There's a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that's going to crash or that you're the one that everyone's going to choose to mock or ignore, you're implicitly telling yourself I'm the exception. I'm unlike everybody else. I am different and I'm special. This is narcissism. Pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently. That your problems have some unique math to them that doesn't obey the laws of physics.
cool universe. Hi besties and welcome to brand new almost adulting the largest self-help podcast in movement, uniform destination for personal growth, dating and mental health, where I give you that Russian tough love, you may not want to hear it, but you're definitely gonna need it. I'm your big host, whoops.
dyslexia, am I right? I'm your big sister and your host, Violetta. Okay, so my xi-chiki, which means my little bunnies, my cuties. What we are going to be talking about today is basically not only that you should be careful what you believe and how repressed memories are not always truthful, but we will then dive into mensens' law of avoidance and how our brains are wired and how difficult it is to change it
all the way down to which is going to be my favorite part. So this is more towards the end of the episode. If you want to skip through some stuff, I would recommend my favorite part. I mean, the first part is like shocking. It's really interesting. The middle part is all right, but the last part has to do it's around when I start talking about Buddhism. That is one of my favorite parts.
And it's basically about the truth about how when we victimize ourselves, in order for us to victimize ourselves, just how special we have to believe that we actually are in order to make ourselves the victim. Because we then believe that our current reality is so unique specifically to us.
That means everyone else must be talking about me, just me right now. Everyone else saw exactly what I just did. Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. I just tripped and it's going to ruin my whole day because everyone saw. Now everyone is going to be talking about this for years to come. I mean, in order for my brain to believe this and victimize myself in a way,
I must believe that I'm so special that everyone else will be thinking about me falling right now for the rest of their lives, right? Isn't that kind of interesting? It puts things into perspective. And then lastly, it also discusses our identity and how necessary or not necessary it is to actually find ourselves.
You may be surprised by the answer. I know I was, but it was interesting to hear a different perspective than the perspective I have about finding ourselves. So that is what will be covered in today's episode. Only for you, my subscribers, my besties. I love you so much. And again, this week, by the end of the week, I will be giving you those Zodiac signs as well.
So moving forward after this week, like I said, the regular podcast, only one episode a week and the rest of the episodes for that week will be coming to subscription podcast only. And I will decide if it's going to be on Tuesdays or Saturdays. I'm talking too much. So love you. Hope you're having an amazing day. Thank you so much for subscribing and for going through this journey with me. And I promise you, it will continue to do nothing but the best and deliver the best episodes to you. I'm still learning. So thank you for your patience.
I want to be the best and I love you. Enjoy. Today, I will be reading a passage from chapter three from the book, a subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson. Be careful what you believe, right?
In 1988, while in therapy, the journalist and feminist author Meredith Marin came to a startling realization. Her father has sexually abused her as a child. It was a shock to her, a repressed memory that she has spent most of her adult life oblivious to. But at the age of 37, she confronted her father and also told her family what had happened. Meredith's news horrified her entire family. Her father immediately denied having done such a thing.
Some family members sided with Meredith, others sided with her father. The family tree was split into two, and the pain that has defined Meredith's relationship with her father since long before accusation of spread like a mold across his branches. It tore everyone apart. Then, in 1996, Meredith came to another startling realization. Her father actually hadn't sexually abused her. I know. Oops.
She, with the help of a well-intentioned therapist, had actually invented that memory. Consumed by guilt, she spent the rest of her father's life attempting to reconcile with him and the other family members through constant apologizing and explaining, but it was too late. Her father passed away and her family would never
be the same. It turned out the Meredith was not alone. As she described in her autobiography, Mai Lai, a true story of a false memory throughout the 1980s, many women accuse male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later.
Similarly, there was a whole swath of people who claimed during the same decade that there was a satanic cult abusing children, yet despite police investigation in dozens of cities, police never found any evidence of the crazy practices described. So, why were people suddenly inventing memories of horrible abuse in families and cults? And why was it all happening then in the 1980s?
Ever played the telephone game as a kid? You know, the one where you say something in one person's ear and then it gets passed through like 10 people? And what the last person hears is completely unrelated to what you started with? That's basically how memories work as well. We experience something and then we remember it slightly differently a few days later as if it had been whispered and misheard. Then we tell somebody about it and we have to fill in a couple of plot holes with our own embellishments
to make sure that everything makes sense and we're not crazy. Then, we come to believe those little filled in mental gaps, and so we tell those the next time too, except that they're not real. So we get them a little bit wrong. And now we're drunk, one night, a year later, when we tell the story, so then we embellish even more. Okay, so let's be honest, we completely make up like one third of it.
But when we're sober the next week we don't want to admit that we're some big fat liar so then we go along with the revised and newly expended drunken version of her story and then five years later are absolutely swear to god swear my mother's grave true than the true story is the most fifty percent true.
We all do this. You do. I do. No matter how honest and well-intentioned we are. We're in a proportional state of misleading ourselves and others for no other reason than our brains, our design to be efficient, not accurate.
Not only does our memories suck. Suck to the point that eyewitness testimonies isn't necessarily taken seriously in court cases, but our brain functions in a horribly biased way. How so you ask? Well, our brain is always trying to make sense of our current situation based on what we already believe and have already experienced.
Every new piece of information is measured against the values and conclusions we already have. As a result, our brain is always biased towards what we feel to be true in that moment. So then, when we have a good relationship with our sister,
will interpret most of our memories about her in a positive light. But when the relationship sours will often come to see those exact same memories differently, reinventing them in such a way as to explain her present day anger towards her. That sweet gift that she gave us last Christmas is now remembered as something patronizing and condescending. That time that she forgot to invite us to her lake house is now seen as not so innocent mistake, but instead a horrible negligence.
Meredith's fake abuse story makes far more sense when we understand that the values in which her beliefs arose. Can we talk about my boobs really quick? I don't know about you, but me, my breasts have been fluctuating since I was 14. Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're smaller, but they're always there. So this message is from my big titty queens, but also from my small titty queens.
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First of all, Meredith had had a strained and difficult relationship with her father throughout most of her life. Second, Meredith had a serious, a failed, intimate relationship with men, including a failed marriage. So already, in terms of her values, close relationships with men were not doing so hot.
Then in the early 1980s, Meredith became a radical feminist. Okay. So this book was written long time ago. So take some of the things he says with a grain of salt. Okay. Don't look away because of some words and keep listening because there's a great lesson. And by the way, I've even saw line order episodes with this happening to a family. So there were loads of cases about things like this, but normally it's because, and this is outside the book, normally
These cases occurred because the therapist was practicing some type of therapy that is now considered looked down upon and in some ways illegal where they recreate memories and never happened. But back then they weren't aware yet the therapist were doing this. So that is why a lot of people came to have memories that never actually happened and ruined loads of families.
When I was watching this salon order, it was based on a true story where the father committed suicide after everyone started to believe that he sexually abused his daughter. Anyway, back to her being a radical feminist. Then in the early 1980s, Meredith became a radical feminist and began doing research into child abuse.
She was confronted with horrific story after story of abuse. And she dealt with incest survivors, usually little girls for year on end. She also reported extensively on a number of inaccurate studies that came out around that time. So studies that it later turned out grossly overestimated the prevalence of child molestation. The most famous study reported that a third of adult women have been sexually molested as children and a number that has since been shown to be false.
And on top of all of this, Meredith fell in love and began a relationship with another woman, an incest survivor. Well, this makes sense. Meredith developed a co-dependent and toxic relationship with her partner, one in which Meredith continually tried to save the other woman from her traumatic past.
Her partner also used her traumatic past as a weapon of guilt to earn Meredith's affection. Meanwhile, Meredith's relationship with her father deteriorated even further, and she was attending therapy at an almost compulsive rate. Her therapist, who had their own values and beliefs driving their behavior regularly insisted that it couldn't simply be Meredith's highly stressful reporting job or her poor relationship that were making her so unhappy that it must be
something else something deeper around this time a new form of treatment call this is what i was talking about around this time a new form of treatment called repressed memory therapy was becoming hugely popular which now like i said is look down upon and not allowed to be practiced but i guess this is what was happening in the eighties which is why there were so many false cases of child most station.
Anyway, this therapy involved a therapist putting a client into a trans-like state where she was encouraged to root out and re-experience forgotten childhood memories. These memories were often benign, but the idea was that at least a few of them would be traumatic as well.
So there you have poor Meredith, miserable and researching incest and child molestation every day for her job, angry at her father, having endured an entire lifetime of failed relationships with men and the only person who seems to understand her or love her is another woman who is currently a survivor of incest. Oh, and she's lying on a couch crying every single other day with a therapist demanding over and over again that she remembers
something she cannot remember and voila, you have the perfect recipe for an invented memory of sexual abuse that never happened. Our minds' biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret them in such a way that they will cohere with all of the previous experiences, feelings and beliefs.
But often, we run into life situations where past and present don't cohere. On such occasions, where we experience, in that moment, flies in the face of everything we've accepted as true and reasonable about our past. In an effort to achieve coherence, in an effort to achieve coherence, our minds will sometimes, in cases like this, invent false memories.
By linking our present experience with the imagined pasts, our minds allow us to maintain whatever meaning we already established. So, as noted earlier, Meredith's story is not unique in fact. In the 1980s and the early 90s, hundreds of innocent people were only accused of sexual violence under similar circumstances. Many of them even went to prison for it.
For people who were dissatisfied with their lives, these suggestive explanations combined with the media, this process and the state of mind have resulted and became so common that a name was introduced for it, that repressed memory therapy, which was false memory syndrome. That's right. It changed the way courtrooms operate. Thousands of therapists were sued and even lost their licenses. Repressed memory therapy fell out of practice and was replaced by more practical methods.
Recent research has only reinforced the painful lesson of that era. Our beliefs are malleable and our memories are horribly unreliable. There's a lot of conventional wisdom out there telling you to trust yourself or go with your gut and all sorts of other pleasant sounding cliches, but perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. After all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more often.
If we are all wrong all the time, then isn't self-skeptism and the righteous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions that only logical route to progress? This may sound scary and self-destructive, but it's actually quite the opposite. It's not only the safer option, but it's liberating as well. And outside of this book, this also goes into a lot of things that I previously have mentioned in my other episodes.
And that is we happen to be the worst narrators around lives because the way we narrow our lives is always based on how we feel in the moment. That means if we are feeling depressed or sad or bad about ourselves, we will then narrate our lives in that exact way. And our brains are so powerful because our brains will try to prove our emotions to become facts. So that means if I believe that everyone hates me, because I feel bad about myself, my brain,
will look to prove that to be true. Meaning not only will I suddenly notice people looking at me the wrong way or my days will seem worse because my brain will look to validate how I feel about myself but I will also then go back in my memories and memories that previously were happy ones. I will suddenly notice things that were never actually there in order to validate that in fact everyone hates me and not just today but since I was born everyone has hated me.
So this is what I would say in a way this chapter is trying to say, but let's keep going. We have some more time. Okay, so we need to talk about gifts, right? Holidays are coming up. If you're anything like me, you've got a million people to shop for because you're just a super nice person, but you have zero idea of what to get them. Luckily.
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Men's law of avoidance, chances are that you've heard some form of Parkinson's law. Work expands so as to fill up the time available for its completion. You've also undoubtedly heard of Murphy's law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
Well next time you're at a swanky cocktail party and you want to impress somebody, try dropping Manson's Law of Avoidance on them. Which is, the more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. That means, the more something threatens to change how you view yourself, how successful, unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it.
There is a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. Anything that shakes up that comfort, even if it could potentially make your life better, is inherently scary. Menson's law applies to both good and bad things in life, making a million dollars could threaten your identity, just as much as losing all of your money.
Becoming a famous rockstar could threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This is why people are often afraid of success. For the exact same reason you are afraid of failure, it threatens who they believe themselves to be. You avoid writing that screenplay that you've always dreamed of because doing so would also call into question your identity as a practical insurance adjuster.
You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a good moral woman. You avoid telling your friend that you don't want to see him anymore because ending that friendship with conflict with your identity is a nice forgiving person. These are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up because they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They threaten the values that we've chosen and have learned to live up to.
I had a friend who, for the longest time, talked about putting his artwork online and trying to make a go of it as a profession. He talked about it for years. He saved up money. He even built a few different websites and uploaded his portfolio, but he never launched. There was always some reason. The resolution on his work wasn't good enough, or he had just painted something better, or he just wasn't in the right position to dedicate enough time to it yet.
Years passed and he never did give up his real job. Why? Because despite dreaming about making a living through his art, the real potential of becoming an artist nobody likes was far, far, far scarier than remaining an artist nobody heard of. At least he was comfortable with and used to being an artist nobody heard of.
I had another friend who was a party guy and always going out and drinking and chasing girls and after years of living the high life, he found himself terribly lonely, depressed and unhealthy. He wanted to give up his party lifestyle. He spoke with a fierce jealousy of those of us who were in relationships more settled down than he was, yet he never changed.
For years, he went on empty night after night, brought off to bottle, always some excuse, always some reason why he couldn't slow down. Giving up that lifestyle, threatened his identity too much. The party guy was all he knew how to beat. To give that up would be like committing psychological hard carry, which whatever that means.
We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify them and maintain them. Even if we don't mean to, that's just how our brain is wired. As noted before, we are unfairly biased towards what we already know, what we believe to be certain.
If I believe that I'm a nice guy, I will then avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. And if I believe I'm an awesome cook, I will then seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. That belief always takes precedence.
Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change. In this way, knowing yourself or finding yourself can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potentials and outer opportunities.
I say don't find yourself. I say never know exactly who you are because that is what keeps you striving and discovering and it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting the differences in others. And then lastly, last page, kill yourself. Buddhism argues that your idea of who you are is arbitrary mental construction that you shall let go of the idea that you exist at all.
that the arbitrary metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus, you are better off letting go of everything. In a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you to not give a fuck. It sounds wonky, but there are some psychological benefits of this approach to life, I concur. When we let go of stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act and fail and grow. When someone admits to herself, you know, maybe I'm not that good in relationships.
Then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no identity to protect by saying in a miserable crappy marriage just to prove something to herself. When the student admits himself, you know, maybe I'm not a rebel. Maybe I'm just scared. Then he is finally free to be ambitious again. He has no reason to feel threatened by pursuing his academic dreams and maybe failing. Or, for example, outside of this book, when I believed that I was meant to be an attorney,
And I did everything I could to pursue that. I worked at law firms. I volunteered at the DA's office at the Harker Yang Division and major crimes. I studied for the LSATs, applied to law schools, including the law school my sister went to. And then when I was put on the waiting list and
followed by a rejection from the law school my sister attended, I finally had to sit with myself and decide, was this for me? Is my identity really in being a lawyer? Do we even want this or do I just want the victory? Am I actually enjoying the journey? And the answer was no. I finally decided to kill my ego and accept failure because it wasn't a failure. It was me coming through the conclusion that I didn't want this hard enough.
that this was not the path for me and i was boy how thankful am i and instead i decided to pursue my accounting degree since i have a degree in business law and accounting and then i became an accountant and i'm doing this so anyway i have both some good news and some bad news for you there's little that is unique or special about your problems that is why letting go is so liberating.
There's a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that's going to crash or that your project idea is the stupid one, everyone is going to laugh at or that you're the one that everyone is going to choose to mock or ignore, you're implicitly telling yourself, I'm the exception. I'm unlike everybody else. I'm different and I'm special. This is narcissism, pure and simple.
You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn't obey the laws of physical universe. My recommendation is don't be so special. Don't be unique. We define your matrix in a mundane and broad ways.
Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or some undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or some failure. Instead, measure yourself by more, mundane identities, a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
The narrower and rare identity that you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary way possible. This often means giving up some grand idea about yourself, that you're uniquely intelligent.
or spectacularly talented or intimately attractive or especially victimized in ways that other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you are somehow owed something by this world. This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you've been sustaining yourself on for years, like a junkie giving up the needle you are going to go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up.
but you will come out of the other end so much better and that concludes our episode for today.
