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Episode 274: Can therapy trigger a victim mentality From food addiction to impulsive shopping, 10 paid dates
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uh well i just so we're we're recording this on uh the 23rd and they just wrapped the um the the big march against the vaccine mandates that was held in washington dc which i had hoped to be able to go to in person um since i'm quite a bit closer to it than i was before yeah um but it just didn't work out with my schedule and uh various other demands on my time so i couldn't make it out there um but are you implying that this podcast is getting away of these protests for you it's true it's true this was one of my pressing obligations today um but uh yeah it was really interesting it was um sort of a mixed bag you know you you hope with these kinds of events that they are very inclusive and they tried very hard to be um obviously i wouldn't say apolitical because it's a very political topic but they tried to be really inclusive with a bunch of different viewpoints so you you had people that were there for a whole bunch of different reasons people coming from all sorts of really strong religious backgrounds uh you know people who have suffered vaccine injuries telling their stories doctors front line doctors who are advocating early treatment over vaccines just a whole medley of things so yeah i am sure the stream is available for people to watch i i don't know i know dell big tree was one of the organizers and he was streaming it on his channel so people can find that wherever uh that's available probably not on youtube i would assume um but uh yeah there there were some really there were some good speeches rfk junior um you know gave quite a rousing kind of keynote um and uh had a lot of powerful things to say i thought and and then there were some kookier viewpoints and some problematic characters but that's how it goes so yeah i was just glad to see it happen glad to see some political action yeah if you had to rate because maybe i just thought about this question on the fly but if you had to rate the or if you had to compare the beat your genes kind of mentality with what's going on right now politically um how would you kind of compare the two in what way like a you know how do you how do you beat your genes as far as yeah yeah mandates we're in the face yeah we're in the face of something that that's you feel very strongly about with these vaccine mandates um and you and dr lyle both do and you know we we uh we we've shared you know you've shared your thoughts here um what can people do to beat their genes in this in this in this situation yeah the main thing that he and i have always come back to when we've talked about this here elsewhere is um the whole position of power questions so you know it doesn't matter if your workplace has a vaccine mandate or if you're if your community has some other kind of mandate um if you are in a position of power where you are not affected by that or you're not as affected by it as you otherwise would be so this is very kind of harry brown how i found freedom in an unfree world if when the world becomes less free you have to rethink how you're going to find freedom and and sometimes that means taking a really hard look at what it is that you're doing with your life where you're living um what you're doing for work and how susceptible that makes you to what um other people who are bigger and stronger and more powerful than you in terms of uh state power um if you're more susceptible to what they're going to tell you to do then it's time to rethink how you can position yourself in a way that you're not if that if that is possible for you or to some degree however that is possible for you if it's something that is important to you it's not as important to everybody as it is to me to me this is it's an incredibly important um not just ideological point but just just a on fundamental principle and and you know my sense of of what it means to have individual liberty um it's really this this is a this is a single issue uh cause for me so i am i'm willing to reorganize my life and and uproot myself quite a bit to manage my way around the situation in ways that other people might not be yeah i remember a few months ago you talked to you were in seattle and you couldn't go anywhere because you know passports were required everywhere so you couldn't even like sit down and have a cup of coffee is it a cup of hot chocolate yeah no seattle seattle's very very vaccine card segregated and that the point is that it's not um as as doug and i have talked about many times it's not about covid it's not about the vaccine or the the boosters or anything like that it's the it's sort of what it says about the the uh political context in which you're spending your time if if you are living in a city that is willing to impose this sort of thing on you um that is writing on the wall about what your future in that city looks like and and what your the constraints on the choices for your life going forward might look like and so this should be a wake-up call for people to to really take stock of whether that's something that they can tolerate and and want to continue to live with or not so looking i mean i i'm very sensitized to this because of my background in political science i look far beyond what the state is doing at any given time and i look more conceptually at well what is it doing and what does that say about what kind of regime i'm living in what what does that mean has suddenly become more likely for me to anticipate down the line and how can i protect myself from that wow that's wonderful dr hawk thank you it's it's a you know just paranoid survivalist at this point it sounds like it sounds like a big display for for a lot of people in the political sphere is freedom is that they want to be promoting freedom i know um i have friends myself like i don't want to travel to countries where there's dictatorships or the you know it just it doesn't feel right to support that system and so i guess on a smaller scale same thing happens in different states here too yeah and you know what i think the this often kind of gets lost in a bunch of talking points and people kind of forget what what they're actually trying to say here and what what concepts we're really dealing with but it is they did cover today really well several speakers really made a good point of distinguishing between you you have the right you know to to get on a plane and fly across the country and go visit a friend and you have a right to uh go into a restaurant that wants your business and you you just you have these sort of basic rights as a citizen of the united states that are being slowly transformed into privileges based on the uh the whims of the the regime or the sub-regime that has power over you at that time and so it happens to be related to this particular pandemic and their perception of the dangers they're in at this particular moment and you may or may not agree with that you may or may not say okay well covet is a public you know it's a significant threat to public health and and some of this limitation and transformation of rights into privileges is warranted you know we need to rethink um how we're going to manage our public spaces to keep the most people as safe as we can so that's it's its own sort of discussion but the the thing that concerns me much further than that is the the transformation of rights into privileges in general um and my awareness of how how impossible um and and how how unlikely if not impossible it is to walk those things back once they've been transitioned yeah i can't speak like very many government programs that have ever walked much back no at least no they no their their tendency is to consolidate greater and greater power and control over their citizenry that that is in principle what they would they would want to maximize they they do not have an inherent interest in your uh in your liberty uh beyond what they're able to control so given the given the pretext given the capacity they're going to take more and more of that off the table and and so that is that's where this whole notion that you have to you know you have to you have to fight for your your space and your freedom from the state uh because it's not going to be happily granted to you certainly never going to be given back to you once not not easily once it's been taken well certainly appreciate hearing your thoughts on this dr hawk it's um it's uh it's kind of interesting to hear the the uh the take from an evolutionary psychology perspective because uh this is a blend you know between the clinical parts of you know what you learn from other from your clients and then and then what's happening in the world and and uh really appreciate your take on it yeah i just am very sensitized to uh political mission creeps so you know it's so it so easily gets caricatured into this sort of oh you know you're anti-vaxx and you're you're spewing ideas about liberty and freedom that don't mean anything and it's like no this is the the high concept here there's nothing more important than that um and it is it's not um i don't think to going too far to say that it's it's what the country was founded on and it's an important part of what we might call the american creed and i'm not ready to to let that go i'm not willing to let that die on my watch i'm not willing to go forward in a life that just sort of surrenders that to the the threat of uh whatever the whatever the the state is telling me at any particular moment in time that i need to be afraid of that is the whole principle of what we're supposed to stand against in the united states and i'm you know if if you haven't been sort of radicalized in this direction by now in this process then you're probably not going to be but in my case i very much have been because it's been um it's been unfolding in a direction that i would not have anticipated and at a speed and to a level that i find pretty horrendous well we will uh anxiously await the future but until then that now what do you say we get too much questions all we can do yeah anxiously await the future and and take active you know uh movement toward participating in your own life in proactive ways as much as you can so we were just doug and i have this other sort of parallel uh very political podcast that we do called talk blocked and um we were just talking on the show this week about how uh you know the real the most important thing to be doing right now is to be investing in community and investing in in skills basic skills um because that's really though that is you know without without truly going into paranoid uh you know proper survivalism that that you getting yourself in a position of power from the state means that you're able to meet basic needs without the state's help that you're not in a position where you you know you've you've lost your business because of a set of mandates and you can't provide for yourself and therefore you have to get the hand out from the state in the form of some kind of universal basic income which comes attached to a bunch of bunch of strings about what kind of citizen you need to be and what kind of politics you need to have and what it's okay to say and what it's not okay to say or do in the public sphere and um what what kind of movements you can or can't make and and that's you know that's just not an acceptable cost for me so if you're if you're driven out of uh your ability to to to provide for yourself then okay well what do we do then we turn towards something that does look a little bit like um you know off-grid survivalism in the sense of you're you're finding out who your neighbors are you're finding out what kind of skills you you can pull together and what kind of problems you can solve and um you're investing in your own health and your own um your own basic skills of living in the world and providing for yourself and your family so yeah i'm i'm like looking at the water field well i'm walking up water filters right now and you know well creation i do have a miter saw though so i could probably build some tables if needed there you go until they till they cut your power [Laughter] yeah yeah he was telling me yesterday that there's apparently the state of california is taxing individual solar panels now which is so you try to go off grid you try to get self-sufficient and you get a you get some sort of skill from sacramento yeah so yeah i mean it's not it's not going to be it's not going to be easy or there's going to be a lot of resistance here and and i don't think we're at the point where people who want to detach themselves from this encroaching sort of state power need to you know completely get into a proper mindset and start investing all their money in bitcoin and getting off the grid and everything we might head that direction but i do think people need to start thinking pretty pretty hard about you know where where does their engagement with the state kind of begin and end and and what is their comfort level with uh sharing their data and um having their movements defined by by their local regime well speaking of extremely local regime we have our first question has to do with the victim mentality so perhaps this could be related to uh the uh the coming crises but uh what do you say we go through this one and see what you have to say let's hear it okay dear doctors i was listening to episode 267 recently and was particularly interested in knowing more about the victim mentality for some context i grew up facing a lot of turmoil i had a physically and sexually abusive father i left home and was homeless from 16 to 18 years old and i dealt with a lot of tumultuous grooming situations at a young age and so forth however i was dealing with it really well until 20 years old when i started to go to therapy while simultaneously moving to a tiny city that was very into woke culture i feel as though it may have actually exacerbated my victim mentality but i'm unsure i want to know was the victim mentality trait already integrated within my genetics or does woke culture and modern therapy have enough influence to exacerbate that mentality and does it matter the severity the weight when it comes to coaching yourself to leave the victim mentality yeah interesting so you you sent me nate this little little short video it's not really doesn't really lend itself to audio very well so we can't play it in the show but this little little short video of a a baby who is uh completely fine after a superficial injury until his his assumed father caretaker um sort of exaggerates and and starts coddling the baby and saying oh my gosh it's okay you know it's going to be okay and the baby immediately picks up on these signals of oh there's an advantage here to kind of playing this up and and i'm going gonna get more stuff i'm gonna get more i'm gonna get more pats on the head and maybe some candy and um you know i'm just i'm gonna earn some esteem here essentially by exaggerating the injury um and so when you're asking you know is the victim mentality integrated into your genes or or is it sort of uh uh created by the cultural context it's both it's in everybody it's in i mean it's in my dogs i've seen it in my dogs it's sort of the you know plane the victim uh gets them more attention gets them more sympathy gets them more stuff and this is a very i mean this this serves a important evolutionary purpose especially with children um where you know it's as long as it stays within the bounds of an appropriate reaction you're you you are you are being given resources by your family and by your tribal coalition in accordance with your need by signaling that need and so when you have been harmed it pays to you know if they're not if they don't see the harm you want to communicate it because otherwise you're not being adequately compensated and so this this is deep within all of us and it's you know it's it's not inherently problematic or pathological um it becomes so when you introduce it to this environmental context and the the psychology industrial complex of of the uh we're going to latch on to this and develop entire systems and bureaucracies and um and and cultural frameworks to reinforce this and to define your reality by it so you've you've got this little this this little tendency that you've observed for your entire life and then you get a therapist who gloms onto it as a mode as a as a means for their own job security because if they can get you to well well let's go back to that that sounds like that was really significant like how you know have you thought about that have you thought about how that's affecting your life right now and suddenly suddenly they have generated a bunch of anxiety in you that needs to be unpacked next week um and and so that kind of relationship and and getting reinforced by everything that you see on oprah and on social media and in just everywhere i mean it's it's this is the sort of general approach to pop psychology all over everywhere that you would look um it starts to get to you and you and you start to think oh my gosh you know i really can't move on with my life until i heal this trauma until i until i move on from this so um you know people it sounds like you went through some legitimately horrific stuff um and you know i i don't want i don't want anyone to uh interpret us as being in a position of oh well you know toughen up move on it's no big deal like you know it's it's we're not we're not trying to deny that that happened um but we're trying to position your life now as you know someone who had those experiences but is not defined by them um someone who possesses the the full resources and capacities and and the unwritten future of your life in this moment um and that every moment that you spend looking backwards trying to quote heal the past is is a moment that is taking you away from building that future so it's it's really a inverted way of of looking at how to reconcile these sorts of things and we're we're not we're not denying that they happen we're not denying that they uh had an important role on defining your sense of normal and habituating you to to certain patterns that you might have to work hard to to relearn and to get comfortable with new ones but that doesn't it it didn't change who you are it doesn't define where you can go oh that's fascinating dr hawk and so how would you start if this person came into your you know booked a consult with you and asked this question yeah well i would i mean we'd have a very similar conversation it's it's sort of like well you know how how do you think these things are like tell me tell me about what kind of problems you have in your life right now and how they were created by this abuse that you went through and and um let's kind of question that let's let's really talk about you know what is stopping you from having a successful relationship what is stopping you from thriving in your career is it really the fact that you suffered this abuse um and and were left homeless and and had all these terrible relationships or are there other things going on um you know some of the other concepts that we've talked about on the show many times you know is there are there ego traps here are there um esteem dilemmas are you know can we think of ways to interpret what we might think of as self-sabotage through a more evolutionary framework of of you just trying to save face in the village and um not be exposed to failure and uh seeking pleasure and avoiding pain and all of these basic things that we do to try to feel good and you know not not show other people our weaknesses that are fundamental to everybody in the village no matter whether they went through terrible childhood abuse or not fascinating thank you so much dr hogg so our next question has to do with stress and i've always appreciated your kind of take on some of the uh more i guess what dr law calls the mystic chip uh with regards to stress and some of the some of the things you've you've you've learned along your journey but the question is dear doctors how do i cope non-destructively with stress as a quite emotionally unstable yet conscientious person i find myself stressed a lot of the time in the past my way of reacting to stress has been reaching for food i learned that i stress ate because my body was seeking something to increase my chances of survival and reproduction during an uncertain time but more recently after successfully stopping myself from using food to alleviate stress i have turned to impulse shopping this also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective since the things that i buy include jewelry hair nail appointments and clothes which all enhance my physical appearance and also increase my reproductive success i was wondering if there's something i could do effectively to soothe stress in the moment that won't make me gain weight or break my bank account and yes the food i was eating was low calorie dense food but as someone with extremely lucky quote genetics yet a perfectionist desire for being stick thin i still gain weight from eating more than i strictly need i know you might say to work on my environment more than i do myself and prevent circumstances that cause stress in the first place for example most recently i've been stressed at work over managerial responsibilities and not wanting to disappoint my boss with overseeing day-to-day operations while being a manager is not something i enjoy this and other stressful positions pay more and allow me to have more money to spend on the various materialistic trinkets that i desire to make me feel more confident about myself in the dating market well i would say there's a reason that we call the show beat your right like this is you've got the the the answer to your question is all wrapped up in those last couple of sentences so you're in a job that you don't enjoy that causes you a lot of stress which causes this downstream problem of quote self-medicating to try to get a little dopamine into your life whether it's through food or shopping or whatever so you're coming with the question of oh how can i stop the impulse behavior to that is trying to make me feel better rather than looking at the the root cause we're trying to you're wanting to treat the symptom instead of the cause the cause is that you're in the stress-producing job um and you are you are a creature who is more prone to stress in general like you've observed about your personality you've got you're kind of got this high conscientious quality to you and so it's probably going to follow you around no matter what sort of job you're in but you can minimize it you can put yourself in circumstances that make that less likely to occur or it's going to occur less often um and so the example i always use is my very high strung dog um who i love dearly who's very emotionally unstable very agreeable unstable it's a lovely combination and he's you know if i were living well i've just moved to this really quiet rural area where he's super chill it's like he's just snoozles all day he's he's very happy he he's eating more you know he's sort of just he's he gets to go sniff deer poop like life is pretty good um and so it's only when he hears the mail truck in the driveway that he barks and gets agitated we're when we're living in the city there's noise all the time you know there's neighbors making noise there's weird sounds on the street there's fireworks going off on holidays and so he's always in the state of hyper you know paranoid arousal he's like oh my god what's going on and it's very stressful for him so i've put him in a new context um and and you know if if he were uh if he were if you're a two-legged dog and he had to work for a living like he might have a higher paying job in the city um he might have more opportunities to meet people and to and to do more exciting things and to and to have more experiences than he does here but there's a there's a quality of life that he's able to enjoy in this environment that he can't in that so this is why we just you have to look at life in terms of trade-offs everything is trade-offs so what's more important to you having the materialistic trinkets to display to your potential mates that come from this higher income or this day-to-day grinding stress of this unpleasant job with responsibilities that you don't like and you don't want that are causing you downstream difficulties with your weight and with your checking account so you have to look very coldly at these things and and do a cost-benefit analysis even if you have to spreadsheet it out to to really determine okay there's there's going to be one one direction here where i have to beat my genes i have to either beat my genes with changing the environment that i'm in that i don't want to be in because i'm better compensated for it or i have to i have to beat my genes in redirecting this nervous self-medication energy into yet another hopefully less destructive channel um and so you can you can weigh those out and think about them but that's the kind of situation that you're in and it sounds to me like you already sort of know the solution is that you know you really are not particularly well suited for this job wow so director hawk do you find yourself less stressed now that you're in virginia and away from all the noise and oh yeah no this is a way better environment for me i am i am a country mouse through and through so i i mean i've been going on walks and you just stop and all you can hear is the occasional drone of a faraway airplane and um little birds chirping and i'm i'm obsessed with foraging and identifying all the plants and trees around so i just walk around with my little notebook and my little id books trying to figure out you know okay what is that is that is that poisonous or is that edible so it's been very it's a really good environment for me gosh some tough decisions when we're trying to beat our genes yeah no it's never i mean it's not supposed to be easy it's you've got to you have to pay the cost somewhere um it's it's not as if you get to elude the cost entirely and find some magical solution where you know it's completely cost free and super easy that it really just doesn't work that way most of the time you have to choose which which bill you pay essentially all right dr hawk so you want to go for one more sure what else do we have okay uh dear doctors if i had to put a label on it i identify as a bisexual female i'm overthinking applying the evolutionary psychology or ep concepts that i understand so well when it comes to dating women for instance do the 10 paid dates still apply when two women are dating in my experience relationships with women move much faster than with men and i've never had an issue pair bonding with females but i'm now in my late 20s and recently reconnected to a woman i met over five years ago we were in overlapping friend groups hung out often we had an interest in one another but never acted on it because we were always dating other people but over the years she would text me a couple times a year checking in and this year it's progressed more because we are both single we live in different states texts often it's light it's fun there's obvious attraction the plan is for me to visit but i'm aware that things could be very different in person versus online so we'll see what happens but i find myself over thinking how i should go about this i'll be staying at her place which is already out of my comfort zone is sleeping with her when i visit a bad idea if i desire a relationship rather than a hookup i normally would never sleep with someone this quickly but this is an odd situation because of the distance and having known her for many years please let me know what you think about this and lesbian relationships in general i would love to hear a deep dive into your thoughts on women dating women well i yeah i think it's almost you know uh you're you're violating the spirit of 10 paid dates by by moving in just as much as you would be by sleeping with her so 10 dates the the whole notion of the idea of 10 paid dates is really to give both of you um a little breathing room to to make sure that you're not acting out of distortion and hormones and excitement and esteem surges of exciting esteem and all of the things that accompany an early relationship so um with women dating women that tendency to immediately play house you know all of the u-haul jokes and and everything else that that's sort of rushing in very quickly getting very serious very quickly um it's it's a slightly different dynamic but i think all the more important to you know try to keep yourself uh from from going all in with this person right away and giving all those signals and looking for all those signals just to assess you know what am i dealing with what are my real feelings you know apart from the the thrill of the initial relationship what what is you know this this person actually about what kind of feedback am i really getting so the fact that you're going to be cohabitating so early is i it's i mean it's going to give you a lot of information but it could also contribute to a lot of the the early pair bond distortion so i would say just follow ted 10 paid dates to in the in the spirit of the law not necessarily the letter of the law and give it some time before you bring the sexuality into the relationship for the same reason that that we advise women dating men to do that there's really not not any big difference in the dynamic or in the principle here it's it's just about you know don't make a big decision when a small decision will do take some time to watch your your nervous system and and you know who this person is and who they become to you over a longer period of time than just getting yourself all wrapped up in a commitment that you don't necessarily want to maintain fascinating dr hawk thank you so so much we really appreciate it it's um i'm sure we'll hear more about about these uh the well i really appreciate hearing about these ten paid dates and the uh the females perspective in this because you know lord knows it's uh both sides both sexes are has been have been confused about it for a while so yeah no i think the the whole the whole idea of 10 pay dates just emerges from this you know don't rush into things it's really that's another way that we can say it it's not 11. yeah it's not there's nothing magical about 10k dates and there's nothing yeah it's it's really it's it's about the you know what are you trying to get out of this experience and and you know my my experience dating women in the past and uh being around women who date women is that it moves way faster than heterosexual relationships um and that that that makes the costs of backing out way higher when you get a month or two in and you're basically already married and you feel like all of this emotional um bondedness that has not necessarily come from a sexual dynamic it's it's come from this plain house dynamic um and introducing you to the your your family members and um you know just kind of making it very serious very quickly and you know over promising to each other what this relationship is about before you actually know what it's about fascinating well dr hawk thank you so so much for coming on during this very important political day for you and uh not going to a protest no it's uh it's it's fine i was glad to be able to participate virtually although it's a little tragic well hopefully things hopefully they either improve or go in a better direction which now that i'm thinking about is probably the same thing so that's that's sort of like um yeah yeah i think it's guaranteed to do one so yeah i i hope so i mean there's some um some signs of hope uh certainly looking at you know the um the uk's recent turnaround um the supreme court's decision uh there's some there's some signs of moving in the right direction but going back to the high concept of states seizing and consolidating power over their subjects it's i think there's still plenty to be worried about so that's what i'm keeping my eye on yeah to quote a u.s official it's time for us to do what we've been doing and that time is every day right geez can't you just see that inscribed on a plaque so moving so just just makes me feel very patriotic all right we'll look forward to talking to you and dr lyle very soon and in the meantime enjoy virginia and the peace of your dog yes i i i shall do so it sounds like a plan i'll talk to you soon okay talk to you soon you
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