The Power of Narrative in Psychology

Malcolm and Simone explore studies showing contextualization shapes emotions more than events. Believing you suffered childhood trauma causes more adult problems than records showing you endured abuse. Self-identifying as an insomniac impairs functioning over poor sleep itself. They explain how groups like cults leverage contextualization to control people. But individuals can also use it to their benefit through placebos, positive stress mindsets, and custom cultures. Ultimately, you have the power to frame life's hardships as opportunities to grow stronger.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] it is not. being abused, which creates the effects of trauma. It is believing that you underwent something traumatic, which creates the effects

Simone: of trauma.

Simone: It was

Malcolm: really important about this is that it means that anyone can use this to their advantage. It means that whatever happened to you as a child, a group with malicious intents, whether it's a cult or a psychologist or a ideological movement can find fertile ground within about.

Malcolm: Anyone's life to separate them from their family and build real trauma into their childhood. Yeah. And this is very advantageous for these groups because when you're a cult, one of the first things you want to do is to separate somebody for their endogenous support networks. You want to separate them from their family and the other people who care about them.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, [00:01:00] Malcolm. Hello,

Malcolm: Simone! It's wonderful to be here with you today.

Simone: It is because we decide that it's wonderful, right, Malcolm?

Malcolm: Exactly! And this is a very interesting topic.

Simone: The subject in this case being basically the effect of contextualization. So most recently, a friend of ours shared with us a study called associations between objective and subjective experiences of childhood maltreatment and the course of emotional disorders in adulthood and the TLDR of this particular study was those who contextualize childhood abuse or maltreatment as such.

Simone: It reported and apparently experienced more emotional problems as adults versus those who through government records and other sources clearly were shown to also experience maltreatment in childhood, but didn't identify as being maltreated did not show the same level of mental distress of mental disorders.

Simone: If you word that differently,

Malcolm: it is not. [00:02:00] being abused, which creates the effects of trauma. It is believing that you underwent something traumatic, which creates the effects

Simone: of trauma. Yeah. Or contextualizing it as this horrible thing. So you can still totally have something bad happened to you. I'm sure.

Simone: And be like that sucked, but like to not identify with it, to not be like, that was horrible. How am I ever going to live this down? My life is ruined because of this.

Malcolm: Yeah. So you actually see this when I was a psychology student, there was this case and I've never been able to find the study that this was done in.

Malcolm: It may have been. anecdotal experience from the teacher at the time, but they were talking about how in countries where rape is very common and quote unquote part of normal life that the rates of trauma from rape are very low. And it's only in the countries where rape is contextualized as traumatic, where you really frequently get this Extreme [00:03:00] trauma response to rape, specifically believing, and this is also what you're seeing was the forgetting before remembering phenomenon, which is a famous phenomenon in psychology where a personal go like, Oh my gosh, I just remembered this, like I was.

Malcolm: R word by my uncle, as a kid, right? It was horrible. I'm traumatized. I covered up that memory from my childhood. And then the person they told this to it'll be their spouse or something. They're like you talked about that last week. You talk about this. All the time. You clearly hadn't forgotten this.

Malcolm: And what's happening is they will remember something like my uncle touched me in a weird way that made me uncomfortable, but they won't contextualize it within the modern context that we associate that with, right? And then one day. They will think about it tied to this new traumatizing context, and the new memory of it that they create through that, the new way they're contextualizing this old memory, is so [00:04:00] different, it completely overwrites the old memory, and they don't remember that they had previously remembered this, or that they had never really forgotten it.

Malcolm: But what's really interesting, Is when this happens, then trauma is introduced. They did not have trauma from the old way they were remembering and contextualizing it, but they do from the new way. Yeah.

Simone: And you've seen this also, we've looked at some of the research on long COVID, remember how I shared that one study with you, where they found that people who. Did not know that they had COVID did not report the symptoms of long COVID at the same period but we're confirmed to have COVID. I should clarify. We're not confirmed to, to have the same symptoms or reported symptoms of long COVID as people who who did know

Malcolm: that they had COVID.

Malcolm: Essentially. A number of people went to a hospital, they were diagnosed with COVID, right? But some people were never informed of their diagnosis. Long COVID essentially didn't exist in that group. [00:05:00] If you had COVID but you did not know you had COVID, your probability of getting long COVID was incredibly low, I think almost zero.

Malcolm: Which When you combine that with the fact that long COVID, like number one corollaries were like general anxiety disorder and

Simone: stuff like that. Yeah. Having a history of sort of mental illness or struggle in general correlates apparently quite highly with cases of long COVID.

Malcolm: That largely implies that this is. Probably mostly psychosomatic. Maybe not in every case, but in many cases, it's psychosomatic. But a specific type of psychosomatic, which is meaningfully psychosomatic. So people hear that and they're like, what? That means it's basically nothing. Whereas I would couch that in what we've been saying.

Malcolm: The pain that comes with trauma is

Simone: real.

Malcolm: Basically all of it. It comes from the contextualization of the event, not the event [00:06:00] itself.

Simone: Yeah. But also the pain that is being experienced is very real. It is.

Malcolm: No. But all of the pain. Whenever someone has ever said that they were traumatized, what they were talking about was the contextualization, not the event

Simone: itself.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. In other words, the thing that is causing the harm is the way that you've built a narrative around it. It's the narrative that causes the harm, not the thing. The, not the traumatic thing itself. It was

Malcolm: really important about this is that it means that anyone can use this to their advantage. It means that whatever happened to you as a child, a group with malicious intents, whether it's a cult or a psychologist or a ideological movement can find fertile ground within about.

Malcolm: Anyone's life to separate them from their family and build real trauma into their childhood. Yeah. And this is very advantageous for these groups because when you're a cult, one of the first things you want to do is to separate somebody for their [00:07:00] endogenous support networks. You want to separate them from their family and the other people who care about them.

Malcolm: This is why when cults often start recruiting you, they ask you about things that happened in your childhood. It's also why malicious psychologists. Now, real psychologists generally do not ask that much about your childhood. That's not like I was trained to be a psychologist. When I was trained to be a psychologist, that was not part of psychology training.

Malcolm: It's become a new thing that psychologists have picked up organically or accidentally, because the ones that accidentally created a dependency in their patients. Ended up getting more repeat business and ended up doing better and ended up being able to spend more money on ads and ended up, being able to grow their practices more.

Malcolm: Yeah. So that iteration of psychology that functions very similar to the way Scientology functions actually, because they use a similar recruiting process has out competed the others. Yeah. But you see this in other parts of the research, so talk about the sleep study,

Simone: Simone. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of my favorite ones.

Simone: There's a study published in behavior research and therapy is literally called insomnia identity. So[00:08:00] let that basically explain itself. People who identify. As being insomniacs are more likely to experience the adverse effects of having poor sleep. And as they put it insomnia identity is more predictive of daytime impairment than poor sleep.

Simone: And so what they did here was very similar actually to the childhood trauma research that we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, they took a bunch of people. Actually measured how well or how poorly they were sleeping and then ask them, Hey, how well did you sleep last night? And they either said, yeah like I slept fine.

Simone: I slept poorly. I slept really well. And then I think they had them report. I don't think they measured their performance that day, but I had them report their performance. Although this is a meta study. So I think they're looking at a bunch of different studies. I'm just remembering one of the ones that was mentioned in it.

Simone: So in other words. They found that those who believed they slept poorly reported much poorer performance that [00:09:00] day or had much poorer performance that day than those who believed they slept well, even if those people who slept well, slept really poorly, which I think is very interesting because again, this shows that how you contextualize things, how you think you're doing Is going to predict how you are actually doing in many ways.

Simone: And of course there are tons of places where this isn't going to come through, like for the past, like year or so, especially with my last pregnancy, I had a pretty bad iron deficiency. And I was pretty exhausted. Like standing up was hard, all this, normal stuff was really difficult to do. And for the longest time, because I hold this view that is, it is my perception that is going to influence, everything.

Simone: I'm like I just have the wrong attitude right now. Like I just need to, get my act together when really I just, I needed to eat like a hamburger. Or, like a pan sear some tofu in a, cast iron skillet with some tomato sauce. And I would have been fine. And now I've worked that out.

Simone: We'll talk

Malcolm: about the placebo study as well. That's another one that's really relevant to all of us. Yeah.

Simone: Let's, yeah, let's take this and then shift [00:10:00] it to the mindset that you I guess what you can do about this, that you can, if you want to use this knowledge to your advantage.

Simone: And instead of saying, okay, everything now that I see is traumatic or every time I contextualize something poorly, I'm going to suffer. What's, what about the flip side? What if you contextualize something really well? Then, oh, there's this whole world of power and empowerment and like good health and good mental health is going to come to you theoretically.

Simone: So there are lots of ways that you can mess with placebos yourself that. Can, help you for example you can use even a non deceptive placebos to reduce stress in a measurable manner. There was one study that's called Placebos Without Deception, Reduce Self Report and Neural Measures of Emotional Distress.

Simone: This is a meta study with, published in the journal Nature, which is a really good journal. That basically found that even when people knew that the effect was a placebo effect. So even though you know that you're just messing with you and there's no like real drug or it's [00:11:00] a doctor just being like placebos are known to make a difference.

Simone: This pill is going to do nothing. Take this pill and it should help you. People are like, Oh, this is helping me. It also helps apparently. And I have another study that found this when the person telling you the placebo is fake or the person administering the placebo also seems respectable. So that, like maybe get like a really smart, respectable friend to administer some made up treatment to you that is supposed to help you feel better.

Malcolm: This is definitely something you could build into, we talked about like crafting cultures, crafting religions. This is definitely something you could do. can build into that.

Simone: And I think many religions do, right? They have these ceremonial, like cleanse, like cleansing of guilt, cleansing of sickness, cleansing of all sorts of mental exercising people.

Simone: What is that? But to, at least from a secular perspective, what is that? But the placebo effect and it is powerful, right?

Malcolm: . Let's dive into what this means for the individual and for society. To the individual, it means that A lot of [00:12:00] the psychological challenges that a person can deal with when it comes to trauma or quote, unquote, the things that have happened to them in their lives are not actually that tied to the serendipitous things that have happened to them.

Malcolm: They are more tied to how they contextualize those things and the way that people around them. Allow them to contextualize those things and encourage them to contextualize

Malcolm: those things. that emotionally rewards resilience you are going to experience a lot less trauma, even if you have undergone the same events. And if you personally choose to lean into things that way, now this. Becomes really important when you look at this sort of urban monoculture in our society, which does almost the exact opposite, you can gain status within this culture.

Malcolm: And by gain status, what I mean is gain a level of protection. So for example, if I have [00:13:00] some form of trauma in this urban monoculture, I can exercise power over other people with something called a trigger warning, which basically says you have to do what I want because of X status that I hold within this society, right?

Malcolm: Like that's triggering stop. But what that is doing is giving you social power. For this level of emotional fragility and that sort of subconscious reward, even if it's not intentional, is eventually going to cause you to lean into traumatic contextualizations of aspects of your life more and more.

Malcolm: It's actually I've studied cults, like I'm really into cults, and like progressive culture is actually in many ways like more unhealthy than I would think your average malevolent cult, which is really interesting. And I didn't like it wasn't trying to be that it just accidentally became that. And it's really [00:14:00] sad when you think about the completely unhealthy.

Malcolm: Unnecessary suffering that's happening across, developed countries right now. And increasingly being spread to developing countries due to this mindset and ways of relating to the hardships of your life.

Simone: No it's incredibly sad. And I want to emphasize this is not just about.

Simone: traumatic events that happened in your childhood. This is not just about you perceiving sleep to be poor. This is not just about you getting COVID and then, assuming that you're still sick and never recovering. This is coming down to like everyday amounts of stress that you're experiencing.

Simone: For example I have three separate studies that I'd like randomly collected because I collect studies that I think are interesting over time that are just about mindsets around stress, just general. Basic stress. So there's one called the role of stress mindset and shaping cognitive, emotional and physiological responses to challenging and threatening stress which basically the T.

Simone: L. D. R. Is teach yourself [00:15:00] to contextualize stress as positive, the source of focus, learning and advancement. Because that, enables you to basically deal with it better. There's another study called Mindset Matters, the role of employees stress mindset for day specific reactions to workload anticipation where it basically says the takeaway is you should contextualize stressful challenges as being able to sharpen your focus, strengthen motivation, help you learn, and help you advance.

Simone: There's another study called beliefs about stress attenuate the relation among adverse life events, perceived distress, and self control that shows specifically for adolescents that they also benefit from a positive stress mindset. So all of these are basically like, okay, you can view this as negative.

Simone: You can view this as, oh, I need to go see my therapist this week. This is traumatic. I'm stressed. Now I'm getting so stressed. I need rest. I need to stay home. I need to. Cut back on things. Or you can contextualize this as this is an amazing opportunity for me to grow. I can become stronger now that, this is a great good part of life and it's [00:16:00] fine.

Simone: It's fine.

Malcolm: No, it's not just fine. It helps you. So the same negative event. It can make you both mentally stronger and feel better, or it can be used by your culture and those around you to make you weaker. And this is where, when people are like, oh, you've created this weird family religion, like what potential positive could that have?

Malcolm: This belief that in 10 million years, our descendants are probably closer to the way we would contextualize a God than the way we contextualize a human, if they're still around. And then who's to say they relate to time the same way we do. So they could be watching over us, right? Rewarding us for doing the right thing.

Malcolm: But what this means, this belief system we've created for our family, is that when negative things happen to us, instead of treating them emotionally as if they're negative things, what we say is, ah, the future police did this for us. It's clearly their... They're trying to give us an opportunity or send us a signal.

Malcolm: If we had gone down that route, it wouldn't have worked out anyway.[00:17:00] And this is just so powerful in terms of contextualization. We get fired. We're like, Oh, they must've been opening our time up for some opportunity. That's about to come our way. We better prepare. Something otherwise stressful happens to us.

Malcolm: We're like, Oh, they were, honing our ability to handle that so that we can better handle it because some even bigger thing like that's about to come. So we really need to focus on getting better at this. And it prevents us from contextualizing really anything in our lives in this negative context, which makes removes, I think a lot of one completely unnecessary negative emotions, but more importantly, it removes unproductive negative emotions, which derail us from achieving our goals.

Malcolm: The things in this life that we think matter.

Simone: And you're specifically pointing out how with our. Designed family culture. We have created mechanisms that give us very easy opportunities to contextualize things positively rather than negatively, [00:18:00] which I think is really key. And actually, culture does play a really big role of this.

Simone: You're reminding me of some research that I found super interesting. Related to decision fatigue that showed a role that culture can play so those of you who are familiar with the concept of decision fatigue. The idea is that by the end of the day, you are so exhausted from all the various choices you've made throughout the day, which sort of cumulatively rack up and tax your mental system that you're just, you can't make good decisions anymore.

Simone: And all these researchers had found things like, oh, once people are tired, they make poor purchasing decisions. People like president Obama came out with Oh, I wear a uniform basically because that removes the amount of decision fatigue that I have throughout the day.

Simone: I am saving my mental capacity for. important decisions because I am president. And what was really interesting is I found some research questioning the concept of decision fatigue when they compared it across different cultural groups. So if memory [00:19:00] serves some researchers looked at decision fatigue among Indian.

Simone: Study respondents. Yes, I

Malcolm: remember this study and you are correct. That

Simone: is the culture they were comparing. Okay. Because my memory is nothing. It was like five years ago

Malcolm: you read this.

Simone: Anyway, continue. Yeah, I remember where I was. I was sitting in our kitchen in Peru when I was reading this. So, It's been a while.

Simone: And so they, they found basically that a person, At least according to the study in Indian culture, the view around mental exhaustion is more like, no, no, no. This isn't a getting drained, like gas gauge thing. This is a getting warmed up thing. So the more hard decisions you make in a day, the more like warmed up you are and the more able you are.

Simone: to make really good decisions because like now, like now you're in the groove. Like now you can keep going, you've got the momentum. So you're using momentum to make hard decisions. Whereas in the United States, the contextualization, the cultural contextualization is, Oh, I've made all these hard decisions.

Simone: Now I can't make any more good [00:20:00] decisions. So I'm going to eat a pint of ice cream tonight. So a lot of that, again, like this is not just a personal, how am I going to? Decide how to contextualize this. This shows the role that a culture, a national culture can play in how psychological tricks are played on us, which is really cool

Malcolm: in this case.

Malcolm: They're looking at a national culture, but I think this shows. How little excuse every individual has to just opt into whatever the dominant culture in their society is, right? You have personal ownership of your culture. You get to choose what that culture is. You get to choose what that framework is, especially if you have a family and that family can be self reinforcing.

Malcolm: It's a lot harder to do this at the individual level, but if you're doing this with a family or a small group of friends, yeah you can build all of that for yourself. Which completely determines how you experience all these things in your life. And that is just absolutely wild that so many people throw away that opportunity.[00:21:00]

Malcolm: Because I think that to a lot of people taking responsibility for themselves. is the ultimate burden, and relinquishing personal responsibility is the ultimate luxury. And I've said this before, that I think we expected as we moved to a post scarcity society, people would indulge in hedonism, but instead what we have found is that they indulge in self victimization,

Malcolm: and the reason they indulge in self victimization Is because that allows them to not take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions. That's really what being a victim is about. It's, I am not responsible for the consequences of my actions or where I am in life.

Malcolm: And to an extent, let's be clear. We are all to some extent, not responsible and fully responsible, right? Like it's a spectrum for every individual. It's just. You get no psychological benefit from [00:22:00] believing that you are not responsible. And this is where the research around internal and external locus of controls come in, right?

Malcolm: And so you just see this along every place that you look at this stuff. And it's insane as it looks to have built like a family religion and a family culture. And people are like, why would you do that? And it's because it matters so much! And some of the older cultures work, but a lot of them do not have good mechanisms to resist online environments, these Skinner boxes we have around us all the time or new information, which can make them hard to believe, right?

Malcolm: Like it does make sense that a lot of people would be creating new systems of

Simone: belief. Yeah, but yeah, so what we aren't saying with all this is there are no exogenous factors that may mess with you or give you mental health problems or whatnot. 100% many people experience depression because of mental [00:23:00] imbalances or because of genuine things in their lives that are making their lives miserable that they cannot.

Simone: Think their way out of 100% terrible things happen. They can cause serious problems. However, you still have a lot of power in how things tip one way or the other. Like not every adverse thing that happens to you has to be bad. You can have some control over that. And so hopefully if you take one thing away from this, it is that there is actually a lot of control you have over whether things go poorly or well for you.

Simone: No matter what happens in life. And this is not us trying to be like out of touch and be like, Oh, I don't know. Use your thoughts to cure yourself. But the scientific research seems to be robust across all these different domains, childhood, trauma, sleep, quality, general stress, decision, fatigue.

Simone: Like it's just all over the place. That it's robustly saying. You've seen

Malcolm: this with me. You've remarked before that generally when something really bad happens to us, my mood improves.

Simone: Yeah. You get super stressed and [00:24:00] like worried when things are going well. And then when things. fall off a cliff, you're like, Oh, okay.

Malcolm: All right. This is going to be fun. Time to do something interesting again. But yeah, it's about contextualization and you could say that's a negative part of the way I contextualize life that if everything's going well, that's when I get emotionally worried. But if you're going to react to things in a certain way, if you have to choose.

Malcolm: Either to become emotionally distressed when things go poorly or become emotionally distressed when things are going well, you're probably better off becoming slightly antsy when things are going well, because usually that means you can deal with things better in those moments, right? There's less genuine pressures, less genuine things to mess up, right?

Simone: Yeah. I, per our culture, we're just not. I think go to luxuriating in a moment.

Malcolm: Yeah, I don't like it. How sinful is that? It's a sign that I need to launch the new project. If I've got free time, I've got to do what's this YouTube [00:25:00] series? I love it. We started doing this a few weeks ago and then we're like.

Malcolm: Huh we initially said we do it once a week, then we ended up doing it every other day, and then one day I'm like, ah, I've got some free time, let's do it every weekday. Um, Which I think is just ridiculously ambitious. I should probably scale this back a little bit.

Simone: But that is not you, but I don't know. We'll see. I think probably we should make more sustainable publishing schedule, but I love these talks with you. So maybe not. I love them with you

Malcolm: too. And I really appreciate that you've helped reinforce this new culture for me. That makes it so easy for me to not really contextualize anything as traumatic, despite all of the traumatic things you do to me.

Simone: Well, I ain't stopping Malcolm. So. Thank you so much for surviving this

Malcolm: far. Personal responsibility. How abusive is

Simone: that? I won't be able to torture you more if you, you know, conk out on me, so hang in there, friend. Hang in there. I love you so much. Oh my gosh,

Malcolm: I love you. You're great.[00:26:00]