a tremendous amount of what you might regard as Shadow integration which in the par Lance of Behavioral psychologists would be something like assertiveness training right it's training in how to stand up for yourself and and for your let's say for your better self which would be the self that you could use productively over a medium to long period of time that would be of use to you but also of use to people around you so it's a self that's bounded by the necessity of taking care of yourself but also simultaneously taking care of the people around you um I I think that the simplest way to start that work is to consult your resentment you know it's easy to become bitter about life and to become angry because of course life is difficult and it's full of disappointments and people are also subject to Betrayal on the part of themselves and on the part of people that hypothetically care for them and so it's easy to get bitter and to be resentful and resentment is a very useful emotion even though I think it's one of the most uh damaging emotions if it's not dealt with properly so if you're resentful basically means only one of two things it either means you should grow up and quit whining and get on with your life or it means that you're being subject to tyrannical forces of one form or another maybe emanating from you maybe a consequence of the natural environment maybe a consequence of society you're being subject to tyrannical forces and you're not uh putting your own best interests forward like in that broader sense that I described and I don't mean your selfish narrow interests that only serve the purposes of instantaneous gratification I mean your own best interests in terms of developing your character over the span of your life if you're resentful it either means that you're immature and that you should grow the hell up and so you need to figure out how much of your resentment is is is that and and maybe allied with the desire to find other things or people to blame but the other possible option is that you have something to say or do right because you're in a situation where you're violating your own internal ethical standards and you're being required pressured let's say to say things you don't believe or to do things that you believe to be wrong and you need to determine you need to start to strategize and plan how you can Rectify that so that you can say what you mean like if you're negotiating with a marital partner for example and there are um issues in your marriage that aren't making you happy well the first thing is you have to take note of that right to see that you're actually unhappy U the second is that you have to be willing to engage in a certain amount of of conflict because in order to sort out what's disturbing you you're going to have to lay your concerns out on the table and say well look this is bothering me you don't have to say well I'm right and you're wrong and you have to fix this you have to say well I've noticed that this pattern of interaction or lack of interaction say in our relationship is making me resentful and angry and the danger of that of course is you're going to take it out on yourself and your partner the danger is pass passive aggressiveness you know you're not going to respond to your partner positively when they do something good if you're resentful about them and you're not going to respond to yourself properly and so you have to lay it out on the table but sort of in a spirit of ignorant humility it's like look I'm frustrated I'm feeling this way about our relationship here's what I think might be going wrong maybe on my part and maybe on your part and here's what I Envision as a possible solution that that's also really necessary if you're going to say what you have to say which is to manifest yourself properly in the world is you can't just complain about what's wrong you have to think well what would my minimal preconditions for satisfaction be you have to offer that to the person that you're negotiating with and so then you learn to abide by the truth to the degree that you can do that and no one does it perfectly you know but it it's very useful because you're not storing up a a whole sequence of memories about how you were unfairly treated and abused and betrayed instead you're trying to stay on top of it and to note your unhappiness and dissatisfaction when it manifests itself and to accept that that's the case and then to analyze that to see if it's your problem like I said with regards to maturity or if it indicates that there's an injustice in the manner in which you and the world are interacting and then to work to set that right even in small ways and so it's it's a matter of character logical development and that makes you that makes you stronger over time and partly what you need you know in order to do that is you have to really understand we do this this is why we built in the future authoring program we built this section where you have to outline your most dismal future right what your future would be like if you let all your bad habits and character logical weaknesses have the upper hand and the reason we did this is because you can't be uh you can't straighten yourself out merely as a consequence of Hope let's say you lay out a vision for the future and you think about what your life would be what you'd like your life to be like and then that makes you hopeful and it motivates you because it gives you something worthwhile and higher order to work for right and that's useful that's positive emotion working for you because positive emotion is experienced in relationship to goals but it's not not as useful as also being chased by something you're terrified by and if you have a good sense of how you'd fall apart if you stayed weak and just exactly what kind of hell that would be then when you determine to do something like to tell the truth and to say what you think and to not do things that you hate then you're going to be pulled Along by the purpose that your vision has provided for you but also pushed Along by your desire to avoid the worst forms of hell that you've already outlined for yourself personally and that can also help you be brave enough to stand up in a situation that would would require conflict because if you have something to say and you have something to negotiate about with someone then there's going to be a certain amount of conflictual dialogue um that accompanies that right it to to lay out a set of problems and to describe the fact forthrightly that those problems characterize a relationship and then to seek for Solutions is quite stressful in the short term and it's really easy to avoid and so people avoid it all the time and then they store up grievances across the span of the relationships and eventually the Grievances mount to the point where they return in monstrous form and just eat everything up that's where you get divorces or that's where you explode at your boss and end up fired or that's where you you know you develop high blood pressure over 15 years because you can't stand all the accumulated uh uh mon all the accumulated monsters in your claw it and and you drink yourself into Oblivion because you can't stand your life that's all you know very counterproductive but it's easy to avoid that necessary conflict on a momentto moment basis because it's very stressful to speak forthrightly about genuine conflicts especially when you're dealing with important parts of your life but otherwise you don't straighten them out and then you have to carry all that forward so you need to be terrified of the consequences of not speaking your peace the more radical the necessary change the more pain that accompanies it like the more opportunity as well but and a lot of what we learn we learn painfully and so it's not surprising that people shrink away from learning we learn in pain and anxiety very frequently everyone knows that like the things that really that you really learned in life it's like it was no joy man like it took you out and so the fact that people flee from that is hardly surprising but it doesn't help that's the thing it just stores up the catastrophe for later and so the better the better idea is to eat a little Poison every day so that you don't have to overdose in a month it's something like that and it is the case that I think because you don't you aren't forced to first of all you don't learn unless you're forced to learn I know there's alternatives to that there's the voluntary search for knowledge and and that's a fine thing and that is an antidote to this but apart from that speaking more practically you tend not to learn unless you're forced to learn and it's and what you tend to learn by force are difficult lessons and so people are very prone to not to not seek that out it's not surprising but it's because they don't understand the consequences very well you know you you it's because maybe it's because they're convinced that there's some way of forestalling the necessary learning and there isn't any way of forestalling it all you do is make it worse in the future you make yourself smaller and you make the lesson harder and so that's why in So Many religious doctrines there's emphasis on humility you know and humility isn't to debase yourself it's to understand that you don't know enough so that your life isn't going to be miserable and so every chance you get to grab something new that will help you along your way you should take it as fast as you can take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve you know and set yourself a little goal um you know maybe you're not studying at all at at and you're at University or maybe you're maybe you're at work and you've got this this stack of paper there you know and you haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month and you know that you should be and you're Bo bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that it's like maybe think well I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper how about tomorrow I just like put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I like I glance through it for 15 seconds seconds see if I can do that it's like well you set yourself a goal of improvement you know it's a humble goal because really are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to a stack of paper you know it could easily be you've been avoiding it you're obviously afraid of it and so the situation could be that dismal and dire and you might think well jeez it's no bomb to my ego it's no it's it's no it's not fostering the the strength of my ego to recognize myself someone who could only withstand 15 seconds of exposure to that thing I'm afraid of and so that's a form of humility too it's like there's things you could do to improve and you know what they are and there's small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction and then the question is are you big enough to take those small steps you know are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them and the answer to that is yeah you are and that's the lot of I don't know if it's a lot of everyone most people have things they avoid you know and they're afraid of so I would say to some degree it's the lot of everyone people vary in the degree to which they've conquered that and you do people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined but most of the time they've got disciplined in exactly this manner it's through slow incremental Improvement and then you challenge yourself it's like well could I do this that would be better then you find out and then you think well is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do that would be better and and you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out generally you get better at it and you can take on larger and larger challenges in any case people do waste a lot of time and they they also act counterproductively a lot of the time regardless we do make progress and and and and we can Thrive under the difficult conditions that make up our lives and we can resist the malevolence that entices us that's within our power and we don't know the limits to that and we also know that it's better to we all know this that it's better to live courageously than cowardly everyone knows that that's what you teach people that you love and and and we know that it's better to live truthfully than in deceit and you can tell that too because that's also what you tell people that you love and we know that you should pick up your damn responsibility and move forward everyone knows that it's it's part of our intrinsic moral nature and that nature is there and it's not difficult to communicate to people about this like everyone knows that you wake up at 3:00 in the morning when you've left let your life go off the rails and that you berate yourself for your uselessness and your cruelty and your failure to take op to take the opportunities that are in front of you and if you were the master in your own house in some sense the captain of your own destiny if there was no intrinsic nature well that would never happen you'd just let yourself off the hook there'd be no voice of conscience tormenting you but no one escapes from that and what that indicates is to me is that at least psychologically we live in a universe that's characterized by a moral Dimension and we understand that well and that moral failings have consequences and and that they're not trivial they destroy you they destroy your family they destroy your community and and you can tell people that and they listen because they know they don't know they know that's the thing and maybe that's the thing about being in an intellectual you do you have the opportunity to articulate ideas that other people know they embody but they can't articulate and that's what people tell me you know they say well you help me give words to things that I always knew to be true but couldn't say or or they say I've been trying to put some of your precepts into practice responsibility being a main One Vision another honesty I I suppose bringing up the pack and saying this is the fun part of doing all of this fun is a weak word that it's it's it's a it's the remarkable part of doing all this I mean I have people tell me constantly wherever I go it's so delightful that you know they were in a pretty dark place and they tell me why and there's plenty of dark places in the world and they decided Well maybe they were going to develop a bit of a vision and take a bit more responsibility and start telling telling the truth and putting some effort into something and they come up and they say well you can't believe how much better things are I would say for the last 45 years we've told psychologists have been have been certainly to blame for this at least in part you're okay the way you are that's what we tell young people oh you're okay the way you are it's like and there's nothing worse than you can tell that you can tell someone who's young than that especially if they're miserable you know and lots of them well if they're miserable and aimless it's like oh I'm miserable and aimless and sometimes I'm suicidal and I'm nihilistic and I don't have any direction in your life it's in my life it's like well you're okay the way you are here and it's like they don't want to hear that they want to hear look you know you're and you know this you're useless you know nothing you haven't got started you've got 60 years to put yourself together and God only knows what you could become and that's so that message is so much more it's so funny because it's so it's such an attack but it's so positive because there's Faith there in the in the potential that makes up the person rather than the miserable actuality that happens to be manifesting itself at the moment and young people respond extraordinarily well to that because and you know that if you're a parent and you love your your child your son your daughter what you're trying to Foster is the best in them you want that to manifest itself across the course of their life you want them to become continually more than they are to see what they could be and well and I think that's part of the great message of the West is that that's that's the that's the ethical requirement of individual being in in in the proper sense is to constantly note that you're not what you could be to take responsibility for that and to and to commit yourself like body and soul to the attainment of that [Music] ideal so in in Genesis one of the things God has Adam do first so God makes the World by speaking okay so that's the first thing to think about you're supposed to think like in a sophisticated way about this that the idea is that there's some integral relationship between communication and the structure of being it's part of the role that Consciousness plays in the world whatever that role is language takes the chaos and makes it into things and so God has Adam name all the animals there they're not even really real until they have names now they're more implicit that's another you know here's here's an example let's say that you're having a rough patch in your relationship and you don't know why it's unnamable is it real well yeah it's manifesting itself in like a physiological discomfort then you talk about it and you name it it's like it goes from this blurry thing that's kind of potential it goes snap and then it's this thing right and then that's a horrible thing it's like a little poisonous thing but it's not a whole foggy cloud of potential poison it's like this little sharp poison thing then you think okay it's real it's a little monster but it's not it's little at least and now probably we can do something about it if we can admit to it so it's this Precision that specifies and like so this is a little bit of the Voldemort effect right if since you're a Harry Potter guy they wouldn't name him right this is the problem we got to name him first oh yeah you got to name them first absolutely because the unnamable is far more terrifying than the nameable you see that in there was a great Blair Witch Project terrifying movie I thought it was brilliant well it's unnamed there's nothing terrible happens in that movie it's all the unnamable it's like what's going on what's going on what's going on and no matter how terrible the actuality is it's rarely as terrible as your imagination cuz your imagination like it's an old thing it's seen a lot of terrible things in the history of life like it can put Monsters Everywhere and so it's almost always better it might be better without exception to name the thing no matter how terrible it is and if you can't name it what that means is that you're you're telling yourself that you're so terrified that you can't bring your attention to bear on it and that makes you you're the loser instantly if it's so terrifying that you cannot face it it's one [Music] there's another rule in my book which is Rule n assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't well they do the person you're listening to knows some things you don't you can be sure of that now whether or not you can get to them is a different matter but if you do get to them it's a real deal for you that's why you want to listen to the other person's arguments is because you're not everything you could be you don't know the pathway forward with as much clarity as you could and it's possible this is one of the wonderful things that I've had privilege of experiencing as a clinician you know because people it's like I live inside a dovi novel as a clinician people come in and they tell me about their lives and I listen to them and they tell me things that are just absolutely beyond belief you know and I learn from my clients constantly they're they're telling me honestly about their experience they tell me things they wouldn't tell anyone else cuz I actually listen to them but part of the reason I listen is cuz I'm desperate to listen it's like there's a possibility I'm going to do something stupid in the next 5 years that's going to be like fatal and there's some small possibility that if we have a decent discussion that you'll tell me something that will eliminate some of my blindness so that I don't have to fall into that particular pit and if you have a good sensitivity for the depth of the pit then you know you're pretty bloody motivated to avoid it and so and that and and that that dialogue is it's it's dialogic it's dialos right it's shared logos it's the way that we redeem ourselves mutually moving forward I said with Bill c16 that I wouldn't speak the language of the radical leftists because I don't think that that language should Define the game but let's say it does so here's the game the world is a battleground of groups and the they're battling for power that's it that's the game and some of them win and they oppress those who don't win so that's how we're going to view the world okay now the leftists say okay well here's the oppressed people the oppressors the patriarchy type patriarchal types they should be ashamed of themselves and give up some power the right-wingers the radical right-wingers look at that and they say oh I see so the game is ethnic identity is it it's it's identity politics okay we're white males we're not going to lose that's the right-wing version of identity politics it's like screw you if we're going to divide into groups if we're going to divide into tribes and I'm in my tribe I'm not going to get all guilty and lose I'm going to get all cruel and win and that's like then you think well there's people in the middle they're kind of looking back and forth which side of the identity politics Spectrum am I going to fall in do I want to go with a do I want to go do I want to be driven primarily by compassion and am I going to accept guilt for my historical privilege so that's one possibility and then I'm the oppressor I'm the member of the oppressor group or am I going to say no with that I'm just going to play to win well then I'm going to go to the right it's like well my sense is how about we don't play either of those games and the reason we shouldn't play them is well the Soviets played the leftwing game and like killed who knows how many tens of millions of people you can't even count it accurately the estimates range from 20 to 100 million those are pretty big error bars and the The Mists maybe 100 million certainly 60 million so okay that didn't work out so well then there's the Nazis like they played ethnic identity politics and racial superiority it's like what do we we want to play that game see what I've been trying to do really what I've been trying to do for the last 30 years is say look there's heavy Temptations to play those sorts of games but that's not the only game in town it's a much better game to play individual it's like get your act together stand up in the world make something of yourself stay away from the ideological oversimplifications set your house in order that's rule six in the in in this book so I have a book rule in there says set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world well I'm suggesting that people stay away from that resentment resentfulness and bitterness even though life is hard and and and there's malevolence in the world it's like yeah you can you can tell a story where everyone's a victim because we all die we all get sick you know and and and things happen to us that are bitter and terrible betrayal deceit lies like people hurt us on purpose you know so it's not just the tragedy of life it's malevolence as well it's everyone's a victim you can tell that story the problem is if you tell that story and you start to act it out you make all of that worse that's the problem and so this is why partly I got attracted to Christian imagery at least in part um because there's an idea in Christianity that you should pick up your godamn cross and like walk up the hill and that's dramatically that's correct that's the right answer it's like you've got a heavy load of suffering to bear and a fair bit of it's going to be unjust so what are you going to do about it except voluntarily and try to transform as a consequence your best bet is truth but that doesn't necessarily mean that's always going to do the trick right I mean sometimes you go fight a dragon and it eats you and if the if you being eaten wasn't a real possibility it wouldn't be a real fight and so you see people like I've seen people in my clinical practice sometimes I had one client in particular who was undergoing a particularly vicious divorce with someone who was really seriously inclined to take him out and would do pretty much everything at her disposal to do so and I strategized with him for about 3 years and we did everything like and Hyper carefully he was a very conscientious and diligent person and he put into practice everything that we discussed and strategized and he still pretty much he got backed into a corner so hard that I didn't know how to help him anymore so I would say however that he like he was very truthful person throughout that and one thing he did do was part of it was a custody battle and he did manage despite his decline in consequence of being repeatedly cornered I would say he did manage to establish what I think was a lasting relationship with his kids so he might have got enough out of what he did to justify it even though the whole landscape was pretty awful I think that not lying is your best bet but life is hard and people get run over and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to emerge in any obvious sense triumphant but if you take the alternative path path especially when you're facing severe tribulations let's say and you comp complicate those with deceit you can be sure that whatever tragedy that you're confronting is going to turn into not only tragedy but something very much akin to hell and so you might be able to at least minimize the degree of suffering even if you can't overcome it or transcended and that's something if you know what you want then you know when you're failing M if you don't allow yourself to know what you want you can keep that foggy um if you don't set out the conditions for your success then you can avoid your responsibility because again that's not clear and the problem with wanting something is that in all probability you're going to have to work for it you're going to have to make sacrifices and it's certainly possible that you want to avoid that um you you you might be afraid to make it clear because other people could deny it to you too which is something I write about a fair bit in that chapter um the problem is and and failing to make any of that clear protects you right now but it's really hard on you over the medium to long term because if you don't make it clear to yourself what you want or to other people the probability that you're just going to stumble into it is pretty low M and and you can put that off indefinitely day after day but the problem with that is that you age while you're doing that and there's a obviously a price to be paid for that so that chapter that's chapter 3 do not hide things in the fog mhm I mean it's a it's a warning about failing to pay attention you know knowledge emerges in a very strange way it it emerges obviously when we learn something we started out by not knowing it and so what that means is that knowledge goes through a transformation process from being absolutely not there to being explicit and fully detailed and one step of that process is emotion and so for example you might find yourself frustrated disappointed about the events of the day but be unable to exactly specify why that's extremely common you know you go home to your partner and you be in a bad mood and you know you'll snap at them for something and they'll say well what's up with you and you'll say well nothing you're just being annoying when it's perfectly clear to both of you that there is actually something up with you and then that disappointment and frustration anger and sadness let's say or anxiety is a sign that something isn't right but it isn't like it isn't necessarily that you're repressing knowledge of what's not right it's that you just you actually don't know and the emotion is the first step in the process by which that knowledge emerges and you might have to sit and think and talk to your partner or to a friend for Go God only knows how long before you're actually going to put your finger on what it is that you're upset about and it could be very far removed from whatever happened to trigger you in the moment and so that's the fog and you can keep things in the fog just by not doing that it's really easy it's no diff more difficult than just sitting there doing nothing because creating knowledge is active and difficult there's another rule I suppose a dictum perhaps that if you don't have your own story then you're going to be a bit player in someone else's story okay so let's talk about that fog again so let's say because of the reasons you already laid out you don't want to make your conditions for failure conscious cuz then you know when you're failing and that hurts you don't want to um make your plans for the future too clear because then if you then if you don't attain what you're looking for it's very clear that you've lost it which is somewhat different than failure right um and then there's also the prob problem that if you make your motives clear to other people then they really have the ammunition to hurt you because like I can hurt you by depriving you of what you want but I can hurt you even better if I really know what you want and can deprive you of that so you have reasons to keep these things unclear but then and then you but the problem then is is that you don't have a a a Direction that's powerful right because you're not Consulting yourself watching yourself learning about yourself figuring out who you are and figuring out what kind of route through life you would have to take to be engaged okay so then you get weak because you're not integrated you're all over the place you're scattered um well then anybody who is has power for one reason or another can compete with you for your own attention and win and so if you don't have your own plan painful as it is to develop one partly because you have to take your own inadequacies into account oh yes and you also mentioned you know you you posit an ideal this is what I want or this is who I could be the farther away that is from you the more inadequate you feel in relationship to it you know so that's another reason to avoid it but yes well that's why every ideal is a judge there's no getting away from that now if it's too much for you I might say well make a lesser ideal like try to pursue something that doesn't intimidate you into paralysis well what you really want to do is you want to lay out a a plan that has a a pretty highend aim but that also consists of steps that aren't too intimidating that that so you have to ask yourself um I would like to do this um I should do it but would I do it and the answer is likely to be no often cuz you know what you're like you're supposed to go to the gym but you don't it's like okay well maybe you won't go to the gym but maybe you'd walk half a block every second day something like that and you have to ask yourself I read about this in the first chapter about the advantage of being a fool you know if you notice that you're not so good at something then you can calibrate down the goal until a fool like you can manage it and then you can attain it and then you're not quite so much of a fool I think you need a meaning to sustain you in life because life is difficult and so the meaning has to be proportional to the the difficulty I think everyone knows that and wants that um whenever I talk to audiences about that and pointed out that it's through the adoption of responsibility that you're most likely to encounter those meanings the audiences would generally go silent because that isn't an equation that's often made right is that well you need meaning that's better than happiness happiness is a consequence I would say a fortunate consequence of the pursuit of something deeply meaningful but almost everything that's deeply meaningful requires the willingness to adopt responsibility and so that's a good thing to know because you might ask yourself well why should I adopt responsibility and the answer to that seems to be something like wow well it it deepens your life you know attention is the basic currency right everyone fights for it and it's incredibly valuable and it it certainly is the case that it's also very tempting to turn your attention to things that grasp your short-term interest rather than say pursuing the causes of negative emotion that's a that's a good example and of course we have massive corporations working night and day to continually attract our attention and there's something sinister about that obviously but but you can't exactly lay responsibility at their feet because there isn't that there's a tremendous overlap between educating people informing them and and making them attend to you and and the lines between all of those things are very foggy let's say and difficult to lay out it's certainly the case that one of the ways that you can keep yourself in a fog about yourself is by distracting is through distraction with external uh with anything in the external world and obviously computer technology cell phones games well not negative in and of themselves perhaps are there at any moment to distract you