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1. 00:02 This is my yellow period. Don’t get your hopes too high. It’s not hepatitis. It’s the lighting. Some would say that this is my orange period. And I am, if anything, politically adaptable. It pays to be orange nowadays. I’m going to discuss something that
2. 00:25 sounds political. regulation or more precisely self-regulation. Now focus on the phrase self regulation. First of all, it implies that there is a self and that this self uses or deploys some kind of regulatory authority, some kind of internal police
3. 00:52 in order to stabilize processes such as effects, emotions and or moods and so on and so forth. It’s a bit misleading and that’s the understatement, the Parisian understatement of the century. It’s a bit misleading because it’s debatable whether we have a self in the classical
4. 01:18 sense or whether it’s a lot more fluid and in flux. And it’s also debatable whether the regulatory environment um the regulation or the self-regulation of emotions for example has anything to do with a regulatory agency which is possessed of some kind
5. 01:44 of regulatory power. whether there is a an internalized law book or criminal criminal you know code that kinds of dictates how the regulation is done and in which case the regulator intervenes and enforces the laws and regulations. That’s not exactly how it works.
6. 02:07 Actually, it’s not at all how it works. I’m here to lend you a a hand and to help you to regulate yourselves or at least to regulate your knowledge about regulation. My name is Sam Vagnin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I am also a
7. 02:26 professor of psychology and right now I’m in the city of lights at least yellow orange lights the known as Paris the capital of France. We we
8. 02:40 Okay, let’s delve right into the topic. Self-regulation is about control. It’s when you control not exactly internal processes, but when you control behavior. And how do you control your behavior? By monitoring yourself. introspection, self-awareness,
9. 03:10 keeping records of your behavior, exper learned experience, lessons you have derived, um inputs from the environment, inhibitory processes, disinhibition in some cases, if for example you’ve taken coke or drank alcohol and so on and so forth. Control is a critical feature of
10. 03:32 self-regulation. But as opposed to what self-styled experts would tell you, self-regulation is not actually about internal processes, but has to do a lot with behavior. And it involves self evaluation, assessing the information obtained during the aforementioned
11. 03:54 self-monitoring or introspection or self-s supervision or whatever you want to call it. So we have self-monitoring followed with by self evaluation assessment and then self-reinforcement rewarding yourself for appropriate behavior for example attaining a goal
12. 04:18 and punishing yourself for inappropriate behavior behavior that is proven to be self-defeating or self-destructive. So it’s all about behavior. Self-regulation is all about behavior. And it’s all about controlling the behavior, channeling the behavior, molding the behavior,
13. 04:39 making choices which are self-enhancing and helpful and goal oriented, not self-defeating, not self-destructive, not selfrashing, not selfharming. And that’s precisely why we say that in certain mental health disorders such as borderline personality disorder there’s
14. 05:00 a massive problem with self-regulation because people with borderline personality disorder are all the above self-defeating self-destructive self- thrashing and selfharming. Self-regul regulatory processes are missing. Indeed, in behavior therapy, in behavior
15. 05:19 therapy, the emphasis is on self-regulatory processes. And as the name of the treatment modality implies, it’s about behavior. So, first we got rid of the first myth that self-regulation is to do is something internal that has to do with internal things. What’s going on inside?
16. 05:40 Not at all. It’s it has to do with the way you act and behave. And because many behaviors are relational, many behaviors are either triggered by the presence of other people are directed at other people in order to modify their behaviors or obtain goals
17. 05:57 and so on so forth. You cannot divorce self-regulation from the social context or socio psychological context. There’s a lot of rel relational relationality in self-regulation. It’s so the word self is very misleading. I I perhaps we should have used the
18. 06:21 phrase self other regulation or something. But to to imply that it’s about self that the self is regulating or even worse the self is being regulated that’s very misleading. Let alone the debate whether there is such a thing as self or whether people
19. 06:41 are actually like rivers they’re in flux displaying at at given times displaying different facets known as self states. We’ll leave that aside. I have a whole playlist dedicated to it. The IPAM IPA play playlist. Okay. So we equated self-regulation with
20. 07:01 self-control. the ability to be in command of one’s behavior, overt behavior, covert behavior, emotional emotionally associated behaviors, or physical behaviors. The ability to restrain and to inhibit one’s impulses. We’ll discuss impulses in a minute.
21. 07:24 In some circumstances, there’s a short-term gain, but there is a longer term greater gain or a longer term or longer term adverse consequences. So, if you can’t control your impulses, you’re likely to opt for plunge into the short-term gain regardless of the fact
22. 07:50 that you are forgoing the greater gain in the future. and or regardless of the fact that there are going to be untoward adverse consequences to your actions. And this is the epitome and the crux and the gist of self-control. Self-control is the ability to opt for long-term
23. 08:08 outcomes that are desirable and to avoid long-term outcomes that are adverse to be averse to adverse undesirable long-term outcomes. So the uh self-control involves aversion to certain outcomes and the desire or the craving of other outcomes. It’s as you can beginning
24. 08:33 beginning beginning to see founded on the pleasure principle. It’s very very primitive. It’s an urge. Self-control is actually an urge and self-regulation is therefore to a large degree instinctual actually to use the langu the lingo of psychoanalysis.
25. 08:51 The choice of short-term outcomes over longer longerterm prospects is known as impulsiveness. Of course, you can’t do any of this if you don’t have self- discipline. Self-discipline is the control of one’s impulses and desires, forgoing immediate
26. 09:11 satisfaction, delaying gratification. We’ll discuss it a bit later. and favoring longerterm desirable goals. There is consequently a resolute adherence to a regimen or course of action in order to achieve these goals. We could therefore say that all these
27. 09:33 complex self-regulation and and so on so forth self-control, self- command, self uh uh discipline, all this all these complex is about goal attainment. It’s goal oriented. This is very ironic because it would mean that psychopaths have an extremely elevated level of
28. 09:57 self-regulation, self-discipline because psychopaths are goal oriented. But of course, this would not be true because what psychopaths regard as goals are usually short-term ones. So psychopaths have a preference for short-term impulsive goals and in this
29. 10:20 sense they end up self-defeating or self-destructing. So while on the face of it superficially psychopaths are goal oriented and therefore more self-regulated they actually less self-regulated because their preference is opposed is the mirror image of the preference of
30. 10:40 healthy people. Healthy people prefer long-term goals and healthy people are averse to adverse outcomes. They prefer desirable outcomes. All this is mediated via what we call impulses. Impulse is a sudden compelling urge to act. Now some impulses result in action without
31. 11:05 deliberation and this is known as impulsion. Um and some uh in some cases there is what is known as impulse control disorder. Impulse control disorder is a disorder characterized by a failure to resist impulses, drives or temptations. Um a compulsion to commit acts that are
32. 11:31 harmful to oneself and to others. So the an impulse control disorder is an element or ingredient in other uh mental health issues, other disorders that may involve problems of impulse control. For example, substance use disorders, paraphilas,
33. 11:51 sexual disorders, conduct disorders, and mood disorders. So yeah, impulses can go arai because they’re very very overwhelmingly strong. They they they flood the zone. You you’re flooded with it. You want it. You want it now. And so it’s very primitive,
34. 12:10 very reptile, if you wish, very very basic, very anim animalistic. In psychonalytic theory, in impulse is the expression of psychic energy from instinctual drives such as sex and hunger. And I think rightly so, although this is this definition is way too
35. 12:26 limited because we have impulses not related to sex and hunger. for example, the impulse impulse to power. But coming back to uh impulses in general, impulse control is when you’re able to resist the impulse. There’s a desire, there’s a temptation, there’s an opportunity.
36. 12:47 You may even believe uh rationally, analytically, you may believe that there will be no negative outcomes should you succumb to the impulse. But you still resist it because for example it’s socially condemned, socially unacceptable or because you don’t want
37. 13:05 to harm other people. So when you resist an impulse, when you regulate the translation of impulse into action, that is impulse control. And impulse control, as I said, can be impaired in in in impulse control disorder. But impulse control involves what we call delayed
38. 13:27 gratification or delay of gratification. It’s when you forgo when you give up on an immediate reward in order to obtain a larger more desired or more pleasurable reward in the future. But this is only one category as I mentioned before. The other category is when you let go of an
39. 13:49 impulse, when you do not allow the impulse to translate into action because you’re simply afraid of the consequences. And of course, in impulse control disorders, there’s immediate gratification, the experience of satisfaction or receipt of reward as
40. 14:04 soon as a response is made. So the your actions are immediately gratifying and this is very addictive and intoxicating and because it is founded on what Freud called the pleasure principle. It was part of the pleasure pain principle. The pleasure principle is a view that human
41. 14:25 beings are governed by the desire for gratification. They they cra they crave pleasure. the discharge of tension that builds up the the cumulative tension and stress and anxiety that build up are experienced as pain unpleasure. And so as long as you don’t discharge
42. 14:48 this, as long as you don’t experience the opposite, as long as you don’t experience pleasure, this unpleasure will continue to accumulate like some kind of toxic uh waste and poison you ultimately. In classical psychoanalytical theory, Ziggman Freud’s work, the pleasure
43. 15:08 principle is the psychic force that motivates people to seek immediate gratification of instinctual libidinal uh impulses. I think today we would call it the dopamineergic um system. Today there is a neuroscientific grounding to the pleasure principle in
44. 15:27 effect. And so Freud said that sex, hunger, thirst, elimination, going to the toilet, um they’re all instincts that have to be immediately uh gratified. But I think he minimized the range and repatory of impulses and drives. For example, I think power, they
45. 15:46 need to be powerful, to be in control, to be a master. I think that’s absolutely equal to sex or to and so in in the trilateral model of uh
46. 16:02 Freud the pleasure principle dominated or controlled the Eid. The Eid operates most strongly during childhood because the ego and super ego super ego is a part of the ego. The ego super ego complex take time to develop. The id is mostly dominant during childhood. And
47. 16:21 you see children have uh problems with delayed gratification. The famous marshmallow experiment. They have problem with delayed gratification and they they seek immediate gratification. Later in adulthood, there’s a reality principle. The ego embodies it and ego mediates
48. 16:39 reality. We’ll not go into all of this. So all this is a kind of not so much regulation. I think the world the word maybe was wrongly true. I mean it’s a wrong choice of word. I think maybe more appropriate to call it self-management. Self-management is when you control your
49. 17:01 behavior. Especially when your behavior is in the pursuit of a particular object. You want to lose weight. You want to have sex with someone. you want to make money. So at that point the impulses and urges could be could drive you to misbehave
50. 17:19 could put you in a place of danger and risk. And so it’s it’s absolutely critical to control your behaviors. You can’t control in reality you can’t control impulses and urges and instincts and drives whatever you you want to call them. You can’t control them. Even
51. 17:36 according to Freud they are biological. You can’t control them. But you can control the translation into action via inhibitory mechanisms, the process of socialization and so on so forth. internalizing um role models, modeling social values and so there various filters and
52. 17:55 membranes that make it very difficult to translate an impulse into action without the mediation of these um layers of meaning and significance and and rules, rulebased uh systems and and so on. So self-management is a desirable aspect for the individual personally and
53. 18:17 socially. But uh self-management can go too far can go too far. It could become rigid. It could become sadistic. It could become it could involve what we call the harsh inner critic or more precisely a bad internalized object. It could it could
54. 18:39 it could take over the individual. It could inhibit the individual to the point of life constriction or life rejection. And perhaps it’s just another way, another metaphor, for example, for schizoid personalities. And so in behavioral therapy nowadays,
55. 19:01 we train clients to apply techniques that help them to modify an undesirable behavior. For example, smoking, excessive eating, aggression, externalized aggression, aggressive outbursts and so on. They learn to pinpoint the problem. They set realistic
56. 19:16 goals for changing and they use various contingencies to establish and maintain a desired behavior and to monitor progress and so on so forth. And in this sense they create a regulatory system. Now in my videos and of course in the literature there’s a lot of discussion
57. 19:33 of emotion dysregulation. Emotion dysregulation is a critical aspect of borderline personality disorder and borderline personality organization. I’ve also dealt a lot with external regulation when all these functions that I’ve mentioned the management system has
58. 19:50 to be outsourced because the inner resources are either insufficient or they’re compromised or they never came into being because of disruption for example in the formation of the self in early childhood. So this video that I’ve made today is a general introduction to
59. 20:07 regulation and then now go and watch the other videos on external regulation and disregulation and you will get the full picture. Regards from Paris.