Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as
Speaker 1: an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
Speaker 1: even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
Speaker 1: should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use
Speaker 1: any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners, Well, my guest
Speaker 1: today is somebody I'm sure many of you have heard
Speaker 1: about because of his best selling books and his insightful
Speaker 1: views about dealing with addiction and is being really traveling
Speaker 1: all around the world talking about this. His name is
Speaker 1: gobb Or Matele'tha Hungarian Canadian physician and therapist. He was
Speaker 1: born in Nazi occupied Budapest in nineteen forty four, emigrated
Speaker 1: to Canada in nineteen fifty six and grew up and
Speaker 1: it's been much of his life in Vancouver and he's
Speaker 1: been a practicing physician. He worked for like a dozen
Speaker 1: years with Really Down and Our Drug Users in the
Speaker 1: downtown East side of Vancouver. But Gabbar and I first
Speaker 1: crossed pass about fourteen years or so ago when his
Speaker 1: book came out called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,
Speaker 1: Close Encounters with Addiction, and that book really put gabb
Speaker 1: Or on the map in my world, not just drug policy,
Speaker 1: but the broader world of how we deal with psychoactive
Speaker 1: drugs and addiction. And out of that grew he's really
Speaker 1: becoming a kind of globe trotting speaker and therapist. Uh
Speaker 1: and then at some point getting involved also in ayahuasca.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just had his fascinating life and most cerently,
Speaker 1: a few months ago he came out with a new
Speaker 1: book called The Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing
Speaker 1: in a Toxic Culture. So Gabar, you know, it's good
Speaker 1: to see you again. Thanks so much for joining me
Speaker 1: and my listeners on Psychoactive. It's great to re connect
Speaker 1: with you with anything. That's been a lot of years.
Speaker 1: I know. I mean, I was thinking back to Uh,
Speaker 1: I guess it was you must have come to New
Speaker 1: York in two thousand eight or nine, called me up
Speaker 1: when we had lunch together, and I have to tell you,
Speaker 1: over the years, I've heard so many people who have
Speaker 1: been so shaped and influenced and even you know, in
Speaker 1: some respects saved by by your teaching. So I really
Speaker 1: want to get into that, and I want to give
Speaker 1: you a chance to talk about the new book. But
Speaker 1: of course for me and the listeners, you know, the
Speaker 1: focus is very much on drugs and addictions. So part
Speaker 1: of what we'll be talking about is really the overlap
Speaker 1: in the connection between those two. So let me just
Speaker 1: start off by asking you. I mean, you had that
Speaker 1: book Hungry Ghosts, and now you have the myth of Normal,
Speaker 1: which is not just about a action, but really about
Speaker 1: a whole range of physiological you know, maladies and such.
Speaker 1: And the common link appears to be your focus on trauma.
Speaker 1: So just explain that link and also the evolution from
Speaker 1: the Hungry Ghost book to the current one. Sure, So,
Speaker 1: what I'm actually arguing is, and and it's not just
Speaker 1: a matter of my personal insight, but really a lot
Speaker 1: of science that demonstrates this is that the common denominator
Speaker 1: in most chronic conditions of mind and body is actually trauma.
Speaker 1: And this is what through whether or not we're talking
Speaker 1: about addictions. The so named mental illnesses from a d
Speaker 1: H data depression to psychosystem bipolar conditions, borderline personality. All
Speaker 1: these diagnoses they have a common threat of trauma, as
Speaker 1: do rumatotritis, multiple scrossism, automan diseases, in general, many malignancies
Speaker 1: as well as do addictions. Of course, I've always argued
Speaker 1: that addictions are rooted in trauma, and so that's the
Speaker 1: common thread is trauma. And the reason the book is
Speaker 1: subtitled Traumulence and Healing in the Toxic Culture is because
Speaker 1: I argue that the very conditions of life in modern
Speaker 1: day globalized, corporate capitalist society actually traumatized people, They hurt people,
Speaker 1: they wound people, and that diseases of mind and body
Speaker 1: in this environment are not abnormal their normal responses to
Speaker 1: what is an abnormal culture. M hm m hm. So
Speaker 1: you know, at one point, there's a quote that you
Speaker 1: have starting with the chapters by Eric Framm. I mean
Speaker 1: you say, the fact that millions of people share the
Speaker 1: same vices does not make these vices virtues. The fact
Speaker 1: that they share so many errors does not make the
Speaker 1: errors to be truth. And the fact that millions of
Speaker 1: people share the same forms of mental pathology does not
Speaker 1: make these people saying so expand on that. Sure, So
Speaker 1: we have this idea that normal equates too healthy and
Speaker 1: natural and within a narrow range of of understanding that
Speaker 1: is correct. So in medical parlance, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: range of circumstances or parameters within machuman life thrives and
Speaker 1: is sustainable. So there's a normal range of temperature. If
Speaker 1: you fall below or go above that, your life is
Speaker 1: at risk. There's a normal range of blood picture that
Speaker 1: equates to what is healthy and natural. Below that or
Speaker 1: above that, life is threatened. So normal there means healthy
Speaker 1: and natural. We make any assumption that that would be
Speaker 1: used to in society in general is also healthy and natural.
Speaker 1: And what froms citation from a book he wrote in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties called the Same Society and I have
Speaker 1: to say it in common, is that what is considered
Speaker 1: the norm in this culture is actually pathological. So that
Speaker 1: for example, the idea, sort of the motivating idea, the
Speaker 1: assumption about human nature that we are aggressive, competitive, individualistic creatures,
Speaker 1: that's the norm, that's what sold to us as reality.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's a pathology. It creates a whole lot
Speaker 1: of illness. Very specifically, it is normal in this culture
Speaker 1: um for parents to be told not to pick up
Speaker 1: their kids when they're crying. That's the norm. But it's
Speaker 1: completely healthy and unnatural and totally foreign to human evolution,
Speaker 1: to indigenous cultures, or for that matter, to any of
Speaker 1: the mammalian relatives. You know, you tell a mother gorilla
Speaker 1: not to pick up their baby when they're distressed. You know.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the things that are actually pathological,
Speaker 1: and they're shared across the culture, are actually unhealthy and
Speaker 1: and and and and unnatural, and they create the disease. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there's one part of me that
Speaker 1: listens to this and say, well, I mean, yes, you
Speaker 1: look around what's going on, you know, especially with technology now,
Speaker 1: and you know, the screen dominating more and more people's lives,
Speaker 1: especially young people. Beyond that, and and a whole range
Speaker 1: of other things that does in faccine pathological consumerism, materialism,
Speaker 1: you know, the crasser elements of dynamic capitalism around the world,
Speaker 1: you know, And the other part of me goes, doesn't
Speaker 1: that in a way sort of romanticize a past. I mean,
Speaker 1: we think about the fact that people's average lifespan has
Speaker 1: gotten so much longer. We think about the frequency with
Speaker 1: whish people oftentype die all times people died violently, you know,
Speaker 1: as oftentimes a much larger numbers in you know, centuries
Speaker 1: past and decades past. We think about the pervasive racism
Speaker 1: and sexism and and stuff that happened in the past.
Speaker 1: So is I mean, didn't those prior societies also have
Speaker 1: their own traumatic traumas, even if mothers were better at
Speaker 1: nurturing their apies, are not deluded by these directives about
Speaker 1: what's the proper way to bring up a kid? Well,
Speaker 1: even that's a good question, but it's a question of
Speaker 1: what what baseline are we looking at if we're looking
Speaker 1: at our revolutionary origins, what you're saying is not the case,
Speaker 1: so that human beings have lived in what we cause
Speaker 1: civilization only for about twelve thousand years, twelve to fifteen
Speaker 1: years at the most. Now our own species, Homo sapiens
Speaker 1: we've been on earth for about hundred fifty two hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years, and other hominin species, you know, pre modern humans,
Speaker 1: but fellow human beings have lived on the earth for
Speaker 1: at least half a million year or longer, and evolutionarily speaking,
Speaker 1: hominids have been here for millions of years and so
Speaker 1: all that time until twelve thousand and fifteen thoud years ago,
Speaker 1: we lived in small band hunter gatherer roots. That's how
Speaker 1: we evolved. That is what a wonderful researcher, our CNRS
Speaker 1: from Not to Day University calls our revolution there in niche. Now,
Speaker 1: in that evolutionary's niche, it's not true that we had
Speaker 1: more disease. Um, it's not true that we are more violence.
Speaker 1: So in those small groups, people basically lived collaboratively, coaterly.
Speaker 1: They had to. It's not a question of moral superiority,
Speaker 1: it's a question of that sort of took to survive.
Speaker 1: And so in those environments, children were picked up, they
Speaker 1: weren't put down. Um. Children spent their whole their on
Speaker 1: the adults. And this has been studied in terms of
Speaker 1: those indigenous cultures that have not been totally destroyed by colonialism.
Speaker 1: They tend to be much healthier than we are. Actually, well,
Speaker 1: I don't. I mean, I also think about you know,
Speaker 1: even pre colonialism, right, I mean, you have a hundred
Speaker 1: graduate groups. But they had to fear about animals coming
Speaker 1: in and eating their parents in the middle of the
Speaker 1: ninth they had to worry about marauding groups. And that's
Speaker 1: that I have to say that that's a modern assumption,
Speaker 1: that's not what the research shows. Well, but it does
Speaker 1: vary from I mean, even if one looks, for example,
Speaker 1: some of the history of Native Americans, you know, before
Speaker 1: even colonization, or you look at you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: you had you know, warring tribes, and you had that
Speaker 1: were some others that were sedentary and landed. That the
Speaker 1: same was true elsewhere. Well, what you're saying is true.
Speaker 1: So it depends on what level of civilization we're at. See,
Speaker 1: what I'm saying is that once you get larger groupings
Speaker 1: and more civilized quote unquote societies, you're going to get
Speaker 1: more and more what you're talking about. It's not a
Speaker 1: matter of romanticizing anything, and it's soon not a matter
Speaker 1: of returning to ways of life that are no longer
Speaker 1: accessible to us. But it is a matter of learning
Speaker 1: what we've lost in the process. So that when the
Speaker 1: Christians came to North America, they were appalled by the
Speaker 1: parenting practices of the natives. You know why, because the
Speaker 1: natives didn't beat their kids into the into the Christians,
Speaker 1: this was a sin. And yet we know that we
Speaker 1: know that beating kids is actually traumatic for kids. And
Speaker 1: these people did not hit their children. And so again
Speaker 1: it's not a matter of romanticizing a way of life
Speaker 1: or or saying that they were perfect. They were not.
Speaker 1: But we've lost a lot so in in terms of
Speaker 1: our civilization, for all our achievements, we've lost certainty, the
Speaker 1: attachment relationships that the Indigenous people would have with their
Speaker 1: children and with each other. We've lost a sense of
Speaker 1: common communality. Um in. In for this book, I spoke
Speaker 1: with an American psychiatrist and physician called Lewis mel Madrona.
Speaker 1: And Lewis has written books on book called Coyote Medicine,
Speaker 1: and he's a book called Narrative Medicine and the part
Speaker 1: of storytelling and healing, And he's from Lakota background partly.
Speaker 1: And he says that in a a court edition and somebody
Speaker 1: gets ill, they say to the person, in effect, thank you,
Speaker 1: your illness is manifesting some dysfunction in our whole culture,
Speaker 1: in the whole society, in the whole community. So you're
Speaker 1: he is our healing. Now, scientifically that is actually the case,
Speaker 1: but Western medicine forgets that we separate the mind from
Speaker 1: the body. And we separate individual from the environment, and
Speaker 1: yet that localtota edition scientifically is much more accurate. So so,
Speaker 1: for example, UM, an American black woman, the more experiences
Speaker 1: of racism they experience, the higher their risk for asthma.
Speaker 1: So there's something about social stress and racist stress that
Speaker 1: actually inflames the lungs the airways of the individual. Which
Speaker 1: means is that asthma a disease of an isolated organ
Speaker 1: in a body, or is it representing a social malaise not?
Speaker 1: The only scientific way of understanding is that the two
Speaker 1: can't be separated. So so I'm saying that there's things
Speaker 1: of an indigenous wisdom that for a long time, UM,
Speaker 1: we're dismissed, but which modern science has actually proven we
Speaker 1: have a lot to learn by not being certainly by
Speaker 1: not being arrogant about our achievements while ignoring all that
Speaker 1: we have lost in terms of human connection. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you, in reading the Myth of Normal these last
Speaker 1: few days, was struck by the amount of evidence that
Speaker 1: you marshaled in terms of the impact of what happens
Speaker 1: to us while we're in our mother's wombs and in
Speaker 1: early childhood, in terms of affecting you know everything from
Speaker 1: various forms of mental and emotional health to even physical health.
Speaker 1: I mean you, but you mentioned, for example at one
Speaker 1: point a sort of semi famous study called the ACE study,
Speaker 1: the Adverse Childhood Experienced the study, and then you dropped
Speaker 1: references to hundreds of others, including the one you were
Speaker 1: mentioning about the impact of racism. But just tell our
Speaker 1: listeners something about that a study and why it was significant,
Speaker 1: and what sort of research out there. It's emblematic of well,
Speaker 1: let me tell you about these studies, and then I
Speaker 1: also let me tell you a bit of our horror story.
Speaker 1: So they studies. They studies stands for adverse Childhood Experiences,
Speaker 1: and these studies have been done originally done in California
Speaker 1: and the Kaiser Permanent They Health system. They looked at about,
Speaker 1: I think but seventeen thousand adults and they did a
Speaker 1: question on their childhoods and they identified what they called
Speaker 1: address childhood experiences or a C s. Anybody listening, they
Speaker 1: can go to the web and just download their a
Speaker 1: C questionnaire. And an a C or an adage childhood
Speaker 1: experience is say physical sexual promotional abuse. That's three the
Speaker 1: depth of a parent, the parent being addicted, apparently mentally
Speaker 1: all a parent being jailed, a rancors divorce valnce in
Speaker 1: a family, one parent hitting another. So for each of
Speaker 1: these adverage Charldter experiences, the risk of addiction goes up.
Speaker 1: And used to work with addictions very much, and so
Speaker 1: the risk of addiction goes up exponentially. They don't add up,
Speaker 1: they multiply. By the time a male child has had
Speaker 1: six of these, his risk of being him an injection
Speaker 1: using substance dependent adult is forty greater forty six fold
Speaker 1: increase than that of a child. But no such experiences.
Speaker 1: So there's a clear link between these traumatic incidents in
Speaker 1: childhood and adult addiction, but not just addiction, also mental
Speaker 1: health issues, autommune disease and so on. So those are
Speaker 1: the a C studies, and they have been published all
Speaker 1: over the world. They've been repeated always with the same
Speaker 1: results internationally, and they've been published in major medical journals,
Speaker 1: psychological journals. That's the a C studies, crucial studies in
Speaker 1: showing the relationship between early trauma adversity and adult illness
Speaker 1: of mind and body. That's the nutshell version of it. Now,
Speaker 1: the horror story is this five years ago, so by
Speaker 1: the way, not just the A C studies, but you
Speaker 1: mentioned all those studies that I collated literally for writing
Speaker 1: this book I've over ten years, are brought together twenty
Speaker 1: five different articles, many of them many of them research papers,
Speaker 1: scientific publications, medical journal articles about all this stuff. So
Speaker 1: there's all this research now that a woman's stresses during pregnancy,
Speaker 1: which is transmitted to the fetus through the umbilical cord
Speaker 1: and the stress hormones of the mother and the nervous
Speaker 1: system reactions to the mother, they have an impact on
Speaker 1: the infant, but is measurable even in utero by various techniques,
Speaker 1: and which show up in higher propensity to disease and
Speaker 1: mental health problems in the child. Later on, and giving
Speaker 1: this talk to an Indigenous group here in Canada some
Speaker 1: years ago, I had a young man come up to
Speaker 1: me and says, hey, Doc, you know what you just said.
Speaker 1: In our community, when a woman was pregnant and then
Speaker 1: if you were stressed or angry, you were not permitted
Speaker 1: to go near them because we didn't want you passing
Speaker 1: on your stress or anger to the infant. So they
Speaker 1: knew this intuitively, nobody have the signs to show it.
Speaker 1: The horror story you know I'm putting in quotation marks
Speaker 1: is that was in Norway five years ago you speaking
Speaker 1: at an addiction conference. There were two very famous American
Speaker 1: speakers there. I will not embarrass them by giving their names,
Speaker 1: but one of them is very high up in the
Speaker 1: world of CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, as high up as
Speaker 1: you can get. The other is a very well known
Speaker 1: American psychiatrist. He edited one of the versions of the
Speaker 1: d s M and is published extensively um and quoted
Speaker 1: extensive in the national media. Very well known people. Both
Speaker 1: of them. We had dinner before the conference and I
Speaker 1: said to the one of them, where do you live?
Speaker 1: And they mentioned a certain city. I said, oh, you
Speaker 1: must know Dr Vincent Felippi. He said, who's that? I said, well,
Speaker 1: I said, Feliti happens to be the lead investigator for
Speaker 1: the famous adverse Childer Experiences studies. This leading American psychologist
Speaker 1: and this leading American psychiatrists both said, what are those
Speaker 1: They've never heard of them, despite the fact that they're
Speaker 1: being published all of the world in all manner of
Speaker 1: leading scientific and medical publications. That's the horror story, is
Speaker 1: that on the one hand, we have all this research
Speaker 1: all this evidence. On the other hand, the leading institutions
Speaker 1: and the leading representatives of the so called healing institutions
Speaker 1: and our culture don't even have acquaintance with all that information.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. Okay, well, let me ask you this because
Speaker 1: you know, it seems to me in sort of psychotherapy
Speaker 1: and trying to heal, right, that that one of the
Speaker 1: kind of overlapping elements, even with the cognitive behavioral therapy folks, right,
Speaker 1: is that part of what's so crucial is changing one's story,
Speaker 1: one's narrative. And I noticed in reading your stuff it's
Speaker 1: also about changing the story. If you change the narrative,
Speaker 1: now you're changing the narrative is much more dear, you know,
Speaker 1: grounded in trying to process and get out underlying elements
Speaker 1: of the trauma, the prenatal trauma, the the childhood trauma. Um.
Speaker 1: But the is it and it is what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: right that this change in changing one's story one's narrative
Speaker 1: about one's life is a common element in much of
Speaker 1: what proves to be effective in in psychotherapy and in healing. Imprinciple,
Speaker 1: that's true. In practice, it depends on precisely I did
Speaker 1: that goes and with what kind of insights. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so I talked about myself and my own particular infancy
Speaker 1: where you mentioned I was born, or at least I
Speaker 1: spent most of my first year under Nazi occupation and
Speaker 1: Hungary and under threat of annihilation. My mother and I
Speaker 1: and for five weeks were separated. I couldn't wouldn't even
Speaker 1: see her as a as a one year eleven month old.
Speaker 1: Now what I made that mean? What I mean it
Speaker 1: means is that I wasn't lovable, and I wasn't loved,
Speaker 1: and I was being abandoned. I couldn't interpret that no
Speaker 1: other way. No. In fact, of course it really happened.
Speaker 1: Was that her giving me to the stranger in the
Speaker 1: streets of Budapest, a place that where I stood right
Speaker 1: on the spot just a few weeks ago, actually was
Speaker 1: an act of incredible love and courage and self sacrifice.
Speaker 1: You know, imagine the twenty four old woman giving a
Speaker 1: baby to a stranger in the street to save his life,
Speaker 1: but as an infant, had no other way of understanding
Speaker 1: it but that this is an abandonment, and who gets
Speaker 1: abandoned somebody who deserves to be abandoned. So I grew
Speaker 1: up with that kind of self concept. Healing does involved,
Speaker 1: in the end, come to terms with the stories that
Speaker 1: the trauma imprinted in your brain and in your body.
Speaker 1: I just don't think it's as simple as some people
Speaker 1: make it out to be. So I've read by and
Speaker 1: Cage's book with great appreciation and her our questions doing
Speaker 1: the work. The four questions that she asked are really
Speaker 1: helpful very often in relationships because what they do is
Speaker 1: they they actually invite the person to take responsibility for
Speaker 1: their beliefs and their reactions, not to make the other
Speaker 1: person wrong for them. That's really good, But they don't
Speaker 1: really deal with the trauma element very much, which is
Speaker 1: how people develop these beliefs in the first place and
Speaker 1: and the traumatic imprints that keep them going. So as
Speaker 1: useful as that work is, I find I do find
Speaker 1: it lacking in that area. And and so that's and
Speaker 1: that's the problem with most of these therapies like CBT
Speaker 1: will change your stories, but mostly the conscious stories that
Speaker 1: you already know or that can be listited through conscious questioning.
Speaker 1: But a lot of the stories that people carry about themselves,
Speaker 1: for example, that I'm not worthy, that I have to
Speaker 1: prove the value of my existence by being a work
Speaker 1: call it doctor. Those are not conscious. I'm not aware
Speaker 1: of them. They're automatic because they're imprinted in my unconscious
Speaker 1: and so so do A deep therapy has to go
Speaker 1: to what are you carrying that you're not aware of? Which, nevertheless,
Speaker 1: um controls your life in certain In a certain sense,
Speaker 1: these dynamics are like uh strings in the hands of
Speaker 1: a puppet. Here you know, and and report like puppets
Speaker 1: by these unconscious strings until you'll come aware. We'll be
Speaker 1: talking more after we hear this. Add is there an
Speaker 1: element to what you're saying it's also Freudian because I
Speaker 1: know it's like in the myth of normal Freud barely
Speaker 1: gets to mention um. But is there a commonality with
Speaker 1: Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of wanting to go back to
Speaker 1: those early stages? And if so, yes, and to what
Speaker 1: extent no? Yeah? So so. Freud was a very flawed
Speaker 1: genius and both genius and very flawed. And the reason
Speaker 1: I don't talk about him much is because fundamentally he
Speaker 1: betrayed himself. So his original understanding of mental illness or
Speaker 1: what he called neurosis in those days, and this isn't
Speaker 1: a paper that he printed in did say that a
Speaker 1: lot of the patients have come to him were sexually abused.
Speaker 1: And this, however, didn't fly very well in polite Viennese
Speaker 1: middle class society. And if you wanted to be a
Speaker 1: successful doctor and celebrated, he'd had to walk that one back. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: he hadn't dealt with his own trauma, so it comes
Speaker 1: up with all these co com ami theories like the
Speaker 1: Oedipus complex and electroc complex, and basically that these these
Speaker 1: young women who had reported sexual abuse were in fact
Speaker 1: fantasizing about sleeping with their fathers. So he fundamentally made
Speaker 1: a good step, and then he raised his own footprints
Speaker 1: and developed all these co com ami theories. But what
Speaker 1: was significant contribution on his part were, I would say,
Speaker 1: to number of basic concepts, but the two fundamental ones
Speaker 1: was that so much of what makes us act resides
Speaker 1: in the unconscious, and that that unconscious is shaped early
Speaker 1: childhood experiences. That's absolutely true what he made of that
Speaker 1: because he couldn't deal with the trauma, he just couldn't. Really,
Speaker 1: he couldn't face the trauma. He basically got scared of
Speaker 1: his own shadow. And so the psychoanalysis was thrown away off,
Speaker 1: of course, and hence you have this phenomenon of people
Speaker 1: being therapy and analysis for years and years and years,
Speaker 1: you know, and they're like kind of a Woody Allen
Speaker 1: character of one of his movies who is in the
Speaker 1: therapy forever and doesn't change at all, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: it probably reflects on the author of those movies as well.
Speaker 1: So I don't talk about Freud very much because he
Speaker 1: didn't understand trauma. In fact, he he ignored it. And
Speaker 1: and and no understanding of human development or mental illness
Speaker 1: can possibly strike home unless people understand the traumatic source
Speaker 1: as it affects the development of the personality, but also
Speaker 1: as it defects the physiological development of the nervous system itself.
Speaker 1: You quote at one point Bethel Vandercock write another kind
Speaker 1: of colleague who's written about trauma his book The Body
Speaker 1: Knows the Score, and you quote him is saying all
Speaker 1: trauma is preverble, and trauma is not what happens to you,
Speaker 1: but what happens inside you. I guess that is how
Speaker 1: you say you put it. And then you quote Besselvenorcock
Speaker 1: again the saying trauma is when we are not seen
Speaker 1: and knowing exactly. So that can show up in vite
Speaker 1: dire ways, because when somebody sexually abuses a child, they're
Speaker 1: not seeing the child. They're seeing an object that they
Speaker 1: want to use for their own purposes. But that dynamic
Speaker 1: of not being seen can happen without any abuse whatsoever,
Speaker 1: just in the home where the parents are too stress depressed, distracted,
Speaker 1: caught up in our own relationship issues, their own addiction perhaps,
Speaker 1: or just the stresses of modern life, the lack of time,
Speaker 1: the child will not be seen, and being seen I
Speaker 1: mean as a as a full human being is an
Speaker 1: essential developmental need of the child, just as much as
Speaker 1: food is. So people can be wounded in in the
Speaker 1: in the dramatic ways that the a C studies indicate,
Speaker 1: but children can also be wounded just because their needs
Speaker 1: in this stress culture are not being met. Hence the
Speaker 1: epidemic of childhood health problems. M H. Now, you're pretty
Speaker 1: damning about both the whole notion of the disease theory.
Speaker 1: Calling addiction a disease, I mean saying that on the
Speaker 1: one hand, there are sort of commonalities there, but that
Speaker 1: thinking about his disease is fundamentally a problem and you're
Speaker 1: also damning about all the genetic determinism, you know, in
Speaker 1: all the way people reference say that the twins who
Speaker 1: are separated at birth grow up in different environments. But
Speaker 1: then unless have higher incidences a certain types of you know,
Speaker 1: behaviors or whether they're negative behaviors, positive behaviors. But I mean,
Speaker 1: and the genetic thing. I think you at one point
Speaker 1: you quote Robert Zapolski saying we're freer from genetics than
Speaker 1: any other species on Earth, and then you quote two
Speaker 1: friend scientists saying, when all is said and done, the
Speaker 1: individual is genetically determined, not to be genetically determined. So
Speaker 1: just explain to our listeners more about why this genetic
Speaker 1: you know, emphasis on genetic terminism is so fundamentally flawed.
Speaker 1: And then we'll get into disease theory a bit. So
Speaker 1: here's the deal. Nobody has ever found a single gene
Speaker 1: that if you have it, you're gonna have a certain
Speaker 1: mental health condition. No, but well, with the exception of um,
Speaker 1: there are some rare cases where somebody has a genetic
Speaker 1: disposition to Alzheimer's. Okay, that's true. Most case of Alzheimer's
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with genes. There is Huntington's Korea
Speaker 1: that would have got three you know, suffered with UM.
Speaker 1: That's genetic. If you have the gene, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: the disease, or taste X disease among the cues, or
Speaker 1: maybe sickle cell adine. You're exactly like these exists. There's
Speaker 1: there's a disease called muscular dystrophy that runs in my family.
Speaker 1: My mother had it, my aunt had it. If you
Speaker 1: have the gene, you're gonna have the disease. Those diseases
Speaker 1: are very rare, like one in ten thousands something like that,
Speaker 1: and most conditions, lest speak of mental health conditions just
Speaker 1: for the moment, there's no single gene that if you
Speaker 1: have it you're can have depression and or anxiety or addiction.
Speaker 1: There's no group of genes that if you have it,
Speaker 1: you're can have depression, anxiety, or addiction or a d
Speaker 1: h D. And there's no google genes that if you
Speaker 1: don't have them, you can't have these diseases, so that
Speaker 1: it's not genetic. Now, there is something genetic going on here.
Speaker 1: It's true that there's a large amorphous group of genes
Speaker 1: that the more of them you have, the more you're
Speaker 1: likely to have almost any mental health condition, but nothing specific.
Speaker 1: So nothing is generally determined, and you can be born
Speaker 1: with the same genes and not have any disease whatsoever.
Speaker 1: All depends on the environment. So what is genes do
Speaker 1: confer is degrease of sensitivity. And the more sensitive you
Speaker 1: are temperamentally, the more you're going to be affected by
Speaker 1: whatever happens in the environment. That means if the amownment
Speaker 1: is harmful or doesn't meant you need, you're gonna be
Speaker 1: more acted than somebody else. It also means that a
Speaker 1: term moment is supportive and nurturing, you can be that
Speaker 1: much better off than somebody else. But the ges themselves
Speaker 1: don't determine. Okay. Now this is contrary to most but
Speaker 1: most doctors believe in the face of all the science.
Speaker 1: Why is that. First of all, genetics offer three benefits
Speaker 1: quote unquote. One is they're simple. Oh it's genetic, okay,
Speaker 1: and now we understand it, and the mind like simple explanations.
Speaker 1: Number one. Number two, if it's genetic in a family,
Speaker 1: For example, if a parent comes to me with the
Speaker 1: childhood h D and if I tell them, well, it's
Speaker 1: a genetic condition, the parent feels off the hook, because
Speaker 1: what can they do about the genes that they passed on.
Speaker 1: As opposed if I say to them, you know, this
Speaker 1: is a temperamentally genetic, very sensitive child, and he's responding
Speaker 1: to family stress. For me in euro onwards, that's more
Speaker 1: difficult for parents to deal with because now they feel
Speaker 1: a lot of inappropriate but almost natural guilt for having
Speaker 1: screwed up their kids. So the genetics takes them off
Speaker 1: the hook. On a social level, genetics says, you know,
Speaker 1: when I quote Louis Menon writing a New Yorker about
Speaker 1: this one day, he says, you know, why should somebody
Speaker 1: be upset or use drugs or you know, in the
Speaker 1: in the healthiest and the most free society in the world,
Speaker 1: it can't be the environment. It must be the genes.
Speaker 1: So society is taken up to hook of looking at
Speaker 1: hobby traumatize large numbers of people. So in Canada, an
Speaker 1: Indigenous woman as six times the rate of rumor to
Speaker 1: the advitis than that of anybody else. In the United States,
Speaker 1: people of color have much more on us high blood pressure,
Speaker 1: autoimmune disease, and so on and so forth. If it's
Speaker 1: all genetic, we don't have to look at racism as
Speaker 1: a social construct and all. But you are saying that
Speaker 1: genetics can lead to a greater probability of somebody being
Speaker 1: afflicted with a particular condition. It's just it's obviously not
Speaker 1: deterministic because the environmental factors, they're both interpersonal and broader.
Speaker 1: Are we play the much more important role? Is that right? Well,
Speaker 1: the genets only play the role in the sense of
Speaker 1: creating a high degree of sensitivity, so people are more
Speaker 1: more reactive to the environment. Um to go back to
Speaker 1: the twin study question. You know they separate twins at birth,
Speaker 1: has sometimes happened. Then it turns out that it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter if they brought up in different homes. They have
Speaker 1: a great propensity to have some of the similar conditions,
Speaker 1: so that if one has a d h D, the
Speaker 1: other was also, it's got a seventy chance of having
Speaker 1: a d h D. This proves that is genetic. It
Speaker 1: proves the opposite its genetic. Why isn't it a d
Speaker 1: that's the first point. The second point is it's not
Speaker 1: true that twins didn't have the same environment. They spend
Speaker 1: nine months in the same uterus. Not any woman that's
Speaker 1: going to give up a baby for adoption is by
Speaker 1: definition of stress woman, she's a single mom and addicted mom,
Speaker 1: poor mom, an abused mom, and unsupported teenage mom and others.
Speaker 1: For nine months. The homers of stress are going through
Speaker 1: to the baby, to the placenta. We've already talked about that.
Speaker 1: And then there is the separation from a birth mother,
Speaker 1: which is an incredible trauma to an infant, to any
Speaker 1: infant of any mammal. And the human being is really
Speaker 1: meant to be with the mother for a long time. No,
Speaker 1: that doesn't happen in his separation. Twin studies, any wonder
Speaker 1: that if one to and there's a condition the other
Speaker 1: one as an ingredient also increased change of evgant. It's
Speaker 1: got nothing a little genetics, except for the fact that
Speaker 1: if they're genetically similar, they're bound to have the same sensitivities.
Speaker 1: M hm. Now, much the same can be said about
Speaker 1: the whole emphasis on calling addiction is a disease, because
Speaker 1: when you do that, you obviously take the responsibility to
Speaker 1: some level off the individual or off the people who
Speaker 1: have been you know, pivot in their life like their parents. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, but you also you're interested you take issue
Speaker 1: at one point you know, you're the great you know,
Speaker 1: critic of the late twentieth century in America, Susan Sontag,
Speaker 1: whose famous essay was called Illness as Metaphor, And you say, God,
Speaker 1: I really admire her, but I wish she hadn't been
Speaker 1: so wrong, and the way she laid this out, well,
Speaker 1: Susan Santagg, as you know, died of cancer um and
Speaker 1: she wrote this illness is a metaphor, as a stern
Speaker 1: and almost contemptuous dismissal of the idea that emotions that
Speaker 1: anything to do with physical illness. And mostly because she
Speaker 1: didn't want to be coupitalized, as she said, culpitalized. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to make to feel guilty for my own illness.
Speaker 1: But what's her actual story? You know, actual story was
Speaker 1: she was a severely traumatized child who his mother left
Speaker 1: her when she was a couple of months old, came
Speaker 1: back into her life when she was three or four
Speaker 1: years old, left again. Susan actually writes in her diary
Speaker 1: that she was very angry with her mother, and she
Speaker 1: turned that anger against herself. She repressed her own emotions
Speaker 1: in know to be accepted by other people. Precisely the
Speaker 1: dynamics that lead to illness. So on the one hand,
Speaker 1: she had this incredible insight into her own mind. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, she denied the connection between those dynamics
Speaker 1: and illness, which scientifically is completely incorrect. So it's very
Speaker 1: sad to read her because on the one that she
Speaker 1: even knew that she disconnected from her true self in
Speaker 1: order to adapt her childhood environment, she turned her anger
Speaker 1: at her mother against herself in terms of self loathing.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm recording her own words, and at the same
Speaker 1: time denied that I had anything to do with the illnesses.
Speaker 1: And I'm telling you they do for physiological reasons, because
Speaker 1: when you suppress your emotions, you're actually messing with your physiology. Why,
Speaker 1: because you can't separate the mind from the body. Now
Speaker 1: you say, I only want to suggest that quote disease
Speaker 1: is more therapeutically useful as a metaphor rather than as
Speaker 1: a literal fact. Yeah. Well, so here's the thing. So
Speaker 1: let's say that I say to you, Ethan, I have
Speaker 1: an addiction, I have rheumatildritis, or I have depression. There's
Speaker 1: an assumption in that statement. What is the assumption? The
Speaker 1: assumption is is that there are two entities. There's this disease,
Speaker 1: this thing. Then there's an eye, and I have this thing.
Speaker 1: Now you aren't aren't on video, but I love to
Speaker 1: take my word for it. I have a teacup in
Speaker 1: my hand. It's a thing. It's not a part of me.
Speaker 1: It's not a manifestation of me. I can put it on,
Speaker 1: I can pick it up, I can drink from it,
Speaker 1: I can smash it if I want to, But it's
Speaker 1: got nothing to do with me. To say that I
Speaker 1: have a disease is to assume that there's this entity
Speaker 1: called multiple scrosses or addiction or rumatilithritis that are separate
Speaker 1: from me and I. The entity that's I has that thing,
Speaker 1: and that thing has got a nature of its own.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that all illnesses, whatever mind, own body, they're
Speaker 1: not things with their own self determined trajectory. There are
Speaker 1: processes that happen in a person, and there are personses
Speaker 1: that happen both on the physiological psychological level and her
Speaker 1: processes that reflect a person's life experience from conception onwards.
Speaker 1: So to look on disease is the process in which
Speaker 1: I can take some active agency. It's very different from
Speaker 1: saying I got this disease, and here's the prognosis. That
Speaker 1: prognosis has got nothing to do with you as a person.
Speaker 1: That's based on statistics, based on statistics collated by physicians
Speaker 1: who understand nothing about the mind body unity. Right, But
Speaker 1: it goes to the whole way, whether as a culture
Speaker 1: or as an individual or a relationship with doctor, we
Speaker 1: talk about conquering this pain, conquering the disease, beating the addiction,
Speaker 1: war on cancer, and which you're basically saying, what we
Speaker 1: really needed the dialogue with any one of those things. Um,
Speaker 1: you spent so much of your useful working life trying
Speaker 1: to under undo the myths perpetrated by the so called
Speaker 1: war on drugs. And we know how successful the war
Speaker 1: on drugs have been. It's been so successful that last
Speaker 1: year over Americans died over overdoses. You know that's a
Speaker 1: successful it's been. Now it's the same with the war
Speaker 1: on cancer. We're not a minute closer to solving the
Speaker 1: problem of cancer then we were fifty years ago. Except
Speaker 1: in some conditions there's been some progress, but overall no,
Speaker 1: the war on illness, aut immune diseases are rising rather
Speaker 1: than subsiding, and so this whole battling and warring against
Speaker 1: some enemy misses the point that illnesses of mind and body,
Speaker 1: addictions and so on, our processes got a normal responses,
Speaker 1: to have normal circumstances, and that we can actually deal
Speaker 1: with them by understanding their true nature, not by seeing
Speaker 1: them as some kind of a mysterious enemy, you know, Gabra.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you I had my own experience decades ago
Speaker 1: when I was It began in my twenties and really
Speaker 1: culminated in my early thirties of just absolutely intense sciatica
Speaker 1: and lower back pain. And I went to a doctor
Speaker 1: and I got diagnosed, and I had to herniated discs,
Speaker 1: you know L four, L five and L five S one,
Speaker 1: and the pain, I mean the third time it was just,
Speaker 1: you know, just incredible. And I was being prescribed, you know,
Speaker 1: benzos and being prescribed I think oxy code owns, and
Speaker 1: none of it was really helping it all. On the
Speaker 1: occasion if I got drunk, you know, that that would
Speaker 1: actually take away the paint briefly. And then I was
Speaker 1: talking with Andrew Wild who was a good friend at
Speaker 1: the time, and he said, read this book by John
Speaker 1: sarnol St Heeling back Pain, right. But I read this
Speaker 1: book and Sardo's basic view was there's nothing physically wrong
Speaker 1: with your body. I mean, less you've been in by
Speaker 1: a truck or something like that, and all the stuff
Speaker 1: about herniated disk it's basically bullshit. And if you randomly
Speaker 1: take a hundred or two hundred X rays, it turns
Speaker 1: out tons of people with hernadd disk and no pain
Speaker 1: and vice versa. And what his argument was was that
Speaker 1: I was basically that there was an underlying angst anger
Speaker 1: anxiety that I was not processing, and my brain was
Speaker 1: playing a trick, you know whereby it basically transformed an
Speaker 1: emotional pain into a physical pain. And then what he
Speaker 1: said is it's simply accepting his diagnosis, not just in
Speaker 1: my conscious mind, but in my subconscious mind, accepting that
Speaker 1: there was zero wrong with my back and these hernya
Speaker 1: disrrelevant that that itself would be the cure. I didn't
Speaker 1: even have to figure out why I had to pain,
Speaker 1: He goes, But if you want to reduce the likelihood
Speaker 1: of recurrence, it's probably a good idea to try to
Speaker 1: do some work with a therapist or here to try
Speaker 1: to figure out what was that underlying pain about. Anyway,
Speaker 1: and I have to tell you from me, it was
Speaker 1: basically a miracle cure. I mean, I've came out of that,
Speaker 1: and I've become a sort of proselytizer for that, and
Speaker 1: I say, I've know many people who's helped. I know
Speaker 1: of huge numbers. Now, from my case, it didn't have
Speaker 1: to do with processing a kind of infantile you know,
Speaker 1: trauma things that happened then. It had to deal with
Speaker 1: processing things that were happening in my current life, some
Speaker 1: of which might have been mats shaped by what happened
Speaker 1: to me when I was much younger. But it was
Speaker 1: about dealing with that piece in my own life. But
Speaker 1: so the notion of your focus on don't ask about
Speaker 1: the addiction or the substance, focus on the pain underlying
Speaker 1: it resonates with resonates in me totally. Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: I very much know about Sarno's work, and and Sarno
Speaker 1: pointed out they actually called the t MS tension site
Speaker 1: the syndrome eventually, which means that the emotional the anger
Speaker 1: and and and the stress that you're carrying would cause
Speaker 1: your muscles to go into spasm, and that that would
Speaker 1: um create a toxic environment in which pain would arise
Speaker 1: and so on, and by understanding all that, you could
Speaker 1: let go of it. And it's certainly true. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've had back surgery and I was grateful for it.
Speaker 1: But out of a hundred people with back surgery, maybe
Speaker 1: three or four should have it. The other night of
Speaker 1: four should do what you did, you know, and and
Speaker 1: I make the same case. So when people started reading
Speaker 1: my book when the body says no, which makes the
Speaker 1: same case about the illness in general Sarno makes about
Speaker 1: back pain, they keep asking me if I knew about
Speaker 1: Sarno's work. And I hadn't known about it because of
Speaker 1: course Sarno, like me, was a medical doctor, but his
Speaker 1: work was never publicized in the medical realm, so like you,
Speaker 1: I had to find out about it through other sources.
Speaker 1: But his work is very much related to my work,
Speaker 1: except he was a back specialist. I was a general physician.
Speaker 1: So I applied the same principles in a much broader
Speaker 1: realm as I do in this book. The myth of
Speaker 1: a normal as well. What I would say about your
Speaker 1: adult stresses is that they very much had to do
Speaker 1: with childhood dynamics. And the issue is not to go
Speaker 1: back and keep delving on what happened in childhood. That's
Speaker 1: not what the problem is. The problem is the imprints
Speaker 1: that we're caring today of what happened in childhood. So
Speaker 1: when you quoted me as saying that trauma is not
Speaker 1: what happened to you, but what happened inside you as
Speaker 1: a result of what happened to you. What happened inside
Speaker 1: you is the wounding that then creates certain behaviors. The
Speaker 1: issue is not to go back and keep analyzing what
Speaker 1: happened you know, in your case six decades ago, in
Speaker 1: my case over seven decades ago, but to understand how
Speaker 1: is that showing up today in my life? How is
Speaker 1: that pulling my strings to go back to my puppet analogy,
Speaker 1: and how can I cut the strings? And how can
Speaker 1: I be free in the present moment? How can I
Speaker 1: be aware of what's happening within me right now and
Speaker 1: not be under the tyranny of the past. To quote
Speaker 1: Peter Libin. So I'm totally with sorry, no, except I
Speaker 1: think I understand trauma more broadly than he ever did,
Speaker 1: because that, you know, he was focusing very much on
Speaker 1: the back. He helped thousands of people avoid surgery and
Speaker 1: lead paying free lives so I mean, he's a very
Speaker 1: remarkable and important figure. Let's take a break here and
Speaker 1: go to an ad. What is happening at least in
Speaker 1: some universities now, and you're seeing it manifest. This is
Speaker 1: the psychedelic renaissance writing. You talk about this in the
Speaker 1: latest book, and you've talked about it obviously more broadly,
Speaker 1: you see major universities from Harvard, Yale and Columbia, and
Speaker 1: you know University California, University College London, and Baylor, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: all setting up research institutes. So clearly there's something about
Speaker 1: psychedelics that both you in your own interaction with people,
Speaker 1: as well as the broader scientific evidence is showing that
Speaker 1: there's really something special here that, and not least to
Speaker 1: the extent that you place this emphasis on very early
Speaker 1: trauma in people's lives, the psychedelics appear to have some
Speaker 1: unique properties at accessing that. So I have to say
Speaker 1: I was surprised that when you wrote Hungry Ghosts you
Speaker 1: didn't know about any of the early evidence about using
Speaker 1: psycholics for this, But once you become aware of it,
Speaker 1: you really seem to embrace it wholeheartedly. Well, how would
Speaker 1: I know about it? Not nobody in my medical training
Speaker 1: ever mentioned that, you know, like many other things, so
Speaker 1: you might recall on this book. I give a case
Speaker 1: of a woman I know very well. She was given
Speaker 1: a terminal diagnosis of an autimmune disease eight or nine
Speaker 1: years ago in her early late twenties. Um Nothing that
Speaker 1: Western medicine, whether it's steroid hormones or anti immune or
Speaker 1: immune suppressants or paint colors, she do anything for her.
Speaker 1: She was paralyzed in the sense that she couldn't get
Speaker 1: out of bed by herself. She couldn't barely move her
Speaker 1: arms and legs anymore. Her face was a rigid mask
Speaker 1: of pain. She just wanted to die. And now she's
Speaker 1: walking around writing autobiography, writing poetry, hiking mobile living, active
Speaker 1: and thriving. And this came to Ayahuasca. And from the
Speaker 1: point of view of western medicine, that makes no sense.
Speaker 1: From the point of view of narrow western medicine, that
Speaker 1: makes no sense. But if you understand the mind body unity,
Speaker 1: and what nobody asked this person is what was your
Speaker 1: life like? Well, she was a traumatized child, adopted from
Speaker 1: a foreign country, sexually abused in childhood, all kinds of
Speaker 1: stuff she developed certain rigid personality patterns which then stressed her,
Speaker 1: which then made her sick. And with the psychedelic plant,
Speaker 1: she was able to see all that, not not overnight,
Speaker 1: but it was dramatic nevertheless, and she was able to
Speaker 1: deal with these traumas. See how she developed these emotional
Speaker 1: dynamics that we're not serving her anymore, and she has
Speaker 1: fundamentally turned it right around. And that story is not unique,
Speaker 1: nor is it scientifically any kind of a miracle. It's
Speaker 1: simply what you expect when people are able to, as
Speaker 1: you said earlier, not just consciously, for on the unconscious level,
Speaker 1: deal with their beliefs about themselves. M Now, you know,
Speaker 1: you have this charming little story in your book where
Speaker 1: you talk about your experience going down to Peru to
Speaker 1: work with some Shamans, and you developed this thing where
Speaker 1: you would work with the Shamans and you would help
Speaker 1: prepare people to you know, but what were the questions
Speaker 1: they wanted to be considering before they took you know,
Speaker 1: did the ceremony and then help them process the next
Speaker 1: day and do all this sort of thing. And you've
Speaker 1: done it many times, and you tell the story of
Speaker 1: showing up there after the first time. At the very beginning,
Speaker 1: Polison and shawmust take you aside and saying we're sorry,
Speaker 1: we need you to withdraw entirely from this and just
Speaker 1: stay by yourself in the next ten days because your
Speaker 1: energy is dark. And you say that you're thinking, my god,
Speaker 1: I've had such success helping people through this, and all
Speaker 1: these people have come because they want to be at
Speaker 1: a at a shamanic ceremony where I'm playing a role.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, you know, you're also acknowledging
Speaker 1: that you yourself have never had a kind of deep
Speaker 1: spiritual experience with iohuasca. So just say a little more
Speaker 1: about what you learned from that whole experience in his outcomes. Well,
Speaker 1: so these this happened just before I started writing them,
Speaker 1: at a normal in June of two dozen and nineteen.
Speaker 1: And yes, I did go to Peru where a couple
Speaker 1: of dozen health workers, you know, doctor psychiatrists, contors, psychologists
Speaker 1: came to work with me and at this retreat, and
Speaker 1: they I had come from a very long, stressful of
Speaker 1: speaking trip. I was completely backed out, and of course
Speaker 1: I was just gonna go do my usual thing and
Speaker 1: do my work, you know, regardless of my own state
Speaker 1: typical work called behavior, and these shamans took me aside.
Speaker 1: After one ceremony they said, buddy, you're fired. So they
Speaker 1: fired me from my own retreat, and they said, you're
Speaker 1: carrying too much darkness and you have to understand. Even
Speaker 1: they knew nothing about me as a person. I mean,
Speaker 1: they were not impressed but my credentials because they didn't
Speaker 1: know my credentials, you know, and all these books and
Speaker 1: work that I've done. They just said, we think, number one,
Speaker 1: you've worked with a lot of traumatized people and you've
Speaker 1: absorbed their traumas and you don't know how to clear
Speaker 1: it out of yourself. Number one. And number two, we
Speaker 1: think you're a bit very big scare when you were
Speaker 1: very small early in your life and you haven't got
Speaker 1: over it yet. And they were pointing right to my
Speaker 1: infancy without knowing my history. And so they assigned one
Speaker 1: of them to work with me alone in five ceremonies
Speaker 1: over ten days, during which I was in isolation basically,
Speaker 1: and the other five shamans worked with the participants, came
Speaker 1: to work with me, and I did a profound spiritual
Speaker 1: experience not easily took the guy five ceremonies. At the
Speaker 1: very end of the fifth when I thought it was
Speaker 1: all over all of a sudden, the spirit hit me.
Speaker 1: If you want entered me, if you're or I opened
Speaker 1: to it, if you want to put it that way.
Speaker 1: It was very deep, very powerful and life changing. And
Speaker 1: they took these native Shamans to be able to read
Speaker 1: me energetically and to see inside me with the help
Speaker 1: of the plant two to do the work and to
Speaker 1: have the presence to say this Western doctor, listen, buddy,
Speaker 1: you need to help. You're not here to help others.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to accept help yourself for a change.
Speaker 1: That was life changing mm hm. And how was it
Speaker 1: life changing? I mean it was Was it your first
Speaker 1: sense of a feeling of the divine? Was it? Had
Speaker 1: it changed the way you're interacting when you were doing
Speaker 1: your sessions with patients. I wish I could tell you
Speaker 1: that I came back enlightened and transformed person, but my
Speaker 1: wife would tell you that ain't that ain't necessarily so um.
Speaker 1: But it did further and in significant way, initiate a
Speaker 1: process in which number one, I dropped this belief that
Speaker 1: I've always had, which I consciously I knew couldn't have
Speaker 1: been right, but it was on the emotional level an
Speaker 1: absolute fixation of mine that I could help other people here,
Speaker 1: but I can't be healed myself. You know. That experience
Speaker 1: knocked that one out of the water and the other
Speaker 1: so that the possibly of healing became not just to believe,
Speaker 1: but an actual experience on my part. That's the first.
Speaker 1: The second was that I realized that my childhood will
Speaker 1: never not have happened. So the fact that I spent
Speaker 1: my first year the way I did, separate from my
Speaker 1: mother for a while, the fact that my grandparents would
Speaker 1: died in our shirts when I was five months of
Speaker 1: age and my mother spend the rest of the year
Speaker 1: grieving for them. All that stuff could never be changed.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't have to define my future. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have to define my presence, so that my happiness and
Speaker 1: connection to life I didn't have to be painted or
Speaker 1: controlled by what happened early in life. That does actually
Speaker 1: feed him in the present moment, Gab, I hope to
Speaker 1: tell you. I mean, your book is inspiring in terms
Speaker 1: of writing insights about ways to deal with not just
Speaker 1: emotional but physical maladies through a more holistic healing. Approach
Speaker 1: in which people understand the process. You know that it's
Speaker 1: not just about treating disease. On the other hand, there's
Speaker 1: another takeaway feeling, which is, my god, we're all fucked.
Speaker 1: I mean, because capitalism isn't getting anywhere, if anything, that's
Speaker 1: going to get more extreme materialism, you know, is pervasive consumptionism,
Speaker 1: not just in America, but in most societies are on
Speaker 1: the world. The medical system being short on funds and
Speaker 1: doctors being pressed for time, pharmaceutical companies being empowered to
Speaker 1: promote the certain things that they do, you know, the
Speaker 1: sort of rapid evolution in the digital sophistication, you know
Speaker 1: what's called constant connectivity, or what you talk about in
Speaker 1: the book as a new way of persuasive design, where
Speaker 1: you design things to appeal specifically to people's addictive behaviors.
Speaker 1: I mean, I come away going, my god, You've identified
Speaker 1: all all everything that's wrong going on in the medical system,
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical system, the broader capitalist cultural political system. But
Speaker 1: how the hell you dig ourselves out of this? Yeah? Well, um,
Speaker 1: you know, so this is where I go back to
Speaker 1: two things here that I talked about in the last chapter.
Speaker 1: One is the importance of becoming disillusioned. So we live
Speaker 1: with a lot of illusions, you know. And and there's
Speaker 1: e called James Baldwin who says that in this country
Speaker 1: words are used to cover the sleeper, whether than to
Speaker 1: wake them up, And so much of the culture designed
Speaker 1: to put people to sleep and to keep them asleep.
Speaker 1: Now we have to become disillusion not in the sense
Speaker 1: of becoming discouraged, but in a sense of losing our
Speaker 1: illusions about And then part of the intended the book
Speaker 1: is to wake people up about folks, this is the
Speaker 1: nature of the society, and these are the impacts. So
Speaker 1: that's the first point, the need to become disillusion Then
Speaker 1: I say to people, would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned?
Speaker 1: Would you rather be? The second response goes back to
Speaker 1: my discussion with no Chomsky, you know, who said that
Speaker 1: he's a strategic optimist and a tactical pessimist, which means
Speaker 1: that yes, in the short term things are getting worse.
Speaker 1: You'd have to be blind to deny that. So that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean we're fucked. It means that we're getting fucked,
Speaker 1: you know. And but but, but, but the long term
Speaker 1: optimism is in my faith, you might say, or my
Speaker 1: conviction that people have it in them to turn this around.
Speaker 1: If you only be engaged in our conversations, if you
Speaker 1: only realize what our reality is, if you only get
Speaker 1: in touch with their own healing capacities, which is an
Speaker 1: intrinsic quality of all life. If we can become more
Speaker 1: collaborative and coordinated and cooperative in our responses, if you
Speaker 1: don't see each other as isolated optimized individuals, if you
Speaker 1: don't buy into the vice of this culture, change is
Speaker 1: actually possible. I'm not gonna happen eight times soon, but
Speaker 1: I do think it's entirely possible. And you know, I
Speaker 1: wrote the book now with the desire to spread the
Speaker 1: bad news, but to say to people, Look, if you
Speaker 1: want to change, we have to see what's in the
Speaker 1: way of that change. You have to deal with it,
Speaker 1: both on the personal and on the social level. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, Gabbor, I mean, that's a lot of ifs
Speaker 1: in there. But since you are ending on a positive note,
Speaker 1: I think that's a nice place to this conversation. All
Speaker 1: I can say is, look, more power to you. I
Speaker 1: hope that you're able to keep getting the word out
Speaker 1: in your message out for many years to come because
Speaker 1: I think you're obviously playing incredibly important and valuable and
Speaker 1: healing role in our society. So thank you, thank you
Speaker 1: for joining me and my listeners on Psychoactive. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for having me. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please
Speaker 1: tell your friends about it, or you can write us
Speaker 1: a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave
Speaker 1: us a message at one eight three three seven seven
Speaker 1: nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you
Speaker 1: can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can
Speaker 1: also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by no h'm
Speaker 1: osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden,
Speaker 1: Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and d In Aronofsky from Protozolla Pictures,
Speaker 1: Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Blusien and
Speaker 1: a special thanks to a bio s F. Bianca Grimshaw
Speaker 1: and Robert BB. Next week I'll be talking about the
Speaker 1: significance of alcohol prohibition in American history with Professor Lisa mcgurr,
Speaker 1: professor at Harvard, an author of The War on Alcohol.
Speaker 1: It just struck me that historians had not taken a
Speaker 1: serious enough look at the repercussions of prohibition. What happened
Speaker 1: once the Eighteenth Amendment, which was of course the amendment
Speaker 1: to the Constitution enacting national prohibition, what happened once it
Speaker 1: had passed. Historians kind of had felt that, you know,
Speaker 1: this was a huge policy failure, and there wasn't much
Speaker 1: to say it was a great disaster, but there were
Speaker 1: huge implications that historians had not done enough to tease out.
Speaker 1: Subscribe to Cycoactive now see it, don't miss it.