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Episode 272: Work evaluation, AbandonmentRejection issues, Life after psych meds
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how's it going well we're still in a free country sort of that's not bad it could be worse let's put it that way it could be worse it could be worse i'll support that that's a cosign could be worse when is that not true that's that's the uh you know everything will be all right in the end if it's not all right it's not the end you know yeah hey hey we're not canada yet that's true that is true yeah how is the winter of how's the winter of severe illness and death for everybody yeah so far so far my street looks about the same like it always looked so yeah so far it's going okay yeah oh we got a snowstorm in seattle so that's uh you know nice nice and symbolic so yeah sitting here watching it watching it coming down right now so it's made things very quiet nobody does anything in seattle when it snows it shuts down the whole city so oh there you go a lot safer yeah all right well let's get some questions nathan dear doctors i listened to dr hawk's youtube on pseudoesteem where you say quote if you are highly agreeable highly conscientious and not that emotionally stable being on social media comes with a high price for your psychology well it feels like you're talking to me thank you i teach workshops for companies i get graded every time from each students from one to five i get five from ninety five percent of the students but sometimes i get a two or three and i can tell right away before i even get the evaluation who in the crowd is the disagreeable one and will grade me low how do i stop trying to please the one disagreeable person and not feel bad for getting a low grade when i have a disagreeable person in my workshop i feel like i have to work twice as hard to turn him or her over to my side feels like i'm spending a thousand dollars on a hundred dollar assignment and i'm drained my boss always sees the evaluation i feel the need to explain myself if a person gave me a low grade my boss uses the good evaluations as a selling point to get the companies to buy more workshops at his school i i'm from denmark hope my english is good enough for you to read please advice oh man yeah yeah i uh i don't know doug has a good answer to this i'd like to hear it because i haven't figured it out the the only thing i figured out um you know and what the point that i made in this video is that it's a your response to um criticism and trolls on social media or this kind of situation wearing a job where you're going to get evaluations and some percentage of them are just going to be crappy no matter how brilliant of a job you do there's there's always going to be a few in the crowd um and so really depending on your personality this is going to affect you differently and and so that kind of type that i was talking about in that video those those are the those are the three things that will make it hardest on you the more agreeable you are the more conscientious you are the more less emotionally stable you are um if you have a combo of all three of those things it's going to hit you the absolute hardest so but you it can hit you pretty hard even if you have a good dose of any of those things you could be um you know very very agreeable and very emotionally stable and it still is very tough to deal with this um sort of inevitable consequence of of uh putting yourself out there in any kind of capacity and i used to get teaching evaluations had the same sort of experience it's like no matter how much effort you put in you cannot please all of the people all of the time you just you just can't and so some of this is just experience and enough iterations recognizing the nature of the bell curve to to desensitize yourself to the fact that there's always going to be a couple of people um the other thing the only other thing that i tell people and that i do myself is when it comes to something like hey you're in a tough spot with with evaluations because they're required but if it's not required if it's just something that you're seeking out because of that 95 percent positive note which is very um attractive very addictive it's very and it's true you know anytime i i if i have comments open on a on a video for example which i don't anymore but when i did most comments are very favorable but then you get you know one or two shitty ones and that will just for me not just ruin my day but you know really sits in my in my nervous system for a very long time and causes me a great amount of distress so that's why my social media is quite closed down um i don't i don't have comments open unless i have a very sort of restricted crowd of people that are that i'm engaging with and it you know i don't look at my direct messages because i get a lot of really hostile direct messages on social media so i just i i really constrain my exposure it's part of how i manage my environment recognizing that i have this um susceptibility in this distortion uh as as part of my personality as a lot of people have particularly women i think uh and you you get hooked on that on the positive feedback and it feels really good feels really nice to get that positive feedback but you are it's it's russian roulette every time you reload the comment section and so you just need to be very mindful of your thresholds with these things um and uh you know this extends to um people i follow who who say things that i i that are going to cause me some sort of distress for some reason or another we we talked in the virtual village um a couple of weeks ago about people seeing a lot of uh you know following some vegan accounts that post um oh you know animal like behind the scenes slaughterhouse footage to to try to persuade people to be vegan and that's the kind of thing where i you know i'm already vegan i'm i'm vegan for a combination of ethical and health reasons i it does not there's no added advantage to me seeing animal torture in my news feed so i i just that's an instant if not a block it's certainly i mute i mute indiscriminately all the time and so um and i just get i get more and more vigilant about maintaining my uh my social media environment it's like landscaping a yard you know you really just need to make sure that you're you're getting the experience that is most beneficial for you and i i totally get that you know sometimes you have to stay connected to somebody for professional reasons but you know you can mute they don't know that you've muted them so um all of those kinds of things i lump together under this same kind of rubric of you just need to recognize how these things affect you and it's not about you know toughening up and being more resilient to them um past a certain point past a certain point it's like okay well i need to not purposefully expose myself to things that are going to totally ruin my day for no good reason yeah i i uh the the the sort of i agree 100 and where i come on down on this is that we we back up the the very first question is do we have to see the feedback and the answer is i'm sure that we don't so your boss is going to send it to you don't don't look at it okay that's the end of it yeah if you can get away with that yes i'm sure you can sure nobody cares nobody's going to ask you what i couldn't i couldn't get away with that when i was teaching so i guess i have egocentric bias because hours were you know our evaluations were part of um like our student evaluations became part of our evaluations as teachers that we go over with uh with the lead professor and it was a whole like none of this stuff was blinded to us so um but yes absolutely if you don't have to look at it don't do it yeah and the uh the first place we stop uh with this the very first question and that that is involved here is well i've got anxiety about not knowing what's going on because i need to get the feedback because i need to make sure that everything's okay okay and it's like well why is that and the answer is oh i need to make sure i'm doing my job well why is that the answer because i need to keep my job why is that because i've got financial anxiety ah we get to that we get to the core issue so the core issue is financial anxiety about a position of power so now what we're going to do is we're going to now look look through the logic of this and say okay so let me get this straight we need to be reading these evaluations but in order to be basically get our behavior to be prophylactic against [ __ ] so that they don't cost us our job that's bs the truth is is that [ __ ] exist they can't stand it uh you remember if you've got 50 people in a village you've got one of them is at the 98th percentile for disagreeable so that's just this at least one yeah at least it's just the stats yeah okay yeah and so the uh and i can tell you honestly this is this is true um true of me so it's not like i'm some raging disagreeable person i i think i'm somewhere probably i don't know 60th percentile for males maybe something like that and um i don't know what i am but the yeah yeah i think you're less you're pretty you're you're 50 yeah cats yeah you're right in the middle yeah i'm right in the middle of the bell curve uh it obviously if i disagree with you and i know i'm right i'm stubborn so the uh there's that issue but that's about conscientiousness yeah that's conscientiousness yes you're like no you were wrong and i need you to know that you're wrong because being wrong is costly to the village and yeah you get very it's like no no no i'm not going to let you proceed under this delusion that you have but that's not necessarily disagreeableness that's just like right managing village politics yeah so the the what was i going to say about this before i was getting flattered and then getting all soft [Laughter] just that way you got one in every crowd yeah you've got one oh yes and so that you're going to have um oh i was going to say that as a male it's not easy for me to listen to other people talk i i don't like it like i'll listen to jen all day long but there but there are people you know if i've got somebody that uh that is supposed to be talking to me in my arena god help dr phil it's like you better be talking really interesting really fast buddy because you got about 19 seconds and then i'm out okay so here if she's doing workshops for people uh that she's supposed to be in there telling them essentially what to do having something to do with their professional life i can just see a typically you know essentially a status defensive male in there in particular like uh uh you're not telling me anything and so it would be a miracle yeah it would be a miracle if it would be one out of fifty it's more like one out of ten okay and so i don't trash people uh when i listen to their mediocre crap i give them you know i'll generally give them a bunch of fours out of a one to five scale that's typically what i will do on a on a continuing ed thing in my history uh once in a while i've trashed people just when i wanted to slam them over the head for their psychodynamic crazy trauma mongering [ __ ] but uh normally it's just a bunch of fours if they're nice people they get fives if i if i really didn't like them they get fours the anyway this is none of this is that important the important thing is is that to to essentially sever the notion that you need to be course correcting depending upon what it is that these people do and that that's going to how you're going to keep your job that's ridiculous it's not going to have anything to do with it so therefore you don't need to read this crap it's just it all belongs in the trash so as jen is pointing out it's great to hear the praise but it doesn't matter if it's 50 to 1 the one is going to be the thing that you're going to remember so don't look at it and if there's some there's some torrent of criticism over something that you said then then your manager you know somebody will bring it up like whoa you better be careful about this area somehow you tripped over a tripwire but i'm sure that that's never happened uh happened to me once as an undergrad i was uh i was explaining i remember here here we are now 40 years or 30 years later uh we're remembering no i wasn't an undergrad i was teaching undergrads and i was we were talking about it was in the class i was talking about males and females and violence and so forth and interestingly enough you'd be surprised at how many oh i don't know in in survey research how many assaults there are from female to male and so i was pointing that out and of course in a bunch of undergrads they're not going to speak up and argue with me because i'm the prof and they're terrified of their grades which of course i'm not conscious of this but on my evaluations you know nine weeks later boy did i get a torrent that's like this was like a throwaway comment in a lecture that i wasn't even hardly thinking about other than hey you know got to be paid attention to these statistics sometimes there's something you can learn that you you're not aware of and and obviously and they all pointed out oh boy there's a lot more to that story well of course there's a hell of a lot more to that story the obviously the the assaults from female to male or not even close to is potentially damaging it doesn't have the same kind of physical intimidation there's a thousand things to talk about there or eight things anyway but the point is that wasn't my point my point was is that i was actually just it was a just a drive-by comment uh but hey you know sometimes there's anomalies and they're worth us you know paying attention and not just assuming we know everything and uh and man yeah i got a bunch of negative comments so the the uh and that was good it's good that i did it's like oh boy i left that hanging out there and had there been a louder and more disagreeable people in the crowd they would have challenged me and then we would have gotten it straight so the so that it's not a terrible thing to have feedback but just wait until your supervisor tells you oh this was terrible what happened there how come we got you know how come we got a bunch of terrible stuff well that's probably never going to happen for you so don't even bother looking at the feedback you're you've got a perfectly good mechanism uh for determining your capabilities which is that your own internal audience knows how well you're doing also the notion that you're working overtime for the [ __ ] remember the [ __ ] just need status that's all they need so whenever they're asking questions or challenging you you use a basic anti-heckler technique right out of feeling good by david burns which is we tell them that's a very good point you know you uh that this is you know more research needs to be done on that and that uh if they want to talk to you more uh you know email me afterwards and we can have a more in-depth discussion on that because that's sort of you know outside the scope those are great discussions but they're outside the scope of this class that way you patted them on the head and they can smile and and feel like they're special so that's how we handle uh disagreeable [ __ ] although don't expect that to produce a more favorable evaluation they're probably still going to give you a crappy evaluation like i think for for agreeables for for this personality type that i was talking to in that video that that you can feel like okay i did that i did the technique i gave them the status i took time out and they still ripped you in the evaluation and i feel like okay well now you need to work even harder next time to give them more status and that's just its own kind of treadmill so yeah they i think that's a very good deflection technique just to get your own um teaching back on track because often they will try to hijack the whole thing um and that's a way to kind of contain them and and also signal to the rest of the group that you are not a total pushover and that you you're still in charge of the operations because you know a lot of times what these these people especially if they are men and you're a female um they really are trying to assert this dominance and take over like you don't know what you're talking about i'm going to become the teacher here i'm going to absolutely undermine your authority in front of the group um and so that that kind of whole sequence says you know gives them some status which probably won't matter in the end but it does signals to the rest of the people i saw that i hey you guys i'm with you i know that he's disruptive um i'm i'm do i'm you know making an appropriate attempt to limit the damage that he's going to do to this whole thing so that's the that's the main reason to use that sort of technique i think yes without a doubt don't expect roses right exactly yeah [ __ ] good all right nathan wonderful thank you guys go ahead the uh no no nothing what's that what's that dr now i had an interesting crack but i lost it go ahead ah dang it all right what else we got all right uh this one may uh may trigger you guys i'm just uh i'm just the messenger dear doctors do you ever talk about abandonment and rejection issues for example my mother divorced my father when i was seven years of age and then my mother was murdered leaving behind seven children wow okay yeah do i talk about abandonment issues no okay so the the fact that this happened doesn't mean that you were abandoned uh it means that you like many a stone age child you went through a situation where there was disruption and who the heck your primary caregiver was so an awful lot of stone age children had their mother murdered in tribal warfare and so the uh and so life is always about gee how am i going to get fed and who's going to be looking out for me and so you know you survived to adulthood uh and the question i think that's that's ringing in the background of this is hey i think i i may have some troubles and isn't doesn't it uh isn't it derivative of the the fact that this happened no it's not okay so your uh your nervous system is not constructed that way your nervous system is constructed to be constantly running cost-benefit analysis on your present and future circumstances so the fact that terrible things happened to you 10 20 or 30 years ago is really not relevant the uh it may be uh it may be occasionally relevant in other words there may be an occasional set of circumstances where those memory files will be called up uh and and therefore you know emotional responses will be activated associated with the memory files uh that's that's fine that's what memory is for so uh but in terms of quote having quote abandonment issues no that's nothing to do with it you don't you don't then learn some deep lesson of childhood that you can't trust the social you know uh framework around you and that all might be lost and that somehow you aren't worthy of holding on to other people's love because they leave you no this is all 100 [ __ ] none of it's true okay there is no encoding in the human nervous system for anything that remotely resembles that uh human nervous system is is uh analyzing its present circumstances uh the uh and it's it's looking at the reasonable inferences about other people's behavior and whether they're going to leave us depending upon its its personality and the current set of circumstances that are involved so some tragedy that happened in a long distant past is not influencing this you know not more than a tiny fraction of the variance of that person's uh you know emotional existence so now that's why we don't bring it up because it's not relevant yeah it's i think that the only way in which it is relevant is that this this is a uh you know pretty far into the bell curve experience yeah you know for for modern life and so you have likely spent your life having it uh repeatedly affirmed to you by the psychology industrial complex and the media and just the culture that you swim in that this that this was causal and this is the source of any any struggles that you have in your life and that you know because um it is it is an unusual experience it's sort of it keeps that file more active um than it otherwise would be and so kind of moving away from that and and developing a new understanding of your your whole self-sovereignty and and your self-determination apart from you know what happened 20 or 30 years ago however however long this was it was 68 i think you said so quite quite some time ago um it's uh that re-re-writing that um you you have to you're not going through the kind of organic decay function that would normally happen as you as you make those inferences about how relevant something like this is to your current life and your current goals because it has been sort of artificially propped up for 50 years so it's um that that is an additional challenge that is not recognized by most mental health professionals and it's certainly not culturally recognized and so um you know i can see why you're looking for answers around this and and wondering why we don't have any much to say about it but it's because we take a very different view of it so you have it's not that it's not that you have to recover from the incident as much as you have to recover from the distortion of and unlearn all of the um the sort of incorrect uh correlations that have been erroneously confirmed over and over and over again since since this happened wow yeah and also there's there's an additional yeah i mean as part of all that there's a lure that says can't this be leveraged into getting some concessions out of the village of course and it has been i'm sure i'm sure it has been like not through no fault of your own you know it's sort of like you you just you just make this observation early on that when people hear the story they they are more likely to um to grant you a little more latitude than somebody else because it is very unusual um and and so you know you don't meet many people who have gone through something this difficult and and this disruptive and so it's like wow okay well what how can i help you how can you know how can we how can i assist you through life right so that just strengthens this this association um and and it becomes very difficult to let go of that it you get very invested in it yeah the file gets called up because it's profitable yeah uh there was a i was just counseling a young lady uh recently and a guy was breaking up with her i mean she was breaking up with him and he was throwing a fit about it and then the issue came up with oh you're doing this and it's it's you know the anniversary of my father's uh my dad my dad dying two years ago it's like so what the hell does that have to do with anything so that's the anniversary of his death it could also be his birthday it could also be father's day it could be there are many there are many correlations that you know your mind and this is how we that's how we're wired and when we look to where is the next most plausible way for me to get a little more concession in this in this transaction yeah and it's not like you're doing this like some sort of evil you know you're not you're not doing this maliciously you're just doing this because you're an energy conserving animal who is you know trying to get the best deal that you have coming to you and you you have made these correlations in the past and and if you feel in the moment that summoning something like that might make someone be a little nicer to you might might take you know take take things a little easier then why wouldn't you do that of course people are going to do that i would do that i'll do this all the time sure particularly like if i'm down in front of some useless government clerk uh trying to get sure something's signed off you know at the dmv this is exactly what my brain is doing yeah how can you make yourself more sympathetic this is what every every uh prisoner is got this hardwired into them every every child has this hard word into them i mean it's uh it's the same sort of impulse that my dogs have to make really really cute sad faces when they want something it's like um and so it doesn't mean that that it's it's uh you know we don't want this to sound totally dismissive because this was a really uh really unusual and and i'm sure horrifying experience um and but it is not responsible for anything that is happening in this moment um except for in the way that it continues to be uh a force in your life because it has been artificially confirmed again and again and again perfect doctors would you would you say this is a form of pseudo-esteem maybe i'm not understanding pseudostem right but would this like kind of act like that where it's a little addictive to to be feeling or advertising it maybe so i i have to let's think this through so pseudo esteem is essentially esteem given to you for uh out of out of um non-direct knowledge of your abilities but rather reputation and the ultimate pseudo-esteem is we don't even know why it is that you're given credit you're just you just have a lot of credit um you have to have some kind of non-specific notoriety would be the ultimate but i think you could um yeah if it's well known and understood why it is that you're deserving of status i would call that a steam um so you can have a steam from people that you don't know that would be pseudo esteem to me is is um your instagram likes yeah it's more like what's that it's it's instagram likes it's instagram yes it's it's it's posing a selfie to try to it's uh yeah it's it's like it's this sort of collection of this feeling that you have more standing in the village based on nothing that you've actually meaningfully contributed um and so it is it's kind of repute it's a little distinct from reputational because reputational is actually based on some you know we know something about that guy in that neighboring village he right he is useful um pseudoesteem is more like really it's false it's false yes it's it's been ascribed to you for for reasons that are fundamentally not true or that are deceptive or um that are just yeah based on something like a selfie so yeah yeah that's yeah i think of sudo steam as my my my uh that that the the gangster pulls up at the fancy club in his fancy car and the valet is impressed and the valet doesn't have any idea what the guy does for a living but he he sees evidence that somehow somewhere this guy thinks of success yes the trappings of success and the um uh yeah so anyway that so the the in some ways you're you have a yeah i think that's more it's not exactly pseudo esteem this story it's more um your you feel the that you're holding a card um against the village's insurance policy um in other words they're granting you it would be problematic for for example a psychologist to not acknowledge that the world owes you a debt and so that's that's why people can feel that i'm surprisingly hard-nosed about this and i'm hard-nosed about this because number one i'm right and number two it's not in your best interest to play that card and so i will i will chop that off in no time uh when people talk to me uh and it's very surprising in my career that people uh generally are not upset with me maybe because they've heard me before but also they it hits the source code that they realize holy smokes that you know it is about what i do with my life and my choices and what i do about it it isn't about the fact that my mother did this or that to me 30 or 40 years ago that isn't the reason you're 40 pounds overweight it has nothing to do with your childhood okay and and all of your little emotional problems and relationship problems and everything else have nothing to do with your childhood this has to do with your your functioning in the present and so to chop that away and to to to throw that little card in the trash or rip it up that's actually in the person's best interest the uh most of the time what i've experienced is that people if people have any sort of um meaningful self-awareness and intellectual honesty about themselves which most most people that we talk to you have some um when you confront them directly with this you know not not in a mean way but in a gentle way um it's actually a relief it's a relief because it's it's you know it's a it's exhausting to people are aware people are aware that they're sort of um you know calling up the past to justify concessions in the present and and that is a it's a difficult um set of balls to keep in the air um and and it's it's sort of frustrating because you do realize that you're you're not being dealt with on the level you're sort of you've you've secured some concessions but it's you feel the sort of the cost of that um you know people don't see who you really are they're not giving you a full a full uh chance to fully express yourself and pursue whatever sort of success does exist for you now not not 50 years ago but now and so when people people know that this is true they know that they do this they know they have an instinct for it they can see how they've done it or continue to do it um and so when you when you shine a spotlight on it it actually feels like a relief for a lot of people because now it's out in the open um and now it's like okay i don't have to maintain this fiction anymore um now i am free to start from where i'm at and and proceed even though it's going to be difficult that there's there's great um there's a great sense of self-empowerment and potential achievement because you know that you you have some distance to close um and now that it's it's more invigorating to try to close that distance because you've you're being honest about where you stand in relation to the goal um so yeah that's not not every time but what i've experienced is that in most cases it's an invigorating relief my partner that's it that's amazing yeah all right oh it's great this answer was so much more than i thought it was going to be and so thank you so much that dr hawkins you were just trying to get us to rant yeah yeah yeah i know i mean and you know it happened but it would in a in a way that i think yeah it was just amazing so yeah you guys like i've said before you guys have a way with words that that many people do not so i really appreciate that it's because of my difficult childhood yeah that's it all right david let's go to the next one all right all right okay um dear doctors i was put on psychiatric drugs when i was 13 years old wait a minute hold on all right i'm all upset no go ahead i was put on psychiatric drugs when i was 13 years old because of anorexia and being miserable about being bullied at school the drugs messed me up i can see it now that i have not used them for years i was on various types of drugs around 10 years i now know how damaging and useless those drugs are and i know my cognitive abilities have been damaged because of them i also now realize just how much damage psychiatry has caused to my life overall i'm extremely angry and bitter angry and bitter it's incredibly painful to think about what has been done to my brain and what potential has been stolen for me i dwell on this anger and bitterness every day and it's unbearable how can i cope well that's a little bit like a trauma story okay so uh let's look at this first of all if you've been years and years without the psychiatric meds it's very likely that most of the damage that's been done has been mitigated okay so second of all if that's not true then save up a few coins and talk to nathan gershfield about doing it fast either at his place or do it uh virtually with nathan so as nathan can guide you through depending upon what your age is and what your health is and you know whether or not it makes sense uh the truth is is that uh water fasting is going to likely be a very good thing to to do some detoxing and and resetting of all kinds of little mechanisms like that uh healthy living yeah your healthy living is going to your body's constantly repairing itself with every cell attempting to constantly circle around and try to reach an optimum homeostasis and that's going to be true with the the cells in your brain as well so the fact that they were pounded by uh toxins for years and years doesn't mean that they can't recover uh they can recover and your your you you will not have lost some uh some critical cognitive function uh or or emotional stability that you can't recover so i think that um uh so i think that that is a uh you've correctly identified that this is nasty crap uh wasn't good for you uh but neither does it sow the seeds of your fate uh now you may be sitting in a wheelchair from tardive dyskinesia because of the antipsychotics that they gave you for 10 15 years that's possible but it's very very unlikely that that's true so if you're uh if you were able to type this out uh and you were able to think through it through these sentences you've got plenty of horsepower left and therefore you know take the bull by the horns do do what is it that you can do to improve your functioning which is diet sleep exercise and fasting and uh if you do those four things then i'm going to expect that that you'll make plenty of a recovery i'm not going to say you're going to make 100 percent of recovery who would know nobody's ever done any research on this and nobody knows i do know however i have seen many people that spent decades on very heavy duty regimens of psychiatric medications and when they came to true north health center and did extended water fasting uh and diet and lifestyle changes they improved dramatically okay so this is it's not like major improvements cannot be made uh if we give this if we give this thing a chance so uh do those things and and uh and then at that point uh whatever's left over in terms of the struggles and emotional function etc etc that's what you know that's what help is for that's what people like jen and myself and and the thousands of other people that have our skills [Laughter] the uh they're uh that's what that's what help us for and so you can contact us or seek other help elsewhere for uh that may be useful but the point is is that def definitely take dead aim at what it is that you can do and make the most out of that that you can yeah yeah the uh i totally the sort of anger and bitterness at you know people making these choices for you when you were too young to participate in them um and uh you know i get that i i totally totally get that and you know you you have recognized the the cost and the toxicity and and even though you have this you know you've got this potential to sort of undo however much of the damage you can you can undo i i totally get that source of bitterness um and so that's where something like my my trusty uh well-worn copy of something like pema children's book you know it's where i go into the kind of buddhist literature this sort of um this you know people people don't know people whether this i'm assuming that this was a parent um and and so kind of giving yourself some some understanding of the you know some distance from the maliciousness of this um and that it like let's say this was your mom um i don't know from the question but i'm just gonna just make some vast inferences here so if this was your mom and she put you on these drugs when you were 13 because you were you were miserable about being bullied and you you were anorexic that was she was doing you know what she thought was best for you at the time and and so to kind of immerse yourself in some um some more uh not even mystical but just kind of like everybody's walking their own path kind of literature and i find the most useful literature for this from my own experiences is the sort of mindfulness buddhist literature um so i don't know if that's a good fit for you but it it does help extend this kind of feeling of general forgiveness to to people who have uh caused great consequences in your life because they were they were acting out of their own distortion they they were doing what they they thought would be helpful even though it that turned out to be incorrect um so that's just a you know kind of a little softer angle to this whole answer that it helps in forgiveness a great deal to kind of understand where people are coming from and knowing that they didn't they didn't do it on purpose most of the time absolutely yeah i want to i want to uh add some more a little bit more to this and that is that your job in this life your um we each get a chance to do the following thing and that is that we we can contract our muscles and change our location in space uh altering the relationship between self and environment and the we are biologically wired to make those choices and to have those contractions of muscles to move ourselves in order to optimize survival and reproductive success that's what it's designed for that is highly correlated with happiness it's not the same thing beat your genes is about about trying to figure out where where we don't necessarily want to optimize gene survival we want to optimize the the currency that gene survival used in order to try to get us to do their bidding and one of those things is a is an entire group of experiences that we call happiness uh and happiness comes in and you know a huge amount of flavors it can enjoy excitement of different things um you know feelings of satisfaction feelings of pride uh feelings of vicarious pride and and watching other people succeed essentially appreciation for the abilities of others or something beautiful in nature there's all kinds of experiences that result in the activation and moods of happiness your job in this life is to try to figure out what muscles to move that's your job okay it's basically like a video game with a sc a scoreboard on it uh that you're you're trying to like rack up the most points you can and you know other part of the game is other people are giving you advice hey invest in this okay do this do that you know you know plastics it's the future the uh in other words all kinds of advice all kinds of opportunities now the uh so our job is to realize that what we have is we've got a body and in it we've got three pounds of brain we've got a nervous system in there and inside that nervous system under certain circumstances the moods of happiness will be activated and in fact we can't stop them from being activated under certain circumstances so our job is to find out hmm how can i get to those circumstances how can i position myself in my relationship to the environment that activates those circuits that is the entire game and we only get so long to do it and then we're dead okay it's like this is it okay this is the this is what there is and so the fact that you had a you know a bunch of [ __ ] happen early and some of the neural circuits got dinged up oh well okay we still have the same game it's exactly the same set of circumstances everybody gets basically the same what looks like the same game with a different set of circumstances somebody's born beautiful and brilliant and healthy well good for them okay they've gotta they've got an easier landscape unless they happen to be where in somalia okay they may be brilliant and beautiful with a great personality but they're in somalia and they're born into a trash heap and they're not to get out of there not good circumstances so we we have to count our blessings and look at the fact that okay i've got quite a bit of freedom until the government takes it away uh for for me to make a bunch of different moves which can activate my mood to happiness that's my job and nobody else can do it for me i have to do it now we may be able to get some assistance so we may occasionally get into situations where it's like whoa should i go to the left or go to the right i'm not sure i'm in trouble maybe i can call somebody or read something and get some advice okay and so that's one that's what we do here that's how we you know how we do our numbers to do exactly that kind of thing we recognize that some of these problems these some of these questions these dilemmas in human life they have patterns to them and often those uh it turns out that there's high principles that we can look down on these things and use high principle in order to make better decisions under dilemmas i.e never make a big decision when a small decision will do things like that the um now but the but the high principle here from my standpoint that i'm trying to exhort into this individual or into any other individual that that is uh is feeling a lot of the defeat anger demoralization frustration etc is to turn it around a little bit and look at it but life is an opportunity it's an opportunity for you to figure out what what can you do where can you physically take your body who do you need to stand in front of what do you need to be watching listening to you know attempting to accomplish where do you need to be okay you're never going to see me living in new york city never going to happen somebody that's there now is like why would you want to live anywhere else okay good for them that's their nervous system that's what hits their moods of happiness inside those structures as far as that goes me not a chance in hell okay i don't know maybe it maybe it beats los angeles no it doesn't i'd rather live in los angeles and i hate los angeles exactly but i hate los angeles i grew up there i absolutely loathe it all right now so the thing is is that so i know what kind of a spot to for myself to be located in and i know you know what people it is that i want to be talking to and i know what kinds of things i want to be doing i'm pretty good at activating the moods of happiness inside this brain i'm trying to learn always how to get better and i'm trying to always get better circumstances if i can but this question and these frustrations hey listen we got a game to play all right and we're gonna we're gonna get control of these variables as well as we can we're gonna attack the problems we're gonna make as much progress as we can and then the nervous system you've got is the nervous system you've got okay and at that point it's like okay there there's it's useless to [ __ ] about it unless somebody somewhere is going to give you a handout or a confession or a concession of some kind don't count on it okay instead we have to look at this thing straight in the eye and say okay what are our options what can we do and usually there's a hell of a lot you can do okay we're usually nowhere near out of options for figuring out how we can alter our circumstances to improve our our ability to activate the moods of happiness so yeah we're not we're not even close to defeated and we almost never are yeah awesome i think that's down there that's like the braveheart speech you know the brave hearts you know on the way to the new year you know yeah so this episode's gonna be coming out in a couple of days which is going to be right in time for for the january 1st so no it's really good i mean that's the essence of everything that we're trying to do on the podcast and when we talk to people and and that's that's all of it right there we we've been bravehearted i never saw that movie it looks like i need to see it it's pretty amazing i think every man who watches that movie gets a little teary-eyed maybe it's just me but all right all right well good that's a good one for new year's time yeah yeah good doctor hawk dr lyle thank you so so much um i don't know if you guys feel like doing one more but i think this is a great place to end yeah let's leave it right yeah we'll wrap it right there perfect all right all right happy new years everybody and jen my my brilliant political science colleague who loves freedom chin up 2022 we're gonna we're gonna good things are gonna happen as people as people have pointed out 20 20 22 is just 20 20 the sequel that's not good [Laughter] yeah there's definitely there's a um the tide is changing in small ways i don't know if it's significant waves or if it's going to catch any uh bigger energy but there's definitely some little narrative shifts going on so i have hope well we'll we're going to hope for the best and we're going to prepare for the worst that's how you do it that's right that's right all right nathan good job this year uh dr lau dr hawk thank you so much it's been an amazing amazing year uh with all the stuff all the [ __ ] that's been going down it's been a breath of fresh air to hear you guys uh your take on it and your uh your just analysis is spot on so we really really love it and looking forward to another year hopefully this one's gonna be uh you know this one's going to be interesting so you better you
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