https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kBJGaadwNMg
that if you go outside your domain of competence and you encounter something you don’t understand the first thing that you’re going to do is look to the knowledge structures that you already possess to explain it and that’s the, you could say from a symbolic perspective that that’s the manifestation of the father because of course that’s what you’re going to do and you know, what’s really interesting too is because I’ve had a lot of clients who’ve had PTSD and without exception, every single one of them was induced by one form of malevolence or another they have to develop a very sophisticated philosophy of good and evil to get out of it because they have a world view in which those things don’t really exist there’s no such thing as pure malevolence well that’s fine unless you encounter it and then as soon as you encounter it as soon as you encounter it, you won’t know what to do and then you won’t be able to get on with your life you’ll do nothing but think about that and think about it and think about it and think about it it’ll disrupt your sleep it’ll put you into a permanent state of preparation for action because the part of your brain that’s detected that which in my estimation by the way is the same part, at least in part, that detects snakes it’s the same damn circuit once it’s seen something like that, it is not going to let you go till you figure it out and that’s basically what post-traumatic stress disorder is and you know, to some degree, each of you will have experienced that maybe not all of you in here, but many of you and you can tell that, so if you go back and you think about your past and you have any memory that’s more than about 18 months old and when you think about it, it produces a fair bit of negative emotion then that’s like a place where there’s a mini post-traumatic stress problem and what’s happened, you remember I showed you that hierarchy moving from tiny motor actions all the way up to high order abstractions well you can imagine, say, you have a good person at the top and you kind of use that scenario to construe other people people are basically good well then you run into someone who is not good and boom, the whole bloody system comes tumbling down because it’s violated that highest order axiom so that’s post-traumatic stress disorder if something has violated an axiom that’s more differentiated closer to the actual motor output, not quite so high in the abstraction chain then all it does is wipe out that part of the structure it doesn’t wipe out the whole thing and you can tell if you have holes in your perceptual value structure by checking to see if you have memories that are still alive in a negative way that are old enough so that they should have been incorporated into your personality and so one of the things you can do you’re doing one of the exercises that’s on my self-authoring site you guys do the personality analysis but there’s another program there called the past authoring where you write down an autobiography and thinking through these things that have happened to you in your past that are negative is a good way of making them go away and thinking them through kind of means you have to figure out what happened and then you sort of have to figure out how to make it not happen again what you’re trying to derive is some kind of causal analysis how is it that I was put into a situation where I was made vulnerable you know and that could be well because you’re only four and you couldn’t protect yourself and now it’s time to update that because you’re a fully functioning adult or there may be things that you have to think through and change in your own personality or attitudes that you’ve been holding on to since you were tiny I had this client once and she came in and told me that she had been sexually assaulted by her older brother and she told me the story and I kind of got the impression that maybe she was like eight and he was like 17 or something like that and she was about 27 when she came and talked to me and then I found out by further questioning that she was four and he was six and I thought she still had this story in her head of her being tormented by this older person right that that’s how she told the story and what I told her was well look another way of looking at this is that you two were very badly supervised children because I mean he was six for god’s sake you know he’s a little kid that doesn’t mean that what happened to her was any less traumatic but but he wasn’t 17 right the story was different than the one she had in her head and you know by the time she left after we had that conversation it was clear that the way that she was construing the experience had radically shifted and it’s very interesting because you know you think of the past as fixed but and it is in some sense but the reason you remember the past isn’t to make an objectively accurate record of the past it’s so that you can use the information in the past to prepare you for the future and your mind won’t leave you alone unless that has happened so if you’ve encountered something that’s negative and you don’t know why and you don’t know what to do about it if that happens again in the future then that will stay with you and I think one of the things it does too is it increases your overall physiological load there’s actually physiologists who’ve been talking about this I can’t remember the damn phrase but you could imagine that your mind is doing something like this all the time it’s it’s it’s it’s got a record in some sense of your autobiographical experiences and what it’s doing is calculating how frequently you’ve been successful versus unsuccessful and the more frequently that you’ve been successful the higher you are up on the dominance hierarchy that’s one possibility so your serotonin levels go up and you’re calmer but also it’s reasonable to assume that the environment is less dangerous right because that’s sort of what constitutes danger you’re somewhere and you act and something you don’t want to have happen happens that’s danger and so your brain is always trying to figure out how to calibrate how anxious you should be and one of the things it does is by sort of keeping track of your past success failure ratio and so to the degree that your past has been characterized by we’ll call them failures that those are situations where you do not get what you want then your your body your brain puts your body on constant alert because if everything that you’ve done has resulted in catastrophe then you’re somewhere insanely dangerous and you should be like like a you know like a prey animal that’s ready to dart in any direction and how much you should be a prey animal is dependent on it’s an estimate partly your trait neuroticism partly your your success as adjudicated by other people right because they’ll pop you up the dominance hierarchy if you’ve been successful but also partly on your record of failures and successes in the past and so you can go back and you can find out where you have holes in your in the structure through which you’re viewing the world that’s one way of looking at it and you can sew those things up and that’s a very that’s in some sense that’s what you’re doing in psychotherapy you know partly it’s exposure to things you’re afraid of and disgusted by and are likely to avoid that’s a huge chunk of it but if you go back into your past and you start talking those things through it’s really the same thing it’s more abstracted so freud of course was always when he was doing his free association process with his clients he’d find that if he just let them talk that their speech would circle until it hit a place like that where they were confused and doubtful and then their speech would sort of wander around that and and then they’d have an emotional expression that was a consequence of that he thought the emotional expression was what was curative it was cathartic in his terms but later james pennebaker upon whom these writing exercises i described his research is based on that my my exercises are based on his research he found that if you brought college students into to the lab and you had them write for 15 minutes three times over three days about the worst thing that had ever happened to them or the worst thing they ever did if i remember correctly they got worse in the short term but better in the long run for example they went visited the doctor less and markers of their physical health improved and so i think the reason for that is because what is that called it’s called something load i just about got it right from the physiologist doesn’t matter they got healthier as far as i can tell because they basically calmed down once they had gone through the negative memory and sorted it out properly and told a properly articulated story and figured out how to deal with it then their physiology calmed down and so then they weren’t as stressed they weren’t producing as much cortisol and so cortisol suppresses your immune function and so they were more likely to stay healthy and so well so that’s all very much worth thinking about