James Fox is the founder of Unitive Mind™. His practice is grounded in Jungian depth psychology and in the long arc of his own formation — four decades of sustained personal and contemplative practice, ten of them in the Jungian tradition.
Every engagement is reviewed personally. The practice is limited, by design, to four concurrent clients — because this work is not scaled, and cannot be delegated.
Mine does — because the work I offer is not a technique I acquired at a distance. It is the terrain I have spent forty years crossing. What follows is not confession, and it is not here for sympathy. It is the ground the work stands on. Read it as evidence.
I was young, displaced, and searching — and I found what a searching person found in that era. Drugs, alcohol, the company of people equally adrift. At seventeen I overdosed and woke in a hospital, having been in a coma. I did not register it as a warning. I was seventeen.
I met Bridget at an Irish dance in London. We married in a Catholic church — a small gathering, her parents absent, my father arriving drunk and having to be removed. Despite everything surrounding it, we were happy. We built something real: two daughters, Hannah and Louise; a construction business that grew; property development; a home. By the standards of what I had started with, I had made it.
What I had not made it out of was the drinking.
The 1980s property crash took everything. The business. The home. And with it, the last protection the alcohol had been providing. By 1985 my drinking had become serious enough that Bridget moved back to her family.
Someone took me to an AA meeting. I have not taken a drink, or any mind-altering substance, since that day.
Forty years.
"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."
My marriage did not survive the early years of recovery. That is a grief I have carried honestly. What I am grateful for is a good relationship with Bridget, with Hannah and Louise, and now with four grandchildren.
In 1991 I visited my sister in Alexandria, Virginia, and could see possibility there. In 1992 a green card came through the lottery. I relocated, studied for and passed my Class A contractor’s licence, and built Fox Construction Group Inc. The business became successful. I became a workaholic.
And I began to discover what every workaholic eventually discovers — that the work is not the solution. It is the avoidance of the solution.
I found a therapist in Arlington. Then another. I sat in more AA meetings. I encountered Zen Buddhism through Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, and spent years in silent retreat. I worked the Twelve Steps with rigour. I celebrated ten years of sobriety. And I was still, in ways I could not yet name, not well.
What I had not addressed were the interior structures — the patterns running quietly beneath every relationship, every business decision, every moment of what I had been calling fate.
It took a crisis in my fifties to make those patterns finally visible. In the aftermath — staying on a friend’s farm in Maine, sitting in meditation each morning — I first heard the name James Hollis in conversation.
Back in Alexandria, I looked him up. He had just moved from Houston to Washington DC to become Executive Director of the Jung Society of Washington. He was giving a lecture. I went. As I listened, I understood for the first time that what Jung had mapped — the unconscious structures, the shadow, the unlived life — was not theory. It was a precise description of what I had been living.
For the first time I had language for what had been running my life. That is not a small thing.
I introduced myself as he came out of the hall and told him I wanted to enter analysis. He said he was full. I told him I had come to Jung through AA and had been sober for over thirty years. He said he would see what he could do. The next day he called with a date.
I spent five years in analysis with James Hollis, and studied at the Jung Society of Washington. Jim is today my friend, my mentor, and a supporter of the work I do at Unitive Mind™.
In 2015 I married Dawn. We have built a life that is genuinely, quietly good, with bases now in the US and the UK.
I did not set out to build a practice for executives. I set out to understand something that had been running my life for decades — and found, in the work of Jung and those who followed him, a language precise enough to name it.
The executives who arrive at this work have almost always sensed the same gap, long before they had language for it. A pattern that recurs regardless of context. An authority that feels performed rather than inhabited. A distance between the leader they know themselves to be and the one who shows up under pressure.
That is not a coaching problem. It is a depth psychology problem. And it is the territory I have worked in — personally and professionally — for forty years.
The work is available. The question is whether you are ready for it.
Six concurrent clients · Reviewed personally
