The Hidden Psychology Behind Relationships, Trauma & Self-Awareness | Dr. Aaron Balick & Shekhar Natarajan

Summary

Tomorrow, Today – Episode Summary

Episode: "The Hidden Psychology Behind Relationships, Trauma & Self-Awareness"

Host: Shekhar Natarajan
Guest: Dr. Aaron Balick (Depth Psychologist, Speaker, Therapist)
Date: June 18, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode explores the deep, often hidden psychological forces that shape our relationships, reactions, traumas, and sense of self. Blending personal stories with rich theory, Shekhar Natarajan and Dr. Aaron Balick dive into the unconscious mind, formative experiences, and how technology—from AI to social media—complicates and sometimes warps our capacity for self-awareness and genuine connection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Foundations of Depth Psychology

• Definition & Contrast with CBT:
  Dr. Balick defines depth psychology as the field concerned with probing the unconscious—the unseen motivators beneath our conscious thoughts and behaviors. Compared to CBT, which focuses on measurable outcomes (“walk in anxious, walk out less so”), depth psychology explores the roots and meaning of those feelings (02:22).
• The Unconscious Mind:
  Freud’s aphorism—“the ego is not the master of its own house”—captures the ego’s inability to control all that happens internally (00:00, 02:22, 25:56). Depth psychologists are “interested in inferring from the surface what's going on underneath the surface.”

2. Personal Origins and Diversity

• Dr. Balick’s Upbringing:
  Raised in Delaware during school integration, Aaron shares how early exposure to diversity shaped his worldview (07:00–12:44).
  “My socially engineered childhood, I think, gave me a sense of being around difference that a lot of people haven’t had.” (09:08)
• The Value of Diverse Childhoods:
  Shekhar parallels with his own “busing” experience at Walmart, illustrating social “infiltration” between groups and the feeling of not belonging fully to either—a tension central to personal formation and adult empathy (14:00, 15:51).

3. Formative Experiences & Trauma

• Nature and Nurture:
  How genetic predispositions and childhood environments interact is unpredictable—similarly raised twins can diverge widely.
  “You can’t tell by a given environment how someone’s going to interpret that environment... That’s why depth psychology is so interesting, but so frustrating.” (18:12)
• Personal and Family Trauma:
  Shekhar opens up about family bipolarity, emotional volatility in his upbringing, and the ambiguous role of nurture versus inborn disposition (21:29–23:14).
• Superior vs. Inferior Functioning (Jung):
  Superior functioning (natural talents) can also be a curse—they bring power, but also imbalance and risk (“double-edged sword”).
  “If that's your only tool, ...you're going to end up lopsided and it's going to cost you after a while.” (24:48)

4. Identity, Shame, and Self-Acceptance

• Sexual Identity and Escape:
  Dr. Balick recounts moving far from home as a gay man to individuate and escape local taboos, linking identity struggles to the search for authenticity (26:38–34:43).
• Liberation’s Effect on the Subconscious:
  “When you're pre-liberation and you're in fear … the idea of liberation is inimical to you... On the other side of it, it's like, oh yeah, okay. So you can go through and out.” (34:48)
• Identity & Professional Empathy:
  Personal struggles—whether with sexuality or loss—seed the curiosity and capacity for empathy vital in psychoanalytic work (32:25).

5. The Power (and Peril) of Early Conditioning

• Unconscious Programming:
  Much of our behavioral “software” is laid down early and unconsciously governs adult decisions—unless we become aware of it (19:35–20:10).
  “Most people are unconscious of the early programming... You become conscious of it, it gives you greater choice. You can't just rewrite it... but it does give you a lot more choice.”
• Escape Velocity & Hidden Fears:
  Shekhar shares deep-seated anxieties from striving to “escape” his origins—performance pressure, fear of failure (38:44–44:43).
  • Notable: “I got to excel in my education because education is the only way I get the escape velocity in my life.” (00:08, 39:20)

6. Relationships: Recognition, Validation, and Patterns

• Authentic Recognition vs. Validation:
  Dr. Balick draws a critical distinction:

  • Recognition: “I see you fully, flaws and all.”
  • Validation: “Job well done.”
    Validation (especially via social media) “took over recognition,” leading to emotional junk food instead of true nourishment (54:55).
  • Notable: “You start seeking more and more validation, and you're getting less and less recognition. So it's more and more like junk food, and less and less like a nutritional meal.” (43:55, 55:06)

• Conflict & Boundaries in Intimate Relationships:

  • The “default mechanism” is to unconsciously recreate parental dynamics—the old “you want to marry your mother/father” from Freud gets reinterpreted as “you create your mother/father” (19:19, 59:35).
  • Important: Tolerating the full reality of your partner (good and bad) is “the nourishing part of a relationship.”
  • “It's all right to drive you nuts. ...It's a refusal to see it that's damaging.” (54:27)

• Aging Relationships & Rupture-Repair:
  Over time, the pattern of rupture and repair—conflict followed by reconciliation—either builds resilience or erodes the bond (61:57–62:38).

7. Projection, Splitting & Societal Dynamics

• Reaction Formation & Societal Projection:
  Freud’s "reaction formation": vehement opposition to a trait is often the sign of repressed identification with it (77:12).
  Example: Homophobic men exhibiting same-sex arousal (78:07).
• Splitting, Populism, and In/Out-Groups:
  Societies, like individuals, split the world into “good us/bad them,” often for ease of mind but at high social cost:
  “The sad part ...it's an easier solution for the mind.” (80:14–81:26)
• Nationhood as Identity Splitting:
  National and tribal divides often mask deep individual and group insecurities (85:15–86:05). Shekhar predicts:
  “I firmly believe that we are staring at some big breakout of war and the emergence is happening right now.” (87:51)

8. Technology, AI, and Modern Mind

• Therapy vs. Tech:
  • AI and LLMs (Large Language Models) can impersonate empathy, but lack real care; they risk becoming “psychological traps” (104:47, 108:07).
• Social Media’s Effects:
  • Social apps amplify validation-seeking, foster shallow connections, encourage unhealthy emotional habits (54:55, 75:06).
  • “Bad,” says Dr. Balick on social media’s overall effect (108:00).
• Can AI Replace Therapy?
  • “At the moment, care. And I think that's an important one.” (110:32)
  • “If there's sentience and it cares, then I'm willing to have a conversation that it could do really good therapy.” (110:37)
  • But sheer experience isn’t enough: “You don't need to have cancer to be a cancer doctor is what you're saying?” (117:15)

9. Organizational Psychology

• All Organizations Are Pathological:
  • “There’s just going to be pathology there because it’s complex. ...You get all the people’s repeated patterns…” (92:06)
• Communication Challenges:
  • “The intended communication is not necessarily the received communication.” (96:13)
• Emotionally Intelligent Organizations:
  • Leaders must read rooms, engage emotional intelligence, and foster boundaries and repair like in families or therapy (97:32–99:10).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Unconscious:
  “Freud very famously said, the ego is not the master of its own house.” – Dr. Balick [00:00, 02:22]
• On Diversity's Impact:
  “My socially engineered childhood... gave me a sense of being around difference that a lot of people hadn’t had.” – Dr. Balick [09:08]
• On Authentic Recognition:
  “The most important thing, psychologically and emotionally, I believe, is authentic recognition from one human being to another.” – Dr. Balick [52:55]
• On Validation via Technology:
  “You start seeking more and more validation, and you're getting less and less recognition. So it's more and more like junk food, and less and less like a nutritional meal...” – Dr. Balick [43:55, 55:06]
• On Projection & Social Issues:
  “There's something about their own desire for men that was not good, that they couldn't tolerate that... they projected on gay men.” – Dr. Balick [78:07]

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Important Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 00:00–05:25 – Freud, Depth Psychology, and the Unconscious
• 07:00–12:44 – Dr. Balick’s Childhood and the Impact of Diversity
• 18:12–20:10 – How Environment and DNA Shape Us
• 21:29–23:14 – Family Trauma & Formation of Personality
• 34:48–36:04 – Liberation, Shame, and Subconscious Change
• 38:44–44:43 – Shekhar’s Relationship with Performance Anxiety
• 52:55–55:06 – Validation, Recognition & Technology
• 59:35–62:38 – Relationship Patterns, Rupture & Repair
• 77:12–78:07 – Projection/Reaction Formation
• 92:06–99:10 – Organization as Pathological Entities
• 104:47–108:01 – Can AI Replace Therapy? Rapid-Fire Q&A about Technology & Psychology

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Tone & Language

The tone is intelligent, introspective, sometimes playful and always honest. Personal storytelling mixes with sharp theoretical insight. Both host and guest are candid about their own “unconscious drivers” and humble about the limits of self-knowledge—mirroring the complexities they discuss.

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Conclusion

Big Takeaway:
Understanding ourselves and others demands honest confrontation with our unconscious programming—the old traumas, desires, and patterns we don’t want to admit. Relationships (romantic, familial, social) provide the battleground and the laboratory. Technology amplifies risk and reward: it can connect or alienate, validate or distort, but never quite replace the human need for authentic recognition.

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Perfect for listeners seeking insight on:

• Relationships & Marriage
• Childhood Trauma
• Identity Formation
• Depth Psychology & Psychoanalysis
• The Impact of Technology/AI on Mental Health
• Organizational Culture
• How to think about change and self-awareness in a complex world

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“People are way more similar to each other than they would ever imagine. ...People really want to be loved. They want to be recognized for who they are.”
– Dr. Aaron Balick [115:01]

Transcript

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Freud very famously said, you know, the ego is not the master of its own house.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I got to excel in my education because education is the only way I get the escape velocity in my life.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Freud says, basically, you want to marry your mother, and it's not that way. You actually, you kind of create your mother or you create your father. You create parental dynamics in each other.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

As though my life depended on it. And, like, you know, if I don't do it, like, I'm gonna get screwed.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

You start seeking more and more validation, and you're getting less and less recognition. So it's more and more like junk food, and less and less like a nutritional me.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Welcome to another episode of Tomorrow Today with Shekhar Natarajan. It's my incredible Honor to have Dr. Aaron Balik. He's a depth psychologist, which is super interesting as a term. Like, I would like to unpack that for us. Speaker, columnist, journalist. Are you a journalist?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Not quite.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I would gq, write for gq, I guess. Right?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And he's also basically a psychotherapist.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right. So it's my incredible honor to have you on the show, sir, and, like, you know, I would love to. For the listeners to kind of, like, understand what depth psychology really means. How do you explain it, and what are the implications to people in general, society in general? How do you kind of decipher all of this, your life journey and whatever you want to talk about? Because this is your show. This is your show, and, like, I'm here to basically just, you know, ask a few dumb questions here and there, but, like, you know, largely guided by you.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay. Wow. So the one thing about depth psychology is we're terribly bad at marketing ourselves. That goes all the way back to Freud. You ask, what is psychoanalysis? And it's like, well, let me. Let's start maybe three hours later, you'll get a sense. So the very brief definition is that depth psychology is inclusive of all the psychoanalytic theories that really prize unconscious process. So today, because we're very much into our outcome measures and things that we can see numerically, things that we can prove, we really like cbt, because you can say I walk into a session with an anxiety level of seven, and I walk out of the session with an anxiety level of three. So I'm better. With depth psychology, we're looking at what are the underlying processes that I'm not aware of? What might be informing that anxiety? What is the meaning of that anxiety? Is that anxiety a symptom, a sign of something that needs to be addressed. The solution may not be about alleviating the symptom, but understanding why it's arising and what you want to do about that. And a lot of that stuff is unconscious. So Freud very famously said, the ego is not the master of its own house. The ego is a part of consciousness that has awareness of its internal world and the external world. Lots of unknowns in the external world, but also loads of unknowns in the internal world. In depth psychology is interested in inferring from the surface what's going on underneath the surface.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Wow. How do you do that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It's difficult, right? And it's difficult.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It sounds like the modern day LLM. I don't know how the hell it works.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. But I think with the modern day LLM, I was thinking about this. It's, it's really interesting because LLMs take you at face value. They're not making inferences so much. They may be able to be programmed to. But if you're speaking. So if someone is speaking to me, a patient is speaking to me, they might say, I really love my mother. An LLM's going to hear, I really love my mother. I'm going to hear you say, you really love your mother. Those are the words. But there was something about your voice that felt like almost there was an aggression and your face was quite stolid in that moment. I'm curious about what's going on inside you when you say I really love my mother. Because it's much more than that.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So like, so you're trying to find for like intent and deception and the self even, Right? Yeah, yeah, got it, got it, got it, got it. So basically it's the, it's kind of the unpacking of, like, the things that are not so obvious.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. I mean, the famous example is the Freudian slip, right? You. You accidentally say something when you mean your mother is the joke when you mean another. But that the slip reveals the unconscious intention that the conscious mind is trying to keep out of awareness. Same with dreams. Not all dreams, not all of us work with dreams in the same way anymore. But because that filter drops down, dreams can tell you stuff about your unconscious that your conscious mind is less aware of.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Well, this is going to be a fascinating discussion. So I, I'm like, I'm already, like, excited to talk to you.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Except that people are usually disinterested.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I know this is gonna be so much interesting. So there's gonna be so much drama about this one. Like in the sense, like, like, you know, unpacking the brain. So tell me a little bit about, like, your upbringing. Like, you know, like, your. Like, how did, like, a guy from America start teaching people psychology here in London? Like, how did that even happen? How did you show up here in the first place?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I came as an exchange student in my senior year.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Where are you from in the United States?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So I'm from the east, from Delaware. The states originally. I went to the University of Colorado in Boulder. Oh, yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Great one.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Wonderful.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I love Jim Collins. Jim Collins.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I don't know Jim Collins.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Jim Collins is basically, like, the famous guy who wrote, like, you know, Built to Last.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay. Yeah, that was. I mean, I was a biology major to start with, and I turned into a film major, and I fell into the.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That's one of the most famous books. Business books out there.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I know. Built to Last now. Yeah. But business was the furthest thing from my mind when I was in Boulder. There were lots of other things on my mind that were not particularly educationally oriented when I was in Boulder.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I changed my major three times, ended up pre med, moving to English through film. So it took me a while. It wasn't Until I was 25, anyway, I came here. I came to England as an exchange student.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So you were. You. You're born in Delaware.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Born in Delaware.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And so, like, your parents, your siblings.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Your family.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So tell me you're doing my job.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I'm psychoanalyzing you, brother.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. Wow. Okay. I. I always think of. I mean, it's so long ago. I think of my Delaware life as a very norm core life. Like, I. I think.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What does that mean?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So, like, think of the film Edward Scissorhands, where all of these houses are exactly the same, but slightly different colors, and all the cars come out of the driveway at the same time. It was just a very. In some ways, very protected. But in other ways, kind of being on the east coast in America during the time of school busing was actually, like, really intercultural, like the experience that I had there in the schools. You know, most of the white people lived out in the suburbs. Most of the black people lived in the cities. But people were bused back and forth to different schools. So we were socially engineered to be mixed up. And this was really, really influential for me, and especially when I encounter people who didn't have that experience growing up. So in a way, I'm growing up in this.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That's Delaware. That's supposed to be, like, above the Mason Dixon line.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That's right. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It was like, there's no separation and segregation.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. So Delaware, if I'm right, people will fact check me. But the northern county was in the northern states, and the southern two were in the southern states, I believe. Right. So there's a long history of that.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So separation was a thing. Segregation.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, when was this learned about? So this would. This would be the 79 or 80. So I remember going. I remember the strikes when I was in elementary school where a lot of the people from the middle class where I was coming from were pulling their children out of schools because they were bringing in the school integration. It wasn't segregated like it was in the south, but it was economically segregated. So it was essentially segregated just by where you lived. If you were near a school, that's what it would look like.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why? Was it traumatic for you?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Oh, no, it wasn't traumatic for me. I remember the strikes that happened when lots of people mostly pulled their white kids out of those schools. Schools did not think we'd be talking about this. My parents didn't do that. So I. I was in this busing thing. So I grew up.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So you would go in a white bus?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I would go. It was a yellow bus. It was a yellow bus, mostly full of white kids going into the city. Right. Where mostly black people lived. And then. And then for like middle junior high school, the buses brought the black kids to the white neighborhoods to go to their schools. And my first best friend, who was called Jesse Brooks, I used to come home and talk to my mother all about, you know, Jesse this, Jesse that. I brought him home. He was a little black boy. My mother told me years later she was so surprised that this had happened because her generation, that would never, never happened. And lots of people didn't have that experience because their parents were worried about what the school situation was going to be like. They pulled their kids out. And it's funny, I don't think about social engineering very much, but my socially engineered childhood, I think, gave me a sense of being around difference that a lot of people haven't had. I mean, when I come to England as well, it says you don't really get that outside the big cities as well. Again, didn't think I'd be talking about this, but growing up in the suburbs, Edward Scissorhands, having a very different school experience, being exposed to people of different racial, ethnic backgrounds, different economic backgrounds, state school.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So there was no co mingling. Was there commingling in the schools?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it's all co mingling. That's the whole point.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But they were bussing it from different place of the.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

They were busing to make commingling. Right. They were busing to destroy the kind of organic segregation that had happened because of economics. Right. You open a school in the suburbs, it's mostly going to be white kids. You open a school in the city, it's mostly black kids. You bring in busing, you make sure it's all mixed, no matter where the school is. That was the intention. Got it, yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And do you think it's a good idea, bad idea?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think it was a very good idea. For me. There was a lot of. I don't remember the resistance. For me, I was just a kid going to school, and that's what school looked like. So when I went to school, there were black and white kids. There I am growing up in this Edward Scissorhands neighborhood, middle class, pretty white. They bring in busing, which is outside of my consciousness at the time, because I'm just a kid who's going to school. I remember that there was a teacher strike. There were issues going on. I know that lots of my kids were pulled out of the public schools at that stage, and I wasn't. And the next year, I go to a bus stop in my neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands land, and I go on a yellow school bus, and I go into the middle of the town where you get into the school, and it's a big mix of black kids, white kids, Latino kids, some Indian kids, not a lot, but all around. Like, it didn't look like my neighborhood, but that was my first social environment growing up outside of my neighborhood. So it was also quite natural to me. So I feel like this, and I think the intention was social engineering. Like I was saying, it's. There was no official segregation where I was. We were too far north for that. But wherever you put a school, you'd have a district around it, and it would pretty much naturally shift out. As to different economic groups, different ethnicities going to different schools. My school did not look like that. And like I said, I haven't spoken about this or thought about this in many, many years. But I think it was a really profound growing up experience for me because that's just what school looked like. That's what other people looked like. That's where other people's backgrounds were. You would make friends, you'd go to people's houses that were different from yours, different sizes from yours, eating different foods than yours. And that's just what it was like. And I know many, many people did not have that experience from that young age. And they carry around a greater discomfort, I think, with difference in being. With difference.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Exactly. So the reason why I want to kept like pushing you back to that point in life is because you don't appreciate diversity till you experience one. Right? And it's always that, like, you know, we always live in a bubble, a social bubble that we create for ourselves and we imagine that is the world that is actually the truth. Right.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

And particularly when you're young.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right, Particularly when you're young. And you carry this. If it's not conditioned, right. You carry that memory and then like, you know, you're living in that bubble. So the information that is fed to you in that bubble actually now kind of reverberates in a way that like, you know, again, unconsciously keeps playing on those biases.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The reason why I bring that, like, you know, point is, it was pretty interesting. You know, you said like your friend was Jackie.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Jesse.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Jesse, yeah. So I used to call myself Jackie Robinson when I was in Walmart. Okay. It was like a funny comment. Supposed to be. So the reason why I said that, like I used to call myself that

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

is

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I used to be. I used to experience busing similar. Oh, yeah, yes, in Walmart. It's a great company, by the way, but the busing experience was for a different reason. And I, I'll kind of get into it. So the Walmart has like two businesses, as you probably know. One is the digital business, one is the. The physical store business, and then it has other business, healthcare, all that stuff. But these are the two primary ways you could shop into the company, right? Like, you know, you could get into the company to access services and products. And all of San Francisco guys were all these techies and they were building the digital company. All the guys in Bentonville, and they grew up in Bentonville. They are all the store guys, right? And so over the. The supply chains and the logistics people, they started like putting the supply chain guys into the San Francisco office. Because supply chain is a shared service. You know, when you're moving a truck, you know, it doesn't matter if you're moving it for digital product or physical products. You know, it's just like if it's going to a store, if it's going to a home, it doesn't matter, it's going to a dc, right? So they shared that infrastructure. So we were, some of, some of us were part of the Bentonville, like, way of thinking, infiltrated into the Walmart digital business. Now the digital guys used to think these guys are all like moles sitting in the San Francisco office. And because you're sitting in the San Francisco office, the store guys or the Bentonville guys used to think those guys are like yahoos sitting in. Right. San Francisco.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right. And so. And so my chief administrative officer, bless his heart, his name is like, Roland Ford. He once said, like, you know, so how do you feel, Shekhar? I said, I feel like Jackie Robinson. I'm going back and forth. I don't belong there and I don't belong here. So who do I belong to? And so that sense of belonging is so critical in the formative stages in life.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. You know, you're not questioning. It's not baked in yet, which is what a lot of people are afraid of. Right. What the agenda is in these situations. But to be an adult, you have to relearn something. To be a kid exposed to stuff, you don't have to learn that stuff at all because it kind of comes. You learn something else. Right? Yeah. And I think reverse engineering it, like you guys were. It comes automatically with suspicion. It comes with friction. Right. It comes with. We get the unconscious stuff, you know, unconscious fantasy and projection and all of that kind of thing. So I guess the question is, you know, who's going to start with the values? But you want to start young with them. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And so the role of the formative stages of your life, like, how important is that from depth psychology perspective? So, like, you know, your experience is very unique, and I'm sure, like, you know, that's why it made you, like, metrosexual. Like, you know, you can live here and you can experience, like, London, which is like the hot, like, melting pot of all cultures.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, right.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And you can appreciate it. But if you go back to the formative stages, how much of the formative stages really help you become who you are as a person?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I'm gonna say it depends. Right. Because. Because it's a really complicated equation that happens because we don't really believe in the kind of blank slate in the sense that the environmental factors are really the major thing. So you have character, which is going to be informed by your DNA and how you interpret your environment. And then you have.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Who teaches you that? Who teaches you that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think that comes with the program. I think that that comes with the gene. So I think if you're. To a degree, and I think we don't know exactly how far, but I think

[Shekhar Natarajan]

so. Can we infer that a criminal's boy would be a criminal?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

No. I think so. Here, let me. Let me Try and draw it out in a kind of a metaphor, a really simple metaphor in a parenting situation. Okay. You can have a child who grows up with really violent parents, and their response to having grown up with really violent parents is that they're very afraid of violence or they could become violent. This is going to be the other one. Right. So you can't tell by a given environment how someone's going to interpret that environment, what sense they're going to make of it and how they go into the world. So you can have twins having the same experience. Right. Even the same DNA, they're more likely to perceive it alike than, I think, two separate, who don't share DNA. Yeah, but you can come from an experience and you can say and have trouble for the rest of your life just expressing your anger and expressing boundaries because anger is so distant to you, you don't want to get anywhere near it. Or you could experience that as this is the way the world works. If you're not angry and loud, you don't get what you need and you go into the world and you've got like an antisocial personality disorder and you're just a mean, angry person. And you can't tell by looking at the genetics of this person or the character of this person how they're going to make sense of their early environment come through. Which is why depth psychology is so interesting, but so frustrating. Right. Because it's really, It's a true inquiry. It's not, oh, well, this happened to you. So therefore.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, you cannot deduce that there's no causality here.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

You're like, well, what sense did you make of that at the time? Well, I don't know what sense I made. Well, let's sit with the, like, what is that bringing up for you now? Well, I feel a little bit afraid. Okay, tell me a little bit about that fear. And you're really drawing out so you can kind of get a sense of what that programming is because most people are unconscious of the early programming that was laid down that continues to inform their decisions. You become conscious of it, it gives you greater choice. You can't just rewrite it. Right. But it does give you a lot more choice.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So this topic is so close to me and to my heart in many ways, Dr. Aron, primarily because my, my brother has bipolarity. And I think I. I think I have bipolarity to a certain degree. I don't know. Like, it's, it's not like really as profound as my brother is. And others in the family I. I guess, like, I don't, like, demonstrate any of those characteristics as profound as my brother does, but, like, what we believe to be true, or at least my brother believes to be true, because he's a psychologist. He's cognitive and clinical psychologist. He has a dual doctorate. It's, like, ironical that a guy with bipolarity is the guy who has a psychology degree. Right. The early days when, like, my parents got married, you know, my mother was always. She was very young. She's, like, you know, 17 years old when she got married. And the reason why they got married is because my. My father wanted to take care of three of my aunts, like my mother's cousins, who got orphaned because their father and mother took care of my dad.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So it was kind of like, you know, generationally, we were trying to take care of the family. And so my mother was so young and, like, you know, she would cry and, like, you know, when my brother was pregnant and so on and so forth. It's sort of like, you know, he grew up with this emotion of, like, extreme emotions of happiness and sadness. And happiness and sadness and the volatility that comes with it. And we were, like, in a single room. So we always had that shared experience of staying silent within ourselves, though. We had these extreme emotions. Right. And that became very formative, you know, in our life. And a lot of people misunderstood who he was as a person because, you know, he could. What he would. Was what he was able to do at that time, that no one understood him really well and no one did, is the fact that he would see things that no one can see in those episodes, which was really extraordinary. Like, you know, he could. He could literally solve a math problem in, like, seconds when it is so, so complicated. Or, like, he could basically figure out, like, you know, how the crater of the moon looks like, just imagining it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Wow.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, it's that extreme. Right. And people thought, like, he was, like, crazy. Like, who's this guy, like, you know, talking about the moon? Hasn't even gone to the moon yet. So. So I think, like, that extreme personalities, you know, are formed early. I feel I. I firmly believe in that. And it's sort of like, to your point, is nurtured a little bit by your circumstances and who you live. And it is. It's very difficult to tease it out.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What caused what?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Because I was born to the same parents. My mother was equally turbulent even that time. But I'm, like, less restrained than my brother is.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So my reaction and my. My. My way of processing things was slightly different, though we came from the same DNA.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes, yes. It's different territory when you start talking about things like mood disorders and where they come from, because they do tend to be, they tend to be less environmentally causal, we think. But there is something about anybody's capacity. So Carl Jung, who was fun with Freud for a while until they had their big breakup, he has this really great concept of inferior and superior functioning. So your, your superior functioning is the stuff that you're naturally good at that I would say you're characterologically good at. Your brother's good at using imagination, I guess, about seeing things with his mind's eye. You'd say that that's kind of a superior functioning in him. And then we also all have inferior functioning, which is the stuff that we're just not as good at doing. Like for me, that's numbers. Right. Good with words, bad with numbers. I think about it as superior functioning, as dominant hand functioning and inferior functioning. Is your other hand right? If you're right or left handed trying to write with your left hand? For me, I'll never bring it up to the standard of my right hand, but I can improve it. And Jung's idea was don't lean entirely on your superior functioning. Like bring up your inferior functioning too, because that's how you balance out who you are. But the thing that brought me on to that is when you have a really exceptional superior functioning, it really is a double edged sword.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Because you can imagine the craters on the moon and you can solve math problems in your head, but you can also probably imagine other stuff that's really terrifying.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Hallucination.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. And stuff that can be really overwhelming. People with achievement complexes or people who are kind of more on the conscientious side of things. On the high side, you have obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything has to be ordered. But up to a certain point, it's a really highly adaptive trait in our society to be able to work and concentrate and get stuff done. But if it's your only tool, if that's your superior functioning and you're not developing the inferior ones, you're going to end up lopsided and it's going to, it's going to cost you after a while.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. A lot of people say like, you know, like when they, when they ask. This is a famous question. And like in all interviews in corporate what's your biggest weakness? And your strength is overplayed. It's your weakness.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes, yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right. Like because you obsess so much about your strength, like, you know, that becomes your. The biggest, like, you know, failure point. Right. So. Oh. Like, you know, I'm such a passionate person. I work so hard that I kill myself. Well, is that, like, really a strength or a weakness? I don't know.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Yeah. I think the biggest weakness is the ego. Right. Because the ego is going to take anything and be like, how do I make this about myself?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So great? So great thoughts, like, you know, about, like, the formative stages and how it actually influences people. So now, then you went to Boulder?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, So I knew I needed to get away. From where, Delaware? Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why? Why was there an urge to get out of, like, you know, Delaware and go to Boulder? What did you not like about, like, Delaware that you wanted to go to Boulder?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

You know, it's interesting. I'm not entirely sure I knew consciously, but I knew I wanted.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But I think you're the doctor of the unconscious now.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I am, but I didn't know that. I didn't know then I wanted to.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So how do you interpret it now?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Now I interpret it as I wanted to start over again.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So what did you not like about what you formed that you didn't. You want to run away from it?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I don't think.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I don't think it was running away, but, like, distancing yourself.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

There might have been some. Some running away.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I'm psychoanalyzing you.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

You are. You're doing a very good job of it. Yeah. You know, I'm a gay man.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I wasn't out then. So I think part of that had to do with my sexuality. Like, I. I knew it was coming. I knew I had to deal with it. And I think the further away from home I was to deal with it, the better for me. So I think that was an unconsciousness.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So it was a taboo that you wanted to run away from, like, or perceive. Taboo. Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, it was in those days that we're talking about the late 80s, early 90s. Now. It's also like, you know, even today they talk about it like it depends where you are. And actually, I didn't go to the safest part of the country. I should have gone to San Francisco or something like that if I was looking for that exclusively. I had been to Boulder before. I knew that they had, like, quite a sort of New Age culture going on at the time. People were really interested in. They were all the crystal shops and the shamanism. And I think Ken Wilber was based there at the time. So integral thinking and the naropa institute was there with all of its Buddhist stuff. And I just had, like, I was just beginning to get a taste of this. And in my final years in Delaware, I found this bookstore which was just full of these books about, like, crazy, like, witchcraft, but also, yeah, meditation and Buddhism and trance states. And I just didn't. I never heard that these, you know, we didn't have the Internet. We didn't have YouTube. I'm pulling these books off the shelf and I just thought there's so much, like, there's so much more to the world than Edward Scissorhands where I grew up. And I just think I knew I had to get far away from home to experience that. And it was a great release for me. So I didn't have. I didn't have any. You know, there was no Facebook either. So you really. You're able to just kind of cut those cables and say, I'm going to start. I'm going to start fresh over here. So I think also, you know, putting the psychoanalytic mind to it. You know, I was a pre med student, nice Jewish boy, pre med student at Boulder. I ended up becoming a film student before graduating with an English degree. And that was also part of shedding the expectations I grew up in. Like, of course I was going to be a pre med student, you know, or a law student or something like that, but it wasn't me. So I think on that unconscious level,

[Shekhar Natarajan]

it's really like you're fighting, like, your identity.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. You put yourself in a situation where you can really individuate because you're not gonna be able to individuate or be a lot harder to individuate closer to home.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So you've separated from your family because of this reason or like, you know, like, is your family still an integral?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

No. I mean, yeah, no, they're still an. Yeah, we got through that. It kind of happened that first year I was away. Wasn't secret.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What happened?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, I came out and told them.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, you know, they wouldn't have had to think too hard about it if they wanted to. You know, it's kind of obvious in some ways, but. Yeah, no, it wasn't. It wasn't the horrible nightmare it was, but it was pretty.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why is it a taboo?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Why is it a taboo?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Because, like, you know, like. Because. Because some of these, like, stupid things is, like, the way we constructed, like, our imagination of what life needs to be.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. Yeah. I mean, there's so many decided that, by the way, there's so Many. There's so many theories around it. You know, when it. When it comes to men, it has to do with internalized misogyny and the hatred of women. And any man who would be with a man must be a woman in some kind of a way. So there's a lot of shame associated with that. I don't think that's particularly explicit. I think there's some truth to it. I think there's a lot of fear. I think people like to have their conventions, and they don't like to have those conventions challenged. It's the same thing as my bust school. Right. These days, you grow up in the world and there's queer people and trans people all around. If you're young and you're growing up in that environment, you are just not thinking this is a scary, shameful thing. But when you're growing up in Edward Scissorhands or whatever your particular version of that is, all of the stuff that's out there can feel really threatening. And actually, in those days, it was threatening because lots of people were dying of aids, which didn't help the situation either. So you have this internalized shame, and then you think, I'm going to activate this and I'm going to die for it. It's pretty scary time for that. But it was very. Despite this kind of socially liberal or ethnically liberal or whatever you want to call that, quite progressive situation, it's very, very conventional. That's what it was. I mean, I remember rocking up to, like, my dorm room with a CU Boulder, Colorado, like, sweatshirt in these white sneakers and jeans, and walked into a room full of, like, goths and stoners, you know, with their hair like this, and they were completely. It wasn't my style, but we just didn't have that where I went to school. So there were these options, and then you start to get explored, well, what's gonna. What's gonna be me? For me, it wasn't gonna be pre med. And sadly for. Not sadly anymore. Sadly for my mother, I wasn't gonna bring home a nice Jewish girl either.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But did that make you a better psychoanalyst because of the sort of the maturity that you have? Because, you know, when you're processing, like, you know, what people perceive as shame, but you. You internalize it as basically your identity, then you're conflicted and you're fighting that, like, consciously, you're projecting something. Unconsciously, you're fighting it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So did your identity. Did your. Did your sexual makeup actually enable you and, you know, sort of empower you to understand people better, for sure.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. It could have been. It could have been lots of different things. That's what it was for me. I'm not surprised that your brother's a psychologist, because I think it's a similar thing for him. I think when you hit and my father also died when I was quite young. I was 15 when my father died. So it kind of went through trauma. Yeah, went through quite a big trauma and loss at that age. So it kind of, you know, it shakes you up and you become curious about the world. You realize, you know, while your friends are worried about whatever it is you're worried about, when you're 14, 15 years old and this, like, big stuff is happening at home, I think it gives you a different perspective in the world. Not that I was, like, particularly deep or anything as a child. You know, it's going through these experiences and just getting on with it, but they are absolutely formative experiences. The dawning of your sexuality from early years, 7, 8, 9 years old. An awareness of something that is just absolutely prescribed. You learn about compartmentalization. You learn about disavowal. You learn about creating a false self that's going to be acceptable to people. You learn about having girlfriends even when you don't want them. And those are all universal experiences. Experiences totally not the content of them, but the process of them. How you survive the parts of yourself that are, you see, are unacceptable to others.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Fascinating. Fascinating. So, Boulder, Colorado, you. You came out with flying colors on the other side, or were you flying on the other side? That's why you showed up in London?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. I don't know how flying the colors were. It was liberating. Yeah, it was. And I think, again. Right. I had this experience of going 2,000 miles from home, so I wanted to go another 5,000, you know. I still want to go another five. Yeah, I still, you know, I still love going to new places and being impacted by new things and having fresh starts. But there were other things, too. You know, there was. There were philosophies I was unfamiliar with. There were drugs I'd never tried before. There was the whole, like, you know, I had a fun time in Boulder, you know, it wasn't. Later, I can be introspective about it and see how it was formative. But mostly I was out of the house. I was coming into myself. I was trying all sorts of things out and having a hell of a time. I really, really enjoyed it.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So it was liberating for you?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Totally liberating. Like euphoric?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. And so how did that change the subconscious?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, I think that when you're pre liberation and you're in fear, fear, the idea of liberation is inimical to you. Like it's just antithetic. Like that's never going to happen. And I remember there was this horrible book that Woody Allen ended up making a movie about everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask. This book was written in the late 60s. I think I got my hands on this as a 15 year old and was reading stuff about homosexuality in this book, which was just evil stuff. Like it was terrible stuff to read. When you're moving in that direction and just thinking, you know, I'm just gonna save up and get the anti gay therapy. You know, as soon as I leave the house I'm gonna just like this book says, you know, so you create a future for yourself that seems insurmountable. Your father's dying, you're thinking, how does anybody survive this situation? How am I gonna deal with this shame? And then on the other side of it it's like, oh yeah, okay. So you can go through and out. And like you say, landing on the other side gives you all of these treasures of experience which are not fun to be won. Right. They are hard won experiences. But it does make you stronger, it does make you wider, it does make you bigger.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Do you like, is there like a bump that you have to get through, like the threshold that you feel like now I feel really liberated and I can let go my past. Is there like a time like that that happens?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't want to say that my experience is, is you could repeat. I think I had it pretty easy. Like it came really quickly for me. Like I didn't struggle with internalized homophobia very much. Like it really washed out for me quite quickly. People struggle with it their whole lives. Yeah. And not, not just that whatever it is you're inheriting that you think isn't good enough or you're not smart enough or you're not creative enough or you're compared to an elder sibling, all that stuff, stuff can last for a very long time. So I actually consider myself quite lucky for having been able to drop it quite quickly. And I've been able to, I think in my life I've picked up identities and dropped them quite quickly. So they don't really, you know, I'm still a gay man, but it's not the main part of my identity anymore. I'm probably more of a psychotherapist.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. So this is a very interesting thought, and I want the audience to kind of hear this out. You know, I think, like, everyone has some sort of hidden fears that they have built in. Right. For me, interestingly enough, there were two things, and, like, you know, I keep, like, you know, now you can psychoanalyze me. Okay, okay. There are two things which keep bothering me quite a bit. Like, you know, growing up as a kid, I always felt when I was going to school that if I don't perform as well, then I'm gonna stay back where I actually, like, started my life. My origin is gonna be destination if I don't perform. Right. That was the makeup of my mind. And I grew up in slums in India, the second biggest one. So I had. I used to take on this extra pressure on myself saying that, you know, what? Like, you know, I got to excel in my education because education is the only way I get the escape velocity in my life. Right? And that extra pressure, like, used to basically manifest in weird ways. I would go to an exam and I would show up with, like, you know, like, if you think, like, you know, all these rings are. Are pretty spiritual and other things. It's just like, you know, I'm carrying these for different reasons now, but I used to have more rings. Not like, not the rings that basically you would think, like, you know, is. Is something that is fancy. But it was like, out of fear. Like, if I wear like a, you know, a yellow sapphire, God is gonna protect me. If I wear like, this white stone, like, you know, angels are going to sit on my shoulder and, like, if I wear like, you know, this, like, religious thread, like, you know, that something is going to happen. Now it's all like fashionista, but so I used to believe so much. Not in myself, but the external forces. Okay? So much so that I used to go into these exams and I used to basically start writing and I would never finish the examination. The fear would just grip me. Like, it would say, like, you know, like, oh, my God, like, you know, if you don't perform, you don't perform. And so, like, everything I write, I used to write a long essay for the same, for a short question. And I would never used to finish the exams on time. And so I always, never scored what I'm supposed to score. Like, I always, like, like fell below my expectations of who I am as a person because I put, like, unnecessary pressure on myself. So that used to happen a lot till I just broke out of it. I don't know, like, how I broke out of it, maybe that was my girlfriend who broke me out of it, whatever happened. And then the second thing that basically happens with me quite a bit is when I'm growing fast, right? And growing fast, like, you know, you begin to sense validation. You get, like, you know, you. You know, people will begin to understand your vision. And then there's the rah, rah, rah that goes behind you saying, like, oh, like, shaker, you're great. And then you're on high, and you go up on the high, and then, like, boom, you fall from the high. So I fear success, Right. I think, like, you know, being successful is. The next thing I know is gonna. I'm gonna be like, you know, falling, like, deep into the abyss.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

You're still afraid of success?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I'm still afraid of success. I'm still afraid of success, so. Because I like to scrap myself out because I know when I fall, I can climb the hill, and I love the climbing of the hill.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Maybe you like the climbing of the hill more than sitting at the top.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Sitting at the top, right?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So it's kind of, like, very, like, paradoxical if you kind of think about it. Right. So even today, when I'm in deep stress, I get, like, dreams about not finishing my exam, showing up in the wrong exam, showing up, like, you know, with, like, a pen that doesn't work or a paper that I never prepared for or a subject that I never knew or it was a different day or different program. Like, I don't know. So it's like the weird dreams that I still get.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Anxiety dream. Yeah, but that's your foundational anxieties sitting there.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's never come out.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. So psychoanalyze me and get the shit out. Get it out of my head.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, I mean, I would. I would. Like looking at it now. Yeah. What. What sense do you make of a kid who protects himself with all of these things, who kind of projects his own. Not in a bad way, but, like, projects his own agency onto the rings, onto the gods, and onto the angels, but then finds himself in such a state of anxiety that he can't finish it was answering one, like, one long. Like, you just keep answering the same question. You got, like. I'm curious about what the experience of that was. You got lost in it. You got. You. You couldn't stop.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I couldn't stop. I could keep writing. I keep writing.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Mm. You were like. You were writing for your life.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yes. As though. Like. As though my life depended on it. And, like, you know, if I don't do it like, I'm gonna get screwed.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Did your life depend on it?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Not at all. Never.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay, so what was it that. Was it that ultimately propelled you out of it? Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I told myself, like, you know, why the fuck do I care? So there was a point in my life where I went to United States with $34 in my pocket, and I made it just fine. And then, like, you know, I. Then I lost my father, and I came back to the United States again. I was gone for two months, and I came back again, and I had to sleep in the car for two weeks, and I had $50 in my pocket. So, like, 2001. $34, 2005. $50. My life didn't change much. And I told myself, like, what's the worst which is going to happen to me? I'll go back to 34. I'll go back to zero. Right, Right. And I don't care. And so that's sort of like, you know, the mental, like, switch that I had. And that happened on the heels of my father passing away and me unplugging him out of his life.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Literally, you mean?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Literally, because he was in a vegetative state. Right. So I was like, basically, we had to decide as a family that whether he's going to stay or not because 88% of his brain was damaged. So it was in a vegetative state.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

How old were you then?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I was 23. I was 23. And so all of this, like. And I was the only guy in the family who would support the entire, like, seven member family, you know, except, like, now my father is gone. So it was six, you know, including me, it was seven. And I'm supposed to be the guy, like, leading the family.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

You're the eldest.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I'm the youngest.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Oh, you're the youngest.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I'm the youngest because the eldest was, like, bipolar.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right. And the second one was just barely getting, like, settled.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But I would imagine that that sense of responsibility is a lot earlier than when your father died. Yeah. That. That. That sense of responsibility was propelling this. Yes. This writing. Yes. So some.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So somehow I said, you know what? I fuck care. And I just, like. I let it go. And then I just never saw anything after that. But even now, at times when, like, my chips are falling down and I feel like, you know, like, something bad is gonna happen.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I just get back into that state of pulling that old dream of me not finishing the game.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It's terrible, those dreams people have. Walking out on stage and not knowing the lines and all that kind of stuff. But see, I think because kids are also. They're emotional sponges, and they really pick up emotions that are going on in the family environment as well. So it could be that there's unprocessed anxiety that you're actually just trying to sublimate in some kind of a way that you've picked up, whether that feels about personal responsibility or whether that whatever that core was that felt absolutely couldn't happen. When you're. It sounds like you're saying when you're. When your father died, it's like that. That thing already happened. So if it's going to be $34 or $50, it wasn't anything to be scared of anymore. But what it was before, that was really, really scary. I wouldn't want to get into what that is because I think. I think a bit longer. But I think there's a really core fundamental feature. You're there.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. Interesting, interesting, interesting. So now, what got you into depth psychology after, like, your bolder education?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Oh, I could give you. Yeah, okay. It's another. Yeah, but remind me about. Because you said this thing about validation before, which I really want to get onto, because it's a really important one. Yeah. I came to England. I loved being in Europe. I didn't want to go back to America, so I enrolled myself on a master's program to extend my visa continental philosophy. Read Freud, and I was like, there it is. Like, immediately. I mean, Freud is like, oh, like, people don't really like Freud anymore. I mean, you know, it's old stuff. So much of it's been invalidated. The guy is a secret genius. You read some of the stuff and it's amazing. You read a lot of BS in it. You know, it's not. It's not all great, but I remember reading this and just being like, sounds like LLMs today. Sounds like.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

He sounds like LLMs today. Like, it's like lot of. Like a lot of beers with a lot of confidence.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes, yeah, exactly. Oh, my gosh. The confidence in this guy. Yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That sounds like ChatGPT. Sigmund Freud. Slash ChatGPT.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

His output, too. I mean, you know, 22 volumes. It's like, you could have written that in your exams. It's just like he had a fair cocaine habit for a bit, too, which I think probably helped in the late 1800s, but. No. Fell in love with it. And I thought. And it was just. It wasn't even necessarily. Again, the.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How could you fall in love with someone. Which is invalidated. Something which is invalidated.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It doesn't matter if it appeals to you. And we know this in very positive ways and very negative ways. Right. You know, president of the United States might not appeal to you, but you might, like lots of people, validate it. It appeals to them.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Do you believe in Freud?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So what I love about Freud is he asked questions that nobody else was asking.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So he was more Socratic and he

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

was not afraid to look. And what a lot of people don't like about him is the conclusions that he came up with, which, of course, some of them are kind of crazy. But he was not afraid to look under the hood and say that children have death wishes about their parents, that children are sexual beings, that adults are basically inherently bisexual. You can believe these things are not. I'm not saying all of these things are true. But he's in a super conservative environment in Vienna at the turn of the last century saying these preposterous things. And how is he saying them? Because he introspectively looked into his own experience, asked himself a lot of questions, and he listened to. To his patients, which was really unusual. They were giving them baths and electric shocks and, you know, all sorts of stuff in those days. And he listened and found meaning amongst the symptoms. And he found another criticism of Freud. You know, it's all about sex, and a lot of it is for him. But he found that especially for women in those days who are completely unable to express either agency or sexuality, were getting serious sick because they were unable to do so. And that when they were able to put words to those things, and he got a lot of these things wrong and made a lot of assumptions and he was a man of his time, that it would release something. And for me, that was. That was incredible. And I thought, okay, because that reflected you sort of. I think it. I. To be honest, I think it. I think it invited quite a narcissistic thing in me, which is I wanted to be the wise guy who had all the answers. Like, that was what I. I want to be that I want to learn this stuff so that I can sit there and be like, this is what's going on. It's not like that at all. I found, to my dismay, it's a lot more difficult than that. But I think the appeal was I want the knowledge and I want to understand it. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And apply it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So that's how you got into depth psychology?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That's how I got into depth psychology.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And did you do a doctorate in that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I did, yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And where did you go from I

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

did that at the Central Department for Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Studies at the University of Essex in the UK.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Wow. So then you were like 20 years in counseling room.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

More now. Yeah, so, yeah, just over two decades in that. In that room, which is still my main job.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So what do you do there?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

We have conversations like this. I probably don't talk quite as much as I'm talking now. More. More for them. But this is. Okay. So on the one level, this is where I'm a very traditional therapist. I don't know, super traditional. But I meet in a room with real people once a week in the same room.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So why do you invite them over and over again? Because they're not like flushed one time.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. They can come as long as they want.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

You cannot give them a pill and say, purgative, done.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

This is why we're such bad marketers. You know, it's just like, come here and I'll see you in seven years time and we'll see how we're getting on. The thing is, because the early programming is so fundamental, we repeat and we repeat and we repeat and we repeat.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's like peeling the onion.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It is, except sometimes you just get the same onion you peel. It is almost the same size again. Right. And then you hit this really frustrating period where it's like, I. I know now that I shouldn't be making these choices, but you're still compelled to make the choices because they're the most familiar thing in the world. So how do you probe, though?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, how deep do you probe and when do you know when to stop probing?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it's a judgment call. And I think it's one that gets better with time. I feel like I've got better with it in time. But in the beginning you really try and learn. It's like data collection phase. You know, this, this person's going to bring me lots and lots of data. And as I get familiar with that data, I will be able to be more and more. I was going to say penetrating, but it sounds a little bit too Freudian. Right. But you can get in there more because then you get a sense of what the resistances are and what the defenses are. And okay, this is why it takes forever because the ego wants to maintain the status quo.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

There you go.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Top job. Yeah. Do not mess with me. Like, this is what I'm comfortable with, this is what I'm familiar with. And to deal with the defenses of the ego is A lot of work, either as a therapist or as an individual, because they are there to preserve the status quo. So sometimes you have to keep hitting the same thing over and over again. And there's a degree to holding people's feet to the fire, but only to the degree that that's negotiated between you. So I don't hold people's feet to the fire who. I don't know. I hold people's feet to the fire who want me to. And we both have a sen of how far that can go and what's. What's reasonable. Right. You don't. And you don't jump in there with the knowledge you acquire it from.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, but how do you build trust in the process?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That's. That's part of it. I mean, you know, imagine if somebody comes with trust issues, like. That's the issue.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That's a very difficult place to start work from. Yeah. So now we can come back to this idea of validation.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yes.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay. So where Freud was wrong and our more modern people are more on top of. Freud thought it was all about sex or libido, but it's really about connection. That's the connection to libido also being about connection. Now, the most important people. Sorry. The most important thing, psychologically and emotionally, I believe, is authentic recognition from one human being to another. That means I see you for the stuff I like about you, but I also see you for the stuff I don't like about you. And I see you for the stuff you like about yourself, and I see you for the stuff you don't like about yourself. And I can kind of. I can love you anyway because you're a complex beast and you've got all this good stuff and bad stuff going on. The best thing a parent can give to their child is to. Rather than see them as an object of their parenting. Yeah. That's going to do what they want them to do, obviously, with boundaries and all that kind of stuff, is to be able to see the authenticity, uniqueness, to recognize the authentic uniqueness of their child. Even the parts where they're not like you, even the parts where they might be disappointing. Doesn't mean that you can't be disappointed. Right. But that's the. That's the nourishing part of a relationship, is that you love what you love about me, but you can also live with what you don't love about me. And we can work through conflict. And that happens in families or it doesn't. You know, when it happens. Well, happens between parents and kids. But it also happens between romantic partners and good friends.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How do you resolve that? Like, you know, because sometimes it drives you nuts, what you don't like about them.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it's. It's all right to drive you nuts, right? It's all right to drive you nuts. Just. You just have to see it and be driven nuts by it. Yeah, it's a refusal to see it that's damaging.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's a refusal to see it. Yeah, I thought refusal is a better thing because, like, then if you. If you're experiencing more and more, does it not build anxiety as another. Like the. On the opposite side, let's say, like, you know, there are two partners, right? Like you and me. And like, you know, you are very. You're very loving and caring, but you're also extreme and extremely violent. Yeah, I cannot take that shit like, all day long if I'm on the other side.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

No, no. And people have boundary. Like, people should have boundaries and shouldn't take that.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What is the boundary condition in that? Like, how do you define the boundary condition? It's because it's the tolerance of the other person. Not like, so much.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Like, this is what's so complicated.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Oh, my God, Please explain.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So this is why relationships are so hard, and this is why we are living at such an inflection point in society. There are so many ways to get around it. Right. So mutual, authentic recognition is where these two people sit with each other in their aggregation and in their boundaries and in their frustration and their love and just try to work through that mess. I hate it when you do that. I don't hate you. I still love you. Sometimes I hate you like, I hate you right now. But fundamentally, I love you and I know you're kind of like this. You're not going to change. Not like this is all verbal. Right. But that you kind of sit with the sameness and the difference between each other. And if you have a child that comes into the world with enough authentic recognition of their sameness and difference, their uniqueness as a child, that gets reflected back to them and they get. They get resilience from that. They get a trust that somebody loves me for who I am. And I'm kind of more freed up to not be as careful to make everybody happy around me or conversely to piss everybody off, depending on how you come through that system. Now, recognition is this interpersonal complexity, like, highly complex thing because it's got all the stuff you were talking about. Validation is like, job well done. Right? Job well done. Validation is a, like, on instagram validation is a retweet, right? So now that we mediate ourselves through technology so much, particularly social media, AI is coming on board very, very quickly as a mediator to oneself and to others. Validation took over recognition. Yeah. So you post something on Instagram, it gets ton of likes. You post something else on Instagram, it doesn't. You're basically trained for the likes, for the validation. And then what happens? And I'm just. I mean, I'm making it very simple here. And the only thing that happens, but you start collecting the kudos for a partial representation of yourself, and then the other parts of the self don't get recognition. And then you start seeking more and more validation, and you're getting less and less recognition. So it's more and more like junk food and less and less like a nutritional meal, because despite how hard it is to sit with someone who's aggravating you, but you love. That's, like, the challenge and friction and work that makes you feel like a solid, full human being. You. You actually need that.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So, like most. Most couples I know, like, because I. I talk to a lot of them who go through marital issues, like, somehow, like, they. They get my shoulder. I don't know why they get your shoulder. I don't know why. Like, okay, like, at least the. The. The thing that they struggle with is they don't know when to walk away to avoid conflict, but. And when to engage in a conversation. Because sometimes what happens is this is I'm just, like, not hypothesizing. I've gotten like, 10, 15 families who have had my shoulder. So not that I'm a freaking psychologist, but like, this, I think I just listen and hear them out is they. They get into the situation where as soon as you start discussing things about, like, the stuff you don't like, then it becomes a blame game. You said that, and hence it triggered me. I said this, hence it triggered that.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Without actually addressing the subliminal, like, causality of, like, what was really causing it, like, you know, what was aggravating of that behavior? Why is that person, like, getting infuriated by, like, you know, stuff which is as small as, like, you know, someone would just, like, brush.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Brush it off.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So some amplification happens, and not understanding that amplification and attributing your action back to that really causes attention. And, like, you don't know when to walk away, when to stay, and then you're caught in this, like, freaking limbo that you can never get out.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. You make it sound like such good fun.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And that's why I tell them, like, I'm not a psychologist, you should go talk to one.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, okay. There's like this sick joke going on in the way we're made psychologically. Right. You couldn't design it more badly in a way. Right. Freud says basically, you want to marry your mother, and it's not that way. You actually create your mother or you create your father, or you create parental dynamics in each other. So you end up doubling down on old patterns that already didn't work in your family. This is the default mechanism. So it might be that you come from a family where one partner always defers to the other partner. And then you might meet someone who isn't particularly happy to be deferred to all the time. But because of where they come from and you come from, you start setting up. They bring their stuff, you bring yours, and you set up the sick dynamic that you get stuck under. So that's a challenge that pretty much is going to come up in any relationship. You're going to react, hash some dynamics between the two of you that you're going to have to move through at some stage. It's where a lot of people give up. Now. People are giving up much earlier. They're giving up after the first or second date because stuff is. Because they're already not as good as you imagine them to be on the app, which is a level of relational complexity, is already a problem. To answer your question directly, what happens there is you're so stuck in the dynamic that you're seeing the dynamic and you're not seeing the other person. Right. What we call transference. So you're kind of having a relationship with your imagined parental figure, kind of becomes that, and you become the child in relation to them. Again, this is like distilled down. It's more nuanced in real life. Right. And to be able to actually hear where that person is coming from even before you resolve it or fix it or find boundaries, if that person is frustrated, that first step is just, I hear you're really frustrated with me. It's just the start. Right. I'm really frightened when you do that. That really frustrates me. The ego gets defensive. Oh, you're saying something bad about me. You know, you bring down the defense. Like, okay, what is it that I did? That so frustrating. Finding a way to have enough tolerance of that discomfort to kind of just meet each other and try and recognize each other for real outside these things doesn't mean they won't be frustrating or annoying, but at least you're not dealing with the mother you're projecting onto them or the father you're projecting onto them. And the really great thing that happens over time in a good enough relationship is this thing we call rupture and repair. That sometimes when the dynamic gets to such a point that it collapses, that there is yelling, that there is splitting up, and then you realize that maybe you went too far, and then you've got to backtrack and you come back and then you try and understand what happened, and then you repair. This often happens after there have been affairs or, you know, really big ruptures or just a slow denigration of a relationship. The repair brings you. If it's done right, it brings you back more strongly. And then how do you.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How do you go out of a relationship and then come back into the relationship with trust?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, you can't always. You can't always do it. I mean, and. And it's not always great to stay in a relationship. You know, this is. This is the thing. Sometimes people get out of relationships too soon before they've given it a chance, and sometimes people stay in it too long when it's not gonna. When it's not gonna respond to changing needs. And these are really difficult things and really difficult judgment calls people have to make for themselves about whether. Whether it is in this. Good enough is a really important phrase, whether this is a good enough situation.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why do you need to live with a compromise?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Because there's no ideal.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What is the degree of compromise? Is it, like, depends on the tolerance limit of the person on the other side? Or because, like, you could. You don't want to silently, like, have pain inflicted on you. No, because you're a tolerant person.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Right? No, that's exactly that. Like, the boundaries have to be understood. They have to be understood, worked through and respected on. On both sides. Which is. Which. Which is asking a lot of insight to start with. Yeah, you're gonna have to repeat your question again about.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No, no, I just wanted to ask you because the question came to me because, like, you know, what's the right boundary? Like, you know, like, how much do you take before you say no?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. So this is. This is why people have a lot of issues with anger, right? Like, the positive use of anger is. Anger usually tells you when a boundary has been crossed. And if you find it very difficult to express your anger, then your boundary keeps getting crossed and crossed and crossed, and then either you become much smaller and you kind of recede into the background or something explodes at some point. If you're angry all the time, it's like your boundary is so far forward that nothing's coming in. So to start with, there has to be enough commonality. Yeah. And mutual respect in order to start having that conversation. The thing that happens in most situations, and this happens in friendships and romantic relationships, is it can recede very slowly over time. So you start losing the overlap that you have to have those conversations. And then one day you wake up and it's gone, and you feel like you don't have any place to start. So it's really down to both sides to honor one's own boundaries, come to understand them if they're important. And it might be that you can't have those boundaries with this person, or it might be that you've gone to therapy and you've kind of changed the way you think about the world. And is this person going to be able to have a relationship with the new person that you've become? Whenever you make a major change in your life and you're in a relationship, that relationship has to flex. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How did you become, like a radio jockey?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah,

[Shekhar Natarajan]

yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I applied for a job.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Tell me more.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

My first counseling job was in a further education college. So working with teens in the BBC. Put out a job advert to be an agony uncle. It's called in the uk or like a Dear Abby for the old folks who remember that. You know, you'd write into the call, you know, this is my problem. And I got the job. So I would just get five questions a week or something that I had to answer with 200 words. It's very difficult for adept psychologists because we're supposed to ask the questions back, not give the answers. So that was a really big learning curve. And then that developed into a Radio Collins show on BBC Radio 1, which was many, many years. I was kind of the mental health guy on that, which was really challenging and really, really super fun.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Would you have, like, regular visitors on the. On the radio, like, you know, they. With the call in. Doctor, please. Like, they would.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. What, the callers?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, yeah. Would they come where they repeat? Because, like, you cannot solve their problems in one day, you said.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Right, yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That's your consulting service.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes, and that's why. That's exactly it. Yeah, but see, it's not therapy. Right. This is advice. This is advice. Most of the time you would have friends, people coming, but sometimes we'd follow up with people and see how they got on. But it would be stuff like we're talking about now. It's like, I can't get on with my parents or I want to come out to my parents, or this is what it's like with my girlfriend or my boyfriend. And it would be okay. What are your boundaries? When can what. What kind of questions might you ask? Are you asking them at the wrong time? Are you afraid to have the conversation? You know, psycho education, basic psychoeducation, a lot of it. A lot of people don't know some of the basics, you know, about boundaries or using eyeline, talking about your experience rather than using blaming language.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I think attribution is the biggest problem.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Attribution is a massive, massive problem.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, attribution is the biggest problem because like, you know, you attribute your anger, your happiness, your. You always, like, you attribute your happiness to yourself and you, you know, attribute anger to others.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And like that attribution, like, you know, is always the problem because ego is

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

at the back to ego, again, is

[Shekhar Natarajan]

the root of all.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Ego always wants to be right.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

And what's really a difficult, this full circle back to bussing. Right. And about seizing ossifying programs. If you're going to change, if you're going to open up, you have to be open to being impacted and being a bit wrong about something. And that's kind of a voluntary thing. I think you have to bring yourself to the ground to, you know, be ready to change your mind. And it always hurts. Like it always hurts your ego not to be right. So to have two people prepared not to be right to each other, to really be prepared to hear the other side, it's really hard to do. But again, this is where the richness of like really positive relationships happen because then you have mutual recognition. I see that you saw it that way. I don't quite see it that way. You either end up agreeing or you do end up disagreeing, but you can live with seeing it in different ways. Got it.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What is the difference between subconscious and unconscious?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. So subconscious or preconscious is available to consciousness.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How many conscious are there?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It depends who you're talking to. For Freud, he said conscious, preconscious and unconscious. Farid had the collective unconscious as well, which is like everybody. Subconscious and preconscious are pretty similar. It's stuff that you are aware of, but that's not in consciousness. So my busing experience was in my preconscious. I knew about it when you asked me about it. It was there, but it wasn't in consciousness at the time. Unconscious is stuff that you are. It's not even in your subconscious. Right. It's. You're not aware of it at all. It arises as a realization. It. In a moment. It's kind of, you know, often an aha kind of a thing.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's dormant.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it's dormant and it's. Yeah. Outside awareness.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's like a sleeper cell.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, it is like a sleeper cell because it gets activated. That's like I'm a terrorist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, you're attached to a parent who dies. You get into a relationship, you're scared they're going to die. Your sleeper cell comes up and says, don't get attached. You like this pain there, right? It's not in your consciousness. You just know you want to get out. Yeah, yeah. So that's. I like a sleeper cell.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, that's. That's an unconscious.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That's a. Yeah, that's not the unconscious thing. So the behavior happens, but you're.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What, what?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

The anxiety driving you're writing is an unconscious thing. We both don't know what that is, but we know there was a behavior you could see and then an unconscious thing that we want to understand behind it. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And subconscious is like something in between, like conscious and subconscious.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, subconscious is like. It's there.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's like a little dormant, like, you know, like you just shake it up and then it wakes up.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. I mean, technically it's kind of the thing that's just not there in consciousness at the moment. So it could be any memory that you had. I mean, lots of people use it these days as, you know.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So then what is the difference between preconscious and subconscious?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, there's. There are different models that. Different. Like Freud never used the word subconscious. So for him, preconscious is. It's at the verge of consciousness. It's available to consciousness and it just needs to tip into consciousness. Subconscious has different. It's a different. Comes from different theories. I don't actually know where it comes from originally, but sorts of ideas like that advertising can subconsciously affect you. That's a bit more than something being conscious or not. It's more like. Is it tuning slightly? Yes. Awareness. So you could say maybe suggestion, recommendation, Subconscious. Yeah, that sort of thing. Or lots of kind of consumer. Consumer psychology stuff is kind of subconscious, you know, impulse buy stuff. Yeah. But it's not like a meaning like

[Shekhar Natarajan]

your attachment situation or is subconscious like more dangerous? Like, you know, if you, if you're Playing with subconscious. Then, like, are you. Are you getting, like, sort of, like, polluted in your head? Like, I think, like, why do. Why do you, like, you know, everything that you hear about, like, making it subconsciously available to you, dancing in front of your eyes, recommendation engines and all these things.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Is polluting your mind and creating more like, you know, like, influx of information, Inundation of information.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That. That causes you to, like, start, like, switching the reality in your head.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay, that's a helpful distinction. So if we. If we just amongst ourselves define subconscious, is that part of your mental apparatus that is available to suggestion or manipulation? Manipulation, yeah. So endless scroll or a position button isn't going to affect your unconscious in any particular kind of a way, but in your subconscious? Yes. I think it's more dangerous in the sense that it can cause a behavior to happen in you. Except when it comes to attachment, which I think is interesting stuff that's happening now, which is much more unconscious that we unconsciously want to attach to others. So the way we attach through technology and the way that attachment is manipulated through technology, I think does have an unconscious effect as well.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Got it. So can you keep drilling from subconscious into unconscious? Like, is there, like, something that, like, let's say, are there emotions that are subconsciously, unconsciously dormant in you that. That just gets activated? Yeah, like a sleeper cell. Like something, you know, you got a signal.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And then, like, you know, that unconscious wakes up and says, you know what? Like, I'm going to, like, screw the world.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. I mean, people live their whole lives like that.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

You know, so is it possible for you to, like, subconsciously play? Because this is very important to know. Because, like, in the consumer world, like, you know, as you're playing with, like, people's mindset, at some point in time, you depress them so much that all of their dormant, like, behaviors just, like, you know, or unconscious behavior just, like, wakes up.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And then you go on, like, a buying spree. Like, you know, you never know before, like, because your bipolarity is, like, switched on. That would never get switched on in, like, regular scenarios, so to say.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay, so that's. That's interesting. So that's something I kind of thought about a lot in the early days of social media. Okay, so you were.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Is that. Is that true or is it, like, just, like, Shaker making shit up?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

No, I think. I think there's a cumulative effect. Yeah. Right. So you think about something like antisocial behavior. Okay. If you. If you want to be antisocial in Real life, you have to pay for the consequences of that. If I slap you in the face, you're either going to slap me in the face or call the police or do something like that. There's going to be direct feedback. And our psychologies are hunter gatherer psychologies. Like, despite everything that's changed, that's the stuff that kind of kept us in order. Reciprocity, human reciprocity. Okay. In the general population, I don't have access to the numbers exactly right now, but antisocial personality disorder is like, I don't know, 1.7% of a given male population say, welcome Twitter into the world. And you start seeing antisocial behaviors that are happening among a lot more than 1.5% of the population. So suddenly you start seeing behavior, not people hitting each. Yeah. You start seeing it shift and then you start to ask the question, okay, how far is that penetrating the unconscious? And I think this is where you're on to a very interesting and dangerous thing, which is the more you scale relationships, like on mass social media, and the more you make other subjects into objects, the easier it is to annihilate them and the more distant you come from the desire or willingness for mutual. Mutual recognition.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

And I think we're now living in a culture where so many of our relationships are mediated that we're losing practice for it. You know, people ghost each other rather than saying, you're not for me, you know, because they can't tolerate the I'm sorry to disappoint you, or I've got to say no, you know, that. That simple boundary where in the olden days you go on a date and if you didn't want to go on a second date, you probably have to tell that person or you have a difficult conversation, you send a text message about it or an email. So here we have stuff that isn't even engineered to do that. Right. But is having a profound consequence on our capacity to sit with difficulty in conflict.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So this is like phenomenal. Like, you know, I'm getting to learn so much from you.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So you ask great questions.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No, no, no, I like, you know, I like. So basically, like, so we dug into the subconscious and like the unconscious sort of wakes up somehow. So how do you. How do you know? Explain projection in the sense. My brother used to say this, and I found it to be like, true. The guys who basically violently attack something are actually guilty of doing that personally. Right. This guy, I forget his name. Like, he was a New York governor. I forget his name. Eric, maybe Something. It'll come to me. But this guy was going after, like, prostitution, but he was going to a prostitute.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Very common. Yeah. Right.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So you tend to project, like in the society, a moral image of who you are, but you are at actually the exploitation on the other side, or you are violating it. And you feel so bad about it yourself that you're projecting that you're like the pariah was gonna go after it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So how do you explain that behavior? What is that called?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So I'm so glad I get to use this. These words. And you asked why I thought Freud was brilliant. These are Freud's words. Okay. He called this reaction formation. Right. It's a reaction formation. And what happens is that there's something that is so distasteful to your ego that your ego keeps it in the unconscious. Like, I do not want to know this about myself. Even though you're doing it every day. It's a kind of splitting. It's called a disavowal. So you're doing it, but you're also not owning it. So in reaction formation, it's so pushed that into the unconscious that you project it on to somebody else. So it becomes those immoral people out there, because it can't be me. And to be able to hold that complete opposite within yourself takes a lot of psychic work. And actually it can break down very, very quickly. But it's astonishing what the ego will do to protect itself.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But it is submerged in the unconscious.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It is subject. So at that boundary, it's like, I don't want to know about it. I don't want to know about this desire. I'm doing it, but I can't own it. Right. So I'm going to get those people. I'll do it on the sly. I'll probably, if I'm thinking about it all, I'll justify it in some kind of way. There was a very interesting study years ago about homophobia in men where they actually measured men's sexual response to pictures of men. And the men that were more homophobic had higher sexual response to these tests. So there was something about their own desire for men that was. That was not good, that they couldn't tolerate that they projected on gay men. Right. You get the very same thing with the immigration debate these days, right?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yes.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Classic kind of thing, like the otherness that I can't bear in myself. I will project onto the actual other. They become. They become the enemy. And splitting is the most basic, is the most regressive, primitive kind of defense that can really be easily manipulated by creating fear, because when we're fearful, we become more paranoid and we're more likely to split.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. The reason why I also brought this up is because it's very. See, the whole world, like, you know, like, you and I come from America, Right. Neither your father nor my father actually belong to America.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, sorry, like, you know, your father may have, but, like, your forefathers didn't. Yeah, Mine, like, was not. And, and, but, like, we are so distasteful about immigrants in general because, like, the whole country was formed on immigration, by the way, for crying out loud. You wiped out all the Native Americans and called it America and you just inherited the land, and now it's yours. And you are distasteful of anyone who's coming into the country. And that is sort of like the projection of the. The entire society today. Every country is becoming more populist. Like, you know, take Italy, for example. Like, you can. You can be an Italian third descent, like, and you can go in and get an Italian citizenship now. No more. Right. Why is that happening? Why is the atomization of the society happening that way?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

The. The sad part of the answer is it's an easier solution for the mind. Right. It's easier to have the bad out there and the good in here, which is why it's easy. Why it's difficult to have the mutual recognition with each other, because in order to really see the outside, you have to be willing to see yourself. And it's an easy answer that always fails is the problem. Right. You set it up. Trump's going to be the savior. He's going to get rid of the immigrants, or we're going to go Brexit and we're going to solve all of our financial problems, or we're going to get this country out of the way and we'll. It never works because. Because the world doesn't work that way. But the primitive mind thinks, good, bad, split. I'm on the good side. All the bad sides out there don't have to worry about my stuff. And then we've got this thing called a cultural complex, which is what you're talking. So you can have a country with a complex. So you have American exceptionalism and America built on genocide and immigration that sees itself as exceptional and A, can't accept the genocide, and then B, I mean, the immigration wasn't easy when it was happening. Right. But sort of, it kind of drew together and now sees that as the foundational problem with the other people.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So what is the Next emergent issue out there, which, like, has this problem in your mind.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, this one isn't enough.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No, I think immigration is a huge problem and it's a projection problem. Right. To your point. Right. What did you call it?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Reaction formation. Reaction, yeah, yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Reaction formation, yeah. So what would be another populous item in the world which would have this kind of criteria? And it is emergent. Now, do you know of anything right now?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay, I'm trying to think of. I'm trying to think of the content for it because, again, the process remains the same. Right. The process is the appeal to the splitting. Right. So you can have someone like Trump who names a number of positions that are constantly flagrantly cast aside, but maintains the adulation of a fair whack, of, like a surprising fair whack of the population. Yeah. It's because it's symbolic, because you want the idealized character who has the easy answer that you will forego your ability to cognitive. Yes. Yeah. You basically outsource that to someone else and you're like, okay, I don't care. He's going to take care of it for us. And that's why, I don't know, it could be any answer in a sense. It could be about left or right. It could be about color. It could be about what hemisphere you on or what religion you have. Anything can really be weaponized for. For it. And we've seen that because most of those things tend to be based on pretty arbitrary principles.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So do you also think, like, you know, there's the whole jihadist movement and other things is also a reaction formation thing? Like, you know, like, I don't like your religion, so I have to, like, go after you because, you know, the very way I'm living my religion is not really good. So, like, you know.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, see, I think.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I was just curious.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, I. I think. Okay. I mean, if I'm pedantic about it, I'll say it's not. It's not necessarily reaction formation, but it is a form of splitting in this. And I think splitting comes from a very vulnerable position. Right. Splitting comes from when you're, like, under the cost. Like, you're. You're in trouble. You need to split, like the good and the bad when you. When you're generally all right. We call it the depressive position. It's like, the world's not great, the world's not terrible, but we got to live with the complex mess of it all. So it helps you. It helps your ego to say, I've made the Right choice here. I'm in the right group. Yeah. So. And I basically. I guess I don't know if I'll get in trouble for this, but sort of the more your religion is right and the other person's religion is wrong, I think comes from a very vulnerable place, because if you feel confident in your spiritual tradition or your background, you're not really threatened by other people's. You don't need to annihilate it. And this goes for. Every religion has its fundamentalists. Right. If you're. If you feel confident and secure, you don't need to.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why does insecurity come from? Where does it come from if it's not unconscious? Like, what. What drives it?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an individual question. Right. I mean, there are.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But why is there, like a collection, like a tribe of those people out there?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So whenever you get a group identity, you get the opportunity. And this happens in gangs, too. It happens in political movements as well as in religious movements. You get the opportunity to outsource a kind of responsibility to a group identity. And this is happening. Actually, we're seeing a kind of.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's a different type of projection.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it's kind of like a. It's like. It's the in group. It's the in group and the out group. Yeah. And there'll be.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

His nation is an. Is a. Is nation like this splitting problem, too? Like, you know, why do you, like, who created these fucking nations?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, I mean, the British, for the most part.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The world did not have these lines anywhere. And like, you know, like, you know, we just said, like, oh, this is called United States of America. Who created that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Well, look where the lines are, right? Like, look at the line between Pakistan and India. Look at the line between Lebanon and Palestine. Israel, the lines between.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why are we creating those lines? Like, what is the reason for that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Because there's an idea of a collective identity that was. That was imposed at that stage, which is crazy, because there weren't even collective identities in Europe until very, very recently. I mean, the nation states that we have now today are pretty recent and they're not holding together particularly well.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But, like, it is so ironic that you would have that because within the nation, you're not aligned either. No, there's a left and the right. Yeah, right. And then there's some. Like, some in the middle. I don't even know.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So what is an identity, then?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, I mean, the tactic generally in those cases is to blame another nation so that you can pull together the Left and the right create a war situation, create a left and right so that you do have national unity. And it wasn't so long ago where that did generally happen. It even happened during the Gulf War, you know, under George W. Bush. In America there isn't really a care to bring everybody together. There's a care to represent one side. But I think in any kind of nation state or group situation, if you have a rallying point, if you have a group identity and if you have an outsider, then you're creating the means for group identity. I think geographical lines, it isn't really, isn't really it these days. I think it was always kind of problematic. Some, some more than others, some are more ancient than others, but most of them are, are hodgepodges.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I, I feel like, you know, like, to answer my own question, I don't know, like, and you have to validate this. I think the next emergent threat is a war, a big war, a full scale war. Because I think like nations are basically like creating its own form of identity. And like the me versus you and the splitting of like, like what is right, what is wrong and like, who's dictating the right and the wrong and like the projection of that and that, that could be like in pursuit of resources, in pursuit of whatever it is.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, and different actors have different like priorities in their life and incentives which is causing this flirting to happen.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

As a society as well. So I firmly believe that we are staring at some big breakout of war and the emergence is happening right now. Like, you know, we are seeing so much disturbance all over. It's just a matter of time. Maybe like in 2029 or 2030, I don't know exactly what time, but you're going to have something of consequence which is going to happen, I feel, because I see that like, you know, it's just a projection problem.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, you know, this guy, I, I forget the name of this guy. Hopefully I can find it like, you know, like this New York governor, like this guy who always used to like beat up all the madams, but he used to go to the prostitute.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It's the same problem,

[Shekhar Natarajan]

you know, So I feel like that's where the society is headed. And so how do you psychoanalyze this?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It's hard. I mean, it is. I've been doing it all the whole conversation though it is a little bit problematic to psychoanalyze individual features.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It is complex.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right. Like, you know, you have, you have nations, you have individuals, you have men in power.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

You have psychopanatics like, you know, people who believe the information to be true or false, and they have their own belief systems, which is not even true and irrationally placed.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, my. I think it's. I don't know if it's going to be war, but it does seem to me to be the atomization of society that is the major risk there. Because at least in the past you had limited, like people, you had limited sources of information in news. And there was kind of even in nation states, say in the 50s and 60s, everybody at least shared a culture. They watched the same movies, they watched the same television show. There was something that they had in common where you have a situation where people are not just getting their information, false and right stuff through various channels, but there, there's very little, I mean, maybe outside of sport, which I'm not particularly into, but, you know, there's very little things that people share on the kind of grand scale. So I think you're just seeing people kind of retreat into groups and I think you'll get civil war, you know, are the nation states going to be able to hold themselves together to war like nation states, or is everything just gonna decompress? I mean, we've seen it before. We've seen it before in history, you know, and yeah, I don't like to think we're going to go through a dark phase before.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I firmly believe that there is like a war which is much bigger brewing three years from now. And then like, you know, there may be another bigger one six years then from then. Like, you know, if you just look at, like how people are behaving, like, you know, you see the patterns of the past and project it into the future. All of these patterns are happening like, you know, 20s, 30s, 40s are reprojecting themselves right now.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Doesn't look good.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It doesn't look good at all. It's just a realignment of things that you never have thought about and you didn't think you'd see and you never thought you were going to see.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But, you know, there's rupture repair in the world as well. I mean, what you saw after the Second World War with the European Union, the creation of the UN international law, what you saw after the financial crisis, the Great Depression, 1929, you saw banking regulation come in. You get these periods where people do shift to the horrors that just preceded them. But then people have short memories. It's the repetition compulsion again. You peel the onion, you put all of this stuff into effect a generation and A half later, people are saying, we don't need that. We're better off on our own. And you start to lose those structures that enable more mutual cooperation. And now we're in a steady situation where the mutual cooperation is peeling away and the individualistic small group alliances are arising. So, yeah, I don't think you're wrong.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What about organizations like, how do you think about organization and culture and how do you psychoanalyze them?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, it's really difficult. And I do a lot of work inside the organization to identify what things are going on, right between how people are perceiving each other, how communication is going on. I mean, the proviso for me is I always say all organizations are pathological to a degree.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What do you mean?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

They're always sick. They're always sick. I just feel like because of the complexity, you know, we're talking about couples in the shoulder, right? It's hard enough with two people. I work with one person at a time. Some people work with couples. You get five people, you get five different opinions, and then orders of magnitude of complexity, you get an autonomous organization of I don't know how many thousands of people at various levels. It also self organizes into interesting dynamics that are at friction with each other. It's the nature of an organization. I don't think you get any organizations that just flow in everybody's head, you know, even ones that are built for that purpose, because you get all the people's repeated patterns, finding a way to sort it out. And the solution, which again, marketing problem for the psychodynamic people, isn't that you can offer a quick fix, but is that you offer ways that the different elements of those organizations find their boundaries between different groups, are able to have functional ways of hashing it through, working through rupture and repair. And sometimes you have a maybe a rupture that happened some time ago. You could have a rupture that happened where a third of the workforce was laid off seven years ago. But it lives as a trauma in the organization. It's just never been addressed. Even people who weren't there then, it can kind of roll forward.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How do you solve the pathology problem of a company?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, no more than you solve the pathology problem of a family. There's just a going to be pathology there because it's complex. I mean, I say it kind of jokingly like pathology is really bad. I'd say complexity that brings in fiction and difficulties and challenges to overcome. You can optimize communication strategies and the way people are Dealt with and understanding what's underlying an organization's problems.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Is it a sender problem? Is it a receiver problem?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Sender, receiver in the sense of the communication. Oh, it can be. It can be both. And it can also be. It can also be the methodology. So for example, Covid. Yeah. Everybody goes online. And then after Covid, people are working from home. People aren't, but nobody's nobody. Very few people are saying, is this a meeting we should have with people in it? Is this a meeting we should have online? Is this something that should be in email? And what happens, same thing is with individuals. The complexity is a difficult card to hold. A board meeting in the room. They're difficult. We've all been in them. They can be really difficult. It might be easier to do it by email. People have avoidance strategies. I think an answer to your question is conscious intentionality. We bring conscious intentionality into. I mean, it has to start with the leadership in rolling it out. But you have to listen to everybody to find out what's going on and what people need. So the intention is how do we run this in a smoother way? And you might find that people need to be around for certain or people need to be in the office or we need to have away days, or we need to engineer a situation that enhances the capacity for people to relate and communicate to each other rather than just not thinking. You just choose to have it on zoom or teams without making a clinical judgment. This is actually something that people should be in the office for. That's actually kind of simple in a way.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I feel like, you know, sometimes the sender is sending the information without understanding what the receiver wants to receive. Right.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. But the receiver can also.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The receiver may have prejudices that like, you know, actually precludes them from receiving that information. So that's the secondary problem. That's the more like, you know, obviously detectable one. But how do you fix like the. The problem of communication in a company, in something like this, it's so difficult to do it. Right. Because you have so many heterogeneous people, like, who want to consume in different ways.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes, it is this. This really cool saying from Neuro linguistic programming, which I think is, you should

[Shekhar Natarajan]

give me a freaking PhD.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Then you'll know it.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No, you know, you done me.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

The intended communication is not necessarily the received communication.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yes.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

So this is where I think these dynamics are. So because people don't know what I take for granted. Right. That particularly if you're in a position of leadership, you are subject More to projection than generally not, right? Because you're either idealized or demonized. And part of it, sadly, is just, you just have to kind of, you just have to deal with that because it's the way things work, work. So part of a solution might be you can craft the most well intended communication, the most careful communication, and it will be received badly by some people and that needs to be functioned into the expectation. There are probably things that can be done around the edges for it, but it is the nature of things that, that projection is going to happen. It's the nature of things that if people feel vulnerable, they're going to be more likely to, to do splitting and have paranoid thoughts. So if people feel that their jobs are at risk, whether that's through a rumor or through the true thing, they're going to be more suspicious of the leadership. So you have to address that head on, you know, because if people feel more secure, you can have those, those conversations more, more easily.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So what is a psychologically intelligent organization

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

is an organization that brings with it more than checkbox awareness of what psychological health looks like in practice.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What does it mean?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Businesses are fundamentally relationships, right? The relationships between managers and employees and salespeople and customers and teams. And if there isn't emotional intelligence operative, you're going to be at a disadvantage. So it's the same thing we were talking about before. You can have something outside your conscious awareness and carry on merrily not knowing that everyone you're encountering is finding you really, really difficult and harsh and not listening. Right. Or you're running a board meeting and you've got an agenda to go through and you hit agenda number three, the whole room becomes anxious. You don't notice because you want to get to agenda item six and everybody's kind of, everybody's already checked out. So it's read a room and then like, okay, I'm gonna have to address this anxiety and we might have to leave points five, six and seven. And it's difficult, right, Because I have my life in emotional intelligence. I tried leadership for a while, you know, in a business, and I found it really, really difficult because I was too sensitive. I was too. I wanted to hear everybody's opinion. I was, you know, you have to be able to manage the boundaries of leadership and taking things forward and listening without like tipping too far on the other side. So I think leaders need a lot of support in order to make that, to make that happen. Because I think it's a very, very difficult job.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Leadership in general is difficult. And I think, like, you know, when you're leading in large numbers, it makes it even more difficult because, like, you're trying to do. So tell me this. I had this idea and I wanted to ask you, like, what do you think about it? So let's say, like, you know, I'm communicating to you the sender and the receiver. Would it be better if basically there was something in between where the sender information got intercepted by a sender proxy or avatar, and then it sends it to the receiver, which receives it in the way that the receiver should receive it. That way it is then passed to the actual receiver. Is it like data morphing? Is it information morphing? Does it work?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I would prefer to see something mediated in a way. So, like, if you think about couples counseling.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

They're arguing in front of the couples counselor. Right. And then the counselor might say, did you see.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How did you do this?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Taking sides.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But I would see the miscommunication and would say, did you see how your partner was hurt by what you said? Like, if they miss it, did you see how your partner was hurt just there? And they might. May or may not see it, but they draw attention to what got mixed. Now, I don't know if you can do that if it's a direct. If you're just morphing the thing, because

[Shekhar Natarajan]

then in this case, the agent sitting in between is that like mediator, if

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

it's a mediator, can identify.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's a coder decoder.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So I encode and send it to you. I decode it before I send it to you. And then you encode it and send it back to the person who's receiving it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But see, I guess it depends what kind of relations you're talking about, because you don't want to take the skill, the decoding and encoding skill away. Well, particularly in a romantic relationship, because you want to be able to know when you get it wrong so you can fix it. Yeah. So I. I think you'd really want to think about in which. Where's the biggest win for a situation like that, where you want it to be really direct? And how accurate can that. You know, we're not always talking about loving relationships or family relationships.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

We could be talking across languages or. But I don't. I don't know how it picks up necessarily. The emotion. Nuance. Yeah, yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So we are taught. And entertain me on this thought. So let's say you and I are husband and wife, and you and I always fight. Let's create an App that sits in between two of us and that says, you're right, I'm wrong, and then every time you're right and I'm wrong, you give me money. Would that change the behavior? Because you're putting an incentive?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But the argument's almost never about right, and wrong is the problem. The arguments are almost always about recognition. Right. So it's not really like your. Your app could say, well, actually, he did do the washing up when you said that he didn't. Right. That's a fact. But he didn't see that you came home really tired and did it anyway and that you wanted him to say thank you because you've been putting all this work and it's gone unrecognized. That's like. And then she doesn't want the app to tell her that she or he wants the husband or the wife to recognize.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Sometimes, like, the wife and husband, they're like, ignorant to each other. They don't like each other.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, that happens a lot, don't you think?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, you're not, like, you're not sympathetic because you're not living the same thing. Like my wife, as an example, she's like. She's an angel. Okay. She's very divine. So. And I sometimes walk into the house and she's. She just like, bursts out saying that, how the heck. Like, you know, like, you never even called me today. And, like, what happened? And I'm like. I'm like, lady, what happened? And it's so much so that, like, basically she's so stressed out, and I don't know exactly what happened in her day that caused her to behave that way.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And then if I'm. If I'm equally agitated with all the shit that is going in my life, it's like a perfect, like, recipe for, like, a disaster. So my. My idea is, like, I thought, like, it's a weird idea is I have my avatar. You have your avatar. Both the avatars are saying, he had a bad day, she had a bad day. Don't get into a fight. If you get into a fight, then it's just going to boil up. Would that be a mediator psychiatrist of sorts or like a depth psychologist? I don't.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Do you know what I think would happen?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yes.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

They'd be like, forget this freaking mediator. I'm still mad at you. I think that's what would happen because I think it's too. What you ideally want in a situation like that is that the familiarity of that situation triggers both of you to be like, okay, we're in a danger zone here.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, we should both back.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, we should both back off.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So human to human is still you think is the best way to resolve issues versus like, like in the sense, like human and there's a mediated human is still you think is the best way?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I'm kind of, I am kind of agnostic. I'm sure that there are ways in, in which mediators could be really helpful. I feel confident that there are ways in which mediators.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No, no, I don't disagree with the mediator, but do you think a technology mediator is a good thing? What do you tell to all those guys who are saying that I could psychoanalyze the shit out of you? Like the technology?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it could.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And how would it do it again?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, I mean, even current models are pretty good at performing real understanding about what you're, what you're going through.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But it doesn't have emotions.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

No. So it doesn't. It doesn't. It's like reading a self help book in a way. It can be. It's more individualized.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Does it need to have emotions like you are emotionally, like, like aware? Right. So that makes you a good person to psychoanalyze me because you're of lived experiences. Right. But like, if I'm, if I'm empathetic to you, then how would I do that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

There's two answers for you. Yeah, I mean, you already know this, right? But I can tell you not to smoke cigarettes or drink too much or exercise. And you'll drink too much, smoke or exercise, if that's what you're gonna, that's what you're gonna do. So simply telling someone the right thing isn't necessarily correlated with an outcome that you're looking for. Got it. Caring that somebody gets better actually kind of is because there's a, there's a person who wants it for you. Now LLMs mimic that really well. They're like really great coaches and they really feel like they care. I think it has an effect on people. But I think the second answer to your question is what people actually need is complex interpersonal mutual recognition as part of their lives. And if they're not getting enough of that, it's a problem. Doesn't mean that they need to get it from their therapist or from their partner. But currently the technological ecosphere is all about removing that rather than enabling it. So if you could find way, if you could do busing. And I used to think this when, when Facebook first came out, it was like, if Facebook had had an algorithm that like required Palestinians and Israelis to have like so many on each other's pages. Right. Or Republicans and Democrats or you know, Catholics and Protestants where you kind of have a socially engineered impactful space rather than one that by its default pulls people apart. There could something, could people still have to be ready to be impacted by that. But I think that was a real miss to not create systems that really put people in the way of each other engagement.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So I'm gonna go on record saying that Dr. Aaron Balik actually thinks Tinder and Bumble is bad because it doesn't really understand you. Is that right?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think Tinder. It definitely doesn't understand you. It definitely doesn't understand you.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Why do people believe in all that nonsense then? Why do they go and like flick right and left and like find a, find a partner?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

They do convenient. They do one thing really. They do one thing really good. They just don't do the rest of it really good. They provide it. They provide the opportunity.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Recommendation.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, yeah. Like if, if it's hard. It used to be.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But how are they matching you? Like, you know, like, you know, like.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Oh yeah, no, the algorithm. No, like, yes, the algorithm.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Because it doesn't psychoanalyze you.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, I've been working for a long time. The secret sauce to a good relationship is still a total mystery to me. It really is. But it's not, it's not the things that you have in common. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, man, like, you know, you got the most complicated job in life. So I'm gonna make it like 15 rapid fire questions.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I'm gonna ask 15.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's simple, like one line each. So social media, on balance, has it been good or bad for human psyche?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Bad.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Bad. AI companion apps, therapeutic tool or psychological trap?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Can I say both?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

You have, you can only pick one. Like Bumble and Tinder.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Given I have to choose a. I'll say psychological trap only because I have to do a binary.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The single most psychologically damaging thing about

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

the smartphone that is there all the time.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Doom scrolling or hope scrolling, which is harder to stop.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think doom scrolling is hope scrolling. So I think that's what makes it hard to stop. I think when you're doom scrolling, you're looking for hope.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So that's the Freud or Jung who understands the digital age better. Or neither of them knew it existed.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think both of them would have been fascinated with it.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But yeah, Freud would have been crazy about it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, I love applying Freud to it. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And I'm sure, like he would have been Elon Musk's best friend

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

because he

[Shekhar Natarajan]

would have loved Grok, you know, he

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

would have been fascinated by it for sure.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Oh, like, I can address so many women.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

He would have had a field day with Elon Musk.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, exactly. They would have gone. They would have actually taken, like, you know, like, you know, SpaceX to the Mars.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The one psychological concept that everyone should understand, but almost no one does.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Oh, my gosh.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Sleeper cell.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay. I'll give you that. It's yours anyway.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No, I'm just kidding. What is that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay, let's say the defensiveness of the ego doesn't always work in your favor.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Got it. The most important thing the unconscious knows that the conscious mind refuses to admit

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

the truth.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

This is that the loop problem? Is that the one?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, I say that because you're reducing me to one answer, but I would say because the. The ego lies to itself. So there is a truth in the unconscious if the ego could see it. Not everything in the unconscious is a truth, but it's there.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Got it. AI therapy. Is it dangerous? Is it necessary? Or is it both?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think it could be both. If it's. If it's deployed well, I think it could be. I think it's dangerous now. I think it could. It could have a. It could have a role if it's deployed well.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The thing that AI will never be able to do in a therapeutic relationship.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, at the moment, care. And I think that's an important one.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What if it cares?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

If it cares, I'm willing to have. If there's sentience and it cares, then I'm willing to have a conversation that it could do really good therapy because I think it's the sentience.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What is sentience? Consciousness. Yeah, super consciousness.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, if it's super consciousness, we won't need therapy anymore, right?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Like, no, like, AI will have it. We don't have it.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I don't think we'll ever have it because we are like animals.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yes. But could it? Could it? I mean, I think that would be. That would be the ideal. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And like, you know, I think super. Super consciousness is just like a. A mystical thing that everyone like. It's like one of those things, like, you know, I want to go to Mars.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Would you ever go to Mars? I don't know. Like, I'll. I'll just say, like, you know, it's like, it fan. Sounds fascinating to go there.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, I mean, I kind of. I kind of believe in it. If you. If you're using that term as enlightenment, like we talked about before, but I. I can recognize in myself there's a splitting there.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That there is a potential that is ideal where I won't have problems anymore. Although enlightened people say doesn't take your problems away.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. But it also, like, drags you down because, like, you know, it's like, oh, like if I get that, like, I have to give up all the. The stuff that I know.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Which is very difficult.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Redeemed me, but not yet. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That's what you went through. So that's what I go through, but I haven't gone through fully.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But if you had an AI that, that really. That really had. That was really enlightened. Really. I mean, it could bring us up.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Only if I, like, choose to accept what it says.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. But it'd be great at manipulating the subconscious. Maybe that persuades you that that's what you want. Depending on whether that's not kosher in superconscious business. I don't know for sure.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Prompting before thinking. How often do you catch yourself doing that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I catch the urge for it a lot. I do it sometimes.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Got it. AI development that most concerns you as a psychotherapist right now.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

The informal use of AI as a therapist. So people talking to their desktop version

[Shekhar Natarajan]

and asking for a suicide note.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Well, it could end now. It could end.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

That happened.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Adam Green.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

It did. Yes. Yeah. In the. The AI psychosis and the sycophancy. And it's. I think it's a really. It's so available and it's so un. Ring fenced. I think it's pretty. Pretty dangerous at the moment.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

That worries me more than official therapy bots.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

The session that changed how you think about a therapist, about you being a therapist.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think it was. I think it was when I thought

[Shekhar Natarajan]

you were going to say, it's me.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I'm not that narcissistic. No. Yeah. No, I would. I had it in my own therapy. I'll just say I had a very. I had a very good therapist who did it. Right. So I was very lucky.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

But, like, did you have a session that made you, like, a great therapist that you felt.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Oh, that made me a great. I did have. Yeah. I couldn't talk about it, but I did have. I did have a session where I was really awoken to a very important realization

[Shekhar Natarajan]

and that helped the family or.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, it should.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What happened? Like, in the sense I don't want

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

you to remain there.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Okay. I can tell you what happened. That I found that I was replicating my own family dynamic in a therapy session as a kind of. As the role I had in my family. Unconsciously got it. And because the. And it was a bad. It wasn't a very good session. It was really difficult. I walked away feeling really icky. And I went outside and I thought, I know this feeling. And I thought, I'm. I'm doing that. So either I need to get out of this job because I don't want to do that for a living, or I need to find a way to do this job completely differently. And it was a really big. And I stayed in the job and did it differently.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

What do you do when you feel the pull of your phone at the wrong moment?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Usually I pick it up like everybody else. I'm trying to get better at that.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Complete this sentence. The thing I know now about the human psyche that I wish I understood at the beginning of my career, that

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

people are way more similar to each other than they would ever imagine.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Oh, really?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

They're not as distinct as you think

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

when it comes to the core desires. And I, like, go on and on about recognition. People get caught up in all. All their kind of stuff because denied recognition or partial recognition, like people. It's gonna sound corny. People really want. People want to be loved. They want to be recognized for who they are. And that's. That's right across the board.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So I. I want to ask you one final question, and then we'll stop. So let's imagine your busing experience. So you got that experience, and then you had this personal experience of your own identity. Those two experiences shaped you. And probably whenever you psychoanalyze people, you could put yourself in their shoes because of these two experiences that formed you that you're able to better, you know, project and give them better solutions. What if there was some sort of a simulator where you could experience everything that everyone experiences, and then you become a super psychoanalyst or you super traumatized? So would that be exciting to you? Every experience, every experience out there, Imagine the power of AI like, what does it do? Like, it just gathers all these world experiences. Let's imagine, like, you know, there is a psycho therapist like you, and, like, there is, like, 50 million psychotherapists out there. And let's, like, get into your brain and what made you who you are. And, like, we captured all of that. We captured everyone's like. And then I train you back and make you live all those experiences. And does it make you a better psychotherapist or like, does it make you like a, like a wackadoo?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any way you could assimilate it, but I don't think you need to. I think that I keep talking about this content process thing.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So you don't need to really experience

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

all, you don't have to experience all the things and you shouldn't have to. And you shouldn't have to experience something in order to treat somebody who has the same experience. Right.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So you don't need to have cancer to be a cancer doctor is what you're saying?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think that's right. And actually it can be dangerous if you think that the way you got through your experience is the way that they should get through their experience. So if you can hold on to the process of my process of my identity crisis around my sexuality might help someone who, whose parents wanted them to be a lawyer and they wanted to be a mechanic and now they're 45 year old lawyer who finally wants to become a mechanic. I could apply my experience of an identity breakthrough right. On completely different content. So actually you only need to know on a profound level very few process experiences because we're all so similar to each other and be able to apply. I mean, I don't want to break it down to like there's like five feelings or anything like that, but that you have a way in to somebody else's experience. You have enough of a doorway into somebody else's experience that you can probably understand them.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Got it. It's fascinating because, you know, I did see an app like someone was trying to build where you could actually, if you committed a crime, you could live like all of your judgment within 15 minutes and get out.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Right.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

And I thought that like that's atrocious,

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

but you would still have the, the consequences of it. Right. You'd have like, you'd have 30 years of prison in your memory or something for 15 minutes. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

How would you do that? Would you like it?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Would I like it?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, I mean like not, not that you're a criminal, but like would you accept a solution like that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I mean, this is an ethical question that I'm not sure I can answer, but I think philosophically, if, if it's philosophically as real, I mean, I think it would be, philosophically, I think it would be as real if you could, if you could do that. I don't know whether you'd want, whether you'd want that. I'd hope by the time we have the technology to produce that sort of thing. We wouldn't need a Clockwork Orange solution to our criminal situation. Something a little bit, you know better than that. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Because it would feel unjust to the people who have actually suffered on the other side. But

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

it would still be the same, though, qualitatively, wouldn't it?

[Shekhar Natarajan]

No. Like I want them to go through all the hell they put me through. Why would I, like, as a human, like, not want them to go through that?

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

But if I'm understanding you right, it's in 15 minutes. But it feels like it was the 30 years in prison.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah. For your brain, not for your soul, is still the same.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Right. Then you walk out.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I guess it depends what the punishment is. Is it to keep you away from society or is it to give you a punishment? If it's going to be a punishment, then maybe that's just. That's there's a process that's useful there, but that's not the solution.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah, like. Like this is. It's a fascinating conversation because so much of what you said is so, like, interesting and so subjective and so situational. Which is. Which is, which is super interesting for me. What I actually got out of this is that whatever AI comes out, I don't think it's going to ever replace someone like you because I think that context awareness and situational awareness and being a human is going to be very important and AI is going to be just a tool to enable you, not necessarily a replacement for you.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I hope so. But I understand a lot of people feel very seen by their AIs who don't care for them.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

It's like similar to being a Google doctor. You just know you think you're a doctor just because you could read what Google is saying but doesn't make you a doctor.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I think that's right. Yeah. And I think there is something about someone's will for you to heal. I want you to get better. I care about this process and I'm in it for your benefit. I mean, ideally then all therapists are angels. Right. But I'm making the choices about my interventions for your benefit as much as I possibly can, rather than to keep you online longer or to maintain your subscription or, you know, and I think with what you're doing, if you, if you can really get something, if what's in the good of the person is actually withholding your services. Like, I'm feeling really anxious as. Maybe you should sit with. AI said maybe you should sit with this for a while and come back to me in 20 minutes and see what that's like. That would be amazing.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Dr. Aaron, this is, like, fascinating call meeting.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Really enjoyed it.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

I like, I loved it. Like, you know, like, I like, I. I don't know where I took you, but, like, I felt, like, good.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

I took you to be in surprising places.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

So fascinating.

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

Thank you so much. So much. No, I really enjoyed that. Yeah.

[Shekhar Natarajan]

Thank

[Dr. Aaron Balik]

you. Sa.