Good morning. I hope you're doing well. I'm Van Mullen. You from Free Domain and great question

from listener this morning. This is at the wonderful community at freedomain.locals.com. I hope

you'll check it out. Has anyone here worked through deeply rooted traumas like those tied to social anxiety?

From what I understand, says the listener, you're supposed

to identify the core issues like the internalized critical voices from your parents,

but I'm not sure what to do once I've recognized them. Am I supposed to challenge them

with rational counter arguments like debating a critic, or are there other

mental strategies to use, since these voices don't exactly respond to logic? Some examples. Here's

some quotes. You're being a burden. You're taking up too much time. You're too slow. You're too

quiet slash loud. You don't look right.

You should be more perfect. Well, well, well. These are challenging and interesting issues and

questions. So I've talked about this in various scattered podcasts, so I'm going to do a

concentrated run through here about the philosophy of self-criticism, self-attack. So the first thing

you need to understand is if you were cornered by some horrible bully who was huge,

like some 300-pound tank of a man, and he said, well, I can punch you, or you can punch yourself,

what's it going to be? What would you say? Well, you would say, of course, like all of us would,

you would say, I would rather punch myself, because if you punch yourself, then you can control

how much damage you do. You can fake it, you can pretend, so it's much safer to punch yourself

than have someone else punch you.

Because if you've got some big old sadist who wants to see you get hurt, then giving you the

opportunity to hurt yourself is deeply satisfying to the sadist. On two levels. One, he gets to see you in pain, even if you're kind of faking it.

But number two, if he can get you to hit yourself, attack yourself,

...