The Doc Jacques Institute of Higher Unlearning

to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for it is intended for entertainment and informational purposes but not considered help if you actually need real help and you're in need of help please seek that out if you're in dire need of help you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them but don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help it's not it's just a podcast it's for

entertainment and information only so let's keep it in that light all right have a good time learn something and then get the real help that you need from a professional Welcome. My name is Dr. Jacques Debruckert, and I am the Dean of the Doc Jacques Institute of Higher Unlearning. I would like to welcome all of you who are in attendance of the orientation to our Institute of Higher Unlearning.

You have worked very hard, very diligently, and studied rigorously to make it into the Institute of Higher Unlearning. You have suffered Addiction, traumas, tragedies, all of the things that have led you to believe what you are. However, we here at the Institute of Higher Unlearning are going to teach you to unlearn about yourself, about your relationships, about your traumas, your self-identity.

the prejudices you have about the world your doubts your fears yes we are going to teach you how to unlearn all those things that you have held dear for all these years have helped support your addiction caused you to act like a maniac an insane person who causes tragedy and chaos everywhere you go finding ways to destroy relationships and jobs and lose money and health.

Yes, we are going to unlearn those bad behaviors and those false understandings and beliefs about you, the student of the Institute of Higher Unlearning. Be proud that you have self-destructed to the point where you have gained admission to our fine establishment of higher education. I am happy and proud that you are here. Welcome. So what if I told you that everything you knew about yourself was actually wrong? Or everything that you believed about yourself was actually untrue?

Wouldn't it cause you to have to spend the time to unlearn something if that were the truth? That maybe you're not a bad person. Maybe you're not a victim. Maybe you're not the one that actually should be destroying themselves. That's what's so strange and unusual and almost tragic that you spend your life living your life and you don't realize that what's happening is you're being programmed.

You're being told what you think of yourself based on people's reactions to you or their words to you or how they treat you.

And so you start to learn and you have this identity and this understanding of yourself understanding of self that leads you to a path of complete and utter destruction and so if you actually made it and met the criteria that we look for in the institute of higher and learning that's because you've really kind of screwed things up but you were also kind of conditioned to believe certain things about yourself that you're going to have to unlearn I was having a discussion with a client and we were

talking about self-identity and the change. And he kept describing it as if like his head was exploding, that he realized now in his recovery that he had to unlearn all these things that he had learned about himself and let them go. He had spent 10 years in addiction as an adult, frantically, frantically trying to figure out how to make a change. And so the change that he had to make was that he had to let some stuff go.

And I talked to people about this in the attempt at trying to get clean and sober, that you can hang on to things. You know, you feel bad about yourself. You feel bad about your relationships or what you did or how you treated people or what happened to you, no matter how traumatic it is. And you hung on to it and you hung on to more importantly, the emotion.

And that was where he had some problems, was the emotional attachment he had to the things that had happened to him were causing him tremendous harm. So he was going to have to let go. But he also was trying to figure out, how do I let go about things that I've accepted as fact? One of the issues commonly experienced with clients is this understanding of self, this self-doubt, self-loathing, self-hatred.

self-directed contempt and anger about whatever happened to them, that they caused it, because you taught that as a kid, and also the things that they had done, which they're not proud of, and they wish they could forget them. Well, it's not that you're going to forget it, because whatever you did, you did. Whatever happened to you, happened to you. Sadly, it's the emotion that you attach to that that really causes problems.

So if you believe that you're worthless because you were told as a kid you're worthless or stupid or you're not articulate or you're not capable, you're never going to amount to anything or you're fat or you're ugly or you're slow. You're not smart enough. You're not capable enough. Everything you touch doesn't work. You're a failure. You know, all these negative things. And you could hear them from parents. You could hear them from teachers, friends, you know, whatever.

And now, unfortunately, because of... Twitter and social media, Facebook, whatever. You're going to get the trolls that are going to kick back on you and tell you that you're a horrible person. So you start to take it on. You've learned that that is what you are. So how do you unlearn something? And that's what I wanted to talk to you about. Unlearning what you think you've learned about yourself. I learned that I am... And then you can enter phrase.

And it's not that you have this conscious idea that you learned it. It's just that it's kind of now you, as an adult, if you're an adult, if you're an adult, you just kind of take it on. And so everybody's met the person who thinks that they're not very good at something or they're not, it's not, you know, you don't measure up.

If you can get on YouTube and you can watch any talent show, when somebody comes up and they think, you know, I sing okay, so I'm going to, I juggle okay or I play a musical instrument okay, so I'm going to try to do that and maybe they'll accept me. And the person is really talented. It's really strange. They don't have an idea that they have that talent or that you're not attractive or that you're not desirable. You're not wanted. You're not acceptable in some way.

And you start to take it on, whether it's true or Or not. A good example of that is I remember hearing in an interview that Michelle Pfeiffer, who is a beautiful woman, is an actress. And when she was a girl, she thought she was kind of strange looking and apparently she didn't have any success with relationships with boys. And so she's working as a cashier at a grocery store. She had graduated from high school and that was pretty much what she was doing. That's where she was.

Somebody in the industry saw her at the Ralphs or Alpha Beta where she was working, whatever it was. And they thought, you know, she's a very attractive woman. Maybe, you know, girls, maybe she could make it in. She should maybe try to make it in Hollywood. She lived in Los Angeles. So they said, here, you know, why don't you come down and audition? She did. She thinks of herself. She said in this interview that she thought of herself as not being particularly attractive.

And she didn't think that she had really any special talent. Well, she's an actress. So she's able to, you know, act. That's her talent. But the concept of like her self-identity was not one of I'm beautiful. And I don't know how that changed over time. I imagine that in the narcissistic, self-indulgent world of Hollywood and Los Angeles, she's not thinking that way anymore. But she did at the time. So strange.

Even as a young woman, she was very attractive and she seems to have some talent acting. I've seen people that are very intelligent and they don't think they're that smart. I've seen people that are brilliant who really just think they're marginally okay or they're just, you know, they were able to make it through life. And interestingly, unless somebody comes along and helps them change that concept, they'll hang on to it and that becomes their identity. And so they live a different life.

If you're an addict, you think you're a failure. Are you a failure or are you a tragic victim of circumstance and conditioning by abuse or neglect? So how do you unlearn that? Well, first there's a process of putting responsibility where it belongs. And I know you may have heard me talk about this in the past, but putting responsibility where it belongs. Are you really, at eight years old, a troublemaker or causing issues or a bad person? If you were neglected, let's say you were abandoned.

You lived in a house and your parent was there, but your parent didn't seem to care that much and wasn't around a lot, like kept leaving you at school or leaving you at home for long periods of time. That's abandonment. You know, you had a roof over your head, you had clothes, you had food and you got to school and you were, you were sent to school, you know, your mom or dad or whoever was sending you to school and made sure you went and all that.

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I didn't, I wasn't like I left on the street. Yeah. But you were, you were abandoned emotionally and physically at times. So that would leave you with a feeling of being unwanted. So how do you unlearn that? I am not wanted, right? Well, you have to be willing to put the responsibility where it belongs.

And as a child, you take on that responsibility yourself because you think if I was worthy of somebody caring, my mom, my dad or both or whoever would not leave me at home for 10 hours at a time. They would not leave me sitting in front of the school while everybody else gets to go home and I'm left standing there waiting for somebody to come and pick me up. If I was desirable or if I was loved or if I was cared for, that wouldn't happen. So you're going to have to learn something different.

So you're going to have to put the responsibility where it belongs. It belongs with your parents. It belongs with a guardian. It belongs with a person that didn't call and say, hey, you know, this kid is sitting out in front of the school or, hey, why is this kid in this house for 10 hours or whatever? Put responsibility where it belongs. You falsely put it on yourself because you were a child and you were me-centric and that's what you thought. It was your fault.

So you're going to have to unlearn that. So you have to be able to give that up. So you put the responsibility where it belongs. And suddenly when you do that, you realize who's actually responsible. And if you are at fault for some of this, but you take all of the responsibility, you're not doing yourself a service. You're doing yourself a disservice. So let's unlearn that. Let's unlearn that behavior of taking on accountability and responsibility for other people's stuff.

If you were sexually abused or if you were physically abused, verbally abused, emotionally abused, abandoned, those five forms of trauma, and you were a kid, you are not responsible. Period. You are not responsible. Period. You could be a bad kid. You could be a troublemaker. You're stealing. You're lying. You're fighting. You're running away. You're throwing tantrums. You're skipping school. You're not doing your homework. You're not doing it. Okay, yeah. That's okay. That was your part.

But the reaction can't be somebody beat you with a belt until you were bleeding. That's not appropriate. So who's responsible for that part? Well, the person who is doing the abuse. So take it off yourself and put it where it belongs. If, in fact, you did actually do something yourself, if you were a violent kid and you were causing fights and hurting people, take responsibility for that. But as a kid, why were you so angry?

That's not to say that you can't be a violent kid and just be a violent kid and be a psychopath in training or at a young stage in your life. Absolutely can't. But realistically, if you have trauma going on, it was the traumatizer that's responsible, not the trauma victim. So the first step in unlearning is to put responsibility where it belongs. Step two, after you've put responsibility where it belongs, now you're going to have to unlearn and relearn how to feel appropriately about that.

So if you have been self-loathing, and self-harming and thinking negatively about yourself because of being abandoned. Now you're going to have to unlearn that. And the way to do that is to say to yourself, I'm going to let that go. I'm going to turn that over. And I'm going to learn something new. I'm going to learn that, wow, that person was abusive to me. And that's not okay.

If you have children... and you're a parent, but you were abused as a child, if you're not abusing your child, you obviously have made some steps towards understanding how wrong abuse is, and so you're partly on your way to making that change, to unlearn a history that was learned inaccurately or incorrectly. So, unlearning, for step three, step three, is to to unlearn, now relearn. So you put responsibility where it belongs.

Then you start to change your feelings about it and reorganize those into feelings that are appropriate. In all seriousness, you're probably not going to be able to do this by yourself, that part of it. This is not a self-study institute of unlearning. It is a teachable institution. So you have to enlist the help of your professors. In this case, it would be a therapist. And relearn a new, more accurate history. So you have to let the old history go and take on the new one.

I had a case years ago of a woman who had cancer. learned something that was completely false about her childhood where she remembered being yelled at and abused because she thought that she actually had done something wrong. And it was an interesting case because what happened was she had to go and do kind of a 360 interview process and talk to siblings and And I think to a cousin who was present when she was getting yelled at or whatever.

And I sent her out to go talk to these people and interview them about like, really, is that really what happened? So she did. And she found out that, in fact, it was because the parent was drunk and Now, this person was young. She was like seven, eight years old, and the siblings were all older. She was the youngest.

So the parent was actually drunk most of the time, and the parent was actually physically and verbally abusing her, physically hitting her, and that she had to change this narrative that she had where she had done things because she was a bad child, and so she was being punished.

In addition to that, she had forgotten or put out of her mind or suppressed an idea changed the the narrative she was oppressing these these uh memories of being physically beaten she didn't remember that she remembered getting yelled at so she had these these uh repressed memories when she found this out it was shocking to her and she had to spend months working on this and trying to understand that what actually had happened was abuse so now she had to unlearn this false narrative that she had

taken on for years most of her adult life uh is because she was like 40 something years old so that's like half your life right so as an adult entirely as an adult she had this false narrative that she'd hung on to about how she was the person that had caused this tirade that was thrust upon her as a child. So she had to unlearn that and relearn an actual, more accurate, factual narrative. So that's how you begin that process.

Now, how long does it take to get through that unlearning, relearning process? It's hard to say.

depends on to what extent but I would expect that it would take you six months to two years to do that because this is a deeply ingrained thing in you as you've tried to figure it out and you've just lived your life so everything that you thought that was bad was something that perhaps you had caused or was something that didn't happen or you just didn't even remember it so Eh, it didn't really matter. Eh, it didn't really affect me.

Eh, that didn't really have negative consequence for me as an adult. I'm fine. When actually you're not because you're a drunk or a drug addict or you're destructive in your relationships or shopping or eating or pornography or internet. Whatever it is. Because you're trying to cope with feeling bad. Amazingly, in the years of teaching in the Higher Institute of Higher Unlearning, I have learned that many people have difficulty recognizing and acknowledging their own flaws, their own faults.

And at the same time, they're not willing to give it up because it's the thing that they feel is the truth. So when you're spending this time learning this, this unlearning process, Understand that your faulty coping mechanism, getting high or being destructive or whatever, is the coping mechanism that you have employed all this time. But it's going to destroy you. So when you're trying to unlearn something, you have to let that thing go and accept that something's different.

Now, there are many different ways of doing that. EMDR is a great therapeutic process for doing that. It's short term. It's very effective. The historical narrative process. It's the one that I use sometimes where I have people bring pictures or photographs in of what life was like as a child. And those who have them will bring them in. And we actually study the pictures. And I mean study. Like, tell me about the picture. What do you remember about this? What do you remember about this time?

Why was this picture taken? Who took the picture? Who's in the picture? Who's not in the picture? Look at their body language, their positioning, the time of day, the expressions on their faces. It's really interesting because if I know the person's story and they tell me about their family and I'm looking at a photograph and I'm like, well, why is this person here? Why is this person not in the picture? Why is this person in the picture?

Why are they facing each other not facing each other why are they standing so close or so far away what is going on in this picture what's in the background why were you there in that in that time and so these and it's like they go through this process and like I'll apply what I know about the things they've told me about their lives and then I look at the photograph and what they told me about their life many times does not match what's in that photograph or they have never really looked at the

photograph studied it to really understand that what they're looking at is like, wow, my dad looks like he's drunk in this picture. You never noticed that? No, he really, he looks like he's drunk. And it's like, well, how do you know that? Well, look at the way he's standing or expression his face. And you know what? I remember what that looked like. Oh, that's interesting.

So the process of unlearning is an actual process and it needs to be guided because The only narrative you understand about yourself is the one that you've been telling yourself all this time. And so how can you trust that? It's the false narrative. Now understand, I'm talking specifically about people who have addiction.

The faulty coping is that they've minimized and diminished and excused or just plain forgotten what really happened because it's really, it's too painful for them to try to dig into it too much. So when you're doing it as a guided exercise, the person who's helping you, a professional, can help distinguish reality from fantasy, help you kind of because of your narrative, help you tease out what really went on.

So to be a successful graduate of the Institute of Higher Unlearning and to get your diploma and to get your diploma and pass with honors, you have to really, really spend some time engaged in the process of unlearning. It's not easy. If it was easy, everybody would do it, but they don't.

But the motivation for doing it is I don't want to be destroying myself anymore because of what I feel uncomfortable about the people that were my relatives or my friends that were around me as I was growing up that were causing me this harm. or the harm that I've caused other people. Part of the unlearning is also, hey, I was a bad person before, but I'm gonna unlearn that my self-identity is I'm a bad person. I'm gonna learn that I'm actually a good person. Now, I did bad things.

I'm gonna have to go through the same process. I'm extending out to other people who did things to me. The same process is one where you forgive yourself and work through that. Make amends, right? Step nine, man, make amends. So now you can go to the point where you're forgiving yourself for being a bad person and unlearn that you're a bad person to learn that you're actually a good person. So present tense versus past tense. I was a bad person. I am now a good person. See, unlearning, learning.

That's how it works. So if you really want to pass with... magna cum laude or some other honor placed upon you take it seriously work really hard and try try as hard as you can to unlearn so you can relearn because life is much more pleasant when you're learning about your true self Rather than what you have been conditioned to believe and understand about yourself. Because it's worth it.

But please don't suffer addiction needlessly, harming yourself over and over again for no reason. Life is much better when you're clean and sober. So go out there and get clean and sober. And I'd like to thank you for listening to Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. And I'll catch you on the next podcast coming up soon. See ya.