Childhood Trauma, Marriage, and Making Friends | Dr. John Delony | EP 307

I've I've rarely rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate what do you actually want they cannot answer that question and they fill it with addictions they fill it with Hobbies they fill it with uh dopamine Chase they fill it with so much stuff and nobody can answer that question what do you want it's what do I don't want and why am I feeling just uncomfortable it's because of them it's because of him it's because of her nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it and you won't aim for it unless you know what it is and you won't know what it is unless you ask yourself and then you might say well why don't you ask yourself and the answer is well maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to and then maybe you don't also trust yourself you know because you might think well if I let myself know what I wanted given my bloody track record I would do everything I could to screw it up so I'll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don't fail at something that's truly important I can always Regale with myself with the idea that well I didn't succeed but I didn't really try had I really tried I might have succeeded whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try you also set the preconditions for failure [Music] hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube or one of the associated podcasts I'm here today with Dr John deloney he's the author of own your past change your future we're going to talk today and I'm very happy to do this to talk to another clinician about the fact that you live your life through a story that you see the world through a story what that story might be like when things are going wrong how it might be approved and also to talk about identity and its transformations in the most practical possible way and so um there are specifics that we can talk about but that's a good place to start what got you so interested in stories John um I I think it I reverse engineered my way into it um it was learning the trauma narrative that played out in the human body 10 15 30 years later after the initial trauma and so I've always thought stories were narrative right there was something I thought about I did not understand that my body was keeping the score to quote vanderkolk right that my body was revving up in fighting battles that I didn't even know was happening and so we're looking at the long-term data man and people are having strokes and cancer and heart attacks from from childhood experiences and that made me step back and go whoa there's there's these different layers to these stories happening all over the place and it's not just narrative it's it's the entire ecosystem that I call my body right my Human Experience and then as I began to pull the thread on those man um those stories were born into and the stories we were told have such a formative shaping of of of our life experience and those stories become the stories we tell ourselves which as we all know in mental health professionals that shapes everything who I think I am and what I think I'm capable or not capable of or I'm the worst thing to ever happen to me those stories are highly limiting or they are the jet fuel on and on a well-lived life right so if we can discuss those stories man what a shape-shifting opportunity for us yeah well that idea about stories in some sense being stored in the body is kind of interesting and so the way I conceptualize it is that a story manifests itself in a in a personality in a set of goals and a set of assumptions about the world perceptions about the world and if you have had terrible things happen to you in the past and that's pretty much true of ever of everyone although some people more than others then your body computes the present danger of the environment based on how many things have happened to you that are terrible in the past that that aren't resolved and resolved would mean that you had generated a solution for them and if you if your psychophysiological system assumes that all the danger that you were subject to Once is still present in the environment that it's going to set you on edge as if you're walking in dangerous territory and the psychophysiological consequence of that is that you're prepared for danger and that does such things as burn up excess resources because you're much more reactive and on point than you might otherwise be in an anxiety prone manner it also suppresses immunological function because your body isn't that worried about long-term immunological Health if you're confronting an emergency and so that you you talk in your book about changing your past owning your past and it's useful to Define that you're likely to overcome a trauma let's say and no longer in some sense store it psychophysiologically if you've generated a causal story about the reason that the trauma emerged and then reconfigured the way that you're conducting your life so that the probability that a similar thing will happen to you is reduced to close to zero right it's not catharsis right it's understanding yeah the challenge there is I think we've following that thread all the way to our modern psychological ethos we've created a world that is based entirely on blame and like somebody else is responsible and so I've got to continue to cut and cut and cut and I reduce myself to a two by two square with which I can exist and if you enter my Square then whether it's ideologically or physically then suddenly you're affronting me and I think there's something about owning your past I look at it more in terms of can I think through what I remember to happen have happened and by the way we know that memory is a disastrous like narrative Storyteller right so I care less about what actually happened and more I'm in my 40s I'm telling myself this story that happened can I tell that story can I relive that story and my body doesn't take off on me right it doesn't rush to solve the problem for me because it knows I'm driving now right the thing about memory is that it's not there to provide an accurate objective record of the past which is in fact impossible because the past is so unbelievably complex it's more like a navigation tool which is I went here I fell into something terrible and now I need to re-calibrate the navigation map that I'm using so that I don't fall into the same hole and you know one of the things that people might want to know who are listening is that if you have a memory that's older than about 18 months and it haunts you and when it comes up involuntarily it produces a stress reaction what that means is that as far as your nervous system is concerned and so as far as your body's concerned that danger hasn't gone away and what's happening is an unconscious alarm system that's looking for pitfalls and holes is warning you that the map that you're using is incomplete in a manner that might might enable you to fall into the same hole and so one of the things that people can do that's very useful is if you have memories like that that plague you is to bring them to mind voluntarily instead of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily and then to Think Through what has changed and what might not have but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose you'd be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it there's no other way of getting the memory to go away like merely re-contemplating it in the same manner over and over won't do it and allowing it to plague you unconsciously it'll do that forever until you solve it it might show up in your dreams it'll show up in your fantasies it'll trigger you so to speak when you're talking to other people if they happen to discuss a topic that's related to it and it's because that the narrative is one of failure and defeat the event was one of failure and defeat and if there isn't a map to allow you to transcend that that's functional then the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying danger is never going to let you go yeah and I I think culturally we've created a pathology of discomfort and as you just outlined so eloquently the only way through this is to turn and face it and walk directly through it right and if you continue to run from the memories and pathologize and Chase the behaviors you end up with our over diagnostic approach to everything instead of turning and facing these things and letting your body heal through relationships and other things in your life um man we just end up chasing your tail and you called it out the more you run the more your body thinks it's winning it's getting away from this stuff so it actually reinforces the anxiety it reinforces some of these um like psychological ailments the further you run from it the only healing is through it and in the culture we've created for ourselves says that uncomfortable discomfort is bad and it's to be avoided at all costs it and it's it's the only path to Healing 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and that you have to hide and that's just a recipe for anxiety now it's not necessarily that easy to turn and face something but you do detail out a variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that you can you can differentiate the problem like you might you might have been traumatized at work let's say or let's not use that sort of jargony that jargony phraseology you may be having tremendous difficulties at work you might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless and so and that's bothering you constantly it's disturbing your sleep for example and It's haunting you and you're you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come and partly that's because the thought of how getting a new job is so daunting that you can't face it and one of the ways of re-calibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable steps and so for example one of the things that you can do if you might have to consider getting a new job because you're unhappy and miserable at work is open up your resume or your CV and look at it right so you might not be able to get a new job but you might be able to open up your resume and look at it and then having done that you've sort of cracked the surface and then maybe you could spend an hour a week for a month updating it or 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes every two days something like that but part of the trick is to take these larger monsters that are frightening enough so you want to run away from them decide that you're going to face the situation you you lay out for example in your book you ask people a lot of different questions about what they're thinking and if something is making you anxious and Afraid and miserable it's very useful to lay out to write out all the reasons it's making you anxious and miserable and to ask yourself what is it you're afraid of and then to develop a differentiated plan for dealing with those so let me ask you this in your psychoanalytic experience can somebody can the majority of people do this by themselves because I if I was to distill down all of the pathologies in modern civilization I keep coming back to a central one Central Point and that's that we are desperately and pathologically and spiritually and frighteningly lonely yeah and I'm wondering if we we can is it even possible anymore to tell a 21 year old boy 21 year old man hey you need to do this by yourself or is the because I I keep coming back to you the first thing you do before you start trying to solve your problems is get a tribe get a gang get a couple of people in your phone or get a mentor somebody you can sit with um and in our we've had to professionalize it with mental health professionals but get some people around you to help be a good reflective mirror for you because we just we're loneling ourselves to death I feel like yeah well I I don't think that that people took old and I think people can't do it alone in part because people and I'm not being snide about this people aren't very good at thinking and they're not very good at negotiation well and when we're when we're anxious our brains shut off rational thinking right it doesn't want us wondering is that a nice bear just wants us getting out of there well that's that's and that's an additional problem you know part of the reason that Honesty in speech is so important is that there isn't any difference between honesty and speech and thinking so you said can people do this alone and the answer to that generally is no because thought itself is generally a dialogical process so what you and I are doing right now is thinking things through now we're doing that with an audience and for an audience but you have some propositions and I have some propositions and we're we're pitting them against each other and cooperating at the same time and we're allowing the discourse to modify our implicit presuppositions so we're allowing the discourse to modify our stories and thought itself is internalized dialogue or trialogue if you're really sophisticated maybe you can break yourself into three people internally and have an argument but it's very very difficult for people to develop a systematic approach to thinking and then to counter that with another internalized systematic approach to thinking and do all of that alone generally what happens in a healthy society as you're pointing out is that we have people around us to whom we can express our concerns and then they react and then you react to that and that's thought and the fact that we would even ask people to do that alone is an indication as you pointed out of how isolated and Lonesome people have become you know you said friends or people you can tell good things to and people you can tell bad things to and you have friends because friends keep you sane and this is one of the things I liked about your book is this insistence that sanity in some real sense is distributed it's not something inside your head it's something that you find as a consequence of being nested in a sequence in a hierarchical sequence of proper relationships and so if you could do it alone man you could do it in solitary confinement and you know even anti-social criminals hate solitary confinement we're social it's it's the way we punish prisoners right is to put them in the hole and we've just created a society where that's where we choose to live uh yeah I love the idea of um I like to think of society it's it's evenly distributed we carry each other's burdens in different seasons um and that's the way through there's just simply moments when my wife gets sick or my dad finds himself my aging father is passing away that right that's the old you know holding your arms up in the desert narrative right like it we need other people to help us navigate these and how many uh I won't I won't put my experiences into your marriage but the number of times over the two decades I've been married that I've been hanging out with some friends that I trust and I say my wife said this and this and my friends go man she's right you're an idiot right and so I need that sort of iron sharpening iron right to help me reframe something that my body's taken off on yeah well a good definition of sanity in some real sense and and I don't mean this in a trivial or a Coy way is that you're saying if you can behave well enough that other people can stand having you around so that they can provide you with corrective feedback and if you're sane enough so that other people can stand having you around they'll reward you when you deserve to be rewarded and they'll punish you when you deserve to be punished and all you need to do is pay really careful attention to that feedback and you'll be sane and properly situated now you know that can go wrong if the entire social Community takes a pathological turn and that makes things more complicated and that does happen from time to time but generally speaking you have to be surrounded by people and so we could walk through that very few people can function effectively without an intimate relationship that's because you don't have anybody who's monitoring you over the medium to long run if you don't have an intimate relationship and so how can you how can you organize yourself intelligibly insanely without the medium to long-term orientation you just can't do it and how can you tell if you're being a civilized human being if you're not bouncing your behavior off someone really close to you continually you you can't that's right you need the intimate relationship you need the family parents and siblings children for the same reason and you need friends you talk a lot in your book about friends and you have some good practical advice I would say and this would be something for us usefully to concentrate on I would say is you talk about how people can make friends because people really don't know and so maybe you could share some of that with people who are watching and listening yeah I think there's there's two tracks I want to follow and one uh we can Circle back to this conversation we're happening that we're having right now evolutionarily is I think we're running a fantastic experiment because for all of the history of mankind nobody could sit in and listen to you and I dialoguing this way unless they were in physical proximity which that physical proximity is a form of intimacy we're all in the same room sharing the same meal sharing the same fire and now we've created this bizarre intimacy where people can drive to work for two hours you know one way and they can go on road trips but they're sitting by the fire with us right and so there's this this intellectual intimacy that's happening but I think our bodies are hollering at us when it comes to making friends um I spent a season man I was two inches from my wife and I was 2 000 miles away from her and I shared a bed with a woman that I loved and I was profoundly lonely and I always thought lonely was um proximal right you have nobody around you and so I think it's proximal and it's emotional I've I've mastered the art of being alone I'm an introvert by Nature just a nerd I love to read my books and so I I mastered the art of being alone in a crowded room I can wave and smile and be completely on my own planet and that has a physiological and a spiritual cost to it and so what I had to stop doing was beating myself up for having a lack of character or I'm a failure no I I needed I needed to learn a new set of skills and that skill set was making friends when you're a child when you're in middle school when you're in high school when you're in University everything is geared towards Community you play games together you don't play games together it's all about doing things together and then you cross that graduation stage or you get out of the army and the world looks at you and says it's now you versus everybody and so I think we just have to say hey I don't have the skill set so what do I got to do I think we overthink it I think Hospitality going first asking people over to your house to your events to your thing and just go first get over yourself look at it as you just got to quit smoking at some point um I just got to make friends at some point I'm gonna go first people are going to say no they're going to challenge you you're going to find out that nobody wants to be around you so you got to go to the mirror and ask yourself what is it about me that I'm projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with me it it really challenges but man just let's stop over pathologizing let's just go be weird Coco be weird and be hospitable go first go first yeah well you know you you said that you're an introvert and the thing about introverts is they often have to learn consciously how to socialize right because extroverts that's right well they're tilted so hard in that direction it just comes naturally to them we could walk through some of the initial stages in forming relationships in a very behavioral manner because people might find that useful so Benjamin Franklin said that one of the things you could do when you first moved into an neighborhood was to ask one of your immediate neighbors for a very small favor right and the reason for that is because it gets the reciprocal trade moving in the proper direction so people like to be of service to other people and if you ask someone to do you a very small favor then you put yourself in their debt and then you can also reciprocate so you allow them to show themselves in their best light because you allow them to easily indicate that they're positive and friendly and willing to do something for someone else and they're very happy about that if you get it right and then you're in their debt so you can offer to do them a favor but but we got to be we have to be very honest about how counter-cultural that is now because overnight just with a snap of the finger we don't ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore man we just get on Amazon Prime and it shows up at our house or we don't ask a friend to drive us to the airport anymore we just click a button on our cell phone and somebody comes and picks us up and overnight I think we have shifted this idea from I'm going to honor you and allow you to be of service to me which is a gift and I'm going to allow my needs to be heard out loud I need some sugar I need an egg I need a ride I need you to help me move right the worst call we've pathology we've suddenly become we think we're a burden Dr Peterson we think we are a burden to our friends and Neighbors and burdensomeness perceived burdensomeness the idea that people are better off without me that's one of the pillars of suicidal ideation and we our entire civilization has run that way we are we've consider ourselves a burden and so the very Act of asking a neighbor to help with something is an act of defiance in our current ERA go for it man you want to be crazy and you want to be counter-cultural ask somebody to help you with something what a gift you know well you can also do things if you move to a new neighborhood for example you can there'll be a local cafe somewhere you can go there once a week for like several months or twice a week at a regular time and you can introduce yourself to the owner and you can tell them that you've moved into the neighborhood and you can introduce yourself to the waiters and the waitresses and you can become a known fixture there and you'll start to feel comfortable there and then you'll be able to start to have conversations with people there and you can do the same thing with people at your local store you have to and you know I had clients who didn't even know how to introduce themselves properly which can be a real impediment for people so you know you say to someone well you look them in the eye because then you're watching their face and then you can see how they're reacting and your unconscious socialization abilities will kick in if you attend to the right cues you say hello there I'm Jordan Peterson I just moved into the neighborhood I'm going to be dropping into your store pretty often I thought I'd introduce myself and then you stick out your hand and you look at them and you make sure that you're paying attention to them and not you and you say what's your name and everyone responds positively to that there and maybe if they don't then it's time to find a different corner store that's right you know and then you try to remember their name but if you don't you say you know we met the other day but I'm terrible with names I forgot your name could you tell me again and if you do that then you know that little corner store then it's not completely foreign territory and you're not alienated from it you're going to start to feel comfortable and the same thing is true for this place you might go every week you have to establish these routines of socialization because otherwise you're in enemy territory at least on known territory and that's extremely hard on you physiologically because you don't know if you're surrounded by friends or full eh and so it's the same with your neighbors you are proposing an act of Revolution by going to a new environment and sticking out your hand and saying hi my name is John what is your name and actually listening to the response that is a revolutionary act that is a that's a transformative I take my son he's 12 and so I've started being highly intentional about our relationship because I'm I'm in the early stages of of raising what is soon to be released in the wild a grown man and so we have breakfast every Tuesday at this establishment here in the States called Waffle House it's just a chain Diner and one of the Revolutionary acts I'm trying to teach him is the act of um uh radical generosity and I again I struggle with sometimes basic hi my name is and so the way I began doing this The Waffle House opened in our small town outside of Nashville Tennessee I started over tipping in a in a significant way because nobody wants to be working the 6 a.m shift on a Tuesday at a waffle house and so I told my son hey we're gonna take care of these these waitresses they're awesome they bring us coffee they bring us juice they're lovely and within a few months they know our order when we get there they are smiling when we walk in and it has absolutely transitioned our social interaction now I look forward to spending time with my son but also hanging out with these great waitresses and asking about their cool tattoos right but it's just going first it's just going first going first going first yeah well that emphasis on somewhat excess generosity in those situations is extremely useful too because it doesn't take that much to distinguish yourself on the attentional front from the run of the mill customer and you know you only need Imagine This you probably only need between 10 maybe under 10 places to go in your social community in order to be well situated and so you said is it every week you do this with your son yes sir okay so we could do some quick arithmetic around that how long how long in all does that whole event take uh we are by the time we sit down and I get him to school late every Tuesday it's probably a grand total of 45 minutes okay and what about travel time it's probably 20 minutes there so it's about an hour and a half okay so it's 90 full circle it's 90 minutes and that's once a week yes sir okay so then you figure you're awake for about 16 hours a day and of that awake time say 12 hours is useful for doing the sorts of things that you're doing with your son because you're going to spend four hours in just self-maintenance right so let's say 12 hours 90 minutes is about approximately one tenth of that we'll just use that as an approximation for easy mathematics so you've you've fixed ten percent of one day and there's seven days and so that's basically three percent of your life you fix by doing that and that means you'd only have to fix 30 more things and you'd have fixed a hundred percent of your life well you know how about you tell a story in your book about one of your friends who was talking about exercise and health and he said to you change the things you do every day the things that repeat those are your life that's the routine around which your life is built people very much overvalue special occasions and vacations and that sort of thing and they don't pay nearly enough attention to the kind of thing you're doing with your son it's like that's once a week you might be able to do that for years it's three percent of your life if you get that perfect now you've got three percent taken care of and you can move to the next small piece and do the same thing you do that with some friends and you you do that with your wife for example a couple of times a week for a couple hours a couple of hour sessions you know one of the things I found in my practice was that this is useful for people who are trying to embark on an intimate relationship is you need you need to talk to your wife about the domestic economy and the practicalities of your life together for about 90 minutes a week and you need to date at least once a week that for that length of time or or maybe twice if you can manage that and if you don't do that you will become isolated and lonely and you'll develop a backlog of communication and if you don't fix that you'll end up divorced and then you'll be fixing it for the rest of your life absolutely absolutely and whenever a backlog of communication I love that I love that idea as though I'm just putting rocks in a backpack and eventually that backpack's going to wear me down if I don't have a regular practice of of communication and again I somehow this became a moral or character logical issue I think it's a skills issue man I think taking some of the drama and smoke out of it and just saying hey I don't know how to I don't know how to tell you wife I've never seen it done I didn't see it at my house growing up I've never seen it I don't know how to do this so I want to practice once a week let's go over our calendar let's go over our budget like how are we going to spend money this week um and let's practice I'm going to try to tell you what I need this week about five years ago my marriage was um I mean we were hanging on by a spider's web just hanging on and so my wife and I realized we we gotta if we're gonna hang on to this thing we're gonna have to rebuild it out of Ash right and I can't tell you I'm a six foot two 195 pound I lived in Texas my whole life Texas male what it took for me to look across the table and tell my wife I just occasionally want you to tell me that you're proud of me that was a hard thing for me to say and I didn't even realize how desperately I've been searching for her approval for the first 15 years we'd been married and how much I kept going out on a limb and on a limb and on a limb and I was taking her non-response as rejection and I never put my needs out there and I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it and then she said man that would have been super helpful 15 years ago and now she makes it a regular she makes it a regular practice of our marriage to say hey I see you and I appreciate what you're doing for our family golly what a gift and I didn't know that uh doing the dishes was akin to foreplay great I will knock those dishes out all day long it's about practicing saying your needs out loud and then man get out of your head the number of hours I've spent researching workout programs when I could have just gone to work out or researching how to tell your wife instead of just telling her what a waste of time we have we have too much data man we have too much information we need to go do go do go act go well you can you can have a preliminary conversation with your partner let's say and say something like look we need to tell each other what we need and want and we're both too stupid to do that because we don't really know what we even want and we have almost no practice at it and worse here's something about that that's really quite sad and frightening is like you know if one of the things you wanted to hear is that your wife was grateful to you for let's say providing property for the family so say proud of you there's a a part of you that's quite insecure that wants that message and You're vulnerable on that point hey and so then if you share that vulnerability the person with whom you're sharing it knows exactly where to stick you if they want and so it's real trust to do that but the alternative is assuming that and people do this all the time they'll say things like well if you love me you'd know what I wanted it's like well first of all that's a pretty perfect love and second I'm not Clairvoyant right yeah well right well you're not even smart enough to do that for yourself most of the time someone else and so you know you can make an agreement with your partner and say look um here's something I'd like to hear you say and here's the words I'd like to hear will you just say that another person might object and they'll say well that's that sounds false if I do it or it won't be real because we're just practicing it and it's it's artificial and then you think well wait a second we're going to be together for the next 10 000 days if it takes yeah yeah or more and if it takes 20 stupid practices to get it right that's not so much stacked up over ten thousand days you know and it might be with many marriages I would say there's probably 10 things that each person wants to hear on a quasi-regular basis that would make the difference between the marriage succeeding and the marriage failing but it means you have to sit down with your partner and say look we should decide jointly what we need and want and we should have enough courage to try to express ourselves stupidly in the attempt to get it and then allow ourselves to make mistakes you know while we're practicing I love that I find that we've become goal obsessed and so if I want to do these things so that I can keep my marriage I find that I end up way out on a limb I find out by chasing somewhere I don't want to go I find it more valuable to say I want to live a life that is not not chasing happiness because that's just cocaine and cotton candy but I want to chase a life of joy and all of the data tells me a good marriage a good connection with the Romantic intimate partner over a long period of time is the best bet I have in maximizing joy and so if I'm going to do that that means I've got to be awkward and by the way if you can stand in front of somebody naked and say do you see me and you think I'm beautiful do you want to join bodies with me surely you can say hey when I see dishes in the sink it makes me feel like I'm not being the Romantic partner I feel like I'm less of a wife because I've created this narrative in my head that this is what a perfect wife does or a perfect husband does can you help with the dishes good gosh you can do you stand in front of somebody naked and say Here I Am surely you can say hey can you help with the dishes right and then we have to be stop being so um looking for people coming at us what's that great saying what have you go looking for in the world you're sure to find start receiving those that feedback as an invitation not as a you've been screwing this up right because my wife could have heard that me saying hey I just want you to say you're proud of me every once in a while as me throwing a grenade right you're failing me because you're not doing these things that's she took it as here's an invitation here's a way you can love me better and what a gift man what a gift yeah well you could get over ourselves man you can help people box those sorts of things in too by saying look let's make this discussion about the smallest thing possible right we're not we're not opening up Pandora's Box and assessing the validity of our entire marriage we're going to try to get one small thing slightly better and we're going to assume that lots of things are going well and so we're going to sit down for 90 minutes a week maybe that's not all at once and we're going to share what's on our minds and we're going to talk about what we would like to see happen and how we would respond positively to that and we're not going to LEAP to the conclusion that that's a generic criticism of the whole marriage this is partly also why people don't have these conversations hey especially when they have developed a backlog of communication so my wife and I had a rule too which was well we had a couple of rules that helped us along with this to to not have the backlog and one of the rules was don't agree to anything that you don't agree to because the last thing well the last thing I wanted to hear five years down the road after we had embarked on a particular pathway was well I didn't really want to do that but I just went along with it because I thought you wanted to it's like well what now am I what am I supposed to do about that you know that was five years ago and we talked about it and I didn't want you to agree because you thought it was easier to agree I wanted a consensus you know and so and the corollary to that was if we're going to talk about something that needs to be addressed now and that will be fixed in the future we don't get to drag up the past because that's another thing that happens right is you start talking about things that are problematic and one person or the other goes well you've you always act like this you've always acted like this and there's no chance in the future that you're ever going to change it's like well instantly you're in a fight because your whole character past present and future has just been Savaged when when the conversation should be something like uh our meal times might go 15 percent better if after you were done eating and you and we had all finished you brought your dishes to the sink and rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher and here's what I'm willing to do in return for that well I like to I like to even take it one step further and personalize it because I find I react when somebody says you need to as soon as somebody points their finger at me I I just I am fully limbic man I go I go fight or flight instantly and so I I tend to say hey uh here's a good example I I work here at Ramsey Solutions in Nashville and uh have a history of helping people get out of debt pay their financial debts off and work together as a community and as a couple to pay the debts off one of the most common questions we get is how do I get my partner on board like he wants to just buy a huge pickup truck and buy the biggest house and he's run the credit cards up and I keep coming to him with these numbers and it's it's very short or it's not about numbers and if you come at somebody like you need to sell your truck and you do this well now you've started a war there's a difference when you sit down and say hey I'm scared to death and I can't breathe because we are so indebted there's something about saying it would really be a gift to me if when dinner was over if you took and rinsed your plate and just took six seconds to put in the dishwasher that'd be a gift to me that's different than you need to take your dishes out right in one of those puts me on the defensive one of those is an invitation and I've just decided man my life is too short to continue to to do anything other than invitations except in very few moments while today's cups of coffee often come with hints of soy and social justice our new coffee sponsor delivers an entirely different experience it's bold strong delicious and overall as good as the causes it supports I'm speaking of course about Black Rifle coffee many of you know about Black Rifle already it's a veteran founded and operated Coffee Company who have made it their mission to hire 10 000 veterans and they're well on their way by purchasing for Black Rifle Coffee Company you're directly supporting the military service Community but what about the coffee itself well it's bold strong and really good go to Black riflecoffee.com and use promo code Jordan for 10 off your first order or when you sign up for a new coffee Club subscription the subscription gives you free shipping on all coffee Club orders Early Access to Club deals and promotions and special discounts from their partner brands that's black riflecopy.com with promo code Jordan for 10 off your first order or when you sign up to become a coffee Club member Black Rifle coffee supporting veterans and America's coffee yeah yeah well that conversation about debt too is one of the ways that you cooperate and negotiate with your spouse and your friends your family for that matter is also to jointly develop something like a joint vision you know because you might be able to sit down with your wife and say well look if we could have the dinner times that we really wanted if they were optimal like you've done with your son let's say what would that look like well let's say yeah a couple of kids you think well do we all want to sit down together as a family that's a quick this has to be a question right to both of you yes that you're actually imagining do we all want to sit down okay yes well how often do we want to do that like seven nights a week is this something that's actually a crucial foundation for our family or can we do it five nights a week and maybe do something different on Friday and you think well do all those micro things have to be negotiated and the answer is those aren't micro things you do that every day they're absolutely foundational and and then you want to hear what the other person has to say because if you don't they're not going to be fully on board plus they might have a better idea than you you never know it's like so let's say we decide well we're going to have dinner together at six o'clock five nights a week and we're gonna let people forage one night a week and maybe sit in front of the TV and we're gonna go out one night a week something like that and we'll try that for a while and then the next question is well what would we like to serve and who's going to cook and who's going to clean up and and if we wanted it to go as well as it possibly could how are we going to get the kids involved and do we want to experiment with some new foods and you know that meal time if that's the evening meal let's say that's 90 minutes that's more than one tenth of your day and so that's 10 of your life that's literally 10 of your life if you get the evening yeah but it's bigger it's compound interest that grows over time I think that 10 you take care it's like it's like putting 15 of your income in retirement it grows to infinitely more than 15 of your income over time yeah right so if you take care of that ten percent it's not just taking care of that ten percent suddenly if your marriage is in sync you're an infinitely better parent right infinitely better citizen infinitely better worker and it becomes a much very recursive the uh uh the famed psychiatrist William Glasser he gave me I love this analogy he says that he could he his famed line was he could fix any marriage in two sessions and he said we think in pictures but we speak in words and if couples can simply align their pictures yeah then you get a very clear path so when my wife comes to me on a Monday and says hey uh this weekend you and me we're gonna go on the hottest date and then she just walks away Monday night I'm wondering where we're going Tuesday night I'm wondering what I'm wearing and for how long right by Wednesday and Thursday I'm wondering who's going to keep the kids and I don't care because they're going to be fine and what hotel we're gonna end up at and then Saturday comes along and she I show up in a suit and she shows up in her running shorts and a t-shirt and I say what are you doing what and she says what are you doing and I say I thought we were going on a hot date and she says it's seven seven tacos for ten dollars down at Taco Hut we're going on a hot date hey I love tacos and I hope she loves the occasional Rendezvous but we both use the word date and we had very different pictures now I'm upset she's upset and we just so in our in my house every single day of the week every day I'm not on the road we ask ourselves this question hey what's the picture of today look like it's just become a vernacular in our home and so when she says I need some space this evening I need some time by myself I I tend to go okay cool after dinner and after the kids and after you're done riding enough I won't hassle you for the last eight minutes of the day for her she's thinking the moment you walk in this house I'm out and I might come back in a week right we just have to align our pictures and I'm cool either way and she's cool either way it's just managing those expectations and being so clear with one another yeah well that's exactly the process of defining a shared vision and one of the things that's lovely about that is it makes you it you're not reactive then so you're not the thing that's being chased by the monster or the dread you're the thing that's actively conceptualizing the manner in which the future is going to shape itself and what you have is the delightful opportunity to share a joint Vision that in principle would be better for both of you than anything you could do alone like you said that all the data shows that one of the best things you can do in your life to maximize your long-term health and increase your probability of at least some Joy is to have a functional long-term intimate relationship and so you have to attend to that and a huge part of that is the development of these shared visions and it's really useful to to develop micro visions and so you know we just talked what would you what would you tell what would you tell clients back in the day when they would come to you and they'd have a three-year-old and they would have just had and they have an infant they have child number two and they would say we're not having sex anymore we have like an intimacy we become co-managers of our house and your response as a clinical psychologist would be you've got to schedule it you've got to put on a calendar and the response always is I don't want to do that anymore that's a great question well my first response is well how often do you want to have sex and people hate that people hate that question and so they avoid it they say well you know we don't really want to be that calculating about it's like okay right whatever we're going to parameterize this once a year it's like no that's probably too little okay 15 times a day it's like no that's probably too much okay so now we got some parameters here somewhere between once a year and 15 times a day let's see if we can narrow that in and this does make people uncomfortable right they don't want to specify their needs and wants and I think it's what's this what's the source of that discomfort where does that come from I think they're embarrassed that they need anything fundamental shame like it's that same exposure of nakedness and then they're they're unwilling to share the information with their partner because it's revealing and then they're afraid they're going to be rebuffed and they're afraid they're going to get into a fight they've got lots of reasons not to want to do it but then that rolls back to those stories that have been that have been haunting them since they were kids right yeah yeah and and they don't want to have the difficult conversation up front and so we might say well okay let's let's be reasonable about this it's going to be some number of times a week you guys have jobs you have kids you're busy you're not going to have a hot date every night you just don't have time for it and so why don't we be reasonable about it we can try let's aim for something like twice a week it's like can you think or maybe we could start with once a week because zero once is a lot more than zero it's a lot more than zero and so then you think well all right and then they say something like well you know we did all that dating when we were dating and and now we don't want to do that anymore it's like okay so what are you saying here exactly you're saying that you don't want any more Romance and you don't want any more hot sex and you don't want to put any work into it and it's just going to happen magically even though it's clearly not happening that's that's your theory and then let's let's run that theory out okay so now you have new kids and that's going to be it's going to be like that for a few years maybe till they're 10 or 11. you're going to be occupied with your family and so now you have a sexless marriage with no intimacy for a decade so what does that look like in like 2032 when you're in divorce court that's right how's that or you're recovering from some addiction right right so of of work or of alcohol or whatever it is because your body's gotta it's got to meet that need somewhere and if it can't get it if it can't get it a true deep connection it will come up with all kind of cheap substitutes right yeah like an affair that's right yeah so so of course you don't want to do this this requires difficult how would you like to have your marriage deteriorate into hell over a 10-year period how does that sound as an alternative it's like well that's not very good it's like okay so which of these two things are you more afraid of and then the when people really think that through they think oh yeah well maybe you know I could take the risk of making what I want known and then okay so now you specify it well a date which night how long how are you going to find a babysitter are you going to do this every week who's going to be responsible for what in relationship to this date all these details have to be negotiated and then we remember you know by the same logic that we've already employed if this is two hours a week then that's 15 percent of one day that's another five percent of your life and it's the intimate part of your life and if you got that right my God you might be a much happier person and so that's another one of the only 25 things you have to take care of to set your life up but I mean you said why are people afraid to do this is they're they're afraid to show their vulnerability man they don't trust their partner they don't know how to negotiate they don't even know what they want themselves you know like it's not that easy for someone to admit that they need any physical attention at all even though everyone obviously does you know because you're putting yourself on the line then and that is the definition of intimacy in some sense in today's 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meditation and reflection on who the Bible calls us to be get Hollow for free at hallow.com Jordan it's hallow.com Jordan give yourself the gift of Peace calm and discipline this Christmas go to Holiday dot com slash Jordan today absolutely absolutely I I I can't tell you and I know you've experienced this too whether it's whether it's a single mom with three kids just trying to figure out what day it is or it's a multi-multi-millionaire who's got resources that far exceed anything I could imagine I've I've rarely rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate what do you actually want they cannot answer that question and they fill it with addictions they fill it with Hobbies they fill it with uh dopamine Chase they fill it with so much stuff and nobody can answer that question what do you want because I we just don't have a culture that has a shared vision of where we're headed we have a culture of you're hurting in somebody else's fault and let's let's start pointing fingers and man we've got to circle the wagons on a shared Vision moving forward yeah because what do you want no that's not a question anybody asks it's what do I don't want and why am I feeling just uncomfortable it's about them it's because of him it's because then if it's what you don't want you're driven by negative emotion if you're if you're running from not to if you're driven by a vision that's positive emotion because approaching something positive in a Visionary manner generates positive emotion if you're only fleeing from things you don't want then you're constantly in a state of anxiety and depression that's how it works because where did that go where did we lose a shared Vision why can't somebody put a flag in the ground and say this is where we're headed that seems to be gone yeah well that's a complicated question you know I mean I would say that's the consequence in the most fundamental sense of uh of of the death of God in the most fundamental way it's the death of it's the death of a sense of higher order Unity eh now it's also a very complicated question if you ask someone what do you want if you could ask your wife that what do you want you'll probably freeze her into immobility because it it's really like asking how do you want all of your life to go please summarize and one of the things yeah well it's it's a lot you know and one of the ways that you can deal with that which you undoubtedly know as a as a as someone who's conversant with cognitive behavioral techniques is you can ask people more micro questions too about what they want so you might say well well we did that on The Dating front already right we talked about that we talked about how you might think about how you want your meal times to go we only talked about dinner time but you could talk about breakfast and lunch as well and then you and there are other micro domains that are very crucial that you can also consider it's like so you could ask yourself well if you could have the education you wanted what would that look like if you were on if you had the jobber career track that would motivate you just hypothetically what might that look like sketch out a bad plan um if you had some friends do you well first do you want some friends and if so how many and and if you had friends and the right number how much time per week would you like to spend with them and if you had some time outside of work and familial responsibilities what might you like to do with your time that you would really like to do and the thing about these questions is that they're they're real questions you know there's this gospel statement that if you knock the door will open and that if you ask you will receive and if you search you'll find if you seek you'll find and people who are faithless in some sense think about it as kind of a Hallmark greeting card approach to the world it's just well you just ask for things and they appear it's like no that isn't what any of that means it means nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it and you won't aim for it unless you know what it is and you won't know what it is unless you ask yourself and then you might say well why don't you ask yourself and the answer is well maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to which is a crucial issue and then maybe you don't also trust yourself you know because you might think well if I let myself know what I wanted given my bloody track record I would do everything I could to screw it up so I'll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don't fail at something that's truly important and then I can always I can always Regale with myself with the idea that well I didn't succeed but I didn't really try had I really tried I might have succeeded whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try you also set the preconditions for failure so it's risky but the alternative is well you don't know what you want so it is a meditative practice like okay if I could have what I wanted imagine the world was constituted so that the entire planet wouldn't explode in an apocalypse if I got what I needed and wanted yeah right it's like what would that be you know what time okay so is this is this is this a cognitive well I don't want to use jargon is this a thought exercise or is this a feeling exercise because here's what I'm seeing across the country I thought it would feel different when I finally got that associate Vice President John yeah I thought I would feel a certain way when I got a car I thought if I could just get to her to date me I would feel a certain way and people are are realizing in Rapid fashion I thought if my politician won I would suddenly feel a certain way here's a great I I testified in a court case against somebody years ago a former student of mine um got into some significant some really terrible things um and he got a long jail sentence and the next morning I woke up and I read what the judge had written and in the sentencing and I he the judge used some of my words and I remember feeling sick to my stomach and I called the mentor of mine a psychology friend uh professor of mine and asked her I said man I feel gross and she said John nobody wins here and I had this perception that I was going to feel a certain way when Justice was done and the right thing happened and I realized man I had thought this through cognitively but I had not managed how are you going to actually feel because nobody wins somebody's life is ruined over here somebody's life is still ruined over here I think we have to I don't know let me uh you're you're infinitely um you've got infinitely more wisdom than I do on this but I find that the cognitive exercise is helpful but it really is important to sit down and say okay how are you gonna feel five days after you've bought this car that you think you have to have well okay so the first thing is is that the probability that you'll be happy because you've accomplished something in any permanent sense is virtually zero and the reason yes thank you for saying that well the reason for that is that isn't what positive emotion is for positive emotion is to indicate that you're making progress towards a valued goal now that's the driver right not not the Finish Line exactly well and that's actually pharmacologically separate right because a satiation reward which would be the accomplishment of something calms you and stops that program from running so for example once you've become vice president if that was your goal then the whole pursuing vice president program comes to a halt now the problem with that is it leaves you without a goal and it also leaves empty space which you immediately have to fill and so often people feel disquiet because now they don't know what to do and they miss that rush because they're no longer pursuing something and so it's very important to know that positive emotion is experienced in relationship to a valued goal and then the question becomes well what's the most valuable goal to pursue and that's really a metaphysical and a theological question in terms of the mechanics of feeling so imagine that you're negotiating the structure of a date with your wife and you're developing a shared vision and so you say well on Wednesday nights once a week we're going to go for dinner and maybe you specify the restaurant and you're going to make the arrangements and I'm going to get dressed up and then we're going to go see a movie and you're going to pick the movie and and then we're going to have a romantic interlude afterwards and we'll we'll run that and see how it goes and then what you want to do is you want to picture that and you want to watch how your body reacts on the emotional level and and that's a that's a bit of honesty it's right and you can see well if we went to this restaurant oh I don't really like that restaurant I think it's kind of expensive I had a bad time with waiters I don't think I'd be happy there then you say those things to your partner you say well I'm thinking this through I'm imagining it and here's the objections that are coming up maybe they're wrong maybe I've got this wrong but I'd like to hear your input because you know we want to get this right should we reevaluate my feelings about the restaurant or should we think about a different restaurant and that should be a question because you don't know maybe you're just stupid about the restaurant or you're cheap or you're afraid to go there because you don't have the right clothes I mean you don't know right but if you want to get your feelings in line you develop the vision and then you you you apprehend the vision with your feelings it's kind of what you do when you go to a movie and you fall into the fantasy of the character you know you embody all the emotions and you evaluate it that way and so and and the other problem with that more goal directed approach that you described is like I think people should plan and they should develop a vision you have to develop the vision and then be somewhat detached from it because it needs to be updated right and modified and hold it Loosely yeah yeah you hold it Loosely yeah that's right because you're fallible and maybe you can come up with a better plan not every minute because you'll drive yourself mad that way but but now and then or I I I I I was obsessed as a young higher education professional with becoming a college President until I sat down at the senior leadership table and I realized I I want that life I don't want I don't want that that life I don't want 24 7 365 and the politics I don't want it asking for money I don't want that life and I didn't have I didn't have a backup plan I didn't know what to do I was right like you nailed it I was completely rudderless because I'd made the finish line the the goal going all the way back full circle to the how you open the conversation I think that becomes really important to lay out an identity and reverse engineer who do I want to be who do I want to become and the goals end up you know it's like the old days um when you went to grad school a PhD was simply a a it was a a high five on a journey of of continued learning I'm gonna continue going down this rabbit hole and now it's become a destination and people walk out and announce themself as educated because I've I've crossed this Finish Line just because you get across a you run a marathon or walking Marathon it doesn't mean you're fit right doesn't mean you're healthy well we did we talked about the necessity of goals and so there's higher order goals and and you need the higher order goals because they integrate you and a goal of becoming a college President is a higher order goal then no goal at all in just sitting in your bed and eating Cheetos right it's a better plan than no plan at all but but and this is where things become profound and serious and I would say even in in a religious sense because what's religious is about what's profound and serious in some sense by definition so you might say well who should I be and you might think well I should be the college President I should have this car I should have this house those are all very particularized versions of yourself and the problem with them is is that their concrete and final actualities and not processes and so here's a good Vision that's a high order vision and I think it's the vision that our whole culture is founded on I should be the person who genuinely confronts the problems and challenges that confront me in my life so that's that's a that's an attitude of active and voluntary engagement right I'm gonna that's what identity yeah yeah and yeah that that's a nice it's an identity of process as well it's like I'm going to be someone who doesn't shy away from the challenges of life yes okay and I'm a guy who confronts it right right and so that's Saint George and the Dragon and that's that's a precondition for therapeutic transformation because in order for you to improve you have to identify the problem the dragon and you have to be willing to face it voluntarily and so you say to yourself I'm going to do what I can to develop the courage to confront the problems in my life voluntarily that's who I want to be and then another element of that is oh I can't do that without telling the truth I have to be willing to see what's in front of me and I have to be willing to admit to myself what I think and feel and I have to be willing to communicate that and so you could say well that makes you that makes your goal something like to think about it archetypally you talked about jungian approaches earlier is that that makes you into a truth-telling hero and then maybe underneath that it's like well could I become College president could I be successful in my business could I be successful in my marriage it's like that's all well and good and those are more concretized goals but the the highest order goal has to be something like an approach rather than a final state right because you might say the approach never ends that's right well and you can say to yourself I want to be the guy who listens to my wife yeah okay so you're never gonna you're never gonna finalize that right because you're doing that all the time and that's also really useful because you don't hit the target and then and then find yourself left with nothing because you can do that every day I want to be the guy who listens to my kids I want to be the guy who pays attention to my friends and I want to be the guy who speaks my mind carefully and judiciously it's like you can bring that anywhere man and you're you're and you're talking you're talking about the difference there that approach let's let's use your example I'm a I want to be a guy who's a good Steward of my wife I want to be that's that's my identity and that means I'm gonna have to backfill it with some goals we're gonna meet once a week and I'm not gonna try to fix her like she's a car engine I'm not gonna try to solve her problems with her as though she's infantile I'm gonna just listen and I'm gonna commit to being quiet and so when she says I'm really struggling with my boss at work I'm not going to jump in with well you know you should probably tell him I'm just gonna I'm just gonna listen right but listen over time I begin I really look forward to learning more about my wife and what she's experiencing in this season and it's different than last season it's going to be different in the new season I think it was uh Esther perel who said if most adults have four or five great loves in their lifetime and if you work really really hard it's with the same person and you become part of their journey and now I can't wait to hear about what my wife's been reading who she's becoming and how I can best be a be a partner to her in this new season whatever it is it's not constantly trying to get back to remember how much fun we have and we were dating man what a waste of a life let's go this way right let's move forward I think tell me if I'm if I'm on the right track here that idea of owning acknowledging reality I didn't mean to but I'm looking in the mirror and I've gained 100 pounds I didn't mean to I it wasn't my intention but now I've spent 15 years in a middle manager job and I hate my life I hate going to work every day I think we do not have the skill set for one of the most important psychological functions that we just we just extract we just just took it out of life right and I think it's it's Ernest Becker's work and yolom's work I think we don't have uh any sort of um ability to grieve privately or as a group we've lost a skill set of grief and so we can't acknowledge reality because we don't know what to do when we look in the mirror and say I didn't measure up to who I wanted to be I didn't mean to yell at my kid and I did I didn't mean to get another dessert and I did we can't deal with that grief and so we Blow by it and say you keep putting desserts in front of me or if you had just picked up your trike six-year-old I wouldn't have yelled at you we just Outsource our dysfunction everywhere because we can't sit in that gap between what we wanted and our reality all right so a couple of things there you talked about finding yourself on the adventure of transformation with your wife now often men feel compelled obligated to generate a solution to the problems that their wives bring them and it is the case because women feel more negative emotion that they are more likely to bring up problems that's why 70 percent of divorces by the way are initiated by women it's because they feel more negative emotions so if the relationship is shaky they're going to suffer for it more first and they probably feel more negative emotion because they're more sensitive because they have to take care of infants and so anyways we can put that aside now it might be that you should help your wife solve her problems and maybe she's coming to you for that but one thing you need to understand and you might understand this as a diagnostician is well do you know what the hell her problem is and the answer is well probably not because she doesn't even know so why does she want to sit down and tell you about her problems and the answer is because she wants to find out what her bloody problems are and so you see this very often in therapy you know when Carl Rogers made a lot of this he said you know if you just listen to people they'll often solve most of their problems themselves and so somebody comes in and they say well I'm really upset and you say well what's on your mind now what's so interesting about that is often the people who are in therapy have absolutely no one to tell their problems to you know like I think I think the rogerian magic though was listening and he brought that other that other side of the equation that we we leave out he listened and he genuinely did his best to love the person in front of him yeah well okay so not sit in Judgment of that person so my wife says Hey I'm going through this I I instantly go well you know you should instead of sitting back and going I love this person tell me let's connect not let's solve right yeah so so you you'd hope that your mindset and this would be part of establishing that high order goal is imagine you would like your wife and you to have a good life and so when you're listening to her that's uppermost in your mind we're trying to have a good life here okay so what's your problem well if you're listening to someone therapeutically they're going to scatter shot the problem they're going to say well it might be this and it might be this and it might be this it might have something to do with the past and it might be this and it's it's quite a mess as they try to calibrate the real problem and you have to listen to all that and what you'll find is that the person will dispense with most of those hypotheses themselves as soon as they utter them they'll think well here's my problem no that's not exactly right and so now that's off the table and they'll say well it might be this and here's some reasons for thinking that but no it's probably not that and so what you'll find is the problem space will clear now Rogers also pointed out and this is very useful is that one of the things you can do when you're listening apart from asking questions which might be well I don't quite understand what you meant by that or you said something 10 minutes ago and it seems to contradict what you just said now which are just helpful questions the other thing you can do is summarize and you can say well I've been listening for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and it seems to me that this is what you said is that right and that people really like that for for two reasons a is one is you compact all that searching into the gist and that's a gift you can give someone and then also if you hit the target if you say yeah that's exactly what I meant then they know full well that you've really been listening and so if you can if you're a man and you're listening to this and you want to know how to deal with your wife when she's presenting you with problems the first thing is is step back a bit and say look she probably has to go through the whole problem set and try not to take that personally just listen and and and you can summarize and you can ask questions but mostly you want to find out well what the hell is the problem here now you might want to LEAP to a solution for for a bunch of reasons one is well to show that you have a solution two is to show you're smarter than your wife which is very bad idea the third is to shut her up so that you don't have to sit there and listen and that's also a really bad idea because you can't shut anybody up about an actual problem right that just doesn't work because it's an actual problem it's not going to go away or if she's coming to you to connect and she's not looking for your solution she just wants to connect and this is the tool set that she has when you shut her up you're giving a much more existential I don't value you right I don't want to connect with you um and that's a much bigger um I think that's a much more crisis or your relationship's in a mess at that point yeah well that yes exactly well and you'll find too with this 90 minutes a week that you have to listen to each other is that in some sense you need that amount of time to clear the air because you can imagine that as you move through life Little Dragons make themselves manifest all the time because things change the car needs maintenance there's a problem with the kid there's something wrong with the bathroom sink um we don't have quite enough money in the checking account you know there's a hundred little niggling demons that pop up constantly and it's very difficult to establish the preconditions for joyful intimacy when there's a nest of micro dragons swarming all over the house and you have to talk those through in order to keep them small and to make them go away and if you do that with some degree of programmatic regularity then you do have the possibility that you'll get beyond the mere sharing of problems then you can have some fun then you can play yes but I think uh two things one here a helpful tip for the listeners here there's been fantastic in my marriage is when my wife sits down and begins to talk I'll often stop at the very beginning and say are you asking me for a solution or are you looking to just tell me are you looking to connect and that is often frames the conversation in a way that I know where I what what she's asking from me and it seems very unromantic at first but man on the back end it saves so it's just like putting sex on the calendar right it just a couple of seconds of awkward changes the trajectory of your entire week and month I also think that men have rightly or wrongly we found ourselves we don't understand our relational value and so we think our value can only be found in offering a solution to something and there's a deeper intimacy there's a deeper connection um my wife values me simply because I am her husband yes I help provide and yes I've I you know can do all these other things there's utility there but I have to see myself as having more value than giving a person less with less power or less smarts than me an answer sometimes the greatest gift I can give her is simply my presence right and we have to get underneath that discomfort of I I'm out of my depths here I don't know what to do other than just listen and I feel useless I feel like I've lost utility right yeah well the I think the problem with that formulation is the idea of just listening it's really hard to listen and there's almost I like that I like that well there's almost nothing you can do that's more transformative to that than that and the reason for that is that just listening gives the other person an opportunity to just think and so then you might say well what are they doing when they're thinking and here's what they're doing is they're asking themselves questions and looking for a revelation they're trying to sort through information so that they can determine the best pathway forward and they're trying to update and develop their vision for their life and you do that in abstraction to test out the possibilities before you implement them and so if you give people space to think which is exactly what you're doing when you're listening then they try out different versions of themselves so they can experiment with finding the best fit and so there's nothing just about listening it's I think apart from speaking accurately and carefully and truthfully there isn't anything more difficult that you can do than to listen and one of the things I loved about being a therapist and it's been very useful to me in my post therapy career as well is that if you actually listen to people they will tell you everything and then they're so interesting you can hardly stand them so give me um and by proxy The Listener give a 22 to 27 year old man trying to make his way in the world what is one or two or three things I I guess I'm turning the interview around on you now what's a couple of practical skills that I can do to lean into listening to practice listening and stop trying to rush to a solution try to get out of a a conversation because I'm uncomfortable I don't have the skill set I never saw my dad do it my granddad never did it they just they just barked orders and watched the game I'm trying to do something that is infinitely more difficult than just flipping channels and yelling at the Packers game what what's a couple of things I can practice well I would say first is have some faith in your own reactions not as solutions to the problem but as points of inquiry so for example when we're talking questions arise in the theater of my imagination and topics pop up and I'm willing to put them on the table and the reason they they pop up is because I'm attending to what you say and that's generating some thoughts in my mind and one of the great things you can do with people is ask them questions I mean there is nothing and this goes back to the the issue of say making friends or establishing relationships there's nothing that people want more than to be attended to that's why advertisers spend so much money trying to Garner attention that's why social media companies spend so much money garnering people's attention attention is the fundamental currency and so people love to be attended to and so you dispense with the idea that you're just listening is you're watching the other person and you're listening and then you're attending to yourself and watching and listening because you'll see that as you focus on the conversation and don't worry about what you're going to say next or how you appear which makes you self-conscious and miserable and awkward instantly you pay attention to the conversation and then you watch what happens inside and this question comes up and you say well I have this question and you don't evaluate the question you you know not if you're deeply engaged in the conversation you just lay it out and you you pull you draw the person out and you see well I don't quite understand what you said there or it seems to me that this is a different way of looking at it what do you think of that the questions have to be honest but if you if you pay focused attention and you ask genuine questions you've got like 90 percent of social skill nailed and you get below you get below I love what you said about the Little Dragons I might I might steal that down the road you get beneath the hey did you see what was on the news today or hey we're overdrawn on our checking account you get beneath those things to the real statement which is I'm scared or I feel lonely or I miss you right these truly intimate connections if you'll just if you'll yeah if you'll just wade into the uncomfortable Waters of discourse well I and I think the way to fortify yourself in relationship to that I mean I've been embroiled in a lot of conflict and I really don't like conflict and I think the reason that I've been embroiled in so much is because I won't delay it like if there's an issue at hand I want to address it right now and the reason for that isn't that I enjoy it in fact I don't enjoy it at all but what I really don't enjoy is prolonged conflict that never goes anywhere and that never ends and so conflict delayed is conflict Amplified exactly just it just grows on you exactly that and and that's one of the oldest stories that people have been telling each other forever is that ignored things grow in the darkness outside the city until they become monstrous and Break Down the Walls and so you think well I'm afraid of having I'm afraid of listening I'm afraid of hearing the problems and that's fair enough it's no wonder you're afraid but you're nowhere near afraid enough of not doing that because that's a bloody catastrophe that'll be a bomb that'll go off in 10 years and blow up your marriage you'll find out that your wife had an affair because well for her own reasons and because you didn't pay any attention to her for like 15 years and then you think well I was afraid to pay attention and yeah fair enough but now look where you are you're you're in hell and and that's just not an improvement and so how do you know in our current ecosystem how do you know when to Wade through uh my little brother sent me something the other day that was like in 2000 Y2K was going to kill us all in 2001 I don't remember what it was like swine flu is going to kill us all in 2003 like there's just this Litany of we rally around this the next end thing that's gonna happen and then we've reached this um this fatigue right and we like there's true cancers out there that are coming for us that we're just like dude I don't have the energy anymore I'm moving on about my day I've been really trying to think that through and so here's some guidelines that I've sort of developed over the last few months so you know there's there's problems of various size out there in the world and the largest problems are the apocalyptic problems that you just described right and it isn't even obvious which of those apocalyptic problems are real but we could say well there's always the possibility that large-scale systems will come to a precipitous collapse and we have to live with that that's true in our own lives we could die at any moment so look at the people we love like our cultures can fall apart the apocalyptic terror is always beckoning as a possibility okay now the question is is that your problem now the answer you do anything about it right the answer is your own nervous system will tell you that because imagine that you're imagine you're facing a problem that's so big that it paralyzes you and it turns you into a tyrant okay that's too big a problem for you obviously and what you have to do is you have to scale back the problem until you find a dragon that's a size that you're willing to contend with that you'll actually contend with and so you know maybe you shouldn't be addressing the large-scale political problems of the world because your own house is a bloody catastrophe and you watch the news and it paralyzes you and turns you into a ranting Tyrant and that means you're not the man for that job you have to scale back and maybe if you scale backed and practiced straightening things up at the local level which are which isn't trivial or easy you get better and better at it and then you could face larger and larger catastrophes and and and practically and productively right instead of virtue signaling and going astray you know you do this in therapy is if if someone is having a hard time making friends you break that down into micro steps and one thing you might have to do as we discussed is you might have to teach the person to introduce themselves you know and their problem is I don't have any friends it's like no no your problem is you don't know how to shake hands and look someone in the eye right and then you might say well can you do that and they might say well I'm afraid to shake hands it's like well can you look at me can you stretch out your hand you know can you touch my hand I mean this might sound trivial but lots of people are paralyzed with social anxiety and they have no idea how to shave your hands yeah yeah yeah there and that just stops them cold right because if you can't introduce yourself how the hell are you going to make friends that's right well it's it's being when our bodies take off on us I love how you said that man because our nervous system tells the truth generally can I listen to my body and just instead of rushing to the diagnostic and rushing to Google or rushing to a WebMD trying to can I just ask myself what's my body trying to protect me from like what whoa I just walked into a room full of people and my heart rate just went up to 200 beats uh per minute and I can't my hands are getting sweaty what are you trying to protect me from these are my people these are my friends this is my this is a wedding I got invited to oh okay I I used to not be safe in this situation I'm safe now I'm okay now and I can think that through that gap between instead of racing over to the bar to grab a drink to quiet that alarm system or to race over to the snack table and get a piece of cake which is what I go that's quite the alarm system I'm a good Southern Christian so I like to eat my feelings like I instead of those issues I can just be really curious and I'm not gonna go to war with my body and try to shut the alarms off I'm just going to listen to him and say hey what's it trying to tell me right now well you you talked about thinking in images before so here's a very useful thing the psychoanalysts learn to do so imagine you do go to a social occasion and you find as you enter the Hall you you're getting nervous and sweaty now if you watch this is why Carl Jung for example believed that we lived through a dream we lived life through a dream so and that's a story and so what you'll see is that if you if you feel that nervousness and you attend to it a little drama will run in your head in images you know and it'll be something like well I'm going to go in here and no one's going to talk to me and this will happen in pictures like a little movie no one's going to talk to me and I'm going to end up in the corner and I'm going to be bored and I'm going to be sweaty and hot and it's going to be real uncomfortable and it's just like this other time when I went to this social occasion and this terrible thing happened and the whole drama will play out in your head and then you know you think oh that's the problem and then well then maybe you have someone to talk to about that fantasy or maybe because now you have the fantasy in front of you and you looked at it you can think well wait a minute as you said wait a minute wait a second it isn't like that other situation my friends are here I can go talk to John I know him real well we'll just have a conversation I can go sit at a table and and with one of my friends and spend most of the time there it can be with my wife but that what will happen is we get nervous and that fantasy will make itself manifest but you don't want to face it and that's when you rush to a premature solution you shut it off right yeah so what what you're doing there is you're failing to allow the anxiety ridden fantasy to make itself manifest and you you do that because you don't want to know where You're vulnerable right and no wonder like who the hell wants to know where they're vulnerable but the answer to that is well someone who wants to fix it because you cannot connect I do yeah I do absolutely right now now I've come to I love looking for those vulnerabilities I love a good community and I love the discourse I love my friends who will Point them out um and say hey here's a blind spot which is why again circling back that's why we have to have other people in our life now if done with the in the right spirit I love um I love that's that's the whole scientific process right rejecting the note like I wasn't wrong right like the whole idea is Let's Be a little bit less wrong right so I think there's yeah that's right that's the whole idea that's humility man is to be a little bit less wrong and Jesus that's what it what a deal but what a what a fun way to live it's such an easier way to live than I have to be right that's a that is an exhausting grip on your life it's a choking grip on your life instead of I want to be a little bit less wrong and I begin to seek out places where I might be wrong that's just taking your blade and trying to sharpen it as finely as possible what a fun way to live well the old the purpose of confession classically was exactly that so the idea was well I'm going to review my week which doesn't seem like such a bad idea why well I'm gonna think about things that I did that didn't work out so well and see if I can specify what they were and see if I can figure out how to replace them with something better at least with the intent to do better and that confessional you know that confessional in some sense which was supposed to be Redemptive and that led to forgiveness at least in principle was very much the same thing as discussing in genuine dialogue the problems of your life it's like well here I seem to have gone sideways here I seem to have gone sideways here this week how do I know that well my conscience is calling me out on it and there were some negative consequences and I feel that this is the mistake I made and I'd rather not make that mistake and as you said if that's handled as if the goal is to stop making those mistakes hopefully incrementally across time then the evidence of the mistake can be an invitation to positive transformation and that would be the encouraging element of humility right it's like well why haven't we but you have to do it in community I think I think the like it went from this ancient religious practice of confession which I think you have to look back thousands of years and say this practice this practice continued to roll on evolutionarily and culturally because it had a deep value and then it was I don't say co-opt it was absorbed by the Mental Health Community to sit down in front across from somebody and I I find great great value in journaling writing things down getting them out of my body and onto paper but I think we've gotten very isolated with our journaling and are writing it down and we've become um I'm having this confession with myself now and there's value to that but I think the truth value is having confession in front of somebody else because then we force ourselves to say do you see me and do you still love me will you still be here if you fully know me that it's the most difficult part of yourself to observe is the place where you're most blind obviously and so you can journal and you can concentrate on yourself but that still might produce a situation where your blindest spots stay blind and also it limits your ability to problem solve creatively because you only draw on your own resources one of the wonderful things about a marriage that's functional is that both of you have two brains to work on to work out whatever problem happens to arise and part of the reason that marriage is difficult is because life is difficult and you you have to jointly confront the actual problems of life which is what makes marriage different different than dating for example or different than an affair which is a you know a wish a wish fulfillment fantasy in some sense of all the intimacy with none of the problems a very terrible thing to do to your partner who is then Laden with only the problems but it's very useful to have two brains because each person is quite different and the probability that the person you're communicating with will have a different take on both the problem and the solution is extremely high and so this is particularly true if you're in a solipsistic uh crisis in relationship to your mental health for example if you're depressed it's very hard to lift yourself out of that alone because some of that dwelling on your issues actually facilitates the depression and the same thing happens with anxiety so now that we're here you're you're a trained in practice clinical psychologist I'm a trained I'm a lowly trained counselor which for the non-academics there's a there's a definite hierarchy there I have we over pathologized culture our individuals are I feel like we have become um a slavish adherence to Diagnostics into labeling and when I look at when I look at expectation theories that people live into the labels that they're given or the expectations that are put before them um I've got some high concern but I also don't want to be dismissive right so help me with that because I feel like everybody man it's so easy to just go get a diagnostic and go get a label and that becomes you and then I end up sitting with somebody and they say well I can't take this job because I was diagnosed with ADHD or I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and my impulse is hey that's a context not an excuse it is a way a way that you see and experience the world and people experience you and you still got to get up and go to work so how are we going to manage that right but I I don't want to be dismissive well look I think part of the problem is is that it's a practical problem in some sense because the diagnostic labeling process is necessary for such things as insurance claims right and so so the the the Lexicon is that is that where we are man of course it is and the Lexicon it's heartbreaking man well and there's some utility in it you know if if you're having panic attacks and you're afraid to go out of your house and I tell you you have agrophobia and many other people have it sometimes that's a real relief because you're not the only crazy person of that type in the world and there's some Pathway to treatment but I was trained fundamentally as a behaviorist and the behaviorists aren't that uh what would you call it impressed with diagnostic labels and the reason for that is that they tend to break down problems into actionable units it's like well I'm depressed it's like well okay fair enough but what's wrong with your life and your mood in the micro details and how could we address that programmatically and I think the problem with diagnosis is that it's really easy to confuse diagnosis with cause right but I'm miserable why well because I'm depressed now well maybe you have a biochemical problem but absent that depression isn't an a black box with homogeneous contents there's specific reasons that you're miserable and unhappy and what we need to do is to break down those reasons differentiate them down to the level of detail where you can start to experiment with addressing them and so if the diagnostic Enterprise interferes with that then it's counterproductive and and that happens very frequently yeah I remember the first time one of my students was hospitalized for major depression and suicidal ideation I was taken aback that the first couple of days after you know they had gotten sleep and were fed the protocol was your job is to get up and go take a shower and then you can go back to bed we're going to take these tiny steps towards right that's you know my friend Dave Ramsey is okay we're gonna get a thousand dollars sell whatever you got sell your famous guitar sell your gonna get a thousand dollars in a savings account first and you're gonna breathe for the first time and then we're going to pay off your debt and then we're good right it's these tiny baby steps towards um and again I think we've been sold a bill of goods that mental health is I just got to get all the thought right thoughts in the right order and I there's something I think we just swiped off wholesale the behaviorist approach I I just don't see that working out man I think we have to often act our way into a different way of thinking and experiencing the world well the other thing too that people should take heart in consequence of is that as you pointed out earlier when we were talking about the cascading effects let's say of sorting out how you have dinner with your family there's multiplying effects well it might be very disheartening to see at what small scale you have to begin improvements right but the truth of the matter is is that that tends to scale exponentially is once you start making improvements the improvements feed back upon themselves and so even if you have to start out small it doesn't take very long before you're on the upward trajectory and it's not linear you know you can fail precipitously right but you can also succeed precipitously once you get the ball rolling positive things tend to aggregate together and you can make a lot of progress even if you start from a pretty damn dismal place so how do we get that that extraordinary insight into the public lexicon how does that become a way of operating because all of us are staring we're running around staring at our own belly buttons waiting to not fall off that precipitous Decline and we are missing the opportunity for this accelerating post-traumatic growth right we've been through hard things okay what come that's the whole book man well that what about that now what do we what do we do next that's the answer to your question well how do we bring that into the public domain well you wrote a book having this conversation and so yeah and and that is how you do it and and you try to communicate the utility of what would you call it humble courageous incremental movement forward and honest communication social Community all the things that we discussed today and I should also point out that we are out of time for the YouTube all right interview is there anything else that you want to bring to the attention of the people who are watching and listening before we before we close no I just want to say I'm I'm grateful for your hospitality it's been you've been a gift I appreciate you well thank you and thank you for your book and I would say to people who are watching and listening um Dr delony's book is a very straightforward take on practical solutions that you can Implement to start incrementally improving your life and that is the right way to to progress one brick at a time you build a solid wall one brick at a time and it can happen a lot faster than you think and so I think the book fills a necessary Niche and I like the winner in which you interwove your description of story and identity and the broader social community and the issue of incremental Improvement and so I'd encourage people thank you for watching and listening to take a look yeah yeah and it was real good talking to you for those of you who are watching and listening I'm going to talk to Dr deloney for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform and the daily wire plus makes these professionally produced YouTube conversations possible and so thank you to them for that and if you're interested in hearing a little bit more about Dr delony's biography and about what's made him successful in his career and his marriage then head on over to the Daily wire plus platform and and tune in and otherwise hopefully we'll see all of you again on my YouTube channel and thank you very much for your time and attention hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,539,419

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: B_373YVlnDA

Length: 102min 39sec (6159 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2022