22.1 Steven Hayes, PhD: ACT and Relational Frame Theory

[00:00:00] You know, I flip it over to sports because you raised the issue, but my dad was a really, really good pitcher in high school and then was there at Duke University for just for a year. And in the summer of his freshman year, having just been drafted by the Reds, he had the chutzpah as a young man, a foolish person, you know, believing he was invincible. He threw a triple header in club ball, 27 endings straight.

[00:00:30] And his arm, he could never throw a fastball again. He could never throw it.

[00:00:37] Somebody get this guy some help.

[00:00:47] All right. So today is a very special day because I'm talking to Steven Hayes, whose theories change my personal life in the way that I professionally practice.

[00:00:58] He is currently an emeritus professor in the behavioral analysis program at the Department of Psychology at University of Nevada,

[00:01:05] has authored nearly 50 books and 700 scientific articles with an H index of 150 and has spent nearly the entirety of his career trying to understand the complex nature of human language and cognition and how it relates to mental illness.

[00:01:22] He originated and helped further develop act or acceptance and commitment therapy, an evidence based and validated therapy predicated on increasing psychological flexibility and based on his development of and subsequent experimental testing of relational frame theory,

[00:01:40] a behavioral theory of language that helps explain how humans communicate with themselves and think by identifying and creating connections between stimuli.

[00:01:50] Dr. Hayes has served in various administrative roles within the APA, the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology,

[00:01:58] the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies,

[00:02:01] and the Association for the Contextual Behavioral Sciences, among many others.

[00:02:07] You've also received numerous awards and recognitions, both nationally and internationally.

[00:02:12] And you just have a motor that is somewhat unprecedented.

[00:02:16] I've seen you on so many various podcasts.

[00:02:19] You've got to be constantly writing and researching and doing clinical trials on the different act processes and more.

[00:02:27] Giving TED Talks, I've got to give a shout out to Mental Breaks to Avoid Mental Breaks,

[00:02:32] and Psychological Flexibility, How Love Turns Pain Into Purpose.

[00:02:37] Teaching at University of Nevada, working with professional sports teams, the list goes on and on.

[00:02:43] I tried to read through your entire CV, but I fell asleep about a tenth of the way through the 240-page document.

[00:02:51] Mine's three, by the way, maybe four if I updated it today.

[00:02:54] Google Scholar Data has Dr. Hayes ranked among the top thousand highest impact living scholars worldwide in all areas of study.

[00:03:04] And Research.com lists you as the 63rd highest impact psychologist in the world,

[00:03:10] though you are number one, or at least top ten,

[00:03:13] in the hearts of a small subset of former psychiatry co-residents at the University of Louisville.

[00:03:19] So, Dr. Hayes, such a pleasure to have you on.

[00:03:22] How are you doing today, and what's new?

[00:03:25] I'm doing great, and that's the first person there who told me I have a good motor, which I do.

[00:03:30] And I've got to share it with my wife and say, you know, no, I'm not a workaholic.

[00:03:35] I just have a good motor.

[00:03:38] Well, and you're almost pushing towards 80, right?

[00:03:42] I'm 76, and I'm looking down the barrels of 77, which is starting to sound like a big number.

[00:03:48] Well, I mean, I can only hope to have the motor that you do have at that age.

[00:03:55] So, it's really impressive, and you don't look 77 or 76 at all.

[00:04:00] So, whatever you're doing is working.

[00:04:02] Yeah, I don't feel it normally either.

[00:04:05] And, you know, then, frankly, it's not an effort because the work just excites me,

[00:04:09] and I get up every day, really looking forward to the day and what I can do.

[00:04:14] And, you know, that's a happy feeling that, you know, maybe something I'll do would be useful to somebody down the road.

[00:04:22] Yeah, and I've got a few rapid-fire questions to get started, but first, I've got to reemphasize something to you

[00:04:29] and try to be creative in the way that I do it.

[00:04:32] So, I corresponded with you once when I sent you a thank-you note a couple years ago

[00:04:37] after you had helped me in a life-changing way.

[00:04:40] A couple years later, you likely had no memory of it.

[00:04:44] You're a psychologist and ended up working in an area related to my work.

[00:04:48] On your end, you had no idea that your choices and actions affected mine.

[00:04:52] On my end, I knew my career was in part due to your willingness to do kind things,

[00:04:58] like engaging with a professional nobody in Louisville, Kentucky.

[00:05:02] I just wanted to rehash those passages for you because part of why I'm here

[00:05:07] is because of the loving acts of you and countless others within the ACT community.

[00:05:13] And the footprint that you've left behind for me

[00:05:15] is pivotal to my personal and professional existence,

[00:05:19] and I hope to leave similar footprints for others on my journey.

[00:05:23] So, thank you.

[00:05:24] Well, that's awesome.

[00:05:26] And, you know, I do have a little rule my wife winces when I say it out loud to people,

[00:05:31] but if somebody emails me, I try to respond.

[00:05:34] And that's pretty crazy when there's, you know, about somewhere probably between half a million

[00:05:40] and a million people who've been trained in ACT,

[00:05:42] and there's something like 10, 11, 12 million copies of books on ACT in 25 different languages.

[00:05:51] So, that means from around the world, people seek me out.

[00:05:54] They want help with this or that.

[00:05:56] And I figure somehow or another, I don't put them on Vita anyplace,

[00:06:01] but these tiny, tiny little things that we do every day, every one of us does it.

[00:06:07] You know, when you help that person across the street or let them pass ahead of you

[00:06:12] when you're driving down the road, whatever it is,

[00:06:14] every single little thing like that creates a softer world.

[00:06:19] And look around, turn on your TV, look at your phone,

[00:06:24] and you'll know that's something that's important.

[00:06:26] So, thank you for the shout out.

[00:06:30] And I'm glad I was able to, you know, give a tiny little nudge or bump when you needed it.

[00:06:37] Yeah.

[00:06:37] And selfishly, I mean, it is very fulfilling.

[00:06:40] I mean, I'm a big believer in letting other people know in a very conscious way

[00:06:45] when they've genuinely made a significant positive impact on my life,

[00:06:50] in part because I know how fulfilling it is to be told that I've made an impact on another person's life.

[00:06:57] So, we have these minds that are programmed to really focus on our survival

[00:07:02] and the things that could harm us or the things that we should be doing that we're not.

[00:07:07] So, to me, it's a very conscious thing to be able to offer those gratitudes.

[00:07:12] You know, I've written blogs on people who have touched my life in that way.

[00:07:16] Some of them will end up with big names and so forth.

[00:07:18] And in ways that are so small, when I reach out to them and say,

[00:07:22] hey, you changed my life, they might even know my name or something,

[00:07:27] especially in the field, just because of that notoriety,

[00:07:30] but I have no memory of what they did.

[00:07:32] A really critical one, if I can tell the story, it's about a 60-second story.

[00:07:37] It's a guy named Les Femi who ended up doing important work in mindfulness,

[00:07:41] who, when I couldn't get into any, any graduate training program whatsoever,

[00:07:47] was a friend of the friend of my brother's at State University of New York, Stony Brook,

[00:07:54] and looked inside my application and said, you've got a bad letter.

[00:07:58] And if I had not removed that letter, I would not be a psychologist.

[00:08:01] I'd either be a lawyer or a carpenter.

[00:08:03] And those were the three options, either go into politics, build houses,

[00:08:08] or do what I really wanted to do, which is become a psychologist.

[00:08:12] And shortly before his, a while before his death, I reached out to him.

[00:08:16] And he knew I was, but he had no memory of this whatsoever, nothing.

[00:08:22] And without him, I'm not a psychologist.

[00:08:24] So, you know, if I've done anything in the world, it's in part due to him.

[00:08:28] If I sort of slow down and look, there's many instances like that.

[00:08:32] And I bet that's true in every single person who's listening.

[00:08:35] Well, now apply that to your own life.

[00:08:38] How can we learn how to be here in a way that spreads in that way and maximizes it?

[00:08:45] You're going to do it anyway.

[00:08:46] And a lot of good will come from your life on the planet, even if you're just sort of not even attending to it,

[00:08:52] because you're doing good things all the time.

[00:08:54] But some of these more critical ones, like how to really be there to respond,

[00:08:59] to do it in a way that's thoughtful.

[00:09:00] And some of these principles, psychological flexibility, put it into your life.

[00:09:04] People see it.

[00:09:05] That influences deliberately put it in your life, kids of your lives, your kids or your patients or your clients or your coworkers or,

[00:09:12] you know, just your neighbor.

[00:09:14] Or it's a lesson that is worth internalizing.

[00:09:18] It will lift you up if you do, because you begin to see your life as part of something way bigger

[00:09:25] than just the space you contain and the years you'll be moving.

[00:09:32] You're participating in something that's a lot bigger than that.

[00:09:35] Think about how many people had to do important things for us to be talking together today.

[00:09:41] I mean, really important things.

[00:09:45] Thousands of people were involved in the development of this technology and being able to keep all these machines and electricity and so forth around.

[00:09:52] I mean, it's been present.

[00:09:54] It's passed.

[00:09:55] It's going to.

[00:09:56] And here it is.

[00:09:57] We're able to talk across thousands of miles in real time.

[00:10:00] Even 20 years ago, couldn't do it.

[00:10:02] 15 years ago, you couldn't do it.

[00:10:06] So, on we go.

[00:10:09] Absolutely.

[00:10:09] I mean, you could make the argument if we never chiseled that piece of rock to form a wheel and get that thing rolling downhill,

[00:10:16] we probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to each other like we are.

[00:10:19] You may not have noticed, but you'll have to go back and listen to my gratitude for you because I pulled it directly from your passage talking about Les and the impact that he had.

[00:10:33] Oh, wow.

[00:10:34] That's why it maybe sounded a little bit familiar when I was saying it.

[00:10:38] I switched a few words out here and there, but I was glad that you rehashed that story because it is an example of kind of one of those butterfly effect moments where, you know, you could have gone in one of two directions.

[00:10:50] So, pretty cool story.

[00:10:53] Rapid fire question wise, let's start out.

[00:10:55] Where were you born and raised?

[00:10:57] Well, I was born in Philly.

[00:10:59] I was raised, really, in San Diego.

[00:11:01] I was there after bouncing around a little bit.

[00:11:03] Then I went to college in Los Angeles at a Jesuit school, Loyola Marymount.

[00:11:09] I told the story it was hard to get in graduate school, so I did a year at San Diego State at a time where they would admit anybody with good test scores and then flunk 90%, 95% of everybody who came in,

[00:11:20] which they would announce on the day of arrival.

[00:11:22] And since I grew up in San Diego, I was happy to be there.

[00:11:26] And I did make it through.

[00:11:27] And by the end of that year, I was at West Virginia where I got my degree, an internship at Brown, 10 years at North Carolina Greensboro, and then 37 years at University of Nevada, Reno, where I just stepped down after graduating 57 PhDs and, you know, building all those things you were talking about at the beginning.

[00:11:49] But now I'm retired, but I'm working harder than ever and trying to put some of these newer ideas into personalization, trying to figure out how we can use tech and artificial intelligence to reach exactly what particular people need at the particular moment they're in for the particular goal that they have.

[00:12:12] And we have brand new stats that we think helped to do that.

[00:12:17] And so that's exciting with apps and all that kind of stuff.

[00:12:21] And finding out that some of the stuff we've been doing in mental and behavioral health will never reach the goals we have.

[00:12:28] And we think we can help correct it.

[00:12:30] So I'm still deep into act and process focus, but I'm trying to leverage that journey in a way that makes it even more relevant and puts it into the knowledge generation structure as well as just, you know, here's some great things you can do clinically.

[00:12:48] Here's some great ways you can let your clients teach you.

[00:13:19] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:13:21] It's no longer so horribly illegal.

[00:13:23] And he locked that in or his mind locked it in as bad.

[00:13:27] This is a bad thing.

[00:13:29] And this is actually one that Father Cyclic, he had escaped from the Eastern Europe when the Russians took it over.

[00:13:37] And when the hippie dippy thing happened, which you're looking at, you know, an ex hippie with hair down to the middle of his back and all that.

[00:13:45] And I wasn't a wild, crazy drug user.

[00:13:48] My goodness.

[00:13:48] Most of the stuff you would use legally now in the very state I was where I was using him.

[00:13:55] I did do full of things.

[00:13:56] Like I did an honors project on the effect of marijuana on time perception, which was really kind of in the face of the whole, you know.

[00:14:07] Putting yourself out there, right?

[00:14:09] Putting myself out there.

[00:14:10] And so he did write in the letter that I was a drug addict, but which is certainly not true.

[00:14:16] But no, I actually never was mad at him.

[00:14:18] I had an understanding about that.

[00:14:20] You know, if you think about how it looked to this elderly man looking at a radical change.

[00:14:27] I mean, even today, people kind of react different ways as to what happened in the 60s and 70s.

[00:14:34] And I think our politics right now is sensitive to things that are happening in terms of, well, some really important things about climate.

[00:14:43] I was a radical kind of climate, you know, Earth Day person.

[00:14:49] Racial justice, sexual orientation and issues like that.

[00:14:53] And those things have such a long arc.

[00:14:56] So I don't recall feeling really angry about it, but I do recall feeling a little betrayed because I asked him if he would write a letter for me.

[00:15:05] And he said with a big smile that he would.

[00:15:08] And boy, did he.

[00:15:09] And that wasn't fair.

[00:15:11] He should have given me a warning.

[00:15:12] It wasn't the opinion that he had.

[00:15:14] It was not kind to me, but it ended up actually giving me a few years to orient to what I really wanted to do.

[00:15:24] And to meet some wonderful people at San Diego State who are brilliant psychologists who helped me out.

[00:15:31] And who knows where it would have gone if I just charged ahead.

[00:15:35] One of the things that happened to me in my life is realizing that some of my motor that you talked about was really defensive and came out of the pain that I saw in my home.

[00:15:48] And that discomfort I felt within my own head and heart.

[00:15:51] And, you know, I think facing big challenges sometimes sobers you up a little bit.

[00:15:56] And who knows, you know, because when I hit bottom and where that took me, that's what led to the work I'm known for.

[00:16:05] So I could have been one of the grant getting freaking machines that you can find in academic medical centers and so forth who've lost track of why they're working so hard.

[00:16:17] And that's kind of a tragedy when you put so much effort into giving people the tools to really make a contribution.

[00:16:24] And I think I've been able to make kind of a different contribution because I didn't take it seriously quite in that way.

[00:16:33] It was more about making a difference than it was about just about building the Vita or getting the dollars in that the deans like.

[00:16:41] So it took punches in the nose for that to happen.

[00:16:45] And the good father cyclic put me on that road.

[00:16:48] Yeah.

[00:16:49] You know, one of the things that I think RFT and ACT have helped me with most personally is recognizing that traumatic things that I've experienced in life.

[00:16:59] You know, there is this yin yang quality to them.

[00:17:02] For example, in professional sports, some of the most successful athletes were born out of trauma.

[00:17:10] I mean, they were born out of, you know, they have this feeling that they're never good enough, but that drives them to want to be better.

[00:17:18] That yin yang, the negative is, you know, the self-doubt and the deep, dark mental places you may find yourself.

[00:17:25] But the benefit, the other side of it, you don't have that same sense of motivation without those experiences.

[00:17:32] So it really helped me to kind of reconcile that more negative aspect of traumatic experience with the very positive and things that I am continually grateful for to this day.

[00:18:14] Yeah.

[00:18:15] You know, the reason why it shocks you so much is that it doesn't fit with something that you deeply want or would like to put into the world.

[00:18:23] It's also going to help you have more compassion if you handle it correctly with people who are in painful situations around you.

[00:18:32] In the sports context, you may become a better teammate.

[00:18:35] Be there for the guy who got benched or had an injury or had a falling out with a coach or, you know, is being picked on by other players and needs to be socialized a little bit as to how you can make that transition from one level to another or from the amateurs, the pros or whatever it is that one team to another.

[00:18:55] And there's a thousand ways that knowing what it's like to have an injury or an upstreet and come back or to have a hitting streak that's really awful in the sports context.

[00:19:06] You know, I flip it over to sports because you raised the issue, but my dad was a really, really good pitcher in high school and then was there at Duke University for just for a year.

[00:19:18] And in the summer of his freshman year, having just been drafted by the Reds, he had the chutzpah as a young man, a foolish person, you know, believing he was invincible.

[00:19:30] He threw a triple header in club ball, 27 endings straight.

[00:19:37] And he could never throw a fastball again.

[00:19:41] He could never throw, you know, a screwball again.

[00:19:43] And he had all these kind of cool things that he could do and threw no hitters and all that kind of stuff.

[00:19:48] So he lived the life of a person who really had had a tragic injury and didn't know how to recover from it.

[00:19:56] His childhood dream went away in a split second when one too many pitches probably could be repaired nowadays with a Tommy John surgery.

[00:20:06] But back in those days, it was just over.

[00:20:09] Well, what's inside that trauma could have been uplifting to him in his life if he'd figured out a way.

[00:20:22] And it sounds critical.

[00:20:24] This guy who knew was a very loving man, but got in his own way, had a similar trauma.

[00:20:30] His dad got up to get a cup of coffee and dropped dead on the floor.

[00:20:34] And when he, at age, what was he, 42 or something, had his first really severe heart attack, he told my mother he was going to start drinking because if he was going to die early, he didn't want to die sober.

[00:20:48] So he deliberately became an alcoholic so he wouldn't have to face that fear.

[00:20:52] Well, of course, that's a bad idea.

[00:20:54] He didn't have to face that fear.

[00:21:24] I've been in conversations where people come up or therapists in training almost tearfully say, I had such a great childhood.

[00:21:31] I'll never be a good therapist.

[00:21:33] And I said, look, just what you told me, you've got plenty enough pain.

[00:21:37] Don't worry about it.

[00:21:39] Or frankly, do worry about it and then flip it over and see where it takes you.

[00:21:44] Just by being a human being, you know, you're going to be exposed to those painful moments where if you say no, life goes in one direction.

[00:21:54] And if you say yes and you dive deeper, life goes in another direction.

[00:21:58] If you don't get it right, don't worry, you'll get another chance.

[00:22:01] And you can do it with the ones that are still lingering at any time.

[00:22:05] You know, it's like walking in a direction.

[00:22:08] If you meant to head this way and you hit something and you're headed at a 90 degree angle, you know, what does it take for you to flip and head back in the same direction?

[00:22:18] Well, it takes like about 300 milliseconds.

[00:22:22] And the awareness of what you've been doing and why is a big part of it.

[00:22:27] So if somebody is listening to us and you feel as though your life is headed in the wrong direction, it's probably been headed in the wrong direction for a while.

[00:22:35] And it probably has something to do with what you do with pain and difficult moments that show up as thoughts and feelings and memories and bodily sensations.

[00:22:45] Learning how to be with that and to turn in the right direction for you, the direction you want to be about.

[00:22:52] That's what acts all about.

[00:22:54] And if it sounds invalidating that you could do it like that, don't worry about it.

[00:22:59] Because what it means is when you flip and have the right direction, now you have a lot to learn as to how to stay oriented in that direction.

[00:23:07] As far as I know, speaking as a 76-year-old dude, you're never finished in that.

[00:23:12] You're never finished.

[00:23:13] You're never big enough, secure enough, set enough, habitual enough that you can just rest on your laurels.

[00:23:20] You're probably going to make some wrong turns today.

[00:23:24] And so, but let's learn from it.

[00:23:27] Turn, step forward, stumble, turn, step forward.

[00:23:32] And it turns out if you do just enough of that to keep moving more or less in the right direction, wrong direction actually is a learning opportunity.

[00:23:41] It triggered my mind to go to that destination fallacy that, you know, oh, once I get to this level, then I'll be happy.

[00:23:51] Then my life will be able to start.

[00:23:54] I know it's tough to talk about our dads, especially I think as men.

[00:24:00] But it's just funny.

[00:24:01] I have these conversations with people and I see these parallels and I wonder how related they are to the way, the overlap in the way that we think.

[00:24:10] Because my dad lost his dad at age six and I think really struggled in having that role model to show him how to be a father, you know, not just in terms of the responsibilities financially, but also in terms of the emotional growth, you know, that he was tasked to instill within me.

[00:24:32] So it's just interesting how ACT kind of changed that relationship for me internally and recognizing the yin-yang of that relationship.

[00:24:43] You know, you mentioned the flip.

[00:24:45] So, you know, now we get to the juicy stuff.

[00:24:48] I've got to preface this by saying that I am naturally a very skeptical person.

[00:24:52] I've got to admit, the first time I heard you trying to explain RFT and ACT on a podcast about five or six years ago, I thought, this guy's so full of shit.

[00:25:04] What is he trying to sell me?

[00:25:07] But as a resident practicing psychotherapy an afternoon a week and having no effing clue what I was doing, I was pretty desperate for guidance.

[00:25:17] And so I kept listening.

[00:25:19] Fifteen minutes later, after a few more failed explanations, not that it was your fault.

[00:25:24] It was probably, you know, the thickness that resides in here.

[00:25:28] But I experienced that flip or what I've heard you call that click of understanding that recognition that I am not any given label that defines me, including those given by my own mind,

[00:25:42] that I could learn to live with ambiguity, and actually that professional ambiguity was necessary to me further developing as a clinician,

[00:25:52] and recognition that my adventure of discovery didn't have an end date.

[00:25:58] It'll never be finished.

[00:26:00] And that click happened for me when you outlined the ABCD experiment,

[00:26:05] one of the pivotal early experiments in terms of, you know, showing this concept of mutual entailment seen in humans but not seen in chimpanzees.

[00:26:16] So I finished recording an episode with Dr. Stephen Hayes on RFT or relational frame theory,

[00:26:23] but I wanted to supplement our discussion with a brief aside about what I reference as the ABCD experiment,

[00:26:31] just so people know what I'm talking about and have a visual at hand to help better understand the concept.

[00:26:39] So to me, this ABCD experiment or the experiment of mutual entailment,

[00:26:45] it is a absolute keystone of relational frame theory.

[00:26:50] So in the first phase of the experiment, essentially you have a chimpanzee and a one-year-old baby,

[00:26:58] and they are shown an A or a B on a screen, we'll say, just to simplify things.

[00:27:06] And their task is to choose either a C or a D, and we'll just say that they press down on a lever.

[00:27:15] And so this first part of the experiment is a training component,

[00:27:18] and both through many, many repetitions of this trial,

[00:27:22] a direct contingency relationship is established.

[00:27:27] And the way that they do it is, we'll just use the reward of a banana as an example,

[00:27:33] and whenever the B is shown on the screen,

[00:27:39] the baby and chimpanzee are rewarded with a banana if they choose C.

[00:27:45] And over 100 or so trials, both the baby and the chimpanzee learn to pick C when B is shown.

[00:27:53] There's no surprise there.

[00:27:55] That is kind of classic behavioral theory.

[00:27:57] So then they flip the experiment.

[00:27:59] They've established that when B is shown, if the baby and the chimpanzee pick C,

[00:28:05] then they will be rewarded.

[00:28:07] And they learn, both of them, no difference between them,

[00:28:10] they learn to pick C when B is shown.

[00:28:12] Now, here's the difference.

[00:28:13] The second phase of this experiment reveals a fundamental difference between our brains

[00:28:22] and that of what we consider to be a very intelligent animal species,

[00:28:28] actually something that shares 98% of our DNA.

[00:28:32] And this second phase flips the script.

[00:28:35] The baby and the chimpanzee are shown a C or a D,

[00:28:38] and their job is to choose the lever corresponding to an A or a B.

[00:28:44] So what happens in this second phase of the experiment that is so fundamentally different,

[00:28:49] when the baby is shown the C or the D,

[00:28:53] and specifically the times where it is shown a C,

[00:28:56] it draws this relationship between C and B,

[00:29:00] causing the baby to pick B nearly all of the time.

[00:29:04] But the chimpanzee does not make this connection of mutual entailment.

[00:29:08] The chimpanzee goes 50-50 between A and B.

[00:29:13] This emphasizes that we take for granted that our minds are drawing these connections.

[00:29:20] And this is one of the simplest connections that exists,

[00:29:23] or the simplest relations that exist.

[00:29:26] The idea that I'm more likely to be rewarded when C is shown if I pick B,

[00:29:31] even though that has never been directly trained.

[00:29:35] So this experiment extrapolated is what Dr. Hayes and I are talking about

[00:29:41] in terms of our mind's ability to relate all of these different things together,

[00:29:46] and the influence of how much information we're exposed to nowadays,

[00:29:51] and the massive increase in our ability to relate all these things together

[00:29:59] to where you'll hear him say,

[00:30:01] we're able to relate more things together internally

[00:30:04] than there are molecules in the universe.

[00:30:07] So hopefully that's helpful.

[00:30:09] Feel free to email me with any other questions about RFT or about this experiment.

[00:30:15] And also, you know, feel free to look up other explanations online

[00:30:19] that may be helpful in your understanding.

[00:30:21] All right, back to the episode.

[00:30:23] This concept of mutual entailment seen in humans,

[00:30:26] but not seen in chimpanzees.

[00:30:29] And it opened my eyes to what my mind was doing in the background of my conscious life.

[00:30:35] It revealed to me that I'm this relatively simple present moment conscious being

[00:30:41] with a supercomputer of a mind capable of arbitrarily relating words, actions, ideas, emotions together,

[00:30:51] and then relaying what's considered in terms of survival,

[00:30:55] the most important bits of that information to that conscious part of me.

[00:31:00] It seriously changed my life in the way that I experienced my internal state.

[00:31:05] For me, I almost instantly felt a relief of pressure,

[00:31:10] similar to what you talked about in your own experience with panic disorder,

[00:31:14] that yes, it was a years-long journey to get to this place of remission.

[00:31:18] You always talk about how you're still in recovery.

[00:31:21] But I had that pretty immediate sense of relief that I didn't have to try to change my mind's information.

[00:31:28] I didn't have to buy into the verbal abuse it bestows upon me.

[00:31:32] I could let go of trying to control it.

[00:31:37] So, why don't you take your best shot at promoting anyone here listening or watching to experience that click of understanding?

[00:31:46] Boy, and it's an uncommon click, but it's not unknown.

[00:31:51] I've heard it before.

[00:31:53] The reason why we were doing the deep dive is in the first 20 years of active element,

[00:31:58] there was only one randomized trial.

[00:31:59] 20 years.

[00:32:00] And I risked my career on the idea that if I could figure out why the human mind puts almost everybody into this place

[00:32:11] where it's hard to learn from the painful experiences that we have

[00:32:15] and be able to turn towards what we deeply yearn for and care about just by our birthright

[00:32:19] and by the deep personal choice of meaning that we have, why?

[00:32:24] And we came up with an answer that's powerful and is really helpful for children

[00:32:28] who can't develop a normal language or a sense of self, etc.

[00:32:32] Well, when you sort of see how the game is played, maybe I can try, let me try it in a way that I've not done it before

[00:32:40] and then just see how it lands.

[00:32:43] Sometimes folks went, wait a minute, you know, like I'm riding on the surface of this vast ocean of thought

[00:32:50] thought that is a miracle in terms of life on the earth and has made us able to do things that are remarkable.

[00:33:00] But one of the things that invites us to do is to suffer admits plenty.

[00:33:06] Because if you look at your pet, your dog, your cat, whatever, you know, you've got everything that you need to make that creature happy.

[00:33:15] I mean, you're not sitting out in the rain.

[00:33:18] You're not cold right now if you need to be warmer.

[00:33:21] You got clothes on your back.

[00:33:23] You got food to eat.

[00:33:24] Now, some people don't.

[00:33:25] We can understand their suffering if they're living in a war zone or whatever.

[00:33:28] But the people listening to us right now, come on, you're in front of thousands of dollars of tech.

[00:33:33] If it's not right in front of you, it's all in the wires that are bringing it to you.

[00:33:37] You wouldn't know how big those numbers are.

[00:33:39] And so you're part of something that is fantastically successful as a result of the same thing that's producing misery amidst plenty.

[00:33:49] And so let me try to do it in a different way.

[00:33:53] If you just look around and see two things in your space here, just by thinking without touching,

[00:34:02] let's relate the two things you just saw, whatever it is, and decide the one that's more on your left.

[00:34:12] How is it the father of the one that's more on the right?

[00:34:16] Probably a bizarre question.

[00:34:18] Never been asked.

[00:34:20] And I can share what I'm looking at.

[00:34:22] I got a piece of paper over here and I got a coffee cup that you've seen before.

[00:34:26] Let me drink my now lukewarm coffee.

[00:34:28] I got my coffee cup on my left and my pair of scissors on my right.

[00:34:32] Awesome.

[00:34:33] And so we're going to have to figure out, I got to figure out how that paper is the father of the cup.

[00:34:39] And you got to figure out how that coffee cup is the father of the microphone.

[00:34:42] Now, if your life depended on it, what are you going to have to say about that?

[00:34:47] Dr. Short.

[00:34:48] So I got my coffee cup and my scissors over here.

[00:34:51] So in order to use my scissors in a safe and effective way, then I've got to have my coffee before I can do that.

[00:35:01] So therefore the coffee cup is the father of the scissors.

[00:35:04] It's waking you up and giving birth to your ability to absolutely.

[00:35:07] And I over here drew down the design as to how to make this cup and even add the words to the front of it that are about being loving.

[00:35:18] And so the paper was the father of the cup.

[00:35:21] Well, I just did it arbitrary left and right.

[00:35:24] Of course, you could write and left.

[00:35:25] You could go in the opposite direction.

[00:35:27] And of course, we did it randomly.

[00:35:30] So it could be any two objects.

[00:35:32] And it wouldn't have to be objects.

[00:35:33] It could even be verbs and so forth.

[00:35:36] But they're more abstract.

[00:35:37] It's harder to do an example.

[00:35:38] Now, this next point, if you just take how many things and actions and qualities that people have words for.

[00:35:47] Just deal with words, even though this theory is not just about words.

[00:35:51] Of a person, just average person, average education adult.

[00:35:56] Just do the numbers.

[00:35:57] You can do that.

[00:35:58] And then you probably heard somebody say the smallest unit of meaning is a sentence.

[00:36:02] So we'll take the simplest sentence, which is something with qualities is related in some way to something else with qualities.

[00:36:12] You know, the red car hit the gray wolf.

[00:36:16] Whatever.

[00:36:17] All right.

[00:36:18] Now figure out how many sentences like that, just with average numbers you have in your head.

[00:36:25] I've done the math on it.

[00:36:27] And you start coming up with answers like more than there are molecules in the universe.

[00:36:32] So friends, listen to me.

[00:36:34] You're riding on the surface of such a remarkable thing.

[00:36:38] And I can explain where it came from.

[00:36:40] It came from us being social primates.

[00:36:43] And it was a really wonderful act of cooperation.

[00:36:46] And then it led to problem solving.

[00:36:48] And then it led to all these wonderful things that we can do.

[00:36:50] And then that thing turns back on you when you're around four or five years old.

[00:36:55] And you hit that point where you can step out and look back.

[00:36:58] And you're going to find yourself wanting.

[00:37:01] You're going to have that moment where you're not smart enough.

[00:37:03] You're not pretty enough.

[00:37:04] You're not good enough.

[00:37:05] You lie.

[00:37:06] You cheat.

[00:37:07] You've got things to be guilty about.

[00:37:08] Your mom or your dad is telling you this or that.

[00:37:11] You're internalizing.

[00:37:13] And you're not even hardly in elementary school.

[00:37:17] You know, so you've taken this incredible engine of creativity where in principle it's almost infinite.

[00:37:26] And more of the molecules in the universe.

[00:37:29] And it's been tracked into something that, yeah, it's given you lots of knowledge and all that.

[00:37:38] But it's also given you the capacity to turn back on yourself and to find yourself wanting.

[00:37:44] You know, every day somebody commits suicide with a note saying that when they're dead, they won't feel what they feel or think what they think or remember what they remember.

[00:37:53] And then when people look at it, this person had a bank account with seven digits, had a spouse who loved them, had kids who loved them, had a house you could dream of.

[00:38:02] I mean, everything.

[00:38:03] And it's not enough.

[00:38:05] That's the kind of creatures we are.

[00:38:07] So our job is not to try to get this vast spider web of infinite possible relations cleaned up.

[00:38:17] Our job is to learn how to rise up above it and to use it as a tool, taking what's useful and leaving the rest.

[00:38:26] That's what the science of psychological flexibility is.

[00:38:30] And that's what it sits on the basic science of relational framing, which is how language works.

[00:38:34] It's not association.

[00:38:36] It's not the chalk on this hand rubbed on the other side, like the old traditional models of language.

[00:38:42] It's this relational transformation is the father of.

[00:38:47] It's not chalk on one hand versus the other.

[00:38:50] It's a whole set of how this relates to that.

[00:38:55] And there's, you know, in your head, thousands and thousands and thousands of relational words.

[00:38:59] I just picked ones that are just so weird that you'd never done it before between those two objects.

[00:39:04] We could do other things better than, et cetera, prettier than.

[00:39:09] It would all work.

[00:39:10] It wouldn't matter.

[00:39:12] So isn't that wonderful?

[00:39:14] Yes.

[00:39:14] Is that awesome?

[00:39:16] Yes.

[00:39:16] Is that full of awe?

[00:39:18] Awful?

[00:39:19] Yes.

[00:39:20] The awesome, awful tool that we got is the one that allows us to think of things that have never been

[00:39:27] and to worry about futures that will never occur, to relate anything to anything else,

[00:39:35] and to find ourself wanting even when we're magnificent creatures just as we are.

[00:39:41] So it's sweet and sad.

[00:39:43] It's poignant.

[00:39:44] It's bittersweet.

[00:39:44] But when you pop the illusion and you are lucky enough to have done it, there's a way forward

[00:39:52] with your whole of your history.

[00:39:54] There's a way to be whole and free, even with such an awesome, awful tool as what's in between

[00:40:00] your ears.

[00:40:01] I really don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you if I didn't have that click of understanding

[00:40:07] because this is something that I wanted, a project that I wanted to engage with for a long time,

[00:40:13] but there was so much self-doubt.

[00:40:16] Why should I do this?

[00:40:17] Why am I qualified to be the person sitting here talking to others?

[00:40:22] Why would I consider myself to be any form of expert?

[00:40:25] Then to your point, you know, if you're trying to clean up all the molecules in the universe,

[00:40:32] that's a pretty tough task.

[00:40:34] You might get, you know, 0.00001% of the way through it in a lifetime.

[00:40:41] But when you created, gave me that explanation and I heard that piece about, you know,

[00:40:47] you're able to relate more things together than there are molecules in the universe.

[00:40:51] I was like, oh, well, I should probably stop trying to, you know, figure this whole story out

[00:40:57] all the time and just ride the wave and, you know, let myself exist and not feel that pressure.

[00:41:03] Obviously, there are some things that it is good to create a story around and

[00:41:07] deliver that context to your why your mind operates a certain way.

[00:41:13] Thanks again for watching and or listening.

[00:41:16] If you're passionate about the subjects that I discuss on the channel,

[00:41:19] do me a favor and like, comment, subscribe, do whatever you can to make your voice heard

[00:41:28] that these are problems that must be addressed in our society.

[00:41:33] If you have any questions, comments or concerns, I want to hear them.

[00:41:39] Feel free to reach out on social media or email us at renegadesyke at gmail.com.

[00:41:46] And if you'd like to be a guest of the show or you have a connection to somebody that you think would be a good guest, let us know.

[00:41:54] Thanks again for listening.

[00:42:32] If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor.