 you're recording. Hello Jessica. Good morning. Good afternoon. Yeah that too. So I'm a bit old-fashioned owing to my age and where I come from ladies of first so I would like to ask you the first question if it's okay with you. Absolutely. What's with this sisterhood day? I've seen it all over your Instagram. So Monday tomorrow is going to be International Women's Day and International Women's Day is just a day to highlight, promote and say thank you to all the women in our world and I'm just so tickled because being a survivor of family violence being you know just a global traveler I've had to reset my life multiple times and so sisterhood has a very special place in my heart and I am where I am right now because of my community and so the women that I've chosen to highlight had played some kind of very important role in my world and my recovery and my continued abilities to just add value and contribute into the world in purpose-driven ways. So we decided did you feel that support, feminine support, support coming from women, support and advice and support coming from women is different in quality from or essence from support and advice and so on coming from men? Do you feel there's a feminine and masculine way of giving support? I think rather than simplifying male versus female I think it's about the quality. So I think that you can get support from a female but if they're not balanced it's not good support and if you get support from a male if it's not balanced it's not support. What is balance support? Can you tell me? I think emotional regulation and mental clarity oversimplification those are my two qualifications. So when I'm looking to build or to expand on my community those are the only two things that I evaluate. What are you doing for your emotional wellness? How do you regulate in a moment of overwhelm? And then I ask a bunch of questions just to kind of surface level understand their way of thinking and their pathways and then I'm able to either evaluate whether or not it's worth internalizing or to just say oh that's a very interesting thing and then just leave it. But I don't think that that's necessarily a female or a male thing. I think that it's more about the quality and all of these women that I'm specific for International Women's Day it's one because socially they call it Women's Day. Two it's because for me and my evaluation system for my qualifications for my community it's the emotional regulation and then it's also the mental tenacity. So every single woman has an absolutely magical mind and they have been able to navigate whether it's overcoming their own personal trauma because everybody has trauma of some sort right or it's a lot of just being able to understand multiple perspectives simultaneously which I think sometimes is a quality that women or a feminine energy is able to possess over masculine because if I turn it inwards for me I view masculine energy as execute whereas feminine energy is kind of B. I don't have a lot of men in my world that just know how to sit which is life for me. It's easy you made a comment the other day about sublimation and so it's really good for me to cultivate that skill to convert things into socially acceptable ideas concepts and goals because my world is predominantly focused around that. Nowadays there's something called gender vertigo. Gender vertigo is owing to the rapid shift in gender roles traditional gender roles. Men feel very threatened by the ascendance of what they consider to be female asymmetric female power they and this is based in in some part on facts because women for example are the majority of graduates of higher education women have attained dominant positions in a variety of professions which used to be male enclaves and so there is there is an ascendance of women possibly because women are better suited better adapted to the requirements of postmodern civilization postmodern civilization requires empathy networking etc etc so many men feel extremely threatened and men being men boys being boys they react with aggression and misogyny did you feel or do you feel that there is a growing gap between men and women I know I'm generalizing but generally speaking do you feel there's a growing gap and enmity even or hostility it's interesting that you mentioned that because living in four different countries I think that my perspective can be applied to my life in Hong Kong my life in Singapore my life in the US or even my life in China and I think to view that gap it really is contextual so in the US I think number one we don't have mental clarity and we don't have a whole lot of emotional regulation we have a society that's constantly keeping people in an emotional state which prevents them from being rational on pretty much all aspects of life so from that I think and also in context of you know women's empowerment and international women's day I think international women's day plays into that male psyche of toxic masculinity and if society is telling you that you're not good enough and that women can do everything then because who was it Rosie Rivets was one of the first ones back in the day that I can do anything a man can do and it was you know the the the traditional male roles and so when we're kind of leaning towards that and a society is promoting that I think that it does play on the individual's mind and so from a guy's perspective a male's perspective if they are not necessarily able to articulate this because stoicism is also valued so if they're not able to articulate what they're feeling how are you able to navigate that in a healthy way and it's different in is it different in China because you've mentioned a variety of cultures and so I personally believe yes because I think the element that's different is self-awareness so Chinese Chinese are more self-aware would you say it's a more self-aware society I personally believe yes I believe I believe Asians in general specifically Chinese I grew up in a Chinese and Italian household so for the Chinese it was reflect on your behavior see on what it's going to look like from the outside and when you have that almost paranoia or that level of awareness it forces you to be more intentional on how you're responding or even reacting and when you're in a western culture say like the Italian side it's not as mindful it's not as aware it's just accept me as I am so from a society perspective you can oversimplify saying that it's more confident but it depends on how you define confidence it depends on how you define collateral damage it depends on how you define whether or not it's a response or reaction because there's nothing wrong with being able to express yourself but for Italians I mean culturally we have oh you know that's just the Italian passion is it really the Italian passion or is it just an unwillingness to regulate your emotions in a productive way I lived in South Korea and I worked in Hong Kong for a while so what I what I had noticed for whatever it's worth and by the way I'm a Moroccan so I have this you know I'm a Moroccan I was born in Israel so I'm a Jew and I worked in Asia I lived in Africa for four years so I was exposed I had been lucky I've been fortunate to be exposed to a variety of cultures and societies but having mentioned Asia I think in the west these westerns not all western societies the west is not a monolithic construct but you had mentioned the United States so the United States where I also lived for two years I lived in New York so the United States is a borderline society if I had to choose a diagnosis it's a borderline society there's modulability emotional dysregulation cognitive deficits etc etc etc it's absolutely a borderline society and we know we know today recent studies of borderline personality disorder we know that borderline is actually a series of self states discrete self states and these self states come to the fore in order to cope with stressors with stress with anxiety with impending doom with abandonment with humiliation with rejection with helplessness yeah and so on so forth so I think it's a borderline reaction which essentially defined it's a reaction of defiance acting out the compensation it's a very outward it's what we call in psychology externalizing reaction it's a reaction of defined well I think in other cultures and I put everything in a basket that would be Asia that would be Middle East Arab countries for example have a lot in common with Asian societies and so there they take much more into account the collective gaze the collective gaze and the others gaze the other is in these societies incorporated as a determinant of identity in other words in the west starting in the 17th century with Descartes with René Descartes the philosopher we broke the world in two there was the observer and the observed and everyone became an observer and everyone was observed had been observed or was observed so they were so it broke the world in two and this wreckage this fault line is limited to western society you don't find it in Asia you don't find it in Africa I don't in Japan the other is a crucial determinant of your identity he is not an is not an is not a strange is not the other person is never a strange never alien never outside you there's not you and him or you and her it's everything one one enmeshed thing where when you think about your conduct when you make behavioral choices you take into account not only your internal state but everyone's internal state and the collective state yes it's much more much more and I blame I blame the enlightenment because it was the enlightenment that broke down the integral healthy connection between man and nature and men and men and atomized us atomized us rendered us floating molecules with no mooring no mooring and no adherence and no belonging and it's horrible I think I think a lot of it is is also not taking things into context my senior thesis was on feng shui and it was disembedding so how do you if you just take feng shui disembedding feng shui so if you just take feng shui as a concept and you take it from the east and put it into the west what happens what's lost if you don't understand the cultural nuances if you don't understand the historical attributes on on how it's actually part of a culture it's not just a concept but all the things that are connected with it and I guess you could also say it's bastardized so we've done the same thing with mindfulness we've done the same thing with meditation we've done the same thing with breathing we've done the same thing with so many different components I mean even the other day I was laughing I was trying this thing called the mirror which was a workout thing and they were having I think it was Tai Chi a Tai Chi module and it was like a 10 minute or 15 minute session and in my mind I was thinking okay well if this is such like a highly regarded thing they should have one of the original teachers my judgment dismissed it unfairly because it wasn't an agent that was teaching it based on my experience I was like well that's not even right from a technical perspective it might be right from a cultural lived perspective it didn't feel right and so for me it was I mean that's my own judgments right and my own framing and and everything but to me it's very interesting because it's not saying that people can't do it it's not saying only certain people can teach it it's just saying that there is more than just the academic aspect experience plays a huge role that I think it's even a bigger discussion which is my issue with a lot of therapists and doctors that if they haven't been through a process how can they help others how can you teach others how can you get through it I mean so you you you adhere to the view that um personal requirement is a prerequisite for proper treatment I mean if you want to treat victims of abuse you it's it's much better if you had gone through abuse yourself if you had experience abuse you you believe this is this is I believe this is true specifically because when you're dealing with psychological warfare there's a lot of times that we like to try to make sense of it and once you've been through it you don't have to make sense of it you just have to accept it and so if you're coming from a clinician perspective then you try to put labels on it you try to do everything else it will be honest you're one of the top authorities in psychopathy and for narcissism and there's a lot of people that don't understand it they think that narcissism is just posting pictures of selfies and you know all this other stuff it's dangerous I mean once you identify it's actually it's predatory it's malicious it's it might not be conscious but that doesn't that doesn't excuse it and so I think for a lot of a lot of clinicians they aren't if they're not trauma-informed if they don't know how to identify it then it could actually cause a lot of harm I do you think empathy empathy is a prerequisite for treating people in people that I serve professions I'm sorry do you think empathy is a prerequisite a precondition for treating people in the helping profession profession I think that I mean I think that there's good empathy and I think there's dark empathy I think that if you're a very intelligent person or if you're a psychopath or a narcissist I think that it's easy to manipulate systems and I think that once you know it's a learned behavior so once you know how to do that because it's the oriented to achieve what you want I think that it's very easy to manipulate that but I'm asking about therapists do you think therapists must have empathy or can you be a dis empathic impersonal therapist who's very good at what he does but he doesn't have empathy he's not acting out of empathy I think you have to have the awareness because again I think that empathy is can be um weaponized so if you're an empathetic therapist if you don't have that awareness and then understanding for different cluster B personalities from an experience perspective you don't know how to identify if you're being manipulated I just that's a very tall order by these set of criteria this would disqualify 99% of therapies I mean I had a very I don't want to devalue their experience or their intention I think that there's a lot of value on it what I would like to say is a couple weeks ago I was dealing with a very toxic individual that was trying to leverage therapy sessions in a harmful way to gas like me and if you oversimplify why do you go to a therapist to understand yourself the moment you are in a therapy session and you're spending more time evaluating another person than your actual client doesn't that challenge the entire system of why you're a therapist in the first place therapy is a tool and like every tool it can be abused and and so on but it still leaves the question whether empathy and experience personal experience are prerequisites can we for example in the future have artificial intelligence administering therapy there's been there's been program called the Liza I think they did exactly this and strangely people were even more satisfied with the program than with flesh and blood therapies yeah well that's what I'm saying because it's it's difficult to manipulate an AI program because with that connection I mean with a lot of cluster B personalities they're predatory so they understand that if there's somebody that's empathetic they know how to tug on those heart strings and so when they tug on those heart strings and it's a manufactured connection if you're aware of it you understand manufactured connection if you're not aware of it you don't understand the difference between manufacturer versus authentic you portray therapy as a potential minefield 100% 100% I know many people I mean I worked in court for it and I know plenty of people that were going to therapy sessions under the premise of trying to understand themselves but no they were not going to therapy for that and even admitted later they were just looking for easier faster more efficient ways to accomplish their goals and so it was a therapist and it's a an internal joy to be able to if you're so qualified then if I was able to dupe you or if I was able to get something around it's a personal satisfaction that I don't necessarily understand how to how to quantify or hopefully I'm able to articulate it but I see a lot of people that know how to work the system because it's not about for some people it's not about figuring out how to better themselves it's being more efficient at being able to keep up their mask right of course the therapy is a set of skills and you can abuse this skill everything's a game but do you believe in the very let's put it this way what's the difference between a therapist and a very good and wise friend or your grandmother who is a repository of intergenerational wisdom and has seen it all and you know it has all the right answers what's the difference between therapy and this therapy is structured obviously but except this structure does it offer any value added or should you just you know stick to your good friends good wise friends and good wise grandmothers in theory therapists are supposed to know a lot of information to be able to identify the different things so in theory you go to them with a therapist with a problem and based on their academics or based on a combination of academics and experience they're supposed to be able to shorten that time frame of you to identify what's your what's your going through and then how to understand yourself to fix it or to navigate and help so they they catalyze they catalyze processes 100 they hasten them accelerated in theory in theory yes in theory would you go to a would you go to a 29 year old therapist or to an 89 year old grandmother 89 year old grandmother without hesitation any single time wouldn't you i'm sorry every time every single time you go to the grandmother so age has a lot to do with it an experience an exposure has a lot to do with it for me i think that when you look at experience in years and stuff like that for me specifically based on my experience i find it very difficult this might be my ego speaking but i find it very difficult to find a 29 year old that has been through similar experience so for the average person perhaps it's a different discussion for me personally i moved overseas at 22 i started my career in foreign countries i've already before i turned 30 i restarted my life four different times in four different countries and had my own business that's not normal by a society standard so if i'm looking for therapy or if i'm looking for and also experiencing family violence so if i'm looking for help or support to navigate any of that i think that i would rather go to somebody an 89 year old auntie or grandmother or even a cab driver sometimes yeah absolutely yeah i fully agree i mean there's encounters and strangers and strangers in bars can have enormous impact on you know they don't have any connection they don't have any um i mean i also think that it's very parasitic because if you look at talking to a grandmother or an auntie it's not an exchange of money whereas if you look at the system of therapy it's not a definitive time of getting healed so they actually benefit i know a lot of people that are in therapy and they've been in therapy for 15 years and yet they're dealing with the same problem there is a perverse what are you learning in those 15 years yeah there is a perverse incentive built into the structure of psychotherapy a perverse incentive in the sense that the therapist has every incentive in the world to perpetuate your victim victim mentality and victim stance yeah and then to drag you along for 15 years the aforementioned 15 years this is happening also online where numerous numerous self-styled coaches and self-styled experts yeah spew out an endless stream of you're a victim you're a victim you're a victim you're a victim videos and people get trapped in this bubble and they can't exit for the life of them yeah there's been there's been a series of studies shocking studies in the past year alone yeah and for example studies by gabai gabay she she and others came up with a new construct in psychology it's called um the tendency for interpersonal victimhood the tiv construct yeah and they suggested that there are certain people who feel very comfortable and very good being victims they feel morally superior they feel legitimized they feel in a cut in their comfort zone and so it's a bad for people and and they and other some other studies especially a few a few days ago a major study was published they found that victimhood movements are infiltrated saturated suffused with psychopaths analysis absolutely and these psychopaths analysis leverage these victimhood movements for grandiosity for you know power and and so on so victimhood is a very very dangerous label and one of the worst sins and crimes ever committed by the psychological community is is this that we had divided the world into angels and demons we had created a morality play of evil versus good and we therefore as psychologists we had engaged in splitting this is the splitting primitive infantile splitting defense mechanism where you're all good or you're all bad you're all evil or you're all good you're all you know and so splitting ironically is the main defense mechanism of narcissism and and borderlines the main yeah so the psychological community had had acted narcissistically and all the coaches and all the experts with or without quotation marks they have a perverse incentive to perpetuate your victim status they don't have any incentive in the world and we are like counting we like we regard therapists as though they were not human as though these perverse incentives will never ever motivate them to act you know improperly or immorally why they're human beings they human beings i mean we can't put this burden on therapies we can't demand from them to not be human to to we can't ask ask them to have a morality which is totally disinterested not self-centered and this is a crime against therapist the expectation that the therapist should behave in a way that no other human being can disregarding their own best interest and their own best interest is to keep in therapy yeah plain and simple i think i think it's more about the the bourbon system though because i think that you can go about i'm sorry it's about a broken system you can go into something with the best intentions and then after a while the the cracks in the system end up giving you micro opportunities to stay in your lane and walk your truth or you know compromise your integrity and compromise your values and compromise everything because in order to make it sometimes you got to you got to you know be agile and i know i personally know a lot of therapists that started therapy for the right reasons and then later on they had to make so many micro compromises in order to stay in business or in order to you know continue doing what they thought they wanted to do i know a lot of people that you know they had practices as a therapist and then went into social work because they saw the fragmentation i know a lot of people that are just livid at the fact you can go to a therapy session to get a label and you think that you're helping yourself because now that you've identified a lot of it is being able to identify what's what's wrong and then find a solution or to get through it at what point does the system allow that reevaluation because if everything is a process why is it just one you take a test and this is what you have for life i think that in itself perpetuates the idea and the practice of a lot of therapists with i was diagnosed with whatever personality nuance when i was four years old and i'm still dealing with that when i'm 47 years old as an example well why you're obviously a little bit different from four to 47 so why not you know have different tests in order to sell them you don't look at day over 20 oh i'm i'm 20 i'm 37 i was putting your leg to evaluate but just to evaluate like such a big difference so try to like think of over midlife crisis i think midlife crisis in the u.s context is 40 right so i think that's when a lot of people they have that awareness and the midlife crisis people joke saying on how like oh you buy a car you do whatever to me i think that is the threshold of when you get tired of playing by society rules and that's when you start to play by your own rules so is it really midlife crisis or is it just 40 years of the benchmark where it's like enough is enough now i'm going to do something fun but society you're quite right right right as far as scholar scholarship goes the midlife crisis has been debunk debunked long ago we we don't consider it as real we are much closer to your view that people simply have changes in preferences and priorities by the way usually motivated by the death of the parents the death of parents is a very crucial moment but i want to i want to latch on to something you have said i think a major sin is reductionism when we reduce people to their disorders we don't say this person has narcissistic personality disorder we say this person is a narcissist similarly we don't say this woman had been victimized we say this woman is a victim so we are this is sick doc that's taking a part and applying it to the whole and so reductionism has done this to us because we we have spent the last 60 years medicalizing the human soul medicalizing psychology owing to owing to ulterior motives and hidden agendas of insurance companies pharmaceutical companies hospitals clinics private practitioners there was a lot of money in the system actually mental health and health in general is the biggest economic sector in the world there was a lot of money sloshing around and dictating this attitude let us pigeon hold them let us pigeonhole let us use categories not dimensions let us use lists not not ranges so you have the diagnostic and statistical manual which is a list a list of lists so primitive it's so bloody primitive no etiology no dynamics no interrelatedness no nothing it's a list of lists like in the days of carlos linus when he started with botany in the 18th century when he was making lists of plants you know 18th century stuff and and this is the latest in in the profession it's very lamentable very lamentable absolutely so as as a an authority in so many different aspects you know i have great admiration for the work that you do and great admiration for you as an individual and one of the things that i think is very sad in the whole context of mental health and psychopathy and you know therapy or any any of these larger larger pictures is the fact that there are a lot of people that don't agree so if people that are talking about these topics if they're not even on the same page how can they fully expect to help and serve the people that they're trying to serve because i feel like there's a big disharmony so for me personally i feel that a lot of the the nuances and i call them nuances it could be fragments breaks whatever of a personality is in my mind an oversimplification of you do the best that you can given the tools that you have so if you're in a situation and that situation is a trauma and it creates narcissism as an example i don't think that you're born with it i think that it is something that develops because that is on how you needed to handle a specific a very specific situation at a very specific moment just because you handled that very specific situation and that very specific moment at a certain age doesn't mean that that is your habit it doesn't mean that that has to carry on through life and and i think that with narcissism or with the labels and people say they suffer from narcissism or their narcissist i think that that is very dangerous because i think that you know once you have that label then people will play into whatever you give them and so if if you're constantly condemning them then they're always playing the defensive if they're always playing the defensive isn't that narcissism in general because you have to continue to defend yourself you have to continue your your hurt you don't need to be condemned you need to be hugged you need to be helped and so i think if you kind of take a step back i think this is one of my fundamental issues with the whole space of people that are trying to help you because just as you said before it divide and conquer so if we have the the oppressors and the oppressed if we have the predators and the the prey if we have the manipulators and the empaths i think that everything is a balance i think that every single person has both sides and they all have the capability to do different things but you know i would love to you know hear your perspective on how if you have that fragmentation and if you know how to work the system there's some people that want to try to change the system and there's other people that are just so accepting of the system and they're like how can i benefit from this so if you take any of these personality tests for example how do you know i mean even if you excuse me even if you have an awareness i would think that i would be able if i had an agenda i would be able to manipulate that test yeah so even from that how do you more psychological tests are jokes because for example the main test for narcissistic personality disorder npi narcissistic personality inventory is a self-reporting test we have to do that self-reporting i mean are you are you haughty and arrogant it's one of the questions i'm kidding you're not uh what the main test for psychopathy which in itself is a very dubious category and probably culture bound in some way but leave it leave it aside for a minute the main test is a pclr and the pclr is a huge component of self-reporting and another component of input from the victims of the psychopath who are obviously in a position to criticize the psychopath disagree with the psychopath i mean they are terrified and intimidated and here's the test there you ask the psychopath to be honest and then you ask people around him who are cowed and terrified to be honest as well so the whole test is but leave testing aside i just gave a presentation in another international conference we've met in an international conference for viewers so i just made uh gave a presentation in another international conference about the the limitations of psychology why psychology can never be a science and there are two reasons why it can never be a science one is the the subject matter is humans and human beings are mutable and changeable from minute to minute from second to second you are never psychological experiments can never ever be replicated end of story never mind how many times you try so that's one problem the second much bigger problem is that there is a huge debate about the language elements and about literally everything fundamental i i am i have degrees in physics and in medicine other fields even in philosophy i have a PhD in philosophy and in these fields there is an agreement on fundamentals and there is an agreement on language and there is a unity disagreement on how to combine language elements and fundamental elements in psychology we don't have the foundation stone there is no agreement on language and there is no agreement on any fundamental i think not a single thing is agreed and when i say agreed is not like shall we have coffee or shall we have tea but the disagreement is a gulf it's unbridgeable in each and in my presentation i isolate 15 or 16 such disagreements very crucial basic language elements and concepts where the disagreement is unbridgeable in principle it's not a question of sitting together in a committee and reaching some accommodation in principle you cannot reconcile and reach a compromise on any of these issues and these issues are the core issues the core issues so psychology is a form of literature and if you want to consult the best psychologist in history you would read to stoyevsky and you would read you would read others you would read you would read authors because they have penetrated human psychology much better than anyone else Freud to a large extent was an author he was he was a good writer he was a you know he had literary flourish and regrettably psychology had become grandiose so it's a wannabe science and so now psychologists are using statistics because it makes them feel like they are physicists you understand and they are wearing white white codes because this looks like they are medical doctors it's pathetic it's absolutely pathetic psychology under these pretensions is the epitome of pseudoscience not very different to astrology in astrology we have a personality test it's known as the horoscope the zodiac is a personality test with 12 personalities so why don't we use astrology because it's a pseudoscience and so when psychology pretends to be a science and with the with all the trappings of a science you know mathematics and this is beyond derisive it's it's it's horrible because it's a psychology is deteriorating into into pseudoscience and people are feeling this there is total distrust in psychology people do not trust psychology they do not trust science generally they do not trust expertise generally because there's this grandiose defense i know as my truth is as good as your truth my fact is as good as your fact who are you i have access to wikipedia so there's a there's a lot of you know anti-expertees fmd fmd is a lifesaver for a lot of people yeah but um i think psychology is in a really in a really because people for example trust physics to a large extent but they don't trust psychology at all psychology is held in very low regard i think it's held in very low regard because trying to pretend that it's something that it is not and people spot the fakery but do do you think that if you can if you connect it with medicine modern medicine that maybe that has something to play with it and play into it because if you go to a psychologist as an example or a therapist something and you get labeled and they give you a label and then they give you medicine that is supposed to help whatever ailment that they've identified you as so now when you start putting chemicals and you start putting medicine inside your system and it's under the assumption in the premise that this is what you're suffering from if you if you break your arm you know what are the pain medicines in order to fix that broken arm if you have to go under for surgery the doctors know what what medicine to give for that when it comes to the mind it's it's so cloudy because it's an invisible wound right there is no necessary necessary um test in my personal opinion as you know you've already mentioned the the self self-diagnosed or the um i forget the word that you said when when you have to self-report so when you're self-reporting all the different things if you don't have the awareness and you're only sharing your perception and in your own reality if there's a flaw in that reality and what you're sharing to that professional person then results in number one a flawed reality and flawed sharing number two a flawed diagnosis and then number three a flawed treatment then you're actually whether it's intentional unintentional and malicious non-malicious it doesn't matter but once you start putting those medicines into your body then it does have a chemical change to your system which in my opinion can actually do more harm so the intention might be to help but then the actual execution could be um not as useful so what is your take on on medicine in context of this is such a cloudy space what happens to those individuals once they get that that label and then those medicines that are supposed to help and then ends up causing more destruction um we are very unfortunate the deceit of them of the mind whatever the mind is we can't even agree on language elements because i can have a huge argument about what is the mind what is consciousness we are not even close to an answer but okay for for discussion sake we are very unfortunate that the seat of the mind is not in the pineal gland about which we know everything and which which used to be considered as a seat of the mind we are also very unfortunate that it's it's not in the heart at the heart because we know everything about the heart it's a very simple pump and we know everything about the heart we are very unfortunate that the seat of mind in all probability is in the brain and the reason we're unfortunate is that we know nothing about the brain nothing i told you that i have education in medicine i teach neuroscience right we know nothing about the brain nothing we're in a state of utter ignorance neuroscience is a proto science it is at its very initial inception medicine has been practiced for well over 2000 years we have very good medical texts going back 2000 years galenus galen we have good medical texts Chinese medical texts are wonderful so medicine is very on science neuroscience is about a hundred years old and serious neuroscience is about 20 years old we know nothing yes really i didn't realize that i didn't realize that that's interesting yes really because you know real neuroscience started with imaging and so so about 20 let's say 40 if i'm generous years old a few decades old yeah we had discovered only recently that serotonin the neurotransmitter that regulates allegedly regulates mind you mood and mood disorders we had discovered only very recently when i say very recently i think it was about 10 or 15 years ago that serotonin is not manufactured in the brain it's manufactured in the intestines that's a recent discovery and yet we have been giving serotonin based medication to people for well over 60 years based on flawed knowledge and on the assumption that it's manufactured in the brain yeah we had discovered the greatest biggest physical structure in the brain 12 years ago yeah we had we did not know about this structure yeah we had no idea that it exists we had discovered it 12 years ago we had discovered the system that flushes and cleanses the brain when you sleep in conjunction with the spinal cord 10 years ago that is the system that is responsible for dreaming apopozygmon Freud we know nothing we are children in the woods we know absolutely nothing and yet we're infested and infected with grandiosity in all these professions so neuroscientists pretend that they know everything about the brain and they feel confident and comfortable to intervene in the brain yeah may i remind you of lobotomy yeah they feel comfortable to interfere and intervene in the brain which is an act i don't have words i'm speechless which is a unique state for me yeah it's it defies believe it's a psychopathic act it's absolute psychopathic yeah to pretend that you know when you know that you don't know and then to go into another person's live brain and intervening it and interfering it and obstruct it and change it and cut it and float it with chemicals and when you don't know you do not know what the outcome will be end of story it's utterly psychopathic yeah it's very interesting because being an athlete so having athletics be such a strong foundation as part of me i was a sprinter so i did the 400 and that makes one of us thinking you know as i'm like reflecting on all that it's so true because i think that you know we grew up or at least my family we grew up with with the thought that endorphins make you happy and happy people are value add right and so if you're working out working out equals you know happiness like the happy chemical and when i think about it it's not necessarily something that the brain is is creating or even you know gut health is a big buzzword for the past couple years it's growing in popularity it's just wait a couple years and it'll change something else i think everything is based in breath because there's a lot of times that if we're you know having a panic attack having exact anxiety if we're having depression if we're having any of these these swings a lot of it if you notice your breath your breath ends up getting really shallow and you kind of get a little bit disconnected and so just by doing a workout whether it's a sprint a high intensity interval workout which is what i teach and what i coach um you get that breath back in so you don't even have to talk about what's happening in the mind you don't have to talk about what's happening in the belly you just know that once you're getting that that oxygen into your system that something is happening it doesn't matter what but it's just it's helping you do a reset and i think that is probably one of the most powerful things that a lot of people are getting shadow band or a lot of people are being muted a lot of voices are being muted because the breath is something that is an unconscious act it's something that just happens and the body just takes care of you by by being able to do it there's no medicine the breathing is the medicine and so by doing that you can't monetize it and so i think going into the conspiracy side of things if we have the breath as being the most powerful tool to get back to and the most powerful medicine to do and now we're dealing with a global pandemic that is attacking our respiratory system and i i'm not saying it's a conspiracy i'm just saying it's critical thinking think about the ramifications think about how to protect yourself think about how to empower yourself how to be like a patient advocate and the self advocate and you know self-mastering and all the different things that associate with it it's very interesting i want to generalize from that i'm sorry i want to generalize from that to take what you have said and generalize it yeah and sorry i'm just thinking out loud because as you as you're saying that i'm just like oh my goodness like the pieces are starting to come together again no i but i love this this way of talking um fireside fireside chat not the you know not the structured interview or dialogue when psychology started the focus was on the mind for some extremely strange reason i mean no one pays attention no one has ever asked why why did the first psychologist focus on the mind why for example didn't they take into the equation the body there was a divorce between mind and body and like the body didn't exist you actually would be hard pressed to find the word body in the entire 34 volumes of collected writings of zygmunt Freud not i remember three times i may be wrong but i think about three times so there's no body even when there was experimental psychology experimental psychology started in the end of the 90th century in germany a guy called vent and later on james in the united states and so on even then it wasn't body oriented they were experimenting with memory with you know but it wasn't but there was no body there no one asked for example subjects to hold their breath see what happens after that or to move their eyes like today we do an EMDR you know or to no one asks people to play with their bodies and see what are the psychological implications which is shocking because it was a departure departure from all previous experience of humanity the romans said healthy mind in healthy body the perception that the body was a main engine and driver of psychology and more specifically mental health was embedded in all previous cultural civilization and societies the jews as well i mean you name it and yet when psychology had started as a science so to speak they divorced the body and the mind and they dumped the body in the trash can and so now we are we are trying to reverse this we have body based trauma therapies as you well know we have so we are trying belatedly and vaultingly and hesitatingly introduce elements of the body organs parts into into the treatment but we still don't have a single holistic uh psychotherapy or school of psychology which incorporates both mind and body as an integral whole we don't have this our mind is broken that's the first comment i wanted to make the second comment i wanted to make there is enormous confusion because psychologists are not trained in philosophy so they don't know to spot logical fallacies they don't know the difference between correlation and causation causation this goes for neuroscience consider for example in neuroscience when they tell you the reason that you are behaving in a certain way is because this and this group of cells is acting out is fulfilled with blood and his electrical activity how do we know that it's not the other way around that your behavior had created this activity in the brain not that the activity of the brain had created the behavior and how do we know that there is no third element which had created both your behavior and the activity in the brain absolutely it's very primitive thinking it's linear it's unidirectional it's a causes b this went out of fashion in physics during the times of Aristotelus in 2500 years ago psychology is 2500 years ago after most sciences not in its discoveries but it's in its philosophical grounding it's very primitive very primitive thinking drives me insane because i'm trained in other disciplines i think it's i think it's also very interesting too because depending on the framing right so if you look at a self-sabotage has been a very big topic for a lot of my circles and coming from a trauma space and recovery space is it really self-sabotage or is it playing out cycles and situations to help you feel comfortable is it an addiction because to me if you're self-sabotaging by society standards then you're not playing as big as how you can you're not you're doing something you take that step forward and then you take two steps back you take that step forward you take two steps back and then you're constantly playing yourself out but even if you're not doing it intentionally because if there's trauma that either has been identified or not identified what you're doing is you're in a merry-go-round of a cycle that's keeping you comfortable and that plays into what we talked about before is that victim mindset so even when you try to get out of that victim mindset by society conditioning or by personal experience it's reinforced by society conditioning it becomes very difficult to make that shift which in the conference that we were speaking at together I mentioned the nuance between having that victim mindset and then the survivor mindset and then the warrior mindset I think is incredibly important to have that and that's that's why I will never go back to school to to become a therapist because I think fundamentally that is something that is missing in terms of the process and so as a coach easier to value me as a performance coach it's this is what you were doing this served you for that does it still serve you no I think you heard of it find something else and then it doesn't serve you cool use it while you can no longer serve you get rid of it let's develop something else and it's a very simplistic approach to constantly have that critical thought to evaluate is this serving me in this moment as soon as it stops serving me why am I holding on to it and then if you're holding on to it is it because of trauma is it because it's keeping you comfortable okay cool if that's keeping you comfortable let's find something else to to get you comfortable or let's just be comfortable being uncomfortable I mean for me related to this conversation I'm just I'm so tickled to share the space I was so nervous and it was just lean in lean in just have faith and just lean in and you don't have to spend so much time in your head you just spend time in your heart and then you just appreciate the moment you don't need to be nervous I'm a pussycat no but you're you're one of the most intelligent people you're highly regarded intelligent pussycat you're you're just very very human at the same time you're very educated and you're also very experienced and I think that combination based on what I've already shared I'm slightly older than you just age nothing else trust me but it's also but it's not normal to have like people that have that self-actualization and that that kind of self-awareness but then go to the different lengths to try to understand themselves and then work through it so I mean even on your social media pages it's you're constantly sharing kind of like personal anecdotes and then also how it applies to science or how it applies to psychopathy and I think there's a lot of people that don't do that because there's that Chinese wall where you have to pretend like you're perfect and you can't share there's that wall that you can't it's almost like a violation if you share too much of yourself you're making wonderful points you know when psychology started no really I don't give compliments by the way as I stick to facts so when psychology had started the main source was introspection and anecdotes case studies they were called case studies Freud and Jung had built the entire edifice which is a magnificent edifice which is now by the way fully confirmed by neuroscience there's been an article recently I don't remember where but scientific article almost everything they said especially Freud is fully substantiated by neuroscience nowadays but leave that aside the whole edifice was constructed on introspection on the one hand and case studies which are essentially anecdotes they didn't study cohorts or populations of 20 000 people 60 000 people and so and then behaviorism came in science came in a pretensions to science wannabe science mathematics lab codes we are doctors we are physicists we are and they discarded all this they threw all this wonderful accomplishment of the human mind they trashed it in the majority of universities in the west it's forbidden to teach psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories and lately object relations theories as well shocking it's by far the greatest achievements of psychology and trust me what I don't know in psychology is not worth knowing it's by far the greatest accomplishment so this is comment number one comment number two what we consider the problem is that we again again break everything apart there's mental illness and there's mental health it's like there's no spectrum either you're this or you're that it's against splitting it's and it's wrong it's not true to start with all mental illness started off as a positive adaptation people had to survive children had to survive somehow so they evolved what we call mental illness but it allowed them to survive it allowed them to thrive it allowed them to become the adults that they are today it had been positive at some time at some point what we call mental illness was actually a sign of healthy self-defense and on the other hand what we call mental health is not always mentally healthy for example if you were an inmate in Auschwitz would it have been mentally healthy not to have depression of course not depression is a healthy reaction it all depends on context normal human response and abnormal human behavior so yeah so what we call of I mean these definitive decisive divisions they're nonsensical everything is context dependent even I would say culture dependent to and dependent on time in history fashions fads influences I mean it's all it's all one big one big thing and I give one example with this I will allow you to speak again and monopolize the conversation too much but I'll give you one example addiction well over 40 percent of the structures and surface of the brain 40 that's four zero are dedicated to addiction the brain is a machine that generates fosters sustains addiction it's an addiction machine end of story there's nothing else that comes close language consumes three percent of the brain language interpersonal I mean behavior consumes seven to eight percent depending how you define emotions consume less than one percent amygdala amygdala and so memory consumes something like six percent addictions consume 40 percent of the brain should we then not say that addiction is actually the normal state that evolution had conditioned us to be addicted had created our brain gave us an instrument that whose main role and function is to have us addicted isn't addiction the core of love and family formation for example yeah for example yeah isn't addiction what drives us to great accomplishments to learning to I mean addiction probably is by far the most important element in human psychic life way outweighing emotions and cognition yet when we say addiction what do we think about illness dysfunction bad to be eradicated to be destroyed to me so it's this morality play this reductionism this polarity you know people talk about bipartisanship partisanship in in washington that's that's an expression of our world we are tribal we're tribal we're tribal we're isolated we are aggressive we're defined we we break apart we're atomized we're broken we're broken everything is broken not only psychology everything politics society and it penetrates the mind it's a mind is broken the bite become our mind is broken I agree I agree I think you touch on a lot of different points I think in context of addiction in the US addiction is oversimplified to drug usage so you have you know alcoholics people are addicted to alcohol you have you know the drugs that we have the opiate crisis which is like the biggest crisis that we're dealing with right now and it's very interesting to me that if addiction takes up about 40% of you know the person's mind and emotions are only 1% if you take a step back and understand that I mean you obviously already understand this but for the sake of everyone that's listening if they oversimplify and understand that addiction is a way to survive in a moment and it's a it's a way to cope with a certain situation if we were able to increase that 1% of emotions actually have civil discourse or actually have meaningful connections or communication about anything to articulate feel or even exist in some of those heavy socially unacceptable emotions then maybe that would have a little bit more of a balancing act between those addictions or in my personal opinion which is a coping mechanism I don't believe in addiction I believe that everything is a coping mechanism so how do you with that awareness how do you shift from a coping mechanism into a tool same thing with what I was talking about before this work for you when it needed to work but does it still work if no let's switch it and I think that's that's an oversimplification because for me like I could very easily you know say that I've had plenty of addictions I mean I have a very addictive personality I'm a high achiever so I mean maybe not an Olympian athlete but I mean for me it's like I have that grit and I have that resilience and I have that mind where once I set my intention to to accomplish something I don't waver so it's the biggest compliment from anybody that I worked with or any of like my bosses or superiors was just when you say you're going to do it it's going to get done and so for me that's an addictive personality that is a staying focused at all cost that is a I said I was going to do it and my integrity is going to mean something you're only as good as your name and so from that how is that not also an addiction I mean that's it's a very pointed I mean if you look at a drug addict as an example they're going to do whatever it takes in order to get that hit so if you apply the same addiction to people that are goal-oriented it's the same thing I mean we're staying very pointed until we cross that finish line same thing finish line on the side finish line on that side why is it that people don't talk about addiction or addictive personalities or coping mechanisms you know within the high achiever space because we're perfect we're probably more dysfunctional than a majority of people we just have too much of an ego to allow everyone to help us and so I think that that in itself is a dialogue that prevents people and again divide and conquer right so we we think that as achievers or as goal-oriented people that we're superior that we're better than everyone else no we're just as dysfunctional we're just as broken we just use different things in order to to get us through and that's one of the big things that I like to talk about is similar to yourself I share personal antidotes and I get criticized for it all the time just how are you actually good at what you do if you're constantly talking about problems that you're going through it's because I'm sharing on how to move through it I mean life is about imperfection life is about how you respond it's 10 what happens to you and then 90 how you respond to it so if I'm sharing on how you respond I'm sharing the question decision that I made and then how I'm able to kind of recover through it and and I think that being you know somebody who has created life in four different countries somebody who has climbed corporate ladders somebody who has crossed ironman finish lines if you want a quantitative thing in 12 hours these are all things that are easily to verify and what is to say that in the behind the scenes I was also dealing with trauma so for me that was my catalyst to become the perfectionist or to become the achiever you could very easily go to I know plenty of women that have the daddy issues oh man I used to get so angry when people were just like Jesse have so many daddy issues and in my head I was like why never turn to drugs I never turned to prostitution so I don't have daddy issues you're crazy I'm not accepting that label but then when you start doing your own work and you start thinking about it it's like well what's the difference between a sex addiction or drug addiction or something that society isn't viewing as healthy versus the achieving which society is valuing as healthy and and I'm not making a judgment to anyone else I'm talking specifically about myself but that's what I like to promote on all of my social media and on my pages to normalize this duality and to normalize the fact that like let's evaluate on a consistent basis what we're doing here again again we're faced with essentially the same problems the for example we we say emotions cognitions addictions these are artificial separations they are caused by language language here is an obstruction not of health as any Zen Buddhist would tell you so emotions for example today we know are intimately connected to cognitions yeah even there are schools in psychology which have reconceived of emotions as a subtype of cognitions yeah thoughts some type of thoughts so should we maintain this distinction going forward I don't think so what about addiction is addiction only about the thing you're addicted to of course not addiction is a total solution because when you're an addict it structures your life it provides you with a social set so drug addicts they socialize with other drug addicts so it fulfills a social function drug addicts have to obtain money to pay for their habit it structures their work habits or the thieving habits yeah drugs are consumed at regular intervals usually most difficult drug most class a drugs are consumed at regular intervals so they structure the day drug add drug addiction has very little to do with the drug which is why it's extremely difficult to rehabilitate drug addicts and alcoholics well over 80 percent of alcoholics 80 relapse within the first year of rehab yeah because it has nothing to do or little to do with the alcohol or the drug the alcohol and the drug is an ecosystem or what I like to call ecosystem yeah it's an ecosystem which provides a total solution it provides meaning it provides direction provides purpose provides social social set or social context milieu it provides something to do it provides you know it's everything it's a total solution and in this sense is this very very different for it for example to religion I'm not quite sure it's also a total solution people go to church to pray no way they go to church to socialize to see and be seen to laugh to talk to sing together to feel good there's so many functions to religion which have nothing to do with God or any of his agents so all these artificial all these reductionism they are the addiction that's the drug we take care of the drug we take over the addiction I emotions they have nothing to do with thinking all this breaking down when when humans are an integrated unit in a contextual so I'm against the concept of individual in individual divided from the world I'm against the concept of personality I think humans are entities that are integrated in huge networks of like of similar entities their identity is like a Venn diagram you know these circles yeah their identity is where the two circles overlap this small area where they overlap this oval in the middle this it's a Venn diagram and to look just at the oval you know cross-eyed that's extremely misleading because you're ignoring the seriously big circles that created everything's context context relational so today we have a relational approach to personality theory we are beginning to understand that for example the the what Freud called the ego would have never would never never develops unless there is object relations relations with other people yeah we're beginning to realize that people what we call individuals are the outcome of complex interpersonal and social processes yeah yeah I think I think that that brings it you know a hundred percent full circle too because one of the I mean there's many things that I honor and value for the gifts that you bring into the world and the number one thing that we connected over with the conference a couple weeks back was talking about narcissistic fleas so I think that in itself is a very powerful nuance because I was very narcissistic and I had narcissistic fleas because that was my survival technique I was surrounded by a whole lot of people that were causing me harm in a very malicious intentional way and for me to not have that fragmentation or for me to protect myself I had to almost be one step ahead so I have to if you want to beat them you got to think like them and so for me it was like all right cool game on this is if this is what we're doing then I'm going to stay a step ahead of you I'm gonna think like however you're thinking in order to protect myself but is that who I am no that was who I needed to be in that moment in order to protect myself so again is it a coping mechanism or is it a tool it's something that served me for a very specific moment of life and then I had to evaluate does it still serve me and I didn't like it how I felt when I was behaving in that way because it was closed it was tight it was from a body perspective it was just I wasn't sleeping and I was like oh my goodness I got the lines up here so I don't look 25 rather than happy lines over here and so for me it was like I think that was one of the most powerful things and you know I have a lot of admiration for the work that you do and the message that you share and the communities that you are building and continuing to foster and a body of analytical people and thinkers critical thinkers and you know understanding how to apply different things and just understand it at a deeper level which I think a lot of people they you know get into I laughed because one of your videos at the very end it was saying this is not a support community this is an educational type thing and I had to laugh because I caught myself because one of the ways that I relate to people is by sharing personal stories I'm like you know what Dr. Sam's right I was like I'm not gonna share the story keep it to questions because that in itself flips a switch from being in that victim mindset of you know staying in that reoccurring system and yeah the hamster wheel and then it breaks that even if it's just a momentary reminder it breaks that habit and that cycle and then it gets you into the inquisitive side which I think is the difference between if you're in the hamster cycle then you're in that victim mindset once you start asking questions during that survivor mindset and so I mean I have a lot of admiration for everything that you do and so for me I think that is even at the very subtle subtle perspective of language and setting standards and boundaries and telling people what you need to expect I don't think that that is obtuse I don't think that's grandiose I don't think that that is narcissistic I think that that is part of healthy normal behavior in order to facilitate forward movement and unfortunately society has branded that otherwise and so I think that in context of some of the messages that you share is are you narcissistic or do you have the fleas I don't think that I'm narcissistic but I definitely know there's plenty of times I have fleas because when I'm in my environment contextually if I'm in my environment it's all abundance if I'm not in my environment if I'm pulled into somebody else's environment I got to protect myself and I hate even acknowledging that I don't know if you're a parent or not I wouldn't like to pry but single intelligent single but would you care to talk a bit about appropriate or right parenting if you have any thoughts about this what would constitute right parenting so even though I'm not a parent I think one of the hang ups for me is I view parenting as a minimum 18 year commitment to another individual I don't see it as a commitment to a child I see it as a commitment to somebody that you're procreating with so for me it's I think that parenting isn't a single individual thing I think it's a team effort so I think that the most important relationships for a child are learned from the parents so if you are selecting a partner that you can simultaneously be and grow and be and grow and be and grow I think that's a healthy dynamic and I think that is very important as a parent to have that duality and that space to kind of be and grow and be imperfect but then also strive for excellence and I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that because they don't have the personal strength or the personal cord or even that personal awareness to know that they're a complete individual so they're always looking for their better half I hate it when society is talking about find your better half you're not complete until you find another person that's not true you are complete and as soon as you make the decision that you are complete and that you want to be complete then it changes the entire game where you can find another complete human being and when you have two complete human beings imperfect but complete right then you are able to facilitate an environment that is going to more or less be healthy for child rearing so it's easy for me to say this in theory because I'm not a parent um one of my hang ups is my 18 year commitment to another individual and because of my family violence I'm still working through what it means and what I think is healthy and so I think it's a it's a little bit of a transition so I might not know what it is but I definitely know what it's not I'm going to say something a bit controversial about parenting I think the two main roles of the parent um is to push the child away and to traumatize the child I'll try to explain sounds bad you learn more through adversity so at a surface level I I understand that and I don't have a you know pushback for that I inquisitive please when I say to push the child away I'm of course referring to the very crucial phase of separation individuation at some point the child needs to separate from the parents and create his or her own boundaries and then within the boundaries become I don't like the word individual but become himself or herself so I prefer Jung's term constellated self constellated because it takes from everywhere and everything so it becomes a self but to become a self you need to give up you need to give up on your parents it is a giant trauma possibly the greatest trauma in life to give up on the gods to give up on these infallible omnipotent omniscient perfect entities that guarantee your survival these entities guarantee your survival to venture out into the world grandiosly because you need grandiosity that's why all children at age two have primary narcissism healthy narcissism because you need to be grandiose to say goodbye to mommy and take on the world when you're two years old never mind how precocious you are you still need grandiosity so this and a good parent allows you not only allows you to separate if you don't separate pushes you away not in a bad way encourages your autonomy and independence and personal agency by distancing herself never mind how much you protest and how much you traumatize and how much you cry and how much you beg she needs to push you away i'm saying mother but applies to father as well the second thing that a good person first thing is to push away the second thing a good parent must do is to traumatize the child every time you set a boundary every time you discipline every time you say no every time each and every one of these times is a mini trauma it's the child at age one or two or even up to age four finds it extremely difficult to tell the difference between external and internal is developing this skill gradually up to age four age four it's already okay but up to age four so whenever mommy says no or sets a boundary or goes away because she has to or doesn't attend to your 10 per 10 trumps and every time she does this it's a mini trauma because it is perceived as something coming from both outside and inside it's an internal process as well so it's traumatizing but of course a good parent has to traumatize the child and has to push the child away for the child to become healthy it is the bad parents what andrei green called dead mothers the bad parents or what we need we consider as a good enough mother so they're not good enough mothers the bad mothers they're the ones who refuse to let the child separate because they are selfish or narcissistic or insecure or their borderline or they are disturbed in some way or and and so they won't let the child separate and they and even worse parents never traumatize the child they spoil the child put it put the child on a pedestal idolize the child thereby preventing personal growth this personal growth is only by friction with frustrating and bruising reality only and if you isolate the child from reality you are doing a disservice and so these people instrumentalize the child he becomes the tool for realizing their dreams and aspirations or they parentify the child they force the child to become a parent these are all forms of bad parenting and it is counterintuitive but the good parent pushes the child away and traumatizes the child on a regular basis that's the good parent the bad parent never does this right right I think I think that you know adding on to that the concept of roots and wings so the the concept of wings have you have you heard of this before roots and wings so my understanding of roots and wings are for wings you're giving that autonomy and you're giving that independence and you're giving all those tools and and for that my family did a very good job with their parenting towards me with giving me that independence and that those capabilities to to do you know everything that I am supposed to do or can do so that I'm not dependent on others the missing component was the roots so having the place where when things get overwhelming that I can turn to them because the dynamic with my family was they give me the tool so that I could be independent and that I could do whatever I need to do but then if and when there was a time where I was unable to do something that was not a safe place for me to take refuge because if I took refuge it ended up just being a lot worse so you learn all right if I'm already going through it and I can't go here for support because if I go here for support it's going to be worse then that's a learned behavior to to go elsewhere and I think that is the balancing act because I think my parents created enough trauma for me to learn those skills because I think society context trauma is going to be bad so you know I've talked in great lengths that I didn't think that my parents were abusive I just think that when it came to their own personal journey they weren't able to handle their own trauma or their own things in a productive way and it resulted in harm towards me so they're imperfect I love them dearly but that is what created that that disharmony and so I think that going back to the 18-year commitment on how I view parenting is being able to regulate yourself being emotionally regulate yourself being able to have that mental tenacity and being able to appreciate understand be graceful with yourself that you are and a flawed human being whilst also trying the best that you can so I think having a partner that can help check you in those components is the number one vital thing so there's going to be plenty of times where I might be promoting wings I might forget about the roots so my partner in life should be the person that's going to say just time out let's make sure that we're giving them the tools to you know be independent but also we want them to turn to us if they need to and so I think that that's an important nuance that I think a lot of people they don't they don't have that balance so it's a lot of people in my personal opinion it's too much roots the clinical term for roots is safe base that's a clinical term safe base is a precondition for healthy attachment style when the self base is absent or when it is deficient or when the self base creates fear then we have insecure attachment styles such as avoidant dismissive avoidant fearful and so on so forth so this is the clinical term I think for the for a parent to be a safe base she needs to have been properly parented and she needs to have internalized her parents so her good parents so that she can parent herself I think the condition for proper parenting is self parenting anyone who cannot self parent can never be a good parent end of story never mind how many books he reads and how much money he pays you or me no way to be a good parent if you're not a good parent to yourself yeah self love in a good sense is critical in this in this so there were many scholars who described bad parents dysfunctional parents so I mentioned one type of such parent that the parent that idolizes instrumentalizes objectifies parentifies and drag green in 1978 describe another type of parent the dead mother he called her that's a mother the focus was is always on a mother because up to age two the mother is critical after age two the father becomes equally important but up to age two the mother is absolutely by far much more critical than the father so dead mother is a mother who is absent emotionally or physically or both unavailable cold detached so this is a dead month another type of bad parent there's a third type of bad parents that's a classically abusive bad parent like my mother who tried to kill me and tortured me physically for 16 years that's a seriously bad parent it's a horror movie so that's another type but I think the most pernicious type of bad parenting are the parents who almost make it almost make it because if a parent is like my mother who would break my skull regularly and try to kill me and torture me physically something like six to eight hours a day every day for 16 years that's actually easier on the child yeah it's easier on the child and it's easier on the environment because it's easy to discern it's it's a clear cut case you see it coming you know what do you do with the mother or father who are almost almost good parents from the outside they look perfect even the child has his doubts you know child says they're good parents I mean why am I reacting like this why am I feeling bad why am I feeling uncomfortable what's wrong with me what's wrong with me I think this is the most pernicious type of parenting and regrettably I would say that in western civilization current day western civilization owing to numerous factors we're not going to right now you would be hard pressed to find a good parent and the majority of so-called good parents are almost good parents this pernicious kind under the radar covert parents if you wish that that's the that's the real yeah I think that that's 100 sure because it's for me it's anything that gets you to question your own personal truth so I think that we have the inability to understand how to navigate different things so touching on you know being able to develop you had an amazing training ground I think of everything as a training ground so okay cool what am I going to learn what tool am I going to sharpen how am I going to get through this am I in survival mode how do I get out of survival mode and how do I get into a place and I think when you approach life from that oversimplified perspective then it allows you to build up that resilience or that you know that grit or that you know ability to just like accept things for what they are radical truth and then be able to navigate through it and I think a lot of times whether it's the parent or society that we are constantly taught to betray ourselves so with your example it could be massive gas lighting so you have your reality that's happening behind closed doors and then you have the reality that's in the public so the cohorts right and so that creates the disharmony and gas lighting by definition is just getting you to question your own truth so if you question your own truth it stunts your ability to kind of move forward because it doesn't have that radical truth aspect to it right and so whether or not you agree with the radical truth it's accepting this is what it is and then how do I extract whatever I need to from a survival mode perspective victim perspective to become a survivor and I think that isn't a journey that the survivor journey isn't something the victim journey is a massive thing that people are talking about survivor journey is not something that's been coined in popularity yet so I think that a lot of times it's being able to go through that it's you know I think that you're very well balanced mentally astute and emotionally regulated person your self awareness and efficacy and everything I think is is very substantial very high and considering what you came from I think is even more of a brush it off your shoulders another athlete that you can put on the on the wall type of situation that unfortunately people aren't always able to say the same thing because people are stuck in that victim mindset and so that victim mindset prevents them from being able to go through and and I see that all the time with myself because people will say you know just when are you going to stop talking about domestic violence when are you going to stop talking about whatever why are you still in that victim mindset if I'm not I can have a conversation about it and I can have radical truth because I've accepted it if I was a victim I wouldn't still be achieving what I'm achieving but I'm talking about it to raise awareness and to also say if I can do it so can you and so I think that that in itself is something that a lot of people they don't and I'm just thinking out loud you know responding to what you said I think that that is a very important and powerful thing in context of parenting because it's you know how do you use that voice how do you go around that toxic masculinity how do you you know share the sentiments that are in your heart to increase from that one percent up to the 40 percent for you know the addiction whatever the coping mechanisms I rather than say addiction I would like to say coping mechanisms and I think that that is a construct that is getting us to fail not just at a nuclear level with our family but also from a reinforced by society so you can oversimplify saying society is gaslighting us because we're just this is the reality that we know this is the reality that our parents are saying that's not true and then when we go to try to evaluate from an academic rational perspective we're just like well heck I think I'm actually crazy there's something wrong with me because this is what I feel this is what I'm experiencing and this is what they're telling me so I think that a lot of times we're just maybe maybe I'm jaded and thinking of this in the western context but I think that the western world is setting a lot of people up to fail so reality always sucked reality was always bad but in the past we had numerous support networks institutions were intact families communities villages your own social stratum your professional guild you belong to a professional guild you belong to a club you know whatever the case may be you had multiple backups you you reality was always horrible too horrible to contemplate we always we we always try to evade and escape reality escapism is not a new pursuit but we always knew that someone has our backs yeah and today what happens is reality sucks like never before to be honest I think that is the worst period in human history and history is my hobby and I can I think personally it's the worst case in human history a worst period it exceeds by now it exceeds the 14th century which was really really a period you don't want to live in you know and so reality is the worst that it's ever been we're trying to escape and the only means of escape are manufactured plastic spectacles spectacles provided by the media by show business by politics by social media by everything is a simulacrum everything is a substitute everything is a cheap plastic knockoff everything is counterfeit but there is need for these things because we don't have the real things anymore we have dispensed with them we have dispensed with the family with you know I am not a fan of Jordan Peterson to use a British understatement I have my reservations regarding this man and his conduct or shall I say misconduct however a part of his message if you take a side apart take aside the misogyny and the rest a part of his message is very true we have discarded everything in a hurry and we had not created any viable substitutes because because of this misperception of the individual you are individual you are divided you are you are so you don't need anyone you serve sufficient your world unto yourself there is a giant inside you just waiting to wake up if you pay Tony Robbins enough money you know it's we have split we've atomized we've split ourselves broken ourselves to pieces and now we're all alone and there is no way to weave the fabric back we are trying desperately to create a result fake institutions so we have social media which is the most a social thing I've ever seen in my life we have Facebook friends and and and by now for example marriage is an extinct institution families child rearing child bearing I mean they're all on massive decline and nothing nothing and so we have nowhere to turn to but ourselves nowhere to turn to about ourselves and when we turn to ourselves it's by definition of pathology if you become your only source of sustenance a core and so on that's a pathology that really is a pathology that's not even something healthy even our brains as a hardware our brains are constructed to reach out we call it senses we have senses our brains are not are not solipsistic they're not inward looking our brains are outward looking and when we look out what do we see nothingness there's nothing there there's nobody there we all objectify each other so there's nobody there I may I may approach a woman because I want to have sex she may approach me because she wants to have money we may both approach someone because the politician can give us access we we objectify everyone and nothing I don't know if it's reversible I don't know I mentioned Peterson Peterson hopes and thinks it is in his own dysfunctional way he hopes and thinks it is I have my grave doubts if it is my grave doubts we are all you know it's been predicted there was a guy called Dukheim Emil Dukheim about a hundred and something years ago and he wrote a book called on suicide and then he wrote another book and he said in the future societies are going to be a nomic in other words all standards all norms of behavior everything will collapse and he said that's going to lead to isolated people in cubicles and a wave of suicide real or psychological suicide like suspension suspension of the self what is binge binge watching Netflix what is workaholism what is drug addiction what is alcoholism nothing nothing it's suicide it's psychological suicide it's not being it's unbeing we have perfected the arts of unbeing it's the first civilization that is perfecting all possible ways and technologies to unbeat and where you are where you're allowed to be it's based on competition and so so again you are not it's because I keep repeating real being is contextual there's no real being as individual that is the primordial sin of psychology primordial sin yeah absolutely I mean I think that you know even we're called human beings we're not called human doings and so I think you know just oversimplified my you know addiction or my coping mechanism was by achieving right so that that's how I process that's how I stayed out of my body because I didn't want to deal with certain things for a very long time and then when I took a step back and realized my own dysfunction then I was able to say okay is this actually a tool that I enjoy or is this a coping mechanism because I'm avoiding something and asking myself these questions and being able to deep dive and then do my own work was so incredibly transformative and powerful for me to become a human being so now I have the choice where I can be in you know grind mode and achieve mode but then I can also have multiple hours of just simply being and I can since I moved into my new apartment I have yet to miss a sunset so I will stand in the middle of my kitchen yes I'll sit in the middle of my kitchen and I'll just look out and watch the the sunset which is amazing because I have classes two nights a week and some of my students I call them warriors they'll laugh at me because rather than stare at the computer screen you know checking their form and everything I'm gazing up and I'm like it's so pretty and so I think it's it's a balance of being able to you know do and also be which I think a lot of times referencing you know when you're talking about binging and you know Netflixing or any of that that is a constant state of avoiding wanting to to to deal with something or to um sit with something and society has taught us that there's good and bad emotions I don't believe that there's good and bad emotions I believe that emotions are messages from the soul to tell us whether or not we're doing something that is good for us or something that's bad for us something that's healthy versus unhealthy so we're you know um sitting maybe maybe to watch something funny is what we need in that exact moment to make it a habit that's when it shifts from a tool into a coping mechanism why are we doing this on a regular basis why are we watching rather than one or two episodes for a laugh to get us out of that moment of overwhelm into the actual moment why are we doing it for 15 hours I mean watching a single watching a single episode is an internal locus of control it means you're controlling watch binge watching is an external locus of control you're allowing the watching to control you I have nine I have a client in seven minutes Jessica thank you so much for your time it's been a huge pleasure to talk to you really I enjoyed every minute I apologize if I hogged the conversation or monopolized it this is my habit I tried not to I really tried it was a beautiful dance it was a beautiful dance I I would just like to say thank you once again you have been a giant source of inspiration and motivation and um ability for me to check myself at various points and so I just want to say thank you so much this was a very enjoyable way to start a true a true pleasure thank you thank you I'm going to say goodbye now thank you bye