Jordan Peterson ~ Never Ignore Small Signs Of Coming Betrayal

sometimes you can come across something new that helps you reconfigure the way that you're living almost instantly in a more comprehensive and fuller way but more common is the traumatic response which is when the presuppositions of your world are shifted dramatically and you fall into the surrounding chaos then it's so hard on you that you know it actually does you psychophysiological damage if someone goes after you at the good person level of analysis and they just demolish you you know in the course of say a three-year relationship hacking away at the idea that you have

any moral worth whatsoever this is what happens when you're abused then that's going to knock you into pieces at a very complex and high level of abstraction so that can undermine your entire worldview if the person instead helps you retool the little behaviors and the little micro structures that make you up and if you're willing to participate in that and if you're open to corrective feedback from the world then you can continually adjust yourself at a small level and then that makes the things in the hierarchy a little higher a little healthier and then that

makes the aggregation of those things a little higher in the hierarchy a little healthier and a little more complete then you can do this bit by bit retooling without ever having to suffer the demolition of huge chunks of your personality so let's go back to the relationship where there's a betrayal it's like virtually every time someone gets flipped upside down because of a betrayal in a relationship after the betrayal happens they say to themselves there were all these signs I didn't pay attention to so and maybe the first sign is who knows your partner starts

to flirt a bit more when you go out on a social occasion it's and not a lot more just a bit more and you decide because maybe you're timid that that that's okay you're not going to just do anything about it but it but it's it's interesting that it happens it grabs your attention and it means something but what you decide is it's not worth paying attention to and so maybe the next eight times that you go out the same thing happens but it happens at a somewhat accelerated rate and then maybe the person starts

to go out without you and so on there's this progression towards the end state of betrayal and every time you get a little hint the world tells you that something's going on you put it aside and you fail to take it into account well you're foregoing your opportunity to adjust the relationship at micro stages because maybe what you should have done the first time that happened is you should have gone home with your partner and said what the hell is going on like this is what was happening why are you doing that here's how you

should have behaved and of course that's going to be a fight there's absolutely no doubt about it but it might be a micro fight instead of a the relationship is over fight and in order to keep a relationship healthy it needs to be retooled at micro levels constantly and the same as the case with your own character when you encounter something that's unexpected especially if it's small enough to handle you need to extract the information from it rebuild the world and rebuild yourself and then maybe if you continue doing that every time you get evidence

of an anomaly or an error or every time the world manifests a meaning to you then you won't have to fall apart because the structure that constitutes you is going to remain viable and healthy from the bottom up and if you don't do that then those errors are going to accumulate and when they finally do manifest themselves as unavoidable like when your partner says I don't want to be with you anymore or I've been with someone else for the last year there's no ignoring that then the whole thing comes crashing down you're no longer in

a relationship you're no longer in a good relationship and then all the other things become questionable so meaning manifests itself so that you can retool being itself on a continual basis while simultaneously minimizing the risk of total collapse and morality then becomes the act of paying sufficient attention and reacting sufficiently so that that corrective process occurs now so you're inside one of these you're going for point A to point B and as you do that things you want to have happen happen and things you don't want to have happen and things you don't understand happen

and let's say that you investigate the things that you don't want to have happen and you investigate the things that you didn't expect and you do that as soon as they come up so then what happens well partly what happens is you're going to change your perceptions a bit and you're going to change your actions a bit and what that'll culminate in overtime is that this whole structural change so instead of going from point A to point B maybe you start shifting so that you're going from point A to point C because as you're gathering

information as a consequence of the inadequacies of the way you're looking at the world not only are you improving your ability to perceive and to act but you're also gathering information that helps shift your perspective to a better point B because you might say well where are you going and why and the answer to that is well you have a plan you're going to get your degree I don't know what your long-term plan is but there's no reason to assume that your long-term plan is correct even though there's no reason to assume that you can

do without one so you're in this weird situation where you have to live within a bounded space and the bounded space is going to produce errors and it's also going to be wrong but at the same time if you use the bounded space then you can transform it continually across time even what it's aimed at and you can minimize the probability of precipitous collapse now