Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:00]

God bless you, dystopian Cuevas. What's the crack? Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast, overnights, long podcast you this week. As promised, this podcast is about psychology and mental health. I'm going to speak about Gestalt psychology, which is an interesting school of psychology that you'll enjoy. But before that, I have some some techie stuff that I used to to get into the Gestalt psychology. So sit back and enjoy it. I've been having an enjoyable week, I found out that I'm on a second government watch list and let me explain a few weeks back.

[00:00:45]

I mentioned that. The Irish government and specifically the Department of Justice were collecting tweets from anyone who had been critical of the system of direct provision in Ireland. If you're a listener from outside of Ireland, direct provision is a very cruel system in Ireland whereby people who seek asylum. So asylum seekers and refugees, when they come to Ireland while they're being processed, they're essentially put into a low security prison for an indefinite amount of time. Some people are there for decades and it removes their autonomy.

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It's quite cruel and it's also a system that's its for profit. So it's paid for by people's taxes. But there's loads of private companies that run direct provision centres for a profit aren't loads of money off it. So you have this self-perpetuating, cruel industry where people's misery has been turned into a commodity. And I'm quite critical of this, as I should be, as anyone should be uncritical over a lot. Now, if you want to hear more about direct provision, listen to my podcast with Ellie Kisyombe and Michelle Darmody.

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Ellie Kisyombe someone who she's an activist who has been living in direct provision. So if you want to hear about it from someone's lived experience, listen to that. So I'm critical of the direct provision. I compare it to this generation's Magdalene Laundries, really is what I consider to be. So because of this, any time I was tweeting about direct provision, specifically critical of it, any time I was tweeting and comparing it to Magdalene Laundries, my tweets were being recorded by the Department of Justice, the government, and being placed into a file to show to government ministers as an example of people critiquing direct provision, not just me.

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Hozier's tweets were in there and Marian Keyes. Basically, the government is watching people online who criticise direct provision and then recording these tweets and putting them into files. And I had to find out about it in the newspaper. And now this week, I found out again the government is still monitoring my tweets on. Basically, any time I'm critical of the government, any time I'm critical of the Irish government in a tweet. And if that tweet gets lots of tweets, the government is hiring people to take these tweets, put them into a report, and then submit this report to the government for review.

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And it's not just me, it's journalists, people working in the arts, anyone who has an online presence who was vocally critical of the government, the Irish government and its policies. And I'm kind of I'm angry about it. I'm angry and annoyed now, first of all. It's probably harmless at this moment in time, it's probably harmless what the government is doing is they're getting public tweets, things that I tweet out publicly or say on this podcast.

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I put this out to the public, but then they take this and they record it and put it into reports. And some people online are saying, oh, you should be thankful. You should be thankful that the government are listening to what you're saying and they might change policy. Firstly, no, that's not the case because a journalist, Aoife Moore, had to find this stuff out. So in order to find out that I was being monitored by the government and that other people are being monitored by the government, a journalist had to apply for a Freedom of Information Act, which means the government are doing it in secret.

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No, they're not really doing it in secret because it means it's kind of like we're not going to tell anyone. But if you want to go through the laborious process of asking if we're doing anything, then we will provide it. So that secret, if if it's not that secret, put it this way. Let's when I tweet something, if a fourth year foreign student, if a student in 40 or a college is doing a thesis and something I tweet is relevant to the topic of their thesis, that person often tweets at me or gives me a DM and says, Blindboy, can I use your tweet and my thesis because it's relevant to something I'm speaking about, or can I use something you said in your podcast?

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In my thesis, and I say, yeah, no problem. Now, if a foreign college student does that, why can't the government. But they don't they're doing this in a way that it's it obstructs the truth. The government are taking tweets, not telling anyone and putting them in internal reports. And then you have to a journalist has to ask for it. It has to access it through a Freedom of Information Act. So that's obstruction. But you can't fully call it secret because it's there if you look for it.

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So that says two things for me. Number one, if someone says, look, your tweets are public, there's nothing wrong with this, there is because they did it in secret. And put it this way. If you if you're if you notice that your cornflakes are slowly disappearing in your house, you go for breakfast every morning and you're noticing that you have less and less cornflakes. So then you say to your housemates, have you been taking my cornflakes?

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And then the housemate says, oh, yes, I have. I have. Yet I was waiting for you to ask before I told you I was doing it. You'd kind of go I come on, just ask me for the fucking cornflakes. Like, I know there are any conflicts. There are any conflicts. I can buy loads more conflicts, no hassle. But just ask me. It's that, you know, you'd be pissed off at your house, made up to do that with your fucking conflicts.

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What? I'm pissed off at the government for doing that. What my data. Secondly, the fact that they're doing it in such an absolute Katari, if that's the way it's pronounced, an absolute obfuscatory way. Hidden way, the fact that doing it in such a hidden way. Suggests to me, no, they're not listening to my my critiques and other people's critiques in order to change policy, they're not they're doing this in secret. So what they're doing is they're trying to find out how they're being critiqued so they can avoid further critique.

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It's a PR exercise. If it was, we are fucking take in all your critical tweets on board and we are listening to you and we're going to do this to democratically change policy. Then they'd be out in the open about it, they'd be getting proof that they begin to look at our so we listen to people's voices. They're not what they're doing is. They want private reports of people criticizing them, a critique, that's why the tweets that are ended up in the reports are ones that are getting lots of tweets and lots of engagement.

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So they're using this as an example of why criticisms of the government are popular, what popular critiques. So they're not using it to change what they're doing. What they want to do is how can we continue what we're doing? How can we continue the bad shit that we're doing but put in such a way that we don't get caught? So how can we take the critics on board to change the narrative so it doesn't look like we're doing anything bad?

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That's what they're doing and that's why they're doing it in secret. Then playing by their public tweets, man, you're tweeting this shit out publicly. All right. If it's a public tweet, they're just people. They can put it into a report. Not necessarily. I tell you why. When I tweet, when I put something on Twitter, I consent to tweeting it. You can delete fucking tweets. I'm consenting to. Here is what I'm saying here in the context of Twitter.

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When you then take my tweets and put it into a government report that drastically changes the context, that changes the context of my tweet, you've removed it from the initial context of Twitter and now it's in a new list in a fucking government report of critical tweets about the government. You've just changed the context. And in a free society, I should be asked if I agree to my tweet being taken and put into a different context. I'd say no.

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I'd say no. Thanks, lads. I actually don't. I'm OK with my tweet being out there on Twitter. I've been in a news article, but I don't think I want my tweet in a government report about people critical of the government, because right now that's harmless. Right now it's fucking harmless. Right now, boss, in in in a society globally where data privacy is a huge issue, data privacy, you know, our our understanding about our data and our rights to our own data in the context of that, OK, you've just changed the context of how my dad has been used.

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Secondly, the fucking fascism is rising out around the world. So what if there's a fascist government in ten fucking years in Ireland in ten years and then they go, great, let's open up that report that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were quite happy to do ten years ago of all the people critical of the government, do you not? I mean, I didn't I don't agree to my tweets. Being in a fucking government document. You've changed the context.

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Fuck you. And finally, it's it's creepy and strange that the message that it sends is you you're free to criticise the government if you like, criticise us all you want. Please don't publicly criticise us all you want. We're just going to write it down and stored away in a document with loads of other people that are criticising us. But you'll keep talking. We're just going to write it down here and the put the covert message of that, what that sends me and other people who are ending up in these documents.

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The covert messaging of that is shut the fuck up. That's the covert message. And it's uniquely Irish. I remember being a fucking teenager. Right. And when I was a teenager and I was, you know, rebelling and act in the bollocks, you know, fucking smoking hash are vandalising phone boxes or whatever the fuck I was doing when I was 14. Ah, my friends were doing it rebelling. What would happen is the guard, the Irish fucking police, there was different levels.

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Right. So if I was hanging around with say, let's just say there was vandalism in an area or people were reporting, ah, those lads are sad and hash out, those lads are smoking hash or they're drinking that group, the group that I mean, what would happen is you're a teenager, you've got nowhere to go. So you're hanging around corners. And when I was hanging around corners, I wouldn't be doing anything illegal. I wouldn't have anything illegal on me.

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The guards would show up. And what they do is they'd say, what's your name? And I'd say, why do I have to give you my name? I'm not doing anything wrong. And they'd go, We just want your name. And I'd say to them, if I gave you my name, like, am I fucking am I on the system now? Are you going to tell my parents? What does this mean? And the guard would say, no, no, no.

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This is just from my notebook. I just want your name from my notebook. So we're sure don't worry about this. This isn't going to go on your record. Not like. I just wanted for your notebook, and that's what the guards used to do, and there was different tiers. So if the lowest tier is the guard, put your name in the notebook and the next tier then is there called into your fucking parents house to give you an official warning and then after that, that proceedings.

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But the lowest one was your name is in my notebook. Now I have your name in my notebook and it's inconsequential. Nothing legally would happen of it. The notebook was probably going to get thrown away, but it sends the fucking message to me going, oh, fuck, the guards got my name in a notebook and now I'm behaving myself, you know what I mean? And it reminds me of this when I was in fucking school, if I was acting the bollocks in school before suspension, before expulsion.

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But both are things that happened to me because I was suspended three times and I was kicked out in sixth year. But before any of that, what the teachers would say was, you're being talked about in the staffroom and it meant nothin. It meant nothin. It's like, so what I'm being talked about in the staffroom. But the message was, your name is coming up a lot in the staffroom. Other teachers are mentioning your name in the staffroom.

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And they're not going to ring up your parents and go, they're talking about him in the staffroom, it sends the message of there's nothing wrong here. Your name has been mentioned in the staffroom, but it's it's a signal. Change your fuckin behavior toward the line. Now, when it's when I'm 14 and the problem is I'm fucking thrown bottles off a phone box, are throwing eggs at a bus, are in school and disrupting other people from learning.

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I thought at the time I was Mason, but I'm just disrupting other people from learning. Right. Fair enough. Fair enough. I, I actually needed a little bit of discipline, but no, no, no, no. I'm a fucking adult in a democracy and I'm critiquing government policies and critique and direct provision. So fuck you, I'm entitled to do that. This isn't right. If if you want to take my tweet and put it in a government report of people criticizing the government, then send me a fucking DM.

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Whoever you are working for the government, send me a DM and say Blindboy. I'm preparing a report for the Department of Justice about people criticising direct provision. We'd like to use your tweet in this report. Is that OK with you? And then I'll answer because we're drastically change in the context and we just want to know if it's OK with you that we do that. That's the correct thing to do, not fucking do it secretly. And a journalist has to access it through a Freedom of Information Act.

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That's not acceptable. I also now have the issue of who do they share this information with? I work in America sometimes if I'm doing a gig in America, I've done podcasts on this before about the auteur. Hell, that is American immigration. I, uh, I almost applied for a work visa this year, but I didn't because I coronaviruses. But I'm probably going to be applying for an American work visa so that I can work in the fucking states and do gigs.

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And in order for them to do that, they do a pretty fucking thorough background check. And are you telling me that the US government, when I applied for one of these work visas to go there, that they're not going to fucking ring up the Department of Justice and go this blind by far, what have you got on him? And then the Department of Justice go? Well, we actually have a lot of reports of him being critical of the Irish government, the U.S. that's that's fucking telling me that's not going to get me flagged at us immigration.

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And then you're going, so what, they can drag you into a room for as long as they want and go through your fucking phone. That that's what it means. So is is. Is my name on this list of people critical of the government now going to be shared with other countries if I want to visit there or get a visa there? I'd like to know that. And then last of all, what this practice does and the secrecy of it, it it creates what's called a panopticon.

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I've done a podcast on this before. A panopticon is.

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It's based on a prison that was designed by this mad bastard called Jeremy Bentham, right? He was this fellow, Jeremy Bentham. He fucking he designed a type of prison, but he also. Before he died, he said he'd leave all his money to a hospital if they preserved his body, if they mummified his body and kept it sitting at the head of the board of directors forever, and his body is still there. But anyway, he invented a type of prison called a panopticon.

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And basically it was a way of keeping prisoners in a prison whereby they could they could never tell if they were being watched or not. So the guard is in a central kind of a central tower and the prisoners don't know if they're being watched or not. So because they can't tell if they're being watched or not, they just behave anyway. And the signaling now, I don't know how the Irish government clever enough to do this shit. Probably not, but the signalling is.

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You I don't know if I if I if I want to as a citizen, critique, direct provision or critique emergency accommodation or critique the government's covid response, I now don't know which one of those tweets is going to end up in a government report. And it's making me hold my tongue before I speak. And I shouldn't have to do that in a democracy. I'm entitled to critique fucking government. I'm entitled to critique the government because I pay for their fucking wages.

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I live in the country. I'm a citizen, you know what I mean? It's that I don't like that my fucking taxes are used to perpetuate and feed the cruel system of direct provision because now I'm in places I don't fucking like that and I'm entitled to critique that. But now I have to watch that. I have to fight myself from holding my tongue because the government put my tweets in these reports that are secret and I don't know what's happening with them.

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And then on top of it all, and this is the most beautifully Irish finish to the fucking last on top of it all. And so I know about this because an article came out during the week. Like I said, a journalist had to look into this and said, look, the government are using your taxes to watch your tweets. And I was in there. Some journalists were in there. Some artists were, in their view, was were in there.

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So this fucking article comes out, everyone's talking about on Twitter. And then I say I'm on a government watch list. And then some people on Twitter say watch list the fucking notions. I got accused of having notions, which is a specific Irish accusation of look at them, that it's telling someone they're above their post. It's said notions, you think you're fucking great, which are watchlist. So I got called Notion's for saying that I'm on a watch list when what I should have said I should have said, no, no, no, no, I'm not on a watch list.

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I'd never consider that that I'd be on a watch list. Oh, no, I'm not that important. No, no, no, no. Instead, I'm I'm not on a government watch list. I'm on a list of people that's being watched by the government. So that's the non notion way to say it. So if anyone accuses me of having notions, I'm not on a government watch list. I'm on a list of people that's being watched by the government.

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OK, just to clear that up, just very important for anyone out there who's jealous that I'm on a list of people being watched by the government. Don't worry, I haven't I don't have notions about myself, OK? But it's a bad thing. It's a bad thing that all of us shouldn't like. It's not a good thing that the government secretly is recording opinions that are critical of its policies. That's a bad thing in 2020. OK, like we've seen in the last decade, we've seen it in America with the NSA spying on on American citizens.

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You know, it's it's just in light of GDPR, it's a bad thing. But in all honesty, do I think this is some grand conspiracy to Ricard's people, critical of the government and fucking silencers? No, I wouldn't give the Irish government that credit to do that. What I'd say is that it's it's really sneaky and irresponsible. It's sneaky and irresponsible and underhanded. All right. Doing it on the sly. Need a Freedom of Information Act, fucking act to to access it.

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And then the irresponsibility of taking someone's tweets and recontextualiSed them into a report of people who are criticising the government. It's irresponsible with our fucking data, it's irresponsible with our own consent about how our data is used. I consent to a tweet, that's what I consent to a fucking tweet on Twitter that I'm free to delete if I change my opinion. I don't consent to being in a foreign government report nor ask my permission. Just like students in fourth year doing their dissertations and thesis's can ask me, they can do it blind.

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Why can I use your tweet in my thesis? If they can do it, you can do it. The government are paying a lot of money for companies to watch our tweets and probably listen to this podcast right now. So government worker, you fucking silly girl. If you're listening to this podcast, just contact me and ask for permission the next time you want to tape a tweet and recontextualise it into a government report, you silly Billy. So that's the second most exciting thing that's happened to me this week.

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Ending up on a list of people that's being watched by the government is the second most exciting thing. The fact the most exciting thing that's happened me this week is I've started watching the Crown on Netflix because everyone's talking about it online. And I was feeling left out. Now everybody's on season four. So I asked, look, is it what is it worth watching from the start? And people said, look, you got to watch from the start.

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You got to see how the characters develop. So I'm on season one. I'm up to about episode for the Crown. If you don't know. Look, everyone knows the Crown. It's Netflix is series about the royal the English royal family. And am I enjoying it? Yeah, I'm on Episode four. I'm on episode fourth. The storytelling is good, the storytelling is good. The character development is good. I want to see what happens next.

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I'm engaged by it. It's certainly not shit, but it's a difficult fork and watch it for an Irish person. It's difficult. Watch if you're an Irish person and you understand history because.

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So wait, not so before I get into the crown. This week's episode is not about the crown. This week's episode is. It's about this week's it's about mental health, but I need to do it via dissecting the crown before we do that, let's get the ocarina pause out of the way. I'm going to play my beautiful ocarina flute. And while I'm doing this, you may or may not hear an advert that is digitally inserted by air guest.

[00:24:19]

[00:24:27]

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[00:24:50]

Now that gives you the option to book a taxi plus screen via the app today.

[00:25:07]

So you heard an advert there, don't know why it was fired, because the adverts are dependent upon your algorithm and what you're searching for. But, um, yeah, that was an advert. And also to remind you, this is an independent podcast and it is funded by you, the listener, via the Patreon on page patreon.com forward slash the Blindboy podcast. Being listener funded means that I can speak about whatever I want. I've got four editorial control.

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No one tells me what to speak about. Must be doing a great job with the government to keep Infocom tabs on me. But advertisers don't tell me what to speak about. They have no say whatsoever over any of the content in the podcast they would do if they were 100 percent funding important. Also, this is my full time job, my full time job, and it's how I earn a living. I'm an artist. I love what I do.

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I fucking love it. And the patriot means that I get to be a professional fucking artist and create loads of art, not just this podcast. So thank you to everyone who is a patron I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. If you're listening to this podcast, if I'm giving you a bit of entertainment or escape and you're enjoying it, just consider paying me for the work that I'm doing.

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And if you can't afford it, don't worry. If you can't afford it, you're grand, you're fine. Maybe you can pay me at a point when you can afford it. If you can afford it and you are a patron, what you're doing is paying for the person who can't afford it. It's a model that's based on kindness and soundness, everybody gets a podcast. Everyone gets to listen. I get to earn a living. What more could you fucking ask for?

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So that's Patreon and dot com forward slash the Blindboy podcast, price of a pint once a month for several hours content. One little thing this this week I had to spend time on. Someone's been uploading my podcasts. Someone has been downloading my podcast from the Internet and then uploading them themselves on YouTube, pretending to be me. I don't know. I think the person thinks they're doing a good thing by doing it. But it goes without saying, please don't be don't applaud my podcast yourself, because that's taken it's taken money out of my pocket.

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It's it's fucking it's taking money out of my pocket. It's directing traffic to a channel that I don't control and I'm not involved with. It's taken my intellectual. It's just bad. Please don't do that. If it's someone who's listening to this podcast who's like, I'm going to take on his podcast and put them all up on YouTube on one channel and Blindboy isn't going to benefit from any of those clicks. And it's not going to direct to his website or anything like that.

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I had to spend a whole fucking day cos I'm independent issue and take down notices to get a load of podcast deleted, which took hours and then took time away from this week's podcast. So please don't do that. If you're someone who's doing it really doesn't help me in any way. If I wanted my podcasts on YouTube, I'd put them up there myself. Follow me on Twitter. Sled's Twitch that TV Fiberglas the blame by podcast. You can come chat to me life Wednesday, Thursday, Friday nights.

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Great fucking craic. And I make live music on it to like the podcast, shared the podcast, leave some reviews. These are ways that can positively help me. Thank you very much. Now back to the podcast. What I'm going to speak about the crown. I mean, you know, it was a glorified the royal family, not particularly, but it wanted to root for them. It want it want you to care about the characters. It wants me to really care about the character of fucking Queen Elizabeth is, you know, uses this incredibly heroic dramatic music to try and get me to give a fuck about Winston Churchill is and there's too many scenes where the royal family, like all they simply do is treat a servant as a human being.

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They're surrounded by servants who are just these anonymous props. And every so often they speak to them with basic human respect. And this is placed in the show as a way to get me to warm to the fucking character, to warm to King, whatever the fuck are Prince fucking Philip, whoever the fuck they're. I don't give a fuck about the royal family. I don't give a shit about him. They mean nothing to me. They're fucking celebrities.

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That's all they are to Irish people. Celebrities. I don't give to fucks about them. They're just inbred love island contestants to me. But it's an entertaining show which completely ignores history and. I'm someone who has an anticolonial view of history. I don't look at English and British history from the point of view of. The fucking royal family, I look at it from the point of view of the countries that were conquered and brutalized and had the resources extracted to provide the ostentatious wealth that you see the royals enjoying.

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I come from a country that was brutalized and had its resources extracted to create that wealth. So on Episode two, when it's got young Lizzy and Philip visiting Kenya in the 1950s. And, you know, it shows Prince Philip being racist, but shows her not being racist and all of a sudden we have to like her because she wasn't racist to the Kenyan tribesman. And then I'm going, oh, this was happening in the middle of the Mau Mau rebellion when Kenya wanted independence from Britain and she's actually on a tour of Kenya.

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I yeah, she's down tour in Kenya to try and can convince the Kenyan people that, no, no, no, you shouldn't rebel and look for independence. You love ours. You love the fact that you have a queen. And I did a podcast on the Mau Mau rebellion. That's the one for the intern, 70000 Kenyan people. Barack Obama's grandfather was one of them. This fucking sexually tortured him in a camp for seven years. Elizabeth Tó.

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Which is depicted in that show in Episode two, Elizabeth's tour was part of the friendly face of the ideological state apparatus to as part of that brutality of that internment by the British and the Kenyan people. But I'm watching and I'm supposed to watch it gone are fucking lazy men. I'm rooting for her. I'm rooting for Lizzie. I'm not. So when you're watching it, as someone who understands English colonial brutality, it's quite difficult, but. It is well written, it is entertaining, I'm going to stick with it.

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I can't wait to watch Episode five tomorrow. I'll be honest, but one thing I am enjoying about watching it when I'm watching it with a critical lens when I'm watching is basically I'm watching it and I'm enjoying it and I'm enjoying the storytelling, both the writers goal of getting me to care about the characters, to care about Princess Margaret, to care about Elizabeth, declare it, to care about Philip. I think they want me to not like Philip, but the writers are trying to get me to care about these characters.

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I can't go there. I just can't because I know the history. So it's not happening. Why what that does that sense of detachment that I have allows me to view. The order, pomposity and silliness of the power structure when when you're not being sold, the concept of royalty and when you're not emotionally invested in the characters, the absurdity of royalty is kind of laid bare. The little rituals that that they have, the propriety that they have to.

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The propriety that they have to pretend in order to solidify their status in the power structure, everyone has to be quiet around them. And there's a scene when when Elizabeth finally becomes queen because her dad dies and her two sisters come up to her. And literally the moment that she's declared queen, they have to change their physical behaviour around their fucking sister. She they can't walk ahead of her. Margaret is reminded in the moment, don't walk ahead of your sister.

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She's the queen now and it's very fucked up. It's very strange, but it's that the writers try and sell it to you as normal. But what it is, is it's the performance of solemnity. When you have a power structure that's utterly absurd and ridiculous. The power structure keeps itself in place by performances of seriousness. Everybody, it's fundamentally fucking ridiculous, is what I'm trying to get at. Who the fuck are the royal family? Who the fuck are you?

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Who decided that you are number one? How did how do you arrive at that? And the fact of the matter is, the British royal family, they are in that position with all that wealth because they can say, well, a thousand years ago, a fellow called William the Conqueror, who was a Norman, came to Britain and he took over the Anglo-Saxon and where the royals and all royal families can trace themselves to William the Conqueror doing that a thousand years ago.

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And that's why we are here now and that's why we are important, which is fucking ridiculous. Inherited power across a thousand years. It's ridiculous, but it stays in place through ritualistic performed solemnity. LARP Essentially, everybody is involved in this game where there is no humour and everything must be really serious and quiet and solemn and you have to perform seriousness all the time. And if you do that enough, you convince people like Jesus. If everyone's behaving this seriously, this must be serious when in fact it's not your fucking a fucking ancestor.

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A thousand years ago was an absolute prick from France who cracked a few heads in. And now you're the queen. Fuck off.

[00:35:43]

So I said this week's episode was going to be mental health related. And it is it is mental health related because I'm I'm enjoying watching the crown. I'm not going to lie. I'm enjoying it. It's obviously good because if the crown wasn't good, my I wouldn't be talking about it and I'd be expressing it as disinterest. I'd have tried to watch it and I'd have just quit and gone back to watching Malcolm in the Middle. But the fact of the matter is, I'm four episodes in and I'm sticking with it and it's good.

[00:36:15]

But I'm walking away from the television every night feeling fucking really angry feet and angry, but entertained, but angry as well. And it's also it's making me look at history, too. I'm looking at history to alleviate my anger. So after that episode, I was like, these fucking pricks, man. All they are is descendents of William the Conqueror. That's all they are. So then I went looking at William the Conqueror afterwards, reading to try and satiate some anger inside me.

[00:36:51]

And I kind of got it. I kind of got this this sense of justice and tell you how. So William the Conqueror. Ah, William the bastard. He was known as William the Bastard because he was he was he was illegitimate. Who gives a fuck? What does that mean? That only that only means something under those stupid, ridiculous royal rules. But he was called William the Bastard and he was the illegitimate child of a Norman King.

[00:37:19]

The Normans were. And I've spoken about them before. In previous podcast's then Almond's were essentially Vikings that settled in France in an area called Normandy and Inten 66. These Normans, William the Conqueror, who was a French Viking, William the Conqueror, went to England. England was populated by the Anglo-Saxon who were just this a God help us, Shahara fucking age. It's the poor old Anglo-Saxon. God help us. Let's just like their people. The Roman Empire collapsed in England.

[00:37:53]

Fucking Anglo-Saxon wandered in from the Far East to Germany, found themselves in England, and then saw Roman ruins and assumed that the Romans were giants. So the poor old Anglo-Saxon were conquered very easily by the extreme brutality of this William the Conqueror fella and William the Conqueror then said, I run England, this is my gaff now. He did it via extreme violence. He had the hardest fucking cons with him. They brutalised all of England and then they established power by doing this thing called the Doomsday Book.

[00:38:29]

William the Conqueror establish lasting power in England through brutality and bureaucracy. So bureaucracy was the doomsday book. He said, I'm king. I rode the place and then sent his jokes all up and down the country of England, basically recording everything. How many pigs do you own? How much land do you have? This is mine. This is keeping records established, soft power. And the English writers today can trace themselves to William the Conqueror. This violent tug of a human being who.

[00:39:08]

Everyone just says he was an absolute bollocks and I was getting more angry, going, you know, reading about the injustice of William the Conqueror until I found out about how he died. And then when I started reading about how William the Conqueror died, I started feeling good again and started feeling a sense of justice. So William the Conqueror. Like, he kind of he saw when he became king of England, he started getting kind of lazy and he was going back and forth between France and England and he was eating loads and loads of food and he became overweight.

[00:39:46]

So then one day, I don't even think it was that old, I think was in his 50s, one day hops on his horse, but he's after getting too fat for his horse. And when he hops on and probably like not listening to people to probably still trying to wear armor and stuff that fit him, but no one's going to say shit to him because he's a bollocksed. No one is going to say to him, you know what, William?

[00:40:09]

You might want to want to have a larger saddle on the horse there. Want to have a larger horse. You have to put it on a few pounds. Probably no one said it to him. So he hops up on his fucking horse and on the saddle there was metal bits protruding on the saddle and his belly. Hung over the saddle and he managed to disembowel himself on his horse, so he ripped open his belly on the saddle of his horse.

[00:40:36]

So he's kind of got fell out and he died, right? But he died with this gaping wound in his stomach, so then they took his body to a church with this gaping wound. And tried to have like this emergency funeral, but the thing was, is they didn't have embalming processes and stuff in those days. So whatever where the wound was in his stomach, his. Bodies started to decompose rapidly and filled with gases, so in the middle of William the Conqueror, his funeral.

[00:41:15]

His body started making all these noises and they're trying to have the fucking funeral. They can't because his body's making all these noises now. Now, this is a thousand years ago. Let's so they don't have modern medicine. So when the body starts making noises, someone goes off, fuck, is he alive? What's going on here? We better check it out. We better check that he's in the coffin. Alright, maybe he's not dead, even though we saw him being disemboweled there a week ago and then someone goes over to try and fed him.

[00:41:43]

The coffin was too small for him. So someone tries to fit him into the coffin and is fucking his dead body explodes like a whale at his own funeral. And the smell was so bad that everyone in the church had to just get the fuck out. So now the great William the Conqueror, who the royals all descend from this person that everyone fucking hated, the king of England. Now everyone's after fucking out of his funeral because his bodies are exploding like a whale.

[00:42:16]

No, gone back in the place stinks. And then the poor people of England, the people with no money, the disenfranchised, stuck going into the church and looting his exploded whale corpse and taken all his jewelry and money.

[00:42:33]

And when I read that. It just made me feel a bit better. It made me feel a bit better because. It felt a sense of justice. It's like the narrative was complete. It's like. He showed daylight that this man was an absolute bollocks, he was a conqueror, he was a brutal murderer. Yeah, he shouldn't have people revering him at his funeral. His corpse should be exploding and people should Rob should be robbing jewelry off it.

[00:43:04]

That's a good ending to his life. That makes me feel better. And it did. So when I'm watching the Crown now, if I find myself getting angry at the solemnity and pomposity of royalty. I just say to myself. You go away and fuck off. G'way you silly fouls which are which are fucking claim to the throne. Your mind, your mind fucking exploded at his own funeral and people looted, looted is God's you silly fools. So I say that to myself and then that makes it easier for me to watch the crown, because I know that it's just.

[00:43:44]

It's based on lies and exploding costs from a fucking dope called William the Conqueror, you know. But. The feeling of completion that I get from that that feeling of satiation, the feeling of things are OK now I feel a sense of justice. Now I got a similar thing. A week ago with with Donald Trump, Donald Trump's after losing the election, fucking great, fantastic, gonna have to see how it pans out. I don't know how I'm going to feel about January 20th.

[00:44:22]

Is he going to concede peacefully? I don't know. But Trump is a William the Conqueror like figure. He's a brute. He's rude. He's an asshole. He's someone who ruled with an iron fist and. Even the people around him don't like him, and you can tell they're like William the Conqueror funeral. That's a shambles. That's a shambles, right? To. You know, for someone to not say you're going to injure yourself in that house or for someone like it means that people or the people closest to him were frightened of him and probably didn't like him the way his funeral happened.

[00:45:11]

With the car bombs exploding and then it being robbed and loaded and, you know, the cars exploding and then everyone exiting the church, the people who are supposed to be his neighbors and friends exiting the church, that's disrespect. They don't give a shit about him. The people around him in the end failed him because he was so rude. And Trump reminds me of that. And Trump, that is William the Conqueror moment last week. In. The fuckin press conference men, the Four Seasons press conference, no, Trump didn't die in his body, didn't explode, but metaphorically, metaphorically, it happened.

[00:45:52]

So when Trump lost the election, Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer, former mayor of New York, caused this fucking press conference and the Trump campaign. Tried to book the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia because Trump treats everyone around him like shit, they accidentally. They didn't book the Four Seasons Hotel. This is the president of the United States. They didn't book the fucking Four Seasons hotel, they accidentally booked a garden center called the Four Fucking Seasons, all right.

[00:46:30]

And went ahead with it. The president of the United States at a press conference was held in the car park of a fucking garden center. The president of America, a garden center, LED's. And it was a garden center in the middle between. A pornography shop and a crematorium. That's how the Trump presidency ended. All right. And. It felt amazing. It felt great. Now. Him losing obviously felt it felt good for him, ending his fuckin presidency like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in.

[00:47:16]

Beside a fuckin upon shopman. It was beautiful. It was beautiful and I felt such a sense of release, it felt like the exploding corpse of William the Conqueror. I felt a sense of completion. I felt. It's not like it's not real justice, that's not really, really justice. Is Trump going to fucking jail for being up for being a criminal, but in a narrative sense, in the same way that like William the Conqueror is, Karp's exploding.

[00:47:47]

Does it mean anything? No, not really, because his dynasty still stayed in power and that became the British Empire. But from a narrative perspective that felt good. And to trump the Trump presidency, accidentally book a garden center and don't want to go on ahead with the press conference anyway beside a fucking porno shop. It's just beautiful. It's beautiful. And it tells you nobody around here gives a flying fuck. You've insulted everybody. You've insulted everybody.

[00:48:23]

Anyone of any quality has left and you're left with people who would book a garden centre by accident for the fucking president of America. And what I want to speak about this week is that feeling, that feeling of completion, that feeling of I interpret it as as justice, but really what it felt like was closing a book. If I was reading a very complicated story that was conflicting, I was confused. And then finally, you close the book and you go, it's done.

[00:48:57]

It's done. I enjoyed that. Now I want to speak about that feeling. I want to speak about the importance of that feeling to human beings for our mental health and wellbeing or happiness. Now, I know you might be thinking Jesus Blain by William the Conqueror is exploding Karp's Donald Trump in a car park. What the fuck does this have to do with mental health? The feeling of completion that I got from this. And then the peace of mind that I got afterwards, that's known as completing a gestalt, there's a school of psychology called Gestalt Psychology, and I want to speak a little bit about that this week and speak about how I how I use it to understand my emotions, to understand my feelings, and to have a sense of self awareness and to bring meaning and happiness to my life.

[00:49:52]

The Trump Garden and sententious. Genuinely reduced my stress that day, it wasn't like me feeling half fuck you, Trump, ha ha. You've got what you deserved. It wasn't that it wasn't like a contempt. I felt like a story had been completed in a right way and I could move on. The Trump presidency for me, has made me feel frightened and confused. I've been frightened and confused for four years and I couldn't make sense of a lot of it.

[00:50:29]

I couldn't make sense of a lot of Trump because we'd never seen it before. But when he when he goes out like an incompetent clown, it might it might not even mean anything. It might be we don't know what's going to happen, but the narrative of it made sense. And I was able to breathe. I was able to go. His political career exploded at its own funeral and the corpse was loaded metaphorically. Finally, something makes sense.

[00:51:00]

He's an asshole and an idiot, and everyone around him is, too. And there's the confirmation because they fucking booked a press conference in a garden center and that happened. That's real. And that felt good. And it restored a sense of balance in how I see the world. Does that mean that fucking Joe Biden is going to be brilliant? No, this isn't about reality. This isn't about actual reality. It's about narrative and meaning and how I see reality and a sense of balance that allows me to at least cope.

[00:51:37]

That allows me to cope, going out like a clown allows me to cope and understand better. So the words that have been used in their gestalt, what the fuck is that? It's a German word. It means whole W.H. O'Reilly and Gestalt psychology. It's it's a way it's a skill of psychology that tries to understand, like all different. There's all different schools of psychology that have different theories about how humans are and why humans are the way we are.

[00:52:09]

And Gestalt psychology takes the position that humans are holistic beings, that we are a whole, that we're not just mental health is not just your mind, that it's not even your general wellbeing consists of of different constituents, your mind, your body, your spiritual self, how you faith your relationship with the world around you. And Gestalt psychology kind of posits that. You know, unless you have a you have holistic health. Then you're not going to have full well-being, so if I'm looking after my mental health, if I'm eating properly, if I'm exercising regularly, if my relationships are in check, if everything all those things are fine.

[00:53:03]

But then one thing such as my my relationship with the world, if that's out of kilter, then it's going to be it's going to be hard for me to feel fully complete and something like Donald Trump. That's. It's hard for me to feel I don't I don't fully have a source on the world when someone like Trump is in power, it's like the pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic as well. Right now, we're kind of right now we're used to it.

[00:53:36]

But at the fucking start, let's when we didn't know what this thing was and it was frightening, doesn't matter how much you were on a day, it doesn't matter how much you mind your own mental health, how well you eat your relationship, your understanding of reality and the events of the world is now unpredictable. So you can't have this holistic health one. Facet of your being is off kilter, so that puts the rest off kilter when my understanding of.

[00:54:07]

Politics are the world feels chaotic, then it throws myself into a sense of disequilibrium, I don't have I don't have equilibrium or balance. That little thing is there in the back of your head that affects my happiness and the gestalt, the whole that Donald Trump knows. For me, it's like something slotted back into place. Something slammed back into place, I felt better, I stopped worrying over something as stupid as Tenberken, a garden centre, it just slotted something into place for me.

[00:54:46]

I Gestalt was completed and I knew what when I felt it, I knew it. I'm like, yeah, this makes sense. I've got a better handle on things now. Things are a bit more predictable. Things make more sense to me also what Gestalt is, it's a way of how it describes how human beings experience being alive, how we how we organize our experience of reality to create meaning that in our day, these little gestalt pop up and.

[00:55:26]

Our throughout our gestalt is is I feel I know I, I feel an itch on my arm. I then notice the itch on my arm. I didn't decide to scratch the itch. Scratching the itch feels good now. The itch is no more. And I've moved on to something else that's a gestalt that's known as the eye gestalt cycle. And throughout I've organized the experience. I've just had an itch noticed felted noticed this. Scratch the itch, completed the cycle, a little narrative journey, a tiny little narrative journey that's gone now.

[00:56:11]

What's the next one? Or have a multiple happening at the same time? Gestalt Psychology tries to explain how we organize. Our experience of being alive like that, OK, and we have thousands of guests throughout our day. It's basically a need arises and then how do we meet that need to complete the Gestalt scratch? And that is the most basic physiological one. I mean, it's not even confined to humans. I remember I remember being in London once.

[00:56:43]

I think I was meditating in London. I was sitting down trying to meditate in a chaotic environment. And when I come out of meditation, I always have. Deeper empathy for about five minutes, and I just looked at a pigeon and I was I feeling contempt for the pigeon? No, I was just looking at a fork and I was observing a pigeon. And I didn't have any strong feelings for the pigeon. I was just looking at the pigeon.

[00:57:08]

Gone, gone. There's a pigeon. But then because I was at a heightened sense of awareness for meditation, I just noticed the little pigeon lift up his leg and scratch his ear. And he scratched his ear and his eyes squinted. And I felt great love and empathy for the pigeon in that moment because I was empathizing with he, he just completely cashed out this little pigeon felt and scratched it and then sorted it out. So when I use the H as an example of of a Gestalt completion, that's the most basic physiological one.

[00:57:43]

But humans have much greater gestalt not only in our day, but throughout our entire life. Imagine a gestalt as a little circle of completion, because that's what it is. It's a cycle. You have a need, you meet and then you try and meet the need and then that cycle is complete. But what about larger ones? But our entire life goals, things from childhood, multiple chakras like a Venn diagram, imagine a Venn diagram of all these gestalt in our life of I want to e ah.

[00:58:19]

I want to find a partner, I want to be successful. All these multiple overlapping circles. And what happens if some of these circles can't be completed for whatever reason. So you've heard me talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, transactional analysis, humanistic psychology, all these different ways of understanding why we are the way we are. None of them are race. They're all theories that posit that suggest why we are the way we are. So we're gestalt. So what are described there?

[00:58:57]

A big thing with Gestalt psychology is the present moment, right, trying to trying to striving to understand your emotions in the present moment and trying to understand the steps of the state, the cycle of your gestalt. OK, let's again go physiological. Let's keep it really simple, Hungar. And I'm going to take you through all the different cycles of hunger and eating in order to experience hunger and to feed yourself, you have to do what's known as you have to make contact.

[00:59:37]

And this is a phrase that's used within Gestalt psychology. You have to make contact with your emotions and your environment in order to complete this gestalt. So the first stage is awareness. You become aware that you're hungry, you make contact, you make emotional contact with the feeling of hunger. And because you've made that contact, you now move into the next stage, which is mobilization. Mobilization is the building up of energy you're starting to think about. I'm hungry.

[01:00:10]

What can I eat? What do I have? You're making contact with all these thoughts about yourself, about your environment, which then brings in the next stage, which is action. Action is the energy that you've built up, true awareness and mobilization. You're now releasing the energy through action. You've decided that you're going to eat noodles. You go and get the noodles. Now you start your cooking the fucking noodles. And then after action comes final contact, you are now eating the food, your eat, your meeting, the needs of hunger, you've made contact with each stage up to this step.

[01:00:47]

Now you're eating the noodles, you've making contact with the eating of the food. And then finally, you've got satisfaction. The circle has been completed. You've gotten your payoff. You've met your need. That's there, the feed. And when you scratch that itch, the feeling of satiation, the food is in your belly. You've met the need. And now that little gestalt of hunger is completed and it feels good. And you move on and something else comes into your day.

[01:01:21]

It feels right. It feels good. Why am I talking about fucking food? How is this relevant to anything? Well, now let's think of. That process and we've all been in this situation. Where you are starved of the fucking hunger and for whatever reason, you can't eat. Let's imagine I don't know if you're in the fuckin office and a meeting is going to fuck and long and you are starved of the hunger, and what's happening now is you're at the first stage of this gestalt, your awareness, and you have this.

[01:01:58]

You're making contact with awareness, but there's a blockage. Your environment isn't letting you move on to the next stage of the gestalt you want to move from. You're trying to go to mobilisations and you're thinking, I've got a fucking sandwich in the fridge, but the boss won't stop talking. Man, I'm thinking about that sandwich. And after a while, it becomes very, very frustrating. Not only are you, you know, feeling hungry, but think of all the new emotions that are coming in now.

[01:02:28]

Think of the frustration, think the anger, think of the unfairness, think of the stress that's coming upon you because you now can't eat because your boss is after deciding this meat needs to go 20 minutes into fucking lunchtime and you're sitting there starving all the extra stress, all the extra pressure and so much of it. It's so much of it doesn't even have to do with how hungry you are. A lot of that stress and pressure, it's because you're not being allowed to complete a gestalt.

[01:03:04]

OK, the unit of organized human experience, the perfect circle of a need arising and then the process of how you meet that need to feel a sense of completion to complete a gestalt that's now not happening. Imagine now think of all the stress that's happening in your life over a sandwich in a fridge. Then the meat and ends. You get to eat Fokin sandwich darkish that is completed. Now let's talk about a more complicated gestalt. Not something as simple as I am hungry.

[01:03:40]

I must get food, which is very easy to understand and something we deal with every day. Now let's look at the multitude of styles that we have in our life that are much larger and that can last year that we're not really aware of. What we're talking about here is a need and making sufficient emotional contact with our self and our environment to meet that need. How many needs do we have in our lives that aren't getting met? So let's just say you're your child and children have children, have the need for love and approval from their parents, from your mother will say so you're a child and you have a need for love and approval from your mother.

[01:04:31]

But your mom has gone through some shit. You're stressed out. Your man might have difficulty expressing love. Maybe she didn't receive love when she's younger. And for whatever reason, your need for love and approval for your mother isn't being met. Your mother isn't meeting those needs. When you are a little toddler now, you have a gestalt right there that needs completion. And just like you're hungry in the office and the boss is talking for ages and you have this desire to eat the sandwich, it's not a sandwich anymore.

[01:05:06]

It's love from your mother and your mother, for whatever reason, isn't given us. And you have this stress and anxiety of not receiving this love. Now you're an adult, now you're an adult. And the opportunity for that love that you received when you were a toddler is long gone because now you're a fucking adult and you have this feeling within you that you're not aware of, but you were never felt loved as a child. So you have an incomplete gestalt about your sense of self-worth and your worthiness of the love of other people.

[01:05:44]

But this is outside of your awareness, this incomplete gestalt. How does it manifest as an adult gestalt? Well, your mind's not around, so now you're trying to complete. Your your need to be loved and to complete this gestalt, you now begin this cycle with a girlfriend, but your need. Your needs have never been met, you've never you've never completed the stage of intimacy and love and love from another person. Now now you've got a girlfriend and you're on a date and you're having a good night and everything's going well so far.

[01:06:26]

And then you fuck it up, then you fuck it up for no reason, out of nowhere, you say something mean to her and you don't know why you said it. Are you make comments about other women in the room you talk about are men, she's right over there. Are you trying to make the girl, your wife jealous? And you're playing these games and you don't know why the fuck you're playing them and this no girlfriend you have, it's like things go really, really well on a date.

[01:06:57]

And then when it gets to the end of the day, every time you fuck it up, you say something stupid. You do something to try and make her jealous. You try and hurt her feelings. And each time it ends in her rejecting you are her disapproving of you. So what you have there is what's known in Gestalt as unfinished business as a child, your needs for love from your mother. You didn't get to make contact with these needs and you because that Gestalt was never completed.

[01:07:34]

Life moved on beyond it. But this this huge gestalt inside you was never completed. This hunger was never satiated. And now you're a grown adult man with adult women. But the needs that you have are not the needs of an adult than the needs of an adult are to achieve an equal intimacy with another adult, equal adult intimacy based on understanding and sharing. But this is you can't achieve this because your childhood needs for intimacy with a parent weren't met.

[01:08:10]

So you're an adult trying to complete the gestalt of a child with another adult and it's not possible. So it manifests as games, self-fulfilling prophecies and a general feeling of not achieving intimacy with another adult. And intimacy doesn't doesn't mean it doesn't have to mean sex. Intimacy means a calm, caring equals sense of love, a completion of a gestalt association, whether or not a person. Your needs aren't being met, you can't meet those needs because you have because you have unfinished business from an incomplete gestalt, from a different time in your in your in your fucking life.

[01:08:58]

Now, a lot of this is going to sound it is sound like transaction analysis, because it does sound like I said, these are all different theories about human beings. Now, what what a Gestalt therapist do with that person. And some of this is fuckin outdated, I'm just this this is stuff that I learned a Gestalt therapist would probably do what's known as. An empty chair therapy session. Whereby? If you the adult man is having intimacy issues with girlfriends because you've uncovered that you don't feel loved by your man.

[01:09:38]

The therapist would try and get to experience the childhood emotions in the here and now, in the present moment and the empty chair, the therapist would say. Your mother is not physically here, but she's in that chair across from you right now. Speak to your mother in that chair and tell her what your needs are. What does it feel like to be rejected? What does it feel like to want to be loved by your math and Gestalt psychology?

[01:10:10]

What kind of asked the ask the person who's in therapy, what are you saying to your mother? What what what do you need from your mother? What do you want from her? Why does it feel like right now to be rejected by her and to experience these childhood moments in the here and now in the present moment now, Gestalt therapy is still it's still used today. It's still used today. Most therapists today are integrative, so they use many different schools.

[01:10:37]

But that would have been very big in the 60s and 70s.

[01:10:41]

John Lennon, like, I don't even I don't even have to know that John Lennon went to therapy. John Lennon's got a song called Mother. Right. It's it's it's from the late 60s and. No, it's from the early 70s. John Lennon's got a song called Mother and the lyrics of Mother. I guarantee you are literally from a Gestalt therapy session. The lyrics of John Lennon song Mother are Mother. You had me, but I never had you.

[01:11:08]

I wanted you. You didn't want me. So I just got to tell you. Goodbye. Goodbye, Father. You left me, but I never left you. I needed you. You didn't need me. So I just got to tell you. Goodbye, goodbye. And then it ends with him just screaming. Mama, don't go, Daddy, come home, mama, don't go, daddy, come home and John. That's John Lennon's song, which I guarantee you came from Gestalt therapy.

[01:11:35]

I know that John Lennon was into what's known as primal screaming. Primal screaming. Was that an offshoot of Gestalt where and it's kind of been rubbished now where people would try and revisit almost child childhood being two years of age and getting out the tears and anger and roar and shouting and screaming that needed to be done as a child, but wasn't for whatever reasons, because of whatever relationship with a parent. But. That there is an example of an incomplete gestalt I'm talking about.

[01:12:18]

I spoke about scratching an itch and eating food because it's so simple to understand that's a simple physiological gestalt. But we have much bigger ones in our lives at all times. And to find the gestalt, you kind of go, what are my needs and am I me, am I making enough contact with these needs to meet them? So if all adults have a need to be loved and to love, and if you find a pattern in your life where you're trying to meet your need to be loved or to love, and this isn't happening for you.

[01:13:00]

Then Gestalt Psychology would say. What can you find in your childhood, what earlier Gestalt wasn't made in your life that's now given you unfinished business and kind of the Gestalt therapist's role is to direct a person through these things, to direct a person through. Experience in childhood. Needs and cash, that's in the present moment, but the therapist has to guide the person through it in a very safe environment, in a safe, nonjudgmental environment, Gestalt isn't really one of these ones that's done via self-help, but it's it's one that I would have.

[01:13:43]

I certainly use Gestalt. As one tool in my toolbox, when I'm trying to be self-aware around my needs, mainly for me, it's things around, although am I right at it now, but procrastination used to be an issue for me. Procrastination used to be an issue. So I would say to myself, like. If I'd been given a project and might my need is to be an artist and to create art and to complete the gestalt of a project and feel that a project is a success, then why then if I was given this project, do I stop at a certain point and not do it or turn down work or self sabotage?

[01:14:27]

What's going on there with unfinished business? Why would you be and this is a common one, you're given an opportunity. You decide to apply for course, and then you get a place on the course and you turn it down and don't understand why you did it. Where the unfinished business. And another example is. Are you somebody who. Do you use humor, an awful loss in your interactions with people in. Do you use humor as a defense mechanism?

[01:15:03]

Are you are you incapable of having serious conversations with another person without feeling the need to nervously introduce jokes? You know, does this create does that create problems for you? Does the thought of a serious conversation about your emotions, about a problem you're having, does the thought of a serious conversation for can terrify you to the point that you find yourself making these awkward jokes at every point of conversation with another person? Does it create problems for you? And what the fuck is that about?

[01:15:40]

Because because some people are like that and it's a it's a failure to make the person who is like that isn't making emotional contact with the other human being. What if. What if that person what if you grew up in a house? Where conflict was a really. Sometimes we have a knee conflict is a necessary part of being alive. Conflict doesn't necessarily have to mean a fight. Conflict can mean pulling someone up on something or conflict can mean disagreeing with somebody's conflict means two people disagree and need to get through the gestalt of conflict in order to feel a sense of hold.

[01:16:28]

I don't like what you did there. I don't like what you said. We need to speak about it so that we can have a sense of resolution and walk away from it. That's a lovely feeling. That's a lovely feeling to have a disagreement with someone to do it in a calm, respectful fashion. What you said hurt me. I hear I hear your heart and then to complete the circle of genuine forgiveness and walk away from it. That's a fantastic feeling.

[01:16:56]

A lot of people can't do it. A lot of people are fucking terrified of it. And when they're put in situations like that, will. Distract from the situation, make a ton of awkward jokes, do anything in the world except actually have the conflict with what if that person grew up in a house where. Conflict. Either either meant passive aggression or it meant explosion. If you had a particularly angry parent and conflict meant them flying off the fucking handle.

[01:17:33]

So any conflict meant your dad screaming or Rowan or your mother screaming and roaring, then you're going to grow up as a child whose needs are not met around conflict. And then as an adult, you're talking to your co-workers and you want to go to your co-worker and you want to. Our co-worker comes to you and a serious conversation needs to be had that involves you disagreeing and you just deflect everything away from this disagreement happen, this disagreement. You're going to make jokes, you're going to do everything and anything.

[01:18:13]

But this disagreement is not happening. Are you fucking free's. Contact your needs are not being met around. Having an adult disagreement and resolving contact in a gestalt, because as a kid, it wasn't allowed to happen in your house, but now you're an adult with this. Your childhood needs aren't being met around conflict and now you're dragging this into the workplace in your 30s. So that's another example of a gestalt not being completed, a little narrative.

[01:18:53]

What are your needs?

[01:18:54]

How do you meet them? How did they arise? What's the process of how it happens? And there are there are quite similar. The need to disagree with someone to have the conversation and then leave it shaken hands, that cycle is identical to feed and hungry, eat in a sandwich and then feel satiated. It's the same as having an itchy nose touching the nose and then the itch going away. But imagine your hand is tied down and you've got this itchy nose and imagine everything else that comes around it.

[01:19:31]

If you if you can't meet the simple physiological need of scratching your nose, it stops being about an itch nose. And it very soon you get all these new emotions, anger, unfairness. And it's easy to understand when it's a physiological gestalt that needs to be completed, that's pure easy to understand. But what about all these other fucking dishtowels that aren't getting met in your life, that are outside your awareness? What's that doing to your levels of anxiety and anger?

[01:20:02]

These huge, big narratives around your life. If not being able to scratch your nose, are not being able to eat the sandwich is so viscerally frustrating, then what's the bigger one like that you don't even know exists in your life? So. I never have I been to Gestalt therapy. I saw, you know, that I trained. When I was training in psychotherapy, I trained for a year in a group, a weekly group work, and that was Gestalt group work where we had to we had to check in with our emotions, with the check in with the here and now.

[01:20:40]

We had to make ice statements. We had to be very careful about how we use language. We had to make sure that we're making genuine contact with other people. So that's my direct experience of Gestalt. But I do use it in my everyday life. I mainly use cognitive behavioral therapy transaction analysis to find these and earlier podcasts.

[01:21:00]

But sometimes. If something in my life, if I'm self sabotaging, if I'm not meeting my needs, if I can clearly identify the beginning of a Gestalt cycle and that first identification is I am aware of a need. And if I'm not meeting that need and it doesn't make sense, then I introspectively starch into my own emotions and I say, what's going on here? Where's my unfinished business? If I'm procrastinating, if if I'm doing this task and I'm spending too much time on the Internet instead and I'm now really upset, I'm now really upset about it.

[01:21:44]

Where's the unfinished business? What do I need to look at from a previous part of my life to complete cashed out so I can now complete this one right now because I'm bringing shit from a previous gestalt to this one. OK, I hope that made fucking sense, i hope that made sense. Gestalt is quite abstract, it's hard to hard to describe. I hope the word gestalt didn't put you off. It just means whole WHOLE. All right, I'll be back next week, don't know what I'll be back with.

[01:22:17]

That was a fucking mad podcast, wasn't it? The fuck was that? From fucking, King Williams exploding corse to that. Alright, God bless. Go fuck yourself.