Hello there. Thanks for joining tonight and my name is Josh and the next in person will be February 6th, Williamsburg, Grand Street Healing.

So if you're around New York, stop by then.

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Tonight we're talking about unreliable and or abusive relationships.

So in behavioral psychology there's a conditioning called intermittent

reinforcement and I'm gonna be saying that a lot and it's really important to

understand how key intermittent reinforcement is to the allure of unreliable and unfulfilling relationships.

What's called positive reinforcement,

a desirable behavior, say, when a dog performs a trick, the owner of the dog will each time provide a reward, you know, a treat, to reinforce the behavior and the rewards increase the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated.

With a child, if you want a child to do its homework, you might offer a reward afterwards they can watch, I don't know, you see in my case, after I did my homework, my parents would allow me to watch an hour of TV when I was a kid.

Positive reinforcement, predictably you get a positive reward after you do a desirable behavior.

But an intermittent reinforcement,

a reward isn't received each time a desirable behavior.

In fact, the reward only rarely, sporadically, is produced.

And those times that the reward is produced are at very random intervals.

So it's in no way predictable.

Intermittent reinforcement are more powerful than positive reinforcement.

Unpredictability produces all kinds of addictive biochemical responses, it produces suspense and attention.

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