How To Deal With Negative Thoughts & Feelings - Jordan Peterson

Thoughts about yourself are indistinguishable from negative emotion. That's how heavily tinged they are with negative emotion. As soon as you become self-conscious, as soon as you start thinking about yourself, you're instantly anxious and miserable. They're the same thing. Becker didn't read Jung, by the way, even though he wrote a book on the psychology of religion, and he said in the intro that it was unnecessary to read Jung, which was exactly wrong, given what he was doing. But Becker basically posited that we had to create fabrications to defend ourselves against negative emotion. That's the essential message of that book. And what that means in some sense is that the whole corpus of human endeavor is an attempt to escape from the realization of mortality. And I think, well, wait a sec. No, we're also escaping from mortality. It's not just the thoughts of it. And it isn't obvious to me at all, and I think almost all of clinical psychology would suggest that this is true, is that falsification as a defense is actually counterproductive in the final analysis. And most of the great clinical theorists, Rogers, perhaps in some sense foremost among them, but perhaps not, insisted that it was the truth that set you free, not the web of defenses that you had erected by necessity to deal with your neurotic death anxiety. That's actually counterproductive. So one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field, is you help people identify those thoughts, in some sense as objects, to no longer identify with them and say, you know, just because you think that, it's not necessarily true, it's not necessarily you, and it's not necessarily helpful. Now we can check and see if any of those three propositions were true. Maybe it is you, maybe you do believe it, maybe it is useful, but we're going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what's driving your misery. And I really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies, because they're thought systems that are almost entirely foreign, in some sense, to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you're describing, and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity. And if they're blinding the person to some underlying reality that's actually revivifying and nourishing, and an antidote to suffering, then they're a tremendous block to exactly that process. You know, one of the things that people might want to know who are listening, is that if you have a memory that's older than about 18 months, and it haunts you, and when it comes up involuntarily, it produces a stress reaction, what that means is that as far as your nervous system is concerned, and so as far as your body is concerned, that danger hasn't gone away. And what's happening is an unconscious alarm system that's looking for pitfalls and holes is warning you that the map that you're using is incomplete in a manner that might enable you to fall into the same hole. And so one of the things that people can do that's very useful is if you have memories like that that plague you, is to bring them to mind voluntarily, instead of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily, and then to think through what has changed and what might not have, but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose, you'd be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it. There's no other way of getting the memory to go away. Like merely re-contemplating it in the same manner over and over won't do it. And allowing it to plague you unconsciously, it'll do that forever until you solve it. It might show up in your dreams, it'll show up in your fantasies, it'll trigger you, so to speak, when you're talking to other people, if they happen to discuss a topic that's related to it. And it's because the narrative is one of failure and defeat, the event was one of failure and defeat, and if there isn't a map to allow you to transcend that, that's functional, then the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying danger is never going to let you go. If you run, then the signal, the story you're acting out, is that the thing you're running from is bigger than you, and that you have to hide. And that's just a recipe for anxiety. Now it's not necessarily that easy to turn and face something, but you do detail out a variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that. You can differentiate the problem, like you might have been traumatized at work, let's say, or let's not use that sort of jargony, that jargony phraseology. You may be having tremendous difficulties at work, you might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless, and that's bothering you constantly, it's disturbing your sleep, for example, and it's haunting you, and you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come. And partly that's because the thought of getting a new job is so daunting that you can't face it. And one of the ways of recalibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable steps. Well, okay, so let me run something by you in relationship to emotional regulation and status. Tell me what you think about this. So the terror management theorist types tend to think that our cognitive beliefs inhibit our anxiety, and they drill that all the way down to anxiety of death, taking a page from Freud, and that's Becker's book, basically, and there's a whole field of psychology that's worked on that. I think it's... I don't think it's right. I think it's more indirect. So imagine this. Imagine that the degree to which your negative emotion is regulated is dependent on serotonergic output, fundamentally. So as your serotonin levels rise, you're more emotionally stable. So you feel less anxiety, despair, the whole panoply of negative emotions, which are pretty tightly clumped together. And so then you might say, well, your emotional regulation is dependent on your status. And I think there's truth in that. Now, let's say I do... we're at an academic conference, and I stand up and I ask you a question, and it's a mean question, but you can't answer it, so your status is devalued. But here's what I've actually done. It's not exactly that I've devalued your status. What I've done is undermined the claim that you have a valid claim on that position. Yeah. Right? And then that's going to dysregulate you, because if that's true, then, well, you've been shown to be an imposter, let's say, or at least a threat is there, and then that would take you out of that hierarchy, and your negative emotion would rise. And then the reason it would rise is because if you are removed from that hierarchy, and now you're alienated and isolated, everything has become way more dangerous. Yes. Right. And you know that people at the bottom of a hierarchy are much more likely to die from all-cause mortality. Right. This is not nothing. Why have a goal? Well, it's easy. No goal, no positive emotion. Because you experience positive emotion by noticing that you're moving towards a goal. And so if you don't have a goal, well, you can't have any positive emotion. So you better have a goal. And so you might say, well, what should the goal be? Well, we could start by saying, well, any goal is better than none. And then we might say, well, it should be a goal that other people will let you pursue, because otherwise it's going to be kind of difficult. Maybe they'll be even happy to help you pursue it. That would even be better. And maybe it's a goal that would enable you to learn how to pursue other goals while you pursue that goal. Boy, that would really be good. And so you can see that your goal is parameterized. But that doesn't mean that any old goal works. It means there's some goals that work nicely and some not so nicely. There are playable games and non-playable games. That's a good way of thinking about it. And you want to have a playable game. And there's a lot of them. Lawyer, plumber, you know, actor, whatever. They're playable games. And it's not obvious which one's better, but it's certainly obvious which ones are sustainable and which ones are worse. So there's a set of playable games. And you need to extract from that set of playable games a game that suits you. And that would be partly due to your temperament, you know, because extroverted people want to play an extroverted game and highly neurotic people want to play a safe game and agreeable people want to play a generous game and disagreeable people want to play a game that's highly competitive so they can win. And, you know, fine. But they're all within the realm of playable games. And that means they're socially acceptable as well. And so that means it isn't just arbitrary. It isn't just relative what you decide to do. It's heavily parameterized. There's a set of playable games. And it's large. The set is large. But there are commonalities within it. And that's why there are commonalities. That's why morality has a common basis fundamentally. And so that's partly what we're trying to investigate. It's like, what does that mean? What does it mean? Is there such a thing? Now, one thing to remember is that if you don't erect a hierarchical structure with something to aim at, you've got no positive motivation because you experience positive motivation in relationship to a goal, not from attaining the goal. That's satisfaction. And besides, it's fleeting. You know perfectly well. You graduate from university. Poof. Next day you have a problem. Which is, what do you do next? And that's a tough problem. It's not like you've solved your problems by winning that game. You just introduced the problem of having to introduce another game. So it's unreliable as a source of positive emotion. But what's reliable is you set a goal. And you try to attain it. And then that gives your life, that literally provides your life with meaning. That's what meaning is. Now it's more than that, but that's what it is. So let's say you're conceptualizing your own failure, you know. And you meditated on it, and you come to the conclusion that God first came to. Hey, not only have things not been going very well for you, but it's actually your fault. And not only that, you brought it on yourself. And not only that, you knew it all the time. Well then you might think you'll wake up and fly right, right? You'll get your wings in order and fly right. But there's no reason to assume that at all. And that's not what happens to Cain. That just makes him more bitter, right? And you can understand that if you think about it just for a second. It's like bad enough when something horrible happens to you. But then to have to swallow the additional pill, right? To have to take in the information that you could have done something different. It was avoidable. And you knew it at the time. And you decided to do it anyways. And I think people are in that situation a lot more often than anyone is willing to admit. You know, you have that little voice in the back of your head that says, and you override it. And you know it's arrogance that makes you override it. It's always arrogance, you know. It always warns you. It's always arrogance. Yeah, I can get away with it. It's like, no you can't. I don't think you ever get away with anything. So and maybe your experience has taught you different, but my suspicions are it hasn't. And if you think it has, well, the other shoe hasn't yet dropped. So Cain doesn't take the opportunity to let God's wisdom reorient his character. And that could have been the outcome. He could have got down on his knees, so to speak, and said, oh my God, I've been wrong all along. I've been living improperly. I've been making the wrong sacrifices. Abel deserves everything he has. I got exactly what was coming to me. You know, could I possibly now straighten myself out and live in repentance and improve my position? That's not what he did at all. He said, all right, fair enough. I get it. It's like, I'm going to go after the thing I most admire, and I'm going to destroy it, and I'm going to do that despite its cost to me, and I'm going to do that just to spite the creator of being. There's this idea in the New Testament that Christ was he who took the sins of the world unto himself. It's a very complicated idea, but part of it, part of it, part of it is associated with the idea that he met the devil in the desert as well. To take the sins of mankind unto yourself is to understand that within you dwells exactly the same spirit that commit the atrocities at Columbine or that ran the camps at Auschwitz, and to actually understand that that's part and parcel of your makeup, and then to take responsibility for it. And I think that in the aftermath of the terrible 20th century, that's what we're left with. We're left with the necessity to take responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves, and that way, perhaps, we can stop those terrible things from happening again. In reference to the Starry Night, for example, there's this series of Renaissance paintings which are quite magnificent that show an image of Mary with 12 stars around her head and with her foot on a serpent, and that's an allusion to the Garden of Eden because Eve crushes the serpent beneath her foot. And this is relevant to your discussion and our discussion earlier about the deepest of all evils, because that's a concern of yours. It's been a concern of mine. What's the darkest possible place? Well, that snake in those paintings represents that, and that's why in Christianity, the snake, which is a predator, is associated with Satan as what you say the emissary of evil or malevolent, something like that. And so because Mary has her head in the stars, she can have her foot on the serpent, and that's part of that meditation. Well, she does that before she listens to your meditation, but that's where I see the psychological link, let's say, because you want to put your psyche in the highest possible place, whatever that is, and we don't know what it is exactly, but it's something like what happens when you look up at the night sky. It's something like that, and if you do that, that means that your foot is simultaneously on that serpent. If you want to stabilize people psychologically, and if you want to imbue them with courage, then what you do is you help them expose themselves voluntarily to the things they're afraid of that they're avoiding. It's a very powerful technique. That's exposure therapy, and what exposure therapy seems to do is to make people braver.