What's Going Right: Dr. Paul Conti On Self-Sabotage, Trauma & Why Being Hard On Yourself Is Slowing You Down

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Dr. Paul Conti is a medical doctor and psychiatrist and expert, treating trauma. He's been in clinical practice for over two decades. Dr. Conti teaches us about the structure of our own minds and how to enhance our mental health. My field is very, very good at polishing the hood, instead of looking at what's going on underneath in the engine.

“Why is it so uncomfortable to just be still with feelings and thoughts?”

The first place to start is...

It's great to see you Paul. Thanks for doing this. Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here. We seek out mental health counsel to reduce our anxiety, lower our stress, or deal with our ADHD, or our depression. But these are, even though they're clinical diagnoses, they're really symptomatic of something deeper. If you're not really invested in your generative drive, the symptomology of that might be anxiety or depression,

there's something deeper going on. Well, I absolutely, I probably said this in our first podcast together that my field is very, very good at polishing the hood, instead of looking at what's going on underneath in the engine. And what we tend to do is take a symptom and say, "Okay, your mood is low. We want your mood to be higher." And maybe there are things that we can do, or maybe there's a medicine that we can give you,

so that your mood is better. And we don't ask, "Why is your mood lower? Where are you finding meaning in your life?" Either big stressors, or traumas, or unsafe situations that we're not even looking at in life. So, so often, what we do is we look at the symptom. We want to polish the hood and say, "Okay, everything will look better if we polish the hood." And then we look the other way that, "Hey, there's something going on in the engine."

And part of that is the field of mental health hasn't exercised leadership. To say, "No, we can look in the engine and we don't have to be afraid to." And then what happens is we become very afraid to look inside of ourselves.

And what we end up doing is turning the other way.

You know, human beings want to understand things. If we don't understand, we've confused and we get afraid. So, if we don't have a way of understanding our mental health, then stigma will continue. And we won't bring our best selves to understanding ourselves. If you think, "What could be more important to understand ourselves and make life better?"

And we very often don't bring our best selves because we want to turn the other way. And that's the stigma of mental health, which just doesn't have to be there. We can look at our mental health as we do our physical health and say, "Okay, there's a way of understanding myself. We all have organs and muscles and joints." And like, this is what's going on in us as human. So, if I'm concerned about my physical health, I want to be healthier.

Right? Then I know there's a way of approach and I'm not afraid to do that. And we absolutely can and must do the same for our mental health.

“And that's what I'm trying to do in the book. It's not that it's all new.”

I like to think that there's a new idea or two in there. But most of what I'm doing is pulling together what we already know and saying, "Hey, we can look at this." And we can approach our mental health with the same understanding and confidence that we think about our physical health. There's the stigma that persists with respect to seeking out mental health help. But beneath that, this notion of self-inquiry.

You know, for a lot of people, it's just take mental health professionals out of the equation altogether. Just the notion of looking inward is scary for a lot of people. And I know a lot of people. They put up really strong boundaries around that. Certain things are off limits or they can't go there. What is that about, typically? It's because we're afraid of what is inside of ourselves, because we don't know that for the vast majority of us,

what is inside of ourselves is okay. And if we go and look at it, we can use that understanding. We can use the fact that we look at it and we see what is there to make things better. In a way, there's a real simplicity to this. What I think of as a simple goodness is we're not going to figure out the problem if we're looking away from it. And so many people, if we start talking about mental health, either we'll physically respond, we'll put a hand like no,

we'll turn away and we are afraid to look at what's going on inside of us.

“And how do we think that we're going to solve the problem?”

If there's something going on over there and I'm looking over here, I'm not going to understand it. I'm not going to solve it. And this leads us to then be literally afraid of ourselves. And if we can realize and understand, no, I can approach myself with compassionate curiosity. I can look at myself and it doesn't have to be with anger and frustration. Like what's wrong with me and why am I in this situation again?

And why can I never get what I want?

Whatever it is, we end up saying to ourselves, right? So there's often anger and frustration and fear. And I don't even imagine what's wrong with me. And like all these things we say that turn us away from the simple goodness of saying, "Hey, if I look at myself, what's going on inside of myself?

If I become curious about myself, if I want to be a detective and say, "Hey, let me think about what's going on inside of me. "Then I can really learn and change. It's not a complexifying. "It's not saying, oh, we have to learn these things that are new and more complicated. "It's actually quite the opposite.

"It's coming to this place of simple goodness where we just say, "Oh, you know, there's probably a lot I could think about. "And people I could ask and reflections are writing I could do. "Let me just bring my best self to understanding myself. "I wonder what that could change.

"It's very difficult to give yourself permission to do that, "though it feels very indulgent."

“And so I'm curious about what is that the core of that version?”

Is it if people, if I gave voice to this or if I looked at it, that means that I am this thing and I'm fundamentally unlovable or if people knew this about me or if I were to talk about it, then they would see me the way that I see myself as unworthy, you know, with the shame and the guilt associated with it.

Does it always root back on some level to some type of trauma

that is, you know, creating that lock? Most of it is fear and frustration, right? We're frustrated with ourselves or angry with ourselves and we're afraid of what we're going to find. And because of this, we want to turn away, right?

We don't believe that we can understand ourselves and we can make things better. And then we think of, oh, thinking about ourselves or talking about ourselves is self-indulgent because we don't have a way of mapping that and saying,

"No, maybe that's a route to health," right? Like we don't think of exercising and eating well as being self-indulgent, right?

"and it's good for everyone and everything in the world

"that I care about."

“So we see it that way because we're not afraid, right?”

And we're not confused. So if we have a way of understanding our mental health, that says, we can look at, like, what is it that I'm saying to myself? I'm saying negative things to myself all the time, right? What's wrong with me and why can't I be any better?

Of course, I'm not going to want to look at myself, right? I'm going to be afraid of what I'm going to find inside. It's like the story I told a lot of my brother and I being kids and one of these old clothes trees in the room that, you know, can look like a monster.

Like, it's got arms coming off of it and when the lights are out, when the lights are low, and then we get afraid, and we say,

"Oh my God, it's screaming that someone would come

"turn the light on and you can see, "Oh, it's just a clothes tree, like a sort of monster. "I don't have to be afraid of it." But until we turn the lights on and we shine them around, our natural, our natural reflex and responses,

humans is to be afraid, we're afraid of the unknown. So if we bring the good news, it says, "We can turn the lights on in all of us." And we can look around and, you know, if we find things that we don't like so much,

we'll change them, right? We're not going to find something that terrifies us and we can get at the roots of things. So if I don't want to look at myself

“because I think, oh, my last three relationships”

have really not gone well or, you know,

my last three jobs haven't gone the way I want them to, or some of my friends are spending less time with me instead of saying, oh my God, what's wrong with me and we get so afraid? We can say, well, why might that be?

Right, did something difficult happen to me. And since then, I haven't been doing as well in the world, what might that have been? Sometimes it's trauma. Sometimes it's the world around us telling us

that we should look away from ourselves and be afraid of what we find inside. But often there is trauma that creates this reflex of guilt and shame inside of us and then we really don't want to look at what we're going to find.

Right? So if we bring compassionate curiosity and we know, if I think about myself, if I get curious about why I am, where I am, what's going right in me? What are the good things about me?

What are the things that I want to be different? Now we're bringing a problem-solving mindset. This is what we do to solve any problem. Right? So we can bring that same problem-solving mindset to ourselves and to our mental health.

It occurs to me that so much of the solution is on the other side of whatever it is that we're avoiding. The feeling that we wish to inhabit requires us to confront the feeling that we don't want to feel. And avoidance, the more I think about avoidance,

the more, you know, I'm starting to believe that this is really, you know, kind of the path towards all solutions. Like the willingness or the courage to face these uncomfortable things that for whatever reason we're wired to avoid, whether it's the world telling us that we should avoid it

or some experience that has created a defense mechanism around avoidance. If I don't want to look at myself and look at what's making me feel unhappy, I pretty much guarantee it will keep making me feel unhappy. So a lot of why we avoid is we're afraid to look at what's so difficult,

we're afraid it will make it so much worse. But it's the opposite when we don't look at what's going on inside of ourselves, we don't look at what's making us unhappy. And I'm thinking what's wrong with me and why isn't my life going the way that I wanted to or why don't I have the friends that I want?

Whatever it is unless I go look at that, it'll be with me all the time. So that's like there's bad news and good news, right? The bad news is if we don't look at it, it will plague us.

“The bad news is if we do look at it, that's how we come to a solution state.”

Right? So we don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find is, I'll often say none of us comes out of the womb feeling bad about ourselves. Right? Or feeling like, oh, there's something wrong with me, right? We can bring that curiosity to saying, no, why do I feel this way about me? Right? And maybe it is some trauma.

It's some voice we're carrying with ourselves that told me a long time ago that I wasn't good enough and that's the voice that's still inside of me. Maybe, well, if that's the case, then I can say what voice do I want to have inside of me? Is that the voice I want talking to me? No, every morning where the alarm goes off, is there a different voice?

Is there a voice that's more real and honest? And I don't want to change just to make myself feel better, right? But maybe I can change to something that makes me feel better because it's true. Right? We can choose the voice that we want to have in our head. So it's just one example where, yes, fear and avoidance keeps us from looking at something that is really amenable to being solved.

Right? You know, people often think the mental health field must be so depressing, right?

and how hard it must be. And I say, no, it's quite the opposite.

I mean, we sit with people through sometimes very difficult times, but it's uplifting work, right? It's work where yes, people can and do get better, right? We all have our issues and we can look at them and we can get better. So my really what of my main points is we don't have to look away.

“That's what keeps us in an unhappy place.”

And when we look at ourselves and we bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves and we can do this alone, and sometimes with trusted others, we don't need to most of us to have somebody professional. Some of us do or we'll benefit from that, but we can start looking at ourselves ourselves. And there's a simple truth here that that makes things better. We don't have to avoid not avoiding is how we bring healthy change.

I want you to imagine the person for whom these ideas are brand new. Perhaps this person their entire life has been self identifying with that negative inner monologue or has no history with curiously investigating their interior life.

“Like, how does that person begin this process of putting into practice these ideas that you're speaking of?”

There are some first steps to taking your curiosity and say, "Let me do something with this."

One way of doing it is to think about what do you say to yourself or what's going on in your mind during quiet moments. So it might be time in an elevator or time between appointments, whatever it may be, what are you saying to yourself? I mean, a car stopped at a light if it wasn't music on. What are we telling ourselves? What's our narrative of self? A lot of us are getting down on ourselves. We're saying really negative things to ourselves and just to notice that. So I say, nothing gets better. If someone were following a person around and saying awful things to them all day,

we wouldn't expect life to get better, right? But it can be even more so than that. We're the person who's doing it to ourselves. We're literally inside of ourselves saying difficult things to ourselves.

So as an example, one thing I realized a bunch of years back was there was a shadow voice inside of me that would be very critical if I did something wrong, right?

So if I dropped something, it would say like, "Oh, we wouldn't idiot." But to stop and realize, "Whoa, that's going on inside of me, right?" And like that can't be make anything better. Do I really believe that? Do I remember when that might have come into me? And even if I can't, how would I like that to be different? I don't think that's right for anyone to do to someone else. So I don't think it's good or it's right to do inside of ourselves. That kind of thing comes from just observing ourselves. So another thing we can do is just write a little bit. You know, you can just be a half a page or a page doesn't have to be a long, you know, anything long that we write, but we can write about my life, you know, the basics of where did I come from?

What went on in my life? What am I responsible for? Where have I guided my life? You know, in the book I write two different perspectives of my life and they're both quite brief. And if you read one, it's very negative. And if you read the other, it's much more positive. And you could say they're both true, right? They are both true. They adhere to the same facts, but I have a choice of which one is actually and really true.

“And if I don't think about the positive one, the part that talks about resilience and perseverance, if I don't say, no, that's what I believe to be true.”

That's going to be my story, not because it makes me feel better. It makes me feel better. It's empowering and it's true. So that's a choice that I can make. And if I don't know that, what I'll do is just have the reflex inside of me of telling myself the negative story. And then I become afraid and I become, I get down on myself and I sort of say negative things to myself. So this idea that we can choose what our story is, what our narrative is. We're going to be adherent to the facts, but we're going to choose what that story is is so empowering.

So I think that these are ways of bringing compassionate curiosity and our just our ability to observe to ourselves and to our own health. You talk about the profundity of these life narratives, like human beings are storytelling animals. It's how we make sense of the world and all of us are walking around with some story that informs the quality of our lives. And just to one degree or another, like these stories are unconsciously woven over time based upon certain experiences that we've had that for whatever reason are brain, selects and kind of over emphasizes in terms of importance.

And we're living reactively based upon this script that we didn't author and to the extent that our negative self-talk is really at the helm, you know, kind of scripting this.

And once you recognize like, oh, it's a story and I can actually tell a different story that becomes that leads you into this empowerment notion that you talk about.

“Yes, to realize I tell myself a story about myself and I don't even really stop and think, what is that story?”

How did I get there and do I even believe it? So as an example, very often I've sat with someone who's coming in and say patients were meeting each other for the first time and I know some information and we talk a little bit and I learn a little bit about their life, maybe in the first 10 or 15 minutes and then they asked them what they think about themselves, right?

And very often they'll tell a story that has no similarity at all to what I've read and the person I've talked to now for 10 or 15 minutes they might say well nothing ever really goes well for me.

And I don't have a lot of friends and it's really hard for me to be in the world and to get ahead and they're telling me a story and that story may be about weakness and it may be about life getting the better of the person and I think, wow, it doesn't match anything that I know is true about this person. So someone who will tell you about the people in their life, right? And then we'll say well no one likes me, right? In just talking with them anecdotally, you learn about a couple good things in their life and then we'll say well nothing ever goes right for me. So we all have a bias in us towards the negative.

And this is built in us to keep us safe. So if five good things happen and one thing happens, it could be kind of dangerous. We should remember the dangerous thing because it keeps us safe, right? So that's a bias in us, but it's a bias in us to keep us safe. What ends up happening is our minds hijack that bias and start making the story of ourselves with that bias at the forefront and because traumas cause this reflex in us of guilt and shame, then we don't look at what may be true about the things that have been traumatic in our lives, but the guilt and shame stays with us and before you know it, we have a story of self that doesn't match who we are, but we just accepted as true.

And it's remarkable to say to someone, even to comment, wow, I mean even knowing you just a little bit that story, you just told yourself, told me about yourself, just doesn't match at all. Like you said nothing ever goes well and you don't have any friends and you're quite alone and then you told me about interconnections and good people in your lives and even some successes and you know sometimes people who really struck by that that they just told me in a very iron-clad way about themselves. And it doesn't match at all what they think about themselves when they're just talking and they're not in that stress of what do I really think about myself, then the old narrative comes up and we need to challenge the old narrative in order to take control of our lives.

So it's a universal that we have this bias towards a negative narrative, but there are people who walk around with some degree of positive affect informed by a positive internal narrative.

I'm not exactly trustworthy of those people, like sometimes I'm like, how could that be possible? Is that sociopathic or narcissistic? Like there's a healthy, you know kind of positive internal monologue that we can craft over time.

“But then there's ones that are somewhat delusional and perhaps like not so healthy. Is that fair? Is that true? I think so. I think that this bias in us towards the negative.”

You know we don't have to be victims to that, right? We can acknowledge okay there is a bias towards the negative. Let me be careful about that. You know if my day goes really really well, but one negative thing happens. I lose my keys or I drop something for am I gonna at the end of the day say always a bad day and I can't do anything right. There's a bias in us, but but we can be empowered to say okay that bias is there, but is that really what I want to build the story upon if I look back and think it was a bad day am I ignoring those five things that went really well.

So so sometimes a person can have a life narrative that that is coming through the lens of thinking too highly of themselves and not looking at things that are negative that's much more rare. Most of us have a bias towards the negative as we think about ourselves and the people that don't have that often are kind of savvy to how things work and they step back and they look at their lives and they understand the tendency to see through that negative lens and they really and truly do want to see clearly.

Right and then also we can learn from the people who are really blessed with such a positive mentality and all that all of us can see them as role models and I write in the in the book about Alessandro

Right and you think wow I mean that is it's an amazing person and an amazing mindset to have and it's too much to ask for the rest of us right but we can look to that and say that is powerful and that is inspiring right and can I have some of that.

“For myself you know can I find some of the goodness within myself to give to myself as I try and look with truth at my own life and then use this way of approach this way that's a parallel for physical health to understand our structure of self.”

Our structure of self or function of self or drives and to say I'm empowered to understand myself let me use this and make my life better I don't have to look away because I'm afraid of what I'm gonna find or I'm afraid that I can't make things better. On this journey towards looking inward towards trying to better understand ourselves you set forth in the book like a couple different pillars first we have to understand how we think and we have to understand how we behave so maybe let's start with the thinking part and how you think about this aspect of it because you have this five part structure of of the self.

But you talk about can you elaborate on that yeah the structure of self is what arises from how our brains work we all have a human brain that's extremely complicated but it also follows patterns and we've learned a lot between psychology and neuroscience we've learned a lot about how our brains.

“Functioned for example we have an unconscious mind and that's part of this pillar and most of what goes on inside of us goes on in our unconscious mind and that sort of sets the climate in us.”

So if it's a climate of negativity inside of me on much more likely to see the next thing that comes at me in a negative way.

So there's a lot of automaticity that goes on inside us in our unconscious mind our conscious mind sits on top of the unconscious mind and that's a much smaller part of our brain space but that's our awareness that's the awareness that we shift from one thing to another it's what we're paying attention to and then we all have defense mechanisms that that protect us you know the world can be a scary place to be and we have defense mechanisms that then we deploy automatically so. We can have a say we can understand them and we can guide them to be different but if we don't do that then they develop with a lot of automatic deployment and around all of this there's a character structure who we are as we face the world what we're predisposed to.

How we tend to interact with other people whether we're outgoing or introverted right there are a lot of things about us that that are captured in our character structure and then upon that is an eye it's an awareness that okay there's a me that that is going to now go through time right there's a me that's going to function. In this world around me so the the first pillar is the structure of self and if we go and we look at what's going on in this pillar this is how we figure out what's going on inside of us when things aren't the way.

We want to be so for example if I find myself being reactive and very aggressive with people I might see okay I'm deploying a defense mechanism right and it's too much right it's not a healthy defense mechanism. How did that come about in me how can I change it so the answers are in these pillars and the first pillar is the structure of self. With respect to let's just take defense mechanisms like having clarity oh I respond in this way when this set of circumstances arises I understand I'm trying to protect some aspect of self with regard to that in terms of change change has to be done through behavior so how do you think about.

The the interplay between thought and behavior in terms of making actually like making changes.

We have to be aware of everything that contributes to who we are right we can't just look at our behaviors and say well I want to change that behavior.

“And I'm just going to do it I'm just going to change it by deciding very very often that's why our efforts to be healthier do not work.”

So if for example I want to be healthier by exercising but I never seem to be succeeding when I go to the gym right then I might look at why is that right I want to be healthier.

I want to exercise why I'm why is that behavior not changing to just say well you decided to change it now go change it like it doesn't work so for example maybe what's going on in my unconscious mind is that I won't be successful.

And unless we go look at that how do we expect the behavior to change right so if we go look I might say well. Did it go wrong six times in six different ways or am I doing the same thing in a way that is in healthy so no this is very common where person who wants to be healthier is too ambitious. And they set forth I'm going to do all of these things because there's a lot of enthusiasm inside and they set themselves up for failure they're not able to adhere to what they did.

And then they take away another experience and they say I'll never be healthy like there's a seventh time I haven't been able to do it.

But what if the person could bring understanding and and that understanding might say what's not really seven times. It's one time seven times over right you've done the same thing over and over again like this is good news right because we can look at that and say well what is that thing let me bring some change there. Right and then and then maybe I can succeed so if I say let me have a slightly less ambitious regimen something that I could really do something that's reasonable for me right. So now I've changed what I'm trying to do and we're going to change myself talk I'm not going to set out doing this telling myself I'm going to fail I'm going to say hey understood something.

I brought change to how I'm going about it so I'm going to do it again and I feel good about this time. Now I can change the behavior right so we have to look at what's going on inside of ourselves the structure of self before we can get to our function right because the structure and the function are intertwined and we we might find the answer in one place or we might find it in another place. But mental health has as really tried to split us apart this is the problem with pathologizing us and saying oh you're I mean sometimes people will talk about people is a number that's a two nine six point three two or.

And this is this is not a holistic view of ourselves if we say okay this is structure that applies to every human and a function that applies to every human the answers are going to be somewhere in there right and I don't want to get caught up on just one place I'm just going to change my behaviors.

It's just not how we work so just as we can understand our bodies to get healthier physically we can understand our minds get healthier mentally.

I think you've really identified the conundrum of personal development because as much as there are principles and things that work. It really is a brain pet pretzel or like a Zen Cohen it's a yes and like there's so many things operating at once like on one level. Things like feelings thoughts and emotions are downstream of behavior from a neuroscience perspective mood follows action.

“And if you want to make a change in your life you have to make a decision and take a contrary action and follow that up with the next right action.”

Create consistency and momentum and set a goal and schedule these things like there's logistical practicalities towards. You know, making a positive change in your life.

But fundamentally if you don't pop the hood and and look inward at what's going on with the engine like the engine is going to catch on fire at some point.

So there's like the doing like these practical things that you have to do and then you have to undo a whole bunch of stuff and if you're avoiding that or turning a blind eye towards it. That your your capacity to change or transform or evolve is going to be neutered or short circuit at Joel hit a plateau or you'll end up backtracking at some point. And I think that happens to us a lot right because. We think of it is so complicated and even and I think of what you just described like there's a loop where a behavior can impact a feeling right so a negative behavior and then I feel bad about myself.

But but feeling bad about myself makes it more likely I'll do the negative behavior. It's a very immersive thing. Right and we're just stuck in a vicious cycle and then we get confused and we get scared. And what I'm advocating for is not making things more complicated. It's actually a simplification.

It says, okay, you know, yes, we're all very complicated, but we can go look at that and we don't have to be afraid to look at that.

“So for example, if there's a negative behavior in your life, we might think well, what is that behavior?”

Do we have an idea of where it came from? If you, you know, put your mind to it, do you think you can change it? If you tried to change it, let's talk about maybe changing it. We could try that. Let's say we bring about ways to change and it doesn't work.

We could say, well, okay, let's let's now let's look again, right? Let's look at why it didn't change. What what's the self-talk going on inside of you?

“Are you feeling so down that it makes it hard to change that behavior?”

Do you need a better strategy? Or maybe it is that the behavior isn't going to change until the feeling changes, right? If you feel really, really down on yourself and you're trying to change your avoidance behavior, say, have social situations, then that's not really going to work, right?

Is it really true that you can't succeed and no one likes you in social situations?

Let's look at some wins or if there aren't a lot of wins, let's look at why there might not be. There's gotta be a way we can get in here, right? And we can do something different, see what change it brings or doesn't bring. And then from that now we have more learning, and then we use that to run it forward.

“We can simplify, have a way of accessing the system, right?”

And then we make something better. We see how it impacted the system and we move forward from there, right? There are ways we can simplify our understanding and our approach, and it fits with the idea of compassionate curiosity and of us not having to be afraid to look at ourselves, we're complicated, but the car is complicated too, right?

So if there's something going on in the engine, it doesn't sound good. We don't just turn away because it's complicated. We say, okay, we gotta look at that or have someone help us. Look at it, we don't have to be afraid just because we're complicated. The episode is brought to you by AG1.

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“What I think is really interesting about this book is the fact that agency and empowerment”

are central pillars and themes, and you are taking a very proactive approach to people's mental health. We're in this paradigm of pathologizing everything, it's a sort of diagnosis and prescribed mentality. And this book is really about, like, how can we flourish instead of, like, how do you deal with this problem? It's like, here's everything that I've learned about how you can think about your own mental health

and take responsibility for it, take charge of it, and be empowered with agency to, you know, up level your lived experience. If just as we do with physical health, we can, with mental health, bring a set of thoughts of structure. That tells us, okay, this is how all of us function, right? We all have a human brain and a human mind, and there are these routes to understanding ourselves.

We all have a structure of self and a function of self and when the structure and function of self

These are the things that make for happy lives, and then the drives that each of us have are in balance.

So just as we understand how our bodies work, and, you know, we can talk about physical health without feeling afraid or intimidated, we can do the same with mental health, and it has to be done in a different way. We have to look at what we know about ourselves instead of just applying diagnoses to ourselves. You know, there's this giant book with enough room in it to give all of us five, six, seven diagnoses, and none of it is explanatory, none of it is empowering, but it's insight and knowledge that will allow us to guide ourselves forward.

“What is your thesis with respect to human flourishing from a mental health perspective?”

We need to have our drives in balance, and we've conceived of humans as having just two drives, a assertion or often called aggression, and pleasure seeking. And it just doesn't explain how we're here, the humans would not have survived, if all there were were assertion and pleasure seeking. There's another drive in us, the drive that is behind altruism, a drive that's behind the desire to leave the world better than we found. In order to leave today, and the people we meet today, and people we care about better than they were before, and if you look at when humans are living in a way that brings happiness.

And when humans are doing constructive things, as opposed to destructive things, we can see what's the same across those situations. When we're doing good things, we're living good lives, these drives that are in each and every one of us are in balance.

“And we're led by the generative drive, which is our birthright as a human being, then everything could come into line underneath of that, our structure of self, our function of self.”

And this isn't to say that there aren't problems, but this gives us a way of understanding ourselves, understanding what those problems are, and making things better. So you just mentioned there's three fundamental human drives, so perhaps it would be helpful if we define those three individually. So historically assertion or aggression has just been the desire to have a cause and effect on the world. I want to do something, and I want to see things be different, because I did whatever I did. It's not necessarily to make things better, it's just that I want to matter, and I want what I do to matter.

And this goes hand in hand with the second drive, which is pleasure, which isn't just a hedonistic form of pleasure, it can be the pleasure of safety or the pleasure of having enough food.

“We want to assert ourselves in the world, and we want these things that bring us pleasure and safety, but there's so much more to us than that.”

There's no way that our species would have survived if it was all about me. Like, everything about all of us is for me. I want to assert myself, and I want to find pleasure. It just doesn't explain constructive human behavior, altruism, the creation of societies and civilizations and beautiful buildings and art and kindness between people. We look at what's real and true about us. We see that there is a generative drive sitting over us, and our philosophy and our literary traditions tell us this.

But we haven't recognized and looked at this in psychology to say, this is what's governing us. And if we're aware of it and we're honing this, then the assertion in us and the desire for pleasure and safety, all this comes into line in healthy ways. If we're not aligned, what happens is we can get very, very out of balance with the other drives, and that's when our lives get off track. The assertion drive and the pleasure drive, these are well understood, well studied and have been the focus of psychology and psychiatry.

Has it always been known that there is this third fundamental human drive, the generative drive, and that it's just been kind of pushed to the side or is this a new idea that you're pioneering.

Now, I think it's always been known. I think that it was known long before we even thought of psychology or psychiatry is a separate discipline. I think poets and playwrights and great writers have always known this and have written about humans and our search for meaning, our search for mattering. So I think we have always known this, it's just that, like any field, mental health can have an orthodoxy to it, and a long time ago, a hundred years or so, when we were learning a lot through Freud and through some of the people who are really thinking about human behavior, we learned a lot, but what we ended up doing was taking that and sort of making gospel of it and saying, okay, these are the only two drives, why?

Because that's what those people were focused upon, right? They were not looking more broadly, so the field then, and it becomes stuck, and that's part of the problem is that mental health is not moved forward.

We know, of course, that we're happier when our lives are about something bigger than ourselves, we're happier and more fulfilled and more satisfied when we feel more connected to other people.

But in our daily lives, we tend to overindex on what it is that we're chasing, whether it's, you know, pleasure convenience or the next accomplishment, so that notion of generative drive, which is this more altruistic kind of animating force within all humans, is something that is sort of down-regulated or kind of less focused on.

“That's strategic about how we're approaching our lives to make sure that we're optimizing for that generative drive.”

So often life can weigh on us. You know, it brings us difficulties and stressors and it brings us traumas and it's easy to have our perspective narrowed.

And to say, "Look, I just need to get through this day or I need to get for myself what I need to get from this day." I'm just trying to find some pleasure at the end of this day and then we can get very cynical and we can think that looking beyond ourselves is something that doesn't really make sense. So it's for people that aren't really going to get themselves ahead, right? And what we do is we literally lose the thread of our humanness and our perspective can get more and more narrowed. And even very good people can lose sight of, you know, what we're here for and what even if you talk to us in calm moments or you know, in quiet moments we'll say, "What we really value, we know what we value, we know that it's the things that are beyond us and low and behold."

That's how our lives are the best they can be also, right, is by looking at what is beyond us. But in modern society we so often just kind of get beaten back to just trying to get through the day and seeing ourselves through the lens of just trying to survive, you know, life is so hard and it is important that we survive each day. But there's so much more to us than that and in the mental health field that has looked at us through the lens of what's wrong, you know, we can sort of be forgiven for having a very narrowed lens often of what we mean and what our lives mean.

“I think we touched on this last time but it might be worth spending a few minutes on this idea of self sabotage. Like why do we continue to seek out or create experiences that make us feel bad?”

Like we're basically crafting negative experiences based upon some narrative or something that happened a long time ago, is it that we find comfort in the consistency of those experiences?

Like what is it about those early childhood traumatic experiences that make us try to replicate them?

“Yeah, I think we find discomfort but we don't know how to change. So if you imagine a person who's been in five relationships that were not healthy or were even abusive, right, and that was their past five relationships and people will say,”

"Oh, that person has a repetition compulsion." I say, "No, that is not what's going on," right, if you talk to people who are in that situation, most of the time, what they're trying to do is make things right. They know that things haven't gone right in these past relationships and they feel very, very bad about that and they want things to go right. So they want to try again, but they don't understand what to do differently. How many times I've seen a person say, "Oh, you can't help me." I've had five bad relationships. I'm just giving up on it, right, and then I'll say something like,

"Well, if you've had five different bad relationships entirely different, maybe I'll agree with you." But it's not what you're going to tell me, right, you're going to tell me about five relationships that all have similarity in them. So let's understand, right, why those things that you're doing that maybe don't attract the healthiest partner, or you can see someone is unhealthy and you're not responding to that and making change. Right, let's look at that. Why might that be? What might you have learned at some point? They told you always have to be pleasing someone, even if you think this might not be a good person to have in your life, or that you always have to behave a certain way in relationships.

Let's look. Does that go back to relationships? Does it go back to childhood experiences that you carry forward with you? Like, we can get at it. So I'm always trying to get that person who thinks it's hopeless because I've had a five bad relationships to say, "No, let's just look at it." Right, we can in a collaborative way bring our curiosity to, "Why might that be?" And we can use that to bring real change.

To use your example of an abusive relationship, is there any validity or wisdom in the idea that one would repeatedly seek those types of relationships out as a way of trying to see if they can make it good this time? Because then it would mean that the original relationship that gave rise to this compulsion wasn't their fault.

Yes, very often not always, but very often that is what we're doing. And if we're doing that, it's just because we don't know any different way.

Right, and if you ask people, if you talk to people who are doing that about what they're doing, somewhere inside of us is the understanding that I'm probably not going to get a different result. But if I don't know how to look at myself and how to understand or I'm afraid to look at myself, what else is there to do?

“Right, and that's why you can see sometimes the light bulb goes off over a person's mind when they realize whether it's a relationship with job,”

to the friendships, family, whatever it may be, I could do things differently. And in the example of an abusive relationship, the person might realize, I'm always trying to police someone else and thinking that if I do that, it'll make them be nicer to me. It'll make things better. And you know, that is how it was when I was growing up. And maybe you know, they'll cite a parent or someone important in their life who treated them that way, right, just do better and maybe I'll be nice to you or just do better and maybe I won't harm you, right?

And the person keeps trying to do better and do better and can't avoid the harm, right?

So then they develop as a sense of fear and frustration and a feeling that there's something wrong with them, which is all that we can understand when we're children, we don't have what we haven't as adults, right? A big outer cortex in our brain so we can think abstractly. So often, if bad things have gone on when a person was a child, the person learns to attribute that to self. They learn there must be something wrong with me and I should just keep trying harder, right? Because the brain hasn't evolved enough to see beyond that. But now that person can be as an adult can look at that and say, who taught me that wrong lesson?

Now I will often say that we learn lessons in childhood, but many of them are not true, right? Many people learn traumatic lessons of how they have to be better for everyone else or either they're never going to get things that are as good as other people get. And you know, we learn these things and we carry them forward with us, but that doesn't mean that they're true.

“And we can stop and we can challenge. So, for example, that person who realizes, you know, I'm choosing people who you can never please in relationships and that's why they don't go well.”

And like, I don't want to do that, right? I have a lot of good to bring to a relationship. I want to bring the best that I have. I want to even understand better what are my strengths and my weaknesses, right? I want to really do better even with my strengths. I want to look at my weaknesses and relationships and maybe make them better too. And then I want to bring a self to a relationship with another person who's also bringing their best self.

Like relationships are hard enough when we're doing that, right? Let alone, if I think I'm not good enough, and I'm going to find somebody unpleasable to try and please.

That's why the same thing has happened over and over again, and that's why the same thing does not have to happen now. With the onset of some degree of self awareness around that with somebody realizing like, okay, my next relationship is not going to be that. I'm extracting myself from whatever relationship I'm in that is playing that narrative out. The work and the discomfort comes in this realizing like, okay, it's not indulgent to honor myself, to value myself, and perhaps I would be well served by establishing a boundary, like, okay, this is not okay.

That's very uncomfortable for somebody who's unfamiliar with that, especially if that person has a default setting around people pleasing, or a fear of abandonment, like, oh, well, if I do that, then they're really going to get mad, or they're really going to have a reason to complain about me to other people. And that can be terrifying to the point of the person just continuing on with the abusive relationship. Right, right, so we do have to lift up the hood, and if we do, we can find the answer, so you had said a person saying to themselves, okay, it's not indulgent to value myself.

“You think about how interesting that isn't a lot of us do feel that way, that is it indulgent to value myself, right?”

So we come right at where was that learned that it might be indulgent to value yourself, right? That probably anchors to something, to something, some relationship, some person where, where you weren't supposed to value yourself, right?

That's not indulgent, so we can come at that by then looking at how we learn something different, if we think that that's what everyone should have, why would we be the exception, right?

“Why is it that I think it might be indulgent to value myself, where did that get into me, right? Who's reinforced that, that it's indulgent to value myself, right?”

Now we're bringing that compassionate curiosity and that kind of Sherlock Holmes, you know, being a detective to like, oh, why might I think that way?

And yeah, I can see how that would allow me to set two lower bar for people who are in my life, then now I've got a lot of people in my life who maybe think it's good that I don't value myself, right?

So where we have to go is what would be healthier, I want to be healthy, I want to take care of myself, how might I value myself in a different way? And now we can talk about then some of the difficult things like, for example, setting boundaries with people, you know, we're not saying, okay, change everything overnight, that's unrealistic, and then it doesn't go well and the person feels worse on the other side of it, we say, okay, let's start making some wins, let's start finding a route to some wins.

And the whole way through we're emphasizing, like, this is not just a frame shift, it's absolutely you feel better, right? What we're doing is we're looking at what's real and true, you're not the only person on earth who doesn't get to have the goodness, you think everyone else on earth deserves, so let's go about making that better. I just know in my own personal journey with this, it's easy to craft and an identity around this, like, oh, if you're a people, please are like, oh, I'm the person who can get along with everyone, not realizing that you're dishonoring yourself the entire way, like living this sort of chameleonic existence where you more than kind of adapt to your environment to make sure that you're pleasant and liked by everybody that you encounter.

“Yes, I think, but looking at core beliefs, I'm a person who's liked by everyone, right? We say, okay, maybe that's true, maybe we talk about it a little bit and this person gets everyone to like them.”

So then we think, well, it's not good to be liked by everyone, right? There will be people who come at a person wanting to take advantage of that person or wanting to feel worse about themselves.

Why is it that I need to be liked by everyone, right? I probably should think about what it means to take care of myself, right? How do I want to take care of myself? How do I want everyone to take care of themselves? And if I do that, I might want to come to a different place that says, you know, if someone is well-meaning, I can be liked by them. I belong well with people who are well-meaning, but you know, sometimes I can't get along with everyone because there are people who are approaching me in ways that you're starting, okay?

Then I have to set a boundary, it's not taking care of myself to get along with everyone, right? So now we're just challenging these core concepts, right? So saying, I get along with everyone can be a core belief about yourself and even if that's true, it doesn't mean that it's good.

“So we'll go and look at that and we want to know, what do we think about ourselves? What's the story we're telling ourselves? What do I think is true about me? Let's get that out there and it's all of that healthy.”

So we're looking for what's going right, way more is going right than wrong because we're operating in the world around us. So in starting from there and not having to be afraid and not getting so down on ourselves. Now we can look at ourselves and we can do difficult things like set boundaries where we weren't able to before small wins, one step at a time, right? This is how we get ourselves better and healthier. We spoken a few times about the importance of setting a boundary and how that's a self-honoring practice. For somebody who isn't used to that or is new to the idea of respecting themselves in that way, this can be a very uncomfortable exercise. So how do you set a boundary?

Setting a boundary often involves a lot of thought reflection and planning. So first we need to know what our intention is. So if someone is too aggressive or insulting to us and we want to set a boundary against that, we need to first know what we're doing, right? We're not going to tell that person and never talking to me again or we can, you know, because we get afraid, I'm going to say something so aggressive and I won't be able to do it, right? We said, what is it that we really want to do? And it might be something like it doesn't feel comfortable when you're talking to me that way. And I'd appreciate it if you did it into it. Something that's firm, right? But we know what we're saying. So we don't fear that we're going to say something so aggressive or we're going to have to say something so aggressive and that person's going to be so angry with us.

So there's going to be a big blowup or the opposite that we're going to say something that isn't effective and then we're going to feel worse.

So I have a set of thoughts or an imagination of what may come back to me so that we're being realistic about what we're doing and how we're doing it.

And then sometimes it helps to talk with someone else, sort of practice with someone else and if we can't to practice alone, you know, saying that and saying that in a way that has resolve of it, please don't talk to me that way. Whatever it is we may say and knowing that we're going to do that and we're going to have the resolve to stay with it. So if the person says, I'll talk to you anyway, I want to do it. Whatever we may not be able to then to go fix that at the moment and to say respond to that.

“But we have to take in that the person didn't heed that boundary. What might I do next? Does that mean I really need to disengage with this person?”

So we don't have to feel that we're opening up a Pandora's box and who knows what will happen after we say this thing or that we will let ourselves down or that we have to solve everything at once.

It's just a declaration of self. It's then it's much clearer to say I don't think it's okay for this person to talk to me this way. It's not okay to talk to anyone this way, so it's not okay to talk to me this way and I'm going to say that. Okay, we get down to then the simple goodness of what it is that we're trying to do. And we prepare and plan and sometimes we rehearse it in a way that we can stand by it. The success of it isn't based upon what the other person does as we can't control that. The success of it then is based upon what we do.

“If the challenge in setting a boundary is being driven by an unhealthy fear of other people's opinions, how does one prepare themselves to sit in a negative reaction to setting that boundary?”

First we need to make sure that it's okay and that it's safe that there's certain people might not be safe to set a boundary with.

So we want to take stock of what is the situation, what is the safety of the situation, including the other person being verbally or emotionally aggressive. So yes, it can be very, very hard to do that and sometimes we need help in doing it. We might think it's going to be hard for me to do that myself. Is there someone else I can recruit, for example, within a family system, someone else who sees that this isn't okay and could I talk to that person about who could have someone with me when I set the boundary.

“Is that something I'm going to feel comfortable doing in person? Is it something I might do in a way that's not in person?”

So we have to look at the specifics of the person, the other person, the situation and what makes it hard to set a boundary. There may be reasons that it's just hard for that person to set boundaries, okay, that may be part of it is kind of in their character structure, but there are often a lot of other reasons in the world around us and we want to take stock of what those reasons are. So we get the maybe they help the time, the place, what we're actually doing, we get it right for what the situation really is.

And if and when that person disrespects the boundary, what can you say to prevent that person whose boundary has been violated from then just caving in, like how do they adhere to that boundary and what is the process of like living up to the promise of sustaining a boundary. Well, we want to have a plan, so the person knows if I set that boundary and the other person comes over it, what am I going to do next? So I might have thought and planned and decided upon what I'm going to say is no, I don't then I don't want to have this conversation and I'll leave and then I may be ready to leave the room.

I might have decided on that, okay, then I would have prepared for it and run through the thought experiments in my head of what it might feel like and I feel ready to do that. It might be very different where I say if that person comes over the boundary, I'm not going to solve that in the here and now or that person is going to be humiliating, I'm going to end up coming away from it feeling worse. So what I made was I not push that at the moment, right, but then I'm going to go, I'm going to go back and I'm going to do something different.

And I may say I'm not going to interact with that person again, I might have a different mechanism, like in a job setting, is that the time that human resources gets involved is just an example, right, so so the person knows what they will do if it doesn't go well and they have the right attribution, the correct attribution, which is if this doesn't go well. I know I'm doing something reasonable, I'm just asking someone not to talk to me in a way that we all know is not okay way to talk to other people, I'm not the one in the wrong here, I can anchor to that, right.

And if it doesn't go well it will be because that person did it respond, it's not because I'm such a loser, I can't get that across to somebody else. And as people will say I'm so weak, I can't make someone feel, no, none of that is true, you're doing something that's good and right. If the other person can't hear that and take that in, there's a problem with them, you have to decide how to respond to that, but we're attributing the problem in the right direction, which is to the person who can't hear that very reasonable boundary.

And I try, I try and give a lot of guidance, a lot of practical steps in the book, but I'll pick a couple of them that I think really, and it really stand out to me.

So for example, with your unconscious mind, thinking about what comes to you automatically can be very important. So what do I say to myself when I'm not paying attention, right? What do I say to myself when I'm in the car at a red light?

“And what do I think about myself if I'm just kind of reviewing my day or thinking about, you know, an interaction I had with someone, how do I lead in, what attitude do I lead in towards myself?”

This is telling us about the unconscious priming inside of ourselves. Do I rapidly go to something negative?

Right? Or if I see something that seems nice, do I think a cynical thought about it? Or do I think, oh, that's not for me. So what we're trying to do is pay attention to what's going on in our unconscious mind. And we look at that through what comes to us automatically, how we respond in certain situations. Now we start learning about ourselves, right? About defense mechanisms, we can think, what do I do if something isn't going well? Right? What do I do if I'm having an experience with someone and it just seems tense or it's not going very well.

“What do I do? And that can tell us about our defense mechanism. So for example, do I get really afraid if I must be doing something wrong?”

And then I say, well, how can I make that person happy with me? Right? Or do I feel like gosh, this isn't going well? And I don't know what to do about it. I better get out of here. And then I say I have to use the restroom, right? So those are possibilities. Do I get very aggressive? I think this isn't going well. So I want to tell that person what's wrong with them, right? So by thinking about how we respond, for example, in situations that could have discomfort or contention, we learn a lot about the defense mechanisms we're deploying.

So what we're trying to do here is just shine light on our whole self, right? It does not serve us to have any darkness anywhere, right?

So what we're trying to do is say there is a mechanism of understanding, and then there are a whole bunch of practical steps we can take. So that we're shining light throughout our structure of self, and then also throughout our function of self, and we know that we're going to find the answers there. And those are just two examples to help understand what's in our unconscious mind, and the defense mechanisms that we're deploying. It reminds me of doing a four step inventory in 12 steps. My sense is that most people have a view of themselves that is far from accurate, and it's only when you kind of engage with some form of rigorous self inventory over a period of time, such that you can identify these patterns objectively that you have this sort of epiphany about how you're actually

behaving in contrast to how you believe you're behaving and showing up in the world.

“Right. Yes, most of us do not have an accurate self assessment or an accurate narrative, and for the vast majority of people, it's not because that narrative is too positive, right?”

There are different problems there that anchor to other mental health issues, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the average person, most often having a view of self, and a story of self, that is less kind and less accurate than what is true. And this is good news. It fits with the assertion that we don't have to be scared to look at ourselves, right? If we look at ourselves, there's a lot of good that we're going to find, but we have to be empowered to do so we can't just say, well look at yourself, right?

I mean, there has to be a way of doing that, which is why is you're describing in the 12-step process, there are steps to look at yourself, right? We need that we need some help and a little bit of handholding all of us do in order to get at what's inside of ourselves, and what I'm putting forth is to say, we all have a human brain and a human mind, and there is a route that we can go about that. That's the way that we can understand so that we can expect good to come of it. I don't expect going to look at myself, and either I'm so frustrated because I can't find anything or I find something so bad, like see, I feel worse, right?

That's not how it goes, right? With a structure to understand ourselves, a mechanism to understand ourselves, and a bunch of help and prompts for how to do that, we can look at ourselves and feel confident, what is this going to lead to? It's going to lead to me making things better. Often we need other people to reflect our behavior back to us, thinking of somebody who's defensive all the time and has no idea that they're being defensive and it takes somebody else.

I think it can be very important and I want to highlight that the first place to start is with ourselves.

“So most people, for example, who get very defensive, very quickly, do know that, right? There's just a defense mechanism to deny it, right?”

So the person who gets defensive all the time, like that person got defensive 20 times in a row, do they really not know that? Well, they know it somewhere inside of themselves, but they may be blocked from really seeing it. Why? Because they're not approaching themselves with compassion and curiosity and very often if a person stops and thinks, "Hey, no harm, no foul. Let's go and on inside of me." That person might say, "Hey, I know I get defensive. You know why? Four people a day or six people a day are telling me that.

Okay, I kind of know that, right? Do I really have to beat up on myself? Is it so bad that I can acknowledge it? Why do I get defensive, right? So now we take the pressure off of ourselves and the place to start for honesty and objectivity is within ourselves and we can often bring a lot more to ourselves than we were bringing before. The second place is with people around us and this is so important in thinking about trauma and our first discussion because trauma creates a reflex of guilt and shame.

And we often then do lose sight of ourselves, so we can think, "Oh, I've always been a person that didn't get along with other people."

And we think that we've always been like that, but we've only been like that since some significant trauma that overwhelmed our coping skills and now we feel different about ourselves. So often we cannot see ourselves accurately. So if I know that say you're a good friend and I see that maybe I've frustrated you a couple of times recently, maybe I haven't seen that, but I'm worried that I have. And I could come and ask you like, "Hey, have you noticed anything in me? Like, I kind of feel a little different."

And you know, maybe you might say to me, "You haven't been a little different. You're a little more short temper, you know, since December or since November."

However, whatever month we want to choose doesn't matter what the month is, it could be two weeks ago or it could be 11 months ago. So there's a time when I noticed some difference in you.

And we think, "Well, why might that have been? It's something happened then." And then very often we use that, you know, that sort of detective work to understand. Like, I've really been thinking differently about myself. Since that thing happened a couple of months ago, and I haven't even really noticed it, but I sure have noticed that my mood is lower, right? But I understand that better, maybe if you're writing a little bit of a narrative about myself, it may be if you're talking to somebody else who knows me.

And if we just bring openness and honesty, like we're going to find good things that are going to help us. We're not going to find our things that things that make us run off screaming because we found something so bad about ourselves.

“That's what leads us to avoid it, and it's just not true.”

The openness and honesty, the compassionate curiosity, like these things are central to piercing the veil of denial. Like, to one degree or another, we're all in denial, to one extent, or another around something that we're doing in our lives, right? And that can be a block to that self-inquery, without the willingness to hold our behaviors loosely and have the willingness to kind of excavate them and look at them objectively. It's very difficult, very complicated, to have a healthy defensive structure around us.

I mean, we can do it, but it requires a lot of work. Otherwise, we all use a little bit of denial and avoidance and rationalization. We all use a little bit of it. But boy, we can get out of balance where we start using, for example, a lot of denial or a lot of avoidance or, for example, a lot of cynical humor, right? Some examples of defense mechanisms that we all can use a little bit of are the same ones that we can rely on more and more and more heavily.

“And we can get to the point where gosh, I didn't think of myself as a person who's cynical and avoids all confrontation by being aggressive, right?”

But like somehow I find myself here because I've leaned more and more and more on those defense mechanisms. And if we anchor to what is going right, if I'm even thinking about myself and I want my life to be better, I promise everyone that there is way more going right than what's going wrong. So if we look at that, like, where are the good things about me, right? What's going right in my life? What have I done right to get to where I am? Have I shown resilience, perseverance, this kind of quiet bravery that so many people have just to get out of bed and to approach life each day.

When I am looking at myself in this way that is full, that is holistic, it makes it easier for me to say, yeah, you know, I do kind of get defensive sometimes or, you know, there are things about me that I do really want to be different. I don't have to see that through the lens of shame or the lens of fear, but I've got to lead with what's going right and I've got to have a way of understanding myself.

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One of the things that I've run up against in this attempt at self understanding is that the self awareness that is a byproduct of this. Can then become its own story that creates a different kind of prison. When you become very self aware of like all of your quirks and your character defects, your patterns that lead you astray, the ways in which you self sabotage, then it becomes a self reinforcing story unless you figure out how you're going to then put behaviors into motion to transcend those patterns and behaviors.

Everything has to serve a process of change. And our function of self, it includes our behaviors.

“It's about our strivings. Where do we want to be in life? Where do I want to go and move forward from this very moment?”

And when we're focused on our strivings, then we want to bring everything else into line. So I want my behaviors to serve my strivings. If I want to have a more full life with new people in it. But my behavior is that I'm staying at home. I'm not serving my striving. So if we look at ourselves in this holistic way and we want to bring change, everything has to serve that. So five more insights into myself. I think why want that to translate to me, maybe understanding my defenses better. So I'm choosing different behaviors.

And then a more effective in what and getting what I want. If it's a better job or it's a partner or it's better physical health, I'm driving towards something. And everything that I'm working on right in myself and in my mental health has to serve moving myself forward. But we have to have an understanding. It's just like someone who wants to lose 30 pounds, be healthier, feel better, have more energy.

“They need to know that that takes time, right? If they just go to the gym for two days and they say, well, I'm not any better, then they'll give up, right?”

And they'll be more down on themselves. So yes, everything that we're doing then has to serve these good healthy goals.

So we have to say, okay, I can see these things in me that I want to change, or even that I don't feel good about it. I feel bad about it. It's okay, right? It's okay. We can look at that.

How do we start making things better? So some of it is also just taking the pressure of that negative voice and saying, yes, if I see things that I want to be different, I'm going to work towards making them different and guess what that leads to. Making them different now we feel empowered, right? We're more looking at what's going right in ourselves. We're even more empowered to change what we want to be different.

“We talked about the five parts structure of self, which really oriented around thinking and you mentioned just now strivings, which is one of the five part functions of self, which is really around behavior like doing, right?”

So maybe talk a little bit more about what those other four parts are and highlight the strivings part and more depth.

The function of self takes that eye that's at the end of the structure of self and moves it through time. So now I'm aware that there's a me and I'm aware that this me is moving through time. I know that I have a history. I know that I'm somewhere right now thinking and doing things and I know that this is leading to the future, the next moments and days that come for me. So there's an eye that I moves through time and then I'm looking at my defense mechanisms, not in a static array of what's my defensive structure, but how am I deploying them in real time, right? What did I just do during that last uncomfortable moment?

Like, what are not just my defensive structure, but how am I deploying them, how fast am I deploying them, what insight do I have about how I'm keeping myself safe in the world? Then we look at what's salient to us, one of the most important words of salience. You and I each could be thinking about a million different things right now. There's so many stimuli coming from inside and out, but we're not thinking of those other things. We're thinking about this is what salient to us and what we're paying attention to, how we're taking our consciousness and directing it is so important and often that's determined by things other than our choice. So if we look at salience, we guide ourselves towards what being prominent in our life is what arises from our choice.

Right? And this is serving us in that it lets us better understand and control and telegraph our behaviors and our behaviors have to serve our strivings. Not just where am I now and how am I behaving now, but if I'm interested in where I'm at now and how I'm behaving now, that's because I'm interested in what will come next. Driving for things we all are striving for things and that sits at the top of our function of self and everything that's going on in us can be anchored to something. Everything we don't like or we want to be different can be anchored to something in the structure of self or in the function of self.

And if we approach ourselves with compassionate curiosity through the lens of what's going right, then we will be able to understand what is not the way we wanted in the structure and function of self.

“And that's how we keep our drives and balance, it's how we find empowerment and humility and agency and gratitude.”

And ultimately what we're all searching for which is not happiness in some nebulous way, it's peace, contentment and delight, which is what we mean when we talk about happiness.

I'm imagining the person who is listening to this or watching it and is thinking, it all makes sense intellectually but Dr. County like salience and and strivings and happiness and purpose and fulfillment. They're like big buzzwords, but I don't know how to drill down to how they, you know, are kind of practical in my life. I'm just, you know, I got two kids at home. I'm trying, you know, like, what am I striving for? I'm striving to get to the end of the day. We were talking about this a few moments ago.

Like, I just, you know, maybe I want a promotion or it would be cool if I had just a little bit more money so we could go on a vacation this year. Beyond that, like, what am I striving for? What's salient to me? Like, I love my spouse, I love my kids, you know, have some good friends and on the weekend we do X, Y, or Z. And the inquiry kind of ends there because to your point earlier, like life is hard man, like I can't even cast my gaze beyond that.

“Right? I would say the narrative that you just said is often said, I think the way that you were saying it with some, with the person feeling some frustration, right?”

And even feeling some hopeless, like throwing your arms up out of like, how am I going to make any of this better? And, and I think first, the way that things get made better is the approach has to be simplified, not made more complicated, right?

Just, well, I love my spouse or I love my pet or I love my garden. We'd say, well, let's pause on that, you know, okay, how much time are you spending with your spouse? How much time are you spending in your garden?

“What's that time like? So many of us are trying to still get through the events of the day, right? We're still fighting some battle that happened two or three hours ago where the frustration within us say when we meet our spouse, right?”

And when we're, so we're with our spouse and both maybe frustrated and not present at the moment. So just one example would be okay if you, it's great to love, love oneself and love your spouse.

Look at how those interactions are going or you having good interactions with your spouse. Maybe the answer is no, because the person is being frustration when they're meeting their spouse. Okay, how could you have better interactions with your spouse? Are you talking back and forth? About how the relationship is going. So now we've got a string to pull on and I say from that the narrative that you gave, there's a lot in there. You just told me that you care about a lot of things. And you told me that you have the perseverance and the resilience to get through really, really difficult days. And there's still things that excite you that you want more, more of your time and energy to go towards. So you told me something really good, right?

You told me with the bias the world often makes inside of us, which is kind of a throw up the hands and frustration bias, but boy, you gave me so many strings to pull on now so that we can make life better.

“Does it mean everything's going to be perfect tomorrow? It's not a polyann of way of looking at things. It's saying, come on, you have to be able to make things better.”

And what does better lead to better than better, right? Now there's a process of things slowly and surely going in a better direction.

And many, many people who thought they were hopeless, who thought that they could not be healthier. They could not find a good relationship. They could not stop drinking. They could not find a better job. Who just said there's no way I can't be a better parent. All the things we say to myself, who are in extremely different places. And they're very thankful to themselves that they believed in themselves enough to go about a process to bring change. One of the things that struck me in the book to kind of further this discussion around the brain pretzel kind of Zen Cohen aspect of all of this is that in addition to these behavioral changes that need to be made.

“This cultivation of compassionate curiosity and self-awareness that's so important. How do we pop the hood and really evaluate what's going on with the engine and figure out how to fix it?”

Is that so many of the things that we're seeking, whether it's more, more love, more connection, happiness, gratitude, satisfaction, fulfillment.

These are a function of being more present in our lives. We need to slow things down and be more still, understand the mind-body connection, find ways to calm ourselves down, to reduce the anxiety and the stress, to pay attention. If you're not paying attention, then you can't have the self-awareness because you're not aware of how you're behaving, but also just to be rooted in your life more, because only in the present moment can you experience these emotions that we all would like to experience more of.

Yes, often we're doing it the way we're doing it because we're doing it that way, right? And that is a recipe for us not bringing change and we end up stuck in that because life moves so fast and we become so stressed about our lives and stressed about ourselves and then it narrows our perspective and we get stuck in these loops and it brings us unhappiness when we can slow down even a little bit and say, well, let me take a look at that. Instead of this auto-moticity, it's just being the way that we are saying, I can slow down a little bit and I can just look at myself and think, is this how I want to be, is this what I want to be doing and so many people want to bring real change to their lives and can bring real change to their lives and are almost lost in their own cynicism of, oh, I could never do that, I couldn't make that better and we know we can say that in such a flippant way and I'll say, wow, this is your life.

You know, we wouldn't say that if we were trying to plug something in and we can get something in outlet in the wallet, well, we want that thing to work, that's try a little bit harder. But we'll say that about our lives, right? So we have to have some hope and then we have to have some value in ourselves that says, yes, we can slow down, we can look at ourselves. We are very, very complicated, but that does not mean that understanding ourselves and bringing healthy change has to be rocket science,

thing about how complicated our bodies are, but we don't have to be physiologist or physicians, right, in order to understand our physical health.

It's not simple, but it's not too complicated for us to understand it, and then I can understand what it means to be healthy and to help those organs inside of me and the function of those organs be healthy.

So even though our bodies are extremely complicated, understanding them enough, to bring healthy change doesn't have to be that complicated.

And the same is true for mental health, yes, we're very complicated, but we have understanding mechanisms that we can bring to bear so that we can bring change.

“And we don't have to be afraid then either of body or mind, and that leads us to really where we must go if we're going to be optimally healthy, which is that we know our body and mind are one, right?”

That we're one entity and our mental health affects our physical health and our physical health affects our mental health. And ultimately we're all one person and we want to be kind to this person, but we want to hold this person accountable for being good person in the world and making themselves healthier.

And this is how we let ourselves live in the moment, you know, for just tripping over ourselves running forward, we're never in the moment.

And that's not what anyone chooses, it's not good for us, it's not what we choose, right, but it's often what we get stuck in. Well, it's socially incentivized, and it's also an effective avoidance strategy. If you're just always moving forward, then you never have to really kind of sit with yourself and your emotions, so it's a way of running away on some level.

“Why is it so uncomfortable to just be still with oneself and feelings and thoughts?”

It comes back to the fear of the unknown that if you stop and you sit with yourself and you think about yourself, you might find things out about yourself, right?

And most of us are afraid of that, and I do think it's remarkable, and I think this arises from the field of mental health, not exercising leadership. Of course, we have to stop and sit with ourselves. If we're going to understand ourselves better and bring healthy change, we wouldn't make any sense that we could do it otherwise. But that's precisely the thing that we are so defended against, that we don't want to stop and sit with ourselves and we are afraid of what we are going to find, that we're going to find something really bad.

“If we were going to find something really bad, we wouldn't be looking at ourselves, right?”

So we don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find, and we don't have to be helpless to say, okay, so if I find things, what am I going to do with that, right? We can have mechanisms where you understand if you stop and sit with yourself, yes, you're going to learn things, but you those things are going to terrify you and you can put them to good use, that's very, very different now. We've turned the lights on and we're not afraid to stop and be with ourselves and to be reflective. One of the themes of the book or ideas set forth in the book is this notion that when you optimize for the generative drive, this foam answer gives rise to these four interconnected states of being.

So talk a little bit about what those states of being are and how that operates. So if we are taking care of ourselves, so we're taking care of our structure of self and our function of self, then good things come from that and one is that we feel empowered inside. So it's a feeling state inside. Instead of feeling on the back foot, we feel much more on the front foot and from empowerment comes active agency. So then we're engaging in the world in which we have agency, we can make decisions and choices and if someone says something or approaches us in a way that's not kind or thoughtful, then we're able to use our agency, for example, to set boundaries.

So this feeling state of empowerment leads to approaching the world with agency. The same is true with humility and gratitude. So humility is a feeling state inside and it's not what humility is often thought to be right to to say that we're not good at something when we are good at it right or not telling lies about ourselves. A boastful lies is humble. No humility means that we can accept that we're human to that life can bring us difficult things bad things things that we respond to in ways that may not have been healthy for us.

We can do things that we're not proud of. We can have some of that reflexive guilt and shame from trauma that that we realize, okay, all of this is in me and I don't have to get down on myself because of it or say what's wrong with me that what I'm human and I'm in the human condition. So humility means we allow ourselves to be human and we say, okay, I can look at myself. I don't have to be so defended that I can't admit that I don't get defensive around people like it's okay. It doesn't mean I'm the worst person in the world is like just look at that we can have the ability to then look at ourselves and accept who we are.

We've looked at what's going right and we've looked at what we want to be different. Then on top of that we have empowerment and the active agency that sits on top of empowerment and we have humility and the active gratitude. I'm approaching the world and I feel grateful that I'm in it. I'm feel grateful that I have what I have. So for example, I don't need to take something else because I don't feel good enough about myself or if someone slides me, I don't have to respond in some aggressive way or if I let myself down.

“I don't feel aggressive towards myself. I'm happy that I'm here and I'd like to make today better than yesterday was that's active gratitude and what sits on top of that is drives that are in a healthy place.”

In a healthy place, I'm trying to over control but neither am I letting control out of my hands and the pleasure drives in a healthy place and I want things that make me feel good and feel happy and feel safe and I'm not wanting to little of that because I don't think anything can make me feel good and I've given up. So then a certain pleasure in healthy places and the generative drive just gets more and more and more. The healthiest place for the generative drive is as much as possible and when all those things are healthy, the generative drive rules us more and the generative drive ruling us more means we're more present and mindful within ourselves and we keep everything else in us healthy.

And this gives us happiness and happiness really is peace, contentment and delight. It's what we're all striving for. It's what people want when you talk about healthy agency. So if all this is in balance and we're led by the generative drive, we find happiness and what that really means is peace, contentment and the capacity for delight.

“So assertion and pleasure. These are drives that need to be balanced. You don't want too much or too little. Yes. Then you you're spiraling out of control and one direction or another.”

And the alternative drive on the other hand is not only something that you want to optimize for you actually you can't get enough of it basically like there is no too much. And if you are really focused on amplifying that as much as possible that acts as a check on those other drives that you want to keep in balance. It's almost it performs the balancing for those. So it's always what you're saying. Yes. If we can be healthy humans and we're aware of what's going on inside of us is leads as best we can be and we know that we all require more work and we're all works in progress.

But I'm aware of what I'm doing. I feel good about the things that I'm doing by and large and the things I don't feel so happy with I'm in the process of bringing change to then I'm a healthy well balanced human.

And I'm not getting down on myself because I'm not perfect right I'm aware that it's hard to be a healthy well balanced human.

It requires a lot of work to be aware of our responsibilities and to be aware of the world around us and what's about ourselves versus what we want to be about others. But if I'm really doing that, I can feel good about myself and that helps keep the other drives in healthy places and those ranges will be different for all of us where a assertion and pleasure optimally resides will be different from you to me and it will be different for other people.

But when we're healthy self aware humans in the world and we know that we're not perfect and we're trying to be better right then that's as good as we're going to be that's us at our healthiest.

“And that's what the generative drive gives us. I'm aware of my responsibilities and what I have to buckle down. It doesn't mean I'm just out there doing things that are only altruistic.”

I have to take care of myself and my responsibilities in order to be altruistic and to bring more good to the world. So ultimately it is the generative drive that leads healthy humans and when you read about people who are healthy in life who have gone through life and feel great about their lives at lighter stages of their life. So they're aware that they've been tragedies and traumas and mistakes but they feel good about themselves and good about life. So they're governed by the generative drive. It comes through over and over and over again and our history, our literary and philosophical traditions tell us this from so many different points of reference and we need to bring this to the psychology and the neuroscience to all the modern data we have that tells us a recipe for how to be healthy, happy humans.

I like this definition of humility being somewhat synonymous with essentially objective clarity like I'm not useless but I'm not that important either like just being really right sized and and and real about like who you are and where you fit in in the world. Yes, absolutely in this let's just go easier on ourselves so having humility is the best way to protect a person from themselves. So if I make a mistake for example and I drop something and I tell myself that I'm an idiot because of that that is not humility right that is not humility that's I'm supposed to be something more I'm just never make a mistake and if I do I'm going to beat up on myself because that's going to make me do something different a lot of us do this to ourselves and that is not humility.

Something from this right it's the humility to accept ourselves as as you said accept ourselves as we are and and it's usually not that otherwise will think too much of ourselves.

“It's that will think too little of ourselves because we come from this perfectionism that doesn't think too much of ourselves.”

It tells us we're supposed to be something more than what we can be whenever it was to make mistakes if we can accept our humility then we can approach ourselves in a way that says okay.

You know what I want I don't want to have to have to be crisis right I just want to be with myself and to know I'm doing okay but I want life to be better.

Let me think about my life and my recent decisions and how might I bring greater health it doesn't have to have all that fear that makes us look away from ourselves.

“I also like how you contextualize gratitude like we're in a culture where there's a lot of like less than well informed ideas around mental health and in particular like how to experience more gratitude.”

You hear a lot about like you have to have a gratitude practice but what you're saying is gratitude is difficult if you lack if you're not empowered if you don't have agency like these you need these other elements in your life in order for gratitude to kind of naturally percolate up so that you can have that experience.

But for somebody who is challenged and experiencing gratitude in their life like what is the you know what what would you say to that person to start being able to experience more of it.

I would say to that person that they really should stop pause take a look at themselves right because if our structure of self and our function of self is healthy then we do build empowerment and active agency humility and active gratitude on top of those foundations right if our drives are imbalance this gives us more of these good things so instead of saying well. Right more in your gratitude journal right I think that's part of polishing the hood and we'd say let's take a look at life what would are the things that you would say you're grateful for if we just ask you the question maybe you write them down and let me say are you are you living in that gratitude right so if I some I'm happy I'm healthy and I'm able to take care of myself in the world I'm grateful for that.

But let's say you and I have a political opinion that differs a little bit and I'm attacking you right I say well that's not really gratitude right I mean I'm grateful I'm grateful that I'm here I'm grateful that I can communicate with other people I'm grateful I could hear different opinion and take it in I don't be threatened by that opinion or or I think so little of my opinion I have to assault you because yours differs like so.

“It it allows us to interface with others and ourselves in the world in a different way so finding active gratitude means we're you know we're in a healthy place so if we're not finding that it's telling us okay it's not the end of the world it says.”

Look at how you work just if you didn't feel good in your body we said well look at your joint so your muscles are where does that hurt and let's go look at the organ there's a way to come at it and understand and the same is true with these foundations of the structure and function itself what sits on top of them. The power of an agency humility and gratitude and then on top of that having our drives in balance assertion and pleasure with the generative drive ruling all and then we're living in. What we think is happy and it doesn't mean every moment but I have an ability to find peace where I can just be an and feel a sense of peace I can find contentment where I can be aware of my own life including tragedies and things I've done wrong and I feel good and I feel okay about my life.

I can have the capacity for delight just as we can when we're children and when we're doing that you can see this is how we get to what's really going right and what's worth there. It's a lot easier to keep ourselves there of course there will be struggles and pressures on us you know that's what life brings but we can get ourselves there and now we're approaching life from a position of strength to keep ourselves in that place of health and happiness. So essentially when you have these four interconnected states of being you have empowerment humility agency and gratitude this creates this flywheel of peace, contentment and delights.

Yes, and that's just together with drives being in healthy places because then to feel empowered inside and to feel that sense of humility right that I'm a human I'm up against a lot just by being a human but I'm trying and I can think about how I'm trying I'm doing my best if I have those feeling states inside of me.

And that's going to serve happiness what better way to interface with the world what what if we learn through thousands of years of thinking and writing about humans this is this is how humans are healthy.

“Right we're approaching the world with the sense of agency we don't think we can control everything but we certainly don't think we can control nothing.”

And we're interested in how we can have more healthy control and we're grateful for being here and we're aware of this that we're more than just an eye right that we are away and we all are that way whether it's in our small groups whether it's couples it's family units. Or it's in larger groups of our societies right in in smaller ways neighborhoods right cities states in the world you know the planet that we all share like all of this is true and when we come through agency and gratitude.

We are in healthy places and then these drives which are in each and every one of us as human beings these drives are balanced and we become more and more.

And that's what someone will tell you talk to somebody who's 92 and really happy with their life and like wow that's interesting and they're not afraid of death and they feel good about themselves and they can tell you also to things in our life good bad and otherwise.

“This is the lens they'll be coming through this is they may not be using these words right but this is what they'll be telling you they'll be telling you about a generative life and struggles well met and disappointment acknowledged and.”

And ability to find peace, contentment and the capacity for delight all the way through you know to us as old as we may be blessed to live. Where does faith and spirituality enter into this picture because that type of person or archetype generally has some form of spiritual connection to something larger than themselves and that plays into this humility notion like you know we're just you know humans on the earth here but there's a lot more going on that we don't. We don't understand yeah faith and spirituality is is a very big part of of everything that we're talking about because it's a very big part of the generative drive right the generative drive tells us what we know to be true that.

“There's more meaning than just us that yes we matter and part of how we matter is the meaning that we bring to other people right because we do want to learn and grow and we all want that people who we think that we don't.”

Nothing is shutting us down what we want to grow as people and we want to have good experiences with others if you know if someone is down on the ground in front of us we want to be able to.

You're metaphorically lend them a hand up right we want other people to do that for us we feel love we we are aware that there's so much beyond us modern science tells us this that there is. There is so much beyond us it's not that science tells us oh there's nothing in where to be all in and all it tells us quite the opposite and having the humility to accept that while there is more. Beyond me and when I'm living in the mystery of that of how we can all fit together and build a better world by being better people in it that is not.

We call the end of that's how we build and create that's how we create structures around us that's how we make medical advances right that's how we build hospitals and rows like we can do so much together right but we only do those great things together. We know and it meant some medicine on the road or builds a bridge on their own but being destructive right we can do that alone and it is so much easier to destroy whether it's alone or it's in groups that that choose to be destructive and nothing about that is about our core humanness and nothing about that is about the faith or the spirituality that's part of our generative drive and part of the beyond us.

It is part and parcel of the simple goodness principle is it not yes you talk about yes ultimately what we're trying to do is to adhere to simple goodness when we think there's something so bad in us we can't look that's so complicated and and. It makes us afraid of ourselves and we see ourselves as a big complex back black box you know simple goodness says we can bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves we can bring understanding mechanisms.

We can bring the interactions with other people other people helping us and us helping them right we can ask other people's thoughts and opinions we can learn from the world around us.

This is all simple goodness and when we're living in simple goodness getting out of bed knowing it's going to be a difficult day but I want to bring my best self. To it right simple goodness fits very very strongly with the generative drive just as faith and spirituality is is the generative drive is infused with it it also is infused with just simple goodness. What do you say to the person who not only sets very high expectations for themselves but never seems to actually exceed them to the point where they feel okay like they're just on this hamster wheel of striving and achieving and no matter what they do or how well they show up and equip themselves in the world it's never quite enough.

We can want to do better and it's always good to want to improve even if the world around us is telling that telling us that we're doing something quite well.

“But our best route to happiness in the moment and to improvement is to acknowledging to ourselves when we are doing something well right if we do that it's not that we'll think we're doing okay and then we'll just stop trying that's never how that.”

Go as it's often put into us that we have to think we're never good enough or we'll get complacent or we'll stop and that's not how people work it's just not how we work if we are thinking we're never doing good enough. We're miles and miles away from complacency what we're doing then is beating up on ourselves and taking away from ourselves by not acknowledging you know I'm doing this thing pretty well right and I do want to do it better. It's kind of like we talked about humility and humility isn't saying you're not good at something when you are right humility is knowing when you're good at something knowing it doesn't make you a better person than the person next to you and just because you're doing well at something doesn't mean you can't do better right I mean humility means.

I know I'm doing something well I know what that means and I do want to look to doing it better but it embraces what is going right and what is good about us it doesn't pretend that we have to.

Floor ourselves with nothing ever being good enough in order to continue doing better isn't the attribution error or the flying the ointment here that.

“I mean that's what's perpetuating the the hamster wheel for most people right and even though every achievement fails to deliver on that promise.”

There's just something about the next mountain that's on the horizon to be climbed that is just enough to you know lure the person to the next descent.

That's a great example of what can happen when our drives are out of balance so I would say that person is a very very strong assertion drive they're trying to do more and more and do and do and do and achieve and achieve and that's going to make them feel better. So they then get lost in the cycle of continued assertion but no pleasure coming from it so assertion becomes very high pleasure becomes very low and that's a person who's a set up for not being happy about life that can be a set up for depression just as one example or cynicism the you know the more I do the more I get and I never feel any better and you know what's wrong with me or what's wrong with the world so.

No we we need to bring our drives into balance if that person is achieving a lot right there are certain themselves and they're achieving a lot and the generative drive is really rolling the day they will take more pleasure in what they're doing they'll still be assertive but they might not be assertive for example to going the length of not paying enough time and attention to children or family right like we can be too absurd to the neglect of other things so that person will then be. Really assertive because you're describing a person with a strong drive to be assertive and make a difference in the world so it'll be very generative but they won't be over assertive and they'll take more pleasure from what they're doing so assertion comes down a little bit there's more life balance pleasure comes up a little bit now that person is living comfortably.

“Under the generative drive they're healthier and they're more likely to be healthy and happy in the future. What are you seeing in your clinical practice more and more of these days that maybe wasn't the case when we did our first podcast.”

There's more and more anxiety in people this more and more of not feeling safe. There's been so much that is bad scary in the news and I think people often want to feel safer by understanding more and often times what we're doing is inadvertently terrorizing ourselves that yes we do want to have some level of understanding. But sometimes if we if our mind is dwelling too much on all the dangers and all the conflicts in the world around us then we feel as if we're unsafe in every moment so being aware of the world around us.

But also being aware of our own lives and how can we build safety and security in our own lives and we have an ability to make good lives for ourselves even in the context of these things that scare us in the world outside of us. And in fact if we're living in that way then we'll bring more goodness to the small groups that we're in even just between self and self right to our families and to our work units and to our communities then that helps us in a small way make the world a better place.

There are legitimate things to be concerned about like we're facing existential threats as a species and there is an amplified sense of uncertainty.

And humans are quite averse to this notion of uncertainty and perhaps on some level that's what drives some of our defense mechanisms and makes people who don't share our world view all the more threatening and that's of course driving us apart from each other and amplifying our anxiety and the like. The book is very much an antidote to that like a way out of falling into that trap but this is a situation that we're all in right now I think there is across the board a heightened sense of anxiety and a distrust of our neighbor and a breakdown in our ability to engage in productive healthy conversation.

“So what are some practical things that you could share with somebody who you know gets agitated when there was somebody who as a difference of opinion or is walking around with a higher degree of stress like just some.”

Simple practical tools or practices or things to remind ourselves of the next time we're in that situation.

And fear and anxiety makes it so easy for us to look at what's going wrong or what's not right or what's threatening. And then we have a bias so if we're talking about anything maybe political maybe anything else and and we disagree we're looking for disagreement we're looking for what's not right because what we've come to do more and more is to try to find difference between us I'm going to help keep myself safe by knowing how you're different from me and protecting myself from that. If you think about.

What that ignores right which is what's going right in all of us all of us have way more in common than we have different between us we want to be safe we want to lead.

Good lives if we lead from okay maybe we have different political opinions but how are we trying to be in the world right what we're trying to do moment to moment do you have a family you're trying to take care of oh I do too right do we both live in this world or we're both trying to do the best we can. In a difficult world so we may see things differently but that's okay like why can't we still be. Can we be kind to one another could be good to one another you know maybe we talk for a while and we still really disagree.

“What's wrong with that like that can be okay too that's what we do when we are at our best and we're coming from what's going right if we're sitting here talking to one another about something.”

And we have a disagreement you know way more is going right then is not going right we're sitting here having a conversation with one another we're healthy enough to do that. We can express opinions we can take someone else's opinion in can we value that and say maybe we create a little more shared understanding and even if at the end of the conversation. Let's see is that we really disagree but I see that you're a good person too I'd have to jump to something if you disagree with me you must be a bad person all this divisiveness right if we come from what's going right that's what we find and whether people look differently or think differently or whatever the case may be.

We see there's way more shared within us when we're being healthy then there is that's different between us.

“I think that the skeleton key here is disentangling your identity from someone's idea you know so that whatever somebody says or however they present to you isn't threatening your world view or your relationship with your sense of reality.”

But when we're so invested in a certain idea because it is integral to how we see ourselves and other words part and parcel of who we are our identity essentially that's when we get defensive or we act in a way that isn't our best self. It's because we're not feeling safe. So if you have a different opinion from me and I feel angry you're upset about that why why might not feeling safe that I could hear your different opinion and say okay you know maybe I think differently why why does it have such a strong impact often on a person because if person feels threatened by that opinion right you have to think like me or somehow I'm not safe and it very much plays towards us them which is never ever good.

For any societies people like you who don't think like people like me weren't troubled right when we're when we're in that place it comes from anxiety the defensiveness comes from not feeling safe and and if we stop and think why why do I have to be why might I be so threatened by other people's opinion have I bought into something that's not true.

Our strength is that we're melting pot that's what I grew up with it's wonderful the people are different and then wonderful the people eat different foods and it's wonderful people of different customs and like that's what we're here for different people come to America and we get better and stronger because of that and that's true. Of places not just America but if you think in the United States we we've come to look so a scant at anything that's different from us but that really runs against what has made us great as a nation it's been the incorporation of people with different thoughts and ideas and experiences.

So I think for us to anchor better to the simple goodness of being humans in the world or if we're Americans is being Americans in the United States can change so much of this but we have to be able to question why did it why do I have such a strong reaction if someone feels different from me. I've got something what's going on inside of me so we become curious about ourselves so instead of looking at you and why do you have that bad opinion I can say well what's going on in me that's where the answer really is right is not that other persons opinion it's like.

I'm reacting to it in interesting ways then if we bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves and there's a route to understand and bring change we don't have to be afraid to think it is interesting I react that way or that I have these thoughts in myself let me look at myself.

“Yeah it's difficult to practice compassionate curiosity towards another human being who might have a different idea than you if you're if you haven't first invested in doing that internally.”

Yes yes I agree 100% and we have to bring that to ourselves in a way that does understand what does compassionate curiosity mean it means I am looking at myself for the things that I'm not happy about or that others are not happy about so if people think that I'm.

very opinionated and very difficult with others when they disagree we want to bring compassionate curiosity to that so I can say well why might I.

That way why am I so opinionated why do I react so aggressively if someone disagrees like what is going on with me I have to do that in myself because it's coming from a place that doesn't feel great right is coming from places doesn't feel safe or doesn't feel whole so there's the kindness principle means we have to do that to ourselves before ourselves before I can say oh you have a different opinion from me like. How might I still look at you in a positive way right that mean the word enemies because of that or are we maybe 99.99% exactly the same except yeah we have this little disagreement so yeah it does have to start at home and then we can bring that compassionate curiosity to others too.

What is your sense of this mass psychology experiment that we're running on humanity by the intent of digital technologies that are creating individualized information silos and and by extension customized realities as we continue to atomize like how we're interfacing with information news entertainment and the like.

It seems to me that this is really driving us even further apart and making it more difficult to have compassionate curiosity around other people and their ideas and to just.

“Congregate in the way that we did when we were kids like what is going on and how is this showing up in terms of pathology and where is it leading us. I think we really need to slow down and to bring some.”

Reflectiveness we have moved ahead very very quickly and mean everyone knows this right but so much has happened in recent years think about the last five years or 10 years 20 years how much technology has moved ahead and it can do great good and it can do great bad like anything that is this a very very powerful tool can do good it can it can bring evil and for us to say well this is very powerful right let's stop and think how are we.

We using this right how can this be used to bring people insular environments where there's no risk of them seeing and outside truth right we might want to be aware of that and to have some.

“Rules and regulations around what's going on and how we're educating people and what people think is education there's so much that's thought to be education but is really just.”

Of very strong opinion I mean that it is in that sense the wild west with what has moved forward so quickly and I think the simple goodness or the common sense tells us let's slow down a little bit I mean we have great minds from all areas of endeavor great minds from science from the arts and science is from literature philosophy engineering medicine psychology to bring minds together to think okay.

And their mechanisms of misinformation it'd be good to work against them right as opposed to being polarized and saying well whose misinformation is it and out there they're different ideas to to step back and say as humans we've a responsibility to ourselves and to the generations that come after us to look with responsibility and some accountability on what we're doing with technology that's running ahead very fast.

Where does a conventional approaches to therapy talk therapy come into this equation because so much of the book is about.

Tools that can empower anybody outside of being in for example your office but how important is it to engage with a mental health professional.

“I think for some people it would be very important someone who's really down has thoughts of not wanting to be alive or suicidal thoughts.”

I mean there are things that can really get to us where we feel like we're not doing okay and then we need to get help from other people around us.

And often even if we don't mean to get help we can move faster with with help from the world around us so I think that good mental health help can be good for us but a lot of the mental health help that is available is not. And I don't need to be critical of of the people who are in the field there are many very very good people who are bringing their best self to trying to help people but our paradigms are often misguided and I think what we have learned across years that I try and put together. In the book serves as a paradigm for approaching ourselves and understanding ourselves and I think there's a therapy and a motive therapy that can be based around this that approaches our mental health just as we approach our physical health with the set of understandings and a set of principles and I am advocating for change my field has taken some of the arrows in the quiver and try to make the whole story around them and that's why we end up polishing the hood or whatever metaphor we want to use.

We need to bring away that humans can understand themselves and that is what I've tried to do in this book not because I've invented it out of nowhere but because we human beings have been working hard on this for many many years and we can pull it together. We can use it as a template for this is what self inquiry looks like right and it can look this way whether we're sitting with ourselves sitting with a friend or in the therapy. You've mentioned a couple times failures and leadership in your field and you just mentioned that you think it's important that there are some changes made.

“What specifically would those changes look like if you were the grand poo ball all of a sudden and you got to wave a magic wand.”

We would first say that there is good news here right the stigma that is surrounded mental health does not have to last and here's how it goes away the good news is we can bring understanding.

There are ways of understanding ourselves so that we do not have to turn the other way because we are afraid of what we are going to find or we are afraid that we won't be able to help ourselves anyway. And that there are a set of principles and we can go about applying these principles because just like we all have a human body we all have a human mind and it follows these principles and it has a structure to it and we can come at it and we can understand ourselves and we can make our lives.

“Better and yes there are great tools in the field of mental health knows a lot of them CBT and DBT and psychodynamic inquiry and IPT and there are a lot of ways or just examples of tools that we can use.”

But we can't base the story around one of the tools and we can't base the story around the toolbox. We have to have a way of understanding ourselves and we can have that so we feel a sense of hopefulness and we want to bring compassionate curiosity and we say yeah I want to do this why because I have an expectation that it will make things better. That's what will bring mental health on to the same interparity on to the same level as physical health because medicine has broad explanatory mechanisms there's good news you can understand how your body works if you don't like some aspect of it there things that you can do to make it better there people that can help you.

So we say okay I can look at my physical health I'll be scared the same applies in mental health. Nobody's ashamed to go to the doctor because they broke their leg like this is like you know no problem but there still is quite a bit of stigma if you're struggling emotionally with something that is preventing too many people from seeking out help.

Well maybe normalizing that is a place to start we will all have a hard time at one time or another and actually it's far more than just one time and as I thought for many many years you know if we are fortunate to be alive and we don't have a real mental health problem. No serious depression constant panic attacks addictive processes things that we can get help for but if we're fortunate that we don't have a mental health problem again even if we do we can get help but if we don't we certainly have mental health issues.

“That's the best state that we get in as humans life is very difficult and complicated and scary and confusing so none of us is getting through it without mental health issues.”

Okay maybe we've been moving away from mental health issues there issues of humanness right now we're working against the stigma and if there's no shame in getting help even if that's you reflecting upon yourself right there's no shame in looking at yourself there's no shame in getting help and you think that something can actually be done about it weren't an entirely different place weren't a place where the stigma goes away and mental health gains the parity that we all deserve it to have with our physical health.

We've certainly come a long way in terms of normalizing the discourse around these things but I think the flip side of that coin is.

Many people creating identities around their psychological issues you know whether it's victimhood or or their trauma you know it's sort of performative trauma or so being so heavily associated with it that it becomes this prison that's really not about getting better it's about kind of.

“Being there because they're getting something out of it whether it's attention or validation of some sort or another.”

Yes those are then use of unhealthy defense mechanism so someone who says building the story of self around a prior trauma without moving their life.

It is relying on defense mechanisms that aren't in the healthiest place so rationalization avoidance denial so the way that we would see that is the same as any set of unhealthy defense mechanisms why is the person doing that right why might they think that the story of self. It means to be based on this negative thing that happened in the past or they feel that they need an explanation or even an excuse for themselves because they don't feel that they can move forward in life that someone who is not empowered the way we would wish them.

And you know when we do the intensive work and we do intensive work now with individuals and at times with couples right this is what we're really looking for we're looking to move forward the understanding of self so the person is empowered to say okay I can change I don't have to build the story of myself around anything else whether it's someone else's voice or it's something good in my past or something negative. In my past by bringing this empowerment we want to build the story of self around like who am I now and and how am I leading and guiding myself into the into the future and we absolutely can do that but again we have to be in balance and when we're anchoring the story of self too much for example to a prior trauma is because we aren't empowered and we can go look at the structure of self and the function of self and our drives and we can find out where.

You know that that we need change but again we have to bring the knowledge that way more is going right and wrong and I don't have to be afraid or shame to look at what's not in the place I wanted to be now that prior trauma is still in our lives but it's not taking away empowerment.

“This might sound like a weird question I'm going to ask it anyway are you familiar with this trend called looks maxing that's happening right now where young men are.”

Doing things to their face and their bodies in order to enhance their physical appearance going to great lengths.

I'm to some degree so I don't have to be knowledge of it so you're going to. Yeah I mean my question is I mean it's something you having some kind of working understanding of what's going on but essentially I'm curious as to your. General psychiatric diagnosis for why this person why why someone would be motivated to go to such lengths and you know and medical interventions.

Psychologically culturally that led to this even being a trend in the first place.

“I think I do I think I do understand I think what you're commenting on is.”

In this particular demographic now doing something that we've been doing in all sorts of ways for a long long time which is to present something outward. That makes us feel that things are in a better place inside and we do that many many in many ways we can do that physically around how we look and how we present to others we can look we can do that by. You know wanting the the front of the house to be painted nicely when things aren't in a good place inside again metaphorically we try and present a good face.

Because that can help us avoid what we aren't happy about inside of us and you would say well why are we doing that are we trying to confuse and convince the other. The answer there is yes to some degree we want people to see us then again whether it's a visually or it's in other ways and see oh I see something I really like I see something I feel good about but often we're using that to hide from ourselves. Right then if a person sees me and they smile back to me because they see something they like am I hiding from what's inside that I don't like and there's nothing wrong with wanting ourselves to look good and be healthy and present.

Good but but often what happens is that's we have way too much of a good thing because what we're then trying to do is to hide from something and often hiding from the other observing us what that's really about is us hiding from ourselves.

It's quite a thing that's happening right now with young men and you know it's it's on some level this has always been happening but it's a very turbo charged version of that.

And it's just interesting from a cultural point of view like why now what's what's happening with young men that's motivating this and why is it happening in such a performative context with like people that are streaming their lives and and you know talking about it in the way that they are.

“Unfortunately done so much in the world to make people feel less secure and to feel more vulnerable and I think we see that in a lot of demographics where we see the trends that are unhealthy in this particular case we see.”

I think people doing something to present in a certain way because there's now something to do about it and there's an acceptability to doing something that makes the person then physically present different because that demographic has accepted that. Then what we see is a vicious cycle where then more people are doing something that really the advent of came from an unhealthy place and now there's something that just gets done because it's done and all this automaticity that gets us way far away from simple goodness then comes into play and if we say well.

You know we're all doing things to make ourselves look better to the outside world so we feel better inside a little bit of that's okay but how are we doing to much of that when then it's working against us and we can look at that in individual people and we can also look at that in different demographics.

“In reading your book I feel very empowered to exert greater agency over how I think about my mental health and how I try to bring awareness and practices to it every single day.”

But there may be a not insignificant group of people who are listening to this are watching it who are listening and thinking this all sounds great it makes sense I want to be better I know I can be happier I know I'm not happy I know that. There must be a way to get over this hump that I'm on but I just you know I just don't know if it's going to work for me or I don't have the motivation or I like the confidence to even try these things like find for you but yeah I'm not going to be able to do it myself what do you say to that person.

What would say pause for a second and just be a little bit nicer to yourself right that's a way a person makes themselves special in a negative way I feel really uncomfortable though.

Right right we need some discomfort right discomfort can get us to good places as long as it's safe discomfort but saying that's a really negative thing to say about myself that other people could get something good. But I can't right and to be kind to oneself that doesn't come out of nowhere no one comes out of the womb thinking that. If you're thinking that I'm sure you're up against a lot you've had difficult experiences it doesn't come out of nowhere right but if you can pause for a second and find some energy and and some.

We do will be successful but if we bring our best self and if I say I just want to understand something make something a little bit better in myself and understanding.

A situation in the world around me I'm not asking myself for a lot and am I really telling myself that. That's closed off to me right and I think that leads towards more compassion of a person thinking yeah that I would say that to myself I you know other people can get better and make healthy change but I can't. To feel a sense of compassion for that but also feel the resolve that I don't want it to be that way. I don't want to understand where that comes from I want to start making some wins I want to make some goodness in my life things that are better today than they were yesterday.

“If I can take these little steps why would I be different from everyone else who can make their lives better and the truth is that we're not.”

None of us are different we can all make our lives better how much better we don't know each other situations and what we're all going through but I'll tell you this for sure.

We can all make our lives better that is not off limits to anyone of us. Anybody who just heard that or saw it. Did so because they actively sought you out. So on some level that speaks to not only a desire to be better but. To one degree or another a belief in the possibility right so that in and of itself is worthy of being honored and.

Just reflecting on that perhaps is enough to take the next step and these these things become self perpetuating pretty quickly.

Right this far more going right in anyone watching this podcast then there are things that are not going right anyone who's doing anything to try and better themselves to learn more. Who's interested in the world around them think of how much has to be going right and the belief of self inside. If a person really felt that they couldn't get any better. They wouldn't watch this right they wouldn't do anything for some really thought nothing can get better. Oftentimes that's a reflex and that's like I can't get better because we're trying to protect ourselves from possible disappointment right but if you're watching this podcast and if you think that you can.

Be better in any way look at what you already have going for you and you already believe that if you're engaged enough to be listening. It's like the person who's constantly asking themselves and other people if they're a good parent like I don't know if I'm just the fact that they're engaged in that inquiry already puts them at the top tier. You know like people who aren't good parents aren't asking myself that question all the time right.

“Right enough is going right that you're reflective about how you're being a parent and you want to be a better parent right and that's a good example because often times that's what a person will bring.”

I'm a bad parent, a terrible parent and you listen and they're saying that they're like. Gosh, I want to know how I can be better parents that person think coming a good parent they're doing all the things right that run directly counter to what they're saying. So often we have faith in ourselves we just don't know it. You know we have to bring ourselves the good news if you're the person asking if you're a good parent and how you might be a better parent. Look at what's already going right and this is true for so many things inside of us is true for parenting and is true for parenting.

And is true for a lot else where we can bring criticism and sort of a sense of hopelessness to ourselves, but that's not how we really. That's not how we really feel it's either a reflex someone told us or taught us about ourselves it isn't true or we're trying to protect ourselves, but if you're engaged in the world. You care about the world and you think you can make it a better place. Is it ever too late to engage in this process? No, nothing else needs to be said no period on what answer, you know.

Final thought before we end this is there anything else that you want to highlight or point out where you think people get it wrong when it comes to ideas around trauma or the agency and the empowerment to take better control of their mental health. I think that we often think that they're nebulous concepts and then we don't know how we can find our way to them. Like it would be great to have that, but how do you get it and we don't think that there are steps to get it as we would with physical health.

“We understand that there are steps and we can exercise if you want to lose 10 pounds with such a losing one pound like we're going to understand that.”

So we believe that there are routes to the good things that we want. And the same is true of mental health, these aren't concepts that are unrelated to one another. They have a route, a mechanism of understanding and a path that we can follow so that we can bring healthy change.

It occurs out of the blue, it's be stowed upon someone.

“No, there are routes to get there and we all can get ourselves there.”

We can start ourselves down that healthy path.

We just have to bring understanding and compassionate curiosity. Fantastic.

I really appreciate you Paul.

“You have been instrumental in my own mental health journey and I want to thank you for that.”

And the new book is really a beautiful offering like this notion on its own of what's going right. Like let's start with like all the good things and build upon that rather than as we said at the outset like let's just pathologize everything and talk about all these things that are going wrong and how to fix them.

“I think it's just a reframe that we need right now that changes fundamentally like the lens on how we're perceiving our mental health.”

Our mental health to begin with and I think it's going to help a lot of people so thank you for your service and for coming here and talking to me today. You're very welcome. I appreciate you as well and thank you for having me on again.