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Chef AJ: The Secrets to Great Relationships | Chef AJ LIVE! with Dr Doug Lisle and Dr Jen Howk
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hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about it's been a while since we've had the dynamic duo back that's not batman and robin it's dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk they are the co-stars of the amazing podcast called beat your jeans they're writing a book together that is very much anticipated by all of us and today they're going to talk about the secrets to great relationships please welcome them both to the show what a great topic and great to see you both together again uh great being here aj thanks for having us yeah awesome it's always my pleasure and so what is the secret to a great relationship there's all kinds of different things because uh uh relationships we weren't just talking about rheumatic relationships we're talking about all relationships and so there's a relationships by nature are what they are is their trades and uh we don't we actually don't like it when um when a for example when a romance starts to go from something that is very easy to something that starts looking very transactional um so when but what that is is that's uh it's kind of like what happens when you are in some kind of a uh like like a job that you were crazy about and now you start haggling about the the terms with the people in hr like you're you're it's not as good so the uh but beneath it we always know that if it's even a job that you love that there's still a trade process taking place and that uh that realization that relationships are in fact treads a lot of parts of the trade are happening unconsciously and they're happening joyfully but they are trades nonetheless and that includes your relationships with your children and that includes relationship with your parents and with your friends and with everybody else uh and certainly romantic partners and so the uh so first knowing that that's true what trades mean is that there's value for value on both sides of the process but there will also inevitably be conflicts of interest and that is really what's a super important thing to understand about relationships sometimes uh obviously young people if they fall in love they they feel like everything is so fabulous because that's like you had your dream job and somebody offered you a whole bunch of money to do it and you're like oh my god what could be better than this and then somewhere along the line you find out that you don't agree on everything or that there's a conflict and it can actually be felt like it's kind of a tragedy like wait a minute i i didn't think that we're supposed to have conflicts oh my god what is this does this mean that our love isn't true and et cetera et cetera and the answer is absolutely not we have to understand that conflicts are not a tragedy in relationships they're an intrinsic part of the nature of life that two people cannot be always in agreement about how we value everything that that may come up uh what relationships are is there opportunities for trades when we try to make them uh to be to be without conflict because we're supposed to agree on everything then we set the stage for big trouble okay and we'll be talking a little bit about some of the ways that where that uh how that winds up looking so actually how we manage conflicts is probably the most important thing that we can have some control over in determining how enjoyable relationships are because we can't make a relationship better than it could intrinsically be but we can make it worse than it could be intrinsically okay so uh and so that's we end up talking about that today the concept of conflict and how it is that we manage it is a really important part to the quote secrets of good relationships the first secret of a good relationship is the two people have to have things about each other that they really value in order to make a good relationship even possible okay you can't have a good relationship with the old grouch next door who likes to hunt and you're an animal rights activist i mean this is just not going to happen but when when the two people of who they are intrinsically have within the possibility a good relationship of some kind then the only question is how are we going to manage the conflicts when they come up and if we manage it well can we have a good relationship or will we manage it poorly and then and then we we detract from it and that's sort of the so it's the notion of relationships their potential and how to best manage conflicts that's kind of what the secrets are that's where they say jen yeah thoughts about that yeah well to borrow a phrase you often use to back the camera up here i would say that you know we're we're interested in talking about this because we you know so often when you're having relationship issues especially romantic issues but any kind of relationship and you go in to see somebody about it to try to get help working on your communication or uh you know to to address the issue at some level the immediate sort of move that that practitioner goes to is to look at your childhood to to kind of look at you know what um where did your intimacy issues come from today or you know why why are you uh struggling to communicate because of something that you learned in your childhood and we part of the reason we want to have this conversation is to kind of bring a different toolkit um that we use and and that's grounded in evolutionary psychology um which you know is much more of a practical model it's it's a it's a relative of cognitive behavioral therapy if you've heard of that in the sense that it's really more problem solving oriented it's it's less interested in kind of the uh the roots of the issue and more about okay what's going on with this dynamic and and how can we fix it um but as doug is saying it's it's you know the it begins with understanding why the conflict is what the what the real nature of the conflict is um understanding why it's happening and and what kind of power struggle is going on um and then figuring out how much of that is in the words of john gottman who is a fairly traditional relationship therapist who i i like a lot i think doug does too there are solvable problems in relationships and there are also unsolvable problems in relationships and every relationship has both just because you have some unsolvable problems doesn't mean that it's doomed that you you're not you can't be together or you can't be happy but you have to be you have to understand what you're dealing with and that that is an unsolvable problem and and what the nature of that is and how you can live with it rather than just being mad about it all the time so i think one of the one of the ways we thought we would kind of get into this is that we're we can take questions that are relationship oriented if people have um issues coming up in any type of relationship and we can kind of apply some of our um our main frameworks and tools as those as those come up um but we can also just talk generally about stuff somebody's asking well are there some problems like what what is an example of an unsolvable problem or does that depend on the relationship it depends on the relationship a bit i think the way he defines it it's it's going to be a problem that is rooted in fundamentally different personalities so as doug is saying if you're if you're an animal rights activist and and you're you know trying to date a hunter that's going to be an unsolvable unsolvable problem doesn't mean that you can't be together you know that's a successful arrangement and some rom-coms if he has a if he has a heart of gold and you know you're able to kind of make it work but it's it's an unsolvable problem in the sense that it is emerging from very deep innate differences between those two individuals that cannot be changed so the classic unsolvable problem is uh he he's an extrovert she's an introvert so this is like a fundamental personality trait and it's it's not going to change so all things equal he wants to go out he wants to visit his friends he wants to go to dinner parties she wants to stay home cuddle watch netflix be quiet um and so there there are compromises that are required here um and it's it's a matter of sorting through what that how that compromise best serves both of those parties but you have to realize that nobody's going to be in entirely getting their way because you have this this fundamental difference um she doesn't have to learn to be more extroverted or push push through her boundaries of of being uncomfortable in social situations um and he doesn't have to uh you know be be happy staying at home and not getting the social cues that he craves there there is a different sort of compromise rather than the two of you need to fundamentally change who you are do you guys think that saying opposites attract is true because a lot of introverts and extroverts that seem to end up together no it's actually not true so um we know that's not true so i'm not just having an opinion on this this is uh this is well known in personality psychology and relationship uh research that that smart people are not attracted to people with low ability low ability people are not attracted to very smart people they um strangely enough i mean you might think it was but it is not true okay so the uh extroverts are not particularly attracted to introverts nor vice versa the uh and uh disagreeables may be attracted to agreeables that's the one exception yes that's it that's the exception yeah very stable people are not attracted to unstable people so uh and sometimes they are sometimes they are if it's a male female dynamic males can find unstable females more attractive than stable females i think they prob they're exciting here with this is going to be what we're going to call latitudes of acceptance so for example um a a person who's not too bright maybe it's more attracted to a person who's a little bit brighter than them than a person who's less right but they're not attracted to a person who's much brighter because that's uncomfortable okay and the same thing would be with uh for example um uh i'm i'm not that open but i'm attracted to people who are one notch more open than i am if you get two notches more open and a notch to me because i am the the nerd that i am that would be 10 percentile points so that's like let's go to the the the asian fusion restaurant instead of the thai restaurant but not bungee jumping right yeah you're you're like let's let's you know kick it up a notch yeah so that's uh that's how that works and quite frankly it's interesting i i think that if a person were 10 percentile less open than me that would not be interesting okay so so i uh that would be alan i'm not attracted that that that's why this one's my new co-author aj uh it's because uh we've got to we have to open it up a little so uh but anyway this is yeah so in general opposites do not uh attract but you you are certainly attracted to people who are reasonably close to you on those dimensions that but but but you may have preferences in other words so um i'm trying to think i my personal preference would probably be someone who's more outgoing than i am in terms of uh i'm pretty introverted somebody one notch more extroverted would be fine one much more introverted would be a little weird my life would get pretty quiet at that point so uh yeah these are these sort of uh these are these sort of things that go on that's great we have other questions aj yeah uh here's one from elizabeth how to pass by the physical attraction and see the person as they are how to pass by it well you know i'll i'll jump in here the um there's a difference between passing uh there's a difference between not uh for example particularly on this on the on the side of on women looking at men when they don't know them that when women are looking at men and they don't know the person they they have not integrated who that person is with into the person's overall aesthetic that will be something that will that will take place for better or worse so uh as as as women uh get to know a person who that man is uh assuming we're talking about a heterosexual situation who that person is becomes part of their aesthetic response okay the um and it may improve their aesthetic response or it may detract from it it may improve it but it still doesn't make it interesting it may detract from it uh and then it's a complete rule out but but so women could be lukewarm early and then it will change and we don't know where it's going to change too but if the person is saying i know this person i'm with this person and i might have been into them before but now i'm not into them or they keep coming on to me and i've known him for a long time and they keep doing their little drive-bys try to tap me on the shoulder but i'm just not into him okay or i've been out with this guy half a dozen times and i just can't i mean he's a really good guy and he's got a lot going for him but i'm just not into it well you're out of luck so the the the notion that you can somehow get past it and then be responding romantically to quote who the person is is impossible uh it's important to understand that at the at the most fundamental level you are an animal you are an animal okay throughout the animal kingdom we will find that vision uh is an incredibly important source of information and maid selection okay it's true in chimpanzees it's true in all kinds of birds it's true in lions it's true and tigers it's true all over the place it's true in zebras it's true in penguins so to try just because human beings have a phenomenal amount of important information about who it is that they are their identity is located inside of their mind and so it turns out that it's an extremely important issue to determine who it is that they are because that's an incredibly important feature of what you're going to be responding to and whether you're attracted to that individual as a human being and sexually or not these are very big deals but they could never be the only thing okay we would expect that's why you don't have some guy with a great personality funny pleasant smart clever you know nice guy uh that looks average and that is not a hollywood movie stone okay you you you that is not a movie star okay well he's not a matinee idol type movie star maybe it might be a character actor yeah yeah so he might be an oscar winner very well known but he's not he's not people's sexiest man alive he's not the leading man that we take women go to spend their tickets so that they can sit inside the other female on the other side of this is uh thing and through mirror neurons be excited for her as she's kissing this guy okay in other words the way that works is she's got to look at this guy and be thinking i'm very attracted to him or forget it it doesn't work okay and so the uh and it doesn't work if he's average he's never going to be he's never going to be that leading man that tells you how important vision is to the species we should not apologize for it we should not run away for it we cannot get past it okay it is what it is we have we personally each have some amount of appeal to some percentage of the market all of us would pretty much like to have unlimited appeal to the entire market of course okay uh that why wouldn't you why wouldn't you want to be qualified for every job on the planet and you'd be like well i did that neurosurgery thing for a few weeks and i really didn't like that that much let me go on and be a nuclear physicist for a little while let me try that okay of course that would be a a fascinating position to be in but really nobody is there so you might say well well brad pitt was when he was in his heyday no he actually wasn't okay there's all kinds of women that would have ruled brad pitt out literally on site okay because there'd be features to them and that's just vision then we get to smelling okay smelling is a huge deal there might be some gal who finds brad pitt extremely attractive but when she got up close to him oh can't stand his smell and that's because their two immune complexes are too similar and she's designed by evolution to be to be uh disgusted with that because essentially he smells like her brother okay so these are uh then then it can be how it is that they touch okay oh and or their voice and what is it they sound like all other other little physical characteristics you know your mind is built around what we're going to call an adaptive unconscious and that adaptive unconscious is running cost-benefit analysis constantly and you are not aware of thousands of the variables that it's computing you are aware of a few of them there are big ones a lot of you can see okay sometimes you can't uh so the book that jen and i are writing is about all these really interesting features of human nature about the things that we can know and the things that we can't know and what it is that we so some of the the deep strategies that we need to learn in order to essentially make better decisions for a better life and so um and one of them would be don't think you're going to get past that okay you have to uh one of one of my favorite little phrases that goes back more than 40 years i'm embarrassed to admit that i was an adult 40 years ago but i was and one of the books that uh across my my plate was uh by wayne dyer dr wayne dyer and uh and he said in that book first be a good animal now i never forgot that okay and uh he you know he didn't know as much as we would all come to learn about diet but yet he had an intuition about it okay and so his notion was you know let's let's first feel like a good animal sleep when you want to sleep you know exercise when when you're feeling some some energy behind that you know work hard you know all these sorts of things and one of them would be honor your own aesthetic preferences okay you didn't say that but that would be implied honor your own aesthetic preferences don't try to make yourself like something that you don't like what a waste of life okay i can't i can't make myself like for example watching tennis like i've watched a little bit of tennis in my time and back in the days of jimmy connors and uh john mcenroe was all all argumentative yeah that was exciting they were throwing things and we're doing fights and yeah he was excited that was like a soap opera it wasn't tennis that's what that's what that was but i i it isn't that i don't respect tennis it isn't that i don't uh uh to understand why other people find a lot of appeal but that's not my game so if i spent my life trying to make myself like that as opposed to watching the nba and the nfl i would be wasting my life okay so don't waste your life trying to like something that you don't like okay now can i add just one one tweak on this for women in particular i would say don't make the other mistake um which is not to give a good guy a chance um and so you touched on this at the beginning of your answer this kind of women uniquely compared to men have have this capability that we call the repeat exposure effect so we talk about this all the time on on our podcast um we talk about it almost every week on our we have a members only podcast that we do video podcast for our members on our website um and repeat exposure is a big deal for women um and it used to happen sort of more organically in the workplace or in um communities where you know you met a guy at church or you met him in the bowling league or you just you kind of you ran into him on sort of a repetitive basis for a certain amount of time it was your brother's friend who came around and every woman i know has had this experience where ah he's not my type ah he's not my type and then one day he kind of does something that impresses you or he you you see him in a new light and you kind of look at him and you're like huh i never thought of him that way before that's a that's a universal experience to the to the female nervous system and that's repeat exposure where you some someone can be sort of marginal where you're not that attracted to them you're not repulsed by them so there's a sweet spot right there's kind of it's it's just not your general type and you probably couldn't see yourself with them but you know they're they're not unattractive it's just not your thing and a lot of women especially now in the world of dating apps will just swipe by those guys they don't give those guys a chance at all to kind of make their repeat exposure case um and that is a that's the mistake on the other end of the spectrum is because you know you you do not that you need to give every every guy you know a hearing but if somebody sends you um who kind of fits that category on a dating app and you're and you're looking to date um a very thoughtful message very personalized really kind of obviously picking up on little little things about you and you wouldn't be attracted to him right out of the gate but you're not you're not entirely sure you don't want to rule that person out without giving him a slight chance to to prove himself so there are mistakes to be made on both um ends of this continuum and that i see is a more common one among women women in the um online dating sphere because we're sort of incentivized to move quickly and only swipe on the men that you're very attracted to but that's a losing game for women because they probably are not interested in you as a potential what what we call a pair bond they probably want to sleep with you because they want to sleep with everybody but they don't want to make you their one um and and that is just a dynamic that exists and we can kind of get more into that if people are interested but but if you are super over rewarded by that picture that you see on bumble and you've never seen a guy that hot and you swipe yes yes yes and you want to go out with them be careful because that's that's probably you're probably you know batting a little over your you're aiming a little too high there so there's an art and a science to this great thank you lots of questions are coming in and i told them it has to be on the topic of relationships here's one from a live viewer named maria i'm in an eight-month relationship and so far no major conflicts how can i get faster feedback on how he manages conflict assume it takes time but i'm 33 want kids so far signs are great i love this question go on a road trip go on a road trip put that guy in situations where unexpected problem-solving occasions are in front of him you want to see how he solves problems under pressure that he doesn't expect to have come up and the most likely scenario for that is an extended road trip or traveling together you want to see him frustrated changing a tire on the side of a busy highway that's going to tell you you know really really how he responds in those kinds of moments how he interacts with you um how uh all of that plays out that's the the super rapid acceleration modality for um discovering the someone's metal in a relationship is one of my favorites so of course there you know there are other ways to do it but i really like that one next one go to spain yeah go to a difficult country yeah yeah yeah yeah spain spain's pretty easy you know i'd take him to like el salvador somewhere we have to bribe a border guard there you go there's the high openness you want you want both of you uh you want to see how he solves problems because you're trying to assess whether he qualifies for you know a parabon for you because problem solving is a very important skill but you also you you want to be under pressure so you can kind of the whole dynamic is going to shift it's going to bubble up any potential conflicts of interest um anything that's been submarine under the surface and kind of held in place by everyone being on their very good behavior you just want to turn the heat up on that great thank you randy says how do i get my husband to talk more or any she says well that is interesting so that's that's we're going to speak to a couple of big concepts uh concepts that will we that's that are weeding their way through the book that we're writing and that that uh weave their way through how to solve all kinds of problems uh and that is number one we're going to call this the principle of identity so jen has already alluded to this and that is that that fundamentally we are who we are you're you're not going to change that all you can change inside of people uh when when uh the neuroscientists and hucksters today talk about plasticity of the brain they are they are using smoke and mirrors and they are completely confusing to entirely different operations and they're pretending that that apples are oranges so we're going to talk about what's an apple and what's an orange when it comes to what we call the principle of identity the um the if i if i had happened to had studied finance uh some reason my dad was into that and and we had uh sort of pushed me that direction and it was just too easy to stay out of it and you were meeting me today i would know a lot about taxes and sheltering and all this kind of stuff that i don't know i would be the same personality okay yeah it would be i i wouldn't my interactions how the kind of music that i listened to wouldn't have changed uh the the kind of partner that i wanted wouldn't have changed nothing would have changed but my knowledge of the environment would have changed my knowledge of the environment would have been a knowledge of taxes and rules and you know all that sort of jazz what you need to do by april 15. my knowledge of the threats and opportunities would have changed i wouldn't have known anything about diet and i have two stents in there in this heart by now if i was even alive given my genetics here so uh i wouldn't be in nearly as good a physical condition i wouldn't have uh i wouldn't have done a lot of things that i've done but i would have done other things okay so the principle of identity is the identity doesn't change at all uh but what changes is your understanding or knowledge of the environment i have no idea what the question was i'm completely get him to talk more not a problem for you you guys know why i love jack hawk oh my god i can't live without her okay so the uh say yes getting him to talk so there's one of two possibilities and that is that that this is part of his identity and it's never going to change okay it is also possible that his understanding of the environment can change because his environment can change so i will tell you an old clinical story uh that i learned from nathaniel brandon who was the uh who was the person responsible for me becoming a psychologist okay so uh he was the author of the psychology of self-esteem 50 years ago the um brandon talked about a case once and it was a a young woman in a married to a guy she loved and he was an attorney and he would come home every night and and and she would want to talk to him about his day he'd be like no no you wouldn't understand and he was just so tired and burned out and this went on for quite a while and and i can't remember how she changed this but i it might have been because of brandon's intervention it probably was and um and the idea was listen you if you really want this to happen you're going to need to learn about what it is that is is the heart of what's in his mind that he's concerned about so this young lady then went to the library and got herself knowledgeable about the area of law that this guy practiced okay and then she asked some questions then turned out he was freaking delighted to talk so the man who wouldn't talk would absolutely talk once he found out once he also she's sending him a tremendous signal of how interested she is in him so quote getting your husband to talk let's look carefully about what is it you want him to say okay if you want him to say oh my goodness it'd be so much fun to go uh arrange flowers with you on the weekends and he doesn't want to arrange flowers on the weekends and you want to have that conversation because you really like to be out the flower arranging place because other women are there with their husbands that are being adoring and you would like to parade around your guy and show that you've got one too and that be so nice to do this together you're violating all kinds of principles about how to have success in relationships i.e you're violating the principle of identity you're also violating another principle that we call the optimal overlap so as jen said earlier you can have very significant disagreements but we may not be able to have the relationship at that that nexus where you have the disagreements we may be able to have the relationship in places where we don't disagree so you may have a great relationship in places where you can and then when you can't then you don't bother to try to make it so so if that guy so the question is does he not want to talk does he not want to talk to you does he not want to talk to you about what it is that you're wanting to talk about what exactly is the situation there there is no neuroplasticity in the universe that is going to change that man's identity about who it is that he is the only thing that can change is that he may have a shift in his understanding about what would be in it for him if there was a conversation between the two of you that would mean that what it is that he might be interested in talking about you would have some interest okay and it wouldn't be like no no dr lyle this is just priming the pump i'll go ahead and learn a little bit about hockey sticks and then i'll get him talking and then we can talk about what i'm interested in talking about no no fair grand kids and their school recitals yeah in the principle of identity okay so the the question is is there anything that you're really interested in that he would be really interested in talking about that is your task to try to figure that out and that would be the really the only way that you're going to get this guy to talk in a way that is organic and sustainable if he's a talker but he might not be a talker so you you know i'm sure he was more talkative during courtship because his cost-benefit analysis on talking was was in a different place he was trying to uh qualify for you so he was he was trying to present himself in the most possible best possible light he was probably i i expect very authentically interested in you getting to know more about you i.e to decide whether he wanted to wife you up or not um then he found out that you are and so it's done we can go back to baseline of just being a very quiet introverted guy so i would only be really worried about this if he was very quiet with you but not when you're out at a dinner party and he's just talking to everybody and he's super social but he never talks to you that that would indicate that there's a real overlap issue and you're probably trying to talk to him about the wrong things as doug is explaining but if he's quiet all the time and and you just want him to be more like he was when you were dating um that was a that was a whole different environmental context for him and you you can't really replicate that um in in the way that you would want to it's it's about meeting him where he's at with his his genuine baseline personality um now now that he has snagged you and feels more comfortable that's great i think i write that down we have so many comments very romantic yeah yeah aj i was just going to say that we have so many comments on how hot you look with your new goatee yeah yeah doug's sporting a new uh new some new facial hair here i i he's trying to uh send some testosterone cues i was just trying to send a cue to jen that i'm serious about finishing the book that's that's your it's your hermit beard are you not going to shave it until you finish the book i spent three days in the in the oregon wilderness uh this last week uh away from everything so so that i could focus and i got got some good work done and i know jen's working hard and uh uh that that's what this is actually about so i i know i i i had no idea anybody would like it for god's sakes all right thank you it definitely it definitely suits you and there's a question from sherry this could probably be a whole show how to deal with a narcissist yeah um well first of all what a narcissist is uh people so we don't it's not it's actually not a category of humans it's a description of one component of their personality and that component is uh disagreeable so really the question is how do you deal with a disagreeable person and so the uh so now and then we're going to get into um interesting interesting problems that it comes comes to deal with disagreeable people so uh i start calling people disagreeable when they're probably 75th percentile on the disagreeable curve then you're running into a lot of resistance from them on on various incendiary issues the uh if someone's uh if someone disagrees with me now and then but mostly agrees then we're going to call that in the middle of the bell curve okay so uh when they're about 95th percentile disagreeable in other words you just can't agree with them about that much whenever you're there's a conflict they're getting all hot and bothered and uh and uh you're you know irritable and difficult threatening that's a narcissist so that's what i call that the um but there's a few problems uh obviously if you think about relationships as trades and what a what a disagreeable person is is a person who is feeling very often like the trade that you're proposing is not fair i.e they don't agree okay um they're never going to change this is part of their identity principle of identity so that that doesn't ever change the um and the question is can you have a good overlap with a person who is very disagreeable can you have a relationship with them the answer is you you might you're running a cost benefit on on this entire package uh people are are not one feature they're not just their beauty they're not just their intelligence they're not just their introversion or extroversion they're not just how good a parent they would be they're not just a person that has a certain financial capability they are a package deal okay a human being is a package deal we don't get to snip out the little part that we don't like no it's coming along with it and so the issue is can we can our relationship be effectively snipping those things out as much as possible the answer is to some degree you can uh in other words uh if you like to go watch hockey you know go watch hockey i'll be here when you get back i'll all have all that been watching the nba so i can't imagine getting into a trick that like talking about you never you never know all right so there's some problems with disagreeable people and um and how we deal with them is usually um uh it's gonna have to do with how we manage arguments because there's going to be arguments with disagreeable people and with arguments um we have to understand that for with argumentation in people we're actually born to win we're actually designed by nature to win arguments we're not actually designed to resolve disputes that is those are very different things and so this is this is heart and soul this is some of the things that we we talk about in the living wisdom library and we also talk about in in uh in the book that we're writing this chapter in the book yeah this is the big deal that we are that human nature has features of it that are not uh that they are not all about peace and freedom and everything being cool they're about getting more from me if it costs you less that's too bad okay this is this is deep in human in human nature it's deep in every animal nature i've got one cat that outweighs the other cat by about four or five pounds is inherently more aggressive and if he's eating peacefully she'll come right up to him she'll purr get right close to him and then bring up her hand and swat him in the face and move over and take his food this is how it is okay i.e uh whatever you're liking so much i'm gonna take it and so whatever whatever it is that's a dispute between us and a recurrently disagreeable person they are wanting more than we believe is fair so we have a conflict over this when that conflict emerges tempers flare and people can get pretty nasty okay and um and that's a that's because we're born to win arguments we're born to raise our voices try to shame them in front of the rest of the village we do that automatically whether or not people are around or not we do it anyway we'll do it in the quiet of our own living room with our partner they start raising their voice we start raising our voice and these arguments were designed to be resolved by the village within seconds 45 seconds two minutes would be a long argument people aren't going to sit around and listen but when we start kind of recounting our evidence we don't we are not taking a a measured view of their opinion and our opinion we are going for the jugular to try to win it's a super important thing to understand about human nature um it's important for all of us to understand it it is incredibly important if you live with a narcissistic individual you live with a very disagreeable person you are going to be in arguments a lot and you are going to find yourself being threatened by their raised voice and you are going to be responding and kind and it's going to be unpleasant as hell and that is what it will be we hope that they're hot enough and interesting enough and smart enough and and fun enough that it makes up for the fact that they're an incredible pain in the ass okay now but how can we best manage that we can best manage that by by understanding how it is to to step out off of the born to win path and so there's a few concepts that are useful that i have rarely been able to use fortunately i don't have very many arguments with very many people but a few times when i've started to have arguments and i knew you know what this person is important enough to me this situation has enough chips in it it's important enough i better not just let my instincts go okay so uh but i have to have an alternative strategy this is what this is where we have quote neuroplasticity is that i've changed my personalities that i've learned that there's a different way to manage the environment it's a completely different thing okay it turns out that if i say to somebody you've got a point no i see you've got a point if i say that then i'm changing the environment right in front of us both they've been on a path to defend their honor with the village by recounting why i'm wrong and they're right and they're loud and they're threatening and they're trying to essentially shame me into capitulation i know that and i'm and i'm responding and kind by raising my voice figuring out where the weakness is in their argument and going for their jugular that's what an argument is that is the anatomy of human argument if instead i immediately say you've got a point then suddenly they have something in their head as they hear it starts to put their foot on the brake that's because they realize wait a minute i've now the village now isn't going to think that i'm so far out of line because he's acknowledging that i'm not that far out of line so that's a huge concession okay so that you've got a point i've actually had to say this five or six times in a row because the person on the other side has so much momentum notice how people repeat the data of against us oh and there's the time when you did this and then there's time to do that and remember the time you did that again yeah i just heard that three times in the last 74 seconds why because new people from the village got curious and came up to to the environment and they're all going to be out judge who's right and who's wrong and they've got to make sure that everybody that's here has heard that argument of a point that's why we repeat the argument okay so what am i going to say i understand you got a point you got a point you got a point i've even gone so far as to choke out you're right you're right about that see then i equivocated yeah it doesn't matter if they're if they're actually not it's the it's that you say the words and that immediately has it throws water on the fire and then and then you can kind of you know gently start start into a crystal clear process but those words your right are music to a narcissistic ears then the next thing we say is i need to ask you a question okay so now we finally get a space for them to shut up for a second okay and then we're gonna go for as as jen is talking about the technique that we call crystal clear i need to understand and then we go and we try to get them to map out what is in their head about this we're going to try to find the linchpin about where we're really disagreeing okay there is a section of ground the thing is the argument puts a blow torch over the entire battlefield it's that basically we are doing a character assassination of them and they are doing a character assassination of us that's what happens in these arguments okay the instead we want to stop the character assassination process and try to essentially not win our job is to explore and understand and be able to define the the narrow patch of ground here where we're actually having a disagreement okay and we have to acknowledge the fact that son of a gun we may just disagree okay and we we may have to live with that that we disagree but we don't have to get carried over the cliff uh with respect to the the characterological assassination process that is intrinsic to human argument okay so how do you live with a narcissist um very uncomfortably okay so there there better be tremendous values that that narcissist brings to the table and there may be okay so uh but that is a that is a hell of a relationship to try to have work so the secret of good relationships is usually don't have a relationship with a narcissist that would be the number one acknowledgement of the principle of identity is that that individual's personality will never improve okay if they're a narcissist at 23 there are narcissists at 13. they're going to be a narcissist at 93. that's how it is okay so you know if you are staring at that situation and in a lot of emotional bankruptcy or pain about this trying to figure out how is there a way that i can manage this that make my my life a lot better no you can make your life a little better by learning a few of the tools that that we delineate uh you can definitely do that but you are not going to have what we would call a forklift upgrade in your life experience you we cannot take you from a five to a seven in this life um not with that individual we might take your life from a five to a six we might make it less unpleasant and therefore better it's an important piece here about um you know it's sort of repping for the more agreeable especially agreeable women who are in a relationship with somebody like this so so a lot of super agreeable women might not necessarily see themselves in that description of the born to win scenario because they're not actively representing their interests in that same way they're not shouting back they're not getting confrontational they're just holding it in and quietly getting resentful and building their iceberg of a case against them until they get to a point where it really is too far so it looks a little different um in depending on where you are in the relationship and and how how much chiseling has been done of of your goodwill as the agreeable person in this relationship and so you said something very early on about you know in the opposites attract question um where there is this exception where disagreeable people highly disagreeable people do to some degree seek out more agreeable people because those are the only people they can be in a stable relationship with if they if they choose another disagreeable person they're just fighting all the time it's con it's endless conflict there's there's never any stability in that relationship so so they will seek out a highly agreeable person but they will deceive that agreeable person in the courtship process and for some amount of time early in the relationship about just how disagreeable they are so you don't see the extent of the narcissism immediately so when we say don't get into a relationship with a narcissist it's easier said than done because you you don't always know what you're dealing with because part of their narcissism is deceiving you about their about that personality trait they know it's not an attractive personality trait they know it's kind of a bad deal so they're walking through life wanting 80 percent of of the pie um they're going to make it seem like with you they're happy with 60 they're a little disagreeable but you find that sort of attractive because it's masculine you like it and it seems fair enough you get your 40 everything's good but then slowly over the course of time you see that they really want 80 and you start to get chiseled and chiseled and chiseled and you're sitting there with your 20 piece and finally it's too much and and then you're in a very bad situation so that's the that's the usual trajectory for a disagreeable with a high um high agreeable and it it just requires a lot of a lot of mindfulness and a lot of um crystal clear and a willingness to recognize the the true nature of that individual when it's made clear to you and the limitations of the the good will in that relationship yeah jen also is alluding something you can sort of see uh the to see why the book that we're writing is complicated and taking time we we have on our website it says the book you'll be out in 2021 i fixed that i edited that it does say 2022 now but our website is the only place that you can get that book which will not be offered for sale on amazon or the general public this is going to be where it's going to be it's going to be in-house the um and you can you can sign up for a lifetime membership you can get a signed copy of our uh it'll be a fancy hard hardcover book with over 50 illustrations we've got an artist uh that's working on on these details but anyway you can see one of them if you read the chat there's a chapter on the website um so you can read a chapter sample chapter and see the art and get a sense of what it is yeah and see just how long my beard's gonna have to get exactly we're in for it one of the things that jen just alluded to is one of the principles that that we discuss uh in this work and that is going to be what we call deceptive altruism so many nice people are deceptively altruistic they are they will pretend that that a a trade proposition particularly with a narcissist or somebody more disagreeable than they are he's fine and the problem with this is that as jen was saying the narcissist can be deceiving you that they aren't quite that much of a pain in the ass and therefore it seems reasonable but this can also be being aided and abetted by the fact that you are deceiving them that it's all okay it's all okay and it's not okay the guess is this gets to be this sort of very interesting problem in the management of these kind of conflicted relationships even relationships where where the person isn't necessarily that problematic they're mildly problematic but if you're a little too nice and we are deceptive in the fact that oh no that's fine with me if we essentially give that message when it's really not fine then as jen says you could start to build up resentment and they actually don't even wouldn't know that you're building resentment because as far as they're concerned you're completely fine with whatever it is you're always you know it's whatever the possible conflict so this is a they they don't a narcissist doesn't recognize your passive aggressive stewing um or you're you're you're closing the cabinet a little too hard or you're stomping around a little bit it doesn't register they it's it's it's like direct conflict or nothing otherwise you're fine there's no problem why should they they're not gonna they're just gonna try to take a little more because you seem fine with that so they're gonna go for one percent more so passive aggression does not serve you um if you're if you're dealing with a high disagreeable yeah and so that's a it's an interesting problem because in in all relationships um the many people that have conscientiousness and and certainly good will towards the relationship and that um that are reasonably agreeable they they will abide by sort of an unwritten rule often and it's a good one uh and and john wooden calls this you know the fine art of friendship go be go more than halfway and so that that actually is a good general rule that okay you know if we we're running into a little stumbling block here just go more than halfway but the problem is if you're with a narcissistic person that stumbling block is happening every 72 hours you have to keep having to go more than halfway okay and and then if you if we're if we're deceptive about it and then we it turns from an initial pleasant mildly deceptive altruism where i'm willing to go more than halfway but i don't intend this to be going on in the recurrent fashion indefinitely it's the today i see that we happen to have a conflict that i wouldn't have normally anticipated i'm willing to go more than halfway no problem okay but what if but what if i'm with the narcissist and now it's going to be a repetitive thing now the problem is is that if we deceive them that it's okay we simply calibrate them to a a trade process that is really unsustainable for our happiness and then as jen says what happens is one day uh very not uncommonly the uh the quieter party in this whole uh thing eventually blows up a few times over a period of time expecting this to recalibrate the narcissist and it doesn't and then finally you're forced with a choice of a life of misery or they're gonna have to leave and so sometimes the narcissist can be very surprised when you know little miss muffet decides to get off and tuff it and actually just freaking leave it's like wait a minute wait a minute what about some counseling you know let's let's go let's go talking they're very fun they go back this is where all this ridiculous language in the narcissistic youtube world comes from the the sort of the love bombing and all of that they they will go back to what they know worked before to get you um and so they they go back into that deception mode where it's like oh you're you're right i went too far and and um i you know i i can do better and i can change yes um and so there yeah that's that's how it's going to go yeah that's it that literally those words you just said are ringing in my ear from a recent session uh uh interesting yes literally living through exactly almost forbidden so that's uh that is all that's going to go down yeah all right aj we have other another question yes we do corey wants to know if either of you saw the netflix uh documentary bad vegan and explain why someone stays in a relationship like that uh have you seen it doug this is about about sarma from pure food and wine um yeah this is a this is a it's really a um not quite a cult story it's it's really just a a highly agreeable woman sort of under the influence of an extremely disagreeable sociopath guy um and to the point where she blows up her entire business and reputation and goes to jail in the end um so i think that it's a very complex story um but but mostly this is just she she has a personality that makes her vulnerable to a type of predation that is old as humanity itself um we actually you know if you if you really look into it we we used to be even more disagreeable as a species if you look at chimps they are super disagreeable they will kill each other on site if they don't recognize if you're if you're from a different group of chimps it's like they don't even you don't even get a hearing you're just dead so um we've moved quite a quite a ways to a more agreeable species but they're still very manipulative terrible i mean doug has worked in the prison system and has met these people um and they are vicious and they are nasty and they will get what they want and they they zero in on their targets with great precision and she was a walking target despite being very successful and not being a total pushover you know you do discover in the documentary um i actually i had a i had a twitter relationship with her it's funny that the the so much of the story is about her twitter presence because back in the day when twitter was much more of a democratic playground um she and i both adopted our dogs around the same time and were equally obsessed with them and so we would share pictures of our dogs back and forth and um so i felt and she's a raw vegan and i was interested in raw veganism and there weren't that many people on twitter who were so i have this personal attachment to the story and and know that she's she's not a pushover she does have a disagreeable streak but she was in awe she was in this guy's thrall of his strong masculine alpha male routine um and he made her ridiculous promises like he had connections that could ensure the immortality of her dog um and this sounds crazy to us right it's like how could anyone fall for that but there are you know there's a lid for every pot out there when it comes to vulnerable women in sociopaths there's there's this incredible book that doug got me to read um called in the sea will tell um that is a similar story of of a young woman who uh shacks up with a with a disagreeable sociopath narcissist type um who gets her in major major legal trouble and when you read this story named buck yes yeah and it's you know when you read these stories you're like what is she thinking how can she be such an idiot how can she not see everybody else sees but this is deep in the female psyche we we are the more uh vulnerable sex and in in our ancestral history and we um you know look to men to provision and protect us and the sort of dark side of that is that we we can surrender free will to them um in a way that allows us to be controlled and manipulated in really devastating ways and i think that's what happened here exactly so aj you watch out for that charles guide yes that's hilarious i think you guys will like this question because it's a perfect general question and you can go as deep as you want on it it is from nat in the big five personality test what personality traits are the hardest to have if somebody wanted to pursue either a long-term friendship or romantic relationship um in other words if you had those what would be your biggest obstacle yeah or maybe yeah like i i that's what how i'm interpreting it like so many different yeah you know wait aj that's a really tough question because the first of all we go to the principle of identity which it doesn't really matter because you are what you are and there's not a damn thing you can do to change it yeah probably the most difficult thing uh would be extreme introversion because you're just you know if you're really an extreme introvert you're just not going to meet very many people and you're not going to want to so i had some uh lovely uh young ladies in my practice uh over the last 30 years that were would go years without any relationship and then maybe never have one and they were such extreme introverts like the idea of going on a dating app and actually going out with anybody was just like no no that's just too overwhelming i'm not going to do it so it becomes more so the longer we had a question on the podcast you missed this week because you were diligently working on the book but uh nate and i had a question about a from a woman who is sort of has be you know is afraid of men is afraid of interacting with men and not because of any bad experience with them but she's basically conditioned herself through avoidance um and baseline personality just introversion and a little bit of uh instability um and so the more you the the longer if you're afraid to drive on the freeway and you avoid the freeway for years um you're gonna be even more afraid to to take that on ramp and get on the freeway when you need to um and so it's you know we do we we get in these grooves for sure so extreme introversion we could we could run down the list i think high instability would be a problem obviously high disagreeableness is a problem um but this is context dependent you know it's it's not a problem to be an introvert if you meet your prince charming restacking books at the library together and it's just the two of you in your private universe and you never need anyone else and you you go home and watch netflix and play dungeons and dragons or whatever whatever librarians do um so it's it's only a problem if you're sort of aiming for the middle of the bell curve or trying to trying to socialize with people who are significantly more extroverted than you are and that's going to go that's going to apply to all of these personality traits i think it's a danger when we talk about the big five to assign value judgments to any of these personality characteristics there's no good or bad personality people will all the time come to us and say oh i have i have a bad personality you know it's um i i'm this and i'm mad and i'm this it's just a bad personality for what you know it's it's people have good personalities for some things and not optimal personalities for other things uh with the pleasure trap of course there's the perfect personality um and there are personalities that struggle more with it um so but the personalities that struggle with the pleasure trap are probably very good uh you know um disney world hostesses they're really great sales people for sales people yeah so it's it's you know that's it's all about context and it's all about finding the right environment for who it is that you are not trying to change yourself to fit yourself in an environment that is not suited for you yeah jen calls that the potted plant theory personality okay put yourself in the right environment don't try to make your make you the plant be able to handle things that you can't handle right right that is great advice brooke says should she wait to be at her ideal weight to date she has about 30 to 40 pounds to lose well i i would say a few things about that and that is that uh you know sort of what does the trend look like the uh is if she has 30 or 40 pounds to lose and have we had the same 30 40 pounds to lose for the last three years and we keep trying and nothing changes okay so that's that's one set of circumstances and in that set of circumstances we would say well of course not there would be no reason for us to do uh you know we're not thinking that life is gonna change that dramatically uh et cetera now if she's thinking well now i've lost 30 pounds in the last six months and i've got 30 more to lose but it looks like it's still happening uh well then that's that that's a completely different set of circumstances the uh i think jen would probably say it doesn't hurt you to be in practice to interview people to essentially go through these experiences and get more used to them the um there was a period of time certainly for me which continues to the present day not not in their post-beard life it won't the whole new era oh my god i i i'm so surprised but i thought i was going to get just nothing but grief about this but i think it was hilarious yeah but uh i that the but what what happened uh at some point for me was i realized you know i'm not that motivated to go out on this date i wrote i wrote to this young lady that's back in the days when i was writing young ladies now now it's more mature people i would write to the uh but i write to some young lady and i looked at some things on her profile and i thought god probably is probably not a fit you know i'm sensing big five conflicts etc but um but it's an opportunity and i remember a a uh a catchphrase from uh the the brilliant sales trainer tom hopkins uh and that and the the phrase was i never see failure as failure uh it's just an opportunity to practice my techniques and perfect my performance and so a date was an opportunity for me to go through this process and and kind of know how it is that i was going to do things and so i was certainly a better date after my 50th date than i was after my third one so and that's how i would look at this question from this lady it's like you're this is an opportunity for you to get used to this process to to get more comfortable with it uh so no reason not to and meanwhile uh there's nothing like meeting mr right but not being ready because if you meet mr wright and you weren't ready you'll go home and kick yourself and you're like yeah that's why i shouldn't have had this 30 pounds okay that will that will light a fire that like sometimes nothing else will and so it's like okay i'm not gonna let that happen again and that's uh so that's that's another reason to not sit on the sidelines and wait till you're ready i think especially if you don't have a lot of experience with the online dating world which is so weird that you have a lot of calibrating to do and that calibrating is not specific to any weight there's there's sort of a a sense of the the uh house of clowns that that online dating is um and sort of getting into that and really getting a sense of the patterns and starting to build up the correlations between what people say in their profiles and what that translates to on the date and um just getting not not just becoming a better date yourself and and sort of having go-to stories and all of those things that happen but also just getting a feel for the whole weird dynamic of online dating and how bizarre it is and there's also always of course the possibility that you you do meet mr right and you qualify just as you are i mean that is not you know impossible to that especially when we're talking about 30 pounds there's it's entirely possible that you meet somebody and who's quite attracted to you just where you're at um that you're attracted you back and you live happily ever after so so no no i don't think there's really any pressing reason to hold off on this right all good right john there's a wonderful comment about jen in the chat this is my first time hearing jen and seeing her in a video i so appreciate her communication skills and intelligence very straightforward and holds her own yeah thanks people are asking for advice dating when older post-menopausal like they're saying you know it kind of dries up literally and figuratively this is a family show aj the uh you know it's it's actually always the same problems whether you're 19 it really is 59 uh it's always uh i i can remember this this gal i was talking to and she scratches her head she goes how come how come the ones that i always want aren't interested in me but the ones i'm not interested in are always interested in me yeah welcome to life yeah life okay and uh and so that's why we call this the magic ten percent it's that there's we you know occasionally in life we're fortunate that we get to a place where we meet somebody that they think we're special and we think they're special and that's the magic okay and uh but that magic if it was easy to find we wouldn't we wouldn't have the swirling cauldron of heartbreak and frustration and loneliness that we do but the uh the human nature is designed to be a tough negotiator so even if you're quite an agreeable person you will find that in the romantic arena your ancestors were picky okay they wanted it just so and if it wasn't just so a lot of times they're just gonna pass and and their grandmother would say oh but he's a really good guy and you're like yeah i know he's a good guy but i've got you know essentially my ancestral history is telling me no deal and you can't you can't change that you can't make yourself like something that you don't like and that's so we see right in front of us that human beings are tough negotiators uh all of them so i i don't know anybody that's just have to go that's not a tough negotiator in this in this domain so uh that's just how it is and it's that way when you're 19 and it's that way well i know for a fact that's true when you're 19 and it's not long before i'll know that that's true when you're 69. i always i love this client that i had at some point she's in her 80s she's got she's interested in some guy in his 90s at the at the senior center but there's this young up and coming 77 year old who wears the sparkly jacket to the weekly dance and she's all flirtatious it's like the same story so his eyes wandering over to her and yeah it's it's really it does not meaningfully change there you go if you have time for one more elizabeth says is it really true that women are for v from venus and men are from mars that's a really actually underrated very good book yeah yeah there's uh there's a lot of truth in that book there's a lot of truth in that book there's a lot of bs in that book i don't want to like give it a wholesale recommendation but there's more truth than not yeah yeah that john gray actually put almost i think unknowingly put his thumb on a big issue that that essentially conventional psychology and pc psychology academic psychology were ignoring and that is that men and women are quite a bit different and so that that has been uh obviously when we look back at the the history of man woman relationships we can see all kinds of reasons for the women's movement and the the essentially uh feminism and all kinds of great authorship and a lot of bitter angry pissed off manifestos all of that is legitimate part of of human history however by 1990 it had arrived at the notion that hey we're all the same and don't say that anybody's bit bigger or better or bad or different than the other it's like that is complete bs because we are extremely different we are we are different but we are absolutely in the eyes of evolution equivalent in other words we're equally important to the evolutionary process and we have equal abilities with resp vis-a-vis nature but the kinds of problems that we are really good at uh are different so men are really good at throwing spears with force and deadliness and and and lust for the process okay uh also known as football social process and conversation in people's feelings and making sure that everybody's getting along okay and that everybody loves their food these are unbelievably different minds and so they and as and john gray happened to in a very unsophisticated fashion he's not a sophisticated guy he's not an academically oriented psychologist at all the guy is a marriage counselor and god bless him because he came out and said listen men are from mars from venus they're not the same and essentially the faster or the more completely we acknowledge our differences then then we're going to be able to address the conflicts there more intelligently and that was i i it was not not just funny but it had some deep insight great thank you well if people want more of either of you you both do private consultations right we do and also we have uh more of this type of thing where we talk about things on the living wisdom library on the podcast that we do there so that's available for folks so yeah we're here this is what we do and we wanted to do this aj because we uh obviously we're deeply in in chef aj's world of health weight loss optimizing your your life experience and that those these are super important and they're actually psychologically complicated that the the ideas that we bring also span all other kinds of areas inside of human nature and so that's uh we want people to know that that's true well thank you and i'll make sure i have all the information to get in touch with both of you in the show notes beautiful sounds good thank you guys this was really really a wonderful uh presentation and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back in about two hours when jackie paterneck is my guest she is a 17 year old who reversed her seizure disorder with a whole food plant-based diet she's going to show you the recipes that made
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