GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Improve Your Mental Health

Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks the second episode in our four episode series with Dr. Paul Conti about mental health. The first episode in the series dealt with how to understand and assess your level of mental health.

Today's episode is about how to improve your mental health. I do want to emphasize that you do not need to have heard or seen the first episode in order to understand or glean important information from today's episode about how to improve your mental health. But I do encourage you to go and listen to the first episode at some point if you have not already. Today's episode deals with several topics important to all of us, as well as protocols to improve one's mental health.

For instance, you will learn how to guide yourself through a process of self-increase in which you address certain key questions about your drives, your level of aggressive drive. Pleasure drive and the so-called generative drive. These are essential things to understand about oneself if you want to guide yourself toward your aspirations.

And if you want to understand how your subconscious processing is influencing your thoughts and your behaviors and your feelings in ways that sometimes serve your aspirations and in other ways that can hinder your aspirations. Dr. Conti shares with us a way of assessing our internal narratives, as well as a way of creating a constructive self-awareness.

And an understanding of where those narratives and that self-awareness stem from in our childhood so that we can navigate forward with the greatest sense of agency. We also talk about how to move past common hindrances to improving one's mental health, such as overcoming intrusive thoughts. And perhaps most importantly, today's episode provides information and protocols that anyone can use to cultivate their generative drive, which is a hallmark of mental health.

Just a reminder that Dr. Paul Conti has generously provided a few diagrams that we include as PDFs in the show note captions. They are completely zero cost to access. And they can help you understand some of the material that was discussed in the first episode of this series, as well as the current episode about how to improve your mental health.

And while those simple PDF diagrams are certainly not necessary in order to understand the material in today's discussion or in the other discussions of this series, many people find them useful. So I encourage you to check out those links in the show note captions. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research rules at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Better Help. Better Help offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online.

I personally have been doing weekly therapy for more than 30 years. And while that weekly therapy was initiated, not by my own request, it was, in fact, a requirement for me to remain in high school. Over time, I really came to appreciate just how valuable doing quality therapy is. In fact, I look at doing quality therapy much in the same way that I look at going to the gym or doing cardiovascular trainings such as running as ways to enhance my physical health.

I see therapy as a vital way to enhance one's mental health. The beauty of Better Help is that they make it very easy to find an excellent therapist. An excellent therapist can be defined as somebody who is going to be very supportive of you in an objective way with whom you have excellent rapport with and who can help you arrive at key insights that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to find.

And because Better Help therapy is conducted entirely online, it's extremely convenient and easy to incorporate into the rest of your life. So if you're interested in Better Help, go to BetterHelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. That's Better Help spelled H-E-L-P. .com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers dozens of guided meditation sessions, mindfulness trainings, yoga, need your sessions, and more.

By now, there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to focus, and can improve our memory. And while there are many different forms of meditation, most people find it difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them.

The Waking Up app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and to carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you. It includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration, as well as things like yoga, need your own, which place the brain and body into a sort of pseudo sleep that allows you to emerge, feeling incredibly mentally refreshed.

In fact, the science around yoga need is really impressive, showing that after a yoga need your session, levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60%, which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work. Another thing I really like about the Waking Up app is that it provides a 30-day introduction course.

So for those of you that have not meditated before or getting back to a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Or if you're somebody who's already a skilled and regular meditator, Waking Up has more advanced meditations in yoga need your sessions for you as well. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to WakingUp.com slash Huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's WakingUp.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion about mental health with Dr. Paul Conti.

Dr. Conti, welcome back. Thank you. In the first episode of this series, you laid out for us in a very structured way what true mental health looks like. Essentially what we should all be aspiring to. And you touched on these themes of agency and gratitude as verb states, really ways of being in the world that allow everybody to have some sense of well-being, to have some sense of themselves in a way that is kind of great. And then, you know, is kind to themselves and to others.

And really to feel good and do good in their life. And without question, this is what people want. You also spelled out for us these two pillars, the structure of self and the function of self, that consist of a number of different things that from which guys are up, or kind of give rise to these feelings of empowerment, humility, agency, and gratitude.

And we reminded us several times that when we are challenged, when we're not doing as well as we would like, that we need to look back to the structure of self and the function of self and ask specific questions in order to arrive or re-arrive at the sense of agency and gratitude.

Yes. And it would be wonderful for us if you could just recap the overall model because it has the components that I just mentioned, but some subtlety and some really key aspects of these pillars, structure of self and function of self. And I think if people keep in mind for today's episode, which is about challenges that people commonly face.

And even if you will, phenotypes that we see commonly out there, for people that haven't heard of phenotypes, phenotypes are the typical appearance of something. So there is the phenotype of the anxious person, the phenotype of the person who just can't seem to get out of a rut. There's the phenotype of the traumatized person. And these things play out differently in different individuals, men and women, boys and girls.

But we're going to visit many of the most common phenotypes out there and think about how to do better, be better, feel better through the lens of the model that we spelled out in episode one. And of course, if people have not seen or heard episode one, today's discussion will still be entirely accessible to them. So in keeping with that, if you could just give us an overview of what this structure of the healthy self looks like as a roadmap for where we're all headed today.

Thank you. Thanks very much. Revisiting the pillars is, I think, the best place to start, because there really are routes to understanding. And if we understand, then we can strategize, we can make change, right? We can make things better. So the first pillar of the structure of self starts with the unconscious mind, right? This incredibly complicated biological supercomputer that's firing a mile a minute, right, underneath the surface in us.

And is throwing up to the surface, all sorts of thoughts and ideas and states that then the conscious mind apprehends. And our awareness comes into play. And then we have defense mechanisms that sort of rise up from the unconscious mind. And they circle and sort of gird themselves around the conscious mind, which they can do in an unhealthy way or in a healthy way or anything in between.

And then the character structure is sort of the nest around all of that. And it's from the character structure that we are engaging in the world in the ways that we're engaging. Right, it's our active engagement with the world around us. And the idea is that the self grows out of that. It grows out of that nest sitting on top of the unconscious mind, to the conscious mind rising above the defense mechanisms and the character structure.

And if we go back to that when we're trying to understand ourselves, you know, trying to understand states of health as well as states of unhappiness or states that aren't healthy. Right, by going back and looking at the structure, we can learn a tremendous amount. And the other side, the other pillar is the function of self. And it really starts with the self awareness, right?

The awareness that, hey, there is an eye, right? I am in the world. Right, there's 24 hours in the day or going to pass today. And I'm going to be doing one thing or another. I'm, so I'm to some very significant extent deciding how am I going to engage in the world around me during that time. Right? So on top of that are the defense mechanisms in action. So defense mechanisms remember unconscious.

So there's a lot then going on inside of us that's determining sort of the field set of options, right? There may be a lot of automaticity that narrows down the set of options of what we may entertain, what we may be aware of, what we may decide. And that could happen for better or for worse, depending upon the health of the defense mechanisms.

But on top of that lies salient so the idea that we would next visit, okay, what are we paying attention to? Right? What's coming from inside? What's coming from outside? And we have to not pay attention to many, many, many things in order to pay attention to whatever our attention is a lighted on at the moment.

So it's a complex process and it's worth looking at very closely if we want to understand ourselves. So after thinking about the defense mechanisms in action, right? The unconscious aspects of how we're engaging with the world, then next to consider is salient.

Where does the mind arrive at at rest? Where does the mind trend towards? Is it something internal? Is it something external? What are all the things we're not paying attention to in order to pay attention to something? And is that thing healthy? Is it not healthy? Is it serving us well?

So there's so much to understand about salience and then the next step beyond that is understanding behavior, right? How are we engaging with the world around us? What are our behavioral choices? What are our automatic behaviors? And then sitting on top of all of that are our strivings.

So we have a sense of wanting something in the world around us and like, what is that and how are we trying to get to it and how does it make us feel? So if we look at the 10 elements, right, the five under the structure of self and the five under the function of self, then what we're really looking at is sort of like looking at 10 cabinets, right? And if we're trying to understand ourselves, whether we're trying to just generally understand ourselves or we're trying to get it a problem, right? Then looking in all 10 of those cabinets makes sense.

Right, some of them will be bare, meaning that they may seem to have very little to do with the problem we're bringing and we kind of maintain an open mind, right? We may be led back to that cabinet, there may be something there. But what usually happens is if we look in all 10 places, we find a couple where there's some rich material to explore sort of the X marks the spot and then we go and we we dig there to sort of mix metaphors we dig in the cabinet where we're going to find something right? And then it leads forward a process of understanding.

And if we're bringing those things into line where we have a healthy structure of self and a healthy function of self and we're aware of all this and we're working on it, we're self aware and we're paying attention to everything built on top of that.

But what we end up with is a sense of humility because one cannot be anything but respectful, compassionate, understanding the complexity of of all of this and understanding how does it manifest itself in us and just the very fact that we can wake our ways in the world, right?

It is so just so impressive and in a way, I think it brings to us a respect, just a respect for being here, navigating the world. And I think of that respect is born humility, the complexity of us, the fact that millions of things are going on underneath the surface, millions of of neuro transmission and endocrinological function, all this is going on under the surface. I'm not even aware of it. And then it kicks up to the surface generates a tremendous amount of respect for the complexity.

And also the diligence and perseverance it takes us to navigate through the world. And I think built upon that understanding is a sense of humility and a sense of empowerment and the humility and empowerment in action, right? So expressed, right, become agency and gratitude and agency and gratitude as you said at the beginning, we're seeing as verbs, right? That's like how we're living life. It's through the lens, so to speak, of agency and gratitude that we're actively living.

And again, I would put forth that when we look at measures of human happiness, right, across disciplines and across time, this is always what we see is is some way of describing how agency and gratitude together as verbs manifest and then create happiness.

It's the state that we're seeking to be in, right? Because from that state of active agency and active gratitude, we achieve what it is that I think we're really searching for. And, you know, there are by infinite words throughout human history to describe what that is, we might choose to use words like peacefulness, right?

And a sense of peace, a sense of contentment, being delighted by things, like just being amazed and impressed by things in the world around us. Like this is a state that we're striving for. And I think when people talk about happiness and what we're really trying to get to, it's this, right?

It's not that these things are passive, right? These things are coming from the active agency, the active gratitude, and they're then interacting with a generative drive within us. We have an aggressive drive, we have a pleasure drive. Like this has been thought about now for a long, long time within mental health and validated in a lot of ways, but what hasn't been validated is that they're the only things, right?

We see human beings striving, we see human beings wanting better for themselves and for the world around them. We see acts of kindness that seem to be rooted to nothing other than the act of kindness. We have within us a drive to know, to understand, to learn, to make better. And that has been described as many, many things across human history.

But I think the words we might choose are a generative drive, a drive to create and to make better. And it's the generative drive as something active within us, right? That is then a lying with agency and gratitude, right? The active ways in which we express ourselves. And then that all together brings us the peace, the contentment, the sense of delight.

Sometimes that may exist in us in a state of rest, right? But very often it's existing in us in a state of activity. And that's why people find the quote unquote happiness, like what people are seeking, not just in meditation. Sometimes we can find it there, but people also find it in action, right? They find it in doing that thing that they love to do or taking care of someone and learning something.

So when we look at all of this, we can then we can then have a route of understanding what is going on inside of us and how we can make the changes that let us be in this state, which is really the state that we are seeking. I really appreciate that you highlight that agency and gratitude are verb states from which peace, contentment and delight emerge. And also the way that you explain the generative drive that is distinct from aggressive drives and pleasure drives that exist in all of us.

I'm smiling because a number of examples of peace, contentment and delight while in action come to mind. I mean, for me, podcasting and in particular preparing for a podcast and a mind, the literature and figure out where the gems reside and where the confusion could emerge. And all of that brings about such peace, contentment and delight for me, but it's anything but passive.

It's likewise yesterday, I had the experience of running into a puppy. It's been well since I've owned a dog and dogs are delightful puppies are particularly delightful. I had the experience of seeing you like that when you ran into the puppy. And you did and and I'm still buzzing from that short interaction with the puppy downstairs or the waymer and her puppy.

It just that I don't know why, but I just delight in animals of most all kinds, not a fan of reptile sorry reptile fans so much, but I just drive so much energy from it and felt like life energy in the way that animal is sort of intentionally scattered as amusing to me as compared to the dog that he will eventually be, which is going to be more linear in his thinking.

Like it encapsulates so much of the other things I love like brain development, etc. Anyway, I highlight those examples because there's nothing passive about it. It's pure delight and joy for me. And it intersects with other delights and joys. And I think that as you describe agency and gratitude, peace, contentment and delight in these generative forces as well as other forces that exist in us.

I think it's really critical that people understand that these are not states that you sit down and place yourself into, although perhaps one could through reflection or meditation or waking up from a really great night's sleep, things of that sort. But that these are things that we can find ourselves awash in if we are doing the right things and those things can oftentimes be very challenging.

So assuming I understand the way the model is spelled out correctly, I'm more and more delighted at the fact that this is not just accessible in one domain, but is accessible in many, many different domains for everybody. This is not something unique to my experience, even though I give examples from my own life, but that we really all do have access to this if we're looking in those cupboards, those 10 cupboards and asking the right questions.

And to maybe come even a little further on the experience of you and the dog, right? So it was an experience of delight, right? And you enjoyed it and brought a sense of peace and contentment like all of that happens.

Right? Think about what that's linked to, like I believe there's a strong sense of agency in you that you are enacting. There's a strong gratitude in you that you're enacting your handling your life in a way and also for all of us good things always come with good fortune, but it comes with our strivings and our achievements that you're in a place to delight in that.

Right? If you're unhappy, like I don't like what I'm doing, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, right? Then there's no room in you to to find the delight, right? And the delight that you find is also very much linked to the generative drive, right? That it makes me think of how you you loved and nurtured Cacello.

Right? So you have it in you to love and nurture a dog and you have done that in a really wonderful way and that generative drive is part and parcel of the delight you feel when you see a dog because you love dogs and you think about nurturing and it all comes together the agency and the gratitude expressed as verbs put you in a position to have that sense of delight, which is so intertwined with your generative drive with the sense of caretaking a sense of creating the beyond self.

Because although you enjoyed and loved Cacello, you enjoyed and loved his happiness, right? So it all comes together and I think it's interesting because in some ways it's a simple example, but like that's life, you know, life has its its big moments, but so much of our lives are at the smaller moments that link together and I think that smaller moment becomes a big example.

I appreciate that you mentioned Cacello for listeners of this podcast that have tuned into early episodes, a Cacello was the source of the background snoring for those of you that haven't you can go check. He's a 90 pound English bulldog master who who had many skills, the best of which was a snoring.

So in addition to the generative drive, which is something that we certainly want to talk more about today, you mentioned these other drives aggressive drives and pleasure drives and much of what we're talking about today is going to be where people can go wrong or where people struggle.

We are also, of course, going to go deeply into where people succeed and in particular where people can ask questions of themselves, in particular, what is working for them and why as a route to understanding how to sift through those cupboards and understand what's not working and why and come up with real actionable answers and and the ability to move forward.

So if you would, could you tell us a little bit more about drives generally like, you know, when I hear drives, I can't help as a neuroscientist but default to okay, the dopamine circuit or the the endogenous opioid circuit or the serotonergic circuit, but you know, how do you conceptualize drives within us and and then perhaps you could tell us what the nature of aggressive drives and pleasure drives and generative drives.

So the concept of a drive, the definition of a drive is is something that's intrinsic to humans. So we could look at it as a motivation, right? I mean, we don't just lie on the ground and do nothing until we passively die, right?

So something is going on inside of us that is driving us to do something other than that and historically, the thinking in the field arising from early psychodynamic principles of the theory in the field that has really dominated the field either directly or indirectly in so many ways has been that there are two drives within us that there there's aggression and pleasure.

And again, these are just words, right? So we could put apply many, many words, which is why of course we want to define what that means, right? So aggression, even though we're using that word for it because the word for it is commonly used, right? But it means it means sort of forward active engagement, right? So so a good healthy amount of aggression using that word for the drive would be a strong sense of agency, right?

So so too little aggression can be a problem, right? Then the person isn't bringing themselves to bear, right? So there's too little in the way of self determination, forward movement, empowerment agency, right?

And in the same way too much of this drive becomes actual aggression. So the idea that I want more and if I can't get it in certain ways, I'll just take it, right? So so that so it starts to become, you know, what we more map to the word aggression, which would be something negative in most cases like like a desire or tendency to harm.

Sure, as aggressive drives get higher, which you see why they're in us because let's say we're defending ourselves or you're defending a family member, right? Or like an entire family, right? Then it makes sense to have high levels of aggression if like your family is threatened, right? So so those drives are in us with with potentially those high levels for a reason, but we certainly access very high levels of aggression without the indication of preservation of life.

Preservation of life or preservation of safety. So so the thought is that's a drive in us and that gets us up and off the ground so to speak right and that the other drive then is pleasure, which again doesn't just mean that we all want to be heatiness, right?

So pleasure could be even the pleasure of relief and safety, right? Like we're like, you know, we're all back in the cave together and we roll the stone in front of the door. We're safe, you know, throughout human development, you know, pleasure comes in a lot of ways. It can come through the pleasure of food or other people, you know, friendship, romance, sex.

In other words, we can achieve pleasure. It can be relief of things that are unpleasant, you know, relief of pain, but there's a drive towards this in humans, which again really does make sense and and too little of it again can be problematic because the person then isn't motivated to sort of seek things because they're not anticipating or don't receive gratification and too much of a drive for pleasure can also create problems.

So we can kind of see how these two drives like, okay, they get us up and off the ground so to speak, but the question is, do they explain everything right and it's a very important question because if they explain everything, then there's not really, there's not room for behaviors and choices that are beyond the self right there's not an explanation for the person who I'll give you an example of.

A person I've taken care of who's just a very strong swimmer, you know, knows how to swim and swim throughout his life who was in a place I saw video of it where there'd been a hurricane and the waves were so frightening, you know, they were just huge, this huge surf and there were people who had gotten dragged out and you just see him, he runs into the water, right, he runs in and he goes and he was really at risk.

He needs to be saved himself, but he saved them and I do not believe you can explain that through these drives. I don't think you can say, well, that was, he was aggressive, he wanted to go and do something, you know, that was imposing himself on the world or he got pleasure in thinking, I'm strong enough to go do this, I mean, I think we're really gyrating, you know, we're contorting ourselves, right, in order to explain it that way.

If we think there's a goodness in that man's heart, like I know there's a goodness in that man's heart, I know him, right, and that goodness sees him in the moment and you know, he knows that maybe he can save them, maybe he can, he's not sure, but maybe he can.

So the next thing, you know, he's in the water. And I think things like the love and nurturing of other people, you know, of children, love and nurturing of animals of plants, right, like the things inside of us that we can explain with those two drives.

And I think they have led to a very, sort of darker way of just conceiving of humans, you know, I think it's a reason why now, you know, you look at us in the modern day and age, we come at humans through the lens of pathology, right, I mean, there's a very, very thick book that if a person is assessing another person is thinking about like, okay, what numbers in that book apply, right, which is like, that's not the way to go about understanding humans.

And I think if we just think there are those two drives, we're not doing justice to humans, right, one, I think it's not true. I think it's evident that it's not true. And then if we're framing it in a way that's not true, we are not appropriately respectful of humans. And if we come from what I believe to be the truth that there is a generative drive in us, a drive for the beyond self, a drive to make things better, whether it has anything really directly to do with me or not.

And as with the other drives, there can be more or less in people, the combination of nature and nurture, you know, what what genetically is in us a predisposition, you know, based upon the genetic lineage that comes down to us and the recombination and now we're a unique person with the unique set of drives, but they are impacted by the genetics and then they're impacted by life experience, so more strongly formative life experience, right.

So the younger the person that is sort of deeper the impact of events, they have nurturing versus abuse, right, on the array on the relative weighting of drives within people, but ultimately we get to these three drives and how they're functioning in a person being a way of understanding and assessing like how healthy or not healthy the person is.

And then we look back to those 10 cupboards, right, for the answers, if we're finding things that we don't like, these drives are at a balance and they're and hear the problems they're causing so very, very concrete issues, right of problems in people's lives, we can look and see, where is that out of balance.

And if it's out of balance, there's something in those pillars that are not in the right place, we can then go back and look in all those covers for like, oh, where do we dig to find the answer, right, we learn things we bring things more into balance, right. So the pillars are in a healthier place and then what sits on top of it as you use or geyser, right, the guys are that then comes up and floats everything on top of it can do that in a healthy way.

Yeah, during episode one, we touched on some of the similarities between understanding the self and building towards a healthy or healthiest version of self where agency and gratitude are these states that are being expressed.

And one of the themes there was this idea, you know, people perhaps want to be healthy so that they live a long time, but presumably they also want to be healthy so that they can walk up flights of stairs, pick up their kids, move objects, not get injured, perhaps even do sport or.

And of course, some people want to be healthy for aesthetic reasons as well, and if we were having a discussion about physical health, we could dress the major pillars there, which were items within the cover like, you know, most people want some ability to have endurance or stamina to walk some distance or maybe even run some distance as I mentioned before walk up a flight of stairs have some strength, some degree of flexibility, certainly some mobility, maybe even dynamic mobility, et cetera.

And in order to address those or improve upon those, they could look in those covers and say, well, how much, you know, running, swimming, you know, long form cardiovascular exercise am I doing per week? How many steps am I taking per day? How many times a week do I lift objects that are slightly heavier than is comfortable for me to lift, et cetera, that it's very tangible, very concrete.

Here you're making the psyche and the self and mental health very much concrete in some of the same way saying there are 10 covers that one can look in and these drives as you refer to them as generative drive aggressive drive and pleasure drive.

You'll probably tell us in a few minutes can be expressed to varying degrees and different people and how that shows up and what that looks like and I just want to frame this in people's minds as very similar to addressing whether or not OK if somebody can run very long distances, but they're always a, you know, having aches and pains or they they feel weak or they are weak.

There are good reasons for that they're overemphasizing one form of exercise the expression is more long lines of endurance and stamina not strength or vice versa the power lifter who can lift 750 pounds from the floor in a deadlift but walks up two flights of stairs and is, you know, belly breathing and has to stop at the top of the stairs. It's obvious in the physical realm it's slightly more cryptic or more cryptic in the psychological realm, but here it's becoming concrete for us.

So I think it's very interesting and very ironic right so the field that I'm in the field of psychiatry has historically wanted to be sort of part of the rest of medicine or like the rest of medicine and what I believe it's ended up doing is glorifying a taxonomy.

Right glorifying a category mechanism of understanding human beings so in the way that that if OK if I'm a practicing general medicine and you come in and you're congested and and I determine like oh you have you have bacterial sinusitis right so so now I've made a diagnosis and now I know what I'm going to do about that right so so the OK I'm going to prescribe an antibiotic now the thought comes in of like what antibiotic right but identify sinusitis.

And if I sign you said it's not you need an antibiotic is like kind of how medicine works right so the thought was psychiatry is going to categorize everything right so we'd say OK I've listened to you like I know your number or your numbers right and then once I've given you the numbers now I know what to do I prescribe this medicine that medicine these many sessions of a certain kind of psychotherapy and like that doesn't work right it doesn't work in mental health it may I mean she's it's not that it never works but if you're going to try and understand.

People like it's different the problem of self like if I have a lack of confidence in one area of life and not in others right that's a significant issue it is not like bacterial sinusitis where then you know OK arrow goes to prescribe antibiotic and I think what is ironic is that this

route of approach right actually does bring psychiatry mental health into line with the rest of medicine right which is why you can make that parallel and you know fits well right when you're making the parallel to physical health and to I want to be healthy OK what is the components of that what am I doing to achieve that if something's not the way I want let me go back and look at those components it may be because it's more tangible sort of essentially easier

to comprehend right is more it's more concrete but but I don't in a sense see it is cryptic just less obvious right but if we go and we look at it and we say oh like that really makes sense right and and in a sense it makes sense that it makes sense right if there's a mechanism of understanding that applies to lots and lots of things that are more concrete why would a similar kind of mechanism like understand what the components are

understand what's built on top of them like this I believe is how psychiatry actually fits with the rest of medicine not by glorifying attacks on me but by coming through the lens of understanding I couldn't understand more and I think that what's so reassuring is that both in terms of creating physical health across the various domains of you know heart health long health endurance strength etc. cognitive health as well as mental health is

verbs you know comes back to action items that we each and all should engage in in order to arrive at the states and you know ways of being that we all want to be right we want to feel healthy look healthy you know et cetera we want to be happy right I know very few people who don't want to be happy I mean certainly is there people who give up but I will talk about that today and routes out of that but

at the end of the day it's all about looking in those bins asking specific questions and then moving forward in specific actions to get to the place of empowerment humility agency gratitude contentment delight etc. as opposed to simply using words and understanding to arrive at insight and then stopping there and expecting everything to change and I think that's where a lot of people are

confused about psychology therapy and psychiatry and and as you mentioned psychiatry has its own shadows if you will within it where the use of drugs which certainly can be very useful even life saving often times is is seen as a fix all that somehow could reorder everything within the cupboards and make the recipe just right when in fact so we'll talk about today that that is generally not the best route but again with the

understanding that drugs can be very powerful tools say a role yeah right based important we understand what role is appropriate for them and that's where we often go straight I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors AG one AG one is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that meets all of your foundational nutrition needs I started taking AG one way back in 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the

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if you'd like to try AG one go to drink AG one dot com slash human to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D three K to again that's drink AG one dot com slash human to claim the special offer so as we move forward here and defining and helping people gain

a lot of a better word agency over their own mental health and self understanding and defining for them what what action items to take you know I'd like to ask you about some of the things that I observe in the world and hear a lot about in particular from the audience of this podcast you know it's obvious to me that people vary in terms of their level of aggressive drive pleasure drive and presumably generative drive as well

one common question is how do I become more motivated right you know and of course that opens up a bunch of other questions like our people afraid of failure and that's why they're not motivated people afraid of success

whether or not motivated is there some underlying childhood trauma or unconscious process that's driving that fear and so on but if we were to take the psychiatrist perspective your perspective if someone comes to you and says you know I you know I just don't really feel like trying it's you know

schools hard school loans are you know are excessive which is true by the way you know it's not even clear that with a degree I can do much you know or I had a series of failures and in the work domain or in the relationship domain and they're just feeling way down as if it's not worth trying you know what does that tell you in terms of where to look and what does that tell you in terms of their drives I mean do we conclude

something about their innate level of aggressive drive where their pleasure drive or their generative drive I mean I think there are many such people out there and then we'll consider some other kind of phenotypic examples

so it's a great example because any good clinician right could could hear that story and then and have thoughts about it right that that could and would hopefully be helpful right without necessarily referring to drives right so so I think you can anchor any set of assessments any evaluation any

attempt at understanding to drives right but but it doesn't have to be that way so for example you might ask that person more questions about what they're doing how they spend their time because you're telling me about someone who's not in getting enjoyment or gratification out of anything right and and that then becomes of interest to me right is is there is there something this person does enjoy right something they'd rather be doing like did they

go to college and take on a bunch of loans because they thought that was better because they thought they were going to do something that now they actually don't want to do right or that opportunity isn't there another frustrated like what is inside this person that might seem different than that and again the answers could be complicated it could be maybe that person enjoys what they're doing but the cost of living where they are is so high that they still feel miserable there's a sense of

deprivation and then that gets back map to like I don't not get any pleasure out of anything right so the answer could be as simple as you strategize with the person of you know for example does a person like that move you move to a different area so so like there's so many ways of looking at this and so many ways of understanding this but you're describing someone to me who who is kind of really complaining that nothing is feeling good right nothing's providing a sense of

enjoyment or pleasure right so I would probably be interested in that first and think maybe the pleasure drive is higher than what's being fulfilled right maybe the pleasure drive is is low and that's an issue in and of itself we sort of learn those things right maybe the aggressive drive is low and you know if that person just put a little more energy into it right like they could be in a different place right so you try and help the person

understand themselves so that you can make change and again that understanding doesn't have to be anchored to to the drives but I do believe the drives are at the root of all understanding because if you sit with that person and you talk to that person then you're going to be able to understand what is out of balance right either in the actual array of the

drives or in how they're being being experienced because again if you have a high pleasure drive to for example and it's not gratified right like that represents a problem right you know what what about people who can experience some pleasure or can keep busy say for instance on social media or playing video games and I should also say perhaps it's bringing them to a place of peace

and delight but in some sense it's not really generative right it you know I'm not going to cast judgment and say that video games and social media are all a waste of time I mean I'm on social media trying to provide value to people and learnings and and I drive value and learnings from other accounts as well but you know there are these milestones if you will in life I mean not that everyone has to

you know go to college and get married and have a family man there are a lot of different paths through life that I would consider successful but in some sense we you know there are milestones like we want to move forward there's this phenomenon nowadays a lot of young people so-called failure to launch like that they're not leaving home or they're not finding a vocation they're not they're not feeling as if they're good anything or they have the sense that unless you're going to be a

you know like top one percent in something it's not worth trying but they can still find you know what most people describe as pleasures like they might enjoy food maybe a little too much they enjoy alcohol maybe a little too much they enjoy social media or video games maybe a little too much I say a little too much because it it's providing more or less a

a sink or a or a reservoir for their aggressive and pleasure drives that's not moving them forward in the standard milestones of life I hear about that a lot I see that a lot and you know so it's a slightly more complex phenotype than describe before is just simply the a motivated or non-motivated person but you know what does one you know what do you think of

of that of the phenotype I just described and because we're unique right each person is unique although we fit categories right so there are categories a person there could fit that could be different for what I'm saying right but I think most people to say on balance right what's what is most prominent right I mean what is most prominent in that situation is there's something out of balance in the

way that's a lot of drive right and what you see a lot of times is the person is a generative drive in them that's higher than their ability to realize that drive the generative drive then is frustrated so I give an example is a real true story of a person who worked very very hard gone to school for a long time and it achieved a very high paying job and like that was the goal right it's a prestigious job as a high paying job and the person for

that was doing quite well at it and you know things what relatively rapidly in a negative directions maybe for a little while the person is doing OK then the person becomes very negligent of themselves in their environment when they're not at the job so you know the houses of mess things are dirty the person is wasting time with

things so this is a person who enjoys it wasn't exactly video games I was saying let's say it could have been right well enjoys them to a certain degree and can really gain pleasure and feel good about the time spent right but start spending too much time right now what was pleasurable starts becoming a distraction mechanism right and then what that transition to was over use of alcohol right so now you have either

something that is actually destructive and was negative to job performance right towards the person this wasn't a person who was drinking a lot before and this is a person who is miserable when they were drinking or they were sort of wasting their time right and we're aware of all of this well there's a very clear problem which is that that person had no

interest in what they were doing none whatsoever it felt like the majority of waking hours were spent in an automaton like way but being awake and aware of the tedium of it the frustration of it the professional side so they they said they had very little intrinsic curiosity or desire to do the job that they were successfully doing right which comes out only after exploration because it seems

like what's going on with this person like the person has a good job and their life was going really really well and they're doing well financially and you know is this person trying to now you know overly indulge themselves right because that why they're drinking what's going on right and what you feel is that this person has a strong generative drive and it was it met one little bit by what he was doing which was creating such frustration inside that the person was either taking

himself online or doing something that was punitive and self injurious and like this is a real story that the person exchange that job for a job that paid a tenth of what the job they had paid and the change in the person's life was amazing like I didn't know this guy could smile right he became happy he loved what he was doing he sold the larger house bought a smaller house kept it beautifully like he was happy

that's what he needed to be happy because then the generative drive in him he loved what he was doing right gets enacted it gets expressed and then other things can come then into line right he's not being over aggressive towards himself and drinking too much you know because he's saying oh to help with you to the world around him and to himself right he's not taking something that serves a purpose in his life like again if the example

had been video games it would be like yeah great you enjoy doing that X amount of time and like go do that and get gratification from it as opposed to then over relying on it and then it's not providing gratification becomes a distraction so those things came back into balance in his life but there had to be the understanding and I think there's a lot of that and people

who have a generative drive in them that they feel is frustrated by a world around them that isn't cooperating now do I think we can understand that and change that in the vast majority of people who are in that place yes but it has to be looked at first right because when it's not always that it's just that a lot of the time right so it has to be understood what is it in that person and then how do you

go back to those pillars and look at what's going on that the person is in that place because the world can bring us a lot of difficulties right and that person who now is saddled with a lot more loans than they expect like I have tremendous compassion for that and sympathy for that like that's real right so people can be up against a lot of things and that's just one of them right but it doesn't mean that life can't be okay right it doesn't mean that but the person has to feel that there's some

way they have to understand enough about themselves is okay this is what this is and I kind of see what this is and why and how I'm here and from there I can start to plot a route to something that is better because yes we have our difficulties and we can have a lot of them right but it's for the vast majority of us it's not like they're not surmountable we have to just understand them and let's say if that person goes and so I'm going to get some help and they go and someone says okay

right you get ten sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy and trying to like how can that person think differently then they'll feel differently look cognitive behavioral therapy has its place right but it's not going to solve that right like that person needs to understand something about themselves not redirect their thoughts to better places right so if the person gets a reflex because that reflex works well for the system right it

refucks works well for the system that's treating that person for the medical system the insurance system that person isn't helped one bit right and maybe a medicine can help right maybe a medicine helps to just take down the anxiety and the tension in the person in the person can sort of think more

about it and and truly medicine did help this person because the idea of leaving the job I'm leaving the prestige I'm leaving the money is that okay to do like it generated a lot of anxiety and it helped to kind of bring the temperature down a little bit of that so that he could

think about it engage in therapy ultimately navigate to where he wanted to be then we get back away from the medicine so like medicine has a role but if you just got medicine I mean what are the possibility what are the odds of that helping like zero right because it's not going to

make the answers unless somehow the person feels a little bit better and figures it out on their own it's not how it works right so medicine has its place but a kind of therapy that recognizes the limitations of medicine in most conditions and is designed to really help the person understand like that's what we need.

Well the example you gave is a spectacular one because as you mentioned medication had its place perhaps even redirection of thought in some sense had its place because as I recall under the pillar of function of self one of the key items is salience you know what we pay attention to internally or externally what are internal narratives are but in staying with the example of this individual again as a as a phenotypic example for everybody to learn something from

the asking of better questions about oneself is really what leads to the understanding so that like better forms of inquiry these are the these better forms of inquiry better questions are really the cardiovascular exercise the strength training the

flexibility training the mobility training coordination training of physical health just translate to mental health right so it's so interesting right because think about it in the example I gave both the therapy part from through the system right the the CBT had a place right and the medicine part also had a place so both of those things have their role but if we build the whole story of like this is what this is and this is how you're going to be helped around those things we

don't help that person at all in fact we ultimately if you take on balance you take all cameras we end up doing harm well in some ways about we stay with the analogy of physical health it would be like the person who wants to get in shape and then they get a I'm not picking on peloton as a brand but just a stationary bike and they they pedal every morning and they lose weight their blood pressure goes down they're doing better but then at some point if we we know for certain

that if you just do the same form of exercise over and over again like sooner or later you're going to get overuse injuries so then there's like the lower back piece and another piece and and you become out of balance there's just but you know I guess this is stealing from the Lance Armstrong book but it's not about the bike right you know it's not about the bike it's about the elevation of heart rate it's about the whatever other healthy

activities go along with exercising first thing in the morning and the all the things that you're not doing as a consequence of exercising in the morning so it seems to me that these these better lines of inquiry as the path to

better mental health a better life that sit under these pillars of structure or self function or self are really the key so in this example right the parallel that you made is even more dramatic right it wouldn't be that the stationary bike right because the stationary bike is achieving a lot of

ends right it would be more like telling the person you know you should walk more briskly when you're going up stairs right like that's a good idea but that's not going to make the change right so the idea that some

CBT some medicine makes sense it's more like that right it's not that walking more briskly up the stairs isn't a good thing it's that we can't build the story around your whole health is going to change based upon that and then that's that's a problem then if the person thinks just walk more briskly

up the stairs and you'll be healthier because when it doesn't work now they've failed right and this gets used a lot in mental that person failed this therapy failed that medicine right and I think it's so also ironic because that's often what the person internalizes well they failed because we set them up 100% for failure right because we took things that have their role at least potentially have their role

we built the whole story around them because that story is convenient for the systems that are providing the care it's it's convenient for the health care systems is convenient for the insurers CBT packages very nicely and you could see how you know if you start changing thoughts and how they make you feel like you know you can get some movement on the surface even if there's no movement underneath right and again I'm not saying CBT is bad

but to see it as the whole answer guarantees failure in so many situations same thing with the medicine if you build the whole story just because it's convenient and and by and large medicines are cheaper than people right so so you can prescribe medicines very reflexively psychiatrists with 15 minutes with a patient that they can't then see back for a couple of months like how does that go well the answer is it only goes well the way a broken clock

is right a couple of times you know twice a twice a day right I mean sometimes it goes well or just somehow it works out and that person can do a little bit of therapy in 15 minutes and choose the right medicines but by and large we do those things because they're convenient for the systems even though that's why like people don't get better like we think they would that's why they stay in systems that's why they come in and out of emergency rooms

that's why they're not able to stop the drugs that end up you know only being stopped when the person dies this happens all the time and we don't stop it because we're coming from a perspective that is so limited it's not saying let's take a step back and look can we really like help someone can we really help that person understand can we help that person make change which ultimately would be of course so much better for the person

and so much better for society but is also better if we just look at bottom line dollars and cents right because the short term view of it is cheaper today to have a psychiatrist at a 15 minute appointment reflexively prescribed medicine that is cheaper today is that cheaper across time when that person is utilizing more resources or they're in and out of emergency rooms it's so short-sighted with which fits with many ways and how our society works

right that we want gratification and we want gratification rapidly that's why a person would accept that their problems could be changed by a medicine right we're kind of conditioned that way well then of course there's the the cost we don't see which is that person doesn't get the opportunity

to express their generative drive and so the and the consequence of that is incalculable right yes and if we take a step back and we look at that I think that what we will see is that we have it's not quite like painted ourselves into a corner but it's like you know the idea that if there's a beautiful tapestry that's the size of the wall right that you can see that only standing back from it right I mean this goes back you know I think a couple thousand

years like this this sort of thought and idea but if you come up too close to it then you can't see what it means anymore and we're up so close to it that we're thinking well okay how could one parameter change and you know can can this person get a 15 minute visit sooner rather than later or how about this medicine instead of that and then it's like our noses are right up against the tapestry and we don't see that we're not doing right by individual

people a lot of the time and we're not doing right by society which then if you stop and think about it we're not doing right by us is any one of us could be in that position and many of us have been in that position being on the other side of things and really needing help and needing to understand so any of us can be there so if we're failing a lot of individual people and we're failing the society it doesn't matter who we are listening to this like ultimately we're failing ourselves

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$150 off their pod three cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's eight sleep dot com slash Huberman let's therefore talk about what does work you know and again placing on the shelf the fact that medications can help

and CBT cognitive behavioral therapy can't help but it they are just but two components of a much larger picture the map that we describe briefly at the beginning of today's episode in that is by the way available as a downloadable PDF in the show no captions I've people want to

look at it visually and that was described in a lot of detail in episode one which I hope people will take the time to listen to because it's so rich with depth of understanding and I'm certain everyone will learn a ton about themselves and others simply by listening to your words

absolutely certain of that that map provides essentially a description of the bins the cupboards to look in to arrive at better answers and even the sorts of questions that one might ask if we could just talk about that in the context of the example that you gave of this person

who made this really incredible choice to move away from this higher paying job you know they were over indulging in certain maladaptive behaviors and again we will use this example but this example is about one of an infinite number of examples that we could use of a person

who's you know in a struggle right they're doing something that's not working for them and they're also not doing things that they know they ought to be doing okay this is important for people to understand because they're going to be people out there they're thinking oh like this poor guy

like he's making tons of money poor him you know but you know he was experiencing deep miseric lack of satisfaction so it could it could have been the reverse example like the person isn't in a job that that brings about enough wealth for them to thrive right because they're

financial realities to life so it's just one example right but it's a good one I think because the person left the money right so it's like what would make you leave that right and it's what would make you leave that is if you're miserable in the situation with that and you're

happy in the situation without it right so it's about leaving misery and finding happiness so if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit of your mindset during those sessions meaning the sorts of questions you ask him about the structure of his self or to reveal the structure

of his self and the function of his self that allowed the both of you to eventually set him down this far better course you know what's better than moving away from frustration and over indulgence and maladaptive behavior to deep satisfaction peace, contentment and delight and

a generative human being right so we can look in each of those ten cabinets right so let's say we look in the unconscious mind cabinet there's not much there right when the person was growing up it was very clear that having more money and having a job that impressed people

was was an important thing he internalizes some of it so some of its unconscious but by and large he's aware of it and that was real to you how he you know you would ask him a question about you know like tell me about your upbringing and he would say yeah like you know money was

important to my family but we always felt like we had you know enough that he wasn't super wealthy but had enough and so when you say there wasn't a lot there do you mean that there was no kind of like x marks the spot or like like blinking red light like whoa there's something really

in his unconscious mind that's in his way is it do I have that right but more because it was conscious right so so he was aware that it was very much like beat into him right like this is a way to be okay right is to have a prestigious job that makes a lot of money right but he's

aware of it if he weren't aware of it we have to bring that to light right but he was a way to look at has a big impact on me it makes it hard to step away like I know I don't really care that much about the money but I also kind of do you know sure I would say money can't

buy happiness but it certainly can buffer certain stressors in life right I mean nobody you know sometimes you hear people have a lot of money saying like money can't buy happiness because you know the lot of miserable rich people but it's like you know it's very different to have a two-night nurses to take care of a baby then to be the person who has to stay up all night taking care of a kid especially or a single mother versus a mother that has a partner who's who's willing to

pitch in you know like you can just can't compare and why that's that's absolutely true in this case we're just looking at money as money like as an endpoint right the idea that no matter no matter what right how how secure and safe like is more money better right and he had an intrinsic

overvalue of that right so so it made it harder to step away from it because he he was over valuing it he knew he was over valuing it just in and of itself not even for what it gets you right but for the psychological meaning of it right then we look at his defensive structures if we

look in that cupboard you see that they've they've really shifted right they shifted from healthy places now they're sort of twisted and distorted and he's doing a lot of denial a lot of avoidance a lot of rationalization right there's he's enacting a lot of aggression towards

himself and he's he's he's doing a lot of projecting right he's he's harming himself with the alcohol he's punishing himself like so his defensive structure it can be healthy we know that because it was healthier right but then we see that it is so twisted so we learn a lot from that right a lot is

conscious in this person the defensive structure can be healthy because it was healthy but eventually it was healthy well it was healthy before I see it was healthy before so you know that it can be healthy again right he has it in him to have healthy defenses they just started getting away from him as he felt less and less satisfied with his job and more and more angry with himself and more and more miserable

this is a really key point for me and everyone else to understand yeah throughout the years of high school and college and friends and things of that sort I would hear this like I used to be really good at fitness or I used to you know if I had a dollar for every time someone said you know

you should have seen me in high school you know like like the person who lets themselves go and arguably is very busy with with professional duties and family duties and you can understand why their time is more compressed than it was when they were in high school but nonetheless you know

you know I hear these sorts of things all the time like I used to have this sense of like I could do things or that like things could work out or that and then it's as if there was a previous version of themself that is completely atrophied and the new version of themself or the later version of themselves rather just simply like doesn't have access to that anymore but the impact of trauma yeah right okay whether it's big trauma or it's you know a big event or it's multiple things like

oh the world is isn't rewarding me I'm trying the world's not rewarding me I'm trying the world's not rewarding me then people become dispirited right demoralized right so it's the trauma of that that takes away the the sense of self the sense of agency like I thought I could do things before now I don't think I can do things right but nothing is really changed in me I mean that's that's a problem right and it's a problem the vast majority of times it's born of trauma.

Does that necessarily mean early childhood trauma or supposed it could be later life trauma I mean one of the things that I like about what you're saying so much is that you know you the psychiatrist is here's I used to be able to do something well or feel well and and that's like it sounds like

is a signal it's really a beacon of health that still exists in the person but that they're out of touch with I think for for most people when they think about themselves or people who talk about how they used to be functional in some domain and they're no longer functional in that domain any longer it sounds as if like things are fundamentally broken like like is this is of a piece of them that was that was functioning like drifted out of their body and left right but I love the optimism

right because I think so much of what we're interested in covering today is not just what's not working and why but also what's working and why and what used to work and why and and the idea that you know within these covers there can be the discovery of of problems clearly that's why

one goes to the coverage as we're defining it but that there are a lot of answers there are there are rest the ingredients for success already exist within us right especially if we know we've had that ability before right because we know that we had it before so think about in this

man he felt that he couldn't make change like now he's stuck right I got a lot of things done I was able to get myself into this school and achieve this and you know and then get this job like he could do all those things but now he feels like he can't do anything to make himself happy

so like we know he could do that he had a strong sense of agency he doesn't now right and and like people often do they feel a sense of loss like naturally I've had this happen in myself like it feels like something's cut out of you and there's something hollow I had that

thing and now I don't right hence the unbroken I'm hopeless the things that we hear over and over and over again so think about the shift in this person to like what's actually going on which isn't that hard to discern we just pay attention to it so that if we run up the structure

of self we say okay not a lot of it is rooted in the unconscious mind right there are are problems of overvaluing certain things but they're in the conscious mind he knows like in his household over dinner it was you know dad or mom you know being proud of some dollar

amount that he achieved so that narrative exists and he's like yeah like money was a big deal in my family kind of thing right by the way I'm not speaking about my family but rarely were their discussions about money they were discussions on other things of course but in this hypothetical

and he knows he overvalues it right he knows independent of what money buys and what he needs and all that he just puts too much importance in money and he knows that right so okay their conscious mind issues he's pretty aware of them and they're pretty kind of set in him

like those are the issues and they're there okay we learned that then we go look at his defensive structure boy that's very very helpful to talk about wow like you at a very healthy defensive structure what were you doing before a lot of sublimation right today you explain

sublimation take anxiety attention or something something negative in the self or there could be negative any channel it towards something positive right he channeled that energy towards learning right he channeled some of the aggressive drive right into a sense of agency

that that got achievement so you looking said right those you know that that network right of of defense mechanisms that comes up out of the unconscious mind was like looking pretty good right it was pretty clear light was coming through it in a you know in a way that wasn't

distorted and now we can look at wow like that things are pretty different now right as as he's saying no it's okay like what do you mean I I spent 10 hours of my weekend utterly wasting time and what what's wrong with that right or you know he's rationalizing

even that he likes to drink when he doesn't because he so mattered himself like the defensive structure now is twisted right so he can say okay we that's a big observation right and then the character structure when we look at that we find a person who's pretty good

at figuring out and understanding things and coming right up to the precipice of change but is a long history of then difficulty making the change right I know it and I'm on the verge of it but I don't I can't bring myself to do it like that's in his character structure

by the way such a common thing I mean people that know better know they know better sometimes you almost have to wonder whether or not it's like it's like a medication in the pocket like they could take it if they wanted to that that might even give them some comfort but they just don't do it they just don't engage in the proper actions to move their life from one place to the next right and if we look then at the level of strivings like he does know what he wants like he wants a feeling of

contentment is really what he wanted was a feeling of contentment a feeling of like I'm taking good care of myself I'm doing something that's a value I'm enjoying doing it like he wanted those things and even when we talked more he had ideas of what jobs would do that in the beginning he said he had no ideas what he really meant that he said to me but was also saying to himself as I have no ideas of jobs that would meet these requirements for me that pay as much as

the one I have right so but but within him which we got to were that where he knew that there were jobs that would make him happy he just had to get over that they were lower paying so think of what we learn about that there's nothing lost in this man there's nothing cut out of him but he's not damaged he's not hopeless and now he can understand that you know he that he understands himself actually pretty well right and and his conscious mind is is apprehending

pretty well what's going on and where he wants to go but boy as I said but boy as he hasn't taken good care of himself the defensive structure gets sort of warped and then it makes it a lot harder to take care of yourself it's like making other problems in life and he starts like feeling lousy about

himself like maybe I can't do much of anything right why because work isn't going as well because he's drinking too much and the role performance goes down right so we can see that and then you know what's of most interest there is that there's a character structure that can come right up to the precipice but not but not pull the trigger so to speak on what the thing the thing the person wants to do because now we start getting okay and understanding of what's

actually going on right and then if we look at function of self let's look in those cabinets too right to help him be more aware of there's an eye here like which he was pretty well aware of but not enough like there's a person here I'm shepherding through 24 hours in the day right like I am an

eye and I'm aware of what's going on inside of me and it can make me happy you can make me miserable like let's let's let's be more aware of that how did he go about doing that because I find this this first step within addressing the

function of self you know self awareness and really understanding that there's a there's an eye there's a me and I'm moving myself through life I find this to be so interesting and on the one hand kind of obvious like okay there's a me like tangible thing you look in the mirror you see yourself

but at the same time it's a bit abstract I think to me and to many people out there like how does one go about building up a sense of self in a way that provides positive agency in the world is it to tell you know we gear all the time at these like affirmations and I'm sure there are people look at

themselves in the mirror and say you are enough and these and I'm not making fun of these people right I actually have my own internal list that I tell myself on waking every morning which has nothing to do with positive affirmation is just actually defining the different roles that I play I

don't know why this is useful to me but I find it incredibly useful to me it reminds me who I am it also reminds or reassures me that I don't have any dementia yet so you know we'll see going forward but hopefully not but yeah let's talk about this this line of inquiry within the the category of

self awareness that people can do regardless of whatever challenges they they might be having or not having you know what does that look like and what do you think that accomplishes at the level of self understanding and agency in the world so one way of looking at that is in this not the words I would use but like what's pervading a person and so to set set set set in the stage right which you can discern by inquiry so so for example in this case the person

so there's a person right who would really not think this is okay right this person taking a job at 10% of the previous pay and the job has less prestige right who's a person who would be very unhappy about that I'm very faulting of that and and talk to this person my patient through the lens of

that he should feel shame for that that person's not alive the person is not alive so one way of looking at what master are you serving right and a lot of like the givens right the automaticity in him was as if like that person was as if alive inside of him really telling him like how this wasn't okay like who's fighting that he wasn't aware that hey that's some other person's voice they was like he's like no I'm very very conflicted about this actually he

wasn't very conflicted about this way when he starts focusing on the eye like what do I actually think what do I actually think I don't I don't care if I make 90% less like I don't care my knee German I put some money away I want to be happy I'm not conflicted like so but in order to get there we have to look at the eye how much is the eye at center stage right in all that I don't mean in that in some way like paying too much attention to the self but like

we're all acting through the lens of the eye no matter what we're choosing right so to be aware of that and do I want to be impacted by the opinions of this other person because I can let someone else's opinions very much I mean we all do right very much impact my thoughts but I want to kind of decide that do I really value that person's opinions I don't want them automatically inside my head telling me how I feel about myself I can't tell you how many people I know

come to me in a place of struggle even though I'm not a clinician and as I listen to what they're struggling with it's so clear that they know the best answer and route forward but that they're dealing with some internal oppressive voice about whether or not they are a good person or a bad person

whether or not the choice they want to make is really a good choice at all sometimes those voices are the voices of parents you know in these particular examples or the voices of peers and so I think if I understand correctly what you're talking about is getting really firmly rooted in who a person is for themselves and what they really value and what they really know to be true for themselves and really trying to not necessarily quiet those voices but see those

voices truly as other even though they come from within their head. Yes, yes to stop and think what voices do I want inside? So maybe I want the voice of a kind mentor who still held me to account you know for a very high standard right it's a good voice to have inside of me. I can't feel with those and they know.

It might not be a good voice is like say a not so kind mentor for whom you could never do anything good enough that's not so good or maybe you take part of that and you leave part of that but the earlier and more formative the voices are

the more they're in our head automatically like that man thought that he was deeply conflicted absolutely 100% like you tell it and then he was right like his experience was to be deeply conflicted but when you go in and dig there's actually if you just dig and you and you get to like okay the

system that assesses this he's he's not conflicted at all right which is why then if you're coming up the function of self ladder and you look at defense mechanisms in action right and what's on top of that salience right now is when it creates an immediacy right so defense mechanisms

in action sort of inform the process and say hey the defenses are shifting to denial acting out right and that's what sort of gives us a time horizon like this thing this is not going to be okay right that if we kept down this path what was very clearly going to happen you don't have to roll

to tape forward that much to see that he's going to lose his job right he's going to feel very ashamed of that like a bunch of negative things are going to happen so it helps the person at pre-hand that like there's something going on here like I'm changing right because like in some way I'm thinking now that it's okay that I'm wasting 10 hours on something that I could really enjoy if I spent 90 minutes on it like well I'm kind of losing a little bit perspective there right so it adds a sense

like a frames a situation right and the salience of it could you elaborate a little bit on this defense mechanism in action of acting out you know I think we covered in episode one and I'm sure we'll come up several times more during today's discussion about things like denial projection displacement etc those defense mechanisms seem to have their own intrinsic definition but acting out is something that we hear more and more about these days like they're acting out

what is acting out is it is it acting out of some conflict is it trying to you know demolish a struggle by by going and doing something else yeah we can think of it as by and large an unhealthy manifestation of a lot of aggression which could be a very high aggressive drive

or an aggressive drive that's not too high but is then furthered powers furthered by a negative situation right say like this one right because the acting out what was going on here inside of this person is he was very very mad right and this is in a person

who who expressed a lot of anger right say or had outlets for it right he wasn't going in running 10 miles or right this was all inside of him he wasn't getting it out in one way or another so what he starts doing is he starts acting out the anger now he's angry

at the world around him because he's unhappy in it and it's not giving him more choices now of course this is about him and not the world around him right but but he's feeling and anger towards the world that won't cooperate right and he's angry towards himself right because like he can't make himself happy like look at all this look at all that he did and look how miserable he is right so a way of acting out then was is the drinking right because the drinking is

the hell with the world right you think I shouldn't be drinking at night and come in the work hungover on i'll do it anyway right to hell with the world so we have snubbing his nose at the world right he's also snubbing his nose at him right to hell with me

right the guy who now doesn't come across the way he did before because i'm showing up at work not in the responsible way i showed up before but in a way it's a little disheveled function is lower to hell with me right so for himself integration like let people think worse of me right because

why because i'm so mad at myself that i think it's justified right and then there's also the inviting of hey if i if i really have an addiction problem here i lose my job it's like fine i deserve that too right like you know there's an acting out against the

self that if the person doesn't stop and look at that that can become true right because that person didn't really wasn't built to say the hell with the world then with me or to not even understand what's the hell with the world me and it also means to

help with me and it's not good for the world or me right but he was able to understand that because we would look at like wow what shifted in you this is a person did a lot of before who now all of that's going into acting out so they're not taking negative

energy and doing something good with it they're taking negative energy and doing things that are bad with it why because there's too much there's a lot of negative energy it's overwhelming everything else and then it's going down these pathways where the unhealthy defenses are always

beckoning us send the energy down here it's easier to avoid than it is to face something and figure it out right it's easier to just act out than it is to hold what's inside of us and then think about why it's there so the unhealthy defenses are beckoning us and for him to see like you you have

had a healthy defensive structure like you can be healthy again you're not broken right but to also see the way these defenses are going is bringing real risk to your to your ability to be happy you get further down the shame and loss path it can be hard sometimes impossible for the person to

get back so it sets the stage like this is very very important what these defenses are how they're being enacted and for him to be able to see that like oh this could be healthy but it's not now yeah these slow you know degrading forms of acting out and self sabotage and sabotage of others I

think are particularly dangerous ones because because they're slow and they sometimes the changes imperceptibly slow and then one day somebody arrives at a place where as you said you know the force you can't get back or that requires you know going into residential treatment or

things that really you know big departures yes big departures in order to get back into life and you know I would never wish for somebody to choose to act out by driving off a cliff instead but there are other forms of acting out that immediately wake people up but it seems like people don't

often select those they select these more subtle forms of acting out where they don't get caught and they or they or no one's calling them out on it because you know you know plenty of people have five or six drinks at happy hour right as opposed to 50 right you know so so it's it's

self slow self sabotage as opposed to immediate self destruction and again we're talking about alcohol but we talk about food video games social media arguing with spouse I mean all of these kinds of things that build up over time to eventually deliver people to a place of real real problems

I'm curious for this particular individual you worked with sounds like that's not what happened they they started this process of self inquiry around self awareness and did you see that the uh... salience that is what they paid attention to internally and externally immediately shifted

there in the defense mechanism of acting out immediately dissolved I mean what was the kind of contour and time and time course there was there was less so sorry if we're looking in the cabinets there's a lot in the defense mechanisms in action cabinet there's not as much in the salience

cabinet because this is the major thing on his mind right above all else like you know he's having intrusive thoughts about it and his self talk was about it but we kind of already knew that you know just like we knew it was in the conscious mind so you think where's the money at

right it's not as much in that realm because he's aware of it if he thought oh I'm not this isn't bothering me very much and he said well all this internal dialogue is about it right then like okay there's a there's a lot to achieve there but just as he brought a lot that was

unconscious into the conscious mind was aware of it um it was salient there's less to do there right because the things to understand and change are not residing so much there for people that are no doubt everyone is thinking about their own internal processes and and where they could ask

better questions and and arrive at better answers to help themselves along um perhaps he could elaborate a little bit more on this salience covered under function of self you know to me salience is what's most apparent um and and oh as you talked about yesterday and again today you know there's

this internal narrative like what's on my mind often or what kind of jumps to mind um I've started doing this recently based on our discussions here um and I've noticed that under different states of arousal and here I'm talking specifically about sleepiness versus alertness type arousal

like when I wake up in the morning or when I'm tired in the evening you know where my mind is at where it defaults to um and what I'm paying attention to throughout the day um is that you know just asking myself to notice and I've certainly noticed some some uh some patterns um I

for instance I've noticed that anytime my overall state is elevated more alertness or in the middle of exercise my mind goes to some um not so pleasant thoughts um and it's interesting to me it's like wow this is strongly correlated with states of internal arousal that are healthy exercise

you know within a limited frame is is or exercises I in general have done in a healthy way is healthy and when I'm sleepy those thoughts never come about uh when I wake up in the morning certain thoughts tend to leap to mind other thoughts no so sort of categorization of different types of

thoughts depending on my internal state is that the sort of line of inquiry that you're that you're um suggesting or describing here yes I think it's quite a half the picture right because half the picture would be what's going on in your mind when your mind is sort of at rest right

what what is then starts playing itself right in your mind right the other side of it is what comes to the fore when there's a lot of competition for attention right so I'm making this up but but the idea that like if he stubbed his toe really badly he'd still be thinking about this

right because there's so much power not again maybe if god forbid he has a badly broken bone there's a lot of pain like he's going to think of that first right but it takes a lot of other stimulus to to be more salient than this right so so you can look at what's coming in your mind

when your mind is sort of free and open that's very very important and relevant and then what's winning out when there's maybe a high arousal state and a lot of competition for attention that's very helpful um again I think along with this self-awareness piece um the asking of oneself you know

what what is happening in my mind when I'm in different states or throughout the day um and as you're describing now also including when there are other things available to think about like does that include how often I'm distracted by a particular thought like how many times throughout

the day my mind goes from the conversation I might be into something else yes yes yeah does it hijack your attention you know there's one way of putting putting a lot of people um mentioned to me challenges with intrusive thoughts um what can be done about those intrusive

thoughts or is it simply a matter of paying attention to the fact that they're there and um and then thinking about that the origins of those thoughts right absolutely I mean one example you could have intrusive thoughts because there's trauma in your background maybe very clear trauma

that you're not facing and addressing and then you have intrusive thoughts to say I'm not safe okay go look for what's still in the unconscious mind or when it comes out a little bit you you push back into the unconscious mind that would be a that's a very different scenario then like

in this case this man was having intrusive thoughts about his job situation is overall situation and it made sense that he was having those intrusive they were markers of the acuity of it right of like you have to do something about this or like something very bad is going to happen so

the intrusive thoughts there and it's made sense right like this is not going well and and your mind is forcing you to pay attention to this because time really can be is of the essence your real risk now so intrusive thoughts can be anything from as they often are they can be markers

of something that is traumatic something that's underneath the surface something that is really bothering us that we shove down that's making guilt shame distress vulnerability that's that's very often the case but sometimes intrusive thoughts are a marker of like oh right that's

a thing to pay attention to and once we identify the intrusive thought I mean how do we eradicate it I mean how do we work with it I mean talking about trauma now you know of course it might map back to a childhood experience some internal narrative but is there some road map for moving

intrusive thoughts from a place of intrusive and disturbing to simply there and kind of me I mean to be wonderful to hit a delete switch but obviously we don't work like that well let's take a look if we could at this example right which is a little bit different

if we if we run through this example the person in the job because then we should talk about trauma driven intrusive thoughts which is I think in many ways the biggest topic about intrusive thoughts but think of it this person here if we go up from salience we look at behaviors right and behavior

actually now is very very important right this person is drinking they're still going to that job they don't want they haven't gone and interviewed for the jobs they want right so we start looking at the behaviors that are making problems the changes in behaviors that could make things

better right and then on top of that we arrive at strivings and I think when I was talking about structure of self I think at least one time I misspoke and said striving instead of self at the top of these pyramids self and striving have a lot of overlap right because if you're

growing a healthy self right out of you know the sort of top of the structure of self pyramid then that self is going to be aware of strivings and and it's going to be better able to enact them so you know his his sense of self was shaken here but he was aware of the strivings for a better

life right so now let's see the roadmap it's interesting right because the roadmap is his roadmap right if we look in those ten cupboards we come up with a roadmap and the roadmap doesn't have a spending very much time in like unconscious land right because he doesn't really need that right

if we look at what makes the difference for him what did we do right we really cultivated the self awareness the eye that is making decisions for him we looked at how his defensive structure had changed and the things he didn't want to be there now and the good things that

were there before and how could he get back some of that how could he trend back towards what was working before so we start to really look at that and then we go from there really to changing behaviors like it requires a behavioral change which is not to walk up to the precipice of doing

this each day but to actually do it right because it was very clear all the vectors so to speak inside even were pointing towards doing it and that that was consistent with the self being healthier that garden growing on top of the structure and the strivings and being realized so for him that

was the roadmap and the ins the ins the salience right wasn't really part of it because the intrusiveness the salience bias inside of him made sense then like of course it went away once he made the decisions right because the intrusive thoughts of like you have to figure this out

you have to figure this out right weren't there anymore along with the intrusive thoughts of you'll never figure this out like it goes away because he made the change but he made the change because we looked at self-awareness and we strengthened self-awareness we looked at defense mechanisms

how they could be versus how they are we looked at the behavioral change which was really necessary and then also referencing a character structure that had has difficulty right coming coming across the precipice right so we we so okay that's a baseline characteristic of him we kind of understand

that but how do we help him change the behaviors anyway when he does that the self is in a better happier healthier place the strivings are realized this person that stops drinking in the way they were they start doing the the enjoyment aspects of their life they start doing them within reasonable

bounds again they're taking care of themselves person smiling that the and now think the generative drive is much more fulfilled so so for what comes on top of those pillars right is that person is a sense of humility right enough humility to say I'm going to walk away from this job I don't

it's okay that the people in the job will think I'm crazy how could you leave that and and like a trigger something in me in some way but like it's okay right like I don't I don't have to you know I'm not out there for that I'm not out there for the big thing that everybody is is guiding I can

of the humility to go to the job that I know makes a difference and feels good to me right he's empowered to make change he's moving away from this the disempowerment of the alcohol and the avoidance right so there's empowerment and humility and absolutely if you talk to that person

on the other side of it like shortly as it was enacting it right getting just to the other side of it who is so much empowerment and so much humility which were then brought to bear through a sense of agency that made the changes right that changed the job that stopped drinking that

dealt with the people who thought negatively of it right through a sense of gratitude of it's not awful that I I'm going to go make less money a lot of people said that to him like how could you do it it was so terrible it's like it's not terrible right I'm grateful like you know what I'm going

to do I'm going to go make an amount of money that it that's all that I need right so it was like that's what helps a person do that thing and that's actually true right that's what what matter to him so an activated an active a verb sense of agency and gratitude then leads into the place where

there was a peace contentment delight he was delighting in the job that he chose and his generative drive was in accord with it you know then we stopped at some point working together he didn't need me anymore he could always come back but we didn't need me anymore then you

look at how are those last sessions a lot of the last sessions were him like in an excited way telling me what he was doing right like on then we did this and like I did this I figured this out like he was so happy about it and you can see that man's generative drive which naturally

naturally is quite high in him but was being squelched right that brings him out of balance now the generative drive was in quite a good place and he had enough aggression or assertion right to to go and do that job and to do that well and and even enough to counter anybody who would still

kind of rise up and say that wasn't a good idea he could counter all that he was getting pleasure from it he didn't need to seek pleasure by what not even pleasure because alcohol was pleasurable no pleasure because harming himself and saying to help with you to the world and to him was

pleasurable right then getting pleasure that way he's getting pleasure in healthier ways taking care of himself doing the job he loves doing his leisure activities like the man comes into balance and then like life is good and when you say okay come back in a couple months like it comes back in a couple of months maybe in six months comes back one more time I don't see him again that's great he totally doesn't need me again and I atrophied right from his life great that's that's the success

state of it eventually arrived at being truly wealthy right yeah with all with all the components of mental health and peace contentment delight that as you describe his story which is a remarkable one it occurs to me that the narratives that we hear as children end up being so powerful yes and

I'm sure there are people out there that receive such direct messages from their mother and or father like you have to do this you cannot do that but often we get messages through observing and overhearing right the way that our mother talks about our father when he's out of the room

the way that our father talks about our mother when she's out of the room and some of this could be nonverbal like a rolling of the eyes or somebody saying yes yes agreeing and then they walk out and they just you know and blowing them off right I mean kids are we are all so aware and integrating

all of that all the time and I I do think those messages get woven into us at a very deep level and then of course there are the conscious narratives that we build up as we go through particular I think elementary and middle school and high school I mean I can still remember

a negative comment somebody made about a jacket that I was wearing in like the third or the fourth grade I forget everything else that happened that year remember that yeah and I'm not you know I'm not insecure about the clothing that I pick you know I mean obviously it's it's the black

a button down shirt I've had similar shirts since the first grade just kidding um but you know that but we the fact that that's embedded in my memory systems it's like just speaks to the the salient of negative of insults basically it was an insult and I'm sure I've insulted plenty of

kids coming up you know as a teenager and and back and forth and um and so but these narratives get so deeply embedded and the idea that one could pick a different path of vocation or like you're miss the opportunity to be truly happy at a deep level based on these narratives I mean

on the one hand it's obvious on the other hand you just go like whoa this is not good this is this is a flaw in the in the design right and yet you're giving us a road map to to understanding and and to overcoming it right let's say we take your examples and we we look they're great

examples and we look at that right the the person making fun of the code in third grade right we're assuming it hasn't harmed you it hasn't changed your course of your life right what does it tell us it shows that negative stimuli are very salient right I'm sure you got a lot of compliments in third

grade two right but it's a negative that stands out which just shows that there's a salience bias in us towards the negative and that's probably about survival and threat sensing like in some ways it makes sense around human survival but it doesn't make sense around human trauma right so then

so you'd given the example of what gets communicated to the child when say mother says something negative about father when father's out of the room father says something negative about mother when mother's out of the room just to give an example right so children because the the complex cognitive

mechanisms haven't been formed yet right then the natural way that the brain functions is in a self-referential way right so so the child generally doesn't have the capacity to say like oh mom and dad aren't really getting along well in in this certain way so when dad's not here mom

vents a little bit about something about him by saying child doesn't thinking about that right then what the child will often internalize is okay there's me and there's mom and dad and mom says dad is bad and dad says mom is bad and I must be bad too right because in general if your parents

are bad then then the child takes that on themselves now again I'm giving a simple example when I'm very much extrapolating it I mean imagine if that were very very aggressive where the mother when this happens right just tells the child how awful the father is and the father does the same

you're not gonna someone's not gonna come out the other side of that being like you know what maybe they're both awful but I'm not that's not how that goes right so the lessons the the traumatic lessons of childhood get internalized right and they don't even always have a solution

state so so you think about the man who knew like okay you have to go get this job and like all those things he internalized you might say well I mean he got to a good place for him right so so for better or for worse at least it was a place to go right to like to go go work hard go

succeed go check this box you've been told you're supposed to check but oftentimes there is no solution state so how many children I mean it's terrible that this is such a high percentage of the work adult practitioners do is is helping people who as children were told one way or another

that they were worthless incapable bad right that gets that gets put into the child unfortunately far far if I mean one time on the planet is too frequent let alone how long often this happens um that example makes really good sense could we and this is a question could could we add to that the

example whereby the child over here's um examples of what say men should be like or women should be like like the these things it's not so much um like you did wrong Andrew or you know you did wrong Paul like or or telling um that are like you screwed up but but it's more um again narratives

that we over here or even a parent um showing uh delight or excitement about a certain phenotype in the world like oh wow look at that person or look at them like like isn't she beautiful right that the young child thinks like okay well then that's the epitome of beauty through the lens of the

parent or gosh like this person like you know like then that that child internalizes that this is the epitome of disgust with another human being and I think children are so savvy uh without realizing it this is like okay well then I guess you you move toward that and you and you aspire to that

and you deflect from that and you can see how these trajectories can be set very early on I mean that these are the these are the four-lane highways that we were talking about it in episode one where just routes of neural processing that can bring us to put choices in life and places in life

that oftentimes you're like I don't want to go down this path anymore and and so the the exploration of of early narratives both direct and indirect you know first person and third person seem so critical oh how how does one go about that I mean clearly with a train clinician like you

uh you would guide somebody through the process but if somebody were to try and do this in some sort of structured way for themselves um what are those lines of inquiry look like because we have vast number of experiences from childhood um but some messages are going to be more salient than

others sure yeah the the reflective self scrutiny you know can help us I think is this a great idea it's a great concept then and we we do a lot of different things sort of inside and we're guided to do a lot of things inside but this I think this should overshadow many if not most of all those

other things of like what's really going on inside of me because if you think about it a lot of people will come through that and they'll learn right so the person is told like this is what beautiful is this is what successful is this is what good enough looks like right and and that person

may through all sorts of experiences no maybe other people in their lives who are more balanced be able to arrive on the other side of that even still sometimes going through the midst of it depending upon age and situation and I know like okay like that's what you know my my father and

mother thinks like this is what beauty is this is what success is but it's one set of opinions and there's not a set of opinions that are going to define me like sometimes people get to that place but a lot of times they don't and they carry that lesson forward and they're not aware of it right

so they think that they're very unattractive even though other people are giving them different signals they think that they're very dumb even though other people are giving them different signals in their own grades and their own success maybe giving them different signals right but

they're not putting the two things together and that's going to generate tension right that might be why that person doesn't follow up on potential relationships right they just don't think they're good enough and the person's eventually going to reject them because of what they look like right

they taking that with them in this in this example from childhood right or they're not satisfied with the job that in other ways is like really great right they enjoy the work the enjoy everything but doesn't pay enough right why because they have some false idea inside of what it's

supposed to pay right because it's what the parent said so so by self-screw and he's like what are the givens you always think it goes back to the math minor right if you can't solve the problem go back and look at the givens right what are you taking for granted like oh I know that every time

I see an x that x equals four right really maybe you know maybe you wrote down four somehow because you were thinking of four at the time and x actually is it three right so just go back and look at what you're taking for granted right and a lot of times this is what we're doing in the therapy

process and then that's when the person can realize so I'm simplifying but for the person to realize like oh there's a voice in my head so to speak as a natural voice that is the voice of this person right who who may not even be around anymore who's opinion doesn't mean is to me what

it did before but that voice is saying you're unattractive you're not making enough money you're not good enough right and you know what I don't believe that right I don't they can identify that and then you can it doesn't happen all at once but you can get it out of you but generally you don't get

it out of you unless you realize that it's there what is the process of getting it out because I think that we all have the capacity to remember certain things and to arrive at a place where we can understand okay I'm I'm taking for granted the fact that there's a voice in my head that says

blank actually I have a brief anecdote to say about this and this isn't the the quote unquote I have a friend thing that I literally have a a a female friend who the other day called me laughing and crying because she was being evicted from her her apartment and she

told her mother about this over the phone and her mother's response was well at least you're thin wow like like and and and she was laughing and crying about it because it reflected so much of her childhood right that like no other accomplishment of having a job having an apartment etc

like you know mattered it was it was it was about one thing it was about a certain form of aesthetic beauty that I'm not even sure she subscribes to even though she happens to be thin right so so the fact that her mother would would lift that from the conversation there's such a deprivation of

of so many things in that in that interaction but but it really wasn't about that interaction it was you know that she was calling me because it was really about her entire childhood right and obviously I'm not equipped to to solve the problem and it wasn't a request for money or anything

of that sort it was just it was almost like the the hilarity and the and the the sadness of the whole picture right but again it's it's weeks to that these narratives that we internalize and that sometimes show up in very glaring ways in the real world it's like to hear that I think was

shocking to her I think she needed to tell me to like like is this real but then it was clear that that message had existed in her head for a long time anyway that could be very pivotal if she realizes that right and even the power of the humor of it this is absurd right that could be

very powerful in in creating change because if there's some vestiges of that inside of her right where like she still believes like oh I'm not good enough because I achieved a b and c but I don't look like x or whatever it can very much help because there's a lot of power behind realizing

that absurdity of like oh my god that's bizarre like so but wait is any of that inside of me am I carrying some of that with me I'm just an incentive for self scrutiny and you know through what you're describing because what's the ideal amount of that to still be in her zero so as as one comes to

realize the messages they've heard or perhaps like in this case that they're still hearing is the process of overcoming those messages and really arriving at the self it it sounds to me like it's a two-part process at least two-part process it's to look in the bin of what are the givens

what are what are what are what are what am I taking for granted about the internal narratives and and think about their origins in childhood or elsewhere but then also cultivating the self awareness piece that's under the function of self like wait what's really true for me at the

level of me that has that that isn't the and this is really I think about separating out the voices in one's head these internalized narratives from the person that we really truly are because the idea is that those two pillars encompass everything we need to look at right those those

ten cupboards encompass everything so it's all that right the person who's going and looking at the givens they're trying to understand what might be in my unconscious mind that I'm not aware of right and huh wow the you know the last time I got this like big award at work I had this reflex

of thought of like but you're not thin enough wow whoa right like there could be a process like that's going on inside of me I don't want that going on inside of me right so the process of trying what is unconscious in us that maybe causing us harm which is often where that's where the

trauma goes right it's where it's where the childhood trauma seats itself which brings us back around to the intrusive thoughts right intrusive negative thoughts negative self dialogue usually does not mean what it meant to the man who need to change jobs right because there they were there

for a good reason right then he needed to make change more often they're the the the vestiges the hangover the lingering badness of some prior trauma so oftentimes when you think if we talked a little bit yesterday about the person who was driving in the car and just telling themselves over

and over that they were that they're a loser right and then they can't achieve the things that they achieved when they stopped doing that I'm simplifying a little but that's the basics of it right because the intrusive thoughts the self narrative all the negativity and this is often

coming from places that are in the unconscious mind right not always but this idea that I don't think I'm good enough I'm saying to myself over and over again like wow let's go back and look at why because the answer to that again lies in a different place it's just a different road map

right the man who needed to change jobs had a road map that like spend a little bit of time in the eye self-awareness and then it kind of then it went through self defense mechanisms in action land and it spent a lot of time with behavior and then it got up to the strivings that's his that's his

road map whereas for someone who's laboring under the intrusive thoughts the negative self talk the automaticity the givens of childhood trauma that needs to go to a different place we now we're spending time with the in the unconscious mind thinking about what's there figuring out what's

there bringing things to consciousness right that person say realizing maybe you know your friend you had this realization of like oh my goodness we say wow did that bring something to the conscious mind in her if so great let's look at that and let's look a lot at it and let's look are there

other things there too right are there other givens right let's bring them to conscious to consciousness so that we can talk about them we can identify them and then look at how does that how does that relate to defense mechanism the character structure and like now what are we doing a process of

of interested inquiry like this is really interesting I mean it should be interesting to the person doing it it's them right and it should be interesting to the person doing it with them right because if you're a therapist it is not interesting to you you need another job right so it's you're

talking to a friend like if it's a friend is going to be interested so there's an interested honest open inquiry with the idea of homic we're going to let's learn things so that we can make change for the better and even though as we talked about yesterday the intrusive thoughts and

the self-dialogue that's gone on over and over and over again it doesn't go away easily but that doesn't mean it doesn't atrophy over time and go away or that the person can have that reflexive thought like oh there's the thought again that I'm a loser or that I should cut myself or I should

drink or whatever it is like I know that thought appears in me automatically at times because it was in my head for so long but it does not telling me anything right it's just an automatic thought it's something I should drink so I tell me anything right other than the fact that like oh that's

what happens in human beings like that's how the self-understanding brings change in us and gets us over the barriers of why I've been trying this for you know what modern mental health would often I was think I I took the selects and I did the 10 sessions of CVT like like you know I'm a failure nothing will ever get better you know the different framing that says hey like this can get better over time in my understanding and my efforts and my thought redirection my behavioral changes

all makes it better and then those things I don't want in my head they're going away it's taking time but they're going away I'm relieved to hear you say that one can have intrusive thoughts and that one approach to dealing with those is to acknowledge them and look at them and not try and

push them back deeper you know not trying to eradicate them I'm familiar with having intrusive thoughts not all the time but it varies periods throughout my life and the idea that one can just like distinguish them is is a great idea but that's simply not the way it's worked at least not

for me but I have found that if I you know just say okay this is spontaneously coming up through the neural circuits of my subconscious and and they're intrusive and I don't like them but I eventually arrive at exactly the place that you describe which is that it's like there's nothing actionable

here like it's just they they go from being intrusive and troubling to intrusive and just kind of mildly irritating to intrusive and like okay you know I just you know and yes I go through some redirect like trying to redirect my attention from time to time when they're happening

but I eventually just get to a place where like okay it's just a boring story or boring imagery there's nothing there like there's nothing there and then they eventually break up like like clouds and that process could take a while but because you took the energy out of them right you made them

go away which happened over time and then the energy that was so powerful of them's less and less and less and less and what happens they dissipate they atrophy right that's how they go away because there's no more power there's no more power in them and and that really is the way that we make

change and I think you know your emphasis upon the fact that it takes time the fact that it takes effort the fact that it only goes away slowly over 20 years of of at times being a therapist what I've seen be the most daunting the thing that makes people just give up and go away

and go back to the things that are bad give up on themselves are that it takes time and you know if you think it's supposed to take two weeks and the world around is kind of leading you to think that and then you go for help and the help kind of leads you to think that whether it's two weeks or

it's 10 weeks if it's going to take two years you're going to go away disheartened right or maybe more angry yourself or maybe demoralized so we have to look at the truth of all of this I a parallel to your story in my own life for years and years and years I carried a negative voice inside there's

always waiting for me to do something wrong so if I say something that's a little bit off or not exactly what I want to say now it would say like that wasn't good like it says something negative inside to me or it's waiting for me to drop something and say that I'm stupid and clumsy right

with me all the time but over time through self-reflection through therapy like through a lot of hard work but a desire for things to be better and a desire to understand it or like it's not there anymore I mean every now and then it'll raise its head right I'll do something really

I dropped a cup of coffee I haven't done it in 10 years and it made a mess and now people are coming to clean it up and man the voice came back right but I could recognize it right like I really feel bad about this and now it gives that voice a chance to come out but it doesn't come out much anymore

whereas what I lived with it for years it doesn't come out much anymore and when it came out not that long ago like I could recognize like I'm not happy I did this and let me hope clean it up but it doesn't mean I'm an idiot right so the voice in my head can just go away as I've been helping

it to do for a bunch of years now yeah I think also important for people to understand is that it takes time but that we can all potentially engage in right actions you know moving towards strivings and hopefulness as we cope with those and trying to finish those internal narratives

those intrusive thoughts it's not as if during the entire process you know you can't function I mean I think that the it's cognitively and sometimes even physically demanding to do but we can still engage in healthy ways in the world and we can still try and avoid acting out and avoid

forms of denial and as I say this I'm realizing that you know that the wish for or the impulse to really just suppress intrusive thought born of trauma or whatever else is really futile like that's not going to work it's not going to work we have to embrace these narratives and not expect

them to disappear in a finger snap but but embrace them and like see them and look at them and and be unafraid to look at them and discount where they are absolutely not true right I would say unafraid to understand right because we must understand means we must look at what's going on

inside of us when I didn't like that voice but was afraid of it like what is going on inside me what does this say about me and I'm and I'm directing away from it well that's why it was with me for like several decades right but when I start to go look at it I can find an answer to it

and again it you have to look at what's going on in that person because one might presume and maybe people listening are presuming this or maybe not but but but a reasonable presumption that might just reflexively happen in a person would be to think that oh when I was younger the

messaging I was getting was that you're not good enough right you're not good enough right that's why I carry with me that you're not good enough right but it's not that sometimes it's the opposite that I was rewarded a lot when I was younger for doing things in a way everyone thought was great

right like getting great grades and being well behaved doing also to things that brought a lot of positively reinforcement to me but I never handled well things that fell even a little bit short of that and then it would have vocal out of shame so so the oppression inside is not coming from

denigration is coming from something different right which is which is also why this is not a search to blame someone right because sometimes the people who are giving the message like they're doing the best they can I mean someone who's saying to a child you're a loser like that's not okay

right no matter what that's not okay but but that's often not how it happens like you know the parent like he says communicating they don't realize that that every time they're admiring a certain level of wealth or certain kind of beauty they're giving that message that the child that

doesn't meet that or is it ends up not meeting that isn't good enough like but they don't know that or you know I had like my parents tried to nurture me and they did a good job of it in many ways and teachers did a good job but so they they're not realizing hey this person's going to end up you

know a bunch of years from now not thinking anything's you know good enough I mean they don't know that so it's not a search for blame and I think that's very very important very important because often people don't want to look inside because they think either I'm going to find something

dramatically wrong with me and the answer I would give is there's almost surely not something dramatically wrong with you if you're having that thought and if somehow there is your better off looking at it now than later right and so that's part of it the other part is that people become

worried that they're going to ruin something you know I'm gonna I like my parents and if I go look at this I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna hate them or like people say say things or think things like that and the idea that we may get down to something that really involves

someone being responsible for something bad now that's if that's the truth the person already knows that inside the vast majority of times they know that they're just not facing that but most of the time also it's not that it's just like okay that's how life evolved and what's the predisposition

like you know I was smart enough to get good grades and I have a low threshold for shame and people reinforce me and and like oh like I can kind of understand that so then I can get control over it it's not a search for anger frustration blame of self or others yeah and oftentimes I hear that

people are afraid of um dealing with these deeper issues or addressing these deeper issues for fear that they'll lose say they're they're drive right that the thing that makes them successful in the first place and that allows them perhaps even to afford therapy or afford the time to think about

these sorts of questions so it seems to me that the drives that you referred to earlier the generative drive the aggressive drive and the pleasure drive are such critical nodes or areas to look for all of us in terms of figuring out whether or not we're doing well or less well according to some features that are pretty much universal in people essentially what I'm saying is at least by my understanding

we all have drives to some extent or another and to the extent that our aggressive drive is very high and pleasure drive is very high and whether or not it's pointed in the right direction it can be generative if it's not perhaps it can undermine our generative drive I'm very curious to know

how you've observed the different ranges of these drives in people and how that predicts whether or not people will do more or less well in different areas of life essentially how the different drives play out I think the the first thing to say is where the drives are at so to speak in

any of us is a combination of nature and nurture so the nature part tells us the range sort of that the drive is going to be but because nurture means so much to humans as as we understand it from epigenetics from from the advance of science we see more and more and more how much

nurture matters so the range that's denoted by nature is probably pretty broad I mean we see the manifestation of that and then the nurture lets us then move that drive now sometimes nurture that's not gone in the right place can move the drive in the wrong direction right but as adults

as people who can take care of ourselves who can learn about ourselves we can change where the drives are seated it's not an easy thing to do because it requires a lot of changes of self with self knowledge and hard work and but we can do it right we can change the sort of array of

how those drives are manifesting themselves within us and we see that I mean that's part of the hopefulness of mental health treatment right that we see not just surface changes but we can see changes on a deeper level so I think it's important that these things are not fixed although

there are some natural elements you know someone who may have a natural sort of low aggression or low self assertion okay it's going to be in the lower range but it doesn't mean that it's locked in at any one particular point and that the place that we want to be what is the place that's

consistent with the things that we want the agency and gratitude as verbs and the the sense of well-being and all of that so the idea is the state of health has the generative drive as as prominent right that's it's the dominant drive and then aggression and pleasure which are still

active in us but they're subserving the generative drive and that's the state that we wish to be in so when we're assessing okay why why is there something that doesn't feel okay or something that's not going okay right then one way to start right is to look at okay what's going on in the person

what may be off in the drives that gives us a very strong idea of okay what's going on a way of understanding what's going on as we then go and look in the ten cupboards to figure out the specifics okay what is actually going on here that we can then change but the framing of what's

going on can come through the lens of looking at the drives and how they're manifest in us what does it look like when the aggressive drive is very high and the pleasure drive is also very high so if these drives are running too high where we end up at is in a place of envy right and envy

I am always sort of on the soapbox about envy because I think envy is just so wildly destructive and if the aggressive drive is very high so the person say in in one way of one way this can manifest itself just wants more and more and more right they're not getting satisfaction from anything but

they want more that may be because of a strong vulnerability inside of them so something that might map to to narcissism for example there's there could be a strong aggressive drive to get more and that leads to something that's very unhealthy so the idea that I want more I need more I don't

have enough I can't get enough then fosters envy right which is the not the desire to like be better or to have more but it's just the desire to feel better about the self whether that involves raising the self up or bringing someone else down that's why envy is destructive so very high levels of

aggression that are not temperate for example by a generative drive that that would also be high then create a circumstance of envy and the envy is destructive and the same happens if the pleasure drive is very very strong so if one continues to want more pleasure so I can't find

any satisfaction I don't feel good about myself I feel berift inside right and and I see that a pleasure can make me feel better but just for a little bit right then it fades away and I want more of it and I want more of it that also can lead to the place of envy like that's the outcome

so if the aggressive drive is running very high or the pleasure drive is running very high or if both are running very high but it only takes one in order to end up in a place of envy so if the generative drive is not high enough to overcome how high the aggressive drive is which would mean then the

aggressive drive will be sublimated towards good productive things so take the energy and put it towards something that is goodness but if the aggressive drive is was way out their head of the generative drive that ends up in a place of envy as does the pleasure drive if I want more and more

and more but I never get satisfaction from anything it never brings me any sense of goodness that where it ends is in a place of vulnerability and resentment right because envy involves wanting more right and and envy if we look at what's really going on envy under the surface involves

wanting everything right if a person is at the outer limits of envy right which is why envy is so destructive because if I can't get enough pleasure and there's so much aggression in me then I'm not going to make myself feel better but what I can do is make other people feel worse

I want to ask you more about envy but for someone to ask is one way to characterize the generative drive and to distinguish it from the other drives is to say that generative drives are pro-social meaning they tend to bring about benevolent interactions between people

in the sense that so pro-social as constructive right as as it is a building goodness then yes because it's the drive in us that makes us want to love and nurture things right that makes us want to learn and sometimes learn to make better in the world or learn for learning's sake that

that the drive is a drive of goodness so if the drive is then going to enact itself in the world around us it's going to be pro-social because we exist as social units right I mean if we decide oh I want to be an island off somewhere like that's not healthy right we exist in social

units from small nuclear family right to a neighborhood right all the way up to nations and to the planet so if we if we perceive the truth of that that hey there's an interdependence between me and others and I see that then the drive will leave to choices and behaviors that are socially

constructive earlier you talked about aggression and you were clear to make sure that we all understood that aggression does not necessarily mean violent aggression right that there are different forms of aggression I'm curious if you could give us some examples of how you've observed

people with high levels of aggression and high levels of pleasure drive as well both male and female and you know here without defaulting stereotypes I think a lot of people just despite the fact that you've clarified what aggression is and isn't in this in the context of

this conversation we hear the word aggression and we think verbal attack physical attack however the way you're describing aggression and the aggressive drive I have a feeling that you're referring to other expressions of aggression as well so if the aggressive drive is running too high and that could have factors of nature factors of nurture right factors of the situation the person is in factors of their whole life but it ends up at the moment in a place that is too high

then what that person is doing in one way or another is to try and exert an unhealthy level of control and that can be done in so many different ways it can be done in that overt way of just intimidating people right of of using harsh language towards people it can be done by manipulating people it can be done through passive aggression there there are all sorts of ways that the person can try and exert

unhealthy control but that's where we end up if there's too much expression of the aggressive drive in us that makes sense and it reminds me of an example from my own life where for some I should say I've had almost exclusively positive collaborations among my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere

like every one of those collaborations has ended in a paper that we were all happy with but more importantly the relationships grew and we're not diminished right but I had one collaboration with someone not to be named where it was going very well but I had the need to reschedule an appointment

so I sent ahead a note about the fact that my carne a dealing with I had some other things I explained why I need to reschedule the appointment and didn't receive a reply which was a little unusual but then eventually received a reply that said well it's clear that you don't want to pursue this

collaboration which is like the furthest thing from the truth right and so I express that and then the collaboration was reinstated but it brought to mind some concern for me because of sort of an extreme reaction to you know something that happens in academics or anyone we get busy with

things come up it was important to tend to the car that is and then at some point later they were late to a number of meetings okay no big deal or academics we tend to run late that's typical of many academics but then I was late once to a meeting and they essentially left and

wrote an email that said something of the sort like I've got my own great ideas so I'm no longer interested in pursuing the collaborate and I was like pretty shocked right because there was nothing really outside the ordinary in terms of busyness and professorial schedules and there were

other people involved postdocs and things like that and there was a great project to be you know to be worked out so I remember being disappointed but also really kind of surprised but then when I mapped it back to the earlier example of the car incident I thought well like there's a real

sort of lack of ability that's person to handle disappointment and yet they're exerting or demonstrating rather some of the same behavior of occasionally running tardy and these kinds of things and I remember feeling like it was pretty aggressive like it's a pretty aggressive reaction

to something that you know could have been handled with a conversation now I must say I'm very grateful that the collaboration didn't proceed and it went elsewhere and worked out great and they're doing great and we're doing great and so no hard feelings but it stands out to me as a

pretty salient example of aggression but not played out at the level of yelling or anything there's a passivity in there but then there's also kind of a kind of entitlement and here of course I'm only looking at the other person's behavior and I should acknowledge I realize canceling

not good being late not good but listen I'm a human being and I you can't so once you were late was this isn't this isn't habitual this is human stuff right right and and a lot of a lot of good work had gone into the project right and there was a cost where you know a most most importantly the

postdoc suffered because they weren't involved in these interactions at all and and yet the project halted at that point so to me that seems like an example of somebody who has a well strong aggressive drive and that's clear from that they're incredibly successful in the academic domain

and when disappointed you know lashes back or is passive one or one or the other is that is that is that what we're getting at here right not surprisingly perhaps the person rarely publishes with other people right probably that doesn't make a very good collaborative partner right and

it totally makes sense I mean if you think about what you're describing here right which is some vulnerability in the person there's some way in which the person doesn't feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved so then there's a sense of of the need and the right to over

control so when you agree to work together you know you didn't agree that I'll never have to cancel anything right but but but the thought was different the framing is different on the on the other and that now we've we've we're gonna work together right so I'm exerting significant control over

you right and again you're not aware of it right and maybe that he's not aware of it in this case it was a she okay okay so that was thinking of someone different but she has to have some deficit of self that results then in the reflexive need to over control and and think about the first

response is a non-response right which is that's aggression it's just it's just passive aggression right the thought would be well you're you're worried something doesn't feel good in you because I didn't respond which was true right you're expecting a response maybe you don't know did you get the

email you know what's happening is she mad so it's sort of effective it creates some consternation and some dissonance in you right then on top of that the person is willing to potentially at that point sacrifice the relationship right so you think about aggression now is not good right this

access aggression is not good for you it it also is clearly eclipsing the generative drive right because it's not good for this person and their research it's not good for this person and the postdocs in their lab right but the but the person is willing to accept that in the service

of gratifying the access integration now so then you said something that then sort of made it okay right for the short term okay then the person feels gratified like whether you apologize or not they took it as you know you've to some degree bow down before me now like it'll be okay at

least for the short term right but then the next thing that happens actually does end the collaboration right so that's not good right and you say even from a self-serving perspective that person was collaborating with you for a reason right she saw a benefit to the science that she's

very very interested in through the collaboration with you but then let that all go right in the service of what in the service of of the ego right of you know my I don't feel good enough about myself right the response to that then it is a is a response of envy that I don't like that you

have the freedom to behave differently then I want you to right I don't like any of it I don't like that I don't control you as much as I would like to and ultimately it's that envy that becomes destructive so it's a setback for that person it's destructive of the science that person

was doing it's destructive of the science that you were doing so envy is destructive and here the the the high level of aggression the aggressive drives at a very high place it's exceeding the generative drive the pleasure drive isn't high enough either because there's not enough pleasure

coming from the great science that's being done right so then the person is approaching the world through the lens of envy right they don't feel good enough they want to exert that aggression through over control and what they end up doing is destructive right and it's very clearly

distressed a great example because it's destructive of the science which is ostensibly the reason that you're there right it's the reason you were there but someone who needs to exert over control is there not just for that reason and then the other reasons can trump the generative reason

that they're there and that's how envy when when it is the product of aggression or pleasure seeking being too high always unfailingly creates destruction and how different is that from agency and gratitude as active verbs right there's there's a sense of agency but the agency isn't

being exactly enacted because if the agency is being enacted in the service of science or career or whatever it may be this not that's not going so well right and the and the gratitude part isn't active like my goodness I'm here like I have this great career I'm discovering things I get to

spend my life in science I get to collaborate with you like there's so many things to feel good about I postdocs in my lab right I get to nurture them because I know more and I can guide like that that's not leading right envy is not those things which is why people who are doing that

at least in this realm of life although this often no this bleeds into other realms of life what you the vast majority of times you see as someone who does not have happiness right in the way that we're the happiness with the quotes right that happiness is you know the sense of peace right the

sense of of well-being right this this being able to delight in things contentment right the person doesn't have that right and here it's interesting right this person gets to the highest levels of academia and they're very successful and they have a lab of their own and they're collaborating

you think that's all great right but not inside of them it's not bringing them those things is evidenced by how this person is behaving and and I would bet almost a hundred percent if you say what's that person like in other aspects of life at least in the professional realm probably in

others too no one's going to describe a happy person so much of what you just said captures this individual extremely well and it also reminds me that so much of the way that you're describing this aggressive drive can also be observed perhaps in the way that people show up to social

interactions not necessarily big interactions maybe even just interactions between two people what I'm thinking of here is the the person male or female who shows up and and just kind of takes over like talks the whole time and tells stories I went to a meal at the when I graduated university

and someone showed up for the first time this meal meaning we had never met them before and just like sat down and just started telling stories like an hour and it was interesting portions of it were captivating and then at some point I realized like this is this is either total pathology

like this person is is crazy but they weren't crazy or they have no recognition that they're absorbing all the oxygen in the room as it's sometimes described but it seemed like they had this need to just control the whole environment by way of speech just like you know fire hose

stories and I've seen this definitely in the academic realm I've seen this in the non-academic realm and social settings and and what's interesting is perhaps why this person does this or these people do this but what's also interesting is how people react to it you know that on the one

hand it I think most people find that kind of obnoxious but there also seem to be people who see this as like oh that person has a lot of agency like they're a leader like they they they actually grab a lot of the attention that they're seeking and we tend to view those people as kind of

empowered I don't actually think that they're necessarily empowered but that perhaps systems from the feeling that the rest of us I like to think have which is some sense of social etiquette where there's some give and take you know you walk into a room you kind of assess you know

what's the context here there's some listening as well as some speaking and so on and and so when someone shows up and kind of violates all those rules on the one hand it can be obnoxious and it overtake everything but as it said before you know there's also this this sense of like oh like

that must be nice to just be able to like be as one one feels and so I think I'm describing this not because I think people should mimic this type of behavior either way you know be really me cannot say anything that's on their mind or just overtake but because I feel like it might be

an exploration of this aggressive drive and if someone's doing that are they trying to like mask something else and why do people react to these seemingly powerful people in this way these things happen in the world around us right they're independent of the spectrum of gender

the spectrum of intelligence achievement right they're human problems so a person you're describing whether that person has character structure problems that that are present with them across time or whether they're in a certain place you know whether it's in life or today like we don't know for

sure what the underpinnings but but what you're describing is it's a presentation of narcissism right and narcissism is rooted not in confidence not in arrogance right it's rooted in vulnerability it's rooted in I don't feel good enough and narcissism then then engages with the world through

the lens of envy so no one else gets to have any time no one else gets to say anything funny no one else maybe gets to say anything at all right there's a there's a dominance of the room right there's a dominance of the room that comes through an inability to tolerate the back

and forth of human interactions right human in engagement right so then that person becomes very dominant and why is that because when they tell a story and they get a laugh or even if it's not that funny and it's a 15th story but somebody smiles a little bit or nobody smiles they can perceive

inside that like I just did that I said that and maybe somebody responded positively I feel good about that for a split second now that's gone and they then you know then the next thing comes and the next thing comes because people who are coming at the world through the lens of narcissism

whether it's just in that particular event right or it's a cross life right are never satisfied and nothing ever brings enough goodness nothing ever brings enough feeling of pleasure so the person then wants more and that's how the person dominates the room now that

can be very seductive right narcissistic people not always but are often very seductive because of that appearance of mastery right of control so that person did have we we could look at it in the short term and say that person had mastery over the room right no one said anything for an hour

but them right so they had mastery over the room they had control over the room but what they're doing is exerting over control right in the short it's like you know penny wise and pound foolish right that bar with dollar today to pay back a hundred tomorrow right because they got to control

that room but a lot of people not everyone right some people are seduced by it right but a lot of people will take away from that something that's not a good feeling something that wasn't mutual that doesn't make a person want to collaborate with that person even being the same space as that person

right so it's it's counterproductive right because the people who might come under the spell so to speak right they're the people who were brought under the spell right they're they're less observing dynamic you know intuitive introspective they're they're they're not the people that you

want in a sense on your side right the people that would be most valuable to collaborate with even as thought partners have conversations with right those people are going to be put off because even if they don't know exactly what's wrong they know like that didn't feel good and they mapped do I

want that feeling more in my life no right so that's the counterproductive aspects well that's why narcissism is destructive because you might say well there's nothing destructive in that you know in that interaction but again you have to be standing so up close to it that you don't

see the bigger picture because when you stand back from that that's not a person who's by and large you know you see that's not a person who's interconnected in the world around them has a group of good supportive friends has a bunch of colleagues where they can sort of exchange information and

you know because all that social dynamic has to happen in the rest of life so you're seeing a situation that is that is counterproductive that is destructive and you always see that when people are enacting narcissism whether it's okay but much about things have happened and for whatever reason like I'm in an unhealthy place and I'm enacting it right now who are if I'm enacting it every day of my life because it's in my character structure and I have it recognized and change it

it's always destructive. The narcissists that I've known and observed almost always seem to have a partner who clearly supports their narcissism or at least doesn't speak up very much against it at least not publicly and not much else except a professional role. In fact there's one scientist who I did not work with who comes to mind and the joke about him was always that this person would talk about themselves endlessly for the first half hour that you run into them and say

okay well enough about me why don't you tell me about me. This person moved to a different country with their partner comes back every once in a while has essentially done nothing over the last decade or so kind of left the field and it's kind of the secretly the laughing stock of the field. There was one other anecdote about this person I'm just I'm not picking on them I'm just trying to

explore these dimensions of aggression and low pleasure drive and envy. At lab meetings it was well known that they would host a basketball game but it was well known that you did not want to score like you know on this person because you would be asked to leave the lab and indeed several people were asked to leave the laboratory for having made embarrassed that the lab had at one of these lab events. By participating in exactly the event that was described in the way it was

described and doing something competent. Right so the game was essentially a way for the person to build themselves up and they were a mediocre at best basketball player so like here's this game where everyone's expected to pretend right and I have to imagine pretend that the person is

actually better at what they do than they are and in some ways this it feels like a replica of of how narcissism shows up in so many other areas of life like you said you know these people are rarely surrounded by people who are actually very bright self you know self-effacing etc you know who they tend to gather people that just support them or no one at all because because no reasonably

healthy person would choose to be around that. Right because that that game is a metaphor for all of life for that person it's sending that message like see this message and extrapolate it out to everything else right and what is so what's the metaphor what's it communicating it's communicating

that you don't do anything better than I do right you don't rise above me interestingly right you don't arise above me in any way you don't get to know things I don't know you don't get to do anything better than then then I then I do right or I will be destructive towards you right it's

fascinating right because it's not about the game right the the the game is a way of of of communicating that message right interestingly the person not even that good at the game like why not choose something you're really good at right because then the message is not communicated is

clearly right and a lot of this is coming is unconscious let's choose something I'm kind of fair to middling at right and they make it very clear that no one gets to be better or I do something destructive to them I mean that's exactly what that is and and imagine like someone is thrown out

of the lab right I mean like this is in many ways like like the biggest thing in their life or one of the biggest things that's anti-generative I mean the the cost of that in the larger world is one less potentially fantastic scientists right and that's the broader that's always the broader

picture because what the narcissist is standing very very close to the tapestry right and and so so the interaction there is um you have scored a basket when I have not right so you don't understand the message that you're not supposed to exceed me and now I will get rid of you because you're

dangerous to have around right because you don't get the message and and you may exceed me in other ways and also I'm going to feel better because I have the power to be punitive right even though it's wantonly punitive right and uncompletely unjustified but I have the power to do that

and it'll make me feel good then to push you away and I know this not going to be good for you and I'll feel good about that right but that doesn't last of course that's why the person continues to do it and it also doesn't understand at all that like that's not good for science right or

most importantly that's not good for me right there's a graduate student in that lab because you didn't say fire the graduates to make the graduates to leave if the person wasn't good no it's make the graduates to leave no matter what so the person is doing things that are injurious to

the society around us obviously to the specific person they're targeting and also to themselves and that's where if you follow if you follow envy and you see high levels of it in situations that are unbounded so like this situation is unbounded in the sense that the person can do that

there's no higher authority right right well labs now this is changing and by the way I should back up a second and say that I do believe and it's been my experience that most scientists and lab heads are not nurses are quite kind are benevolent I mean they'll be a little quirky or

scientists after all but but not narcissists at the same time it is true that for a long time less so now laboratories are sort of like little fiefdoms there was very little oversight from the universities and so the lab you joined became your entire world in landscape right and there

was some exploitation by narcissistic lab heads for sure yeah as you said it was unbounded right like there was no oversight whereas this would be much harder to recreate today if someone we wanted to and I think that's why by almost everyone listening to this will it will resonate with them they'll

find some familiarity because you see this or you can see this in situations where there's a bounded group of people right there's just a certain group of people in a certain situation and that's who they are but the authority of the person leading the group is unbounded so there's

a situation where if that person has narcissistic tendencies aggressive drive is too high pleasure drive is high but not being met if all those things are happening that's when you see this come to light which is why the destruction varies based upon the destruction that's permissible within the framework right so here that this person wasn't going to like fire everyone in their lab right so in a sense they could only damage their lab so much although maybe if you damage your lab

so much you don't get funding you inadvertently sink yourself right so so even there that person could bring about their own destruction but when you see the other end where it's really unbounded like like in the sense of war right and someone who has who can control a machine of war who then

has everything right like what do they need right well they need something they don't have and never will get so so now they start enacting war and war is destructive right and you think oh that person wants something mean how many times does this is someone start a war right that's

this clearly an unjustified war right so war because they they want something then they get something in their satisfied right that that's not how it goes right then they get something and they're not satisfied and they want more so in discussions at times about narcissism and envy

and and how that can play out on the the world stage so sometimes you know huge events in human history will come up and people for example will will bring up Adolf Hitler and and they did it Hitler wanted things wanted things know that the the unbound narcissism the unbound envy wanted

destruction right this is a person who if things had continued to go as this person intended right there would have been no one left on earth but him because the process is nothing but destructive which is why after the fact that there's incalculable human carnage right and he himself was

among the incalculable human carnage because that's the endpoint of narcissism that's the of narcissism on a broad stage right that's the endpoint of envy at its highest magnitude and we see that as examples whether we see on the smaller stage of the lab right but head that you're

describing or on the larger stage of of unbounded war we end up with destruction like 100% time that's the final common pathway for all of that are there some consistent themes of childhood that lead somebody to become a narcissist and in addition to that I'm curious whether or not

narcissists ever have insight whether or not if offered the opportunity to explore the 10 cupboards under the structure of self and function of self whether or not they eventually see inside those cupboards and go oh my goodness I've got this self that's clearly overinflated and I've got these defense mechanisms and I'm so envious and and and modify their behavior or whether or not the narcissists are immune from constructive self-reflection right with the dancer that the first part is

is the vast majority of narcissism it may be all of it we don't know for sure is is rooted in the childhood trauma of not feeling good enough right which is not an excuse right for people doing doing awful things it's not what we're saying we're trying to have an explanatory mechanism right

which which goes back to formative life experiences and not feeling good enough whether it was because that person was directly denigrated or that person wasn't denigrated but could never work hard enough never could be enough to to to get approval right again it's not a hundred percent

in human beings are complicated but if you go and look you see that that there was never a state of like oh I feel good enough about myself right and if there's never a state of I feel good enough about myself because someone has told me that and given me the pad on the head or given me the

positive comment you can see how in a certain sort of natural lay the land genetically and in in concert with with other experiences that person can get to adulthood with with a lot of aggression in them and never having experienced I'm good enough it's still running along inside of

them and then they're enacting that aggression in the world around them that's most commonly what we see and because there's such deep vulnerability and such deep insecurity then people say people who suffer from full blown narcissism narcissistic personality disorder so in action of

envy on the on the highest levels that is they're so defended they're so strongly defended in an unhealthy manner from seeing their own vulnerability that it is extremely difficult to get that person to come around and say okay let's let's look in those ten covers within the field people often

talk about treating narcissistic people they talk about it in a nihilistic way and and some just be very experienced people say oh that's impossible right that never gets better now I'm not a believer in therapeutic nihilism I think that yes it is it is the norm that that person

just can't get it together to go look at that thing they're so defended against it they're so afraid of it right they won't look anywhere near it so they're looking in the other direction and they're furthering all that on health it's not the case that it's always that way and on a couple

of occasions I have worked with scene in a witness narcissistic people who can make changes now it's usually in the context of something very extreme that causes them to do that so someone who will no longer have access to family members they want to see or to financial resources that

they you know need to keep themselves afloat it's things that often are that dramatic it's not always that but we can see though in those kind of extenuating situations where the problem is so big the envy is so high but the motivation for change is very very high because since on the

carrot and stick model the stick here is very very strong that if a person then goes and does that the you you can see change inside of them so we're never in a place of of therapeutic nihilism but the but the barriers to that are very very high because the the self is so wounded that the

person is protecting that self so strongly that's why the narcissism and envy are so full blown and it's hard to get that person to go back and look but not impossible based on what you're telling me it seems that it's a very low probability that a non-clinician could change a narcissist like

in other words if one is engaging in the world with an narcissist because they have to presume leader they just find themselves in that place would you say to that person there's very little if anything that you can do to change the narcissist behavior or psychological framework if they

because of course if the narcissist can't often do it for themselves with the help of a skilled clinician why would a why would anyone else be able to achieve that so we're coming at what we're doing here from a perspective of truth about human beings right and that truth brings with it

hopefulness right it brings with it hopefulness that people can change and how people can change and and I am a hundred percent all for that it's the way to look at ourselves right but it is also true that there are aspects of pathology that that require clinical treatment in order to improve so

now we're looking from the other side and saying hey there's a problem here and there's a deep problem here and that we have to come out from a different perspective of how can you help that problem and there's a science behind this too of what level of clinical care for example

it is most likely to be helpful to someone like this and it's not an individual clinician even right it's a team of people who work through different modalities who can sort of wrap around that person so it's not just a level of clinical care is needed but it's a relatively high level

of clinical care and that in general is the is the only way that we get at narcissism that's not a hundred percent but that's the vast majority of time so what can then the person do right a person cannot be a team of clinicians right what that person can do one choices to disengage right but

disengagement can come with the promise of reengagement right many many times I've worked with people and practiced and rehearsed with them like okay what might you say to someone along the lines of you know I've known you for a long time or I care about you or I love you right whatever they

may say to lead in but I can't be with you or I can't be around you right there's there's something going on that that makes it not okay for me it doesn't feel okay and person maybe says things like you know you're aggressive or demeaning or whatever it is or maybe they just say

it just doesn't feel okay I can't have it and and then the the the need to step away from the person but look if you if you got some help right if you took better care of yourself in ways that would be better for you and for the people around you then of course I'd want to be in your life you know

something like that's a disengagement can come you know with that encouragement right to the person but but one way or another you have to set boundaries which is okay I have to deal with this person so I'll deal with them a little bit or I don't have to deal with this person so I won't

right or I can't get away from this person so I have to take with a grain of salt what they're saying to me but ultimately some form of strong boundaries or disengagement is like that's the response that that that's the self-care response right for the person who's who's with the narcissist

what are some other ways that the aggressive drive and pleasure drive and generative drive for that matter play out for instance we talked about the former patient of yours who eventually switched jobs clearly had a generative drive within him but it was being blocked by a number of

choices rooted in narratives that originated in childhood etc we talked about individuals with high aggressive drive high degree of pleasure drive but a very diminished capacity to experience pleasure and therefore a lot of envy and the destruction that comes with envy yes what are some

of the other variations on these drives as you observe them in your clinical practice well our overall framing is we want the generative drive to be the one that's deterministic right it's the one with the strongest influence so we want to we want to nurture the generative drive in us

and in others and and it makes sense for us to talk about that but we've looked at how do things get out of balance right and from the perspective of well what if the aggressive drive or the pleasure drive what if they're too high right and then it makes sense that often not always what can be

driving them to be so high are things that aren't healthy in us then the higher they get the harder it is to gratify them so we end up with that problem of envy right but we can be out of balance in the other direction too right where where the person does not does not experience a

an ability to engage with the world around them right they they don't think they can do anything to change anything for the better insider outside of themselves and if they're not doing much they don't feel that they can do much and and and also not receiving pleasure from things there's no

gratification from the things that person is doing like we see situations like this too with the aggressive drive the pleasure drive or both and then we end up not at envy because envy is the side of excess but we end up at demoralization on the lower side now demoralization is not a specific

psychiatric diagnosis it can predispose to psychiatric problems like the biochemical abnormality of depression right but what we're talking about here is not a psychiatric diagnosis right like envy is not a psychiatric diagnosis like it's a it's a thing like there can be experience that can lead

to diagnoses the same thing with demoralization if you don't feel that you can make a difference to anything right and you're not enjoying anything or feeling gratification from anything then that pool is going to win out that's going to be a demoralized person the same way of course we know

in experiments when you know the the you know you have a a rat going for food if like if you do it enough when the rat goes for the food and you take the food away the rat stops trying right learned helplessness right and that right that exists in us too and it comes along with all

sorts of other things because what we being not rats right we have a whole bunch of thoughts about that of oh my god I'm not good enough and nothing will ever be okay and you know so demoralization then is is it can be very very strong in taking a person away from the other things we're trying

to seek right either because that person has the the essentially the learned helplessness right and all the things the complicated things inside of us that can come along with that or the person isn't gaining pleasure from anything so when when we're considering the ways in which we can be

out of balance right we think okay aggression and pleasure drive if if one or the other or both is too high we end up at envy and if one or the other or both are too low we end up with demoralization and you can take almost any scenario it could be a scenario something that's just not really not

going well for a person not a clinical scenario it's a thing in a person's life or we can take clinical scenarios and the vast majority you know outside of outliers like a head injury for example we can take those scenarios and we can look at it in that way and we can understand

what's going on at least we can understand enough that when we go back and look in the 10 cupboards of the two pillars we can then have some understanding of okay what is going on we know the basic picture and how things are not in in the balance we want them in now we can understand

that enough to go back and then look in those 10 cupboards and and I believe that just about everything except those biological outliers like a head injury fits into that heuristic which is why we can use it to understand we can use it to help we can use it to make change what a powerful

lens to think about and explore the self and where things are working for us and where things are possibly not working for us if I or anyone else out there wanted to get some read on it assess their level of aggressive drive and their level of pleasure drive and their ability to

experience pleasure what sorts of questions would one ask you know for instance is it a question of how driven am I how how much get up and go do I have how much pleasure do I experience from an interaction with a puppy an interaction with food is it too much like does it draw me off

core so those the sorts of very simple but I'm perhaps also very informative questions that we could start to use to probe our psyche yeah I think yes but I would come top down right so if if the goal of health is that aggression and pleasure those drives are subserving the generative

driving start to look there right if a person can take so to an honest inventory of self like what kind of force am I being in the world around me and and that could mean for example what kind of force am I being in my family right am I denigrating to the people around me or the other people

in the home afraid of me like what what kind of force am I being a force for good am I bolstering get people can't always see that in themselves and take stock of themselves but what we're talking about a situation where we think a person can like they can bring to bear who am I being

in the world in other ways if you think of the example of the person who needed to leave the job who who could look at that and say say no I'm not you know I'm not being generative in the world in the way I want to I'm certainly not doing my job as well as I would want to I'm making my own

life worse right so so that person could then see that's out of balance or in another way a person might see know a lot of what I'm doing is self-serving or maybe destructive like people can realize that right so you can realize by taking an inventory of self is is the generative drive what's

deterministic in me and again not always but we're talking about a process of exploration if the answer to that is yes if you say I'm trying to be the best person that I can and I think about the people over whom I have any authority right and and like I try to be reasonable and I try to be fair

and I try and be circumspect and you know I try and think in someone else's shoes I mean I you know sometimes I have to set boundaries expectations or even punishment right but but I'm like careful about how I'm doing that and I'm certainly not perfect and I get things wrong at

times but you know I do think I'm contributing to the world I'm doing whatever I take on you know as well as I can do it I'm productive at work I you know my kids are doing okay or my friends are are doing all right whatever it is that if we can come up with that then then we can say okay exhale a little bit like we're in a good place right it doesn't mean everything is optimal of course so then go look at the level of the aggressive drive which might mean you know how assertive am I right

am I the kind of person who comes up to the precipice but does it make the decision am I the kind of person who's a little too assertive and sometimes I'm sort of walking on people a little bit like a person can go look at the aggressive drive within them or pleasure seeking am I doing

things that bring me gratification right am I engaging with the people around me in a way that brings the gratification that one might one might wish for right so if it's in a romantic relationship is there romance like are we being nice to one another right so so you can go and look at that and

say am I getting gratification from the things I'm doing right am I am I am I taking this wherever this drive is within me and trying to satisfy it in reasonable healthy ways that are also good for others and we're back to the generative drive so that's one way of coming at it and it's the way

that we would like to because now what what do we try to do next and what can we make things better right can we optimize things okay things are okay right but can we make them better but let's say we see that the the the generative drive is not winning the day right and people can see that

that like look I'm seeking pleasure right it's why I got for example here over and over it's what that's why I got addicted to this substance and now it's not providing any pleasure to me it's now making me miserable right but but there but I wanted what it was giving me again this doesn't

mean that the person it just wants to have the world's best time right it may mean that they're really suffering a lot right and the pleasure that that drug gave them was some relief from pain and this is how many many people tragically ended up becoming addicted to and dying from

opiates right because they say the opiate after the surgery or the opiate after the injury then is soothing something right and it's soothing something because the person feels less bad about something inside of them hear this all the time that that then fosters addiction so so that person

looking for pleasure this isn't something where we would say in some lighthearted manner that person took chances with their life I mean sometimes we'll see that but but more and more what people are looking for then is relief from suffering right but we can get to that point where we we can

ascertain for whatever reason that the pleasure seeking is is too much and if pleasure seeking an aggression or too much we we we become aware of dissatisfaction right if you're if you're relying too much on aggression I always want my way it's not always going to happen right or I

always want that pleasurable thing I always want to feel better I that also doesn't happen right so so then that can guide us towards being aware of where those drives and if the drives are high by how much uh dissonance is created by the what's actually coming of the drive right versus the level

the drive is at so so I guess it's a long way of saying yes to your question but I would sort of come top down because the generative drive is so important and it does gate gate forward like kind of where are we at you know in the spectrum of like how healthy am I or are there elements of unhealth I

want to kind of go after or you know my seeing things in myself that really say things that are unhealthy are really dominating my life are deterministic like addiction you know just just one example you know addiction things that are self-destructive right because then that's a place to

then look at it more through the clinical lens and maybe I won't just talk to a trusted other you know or and go get a book but maybe I should and maybe I should have a clinical care yeah the example of addiction is very potent and it also brings to mind the perhaps

um less apparently dangerous situation but one that I think is really common where people have a certain amount of aggressive drive they have a certain amount of pleasure drive but there's a kind of um passivity and draining out of the generative drive we're competing out of the generative

drive because of social media uh and the reason I bring this up is again not because I dislike social media I rely on and use social media for teaching and learning extensively really but in going back to the pillars that underlie whether or not we achieve an experience agency gratitude peace

contentment and delight within the pillar of function of self there's this thing salience you know and what we're paying attention to internal and external and social media does seem to me a unique circumstance never before observed in human evolution where you have a near infinite

number of environments available to you and we know that you know a picture is worth a thousand words in a movie is worth a billion pictures when it comes to drawing our attention I mean you just look at you give a young child even an infant an iPad I mean that kid is in the tunnel I don't

necessarily think that's a bad thing and their computers and computer screens are going to be a part of their lives now and forever presumably but it is the case that there are a lot of people who perhaps have the propensity for a strong generative drive but because they also have a

propensity for a uh pleasure drive they wake up they pick up the phone they look at the phone you know something captivates their attention then they're thinking about that it might be something that brings them delight but more often than not it's something that brings them either mild irritation

or or mild entertainment um maybe even intense entertainment for a short while but very quickly minutes and hours go by in which we are not engaging in the world unless we are posting valuable content and so social media is a bit of a of a drain on these drives I mean it taps into these drives

in very strong ways and all one has to do is observe the behavior of people in public spaces now in airports on trains even in their cars and I mean people are essentially watching TV all day long and and it does it does concern me and I and I raise it because um I feel like it can distract

from our generative drive in a way that um it doesn't necessarily speak to any kind of like deep character flaw or any kind of subconscious narrative but just that that salience um covered uh is is like clearly something within that salience covered is is happening that's um

unprecedented um and very very powerful and potentially quite destructive yeah I think to to understand this you know I would uh cite this belief right I believe this to be true that human beings have a long history of under appreciating the power of the discoveries that are then

in their own hands so we discover gunpowder how long into we're shooting each other right we discover nuclear fission right now are we going to destroy the planet right so social media and since it's a discovery to think that comes from what we figured out as humans that now is there

in in front of us and big powerful discoveries deserve to be treated with respect right gunpowder is very powerful and if people need to hunt in order to survive a gunpowder can help them hunt without getting hurt and it would be more successful right nuclear fission can has provided some good

things to humanity but it can also destroy humanity so I think the same is true here that what what you're talking about is something of immense power and you can see how if it gets out of balance so to let's use the sailing so let's say the social media is too salient right that's going to

make a problem right if it's too salient in the sense that the person is always looking at things that don't make them feel good enough right well that's not going to go well and that's going to affect what's in those other ten cupboards right and what is built on top of it so then it gets

into the unconscious mind like oh I thought I was good enough until like now I'm looking at all the social media and I realize I'm not I mean this is people who treat teens you know often talk about this that you see something that you didn't often see before where a person who might have

gotten through a lot of form of years thinking like like oh how I look is okay for example then is bombarding themselves with social media that tells them how they look is not okay and then that changes absolutely or perhaps social media is just simply absorbing a ton of time and energy

but mostly time that could be devoted to to a generative force right that's yet that's the other side of it so think about the example of the person who I know it wasn't social media but we're saying what if it were social media that instead of 90 minutes a day you know it's it's eight hours

because there's an analog there right and we see a lot of this and it's taking something that that can be good right and can and since it says you could even should be good like there's enough out there right in terms of learning and bolstering that like why should it not be good right

but it's not good because the defense is then shift like if you if you're relying on it 10 hours a day there has to be some denial right because there are other things to do in the world there has to be some avoidance there has to be some rationalization like something is going on there that's not

healthy so if you tell me this person is utilizing social media 10 hours a day they're not looking at things that make them feel bad about themselves they're just doing it then and I think looking something

is is out of balance now it may be that that that person's defenses are out of balance so think about the example of the person with the job they didn't like then their defensive structure changes then the thing that was good for them they rely on too much and now it becomes something that's not

good for them right so then you go and look at what else is out of balance here right what else is is driving so maybe it's being driven by the change in defense mechanisms etc maybe it's the other way around that this person just kind of habituated doing more and more and more and more of

it and then you would come out in a different way of okay can you can you slowly but surely do less you know replace the time with things that were good before because you could then back that person out to where they were before but you're not going to back the person out to where they were

before if it's being driven by something else so we again come to the curiosity you tell me that person is on social media 14 hours a day I'm curious right I want to understand what what is what is the balance of those drives right you you've just told me a very powerful point about

salience that doesn't sound like a good one so already you're giving me clues about where the drives are which means where's that person at what's going on and all those cabinets then you give more information and sit and talk with the person now you know you're going to understand

like what is the lay of the land here and how do we go about making it better I love the concept of the generative drive first of all because it's pro-social it brings about great things for us and for for the world and I mean what is better than peace contentment and delight especially

when we remind ourselves that those are active phrases or those those can be achieved in experience inside of action it's not just sitting levitating naval gazing that sort of things it's not enlightenment right it's peace contentment and delight very big difference very very big

difference yes one of the other reasons I love this concept of the generative drive so much is also because it is a verb state it has to do with creating things in us and in the world in cultivating our experience of things and and what we do and what we say and how we respond to

what others do and say and I also like it because it's distinct from the way that we're normally taught to think about psychological well-being or being a healthy individual which is usually centers around a discussion of goals and values and you know like what am I trying to focus on and

what sorts of people do I want to engage with in the world and certainly all of that is really important goals and who you engage with but I think for many people out there much of their time is spent thinking about other people like how healthier or unhealthy are the people they're

dating or their friends or what's going on between two family members you know which of course is fine to think about but a lot of emphasis is placed on like our assessments of others and how those are impacting us and in some cases people default to just thinking about others and

their problems and seeing their problems and what we're really talking about here is a process of introspection and inquiry that's very structured and as it's been laid out by you you know these two pillars structure of self function of self with these ten cupboards that might sound like a lot of

cupboards but as we talked about in the first episode all of that flows up to these very simple right ideals and concepts and action states and ways of being and to me there's nothing more powerful than the statement that what we are all seeking are states of agency and gratitude

because again to go back to the analogy of physical fitness there are not an infinite number of different physical states or states of fitness that one um can seek their endurance their strength their flexibility there's dynamic movement there's you know explosiveness there's speed there

a bunch of you know subtleties to it but here it really seems that the psyche ourselves and our mental health is really tractable if we turn the lens and we look inward yes yes I think that hits upon a very very important point is we talk about understanding oneself in the process of

change right and I would describe that as rational aspiration right so let's use the physical health example right if if I think okay I want to be healthier you know I want to have more strength I want to have more endurance and I might even have ideas of what that would be I want to be able

to run a certain distance in a certain time lift a certain amount of weight I have an idea of what that is but rational aspiration is rooted in our present or like I'm aware that there's a me now that that like isn't in that state and I'm aware that there's a the things that I'm going to do

to get to that state right and I'm not that dreading them like okay they'll be difficult right but that's okay I can do difficult things I can take pride in doing difficult things and that's how we all achieve things so I see myself in the present because of course goals are good and that's true

as long as we're still living our lives in the present because otherwise goals just become fantasies or things we want to want to possess so if I'm aware of the state of physical health I'm in right now and I'm aware of the state of physical health I want to be in and I know there's a bunch of

pathways I could take to get there but I have to think about that that figure it out do those things and then I'm going to navigate myself there that's how the whole process is good right I don't feel bad about myself now I recognize something I would like to change I'm not saying all

you were loser because you don't have those things right I feel I feel good about myself now I recognize there's something I want and there's going to be a process a process across time across effort that's going to navigate me there then when I get there I feel good about being there right

it's very very different if I think I want that I want to possess in a sense right I want to possess the ability to run a certain distance in a certain time I just want the thing I'm covetous of the thing right that is not good right because the person then often is denigrating to the self

not always but that's a motivation to go out and get that thing that's better and and they're they're really lamenting the process of getting the like they just want something is an endpoint and that doesn't make for happiness it doesn't make for even the humility and humility and action

the gratitude right of like the humility is I can't just do that overnight I'm going to have to work hard people have to work hard I'm no different than anybody else I'm not special I got to get in there and work and use the elbow grease and then I'll get healthier like all of that is good that

I just want to possess something is not good and that's why people in scenarios like this they might like go through maybe in an unthinking way or they're gutting it out where they go and they get that thing right but then that thing is not enough right and they want more now there's not

there's nothing wrong with wanting more if it's if it's the healthy an action of self right I'm going to now map my way this feels better I want to map myself from here to the next level of better physical fitness that's different than I just want that thing because then if I get it

it won't be good enough right it doesn't make me happy it doesn't satisfy me and that's the that's the unhealthy state of just wanting things to possess them and then we don't feel good about them which is you know the thought of if you give people if you give a person something

they'll resent you for right again that we're painting it in a certain way the context of that statement which I used to hear you know a lot even when I was younger like people would say that right and what were they trying to get at right what they were getting at is it doesn't feel good

if you didn't work for something right like if you know you didn't work very hard and you got to see but I give you an A or somebody gives me an A right I know that that's not good I know that I got the thing I got the A and I might feel happy in the moment because I wanted that thing

but there's no real pleasure in it there's no satisfaction there's no contentment there's no sense of self there's nothing generative I didn't work hard enough to go from a C to an A right so it's that that and that really brings us back to the self that we're growing on top of you

know of the structure right and how that how that self is functioning right how it's striving because now we're really talking about strivings and if I'm going to strive for something and work hard to get it well I get the good feeling on the other side of it and now we're we're living in

the generative space well I love the structure of what you've laid out again thank you the pillars of structure of self and function of self with 10 covers between the two of them that when explored can seem a little bit complex but there really some very straightforward types of inquiry that

anyone can go about about self awareness and address potential defense mechanisms what we're conscious of maybe what we're not conscious of look at our behaviors and our strivings and how that flows up to these simple ideals again of empowerment humility agency and gratitude as verbs

and then from that peace contentment and delight and the generative drive which gosh if there ever was a more powerful concept and something to strive for I I don't think it exists because the generative drive is is extraordinary and in the number of different ways it plays out

and it seems always positively right and of course the aggressive drive the pleasure drive exists a varying extent and all of us but cannot be allowed to overcome the generative drive if we're going to to really thrive so so thank you again so much for this framework and again to

remind people listening and watching that this framework is is mapped out in a downloadable PDF if people want to see it visually even though we've touched on it several times before I really appreciate how logical clear and actionable this framework is and and also that in providing

a framework for us it gives us something to hold our mind to you know I think I and so many people out there familiar with like being in a struggle and not being able to orient like like where am I in the struggle not knowing what to do and you you've provided some incredible points of reference

for us to really like focus on start asking questions about I and how I see myself what am I paying attention to and so on and so forth to really first anchor and orient and then be able to move forward in this process as many times as it's required to get where we each and all want to go so

thank you so much for this I know in our next discussion we're going to touch on the relational aspects of human existence you know and not just selves but interactions between selves including some of the it's called a darker and unfortunate aspects of of human existence like narcissists and

some of the challenges of different you know full blown personality disorders but also just in terms of building healthy relationships between friends romantic partners parents and children and siblings and co-workers and and all the rest so thank you again for this incredibly rich knowledge that you provided us and and and I'm at forward you're very welcome and thank you I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you great well to be continued thank you for joining

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