HealthyGamerGG - Shame Isn't Something to Overcome Alone

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Today Dr. K dives in to shame. He talks about what shame actually is, being action oriented, how to measure life purpose, confidence, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That shame is going to interfere with that behavior. An understanding of that in the present moment, what is the shame dictating in my mind? What is it telling me to do? What is it not telling me to do? As those emotions arise in your mind, that creates resistance to action. I struggle with shame. How will coaching help? Hi, using a throwaway because other people know my real account.

I've been in the Discord for a while and attended an Ask a Coach event on shame that was interesting. I also watched a Dr. K video on shame, and I liked the explanation of how shame is the gap between my current self and my ideal self. He also mentioned that coaching can help with this, but I don't understand how talking to another person will reduce the gap. It doesn't make any sense in my head. It just feels like I will never live up to my full potential. Also, is this the right place and time for this question? Okay, let's talk about shame. So the first thing that we're going to do is talk a little bit about what shame is. So if I had to encapsulate it, I would say that shame is the gap between where you are and where you ideally should be.

So there's like an ideal self that we all have in our mind, right? I'm someone who works out. I'm someone who eats healthy. I'm someone who wakes up on time. I'm someone who doesn't waste all my weekends in front of a screen and doom scrolling. There's this person that we know we can be, right? Because technically, like, I have the power to do that. So oftentimes the ideal self that I'm talking about is not like a fictitious self.

It's not like I can fly to the moon or I can, you know, fly to the sun. Like the ideal self that we have is are all the things that we know we can do. And oftentimes those are the things that we have done in the past, right? Because there have been weekends where I've stayed completely away from my phone. There have been times where I've woken up early and started studying and gotten ahead in a class. I have gotten an A on a test. So we know we're capable of it. And there's this ideal self that we build for,

which is all of the things that we've done in the past, which if we put them all together, we have this potential to be this version of ourself. There's that person over there, and then there's where I am. And the gap between these two things is where shame lives, right? Because I'm not living up to my potential. So now the question is, if this is true, like, what do we do about that, right?

How do we approach this problem? Because the challenge with shame is that, once again, if I'm ashamed of myself and I try to do something, sometimes that shame can really create problems for me. So let's say I wake up on a Saturday morning and I end up studying for four hours. If I'm carrying that shame with myself, something really subtle can happen.

Instead of being proud of my achievement, I can beat myself up for it. And I can say, oh, my God, I should have been doing this all along. Oh, my God. Why did I only study for four hours? I really should have done eight. Right? I should have been doing this all along.

And I'll even be resentful. Because here's the problem with the shame gap. Here's the ideal self. Here's where I am. Even if we do this, we still fall short of our goal. So something really bizarre happens where progress isn't enough. progress doesn't actually lead to positive reinforcement. All progress does is make it clear how much more I have to go.

And so even though I'm moving in the right direction, I don't receive positive reinforcement from it. And that's because of the shame that I carry with me. Now, some people may be wondering a little bit because this person was asking about coaching. Right? So because it's a good point that the person brings up, which is that like if I carry shame, I don't understand how talking to a different person will fix this problem,

because this is what I'm capable of. And if I'm over here, talking about how I'm over here, doesn't actually move me towards my goal. Right? Like, it doesn't actually move me towards my goal. So here are a couple of things to understand. The first is that when I have an ideal self and I literally make progress, this is not a positive reinforcer, right?

Because I have this gap left. the gap is still there. So what do I need to do? I need to find some way to get rid of this thing. Because if I can start over here and I move this far, then this is progress. This is like, hey, I accomplished something today. And tomorrow I can do this, and tomorrow I can do this, and tomorrow I can do this. So this is where when we think a little bit about how coaching works, coaches are going to help you all do a couple of things.

The first is to understand where the idealistic expectation came from. because as long as that idealistic expectation is there, it's going to be so hard to live up to it. And that idealistic expectation is built up from all of these different experiences that leave an emotional impact. When I get a B and I could have gotten an A, that hurts and I feel a little bit ashamed of myself.

Right? When my older brother or sister, they got a 4.0, but I only got a 3.2. and when my parents compared me to the older child, that makes me feel ashamed. Or even more devastating in that when I used to get a 4.0, when I was a gifted kid, and I was in the honors program, and I got a scholarship to go to college. Because I was in the top 10 in my class, and now I'm struggling. So the ideal self, as long as that exists, it's going to be hard to sort of fix

that shame gap. So how do we approach that in coaching? We start by understanding that that ideal self is built up from a series of fantasies. And as you go through past experiences of your life, and you start to realize where does that ideal self come from, and you start to unpack it, you begin to realize that some of the ways that you were judging yourself were actually unfair. Right? So like maybe you had ADHD and your older sibling didn't. You start to realize that because you were so intelligent, you never developed a good study habit. So you have the classic pattern of a gifted kid, which is number one, straight to number 15, right? You're doing fine, you're doing fine, you're doing fine, you're doing fine, you hit a wall and then you go straight to like nonfunctional. Because now your IQ can't

keep up. It's not sufficient, and you haven't built the appropriate skills. So as you work with a coach, like this is what they try to do is try to help you reframe things to understand why things happened. And once you understand why things happen, hopefully you can be a little bit more non-judgmental towards yourself. And that's where, like, how do I learn how to be non-judgmental? The way that you learn how to be non-judgmental is someone else treats you non-judgmentally. So this is also something really simple to understand. Where does the negative self-talk in your head come from? It comes from the outside.

That's where it starts. Right? So when you have kids that are browbeaten by parents, nagged by parents, nagged by parents, always making comparisons to your older, brighter, stronger, faster, more charismatic sibling. When they always make those comparisons, you learn that. In the same way that you learn slang and you learn the language that you speak at home, you learn that kind of self-talk.

Because other people speak to you that way. So if you look at some of these relationships like therapy or coaching or even intimate friendships, intimate romantic partners, as people start treating you different mentors, mentees, as people start treating you non-judgmentally, you will learn how to look at yourself non-judgmentally. And by going through your life historically and sort of recognizing how your shame built up over time,

as we start to rewrite that history, reinterpret those events, the shame will start to decrease. Or sorry, the idealistic self will start to decrease. As the idealistic self starts to decrease, the shame decreases with it, because it's the gap between these two things. The next thing is that coaching is really outcome, not outcome oriented, but it's like action-oriented.

It's not just about fixing shame. If your primary concerns are clinical in nature or it's just to deal with emotions, I would say like therapy may be more appropriate. What coaching is really about is the application of that internal work towards external things. That's what I really think coaching is specialized for. So now the question is, if you want to apply for a job, if you want to apply for a promotion, if you want to ask someone out, that shame is going to interfere with that behavior. An understanding of that in the present moment, what is the shame dictating in my mind? What is it telling me to do?

What is it not telling me to do? As those emotions arise in your mind, that creates resistance to action. As we have resistance to action, it becomes hard to act. And so we feel paralyzed. We start to feel tired. we start to feel directionless, et cetera. So the key thing about coaching is it also has a very present focus. Okay, what are your goals and what gets in the way?

How to shame interfere with it. As we start to understand those things and as we start to emotionally decompress, whatever fuels your resistance, then the resistance gets lower and it's actually easier to act. And so you can't, it's not sort of, you can sort of fix the shame, but then it's also about how the shame interferes in your life. and it's about targeting that particular interaction. And once we can target the shame as it interferes in the other parts of your life, as we reduce that, then hopefully your life starts to move in the right direction.

So we have an IRB approved study that's running right now. We presented a study that had 1,300 participants at the American Psychiatric Association in our coaching program. So what we've found now is that people who are in coaching for four months or five months see a 58% increase in their sense of life purpose. So people come in directionless. 58% increase in life purpose. We see 25 to 35% reductions in depression and anxiety.

Now, this is not a clinical intervention, so how could it possibly reduce depression or anxiety? And it turns out that as you start building a life, as you start finding purpose, and you start moving forward in a positive, direction, the negative emotions start to improve. So we're not there to treat depression or anxiety. Let me make this very clear. We're there to help you build a life. And as you build a life, the negative emotions start to get better. And that's a statistically significant finding.

So how does coaching help with shame? That's how I'd lay it out. Right? It's not just about fixing the shame. It's about an application of understanding how shame affects your behaviors, understanding how shame affects your mind. It's about digging into those things and reframing them, trying to understand where this shame came from. It's even about decompressing the emotion in the moment so that you can take the actions that you want to, so that resistance is not too much to deal with.

And hopefully, that'll help. Your mileage may vary, but at this point we feel really confident, based on IRB-approved studies and initial outcomes data, that these are pretty consistent findings. and that if you really want to put together your life, you have to have a sense of purpose. And once you have that North Star, then other problems become easier to deal with. Whether there's a will, there's a way, whether there's a goal that you're kind of moving towards on a daily basis.

It makes all the other things kind of fall into place and becomes easier to tackle. And that's what we really try to do at HG coaching. Questions? Oh, a lot of good questions. Okay. So how's life purpose measured? Great question. So we measure life purpose based on, I think, an NIH patient-recorded promise scale.

So the National Institutes of Health in the United States developed standardized public domain scales. So this is developed by the NIH. They said, this is the scale that we're going to use. It's not owned by anyone. It's not used for a particular purpose. So some scales, for example, are developed by pharmaceutical companies. news flash sometimes when a pharma company develops a scale, it is developed in a particular way to be optimized for their medications.

So this is developed by the NIH, and it's kind of like the gold standard, at least in my opinion, of scales because there's no bias in it. So we use standardized outcome reporting measures. How do you estimate the percent of depression reduction? Great question. So that's a subjective report also by a promise scale. So there's like a standardized scale that we can use to measure how to press someone else. These are scientifically validated.

Does longitudinal prove to be more effective? Great question, topless orange. Up to a point is what I would say. So some people get a lot of benefit in a short amount of time. Some people get more benefit over longer periods of time. But it does appear that overall, the longer you're with it, the more. more it helps. There are a couple of other very important caveats to that data.

One is that sometimes people accomplish a lot in a short time and then they're done. So we actually don't have long-term data on like a lot of success stories. So the most common reason that people leave coaching is they accomplish their goals. Number one reason to stop coaching. And so, you know, like basically like it, for some people it takes longer to get there. For some people, they get there faster, but it's not necessarily like more is better, if that makes sense. So do I have links to the studies that you talk about during stream? I would love to read them. So if you all want links, so a lot of the stuff that we, let me, so I have three ways to answer that question.

The first is not always, but for example, if you all want to learn about attachment theory, you can get a book on attachment theory. So I recently got, let me see if I can find it. this book is great on attachment theory, right? So I don't know how to say this, but when I like teach stuff, I read this. And this is not one study. I mean, this is like, you know, this is a textbook. So this probably has hundreds of citations. Second thing is, if you all want citations, Dr. K's guide has a ton of them.

So that's where we do try to very exhaustively offer a targeted bibliography to the concepts that we share. So that's the best place to find a bibliography. Third thing is the data that I'm citing now is not published. It's from an IRB approved study that we're preparing for publication. So it's pre-publication data. Although it has been presented, so vetted in some way by the APA, because they have to look at our data and decide whether it's okay to preliminary present. At conferences, you frequently will have pre-publication data that's presented.

So if you're asking about us, like our data. Good question, though. Book name? Handbook of attachment. It is called the handbook because it barely fits in the hand. A couple of other things, if people are curious. So just other outcomes, 16 weeks of group coaching. Also experienced 58.

Oh, okay, so it looks like I got some numbers wrong. So personal coachings, we see a 35 to 45% reduction in anxiety. in group coaching is 27 to 35 percent. And in career coaching at eight weeks, people see 25 to 35 percent reductions in depression and anxiety and a 25 percent increase in confidence in the trajectory of their career. That's at eight weeks. So for career coaching, we don't have quite as much longitudinal data. It's also been smaller.

So we don't have like, you know, our sample size for our APA presentation, was 1,300. We don't have that many people who've gone through career coaching. So we, we, it seems like people get, are 25% more confident in their career trajectory. Jay Naxo, have I made a video about what is purpose? I think so. You can check our YouTube channel, but we talk a lot about purpose in Dr. K's guide, I think especially the depression guide or the meditation guide. So I think that a lot of like, what may be getting misdiagnosed is depression is actually like a lack of purpose in life. Bunzo I is asking, have you read the book attached to the new science of adult attachment

and how it can help you find and keep love? No, I have not. So I've heard good things about the book, but I generally speaking read primary textbooks or papers as opposed to pop science books that are targeted at the lay audience. I'm not saying that the book isn't great. but, you know, like, I just, I like to get as close to the primary data as I can. So what I tend to find about a lot of the pop science books is they're fantastic. Don't get me wrong.

But that, like, I oftentimes am not satisfied with the data that they present. It's usually, like, a lot more anecdotal, right? It'll be like lots of stories. Which is fine. The audience is different. Mollett Offlane is saying, giving someone, career coaching, it's a boost. And of course, people start to believe in themselves. They would get a higher boost if you put in $5,000 in their account. My point being that people are delusional and can be

swayed in different ways. I don't know what you base that on. Mollett Offlane. Love the name, by the way. I actually don't know that they would, I actually don't know how you make that claim, that if you just gave someone a cash infusion, they would feel more confident about their career trajectory. In fact, I would actually think that that would have very little impact. They may reduce their stress, may provide a sense of financial security, but what we're talking about is career trajectory, confidence in where your career is going that's built up over time. I don't know that a one-time cash infusion would make people feel more confident. It's an interesting point. I'm just really curious what you base that on. Is lack of purpose associated with lack of motivation

or excitement, I would absolutely think so. That too is not, I'm trying to think about whether I've actually seen a study that uses a validated measure of emotion, I mean, motivation, excitement, and a validated measure of purpose and whether those two things are correlated, I can't think of one. Seems like simple, right, that the answer would be yes, but I don't know. So does your new ADHD module have insights on inattentive ADHD types? So this is a great question. So this may sound kind of weird, but in the ADHD module, we don't focus on the separate subtypes of ADHD, and there's a reason for that.

So if you look at the subtypes of ADHD, right, there's inattentive type, there's hyperactive, there's ADD, hyperactivity. There's even hypotheses of an emotionally dysregulated subtype. So my experience working as a clinician with ADHD is even if you get diagnosed with a particular subtype, there's a lot of variance within that subtype. So inattentive may have more of a social element versus like a professional element. So some people will have like a bad inattention in their professional life, but be totally fine in their social life or vice versa. So instead what we do is rather than focusing on sort of the DSM subtypes, what we focus on is the neuroscience circuits. So what are all of the ways in which ADHD impacts or ADD impacts your brain? What are the different neuroscientific circuits?

How does it affect your emotional regulation? How does it affect your attention? How does it affect executive function like planning and executing action? And so my experience has been that when you take a more comprehensive neuroscience approach and you understand, okay, what are all the ways in which my brain is like being impacted by this? That's when you can really figure out a tailored strategy. to understanding yourself. And as a clinician, that's kind of the approach that I take, if that makes sense. Right? It's not a substitute for clinical treatment by any means.

But what it is is an insight into how I think about patients, which I think is absolutely like educational, which even patients should think about themselves this way. To your knowledge, can repeated medication in efficacy indicate a misdiagnosis of ADHD? Sure. Right. So not commenting on your particular. particular case, but a general principle of medicine is if the treatment doesn't work or five treatments don't work, then reconsider the diagnosis. That's like diagnostic logic 101.

Thank you, Topless Orange, for answering North Star Warriors questions. So this is important to understand. So when we started streaming, a lot of people wanted to work with Dr. Kay. And while I'm flattered by that, what I really found was like, I just can't do it, like physically. I don't have enough hours in the day. I would love to work with each and every one of you individual. And I'm not just saying that. I genuinely mean it. Like, I love doing individual work.

Love it. It's like one of my favorite things to do. The challenge is that there just isn't enough time fundamentally. So then the question is like, okay, if I can't get to everyone, so one of my, I went to a friend of mine and I said, hey, I'm getting a bunch of referrals. Like, I'm not quite sure what to do about it. And they were joking and they were saying, yeah, well, like, you know, either you increase more hours in the day, or you duplicate yourself. That's the only way that you can help these people.

They were being facetious, and they were saying, you basically can't help them. There's nothing you can do. But I got to thinking, and I was like, wait a minute. How special am I? And I actually believe I'm not that special. I think a lot of what I accomplish is not because, like, there's some special circuit in my brain that other human beings don't have. I think it's just because I was taught certain concepts and like have had certain kinds of training, right? So a couple of years of meditation training, medical school, psychiatry residency, clinical work, and also a lot of stuff that isn't clinical work. So I myself struggled with playing too many games and I hung out with a lot of gamers. And so then the question became, can I actually teach what I do to people? And so then was kind of thinking about, so

I did, one of the first things that I did is put together a continuing medical education course for the American Psychiatric Association on video game addiction, which you all can sign up for and watch if you want to. I also started teaching stuff at Harvard Medical School, so like started teaching stuff on technology addiction and stuff there. And so it was trying to equip clinicians, but like ran into a slight problem, which is that I don't, the people, like psychiatry residents at HMS don't have like 50 hours to spend, learning what I can teach. They've got to learn a bunch of other stuff, right? They have to learn

about psychopharm. They have to learn about schizophrenia. They have to learn about TMS and ECT. And I don't think that my knowledge is more valuable than theirs. I don't think it's a good idea to have Dr. K. K. teaching there for 50 hours. It's not appropriate. There's way more important stuff for them to learn. But for our particular population, there are things that I think are applicable. And that's like literally why we started a coaching program. Everything that we do at H.J. is designed based on the needs of the community, literally. So the question is, can I teach people what I do? Now, are they duplicates of me?

Of course not. But I think we can teach them enough. And that's what the data shows. So we started a pilot. We took, I think, like eight or ten people from the community. And I shared some concepts and they started working with some clients. And like we did pilot studies, right? So we started with a pilot study.

didn't charge anything or anything like that. Let's just see if this works. And then since that time, we've gone through six or seven curriculum revisions. As we collect data, as we ask people, what worked for you, what didn't work for you, we get better globally. And then we disseminate that out and we modify our curriculum. And I think part of the reason that we get the outcomes that we get is because we really incorporate data, analytics, and feedback into curriculum advancements. So, like, in a weird way, I mean, all of our coaches are fantastic, but like the ones that are trained later, I think have a more refined curriculum, which the older coaches have access to as well, but so they can rewatch stuff. And so, but basically a lot of the refinements come from actually the older coaches, when the older coaches will say, hey, I've seen like 15 people who struggle with this, like let's talk about it. And then we figure things out.

So we try to stay adaptive and responsive to the community. Do you do follow-ups to track the long-term effects of coaching, Simeon? Great question. Not yet is the answer. At least not that I'm aware of. Yes, dude, is asking, how can we make your lessons and perspectives available broadly in general school education rather than having to stumble upon it by misclicking on an Asman Gold Stream? Yes, dude, your guess is as good as mine. If anyone out there has a... So I saw a really great post like a couple months ago about a teacher, who like synthesized one of our workshops and taught it to a group of their fellow teachers.

And they were like, this is really, really helpful. Like we were talking about gifted kids and stuff like that. Like why kids like behave the way that they do. I don't remember the details of what they taught. But I'm like I said earlier, I'm totally, I think that health education and understanding your mind should be a basic part of education. So this was true in ancient India where like learning yoga and meditation was a part of school. In fact, school was taught at monasteries.

So you learned like science and music and like how to meditate and about emotions and sense organs and all this kind of stuff. So this is where I hate to break it to you, yes, dude, but I don't have all the answers and we're not all geniuses over here. This is where if you all have a suggestion for making, and a suggestion is like, y'all should do this. Like that helps only so much, right? So the more operationalized it is, or if anyone knows people who work on educational curriculums, you know, let us know. Because we'd love to make this a part of standard education. We've gotten some interest from teachers here and there, but like it's a system. And like, I don't know how to say, I don't have any magical power to like wave something and go talk to a superintendent of the school district.