Trauma is Always Self Inflicted
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about a recent study that confirms what we all have long-held beliefs about childhood trauma and the effects it has on our lives. We also talk about the role of trauma in our daily lives, and how it can have a direct impact on our mental health.
Transcript
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all these people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never
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allowed to feel bad. And I was never allowed to confide in people. And they're like, and that was
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all bad. That was all bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes
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your life better. When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame
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your life in the moment, it doesn't feel awesome in the moment when you want to be vulnerable,
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it doesn't feel awesome. But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically
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better. And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points.
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Would you like to know more? It is so great to be here with you today. You had just sent me this
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study where you're like, this is so fascinating and better than that. It confirms our preexisting
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beliefs. And isn't that just the studies, right? That's what, that's why people read studies too
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for confirmation bias. So this study is by Andrea Denise and Kathy Spatz-Widham. I'm going to get
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their names wrong. Of course it's called objective and subjective experiences of child maltreatment and
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their relationships with psychopathology published in nature, human behavior, which is a very respectable
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journal. And basically they found, I'm just going to quote them. We found that even for severe cases
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of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective
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measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports. In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked
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to subject reports, subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports
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were consistent with objective measures. So dumbed down Simone words.
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I'm going to say this in simpler language. Basically what it means is that if you had a really traumatic,
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in the way that modern society would frame trauma, childhood, like you were systemically abused
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in ways that were verified by the court system, but you don't believe that you had a difficult
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childhood, you will not have any negative effects from your childhood. However, if you had a perfect
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childhood, but you believe you had a terrible childhood, you will have all of the effects that
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we associate with childhood trauma. Now, this is something that confirms with other studies that we've
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talked about on this show. You know, we've talked about the study of sleepers that showed that people
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who believed that they had had bad sleep, but hadn't actually had bad sleep, had all the effects that we
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as a society associate with bad sleep. People who verifiably had bad sleep, they didn't have any of
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those effects. Yeah. It's how you see it. If you think that you slept poorly, you're going to show signs
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of fatigue that day are going to struggle. And even if you slept like shit, but you believed you slept
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really well, you'd be like, Oh, I'm perky. I feel good on average. This is so critical within our,
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because what this actually means, you know, you can, you can say, Oh, this is like interesting or
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quirky or whatever. It actually means that as a society, when we say something like childhood trauma
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causes adult issues, what that, that, that is just verifiably untrue. It's the belief that you
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were traumatized in childhood that causes adult issues. Yet often these two things are pretty
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correlated, right? Often somebody who is, is traumatized in childhood will have the belief
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that they were traumatized in childhood. Right. But what's critical to remember is when, uh,
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the left, it's usually the left who does this, invents new types of traumas that somebody can go
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through, or they frame something as particularly traumatic that previously people wouldn't have
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thought of as traumatic. They create the symptoms of trauma in that individual where that individual
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previously wouldn't have had those symptoms. And this is, you know, we have seen this have such
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negative effects on individuals' lives. Recently, we were interacting with someone
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and they were just absolutely riddled with like all sorts of diseases, you know, neurological issues,
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pain, all these sorts of very Spoonie like issues. If you go to our Spoonie episode and, and we had a
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friend who was like that as well, you know, but what was really interesting is she was only like that
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when she was a progressive. So when we first met her, she was like deep into the progressive sphere.
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And so do you want to talk about what happened? Cause she's a better friend to you than me.
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Yeah. I mean, she, she had some severe health problems and they included, you know, seizures,
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severe allergies. I mean, this was a fairly limited life that she had to live. She couldn't,
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you know, she couldn't look at computer screens. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine your life,
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not being able to look at computer screens. It was, it was really rough. And then,
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yeah, she, she shifted some things. She got in a really good relationship. She sort of
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changed her standards and values and sort of the way that she was going to prioritize things in her
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life. And then like one day she called me and she was like, yeah, so I don't have seizures anymore.
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I don't know. Well, so it wasn't just that. So, I mean, the guy who she married is a Texan guy.
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You actually have seen this couple in some of our, um, after video credits playing with the kids at
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one point. Yeah. We really, really liked them. They're awesome people. Yeah. Yeah. And the,
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and the, the 4th of July party, they, they hosted this, but yeah. So, so Texas guy, very religious,
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you know, and actually not at first. So he and she had known each other for years. He was also in this
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far progressive movement. And then they started hanging out more with us than their other friends.
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And then they became like really, like, like they, they went along with sort of the way that we were
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going, but they went further than us. And, and now, you know, they're really into Jesus and all that
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and very much structure their lives as a very religious conservative couple. And they focus
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on this real trad aesthetic. Yeah. I would, I would say that you go, we almost like implied that like
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we had some influence on them. No, like they, they very, very introspectively thought through
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their lives and their values. And they came to a very religious and more traditional conclusion.
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Do you really think that would have happened had they not known us? Hold on. Do you really,
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we were their only like non ultra progressive friends.
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We, we may have nudged them slightly, but I think many, many factors nudged them slightly.
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Okay. I'll agree with that. I'll agree with that. Yeah.
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And, and, and, but anyway, I thought like that is really interesting. And I think, you know,
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we, we see this effect of recontextualization on real world health outcomes, but what also makes
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this, this nature study really interesting to me is, is Ayla also recently released some interesting
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research on basically how women remember their childhoods differently than men. And, and basically
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she looked through her massive amounts of data at how people viewed their childhoods and whether they
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thought they were neglected, never, rarely, sometimes, often, or very regularly, and whether
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they were verbally abused, whether they were physically abused and how often they were spanked.
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And then she also asked them like, you know, what was the social class of your upbringing?
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And, and, uh, you're taking too long to get to the point.
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The point was basically girls reported more physical abuse, more verbal abuse, more, basically
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more hardship and trauma in childhood. And it almost implied also that their social class was low.
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Poor, I think actually they reported that their social class was lower. So basically like girls
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saw their childhood as much worse than boys did, even though typically when you look at punishment,
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Take a step back. It was very obvious from the data sets that this was an equal data set in terms
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of boys and girls. Women were not being punished more than men. They were objectively remembering
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every aspect of their childhood as being worse than the men. Now, what we don't know is,
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it could turn out that men are just misremembering their childhood and, and, and the women actually
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are remembering everything. Or it could turn out that the women are inventing a trauma that
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didn't exist in their childhood. And there's many things that could lead to this, but I probably
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think the biggest factor in this is that our society does not reward men for experiencing and contextualizing
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things is traumatic. Whereas our society does reward women for doing that. And this is really important
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in the context of this other study as well, because it means that through doing that, you know, all these
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people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never allowed to feel bad.
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And I was never allowed to confide in people. And they're like, and that was all bad. That was all
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bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes your life better.
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When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame your life in the moment,
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it doesn't feel awesome. In the moment when you want to be vulnerable, it doesn't feel awesome.
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But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically better.
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And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points. And so that
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when you have these people who try to shut down these sorts of conversations about, well, you really
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shouldn't as a man indulge in these sorts of emotions, that these people are helping you being
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more mentally healthy. And when people engage with us, they often are like, wow, you guys really
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don't allow yourself to like feel those emotions. And, you know, that's really going to cause damage
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over time. And I'm like, well, I I've been around you. I'm obviously a happier person than you. So
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like, that's not true, but anyway, continues to them.
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Well, I just, it's also really interesting, the cultural role that that plays, you know,
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that I think we do live in a culture now where women are more allowed to have trauma and encouraged
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to have trauma. But it also is scary to me how, especially in progressive circles, people gain
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status by typically showing some form of victimhood, which seems to encourage people to lean into their
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past, find something that was wrong with it, and then turn it into drama, which will in turn
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yield all these mental disorders and problems. And so it's no wonder that we're seeing mental health
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epidemics. And it's, it's really sobering also to know that there's research that shows that how
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Well, I want to go over how forced people are to contextualize their childhoods this way.
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No one has seen this as me. So just as an example, I don't know where how many hundred episodes in at
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this point, and people are just now learning this about me, but I grew up in the prison system.
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So at the age of 13, I was sent to court appointed prison alternatives. If you have read the book
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holes or seen the movie holes is a very good example of one of these camps. It was a private
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prison system for children that was related to the troubled teen industry, but it was like the
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court appointed iteration of this. And from that age until college, I never lived with my parents
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again, full time. And there's a lot, there's a lot more to this journey than that. But when I'm
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talking to reporters, you know, they're always like, where did you come from? What's your origin
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story or whatever. And when I say this, they're always like, Oh, that explains why that explains so
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Right. So it's just his trauma. He, all of this is to deal with his trauma.
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His trauma. And I'm like, well, no, you know, like, like, I don't,
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that's not really that relevant to my current world perspective. And they will not accept that
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answer. You've seen this. They just refuse. You can see that they're like, Oh yes, little traumatized
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child. I see you, you know, acting tough, but that's only because of the trauma. And I'm like,
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no, culturally, I was taught that this isn't the way you relate to what's hard in your life.
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Because, you know, worst case scenario, you create this rags to riches narrative,
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which is really plausible. Like it's one I could really indulge in. But if I'm being honest,
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my parents were both really smart people. And for generations, my family has had a very easy time
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making money. And I inherited that. And yes, I may not have inherited wealth directly or inherited
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their social circles or connections directly, but I did inherit the capability of life not being that
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hard for me, just from a mental perspective, like whether it's the way I like, like sociological
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profile aspects or, or, or IQ or whatever you want to call it. And so I don't really personally
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contextualize my childhood as being that hard at all. Now, it's funny now that I think about it,
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most of the people I knew committed suicide before they hit their twenties. So that's an
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interesting fact, not most, but like a large chunk. Um, not great. Yeah. Maybe that wasn't that good,
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but this shows how much you can twist your reality to just be like, nah, it was awesome. It all turned
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out great. You know, I do want to talk with you about on this front, right. It's like,
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you know, cause we need to think about how we're going to handle this with our kids and how, how to,
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you know, encourage them to deal with things that are genuinely traumatic. Right. I mean,
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you went through some stuff and other people went through some stuff. And, and so there's,
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you know, we know that the way you contextualize things can significantly impact how damaging or not
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something is. But then we also know that there are things like PTSD, which are real and which are
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almost not almost, which are fairly mechanical and sort of the way they work and need to be fixed.
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And where's the difference, you know, because you need to admit that you have PTSD to be able to deal
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with it. And I feel like, you know, part of this view is it's really misunderstood. Trauma does not
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cause PTSD. PTSD is caused by a very specific psychological phenomenon happening repeatedly.
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And it comes down to, I call it the Houdini phenomenon, right? Houdini famously died because
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he had this trick where he would tense his muscles and then somebody would punch him in the gut. And
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one day after an event, somebody sucker punched him in the gut. He didn't have time to tense his
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muscles first. Cause he didn't know what was happening. The guy was just like, well, are you
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really invulnerable to this stuff? And he died from, you know, internal injury. And this is
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obviously a really sad death, but it shows what actually causes what we call PTSD. If you are in
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a family in which somebody is reliably abusive, i.e. if every day your dad comes home and beats you,
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you will not develop PTSD. You only develop it. If your dad is good a lot of the time,
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but occasionally he beats you and you don't expect it. It comes out of nowhere. There's no way of
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predicting when this is going to happen. A wife who is always mean to you won't cause PTSD.
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A wife who is mean to you randomly and without the ability to predict it won't cause PTSD.
00:16:01.340
So you're saying it's like the sort of evil twin of operant conditioning?
00:16:06.000
Exactly. PTSD is the evil twin of operant conditioning.
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Where if something very unexpectedly bad happens to you, it's like the opposite of the addiction that
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you get with positive operant conditioning, which is like this first, explain what you mean by
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operant conditioning. So people, right. So, so operant conditioning, um, is a, a, a form of sort
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of like feedback training where when you do not predictably offer rewards, but very unpredictably
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offer awards, examples might be slot machines, gambling, various types of mobile games, et cetera.
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Like it's built into everything these days. You actually have a very, you can have a very,
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a very addictive response. Like the dopamine reward for when you do get that unexpected reward
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is incredibly high. And so it seems that PTSD, as you describe it is the opposite of that, that,
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that when very unexpectedly, a really bad thing happens, the reaction that you have also is like
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on overdrive, but in the negative, like panic sense. So.
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Yeah, that's exactly it. And it can cause like visible changes in parts of the world.
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Okay. So why, why then do people come back classically from war with PTSD if they like expect
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to be, you know, war is not every day people are shooting at you. War is sitting around doing
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nothing for months and a half. And then in one day, half of your friends die.
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Why did you not get PTSD from getting like thrown into the desert and having like kind of boring days
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and then really, really, really bad things happening to you. Like some kid trying to kill you with a
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shovel in the middle of the night. Oh, like me? Because I didn't contextualize those things as
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bad, I guess. Do you still think contextualization? No, because I think you've argued in the past.
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No, even in these moments, if somebody went into war and they contextualized it as this honorable
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thing and everyone who died was in it as this honorable event, as I think a lot of people did
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historically, even though wars were similar, I doubt you had as much PTSD back then.
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Do you still think that contextualization is something to do with PTSD?
00:18:00.740
PTSD. Yeah. But it's about in the moment contextualization. Because PTSD is not something
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that's caused by the way we remember the events. It's caused by... The unexpected, but also the
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emotional. The unexpected and negative nature of the events. In these moments growing up, these bad
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things happen. Simone was talking about a few times people tried to kill me. I starved at times. I
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had to eat ants to not die. I had to learn what insects I could eat in the area, what plants I could
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eat. It was hard because I was allergic to something they were using in the foods that they were giving
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to the kids and they didn't believe me. And so, yeah. So a lot of stuff happened, but I just saw
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it all as an interesting challenge. Like that was genuinely the way I engaged with it. I was like,
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oh, this is a really interesting challenge. I suppose this isn't the way a lot of people engage with
00:18:51.320
things like this that happened to them in life. But that's how I contextualize it. You know,
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I just saw it as an interesting challenge and I engaged with it like that. And I think that all
00:19:00.620
events, everything that comes into your brain in the same way that everything that comes into my
00:19:06.740
eyes is filtered through the lenses I wear, is filtered through the lens that you create, which
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is the narrative for the events around you. And maybe it's an as a guy situation. You know,
00:19:18.100
you're talking about as a guy, as a girl, a society that frames women as victims, you know,
00:19:22.500
the princess in the tower or whatever, and guys as the heroes. Well, this was just all part of my
00:19:27.920
heroic journey. Yeah. And I guess, you know, if you were a girl, you know, as a guy, you were maybe
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thinking like, oh, like I'm, I'm being rugged. This is like an adventure survival thing. This is
00:19:37.260
making me stronger. Whereas maybe a girl would be like, oh my God, I'm abandoned. I'm unloved.
00:19:41.560
Like they might see it as very different because there aren't very many like heroes journeys for
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women that involve this level of survivalism. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I just,
00:19:52.360
I guess I don't have anything to say other than, yeah, you're probably right about this.
00:19:55.240
Well, I have one additional question for you because I don't think it was just you
00:19:57.840
contextualizing masculine heroes journeys while going through this as a kid that helped you not
00:20:02.180
contextualize it in a way that did give you PTSD or other forms of trauma based on your
00:20:06.280
contextualization. I'm wondering if your parents modeled this, like, where did you get, where do
00:20:12.720
you think? Because obviously everything's going to be a just so story. This is all speculation. We can't
00:20:16.620
know why we thought what we thought or why we did what we did, but your best guess, where did you
00:20:21.780
get this attitude of like, oh, this is an interesting puzzle. How can I work this out?
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Like, was this from books you read? Was this how your parents behaved? Like, how was this
00:20:30.340
given to you as like the evoked reaction instead of some other reaction?
00:20:34.380
Well, I think that this is a very important thing about raising kids. And we had done another video
00:20:38.860
on this, on the Jordan Peterson raising kids thing. And we're like, we really disagree with his
00:20:43.880
parenting strategies because they are focused on breaking the child's will and getting them to obey
00:20:49.540
authority. Whereas ours are focused on stoking a child's will and getting them to resist authority
00:20:55.740
and even gain like emotional fire and happiness from the moments where they successfully resist an
00:21:02.960
unjust authority. And I think that there's a final form of childbearing, which is narrative
00:21:08.440
focused childbearing where, and this is the most common, where you teach a kid to engage with mostly
00:21:14.780
just narratives about themselves and about society and about their role in that society.
00:21:19.500
Narrative focused childbearing always leads to really negative outcomes. Right. And I think it's
00:21:24.660
really important that we don't allow our kids to engage in that because that's what progressive
00:21:28.840
society uses right now to really fuck kids up because every cult historically, this is just the way
00:21:35.280
cults work. It's a very effective strategy. If you can convince people that their close support networks,
00:21:40.860
their family and their culture were abusive to them as kids, you know, then you can separate them from
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their support networks and then they become much easier prey and they become much less likely to
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deconvert. So yeah, there's a reason that these institutions target individuals in this way. It's
00:22:00.040
because it's a really good source of prey, but you should know, I think, so there's two things here.
00:22:04.760
One, as a parent, you know, and we'll do a video on like how to be a good parent because I think
00:22:08.500
that's a good one, like all the things we're trying to focus on, but you really need to focus
00:22:13.280
on or one of our core things that we focus on as a cultural tradition. And I would encourage
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other people to consider is stoking their will in internal locus of control and, and sort of desire
00:22:26.180
to know what's right for themselves and fight for that. Did your parents do that? Yeah.
00:22:33.180
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my mom told me, oh, they don't care what the teachers say. They're
00:22:38.960
idiots. They're losers. You know, well, that's not something a lot of parents would say, you know?
00:22:46.460
But it really, it really worked for me. You know, my parents never being like, I will sit and punish
00:22:53.340
you until you accept X thing that I'm telling you.
00:22:58.000
Yeah. No, they just locked me in my room and be like, look, if you're having a moment right now,
00:23:01.880
you're having a moment, we'll handle you later. So, so I think that's really important in terms
00:23:07.680
of dealing with situations like this, because then when you deal with hardship, you're not looking at
00:23:12.940
who's to blame or anything like that. It's just a challenge for you to overcome because so much of
00:23:19.720
the world depends on you overcoming it. And I also suppose that's another thing with kids,
00:23:25.620
you know, I was really taught to view protecting the world as my responsibility and as something
00:23:33.260
that I needed to do. And everything else was just sort of a challenge on my way to achieving that
00:23:39.360
end state. It was just like, well, this is just what you have to do as a member of this family.
00:23:43.300
Your goal is to fix things and no one else is going to do it. And the entire world's going to
00:23:48.840
work against you. And I think that those sorts of framings are really useful. And I think that these
00:23:53.860
are ones that Christians often do, you know, they see people attacking them as a sign that they're
00:24:00.160
more likely to be right. And this is actually part of what creates susceptibility was in more
00:24:04.440
religious communities, I think to MLM scams, because when they see people being like, look,
00:24:09.700
can't you see this as a scam? Can't you see these statistics? They're like, oh, well, the fact that
00:24:14.860
people are attacking, it means they must be on the right path. So there are negatives to this as well.
00:24:20.220
Interesting. Okay. So gosh, I mean, like, how are we going to impart this to our kids in a way that
00:24:30.740
doesn't, I don't know? Well, I think the easy part is stoking their will. I think the hard part is
00:24:36.960
providing external challenging situations that they have to overcome. I mean, my theory on this
00:24:43.020
remains the same in that I really think it's clear that when you have siblings, like a lot of siblings
00:24:51.720
in a family, you have already artificially created that hardship, because there's not always going to
00:24:56.160
be a parent who's ready to do what you need right away, because they may be helping someone else. And
00:25:00.240
there's just more limited resources. And there's also more people around who are going to make your
00:25:04.740
life complicated, who may want your help or need your help, or make it possible for you to get help
00:25:09.160
right away when you want it. So I actually think just having siblings is enough, like enough hardship
00:25:13.400
in life to solve the problem. You don't think so?
00:25:30.580
I don't think seven counts. That's a normal number of kids. You need a reasonable number of kids.
00:25:35.440
Malcolm, that is not a normal number of children.
00:25:43.560
No, even, come on. Like, even people in the past, you know, they may have birthed 10 kids,
00:25:49.480
but they had like four or five. Like, this is, you know, I'm just saying.
00:25:55.160
Like, let's be reasonable with what is a hardship level of having kids. But yeah, I mean, I think
00:26:03.240
between us giving them siblings and us also not being, well, us being inherently very frugal people
00:26:09.480
is enough to create limitations that force some creativity and resilience. If that makes sense.
00:26:19.560
But I do, I do think this is really interesting. And actually we've received some,
00:26:24.840
some emails actually from people who follow this podcast. And thank you, by the way,
00:26:28.440
for contacting us guys. But many of them actually are surprisingly riddled with this culture,
00:26:35.160
with this, like, well, you know, yeah, I, I have this thing that's running against me. Like,
00:26:42.760
Yeah. They start by telling us their narratives.
00:26:44.760
Yeah. Like we're seeing a lot of like learned helplessness or like, um,
00:26:49.240
determined what's the word fatalism. And like, well, I'm just not going to try because there's
00:26:56.600
And I get that narratives are difficult to break.
00:26:59.080
But if you're starting with one of these narratives and you realize yourself is having one,
00:27:02.760
the most important thing is to change your friend group and change where you're living and change what
00:27:07.720
you're doing every day. If you change your environment, it is, and you go into this new
00:27:13.400
environment, like dead set. Okay. Well now I'm going to live this like trad conservative lifestyle
00:27:19.000
and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to be industrious. The amount to which you can change
00:27:29.720
Like it is the, the, the, the core study on this that I always cite is people coming back from Vietnam
00:27:35.640
who are addicted to heroin, something like 86% of them, the addiction basically immediately
00:27:43.160
disappeared when they came back. And the question is why, because their contexts were so different
00:27:48.360
that even really deep seated neurological phenomenon could be reset because your brain definitely
00:27:55.000
basically is running different modes for different environments.
00:28:01.160
Well, this, this has been spectacular, Simone, and I hope it helps some people. And, and really
00:28:07.480
the biggest takeaway from this, I would say is when somebody comes to you and they try to tell you
00:28:12.200
that your childhood was traumatic or your parents did something traumatic or, oh, here's this problem
00:28:17.320
you have that you didn't know you had. Now, if you're like, no, I guess I always sort of knew
00:28:22.280
that this was something that was troubling me. I just didn't have words. No, you didn't. That's not
00:28:26.680
a thing. That is, that is people writing things into your history. That is the way, if this wasn't
00:28:32.120
every morning you woke up and you're like, this is my big problem today, then it was created
00:28:38.600
for you. And I hate to say it, but this is one of the big issues we have with the trans movement
00:28:45.560
in that I do think that there are some people who are genuinely born trans, but I think for a lot of
00:28:50.680
people who joined the movement, it's more like this is something they were convinced was a problem
00:28:55.480
for them. And if they hadn't had people selling this to them, they never would have known that
00:29:00.040
this was a problem in their life. And so this level of pain that they're experiencing every day
00:29:04.760
is created by people pointing out the problem and contextualizing the problem and then framing the
00:29:10.920
problem as really bad. You know, one of my favorite things that I mentioned as a study, and I've never
00:29:16.680
been able to find this study, but it was mentioned when I was doing my degree in college at St. Andrews,
00:29:21.560
by the way, right now ranked the top university in the UK and by above both Oxford and Cambridge by
00:29:28.920
both the times and the guardian for the last two years. I, Hey, I got to take pride in my own honor.
00:29:34.280
Anyway, it was a study that showed that women who grew up in environments where unwanted non-consensual
00:29:42.280
surprise sex was common. It didn't have any negative effects from it, but people who grew up
00:29:47.160
in environments where unwanted, non-consensual surprise sex was uncommon. Like, you know, the
00:29:53.560
West really faced negative reactions to it. You create your society, the people who your friends
00:30:00.440
with, they create what's traumatic for you by what they contextualize is traumatic. And I guess you could
00:30:06.600
say everybody gets their sort of wisdom saving score. Yeah. I'm sorry. I've been playing a lot
00:30:11.160
of fall over skate three recently. And so it's a, it uses the D and D engine and it's, you know,
00:30:16.200
you roll the dice every time to see if you get a saving throw against this. But if you have a
00:30:20.840
community that's constantly trying to tell you people, not recognizing this people, not seeing you
00:30:25.880
this way, this is traumatic. It becomes traumatic in the way that trauma is meaningful. And by that,
00:30:32.040
what I mean is all trauma is really just due to these sorts of contextualizations. And no matter
00:30:37.560
what happens to you, the things that happen to you aren't what create the trauma. It's the way your
00:30:43.720
community and yourself choose to relate to those things. Yeah. So yeah, if you, I think a lot of
00:30:51.960
people who, because it will tell them it's such a cheat code. I think a lot of people who follow this
00:30:56.680
podcast think that they have this view, but don't. So next time you find yourself believing that,
00:31:04.200
you know, you, you can't solve a problem. That's probably a sign that you might be subject to these
00:31:10.040
views. So there's that. Sometimes one of the fun cultural differences between Simone and I is
00:31:17.160
every time something bad happens, she's always like, I didn't even realize that looking for a solution to
00:31:22.440
this was possible. She grew up her entire childhood, like not knowing about mucinex because like her
00:31:28.200
family, like they'd be sick and they wouldn't, I'm like, you're sick. Yeah. I'd be like, well,
00:31:31.560
you're sick. Google solutions. What do we do about this? She'd be like, I've been feeling really bad
00:31:36.920
today about X. And I was like, okay, go to Claude, type that in. That's an AI. That's the anthropic AI.
00:31:43.240
And let's find a solution. He goes, oh, there probably isn't one. I'm pregnant. And I'm like,
00:31:47.560
I'm sorry, just try. This was gas recently. And it was like, actually, there's this really easy
00:31:53.400
solution that doesn't hurt pregnancies. And she's like, like, why did you have so much resistance to
00:31:58.920
even trying? Yeah. I think part of like, a lot of it's how I grew up that like, there, there was no
00:32:05.400
attitude about like, oh, like take cold medicine when you have a cold. It was just like, drink
00:32:10.280
solutions. And that's a cultural attitude that you can. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm not,
00:32:15.640
I'm not exempt from this. That's why I really recognize it as a problem. So go home and think
00:32:21.240
about it, people. But Malcolm, thank you for helping me think through it all the time,
00:32:24.440
because I really appreciate it. I love you. I love you to death, Simone.