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Jan. 22, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

37:02

1836 Nonviolent Communication (NVC) | An Introduction

Some of my reservations about Marshall Rosenberg's approach.

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	Alright, so following this, we have a conversation about nonviolent communication.
	I'm sorry, I didn't find my notes during the actual call at the roundtable, but I wanted to talk about some issues that I have with nonviolent communication, aside from the basic fact that it seems to imply that every other form of communication is violent.
	Now, there are...
	Approaches that don't make somebody wrong, but make them set up alarm bells in me.
	So, for instance, a spirituality is the base...
	So, Martian Rosenberg has explained the influence of the supernatural on the development and practice of nonviolent communication.
	Quote... I think it is important that people see that spirituality is at the base of nonviolent communication and they learn the mechanics of the process with that in mind.
	It's really a spiritual practice that I'm trying to show as a way of life.
	Even though we don't mention this, people get seduced by the practice.
	Even if they practice this as a mechanical technique, they start to experience things between themselves and other people they weren't able to experience before.
	So eventually they come to the spirituality of the process.
	They begin to see that it's more than a communication process and realize it's really an attempt to manifest A certain spirituality.
	Rosenberg further states that he developed NVC as, quote, a way to get conscious of what he calls the beloved divine energy.
	There's an amorality.
	It abjures moral considerations, which I wanted to sort of mention.
	And... This is some issues that I have with it, and I'll tell you why, or at least what makes it somewhat alarming to me, and you can then tell me if it makes any sense to you.
	And by the way, this is my first workout with a podcast in my home gym, and I hope it's alright.
	I've ditched my gym membership.
	It was expensive, but it was mostly the time that it took to go and come back, so let's put some money into a home gym instead, and we'll see how that works out.
	I mentioned this in the roundtable, but there are two major issues that I have with people who are spiritual.
	Let me define what I mean by that.
	I don't think it's an unusual definition, so I don't think I'm going off the reservation as far as that goes.
	The issues that I have...
	with people who are spiritual is that, in its essence, spirituality, and look, I've used the term myself and blah, blah, blah, so you can let me know all about how crazy that is, but in terms of the formal way that spirituality is approached in a definitional standpoint, Spirituality is the belief that there is more to the mind than the brain, that there is more to life than matter.
	And that, as far as psychology goes, that to me is a dangerous, dangerous red flag for two reasons.
	The first is that there is, for people who are spiritual, always and forever a golden age that we have fallen from.
	A worship of a prehistorical ancestral past.
	This is true of everybody that I've ever met or read about who is a spiritual.
	The reason for that is quite simple.
	Spirituality means a soul.
	A soul means divinity.
	Divinity means perfection in the past.
	Because there's obviously evil and dysfunction in the present, For a being to have created life that was evil and had the capacity and the manifested evil and dysfunction, that deity must have valued evil and dysfunction and therefore could not be a moral deity.
	Therefore, if we're going to believe in a benevolent and good deity, Then the only way that the current corruption and evil aspects of human life, of human society, the only way that that can be explained is if there has been a fall from grace.
	And, of course, this is mythologized in many religions.
	The Garden of Eden is the one that we're probably all the most familiar with.
	And that's a huge problem when it comes to understanding how the human mind works, how psychology works, how human beings are, how we have developed.
	To believe that there is a golden age of prior peace and virtue and pacifism that has descended into the modern age of aggression and evil is entirely the opposite of what has happened.
	It's like It's like a biologist saying that life started as the most complex systems that can be imagined and then got progressively simpler over time.
	Now, if a biologist genuinely believed that, then a biologist would never even get close To the idea of evolution, and would not in fact be a biologist, but rather a theologian.
	And Rosenberg cites with great approval some theologian who talks about the last 8,000 years as being an aberration from a prior golden age of wonderful and peaceful human communication.
	Well, that's counterfactual.
	It's counterfactual.
	And you only have to Listen to my grueling audiobook reading of The Origins of War and Child Abuse or look at any of the psychohistory research into primitive cultures to realize that these are not wonderful cultures of peace and reciprocity.
	If they were wonderful cultures of peace and reciprocity, they would be technological, there would be a significant division of labor, there would be an independence of culture and superstition, there would be philosophy, rational thinking, cities, spaceships, time travel, jetpacks.
	Everything that you could imagine, because that's what human beings do in a state of freedom.
	Primitive cultures, by definition, are primitive because of brutality, particularly towards children.
	So to say that there was a golden age of peace in the past that human beings have devolved from is the exact opposite of what has happened.
	And what happens then A lot of Margaret Mead's work on, I think it was Samoa, Coming of Age in Samoa was her big book, has been thoroughly discredited as made up and fabricated.
	This is my understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong.
	But what happens is that spirituality, as an approach to understanding the world, Creates a deep, needy, and virtually insatiable demand for evidence of the noble savage.
	Evidence of Pre- or anti-technological or anti-capitalist societies as being peaceful and wonderful and kind and laughing and sexually liberated and joyous and so on, right? So there's this story about some tribe that if one tribal member steals from another, what they do is they all sit him down and tell him how much he's enriched their lives.
	I don't believe it for a second.
	I could be wrong, obviously, but I don't believe that for a moment.
	I've read so much about the noble savage, you know, like this myth that the Indians lived at peace with the land, and they used every part of the buffalo and didn't waste things, and it wasn't until the white man came along, oh, bad whitey, and so on.
	And that stuff's all we completely discredited.
	It's not true at all. Indians regularly ravaged and despoiled the wilderness because there were no property rights.
	Of course they did. Everything was either owned in common or not owned at all, and we all know what happens to the commons, right?
	Without property rights, there's no economic incentive to not ravage, to spoil, and plunder the land.
	And they would regularly drive buffalo off a cliff and just eat parts of them and leave the majority of them to rot in the sun.
	So I've heard so much of this noble savage stuff discredited over time that I can only assume that there's a huge cadre of intellectuals who serve the prejudices of spiritual people and perhaps their own prejudices towards spiritualism.
	By manufacturing or imagining or fabricating or extrapolating the, quote, peacefulness of primitive cultures.
	Primitive cultures are superstitious, brutish, and horribly violent and aggressive towards their own children because they don't change.
	Because they don't change. If you look at the Aborigines in outback Australia, they haven't changed in thousands of years.
	Look at a culture like China that didn't change for thousands of years because it was incredibly violent and repressed and brutal, particularly towards children.
	The women had their feet bound, for heaven's sakes, which is, say, crushed and mutated and distorted.
	So we see stagnation in systems of violence, right?
	Think of the economic, quote, progress of dictatorships, of communist systems.
	Stagnation occurs as a result of violence.
	So to say that these cultures which retain These incredibly primitive Stone Age characteristics for thousands of years, that this is not a result of violence towards children in particular.
	I mean, that's just sad.
	It's sad, it's selfish, and it's disrespectful towards the suffering of the children that had actually occurred.
	It's ignoring that suffering and turning it to some sort of magical glowing being virtue for the sake of your own prejudices towards mysticism and spirituality.
	It's selfish. We deal with the facts.
	Mature personalities deal with the facts.
	They don't skew the facts to fit the prejudice.
	So, this idea that at some point in the past There was this wonderfully Adapted and peaceful and loving, noble, savage, bouncing, happy, chubby children on their laps and, you know, singing unearthly choruses to the joys of the dawn.
	This is all madness.
	It's all prejudice. It's all manufactured.
	It's a bad Pocahontas ripoff in terms of the Disney cartoon, which itself was a...
	Anyway, I think we get that.
	So I have a huge problem with that.
	That is somewhat significant, but only from a developmental standpoint.
	What is much more significant and dangerous to me in the writings and psychological approaches of mystics is this belief, and I talk about this in the roundtable, it's the belief that the personality exists outside the brain, outside the physicality, that there is a soul That cannot be corrupted.
	Right? So, there is an essence, a soul, an essence to the person that cannot be destroyed or corrupted or overshadowed or buried under evil or dysfunction.
	There's an old Stephen King book, I think it's called The Stand, Where there's a guy in it who's mentally, mentally, developmentally handicapped.
	And at some point, and this has been, oh God, I don't even know.
	I read this when I was gold panning up north, which is a good 25 years ago.
	Getting up slowly. There's some seance or some way that they contact him in a coma or whatever, and he talks perfectly rationally, and he says, I don't know, his name was Bob or something, he says, well, they say, well, who are you?
	Because Bob is retarded. And he says, I am God's Bob.
	Right? I am God's Bob.
	In other words, the fact that my brain was starved of oxygen, that I had, that my brain cells failed to replicate, that the brain, which is the true vessel of Of my personality, the fact that my brain is damaged has not affected my essence, my soul, my spirit, my personality.
	Because there is a personality that exists beyond the material, independent of the material, yet, of course, always bound into the material.
	But there is a perfect person inside whatever shattered vessel there is.
	That I submit, is one of the most dangerous notions that there is.
	Because if we separate the personality from the brain, then the illusion continues that we can reach the good person inside the dysfunction.
	So, to take an example, your lungs are material.
	They're not spiritual. They're not ghostly gobbling wings of primordial ecstasy.
	Your lungs are cells, matter, flesh, carbon.
	If you smoke for 40 years, your lungs get all tarred up and gunked up, and you may get to cancer.
	Highly likely you will, I suppose.
	So, when the doctor goes in, he's not excavating There's no spiritual lung in the physical lung, but if the doctor thinks there is, then a number of things will occur.
	So if the doctor thinks that There's a magical little operation, maybe it's just a series of words, non-violent chemotherapy or something, that you can smoke for 40 years.
	And then there's a word, a phrase, a magic spell, a dance that will begin the process of cleaning up your lungs and that your original, healthy, pink, perfect lungs are still in there somewhere.
	We just need to find the right combination of sounds and movements to...
	Cause your corrupted lungs to fall away, thus revealing your beautiful, perfect, God-given lungs within.
	Well, that would be to condemn someone to a near certain death.
	And it would also be, if this view were propagated and accepted, it would be a huge incentive for people who liked to smoke to smoke.
	In the belief that they would just do X, Y, and Z to reveal their perfect lungs and shake off all the cancer later.
	Right? You could smoke for 40 years, you get cancer, you just do a couple of magic dances, magic spells, and you're back to perfect health or on your way.
	Well, that's not the truth of the situation.
	Now, why, oh why, would the brain be any different from the lung?
	Well, in truth, it's not.
	It's a physical organ, just like the lungs.
	Now, there is neuroplasticity, there is adaptation, there is sense heightening if a sense is lost, there's introspection, there's meditation.
	There's things that the brain can do to heal itself with significant effort and coaching that the lung can't do, at least not that we know of.
	So there is some neuroplasticity, but the Elimination, or I don't know how best to put it, the rewiring of the brain is not to get back to some original state, right? So, if...
	You had a terrible childhood and this gave you the usual symptoms, right?
	A very active fight and flight mechanism, an inhibited neofrontal cortex response, heightened cortisol, all of the usual stuff that goes on with child abuse so that you had very strong impulses, very poor impulse control and a tendency towards addiction and dysfunctional behavior.
	There's no original you that wasn't abused, that the abuse can't touch, right?
	The brain has been damaged, or to put it more precisely, the brain has been reshaped to survive in an abusive environment rather than a peaceful and free environment.
	And so because of that, you can take...
	Your broken brain, and you can rehabilitate it to some degree.
	But that doesn't make it like you were never broken, like you were never hurt, you were never damaged, you were never abused.
	There's no perfect God-given you that survives all conceivable abuse, right?
	Hope you dig it, what I'm talking about.
	So, the analogy I use in the conversation is you can take the foot of a Chinese girl in the 19th century and you can curl it and break the bones and mash it back into its own heel so that the toes grow into its own heel and she ends up with this disgusting little club foot that's just hideous.
	Now, maybe after years of therapy she can uncurl that and have some approximation of her former feet, but there are no perfect feet in there that you can release, right?
	There's painful rehabilitation which can undo some of the damage.
	But there's no perfect foot in there that you can ever reclaim.
	That's broken. That's gone.
	That's done. You know, whatever my personality was going to be in the absence of abuse is gone, done, broken, never to be retrieved.
	There is no unabused me that exists.
	There is a post-abused me, which I'm very happy and proud to have achieved.
	But that's post-abuse.
	That's not unabused. So, to me, the enormous danger...
	If we sort of go back to the lung analogy, because the lung analogy is a damn good one, because so few people do go through the rewiring of the brain, the years of therapy, the strenuous self-examination, the years of analysis and pursuit of self-knowledge, and the sometimes teeth-gritting willpower to improve your habits and so on.
	So very few people go through that, that The analogy of the lung is entirely legitimate for the vast majority of the population.
	So if we go back to the lung analogy, First of all, believing there's a perfect you that can never be broken and is recoverable through communication techniques, right?
	Nonviolent communication isn't spend 10 years in therapy and through self-knowledge and examine your history and, you know, attempt to repair your relationships and break with abusive people if you can't repair them and all of these kinds of things, right?
	It's not like that. It's like, here, I'm going to give you a two- or three-day course, I'm going to give you some communication tips and techniques, and you will have a magical flowering in your relationships.
	And if you watch Rosenberg, the founder of NVC, in conversation with people to coach them on this, he will tell them, don't say that.
	No, no, no, don't say that.
	Don't say that. Don't say that.
	Say this. That to me is not authenticity.
	That to me is not deep self-knowledge.
	That is not getting to the source of the problem.
	That is wallpapering over the cracks.
	That is putting a band-aid on the wound.
	And it certainly is true that in the short run there may be some changes, but unless the underlying issues are dealt with, it doesn't help.
	It's like telling somebody with emphysema to breathe deeper.
	Yeah, it may re-oxygenate their blood in the short run, but it doesn't deal with the underlying problem.
	Look, this is not specific to NVC, and please understand, I'm no expert on NVC. This is just the stuff that I've read probably in maybe four to six hours of reading and viewing videos, so I may be way off base.
	I'm talking more about the spiritual aspect, the problems that spiritualism has in its understanding of human physiology, of human psychology, of the human brain, and the mere effect of the brain, which is the mind.
	The mind, which does not exist independent of the brain, is entirely subject to changes within the brain.
	So if you believe in the perfect soul thesis, then what is a phrase that is used, and Wes uses it, I think, a phrase that is used in NVC and others is to get through to whatever is still alive in the person.
	And that's a way of saying to break through to their true self.
	Their true self is a metaphor, is an analogy.
	In this, it's not the way that I use it, which doesn't mean that it's wrong.
	I'm just pointing out a difference, right?
	The true self... In NVC is the spirit, the soul, the uncorrupted part of the person, the part that cannot be corrupted because it is immaterial.
	Sorry, it's non-material.
	Immaterial is confusing because it's two meanings, not important and not material.
	So, it's really dangerous.
	So, if you are in a relationship and With somebody who has, you know, let's just say a dad, a dad who's abused you for 30 years, physically when you were young, perhaps emotionally when you're older.
	The danger to me in NVC is to believe that there's still an uncorrupted part of your dad that you can access, a part that has not...
	Experience the child abuse that leads the tendency towards such abuses in an adult.
	And then the actual act of abusing.
	So, you know, 50-60 years of, quote, smoking.
	And that doesn't mean to me that it's completely impossible for a long-term abuse victim and abuser to change.
	And that's not to say that the prompt for that change might not come...
	From someone outside interacting in a different way.
	You know, it's possible.
	I don't consider it likely, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible.
	But by skirting over the rewiring of the brain that is necessary to change dysfunctional and abusive habits, the years, I kid you not, years of intense and grueling Rehabilitation that is required to undo the physical brain damage wrought by the experience of abuse and in particular the infliction of abuse.
	To skirt over that and say here are some communication tips that will bypass all of the brain damage and connect you to the non-material glowing perfect soul within is a delusion.
	That is unsupported by any scientific evidence that I am aware of.
	I'm always cautious, cautious, cautious, and this includes objectivism, but I'm always extremely cautious around psychologies and philosophies developed prior to the understanding of the physical effects of child abuse on the brain.
	Now, not only was NVC around prior to this knowledge and understanding, but...
	NVC is based upon a form of religious superstition and spiritualism and mysticism that is as old as a human species.
	It was developed long before the physical dependence of the personality on the brain was established, I mean, millennia before the understanding of the physical effects of child abuse on the brain and thus on the personality which is the brain, right?
	The personality is like gravity.
	The brain is like mass. It's an effect.
	There's no such thing as gravity without mass.
	There's no such thing as a personality without a brain.
	So I'm very, very careful around philosophies of interaction that are based upon the idea that there's a perfect person somewhere within that other person.
	That there's a perfectly healthy lung somewhere deep down in among the diseased lung that you just have to connect with and uncover.
	That doesn't require many years of intense work and rehabilitation to achieve.
	Very, very cautious about that.
	Now, the other thing that I wanted to mention about this is that there is Another significant issue that I think is driving the popularity of things like NVC. I can't speak for the other participants of this roundtable, of course, but I will say this.
	I believe, not to say that it's proven, I think there's good evidence for it, but I believe that people want to believe in this perfect soul hypothesis because it's very painful to accept that Even if a person you have a dysfunctional relationship with,
	an abuser, a parent or someone, that even if that person thoroughly commits to personal growth, now, today, this moment, it will be years before they're capable of functional relationships.
	If you really want to run a marathon with a chain smoker, And you're just desperate to run that marathon.
	It's going to make you the happiest.
	Then you're going to be very susceptible to people who come along and say, I have a magical shortcut that will allow this heavy smoker to stop smoking and run a marathon in a week.
	Right? Because you really want to man this marathon with the smoker.
	And trying to have a loving, highly functional, respectful, peaceful relationship with someone with whom you have a history of dysfunction and abuse It's like wanting to go sprinting a marathon with a chain smoker.
	Can the chain smoker put down his last cigarette this very moment, go to his doctor, get an exercise plan, slowly begin to get his creaking 50-year-old nicotine-riddled body into motion?
	And can he, for months and years, train and exercise to undo some of the damage he's done?
	Well, yeah, some. Be able to run a marathon, sprint a marathon, with his 20-year-old son?
	It's possible.
	But there's no magic to it.
	There are no shortcuts to it.
	There's no little dance you can do to have the chain-smoker's lungs slough off their tar and nicotine and gunk and breathe fresh and young and healthy.
	There is a process of rehabilitation, of strengthening your heart and your lungs and your muscles.
	Which is grueling and hideous and painful and lengthy.
	Lengthy, lengthy, lengthy.
	And this is, now that we understand the relationship between early childhood abuse and cigarette smoking...
	We also understand that there is no way to put down the cigarette, I think, in a healthy way without understanding and dealing with the root abuse that drove the cigarette smoking to begin with.
	So not only is there the physical action, the physical actions of putting down the cigarette and going to the doctor and exercising and all of that kind of stuff, but none of that, I believe, is fundamentally really possible or sustainable.
	Without dealing with the historical dysfunction and abuse that drove the addictive behavior to begin with.
	And even if somebody does quit smoking, without dealing with their underlying abuse in history, they're just going to come up with some other damn addictive behavior, and the addictive behavior could be exercise, right?
	So... If you put that information out, so people are desperate to run a marathon with their dad tomorrow, their chain-smoking 300-pound dad tomorrow, well, everybody wants a shortcut to that, right?
	But if you go up to someone who's desperate to run this marathon with his dad tomorrow and say, oh man, I gotta tell you, if you want to run this marathon with your dad...
	It's up to your dad.
	You can help him.
	You can support him. You may even be able to provoke a certain amount of self-knowledge by changing your behavior with him, but you can't make him do it.
	The first thing he needs to do is admit there's a problem with his smoking.
	The second thing he needs to do is to recognize that his dysfunction stems from historical abuses, most likely, and he needs to go and get help from a therapist.
	He needs to go and get help from a doctor.
	He needs to go and get help from a personal trainer.
	He needs to go and get help from a nutritionist.
	And even if he does all of these things, it will be years of Before he is able to run that marathon, even if he commits 150%, now, today, this moment, it will be years.
	Now, he can run maybe shorter distance, blah, blah, blah, but before you get what you want, even if he fully 150% commits today, it will be years.
	This is the reality.
	Now, how many people want that reality?
	How many people want to hear, even if your abusive dad fully recognizes there's a problem, fully recognizes there's a solution called self-knowledge and therapy and maturity and responsibility and ownership and reciprocity and virtue and philosophy and How long is it going to be?
	It's going to be years before you can be in a relationship with him that you genuinely trust, even if he accepts the magnitude of the problem today and commits fully to dealing with it.
	Well, people don't want to hear that, right?
	People don't want to hear these truths.
	They're ugly, they're unpleasant, they're difficult.
	What they want to do is they want to believe that I can make it happen through some tricks of mine.
	I can learn some rhetorical devices that will break through this history, that will break through the dysfunction in the brain to the perfect God-given mind within.
	I have a dance that will cure my dad's lungs and we can go jogging tomorrow.
	That is a deep, deep need that people have.
	And oh man, I can completely understand that.
	And I can completely sympathize with it.
	I really can. But it would not be a kind thing for me to participate in this delusion.
	It would not be a kind thing for me to participate in this delusion.
	Because, well, for two reasons. One is that it will keep people around abusive people.
	Because that first step is the doozy, the step of admitting there's a problem and fully committing to change.
	And I'm not saying that that's a single conversation you have with people.
	I never say that at all. It's multiple conversations over quite some time, but not the rest of your life.
	Because every time somebody denies the truth, the truth becomes less and not more likely.
	It doesn't mean impossible, but it also means that every time you have a conversation about the truth with someone, That if it doesn't start any motors on their part, if they don't come back to you with thoughts they've had about your conversation, if they deny it, pretend nothing happened, well, the odds become progressively less likely to the point of near impossibility every time that happens.
	So, people don't want to place the onus for change on others because that onus is so often rejected.
	It's painful, it's painful, it's painful.
	And people don't want to.
	Except that even if that onus is accepted on the part of others, that it will be so many years before equality and functionality is consistently present in the relationship.
	It's painful, painful, painful.
	So I'm concerned that people come up against the brick walls of other people's indifference and hostility and commitment to dysfunction.
	And rather than just taking a deep breath...
	Drinking all of that in and saying, well, this is the reality of what is.
	This is the reality of what the other person is bringing to me, or not bringing to me.
	This is the observation that I as an empiricist must accept and deal with.
	People don't want to stand and stare down into that abyss.
	And so they veer off towards this magic, this illusion that you can create change in others.
	I think that's very dangerous.
	Now, the last thing that I would say is that psychologists and psychiatrists have a number of categories of mental dysfunction that are considered to be more or less incurable.
	Things like borderline personality disorder, really bad instances of narcissistic personality disorder, and there's a host of others which are, you know, Antisocial personality disorder.
	You may be able to ameliorate some of the symptoms, but these are called character logic disorders, which means that they're not a personality with flaws.
	They are a flawed personality fundamentally.
	And again, this is just my knowledge as an amateur and my opinion as an outsider.
	Actually, not just my opinion.
	This is the latest research that I've been aware of.
	This unchangingness of human personality is really important.
	You know, they've done studies that track people from when they're 5 to when they're 50 or even 60 and have found that the teacher's evaluations of the kids when they were 5 hold pretty much true to how these people are In their late 50s and 60s, human personality is extremely, extremely conservative.
	It does respond to vigorous pressure and willpower, but slowly.
	It's like turning a supertanker with no assist.
	And so my issue is that the premise of nonviolent communication is that you can, even if the other person isn't interested in nonviolent communication, even if the other person is disturbed or pathological, that you can, simply through changing how you approach the interaction, make some fundamental changes in the relationship.
	Well, that's an amazing claim.
	I mean, it's an astounding claim, which flies in the face of 150 years of established psychological practices.
	And I'm not just talking about the medical bombs of psychiatry.
	I mean, psychological practices, these fundamental personality disorders are not open to much alteration.
	And so, you know, this is another level of skepticism that I have when they say that it works in every situation and I imagine it can be used to better any relationship.
	If professionals with decades of training and experience and sometimes court-ordered treatment or even voluntary treatment that goes on for many years, if they are unable to To repair the damage to these personalities,
	trained professionals, for many years, I fail to see how it can be a credible claim that amateurs with some training can achieve fundamental changes in their relationships with people who may have these severe personality disorders.
	Right? It does seem almost shady to make this claim.
	Now, maybe this claim is limited, and maybe I've misunderstood it, and maybe this is not relevant to nonviolent communications.
	I'm just putting this out as something that I have particular caution with.
	If the most advanced psychological practices and the most committed therapists with decades of training and experience cannot make much of a dent in character logic problems in fundamental personality disorders, How on earth can Rosenberg and his crew make the claim that untrained amateurs can make any fundamental changes in these relationships?
	It's an astounding claim to say that untrained amateurs using this approach can do almost infinitely better than trained professionals with all the resources at their disposal.
	I certainly would not dismiss such a claim out of hand, though I would be skeptical.
	But I would want to see a lot of proof.
	I would want to see a lot, a lot, a lot of proof for these kinds of claims.
	And I've not seen them forthcoming.
	I've not seen the control group experiments.
	I've not seen couples who try it and couples who don't.
	Do they stay together? I've not seen...
	I've heard anecdotes, and anecdotes are not science.
	Anecdotes aren't even good marketing in this field.
	So, again, if you know of studies, if there's stuff that I'm missing, please let me know.

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