Trauma Psychiatrist on How to Transform Your Mental Health

We can look at our physical health and say, "I want to be healthier. " And we absolutely can and must do the same for our mental health. Dr. Paul Ki is a medical doctor and psychiatrist, an expert in treating trauma. — He's been in clinical practice for over two decades. — Dr. Ki teaches us about the structure of our own minds and how to enhance our mental health. My field is very, very good at polishing the hood instead of looking at what's going on underneath. in the engine. Why is it so uncomfortable to just be still with feelings and thoughts? — The first place to start is — It's great to see you, Paul. Thanks for doing this. — Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate being here.

— We seek out uh mental health counsel to reduce our anxiety, lower our stress, or deal with our ADHD or our depression. But these are even though they're clinical diagnosis, they're really symptomatic of something deeper, right? Like if you're gener if you're not like, you know, kind of really uh invested in your generative drive, like the the symptomology of that might be anxiety or depression, right? Like there's something deeper going on, — right? No, absolutely. I probably said this in our first uh podcast together that my field is very good at polishing the hood instead of looking at what's going on underneath in the engine. And what we tend to do is take a symptom and say okay your mood is low. We want your mood to be higher, right? And okay, maybe there are things that we can do or maybe there's a medicine that we can give you so that your mood is better. And we don't ask why is your mood lower? Where are you finding meaning in your life? Are there big stressors or traumas or unsafe situations that we're not even looking at in life? So, so often what we do is we look at the symptom, right? We want to polish the hood and say, "Okay, everything will look better if we polish the hood. " And then we look the other way that, hey, there's something going on in the engine. And part of that is the field of mental health hasn't exercised leadership to say, "No, we can look in the engine and we don't have to be afraid to. " And then what happens is we become very afraid to look inside of ourselves. We don't anticipate that we're going to be able to figure things out. We're scared of what we're going to find. And what we end up doing is turning the other way. You know, the human beings want to understand things. If we don't understand, we confused and we get afraid. So if we don't have a way of understanding our mental health, then stigma will continue and we won't bring our best selves to understanding ourselves. If you think what could be more important to understand ourselves and make life better and we very often don't bring our best selves because we want to turn the other way and that's the stigma of mental health which just doesn't have to be there. We can look at our mental health as we do our physical health and say okay there's a way of understanding myself we all have you know organs and muscles and joints and like this is what's going on in us as humans. So if I'm concerned about my physical health or I want to be healthier, right, then I know there's a way of approach and I'm not afraid to do that. And we absolutely can and must do the same for our mental health. And that's what I'm trying to do in the book. It's not that it's all new. I like to think that there's a new idea or two in there, but most of what I'm doing is pulling together what we already know and saying, "Hey, we can look at this and we can approach our mental health with the same understanding and confidence that we think about our

physical health. " — There's the stigma that persists with respect to seeking out mental health help. Um, but beneath that, this notion of self- inquiry, uh, you know, for a lot of people, it's just take mental health professionals out of the equation altogether. Just the notion of of looking inward is scary for a lot of people. And I know a lot of people, they put up, you know, really strong boundaries around that certain things are off limits or they can't go there. — What is that about typically, — right? It's because we're afraid of what is inside of ourselves because we don't know that for the vast majority of us, what is inside of ourselves is okay. And if we go and look at it, we can use that understanding. We can use the fact that we look at it and we see what is there to make things better. I mean, in a way, there's a real simplicity to this. What I think of as simple goodness is we're not going to figure out the problem if we're looking away from it. And so many people if we start talking about mental health either we'll physically respond. We'll put up a hand like no or they'll turn away and we are afraid to look at what's going on inside of us and how do we think that we're going to solve the problem. Right? If there's something going on over there and I'm looking over here, I'm not going to understand it. solve it. And this leads us to then be literally afraid of ourselves. And if we can realize and understand, no, I can approach myself with compassionate curiosity, right? I can look at myself and it doesn't have to be with anger and frustration like what's wrong with me and why am I in this situation again and why can I never get what I want whatever it is we end up saying to ourselves right so there's often anger and frustration and fear and I don't even can't even imagine what's wrong with me and like all these things we say that turn us away from the simple goodness of saying hey if I look at myself what's going on inside of myself if I become curious about myself if I want to be a detective and say hey let me think about what's going on inside of me, then I can really learn and change. It's not a complexifying. It's not saying, "Oh, we have to learn these things that are new and more complicated. " It's actually quite the opposite. It's it's coming to this place of simple goodness where we just say, "Huh, you know, there's probably a lot I could think about and people I could ask and reflections or writing I could do. Let me just bring my best self to understanding myself. I wonder what that could change. " It's very difficult to give yourself permission to do that though. It feels very indulgent. Uh and so I'm curious about what is at the core of that aversion. Is it if people if I gave voice to this or if I looked at it that means that I am this thing and I'm fundamentally unlovable or uh if people knew this about me or I if I were to talk about it then uh you know they would see me the way that I see myself as unworthy you know with the shame and the guilt associated with it. Does it always root back on some level to some type of trauma that is, you know, creating that lock? — Mhm.

Most of it is fear and frustration, right? We're frustrated with ourselves or angry with ourselves and we're afraid of what we're going to find. And because of this, we want to turn away, right? We don't believe that we can understand ourselves and we can make things better. And then we think of oh thinking about ourselves or talking about ourselves is self-indulgent because we don't have a way of mapping that and saying no maybe that's a route to health right like we don't think of exercising and eating well as being self-indulgent right we say no that's good self-care and that's good for me and it's good for everyone and everything in the world that I care about so we see it that way because we're not afraid right and we're not confused so if we have a way of understanding ing our mental health that says, hey, we could we can look at like what is it that I'm saying to myself? If I'm saying negative things to myself all the time, right? What's wrong with me and why can't I be any better? Of course, I'm not going to want to look at myself, right? I'm going to be afraid of what I'm going to find inside. It's like the story I tell a lot of my brother and I being kids and there was one of these old clothes trees in the room that, you know, can look like a monster. like it's got arms coming off of it and if when the lights are out low and then we'd get afraid and we'd say oh my ah we'd scream and then someone would come turn the light on and you can see oh it's just a clothes tree like it's not a monster I don't have to be afraid of it but until we turn the lights on and we shine them around our natural reflex and response as humans is to be afraid we're afraid of the unknown so if we bring the good news that says hey we can turn the lights on in all of us and we can look around and you know if we find things that we don't like so much we'll change them right we're not going to find something that terrifies us and we can get at the roots of things so if I don't want to look at myself because I think oh my last three relationships have really not gone well or you know my last three jobs haven't gone the way I want them to or some of my friends are spending less time with me instead of saying oh my god what's wrong with me and we get so afraid we can say well why might that be right did something difficult happen to me and since then I haven't and doing as well in the world. What might that have been? Sometimes it's trauma. Sometimes it's the world around us telling us that we should look away from ourselves and be afraid of what we find inside. But often there is trauma that creates this reflex of guilt and shame inside of us. And then we really don't want to look at what we're going to find. Right? So if we bring compassionate curiosity and we know if I think about myself, if I get curious about why I am, where I am, what's going right in me, what are the good things about me, right? What are the things that I want to be different? Now we're bringing a problem-solving mindset. This is what we do to solve any problem, right? So we can bring that same problem-solving mindset to ourselves and to our mental health. It

occurs to me that so much of the solution is on the other side of whatever it is that we're avoiding. Like the feeling that we wish to inhabit uh requires us to confront the feeling that we don't want to feel. You know what I mean? uh and avoidance. The more I think about avoidance, the more I you know I tend I'm starting to believe that um this is really uh you know kind of the path towards all solutions — like the willingness or the courage to face these uncomfortable things that for whatever reason we're wired to avoid whether it's the world telling us uh that we should avoid it or some experience that has created a defense mechanism around avoidance. Mhm. Yeah. If I don't want to look at myself and look at what's making me feel unhappy, I pretty much guarantee it will keep making me feel unhappy. So, a lot of why we avoid is we're afraid to look at what's so difficult. We're afraid it'll make it so much worse, right? But it's the opposite when we don't look at what's going on inside of ourselves. making us unhappy. And I'm thinking, what's wrong with me? And why isn't my life going the way that I wanted to? or why don't I have the friends that I want whatever it is unless I go look at that it'll be with me all the time so that's like there's bad news and good news right the bad news is if we don't look at it will plague us the good news is if we do look at it that's how we come to a solution state right we don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find is I'll often say like none of us comes out of the womb feeling bad about ourselves right or feeling like oh there's something wrong with me right we can bring that curiosity to saying no Why do I feel this way about me? Right? And maybe it is some trauma. It's some voice we're carrying with ourselves that told me a long time ago that I wasn't good enough. And that's the voice that's still inside of me. Maybe. Well, if that's the case, then I can say, what voice do I want to have inside of me? Is that the voice I want talking to me? You know, every morning when the alarm goes off, is there a different voice? Is there a voice that's more real and honest? I don't want to change just to make myself feel better, right? but maybe I can change to something that makes me feel better because it's true, right? We can choose the voice that we want to have in our head. So, it's just one example where yes, fear and avoidance keeps us from looking at something that is really amenable to being solved, right? You know, people often think the mental health field must be so depressing, right? Because no one gets any better. And people approach me often feeling sometimes sorry for me for what I do and how hard it must be. And I say no, it's quite the opposite. I mean, we sit with people through sometimes very difficult times, but it's uplifting work, right? It's work where yes, people can and do get better, right? We all have our issues and we can look at them and we can get better. So, so my really one of my main points is we don't have to look away. That's what keeps us in an unhappy place. And when we look at ourselves and we bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves and we can do this alone or with sometimes with trusted others, we don't need to most of us to have somebody professional. Some of us do or will benefit from that. But we can start looking at ourselves ourselves. And there's a simple truth here that makes things better. We don't have to avoid. Not avoiding is how we bring healthy change. I want you to imagine uh the person for

whom these ideas are brand new. Perhaps this person their entire life has been self-identifying with that negative inner monologue or has no history with curiously investigating their interior life. Like how does that person begin this process of putting into practice these ideas that you're speaking of? — Yeah. There's some first steps to taking your curiosity and say, "Let me do something with this. " You know, one way of doing it is to think about what do you say to yourself or what's going on in your mind during quiet moments, right? So, it might be time in an elevator or, you know, time between appointments, whatever it may be. What are you saying to yourself? You time in a car, stopped at a light if there wasn't music on. What are we telling ourselves? What's our narrative of self? A lot of us are getting down on ourselves. We're saying really negative things to oursel and just to notice that. So I say nothing gets better. If someone were following a person around and saying awful things to them all day, we wouldn't expect life to get better, right? But it can be even worse than that. We're were the person who's doing it to ourselves. We're literally inside of ourselves saying difficult things to ourselves. So, as an example, one thing I realized a bunch of years back was there was a shadow voice inside of me that would be very critical if I did something wrong, right? So, if I drop something, it would say like, oh, and what an idiot or and to stop and realize like, whoa, that's going on inside of me, right? And like that can't be making anything better. Like, do I really believe that? Like, you know, do I remember when that might have come into me? And even if I can't, how would I like that to be different, right? like I don't think that's right for anyone to do to someone else. So I certainly don't think it's good or it's right to do inside of ourselves. So that kind of thing comes from just observing ourselves. So another thing we can do is just write a little bit. You know it can just be a half a page or a page. It doesn't have to be a you know a long um you know anything long that we write but we can write about let me write about my life. You know the basics of where did I come from? What went on in my life? What am I responsible for? where have I guided my life? You know, in the book I write two different perspectives of my life and they're both quite brief. And if you read one, it's very negative. the other, it's much more positive. And you could say they're both true, right? They are both true. They adhere to the same facts. But I have a choice of which one is actually and really true. And if I don't think about the positive one, the part that talks about resilience and perseverance, if I don't say, "No, that's what I believe to be true, that's going to be my story, not because it makes me feel better. It's empowering and it's true. " So that's a choice that I can make. And if I don't know that, what I'll do is just have the reflex inside of me of telling myself the negative story. And then I become afraid and I become I get down on myself and I start saying negative things to myself. So, so this idea that we can choose what our story is and what our narrative is. We're going to be adherent to the facts, but we're going to choose what that story is so empowering. So, I think that these are ways of bringing compassionate curiosity and just our ability to observe to ourselves and to our own health. You talk about the

profoundity of these life narratives like human beings are storytelling animals. It's how we make sense of the world. And all of us are walking around with some story uh that informs the quality of our lives. And to one degree or another, like these stories are unconsciously woven over time based upon — certain experiences that we've had that for whatever reason our brain selects and kind of overemphasizes in terms of importance. Um and we're living reactively based upon this script that we didn't author and to the extent that our negative self-t talk is really at the helm you know kind of scripting this we're all living our lives uh in accordance with a script that we didn't author I suppose right and once you recognize like oh it's a story and I can actually tell a different story that become that leads you into this empowerment notion that you talk about.

— Yes. To realize, hey, I tell myself a story about myself and I don't even really stop and think what is that story? How did I get there and do I even believe it? So, as an example, very often I've sat with someone who's coming in, say a patient, we're meeting each other for the first time and I know some information and we talk a little bit and I learn a little bit about their life, maybe in the first 10 or 15 minutes and then I ask them what they think about themselves, right? And very often they'll tell a story that has no similarity at all to what I've read and the person I've talked to now for 10 or 15 minutes. They might say, "Well, nothing ever really goes well for me and I don't have a lot of friends and it's really hard for me to be in the world and to get ahead. " And they're telling me a story and that story may be about weakness and it may be about life getting the better of the person and they think, "Wow, it doesn't match anything that I know is true about this person. " So, someone who will tell you about the people in their life, right? And then we'll say, "Well, no one likes me. " Right? in just talking with them anecdotally, you learn about a couple good things in their life and then they'll say, "Well, nothing ever goes right for me. " So, we all have a bias in us towards the negative. This is built in us to keep us safe. So, if five good things happen and one thing happens that could be kind of dangerous, we should remember the dangerous thing because it keeps us safe, right? So, that's a bias in us, but it's a bias in us to keep us safe. What ends up happening is our minds hijack that bias and start making the story of ourselves with that bias at the forefront. And because traumas cause this reflex in us of guilt and shame, then we don't look at what may be true about the things that have been traumatic in our lives, but the guilt and shame stays with us. And before you know it, we have a story of self that doesn't match who we are, but we just accept it as true. And it's remarkable to say to someone, even to comment, "Wow, I mean, even knowing you just a little bit, that story you just told yourself, told me about yourself just doesn't match at all. " Like you said, nothing ever goes well and you don't have any friends and you're quite alone and then you told me about interconnections and good people in your lives and even some successes. And you know, sometimes people are really struck by that they just told me in a very ironclad way about themselves and it doesn't match at all what they think about themselves, you know, when when they're just talking and they're not in that stress of, "Oh my gosh, what do I really think about myself? " Then the old narrative comes up and we need to challenge the old narrative in order to take control of our lives.

So it's universal that we have this bias towards a negative narrative. Uh but there are people who walk around with some degree of positive affect informed by a positive internal yes narrative. Uh I'm not exactly trustworthy of those people. Like sometimes I'm like how could that be possible? Uh is that sociopathic or narcissistic? like there's a healthy uh you know kind of positive internal monologue that we can craft over time. Um but then there's ones that are somewhat delusional and perhaps like not so healthy. Is that fair? Is that true? — I think so. I I think that this bias in us towards the negative um you know we don't have to be uh victims to that, right? We can acknowledge okay there is a bias towards the negative let me be careful about that you know if my day goes really well but one negative thing happens I lose my keys or I drop something for am I going to at the end of the day say oh it was a bad day and I can't do anything right there's a bias in us but we can be empowered to say okay that bias is there but is that really what I want to build the story upon if I look back and think oh it was a bad day am I ignoring those five things that went really Well, so sometimes a person can have a life narrative that is coming through the lens of thinking too highly of themselves and not looking at things that are negative. That's much more rare. It's much more rare. Most of us have a bias towards the negative as we think about ourselves. And the people that don't have that often are kind of savvy to how things work and they step back and they look at their lives and they understand the tendency to see through that negative lens and they really and truly do want to see clearly, right? And then also we can learn from the people who are really blessed with such a positive mentality then all that all of us can see them as role models. And I write in the book about Aleandro Zenardi who woke up after an accident and had lost both legs. And his first thought was I wonder how I'm going to do everything I do without legs, right? And you think, wow, I mean that is it's an amazing person and an amazing mindset to have and it's too much to ask for the rest of us, right? But we can look to that and say that is powerful and that is inspiring, right? And can I have some of that for myself? you know, can I find some of the goodness within myself to give to myself as I try and look with truth at my own life and then use this way of approach, this way that's a parallel for physical health to understand our structure of self, our function of self, our drives, and to say, I'm empowered to understand myself. Let me use this and make my life better. I don't have to look away because I'm afraid of what I'm going to find or I'm afraid that I can't make things better. on this journey towards

looking inward towards trying to better understand ourselves. Um you set forth in the book like a couple different pillars. First we have to understand how we think then behave. So maybe let's start with the thinking part uh and how you think about this aspect of it because you have this um five-part structure of the self — that you talk about. Can you elaborate on that? — Yeah, the structure of self is what arises from how our brains work. Like we all have a human brain that's extremely complicated, but it also follows patterns. And we've learned a lot between psychology and neuroscience. about how our brains function. For example, we have an unconscious mind and that's part of this pillar. And most of what goes on inside of us goes on in our unconscious mind. And that sort of sets the climate in us. So if there's a climate of negativity inside of me, I'm much more likely to see the next thing that comes at me in a negative way. So there's a lot of automaticity that goes on inside of us in our unconscious mind. Our conscious mind sits on top of the unconscious mind and that's a much smaller part of our brain space. But that's our awareness. That's the awareness that we shift from one thing to another. It's what we're paying attention to. And then we all have defense mechanisms that protect us. You know, the world can be a scary place to be in. We have defense mechanisms that then we deploy automatically. So we can have a say. We can understand them and we can guide them to be different. But if we don't do that, then they develop with a lot of automatic deployment. And around all of this, there's a character structure. Who we are as we face the world, what we're predisposed to, how we tend to interact with other people, whether we're outgoing or introverted, right? There are a lot of things about us that are captured in our character structure. And then upon that is an I. It's an awareness that okay, there's a me that is going to now go through time, right? there's a me that's going to function in this world around me. So the first pillar is the structure of self. And if we go and we look at what's going on in this pillar, this is how we figure out what's going on inside of us when things aren't the way we want to be. So for example, if I find myself being reactive and very aggressive with people, I might see, okay, I'm deploying a defense mechanism, right? And it's too much, right? It's not a healthy defense mechanism. How did that come about in me? How can I change it? So the answers are in these pillars and the first pillar is the structure of self. — Mhm. With respect to let's just take defense mechanisms like having clarity. Oh, I respond in this way when this set of circumstances arises. I understand I'm trying to protect some aspect of self with regard to that. In terms of change, change has to be done through behavior. So how do you think about um the interplay between thought and behavior in terms of make actually like making changes

— we have to be aware of everything that contributes to who we are right we can't just look at our behaviors and say well I want to change that behavior um and I'm just going to do it change it by deciding very often that's why our efforts to be healthier do not work. So if for example I want to be healthier by exercising but I never seem to be succeeding when I go to the gym, right? Then I might look at why is that right? I want to be healthier. I want to exercise. Why am why is that behavior not changing? To just say well you decided you should change it. Now go change it. Like it doesn't work. So for example maybe what's going on in my unconscious mind is that I won't be successful. I won't be successful because, you know, the last six times I tried to go to the gym and to be healthier, I wasn't able to do it. So, it's inside of me all the time. I'm not going to be able to do it. I'm going to feel worse about myself this time than all the others. Unless we go look at that, how do we expect the behavior to change? Right? So, if we go look, I might say, well, did it go wrong six times in six different ways, or am I doing the same thing in a way that isn't healthy? So no, this is very common where a person who wants to be healthier is too ambitious and they set forth I'm going to do all of these things cuz there's a lot of enthusiasm inside. Then they set themselves up for failure. They're not able to adhere to what they did and then they take away another experience and they say I'll never be healthy. Like there's the seventh time I haven't been able to do it. But what if the person could bring understanding and that understanding might say well it's not really seven times. It's one time seven times over. Right? you've done the same thing over and over again like this is good news right because we can look at that and say well what is that thing let me bring some change there right and then maybe I can succeed so if I say let me have a slightly less ambitious regimen something that I could really do something that's reasonable for me right so now I've changed what I'm trying to do and I'm going to change my selft talk I'm not going to set out doing this telling myself I'm going to fail I'm going to say hey I understood something I brought change to how I'm going about it So I'm going to do it again and I feel good about this time. Now I can change the behavior. Right? So we have to look at what's going on inside of ourselves, the structure of self before we can get to our function. Right? Because the structure and the function are intertwined. And we we might find the answer in one place or we might find it in another place. But mental health has really tried to split us apart. This is the problem with pathologizing us and saying, "Oh, you're a I mean, sometimes people will talk about people as a number. That's a 296. 32. " Or this is not a holistic view of ourselves. If we say, "Okay, there's a structure that applies to every human and a function human. The answers are going to be somewhere in there, right? And I don't want to get caught up on just one place. I'm just going to change my behaviors. " It's just not how we work. So just as we can understand our bodies to get healthier physically, minds get healthier

can understand our minds get healthier mentally. — I think you've really identified the conundrum of personal development because as much as there are principles and things that work, it really is a brain pet pretzel or like a Zen Cohen. It's a yes and like there are so many things operating at once. It's like on one level things like feelings, thoughts, and emotions are downstream of behavior. From a neuroscience perspective, mood follows action. And if you want to make a change in your life, you have to make a decision and take a contrary action and follow that up with the next right action. Create consistency and momentum and set a goal and schedule these things. Like there's logistical practicalities towards uh you know making a positive change in your life. But fundamentally, if you don't pop the hood and look inward at what's going on with the engine, like the engine is gonna catch on fire at some point. So there's like the doing like these practical things that you have to do and then you have to undo a whole bunch of stuff. And if you're avoiding that or turning a blind eye towards it, your capacity to change or transform or evolve is going to be neutered or shortcircuited. you'll hit a plateau or you'll end up back treading at some point. — And I think that happens to us a lot, right? Because we think of it as so complicated. And even, you know, I think of what you just described, like there's a loop where a behavior can impact a feeling, right? So, a negative behavior and then I feel bad about myself, but feeling bad about myself makes it more likely I'll do the negative behavior again, right? — It's this recursive thing, — right? and we're just stuck in a vicious cycle and then we get confused and we get scared. And what I'm advocating for is not making things more complicated, right? It's actually a simplification. It says, okay, you know, yes, we're all very complicated, but we can go look at that and we don't have to be afraid to look at that. So, for example, if there's a negative behavior in your life, we might think, well, — what is that behavior? Do we have an idea of where it came from? If you, you know, put your mind to it, do you think you can change it? Have you tried to change it? Let's talk about maybe changing it. We could try that. Let's say we bring about ways to change and it doesn't work. We could say, well, okay, let's now let's look again, right? Let's look at why it didn't change. What what's the selft talk going on inside of you? Are you feeling so down that it makes it hard to change that behavior? Do you need a better strategy? Right? Or maybe it is that the behavior isn't going to change until the feeling changes. Right? If you feel really down on yourself and you're trying to change avoidance behaviors, say of social situations, then that's not really going to work, right? We might say, well, let's look at why you feel so down on yourself. Is it really true that you can't succeed and no one likes you in social situations? Let's look at some wins. Or if there aren't a lot of wins, let's look at why there might not be. There's got to be a way we can get in here, right? And we can do something different. See what change it brings or doesn't bring. And then from that, now we have more learning. And then we use that to run it forward. we can simplify, have a way of accessing the system, right? And then we make something better. We see how it impacted the system and we move forward from there, right? There are ways we can simplify our understanding and our approach and it fits with the idea of compassionate curiosity and of us not having to be afraid to look at ourselves. We're complicated, but the car is complicated, too, right? So, if there's something going on in the engine that doesn't sound good, we don't just turn away because it's complicated. we say, "Okay, we got to look at that or have someone help us look at it. " We don't have to be afraid just because we're complicated.

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this book is the fact that agency and empowerment are central uh pillars and themes and you are taking a very proactive approach to people's mental health. We're in this paradigm of pathizing everything. It's a sort of diagnosis and prescribed mentality. And this book is really about like how can we flourish instead of like how do you deal with this problem? It's like here are here's everything that I've learned about how you can think about your own mental health and take responsibility for it, take charge of it and be empowered with agency to you uplevel your lived experience. — Yes. Just as we do with physical health, we can wi-i with mental health bring a set of thoughts, a structure that tells us, okay, this is how all of us function, right? We all have a human brain and a human mind and there are these routes to understanding ourselves. We all have a structure of self and a function of self. And when the structure and function of self are in healthy places, then these good things sit upon that. agency, empowerment, humility and gratitude. These are the things that make for happy lives and then the drives that each of us have are in balance. So just as we understand how our bodies work and you know we can talk about physical health without feeling afraid or intimidated, we can do the same with mental health and it has to be done in a different way. We have to look at what we know about ourselves instead of just applying diagnosis to ourselves. You know, there's this giant book with enough room in it to give all of us five, six, seven diagnoses. And none of it is explanatory. empowering. But it's insight and knowledge that will allow us to guide ourselves forward.

— What is your thesis with respect to human flourishing from a mental health perspective? — We need to have our drives in balance. And we've conceived of humans as having just two drives. assertion or often called aggression and pleasure seeking and it just doesn't explain how we're here. Humans would not have survived if all there were assertion and pleasure seeeking. There's another drive in us. The drive that is behind altruism. A drive that's behind the desire to leave the world better than we founded or to leave today and the people we meet today and people we care about better than they were before. And if you look at when humans are living in a way that brings happiness and when humans are doing constructive things as opposed to destructive things, we can see what's the same across those situations. Right? When we're doing good things and we're living good lives, these drives that are in each and every one of us are in balance and we're led by the generative drive which is our birthright as a human being. Then everything can come into line underneath of that. Our structure of self, our function of self. This isn't to say that there aren't problems, but this gives us a way of understanding ourselves, understanding what those problems are and making things better. — So, you just mentioned there's three fundamental human drives. So, perhaps it would be helpful if we defined those three individually. — Yeah. So, historically, assertion or aggression has just been the desire to have a cause and effect on the world. I want to do something and I want to see things be different because I did whatever I did. It's not necessarily to make things better. It's just that I want to matter and I want what I do to matter. And this goes handinhand with the second drive which is pleasure which isn't just hedonistic forms of pleasure. It can be the pleasure of safety or the pleasure of having enough food. So we want to assert ourselves in the world and we want these things that bring us pleasure and safety. But there's so much more to us than that. There's no way that our species would have survived if it was all about me. Like everything about all of us is for me. I want to assert myself and I want to find pleasure. It just doesn't explain constructive human behavior, altruism, the creation of societies and civilizations and beautiful buildings and art and kindness between people. So if we look at what's real and true about us, we see that there is a generative drive sitting over us. and our philosophy and our literary traditions tell us this, but we haven't recognized and looked at this in psychology to say, "Hey, this is what's governing us. " And if we're aware of it and we're honing this, then the assertion in us and the desire for pleasure and safety, all this comes into line in healthy ways. Because if we're not aligned, what happens is we can get very, very out of balance with the other drives. And that's when our lives get off track. Mhm. The assertion

drive and the pleasure drive. These are well understood, well studied and have been the focus of psychology and psychiatry. Uh has it always been known that there is this third fundamental human drive, the generative drive, uh and that it's just been kind of pushed to the side or is this a new idea that you're pioneering? — No, I think it's always been known. I think that it was known long before we even thought of psychology or psychiatry as a separate discipline. I I think poets and playwrights and great writers have always known this and have written about humans and our search for meaning, our search for mattering. So I think we have always known this. It's just that like any field, mental health can have an orthodoxy to it. And a long time ago, 100 years or so, when we were learning a lot through Freud and through some of the people who were really thinking about human behavior, we learned a lot. But what we ended up doing was taking that and sort of making gospel of it and saying, okay, these are the only two drives. Why? Because that's what those people were focused upon, right? They were not looking more broadly. So the field then kind and it becomes stuck and that's part of the problem is that mental health has not moved forward. It has not integrated neither new knowledge for example from neuroscience nor old knowledge that we've had about humans you know for centuries and centuries. And it hasn't exercised leadership in saying to us, hey, we can draw together everything we know as people, as humans, and look at what we can learn from it to understand ourselves as opposed to just looking at mental health through a lens that's just pathizing. We know, of course, that we're happier when our lives are about something bigger than ourselves. We're happier and more fulfilled and more satisfied when we feel more connected to other people. But in our daily lives, we tend to overindex on what it is that we're chasing, whether it's, you know, pleasure, convenience, or the next accomplishment. So that notion of generative drive which is this more altruistic uh kind of animating force within all humans is something that is sort of downregulated or kind of less focused on like we're not strategic about how we're approaching our lives to make sure that we're optimizing for that generative drive.

— So often life can weigh on us. you know, it brings us difficulties and stressors and it brings us traumas. And it's easy to have our perspective narrowed, right? And to say, look, I just need to get through this day or I need to get for myself what from this day or I'm just trying to find some pleasure at the end of this day. And then we can get very cynical and we can think that looking beyond ourselves is something that doesn't really make sense or it's for people that aren't really going to get themselves ahead, right? And what we do is we literally lose the thread of our humanness and our perspective can get more and more narrowed and even very good people can lose sight of you know what we're here for and what even if you talk to us in calm moments or you know in quiet moments we'll say what we really value. We know what we value. We know that it's the things that are beyond us. And lo and behold that's how our lives are the best they can be also right is by looking at what is beyond us. But in modern society, we so often just kind of get beaten back to just trying to get through the day and seeing ourselves through the lens of just trying to survive. You know, life is so hard and it is important that we survive each day, but there's so much more to us than that. And in the mental health field that has looked at us through the lens of what's wrong, you know, we can sort of be forgiven for having a very narrowed lens often of what we mean and what our lives mean. Mhm. I think we

touched on this last time, but I it might be worth spending a few minutes on this idea of self-sabotage. Like, why do we continue to seek out or create experiences that make us feel bad? Like we're we're basically crafting negative experiences based upon some narrative or something that happened a long time ago. Is it that we find comfort in the consistency of those experiences? Like what is it about those early childhood traumatic experiences that make us um try to replicate them? — Yeah. I think we find discomfort but we don't know how to change. Right. So if you imagine a person who's been in five relationships that were not healthy or were even abusive, right? and that was their past five relationships. And people will say, "Oh, that person has a repetition compulsion. " They say, "No, that is not what's going on. " Right? If you talk to people who are in that situation, most of the time, what they're trying to do is make things right. They know that things haven't gone right in these past relationships, and they feel very, very bad about that, and they want things to go right, so they want to try again, but they don't understand what to do differently. Right? How many times I've seen a person say, "Oh, you can't help me. I've had five bad relationships. I'm just giving up on it. " Right? And then I'll say something like, "Well, if you've had five different bad relationships, entirely different, maybe I'll agree with you, but that's not what you're going to tell me, right? me about five relationships that all have similarity in them. So let's understand right why those things that you're doing that maybe don't attract the healthiest partner or you can see someone is unhealthy and you're not responding to that and making change right let's look at that why might that be what might you have learned at some point that told you always have to be pleasing someone even if you think this might not be a good person to have in your life or that you always have to behave a certain way in relationships. Let's look does that go back to relationships? Does it go back to childhood experiences that you carry forward with you? Like we can get at this. So, so I'm always trying to get that person who thinks it's hopeless because I've had five bad relationships to say — no, let's just look at it, right? We can in a collaborative way bring our curiosity to why might that be? And we can use that to bring real change. Now, often we're off to the races of like how are we going to understand what change be? What's the sixth time going to be that's different from the five that came before it? — To use your example of an abusive relationship, is there any validity or wisdom in the idea that one would repeatedly seek those types of relationships out as a way of trying to see if they can make it good this time? because then it would mean that the original relationship that gave rise to this compulsion wasn't their fault. — Yes. Very often, not always, but very often that is what we're doing. And if we're doing that, it's just because we don't know any different way, right? And if you ask people, if you talk to people who are doing that about what they're doing, somewhere inside of us is the understanding that I'm probably not going to get a different result, right? But if I don't know how to look at myself and how to understand or I'm afraid to look at myself, what else is there to do? Right? And that's why you can see sometimes the light bulb goes off, you know, over a person's mind when they realize whether it's a relationship, a job, it's their friendships, family, whatever it may be of like, oh, like I could do things differently, right? And in the example of an abusive relationship, a person might realize, right, I'm, you know, I'm always trying to please someone else and thinking that if I do that, it'll make them be nicer to me. It'll make things better. And, you know, that is how it was when I was growing up. And maybe, you know, they'll site a parent or someone important in their life who treated them that way, right? Just do better and maybe I'll be nice to you or just do better and maybe I won't harm you, right? And the person keeps trying to do better and and can't avoid the harm, right? So then they develop just a sense of fear and frustration and a feeling that there's something wrong with them, which is all that we can understand. When we're children, we don't have what we have as adults, right? A big outer cortex in our brain. So we can think abstractly. So often if bad things have gone on when a person was a child, the person learns to attribute that to self. they learn there must be something wrong with me and I should just keep trying harder right because the brain hasn't evolved enough to see beyond that but now that person can be as an adult can look at that and say who taught me that wrong lesson now I will often say that we learn lessons in childhood but many of them are not true right many people learn traumatic lessons of how they have to be better for everyone else or they're never going to get things that are as good as other people get and you know we learn these things and we carry them forward with us, but that doesn't mean that they're true. And we can stop and we can challenge. So, for example, that person who realizes, you know, I'm choosing people who you can never please in relationships and that's why they don't go well and like I don't want to do that, right? I have a lot of good to bring to a relationship. I want to bring the best that I have. I'm I want to even understand better what are my strengths and my weaknesses, right? I want to really do better even with my strengths. I want to look at my weaknesses in relationships and maybe make them better, too. And then I want to bring a self to a relationship with another person who's also bringing their best self. Like relationships are hard enough when we're doing that, right? Let alone if I think I'm not good enough and I'm going to find somebody unpleasable to try and please. That's why the same thing has happened over and over again. And that's why the same thing does not have to happen now with the onset of

some degree of self-awareness around that with somebody realizing like, okay, my next relationship is not going to be that. I'm extracting myself from whatever relationship I'm in that is playing that narrative out. The work and the discomfort comes in this realizing like okay it's time it's not indulgent to honor myself to value myself and perhaps I would be well served by establishing a boundary like okay this is not okay. That's very uncomfortable uh for somebody who's unfamiliar with that. Um especially if that person has a default setting around people pleasing or a fear of abandonment like oh well if I do that then they're really going to get mad or they're you know they're really going to have a reason to complain about me to other people and that can be — terrifying to the point of the person just continuing on with the abusive relationship. — Right. So and we do have to lift up the hood and if we do we can find the answer. So, so you had said a person saying to themselves, okay, it's not indulgent to value myself. You think about how interesting that is. And a lot of us do feel that way that is it indulgent to value myself, right? So, we come right at where was that learned that it might be indulgent to value yourself? Right? That probably anchors to something to something, some relationship, some person where you weren't supposed to value yourself. Right? So then we talk is it indulgent for a person to value themselves and we say no we would want everyone to be able to do that right to see that you're worthwhile you deserve not to be harmed you deserve people who want goodness for you around you right that's not indulgent so we can come at that by then looking at how we learn something different if we think that that's what everyone should have why would we be the exception right why is it that I think it might be indulgent to value myself where did that it into me, right? Who's reinforced that it's indulgent to value myself, right? Now, we're bringing that compassionate curiosity and that kind of Sherlock Holmes uh, you know, being a detective to like, oh, why might I think that way? And yeah, I can see how that would allow me to set too low a bar for people who are in my life. Then now I've got a lot of people in my life who maybe think it's good that I don't value myself, right? So, so where we have to go is what would be healthy. I want to take care of myself. How might I value myself in a different way? And now we can talk about then some of the difficult things like for example setting boundaries with people. You know, we're not saying, "Okay, change everything overnight. That's unrealistic. " And then it doesn't go well and the person feels worse on the other side of it. We say, "Okay, let's start making some wins. Let's start finding a route to some wins. " And the whole way through we're emphasizing like this is not just a frame shift so you feel better, right? What we're doing is we're looking at what's real and true. You're not the only person on earth who doesn't get to have the goodness you think everyone else on earth deserves. So, let's go about making that better. I just know in my own personal journey with this. Uh it's easy to craft in an identity around this like oh if you're a people pleaser like oh I'm the person who can get along with everyone not realizing that you're dishonoring yourself the entire way like living this sort of chameleonic existence where you morph and kind of adapt to your environment to make sure that you're pleasant and uh liked by everybody that you encounter. — Right. Yes. Think about looking at core beliefs. So you say I I'm a person who's liked by everyone, right? We say, okay, maybe that's true, right? Maybe we talk about it a little bit and this person gets everyone to like them. So then we think, well, it's not good to be liked by everyone, right? There will be people who come at a person wanting to take advantage of that person or wanting them to feel worse about themselves. Why is it that I need to be liked by everyone? Right? I probably should think about know what it means to take care of myself, right? How do I want to take care of myself? everyone to take care of themselves? And if I do that, I might want to come to a different place that says, you know, if someone is well-meaning, I can be liked by them. I get along well with people who are well-meaning. But, you know, sometimes I can't get along with everyone because there are people who are approaching me in ways that just aren't okay. And I have to set a boundary. just not taking care of myself to get along with everyone. — Right? So now we're just challenging these core concepts, right? So saying I get along with everyone can be a core belief about self. And even if that's true, it doesn't mean that it's good. — So we we'll go and look at that and we want to know what do we think about ourselves? What's the story we're telling ourselves? What's what do I think is true about me? Okay, let's get that out there and is all of that healthy? So again, we're looking for what's going right. way more is going right than wrong because we're upright and we're in the world around us. So, in starting from there and not having to be afraid and not getting so down on ourselves, now we can look at ourselves and we can do difficult things like set boundaries where we weren't able to before. Small wins, one step at a time, right? This is how we get ourselves better and healthier.

We've spoken a few times about the importance of setting a boundary and how that's a self-honoring practice. For somebody who isn't used to that or is new to the idea of respecting themsel in that way, this can be a very uncomfortable exercise. So, how do you set a boundary? — Setting a boundary often involves a lot of thought, reflection, and planning. So, first we need to know what our intention is. So if someone is uh too aggressive or insulting to us and we want to set a boundary against that, we need to first know what we're doing, right? We're not going to tell that person and never talk to me again or we can you get afraid I'm going to have to say something so aggressive and I won't be able to do it, right? We say what is it that we really want to do? And it might be something like it doesn't feel comfortable when you're talking to me that way and I'd appreciate it if you didn't or something that's firm, right? But we know what we're saying. So we don't fear that we're going to say something so aggressive or we're going to have to say something so aggressive and that person's going to be so angry with us or there's going to be a big blow up or the opposite that we're going to say something that isn't effective and then and we're going to feel worse. So knowing what is the boundary that we are setting, what words do I want to put to that? Can I imagine myself saying those words? Do I have a set of thoughts or an imagination of what may come back to me? So that we're being as realistic about what we're doing and how we're doing it. And then sometimes it helps to talk with someone else or to practice with someone else and or if we can't to practice alone, you know, saying that and saying that in a way that has resolve of please don't talk to me that way or whatever it is we may say. And knowing that we're going to do that and we're going to have the resolve to stay with it. So, you know, if the person says, "I'll talk to you any way I want or whatever," we may not be able to then to go fix that at the moment and to say respond to that. But we have to take in that the person didn't heed that boundary. What might I do next? Does that mean I really need to disengage with this person? So we don't have to feel that we're opening up a Pandora's box and who knows what will happen after we say this thing or that we will let ourselves down or that we have to solve everything at once. It's just a declaration of self. It's then it's much clearer to say I don't think it's okay for this person to talk to me this way. It's not okay to talk to anyone this way. So me this way. I'm going to say that. Okay. We get down to then the simple goodness of what it is that we're trying to do and we prepare and plan and sometimes rehearse it in a way that we can stand by it. The success of it isn't based upon what the other person does because we can't control that. The success of it then is based upon what we do. If the challenge in setting a boundary is being driven by an unhealthy fear of other people's opinions, how does one prepare themselves uh to sit in uh a negative reaction to setting that boundary? Well, — first we need to make sure that it's okay and that it's safe. That there's certain people it might not be safe to set a boundary with. So we want to take stock of what is the situation? um what is the safety of the situation including for the other person being verbally or emotionally aggressive. So yes, it can be very hard to do that and sometimes we need help in doing it. We might think it's going to be hard for me to do that my myself. Is there someone else I can recruit for example within a family system? Someone else who sees that this isn't okay and could I talk to that person about it? Could I have someone with me when I set the boundary? Is that something I'm going to feel comfortable doing in person? Is it something I might do in a way that's not in person? So, we have to look at the specifics of the person, the other person, the situation, and what makes it hard to set a boundary. There may be reasons that it's just hard for that person to set boundaries. Okay, that may be part of it. It's kind of in their character structure, but there are often a lot of other reasons in the world around us, and we want to take stock of what those reasons are so we get the maybe the help, the time, the place, what we're actually doing. we get it right for what the situation really is. And if and when that person disrespects the boundary, what can you say uh to prevent that person whose boundary has been violated from then just caving in? — Like how do they adhere to that boundary and what is the process of like living up to the promise of um sustaining a boundary? — Right. Well, we want to have a plan. So, the person knows if I set that boundary and the other person comes over it, what am I going to do next? So, I might have thought and planned and decided upon what I'm going to say is no, I don't then I don't want to have this conversation and I'll leave and then I may be ready to leave the room. I might have decided on that. Okay, then I would have prepared for it and run through the thought experiments in my head of what it might feel like and now I feel ready to do that. It might be very different where I say if that person comes over the boundary I'm not going to solve that in the here or now or that person's going to be humiliating. I'm going to end up coming away from it feeling worse. So what I may do is I not push that at the moment. Right? But then I'm going to go back and I'm going to do something different and I may say I'm not going to interact with that person again. I might have a different mechanism like in a job setting is at the time that human resources gets involved just as an example. Right? So, so the person knows what they will do if it doesn't go well and they have the right attribution, the correct attribution, which is if this doesn't go well, I know I'm doing something reasonable. I'm just asking someone not to talk to me in a way that we all know is not an okay way to talk to other people. I'm not the one in the wrong here. I can anchor to that, right? And if it doesn't go well, it will be because that person didn't respond. It's not because I'm such a loser, I can't get that across to somebody else, as people will say, or I'm so weak, I can't make someone feel. No, none of that is true. You're doing something that's good and right. If the other person can't hear that and take that in, there's a problem with them. You have to decide how to respond to that, but we're attributing the problem in the right direction, which is to the person who can't hear that very reasonable boundary.

boundary. in terms of developing some awareness around uh one's structure of self, these five parts, what are some practices that you can share um to help people kind of connect with what their defense mechanisms might be, what their character structure is, for example. And I try and give a lot of guidance, a lot of practical steps in the book, but I'll I'll pick a couple of them that I think really um kind of really stand out to me. So, for example, with your unconscious mind, thinking about what comes to you automatically can be very important. So, what do I say to myself when I'm not paying attention? Right? in the car at a red light? um what do I think about myself if um I'm just kind of reviewing my day or thinking about you know an interaction I had with someone how do I lead in what attitude towards myself this is telling us about the unconscious priming inside of ourselves do I rapidly go to something negative right or if I see something that seems nice do I think a cynical thought about it or do I think oh that's not for me so what we're trying to do is pay attention to what's going on in our unconscious mind and we look at that through what comes to us automatically, how we respond in certain situations. Now, we start learning about ourselves, right, about defense mechanisms. We can think, well, what do I do if something isn't going well, right? I'm having an experience with someone and it just seems tense or it's not going very well. What do I do? And that can tell us about our defense mechanism. So for example, do I get really afraid and think I must be doing something wrong and then I say well how can I make that person happy with me right or do I feel like gosh this isn't going well and I don't know what to do about it I better get out of here and then I say I have to use the restroom right so those are possibilities do I get very aggressive I think this isn't going well so I want to tell that person what's wrong with them right so by thinking about how we respond for example in situations that could have discomfort or contention we learn a lot about the defense mechanisms we're deploying. So what we're trying to do here is just shine light on our whole self, right? It does not serve us to have any darkness anywhere, right? So what we're trying to do is say there's there is a mechanism of understanding and then there are a whole bunch of practical steps we can take so that we're shining light throughout our structure of self and then also throughout our function of self and we know that we're going to find the answers there. And those are just two examples to help understand what's in our unconscious mind and the defense mechanisms that we're deploying. — It reminds me of doing a four-step inventory, you know, in 12step. My sense is that most people have a view of themselves that is far from accurate. And it's only when you kind of uh engage with some form of rigorous self-inventory — uh over a period of time such that you can identify these patterns objectively that you have this sort of epiphany about how you're actually behaving uh in contrast to how you believe you're behaving and showing up in the world. — Right. Yes. Most of us do not have an accurate self- assessment or an accurate narrative. And for the vast majority of people, it's not because that narrative is too positive, right? There are different problems there that anchor to other mental health issues. And that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the average person most often having a view of self and a story of self that is less kind and less accurate than what is true. And this is good news. It fits with the the um the assertion that we don't have to be scared to look at ourselves, right? If we look at ourselves, there's a lot of good that we're going to find, but we have to be empowered to do so. We can't just say, "Well, look at yourself, right? I mean, there has to be a way of doing that. " Which is why, as you're describing in the 12step process, there's steps to look at yourself, right? We need that. We need some help and a little bit of handholding. All of us do in order to get at what's inside of ourselves. And what I'm putting forth is to say we all have a human brain and a human mind and there is a route that we can go about that. There's a way that we can understand so that we can expect good to come of it. I don't expect I'm going to look at myself and either I'm going to be so frustrated because I can't find anything or I find something so bad like see I feel worse. Right? That's not how it goes. Right? with a structure to understand ourselves, a mechanism to understand ourselves and a bunch of help and prompts for how to do that, we can look at ourselves and feel confident. What is this going to lead to? It's going to lead to me making things better. Often

we need other people to reflect our behavior back to us. You know, I'm thinking of the, you know, like somebody who's defensive all the time and has no idea that they're being defensive and it takes somebody, "Oh, you're doing it again. What do you mean I'm not defensive? " That kind of thing. How important is it to uh engage in this process with either a trained professional or even just somebody who knows you well who can be an objective mirror? — Yeah, I think it can be very important and I want to highlight that the first place to start is with ourselves. So most people for example who get very defensive very quickly do know that right there's just a defense mechanism to deny it right. So the person who gets defensive all the time, like that person got defensive 20 times in a row. Do they really not know that? Well, they know it somewhere inside of themselves, but they may be blocked from really seeing it. Why? Because they're not approaching themselves with compassion and curiosity. And very often if a person stops and thinks, "Hey, no harm, no foul. What's going on inside of me? " That person might say, "Hey, I know I get defensive. You know why? four people a day or six people a day are telling me that like okay I kind of know that right I do I really have to beat up on myself is it so bad that I can acknowledge that like why do I get defensive right so now we take the pressure off of ourselves and the place to start for honesty and objectivity is within ourselves and we can often bring a lot more to ourselves than we were bringing before. The second place is with people around us and this is so important you know thinking about trauma in our first discussion because trauma creates a reflex of guilt and shame and we often then do lose sight of ourselves. So we can think oh I've always been a person that didn't get along with other people and we think that we've always been like that but we've only been like that since some significant trauma that overwhelmed our coping skills and now we feel different about ourselves. So often we cannot see ourselves accurately. So, if I know that say you're a good friend and and I see that maybe I've frustrated you a couple of times recently or maybe I haven't seen that but I'm worried that I have and I could come and ask you like hey have you noticed anything in me like I kind of feel a little different and you know maybe you might say to me you have been a little different you a little more short-tempered you know since December or since November whenever whatever month we want to choose doesn't matter what the month is it could be two weeks ago or it could be 11 months ago it's just there's a time when I notice some differenc in you and we think well why might that have been did something happen then and very often we use that you know that so detective work to understand like I've really been thinking differently about myself since that thing happened a couple of months ago and I haven't even really noticed it but I sure have noticed that my mood is lower right but I understand that better maybe through writing a little bit of a narrative about myself but maybe through talking to somebody else who you know who knows me and if we just bring openness and honesty like we're going to find good things that are going to help us. We're not going to find our things that make us run off screaming because we found something so bad about ourselves. That's what leads us to avoid and it's just not true. — Yeah. The openness uh and the honesty, the the cur the compassionate curiosity, like these things are central to piercing the veil of denial. Like to one degree or another, we're all in denial to one extent or another around something that we're doing in our life, right? And that can be a block to that self- inquiry without the willingness to um hold our behaviors loosely and have the willingness to kind of excavate them and look at them objectively. It's very difficult and very complicated to have a healthy defensive structure around us. I mean we can do it but it requires a lot of work. Otherwise we all use a little bit of denial and avoidance and rationalization. it, but boy, we can get out of balance where we start using, for example, a lot of denial or a lot of avoidance or for example, a lot of cynical humor, right? Some examples of defense mechanisms that we all can use a little bit of um are the same ones that we can rely on more and more heavily and we can get to the point where gosh I didn't think of myself as a person who's cynical and avoids all confrontation by being aggressive, right? But like somehow I find myself here because I've leaned more and more on those defense mechanisms. And if we anchor to what is going right, if I'm even thinking about myself and I want my life to be better, I promise everyone that there is way more going right than what's going wrong. So if we look at that like what are the good things about me, right? Like what's going right in my life? What have I done right to get to where I am? 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One of the things that I've run up against in this uh attempt at self-standing is that the self-awareness that is a byproduct of this can then become its own story that creates a different kind of prison. When you become very self-aware of like all of your quirks and your character defects, your patterns that lead you astray, the ways in which you self-sabotage, then it becomes a self-reinforcing story unless you figure out how you're going to then uh put behaviors into motion to transcend those patterns and behaviors. — Yeah. Everything has to serve a process of change, right? and our function of self. Yes, it it includes our behaviors. It ultimately is about our strivings, right? Of where do we want to be in life? Where do I want to go when I move forward from this very moment, right? And when we're focused on our strivings, then we want to bring everything else into line. So, I want my behaviors to serve my strivings. If I want to have a more full life with new people in it and but my behavior is that I'm staying at home, I'm not serving my striving. So if we look at ourselves in this holistic way and we want to bring change, everything has to serve that. So if I have more insights into myself, I think well I want that to translate to me maybe understanding my defenses better. So I'm choosing different behaviors and then I'm more effective in what? In getting what I want, right? If it's a better job or it's a partner or it's better physical health, I'm driving towards something and everything that I'm working on, right, in myself and in my mental health has to serve moving myself forward, right? But we have to have an understanding. It's just like someone who wants to lose 30 lbs, be healthier, feel better, have more energy. They need to know that takes time, right? If they just go to the gym for two days and they say, "Well, I'm not any better. " Then they'll give up, right? And they'll be more down on themselves. So yes, everything that we're doing then has to serve these good healthy goals. But we have to have a way of going about it and we have to have a timeline go easy on ourselves. We have to say okay I can see these things in me that I want to change or even that I don't I don't feel good about it I feel bad about. It's like it's okay right it's okay. We can look at that. Now how do we start making things better? So some of it is also just taking the pressure of that negative voice and saying yes, if I see things that I want to be different, I'm going to work towards making them different. And guess what that leads to? — Making them different. Now we feel empowered, right? We're more looking at what's going right in ourselves. We're even more empowered to change what we want to be different.

We talked about the five-part structure of self, which really orients around thinking. uh and you mentioned just now strivings which is one of the uh five-part functions of self which is really around behavior like doing right so maybe talk a little bit more about what those other four parts are and you know highlight the strivings part — in more depth — yeah the function of self takes that I that's at the end of the structure of self and moves it through time so and I'm aware that there's a me this me is moving through time. I know that I have a history. I know that I'm somewhere right now thinking and doing things. And I know that this is leading to the future, the next moments and days that come for me. So there's an eye. That eye moves through time. And then I'm looking at my defense mechanisms not in a static array of what's my defensive structure, but how am I deploying them in real time, right? What did I just do during that last uncomfortable moment? like what are not just my defensive structure but how am I deploying them? How fast What insight do I have about how I'm keeping myself safe in the world? Then we look at what's salient to us. One of the most important words of salience. You and I each could be thinking about a million different things right now. There's so many stimuli coming from inside and out. But we're not thinking of those other things. We're thinking about this. It's what's salient to us and what we're paying attention to. How we're taking our consciousness and directing it is so important and often that's determined by things other than our choice. So if we look at salience we guide ourselves towards what being prominent in our life is what arises from our choice. Right? And this is serving us in that it lets us better understand and control and telegraph our behaviors. And our behaviors have to serve our strivings. Not just where am I now and how am I behaving now, but if I'm interested in where I'm at now and how I'm behaving now, that's because I'm interested in what will come next. I am striving for things. We all are striving for things. And that sits at the top of our function of self. And everything that's going on in us can be anchored to something. Everything we don't like or we want to be different can be anchored to something in the structure of self or in the function of self. And if we approach ourselves with compassionate curiosity through the lens of what's going right, then we will be able to understand what is not the way we want it in the structure and function of self. And that's how we keep our drives in balance. It's how we find empowerment and humility and agency and gratitude. And ultimately what we're all searching for, which is not happiness in some nebulous way. It's peace, contentment, and delight, which is what we mean when we talk about happiness.

I'm imagining the person who's listening to this or watching it and is thinking it all makes sense intellectually, but Dr. Ki like salience and um and strivings and happiness and purpose and fulfillment, they're like big buzzwords, but I don't know how to drill down to how they, you know, are kind of practical in my life. like I'm just, you know, I got two kids at home. I'm trying, you know, like what am I striving for? I'm striving to get to the end of the day. We were talking about this a few moments ago. Like I just, you know, maybe I want a promotion or it would be cool if I had just a little bit more money so we could go on a vacation this year. Um, beyond that, like what am I striving for? What's salient to me? Like I love my spouse, I love my kids, you know, I have some good friends and on the weekend we do X, Y, or Z. And the inquiry kind of ends there because to your point earlier like life is hard man like I I can't even cast my gaze beyond that. — Right. I would say the narrative that you just said is often said I think the way that you were saying it with some with a person feeling some frustration, right? And even feeling some hopeless like throwing your arms up of like how am I going to make any of this better? And I think first the way that things get made better is the approach has to be simplified not made more complicated right there has to be an approach that you can follow to make your life better and you have to see some hope that you can be better. So if you think well what do I care about or what are my strivings? You say well I love my spouse or I love my pet garden. We say well let's pause on that you know okay how much time are you spending with your spouse? in your garden? What's that time like? So many of us are trying to still get through the events of the day, right? We're still fighting some battle that happened two or three hours ago or the frustration within us. Say when we meet our spouse, right? When we're so we're with our spouse and both may be frustrated and not present at the moment. So just one example, would it be okay if you it it's great to love oneself and love your spouse. Let's look at how those interactions are going. Are you having good interactions with your spouse? Maybe the answer is no because the person is bringing frustration when they're meeting their spouse. Okay, how could you have better interactions with your spouse? Are you talking back and forth about how the relationship is going? So now we we've got a string to pull on and I say from that the narrative that you gave, there's a lot in there. You just told me that you care about a lot of things and you told me that you have the perseverance and the resilience to get through really difficult days and there's still things that excite you that you want more of your time and energy to go towards. So you told me something really good, right? You told me with the bias the world often makes inside of us which is kind of a throw up the hands and frustration bias but boy you gave me so many strings to pull on now so that we can make life better. Doesn't mean everything's going to be perfect tomorrow. Oh, it's not a polyiana way of looking at things. It's saying come on, you have to be able to make things better. And what does better lead to? Better than better. Right now, there's a process of things slowly and surely going in a better direction. And many, many people who thought they were hopeless, who thought that they could not be healthier, they could not find a good relationship, they could not stop drinking, they could not find a better job, who just said there's no way, I can't be a better parent. all the things we say to ourselves who are in extremely different places and they're very thankful to themselves that they believed in themselves enough to go about a process to bring change. Mhm.

One of the things that struck me in the book to kind of further this discussion around the brain pretzel kind of Zen Cohen aspect of all of this is that in addition to these behavioral changes that need to be made, this uh cultivation of compassionate curiosity and self-awareness that's so important. How do we pop the hood and really evaluate what's going on with the engine and figure out how to fix it? is that so many of the things that we're seeking whether it's more love, more connection, happiness, gratitude, satisfaction, fulfillment, these are a function of being more present in our lives. like we need to uh slow things down and be more still, understand the mind body connection, find ways to calm ourselves down to reduce the anxiety and the stress to pay attention. If you're not paying attention, then you can't have the self-awareness because you're not aware of how you're behaving. But also just to be, you know, kind of rooted in your life more because only in the present moment can you experience these emotions that we all would like to experience more of. — Yes. Often we're doing it the way we're doing it because we're doing it that way, right? And that is a recipe for us not bringing change. And we end up stuck in that because life moves so fast and we become so stressed about our lives and stressed about ourselves and it narrows our perspective and we get stuck in these loops and it brings us unhappiness when we can slow down even a little bit and say well let me take a look at that. Right? Instead of this automaticity of just being the way that we are of saying, you know, I can slow down a little bit and I can just look at myself and think, is this how I want to be? Is this what I want to be doing? And so many people want to bring real change to their lives and can are almost lost in their own cynicism of, oh, I could never do that or I couldn't make that better. And you know, we can say that in such a flippant way and I'll say, wow, like this is your life, right? You know, we wouldn't say that if we were trying to plug something in and we couldn't get something in an outlet in the wall. Like, well, we want that thing to work. Like, let's try a little bit harder, but we'll say that about our lives, right? So, we we have to have some hope. And then value in ourselves that says, yes, we can slow down. We can look at ourselves. We are very complicated. But that does not mean that understanding ourselves and bringing healthy change has to be rocket science. Think about how complicated our bodies are. But we don't have to be physiologists or physicians, right? In order to understand our physical health. We can say, "Okay, we have a heart, we have lungs, we have bones, we have joints, I have a liver, I have kidneys. " Can understand the basics of what these are they're doing inside of me. It's not simple, but it's not too complicated for us to understand it. Then I can understand what it means to be healthy and to help those organs inside of me and the function of those organs be healthy. So even though our bodies are extremely complicated, understanding them enough to bring healthy change doesn't have to be that complicated. And the same is true for mental health. Yes, we're very complicated, but we have understanding mechanisms that we can bring to bear so change and we don't have to be afraid then either of body or mind. And that leads us to really where we must go if we're going to be optimally healthy, which is that we know our body and mind are one, right? that we're one entity and our mental health affects our physical health and our physical health affects our mental health and ultimately we're all one person and we want to be kind to this person but we want to hold this person accountable for being a good person in the world and making themselves healthier and this is how we let ourselves live in the moment. You know, if we're just tripping over ourselves running forward, we're never in the moment. And that's not what anyone chooses. It's not good for us. It's not what we choose, right? But it's often what we get stuck in.

— Well, it's socially incentivized. Uh, and it's also an effective avoidance strategy. If you're just always moving forward, then you never have to really kind of sit with yourself and your emotions. — So, it's a way of running away on some level. Uh, why is it so uncomfortable to just be still with oneself and feelings and thoughts? It comes back to the fear of the unknown that if you stop and you sit with yourself and you think about yourself like you might find things out about yourself right and most of us are afraid of that and I do think it's remarkable and I think this arises from the field of mental health not exercising leadership of course we have to stop and sit with ourselves if we're going to understand ourselves better and bring healthy change I mean it wouldn't make any sense that we could do it otherwise. But that's precisely the thing that we are so defended against that we don't want to stop and sit with ourselves and we are afraid of what we are going to find that we're going to find something really bad. If we were bad, we wouldn't be looking at ourselves, right? The people who find something really bad inside are a minority of the population and there people who aren't stopping and sitting with themselves. So we don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find and we don't have to be helpless to say okay so if I find things what am I going to do with that right and no we can have mechanisms where you understand if you stop and sit with yourself yes you're going to learn things but those things aren't going to terrify you and you can put them to good use that's very different now we've turned the lights on and we're not afraid to stop and be with ourselves and to be reflective

— one of the uh themes of the book or ideas set forth in the book is this notion that when you um optimize for the generative drive, this faments or gives rise to these four interconnected states of being. So talk a little bit about what those states of being are and how that operates. Mhm. So if we are taking care of ourselves, so we're taking care of our structure of self and our function of self, then good things come from that. And one is that we feel empowered inside. So it's a feeling state inside. Instead of feeling on the back foot, we feel much more on the front foot. And from empowerment comes active agency. So then we're engaging in the world in which we have agency. We can make decisions and choices. And if someone says something or approaches us in a way that's not kind or thoughtful, then we're able to use our agency, for example, to set boundaries. So this feeling state of empowerment leads to approaching the world with agency. The same is true with humility and gratitude. So humility is a feeling state inside. And it's not what humility is often thought to be, right? To uh say that we're not good at something when we are good at it, right? Or not telling lies about ourselves. boastful lies is humble. No, humility means that we can accept that we're human, too. That life can bring us difficult things, bad things, things that we respond to in ways that may not have been healthy for us. We can do things that we're not proud of. We can have some of that reflexive guilt and shame from trauma that we realize, okay, all of this is in me and I don't have to get down on myself because of it or say, what's wrong with me? That what I'm human and I'm in the human condition. Humility means we allow ourselves to be human. And we say, "Okay, I can look at myself. I don't have to be so defended that I can't admit that I um that I get defensive around people. " Like, it's okay. It doesn't mean I'm the worst person in the world. It's like just look at that. We can have the ability to then look at ourselves and accept who we are. And that means that we're approaching the world through the lens of gratitude. So when we are living through the generative drive, our structure of self and our function of self are in good healthy places because we've gone and looked at them. We've looked at what's going right and we've looked at what we want to be different. Then on top of that, we have empowerment and the active agency that sits on top of empowerment. And we have humility and the active gratitude. I'm approaching the world and I feel grateful that I'm in it. I'm feel grateful that I have what I have. So, for example, I don't need to take something else because I don't feel good enough about myself. Or if someone slightes me, I don't have to respond in some aggressive way. Or if I let myself down, I don't have to be aggressive towards myself. I'm happy that I'm here and I'd like to make today better than yesterday was. That's active gratitude. And what sits on top of that is drives that are in a healthy place. Then the assertion drive in me is in a healthy place. I'm not trying to over control, but neither am I letting control out of my hands. And the pleasure drive is in a healthy place. And I want things that make me feel good and feel happy and feel safe. And I'm not wanting too little of that because I don't think anything can make me feel good. And I've given up. So then assertion and pleasure are in healthy places. And the generative drive just gets more and more. The healthiest place for the generative drive is as much as possible. And when all those things are healthy, the generative drive rules us more. And the generative drive ruling us more means we're more present and mindful within ourselves. And we keep everything else in us healthy. And this gives us happiness. And happiness really is peace, contentment, and delight. It's what we're all striving for. It's what people want when you talk about healthy agency. So if all this is in balance, and we're led by the generative drive, we find happiness. And what that really means is peace, contentment, and the capacity for delight.

— So assertion and pleasure, these are drives that need to be balanced. You don't want too much or too little. — Yes. — Uh then you you're spiraling out of control in one direction or another. — Generative drive on the other hand is not only something that you want to optimize for, you actually you can't get enough of it basically like there is no too much, — right? Uh, and if you're really focused on amplifying that as much as possible, that acts as a check on those other drives that you want to keep in balance. It's almost uh it it performs the balancing for those. — Yeah. — Essentially is what you're saying. — Yes. If we can be healthy humans and we're aware of what's going on inside of us as least as best we can be and we know that we all require more work and we're all works in progress but I'm aware of what I'm doing I feel good about the things that I'm doing by and large and the things I don't feel so happy with I'm in the process of bringing change to then I'm a healthy wellbalanced human then and I'm not getting down on myself because I'm not perfect right I'm aware that it's hard to be a healthy well balanced human. It requires a lot of work to be aware of our responsibilities and the world around us and what's about ourselves versus what we want to be about others. But if I'm really doing that, I can feel good about myself. And that helps keep the other drives in healthy places. And those ranges will be different for all of us. Where assertion and pleasure optimally resides will be different from you to me and it'll be different for other people. But when we're healthy, self-aware humans in the world and we know that we're not perfect and we're trying to be better, right? Then that's as good as we're going to be. That's us at our healthiest. And that's what the generative drive gives us. I'm aware of my responsibilities, what I have to buckle down. It doesn't mean I'm just out there doing things that are only altruistic. I have to take care of myself and my responsibilities in order to be altruistic and to bring more good to the world. So ultimately, it is the generative drive that leads healthy humans. And when you read about people who are healthy in life, who have gone through life and feel great about their lives at lighter stages of their life, so they're aware that there have been tragedies and traumas and mistakes, but they feel good about themselves and good about life. They're governed by the generative drive. It comes through over and over again. And our history, our literary and philosophical traditions tell us this from so many different points of reference. Then we need to bring this to the psychology and the neuroscience to all the modern data we have that tells us a recipe for how to be healthy, happy humans. I like this

definition of humility being somewhat synonymous with essentially objective clarity. Like I'm not useless, but I'm not that important either. like just being really rightsized uh and and real about like who you are and where you fit in the world. — Yes, absolutely. And this lets us go easier on ourselves. So having humility is the best way to protect a person from themselves. So if I make a mistake for example and I drop something and I tell myself that I'm an idiot because of that, that is not humility, right? That is not humility. That's I'm supposed to be something more. or I'm supposed to never make a mistake and if I do I'm going to beat up on myself because that's going to make me do something different. A lot of us do this to ourselves and that is not humility. Humility is saying, "Okay, if I drop something, you know what? People do that. I do that. " You know sense it's okay. Is there something else I could have done? Maybe I could have been a little more careful. Like maybe I can learn from it, right? Or if I made a mistake and I hurt someone's feelings, right? I can say, "Okay, I don't like that I did that and maybe it wasn't my best self coming out at the moment, but I don't have to tell myself I'm a terrible person, right? I can say, "Okay, I'm trying to be a good person in the world. I'm, you know, I'm doing the best I can. " and can means let me learn something from this right it's the humility to accept ourselves as you said accept ourselves as we are and it's usually not that otherwise we'll think too much of ourselves it's that we'll think too little of ourselves because we come from this perfectionism that doesn't think too much of ourselves it tells us we're supposed to be something more than what we can be supposed to make mistakes if we can accept our humility then we can approach ourselves in a way that says okay — you know I I want I don't want to have have to be crisis, right? I just want to be with myself and to know I I'm doing okay, but I want life to be better. Let me think about my life and my recent decisions and how might I bring greater health. It doesn't have to have all that fear that makes us look away from ourselves. I also like how you

contextualize gratitude. like we're in a culture where there's a lot of uh like less than well-informed ideas around mental health and in particular like how to experience more gratitude. You hear a lot about like you have to have a gratitude practice, but what you're saying is gratitude is difficult if you lack if you're not empowered, if you don't have agency like these, you need these other elements in your life in order for gratitude to kind of naturally percolate up — so that you can have that experience. But for somebody who is challenged in experiencing gratitude in their life, like what is the you know what would you say to that person to start being able to experience more of it? — Yeah, I would say to that person that they really should stop, pause, take a look at themselves, right? Because if our structure of self and our function of self is healthy, then we do build empowerment and active agency, humility and active gratitude on top of those foundations, right? If our drives are in balance, this gives us more of these good things. So instead of saying, well, write more in your gratitude journal, right? I think that's part of polishing the hood. I would say, let's take a look at life. what are the things that you would say you're grateful for if we just ask you the question maybe you write them down and let me say are you living in that gratitude right so if I say I'm I'm happy you I'm healthy and I'm able to take care of myself in the world I'm grateful for that but let's say you and I have a political opinion that differs a little bit and I'm attacking you right I say well that's not really gratitude right I mean I'm grateful that I'm here I'm grateful that I can communicate with other people I'm grateful I could hear a different opinion and take it in I don't have to be threatened by that opinion or I think so little of my opinion I have to assault you because yours differs like so it it allows us to interface with others and ourselves in the world in a different way. So finding active gratitude means we're you know we're in a healthy place. So if we're not finding that it's telling us okay it's not the end of the world. It says look at how you work. Just if you didn't feel good in your body, we'd say, well, look at your joints or your muscles or where does that hurt and let's go look at the organ. There's a way to come at it and understand and the same is true with these foundations of the structure and function of self. What sits on top of them? Uh the empowerment and agency, humility and gratitude. And then on top of that, having our drives in balance, assertion and pleasure with the generative drive ruling all. And then we're living in what we think as happiness. It doesn't mean every moment, but I have an ability to find peace, where I can just be and feel a sense of peace. I can find contentment where I can be aware of my own life, including tragedies and things I've done wrong. And I feel good and I feel okay about my life. And I can have the capacity for delight, just as we can when we're children. And when we're doing that, you can see this is how we get to what's really going right. And once we're there, it's a lot easier to keep ourselves there. Of course, there will be struggles and pressures on us. You know, that's what life brings. But we can get ourselves there. And now we're approaching life from a position of strength to keep ourselves in that place of health and happiness. — So essentially, when you have these four interconnected states of being, you have empowerment, humility, agency, and gratitude. This creates this flywheel of peace, contentment, and delights. — Yes. And that's this together with drives being in healthy places because to feel empowered inside and to feel that sense of humility, right? That I'm a human. I'm up against a lot just by being a human, but I'm trying and I can think about how I'm trying. I'm doing my best. If I have those feeling states inside of me, then how I'm going to interface with the world will be through agency and gratitude. Right? Everything then that I'm doing that's coming out and in is coming through agency and gratitude. And that's going to serve happiness. What better way to interface with the world? What have we learned through thousands of years of thinking and writing about humans? This is how humans are healthy, right? We're approaching the world with a sense of agency. We don't think we can control everything, but we certainly nothing. And we're interested in how we can have more healthy control. And we're grateful for being here. And we're aware of this that we're more than just an eye, right? That we are a we. And we all are that way. Whether it's in our small groups, whether it's couples, it's family units, or it's in larger groups of our societies, right? In smaller ways, neighborhoods, right, cities, states, and the world, you know, the planet that we all share. Like all of this is true. And when we come through agency and gratitude, we are in healthy places. And then these drives which are in each and every one of us as human beings, these drives are balanced and we become more and more generative. And that's what someone will tell you. Talk to somebody who's 92 and really happy with their life and like, "Wow, that's interesting. " And they're not afraid of death and they feel good about themselves and they can tell you all sorts of things in their life, good, bad, and otherwise. This is the lens they'll be coming through. This is they may not be using these words, right? But this is what they'll be telling you. They'll be telling you about a generative life and struggles well met and disappointments acknowledged and an ability to find peace, contentment, and the capacity for delight all the way through, you know, to as old as we

may be blessed to live. Where does faith and spirituality enter into this picture? because that type of person or archetype generally has some form of spiritual connection to something larger than themselves. And that plays into this humility notion like you know we're just you know humans on the earth here and there's a lot more going on that we don't understand. — Yeah. Faith and spirituality is a very big part of everything that we're talking about because it's a very big part of the generative drive. Right. The generative drive tells us what we know to be true. That there's more meaning than just us. That yes, we matter. And part of how we matter is the meaning that we bring to other people, right? Because we do want to learn and grow. And we all want that. People who if we think that we don't, something is shutting us down, right? We want to grow as people and we want to have good experiences with others. If you know if someone is down on the ground in front of us, we want to be able to truly or metaphorically lend them a hand up, right? We want other people to do that for us. We feel love. We are aware that there's so much beyond us. Modern science tells us this that there is so much beyond us. It's not that science tells us, oh, there's nothing and we're the be all and end all. It tells us quite the opposite. And having the humility to accept that, well, there is more beyond me. And when I'm living in the mystery of that of how we can all fit together and build a better world by being better people in it, that is not polyiana. That's how we build and create. That's how we create structures around us. That's how we make medical advances, right? That's how we build hospitals and roads. Like we can do so much together, right? But we only do those great things together, right? No one invents a medicine on their own or builds a bridge on their own. But being destructive, right? We can do that alone. And it is so much easier to destroy, whether it's alone or it's in groups that choose to be destructive. And nothing about that is about our core humanness. the faith or the spirituality. That's part of our generative drive and part of the beyond us. — It is part and parcel of the simple goodness principle, is it not? That you talk about. — Yes. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is to adhere to simple goodness. When we think there's something so bad in us, we can't look. That's so complicated. And you know, and it makes us so afraid of ourselves and we see ourselves as a big complex black box. You know, simple goodness says, hey, we can bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves. We can bring understanding mechanisms. We can bring the interactions with other people, other people helping us and us helping them, right? We can ask other people's thoughts and opinions. We can learn from the world around us. This is all simple goodness. And when we're living in simple goodness, getting out of bed knowing it's going to be a difficult day, but I want to bring my best self to it. Right? Simple goodness fits very strongly with the generative drive. Just as faith and spirituality is the generative drive is suffused with it, it also is suffused with just simple goodness. M

— what do you say to the person who not only sets very high expectations for themselves uh but never seems to actually uh exceed them to the point where they feel okay like they're just on this hamster wheel of striving and achieving and no matter what they do or how well they show up and equip themselves in the world it's never quite enough. — Yeah. Well, the hamster wheel of never good enough is not a hamster wheel to be on, right? It's just it's taking our energy and our enthusiasm. It's taking it away from us. So, we need to work very hard to not be on that hamster wheel. We can want to do better. And it's always good to want to improve even if the world around us is telling that telling us that we're doing something quite well. But our best route to happiness in the moment and to improvement is to acknowledging to ourselves when we are doing something well. Right? If we do that, it's not that we'll think we're doing okay and then we'll just stop trying. That's never how that goes. It's often put into us that we have to think we're never good enough or we'll get complacent or we'll stop. And that's not how people work. It's just not how we work. If we are thinking we're never doing good enough, we're miles and miles away from complacency. What we're doing then is beating up on ourselves and taking away from ourselves by not acknowledging, you know, I'm doing this thing pretty well, right? And I do want to do it better. It's kind of like what we talked about humility and you know, humility isn't saying you're not good at something when you are, right? Humility is knowing when you're good at something. Knowing it doesn't make you a better person than the person next to you. And just because you're doing well at something doesn't mean you can't do better. Right? I mean, humility means I know I'm doing something well. I know what that means and I do want to look to doing it better. But it embraces what is going right and what is good about us. It doesn't pretend that we have to fogg ourselves with nothing ever being good enough in order to continue doing better. Isn't the attribution error or

the fly in the ointment here that uh the satisfaction or fulfillment or sense of wholeness that's driving that quest to achieve uh is going to be purchased or found on the other side of the next accomplishment. I mean, that's what's perpetuating the — the hamster wheel for most people, right? And even though every achievement fails to deliver on that promise, uh there's just something about the next mountain that's on the horizon to be climbed that is just enough to, you know, lure the person to the next ascent. — Yeah, that's a great example of what can happen when our drives are out of balance. So I would say that person is a very strong assertion drive. They're trying to do more and do and do and achieve and that's going to make them feel better. So they then get lost in this cycle of continued assertion but no pleasure coming from it. So assertion becomes very high. Pleasure becomes very low and that's a person who's a setup for not being happy about life. That can be a setup for depression just as one example or cynicism. The you know the more I do the more I get and I never feel any better and you know what's wrong with me or what's wrong with the world. So know we need to bring our drives into balance. So if that person is achieving a lot, right? They're asserting themselves and they're achieving a lot and the generative drive is really ruling the day, they will take more pleasure in what they're doing. They'll still be assertive, but they might not be assertive, for example, to going the length of not paying enough time and attention to children or family, right? Like we can be too assertive to the neglect of other things. So that person will then be really assertive because you're describing a person with a strong drive to be assertive and make a difference in the world. So they'll be very generative, but they won't be over assertive and they'll take more pleasure from what they're doing. So assertion comes down a little bit. There's more life balance. Pleasure comes up a little bit. Now that person is living comfortably under the generative drive. They're healthier and they're more likely to be healthy and happy into the

future. What are you seeing in your clinical practice more and more of these days that maybe wasn't the case when we did our first podcast? — There's more and more anxiety in people. of not feeling safe. Uh there's been so much that is bad, scary in the news and I think people often want to feel safer by understanding more and often times what we're doing is inadvertently terrorizing ourselves that yes, we do want to have some level of understanding. Um but sometimes if we if our mind is dwelling too much on all the dangers and all the conflicts in the world around us then we feel as if we're unsafe in every moment. So being aware of the world around us but also being aware of our own lives and how can we build safety and security in our own lives and we have an ability to make good lives for ourselves even in the context of these things that scare us in the world outside of us. And in fact, if we're living in that way, then we'll bring more goodness to the small groups that we're in, even just between self and self, right? To our families and to our work units and to our communities, then that helps us in a small way make the world a better place. I mean, none of us is going to go out and change all the dangers in the world, right? But if we're starting with ourselves, then we do make positive change. And if enough of us do that, well, that creates bigger change for the better in the world. And again, I think that's not a pie in the sky concept either. That's how it works. — There are legitimate things to be concerned about like we're facing existential threats as a species and there is an amplified uh sense of uncertainty. Yes. — And humans are quite averse to this notion of uncertainty. And perhaps on some level that's what drives some of our defense mechanisms and makes people who don't share our worldview all the more threatening and that's of course driving us apart from each other and amplifying our anxiety and the like. Uh this book is very much an antidote to that like a way out uh of falling into that trap. But this is a situation

that we're all in right now. I think there is across the board a heightened sense of anxiety and a distrust of our neighbor and a breakdown in our ability to engage in productive healthy conversation. So what are some practical things that you could share with somebody who you know gets agitated when they're with somebody who has a difference of opinion or is walking around with a higher degree of stress. like just some simple practical tools or practices or things to remind ourselves of the next time we're in that situation. — Yeah, fear and anxiety makes it so easy for us to look at what's going wrong or what's not right or what's threatening. And then we have a bias. So if we're talking about anything, it may be political, it may be anything else, and we disagree, we're looking for disagreement. looking for what's not right because what we've come to do more and more is to try to find difference between us. I'm going to help keep myself safe by knowing how you're different from me and protecting myself from that. But if you think about what that ignores, right, which is what's going right in all of us. All of us have way more in common than we have different between us. We want to be safe. We want to lead good lives. If we lead from okay, maybe we have different political opinions, but how are we trying to be in the world, right? What are we trying to do moment to moment? Do you have a family you're trying to take care of? Oh, I do too. Right? Do we both live in this world? Or we're both trying to do the best we can in a difficult world. So, we may see things differently, but that's okay. Like, why can't we still be, you know, can we be kind to one another? Can we be good to one another? You know, maybe we talk for a while and we still really disagree. What's wrong with that? Like, that can be okay, too. That's what we do when we are at our best and we're coming from what's going right. If we're sitting here talking to one another about something and we have a disagreement, you know, way more is going right than is not going right. We're sitting here having a conversation with one another. We're healthy enough to do that. We can express opinions. We can take someone else's opinion in. Can we value that and say maybe we create a little more shared understanding? And even if at the end of the conversation what I see is that we really disagree. But I see that you're a good person too. I don't have to jump to something. Oh, if you disagree with me, you must be a bad person. All this divisiveness, right? If we come from what's going right, that's what we find. And whether people look differently or think differently or whatever the case may be, we see there's way more shared within us when we're being healthy than there is that's different between us.

It seems that the skeleton key here is disentangling your identity from someone's idea, you know, so that whatever somebody says or however they present to you um isn't threatening your worldview or your relationship with your sense of reality. But when we're so invested in a certain idea, because it is integral to how we see ourselves, in other words, part and parcel of who we are, our identity essentially, that's when we get defensive or we act in a way that isn't our best self, right? It's because we're not feeling safe, right? So, if you have a different opinion from me and I feel angry or upset about that, why? Right? Why am I not feeling safe that I could hear your different opinion and say okay you know maybe I think differently why does it have such a strong impact often on a person because if person feels threatened by that opinion right you have to think like me or somehow I'm not safe and it very much plays towards the us them which is never ever good for any society it's people like you who don't think like people like me we're in trouble right when we're in that place it comes from anxiety the defensiveness comes from not feeling safe. And if we stop and think, why do I have to be why might I be so threatened by other people's opinion? Have I bought into something that's not true? Maybe it's only people that look like me, think like me, eat like me, dress like me, or they're the only people I can feel safe with. Um might that have been getting into me? If so, why is that really true? I mean, you think about America, our strength is that we're a melting pot. That's what I grew up with. It's wonderful that people are different and eat different foods and it's wonderful people have different customs and like that's what we're here for. Different people come to America and we get better and stronger because of that. And that's true of places not just America. But if you think in the United States, we we've come to look so a scance at anything that's different from us. But that really runs against what has made us great as a nation. And it's been the incorporation of people with different thoughts and ideas and experiences. So I think for us to anchor better to the simple goodness of being humans in the world or if we're Americans just being Americans in the United States can change so much of this. But we have to be able to question why did I why do I have such a strong reaction if someone feels different from me about something? What's going on inside of me? So we become curious about ourselves. So instead of looking at you and why do you have that bad opinion? And I can say, well, what's going on in me? Right? That's where the answer really is, right? It's not that other person's opinion. It's like, wow, I'm reacting to it in interesting ways. And if we bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves and there's a route to understand and bring change, we don't have to be afraid to think, huh, it is interesting I react that way or that I have these thoughts in myself. Let me look at myself. Yeah, it's difficult to practice uh compassionate curiosity towards another human being who might have a different idea than you if you're if you haven't first invested in doing that internally. — Yes. I agree 100%. And we have to bring that to ourselves in a way that does understand what does compassionate curiosity mean? It means I am looking at myself for the things that I'm not happy about or that others are not happy about. So if people think that I'm very opinionated and very difficult with others when they disagree, we want to bring compassionate curiosity to that. So I can say, well, why might I be that way? Why am I so opinionated? Why do I react so aggressively if someone disagrees? Like what is going on with me? I have to do that in myself because it's coming from a place that doesn't feel great, right? safe or it doesn't feel whole. So there's the kindness principle means we have to do that to oursel for ourselves before I can say oh you have a different opinion from me like how might I still look at you in a positive way, right? Does that mean that we're enemies because of that or are we maybe 99. 99% exactly the same except we have this little disagreement. So yeah, it does have to start at home and then we can bring that compassionate curiosity to others too.

— What is your sense of this mass uh psychology experiment that we're running on humanity by dent of uh digital technologies that are creating uh individualized information silos and by extension uh customized realities. as we continue to atomize like how we're uh interfacing with information, news, entertainment, and the like, uh it seems to me that this is really driving us even further apart and making it more difficult to have compassionate uh curiosity around other people and their ideas and to just congregate in the way that we did when we were kids. uh like what is going on and how is this showing up in terms of pathology and where is it leading us? — Yeah, I think we really need to slow down and to bring some reflectiveness. Uh we have moved ahead very quickly. I mean everyone knows this right but so much has happened in recent years. Just think about the last 5 years or 10 years, 20 years, how much technology has moved ahead and it can do great good bad like anything that is just a very powerful tool. It can do good, it can bring evil. And for us to say, well, this is very powerful, right? Let's stop and think how are we using this, right? How can this be used to bring people insular environments where there's no risk of them seeing an outside truth? Right? We might want to be aware of that and to have some rules and regulations around what's going on and how we're educating people and what people think is education. There's so much that's thought to be education but is really just know a very strong opinion. I mean that it is in that sense the wild west with what has moved forward so quickly. And I think the simple goodness or the common sense tells us, let's slow down a little bit. I mean, we have great minds from all areas of endeavor, right? great minds from science, from the arts and sciences, from literature, philosophy, engineering, medicine, psychology, to bring minds together to think, okay, let's be reflective about how we're using what we've gained for ourselves, these technological advances, and let's look at what is good and what is not. Like, we believe that misinformation is not good, right? As a species, we believe that and they're mechanisms of misinformation. It'd be good to work against them, right? as opposed to being polarized and saying, "Well, whose misinformation is it? " And now they're different ideas. To step back and say, "As humans, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to the generations that come after us to look with responsibility and some accountability on what we're doing with technology that's running ahead very fast. Where does uh conventional uh

approaches to therapy, talk therapy, come into this equation? " because so much of the book is about tools that can empower anybody outside of being in, for example, your office, but how important is it to engage with a mental health professional? I think for some people it would be very important someone who's really down, has thoughts of not wanting to be alive or suicidal thoughts. I mean, there are things that can really get to us where we feel like we're not doing okay and that we need to get help from other people around us. And often, even if we don't need to get help, we can move faster with help from the world around us. So, I think that good mental health help can be good for us. But a lot of the mental health help that is available is not good. And I don't mean to be critical of people who are in the field. There are many very good people who are bringing their best self to trying to help people. But our paradigms are often misguided and I think what we have learned across years that I try and put together in the book serves as a paradigm for approaching ourselves and understanding ourselves and I think there's a therapy an emotive therapy that can be based around this that approaches our mental health just as we approach our physical health with a set of understandings and a set of principles. And I am advocating for change. My field has taken some of the arrows in the quiver and tried to make the whole story around them. And that's why we end up polishing the hood or whatever metaphor we want to use. We need to bring a way that humans can understand themselves. And that is what I've tried to do in this book. Not because I've invented it out of nowhere, but because we human beings have been working hard on this for many, many years. and we can pull it together and we can use it as a template for like this is what self inquiry looks like, right? And it kind of look this way whether we're sitting with ourselves, sitting with a friend or we're in a therapy room. — You've mentioned a couple times uh failures in leadership in your field and you just mentioned that you think it's important that there are some changes made. Uh what specifically would those changes look like if you were the grand pooha all of a sudden and you got to wave a magic wand? — We would first say that there is good news here, right? The the stigma that has surrounded mental health does not have to last. And here's how it goes away. The good news is we can bring understanding. their ways of understanding ourselves so that we do not have to turn the other way because we are afraid of what we are going to find or we are afraid that we won't be able to help ourselves anyway and that there are set of principles and we can go about applying these principles because just like we all have a human body mind and it follows these principles and it has a structure to it and we can come at understand ourselves and we can make our lives better and yes there are great tools and the field of mental health knows a lot of them CBT and DBT and psychonamic inquiry and IPT and there are a lot of ways they're just examples of tools that we can use but we can't base the story around one of the tools and the toolbox we have to have a way of understanding ourselves and we can have that so we feel a sense of hopefulness and we want to bring compassionate curiosity and we say, "Yeah, I want to do this. " Why? Because I have an expectation that it will make things better. That's what will bring mental health onto the same into par onto the same level as physical health. Because medicine has brought explanatory mechanisms. There's good news. You can understand how your body works. If you don't like some aspect of it, there are things that you can do to make it better. There are people that can help you. So, we say, "Okay, I can look at my physical health. I'll be scared. " The same applies in mental health.

Nobody's ashamed to go to the doctor because they broke their leg. Like this is like, you know, no problem. Uh but there still is quite a bit of stigma if you're struggling uh emotionally with something uh that is preventing too many people from seeking out help. Uh I think we've come a long way and certainly podcasting has done a service towards um disabusing people of that stigma. Uh, but it's it it's sticky, you know, it's intractable. Like, what else can we do to help people feel empowered to seek out help when they're having a hard time? — Mhm. Well, maybe normalizing that is a place to start. We will all have a hard time at one time or another. And actually, at far more than just one time. And as I've thought for many years, you know, if we are fortunate to be alive and we don't have a real mental health problem, you know, serious depression, constant panic attacks, addictive processes, things that we can get help for, right? But if we are fortunate that we don't have a mental health problem, again, even if we do, we can get help. But if we don't, we certainly have mental health issues. That's the best state that we get in as humans. Life is very difficult and complicated and scary and confusing. So none of us is getting through it without mental health issues. So if we say, okay, what does that mean? It just means that I'm a human in a difficult world. Okay, maybe we even move away from mental health issues. They're issues of humanness. Right now we're working against the stigma. And if there's no shame in getting help, even if that's you reflecting upon yourself, right? There's no shame in looking at yourself. There's no shame in getting help. And you think that something can actually be done about it. We're in an entirely different place. We're in a place where the stigma goes away and mental health gains the parody that we all deserve it to have with our physical health. We've

certainly come a long way in terms of normalizing the discourse around these things. But I think the flip side of that coin is many people creating identities around their psychological issues, you know, whether it's victimhood or um or their trauma, you know, sort of performative trauma or um so being so heavily associated with it that it becomes this prison that's really not about getting better. It's about kind of staying there because they're getting something out of it, whether it's attention or um validation of some sort or another. — Yes. Those are then use of unhealthy defense mechanisms. So, so someone who say is building the story of self around a prior trauma without moving their life forward is relying on defense mechanisms that aren't in the healthiest place. So, rationalization, avoidance, denial. So the way that we would see that is the same as any set of unhealthy defense mechanisms. Why is the person doing that? Right? Why might they think that the story of self needs to be based on this negative thing that happened in the past? Do they feel that they need an explanation or even an excuse for themselves because they don't feel that they can move forward in life? That's someone who is not empowered the way we would wish them to be. And you know when we do the intensive work and we do intensive work now with individuals and at times with couples, right? This is what we're really looking for. We're looking to move forward the understanding of self. So the person is empowered to say, "Okay, I can change. I don't have to build the story of myself around anything else. " Whether it's someone else's voice or it's something good in my past or it's something negative in my past. By bringing this empowerment, we want to build a story of self around like who am I now and how am I leading and guiding myself into the future? And we absolutely can do that. But again, we have to be in balance. And when we're anchoring the story of self too much, for example, to a prior trauma, it's because we aren't empowered. And we can go look at the structure of self and the function of self in our drives. And we can find out where, you know, that we need change. But again, we have to bring the knowledge that way more is going right than wrong. And I don't have to be afraid or ashamed to look at what's not in the place I want it to be. Now, that prior trauma is still in our lives, but it's not taking away empowerment.

This might sound like a weird question. I'm going to ask it anyway. Uh, are you familiar with this trend called looks maxing that's happening right now where young men are uh doing things to their face and their bodies in order to enhance their physical appearance going to great lengths. — I am to some degree. So, I don't have a big knowledge of it. So, you're going to — Yeah. I mean, my question is I mean It's founded on you having some kind of working understanding of what's going on. But essentially, I'm curious uh as to your — uh general psychiatric diagnosis for why this person why someone would be motivated to go to such lengths and you know and medical interventions um to enhance their appearance. but also uh what's going on kind of from what's going on psychologically, culturally that led to this even being a trend in the first place. No, I think I do. I think I do understand. Um I think what you're commenting on is in this particular demographic now doing something that we've been doing in all sorts of ways for a long time which is to present something outward that makes us feel that things are in a better place inside. And we do that many in many ways. We can do that physically around how we look and how we present to others. We can look we can do that by um you know wanting the front of the house to be painted nicely when things aren't in a good place inside. Again metaphorically we try and present a good face because that can help us avoid what we aren't happy about inside of us. And you would say well why are we doing that? Are we trying to confuse and convince the other? And the answer there is yes to some degree. We want people to see us then again whether it's visually or it's in other ways and see oh I see something I really like or feel good about. But often we're using that to hide from ourselves. Right? Then if a person sees me and they smile back to me because they see something they like. Am I hiding from what's inside that I don't like? And there's nothing wrong with wanting ourselves to look good and be healthy and present good. But often what happens is that's we have way too much of a good thing because what we're then trying to do is to hide from something and often hiding from the other observing us. What that's really about is us hiding from ourselves. — It's quite a thing that's happening right now with young men and u you know it's on some level this has always been happening but it's a very turbocharged version of that. Um and it's just interesting from a cultural point of view like why now? what's happening with young men that's motivating this and why is it happening in such a performative context with like people that are streaming their lives and uh you know talking about it uh in the way that they are. — We've unfortunately done so much in the world to make people feel less secure and to feel more vulnerable and I think we see that in a lot of demographics where we see the trends that are unhealthy. In this particular case, we see I think people doing something to present in a certain way because there's now something to do about it. There's an acceptability to doing something that makes the person then physically present different because that demographic has sort of accepted that. Then what we see is a vicious cycle where then more people are doing something that really the advent of came from an unhealthy place. And now there's something that just gets done because it's done. And all this automaticity that gets us way far away from simple goodness then comes into play. And if we say, well, you know, we're all doing things to make ourselves look better to the outside world. So we feel better inside. A little bit of that's okay. — But how are we doing too much of that when then it's working against us? And we can look at that in individual people and we can also look at that in different demographics.

In reading your book, I feel very empowered uh to exert greater agency over how I um think about my mental health and uh how I try to bring awareness and practices to it every single day. But there may be a not insignificant group of people who are listening to this or watching it who are listening and thinking this all sounds great. It makes sense. I want to be better. I know I can be happier. I know I'm not happy. I know that there must be a way to get over this hump that I'm on. Uh but I just, you know, I just don't know if it's going to work for me or I don't have the motivation or I lack the confidence to even try these things. Like fine for you, but yeah, I'm not going to be able to do it myself. — What do you say to that person? I would say pause for a second and just be a little bit nicer to yourself. Right. That's a way a person makes themselves special in a negative way. — That feels really uncomfortable though. — Right. We need some discomfort. Right. Discomfort can get us to good places as long as it's safe discomfort. But saying, "Hey, that's a really negative thing to say about myself that other people could get something good, but I can't. " Right? And to be kind to oneself. That doesn't come out of nowhere. No one comes out of the womb thinking that. If you're thinking that, I'm sure you're up against a lot. You've had difficult experiences. It doesn't come out of nowhere, right? But if you can pause for a second and find some energy and some uh good feeling inside for self to say let me give me myself a chance. There's no guarantee. There is no guarantee. We don't know for sure that anything we do will be successful. But if we bring our best self and if I say I just want to understand something, make something a little bit better in myself and understanding a situation in the world around me. I'm not asking myself for a lot. And am I really telling myself that that's closed off to me, right? And I think that leads towards more compassion of a person thinking, yeah, that I would say that to myself. I you know other people can get better and make healthy change but I can't to feel a sense of compassion for that but also feel a resolve that I don't want it to be that way right I want to understand where that comes from I want to start making some wins I want to make some goodness in my life things that are better today than they were yesterday if I can take these little steps why would I be different from everyone else who can make their lives better and the truth is that we're not that none of us are different we can all make our lives better how much better we don't know each other situations and what we're all going through. But I'll tell you this for sure. We can all make our lives better. That is not off limits to any one of us. Anybody who just heard that or saw it uh did so because they actively sought you out. Uh so on some level that speaks to not only a desire to be better, but to one degree or another a belief in the possibility, right? So that in and of itself is worthy of being honored and — um just reflecting on that perhaps is enough to take the next step. And these things become self-perpetuating pretty quickly. Right? There's far more going right in anyone watching this podcast than there are things that are not going right. Anyone who's doing anything to try and better themselves, to learn more, who's interested in the world around them, think of how much has to be going right and the belief of self inside. If a person really felt that they couldn't get any better, — they wouldn't watch this, right? They wouldn't do anything. If a person really thought nothing can get better, often times that's a reflex in us. I can't get better because we're trying to protect ourselves from possible disappointment, right? But if you're watching this podcast and if you think that you can be better in any way, look at what you already have going for you and you already believe that if you're engaged enough to be listening. — It's like the person who's constantly uh asking themselves and other people if they're a good parent, like I don't know if I'm you just the fact that they're engaged in that inquiry already puts them at the top tier, you know, like people who aren't good parents aren't asking themselves that question all the time, right? Yeah. enough is going right that you're reflective about how you're being a parent and you want to be a better parent, right? And that's a good example because often times that's what a person will bring. I know I'm a ter I'm a bad parent. I'm a terrible parent and you listen and they're saying that they're like gosh, I want to know how I can be a better parent. That person think I'm being a good parent. They're doing all the things right that run directly counter to what they're saying. So often we have faith in ourselves. We just don't know it. You know, we have to bring ourselves the good news. If you're the person asking if you're a good parent and how you might be a better parent, look at what's already going right. And this is true for so many things inside of us. It's true for parenting and it's true for a lot else where we can bring criticism and sort of a sense of hopelessness to ourselves, but that's not how we really feel. It's either a reflex someone told us or taught us about ourselves that isn't true or we're trying to protect ourselves. But if you're engaged in the world, you care about the world and you think you can make it a better place.

— Is it ever too late to engage in this process? — No. — Nothing else needs to be said. No. Period. — One word answer. — Yeah. — No. — Uh final thought before we end this. Uh is there anything else that you want to highlight or point out uh where you think people get it wrong when it comes to ideas around trauma or the agency and the empowerment to take better control of their mental health? Mhm. I think that we often think that they're nebulous concepts and then we don't know how we can find our way to them. Like, oh, it'd be great to have that, but how do you get it right? And we don't think that there are steps to get it as we would with physical health. We understand that there are steps. You know, we can exercise. If you want to lose 10 lbs, what starts with losing one pound? Like, we got to understand that. So we believe that there are routes to the good things that we want and the same is true of mental health. These aren't concepts that are unrelated to one another, right? They have a route, a mechanism of understanding and a path that we can follow so that we can bring healthy change. And I think we need to understand that otherwise it seems like good mental health or a happy person, it's something that's just given to someone. It occurs out of the blue. It's bestowed upon someone. No, there are routes to get there and we all can get ourselves there. We can start ourselves down that healthy path. We just have to bring understanding and compassionate curiosity.

curiosity. — Fantastic. Uh I really appreciate you Paul. You have been — uh instrumental in my own mental health journey and uh I want to thank you for that. And the new book is really a beautiful offering like this notion on its own of what's going right like let's start with like all the good things and build upon that rather than uh as we said at the outset like let's just pathize everything and talk about all these things that are going wrong and how to fix them. uh I think it's just a reframe that we need right now that um changes fundamentally like the lens on how we're perceiving our mental health to begin with and I think it's going to help a lot of people. So, thank you for your service and for coming here and talking to me today. You're very welcome. I appreciate you as well and thank you for having me on again.