I'm reading a book on psychoanalysis called Relational Perspectives on the Body. It came out in 1998 and here's just one idea which I'm loving. This is from Carl Jung. He saw the unconscious as striving to compensate and correct for a one-sided conscious attitude. My conscious attitude is I only think about generally speaking what's great in my life, what I'm happy about in my life, what brings me joy in my life, what gives me a feeling of accomplishment in my life. I consciously choose to focus on what I have. I don't choose to focus on what I don't have in my life. I'm just telling myself, isn't it great? I'm looking at palm trees. This is how I go through the day. Isn't it great? The sun is shining. Isn't it great? There are blue skies. Isn't it great that I have food in the refrigerator? Isn't it great that I have food and water stored up in case there's an earthquake? Isn't it great I've got $15,000 in the bank? Isn't it great that I've got regular sources of income flowing in? Isn't it great that I have friends? Isn't it great that I have synagogues that I love? Isn't it great that I get to talk on YouTube? Isn't it great that people sometimes throw down a Super Chat to share appreciation for my musing? Isn't it great that this pretty girl smiled at me and talked to me today? Isn't it great that I've got all these books I'm incredibly excited about reading? That's how I consciously go through the day. It's like, oh yeah, this is great. I don't think about what's missing from my life. I spend very little attention to what I don't have. I just said I just glory in what I do have and I look forward to doing more of the things that are possible for me. Whoa! Thank you so much, Josh Randall, $20 Super Chat. Here's some Ascension Bucks. Thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate it. It gives me a lot of energy when people support the show like that. I love this idea from Carl Jung. The unconscious is striving to compensate and correct for one-sided conscious attitude. My conscious attitude is to always celebrate what's great in my life, to focus on what's great in my life, to have gratitude for what's great in my life, to draw energy and inspiration and joy from what's great in my life, and to just set aside everything that I don't have. Because I feel like I'll be much more successful getting the things that I don't have and wish to have if I focus on gratitude, an attitude of gratitude. Thank you, God, for giving me another day. Thank you, God, for renewing my soul. Thank you, God, for waking me up. Thank you, God, for putting me to sleep. Thank you, God, for allowing me to do another live YouTube show where I didn't completely melt down and make a complete fool of myself. But what's probably going on unconsciously, and that's where I pick up my journal, and I like to journal most every day about, okay, if I was really mad about something right now and wasn't conscious of it, what would I be mad about if I was really feeling jealous? So I just journal about the things that I may be feeling vulnerable about, sad about aching for, jealous, envious, angry, rage. I'm not conscious of these things, but if I had them, where would they come from? Where would they be heading? So I like this idea of Jung, that the unconscious is striving to compensate and correct for one side of conscious attitude. There's very one side of conscious attitude. I just want to celebrate the things I have, and I don't want to dwell on the things I don't have. But I take a few minutes, 20 minutes a day to journal about all my most vulnerable feelings. I step out of this attitude of gratitude. Yay! And go, okay, if I was feeling petty right now, what would I be feeling petty about if I was feeling jealous right now? If I was feeling just aching and longing and desire and jealousy and rage and if I was feeling impotent, what would it be about? So this really rings true to me that our unconscious is constantly striving to compensate and correct for out one side of conscious attitudes. I don't know about you, but for much of my life, I've lived very much in my head and throughout my life I've had very strong opinions which I'm constantly discarding and then taking on new strong opinions, but I just had the vague sense that in my unconscious there was kind of this process to correct and compensate for my very one-sided conscious attitude. So my conscious attitudes tend to be very one-sided. It's like, okay, this is the way. So as a Yongying says, we must develop metacognitive processes. So we must build on our capacity to think about and entertain our own subjective states from different perspectives. So there's no one true Luke, right? There's not like a through life for the one true Luke doing, whoa, Josh Reynolds says, $30 soup chat, if I drift too far too long from gratitude awareness, the suffering is immense being that way in my whole life.  Not sit in it, like not carried around with you, but instead of like walling it off, it's like I must never open that door. So I've got a closed cupboard door there. All right, so let's say that's my psyche. And there are things that I long for that I don't have. And let's just say I just keep that aspect of my psyche. Is it best for me just to keep that part of my psyche just locked? Or, obviously I'm no expert here, it's a good idea for me to go into that cupboard. Now open it up maybe once a day and just air it out. Maybe take everything out once in a while and clean and dust and organize and discard things that I don't know. So instead of just like locking that cupboard of my psyche off, am I better off opening it up once a day for 20, 30 minutes and just journaling about it? So what are the keyness pains that I have right now that I don't want to consciously think about?  All right, I've got a journal. So I've got my journal. I write down my hidden pains and my desires and my petty feelings. And I got the journal and then I shut it and just put it away. I'm done. Now I'm back to just focusing on gratitude for the things that I have and generally ignoring the things that I don't have. Holly says gratitude and humility are so important. Absolutely. So humility once again, that simply means living in reality. So for Holly, it's not humble for her to say that she's a terrible attorney. In certain areas she's at least a competent attorney if not a good attorney. There's nothing non-humble about facing that. But inside, I talked a little bit in my show earlier about subjective versus objective states and we usually live in a subjective state. So subjectively, I feel like I'm the most consequential important person who's ever walked the face of the earth. There has been no man like me and there will be no man like me after I go. That's just my subjective experience. Obviously, there's absolutely no objective basis for that feeling. So subjectively, I feel like I'd be a great president of the United States, a great prime minister of Australia, that I could run a movie studio, that I could be an editor of the New York Times, and that I'd be amazing at all those tasks. But objectively, not much evidence for that. Subjectively, I feel like I'd be the greatest and the one and only true successor to Rush Limbaugh. But objectively, there's no objective evidence for that. So we want to be able to move between these various states, the subjective state where we feel all our desires and wishes and then an objective state where we see ourselves as how a neutral third party would see us and then I want to be able to carry on right now what's going on. It's not primarily information and it's not primarily entertainment. What's going on right now is primarily a relationship. I have a relationship with Holly that goes back at least three years. I have a relationship with Josh Randall that goes back three years. I have a relationship with Mattie that goes back 14 years. Something like that. So what's going on here is we have a relationship and this is not just primarily about me lecturing you. It's like you say things, I react, I say things, you react and it's not out of the blue. We're building upon a relationship that goes back many, many years and in all likelihood will extend many more years into the future. That's the context for what's going on here. So if one's to look at this stream primarily in terms of what's the information or what's the entertainment value, you'd be missing what's really going on in these streams. What's really going on in these streams is a relationship, is a friendship, is a community where people from the stream, they meet each other, they do business with each other, they date each other, they hang out with each other. What's going on here primarily is that we have a community. But anyway, there's no one Luke. It's not like this is the true Luke and the Luke who's doing gossip streams, that's not the true Luke or the Luke who's making bawdy humor, that's not the true Luke or it's only the Luke who talks Torah, that's the true Luke. It's only the Luke who's doing a show with Doovid. That's the true Luke and everything else is just a pale limitation. No, there's no one true Luke. I am different with every person I interact with. I conduct myself a little differently in synagogue than I do when I'm teaching an Alexander technique lesson as when I'm doing a live stream, when I'm hanging out with a friend one-on-one. I have different interactions when I'm hanging out with Joe, Jeff and John one-on-one as opposed to when I'm hanging out with all three of them simultaneously. So I don't think that there's one true self that we have. Rather, what's going on here in technical language is called intersubjective. Like, who I am is dependent on who you are and the relationship between us and the space that we're occupying. Time, space, relationship, that shapes who I am. Josh, Randall, wow, $20 superchat. Is it wrong that I sometimes look at the woes of others and feel grateful that I'm not also afflicted that way? No, not at all. Like, everyone feels better when they look at the woes of other people. Now, there's no way we can escape from comparing ourselves to other people and we should not try to escape from that. So, do I think the Noahide Law is problematic in any way? Okay, I can't keep up. So let me go back to we can't help comparing ourselves to others. That's essential because we have to compare ourselves to others for the purpose of connection. We absolutely need to connect with other people. And so we have to have a sense of what's going on to effectively compare ourselves to others. Then we need to compare ourselves to others for connection, community and for information. So we need information and we get information from comparing ourselves to others. Then we need to compare ourselves to others for inspiration and to have like a relative sense of where we're at in life. But you can obviously very easily tip over into resentment and disgust. Right? Once you start comparing yourself to others, the automatic thing is that you then tip over into resenting those who are above you and having disgust and loathing for those who are below you. So that's the natural normal human tendency. But you probably don't want to hang out there. I think we have to accept that this is normal natural that we will start tipping over into resentment of those who do better than us and disgust with those who don't do as well as us. So we never get away from being human. But I think we get a chance to determine what channel we stay in. So we don't want to stay in resentment and we don't want to stay in loathing for other people. But we can't escape our humanity. We will always be comparing ourselves to others. It's futile to not do that. It rubs you over the human to not do that. But you don't want to spend a great deal of time in the TV channels in your soul of disdain or resentment.  They're a child of God. They're on their path. I'm on my path. So we can't help but notice. But you don't want to stay in a state of resenting others or just having absolute disdain for others because that doesn't do us any good. But it probably helps to own our own soul. And so part of what constitutes our soul is our longing. You know, our subjective yearning, our desires, unfulfilled desires, our embarrassments, our petty hurts and jealousies and barely conscious rage and resentment. Perhaps there's great benefit in just writing them out, what they could possibly be, but then closing the book and moving on. So we want to be able to think about and see ourselves from many different perspectives. Yeah, resentment is no friend of mine. So it's going to come up. It will always come up, but we don't want to stay there. And so how do we avoid staying there? For example, by not writing up tickets for people for unenforceable tickets. Oh, so and so should not have done that. We have no power to enforce those tickets for their infractions. So writing up unenforceable tickets does not serve us. But we're different in every interaction with everybody in different contexts. So I'm not sure there's any one true self. So we need the capacity to effortlessly see ourselves from different perspectives to understand our own subjective states. And then to, if I'm talking to Josh Randall, like right now I'm talking to Josh Randall. So I've had private conversations with Josh. I've had many online streaming conversations with Josh. I have a pretty good idea of who he is, where he's coming from. So I take that into account when I carry on this conversation. So it's not a huge leap. It's not a great mental challenge for me to go from just thinking about my own subjective state to seeing things from Josh's perspective and then seeing things from Holly's perspective and seeing things from Matashahu's perspective. Then seeing things perhaps from the perspective of someone who's never been on this stream before. They're just alighting on this stream by accident. And what does this conversation look like to them? So we don't just merely want to see ourselves from our gut or from our emotions. We don't want to just merely see ourselves from a called cognitive objective evaluation. We want to see ourselves from every different possible perspective, alright? Without impulsively having to enact anything. So this is what Jung really means by transcendence. So Jung sees the mind as a self-regulating system. So by transcendence he means this internal dialogue in which the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious mind are loosened. Allowing some mutual influence to occur while maintaining tension between them. So let's just suppose that Jung is right. That the unconscious mind is always trying to correct and compensate for what the one-sided conscious mind is doing. So we can relax and we can journal and listen to music and meditate and we can perhaps open up some space in the unconscious mind and allow room for it to penetrate into our conscious mind. Wow, thank you so much for your support of the show. Josh Randall, $20 Super Chat. Why do resentments look so absurd when you write them on paper?  That's because you're shifting from your subjective state to an objective state. Okay, so let's think about, let's think that I have a resentment. Okay, so I came to LA in 19, I returned to LA in 1994 and I was having tremendous success with the ladies. But then I started dating this smart, she had it together woman who would not go to bed with me. And I was amazed because pretty much everyone I was going out with by the third date I was going to bed with. But this woman, I went out with her five times, I think, and she did not go to bed with me. So I had some resentment. Like I was 27, I was a good looking charming guy and women were just falling into bed with me left and right. But this one woman wasn't going to bed with me and so I had a resentment. And it's like, man, I've gone out with her five times. What's the matter with this woman? Okay, so my subjective sense is I don't get why this woman is not getting to bed with me. I desire her and I'm a good looking charismatic guy and she should feel grateful to go to bed with me. That's just my subjective sense. But when I talk about it objectively, so I'm sharing it with you, sharing it with the world, I realize how ludicrous it is for me to have resentment that this one woman wouldn't sleep with me after five dates.  Like my subjective sense is I am the one true successor to Rush Limbaugh. Objectively, I step out of that and I think that's absolutely ludicrous. There's no objective basis for that point of view. So I used to write a lot of stories about this one girlfriend who caused me a lot of heartache and she was insensitive and she had a lot of contempt for me. She thought I was a wimp. Can you believe that? I mean, I got this huge pain threshold. Like my physical therapist told me that I had this huge pain threshold, but I told my girlfriend, oh, I was going to get physical therapy because, you know, I got really bad plantar fasciitis or this problem or that problem.  I'd never had a girlfriend before who had contempt for me. He thought I was a wimp. It was shocking and so I was getting a little bit hurt and disturbed and so I was writing all these stories about how hurtful she was and my writing teacher just got sick of, I think, these one-sided stories and she suggested, why don't you write about things from Lisa's perspective? And then as soon as I started writing about things from Lisa's perspective, I would run them by her. I would read them aloud to her and she enjoyed that and she'd correct me. I was about 95% accurate in understanding things from her point of view, but as soon as I snapped into the mode of writing about things from her perspective, all my petty subjective, you know, hurts feeling, you know, hard-dumb by feeling transgress, feeling abused, like all those petty subjective hurts, they just disappeared when I moved into the objective realm of, oh, you know, how does this look like from Lisa's perspective? So normally I only see things from my perspective, but with the prompting of my writing teacher, I started to write stories from Lisa's perspective and that forced me out of my subjective frame of mind into an objective frame of mind. So all my resentments and hurts and grudges, they just disappeared. So when we get out of our subjective state into an objective state, our petty hurts disappeared. Now, we don't want to live completely in an objective state because then we'll be crushed by our own insignificance, right? If you never spend any time in an objective state, you'll be grandiose, histrionic, narcissistic, and wildly out of touch with reality.  So you want to be able to just oscillate between subjective, objective, subjective, objective. Subjectively, resentments will just come up, come up, come up, but you don't want to dwell on them. So you switch, you write them down and move into an objective state. You share them with a sponsor or share them with someone else and they just diminish and go away.  Most of the time we should feel that we are the center of the universe, right? That's no more natural and healthy. But if we feel that 99.9% of the time, that's not going to serve us. But maybe 95% of the time, and then 5% of the time we try to see things from others' point of view. Holly says pride can get in the way of purging resentments. We often feel righteous. It took me a long time to realize that we have to take a lot of bad stuff in life and that's just how it is. Well, what's deeper than that is to recognize how much bad stuff you've done to others. Okay? So once you sit down and get objective about all the unnecessary harm that you've caused to others, your own ability to feel self-righteous will just melt away. Because you'll recognize that no one, if you go deep enough and you're honest enough, you'll recognize that no one's done anything as bad to you as you have not done to others or at least it's going to be in the same ballpark. Like, I once was listening to pop music on the radio and just cruising along one morning having a great time driving down the road and I just went right through a stoplight, like 60 miles an hour. And there were cars lined up who had the right of way to turn in front of me. And if they hadn't seen that I wasn't stopping, right, I would have plowed into one of those cars, killed myself, killed, you know, however many people were in that other car because I was just having such a great time bopping to the music, I wasn't paying attention to the traffic lights. So I would have very well been a massive killer.  Oh, go.  Holly says, I think we often assign malintent to people who have just been careless with our feelings but don't really intend harm. Yeah, often, but often people intend harm. I know I often intend harm. Like, I think once we get, get honest with how often we intend harm, like, there are no, there are no married couples that aren't frequently, deliberately doing things to hurt each other, right, it's called normal marital sadism. So if you're punching each other, that's not normal marital sadism. But like in sex, the woman may lack enthusiasm. The man may be selfish. He's not doing the things that she likes in bed. The man may be premature ejaculator and he's doing it deliberately to hurt her even though he claims that he loves her. The woman claims that she loves her husband, but she's just going through the motions in the bedroom. Like, we're always constantly deliberately hurting the ones that we say we love the most. And if you can't face that reality, then you're not going to make much progress because we have to begin with reality. We have to begin with what's true. Like, we're human beings and human beings deliberately try to hurt the people they love. So we have to face that we are deliberately trying to hurt and irritate and infuriate and belittle the people that we say we love the most. For some, that's a hard truth. But that's reality. Until you can face that you are deliberately harming the people at times that you say you love the most or feel you love the most in the world. There's no hope until you can come to terms with reality. When we were babies, we had to be assertive and act as though we were the center of the universe. No crying, no love, no food. I don't know how anyone can go through life without acting and feeling like they're the center of the universe most of the time. But if you want to succeed in the workplace, you have to shift more often into an objective frame of mind. If you want to succeed with other people, you have to be able to see how they're seeing things. So Jung thought that we should loosen the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious mind through things like meditation and journaling. Journaling is a mirror to the mind.  If you want to know what's going on in your brain, you journal. It's a mirror to the mind. It's Dennis Prager. Understanding the unconscious, the interplay between them, we can start to have some peace with the tension between these polarities. So we have a mind that operates in a way to protect us from further trauma. We've all been traumatized and you can always tell if you've been traumatized in a certain area. You can't talk about it normally. You want to be congruent.  So my emotional affect refers to my feelings. My emotional affect should match the words that I'm saying, my gestures, body language, my emotions as they ride through my face and body, and my words. They should all be congruent. And the less congruence, that means the more trauma, the less things have been resolved. So you know that you've got unresolved trauma if you can't talk about something without your voice cracking or without really strong physiological reactions rippling through you. So I had 10 years of therapy. I think I can talk about most everything that's happened in my life without having some extreme physiological reaction. So I've spoken about it. I've worked through it.  And so you can't feel the emotions that come with the recalling being physically abused. All emotions start in the body. We feel joy, jealousy, anger, hatred, the thrill of victory, desire, loneliness. We feel it in our body. And then we put it into words. Then we have the capacity to put it into words or to mentalize it, to understand or unpack what's going on. But if we just block out say physical abuse or trauma and so that we just have a completely flat affect when we talk about, say, something beaten or some horrible thing happening to us when we've been unable to process the trauma, then the body keeps score. Then it very likely comes out in back pain or headaches or indigestion or skin diseases or all these other things. So that's why it's important to have the capacity to unlock what's going on just below the surface, because the body keeps score. You may have blocked these painful interactions, but they're going to come out. Most of our physical pain, most of our back pain, most of our headaches, most of our indigestion, most of our skin diseases, they come from, in all likelihood, unconscious rage. So affect, I got the dictionary for the American Psychological Association. Affect, any experience of feeling or emotion ranging from suffering to elation, from the simplest to the most complex sensations of feeling from the most normal to the most pathological emotional reactions. So often described in terms of positive affect, positive emotions or negative affect. So along with cognition and co-nation, affect is one of the three traditionally identified components of the mind.  That's the proactive as opposed to the habitual part of motivation that connects knowledge, affect, drives, desires and instincts to behavior. Then embodied cognition as the thesis of the human mind is within the body and it is determined by the structures of the body, the morphology, the shape of the body, the sensory motor systems and its interactions with the physical environment. So the idea of the body keeps going, means everything that's happened to us is in our body. It's taken at all in our body. So when we're saying, you know, having an embodied conversation, it means we're dropping out of a hyper aroused state where we're just primarily in our mind. We're coming down, we're dropping down and we're landing. So that we're having this conversation where I'm feeling this conversation. I'm speaking to you and I'm talking to you from my body where everything that's happened to me is lodged as opposed to just being up here, you know, spinning fancy theories. So embodiment means that everything we've experienced, our physical bodies contain all the traces of our previous experiences. If you enter a room, someone who's really skilled will be able to detect signs that you're in that room, right? You've got all these TV shows about investigating crimes and murders and people pick up DNA from rooms. So every time you enter a room, you leave part of yourself there.  So we incorporate our life experiences into our body. And so people usually with defects or, you know, weird interfering tension patterns, that's how they've incorporated, how they've dealt with pain and stress. They've developed weird interfering, you know, tension patterns where they have one shorter that's higher than the other or they have, you know, all sorts of lines of worry or tension on their face. So reflexive behavior. So that's the opposite of co-nation. Reflexive is just means habitual. It's free from conscious control, such as when we salivate at the prospect of food. Catexis, that's the investment of libidinal energy in an object or an idea. Like patriotism is a form of catexis. It comes from the Greek word to occupy. It's also a translation of a German word meaning occupation. So the libido is sent out to seize an external object just as an army would seize and occupy a city. So in psychoanalysis, objects are those things that have been connected, meaning they've been invested with our libidinal energy, with our libido, with our emotional drives. So these objects can be other people or anything else or even abstract concepts like freedom or justice. So these are objects. The subject in psychoanalysis is the sum of the physiological and psychological operations that sustain the individual. So subjective point of view, right? Everything that I'm feeling and thinking and experiencing. Objective point of view, right? We're looking out. So psychoanalysis does not believe that there's like one true essence of ourselves, that there's like a centered autonomous eye with self-awareness. So from a psychoanalytic point of view, our autonomy and self-awareness is constantly undermined by impulses from our desires and we're steered by pressures from our conscience and we change in relationship to who we're in relationship with.  So we comprehend our own desires and what we intuit other people's desires, intentions and affects. So in psychoanalytic training, the analysts in training, if they tell a Freudian supervisor about a case revolving around intimacy, then the Freudian would tell you to understand it in terms of the patient's conflicted sexuality. But psychoanalysis has moved steadily over the past 40 years away from Freudian approach about sexual conflicts towards interpersonal relations. So who we are primarily determined by who we're in relationships with. So if you tell an interpersonal supervisor about, say, a patient's sexual conflicts, then the interpersonal supervisor will tell you to look at these underlying sexual conflicts in the terms of the patient's relationships. So Freudians tend to highlight the sex drive, they put that at the core of the human experience, and then interpersonal analysts put relationships at the core of the human experience. So this one analyst in training had a female supervisor and she told him when you listen to a patient's free association, think body, think sex, think dirty. Okay, that's the Freudian approach. So another term that analysts love is self-reflexivity. So that's simply the capacity to experience and observe and reflect on oneself as both a subject and an object. So I can carry on this conversation thinking about what's going on inside of me, what's going on inside of you, how I would look to an objective third party. I can just oscillate between all these different points of view and there's not a lot of tension or strain or struggle between oscillating, understanding different points of view than I have varying degrees of self-reflexivity. So it also means we use a cognitive approach to think about ourselves from the outside. So as if I was standing over here and looking at myself here doing this live stream. Many narcissistic personality disorders, histrionic borderline personality disorders, addictions, perversions, eating disorders, psychosomatic meaning the body is suffering pain because the mind can't deal with something. Okay, these can be best understood as the patient's inability to oscillate between the subjective and objective sense of oneself when we see ourselves either as the center of initiative and also as the recipient of other people's initiatives. So emotion is essentially psychosomatic. We don't feel emotions outside of our body. We feel emotions in our body. So somatic refers to the body, psycho refers to the mind. So all emotions occupy both, yeah, think body, think dirty, think 40. Excellent. Okay, so there are no emotions outside of the body and the mind. The mind, the emotions, the body, they're all constantly interacting on each other. So if my shoulders start to get tight, my back tightens up, that's going to affect my emotions and my thinking. Can you be healthy if you just bury your pain and decide to move on? I didn't know. At some point I just get sick of self-analysis and just want to let it all go and move on.  So I don't have a definitive answer and I'm only an amateur. So I think different people benefit from varying levels of self-understanding. So if your body is not causing you any major problems, if you're not repetitively blowing up your life or hurting yourself, if you're not repetitively doing things that you'd rather not do, then objectively there doesn't seem to be a strong case that you need to engage in more self-analysis. But if you've got a problem with headaches, if you've got a problem with eating too much, if you've got a problem with getting into certain unhealthy interactions with people, if you have a problem with digestion, if you've got some weird skin disease, if you can't sleep, right, if you've got these major problems going on, then maybe some journaling and some inner work can be of benefit. So when the psychological aspect of an emotion, so let's just say something very painful happened to you earlier today, and you decide, I'm just going to block it out and just move on.  Okay, so what can happen is the emotional expression is blocked. You're just going to block that. You're just going to put it in that closet and lock it. But emotions and trauma and pain, they always also occur in the body. So you're going to block the emotional expression and block the self-analysis. But the physiological aspect of the trauma that happened to you, that can lead to psychosomatic explosions like debilitating back pain. Your back may go out. You may get laryngitis. You may get debilitating headaches. You may not be able to sleep. You may not be able to digest. You may get weird eruptions on your skin if you don't deal with your emotions unless you're willing to come to terms with your inner self. So you may want to own your soul. You may want to do the soul work. That involves noticing your emotional states and what's happening to you. If I push negative feelings away and it's Josh, they come back as bunched up tight shoulders. So why would one not want to own one's own soul to be aware of what's going on inside of you? So if you're not congruent, it means that you're dissociating, right?  They were abused as kids and so they kind of float outside of themselves when they're having sex. And so pathological dissociation is a defensive impairment of reflective capacity. We're not able to reflect about what's really going on with us. When we shift from dissociation to openly engaging with the inner conflict that we're experiencing, we're increasing our capacity to own our own soul. We're developing the ability to see ourselves objectively and subjectively to see ourselves as other people might see us and see ourselves as we might want other people to see us. And we can oscillate between all these different points of view without much stress. We can look at various aspects of ourselves that we want to deny or push away or ignore. So for psychoanalysis, the aim is to restore this self-reflexive functioning so that we can oscillate between all these different perspectives on all the different parts of ourselves. So a long-established principle of psychoanalysis is that the analyst, the psychoanalyst, has to form an alliance with the patient's observing ego. So when you have therapy or analysis, you talk from your subjective self, but you also kind of at times drift outside of yourself and get a sense of how what you're saying sounds like to an objective third party or to your analyst. So in psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst forms an alliance with that observing part of yourself which is split off from the patient's experiencing subjective part of himself. So to become self-actualized or self-aware, we have to break with identification with any single aspect of our self, right? And engage in this ongoing dialogue between all the different forms of subjectivity and objectivity that we have the ability to. So we have internal dialogues going on. We stand in the space between different realities, different perspectives, different subjective experiences. So we are able to be at peace with all these different aspects of ourselves, the subjective and the objective. Whereas trauma, with trauma we're going to want to wall off parts of ourselves. Just like, ah, I'm not going to open up that door to my psyche where that person did something really humiliating and debasing to me. I'm just going to keep that locked up. But I'll conclude with this great observation from Carl Jung. The unconscious is striving to compensate and correct for the one-sided conscious attitude. The unconscious is striving to compensate and correct for the one-sided conscious attitude. Josh says, every time I put family grief down to be the strong one, I experience acid reflux. So there's, I think, a point to just journaling a few minutes a day about, okay, if I was feeling upset right now, what would it be about if I was feeling petty right now? If I had rage right now, what would it be about? What are the deepest pains? What are the things I really don't want to look at in myself, in my life, in my experience? What are aspects of how I've related with other people that I don't want to think about right now? And just, you know, journal it, and if you have fears of safety, you can just, you know, journal it and burn it. Talk to you later.