VrNM-JCGGfI.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          Okay, so you see you don't see irrelevant things. That's most things you do. See things that move you forward and you do see things that get in your way and in the class of things that get in your way are in determinant occurrences, novel or anomalous occurrences, and almost everything that gets in your way is in some sense a novel occurrence because you usually structure your behavior so that you don't go anywhere where something wildly anomalous is likely to occur, so, so not if you encountered an obstacle to things happening at the same time and one is that your movement forward to your specific goal or sets of goals is blocked, but the second thing that happens is you're faced with a mystery and the mystery is this thing wasn't supposed to exist, but it does exist. So what implication does that have for everything?

Speaker 1:          00:48          I think, and that's very, very hard on people. They do not like that at all and no wonder because it's, it's, it's the constrained chaos that's underneath everything inhibited by your contextual knowledge that suddenly popped its head up into your world. It's like it's like the shark in the movie jaws, which is of course a mythological story. It's exactly that and, and it's, it's exactly what that movie signified, a safe vacation paradise all of a sudden threatened by some subterranean thing that can pull you down and and that destroys the peace and the harmony of that particular community to dragon story. It's a hero myth. It's, it's the story that people have been telling forever, so, so what you can think, you can think of that thing that re-emerges, that shark that rises up from the depths or that whale or that dragon or that Predator or or the foreign invader for that matter or the barbarian, and they all fit into the same category.

Speaker 1:          01:47          That's what had been deemed irrelevant suddenly manifesting itself. And when you think about how much is deemed irrelevant, the fact that it's suddenly manifests itself, that's exactly the purpose for the reason for the, for the trauma. It's like, well, I've, I've eradicated from my conceptualizations, 99 point nine, nine percent of everything. It's zeroed out and all of a sudden I've made a mistake, bang. I don't know where I am. Well, what's relevant when you don't know where you are and the answer to that is, since you don't know everything is relevant and you can imagine the sort of terror that people who experienced paranoid schizophrenia are living in perennially because what happens to them is precisely that they undergo neurophysiological transformations that makes everything that they once depended on disappear and everything comes back is relevant and that puts them in the early stages of schizophrenia.

Speaker 1:          02:44          That's extraordinarily stressful neurophysiologically, so they're overwhelmed with cortisol and their brains don't deteriorate as a consequence of that is just too much, so unsurprisingly, right? Because you can't deal with. You can deal with anything, let alone with everything. Now and often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in, in the training of of of clinical therapists, but often what you see when you are dealing with people who are in crisis isn't people who have a mental illness. In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare. What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed by catastrophe so their life has fallen apart in some way that makes what they're doing actually impossible. You know, so maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed a very serious illness and that's throwing their entire financial state into utter chaos.

Speaker 1:          03:41          Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work or you know you can. You can imagine the potential range of catastrophes and they're coming to see you because they're anxious and depressed, but the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped its head back up and is hell bent on their destruction. And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters out at the same time and it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it. Although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere. It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke. And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way. So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems.

Speaker 1:          04:25          And that's a very, a very well, it's extraordinarily difficult. Generally speaking, people often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources. They cannot figure out what to do. And so, you know, in a situation like that you can administer antidepressants and maybe that'll help the person increase their stress resistance. But as a, uh, and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down that they are in fact exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them, but making the person more stress resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job. And it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years who has a degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer. Like these things are major. You know, I often see people who, while they're in a relationship, maybe they're rather isolated, older, older people.

Speaker 1:          05:18          One of the partners is dying in their entire financial situation has become catastrophic. It's like that's not a mental illness man, I mean they may have got into that situation because of one inadequacy or another, but you don't even want to push that too far because that sort of thing can happen to anyone and and will in fact happen to most people in one form or another at least at some point in their lives. So you want to be damned prepared for that. You want to be prepared for that because it's bitter and harsh and anxiety provoking and painful, but if you're not ready that it's also hell. And often you can stop things from becoming hell even though you can't stop them from being bitter and painful and anxiety provoking and all of that. You can at least delimit the catastrophe enough so that it doesn't permanently bring you and the people around you down and that's, that's not so bad, right?

Speaker 1:          06:11          That's a hell or at least it's a lot better than the alternative. So this is the problem. You know, things object things are obstacles. Well, how big is the obstacle? It's the same. It's the same question is how big is the Predator that's lurking outside the door of our cave? It's exactly the same problem except construct, conceptualized abstractly and and I would say exactly the same systems that you're distant ancestors used to conceptualize the lurking Predator are the systems that are activated now when you encounter the reemergence of all the monsters that you've ignored, it's the same neurological platform you think, well, how could it be otherwise? Because evolution is a conservative process. Everything about you is built on on ancient foundations, right? Very little new. Certainly very little radically new comes into existence. It's mostly tinkering with structures that have been around forever. Like your body plan, for example. That's unbelievably old. I mean you share that with. You share that with lizards, roughly speaking, so it's incredibly ancient.