Based Camp - Based Camp： The Trauma Conspiracy

00:00:00.000 it is not being abused which creates the effects of trauma it is believing that you underwent

00:00:11.040 something traumatic which creates the effects of trauma and what's really important about this is

00:00:18.560 that it means that anyone can use this to their advantage it means that whatever happened to you

00:00:24.800 as a child a group with malicious intents whether it's a cult or a psychologist or a ideological

00:00:32.020 movement can find fertile ground within about anyone's life to separate them from their family

00:00:39.980 and build real trauma into their childhood yeah and this is very advantageous for these groups

00:00:46.940 because when you're a cult one of the first things you want to do is to separate somebody for their

00:00:51.420 endogenous support networks you want to separate them from their family and the other people who

00:00:56.380 care about them would you like to know more hello malcolm hello simone it's wonderful to be here

00:01:02.980 with you today it is because we decide that it's wonderful right malcolm exactly and this is a very

00:01:10.200 interesting topic the subject in this case being basically the effect of contextualization so most

00:01:16.120 recently a friend of ours shared with us a study called associations between objective and subjective

00:01:21.400 experiences of childhood maltreatment in the course of emotional disorders in adulthood and the

00:01:26.740 tldr of this particular study was those who contextualize childhood abuse or maltreatment as such

00:01:34.080 reported and apparently experienced more emotional problems as adults versus those who through

00:01:42.040 government records and other sources clearly were shown to also experience maltreatment in childhood but

00:01:48.400 didn't identify as being maltreated did not show the same level of mental distress of mental disorders

00:01:55.980 word that differently it is not being abused which creates the effects of trauma it is believing

00:02:07.200 that you underwent something traumatic which creates the effects of trauma yeah or contextualizing it as this

00:02:16.480 horrible thing so because you can still totally have something bad happen to you i'm sure and be like

00:02:21.600 that sucked but like to not identify with it to not be like that was horrible how am i ever going to live

00:02:26.420 this down my life is ruined because of this yeah so you actually see this when i was a psychology

00:02:31.920 student there was this case and i've never been able to find the study that this was done in it may have

00:02:36.880 been anecdotal experience from the the teacher at the time but they were talking about how

00:02:41.540 in countries where rape is very common and quote-unquote part of normal life that the rates of trauma from

00:02:49.840 rape are very low and it's only in the countries where rape is contextualized as traumatic where you

00:02:56.980 really frequently get this extreme trauma response to rape specifically believing and this is also what

00:03:05.020 you're seeing was the forgetting before remembering phenomenon which is a famous phenomenon in psychology

00:03:09.820 where a person will go like oh my gosh i just remembered this like i was r word by my uncle

00:03:17.780 as a kid right it was horrible i'm traumatized i'd covered up that memory from my childhood and the

00:03:24.080 person they told this to it'll be their spouse or something like you talked about that last week you

00:03:27.600 talk about this all the time you you clearly hadn't forgotten this and what's happening is they will

00:03:34.140 remember something like my uncle touched me in a weird way that made me uncomfortable but they won't

00:03:40.360 contextualize it within the modern context that we associate that with right and then one day they

00:03:48.040 will think about it tied to this new traumatizing context and the new memory of it that they create

00:03:55.600 through that the new way they're contextualizing this old memory is so different it completely

00:04:01.820 overwrites the old memory and they don't remember that they had previously remembered this or that they

00:04:08.020 had never really forgotten it but what's really interesting is when this happens then trauma is

00:04:14.380 introduced they did not have trauma from the old way they were remembering and contextualizing it but

00:04:19.740 they do from the new way yeah you've seen this also we've looked at some other research on long

00:04:28.000 covid remember how i shared that one study with you where they found that people who did not know

00:04:34.900 that they had covid did not report the symptoms of long covid at the same period but we're confirmed

00:04:40.300 to have covid i should clarify we're not confirmed to to have the same symptoms or reported symptoms of

00:04:46.600 long covid as people who who did know that they had covid essentially a number of people went to a

00:04:52.240 hospital they were diagnosed with covid right but some people were never informed of their diagnosis

00:04:56.520 long covid essentially didn't exist in that group if you had covid but you did not know you had covid

00:05:02.900 your probability of getting long covid was incredibly low i think almost zero which uh when you combine

00:05:10.980 that with the fact that long covid's like number one corollaries were like general anxiety

00:05:16.060 disorder and stuff like that yeah having history of sort of mental illness or struggle in general

00:05:21.900 correlates apparently quite highly with cases of long covid that that largely implies that this is

00:05:28.620 probably mostly psychosomatic maybe not in every case but in many cases it's psychosomatic

00:05:34.020 but a specific type of psychosomatic which is meaningfully psychosomatic so people hear that

00:05:39.700 and they're like what that means it's basically nothing whereas i would couch that in what we've

00:05:45.700 been saying the pain that comes with trauma is real basically all of it comes from the contextualization

00:05:56.180 of the event not the event itself yeah but also the pain that is being experienced is very real

00:06:04.680 it is no but all of the pain whatever someone has ever said that they were traumatized

00:06:09.520 what they were talking about was the contextualization not the event itself yeah yeah in other words the

00:06:16.560 thing that is causing the harm is the way that you've built a narrative around it it's the narrative

00:06:20.580 that causes the harm not the thing the not the traumatic thing itself it was really important about

00:06:26.520 this is that it means that anyone can use this to their advantage it means that whatever happened to you

00:06:33.200 as a child a group with malicious intents whether it's a cult or a psychologist or a ideological movement

00:06:41.200 can find fertile ground within about anyone's life to separate them from their family and build real

00:06:49.640 trauma into their childhood yeah and this is very advantageous for these groups because when you're a cult

00:06:56.760 one of the first things you want to do is to separate somebody for their endogenous support networks

00:07:01.760 you want to separate them from their family and the other people who care about them this is why when

00:07:06.620 cults often start recruiting you they ask you about things that happened in your childhood it's also why

00:07:13.160 malicious psychologists now real psychologists generally do not ask that much about your childhood

00:07:17.460 that's not like i was trained to be a psychologist when i was trained to be a psychologist that was not

00:07:21.680 part of psychology training it's become a new thing that psychologists have picked up

00:07:25.860 organically or accidentally because the ones that accidentally created a dependency in their patients

00:07:30.800 ended up getting more repeat business and ended up doing better and ended up being able to spend

00:07:35.060 more money on ads and ended up being able to grow their practices more so that iteration of psychology

00:07:39.880 that functions very similar to the way scientology functions actually because they use a similar

00:07:44.060 recruiting process has out competed the others but you see this in other parts of the research so talk

00:07:50.260 about the sleep study simone yeah yeah this is one of my favorite ones there's a study published in

00:07:55.400 behavior research and therapy is literally called insomnia identity so but that basically explained

00:08:02.660 itself people who identify as being insomniacs are more likely to experience the adverse effects of having

00:08:11.260 poor sleep and as they put it insomnia identity is more predictive of daytime impairment than poor sleep and

00:08:18.480 so what they did here was very similar actually to the childhood trauma research that we mentioned at the

00:08:24.460 beginning of the podcast they took a bunch of people actually measured how well or how poorly they

00:08:31.320 were sleeping and then ask them hey how well did you sleep last night and they either said yeah like

00:08:36.500 i slept fine i slept poorly i slept really well and then i think they had them report i don't think

00:08:41.460 they measured their performance that day but i had them report their performance although this is the

00:08:45.280 meta study so i think they're looking at a bunch of different studies i'm just remembering one of the

00:08:48.440 ones that was mentioned in it so in other words they found that those who believed they slept poorly

00:08:56.740 reported much poorer performance that day or had much poorer performance that day than those who

00:09:03.600 believed they slept well even if those people who slept well slept really poorly which i think is very

00:09:10.180 interesting because again this shows that how you contextualize things how you think you're doing

00:09:15.320 is going to predict how you are actually doing in many ways and of course there are tons of places

00:09:20.000 where this isn't going to come through like for the past like year or so especially with my last

00:09:24.680 pregnancy i had a pretty bad iron deficiency and i was pretty exhausted like standing up was hard all

00:09:31.060 this normal stuff was really difficult to do and for the longest time because i hold this view

00:09:36.620 that is it is my perception that is going to influence everything i'm like i just have the wrong

00:09:41.420 attitude right now like i just need to get my act together when really i just i needed to eat like

00:09:45.740 a hamburger or like a pan sear some tofu and a cast iron skillet with some tomato sauce and i would

00:09:51.500 have been fine and now i've worked that out well talk about the placebo study as well that's another

00:09:56.540 one that's really relevant to all yeah let's yeah let's take this and then shift it to the mindset that

00:10:02.320 you i guess what you can do about this that you can if you want to use this knowledge to your

00:10:08.480 advantage and instead of saying okay everything now that i see is traumatic or every time i contextualize

00:10:13.340 something poorly i'm going to suffer what's what about the flip side what if you contextualize

00:10:17.580 something really well then oh there's this whole world of power and empowerment and like good health

00:10:23.800 and good mental health is going to come to you theoretically so there are lots of ways that you can

00:10:28.040 mess with placebos yourself that can help you for example you can use even in non-deceptive

00:10:36.820 placebos to reduce stress in a measurable manner there was one study that's called placebos without

00:10:41.900 deception reduced self-report and neural measures of emotional distress this is a meta study with

00:10:48.340 published in the journal nature which is a really good journal that basically found that even when

00:10:53.580 people knew that the effect was a placebo effect so even though you know that you're just messing with

00:10:58.420 you there's no like real drug or it's a doctor just being like placebos are known to make a difference

00:11:02.680 this pill is going to do nothing take this pill and it should help you people are like oh this is

00:11:07.180 helping me it also helps apparently and and i have another study that found this when the person

00:11:13.080 telling you the placebo is fake or the person administering the placebo also seems respectable

00:11:19.120 so that like maybe get like a really smart respectable friend to administer some made-up treatment to you

00:11:25.500 that is supposed to help you feel better this is definitely something you could build into we talk

00:11:29.640 about like crafting cultures crafting religions this is definitely something you can build into that

00:11:34.020 well i think many religions do right they have these ceremonial like cleanse like cleansing of guilt

00:11:39.520 cleansing of sickness cleansing of all sorts of mental exercising people what is that but to at least

00:11:46.820 from a secular perspective what is that but the placebo effect and it is powerful right let's dive into

00:11:52.680 what this means for the individual and for society to the individual it means that a lot of the

00:12:00.100 psychological challenges a person can deal with when it comes to trauma or quote-unquote the things that

00:12:06.120 have happened to them in their lives are are not actually that tied to the serendipitous things that

00:12:11.780 have happened to them they are more tied to how they contextualize those things and the way that people

00:12:17.840 around them allow them allow them to contextualize those things and encourage them to contextualize

00:12:22.500 those things so if you are within a community that emotionally rewards resilience you are going to

00:12:30.460 experience a lot less trauma even if you have undergone the same events and if you personally choose to lean

00:12:37.680 into things that way now this becomes really important when you look at this sort of urban monoculture

00:12:44.240 in our society which does almost the exact opposite you can gain status within this culture and by gain

00:12:53.860 status what i mean is gain a level of protection so for example if i have some form of trauma in this

00:13:01.540 urban monoculture i can exercise power over other people with something called a trigger warning which

00:13:06.600 basically says you have to do what i want because of x status that i hold within this society right

00:13:12.880 like that's triggering stop but what that is doing is giving you social power for this level of emotional

00:13:21.380 fragility and that sort of subconscious reward even if it's not intentional it's eventually going to

00:13:28.240 cause you to lean into traumatic contextualizations of aspects of your life more and more

00:13:35.580 if a it's actually i've studied cults like i'm really into cults and like progressive culture is

00:13:44.120 actually in many ways like more unhealthy than i would think your average malevolent cult which is

00:13:51.060 really interesting and i and it didn't like it wasn't trying to be that it just accidentally became

00:13:57.680 that and it's really sad when you think about the completely unnecessary suffering that's happening

00:14:05.560 across developed countries right now and increasingly being spread to developing countries due to this

00:14:12.200 mindset and ways of relating to the hardships of your life um no it's incredibly sad and i want to

00:14:20.480 emphasize this is not just about traumatic events that happened in your childhood this is not just about

00:14:25.900 you perceiving sleep to be poor this is not just about you getting covid and then assuming that

00:14:31.120 you're still sick and never recovering this is coming down to like everyday amounts of stress that

00:14:37.100 you're experiencing for example i have three separate studies that i'd like randomly collected

00:14:41.280 because i collect studies that i think are interesting over time that are just about mindsets around stress

00:14:46.520 just general basic stress so there's one called the role of stress mindset in shaping cognitive emotional

00:14:53.620 and physiological responses to challenging and threatening stress which basically the the tldr is

00:14:59.400 teach yourself to contextualize stress as positive the source of focus learning and advancement

00:15:03.940 because that enables you to basically deal with it better there's another study called mindset matters

00:15:09.100 the role of employees stress mindset for day specific reactions to workload anticipation

00:15:13.800 where it basically says the takeaway is you should contextualize stressful challenges as being able to

00:15:20.220 sharpen your focus strengthen motivation help you learn and help you advance there's another study

00:15:24.720 called beliefs about stress attenuate the relation among adverse life events perceived distress and

00:15:31.040 self-control that shows specifically for adolescents that they also benefit from a positive stress mindset

00:15:37.420 so all of these are basically like okay you can view this as negative you can view this as oh i need to go

00:15:42.820 see my therapist this week this is traumatic i'm stressed now i'm getting so stressed i need rest i need to

00:15:47.680 stay home you need to cut back on things or you can contextualize this is this is an amazing

00:15:53.360 opportunity for me to grow i can become stronger now this is a great good normal kind of life and it's

00:15:59.600 fine it's fine no it's not just fine it helps you so the same negative event can make you both

00:16:07.920 mentally stronger and feel better or it can be used by your culture and those around you to make you

00:16:14.200 weaker and this is where when people are like oh you've created this weird family religion like what

00:16:20.240 potential positive could that have this belief 10 million years our descendants are probably closer

00:16:26.160 to the way we would contextualize a god than the way we contextualize a human if they're still around

00:16:29.980 and then who's to say they relate to time the same way we do so they could be watching over us right

00:16:34.560 rewarding us for doing the right thing but what this means this belief system we've created for our

00:16:40.020 family is that when negative things happen to us instead of treating them emotionally as if they're

00:16:47.000 negative things what we say is ah the future police did this for us clearly they're they're trying to

00:16:53.920 give us an opportunity or send us a signal if we had gone down that route it wouldn't have worked out

00:16:58.560 anyway and this is just so powerful in terms of contextualization we get fired we're like oh they must

00:17:08.100 have been opening our time up for some opportunity that's about to come our way we better prepare

00:17:12.240 something otherwise stressful happens to us we're like oh they were honing our ability to handle that

00:17:17.100 so that we can better handle it because some even bigger thing like that's about to come so we really

00:17:21.700 need to focus on getting better at this yeah and it prevents us from contextualizing really anything

00:17:28.960 in our lives in this negative context which makes removes i think a lot of one completely unnecessary

00:17:35.920 negative emotions but more importantly it removes unproductive negative emotions which derail us from

00:17:42.820 achieving our goals the things in this life that we think matter and you're specifically pointing out

00:17:48.580 how with our designed family culture we have created mechanisms that give us very easy opportunities

00:17:55.980 to contextualize things positively rather than negatively which i think is really key and actually

00:18:01.880 culture does play a really big role of this you're reminding me of some research that i found super

00:18:05.960 interesting um related to decision fatigue that showed a role that culture can play so those of you

00:18:12.700 who are familiar with the concept of decision fatigue the idea is that by the end of the day you are so

00:18:20.100 exhausted from all the various choices you've made throughout the day which sort of cumulatively rack up

00:18:25.140 and tax your mental system that you're just you can't make good decisions anymore and all these researchers

00:18:30.380 had found things like oh once people are tired they make poorer purchasing decisions people like

00:18:35.740 president obama came out with oh i wear a uniform basically because that removes the amount of

00:18:40.640 decision fatigue that i have throughout the day i'm saving my mental capacity for important decisions

00:18:47.020 because i am president and what was really interesting is i found some research questioning the concept of

00:18:54.540 decision fatigue when they compared it across different cultural groups so if memory serves

00:18:59.960 some researchers looked at decision fatigue among indian study respondents yes i remember this study and

00:19:06.780 you are correct that is okay because my memory is nothing like five years ago you read this anyway

00:19:13.080 yeah i remember where i was i was sitting in our kitchen in peru when i was reading this so

00:19:18.800 it's been a while and so they they found basically that at least according to the study in indian culture

00:19:26.640 the view around mental exhaustion is more like no no this isn't a getting drained like gas gauge thing

00:19:34.600 this is a getting warmed up thing so the more hard decisions you make in a day the more like warmed up

00:19:41.300 you are and the more able you are to make really good decisions because like now like now you're in the

00:19:46.480 groove like now you can keep going you've got the momentum so you're using momentum to make hard

00:19:51.260 decisions whereas in the united states the contextualization the cultural contextualization

00:19:56.100 is oh i've made all these hard decisions now i can't make any more good decisions so i'm going to

00:20:00.540 eat a pint of ice cream tonight so a lot of that again like this is not just a personal how am i going

00:20:05.860 to decide how to contextualize this this shows the role that a culture a national culture can play

00:20:11.520 in how psychological tricks are played on us which is really cool i mean in this case they're

00:20:16.080 looking at a national culture but i think this shows how little excuse every individual has

00:20:21.880 to just opt into whatever the dominant culture in their society is right you have personal ownership

00:20:28.960 of your culture you get to choose what that culture is you get to choose what that framework is

00:20:33.400 especially if you have a family and that family can be self-reinforcing it's a lot harder to do this at

00:20:38.300 the individual level but if you're doing this with a family or a small group of friends

00:20:42.560 yeah you can build all of that for yourself which completely determines how you experience all

00:20:49.300 these things in your life and that is just absolutely wild that so many people throw away

00:20:58.680 that opportunity because i i think that to a lot of people taking responsibility for themselves

00:21:05.940 is the ultimate burden and relinquishing personal responsibility is the ultimate luxury and i've

00:21:15.660 said this before that i think we expected as we move to a post-scarcity society people would indulge

00:21:21.220 in hedonism but instead what we have found is that they indulge in self-victimization

00:21:26.460 and the reason they indulge in self-victimization is because that allows them to not take responsibility

00:21:37.920 for the consequences of their own actions that's really what being a victim is about is i am not

00:21:43.960 responsible for the consequences of my actions or where i am in life and to an extent let's be clear

00:21:50.460 we are all to some extent not responsible and fully responsible right like it's a spectrum for every

00:21:55.320 individual it's just you get no psychological benefit from believing that you are not responsible

00:22:03.300 and this is the research around internal and external locus of controls come in right and so you just see

00:22:08.580 this along every place that you look at this stuff and it's insane as it looks to have built like a family

00:22:16.380 religion and a family culture and people are like why would you do that and it's because it matters

00:22:20.440 so much yeah some of the older cultures work but a lot of them do not have good mechanisms to resist

00:22:31.520 online environments these skinner boxes we have around us all the time or new information which can

00:22:37.460 make them hard to believe right like it does make sense that a lot of people would be creating new

00:22:43.600 systems of belief yeah but yeah so what we aren't saying with all this is there are no exogenous

00:22:51.800 factors that may mess with you or give you mental health problems or whatnot 100 many people experience

00:22:58.240 depression because of mental imbalances or because of genuine things in their lives that are making

00:23:02.580 their lives miserable that they cannot think their way out of 100 terrible things happen they can cause

00:23:08.680 serious problems however you still have a lot of power in how things tip one way or the other like

00:23:15.760 not every adverse thing that happens to you has to be bad you can have some control over that and so

00:23:23.180 hopefully if you take one thing away from this it is that there is actually a lot of control you have

00:23:28.900 over whether things go poorly or well for you no matter what happens in life and this is not us trying

00:23:34.340 to be like out of touch and be like oh i don't know use your thoughts to cure yourself but the

00:23:39.080 scientific research seems to be robust across all these different domains childhood trauma sleep

00:23:44.340 quality general stress decision fatigue like it's just all over the place that it's robustly saying

00:23:51.640 you've seen this with me you've remarked before that generally when something really bad happens to us

00:23:56.960 my mood improves yeah you get super stressed and like worried when things are going well and then when

00:24:02.500 things fall off a cliff you're like oh okay all right this is gonna be fun time to do something

00:24:09.480 interesting again but yeah it's about contextualization and you could say that's a negative part of the way

00:24:14.140 i contextualize life that if everything's going well that's when i get emotionally worried but if

00:24:21.400 you're going to react to things in a certain way if you have to choose either to become emotionally

00:24:26.660 distressed when things go poorly or become emotionally distressed when things are going well

00:24:30.260 you're probably better off becoming slightly antsy when things are going well because usually that

00:24:36.720 means you can deal with things better in those moments right there's less genuine pressures less

00:24:41.660 genuine things to mess up right yeah per our culture we're just not i think good at luxuriating in a

00:24:50.460 moment yeah yeah i don't like it what how sinful is that it's a sign that i need to launch some new

00:24:56.040 project if i've got free time i've got a it's this youtube series i love it we started doing this a

00:25:02.280 few weeks ago and then we're like huh we initially said we do it once a week then we ended up doing it

00:25:07.380 every other day and then one day i'm like ah i've got some free time let's do it every weekday

00:25:11.120 um which i think is just ridiculously ambitious i should probably scale this back a little bit

00:25:16.820 but that is not you but i don't know we'll see i think probably we should make a more sustainable

00:25:22.600 publishing schedule but i love these talks with you so maybe not i love them with you too and i

00:25:27.760 really appreciate that you've helped reinforce this new culture for me that makes it so easy for me to

00:25:33.900 not really contextualize anything as traumatic despite all of the traumatic things you do to me

00:25:38.360 well i ain't stopping malcolm so thank you so much for surviving this far personal responsibility

00:25:47.120 how abusive is that i won't be able to torture you more if you you know conk out on me so

00:25:52.680 hang in there friend hang in there i love you so much you're great

Based Camp - July 27, 2023

Based Camp： The Trauma Conspiracy

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