The Elusive I-10 (lYyeS-SILB0)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lYyeS-SILB0

Welcome back everyone to the elusive eye, the nature and the function of the self with my good friends and co interlocutors, Greg Enriquez and Christopher master Pietro. So we are in the midst of a very rich and I think thought provoking and insightful journey with Greg on what he’s sort of broadly calling the therapeutic and clinical dimensions of the self. How does this model that we work together to build a theoretical model of the self, how does that align with and and how we afford and respond to the clinical dimensions of the self that are so prominent in great work. So I’m just going to now pass things over to Greg, and let him take the reins. Thank you so much, friend. Yes, it’s a, you know, so last time we were really speaking to sort of some of the more initial theoretical elements. So in the sense that, you know, I, when I’m my updated tripartite map of consciousness human consciousness is basically domain of the experiential self and I call the experiential self the private narrator more the egoic functions and the public management itself. And then what we showed last time was how your model of the self the cognitive science architecture that we’ve built over the course of this dialogue. Oh, he cut out for me. Yeah, you still there. Greg. Oh, you’re back. Yep. Well, I lost you guys. Sorry I’m back. Okay. Over the course of the dire sorry about that. Over the course of the dialogue. Showed sort of what that model of the self enriched for us. Okay. In terms of it sort of gives this layered perspective merging out of quality and then have modeling of just the agent arena environment modeling of the self other environment, how that kind of get mapped by the influence matrix and then you have the adverbial I positioning itself and then sort of perhaps on top of that or adjacent to that. This justifying narrative here. And for me what that does is so now as a clinician, basically what I would say is, oh, wow, that provides a lot of sort of cognitive science justification for what I’m working with. And now we can sort of then say hey okay how is it that I experienced somebody in the clinic room. And what I’d like to do then is that you know start on that journey and talk a little bit about this and we can put this in the show notes. I’ll tell you a little bit about a case that I’m fortunate enough based on a successful case that I’m fortunate enough to be able to talk about. So if I share the screen real fast, and I’m going to be bouncing back and forth between points as my tendency. In terms of this so. So essentially, I’ll share a little bit of what you know we call Maggie story. This is actually a snapshot of the first session with Maggie she forwarded us the opportunity to talk about her story. So, right here she’s basically just asked to leave. So I don’t want to be here. Her friend brought her in in relationship to her friend had walked in on her as she was cutting on herself. She had a long history of anxiety and and social anxiety depression low self esteem. Unfortunately, there was an incident with her boyfriend, which you might imagine, a traumatic incident with her boyfriend. That was, you know, very injurious to her. And she had no way of processing this. So it’s that kind of like psychic cancer on her soul in relation. In her senior year she had gotten some relief she had made some friends had done pretty well. But when she came to college she was at this idea that, you know, that she would be freed from her past. Right. But unfortunately, when she got here other people hooked up made friends. And she was in a particular niche. And all of a sudden very quickly as what she thought was going to escape her past then cascaded into a collapse. So that over the six week period. So this is in the middle of October so she arrived in the end of June, I mean July, end of August into the beginning of September, so we’re six to eight weeks in to the session she’s a freshman. Interestingly, she was 17 years old and I had that she was just about ready to turn 18 is an ethical dilemma as to whether or not you can treat somebody as you know there’s there’s issues along that line so that was interesting because she did not want her parents to know at all in relation so that was interesting and she was actively suicidal. She cut on her wrists. And then her friend walked in so she’s a cutter. And then her friend walked in saw some of the blood and then Maggie freaked out and left. Thankfully her friends followed her. She climbed up on a bridge and got off on the other side of the guardrail. And thankfully their friends talked her down from that. And then they stayed with her that night, and then they brought her in the next day. And so that’s this is the next day from that in relation. And so my doctoral student, you know, did a screen said hey you know she pretty quickly told him about the, you know, quasi attempted suicide of the night before. And so I was in class I got a call. I was like, all right, I’ll come on down, gave her some things to fill out. And then I arrived on the scene. As soon as I got there she was like I don’t want to be here anymore I’m out of here. So that’s not an uncommon frame of reference. And so then we, you know, joined together and talked about the process of what the various options were I had to tell her yeah she left at that time I would have had to call the cops at that stage unfortunately because she was in a obvious high risk for herself so we had to get a place where she was going to be safe. And so that’s a two and a half three hour process. But ultimately then, you know, we established a healing environment and working relation and started on a journey in relation to that I thought I would bring her up because what happened to her is a really pretty intense but classic example of what I see in many many individuals these days, in terms of the struggles that they have with their interior, the internalizing processes of the self in terms of what kind of pain they feel emotional pain, what it means to them relationally, what it means to them in relationship to their their internal narrator and how they try to portray themselves publicly. So very very classic experience that I see is individuals who have high trait neuroticism and talk a little bit about what that means but basically that emotional system the basic quality into the negative affect system idols very high, you know, wonder why that is in relationship to development. But what we see what I see at least there’s a lot of data for this in terms of sort of especially in women in puberty. What we see is an explosion of internalizing disorders in say 1213 year old individuals. And what I believe is happening and I think there’s a lot of evidence for what’s happening is as that negative anxiety system comes online as the sense of social place and social status becomes very salient there’s a lot of evidence that all of a sudden, that one social social place social judgment social comparison becomes very salient concerns, and then the capacity for a higher order narrating identity, who am I what should I be, what should I feel what should I want to feel sets the stage for a pretty vicious cycle, what I call a neurotic loop. So the neurotic loop cycle is you know you have a negative reaction to negative feelings. So you have a sensitized negative feeling system of vulnerable relational field system like I feel like I’m under threat, and a narrator that wants to be not to be either in, in pain or observed to be negatively reactive, so you’re trying to sit on a emotional system that is jumpy, but you don’t want to come across as hyper sensitive or reactive, and you want your friends want you to be happy and everything else. So it’s a very very sort of tenuous system, and then it sets the stage for all sorts of justification relative to affect meaning like, stop this way, you know, don’t be this way. And she really embodied this in a huge way at multiple levels basically she lived essentially in a world by herself she would not tell any she never told her parents, anything about what And indeed this is actually one of the very traumatic moments in the therapy down the road is she, she ends up buying into the therapy we have a good first couple of weeks into six weeks or so, right before the Christmas holiday. She actually has an episode where she was cutting we had minimized her cutting but she was kind of a little bit her. Her physician noticed that asked some questions and told her mom that he was concerned about her. That was a reveal for her that was very upsetting she was very she was ruminative about that. And then ultimately that created a cascade of a suicidal another suicidal episode at the end of the semester. And she then went in, and then I guided her into the hospital. And this is not an uncommon thing. If you can set up a system, so that the individual can experience the hospital as healing which is definitely not always the case but I actually had a hope that this in this It might be in my hopes for not to be well founded. So what happened in the context of this is we were able to catalyze an opportunity for her to reconnect with her mother. So her mother visited And the hospital. And that gave me an opportunity to assess her mom because it’s, she talked about how critical her mom could be or judgmental. And when you’re dealing with an individual like this it’s very hard to know whether this assessment is a projection of sensitivity to mom, or whether And I’m not sure whether mom is really harsh and critical. Folks like this will see the world through their glasses and their glasses are everybody’s critical so this afforded me an opportunity then to meet with mom and make my own assessment and indeed mom shared with me that her, you know that she was something happened to her daughter she knew the light went out with her daughter’s eyes was the way mom put it. And she never knew what happened but never knew how to approach her. Never knew how to approach Maggie, but clearly care deeply and had a capacity to be sensitive, but just didn’t know, Maggie’s very one of the hypersensitive child, and the mom just didn’t know idea. We were able to engender an opportunity for the two of them to have a conversation and to open up lines of communication that adhere to for not been available. And she was then able to tell her mom that she was raped by her boyfriend, when she was 15. And, you know, that was a cascade of shame, and it turned out the episode happened when she snuck out and drank a bit when she was 15 so she snuck out of her bedroom. She was convinced that her parents would basically then blame her for the episode, given that she disobeyed them and you know violated some rules. And I was fortunate and I tested mom waters on this and I was very pleased and this was a great example sort of of the self in terms of its potential for a phase shift. And Maggie basically handles this story and you know we have a three hour session or so together, where Maggie is able to reveal this and you can you know you can imagine what this is like for her in terms of super intense social anxiety massive amounts of shame, terror and relationship and massive amounts of anticipation of judgment and alienation. And thankfully, what happens is the reverse of that. So her expectation is or the anticipated fear if we do some predictive processing and internalized modeling that she’s done an enormous amount of is how could you let me down you made this happen to you. And of course then or what really happened and thankfully like I said I tested the waters is that mom’s reaction was maternal was, oh my god honey I can’t believe this happened to you, you know that just because you stuck out doesn’t mean you deserve to got raped and I knew something horrible had happened and I’ve wondered all these years what happened, and I would want it to be there for you but I had no idea how. And so we’ve talked some about that itself modeling is such a sort of key structure of you know where you are and how whether or not you’re attached and her modeling was basically like you know if anyone knew what she was and who she was and what she had been, you know, she was just a horrible person. And so then what happens is mom, you know, basically reaches to her, holds her and pulls her close and affords her a mirroring and and the love that you know she was not expecting. And that resulted just in a cascade of changes for Maggie was a very very moving train self transformative event that laid the groundwork then for really the next year therapy that we engage in terms of terms of that so to me what that the reason I wanted to share it’s a it’s a real life, you know, documented sort of example of what happens to individuals a initially in relationship to how they can turn against themselves how the narrator emerging online narrator, fearing the public and feeling the pain, but, but becomes completely in its own structure. You multiply a trauma on top of that and you can then channel that system that system can go into a nightmarish place anyway but you multiply a trauma on top of that. And you can find yourself in a really really dark, dark place. So, that’s that’s Maggie story in relation, and the blog basically delineates that and delineates the process by which we were trying to kind of create in her and understanding of what was going on. And one of the reasons I also wanted to tell the story is that Maggie was not, I don’t think she’s terribly uncommon in that she had had made a series couple of serious suicide attempts in her junior year, year following the rape. And she freaked everybody out and they put her in a, you know, she puts the first time in a hospital she was reluctant to go back was not not helpful. I mean, you know, maybe prevented her from making a suicide attempt immediately, but they basically medicated or gave her a mental health crisis. And, you know, essentially narrated this in terms of biomedical disease terms and did no substantive sort of psychotherapeutic work no exploration but this might be an origin of trauma that she might have a social anxiety or personality disorder that’s emerging, and what that would mean to the internal working model of the stuff. In fact, one of the things I afforded her very early was I gave her an interpretation of her structure in terms of what I call a shame based oppression. Shame based oppression is when the system, the judging system it’s very common individuals have an avoidant personality disorder. For those that don’t know an avoidant personality disorders a structure that’s kind of the opposite of a narcissist. And that’s what the breakup looks like. Okay, it’s like hey I’m a winner I’m the cam I’m you know, very potentially combative very willing to enter in the arena, a massive amount of assertion that you will win the position of the avoidance essentially the exact opposite you’re, you’re obsessed with the fear of losing and therefore you’re chronically submitting and deferring and chronically feeling the sort of the white flag of shame and submission in relation, and the narrator of iniquity and ineffectiveness becomes very very dominant. It overlaps a lot with social anxiety disorder. So, but she had nobody ever explained to her sort of this frame of reference. They basically medicalized it. And certainly it doesn’t always happen but it happens too often as far as I’m concerned, relative to what we can have access to. So if we take, you know the justifying top side and the internal modeling side that you laid out john what we really get is a very clear example the ways in which vicious feedback loops of injury into the attachment, and then isolation and then safety and then internalized narrative that makes somebody feel more and more isolated in a vicious sort of cycle sort of way that delivers a very critical self judgment that ultimately dead ends the person and shuts them down, motivationally emotionally. And that’s what we saw with her fairly dramatically. So, her understanding of that in her capacity then to gain a metacognitive perspective and relationship to it and have some framework references you can explain what was actually happening as it often is the case with therapy is a very very valuable thing to gain some, you know, mapping of the processes that the person’s facing. That’s a wonderful, not the event but your, your, your discussion of it, Greg and I’m glad you were able to so successfully help her. So, a couple things that I would want to note. And maybe they’re both notes and questions. One is that you know the throughout all of this is self relevance and self interpretation self modeling. And like you said and the way this is self organizing and the way it’s extended and loops through the environment and loops for other things. So, I’m picking up on a lot of the themes we’ve talked about. And so thank you for that. And then the both the way that self organizing process can become malfunction, but also that carries within it the potential for healing. So all of that, I think, like, really builds very well. But I noticed the juxtaposition between your successful therapy and her initial treatment by the official sort of medical community. And I noticed what, well, maybe it’s more of a question. It seems to me that precisely because there is no good model of the self and all of this machinery, even though the term is used so prevalently through psychology and through psychiatry, that that whole dimension, the whole dimension of the It was just did not come on to the therapeutic screen for them. And it was like you said, it’s basically, you know, the disease model, the medicalization, and then all of that is, it is not addressed. So it’s, it strikes me that this is sort of a question, but poses a statement that you know you’re giving us obviously this, this primary level, where the model and the therapy are really, you know, coherent with each other, but then it strikes me there’s the meta level that you’re giving us. And it strikes me there’s the meta level that this whole series is addressing, which is this construct is not just out there as a theoretical idea, right, it goes into the very guts of how we try to help people with some of the most serious issues and if somebody does, I’m sorry, I’m a little bit aghast that the medical community I see suicide in terms of the relationship that the self has to itself like, I mean, what, I mean, I’m sorry, I mean, I’m from the outside. And so I have, I have the unjustifiable self righteousness of the, of the naive, but, but nevertheless that strikes me is just incredibly conceptually myopic, if not theoretically myopic, it’s like, how are you not thinking about the how are you not thinking about the self machinery, when you are confronting the phenomena of suicide, like, like, what, like that, that is not I mean I in one sense it’s a medical issue, but it’s, it’s fundamentally a psycho ontological issue. Right. Like animals aren’t doing anything like this, like, come on, this is so bizarre. And so I guess I might my statement and question is, like, am I reading this correctly and what you like, how does that land with you with the how do you, how do you know what would you respond to, to that point. I’ll try to be measured. I appreciate your, I appreciate your energy deeply. My, my, you know. I’m trying to measure it listen I talked to a lot of psychiatrists I mean psychiatrists are not fools. You know, at an individual level. Okay. But the institutional infrastructure we talked about the meaning Christ. Yep, exactly. What what has happened at the institutional level. And so psychiatry is basically gone through two major waves. And then Freud comes along, and many individuals will start to see the vast majority of psychopathology through a 40 and lens. And in many ways, there’s an argument that, you know, psychiatry gets taken over for by an analytic lens that’s deeply problematic say from 1920 and 19 mid 1950s. Okay. And then you get the, you know, the chemotherapy revolution in psychiatry, psychiatry. And then to me, it the way it grows it becomes deeply problematic by the 1980s, so that the energy and psychiatry is very much then oriented towards, oh, yeah, these are all brain disorders that we have diagnosed, and we’re going to institutionalize them narrative around brain disorder. And then we’re going to institutionalize the psychopharmacological treatments i mean if you look at the top 10 drugs that in terms of money, like three of them are psychiatric drugs, okay, of all in terms of the amount of money and then the idea that is a brain disease. Now even anxiety I guess is a brain disease. The medicalization of our problems, mental health problems is really dramatic and painful. And then you see the consequences both in terms of say, turn on a TV, you know and be like hey if your first If your first anti depression didn’t work you know we have second anti depressions that we can take on top of that you know certainly in the US we have in these ads all the time. It’s sad to me and so the energy and power that you have and indeed this is why this conversation is so important to me. If we had a dynamic functional model of the self, okay, like the, especially the ego the experiential self the embodiment of elements, we understand the process by which these parts, okay, it’s a complex dynamic system is in complex dynamic interrelation and you set it in a developmental framework and the processes by which maladaptive loops can form through these parts is very reasonable, very obvious, you know, and that’s not a malfunction. So maladaption happens at the level of learning and development that doesn’t necessarily reduce to any part malfunction that would be operative at the neuro biological level. Those are totally different ontological categories. Yet medicine has to ascend for it to be medical problems, rather than just problems and living diagnosable diseases can’t be just problems and living. They have to be medical harmful dysfunctions. That’s that’s the definition of a disease. So really they’re actually playing an ontological language game that forces essentially these categories to be placed at a lower level of analysis, and the damage that that does to our society and meaning making is serious and tragic. And by the way, the blame also sits with the goddamn psychologist, because they have no ontological clarity about what the hell are talking about, John. It’s a common, I mean, this is what matters to me because it’s sort of like, Jesus, are we telling these kids, I mean, this would happen all you just have been a depressive disease. I mean, that’s what you live after two weeks in a damn hospital. That’s what she came away with and meds, no talk therapy, no nothing. And that’s a that’s an extreme but it happens. It definitely happens. So it’s painful and it’s frustrating and the meta message talk about this why I want to hand this over to Chris at the level of what’s the existential meaning of our condition in relation well the psychiatric, you know, narrative is strong and potentially toxic and corrupting. Well, if I can say one more thing before Chris responds. I mean, it sounds like we’re caught, you know, we have, we have just this profound Socratic ignorance of the self. And then, and then we mask it with with with with, you know, the romantic proclivity to identify the self with with the with the with the with with the autobiography of your, your, of your uniqueness or something like that, which is completely useless, you know, impotent to address the issues that you’re addressing for this unfortunate woman and both the Socratic ignorance and the romantic pretense. And I think it is fundamentally pretentious in profound ways. I should say decadent romanticism, I should qualify the decadent romantic pretense, because I don’t want to tar all of romanticism with that brush. I apologize for that decadent romanticism. But nevertheless, that is pervasive in our culture. I think both of those, I mean, I don’t want to reduce what’s happening to a sociological issue. I’m not trying to be Durkheim here, but I mean he did write his book on suicide. He did write his book on suicide. Precisely. Oh, right, that if if your worldview cannot properly render a coherent meaning for people, you’re going to see fundamental increases in suicide that are going to be independent of people’s physiology, etc, etc. And I think that’s what the classic work showed. And I mean, that was written in the 19th century. So, I mean, it just strikes me as just how well I in some ways I know, but the invective is coming up because I get the suffering that this woman was confronting is something that I’m aware of. And so, I think that we are so impotent and ignorant about the self in a way that is potentially fatal. I think I just want to thank you, Greg, for because I mean it gives it edge to everything that we’re talking about that is just crucial and important, and even poignant. So thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s that’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of college students. So, anyway. Yes, I mean, yeah, well, I mean let’s, if we were to scale up this problem, even more. I don’t want to tip us into this conversation for too long, but I mean, the, like the bed of procrustaceous that we’re talking about you’re talking about it in a psychiatric context, Greg, but if we were to just talk about it, talk about the, the medicalization of the self for a moment, like, think of what where we are right now and coven, right, like the, the, this idea that that if you bridge your model of the self so thoroughly that it becomes confined that its concerns become confined to the preservation of, of physical health. And everything besides become superfluous becomes a kind of afterthought or egg junked. And effectively what you do is you know the capacity of restoring the self reflexive connection. And I mean, to me it’s just it’s just a large it’s just a it’s just a scaled up version I think of the same problem you can’t confine people in finitely from one another from the world, and not expect their, their, their, not expect their spiritual health to fail for that exact reason. Right. And the same, the same, the same abridging of the self is happening at a mass scale right now and it’s it’s destroying people for the same reasons, I think, and in that case it’s not the psychiatric profession that’s that’s perhaps the perpetrator it’s exceeded to the level of the state, but it’s the same myopia, I think, totally. And it goes to the meaning crisis goes to the point of what is the philosophical and scientific relative to theological message and context of narration that we are actually speaking to ourselves about, you know, and it’s like, I don’t know. Yeah, we’re gonna have serious problems with the absence of that collective narrative that’s rich in wisdom orienting as opposed to reductive and fragmented and chaotic and instrumental. That was very excellent. I want to put another thing on it that I think is very complimentary to this website, and I noticed the shift in terms, and Chris this reminds me of pond’s work, you know I think it’s in the agony of arrows where he talks about the elevation of health, especially physical yeah right. You know, I don’t I don’t I don’t believe in religion, I go to the gym, you know, every day and I pump out and I do all this because I want to be healthy. And what is it to be healthy. And I noticed that what’s happened when Greg was relating his interaction. You know, it was around mental health, but when Greg was laying out his model, he was talking about well being. And that shift in vocabulary, I think, is it points to that endemic thing you’re talking about Chris about, you know, the truncating of the well being and therefore the truncating of the self down to sort of hell, which is understood itself in a very crude, and this is part of pond’s critique. Right. I think it’s pretty sure it’s the agony of arrows, where he makes that critique. I like and that we go well, oh, and health is what you all do that it’s in the end is like, yes, health is a value, but it’s not, not not synonymous with well being. So, wow, that I think the point you made Chris it lines up with pond very well and Greg I noticed that when you talk about your own framework, you focus on well being as your primary normative term, but that when you’re talking on behalf of, you know, the mental health system, you switch, I think, you know, naturally enough to, you know, the mental health discourse, and that’s a serious shift. That’s a serious shift. And it’s that I’m really glad you picked that up and it’s central to getting from my vantage point, much of what the unified approach so there’s unified theory and unified approach tries to do is afford us the bridging from a theory of human mental behavior that Then, and angles us on psychological adaptation and development in a way that affords us a particular angle from the psychological doctor around mental health. Okay, but does so is then contextualized in relationship to optimal human functioning and well being right You know, it’s just well then placed to them be like yes, we want to reference this in relationship to what is the you diamonic potential of individuals and groups and societies to afford us, and that has to be the record to me that has to be the proper reference Okay, and that by the way is completely absent in psychiatry. All right, my friend, Waldemar Schmidt, who’s a long term student in both psychiatry and psychology, but he is actually a pathophysiologist. And so his he’s a professor of pathophysiology studies the kidney and liver makes a really great point in relationship to say the DSM diagnostic and statistical manual. And he’s like, you know, when the first thing that I learned as a pathophysiologist was what is a healthy liver and a healthy kidney look like. Okay, that becomes the model was the optimal functioning. The DSM has no picture of what a healthy individual. Exactly. Exactly. There’s no frame of reference. It’s just the absence of annoying distressing injurious symptomatology, whatever that is it. But what is that. Well, there’s an implicit normativity, the implicit activity is, are you functioning well within a market economy. That’s that. Basically, no, but I mean, because I lectured on the DSM not that long ago and it’s like, it’s coming down to, like, can you basically dress and clean yourself and keep up a job that that’s that’s what we call it. The bar. Yeah. What, but yeah, it’s like, our ontology of the self has become so impoverished that we have just dropped, dropped, dropped, dropped when we try to intervene in cells in a significant fashion. Okay, I’m going to, I could talk about this a lot because right plugs in but I want to give I want to give back to you. I want to give some. Okay. All right, so yeah, I’ll come back to the embedded but I’m really glad we framed it this way because this is why so passionate to me. Okay, because the institutional narratives and ideologies that drive all of the money and the reimbursement and what we pay and what we do and how we entertain ourselves. It’s all embedded in a worldview context and what it speaks to us and how we frame that’s unbelievable we’d mirror that back and give it back. And so if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t, if we don’t And the eastern wisdom traditions actually genuinely speak to something that we can bridge from a Western psychological cognitive science view and align that up and give people a message in a meaning making system that actually affords fulfillment. Well, then we wouldn’t have one third of our college students being diagnosed with mental health problems and be one quarter of them being on pills for depression and anxiety. Well, I mean, at least that’s the ideological, you know, positive state. So anyway, there it is, I’m glad we got a little charged rhetoric in relation. Well, so you see the poignancy of that kind of suffering, and I’m deeply appreciative of the fact that you were there, Greg. But when you see the poignancy of it, it provokes a kind of reaction. At least I think it should. I can vouch for that. I’ve seen that enough and felt it enough over the years for sure. Definitely. Okay, so now let me go in more than a little bit of the intellectual arguments that I wanted to make in terms of as we move from here. So, so now let’s get into psychiatry does this thing so now here now I’m going to go back to my own intellectual awakening and basically like, hey, when you’re getting trained you know psychiatry’s got its issues is so does all of the mental health disciplines. So now it’s like I’m going to go to psychology. What’s a psychological doctor to do in this situation. Well, it’s really a problem at one level, because there’s a thing called the problem of psychotherapy, which is that psychotherapy is a jungle. Okay, it’s a jungle of different approaches like what do you choose you go Freudian, do you go Rogerian do you go new wave CBT do you go behavioral, do you go family system solution focus multicultural. I mean, how do you manage that. And that’s, that’s essentially the difficulty that I encountered, and my sense was the followings like okay, I want to afford the Maggie’s of the world. I want to be the best opportunity to find a path towards wisdom I want to be as flexible and comprehensive in my affording giving them that affordance. I am a coherent just, which means basically I like to make sense out of shit. I know that’s crazy but you know, I like intelligibility and sensibility you know somebody said that that was right. I heard from john that actually, you know plausibility and intelligibility are good things you know I think I was born with that sense of ability. Anyway, but, but these are, they are really a for you a lot of interesting things but actually it’s a real problem. And indeed then what my question was well actually could you develop a human psychology that orients in relationship to the key insights of this jungle and do so in a way that affords meaning making so that they assume these key insights can be assimilated and integrated into a whole package that becomes the division and the quest that ultimately comes to unified theory and back into the unified approach. So great question here, because it’s on there as large. So my interaction with this community has been when you press people therapist they often self disclose that they’re eclectic. And so, what I mean is that this isn’t just a theoretical problem about there isn’t a unified framework, but it’s that in practice people are trying to find some kind of integration but they’re doing it in a very fragmented auto didactic kind of fashion, is that a fair thing to say absolutely the vast majority of people identify if you if you if you survey therapists and counselors you know the vast majority of them. If you ask the right questions in a particular way, they’ll sort of have a home place but they’re basically a quick And at the level of, you know, if you then pay really good people doing good things but if we were to bring theoretical scientific or philosophical rigor to that eclecticism. It’s bad. It’s just sort of like, it’s a hodgepodge of all these various things. But as soon as you get, you know, and then you back up and you say well what’s the ontological difference or do you have equivocation, you know, and then, believe me, John member, we don’t even know what behavior and mind is. So when we back up into these concepts and then you drop them all together in particular types of frames. I mean it’s basically a shit show of, you know, confusion. So that’s that’s the problem. That’s a standard practice. Within the cognitive science we have the conceptual morass of the cell. And then within the self psycho technologies. We have what you just aptly described as the ship show. So that’s the generalize conceptual Morass. So then that’s what that’s what my life quest sort of is is actually, it doesn’t have to be that way and that’s what’s really at least that’s my argument is actually, we can make a lot more coherent and then cumulative sense, and this is again, this isn’t about finishing the project or getting the project started with the right field framing, you know, a unified field framing actually says oh these are what our terms can mean now we can actually build off of them. That’s what I’m after, not like being done. So that’s what I’m after. And so what that stood for is Roger Freud Skinner and back. What you see here is you see in the bottom here you got evolution and neurophysiology, so support just a perspective of from biology, you know, and certainly psychiatry that operates there, and So you get the individual human human individual level of analysis of problem with this problem in psychotherapy pairing and you get the major paradigms. Okay. And the socio cultural systems context sits above it so you get biopsychosocial here, and the major figures at the individual human level can be well framed in relationship to these icons. Okay. So, although there certainly are variants of on these lines, but if you were to say all right I’m going to take four iconic paradigms schools of thought, and their leaders, you can do pretty well in terms of really especially if you block back bracket off the biological and the socio cultural and family systems above. Right. So that was apparent to me and my own framing and my own work. Now, one of the things I want to share then is sort of like okay how I got here and part of also what I’m saying is is that what and we’ve alluded to this already is that I really want a model of character adaptation and functioning. That’s far more comprehensive than, you know, certainly personality trait theory. And ultimately what’s going to emerge the unified approach that is these four different key insights from the jungle. We get what’s called character adaptation systems theory which I’ll go through here in just a second. This is the quick schematic of it is the fifth branch on the tree. And, you know, we publish this in a good journal if people are actually interested and I can send links. So, the, what I’m going to share is I had this model, okay that you see this is the basic model. And what I had found in applying this model is that each of the human individual perspectives, focused on different patterns of adaptation. Okay, that you can then dilute elucidate and determine to see brilliant Greg. Yep, that’s a. So, if you attend to what the psychotherapeutic processes are. Okay. You see that actually the maladaptive systems they want to identify and then engender psycho technologies to reverse and create more virtuous cycles well they all actually use an adaptive or to maladaptive to adaptive cycle framing. And at the same time they lens or a specialized different aspects of the human psyche. Right, right. So, I had this was the initial scheme I developed so I teach integrative psychotherapy. So at the bottom here you’ll see the three broad context. Okay. And then I talked to people about hey there’s a behavioral habitual process of adaptation that people engage in and then we can think about this in terms of clinically in terms of your lifestyles. So what is the circadian rhythm of the day, what is the stimuli that prime particular cravings and tendencies for you to engage in. What are those procedural systems that you know you have access to that are downgraded and then just triggered by particular patterns of stimuli. And then how do you interact with the environment and then you know sort of an engineering sort of way. Well that’s a habit and behavioral lifestyle frame. The evolution of Carl Rogers in certainly in terms of sort of systematic psychotherapy can be seen in terms of the experiential and best alt like fritz pearls, and then into what’s called a motion focus therapy I don’t know if you’ve heard of a motion focus there I did training with less green greenberg on emotion. You damn well have heard of it then he said he’s one of the co founders with Sue Johnson who goes off and does it with attachment. I mean, attach merges it with attachment does couples therapy but less greenberg is the founder, of course, what he calls a Neo humanistic emergence And I think that’s a great way to kind of be an emotion coach and what the emotion focus people do. If you’re Carl Rogers are ordered, you know, believe that people have this organismic valuing process that you would if you were empathize with and you We can see you and I john can say well that’s that valence qualia. Right that then gets organized by affect. And by the way now, we can see very clearly based on your model well that would be the care, the base care of the self system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then trying to figure out what the alignment is is the base care of the system. And then you can see well the social judgment of people and your internalized critic judgment. Well that’s going to throw off the basic care. And then if a good therapist comes along and says I can detect what your organismic valuing process is through empathy and unconditional regard, then I can cultivate that growth in you and then you reflect on that and then you’ll get coherent integration between And then you’re organizing potentially true self and Rogers didn’t use that word that much but many other therapists does like Winnicott and then into the social self and so that you can then see that very much clearly as a Aspect of, you know, the whole process and I argue that all good therapy begins with Rogers, he really does know how to set the psychotherapeutic healing context. And then there are these relational systems so then not only have the base of the energy and the emotion system but now you get the self modeling system starting with attachment and tracking and my loved in my, you know, what’s my power my freedom my love And then the conflict that I’ll experience like, hey, do I defer and get along with somebody but after suppress my anger and self interest or to get really anger and suppress my guilt and affiliation core conflictual relations are very, very common. And then finally that verbal I am justified because narrative gets into existential identity and for therapy what we’re trying to do is cultivate a developmental process of awareness. I want to see where you are cultivate awareness of what brought you in and what this is about and then awareness of what your issues are and then sort the process out of accepting that which you can’t change and then cultivating the skill and zone of proximal development of toward change that you can. Right. So, so this was this game and then through all these systems and there’s also these filtering and defense mechanisms. So in 2008 2009 or 2008 or so this really, this was my schema. In terms of something interesting happen, and that is Dan McAdams and Jennifer I think is Jennifer pals produced a 2006 article in American psychologists called a new big five, which basically I was bitching before about you know personality shouldn’t be traits just traits and this is actually an article in American psychologist by Dan McAdams saying exactly that it’s saying that personality and integrative science of personality should be much more than traits and any they offer then a new big five and what they mean by that. Well they frame personality, and we’ve discussed the some, but it really the science of personality should be about a way a human person is like everyone else and frames human nature gives us individual differences which is where the trade people have been focused on a lot, but also articulates how we’re like no one else in terms of our uniqueness and then have afford us the appropriate schematic and relationship to that. And so what they do is they talked about the evolutionary genetic context, and that would be sort of consistent with traits as a foundation. Then these character adaptations, which they call, and they, these are, these are basically learned procedural and participatory capacities that you have that’s what a character adaptation is, then you build an identity and adolescence on top of that, and you live in a social cultural context. Okay, so for McAdams and pals when we think about personality, they argue that this should be the big five that we should think about, not, you know, whereby the big five are then just located in one, one part of the five. Right. So that was their frame. We can, they didn’t emphasize this but they certainly would acknowledge this would go into a developmental context course, of course, now, in the context of this article McAdams and pal says hey, you’ll never get a big five of character adaptations, because the process by which individuals build unique skills or talents, there is varied as shooting a basketball, or what you do to prep your notes or any other number of learned behavioral repertoires. However, I realized that actually what I was doing in the systems of psychotherapy adaptation was actually not so much delineating specific character adaptations, but I was delineating the adaptive modes or systems of adaptation, right, that could then be played out so it’s not so much that there’s a big five of character adaptations, but there’s a big five of character adaptation systems. And I like when you’re like, hey, we’ll never have a theory of relevance, but we can have a theory of relevance realization, you can actually have a theory of adaptive systems. And ultimately then I then resulted in the development of the combination of really that insight what I developed in psychotherapy, the unified theory approaches then afforded then this particular map. I’ll share you now and then that will then set up so when I look at Maggie who comes in to the office, okay as a psychological doctor, I’m going to now see her, certainly I’m going to see her overall well being. And then I’m going to be particularly attending to her character functioning adaptation and development in relationship to what her overall well being is or psychosocial well being, and I will be thinking about it from her vantage point and then my vantage point through these particular lenses. So this is the fifth branch on the overall tree. It looks like this, what you get is three different contexts which we’ve actually seen repeatedly there’s a biological context that starts at, well it’s connec, conception, and then represents your biophysiological line. Then there’s a mental behavioral context which is basically the agent arena relationship across time, starts with your distal early architecture, most notably things like attachment early learning structures sensitive periods, and then the more recent changes that happen that are salient in an individual’s life, and then you’re embodied in or born into a sociocultural context that has macro level values and belief structures, meso level community like status issues like what’s your socioeconomic status, and then your particular family and personal relations that you have. That’s a Bronfenbrenner. And then you have these five systems of adaptation that can then tell us about this basically translates from the systems that I shared before, we have habits, the experiential online system, so this is the just me and the environment in particular and then the relationship system is me as I model the self other world relation. The defensive system then really refers to the management and the coherent management of your primate self, which is represented in relationship to these three into then the person self which is the justifying system. Right, right. So then this, and what this does is we put the person in a context of stressors and affordances, what they perceive in the world and the paths of investment that they can, and like what we see with Maggie is really an intense, and you nailed this and as we see this absolutely and I actually hadn’t framed it exactly this way, but you get the reciprocal narrowing of rumination, collapse and then everything that you get that I used to just call tunnel vision which is basically the same thing. You get tunnel visioned into a particular set of loops, and we want to then reverse that cognitive cycle and create that reciprocal opening of flexible possibility and stuff. But when you arrange it this way. So this then says oh yeah there’s actually a big five inside of character adaptation systems which is now located in relationship to the McAdams and pals, but it’s also the case that we can arrange the Rogers Freud back or the behavioral experiential neo humanistic psychodynamic and cognitive perspectives, then get aligned with the systems of adaptation. Right. So now what I’m doing basically, when I wondered about the problem of psychotherapy. I thought that we could have a map or model of human psychology that would afford us a way of looking at all these different perspectives, just like human biology what you know medicine does get a lot of things right, it or it looks at you as a whole organism and then it narrates the various dimensional systems that you have your digestive system, you have a muscular system you have a respiratory system. Well my analogy is actually the mental health people with their disorganization been focusing on certain systems of adaptation, developing psycho technologies, but we had not developed the map of human mental behavior that afforded the interrelations of the systems, and you can put them together in a very similar way that the body is put together in relationship to that having different organ systems that affords them a picture of the whole in their interrelation. So that’s what character adaptation systems in genders, and, and I also then argued, you know, actually yeah we can put in so the work why is the work relevant here if we add the, the John for making map of the self that we’ve just went through, actually the habit system into the basic neurobiological architecture, the emergence of valence qualia, the mapping a relationship system up top of the justification. That’s actually a very very tight. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Very, it’s very beautiful. And it gives, I was going to say reciprocal opening ultimately relies on some, you know, affording model worldview model of the agent arena relationship. Absolutely. So, the last thing and then I’ll say is then that these are these are this is an engine, and then what will ultimately develop if you go back to identity and traits. You see in the McAdams and pals hey there ways in which maybe I’m going to argue that this is actually sort of the rotating wheel upon which adaptation and development occurs, and then there are different domains of development that we can then track somebody’s personal development around, and that gives rise to this model, which is the wheel of development, and it’s a wheel in the sense that it’s supposed to be turning to capture the idea that a person is developing over time. The center of it is this character adaptation systems model, so we’re always an agent arena relations. Yep. All the capacities that we build emerge out of that. But when we then look at the domains we can then see that actually, and there’s no, I don’t mean this stuff like a precise domain but five large domains present themselves in relationship to this, this element that then we can just in terms of utility of remembering we can then divide them up into particular aspects so dispositional traits then I argue to be essentially set points in various tendencies that emerge and of course the big five. We’re pretty familiar with john you might be interested to note that the big five in my view, very much aligned with this particular model. Such that extraversion and neuroticism afford us a picture of negative affect and positive affect and the idling of those systems extraversion does pull into the relationship system some, but we can see agreeableness dimensionality of whether you’re self oriented, hostile, defensive, etc. And then really conscientiousness and openness or whether or not you’re sort of conservative order structured in a particular way or flexible and exploratory that gets that plasticity around the frontal lobe regulation of the higher cognitive structures in relationship to the more animalistic ones. So the modeling about where these systems emerge relative to the systems of adaptation, I think are actually quite tight. No, no, that’s very tight. That’s very tight. And then in terms of identity this then gets into we can now assess if we have a model of sort of okay what is the experiential self model. We know what the parts of it we can then take a look okay so what’s the affective valence right, what is the influence matrix where is the person in relationship to their attachment structures, how competent do they feel, where does their attentional adverbial consciousness jump around, and then how does that narrator, organize with complexity and coherence or defensiveness and rigidity, how does the narrator tell the story of the self both to itself and to other people. So we can then build these models of identity. Okay, so what’s the basic structure of self concept, how reflectively aware, is it is it able to shine the light on the system and say hey, you know how you I mean I’ve had many people so tell me how you’re feeling, I don’t know. No, yeah, just no capacity Alexa Thymian is the term used like you have no capacity shine the inner light. You talk about you know Wilbur or loving or any number of models of ego development agency self control complexity and coherence and there are a lot of different angles on this but we can then really utilize we can have the assessment. There’s so much connection with so many of the dimensions we were talking about. 100% and if we go back to psychiatry, and so we, so we want to basically make a commentary that psychological mental health confusion, coupled with psychiatry and attachment to medicine gives rise to a model of struggling right that is painfully and over medical eyes and gives rise to other naive romantic views about just be yourself and all this stuff. There’s an actual affordance of a very rich complicated model that can inform our education we can tie in Zach Stein’s notions in relationship to this Yep, yep, and how we can see ourselves, you know, far more than traits far more than chemicals or far more than some romantic ideal that is just me. So values and virtues obviously there’s a lot of work on positive psychology and go back to Aristotle in a wide variety of different elements that we restore notions along these lines abilities, you know, Howard Gardner tried to get famous by calling them intelligence, but there are domains of ability, you know, music and then finally there’s pathology. Recently there is a move in psychology talk about really developing a taxonomy that’s psychopathology that’s grounded a lot more research and meta analysis of various different domains. So, the character wheel character development, then, basically what I’m suggesting is the following. I’m suggesting that actually the different approaches to psychotherapy track different patterns of adaptation. We can then see that and then you can hone in on, you know, action behavioral patterns you hone in on emotional patterns you can hone in on relationship patterns patterns of defense patterns of justification. The field of personality certainly I think reflective members say hey there’s a much broader domain and McAdams and pals article said wait a minute, these characteristic adaptations. These are all the learning procedures that people engage in, but actually the lens of the unified theory said wait a minute, there are different systems of adaptation, we can organize those and put those as central and then you actually a bridge for a big picture of personality theory into psychotherapy with a degree of coherence that at least affords me a way of making sense out of the field. So it sounds to me also like the, the language of systems of adaptation holds nicely into relevance realizing scenery in which self relevance is plugging into agency, auto poetic, you know, autonomous adaptive right there. Totally, I mean for remember before I realized how to talk elegantly about it I talked about it in terms of behavioral investment, right, which essentially is you know the agent arena environment relationship in a context of investment and return on investment, and now with the architecture of recursive relevance realization, you now find, especially now that it maps up with the really neuro biological bottom up predictive processing models. And then bring very very tight overall agent arena relation bring basic behavioral and evolutionary learning now bring tight neuro biological research and then bring tight and expansive cognitive science to bear all that stacks brilliantly and I think it affords us a very very clear and tight model. I agree, and I think it’s a rigorous model, and it’s a model that is much more reflective of the human reality and therefore much more conducive to effective intervention in human transformation and change. Amen. Yes, so, so anyway, model of sort of how I want to map character functioning and adaptation, what it means to me clinically. And then what the implications are both for the clinic room and how we think about mental troubles and certainly there’s a lot more to be said about that but this just lays it out. But ultimately also what it means set the stage for thinking about what it might mean for us as a society and we existentially liberalize. Absolutely. I mean, this model, it’s, I mean, again I’m just so impressed by your ability to do this kind of systematization, and then integrate it with the work that’s been done here it’s, it’s continually impressive. And the elegance of it. But I mean it’s a model which reaches down into psychopathology and up to the meeting crisis. And I think that’s one of the great strength of this model. Totally. Thank you. Greg I have a question. Did you want to say something else before we go on. Yeah, no, I have one last slide and then that will wrap it up and I basically yeah I’m getting to the point where, you know, this is, this is the model stuff that I wanted to share with you. Okay, do you go for your last slide Greg and then I got a question for you. Okay. So, the last thing that I’ll say in relationship to this, we talked about the well being piece. And then this gets into well what is the implication. So this is the understanding structure. And of course there’s enormous amount to say about this but there, there are really clear guiding principles of what this says in relationship to how we think about what goes wrong. Right, both inside people and outside of people. So the last model I’ll share with you is this calm mo model of, you know, which the central issue is I don’t believe our society knows how to deal with negative feelings. And this is a very bad for individuals that have high trait neuroticism. Okay, and then a relationship system which often by the way is very kind to individuals but often kind systems often hypersensitive and they over victimized and they over sensitize to injury in a particular way. So I tell people, listen if you’re an eight year old kid you’re learning to ride your bike and fall off and you cut your knee. Okay, where you go from that, how you manage that can go anywhere from us quit your whining kids shut the hell up and get on the bike, which then structures one particular relation to Oh my god I’m so sorry you don’t ever have to get on that bike again. I would never want you to cut your knee that’s so horrible look at all that blood. 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So you feel lousy and then if you’re I hate feeling this way, there’s some negative reaction to the negative feeling. Okay. And this is the architecture of a neurotic look. Yes, you get a narrator, now, now you have a secondary negative reaction to their reaction so you feel the negative then it creates anxiety then you create the judgment, the blame of the environment other kinds of things and it layers itself on top of it. And basically this negative, you can see here what we call negative mood model of avoidance and control on the one hand. So you try to block it. The internal critic is bitter. You try to block the feelings. This actually then builds up. So we talked about the episodic memories. So we know from things like semantic associated network theory, one of the flags that we flag our feelings on our memories on our feelings. So what happens is people jam in the closet of their shadow. Let’s say somebody doesn’t want to feel shame. I mentioned one time, I said I didn’t cry for a long time. I put in my shadow, in the closet, sadness. Sadness for me then meant weakness and lacking masculine agency and capacity to solve problems. So I didn’t feel that. And then when I then was resistant to it, I then feel a sense of avoidance and control. And what happens in relationship to that though is those signals do not communicate what they need to say and they build as unmetabolized feelings. And I really would be fascinating really, I think this is actually operative at some neurobiological energetic store level. It’d be really fascinating to see. But you certainly can do the metaphor of the stacking. And then what will happen is somebody who tries to avoid the feeling, they believe they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t handle it. And then a trigger happens so that there’s enough activation. And then what happens is you get flooded and overwhelmed. So then the systems run and all the associations of those systems pour out onto the thing. And usually you get some weeping, you get rage, you get panic, or you get complete despair. And then when you overload the system, then you get massive reciprocal narrating because affects are pretty short term in terms of what you’re looking at. And you collapse yourself. They’re also quite impulsive. They want to communicate, but they also want action. You often then engender things like you break something or you hide in your room or you embarrass yourself horribly in front of people. And of course, what does that do is it teaches the second order system is I knew these feelings were bad. Right. And then they’re gonna get back in once they run their course, then you jam them back into the closet. So we see this all the time. So what does it mean? Basically, what it means is the self, we got to create a stacked experience where on the one hand, that I and narrator are aware and attuned of those feeling systems. And on the other hand, the I can understand the long term consequence, the imaginal space, the image based space, the possible space, and you cultivate an adaptive regulation of those impulses. Right. So essentially, this is what we call the emotional sweet spot in relationship to the positive opponent process of holding awareness and effect with awareness and attunement. And at the same time, cultivating adaptive regulation as it integrates into the system. It’s kind of an optimal grip on yourself, an optimal grip on your affect exactly on the self and which of course, affect is responding to self world changes and expectations. And so ultimately, the calm mo approach to meta to integrative psychological mindfulness says, hey, we need a metacognitive observer. So step outside the stream, take your lenses off that you’re looking through, look at them right to the verveky look at them and adopt a metacognitive frame shift to see yourself in a particular way. Okay, cultivate we want to train actually is capacity as a modus operandi. That’s a doubles for calm mo. And we want to then be curious with wonderment, huh, isn’t it interesting that this is so injurious to me? Not like I hate this. I feel lousy. I wonder why. And isn’t it interesting that this is part of my experience? Okay. The capacity to accept pain. So the Buddhist, you know, famously characterized suffering is the combination of pain, test times resistance. So resistance would be sort of the opposite of acceptance, a loving compassion, a meta MTA view of the world, oneself and one’s other, and then a motivated toward valued states of being, which ultimately also means, by the way, in terms of philosophy and existential reflection, these are we need deep reflections on what is optimal for us, what’s realistic, what is optimal, what’s optimal for us, what’s optimal for the relational world we’re in, what’s optimal for our culture and society. But, you know, another picture I can engender now is John’s picture. So we can be, you know, calm mo and relationship to the structures of the self as John laid out for us. And so my bottom line is, yeah, when somebody comes in, they have their particular narrative, she brings her narrative, that’s her unique narrative of understanding and unique position in the world. And I needed a system that afforded me what I thought would be the most comprehensive, conciliant and coherent package that would afford me to engender a wise, but also a wise system that would afford her the capacity to transition from the maladaptive, reciprocally narrowing states into an open and hopefully virtuous, adaptive and more optimal state of being. And that’s basically the way I frame my psychotherapy work. That was beautiful. I’ve already given my response. I’ll open things up to Chris. Yeah, that was impressive, Greg. I’m gonna have to look at that again to digest it in its totality. I’m glad I waited, actually. I’m glad I waited because my question has more to do with what you’ve just presented with the calm mo. And it has to do with the role of the relationship between the character adaptation systems and the role of fellowship, which I think is where Dialogos is premised, right, is at that intersection. And one of the things that’s, I think, most striking about Maggie’s story as you narrated it is the role that’s played, obviously by yourself as a therapist, but also the role that’s played by her friends and the role that’s played by her mother in the course of the events. And one of the things that’s really interesting to me is how the disclosure of that event to her mother affected such a profound shift in the realism of the event in the way she was able to apprehend it and the way that then returned into the therapeutic process. Because it occurs to me that one of the ways that we gain a purchase on the experiential realism of ourselves is via the surrogate perspective of our fellows in the light of their recognition. Right? There is a close connection between that recognition and that realism. And I think it has to do with the capacity to vary and graduate the level of narration and to vary it effectively. Right? So in a situation in which my sense of myself’s narration is very confined, the easiest way, the most ready-to-hand way of widening the ambit of possibility that narration can operate within is to outsource my perspective to someone that knows and recognizes me finely so that suddenly I can maintain the realism that you might associate with the self-flagellating neuroticism. I don’t want suddenly to try and evolve myself into fantasy that’s going to just pull me further away from what I know to be true of myself, especially when it’s unflattering. So that the connection with the fellow, the close fellow, maintains the realism so that it can operate so that it can be conversant with the neuroticism, but also provides the capacity to widen and refresh the perspective such that the realism can actually be continuous with the possibility of being more. Because I think that the role of friendship, for instance, one of the roles of friendship, I think, is to mediate the relationship between what you described as the crosshairs of the personality, right? The part of us that’s irreducibly unique and the part of us that’s protein, right? So the role of, so if I could put it in a slogan, it would be something like the way that we optimally grip ourselves is often with the hands of our fellows. Now, we love it. Right? And it seems to me that that had a pretty decisive role in not just the case study that you’ve just described, but has a pretty fundamental role in being able to maintain that connection in any case. It’s unbelievable. I mean, so to me, the core, fundamentally nourishing need of the soul is the need to be known and valued in the relational system. Right? So that’s the, am I known and valued by important others? That’s a full belly as opposed to an empty belly. So it’s absolutely foundational at that level. And of course, how that is framed and how that’s cultivated both is the internal process of what it is that I experience myself as and how I model and narrate myself. And at the same time, it’s also constituted by the interpersonal feedback loops of the other. And the opportunity to have virtuous cycles within and virtuous cycles between others is the honorable fellowship of genuine, authentic relation and connection and the fulfillment of the human soul, basically. The absence of it, either inside or between, and the potential vicious. So let’s look at what happened to this woman. Okay. So she goes out and she’s raped. Okay. So date rape, basically, you know, classic kind of nightmare scenario, but forced upon a virgin. She’s a virgin. So she loses her virginity in this context. All right. And then you come home, okay. And your biological structure as a female, which is, you know, obviously if you take a little bit of an evolutionary psych to actually engender the honoring of this, that the signal that you have basically just been devalued, okay, that you’ve had something stolen from you is embodied in every cell of your body at that juncture. Okay. So the signal of your is like, oh my God, you’ve been completely violated and treated with an enormous amount of indignancy. That’s what, and now what the system now wants to basically do is, is that my reality? Okay. I mean, or was this an aberration that I can restore to some degree of secure expectation? And the answer then is not only did that happen, but now the internalized narrative is, oh my God, the projecting model is I can’t face my parents based on that and have them see me this way. And I then project that they won’t, no one will be able to tolerate it so that I’ll get blamed for sneaking out and drinking as well. Okay. Okay. Basically the entire messages, you are there to be used and devalued and there is no retribution and there’s no honoring of the self. So it’s a complete catastrophe at every level, at the narrating level, at the cellular level, the relational level, that you are not valued. Okay. And you have no value. And indeed, when the thing reverses itself, what emerges is, oh my God, and this is what I tried to drop in her, is that a lot of the consequence of this emptiness is in fact, not necessarily in the world itself, but is in the reciprocal narrowing process of the interpretive relevance realization, not using those terms back then, but basically, and with, when I told her, I said, I think that your mother may think differently about this than you do. Okay. You could tell she had the hope. And then my job was to cultivate that hope, check with mother to see if it happened and realize the desire in a realistic way and create the potential and the awareness without self blame that actually a lot of the script of her misery have been a function of the way she’s narrated and react and anticipated. So then what happens to her and the reason it was a massive phase shift is like, oh my God, yes, mom actually loved me all along. And B, it was the way I withhold her that she withheld to me, and we never resolved this. And C, this was a lot in my head. And my doctor has told me with clarity why this vicious cycle happens to a lot of people and why the nature of the self is such that we’re vulnerable to it. And oh my God, it’s sort of like an allergic reaction only at the level of psychology. And we can afford an understanding of that without massive self blame, but at the same time, afford agency, engagement and being and boom, I mean, you know, the significant implications of her life in the three months that followed that particular intervention was, well, we talk about sudden gains in therapy and there’s no doubt that that was a sudden gain and transformational shift in the fundamental architecture of herself, other model across many, many different modes. So Chris, thank you, Greg, by the way, that was excellent. I also got a sense that you’re, and I think this is constant with everything Greg said, you’re positioning the self as sort of the intersection between the inner dialogue and the outer dialogue, right? And then part of what the self is trying to do is find sort of a, you know, a bi-dimensional, you know, optimal grip on those, right? So that it’s making sure this is looping well and it’s making sure this is looping well. And those two, those gears are not grinding against each other. If I can speak metaphorically so I can speak quickly, I was picking up that in what you were putting an emphasis on. If that’s the case, then that provokes a question to both of you. Because I think it has both an existential and a clinical dimensionality to it, dimension to it, which is, it seems to me that we could be deeply confused of, I’ll use the neutral term discourse to when I’m making noises come out of my face hole towards other people, okay? We can be confused between that as communication and that as communing. Because what I heard Greg saying is that people actually want the communing, but very often I think people can get stuck at the communication level because the inner filters are locking them at this level, the justification level. And so they can’t drop down to the machinery they need to access for communing. And then that means they can’t get the external dialogue of communing and they’re locked into communication. So they’re locked into communication this way. And then that gets locked them into, it locks them into which, which is the, the locks them into which like it gets them locked up into the sort of the justification level, right? And then basically that’s a very hard place to get stuck in. And then the culture is reinforcing that by telling them what matters most about you is your propositions and your ideology. And so the question that emerges is I can see how an inability to properly discern the relationship between communication and communing could, and I don’t, well, I want to turn it into a question. Is it not the case that that would like infect, I’m trying to come up with a verb here, infect the self in a profound way? So I mean, I don’t want to remove the idiosyncratic causal events in people’s lives and the trauma, but I’m also talking about sort of a structural functional thing that’s going wrong. That’s being reinforced by the society is where people are, they can’t, they can’t distinguish and properly relate communication and communing. Totally. My history on deciphering the influence matrix might help us a little bit. So it’s called the influence matrix because when I was first putting it, I was putting in pretty instrumental evolutionary psychology terms. Okay. And the other, Hey, to what extent can I influence both of you in accordance with my interests? And then will you expend work energy and where am I? And that puts me in status and blah, blah, blah. Okay. Which is totally legitimate and an important thing. However, there’s a fundamental, what emerged to me when I saw in the clinical world is that many people would be able to have influence or be influenced by others and resent the shit out of it. Right. Right. So if you, if you create contingencies and I, and I get you because I somehow, I have some power over you and then I force you to tell me you love me. Okay. You know, then I can influence you, but you don’t value me. And that’s a very then precarious state of being. So a much better space. So it went from social influence to relational value. Right. So then it’s like this felt sense of actually, I’m in a much better safe when you guys actually care about me. Right. So that’s a, that’s fundamentally different in relationship. And by the way, in a society that now excessively instrumentalizes and then creates capital labor relationships around every outcome that’s unmeasurable, you’ve actually now confounded influence with relational value, potentially that way. That’s a, that’s a big issue. And then the final move I made was, wait a minute, a number of people are, have influence in our value, but they are not known. Yeah. So I talk about known and value because they put on the public face because of the weird dynamic of justification, which means I can tell you because I, what I think you want to hear. And then you love me for me telling you what I think you want to hear. Now you do love me and I have influence, but you don’t know who I really am. Okay. And then that means I’m stuck up here in performative communication acts, but I’m not anchored into the authentic process of communion with being known and valued in place. I see that that’s a fantastically clear mapping. So I’m wondering if the tendency in our culture, which you just alluded to, to use univariate measures of the entire human being is, is also contributing to that collapse. Like we, we take them, what’s the measure of how the measure of the economy is the one thing, the GDP or something like that. What’s the measure of a person? Well, what’s their wealth? What’s their socioeconomic status? Like we have these univariate measures that collapse. I mean, I think that what we have, the three of us have been doing over these last 10 episodes is, you know, slowly opening up the dimensionality of the cell. All right. And unpacking it and distinguishing it and then relating it, you know, basically complexifying it. And then we’re, right. And then we’re in a culture that takes univariate measures that just collapse all that dimensionality down. And how could people within that kind of univariate measures, how could they pull things apart the way they need to in order to get the things that you’re talking about, Greg? It seems to me that it’s going to be just increasingly difficult for them to do that. Right. It’s a nightmare at the level of society. Okay. And I’m, this, I’ll come back to psychology and my annoyance with what psychology did. Okay. Our failure to understand ontology and our needs for scientific epistemology for much of psychology, what they ended up doing is, oh, well, we’ll survey aggregate individuals and find variables and do variable cluster analysis. Okay. With no fucking map of the self and the individual dynamics that actually then have to be translated. So then we get particulate variable aggregate relations and tell everybody, hey, this little recipe was found to work out here with no understanding about how to metabolize that in the dynamic complex variable relation. So we’re doing this at multiple levels. We’re just flooding people with particulate pieces of information that’s not up to the dynamic task of the interrelations of the dimensions and not cultivating in people way to engender the intersection of these in an optimal way. I mean, we just don’t do any of that. Chris, this just reminds me so much of Crooked Guard and the way human beings are sort of like, you know, and his ideas about sin and the sickness unto death, that the way human beings are just being, you know, rendered because, you know, what the Crooked Guard already often gives portrayals of individuals who have collapsed to one dimensionality of their humanity and they get stuck there in a profound way. And then, you know, and then of course he does have a critique. He calls it Christendom, but he has a cultural level critique of that flattening all over the place. Yeah, I don’t really want to get into that because we’ll talk about that next time, but yes. Well, that’s a great segue, right? That’s a great segue there. That’s a great segue there. The transition, that’s what my hope was, is that we could lay the clinical table and set up the existential implication. Well, that sounds like the bridging point has just been well made. Sorry, that was self-congratulatory, but it’s… No, it was well made, John. That’s good. That’s okay. I think this has been a long one, but I think the length is completely justified, but I think we should wrap it up for today. That was my final thing to say, what I just said, the foreshadowing of the connection to Crooked Guard and what the things Chris is going to bring to the fore next week. Is there anything more Chris or Greg that either you want to say? No, I swallowed a lot of comments I had along the way as I was engulfed in the tide of Greg’s systematic brilliance. Well, thank you, sir. I appreciate that. I got nothing. Well, it’s a joy to be able to pick up the baton from John in relation to the cognitive science. I hope I conveyed why I care about this, and then set it up from a psychological health perspective. I am debating whether to get my clinical license in part as a statement, because I really believe that the time is about a meta-psychological meaning and deep existential questions. Chris, I really look forward to your reflections on that issue as we transition. Thank you, Greg. Well, you teed it up beautifully. I’m very grateful. I hope, Greg, that you felt me reciprocating why you care about my work. I think why I was caring about yours. Amen. Lots of care. Have your be proud. All right. Thank you. We will pick it up next week, and we will pass the baton to Chris. Perfect.