. So, so it kind of fell into place organically. But, but I would say that that some of it was because, you know, there just was another path that at that time I couldn’t go. Now that did change, I would say in the 90s.

probably the mid 1990s. So that’s not, I just want to be clear that that’s not at all the case nowadays.

Josh Mortensen (08:08.538)

For sure, yeah. And then obviously this book that you’ve written, Psychological Effects of Immigration, at some point these two interests kind of coalesce. So how long ago did you start looking at immigration or when did it become a, what was the source of that curiosity for you in that field?

Robert Tyminski (08:31.326)

Well, my grandparents are immigrants, so that just was an experience that within the family I had. My grandmother and grandfather immigrated around 1910, 1911, so over 100 years ago. And they were both Polish, but Poland did not exist at that time. So my grandfather’s documents say he came from Russia because he lived on

the side of a river that belonged to the Russian Empire. And my grandmother’s documents say she came from Austria because she lived on the other side of the river, which was part of Austria-Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. so my grandmother really never learned English. I mean, spent a fair amount of time with her as a child and teenager.

And I never learned much Polish. so I was kind of just, you know, I liked being with her and she was a wonderful woman. And my other grandmother came from Canada and her, before her, the generation before came from Ireland. And so there was always this story of people coming from different places.

So that’s personal. Professionally, the school that I mentioned that I was the head of, we had a fair number of children whose parents were refugees or immigrants at that time. You know, there were a lot of wars in Central America. So we had a lot of kids who came from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

So just working with those parents, I would hear more stories about that. But the motivation for the book came in a funny place, and that is that in 2015, I was president of the Jung Institute in San Francisco. And when you’re president, there are these meetings once a year where you go to Zurich.

Robert Tyminski (10:50.354)

and all the presidents of all the institutes can come worldwide, come to Zurich, which is sort of like the mothership in a way, because Carl Jung was from Zurich, or professionally, he actually was from Basel, but professionally he settled in Zurich. And so I went there for these meetings in 2015, and on the way back I sat down in the plane and the person sitting next to me was this,

woman who, American woman, but she was Persian. And she and I started talking and turned out that she also worked kind of in an adjacent field to psychology and psychotherapy. And she said to me, well, so if I’m going to refer somebody to you, what kind of person would I be thinking of? And I started to think and I realized as I thought that a fair number,

pretty high percentage of my patients were either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants. I just, I mean it was kind of, I don’t want to say revelatory because I had known that all along, but when I actually started to think about the numbers, it really kind of resonated for me and so I answered her by saying, well, if you know somebody who’s dealing with immigration issues or

is a child of an immigrant, even an adult child of immigrant parents, I might be a good person to keep in mind.

Josh Mortensen (12:26.169)

Interesting. So again, the universe just kind of kept giving you your path and you just, you know, picked it up and followed it.

Robert Tyminski (12:35.24)

Yeah, I’m not a random guy, but I think when opportunity knocks, I think I have enough consciousness that I can sort of wonder, like, well, what’s going on here, and then dig into it a bit.

Josh Mortensen (12:41.168)

you

Josh Mortensen (12:58.648)

Yeah, that’s very cool. I think that that idea of opportunity knocking is actually something I think about a lot because there’s this kind of prerequisite mental state you have to be in in order to open that door when not when opportunity does knock. And it’s kind of, it’s it’s almost like this idea of recognizing

that, or just being prepared for it. So in a weird way, opportunity is all around us, but people only see it when they’re ready, like when it’s in that conscious state. And I always find that like a fascinating idea. When it comes to immigration, obviously in the world we live in today, it’s a big topic. We all know immigrants. In America, we all come from immigrants. And it’s something that can easily get

turn into a political debate, a political conversation. And as I was saying to you before, like I’m not afraid to go into politics. I’ve had a lot of people on the podcast where we discussed different aspects of politics. But for me, it is more interesting to take a look at almost every subject from a psychological perspective. I think that almost like, it’s hard to see anything in the human realm that’s not downstream of psychology.

Robert Tyminski (14:09.39)

What’s this?

Josh Mortensen (14:17.972)

and the workings of the human psyche and the collective. And so that’s a more interesting way for me to approach it in general. from your perspective, immigration and the psychology of immigration, what’s a good, as far as this conversation goes, what do you think is a good starting point for jumping into that? Is it just acknowledging that this is a situation that’s always existed and it exists today and it’s something that would be useful to figure out?

Robert Tyminski (14:49.326)

Yeah, it’s always existed if you think human beings have always wandered and always migrated. It’s never been a question of like,

Everybody settled in one place and then a few people decide to move to another place. That would be a very kind of, you know, simplistic and even wrong way to think about it that people have always wandered and so that’s part of the reason I think in writing the book I was looking at like some of the reasons why people wander and it relates to what you and I were just talking about opportunity and I do think that a lot of people

move because they’re looking for better opportunities not just for themselves but for their children.

And in the Aeneid, which was written by Virgil like 2000 years ago, he’s talking about, he’s trying to create this foundation myth for Rome, for the Roman Empire. And he, so he goes back to Troy and he uses the figure of Aeneas who was a Trojan and escaped the, you know, they lost to the Greeks. And he escapes with

His father and son, his wife doesn’t make it. So that’s interesting too because often these danger these these journeys are dangerous. They can be life threatening. And so it’s an immigration or migration story really that that he was writing about. There’s an interesting line that I used to tell and

Robert Tyminski (16:30.574)

one of the chapters and in the Latin version, I don’t read Latin, but I kind of like to look up some of the Latin and compare it with the English and when they’re talking about the settling when they finally do make it to Italy, they settle on a place called Latium which is roughly historically somewheres to the west of Rome on the coast.

there’s this line called, zik, sik, eter ad astra, it means thus goes one to the stars. And it’s about the children. It’s about the children being able to have a better opportunity and to be able to really reach for the stars, whatever that might mean, but,

something to be able to do something that they would not have been able to do in the homeland that they came from. And so I think opportunity is a real powerful motivating factor in immigration. It’s not just economic opportunity. It’s kind of a life opportunity that can include things like safety, feeling that you’re going to have better

you know, just better social environment. And so it’s a whole slew of things that really have to do with a person’s motivation for wanting to move.

Josh Mortensen (18:07.032)

My own personal experience, obviously, I’ve spent my entire life in the United States, in America. Aside from in my past growing up Mormon, I did spend two years in South Korea as a missionary. But aside from that, I’ve spent my entire life in America, in the Western United States. But at the same time, my family did move around a lot. My dad was a, he did general contracting, so he was a builder. And

Robert Tyminski (18:34.19)

Mmm.

Josh Mortensen (18:36.16)

he was, it’s interesting the word opportunity, because I’ve never thought of it necessarily this way, but he was constantly moving us, you know, between Arizona and California. And it was opportunity, right? Like he had to go where work was available. He had to go where he could make a living and provide. in doing that, it’s interesting, I guess I have my own kind of…

microscopic version of an immigration or it’s more like migration, I guess, experience. And what I feel I’ve discovered from my own childhood is that when I look back, there are places that I loved being. There were places where I felt like, I would love to just stay here, particularly Northern California. Growing up, we lived in a grape vineyard in a small town. And as a kid, I wandered the countryside and

Robert Tyminski (19:07.606)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Robert Tyminski (19:29.55)

Hmm.

Josh Mortensen (19:32.368)

It was just very, the weather and the scenery and it was just very beautiful. But even in that area, we moved around quite a bit and there’s a sense of never really having a place, never really belonging somewhere. And as soon as you start to feel it, like for my family story, was like, as soon as you start to feel that, maybe this is where I belong, it’s time to pack up and go somewhere else again. yeah, maybe…

Robert Tyminski (19:32.963)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (19:59.118)

Hmm.

Josh Mortensen (20:02.8)

I don’t know, do you have thoughts on that idea of humans and obviously following opportunity and sometimes you have to leave because of dangers and whatever, collapse or whatever. But having that place, what does it mean to have a place and then when you don’t have that, what are the effects?

Robert Tyminski (20:13.56)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (20:24.674)

Yeah, well, I think you were just saying something about a kind of, you didn’t use the word rootlessness, but like, where’s your anchor? And then having like some kind of visible reaction when you were talking about living near the vineyards and how that environment was really fun for you as a child. so I think there are these things about settling that

that are not just external, but they’re internal as well. And the internal aspect would be, you know, something about when you look inside yourself, what do you feel as a home? And that’s a feeling, a sensation. It’s often a kind of a confluence of different images. And that’s really something about, you know, how you’re settled in yourself.

And that does have a lot to do with having some sense that you’re moving around and outside as well, and that you don’t have to necessarily have a true home. But how do you internalize and take in those experiences so that you get this sense inside yourself that you have a home?

So I think that it’s these two aspects, right? It’s both external and internal. And so what you were describing about the moving around, that’s actually part of the Aeneid too that takes them eight years to get from Troy to this place called Latium. And they have a lot of detours. They stop in a lot of different places. There’s a very famous

detour that they take in Carthage, which is in northern Africa and where Aeneas, who’s the hero, meets the princess Dido. you know, so there’s been numerous stories about Dido. I think there’s an opera about Aeneas and Dido. And so all these kind of detours that a group of people or a person

Robert Tyminski (22:44.556)

might take is something that happens in the physical world, but it also is something about what happens internally. We all take, like just talking about my background, right? Like you can see the detours that I took and some of them were environmental because of what I was exposed to.

but then also how did I internalize that and what did I do with it? So it’s just kind of back and forth that I think is really interesting.

Josh Mortensen (23:16.91)

Yeah, absolutely. And then that just that sense of home, of having your place that

Yeah, I think it must then kind of bleed in on that inner side of your like on the inner psyche, it bleeds into this idea of like who I am, you know, this identity, and to be able to connect to a place and say like, this is, this is who I am, this is where I’m from. Because for me, you know, I, we moved from California in the middle of high school, and I ended up in Arizona. And it was so different. The

Robert Tyminski (23:54.254)

Hmm.

Josh Mortensen (23:54.542)

The cultural environment was different. We went from living in the country to living in the city. The physical environment was so different. We went from being in this place of moisture and everything’s green to being in a place that was dry and everything’s kind of a pale tan color. And that feeling of being unsettled, I think it also affected my sense of identity as well, because I went from…

assimilating to the place I had been and starting to feel comfortable and starting to feel like I belong here to then going to a place where I was definitely the outsider and everybody saw me as the outsider and I felt it felt like it felt like landing on another planet. yeah, so so I guess the you do mention identity in your book and and how does how does that kind of play out in what you’ve seen with the people you’ve worked with and any research you’ve done?

or even just the thinking that you’ve been able to synthesize. How does this idea of place and identity play together?

Robert Tyminski (25:01.946)

Well, I have to notice you’re wearing a green shirt, so something about that green environment did work its way into your color preferences. I think identity is much more fluid, and as a term, I’m not sure psychologically that it has the use that it once had.

Josh Mortensen (25:11.65)

Yeah, it is a color that I prefer, yeah.

Robert Tyminski (25:30.942)

It used to be in psychology, I would say.

I mean, even up until recently, when people were thinking about identity and if they were thinking about it as a psychological concept, inevitably they would read something that either Eric Erickson had written or something by Eric Erickson. He wrote a book called Identity, Youth, and Crisis that was partly his reflection on what was going on with American youth in the 60s and early 70s.

So he came up with these ideas about something about identity kind of vacillating. did say some that we experiment, we try on different things, but he came to really look at identity as having essentially something that you’d think of as being relatively normative and well adapted once you had

consolidated around who you wanted to be. And then he is kind of against this, he saw something called negative identity, which was a kind of gravitating away from this more adapted form into things that could be experimental and subversive, but also problematic and in this kind of theory that he was, he was a psychoanalyst. And so

So was really this kind of interplay between adaptation and maladaptation, if you will. I don’t think that that’s a terribly useful 21st century construct. It is historically useful to look at and see how things were. I think of identity now and how people are put together as I use the idea of a mosaic because I think we’re all made up of bits and pieces.

Robert Tyminski (27:35.206)

And if sometimes those bits and pieces come into view in a way that looks more coherent and looks actually quite appealing, but a lot of the time it can vacillate and it can kind of oscillate to something quite different where the jagged pieces of experience are actually much more prominent. And what sticks out is something about

really how fragile our grip on who we are is. I think there’s an idealized way to think and tell yourself, this is who I am. I figured myself out. Well the person who says that is probably like either speaking about a momentary experience or they’re fooling themselves.

because we’re really never quite sure of that question, who am I and what am I made of and what do I show to the world and what are the different parts of who I am. And so this idea of the mosaic for me, I think speaks to some of that because it really is, I’m sure you’ve seen many mosaics, most people have, they’re really made up of these small bits and pieces that are put together.

in a way that can create a picture. But often it depends on what you’re looking at because if you zoom in you won’t see as much. You’ll only see the bits of the tiles or the tesserae as they’re called. And if you step out you’ll see something different. If you walk a little bit and look at it you’ll see something different again. And that I think captures something about the fragmentation.

of psychic life as well as social life in the 21st century.

Josh Mortensen (29:37.136)

I agree with you. I think that it’s more helpful to look at us as constantly evolving and given the environment, given the necessity of the situation, different aspects of us will come to the foreground. And to, like you were saying, to try to pin your identity to a specific moment, it’s tempting, but then the next moment is…

at least from my experience, the next moment can be very shattering in a sense that you go, like I no longer feel that way, or I no longer have the ability to do that thing that I was doing before, even if it just comes to like a comfort level, you might start to feel kind of comfortable with who you are and the way things are going, and then life will throw something at you and it kind of pushes you back into this feeling of being less in control and less.

you know, centered or grounded and then all of a sudden that identity doesn’t feel like you anymore. There are, you know, there are moments where I’m a very disciplined person, where I’m eating healthy and I’m exercising and I’m putting a lot of energy towards my work and I’m getting plenty of sleep and I’ll think about, wow, I feel so good right now. And then I’ll get, you know, I’ll get a cold and I’ll spend three days trying to overcome a cold. And then all of that momentum seems to have shifted. And then I just feel like a very different person. And

Yeah, it makes me think of, you know, when in the New Testament, this idea of like, we contain multitudes. part of it, you know, in looking at the human psychology, looking at human psychology, and particularly us here in the West, a lot of the way that we see the world and we experience ourselves is downstream from thousands of years, 2000 plus years of monotheism, and this idea that we’re supposed to center our psychology around an individual.

Robert Tyminski (31:14.67)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (31:34.798)

You

Josh Mortensen (31:35.118)

and we are that individual. And it’s not necessarily reality, it’s just the way that the myth has organized our psyche. And so then to constantly try to hold onto that one identity is kind of a losing game because we grow up, we mature, with some things we get over them, we heal or we integrate parts of ourselves. And then that image that we had at one point, it no longer holds.

Robert Tyminski (31:42.552)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (32:03.434)

And it’s interesting because this is another thing that’s been very politicized lately is this idea of identity. And it seems to me like it’s a big argument about something that’s like you’re saying is not actually cohesive. That, you know, we are this desire for everybody to see us the way that we see ourselves, when in reality, the way we see ourselves changes over time. And so to demand other people’s, to demand that other people see us.

Robert Tyminski (32:18.734)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (32:29.389)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (32:33.122)

is this image. It’s a losing game.

Robert Tyminski (32:37.76)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like you brought in the idea of a myth because in a way a lot of the political discourse around identity now is reflective of some kind of mythic quest, you know, to be able to achieve a certain degree of certainty about this is what we mean by identity. And it’s really, as I said, to me lost a lot of relevance because if you think about a mythic quest,

well that doesn’t happen in reality and the whole idea of a myth, mean usually the characters in myths are supernatural or they’re godly or they’re magical or whatever we want to think about it, they belong to another realm and so that’s not…

The reality of who we are in the world. We can love those myths and stories and and we can identify I think the idea of identifying is still relevant. We can identify with aspects of them, but then they just become a part of our mosaic. They don’t become the The definition of the mosaic. And so I think what you know what you’re saying about You know about

about a myth is really important because there’s a lot of idealization about who we are and being able to define who we are. And I like to also use the word shattering because it’s fragile. Who we are in any moment is subject to change in whatever happens to us next. And often it’s incredibly

inconsistent with who we might have been, you know, at some period of time, whatever it was before that moment. And so this kind of, again, fluidity, it’s almost a little bit mercurial in a way, if you think about the element of mercury, Sort of very, very silvery and also hard to hold because it’s so fluid and also very toxic.

Robert Tyminski (34:55.788)

So there’s something about this nature of the psyche that is quite mercurial and around identity, I think. Immigrants know this very well too because they had an identity right in their homeland. And then while they’re voyaging, often their identity in that.

that transitional space of the voyage or the journey undergoes change. And then when they settle into their new homeland or their receiving land, then they often have to be facing like, I’m not who I was before and who am I now? And so those kinds of questions really come up around any sort of migration story. Just like you were saying.

like when you moved from California to Arizona.

Josh Mortensen (35:54.02)

Yeah, yeah, I could. I’ve experienced it myself multiple times. And I could definitely see there have been there have been so many mass movements throughout all of history. History is this is basically just the constant movement of groups and the way they collide and the way they kind of consume or assimilate each other. And then it’s it’s like constant movement. And when I think back on

When I think back on ancient times when entire civilizations would be overrun by other groups in more modern times, just the spreading of Europe across the world. then also this idea of people, well before we had the technology that we have today, people getting on a boat and just sailing across the ocean to go.

create something new. It’s hard to even wrap my head around it. You’ve never seen a picture of this place. You don’t know anybody there. You don’t have anything prepared for you, but you’re just gonna go and figure it out. You do that and whatever this sense of who you are and the way that you adapt to the world, it’s gotta change so drastically that the idea of ever going back is…

and having to re-assimilate into that way of being, it seems almost impossible.

Robert Tyminski (37:26.574)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s a huge challenge. mean, they talk about what it’s called a culturative stress, and it’s about what happens when, you could actually think about it even like what you were describing happened to you in high school, that you had to acculturate to a new environment. And whenever any person has to do that, there’s a whole variety of anxieties.

and as well as other feelings that you have to deal with. For instance, you might miss the place you were before and you might have to grieve something about the move. But then there’s a lot of learning that you have to do because the new environment will demand that of you and require that. And so this term, a cultured of stress, is often used to say something about the immigrant once they’ve kind of…

reached their destination, that they have to undergo this in a way, whole series of questions about who they are, what they’re gonna do, and just how they’re gonna make a life for themselves. Those are huge things.

Josh Mortensen (38:41.026)

And using the example that you gave of the mosaic or the metaphor of the mosaic, when you get there, both as an individual and with whatever version of a group that you’re with, whether you’ve traveled with your immediate family or strangers from the same land, but going to the same place, once you get there, there are going to be aspects of the mosaic that were once a key part of who you were that you’re going to have to let go of, or you’re going to have to kind of hide in that cultural

you know, that acculturative stress environment where you, yeah, I guess the idea of shattering again, where you have to let go of some things or hide them or as you go through this kind of a simulative process, it’s gotta be extremely stressful.

Robert Tyminski (39:31.168)

Yeah, yeah. Well, there are different ways to also, like once you’ve settled, right, you’ve reached your destination, you know, there’s different ways to approach it because you could have a lot of what we would think of psychologically as nostalgia for the homeland. And that can be a little bit of a trap because

If you’re overly nostalgic, then you might try and recreate the homeland in some way in your new country. And that could lead to some sort of social isolation where it prevents you actually from participating more in the environment of your new homeland. So there’s this way in which nostalgia is, I think, factor. You said assimilate and

Assimilate is also an immigrant strategy, but the problem with assimilation is that it often means that you do participate in your welcoming country or your new, you know, your new homeland, but that you relinquish what you took or brought with you from your homeland. And so assimilation is a little bit like a psychological colonization.

It’s that you have to make so much space psychically for the new place that you really repress or forget or try and dissociate yourself from the homeland that you came from. so assimilation is a little bit of a trickier, I mean, it often is what people spoke about in the US, for example, in the 20th century.

with immigration that the people who came had to assimilate. so the problem with that is that not everybody can do that. the example I gave of my grandmother from, you know, who Polish, she didn’t learn much English. And so she never became a citizen.

Robert Tyminski (41:43.49)

And I remember every year or two she would have to go, my father was, she had many children. She ended up having, I think 12 or 13 children. she had, my father was the, often the one that she would turn to to help her with bureaucratic administrative type things. And so.

he would have to take her to the local, it was called Immigration and Naturalization Services back then, INS office, to have her alien card renewed. And I can remember hearing about this as a kid thinking, is she from a different planet? Like, what does that mean, her alien card? And that’s what they were.

know immigrants were called who weren’t naturalized they were called aliens and we still have that terminology now we talk about illegal aliens right so so back to what we were talking about with assimilation the and and a more optimal and psychologically perhaps generative process would be to try and do both to participate in the activities of your your new country

while also preserving something about your homeland, its traditions, maybe even the language where you came from. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t learn the new language or that you don’t, as I said, participate in all the other activities and socially in your new country, but that you also have some way of psychologically honoring where you came from. This is actually…

a funny piece in the Aeneid because when Aeneas leaves he brings his father and Cices is his father’s name and his son Ascanius. Ascanius is probably four or five at the start of the Aeneid and so it’s the three of them and so this generational stacking

Robert Tyminski (43:50.486)

is so significant because that’s part of the move, the immigrant move, is that you’re bringing the previous generation, your generation, and the future, the stars, you’re bringing that with you in the move. so that’s something about then, like if you’re the grandfather of the boy, the little boy,

is somehow then symbolic of the homeland and the traditions and being able to live with them and keep them alive.

Josh Mortensen (44:26.52)

I almost see this, way that you’re describing it, you’re bringing the grandfather, but you’re also bringing the son. And so there’s this transition that you’re talking about. And I almost see outside of immigration and migration, just generation to generation, kind of the evolution of people’s cultures. When I think about it for myself, just my own family culture.

this idea of moving forward in history is this constant tension between what to keep and what to let go of, what to bring forward and what to abandon. And even from my own family perspective, there were plenty of things that were good about my family growing up and probably pretty standard for the time.

Robert Tyminski (45:03.758)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (45:23.674)

But there were also plenty of things that I would never wanna bring forward into my family. And it almost seems like growing up or maturing or you might even call it like breaking a cycle if these things are negative that you don’t wanna bring forward. And it’s just that there is this process that every human has to go through deciding what is of value so that they wanna give it to their children, those stars, the future generation.

Robert Tyminski (45:29.486)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (45:39.896)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (45:50.872)

and then leaving behind the things that aren’t going to be beneficial going forward.

Robert Tyminski (45:53.208)

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, yeah, there are things to, that’s absolutely right. There are things that you do wanna part ways with and that belong to either an older time or to an older version of yourself or to your parents’ generation. And I think that’s part of this idea of the mosaic. They’re still there. It’s just that they might not be in the center of the mosaic or a piece of the.

part of the mosaic that you want to be looking at and presenting. So they don’t disappear. I think that would be a point in what you’re saying is that if you have enough consciousness, you can choose to not make them be as highly relevant to your life as they once might have been, or maybe your parents might have wished they would be, or your grandparents might have hoped they would be, that sort of thing.

you have consciousness to decide what you want to do. But those things, yeah, there are a lot of things that we part ways with because they’re just not relevant in many ways to either our current life, what we desire and what we want for ourselves. So that’s a good point.

Josh Mortensen (47:08.376)

Yeah, and I guess I’m taught. Yeah, yeah, and I think that I guess I was talking about it from my own perspective. It’s like I want to leave behind the things that I felt were negative or detrimental. But from an immigrant’s perspective, sometimes the place that you’re moving to this process you have to go to go through of figuring out how to exist in this new place, there’s there’s a little bit more of a forcing mechanism to leave behind things that perhaps you don’t actually want to leave behind.

but I could see, you know, I have friends who, their parents were born in another country and they moved here and the parents left behind far less. But by the time their children grow up, they’re much more adapted to the environment, the culture that they grew up in. And so sometimes these things I would imagine just happen gradually over time, less as a conscious choice and more of just people are products of the world they grow up in.

Robert Tyminski (47:55.288)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (48:07.918)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, no, that’s true. I mean, yeah, we all, you know, have things that are, again, part of what we know and part of what we’ve experienced. But, yeah, I think for immigrants, there’s often a sense of, like, what do they want to hold on to, you know? And that can become a part of their new home, too. So can be a…

question, know, and sometimes it’s tradition, sometimes it’s cuisine, sometimes it’s a language, you know, those kind of things. So it keeps something alive, but there are many things that, again, don’t have that relevance, right? And so they recede.

Josh Mortensen (48:57.198)

Yeah, absolutely. And then just kind of coming back to this idea of the psychological effects on the individual going through this whole process that we’ve been describing in your work, you know, with children and people who have been forced to immigrate or who have, you know, have come here out of choice looking for opportunity. When they come up against the struggle of doing all this, what is, you know, do you have advice for how to handle it for how to kind of

work through some of these challenges that come up psychologically.

Robert Tyminski (49:31.438)

It’s like the million dollar question you’re asking me and I’m not going to do it justice. I’ll probably only be able to do about $20 worth of it. I’m sorry on that acknowledging my limitation there. But the one thing the research I think shows, which is again makes a lot of kind of common sense.

is that building a community once you’ve moved is so important and making connections with the local environment. Those kind of things, you might just assume that most people would do it, but that’s not always the case. A lot of people isolate. A lot of people find the language an obstacle. A lot of people find the customs an obstacle.

those obstacles somehow have to be navigated so that people can make connections. Those connections are sort of, in a way, psychological nourishment to help the person not just integrate into the new situation that they’re in, but also to deal with this acculturative stress that I had mentioned earlier.

So the more isolated a person is, the more risk they are for another kind of really unfortunate, you don’t see it so much, but it’s called marginalization. This is like a way in which a family, for instance, might not do the things that we’re discussing right now. And because of that, they might.

they might actually miss out on a lot of opportunities and then that will affect their mental health, it’ll affect their physical health, it’ll have a lot of consequences. So building local community is probably psychologically the most important thing. There’s some discussion about trauma, right? Because a lot of times people are leaving traumatic circumstances, war, and now like,

Robert Tyminski (51:50.798)

climate disasters, human trafficking, all kinds of really awful dark side of humanity type things. so people leave those, they’re traumatized by those things. And it can happen at any point in a migration. It can have happened in the homeland. It could also happen during the migration, right? During the journey, those things can happen.

So there’s some question about once they’ve settled, how helpful is it to go into helping them deal with the trauma? And that really is a bit of a mixed question. think again, making psychological support available is important, but it’s a little bit the cart before the horse kind of thing that probably the emphasis should be on forming local community.

and psychosocial support. And then the trauma could be dealt with a little bit down the road. Now that’s a rule of thumb. That isn’t true. You can’t make these things into rules that you would do in every case because there may be people who are so traumatized that they need immediate treatment for that. But in general, the psyche is fairly resilient and even when it shatters, again,

That’s partly why I like the mosaic idea. It’s able to somehow come back together and reshatter and come back together. So this kind of resilience, I think, is important. And immigrants are amazingly resilient. so it’s helpful to just think about, what do they need in the situation they’re in? How recent has the trauma been? Is this something that just happened a week ago?

or is this something that happened months back and how have they dealt with it if it’s been months back? So there’s a whole slew of questions. I will say, I know we had said we would be careful about talking about politics, but right now I think a lot of the policies are traumatizing and I don’t mean that that’s a conscious or political intention.

Robert Tyminski (54:14.2)

but just the effects of some of these forced family separations, that’s a traumatic event. That would be traumatic for any family. The sort of idea of like you go in to an administrative office and your paperwork appears to be in order and somebody gets arrested or taken away, that is a traumatic event. So those kinds of things are

occurring now more frequently than they had been a year ago.

Josh Mortensen (54:50.512)

Yeah, it’s, um, you’re right. It would be traumatic to anybody to experience that. And it’s a, yeah, it’s not a, it’s not a simple situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into. uh, yeah, it’s, it’s, it seems like very performative. seems very theatrical, which is kind of what politics is. And it’s unfortunate that there are people who are on the receiving side of that because

Just like you’re saying, if you have gone through trauma, you get to a new place. What you need is just calm. You need to feel safe. You need to feel settled. You need to start building that community. But then to have this lingering fear over, know, over top of whatever you’re trying to do is just so counterproductive to that type of trauma recovery or healing or, you know, resettling. It’s interesting because not to harp too much on my experience, but it, you know, it’s just kind of my reference point.

Robert Tyminski (55:33.528)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (55:47.024)

Going from, you’re talking about building community, and when I was a kid, I was not at all who I am today, and so I was a very shattered mosaic as a kid, and I just always struggled to socialize. I was extremely introverted. I had a hard time communicating, especially around large groups of people. If it was one-on-one, I could do pretty well, but as soon as you get me around a group of people, I really didn’t want to stand out.

And so as a kid, moving from one place to another, I did what you’re describing in that like I isolated myself and I didn’t really try to join the community and build a community. And it was, yeah, it was so hard. And it was very, it took a long time to get over it. But now as an adult, you know, I moved my family to Idaho a couple years ago. And so just trying to get back to some like greener, you know, more.

more agrarian kind of existence and being, you know, being who I am now, being like, worked like, working through so many different things, I’m much more social than I was before and it’s been, it’s been very rewarding to build a community of people here, to reach out and to meet friends and to have people to spend time with. And it’s made the transition for our entire family so much better.

than it was looking back to my experience as a kid. I think that that feeling welcome in a place is probably the most helpful way to kind of settle in that place, just like you’re saying.

Robert Tyminski (57:27.116)

mhm mhm yeah

Josh Mortensen (57:28.91)

And then the other thing that happens, sorry, just one other thought really quick is that looking back on when I was younger especially, you go from being in one environment to another and even from Northern California to Phoenix, Arizona, the high school culture was so extremely different. And what I experienced as an outsider, and I experienced it in real life, but then I only heard somebody else talk about it years later, like decades later.

Robert Tyminski (57:33.176)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (57:57.678)

And I thought, yeah, that’s what I was experiencing. And what it is is when you’re the outsider and you’re trying to join this community or you’re trying to like fit in with these other people, what ends up happening is you’re like, you’re an observer. And so you can observe the way that they’re behaving and you can see how they talk to each other. You can see how they interact, how they go about things. And for them, it’s second nature. They don’t have to think about it.

Robert Tyminski (58:13.88)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (58:25.178)

but for you, you’re observing it. And so in a strange way, you come to understand them better than they understand themselves, but at the same time, you can’t replicate it because for you, it’s like acting, it’s like try, it’s performative, trying to participate in whatever they’re doing. But for that group that you’ve encountered, for them, it’s just second nature. And so when you can’t do it, they do look at you like you’re an alien, like you have something wrong with you, even though they’re unaware that it’s just their culture.

Robert Tyminski (58:41.166)

Mm-hmm.

Robert Tyminski (58:50.926)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (58:54.682)

Does that make sense?

Robert Tyminski (58:56.47)

Yeah, no, no, I was thinking when when you’re saying that like watching them and just seeing what they do. Well, they have the benefit of a feeling almost like their being, you know, which was their body as well as their psyche, but that their being is continuous with the environment they’re in. And you’re coming in and so

So you’re not gonna have that same sensation and experience of continuity with that environment because it’s new to you, it’s foreign. And so you might get there, it’s not like it’s an all or none kind of thing that you can never attain. But at the beginning and for a period of time, this acclimation or acculturation, I was thinking about culture shock.

that’s often another term and people use that term not just to talk about travel but to talk about something like you’re saying that when you you know you move from one part of the country to another suddenly you’re confronted with with ways of being really that are quite different and it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a feeling it’s really something that that’s kind of embedded in the psyche but also in our body and kind of a deeper way.

And we know when we’re having that feeling like, I don’t belong here or I don’t belong here yet or I don’t fit in here yet. And that can be quite painful. That can be alienating. It can be disorienting at a minimum.

Josh Mortensen (01:00:40.04)

absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve definitely felt it myself. And I’ve probably seen other people experience it as well. And I’m sure that people who immigrate or migrate, they they all experience it on some level, it’s something that they’ve got to figure out and overcome. Circling back to back to Virgil’s poem, and this idea of these leaving Troy and ending up in Latika. Is there kind of a how does the myth

conclude? How does it kind of settle for them?

Robert Tyminski (01:01:13.006)

It had, does it have happy ending, right? It’s a myth, so you know, it sort of does, but that was because Virgil wrote it at the time that Augustus was the emperor of Rome. And so he had an intention, many people speculate, no one knows for sure.

Josh Mortensen (01:01:18.348)

Yeah, yeah.

Robert Tyminski (01:01:41.304)

He had an intention of trying to not only create a foundation myth for Rome, but it was almost like it was a piece of PR, positive PR for Augustus. So in other words, that Augustus would be like Aeneas in the story and that people would be able to make that connection and be thankful that they had someone as glorious as Augustus as their leader who

could trace his roots back to Aeneas, the hero. so the ending of it, there’s a battle. So they do settle in this place on the western coast of Italy. And there are native tribes there. There are other Italian tribes who have lived there. so initially they try and conclude some sort of a treaty or path.

whereby the newcomers will be allowed to settle. And this kind of agreement gets broken. And part of how it gets broken is that Aeneas’ son Ascanius, who is now a teenager, right, it’s been eight years, so now we think he’s about 14 or something like that, which back then would have been considered a young man. There really wasn’t a concept of adolescence.

to the last maybe 150 years or so. So back then he would have been considered a young man. Well, he goes hunting and he shoots a stag, which is considered a sacred animal to one of the tribes. And he didn’t know that, right? It’s like what you were talking about, like the person not knowing. So he kills this stag and then a whole

war breaks out between the tribes. And so there were some other factors as well, like who would be allowed to marry one of the local king’s daughter. so there was also some other political intrigue. It wasn’t just this one incident. So there’s this big battle and Aeneas emerges as the victor.

Robert Tyminski (01:04:07.842)

But he does something at the end that’s really quite astonishing. So the man he defeats kind of concedes and so the honorable, heroic thing would have been to spare him. And that would have also shown some goodwill for we’ve gotta learn to live together. Well, Aeneas kills him. And this is considered almost like another sign of

something about a kind of brutality in a way of the hero that he had to assert. so in the story again, it made it seem like Augustus was, because that was the comparison figure that Augustus was this strong man who would continue leading Rome to ever greater glory. But if you think about it in terms of the story,

that Virgil was writing, it’s really kind of not a great ending because it ends with what would have been considered like a murder rather than an act of mercy.

Josh Mortensen (01:05:17.878)

Interesting. So maybe it ends up being the not what you should do ending kind of an example of what not to do as an immigrant. Yeah.

Robert Tyminski (01:05:26.52)

Yes.

That’s right, that’s right, an example of what not to do. Yes, yeah, yeah, especially when you’re trying to get people to welcome you and be neighborly.

Josh Mortensen (01:05:34.284)

Interesting, okay.

Josh Mortensen (01:05:43.416)

Yeah, interesting. Okay, well Robert, I’ve really appreciated you taking the time to talk with me about all this stuff. I find it interesting. I appreciate you being able to come at it from so many different perspectives and it is something that pressing, very pressing for all of human history and then especially in our modern times as well. If anybody wants to find your book, if they want to find the work that you do, where would they go looking for you?

Robert Tyminski (01:06:11.948)

So I’ll just show the book quickly so everybody can kind of see it. don’t know, I guess this is a podcast so I’m not sure if there will be a video version too.

Josh Mortensen (01:06:21.732)

There will, yeah. I’ll put it on YouTube.

Robert Tyminski (01:06:23.51)

Okay, so I have a website and it’s just my name, Robert Tyminski. So T-Y-M-I-N-S-K-I.com. And there are links there to the books that I’ve written, including the immigration book. I think right now the publisher is having a 20 % offer, something like that sale. So if any of you are interested, you might…

now would be a good time

Josh Mortensen (01:06:55.298)

Okay, awesome. Well, again, thank you, Robert, so much. I’ve really enjoyed it. I felt like I learned a lot. And so thank you, and I hope we could do it again sometime.

Robert Tyminski (01:07:05.11)

You’re welcome. It’s great talking with you, Josh.

Josh Mortensen (01:07:07.832)

you as well. Okay, bye.

Robert Tyminski (01:07:10.67)

Bye.