The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:46:45 · Scott Galloway
[00:46:45] S2: from Anna Lembke. I wanna talk a little bit about, I wrote a post on this that got a lot of feedback, polarized feedback, the cult of therapy. And that is, see a lot of people thinking, oh, there's an issue here with one of our kids. And I don't, I'm being critical to parents, but I think sometimes, especially parents with money outsource it and think we'll just fix it with therapy. And I want to be clear. I think therapy is a wonderful thing and it benefits thousands of people. Probably not millions because there's not enough therapists, but if you have the resources and it's something that can help pun. What I worry though, is that with TikTok, there's so many, what I call ring light therapists, that we've created these cults of therapy where you just, you need to work on yourself first. And I'm fairly like bullshit. Get a job, get a friend, get a girlfriend, get out of the house, start exercising. That is the equivalent of a nuclear detonation of therapy for sixty to ninety percent of the young men I deal with. And there's this notion that they learn on TikTok or that their parents want to put them in therapy that, oh, they need to work on themselves. And my attitude oftentimes, and I realize there's a fine line here, and I will defer to what you say as I have no training in adolescent psychiatry. But to be blunt, I work with a lot of young men. I find that a lot of this is, okay, the best therapy here is going to be life outside of the house. And occasionally I run across a kid and I'll say to the parents, I am in over my head, I'm over my skis. There's something going on here. You need a psychiatrist. This kid needs therapy. There's something going on here that I can't even begin to understand. But I think most of the time it's like, if this kid can get a job, start working out, get some friends, and maybe start asking women out, that's gonna be five years of therapy. Right? Right. So I'm putting forward a thesis that has what I'll call this ring light TikTok cults of therapy. Has it gone too far?
00:48:54 · Anna Lembke
[00:48:54] S3: Absolutely. And I've said very similar things. I mean, again, wanted to qual... Wanna qual... Qualify all this by saying I do psychotherapy. It can be tremendously helpful for many people. But the problem is that therapy is predominantly inward and backward, not outward and forward. And we are spending way too much of time inward and backward, thinking about ourselves, and importantly, thinking about past trauma. So a huge emphasis of modern therapy is to organize and structure our experience based on past trauma and see everything that happens to us as causally related to some past trauma. That is a worldview that is not, like, fact. Like, we could choose to navigate the world in a very different way. And although I think it's important to process and understand what's happened to us in the past, including the bad things, what is effectively happening with a lot of people who develop this trauma based worldview is that they never move past it. And every single felt experience or emotion they have, then they tie it back to this past trauma. And those folks end up with, like, no friends, no relatives. Mhmm. They they don't do well, and they're miserable. And and so we absolutely have to think about different ways of doing therapy, first of all, that it can't all be this Freudian concept that, you know, everything that that any form of sort of mental suffering and adulthood is tied to some conscious or unconscious childhood experience. That's just not realistic. We are much more influenced by what is happening to us right now than we are influenced by what happened to us twenty five years ago. I'm sorry, but that just that is a fact. We we cannot hold on to, like, the, you know, what happened to me when I was eight as an explanatory model for everything that happens to me when I'm 25 or 35, for that matter, 55. So... And then also I would just add, we we just have to get out of our own heads. We spend so much time not We in have to get out of our heads, and we have to be very suspicious of the stories that we tell. I mean, one of my my patients who got into recovery from long time addiction finally kind of came to the realization that, like, he couldn't really trust his own narratives. Like, in some ways, they were all sort of not real.
00:51:35 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway
And what he needed to do was go kickboxing, look at a rose bush, go out and meet some people and talk to them. And I think that's exactly right. When we are feeling down, distressed, anxious, we're usually ruminating. We're caught up in our own heads. If we can pivot our psyche outward, surrender that desire to try to control things through our mental mentations and ruminations, because that's what we're trying to do. It's this illusion that if I just keep thinking about this, I'm gonna be able to, you know, fix this and solve this problem. It's like, no. No. Stop. Stop thinking about that. Go out into the world. Pay attention to reality and what's really happening. Like see what needs to be done, do that thing, move forward. [00:52:28] S2: I really do. I find your work so powerful. I wanna talk a little bit about, I think the most undiagnosed addiction, and this is because sample size of one in a modern age is, I'd like to think I'm fairly aware of my own addictions, is the addiction to the affirmation of strangers. And quite frankly, it's made me successful. I'm so concerned with what other people think and that they'll like me if I have a lot of money. And that if I'm on CNN, that I pursue those things at the cost of the health of my relationship with myself, my own health, my own self esteem and my relationship with my family. [00:53:06] S3: Right.
00:53:06 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway, Scott Galloway
[00:53:06] S3: Right. [00:53:07] S2: And, you know, I wasn't as home as much as I should have been with my kids. And I really regret it now because I couldn't resist going to the World Economic Forum because I was gonna get to be on stage with someone famous. [00:53:20] S0: And now I look back and [00:53:21] S2: I think they're gonna be dead and I'm gonna be dead soon. Who cares? And I think economic security is really important, but I had that a long time ago. Why am I still sacrificing important things in the pursuit of it? And I think, well, it's because it, I think it makes me more impressive to other people. Talk about, one, is there a term for the addiction to the affirmation of others? And I won't say relevance because that makes it sound more noble. It's... Yeah. I'm I'm gonna read the comments in this video. And if someone says mean things about you and me, I'm gonna get upset. [00:53:59] S3: Right. And
00:53:59 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway
[00:53:59] S3: Right. And [00:54:00] S2: if they say nice things, it's gonna make me feel good. And that's sort of pathetic because most likely it's a bot, an Albanian troll farm sponsored by the GRU, trying to create polarization. But is that... What is the term for that? And if you're an adult that has recognized some success because of that addiction, what are your thoughts around modulating it and turning it, you know, and hopefully, quite frankly, addressing it? Because I know enough to know that I suffer from it. It's like I used to joke, I have German and Italian parents, so I'm smart enough to know I'm fucked up but too lazy to do anything about it. So I'm smart enough to know this is some sort of addiction, but I'm not entirely sure what to do about it. Your thoughts. [00:54:44] S3: First of all, thank you for your humility and transparency. I think that really helps so many people when we admit our own vulnerabilities. [00:54:52] S2: I just like talking about myself. [00:54:53] S3: Well, okay. Whatever. I still think it's helpful. [00:54:56] S2: Thank you.
00:54:57 · Anna Lembke
[00:54:57] S3: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, what we all want is human connection. It is our lifeblood. And social validation, reputation and enhancement, affirmation, Every other drug is really just an indirect vehicle to try to get that. That is what we all really desire at the end of the day. And, of course, now we've created this medium with likes and shares and comments and followers that makes that all so much more possible. Plus, AI agents are completely engineered to do that for us. So now we don't even need other humans. We can just get our affirmation from our AI chatbot that tells us how wonderful we are. So this is... And there's also science behind this, not just clinical observation. Studies showing that social validation and rep... Reputation enhancement releases dopamine, and the brain's reward pathway feels really, really good. So you are not alone. We are living in the age of what I call endemic narcissism, where narcissism has become so common that we're all struggling with it. We have these, you know, all these technologies that literally force us to look at ourselves. We're constantly being encouraged from childhood on to achieve, to go to the best schools. Parents measure their success as parents by what their kids are doing, what school they went to, how much money they're making. I mean, this is absolutely baked into the the the sort of... I don't know what analogy I'm looking for, but it's baked into our experience now, this endemic narcissism. And what's very clear to me is that narcissism is contrary to how we evolve, which is to live together in these tribes. And when we make these efforts to distinguish ourselves outside of and above the tribe, our... The natural homeostatic reckoning for that is shame and self loathing. That shame and self loathing is the natural ballast for narcissistic self regard, which I think explains why we are seeing so many people in clinical care who hate themselves, who are experiencing impostor syndrome, who have overwhelming shy... Shame. If they really give themselves, like, a moment to let it in, so many people experience profound shame. I know myself when I, like, give a talk, you know, to a big audience or whatever, afterwards, I have this incredible comedown, which is primarily shame.