Hey deserving listeners, I thought I would answer patron emails.

Let's get to the first email here.

Anonymous patron writes,

can you tell us about the psychology workings of stubbornness,

psychological workings of stubbornness and stubborn behavior.

I identify stubbornness as a person's refusal or inability to change or assess their own actions

even after repeated consequences for their actions.

In other words, people who can't or won't change even when it's making their lives worse.

What causes people to act this way? Why can't people change when it could help

their lives? To clarify, this is separate from addiction. I mean stubborn behavior

in general. end of email.

So I could talk a lot about this, but one conceptualization

that I have found to be accurate is that when some people are young they are not allowed to assert themselves.

So think about a child who has the normal range of emotions and desire for power and you have one or both

parents who are either abusive when the child asserts themselves or emotionally coercive or even overprotective.

And the child at the age of three or four learns that they cannot safely express themselves in a spontaneous way,

especially when it comes to asserting their own power,

expressing their own wants.

You know, like, I don't want to take a nap right now, or I don't want to eat that right now,

or I don't want to do my chores or whatever it is that, you know, I guess it'd be weird if a four-year-old had a chore, but I guess picking up their toys or something.

You know, there are normal things that kids will want to assert their power over, and if there's some complication there, the child learns that they can't assert themselves.

But on the inside, they still desire power as anyone would.

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