Mark Pellegrino and Gena Gorlin — Philosophy and Mental Health Episode 2

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello everybody thanks for joining us on this continuing series uh about the intersection of of psychology and philosophy is there a difference between the two how do they complement each other um I I think there's a vital complimentary relationship ship between the two but I didn't start realizing this till very late in my therapeutic relationships of which I have many I I hate to say um I I was a little promiscuous in my in my therapeutic life but I'm very pleased to have you as one needs to be yeah it's okay that's a good thing a good thing oh good so what who you just heard here was H was Dr Gina gorland I just want to say a little bit about you you're I think you're awesome um clinical associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin where I feel like every objectivist on the planet is moving or am I wrong yeah no there seems to be such a trend of okay so maybe maybe I mean you wouldn't know it from the praza uh stuff that was going on there but it seems like it might be a new G Gulch I don't know but uh but Gina you're a practicing licensed psychologist and a coach for entrepreneurs and other ambitious uh innovators and you published tons of academic and popular articles researching researching this is interesting to me the moral psychology of self-creation I love that and you write a popular substack newsletter titled building the builders now when you did Welcome by the way I want to just extend the formal welcome to you um and say I'm happy to have you believe me and and I know you're super busy so we won't take a whole lot of your time um I mean so I'm gonna ask a question that may I don't know if it's too broad to to ask um but uh is there a difference between psychology and philosophy if so what is the difference between the two great question yeah it's a great question I just taught a class on it or the first class of a intro psychology course for the irand Institute so very much dealing with the question of where does psychology where does philosophy end and psychology begin and you know the overlap the distinction yeah I mean so of course philosophy deals with a lot of psychological topics do we have free will what is the nature of Concepts how you know reason is man's means of survival right like that's such a psychological insight we need self-esteem and purpose right so a lot of since it's about the human being in relation to you know their world right man in relation to reality half of that subject matter deals with you know the the mind of man so of course philosophy heavily deals with psychological topics as it deals with you could say physical top right it deals with physics in so far as it you know provides fundamental kind of metaphysical premises like existence exists and you know Consciousness doesn't have Primacy over existence right and like magic and mysticism aren't real right so like it's also you could say laying the foundations of of the Natural Science I mean it is it's laying the foundations of the Natural Sciences of every science right by prescribing kind of broad epistemic norms and by spelling out kind of really General univ IAL facts about the the world we live in and the beings that we are but where psychology kind of picks up you know the mantle is where we get more specialized and where we need more specialized study and inquiry systematic observation systematic data Gathering systematic inference from that data in order to really understand the workings of the mind and turns out there's a whole lot to do you know at that more specialized level of inquiry to understand this incredibly complex uh you know entity and and existent that is the human mind you know which is connected to a body and which has a subconscious and which has associations and memories and perceptions and Sensations and you know and and emotions that can be rewired but need to be rewired in particular ways or you know certain amounts of time and where the conditioning you know where the external context really impacts how all those internal processes unfold and you know where we our valtion operates within certain parameters and you know we develop over time in ways that require a careful study of you know the child across stages of development and how that differs by culture and how that differ by genetic predisposition all of which turns out to make some kind of difference but you know it's a question of what kind and and at what points and how malleable so that's really where the science of psychology you know picks up now it sounds to me like the science of psychology is very coherent from your point of view but from my point of view as a person who has been on the other side who's been on the couch I found I found the science of psychology to be not so scientific and to or or to be split into into two different camps for me two oh well that's from my own limited experience well I I split it into this type of this these two types of camps the mystics or the materialists so so for me it was like there was the yans and the freudians who actually got a hold of me uh and you know they they attributed lot lots of my feelings and Sensations and Neurosis to uh you know what I would consider now to be mythical narratives that have nothing to actually do with what I was exper exping or very little to do with that and then there's the the neuroscientists types uh like the Sam Harris who who you're all you're you're entirely a biological vessel everything that happens to you uh is is a matter of chemistry and the cause and effec of chemical reactions and so there is no in the one sense you're a victim of drives and or mythical elements that are far outside of your your moral Agency on the other side you're a victim of material elements that are outside your moral outside your moral agency no one talks about moral agency really I mean well let's talk about that company expect accepted no no but so a couple things so first of all you're picking up on what is a definitely a kind of historically rooted dichotomy within the field but it's interesting that you've picked up on it through the conduit of these fairly kind of pop cultural you know in the case of Sam Harris like he's not don't think most psychological scientists would sort like even truck with him as like wouldn't would consider him like he's a scientist he's one of us he's like out there being a popular well that's good to know because he's influencing the culture so I'm glad to know that the scientists on the inside aren't on the same page yeah so well which doesn't change the fact that he's influencing the culture right that's still very real but in any case yeah I mean and there are certain things that he's good on but like these are such mixed bags on every side but anyway but but I'm very much with you on the you know the stuff where he's quite bad and Beyond what you would find within the academy in terms of like kind of more measured and more like data driven if nothing else kind of accounts of um of how we think and how we learn and so on so that's Sam Harris on the one side who's like a almost like a reducto absurdum of one bad school of thought within psychology and then you've got your freudians and your yans who in my experience who vary so widely that it almost becom laughable to try to lump them all under one school although they all sort of get labeled to some extent or another as psychodynamic or kind of falling under that broad umbrella to the extent that their kind of loyalties are more with like with with that half of the field than with kind of the more quote cognitive behavioral quote evidencebased half of the field so so so there's definitely this broad divide but like there are plenty of psychodynamic theorists and therapists I've worked with some of them as colleagues who are much more who who so I wrote a paper about nurturing agency via awareness or it was called agency via awareness a meta process in Psychotherapy with a psychodynamic therapist and researcher so like that's one example but we also cited a bunch of other researchers within the psychodynamic s literature who also were very much pro- agency Pro sort of empowering individuals to be their own conscious you know agents and through self-awareness through Insight you know really kind of taking charge of their lives so lots of psychodynamic therapists and theorists will very much fall more on that side like no we are the we're pro agency they're the you know the behaviorists and the reductionists and then there are plenty so Ben Dura eron Beck and uh Stephen Hayes who's in the third wave uh School of therapy he he developed acceptance and commitment therapy Marsha linahan who developed d behavior therapy so a lot of the pioneers and the people on the quote behavioral side are also all about agency and they've kind of rehashed or kind of recombined some of the original Concepts and Frameworks and you know and done a lot of Empirical research and observation with actual people which I think grounds their theories to some extent such that they've arrived at ideas that in many ways are empowering of human agency you know Marshall and Han talks about how you can change only once you've accepted reality so she has you this whole dialectical behavior therapy concept is it it's a kind of packaging of the Serenity Prayer you know God grant me m is the god part you know the serenity to accept what I can't change courage to change what I can and the wisdom to know the difference like she's all about how to do that and what are all the psychological skills social interpersonal cognitive behavioral skills involved in being able to do that including you know accept the past you know as the past you can't change it accept you know the fact that you have these problems and these flaws today and then get on with actually changing them with taking responsibility for yourself and for your fully lived life she talk you know she wrote A Memoir called building a life worth living so I just want to you know put in a good work like there's a lot of good work that's happening in Psychology even though ultimately we still haven't escaped these sort of buckets that are still operating under false dichotomies that we've inherited from philosophy now this was an important what you said was interesting to me because you said part of her philosophy is accepting the past because you can't change it now one of my therapists I don't know how I would classify her uh but she gave me Alice Miller to read I don't know if you ever read Alice Miller drama of the gifted child uh she did she she did sever she did several analyses of uh psychological analys of uh of dictators like Shu and Hitler Stalin she might have even psychoanalyzed um and she had a couple of interesting points about the German culture that created enabled the Hitler to come about but but the drama of the gifted child is her seminal work and I think she originally wrote that and presented it to Congress uh as a as a a testimony to child abuse and it sort of changed the the way people look at child abuse from just Flatout neglect and physical abuse to the kind of to it sort of mental abuse um uh and you know more more subtle things now her the reason I'm saying all this is because her perspective which my therapist put on me which then affected my relationship with my mother for a very long time was you can't just accept the past you have to grieve the past you have you have to openly grieve it and then you have to mourn it get through that thing and then then you can get past it now is that a truth because I that's true you do have to do that well hold on hold on okay okay I'm not in uh in agreement with aspects of what you're saying and so it is often the case that there's grieving to be done around any kind of loss any kind of dramatic shift in our lives and how they're going to go from here whether that's you know the death of a loved one where grief is most you know kind of paradigmatically needed right and appropriate or a breakup or in some cases the loss of the life that we feel we deserved and wish we had had or the love that we sort of pined for and maybe never actually had but we're sort of holding on to as an ideal as a as an aspiration and at some point we need to sort of cut tithe with that version of our you know aspirational reality and life so I think there's absolutely grieving to you just like if you think about to relate this to a kind of philosophical or objectivist context if you think about like needing to De automatize a habit or de automatize you know like a context you know used to believe in God and then I you know thought it through and realized there's no God and then it took time to sort of automatize my atheism you know to kind of stop constantly fearing that I'm going to go to hell if I screw something up and kind of having to remind myself that wait wait wait no that I don't actually believe in that anymore that's just a habit now it's the same thing with like having to deom size if anyone's ever been through a painful breakup you have to learn what you're you kind of learn a new mental model of your life where that person is no longer in it right and there's a bunch of habits that correspond to expecting them to be there right and you've got to unlearn those habits and grieving is part of that process of very consciously you know and a big part of grieving is also like really appreciating and acknowledging even paradoxically um savoring in some cases like the love that was there you know the value that that was gotten you know from that relationship or in some cases you know like I I really wanted love I wanted you know I'm someone who really values intimate honest relationships and so I wanted that with my mom and to accept that I never really had it and I'm not saying that's true for you but just from your story like one way that might have played it like to accept the reality where I never really had the love that I sought or where it went away for reasons that weren't you know up to me it's going to take time for that to really sink in and it's going to take some grieving of the loss of that love that I you know thought I had and that I wanted or that I had at one time and part of that is like being serious about our values right like I I do value honesty and love and intimacy and to that extent of course this hurts it should hurt it would be weird if it didn't hurt um but it but the way you describe it it feels like the It Feels Like The Grieving is a a very guided process like uh M you know what I'm saying be guided in the sense that somebody somebody you you you express lots of nuances in that grieving process that I didn't necessarily experience at the time I mean it it rolled over you know either Elizabeth kuer Ross you know sort of stages of death kind of thing which also not very scientific just not very not not very scientific but but also gesturing something real this therapist gave this to me as a as a as a sort of guide book for you know the various stages that I would probably go through experiencing but none of the Nuance like you just said you know the cherishing the love that that grieving process meant to you uh it almost made me cry when you said that because I felt like because it's very personal to me because I had such an explosion of grief and anger at my my mom who was my primary caretaker for all the stuff that I had experienced with her and with other men that she had brought into my life um that you know she when she got sick and passed and she was dying I I remember hugging her close to me and thinking what the was I so mad at and is it possible and maybe that's just a rationalization or just something that a sentiment that I had because of what was happening but is it possible to deatti without the you know the more overt manifestations of grief or rage or going through whatever those stages are yeah yeah I mean I that's one thing I wanted to say so I'm glad you're raising it and bringing me back to it which is very few of these kinds of processes SE these kinds of needs are Universal like psychological universals exist at a much wider level you know like we all need agency and you know a sense of our own efficacy we all need to reason our way through life right like at that widest level and then the moment you get any more specific like we all need to grieve no some of us don't need to grieve and some of us experience it very differently than others and I think it's very easy to generalize and we see a lot of generalizations getting thrown around based on somebody's particular s psychological lens or framework or School of that where like this is actually something I've been seeing in Silicon Valley circles that's a an interesting trend of late where everyone is suddenly on about trauma like everyone apparently even like the VC you know the investors who are hearing the pitches you know that first time Founders early stage Founders are giving to like 90c pitches or you know brief intro calls where normally it's like cut and dry like tell me about what's the you know sort of value proposition here how much of a market how like how much can I make you know from your company like suddenly VCS don't want to venture capitalist they don't want to talk about your company they want to talk about your childhood like something is like there's like something in the water in silon Valley and I have some guesses about what or who it might be but like everyone's traumatized and your trauma is what's going to inform how you run your company and what kind of leader you're going to be and so we need to understand your TR and to me like that's a just wrong it's just false it's just patently false not everyone is traumatized plenty of people are not traumatized even if they've experienced things that might be traumatizing to someone people emerge without any trauma like they just depending on their temperament depending on you know just like the meaning that they make of it at the time depending on who else they have around and how they're sort of you know processing and prioritizing those different relationships people are resilient people differ vastly you know in their reactions to Any Given type of experience and so there's just very few Universal prescriptions someone can give like you have to grieve or grieving has to include XYZ do you think I mean do you think culture is teaching us that we have to be traumatized though I mean I feel like I feel like people are getting a certain um social status by by exhibiting to the world that they have experienced a certain amount of trauma and not only just experience a certain amount of trauma but it's irreversible there's there's nothing that can be really done about it um do do you think at a certain level yeah yeah sorry go ahead so the culture I I feel like the culture feeds a sort of mental illness right and it it's robs you of agency because it's as if the trauma that you've experienced commands you there's really nothing you can do about it it's in you and it defines you so with give given the fact that that intersection that culture of intersections right where it's all about abuse and oppression and and Trauma and how much trauma do you have how can you as an individual um I don't want to say struggle against it but arm yourself against that in in the in the in the while you're also dealing with your own I mean I don't want to say frag fragility because I believe in antifragility but I your own problems and issues and fissures that you need to fix that might be very real sure so I recently wrote a piece on this for my suback not to just you know do a Shameless plug but it's on this topic um called it your flaws matter less than you think is the name of the piece and I wrote it specifically to counter this cultural narrative that you're talking about and I think it's a kind of two two-part narrative they're like two heads to the same you know ugly beast like one of the heads is when someone is great it's because of their TR their trauma like you said it defines them it's what makes them great so it's like you know depression breeds great art I'm sure like as a you know as an artist right and being in the film industry I'm sure you've seen a lot of this like Mantra of just like you have to suffer for you know you've got to be a mad genius a crazy yeah like everyone in Hollywood has bipolar disorder I've actually heard that cited as like just like a fact on um you know just like genius is born of suffering trauma and and mental illness which is so dead wrong that it's like hard to even wrap once had head around how wrong it is but it's just kind of believed so that's one and then the flip side of it yeah which is like our shadow work has to take priority over everything right it's like the self like this kind of self-help like healing you know mental health culture has taken on which I think is part a big part of what you're describing like this kind of moral stature almost where like you are like your worth is measured relative to how hard you've fought against your traumas or how much you've had to you know how much Shadow work you've had to do and how vulnerable you've been in the face of all the pain that of course you've suffered because who hasn't suffered a bunch of pain and had to you know deal with all these fissures so I think both of those things are in the culture I mean they're one thing but I think they kind of just rear their heads in different ways and my kind of counternarrative really comes down to your flaws are not you know flaws being a catchall for like mental health issues and struggles and you know whether it's depression anxiety trauma like disorganization poor social skills you know whatever your particular issues they are not fundamental to you what's fundamental to you are your virtues and the life you're building like what you can do what you've achieved or what you're on a path to achieve and you can do things you can build you can Thrive you can uh be a virtuous person you can be an interesting person just have an awesome life even with a bunch of flaws and some of those flaws will be worth your time to you know override or to altogether you know deze work through spend time on in therapy and some won't and there's always opportunity cost to whatever time you spend trying to become you know less less easily triggered or trying to become you know more immune to depression like you might sometimes just go through spells of depression but like can you learn to just keep working on what you're working on and like keep going out with friends even while you're feeling down because by the way that's one of the best treatments for depression is just like behavioral activation AK going out and living your life you know and so I cite musk in that article as an example although I still have a kind of fraught relationship with some of the stuff he's on about but like this guy's sending rocket ships into space you know that are actually like like he's doing unprecedented things for Humanity I mean really you know for himself because he thinks it's cool right but also like all of us are better off like we are on track to populate Mars one day because of this guy's insane ambition but like all that any of us care about is you know that he's inflammatory on Twitter right like which is annoying it actually is annoying and it actually you know I would argue those are real faults but like context like are we sure he'd be better off spending the hours in therapy working on those faults that instead he's spending on running SpaceX and Tesla are we sure and like for him do we know that that's a better use of time I don't you know you know I I want and I wanted to touch on this uh this idea that your your uh your neurosis is your art that's a very very popular conception especially when I first came into acting the my acting teacher Mentor Sanford Meisner a very famous acting teacher who came from a very famous U theater company called the group theater that basically taught everybody that you know in America from dairo to Marlin Brando Pacino they all came out from under the the tutelage of of actors who formed this group theater Meisner used to say outright Neurosis creates art but my own experience was my own experience was very different my own experience was no my Neurosis makes me um under sensitive and hypers sensitive it makes me completely out of with reality it may it may look explosive and interesting on stage for somebody for for some things but it also prevents me from going deeper it prevents me from touching myself from knowing my values it blinded me to reality so I I in for my acting class I Don't Preach that at all I think that's an extremely unhealthy way to look at life the clearer I got the better I got and and an actress I knew who was F famous uh at the time for for TV show called We Got It Made which was a sitcom in the late 80s or early 90s I was trying to encourage her to go to therapy because she was so so messed up she sort of looked at herself as a Marilyn Monroe and had that sort of vibe going I'm like you got to go to thery kid she can't can't go to therapy I won't be able to act if I go to therapy there it is I said yes you'll be better I was like you'll be better yes yes you'll be better so I wanted to I also wanted to say something else like you said going out there in the world going out with friends can I still do that even though I'm depressed well yes you can and that reminded me of an acting lesson that I teach that becomes a life lesson too which is and this this is not like fake it till you make it I don't buy that stuff but Behavior beets feeling Behavior begs feeling so when you you go out and on what you know yeah act on what you know right act on what you know you feel it that's very good and that action produces feelings because we're an integr you know we're an I'm I'm saying this as a normie not like somebody like you knows right but it feels integrated right it feels integrated so so you you do something and you're going to make self happier you're in the midst of a depression you go out with friends you can get out of it you can see above the the rim of that um depression simply by behaving um like you're compatible and enjoying valued self right like like the self the authentic self that you know you can be when you're not under this distorting cloud of depression right like the depression is not the authentic version of you right like the depression kind of casts a shadow over your authentic self so go be the authentic self and you know she'll wake up and come out of hiding yeah that's interesting too because a lot of a lot of people in the artistic Community view authentic in a very specific way it's like the dark thing if you're the morose dark poetic character you're authentic and and rouso didn't Russo have a Vibe like you know civil civilization sort of took a robbed you of your authenticity which was sort of a Savage un you know Unbound UNC unrationed but what is authentic I mean is is there a perspective tell us that's a good question because yeah because I I'm sure that the way I use the word is sort of un kosher and not the mainstream usage because I'm guessing something like what you're saying is more familiar to the mainstream and I'm pushing back on right but I think part of that is there's yeah there's a diff there's a philosophical difference right between the rousan conception of like what is authentic or like genuine right like true what is what does it mean to be true to yourself to be honest and people will all often push back like well but don't I want to be true to myself which means that I should be brooding and like and fussy and frustrated because in that moment I feel really short-tempered and just like pessimistic well is that your considered Judgment of what's true even in that moment if you had to swear in court or if you knew there was a a lot of money on the line based on like whether your current snippin matches the reality of somebody's intentions toward you in that moment or of how you know good or bad your prospects are over time like would you swear to the snippy version of reality or would you actually swear to a brighter sunnier more you know Goodwill more benevolent version of reality that is just like not emotionally you know real to you right that in that moment but that like you can muster the knowledge you can muster the wisdom that that's actually what's true and real in which case what's more authentic is it to just react from whatever feelings of the moment happen to push you around or is it to act from wisdom act from your your considered reasoned judgment and understanding of what's really going on right where yeah sometimes that might mean you override your initial urge to you know like insult somebody or to snap at somebody but like you're doing that because you don't want to say something you'll later regret and that you didn't mean right like we often look back and like wow I said things that I didn't really mean right and I really regret having done that I said things I don't believe that's not authentic right what's authentic is if you're able to capture the full context of what you know and care about in that moment and speak from that which might mean holding your tongue sometimes right like that that's actually the more authentic thing to do that seems like that takes a great deal of training to self-training uh to speak with the full context of your life and your relationship with the person you're speaking with in mind as you're doing it in the midst of very powerful feelings or a desire to do harm to that other person and that that does make that does that that makes authentic that raises the level of authenticity to me because what the artists have been taught I think uh authenticity is is sort of an animalistic level of behavior just like Let It All Hang Out kind of yeah let it all hang out and that's how how boring to be honest with you it's so P I'm done with it but but a real authenticity on the human level is so high it's it's rising above the feelings of the moment not denying them but understanding where they sit in the context of your whole life that's wisdom that's wisdom so why do I mean so so many of the therapies that I went to focused on feeling feeling feeling feeling feeling feeling feeling and um and I know objectivists sort of have the opposite problem I I know objectivists who are are really remote from their emotions they're not in touch and they use objectivism as as a way of r rizing the fact that they're not really in tou with their feelings um but despite all the despite all the chaos I thought that the the the the feeling feeling feeling feeling crowd gave me it wasn't until I started to integrate the principles of objectivism that I started to feel psychologically clearer irrespective of who was in the chair analyzing me is there a reason for that interesting I mean I it does sound like you generally saw psychoanalytic types who yes who weren't necessarily as informed by more recently developed cognitive approaches because if you were sitting in a you know CBT session you know like a session of cognitive behavioral therapy with somebody who's competent because there are plenty of incompetent there are probably more incompetent CBT practitioners well I don't know if I want to go so far say that but it's sort of like it's easier to get by as an incompetent CBT therapist than as an incompetent psychoanalyst because you have all the like structure and Scaffolding of like worksheets you can do and like rules kind of like checklists you can go over together so I want to say that as a kind of caveat like you may have had a lot of bad CBT and that's not a knock on CBT it's just a knock on the you know the therapists who are bad out there anyway but good CBT you would be constantly doing the work with your therapist of figuring out the premises behind your emotions and then questioning them challenging them checking them against reality doing behavioral experiments designed to really put your you put your beliefs the ones that are pushing on your you know emotions to the test and then very consciously reappraising those premises you know those beliefs those automatic thoughts as a CBT therapist might call it you know in light of new experiences and in light of the full data set that you have available so psych gotten really good at that actually does does a therapist answer questions in that case because my last therapist who who I who I took to be pretty good never really answered questions and I felt like punching him in the face because it was like I want an answer I literally don't have the context to be able to answer this question and I'm searching for it and is it right or wrong I need to know if my feeling is right or wrong and he never he always evaded a complete Judgment of whether my feeling was right reflective of reality or just something you know twisted up in my Machinery that I needed to straighten out and I was dying for that kind of guidance and I never got it yeah I mean so it's so funny so there's Dogma on every I mean then you see this with objectivism too there are plenty of people who are sort of like dogmatic about objectivism right so I don't think any school of thought is immune from this right so on the psychoanalytic side there are plenty of dogmatic therapists right dog atic psychoanalyst psychodynamic therapist who will never answer a question because like that's the rule that's the Dogma you know and they're kind of taking it at that level and there are plenty of CBT therapists who will always answer every question and be very directive even though sometimes that's just the dead wrong move therapeutically so it's a matter of context like when is it actually you know I sometimes answer questions but I don't always answer questions that my clients ask me and it's a very nuanced contextual decision like what do you need from me right now and do you actually need me to tell you this or can you work it out do you already know the answer like is this a skill issue is this a knowledge issue or is this the motivation issue for example you know and where can I sort of help move you forward I I think after three years he might have answered one question I would have I would have suspected that he was using that kind of um wait I was gonna I was gonna ask you a question and it just went out of my head umor I hate it when that happens you know the the Pains of getting older no no no no you didn't uh it's me so wait but I'll so so I'll read a couple of questions here uh ju in the chat here just until I can recover what it was I was ask gonna ask because I swear it was super important then it will come back it will important important to me um uh so agreed says Rose Richards about our topic earlier and also people project a lot of their issues on to others oh I noticed this a lot on social media there's a lot of pathotypes on social social media and narcissists um how do you deal with this is just a a total aside since I feel like I'm dealing with narcissists on social media how how can you deal with a narcissist is it possible to deal with a narcissist yeah this is definitely a Bugaboo of mine also so I have to issue a disclaimer here which is that narcissism has become one of these buzzword right and one of these like cultural kind of hot you know like flash points and whenever that happens inevitably there's like definitional drift you know it just like acquires its own kind of stereotypical you know meaning in the culture that isn't that grounded in observation or S you know scientific study so narcissism is a fairly specific thing it's it's a personality disorder I mean and there are a few subtypes of it right but it's associated with you know like a an extremely defensive kind of coping style where there's pretty profound sort of self-doubt or there's some sort of impossible and very kind of rigid standard of worth that somebody is you know feels themselves incapable of living up to and the way that they cope with that is by ganizing themselves or by constantly being kind of preoccupied with their own you know alleged worth and and amazingness right and it's always sort of all about them because they're super insecure and they're all you know they're on about that right oh wait you mean Trump Trump really isn't great Trump really isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread it's maybe a narcissistic okay I mean there I'm gonna that's one of the most confident diagnoses I can make and I'm you know despite not having personally met the guy so yeah no I'm with you on that one that that one's yeah it's a defensiveness it's it's it's a very insecure place to be psychologically right yeah I mean you can see it it's just like what is the need what you for all of this kind of like a right like what is the need for all the kind of self-aggrandizing and the denial of observable facts that don't match your preferred narrative where you are this Untouchable God fig right like why would somebody need to do that unless it's to patch something up right or to cope with something that is not fully there um but but there's a further question about dealing with them on social Media or did you remember yes yes no there there is I mean I guess you can't um because the the defensiveness is so ingrained it it requires it requires treatment it requires somebody to understand that they are defensive so insecure that they've put up this grandiose facade and and the the desire to fix it and go to therapy there's nothing that you can do except walk away I think is probably the best I mean I think it just depends yeah I mean I think it depend depends on the narcissist it depends on your relationship with the narcissist and what like what you're trying to get from The Narcissist I've had plenty of delimited relationships with people whom I you know never formally diagnosed but may well have diagnosed as narcissists if I were doing an formal assessment on them you know and I've treated a couple of people who I did give formal diagnosis to and in each case there you know there were various ways the person was hard to deal with for sure and that I had to really delimit my interactions with the person for sure but there were also ways you know and I'm definitely not naming names but you know I've had narcissist acquaintances colleagues friends whom I've learned a lot from because they're actually incredibly knowledgeable and smart and when you kind of poke at them in the right way like that sounds dehumanizing and I worry sometimes about just like we dehumanize people who happen to have this diagnosis formally or not as narcissists like suddenly they just become these boogey men but anyway uh like these are still human beings they're you know they have a problem they're not necessarily facing that problem in the you know most virtuous way and that's bad but like there are lots of other ways that we can fail to you know virtuously face our problems and we don't dehumanize all of those so it's like a little bit of become a little bit of like a bogey man but but I've learned a lot from people yeah go ahead this this past this past therapist I'm I'm I seem to be nailing this past therapist but he wrote a paper on the the the fact that artists need narcissism in order to be good which sort of parkens back to the to the uh you know you need Neurosis in order to be a good actor you need you need self-esteem you certainly need to think that you what you have yes you need the opposite you need to think that what you what you have to offer is worth value and that other people want to see it and then you know you can have bear yourself with confidence up there on stage people just conflate these things all the time which is just and they conflate them it's frustrating itself because it becomes a it becomes a part of the social uh narrative it's it's part of our cultural narrative now that sickness is art that VI if you're if you're traumatized um that has to Define who and what you are forever and ever and ever and ever as opposed to working Beyond it accepting it as a reality and then maybe even realizing it's going to leave scars that like in our body prevent us from going doing all the things we'd love to do in the ex in the way that a perfectly healthy person would love to but doesn't prevent us from living life uh fully um I know I've had to redefine you know my concept of love and relationships with people according to what I'm capable of some of which is just understanding my nature and and that that that reminds me there there there's sort of a a a relationship between you have to accept sort of where you are but you also have to be aspirational can you talk about that because it seems sort of like um I don't want to say it seems like a a paradox that you can't do both at the same time but you you certainly need both qualities in order to get better psychologically totally yeah I mean so this is you know I was Jing at this with dialectical behavior therapy DBT which is Marshall inan big um Innovation she pioneered this whole treatment that's sort of centered on that goal and that idea um that's the dialectic she's talking about she's using weird philosophical sort of foundations that aren't good but to justify something that is actually very good at the Practical kind of implementation level um but and but more fundamentally so not only are they not paradoxical so you know and I agree they can feel paradoxical like can sound paradoxical but like if you think about aspiration not in terms of this like need to prove something to some arbitrary authority figure that's like breathing down your neck that you know is sitting on some Divine jury waiting to judge you right in which case you know sort of like the calvinistic like either I'm one of the chosen people you know it's like am I destined for Hell or Heaven am I one of the good or one of the bad and like everything I do is like a test of which one I turn out to be and it's by some fixed arbitrary metric if you throw out that whole way of thinking that whole kind of d logical Duty you know based kind of detached like um categorical way of thinking about ethics and about the good and instead you know become what Rand called a disciple of causality in the sense of like I have one life to live I want to drink life to the least I want to get the most joy and meaning and fulfillment I can and it's my life and I have about this much time you know kind of remember the roor kind of speech not speech conversation with the dean where he's like what do you mean like I don't need I don't have anything else to learn at this institute I don't want to waste my time I have maybe 60 good years left and I want to spend them building and I know that this is what I love I'm moving on to the next thing because that's going to position me to make the most of my remaining time right without accepting in the sense of like doing a really honest accurate inventory of your reality of like what is you know what do I have to work with right like what's the raw material including my strengths my weaknesses how old I am what I do or don't possess you know the mistakes I've made that I now need to pay in some way to you know to repair or whatever like what am I working with so that then I can build my masterpiece out of those raw materials right if you aren't open or honest you know if you don't have an honest kind of inventory of the raw material then you're in fantasy land about your aspirations right then the aspirations are not real they're not credible you're not going to even you know you're not going to be able to make a kind of credible causal model and plan for getting from here to there if that makes sense agreed and your Masterpiece I you you shouldn't you shouldn't be comparing it to Michelangelo you shouldn't be comparing it to Rafael you shouldn't be comparing it to vmir it's your own it's your own particular Masterpiece that will look your way and that's that's important because a lot of people get caught up I think in in these comparisons and and they end up being quite quite bummed out I wanted to ask you about anxiety because I think a lot of uh a lot of folks that I know and a lot of folks in the in the fandom for Supernatural complain a lot about anxiety and I want to tell you a particular story of mine um and I want to see if what I did was good or bad I used to suffer from these anxiety attacks that felt unbelievably awful like they're terrifying experiences and then one day actually in Paris one day I was in Paris and I started to feel the the anxiety attack come on like a like a wave and normally that would elicit Terror like oh here it comes yes instead I just asked myself this one question I'm like my body's trying to tell me something about me right now it's actually it's informing me about something I want to listen Okay so I opened my mind and I said what do you want to tell me my inner ear and I said what do you want to tell me and it was like it was like diving underneath a tidal wave the thing just passed right over me I didn't necessarily get clarity as to what it was that set it off I'm sure there was some physical characteristics that were going on that I wasn't aware y but I W but I wasn't um which I'm feeling from you by the way from your talk with your own because that sort of made something clear to me um but embracing it embracing it instead of fearing it made it yes much much less powerful I mean yeah that sums it up that's beautifully so what are what are the causes of anxiety because that you you talked about somatic potential causes too when you were when you were um talking to youron and and people might not understand that cuz it just feel so visal and so like out of the blue I know yeah I mean so there's so much yeah I could say about this when we started the wider level of what is like like what's the cause of anxiety or the cause that so first of all there's not one cause people are genetically predisposed to more easily develop phobias and develop you know generally kind of neurotic patterns of reacting to stressful events to ambiguous events to you know like whatever happens to us us that's kind of scary or just kind of we're not sure what to make of it or we're not sure how we're going to solve it handle it right and we all have stuff happen to us but like some of us are just predisposed to be more bothered than others of us so there are certain predispositions and same goes for you know like you're mentioning biological predispositions some of us have like a kind of just more reactive physiological alarm system like our figh or flight system or sympathetic nervous SYM it's just kind of like you know rigged to go off more easily so like think it you know it's like it's got a lower threshold for Activation so you know we might have the same sort of cognitive appraisal like the same understanding of a situation as our you know friend over here but like we feel it as panic and they just feel it as like you know mild stress right so all else being equal so anxiety has many many causes in the sense of like factors that can predispose us to it but what turns like a fear or arousal or like sort of sensitivity of the kind I'm talking about what turns it into like chronic anxiety or like a pattern of anxiety is absolutely at least influenced by and we know now really tends to be caused and maintained by how we interpret that initial reaction and how we're interpreting the situations that make us feel those initial you know stressed or panicky or just kind of fearful symptoms so you know say we have some interactions at school where a kid is kind of you know mean to us and we feel un you know we feel that sort of unpleasant Eternal kind of we feel butterflies we feel knots you know in our stomach our chest you know feels Hollow and also you know we're thinking to ourselves like wow I must have really screwed up that interaction and it's almost arbitrary which comes first like did we first somehow learn because you know we had a mean harsh critical parent who always blamed us or always called us names you know that we internalized as like our own interpretive you know schema for why somebody might be mean to us or did we first just like feel those knots and S and then the way we interpreted that is something must be really wrong and I must be really messing this up right but one way or another we now form a belief of premise a schema I'm incapable of you know compet ly interacting with people or the world is dangerous or just like people are dangerous volatile not to be trusted right or you know or or or like my body my physical health is constantly at risk right like I so whatever it is we form these beliefs through these experiences and how we process them and now those beliefs become self-reinforcing through the avoidance that they motivate us to do yes so when you were just saying right like you knew oh here we go it's coming on and the way you'd normally respond is by trying to get the hell away from it and like resisting it and pushing back on it which of course then would just make it spiral and spiral and get bigger and bigger right yeah and this time you just didn't do that because the signal you're sending to your brain when you very naturally understandably like resist and are freaked out by the initial anxiety symptoms the signal is this is dangerous this is bad this is scary I should solve this this is a real problem for me and now I'm trying to solve it but instead of solving it I'm actually just feeling worse because of course you feel worse when you think something dangerous and scary and bad is happening and now I'm even more out of control of these symptoms which just reinforces that I that they're bad and dangerous and scary and I don't have control over them and now I'm having a full-blown panic attack and so it turns out that just changing the narrative changing the interpretation just as you did like turning toward instead of away from it which we actually do by Design in the clinic by having somebody for example breathe through a straw with their nose plug to just like bring on those symptoms on purpose so then they can be curious and turn toward them and listen to them instead of avoiding them that turns out to be the Cure so you solved it for yourself which is really cool is that sort of also do do do do you uh let's say somebody's afraid of going to crowds they want to go to a convention a fan convention but crowds terrifies them getting on planes and confined spaces terrifies them do they do you do you think that they should be exposing themselves to those smaller places with it's slowly until they become aware that it's those aren't threats at all and and so it's exposure to that it's embracing exposure it's embracing it to change those synapses and conclusions that you have in your mind exactly I guess conclusions that have created cognitive behavioral therapy yes that's you know so for C CBT cogni therapy for anxiety consists of basically the two components we're talking about the cognitive part is identifying what are those judgments premises beliefs like I believe that the world is dangerous I believe that people mean ill you that people can't be trusted and I need to protect myself from them or or they can do me great harm I believe that you know if I'm on an airplane I won't be able you know I'll have a terrible panic attack and I'm going to cause the whole airplane to crash because you know or whatever the case may be like here are the beliefs how plausible are they what's the evidence I have to date and now that I have enough of a sort of measured View at least like probably this is exaggerated probably it's neither as likely nor would be as bad as costly as severe as my brain is imagining okay now let me go test it and that's where we go to do the exposures and the exposures are what does the work they Victor I remember I remember reading Victor Frankl and in his logo therapy he had something called paradoxical intention that he used which is very similar to turning into the thing it's like if you're afraid of you know profusely sweating in public just say I'm going to be profusely sweat in public you sort of embrace it you say I want it I'm gonna have let's make it happen yeah we literally will Splash water on ourselves to be sweaty and then we'll go out in public and then we'll see what that's like and then and then you you you sort of um I guess disarm that that fear by um by directly embracing it um I know we don't we don't have that much time there was there's one or two more thing wait do I have a question here I saw a theory that says that trauma occurs when someone's experience uh presents evidence that conflicts with their established identity and this disassociation hinders the ability to harmonize reasoning and emotional process it made sense to me at the time what do you think about this and how do you think the emphasis on objective reality and self-esteem can help overcome this situation that's a good question it's a great question of course always always ask good questions that's very good so is do you agree with that that that occurs when someone's experience presents evidence that conflicts with their establ that s that that sort of sounds like cognitive dissonance to me and not not not so much trauma but but or is that a form of trauma yeah good question so so that is one manifestation one example of I think the Brad broader model that explains a lot of trauma if not most trauma and certainly with the sort of cognitive model of trauma which I find very you know credible and which I've used to actually treat people effectively um on the cognitive model when we experience a trauma what makes it an enduring source of distress and you know impairment for us is that in some way it clashes with our either pre-existing worldview or so maybe that's our identity maybe that's just like the general kind of view that things make sense in the you know a really common view people come in with and then trauma happens and then they get stuck is good things happen to good people bad things happen to bad people you know just world theory where per se about them done but it's just like I live in a predictable just world where generally I can expect good things if I'm good and then they get raped right or robbed or you know something awful happens to them and now to if they're going to preserve the original narrative good things happen to good people bad things happen to bad people either they have to throw themselves under the bus like I must be bad I must have caused this somehow it must have been my fault it must be a punishment right or then they have to throw out the original belief with the bathwater where now you know what no the world is not just unjust but it's dangerous and bad and cruel and I can just expect harm around every corner and one way or another they end up stuck because neither NE of those pictures of the world you know is objective or true or workable right it's like if you think you're bad good luck to you right we know that that's not workable and if you think that the whole world is dangerous and bad and unnavigable good luck to you right so you end up stuck and you know treatment for trauma involves first identifying that stuckness like O Okay so you've got this belief and it clashes with either the world or with your prior beliefs or with your needs let's check it let's start and that is also just like let's go back and really think through like feel and think through what happened because often we avoid again avoidance is the maintaining factor for every form of pathology basically or Psychopathology so like we have you know whatever the really kind of incomplete fragmented conclusions that we drew in the height of emotional upset right and turmoil when the trauma happened and like it's not that nuanced and it's not really you know it doesn't consider the full context like it was my fault or it's it was his fault and therefore everyone like him is automatically B you know whatever it is and then we don't go back to rethink it because we don't want to have to face it again right we don't want to have to remember the horrible thing that we are you know retroactively interpreting as the complete upset of our entire worldview right and so it just keeps perpetuating itself so a big part of treatment is actually go back and see what happened like you know reprocess it fresh and like tell the whole story from start to finish feel the feelings and sort of Do The Grieving where appropriate to come back to our you know first um point and and like put it into context like really see it in light of reality you know and in light of yeah your own resilience and worth and you come to the conclusion um well bad things do happen to good people sometimes and I was unlucky I was in the wrong place at the wrong time does that cure the trauma I mean does that does that make it you'd be surprised I mean not by itself but when you go through a so for example there's a 12-week treatment called cognitive processing therapy in which you first a retell the story and then also start identifying stack points like what are all the kind of beliefs and ways of thinking about just the day-to-day world that have been you know that I have concluded as the function of what happened so like I can't trust people this must be my fault I'm bad I'm so broken nothing good will ever happen to you know that whatever that set of things you start collecting them you start checking them you just just start checking like is this true is there counterevidence is this an overgeneralization am I mind reading am I fortune telling you know there's like a list of cognitive distortions that you can check again like I said there's all these checklists in CBT it's like you've got a checklist of like am I committing any of these logical fallacies and then you also go out into the world and like try to open up up to someone a little bit if you haven't been in like you know test the waters see what happens and then feel the feelings of like wow actually that was not the disaster that I expected based on what happened that one time right like and also I have resources now that I didn't have then right like often it's just an overgeneralization from then to now right like things that happened to us as kids when we were genuinely helpless right and just had no agency or very little to now we're like you know we're grown adults and we can just like close the door on somebody we can tell them no we can stop calling we can not pick up their calls right so just realizing like you know it's not the world that it used to be and also the world is far you know more expansive than what this trauma represents I love this concept in cognitive behavioral therapy that you have a checklist of things that allows your mind to be in the in the helm again that allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life um and and uh checking your premises constantly um so that you I can see how you can find your way out of the trauma that way I we have one last question here because I know your time is precious and I don't want to hold you here any longer do you think a person can work on their trauma and be free from it I think everything you've said from this from this perspective says yes um and uh if even if life presents a trigger to this person so if this person goes back to the old self so maybe it can happen even even if you're in the midst of the Cure even if you're in the midst of doing the right checks on everything you may fall back to the original position but you're still and that doesn't mean you can't come back on the wagon it's 100% a lapse need not be a relapse and a relapse need not be a collapse okay so uh Ally you have a question real quickly I don't see uh you you you want to ask that question go ahead I'll make it the last question can you unmute yeah I'm unmuted can you hear me yes I can go ahead this is the last question okay so um I deal with my own trauma and I've been dealing it with for five years and um I do stuff like that helps me like keep my mind busy but I know it's not like a guaranteed process and I'm not going to lie for the past five years um it it still feels empty it feels like a whole Kaleidoscope of worlds are just crashing around but but um and I feel like it has not improved even with therapy because it still feels like the same kind of empty no matter how many like good things have filled with it um it it feels like it can't ever get better and this is going through I like since last year as well my dad died in 2019 and then last year my mom died along with my cat two days after that and then I had another cat passed away and so that has changed me um greatly I've become like severely emotional um I L sh out my friends and I don't intend to try to um and it's just and then it just fatigues me to the point where it's just like I can't do this anymore and I don't mean like that in a bad negative kind of way you're so it's just that it it's just it gets me tired I can't hang out with people it just even when I go to cons like my friends are with me they go and do things I can't go with them because I get tired so I was just wondering how do you handle fatigue as far as like when you you have like cocktail of anxiety and depression going on yeah yeah so Al of all seriously thank you for sharing that thank you for I I feel like even just being able to get that dose of reality on this call because it's so easy for us to have a kind of like casual detached conversation about trauma and anxiety and you know like could people could easily get the impression of like you know you just go to therapy and you deal with it and you move on with your life and that's just not the reality of dealing with you know complex and recurring right and serious trauma and so thank you for like just bringing perspective to all of us on that front and I kind of feel like I want to go back to where we started with you know Mark saying like apologetically I have been F how did you put it with your therapist like I have been whatever yeah of therapist yeah oh promiscuous I've been a promiscuous promiscuous that's the one and me saying like good for you because that's sort of what it takes sometimes because the fact is like rarely do you get better in one course of treatment like that is very much the exception not the rule rarely does one therapist sort of like know all the different interventions and all the different you know like hacks and Frameworks that in fact would you know that exist out in the world of treatment that could help you but like you're just not going to unfortunately you know and I want like I'm working toward a world where this will be the case but right now it's just not the case that you sort of like have a reliable you know complete sort of expertise From Any Given practitioner like they're just not going to be aware of everything out there and so it it's hard it's work and it takes time and you've been living that you know reality and it can be for sure exhausting and I think and I know I I guess what I can say here you know in this brief kind of end of you know interview responses I have met and worked with and you know had dear precious relationships therapeutic and otherwise with people who have been where you are and been through what you've been through and you know if you can imagine even more harrowing still in terms of just like the amount of kind of loss and the compounded like you know grief and just displacement and you know and struggle and I have seen them Triumph and overcome and not just that I've seen them turn their struggle into Grist for growth and wisdom you know so there's the concept of post-traumatic growth which is a very important contribution to the literature in recent decades I guess now and there not only you know can you like overcome the trauma and sort of come back to some sort of because you'll never be the same person you know I think there's an illusion and this is where the grieving thing comes in right like you're not going to be the same person that you were before losing both of your parents and two of your beloved pets and like having all this stuff happen in short succession but nor do you want to be because you now have all the wisdom and experience and like and resilience you know through struggle and just like knowledge of you know what kinds of therapies and techniques and challenges and you know and like the relationships you'll have formed in the course of working through the stuff you now have all that and again and I say now like right now it doesn't feel like any of this is a resource it feels like a drain but like when you're on the other side of this journey on the other side meaning like there's a critical mass of sort of techniques and tools and success is wins through treatment and D through kind of self-care self-education there's enough winds that like it out you feel like there's now a Tailwind instead of a headwind right now it sounds like you're just facing headwinds right but at some point you know the um um what is it the what kind of wheel metaphor oh my gosh I always forget the word the like the wheel that like you have to kind of push it and push it till it finally takes off on its own do you know what I'm talking about I do but I'm uh I'm blanking on the the name of the metaphor the the and ah can't believe like it's the wheel thing metaphor that when you push it and it takes off it yeah here you know what I'm gonna tell you because it's in my PO sorry I know now I'm keeping everybody over time but it's the Turning of the flywheel flywheel yes somebody just said flywheel thank you Lou thank you genius yeah you're right in the in the thick of like having to push the flywheel and push the fly like gravity is against you and at some point there's a critical math of experiences of like pushing yourself to like go out even though you feel like you're too tired and sometimes it's going to just suck and then other times you'll be surprised like wow that was weirdly fun and I didn't know I had that me and like you need enough of those and they don't have to be every time but just enough of them that at some point you notice oh like I actually kind of want to go out and I'm actually just like tempted now like now I have to stop myself from going out because I need to study but what I want to do is go out with my friends because like that's actually become a more default kind of way for me to be and like it actually now energizes me a little bit instead of draining me consistently and that's where the the effort will have paid off and now the flywheel has taken off on its you know now it's creating its own momentum its own gravity I've seen it happen many many times and you're not alone in that struggle and I you know and and you're welcome to reach out for any further quick wisdom that I can impart but or like you know therapist recommendations or whatever but thank you for asking and yeah g Gina I just wanted to thank you for coming on I mean I I feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours and uh I know you're so busy don't we we both don't have that amount of time but but you've actually made things very clear to me I hope you made things clear to other other folks out there um we're going to make this an ongoing Series so hopefully maybe sometime in the future down the line we can come back and continue the conversation please please if you can read her substack building the builders um because we're Builders I mean it's this isn't just for entrepreneurs but I feel like we're building our own lives our own character our own self-esteem team um through philosophy and through psychology interventions we can come out of some really really dark places and actually experience the best in ourselves and that's what I hope people out there experience and I want to thank you for being a part of that thank you so much this has been a pleasure you're so fun th thank you so are you I hope to see you in the future byebye very much likewise bye everybody and you know happy building bye starting with ourselves yes

Channel: Mark Pellegrino

Views: 864

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Id: lFa8c5EhRtw

Length: 72min 6sec (4326 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024