Childhood Trauma Resolved: Dr. John Delony on Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Transcript)

And that made me step back and go, “Whoa, there’s these different layers to these stories happening all over the place.” And it’s not just narrative, it’s the entire ecosystem that I call my body, my human experience.

And then as I began to pull the thread on those, man, those stories we’re born into and the stories we were told have such a formative shaping of our life experience. And those stories become the stories we tell ourselves, which, as we all know in mental health professionals, that shapes everything. Who I think I am and what I think I’m capable or not capable of, or “I’m the worst thing that ever happened to me.” Those stories are highly limiting or they are the jet fuel on a well-lived life.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: So if we can discuss those stories, man, what a shape-shifting opportunity for us.

How Trauma Lives in the Body

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that idea about stories in some sense being stored in the body is kind of interesting. And so the way I conceptualize it is that a story manifests itself in a personality, in a set of goals and a set of assumptions about the world, perceptions about the world.

And if you have had terrible things happen to you in the past, and that’s pretty much true of everyone, although some people more than others, then your body computes the present danger of the environment based on how many things have happened to you that are terrible in the past that aren’t resolved.

And resolved would mean that you had generated a solution for them. And if your psychophysiological system assumes that all the danger that you were subject to once is still present in the environment, then it’s going to set you on edge, as if you’re walking in dangerous territory.

And the psychophysiological consequence of that is that you’re prepared for danger. And that does such things as burn up excess resources because you’re much more reactive and on point than you might otherwise be in an anxiety-prone manner. It also suppresses immunological function because your body isn’t that worried about long-term immunological health if you’re confronting an emergency.

So you talk in your book about changing your past, owning your past, and it’s useful to define that. You’re likely to overcome a trauma, let’s say, and no longer in some sense store it psychophysiologically if you’ve generated a causal story about the reason that the trauma emerged and then reconfigured the way that you’re conducting your life so that the probability that a similar thing will happen to you is reduced to close to zero. It’s not catharsis, it’s understanding.

DR. JOHN DELONY: The challenge there is, I think, following that thread all the way to our modern psychological ethos, we’ve created a world that is based entirely on blame and “somebody else is responsible.” And so I’ve got to continue to cut and cut and cut and I reduce myself to a two-by-two square with which I can exist. And if you enter my square, then whether it’s ideologically or physically, then you’re suddenly affronting me.

And I think there’s something about owning your past. I look at it more in terms of, “Can I think through what I remember to have happened?” And by the way, we know that memory is a disastrous narrative storyteller.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: So I care less about what actually happened and more, “I’m in my 40s, I’m telling myself this story that happened. Can I tell that story? Can I relive that story? And my body doesn’t take off on me.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: It doesn’t rush to solve the problem for me because it knows I’m driving now.

Memory as a Navigation Tool

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. The thing about memory is that it’s not there to provide an accurate, objective record of the past, which is in fact impossible because the past is so unbelievably complex. It’s more like a navigation tool, which is, “I went here, I fell into something terrible, and now I need to recalibrate the navigation map that I’m using so that I don’t fall into the same hole.”

And you know, one of the things that people might want to know who are listening is that if you have a memory that’s older than about 18 months and it haunts you, and when it comes up involuntarily, it produces a stress reaction, what that means is that as far as your nervous system is concerned, and so as far as your body’s concerned, that danger hasn’t gone away.

And what’s happening is an unconscious alarm system that’s looking for pitfalls and holes is warning you that the map that you’re using is incomplete in a manner that might enable you to fall into the same hole.

And so one of the things that people can do that’s very useful is if you have memories like that that plague you, is to bring them to mind voluntarily instead of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily, and then to think through what has changed and what might not have, but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose, you’d be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it.

There’s no other way of getting the memory to go away. Merely recontemplating it in the same manner over and over won’t do it. And allowing it to plague you unconsciously, it’ll do that forever until you solve it. It might show up in your dreams, it’ll show up in your fantasies. It’ll trigger you, so to speak, when you’re talking to other people if they happen to discuss a topic that’s related to it.

And it’s because the narrative is one of failure and defeat. The event was one of failure and defeat. And if there isn’t a map to allow you to transcend that that’s functional, then the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying danger is never going to let you go.

The Pathology of Discomfort

DR. JOHN DELONY: Yeah. And I think culturally we’ve created a pathology of discomfort. And as you just outlined so eloquently, the only way through this is to turn and face it and walk directly through it. And if you continue to run from the memories and pathologize and chase the behaviors, you end up with our over-diagnostic approach to everything.

Instead of turning and facing these things and letting your body heal through relationships and other things in your life, man, we just end up chasing your tail. And you called it out. The more you run, the more your body thinks it’s winning. It’s getting away from this stuff. So it actually reinforces the anxiety. It reinforces some of these psychological ailments.

The further you run from it, the only healing is through it. And the culture we’ve created for ourselves says that discomfort is bad and it’s to be avoided at all costs. And it’s the only path to healing.

Breaking Down Problems into Manageable Steps

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: If you run, then the signal that the story you’re acting out is that the thing you’re running from is bigger than you and that you have to hide. And that’s just a recipe for anxiety. Now, it’s not necessarily that easy to turn and face something, but you do detail out a variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that.

You can differentiate the problem. You might be having tremendous difficulties at work. You might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless. And that’s bothering you constantly. It’s disturbing your sleep, for example, and it’s haunting you. And you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come.

And partly that’s because the thought of getting a new job is so daunting that you can’t face it. And one of the ways of recalibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable steps.

And so, for example, one of the things that you can do if you might have to consider getting a new job because you’re unhappy and miserable at work is open up your resume or your CV and look at it. So you might not be able to get a new job, but you might be able to open up your resume and look at it. And then having done that, you sort of crack the surface.

And then maybe you could spend an hour a week for a month updating it, or 10 minutes a day, or 10 minutes every two days, something like that. But part of the trick is to take these larger monsters that are frightening enough so you want to run away from them, decide that you’re going to face the situation.

You lay out, for example, in your book, you ask people a lot of different questions about what they’re thinking. And if something is making you anxious and afraid and miserable, it’s very useful to lay out, to write out all the reasons it’s making you anxious and miserable, and to ask yourself, “What is it you’re afraid of?” And then to develop a differentiated plan for dealing with those.

The Epidemic of Loneliness

DR. JOHN DELONY: So let me ask you this. In your psychoanalytic experience, can the majority of people do this by themselves? Because if I was to distill down all of the pathologies in modern civilization, I keep coming back to a central one, central point. And that’s that we are desperately and pathologically and spiritually and frighteningly lonely.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And I’m wondering if we can. Is it even possible anymore to tell a 21-year-old boy, 21-year-old man, “Hey, you need to do this by yourself”? Or is the… Because I keep coming back to the first thing you do before you start trying to solve your problems is get a tribe, get a gang, get a couple of people in your corner, get a mentor, somebody you can sit with.

And in our… we’ve had to professionalize it with mental health professionals, but get some people around you to help be a good reflective mirror for you. Because we just… we’re lonelying ourselves to death, I feel like.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, I don’t think that people can generally do this alone. It’s actually very difficult. And I think people can’t do it alone in part because people, and I’m not being snide about this, people aren’t very good at thinking and they’re not very good at negotiation.

DR. JOHN DELONY: Well, and when we’re anxious, our brains shut off rational thinking.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: It doesn’t want us wondering, “Is that a nice bear?” It just wants us getting out of there.

Building Sanity Through Relationships

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON:

Well, that’s an additional problem. You know, part of the reason that honesty and speech is so important is that there isn’t any difference between honesty and speech and thinking. So you said, can people do this alone? And the answer to that generally is no, because thought itself is generally a dialogical process.

So what you and I are doing right now is thinking things through. Now we’re doing that with an audience and for an audience. But you have some propositions and I have some propositions, and we’re pitting them against each other and cooperating at the same time. And we’re allowing the discourse to modify our implicit presuppositions. So we’re allowing the discourse to modify our stories.

And thought itself is internalized dialogue or trialogue. If you’re really sophisticated, maybe you can break yourself into three people internally and have an argument. But it’s very, very difficult for people to develop a systematic approach to thinking and then to counter that with another internalized, systematic approach to thinking and do all of that alone.

Generally, what happens in a healthy society, as you’re pointing out, is that we have people around us to whom we can express our concerns and then they react, and then you react to that. And that’s thought. And the fact that we would even ask people to do that alone is an indication, as you pointed out, of how isolated and lonesome people have become.

You know, you said friends are people you can tell good things to and people you can tell bad things to. And you have friends because friends keep you sane. And this is one of the things I liked about your book, is this insistence that sanity, in some real sense is distributed. It’s not something inside your head. It’s something that you find as a consequence of being nested in a sequence, in a hierarchical sequence of proper relationships. And so if you could do it alone, man, you could do it in solitary confinement. And, you know, even antisocial criminals hate solitary confinement. We’re social.

DR. JOHN DELONY:

It’s the way we punish prisoners, right, is to put them in the hole. And we’ve just created a society where that’s where we choose to live. Yeah, I love the idea of—I like to think of society, it’s evenly distributed. We carry each other’s burdens in different seasons, and that’s the way through.

There’s just simply moments when my wife gets sick or my dad finds himself, my aging father’s passing away. That’s the old “holding your arms up in the desert” narrative, right? We need other people to help us navigate these. And how many—I won’t put my experiences into your marriage, but the number of times over the two decades I’ve been married that I’ve been hanging out with some friends that I trust, and I say, “My wife said this and this,” and my friends go, “Man, she’s right. You’re an idiot.”

Right. And so I need that sort of iron sharpening iron to help me reframe something that my body’s taken off on.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON:

Yeah. Well, a good definition of sanity in some real sense, and I don’t mean this in a trivial or a coy way, is that you’re sane if you can behave well enough that other people can stand having you around so that they can provide you with corrective feedback.

And if you’re sane enough so that other people can stand having you around, they’ll reward you when you deserve to be rewarded and they’ll punish you when you deserve to be punished, and all you need to do is pay really careful attention to that feedback and you’ll be sane and properly situated.

Now, you know, that can go wrong if the entire social community takes a pathological turn, and that makes things more complicated. And that does happen from time to time. But generally speaking, you have to be surrounded by people.

And so we could walk through that. Very few people can function effectively without an intimate relationship. That’s because you don’t have anybody who’s monitoring you over the medium to long run if you don’t have an intimate relationship. And so how can you organize yourself intelligibly, sanely, without the medium to long term orientation? You just can’t do it.

And how can you tell if you’re being a civilized human being if you’re not bouncing your behavior off someone really close to you continually? You can’t. You need the intimate relationship. You need the family, parents and siblings, children for the same reason. And you need friends.

You talk a lot in your book about friends. And you have some good practical advice, I would say. And this would be something for us usefully to concentrate on, I would say, as you talk about how people can make friends, because people really don’t know. And so maybe you could share some of that with people who are watching and listening.

The Art of Making Friends

DR. JOHN DELONY:

Yeah, I think there’s two tracks I want to follow and one we can circle back to. This conversation we’re having right now, evolutionarily, I think we’re running a fantastic experiment because for all of the history of mankind, nobody could sit in and listen to you and I dialoguing this way unless they were in physical proximity, which that physical proximity is the form of intimacy.

We’re all in the same room, sharing the same meal, sharing the same fire. And now we’ve created this bizarre intimacy where people can drive to work for two hours, you know, one way, and they can go on road trips, but they’re sitting by the fire with us, right? And so there’s this intellectual intimacy that’s happening, but I think our bodies are hollering at us when it comes to making friends.

I spent a season, man, I was two inches from my wife, and I was 2,000 miles away from her. And I shared a bed with a woman that I loved, and I was profoundly lonely. And I always thought lonely was proximal, right? You have nobody around you. And so I think it’s proximal and it’s emotional.

I mastered the art of being alone. I’m an introvert by nature, just a nerd. I love to read my books. And so I mastered the art of being alone in a crowded room. I can wave and smile and be completely on my own planet. And that has a physiological and a spiritual cost to it.

And so what I had to stop doing was beating myself up for having a lack of character or “I’m a failure.” No, I needed to learn a new set of skills, and that skill set was making friends.

When you’re a child, when you’re in middle school, when you’re in high school, when you’re in university, everything is geared towards community. You play games together. You don’t play games together. It’s all about doing things together. And then you cross that graduation stage, or you get out of the army and the world looks at you and says, “It’s now you versus everybody.”

And so I think we just have to say, “Hey, I don’t have the skill set, so what do I got to do?” I think we overthink it. I think hospitality, going first, asking people over to your house, to your events, to your thing, and just go first, get over yourself. Look at it as, you just got to quit smoking at some point. I just got to make friends at some point. I’m going to go first.

People are going to say no. They’re going to challenge you. You’re going to find out that nobody wants to be around you. So you got to go to the mirror and ask yourself, “What is it about me that I’m projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with me?” It really challenges. But, man, just let’s stop over-pathologizing. Let’s just go be weird. Go be weird and be hospitable. Go first. Go first.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON:

Yeah. Well, you know, you said that you’re an introvert. And the thing about introverts is they often have to learn consciously how to socialize, right? Because extroverts—

DR. JOHN DELONY:

That’s right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON:

Well, they’re tilted so hard in that direction. It just comes naturally to them. We could walk through some of the initial stages in forming relationships in a very behavioral manner, because people might find that useful.

So Benjamin Franklin said that one of the things you could do when you first moved into a neighborhood was to ask one of your immediate neighbors for a very small favor, right? And the reason for that is because it gets the reciprocal trade moving in the proper direction.

So people like to be of service to other people. And if you ask someone to do you a very small favor, then you put yourself in their debt, and then you can also reciprocate. So you allow them to show themselves in their best light because you allow them to easily indicate that they’re positive and friendly and willing to do something for someone else, and they’re very happy about that. If you get it right, and then you’re in their debt. So you can offer to do them a favor.

The Revolutionary Act of Asking for Help

DR. JOHN DELONY:

But we got to be, we have to be very honest about how countercultural that is now, because overnight, just with a snap of the finger, we don’t ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore, man. We just get on Amazon Prime and it shows up at our house. Or we don’t ask a friend to drive us to the airport anymore. We just click a button on our cell phone and somebody comes and picks us up.

And overnight, I think we have shifted this idea from, “I’m going to honor you and allow you to be of service to me,” which is a gift, and “I’m going to allow my needs to be heard out loud. I need some sugar, I need an egg, I need a ride, and I need you to help me move,” right? The worst call.

We’ve pathologized, we’ve suddenly become—we think we’re a burden, Dr. Peterson. We think we are a burden to our friends and neighbors. And burdensomeness, perceived burdensomeness, the idea that people are better off without me, that’s one of the pillars of suicidal ideation.

And our entire civilization has run that way. We consider ourselves a burden. And so the very act of asking a neighbor to help with something is an act of defiance in our current era. Go for it, man. You want to be crazy, and you want to be countercultural? Ask somebody to help you with something. What a gift, you know?

Practical Steps for Building Community

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON:

Well, you can also do things if you move to a new neighborhood. For example, you can—there’ll be a local cafe somewhere. You can go there once a week for, like, several months or twice a week at a regular time, and you can introduce yourself to the owner, and you can tell them that you’ve moved into the neighborhood, and you can introduce yourself to the waiters and the waitresses, and you can become a known fixture there, and you’ll start to feel comfortable there, and then you’ll be able to start to have conversations with people there, and you can do the same thing with people at your local store.

You have to—and, you know, I had clients who didn’t even know how to introduce themselves properly, which can be a real impediment for people. So, you know, you say to someone, well, you look them in the eye, because then you’re watching their face, and then you can see how they’re reacting. And your unconscious socialization abilities will kick in if you attend to the right cues.

You say, “Hello there, I’m Jordan Peterson. I just moved into the neighborhood. I’m going to be dropping into your store pretty often. I thought I’d introduce myself.” And then you stick out your hand and you look at them and you make sure that you’re paying attention to them and not you. And you say, “What’s your name?”

And everyone responds positively to that. And maybe if they don’t, then it’s time to find a different corner store, you know, and then you try to remember their name, but if you don’t, you say, “You know, we met the other day, but I’m terrible with names. I forgot your name. Could you tell me again?”

And if you do that, then you know, that little corner store, then it’s not completely foreign territory and you’re not alienated from it. You’re going to start to feel comfortable. And the same thing is true for this place you might go every week. You have to establish these routines of socialization because otherwise you’re in enemy territory, at least unknown territory. And that’s extremely hard on you physiologically because you don’t know if you’re surrounded by friends or foe. And so it’s the same with your neighbor.

DR. JOHN DELONY:

You are proposing an act of revolution by going to a new environment and sticking out your hand and saying, “Hi, my name is John. What is your name?” And actually listening to the response. That is a revolutionary act. That is a transformative—

I take my son, he’s 12. And so I’ve started being highly intentional about our relationship because I’m in the early stages of raising what is soon to be released in the wild, a grown man. And so we have breakfast every Tuesday at this establishment here in the States called Waffle House. It’s just a chain diner. And one of the revolutionary acts I’m trying to teach him is the act of—

Radical Generosity and Going First

DR. JOHN DELONY: Radical generosity. And I, again, I struggle with sometimes basic “Hi, my name is.” And so the way I began doing this, the Waffle House opened in our small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I started over-tipping in a significant way because nobody wants to be working the 6am shift on a Tuesday at a Waffle House.

And so I told my son, “Hey, we’re going to take care of these waitresses. They’re awesome. They bring us coffee, they bring us juice, they’re lovely.” And within a few months, they know our order when we get there. They are smiling when we walk in. And it has absolutely transitioned our social interaction.

Now I look forward to spending time with my son, but also hanging out with these great waitresses and asking about their cool tattoos. Right? But it’s just going first. It’s just going first. Going first, going first.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, that emphasis on somewhat excess generosity in those situations is extremely useful too because it doesn’t take that much to distinguish yourself on the attentional front from the run-of-the-mill customer. And you know, you only need, imagine this, you probably only need between 10, maybe under 10 places to go in your social community in order to be well situated. And so you said, is it every week you do this with your son?

DR. JOHN DELONY: Yes, sir.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so we could do some quick arithmetic around that. How long in all does that whole event take?

DR. JOHN DELONY: By the time we sit down and get him to school late every Tuesday, it’s probably a grand total of 45 minutes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, and what about travel time?

DR. JOHN DELONY: It’s probably 20 minutes there, so it’s about an hour and a half.

The Mathematics of Fixing Your Life

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so it’s 90, full circle, it’s 90 minutes and that’s once a week.

DR. JOHN DELONY: Yes, sir.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so then you figure you’re awake for about 16 hours a day. And of that awake time, say 12 hours is useful for doing the sorts of things that you’re doing with your son because you’re going to spend four hours in just self-maintenance. Right.

So let’s say 12 hours, 90 minutes is approximately one-tenth of that. We’ll just use that as an approximation for easy mathematics. So you can, you’ve fixed 10% of one day and there’s seven days. And so that’s basically 3% of your life you fixed by doing that. And that means you’d only have to fix 30 more things and you’d have fixed 100% of your life.

Well, you know, you tell a story in your book about one of your friends who was talking about exercise and health and he said to change the things you do every day, the things that repeat, those are your life. That’s the routine around which your life is built.

People very much overvalue special occasions and vacations and that sort of thing. And they don’t pay nearly enough attention to the kind of thing you’re doing with your son. It’s like that’s once a week, you might be able to do that for years. It’s 3% of your life. If you get that perfect now you’ve got 3% taken care of and you can move to the next small piece and do the same thing.

You do that with some friends and you do that with your wife, for example, a couple of times a week for a couple of hours, a couple of hour sessions. You know, one of the things I found in my practice was that this is useful for people who are trying to embark on an intimate relationship is you need to talk to your wife about the domestic economy and the practicalities of your life together for about 90 minutes a week.

And you need to date at least once a week for that length of time or maybe twice if you can manage that. And if you don’t do that, you will become isolated and lonely and you’ll develop a backlog of communication. And if you don’t fix that, you’ll end up divorced and then you’ll be fixing it for the rest of your life.

The Backlog of Communication

DR. JOHN DELONY: Absolutely, absolutely. And whenever we had backlog of communication, I love that, I love that idea. As though I’m just putting rocks in a backpack and eventually that backpack’s going to wear me down if I don’t have a regular practice of communication.

And again, somehow this became a moral or characterological issue. I think it’s a skills issue, man. I think taking some of the drama and smoke out of it and just saying, “Hey, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to tell you, wife. I’ve never seen it done. I didn’t see it at my house growing up. I’ve never seen it. I don’t know how to do this. So I want to practice once a week. Let’s go over our calendar, let’s go over our budget. Like, how are we going to spend money this week? And let’s practice. I’m going to try to tell you what I need this week.”

About five years ago, my marriage was, I mean, we were hanging on by a spider’s web, just hanging on. And so my wife and I realized we got to, if we’re going to hang on to this thing, we’re going to have to rebuild it out of ash. Right?

And I can’t tell you, I’m 6 foot 2, 195 pounds. I lived in Texas my whole life. Texas male. What it took for me to look across the table and tell my wife, “I just occasionally want you to tell me that you’re proud of me.” That was a hard thing for me to say.

And I didn’t even realize how desperately I’d been searching for her approval for the first 15 years we’d been married and how much I kept going out on a limb and on a limb and on a limb. And I was taking her non-response as rejection. And I never put my needs out there. And I was embarrassed and ashamed to say it.

And then she said, “Man, that would have been super helpful 15 years ago.” And now she makes it a regular practice of our marriage to say, “Hey, I see you, and I appreciate what you’re doing for our family.” Golly, what a gift.

And I didn’t know that doing the dishes was akin to foreplay. Great. I will knock those dishes out all day long. It’s about practicing saying your needs out loud. And then, man, get out of your head. The number of hours I’ve spent researching workout programs when I could have just gone to work out, or researching how to tell your wife instead of just telling her. What a waste of time we have. We have too much data, man. We have too much information. We need to go do. Go do. Go act. Go act.

Vulnerability and Trust in Relationships

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you can have a preliminary conversation with your partner, let’s say. And say something like, “Look, we need to tell each other what we need and want. And we’re both too stupid to do that because we don’t really know what we need and want, and we have almost no practice at it.”

And worse, here’s something about that that’s really quite sad and frightening, is like, you know, if one of the things you wanted to hear is that your wife was grateful to you for, let’s say, providing properly for the family. So say, proud of you. There’s a part of you that’s quite insecure that wants that message, and you’re vulnerable on that point.

And so then if you share that vulnerability, the person with whom you’re sharing it knows exactly where to stick you if they want. And so it takes real trust to do that. But the alternative is assuming that. And people do this all the time. They’ll say things like, “Well, if you love me, you’d know what I wanted.” It’s like, well, first of all, that’s a pretty perfect love.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And second, I’m not clairvoyant.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, yeah, well. Right. Well, you’re not even smart enough to do that for yourself most of the time. Someone else. And so, you know, you can make an agreement with your partner and say, “Look, here’s something I’d like to hear you say. And here’s the words I’d like to hear. Will you just say that?”

Another person might object. And they’ll say, “Well, that sounds false if I do it. Or it won’t be real because we’re just practicing it, and it’s artificial.” And then you think, well, wait a second. We’re going to be together for the next 10,000 days.

If it takes, yeah, yeah. Or more. And if it takes 20 stupid practices to get it right, that’s not so much stacked up over 10,000 days, you know, and it might be with many marriages, I would say there’s probably 10 things that each person wants to hear on a quasi-regular basis that would make the difference between the marriage succeeding and the marriage failing.

But it means you have to sit down with your partner and say, “Look, we should decide jointly what we need and want and we should have enough courage to try to express ourselves stupidly in the attempt to get it and then allow ourselves to make mistakes, you know, while we’re practicing.”

Chasing Joy Over Happiness

DR. JOHN DELONY: I love that. I find that we’ve become goal-obsessed. And so if I want to do these things so that I can keep my marriage, I find that I end up way out on a limb. I find that by chasing somewhere I don’t want to go, I find it more valuable to say, I want to live a life that is not chasing happiness because that’s just cocaine and cotton candy.

But I want to chase a life of joy. And all of the data tells me a good marriage, a good connection with the romantic intimate partner over a long period of time is the best bet I have in maximizing joy. And so if I’m going to do that, that means I’ve got to be awkward.

And by the way, if you can stand in front of somebody naked and say, “Do you see me and do you think I’m beautiful? Do you want to join bodies with me?” Surely you can say, “Hey, when I see dishes in the sink, it makes me feel like I am not being the romantic partner. I feel like I’m less of a wife because I’ve created this narrative in my head that this is what a perfect wife does or a perfect husband does. Can you help with the dishes?”

Good gosh. You stand in front of somebody naked and say, “Here I am.” Surely you can say, “Hey, can you help with the dishes?”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right?

DR. JOHN DELONY: And then we have to stop being so looking for people coming at us. What’s that great saying? Whatever you go looking for in the world, you’re sure to find. Start receiving that feedback as an invitation, not as a “you’ve been screwing this up,” right?

Because my wife could have heard that. Me saying, “Hey, I just want you to say you’re proud of me every once in a while” as me throwing a grenade, right? “You’re failing me because you’re not doing these things.” She took it as “here’s an invitation, here’s a way you can love me better.” And what a gift, man. What a gift.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, you can.

DR. JOHN DELONY: We got to get over ourselves, man.

Making Discussions Small and Manageable

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You can help people box those sorts of things in, too, by saying, “Look, let’s make this discussion about the smallest thing possible, right? We’re not opening up Pandora’s box and assessing the validity of our entire marriage. We’re going to try to get one small thing slightly better. And we’re going to assume that lots of things are going well.”

And so we’re going to sit down for 90 minutes a week, maybe that’s not all at once, and we’re going to share what’s on our minds, and we’re going to talk about what we would like to see happen and how we would respond positively to that. And we’re not going to leap to the conclusion that that’s a generic criticism of the whole marriage.

This is partly also why people don’t have these conversations, especially when they have developed a backlog of communication. So my wife and I had a rule too, which was, well, we had a couple of rules that helped us along with this to not have the backlog. And one of the rules was, don’t agree to anything that you don’t agree to.

Because the last thing, well, the last thing I wanted to hear five years down the road after we had embarked on a particular pathway was, “Well, I didn’t really want to do that, but I just went along with it because I thought you wanted to.” It’s like, well, what now am I, what am I supposed to do about that now?

You know, that was five years ago, and we talked about it, and I didn’t want you to agree because you thought it was easier to agree. I wanted a consensus, you know, and so. And the corollary to that was, if we’re going to talk about something that needs to be addressed now and that will be fixed in the future, we don’t get to drag up the past.

Because that’s another thing that happens, right, is you start talking about things that are problematic, and one person or the other goes, “Well, you’ve, you always act like this. You’ve always acted like this, and there’s no chance in the future that you’re ever going to change.”

It’s like, well, instantly you’re in a fight because your whole character, past, present and future, has just been savaged. When the conversation should be something like.

Negotiating Household Responsibilities

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Our meal times might go 15% better if after you were done eating and we had all finished, you brought your dishes to the sink and rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. And here’s what I’m willing to do in return for that.

DR. JOHN DELONY: Well, I like to even take it one step further and personalize it because I find I react when somebody says, “you need to.” As soon as somebody points their finger at me, I just—I am fully limbic, man. I go fight or flight instantly.

And so I tend to say, hey, here’s a good example. I work here at Ramsey Solutions in Nashville and have a history of helping people get out of debt, pay their financial debts off, and work together as a community and as a couple to pay their debts. One of the most common questions we get is, “How do I get my partner on board?” Like, he wants to just buy a huge pickup truck and buy the biggest house and he’s run the credit cards up and I keep coming to him with these numbers and it’s very short or it’s not about numbers.

And if you come at somebody like, “you need to sell your truck and you do this,” well, now you’ve started a war. There’s a difference. When you sit down and say, “Hey, I’m scared to death and I can’t breathe because we are so indebted,” there’s something about saying, “It would really be a gift to me if, when dinner was over, if you took and rinsed your plate and just took six seconds to put it in the dishwasher, that’d be a gift to me.”

That’s different than “you need to take your dishes out,” right? And one of those puts me on the defensive. One of those is an invitation. And I’ve just decided, man, my life is too short to continue to do anything other than invitations, except in very few moments.

Developing a Joint Vision

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Well, that conversation about debt, too, is one of the ways that you cooperate and negotiate with your spouse and your friends. Your family, for that matter, is also to jointly develop something like a joint vision, you know, because you might be able to sit down with your wife and say, “Well, look, if we could have the dinner times that we really wanted, if they were optimal, like you’ve done with your son, let’s say, what would that look like?”

Well, let’s say you have a couple of kids. You think, well, do we all want to sit down together as a family? That’s a question. This has to be a question, right, to both of you. Yes. That you’re actually imagining. Do we all want to sit down? Okay, yes. Well, how often do we want to do that? Like seven nights a week. Is this something that’s actually a crucial foundation for our family? Or can we do it five nights a week and maybe do something different on Friday?

And you think, well, do all those micro things have to be negotiated? And the answer is those aren’t micro things. You do that every day. They’re absolutely foundational. And then you want to hear what the other person has to say, because if you don’t, they’re not going to be fully on board. Plus, they might have a better idea than you. You never know.

It’s like, so let’s say we decide, well, we’re going to have dinner together at six o’clock five nights a week, and we’re going to let people forage one night a week and maybe sit in front of the TV and we’re going to go out one night a week, something like that, and we’ll try that for a while. And then the next question is, well, what would we like to serve and who’s going to cook and who’s going to clean up? And if we wanted it to go as well as it possibly could, how are we going to get the kids involved? And do we want to experiment with some new foods?

And, you know, that meal time, if that’s the evening meal, let’s say that’s 90 minutes, that’s more than one-tenth of your day. And so that’s 10% of your life. That’s literally 10% of your life if you get the evening—

DR. JOHN DELONY: Yeah, but it’s bigger. It’s compound interest that grows over time. I think that 10—you take care—it’s like putting 15% of your income in retirement. It grows to infinitely more than 15% of your income over time.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: So if you take care of that 10%, it’s not just taking care of that 10%. Suddenly, if your marriage is in sync, you’re an infinitely better parent.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

Aligning Your Pictures

DR. JOHN DELONY: Infinitely better citizen, infinitely better worker. And it becomes very recursive. The famed psychiatrist William Glasser gave me—I love this analogy. He says that his famed line was he could fix any marriage in two sessions. And he said, “We think in pictures, but we speak in words.” And if couples can simply align their pictures, then you get a very clear path.

So when my wife comes to me on a Monday and says, “Hey, this weekend you and me, we’re going to go on the hottest date,” and then she just walks away. Monday night I’m wondering where we’re going. Tuesday night I’m wondering what I’m wearing and for how long. Right? By Wednesday and Thursday, I’m wondering who’s going to keep the kids, and I don’t care because they’re going to be fine and what hotel we’re going to end up at.

And then Saturday comes along and I show up in a suit, and she shows up in her running shorts and a T-shirt, and I say—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What are you doing?

DR. JOHN DELONY: And she says, “What are you doing?” And I say, “I thought we were going on a hot date.” And she says, “It’s seven tacos for $10 down at Taco Hut. We’re going on a hot date.”

Hey, I love tacos. And I hope she loves the occasional rendezvous, but we both used the word “date” and we had very different pictures. Now I’m upset, she’s upset, and we just—so in my house, every single day of the week, every day I’m not on the road, we ask ourselves this question: “Hey, what’s the picture of today look like?” It’s just become a vernacular in our home.

And so when she says, “I need some space this evening, I need some time by myself,” I tend to go, “Okay, cool, after dinner and after the kids and after you’re done writing and after, I won’t hassle you for the last eight minutes of the day.” For her, she’s thinking, “The moment you walk in this house, I’m out. And I might come back in a week.” Right? We just have to align our pictures and I’m cool either way and she’s cool either way. It’s just managing those expectations and being so clear with one another.

The Power of Shared Vision

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s exactly the process of defining a shared vision. And one of the things that’s lovely about that is it makes you—you’re not reactive then. So you’re not the thing that’s being chased by the monster or the dread. You’re the thing that’s actively conceptualizing the manner in which the future is going to shape itself.

And what you have is the delightful opportunity to share a joint vision that in principle would be better for both of you than anything you could do alone. Like you said, all the data shows that one of the best things you can do in your life to maximize your long-term health and increase your probability of at least some joy is to have a functional, long-term, intimate relationship. And so you have to attend to that. And a huge part of that is the development of these shared visions. And it’s really useful to develop microvisions. And so, you know, we just talked—

Scheduling Intimacy

DR. JOHN DELONY: What would you tell clients back in the day when they would come to you and they’d have a three-year-old and they would have just had—and they have an infant, they have child number two—and they would say, “We’re not having sex anymore. We have an intimacy—we’ve become co-managers of our house.” And your response as a clinical psychologist would be, “You’ve got to schedule it, you got to put it on the calendar.” And the response always is, “I don’t want to do that anymore.” What’s the follow-up?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Great. That’s a great question. Well, my first response is, well, how often do you want to have sex? And people hate that. People hate that question. And so they avoid it. They say, “Well, you know, we don’t really want to be that calculating about it.” It’s like, okay, right, whatever. We’re going to parameterize this. Once a year? It’s like, no, that’s probably too little. Okay, 15 times a day? It’s like, no, that’s probably too much.

Okay, so now we got some parameters here. It’s somewhere between once a year and 15 times a day. Let’s see if we can narrow that in. And this does make people uncomfortable, right? They don’t want to specify their needs and wants. And I think it’s—

DR. JOHN DELONY: What’s the source of that discomfort? Where does that come from?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, I think they’re embarrassed that they need anything. So it’s just fundamental shame. Like, it’s that same exposure of nakedness. And then they’re unwilling to share the information with their partner because it’s revealing. And then they’re afraid they’re going to be rebuffed, and they’re afraid they’re going to get into a fight. They’ve got lots of reasons not to want to do it, but—

DR. JOHN DELONY: And that rolls back to those stories that have been haunting them since they were kids, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. And they don’t want to have the difficult conversation up front. And so we might say, well, okay, let’s be reasonable about this. It’s going to be some number of times a week. You guys have jobs, you have kids, you’re busy. You’re not going to have a hot date every night. You just don’t have time for it.

And so why don’t we be reasonable about it? We could try—let’s aim for something like twice a week. It’s like, do you think—or maybe we could start with once a week? Because zero—once is a lot more than zero. It’s a lot more than zero.

And so then you think, well, all right. And then they say something like, “Well, you know, we did all that dating when we were dating, and now we don’t want to do that anymore.” It’s like, okay, so what are you saying here exactly? You’re saying that you don’t want any more romance and you don’t want any more hot sex, and you don’t want to put any work into it, and it’s just going to happen magically, even though it’s clearly not happening. That’s your theory.

And then let’s run that theory out. Okay, so now you have new kids, and that’s going to be—it’s going to be like that for a few years, maybe till they’re 10 or 11. You’re going to be occupied with your family. And so now you have a sexless marriage with no intimacy for a decade. So what does that look like in 2032 when you’re in divorce court?

DR. JOHN DELONY: Right, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How’s that?

DR. JOHN DELONY: Or you’re recovering from some addiction, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: Of work or of alcohol or whatever it is, because your body’s got to—it’s got to meet that need somewhere. And if it can’t get it—if it can’t get a true deep connection, it will come up with all kinds of cheap substitutes.

The Fear of Vulnerability and Negotiation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right? Yeah. Like an affair that’s right. Yeah. So of course you don’t want to do this because it requires difficult negotiation, but how would you like to have your marriage deteriorate into hell over a 10 year period? How does that sound as an alternative?

It’s like, well, that’s not very good. It’s like, okay, so which of these two things are you more afraid of? And then when people really think that through, they think, oh, yeah, well, maybe, you know, I could take the risk of making what I want known.

And then, okay, so now you specify it. Well, a date. Which night? How long are you going to find a babysitter? You’re going to do this every week. Who’s going to be responsible for what in relationship to this date? All these details have to be negotiated.

And then we remember, you know, by the same logic that we’ve already employed. If this is two hours a week, then that’s 15% of one day. That’s another 5% of your life. And it’s the intimate part of your life. And if you got that right, my God, you might be a much happier person. And so that’s another one of the only 25 things you have to take care of to set your life up. But I mean, you said, why are people afraid to do this?

They’re afraid to show their vulnerability, man. They don’t trust their partner. They don’t know how to negotiate. They don’t even know what they want themselves. You know, it’s not that easy for someone to admit that they need any physical attention at all, even though everyone obviously does, you know, because you’re putting yourself on the line then. And that is the definition of intimacy in some sense.

The Lost Art of Knowing What You Want

DR. JOHN DELONY: Absolutely. I can’t tell you, and I know you’ve experienced this too. Whether it’s a single mom with three kids just trying to figure out what day it is, or it’s a multi-millionaire who’s got resources that far exceed anything I could imagine. I’ve rarely, rarely sat down across from somebody and had them be able to articulate, what do you actually want?

They cannot answer that question. And they fill it with addictions, they fill it with hobbies, they fill it with dopamine chase. They fill it with so much stuff. And nobody can answer that question, what do you want?

Because we just don’t have a culture that has a shared vision of where we’re headed. We have a culture of “you’re hurting and somebody else’s fault.” And let’s start pointing fingers and man, we’ve got to circle the wagons on a shared vision moving forward. Because there’s, what do you want? Nope, that’s not a question anybody asks. It’s what do I don’t want? And why am I feeling just uncomfortable?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s because of them.

DR. JOHN DELONY: It’s because of him. It’s because of—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, then, if it’s what you don’t want, you’re driven by negative emotion.

DR. JOHN DELONY: You’re running from not to.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: If you’re driven by a vision, that’s positive emotion. Because approaching something positive in a visionary manner generates positive emotion. If you’re only fleeing from things you don’t want, then you’re constantly in a state of anxiety and depression. That’s how it works. Because where did that, where did that—

DR. JOHN DELONY: Where did that go? Where did we lose a shared vision? Why can’t somebody put a flag in the ground and say, this is where we’re headed? That seems to be gone?

The Death of God and Higher Order Unity

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s a complicated question. You know, I mean, I would say that’s the consequence in the most fundamental sense of the death of God. In the most fundamental way.

It’s the death of a sense of higher order unity. Now, it’s also a very complicated question. If you ask someone, what do you want? If you could ask your wife that, what do you want? You’ll probably freeze her into immobility. Because it’s really like asking, how do you want all of your life to go? Please summarize. And one of the things—

Yeah, well, it’s quite, it’s a lot, you know. And one of the ways that you can deal with that, which you undoubtedly know as someone who’s conversant with cognitive behavioral techniques, is you can ask people more micro questions too, about what they want.

So you might say, well, we did that on the dating front already, right, we talked about that. We talked about how you might think about how you want your meal times to go. We only talked about dinner time. But you could talk about breakfast and lunch as well. And then you could, and there are other micro domains that are very crucial that you can also consider.

It’s like, so you could ask yourself, well, if you could have the education you wanted, what would that look like? If you were on, if you had the job or career track that would motivate you, just hypothetically, what might that look like? Sketch out a bad plan.

If you had some friends? Well, first, do you want some friends? And if so, how many? And if you had friends and the right number, how much time per week would you like to spend with them? And if you had some time outside of work and familial responsibilities, what might you want to do with your time that you would really want to do?

And the thing about these questions is that they’re real questions. You know, there’s this gospel statement that “if you knock, the door will open” and that “if you ask, you will receive.” And “if you search, you’ll find.” “If you seek, you’ll find.”

And people who are faithless in some sense think about as kind of a hallmark greeting card approach to the world. It’s just, well, you just ask for things and they appear. It’s like, no, that isn’t what any of that means. It means nothing that you want will manifest itself unless you aim for it. And you won’t aim for it unless you know what it is. And you won’t know what it is unless you ask yourself.

And then you might say, well, why don’t you ask yourself? And the answer is, well, maybe no one ever explained to you that you needed to, which is a crucial issue. And then maybe you don’t also trust yourself, you know, because you might think, well, if I let myself know what I wanted, given my bloody track record, I would do everything I could to screw it up.

So I’ll just keep myself opaque to myself so that I don’t fail at something that’s truly important. And then I can always regale with myself, with the idea that, well, I didn’t succeed, but I didn’t really try. Had I really tried, I might have succeeded. Whereas if you let yourself know what you want and then you try, you also set the preconditions for failure.

So it’s risky, right? But the alternative is, well, you don’t know what you want. So it is a meditative practice. Like, okay, if I could have what I wanted.

Imagine the world was constituted so that the entire planet wouldn’t explode in an apocalypse if I got what I needed and wanted. Yeah, right. It’s like, what would that be? You know, what type?

Thought Exercise vs. Feeling Exercise

DR. JOHN DELONY: Okay, so is this a cognitive, well, I don’t want to use jargon. Is this a thought exercise or is this a feeling exercise? Because here’s what I’m seeing across the country.

I thought it would feel different when I finally got that associate vice president job. Yeah, I thought I would feel a certain way when I got a car. I thought if I could just get her to date me, I would feel a certain way. And people are realizing in rapid fashion. I thought if my politician won, I would suddenly feel a certain way.

Here’s a great, I testified in a court case against somebody years ago. A former student of mine got into some significant, some really terrible things, and he got a long jail sentence. And the next morning I woke up and I read what the judge had written. And in the sentencing, and I—

He, the judge used some of my words. And I remember feeling sick to my stomach. And I called a mentor of mine, a psychology friend, professor of mine, and asked her, I said, man, I feel gross. And she said, “John, nobody wins here.”

And I had this perception that I was going to feel a certain way when justice was done and the right thing happened. And I realized, man, I’d thought this through cognitively, but I had not managed how are you going to actually feel? Because nobody wins. Somebody’s life is ruined over here. Somebody’s life is still ruined over here. I think we have to, I don’t know.

You’ve got infinitely more wisdom than I do on this. But I find that the cognitive exercise is helpful, but it really is important to sit down and say, okay, how are you going to feel five days after you’ve bought this car that you think you have to have?

The Purpose of Positive Emotion

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, okay, so the first thing is that the probability that you’ll be happy because you’ve accomplished something in any permanent sense is virtually zero. And the reason—

DR. JOHN DELONY: Thank you for saying that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the reason for that is that isn’t what positive emotion is for. Positive emotion is to indicate that you’re making progress towards a valued goal. Yes.

DR. JOHN DELONY: Now that’s the driver, right? Not the finish line.

The Mechanics of Feeling and Goal-Setting

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. Well, and that’s actually pharmacologically separate. Right. Because a satiation reward, which would be the accomplishment of something, calms you and stops that program from running. So, for example, once you’ve become vice president, if that was your goal, then the whole pursuing vice president program comes to a halt.

Now, the problem with that is it leaves you without a goal, and it also leaves empty space which you immediately have to fill. And so often people feel disquiet because now they don’t know what to do, and they miss that rush because they’re no longer pursuing something.

And so it’s very important to know that positive emotion is experienced in relationship to a valued goal. And then the question becomes, well, what’s the most valuable goal to pursue? And that’s really a metaphysical and a theological question in terms of the mechanics of feeling.

So imagine that you’re negotiating the structure of a date with your wife and you’re developing a shared vision. And so you say, well, on Wednesday nights, once a week, we’re going to go for dinner, and maybe you specify the restaurant and you’re going to make the arrangements, and I’m going to get dressed up, and then we’re going to go see a movie, and you’re going to pick the movie. And then we’re going to have a romantic interlude afterwards, and we’ll run that and see how it goes.

And then what you want to do is you want to picture that and you want to watch how your body reacts on the emotional level. And that’s a bit of honesty. It’s right. And you can see, well, if we went to this restaurant, well, I don’t really like that restaurant. I think it’s kind of expensive. I had a bad time with the waiters. I don’t think I’d be happy there.

Then you say those things to your partner. You say, well, I’m thinking this through. I’m imagining it. And here’s the objections that are coming up. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe I’ve got this wrong. But I’d like to hear your input because, you know, we want to get this right. Should we reevaluate my feelings about the restaurant, or should we think about a different restaurant?

And that should be a question. Because you don’t know. Maybe you’re just stupid about the restaurant or you’re cheap or you’re afraid to go there because you don’t have the right clothes. I mean, you don’t know, right? But if you want to get your feelings in line, you develop the vision and then you apprehend the vision with your feelings. It’s kind of what you do when you go to a movie and you fall into the fantasy of the character. You know, you embody all the emotions and you evaluate it that way.

And the other problem with that more goal-directed approach that you described is, I think people should plan and they should develop a vision. You have to develop the vision and then be somewhat detached from it because it needs to be updated. Right. And modified and hold it loosely.

Yeah, yeah, you hold it loosely. Yeah, that’s right. Because you’re fallible. And maybe you can come up with a better plan. Not every minute because you’ll drive yourself mad that way, but now and then.

Identity Over Destination

DR. JOHN DELONY: Or I was obsessed as a young higher education professional with becoming a college president until I sat down at the senior leadership table and I realized I don’t want that life. I don’t want that life. I don’t want 24/7, 365 and the politics. I don’t want it, asking for money. I don’t want that life.

And I didn’t have a backup plan. I didn’t know what to do. I was completely rudderless because I’d made the finish line the goal. Going all the way back full circle to how you opened the conversation, I think that becomes really important to lay out an identity and reverse engineer. Who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? And the goals end up—you know, it’s like the old days when you went to grad school.

A PhD was simply a high five on a journey of continued learning. I’m going to continue going down this rabbit hole. And now it’s become a destination and people walk out and announce themselves as educated because I’ve crossed this finish line. Just because you run a marathon or walk a marathon doesn’t mean you’re fit.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right?

DR. JOHN DELONY: Doesn’t mean you’re healthy.

Higher Order Goals and Process-Based Identity

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, we talked about the necessity of goals. And so there’s higher order goals. And you need the higher order goals because they integrate you and a goal of becoming a college president is a higher order goal than no goal at all and just sitting in your bed and eating Cheetos. Right. Better plan than no plan at all.

But then this is where things become profound and serious. And I would say, even in a religious sense, because what’s religious is about what’s profound and serious in some sense by definition. So you might say, well, who should I be? And you might think, well, I should be the college president, I should have this car, I should have this house. Those are all very particularized versions of yourself.

And the problem with them is that they’re concrete and final actualities and not processes. And so here’s a good vision that’s a high order vision. And I think it’s the vision that our whole culture is founded on. I should be the person who genuinely confronts the problems and challenges that confront me in my life. So that’s an attitude of active and voluntary engagement. Right. I’m going to do—

DR. JOHN DELONY: That’s an identity.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that’s an identity of process as well. It’s like I’m going to be someone who doesn’t shy away from the challenges of life. Okay.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And then I’m the guy who confronts it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right. And so that’s St. George and the dragon. And that’s a precondition for therapeutic transformation because in order for you to improve, you have to identify the problem, the dragon, and you have to be willing to face it voluntarily.

And so you say to yourself, I’m going to do what I can to develop the courage to confront the problems in my life voluntarily. That’s who I want to be. And then another element of that is I can’t do that without telling the truth. I have to be willing to see what’s in front of me and I have to be willing to admit to myself what I think and feel and I have to be willing to communicate that.

And so you could say, well, that makes your goal something like—to think about it archetypally. You talked about Jungian approaches earlier, is that that makes you into a truth-telling hero. And then maybe underneath that it’s like, well, could I become college president? Could I be successful in my business? Could I be successful in my marriage? It’s like, that’s all well and good and those are more concretized goals, but the highest order goal has to be something like an approach rather than a final state. Right. Because you might say, well, I want to be—

DR. JOHN DELONY: The approach never ends.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. Well, and you can say to yourself, I want to be the guy who listens to my wife.

Yeah. Okay, so you’re never going to finalize that. Right. Because you’re doing that all the time. And that’s also really useful because you don’t hit the target and then find yourself left with nothing. Because you can do that every day. I want to be the guy who listens to my kids. I want to be the guy who pays attention to my friends. And I want to be the guy who speaks my mind carefully and judiciously. It’s like you can bring that anywhere, man. And you’re talking—

Backfilling Identity with Concrete Goals

DR. JOHN DELONY: About the difference there, that approach. Let’s use your example. I want to be a guy who’s a good steward of my wife. I want to be—that’s my identity. And that means I’m going to have to backfill it with some goals. We’re going to meet once a week. And I’m not going to try to fix her like she’s a car engine. I’m not going to try to solve her problems with her as though she’s infantile. I’m going to just listen, and I’m going to commit to being quiet.

And so when she says, “I’m really struggling with my boss at work,” I’m not going to jump in with, “Well, you know, you should probably tell him.” I’m just going to listen.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: But listen, over time, I begin—I really look forward to learning more about my wife and what she’s experiencing in this season. And it’s different than last season. It’s going to be different in the new season. I think it was Esther Perel who said, if most adults have four or five great loves in their lifetime, and if you work really, really hard, it’s with the same person and you become part of their journey.

And now I can’t wait to hear about what my wife’s been reading, who she’s becoming, and how I can best be a partner to her in this new season, whatever it is. It’s not constantly trying to get back to “remember how much fun we had when we were dating.” Man, what a waste of a life. Let’s go this way, right? Let’s move forward.

The Lost Skill of Grief

I think—tell me if I’m on the right track here—that idea of owning, acknowledging reality. I didn’t mean to, but I’m looking in the mirror and I’ve gained 100 pounds. I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t my intention. But now I’ve spent 15 years in a middle manager job and I hate my life, I hate going to work every day.

I think we do not have the skill set for one of the most important psychological functions that we just took it out of life, right? And I think it’s Ernest Becker’s work and Yalom’s work. I think we don’t have any sort of ability to grieve privately or as a group. We’ve lost the skill set of grief.

And so we can’t acknowledge reality because we don’t know what to do when we look in the mirror and say, “I didn’t measure up to who I wanted to be.” I didn’t mean to yell at my kid and I did. I didn’t mean to get another dessert and I did. We can’t deal with that grief and so we blow by it and say, “You keep putting desserts in front of me,” or “If you had just picked up your trike, 6-year-old, I wouldn’t have yelled at you.”

We just outsource our dysfunction everywhere because we can’t sit in that gap between what we wanted and our reality.

Listening as Problem Discovery

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, so a couple of things there. You talked about finding yourself on the adventure of transformation with your wife. Now, often men feel compelled, obligated to generate a solution to the problems that their wives bring them. And it is the case because women feel more negative emotion, that they are more likely to bring up problems.

That’s why 70% of divorces, by the way, are initiated by women. It’s because they feel more negative emotions. So if the relationship is shaky, they’re going to suffer for it more first. And they probably feel more negative emotion because they’re more sensitive, because they have to take care of infants. And so anyways, we can put that aside.

Now, it might be that you should help your wife solve her problems and maybe she’s coming to you for that. But one thing you need to understand, and you might understand this as a diagnostician, is, well, do you know what the hell her problem is? And the answer is, well, probably not, because she doesn’t even know.

So why does she want to sit down and tell you about her problems? And the answer is, because she wants to find out what her bloody problems are. And so you see this very often in therapy. You know, when Carl Rogers made a lot of this, he said, you know, if you just listen to people, they’ll often solve most of their problems themselves.

So somebody comes in and they say, well, I’m really upset. And you say, well, what’s on your mind now? What’s so interesting about that is often the people who are in therapy have absolutely no one to tell their problems to. You know, I think—

DR. JOHN DELONY: The Rogerian magic, though, was listening and he brought that other side of the equation that we leave out. He listened and he genuinely did his best to love the person in front of him.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, okay, well—

DR. JOHN DELONY: And not sit in judgment of that person. So my wife says, “Hey, I’m going through this.” I instantly go, “Well, you know, you should—” Instead of sitting back and going, “I love this person. Tell me, let’s connect, not let’s solve.”

The Art of Listening in Relationships

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, yeah. So you’d hope that your mindset—and this would be part of establishing that higher order goal—is imagine you would like your wife and you to have a good life. And so when you’re listening to her, that’s uppermost in your mind. We are trying to have a good life here.

Okay, so what’s your problem? Well, if you’re listening to someone therapeutically, they’re going to scattershot the problem. They’re going to say, “Well, it might be this and it might be this and it might be this and it might have something to do with the past and it might be this,” and it’s quite a mess as they try to calibrate the real problem.

And you have to listen to all that. And what you’ll find is that the person will dispense with most of those hypotheses themselves. As soon as they utter them, they’ll think, “Well, here’s my problem. No, that’s not exactly right.” So now that’s off the table. And they’ll say, “Well, it might be this, and here’s some reasons for thinking that, but no, it’s probably not that.” And so what you’ll find is the problem space will clear.

Now, Rogers also pointed out, and this is very useful, is that one of the things you can do when you’re listening, apart from asking questions which might be, “Well, I don’t quite understand what you meant by that,” or “You said something 10 minutes ago and it seems to contradict what you just said now”—which are just helpful questions—the other thing you can do is summarize.

And you could say, “Well, I’ve been listening for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and it seems to me that this is what you said.” Right? And people really like that for two reasons. One is you compact all that searching into the gist, and that’s a gift you can give someone. And then also, if you hit the target, if you say, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant,” then they know full well that you’ve really been listening.

And so if you’re a man and you’re listening to this and you want to know how to deal with your wife when she’s presenting you with problems, the first thing is to step back a bit and say, “Look, she probably has to go through the whole problem set.” And try not to take that personally. Just listen and you can summarize and you can ask questions. But mostly you want to find out, well, what the hell’s the problem here?

Now you might want to leap to a solution for a bunch of reasons. One is, well, to show that you have a solution. Two is to show you’re smarter than your wife, which is a very bad idea. The third is to shut her up so that you don’t have to sit there and listen. And that’s also a really bad idea because you can’t shut anybody up about an actual problem. That just doesn’t work because it’s an actual problem. It’s not going to go away.

DR. JOHN DELONY: Or if she’s coming to you to connect and she’s not looking for your solution, she just wants to connect. And this is the tool set that she has. When you shut her up, you’re giving a much more existential “I don’t value you.” Right? “I don’t want to connect with you.” And that’s a much bigger—I think that’s a much more crisis or your relationship’s in a mess at that point.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that. Yes, exactly. Well, and you’ll find, too, with this 90 minutes a week that you have to listen to each other is that in some sense you need that amount of time to clear the air. Because you can imagine that as you move through life, little dragons make themselves manifest all the time because things change.

The car needs maintenance. There’s a problem with the kid. There’s something wrong with the bathroom sink. We don’t have quite enough money in the checking account. You know, there’s a hundred little niggling demons that pop up constantly, and it’s very difficult to establish the preconditions for joyful intimacy when there’s a nest of micro dragons swarming all over the house.

And you have to talk those through in order to keep them small and to make them go away. And if you do that with some degree of programmatic regularity, then you do have the possibility that you’ll get beyond the mere sharing of problems. Then you can have some fun, then you can play.

Practical Tips for Better Communication

DR. JOHN DELONY: Yes. But I think two things. One, a helpful tip for the listeners here that’s been fantastic in my marriage is when my wife sits down and begins to talk, I’ll often stop at the very beginning and say, “Are you asking me for a solution or are you looking to just tell me, are you looking to connect?”

And that often frames the conversation in a way that I know what she’s asking from me. And it seems very unromantic at first, but man on the back end, it saves—so it’s just like putting sex on the calendar, right? Just a couple of seconds of awkward changes the trajectory of your entire week and month.

I also think that men have, rightly or wrongly, we found ourselves, we don’t understand our relational value. And so we think our value can only be found in offering a solution to something. And there’s a deeper intimacy, there’s a deeper connection. My wife values me simply because I am her husband. Yes, I help provide, and yes, I can do all these other things. There’s utility there.

But I have to see myself as having more value than giving a person with less power or less smarts than me an answer. Sometimes the greatest gift I can give her is simply my presence.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And we have to get underneath that discomfort of, “I’m out of my depths here, I don’t know what to do other than just listen.” And I feel useless. I feel like I’ve lost utility.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, I think the problem with that formulation is the idea of “just listening.” It’s really hard to listen. And there’s almost—

DR. JOHN DELONY: I like that. I like that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, there’s almost nothing you can do that’s more transformative than that. And the reason for that is that “just listening” gives the other person an opportunity to just think. And so then you might say, “Well, what are they doing when they’re thinking?”

And here’s what they’re doing: they’re asking themselves questions and looking for a revelation. They’re trying to sort through information so that they can determine the best pathway forward. And they’re trying to update and develop their vision for their life. And you do that in abstraction to test out the possibilities before you implement them.

And so if you give people space to think, which is exactly what you’re doing when you’re listening, then they try out different versions of themselves so they can experiment with finding the best fit. And so there’s nothing “just” about listening.

I think apart from speaking accurately and carefully and truthfully, there isn’t anything more difficult that you can do than to listen. And one of the things I loved about being a therapist, and it’s been very useful to me in my post-therapy career as well, is that if you actually listen to people they will tell you everything and then they’re so interesting you can hardly stand them.

Developing Listening Skills

DR. JOHN DELONY: So give me and by proxy the listener—give a 22 to 27 year old man trying to make his way in the world. What is one or two or three things? I guess I’m turning the interview around on you now. What’s a couple of practical skills that I can do to lean into listening, to practice listening and stop trying to rush to a solution?

Try to get out of a conversation because I’m uncomfortable. I don’t have the skill set. I never saw my dad do it, my granddad never did it. They just barked orders and watched the game. I’m trying to do something that is infinitely more difficult than just flipping channels and yelling at the Packers game. What’s a couple of things I can practice?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, I would say first is have some faith in your own reactions. Not as solutions to the problem, but as points of inquiry. So for example, when we’re talking, questions arise in the theater of my imagination and topics pop up and I’m willing to put them on the table.

And the reason they pop up is because I’m attending to what you say and that’s generating some thoughts in my mind. And one of the great things you can do with people is ask them questions. I mean there is nothing—and this goes back to the issue of making friends or establishing relationships—there’s nothing that people want more than to be attended to.

That’s why advertisers spend so much money trying to garner attention. That’s why social media companies spend so much money garnering people’s attention. Attention is the fundamental currency and so people love to be attended to.

And so you dispense with the idea that you’re “just listening” as you’re watching the other person and you’re listening and then you’re attending to yourself and watching and listening because you’ll see that as you focus on the conversation and don’t worry about what you’re going to say next or how you appear, which makes you self-conscious and miserable and awkward instantly, you pay attention to the conversation.

And then you watch what happens inside. And this question comes up and you say, “Well, I have this question.” And you don’t evaluate the question. You know, not if you’re deeply engaged in the conversation. You just lay it out and you draw the person out and you see, “Well, I don’t quite understand what you said there,” or “It seems to me that this is a different way of looking at it. What do you think of that?”

The questions have to be honest, but if you pay focused attention and you ask genuine questions, you’ve got 90% of social skill nailed.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And you get below—you get below—I love what you said about the little dragons. I might steal that down the road. You get beneath the, “Hey, did you see what was on the news today?” or, “Hey, we’re overdrawn on our checking account.” You get beneath those things to the real statement, which is, “I’m scared” or “I feel lonely” or “I miss you.” Right? These truly intimate connections. If you’ll just—if you’ll—yeah, if you’ll just wade into the uncomfortable waters of discourse.

Confronting Conflict Early

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and I think the way to fortify yourself in relationship to that—I mean, I’ve been embroiled in a lot of conflict, and I really don’t like conflict. And I think the reason that I’ve been embroiled in so much is because I won’t delay it. If there’s an issue at hand, I want to address it right now.

And the reason for that isn’t that I enjoy it. In fact, I don’t enjoy it at all. But what I really don’t enjoy is prolonged conflict that never goes anywhere and that never ends.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And so conflict delayed is conflict amplified.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly.

DR. JOHN DELONY: It just grows on you.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly that. And that’s one of the oldest stories that people have been telling each other forever, is that ignored things grow in the darkness outside the city until they become monstrous and break down the walls.

And so you think, “Well, I’m afraid of having—I’m afraid of listening. I’m afraid of hearing the problems.” And that’s fair enough. It’s no wonder you’re afraid. But you’re nowhere near afraid enough of not doing that because that’s a bloody catastrophe that’ll be a bomb that’ll go off in 10 years and blow up your marriage.

You’ll find out that your wife had an affair because, well, for her own reasons and because you didn’t pay any attention to her for 15 years. And then you think, “Well, I was afraid to pay attention.” And yeah, fair enough. But now look where you are. You’re in hell. And that’s just not an improvement. And so how do you know—

Navigating Apocalyptic Thinking

DR. JOHN DELONY: In our current ecosystem, how do you know when to wade through? My little brother sent me something the other day that was like in 2000, Y2K was going to kill us all. In 2001, I don’t remember what it—swine flu is going to kill us all in 2003. There’s just this litany of we rally around this, the next end thing that’s going to happen and then we’ve reached this fatigue, right?

And we’re like, there’s true cancers out there that are coming for us, that we’re just like, “Dude, I don’t have the energy anymore. I’m moving on about my day.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’ve been really trying to think that through. And so here’s some guidelines that I’ve sort of developed over the last few months. So, you know, there’s problems of various size out there in the world, and the largest problems are the apocalyptic problems that you just described. Right?

And it isn’t even obvious which of those apocalyptic problems are real. But we could say, well, there’s always the possibility that large-scale systems will come to a precipitous collapse and we have to live with that. That’s true in our own lives. We could die at any moment. So could the people we love. Our cultures can fall apart. The apocalyptic terror is always beckoning as a possibility. Okay?

Now the question is, is that your problem?

DR. JOHN DELONY: Now the answer, can you do anything about it?

The Nervous System as Guide

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The answer is your own nervous system will tell you that. Because imagine that you’re facing a problem that’s so big that it paralyzes you and it turns you into a tyrant. Okay? That’s too big a problem for you, obviously. And what you have to do is you have to scale back the problem until you find a dragon that’s a size that you’re willing to contend with, that you’ll actually contend with.

And so, you know, maybe you shouldn’t be addressing the large scale political problems of the world because your own house is a bloody catastrophe. And you watch the news and it paralyzes you and turns you into a ranting tyrant. And that means you’re not the man for that job. You have to scale back.

And maybe if you scale back and practiced straightening things up at the local level, which isn’t trivial or easy, you get better and better at it and then you could face larger and larger catastrophes practically and productively. Right. Instead of virtue signaling and going astray.

You know, you do this in therapy. If someone is having a hard time making friends, you break that down into micro steps. And one thing you might have to do, as we discussed, is you might have to teach the person to introduce themselves, you know, and their problem is, “I don’t have any friends.” It’s like, no, no. Your problem is you don’t know how to shake hands and look someone in the eye.

Right. And then you might say, well, can you do that? And they might say, well, I’m afraid to shake hands. It’s like, well, can you look at me? Can you stretch out your hand? You know, can you touch my hand? I mean, this might sound trivial, but lots of people are paralyzed with social anxiety and they have no idea how to shake hands. Yeah, yeah. And that just stops them cold. Right. Because if you can’t introduce yourself, how the hell are you going to make friends?

DR. JOHN DELONY: That’s right. Well, it’s being—when our bodies take off on us. I love how you said that, man. Because our nervous system tells the truth, generally. Can I listen to my body and just—instead of rushing to the diagnostic and rushing to Google or rushing to WebMD, trying to—can I just ask myself, what’s my body trying to protect me from? Like, what?

Whoa, I just walked into a room full of people and my heart rate just went up to 200 beats per minute, and I can’t—my hands are getting sweaty. What are you trying to protect me from? These are my people. These are my friends. This is my—this is a wedding I got invited to. Oh, okay. I used to not be safe in this situation. I’m safe now. I’m okay now.

And I can think that through that gap between instead of racing over to the bar to grab a drink to quiet that alarm system or to race over to the snack table and get a piece of cake, which is what I go to quiet the alarm system. I’m a good Southern Christian, so I like to eat my feelings. Like, I—instead of those issues, I can just be really curious. And I’m not going to go to war with my body and try to shut the alarms off. I’m just going to listen to them and say, hey, what’s it trying to—

Living Through a Dream

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you talked about thinking in images before, so here’s a very useful thing the psychoanalysts learned to do. So imagine you do go to a social occasion, and you find as you enter the hall, you’re getting nervous and sweaty. Now if you watch—this is why Carl Jung, for example, believed that we lived through a dream, we lived life through a dream. So, and that’s a story.

And so what you’ll see is that if you feel that nervousness and you attend to it, a little drama will run in your head in images, you know, and it’ll be something like, well, I’m going to go in here and no one’s going to talk to me. And this will happen in pictures like a little movie. No one’s going to talk to me and I’m going to end up in the corner and I’m going to be bored and I’m going to be sweaty and hot and it’s going to be real uncomfortable. And it’s just like this other time when I went to this social occasion and this terrible thing happened and the whole drama will play out in your head.

And then, you know, you think, oh, that’s the problem. And then, well then maybe you have someone to talk to about that fantasy. Or maybe because now you have the fantasy in front of you and you looked at it, you can think, well, wait a minute. As you said, wait a minute, wait a second. It isn’t like that other situation. My friends are here. I can go talk to John, I know him real well. We’ll just have a conversation. I can go sit at a table with one of my friends and spend most of the time there. I can be with my wife.

But what will happen is we get nervous and that fantasy will make itself manifest, but you don’t want to face it. And that’s when you rush to a premature solution. You shut it off. Right? Yeah. So what you’re doing there is you’re failing to allow the anxiety ridden fantasy to make itself manifest. And you do that because you don’t want to know where you’re vulnerable. Right. And no wonder, like, who the hell wants to know where they’re vulnerable? But the answer to that is, well, someone who wants to fix it. Because you cannot.

DR. JOHN DELONY: I do. Yeah, I do. Absolutely Right. And I’ve come to—I love looking for those vulnerabilities. I love a good community and I love the discourse. I love my friends who will point them out and say, hey, here’s a blind spot. Which is why, again, circling back, it’s why we have to have other people in our life now. It’s done in the right spirit. I love—

I love. That’s the whole scientific process, right? Rejecting the note like, I wasn’t wrong, right? Like the whole idea is, let’s be a little bit less wrong. Right? So I think there’s—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, that’s right. That’s the whole idea, that’s humility, man, is to be a little bit less wrong. And Jesus, that’s—what a deal.

DR. JOHN DELONY: But what a—what a fun way to live. It’s such an easier way to live than I have to be—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. That’s just—

DR. JOHN DELONY: That is an exhausting grip on your life. It’s a choking grip on your life instead of I want to be a little bit less wrong and I begin to seek out places where I might be wrong. That’s just taking a blade and trying to sharpen it as finely as possible. What a fun way to live.

The Purpose of Confession

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the old—the purpose of confession classically was exactly that. So the idea was, well, I’m going to review my week, which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Why? Well, I’m going to think about things that I did that didn’t work out so well and see if I can specify what they were and see if I can figure out how to replace them with something better, at least with the intent to do better.

And that confessional, you know, that confessional in some sense, which was supposed to be redemptive and that led to forgiveness, at least in principle, was very much the same thing as—

Discussing in genuine dialogue the problems of your life. It’s like, well, here I seem to have gone sideways here. I seem to have gone sideways here this week. How do I know that? Well, my conscience is calling me out on it and there were some negative consequences and I feel that this is the mistake I made and I’d rather not make that mistake. And as you said, if that’s handled—

As if the goal is to stop making those mistakes, hopefully incrementally across time, then the evidence of the mistake can be an invitation to positive transformation. And that would be the encouraging element of humility, right? It’s like, well, why humble?

DR. JOHN DELONY: But you have to do it in community. I think, I think like it went from this ancient religious practice of confession, which I think you have to look back thousands of years and say this practice, this practice continued to roll on evolutionarily and culturally because it had a deep value.

And then it was—I don’t say co-opted—it was absorbed by the mental health community to sit down across from somebody and I find great, great value in journaling, writing things down, getting them out of my body and onto paper. But I think we’ve gotten very isolated with our journaling and writing it down. And we’ve become, I’m having this confession with myself now, and there’s value to that.

But I think the true value is having confession in front of somebody else. Because then we force ourselves to say, do you see me and do you still love me? Will you still be here if you fully know me?

Two Brains Are Better Than One

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That it’s the most difficult part of yourself to observe the place where you’re most blind, obviously. And so you can journal and you can concentrate on yourself, but that still might produce a situation where your blindest spots stay blind. And also it limits your ability to problem solve creatively because you only draw on your own resources.

One of the wonderful things about a marriage that’s functional is that both of you have two brains to work on, to work out whatever problem happens to arise. And part of the reason that marriage is difficult is because life is difficult and you have to jointly confront the actual problems of life, which is what makes marriage different than dating, for example, or different than an affair, which is a, you know, a wish, a wish fulfillment fantasy in some sense, of all the intimacy with none of the problems, a very terrible thing to do to your partner, who is then laden with only the problems.

But it’s very useful to have two brains because each person is quite different. And the probability that the person you’re communicating with will have a different take on both the problem and the solution is extremely high. And so this is particularly true if you’re in a solipsistic crisis in relationship to your mental health.

For example, if you’re depressed, it’s very hard to lift yourself out of that alone because some of that dwelling on your issues actually facilitates the depression. And the same thing happens with anxiety.

The Problem with Over-Pathologizing

DR. JOHN DELONY: So now that we’re here, you’re a trained and practiced clinical psychologist. I’m a trained, I’m a lowly trained counselor, which for the non-academics—there’s a definite hierarchy there.

Have we over-pathologized culture? Our individuals are—I feel like—

We have become—

A slavish adherence to diagnostics and to labeling. And when I look at, when I look at expectation theories that people live into, the labels that they’re given or the expectations that are put before them. I’ve got some high concern, but I also don’t want to be dismissive, right?

So help me with that because I feel like everybody, man, it’s so easy to just go get a diagnostic and go get a label and that becomes you. And then I end up sitting with somebody and they say, well, I can’t take this job because I was diagnosed with ADHD or I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, and my impulse is, hey, that’s a context, not an excuse. It is a way, a way that you see and experience the world and people experience you, and you still got to get up and go to work. So how are we going to manage that? Right, But I don’t want to be dismissive.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, look, I think part of the problem is that it’s a practical problem in some sense because the diagnostic labeling process is necessary for such things as insurance claims. Right, right. And so the lexicon—

DR. JOHN DELONY: But is that—is that where we are, man?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Of course. Of course it is.

DR. JOHN DELONY: And the lexicon, that’s heartbreaking, man.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and there’s some utility in it, you know, if you’re having panic attacks and you’re afraid to go out of your house, and I tell you, you have agoraphobia, and many other people have it, sometimes that’s a real relief because you’re not the only crazy person of that type in the world, and there’s some pathway to treatment.

But I was trained fundamentally as a behaviorist, and the behaviorists aren’t that—what would you call it—impressed with diagnostic labels. And the reason for that is that they tend to break down problems into actionable units. It’s like, well, I’m depressed. It’s like, well, okay, fair enough. But what’s wrong with your life and your mood in the micro details, and how could we address that programmatically?

And I think the problem with diagnosis is that it’s really easy to confuse diagnosis with cause. Right. Well, I’m miserable. Why? Well, because I’m depressed now. Well, maybe you have a biochemical problem, but absent that, depression isn’t a black box with homogenous contents. There’s specific reasons that you’re miserable and unhappy. And what we need to do is to break down those reasons, differentiate them down to the level of detail where you can start to experiment with addressing them. And so if the diagnostic enterprise interferes with that, then it’s counterproductive. And that happens very frequently. Yeah.

The Power of Small Steps

DR. JOHN DELONY: I remember the first time one of my students was hospitalized for major depression and suicidal ideation. I was taken aback that the first couple of days after they had gotten sleep and were fed, the protocol was your job is to get up and go take a shower and then you can go back to bed. We’re going to take these tiny steps towards.

Right. That’s, you know, my friend Dave Ramsey is, okay, we’re going to get a thousand dollars. Sell whatever you got, sell your famous guitar. Sell your—you’re going to get a thousand dollars in a savings account first and you’re going to breathe for the first time and then we’re going to pay off your debt and then we’re going.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

DR. JOHN DELONY: It’s these tiny baby steps towards. And again, I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods that mental health is, I just got to get all the right thoughts in the right order. And there’s something I think we just swiped off wholesale, the behaviorist approach. I just don’t see that working out, man. I think we have to often act our way into a different way of thinking and experiencing the world.

Exponential Growth Through Incremental Change

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the other thing too that people should take heart in consequence of is that as you pointed out earlier when we were talking about the cascading effects, let’s say, of sorting out how you have dinner with your family, there’s multiplying effects.

Well, it might be very disheartening to see at what small scale you have to begin improvements. Right? But the truth of the matter is, is that that tends to scale exponentially. Once you start making improvements, the improvements feed back upon themselves.

And so even if you have to start out small, it doesn’t take very long before you’re on the upward trajectory. And it’s not linear. You know, you can fail precipitously, right? But you can also succeed precipitously once you get the ball rolling. Positive things tend to aggregate together and you can make a lot of progress even if you start from a pretty damn dismal place.

DR. JOHN DELONY: So how do we get that extraordinary insight into the public lexicon? How does that become a way of operating? Because all of us are staring, we’re running around staring at our own belly buttons waiting to not fall off that precipitous decline. And we are missing the opportunity for this accelerating post-traumatic growth. Right. We’ve been through hard things. Okay. What come—that’s the whole book, man.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s—

DR. JOHN DELONY: What do we, what do we do next?

Spreading the Message

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s the answer to your question. Well, how do we bring that into the public domain? Well, you wrote a book. Yeah, but we’re having this conversation. And so, and that is how you do it.

And you try to communicate the utility of, what would you call it? Humble, courageous, incremental movement forward and honest communication, social community, all the things that we discussed today.

And I should also point out that we are out of time for the YouTube interview. Is there anything else that you want to bring to the attention of the people who are watching and listening before we close?

DR. JOHN DELONY: No, I just want to say I’m grateful for your hospitality. It’s been—you’ve been a gift. I appreciate you.

Closing Thoughts

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, thank you. And thank you for your book. And I would say to people who are watching and listening, Dr. Delony’s book is a very straightforward take on practical solutions that you can implement to start incrementally improving your life. And that is the right way to progress.

One brick at a time. You build a solid wall one brick at a time, and it can happen a lot faster than you think. And so I think the book fills a necessary niche. And I like the manner in which you interwove your description of story and identity and the broader social community and the issue of incremental improvement. And so I’d encourage people watching and listening to take a look. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was real good talking to you. For those of you who are watching and listening, I’m going to talk to Dr. Delony for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. And the Daily Wire Plus makes these professionally produced YouTube conversations possible. And so thank you to them for that.

And if you’re interested in hearing a little bit more about Dr. Delony’s biography and about what’s made him successful in his career and his marriage, then head on over to the Daily Wire Plus platform and tune in. And otherwise, hopefully we’ll see all of you again on my YouTube channel. And thank you very much for your time and attention.

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