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Hey all, I thought I'd go through and transcribe, and add some structure, to Stef's podcasts that gave me those 'aha' moments that indicate the implosion of some part of my previous conceptions and in the void an influx of knowledge and reason. Feel free to leave feedback on the format, I could include time stamps or links to other podcasts if it is useful. Here is 'How to find a good therapist' 00:00 - 17:35/46:57 Movie reference: A Beautiful Mind A therapist is someone who checks the reality of what you are seeing. Stef undertakes a moral exploration of the question ‘What is therapy?' He believes that if we have suffered from the predations of evil people, unfortunately we are lost in society - people will not say “Damn! That was evil, what happened to you, I’m so sorry”. They will clam up, keep a distance, shun and ostracise people who put them on the spot to make a moral judgment about what happened to the other person as a child. “Don’t get involved” seems to be the mantra of society, because we are addicted to betraying the victims of evil (see other podcasts). If I say I suffered at the hands of X as a child, people will feel agitated at me for putting them in a place to cast moral judgment; with this comes an onus of deciding to act against the evil or to do nothing. Contrast this with society where people are more than ready to cast judgment; Drug users, Evil! Homosexuals, Evil! Tax-avoiders, Evil! If you’ve suffered evil, as most people have, particularly if you have suffered as a child: you have the feelings of rage, vengeance, all these primal feelings you have pent up inside you. Its like a big crater of a volcano that never erupts, it wants to spew out but has no outlet. The after effects of evil cannot be assuaged on their own; we are social beings and we need outside input to validate what is going on. We need to turn to people in society and say “Listen, do you see that devil in the room? Do you see that evil?” How many among us will say “Yeah! I see see that! That’s terrible!”?More likely we will hear, “Ah maybe there is evil, maybe there isn’t just get over it. It’s your family, your culture, your religion, your nation get over it you’ll never get around it. Even if there is evil, think of the good in the evil person! You must have loyalty to them because of family/religion/culture.” With Nash’s hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind, people either say, “Yes, I see the people you see," or “No, I don’t see anyone". There is a definitive truthful ANSWER; if people don’t see the evil at least Nash knows he’s hallucinating. In society, in order to avoid awkwardness we don’t get an answer. If there is evil, people will say they don’t see it just to avoid having to act. The person inquiring with society has no root to reality; the rest of society deny him his chance of a definitive answer as to the reality of his experience. We are stuck with the effect of evil because nobody will socially accept the existence of the evil. Politically, however, people are more than willing to accept it; as long as it does not require them to act personally against an evil, people are more than willing to decry evil and give true evil the power over those decried. People have trauma because they have experienced evil, not because they have experienced misfortune. Take, for example a person who’s mother died of cancer when they were the age of 9. People will say “My goodness, that is awful, how terrible!”. If they have a great Dad he will help them through it and they will have the memory of their mother to grieve with and it should not lead to permanent psychological damage because the reality is accepted by everyone around the person. What if people said "I don’t know if she had cancer, is there such thing as cancer? I don’t think we can keep being friends if you keep talking about things like this.”? People are opposed to fundamental emotions: ardent love, passion, integrity, virtue. That’s why we need a community that reveres these most fundamental human traits. If you had a culture that denied the death of your mother, you’d go insane. "Be friends with cancer, it’ll make you tougher!” people would say. You would not be able to heal, inside you’d be living in a void; your experience would be so fundamentally undermined, so you could not feel anywhere near accepted in society. Your feelings of loss and anger and grief would be rejected or attacked. This will give you a permanent psychological problem until you see a therapist who says “Oh, my gosh that is so terrible. Tell me about that,” which means you still have to deal with the denial of reality by your society outside the therapist’s office. Anything serious or real threatens the collective psychosis. …