TRIGGERnometry - Psychotherapist Explains the Culture Wars

00:00:00.000 A lot of people with cats in gardens put these wires around, you know, around their gardens and they put this collar around a cat's neck.

00:00:09.780 And the cats then wander around not knowing what's going on. They get near to this wire and they get an electric shock.

00:00:15.880 But after about a week or two, the cats don't go near those wires.

00:00:20.060 And what we've now got in our culture is those wires now are all over the place.

00:00:24.960 So we've all got these little collars around us, you know, electrocuting us.

00:00:30.880 But the worst thing is we now don't even know where they are.

00:00:40.460 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:43.200 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:44.520 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:45.840 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:51.380 Our guest today is a practicing and published psychotherapist, Andrew Thomas.

00:00:55.560 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:56.480 Well, thank you. Welcome. Why am I saying welcome? It's great to be here.

00:00:59.960 You've taken over the space. You feel right at home.

00:01:02.780 You did allude to the fact that you work with couples before we started,

00:01:06.680 and you said this felt a little bit like it,

00:01:08.460 and I did complain there's not enough sex in this relationship.

00:01:11.260 Well, we can work on that afterwards.

00:01:12.760 We can put a half hour into that.

00:01:14.600 I absolutely hope so. We need to get more love into this.

00:01:17.800 But look, joking aside, it's great to have you on.

00:01:20.360 And I'll be honest with our audience, we got you on because you got in touch with us and you had some very interesting things you wanted to talk to us about from a psychotherapist perspective, but particularly relevant to the political context.

00:01:32.440 And one of those things was the idea that people live right and vote left. So talk to us about that.

00:01:41.080 So we have, across the Western world now, a large part of the middle classes who, the way they live their lives is, from my perspective, admirable.

00:01:56.560 They're resilient. They take responsibility for their outcomes in their lives. They work really hard.

00:02:02.200 if they meet obstacles in their way they try to overcome them in fact they really largely look

00:02:13.340 into themselves for the resilience and the resources and the capacity to learn to overcome

00:02:20.280 the problems and and achieve what they're hoping to achieve and the other thing is they raise their

00:02:26.220 children in that light. So they raise their children to be resilient, resourceful, adaptive.

00:02:33.740 But when they go into the voting booth, they vote for parties that promote policies and a cultural

00:02:41.900 outlook that are largely, in many ways, diametrically opposite to the way they actually

00:02:48.460 live their lives themselves. I mean, not to be too political, you know, we have the classic case

00:02:54.900 Diane Abbott, Doyen of the left, whose son went to a private school. So the way she actually

00:03:03.480 lived her life, or lives her life, she hasn't gone yet, lives her life compared to how she

00:03:10.220 actually votes and the types of policies she's brought, they're diametrically opposite.

00:03:16.860 So this is very interesting, Andrew, because this is one of the things that I've been kind

00:03:21.420 of chronicling in some of the articles I've written and in my book that I'm working on etc

00:03:26.080 which is that there is a often an inconsistency between the things that people do and the things

00:03:32.400 that people say one ought to do or that you ought to do so what is your theory about why that's

00:03:39.480 happening well just say I mean I'm increasingly uneasy about the labeling virtue signaler and

00:03:46.680 woke and all the rest of it i mean if it take diane habit i mean what achievements she's had

00:03:53.700 in her life you know what what barriers she's broken down and overcome and and i'm i'm increasingly

00:04:01.840 uneasy about how people are so that the polarization and the labeling that's going on

00:04:07.740 but the drivers behind that uh are there's a number of core if you want me to talk about the

00:04:13.520 sort of psychological, and also the evolutionary psychological and the neuroscientific drivers

00:04:21.800 behind that, is that there's two things, that genetics are an important factor in our propensity

00:04:32.860 to experience anxiety, depression. So if you read a book called Blueprint by Robert Plowman,

00:04:37.820 you'll see a wonderful resume and a coverage of where we are in understanding that. But it's

00:04:43.160 looking really very convincing that our genetics are very influential but it's also how they

00:04:48.780 interact with the environment if you put an environment around young children that's chaotic

00:04:55.220 uncertain where their attachment is being switched on switched off you're going to start to get more

00:05:02.900 and more children growing into adults who demonstrate of what you know sort of what we

00:05:08.840 say maladaptive avoidant behavioural patterns. So a study has been done that people who have got

00:05:18.600 left of centre leanings have got a greater propensity towards anxiety and seeing the world

00:05:24.440 through what I would call a foppy lens. So what do I mean by a foppy lens? Well there's a tendency

00:05:33.160 to trigger into a survival type of pattern so imagine a hundred thousand years ago you're

00:05:39.880 walking through the bush to pick berries or whatever you come to a clearing on the other side

00:05:46.600 there's a berry bush but it's moving in a strange way all the birds have gone a bit quiet and there's

00:05:52.200 nothing else moving what happens is you focus so everything focuses so you focus on the bush

00:06:00.040 the next thing is you overreact so your your survival system you start to get

00:06:05.860 adrenaline pumping through your system so you overreact so you get F you focus

00:06:11.020 you overreact and P is you become pessimistic so we know from David

00:06:16.660 Attenborough documentaries that there are far more antelope than there are

00:06:20.800 tigers but you'll be pessimistic because you'll see that the bush is likely to

00:06:27.140 have behind it the most incredibly big tiger that hasn't eaten for three weeks with a taste just for

00:06:33.360 you. So you focus, you overreact, you're pessimistic, and you get it as a package. The reason you get it

00:06:39.280 as a package is it's no use focusing and being pessimistic if you don't overreact, because if

00:06:44.980 that lion comes out and you haven't started to overreact, it might make five meters to you before

00:06:50.780 your adrenaline system starts going okay and so that could be the difference between you getting

00:06:57.640 your dna into the next generation or not so you you focus you overreact you're pessimistic you

00:07:03.240 get as a package and the eye is it's inaccurate and the reason why evolution has made that

00:07:09.180 inaccurate is a hundred thousand years ago you could be you could run away many times but only

00:07:15.900 eaten once it's better to overreact just in case to be safe so so that is a survival system that's

00:07:22.520 in every single one of us 7.8 billion of us that we've got that in us so if you then couple that

00:07:29.480 with a uh an early stage development i'm gonna sound to be a clinical the system uh early stage

00:07:37.660 family life for for um children where is dad there or dad not there is dad looking at the

00:07:45.660 mobile phone is dad not looking at the mobile phone is mom there or no is is she there or not

00:07:50.440 there you know oh where did dad go there's a there's a new man in the house or whatever

00:07:55.400 so that is likely to develop a higher proportion of your society with a heightened foppy reaction

00:08:03.680 to the world around them and has that happened have people been growing up in increasingly

00:08:07.980 unstable childhood environments? Well, yeah, since the 1950s, yeah, it looks like, what you're

00:08:17.620 saying is, I mean, this isn't sort of saying, you know, there's a stereotypical, if you're like this,

00:08:23.180 it's going to be dreadful. But overall, the challenge of raising a child, I mean, the

00:08:30.400 correlation between single-pairing families and all sorts of things that that happen in life is

00:08:37.300 is not good because it's incredibly challenging to raise a child by yourself there are many single

00:08:42.080 parents that do that but they're also now because I sit in rooms with couples that have you know

00:08:47.900 for thousands of hours it's not confined just to single parenting you know the pressures this

00:08:54.100 this self-actualizing goal that generates this incredible high hours working culture

00:09:02.260 where whatever car you've got you know whatever look you've got you know you know that you've

00:09:09.220 managed to attain will fade quite quickly so so so we do have a society that in in many ways is sort

00:09:19.140 sort of set to generate a proportion of the, you know, coming back to the irony,

00:09:24.860 if you look at the middle classes, their goal is stability, you know,

00:09:30.060 they do whatever they can to create a stable environment around their children.

00:09:34.760 You could say some are over the top, you know, tiger parents.

00:09:40.380 But the outcome of a lot of policies today is to create incredible uncertainty

00:09:45.500 in a lot of households, which the survival system, the attachment system of young children,

00:09:54.080 especially the age of two, three, four, five, are hypersensitive to. And at those ages,

00:10:02.020 they're experimenting with different behavioural patterns. So if mum or dad are unavailable

00:10:09.480 or incredibly angry, then they may experiment with a shutdown type of survival system,

00:10:17.660 which is to self-anesthetise. Or they may start to experiment and develop what I call a legacy

00:10:24.980 behaviour, which is an acting out type of behavioural pattern, which is dragging the

00:10:29.260 attention of the parent back onto them in any way that system can do. So if you've got a society,

00:10:37.320 a culture that's generating sort of more fragile, more foppy-orientated styles of behaviour.

00:10:46.980 And then along comes the noughties, and we have social media, we have the capacity.

00:10:54.660 And I'm coming back onto the middle classes now.

00:10:56.980 So if you've got a greater proportion of the middle classes who are likely to trigger a lower level of activation into a foppy-like response,

00:11:06.540 If you get that and then you ram social media into that and the incredible OLED screens and high definition and surround sound and then you allow, then people get into their own silos because it's much less threatening to be out of your silo.

00:11:23.420 What you're going to do is you're going to get people sort of triggering and trying to find ways to rid themselves of the discomfort in terms of the dichotomy between their comfortable lives and the chaos, terror, the burning fires in Australia or California and their comfortable lives.

00:11:44.900 and so if you have a tendency to trigger into a foppy like state you're going to really just

00:11:53.640 reach out for really quite sort of immediate solutions to calm yourself so you'll be looking

00:12:00.820 for avoidant styles of behavior also if your neighbors are talking about how dreadful the world

00:12:06.220 is uh um how the world's going to come to an end you know very soon then again remember that

00:12:15.300 attachment metric is playing out in those relationships as well but isn't there also

00:12:21.260 a vested interest in society because the more foppy like behavior people have the more likely

00:12:27.780 they are to be good consumers to buy things to desire things to to this constant consumption

00:12:34.120 that we have in our society, which is necessary

00:12:36.580 to keep the economy growing.

00:12:38.760 Well, absolutely, yeah, yeah.

00:12:41.140 I mean, if it's self-actualisation,

00:12:43.760 which is the never-achievable goal, I mean,

00:12:47.560 if you go out and buy a book on meditation and two years later

00:12:51.660 you're self-levitating above some glass-like Andean lake

00:12:57.200 and out of the corner of your eye you see Sting with Trudy

00:13:00.660 having tantric sex four foot above the lake,

00:13:03.100 you know what are you going to do you've somehow got to do your meditation even better now this

00:13:09.880 isn't this avoidant way of looking at things the driver it isn't nihilistic it isn't sort of a

00:13:15.840 well we should not try to do anything it's more about actually being able to look at the drivers

00:13:22.260 for your behavior and look at them that they are driven by your behavioral patterns by how your

00:13:30.540 system got trained by this whole physiology, this whole neurological system, which you've got.

00:13:43.660 And that it means that if you've got it and that's what's driving it, you've actually got the hands

00:13:50.400 on the levers. So that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try your best, push yourself as hard

00:13:56.040 as you can, but that goal, that drive, can come out of much more understanding of how

00:14:04.140 positive or negative it is for you in your life, given how you are and the resources

00:14:08.820 you've got, rather than just being handed down this existential goal that Maslow came

00:14:14.500 up with in 1943.

00:14:18.160 In many ways, isn't the pinnacle of self-actualisation social media?

00:14:23.620 Where you can actually curate the way you want people to see you, the way you want to

00:14:30.440 be viewed, who you are.

00:14:33.700 If you look at something like Instagram, you can physically change the way you look.

00:14:37.880 You can create this life which actually has no bearing on your real life whatsoever.

00:14:43.620 It's the pinnacle of avoidance.

00:14:46.180 It allows you to sculpt your avoidant behavior in any way, shape or form you like.

00:14:51.460 I mean, Jeff Bezos, not Jeff Bezos, who's the Facebook guy?

00:14:57.900 Oh, Zuckerberg.

00:14:58.760 Zuckerberg.

00:14:59.360 I mean, he probably thinks he's the greatest business person

00:15:01.880 ever in the whole wide world.

00:15:03.700 I mean, his bank balance would say so.

00:15:05.360 Yeah, well, it would do.

00:15:07.040 But this avoidant style of behaviour isn't recent.

00:15:10.760 It's been going, the first Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago,

00:15:14.820 we developed language, what, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

00:15:18.760 you know that the the we've wanted to have the best possible level of attachment we can have

00:15:25.760 with the people around us for a hundred thousand years and long come social media and hey presto

00:15:33.640 you can you you're in a society that is is slicing and dicing what's acceptable and what's not

00:15:40.940 acceptable and hey presto you can just suddenly find other people who've got the same avoidant

00:15:46.760 behavioural patterns as you have. So, you know, Zuckerberg may have thought, well, God, I've

00:15:52.420 created this incredible thing that I've pushed onto it. But the human race has just been

00:15:56.280 gagging for Facebook for a couple of hundred thousand years. You know, it fed into a phenomenal

00:16:03.520 demand. But that demand has also been driven by, you know, this culture of, you know, the right way

00:16:12.880 to speak, the right way to look, the right way to behave. And if you look at the education

00:16:19.000 of young children now, or males or female or whatever, there are so many criteria now

00:16:26.760 that mean you're either in or you're out. I mean, I don't know if you know any people

00:16:31.820 with cats. Well, a lot of people with cats in gardens put these wires around their gardens

00:16:40.180 and they put this collar around a cat's neck and the cats then wander around not knowing what's

00:16:46.140 going on. They get near to this wire and they get an electric shock. But after about a week or two,

00:16:51.320 the cats don't go near those wires. And what we've now got in our culture is those wires now are all

00:16:57.920 over the place. So we've all got these little collars around us, you know, electrocuting us.

00:17:04.740 But the worst thing is we now don't even know where they are.

00:17:07.960 it's so good that you bring that up because as you know it's one of the things we've talked a

00:17:13.520 lot about on the show which is the idea of freedom of expression freedom of speech uh why suddenly

00:17:19.440 it seems like to me at least things that we used to all be able to to to debate to discuss to let

00:17:27.660 people have wrong opinions to let people have bad opinions to let people have whatever opinions they

00:17:33.040 wanted i mean look at you know there's a lot of talk now about how we've got to shut down

00:17:37.680 conspiracy theories and ideas about what's causing the pandemic or why are there lockdowns

00:17:44.140 and why is this and why is that.

00:17:45.260 It was 20 years ago you had 9-11, a huge terrorist attack, loads of conspiracy theories flying

00:17:51.220 about all the time.

00:17:52.300 It never occurred to anyone that they should be shut down.

00:17:54.520 I remember watching conspiracy documentaries about 9-11 on social media or on later in

00:18:02.200 the day, but also on TV.

00:18:03.480 He was considered a normal part of the social discourse about things,

00:18:08.040 that people are allowed to have different thoughts

00:18:09.640 about different things, even if they're completely wrong.

00:18:12.300 And yet we've got to a position where now

00:18:14.180 we seem to desire a massive crackdown on that.

00:18:17.280 But if you look at that through the lens

00:18:19.820 of the live right, vote left, middle classes,

00:18:23.180 who have their handles on the levers of power in society,

00:18:27.280 they're in the think tanks, they're in the schools,

00:18:31.260 that are in the universities, they're the sort of people

00:18:34.920 who become MPs, be they Labour, Lib Dem or Conservative,

00:18:38.980 those live right, vote left, well, maybe not the Conservatives,

00:18:42.760 but you know what, you know.

00:18:43.560 Also the Conservatives now.

00:18:44.820 Yeah, well, possibly, yeah, yeah, yeah, Freudian slip there.

00:18:49.300 So, but if you look at it, the cognitive dissonance

00:18:56.360 that's possible for them, which is, are you aware

00:19:00.360 with cognitive dissonance.

00:19:03.340 No wonder they don't want to talk to their friends

00:19:06.540 about politics or economics and maybe see things differently

00:19:09.920 because that might generate a sense of cognitive dissonance

00:19:13.700 between how they live and how they vote

00:19:17.560 that will generate a sort of foppy type reaction.

00:19:21.000 People get triggered up.

00:19:22.840 So that's why you see in the middle class circles,

00:19:25.800 are, you know, if ever people shying away from talking about politics because it's really

00:19:32.100 uncomfortable. I mean, I don't know how we're going to get through this, but if you look at

00:19:38.040 the 1970s, that was a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance. People think that Margaret

00:19:43.180 Thatcher came in and she was this incredible leader with this vision. I see it slightly

00:19:47.900 differently is that in the 1970s, people who'd bought into socialism, nationalisation, state

00:19:57.440 control, sort of the state could somehow define which industries were the best to go in to and

00:20:04.420 invest in. Well, in the 1970s, those very same people ended up walking past piles of rubbish

00:20:11.320 or lighting their homes with candles

00:20:13.880 or experiencing three-day weeks

00:20:16.900 or I think it was in 1917, 29 million days of strikes.

00:20:23.080 And that was an incredible cognitive dissonant experience

00:20:27.160 that challenged their views.

00:20:30.680 And that is what I think Margaret Thatcher was able to build on.

00:20:35.960 She was able to – she came into a society that had, in a way, been partially reconditioned.

00:20:46.060 And at the moment, what we have is a society that enables people, you know, through the incredible printing presses, you know, modern monetary theory that enables us to insulate ourselves from whatever views we might want.

00:21:04.680 because, theoretically, society is so incredibly wealthy.

00:21:08.960 In other words, we can advocate, let's say,

00:21:12.120 just hypothetically speaking, for open borders

00:21:14.320 without thinking of the consequences

00:21:17.300 that that would have on the country, let's say.

00:21:20.460 Not least because we are insulated ourselves from them.

00:21:23.520 Well, the people in power and the middle classes

00:21:26.760 that may hold those views

00:21:29.440 might live in very leafy, monocultural environments.

00:21:34.680 And they have maybe the financial muscle to buy houses in the catchment area of the best schools.

00:21:43.140 Their children will typically go to Russell Group universities.

00:21:46.740 They'll compete for jobs, you know, that require very high levels of English skills that maybe aren't competing at the other end.

00:21:55.400 But I don't hold that.

00:21:59.360 You know, if you look at those people, they're models of industriousness.

00:22:05.020 I mean, that's the problem.

00:22:06.120 When you start to go down that rabbit hole, you can start to become condemning.

00:22:10.420 But they actually mimic, you know, really ideal behaviours.

00:22:17.860 What I would be condemning is advocating for things with no regard

00:22:22.480 for the impact of those things on other people.

00:22:24.660 I am happy to engage in discussion with those people.

00:22:27.760 I don't believe they're disgusting.

00:22:29.300 I don't believe that they're immoral.

00:22:31.000 I just think that they are mistaken.

00:22:33.220 And if we were to have a conversation,

00:22:35.460 I hope that we could change each other's minds

00:22:37.740 and come to a compromise.

00:22:39.280 What I have found, though,

00:22:40.540 one of my best friends is, you know,

00:22:42.920 one of these kind of almost loony lefties, if you like.

00:22:47.000 And whenever we have a conversation,

00:22:49.000 I've got him to say this many times.

00:22:50.960 I go, look, I'm an immigrant, right?

00:22:53.080 You realise that when you allow large numbers of people

00:22:55.720 to come into a country without the opportunity

00:22:58.200 to integrate properly, it causes problems, don't you?

00:23:00.620 He'll go, yes, yes, yes.

00:23:02.040 And I talk him through the whole thing, and he goes,

00:23:04.340 look, I understand all of that.

00:23:05.800 I just think we should have open borders.

00:23:08.460 What we're witnessing there is an avoidant behavioural pattern.

00:23:11.480 Right.

00:23:12.220 So what's driving him to behave like that,

00:23:15.160 which you find frustrating?

00:23:16.480 I mean, if you were really...

00:23:17.780 What I'm hearing for a lot of people in this situation,

00:23:20.660 if they try to engage in people who do the live right, vote left stuff.

00:23:25.300 If maybe your friend doesn't sort of live right, I don't know,

00:23:29.680 but what they're experiencing is they get very upset very quickly.

00:23:35.000 Yeah.

00:23:35.300 Yeah.

00:23:36.520 Yeah.

00:23:37.160 He knows.

00:23:38.220 Yeah.

00:23:38.660 He knows all about it.

00:23:39.340 You've got a good point there.

00:23:41.060 Yeah, they do.

00:23:41.660 They do.

00:23:43.300 And what you're witnessing is an avoidant behavioural pattern

00:23:46.800 because it's conversation over.

00:23:48.480 Yes.

00:23:48.960 Yeah, it's conversation over.

00:23:50.660 Let's split up, let's move apart, and let's not address it.

00:23:53.740 But that is a survival-orientated, you know, that's an avoidant-orientated behavioral pattern.

00:24:00.040 So what can we do about that as a society?

00:24:01.780 Because it seems to me that it's quite important for people to be able to discuss practical ideas about the direction of travel.

00:24:08.820 Do we take a left turn? Do we take a right turn? Do we keep going straight? Do we slam on the brakes?

00:24:13.660 That, to me, is a practical conversation about ensuring the well-being of everybody going forward,

00:24:19.620 and particularly our children, grandchildren, etc.

00:24:21.660 We've got important decisions to make as a society, right?

00:24:25.020 Yeah.

00:24:25.300 So how do we bridge those divides?

00:24:27.520 How do we, within ourselves and particularly with other people?

00:24:31.680 Well, I'd like to say we shift away from Maslow's conception

00:24:35.460 at the higher end, the self-actualisation,

00:24:38.340 and we move to a more accurate and sort of a more accurate model

00:24:44.340 of what human motivation and human drive is really made up of.

00:24:49.620 and move to a place where more of us, many more of us in the West,

00:24:57.660 are aware of what drives our emotional life, what causes us to trigger.

00:25:04.040 So for your good friend who says, well, blah-de-blah,

00:25:08.800 well, he doesn't sound like he gets really angry,

00:25:12.220 but he almost sounds like he sort of withdraws,

00:25:14.540 he sort of shuts down from the debate, you know,

00:25:17.060 which is another avoidant style of behaviour.

00:25:19.080 You sort of self-anesthetize it because he just doesn't want to go there.

00:25:23.160 Yes.

00:25:23.540 Because to touch on that live rail would really generate a lot of discomfort.

00:25:29.620 So if he could become more aware of how he triggers around these subjects,

00:25:37.300 so he could actually notice as I develop this other model,

00:25:41.100 which is the reflective mind, reactive brain, and reactive body.

00:25:45.260 So, you know, this system is phenomenally complex.

00:25:49.080 And you can go on training courses now that pick up individual parts of the brain and they say it does this or that.

00:25:55.160 So what I decided to do in my work was create a model that enabled clients to really just see the basic core system of the human,

00:26:06.840 which is a capacity to be reflective, the reflective mind, the reactive brain, which is going all the time.

00:26:13.800 Yours is going on at the time.

00:26:15.280 You know, what is this guy going on about?

00:26:16.780 Whatever.

00:26:17.120 you're asking it to do that it's just ramming narrative and sensations you know narrative

00:26:25.240 into the surface of your brain and sensations across your body so you've got a reactive body

00:26:30.500 and a reactive brain that's constantly interacting so if we can a lot of the work i'm doing now and

00:26:37.560 other therapists who are using the rainbow map or if you want to go sensory motor therapy

00:26:42.480 is that we're trying to enable our clients

00:26:47.420 to notice their system triggering.

00:26:50.400 So I've got this one concept which is called a trigger flag,

00:26:53.760 which is typically a physical sensation.

00:26:56.660 So as a lot of people trigger, they notice their throats go

00:26:59.560 or the jaws go.

00:27:01.220 And if you can notice the self-triggering or withdrawing,

00:27:05.400 you can actually then exert a little bit more choice

00:27:08.380 about whether, oh, okay, here goes Constantine,

00:27:12.480 this is the experience I've got, I feel really uneasy about this,

00:27:16.520 I just want to shut this conversation down, I don't want to go there.

00:27:20.420 If you can actually notice that driver,

00:27:26.440 then you can exert more choice about whether you obey it or overrule it.

00:27:32.220 So there's two ways out of this that we've got in the West.

00:27:36.240 We're either going to go through a 1970s

00:27:38.400 and we're going to get cognitive dissonance.

00:27:40.540 there's going to be widespread it wasn't meant to work like this i mean a lot of people are

00:27:45.500 starting to look at it like that aren't they that that hold on you know so if we were you know if

00:27:53.080 if we were trying to clear the area like like we we've made everyone able to get a degree now

00:27:58.520 now the last year whether they turn up to university or not you know that that that

00:28:03.380 that whole thing you know of self-actualization if self-actualization you know

00:28:09.880 the politicians the last 30 years if part of self-actualization society is everyone's going

00:28:15.300 to get a degree everyone can have a degree but we're also already starting to see the cognitive

00:28:21.560 dissonance getting in there because companies can't tell the difference now and degrees are

00:28:27.000 going down and down in value so so you know maybe we'll get the cognitive dissonant bit by bit

00:28:34.720 and we'll be able to sort of turn the corner

00:28:38.020 or maybe it will be a 1970s type of mass cognitive dissonance

00:28:43.140 where you really see what you get when you nationalise everything.

00:28:47.240 Isn't it, look...

00:28:48.020 Or not everything.

00:28:49.000 So, and the other thing is more awareness of how your system,

00:28:53.760 your survival system triggers.

00:28:56.460 Look, this is all very intelligent

00:28:58.940 and you're a far more intelligent man than me and good luck to you.

00:29:02.000 isn't it a question of just being fucking brave and having a little bit of balls and saying what

00:29:07.420 you think you know we feel uncomfortable we feel uncomfortable at certain points when I started my

00:29:13.500 teaching career I felt uncomfortable and being in front of 30 kids but you have to do it in order

00:29:18.820 to have a career you feel uncomfortable when you ask a woman out but otherwise you're never going

00:29:23.320 to get have sex why is it that we now have a culture where we feel bad about being uncomfortable

00:29:30.480 Life's uncomfortable, isn't it?

00:29:32.020 Or are we just getting old?

00:29:32.780 Yeah, but we've all got metaphorical collars around our necks

00:29:39.120 that electrocute ourselves.

00:29:41.300 So you've got lovely, you know, the stuff about the live right,

00:29:47.320 vote left, mill classes, we've all got friends like that.

00:29:52.080 And we love them and like them, you know, and connect very strongly.

00:29:57.080 And if you come out, and I've tried it a few times,

00:29:59.580 if you come out and try to challenge them, I mean, this is a cult.

00:30:05.640 You know, they'll double down and you'll lose your friends.

00:30:11.380 You know, that's the way it seems at the moment.

00:30:13.400 I mean, you know, how do you actually try to engage in conversations

00:30:20.320 with people who, if they start to get into that conversation,

00:30:23.940 will become increasingly uncomfortable because of that cognitive dissonance?

00:30:27.520 I mean, it's a psychological driver for them.

00:30:32.280 They trigger and then the reflective mind starts shutting down.

00:30:37.700 So with your friend, the capacity to be reflective starts to go down

00:30:42.700 and the reactive brain and reactive body start to dominate.

00:30:45.920 I mean, I'll give you a quick example in this.

00:30:47.860 I mean, the door to this room is over there, okay?

00:30:51.640 if that handle goes down I can guarantee you instantaneously every single one of our reflective

00:30:58.620 minds will shut instantaneously because we'll turn look around there and that's an example of

00:31:04.340 compulsive behavior and that's what you're dealing with so as you start with your friend you say

00:31:09.320 come on you're just just wrong you know go on look at this look at this how does that work

00:31:16.000 not very well

00:31:17.300 I'll be honest with you

00:31:18.140 yeah

00:31:19.080 and

00:31:19.980 do you think that

00:31:21.600 school has got a part

00:31:22.780 to playing this

00:31:23.360 and the way we raise kids

00:31:24.860 where we want kids

00:31:26.020 to be safe

00:31:26.680 we want to protect them

00:31:27.960 and I've seen it

00:31:28.620 in schools that I've taught in

00:31:29.860 you know

00:31:30.460 we want to molecule them

00:31:31.780 we want them to be

00:31:32.580 as safe as possible

00:31:33.540 all the time

00:31:34.840 every single minute

00:31:36.000 of every day

00:31:36.700 so that

00:31:37.300 when they actually

00:31:38.380 get confronted

00:31:39.300 by

00:31:40.580 you know

00:31:41.600 a challenge

00:31:42.280 or a disagreement

00:31:43.560 they don't know

00:31:44.840 how to deal with it

00:31:46.000 Well, we've got, you know, this safety culture, you know,

00:31:49.720 a sort of, in a way, an exploitation of Balby's attachment theory from 1958.

00:31:59.780 We've got a society now that is, you know, social workers, psychologists

00:32:05.120 who are so well-versed in attachment with a view that if you have any level

00:32:11.600 of detachment, we've got to somehow stop that.

00:32:14.220 but where I think we're getting it wrong it's the direction that the detachment I mean I think it

00:32:22.440 would have been better if you called it detachment theory because from a survival perspective you

00:32:27.480 can't be breastfeeding when you're 20 you know a hundred thousand years ago you know you're doing

00:32:32.220 a hunt and the tiger store the antelopes they oh just wait I've got a break because I need to go

00:32:37.100 to mum to have a bit of a top up I mean it wasn't really a survival orientated advantageous way of

00:32:42.800 So from the point of birth, the child has to learn to detach from the parent.

00:32:51.680 So what we're sort of getting sort of mixed up is a clear understanding of where that detachment comes from.

00:32:59.360 So if the parents are very stable, they're there, it's the healthy form of detachment if it's engineered from the child's end.

00:33:06.540 okay so the child experiments at two or three or four and they push more and more distance between

00:33:12.960 them but they know if they want to turn around and come back that security is there but on the

00:33:18.400 other hand you also need you also need elements of parental forced attachment so oh my god the

00:33:25.780 you know the parent isn't there it it depends on frequency and degree you know if the if the

00:33:31.340 parent is constantly detaching and doing it to a really brutal extent then you're likely to

00:33:39.220 train that child survival system into developing maladaptive behavioral patterns but but what we

00:33:46.100 can't do as a society or parents is is is in a way say you know protect the children you know give

00:33:53.500 people uh trigger warnings all over the place i mean the the actual experience of being triggered

00:34:01.200 of being upset is a developmental experience i mean i'm not it's all about degrees isn't it when

00:34:08.160 you say it's a developmental experience just to translate it into simple language what you mean

00:34:12.200 is you have to go through life and experience being triggered quote unquote in order to grow

00:34:17.240 yes yeah um i can give you a little bit more no no it's good i think i think i think the simple

00:34:25.080 yes is good. I was just about to get off into it all. Yes. So, so you need to like, I mean,

00:34:31.200 Francis was saying this, you need to experience discomfort in order to be a fully fleshed human

00:34:36.600 being. I know this from my own life. And this is why this whole ideology, to some extent,

00:34:41.420 this is why we've been talking about this stuff. I know that almost everything that I've ever done

00:34:46.320 in my life that's been worthwhile, in my opinion, has involved extreme discomfort at some level.

00:34:51.820 every single thing whether it's work whether it's relationship whether it's my own personal

00:34:57.360 development as a human being whether it's reading an important book right it's required discipline

00:35:03.660 and sticking with it and sometimes reading a bit that I wasn't interested like do you see what I'm

00:35:07.740 saying this idea that we must avoid discomfort as the greatest objective of our existence is absurd

00:35:16.740 But there's a more fundamental driver and need behind that as well because, you know, I talked to you about those, what I call trigger packages earlier.

00:35:28.140 If you, 100,000 years ago, if you're four years old, there's a forest fire comes in, you smell the acrid smoke, you see the expressions of the faces around you, you feel the heat and you hear the screaming and you manage to just get out with your life.

00:35:46.740 The trauma-based learning system is going to create trigger packages

00:35:51.100 that will endure for the rest of your life.

00:35:53.020 Why?

00:35:53.720 Because you don't experience another forest fire

00:35:56.540 for the next 20 or 30 years, you know, you happen to be 32 or 33,

00:36:00.940 you get the faintest whiff of acrid smoke and bingo,

00:36:04.280 you get that experience, that incredibly powerful,

00:36:08.040 visceral experience and you become alert to what's going on around you

00:36:12.140 and you're forewarned and you get the hell out, okay?

00:36:16.740 evolution has it those trigger packages are incredibly resilient they don't shift but the

00:36:23.480 other thing about them is they are recon they can be reconditioned when they crack open

00:36:28.480 so a lot of therapeutic approaches today like cbt orientate cognitive behavioral theory

00:36:35.380 therapy orientated towards phobias is actually causing the person to trigger in a sort of minor

00:36:42.660 a way and then an increasing way around say spiders or flying or whatever because what it's

00:36:48.640 actually doing is cracking open that trigger package but in a manageable way and then piling

00:36:53.960 in new narratives so so when it shuts down again it's less potent and when it opens up again there

00:37:01.520 will be maybe other narratives and more restorative uh resources so it doesn't overwhelm you so to

00:37:07.960 come back to you yeah i mean triggering uh overcoming challenges uh uh having upsets uh

00:37:17.920 are yeah are all really uh recondition opportunities to recondition i mean we don't

00:37:26.040 want this to say you know abusive behavior violence sexual abuse those aren't constructive

00:37:33.900 experiences you know they're incredibly damaging i'm pretty sure that's always been universally

00:37:39.720 understood yeah i think what's happened in recent years is is an attempt to conflate that

00:37:45.060 those things you're talking about violence abuse etc with ordinary experiences in life that's why

00:37:54.620 people now talk about language as being violence right the words are now considered violence by

00:38:00.040 some people because it's an attempt to conflate the two and i think it's quite a deliberate attempt

00:38:04.900 because it's a way of getting power of other people yeah i didn't see it quite like that i i

00:38:10.500 think the people who are saying that a lot of maybe some people are like that but quite a lot

00:38:15.660 of the people are genuinely triggered you know that that sense of vulnerability uh you know the

00:38:23.500 the the anxiety the fear the pain i think is quite real what we have to look is how do people end up

00:38:30.600 developing to have that type of sensitivity so so so yeah no i see it's like slightly different

00:38:38.560 take your point so you just to summarize because you've already made this point i take it your

00:38:44.060 conception of this is that people are hypersensitive am i okay to use that term

00:38:50.540 Not everyone. There's an increasing proportion of society, yes, that are powerfully triggerable.

00:38:55.520 And they are very easy to trigger because the unstable childhood environment they grew up in,

00:39:02.840 combined with the education system, combined with blah, blah, blah, and social media.

00:39:08.280 Yeah, you've got to be a bit careful with that because, okay, parenting is a very broad spectrum of parenting.

00:39:15.200 OK, so the branches of parenting that will really predictably generate sort of discordant behavioral patterns in life, you know, in the upper and lower quartiles of that sort of distribution.

00:39:31.980 So this isn't a message to parents that they somehow have to be perfect parents.

00:39:36.860 Just being OK is largely good.

00:39:39.520 And then it's how your genetics interact with the environment that then really make the difference.

00:39:44.660 But if you are starting to generate a society where the electric wires are encroaching, then you're pushing more people.

00:39:56.660 You know, that shape of that distribution curve is changing.

00:40:00.720 And more and more people are starting to grow up with triggering systems, as I might call it, that are on a hairline.

00:40:09.360 that are really sensitised to going off to any perceived threat

00:40:15.240 and generate really powerful levels of discomfort.

00:40:19.620 I mean, it's a very, very, very good point.

00:40:22.020 Look, how much of this is also a type of narcissistic behaviour as well,

00:40:27.200 whereby someone goes to a comedy night, for instance,

00:40:30.480 they hear a joke, everyone laughs, or the vast majority of people laugh,

00:40:34.420 they feel it's disgusting, therefore they want to set the parameters

00:40:39.340 of what is and what isn't acceptable because of the way they see the world.

00:40:43.920 Isn't that a form of narcissism as well?

00:40:45.760 Well, you're seeing someone behave, you know,

00:40:51.920 driven by an attachment form of behaviour.

00:40:54.300 Their behaviour is really trying to, in a way,

00:40:59.400 reattach themselves to whoever they perceive to be their attachment group.

00:41:04.020 so so they're experiencing you know it's sort of quite a visceral sort of physical experience or

00:41:12.200 maybe narratives are really punching into their brains that are really powerful uh and a bit like

00:41:18.760 your friend you know the that joke has pushed them onto the live wire and so now with uh social

00:41:25.380 media they can go straight to that and and with that's a classic avoidant behavioral pattern

00:41:30.820 They'll sate their discomfort by going out onto social media and demonstrating their virtue and that they don't align with that type of joke or that type of thinking.

00:41:43.580 And that will calm them down.

00:41:45.420 Well, here's the thing, though, because Francis' question, I think, is very good, because.

00:41:49.680 I remember a situation where I was performing in a comedy show and my wife was there and she had literally just come back from Ukraine from her grandmother's funeral.

00:42:00.240 And the comedian who was on before me was doing material,

00:42:04.620 pretty funny material, about pushing his grandmother down the stairs.

00:42:08.060 It was a comedy routine.

00:42:08.840 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:09.980 And my wife, being a normal person,

00:42:12.100 obviously, you know, she was feeling a bit raw.

00:42:14.300 Her grandmother, who was important in her life, had just died.

00:42:17.280 Got up, went to the toilet, got a drink of water,

00:42:21.020 waited for this comedian to get off stage,

00:42:23.200 came back in the room and watched the rest of the show, right?

00:42:25.620 She was not untriggered by him making jokes

00:42:28.500 about a very raw subject for her at that time.

00:42:30.920 But it never occurred to her to go on social media

00:42:33.540 and to sate her whatever in that way.

00:42:37.400 So what is the difference between her and someone who feels

00:42:40.520 that's what I think Francis is getting at

00:42:42.380 when he talks about narcissism?

00:42:43.640 Well, a couple of things.

00:42:45.020 How well does it work when you write an article

00:42:47.380 and you label group people narcissists?

00:42:49.880 I mean, how convincing is that?

00:42:51.400 How do people react when you sort of label them

00:42:55.460 with really quite negative sort of style.

00:42:57.440 We're just asking you the question.

00:42:58.940 To me, it's not a question of persuasiveness.

00:43:01.260 To me, it's a question of accuracy.

00:43:03.440 Is it accurate or not to say that partly this is driven by narcissism?

00:43:07.200 I suppose what you're looking at and you're talking to

00:43:09.580 is the person who is looking at the behavioural patterns

00:43:12.120 and the drivers behind that, which is, I mean,

00:43:14.840 the couple work I do, you know, there are hundreds

00:43:18.280 and hundreds of couples I've sat with, you know,

00:43:20.800 far more difficult than the two of you.

00:43:22.500 you know over the years and they you know and because they they are coming in they're talking

00:43:30.620 about the real nuts and bolts of what's happening in their relationships and then they talk about

00:43:36.340 one of their children who's just been labeled ADHD or some other label that's been given to

00:43:45.000 them by a child psychologist now there probably are children with ADHD or abnormal but if that

00:43:51.240 child psychologists were to really hear what I've heard about what's really going on in that family

00:43:57.420 they would marvel that that kid even gets out of bed in the morning you know when you hear what

00:44:02.760 goes you know I hear stuff that you just wouldn't believe and so we're so we're mislabeling people

00:44:09.960 all over the place in our society today I mean it's an easy thing to do isn't it you know it

00:44:15.220 just this label person.

00:44:17.280 I mean, I've been guilty of it until about six to nine months ago,

00:44:21.800 you know, because, you know, my thinking around this

00:44:23.740 has been evolving, you know.

00:44:26.080 You know, I might have been calling people virtue signals.

00:44:29.140 I don't really do that now.

00:44:30.420 You know, I don't do that because I just think that the people

00:44:34.660 I think about who are virtue are actually really great people.

00:44:39.160 But they trigger.

00:44:40.600 But they trigger.

00:44:41.940 But they trigger and they avoid the cognitive dissonance.

00:44:44.660 You have to be able to describe things accurately, though.

00:44:46.840 I get this whole non-judgment thing.

00:44:48.680 Yeah, I get what you're coming from.

00:44:48.980 I get it.

00:44:49.820 But at the same time, I personally know people,

00:44:53.360 and I know in myself the temptation to signal virtue on social media.

00:44:59.160 I know it in myself, right?

00:45:00.960 Yeah.

00:45:01.340 It exists in all of us.

00:45:02.500 I would never do that.

00:45:03.260 No, sure, mate.

00:45:05.120 That's a great virtue, Steve.

00:45:06.480 That's a great virtue signal right there.

00:45:07.860 Come on.

00:45:08.140 So this is my point is we all have the instinct in us

00:45:12.340 to get attention from the community, the society.

00:45:17.360 To attach.

00:45:18.480 To attach, right?

00:45:19.400 To attach.

00:45:19.880 So to say that somebody is engaging in virtue signalling

00:45:24.080 is not to say that they're a bad person or that they're immoral.

00:45:28.500 It is to say that they're engaging in a behaviour that I recognise.

00:45:31.480 Look, I think three of us, we're all seeing this identitarian culture

00:45:39.840 where minority groups are being convinced

00:45:44.020 that any problems that they have in their lives

00:45:47.680 have got nothing to do with them.

00:45:49.940 It's got everything to do with the society around them.

00:45:52.740 I'm not saying society doesn't have its problems

00:45:55.220 and don't negatively influence groups,

00:45:58.660 but to send a message to certain minority groups

00:46:02.180 or groups of people that it's nothing to do with you,

00:46:05.260 don't ever look at your behaviour, just look outside of yourself.

00:46:08.900 Well, yeah, that is incredibly damaging.

00:46:12.580 But the reason why I'm quite like the live right, vote left,

00:46:18.180 is it's actually descriptive of the behaviour.

00:46:20.420 Sure.

00:46:20.780 Yeah.

00:46:21.460 Whereas virtue signalling is a sort of quite a pejorative term.

00:46:27.040 But where you could argue, yeah, well, that's actually a description

00:46:29.880 of the behaviour, I suppose.

00:46:32.000 But so it sort of has a sense that it's quite sort of just quite pejorative.

00:46:36.940 you know it's great it's a put down isn't it and i have to say i've been guilty of that myself in

00:46:42.020 years gone by but it doesn't work it just pisses people off no what if you want to piss them off

00:46:50.420 yeah i mean go for it yeah yeah then you drive engagement on social media you know that's the

00:46:58.480 way to do it we've got to wrap up men there's one more question that i wanted to ask right which is

00:47:03.480 this why have we started to conflate mental health with mental illness and we use these two terms

00:47:13.060 interchangeably when they obviously have very very different meanings well if you read a book called

00:47:19.900 black rainbow by um oh what's her name uh rachel it will come to me black rainbow it's about this

00:47:29.220 times journalists journey through her mental illness over 20 years and if you ever want to

00:47:36.340 get an understanding of what is the difference you know what is mental health what really is

00:47:41.040 mental illness read that book you know because she eviscerates herself you may not you know she's

00:47:47.640 very wealthy uh has got the ideal life but but she turns her pen on herself in the most unremitting

00:47:55.360 way and you and if ever you want to get an understanding what the difference is i mean

00:47:59.200 basically mental illness mental health is is you're basically engaging in behavioral patterns

00:48:05.960 that are getting in the way of you experiencing your life in the way you want to

00:48:09.240 getting up and being a bit sad in the morning is something different but you know i think in this

00:48:18.420 i've seen i've seen listen to a few podcasts you ask at the you know if you want to ask me

00:48:22.940 that final question you do i was i might might be able to respond to that a little bit more

00:48:27.900 what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be seamless uh yeah great

00:48:32.600 yeah uh i think it's sort of the way people in public eye are talking about the experience of

00:48:40.920 psychotherapy uh it's great so i mean it's it's fine to say hey i've been to see a psychotherapist

00:48:48.000 or, you know, I went with, you know, I had these issues.

00:48:52.860 But what we're starting to see is people talk about

00:48:56.040 what they actually talk about in the psychotherapy session.

00:49:00.380 You know, in the public eye.

00:49:02.400 They're talking about relations or what people did

00:49:05.860 or what people said.

00:49:07.540 And what they're doing, unwittingly probably,

00:49:09.860 is they're weaponising the actual psychotherapy session.

00:49:14.300 And one of the most precious things about psychotherapy

00:49:16.940 in our culture today is the perception that if you sit with someone like me

00:49:22.220 or any of my peers who are in the mainstream therapeutic organisation,

00:49:26.840 the BACP, you know, any of these sort of psychological mainstream,

00:49:31.680 we're all really tied into really strong senses of ethics

00:49:35.840 around confidentiality.

00:49:38.060 And if we start to challenge, you know, through what we talk about

00:49:42.740 that actually happens in the session publicly,

00:49:45.040 then you're starting to create an impression that you know what's talked about in there can

00:49:51.720 just be spread everywhere and i think that's a retrograde step and the next thing is

00:49:57.160 is is uh starting to get and i think coming back to your question francis is starting to get a bit

00:50:03.860 more of a gauge about when they're accessing psychotherapy so so it's okay to feel a bit

00:50:10.520 sad at times it's okay to feel a bit angry at times you know that's not a mental illness if

00:50:15.680 you if you're being angry all the time or sad all the time yeah that's that could well be a problem

00:50:20.680 but i think people in the public eye need to think a little bit more about how they're communicating

00:50:27.300 the degree of uh the the the mental health issues that are causing them to go to therapy or not

00:50:36.560 so I'd like that to be the the awareness of how people in public eye talk about the reasons why

00:50:45.140 they go to therapy what happens to therapy and the the degree of the issues that cause them to

00:50:51.420 go to therapy I think that would in a way preserve and protect the the the sanctity

00:50:58.460 and the effectiveness of therapy regardless of how you practice it and that is a wonderful point

00:51:04.860 to end the show thank you so much for coming on if people want to find you where is the best place

00:51:08.620 to do that well i i'm now uh you know delivering a you know public uh workshops two hour workshops

00:51:15.300 oh by the way all the training i do is not for profit so i charge as little as i can uh and a

00:51:22.740 third of all the revenues that i generate go to the charity shelter uh because of the connection

00:51:28.060 between mental health and homelessness and thomas thank you so much for coming on the show well

00:51:33.380 thank you very much I mean it's been really interesting really fascinating to meet you and

00:51:38.460 talk to you thank you likewise likewise and thank you for watching and listening we will see you

00:51:44.620 very soon with another interview uh all of them go out at 7 p.m uk time and of course you can

00:51:50.060 catch a raw show as well we've got those four nights a week 7 p.m uk time 2 p.m eastern take

00:51:55.700 care and see you soon guys we hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview remember to subscribe

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TRIGGERnometry - November 04, 2021

Psychotherapist Explains the Culture Wars

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