Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - What Is Reflective Functioning? Mentalization, Attachment Theory & RF Scoring with Dr. Miriam Steele

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

In this episode, Dr. Puder hosts a conversation with Dr. Miriam Steele, a leading expert in reflective functioning (RF), mentalization, and attachment theory. They explore the origins of RF from the pioneering work of Peter Fonagy and John Bowlby in the London Parent-Child Project, its role in predicting secure attachments and sensitive parenting, and distinctions from empathy. Conversation topics include cutting-edge research on mentalization-based treatment (MBT) and transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and eating disorders, therapist RF's impact on patient outcomes, body image representations, and smartphone effects on parent-child bonds. By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.5 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog Link to YouTube video Main Attachment

All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Dr. Miriam Steele. She's a PhD researcher, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, who was involved in the early studies on reflective function and ongoing on the new studies coming out. Her husband was on a prior episode, and they both co-authored with Fonegee, the Manual of Reflective Function. Today we're going to be talking about reflective function. We're going to be talking about understanding how it can help us understand ourselves,

how to increase compassion for ourselves, where some of the gaps can be, and then where we can have some compassion increases as we think through our own journey, think through our own reflective function. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much, David. Very happy to be here. So maybe you could start by just defining reflective function. Okay.

So reflective functioning has to do with the capacity to think about thoughts, intentions, and feelings in oneself, as well as in another person. And that capacity has been shown to be linked to responsive and sensitive caregiving in terms of parent-child relationships, which in and of itself leads to something similar in the child in terms of their capacity to also put themselves in someone else's shoes. And it is becoming a parent more recently that it is perhaps the mechanism of change in psychotherapeutic work. So it started for us looking at the narratives that we prompted from adults in response to the adult attachment interview. And from those interviews that we collected even before a first baby was born,

we could predict something about the nature of that child's tie to each parent. And from there, it's become very popular to think about that specific mechanism, not necessarily unlike empathy or insight, but slightly different in this context in terms of the fact that with reflective functioning, we actually have an empirical measure. We have a scale that you alluded to, to that allows us to rate narratives of many different kinds, as well as to listen differently within psychotherapeutic context. Yeah, so how is it different than empathy? How is it deeper than empathy?

I think it's deeper in that it is much more specific in terms of one quality of empathy. And empathy, I think, is a very kind of broad overview, and this is something very very specific that contains within it different ramifications as well as different specificities. So, for example, in response to the out of attachment interview question around, why do you think your parents behaved as they did during your childhood, that is one that demands a reflective response. And I think just pure empathy wouldn't get at the specificities. So what we're looking for there is for the individual's capacity to put themselves in

their parent shoes, what was going on for them when they were parenting early childhood and then beyond, as well as to put themselves in their own shoes. What was it like for them growing up? Do they have a developmental perspective? That is, putting themselves back there and then into the here and now. And that is an example of why it's more than just empathy, because it has these other dimensions to it that are quite specific. Okay. And so maybe we should get back up just a little bit and give me a quick history. How did you get involved with Fonigy in the early studies? Tell me about some of the early longitudinal work you did in the London Parent, Child Project, adoption studies.

So we got to London because I very much wanted to undertake psychoanalytic training at the Anna Freud Center. It was kind of the center London of psychoanalytic work and trainings. So that was my first kind of goal to train as a child psychoanalyst. I knew though that I needed a PhD and Peter Fonagy was very close to some of the eminent analysts at the Anna Freud Center, especially someone called Joseph Sandler. So Joe Sandler was a very famous object relations theorist and my husband Howard was signed up to work with him on a PhD. And so looking around, Peter Fonagy seemed to be the best option for me in terms of looking

first supervisor. And so it was kind of this serendipitous moment in terms of what was available and that I wanted to do those two things at once, the child dental training and the PhD. So I came to Peter and said, I want to do this study on intergenerational patterns of attachment. It was 1985, 1986, when this monograph by the Society for Research in Child Development came out with the move to the level of representation, this incredibly paradigm-shifting seminal moment where Mary Mae presented to the world some of her unique assessments to do with attachment,

including the adult attachment interview. And at that time, Peter turned to me and said, I don't know anything about attachment. Why don't you go talk to John Bowlby? And I was a young 25-year-old. I'm like, I can't go talk to John Bolby. Yeah. And he said, no, no, no, it's, he's, he's there at the Tabistock.

So for some of us older folks, you might remember that before email, you actually had to write a letter to someone and wait for their response. So I wrote to his secretary, and she wrote back offering an appointment. And so the London Parent Child Project, really, I do feel has John Bolby stamp on it in terms of his guidance. Because as I was going to him to describe what we were, we were. were intending to do, he said, well, Mary Main and Eric Hessey are coming to the Tabastock Clinic in London to train people in the Adult Attachment interview.

I think he should do the training. So we brought that back to Peter, and he understood the potential gold that was in there in terms of doing the training. So the three of us undertook that training all the way through with Volby's guiding hand on parts of the research. And so we were aiming to show that even before a baby is born, we could predict the quality of their attachment to each parent. One of the unique features of our study is including fathers all the way through as much as mothers, which even to this day is unfortunately not the focus or as much the focus as it should be. And we were able to show that when we collected these 100 interviews from mothers expecting their first babies, so it was that it was the focus.

the transition to parenthood, which is another important feature. What does it do to your attachment system to go through going from being perhaps an individual or partner, but not yet a parent? How does that change your own representational world to do with attachment? And then we studied, so we had 100 mothers and their 100 fathers, the partners, and we then followed them up by inviting them to come to University College London, where we were doing our PhDs so that we could conduct a strain situation assessment, 12 months with mother, 18 months with father. That was very much trying to replicate Mary Main's seminal study of trying to find a match between the ways the babies behaved in the strain situation and what was in the minds of the

parents who gave rise to those patterns. So Mary Main did it retrospectively. She had parents of six-year-olds on whom she had strained situations from 18 months and 12 months prior and could make a match between them. We were very interested, could you even get to this before the baby's even born? And we found with about 75% accuracy, we could make those predictions. What percent accuracy? About 75%. And so what kind of predictions were you making? So if the parent delivered a narrative to us in response to the 18 questions of the adult attachment interview, which was classified as secure. So one gets a set of ratings,

how loving was the parent, how rejecting, how role reversing, that is, turning things upside down so that the child felt some responsibility in even parenting the parent. We looked for a set of scores around idealization, derogation of parent, current anger. And then one of the central pieces is coherence, and that's really one of the big names of the game in attachment assessments. Out of these different parts of what we're looking at, whether it's the behavior of the infant in the strain situation or the adult in response to the adult attachment interview, does it hang together? Are there contradictions that don't make sense? Is there enough detail in what they're telling us? And within that, it was our reading of these 200 interviews

that we discovered reflective functioning. That is, Mary Mayne had. at a scale called metacognition, which wasn't very developed at the time, which is the individual's capacity in the moment of saying something to catch themselves, kind of a Freudian slip moment. Like, oh, wow. I said my father died when I was 14 years old instead of my father died, those kind of slips without realizing it. We misunderstood actually that scale originally, and we were thinking of it much more. in terms of theory of mind, in terms of putting oneself in someone else's shoes.

So it was Peter's great delight when Mary Main and Eric Hessey were visiting our London lab, and we told them about the way that we were coding metacognition, and Maryman said, that's not what I had in mind, that's not the scale. We saw Peter smiling, couldn't quite understand it as the doctoral students. And when they left, we were like, wow, we're in trouble here, but like, what are we going to do? And he said, no, this is great. We would call it our own variable, and that was the birth of reflective functioning. Okay.

And so how did reflective functioning compared to some of the other measures of attachment in the adult attachment interview that were already there that you probably also already scored? How did reflective functioning uniquely show something? So I think it showed something around how people might have arrived at their clients. classification. So the adult task for interview is taking into account early childhood experiences, but not just what happened, but what the person makes of those experiences. That's really, that's really the key. So individuals who face a lot of adversity, but somewhere along the line where they've learned to process, to metabolize, to come to terms with those experiences, there was something in the way they talked about their childhood, which was so impressive,

sometimes even more impressive than those individuals who had relatively good enough family upbringings. There's something about overcoming and working through possible trauma or trauma that really showed us something about this reflective functioning construct. So we actually divided our sample up into two halves, those who suffered from adversity. So things like a parent being medically or psychiatrically ill. fathers being out of the family context. Remember, we were collecting this date in 1980s, and so that had different kind of meaning than it might have in 2026. Children going off to boarding

school before the age of 11. This was before Harry Potter made it very cool to go to boarding school. So he included that as a variable. And what we found is if we divided them up into those individuals who face at least two of those adversities versus those who didn't, and they had this capacity of reflective functioning that we coded, there was an overarching response that all of their children were securely attached to them.

If an individual faced adversity but didn't have this capacity of reflective functioning, every single one of them but one child was insecurely attached. So that's where the focus became for us. What is going on, how to promote reflective functioning, but it feels like that is one of the keys towards secure attachment in the adult, and very importantly, alongside that, is their capacity

to provide sensitive and responsive caregiving to their child, which would result in secure attachment in the child. Amazing. Yeah, and I feel like there's been so much research since that early study that has continually proved this to be such an amazing. measure that has such strong predictive validity, right? When I think about, you know, if a scale, if a measurement is valid, it's like, what is the predictive ability of this measure? And it seems so strong and so black and white. It's not just a point two correlation like a lot of social sciences are. You know, it's like this is a huge link, right? How do you feel it's developed since then?

of research are you most excited about that has come out since then and kind of like let me understand kind of where you feel the field has come since? Yeah, so if I can just say a few words about the amazing part of that prediction. So when we took our results to John Bolby and showed him, he was shocked. He said, you know, we can't even predict the weather. Yeah. And that we can predict something as nuanced and as in some ways elusive to measure. and as sophisticated as a parent-child relationship,

from what one person says in words to a totally different human being's behavior in the strain situation is rather amazing. So much of this goes back to some of our central ideas within a psychodynamic psychoanalytic context that is the power and the influence of early experience and how that unfolds over time. but the power comes from having an empirical measure,

having some way of measuring that rather than it being, oh, we know this to be true or we think that this is the case, right? It's in our evidence-based world hugely important. I think some of the exciting work, and Peter Fonagy's really been the one at the forefront of this, is to take the reflective functioning construct, that which we measure in something like an interview, and think about it in clinical context, often termed mentalization.

And in some ways, those are just the same thing. They're not very, very different. One is just the empirical measure. Mentalization is more of the kind of theoretical or clinical construct that comes with that. And so Peter developed the mentalization-based treatment, MBT, first of all, because he was really interested in what goes on with individuals who have a borderline personality disorder diagnosis. What is going on?

And it was his insight to see that they lack this capacity of reflective functioning or mentalization is very hard for them to accurately put themselves in someone else's shoes or to have an understanding their own accountability or the way in which their own behavior can be predicted by themselves. So there's a gap or some kind of deficit

And so there's now a huge industry around mentalization-based treatments in every kind of flavor, both continuing on with those with borderline personality disorder, but there's versions for children, versions for adolescents, and it has a very strong evidence-based. So that's like one place that it's gone. It's also gone in different directions in terms of the research. There are people who are able to find that a psychotherapy intervention like transference-focused psychotherapy that was initiated by Otto Kernberg, Clark and Diana Diamond,

Ken Levy had his hand in that as well, and was actually Ken Levy who had initiated a study looking at transference-focused psychotherapy and reflective functioning and showing that the treatment actually increases RF, and that goes hand-in-hand with better psychiatric outcomes. So some of those places is very exciting in terms of showing that a psychotherapeutic treatment has an impact on a patient or clients, RF, and that that we think is the mechanism of change, that that is what's changing, regardless of the modality. So it doesn't have to be a psychodynamic or attachment-based intervention, even, you know, purely behavioral intervention or a CBT or a DBT intervention. That's what's changing. It doesn't change perhaps as dramatically as something like transference-focused psychotherapy or MBT, because that is focused exactly on that construct where there are other things going on in those other modalities.

So that's one place. In our own research, we're doing a lot of work thinking about body representations. It's kind of been left out, interestingly, from the attachment literature, both the research and the clinical. And so we use something called the MIR interview that was developed by Polyne. Kurnberg, the late wife of Otto Kurnberg, and a colleague in Copenhagen, Bernadette Bull Nielsen, looking at the impact of attachment on one's body representation. And so we've got a whole series of studies looking at intergenerational transmission of body representations and attachment from mothers to babies to their toddler girls. And we find some very interesting results

in that match. We've done it with them. sample of gay men. We've done it recently. We're wrapping up a study looking at individuals with physical disabilities and their Adels Attachment interviews and body representations. So that's like a unique space that RF is right in the center of. And then we're also doing a study looking at the influence of smartphone use or cell phone use on parent-child attachment. So we're collecting out of attachment interviews, what were our hunch or our hypothesis is those individuals with higher RF or reflective functioning, it's not that they're not going to be using their phones with their kids. That's not possible anymore. The phones are here to stay, but they might do it

differently. It might be a buffer against the negative impact of technology because there's more of a sense of putting themselves in their child's shoes or being able to pause themselves in some of the behavior that, at least. needs us to pick up our phones when we're with our kids. Amazing. Yeah. I think, um, I think this is, there's, there's so much good stuff there. I'm, I've been actually puzzled. There was an early study where they looked at the, the reflective function and the scores in people with BPD and it was about 2.7. And the people with eating disorder was about 2.7 as well. And so do you, it sounds like you might have a why for that.

what would be the why for why someone with an eating disorder would have a lower reflective function? I think probably, you know, something similar in terms of, you know, the rigidity of a defensive structure, you know, so that it precludes, right? They're not being very in touch with what's going on with their bodies. The misattribution, right, so when they look in the mirror and they see someone much larger than themselves, and some of the rudiments that could be connected to aspects of parent-child relationships, which have gone askew somewhere along the line, leading to dampening down of reflective functioning early on. And so some of the work would be to ignite the curiosity within these patients

about what's going on within themselves, both their bodies, but as well as their thoughts and feelings. So I think there's something about the shutting down part of reflective functioning. that could lead to something as serious as an eating disorder or borderline personality disorder. So I'm sure you're aware of John Kologan. He did an article 2017 called Therapist Reflective Functioning, therapist's attachment style, therapist effectiveness.

And he was looking at reflective function in the therapists, right? and then he looked at the patients that they were treating. They measured the OQ45, which is probably the gold standard for session to session changes. And the therapist, reflective function, predicted how fast patients would get better. For those of you who are watching this on YouTube or X, I'll pull up the graph here. I've given.

So it's like basically you have the slope at which people get better, if their high reflective function is much sharper than medium reflective function and low reflective function, they don't get better much at all, which is my thesis on bad therapy and kind of the cultural impetus to say, you know, not all therapy is good. It's like, yeah, you could have a low reflective function therapist. This seems to be irrespective of modality. Do you have any thoughts on this? Because, you know, I love mentalization-based things. I love transverse folks therapy, but I've been thinking more and more about this, the provider themselves, right, and their reflective function. Any thoughts on this? Yes, it's kind of, in some ways,

can be a very painful realization for those of us quite tied to our modality to learn that it doesn't matter. Well, it matters, but maybe in a different way. Yes, because the vast majority of psychotherapy process or psychotherapy outcome research all seems. to come down to this point, that it is the person of the therapist that actually accounts for why their therapy works. I think that our modality is really important to us as it gives us a toolbox and a way of working. Right.

So I think for in that realm, it's really, really important, right? So I think it would be hard for some of us to deliver an intervention that is outside of a modality. And sometimes they have research studies like this with the same therapist. is asked to deliver a psychodynamic approach and then a CBT approach, because then you have the person as constant, except it's not exactly constant because, you know, that's really forcing someone to think outside of the box

or to push that envelope, whatever metaphor you want, in terms of doing something that doesn't feel so comfortable. I think the issue, you know, it's a bit of a tricky issue, what do we do here about this? You know, do we select therapist? We do something like an AI at an admissions interview for a clinical psychology or social work program or licensed mental health or a psychotherapy training. In some ways, we know this. It would make sense that we would want to engage people who are securely attached.

On the other hand, most of us are in this line of work, not because we necessarily had the easy, good enough kind of childhood experience. So somewhere along the line, we became very interested in the psychology of ourselves, the psychology of the other, how things work in people. And so I think some of that flatlining will come from individuals who perhaps haven't worked through some of these issues themselves and makes it very hard for them to listen to patients with an accuracy and a compassion that would come from higher RF individuals. But I think there's been some studies, not a lot actually, on, you know, that study is unique. There were some early studies Mary Dozier did with Roger Kobach on galvanic skin responses in therapy and those kinds of matches showing, you know, which might have better outcomes than others. But I think, you know, it's a ethically vulnerable place to go to, you know, actually in terms of impingement on privacy, for example, to do those kinds of, but it is the person.

And I think that that allows both the therapists to be present in a very powerful way, regardless of what they're picking up or saying in words, but it's also how they think and feel about the patient. Yeah, so this comes down to my sort of new hypothesis or the cohorts I'm running. It's kind of like, okay, I don't think you can ethically grade people. their reflective function because it is so personal coming into therapy school, right? And I think the best time to grow is when you don't have the pressure of some outside institution that's saying, we're going to gate keep you here, right? And then the other thing I've realized is that

increasing in reflectiveness or reflective function, it's a life journey. And even in the best studies of transfers focused therapy, they're only increasing about one point per one year of pretty intensive therapy. And so we're on 11 point scale, negative one at nine, nine being the highest, nine being something you never see according to yourself. Except for you and I. Oh, no, see, that's not true. Well, you know, it's, okay, so this kind of came to, you know, how we connected, just to self-disclosure. I got my AI done with Merriam, and there were some passages that were lower than others, right? Not all were perfect. And I think that's okay, right? That's what I've been thinking about in these cohorts. It's like, wherever you start from,

that's okay. The goal is to increase. The goal is not to look like it's higher, but to actually do the work so that it gets higher, right? So, you know, I was thinking what we do is make this very practical at this point. And I went back through. Abraham Lincoln and I pulled up some passages and I created some passages. And so we would look at his reflective function to kind of bring this to life a little bit. So here we go. I'm going to actually pull up. I put this on PowerPoint. And for those of you don't know, Abraham Lincoln probably had more of a depressive personality. He had a very harsh internal critic. So okay, here's the first passage. So this is an actual letter.

He wrote to John T. Stewart regarding Ann Rutledge's death in 1835. Okay, and he wrote this in 1841. So just to give you a picture, this was six years later. So he wrote to his friend, for not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me. It is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living.

If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole of human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it appears to me. the matter you speak of on my account you may attend to as you say unless you shall hear of my condition forbidding it i say this because i fear i shall be unable so what would you rate this r f um you know there's many compelling features to to his very poetic prose and one of the things we can really you know hear in that is is his

suffering, right, in his capacity to describe that suffering. Right. I think probably in the, well, if you bring it back up, I can. Okay, okay. Yeah, bring it back up. So we can go through some of the specifics. Okay, so even that you must pardon me, like you, you know, he's coming into this interview where he has the sense of what it is the interviewer is looking for.

And he's asking, he's saying, I have an understanding of what you're looking for, but you must pardon me. So there's something somewhat relational in that. And he's saying, you know, it's not my power to do so. I can't, I can't. Now he says, I'm now the most miserable man living, right? So that's, you know, hyperbole. It's quite extreme. He can't know that he's the most miserable man.

But what he's saying is that it's very bad. And then this poetic thing around, if my misery was distributed among all of humankind, nobody would be cheerful. That's how bad it is. So he does have some sense in using this poetry about the impact of his words. He is speaking to an audience. He's not oblivious and just embedded in his own experience.

He's really trying to share what this feels like to him. And he says, then whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell, I awfully forbode I shall not. So that's just kind of sitting in the depression and more around how it's impossible to mean as he is. He needs to die or be better. And then he's saying that whatever, the matter you speak of on my account, you may attend to as you say, because I fear I shall be unable.

So, you know, this as well, this vignette did not come in response to, obviously, an ad-attattatt-attachment interview question. So here we would ask around his thoughts and feelings around the time of her death, have they changed over time, and looking for semblance of RF in some of that as a way of understanding his grief process. So I think I would give this a three somewhere around there on RF. Okay. the interesting thing I find in this is that with something that's more poetic, it's really like, can I evoke in you an understanding of what's going on inside of me, right? And I think he does a good job of evoking that he is in a really dark place and it's a hopeless place, right? But yeah, it's lacking some things. So what I did was I in my own brain now, and this has never been. revealed before, so this is the first time you all are hearing this, I tried to increase it not completely, but a little bit, okay? And so we're going to read that now and see where we go from here, okay? So, Anne's death initially profoundly overwhelmed me, and I was the most miserable of men.

I was so profoundly miserable that if you were to distribute my feelings to the whole human family, there would not have been one cheerful face. I felt incredible guilt for the death, despite my understanding I could not have prevented it. The guilt was thick. I knew irrational, but tied my gut into knots and left me feeling sour and sick. I, at one point, remember my dad punishing me

for my scholarly ambitions. He wanted a farm worker, and I was a reader. And I remember it was better to suppress my anger, to prevent further rage from him. And I would be punitive for my love of reading, but also knowing that I was not bent to be a farmer. I found myself guilty at my fleeting anger towards God, bitter, rageful, pounding my fist into the air, but then pounding my fist on myself as well for being angry, likely. also remnants of how I had to stuff the anger growing up.

I moved through the anger eventually more to just pure sadness, accepting I had lost the love of my life, a perfect angel, grief, heavy, thick, but also an air of resoluteness to incorporate the best parts of her of how I remember her into my way of being. So well done, David, for increasing

Abraham Lincoln's RF here. I think we could go through it and point to the places of a higher RF. One of the things we, you know, that I didn't mention the first clip is that there was reference to his mental state, but not much using mental state terminology. And that's where the increases come here. So the profoundly overwhelm me already suggests something of that mental state this next but I was so profiling miserable that if you distribute in buying is more or less the same but then he says I felt incredible guilt right so naming that as a mental state and then he ties it for the death right so there's an understanding of how how that mental state came about in terms of what it's tied to as this actual event and then he says despite my understanding I could not have

prevented it. Right. So there's a very high sophisticated RF piece. Right. So he's saying that I'd have an understanding about the way mental states work. And despite my knowing at some conscious cognitive level that I was not responsible, it went so deep I couldn't shake it off. I still, I recognize I felt that guilt. Now, if somebody says that, they've already done some work on that guilt. Right. It's the person who is unaware of this mechanism or this connection that would be lower RF, right? So if you, you know, they could, you still use the word guilt. I felt really guilty, you know, because I really think that, you know, I should take in better care or had I not gone on a trip just then, you know, whatever, without really acknowledging

that that guilt is misplaced or that I understand. He's saying, I understand why I felt guilty. And no matter what I do, I can't shake that is a window into his inner world, especially around mental states. The guilt was thick, I knew rational, but tied my gut into knots, and that left me feeling sour and sick. Here's another point that he gets another kind of check on the reflective functioning scale around understanding how a mental state impacts the physical body, right? so alluding to some kind of mind-body piece. It's another way of explaining to the reader or the audience here, this is how bad it is.

Like he's also very in touch with how this might land in terms of, you know, I'm sharing with you. This is how it felt in my body to let you know how devastating all of this was. Then he brings in this point around his father punishing him and the discrepancy between his father's vision for him, which was to be a farmer, and his own individual wishes of what he would be, which is more scholarly, he was a reader. And then he knew himself well enough. He knew that I was not, I didn't have the bent to be a father, a farmer.

That's an interesting slip. And then he says, I felt myself guilty at my fleeting anger towards God, even to the point where he's raising his fist to the air and then raises it to himself. So he's aware of the process and able to track those feelings. So he's feeling anger. He projects it on to God, I guess, for having his father not understanding him from an early age as well as what happened to his wife. And that even understands how he turned that anger onto himself. And that's an early version of how we think of depression within psychoanalytic theory around

it's aggression turned against the self. And then he says, I moved through the anger eventually. So that's another check on the RF scale. He's giving us some kind of developmental perspective, both in his reference to himself as a child, but also this process. What was it like for him to move through the anger rather than just pure sadness,

accepting that I'd lost love of my life? There's a little bit of idealization there with a perfect angel that comes in, but then his wish to grieve in a way that was efficient or accurate and remember her into his way of being. That's also a little bit aspirational, but he is looking to where this might end up. Okay. So what score do you give it? So this one is more, I think, in a five, in the five range. Okay.

And yeah, I left in a little bit lower RF by some idealization, right? And I was trying to tie, I was trying to tie the depression to some deeper developmental themes that were true for Abraham Lincoln. His father notoriously would get really angry at him when he was not farming and reading instead of farming. So I tied that in. So yeah, it's good. So, okay, this is a five. Lying is a five. This is good.

I think, okay, so here's my attempt to increase this more, worked on this last night. Okay, at first I saw her as a perfect angel, and for years, I idealized her as perfection. So just to let the audience know, I'm kind of leaving most of the first part, right? But this is kind of an add-on. So it's like imagine that last part was still there, but this is kind of an add-on. Okay. Eventually with time, I realized Anne had many strengths. She was intelligent, attractive, and lively, but in retrospect, a lot of my emotions were based on youthful passions, and I did not know her as well as I might have imagined, which led to project angelic qualities on her. I also think

our co-interest in learning contrasted sharply with my father's dismissal and even physical abuse towards my desire to learn. Perhaps her dying before her youthful ideal could grow into loving each other's imperfections, that ideal twisted the knife of my pain all the more. I can never fully know what she might have felt. The terror of the typhoid fever, I imagine in part she was horrified by the prospect of death, sadness of leaving her family, sadness of leaving me before we could have our own family, and seeing her in such, so much psychic pain was itself misery for me. I am telling you this feel some inadequacy to explain how horrible I felt and worry you might judge me for being so depressed for so long, but now I have compassion for the dark space I was in

during that time after her death. She was my first love. I allowed myself to love with my whole and unguarded heart and I felt life came to an end for a while. I was a ghost wrapped in profound thought, indifferent, going about my work. I also sometimes will meet men who are in a similar place and sit in their profound sadness and feel for them knowing what it was like for myself to go through it. Somehow that brings me meaning to share in their agony. So, on the one hand, we have some increases or there's some parts of this where we could point to aspects of higher RF. Although I think, David, you might have gone too far in keeping with the poetic kind of flavor, and that could bring RF down.

Okay. So I think that that's also important. There's something often very crisp and to the point when someone has someone has. very high RF. And this is you are trying to write in the style of Lincoln way back when, in terms of the stature and that way of writing. But one wants to be clear about they're trying to get this message across, and some of the flowery language, the overly poetic, actually distances one from his experience as you

try and kind of track it. So, okay, yeah, walk, walk me through it, walk me through it. I want, I want your truth. I don't want your, you don't need to. No, I think that's, it's helpful that it's not just, you know, I'm almost thinking here, like you have an AI version, you know, let's put this bit of pros in, tell CHAP, GBT, increase RF, it might do something, you know, like this. I also think, because I'm thinking about AI in this context a lot, how different it is to say,

do an AI, or to look at some extent. like this in terms of having it resonate with how we feel that if you just did the chat GBT thing, you'd have no access to. So there's something in the pondering of this word versus that word or this experience versus that experience that drives our clinical intuition and some of the ways which we can't even put words to are understanding about another person. but that would be the goal that why a therapist doing something like an AI might prove so valuable in a therapeutic context. So I think the use of at first in this does get a check on the mental state side of things

in terms of they're orienting you towards time, right? There's some kind of developmental perspective. At first means when I first met my wife and that he saw her as a perfect aim. and that even moves beyond that first point to the years after were idealized to her as perfection. That's all high RF, you know, that he can now, looking back what his first impression was and that it stayed that way, and he uses the word idealized. It's kind of a self-deragating word, but he is conveying that I've gone through some kind of process. And then he says, eventually with time, so there's another reference.

to a process over time. I realized that she had many strengths, and he lists them, intelligent and tractable I mean. But in retrospect, a lot of my emotions were based on youthful passions. So he's also saying the impact of those first impressions and who she was changed, right? And that he's looking back and saying,

that was part of, I can put my, I can understand myself at that point. I was younger. these youthful passions, but that they might have actually gotten in the way of knowing her, right? I did not know her as well as I might have imagined, right? So that's a very sophisticated RF, right?

Saying because of those youthful passions and that initial, you know, rose-colored glasses, view, whatever, but that actually got me in the way of actually knowing who she was, which led to project angelic qualities on her. Right? So, yes, I mean, this is what someone who knows something about RF would also go that next mile, right? How his ideas about her projected onto her, right, so that he couldn't kind of see her clearly. And then he talks about things we shared in common, the learning, and that was in contrast to his father's own dismissal and even physical abuse.

towards his desire to learn. So he's now comparing what it was like and why Anne was so important to him because she was a contrast of the way his father was. So again, he brings in some kind of developmental perspective. Perhaps for dying before our youthful ideal could grow into loving each other's, that sentence, I thought was overly poetic and takes us away from the essence of what he's trying to convey because it doesn't actually give us more information. He's giving us, he in fact goes back to his idealization with this, you know, that we could grow into loving each other's imperfections, that ideal, there's something, it doesn't help us in the RF. So we might want to mark that with a bit of, you know, we might highlight that with yellow

and a question mark. If he continued in this way with much more of that, it would lower the RF score. And let me justify my attempt here. Okay. My attempt was thinking, if he had this ideal when she died, I think it almost was a part of the death of the ideal. The grief was not for the real person. It was for part of the ideal, part of the connectedness that he felt with her in the midst of their mutual interest in learning, you know, which was kind of like a redemptive healing compared to the father. you know, abuse towards him when he was learning. And so I think, I think what I was trying to say here was that could he be, could he be imagining that part of her dying in the midst of the ideal magnified it, right? Where it's like, like it was the, it was the ideal that magnified the pain.

Anyways, maybe not, though. Maybe that, does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I think he gets a little credit in terms of, you know, thinking about how he might feel in the future. But it was a little too subtle, and I think that the poetic piece puts some distance from being in touch with the mental pain, actually. Like, it's a bunch of, you know, these are images,

flowery words, twisted the knife of my pain. Yeah, it doesn't add that much more to what was there before. Okay, fair enough. And then we get, I can never fully know what she might have felt. So that's a higher-off point, right? That the nature of someone else's mental states are not visible to us and even puts himself in her shoes when she had this typhoid fever and trying to imagine what she felt like,

including her mental states around that. So not just what she would have felt like in terms of the physical part, but the specificity around her sadness leaving her family, Stateness leaving him, before they could have had their own family, as well as her seeing his satness would have made her sad. So all of that is higher RF. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because I was thinking, I got to the end of this and I was like yesterday, I was like, you know, I haven't really put my mind in what that was like for her dying.

So it's like all about him. And so I was like, okay, what would be the potential reasons that this would be painful for him to see her suffering too? And her losses. Like he wasn't just having his own loss of her. He was a witness to her loss and losses in the midst of her death. Yes. Yeah. So, okay.

And then I am telling you this feels some inadequacy to explain how horrible I felt. So he's also letting you in on his mental state around this in terms of, you know, even by telling you this, I'm not getting anywhere near how bad this was. And where you might judge me for being so depressed for so long, right? So he's also putting himself in your shoes, the interviewer, shoes, by saying, I'm worried about how you're going to see me with all of this. he says, but now I have compassion for the dark space I was in during that time after a death. So he's now saying he's got some self-compassion for himself. If that was a period, he'd get more RF points. Because now he's going off into, again, she was my first love.

I allowed myself to love with a whole and unguarded heart. And I felt like life came to an end for a while. I was a ghost. it kind of trails off into almost an absorption with his thinking about her rather than, you know, a clarity of being able to, you know, say stop. He said enough, and it actually detracts rather than ads. Interesting. Yeah. And then the reference to the ghost, I was a ghost, I was ghost.

You know, here's my thought process. Okay, let's go back to, um, the good I did here. So in telling you, this feels some inadequacy to explain how horrible I felt and were you might judge me for being so depressed for so long,

first of all, someone with the more depressive personality, they are very acutely sensitive to the person that they're telling the story to, right? And they may feel a sense of internal judgment and project that judgment onto someone else, right? That you may judge me, right? probably the reader is not judging him,

but that could be a little bit of an RF mistake. But the higher RF person is actively trying to, is actively imagining the experience of the other, right? Like even the person that they're telling the story. So in the AAI, for example, if someone pauses and imagines what you might be thinking or feeling as the person giving,

They, that's higher RF, right? Yes. Yes. We also take into account the relationship with the interviewer. Yeah. Especially, yeah, including trying to enlist the interviewer's empathy for their perspective and get them on board with it. Hmm. In a way that is doing something for them, you know, like, wouldn't you agree that was a terrible thing for a mother to do, you know, is a sign of lower.

RF, but some sense of an individual never heard your story. So what is it that you wish to share to convey an image in their mind about what was like for you? Okay, say this again. So if the, how can you lower your RF by noticing the interpersonal or by the projection of the interpersonal in the, in the midst of the AI? So I think, you know, because the beauty of the AI is paying very, very close attention to the use of language, right? And that there's a bit of around, you know, give evidence for what you say. So evidence isn't just the words, but it's often discrete memories or incidents is the way to give evidence for what you say. And you're in a situation where you have your own mind that incorporates or encapsulates reflective functioning

and your attachment story. You're trying to convey that to another person. So being somewhat conscious that they don't know your story, what is it you wish to share with them? And at the same time, we have a whole set of defensive maneuvers that are trying to protect you from being too in touch, perhaps, say, with your mental pain. So you have an idea of what happened, right? He's suffering here from the loss of his wife. But these added words take him somewhere away from being totally in touch with that pain. So it looks like, you know, more flowery words about what it was like is consolidating

that image, but it actually takes you further and further away from the crisp beginning bits around what that experience was like. So when you pile on all these other words, it diffuses the message rather than enhances it. Interesting. That's good. Okay, so what would you score this passage, knowing all that? I'm pretty stingy with my scoring often. And we would be looking at a whole interview, not just that, but if we looked at this passage, I don't know that I would go much higher than a six, five or six, because of that slightly too poetic, taking away from the essence of the meaning. That's good.

Okay. I appreciate that. Okay. So, next I have some Theodore Roosevelt. I thought I would just look at these little chunks, okay? and ignore how I scored it. Okay. I was a sickly, delicate boy.

I had to make my body. So just that little statement. I think... It's pretty low, okay. It's low, like two? Okay, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. that highest form of success which comes to the man who does not shrink from danger,

from hardship or from bitter toil. I'd also not give it more than a one or two. Okay. And there were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, but by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid. So that's getting a little bit better. I think the lack of specificity or an example

about what those kinds of things are and makes it remain very vague, including I gradually cease to be, like I would need a little bit more there in terms of, so, for example, I was first afraid of, you know, what was going on in the opposition or whatever, and then I learned that if I would just put forward my views which I felt to be true or what I ceased to be afraid,

and that was more efficacious for me. But I think just the lack of specificity here of example. One doesn't really know exactly what he's talking about, except that he was afraid before and now he's not. Yeah. So pretty low RF still. Okay. Yeah.

So there was a death, and then he wrote in his journal, a big X, and he said, The light has gone out of my life. Okay, that was a death. I think is, yeah, so he wrote, The Life Has Gone Out of My Life in a diary entry, February 14th, 1884,

marking the devastating personal tragedy. His wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, and his mother, Martha Bullock Roosevelt, both passed. His wife died of kidney failure. Just two days after giving birth to their daughter, Alice. His mother, Martha, passed away earlier the same day from typhoid fever. Okay.

And so he wrote that in his journal. And so I did my attempt to increase his RF regarding this event. And I think this was the only time I did it. Yeah. So here we go. At the moment I recorded the Bleak X, signaling the unbearable grief over losing Alice and my mother. I did not yet grasp why I compulsively thrust myself into relentless activity. But now reflecting deeply, I understand that distracting myself with

activity were forged early in my childhood. Struggling with severe asthma, I learned through my parents' persistent encouragement, praise, and affection that vigorous action, resilient, and cheerfulness were the surest routes to approval, security, and self-worth. My father's proud insistence that I must overcome weakness through relentless physical effort, combined with my family's enthusiastic celebration of courage and optimism shaped my personality to instinctively flee vulnerability through incessant motion and energetic productivity. Thus, when confronted by profound loss and helplessness, I instinctively retreated into ceaseless action, not merely to escape grief, but to unconsciously reaffirm my deepest internal lesson that strength, achievement, and

vitality alone could ward off the unbearable fear of weakness, loss, and despair. We had some very poetic presidents. Yeah, so he gets, there is a lot to get credit. I think, again, the overly poetic language distracts and diffuses the power of the RFness. If you want to think of it that way. So he is being able to go back in time at the moment I recorded that, bleak X. And the bleak X is both commenting on how he perceived it, but perhaps also how other people might perceive that. And he put that together. That was my way of describing the unbearable

grief over losing Alice and mother. I would put a period there rather than a comma, because the long run-on sentences are often indicative of an overactive RF stance that takes, rather than the crisp. So if we put a period there, I did not yet grasp what I can possibly... Yeah, so I did not yet grasp would get high why I compulsively thrust myself into relentless activity. And but now, so...

And then you put the word in reflecting, thinking, oh, that'll get me some good high RF points, which it doesn't necessarily. I understand that distracting myself with activity were forged early in my childhood. So there's a little bit too much going on here that is like an overactive, you know, trying to make sense of one's experience,

but there's just too much there that actually diffuses that capacity rather than shows it even more so. So he's saying that he did link his relentless activity with that being a way of distracting himself and that it came somewhere from childhood. So that's why if we had a period, say, after the activity,

and then he explained that part. But it's like one thought just bridging all the time to yet another element, and then we get to the asthma. It's not, say, the clear crisp focus that you might want to see in the highest RF, because it's, yeah, it's a little overboard. Yeah, and that's okay, because we're like my, I'm not, I was, yeah, we're not trying to make a perfect. It's all okay. And people speak this way.

There are people that, you know, not exactly like this. I think there is something about the. I think what I was trying to do in this passage was to explain, like, kind of that hypomanic personality that he embodied, which has aspects of denial, but. then a thrust in activity. So after the death of his, you know, wife and mother, he spent, I think, two years just kind of hunting and farming and really just action, right? So it's, it's like my attempt to put into words, like, the why underneath his behavior. I guess I would like almost want to challenge you, rewrite this. Okay. With half the amount. Okay.

And pull out of it what you think are the key parts of how he achieved IRF. So there is the developmental perspective there. He's saying it's something that is tied to his childhood. He's saying that within himself, his personality around the relentless activity was in response to that. But like, for example, my father's proud insistence, like that in and of itself could be unpacked. That would give us more clarity. for example, saying, I understood that my father was very proud at my perseverance and the way in which I showed that I was really working at overcoming my weakness. And he knew that by my, you know, relentless physical effort, period.

Yeah, because then it goes often to combine with enthusiastic celebration of courage and optimism, we don't know what that is. in some ways that just words, like about what? And then he's saying that shaped my personality to instinctively flee vulnerability through incessant motion and energetic. Like it's just lacking specificity. We don't know exactly what he's talking about. So that was, you know, it was in that year

that I ran my first marathon or I don't know, whatever the equivalent would be. Like something that ties it not to the kind of lofty language but actual experience. Right, right, right, right. It's like, okay, so, yeah, sometimes in the, like, adult attachment interview, it's like you have these, these words, like, you know, what is the word to describe your relationship between you and your mother? And then what's the example, right? And then the why might be why they might have been behaving that way.

Right. And so in this, it's more, it's too fast almost. It's like, well, what do you mean he was enthusiastic of your courage? So if instead he said, like, when I ran a marathon, my father was so enthusiastic that I pushed through the pain. And that was how I got attention from him. Maybe that would be better. Yeah.

Like how I got connection. I think we are looking for more succinct and the examples really often do illustrate that evidence for that way of thinking. Otherwise, there's a bunch of words, and it's very hard for the reader or the person you're talking to to have sense of what was really like for him.

One gets a little bit of a sense, but I think with some of those specific examples, you'd get a much deeper sense. Okay. That's good. But it's often, you know, it's often not done. giving yourself credit here for, or I'm giving credit, for the creativity to look at something in the public domain, a very personal, you know, part of a relational perspective from these two presidents as a way of illustrating this. So I don't think that's been done before.

Yeah, I think it's kind of fun, you know? Yeah. It's kind of fun. Because one thing I've realized from reading biographies after learning this and kind of thinking about it a lot, is you'll have a good biographer will increase the RF of the person in a way that the person maybe their writing wasn't high RF. I don't know if you've thought about that. Yeah, well, it's through the lens

with which we see the world, right? And almost the kind of gestalt where we're putting things together and not realizing what our bias is. So if you're doing the biography of someone you really admire, you know, that might slip in, right?

Or maybe the biographer explains the why better than the person knew themselves. Maybe that's what I'm saying. So it's like the biographer is pulling together all of the threads of how they arrived at where they arrived in a way

that the person themselves couldn't have even described. Right. Yes. And you know, we know that in that kind of writing there is a lot of bias. Okay. And, you know, I think that probably we evaluate those biographies differently, you know, the ones that come out and we don't recognize the person, for example, in it. They've gone so far, you know, is a little too far.

But you can't separate out the writer of the thing from the person. You know, it's part of how they're writing and how. they're portraying that person to us. I mean, it'd be interesting to see of, you know, positive perspectives versus negative, because there's also biographies on terrible people. And, you know, we then diminish their RF because, and maybe some of them, you know, have very, very high at RF, putting it to evil use, for example, but maybe know exactly how to get at people because their RF is there.

Usually we think of it as being in the empathy, compassion, the positive features of individuals. But I think some of the evil people as well often have an inkling on how to be cruel in that way. But we wouldn't want to call that high RF, but there's something of a similar process potentially. I've been thinking about this. Okay, so let's kind of slow this down right here then. if you were morally bankrupt, right? Like, it seems like you would score lower on RF just from the self-focus, you know,

you being the center of your own language. But do you feel like these are very different separate domains? Like a sense of like morality, evilness. You know, someone who's maybe sadistic would have a degree of, desiring omnipotent control and, you know, they would have narcissistic features and Machiavellian features, but would that be high RF? Right.

What do you think? I think for the most part, we would want to maintain that, you know, high RF does go with someone with compassion and empathy and being able to put themselves in someone else's shoes. And so the definition of those that are morally bankrupt and doing ill or harm to others is is not being able to do that. So we have a paper with Peter Fonagy from a long time ago that looked at adult attachment interviews and RF in individuals who are incarcerated.

And the ones that got the lowest of all were those that committed crimes against another human being, you know, like an assault, like rape, that kind of thing, versus more kind of white-collar crime or where nobody in their mind actually got hurt like a theft from somewhere, they wouldn't even notice, or where you're not actually in the moment putting yourself in the other person's shoes, this, you know, or what's wrong, but to have heard another individual,

you can't really do that from a high RF perspective. You know, like at some level, you can't really put yourself in someone else's shoes and then do terrible things to them. I've been reading about Epstein quite a bit. I'm a little bit down that rabbit hole. and, you know, it seems like... I'm sorry. Yeah, I feel like I need to cut myself off at this point, actually.

Or I felt that several times in the past week. I'm like, okay, today I'm done. I can't, you know. But there were portions where he is telling, for example, Bill Gates, how to run the nonprofit meeting. And he says things to Bill Gates like, you know, when you run this and you're talking to these donors, try to listen to what they desire,

how they want their money to be spent. And you are facilitating their desires more than you are bringing them into your vision. So it's like, how do you capture their own vision? So he's like, in another letter, he's saying to someone, did you read the books I recommended on deception? Now, I couldn't find those books, right?

And then you see him also subtly lying in a way to make himself seem more powerful in emails. You know, he would say he would drop name drop, you know, in ways that he actually wasn't connected to certain people, but he almost like inferred that he was pulling the strings to get, you know, more sexual control over some females, for example. And so there's, in this one email to this female, he's alluding that he has pulled the strings,

for these two models that are doing so well. And if only she would listen to him and do whatever he says, you know, that's when he will, you know, help this person obtain the highest levels of success, right? So he's pulling the strings. But to do that, you kind of have to know

the mind of another, right? So is that reflective function? But then also you're, it's kind of like, or does he just know dark psychology? You know, does he know it? you know so what do you what are your thoughts there i i was thinking of of him um but you know it's he's now in the public domain and in in such a crazy way and every day we hear every day we hear someone else that he's connected to and and some were thinking how did he do it you know like

what was it and i think there was this you know darker use of being able to understand the other and and use that in very horrible and evil ways. Right. So I think somewhere, like if we talk to him, and I think that there was, somebody wrote about how he was not remorseful at all about all that he did, you know. And so there we saw the very lack, you know, that kind of callous behavior that we see in extreme, you know, criminals, for example, that callousness was also at work. So I think if we, you know, look at what it was that he had that RF, but he put it.

it to such an evil use that overall we would hope that he would get, you know, a zero or minus one. But I think in how he got to where he got to often was being able to at least maybe it was pseudo-RF, but he understood something very important about how powerful it is for people to feel like he understood them, he was on their level, that he had their best interests at heart, all of those, but I don't feel that that's authentic RF. It was using that strategy for evil. You know, okay, so maybe what you said there makes sense to me in terms of like, okay, if he was harming people, right, and he wasn't experiencing the why of his harming people, I think that would be low RF. So it's like, well, why do you want omnipotent control and why do you want power

over these people. And like, what is what is driving you? You know, and instead of that being a conscious thing that he's aware of, it seems like he just acts upon it and continually moves to increase his power, right, in all circumstances. And couldn't curtail any of it. I mean, the absolute ridiculousness of how broad this one is just, you know, is just astounding. You know, and I think that's partly why we can't stop looking, as you're suggesting, in going down these rabbit holes is that there's a wish to understand, you know, and in awe of him at some level as well, you know, that it's, you know, there's, there's no, there's no part of our society that he didn't reach, you know, from sports stars to leading academics

to high-tech, like it's every, a prince who, you know, got arrested yesterday. Like it's, you know, for the more common folks among us, it's like, you know, it's just fascinating. I think my own, like, I tweeted out a couple of days ago, like, why is no one arrested? And finally we're seeing some. And it's like, for me, it's more of that piece of like, where is the justice, right? I want justice. I want, you know, like, I mean, for me, it's like I have spent the last 10 years

talking to victims of sexual violence and helping them in therapy and helping them break off from narcissistic relationships and, you know, like trying to heal. And so for me, it's like this kind of disgust of like this is just like revolting. I think there isn't interest in understanding psychopathy for me because I feel like so many of my patients have gone through and in my own journey have touched on people

with a level of psychopathy. sadism and psychopathy where it's like we so want to help everyone but I'm not sure we're going to be able to help someone who's psychopathic right and so we need to be able to like differentiate in our own practice how do we how do we identify if someone is

psychopathic and how do we keep some distance right? Yes. So so yeah I was talking to a patient this morning and we were talking about like okay she you know, if you can read the room, if you can understand what people want, is it always manipulative to give them what they want? And my thing to her was like, well, what's the, what is the reason to give them what they want? Are you trying to get something in for yourself,

for power, you know, and there's like the spiritual principle of like, don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing when you give, right? So when you give a gift, try to, like, hide it from yourself almost. You know, don't give a gift in public to be appreciated by other people. And so if you give, if you ever to read someone well and know what a good gift is,

and you give that gift, you give it not to get something in return, but truly to give it to the other person to bless them, you know? And then you almost try to forget the inherent maybe goodness of that, that you yourself have done this thing, right? Because that would be kind of, you know, I don't know.

Does that make sense? Like, so it's like... It does make sense. It reminds me there's an eminent Jewish philosopher from many hundreds of years ago, Maimonides, who talked about levels of giving. Okay. You know, and the, you know, one of the lowest is somebody asks you, and then you give, right?

Okay. And then there's other ones where somebody tells you someone else needs and you give. So they might still know who gave it. but less. And then the highest is, you know, where the person has no idea, right? And I think it's getting at that space. They have no idea that you were the one who gave, right? Or, and then there's also, you don't know where it went. Like you give and it's just in the trust that it'll, you know, go to the right kind of people. But that takes away from somewhere you still, I think that idea of like, tell yourself he didn't do this good thing. Is it, is an interesting one. Can we? really, really do that? Or it's just saying, don't be so thinking, oh, I'm an amazing person because look what I've done. And you get that when the person knows that it was you and you're expecting a thank you or whatever. But there's something that is coming through around you give because you feel that's the right thing to do. I don't know. If it makes you feel good,

I'm not sure that that's necessarily a bad thing. But there's also so much theory of mind, Like when you give to someone and they don't know who it is, you're putting yourself in their shoes. Like if you were needy and needed, would you want everybody to know that? No, you're protecting their self-esteem or whatever by not being kind of public or knowing. So I think there's a lot in our thinking about motivation and why we do the things we do on that positive realm. And then when we look at Epstein and all those other elite people who did very best, things, you know, there's something so irksome, I think, to the rest of us over, why would you think that this is okay and you can get away with it? And now we have our government here who's not arresting anyone as far as I can tell as compared to in Europe, I think, in Norway and in England now. But not here. And whether that's, you know, to do with our current context. I'm not so sure some of this was available for many years and nothing was done. Yeah, I hope that the listener, I'm mentalizing the listener, and I hope that you're not annoyed at me going into my own sort of peculiar interest here with Epstein.

But I think it does illustrate this reflective function at its finest. It is both true to yourself, but it's also the, it's not, if it's bent, if you're, if the gift of psychological mind, is bent towards your towards a more of a sadistic you know power hungry thing it could actually be a low reflective function version of psychological bindiness and I think that's the cool thing about reflective function is it catches actually a more selfish or self-oriented persona and then the my final thought was a I saw this one email between Epstein and this guy and he's like, have you considered GHB for your insomnia or are you taking GHB, which is the date rate pill? So Epstein is alluding that GHB would be a good medication for sleep. And it's a powerful medication for sleep. Actually, they use it in narcoleph-like very severe cases,

right, of narcolepsy. And it made me think like, you know, for some people, even if they're morally bankrupt, like they still have issues with sleep. And one of my, um, I, I, I, I, this out and one person tweeted back like, no, morally bankrupt people don't have issues of sleep. They sleep fine. And I actually looked it up and people higher in dark triad traits actually have worse sleep. There's been studies on this. So maybe it can't, maybe they can be hiding it from themselves during the day, but at night it comes to them in nightmares and in troubling things. And this is where the hiding from themselves during the day is low RF. what do you think?

It could be. Yeah, it would be hard to know. I hope that they have nightmares at night for what they've done, you know. At least that would give us some kind of glimmer of hope if there was some level of remorse, or is it so deeply hidden that they're not even in touch with the connection between what would be disrupting their unconscious and their sleep. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so kind of bringing this to a close here. I know this has been a good, this has been a great dialogue. I've really enjoyed it. Anything still like lingering in your mind that you would want to say? I think one of the things I would like to say is just knowing about how RF works from the research domain is very powerful within your clinical work. So whether you get trained fully on doing the AI, you know, which we love training clinical. We have an AI training institute going on in July of this year on Zoom.

But even if you don't do the full AI coding, being aware and familiar with the research and the theory of RF, I think can really change clinical practice. Yeah, I think it has the more I understand it, the more I dig into it. And I think the other thing that is that AI may not be able to be the best at increasing your RF, right? Because AI in and of itself,

is abdicating your own experience of the visceralness of your emotionality. Right. And the process is necessary to grow your RF. And this is where I think the interpersonal nature of things like transfer of focus therapy is something that increases RF or therapy that has an interpersonal aspect, right?

Group therapy, that kind of thing as well, where there's an interpersonal piece will probably be the closest thing because it's an authentic increase. Right. With authentic people, I mean, I don't know whether the bots could get so good

at delivering therapy that they could do that. It's sycophantic, right? At the very nature, it's sycophantic. It caters to what people desire to hear, which is the problem. Okay, well, I'll post in the show notes, links to your training.

And I know I've done the reflective function training with your husband. I think I might sign up for this AAI training as well. Very good. We'd love to have you on board. It'd be fun. And so, yeah, we will leave it there for today. Thank you so much for coming on. Great. Thank you, David.