TRIGGERnometry - Psychotherapist Explains the Culture Wars

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Counsellor and Psychotherapist Andrew Thomas joins us in the studio to discuss his Rainbow Map, a spin-off too of trigger-based therapy. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of people with cats and gardens put these wires around, you know, around their gardens, and they put this collar around the cat's neck. And the cats then wander around not knowing what's going on. They get near to this wire and they get an electric shock. But after about a week or two, the cats don't go near those wires. And what we've now got in our culture is those wires now are all over the place. So we've all got these little collars around us, you know, electric. But the worst thing is we now don't even know where they are.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our guest today is a practicing and published psychotherapist. Andrew Thomas, welcome to Trigonometry. Well, thank you. Welcome. Why am I saying welcome? It's great to be here.

You've taken over the space. You feel right at home. You did allude to the fact that you work with. couples before we started and you said this felt a little bit like it and I did complain there's not enough sex in this relationship. Well, we can work on that afterwards. We can put a half hour into that. I absolutely hope so. We need to get more love into this. But look, joking aside, it's great to have you on. I'll be honest with our audience. We got you on because you got in touch with us and you had some very interesting things you wanted to talk to us about from a psychotherapist perspective, but particularly relevant to the political context. And one of those things was, you were.

the idea that people live right and vote left. So talk to us about that. So we have across the Western world now a large part of the middle classes who the way they live their lives is from my perspective admirable. They're resilient. They take responsibility for their outcomes in their lives. They work really hard. If they meet obstacles in their way, they try to overcome them. In fact, they really largely look into themselves for the resilience and the resources and the capacity to learn to overcome the problems and achieve what they're hoping to achieve.

And the other thing is they raise their children in that light. So they raise their children to be resilient, resourceful, adaptive. But when they go into the voting booth, they vote for parties that promote policies and a cultural outlook that are largely in many ways diametrically opposite to the way they actually live their lives themselves. I mean, it's not to be too political, you know, we have the classic case of Diane Abbott, Doyen of the left, whose son went to a private school. So the way she actually lived her life, or lives her life, she hasn't gone yet,

lives her life compared to how she actually votes and the types of policy she's poor, the diametrically opposite. So this is very interesting, Andrew, because this is one of the things that I've been kind of chronicling in some of the articles I've written and in my book that I'm working on, et cetera, which is that there is often an inconsistency between the things that people, do and the things that people say one ought to do or that you ought to do. So what is your theory about why that's happening? Well, just say, I mean, I'm increasingly uneasy about the labelling virtue signal and woke and all the rest of it. I mean, take Diane Abbott. I mean,

what achievements she's had in life? You know, what barriers she's broken down and overcome? And I'm increasingly uneasy about how people are, so, the polarisation and the labelling that's going on. But the drivers behind that are, there's a number of core, if you want me to talk about the sort of psychological, the sort of, and also the evolutionary psychological and the neuroscientific drivers behind that, is that we have, there's two things that, that, um, that, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Genetics are an important factor in our propensity to experience anxiety, depression. So if you read a book called Blueprint by Robert Plowman, you'll see a wonderful, a resume and a coverage of where we are in understanding that, but it's looking really very convincing

that our genetics are very influential. But it's also how they interact with the environment. If you put an environment around young children that's chaotic, uncertain, where their attachment is being switched on, switched off, you're going to start to get more and more children growing into adults who demonstrate, you know, sort of what we would say, maladaptive avoidant behavioural patterns. So a study has been done that people who have got left-of-centreleaning have got a greater propensity towards anxiety and seeing the world through what I would call a foppy lens. So what do I mean by a foppy lens? Well, there's a tendency to trigger into a survival type of pattern. So imagine 100,000 years ago you're walking through the bush to pick

berries or whatever. You come to a clearing. On the other side, there's a berry bush, but it's moving in a strange way. All the birds have gone a bit quiet and there's nothing else moving. What happens is you focus, so everything focuses. So you focus on the bush. The next thing is you overreact. So your survival system, you start to get adrenaline pumping through your system. So you overreact, so you go, F, you focus, you overreact, and P is you become pessimistic. So we know from David Attenborough documentaries that there are far more antelope than there are tigers. But you'll be pessimistic because you'll see that the bush is likely to have behind it the most incredibly big tiger that hasn't eaten for three weeks with a taste just for

you. So you focus, you overreact it. You're pessimistic and you get it as a package. The reason you get it as a package is it's no use focusing and being pessimistic if you don't overreact because if that lion comes out and you haven't started to overreact, it might make five meters to you before your adrenaline system starts going. Okay? And so that could be the difference between you, getting your DNA into the next generation or not. So you focus, you overreact, you're pessimistic,

you get as a package, and the eye is it's inaccurate. And the reason why evolution has made that inaccurate is 100,000 years ago, you could run away many times, but only eaten once. It's better to overreact just in case to be safe. So that is a survival system that's in every single one of us, 7.8 billion of us, that we've got that in us. So if you then couple that with an early stage development, I can't sound to be a clinical, the system, an early stage family life for children where is dad there or dad not there?

Is dad looking at the mobile file? Is dad not looking at the mobile file? Is mom there or no? Is she there or not there? Oh, where did Dad go? There's a new man in the house or whatever. So that is likely to develop a higher proportion of your society with a heightened, foppy reaction to the world around them.

And has that happened? Have people been growing up in increasingly unstable, chartered environments? Well, yeah, since the 1950s. Yeah, it looks like... What you're saying is, I mean, this isn't sort of saying. you know, there's a stereotypical, if you're like this, it's going to be dreadful. But overall, the challenge of raising a child, I mean, the correlation between single-parent families and all sorts of things that happen in life is not good, because it's incredibly

challenging to raise a child by yourself. There are many single parents that do that. But they're also now, because I sit in rooms with couples that have, you know, for thousands of hours, It's not confined just to single parenting, you know, the pressures, this self-actualizing goal that generates this incredible high hours working culture, where whatever car you've got, you know, whatever look you've got, you know, that you've managed to attain will fade quite quickly. So we do have a society that in many ways is sort of set to generate proportion of the... Coming back to the irony, if you look at the middle classes, their goal is stability. You know, they do whatever they can to create a stable environment around their children. You could say some are over the top, you know, tiger parents. But the outcome of a lot of policies today is to create incredible uncertainty in a lot of households

which the survival system, the attachment system of young children, especially at the age of 2, 3, 4, 5 are hypersensitive to. And at those ages, they're experimenting with different behavioural patterns. So if mum or dad are unavailable or incredibly angry, then they may experiment with a shutdown type of survival system, which is to self-anithetize. Or they may start to experiment and develop what I call a legacy behavior, which is an acting out type of behavioral pattern, which is dragging the attention of the parent back onto them in any way that system can do. So if you've got a society, a culture that's generating sort of more fragile, more foppy-oriented styles of behaviour, and then along comes the noughties, and we have social media, we have the capacity, and I'm coming back onto the middle classes now. So if you've got a greater proportion of the middle classes, who are likely to trigger a

lower level of activation into a foppy-like response. If you get that and then you ram social media into that and the incredible OLED screens and high definition and surround sound and then you allow, then people get into their own silos because it's much less threatening to be out of your silo. What you're going to do is you're going to get people sort of triggering and trying to find ways to rid themselves of the discomfort in terms of the dichotomy between their comfortable lives and the chaos, terror, the burning fires in Australia or California, and their comfortable

lives. And so if you have a tendency to trigger into a phopulite state, you're going to really just reach out for really quite sort of immediate solutions to calm yourself. So you'll be looking for avoidant styles of behaviour. Also, if your neighbours are talking about how dreadful the world is, how the world's going to come to an end, you know, very soon, then again, remember that attachment metric is playing out in those relationships as well. But isn't there also a vested interest in society? Because the more foppy-like behaviour people have,

the more likely they are to be good consumers, to buy things, to desire things, to this constant consumption that we have in our society, which is necessary to keep the economy growing? Well, absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, if it's self-actualization, which is the never-achievable goal, I mean, if you go out and buy a book on meditation, and two years later, you're yourself levitating above some glass-like Andean Lake, and out of the corner of the eye

you see Sting with Trudy having tantric sex four foot above the lake you know what are you going to do you've somehow got to do your meditation even better now this isn't this avoidant way of looking at things the driver it isn't nealistic it isn't sort of a well we should not try

to do anything it's more about actually being able to look at the drivers for your behaviour and look at them that they are driven by your behavioral patterns, by how your system got trained, by this whole physiology, this whole neuroscient, this whole neurological system, which you've got. And that it means that if you've got it, and that's what's driving it, you've actually got the hands on the levers. So that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try your best, push yourself as hard as you can.

But that goal, that drive, can come out of much more understanding of whether, of how positive or negative it is for you in your life, given how you are and the resources you've got, rather than just being handed down this existential goal that Maslow came up with in 1943. In many ways, isn't the pinnacle of self-actualization social media? where you can actually curate the way you want people to see you, the way you want to be viewed, who you are. If you look at something like Instagram, you can physically change the way you look. You can create this life, which actually has no bearing on your real life whatsoever.

It's the pinnacle of avoidance. It allows you to sculpt your avoidant behaviour in any way, shape, of form you like. I mean, Jeff Bezo, not Jeff Bezo, who's the Facebook guy? Oh, Zuckerberg. Zagaberg. I mean, he probably thinks he's the greatest business person ever in the whole wide world. I mean, his balance would say, sir. Yeah, well, it would do.

But this avoidant style of behaviour isn't recent. It's been going, the first home of sapiens 200,000 years ago, we developed language, what, 50 to 100,000 years ago. We've wanted to have the best possible level of attachment we can have with the people around us for 100,000 years. And long come social media and hey, presto, you can. You're in a society that is slicing and dicing what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And hey, presto, you can just suddenly find other people

who've got the same avoidant behavioural patterns as you have. So, you know, Zuckerberg may have thought, well, God, I've created this incredible thing that I've pushed on to it. But the human race has just been gagging for Facebook for a couple of hundred thousand years. You know, it fed into a phenomenal demand. But that demand has also been driven by the, you know, this culture of, you know, the right way to speak, the right way to look, the right way to behave. And if you look at the education of young children now or males or female or whatever, there are so many criteria now that mean you're either in or you're out. I mean, I don't know if you know any people with cats.

Well, a lot of color of people with cats and gardens put these wires around their gardens, and they put this collar around the cat's neck. And the cats then wander around not knowing what's going on. get near to this wire and they get an electric shock. But after about a week or two, the cats don't go near those wires. And what we've now got in our culture is those wires now are all over the place. So we've all got these little collars around us, you know, electrocuting us. But the worst thing is we now don't even know where they are.

It's so good that you bring that up because as you know, it's one of the things we've talked a lot about on the show, which is the idea of freedom of expression, freedom of speech, why suddenly it seems like to me, at least, things that we used to all be able to debate, to discuss, to let people have wrong opinions, to let people have bad opinions, to let people have whatever opinions they wanted. I mean, look at, you know, there's a lot of talk now about how we've got to shut down conspiracy theories

and ideas about what's causing the pandemic or why are there lockdowns or why is this and why is that? It was 20 years ago you had 9-11, a huge terrorist attack, loads of conspiracy theories flying about all the time. It never occurred to anyone that they should be shut down. I remember watching conspiracy documentaries about 9-11 on social media or later in the dead, but also on TV. It was considered a normal part of the social discourse about things

that people were allowed to have different thoughts about different things, even if they're completely wrong. And yet we've got to a position where now we seem to desire a massive crackdown on that. But if you look at that through the lens of the live right, vote, left, middle classes, who have their handles on the levers of power in society, they're in the think tanks, they're in the schools, they're in the universities, they're the sort of people who become MPs, be they labor, Lib Dem or Conservative, those live, right, vote left, well, maybe not the Conservatives,

But you know what, you know. Also the concern is now. Yeah, well, possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Freudian slip there. So, so, but if you look at it, the, the, the, the, the, um, cognitive dissonance that's possible for them, which is a, are you aware with cognitive dissonance?

Yes. Yes. If they, no wonder they don't want to talk to their friends about politics or economics that maybe see things differently because that might generate a, sense of cognitive dissonance between how they live and how they vote that will generate, it generates a sort of foppy type reaction. People get triggered up. So that's why you see in the middle class circles, you know, if ever people shying away from talking about politics because it's really uncomfortable. I mean, I don't know how we're going to get

through this, but if you look at the 1970s, that was a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance. think that Margaret Thatcher came in and she was this incredible leader with this vision, I see it slightly differently, is that in the 1970s, people who'd bought into socialism, nationalisation, state control, sort of the state could somehow define which industries were the best to go in to and invest in. Well, in the 1970s, those very same people ended up walking past piles of rubbish, or lighting their homes with candles, or experiencing three-day weeks, or I think it was in 1917, 29 million days of strikes. And that was an incredible cognitive dissonant experience that challenged their views.

And that is what I think Margaret Thatcher was able to build on. She was able to, the art that she, she, she, came into a society that had in a way been partially reconditioned. And at the moment, what we have is a society that enables people, you know, through the incredible printing presses, you know, modern monetary theory that enables us to insulate ourselves from whatever views we might want, because theoretically, society is so incredibly wealthy. In other words, we can advocate, let's say, just hypothetically speaking, for open borders without thinking of the consequences that that would have on the country, let's say,

not least because we are insulated ourselves from them. Well, the people in power and the middle classes that may hold those views might live in very leafy, monocultural environments. they have maybe the muscle, the financial muscle to buy houses in the catchment area of the best schools. Their children will typically go to Russell Group universities. They'll compete for jobs, you know, that require very high levels of English skills that maybe aren't competing at the other end. But I don't hold that. You know, if you look at those people, they're models of industrial.

I mean, that's the problem. When you start to go down that rabbit hole, you can start to become condemning. But they actually mimic, you know, really ideal behaviours. What I would be condemning is advocating for things with no regard for the impact of those things and other people. I am happy to engage in discussion with those people. I don't believe they're disgusting. I don't believe that they're immoral. I just think that they are mistaken. And if we were to have a conversation, I hope that we could change each other's minds and come to a compromise. What I have found, though, one of my best friends is, you know, one of these kind of almost loony lefties, if you like. And whenever we have a conversation, I've got him to say this many

times. I go, look, but you look, I'm an immigrant, right? You realize that when you allow large numbers of people to come into a country without the opportunity to integrate it properly, causes problems, don't you? He'll go, yes, yes, yes. And then I talk him through the whole thing. goes, look, I understand all of that. I just think we should have open borders. What we're witnessing there is an avoidant behaviour path. Right. So what's driving him to behave like that, which you find frustrating? I mean, if you were really, what I'm hearing for a lot of people in this situation, if they try to engage in people who do the live right, vote left stuff, if you, maybe your friend doesn't, doesn't sort of live right, I don't know,

but what they're experiencing is they get very upset very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He knows. Yeah.

Yeah. You've got a good point there. Yeah, they do. They do. So, so, so, and what you're witnessing is an avoidant behavioral pattern because it's conversation over. Yes. Yeah.

It's conversation over. Let's split up. Let's move apart and let's not address it. But that, but that is a survival-oriented, you know, that's an avoidant-orientated behavior. So what can we do about that as society? Because it seems to me that it's quite important for people to be able to discuss practical ideas about the direction of travel. Do we take a left turn?

Do we take a right turn? Do we keep going straight? Do we slam on the brakes? That, to me, is a practical conversation about ensuring the well-being of everybody going forward, particularly our children, grandchildren, et cetera. We've got important decisions to make as a society, right? Yeah. So how do we bridge those divides?

How do we within ourselves and particularly with other people? Well, I'd like to say we shift away from Maslow's conception at the higher end, self-actualization, and we move to a more accurate and sort of a more accurate model of what human motivation and human drive is really made up of. Okay. And move to a place where more of us, many more of us in the West, are aware of what drives our emotional life, what causes us to trigger. So for your good friend who says, well, blah-de-blah, well, he doesn't sound like he gets

really angry, but he almost sounds like he sort of withdraws. He sort of shuts down from the debate, you know, which is another avoidant style of behavior. He sort of self-anesthetize it because he just doesn't want to go there. Yes. Because to touch on that live rail, Jenner, would really. really generate a lot of discomfort. So if he could become more aware of how he triggers around these subjects, so he could actually notice as I developed this other model,

which is the reflective mind, reactive brain and reactive body. So, you know, this system is phenomenally complex. And you can go on training courses now that pick up individual parts of the brain and they say it does this or that. So what I decided to do in my work was create a model that enabled clients to really just see the basic core system of the human, which is a capacity to be reflective, the reflective mind, the reactive brain, which is going all the time. Yours is going on at the time. You know, what is this guy going on about whatever. You're asking it to do that. It's just ramming narrative and sensations. You know, narrative into the surface of your brain and sensations across your body. So you've got a reactive body and a reactive brain that's constantly interacting. So if we can, a lot of the work I'm doing now and other therapists who are using the rainbow map or if you want to go sensory motor therapy

is that we're trying to enable our clients to notice their system triggering. So, so I've got this one concept which is called a trigger flag, which is typically a physical. physical sensation. So as a lot of people trigger, they notice the throats go or the jaws go. And if you can notice the self-triggering or withdrawing, you can actually then exert a little bit more choice about whether, oh, okay, you know, here goes Constantine, this is the experience I've got, I feel really uneasy about this, I just want to shut this conversation down, I don't want to go there. If you can actually notice that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. driver, then you can exert more choice about whether you obey it or overrule it. So there's two ways out of this that we've got in the West. We're either going to go through a 1970s and we're going to get cognitive dissonance. There's going to be widespread. It wasn't meant to work like this.

I mean, a lot of people are starting to look at it like that, aren't they? Hold on. You know, so if we were, you know, if we were trying to close. clear the area, like we've made everyone able to get a degree now. Now, the last year, whether they turn up to university or not, you know, that whole thing, you know, of self-actualization. If self-actualization, you know, the politicians in the last 30 years, if part of self-actualization society is everyone's going to get a degree, everyone can have a degree. But we're also already starting to see the cognitive dissonance getting in there because companies can't tell the

difference now. And degrees are going down and down in value. So, so, you know, maybe we'll get the cognitive dissonant bit by bit and we'll be able to sort of turn the corner or maybe it will be a 1970s type of mass cognitive dissonance where you really see what you get when you nationalize everything. Isn't it? Look. Not everything. So, and the other thing is more awareness of how your system, your survival system. some triggers. Look, this is all very intelligent, and you're a far more intelligent man than me,

and good luck to you. Isn't it a question of just being fucking brave and having a little bit of balls and saying what you think? Do you know, we feel uncomfortable. We feel uncomfortable at certain points. When I started my teaching career, I felt uncomfortable

and being in front of 30 kids, but you have to do it in order to have a career. You feel uncomfortable when you ask a woman out, but otherwise you're never going to have sex. Why is it that we now have a culture where we feel bad about being uncomfortable? Life's uncomfortable, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, but we've all got metaphorical...

You are getting old, but... We've all got metaphorical collars around our necks that electrocute ourselves. So you've got lovely... You know, this stuff about the live right vote, left mill classes, we've all got friends like that. And we love them and like them. you know, and connect very strongly.

And if you come out, and I've tried it a few times, if you come out and try to challenge them, I mean, this is a cult. You know, they'll double down and you'll lose your friends. You know, that's the way it seems at the moment. I mean, you know, how do you actually try to engage in conversations with people who, if they start to get into that conversation, will become increasingly uncomfortable

because of that cognitive dissonance. I mean, it's a, it's a psychological driver for them. They trigger. And then the reflective mind starts shutting down. So with your friend, the capacity to be reflective starts to go down and the reactive brain and reactive body start to dominate. I mean, I'll give you a quick example in this. I mean, the door to this room is over there.

Okay. If that handle goes down, I can guarantee you instantaneously, every single one of our reflective minds will shut instantaneously because we'll turn and look around there. And that's an example of compulsive behavior. And that's what you're dealing with. So as you start with your friend, you say, come on, you're just wrong. You know, go on, look at this, look at this.

How does that work? Not very well. I'll be honest with you. Yeah. And do you think that school has got a part to playing this and the way we raise kids? Well, we want kids to be safe. We want to protect them.

And I've seen it in schools that I've taught in. You know, we want a modicoled them. We want them to be as safe as possible all the time every single minute of every day. So that when they actually get confronted by, you know, a challenge or a disagreement, they don't know how to deal with it. Well, we've got, you know, this safety culture. you know, sort of, sort of in a way, an exploitation of Balby's attachment theory from 1958. We've got a society now that is, you know, social workers, psychologists who are so well-versed in attachment

with a view that if you have any level of detachment, we've got to somehow stop that. But where I think we're getting it wrong, it's the direction. that the detachment, I mean, I think it would have been better if you called it detachment theory, because from a survival perspective, if you can't be breastfeeding when you're 20, you know, 100,000 years ago, you know, you're doing a hunt and the tigers or the antelopes say, oh, just wait, I've got a break because I need to go to mum to have a bit of a top-up. I mean, it wasn't really a survival-oriented, advantageous way of behaving. So from the point of birth, the child has to learn to detain to determine to detain.

from the parent. So what we're sort of getting sort of mixed up is, is a clear understanding of where that detachment comes from. So if the parents are very stable, they're there, it's the healthy form of a detachment if it's engineered from the child's end. Okay? So the child experiments at two or three or four

and they push more and more distance between them, but they know if they want to turn around and come back, that security is there. But on the other hand, you also need elements of parental forced attachment. So, oh my God, the parent isn't there. It depends on frequency and degree. You know, if the parent is constantly detaching and doing it to a really brutal extent, then you're likely to train that child survival system into developing maladaptive behavioral patterns.

But what we can't do is a society. to your parents is in a way, say, you know, protect the children, you know, give people trigger warnings all over the place. I mean, the actual experience of being triggered, of being upset, is a developmental experience. I mean, it's all about degrees, isn't it? When you say it's a developmental experience, just to translate it into simple language, what you mean is you have to go through life and experience being triggered, quote,

unquote, in order to grow? Yes. Yeah. I can give you a little bit more. No, that's good. I think the simple yes is good there. I was just about to get off into it. Yeah.

So you need to, like Francis was saying this, you need to experience discomfort in order to be a fully fleshed human being. I know this from my own life. And this is why this whole ideology, to some extent, this is why we've been talking about this stuff. I know that almost everything that I've ever, done in my life that's been worthwhile in my opinion has involved extreme discomfort at some level. Every single thing, whether it's work, whether it's relationship, whether it's my own personal

development as a human being, whether it's reading an important book, right? It's required discipline and sticking with it and sometimes reading a bit that I wasn't interested. Like, do you see what I'm saying? This idea that we must avoid discomfort as the greatest objective of our existence is absurd. But there's a more fundamental driver and need behind that as well because I talked to you

about those what I call trigger packages earlier. If you, 100,000 years ago, if you're four years old, there's a forest fire comes in, you smell the acrid smoke, you see the expressions of the faces around you, you feel the heat

and you hear the screaming and you manage to just get out. with your life. The trauma-based learning system is going to create trigger packages that will endure for the rest of your life. Why? Because you don't experience another forest fire for the next 20 or 30 years. You know, you happen to be 32 or 33.

You get the faintest whiff of acrid smoke. And bingo, you get that experience, that incredibly powerful, visceral experience. And you become alert to what's going on around you and you're warm, forewarned, and you get the hell out. Evolution has it, those trigger packages are incredibly resilient. They don't shift. But the other thing about them is they can be reconditioned when they crack open. So a lot of therapeutic approaches today, like CBT orientate cognitive behavioral theory,

therapy orientated towards phobias, is actually causing the person to trigger in a sort of minor way and then an increasing way around, say, spiders or flying or whatever, because what it's actually doing is cracking open that trigger package, but in a manageable way, and then piling in new narratives. So when it shuts down again, it's less potent. And when it opens up again, there will be maybe other narratives and more restorative resources, so it doesn't overwhelm you. So to come back to you, yeah, I mean, triggering over again.

becoming challenges, having upsets, are all really opportunities to recondition. I mean, we don't want this to say, you know, abusive behaviour, violence, sexual abuse, those aren't constructive experiences. You know, they're incredibly damaging experience. I'm pretty sure that's always been universally understood. Yeah. I think what's happened in recent years is,

is an attempt to conflate that, those things you're talking about, violence, abuse, etc., with ordinary experiences in life. That's why people now talk about language as being violence, right? The words are now considered violence by some people, because it's an attempt to conflate the two. And I think it's quite deliberate attempt because it's a way of getting power of other people. Yeah, I don't see it quite like that. I think the people who are saying that have got A lot of, maybe some people are like that, but quite a lot of the people are genuinely triggered. You know, that sense of vulnerability, you know, the anxiety, the fear, the pain, I think is quite real. What we have to look is how do people end up developing to have that type of sensitivity?

So, yeah, no, I see it slightly differently. Take a point. So just to summarize, because you've already made this point, I teach you. take it. Your conception of this is that people are hypersensitive. Am I okay to use that term? No, everyone. There's a greasing proportion of society, yes, but they're powerfully triggered. And they are very easy to trigger because the unstable childhood environment they grew up in, combined with the education system, combined with blah, blah, blah, and social media. Yeah, you've got to be a bit careful with that because OK parenting is a very broad spectrum of parenting.

Okay. So the branches of parenting that will really predictably generate sort of discordant behavioral patterns in life, you know, in the upper, well, upper and lower quartiles of that sort of distribution. So this isn't a message to parents that they somehow have to be perfect parents, Just being okay is largely good. And then it's how your genetics interact with the environment that then really make the difference. But if you are starting to generate a society

where the electric wires are encroaching, then you're pushing more people. You know, that shape of that distribution curve is changing. And more and more people are starting to grow up with triggering. systems, as I might call it, that are on a hairline, that are really sensitized to going off to any perceived threat and generate really powerful levels of discomfort. I mean, it's a very, very, very good point.

Look, how much of this is also a type of narcissistic behavior as well, whereby someone goes to a comedy night, for instance, they hear a joke, everyone laughs, or the vast majority of people laugh, they feel it's disgusting, therefore. they want to set the parameters of what is and what isn't acceptable because of the way they see the world. Isn't that a form of narcissism as well? Well, you're seeing someone behave, you know, driven by an attachment form of behavior. You know, well, their behavior is really trying to, in a way, reattach themselves to whoever they perceive to be their attachment group.

So they're experiencing, you know, it's sort of quite a visceral sort of physical experience or maybe narratives are really punching into their brains that are really powerful. And a bit like your friend, you know, that joke has pushed them onto the live wire. And so now with social media, they can go straight to that. And that's a classic avoidant behavioral pattern. They'll sate their discomfort by way. going out onto social media and demonstrating their virtue and they don't align with that type of joke or that type of thinking and that will calm them down.

Well, here's the thing, though, because Francis' question, I think is very good because I remember a situation where I was performing in a comedy show and my wife was there and she had literally just come back from Ukraine from her grandmother's funeral. And the comedian who was on before me was doing material. pretty funny material about pushing his grandmother down the stairs. It was a comedy movie. Yeah, yeah. And my wife, being a normal person, obviously, you know,

she was feeling a bit raw, her grandmother, who was important in her life, had just died, got up, went to the toilet, got a drink of water, waited for this comedian to get offstage, came back in the room and watched the rest of the show, right? She was not untriggered by him making jokes about a very raw subject for her at that time. But it never occurred to her to go on social media

and to sate her whatever in that way. So what is the difference between her and someone who feels, that's why I think Francis is getting at when you talks about narcissism. Well, a couple of things. You know, how well does it work when you write an article and you label group people narcissist? I mean, how convincing is that? How do people react when you sort of label them with really quite negative sort of style?

We're just asking you the question. To me, it's not a question of persuasiveness. To me, it's a question of accuracy. Is it accurate or not to say that partly this is driven by narcissism? I suppose what you're looking at and you're talking to as a person who is looking at the behavioral patterns and the drivers behind that, which is, I mean, the couple work I do, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of couples I've sat with, you know, far more difficult than the two of you. You know, over the years.

And they, you know, and because they're coming in, they're talking about the real nuts and bolts of what's happening in their relationships. And then they talk about one of their children who's just been labeled ADHD or some other label that's been given to them by a child psychologist. Now, there probably are children with ADHD or abnormal. But if that child psychologist were to really hear what I've heard about what's really going on in that family, they would marvel that that kid even gets out of bed in the morning. You know, when you hear what goes, you know, I'm I hear stuff that you just wouldn't believe. And so we're mislabeling people all over the place in our society today.

I mean, it's an easy thing to do, isn't it? You know, it just is a label person. I mean, I've been guilty of it until about six to nine months ago, you know, because, you know, my thinking around this has been evolving, you know, you know, I might have been calling people virtue signals. I don't really do that now. You know, I don't do that because I just think that. the people I think about who are virtually are really great people.

But they trigger, but they trigger. But they trigger and they avoid the cognitive dissonance. We have to be able to describe things accurately, though. I get this whole non-judgment thing. I get it. But at the same time, I personally know people, and I know in myself the temptation to signal virtue on social media. I know it in myself, right?

It exists in all of us. I would never do that. No, sure, mate. That's a great virtue, Steve. It's a great virtue signal right there. So this is my point is, we all have the instinct in us to get attention from the community, the society.

To attach. To attach. To attach. So to say that somebody is engaging in virtue signaling is not to say that they're a bad person or that they're immoral. It is to say that they're engaging in a behavior that I recognize.

Look, look, I think we're, Well, three of us, we're all seeing, you know, this, this, the, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this is this identityarian culture. Mm-hmm. Where minority groups are being convinced that any problems that they have in their lives, they've got nothing to do with them. You know, it's got everything to do with the society around them. I'm not saying, you know, society doesn't have its problems and, and don't negatively influence groups, but to send a message to certain minority groups or groups of people, that it's nothing to do with you. You know, don't ever look at your behavior.

Just look outside of yourself. Well, yeah, that is incredibly damaging. But the reason why I'm quite like the live right vote left is it's actually descriptive of the behavior. Sure. Yeah. Whereas virtue signal is a sort of quite a pejorative term. But where you could argue, yeah, well, that's actually a description of the behavior, I suppose.

But so it sort of have a sense that it's quite sort of just quite pejorative, you know. It's a put down, isn't it? And I have to say, I've been guilty of that myself in years gone by. But it doesn't work. It just pisses people off. No, it's... What if you want to piss them on? Yeah, I mean...

No, they'd go for it. Then you drive engagement on social media. You know, that's the way to do it. We've got to wrap up, man. There's one more question that I wanted to ask, right, which is this. Why have we started to conflate mental health with mental illness? And we use these two terms interchangeably when they obviously have very, very different meanings. Well, if you read a book called Black Rainbow by, what's the name, Rachel, it will come to me, Black Rainbow, it's about this Times journalist

journey through her mental illness over 20 years. And if you ever want to get an understanding what is the difference, you know, what is mental health, what really is mental illness. Read that book, you know, because she eviscerates herself. You may not, you know, she's very wealthy, has got the ideal life, but she turns her pen on herself in the most unremitting way. And you, and if ever you want to get an understanding what the difference is. I mean, basically mental health is, you're basically engaging in behavioral patterns

that are getting in the way of you experiencing your life in the way you want to. Getting up and being a bit sad in the morning is something different. But, you know, I think in this, I've seen, listen to a few podcasts, you ask at the, you know, if you want to ask me that final question you do,

I might be able to respond to that a little bit more. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Seamless. Yeah, great. I think it's the way people in the public eye are talking about the experience of psychotherapy. It's great. I mean, it's fine to say, hey, I've been to see a psychotherapist or, you know, I went with, you know, I had these issues. But what we're starting to see is people talk about what they actually talk about in the psychotherapy session.

You know, in the public eye. They're talking about relations or what people did or what people said. And what they're doing unwittingly, probably, is they're weaponising the actual psychotherapy session. And one of the most precious things about psychotherapy in our culture today is the perception that if you sit with someone like me or any of my peers who are in the mainstream therapy organization, the BACP, you know, any of these sort of psychological mainstream, we're all really tied into really strong senses of ethics around confidentiality. And if we start to challenge, you know,

through what we talk about that actually happens in the session publicly, then you're starting to create an impression that, you know, what's talked about in there can just be. spread everywhere. And I think that's a retrograde step. And the next thing is, is starting to get, and I think coming back to your question, Francis, is starting to get a bit more of a gauge about when they're accessing psychotherapy. So it's okay to feel a bit sad at times. It's okay to feel a bit angry at times. You know, that's not a mental illness. If you're being angry all the time or sad all the time, yeah, that could well be a problem. But I think people in the public,

I need to think a little bit more about how they're communicating the degree of the mental health issues that are causing them to go to therapy or not. So I'd like that to be the awareness of how people in public eye talk about the reasons why they go to therapy, what happens to therapy, and the degree of the issues that cause them to go to therapy. I think that would in a way preserve and protect the sanctity and the effectiveness of therapy regardless of how you practice it. And that is a wonderful point to end the show. Thank you so much for coming on. If people want to find you, where is the best place to do that? Well, I'm now delivering a public workshops, two-hour workshops.

By the way, all the training I do is not for profit. So I charge as little as I can And a third of all the revenues that I generate go to the charity shelter Because of the connection between mental health and homelessness Andrew Thomas, thank you so much for coming on the show Well, thank you very much I mean it's been really interesting really fascinating to meet you and talk to you Thank you likewise likewise and thank you for watching and listening

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