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Episode 40: Sexual Abuse and Trauma
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all right good evening everybody I'm Neji here on with dr. Lyle dr. Lyle how you doing today good good good it's good to hear your voice again excellent so today we are talking about sexual trauma sexual abuse and all the things that go with it now this could be a bit of a touchy subject for some people so this is why we have dr. Lyle who's a PhD and a psychologist who's probably seen you know way more cases than I have in my life about this to kind of explain this from the lens of evolutionary psychology so dr. let's just tee off here you know we have you disorder just start yeah I would and again let's let me begin this by by saying that what I'm sharing or my opinions and and then I will I will present some evidence that that is consistent with my opinions and then we will talk about evolutionary theory as it as it integrates in with the evidence and obviously my opinions because my opinions are going to be partially derived from evolutionary theory and what makes this disturbing is that what it is that I think about this and some of some of us some my colleagues it's very controversial and upsetting for a lot of people and it's it's inconsistent with the standard way that psychologists think about these problems now let me begin by taking a let's first talk about what many people believe to be true many people believe that if you see problems of adjustment in adults divorce alcoholism drug addiction you know spotty poor conscientiousness with respect to I don't know credit and and job stability relationship stability and instability etc etc all the way down to in orgasmic females and anything else that you can think of under the Sun what psychologists typically are thinking or many psychologists I shouldn't say all my colleagues but very very large percentage my psychologist will my fellow psychologists will tend to think about these problems in the following way if if we see something that seems to be undesirable and may be self-destructive and you know something like like I said addiction or maybe obesity for example we see these things problems that people are struggling with we say well you know people shouldn't in principle have problems it must be that these were caused by something and so it must have been caused by something obviously that happened before but the only problem is is that when we talk to somebody that has problems at 35 when we talk to them turns out they around problems when they were 27 similar problems okay and then it turns out then we talked them a little further while they're having those same similar essentially cues or clues to those problems were evident when they were 18 and so we started thinking well the problem that got them off track must have happened before this and so they continued to excavate excavate into the person's history and they come up with the idea that something must have happened early to cause the behavioral pattern that they're seeing that's problematic at 35 or 45 or 55 or whatever the issue is now this isn't this isn't this stupid inference it's just an interesting one and unfortunately they don't tend to look at these as hypotheses they tend to look of it as as obviously true because they don't have any other hypotheses in their heads so as a result what psychologists will do and have been doing for a hundred years is that they've been looking for terrible things that must have happened in a person's upbringing that resulted in the dysfunctional things that they're seeing 40 years later 30 or 40 years later whatever it is and the thing is is that they might not be able to see anything obvious so they think well maybe it's something that I don't see maybe it's something that would be very very full on human psychology and what do we know that's very impactful in psychology well if you're an adult one of the most important things in your life is sex and and you think about sex and sexual dynamics rule major important critical decisions and relationships in your life so as a result we are thinking then that something important must have happened to the child when they were five and an important thing might you know might well have involved sex and it wasn't a good thing it was a bad thing and therefore sort of deranged the person's personality development and that's why we have a person overeating compulsively at 38 years old or they're an alcoholic or they're three-times divorce or they've got an explosive anger problem or their criminal or whatever else so these are these are the this is the notion now these are very interesting hypotheses but it's going to turn out that nobody had bothered to actually look at this either critically from a theoretical point of view or more importantly to look at it scientifically from that point of view now from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology this is what we might suspect although you know like the other evolutionary psychologists might disagree with me but this would be an in-principle way to look at the way trauma would work on human psychology the if there is a trauma what trauma would be would be an event that took place where there was a substantial biological loss and a substantial biological loss could be for example your arm it could be your head and you could be dead it could be your little sister okay something very important to you your home burned down in other words there must be some statistical association with reduced likelihood of genes survival as a result of this incident okay that's what that would be it could be that you were made a fool out of in front of everybody in your school as a nine-year-old and therefore in horribly traumatic to you and of course this would make sense that this would be true and you could have reverberations for years because it could have reduced your status in the village considerably and therefore reduced your likelihood of successful reproduction so you can see from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology the organism should be designed by nature to have memories associated with very substantial losses and to not have memories associated with things where there's no significant gains or losses because you can't store everything in a memory so you better store the things that are the most important things that are associated with either gains or losses and keep good accounting of those things now and that's of course what is that we find so if you are dealing with animal memory research or you're dealing with human memories research you will find that the things that are going to be salient in memory and things are going to be recorded well are going to be things that are quote important and important is going to mean that there are large statistical variances between the survival of the genes or essentially with either good things or bad things for the genetic code that's how the system should be designed and that is how it's designed now from this standpoint I'm going to leap a little bit forward and we're not going to talk about childhood sexual issues we're going to talk about adult sexual issues for a minute so that we can understand why there could be a massive misunderstanding among psychologists about the importance of child sexual issues if you are a woman let's suppose you're 18 years old 16 years old 19 years old 27 years old 34 years old if you are a woman who is fertile and you are raped then it's going to turn out that this is a very significant biological loss why okay it's a significant biological loss because in the wild any unprotected sex act in humans between a male and a fertile female has a 5% risk of pregnancy that means if you consider that the job that a mother does in raising a child takes let's just say for the sake of argument it takes 20 years to get a child it's sort of fully viable now it might be less than that and they start to get more and more viable and on their own by the time they're about fifteen or sixteen in the Stone Age environment but they're still hanging around mother and they're still developing so we're just going to call it 20 years so think about 20 years of attention and we're going to we're going to divide that by a 5% chance of pregnancy so essentially that's one year of intensive attention that a mother would give a child that is the biological cost of that sex act now you might say well there's a 95% chance that nothing happens that's true but that's not how nature is going to work nature is going to be a statistical analytic engine that is going to analyze variances between the things that are happening in the environment and how it impacts the organisms survival and reproduction and it's going to encode neural circuits that are going to have reactions that are going to be consistent with those variances in order to encourage behavior that's optimal for the organisms gene survival so therefore a rape will be essentially the cost of one year of mothering to that organism that is a very substantial biological cost and so as a result we should expect that the organism should find that to be very painful indeed very disturbing indeed and in fact it should be quote traumatized as a result of being traumatized what that means is it means that that those memories are very high priority and the the events and environmental circumstances associated with that event are very important for the organism to pay attention to and to code those as potential correlates with the with that bad outcome so for example I knew one person that I knew was raped by a man who shared a lot of characteristics with Johnny Depp and as a result she cannot really watch a Johnny Depp movie just because that it makes for uncomfortable and it keeps bringing up the memories of that incident and so what that should do is it should cause an avoidance reaction in the organism that essentially does not want that stimulus so that that should make perfect sense this is no different in principle than if you eat something that makes you sick the next time you smell it it should make you feel a little ill even though it might have been one of your favorite foods before so this is uh this is essentially how the system would work now as a result of rape trauma being very real very biologically expensive to adult women you can only imagine that the inferences you know incidentally there's this decided lack of insight on the part of males about this because two males a sex act in principle could never cost them a year of their full time and attention of the equivalent of a year of motherhood so as a result their attitude is sort of hey what's the big deal why it makes such a big deal out of it okay because to them that the biological cost is exceedingly small so as a result they just they in typically the average male brain in natural history of this species has remarkably little insight into how impactful it might be on female or how unpleasant it could be to sort of force the issue a little bit if the female was not that interested or all the way to a major force of rape now so that being a state of affairs that that's how this thing should be working then you can only imagine the inside the head of the average human particularly the average female adult as she thinks about the possibility of a young person much younger a six year old 8 year old nine year old thinks about that person being sexually abused any normal person would say that is horrendous and horrible because it was already really horrible for me and I was a big strong 24 year old athletic you know person with a lot of self-esteem think about how incredibly traumatic and horrendous this would be to a six or seven year old little girl it's just it's inconceivable to them how bad this would be they would estimate that the impact on this might be 10 or 15 or 20 times the reverberation that it was for themselves and that's a very reasonable inference however it is not an accurate inference why the reason is is that first of all very and we're going to for all due respect to people that have been victimized in worse fast rooms or in any fashion actually but very little child sexual abuse has to do with penetration so it's going to leave the the statistics are that it's less than 2% of incidences involved this so almost all childhood sexual abuse has to do with fondling adults nasty fingers where they shouldn't be etc etc now the so no one is saying that this is a good thing no one is saying that this is a benign thing however what we're going to say is that it's not the same thing as a rape and it's not even close to the same thing as a rape when it comes to the biological costs that the children are incurring as a biological entity you would expect that the biology the system should be tracking an event like a rape to a fertile female as being very very traumatic and need very expensive code all aspects of the memory situation and keep track of situations that are similar and avoid them okay that's how that system should be working in order to help that female avoid that biological cost again in case there's anything that she could do in her decision-making that would reduce the likelihood of that happening in the future now the but the child most victims of child abuse have been through an incident where they have not been impregnated they're a year of their of their full time attention and energy as an adult as a biological system has not been taken from them and as a result we should not expect the system to be traumatized similarly we wouldn't expect it to be true based on basic evolutionary principles and it's going to turn out that if we study if we study rape victims for example we will we will often but not always find that the impact of this will last for many many years as they continue to have inside their heads and essentially a warning device that is put in there now has been activated too for them to steer clear of situations where they could lose another year however if you if you're a child sexual abuse victim there has been no corresponding loss that looks like that and so we wouldn't expect you to be have a system that would be a panicked about coding your way around similar situations and not only that it's going to turn out that you're standing or situations with respect to other individuals is going to change dramatically as you get older so we wouldn't expect you to be sitting inside of a traumatized five-year-old psychology when you're 25 years old would doesn't make any sense so it's going to turn out that this question then was finally addressed scientifically by a team of researchers out of Temple University and the lead author was a guy by the name of rind Rin D and what he did and his colleagues was that they they actually looked at I believe on the order of thirty or thirty-five thousand known cases of childhood sexual abuse and then what they did was they correlated this with the I don't remember exactly how this was statistically done but effectively this was the net effect what they did was they then looked on these victims and they found out all of the problems that had taken place in their lives how many divorces how much alcoholism how many jobs lost how much depression how many visited psychiatrists how many committed suicide how many had you know bad credit problems lost their home in other words all the major sort of psychological variables that you could ever think would be associated you know any bad outcome basically and what they did was they ran a coalition against the experience of being a victim in childhood and the likelihood the increased likelihood the one would have any kinds of problems of any kind as an adult now what they found actually completely surprised me because I did not expect the results to be just what they were it turns out that the results indicated that there was essentially for all intents and purposes no relationship whatsoever between having been a victim of childhood sexual abuse and any psychological outcome that it could be measured later on now that actually the net effect was 0.9 of 1% of the variance was associated with having been a victim that folks is nothing so that means that some person that is overeating and has an obesity problem at 40 years old and can't figure out how to why it why it is that she can't lose the weight goes to a psychologist who then tries to look for the puzzling reason why this is happening and the two of them cannot figure out why she continues to engage in the self-destructive behavior and I would tell them that it's the pleasure trap that they're designed by nature to seek the richest food possible and they're designed by nature to conserve as much energy as possible and that these would be derivatives of straight evolutionary theory however that psychologist doesn't know this so the psychologist instead is puzzled by the self-destructive a parent you know self-destructive behavior and they reason about it and they think about it and they can't find any reasons in the in the present so they keep marching back into the past and they march all the way back to the childhood and then they start speculating that maybe this individual must have had something traumatic well traumatic wasn't being embarrassed in school about eating hotdogs and then throwing up on the plate that isn't what happened no it has to be something very very impact for human nature and the only thing that psychologists that can come up with that's impactful of any significance it's going to be sexual in nature because sex is such an enormous ly important part of life and we certainly know very clearly that adult sexual trauma in females is very impactful so therefore it makes sense that somehow sexual trauma must be related to the to the problematic behavior that we're seeing in the forty year old and there the analysis sits and there the analysis sits and sits and sits and the years of therapy go by and the hand wringing and the blaming of the father or the uncle or so four four four memories there may or may not be fabricated and and believe me I'm not trying to minimize anybody's negative experiences that they have had at the hands of an abuser the I try to explain to people my position on this that if I was nine years old and some thug came down my street and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and then snapped my arm over his knee and left me in the street squalling and miserable with a broken arm that would be a salt a felony assault and battery with great bodily injury on a minor and that individual should be incarcerated for many years for doing that okay however if we were trying to figure out why I had a drinking problem when I was thirty we would not say well gee did you have anything traumatic happen to you in your childhood and I said well yes actually when I was nine years old on my street this thug came down my street and I argued with him about moving out of the out of the way of his motorcycle because I was playing baseball and he got off his motorcycle and he snapped my arm and I you know it was a disaster and it was emergency surgery done for my it said it was hell okay we wouldn't then say well gee that's the reason you're having a drinking problem we wouldn't do that because it doesn't it doesn't line up and make any sense to us the now what would we expect to have we would expect to have me having a little extra anxiety around Hells Angels that's what we would back thirty years later okay we would not expect multi-dimensional multi-system disruption in the psychology in the entire motivational system as if the entire thing had been disrupted along all kinds of different lines we would not expect that this system shouldn't be that stupid it should be very narrow and focused according to whatever the losses were it should code anxiety and ability of avoidance reactions specifically to those things that way if I get sick and of some food I don't then not want to eat any foods and have horrendous anxiety reactions and nausea reactions about any food I have anxiety reactions about analogous reactions about specific foods ok so this is how my fellow psychologists have been lost dr. rind a publishes paper with his colleagues and I have to tell you I Nathan but what happened next was a was a scandal in the history of science the it turns out that of course this was published in a mainline top-of-the-line journal published by the American Psychological Association so this was Cadillac a grade science all the way the reviewers that reviewed it couldn't see anything in the world wrong with it it was superbly done statistical analysis when this hit the the rank and file in psychology they flipped out okay and the paper was vilified it was actually it was condemned on both floors of the United States Congress by unanimous vote it turns out that nobody in that Congress read that study okay there's only four people in the entire Congress that we're capable of reading the study and they didn't read it but everybody voted against it okay so what you have is basically people not wanting to look at the truth and yet what a tragedy this is to not look at the truth now since I have spoken up on this issue I have had many people come up to me and they have told me you know I was molested as a child and I always wondered with all of the news media and all the the psychobabble about this issue they only use the word psychobabble that's my word but they always worried that maybe there was something wrong with them that they didn't know about okay and yet when I explained how this would work and how we make sense of it they were relieved and and realized you know I've always been a little bit worried about that but now that makes perfect sense and what you're saying is completely consistent with my life history okay the it seems maybe to some people that this would be unfriendly or insensitive but I want to challenge anybody that's thinking that and any psychologist but here's me against that view and I want you to look a little harder at this and try to put on a scientific hat and look a little cleaner because the truth is is that if we do psychotherapy that is directed at trying to unwind child sexual abuse issues and it turns out we're completely wrong that all we're doing is digging up and reactivating unpleasant memories and it turns out that those incidences don't have anything to do with the problematic behavior that the people are having in the present then we are doing these people a tremendous disservice okay and we are prolonging their suffering and increasing it so it is irresponsible to not actually look at the facts and and honestly approach this problem as if maybe we've still got something to learn does that make sense yeah this is uh so just just in case people are interested in reading more about this study this was Bruce rind you're saying rice Bruce rind and he published a paper what was the name let's see here Temple University I believe it was yeah Bruce wine if you look up Bruce wine you will find if you look at Bruce Ryan PhD you will very quickly find this because he became infamous behind this and in effectively after Ryan published there was tremendous criticism and I can remember reading one of the critics with some bigshot statistician who said oh my god they violated all these all these assumptions in statistics that we have to use etc and as a our statistics professor myself I rolled my eyeballs at this criticism I couldn't believe that fellow scientists would tee off in this way and it turned out that what the Ryan team then did is they went back and reanalyzed the data using that professor's criticisms and giving him the benefit of the doubt on every single measure that he proposed and it changed the results from 0.9 percent to 1 percent okay Wow in other words there there was no wiggle room and anybody that knew anything about stats including that critic knew damn well that there was no room in those assumptions statistics is very robust when you start analyzing 35,000 cases the truth emerges and it's very clear what it is and what we find isn't is the best good news that was the least the least welcomed good news in the history of psychology and the least welcomed good news in the history of psychology is that human children are robust to this kind of behavior on the part of adults and other children there there's their long term psychology has apparently been shaped by nature to not be particularly impacted by these incidences as we would expect because there's no dramatic biological losses that are being incurred at that time and so we wouldn't have expected it from evolutionary theory and we don't see it from the empirical science and so this is actually extraordinarily good news so the 21st century of clinical psychology if they have the courage the intellectual courage to absorb this extraordinary information they can help the process of science advance our ability to do better clinical psychology and help many more people in the future than we're helping today yeah I can see why it's controversial because I've already example that that you know I don't mean to poke fun at this at all but this happens you know probably once a week at the grocery store where I go to the grocery store I'm trying to get some pretty healthy food I look at the cookie box and the you know the chips and all the stuff and I know I'm not supposed to eat them and then like I'm examining it here and there and then there says of word vegan gluten-free organic and bam it's in my cart you know because because at this point it's like well you know at least I think that it's not going to harm me so what the hell so I can see why people would not like these these conclusions because I mean what what do you say to the pedophile who hears these conclusions and says well I might as well just like you know I that what they do is they take away the moral conundrum away from their actions because well I'm not damaging the child psychologically although they're doing something horrendous besides that well you know this is the issue and it's just like the broken arm so you are you are you can make a child's life miserable during this process some uncle that is that is molesting some kid for four years every time he comes over the kids house you know on the weekends is and making that kid anxious and nervous and feel yucky it's terrible okay these are criminal acts and these these people should be caught and appropriately penalized but we don't need to then make the mistake first of all of thinking that they have destroyed an entire life because they have not okay and second of all we also don't need to make the mistake clinically in our effort to be very sensitive about this and I will submit you that the clinicians have fallen into a trap where they are looking back to early childhood to try to figure out the mysteries of the human present and it's going to turn out that the mysteries of the human present obviously when we have people with problems throughout their life there's various and sundry reasons for those problems many of those problems are inherent in the human design is the human struggles under competitive pressures for esteem and so people are going to be depressed people are going to be anxious people are going to feel intimidated people are going to have low self-esteem under appropriate conditions the organism is going to design those experiences as helping to help orient the organism to potentially more successful behavior okay so the so we have to understand what much of the unpleasantness of the human condition is deriving from the however there are other things that look to us like they're pathological we have some some person with a drinking problem or we have a person that did compulsively overeats or we have a commit is uh a lot none I don't know whatever the issue is there's very very flaky and irresponsible and so we look at these things and we say will something bad must have happened early and the truth is is that by no means nothing nothing bad had to happen early these things are an interface for example between individual genetic variation and the modern environment that we have okay and so that's why you'll see a whole classes of gene pools where there'll be almost no alcoholism in the gene pool and you'll see other gene pools where there'll be 50% of the gene pool will be alcoholic and we know that these are genetic variances 10,000 years ago there weren't any alcoholics because there wasn't any alcohol but now that you have a modern unusual situation where you have a substance for example in this case alcohol or any drug or for example modern process rich foods so there's individuals that are more susceptible to those problems than others all people are going to be potentially impacted by artificial process stimulation that is very very hyper palpable or very hyper excitatory the dopamine or endorphin pathways so there are traps out there for people but if we're going to try to figure out why Johnnie is a heroin addict when he's 35 don't look to the fact that he was molested by Uncle Louie because he was no more likely to be molested than any other person in the society that is not a heroin addict his heroin addiction is not related to those early childhood experiences that is very important for the future of clinical psychology for clinicians to wrap their heads around this and to essentially get their attention focused on the things that we can do about the problems that we can change yeah and what do you say to two to two people who might say well the child loses trust and authority figures or they they are anxious when it comes to and anybody I mean you said the dot the Johnny Depp type of example right where anything kind of shares those characteristics right from a general standpoint as a child lose trust no no of course not because the system wouldn't be designed to be that stupid so the system is designed to in this young woman's case but if something looks like Johnny Depp then that's a the stone-age brain says there's a damn good chance it was the guy okay so the system doesn't feel that way about or other boyfriends or people that she meets Samsung it doesn't have that reaction it doesn't get an abhorrence to sexual activity that would be a biological disaster for that thing to code it in that way okay what it codes is it codes anxiety around features stimulus environment features that suggests that the threat is present and that we need to avoid it that is exactly how an evolutionarily designed system would work so the notion that you could say oh well I lost faith in authority there is no such thing as losing faith in authority you can lose faith in specific individuals okay that betray you then betray your trust specifically that would make sense it would never make sense to quote lose your faith and authority that's absurd okay there would be no no neural circuit that would make that possible so so there there's many of these notions that people have our very very naive inferences about human psychology that are are biologically impossible yeah forgive my ignorance I this is no no no worries at all these are these are very good questions because they are the questions that and they are the comments that I will often see in the news media about various issues like oh well you know doesn't this you know mean that you know I can remember when I was at the University of Virginia and the Challenger I think it was the Challenger blew up and I can remember an idiot psychologist on the staff of the UVA saying well this means the children are going to be a lot more worried about nuclear war it's like you've got to be kidding that that was that was a dumbbell 115 IQ comment out of out of a dumbbell psychologist at UVA that didn't understand anything about how the human mind would be wired there is no way that children would make that inference and children in the United States did not grow up with an increased anxiety about nuclear war as a result of the Challenger exploding now a few of them might have been a little bit more worried about going up in airplanes for a while okay until the evidence overwhelmingly contradicted that it was a problem and then we've gone that's how the system is a lot smarter than people think and then so I'm assuming the same thing applies in sexual situations so you have somebody who is sexually abused or they were raped you know some some sort of trauma and now they can have you kind of mentioned kind of an example they can have an orgasm or they just they can't get excited or that they just you know they shut down no and what you're suggesting is that there's there's something else at play there of course there is in other words that the system is is overwhelmingly the entire design of the system is to reproduce if it could be the case that we could have some unpleasant things happen early in its childhood that would stop that process from happening you can of course realize that the genes that would be sensitive in that way we'd be selected out very quickly in evolution hmm okay so there's no way that that's the way this thing is designed and the the the anxiety and avoidance reactions that a system has will be as a result of the evolutionary design commensurate with the losses biologically that are being coded you know that are actually being experienced by organisms that have that experience okay that is why it hurts less to have a hangnail than it has to then tearing the meniscus in your knee okay that's why that works that way the system is going to calibrate very well it's pains and pleasures that's why a couple of it's unsalted and unroasted they taste pretty good but it's not as good as having sex with the most exciting person you've ever had sex with it's not even close okay because the system is essentially calibrating its feelings around the the genetic profits and losses that are associated with those events so this is where evolutionary psychology essentially looks at dr. Rhines data dr. Ryan I doing do not believe was an evolutionary psychologist or was informed about evolutionary theory I don't think that that's true I don't I'm not very familiar with his work I'm just familiar with this publication and it's aftermath but the but I don't believe so the but we can use the lens of evolutionary theory and look at this problem and then very quickly realize that his results are not not particularly surprising now I was a little bit surprised and I'll tell you why okay I wasn't surprised that the results would be very mild but I was I thought that the results would actually indicate an increased statistical likelihood of problems with these people relative to the base rate of non molested individuals because I believe that some of the molestation was coming from their parents and that would indicate to me that their parents had some bad genes had some problematic genes and therefore I actually thought that the pathway by which we were going to see some significant differences in adult outcomes was going to be through the genetics rather than the experiences that's what I was thinking I was going to observe when I read this article when I found that the that the Association was nearly zero that surprised me a great deal I have to tell you and and that's probably because most of the molestation that takes place is probably not within the genetic family it's probably between the the victim and non non first-degree genetic relatives and so therefore that's probably why the correlation that I expected to be there you know wasn't there now what kind of personality characteristics would be present in somebody who'd be more likely to do this to it - to somebody else oh well the I think that this isn't this isn't that Pleasant of a discussion but I'll just give you a no but I'll I'll give it to you the what you're what you're going is find is that there's probably going to be two two main things that are going to determine whether some of it one is is pedophile it's almost always men by the way it's exceedingly rare female pedophilia is exceedingly rare that's because the female you know DNA is so expensive women are designed by nature protect their DNA not to go out there and get it and so this is a male dominated you know pathology and you're going to if you think about if you were to think about where this would make some sense evolutionarily speaking you would expect it that most of the problem would be with females just before puberty and that is in fact exactly what you find so in other words even though there are individuals that are attracted to three and four and five-year-olds that's not where most of the action is and incidentally most of the action is heterosexual because most people are heterosexual by far and so pedophiles are not just indiscriminant they're just as discriminating as everybody else and so as a result most of the problems most of the victims are girls and so it's going to be the case that the girls that are going to be victims are most often going to be 9 10 11 12 years old right in there and the reason why why one would suspect that this is true is that effectively the the perpetrators are essentially jumping the gun on the female fertility that they if you think about a biological bell curve inside of men's heads for when they would find females maximally attractive you can imagine that the average male should find females maximally attractive at the peak of their fertility which is going to be between 19 and 21 and that is where you're going to see the vast majority of models Playboy magazine etc pornography etc that's exactly where you find it now that it doesn't mean to say that men don't find women that are 40 and 50 attractive they do but they're going to find females of that age most perfect in terms of their analysis of their of their fertility so that you're going to find the biggest impact there and that's exactly what you do find and so you're going to find that males that prefer actually aesthetically prefer twenty-seven-year-old over a 21 year old are going to be a little bit unusual okay so now we're moving off the middle of the bell curve into a gene or a gene set that is a little bit less common we move it out to 45 now it's quite a bit less common okay so in other words there's no doubt that our ancestors ancestral males had wonderful loving relationships with women of different ages but the ones that were more interested in the females that did not show significant agent kids left more genes than the ones that were less discriminating okay so that is why 55 year old women are not you know leading women in Hollywood that doesn't make sense to people so the so as a result you can imagine in your head a bell curve of sexualized excitation driven by specific genes driven you know into making specific genetic circuits genetically built circuits to cause males to have to be enticed so we would expect that optimum to be right there 19 to 21 which is where it is we would expect it to be less prevalent by the time the females 30 we would find it also equally less prevalent by the time the females 15 okay a 15 year old female is considerably less fertile than a 20 year old female and the male mind registers that okay now we you start to realize well wait a second what about 14 so now it's going to turn out that there's going to be a certain percentage of males on that bell curve that that's what they like but it's or that's what it's going to be optimum for them but it's going to be a smaller percentage than the 15 and a smaller percentage than the 16 etc keep moving down the bell curve into the tiny little tail the very unusual variance this is where you get you know people that are extremely unusual in some way so on the bottom 2% of a bell curve for IQ we have what we call mentally retarded people that's just where we draw the line and that's the name that we give them but it's just a little tiny slice a very tiny little piece of the bell curve in that same way a tiny tiny little piece of the bell curve you know whatever this is I'm not sure what it is might be 1% of males or less are will find females that are 8 9 10 very sexually attractive okay so there you have it there a genetic oddball it is probably it probably also interacts and it's probably not entirely genetic in the sense that it probably also interacts with sexual attractiveness yourself so for example a someone with pedophilic leanings might actually prefer girls that would be 15 but they don't have enough swab and there's sufficiently unattractive and the females are sufficiently well defended and sophisticated so they're already defending themselves and so are goofy looking 30 year old guy with no social skills the drools and can't speak very clearly that guy has no chance at a fifteen-year-old okay so as a result he moves down the curve away from what is most attractive to him but still attractive this is exactly what a male does who's an eight and a heterosexual and forty years old he also will move down the curb from what he finds most attractive which would be a 23 year old 10 and he moves down the curve towards what he can get that is still sufficiently attractive so the same process is going on except we're looking at a genetic oddball you know and possibly a social oddball as well and and it leads us into this unfortunate kind of criminal behavior mom series very interesting so any any closing thoughts - you know we did talk about this in great detail and I hope any listeners that have any questions feel free to email me or call a next show or anything like that and we can talk more about it but but this is there in great - any final thoughts about you know how to deal with this if it has come up yeah they're one of the reasons that this is big deals I've had parents who's whose children were known to have been victimized and so when I explain this to them it can be of enormous relief for them because they're thinking that their child has been badly damaged and they're told this by their social workers and the psychologist and everything else and it's a horrendous mistake okay and so the this is this is not a cold evolutionary scientists with thick glasses and equations on the board being insensitive to humanity that is not where this comes from that's not where dr. Ryan was coming from that's not where I come from that's not where evolutionary theory comes from we come from a deep desire to figure out the truth because it's only through the truth can we can we learn and modify our behavior in ways that are maximally effective and so this so in no way does this mean that that I am insensitive to the suffering that someone may have done as a child they may still have some memories that are very unpleasant from time to time but I want you to know that this is not what is the main thing that is stopping you from achieving some very important stability or very important goals in your life and it's useful for you to know that so that we don't crawl down the abyss of modern psychodynamic early childhood trauma therapy because that that is a that's a tremendous waste of potential human happiness fantastic and if any listeners have any issues they want to discuss with you they can go to your website is teamdynamix org and and see if they can kind of answer some questions through some of the videos you have and some of the audio clips you have and if it's something to get a consultation for that's we've had we've had a couple listeners who did that they did great so they've actually emailed me at a wonderful time dr. waz Oh
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