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Before any honest interior work can happen, one particular fiction has to be dismantled. The idea of normal. Brian Mattocks does not treat this gently. What psychology calls normal is a statistical artifact: thousands of personal histories blended together, averaged out, stripped of every specific variable that makes human experience human. The number that comes out of that process does not descri
Show Notes
Before any honest interior work can happen, one particular fiction has to be dismantled. The idea of normal. Brian Mattocks does not treat this gently. What psychology calls normal is a statistical artifact: thousands of personal histories blended together, averaged out, stripped of every specific variable that makes human experience human. The number that comes out of that process does not describe any person who has ever existed. There is no control group on a street corner, no factory setting, no prototypical human being against whom you can meaningfully measure yourself. What most men are actually doing when they invoke the idea of normal is using a constructed fiction to enforce containment on parts of themselves that are already suppressed and neglected.
This matters practically because the ledger introduced earlier this week does not function if you are measuring it against an imaginary benchmark. You cannot get honest data about your own internal account by comparing it to a standard that was never real. Brian reframes the measurement: instead of comparing yourself to a fictitious average, start comparing today against yesterday. What did it cost to be you in the rooms you occupied this week? What are you carrying that was genuinely yours, and what are you carrying because someone else's idea of normal told you to? The episode closes with a direct reminder that containment is not resolution, and that 20 years of stored emotional intensity does not disappear; it becomes the background depletion that rides on your back without a name.
Key topics this episode:
- Why the psychological concept of normal is a statistical generalization, not a real standard
- How the comparison to normal becomes a weapon turned inward against suppressed parts of yourself
- The difference between antisocial behavior and the internal cost of enforced normality
- Containment versus resolution: storage has a cost that compounds
- Measuring your account against itself rather than against a fiction
- What interoception begins to surface when the false standard is removed
The chains do not come from nowhere. A significant number of them were forged in the effort to match a standard that was never real to begin with.
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- Jorge
Creators and Guests
What is A Mason's Work?
In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.
[00:00] Before we get in any further in this conversation about the masks that we put on and the scripts we tell ourselves, I need to talk about something really, really important.
[00:16] There is no such thing as normal.
[00:26] There's no such thing.
[00:30] If you think you're abnormal or you think you're normal, you are making it up.
[00:39] And I mean this.
[00:41] It's really important.
[00:45] When we talk about a normal response in a psychological context, what you have to know about this is they essentially take the stories of thousands and thousands of people, blend them all together.
[00:59] And out of that stack of stories comes this essentially normalized data set where somewhere in the middle, this is what most people do.
[01:10] It does not factor in anything that matters, right?
[01:15] It is essentially a process where they chew up all the inputs and chew up all the outputs and spit out data that they use to make generalizations about the human experience.
[01:24] And if you are comparing yourself to that generalization about the human experience, you're comparing yourself to a fictitious thing because it, again, doesn't exist.
[01:34] It removes personal history.
[01:37] It removes all of the things that make the human experience human.
[01:43] You can't walk up to a dude on the street and find the control group.
[01:49] There is no factory setting where everyone just kind of is born and there you go.
[01:55] That's a prototypical human being.
[01:57] What we call normal is statistics and people have weaponized those statistics internally and turn them into a comparison engine.
[02:10] You are not to be compared.
[02:13] You are not a problem.
[02:15] Your behavior is not, you know, measured against some sort of global standard of behavior.
[02:21] It's really important that you get this because when you start talking about what's normal internally, you're oftentimes weaponizing that whole idea against parts of yourself that are suppressed, that are beaten up, that are neglected.
[02:43] And so if you recognize that there is no normal, we can start to really do some meaningful work because if there is no normal, every response you have is legitimate.
[03:01] Everything you feel is legitimate.
[03:04] Everything you think is legitimate.
[03:07] Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to immediately fly all the flags and be as freaky as we need to be.
[03:17] We'll get there.
[03:18] I mean, don't get me wrong.
[03:19] That's part of the design intent here is to give you that kind of freedom.
[03:23] But what we need to understand is that in the fight to be normal, we have defeated ourselves.
[03:33] We've created these chains that we carry on with us.
[03:38] Now, this is again, we talked about this just a little bit and I need to be quite clear.
[03:44] This is not a reason or an excuse to be like, well, if there's no normal, then cool.
[03:49] I can start beating people up or I can start being emotionally abusive.
[03:54] This is not a license.
[03:55] The fact that there is no normal doesn't just kind of give you this get out of jail free card.
[04:01] What we do live in is a society and everyone's behaviors kind of mash together and you want to make sure that you're not doing the things that are antisocial.
[04:12] However, when that story of normal is used to create these shackles on your behavior, you really are again, creating these entries in this account that is, uh, you know, leading to this sort of physiological burden over time.
[04:35] If you contain your emotional intensity for 20 years, it's not like that went away.
[04:45] It just kind of made its way under the surface and becomes part of this ongoing depletion that you carry because containment isn't resolution.
[04:55] It's storage.
[04:57] That storage has a cost that we talked about yesterday.
[05:01] So this is what the interoceptive process starts to reveal.
[05:06] It uses your data from your body and it helps you identify these real responses that everything that you have, everything that you're experiencing is legitimate and appropriate, uh, for you to feel.
[05:25] Now, again, you don't want to necessarily have them drive all your actions.
[05:30] So I'm, we, we're going to be clear about this and I'm going to re caveat.
[05:34] This is as often as I can, these behaviors, these things that you've added, these stories, you tell yourself this masking that you do sometimes is entirely appropriate.
[05:47] It's when it's when it's when the cost is more than, uh, what it would be if you were processing it regularly, processing things regularly, that's when it sort of mounts up and turns into this weight that we're trying to avoid.
[06:02] So stop trying to measure your sort of account against some sort of standard that was never real.
[06:11] Start measuring it against itself.
[06:14] What does today feel like?
[06:16] What did yesterday feel like?
[06:19] What does it cost you to be you in the places where you go?
[06:24] What are you carrying that was yours?
[06:28] What are you carrying?
[06:30] That was someone else's idea of what you should be.
[06:34] We're just learning to feel.
[06:36] We're just learning this sense what that instrumentation is telling us.
[06:41] None of these things are, again, you have permission to feel them all because everything that you're feeling is all you got.
[06:51] We'll talk more about this again.
[06:54] The entire arc of this entire podcast is all about understanding these things, processing them, working with them, using the tools, using the roles in the lodge to help close those gaps.
[07:06] But until you can become aware of them, you can't do anything with them.
[07:13] And they are silently just kind of riding on your back, keeping you, keeping you down.
[07:19] We'll work more on this in tomorrow's episode.