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Episode 190: Minimizing distortions, Worth it to disagree
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you're dr. Lisle I've been listening the show for close to two years now and I've enjoyed seeing the world through doctor dr. Lau's lenses and now additionally dr. Hawks I was wondering how dr. dr. Lisle reconciled two seemingly opposing thoughts that I've heard on separate episodes number one that CBT is an effective therapy to mitigate cognitive distortions and number two that the human brain and nervous system does an immaculate job of evaluating its effectiveness and status within a group if our brains do such an amazing job of evaluating feedback from the group why are cognitive distortions so common a really good question so let's let's see if we can let's see if we can understand we're gonna let me take a big sweeping view so that we understand the nature of life and what the mind is up to so the nature of life is for an animal is for the animal to make the best possible moves obviously for genes survival so we are replacing that slightly even we have a slight modification of that in human life and that is that we're trying to essentially cause optimize our happiness or our life experience as opposed to genes survival those two things are highly correlated but they're not a hundred percent so so with that being said it would be the the let's let's skip over that very important detail as we follow the logic down to understand Distortion so the in any animals understanding of reality at any point in its life is distorted so of a fox doesn't know where the the rabbits are it has a guesstimate about where the rabbits are and but it doesn't it's not sure and so it actually is operating under a distortion in other words it it doesn't know the exact concentration of rabbits on the three acres to its left versus the three acres to its right all I can do is get an estimate it may even have them quartered properly it may know that there's more likely to be rabbits on the three acres to the left as opposed to the right but it doesn't know how concentrated and what it doesn't know is that the three acres behind it are actually more concentrated than the ones on the left so you're you're always operating under Distortion the what Aaron Beck noticed with a very simple little feedback check looking at depression fifty or sixty years ago I think was the 1950s I guess a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania and he decided to do something very simple I don't actually know how this was born or why he did it but he he asked to press people to sort of write down their thoughts about things and he believed that he noticed in their reports that their thinking seemed to be distorted and he thought you know what I think that they have an unrealistically negative view of the themselves and the future and the world I just think that they're just generally negative and so then he thought to himself well maybe I ought to try to tell him that and sort of knock some sense into their head and point out to them that I actually think that their thinking is distorted and so he did that and he seemed to have some success and that that's the dawn of cognitive therapy now you might say wow that's the big revolution in revelation it's like yeah but it seems like that's what of course people have been naturally doing forever so it's like well gee I don't think I'm ever going to get a girlfriend not after Suzy doped to me it's like hey we'll listen kid you know there's always somebody else is gonna come along you know next year there's a new class of freshmen you know and you'll be a you'll be a junior so you're a little you're a little more cool than they are and maybe you get a shot at one yeah you know so the obviously the process of human beings talking to each other and reasoning through challenging situations involves the attempt to try to under ideal circumstances both people are attempting to minimize distortion and so a good friend is listening to a friend's possibly distorted inferences and attempting to correct those with more realistic information the so that's cognitive therapy I mean it's got a fancy sounding name cognitive therapy and cognitive distortion but and it sort of deserves it in other words the we could actually drop the word cognitive because what other kind of distortion would there be all right so the obviously it's a mental process of estimating the truth so it would have to be a cognitive distortion it couldn't be in couldn't be any other kind now and then that was sort of reasoning things through now remember this is the backdrop against the the two twin grand theories of psychology that are sitting outside of this are psychoanalysis which has its own view of essentially distortions and how it is that people come to be depressed and you know it's got its own deep conflicted Freudian morning and melancholia you know crap that that he cooked up and on the other hand you know behavior therapy or sort of behaviorism doesn't really have anything to say about this and so this was the humanists had their own ideas of various kinds but which made quite a bit of sense in other words Carl Rogers is inferring that people are sort of short of positive regard and that they need positive feedback so that's what he's thinking and which has some truth in it obviously we see the seeds of steam dynamics in that thinking but Aaron Beck is is coming along with something that is very sort of engineering style very matter-of-fact very you know he's a psychiatrist but he's not succumbing to psychodynamic crap and he's also not succumbing to the prescription from behaviorist ik science at that time saying you can't look at the phenomenology of the individual you know two behaviorist to asking people their opinions on why they think and feel the way they do is like oh no no that's not what we do we just watch their behavior you know forget about talking to them you can't do that that's gonna be misleading and Aaron back fortunately was in a Department of Psychiatry instead of psychology so he wasn't being browbeaten by the canarian dominance of the time and he says no I'm very interested in what it is that these people report I think it's important and and it looks to me like they are unrealistically negative and so now what I'm going to do is my new quote therapy is going to be to essentially reason with them and let's see if if if in fact they're making incorrect inferences about the data that they've seen and why it is that they're making the inferences that they're making and let's see if if I can change their mind and if I can change their mind I believe that the reason why they feel the way they feel is because they think what they think and that their feelings are a derivative of their thinking which is absolutely true okay so then there was you know fights in the literature and in emotion theory between people like George Mandler and Richard Lazarus at Berkeley when people some people saying oh no feelings are before thoughts and man they're saying no there's has to be thoughts before feelings and argue back and forth in the hotty totty literature of of early cognitive science and it's you know obviously true I think another Robert science was a big guy saying oh no feelings come first this is all total bullshit the the obviously information processing comes first and of course these guys couldn't possibly understand because they don't have a sophisticated of theory at that about how the mind works at that point so of course what the mind is doing is it's analyzing data it's a computer and this would be finally brought to the fore by tooby and cosmides who explained that the mind is a computer it's not like one it is one and it's running computations on genes survival and it has algorithms for essentially doing coming up with value assessments and so what's gonna happen is that it does the best it can given the data it's got at the time and the algorithms that it has to run them and obviously this is way past Aaron Beck writing in the 50s and it's way past the cognitive therapists and the cognitive therapy that you see today because they don't they don't understand any of the stuff that we talk about on this podcast but the concept of distortion and the questioners question is yes CBT was was the the first real basic mechanical observation of saying listen people's feelings are a derivative of their thoughts and the they actually came up with the name for the thoughts they called them automatic thoughts and I would go further and saying that the where they just said hey they're just automatic but actually they wouldn't have known that the thoughts are coming or emanating from deep algorithms that the organism has no choice is to think what it's thinking and and so the thoughts themselves lead to inferences about the nature of the person's relationship between self and reality and then those those inferences give rise to feelings and those feelings are prescriptions for action that's how the organism is designed so the cognitive therapy model is hey if you're getting a lot of depression in your feelings it's possible that this is unnecessary and that it's actually a derivative of distortion so they recognize if your cat dies and you're miserable because you just have a loss a that's a loss but if you are depressed because you feel like you just got fired and you'll quote never get another job if that's what's coming out of your mouth in front of your therapist the therapist can say well now wait a second you're saying that the way you think right now is since you'll never get another job and it arrestingly enough maybe that is kind of what you think you even deep down into your gut is you're feeling like you're you know in other words the the unconscious thought processes are giving rise to a verbal report that says I don't think I'm ever going to get another job and the therapist says okay well let's just pause right there let's let's examine that for what they call whether or not it's rational in other words is there an alternative hypothesis based on the evidence that we have and so it's a it's a mechanical method of therapy that says let's see yeah is it you know what evidence do we have but that's true how many times have you been hired before well six times and then how many times you've been fired twice okay so that you were fired on your second job then you got three four and five job then you got this job then you got fired from this job what makes us think that six is all there is in the hopper for you six different times somebody said that we will hire you so what makes us think that there won't be a seventh and eighth and a ninth okay so essentially pointing out the fact that the individual can be making an inference that isn't supported by the evidence this is what cognitive therapy is now so and it's pretty good it's the best thing that's been shown okay up to this point empirically for for a wide variety of psychological ills now I believe of course that it can be radically improved if it if it has a more sophisticated model as to the nature of distortions cognitive distortions are of course what it is that we're attempting to reduce in any kind of therapeutic process because distortions are to soar of mistakes in the persons or the animals decision-making that is the source of error and errors lead to failures and failures lead to bad things so that's you know the the the rabbit running from the fox who thinks it should turn left right this minute and it actually should have turned right pays for with its life it made a mistake okay so the the person that that goes to Las Vegas and thinks that they're gonna win and puts their family savings down on you know sixteen red on the roulette wheel if there is such a thing the that individual has has a distorted view of the probability of success and what that would mean so distortions are what it is that we are trying to reduce in order to improve the decision making of the organism which leads to better outcomes which leads to a better existence okay so cognitive therapy is a is a you know relatively crude but straightforward and relatively reasonable approach towards attempting to reduce distortion now the second question is to say okay well I brag about how sophisticated the mind is and how it works extremely hard at trying to figure out where the person stands visa visas the environment so how is that how does that square with the fact that that that distortions exist and that cognitive therapy is potentially or any kind of therapy is a is a device or a technology to reduce distortion well first of all all minds are operating under sourcing all the time it's just a matter of how much Distortion so the and and so I you know I'm not even wild about the concept of therapy because has a bizarre connotation to it that heart harkens back to the repairing of the freudian and neo neo Freudian you know and current psychodynamic thinking which i think is you know haywire at the core the because we don't need to be repented the what what is necessary is to make the mine more accurate so it's the removal of error that's going to help us we're attempting to fly a jet here and so the the LAT the least error we have in our computer systems and the least error we have in our understanding of engineering well reduce the likelihood of people being dead okay so the whole point is to what's therapy is isn't therapy it's learning for God's sakes okay it's improving the minds understanding of its environment and so there's several ways that the organism can come about by having distortions that you know can't can be reduced through education so let's look at one so basically life experience will cause you generally to have your distortions decreased so you will as you're born and as you grow up you start to understand the context of the world and your place in it you figure out that there's people other than your parents that know stuff and a lot of people know a lot more than your parents about a lot of things well you don't understand that when you're three but by the time you're 13 you do okay and so you start to find out that there are there are assets out in the world that you didn't know about and you also found out that there's liabilities out there that you didn't know about and so you so yes your your brain is learning details of the environment you're essentially like a fox that is you know been shipped into a new territory and dumped off and now you got to like learn the whole landscape you got to map that thing out there so you know where the swamp is or where the snakes are and where the rabbits hang out and everything else in the sudden you're learning learning learning learning and and the more you learn the more accurate your understanding the environment the more effective your behavior is because the less errors you make now the so your life experience ie the data that you have in your head helps you be more accurate in and how it is that you approach the challenges of life so it can be easily the case that individuals have had a relatively strange-looking data set has come their way and their life experience and it will tip them either overly positive or overly negative and that that data set which is inevitable okay think of a list of random numbers and random numbers have patterns in them that get people all excited this is what this is the Fiasco of stock market analysis okay the the notion that that we're gonna be see patterns there and we'll run correlation coefficients and then we're gonna bet on it okay so a person can for example and and you will hear this they'll have two or three things go wrong in a row and they're thinking that they have bad luck that this isn't their day or it's not their season or whatever they have pity listen it's not this isn't the way it is this is it isn't it isn't necessarily at all it likely has their failures or their negative feedback has causes those causes are unmistakable to identify what they are and and therefore you may be able to change your odds by by understanding the the roots of why it is that you've had experienced failure so your experiences I had a person that that had a that at a company goes south on him and he was completely flabbergasted by this because his previous company had been very successful and he actually believed that the reason his previous company was successful is because he was smart and hardworking and honest and decent and I explained to him no that isn't why you were successful you're successful because you're smart and decent and honest and hardworking and lucky okay so you forgot the fifth variable magic sauce okay what's that the magic sauce the magic sauce exactly okay and so so therefore you know this was important and he had not actually understood the nature of the competitive reality so that marketplace well enough to really dig into the probability and statistics and as a result that's why he took a chance in the first place so because he was overly optimistic and believed that hard-working and decent and honest and smart it was gonna be enough it's like well he lucked out good for him okay but it but it set up a distortion in his mind and in the people that invested it in the second time around that you know that he that he had this special sauce it's like no he didn't he had all the variables than anybody has for success except the second time around he didn't get the fifth variable that would be critical okay so so therefore quote therapy is going to be about a sophisticated education about the nature of by listening to people and understanding what they're thinking we try to get clear about what inferences they're drawing from the experiences that they've had and we try to figure out whether those experiences are actually and the inferences that they're making from those experiences are actually mapping onto the competitive realities that actually await them in further interactions with the marketplace and sometimes they don't sometimes the person is oh let me give you just an example that it's not a great example but it is an example so let's suppose there's a young lady that's struggling in the dating world and she's carrying around 20 extra pounds now because she herself doesn't mind if a guy is 20 pounds overweight or not she just can't seem to feel like it would be that big a deal so she's pretty and you see that she goes to the hair place and has beautiful hair and his beautiful makeup and his beautiful clothes and yet she can't find the magic 10% and so she's like God you know what's the deal and the and so she's got a distorted view because she's sitting inside of a nervous system that that is has a bias built into it because it's a female brain looking at the problem instead of a male brain looking at the problem and so she actually doesn't understand just how many chips she's leaving on the table okay so that that would be an example of someone who it's not like they don't know that there's that it's not an issue but they can underestimate the issue and how much variance in their success is going to be writing on that on that variable so that just is my entrepreneur underestimated how much luck had to do with success in his endeavor in endeavors you know the so some people may be thinking that this for example the luck issue is a jaded view of reality it's not publishers understand this finally after a century of miss investing in what they think is a great book okay they finally realized it's a waste of time for new authors that we don't know what they could be could do what we're gonna do is we're gonna give thousands of authors a shot at it and put a little tiny bit of money on each one of them and then the right that's the right algorithm rather than then us huddling around a table and saying well we think this one is really good so we're gonna put 250,000 dollars behind this one and that's the right way to do this because this is a great book it's like no no no no that is not the right idea the right idea is to publish you know 15 books give each of them 15 grand publicity and that gives us 15 shots it's something we don't see coming that's how the publishing industry works okay so they've done that because any other model has fallen flat on its face so the idea of an old editor in the 1940s you know looking at a couple of books and scratching their chin and really deciding which one to bet on yeah that's over that's that that model of decision-making is now buried by a much better understanding of the the essentially the unpredictability of success so it's not jaded to say that you that that you could have a distortion in your own understanding about the causes of success and failure in a given domain now so you're a personal experience can be can have been biased and you could be therefore making it would be very honest for it to be biased in other words you're you don't understand the situation you've you've had you've looked for a correlation you believe you see a pattern and it looks like there's a pattern but actually the law of small numbers has got you and you don't understand that it isn't the way you think it is and so this is where the mind despite its magnificent capabilities can be limited in its ability to make accurate distortions and so a wise person that knows them knows the landscape better than you know it can actually educate you and therefore reduce your error and therefore help you now another source of distortion is personality so if you can imagine that probably the least distorted personality if you were to imagine this would be an extraordinarily bright person you know with a personality that went right down the middle of the big five bell curve so they're neat note neither no or Pando close for 50 percentile 50th percentile conscientiousness the fiftieth percentile on on introversion extraversion and agreeableness and on emotional stability that individual would have exceptional insight into how other people are likely to react to things because they themselves would have the least distorted position from from their own egocentric bias to be looking at other people's behavior and anticipating what they're likely to do if you are highly conscientious individual you would be more likely to make mistakes and inferences about other people's behavior what it means so for example somebody that agrees to do something and then flakes out you might infer well they don't really like me they're disrespecting me etc etc when really they're just kind of flaky they're just at 35th percentile conscientious human and you didn't understand that and so therefore you're over you're over reading what you think you're seeing there and you're making a mistake so you can see that the further you get away from your fellow man in terms of your view the more likely you are to make mistakes now you might say well shouldn't an average Joe than average IQ be in the best position no the the more brains you have the more computing power you have the more capability you have to make the limp at least errors and so you you undoubtedly open up some error variance if you're exceptionally bright because you will sometimes overestimate what other people are capable of doing mentally so that that that channel opens for error but generally what you would want if you were trying to build the superb coach for humans is you would put that person exceptionally bright and then right down the middle of the the big five the now so personality anything where a person is away from the mean this is another source of distortion the so so now we're seeing the two major sources of distortion that leap out at us one of them is environmental and the other one is genetic and so any human thought feeling and experience is nothing other than an interaction between environment and the genes so we would expect to find two sources of error in the system one of them would be experiential ie the database is distorted and the other would be the the underlying architecture of the system ie the the genes are distorted so you can an exam a great example of a hyper conscientious person having a distorted genes would be a hand washer that's washing their hands 80 times a day okay or an anorexic so these there or germ folk you know germ phobic of various kinds you know I don't know airplane phobic whatever any kind of high anxiety individual you're looking at a nervous system that is overestimating the worst-case scenario so this is this is an example of how the genes are are driving distortions and therefore they're driving error and they're driving unpleasant fallout as a result of that error if you were for example not very conscientious and extremely open then those distortions would lead you to take risks that seem reasonable to you but then will very likely wind up in tragedy okay so that's the other way that it works so another source of distortion for a mental process would be chemical so if you're you've got drugs in the system alcohol etc or sleep or actually possible injury a brain injury so any assault on the integrity of the neural architecture in any way is going to add distortion to the minds ability to make estimates of its nature of relationship between self and environment and this is why alcohol is called liquid courage in other words if if a guy's gonna go up to a woman at a bar and he would be anxious about it it's a good idea to down a couple of scotches and tamp it down the anxiety okay so that's that's why that's that's why that works that way that facilitates that process okay now they another source of distortions is going to be the mismatch between the world that we find ourselves in today and the world that the neural circuits were designed for so the pleasure trap is something that comes to mind so the pleasure trap and all of its guises is a is a way for the organism to get a distortion and therefore make self-destructive decisions or costly decisions as a result of that the ego trap is a it's another trap where the modern environment can extend the the ego traps reach instead of being a short-term social phenomenon it can turn into a lifetime or a long-term mess you also have other situations in the modern environment so you've got you've got this you know social pressures and expectations around amount around romantic relationships that lead to marriage etc etc so that's another host of problems you also have a the anxiety and high sensitivity to the notion of bad news and so you have people worried about burning issues you also have people worrying about you know essentially overestimating the likelihood of tragedy happening to them because they're seeing tragedy on the news etc etc so there's a Darwinian distortions are a set of distortions that that are can be encoded in the system because they're evolutionarily useful but but they are but they are distorted so for example if you hear a twig snap in the woods the first inference you make is predator even though it's exceedingly likely to be wrong so it's a it's an adaptive distortion but it's a distortion it's not distorting the Seabee on what would be the the highest and best use of the organisms musculature at that moment no it should get ready to run every single time it hears that thing even though it has no additional evidence that it might be a predator so the the system was shaped properly in order to run that motivational calculus but when we look we see that it's quite interesting how the inference that the organism is making phenomenology of the organism is oh shit what's that okay and if you were to ask a person its estimation of whether or not that's a predator at that instant it's intuition is God it could be one in five when the realities is the real likelihood is is one in five thousand so so anyway the the long and short of it is the mind is exquisite and brilliant it's running all kinds of data analysis to try to give the person an accurate view of the situation it finds itself in however the situation it finds itself in is inherently very complicated and the individual themselves is born with inherent individual differences that make it have a distorted computer and so as a result its experiences also couldn't possibly be a fair sample of perfectly unbiased sample of what life is going to be like okay so as a result as the person goes on in life and has more life experiences they get increasingly better calibrated at the likelihood of you know tragic failure versus grand successes and so this is why a thread boys by the way 85% of them believe that they're going to be professional athletes okay so eight thousand four hundred and ninety-nine of them will be wrong out of those ten thousand okay so the one of them one in 10,000 will be so it's so tragedy that the other 8,000 499 you'll have to face they just have to face a recalibration a removal of the distortion that they're sitting on as eighth graders so that's the very long answer to what is actually a great question about the nature of distortion cognitive therapy and and you see now in as I go through the distortions you're seeing a more sophisticated view of the nature of the generation of distortion than you would have in cognitive therapy cognitive therapy doesn't understand anything about behavior genetics that's not part of its playbook and yet it vaguely would understand that experiences would drive Distortion it wouldn't know anything about Darwinian distortions it would certainly recognize chemical distortions and if they if they were thinking about it and which they're not so the cognitive therapy I recognized it as a cousin to what it is that I do it's a it's a distant cousin that was a forerunner of what I consider you know cutting-edge modern clinical psychology which is clinicals which is essentially cognitive therapy that is embedded in the biological Concilium sub evolutionary psychology absolutely fascinating dr. Lisle you said it was a long answer it's 40 minutes but all I have to say is I missed you [Laughter] Jen coulda said it in 15 but nothing against dr. hawk at all she knows how much I adore you know and enjoy hearing her talk but no we missed these these long explanations it's really complete all right all right what else we got all right so our next question is this is actually it's perfect timing because you were talking a little bit about this so dear dr. Lyle hmm I have your dr. Lyle I've often felt anger when someone seems to misunderstand something perhaps honestly or perhaps disingenuously in something that is approaching an argument the feeling often keeps me from explaining exactly what I mean because I just expect that the exact points of the disagreement are disingenuous so it won't matter and I will only regret justifying myself and quote opening up you've often mentioned that communication in relationships isn't faulty the way most psychologists say but you've also talked about getting crystal clear so should I beat my jeans and get crystal clear in these cases or is the inference that it won't change a thing correct okay we're sort of we've got to as I see it two very different questions and I think that they're being molded in the questioners head so one of them is going to be the nature of anger and argument in general the other is going to be the nature of repeated anger and argument within relationships that's a whole different issue okay so the so let's begin with the nature of argument so the per the way this person is tracking their internal experience is admirably accurate in other words as soon as we begin to sniffing argument we pick up cues that the person is starting to use tactics either either in the logic of what they're using or it could be in any any of the five communication channels so it could be facial expression body posture touch voice tone or the words themselves so any way you slice it we're picking up cues that they are intending to win okay now it's going to turn out that the reason why we're angry is that we believe that that they are not playing fairly so we can sniff that they're not going to play fairly so this is clearly an ancient game theory dilemma for humans when there's a disagreement so we what will happen is people if you start to pick up cues and the cues are when I stalk about the magnificence of the mind one of them is what are we talking about and what is the social context right now what seems to be the point of dispute and is something about this are they aiming for some resources here to take them away from me rightfully in some fashion and that they're they're gonna try to wangle to get these resources so they're gonna be treating me unfairly and which means that they are essentially inferring in some fashion that they deserve these resources and that I don't deserve them or my share of what I believe my share is so there's a that those resources could be esteem easily okay so it could be like listen don't you know who I am I blah blah blah okay so this is and what I believe to be the case is that in these essentially resource allocation disputes that took place in Stone Age villages that when there was a disagreement notice how voices rise they do not remain at the same level the the decibel intensity increases this indicates to me that the arguers were attempting to [Music] display their their their irritation that they are being egregiously cheated and that they want to draw attention of other members of the village because they're gonna want to have a jury and then what happens is is that like let's suppose it's no you told me that you were going to give me five coconuts for that carving and now you're coming with three and that's it wasn't our agreement okay I can already feel myself like I've never been been in the situation I'm already getting hot under the collar okay so avoidance is that you can you can feel like a No this is what our deal was okay and so you can feel that anger starting to happen and what we're we're doing is is that we're bringing in a crowd okay and we're attempting to win this thing very quickly because the crowd is not very interested in our dispute they are vaguely interested in our dispute and our increase of our voice tone is a signal to the village that we need you know we've got a dispute here between two village members and we need a jury okay to decide this because we've got a disagreement and we aren't gonna resolve it so somebody's gonna have to back down okay and so that the jury is going to decide who needs to back down who isn't playing fair and so as a result what's going to happen is what I notice in human argumentation is that people do not play fair they go they use rhetorical tricks they go right for the jugular they give biased samples of the evidence they conjure up ancient history with respect to that other individual that has nothing to do with the current pattern but is you know tangentially damning and and as a result this is what when you start to smell that the person on the other side is gonna dig their heels in and that they're going to go to the mat on this dispute you feel the same this is game theory okay so game theory says don't let them steal a march on us I'm be just as shitty as you can be okay and in fact I can remember when I was a little kid I don't know I was having some problem in kindergarten or I don't even remember yeah and so I there was an old guy named Mel at this auction in downtown Long Beach that we'd always go to the oxygen because my dad was really cheap and he just loved the auction you get things for you know ten cents on the dollar and there's the old auctioneer named Mel of course it's just tough tough as an old boiled owl and my dad was a you know would've been a young man I would have been five who my dad was 35 and Mel was an old tough guy and there was some discussion about you know me and some fight at school that of course didn't happen that could happen and I was worried about it and and and my dad said like all good responsible conscientious men well you know you don't start it but you finish it you know I mean and so I was clearly had some kind of anxiety and Mel said no way no you hit him first [Laughter] sort of striking contrasted strategy okay that and my dad cracked up he's like yeah okay let's think that through that's not necessary if we think of fights inevitable you go ahead and hit him first and so not that this ever happened in my life but it was it it was an interesting sort of moral sanction from the elders in the village like hey don't get hit first then you're in a disadvantage so similarly argument clearly works this way go ahead and hit first hit hard ok sucker punch him and so you can you can feel this if if you didn't have any bed or evidence of this look at the presidential politics that have been going on for the last several years it's unbelievable like it's all about hitting sideways see them when they give one and when they don't see it coming as hard as you can ok so the so the person's sort of knowledge that they can see a wait a second I find myself getting angry that's right that's your internal signal that you're being treated unfairly and you're gonna threaten them that they better back off where there's going to be consequences ok that's what's going on so obviously that's not gonna happen too much repetitively with people in your environment and once you've got some boss it's constantly asking to stay overtime and you're not in a position of power to tell them go to hell ok so usually but you may have some mother-in-law that's just always irritating you because she's we've got this kind of a situation and it's repetitive but now you understand what's that there what's at the root of this normally we wouldn't have a repetitive problem with somebody unless what we have is a disagreeable person on the other side of the equation and a disagreeable person by genetic nature has a biased view as to what's fair and so they're always feeling like our offering is not adequate and therefore they're they're snarling at us that we're cheating them and then we can you know in the early game we may feel guilty but after repeated exposures to this it's like no you're out of line and we feel ourselves rising to the occasion to try to defend our time in our energy against someone who has unreasonable demands so that all being said that's the explanation of the anger mechanism and why you feel what you feel because you are caught in a game theory dilemma as soon as you snip that somebody's going to treat you unfairly and in a negotiation you can feel that you better defend yourself so now in a relationship if this is happening consistently over time we got a serious problem now a therapist of course modern therapist doesn't have any idea why anybody's angry okay they think it's you know hurt and and that that you know there's bruises from the past that remind some god-knows-what they think they're just convoluted messes okay no the bottom line is is that if you have anger it's because you believe that the other party is not treating you fairly if you're in a relationship where this is a repeated issue over time this is not a communication problem this is a personality conflict okay this is not fixable the arguments that you're having are Groundhog Day they're happening all over again next week the week after that two weeks later three weeks later two sundays up it's like it's always going to come up because there's no underlying fix for this the reason it's happening repetitively is the other person is not reasonable or we're not reasonable and the interaction between those two individuals gives rise to this dynamic and that dynamic is not fixable okay now the so what I will argue is that people are actually exquisitely good at communicating in relationships now let's suppose we have people who are actually very quite happy a lot of the time and then they have an argument okay and it's pretty bad and now that's different because what can happen is is that these instincts that say hey I got a win okay and and people can feel like what's what's at stake here is when we start arguing with someone close to us that we generally have trusted that we believe that they value us at a certain level and now the negotiation the inferences that we're making about the nature of this negotiation are that that no we don't feel that way so I have a friend of mine you know it has really a terrific marriage but he himself is pretty touchy and the wife is Saint okay but every once in a while she will call something called give him feedback that she believes his is fair and reasonable and you know if it hits him the wrong way because he's pretty touchy he can really go off he can get really upset and and and so she you know she's not trying to teach him a lesson but every once in a while she just trips over it so he's you know he's the seventieth or 80 percentile disagreeable she's a 20th the 30th percentile she's super very very agreeable so in general they are in an equilibrium and the relationship works but every once in a while it tips that way and incidentally it's always that way it's never that he accidentally over insults her yeah I mean that never happens the the blow ups that they've had over the years are always the same direction it's always the disagreeable human has gotten you know the agreeable human has given what she considers to be reasonably honest feedback about something and the disagreeable has all been a shape okay now fortunately for them this doesn't happen often because they're essentially in a in an agreeable disagreeable equilibrium but yeah so when you have something like that happened the what we have to do so if it's the relationships important if the stakes are high on any dimension what we want to do is we want to do crystal clear so what crystal clear is is taking a specific dispute and being very careful about how we question you know what message are you trying to say here what exactly are you trying to say and so when usually but well between two partners where the where we're not talking about a dispute that has now turned itself into a mushroom cloud of essentially a vicious cycle so the relationship of good relationships in a to a cycle where we're sending the same signals to each other and reaffirming our desire to be in the relationship when you're in an argument you feel the things start to spend the other way and the human instincts desire to win the argument can start to move us into a vicious cycle okay yeah I II you're treating me unfairly so I'm gonna go for the jugular and go after you unfairly okay and then the other person sees that and they're like a boy well then I need to defend myself in terms of my reputation the Klan here so now I'm gonna go after you okay so that severe can very quickly spin into a vicious cycle it's so fast it can happen literally with one comment or even a smirk okay that's how sensitive people are to which direction that particular dynamic is running okay so crystal clear is a way where what we're going to do is by very careful questioning and allowing the person to express themselves and not interrupting them challenging them what we are going to do is that we are we are essentially diffusing the Stone Age instincts that says I have to hurry and win this argument very very fast because the jury is only going to listen to this for about three minutes and then they're gonna render judgment okay it's like no no no no you go right ahead and I'm gonna ask you why you're saying what you're saying and why you're thinking what you're thinking thinking and why you're feeling what you're feeling and I want to hear the whole context so when I said this that really upset you tell me why okay and then we let them talk and talk a talk a talk a talk and we do not and we ask them clarifying questions now very often just by doing this sometimes we will as we're listening to this we will hear the distortion area well hear that they're making inferences and they're drawing in data to that theory that is that is incorrect okay but we wait we don't dispute it then we let them get the whole story so that's step one they tell their whole story step two is we feed it back okay so step two as we say okay so when I said this then you said this and that's B as you felt this and you were thinking this and then we had that situation before that was kind of similar and then five years ago you know this happened and I made a comment at your mom's place and you think that's related to that and you think that's related about and this that this that and then you're thinking this and you're thinking that and so now you're thinking that this is really what I meant and this is worthy what I'm thinking and you're thinking that this is what it means about what I feel about you okay so we get it all out and we feed it back and what you're gonna see when you do that is a relief on the person on the other side they were feeling the stone-age panic that they weren't going to be able to make their case and not only do we let them they make their case in exhausted detail we feed it back to them and make sure that we've got it right and very often they'll correct us like no no that isn't quite what I'm feeling what I'm feeling is this like okay so then we feed it back again so by the time we do that there is a you know what they start to infer on the other side of the equation is that we're not in a vicious cycle okay it's a tremendous signal to the person on the other side we are not in a vicious cycle okay that in fact I care enough about what you think and what you feel and I'm worried about what what is that you were you thinking I'm coming from but I need to understand it and I'm going to take exquisite detail in my understanding of this I'm gonna get it so that I understand you really well because I'm super motivated to understand where you're coming from that's a huge message to give somebody on the other side of the table okay that's how we stop the vicious cycle okay now the next thing we do if we are you know if you can learn this and map it out you can do it mechanically - it doesn't you know you can do this you can learn this as a couple if this happens once a year and it's really tough on you then you you can learn this and you can say let's do it this way and your instincts won't let you do it you won't want you to do it but you can it's learn about ya it's a way to as we go back to the first question it's a way to learn how to reduce your distortions okay so you're wired by evolution to have a distortion about the other person's motives and to actually throw distortions into an argument that makes you more likely to win it in order to defend your esteem ie whatever resources that you have at play in this thing so instead what we're gonna do is we're going to you know really get careful about the analysis the problem to remove all possible distortions okay and then before we're going to come back and we're going to tell the person where it is that we believe their distorted we're going to contextualize the whole situation in a way that it's going to start to spin it in a virtuous cycle which is where we want this thing and that's that we're going to bring back the context and we're going to tell them a little bunch of things about them that we find super valuable so we're gonna flood the circuit okay then the next thing we do is we say okay here's how I see it differently than you okay I agree here I agree here I agree here I agree here and I agree than when I said that I was kind of pissy because I was hurt but this is what it is that I was really thinking and this is what I'm worried about and this is how this went down okay so this is how it is that you know if we're motivated and we've got actually a very good relationship but we will have occasionally threats to that relationship that can get scary you know so if you had a big fight yesterday and yet these are two people that care a great deal about each other but the fight itself is an indictment of the relationship but what we gotta do so we got to suck it up and try to quote communicate very effectively you know in ways that beat the djinns okay because when people are angry they'll send affection kids they're threatening they're really raw and worried etc so that can happen now my my ex one when I say that therapists do not know what they're talking about when they think that the cause of the problem and relationships is communication problems is because long-term or current conflicts of interest in relationships is evidence of personality conflict it's not evidence of problems in communication in the relationship okay this what I'm talking about is the way you more quickly and more effectively repair and get better at the fact that relationships because there's a lot of chips on the line can have some scary moments and that this is how it is that we can transcend those and and not you know and not essentially cause more misery than we need to it's a it's a it's a way of thinking through how to remove distortions as as surgically and as humanely as possible that's what this is
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