The Blindboy Podcast - Intro to Cognitive psychology Pt2

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

Update on the housing crisis protest, More cognitive psychology, how to improve self esteem Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast, and we are on episode number 50. Fucking hell, that's a king's ransom in podcasts. How are ye? I hope you've had a charming week. How are ye? I hope you've had a charming week. You know, it's September. The temperature is... Actually, do you know what? It's still nice outside.

It's still kind of nice. I've been having some delicious evening jogs. There's a bit of a bite. There's a promise of a bite in the air, but I don't mind it. I'm looking forward to freezing cold nights, drinking a pint in a smoking area and looking at my own it, I'm looking forward to freezing cold nights, drinking a pint in a smoking area, and looking at my own breath, I'm looking forward to that, but do you know what, I fucking hate, I hate killing spiders, I hate killing spiders, any insect,

I just fucking hate it, and it's hypocriticalical because I'm not a vegetarian like you know but I just I hate the arrogance in me of deciding that a little creature's life ends but because it's September right

there's these fucking there's these massive massive spiders do you know when you see a spider in your house and you just look at them and you go, what the fuck are you doing in Ireland? What business have you in this country? You're too big. And there's a...

I don't know their exact breed, but I think they're just called the common European house spider. But they're massive. They're fucking huge. So big that when if if they walk along the floor you can hear them do you know those lads the size of the palm of my hand so when i see those spiders in my house and like there's loads of them now at this time of year

because they're looking for somewhere warm to go for for the winter you know they usually they crawl into like behind a book or into a skirting board or whatever like i don't like them in the house they're too big do you know the other day i had a rug not a rug like a throw blanket thing on the ground and i pulled the blanket up and what falls out a fucking giant spider and I can hear him trickling along the ground. I'm not scared of spiders but I don't want to be lying on my couch and one of these fuckers crawls on me. It's just unpleasant. So last night I stayed up late watching YouTube as the Yanks call it watching YouTube

on the telly which I enjoy doing on the big screen and I seen one of these fuckers he'd obviously crawled in a vent and it was about 4 in the morning so he was on the wall

and I went over to try and get him with a glass because I like to capture them and remove them and put them outside don't like killing them so I went over to try and get him with a glass because I like to capture them and remove them and put them outside. Don't like killing them. So I went up with the glass and placed it gingerly underneath his talons and he fell, not into the glass but onto my hand. So I screamed very loudly, smashed the glass onto the ground and then the spider ran across the ground

and it was four in the morning I was ready to go to bed and now I'm cleaning up glass and I've just screamed and that was unpleasant so I got impatient and I picked up like a feather duster and I killed him, I smashed him with it and

felt like a fucking cunt I felt like such shit for giving in to that primal urge and not my frustration and laziness meant that I ended his life and I fucking hated myself for it and I felt like shit going to bed and I felt like shit waking up. So I left him there on the kitchen floor and I was like, yeah,

I'll deal with him in the morning. So I got up expecting to take his body and trun it into the bin or down the jacks. And he was gone. So I was like, I don't know what happened. A gust of wind must have come in and blown him under the fucking skirting board or whatever. I don't know.

So anyway, just before I got to record this podcast. There he is outside the door of my studio. With seven legs legs not eight so obviously I gave him a batter with this feather duster knocked him out he woke up in the middle of the night and had more or less recovered completely but lost a leg

and when I saw him I was like fucking hell I thought I'd killed you last night but I didn't and I was like, fucking hell, I thought I'd killed you last night. But I didn't. And I made a decision there and then. I said, you're staying in my gaff for the winter. I'm not kicking you out. Because, I don't know, I just felt thankful.

That's one of those moments that makes me question a spiritual element, you know? Taking it back to Carl Jung and Jungian synchronicity I feel so powerfully and so strongly about not killing these fucking spiders and this cunt manages

to evade death and then appears outside the studio before I'm ready to record the podcast so I made a I suppose you could call it superstitious

to an extent I don't know call it superstitious, to an extent, I don't know, is it superstitious or purely just the Jungian synchronicity, where you take meaning from a coincidence that happens in the universe, and that's kind of a coincidence, so I said, fuck it, do what you want, do what you want, so he came into the studio studio and i don't know where he is now but he's probably just gonna crawl into a fucking he wants nothing to do with me just wants to crawl in under a skirting board and he seemed pretty healthy he was moving around even though he'd lost a leg but i mean spiders can lose legs they're all right so he's gonna chill out and re-emerge in april or whatever and i'm just gonna have to deal with it, you know, I'm just gonna have to live with that, this irrational fear that I have, like,

they can't bite me, do you know, they're harmless fuckers, now, false widows, different story, maybe not a different story though, I've heard that the false widow thing is a bit of a, an exaggeration, so anyway, yeah, that's my, that, yeah, that's where my head is at starting this podcast. That's where my head is at. I had a meaningful coincidence, a Jungian synchronistic moment from the universe concerning a spider's leg. So last week's podcast was about cognitive psychology. And I got some incredibly positive feedback from you. I'm thrilled to get the positive feedback. Just people listening to the little bit I did on cognitive psychology and it's reframing their view of themselves and just bringing people closer to

the simplicity of mental health you know because it it is and remember now i made a distinction between mental health and mental illness but maintaining mental health it is it's as simplistic as an exercise regime if you get if you get what i mean you know it's effort to exercise it's effort to eat well but at the same time it is simplistic once you make it your lifestyle so thank you for all that feedback so as a result and at your request this week's podcast is going it's going to be part two of the cognitive psychology. But before I get on to that, what I do want to have a tiny chat about is because also what I spoke about in last week's podcast was the protests in Dublin and the violence against peaceful protesters that we saw from the the Gardaí the Irish police and the Irish police that there was to put it into context there's a there's a housing crisis in Ireland a massive housing crisis the there was a group of protesters going under the name of

take back the city check out the hashtag and they are occupying vacant properties in Dublin, peacefully, vacant properties. And last week we saw the Irish police turn up in wearing balaclavas with a private security paramilitary force with them, also wearing balaclavas. And they forcefully removed the peaceful protesters, sending five of them to the hospital

right and this was shocking last week it was fucking shocking and I've been waiting all week for either the Irish police or the government to make some type of statement as to what fucking happened and of course there is none

there has been no statement or accountability even though the evidence has come out that we said the private security in balaclavas which is actually illegal it's illegal for private security to hide their identity um that they arrived as well in a van that had no tax you know parked and i think it was double yellow lines or something like that parked on, I think it was double yellow lines or something like that, aided and abetted by the actual police, you know. And the security carried out the acts of violence, not the Irish police, which is quite snaky. Now for those listening going, why isn't he calling them guards? Why is he calling them police? Well do you know why? Because there's about 200 000 listeners that

aren't based in ireland so i'm gonna say police instead of guards or guardi um so anyway here's the deal instead of the irish government or the police actually addressing why any of this happened what they've done instead is that they're pumping out a narrative that there were threats made against the Irish police online, which there were. That's just what happens, you know, if you go on fucking Facebook or whatever. Like, a week doesn't go by where I'm not fucking threatened by somebody.

That's just what happens. Every week I have to read someone going I wish the holes would disappear in his bag and he chokes to death, I've been dealing with that for 17 years, but threats are made against the guards online because everybody was talking online about this protest, so certain people

idiots, said stupid shitty comments that were violent and they were in the minority and they don't represent the protesters these people are just wankers but the government of course now they're choosing to focus on that instead of commenting on why the actual peaceful protesters were assaulted the minister for fucking can't no no no i can't remember he's minister of his name is Charlie Flanagan anyway but he says that now

he wants to bring in a law or would support a law that makes it illegal to film the Irish police during their course of work which is bullshit everyone doing their job

is filmed in some respect you know if you work in a fucking hotel or a coffee shop there's CCTV so that's ridiculous plus we as citizens need to use

cameras in our defense to make sure that police brutality is is not a thing the camera is the weapon of the civilian as we have seen in the past fucking five years it's it's to protect us against brutality but anyway what this is what's fucking happening. The government are, as a way to create kind of dissent, instead of accepting responsibility and being accountable, they are trying to get the Irish people to turn against the protesters. They're trying to derail the conversation to create an argument, right? And the main argument is really, what I'm kind of seeing online is people are going, you shouldn't occupy buildings that are privately owned.

That's breaking the law. It's like, yes, it is. That is breaking an actual law. But the problem is, when you protest, right, within the predefined rules of what the government decides how you should protest, it's often not effective. So, like, here's the thing. These buildings in Dublin City, Dublin City is fucked, you know. There's a massive housing crisis. There's a huge shortage of properties to rent.

There's homelessness. There's people dying in the streets. And most people can't afford to either own a house or rent. And a huge, there's many, many causes. There's multiple, multiple years of kind of Thatcherite neoliberal policies that, you know, no longer the government takes responsibility for social housing and it's put onto the market right that's been going on for years then also there's airbnb doesn't help anything you know most of the lettings in dublin now are going for airbnb short-term lettings rather than long-term and also there are there's a huge amount of vacant property in dublin landlords who have a building an entire building they're

leaving it fall to shit um because they're waiting for the time when they can sell it at a better price and that currently that should be illegal right there's people online getting pissed off about oh how would you feel if if protesters occupied your building if they went into illegally went onto your private property well like here's the thing the protesters are it's very important to remember this they're not going into houses where people are living the building in frederick street that was occupied by the protesters was vacant for three fucking years all they did was they went into a property that known it's a crime against bricks and mortar that's what it is there's no people being affected in this also here's another way to look at it

if you if you love the law so much all right and by the way do you do you smoke joints do you download things illegally that's also breaking a law sometimes laws aren't necessarily just here's how i see it a building that is vacant in the middle of dublin city right during a housing crisis while there's homeless people on the streets why is that not viewed as an act of vandalism that is so extreme it kills people because that's what it is vacant property the amount of them in dublin city is an eyesore it's an act of vandalism that is resulting in people's debts in families having to sleep in hotels and for you not being able to either not being able to pay rent because it's too expensive and never been able to afford a house so why isn't the law legislating to say that uh

a vacant property should be illegal like the statistics show between 40 and 50 homeless people die in ireland a year what if I nailed a gun to a wall in O'Connell Street and it shoots 50 homeless people a year you know what would you think if I did that act of vandalism well that's you know vacant properties

it's a very hot take vacant properties are contributing to that so why is it legal why is there no law for that? And I know you're going to say, oh, but there is one. There is a vacant property. Yeah, but it's like,

I don't think it's going to be enforced till 2020 and it's something like 3% tax. I'm talking about proper punitive tax to de-incentivize anyone hoarding vacant property okay force people develop it or sell it because it's it's affecting everyone's life come on to fuck and no one's talking about seizing vacant property it just means if you're three years with a property and it's falling to shit then that should be heavily penalized by the way of tax it's not though do you know why because three quarters of the people in power in this country are landlords

so a final fucking word on it be careful the government are putting out a narrative and it's been supported by the usual things, the ideological state apparatus which are the kind of, the intellectual structures of the state that are used to maintain power the media, the police

religion, although the, oh do you know what yeah, the usual suspects the fucking Catholic lobbying groups surprise surprise are very much interested in protecting the

protecting the the fucking the landlords purely on the grounds that they hate the left but the ideological state apparatus is trying to

create an argument between the ordinary people which basically demonizes the protesters they want the the protesters have been painted as um jobless layabouts who are troublemakers and lawbreakers and we as as hard-working ordinary people should be highly offended at this that's the narrative that is being pressed out now in the media and by the government so that we have a big fight with each other and while we're fighting and bickering online nothing gets done that's what they want so i say to you the people that are

protesting are doing it for you okay are you happy with your rent do you feel that you can't save money because your rent is so high are you living with your parents are you a student who can't live in their chosen city to study because the rent is too high are you somebody who feels they will never own a fucking home. Because the houses are too expensive in the first place. And you can't save money because the rent is too high. Here's one for you. Are you in a job or career that you don't enjoy.

That doesn't give you a sense of meaning. Because you need this job to pay your incredibly high rent. And given the choice would you like to be in a job that has less money but is much more suited to you and gives you a sense of meaning but you can't have that job because it would mean not paying the rent not being able to pay your rent so for all of those you know these factors i'm guessing that's 90 percent of the people listening to this podcast if If that's you. Then the people that are protesting.

Are doing it for you. So be very cautious. When you see someone online. Calling them SJWs. Or hipsters. Or hippies. Or any of these pejorative terms. These people are protesting for you.

They are the young radical people. Who are always at the front line of shit. these people are protesting for you they are the young radical people who are always at the front line of shit they're doing it for you so please support them so if it's for all of us let's not divide and fight with each other about it and bicker because that's what the powers that be want civil disobedience is peacefully disobeying laws that a society considers to be unjust and the reason you live in this country is because of that you know the likes of the land league what were they doing you know occupying properties for your fucking ancestors it is absurd and unacceptable that this country which is apparently the star of europe in terms of how well our economy is doing it's absurd that in this

country you have to worry about housing something that is a it's a human right the un charter of human rights housing is a human fucking right having a home is a human right and 20 years ago having you know renting somewhere or owning a house it was just something you did something that was going to happen

and you had time to be stressful about other shit but it's absurd lads and it doesn't have to be that way so please support the protesters um how do you support it hashtag take back the city right follow the take back the city twitter page you support it by if you're not in dublin retweet them share it make it visible as much as possible using your social media okay also if you are in dublin and just go down to where the occupations are when something's happening as many people there

as possible prevents the assault of peaceful protesters that happened five people were sent to hospital and obviously do not threaten the guards or anybody with physical violence online and that goes without saying why would you want to anyway that we could you know we live in a democracy this can be done in democratic fashion um call out anyone that you see doing it they're not helping fucking anyone what the protest needs is so much visibility that it can't be ignored, okay? And it can't be ignored by the government, that it has to actually be responsibly addressed in a compassionate fashion, because that's what you vote the government in for, okay? And they don't want it to be visible.

They want us all bickering with each other instead, so that we get distracted. Fuck that. This is your country. Housing is a human right. Let's have a bit of that, please. And I know there's going to be some of you listening kind of pissed off that I just did a political rant there. But from where I'm standing, I don't consider what I've been talking about to be political at all. It's an issue that is unfortunately politicized but um I don't consider this issue political no more than

I consider when I speak about mental health to be political mental health is unfortunately politicized but it's not political um I'm human rights lads compassion our quality of life our quality of existence that's what that past 15 minutes was about and it is unfortunate that it has to happen within a kind of a political sphere if you get me and I'm not attacking guards either there's plenty of sound compassionate guards out there the problem is the the system that those guards are being asked to enforce so that they can keep their jobs and pay their extortionately high rent or absurdly fucking high mortgage so last week's podcast was a basic introduction to cognitive psychology and i only covered a little bit of it i definitely suggest going back and listening to last week's podcast,

if you're going to listen to this week's one, because it's a continuation from last week's. So as a little kind of a recap, what is cognitive psychology? Well, it's a school of psychology. It's one of the most kind of empirically tested forms of psychotherapy and it's a out of all the forms of psychotherapy it's the most effective one that you can do by yourself as a form of self-help and regulation for your mental health regime basically we it posits

that how we feel is as a result of the way that we think, our cognition to think, and that by adjusting and assessing how we think, we can then influence the outcome of how we feel. And like human discomfort, as I continually say, discomfort is unavoidable. Pain is a necessary part of being alive you're going to experience pain however i would wager that if you think about what causes you the most amount of distress throughout your day okay whether this distress manifests itself as anxiety or depression or shame

the vast majority of what tends to bother us and make us unhappy it's not shit that's actually happening to us but rather it's the internal dialogue that we have with ourselves about stuff that has already happened or shit that hasn't happened yet does that make sense are you upset most of the time because you're thinking about something that has already happened or something that has not happened yet that means that all of that pain is completely um avoidable do you know because the discomfort that you feel right the intense discomfort that you

feel is because of the thoughts that you have about past events or future events and cbt would wager that chances are if it's resulting in mental health issues, the thoughts that you have are irrational. Okay? Even if that thing that's bothering you is an actual threat, chances are that if it's resulting in extreme overwhelming stress, it's because your thoughts around it are just too extreme, too are just too extreme. Too negative. Too anxious. And that can be adjusted.

And it's not positive thinking. Because like I said. The triggering event could be quite negative. So instead of thinking positively. You think more rationally. And CBT sets out a framework as to what rational thinking is. So we looked last week at what are known as thinking errors, okay, and a thinking error are, they are faulty ways of thinking about either ourselves, other people, or the future, or the world.

Faulty ways of thinking that all of us tend to have in common, and how these can be changed and readjusted into something more rational. First one we looked at was catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is when you take kind of a small negative event and your imagination focuses on the absolute extremes of what's going to go wrong. And we looked at the ABC model. A is the activating event. B are the beliefs or thoughts that you have about that activating event. And then C, the consequence of those thoughts, your behavior and your emotions. So if your activating event is, I have an exam coming up and your beliefs are, I'm a useless piece of shit and I'm definitely going to fail.

Then the consequences of that are feeling incredibly low self-esteem, feeling sad, and behaving as if you are definitely going to fail. We also looked at, what was the other one? All or nothing thinking. Black and white thinking. A style of thinking about an activating event that has zero nuance it's completely black and white and extreme you're walking down the road you meet your friend you think they're off with you you think you know they might be in a bad mood and they weren't very nice to you you leave the

conversation and your mind is racing with how you're an absolute piece of shit and they hate you and now everyone and of course they hate you everyone hates you rigid black and white thinking that doesn't have a basis in reality that can lead to rigid black and white extreme unpleasant emotions so if you want to hear more about those ones go back to last week let's uh explore some new ones you can't so one type of one quite common negative automatic thought as they are known is fortune telling all right and what this is basically is making predictions about an activating event with no evidence whatsoever the predictions are instead informed by negative thoughts or low self-esteem so for instance i'd have experienced this now because like when i had anxiety um agoraphobia and social anxiety were quite high on my radar so

if i got invited to a party or told to come out, now social situations were highly triggering for me, something I was very afraid of. So I'd get invited to go out, and then my mind would race with all the possible things that could go wrong. I'd spend the evening predicting that I would embarrass myself. I would spend the evening predicting that when I tried to speak to somebody I wouldn't know what to talk about and I'd be really fucking boring or that they might reject me as a result of this

or I might spend the evening predicting that I'm going to go to this party and I'm going to be picked on and bullied and made a fool of and laughed at or that people might find out that I'm a fraud or they might be able to see, you know, they'd be able to see my own low self-esteem and they would look upon me with contempt and if being invited to the party a is the activating event then b my beliefs about that my predictions based on my fears and anxieties right that b results in a c actual, so my emotions would be highly anxious, because when you tend to get an emotional hijack like that, and you think about, you know, these are highly irrational, negative automatic thoughts are, they're not passive,

they're very intense thoughts that lead to what we call mental health issues. They lead to emotions like anxiety, okay? And the consequence, so A is the triggering event, B is the belief, the prediction. What is the C? C is intense anxiety, that's emotion, and then a set of behaviours such as, no, I'm not going to the party, I'm going to stay in home tonight now, because my mind has decided that it is definitely going to go terribly. And then what happens with C? A cycle of shame. You end up then flagellating, feeling bad about yourself because you gave in to it. And it's a vicious cycle.

What else? People who are shy and self-conscious when it comes to relationships, you know. You could maybe, I don't know, you go into a shop on your way to work every day and there's a person behind the counter that you fancy and you really want to just fucking ask for their number, but you predict that they're absolutely going to reject you, why would they, what would they possibly want with me, they're far too fucking good looking to want anything to do with me. So you treat your prediction as if it's the truth and you don't bother. And then you feel shame and you feel cowardice for giving in to that fear.

And again, it's a continual reinforcing cycle. So how do you get out of that? You test. a reinforcing cycle so how do you get out of that you test you know like i said the first thing you do you write it down you write down your activating event you write down as honestly as possible the beliefs that you have about that that activating event and once they're there on the page you test them against reality and mainly what you're doing with the thoughts is that take it back to the party right I've been asked to go to a party I am definitely going to embarrass myself

like these would be the thoughts that you'd write down I am definitely going to embarrass myself it is going to be awful I'm worried I'm going to sweat and everyone will see my sweat patches and it will be so embarrassing. When you write these thoughts down and you're being very honest with yourself,

what you often find on the page is that they're always very rigid and extreme and have fuck all room or nuance in them. It's always definite. This will happen. this will definitely happen it is going to be terrible so what cbt would get you to do is to look at those beliefs on the paper and try and change them to something that's actually fucking rational you know this shit is really easy when like if you're talking to a to a friend this is why it's so important as well to speak about

your mental health with other people you know like have you ever spoken to a friend and they come to you with their fears and anxieties and when you hear them say it to you their fears and anxieties seem absolutely ridiculous to the point that you have to nearly stop laughing you know if it if you go to your friend and go i can't go to the party why to be honest i'm scared of getting so sweaty that everyone laughs you would have to try and not laugh when you hear that but when it's happening in your own head it's you can't see it for how irrational it is or how absurd it is because that's your lived reality so when you put it on the paper you get to actually go hold on a second I'm gonna go to this party and I'm gonna sweat and I'm gonna

sweat so badly that everyone laughs at me where's the fucking evidence for that and even if the evidence is that you're a sweaty person even if that that is the evidence, even if there's a high likelihood that you're going to sweat, what you do then is you go, all right, how can I, how can I get around this, because I want to go to that fucking party, so you write down, I'm going to wear, maybe I'm going to wear a piece of clothing that doesn't show my sweat, if I'm actually going to sweat, because that's an issue that I have, we'll'll say um or and this is what i used to do now sweating wasn't my issue i used to have um i always had an irrational fear of fucking puking i don't know why i just had an irrational fear of what if i go to a public place and puke

or get leg cramps i remember going to see lord of the rings years ago and i actually did get leg cramps so my friend had to massage my legs in the foyer of the cinema and it was very embarrassing. I got a panic attack while my buddy was massaging my legs but it was actually a good experience because I had to live through my darkest fear. But one thing you do if you're making these negative predictions about what you think would happen around your anxiety in a public event a way to test them is you ask yourself, truly,

what if this actually did happen? What if I puked my ring up at the party? What if I got so sweaty that people were actually looking at my sweat patches? What if that happened? Would it be the worst thing in the world would it be so terrible that i definitely could not face it and what you say to yourself is do you know what if that did happen it wouldn't be pleasant it wouldn't be something i'd enjoy but i'd fucking cope and that's it that's a that's a great phrase to use within cognitive behavioral therapy when it

comes to irrational fears and irrational beliefs you remind yourself no matter what happens even if it's going to be unpleasant you will always cope and coping is the best you can do. You'll cope with it. You might be embarrassed at the party. You might get some fucking dickhead might even laugh at you. But you'll cope. And it's not only through the attitude that you will cope. But actually testing it in real life. Going to the party and coping. That's where true kind of personal growth comes from that's where your that's where self-esteem comes from and i'll get on to self-esteem later

because to be honest that's the the ultimate goal of cbt is not only to conquer these rational and irrational fears but to establish a decent sense of self-esteem in yourself so on to another negative automatic thought this one is called mind reading and mind reading is one of the things with uh with cbt is's like we can have negative negative views of ourselves negative views of other people and negative views of the future if you have negative views about yourself those negative views that you have they're specific to you and they're based upon your childhood really you know and if you have low self-esteem and like we'll say if you've you know if you experience rejection at a young age from a parent or a sibling then you can internally learn quite irrationally that you are someone who is to be rejected

that rejection is part of your script and that's what that's what happens people reject you you're unwanted you're unlovable that's that's quite a common one and it can it can happen quite arbitrarily it could be simple that something as simple as being fucking two years of age and you have a parent who's in who's had a tough day at work and you come in very excited with your tonka truck to show them something and your dad dismisses you or gets angry and something as simple as that is it can be enough if a child is sensitive to put a kind of a narrative in that child's mind that they are someone who is to be rejected if they approach someone with

positivity that they are to be rejected so mind reading is basically it's where you project your own unconscious negative opinions about yourself where you project these into the behavior and thoughts of other people with no evidence. So, a common one is, if you're fucking, if you're texting a girl or a boy that you fancy, do you know, and it's the early days of texting, you're not sure what the fuck, what they're into, you're not sure if, or you're not sure if they're into you, you're not sure what the fuck uh what they're into you're not sure or and you're not sure if they're into you and maybe you know obsessively analyzing the their text for certain words

that prove as to why they don't actually like you or they might go a full day without texting you and you spend the entire day going yeah because i'm a piece of shit and they don't want me and who the fuck am i to even think i could text them i'm such an idiot you know these are the negative thoughts that could float around your head if mind reading is an issue and this can kind of spiral as like i said activating event you're texting someone you fancy fancy be belief about activating the event that you're texting someone you fancy and they're leaving they haven't texted you back in in six hours okay so that's the activating event that triggers you triggers you into your negative automatic thought so be your belief about them not texting you in six hours is yeah because they don't fucking fancy me they're trying to blow me off they're trying to get rid of

me um why would they fucking fancy me i'm a piece of shit they're out of my league i'm embarrassing the life out of myself out of even trying so the six hours have passed your brain is now this negative washing machine okay and i refer to it as a washing machine because that's what it's like it's this crumpled disjointed busy continually tumbling set of thoughts in your head that continually gets more and more emotional and painful as they go along so your b is this now what is your c what are the consequences of these negative uh beliefs about the activating event the consequences are you now start start to feel very low you start to feel shame and embarrassment you start to feel ugly you start to feel unwanted you start to feel the feeling you first felt when you went up to

your dad with that tanker truck when you were three years of age and he pulled a certain face or dismissed you in a certain way that at that age of your life confirmed to you that you were to be rejected and this comes back up and this is the beauty of psychology if you remember the transaction analysis podcast from a few weeks back this is where transaction analysis can come into it as well and this affects your dialogue now with the person who you've been texting so your mind is flaking around the place you've definitely been rejected they definitely don't like you so now what happens you're now texting them out of the fucking blue out of the fucking blue you are texting them going so sorry for texting you and for bothering you and taking

your time i know you don't like me anyway. Now the other person receives this text and they're going, oh fuck it, I actually do like them. I was just, I was in work all day and I wasn't allowed to take my phone. But now I actually kind of don't like them because they're being needy. Do you know? That's how that can work. And then what you have is what's called a self-fulfilling prophecy the person whose negative automatic thought is if you know if their issue is mind reading they can actually unconsciously set up situations for themselves whereby rejection is the end result and there then if you bring in your transaction analysis that is the full that's fulfilling the life script the life script is i was rejected at a young age therefore my narrative of my life is

to be continually rejected and we will hammer and shape unconsciously our lives to confirm these things and for them to actually manifest themselves in reality. Well that is not how it has to be. That is the joy and beauty of psychology. That's the joy and beauty of tools like CBT and transaction analysis. So now what do we do? You get the text from the person that you fancy. Or sorry, not the text.

You notice that they haven't texted you back in six hours. And you try and catch the negative mind-reading thoughts when they happen. That's a key skill to cognitive behavioral therapy. It's noticing when an unhealthy emotion or an unhealthy thought presents itself and you can only notice these things when you learn and verse yourself in what is a negative and an irrational thought and what is a rational thought so when the irrational thought of ah they fucking hate me they think i'm a piece of shit you need to learn the skill of noticing when that happens and when that does happen that's when you take out your piece of paper and you go i can feel it now i can feel in my belly the negative emotion i i'm i'm familiar

with this feeling and i'm familiar with the pattern of uh spiraling uncontrollable unpleasant emotions that follow when i get this feeling in my belly and you notice that you take out your piece of paper and you write down ABC a you write it down activating event this person hasn't texted me in six hours B you honestly write down and you can throw this into the bin afterwards this is just for you you honestly write down B. the beliefs that you have about the activating event and your beliefs are they don't fancy me they're trying to blow me off

I'm a fucking wanker for even thinking I'd have a chance with them they're embarrassed by me it must be awful for them to have to put up with someone like me texting them. It's so shit that they, they can't even bring themselves to text me on their phone. That's how worthless they think I am. I'm not even worth the text. What a prick. Write all that toxicity down. And then you go at that when it's there on the paper and you say right let's look at this against reality and you go they haven't texted me in

six hours what are the what what are the the rational here's let's write a list of rational reasons as to why they have not texted me in six hours and you write them down and it's when i know they're working and then you go maybe they were distracted maybe they've lost their phone maybe they were out last night you write all these lists these things down and what happens is that the c c being the um the, previously those consequences were you feeling like a piece of shit and then texting that person with so sorry for even getting involved in your life or something passive-aggressive even, now your C is I'm gonna wait it out, I'm gonna wait it out and I'm going to wait it out. I'm going to wait it out. And I'm going to wait for him to text. And maybe if it's two days,

if it's two days, then I might have to take a hint. I might actually be being ghosted right here. But we'll see how it goes. And I'm going to try and cope right now. And I'm going to resist the urge to respond. And again, taking it back to,'ll say the transaction analysis and transaction analysis is it's it's is it's psychodynamic and whenever you hear the word psychodynamic it means um friday childhood these irrational emotions that cbt tries to conquer like i said they're rooted in childhood because

they are rooted in childhood what you have to remember about them is that children are are very impulsive beings children like freud has it as a thing i explained it fucking 50 podcasts back probably but the the id the ego and the super ego children uh the id is the part of our personality that we're first born with it's very impulsive all the id wants is is food and pleasure when we get triggered into early childhood memories of something like rejection or pain our id takes over and the id part of our mind you don't want to be living your life on that if you lived your life based purely on your id you'd be a very emotional person who hits everybody who hurts you and who grabs every piece of food that you see without any kind of rational process around it so when these negative emotions come

about you have to resist the urge of that id that looks for immediate satisfaction so the immediate satisfaction of not waiting six hours for a text back that immediate satisfaction it doesn't necessarily mean that you want to be satisfied positively the satisfaction could be confirming that you are actually a piece of shit who's being rejected do you know what i mean it's complex like that so that's what you're trying to kind of tackle with it is this making sense your goals um and then as well think like that's that's a very common one everybody who's ever fancied anyone knows the feeling of waiting ages for a text everyone knows that feeling and knows the feeling of finally getting the text after six hours and it's like holy fuck there's nothing

wrong oh i'm such an idiot how could i have been how could i have spent the past four hours pulling my hair out thinking I was being rejected? And they've just texted back and everything's perfect right now. And we tend to do that in this continual cycle. Instead of actually going, hold on a fucking second. You've just ruined your own day. You've ruined your own day with continual negative thoughts. And the other thing as well, and it can go back to the all or nothing thinking like you think this person has rejected you and then that goes from this one person

rejecting you to of course they rejected me everyone rejects me i'm never gonna have a girlfriend i'm never gonna have a boyfriend do you know what i mean all of these negative uh automatic thoughts six of them can be going at the same time depending on certain triggers that are specific to you because of childhood events okay and the best part is it doesn't have to be that way it does does not. There is a tool called cognitive behavioural therapy that should have been taught to us in school and this is how we tackle it. Basically, the vast majority of the discomfort that you feel in your life

is not because of what happens to you but because of the way that you view what happens to you. Okay? Now, obviously, that's quite a privileged position. There's many, many things that contradict that. Do you say that to someone with a terminal illness? No. But CBT is...

CBT is basically just... Let's just say we weren't talking about mental health, and instead we were talking about physical health, CBT is just a very basic, it's like me showing you the food pyramid for the first time, it's like me explaining to you the notion of if you eat too many calories, you might gain weight for the first time, do you know what I mean, it's very basic, and it's not a solution for everybody but it's pretty handy and like i said it's in terms of empirical evidence it's the most empirically based form of psychotherapy and self-help that's there so before we get on to a new one now we're going to do our ocarina pause um this is it's our pause where I play my Spanish clay whistle

and then an advert will probably play Be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first O-Men. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what?

Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

Who said that? The first O-Men. Only in theaters April 5th. 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 hosts 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. So that was the ocarina pause. You may have heard an advert there or some bullshit. I don't know. Also, I'll get on to the bit where i beg you um this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page if you're liking this podcast you're taking something from it you're enjoying it remember i essentially i make it for. I do five hours of content a month. And I rely upon year donations to keep it going. So go to patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast.

And ask yourself, did I enjoy this enough that I would buy blind buy a cup of coffee or a pint once a month? And if you did, please do. Give me the equivalent of a cup of coffee. And if you don't feel that then you don't have to you can continue to listen for free and that's absolutely fine as well all right yart okay so we'll move on to a negative automatic thought called emotional reasoning this one is it's slightly different to the rest in that i don't know how it fully fits into the the abc model i'm not sure how it's like activating event belief about the event and then see emotional reasoning is is it's you have to remind yourself that feelings are not facts okay and i know that that that's a that's a bit of a lot to take on board but that's a lot of the issues and problems we can face is

that we feel a certain way a certain emotion and because we feel this way then that means that we're you know it's definitely the case anger you know now i'm going to do a whole separate thing on anger at some point but anger is one of these you know like someone insults you or slights you in some way so as a result of that, you feel fucking furious. And now because you feel furious, it means that the person definitely set out to hurt you. And now you're justified in hurting them. Okay? You've taken the emotion of anger and fury that you felt and used that as evidence to justify why it actually happened. Okay? that you felt and use that as evidence to justify why it actually happened okay and the thing like i said now this is a separate podcast but

regarding like anger and a few other emotions there's there's concepts in cbt called personal rules now all of us have these personal rules about how we must and must not be treated and everyone's personal rules are different and some again our personal rules come from the house that we came from and the you know the type of childhood we had you could have a personal rule that if you're living in a house with people, they must be tidy all of the time. The fact of the matter is that some people just aren't tidy. That's life. But if your personal rule around tidiness is that the people in your house that you live with must keep it as tidy and must keep it to the standards of your tidiness,

that means that chances are your personal rule is going to get broken a lot so you're going to be angry a lot so you're living in a house one of the girls doesn't wash the dishes so because she does not wash the dishes you see this your personal rule about you must clean the dishes it is an effrontery to me it is insulting to me if you do not clean the dishes now that the dishes haven't been cleaned you're now fucking furious with her and you've two ways of expressing it you are either the type of person who goes up to your bedroom and wastes your entire night seething about that bitch that you live with who hasn't cleaned the dishes or you fucking confront her and scream into her face and she's looking at you going fuck's sake

i just didn't i just didn't clean the dishes but here's the thing what's actually wrong there is it's your personal rule about how you must be treated okay now how would you tackle that with CBT a the dishes haven't been cleaned b people who do not clean dishes or people who people who are messy around me are doing it to try and hurt me they are they know what my personal rule is and they know that they're crossing my line how dare they you need to write those out and look at them and the rational the rationality is is like no i'm sorry people do not know what our personal rules are now that doesn't mean that it's okay to live in a house where the other person is messy as fuck it doesn't what you do is you look at your your personal rules and I'm going to do a separate podcast on personal rules because

again there's entire lists of them but it's not that you have personal rules it's that they're they're very rigid so when you write them out and you're being honest with yourself they'll probably say something like people must be clean around me people if people are not clean around me it means they are disrespecting me people who do not adhere to my rules of cleanliness are cunts these are probably what your personal rules are right let's just say if cleanliness is a thing there's many others there could be how polite people are to you stuff like that what they'll have in common is that the language of these personal rules is incredibly rigid and incredibly extreme people must clean when they are in my house people should people have to so with cbt

you go back to those rules you change the shoulds and the musts there's nothing wrong with it want wanting your housemate to clean dishes there is nothing wrong with that that's acceptable but it is wrong to create these fucking tyrannical demands of them so what you would do is you would change the personal belief of people must be clean around me you'd go at that with cbt and you'd change it to the much more rational i have a strong preference that people around me are clean it would be great if people around me are clean however if they're not i'm gonna i'm to try and cope with it. Or I'm going to try and approach them for some type of compromise.

But if your personal rule is broken and it's very rigid, you won't approach them for compromise. Because your anger has been triggered. So imagine this. Dishes are dirty downstairs. Now as well what you do with the personal rules you would look for reasons if one of your rules is that fucking bitch didn't clean the dishes what a cunt she did it just to piss me off if that's something you write down in your notes as an actual belief you have in the moment then you have to go at that and you go hold on a second maybe she grew up in a house that was kind of messy and she doesn't have the same rules around cleanliness that I have maybe

she is very stressed out and didn't feel like it she could be tired do you know you have to look at these things and write those down as potential options because if you don't and you go up to your room, and you're pacing around your room, and the way you spot this is you look at your body language too. Someone who is seething with anger, your teeth are clenched, your face is red and hot, your fists are clenched, you might get a pain in your tummy

from all the lactic acid that's been released, and you're upstairs with these visions of smashing her face in or visions of catching her and fucking choking her now I don't want to sound like I'm normalising abuse there now I didn't gender the housemate it could be a woman

hitting someone isn't fucking great at all but what I'm saying is that when anger takes over people we can catch ourselves in these irrational unacceptable fantasies of actually acting violence out on the person who has broken our personal rule that's what i'm trying to say i'm not saying it's acceptable but you're up in your room fantasizing about throttling her so then you decide i'm fucking going down to the bitch i'm going down to the bitch now and I'm going to tell her about those fucking dishes

and how dare she so you do now what chance have you of actual communication or compromise in that situation fucking none because when you do try and confront the person

chances are most people have a fear of conflict. So you don't go down and scream at her. You go down and shake while you're trying to talk, not able to get your words out because the part of your brain where rational cognitive thinking comes from is not engaged. Instead, what's engaged is like your your amygdala your lizard brain your prison primitive fight or flight brain is engaged and this doesn't allow you to uh for

complex reasoning or speech and instead you're just there with a big red face shaking in front of your housemate and she's looking she's just she's just trying to watch she's just trying to watch netflix like and she's looking at you going why are you so angry what's wrong then you start crying you know what i mean that's all avoidable that is all avoidable and if you're relating to that and you're going fuck me that's my life well guess what there's a solution to it and that solution is simply adjusting your thoughts and beliefs about the triggering events and it wasn't taught to you in school because instead they wanted to teach us about why a piece of bread is haunted by the ghost of a 2 000 year old carpenter

um is there anything else I want to fucking cover? We're 63 minutes in. I'm going to do a little bit on self-esteem. One of the goals of CBT is to arrive at healthy self-esteem. I mention this a lot. I refer to it as an internal locus of evaluation. have an internal locus of evaluation. It means that how you value yourself comes from inside, not from outside. Because when it comes from, when your self-worth comes from external aspects of your behavior, we'll say, or how other people think of you, then you can't control that because it's outside of you. So you'll forever have kind of low or

fluctuating self-esteem but if your self-worth comes from just simply the intrinsic value that you have as a human being that's no different to anyone else's then it's possible to have a base level sense of self-esteem which contentment and happiness can come from um like the mantra i use and i say it nearly every podcast i am better than i'm better than nobody and nobody else is better than me because human beings are too complex to compare to each other so i'm going to give you some kind of tips from CBT about not how to kind of improve your self-esteem but I'm going to list out some things right like a big part as well of CBT is what's known as homework if you went to a CBT therapist they would give you homework to take home and things for you to try and do throughout your week

and then come back and see how you got on with them the week later. So here's some ways to, some things to stop doing if you want to improve your self-esteem. So if you want to arrive at a better self-worth, then stop doing these things if you do them. So number one, putting other people down and that doesn't mean walking up to someone and calling them a cunt in your own head putting other people down if your kind of opinion of yourself is unconsciously quite low the way that you can make yourself feel better is by looking at another person and feeling contempt for them. It could be something as simple as who the fuck do they think they are wearing those stupid shoes to, oh God, they think they're so great in their BMW.

Try and stop doing that. How another person is living their life in that way, it's none of your business or none of my business. Number two, thinking that you're special. Specialness, this is one that really presents itself with people that are like between about 16 and 24, you know, really trying to find themselves. But when we have unconscious feelings of worthlessness, we can try and tell ourselves that we're actually special. We can end up with a fear of being normal.

And you kind of say to yourself, well, if I'm normal, I'm nothing. So I better be different and special in some way. And you can end up focusing on going out of your way to be different and special in some way and you can end up focusing on going out of your way to be different or special or weird and that can be quite stressful that's not great for the self-esteem because again that's ideal self-behavior it's looking for an ideal version of yourself rather than being happy with who you are and there's no such thing as special nobody is we all have the same intrinsic value some people have you know might be talented at this might be talented at that or good at this or whatever those are just aspects of that person's behavior doesn't define them as a human

being it doesn't define you so stop telling telling yourself you're special, stop trying to get the approval of other people, all right, if we have an unconscious dislike for ourselves, we can very much overcompensate by really trying to get other people to like us and when we do that right when when our desire to get other people to like us is motivated by an internal dislike of ourselves right because there's there's nothing really wrong with being nice to people and wanting to be pleasant to people i'm talking about if the driving force is a dislike of yourself an unconscious dislike and it manifests itself as it's it's kind of it's mind reading it's assuming that everyone you okay you think you're a piece of shit you then assume everyone else thinks that so you have to go that extra mile to make them happy so now you're not being a lot a lot of your interactions with people they're not necessarily

genuine what they are is excessive politeness or excessively showing interest in him or dare i say it a small bit of fucking arse licking and that's that can be very stressful and it can result later on with again the same feelings of low self-worth they just come back because later on in the evening your brain tickles at the back of your head and you tell yourself i'm a fucking lick arse do you know what i mean so and i know that's a tough one that's a lot to take on board so it's more see be yourself is very vague especially when it's like part of the journey of cbt is trying to find who you are so rather than saying be yourself just try and catch the moments when you're excessively going out of your way to be to be nice and the way that i would suggest catching that moment is it's when your niceness okay even though it's expressed as smiles or whatever when when you know it when you feel it as a nervousness when you're speaking with another person and you can feel

a trepidation and cautiousness and nervousness or maybe when you speak even though the things you're saying are nice you're apologizing for every word that you say you know a lot of your language is this is going to sound stupid but that type of stuff look for the nervousness in your interactions with people and or maybe how draining it is and it could be oh you know what i don't actually think a hell of a lot about myself so as a result i massively overcompensate and how nice i am to other people that can again it's it's far removed from self-acceptance um just just take people as they are try and take yourself as you are and whether people like you or don't like you if you're just simply showing people respect

and the compassion that they deserve and the love that they deserve if that person has a problem with you beyond that it's out of your control what can you do do you know what i mean that that's the the end goal attempting to feel more significant right by controlling other people now there's different ways that can manifest there can be outright explicit control you know toxic control the type that you would find in a if you've got a boyfriend or girlfriend and you're actually trying to tell them what to do or create parameters as to where they can and can't go or what they should and shouldn't like or what they you know what i mean yeah it doesn't have to be even abusive or toxic do you know in that the other person would notice it it could be simple as simple as having an issue if the other person

likes omelets and you don't like omettes instead of accepting that they like omelettes who gives a fuck there's that type of we'll say toxic level of control and then there's the other type of again it's it's about um if you don't feel if you don't feel very significant or important you can exert your importance by trying to see your importance reflected back at you in somebody else's behavior somebody else's behavior and there's a classic line that you know people who don't understand their their emotions try and control other people's behaviors and that's what this is so it could be it could be fucking i don't know know, controlling behaviour can actually express itself in you thinking you're trying to be nice. It could be always trying to, being a matchmaker.

You've got that one single friend and you're going out of your way to set them up with boys or girls. And you're not actually stopping to ask is this what they want do you know what i mean continually meddling in that respect and unconsciously consciously you think you're doing it for them for their well-being but you're not what you're doing is your own feeling of insignificance you want to shape and influence the life of someone around you so that that change can be reflected back at you and you can look at it and go i'm important look what i did you know and again it's unconsciously driven there's no reason to beat yourself up around it but just be mindful if that's if that is a behavior you engage in it could be one of the factors that

is uh resulting in low self-esteem um it could be something as simple as fucking you've got a lads always do it on fucking you know if you hear girls complaining about lads uh on a date the lad could be really fucking insecure and he's demanding that the girl go and watch the wire now like there's nothing wrong with suggesting you watch the wire it's a great tv show but when someone is excessively pushing it and the next time you talk it's like did you watch the wire you didn't ah for fuck's sake you know that's uh that's a form of control even though it's manifested as something quite positive which is recommending a good tv show the obsessiveness that you might express around it it's actually a form of control it's simply if she watches the

wire then that must mean she values me and i'm not a big piece of shit do you know what i mean she values me and i'm not a big piece of shit do you know what i mean so they're just a few there's a few more it's 74 minutes in now i could fucking do these bloody podcasts for ages these uh psychology ones but i'll leave you go i won't revisit it next week i'll go and do something mad next week because we've had two weeks of psychology there i'll find something silly to talk about but yeah i'm consciously fucking i'm deliberately doing these psychology ones the cbt ones because it's september and like i said last week it's a challenging month for all of us days are getting fucking shorter people are back in school back in college you know uh even if you're not in school or college,

going to work in the mornings is more stressful because there's more cars and more of a commute, you know. So September's a challenging one for all of us and it's a month where we should all be mindful of ourselves and mindful of each other. And what better tools to learn than fucking CBT? So I hope you enjoyed that. Give me a shout on Twitter or whatever for some feedback

let me know if you liked it fuck off if you have a problem with the the politics at the start like I said look it needs to be fucking said and with this platform that I have here it's not being spoken

about on the radio or the TV in any serious way now it is getting a mention but here we have this fucking beautiful podcast its listenership genuinely rivals any radio show or tv show in the country and I'm in the pocket of nobody Dennis O'Brien does not own a parent company that controls this the taxpayer and the bai do not own a parent company or that this podcast is it's me in my bedroom in limerick talking into a sock and you are choosing to listen to it and it's not even advertised the only money that's put into this fucking podcast is what you

might give me through the patreon so we have a genuinely free um piece of broadcasting here and because of that i just i wanted to dedicate 15 minutes to those protesters and the housing crisis and to counteract like i said the dominant narrative that we should all be fighting with each other over it fuck that all right have a good uh have a lovely week have a lovely week i'll be back on d next week with something different yart 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 hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m 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.