The Blindboy Podcast - An intro to cognitive psychology pt 1

Episode Date: September 12, 2018

Also, I speak about the housing crisis for a bit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, you glorious, glorious boys and girls, what's the crack with G? Welcome to episode 49 of the Blind Boy Podcast, September 12th. Um, what's the crack? I hope you enjoyed last week's podcast last week's podcast was um it was a live podcast interview with vincent brown and i got a good response i fee from that again my apologies my apologies for not giving you your regularly scheduled podcast hug and putting out a live podcast instead but I was over in Spain in the city of Cordoba I have to call it Cordoba now because I used to call it Cordoba and I've been corrected so many fucking times that I'm now gonna start calling

it Cordoba the correct pronunciation be like someone calling dublin dublin all the time and letting them off with it you know but yeah i was over in fucking spain and i don't think anyone records podcasts in spain because every single room in spain is tiled from floor to ceiling so i brought my mic with me sat down at a desk and attempted a podcast recording and it's just it sounded like I was recording it on the inside of a mannequin's head you know it just it was rotten like that that's the thing with sound you have to have a a damp room if you want decent sound if you've got a room that's got tons and tons of echoes and all these think of it like this this is the way i look at it sound is like um it's like a ping pong ball you know if i'm somewhere and i like if you're in a room and you fuck a ping pong ball off the wall

and it hops all over the gaff off all different walls then the sound of your voice will do the same thing it becomes a a giddy cacophony but if you're in a room that's you know full of stuff and you you fuck uh a ping pong ball at the wall and it just drops because there's so much shit in the way sound will also drop so i couldn't i couldn't uh record the podcast in spain it would have been terrible so i gave you a live podcast with vincent brown instead this week i am back with your weekly scheduled podcast hug and i'm recording it quite late because I've been stuck on Twitter all evening. And the reason why is, as you know, I've spoken about the housing crisis in Ireland a few times on this podcast. And up in Dublin, where the effects of the housing crisis are manifesting themselves at the worst i think um there's a group of

protesters right they're protesting on under the hashtag take back the city they're housing activists in dublin and what they've been doing is they were occupying a vacant property in Frederick Street in Dublin and they were occupying this building illegally but peacefully occupying this building that had not been occupied had not been used for three years empty building in the heart of the city centre with homeless people all around it and the activists were occupying this so tonight uh something happened which i've never ever seen in the i've never seen this in in the irish state an unmarked and this was all fucking i saw this in video and photographs on Twitter an unmarked white van full of men wearing balaclavas

showed up and violently removed the peaceful protesters from Frederick Street now what makes this worse is that these civilians in balaclavas were accompanied by the Gardaí, the Irish police who were also wearing balaclavas were accompanied by the guardi the irish police who were also wearing balaclavas and these these these lads were in an unmarked van no license plates no tax right so an illegal vehicle and the guards are escorting them and protecting them one of the protesters in is in

hospital and the guards pepper sprayed the peaceful protesters, is in hospital, and the guards, pepper sprayed, the peaceful protesters, and I've never seen, anything like that, it was fucking shocking, absolutely shocking, to see, I don't know,

I'm trying to wrap, my head around it, okay, because there's a new, we have a new police, commissioner, in the guards in Ireland, and this commissioner,

used to be, a commissioner, with the PSNI, commissioner in the guards in Ireland and this commissioner used to be a commissioner with the PSNI up in the north of the country and you know they're used to a lot more hardcore shit because of sectarianism so I don't know was this a deliberate act of

terror I suppose you'd call it, by the Irish police? Or was it just a bunch of thick cunts not kind of being aware of their brand? Because all the photographs, now if you want to see this, go to the hashtag TakeBackTheCity on Twitter. Hopefully, as you listen to this podcast, these images are going to be all over the Irish newspapers of Irish police in full uniform wearing bataclavas and behind them civilian thugs, paramilitary thugs essentially. I mean, if you are a security force that is armed, they had batons and has bataclavas and as backed by the, protected by the state, that effectively means

paramilitary, I'm stretching it but effectively that's what it means the guards were protecting a paramilitary security force to an extent and I'm hoping these pictures are going to be all over the fucking newspaper this morning

but yeah, I can't get my head around, is is like was it planned did the guards deliberately like because this is vladimir if it was planned that's vladimir putin shit if you look at how russia is policed the police will they'll discover cover their identities they remove their uniforms so that the observer can't tell who was a thug and who was a policeman they're doing this with the the invasion of crimea the russian army uh they're called the little green men they're soldiers present in ukraine with no markings and their faces covered and no one knows who they are but people can very easily tell they're actual russian troops just not in uniform so what is the state

consciously want to put out this very terrifying paramilitary image of the irish police that they will show up and brutally they will show up and protect uh brutal thugs if you attempt an eviction or if you attempt to protest the housing crisis or is it just a bunch of thick bastards who said i don't we have to do this eviction now i don't want my face on social media i'm going to wear this balaclava and everyone decided this and they didn't have the intelligence or foresight to realize that a load of irish police wearing balaclavas defending a bunch of cunts who are not police in balaclavas will look bad because it looks very bad balaclavas aren't great in ireland lads um when we see a balaclava, all we consciously think of is some dangerous things, terrorism, you know. This is one of the artistic reasons why I wear a bag on my head.

You know, I'm conscious of that connotation as part of my art. But I'm not trying to take away anyone's rights, if you get me, you know. But back to the original point. If the police in this country made a conscious, calculated decision, right, to wear balaclavas, to stand by while effectively a paramilitary group or private security group carried out the dirty work with balaclavas on as the as the official police allowed it to happen if that was a calculated move then that is um tyranny do you know that's a conscious it's a conscious spectacle of irrational authority it's a conscious spectacle of force designed to psychologically intimidate anybody who would dare occupy a building because that's what they don't want they don't want this spreading and everybody in Ireland finding an unoccupied building in their town or city and going yeah

I'm protesting in there because that would create chaos and we really shouldn't stand for that at all and it's one of those things where you go i sure what can i do what you can fucking do is and and this is the other thing with the housing crisis in general it's such an abstract thing it's very easy to feel powerless you know but the fact of the matter is why is the housing crisis happening because three quarters of our elected representatives are themselves landlords so it is not in the economic self-interest of three quarters of our government to do anything about landlordism because they're fucking profiting off it make your TDs frightened write a letter to your fucking TD

and let them know you are not getting my vote unless something is done about the housing crisis and never again are the fucking guards of this country to create a spectacle of intimidation again are the fucking guards of this country to

create a spectacle of intimidation like fuck that fuck that we lived through enough of that with the Brits well I didn't

but you know what I mean fuck that so yeah was that a bit of a rant no that's an important rant because I'm concerned that the I don't know we'll see

how well it's reported in the media we'll see but it's shocking it's shocking and if you're pissed off about this join a local housing action group because here's the story too

like winter's coming up people are going to be dying in the streets of homelessness and that's the far end of the spectrum like there's no council houses being built right there's a massive housing list um airbnb most people who have properties are just airbnb in them on short-term holiday lets so those properties are not available uh for people to rent this is creating a shortage rent is fucking utterly extortionate i think a figure come out last week that shows that the the average dublin rent is twice as much as it would be for a mortgage for the average Dublin house but of course nobody can afford the deposit for a mortgage so everyone is stuck in this renting environment where the rent is completely out of reach and it's disgusting like I had my 20s robbed off me because of the

recession I had to watch all of my friends leave the country or commit suicide because of the recession. Now the recession is over and Ireland is again back to being one of the fastest growing economies in the European Union. And the people that are in their 20s now are having their 20s robbed off them because of prosperity. They have jobs but they don't have essentially have access to fair housing all their money is going on rent if they're not living at home with their parents so and there's another recession coming like you all you got to do is look at the economies of like turkey and i think is it argentina as well the signs of another possible recession are pretty strong so where the fuck am I going with this

after depressing you now after depressing you cunts with this shit what can I what positivity what do you do with the rent crisis in Ireland what is

it's all fine and well to be complaining what do you do with the rent crisis in ireland you know what what is you know it's all fine and well to be complaining what do you do to to solve it here's one i know fucking economist right but here's one possible solution and if you if you do know about economics and you think that's what i'm about to say is utter trash then please let me know educate me educate me because I'm I'm ignorant on this subject but what if right um like if you look at property and housing okay what makes it expensive and out of reach and what drives the what drives the market and makes and creates bubbles is value of property based on land right a house is a house but a house in one area is not that expensive and a house in another area same house house, very, very expensive. The pricing is based upon the actual area that it's in. And usually those areas are more expensive because of, like, amenities and stuff.

Paid for by the state, do you know? You look at, like, a posh area in Dublin, they've got dart lines, they've got fucking the best schools all of this state funded amenities that are pushing up the fucking value and who pays for that us then you go to a poorer area in Dublin that has a lack of amenities and a lack of funding and the price goes down So what if you tax the land, right? Tax the land that the building is on. So like, if a house is in one of these fancy Dublin areas with all the amenities, then if you want to buy that house, the tax for purchasing that house is very, very high. And then if you want to buy a house in a cheaper area the

tax is less and that would then balance out and stop this insane fucking bubble and thus make housing more accessible and affordable um that's what you know and it's not that radical either. We already have, you know, that already exists with like VAT. Do you know? Well, no, VAT is 23% across everything. Income tax. We get taxed on our income. And if you're in a higher income bracket, you are taxed at a higher rate. This already exists.

It's normal. We accept it. It's part of society. It's considered fair. so why not start doing that with property too, why not view a landlord who's making obscene amounts of money view that as their job

and tax it appropriately in terms of the land I don't know, if that's bullshit and you know more than I do, let me know why that's bullshit and you know more than I do let me know why that's bullshit and I'll take it on board and evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of

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That's sunrisechallenge.ca. If you're listening to this thinking, Jesus Christ, Blind Buyer, after spending the first 15 minutes now of this podcast talking about politics, I'm sorry. all right i can appreciate for some people that's not interesting but i had to get it off my chest i really need to speak about it but also i don't consider that politics i really don't that's when it comes to the housing

crisis that's a human rights issue and to frame it as politics is that's what they want you to think about it it's not it's human rights housing should be just one of those things that's a given in a decent society housing should be a given okay i almost said gibbon there and i was just imagining imagine that some some discrepancy in the constitution you spell it wrong everyone's entitled to housing as a given and instead you're given a monkey you have to climb inside this little fucking given

and live inside him and he's swinging off trees in the Phoenix Park Michael D. Higgins trying to hit him with a slingshot entire family's inside him this swinging given anyway good news Donald Trump isn't coming to ireland because he's a cunt he's after uh cancelling his visit yay um so what is this week's podcast going

to be about it's not about the housing crisis even though i just had a little bit of a rant one of the most popular podcasts that I've not popular but one one of the podcasts that I get most mails about

or the most amount of kind of thank yous from ye about is a podcast called fuck what's it called is it is it Creaking Ditch Pigeon?

Yes. A podcast episode called Creaking Ditch Pigeon. Now I should have called it a proper fucking name, but I didn't. But in Creaking Ditch Pigeon, what we explored was a school of psychology called transactional analysis. was a school of psychology called transactional analysis. And transactional analysis is, it's just a way of analysing our kind of communication and relationships with other people

and how we live our lives unconsciously based on a kind of a negative script that we've written for ourselves at an early age so we end up repeating the same mistakes over and over but once you can identify what this script is you can rewrite it for yourself now that sounds quite abstract but if you want to get the the full whack of that's about, go back to the podcast, Creaking Ditch Pigeon, which I put out in July. And,

yeah, I get a lot of fucking mails from you from it, people going, holy fuck, this is, the shit you said in that podcast has really changed my life, it's really opened up how I look at myself and i can't believe i didn't know this stuff and i get an awful lot of praise for it for that episode and i shouldn't

because they're not my concepts i'm i'm all i'm doing is uh democratizing fucking transaction analysis psychology. That's all I'm doing. They're not my ideas. But when people mail me like that and go that little bit of psychology, that simple bit of psychology that you spoke about in that podcast was life changing.

It makes me, I'm very grateful, but it also makes me angry because why the fuck is this not taught to us in school that's like i i studied a lot of psychology and through studying psychology and applying psychology to my own life i have become a very happy I have become a very happy effective human being you know I'm quite close to the the best version of myself that I can be 10 years ago I wasn't you know I had severe depression anxiety and was at times suicidal and now I'm not now i'm a very happy effective person who's i'm compassionate towards myself

and other people and i've got a good life and by which i mean i wake up in the morning and my day is nice no matter what i'm doing my day is okay if i if i have a stress or worry or if there's negative things going on for me, it's because something negative is actually happening. Because pain is unavoidable. You know, disappointment is unavoidable. People will reject you. You will embarrass yourself.

Stuff like that. But they're good complaints. Being upset is okay when being upset is the rational response to the trigger. But when we are upset or anxious or angry and the trigger is kind of internal, that's where mental health issues come from. But the solution to that, for me anyway, alright, because I want to be careful that I'm not speaking for other people, for me the solution to that is self-help through learning about psychology. So what I'd like to speak about a little bit this week is a little bit of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology, specifically cognitive behavioural therapy and rational emotive behavioral

therapy they're the most um that alongside mindfulness and a good exercise regime that's almost my holy trinity of my mental health regime and cognitive psychology saved my life. CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy for short. Not to be confused with cock and ball torture. But yeah, CBT saved my life. Because it's a type of psychology, I think for me, as a means of self-help it naturally fit my personality type you know I'm I'm introspective and I think introspective people have are at an advantage when it comes to self-help in psychology.

By introspective, I mean I'm very happy and quite comfortable and drawn towards my internal world. Do you know? I'm a bit of a loner. A lot of my energy and happiness comes from exploring the inside of my own head you know it's because i'm an artist as well some people are not kind of introspective they're extra extrospective if that's a word or extroverted some people are not very comfortable in their own heads or or being alone with themselves but they get pleasure and energy from. Other people. You know.

But. If you're introspective. I think cognitive therapy. Cognitive psychology. Would be of benefit to you. And if you're fucking. External as well. Maybe.

So what is. Cognitive behavioral therapy? Something that I've spoken about a lot. What the fuck is it? It's a school of psychology that is, it's been clinically proven to be more effective than medication in the treatment of depression. It's one of the main kind of talk therapy for the treatment of depression it's one of the the main kind of talk therapy for the treatment of depression now i have to be careful around my language there okay because i don't want to sound

like i'm demonizing medication i'm not i'm i'm just coming from personal experience on this um cbt is what worked for me and i have to be cautious how i use the language because often when i mention cbt there's always someone listening or someone watching who says i tried cbt and it didn't work for me well that's because like that's no one's fault. It's not your fault, it's not CBT's fault. The thing with therapy, right, psychotherapy, everybody is different, so everybody requires a different approach. And some people require just psychotherapy. For other people, medication is what is most effective. And then for others, it's a mixture of loads of different therapies and a little bit of medication as handled by an actual

professional okay so i don't want it to be the be all and end all the other thing too is because cognitive behavioral therapy is one of the few psychotherapies that can have measurable results it often gets taken up quite in in a neoliberal fashion by the health system like in the uk they love cbt and they roll it out for everything because it can deliver results and that's quite handy for balancing books so as a result in that respect cbt has failed quite a few people so people get angry with that but don't get angry with cbt get angry with the neoliberal fashion in how it's sometimes rolled out as a solution it's not for everyone in the same way that you know i used to recommend mindfulness meditation for everyone now i don't mindfulness meditation is good for some people but other

people who have body trauma for instance if someone has i don't know if someone was in a car crash and they've got ptsd or some type of trauma from a car crash, they can have quite a lot of emotional pain centered around certain parts of their body that were injured. And meditation can be unsafe for those people. You know, it can bring up some of that negative emotion from parts of the body that you're focusing on. negative emotion from parts of the body that you're focusing on so when i'm talking about psychology i'm going to try try and come at it from the most personal perspective possible to only speak from my experiences about myself because that's all i know not about you and if you're listening and you happen to take something from it then fair play that's what i'm hoping for

that's what happened with the fucking transact Transactional analysis podcast. I spoke about my experience with it. And other people were like. Fuck I'll give that a lash. So I'm not speaking for you. Or anybody else. Just me. So cognitive behavioral therapy. It's a school of psychology.

Whereby. It's basic tenet. Is that we feel the way we think. Alright. Our thoughts. our emotions. And then our emotions influence our behavior. So by that rationale. In order to tackle we'll say, anxiety or to tackle depression.

You attach the, what you tackle first is the actual thoughts that you have and thoughts about yourself, thoughts about other people and thoughts about the world or the future. You tackle those thoughts and it's about separating not necessarily positive thinking from negative thinking but separating negative thinking from rational thinking because positive thinking isn't sometimes bad shit happens so why would you think positively about some bad shit you don't what you strive for is to think rationally rather than irrationally. mental health, like, all of us, right, having spells of poor mental health is a normal part of being human, everyone will experience that, mental health is very, very similar to physical

health, okay, if, you know, if you don't eat correctly, and you don't get exercise and you do that over a long enough period you will incur uh you know physical health issues as a result of your lifestyle mental health is quite similar if our lifestyle and our thought processes are consistently negative we can end up in a mentally unhealthy place mental illness is different mental illness is like asthma do you know what i mean it's you know it's not it's not caused by anything it It can be, but people with mental illness, like a personality disorder and stuff like that, a lot of that is really outside of the control

and requires a much different strategy. And I don't speak for mental illness because I don't have experience of mental illness. I have experience of severe mental health issues, which I was able to improve and which i can keep at bay but i don't have first-hand experience of mental illness okay so and cbt is often used as part of a mental illness regime but the mental illness tends to be the realm of multidisciplinary. A mixture of psychotherapy and psychiatry. Whereas mental health.

Kind of psychotherapy can cover it. And drugs too. So anyway. With CBT. If you think about. What it is to be human. Right. To live your everyday life.

In your head. It's a continual dialogue with yourself. You know, when you're on your own, it's very rare that the internal chatter of your brain is truly quiet. We're always chatting to ourselves in our heads, okay? And how kind of mentally healthy you are it can depend upon how um healthy that internal chatter in your brain is do you know is your internal chatter excessively judgmental of yourself is it excessive excessively anxious excessively um negative and low you know when you're on your own thinking about anything you know are you the type of person who can't sleep because in your brain you're consistently going over something that you did the other day that you perceive to

be embarrassing you know that's a common one i don't have experience of that but i see that a lot people just going off to sleep and then all of a sudden they're thinking about something that they perceive to be embarrassing that they did 10 years ago or 10 days ago and this goes over and over in their head in a very judgmental, shameful, why the fuck did you do that? So if that's a consistent theme in your head, chances are you won't be very happy. Your day to day won't be very happy. Or if you're a warrior, then that would mean that your internal dialogue with yourself is consistently searching for evidence of what terrible things are going to go wrong do you know with certainty what things are going to go

wrong if you're prone to depression your internal monologue can be quite harsh on yourself do you know um in cbt the you know the three things that cbt says needs to be present in order for a person to have depression is a negative view about yourself a negative view about other people and a negative view of the world or the future and when all three of those things are present in your internal dialogue and thinking process it will express itself as the emotion and behaviour of what we call depression

ok so CBT trains us, ourselves to get at to identify these thoughts and to challenge them, to identify them as, they're known as negative automatic thoughts.

Like before I discovered CBT, my default thoughts were very fearful and very negative. And I never challenged them, just like with the transaction analysis. I never had reason to challenge them because I thought this is just how I am and this is how just how the world is I would have believed myself to be very incapable and very fragile and weak and I would have seen myself as lesser than other people and I would have seen myself as lesser than other people, and I would have viewed other

people as being better than me, and these were automatic ways that I viewed myself that I never challenged, and it expressed itself in panic attacks, and what would happen is I'd get a fuckload of panic attacks, not be able to leave the house because of them, and then all of a sudden I get depression because of the shame of not being normal, not being able to leave the house because of them and then all of a sudden i get depression because of the shame of not being normal not being able to leave the house so it's a vicious cycle so i tackled all that using cognitive behavioral therapy and tackling the negative and toxic thoughts that cause the emotion which then caused the behavior is this making sense so cbt operates on what we'd call the abc model right this is an attempt to break down you know the internal monologue that i spoke about there the experience of being alive to break it down into a little simple formula called ABC. So A is the activating event, right? That's the trigger. B is the belief

that you have about that activating event. And then C are the consequences as a result of the belief that you have about the activating event, ABC. So like, first off, what's an activating event ABC so like first off what's an activating event um just something that happens in the real world it's it's an external thing that happens outside your body it could be um thinking about something that might happen in the future Or something that has already happened Do you know It could be a wedding that you were at It could be an exam that's coming up If you're in college or in school

It could be a memory from your childhood It could be whatever It's an activating event Like we all get the same fucking kind of activating events, let's just say, let's just say the activating event is, you're in college, and you have to write a 3,000 word essay and have it in in a month, alright, so the activating event is, right, okay, I have to write an essay, so then we go on to B, now that's your belief about the activating event, your thoughts, your personal rules,

the demands that you make on yourself, and other people, and kind of the meaning that you attach to the activating event, so let's just say okay activating event 3000 words I have to have that done that essay done by December or whatever

in a month your belief is I am utterly incapable I don't know how I'm going to fucking do this this is impossible and then what can happen with the beliefs I don't know how I'm going to fucking do this, this is impossible. And then what can happen with the beliefs is that,

and how kind of anxious or negative you are, they'll spiral. So, I've got an exam, I have to get 3,000 words done. Oh fuck, I'll never be able to do that. Oh shit, I'm fucking useless. I'm so thick, everyone else is so much better than me I'm an absolute failure oh no what am I gonna do I'll never be able to get this these 3,000 words done and then C is the consequence of that thought the consequence then it could be your emotion so if if if a you think about your exam b you beat the living shit out of yourself because you don't think you're able to to get the

essay done or you don't think you're as smart as the people around you you think that you're a fraud and everyone else can see it if that's your B if that's your beliefs your thoughts what's going what's your C going to be like your C will emotively express itself as shame feeling lesser feeling upset feeling sorry for yourself and then that c then can go back to b and form a feedback loop of negativity that makes it worse because you go oh fuck i feel like shit now this this is evidence because i now feel upset this is now evidence that my belief that i am incapable is actually true This is now evidence that my belief that I am incapable is actually true. So what do you do with CBT?

You go at the B, the belief, and you test it against reality. You go, where is the actual evidence that I am incapable? Where is the evidence that I am unable to do this essay? Is there evidence that I can at least try? And you go, well, yeah, there is. Is there evidence that if I plan out effectively to do this essay and try my best that I might actually pass it or i might actually do well and you go well yeah there is evidence for that so when you change your thoughts like that then the see the emotions that that come out as a result of it they're not as extreme now there's not extreme sadness what you get is a bit of stress because let's face it you have to write

a fucking 3 000 word essay and that is a daunting task but when your when your belief about the essay is rational when it is based in reality and tested against reality it means that your emotion is then rational so it's appropriate to respond to an exam with a certain degree of caution and trepidation and stress because it's a task. But you're not pulling your fucking hair out, calling yourself a piece of shit and imagining yourself being homeless in 10 years. Do you know what I mean? Because that's where that type of negative thinking can go when you really spiral into anxiety or depression your mind will become powerfully irrational and you will go from being unable to do a simple task to visualizing how your life will unravel into utter destitute chaos as a result and you'll treat that as reality

and doing that consistently over and over again is what leads to mental health issues it's what leads to anxiety and depression so so that there that's the most kind of simplest basic assessment of the basics of cbt of cognitive behavioral therapy there right the most basic one and I'm probably gonna cover CBT over multiple podcasts not in succession but I'll be touching back at it because it's so big and I do want to cover all of it so I'm going to take little bits at a time so one thing I want to speak about today are what's known as thinking errors. Okay. So we've got our A, B and C.

A, triggering event. All right. My triggering event and your triggering event are going to be the same thing. Like, this is how you know as well. Like, yeah, there's a lot on the internet that i there's a lot on on on twitter that i follow collie ennis is his name and he's um he's like a zoologist for insects i don't know what you call it but he's one of the foremost authorities on insects in ireland and on twitter he uploaded a photograph of himself handling a venomous tarantula

and the tarantula was nearly biting his finger and this could have killed him like it's tarantula that if it bit you it would put you in hospital and I saw this image of the tarantula on his finger and I tweeted at him you fucking lunatic said, because that scares the shit out of me. And he says back to me, I'm not scared of handling this tarantula. But if you told me to go out and speak to an entire crowd full of people, that would terrify me. Whereas for me, like I'm not like I'm used to terrify me 10 years ago, but I'll happily go out and speak to 500 people. Not a bother on me. That doesn't scare me in the slightest'm I'm used to terrify me 10 years ago but I'll happily go out and speak to 500 people not a bother on me that doesn't scare me in the slightest because I'm used to it but here we have two separate people the same activating event we say public speaking whatever about tarantulas public speaking same triggering event one person is terrified of it and the other person is not at

all terrified of it so why are two separate people have two completely different reactions to the exact same triggering event well the answer is in the b the belief that we both have about the triggering event and my belief about public speaking or speaking in front of an audience my genuine belief is it'll be grand you know now 10 years ago i couldn't fucking speak in front of like even when i was in school I couldn't speak in front of a class because I was terrified of what if right in my mind what if I do something embarrassing and everyone stares what if I puke what if I fall over this used to keep me awake at night and as a result of that I had huge anxiety with speaking to large groups of people but I

challenged it so if two people have different reactions to the same triggering event the evidence suggests that is the beliefs that those two people hold about the triggering event that makes it either frightening or not frightening and so we can all change our beliefs about the triggering event assuming other factors aren't involved like mental illness or trauma ptsd which require quite a bit more work you know so regarding the b's the beliefs the beliefs about triggering events in the abc model there are a lot of negative negative automatic thoughts that all humans have kind of the same ones you know there's about 12 of them and we all kind of have the same ones um we'll each drift towards uh different ones depending on how we were raised so here like here's a common um negative automatic thought

that we'll say if you suffer from anxiety you might be used to catastrophizing okay Catastrophizing. Okay. You're presented with some kind of. Challenge. Or stressful event. And. Your automatic reaction. Every time. Is to completely catastrophize it. So.

I don't know. You're. Waiting at home. And your girlfriend. And your girlfriend. Or your boyfriend. Usually comes home at 5 o'clock. And they're late. Okay.

They're late. So what does your mind do? Catastrophizes. So you go. Oh fuck. They've been hit by a car. What if they've been hit by a car. What if they've been hit by a car? And you're trying to text them and you're not getting an answer.

And your brain is going, fuck, they're splayed out on the road. Smash the bits, they've been hit by a car, they're dead. And then that spirals and spirals and spirals. And now your brain has gone from, what if they've been hit by a car, to they have definitely now been hit by a car. They lying dead in the road now you're crying you're crying and you're mourning for them and you're you're now all of a sudden you feel that anxiety coming on and a panic attack is coming on and your partner is 100 definitely dead in the road. And you're thinking about the last thing you said to them.

And you're pissed off about that argument you had last week. And now they're dead. And you're getting ready to ring the police. That's your B. Your C now. Your emotions are incredibly fucking anxious. You're shaking. You're going white.

You're behaving in a way as if they're actually dead does that sound familiar to you? or let's just say I don't know, you go to a fucking party and when you're at the party you say something stupid to someone. You say something out of place or silly in conversation. Or maybe you're talking to three or four people, and as you walk away, your foot hits a flower pot,

and you kind of stumble, and everyone giggles awkwardly. So you leave the party, and then in your head you're going, Oh, fuck, they all saw me stumble, shit, I bet they're laughing at me, oh fuck it, I'm such an idiot, oh, they must all hate me now, they definitely hate me, oh fuck, I can't believe all my friends hate me, of course they do, I'm such a loser, I'm such a fucking fool, of course they'd hate me. And now you're feeling bad about yourself. Now your behavior is incredibly irrationally negative. And so is your emotion.

You're starting to feel like a piece of shit. Both of those situations are your negative automatic thought was catastrophizing. Catastrophized it. And the commonality with negative automatic thoughts is that they're always rigid they're very highly emotional right you feel them as you know let's just say the you know your girlfriend got hit you think your girlfriend got hit by a car you experience that fear quite intensely and it's very rigid your mind does not allow in any information that contradicts the conclusion that you've made in your head with

no fucking evidence you have no evidence whatsoever that your girlfriend has been smashed up on the road none the only evidence you have is that she is not home and a half an hour has passed that's the only evidence you have but if catastrophizing is a negative automatic thought that you suffer from you're going straight to death on the road worst case scenario and treating as if it's real and if anything comes in to counteract that this tragedy has happened your brain simply will not let it in because it's black and white and it's rigid and what cbt would try and get you to do in that situation is usually when you start off you write it down you you'd you'd write down my girlfriend is dead on the, she's splayed out in blood, all of this

stuff, you'd write it down and you'd look at it on a piece of paper and immediately now that it's on a piece of paper, you can kind of chill out when you see it and you go, fuck it, that looks a bit mad, does it? That's a bit extreme, is it? When it's on paper, you can see that. When it's in your head, you can't. It's like trying to juggle. You know know when you're caught in the moment of um this emotional hijack of catastrophic thinking it's like juggling all these ideas so you can't kind of step back and look at them but when you write it down you can so what cbt would get you to do is you'd look at the sentence my girlfriend girlfriend is 20 minutes late from work, she is dead,

and you'd simply go, where's the evidence? And you'd look at it and you'd go, well, there isn't any evidence. She might be dead, it's a possibility, but it's a very small possibility. And then you'd ask yourself, I'm going to have to sit with the anxiety that she might be dead, but she most likely isn't. And then you'd ask yourself i'm gonna have to sit with the anxiety that she might be dead but she

most likely isn't and then you'd look at what are other reasons that your girlfriend isn't home from work and she's late what what are the reasons that she's not looking at her phone and then you'd go maybe she met an old friend and they're having a great chat and or maybe she met a friend and the friend is fucking telling her something very important telling her something personal and she doesn't want to be rude and reach into her fucking pocket and pick out her phone and you start to challenge it that way with rational things and then all of a sudden you're still a little bit uncomfortable because it is odd that your girlfriend isn't home from work that's strange but you're the level of uncomfortableness is you can handle it it's normal it's a little hum of stress because

it's appropriate to be stressful to be concerned concerned. But it's not. In the fucking corner. Having a fucking panic attack. Thinking about ringing an undertaker. Do you know? Or. You know you mix in jealousy with that. There's other people. And instead of thinking that their girlfriend is dead.

They think their girlfriend is having an affair. Or their boyfriend is having an affair. And all of a sudden, now they're picking up their phone, and they have decided in their head, they're going, I bet it's that cunt Jack who she works with. Yeah, it's Jack, isn't it?

I'm going to ring Jack's phone. Now you're ringing Jack's phone. You never ring Jack. You met Jack last year at a Christmas party. Now you're ringing Jack's phone. You never ring Jack. You met Jack last year at a Christmas party. Now you're ringing him out of nowhere because you don't know where your girlfriend is and you look like a fucking asshole. That is what catastrophic thinking does

and that's just one negative automatic thought, just one thinking error that we do. And it can be challenged and you challenge it by testing it against reality fucking hell that's 50 minutes and i've only done one negative automatic thought okay let's look at another so here's another common automatic thinking error that we all kind of go through it's called all or nothing thinking or black and white thinking and what this is is like this one can pop up with

it's unhelpful around things like addiction and it's also one you have to look out for if you're if you're creative all right let's just say you want to go on a diet right let's just say you want to go on a diet you want to lose half a stone or whatever you're not happy with how you look and you're like ah fuck it i could do with losing half a stone or i just want to keep an eye on my food so you start off on a monday on the diet, low carb, which is hell because carbs are delicious. So Monday, no carbs, fucking great, kind of happy with yourself. Tuesday, you're really, really craving a carb. So you say, fuck that.

And you go to the cupboard and you have a biscuit. And then after having the biscuit, your mind goes immediately to that's it now i've had a biscuit the whole fucking diet is pointless this is it i can't do this it's impossible i'm such a piece of shit and now all of a sudden you're eating an entire packet of biscuits that is all or nothing black or white thinking there's no it's it's a style of thinking that doesn't allow for any flexibility in there there's no rigidity there's no compassion do you know if you start off on a diet and you fall off the wagon and have a fucking biscuit who gives a shit you go i had one biscuit i'm gonna i'm going to try to not do that again but with all or nothing thinking you're going now fuck this pointless entire packet if you're creative and you want to make a piece of music or you want to sit down and

write a short story or do a painting you're getting on fine and then you make a mistake and then all of a sudden this this black dog of judgment comes upon you and you go that's it it's pointless i'm a piece of shit and and you you you don't finish the painting or you don't finish the song because one little mistake your mind tells you that the entire endeavor is now completely pointless are you studying in college or in it you're in work and again one little mistake and this one little mistake means that you are now definitely an absolute failure it's it's odd or not I'm thinking it's very judgmental you know it's very good it's a very judgmental thing um maybe you maybe you meet a friend in the street and for whatever reason that friend

they're a bit off with you when you meet them they're a little bit off they're not as friendly as they were last week that's the activating event then you say goodbye and in your head now you have the fact that they were a little bit off is complete and utter evidence that they fucking hate you and you have somehow disappointed them. Or they have found out that you're a piece of shit. Now you're not a piece of shit. This is internal bullshit. You know sometimes we can think that we are unlovable pieces of shit. If that's our thing.

If we have difficulty loving ourselves. that's our thing if we are have difficulty loving ourselves any tiny rejection or any tiny slight from another person we can take as utter evidence of i have been utterly rejected and they've figured out that i am an unlovable bad person and they've rejected me and you're not taken into consideration you know cbt would say to you in that situation where is the evidence that your friend who was slightly rude or slightly off with you where is the evidence that they hate you because you have to remember your brain won't let in anything that's contrary to it it won't let in the fact that they were absolutely lovely to you last week it won't let in the fact that you've had a fairly solid decent friendship for two years it won't let any of that information

in it because the black and white trigger will only let in the negative information that confirms it so you write it down and you go where is the evidence that I am a piece of shit? Where is the evidence that this person definitely hates me based on one conversation? And when you see it on a piece of paper, you go, do you know what? That's not very rational. Maybe that person had a bit of a shitty day. Maybe they have something going on in their life and it doesn't all revolve around me. And they're entitled to have a shitty day and where is the rule that says

they have to be super nice to me all the time anyway who made that rule and what that is it's a rational flexible way of challenging that negative automatic thought the all or nothing thought same thing with the Of challenging that negative automatic thought. The all or nothing thought.

Same thing with the. Sitting down doing something creative. Making a mistake. Disappointing yourself. As part of a creative endeavour. That is a failure. Failure is an essential part. Of any creative endeavour. You must fail over and over again if you are to get good.

And if the tiniest failure is enough for you or I to use that as utter confirmation that we have no talent and that it is pointless to try because we're so shit. You know, what is the sea of that what are the consequences of that type of thinking the consequences are lowered confidence why would you want to continue trying when that's your process when your process is one of self flagellation and irrationally believing that one mistake means that you're shit and should never try the consequences of that are going to be well i'm now afraid of doing art i'm now afraid of following this thing that makes me happy because it just means pain you know and that result in low self-esteem that will spiral into feelings of depression, feelings of sadness.

Negative automatic thoughts, it's like eating McDonald's for your head every fucking day. Do you know? Over time, these negative automatic thoughts chip away and chip away and chip away until after six months, you are a person with mental health issues. That's how it works. In the same way that eating McDonald's every day and not exercising you will end up as an unhealthy person.

But you can reverse it. You can stop it. You can catch it in the moment and that's what CBT does. We're a fucking hour into the podcast lads. Do you know what? I'm going to have to i think i might pick it up next week because there's a few more of these negative automatic thoughts that was just two catastrophizing and all or nothing thinking there's there's loads more there's fortune telling mind reading emotional reasoning

loads of them i might pick it up next week i'll see i'll see how ye if this was helpful to you and you found it beneficial i'll pick up uh next week on the fucking negative automatic thoughts all right fuck what do we do now 60 60 minutes. Alright an ocarina pause. Bollocks. Alright this is the pause. Where we play the ocarina. Which is a. It's not a Spanish clay instrument.

It's actually a South American clay instrument. That the Spanish appropriated. I learnt that during the week. So I'm going to play the ocarina. And hopefully we'll have an advert for the British Army or something. We'll digitally insert itself. That was the ocarina pause.

So also, support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the patreon page which is patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast and what we have is it's i make the podcast for free i do it once a week and it's about five hours of content a month and we've got a system whereby if you enjoy the podcast and you feel like giving me the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee once a month you can do that and if you can't afford that you can then you can listen for free and i that model. I love that model because what it does is I can earn a living from doing something I love. You can kind of pay for it if you want.

But most importantly, if you can afford to give the money, you're kind of paying for someone else who can't afford. Do you know? And I just like that model. It's just, it's very fair so patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast if you'd

like to give me the price of a pint once a month and if not that's fine you don't have to it's a model that operates on soundness your goals we'll be looking at a couple of questions okay a couple of questions that I'll take from you and I'll answer them.

So, Tony asks, How do you reconcile some of the obvious laddish behaviour and sentiments in some of your early comedy sketches and songs with your true feelings and views on the subjects of objectifying women and fragile masculinity. I know songs such as Bag of Glue were meant to be ironic comedy. But no doubt there are some young males in Irish society that may have not got the joke. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever heard our song Bag of Glue.

Now first off. Bag of Glue was written by a pair of 16 year olds. We wrote that when we were 16 and it's got its heart in the right place but looking back now it was done terribly. It was done wrong. Bag of Glue is a very very misogynistic song. if you listen to the lyrics they're all about objectification and misogynism and what it is is it's laddish bragging i spoke about that on a few podcasts back about the way for a lad to attain status within a social group of other lads is to brag and brag and brag about their sexual encounters with girls and a big thing was kind of i don't care what she looks like i'll write anything and that's kind of what what bag of glue is as a song it's that the lyrics are kind of complete and utter hyperbole

of sexual exaggerations but if you look at the music video for bag of glue it's us and a load only men loads of straight kind of sad losery men in an all-male nightclub and the lyrics are about bragging about riding these women but it's coming out of the mouths of lads that are clearly lying and just hanging around with each other and kind of lads you'd say if they saw a fanny they'd look for a plaster do you know like that's what bag of glue is it's a highly misogynistic song but the intention was put it into the mouths of total kind of losery lads who are clearly lying and talking out of their hopes and i probably would like we haven't performed that song live in fucking years in about five years because we don't we just don't like doing it we just it's juvenile work it's the

work of a pair of 16 year olds and we don't really um we're not really into it and as well like you mentioned there a huge problem we had in the early days. Like we started gigging. 2006 whatever. Our earliest crowds. We said before Horse Outside. They were kind of. They were a knowing crowd. Who understood the jokes.

And they got the irony. Then when Horse Outside happened. We ended up with this mainstream fucking audience. And they were people who didn't get the joke so those were the lads who would come along and all of a sudden they're singing along to bag of glue a bag for me bag for you let's get wrecked on bags of glue i don't remember the lyrics there's no way i'm riding you unless i'm wrecked on bags of glue so you had lads now shouting these lyrics without a shred of irony they mean it same with fucking horse outside do you know and so like we consciously tried to get the fuck away from that audience first and foremost because those gigs were not enjoyable as well

you couldn't make any you couldn't make jokes with any nuance it was just tits willy bum fart and that's all they laughed at so we got the fuck away from that but um how do i reconcile some of the earlier stuff i can't really can't really it's just i was 16 and i'd love to go back to my 16 year old self and go nah that's kind of silly here's a different way to do it or maybe don't do it at all how about writing a song about something different you know but you have to grow I was a different person then

you just have to grow from it and we don't do it live anymore neither of us are like that song um Thomas asks I get asked this loads i get asked this fucking question a lot and i'm going to answer it again what are your views on jordan peterson and do you feel you appeal to the same demographic um my views on jordan peterson change right first off when Jordan Peterson is just talking about psychology

I quite like that you know because if he's talking about young or things like that that's enjoyable when he starts talking about politics I do not like it because he's agenda driven when he starts talking about post modernism I'm sorry to say

it the man hasn't a fucking clue. He really doesn't. And I say that as somebody with a master's in critical theory. You know, I know what fucking post-modernism is and what critical theory is. And I don't think Jordan Peterson does. A word like post-modernism. Post-modernism isn't a thing you do there's no such thing as a post-modernist post-modernism is a diagnosis of where society was after modernism

that's that's all it is it's no one there's no post-modern agenda no one calls themselves a post-modernist and says i'm going to go and do some post-modern shit now and if they do they're pretentious it's a diagnosis um very odd that like he doesn't grasp that as well with jordan peterson he his views on socialism, he's a little bit all or nothing. If someone mentions the tiniest bit of socialism, all of a sudden he's talking about gulags in Soviet Russia. And that's ridiculous. It's fucking ridiculous.

There's a scale. Most people who want a bit of socialism do not want gulags and complete communism. They just want their tax money to be used for housing, healthcare and amenities rather than rampant capitalism. The other thing I have to say about Jordan Peterson, and I'm going to upset a lot of men. I read his book and i tell you i'll tell you this i do believe if jordan peterson was around at the time of the irish famine he would be a scholar who would be arguing with the british as to why the irish deserve to starve okay i read his book throughout it there's a very very strong subtext throughout the entire thing which is people who are poor are there because that's how nature wants it

and i'm just i'm not into it. The other thing too, for someone who speaks as brilliantly as he does about psychology, there really isn't a lot of compassion in his words, and this is one thing I find a commonality with a lot of, I don't know what I want to call him, right wing, a lot of conservative critics compassion and love is is really evidently lacking from their discourse okay now you could also say

that about people that are we'll say on the extremes of the left too we tend to find that anyone who's on the extremes of anything compassion tends to be lacking from the discourse reason uh flexibility you know um do i appeal to the same demographic as jordan peterson i guess i do because so many of my fucking followers ask me what what i think of him and want me to be a fan of him and sometimes yeah when he's talking about psychology but i maintain i read his fucking book it's a trojan horse for very conservative uh nearly christian and a belief that people who are on the bottom are supposed to be there because that's the way nature intended it and i found that about a

lot of the book and i really didn't sit that didn't sit well with me at all okay we're 70 minutes um i genuinely believed i was going to do a nice little neat roundup of some cbt concepts this week clearly that was not the case it's much much bigger than i thought it was i managed to get through two thinking errors and i'll revisit some of the rest um next week depending on what the feedback is for this podcast if i feel that people got something from it then i will go back to it the reason as well i wanted to do it this week is during the week was a national suicide awareness week so and it's like it's september people are going back to college uh the days are getting shorter and the government is going is coming back things kind of return to normal in september you know seasonal adjustment disorder, September is, September, October,

there are months where we're vulnerable, we'll say, so I figured, yeah, now is the time to start talking about cognitive behavioural therapy, not July, when everything's grand and sunny, you know, alright, God bless, go fuck yourselves, have a lovely, lovely week, and be nice to each other, be sound, be compassionate. Go fuck yourselves. Have a lovely, lovely week. And be nice to each other. Be sound. Be compassionate. Rub a dog. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night

on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.