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Episode 233: Helping friends, aliens, PMS, anger management, reducing anxiety
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i feel like i'm in the process of losing my best friend she's been trying to leave an emotionally abusive narcissistic relationship with a much older man for a while she's 31 he's 67. until very recently i was giving everything i had in the tank to convince her to leave this man promising to even send her thousands of dollars to make the cross-country move i have even helped to set her up as a freelancer and she has proven that she can make a steady albeit humble income doing so still she seems unwilling to leave him for a variety of complicated reasons while on the one hand i'm trying to continue being kind and understanding of her stick another part of me feels completely fed up i feel like if i continue sticking by her even though she's wasting her life i'm almost endorsing how she is choosing to live her life she's my best friend and means a lot to me i have no other friends except for my immediate family but i'm quite frankly at this point where i don't know how this friendship can continue if she is living her life heeding a set of values that i in no way endorse of her own admission she has no future with the sky but whenever i try to have this conversation with her she freezes up and goes silent on me for weeks until she messages again with a complete change in topic what would you do doctors if you were in my position i feel very sad but also completely exasperated thank you so much for your wisdom oh i can jump in i've been on both sides of this equation a couple of times and there's a lot of various a lot of sort of principles that we talk about that are emergent in this question that we can revisit uh but i i definitely sympathize because i'm i i have definitely i have been the uh sort of bad decision-making needy best friend who's not taking the very good sound advice from another friend and i have i have also been the friend who is desperately trying to dispense the advice to make better decisions to a friend who just refuses to do so so um and this i think this is to to some degree a particular feature of adult female friendships i don't think i don't think dudes struggle with this in the same way that women do women female friendships are uh sort of a unique animal and there's a i think women don't often understand that friendship friendship is really you know uh it's an insurance policy so we've talked about this before so you're you're essentially paying the premium on uh you know the the content of that friendship by investing your time and energy listening to their problems and staying up late phone calls and sending sending messages back and forth and you know watching movies together and going out to coffee or whatever you're doing all of those things are how you're you're investing over time in that person and you're doing so at some level strategically because you were investing in them being there for you when you need them so all you know relationships are all sort of baseline there's there's an element of transaction um in the way that we talked about last week when we talked about the unconditional love question um and so there is a there's a transactional dimension to friendships as well which you know we sort of forget about we remember that it's present in uh work relationships and and romantic relationships to some degree when there are qualification issues in particular but we forget about it in friendship there's sort of this idea especially in my experience between um women that you know you got to stick by each other through thick and thin and it's it's a you know friends forever kind of deal and you're feeling very frustrated that she's not taking your advice because she's not she's not valuing your advice you've been putting yourself out there again and again and again trying to really you know listening to all of her woes and and hearing her talk smack about this guy you know telling her you know she's she's telling you that there's no future um she's she's complaining about him to you probably because she doesn't have anybody else to complain about him too and so you were trying to solve the problem for her to make yourself more valuable to her as part of the insurance investment scheme and just because that's just what friendship is and how it works and and she's not she's not taking your advice she's essentially just what what that reads to your nervous system is is that she's not listening to you uh and so of course that's going to generate frustration of course at some point the cb on continuing to give her advice that she's just not going to take really runs itself out and you're you're really tired of listening to the same song and dance from her like hey i have this terrible problem please help me solve it and you're giving her perfectly good ways to solve the problem and she's not taking you up on them so this is of course it's going to be frustrating um and so you uh you're you're in a position where the this this moment of this friendship it's not to say that there's nothing here that can ever be redeemed and that you two can't be close again but she is essentially not qualifying to be your friend right now um with this relationship being so central in her life and there's no you you don't owe her this this dogged uh perseverance of of attention and to just continue throwing bad advice or good advice at someone who's not going to take the advice it's like just it's a bad investment um and so i would just recommend you know that this is this is sort of a uh we need to come up with a cute term for this because it's not quite ghosting but just distancing yourself from the situation because she's clearly not she's not going to change her mind and take you up on it she's running her own cb and we don't know all of the components of that i can i can tell you that i have been when i've been the the sort of bad friend on the side of this i i will behave in very similar ways that you were describing her behavior i will you know say things like oh yeah i know that there's no future and i know it can never work because in some sense i'm trying to acknowledge that your your efforts are appreciated and understood and that like i get that you're trying to help me and so i'm gonna give you some status for that um and so but that doesn't mean that's how she really clearly it's not how she's really feeling it's not really what's at the heart of the cb what's really at the heart of the cb is that she's staying with him for whatever the reasons are we we don't know from this question exactly what all of the dynamics are but there's some constellation of her own personality features her own agreeableness her own lack of probably financial independence particularly since you're talking about her sort of humble income that she's making freelancing so she's she's feeling both hemmed in in terms of what other choices she can make in her life and then she's also there's some she's she's continuing to benefit from the relationship in ways that you perhaps are not even privy to or definitely don't understand for whatever whatever reasons so she's running her cb she's trying to kind of manage you because she knows what to expect from you she knows where you stand it's very clear where you stand and what you've told her to do and and what you believe is the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do and that's why she's going silent on you she's probably a fairly agreeable person who and it's very hard for agreeable people to leave even bad relationships so keep that in mind is probably the less agreeable of the two of you um she's she's struggling with that um and then she she is managing you um by going silent when she knows that she's gonna run up against your your essentially your criticism because you're not approving of the choices that she's making and she doesn't feel like she is empowered to leave this relationship for for whatever reason either because there's some benefit she's getting from it or she's too scared to leave um and or some combination of those two things so uh there's there's really you you have done from how this question is laid out pretty much everything that it sounds like would be reasonable for any friend to do and i would just i don't i you know i always um of the feeling that there's very rarely a need to make any big declaration of these things but you just sort of distance yourself a little bit and if she squawks about it and complains like where are you where have you been just you can say something like i just really feel like this this relationship is a little toxic to my dynamic with you and you know i feel like i there's nothing more i can do to help you with it and until you're until you want my help to make a plan and to do something then i'm just really i think i need to take some time and and a little distance from our friendship right now um and you know just i i'm not severing ties and i'm i'm here if and when you need my help but until then i'm gonna let you kind of work this out on your own because i think you've you've got stuff that you need to do um and i and really only have that conversation if it really comes to it and she's pushing you otherwise i really i don't think that conversation is even necessary i think you just get a little less responsive and you you just manage your own um your own investment and the level at which you were trying to live her life for her um this is kind of a corollary of the question we had last week or the week before about letting letting people run their own show letting children run their own show letting adults run their own show it's really it's her life it's her cb you've made your role and what you're offering her very clear and you're not you're not taking that away from her if she wants to take you up on it but you're not going to try to just beat your head against the wall and offer her help that she doesn't want at this point so that's how i would generally approach that wonderful dr lyle what say you do you have anything else to add to that yeah no all good comprehensive perfect all right well that was easy yeah here we go okay what's next for us all right dear doctors i have a question regarding alien abductions i once read a book called communion which is an alien abductees accounts of being abducted over several years in this book he also detailed other people's experiences john e mack the former head of psychiatry at harvard where gent went to college did a decade-long study on 200 alien abductees and did not find any obvious pathologies present across the study subjects if mental illness is not to account for the feeling of being abducted by aliens what are the doctor's takes on this strange phenomenon how how classic some guy in the department of psychiatry is going to do some worthless study so he can get on a tabloid front page the uh this is you know you did a decade long study of 200 people that that claim this like this is something interesting what a total waste of time the uh all we're obviously talking about here is some some probably some degree of extroversion obviously high openness probably not very high conscientiousness and probably not very smart so if we took the average iq of the average object abductee there's a good chance it's below the mean so uh because if your your stupid friends just might believe you and give you give you a little status for it so now i wouldn't expect any psychopathology out of this i just expect some rather run-of-the-mill nonsensical humans that believe in all kinds of crazy [ __ ] that's what i think wonderful yeah that's what that is i mean what what a i mean what a ridiculous thing for this guy to do i mean really how many people do you need to study before you figure out that these are just a bunch of low end not very smart whack jobs that there's nothing wrong with them just do you know do 10 let's not spend a decade and do 200. what a what a fool all right or but really what it was was grandstanding because it was the the sexiest thing that this guy could sell at a conference that's what that's what drove that whenever you can't figure out something why somebody's doing something look for status and that that's what that research was all right all right all right i take it you don't believe me no or alien abductions nor do i believe that people thought that they were abducted right i mean that's that's really occam's occam's razor answer to this question is that's what they have in common is that they were all actually abducted like let's just consider the obvious hypothesis like let's just take them at their word yeah sure right and despite you know the amazing thing is about that is that like all of the radar work that we do and and the motivation for the aliens obviously what the aliens wanted to do was they wanted to come and not talk to any of our heads of government heads of military heads of science or anything else no they wanted to talk to 200 morons that's who they wanted to talk to and otherwise leave no sign yeah yeah so anybody that it would say it is an idiot and anybody that believes it is an idiot and anybody that studies it is an idiot the whole thing is total fiasco dr lyle what do you think about the movie independence day that one was pretty well that's a good movie thank goodness it's totally basically a documentary all right well i i know better than to try to weigh in on that question when when doug's in that much of a rant about something feeling that disagreeable oh so your mystic chip your mystic chip is uh you know well yeah i think i think it's coming down to openness it's gonna listen and and status opportunity not only you know the the author of the study in the paper and his own status mongering but also yeah the you know doug's touching on it the sort of low-hanging fruit of of social status available to the local yokel who gets to go to the bar and tell a story about being abducted so oh god yeah yeah i would do it myself it's not tall tales you know like control for people like who's who's most likely to tell a tall tale in general yeah all of those characteristics that you're talking about with it with a dose of again the sort of the extra version to go weave weave a tail in a social setting about it to gain a bunch of status so yeah but he's he's uh the head of psychiatry so he's not thinking about the world this way um and uh yeah i i also just you know since i've been tarnished by my association yeah yeah right want to state for the record that i don't you know was not part of that department and i don't know the guy and don't completely have no knowledge of any research or any work that he's done and have nothing to do with my harvard experience there you go there you go you're all you're clean gotta defend myself here right all right what else our next question this listener actually has has has it right yeah and she starts with saying dear doctors especially doctor oh well thank god there we go dear doctors especially dr hawk i've been struggling with mood swings pms my whole life now however they've gotten worse over the past few months since i seem to let out my frustration on my partner now i really try not to take it out on him while i'm pmsing but i simply can't stop myself from obsessing over my exaggerated feelings and emotions i feel like i need so much more attention and signs of love that it that it makes it kind of hard and almost impossible for my partner to treat me right during this period small mistakes like not messaging or calling me back on time make me furious and when he tries to apologize i tend to stonewall him and twist his every word so that i get even angrier i'd really appreciate some tips on how to get along with my significant other during this special time and get some advice on how not to obsess over one's emotions pm ask the question that sounds like yours for me is the pms question yeah well yeah sort of irrational rage with pms is definitely i think an experience a lot of women share um and i think what you're seeing here is the you're saying that it's gotten worse as you've been taking it out on him more recently but i think you're probably seeing the the actually i i have i have a good friend who says this about my own pms that it's the only two days a month that i'm actually really myself and the rest of the time i'm i'm liking the i'm holding it together with the agreeable facade and so you're you're more in a position of power in that relationship if um it's it's uh you've been together for a while and so you're letting your you're you're more freely expressing your rage um during in in your neediness and all of the other like high high emotions that you're having at this time so i don't think it's that you've you you're experiencing worse symptoms than you were before but you're more prone to voicing them and um you know asking him to acknowledge them in a particular way so that's the first first place i would start there so i think you're just generally more in a position of power in the relationship and so your your your emotions are more likely to bubble up in their true form and you're going to share more of them and you're going to make more demands on your partner so it's not not that you're getting worse or that there's anything wrong with you you're just feeling more secure in your relationship and your true self is coming out to play a little bit so um and this is i mean this is just a completely common experience so i would give you the the general toolkit that i that i give most people around anything resembling sort of emotional instability which it sounds like you're probably somewhere on the you know not extremely emotionally unstable but you're on the right side of the curve if you're if you're having symptoms like this and they're getting worse around that time of the month where you're really having trouble modulating your moods and you're you know really prone to exaggerating things both for for good and ill you're probably just a less stable human and it's going to be very difficult if not impossible for you to change that so you're you're a reactive human just like you know cats there anybody who's lived with cats usually if you have multiple cats in the household one of them is nowhere to be seen when people show up at the door and the other one's coming out and looking for pets and socializing and the other one skitters off and goes and hides under the bed and you don't see it for three days it's just these are the the individual differences in like emotional stability inherent to any particular creature and you're more of a skittish reactive human and so just like you can't really train that cat to not be afraid when somebody shows up at the door no matter how many times somebody comes by just because that's how it's built you're probably always going to experience this high degree of emotional reactivity and the obsession and the demands on your partner and all this kind of stuff that's bubbling up around this time you're not gonna you're not gonna stop that from happening this is just kind of who you are and as long as you're you're gifted with womanhood and during your moon time you're gonna have this kind of experience so i tend to think of the best way to work with this is sort of retrospectively so pro actually preventative and retrospectively so i would sit down with your partner and explain uh personality and big five and individual differences and how you're a little less of a stable person you're over here on the bell curve and that makes you just more dynamic and exciting and part of that means that you're more prone to this really high degree of negative emotionality around this particular time of month um more more so than usual and so this is something to be expected and then you you recruit him as uh as you know a co-conspirator in that like you really just you're you're asking him to you know when it one of the the terms that comes from psychodynamic thinking and all kinds of wooy stuff but that i actually like a little bit and i will use with people is to to create a container for this kind of moment in your relationship so you're really asking him to partner with you in this process because you can't change who you are you're not going to suddenly tamp down these emotions and make them go away you're asking him to understand that they're emerging for a reason and that they're more exaggerated around this time of the month than at other times and so you know can he be present for you for that can he sort of you know not not take take it as literally and seriously at that time because it's a passing storm and then also use it retrospectively after you've had a big blowout after you've accused him of not responding to your texts quickly enough and just sit down with them and say i was insane earlier and i'm really sorry and i just you know i just i wasn't i couldn't be present in my emotions and i was just in a hyper elevated state and i really apologize and can we just reset things and so as long as you're retaining that mindfulness around your own behavior and and you've set the expectations accordingly and he's sufficiently over rewarded that he's not gonna run away when you you have crazy emotionality which it doesn't sound like he doesn't sound like he's too worried about that sounds like he's sticking around um then those are kind of the best ways to try to try to deal with this problem because you're you know you're asking the question like how to not obsess over your emotions like this is just this is just what you're doing this is who you are and how you're built um and it's gonna vary at different times in the month like it will for most women so it's really just about engineering the relationships that you have to accommodate that rather than trying to change who you fundamentally are wonderful dr lyle uh i mean all great the um i would i would say um like all of that makes a great deal of sense to me one possible little technique that that might be suggested to uh her husband would be to uh during that time to to flood your circuit so the um the this is uh and so again jen is painting a picture where they're co-conspirators it's the two of them against the fact that we've got a raging storm of neurons okay and you are not the problem that right the storm is the problem and you're in it together you're right beautifully beautifully uh conceived and so the the notion here is that one thing that can the what we see is that that we can see inside from this kind of turbulence sort of what the goals are and the important features are of the human organism in this case the woman in a relationship in other words the probably the biggest concern is am i secure in the relationship like it isn't like whether or not the apples that got delivered you know what i mean are tasty or not no the issue is my relationship my husband whether i'm secure whether i'm wanted whether or not you know the fact that i'm turbulent now and upset yeah my upsettedness is actually causing the very problem that it is that i'm very desperate to try to solve which is to try to be more more interpersonally attractive and therefore worth it and therefore get good feedback and therefore be secure so it's a very sort of frustrating firestorm and one of the uh the ways to combat this is for the man to uh basically uh you know hug you and whisper in your ear and say you know you're the most important person in my world you're i love you to death and you are invited and included in everything in my life and essentially we're flooding that person's nervous system we're speaking right down to the source code uh the source code is uh abandonment anxiety that that is the source code of the situation so we want to speak in as clear and and heavy-handed english that we can and physically which with the hugging and right up to the ear where it's super intimate that it's basically from my mind to yours this is what's inside my mind and that uh that flooding of the circuits literally uh in my and my my personal history with this has been that this is uh this sort of of uh behavior this sort of technique uh is is worth you know more than five hours of careful dissection and argument and careful you know analysis of why everybody's upset in other words we go right down into the source code and we sue that organism that at a primal level is very very anxious and upset so that's uh that we that's a piece to this puzzle that we can add depending on if the personalities can handle it and it works uh but i would offer that as a not only as a specific technique for this situation but a more generic technique is when there's issues in relationships we try to identify the source code threat and try to speak as directly and forcefully and effectively to that issue as possible and that that is uh the best leverage we have against these kind of problems i remember uh telling somebody you're invited and included and i had to say that three times i was like you're invited you're included come on and they got even yeah i was gonna say i think this is a this is a real personality dependent question as well because like if somebody did that to me if i was really upset i would feel a little patronized it would be like depending on the circumstances but the letting the cert like like like attribute anecdote flooding the circuits would work like in other words if you get really specific about why i'm invited and included and it's like really sort of like you're you're gonna you're gonna get really really directly specific about all the ways that i am valued and included then it's like okay all right then i'll then then we can work with that but just the sort of the the generally being told would not do it for me if i was really highly highly elevated in that particular abandonment fugue interesting i think it's gonna it's gonna vary a lot depending on different women and their um their pms experience sure worth a shot it's totally worth a shot and and again it's like giving him like he because he mostly you know with his male mind wants to fix the problem fundamentally um and so the worst thing as doug is alluding to the worst thing most men are are going to do in this situation is to rationalize it and and you know pick it apart and be like but i didn't say that i said this and this is how i went i'm like no don't do that and so enlisting him and explaining to him that you know he has this impulse to fix it but that's really probably not what you need most in the moment because you recognize that you're you were escalated and somewhat irrational um that that you know you can communicate to him you can give him the tools that are going to work best and empower him with those um to help him feel like he's more on board with this this the two of you against the problem routine so uh whatever that is for you whether it's it's the um source code uh you know abandonment swaddle or if it's something a little more specific that's sort of um encompassing more of the rational rational approach then whatever that particular blend is i think can you you'll find some equilibrium all right our next question which is kind of in a similar topic is uh what's the dear doctors what is the deal with anger management dr doug lyle has spoken before about how anger is a response to a perception of unfairness would this basically mean that if you're angry but not getting your way all you can do is distance yourself from the situation and people or gather more information and understand if your anger is potentially unfounded i guess i'm in a situation where i feel very angry and confident that i'm right but it feels awful is time the only way to get over it well this person is sort of uh you know asking an interesting question but with what the the specifics are always critical here so hard to to answer whether time will fix this or not uh the answer is maybe not depends upon what the what the circumstances are and what's happening now the anger is a an instinct and so it's an instinct to signal uh other people that have done something uh it is the first thing it is it's a it's an indication of conflict of interest between you and some entity it might be your computer screen which is a is a behind that is the designer of the screen and the manufacturer on the salesman and everything else so in other words the if you're angry it's between you and another organism uh with a consciousness and so that's how you know the fact that the fact that you might actually be uh pissed off at your cell phone is it's not the cell phone it's the people that that you have an implied contract with that it's supposed to work and when it's not working they're violating the contract by your estimation so anger is a an instinct that's designed to have an impact on the person who is the target of that anger so it's designed to cause signal to them that you believe that you've been treated unfairly now you may be very irritated with somebody and not signal to them because you you have enough other savvy you're a complicated machine and you realize that may not be in your best interest okay so uh part of the part of the process is probably um informing your own nervous system that it's the the feelings actually are a global uh informing uh process to to essentially activate all kinds of other circuits around the brain to alert it as to what's happening and then to start working on the solution so the the problem is i'm not being treated fairly according to my uh my estimation of what's fair and the anger is a is an instinct to threaten the individual or individuals on the other side of that with some kind of a penalty that they're going to a price that they're going to pay if they continue to to block the goal that they're blocking of yours so now so quote do we just get over it well a lot of times we do because uh at the obviously at the moment there is some values on the line and they are blocking them in a in in a way that we feel is unfair and so it activates the anger instinct uh but the anger instinct even if we share it with them and threaten them they may push back uh they may they may penalize us further uh they may do nothing about it in other words they they may basically shrug their shoulders and say too bad that's the negotiation and you're out of luck and no i don't want to date you that's that okay in other words whatever it is uh they have their own perception of what's fair and what isn't fair and those two perceptions may conflict indefinitely and as long as the value is on the line and it represents goals of the individuals involved it would continue to activate the anger mechanism so the so it depends upon you know the the notion that time heals all wounds depends upon what the wound is what's causing it and whether the circumstances involved have actually passed the um now the person's alluding to some good thinking in terms of how it is that you get over it so one of the ways you do it is you back up and you try to understand precisely why it is that you believe that they're being unfair and why it is that you think that you've been aggressed against and then you then you want to think about the the safest and most effective ways that you might try to address that unfairness at the end of the day um uh a lot of times these you know the anger is going to it's going to fade because the cb on it is no longer worth it in other words we've already determined that we can't push him around with our anger we can't guilt him into making changes uh and so therefore the the nervous system basically says you know we've lost this fight and it's it's not worth uh generating this this system in order to can keep informing us of this because it's it's not likely to be successful uh very much similar to you've got an exciting new possibility for a job but after they turn you down you're depressed about it and unhappy about it but then you aren't excited about when you see their ad in the paper again because you you that that opportunity is not going to be for you so that's how that's how this is going to work um ultimately if we're really irritated and we're continually irritated uh it's because we are in some kind of a position of weakness uh with respect to whatever this uh whatever the the resources is that they are blocking and from our perception blocking unfairly and so uh from my point of view that uh if we're in a position of weakness we're in a position of weakness the only way to start to maneuver your mind around the problem is to understand that that you can get to a position of power but in this particular instance you're going to lose and so what you're going to lose is you're going to lose some resources you're going to lose some time and energy that's what's going to happen you may lose some status they may have taken credit for something that you did and you can't guilt them into changing it and therefore you know you're you're in a situation where that's kind of too bad and uh so what you want to do is you want to look at circumstances like this where there where there was something important that was activating the anger mechanism and there was wasn't anything you could do to get even and you want to back up and you want to say how did i get myself into the situation where i was in a position of weakness where i could have been exploited okay what were the circumstances that led to me making those choices and having that situation vis-a-vis that individual and it could be that you know you flew to some third world country at the wrong time and now you got a conflict of interest with the military junta and now you're in trouble okay and yeah you're angry because you're an american citizen you should be treated differently but you're not being treated differently so what did you do to put yourself under those circumstances uh so think through you know if you ever lose something major and you're really hot about it uh it does make sense to back up think through all the angles and understand that for for whatever a set of circumstances probably quite reasonable that you made assumptions uh that your that your position and your value flow from this relationship was safe and it turned out that it wasn't and that's an important lesson uh when if you ever lose big the most important thing you do is don't lose the lesson so keep in mind uh that we are often in situations where you know we we can be uh upset like this because we are feeling that we're in positions of weakness and what we take out of those when we lose is make sure that we file that away in the concept away for next time it isn't just that specific individual that needs a red marker uh for you for your memory it's also the entire process by which you got yourself into that that also needs some analysis if the loss was substantive enough so that's uh that's the the story on anger and its processing wonderful dr lyle all right all right our final question for this evening dear dr lyle dear dr hawk thank you so much for sharing your knowledge to help people it's much appreciated i was glad to see jordan peterson is doing so much better after recovering from his physical dependencies on benzodiazepines i think many people were surprised he turned to penzos given his knowledge as an evolutionary psychologist would you be able to explain what makes people desperate enough to seek anti-anxiety drugs and what could be done from an evolutionary psychology point of view instead to reduce stress and anxiety and avoid resorting to medication well we this could be a joint but uh let me just give a few things off the top and jen you just pile in as we go around this one thing is just to understand that um uh a useful thing to understand from an evolutionary point of view is that anxiety is uh is a reaction to the the fact that you're being threatened and so um uh one one thing that you can do is you can figure out what that threat is and then move yourself so one of the the beautiful uh metaphors that jen has come up with is the notion that you think of yourself as a potted plant for goodness sakes don't don't try to fix yourself try to change your environment so the environment fits you so if you're in situations that are causing you a great deal of anxiety the thing to do in principle isn't to figure out how to medicate or change yourself somehow the situation is to change the informational inputs that are hitting your nervous system that are causing the anxiety so i i would have told the guy to you know you know long since to hang it up and go to bora bora take some of your success and just go freaking chill on an island for a couple months and shut off the cell phone that would have been a really good idea uh but in principle that's that's my notion is to uh to think about what's you know what inputs are hitting the circuits that are causing it uh and of course there's many reasons why he he would have blown past you know any reasonable stop sign just because he had so such enticing cbs in order to keep in the public eye so uh jen thoughts on this yeah well as a as a as the kids say i stand jordan peterson so he like i'm a you know a pretty big fan and i followed him pretty closely um and so i i i happen to know sort of a little bit more about you know the story of his um his turn toward benzos is less about the pressure of being in the public eye and more about his wife's uh diagnosed terminal illness so you know basically his wife was sent home to die by a bunch of experts that they consulted with some rare cancer and that there was really nothing to be done and so that that was i think the proximate that was what got him into the enzo's but he was primed for it i think by his his sort of ridiculous ascendancy that he he is not as a personality really prepared for i think we've talked before um about you know sort of who jordan peterson is big five-wise um and he's extremely conscientious fairly disagreeable and pretty highly unstable and that combination of things um i think he has a very hard time taking on criticism and he has a very hard time um just letting things letting things go in general letting things kind of slide especially and when you reach the level of fame as quickly as he did from of you know decades of living a relatively quiet life is you know a very uh uh cherished professor at the you know with a cult following at the university of toronto that you know a small number of people knew about and really valued um and a lot of status and that sort of village that he had established for himself into this national stage international stage um with ridiculous number of trolls and people coming at him from all directions with all kinds of criticism i think it was very very difficult for him to take that on and and even if he had i mean he certainly had the resources to take himself off to bora bora but it's not who the guy is like he's a workaholic conscientious unstable you know like like super super freak so he just wasn't gonna do it um and uh you know the story that he tells um he if people are interested in kind of catching up on this and people may not be aware that this is what he went through but he he nearly died um both you know mostly from from his attempted withdrawal from his um benzo dependency and uh his family wound up taking him to russia which was the only place that they could find sort of experimental treatment that um put him in a coma for some lengthy amount of time to allow him to detox without the um the detox symptoms that were almost worse than the addiction itself that was making it impossible for him to detox in canada or in the states so i don't i don't know all of the exact details but he his daughter just interviewed him on her podcast and so people can watch that or listen to that um for the details and he's he's definitely he's not totally out of the woods like he's doing better but it's still pretty rough so um uh and the other thing i would add is that the question is saying given his knowledge as an evolutionary psychologist i would not classify him as an evolutionary psychologist he he is evolutionary psychology adjacent and he borrows a lot of concepts and you know some some of some of them are very useful the way that he talks about things and approaches problems but he's got a lot of noise in there too he's he's like half evolutionary half jungian um and there's a lot of spiritual mystical weirdness which was part of why i always found him very appealing right but he makes sense yeah so i and and he by his own admission um in that interview with michaela um he he basically does not he he the version of the story he tells us that he didn't realize that um benzes had such a high uh that they were they were addicting so likely and so he really thought that this was just totally standard medication just to manage like i think he just wanted to get some sleep i think he was having trouble sleeping um and uh and so he's become now a real advocate against them and very strongly in that interview says you know people need to know that this is you know very high addiction rate um really difficult to get off of them if you're on them for any amount of time even i think you know a week two weeks two weeks is enough to to put you in a serious trap yeah and it's and it happens to you know a vast majority of people who do it so i think he's come around but he just didn't know he just didn't know he was in the sort of conventional psychology world that was like this is a tool to manage anxiety and so why wouldn't we use it if we're going through a really hard time like it's not you're not going to get addicted only addicts get addicted and he's just you know had his foot in that paradigm he doesn't you know he's not really a clinical psychologist either he's a professor um and he's you know he is he has some clinical experience and he has a practice but really fundamentally he's an academic and a professor and an author and sort of public figure so he just he just didn't know and he got himself in the trap and nearly died so um and uh yeah it's i'm i am glad that he didn't there was you know some scuttlebutt on twitter for months like did michaela just you know did she take her dad to russia and kill him and you know she's now like tweeting for him and you know where's like free jordan peterson so that he's now been seen but you can tell like if you if you follow him that he's um he's not at full recovery by any means he's he's definitely low energy still pretty stressed still not doing that well so did a lot of damage yeah yeah and not only was he not informed but neither was his psychiatrist which is what makes robert whittaker a hero so that's why our people our people need to know that anatomy of an epidemic is a is a tremendous document it's well worth your read even if you don't have anything to do you know just if you're of the next 20 books that you're going to read in this life even if you don't have anybody that you even know or have any interest in psychiatric meds anatomy of an epidemic is just from the sheer standpoint of world history and also the nature of medicine and and misinformation and etc it's it's a phenomenal story uh well worth your read and unfortunately uh these guys didn't know i was just gonna say well the second part of the question was about you know what if not benzo's then what then what do you do how do you manage anxiety but it it points to sort of the limitations of his own nervous system to in ways that you know we've we talk about all the time like he's a very anxious nervous system he's um and it's why his his only strategy really is to control his environment maybe not by escaping to a tropical island but by um by by techniques that you know we've talked about in other cases where it's like don't look at your youtube comments dude like you know you really really need to um to really control the level of information that's coming into your world and and who you're dealing with sorry about but so he really more more than most people he's got to really control who he's hanging out with what he's reading you know just um as as much as possible he's never going to be able to completely turn off and shut down and escape but he can have he can outsource and people with that personality can outsource the management of the the most anxiety causing things in their lives to other people particularly someone with resources like he has like just have someone else read your email you know have someone else manage your social media accounts and all of that so yeah you
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