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Episode 266: Going mad, nervous breakdowns, Getting over small slights
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all right dear doctors is there such a thing as going mad are similar expressions mostly just used to discredit people what about things like mental breakdowns um there there is such a thing as going mad uh it's interesting that they call it mad because maybe when people are really mad they they seem like they can get downright irrational and unpredictable and dangerous and you know etc so but what we call is a madness or psychosis um people can can absolutely have that happen to them and the um and so people that that carry there's a couple of of major diagnoses that uh where this is involved uh specifically schizophrenia and bipolar disorder so we now know an awful lot more about this whole thing than we've ever known obviously and so we know that um that these are uh these are sort of like they're they're effectively personality characteristics is uh the way the way we should be viewing all of these things so whether you're ocd or a major depressive disorder or a you know adhd disorder you know i.e uh or whether you're a borderline personality disorder or you're a schizophrenia uh we should just view all of this as personality so and and it's all gonna be uh ultimately percolated down to gene variation so there are people that have uh that have uh the propensity for some very strange thinking and what exactly causes them to slip from more functional on thursday to next thursday quite a bit less functional and and maybe maybe even flooredly psychotic where they're babbling uh nonsense and and you can't understand what they're saying or they're incredibly anxious and paranoid etc what exactly causes that is not known uh but it's uh it's an inherent instability of that individual's brains uh and they're put together in a particular way by you know thousands of genes that give rise to those characteristics now in in many cases uh people that that carry a bunch of these genes may be kind of odd their whole life and they they may have some odd thinking they may be more paranoid than normal it's very likely that they would be they may they may hear things that other people don't hear in other words they have auditory hallucinations they may occasionally though more rarely they may have visual hallucinations this is true of uh both uh the schizophrenia group of of of people as well as the bipolar um now it turns out that uh the the bipolar and schizophrenia were seen as very distinct in the history of psychology because they they seem to look very different in certain presentations however now we know that it's uh the overlap of the genes responsible for both these things is very very high so uh so in other words what we're looking at is thousands of little problems in the genetic code that give rise to some uh mental processes now so the question is can you go mad in other words can you be fine one day and absolutely crazy the next not very likely more likely that uh but what we do see is we see people that that can that they might be functioning quite well for example in high school and then around 19 or 20 or 21 sometime in there they may have what we call a psychotic break where they go through a period where they they start to decline in terms of their clarity of their thinking they may start to get more paranoid they may have huge sleep disruption and then what happens is is that they they may turn floridly psychotic and they may stay there for a while um now it's going to turn out that uh those it's kind of like a wave it's kind of like if you're if you're going to vomit you know what i mean you know what that feels like to have a big wave where something is really feels out of control and terrible generally speaking if nothing is done then things will calm down okay and they uh and their post post uh psychotic quote break functioning well things will settle uh back in and they may they may look worse than they did two years earlier uh but they but they may not you know but they won't be as bad as they were three weeks ago when they were in the middle of a quote psychotic break the um so that's kind of uh in other words what you're looking at folks is you're looking at some inherent instability in in the system and people have looked very hard at trying to figure out what caused this so they'll say things like that well they were really stressed or their parents broke up or they lost their job or it's none of that's true in other words people have tried to figure out are there environmental variables that come into the equation psychological inputs that give rise to this and the answer is no and it's it's no surprise that uh that that would be true uh for the for the reasons that what you're seeing is sort of structural limitations in the brain it would be like saying um you know a little old lady fell and broke her hip uh because she had osteoporosis and what was the reason oh is because she was thinking that she was you know weak or whatever it's like no her her thought processes had nothing to do with it well your thought processes have nothing to do with the fact that your brain may have built-in structural uh weaknesses according as a result of a lot of mediocre genes that give rise to mediocre structures that cannot you know that they can't maintain something unbelievably difficult which is thought feeling and behavioral integrity that is optimal relative to your environment so it's very tricky to do that and so it's no surprise at all that uh we have people that that have uh you know some parts that don't work too well and that they they give rise to what we what we're going to call madness now notice that in principle when you start saying okay what does it look like well a lot of anxiety a lot of paranoia uh you know loss of sleep possibly etc so it's like okay well exactly how is this that different than for example ocd so let's take a look at you know some of my favorite ocd friends are they paranoid that they're paranoid okay they're paranoid of everybody that wants to stick out their hand and shake their hand okay they're they're paranoid that that if they send food back to the kitchen that somebody's gonna poison the food and you say well that's not crazy that's just larry okay all right so are they really anxious there are two options take it or leave it that's that's what the restaurant you know in my head said yeah so yeah exactly i mean in other words i don't think i've ever sent anything back because i got just enough paranoid in there but my friend larry certainly wouldn't and so the and so now what are we looking at well we're looking at essentially the assessment of risk threat etc what's the difference uh between larry and schizophrenic well schizophrenic very well maybe at some times be hearing voices but larry doesn't hear and that's because larry's brain is has got better integrity of function because he doesn't have all those schizophrenia genes that give rise to that process you can imagine if you did hear things that other people weren't hearing you had auditory imagery in there that you would suddenly be thinking well of course there's somebody talking to me through this wall and they're whispering i can hear people whispering and why would they be whispering they must be they must be out to get me in other words these would be actually fairly reasonable inferences for the human mind to be making given that it evolved in a stone age situation where it had a lot of conflicts with local people i.e in its own tribe and outside of its own tribe and so there was always political problems and and strife and etc etc so people were talking about you behind your back sometimes they were plotting against you behind your back so you can imagine that those being fairly normal circuits inside of humans that if you put some of those bricks together with some faulty bricks we're going to get a whole lot more of that and if we add some disturbance in the imagery systems of the brain then we get you know what we would call full blown psychosis so that's what going mad is it is the periods of time in people that are genetically susceptible where they uh where their brains lose the uh enough functional integrity to the point where they've substantially lost contact with the truth so um you know everybody operates under certain delusions in other words you don't know exactly what's true and you believe that this is true but it turns out that that's not true that's not that's just a limitation of your ability to understand reality but these folks have their you know sensory apparatus effectively uh is is not operating properly and as a result you you can imagine if you had your sensory apparatus not operating properly if you saw things and heard things and other people weren't acknowledging it you would believe that there was possibly you know essentially a conspiracy against you and so um at any rate that's what quote going mad is and um and you know such as life you know it turns out psychiatric medications can calm that stuff down pretty quickly but at apparently great cost in other words so the the tools that we have now uh to combat those processes i believe are worse than the disease is my reading of the evidence when i read robert whittaker uh his his book anatomy of an epidemic so the uh yeah that's what going mad is and fortunately an awful lot of people that uh that go mad for example particularly the bipolar variety which looks to be a little less severe uh in terms of its uh general total disturbance than than schizophrenia then a lot of those people will be fine they may have one or two or a handful of periods of a couple of weeks or so where they are where they are not doing well where a tremendous tremendous amount of their thinking and their actions and their feelings are are not are not falling into consistent uh consistent pattern with reality and so they i can remember uh a case of uh of of a doctor that i worked with uh that had a client that that uh in a in a manic phase which a lot of times lasts for a couple three weeks took the entire family fortune and went to las vegas and gambled it all away at the time it was about half a million dollars and so the um obviously so that that's the kind of thing that can happen uh when people quote go mad that's that's what we're talking about almost always when we say did someone go mad we're saying they are they they're probably have a diagnosis of some skits schizophrenia type thing or bipolar and they they're go they go through a particularly rough period uh in terms of their their brains you know integrity all right so that's that thank you dr lyle um our our next question kind of falls in in the same topic uh which is what could cause a fully functional productive member of society to have a nervous breakdown and become a total basket case this listener further writes conventional diagnoses include ptsd anxiety major depressive disorder and the treatment has so far been treatment with more and more medications whether in or outpatient is this just a function of personality is this person running a cost benefit or cb analysis that says it's better to be this way even though they're miserable and claims that she wants to get back to work and life and also what is the best way to support her or support a person like that in this state yeah um yeah nervous breakdown that's going to be different than quote going mad okay so a person a nervous breakdown is is crying and tearful and exhausted and and miserable and anxious but they are but they are not believing that um that the martians are speaking to them through the television set and they want that person to go uh and track down [ __ ] spacek and that [ __ ] spacek wants to have their baby so i i met such an individual okay so uh there's a big difference between quoted nervous breakdown uh which is run-of-the-mill anxiety overwhelm depression uh big difference between that and as we get into more severe psychotic process all right so nervous breakdowns well the um what this is is a a person who is i mean a breakdown sounds so dramatic it's basically a person is uh can can be frozen in their motivation because they they don't know kind of what to do they are depressed because they may have faced a great deal of failure feedback and so they don't know what to do to keep trying in whatever domain it is that they're experiencing this rather acute feedback they are also they could be very anxious because there might be significant uh payoffs for performance one way or the other in other words if they don't get something done then they're going to lose this about the other status or resources etc um and they can also uh they're often very tired and so an awful lot of try to give you this to you straight from from uh a clinician with you know 35 years of clinical experience uh the the nervous breakdowns that i have seen are very often drug related so the people have been using coffee cigarettes alcohol stimulants and they're really tired and they they can become exhausted defeated essentially their lives have been a significantly out of balance behind whatever the challenges are and they they have exhausted uh the their themselves and their their minds are biochemically out of balance and so of course the last thing when they're biochemically out of balance that we would ever do is we would not want to introduce yet another drug which causes them to be even more imbalanced so the psychiatric approach to this is of course ass backwards which is exactly what we would expect but instead what we generally want to do is to essentially back the person out of the overwhelming challenges and get them to sleep so that's where we would take people to a place like true north or nathan's place at fasting escape or or grandma's you know granny unit and just chill out okay sleep and sometimes what the person needs is they need to sleep for for 20 hours for you know three days in a row like that they need to withdraw off their coffee they need to uh they need to be told no you don't have to do this and you don't have to do that and you don't have to worry about it because we've got plenty of time to manage these problems or whatever the challenges are what if my house is in the middle of foreclosure oh well there's really you know if there's nothing for us to be done about it then there's nothing to be done about it okay how much equity is in there oh well 300 000 well after they sell that thing at auction there's a good chance you're going to get some money back and then on to the next problem of life in other words whatever the problem is unless we have your life literally at stake we don't really have any reason uh to be so completely defeated devastated etc so and the mind is capable of managing whatever it is that these challenges are however it may not be very capable of managing it if it's been managing on seven cups of coffee a day to be able to push its way through this big deadline and uh and and therefore it's been adrenalized and exhausted etc so pretty much the nervous breakdowns that i've seen in my career have been as a result of they've usually had uh recreational in other words crutch drugs been associated with it and what we have is a person's mind is just wiped out they're super tired and things are wiped out so the biggest thing that we can do with someone uh that we know that's quote having a nervous breakdown is back up the question of what it is that we need to accomplish and uh usually that is very little pretty much all you need to do is sleep okay oh well i'm gonna lose my apartment in three weeks okay well where are you gonna go then okay so let's make sure we have that problem solved so that your mind can relax uh do you does your does your grandmother have a hen house that you can stay in uh you know where would your next move be and so this is where as psychologists pretty much uh i you quit being some fancy person trying to think things through of any complexity and all we are is a social worker okay we're basically saying let's make sure that we understand how you are going to you know get enough food get enough water not freeze or burn to death and have a place to poop that's it okay after that oh well so the big project goes in the tank and your company's all pissed at you and you get fired oh well okay that's all right you know they're worse things have happened to people so um i can remember i had a case like this and uh it was a a law enforcement officer had tremendous pressure on him as an expert witness at a huge trial and this was not good this was not good for him it wasn't good for his his family it wasn't good for anything it was the only thing that it was good for was the district attorney and uh the district attorney was a very decent gal and this guy you know felt an enormous sense of responsibility but the expert witness problem was tricky it was a super tricky case and the the d.a was believing they had a case and that they but they needed to thread a very complex needle to make the case stick and it it involved putting this guy in some pretty tricky crosshairs about how he was going to answer for how it is that he had you know dealt with his investigation and and uh it was it was tricky and he was overwhelmed he was it was like a three-year process and he was definitely in recurrent quote nervous breakdowns and finally um one day it dawned on the three of us uh meaning his wife and i and himself like what the hell like i didn't really understand it had not been even discussed really as an option of him backing out but once we started to confront that and realize now wait a minute wait a minute did this why wouldn't we okay we we had to run down through that whole thing and in the next week or so um he went and approached the d.a and the d.a was an absolute uh princess about it said don't don't even worry about it no problem you got to take care of you man that was a beautiful thing to hear and that individual did way better there was a just like a huge uh alteration in that individual's functioning uh over over the next few months and then into the future so again nervous breakdown overwhelm people too much pressure you know time pressure money pressure performance pressure status loss issues uh talks uh you know drugs toxifying the system short of sleep that's that is the recipe for a nervous breakdown the solution is how do we peel back all the pressure how do we get this person out of all the um all of the things that are interfering with that brain getting to an equilibrium of which sleep exercise diet and drugs are all of the variables to be paying very close attention to i have a great deal of confidence in the mind's ability to essentially worry the amount that it should be worrying and take actions that it should be taking provided that it isn't under bizarre non-stone age uh inputs and non-stone age inputs are all the what we call the dietary drugs that can interfere with that as well as the electric light bulb keeping people up uh et cetera as well as too much status and too much pressure on something and and sort of not having thought through literally opting out of it all and and actually thinking through the consequences of outing of it all and realizing you don't need anything in this life you need air water food and temperature regulation everything else is you know it is not essential so let's just realize we don't have to dance to anybody's tune okay and so once we sort of re-establish and dial back what the person needs to deal with then we can slowly work our way through the options and and how we're going to uh to manage the different choices that we have with respect to the to the challenges that the person has dr lyle thank you so much that uh that made so much sense it's uh i hope this listener uh gets some comfort from your answer all good all right well what else do we have nathan all right well speaking to dancing to somebody else's tune our next question is uh is the following dear doctors how do i get over small slights in an otherwise happy and healthy relationship i'm probably more sensitive than the average bear my partner of five years is great we're mutually over rewarded magic 10 percent the whole deal but he has a habit of correcting me on the proper pronunciation of words whenever they come up usually one to three times per year the first few times i took it on the chin but eventually i told him it really bothered me and made me feel stupid for context he is older and more educated and i've always been insecure about this many of the words are either place names for example mauritius i don't even know how to pronounce that one or sometimes it's just a sliver of the tongue where i did not know where i did know the correct pronunciation i told him if he knew how much it hurt my feelings he would not do it and he understood that but i guess he can't help himself because he still does it other small slights could be if he didn't show appreciation for a great meal that i make when i do all the cooking these incidents can set me off on a three-day freeze-out i don't think he deserves me being angry with him for that long and always wish i could just stop feeling angry it took me a long time to even start bringing up hurt feelings because i've always felt so over rewarded but now i try to do things so i try try so that things don't fester i try to think of all his good qualities but that doesn't work is it just a neuroticism disagreeably streak in me that i can't change i tend not to think of myself as a disagreeable but i always go out of my way to not hurt others feelings i'm an otherwise happy cheerful person so do you have any ideas on how to get over these slights me 36 him 43 five years relationship blend family not married yeah i i don't want to appear to be some genius that knows the answer to everything so this is um what we have is a and i can't necessarily see through this so i'm taking taking some things uh at face value here so the uh the slights i mean it seems pretty rare and i can see um there are a lot of people that that are remember for example him correcting your pronunciation is a way to display his intelligence so it's a so we can see that that's a fitness indicator he's displaying and he he probably does that with other people under appropriate circumstances um you know in other words it's a little chip that's in there i mean i have that chip god i did that to my advisor once god i can't believe it we do we just went back four decades into my memory the uh i i i still remember it like it was yesterday and and i can remember he was a nice that guy he like paused and i did you mind sharing the details no i'm not gonna share the details the uh so anyway so the point is is that uh i could see how this could could be perfectly and utterly reasonable except that now we see that some of her frustration is leaking into other areas so the question is whether or not he's he's doing some signaling with her about the fact that he's not that happy with certain things or that he's essentially one of the ways that we go about in a in a non-optimal fashion to get more let's back up for a second relationships are fundamentally trades so there isn't anything quote called a relationship that is not a trading process that's what it is so you are expending time and energy with that other individual at the expense of other things you could be doing with your time the reason you do that is that quote relationship which means a process of of recurrent trading processes seems like a very good value relative to your uh what your options are so uh that's what's happening however because these are trades remember there is some incentive obviously to try to get a better deal in the trade than the one that we have and so if you're gonna buy a used car you know you look that thing over and you say well you know i would give you six grand for it but there is that the three dings in the in the bumper and they're saying yeah well we know i already figured that into the price okay so the the criticisms of the the the other person's uh value their limitations is one of the ways that we can get what we want but chisel the price down so one of the motivations of criticizing somebody's pointing out their limitations with their vocabulary or not signaling our value of their meal is that we are we are essentially uh signaling to them that we that we're that we're going to now do five percent less but we expect everything that we are already getting okay this is part of what i call the chiseling chip so the um that you know comes from my concept of you know the old coins it was a 20 doubloon but you knocked a little corner off the goal that was still worth 20 but you got a little chunk of gold in your pocket okay so and a lot a lot of relationships wind up looking like this so they wind up they begin with everybody hiding their liabilities and essentially trying to entice the other into the relationship by signaling very high value with i very high benefit very low cost and uh very often those are lost leader advertisements and they aren't true and so pretty soon we find out what i call their dirty laundry okay so now we find out what the real trade is which is why a great many fledgling romances don't last for more than 90 days uh because 90 days we finally vet what the real trade is and then the trade's gone because it's not worth it after all however in a trade that is worth it and continues on that doesn't make it immune from the chiseling chip so i'm going to try to keep getting what i want out of this relationship but i'm going to try to give you one percent less and it's uh and so part of little criticisms that people will level uh at their partners is going to be behind that issue that there's a possible motivation to do a little bit of chiseling um now the um so anyway so so keep that in mind so i'm i'm not like the person's talking about how happy they are in the relationship and how it's got it's fundamentally very solid so i'm not critiquing that or suspecting that that's not true i am however suspecting that that doesn't mean that you may not have a chiseling chip process uh there that could be giving rise to some of this however let's suppose in principle that even if you did it's mild but it's pretty irritating because we're hearing that she can freeze up for three days and really feel you know pretty upset pretty angry i.e you're treating me unfairly and i'm considering threatening you to actually get you to treat me fairly because remember that's what anger is anger is a signal it's a communication that tells the person on the other side of it that you are treating me unfairly and now i'm going to level a threat at you so that you i will impose costs on you unless you stop and so a person that is in a position of significant weakness in an exchange very often does this very quietly i.e passive-aggressive so they they are they they want the other person to get the signal but they don't that but but they don't feel powerful enough they kind of want to want the person to infer it and then figure it out and then then they want to see that the person feels guilty okay the purpose of anger is to get resources and the fundamental emotional response on the other side of anger that is planned in other words the person who is expressing the anger is expressing their their uh outrage that you've treated me unfairly the purpose of that is to the proximal purpose is to cause guilt and uh when the other person experiences guilt they basically have the inference oh my goodness i'm so sorry i treated you unfairly and then the next sentence is the the as i'm reporting the the informational content the structural informational content of what's inside the person's brain when they're feeling guilty it's oh let me see what i can do to make up for this okay so whether they say it or not or think it or not that that is the process that their mind is going through and so when we're angry we are hoping and expecting to some degree uh that that's what the result will be on the other side but you can imagine that when a person is angry they have a a range of opti of alternatives and options and outcomes that they are that they're calculating and if they're an individual that's in a position of weakness then they may be thinking you know what i don't want to come out and say what i'm upset about because i i what that may provoke is the other person may say hey you know what if you're pissed at me for that you can just take the whole relationship and shove it because i don't need it i'm out of here okay and so our person who's in a relative position a weakness may not feel like they can afford to take that risk and come out with their anger and thereby get rebuked and rejected and abandoned so instead what they do is they quote go silent they give them the silent treatment okay and uh and they have little cold signals and what those signals are about is they're saying i'm angry with you and i am i'm leveling a threat at you and i am considering costs that i can impose on you and one of them i can oppose on you is your feeling of peace of mind that everything's cool in our relationship because it's not okay and bear if i do this then you may start thinking hmm what could she be pissed about and then you may be thinking oh it could be that thing that i said and then it's like oh i actually feel bad about that it just sort of came out i didn't mean anything by it or etc but boy i sure wouldn't have wanted you to take that the wrong way and so now here comes prince charming falling all over himself apologizing okay and and communicating that he feels guilty so therefore our passive aggressive quiet not in a position of power individual was able to signal her anger at low risk okay to to do to possibly accomplish her goals without taking the big risk of being openly angry all right now so that's the fact that we have some of that going on uh tells me uh that it is quite possible that she's she's facing some non-trivial chiseling chip behavior and that chiselling chip behavior can include correcting a person's pronunciation uh with them in other words that could be a signal from from the the more powerful individual that i'm not that impressed with you you know what i'm saying and therefore i'm not necessarily going to pull pay the full fare in this relationship the way i did a year ago it's a warning it's a renegotiation tactic now i'm not saying that it is i'm just saying that it might be okay and the same thing is true if we're not signaling any appreciation for the things that you bring to the relationship which you feel like would be reasonable that they would signal their appreciation so again that would be like i don't say thank you if i feel like you owed it to me so the uh so this is the you know and particularly if i feel like if i lent you five thousand dollars and we were supposed to you're supposed to pay back five thousand dollars today and you pay me back two thousand i don't say thank you i'm like okay all right it's like i don't say well thank you no i don't and the same way that when somebody doesn't signal their appreciation when we do something for them they may be feeling like hey i feel like it's out of balance anyway i'm not going to say thank you and act like everything's hunky-dory because it's not hunky-dory so that's uh so these are all all kinds of considerations that i'm trying to read into an unbelievable small amount of information uh but i'm trying to map this thing out as best i can now let's suppose that that is actually that we have naturally sort of a a a moderately emotionally unstable person um the uh and so as a result uh moderately unstable and um so as a result she's she's she ends up taking things that are actually mild normal rough and tumble processes and in fact is doubling their significance in other words they're they are very small little chisel maneuvers or not even but it looks like they are it looks like they're more significant and therefore that's why she gets feeling like hey this is unfair and yet i'm in a position of weakness and now i'm all upset okay now i'm playing the only card i've got which is passive aggressive now the what we want to move this towards is we want to move this towards um uh what i would call crystal clear so crystal clear and and if this happens this is happening fairly often you could sort of do a little um kind of a thing where where we could say listen um that every once in a while i want you know we either do this sort of formally but usually that doesn't work where we periodically we make it kosher to you know call a call a a little family meeting a little relationship meeting and so it's good to do this you know to have that as a as a thing that has happened uh some people that are that don't know what they're doing or they want to hide or there's they're big messes and it's all impossible they weren't going to go to quote therapy well good luck to you all okay instead the probably the better move is going to be to just have this process take place between yourself so there's not some third party watching and then everybody's grandstanding for the crowd and trying to play up to the therapist that i'm the reasonable one and she's the nut okay which is exactly what goes down the um so instead what we want to do is we want to say listen you know things things come up between us from time to time and i get upset and then i feel like you know i i feel like i'm you know kind of a in a weak position for one reason or another i'm not sure i'm on the right side of it but i'm still upset and i go quiet and then i don't think that's good for us i think it's not a good pattern so instead uh if something comes up for me i'd like to you know be able to have this family meeting where where we sit down and we sort of clear a space and we we we take half an hour and we we have something to eat and we light a couple of candles and we take out a pad of paper and we kind of talk about things from time to time are you okay with that because that's how i want to you know if we've if we've got some conflicts that come up i kind of want to talk them through because i don't like to sit on them now that's reasonable that's incredibly reasonable um i i think the the idea of saying well we're going to do this once a week you're going to drop it because you're only going to want to do it when there's an issue and so when you want to do it because there is an issue or you feel like you you want to get through a mess because there is an issue then you want to have it in place that we have this process that we do so we're gonna have some food and we're gonna have some decent lighting and comfort and uh where we're gonna sit down with a you know a pad of paper and a pen so we can take some notes on this and we're going to talk okay and try to talk it through and so this is the beginning of what i call crystal clear so crystal clear is that people take turns and somebody starts and we and the idea is the other person their their job is to listen and ask clarification questions but they are not allowed to argue but correct or anything else if you if you pick up the fact that the other person is making a mistake in inference or has a mistake of fact you write it on the pace of paper and you say hold on a second let me write that down okay so if i was listening to her and she had she was all twisted up about something and i said okay we're going to begin i want you to tell me like what you're thinking what's on your mind just give me the whole thing okay well there's this and that and this and that and this and that okay and then you did this and then i see this and i'm like okay hold on a second so i'm going to write it down anything anything where i feel like and are so you were thinking that i called so and so back you know did that do you you thought that i did that okay let me write that down so we make sure that we we get a full accounting we want to know what is inside for example if you're the guy on the other side of this you want to know everything that's in that girl's head okay and then you're going to feed it back okay you're going to say so let me get this straight so you're feeling this and you're feeling that and it's associated with this that and the other and then when i did this you felt that you wanted to say this but you didn't say it but what you did do is this and that's what happened and then you're feeling this and then i did this and etc etc and so this all comes down to these are things that are swirling around do i have that right yes there's something tremendously satisfying tremendously satisfying about having someone reiterate what your thinking and feeling is and the logic why is it you're angry and why you feel like it was unfair and to have the person that to get the entire thing out if it takes 17 minutes you sit there and you take you take those questions if you try to short circuit it which i'll explain in a minute while you why you will okay if you try to short-circuit it it's just going to prolong the agony so we we want to shut up and listen and when we feed it back a lot of times they'll say wait a second not quite right i'm also upset about this that and the other okay so we have to include that that this that and the other is also in this equation yes we want to get to the point where the the the the person is upset can feel like they have been fully heard and understood down through every tributary of the reasoning and every every you know action potential in that nervous system that's what we want when they get there they can relax and now we know a pretty well cinemascope view of what is their beef where they think things have been unfair and now we can say okay let's look at this because i've got some disagreements i feel like you're making some inferences that aren't correct so now let me go down through here and explain how it is that i see this on this or that dimension okay so this is now crystal clear the other direction now the other person number one has to shut up now this is the the plan and you know it doesn't have to take that long seems like it's agonizing but it doesn't really have to take that long and a significant you know for example there's some significant hurt uh about some little issue it's like that that that woman for example may need to spin for 10 minutes about all this like gosh i'm just so frustrated i don't understand um you know what it is why it is that you're correcting me like that and i feel like you you mean to do this and you mean to do that etc etc we want to get everything that's in our head and if you're a partner in a very good romantic relationship you ought to be highly motivated to know what's going on inside your partner's head should be super important information particularly if they're unhappy okay so that's how crystal clear is done and very often in the doing a crystal clear problems can be significantly solved or they're uncovered okay so somebody may get cagey and crystal clear and not get clear and they may be resistant towards giving up you know giving up a position or part of the argument etc the uh so we may uncover the fact that all is really not well in that relationship the at the fundamental level let me tell you what's being attacked when there are conflicts of this type of nature in a relationship what's being attacked is a person's confidence that they are in fact accepted that is the fundamental issue in a relationship it isn't whether or not you know he spent he spent that extra beer money on himself and his buddies at the bar rather than bring home flowers for her which you haven't brought me any flowers in two years but you always used to okay no it's not about a dispute about that money it's about what that means in terms of how valuable i am to you so in the relationship process in the trades that go on there are also inferences about how valuable you find me this is why the relationship why why my little company is called esteem dynamics it is the dynamics of the esteem signaling in the relationship that is the enjoyment of the relationship or it's suffering so we want to know what the real esteem processes are that are in the relationship and if the person really esteems you then when you squawk and you say listen i feel like when you do this and that you don't value me that much you mean must not find me that beautiful i have a feeling that if you found me beautiful and sexy and were really interested and were really proud of me then you wouldn't be doing things to chisel away you know my self-confidence or to criticize me that and the guy may say you know what the truth is i'm doing it because i feel like i'm over rewarded and i feel like you might feel like you're too high and mighty and that you you know i want to actually i find myself trying to reduce your confidence because i feel like maybe i'm not enough so we don't know what those signals mean but if there's toxic signals we want to smoke it out okay and so if we're not sure we float hypotheses all this idea of oh well don't say what to normally just do what you mean like no what's in your mind is your speculation about what's in their mind and say it okay i'm worried that makes me think that maybe you think this and maybe you feel that okay so at the end of the day folks we either have a you know a very good relationship or we have something in the middle or we have a lousy one in other words the relationship sort of is what it is and what we don't want and all that we can do in any kind of therapeutic process is we can reduce the unnecessary suffering the unnecessary suffering that takes place in relationships under conflict is when people are misreading the cues that they're observing and they are inferring worse than is true okay that that's a that's a problem and that's where the unnecessary suffering takes place if that may or may not be the case okay so we have to like you know if we want to feel better and get to the other side of something we have to figure out what that negative feedback and conflictual process actually means okay and we do that by a crystal clear process and by we were open and vulnerable about our fears about what it all means and then we find out where that other person is we may find out that they're having cognitive dissonance about whether they want to be in the relationship and they are in fact being a little bit shitty because they're not so sure it's like whoa well part of me and was inferring that and that's why i'm really anxious and that's why i'm upset fair enough okay but maybe it's now been articulated or signaled fair enough we didn't make it any worse by having the meeting okay our hope is that the relationship and its status is actually better than we are fearing that we are actually making worst case scenario inferences in some of these uh conflictual communications and it's going to turn out that if we crystal clear that other person looks at us and says no way that isn't even remotely what i'm thinking or feeling you're completely misreading that okay um as you know person that's been on the planet for a while in a few relationships the truth is it's all over the map so i've i've had people you know worry about things and then then finally i hear about what they're worried about and i look at them and i'm like god trust me that is the last of your worries that that's not even on my radar okay uh other times i had i had you know trepidation or i had concerns about a relationship and i was definitely you know emotionally unavailable and throwing up smoke and didn't want them to know where i was really at and so i was trying to work out where i was in the relationship and how i felt about it okay so anybody trying to figure that out good luck because the truth is is that you know when if a relationship's in trouble people can be very difficult to figure out where they're at when a relationship's good it's not that hard they embrace crystal clear it's like oh god the last thing i want is there to be on any unnecessary conflict here okay so let's get clear you're beautiful you're brilliant you're fabulous you're a great cook and i this relationship is super important to me it's highest priority and if i do something like that i feel sick about it but i can't help it i've got a disagreeable chip in my head and it goes off from time to time okay but i'm sorry about it i'll find ways to make it up to you that's if your relationship is good that's the kind of reaction you'll get yeah if there's deeper problems things will look differently so crystal clear and your job is uh uh to you know to have it sort of semi-formal where we where we sit down and we're talking about the relationship and we do it in this way so the person that anybody can start and you can take turns or you can say listen i need to start and the rules of crystal clear is i have to talk until i'm done talking and you can ask me questions and then i want you to tell me you know summarize it for me at the end because i want to make sure you understand where i'm at and what i'm going through or we can start the other way i see that you're in some stress i could tell we've got a lot of conflict tell me where you're at i want to have a full understanding so that's how we do crystal clear all right nathan thank you dr lyle um you mentioned that that the people will desire sometimes to short-circuit this process um yes so can you talk about that um why why would that be yeah um one reason is that they're hiding in other words they there's conflicts that they don't want to face and so they're they're in the relationship but they're under in the relationship with um there's some there's some motivation for being deceptive and uh that's that doesn't make them bad people and it doesn't make the relationship doomed it just means that at that point they can understand that there's conflicts between them and the other person they're not sure where they're at and they're not sure they want to get confronted so the um this is that means your relationship isn't in the greatest space it means it's under a lot of challenge when a relationship is exceptionally good then then the people have a tendency to they have the opportunity to do what what uh jen and i call golden play okay golden play is that it's like the gift of the magi from o'henry it's that what's going to make me happy is making you happy so therefore because your emotional expressions of happiness with me and that i can observe in you are so important to me and they so resonate in such a critical feature of my own happiness then i want to know what that is okay so golden play is that if two people are feeling relationship is very valuable and they are they are invested enough and and decent enough humans that they can play golden then then sometimes under conflict all we have to do is start that golden maneuver in the right direction and it sorts itself out okay you are not in a golden play situation doesn't mean you can't have a decent relationship but you're not in a golden place situation where one party is feeling you know naturally by virtue of their personality that they're sufficiently disagreeable that they're attempting to chisel you and so they may do that with periodic criticism or a lack of compliment uh complimenting uh they may be semi-consciously trying to cause you to feel insecure so that you'll hustle and give them 10 more for 10 less if you're in that situation doesn't mean that these people that you can't have relationships with such individuals but you will not have relationships at the level of which human beings can have relationships okay human beings not all human beings but many human beings are capable of being in a golden play situation and uh and that and when you find that people that people that are there they will know exactly what it is that i'm talking about that uh that what what you what makes you happy is what makes me happy and therefore that's the the thing that i'm most focused on and when that's coming back to you from the other direction then you have a a uh the ultimate of a virtuous cycle and that's what we hope to we hope to rescue that from any misunderstandings okay all right dr lyle thank you so so much may we all have um plentiful golden plays in our life all good all right nathan i think that's plenty for one for one night excellent thank you so so so much dr lyle uh we really appreciate the uh the the detail the level of detail that you went into in these explanations it's it's uh it's it's exciting to learn more about these processes i mean every time every episode that i that i listen to when you explain these things i learned something new so i really appreciate it cool all right well everybody we should have dr jen should be back on on our next time around so we'll look forward to liven things up a little perfect all right have a good good evening dr lyle you
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