Jordan Peterson: How You Got “Facing What You are Afraid of” Wrong

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today philosophy insights did some special editing of Jordan Peterson's lecture and I hope you enjoy the content facing what you're afraid of and that's a key Concept in Psychotherapy hey there's there's not that many key Concepts in Psychotherapy one might be that you enter into an honest relationship with your client the the second is that exposure to the things that you don't want to be exposed to is Curative if it's voluntary that's a big deal and it has to be voluntary it can't be involuntary because that'll just make it worse because you might ask well you know if a kid has a fear of rats or mice they got that fear because often they were exposed to rats or mice and then you use exposure to rats and mice to cure them well that makes the precipiter of the illness The Cure which makes no sense well what's the distinction well it's it's one thing to have something pop up at you when you're not expecting it that puts you in a state of of apprehension and preparation for action in the state of even a state of Terror a state of uh reflex of shock and then perhaps Terror and maybe something you don't recover from that's completely different than facing something voluntarily the psychophysiology isn't even the same so if you're faced with a stressor of a certain magnitude and it's involuntary your body produces a lot of the stress hormone cortisol and in large doses cortisol is toxic especially if it's produced over long periods of time but if you face it voluntarily then that doesn't happen you use a completely different set of circuits to do something voluntarily and it's the utilization of the voluntary circuits that indicates your Mastery over the thing that you're afraid of and that Mastery over the thing that you're afraid of and can't cope with that actually constitutes your adaptive personality and so part of what the existentialists were suggesting is that precisely and you see this you see this in Freud with his insistence that you go into your messy past and and dig up the corpses and the skeletons and sort them out and Jung's insistence that what you want is most is to be found where you least want to look and Roger's insistence that people communicate honestly about difficult things it's all predicated on the same idea in some sense that voluntary exposure is one of the Prime things that cures people and one of the things that you should think about you think well is that a valid claim well you have the psychophysiological evidence but it's also the case that that is how people learn right if you're a child and you're learning to master the world you actually exist in a state of existential anxiety unless you you're near someone that will take care of you so for example if you take the typical child and you go to a mall say a three-year-old and then you have the three-year-old stand and you leave it isn't going to be very long until you're far enough away so that most of most children in that situation will immediately start to cry they'll get worried and they'll start to cry and then they'll break down because well because that's the existential anxiety like you think well a normal child is calm it's like wrong a normal child close to someone who will take care of them is calm but that is by no means the same thing it's not even close to the same thing and so it you get backwards in your psychological thinking if you don't notice that because you think well the normal human being is calm and well put together it's like no wrong the normal human being in a place of safety is calm and well put together but why you would ever think that a normal place is a place of safety you know assuming that that's the the standard or the norm there's absolutely no reason for that you see this with rats too because the behaviorists for example made the presumption that you had to teach rats to be afraid but let me tell you how that actually worked it's really interesting and it shows you how carefully you have to analyze say psychological experiments to understand what's going on so let's say you take a lab rat okay like and let's say it's a lab route that like a rat that Skinner used BF Skinner who is the most famous of the behaviors and he could get rats to do anything he taught pigeons to play ping pong he taught pigeons to guide guided missiles by photographs and he did that with behavioral training they were never used for guided missiles because they got the electronics working before the program was set into operation but he could get them to Peck at photos to guide something that was flying accurately and he did that with behavioral training so Skinner I mean he he was no joke he could he really knew how to train animals and it's very useful material to know we'll talk about it to some degree if you want to train children for example or pets so because the learning mechanisms are very similar which is why of course we can get along with pets right we understand them like we understand children roughly speaking so anyways so let's say you've got your rat and he's sitting there and he's pretty calm and he's in his cage and so he's already a weird rat because he's been genetically altered he's not a wild Norway rat so he's a little Tamer than a normal rat maybe he's a little more fearful although perhaps not and he's also a solitary rat in his cage and there's no such thing as a solitary rat it's like a solitary zebra or a solitary carp um or uh not carp cod cod existed huge schools there's no such thing as a Cod which is why they will never come back as far as I can tell because once you wipe out the school it's like you wipe out a beehive and you're going to have six bees what the hell are you gonna do with six B's what are they gonna do they don't exist on their own and and and herd animals are like that too and and cod are like that so they organize their mating behavior in their huge schools so without the schools like what the hell is the Cod gonna do nothing and that is what they're doing but anyways back to the back to the rat so you've got this rat he's in a cage he's alone and he's hungry because one of the things that Skinner did was starve his rats down to 75 percent of their normal body weight so that they would respond a lot more to food so so that's the model and that you got to keep in mind the nature of the model because the model is like the the way the model is constituted is equivalent to your implicit assumptions about your experiment and people don't take that into consideration okay so the rats calm so then what you do is you take the rat out of his cage and you put him in the testing chamber and so maybe what you're going to do is you're gonna set the rat up so that a light goes on and then he gets a little electric shock okay but and that you're going to teach them to be afraid of the light so after you pair the light with the shock six or seven times when the light comes on the rat's gonna freeze so and he freezes because he's using Predator avoidance strategy basically to deal with the threat but but and so you think well comrat learns to be afraid but no because when you put the rat in the cage the new cage what does it do well it doesn't just you know find the sofa and have a nap it's terrified when you put it in the new situation that's the normal rat it's the one that's like this it doesn't move because if it moved maybe a predator would pick it out like a cat because cats can see lateral movement that's why they have slit Eyes by the way so they can detect lateral movement and you know that because if you play with your cat like this it'll Chase your hand but if you do this it won't it's because it doesn't Chase things that do this it doesn't Chase kangaroos you know it chases things that move like this so it has eyes for that anyways the rat's Frozen and then it starts to sniff because a rat is all smell most animals most the brains of most animals are organized around smell human beings are very weird because our brains are organized around Vision but that's just not the case for most well you know dogs they're the weirdest things eh because they can they they can smell like way better than you they can detect odors way better than you probably most of you smell better than a dog but they can detect odors better than you but everything seems to smell good to a dog which is the strangest damn thing you know with a nose like that you'd think they'd never even want to go outside but anyways oh oh no I probably lost my place all right dogs smell where were we going with that rats yes and what's that Frozen yes okay so the rat that's the one that's the one so the rod is in its cage and it's frozen so that nothing can see it and eat it and so it starts to sniff because it uses smell to see what's going on and so if you take rats that have never been exposed to a cat and you like blow cat odor over them they do not like that at all they do not like cat odors so it's built right into it's an archetype that the Predator cat is an archetype for the rat and it doesn't need any any pre-training to respond to it and it's probably also the case with human beings and things like snakes and looming objects we've got some archetypal Predators as well but all right so the rat sniffs and then if nothing happens it thinks okay a rat can sniff here without dying and so then it starts to relax a little bit maybe it starts to move around a bit then it thinks okay a sniffing rat that's moving a little bit can live here without dying and then nothing else happens and so it relaxes a bit more and then it starts to sniff its way around and it'll sniff all around the cage and check out all the corners and make sure that there isn't anything there that can eat it because the rat actually cares about that and then when it's completely explored the cage and decided that it's safe then it turns into a normal calm rat but that's post-exploration so you have to say well a rat that has thoroughly explored its territory is a calm rat that's a whole different way of looking about fear then you turn the light on and shock it and the rat thinks ah wrong it's not safe here and that light indicates so indicates that it's not safe so basically what you've done is remind the rat that life is dangerous you have not taught it fear it's not the same thing the rat knows everything about fear it learned that it was safe and it was wrong and that's a really a really important thing to understand also about what you're like because you know per like anxiety that needs no explanation depression that needs no explanation what needs explanation is how the hell do you ever feel secure and together ever because that's the mystery and partly the way you do that is by never going anywhere where you're upset you stay in your territory and so like this is your territory and everyone knows how to act here right so you look around it and everyone's sitting and doing exactly the same thing so you can ignore them you can pretend that they're not dangerous and most of the time that will be correct and some of the time it won't be and so you maintain your emotional stability by staying where you belong and that's quite different than the psychoanalytic view psychoanalytic view you know that you're you're calm and well put together if your psyche is properly organized
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Channel: PhilosophyInsights
Views: 4,226
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Keywords: Existential anxiety, pathology, existentialism, Jordan Peterson, western, modern, view, worldview technology, nihilism, psychoanalysis, fear, stress, Jung, Roger, psychology, psychologist, Human, personality, existential, negative emotions, anxiety, depression, depressed, explain, lecture, Jordan B. Peterson, professor
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Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)
Published: Mon Jul 17 2023
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