Brendan, Peahen is eating sweet cheesecake, eavesdrop on his Toltec smear, grease on his milkshake, critique his shoelace. Welcome to The Blind Bye podcast. I've got a brand new microphone, everything is running well audio wise. I'm just going to do a little test at his microphone. Postman, postman, postman, postman, postman. That's a handsome microphone. I'm very happy. Let's see if we can hear my squeaking chair. That's a new chair that was supposed to be sans squeak when I purchased it, but it is it's been subject to some weathering by my legs and ours.

So it's it has achieved a gentle squeak, but focus. You know, you need a chair to develop a bit a bit of personality. And. I suppose it feels less lonely if I have a chair that squeaks, it's like having a co-host.

But yeah, thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast, which was I spoke to two professors, two experts in the field of psycho biotics, which is an exciting and emerging new field where they're looking at the relationship between our diets and our brains and our gut flora and our brains. And they spoke about the importance of eating fermented foods and eating oily fish. And all week on Instagram, I had people making their own kimchi, people making their own kimchi, trying to make sauerkraut, making kefir, people making their own fermented foods.

As a result of last week's podcast, which was lovely to see because. It's just it's pure, it's perfect quarantine stuff, making fermented foods is perfect quarantine stuff a lot of people were making the Keffer CAFO seems to be the easiest thing to make. And I would recommend making your own fermented foods because like I said, a lot of stuff that's marketed as fermented isn't actually fermented, it's pasteurized.

So when you make your own stuff, you know, you're getting legis. Fermented bacteria or whatever it is into your body. I'd love to start eating more oily fish. But I just I think the thing with fish. You have to be raised on fish, you have to be raised with an appreciation for fish. And I grew up in a house where my mother had a shellfish allergy. Like even last week, she got vaccinated last week, so as a trace, I ordered her fish and chips.

But then I have to ring up the fish and chip shop and say, have any of the fish been in contact with shellfish? And they couldn't guarantee me that it wasn't. So we had to cancel the order and she got a Chinese instead. But I digress. I'd love to be able to eat. Oily fish, but I just can't I wasn't raised with the taste of fish, I can eat canned tuna, I can eat canned tuna and I'd eat like a deep fried cod from a chipper.

But canned tuna apparently doesn't contain the essential fatty oils that you want from tuna. Canned tuna is different, and you're not supposed to eat canned tuna more than three times a week, I heard, because it contains mercury, a lot of large fish. Here's something I learned about fish. Why the fuck am I talking about fish after? Here's a little tidbit I learned about fish. Apparently, if it's a particularly large fish and tuna are fucking massive tuna like the size of a car.

So if a fish is really large and it lives long and it eats lots of other small fish, then it accumulates mercury in its body. So we're not supposed to eat tuna more than three times a week, but I'd love to be eaten mackerel. Mackerel seems to be in terms of the cycle biotics and the benefits and the essential oils that you can get. Mackerel seems to be the best choice and I just can't do it. The thing that makes fish tasty to some people, whatever that is, I don't have it.

I don't have that thing. And I'd love to have that thing because I know people that are really passionate about fish. And I it's a bit like Star Trek. I'd love to enjoy Star Trek because I know people who like Star Trek and they fucking love it. Bus. I don't have the gift of Star Trek and I don't have the gift of appreciating Macra, so, alas, I'm just going to have to eat a lot of flaxseed or something.

And I can't eat fresh tuna. I've tried to eat fresh tuna before. Fresh tuna doesn't taste like canned tuna. Fresh tuna is weird, man. It tastes like steaks, leathery brother. That's all I can describe it as. It's it's just too odd. And fresh tuna, tuna steaks apparently does have the essential oils you're looking for. So that's that that was the takeaway from last week's podcast, excuse the pun, in order to have a healthy gut biome and for this healthy gut biome to have a positive impact on your mental well-being, then we should be eating diets that are full of.

Proper fermented foods, loads of natural sources of fiber. I don't have a problem with that. That's just a load of broccoli and spinach that's grown and then oily fish. And I'm going to work on it. I'm going to work on the first thing I'm going to work on and I'm going to try, but I've tried a lot. So I'm recording this podcast in March 2021. And we are in the middle of. Coronavirus lockdown. So if you're listening from the future, if you're listening in like 2023, am I going to speak about coronavirus for the next eight minutes only?

And then after eight minutes, I won't be speaking about it again because I just think in the future.

When we listen back to anything about coronavirus, it's going to sound like when someone talks about Christmas in June, so if you are in the future and you've got a hoverboard and skip forward eight minutes and then I won't be mentioning the pandemic anymore after that. So for this week's podcast, I want to talk about the theories of a psychologist. And the psychologist theories are of great help to me. In how I navigate my life and. I suppose I'm doing it because.

Like you, I'm struggling at the moment, I am struggling at the moment because of the world, because of the pandemic, I'm doing a lot of work on myself at the moment, daily work. I've gotten back into meditating and meditating twice a day to meditate and to to fully understand my emotions, to truly understand what I'm feeling, to sit with my emotions and to make sure that I'm noticing them. That's all I'd say. Meditation helps me to.

Not his emotions, because when you don't know his emotions, they will drive your behavior and your moods in ways that can lead to distress. I spoke about this two podcasts ago about necessary pain are not about avoidable pain and unavoidable pain. And I'm trying to work on the avoidable pain and meditation helps me through that if you're interested in getting into meditation. I use an app called Headspace. All right. Now, that's a paid app. This isn't an advert.

I just find that Headspace is a really, really good, simple app for basic mindfulness meditation. That's what I use and it helps me.

One thing I'm struggling with, too, is maintaining faith in in people in in humanity. OK. One of the struggles of this pandemic is. Look, we're all stressed, we're all under pressure. We're all coping with this in a different, different ways. We're all disappointed. There's a lot of negativity and people are expressing this negativity and reacting to it in different ways. And these ways, these ways are often disappointing and hard to be around quite you know, people are on the Internet being a little bit more hostile than usual.

That's understandable. There people are lashing out. It's not pleasant to be around and then some people are behaving in ways that are selfish and harmful, literally harmful to other people, people who aren't adhering to social distancing, people who aren't wearing masks are out and their masks properly. There's some people not pulling their weight. OK, all of us must wear masks, adhere to social distancing to keep everyone else safe. It's a collective effort. And we almost do this to save some lives.

And some people simply aren't. For whatever reason, other people are straight up behaving obnoxiously. They're deliberately not wearing masks. They're deliberately causing the pandemic a hoax and. These voices rise to the top, like when I go to the supermarket. Which is one of the few joys in my day when I do it, when I go there, like if one person isn't wearing their mask properly or one person isn't adhering to social distance. I would focus only on that one person.

And I won't notice all the other people that are pulling their weight, so then I walk away from that situation feeling angry about one person who wasn't pulling their weight. And then I go on to the Internet and I see people being and Dirac's are people caught in the pandemic, a hoax. And my brain focuses only on the people who are behaving atrociously. And I'm ignoring the people that are actually putting in the effort behave and compassionately and behaving in a way that's mindful of other people's safety, I'm ignoring these people and focusing on the negativity.

And one of the consequences of this that I have to be incredibly mindful of is when I view other people through that lens and focus only on the negative behaviors, which is a minority. If I go to Donz and there's one person not wearing a mask, that person is a minority. If I focus only on that, I have to be mindful that I'm not. Developing a negative view of humanity in general and the evidence I have for how I might be veering to toxically, veering towards that view of humanity.

The evidence I have is I come back from the supermarket. One person wasn't wearing a mask. And then I'm at home and I'm packing away my groceries. And all of a sudden now I'm angry and I'm upset. And the the thoughts inside my head are toxic, judgmental and rigid, which I know are bad news. So some of the thoughts that have in my head would be.

That asshole in the shop wasn't wearing his mask. Everybody is selfish. We are all fucked, what's the point, what's the point in me even trying? Everyone is really selfish and then I find myself getting angry and then I find myself getting anxious, and then I find myself getting upset and now I'm having a bad day. Now I know from emotional awareness I spoke about this two podcasts ago, the statement, one man was in the shop not wearing his mask.

Everybody is selfish.

We are shocked, what's the point? These are irrational statements. There's no evidence for that. The evidence is I went to Donz, I saw one person who wasn't pulling their weight and I ignored everybody who was pulling their weight. And then I walked away with an irrational opinion that's informed by the toxic emotion of anger, because I know if I allow myself to be overcome with a reactionary, toxic emotion, I will receive what's called an emotional hijack, where the emotion floods my body.

It takes over my ability to think critically, and it will cause my brain to interpret facts that are only so toxic. Emotion so of my toxic emotion is contempt for humanity because that's a contemptuous view of humanity. Everybody is selfish. We are fucked. What's the point? That's toxic and it's contemptuous and it's not evidence based. But if I'm angry, I believe it. So I stop myself in that moment and I say to myself, no, hold on a second.

No blind by one person wasn't wearing a mask. It's OK to be disappointed with their behavior. That's still OK. But I don't know where their head is at. I don't know what their situation is. OK, so instead I'm going to focus on everyone else who was pulling their weight. And then I'm then not contemptuous of humanity in general because that's a recipe for sadness and a recipe for depression and a recipe for distrust and unhappiness. So what I want to focus on this week is the theories of a psychologist called Cara Rogers, because Cara Rogers's theories of human personality essentially view human beings as being good, that human beings when given the option, we choose compassion and love and fun.

And when we don't do these things, it's not a failure of our humanity, but rather the conditions of our environment that create negative behaviors. So that's what I want to talk about. I want to take a look at Rodgers's theories of human personality to restore my faith in other human beings, because if I'm going around the place with a negative view of other people, then I lose my capacity for empathy. Then I become afraid of people are suspicious of people, and I don't want that.

I want to. Love other people, understand other people, and to have empathy for them, that's separate to their behaviors, to appreciate other people's intrinsic value because we all have intrinsic value. So I've most definitely touched on the theories of Chi Rogers previously in other podcasts, because he is a pioneer of a type of psychology called humanistic psychology, which is it's like a cornerstone of like I'm not religious, I'm not a religious person. I'm but I respect people who are religious so long as their religion doesn't try and control other people's behavior.

Because I view people who are religious as that's just their way of maintaining mental health. If someone turns to Christianity or Islam or whatever, that's their way of maintaining mental health and understanding other people. And if they are not controlling other people's behavior, Faulknerian. None of my business, but I'm not religious. So the texts that I consult are the texts of psychology and psychotherapy. That's what I use to understand myself and understand the world and trying to achieve happiness, because that's what I want.

All I want is on a day to day basis, how can I be happy today? And bad things might happen. Disappointing things might happen. But even within all that, I can still be happy in my day. If I live my day with meaning, that's all I want. So I consult psychology and psychotherapy to achieve that, to have that as part of my journey. So Rodgers's humanistic theory, humanistic psychology kind of comes from existentialism and existential psychology.

Existential psychology kind of veers towards that's. Life has life is meaningless, right, so there's no set meaning in life.

Life is chaos, but we as humans have the freedom to find our own meaning. So life itself means nothing. But we as individuals have the freedom to find our own meaning. That's kind of existential psychology in a nutshell. Now, one of the. One of the pitfalls of the existential view is that. That in itself is anxiety inducing the idea that life has no meaning, but we have the individual freedom to find our own meaning, we can get what's known as existential anxiety, a sense of anxiety about simply existing.

Because we are overwhelmed with the. Realization of that freedom and that choice to find our own meaning and that the freedom. To find meaning can actually be stifling because what we'd prefer is a set path and existentialism says there's no such thing as a fucking psychopath, there's religion. God, fuck that. There's none of that. Life is chaos. And you must find meaning in the chaos. And that can be a struggle. The humanistic approach. Rodgers's approach is similar to existential psychology, but it's less anxiety inducing in that.

It kind of posits that, yes. There is no meaning in life, and yes, we have the freedom to find our own meaning boss, we have what's known as the actualizing tendency so humans will naturally veer towards meaning. We will actualised towards meaning. What I mean is that there's there's a force inside of us, which Rogers called the actualizing tendency. Where it's like a built in motivation present in not just humans, but every single life form, that we will naturally grow and seek out the best version of ourselves if the right conditions are present.

And think of it this way, regarding the actualizing tendency, let's think of it in terms of a plant, because all living creatures have actualizing tendencies. So let's take a potato, for instance. If you plant a little potato in a pot, in a room, you get a pot of soil and you put a potato in there, the potato will sprout upwards and it'll show a little green leaf and potatoes have many there actualizing tendency responds to different stimuli.

So one stimuli is photo tropism plants will move toward light. So if your potatoes in one corner of the room and the window on the other corner of the room, then the green leaves, the stem will point towards that window. Also, potatoes respond to geo tropism. The roots will always move downwards towards gravity. Even if the plant is the pot is on its side, the roots will move down towards gravity. Hydro tropism is another one where the roots of a plant will find water.

So potatoes will actualise towards the things that give it life, light, water and gravity. Now, if you ever put a potato, if you ever fucking had potatoes, rice. And they're in the cupboard and you forget about them, you forget that you've got a couple of potatoes in a cupboard and he closed the door and then you open the fucking cupboard a week later and then you jump with the fright because it looks like an alien like this has happened in loads at the moment because of the pandemic.

If you type alien potato into Google, you get some horrifying pictures, because over the course of the pandemic, particularly with students who are living in a flat and then all of a sudden a fucking college is shut down and they have to go home for two months and then come back, there's a lot of people coming back to their flats only to find that their entire cupboards are overcome with these alien potatoes growing big, long tentacles. Right. And this poor little potato by itself in the cupboard has grown these giant root like tentacles that are trying to get out of the cupboard.

Well, that's that's that's the potatoes actualizing tendency. The potato needs to grow into a plant, but it doesn't have any of the conditions in its environment that allows us to do it, but it tries its best. And it because it's stuck in a dark cupboard with no soil, it's this perversion of a potato. It's a big, long tentacle thing with a withering little brown thing in the middle. It's a creepy, strange, alien looking creature.

It's an anti-social potato that is a potato that is engaging in toxic behaviors. What humans are similar, that padano or that little Pereiro still has an actualizing tendency, it's still trying its best to become the best version of itself that it can be. But the lact cobber just won't let it be. So it's it's a weird bastard, I suppose, him after realizing a little bit of a heartache there, that's Pateros during this pandemic. They're quite similar to humans.

During this pandemic, we are turning into weird little alien creatures with big, long, toxic tentacles growing out of our cells.

We're still trying to realize our actualizing tendency, but the environment is not conducive with us achieving our actualizing tendency. But instead of growing big, long, purple tentacles out of our bodies, our tentacles are our thoughts and behaviors are short fuses, our anger, our denial, our judgement of other people, our sadness, our unhappiness, because we don't have access to the equivalent of our light, gravity and water right now. And the things that we as humans self actualize towards are the two big ones are love and safety.

We all want to be loved and we all want to love someone or something else that's a universal part of being human, we all want safety who doesn't want to feel safe, to feel loved and to love someone or something else. And we will always actualize towards these good things to become the best version of ourselves if the right environment is present for us.

Now, the thing is with being human. So as humans, yes, we have an actualizing tendency and we would veer towards self actualization and becoming the best version of ourselves, but also as humans. We created society and culture. And sometimes society and culture. Doesn't always fit in with our actualizing tendency. This is why you hear people saying, you know, we must build a more compassionate society. Think of it this way how how does a person's self actualize within a culture that discriminates on the basis of gender or discriminates on the basis of a color of a person's skin or discriminates on the basis of a person's socio socioeconomic background or discriminates against a person's physical appearance, our sexual preferences?

The list goes on and on and on. These are social constructs which can serve as barriers towards a human's self actualization. The human is still reaching towards safety, self-love and loving other people. But society stepped in and said, no, you are less than so. The journey for you to become a happy person. What meaning is? Is it considerably more difficult? Society creates the collectively all of us as a society. Create these things called conditions of worked that humans have got worth within a society only based on certain conditions.

And the problem with these conditions of what is these can. Fuck up. Fuck up our actualizing tendency, the actualizing tendency, according to Rogers, is informed by a thing called organismic valuing. Right? Organismic valuing is basically that we as organisms, we understand what is good for us. We know what's good for us. If you're given the choice between eating a fresh piece of meat and a rotten piece of meat, you're going to choose the fresh piece of meat because, you know, you just know that's what's good for me.

And the rotten piece of meat is what's going to make me feel sick. So your organismic valuing will. Push you towards the fresh piece of meat, but sometimes society and culture creates these conditions of what? About how we value ourselves that are a little bit closer to the rotten piece of meat and it can distort our actualizing tendency at one thing are two things that humans definitely kind of have organismic valuing for things that we know are good from baat, our positive regard and positive self-regard.

So what humans thrive in and love is positive regard. That simply means from when you're a baby to right now that it's nice to receive love, affection, attention, nurturing from other people. That feels really good when other people approve of us saying nice things to us. When other people appear to think that we're good, that feels good. And what's also nice then as a result of that is positive self-regard. And we develop positive self-regard kind of based on.

The positive regard you received from other people, like a mirror, so if you grow up and the adults around you give you positive regard, they give you love, they give you attention, they give you nurturing, then you start to feel these things towards yourself. That's called positive self-regard, and that's where our self-esteem comes from, how we value ourselves as human beings. Do you love yourself? Are you able to nurture yourself when you think about yourself?

Do you feel OK with how you think about yourself? That's positive self-regard. So our actualizing tendency via organismic valuing means that. We will until we die, I want to be. Loved by all the people, we will want to love other people and we will want to love ourselves and all three of those things create meaning and happiness. Now, where this can go astray is that society. Can create what's called conditions of water, as I mentioned earlier, right, and parents, teachers, peers, the media, what's on television culture in general can create conditions of what?

So you are only worthy of love if and a lot of these conditions of work aren't necessarily helpful, like we live in a capitalist society. So we have a condition of what does equates our person of value as human beings with our economic value, whether how much money do you earn or how valuable are you to the economy and that condition of what exists as a social construct within capitalism. It has nothing to do with the human actualizing potential of love, kindness and self love and these conditions of what that society creates.

Like I said, we we know that we want positive regard, which is the approval of other people, but conditions of work within society. Means that we can only get positive regard from other people on certain conditions, and Rogers called that conditional positive regard. And what can happen there as we bend ourselves then towards because these.

The conditions conditions are positive regarding conditions of and society are very powerful. So what can happen is that a bit like the potato that's trapped in the cupboard we bend ourselves. Into a shape that isn't determined by our organismic valuing our genuine actualizing tendencies, but we bend ourselves towards conditions of work that are created by society that might have nothing to do with who we really are as people. So, for example, you could be a little child and you have parents who very much value success and academic achievement and getting a good job.

And this is who your parents are. So you're a little child and you want to be an artist. Are you want to be a dancer or a musician or you want to play sports and your parents are like, no, that's if you be an artist, there's no guarantee that you're going to become wealthy. You need to study hard in school and become an economist or become a doctor. But who you really are is a creative person. And you might not be interested in these things, but your parents give you positive regard.

They give you praise when you appear to be studious, are interested in earning money, and then they chastise. You are say that you're wasting time when you tried to be creative. But all you know as a child is, you know, you're organismic valuing is telling you what the adults are giving me praise when I'm good at school are the adults are giving me praise when I say that I want to be a doctor or I want to be an economist.

So you notice and recognize this positive regard from other people as a good thing and then they start conditioning leads to conditional, positive self-regard. So now you start to value yourself, your self esteem based on conditions of work that have nothing to do with who you are as a person. Now you're getting older and you want to be a doctor or you want to be an economist, but that's not who the fuck you are. But still, you're reaching toward this goal of doing well in school, earning loads of money.

You're reaching towards this goal. But it doesn't you don't feel happy, you're continually chase and you don't feel happy, you don't feel contenting, you don't know why. And then when you think about doing art or drawing, are making music the things you actually want to do. These things now make you feel like a bad person because you've been raised with these conditional, positive regard that your parents have told you you are a good person when you strive towards being wealthy and you're a bad person when you strive towards something quote unquote useless like art.

And then you internalize that as a condition of positive self-regard, I only want the word the I only have value and worked on these certain conditions and that's just one example. There's a million examples. You could have parents who value physical appearance over anything else of value, how nice your clothes are are they can value how polite you are to strangers. And then you internalize this as I am a good person when I meet certain conditions that have been laid out to me by my parents, my peers, my teachers, the media, whatever.

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I would start playing by podcast. Back to Carol Rogers and I was speaking about conditions of Ward and Rogers states, this can lead towards what's called incongruity, OK, if we live most of our lives. With these conditions of what conditional, positive self-regard you only regard to serve as a good person under certain conditions that were laid out by other people, when we do that, it can lead to a fragmentation of self. We have we can split into our real cells and our ideal says, OK, and what these two things are, is your real self is who you actually are, the real person, the you are genuine organismic valuing your actualizing tendency to light that you are unique to you as a person moves towards to find meaning and happiness, the love that you want to comfort you, that you want the safety that you want, the job that you want, whatever the fuck that is, that you're organismic value and genuinely wants that your real self.

But if you've been given these conditions of what from parents or teachers or whatever those conditions of what create what's known as the ideal self, and the thing with the ideal self is it's not a you that's based on your actualizing tendency and your actual needs. So to take it back, it's the you that's studying to be an accountant, even though you wanted to be a dancer. It's the you that feels you need to be the most attractive person in the room.

It's the you that feels you need to be really financially successful and have a big house and a big car because society has created conditions of worth around this. You only have self-worth when you meet these certain conditions. And the problem with the ideal self is that because it's not your real self. It's always out of reach, it's someone else's standards, and you're always chasing towards it, and it's not even a thing you want to chase towards, it's the potato in the cupboard thinking that the door is the soil.

And also what Kyle Rogers humanistic theory. He states that when our real selves and our ideals are too far apart, when they're too different, when your ideal self is just miles away from who you really are. This is called incongruity. It's the fragmented self. You're living a fake life, essentially, and you don't really know it, but all you experience is neurosis, anxiety, depression and a sense of meaninglessness. Remember I mentioned at the start about existential psychology that it says this.

Life itself has no meaning, but we as humans have the freedom to find meaning, but within humanistic psychology, Rodgers's psychology, Rogers is the same. He says, yes, life has no meaning, but we can find our own meaning, but we will move towards the light. We know what that light is, what society can fuck up where the light is. And that's when you develop an ideal self. And if you are living mostly in your ideal self, which means you believe that your sense of what is dependent upon other people's expectations of you, that's a recipe for deep unhappiness.

And the thing is to with the ideal self, the self that isn't really you that you're continually reaching towards, but you can never reach the ideal self is. Very fragile, your ideal self would continually have you comparing yourself to other people, looking at what other people have and compare in your situation to it and feeling unhappy are looking down on other people. An ideal self will cause us to engage pretty powerful defense mechanisms, such as denial. If you were raised in a house where your parents didn't allow you get angry, like if you were unhappy about something as a kid.

So you try and speak about the thing that's making you unhappy or even throw a tantrum because you're a child. And that's OK if you're a child, because you might be naturally as part of your real self might be to be assertive because the actualizing tendency once love, self-love and also safety and being assertive is how you create safety for yourself. Assertiveness is this is not OK. This is OK. These are my boundaries. That's how you create safety through assertiveness.

But this was all immediately shot down with you must not get angry and no fighting. Nothing like that. Just be quiet. Be quiet. When you do that will educate the child can learn. I am a bad. The adults say that I'm bad when I complain. But when I don't complain and I shut up, the adults tell me that I'm good. And then you internalize that as a condition of positive self-regard of I am a good person when I don't complain and I don't argue and I'm a bad person when I do complain and I do do argue.

So then you become an adult and you're fucking terrified of conflict. So whenever conflict occurs in your life, you have developed in a very fragile ideal self based around not getting into arguments and not speaking up for yourself when you do inevitably. Find conflict, because that's a part of you're going to find conflict in your life. Conflict is going to happen. That's part of being a human being. And conflict, as I mentioned, is what happens when we search for safety, when we want safety.

And safety doesn't necessarily mean physical safety. Like I said, it can mean your boundaries. When we search for safety, sometimes we must engage in conflict in order to achieve our safety, the healthy ways to do a true assertiveness, which is healthy conflict. But when conflict occurs, you don't speak up for yourself. You don't let your needs known to the other person. You don't tell the other person that you're unhappy about whatever it is that is happening and.

You don't meet your needs, are you engage in denial, such as passive aggression, because you were raised not to be aggressive, will say not to be aggressive or to create conflict. So instead, to resolve the conflict, you become passive aggressive people who were raised to not to not engage in conflict or to express their anger or to let their needs be known, still need to meet their needs. So often adults who are like this will get their needs through being sneaky or being manipulative, because these are ways to meet your needs for safety without engaging in any conflict.

And that will lead to an unhappy existence because you're either lying to people all the time are instead of actually having an adult discussion about something, refusing to talk to someone, giving them the silent treatment or to them, which are defense mechanisms for healthy conflict. And the nice thing, too, as well about. Rogers's theory and Rodgers's way of looking at that is that then allows us to be more compassionate and empathic. So if you are dealing with a person and this person.

Is passive aggressive or isn't telling the truth or is instead of arguing, which are lying to you are. Trying to trying to manipulate your true lies are trying to turn all the people against you, all these things are deeply unpleasant. But isn't it healthy to be able to view that person's behavior and say this person's behavior isn't acceptable? But essentially, this is the only way they know right now how to meet their needs because actually having conflict and being assertive, they're not capable of that.

And that then allows you to dislike the person's behavior while still valuing them as a human being and have an empathy which then protects only icebox. And you don't experience toxic anger towards someone who's lying to you. So if as adults we find ourselves in a situation where there's incongruity between our real self and our ideal self, and as a result of this, we've got unhappiness and an inability to find a sense of meaning because you don't know what your personal meaning is.

And then this is unnecessary suffering. Like, what do you do about it? Well, that's that's where psychotherapy comes in, because Carol Rogers is also considered. The founder of Modern Psychotherapy and Humanistic Psychotherapy. Tries to help. The person who is in therapy to find what the real self is, to kind of go back over their childhood, to interrogate their emotions, to become aware of what is my ideal self, what is my real self, and how can I move towards who I actually am once I find out who that person is and that they are.

That's the journey of therapy. That's the journey of psychotherapy. The therapist would ask you questions. For you trying to arrive at your own answers to try and identify what are your conditions of what what are the rules and values that you have about yourself or about other people whereby you apply what and a good way to get an inkling of it outside of therapy is. When we get our ideas selves, we tend to project these things on other people. What are you jealous of?

What are you jealous of? Other people? Are you if if somebody, you know, is very physically attractive or gets a lot of attention from guards or from lads, if this person, does that make you feel jealous? Does that make you want to put that person down in your head or talk shit about them? Or does it make you want to wish bad things upon them? Are you are you jealous of because jealousies, jealousy is a part of being human.

Why are you jealous about of other people? How do you feel when someone has a nice car or a really good job? Do you want to call that person a dickhead or are you simply fair play to them? That's a nice car. I wouldn't mind one of them, but fuck, it seems like a lot of effort. You'll find your ideal self in in what deeply threatens you in other people's behavior are similarly, if you have a nice car and someone else is a shit car and all of a sudden you're going to have fucked them with their shit car fucking pricks with their shit car, really toxic, angry reactions to another person's possessions or appearance or behavior that has fuck all to do with you.

That's where the ideal self is like the most upsetting and the the most unpleasant part of my job is having to deal with every so often the outrage of some people's ideas settles in particular. When I when I released my first book of short stories, some of the fucking hate mail that I got from strangers, and these aren't people who had read the book, just men my own age who'd found out that I was writing a book sending me all this vicious hate mail, saying things like fucking how the fuck do you think you are?

You're just an aged from Limerick with a bag. And I said, You think you can be a writer, you've no talent, your fucking talent is. And then one person tried to corner a bomb, a fucking bomb threat into a reading. I was doing just this unparalleled rage from strangers who don't know me. And all I done was announce that I'm writing a book of fiction. And this was deeply, deeply triggering to them. And the only way I could rationalize it and handle is I had to say to myself, these poor lads grew up in a house where one of their parents idolized Arthur's.

And maybe this lad doesn't have the desire, talent or ability to be an artist. But his parents were like, well, artists are the only people that fucking matter. And this writer is brilliant and that writer is brilliant. Or if only you could write like this person. And now they're an adult who thinks they want to become a writer and tries and tries and tries. And then when someone else steps into that space and actually writes a fucking book, it has triggered decades and decades of unowned fury.

But now I'm dealing with it. And there's a saying that, like, there's no one is angry as a failed artist. And in my experience, that's not the case at all, because I never get shit from, quote unquote failed artists, because failed artists are people who have at least tried. They've tried to make something and maybe it didn't succeed. These people aren't furious over. They're a bit disappointed. The hate mail that I get is from people who never tried the anger, from its artists who never tried because they were too scared to fail.

And that, to me, often suggests a deep idea of self. It's a defense mechanism. Maybe they simply can't but have this deep pressure to do it because of a condition of what? That's where the blind fury comes from. I'm not talking about someone talking shit are a little bit of a grudge. I'm talking off the scale blind fury from a stranger that exists but in in therapy and psychotherapy. A therapist would speak to a person, try and find the things that has them feeling contempt, extreme contempt, jealousy, anger for strangers or other people, and then probing.

What is it about this person releasing in the book that makes you want to get so angry? Or what is it about this person having a drive in a Mercedes that makes you call them a prick? And then you peel back the layers and you find. Oh, I feel that I will only have words if I become an author, I will ah, I will only be a good person if I drive a Mercedes. And where did you learn that?

And you delve back and back and back and the process of therapy, humanistic therapy, to get that person to arrive to a place where they themselves are identifying their real self and their ideal self and then hopefully leave in therapy. No longer value in these things, no longer giving a flying shit about books or about Mercedes or how good looking they are and instead following the path of what they actually are. And the thing is to the humanistic therapy quite a lot, it ends in quite a lot of divorces.

Some people can realize that, like I've chosen a career and a partner that has not fulfilled my needs in any way whatsoever because I've been living my life towards an ideal, a fabricated version of myself that was dependent upon conditions of what I learned from my parents or society. And now I've a better idea of who I am. And these things seem really silly to me, the person moves from what's called conditional positive self-regard to unconditional positive self-regard, which is basically.

I have intrinsic value as a human being, and no aspect of my behavior defines my worth as a human being. Whether I'm writing books, having a cool job, earning money and having a good looking partner, being physically attractive, these things I'm still allowed want them. But they do not define my work as a human being that do not define my work because my work is intrinsic and it's intrinsic to me. And I'm no better than anybody else.

And nobody else is better than me because all humans are unique and too complex to evaluate against each other. And when we travel, the journey of therapy moved towards. Unconditional, positive self-regard to love ourselves unconditionally, unconditionally, without condition then. Your actualizing tendency and your organismic valuing you, you you know what it is that you move towards to make you the best version of yourself, which is unique to you. If your issue is around conflict, you learn to become an assertive person who is able to express their needs and healthily engage in conflict.

If you're a bank manager who should have been a dancer. All of a sudden, you're trying to become a dancer now, because that gives you meaning if you think you were supposed to be a writer. But instead, you'd have been better off doing science than you move towards there, and that gives you meaning identifying what our ideal selves are, stripping these things away, learning to love and accept our selves, unconditional, positive regard. And then where the little potato in the cupboard.

But we're not in the cupboard anymore. We're in a pot or in soil. And we know where the light is and we know where the ground is and we know where the water is. And we grow into a healthy potato plant free from the conditions of what. I hope that was a nice overview for you. For theories of Karen Rogers, if you're interested in read more about Carl Rogers, he's got a book called Unbecoming a Person, which is his seminal work.

He's written loads about humanistic psychotherapy and the humanistic psychology and Rodgers's view of personality. When you can view humans like this. And you realize that even though some people can behave in ways. That aren't helpful to those around them, that these people are essentially locked in a cycle of completely avoidable suffering and that ultimately everybody has intrinsic worth. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to love someone else. And everyone wants to be safe. But some people because of society.

Are just looking in the wrong places, and it's Harten them. All right. God bless. Don't know what to be back next week. I'd like to think a little heartache, I would like to think a little heartache, but this month has been mostly psychology podcasts because that's where my head is at. That's where my head's at at the moment. I'm working on myself and I'm trying to keep on trying to make sure that I'm fucking and lads and trying to make sure that I'm coping.

So I've had to I've had to open some books I haven't opened in. And six or seven years, to be honest, Michael Rogers book was up on the shelf getting dusty. And I opened it for the first time, the last couple of days and looked through it to remind myself of this stuff. So there are not. Becoming contemptuous for my fucking fellow man, because I can't be doing that. Fuck that. Yacked. A traditional medicinals, we believe that nature knows best.

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