https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4tQOlQRp3gQ
Hi there. So welcome to Maps of Meaning. I’m going to tell you a story to begin with and then we’ll take a break. And after the break then I’ll give you more details about the class structure. If you want to know more about the class structure, all you have to do is go look at the syllabus online. If you type my name into Google, you’ll get my website and then all the courses are listed there and then you just go to the course website and it tells you everything you need to know. I’ll give you just a brief overview for now. There’s a main textbook which I presume you may have already purchased and perhaps not, it’s available at the bookstore. And then there’s some adjunct readings that are listed on the website that are scientific papers that serve as appropriate additional background material, mostly concentrating on neuroscience material. And so that’s the readings and the order of the readings is also laid out on the website. In terms of assignments, there are three, three and a half in a sense. But the first one is I’ve developed some writing exercises over the last few years for students. And they’re on a website right now called selfauthoring.com, which you don’t have to worry about because you have access to the programs through this course website. I’ll tell you about the two writing, personal writing essays first. So there’s a lot of evidence that has accrued over the last 15 or 20 years, some of it stemming from the psychoanalytic tradition, that writing about your life fundamentally has extraordinary benefits, I would say. Some of them are health benefits because it seems that, and this is something we’ll cover to a great degree in this course, it seems that if there are elements in your past that you haven’t dealt with or areas of uncertainty in your current life or in your future considerations, you bear a heavy stress load because of that. Your body really doesn’t like uncertainty that much. And oddly enough, there can be uncertainty still in the past. You know, if things have happened to you that you really don’t understand, your body and your brain seem to respond to that as if it’s an area of dangerous territory that has the potential in some sense to haunt you. And one of the ways that your body seems to respond to that is by producing high levels of stress hormones like cortisol. And the reason your body does that is because the more dangerous your environment is, the more you should be prepared to act rapidly at any given moment. And that’s fine, except that it’s costly from a psychophysiological perspective. It’s demanding. It’s physiologically demanding. And what that means is that over any reasonable span of time, it actually hurts you. So writing about your past, especially about things that were somewhat difficult and hard to understand, seems to, well, it seems to lower the degree to which you’re haunted by uncertainty. And then, so I have one assignment for you, which is writing an autobiography. And there’s a structured program online that guides you through that. And basically what it asks you to do is to divide your life into seven epochs, stages, and then to write about what you experienced during those epochs, for better or for worse, and then to try to understand them and to articulate them. And partly I want you to do that because I think it’s a thing that is good to do, especially for people your age, especially when you’re stopping one thing, which you’re going to be doing soon, and starting another. It’s a good thing to get caught up. The other reason I want you to do it, though, is because this course deals with narrative and the psychology of narrative and the relationship between narrative and your own personal experience. And there’s no reason not to utilize the theoretical propositions that we’re going to walk through in a personal and practical sense at the same time that you come to understand them theoretically. So you’ll be asked to do that. It’s actually the first assignment. And then that will be given to three of you. Each person’s essay will be given to three classmates, and they’ll provide feedback on it. So what I usually recommend is that you write the autobiography for yourself. The program will provide you with a complete printout. Then you can edit it because there may be things that you want to write about that you don’t want anybody to read. Now part of the reason I instituted this was because it’s impossible for the TAs to grade and assess that many assignments because there’s three assignments and I don’t know how many people in the class, probably somewhere between 60 and 80, which I guess would be 70. Yeah, yeah. And that’s 210 assignments. Like that’s just not going to happen. And I didn’t want to cut the writing out of the class because I think it’s foolish to do that. So we use a peer grading system. And the way that works is that you get feedback from three peers and you get the average of the best two grades. And then you’re also marked on the feedback that you provide. Now what’s happened in the past, although this wasn’t something I expected, is that students have actually found it extremely useful to read the autobiographical essays of their peers because you don’t really know that much about other people and you don’t know how similar you are to them or how different you are from them. And that’s especially true if you’re relatively young and having the opportunity to read the kind of writing that you’re going to do that’s being produced by other people turns out to be something that everyone has found extraordinarily useful. I’d like to take credit for that but I’m not going to because I didn’t really realize that it would be so useful. And what we’re actually going to do in further developments of the program is set it up so that because people do use this on a private basis and we’re using it in various places which I’ll talk about in a minute, I want to set it up so that when people use it they can post their final product online and have people comment on it and then have the comments voted up or down. So I’m thinking about or planning to develop a site where people who are interested in psychology could go and practice their skills because it’s very useful for people to have feedback on what they’ve written, you know, if it’s constructive feedback. And constructive feedback should be something like, well, you know, I really didn’t understand what you meant here and this seemed kind of vague and, you know, I really liked what you did here. I think it’s clear I understand what you’re doing. It seems to be well articulated and delineated. So that’s the next stage of the project and that’ll be coming along relatively soon. But anyways, for now, you’ll start with the autobiography and I would recommend that you start it now. Well, like not this second because here we are in this class, but, you know, as soon as possible because it’s actually quite demanding. And if you wait, you’ll find that you can’t do it and then you’ll be annoyed and, you know, the whole purpose of the exercise will be lost. Plus, it’s also extremely useful to do it over multiple occasions and sleep in between writing sessions because the evidence seems to suggest that if you’re doing autobiographical and exploratory writing that you need the downtime to sleep in order to consolidate the changes you’re making in your representational structures. And so doing it over multiple periods is, first of all, it’s the only way really to do it because it’s too difficult to do it in one sitting, but it’s also more beneficial. Now one thing you might think about, and this appears to be the situation, is that your personality is actually organized at the highest level of analysis through articulation. You know, because you’re a kind of a, you’re a hierarchical psychophysiological structure. That’s one way of looking at it. And that structure has to be organized and unified because otherwise you’re like a collection of warring spirits and that’s not an efficient and effective or happy way to live. There’s a lot of suffering. And so the more you’re able to articulate yourself as an entity, the more clearly defined you are and the more, the consequence of that clear definition in unity is that you’re not going to be a house that’s divided unto itself. And that’s an extraordinarily useful thing. I mean one of the goals for most clinical processes is the integration of the personality, right, to make you an individual. And an individual is something that’s not divided. And the autobiographical exercise will help with that. And students have claimed in the past that they’ve been able to put a lot of things that have been disturbing them to rest as a consequence of writing through it and thinking about it. Now, you know, there’s nothing particularly magic about writing. But there is something magic about thinking. And there’s something particularly magic about thinking accurately and precisely about important things. You know, and the advantage of doing that through writing is that you can be much more precise and accurate because you get to externalize your thinking, right, which is what you do when you write it down. And then you can think about what you thought about. So you can engage in a recursive process that enables you to sharpen up your words and sharpen up the representations and extract out the proper causal relationships that make up your experience. You know, the point of memory. People think, well, the point of memory is to remember the past. And that’s complete rubbish. That’s not the point of memory at all. The point of memory is to extract out useful information from your experience so you don’t run into the same wall repeatedly as you move through life. And so if you have things in your past that you don’t really comprehend and that are still disturbing you, what that means in some sense is that there are areas of the world that you don’t comprehend well. And that’s not good because those areas exist even though you encountered them in the past. That doesn’t mean they’re gone. And it also means that there are places in your past that are, in some sense, loaded with information that you can extract. And in some real way, you make your psyche out of the information that you extract from your experience. It’s kind of a Piagetian presupposition. I mean, your psyche, your personality comes from somewhere. It just doesn’t emerge out of nothing. And so you can mine your past for information that you have not completely comprehended. In that way, you can expand your personality and your competence. So I would also recommend, because this is also a motif of the course, is when you do the exercise, pay attention to your words because you’re using your words to construct your personality. And that’s one of the great discoveries in some sense of human culture is that there’s a relationship between the word and the construction of the world. It’s a fundamental relationship. And if you’re precise and careful with your words and with your writing, then what you call into existence for yourself is a well-defined, sharply defined personality and a sharply defined world. And that’s one in which you can act and obtain the consequences of those actions that is necessary to sustain you. So I would say, if you treat this exercise like a class exercise, then you’re missing the point completely. It’s not a class exercise. It’s something that’s designed to bring you up to date, to free you from your past, and to allow you to move forward into the future untrammeled by things that you might be dragging behind you. So there are instructions in the program that tell you what state of mind to place yourself into. But I’ll describe it briefly. Now you want to be in something that’s like a reverie. You know, a reverie is like a state of mind that allows you in some sense to daydream. You know, sometimes when you’re sitting and you’re not necessarily focused on anything, which is increasingly rare these days, your mind will wander. You know, and sometimes it wanders into the future, and sometimes it wanders around problems that you have from day to day, and sometimes it wanders into the past to sort of circle around things that are still consuming you, and that’s the state of mind you want to be in. So you can bring up to the surface issues that are relevant and important, and then start to articulate them and to address them, you know, as the relatively well-educated adult that you are now. So you know, sometimes people are hurt by past experiences because they’re too young and too cognitively naive and unsophisticated to actually understand what’s going on, and to place it in a broader context. The fact that you’ve become educated and that you’re, well mostly that you’ve become educated, you may have the opportunity to reconstrue and recast some of the things that you’ve been thinking about, you know, and carrying along behind you. So that’s assignment one, and I really would recommend, get at it, because it’s not something you can do in the last moment, not without causing yourself misery and grief. The third assignment is the same kind of writing exercise, except it’s about the future. Now one of the propositions that this course is predicated upon is the idea that you’re always in a cognitive schema that contains at least two points of reference, and one is point A, roughly speaking, and one is point B, roughly speaking, and that your life is a continual journey between point A and point B, and point A is the present as you construe and point B is the future that you’re heading to. And in any moment you’re operating with both those poles active, regardless of what you’re doing, because you’re a goal-directed creature, you’re always aiming at something. And in order to obtain what you’re aiming at, and in order to keep the structures that you’re using to organize your experience functional and pristine, you need to have a well-defined sense of where you are now, and you need to have a well-defined sense of where you’re going in the future and why you’re going there. Now this exercise, which is the third assignment, asks you to put yourself in the same state of mind that would be particularly appropriate for the past authoring exercise, except that you’re projecting yourself three to five years into the future. That ability, by the way, probably only emerges at about the age that all you guys are. I’ve tried doing this exercise with high school kids, and they can’t do it. So we’re making a high school version where the kids have to think three to six months into the future, because that seems to be really all they can manage. But you’re at a point where you can cast a future self farther out. The idea is to put yourself in, to adopt a particular attitude towards yourself while you’re completing the exercise. That attitude is, imagine that you’re someone whose care you’re charged with. What I really mean is to sort of duplicate yourself and to take a particular attitude towards your future self. The idea is, if you were going to construct a future for a person, that person being you, and the future was optimized, not in some moronic dreamlike manner that involves yachts and super models, but something that’s realistic and something that you can actually apply. So if you were constructing the future that would be best for you, all things considered, what would that look like? The first part of the exercise asks you to consider what I regard as the most fundamental dimensions of human existence. You know those already. What makes up life? Career, family, friends, intimate relationships, activities that you undertake on your own time, and concerns that are related to health, including use of drugs and alcohol. So those aren’t the only dimensions, but they’re fundamental dimensions. What I’m asking you to do, and what the program will ask you to do, is to think, okay, if you could optimize your life along all of those dimensions, exactly what it would look like. Because one thing you can be sure of is that if you’re not aiming at something, you’re not going to hit it. The other thing you can be sure of is if you’re not aiming at something, someone else will aim you at something for some reason, or some force that you don’t understand at all will aim you at something, and you may end up getting something you seriously don’t want. And I would not recommend that. Stumbling through your life aimlessly is not a good strategy. You can end up some terrible places, but you will certainly end up as a pawn of things that you may not want to be a pawn of. Now we’ve used this program, we’ve tested this program quite thoroughly so far. We’ve used it for, to begin with, we used it for students at McGill who were struggling academically. So, you know, they were smart kids, but they were on academic probation, and they filled out the Future Authoring Program and raised their grade point average at 25 percent, dropped their dropout rate by 30 percent, and so which was quite stunning because it’s very difficult to improve people. You know, it’s easy to make them worse, but it’s harder to make them better. But then we’ve tested it now on more than 3,000 students at the Rotterdam School of Management, and over four successive years we’ve raised the performance of the students 25 percent and dropped their dropout rate by 30 percent. Seems to be, in the Rotterdam samples it was particularly effective for men, but we don’t know what conclusions to draw from that because it was a business program and there was a minority of women, but they were outperforming the men, and we don’t know if that’s a gender thing or if the women who were in the business program happened on average to be more committed and more intelligent, more conscientious than the men who were in it. But anyways, the point is that it’ll ask you to consider those fundamental dimensions of your life and to envision how they would be constructed if you could construct them properly. And then it asks you to write for 20 minutes after you’ve done that about what your future could be like in three to five years if it was optimally structured, free writing. And then it asks you to do something that’s actually the reverse, which is consider all your inadequacies and weaknesses and stupidities and foolishnesses and imagine what your life would be like if you really let them have the upper hand. And everybody, I think, has some sense of that because everyone has some sense of how they would go wrong if they were going to go wrong. And it seems to me to be a very useful exercise to allow yourself to envision where you could end up if you didn’t get your act together and put things straight. And to me, in some sense, what that means is that you’re outlining your own personal heaven and your own personal hell. And it’s useful to have both of those because you can run away from what you don’t want and you can run towards what you do want. And that’s quite motivating. You know, and one of the things I’ve observed quite regularly in my clinical practice is that people are often loathe to make decisions that will cause conflict. You know, so say, especially if they’re agreeable people, you know, say that you want to pursue a career path that your parents don’t agree with. And it would take a fair bit of, you know, intense negotiation in order to free yourself up so that you could pursue that path. It may be just as easy to let it go from moment to moment because that’s conflict-free and end up doing something that you’re not committed to. Then the question is then, though, where does that take you? And if you have a very, very clear idea of the kind of trouble you can get into by not facing the actual realities of your life, it makes you much more likely to fight for what you need to fight for in the present because you know, you know, in some sense you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t, so you might as well take the chance and struggle for what you want now. And so defining a negative future can also be extremely useful. So plus it’s, you know, it’s realistic. People’s lives fall apart all the time. You know, you can expect that your life will fall apart at some point in one way or another. So it’s useful at least to prepare yourself so that that doesn’t happen any more often than it has to and that if you’re going to engage in conflict and so forth in order to pursue what you want, that you have your rationale straight. So the second part of the, third part of the exercise has you develop a fully articulated rationale for your vision. Now there’s a bunch of reasons for that. One is, you know, if you’re having a discussion with someone, I can tell you how the typical discussion about something important goes. If you’re having a conflict with someone, it’s usually someone close to you like the person in your family. You know, you’ll bring up something they don’t want to hear. Okay, so then they’ll tell you two or three reasons why that’s actually your fault and not theirs. And if you can, and sometimes that’ll set you right back on your heels. It’s the end of the discussion, especially if they’re quite emphatic and maybe aggressive about it. If you can get past that and engage in the discussion and start to get somewhere, well then they’ll usually get angry at you. And then past that, they’ll cry. And then past that, you can have a discussion. But in order to get to the point where you can actually have a discussion, you have to have your arguments set up like soldiers behind you. And so if you want to move towards a particular goal, you’re going to run into impediments and some of those impediments will be other people. The voices in your own head for that matter. The more deeply you have your rationale for what you want articulated, the more potent you are as a fighter for your own destiny, so to speak. And so the third part of the exercise asks you to think deeply about why it is that the future you want is important. And not only to you, because of course it’s important that it’s important to you, but also what effect moving towards the future that you actually think would be best for you, what effect that would have on your friends and your family and society at large. Because those things also have to be taken into consideration when you’re constructing what you might regard as your destiny. And so these are very, very important things to get right. One of the things that’s really remarkably pathological about our current education system is that this sort of thing isn’t done more regularly. Because I can’t imagine, since you’re all university students, there’s absolutely nothing more important than you can possibly do than to spend some genuine time contemplating who it is that you want to be as you expand yourself throughout life. There should be whole courses devoted to that. And there isn’t, and there’s weird reasons for that, which I’ll get into later. But this gives you an opportunity to think, all right, maybe I could have what would be best for me, which by the way is different than what I want. Maybe I could have what would be best for me if I knew what it was and I was actually aiming at it. And my experience has been, like I’ve watched people for many, many years in all sorts of different situations and over very long periods of time, because I’ve had a clinical practice for more than 20 years now. And I can tell you that if you know what you’re aiming at, there’s a pretty decent chance you can get it. And if you don’t know what you’re aiming at, then God only knows where you’re going to end up. And it will not be a happy place. So it’s very much useful to put some thought into this and to consciously take hold of and articulate what it is that you want for a destiny. And there’s no reason to assume that you can’t achieve it. You’re all smart, you wouldn’t be here. And you’re all reasonably hardworking, or maybe extremely hardworking, or you wouldn’t be here. And a good chunk of you are probably creative. So you have as good a chance of attaining what you could be as anyone. And so, I would say, dream realistically, or maturely, that would be a better way of thinking about it. But also don’t be afraid to be ambitious about what you want, because the world’s full of possibility. And there’s no necessary reason that you can’t make use of that possibility. And I can tell you as well that you better make use of it. Although I’m sure you know this to some degree, some of you do anyways, life hits you hard and tragically multiple times throughout your existence. And no one escapes from that. And so the problem with that, apart from the fact that it’s painful and anxiety provoking, is that it can make you bitter. And once you’re bitter, you’re a dangerous person and a miserable person. And so the only way to protect yourself against that happening is to have the kind of life that’s rich enough and meaningful enough so that you can take the blows and accept it. Because there’s no way you can escape from the blows. They’re an inevitable part of life. So your life better be rich enough so that you think, okay, well on balance, the price I pay for being alive is worth it. One of the things we’re going to talk about in depth in this class is the social consequences of failing to do that. Because bitter people are extraordinarily dangerous from a sociological and a political perspective. And so the ranks of the totalitarians of the past are full of people who are arrogant and resentful. And the steps past arrogance and resentment are murder and genocide. And so the less of that, the better. So part of the utility in putting your personal house in order is that you’re much less likely to be a pathological force on a sociological and political stage. So as far as I’m concerned, this is extremely important work. And we already know from the empirical evidence, strangely enough, that it seems to have a very profound effect on people. So all right, so the other assignment is an essay. You can write an essay on your choice of topic as long as the topic is related in some intelligible way to the course material, which really leaves you quite a wide range of choice. And it can be a scientific essay, it can be a philosophical essay, and it can also be a creative project if you want to do that. Although if you choose to do a creative project, then you have to write a commentary on it. So in some sense, you have the opportunity to engage in whatever project you’d like to engage in as long as, as I said, it has some relevance to the class. So there’s those three assignments. There’s the readings, and then there’s a final exam at the very end. And the final exam is multiple choice, strangely enough, but it’s the stick that goes along with the carrots, you know, because one of the things I’ve observed in the class is the reading is difficult, and you actually don’t have to do it to participate in the class. And so of course people don’t do it because, not because they’re, well sometimes because they’re lazy and useless, but mostly because they prioritize their time because their time demands are heavy, and things that aren’t absolutely crucial don’t get done. So the exam makes it crucial. So if you do the reading, you won’t have any trouble with the exam. But if you don’t do the reading, then you will have trouble with the exam. So I would say do the reading and stay caught up, because it’ll make the course a richer experience and plus you’ll do better on the final exam. So that’s basically the outline of the course. Now what I’m going to do is walk you through the material fundamentally and try to explain more deeply why it’s relevant. One of my aims in this class is, like I’m not a fan of information for information’s sake. I think that it’s a mistake to pursue information that isn’t relevant. You can pursue it if you think it might become relevant in the future, that’s fine. That’s a calculated risk. But I don’t want to teach you anything in this class that you don’t find immediately compelling and useful, both personally and on the broader social stage. I think the information that I’m going to provide to you, I think it’s absolutely vital. I truly do not believe that you can live properly without knowing what I’m going to tell you. You might think that’s kind of a grandiose claim, but I’m also not trying to take credit for the content of the information that I want to purvey. I’ve spent a long time analyzing the fundamental elements of the great stories of the past. People are historical creatures, and unless they’re grounded in the past, unless they’re grounded in history, they float up and disappear, and it’s not good. You need to know, especially modern people, modern people have to understand to believe. Maybe that’s fine, who knows? We paid a big price for it because our demand to understand has made it difficult for us to have any faith in the sorts of things that human beings have believed throughout the entire course of history, and that makes modern people in some sense educated but bereft. They’re philosophically weak, and they’re often nihilistic or ideologically possessed. Either of those two things is, those are like mental illnesses as far as I’m concerned. I also believe that the material in the course serves as a vaccination against ideological possession. I think that ideological possession, while it was certainly the social psychopathology that threatened the world most in the 20th century, it would be nice if we could rid ourselves of the tendency to adopt mindless single cause explanations for things and confuse that with actual education and wisdom. I want to outline to some degree what I think ideologies are and why they’re so pernicious, and also to provide you with what I think of as an alternative to ideological thinking that’s still grounded in, well, it’s grounded in meaning fundamentally. So anyways, I thought I was going to tell you that after the break, but I guess that didn’t happen. So do you have any questions about that to begin with? Then I want to tell you this story. Yes? Sorry? Be due? It’s available now. All you have to do is go online and you can sign up for the writing assignments. You have to generate a username and password, but if it isn’t functional, let me know. Last time I checked it was functional and it’s pretty reliable. So you can start right away. Just find the website and away you go. Anything else? So, yeah? Yeah? Well, you know, the next time you have a really intense discussion with someone about something that’s important, just watch what happens if you don’t quit. You know, and you will quit if you’re not grounded in what you say firmly, and you’ve thought it through like mad. What right do you have to impose any suffering on someone to make a point if you don’t know what you’re talking about? You have no right at all. And there’s lots of times when you’re dealing with people in intimate relationships where you have a conflict of viewpoint and interest. And you can either ignore that, which means you sweep it under the rug, which is a very bad thing to do, or you can fight it through. And to fight it through means that you’re going to cause emotional upset in the present. And people shy away from that, and rightly so, you know, because it can get out of hand. But the problem with shying away from it is that it’s a small problem right now. If your eyes are open, you can see that it’s going to develop into a large problem in the future. If you address it now, it’s going to cause conflict, but it’s nothing like the complete hell that it will generate if you let it go. But then you have to fortify yourself properly to engage in that kind of battle. And you know, these sorts of battles will take place throughout your whole life. If you want to make a, if you want to have a raise, for example, or if you want to deal with a bully at work, or if you, you know, any time that your autonomy or your freedom is challenged, or that your sense of moral propriety is challenged, so that people are trying to get you to do, say, something that you believe to be wrong. If you’re not fortified with arguments, like a general in charge of soldiers, you’re just going to get walked all over. And that’s not a good thing, you know. To be a helpless victim is a bad destiny, and it certainly pollutes your psyche to also be in that situation. So you want to make yourself into something that’s formidable. And the way to do that in a civilized society is to make yourself a master of words. And in the philosophical sense, words that have meaning and that you’re behind, that you’re willing to stand for. And so that, it’s not the same as, say, trying to win an argument. I mean, if you’re smart and you’re dealing with someone that you have an intimate relationship with, you never try to win the argument. It’s like, what the hell is good is that going to do? You still have to live with the person. You know, they’ll just take their revenge on you some way if you win. So what you want to do is solve the damn problem, but that usually takes a bit of a war. So and then you better be ready for a war, or you’re going to be the loser. And maybe the person you’re fighting with will be the loser too. So all right, I want to tell you a story. And there’s a bunch of reasons I want to tell you this story. And one is, is because the story illustrates very well how unbelievably profound archetypal revelations manifest themselves in very, very simple form. Because I’m going to read you a story that’s written for four-year-olds. And it’s a variant of the oldest story that humanity has ever told. We know that. We know what the oldest writings are that we’ve been able to dredge up and translate. And this is a variant of a story called the, I don’t know how to pronounce this properly, the Enuma Elish, which was a Sumerian story from thousands of years ago that’s actually quite nicely documented. We have the tablets and so forth. And they were discovered in the late 1800s. But it’s a variant of a hero’s story as well. And the hero’s stories are the story of human beings fundamentally. A hero myth is the story of the individual in society. And so the reason that hero mythology, for example, is so absolutely potent is because it provides the grammatical structure for understanding your life and laying it out in the world. And so this is a small variant of that. And it’ll give you an idea as we walk through it how this sort of information is transmitted. It’ll give you some indication of how it is that you understand such information even though you don’t know that you understand it. Because this story obviously is about something completely fictional and fantastic, right? As you can tell, it’s a story about a dragon. And of course, I mean, how many of you have watched a movie about a dragon in the last year? Yeah. Is there anybody who hasn’t? Okay. You haven’t? You haven’t? That’s good. That’s amazing that you could actually avoid that. So, you know, that’s kind of strange because of course those things don’t exist. And so you might ask yourself what accounts for their absolutely enduring popularity and even their cult-like popularity because you see that with both in Harry Potter because there’s a dragon in here, multiple dragons in Harry Potter, right? In the second volume, there’s the basilisk that lives underneath the school, which is a very archetypal idea. And then of course there’s the hobbit and there’s how to train your dragon. And it’s like there’s dragons in Sleeping Beauty and like there’s dragons everywhere. And of course that’s why this boy has this problem. He sees them everywhere and people say, well, there’s no such thing. So okay, so we’re going to walk through this and I’m going to explain to you some of what it means. So the first thing that’s kind of interesting about this illustration, and I don’t know if the author Jack Kent or the illustrator knew this, but if you look at traditional representations of this figure called a neuroboros, which is like a world-encircling serpent, it’s very, very frequent that the entity has a twist in its tail. And from what I’ve been able to understand, that twist represents infinity. So the dragon in part is something that represents what’s continually beyond our realm of knowledge. And so it’s a very complicated idea and it echoes everywhere. So one thing you can think of is that there’s always something that’s beyond your realm of knowledge, your realm of competence and ability. Another thing that you can think of is that people have known this for a long time and it’s a strange form of knowledge because it’s knowledge about the limits of knowledge. So it’s like meta-knowledge. And you can generalize from that meta-knowledge to some degree because you can say, well, as you go through your life, you’re going to have a lot of problems. And then you could also say, as you go through your life, a lot of unexpected things will happen to you and many of them will be problems. And then you can say, well, what that means is that you can conceptualize a class of unexpected things. The class of unexpected things is all the potential unexpected things that might happen to you. And then you could say, well, how do I deal with an unexpected thing? And the answer to that is you learn how as you deal with it. But you could also ask yourself, well, how do I deal with the class of all unexpected things? And that’s a whole different question. And I would say in some sense that’s a primary religious question. It deals with the fundamental realities of life. There are things outside your domain of competence, outside of the domain of competence of your culture, and you will have to deal with them. So how do you deal with them? One by one? Or can you deal with them as a class? And so one of the things that I would like to offer you as a hypothesis is that figures are symbolic representations of the class of all things that lie outside of your competence. Now you see the figure of the serpent or the dragon in relationship to a dwelling in very many stories. So one story, for example, that this motif comes up in is the story in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, because there’s a serpent in the garden. And that’s exactly the same idea as the dragon in the house. That’s the same idea as the fact that no matter how hard you try to make the environment that you’re in stable and secure, the things that you don’t understand and don’t know how to deal with are going to poke their head inside and emerge. There’s no way of keeping, so to speak, there’s no way of keeping the snakes out of the garden. So it’s the wrong approach. Maybe you could build a fence that’s 200 feet high and that’s drilled 100 feet into the ground that’s made out of solid concrete and put a cap on it and sit in the middle of that and not let anything in. First of all, that seems like a bad strategy, but even that, it doesn’t matter because the things that you don’t understand can emerge inside of you as well. And that happens, for example, every time you get sick or every time your body does something that you don’t expect or want it to. There’s no escape from this situation. And that’s partly what this story is about. So this little boy, he’s maturing, he’s growing up, he’s becoming self-conscious, and he’s at an age, because he’s about three or four, he’s at an age where self-consciousness actually seems to emerge in children, where they become aware of themselves as really separate creatures and often start to concern themselves with covering up, putting clothes on, not being naked around other people. Some children care about that and some don’t, but that is the age approximately that it develops. So this boy, he’s in his house, he’s in his window, and he’s become aware of something that’s at least perplexing. Now you might say, well given the size of the dragon, that it’s also terrifying, but we’ll start with perplexing. So because what’s perplexing can turn into what’s terrifying if you ignore it. And that’s partly what this book is trying to present. It’s funny because it’s a cute little book, you know, it’s just a cute little book. So there he is. What sort of facial expression is that? What do you think? Surprise? Yeah, okay, so what happens is, well the kid wakes up, there’s something on his bed, he’s not sure whether he should be afraid or interested, so he’s sort of both. It’s like a startle response in some sense, but at least it’s a bit of focused attention. He’s discovered something. Billy Bixby was rather surprised when he woke up one morning and found a dragon in his room. It was a small dragon about the size of a kitten. The dragon wagged its tail happily when Billy patted its head. Okay, so what can we observe about that? First of all, something unexpected has happened. For a little kid, that’s going to capture their imagination. It’s like, well, is that scary? What’s Billy going to do? It’s a narrative hook. Something unexpected has happened. It’s paradoxical too because it’s a dragon, and Billy is surprised, but it’s a small dragon. It’s only the size of a kitten. Kids know about kittens. They’re soft and cuddly, and they’ve got claws, but they’re basically harmless and interesting. Not only that, when Billy interacts with the dragon at this size, it actually wags its tail and is happy. There’s a paradoxical situation set up for the boy right at the beginning of the narrative, which is something unexpected happens, and it has ambivalent significance. He’s interested in it, and he’s alert to its possibilities, but that’s about as far as it goes. Billy does what the logical child would do. It’s called referencing, by the way. For example, if there’s a child in a room and a mouse runs by, the child will orient towards it and follow it with its eyes and its head. If the parent is around, then the child will reference the mother or the father and read off the mother’s face what the significance of that event was, because it’s unclassified significance. Really interesting because it’s unexpected and fast, enough to alert you to produce an orienting response so that you attend to it. Then it demands classification. It starts off interesting and even potentially upsetting. That’s how it manifests itself to begin with. Then the referencing, which is the look at the mother’s face, allows the child to utilize the wisdom of the parent in order to rapidly classify the significance of the event. Then you think, well, the mother says, oh, it’s just a mouse, we’ll take care of it later. That’s one reaction. Another reaction is she jumps up on the table and has a screaming fit and then calls the hospital because she has a panic attack. The meaning of the mouse under those two circumstances is very much different. She could also say, well, there aren’t any mice here, which is also a rather pathological response, but perhaps not as bad as the full-fledged panic attack. So part of the point of that is that when a child encounters something unexpected so that it’s outside of their domain of competence, it does attract their interest. They’ll orient towards it and explore it, but then they’ll use whatever cultural information is at hand to classify the phenomena so they know what to do in its presence from then on. So that’s an interesting thing to think about, because there’s a couple of things that you can think about a mouse. One is, what is a mouse? That’s like a scientific question. And the other is, if there’s a mouse, what should you do? And that’s not a scientific question. That’s a moral question because it has to do with behavior. And it turns out that when you’re attempting to classify a phenomena, the way that you’re set up given that you’re a living creature and that you’re very much action predicated is that when you’re trying to classify a phenomena, its implication for behavior is more important than its objective nature. And so almost all the knowledge that you have that grounds you in the world is actually information about how to behave in the presence of things. It’s not information about what they are from an objective perspective. And your brain is set up that way. You’re very, very much action oriented. Well obviously because you inhabit a body that moves and your primary problem in life is what to do with your body as you move through space and time. And that’s a particular category of knowledge. I would say that’s the category that’s essentially moral. And the ideas that underlie the essential categories of action, moral action, are religious ideas or at least that’s a claim. So that puts them in a completely different category than scientific ideas. And it also places them somewhere where there’s no necessary conflict between the objective and the behavioral. You have to know how to behave. And science does not tell you that. In fact it can’t. The scientific method is actually designed so that the motivational significance of objects or entities is stripped off them before the investigation begins. You have to treat the phenomena as if it’s objective and neutral in significance. And that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that things are objective and neutral in significance. It just means that for the sake of a certain set of processes, which are basically associated with the scientific method, you have to undertake that operation before you start the game. And I think it’s a very pathological turn in human history that we’ve confused the necessity of stripping off the significance from something before you can study it scientifically with the idea that things have no significance intrinsically. Because that’s a completely debatable point. And it’s certainly not how your brain is set up. And you might think, well, your brain evolved. Well that’s the hypothesis anyways. And you might say, well, what did it evolve in relationship to? And then you might say, well, it evolved in relationship to reality. Because that’s actually how you define reality, especially if you’re a Darwinian. And the way your brain reacts to things is that it assesses their motivational significance first. So then you might say, well, how can you justify the claim that the motivational significance isn’t real? And the answer, as far as I’m concerned, is you can’t. The motivational significance of something might be the most real element of it. Anyways, and you certainly act like that, even if you don’t believe it technically or rationally. As you move yourself through the world, you’re constantly evaluating things for their motivational significance. And you do that without thinking. It’s just how you are. So that’s also worth thinking about. We’ll return to that many times. Billy went downstairs to tell his mother. There’s no such thing as a dragon, said Billy’s mother. And she said it like she meant it. It’s like, well, yes and no. So then you might say, well, you have a three-year-old child, and maybe they’re having a hard time going to sleep because it’s dark. And fear of the dark is actually an emergent phenomena. So as the child’s fear system develops, as the child becomes more and more ambulatory and needs to be protected from the consequences of wandering off unattended, the fear systems also come online. And what do they do? They populate the darkness with monsters. Now you might say, you go into your child’s room and they say, well, there’s a monster in the dark. And you say, well, there’s no such thing as monsters. And then you think, really? There’s no such thing as monsters. That’s why people are terrified to let their children walk three blocks to school. Because there’s no such thing as monsters. It’s like there are plenty of monsters. And you might say, well, there aren’t monsters like dragons. And then I might say, well, what makes you so sure of that? Why is that a bad classification heading? If you’re talking about the class of all dangerous things that lurk in the darkness, because that is a good place for the class of all dangerous things to lurk, how better to represent it than in monstrous form? Because the monstrous form takes pieces from all the potential dangers and amalgamates them into a single danger and says, look out. Wander into the domains that you don’t understand at your peril. Well that’s not fake. It’s not false. It’s real. You know, and children are small and edible. And they’ve been that way throughout history. And you know, children who wandered too far away from the campfire were going to get hurt. And so the idea that there aren’t dragons, for example, there aren’t monsters, that’s not a good idea. It’s not the right approach. I remember once, this may only seem peripherally related, but it’s actually integrally related. One time, I remember my daughter, when she was about three, or thereabouts, she came to talk to my wife and I in the morning. And she said she had a nightmare. And the nightmare was she’d seen this clear stream running through, sounds like an environmentalist fairy tale. She saw this clear stream running through a forest and there was garbage in it. And when she saw the garbage in it, you know, she was upset about it. And then she came into our room and she said that this was upsetting and that why was there garbage in the stream? And one response to that is, you know, don’t worry about it, it was just a dream. And the other response is, well, what would you do if you came upon a situation like that? And so we asked her that. And she said, well, maybe I could take the garbage out of the stream. And so I said, well, you close your eyes and just imagine that, you know, you take the garbage out of the stream and maybe you go put it in a garbage can and then that’s the end of the problem. So she was quite happy with that. And then she wandered off and went back to sleep. And that’s a better answer than that was just a dream. And I don’t exactly know what you mean when you say that was just a dream anyways. What the hell do you know about dreams? You know, I mean, really, everything in the world emerges as a dream. And you don’t understand dreams at all. You go to sleep and they happen to you. You don’t control them. They’re phenomena of nature. So what are you going to say? That was nothing? It’s like, yeah, sure, it’s not nothing. Well, that’s her position. Billy went downstairs to tell his mother, there’s no such thing as a dragon, said Billy’s mother. She said it like she meant it. That’s a person who does not want to admit to the existence of chaos and disorder or who wants to protect her child from that. And you know, there’s some utility in that because children have a limited capacity to deal with chaos and disorder. But to deny its existence in their presence is the wrong thing to do. First of all, you give them the wrong idea about the nature of the world. Second, you’re implicitly telling the child that there are certain elements of reality that have to be hidden from them because they’re either so overwhelming that no one can deal with them or that the child is so useless that the child can’t deal with them. That’s not the right message to give your children. The right message is there are dragons. But if you’re careful, you can learn how to deal with them and will help. So it’s like Oedipal Mother Mistake Number One. Billy went back to his room and began to dress. The dragon came close to Billy and wagged its tail. So it’s looking for attention, right? There’s something in the household that’s looking for attention and people are ignoring it. Now, I don’t know how many households you’ve walked into where that’s the case. I mean, I don’t know. It’s endemic among households where there’s a number of things that are demanding attention and no one’s paying attention to them. There are things that you don’t talk about or there are things that you have to pretend not to notice. Everyone walks around on eggshells or on the elephants underneath the carpet pretending that everything’s all right and there’s nothing that’s all right in the household at all. And so people in this situation like that are denying the reality of their own, not of their own senses, but of something even deeper than that. They’re denying the reality of the importance that their own nervous systems are signaling to them constantly. It’s something’s up here. Something’s up here. Something’s not good. It should be attended to. It’s like, no, everything’s okay. We don’t talk about that sort of thing. It’s like that won’t make it go away. Billy went back to his room and began to dress. The dragon came close to Billy and wagged its tail, but Billy didn’t pat it. If there’s no such thing as something, it’s silly to pat it on its head. It’s reasonable proposition. Billy washed his face and hands and went down to breakfast. The dragon went along. It was bigger now, almost the size of a dog. So that’s interesting. So for some reason, the dragon is now growing. Now we don’t really know why it’s growing. So that’s another mystery that’s popped up in the middle of the narrative. We might infer. Well, we won’t infer anything. It’s foreshadowing the fact that the dragon is growing. The idea there, there’s something like a hint of an idea that if something surprising attracts your attention and you don’t attend to it, then it has the probability of expanding in size. That’s a very interesting thing, that idea. So I can give you an example of how that sort of thing can occur in your own life and how your senses blind you to the reality of things. So let’s say you get a bill from the tax department and they say, well, you owe us 95 and it’s a little bit more insistent. And so you crumple that up and you throw it in the garbage. And you continue to do this. And what happens is that little thing that you’re ignoring is going to aggregate monstrous qualities across time. And if you leave it long enough, then it’s going to be something that you’re really going to have to contend with. Like maybe it’s something that destroys your credit history so that you don’t get to have a mortgage on your house the first time that you try to buy a house. Or maybe you get tangled up with the tax department and they audit every income tax return you do for the rest of your life, which would make you miserable for about a month a year on a permanent basis for the next 50 years. So it’s a strange thing because your senses seem to be designed to tell you what’s immediately relevant in this immediate space, right now, here and now. And so you see things a certain way. But they’re not really that way. And lots of things that seem relatively innocuous from an objective perspective have the capability of manifesting themselves in magnified proportions across time. And all you have to do in order to have that happen is just do nothing. They’ll grow of their own accord if you don’t attend to them. And pretty much all the real problems that you’ll face in your life are going to be like that. There’ll be things in your relationships, for example, that you think, well, I don’t really have to attend to that. It’s like, fine. You know, don’t attend to it once you’ve been alerted to its existence and see what happens. And that’s what this book is about. So it’s bigger now, about the size of a dog. Still not too bad. It’s a dog. You could deal with that, probably. Billy sat down at the table. The dragon sat down on the table. This sort of thing was not usually permitted. But there wasn’t much Billy’s mother could do about it. She’d already said there was no such thing as a dragon. And if there’s no such thing, you can’t tell it to get down off the table. I like this scene for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons I like it is because if you watch parents with their young children, one of the places that there’s terrible conflict around is eating. Many children are somewhat neophobic. They don’t like new things, or at least they tell you that they don’t like them. And many children are also quite disagreeable. So children vary in their temperament. And there are some children who will do everything they possibly can to please you. And they’re pretty easy children to take care of, although they have their own sets of problems. And then there are other children who are very disagreeable. And their fundamental position in life is no. And that usually emerges at about the age of two. And that’s when children discover no. And it’s the magic word, because parents tell them that please and thank you are the magic words, and that’s wrong. No is the magic word, because what no is is a test case. It’s like, all right, where do I end and where do you begin? And the way I discover that is by you ask me something, I say no. My son was like that. He was hilarious as a two-year-old, because everything you asked him was no. So I’d ask him a bunch of things that I knew he didn’t want to do. And he’d say, no, no, no. And I’d say, well, how would you like some chocolate ice cream? And then he was really on a roll by then, and he’d say, well, no. And then he’d think about it and realize that he just passed up an opportunity for chocolate ice cream. And so that was a good trick to play on a two-year-old, as far as I was concerned. But no is a really important word. And it’s the place of the battleground between the child. It’s a Freudian idea in some sense, although Freud identified this conflict more with toilet which is also a place where terrible conflicts can emerge. I knew a family who had a daughter who would only use the toilet if she had a diaper on. Now, that’s defiant, man. She had full control over her system, but there was no damn way she was going to do what her mother wanted her to do. She had to put a diaper on, and then she would go to the toilet. So yes, there was like a year’s worth of warfare around that, I can tell you. You see the same thing at tables with kids, because people have a real hard time. And I don’t know if it’s always been like this, but modern people have a terrible time trying to get their children to eat. Because they’re possessed by stupid ideas like, well, the child will eat what’s good for them. It’s like, that’s… do you? Why would you expect a two-year-old to do that? Who the hell eats what’s good for them? It’s like chocolatey Claire’s and milkshakes for lunch. That’s the right thing to do. Children aren’t stupid. They can just eat hot dogs and nothing else. Or maybe hot dogs and Kraft dinner. That’s all they ever want. You can let your kid get away with that? Well, what do you do then? They’re going to grow up to be someone who isn’t smart enough to enjoy food. That’s not that helpful. It’s like there’s about six things in life that are intrinsically pleasurable, and eating is one of them. So you can warp them pretty nicely when they’re little about what they’re going to be allowed to eat and what not. You deny them a whole lifetime of pleasure, the pleasure that can be involved in exploring new foods and eating new cuisines and all of that. But especially with little monster children, getting their eating habits straight is no joke. You have to have rules. There has to be consistency. There has to be discipline, and there has to be orderly timing. Because the kid is also trying to organize their bodies, they’re trying to organize themselves with relationship to the rhythms of the day, with sleeping and waking and eating and all those things that are the basic elements of a fundamentally healthy existence. Trying to get a child to be in tune with some sort of stable rhythm for some children is extremely difficult. I’ve had clients whose sleeping and eating was chronically dysregulated, which basically meant that for their whole life, they never ate properly and they never slept properly. They never learned how to do it. It’s partly because this little battle here never occurred. It’s like there is a dragon at the table. That’s partly why it’s so important to have your family around the table on a fairly regular basis because that’s a fundamental place where the individual meets society. Human beings share food. It’s like that’s weird. There aren’t any other animals that do that except fundamentally from mother to pup. But human beings share food and it’s really built into our systems at a deep level. I noticed with my daughter, who was quite agreeable, at least when she was young, I used to play tricks on her too. When she was at the table and she was about 18 months older, maybe she’d have some dessert and then I’d ask her if I could have it. She’d give it to me right away, which of course made me feel horribly guilty. It’s like stealing candy from a baby. I felt like Mr. Burns. But she’d hand it to me right away with a smile on her face, which I thought was absolutely remarkable. It was curious to see that that was built in as an instinct at such an early age. By the time she was three, this kid’s age, there’s no damn way she was going to hand me her dessert. Because it was at that point, I think somewhere around that point, that she had started to conceptualize herself more as an individual and that initial instinct that was a sharing instinct had vanished. Then you have to kind of socialize it back into place. But anyways, there’s plenty of dragons at the table. You’ll see that too sometimes. You go out to restaurants and there’ll be a family there with their two-year-old or two-and-a-half-year-old and the thing is completely out of control. It’s like a cat with a clothespin on its tail running around the cafe or restaurant doing nothing but causing trouble. The thing about, I had a client once who was a very immature man, but he had had a child and he wanted to sort of wake up a bit and try to be a civilized human being and not to screw up this kid too terribly. He had this dream that the crib for the baby was by the window and that a bolt of lightning had struck inside the window and let a ball of lightning go in the house and it was tearing all over the place. I thought when I discussed the dream with him, I thought, well, the dream’s telling you about children. There’s a powerful potential inside of them, but unless it’s socialized properly and integrated properly into culture, then it can be a terrible destructive force and there’s little doubt about that. Well, anyways, it doesn’t matter because Billy’s mother has already decided that there’s no such thing as a dragon at the table and that means that when she takes her child to a restaurant or to a dinner and it misbehaves terribly, that the child will continually encounter nothing but fake smiles and disapproval from all the adults that are around it and that’s going to be its destiny for the next number of years. If you want to do something particularly evil and vicious to your child, then make sure that you fail to inform them of any of the basic rules of civilized behavior so that everywhere they go, the adults can pretend to tolerate them and then really be pleased when they leave and never invite them back. That’s a great destiny. Mother made some pancakes for Billy, but the dragon ate them all. Mother made some more, but the dragon ate those too. Mother kept making pancakes until she ran out of batter. Billy only got one of them, but he said that’s all he really wanted anyway. So I’ll tell you another story about that. When I lived in Boston, I had little kids and my wife took care of some neighborhood little kids because she didn’t have a green card and she was home with the kids anyways. She took care of some other little kids. One of them would only eat hot dogs, that was quite funny. He’d only eat hot dogs at his mother’s place, but at our house he ate all of his lunch and he was perfectly happy about it, so I thought that was quite amusing too. Anyways, one day a neighbor came by and the neighbor had a four year old child. The neighbor was looking for someone to take care of the child because her nanny had been in a car accident and couldn’t take care of the child temporarily. So the child had sort of been circulating around neighborhood houses for a couple of days and people were taking care of him, then he ended up at our house, which was fine. So he’s a cute little guy. The mother came to the door and she said, she pushed the boy in, he was kind of like this, he wasn’t very happy. She said, he probably won’t eat all day but that’s okay. And I thought, hmm that’s a remarkably interesting statement to put forth as a proposition the first time we meet your son. It’s like, he won’t eat all day, which by the way is not okay, it’s not okay, and you’re going to tell us that it’s okay, and you’re going to expect that we’re just going to accept the fact that you think it’s okay. And that’s the whole story. You deliver all that information in one little sentence. So I thought, well that’s pretty damn peculiar. I believe she was a psychologist too, which was quite interesting. So okay, so that’s fine. So I went out to do something and there was four kids playing in the house and when I came back, the little guy was in the porch, like where the boots were and everything, and he was sort of standing there like this. And I thought, hmm that’s not good because there’s all these other kids, like he should have been in there playing, but obviously that’s what a child is primed to do. He should have been in there messing about with, I think there was a two year old and a three year old and another four year old, he should have been in there causing trouble and having fun and playing, but he wasn’t. He was standing in the porch like this and he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy. So I looked at him for a bit and then I poked him a couple of times because I thought, you know if you’re interacting with little kids, they’re very playful. They’re kind of like puppies. So if you tease them a bit and tickle them a bit, then usually even if they’re crabby, a smile will break out despite their best efforts and then they’ll sort of giggle and maybe they’ll try to whack you away. They go into a play routine. Although you may not know it, mammals like us have a play circuit. So we’re intrinsically playful, which is partly why we can get along with dogs, because of course dogs are intrinsically playful and most people know how to play with a dog. You know when a dog wants to play, right? Because it sort of puts its paws down and looks up at you and sort of grins and puts its tail in the air and goes like this. It’s like, clue in primate. It’s time to engage in some playing. You know, basically you know how to do that and even the dog knows how to do that. So I’m poking this kid and trying to get him to smile, but there’s no damn way. I’m poking him. He’s just ignoring me like mad and I thought that’s not good, you know, because you don’t want your four year old to have learned that you should, that it’s okay to ignore adults or that you should ignore adults or that you can ignore adults. That’s all bad because the world’s full of adults and they know a lot of things and they control all the resources and so you better get along with them. Plus you’re going to end up as an adult for most of your life. So if the first rule is adults can and should be ignored, then what the hell are you headed for? It’s one of the reasons that it’s really useful to make sure that children respect adults because they’re going to be adults. So if they don’t respect adults, then of course they don’t have any respect for what they’re going to be. Why the hell grow up? You end up like Peter Pan because that’s what Peter Pan’s about, right? Peter Pan wants to stay in Neverland with the lost boys where there’s no responsibility because he looks at the future and all he sees is Captain Hook, a tyrant who’s afraid of death. That’s the crocodile, right? It’s chasing him with a clock in his stomach and it’s the same thing as this dragon. So kids have to respect adults. You’re doing them a disservice if they don’t. So okay, so fine, I’m poking this kid, there’s just no damn way. I’m not getting anywhere with him and I thought this isn’t good. There’s something deeply wrong with this little kid. So that’s fine. So then we sit all the kids down for lunch and the rule is eat your damn lunch and be thankful for it because you think about this. Leonard Cohen wrote this song once about, I don’t remember the song particularly, but he talked about the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen about who’s going to serve and who’s going to eat. It’s like if you haven’t encountered that, then there’s something terribly wrong, you know? Because a lot of the tension in households is domestic tension. The tension between husbands and wives, say, or husbands, wives, and children. It’s like just who the hell is going to do the domestic duties and how and when? And the answer can’t be, well, we’re not going to do them because then you eat Cheetos and popcorn for the rest of your life and that’s not good. It’s got to the point in England because the domestic situations have deteriorated, the rituals have deteriorated to such a point that about one third of families no longer have a dining room table and you can buy precooked hard boiled eggs. Yeah, yeah, right. It’s not a good thing. You might ask yourself, why the hell everyone is either fat or has an eating disorder? Part of the reason is that the entire domestic routine around regulating food intake has disappeared. That’s a terrible thing for people because we’re social eaters. So you might say, well, if you sit down with a bunch of other people at a table, how much should you eat? And the answer is you should eat on average what everyone else eats. And that’s exactly what you do even if you don’t notice it. People are so wired into, we did experiments like this. If you bring undergraduates who don’t know each other into a lab and you give them a snack while they’re doing something like watching a movie, they will eat the same number of chips. So if one of them eats the whole half the thing, the other will eat half. If one only has one, the other will only have one. The correlation between the food intake, between the diodes was about 0.8. It was staggering. It seemed to be a little higher for extroverts than for introverts, but it was remarkably concordant. You can understand why, right? Because human beings share food. It’s like you are not going to be a popular tribes person if you eat 30% of the food when food is in short supply. You better be bloody awake and make sure that you don’t take more than your share. It’s a fundamental element of human nature to do that. We also regulate our sense of satiety by cues that are external to us. So regulating our food intake also because we’re omnivores turns out to be a tremendously difficult thing. Well anyways, back to this kid. So we bring all the kids to the table and they’re sitting around and they’re having lunch. The rule is, as I said, eat what is in front of you and be pleased and happy about it. So you might say, well why would that also be a rule? It’s like, okay, put yourself in this position. Now, because you’ll be in this position. You’re going to cook your damn kid some lunch and you’re going to do that, well let’s calculate it out because I like doing arithmetic. So let’s say it takes you half an hour a day and you do it seven days a week, but we’ll multiply that by three because there’s three meals. So it’s an hour and a half a day, right? So okay, fine. Seven times an hour and a half is roughly ten. So it’s ten hours a week, it’s forty hours a month. Forty hours a month is a full work week. So forty hours a month times twelve. Twelve full work weeks, right? Yes, that’s three full months of forty hour days of cooking something for your damn kid. Now that’s a lot of time and then you’re going to do that for eighteen years. So then you might ask yourself, what sort of response do you need from your child in order to not feel resentful and miserable about the fact that you have to do that for three bloody months this year? You just have to think about this. This is also why it’s necessary to know that inside yourself you carry a monster just like the world outside you carries a monster. Do not think that you’re going to be able to maintain a healthy attitude towards your child or towards food or towards yourself if all you can muster up for the effort of cooking and preparing food is the attitude of a slave and continual punishment from the people that you’re offering food to. It’s like who the hell wants that? So you want to teach the miserable little blighter that he’s lucky that there’s any food there at all and that the proper attitude is to say really thank you very much mom or thank you very much dad. I’m glad that you produced something. And then you know you can be all happy about the fact that you were a slave and away in the kitchen and you can like your kid. So, and you know you might think well everybody likes their kids. It’s like yeah right, no. That’s not true. That’s not true. And now and then you know you read in the newspaper about someone who’s you know being pushed a little bit too far on some day that they’re unemployed and hungover and you know their relationship is just broken up and they do something absolutely brutal to their child and you think well how can anyone do that? It’s like there’s a lot of history of terrible interactions between the mother and the child or the father and the child before something like that happens. So you know if you want to protect your child against the beast that’s inside you, you might want to teach them to treat you with some respect so that you’re much more likely to be a civilized human being around them. So alright so anyway so this kid’s sitting there and there’s no damn way he’s going to eat anything. So we decide we’re going to feed him which I’m an expert at because my son, the one who said no all the time, he was the most stubborn little cuss you could possibly imagine One time when he was about nine months old he got a hold of the spoon and it was like he was not going to be fed anymore so that’s fine, good, you know it’s like feed yourself but no. Kids they’re too damn curious and playful really to feed themselves so you sit them in a high chair and then you know they fling the food onto the floor because that’s pretty cool they can watch that over and over you know or they mess around with it or maybe they you know put some in mom’s hair because that’s interesting too. They have two or three bites and then they’re not ravenous and then they’re much more interested in playing and that’s fine except that if the kid doesn’t eat then it gets crabby and you know whiny and miserable and then it disturbs the mother or the father and then it won’t sleep at night it’s like that’s no good. So after about three days of that I took the spoon back from him and he was not happy about that man. Trying to get that little kid to eat once I got the spoon it was like a four hour battle. It was really remarkable so I had a lot of respect for his ability just to withstand stubbornness you know but I’d learned by that time as a parent that like if you want to discipline your child there’s an attitude you have to take which is I am going to win this like I don’t care how stubborn you are I am going to win and because I know I’m going to win I’m not going to get angry I’m just going to out stubborn you and so I’d take up some food and put it in front of him and he’d go like this. So that was a good trick and so I tried to get the food in there and his teeth were gritted so I’d poke him you know poke poke poke poke and after about ten pokes he’d get annoyed and go ah and I’d put the food in and then he’d try to spit it out so I’d hold it in and so then that was like three minutes you know and then we did it with another spoonful and you know after about I’d say an hour of this my wife had to leave because it was like she just couldn’t handle it and about an hour after this he decided that you know it was okay and that he would let me feed him but like it was brutal and it was amazing I mean little kids are so damn tough you know they’re really cute and everything and but they’re so tough you just can’t believe it so anyways so we had this kid at the table and he was not going to eat so my wife who’d learned these tricks by this time decided to feed him and he had a lot of sort of nine month old or eight month old behaviors because you know kids have different strategies of resistance if they don’t want to do something and those strategies get more sophisticated as they get older but and he had some strategies but they weren’t sophisticated you know like he didn’t make jokes or knock the spoon away or get angry or run away or any of those things he did kind of nine month old things which means he just put his head down and when she put the spoon towards him he just averred his head one way or another so that was interesting because I knew that his parents had given up feeding him when he was about eight or nine months old because those tricks worked and so that’s why she could come to the house and say he probably won’t eat all day but that’s all right which it isn’t it’s not all right so fine so my wife is trying to feed him and he doesn’t open his mouth so she pokes him a bit and sooner or later he gets mad and you know goes ah and she puts the food in and she does and then she pats him on the head as soon as he swallows it and says look you’re being a really good kid you know you’re doing a good job and then so he’s wondering what the hell’s going on and then it was so interesting because she kept feeding him and he was still doing this but as she patted him on the head he’d be doing this and he’d open his mouth so it was like there was this weird conflict between his habitual behavior and this thing that was being reinforced so then she’d you know put the food in and pat him and he’d you know he’d be kind of happy about that and then he’d go back to his routine and then she did that for I think about 20 minutes it wasn’t disruptive like all the other kids ate they didn’t even really notice what was going on it wasn’t it wasn’t a big deal you know but I was watching because I knew something was up because the stupid thing that his mother said and then the fact that he wouldn’t play and he ignored me I thought nah nah there’s something really not good here there’s dragon here and it’s a big one so she feeds him and then he finishes the whole bowl it’s like and she says you’re a good boy you ate the whole bowl and Jesus you should have seen what happened to that kid man it just about broke my heart like really like his eyes got big and he smiled and he was just like he was super thrilled because he’d finally accomplished this absolute basic necessity that he hadn’t mastered in four years he finally got it right you think of all the meals that he went through either being ignored or failing three times a day for like three years nothing but failure and bad responses and you know he’d internalized all that he thought he was a bad kid and then all of a sudden poof he figured this out and you know got a little reward for it was like he just lit up and that whole shell that he had on that that he was like using to protect himself when he was in the porch that just melted away it was like it was horrifying and amazing at the same time and then he followed my wife around after that in the house just like a puppy dog like he wouldn’t get he would not get more than one foot away from her it was unbelievable and then we went downstairs to watch like a movie with the kids and she sat on a rocking chair and he climbed right up on her lap and grabbed her just like that harlow monkey grabbed the you know the little soft mother instead of the wiry mother he was like this and he was like that for like two hours he wouldn’t let her go so then the mother came home his mother came home and she came downstairs and she looked at what was going on you know and this kid was like glommed on to my wife and she looked at her and she said oh super mom and you know took her kid and went home it’s like jesus like if you don’t think there’s a dragon in that story man you’re not listening to it it was not good and her response at the end was terrible she should have said well how’d you get him to eat it’s like and what what the hell is he doing like hugging you he never does that to me no way man she was gonna let that piece of information in and it’s no wonder because the dragon in that story was her and it was something she did not want to admit and she was willing perfectly willing to sacrifice her child to that to her failure to realize that she could be a dragon so that meant that the child was the problem and that’s a hell of a thing to do to a four-year-old so it was not pleasant it was really not pleasant in fact we probably did damage to the child by actually getting him to do something good because we opened up him up to the possibility that he could behave properly and be rewarded for that and that gave him hope and so you can bloody well be sure that that hope was dispensed with the next day so and that’s why Billy doesn’t get anything to eat yes oh no I’d still do it because you know the child at least the child got to learn that there was adults somewhere in the world that would pay attention to them you know so I mean yes well you have to you know you can’t let things that aren’t right occur under your supervision you know it’s not appropriate and you should pay attention little kids you know they’re they’re remarkable little things and you know they they’re if you pay attention to your kids you’ll never have better companions you know children they’re remarkable they’re really easy to get along with unless they’re hungry or tired or hot or cold it’s like you should be able to deal with that right four things it’s like is he hot is he cold is he hungry you know does he have to go to the bathroom that’s it and then you know wherever you take them they’re happy until they get tired or hot or cold or hungry and by that time you’re probably one of those things but you’re too stupid to notice so the kid will notice first and then you’re done and but it’s fun and the kids are like they’re like little they don’t have any latent inhibition technically I think is what’s going on but when you’re around little kids you know you’re no longer cynical because they still see the world and you can’t because you’re old and stupid and blind and you know the kid can still see the world and so when you take the kids around you can see the world again because you can see it through their eyes and that’s such a gift it’s just unbelievable so you know you don’t want to mess with that and you don’t want to be the one that’s responsible for deciding that the kid happens to be the monster that you won’t admit you are and believe me you’re a monster there’s absolutely no doubt about it the question is only do you know it and are you going to do something about it and if you think that’s wrong then well you know good luck to you Billy went upstairs to brush his teeth mother started clearing the table the dragon who is quite as big as mother by this time that’s not so good right made himself comfortable on the hall rug and went to sleep so now she’s ignored something for so long that it’s you know I’ve seen people in therapy talking about their marriages when they’re sort of on the verge of divorce you know and they have dragons with that they that the person brings with them that are their size or bigger and what that means in some sense is that they’ve ignored certain things for so long that the problem has become so complex and multifaceted and multi-headed that they no longer have the energy or the ability to solve it so it’s like you know I tried to calculate at certain times how many decisions that you make during a day you know whether you’re going to react one way or another and maybe you’re doing that in the context of a relationship you know and you know most of you know if you’ve had a relationship of any length you know more than a couple of months you start to actually interact with the person rather than your idea of the person and you know there are conflicts and part of them are because you’re both stupid and erotic and ignorant and half crazy and some of them are because life has real problems and there’s really difficult things like conflicts of interest that have to be worked out it’s really hard and you know you can with each interaction that you have within a relationship you basically decide whether you’re going to address the reality that’s in front of you or whether you’re going to let it slide and you know if you let 10 or 20 things slide a day those are all things that would in principle have to be addressed in order to keep the relationship pristine and functional and adapted to the current situation you let 20 things like that slide a day it’s like 150 a week or 600 a month or 7000 a year and you do that for 10 years then it’s 75,000 things that you haven’t dealt with and so then you go to therapy and you say our marriage isn’t so good and you know you look behind it you see oh there’s 75,000 problems that you haven’t solved it’s like good luck starting now you know you just can’t do it and and at that point maybe there’s no way out divorce it’s like good luck with that especially if you have children it’s like you might as well have terminal cancer you know getting divorced with children is no joke and I’ve seen people’s lives absolutely demolished by that so that there was no hope they could recover it’s really not good I mean sometimes it works and the people are you know they can communicate enough to be reasonable about the about the distribution of assets and and the children’s custody but you know if they’re not reasonable oh my god it’s just awful so don’t generate problems around yourself by avoiding necessary things until the problem is so big that it’s bigger than you because you’re basically done at that point you can’t fix it you don’t have the energy so you can tell when a couple’s like that because they keep bringing up things from the past like 20 year ago things you know he’s always like you’re you’ve always been like that you’re like that now and you’ll always be like that in the future it’s like that’s no way to begin a negotiation then you can remember something that happened 20 years ago and bring it up it’s like that’ll make you happy by the time Billy came back downstairs the dragon had grown so much he filled the hall Billy had to go around by way of the living room to get to where his mother was I didn’t know dragons grew so fast said Billy there’s no such thing as a dragon said mother firmly yeah cleaning the downstairs took mother all morning what with the dragon in the way and having to climb in and out of windows to get from room to room it’s like that’s a really funny one day because it’s like it’s so obvious now that there’s something up but she’s still not gonna admit it and so you know I’ve been in places like that too where there’s so much interpersonal tension among the participants and so many pathological things going on in the household that nothing simple can get done you know so like maybe that the job of making a tuna sandwich takes like two hours because there’s nothing but first of all nobody can find anything to make it with and you know the fridge is empty and maybe the tuna cans are six years old and the breads all moldy and stale and then even if that wasn’t the case they can’t figure out who the hell is gonna go shopping and even if they could manage that there’d be a big fight around you know what should be on the sandwich and how much tuna and so and the point of this little part of the story is that you know a simple task is only a simple task if there aren’t all sorts of impediments around cluttering it up you know and if there are impediments like that cluttering it up then you just can’t get it done and then you can see why that’s so terribly stressful because what it means in part is that there is no way that you can just do something straightforward with ease everything is about everything all the time it’s like oh it’s awful it’s awful and it’s very very common you know you see couples all the time this is a modern problem you know one of the advantages to traditional divisions of labor is that everybody knows what to do now you might say well that’s not fair it’s like yeah okay fine it’s not fair that’s probably true the question is what the hell is the alternative and the alternative is you have to negotiate every single task so you know if you’re going to cohabit with someone at some point in the future here’s your options slavery tyranny or negotiation so you can be the slave you can be the tyrant or you can negotiate but the problem is in the absence of routine and ritual and tradition there’s no rules so everything has to be negotiated and the problem with that is most people can’t negotiate they don’t know how you know because the negotiation it’s a complex process and people are very unlikely to engage in it so when I’m when I’m trying to get people to make decisions when they when they have to deal with something that’s very complicated the first thing I do is I say okay look let’s lay out the problem space okay all we’re going to do is discuss what might be going on here we’re not going to jump to any conclusions about whether any of these theories are correct we’re just going to contemplate them and right away there’s resistance to that because it’s very difficult for people to separate a hypothesis about the way things are from a description of the way things are so they get afraid that as soon as you discuss something in a certain way that that’s the way it’s going to be and so they can’t even lay out the problem space so that’s the first impediment to negotiation and then another impediment is they can’t define what they want you know so like if you and I are going to negotiate about something one of the things you need to know is what I could do that would satisfy you and if the answer is well if you knew me better you’d know what would satisfy me which is a very common answer it’s like I’m hatched right from the beginning because like I’m stupid I don’t know what will satisfy you I don’t even know what will satisfy me you have to you have to tell me because I’m not very bright it’s like what do you want well I don’t know it’s like oh no that’s not good it’s like now we have two problems the problem and whatever would make you happy it’s like it’s terrible and then you have to lay out the solution space it’s like well we could do it this way or we could do it this way or we could do it this way or here’s another option or this is an option and like why don’t you think those through it’s like oh that’s a whole set of multiple realities it’s overwhelming it’s like I’m not doing that I’m tired of this discussion I’m gone so so there’s a dragon in everyone’s house of that size now because no one knows what to do and no one knows how to solve the problem of what to do because people don’t know how to negotiate they just aren’t good at it it’s hard to negotiate you know because you have to suspend your judgment and you have to have a symbolic war that doesn’t erupt into a real war and then you have to solve it and then people have to agree to the solution and then they have to enact the solution right they have to be they have to be they have to what act out their word once the solution has been negotiated and it happens but it’s very difficult so people avoid it all the time and then everything becomes incredibly complicated I went to a house once quite regularly where the husband refused to he was kind of a traditionalist you know and he refused to ever thank his wife for doing anything that was domestically related like cooking now and she also had a career and it was you know a pretty demanding career so it wasn’t self-evident that she should be the one that was doing this but that doesn’t matter you know she could cook but she wouldn’t and so every time I went there I had the most god-awful food it was just staggeringly terrible you know everything had done been done to that food to torture it that an intelligent and irritated person could possibly do and so the price that was being paid in that and the kids wouldn’t eat and it’s no goddamn wonder you know it’s like who would eat that you know and so the price the family was paying for not negotiating around this complex operation because running a domestic economy is very complex operation the price they paid for it was every single meal was like curdled with resentment and the food quality was terrible and everyone was angry it’s like oh my god that’s like it’s four hours a day of that you know that’s like a quarter of your waking life so and you know after engaging in that sort of interaction with your husband or your wife for like a quarter of the day for 10 years you can be sure that whatever goodwill you might have stored up is pretty much evaporated so you know one thing that you might think about and this is counterintuitive you know because people think what are the most important events in your life and you know no one is going to say breakfast you know you think well I went to Europe for two weeks this summer something like that’s like all that stuff’s irrelevant who cares about that exceptions are irrelevant your life is made up of the things you do every day that’s what it’s made up of so you know I don’t know how many thousands of hours you’re going to spend having breakfast over the you know the course of your life but it’s going to be something like one sixteenth of the time you have left so let’s say you’ve got 80 years left that means you’re gonna have you’re gonna have spent five years having breakfast so get it right you know because about I would say about half of your life is routine and if you get the routines right you know so everybody sits down and meals real good and everybody’s happy about it and all the little decisions have been distributed properly it’s like poof half your life is good so you know and you won’t get fat and have an eating disorder which is also it’s also kind of a plus or you won’t get as fat or have as much of an eating disorder by noon the dragon filled the house its head hung out the front door its tail hung out the back door and there wasn’t a room in the house that didn’t have some part of the dragon in it I bet that there is a house like that on some of you will live you know where there’s a lot of houses some of you live in apartments doesn’t really matter but I bet you if you live in a house on a block of houses there’s at least one house on that street where the tail of the dragon has started to come out of the house and you know what that’s like because it’s the house that you don’t really want to look at when you walk by you know and maybe I don’t know that needs a new roof and like the door is a little bit crooked and the lawn isn’t cut and you know there’s some rusty things lying around there and like it’s just not taken care of and you know and maybe you know from the gossip in the neighborhood too that there’s something going on in that house that is just not good and it’s got to the point where it’s so not good that it’s starting to spread itself out beyond the domestic confines of the house so you know you out you run into people like that now and then too you’ll notice this so you know sometimes I don’t know if this has happened to any of you but it might have it’s happened to you in some ways you know that there are those people who can’t not tell you everything about what’s going on in their life even if you’ve hardly even met them if you see someone who’s really in trouble you know you’ll sit on the bus and somebody who’s clearly on the road to being thoroughly deranged will sit down beside you and they’ll start telling you about the problems of their life it’s like you know that the dragon that they’re dealing with is so big that they can’t even contain it they’re so desperate to have it dealt with that they can’t not talk about it you know and there’s lots of people like that they’re the ones what is that stupid little phrase tmi is that right too much information it’s like yeah well what why does that happen it’s because people are dealing with anomalies and unexpected occurrences and tragedies and they cannot articulate a solution and most people think by talking which is also part of the reason that therapy works it’s right well do you think i doubt it you might but very few people think you know and so if you want to solve a problem you want to talk it over with a friend and so you know you might just think that you’re talking about the problem sort of you know what the problem is but you’re talking about so you don’t when you talk about it you articulate the problem space you start to generate potential hypotheses about solutions but more than that if you’re talking to someone you can watch them just like the little kid with the mouse would watch the mother it’s like well here’s what i think the problem is and if you go you know you’re listening and you go like that you roll your eyes you know it’s a hint to the person that maybe that’s not the most appropriate way to formulate the problem now maybe you don’t roll your eyes but you know you don’t encourage them or maybe they tell you what the problem is and you’re really actively engaged and you’re nodding well then they know that maybe they formulated that the way someone half sane and tolerable would formulate it and then they can walk through the solution so so when you sit down beside someone and they have to tell you everything one of the things that you know is that they don’t have anyone to listen to them and part of what happens in therapy and a huge part of it is that you just listen i have one client that’s that’s all i ever do with her she comes in twice once every two weeks and i just sit there and listen to her for an hour and now i can maybe have a bit of a discussion with her for the last 10 minutes but if i try to say anything for the first 50 minutes she just looks kind of irritated and you know it’s like i’ve interrupted the flow of the of the interaction and she’s alone she doesn’t have anybody to talk to so you know she wants to listen to herself think and she can’t do that by herself she has to have someone to do it with and so you know people think by talking and some people have no one to talk to and so their problems start to spill out and you know by that time you can’t even help them usually because you if you listen for three years it wouldn’t be enough listening you just listen forever and you never get to the bottom of it when the dragon awoke from his nap he was hungry the bakery truck went by the smell of fresh bread was more than the dragon could resist the dragon ran down the street after the bakery truck the house went along of course like the shell on a snail i read this book a while back i think it was called the glass castle it’s a very very cool book it’s about this woman whose parents were extremely creative and intelligent and unbelievably unconscious like just so unconscious that it was mind-boggling disorderly and non-industrious and and so they were they were a little bit on the psychopathic edge of things and you know her father would dream up all sorts of new ideas and many of them were actually brilliant because he was no idiot but he was kind of a petty crook and you know he’d get in gambling trouble and and you know cheat people at cards and not pay his bills and so on so like every three months they had to move and like if you have to move every three months you know that the dragon in your household has got so big that it’s actually the one that’s carrying around the house and that happens to people a lot and so their lives are so disorganized they can’t even stay in one place for any length of time you know so the mailman was just coming up the path with some mail for the bixby’s when their house rushed past him and headed down the street he chased it for a few blocks but he couldn’t catch it now if you move enough and you’re unstable enough then none of the rest of society can communicate with you or stay in touch with you and that deprives you of all the benefits that a certain degree of predictability would confer upon you like you don’t get your mail well mr bixby he’s quite a genius too when mr bixby came home for lunch the first thing he noticed was that his house was gone it’s like sometimes people don’t notice things until it’s got to that point right because now and then you hear a story about someone coming home and like their wife has packed up and taken the children and that was the end of that and the person says well i never saw that coming it’s like right you never saw it coming and mr bixby you know his conventional sort of guy a little bit on the clueless side obvious obviously he didn’t know what the hell was going on he comes home and his house is gone and it’s a neighbor that has to tell him where it went it’s like he’s just as inattentive as his wife mr bixby got in his car and went looking for the house he studied all the houses as he drove along finally he saw one that looked familiar billy and mrs bixby were waving from an upstairs window mr bixby climbed over the dragon’s head onto the porch roof and through the upstairs window how did this happen mr bixby asked that’s a good question right and that’s where the story actually starts to turn around because somebody finally admits that there’s a problem so they say well what’s going on which is to say there is a problem you know because when you make a statement the statement has all sorts of inferential meanings that are attached to it and just to say well what’s the problem is also to say well that there is a problem and to say that it’s worthwhile formulating the statement that there’s a problem and that it’s worthwhile thinking about it that’s a big move you know one of the things that carl rogers said about therapy and he’s absolutely right about this is that there are preconditions for therapeutic improvement and one of them is the person who comes for therapy has to admit that there’s a problem before they come and they have to want to have a solution and if that situation isn’t there you can’t do anything with them i i had people assigned to me at some time to come and say assigned to me at some times by the court it’s like court assigned therapy that is not useful because like the person has to say well i’m in trouble and there could be a solution and you know otherwise they’re just sitting there like this you know sort of looking at you or i had one guy who was a real psychopath he was a child abuser and you know all he did the whole bloody therapeutic the whole time i was with him was brag about what a pillar of community he was you know and i he was really quite psychopathic so i tried to at least convince him that you know he was likely to continue to get in trouble if he didn’t stop what he was doing but you know he was also one of those people who knew absolutely everything and there was nothing at all that anybody could ever tell him and you know it was it was just like there was i was it wasn’t any more useful than it would have been if i wasn’t even in the room was completely pointless so because he didn’t have a problem everybody else had a problem the dragon wagged his tail happily then even faster than it had grown the dragon started getting smaller soon it was kitten-sized again i don’t mind dragons this size said mother she’s certainly come around why did it have to grow so big i’m not sure said billy but i think it just wanted to be noticed it’s a tremendously profound little story you know because it’s got echoes of the of paradise and paradise lost in it the dragon in the the dragon in the garden but it’s even it’s better than that because it shows how dangerous it is to ignore things and then it caps it off with the proposition that even if it’s a bloody dragon if you just admit it’s there and look at it there’s a high probability that it’ll shrink to a manageable size you could hardly ask for a better ending right because you know you maybe they something magic happens and a thunderbolt gets rid of the dragon you know it’s it’s a wrong kind of ending this is yeah yeah you’re stuck with the dragon but you know maybe if you pay attention to the goddamn thing then not only does it stay kitten-sized which isn’t so bad but you can deal with it and then there’s something else is like do you really want a household with no dragons you know like you imagine that because people one of the things dostievsky pointed out in his this was in notes from underground which is a very powerful commentary on the foolishness of utopianism you know so if you if you produced a utopia there wouldn’t be any snakes in it right because utopia is where everything’s perfect it’s like what the hell would you do in a utopia you know you just sit there while everything was perfect seriously do you really want everything to be perfect or do you want to be surrounded by manageable problems that you can make a meaningful contribution to that seems better you know so so there’s something better than perfection it’s weird and what’s better than perfection is manageable imperfection because it gives you something to do and so one of the things dostievsky said this was back in the late 1800s he said utopias will never work because people are basically somewhat insane and if things were too perfect around them all they’d go do is go around and smash things until something interesting happened so that they had something to do and that that seems to be you know precisely right so the moral of the story here is don’t ignore the damn dragon but there’s more than that too it’s like if you attend to it properly if you have your eyes open then maybe the thing will stay manageable and that’s a lovely ending i mean one of the things we know for example if you’re dealing with people who have an anxiety disorder maybe they have agoraphobia you know they’re very terrified often they’re terrified of death what they’re really terrified of is this they’re terrified that they’ll have a painful and sudden sort of death in public while people are watching themselves make a fool of themselves while they’re dying so there’s two elements to it there’s the fear of mortal vulnerability which is real you know and sometimes people develop agoraphobia after they’ve had heart palpitations or something like that you know and so there’s a dragon inside when you think well my god you know i might die and so then they go to the emergency ward three or four times when they have panic attacks because they’re thinking they have heart attacks and what are they afraid of well they’ve just figured out that you know they might be walking down the street one day and die and it’s like yes that could happen you know and it’s often people who are quite dependent who’ve been dependent for much of their life and whose dependency relationships have been disrupted in some way that start to manifest these symptoms but then if you dig a little bit deeper they’re also concerned about the fact that you know well something unbearable is happening to them physiologically they’ll expose themselves to the public and so they’ll be watched so it’s kind of it’s both social judgment plus mortality fear which is like the sum of all fears in some sense if you treat agoraphobic people what’s quite interesting is you actually don’t ever convince them that the world is more is less dangerous than they have now realized and the reason for that is it isn’t less dangerous than they’ve now realized they had just never realized that right and so they’ve never really grown up and so then you expose them to situations of danger and you might say well they habituate and become less frightened it’s like that isn’t really what the evidence suggests what the evidence suggests is that they become braver which is way better because the world is dangerous and so you know if i had to fix you to cure you of your anxiety disorder i have to say look everything’s going to be all right it’s like no no you’ve already figured out that everything is not going to be all right and so then that question is well once you’ve figured out that everything is not going to be all right what are you going to do and the answer to that is there might be a lot more to you than you think and it could easily be that regardless of you know how fragile you think you are and how little of you there is that might just be wrong you know and if you exposed yourself to things that were challenging and frightening you’d find out that the monster that you have inside of you has real utility because you’re a lot more dangerous and capable than you think and that is what people who are treated for anxiety disorders conclude they think oh you know so maybe you it’s usually women that have agoraphobia it’s quite interesting so maybe you get the woman so she can now go on subways again and she can take the bus and she can go on elevators and then she goes home and has a big fight with her husband which she hasn’t done in 20 years because she’s been too timid you know and so what she’s learned is hey i’m not as useless as i think i don’t need as much protection as i thought i needed i can stand up for myself and you know then she can take on other challenges that she wouldn’t have been able to take on before because you’ve taught her that she’s brave that it’s possible to be brave and courageous and that if you do that it actually works and that’s really what happens at the end of the story it’s like you know mr bixby finally thinks well there is you know the problem here we should figure out what it is and the kid says what it is everyone listens and all of a sudden poof you know it’s back to manageable proportions and so one one of there aren’t that many optimistic things in philosophy or in psychology or in life that are truly optimistic and reliable but one of the things that is both optimistic and reliable is you might be a hell of a lot tougher than you think and so you know when you’re when you’re assaulted as you will be throughout your life by terrible things happening you know for example at some point when some of you have already done this you’re going to have to deal say with the death of a parent you know you can do that you know and in a way that’s terrible it’s terrible that you can do that because you might think well if you really loved your parent you know and they die then the logical and appropriate thing is to fall apart and never be put back together because anything less would mean that you didn’t have sufficient love it’s like no well you know you are a bit of a monster and it turns out that you can lose a lot more than you think and you can still move forward and even more importantly it turns out that that’s the right thing to do because if a tragedy strikes in your vicinity you know you can either lay down and fall victim to it and then add to the problem or you know you can stand up and take it and deal with it and you know maybe be a comfort to the other people around you that are also suffering from the tragedy and you can move forward you know and I saw this I’ll stop with this and then we can take a break I had a client at one point who was afraid of very many things for example she was a vegetarian and part of that was because she was terrified of meat so she wouldn’t go into a supermarket where the butcher shop rows are and you know you can understand that it’s like well how can you do that it’s there’s nothing but mayhem and carnage there you know and you don’t see it but she saw it you know and so it terrified her and so I’d take her to butcher shops now and then and get her kind of used to it and and she had a dream at one point and I can’t remember the exact nature of the dream but it was something like this she saw a gypsy in the forest and the gypsy said to her that unless she learned how to work in a slaughterhouse she’d never finish her degree because she had been doing her degree forever and she spent like 20 hours a day sleeping so because she didn’t want to be conscious because it was too burdensome so we talked about that dream she was quite a remarkable dreamer and I said well you better think about that like you need to do something that would push you beyond your limits it’s like you’re not going to go to a slaughterhouse because I don’t think I can arrange that but maybe you better think about what you could do and so she went away and she came back the next week and she said I think I want to go see an embalming I thought oh well you know I didn’t really expect that so I thought okay well that’s fine so I called up a few funeral parlors and I told them what was going on and I said you know is it possible that I could bring one of my clients there and they said yes because they’re kind of used to it like they deal with this every day right these people deal with that every day amazing and so you know I took her there and it was quite an exposure experience for me too you know because I’d never seen anything like that and I’m a little bit on the squeamish side or maybe even a lot on the squeamish side so you know we were in there and there was the embalming table and the body was laid out on the table and you know they were doing the prep work that they have to do in order to preserve the body for for their funeral and later and you know it’s quite a gory process all things considered there’s a lot of fluid drainage and that kind of thing and so she was standing beside me we were outside the room it was a small room and so we were outside looking through the door and she was basically doing this and you know as she did that she’d look longer and longer you know and then finally I would say after about 20 minutes she didn’t run away after about 20 minutes she could just watch and then she asked if she could go inside the room and you know the guy said that was fine and then she asked if she could touch the body and like she did all that you know and I learned a lot that day too because I talked to them about how funerals are arranged and all that sort of thing which is knowledge you need to know even though it’s terrible knowledge unless you want to be useless you need to know about that sort of thing and you know what was really interesting about that was after that she had some calibration point for her fears you know so she’d think well I’m terrified of this therefore I can’t do it people think that’s like well then she could think well this is nowhere near as bad as like going to the mortuary and watching someone be embalmed it’s like I did that I can do this it’s like yeah right absolutely you know you have to be a monster to stay alive you it’s better to be a conscious monster though than an unconscious monster because then you know you’re in control of the monster rather than the other way around and it’s necessary and part of what this book says is look you know if you pay attention to terrible things you can shrink them to manageable size they’ll never go away but maybe you don’t even want them to go away but at least they’ll shrink to manageable size and that and what that tells you is just how bloody powerful it is to pay attention so there’s nothing more powerful than paying attention okay so let’s take a break for a bit 15 minutes