Hijacking Truth Through The Guilt, Blame, And Shame Cycle

Watch the episode here

We want to talk about a different purchasing truth, Bill, what you call hijacking truth and through a particular lens of guilt, blame, shaming, and the cycles of such.

One of the biggest challenges regarding the truth as we’ve gone over in our previous episode is that there’s this perspective that people have about what’s true. There’s this perception about what people have is true and the perception is more of a limited truth and a perspective is larger. What happens is that if somebody wants to hijack truth, what they do is they proportionalize either make it bigger or make it smaller. I’m going to make it bigger. The great things that I’ve done or I’m going to make it smaller, the bad things that I’ve done. That’s called proportionalizing truth. It’s focusing on the illusion or the partial truth. I’m going to make it bigger or make it smaller. It depends on how I would like my audience to view the world.

That is very weird and frustrating. I see the truth being hijacked a lot, but I’m frustrated that others don’t recognize it or aren’t as frustrated by that.

That’s the thing that’s most unsettling, Tom, is that once you get the person’s perception hooked and once you have their perspective moving in your direction, all you got to do is proportionalize it. If I want to amplify my enemy and start to look at the falsehoods or the frailties of that, I’m going to make them bigger and smaller, even if it’s not true. I can assign something to that person to get them out of the game, to knock them out. A small media message repeated over and over again is a big part of that hijacking process. It’s called proportionalize thing. I’m going to proportionalize this to take something out of the news. There’s no collision and minimal obstruction.

It looked like it was a mountain, but it’s a mouse that’s proportionalizing. They’ll usually follow that with a reward. Look at how good we’ve done, look at how far we’ve done. They’ll put anticipation, look where we’re going. It’s going to be great when we get there. I’m not sure about getting there. That’s called uncertainty. All of a sudden, the person is completely hijacked all the way across to it. The worst-case scenario is the snake oil salesperson of this guy that would go around and sell this elixir, oil, or drink and come in, “This is going to take care of this ailment and it’s going to take this.” “How about this? Will it take care of this?” “Yes, it takes care of that too.”

The results may vary. There is an uncertainty narrative. That creates dopamine at the bottom. Maybe on the one that it would work for. From a testing standpoint, there’s a person that did exhibit sub benefits, but it was more from the placebo effect than it was from the substance, which is a whole other challenge. Getting a person into a person’s mindset of healing or progress, it’s tough. There’s a big part of it. If you did this on the stock market, it’s called pump and dump. I’m going to pump information in and the stock price goes up. I’m going to sell at the top. The value crashes back down. All the people that got pumped on the hype of the thing, the perception and the perspective of this thing being bad or good are going to get caught. The SEC has regulations about this. You cannot pump and dump. You cannot hijack a stock price. You cannot take the media and do X, Y and Z. You can’t do that or otherwise, that’s a big problem.

Isn’t it interesting how when it comes to the SEC and stocker regulation, there are laws and that’s a big problem as all agencies to enforce it? When it comes to the president of the United States pumping up, “We’re going to have this tax cut and save everybody all this money.” It seems to be a pump and dump scheme where so many people don’t get any refund or owed a lot of money. They weren’t properly prepared for it because they expected this big tax cut. At the end of the day, that reward wasn’t there for most people.

It wasn’t. A bunch of people had to pay more and they would go like, “I thought I was going to get something back from the promise.

 How did I get to pay more?” They’re realizing that some of them are not realizing they’re going to double down on the bet. They’re going to say, “It will take a little while because watch the narrative.” The tax breaks to take effect but some people might not have experienced the other way, but this next time, as we keep going, all they’re doing is pushing it down and the responsibility and the accountability are not going to fall on their shoulders. They’re going to look for some form of experience to show up where the person feels guilty.

There’s a sense of blame that’s going to show up. A sense of shame, which is what we’re heading towards during this hijacking process of truth. It’s getting hijacked and language is the driver. The way language has formulated is the thing that’s doing it. When it is done in marketing and in branding, there is a brand promise. This brand promise is this is what we’re standing for. We’re the good guys. We’re the people on the right side of this. Those other people, they’re the bad people on their side. The brand promise is if they’re in charge, they’re going to do all these bad things. Wouldn’t it be terrible? We’re back up to perception, perspective and proportion. The reward, the anticipation, the uncertainty. It is a sequence of language narrative that regrettably most or all of the Democratic candidates have no ability to understand how to use. It’s unsettling.

They better go to school quick. We see this playing out almost every day. Isn’t the whole tariff war the same thing where China is the bad guy and the United States is the good guy?

The tariff war needs to have that hijacking. The tariff was here’s what the China narrative was during the campaign and look at how he’s coming back around to recycle it. China is bad, China is good. There are parts we need in China. Here’s a good thing. Here’s the North Korea thing. There are these touchstones that he’s planting regarding perception and perspective. The perception is, “Here’s the way I see it.” The perspective is, “I want you to see my view of it. Don’t look at this other view of it.” The reward is, “Wouldn’t it be great when wait a minute.” The anticipation is, “There’s some movement on it. Look at what’s happened. There’s some movement on it.” It’s a little unsettling. I’m not sure, but those Democrats might get in the way of this. That’s uncertainty. See what they’re doing.

 They’re obstructing where we’re going. The right people, the good people, the people that pray, the people that do this, the people that have these values. The ones like me and the ones like you did because you voted for me.

If somebody wants to hijack truth, what they do is they proportionalize—either make it bigger or make it smaller.

CLICK TO TWEET

They changed the narrative by wanting to investigate the investigators. It’s going back the other way. The only person that I see who’s doing a better job than the Democrats of messaging on this or at least trying not to let the president hijack truth is George Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s husband. He’s very vocal about that and calling the president out on everything that he’s lying about on a daily basis. The Democrats are not talking about it.



You’re right because the Democrats, they’ve been labeled to diagnose as being this spot. As soon as they open their mouths, they become an easier target. Whereas the Republicans that are the defectors, they can say whatever they want and they get to be this whole another level of honesty because they get to say, “This guy is going against all of us and here’s how bad he’s doing it.” All the defectors are sitting right in that spot. All of them are going like, “We’re out of this. We are not doing this anymore.” The courage, they get to speak up and be direct. With their message, there’s no safe way for a Democrat to get there unless they use some of the languaging tools that I teach. That’s the problem. They don’t have the ability to break out of the guilt, the blame or the shame cycle, and stare it down and put a spotlight on it. That’s a big part of what we’re going to be talking about because a big part of the truth is you got to see where the language messaging is coming from. Be able to look at and have the right message to counter that message.

Can we share an example of that, Bill? I’d love to see how you would create that counter-narrative and first layout what one of the examples of this guilt, blame or shame that we’re seeing.

If I were to take a look at a Democratic candidate running, and you were asked a very difficult question. What makes you different? Most of them will fall into either two dead-end narratives. The first dead-end narrative is, “I have a plan that’s better.”

I hear that all the time. It’s 22 of them. It’s hard to keep track of who’s who.

The latest one was Tim Ryan, the guy on Bill Maher. He goes, “I have a plan.” I’m going like, “You’re lost.” This guy ran on no plan and you think you’re going to get it with a plan. He still doesn’t have a plan because nobody knows what the government does fully.

Because they don’t, he gets to ignore the entire system. All the wonderful things that the government does that keeps us safe that no one knows about, all they know is the government is bad. Let’s make the government listen. Meanwhile, scaring geese off of runways so that they don’t fly into an engine saves lives. The government is not bad. They do things we don’t see from a committed safety place. You don’t lose 200 people on a plane because the bird flies into the engine.

What winds up happening is that if the perception and the perspective are that we don’t know what government does, therefore it’s bad. All I got to do is proportionalize the bad and immediately I get to ignore because that’s what’s happening. Somebody’s hijacking the truth with a media narrative. How do you combat this? The one dead-end is I have a plan. The second dead-end is the story called people are hurting. We’re not getting the progress that we would like. In other words, pointing out the pain of somebody is different than standing for a quality that people can get behind. Let’s take the third option. Ask me the same question.

What do you stand for, Bill?

The first thing is to reestablish mutual respect. Even though the other side isn’t respecting us the way we would like, we can stand together as a respectful unit moving forward. The Democrats will stand together for mutual respect, even though the other side is not doing that. Look at how your physiology changed as soon as I said what I was standing for. All of a sudden, if anybody crosses the mutual respect line, I’m on it. That’s not even close to what mutual respect looks like in America.

This sounds very familiar to me. On The Tonight Show, Pete Buttigieg was being interviewed. Donald Trump has already tried to label him as a character in Mad Magazine because maybe in some ways resembles him. He’s trying to label people to judge and bring him down to the level of a comical character and say, “Don’t take him seriously. He’s like this guy.” What Pete Buttigieg said that I thought was brilliant was, “We’re trying to raise the level of the conversation in America to the extent the president made a literary reference, I think that that’s an improvement.”

That’s a pivot on having a little bit of empathy and Teflon energy. It’s like, “You want to call me a name, you’ve got to do a lot better than that guy. I’m not going to be the character on Mad Magazine.” It’s alluding to me too. I’m not going to say, “Thank you for being able to let me know the magazines you read. Now we know the magazines you read. That’s an improvement.” It’s a differentiator and you don’t go down the road of bureaucracy, which is, “I have a system. I have a plan. I have a rule or I’m going to enforce this and we’re going to stand for this.” It’s not as strong. You’ve got to get them to do things and engage things differently.

The president says, “He’s like Alfred E. Neuman.” He’s trying to label him like he does to everybody and bring the level of discourse down. Pete Buttigieg did to me he did along the lines of what you were saying and that he raised the level of the conversation. Instead of turning around and calling the president’s name and labeling him, he gave a more intelligent and thoughtful response. He wasn’t going down that, “I have a plan for this and that, so we don’t care what the president says.”



That’s important because the shame cycle is an emotional gerbil wheel. What Mayor Pete Buttigieg did was he was a person that stood for something that was more important than the label that was being assigned to him. He stepped into the label, dismantled it, backed off and provided an adult response. The shame cycle is a very tragic language strategy you can use on kids, but you will pay for it later. If you use a shame cycle on a kid, they will let you have it. It’s easier to assign fault when you’re in a blaming and shaming perspective to others. You don’t have to do any self-accountability. That is unsettling. Regrettably messaging and America is designed to impact the audience this way.

It’s only to confirm the belief that my identity is better than another person’s identity, resulting in an emotional response. I feel better about being on this team than the negative message that was painted on the other team. Forget about truth. I don’t want to be known as being on that team. I don’t want to play on that team. I want to play on this other simpler team. It looks simpler but it’s more costly. It’s a little unsettling even to believe that we could get trapped this way. Tom, let’s take this example of Donald Trump and Mayor Pete Buttigieg out for a spin on the shame cycle.

We could pull the curtain back because a lot of this thing about purchasing truth is you’ve got to pay attention to how something is being messaged. We have a thing called the shame cycle. There are four words. The first word is control. A controlling sentence or phrase is usually where a label comes in or a diagnosis. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, he makes fun of his last name. What do they call him? He’s trying to minimalize or disrespect another human being’s name. My name is better than his name, Donald Trump. He’s trying to do that. What that does, that’s called a controlling narrative.

He is trying to make it sound like a stutter or you’re going to sound silly when you say his name. You remember when he made fun of that New York Times columnist who was handicapped and had a speech impairment. Donald Trump is very comfortable belittling people for things like that.

He’s very comfortable in the control position. What winds up happening, he’s familiar with pulling the levers. He doesn’t know how he doesn’t know the cost. He knows he gets the rewards from it. He doesn’t know what the long-term cost is that people are taking his name off of his buildings. I saw a person pulling Donald Trump’s name off of one of his resorts. They were taking a crowbar to his name.

Do you mean like vandalism?

No, not vandalism.

They had the right to do it. They didn’t want to be associated with his name?

They had the right to do it. They say, “No one’s coming to our resort hotel on a beach.” It was one in Miami because I had driven by it while I was down there. I was like, “That’s the one in Miami, isn’t it? It is.” They were prying the name Donald Trump off of Ocean Resort in Miami. All of a sudden, it’s like, “What’s going on there?” What happens is as soon as somebody says a control narrative, there is an arrow coming down to the bottom word called release. The release is this person is on a place of helplessness because they can’t do anything with the label I called them. It’s like, “How is Mayor Pete Buttigieg going to argue with Alfred E. Neuman?” The only way to do it is to step into it, “I’m glad Donald Trump is becoming more literal. He’s reading a magazine now. He can have fun with this right now. He can go like, ‘Did you hear that?’ It’s great that he’s reading again. What magazine again? Maybe he could bring some of those ideas into government.” He could push into it and dissolve the same shame cycle.

I thought it was brilliant.

It's easier to assign fault when you're in a blaming and shaming perspective to others. You don't have to do any self-accountability.

CLICK TO TWEET

Hillary Clinton could have done the same thing, “Crooked Hillary Clinton, thank you so much for that wonderful label. Let’s go ahead and see about that label as crooked Hillary Clinton. I could bend in a crooked way. I could bend my fingers and they could look crooked. I’m not sure.” Notice how minimalizing the label. I’m changing the proportion of the label because she didn’t reduce the proportionality of her emails and what was in it. I hope they find the 3,000 missing emails. When a person tries to explain against the controlling narrative, it gives the power back to the person. The person then is stuck in a narrative between control and release. You cannot win in that space.



It’s exhausting. It’s draining. It causes polarization. That’s what the shame cycle does. The word submit is there and the word is a rebel against there. All of a sudden, I’ve got to submit for a second. I’ve got to rebel or fight against it. Mayor Pete Buttigieg did not fight the label. He observed the label, stepped into the label, made the proportion of the labels smaller and turn the label back into an advantage. “Donald Trump is learning how to read. I’m glad his literal discourse is getting better. I’m glad we’re upping our conversation.” He’s not getting sucked into the vortex of a thing called a shame experience or a shame narrative.

When a person has done a lot of terrible things, when a family has done a lot of terrible things, there is this circling around the shaming experience of the terrible thing that a person has done or even the trauma that person went through. What happens is that this vortex around shame takes place. There’s a control sentence. There’s a rebellion sentence. There is a release sentence. There’s a submit sentence. What happens is with what happened to every Republican that went up against Donald Trump, he took him in here and they had no languaging skills to get out.

Even though a lot of them tremendously more experienced than Donald Trump at governing, at politics, and all these things. They allowed a newbie to come in here. It’s like they got flushed. I see this as a swirl in the toilet, you just get flushed.

The language and the languaging structure is that we can watch this in all levels of our society, control, rebellion, release and submit. Let’s do some visual examples and some verbal examples. Let’s take it something easy. Let’s take something like an addiction.

Addiction is hard. Addiction and the shame cycle play off of each other. The language and the chemical work against the individual because the person in its emotional state doesn’t know how to deal with their own thoughts. Shame regarding language and thoughts or events is something that is, I don’t know how to talk about this difficult thing that happened to me and I don’t know how to deal with proportionalizing it. It doesn’t.

I don’t know how to let it go. My body wants to keep amplifying it and that’s what the shame cycle does. Let’s use somebody that is drinking more alcohol than their body would like. In their first controlling sentence off of getting sober, they might say, “I will never do that again. I promise.” That is a controlling sentence. If the person uses never or always should or shouldn’t, can’t, they are stuck in a controlling narrative. Eventually what’s going to happen is that they’ll say the next sentence, “Just this once.”

They’re rebelling against their own sentence because they want access to choice. Once they do that, it drives them around past the “just this once” to, “How could I have?” because now they’re waking up the next day with a hangover and how could I have. The loved one that is looking at them going like, “What’s wrong with you?” That’s a controlling sentence. Notice that what’s wrong with you and how could I have are opposite each other. The news media and Donald Trump are stuck in a shame cycle and they don’t know it. They don’t because of the label, “Donald Trump is a narcissist.” I inserted that’s a submit sentence or, “I’m an alcoholic.”

If somebody says, “I’m sorry,” when somebody apologizes, a little bit of them is taking a shame for the bad thing that they did. That’s problematic because as soon as someone says, “I’m sorry,” they then will have to say, “I’ll never do that again.” We’re stuck in the cycle all over again, “I’ll never do that again. I promise. I can handle this. It’s a wedding. I could have a little champagne. I don’t want to be left out.” All of those are rebellion sentences. “It’s my own life, whatever.” Those are all releasing sentences that give permission for the person to do a bad thing as something that’s against their interest. They get to get the shame on the back end, “What’s wrong with me or I have no discipline.” What do you catch them with from this? Can you see immediately we’re exhausted already?

It seems like it is a never-ending cycle. If you don’t know what to say or how to handle it, you’re stuck. Let’s talk about it. I want to come back to the news media because it’s important to eliminate that a little bit. When Mayor Pete Buttigieg said to Jimmy Fallon, “We want to raise the discourse of our conversation in this country. I’m glad that the president picked literary reference because that’s a step in the right direction.” Where did his path on this chart go? Did he move away from it entirely?

Yes, he moved away from the chart and he’s half-a-step back from the chart. Observe the strategy and language and reframed the controlling narrative that the label because it would’ve been so easy. He would have been in a mudslinging match with. It wasn’t, “I’m not that guy. The things I’m saying are not cartoonish. I’m not this.”

If he said, “That shows how a child is the president is because he can’t have a real conversation about the issues.”

That’s a blame narrative and blame is another floating piece of stuff inside this toilet. Guilt and blame are all circling around shame. They’re floating pieces of toilet paper. You’ve got to observe it. It’s like, “I’m not getting in there.” I’m going to go like, “Somebody could get stuck in that swirl, but I’m not going to get stuck.”



You can call it the toilet. You could call it the gutter. He stayed out of what I think metaphorically a lot of people think is the gutter.

When Donald Trump repeats the same label, Donald Trump looks like the guy in there with no literary consciousness. Pete Buttigieg can stay with literary metaphors, “I’m glad he’s reading. I’m glad he’s using that magazine as a point of reference. Maybe you can find a policy or two in there.” He stayed in the observation space. Humor is an important spotlight regarding shame because there’s a lot of pain that is being created inside this presidency. Even the people that are voting for him don’t know the level of pain that’s coming in their direction over the next four years that has to be cleaned up. It’s hijacking it in such a way to meet the needs of the few ahead of the needs of the many. That’s what’s going on. That’s what the shame cycle does. It provides cover for clever strategists and linguists to get over this.

How does the news media get stuck in this cycle and they flush themselves probably a lot? How can they break out of it? Can we think of an example to share about that?

There’s years’ worth of examples of how they’re getting stuck in there because they get stuck trying to use facts to combat shame. You cannot use facts to combat shame. Even if the facts are on your side. Even if they’re monumental, facts have no ability to stand up to shaming narrative. The only thing that you can use it as a narrative of observation coupled with a language of compassionate for the person that’s using the shame. If Rudy Giuliani gets on, “Mr. Mayor, you’re having some thoughts that going to Ukraine would be a good idea for Americans to start depending on other foreign agencies rather than our own. Is that what you’re recommending?”

That is putting a spotlight on his narrative. It sounds like you’re encouraging Americans to go outside to other foreign sources because you would like us not to trust the agencies that are with us. “Is that what you’d like us not to do?” I’m taking and looking at that narrative and not letting it hijack it. “You would like us to look at it in that? You have some thoughts about Joe Biden and his son and oil, and you’re lucky to start a messaging about some negative elements.” I feel curious. “Would you be willing to disclose the factor of the resource so that we can help support you with the fact of the resource that you have in your hand?”

He never would do that. Many people have said this.

“You would like us to trust word of mouth. Is that what you would like us to trust? In evidence, what we’d like to do is have something hard because the news media would like to cover facts. We don’t want to be called fake news anymore. We would like to work off the evidence that you have so we can help promote your idea.” The shaming narrative is they’re taking and looking to proportionalize an illusion and make the illusion bigger. There’s something wrong with it. Even Joe Biden didn’t step into Creepy Joe well enough. His handlers didn’t help him with his language.

It’s Creepy Joe and now Sleepy Joe, isn’t that the other one?

You got to step into that. “It sounds like that he is requesting that I asked permission from women before I touch them, kiss them and go in them. Is that what he was requesting? The president has some great experiences and maybe he can teach me a thing or two about how to best treat women.” Shame doesn’t do very well when you shut a spotlight on it. It doesn’t do very well when you accurately proportionalize it. There are people that do very terrible things, but if we’re getting hijacked by identity or good versus bad or one party versus another party or government bad, good, we are not in alignment with the perspective. Other countries that have more suppression of their people get away with this all the time because they control the media messages.

Certainly, that’s what Donald Trump is trying to do is control the media message. He does a pretty good job of it, even though he doesn’t own the media. Let’s take one more little example, for instance, Donald Trump keeps claiming The Mueller Report was that complete and total exoneration, no collusion, no obstruction. The media keeps saying, “No, it wasn’t a complete exoneration. There is evidence of obstruction.” They’re arguing it on the facts.

Every tweet has a controlling narrative, has a rebelling narrative, has a submitting a narrative.

CLICK TO TWEET

They are and they’re getting their butt whip is what they’re doing.



What should a good media anchor say? What should the media do that would be more effective?

The president is mentioning that there is no collusion. He’s also mentioning that collusion is a big deal. He’s also mentioning that there was some minimal amount of obstruction. Here’s the turn. It’s very frustrating and disheartening that the president would promote something that’s not in alignment with truth. The truth is that if this was in front of a judge, regrettably a judge would not agree with what the president is saying. Notice how vulnerability and humility came in with my narrative. It’s like he’s trying to use a control thing in order to get us or the truth-tellers to bite on the bait in the water, “The facts are here.” No, the facts never stand up to shame because the person is so entrenched in protecting their legacy, their identity. When President Ronald Reagan and his administration were caught in the Iran-Contra thing. The weapons that were sold to rebels and how the funds were diverted and that was caught. He went into a place and took one for the team by releasing and say, “I didn’t know anything about it.”

Going into a submit position saying, “People didn’t tell me about this. They say it’s true, but it’s hard to believe that’s the way this thing happened under my watch.” He didn’t say it that way. What happened is he took on the shame to put a cover for his own identity and his own respect. These other people were bad. Oliver North and all the different other people that got caught got convicted and went to jail. They now have to pay for that by going to jail. Those people are going to have to fall on the sword too. Oliver North takes one for the team. Ronald Reagan takes one for the Republican team because that’s what he did.

They literally covered the shame cycle and the rest of America felt a little bit better because they took one for the team. There were no reparations to all the people that got killed because of what they did as well as what needed to be done from a governmental standpoint to have the oversight that was necessary. Regulations are to catch people from rebelling. Another word root for rebellion is called crook or I’m going to steal something, whereas I’m going to meet my need for choice at the other people’s expense. Authoritarians need this. They use the shame cycle all the time. All you got to do is listen to it.

There’s always some enemy that was better than that needed to be suppressed because we want to choose to do whatever we want to do for our benefit at the expense of others. The shame cycle is very dangerous. You could see how blame and guilt get mixed into this. The blame is like a control narrative. The guilt is, “How could you mean I’m guilty? I’m not guilty of this.” That’s a release narrative, “I am guilty. I have to submit to that.” The counter-intuitive part of it, the thing that’s opposite of that is very important to talk about.

What’s counterintuitive is that if you are trying to battle this cycle, you can’t come out and present the facts. I’ve seen Bill Maher a number of times in his show over the years when he’s frustrated with what somebody on the panel is saying and he says, “We have these things called facts.” He’s trying to say it louder and emphasize it so people will care, but they don’t. That’s the most effective way.

It isn’t. Even though he’s right, it’s not helpful to point it out. What blows up shame and blows up their narrative is calling them on it when they do it. For example, if a panelist says the sentence which has happened multiple times on his show. No collusion, some obstruction. The person needs to be called out when they do that. It might sound like this, “I appreciate what you’re trying to do is to protect the president at this time. It sounds like you want to protect him by saying no collusion and no obstruction. What truth looks like to me is that this is an obstruction piece and here’s the one piece.”

You land whatever piece of obstruction. If this happens, this happens. That shaming thing that they did called propaganda, you get to look at. The shame is an empty promise of progress. “I’ll never drink again, I promise,” is an empty narrative towards progress because as soon as someone apologizes, there’s a controlling sentence that’s coming next. You need to turn down and reframe an apology to a disappointment, a mistake so that shame doesn’t suck you into the narrative that this person has enlisted you to participate in. They’re hijacked.

They’re pulling the levers on you. It’s the wizard all over again.

This is significant. Regrettably, the media doesn’t have a handle on this very well. They are trying to fight shame with truth and it doesn’t work that well. You can fight it by shining a light on it. You can fight it by putting it in proportion. The president would like us to believe this. At the same time, the truth that he’s trying to promote is not in alignment with the truth that Mueller showed. It’s like the truth is not in alignment. The president is doing his best to communicate his version of the truth. It’s not in alignment with the scope and the extent of how this has shown up. It’s difficult because the proportionality and the repetition that it takes to get somebody in a country on the shame cycle come tweet after tweet. Every tweet has a controlling narrative, has a rebelling narrative, has a submitting narrative. Somebody else has to submit, a releasing narrative. If you watch multiple tweets, all of them are there.

We’re not sure. We’ll have to see if the Dems will let us do it. It’s like, “Letting us do what? Steal, lie, rebel against police officers?” It’s a different time.

This has been so limiting though. Thank you, Bill. That helped me understand a lot more about this shame, blame, and guilt cycles and how truth gets hijacked. That helps me understand a lot better on how Donald Trump has succeeded here.



The main thing, Tom, and we’ll get into this next time is to get into a place where we can look at this from both, to stop mine reading and to also to move into a place of emotional sobriety. Those are the two next pieces of truth. You can imagine what it would be like is to have an emotionally sober response to a shame cycle narrative. You don’t want to take and fight the battle in this way. You want to fight the battle in a way that is going to help move the narrative in a healthy way. Mayor Pete Buttigieg gave an emotionally sober response to being called Alfred E. Neuman. It seems like he’s got a label. He’s trying to control a little bit here. I’m glad that he’s reading some literature.

It was brilliant. He didn’t take the bait. It’s what he didn’t do.

That’s an emotionally sober response. That’s the next thing we’ll get into is how do you have a sober emotional response and stare the shame cycle down.

Thanks, Bill. I look forward to that.

Me too. Thanks, Tom. Talk to you soon.