Jordan & Tammy Peterson: Couples Report from understandmyself.com | #226

conflict avoided is conflict delayed and magnified and so it was a cross-temperamental learning process for me i had to learn to work against my temperament in order to engage in conflict that was necessary when it was necessary we always worked through our problems until we had resolution and you were very uh up you were very persistent in making sure that we found our resolution and i don't know exactly what that was about if it had anything to do with your personality well i think partly weirdly enough it was a consequence of my dislike of conflict i thought oh my god we have a problem here it's an actual problem it's going to happen every day or every week or every month for the rest of our bloody lives let's hash it out right now despite the fact that that will make me sweat and raise my blood pressure and exhaust me because if we can actually negotiate our way through it and come to a solution we wouldn't have to have a fight anymore yeah and that worked we went through our problems and we still continue to go through our problems we don't rehash stuff all the time no well we made rules too and one of the rules was and this has been a rule that tammy and i have used in our whole relationship is like do not agree to something you don't agree to because the worst thing is is you negotiate out a settlement and the person decides they're going to implement it but really they're resentful about it because they didn't want to have any conflict and then they're crabby about it every time they do it they do a terrible job and they're irritated about it and that lasts forever [Music] mom and dad fancy seeing you guys in nashville we're very happy to be here hi michaela hi this is fun yup this is going to be fun uh we are going to talk about your couple's report which is part of dad your understand myself personality report system where you can join people together and then see all the ways that you either work or don't work right right each person can do a personality assessment at that site and then they can join with their partner or with anyone else they choose to have a couple's report generated that outlines their similarities and differences where they'll get along easily and where they might have differences and why those differences can be useful and so forth so are you guys really comfortable with sharing this with the world the differences in your personalities whether or not that works i mean apparently it works fairly well you're both here you're on the same couch that's a good start yeah well um we won't say anything that we don't want to share but we've talked a lot about our personality differences and similarities and and figured out at least to some degree how to appreciate them and how to negotiate in relationship to them mom what do you think are you ready yeah i'm ready okay we're going to start with agreeableness so dad you scored 95th percentile in agreeableness yeah that's sad and mom [Music] you scored 29th percentile in agreeableness that's different so it's a little bit different so i guess we should talk about has that been an issue with having one person significantly higher in agreeableness than the other well if i could start i think that you want some difference because you know you're reacting to what's going on in the world and you can temper each other or you know change the way someone is seeing something through the lens of agreeableness and have a broader idea of interpretations of the world so so the utility for me in having your mom be more disagreeable than me is that i tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt at a fairly broad level and tammy is much more skeptical i would say of people than i am and that means that when there's someone around who you should be skeptical of she's more likely to pick that up and so i like to bring her to meetings and just as an observer often because she'll report to me afterwards about her thoughts and her suspicions and then i've learned through sometimes painful experience to at least pay attention to that i think tam might have paid some price for her higher levels of disagreeableness though think well like what well when you're disagreeable you tend to say no does that have anything to do with extroversion as well though yeah if you're enthusiastic you tend to say yes well we won't talk about my enthusiasm yet we're going to get there yeah we're going to get there no but i think it has something to do with me saying no and also wanting my own way stubborn yeah i want my own way yeah it also um it it does lead to some misunderstanding because people low in agreeableness can be kind of curt and snappy not snappy that's not exactly right they can be curtain blunt they're less polite and so if you want to know what someone thinks it's really good to have a disagreeable person around but it's not like they really go out of their way to smooth things out so that there isn't that's more than just this it's i i have risk of like i'm i'm not volatile right and i have really low and withdrawal that's part of that yeah well that's complicated that it helps a lot because it means that you're less likely to get upset and so but i'm less likely to walk away when there's a confrontation mm-hmm right and that can be both good and bad and that's hard on something scary to be around it's it's hard on somebody who's more agreeable how did you experience the differences in our temperament mick when you were growing up so i'm it's funny because i'm in a lot of conflict all the time but i hate conflict it really bugs me i don't like it i don't like firing people for example i don't really even like disciplining people even um i don't like hurting people's feelings and i would say tammy is less sensitive to that than i am and that's not a criticism but but and this is coming from someone who's also i'm split with agreeableness right but low in politeness mom i don't think mom would hurt somebody's feelings unless they kind of deserved it right well i think and your i guess description of what deserve is would be different yeah well i think your mom's judgment is really good and i think she often puts people in their place let's say when they deserve it and also she's also extremely compassionate towards those who need it but not towards those who don't so your mom was unbelievably responsive to you guys when you were infants so how did you experience the difference in our temperaments you and your friends and at least when you were younger well when people came over they used to be initially afraid of you like oh you know jordan but then when they got to know you that would switch over to mom so that's one example if i needed to get a yes from a parent i would probably go to you that was very sneaky and treacherous of you so was it was there a downside to that the fact that i would be more likely to say yes and an upside to your mother's propensity to say no everything was so muddled together because of how sick i was that it's difficult to stay so is it disappointable person more likely to tell you something that they see as um an issue to discuss that might be sensitive than someone yeah definitely that's why it changes so that's truth right that's the truth yeah yeah well in the relationship between disagreeableness and truth is an interesting one thing about disagreeable people is because they're in some sense a little bit more out for themself and are more likely to bargain on the part of themselves than on someone else's part is that they might be more tempted towards deceit that was self-serving directly whereas an agreeable person would be more tempted to like smooth over the truth and make everything nice so no one's feelings get hurt yeah both those don't work out well no well that's why it's nice to have a dialogue yes you know right both those don't work out well it's also gone you know as your differences on agreeableness and this is true for all the personality dimensions maybe except neuroticism as your as the gap between you when you're in a couple increases it's also increasingly difficult for people to understand each other because they don't understand their motivation so the agreeable person will be running around doing everything for everyone and making things nice and the disagreeable people person will be more competitive and blunt and well and less likely to do such things and so they can misinter misunderstand and misinterpret each other quite quite easily so i'm going to just read a couple of sentences so people can get an idea of what you get out of this report because this is the amount okay so you basically do the understand myself personality test you get two people to do that and then you can hook it up online and i told dad that he should be charging for this because i'm running his business and this shouldn't be a free product however it is a free product you just hook up your results so if you've already taken it you can hook up your results with other people but there's probably how many how many words here four thousand eight thousand like four thousand words it's a real detailed report well part of what we did we has we spent years building the couple's reports there's probably a hundred thousand words behind it because there's ten aspects that people are compared on and then there's five different groups you can fall into uh you know way above average above average average et cetera and so the program generates the report based on your placement on a normal distribution percentile essentially and so there's a tremendous amount of writing and work that went into this it's the equivalent of at least two books i would say we were going to launch it with a relative fanfare let's say but i got extremely ill and we couldn't do that and so we decided to release it anyway because we thought it was in people's best interest and we're actually pretty happy with the sales and so but yes it's a major feature it's the only personality test i know of and certainly the only scientifically validated test that actually offers people a direct comparison with a report based on that comparison between them and their partner and we're hoping it'll be extremely useful for people because you need to understand that there are temperamental differences and you need to understand what they are and then you need to understand and appreciate your differences and similarities and figure out how to negotiate them very complicated for people so i think what we should do because we're going to be seriously delving into this i think i should kind of give a brief overview of what it's going to look like and then we get into each trade so we just looked at agreeableness agreeableness breaks down into compassion and politeness so it will do a comparison between agreeableness overall and then dad's compassion level mom's compassion level to adds politeness level mom's politeness level so when he said ten aspects it does the five uh openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism breaks all those into two aspects and then gives you a comparison it's a lot of information here and that's based on an instrument called the big five aspect scale which i developed with my students particularly colin de young who was lead author on that paper and it's become one of the standard means of assessing personality psychometrically in the research literature and also has been used by now tens of thousands of people online so i think it's reasonable to say that it's the best personality instrument currently available in terms of the breadth and the detail of its coverage and it's certainly the only one that offers this couple's comparison so do you guys think i should just like kind of burn through some of this and you can stop me yeah well just that you can just ask questions and yep that would be fine so let's go too so we covered agreeableness agreements breaks into compassion politeness compassion dad you scored 96th percentile and mom you scored 48th percentile so some of the some of the information you get here this is you you are likely to be highly conflict diverse because you'll be concerned about causing your partner negative emotion your partner mom is likely to be capable of engaging in conflict and he or she will be a bit less concerned about causing you negative emotion so that's one sentence out of you know a large paragraph just describing the implications of compassion as a couple so i'm gonna just keep going and you maybe mom too comment if you want to comment about what this kind of thing means dad well i had to learn to i would say engage in conflict especially when it conflicts with compassion um i've been in a lot of conflict the r and i don't find it pleasant and i don't like upsetting people at all it really bothers me and uh but i did learn that conflict avoided is conflict delayed and magnified and so it was a cross-temperamental learning process for me i had to learn to work against my temperament in order to engage in conflict that was necessary when it was necessary and so that conflict probably perhaps came more naturally to your mother or with less internal opposition yeah i don't think it i don't think it bothered me as much but we always worked through our problems until we had resolution and you were very uh obs you were very persistent in making sure that we found our resolution and i don't know exactly what that was about if it had anything to do with your personality well i think partly weirdly enough it was a consequence of my dislike of conflict i thought oh my god we have a problem here it's an actual problem it's going to happen every day or every week or every month for the rest of our bloody lives let's hash it out right now despite the fact that that will make me sweat and raise my blood pressure and exhaust me because if we could actually negotiate our way through it and come to a solution we wouldn't have to have a fight anymore yeah and that worked we went through our problems and we still continue to go through our problems we don't rehash stuff all the time no well we made rules too like when we were talking about an issue it might have been something as trivial as who was going to clean up the bathroom sink and how quickly after they used it part of the rule was we focus on the specific issue so you don't get to say well you never cleaned up the sink and you're always leaving things around and you've done this your whole life and you'll never change which is a really bad negotiating strategy it was like okay apparently we have a problem with the sink that might have been because of our differences and orderliness which we'll get together it's like what is it that you want specifically done about this specific thing and then we would negotiate back and forth until both of us were satisfied and we used to have meetings with you kids once a week i don't know if you remember somebody i vividly remember you favorite why do you vote in a ptsd because you wanted to go out and play i'm just kidding yeah well well we sort we'd sort out the week's responsibilities at this meeting and the meeting had rules which was well there's some jobs that need to be done and everybody has to play a role in doing them so that nobody gets resentful and bitter and you have to attend the meeting although you can leave if you get upset but you have to come back and you have to abide by what you say what you agreed to and so for the week so it was for the week it wasn't a big ask right seven days but that's a long time for a kid it is a long time yeah well and and people generally don't have meetings of that sort and one of the rules was and this has been a rule that tammy and i have used in our whole relationship is like do not agree to something you don't agree to because the worst thing is is you negotiate out a settlement and the person decides they're going to implement it but really they're resentful about it because they didn't want to have any conflict and then they're crabby about it every time they do it they do a terrible job and they're irritated about it and that lasts forever so none of that so that's a good rules do not agree to things you do not agree with and if you're agreeable you'll say yes and then you'll get resentful and that's the bitter and horrible underside of empathy i could add to that too if you're in a situation where you feel like you have to say yes as an agreeable person um say you need some time yes because i use that trick i mean i'm way better now i don't have issues with saying no at all anymore but when i was younger and more concerned about other people's feelings i guess uh i started saying i you know i can't make that decision right now i'm not comfortable you say i'm not comfortable making that decision right now or can i have till tomorrow yes yeah well that's not a trick i would say that's a good that's a wise strategy and we also learned in our relationship often to discuss things and then let both parties sleep on it and if you go to sleep with the intent of further clarifying the negotiation then you often wake up in the morning with something to say you know that might also cause further conflict but is part of the means by which you reach a peaceful negotiated settlement i mean tammy you remember when we were first together we'd have a conflict about some deep thing usually for about three days yeah and then once a week well and then yeah yeah for a year yeah more than that even perhaps for the first year yeah well often i'd be trying to work through this and it would be at night and tammy would say i have to go to sleep now which drove me crazy i'd be up like persisting on the internal discussion she'd be sound asleep beside me which is extremely annoying but she would very frequently wake up in the morning with something to say that was helpful or with a dream that related to it well those kind of pauses that you take when you sleep allow it allowed me to reflect and find out what i may have brought to the situation and that always helped yeah well that was another thing we did constantly too which was to try to figure out how you know i would sit on the end of my bed and tammy did this as well when we were having a fight and think okay what stupid thing did i do at some point in the in the lead up to this discussion that increase the probability that this would be unpleasantly conflictual and that's interfering with the solution and man if you ask yourself that question you'll get an answer and then you can offer that answer to the person you can say look despite the fact that you're utterly wrong and that this is horrible and you should just listen to me because that's what you like to think you could say well here i figured out something i did that was not optimal or maybe outright wrong and it's complicating it and so like sorry about that and you have to mean that and if you have any sense you do and then we could progress yeah that was a great strategy because i think it not only deals with the situation at hand but it deals with behavioral patterns that you've had since childhood that sometimes don't work anymore and in the in the conflict you can see the discord and you wonder what you may have brought to it so then that can shed some light on past um behaviors and then you can update them yeah through the negotiation well yeah that's a huge part of what you're doing in negotiation is that update it's also the case that if you concentrate on your stupidity you now have a problem that you could solve whereas you really can't solve the problem of your partner's stupidity you know you can you can negotiate and you can discuss it but really that's well that's that's in their domain so you should really pray to be enlightened about your own ignorance and limitations and error because you can get rid of that with good faith and and through negotiation people are not good at negotiating negotiating one thing too you can offer your partner we did this a lot too it's like okay looks like i'm in the wrong here what do i have to say what words do i have to say to you right now that will satisfy you and you might think well if you love me you know or you should figure out the words on your own it's like no i'm stupid you tell me all wander through these words awkwardly and artificially because i'm not very good at it and maybe i'll get better at it in the future you can give your partner that gift right you offer them conditions for your satisfaction what do you want that also forces you to specify what you want you have to ask yourself like you're upset okay what do you want well i don't know fair enough we can talk about it and then maybe you identify if it's well i want you to suffer and then that can pop into your head and you're like oh maybe i'm contributing to the problem too yeah maybe right yeah okay next we're still in agreeableness yeah we're still in agreeableness you are high in politeness this is my favorite aspect and you are low in politeness so you scored 85th percentile dad and mom's scored 16th percentile right that's a big difference yeah baked it there's big differences that's a big difference between us yes yeah and i i noticed this often when we had when we were fighting um arguing because tammy would say something so outrageous and impolite and then she would top it with like another thing that was even more outrageous and impolite and then with another and they were usually an impolite people can be very funny they were usually so over the top that it would make me laugh you know but it was that impoliteness that does cause friction in our relationship because she's more likely to be curt and mom's pretty curt yeah yeah yeah and pretty blunt and blunt and so you know i'll try to do something nice for her and she'll say something kurt or blunt and then you know that hurts my feelings and uh but but yeah well c'est la vie you know but you're pretty damn funny and i think i i like that provocativeness i'm trying to be more kind and loving yeah well i have a better relationship now with my conscience or with my intuition or my higher power i have a better relationship and i'm trying to because you know all of us have these personalities were given wrestling with and then you know do i want to be that blunt well in some situations yes you know but in a personal situation with someone i love well no yeah i do i feel i don't want that yeah and yeah with regards to this distribution like we all have temptations towards certain sins and what we've been gifted certain virtues that make it easy for us and it's really useful to understand that temperamentally like an extroverted person person is going to find it easy to be social but an introverted person is going to have to learn oh i've been i've had to learn a lot right and especially now that he's a public figure for me to be involved in that i've had to learn a lot about being in a situation with people i don't know and striking up a conversation yeah and you're getting good at that introverts can get unbelievably socially skilled but they have to learn it consciously and that that that bluntness and impoliteness i do believe that that was part of what attracted me to you to begin with because you were teasy and there's a playful element to that or they can be even though it's like harsh play right it's like playing with a dog who might bite you but but but a playful dog and i really admired the fact that you weren't a pushover like ever since yeah right yeah someone taught us how to do that they're pretty good at barking actually broke yeah yeah yeah you inhale when you bark we can even pull down you started this fiasco okay i think moving on i think that we should i'm going to skip a couple let's do extra version because we were talking about that one oh yeah let's yeah um so dad scored 98th percentile in extroversion which is extremely high and mom scored 88th percentile in extroversion which is also very high uh so let's let's start with enthusiasm i guess enthusiasm is fine you guys were actually fairly close 92 percentile for dad and 86th percentile for mom yeah well that's one of the things that's actually made our relationship easy dangerous yeah yeah both of those but the thing about your mom is is that if i offer her an adventure she'll say yes yes that's fun yeah because she's enthusiastic so for example earlier this year when i was still extremely ill we started talking about this upcoming tour in 2022 and it's a major undertaking i think we've got 150 cities slaughtered or something and i what well i don't know it's lots 100 anyways wow um and i asked her if she wanted to do this because she seemed enthusiastic during the discussion with creative artists agency who was helping her enthusiasm yeah and you know we she just about died two years ago and then like i wished i was dead for like most of the last two years and so and we had no idea really if i was going to be able to manage this at that time but we thought we'd better get on with our lives anyways but your mom is always up for an adventure and i had faith too that you you would be better as well i really did yeah so that's been really helpful for us because my life has been pretty wild in many ways and but with a tremendous amount of opportunity and your mom despite her lower agreeableness if there's an adventure to be had she's on board with it and you know you might think 88th percentile and 98th percentile aren't that different but i if there were 100 people in the room i'd be more extroverted than two of them then that all but two of them whereas your mum would only be more extroverted than one in ten so it's the difference between one and fifty and one and ten it's still a big difference percentiles are sort of misleading that way but because say if you have 98th and 99th percentile in extraversion the 98th percentile person is more extroverted than 49 out of 50 or 49 out of 50 but the 99 percentile person is more extroverted than 99 out of 100 twice so that's in some sense twice as extroverted i scored 99 99 yeah i scored 99 but i'm way less polite than you and i think that has a lot to do with the differences here yeah that's the temptations towards narcissism that high level of extroversion and relatively low level of agreeableness so you want that moderated by conscientiousness and compassion yeah well that makes a difference too yeah that makes a difference too yeah yeah so well and we saw this difference in you and julian because you could not not tell us anything you told us everything and you always wanted to be around people whereas julian was more reserved and he was certainly his proclivity and this is his proclivity was to not tell us things to maintain privacy and that we could see that when he was three two yeah we could see those differences extremely those differences are there extremely early i was also a bit confused because you said tell the truth like no matter what yeah it wasn't a bad thing we thought you could keep some of that to yourself and that would be okay well it's a tricky thing to figure out when you're not saying something because you're lying and when you're not saying something because you have a right to privacy it's a tricky thing to sort out yeah okay so extroversion breaks down into enthusiasm and assertiveness we did enthusiasm assertiveness percentile dad and 81st percentile mom i didn't realize you were so extroverted i guess there there's quite a difference between 80th 88th and 99th or yeah yeah and also you're extremely extroverted and so by comparison your mom looks less wow wow yeah that's just how extroverted you are okay well there's a huge difference at the upper ends of the distribution like you think what's the difference between 99 and 99.9 it's like it's nothing it's 0.9 it's no it's the difference between one and a hundred and one and a thousand so if you got if you're at 99.9 and you got 10 99th percentile extroverted people in the room you would be the noisiest person so and that yikes yeah and there's no that doesn't that doesn't diminish at the upper ends yeah yeah and so assertiveness i think part of the other part of the reason why i can't engage in conflict resolution is because i i will talk about things yes as people may have noticed maybe maybe yeah yeah and maybe you also understand that having the conflict now like you said is going to prevent conflict in the future and so it's actually more of an agreeable thing to to have less conflict which would be addressing it yes if the in the long run yeah but i find you know when i do my podcast people sometimes criticize me for interrupting and that's this extroverted assertiveness when when i'm listening to a conversation questions are popping up in my mind like mad it's part of verbal fluency and like i need to ask them i need to ask them it's it's a real impulse and that's deeply rooted temperamental impulse and i've always been unbelievably talkative right from the time i was two i think they called me motor mouth when i was a kid my cousin called me motor mouth and that kind of caught on so now that'll be a meme i presume i wouldn't underestimate zoom too i mean we're having a conversation you're not interrupting and say there's enough of a delay on zoom that you end up interrupting when you're not well that's especially true if you're assertive and enthusiastic because and this is tam's pretty extroverted but you and i are talking more and the reason for that is that her lag to first utterance is maybe a half a second longer than ours what is negative negative one exactly yeah exactly all right so i learned when we were disciplining the kids i often disciplined you guys first assertiveness likely neuroticism well i don't think so but very funny but i i learned that if i could just shut up for like five seconds that whatever annoying thing was going on would annoy your mother and then she would she would intervene but if we just left it to the natural course of things the the relatively well the difference in extroversion between us at least in relationship to that was enough so that i would end up doing most of the discipline that wasn't that what you remember yes verified verified but verified just as an impolite person would insist upon it [Laughter] okay conscientiousness dad scored 97th and mom scored 83rd and then let's break it down i think it breaks down into industriousness and orderliness and then dad do you want to give like a two second explanation of industriousness and orderliness sure well orderliness is associated with disgust sensitivity at the emotional level and orderly people don't like things that shouldn't be touching touching they like things where they should be they like everything organized they're more likely to have a schedule mess bothers them viscerally just like disgust does um tammy what what's our scores there yeah you can't talk about me yet we don't have our scores up industry [Laughter] um so you dad scored 99th and mom scored 96th wow cool but there that's an interesting difference there too because that makes me one in a hundred on that dimension in her one and 25. and so wow it doesn't make any sense really does it what if i had it would make sense yeah well then yeah right and so like i left in my own devices i would just work all the time yeah and they're locked and just lock you in there yeah we kind of did that in my office because we learned no i learned do you go ahead and tell you can tell that story you went when you went to work you didn't want to be interrupted so i didn't interrupt you so you could be there for hours and hours and hours yeah and then i i'm kind of fascinated by how you can do as much as possible in the shortest possible period of time and that's always kind of a game for me and that's associated with industriousness i like to work i would work all the time pretty much i'm getting better at leaving that with recreation especially artistic recreation and i like to spend time with your mom and you guys so that those were those were good breaks and i have a much more balanced life yeah i have a much more balanced day-to-day experience yeah that was especially true and that was good for you yeah definitely because you learned how to do some things besides work yeah well i also trained myself when i was in especially in graduate school to really work i wanted to see i spent like five years pushing my the limits of my ability to work and then i figured out how to pull back a little bit from that because i was exhausted i think when you're young it's really useful for about two years or three years to work yourself to the point of exhaustion to find out where that limit is and then dial back and when you're young you can kind of stand it because you're healthy as long as you don't drink too much etc but it's really useful to test that out and so these career obsessed people they tend to be extremely high in industriousness and it's a precondition for extreme success in most endeavors yeah it's like a game right it's like a contest it's a contest yeah especially if you're a little disagreeable too you know so in order to leave university that way now what's the difference in orderliness between us uh dad you scored this doesn't seem right you scored 80th and mom scored 40 first but mom was i think it was more aesthetics than orderliness that's what i think so openness i liked beauty oh that's interesting yeah i still i still really like people it might have also been something your disagreeableness probably made you less attached to objects yes yeah yeah i'm not attached oh well that's a yeah that's another thing baby pictures baby books yeah i went outside one day those if you want that i went yeah i should just give them to me like out of my house i went outside one day and i had this one book where i had drawn little figures in it was like i'm you know however many centimeters tall and this is my name and i'm five and it was just sitting on the sidewalk my mom was cleaning house yeah yeah your mom i think it is she doesn't love me i think it is lower that lower agreeableness i mean tammy's very good at at getting rid of unnecessary things and i know that was you know perhaps not unnecessary where's julian's it's not audi what is that supposed to mean but it does clear away the clutter and yeah we've accumulated a lot of things especially over the last few years and your mum's ability to not get sentimentally attached to things unduly has been instrumental in us keeping our environs functional and hopefully beautiful to the degree we've been able to manage that yeah i don't know how old you were when i got rid of all the large suitcases we could only have small suitcases and you could only take that much stuff no matter where you were going or how long you were going for and that was part of who it was cluttery to have we didn't have room for big suitcases okay no more suitcases yeah yeah they they tour just so people know with a carry-on it's very impressive these outfits carry on okay let us continue do you know what the this stewardess said to the vulture when he tried to bring three bags onto the plate only two carry-ons allowed sir yeah i sent that to readers digest and i got a hundred dollar check that makes the story so much better yes it does yeah well i really liked reading just when i was a kid you know it was a good magazine i remember seeing that it was written in there for you yeah i bet those are these people are gonna be scrambling to get their hands on those now we should have some of those okay anyway just try to make money just in any way possible okay we covered we covered extraversion enthusiasm is fun assertiveness enthusiasm that means to be possessed by god by the way enthusiasm that you just say fun instead yeah it's a lot of positive emotion and there yeah yeah extroversion is the positive emotion dimension and extroverts are fun to be around i used to think that enthusiasm meant somebody knew what they were doing but now i know it's just enthusiasm yeah yeah discounted them being like that's a great idea yeah that's a great idea here's the plan let's do it fantastic yeah like oh wow okay you're really into this that's where you know you're into everything yeah exactly every idea is good yeah well too much enthusiasm makes you manic i've had that uh that issue a bit yeah yeah it makes you manic that's that so every trait pushed to its extreme can degenerate into a pathology and that that's true of all of them you might think you can't be too creative it's like oh oh yes you can you see patterns everywhere even when they're not there so and it's very difficult for highly creative people to catalyze an identity because they're interested in everything that's different than being enthusiastic about everything you can be interested in everything without thinking everything's a great idea and let's get on it or you can be both extroverts are impulsive so and fine yeah well and there's it's certainly the case that you can have too much fun one of the things that was painful about having children was the realization of how much time you spend disciplining them because they're having too much fun because they run around and you know they get too excited and then they wear themselves out or they they trip over things or bump into each other it's like settle down settle down you think i'm educating my children not to be happy it's like well everything has its limits i'm happy that's good okay neuroticism actually first quick question what happens in couples if you have one person who's super extroverted and one person who's not because that to me my mom and dad my dad was probably as extroverted as you guys because he was super extroverted my mother was not super expensive yeah he's still now he's 90. and still funny yeah and he's the life of the party man and he was the life of the party in fairview yeah i think you're doing this i think your dad was the most extroverted person in our town it seemed that way yeah i mean he was he was and there was about three that was way more extroverted than i was yeah way more way way more i was always quite surprised by his enthusiasm and his his goal of just doing anything and he was low and agreeable super like low in politeness yeah yes and he's hilarious yeah he is yeah but you don't yeah and he'll tell you what he thinks too man even kids yeah like i told my kids don't do anything to annoy your grandfather he will not forgive you and you were good you were good but yeah my mother was very quiet yeah unbelievable and i don't think she would have known anyone if it were it weren't for my father because he brought people to her and i don't think she had the temperament temperament to bring people to her she didn't she didn't so thank god that she found him and that he found her yeah and introverts get worn out by social interaction and they need to go have a break fairly frequently whereas extroverts get energized and so yeah it was tricky for your mom and dad because it was hard for them to bridge that gap because your dad was always out socializing and yes and your mom enjoyed that and she thought he was funny but she was very she didn't go out with him and she didn't really go out and make friends on her own either you know through sports and that's something that she did with sports even though she was introverted she could act out something but not yeah maybe more open yeah because that can sometimes override it right if you're an introvert but you're high in openness well she was actually a good athlete too so that helped a lot it was a domain of competence for her and that's a kind of social activity right it's not sitting around talking which experts will do it was going on doing things with people and so that's something for introverts to consider too it's a good avenue to social interaction shared activity rather than mere socialized conversations like dancing they went dancing yeah they curled together they golfed together and mom went and watched all the sports the dad did hockey and baseball and so she was out with people when he was doing things and then when she was little older she was doing them too and did very well with him my dad my mom is extremely high in enthusiasm and my dad is very low in enthusiasm although he's quite assertive makes him a complicated character because he's half extroverted and half introverted and so he was difficult to understand in that way but it's difficult to rouse dad to enthusiasm for any activity and that's hard on my mom because she's really enthusiastic and really and less assertive although not unassertive and so that was has been a point of conflict between them and their relationship okay neuroticism so you scored 74th yeah i was probably still pretty sick yeah i took this test and i so i've done this a number of times throughout my life i know it says clearly on the website you can only take this once which is terrible marketing yes i don't think that's true either i don't think it's you go through life changes you can do it again right but you should there should be a gap between the times you take it oh yeah you can't just repeatedly take it till you end up with the personality you don't have what you want yeah for sure well that's that's really why we built that portion in there let's say just don't cheat if you just repeatedly answer the questions honestly because i did this when i was young and it was pretty much the same but when my depression went away my neuroticism plummeted so the withdrawal aspect too um but also the volatility well depression depression is a modulation of your neuroticism in some sense and so it's always been difficult for me to answer the neuroticism questions because when i'm healthy i'm low in withdrawal and i'm low in volatility but when i'm unhealthy well both of that mounts up and so then the question is because i've had some repeated bouts of depression the question is well who are you and dancers well it depends on whether or not i'm depressed yeah so it's hard to answer um but i think oh and this is you can tell me if this comment is wrong but i think people can get along with a variety of different personality traits right but if you have two neurotic people yeah i'd just try and find i remember seeing my score and my score neuroticism was like 90 something i was like okay the only there's certain personality traits i wanted to mate but i definitely can't be with another neurotic person well women initiate about 75 of divorces and there are multiple reasons for that what but one reason is is that women are higher in trait neuroticism they're more sensitive to negative emotion so they feel more units of negative emotion subjectively per unit of stress that's a way of thinking about it and so they get unhappy faster now why is that well the jury's out on that but some possible reasons it seems to kick in at puberty because it's not true for boys and girls they're smaller their upper bodies aren't as strong they're they're not likely to win physical contests especially with men especially with tough men despite the marvel movies and so the world is more dangerous for them in some sense physically but i think more importantly is the fact that they are going to bear primary responsibility for dependent infants and if you have an infant depending on you you should react to the world as if it's more dangerous than you might if it was just you negat navigating through it so now the downside of that for the people who have to live with women and for women themselves is that they're more likely to get upset they're more likely to make a big deal out of something statistically speaking there's plenty of men who are more neurotic than plenty of women but on average which is the case that's just the worst i'm just going to put it out there that is the most yeah well it's just it's useful for men to understand this you know because women we got mom oh michaela that's extroversion talking away and then realizing what she's saying yeah yeah that's for sure did you know side note shying away from this um have you heard of the vasopressin and oxytocin for bonding which is really interesting so vasopressin is released when there's stress and men tend to bond when that chemical is released so you which isn't that interesting so you can stress out a man in a situation and that'll increase reconciliation bonnie yeah but for women it's oxytocin that's really involved with bonding so what you want to do for a woman is make her feel safe yes so it's interesting isn't that interesting they did a bunch of studies on voles too shot them full of oxytocin and vascular presence see what happens but that's that's so cool so you can be more neurotic you can get away with being more neurotic as a woman if you're with a man who's more stable and potentially according to voles that might even increase bonding if you can if the man can take away some of the woman's kind of problems and make her feel calmer yeah well i think that's highly likely highly probable that yeah and so i think when i'm healthy i'm low in withdrawal and a little higher in volatility but low in withdrawal because i don't you know fear fear doesn't stop me from doing things yeah mom so this i i would say when you did this because you scored 80th and that's just not true because you wouldn't do a a world tour and meet all these people if that was the case you just stayed home right you scored a third yes i have no withdrawal so we're kind of we're a little bit the sex differences here are turned around yeah i know that's that's yeah well and so that means that when we have a disagreement for where whatever it is caused by my need for safety being a woman and your need for being uh having some sort of reconciliation is is kind of backwards yeah well your mom has a relatively masculine temperament because she's low in agreeableness and low in neuroticism and i have a relatively feminine temperament especially when i'm depressed and so and that's an interesting it's interesting to consider that in light of this cultural argument about sex and gender well there's there's two sexes let's be clear about that and there has been for several hundred million years so there's actually no dispute about that but there's a lot of variability even biological variability at the temperamental level and so there's plenty of masculine women and feminine men but that doesn't mean they should switch bodies that's actually the wrong solution to that problem so and that can be true even though on average women are higher negative emotion and higher in agreeableness okay oh yeah so neuroticism i mean the the one of the problems there is that people are higher in negative emotion and neuroticism will tend at least from the perspective of those lower to make mountains out of mole hills and so it's a problem that you deal with in clinical practice a lot especially with people are depressed because any failure makes them think they're a horrible unworthy person and that their life isn't worth living and that's too much of a reaction to every problem so part of the way you bind that is you try to make the discussion about the smallest thing it can possibly be about and i think that's a good guide to political discussion as well everything's not climate local local local specific practical ah actionable negotiable articulate articulable yeah it's not arcade articulatable yeah i think it's articulable but maybe [Laughter] see the impolite person corrected me dad's dad's right but you can also say articulable huh i don't know that word yeah so they're so they're girlies we learned yeah we learned something yeah successful podcast well that's me enthusiasm asking that doesn't make sense tell me about that alone well that's that provocative part too that's linked to a sense of humor most most comedians are low in politeness high in compassion though they may still be they're low in politeness because they'll say things that no one else would say and that's funny it's often funny openness to experience yep that's basically the creativity dimension essentially that's what peop people think openness is like how willing you are to discuss things how open it's it's not a great name the psychometricians didn't nail that one well but it's a hard one to get right but you can think of it as creativity and interest in ideas and that's otherwise it's misunderstood yeah so dad you scored 98th overall and mom scored 68th and that breaks into so when i scroll down here actually i'll show it on the screen but you can see behavioral roles your virtues and faults as a couple and that's under all these different personality aspects so intellect that's the first one it breaks into intellect and then openness intellect dad you scored 97 percent on intellect mom scored 34th percentile in intellect and that's really interest in semantic ideas i would say so people high in intellect they're philosophically minded they like non-fiction particularly um men are likely to be higher in this intellect than women although women are higher in the other aspect of openness which is more interest in aesthetics and formal creativity and more likely to read fiction and so i'm really really interested in ideas although i'm also interested in aesthetic experience and your mom is definitely less interested in ideas than i am because i'm obsessed by them oh yeah yeah you're obsessed by ideas oh yeah yeah you notice that some people have noticed that yeah i mean when i was when i was in graduate school i was thinking about ideas at an extremely rapid rate 16 hours a day like it was non-stop the only thing i could do to stop it was go lift heavy weights it was the only thing that and alcohol when you were a little kid when i knew you when you were eight nine ten you seemed very thoughtful you seemed very interested in the books that you were reading so the whole ideas had already had already begun yeah i was reading like i always went to bed and read i could read a book a day when i was a kid science fiction book usually but i read a lot of nonfiction world book encyclopedias and i was obsessed with words i couldn't tie my shoes up if the shoes were on a newspaper an old newspaper you know sitting in the porch i'd stop and while i was telling my shoes i'd read all the newspaper articles my brother was the same i used to do that he couldn't get in the house because he'd kneel down take his boots off and there he'd be reading this man words words and combinations i haven't seen before yeah yeah yeah so okay so and then there's open then there's the other aspect of openness and what's the difference is there uh 96th for dad and 87th for mom yeah and that was a pretty good point of contact for us too for a long time i was obsessively investigating and buying art and i bought like 400 paintings but i whittled them down from a sub sample of a larger sample of say 4 000 so i'd go on ebay and look at like 2 000 paintings in an evening which you could do on ebay which was really cool and i got so the good ones what i thought were good would sort of pop out at me and then i'd print them out and lay them on the floor and your mom would come in and with her unsentimental and judgmental eye and slightly less interest in aesthetics we would go through them and i would ask her okay there's 10 here get rid of the worst one and she was very good at that yeah it worked really well yeah she liked that she liked that well she also yeah because if you like them all you have to get rid of them yeah i'd already pre-screened them you know but i wasn't going to buy 10 a night i only wanted to buy four a night yeah so but that worked out really well and it was interesting too because your mom was kind of worried about my art buying obsession which lasted about three years could have been more worried about it yeah but generally when i came brought her upstairs to look at the paintings she'd say well i don't like that one and i don't like that one and i don't like that one but you could get those other three and that was enthusiasm plus her interest in aesthetics and so that's funny yeah okay well and that's a good one i think it's really hard for couples where one person is really high in openness and the other one isn't that's a hard gap to bridge man because the one person is going to be really interested in ideas and in art and literature and music and all of that all of the whole artistic realm and the other person isn't isn't struck by that or consumed by it and i don't know how to mediate that well that was good for us for sure yeah it really made fun for us i mean my mom is lower in openness than my dad and art scares her especially if it has to be nice like she'd have her house covered with kittens if that was a possibility in fact she does to some degree i bought some rough russian impressionist paintings from an artist that i really liked in the soviet union and they were selling for like nothing they were next to free i bought my dad 10 of them which i really liked and sent them to him and he liked them a lot but mom wouldn't let him hang them up upstairs i think they were too unsettling for her but he eventually got them framed and then brought them up sort of one at a time and she got accustomed to them and then liked them and then years later probably 10 years later when i reminded her of the first part of the story she didn't remember it at all she really liked the paintings by then but it took her a long time art is quite terrifying you know and if you're naturally attracted to it that's one thing but beauty is no small force man and so for people low in openness they're not attracted by the aesthetic experience to such a degree and so it's kind of unsettling for them so and that's a tough that's a tough i remember i went to visit my dad and we had gone to vancouver and i said let's go to the emily carr museum why would we want to do that he said he wasn't very high in openness but what makes you think that'd be a good idea but i think what about this though if you have someone who's extremely extroverted though then wouldn't that just override it because even even going around no no they just want to go there because to be part of the crowd and have fun yeah yeah but they don't they don't care about the art yeah but the museum would have to be full of people yeah they'd go to a party at a museum yeah but they wouldn't go imagine the museum was empty and they had to go there alone like oh yeah i'm extroverted but i would go to a museum alone i'd rather go with someone but i would go alone yeah and i go to movies alone see i don't yep i like movies alone as well yeah i think i've had that issue a bit when i've been traveling and i like to go to parties when i'm the only one there that i don't know anybody else there i used to do that all the time when i was in my twenties you know around the university and i'd find a party and i'd walk in the house and be in a party with people didn't know anybody low and withdrawal yeah yeah yeah that's part of your part of your basically yeah i was like oh this is interesting that was disrupted for you to some degree by the pill well the pill yeah the pill was terrible it made me depressed and volatile and volatile but thanks to everybody like no one says everybody depressed and volatile i still had no withdrawal though it upped my volatility but it didn't change no no it didn't so that's interesting it doesn't make everybody depressed i had clients who were depressed especially with pms like they had cyclical monthly depression and for some of them the pill smoothed that out substantially so you have to pay attention to individual pills i know it wasn't good it was terrible it ruined a lot of people i didn't take care of myself i didn't take i didn't cut my hair i didn't take take proper care of what i was wearing and stuff it really depressed yeah it was really bad it was really and you're not prone like that's so wonderful it was chemical yeah you're not prone to depression like that no rebecca is like unbelievably bubbly not prone i would say at all same thing as soon as she went on the pill uh she was crying every day yeah that's a massive difference and people are put i'm not happy with that people are put on that when they're like 14 for safety when your emotions are all topsy-turvy anyway and they're like and then it takes a couple weeks to make you depressed so you don't really notice right away and then you're on it for 10 years before it's like oh you know or longer 15 years because apparently it's safe to take forever anyway i started taking the pill when i was 16 years old i finished i definitely had way more trouble with my parents for the last two years of high school so i think i changed dramatically and then i went off to university you changed around that time and i went off the pill went to university went back on the pill dropped out of university and i was you know meeting boyfriends and so i would take part in goal directed when i was not on the pill and then as soon as i was on the pill i'd drop everything well it was terrible after michaela was born no julian yeah that's right after julian was born we were getting along pretty well and you weren't going down the pill i went back on the pill when julian was a year old yeah and i just my i was completely different person i was completely different person and luckily someone came to visit who said the same thing happened to her and so i stopped taking them and then i then it was fine yeah it was quite dramatic it was quite dramatic anyways we shouldn't talk about that too much yeah yeah no but birth control pills and yeah they're going to get along yeah right can we well we went over the personality report yeah so people can go to if they want to do that they can go to understandmyself.com yeah it's dirt cheap it's we tried to make it ridiculously cheap we tried to make it we had 9 we had rules for the company we wanted to only sell we wanted to sell because we wanted to make sure we developed the personality tests and also the self-authoring suite which helps people write about their past present and future we wanted to only offer high quality scientifically validated interventions that were self-directed for people so they had to be based on a solid research background we didn't want any administrative overhead we wanted people to be able to do it on their own we wanted to make it scalable ultimately and we wanted to keep the price as low as possible and so those were the and the saleability issue is think about it this way you develop a personality test but no one uses it well that's not a good solution to the problem you want to have people use it so then and then you want to have them use it and be happy enough about it to pay for it because that's actually a mark of its utility so we instituted my partners and i doctor robert peel who was my graduate supervisor and dr daniel higgins who was an is an mit trained engineer and was my student at harvard who i've been working with now for 20 years we use those principles to guide the development of all these tests and that's worked real very well so far website's a bit wordy but we're working on that now so anyways yeah understand myself um it's been i think you know even though well when we were first working on the test we gave it to kids yeah that was really useful they were young young yeah six years grade six yeah five or something i remember that like super young you had to self score it yeah and i realized because oh yeah it didn't work for them at all kayla and i would get into tussles now and then um and i realized after reviewing her personality scores that it wasn't because she was low in agreeableness because i i thought she was pushing back but it was because partly because she was ill she was volatile and she she'd get upset when we were discussing things not because she was rebelling or pushing back but because she got upset and so i tried to learn when she was upset not to get upset about that in return but to give her a hug or a path and to understand that it was emotional upset rather than you know rather than a motivated rebellion that was really helpful and i learned too that julian was extremely easy to get along with um yeah and it wasn't because he was agreeable because he's not agreeable but he's really emotionally stable really low in neuroticism and so and when in retrospect i thought well that makes sense because if he said no you couldn't get him to do it like really really when when he was a little kid when he was a little kid he used to say yes in school sometimes but not do it yeah just didn't want to be bothered by the people who were yes shut up so i had to explain to him i said you know there might be other kids who want to do this you've said yes you've got you've got the right to do it but now you didn't do it someone else didn't get to do it so just say no and get on with it well now he just says no very easily yeah when he was that used to confuse me yeah confuse me hey can you help with this no yeah what do you mean you can't like i don't really want to help with this either but i'm helping with it because the other person needs help you're just saying no what are you doing sitting at home like i want to be sitting at home when he was about 11 months old he had this tippy cup and he used to we'd fill it with water or milk and and give it to him and he used to dot make dots everywhere with it and when that was milk that wasn't such a good thing so we tried to get him to stop doing that and we finally had to take the cup away because there was no way he was going to stop doing that and he was only like 12 months old 11 months old and i had a battle with him one time when he was learning to feed himself because he had taken the spoon from his mom he wasn't going to give that goddamn spoon back and then he wasn't eating because he'd just eat a bit and then he'd play he's playing hockey yeah he has played hockey that's right and then he was getting too hungry and then he'd get crabbing he wouldn't nap and then he was upsetting his mom and i thought all right kid i'm taking that spoon back because i'm gonna feed you and it literally took me three hours fighting with this like 10 month old it wasn't really a fight though it was really ingenious so he'd poke him in the shoulder a little bit and julian would be sitting there with his mouth shut up just try to feed me and then he'd poke him a few times and he'd go and then you stick the food in his mouth then he tried to push it out with his tongue airplane mode yeah i thought it was on april airplane but apparently it isn't let me fix that right real quick so yeah yeah it it well it got so intense this fight that your mom had to leave the room because she couldn't tolerate the conflict and i it was making me sweat too but i thought there's no damn way this nine month old kid is gonna win i was patient like i'd learned at that point when i was disciplining you kids to not usually not get upset it was just like no on the steps with you you stopped doing that when you're willing to behave like a civilized human being you can come back that was the rule right do something disruptive yeah you remember those words well you you were pretty easy to discipline because very easy yeah very you should have known you were agreeable yeah all we had to do really was say no and we didn't even have to say it very harshly you'd just stop i think i i scored 50th percentile because the compassion was at 88. okay brightness isn't like low but julian when we used to put him on the steps man he would just sit there and rage like his fists clenched his jaw are you ready yet he'd say oh no but he was trying to get himself under control yeah we'd go over there and this was he was very young i remember just being sad are you ready to get off the steps no i'm not ready yet and then he'd get himself under control it was really interesting to watch him build that internal apparatus to control you know to control that and he got extremely diplomatic because he was so disagreeable but because we were disciplining him he would just worry that edge like how much can i get away with exactly precisely right now and your mom and i would watch this because especially if he went to daycare and interacted with some kids who were full of tricks he'd come home full of tricks you know he'd try them out let's try this out and see if it works and so it does that yeah yeah yeah yeah well it's it's a signal it's a sign of the imitative instinct yeah no one likes that kid that's right stop being that kid yeah and so tammy and i would talk because we tried to present an integrated disciplinary front we weren't going to let you kids play one of us against the other although imagine you'd manage that some of the times and we'd say okay julian he's getting out out here we're going to crack down on him for two weeks he doesn't he doesn't get away with a whisper out of line and so we'd really like attend to him right watching it if he ever did anything out of the line it was like stop and what was really interesting this was so interesting every time we did that he liked us way more oh yeah yeah it comes for attention yeah it's not chaos right right got some boundaries they're not just like well how far can i go yeah oh i have a story i have a story so when we were in boston i was taking care of these little kids one afternoon someone's someone's care worker had a car accident and they didn't have someone to take care of him and i had your friends that used to come over and play all the time so i had this troupe of kids in the house and so this little guy came in and he was about three years old and his mom said don't worry he won't eat anything but you know just keep him for the day and i thought well that doesn't make any sense so don't worry he won't eat anything yeah so at lunch time we sat down we had chicken pot pie and you guys knew that you had to eat and so did the two kids always came they knew yeah except that one kid he'd only eat hot dogs at home mitchell yeah was that right yeah but he ate everything at our house probably knew what was that yeah oh i didn't know that yeah anyway this little kid sat down and he wasn't going to eat anything but we did the same thing we did with julian yeah except i used more reward and then he would eat something and we'd go good boy we tried to feed him something eh yeah and he was about he was about four he might have been four he might have been four we tried to feed him something and he'd go like this yes and i thought well that's what that's what a nine month old does it just move his head i thought oh this kid hasn't been interacted with since he was nine months old yeah and so i just keep the spoon in front of him and with a little bit on one finally he'd he'd eat it and then i'd go pat pat pat you did the feeding not me that was you that did that yeah yeah and you were there i was watching that's right and you kept rewarding him and then it was so interesting so when i had come home that day that kid was standing in the porch by himself looking miserable while the other kids were playing and i came in i looked at him i thought what the hell that's not good and so then i poked him a bunch you know to try to play with him and he just went like this he was sullen and he had no idea how to play and so that was really sad and then lunch was after that anyways tammy fed him and he got right to the bottom of the bowl and finished it and she said look you finished it look what you did and he just lit up into a huge smile oh that's gonna make me yeah oh it's worse it's worse it's worse he wasn't toilet trained yet yeah he followed tammy around for the rest of the day like a puppy like he was right on her path and then yeah when we sat down we used to go downstairs and watch disney and and he sat on my knee he climbed right up on her and grabbed her like that like that little monkey clinging to the wire mother in the famous experiments and then jesus christ his mother came home and came downstairs and she saw tam hit this kid clinging to tammy and she said oh super mum and grabbed him by the hand and laughed it's like that's a horrifying story yeah yeah well she was a psychologist too so just to put another i think he was a psychologist okay whatever yeah no he wasn't yeah yeah anyway i hope that that day wasn't enough to really help them help him some well yeah right or just make them hate you yeah and take it out on the kid yeah yeah which they definitely would if it's like how dare you show attention it was something man yeah well they one of the kids we babysat there too this kid the one that wouldn't need anything at home he was actually a pushover this kid he wasn't tough he was lovely he was a nice kid but one day he had a temper tantrum in our house and he could have a temper tantrum until he turned blue breath till he turned blue try that at home folks and see how much willpower that takes well he was having a tempered tantrum in the kitchen and he held his breath and turned blue we just left no we put him on the stairs and he woke about the stairs and there's no one around it was like oh that was a lot of work for nothing anyways he didn't have any temperatures he couldn't do that oh yes well i didn't know that he could do it it's amazing it shows you how much will there is there you know and you want that will directed and and disciplined and all of that got spent on passing out yeah yeah exactly yeah not spent on counterproductive activities okay well we went through everything uh okay do you what do we talk a bit about the united disciplinary front i mean tammy and i agreed that we were going to discuss our disciplinary strategies and and implement them and watch each other you know because you need two people to do that because sometimes you're in a bad way we didn't really disagree on that just so i know just like we could clip this or something it's this is just how to work with your partner to disappear properly yeah yeah well and one of the advantages to that and so we didn't let you kids and this i turned this into one of the rules of my book well first book don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them and that was a rule in our household it's like we're not going to dislike our kids period we're going to not only love them which kind of comes along for the ride at least to begin with but also like them and so we never let you guys do anything that made us displeased with you for any length of time and one of the great advantages of that was that we could take you to restaurants even when you were very little and so you were much less of an impediment so to speak to our social lives than you would have been otherwise we could only keep you in the restaurant for about 45 minutes to an hour when you were little you know garlic have you seen her in restaurants yeah she's she's sitting there for two hours yeah she's great yeah scarlett's very socially appropriate well she doesn't have any sugar in her diet that helps i think yeah she's not hyperactive at all yeah no she doesn't have a neediness to run around yeah but she's you've done a good job but she's playful yeah she's very playful she's very alert and she's very socially appropriate and that's such a gift to give your kids because then people used to come over to our table all the time because we'd sit they'd look askance at us when we came in with little kids it's like oh my god this is going to be a terrible show and then you'd sit there like civilized human beings for you know up to an hour and people would come over and they'd they were smiling at you and looking at you in a pleasant way really positive reinforcement for you guys and you got to come with us to other people's houses often because you were well behaved we got invited back yes that's right we got invited back yeah yeah yeah if you go over to someone's place with your kids and you don't get invited back well it's probably either you or the kids definitely you but yeah it's the kids it's also we had times in restaurants in boston oh you'll remember this one in boston where you would misbehave in a restaurant i'd just take you outside often it was winter and we just stand there it was like okay kid here's your options we can stand here in the cold which i can probably tolerate more than you for as long as necessary or we can go back into the restaurant and act like civilized human beings what do you want restaurant please so do you remember the time in toronto i don't know if it was you or julian but i think it was julian we went into a donut shop to get a doughnut and he was misbehaving in some manner so i just went outside with him no no i put him outside twice there was twice oh there's twice i put him outside i was sitting right in the booth i put him outside it's like you can stand out there until you're a civilized human being and this woman just got she got so upset about that that she literally once he came back in she literally went outside and put her butt against the window and shook it back and forth and then laughed it was like how dare you try to make your child you know act like a civilized human being so people like him yeah it made her very upset made her very sad nice show and comforting upset yeah you could tell that story i remember one horrible story so i was on methotrexate and naproxen which completely obliterated my appetite in the morning i was nauseous in the morning so dad used to kind of force-feed me yeah which was very just as unpleasant as it sounds yeah it was awful we were at a we're at a a stop going to the big apple the big house that's right away from toronto to montreal yeah and it was lunch or breakfast lunch and we were sitting at a table and i was like i'm not hungry i'm not eating you know i wasn't very i was probably nine or something and dad was like oh no you're eating this yeah right and it was just that's just mom and julian left yeah we went because it wasn't pleasant you know because you weren't hungry at all we didn't fight about it exactly but you were not motivated i was upset yeah of course you were sad yeah but you had to eat because you were already losing weight and they told us you your kid has to eat or she's gonna wonder what have happened if we would have just given her some meat jerky i used to ask for jerky for christmas yeah yeah but but anyway the one well we didn't know yeah yeah well obviously how would we have known yeah i was speaking obviously okay no not obviously i mean and encouraging you to eat yeah i wasn't force-feeding you i wasn't prying open your door i feel like i yeah well the rule was you you had to eat your lunch because well i was losing weight yeah you were losing weight and this woman came over and she said she sat behind i remember she was sitting behind me you were feeding me from here and she turned around and and just like berated you and i can remember that made me so angry because i was like you have no idea what's going on here even i knew that i was only nine i was like how dare you interrupt this yeah well you you knew that you needed to eat but it's not easy to eat when everything tastes like cardboard and you're not hungry and it's not it's not easy to eat at all and you were too young to take that on to yourself by that time you were giving yourself your own injections so do you remember how that happened i do i remember i missed this whole simpsons episode yeah i can remember like having the needle and being like ugh can't do it the simpsons is playing downstairs you had to have a needle how often a day twice a week twice a week and so we were administering it but that was scary for her because needles are scary for little kids yeah it was also the alcohol made me nauseous and because the methotrexate had made me nauseous in the morning and it was yellow when i was swallowing it and the injection was yellow i had nausea associated with that color yellow so when i gave myself the injection it'd make me nauseous because i'd already associated nausea with yellow it was just yeah so i used behavioral techniques on with michaela to help her learn to inject herself because we thought it would be better she had control over that and so she was motivated by money like and she still is um and so i and she knew what money was by that point quite sour keys yeah yeah she knew what it could be exchanged for and so i told her that if she could do the injection i would give her 50 dollars and that was quite a lot of money at that point and so she sat for 40 minutes i would say on the stairs with that needle poised to inject and fighting with herself and and then kitchen table and then did it and then i i think the next day it was i'll give you like 40 dollars but you have to do it in 15 minutes and then we whittled it all the way down to five to five minutes or five dollars five it was five dollars i got five dollars every time i gave myself an injection yeah for for a long time i was like like 17 or yeah yeah well we wanted that you know we wanted to sort of balance the scales a little bit and but you got so you were extremely good at it it was way better it became you know part of the daily routine it wasn't a big deal you weren't afraid of it anymore and it was under your control really needed to be well yeah you should it was a lot better though it was a lot better yeah yeah as good as that can be um yeah it was as good as it can be and sometimes that's enough to make all the difference well is there any like i have more questions but we've been going for an hour and a half i think is time to wrap up yeah that's pretty cool you can always do another one later yeah okay well that was fun yeah we can see how people react and if they have questions then at some point we could ask answer specific questions about relationship difficulties along the given traits yeah that's a good idea that sounds good well thank you guys that was fun yeah thanks it was fun [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,548,060

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, understand myself, understandmyself, Tammy Peterson, Jordan Peterson wife, Jordan Peterson relationship, Our relationship, Tammy and Jordan, Jordan and Tammy, Tamy Peterson, Tammie Peterson, Mikhaila Peterson, Mikayla Peterson, Michaela Peterson

Id: LQwP5dIBgiM

Length: 82min 43sec (4963 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

This episode was recorded on March 12, 2021.

In this episode, Mikhaila, Jordan, and Tammy Peterson cover the Understand Myself Couples Report—a feature in the Understand Myself Personality Report, which you receive after both members of a compete the https://understandmyself.com process. The idea behind it, as the name suggests, is to help you better understand your own and other people's personalities. After going over Jordan and Tammy’s report, we dive into the different personality types, the benefits of the report, negotiating with your partner, disciplining children, and much more.

Go to https://understandmyself.com/ to access the Understand Myself assessment.

If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe!

[u/rockstarsheep]

Interesting marketing.