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Jan. 31, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:55:46
1572 Sunday Show 31 January 2010 - Guest Psychotherapist Daniel Mackler - Freedomain Radio

Listeners ask Daniel Mackler about his approach to therapy and self-knowledge.

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Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us.
This is Pinch Punch, the last day of the month of January 2010.
And as a special, special present or prize for the listeners, we have the psychotherapist Daniel Mackler, who I recently had a very stimulating and, by all reports from the listeners, exciting and thought-provoking interview with.
And he has kindly agreed to join us and answer any questions that people may have.
A brief Caveat is probably in order as usual, which is that this is just like advice column stuff.
This is no substitute for an actual conversation with a therapist or anything like that.
But if you have general questions, which you think would be useful to have responded to by Mr.
Mackler, please do speak them up.
And I'm sure he will be more than happy to take his best swing at it.
But just remember, it's no substitute for actually talking to a therapist, and please try and keep your questions on the general side of things.
So thank you so much for taking the time, Daniel.
I really do appreciate it. I know that you're winding down your practice, which I think is a shame for your patients, but I'm sure it's good for your future desires.
And I really do appreciate you taking the time.
Well, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. My pleasure. So, I'm not going to do my normal Rambo Tangents Biddlefrest intro, but I'm instead going to invite you to ask questions.
There are a number of different ways that you can ask Daniel questions.
First, of course, most importantly, smoke signals, particularly if you are an Iroquois.
Secondly, we have carrier pigeons.
Third, we have mime video cam uploads.
And last but not least, we have Skype.
Followed by the chat room, which you can type into and ask a question.
Followed by a phone number, which you can call into at 315-876-9705.
Just please let James P. in the chat room know that you're calling.
And you can join in there.
So I will not do anything other than ask you to ask Daniel whatever is on your mind about the process of therapy, finding a good therapist, what you can expect, what you cannot expect.
And if you have questions, please spreken Sie ab.
Well, so I guess let's go.
Oh, hi. Hi.
I was just reading your website and some of the essays that were on it, and some questions came up around the three differences between therapy and friendship essay.
Oh, yeah. I see.
So I'm trying to learn how this all works.
So you're Greg, I guess, right?
Yes. Okay. Hi, Greg.
Hi. Good to meet you. Good to meet you, too.
So yeah, I was reading that and I liked the article and I thought it was really well written and really well thought out.
And I just had some questions or some clarifications around especially the Section 3 personal questions.
Okay, you're going to have to remind me because I probably haven't read it in about six months myself.
Sure, sure. Well, basically in Section 1 you said the purpose of each relationship.
The therapist's purpose is to help the patient face his buried traumas.
And that's just a very brief synopsis.
The patient's purpose is to grow at all costs, and friendship is mutually beneficial selfishness.
Yeah, that's kind of provocative, what I said.
Oh, I fundamentally agree with all of that.
But I had some questions around personal questions, section three.
Okay. Especially the bit in friendship wherein you said, it is acceptable for a friend to ask any personal question for the sake of his own personal growth, but only insofar as it respects the delicate balance of the friendship.
This requires much patience, self-awareness, and appropriate mutual self-appraisal on the part of both friends.
On the contrary, it is rarely appropriate for a friend to ask or request a question intended to stimulate the other to grow or explore.
That is a therapeutic question and does not belong in a friendship.
And I was just sort of curious on if you could...
I need to process that for a second.
Now, first let me just think about it.
I have to decide if I agree with what I wrote.
And I think I do. So I think I'll feel comfortable explaining it better and defending it.
Sure. And that just sort of, I guess, raised some questions in me as to the difference between mutual growth and asking personal questions of each other in the context of...
Because even if a friend asks a question that's very personal to another friend...
Right. Where you would draw that line between a therapeutic-type question and a question intended to grow in a friendship sense?
Okay, so where would I draw the line?
I guess the way I handle that question is, and the way I do a lot of my writing when I come up with my quote series, is I... I use my own personal friendships as my model, and I also use my relationships with my patients as my model.
So I find with my personal friendships, and also the way my friends treat me, I actually find it rather offensive when people who are friends with me start asking me questions where their purpose is to help me grow.
I don't like that. And so I apply the golden rule, where I don't ask other people questions like that.
And I know some people that love being asked questions like that, and they like friendships that are sort of like therapy relationships, and they find that very appropriate.
I don't.
Now, I don't know if I'm exactly answering your question, but the flip side is when I'm with patients of mine, whenever I have a personal question to ask them, I bounce it I self-reflect and ask myself, am I asking this because I'm just generally curious?
And there's lots of things about my patients that I'm very curious about at times.
And I could spend hours just picking apart things in their lives that I want to know just for my own edification.
But if I find that there's not really a therapeutic reason to ask the question, then I don't ask it.
And now sometimes it's complicated because not only is there a therapeutic reason for me asking it, but I also am curious.
In that case, I say, It's fine, and I ask the question.
But if it's just for curiosity, I don't ask it.
Now, where do I draw the line?
So I guess you're asking...
Well, for example, the level of appropriateness of...
I guess just to be in full disclosure, I do have some friendships wherein my friends help me to grow and ask me questions intended to help me grow.
So I have some of those friendships, and I do like that.
Right. And I was curious if it would be more like a universal principle of this is an unhealthy thing to do or if that's more of just a this is my personal preference and it's worked for me.
Right. And now here's the complexity in me answering this question.
And this is also the complexity in me writing the essays on my website.
If I write things that I set it down as a theory and I say this is unhealthy and this is healthy and it's a distinct thing, then basically what I'm saying to you is your friendships are unhealthy in certain ways.
And that's a complicated thing for me to answer because whether I think it or not, it doesn't mean I want to say it.
And so I guess my entire website is based on my personal experience.
Is it true?
Is it 100% factual, everything I'm saying?
Not necessarily, but I state it as fact.
And I come with the assumption that everything I'm saying has a subjective quality, but the degree to which...
My self-reflection actually overlaps with truth or allows my thoughts to overlap with truth.
That's the degree to which it is objective, but obviously because I'm just a person, it's going to be subjective.
I know I'm still just talking in a lot of circles here, but basically...
If I watched your friendship and I could be 100% with your friendships where you were doing this, and I could be 100% completely honest, I might say, you know, it makes me uncomfortable.
I wouldn't want to do that in a friendship.
I wouldn't want friends that ask me questions like that.
Because the bottom line is, I think it's, in my life, I am my own therapist.
I don't have a therapist anymore.
I haven't had one for a long time.
And I practice therapy with myself.
So I ask myself, I don't want my friends asking me those kind of questions.
And I really do get offended when friends ask me questions.
And I'm very sensitive to it when friends ask me therapeutic questions.
And usually for me, when I am in a relationship with someone where they start asking me therapeutic questions, I pull away.
Now, I have some close friends I'm trying to find if there are exceptions to my theory that I created.
And there might be very rare occasions if I'm in a lot of pain, I'm really, really suffering, and I'm in a lot of turmoil, and I might have a friend who asks me a therapeutic-like question.
And I might accept that role as them being in the role of sort of almost like a friend therapist to me, but It would have to be very rare.
Because I can think of examples, actually, where some of my closest friends have asked me therapeutic questions and I don't find it inappropriate.
But if it starts becoming, I would say, more than one-tenth of one percent of our relationship, then I don't want it.
Sorry, somebody just asked, what is a therapeutic question, if you could give an example?
That's a good thing to say.
I'm trying to think of a good example.
Let me think. Well, for instance...
Let's say I'm talking with a friend about my relationship with my parents and ways in which I might be replicating my relationship with my parents, with other people in my life, other authority figures, for example.
And the friend might ask me, well, what might motivate you to replicate those Your relationship, your ancient relationship with your parents, with the modern authority figures in your life.
And then I can picture the friend scratching their chin and looking at me.
That's like behaving like a therapist.
So it would be sort of an open-ended question where the motivation on the part of the person, the friend who's asking the question, is to help me grow.
And on the other hand, I could see the friend asking I'm trying to think if I could formulate a question that a friend might ask.
If I say, you know, I think I'm replicating my relationship with my parents with certain authority figures, modern authority figures in my life.
The friend might go, oh, I'm really curious about that.
Could you tell me more about how you're doing that?
Just because I'm really curious.
It's basically a similar question.
They want to know more. They want to get more information.
But in one case, the motivation is...
To satisfy their own curiosity and to learn.
And that way, I feel like I'm dealing with a peer and there's a mutual relationship there.
In the other case, I feel like the person is putting themselves in a position where they're not asking for their own curiosity.
They're asking to help me and I feel that the balance and the friendship becomes unequal.
They're taking a more powerful role.
And that throws off the balance of the friendship, and I don't like that.
On the other hand, with a therapist, I don't want the therapist to pretend like they're my peer and my equal, because that's not why I'd be going to them.
That's not why I'd be paying them money.
And I basically would be using the therapist in a therapeutic relationship as an extension of myself, as opposed to as a separate person.
And I don't know if that exactly makes sense, and I still feel like I might be being very long-winded, but I'm just doing my best to answer it.
No, long-winded is definitely the purpose.
And I'd just like to add a thought or two from a non-therapist perspective.
But I think that, I mean, it is an interesting question because a friendship which is based on intimacy and mutual respect should have that openness of heart and openness of mind that you can ask questions and so on.
But as far as I understand it, the therapeutic relationship is an authority relationship, right?
The therapist is assumed to be an expert, you know, has training and has a goal in mind.
Which is sort of revealed over time, which he's leading the person towards, the patient towards, on a long-term basis.
It's a series of questions, which in a sense the therapist is asking because he believes he already knows the answer.
But the patient... That's an interesting question.
Can I cut in for a second there?
This is actually an interesting question you brought.
I agree with everything you said until the last thing.
And I thought actually it was a really good explanation that you just gave.
But the last thing is the therapist asks the question that he already...
Thinks he already knows the answer to.
Actually, for me, that's a criteria that I use the exact opposite.
Where I sit with patients, I try to never ask questions that I already know the answer to, to my patients.
Because otherwise, I feel like I'm asking rhetorical questions, and that's a bit insulting.
Because it's sort of like, it's like then I'm sort of leading the witness.
As opposed to, I do use my curiosity and my relationship with my patients as a basic guiding force for myself.
But it's just simply the motivation for why I'm in this relationship is completely different than why I'm in a relationship with a friend.
It's the same thing being in a romantic relationship.
It's not necessarily bad in a romantic relationship, hypothetically, if you believe that romantic relationships are okay, to be sexually involved with a partner, whereas it's completely inappropriate for a therapist to do it because of that.
One is the power differential between the therapist and the patient versus friends or romantic partners where I believe theoretically there should be a level of equality there.
And the second one is how in the world could a therapist being sexually involved with a patient Allow the therapist to further the patient's goals of growing.
I think it's far too easy for the exact opposite to happen as the result of a sexual relationship.
I'm taking it at a different angle, but I just wanted to touch on that point.
When I ask patients questions, I often hold my questions back.
I don't ask them if I feel like I already know the answer.
I wait until I can get a question that I really don't know the answer to.
And then it creates a lot more energy in the room.
And I think also people can pick up on it when they're being asked a question that the questioner already knows the answer to.
I think they often unconsciously, sometimes consciously, can feel like it's a bit of a game.
And so I hold my questions and I wait until I get something that I really don't know.
And then I can ask with really stimulated curiosity.
No, I agree. And that's an excellent clarification, of course.
It certainly didn't mean to imply that you know exactly what the person's going to say, but it is a guided conversation on the part of a therapist.
Otherwise, you'd be like a random question generator or some guy from the street, right?
So there is a sort of guidedness to some degree to the conversations with the therapist, would that be fair to say?
Totally, totally right on, yes.
Right, and that's not the case with friendships, because friendships do not, should not have, at least, these roles can switch, the authority roles can switch, but friendships should not get locked into an authority pattern, and when you are having a guided conversation that is an authority situation, like when you're describing your symptoms to the doctor, that is not an equal relationship in terms of knowledge and expertise.
So I think for friendships, for one person to take the sort of, the guided An expert role in the friendship creates an imbalance of equality.
It's okay, you know, little bits, as you were saying, Daniel, if you're really upset and a need to, somebody like a drowning man needs a log, then it's great, but it shouldn't be one-sided and in perpetuity.
Yes, and you also said something else that I liked, that there was an implication of what you said, that a friendship is not a guided relationship, and that's a difference that I didn't actually get in my essay, that there's a guided quality and a purpose and guidedness In the therapeutic relationship, where the relationship is very open-ended.
I'm like, hey, I don't hang out with my friends.
Hey, I'm going to meet you tonight at 7 o'clock for dinner, and we're going to have a subject for this meeting, and we're going to go in this direction, and I'm going to lead you, and maybe next time you'll lead me.
It's not like that at all. Yeah, there is a spontaneity and a sharing that goes on that is not.
And of course, the therapeutic relationship in some ways is a little bit more focused upon the patient.
It should be, I guess, a fair amount more focused on the patient than on the therapist.
And that, again, should not be the case in a friendship of equals in the long run, I mean.
Right. Now, here's an interesting thing.
I'm going to throw, I don't know what you'd call it, throw a wrench in the middle of this one, that when I work with patients who are dealing with Psychotic issues.
Sometimes they're floridly psychotic.
They're in a very different reality.
They're extremely anxious.
They're anxious to the point of terrified.
They're hallucinating.
They're delusional. Often, a lot of what I'm saying about therapy doesn't apply.
Sometimes I do come down to the level of equal stuff.
Sometimes I reveal totally more information.
It's a totally different way of doing therapy.
So I when I write about therapy, often I'm writing about therapy with people who are not psychotic, but with psychotic people, whoa, the game is totally different.
Game in quotes, that is.
Right.
And just just for those who don't know the technical term, floridly psychotic refers to anybody who disagrees with anything on free domain radio.
I think that's really, really important to clarify.
No, if you could just explain that term.
And you have to add anyone who disagrees with anything on iraresoul.com.
That's right.
Exactly.
People who are very much out of reality and even hallucinating in someone.
Is that is that fair to say?
Which is a complicated thing, because what then again, that begs the question of what is reality?
Because, of course, you can easily suddenly define 99 percent of society as being quite psychotic.
And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that argument.
I don't think I would either, but...
So Greg, did that take a fair swing at your question?
Yeah, I thought it did.
So I guess just one more point that came up while you guys were talking for me was, I guess...
I mean, if friends do genuinely get joy out of, like, this would be how I see my friendships, like, genuinely get joy out of helping each other with self-growth, but it's not in sort of a guided therapeutic sense, that would be, I mean, from what I get the sense that you're saying, like, for example, and changing that role, like, it's not always one friend, but it's just like, hey, you need some help, let me talk through this issue with you, oh, I'm having some trouble with this, and then So much more of a fluid sense.
Would that be more along the lines of the spontaneous friendship?
Probably, yeah. And I also think this is a weakness on my website.
I state things in black and white a lot of times for the sake of brevity, for the sake of clarity, to make a point.
And so what you're saying, I think, is you're talking about more of the shades of gray.
And I may not be disagreeing with you there because I can often read my own stuff and say, oh, that didn't apply to what I just did yesterday.
Right. Yeah, so I think that's a fair thing that you said.
Gotcha. Okay, well, I have no more qualms about any of that stuff, and that was a good explanation.
So I guess the next person who has questions, or if you guys have more to add.
No, I think that's great.
If you have another question for the highly esteemed Daniel Mackler, please speak up to the mic.
And we really would like to take the next in either Orkish or Klingon, which I think Daniel's pretty fluent in both.
So feel free to jump into either of those dialects.
That was Klingon.
Oh, I know. I know.
Alright, this is time for people to speak.
We have lots of people. Yes, go ahead.
Hi, I just have a quick question for Daniel and maybe Stefan can comment on the topic a little bit.
Stefan has frequently talked about this idea of this sort of ecosystem and I was wondering if Daniel had a Sort of similar concept in terms of psychology and how the two might compare.
Sorry, just before you respond to that, because I don't think Daniel's aware of the way that I approach self-knowledge from a philosophical standpoint, which is I have a phrase that I use called the MECO system, which is that I am not a sort of singular identity or personality, but I am a sort of ecosystem of Thank you.
Thank you. Did you make up that word, the MECO system? Yeah, yeah.
With an M? It's catchy.
Pretty good. I never thought of it.
Yeah, I like it. So what was your question again?
I don't know your name, sorry. I see HKWFDR. Yeah, his question was, do you have a suggestion?
Sorry to interrupt, just to paraphrase.
Do you have, what is your, I guess, approach to the personality?
Do you view it as a singularity, as more sort of competing or complementary psychological forces?
Well, I think that your idea of a Miko system is pretty new.
I could imagine it would be pretty nuanced and pretty complex.
I, for the sake of simplicity, and I hope it's not being simplistic, but for the sake of simplicity, I believe that the core of the personality is a true self.
And that that true self is...
It's going to sound really new age and cheesy.
I don't mean it that way, but like a ball of energy within us that is true, that knows truth, and that that is the essence of who we are on the inside.
And that because of our traumas, we develop other sides of ourselves that we Swallow up other people's personalities, swallow up our parents' personalities, swallow up other relatives' personalities, other important people, swallow up ideas of our society, swallow up mixed up ideas.
We develop defenses like denial and projection and all sorts of different things that we've swallowed up inside of ourselves that you could say make up that ecosystem.
And I might put But I still would differentiate that I think there's two parts of us.
There's the true self that's the core of who we are and always will be the core of who we are.
And no matter how screwed up or messed up we or anyone gets, they've always got that core of perfect true self within them.
And then there's all the other parts of them that make up that ecosystem.
And that, to me, could all be fashioned under the rubric of a false self.
And there's a million different parts of it that interact and that interacts with the true self.
And it's very, very complex.
And it often can be very hard to sort out what is the true self?
What is the false self?
What is real? What is not real?
What is true? What is our healthy part?
What is our unhealthy part?
And I'm going to go back to the last question that Greg asked when he said, if I get joy from something in a friendship, and that's what I wanted to comment on also, is that just because we get joy out of something doesn't mean that it's healthy.
So things can give joy to the false self.
That can actually be very unhealthy.
For instance, a person shoots heroin, they're going to get high as a kite, and they're going to be feeling massive amounts of joy.
But that doesn't mean their true self is feeling joy.
But overall, the color that the, quote, mycosystem reduces to, mycosystem as I define it, as it would reduce to, would be joyous.
But things that And sometimes there's contradicting things.
Things that bring joy to the true self can sometimes bring complete misery to other parts of the personality that are traumatized or false, which is why healing, the process of becoming healthier, is such a miserable and painful process.
I feel like I'm going off on a tangent.
Is that okay? Does that make sense what I'm saying?
No, I think it does, obviously.
And I think it complements at least the degree to which I formulate that, which is that The true self is like the empirical and rational self that deals with reality, but the false self is that which has had to conform to duress, to threats or to the threats of withdrawal from others, often parents or caregivers.
And so when we have to conform to the expectations of others, we're no longer rooted in reality and empiricism and reason.
We're rooted in conformity to prejudice, and that is a very hard thing to shake off over time.
Right. And I think what you said also is the true self is the empirical self that, I don't know, navigates reality or something like that.
I would also say the true self, that's the intellectual side of the true self to me.
The emotional side is where our passion comes from, where our vital essence as human beings come from, where our desire to live comes from.
That comes from the true self and the sides of our self that are messed up.
That's the false self.
Or sometimes the true self gets translated through the lenses of the false self.
So the false self can be very passionate or seem very passionate, but really it's just the basic essence of us, the basic beauty of us being translated through these distorted lenses.
So the passion can come out in very strange, peculiar, and sometimes even perverse ways.
Yeah, and we've also talked to this show at least about how we can only meet in reality.
We can't meet in illusion.
So the degree to which we believe things that are false...
It's the degree to which we actually can't connect in an honest and authentic way with others.
So the true self is so valuable because it is really the only aspect of the self that is capable of sustained intimacy rather than show-off-it-ness or manipulation or over-sexualization or that kind of stuff.
Right. Right.
Now, sorry, I just wanted to check.
Did we answer the...
We always go stampeding off on these planes of speculation, which is great, but did we actually answer the question that the fine gentleman had asked at the beginning?
How do you feel? Did we swing and miss, or are we not even in the ballpark?
No, I think that's right on point.
Thank you. Excellent, excellent.
And was there anything else you wanted to add or to ask, or should we move on to another caller?
No, I think you should move on.
I'll just say very quickly that I really enjoyed the conversations that you've had with him and that I've enjoyed checking out some of his own videos and learning his own perspective.
Oh, yeah. And thank you. And one of the people in the chat room has mentioned that, Daniel, your iraresoul.com is where your DVD is available.
Take these broken wings and said that he found it enormously enjoyable and is highly recommended and rich and valuable and has recommended it to others.
So I just wanted to mention that. Well, how nice.
That definitely gives a back rub to my insecurities.
Hopefully not stimulating them and energizing them.
No, no. It calms them down.
Thanks. I appreciate whoever said that.
That was Dave. Okay, so we have obviously time for more questions.
If you have a question for Daniel, please unmute and pipe up.
Oh, yeah. I guess while we're waiting for somebody to come up with a question, I'm a big fan of dreams and looking at nightly dreams as some fantastic information coming from the core, coming from the true self.
What are your approach to dreams?
Do you find that stuff useful? Do you find it sort of extraneous material or do you use it in your therapy at all?
Therapy with myself or therapy with other people?
Let's start with others. Well, with others, I sometimes...
Ask them if they're interested in looking at their dreams.
Sometimes I spontaneously do if I'm curious about what they're doing in that part of themselves.
But often people bring their dreams in anyway.
And so, yeah, I use their dreams and I try to help them find out what their dreams mean.
I mean, I totally do not believe that dreams are extraneous.
I also do believe dreams come from the true self, but they're translated through the lens of the false self.
So dreams are, by their very nature, metaphorical.
They're not straightforward and reality-based.
So I think if they came from the true self, they would not be metaphorical.
And I also believe that if someone fully resolved all their traumas and theoretically no longer had any false self, they just were purely true and purely reality-based, they would have no need to dream at all.
But I've never met anyone who's done that or who's been there.
On the other hand, I've met people who say they don't dream at all.
And I think the reason for that is not that they don't dream at all.
It's just that they're so disassociated from themselves that they are split off with any conscious memory of their dreams.
and they're actually dreaming like mad, but they just don't know it.
So what I do when I work with patients who bring dream material, and as often people will say to me, well, what does it mean?
And this is an interesting thing.
I recently had someone who came in for a first session and they asked me, I had a dream.
What do you think it means? And I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to have answered them because I feel to really...
I think you really have to understand the person really well.
The dream is always a part of a context, and the context is their whole life and their psychology and their childhood and their history.
Often if I don't know someone that well, I can still take a stab at it, but I think that's because I'm on the pulse of people's personalities pretty well.
But if I don't know someone at all and really don't know them, I wouldn't I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to think I could really get a grasp of what their dreams are, considering often I have dreams myself and it takes me a while to come to even a rudimentary understanding of what they mean.
On the other hand, a lot of times I do feel like I can figure out a lot of what my dreams mean and I find them incredibly useful to me.
And when I work with patients and they bring dreams in, I like to look at the therapy relationship as a collaborative relationship where both of us strive together To figure out what this dream means.
But ultimately, I defer to what they think the dream means.
Not only because at a deeper core level, especially unconsciously, people always know themselves better than I know them.
But at the same time, the goal of therapy in my mind is not...
I mean, I said it on my website. The goal is to uncover traumas and heal.
But at the same time, I feel that a profound goal in therapy is for the person who's in therapy to learn how to do it themselves.
To learn how to do self-therapy.
So if I'm sitting there just being the god on high, scratching my chin and analyzing their dreams for them and doing all the work for them, and then they say, thank you, thank you, I got so much out of that.
Here's your money, you deserve it.
Then I feel like what I'm also subtly, subliminally telling them is that you need me to analyze your dreams.
You need me to heal.
And you really can't do it yourself.
And I don't want that.
Because I wouldn't want anyone to do that to me.
I like doing my own dream analysis.
There probably are times where other people could be very useful in helping me analyze my dreams.
But ultimately, I like doing it myself.
And I put a lot of energy into my life into it.
And some of my patients put a lot of energy into dream analysis and dream work.
Other people that I work with put no energy into dream work, and that's their choice.
Well, it's funny because people talk a lot about the subjectivity of dreams, but if you've had conversations with people exploring the metaphorical content or the life content of dreams, it's hard to believe that it remains purely subjective because when you really get a dream or at least you get a core part of a dream, everybody in the conversation gets goosebumps at the same time.
I know that's not scientific, but it really, really does occur when you get a dream.
I just had one last night which I thought was interesting and I was going to mention it today if the subject came up, so I guess I will.
Which is two different ways of looking at something in a dream, right?
So I dreamt last night that I was swimming in the ocean, and sort of gentle killer whales were surfacing with their huge black fins, dorsal fins, and it was really quite beautiful.
And then I saw a freighter with a whole bunch of black guys standing on the railing, and I think I saw the flag.
It was a Finnish freighter.
and so you have killer whales and you're like what what on earth are these these black finnish sailors but then i thought well killer whales are black and we have black finnish sailors in the way the dream is talking about two sides of the same coin right because killer whales can be thought of as black sailors with fins right black finnish sailors i mean it really is quite an amazing thing what dreams do in terms of just giving you different ways of looking at the same thing and expanding your consciousness so i just wanted to mention that i think it's really worth uh
it's really really worth uh looking into your dreams and talking about them with people we have a Can I try something for one second, Stefan?
I think you'll have a laugh on this.
I want to just try a hypothetical experiment.
Now let's say that was my dream, and I had dreamed that exact dream.
Can I interpret it for myself as if it were mine?
Please. I think you'll find this interesting.
If I had that exact dream, I would say, first of all, whales usually are a symbol for me of power, strength, and...
And freedom, in a way.
Also, killer whales work in pods, so it would be me wanting to be more socially connected, probably, and feeling alienated.
Then, interestingly, Finnish.
I was actually writing a lot about Finland yesterday and today.
You're right, yeah. Yes, I'm planning to go to Finland in the next few months to study a programming That is getting the best results in the whole world with people diagnosed with schizophrenia.
They're getting 85% cure rates off medication.
So I'm going to Finland. So I would right away say, oh, this is my hope to go there and my anxiety perhaps about going there.
And then the other thing I'd probably say is I'm ending my therapy practice in a month.
I'm finishing it.
So that's probably what's finished.
Right, finished. Yeah, that's good.
That's good.
So that goes to show for me how it would be perhaps a completely different interpretation than what it represents for you.
Right.
Right.
And I could actually have that dream very easily.
It would be something that would make sense to me.
Right.
No.
And I think, again, I don't want to sort of dip into the whole dream thing.
But you may have slightly different symbols.
I think for me it is I've had dreams about whales for many years.
And to me they really are around the true self because they kind of go to the surface but they can also go very deep.
And I think that sort of depth of knowledge, of self-knowledge is really, really important.
And the saying that the two things are the same, the ship and the killer whales, to me, is sort of like saying that the instinctual depth which self-knowledge generates, which is, as you say, sort of very complex and deep and emotional, is in a way the same as all of the technology that we're using to have this conversation, is in a way the same as all of the technology that we're
this ship that sails on the surface and so on, that all of the abstractions and technology and complexities of how we communicate as a community, this is sort of the free domain radio community, is not different or distinct from that sort of self-knowledge.
So communication in a community is essential for pursuing self-knowledge.
And I think that the depth is very important to the technology at the surface.
And those two have very strong similarities.
So that's sort of what I got out of it.
But you're right. You can go six million different ways.
But what I find is that when you get one that's really core, you do kind of get that, ooh, you know, that kind of tingly feeling, which is really, really helpful.
And I hope that you will, if you get a chance, talk to us about what you extract from Finland, because I think that's very, very helpful.
Now, sorry, we've had another question, which is you because a listener is asking you have, of course, Daniel, have a very strong history of journaling.
And so the question is, what is your approach to journaling?
What formats do you use?
Do you keep a dream journal, an emotion journal, event journal, a weekly revision of writings?
What is your approach to your own journaling, if you don't mind talking about that?
I'd love to talk about it.
It shifts, but I have a general format that used to be a bit different.
Right now, My system is, first thing I do when I wake up in the morning before I do anything is I roll out of bed, I turn on my computer, and I don't want to waste any time because when I first wake up, there's so much material in my head, so much unconscious material that's right at the surface that I don't want to miss it.
For me, that's low-hanging fruit.
I keep my computer on a hibernate state, so it doesn't even have to kick into Microsoft Word or anything.
I press the button, within five seconds my computer's there, and I just start writing immediately.
But the first thing that I write down is all my dreams.
And I'm actually less rigorous about it than I used to be, because what I used to do is I used to wake up three or four times in the middle of the night And get on my computer and write down my dreams.
I would be, you know, bleary-eyed.
I'd wake up in the morning and I would sometimes have 4,000 words of dreams written down.
And then the amazing thing that I discovered again and again is I'd get on the computer in the morning, I'd read my dreams, and I didn't even remember having them a lot of the time.
Or I'd remember little bits of them and I was shocked at the detail that We're good to go.
And I only can write, you know, what, 30 words a minute?
When I type, I can type 100 words a minute.
So it's just so advantageous.
I wish I could type 200 words a minute because I can think that fast.
But the limiting factor is how fast I can type.
And the basic way that I write, what I do for my journaling is I study my emotional conflicts, whatever bothered me pretty much from the day before or during my night's sleep, whatever I'm obsessing about and And I just write about it.
And I try to write about my feelings and I analyze it.
So I write from an emotional place, but I also write from an intellectual place.
And I try to have those two overlap.
I try to use my intellect to help me explore my emotions.
And it really varies how much I write.
If I have something that I'm greatly conflicted over, I can write, you know, 10,000 or 15,000 words in a sitting.
And I used to do that every day, all the time.
I have literally millions and millions and millions of words of journal entries.
Now, I probably write 2,000 words a day, maybe 3,000.
If it's a particularly stressful time I'm going through, maybe I'll write 4,000.
Sometimes I'll write 500 words, and maybe once every two weeks.
Now, I give myself the liberty to not write in my journal.
Today, I had a lot of stuff to do.
I had a lot of projects to do, and I gave myself the liberty today to not write in my journal.
But I went for about three years where I never missed a day.
And what I found is that it helped me profoundly.
It was an incredible way to get to know myself better.
And I consider it a cornerstone of my self-therapy process, if not the cornerstone.
And then what I do is after I've written out all of my just general journaling, then I go back to my dreams that I've written down and I analyze them line by line, Often, or sometimes clause by clause, and sometimes even word by word.
And I allow myself to free associate.
Whatever comes to my mind, I write it down.
And then after I've free associated, I analyze it, and I try to make sense of what the dream means.
And usually by the end of the dream, I have formulated some understanding of what this dream means, what it represents to me, and why I dreamed it.
Does that mean that I'm correct?
I don't think so.
I aim to being as close to correct as possible, but the point is, I think just studying the dream brings me closer to my unconscious and helps me unravel stuff.
Sometimes I have a wonderful aha moment.
Sometimes I dream numbers, or I'll see a sign on the wall that has numbers on it, and I'll remember the numbers, and I'll write them down.
I've had it where I've remembered an old friend's telephone number, and it's been on the wall in a dream, and I haven't thought of the number in 10 years.
It's amazing that I was thinking about that person, and then I have to analyze, why was I thinking about that person?
There's sometimes profound things like that in my dreams that I'm able to tease out through analysis.
Often it's more mundane and then there's lots of stuff sometimes that I really have no clue and I just take a stab at it and guess and then move on and don't really go back and think about it too much.
But another thing I use my journaling for is often I'll go back and read a journal entry I wrote a year ago or now that I've been writing in my journal for 20 years.
I'll go back and read, what was I doing 15 years ago today?
Where was my head at?
And it's a fascinating experience, because I'll go back and read an entry that I never looked at since the day I wrote it.
And so I could go back and see, what was I doing the last day of January 1995?
And where was I? I was actually then, I was living in St.
Thomas in the Caribbean, and I could go back and see where my head was at.
And sometimes it's It's very painful to see that.
Sometimes it's very touching. Sometimes I'm really surprised to see how insightful I was 15 years ago.
And I didn't realize how insightful I was.
And sometimes I'm shocked to see how unhealthy I was 15 years ago, for example.
So this is another thing. I love keeping records of my journals.
And after I handwrite stuff into my handwritten journals, if I'm away from my computer, I often go back in later and type it down so there's actually a digital record of it that's very easy for me to access.
So I just went off on quite the tangent there.
That's sort of my answer to personally how I use journaling.
Well, that's great.
I used to journal a lot more, certainly since, you know, the baby cakes came along.
It's quite a challenge.
I do view podcasting to some degree as journaling because I'm trying to be as honest about my thoughts and feelings as they can be.
And that's a kind of journaling, but I wouldn't say it's exactly the same.
But I found that the most fruitful kind of journaling for me, and this probably comes out of my artistic experience as a playwright, as an actor, was to have debates, right?
So you know how you have these arguments in your head.
I just found, you know, assign the different aspects of yourself, in a sense, names, or if you can be that self-empathetic, let them assign themselves names.
And actually write out the dialogue like you're writing out a play or a screenplay.
And I found that was a great way to bring an incredible amount of wisdom that was buried below a kind of self-indifference to the surface and has really, really helped to guide and really raise my self-esteem.
The more that you get a sense of your own wisdom and depth, the stronger your self-esteem.
And you get kind of bulletproof after a while once you've been right about things a lot and didn't even know it beforehand.
You get a great sense of self-guidance and a great sense Of self-trust.
And I think that is a very, very powerful thing that comes out of that kind of self-exploration.
And probably a lot of internal autonomy also.
Tell me what you mean? And I said also probably a lot of internal autonomy.
Oh yeah, no, I got the words. I'm just, if you could explain what you mean a bit.
Oh, that by doing that kind of dialogue with yourself...
You function in a role.
Well, to use that analogy, you function in a role as a therapist for yourself.
And it can be very self-soothing.
But also, I would imagine you gain a strength at being there for yourself and knowing how to work out your own issues.
And I'll say more in the context of myself.
I found that the result of journaling, I become much more of an autonomous person.
I find that I don't spontaneously need to lean on people.
In quite the same way I used to.
Not that I think it's necessarily bad to lean on people in all cases, because I do believe we're social creatures.
I like to compare, to contrast humans to orangutans, where orangutans, they go and live in the jungle for 51 months a year, and then one month a year they come out and they mate with each other, and then they go back and they live in complete solitude for 51 months a year.
Humans aren't built that way.
I don't think our brains are structured that way.
I really think we do need to be massively interconnected with each other and yet some people over rely on that interconnection in ways that they should be gaining more autonomy with themselves and I think that that's where things like journaling or using forms of inner dialogue or self-reflecting or analyzing one's dreams can help a person become optimally autonomous right right no I think this is this is why this technology is so amazing because I think throughout most of human history The drive towards authenticity was like it created a kind of moat between yourself and those around you who very often were invested in quite the opposite of authenticity and self-knowledge,
whereas we have beams that can join the stars in the night sky of those who are pursuing self-knowledge.
We do have at least some technology that can allow us to have a community, whereas I think beforehand it would be much more isolating, particularly for people who aren't, say, in New York or where I am, where there's more people of like-mindedness around, but people...
who grew up in small towns in nebraska and so on and i think that self-knowledge would have been you know you'd have been like boo boo radley in a in a run run down house with nobody talking to you whereas now i think you do have more options for conversation uh however imperfect they may be at technological arm's length you have more options for conversation and i think that raises the attractiveness of authenticity and self-knowledge higher than it was previously i would totally agree Imagine 800 years ago where there weren't even books available?
Right, right. Where would a person get new ideas?
Maybe from hearing a priest give a sermon, if the priest was any good, and that would be it.
There was, I mean, now it really is, this phenomenon of the technological expansion is psychologically revolutionary.
Yeah, I think so. It's as important as the printing press.
Alright, I think we have another question floating around, if you would like to ask it.
Oh, questioneer? Yeah, I have a question for Daniel about something he said earlier about dreams.
Okay. You mentioned earlier that when someone doesn't usually remember their dreams, that you think that they have a very strong disconnect from the South, so much so that they don't even retain the memories of the dreams that they're having.
Could you go more into that and what you think someone might be able to do if they're interested in analyzing their dreams but are having trouble remembering the dreams in order to be able to do that?
Right. I'm going to give an answer from an odd angle first.
I'm just going to wait until that phone finishes ringing.
Here's a fascinating thing.
I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia.
They often can be so split off from their inner conscious sense of self that they don't even realize they have a self.
And what I've seen pretty universally is when people are pretty severely in quote unquote schizophrenic states, they have absolutely no dream recall.
And instead, they're going in a sort of opposite way.
And We're good to go.
What I've observed with these people is when they start reconnecting with themselves, their selves on the inside, their true self, they start becoming aware of themselves as a person and they start coming out of their delusional world and they start having fewer hallucinations.
Often what happens is They start remembering their dreams, and I've seen this with many people, and it's a fascinating phenomenon.
Now, that doesn't mean that just because someone is not remembering their dreams, therefore they have schizophrenia, but I think there's lots of different reasons that someone might have no dream recall.
I know people that take certain medications that just blocks them from remembering their dreams, and it's not just like psychiatric medications.
Sometimes certain pain medications or certain people With alcohol or sometimes even just completely physical medications.
And then I know other people that when they take certain medications, their dreams go through the roof and they're remembering tons of dreams.
They're having vivid dreams or they're having extremely violent or sexual dreams that they were previously having.
But I think that if someone is having difficulty remembering their dreams, there are a lot of things that they can do.
To improve their dream recall.
I've even heard some nutritionists and certain psychiatrists say there's certain vitamins, I forget vitamin B12 maybe, don't quote me on it, but gives a person much more vivid dreams and dramatically improves dream recall.
And I think another thing is, if a person can discipline themself, To wake up in the middle of the night and write down their dreams, often they will have dream recall, where in the morning they'll have none.
And if a person wants to try this as an experiment, drink two big glasses of water before you go to bed.
You'll wake up at three o'clock in the morning having to go to the bathroom, and often there will be a dream there.
Whereas if they sleep the whole night through, often there won't be a dream.
So that's one possibility.
But I would just say in general, and there's Probably exceptions to this is that people who are more generally more emotionally disconnected with themselves.
Generally, have less dream recall.
Or then there's an exception to this.
I think there's an Irving Yalom.
He's a famous therapist.
He does a lot of interesting writing.
I don't know if you guys have heard of him, but he writes a study or he writes an experience he had working with a patient who was very, very emotionally disconnected but had a profoundly amazing ability to recall his dreams in vivid detail.
But the exception with this man who remembered his dreams in vivid detail but was emotionally connected is that he had absolutely no understanding of what his dreams might mean metaphorically.
And I think also had not much interest in it either.
But he did remember the dreams.
But it was a window into his emotional world that he did slowly become curious about.
So I... I want to be careful being too black and white in my theory about why people don't remember their dreams.
I'd say it's probably I'm speaking more in broad brushstrokes.
Yalom, is he the guy who wrote Love's Executioner?
He wrote Love's Executioner, he wrote a few novels, and he wrote the famous standard text for group therapy.
Yeah, he's a very, very good therapeutic writer, highly, highly recommended.
Yeah, good writer.
What I've heard from people who know him is that he's also incredibly, incredibly narcissistic.
Like, it's all about himself times a hundred.
Well, you know, we don't necessarily have to have the lung doctor not smoke in order to take his advice, right?
Although it generally is a little better if he doesn't.
Right. And yet, I remember when I first became a therapist, I read almost everything he had written up to that time and found it very helpful to me because he's a very clear writer and he's also engaging.
So many therapeutic writers are so incredibly boring that it's like they get into this technically jargon detail that's just so inaccessible that makes you just want to go to sleep.
Yalom, on the other Y-A-L-O-M, he is definitely an exception.
Right, right. Did that answer the question, oh, fine listener of ours?
I mean, it did answer it somewhat.
The main reason I asked is over the last four to six months or so, I've been doing a lot of, I guess you could call it self-therapy, along with the help of a couple of friends of mine.
And I really do think at this point I'm becoming more emotionally connected with myself.
I mean, I'll sometimes wake up in the morning and, like, feel miserable about things that before I would have repressed and stuff like that.
You know, I do feel like I'm becoming more emotionally connected, and I hadn't really thought about the dream thing until recently.
But, I mean, I almost never remember my dreams when I wake up.
And when you said that that seems to indicate a disconnect, that kind of threw up a red flag in my head.
Like, is there some sort of I'm failing to make or something I'm missing that I need to hit in order to be able to remember those dreams.
Right. And this is also the risk, again, as with the previous question, is when I start saying that, it can very easily come across that I am imposing my analytical judgment on you.
And I don't want to do that because I don't know you or your story.
And if I across the board say, The reason that you or anybody is not remembering their dreams in the morning is because they're emotionally disconnected.
I would feel disgusted with myself if I was wrong, and I could be wrong, because there could be a lot of other things going on.
But for instance, this morning, I was actually under a lot of stress, and I remembered a fragment of one dream, but I just was like, I have so much to do.
I have so much work to do. I didn't write it down.
For the life of me, an hour later, I couldn't remember that dream.
And does that mean that I was emotionally disconnected or could it mean that I just had a lot of other stuff in my mind and I wasn't going to that deep, quiet place in myself that I need to go to have dream recall?
And I was emotionally connected to other stuff.
But I also know when I put a lot of effort and I really made it a top priority to remember my dreams to the point of waking up several times in the middle of the night, I got dreams every single night for years in a row.
But that's just me.
And so, again, I speak with broad brushstrokes, but so if you take it for you as a red flag that you don't remember your dreams in the morning or don't always remember your dreams in the morning, I would say take it as a red flag.
Hypothetically, but it might not be that.
And I just think that this is something that I definitely don't want people ever to do with my writing or my website or what I talk about, is to take what I'm saying and using it to beat themselves up.
So don't take the flag and beat yourself up with it.
It's my fear. I must say that it's quite delightful for me as a host because, Daniel, this may be your first genuine exposure to a philosophical crowd.
But it's quite absolutely delicious for me to hear somebody else put forward a principle and then have someone else come up with an exception because really that's 95% of philosophy.
So it's just really, really nice for somebody else to be taking the universal bullets at the moment.
So I really appreciate that. Right.
And I also find it interesting that, I mean, I think, let's say someone, here's just a funny experiment.
If someone paid me $1,000 to go through my entire website and to Rip apart my own theory for me to do it and to come up with exceptions to it and prove exactly how I'm wrong, I think I could write a whole book on how my theory is incorrect.
And I think I'd be correct in my finding exceptions to it.
So in that way, it's like, yeah, I'm trying to write about truth, but truth can sometimes be a nebulous thing for me or perhaps for anyone to pin down.
That said, I don't want to get lost in truth.
Entirely just trying to pick apart my point of view, but I want to just get out stuff that I believe is essentially true, maybe even if there are exceptions to it.
No, I think that's right, and you've got to plant your flag somewhere in order to start a journey.
You have to have a starting point.
Even if it's not perfect, it's a place to start.
And philosophically, there is a huge difference between self-knowledge and all other kinds of knowledge, which is really the difference between relativism and Aristotelianism or scientific knowledge.
The scientific approach to reality that when you understand the lower intestine, you have not changed the lower intestine.
In fact, if it changed due to your understanding, you would never actually achieve understanding of it.
When you can correctly classify the difference biologically between a mammal and a reptile, you have not changed anything in reality.
You have simply conformed your own thinking to reflect accurately the realities that are out there.
However, when you learn something about yourself, you change yourself.
And this is why it is an endlessly absorbing, and sometimes it feels like you're falling through an endless series of chasms into yourself.
To observe the thing is to change the thing.
And that is very different from the empirical, external, rational approach that we take to understanding, you know, geography and science, physics, biology, and so on.
We do not genuinely, although there are some scientific experiments, particularly in the realm of physics, where the observation changes the thing being observed.
But that really is the exception.
But with self-knowledge, when we learn or understand something about ourself, we are no longer the self before we understood that.
And that's why it can – and people who take a lot of internal knowledge, like they go for self-knowledge, they end up really kind of in a postmodern relativistic point of view because that does apply to self-knowledge.
But the philosophy is really around finding that balance between the subjectivity and constant change of internal knowledge versus the objectivity and rationality of external knowledge.
Those are two classifications of thinking that can be confusing to people and just wanted to differentiate that.
Wow. Yeah, that's pretty intense.
Good. Good. Okay, well, let's leave that there and see if we have other questions.
I certainly have a few floating around in my own Exceedingly bald noggin, but we'll see if other people have questions to ask Daniel.
If you'd like to speak up now, that would be great.
Can I share a funny story for one second first?
Oh, please, by all means.
I went to a haircutter for a long time who I really like.
Oddly, I admire this man.
He's something that I aspire to be, which is extremely straightforward.
There's no... No jabber.
There's no side talk. There's no mixed motivations.
He just says it. So I asked him one day, when he was cutting my hair, I said, let me ask you this.
His name is Pepino. I said, Pepino, am I going bald?
And he said, I never tell my customers if they're going bald or not.
And I said, why? He says, because if they are going bald and I tell them they're going bald, they never come back again.
And I said, I said, oh.
I said, so what if they're not going bald?
You still don't tell them? He says, as a general principle, I do not tell them.
But what's interesting is, Pepino often has questions about psychology for me when I go.
He knows I'm a therapist and he respects me for it.
He stores up questions for two months before he sees me.
Next. So I told him, I said, Pepino, I need to let you know.
He's 20 years old with me.
I said, Pepino, You have to understand, I really know myself well.
I don't have a lot of insecurities about my body.
This doesn't bother me at all.
And I'm a therapist. I really have a lot of self-knowledge and I have a lot of confidence in myself.
And I'm not insecure about this.
So I'm really just not asking you with any self-hatred or anything attached to it.
This is about three years ago I asked him this.
I said, I'm just asking you, is it just a general factual question?
Am I going bald? And I said, so you're not going to lose me as a customer.
There's no stress about it.
I said, so I would help me if you could answer because I can't ask very many other people this.
He says, okay, Daniel, I trust you.
He says, I need to let you know you actually are starting to go bald.
And in about five years, you're going to have a more significant bald spot.
Well, my heart dropped.
I couldn't handle it.
I didn't go back and see him for two years.
Right. And I ran into him on the street one day.
He goes, where have you been? I said, I said, Pepino, you were right.
You knew me better than I knew myself.
I couldn't handle it when you told me I was going bald.
So I found it really interesting that I actually was much more insecure about it than I ever thought I would be.
And he knew me and he knew the psychology of baldness better than I did.
And I found that fascinating. Yeah, well, for me, it started around the age of 17.
So I've had some time to get used to it.
But I do remember one time, you know, there's these bits in life where you remember that you've turned a corner, you know, and for those of us A little older, there's, you know, that bit where you're not quite the sprightly young man that you used to be.
And I remember mine very, very clearly when I was in my 20s and I went to late 20s, I think.
I went to my barber and I said, you know, the usual.
And he said, well, I can't do much about the top, but perhaps I can trim your ears.
And it's like, well, I guess I'm not a teenager anymore.
I'm bald and I have hair growing out my ears.
What has happened to me? Youth, it flees.
Anyway, that's a good story, though.
Let's just see if we have anyone who's been holding off, otherwise I'll pepper a question in or two.
Okay, so from the people who've had a look at your website, Daniel, one of the questions that's come up is around masturbation.
And, you know, we have some single guys who know how to use computers, so I guess we can say that technically we may have a fairly spank-happy crowd who perhaps read with some dismay your perspectives or opinions upon masturbation.
I was wondering if you could...
Flesh them out. Oh, brother.
I'll try to quote-unquote flesh it out.
It's a funny thing because Ah, gosh.
I don't know. How openly have people discussed masturbation on free domain radio before?
Not that it should affect me, but it's always just a sort of a...
I don't think it's been a particular topic, but...
Well, let's go for it.
You know, why not? You know, I mean, we try to have no frontiers of knowledge here.
And, of course, masturbation is something that is a pretty universal human activity.
There are some, and non-human activity as well, There are some, particularly for men, in terms of testicular and prostate health, there are some particular benefits to masturbation.
And so as a sort of fairly universal human activity, I don't think it should be beyond the pale.
We're not Catholics, right?
So it shouldn't be beyond the pale of discussion, I think.
And since you've written about it, I thought it would be worthwhile having the conversation.
Right. Well, interesting first that you bring up about Masturbation is being healthy for men who get older in terms of preventing prostate cancer.
And I've talked to some older guys whose urologists have told them, yeah, you need to masturbate fairly regularly.
It's definitely good for you.
So I'm not going to address that here.
I'm talking more in an emotional sense that my attitude, and this is where I get pretty extreme, and I don't know very many people that are going to agree with me here, but so be it, that First of all,
I believe that our human sexuality is an inherent part of all of us, and yet I think that in our modern world where people are so traumatized, where the norm is so traumatized, where even the healthiest people remain very,
very traumatized, and we live in a world that's so incredibly sexualized in so many ways that So much of our emotional disturbances and our unmet needs and our longings in life that really are emotionally based get played out through the sexual lens.
That happens both in terms of sexual interaction with other people and in sexual fantasy that can play out through masturbation.
And I believe that it's not that masturbation is inherently a bad thing because that That really, to me, is too black and white.
Because I also think there are cases where people who don't masturbate at all, because they're so repressing parts of themselves.
And I think for them, for those people, masturbation can be a step in a healthier direction.
So, for instance, I've been on some Mormon websites, and I've talked to Mormons and some other religious people.
It's just so prohibited to masturbate, and it's such a Awful, stigmatized thing to masturbate, that for those people, learning how to masturbate and learning to find pleasure in that way can actually be very, very healthy and can definitely be a resolution to some of their perverted behavior, sexually perverted behavior.
But on the other hand, I think that learning how to masturbate and masturbating regularly or even frequently or infrequently is not the be-all and end-all to emotional health.
Just like I don't think sexual interaction with a partner is the be-all and end-all to emotional health at all.
Because I think our real goal as people is to resolve our traumas.
That's the internal goal that I believe the core of our true self desperately wants.
So I'll state that as a universal.
Consciously or unconsciously, and I think for most of us it's unconsciously, but the healthier we get, it becomes more of a conscious purpose.
We desire to work out our traumas, to grow, to heal, and to manifest our true selves.
And I think that sexual acting out or sexual expression, when people have not resolved their traumas, always carries some degree of playing out our unmet needs and our desperate desire to be loved.
Through a sexual lens, and I think that happens both in terms of sexual interaction and in terms of masturbation.
Now, often I think that masturbation is healthier than sexually interacting with a partner because when we start sexually interacting with a partner and we still have unresolved issues, we're still actually playing out our desire.
To get our unmet childhood needs met by another person.
And I think that can be very damaging to a relationship.
And I think actually it inherently is damaging to a relationship, and it's damaging to a person's relationship with their own self.
That doesn't mean that it feels bad to people.
Sometimes it feels really good, and a lot of couples bond over their sexual relationships, so it feels good to them.
And so what I say now probably will come across as just reactionary or ludicrous to them.
So I think for those people, masturbation is healthier because it's actually not...
It's not playing these things out in actual interaction, so it's not damaging relationships.
Though, of course, masturbating can damage relationships.
I think if people are masturbating in their fantasy about people that are close to them in their lives, and those people don't know they're masturbating, you know, fantasizing about them, I think it can be quite damaging to a relationship.
But I think, ultimately, masturbation can prevent a person from having the deepest connection with himself or herself.
I also think the answer is not necessarily simply not to masturbate, because I think for some people that creates a whole host of other problems.
I think it can create too much anxiety.
It can create all sorts of other stresses and frustrations and pains in their life that they may not be able to tolerate.
So in a way, masturbation is...
Sort of like an antidepressant that helps keep some people stable.
Now, I don't advocate antidepressants, but I know for some people, they call them a lifesaver because they can't handle living without them.
And I think for some people, masturbation functions in that way.
So it's not necessarily black and white, but I still am quite skeptical about masturbation.
So I don't know if I've answered that.
No, I think that was good, and I appreciate that it's not always the easiest topic to talk about, but no, I certainly think that that was a very good explanation of where you're coming from.
To give a little bit more on it also, I think masturbation often can mean very different things in general for men versus women.
I know a lot of women who say they don't masturbate at all or that they've never really gotten much pleasure out of masturbation.
I know other women who say they masturbate regularly and get a lot of pleasure out of it and have a lot of orgasms through masturbation and actually only have orgasms through masturbation.
And if it worked for masturbation, they wouldn't even know what an orgasm was.
On the other hand, I know men who, probably a far majority of men who have told me about it, that they masturbate to pornography and they masturbate to internet porn, even when they're in a relationship with someone else, whether it's a gay relationship or a straight relationship.
And I personally am very against pornography.
I think it's incredibly disrespectful to the people who are having the photographs or the videos taken of them, but I also think it's very unhealthy for the people who are looking at that.
I think it really creates a very distorted sense of human interaction, and I think it inherently is violating to people.
It's complicated.
I think the world would be better off if there was no pornography at all.
I also know that there are statistics that when pornography is banned, that rape rates go up.
And men do all sorts of horrible things when they're now masturbating to pornography.
On the other hand, I know a lot of women who tell me they know that their boyfriends and their husbands, who they are having sex with at times, still masturbate to internet pornography.
And a lot of them say they feel like they're being cheated on by their boyfriends and their husbands.
And they don't say it.
To their boyfriends or husbands all that often, but they don't like it.
And they, you know, they find the porn on the computer and they know what their boyfriend's doing.
And they know that, you know, he's having relationships with all these anonymous women on the Internet, you know, who had photographs taken of them and had videos taken of them.
And it can be very hurtful to people.
I also know gay people who say they know their boyfriends who are cheating on them with Internet porn and, you know, masturbating to it all the time.
And I don't think anybody feels good about it, knowing that their partner is It's having a relationship with internet porn off to the side.
So these are just lots and lots of ideas I'm having.
Right. And certainly, I mean, without a doubt, I think it's fair to say that pornography is very much an outside-in view to sexuality, in that obviously you don't know the people, and it is really very much around the stimulation of the visual without any real sense of the person.
And in fact, if you sort of go into...
What the person has probably experienced to end up on your screen in that way, it's, I think, pretty hard to maintain an arousal.
So I think there is a kind of dissociation involved in that.
It has to be. I think if you really were able to emotionally connect with the people who are the subjects of the pornography, who are being paid or not paid to expose themselves in various ways, I think if a person emotionally connected them, there would be no way to get aroused.
I had a conversation with a relative of mine over the summer I mean, it was the most primitive conversation where he said that he thinks that women, some women who are prostitutes actually do it because they love sex and they really like being, you know, they like selling their bodies to men.
And I asked him, well, how would you feel, you know, would you enjoy it if someone paid you $100, some big fat sweaty guy paid you $100 to have oral sex on him?
And he goes, oh, but I'm not gay.
That's not the issue. I said, okay, so how would you feel if some You know, unpleasant-looking, sweaty woman paying you $100 to have oral sex on her.
And he said, oh, but that's totally different.
And I said, well, how is it?
I mean, I asked him, I said, how many prostitutes have you talked to?
I said, I never met one that said she really loved the sex.
They pretend to, but even the ones that can get certain pleasure out of it, Deep down, they feel very degraded by it.
And if they had something better going for them, they wouldn't be doing it.
And what I see with women that have engaged in pornography, in terms of being subjects of it, being paid to have people take their pictures and videos of them, and women who have been prostitutes, is that almost universally there's a history of sexual abuse with these women.
Sometimes, at first, they're not aware of it.
They're replicating their histories of sexual abuse.
But often, when they start getting into their deeper histories, they find that there was a lot of sexual abuse in their history.
Because someone who was not sexually abused would not spontaneously want to disrobe for complete strangers.
And that would just be far too uncomfortable.
Right. And there is, in almost all cases, at least that I am certainly no expert in what I've said, We had a debate some years ago here that was quite explosive for people around prostitution and what I came up with was that there is almost always a history of sexual abuse and in more than 85% of the cases there is a current history of drug abuse because I don't think that you can do something that exploited and shameful without drugging yourself into near oblivion and I think those two combinations of things is something that you have to sort of avoid if you're exposed to that material.
I totally agree with you.
Makes total sense to me.
Now, sorry, that having been said, the argument from the other side, which is not to say that it's a moral argument or whatever, but I've sort of thought from time to time that...
You know, we have, in a sense, more than two selves.
But we have kind of two selves. We have a self that is sort of in a higher and abstract.
And I think that's very, very good and very important.
But we are also animals.
And what we come with as animals, as mammals, is that we are sexually excited by looking at sexual acts.
And that, to me, makes entire biological sense, right?
And this is all through the animal kingdom that...
That chimpanzees and orangutans and apes, when they see sexual acts being performed, it's generally the case.
They don't exactly rent hotel rooms in Borneo.
Then there will be a sexual excitation from the visual stimulation of watching a sexual act.
I don't think that means that people are sort of corrupt or evil or nasty or degraded or broken or anything like that.
But there is a physiological response, I think, to viewing a sexual act that is obviously not what we're designed for.
Because viewing a sexual act when we were I guess evolving was pretty rare, just in the same way that sweets or honey or sugar were very rare.
But now it's all around us, and I think it's thrown the balance really off from what we were biologically kind of programmed to do, which was react to sexual acts with sexual excitation, because we would hope to get, you know, procreation out of that somehow, if things were more sort of masked.
But I think it's really a sort of a tuning fork that was developed for a very faint sound It's now constantly being bashed against the wall, and I think that creates quite a distortion.
I wouldn't disagree with you there.
I also... I guess I would present a hypothetical in reply, because I do agree with what you're saying.
And I don't know to what degree we really are sexual beings, because I think we, as a species right now, and individuals are so traumatized and are so...
And it's risky to say this, but we're so...
Disconnected from our inherent nature, assuming we have an inherent nature.
So my hypothetical that I would put is, if there was such a thing as a person who were untraumatized, who was raised in a way that he or she was totally connected with him or herself, what would that person's sexuality look like?
And my guess in reply to that hypothetical question is that the sexuality the person would have would be So, so, so profoundly much less than the sexuality that we see from the average person nowadays.
Now, of course, there are people on the other extreme who are so traumatized that they've just totally split off their sexual self and they just have, like, no sexuality.
And I think those people would become more sexual.
But I think the average person in our society who is hyper-sexualized, which a lot of us are, I think that That person, if they worked out their traumas, would just inherently become much, much less sexual.
To the point that I think that if they were going to masturbate, maybe they'd masturbate once every three months.
Once a month, or maybe less than that.
They wouldn't have that much desire for sex.
Just a personal opinion.
No, and I think you can elevate that scientifically somewhat above a personal opinion insofar as the research that I was doing.
And when I talked to Dr.
Felitti, who's head of the ACL study through Kaiser Permanente...
That hypersexuality or promiscuity is directly correlated with not just sexual but child abuse trauma.
That excessive sexuality promiscuity is a form of self-medication for damage done to the brain through early exposure to trauma.
So for sure, if children were raised in a more healthy manner, the hypersexuality would have no mouth to hook into, so to speak.
So I think it's more than just an opinion.
I think there's some really, really good scientific backing for that.
And I also think when I say hypersexual, I'm not talking about the top 1% of people that are hypersexual.
I mean, I talk to guys sometimes who masturbate 10 times a day, and they're 45 years old.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about the norm.
And I think the norm is hypersexualized.
No, and I agree with you. The culture as a whole is hypersexualized, for sure.
Yes. And...
Anyways, okay.
So... Alright, no, that's great.
And I would also include the hypersexuality, not just in terms of, you know, TNA, butts and cleavage and all that kind of stuff, but the fetishization, the over-fetishization of physical beauty, I think, is another form of hypersexuality because we are trained to respond to that somewhat biologically and somewhat culturally, to respond to those sort of even features and high eyebrows and clear skin and lustrous hair and all that kind of stuff.
we're kind of programmed to respond to that in a quasi-sexual manner.
And it's something that I remember when I was an actor, the degree to which the women who weren't fitting that mold did have some despair about their potential success as actresses because that really is what we consider to be quality.
So anyway, I want to make sure that we get on to the next question, if there are any.
Otherwise, I'll pepper a few more, and I really do appreciate your time.
Oh, I also wanted to just check in, Daniel.
I mean, you said you had a lot of stuff to do today.
and how you said you had a lot of stuff to do today.
I don't want to monopolize your time for...
I worked hard and I did it.
So we're good until six o'clock.
Is that it?
Oh, that's it.
Yeah, we're good.
I just wanted to double check it.
I don't want to keep talking. You've got one foot out the door or something.
No, no. I scheduled this until 6 o'clock for myself.
Fantastic. If you want me here, assuming.
Oh, absolutely. I'm certainly enjoying it, and I'm really appreciating your responses.
So let's just pause and see if there's anybody who has questions that they'd either like to type into or speak up through Skype.
Don't forget to unmute yourself.
Oh, yes. Okay. So I'm sure that you expected this question to some degree, but there was some surprise.
And you and I talked about this a little bit privately, but obviously it's better if you talk about it here.
Some people were surprised to hear of your choice of celibacy.
And that, I think, is something that is surprising to a lot of people.
And I think it's important for them to understand the context in which you've You've made that choice.
And if you could talk a little bit about how that came about and the benefits that you've experienced, I think that would be very interesting to people.
Sure. Well, I've been celibate now.
Actually, it's almost 11 years.
And celibacy is, again, sort of a nebulous term because I haven't been completely celibate from masturbation for 11 years, but I have not been sexually involved with anyone for...
11 years. And what happened, I guess I'll say it, I don't know if people know, but I'm actually heterosexual.
And I had a lot of girlfriends in my past.
I had a lot of wild sexual stuff happen in my past, in my adult life, that is.
And also, I was to varying degrees sexually abused as a kid.
And from different sources and in different ways, and a lot of it was emotional incest.
But What happened to me is that in my sexual romantic relationships from my teen years through my 20s, I had a lot of fun.
I had a lot of good relationships with women, but I also started realizing by about age 22, 23 that I was engaging in certain repeated patterns in my relationships that I didn't like.
And the relationships often didn't end well in certain ways.
And I didn't really have any sort of psychological framework for understanding this.
But all I knew is that I didn't feel good about myself as the result of a lot of what I was doing.
And I started also realizing that even though I didn't feel good about myself, I would do it again.
And it's nothing like horrible or crazy.
I wasn't sexually abusing anybody.
But I was hurting people.
I was hurting certain women in certain ways.
I was leading them on certain ways.
I was being emotionally seductive.
And there was a sexual element in the emotional seduction.
And also what I realized is that I was really hurting my self-esteem.
I felt like... Am I allowed to curse on here, by the way?
Yeah, by all means.
Okay, I felt like a piece of shit about a lot of what I did afterward.
The next day, the next week, I felt rotten about myself.
And I couldn't look myself in the eye.
And yet, then I'd do it again.
And it wasn't extreme stuff.
It was subtle. And it was a lot of the stuff that my friends were doing and they'd feel bad about it.
And then they'd move on.
They didn't care. But I did care.
And I just couldn't tolerate it.
And what happened is the last serious girlfriend that I had that I was sexually involved with It ended in much the same way, and I don't want to go into too much detail, and I don't even think it's necessarily necessary, but the way that it ended emotionally, I just felt like, I can't keep doing this.
And I was getting emotionally healthier in a lot of ways, and I looked myself in the mirror, and I was just like, you know, I knew I had a lot of gifts as a human being, gifts as a person, and I had a lot to offer people in relationships, and I felt that I was misusing my gifts By playing them out in an interactive sexual way with other people.
And so for a while, after my last relationship, it wasn't even like I said, I'm going to become celibate now and I've taken a vow.
I just stopped hitting on women for a while.
And I stopped chasing after women and I stopped using my interactive gifts to get women into relationships with me and to get them into bed with me.
And What I discovered, and it wasn't even like this was such a conscious process, but what I discovered is that I started feeling better about myself.
And so I stopped doing it more and more.
It was the same reason I stopped drinking alcohol and stopped smoking pot.
I just felt better about myself.
And over time, A year turned into two years, turned into three years.
And I was never saying I will never date again and I'll never be in a relationship again.
All I said to myself is, if I'm going to date again and if I'm going to be in a relationship again, it's going to be different.
And I started and I still did date.
I've dated in the last 11 years.
It just didn't get actually got physical with one person, but it never went that far.
And that was only one person in 11 years.
And what I found is that my self-esteem went up dramatically.
And I started developing really deep and wonderful friendships with women in a way that I'd never had that before.
And that was so valuable to me.
Some of my closest friends in the world are women, and I can't tell you how much I treasure them as friends.
Also, once I became a therapist, a very interesting thing happened because I had a lot of female patients, and a lot of them were young and pretty female patients.
And I came at the therapeutic relationship in a totally different way than I used to approach women who were young and pretty.
There was no seduction on my part at all.
Sometimes they were seductive toward me, but I wasn't playing that at all.
And instead, I started listening to them and seeing life through their eyes and through their feelings.
And I started empathizing with them and with other women in an entirely different way.
And suddenly what I found is the My desire for sex for them went way, way down.
And it wasn't that I lost my heterosexuality, because I have retained my heterosexuality, but it just feels very different.
And a lot of times, even a woman I know could be very physically attractive to me, and on a physical level is attractive to me, I don't feel...
Any desire to push a sexual relationship.
And instead, what I find is that the friendship develops and that my self-esteem grows.
And I just don't do anything that I'm really regretting.
And as a result of that, I just feel so much better about myself.
And that, over time, has caused me to explore, what does celibacy mean?
I didn't even know that I was celibate.
And now I have Two of my best friends are also celibate in a very similar way to how I am.
I find an incredible amount of camaraderie in that.
One of them is a man and one is a woman.
One is actually gay and one is a straight woman.
My male friend is gay and celibate.
I have learned so much from him and through his experiences of celibacy because we talk openly about it.
I just find that it's a totally different paradigm for approaching relationships with people.
So people will ask me, well, are you in a relationship or are you single?
And my answer is, I'm neither of those.
Because to me, single implies that I'm alone and I'm looking for someone to be in a relationship with, and I'm really not.
I used to, even in my early years of celibacy, I was looking for relationships, but now I'm not.
Now, have I taken any vows of celibacy, like a monk or a priest?
I haven't taken any vows at all, and I don't believe in vows, because the day might come where I want to be in a sexual relationship, and I'm not going to stop myself from doing it if it really feels right.
But to be perfectly honest, the last 11 years, what I've found is it just doesn't feel right.
Something in me, when I self-reflect and get to my core, which I've become more connected with, tells me, When I really ask myself, is this really a healthy thing that you want to do?
And is this building this relationship with you, with this person you're with?
Or are you just going to be doing this to, you know, to get off in some ways?
And I've had no lack of opportunities.
I've had a lot of women who probably would be in a relationship with me, some who've thrown themselves at me.
And I just felt better about myself for it.
And it's allowed me to grow as a person in a whole new and profound way.
And I actually treasure it.
At first, it was a little weird to not be dating and not be in relationships.
I felt kind of alienated and maybe even a little ashamed of myself, but now I don't feel that way.
And I feel kind of proud of myself, not in a grandiose way, but just sort of in a way that says, I'm proud of myself because I'm more connected with myself, and I like myself more for how I behave.
And I like the perks that I've gotten from it.
And actually, the perks that I've gotten from being celibate are, to me, Far greater than the perks I got from being sexually involved with women.
And by the same token, I guess that pretty much covers what I wanted to say.
Right, so it is, and I appreciate that, I appreciate the candor of your explanation.
It is, it sounds like an act of rational and healthy selfishness, given the gains that you get from this.
And I also just wanted to express, and I'm sure you've heard this before, but just, you know, person to person, I just wanted to express my just deep and enormous sympathy.
For what you suffered as a child.
I mean, I think that goes without saying, but I think it too often goes without saying that that is an unbelievably tragic thing to experience, and you really do just have my deepest sympathy.
Yeah, and I mean, also my experience, now when I say sexual abuse, I believe first of all that almost everyone's been sexually abused in various ways.
I don't think you can live in our culture and not at some level have your sexual self be abused.
But if there's the degree of sexual abuse, the intensity of it is from 1 to 100.
And I work with some people that are much more up in the 90s and up near 100.
People who have been raped hundreds of times by multiple people starting when they were two years old, stuff like that.
Awful, awful things that have happened.
Those are the people up in the 90s.
I'm probably down in the 20s in what I experienced.
And yet, I still think that Even though it was in the 20s or maybe in the teens, maybe it was even in the 30s, it still had an incredibly profound effect on my development as a person and my concept of sexuality, and I'm still recovering from it.
I work with tons of people who are conventionally defined as sexual abuse survivors, and I don't want to minimize their experience by jumping on the bandwagon and saying, I too was sexually abused, but at the same time, I was.
And I was sexually abused by people who had a lot of responsibility to not sexually abuse me.
And I feel a lot of sadness about that.
I also feel a lot of rage and a lot of resentment and a lot of anger.
And I would never deny myself those feelings because that's part of my healing process.
Absolutely. Now, there are some people who are confused about the difference between...
I think you termed it...
Let me just see if I can remember.
Was it emotional sexual abuse?
There was a phrase that you used, and I'm sorry to have missed it.
That's okay. Emotional incest.
Sorry, I think that's the phrase that you used.
I wonder if you could just explain that term a little bit for people who aren't familiar.
I think we're all aware of the darker, to some degree, darker kind of direct physical rape and so on of children, but the emotional incest aspect, I think, is confusing people.
Yes, and I think there can be a huge amount of overlap between...
First of all, I think all physical...
All sexual abuse that takes place on a physical level is also emotional.
It's all... Yes, I agree with that for sure.
...is emotionally sexual abuse.
But I did not experience all that much physical sexual abuse.
A little bit. And some stuff that really was bad, but the majority of what I got was really just very emotionally perverse adults...
Having relationships with me that were sexualized relationships that really, really distorted my sense of sexual self.
And so I think that emotional sexual abuse that's purely emotional can be like parents who get into romantic relationships with their children under the guise of it's just a parent-child relationship, but really it's a sexualized relationship.
There's a lot of sexual energy that's being transformed back and forth in a very inappropriate way.
Parents getting their Or even having sexual material in the house that children can get a hold of.
Or parents walking around naked and sometimes can be very emotionally incestuous.
Sometimes even giving sexual educational information can actually disguise a lot of perversity on the part of parents.
I think parents can be sexually provocative with their children in many, many ways.
Parents taking sexualized pictures of their children in ways that are considered conventionally acceptable.
Parents letting their children watch sexualized things on television, I think can be very incestuous to children.
It's not necessarily overt sexual abuse, but it definitely can be sexual abuse.
Well, for instance, this.
I would hope to hell that there's no children listening to this right now.
I don't think this is an appropriate forum for children.
Just like my website, I don't think any parent should let their child look at my website.
And I could think that if a parent I've discussed a lot of this stuff with a child.
I think it could be emotionally incestuous.
That would just be my opinion.
But I don't know if that defines it a little bit better.
I think that does. Thank you for the clarification.
And we have a woman who is interested in asking you a question, if you'd like to go ahead.
Sure. Hi, Daniel.
Hi. You mentioned earlier that you tend to think of things in black and white, and that's certainly the experience that I had reading your website, which I must say disturbed me not a little.
But it seems that in this call you've either kind of modulated your views or, you know, acknowledged at least the shades of gray.
I was wondering...
Why the difference?
And is there some sort of, I don't know, therapeutic benefit from being so black and white on your website?
Or I'm just wondering if there's an actual reason behind the difference that I've perceived, or if my perception is incorrect.
Well, I see your name is Charlotte, right?
Yes. Hi.
I think... Let me try.
I just think interpersonally, a lot of times it's easier to describe the shades of grey.
Also, a lot of my essays on my website are very short.
300 words. I can express that in two minutes.
I want to get a whole idea across.
And for the sake of brevity, I didn't want to beat around the bush on my website.
I want to just get right to the point.
And so it comes across as black and white.
But if I really, at its basic essence, if I think what I'm saying on my website is incorrect, then I change it.
And I have modified my website a lot over the years that I've had it up.
But interpersonally, I think it gets, I think it's just easier sometimes to talk about some of the shades of grey.
But on the other hand now, you said you were disturbed by reading stuff on my website, so Then that would get into the question of, and I don't know the answer to it, are you disturbed because my website is inherently disturbed, or are you disturbed because the bluntness at which I'm speaking is challenging your denial?
And I don't know the answer to that.
So basically, is the denial mine, is the denial yours, or is it some combination in the middle?
And I really, I don't know.
So I guess I would have to know But in general, that's how I would answer your question.
Sure. I mean, it might be possible that it's all mine or that it's mutual.
Or it's all mine!
It's possible that it's all yours as well.
It's a very interesting contrast between Steph, who tends to preface everything with, you know, this is just my opinion, as he did at the beginning of this interview, for example.
And, you know, your website, which says...
For example, I'm looking at this sort of short list of ways to speed up your path to enlightenment, and it's just, you know, stop having sex, full stop.
Do not masturbate, full stop, which you've modified to a significant degree here.
That's the only thing that I wanted to comment on.
Right. Right. Tell me if I'm wrong.
I'm not on my website now, but if you scroll to the bottom, or maybe it's at the top, I can't remember.
Isn't there a caveat in there that says, I acknowledge that I'm being blunt about what I'm saying, and that this is not necessarily an easy path, nor is it necessarily an advisable path, because if someone stops doing these things, all sorts of other stuff is going to come up.
So I think in that website, in my memory, that webpage, I actually do put some shades of gray in there.
And you tell me if I'm wrong or right.
I don't remember. I don't see it on this page specifically.
I'm sure that there is a caveat somewhere else on the site, but this page to which I was directed doesn't seem to have much of that.
Interesting. I may have actually taken that down, because I think at one point it was up there, and I just...
I can't remember. But anyways, the thing is...
Well, sorry, I just want to jump in for one thing, which is to...
I mean, I get these criticisms as well, which is all perfectly fair to be criticized.
You could make the case that if somebody's sexuality is disturbed, that to some degree, cold turkey will speed things up.
And obviously, if somebody's sexuality is disturbed...
That's going to have an effect on the relationships they choose and the health of those relationships, and that's going to continue the pattern of disturbance.
And if they then stop the relationships but continue masturbating to the same, possibly, again, this is all just theoretical nonsense, but if they continue to masturbate to the same theoretically disturbed images or movies, then it's not really the same as healing.
So the cold turkey, I think as far as I understand it, Daniel, you're looking in a sense to get to the underlying anxiety and to reduce the amount of self-management or self-medication through various habits.
I mean you would say the same thing to somebody who was, I would assume, who was abusing drugs.
Like if you want to speed up your healing, you have to stop abusing drugs and that's going to make you feel worse.
But it's going to get the material into your consciousness that you actually need to process.
And if the sexuality is disturbed, then the same thing would be true with the advice that you're giving anybody.
Again, I'm really paraphrasing, and tell me if I'm at all off base.
I think that's fair. But if someone is going to do those things that I say to speed up your path to enlightenment, whoa, there's going to be consequences in the person's life.
And they're going to have to make major, major life changes to be able to accommodate the emotional changes that are going to erupt from within them.
But... Oh gosh, there was something else I was going to say, and I forgot it.
But... Oh, I know what it is.
That me not prefacing stuff.
Not always saying, in my opinion, this and that.
Part of why I consciously did not do that on my website is that I think a lot of people, when they preface it by saying it's my opinion and I think that, I think they're actually not telling the truth.
I think deep down they really believe it to be true.
They're just saying that to be polite.
And I decided on my website that I didn't want to be polite.
I wanted to just state what I believe to be true.
And people are going to know that it's, you know, ultimately that it's just my opinion.
I think that's just self-evident.
And so why did I have to say that?
I wanted to just be as straightforward as I could be, because if I believe it, I wanted to say it.
And on the other hand, it's like people state things as fact all the time that I don't necessarily agree with and I don't necessarily think is fact.
And, you know, They often preface it, well, it might be true that, but, you know, they're just being nice when they add that in so it doesn't threaten people as much.
In part, I just want to be a little more risque when I wrote my website.
Does that answer your question, Charlotte, or did you want to ask another or further expand this one?
No, but by and large that answers my question, especially the last bit.
Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome.
The difference is, of course, as well, that, I mean, Daniel's a therapist and I'm not, so I just always want to make that clear to people, so I don't have the training or the experience to make statements of that kind in any kind of absolute way.
That's one of the differences, but sorry, go ahead.
I don't know. I'm also a person, though, so actually on my website I'm not a therapist.
I'm just writing as, this is Daniel's website, but it's a complicated thing because I think there's A lot of people think because someone's a therapist, therefore they're a therapist all the time.
Actually, at the very moment, when I'm talking to you right now, I'm not being a therapist.
I'm just speaking as a person.
But to me, a therapist means that I'm engaged in the therapeutic relationship with someone for a purpose.
And actually here, I more came on for the subject of discussing therapy in general and giving opinions on what anyone wanted to ask me, but I wasn't being a therapist to you or to anybody here.
There's a quote that somebody posted in the chat, which is of yours, that if you could expand a bit just before we end up.
You've written that people who are not fully enlightened have sex because they're on a misplaced search for the nurturance that only deep emotional healing provides.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by fully enlightened?
Ooh, fully enlightened. Well...
In four minutes or less.
I'll try it in two minutes or less.
We can go a little over. We're at the mercy of your schedule, so don't feel completely pressed for time, because this is a podcast.
But if you could expand on that, it would be great.
Well, my concept of enlightenment, and it's such a tricky word, and I've thought so many times of ditching the word entirely, because...
Because of all the New Age and religious connotations with enlightenment that I personally don't like.
But I like the idea of enlightenment being the idea that first there is truth and that it's coming from outside of us into the truth of us and it's also emanating from us.
And so to me, full enlightenment is full resolution of all of our traumas, all of the parts of us, all of our defenses that are not really who we are at our essence.
And that's based on my conception of humanity.
Now, I think that, so that's in a nutshell definition of enlightenment, my conception of what enlightenment is.
A lot of people would have a different conception.
I also think there's a lot that would, and it's just a theoretical concept.
Because I don't know anybody that's fully enlightened, myself included.
I've still got a lot of work to do.
But on the other hand, I derive my concept of enlightenment based primarily on my own experience of growing toward enlightenment, of resolving a lot of my traumas, and also watching a lot of other people in my life, both therapy patients and other people in the world, who have done a lot of personal evolution in terms of resolving their traumas and watching them Change and become more, quote, enlightened.
And that's where I've derived my theories from.
Now, my theoretical concept is that as a person becomes more enlightened, as they also have fewer traumas, as they're more connected with their true self, they're going to be playing less of their unresolved material out through the sexual lens.
Because first of all, they're going to have less unresolved material.
They're going to have Fewer ancient unmet needs from their childhood locked inside of them because they will have resolved that.
That's part of resolving trauma also, is resolving those ancient needs through healthy means, through really maturing as a person.
And so people who are more mature are going to be playing less inappropriate material out through the sexual lens.
And I think people who are ideally mature, if this is a true concept or not, this idea that people can become fully enlightened, They're not going to have any unresolved childhood needs because they would have resolved them all.
They're not going to have any traumatic things.
They're not going to have any more psychological defenses.
So they're not going to be playing anything out through the sexual lens.
For those people, sex would be simply a purely biological activity.
It wouldn't be an emotional activity.
And I think a good analogy that I think of is eating, eating food.
People who overeat or undereat, people who are compulsive overeaters or who are anorexics or who are bulimics or even getting in that direction, people who get a lot of emotional pleasure through food or through denying themselves food, they are playing out their eating habits through their traumatic lenses, through their ancient unmet needs, through the lenses of their unmet needs.
And as they resolve their traumas more, they're not going to play out those needs Those needs through the lens of food, and their eating is not going to play out through the lens of unresolved traumas.
And so I think eating is a lot like sexuality, that eating is actually not inherently an emotional activity.
It's not a way to emotionally bond.
It can be used for that, but eating is ultimately a biological activity.
You stick good, healthy, appropriate food in your mouth, you chew it up, you digest it, and then you excrete it out the other end.
And I think it's a good analogy for sex.
I think that healthy eating is a lot like healthy sex.
It's not an emotional activity.
Right, right. I'm going to assume that that does answer the question.
Now, is there anything I just wanted to mention?
Also, the website for Daniel is iraresoul.com.
You can also have a look for Daniel Mackler on YouTube to see some of his...
It's, I think, very, very important videos.
Certainly, his material is challenging, and I actually quite appreciate that.
He would no more agree with everything I say than I would with myself or perhaps he would from day to day with himself.
But I think that as a group that has some of the most challenging material on the web, I think that we should welcome and embrace the challenges of his perspective.
I think it's a good thing to put yourself up against that kind of light and see what kind of shadows get cast.
So I really do appreciate.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, I really do appreciate the perspective that you put forward.
But I myself do do I'm a little bit more content with the lack of what is sometimes called weasel words, you know, that it seems to be and in general and mostly and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
I think that if you do believe something that straight up, it's honest and has integrity to communicate it that straight up.
And I'm sure he would be open to disagreements if good evidence were presented, but I really do appreciate that perspective.
Sorry, go ahead. Can I share something with you, Stefan, that's interesting?
Please. I was watching one of your, you know, before I did your show last week.
You did the I Hope He's Not Nuts tour here.
Well, I was just curious. I wanted to know who it was that was, you know, going to be interviewing me and who I was interacting with.
And in part, it was for healthy reasons.
And I think in part, it was I was really insecure.
And I was like, I don't want to say anything that's going to offend him.
So I want to find out what his point of view is so I can be more gentle.
But I watched one thing where you said, with no weasel words at all, you said, It's caused by prenatal hormones, something like that.
And I thought, oh, I don't agree with that.
And it was really interesting because in one sense, I really appreciated it that you didn't use any weasel words.
You just said it straight up as this is fact.
And what I felt is that sets the stage for a really honest debate and discussion.
Because you can't really back out of it when you say something that strongly.
And so, to me, that's like an example.
I do a lot of that kind of stuff.
I put stuff out very bluntly.
Now, I might be wrong sometimes, but at least I've taken a stand.
And I really admire it when people take a stand, because especially in the therapeutic field, people are terrified to take a stand.
They're little mice. They run around squeaking all the time, and they never say what they really believe.
And half the time, they don't believe in anything anyway.
So... Actually, I wanted to be one of those people who says, you know, if deep in my heart I believe it, I'm going to say it, and I'm going to state it as fact.
I may be wrong, and you know what?
I'm open to growing and changing.
If somebody challenges me, I'm going to go back and think about it.
For instance, later tonight or maybe tomorrow, I'm going to go back and I'm going to read that essay that I wrote on ways to speed up your path to enlightenment.
And I'm going to think about what Charlotte said, and I'm going to decide, well, you know, maybe I was too harsh.
Maybe I was too black and white.
And you know what? Maybe in two years I'll go back and read my whole website and go, oh my god, this whole website is so blunt and black and white, and I come across like such an arrogant jerk.
Maybe I should rewrite the whole thing and make it more gentle and make it more shades of grey.
But for now, for whatever reason, conscious or unconscious, that's what I needed and wanted to do.
And You know, if it disturbs or offends some people that I felt, well, I guess that must be a sacrifice that I need to make.
But will it be this way for me forever?
I really don't know. Right.
It is a challenge in the continuum of change that we all go through.
We could spend our whole lives never having any opinions, or never having any firm opinions, because, well, it might be different in five years from now.
But, you know, with regards to the...
I mean, the science is really strong on the homosexuality and hormonal issue, and I get lots of people who challenge me on that, and I sent them lots of references, and I never heard back from anybody whose science put doubt on that.
Right. We'll find out.
Certainly if the science proves different, then I will remove that or put a caveat on it or update it.
But I think you do have to recognize that certainty is possible even in the continuum of change and new information.
Otherwise, we can spend our whole lives just deferring to the possibility of error.
And that's, I think, not a respectful position to take because bad people are always very certain.
And I think it's important for good people to fight that certainty as well.
Right. Can I share one thing, Stefan?
You can share five things if you like.
Okay. After I heard you say that on that video, when you said homosexuality is caused by prenatal hormones, I was like, ooh, I don't agree.
And I was kind of annoyed by it, but I was like, okay.
I went and I started researching on it.
And I found that actually, I found a lot more material that supported your Point of view than I had expected to find.
So I chilled out and I was like, oh, kudos to Stefan.
But then, at the same time, I didn't let it go.
I have an essay on my website.
I call it Why Are Gay People Gay?
Also. And I've studied this like mad.
Now, what I thought is the basic challenge I had for you, and I didn't necessarily come on here to debate you on this, but I thought I have known two different sets of identical twins, both men, where one man defines himself as purely gay and one man defines – one twin defines himself as purely gay and one twin defines where one man defines himself as purely gay and one man defines – one Identical monozygotic twins, they have the exact same genetic makeup and they were both raised in the same intrauterine environment.
So I find that fascinating as a challenge to the hormonal thing.
And then I have lots of other things.
And if you would like to send me any more information, I would be absolutely happy to look that up.
And what comes out of this, I think, is that I really like to...
I will get an expert on and, you know, we'll put that or I'll put that to him and we'll ask what the expert would have to say about that because I'm really interested in reeling in the experts these days because Lord knows I've talked for long enough in this show.
So I think that's great.
If you could send me that stuff, I will absolutely place it in front of an expert and we'll see what they say.
I have a link on my website for my essay.
Now, what I had the chance to do is what was very interesting is one of the sets of twins, they're in their mid-80s.
And one has actually since died.
But the interesting thing is they were both psychotherapists.
And one was actually a prominent psychotherapist who's published a few books.
He was a semi-famous Gestalt therapist.
I have one of his books.
And I asked him, I said, I would actually like to interview you about why you think you're gay and your identical twin brother is straight.
Because it goes in the face of everything that says that it's a biological condition.
Because this is basic proof that it's environmental in your case.
So he said, okay. I went up to his office.
He was about 82 at the time.
And we sat for about three hours.
And I just grilled him for hours.
And you know what we finally came up with?
What he finally came up with?
He had absolutely no clue why he was gay and why his brother was straight.
No idea. I still have my theories.
I have theories that I think are better than his.
But it was just interesting. Right, right.
Well, Noah, and look, that's great information to have, and you're absolutely right that it does strike a blow against the hormonal theory, so I will try and dig up some good information and see if we can't either get an expert to say, Steph, the hormonal theory is still tentative, in which case I'll broadcast that, or to say there's some explanation for it, which we should also talk about.
So I really appreciate that.
I will have a look at that. Or the hormonal theory is 80% true, but 20% not true.
Something like that. And I don't know.
And that's where it's like, hmm, I don't know.
And by the way, I've asked so many gay people why they think they're gay.
And very few come up with a really good answer.
But by the same token, I've asked a ton of straight people, including myself, why am I straight?
Why are you straight? And they don't know either.
Most people don't have a good answer for it.
Well, it's because girls are so pretty.
Anyway. Right. That's my scientific explanation.
Girls are pretty. And for some people, boys are too.
Absolutely. All right.
Well, listen, being respectful of your time, and I really, really do appreciate it.
Did you have a fun time on the show?
Was it sort of what you expected?
Was it close to what you expected, or was it something different?
Well, it's actually interesting that you ask.
If I can go for two more minutes on that subject?
Yeah, please. This time, I had a lot fewer expectations and I was a lot calmer on your show.
The last time, oh man, I thought you were going to grill me.
So I was like in defensive mode.
I didn't tell you this, but I thought you were going to be really harsh and you were going to have lists of things that you were going to critique my point of view.
So I was actually more anxious and had a lot more expectations and was quite wrong about what my expectations of the show were going to be like.
This time... I was just calm and was coming in to have a good time.
So I really had no expectation.
I just thought it would be fun. And actually, it proved to be that.
Well, I'm glad. And I think people misunderstand.
I am merciless on bad ideas, but I'm actually quite nice to people.
So I think people get that confused, I think.
Right. And I feel the same way.
It's like I love to take apart an idea and rip it to pieces.
But at the same time, when I interact with the person behind the idea, it's like I can really like them.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
For sure. So I'm glad you had a good time and I just wanted to point out or to relate that the people in the chat room are saying that this is by far the best Sunday show so far of the new decade, which I take enormously personally.
No, I'm kidding. No, I appreciate that.
So you just got fantastic views and people have really, really enjoyed having you on the show.
And I just wanted to wish you a fantastic trip to Finland and I hope you'll think about maybe spending a few minutes to share your findings when you get back.
Yeah. Interestingly, on Tuesday, I'm going to Sweden for a week, but then in the summer, I'm going to be going to Finland.
Oh, fantastic. Okay, good.
It's a tour of the socialist paradises.
Very nice. Yeah, that part of the world.
Okay. All right, well, have a great trip, and perhaps we'll talk when you get back.
And thank you again so much for taking the time.
Yeah, thank you. Bye, all.
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