Speaker 1: Responsibility. If you break down the word response ability, nobody
Speaker 1: else can respond to your circumstances about you. Nobody else
Speaker 1: can respond to the impacts that you carry. But you.
Speaker 1: You're a response able, But you're not at fault. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the one you feed. Throughout time, great tinkers have
Speaker 1: recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like
Speaker 1: garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other will keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us
Speaker 1: on this episode. We are happy to welcome back Gabor Mate,
Speaker 1: a highly sought expert on a range of topics such
Speaker 1: as addiction, stress, and childhood development. He's written many books,
Speaker 1: and several of them are best sellers, including the award
Speaker 1: winning in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction,
Speaker 1: and When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress.
Speaker 1: Gabor's works have been published internationally in more than thirty languages.
Speaker 1: On this episode, the topic is his new book, The
Speaker 1: Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing and a Toxic Culture. Hi, Gab,
Speaker 1: we're welcome to the show. Nice to be with you, Eric,
Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to have you
Speaker 1: back on. I don't know when we talked last, but
Speaker 1: it's been a number of years. You've got a great
Speaker 1: new book called The Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and
Speaker 1: Healing and a Toxic Culture, And we'll dive into that
Speaker 1: in a second. But we'll start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the Parable and the Parable. There's a grandparent talking
Speaker 1: to the grandchild and they say, in life, there are
Speaker 1: two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second
Speaker 1: and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins,
Speaker 1: and the grandparents says the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. How you'll answer the question today, it
Speaker 1: will be very different how I might have answered it
Speaker 1: some years ago. Yeah, but as then now is that
Speaker 1: hungry wolf is the part of you that was denied
Speaker 1: and hurt and scared and traumatized. So then rather than
Speaker 1: starting it, we have to befriended and remove its me
Speaker 1: there to be that aggressive and to be that destructive.
Speaker 1: So we have to be friends all aspects of ourselves.
Speaker 1: So I would say we have to be friends and
Speaker 1: feed both wolves in the right way, because it's not
Speaker 1: in the nature of the wolf to be that way.
Speaker 1: Something made him that way. Well, that certainly speaks to
Speaker 1: a lot of your work summarized pretty succinctially there. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the new book and tell me about the
Speaker 1: Myth of normal. Why did you title the book the
Speaker 1: Myth of Normal? Yeah, it has two meanings. We tend
Speaker 1: to assume that what is normal is healthy and natural
Speaker 1: rich and human evolution was also the case because what
Speaker 1: was healthy and natural was also the norm. That's how
Speaker 1: we evolved as as creatures. No creature can evolve against
Speaker 1: its own nature. But in modern society, what is normal
Speaker 1: in other words, what passes for daily life and daily
Speaker 1: human exchange and interaction and social structures that may me
Speaker 1: the norm in a sense that they represent the average,
Speaker 1: but they're no longer healthier and natural. So that's the
Speaker 1: first myth of normal. The other is that as a
Speaker 1: physician and also as an individual, when I understand people's illnesses,
Speaker 1: including their addictions, including their mental distress, including their physical illnesses,
Speaker 1: we see these people as a normal, but actually their illnesses,
Speaker 1: their addictions, their ailments are normal responses don't have normal society,
Speaker 1: so that the normality is not an individual. The pathology
Speaker 1: is not an individual. It's in the social conditions and
Speaker 1: the personal relationships and the context that evoke those um ailments.
Speaker 1: And they can give you one example, the more episodes
Speaker 1: of racism and black American woman experiences, the greater the
Speaker 1: risk for asthma. Now asthma is a streuss it in condition.
Speaker 1: That's a normal response towards that normal, which is that
Speaker 1: one human being should be considered less than the other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you say, chronic illness mental or physical is to a
Speaker 1: large extent a function or a feature of the way
Speaker 1: things are, and not a mysterious aberration exactly. And so
Speaker 1: I would say that a lot of what you're proposing
Speaker 1: in this book, and again, correct me if anything I
Speaker 1: say as a misstatement, is that it is the traumatic experiences.
Speaker 1: And we're going to get into what trauma means in
Speaker 1: a minute, But it is traumatic experiences, big T, little
Speaker 1: T trauma that are a big part of why are
Speaker 1: mental and physical health is deteriorating, and we need to
Speaker 1: treat that trauma, both collectively and individually, exactly. So there
Speaker 1: was an article in The New York Times four days
Speaker 1: before this interview, fun page headline article, there's a teenager
Speaker 1: on ten different psychiatic medications at age seventy. You knowing
Speaker 1: now that's an increasingly common phenomenon. And there's been articles
Speaker 1: recently in The New Yorker and the New York Times
Speaker 1: about the mysteriously rising rate of childhood and adlas and
Speaker 1: suicides and the number of children being diagnosed with depression, anxiety,
Speaker 1: self cutting, so called oppositionality a d h D, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: is going up and up and up. Now, what that
Speaker 1: tells us that these conditions can't be genetic because geez
Speaker 1: don't change over ten years or twenty years or ever
Speaker 1: in a hundred years. So there's something we have been
Speaker 1: in the environment. And what's going on in the environment
Speaker 1: is that more and more young human beings are growing
Speaker 1: up on the conditions that don't meet their essential needs.
Speaker 1: And so the anxiety and the depression, and the self cutting,
Speaker 1: and the addictions and even the desperation that will drive
Speaker 1: a young person to enter their lives, these are responses
Speaker 1: to have normal circumstances. And that's why I that our
Speaker 1: culture is a toxic culture because it actually poisons people psychically.
Speaker 1: So I want to get into some of the trauma
Speaker 1: that happens within a family system or to a person.
Speaker 1: You know, they are sexually abused, they are assaulted. We'll
Speaker 1: get to that in a second, but let's talk broadly,
Speaker 1: more broadly culturally. What are the broad cultural things that
Speaker 1: are making the environment toxic. Well, let's begin with conception,
Speaker 1: so that we know that the mother's emotional states during
Speaker 1: pregnancy have a hormonal impact on the child's brain, physiology,
Speaker 1: and even on the child's genetic functioning. And these effects
Speaker 1: can be traced for decades after the pregnancy. Scientifically speaking, No,
Speaker 1: when you think of all the stress that's on women
Speaker 1: these days as they're trying to hold on a job
Speaker 1: and take care of a relationship, and in a very
Speaker 1: stressed and fractured culture, that's affecting the children and the
Speaker 1: unus already. I mean noticed, so are kinds of physiological
Speaker 1: studies now. As a physician, I was never trained when
Speaker 1: I was looking at the pregnant women. Nobody ever trained
Speaker 1: me to ask her about her emotional states or the
Speaker 1: mental states, about the states of our relationship. Just pay
Speaker 1: attention to the body weight gain measurements, alto sounds, blood tests,
Speaker 1: But they don't ask how are you feeling as a
Speaker 1: human being? What's your life like, what's your job like,
Speaker 1: what's your relationship like? So already the toxicity begins in unal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then there's childbirth. Nature evolved human beings is that childbirth
Speaker 1: isn't just a mechanical event of getting the infant out
Speaker 1: of the womb and into the world. It's also an
Speaker 1: event that, on the national circumstances, promotes bonding and the
Speaker 1: release of a whole love cocktail of chemicals and both
Speaker 1: mother and infant that prepares them from the bonding experience
Speaker 1: that must be present for health each other development. Now
Speaker 1: moderner stat pricks can do miraculous feats and saving maternal
Speaker 1: and infant life and hell, but in a small minority
Speaker 1: of cases, about ten to fifteen at the time. Now
Speaker 1: the caesarean section rate here in bellsh Coombia where live
Speaker 1: is close to and it's going up internationally, especially in
Speaker 1: the developed world, which means that a lot of infants
Speaker 1: no longer have the experience of the birth that nature
Speaker 1: intended for them. Then we get into parenting. A lot
Speaker 1: of parents these days are given advice such as ignore
Speaker 1: the baby's crying, let them sleep it out, or a
Speaker 1: two year old child, if they're angry, make them sit
Speaker 1: by themselves. Now you tell a mother bat boon or
Speaker 1: a mother bear to know the baby's cries. You tell
Speaker 1: a mother elephant to know the baby's cries. So human
Speaker 1: beings are now increasingly divorced from their own paranting instincts
Speaker 1: because of the pressures of the culture. That means children
Speaker 1: are not getting their development on these met Children have
Speaker 1: certain basic needs like any creature like an acorn, the
Speaker 1: nature of an acorn is to become an oak tree,
Speaker 1: but not unless it's given the right soil and nutrition
Speaker 1: and irrigation and sunlight. Same with human beings via essential needs.
Speaker 1: The human child has the need to be accepted and
Speaker 1: loved exactly who they are unconditionally. They have the need
Speaker 1: not to have to work to gain the esteem and
Speaker 1: love of the parents, but for that to be there naturally.
Speaker 1: They even the need to experience all the emotions, whatever
Speaker 1: they happen today, joy, pain, grief, anxiety, anger. In modern world,
Speaker 1: parents are often programmed or taught to deny the right
Speaker 1: of the child to have all their emotions. That is
Speaker 1: traumatic for kids. So then I could go on about
Speaker 1: the way schools schools deal with kids. Yea. Then there
Speaker 1: is the stresses of modern life that impose the three
Speaker 1: essential triggers for stress, uncertainty, conflict, and loss of control
Speaker 1: that characterizes so many people's lives. Yeah, those are physiologically stressful.
Speaker 1: That physiological stress undermine the immune system. So I could
Speaker 1: just go on forever. But there's so many features of
Speaker 1: modern life that actually are toxic to help human life.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the let the baby cried out model. I
Speaker 1: certainly experience that as a baby. I know you did.
Speaker 1: It's a horrifying sort of thought, but it seems to
Speaker 1: me and maybe it's just the circles I travel in, Right,
Speaker 1: this is what I never know, like what is more
Speaker 1: broadly culturally happening and what is just in the small
Speaker 1: circle I'm in. But there seems to be a real
Speaker 1: knowledge now of children's attachment needs, and there's less of
Speaker 1: that than there seems to have been maybe in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Do you see, broadly speaking, some aspects of our culture
Speaker 1: getting better? Yeah, I agree with you. I mean I
Speaker 1: think much more many of our parents are aware of
Speaker 1: the child's attachment needs. And in the nineteen fourties and
Speaker 1: the fifties, the dominant influence of parenting was Dr Spark.
Speaker 1: Dr Benjamin Spark, who told parents to leave the child
Speaker 1: alone in his room, shut the door, and don't go back.
Speaker 1: And he talked about the chronic resistance to sleep of
Speaker 1: the infant. If it wasn't resistant to sleep, infant resistant
Speaker 1: to being left alone. No animal leaves their infants alone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a mother baboon will not do that. And he talked
Speaker 1: about the tyranny of the infant. Now we've seen the
Speaker 1: consequences of that, and so there's been a certainly great
Speaker 1: reaction against that, but it's not broad enough that reaction.
Speaker 1: And although there are more parents or recognizing that now,
Speaker 1: thank god, the dominant advice of psychologists and parenting coaches
Speaker 1: and so on is still along those behavioral models which
Speaker 1: ignore the child's needs and focused instead on what the
Speaker 1: parent wants the child's to be like, So the emphasis
Speaker 1: is not on the child's developmental needs but on parental convenience.
Speaker 1: Would you understand parents wanting desperately in the stressed world,
Speaker 1: but be forgotten the needs of the child, right? I
Speaker 1: think so much of what you just talked through, and
Speaker 1: you point out in the book is that all this
Speaker 1: stuff is so interdependent that the modern stresses of our
Speaker 1: world to parents working, having to work essentially in an
Speaker 1: environment where their work is coming at them constantly twenty
Speaker 1: four hours a day via phones, you know, that then
Speaker 1: impacts their ability to be a good parent. If we
Speaker 1: look at the way my mom parented me, so much
Speaker 1: of that came from her experiences she was going through
Speaker 1: how she was parented. So all this stuff becomes really
Speaker 1: interdependent and very difficult to tweeze apart absolutely. And I
Speaker 1: wrote this book, The Middle of Normal with my son Daniel.
Speaker 1: In the book, Danielle talks about how he was traumatized
Speaker 1: by his parents and he's had his mental health challenges,
Speaker 1: and I know where they came from. They came from
Speaker 1: here from me. I'm the last person to be able
Speaker 1: to deny the impact of my parenting on my children,
Speaker 1: given that this is the work that I have studied
Speaker 1: in pursuit for so many years. Daniel talks about how
Speaker 1: when he was small, used that there is your current
Speaker 1: nightmare of the floor disappearing. All of a sudden, the
Speaker 1: floor disappears himuner this sheet, when the floor was not
Speaker 1: the floor. What that had to do with was that
Speaker 1: too stressed parents who had not worked through their own
Speaker 1: traumas before they had kids would create an environment of
Speaker 1: pension and conflict in their home which the small child
Speaker 1: experiences the floor disappearing. Yea. And so we loved our kids,
Speaker 1: who did our best as all parents to, but inevitably
Speaker 1: we passed our traumas onto them. So this is not
Speaker 1: pointing fingers or blaming anybody, is to recognize the larger picture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how in the stress society, we almost invariably passed on
Speaker 1: or inevitably passed on our traumas to our kids. Oftentimes
Speaker 1: people talk about from generation to generation, like breaking the cycle.
Speaker 1: I'm going to break the cycle. My son's twenty four now,
Speaker 1: and so I look at what I did well and
Speaker 1: what I didn't do well, and you know, I think
Speaker 1: breaking the cycle might be a little too buyinary, which
Speaker 1: seems to me is it's like maybe if there was
Speaker 1: a hundred units of trauma flowing down through the generations,
Speaker 1: he only got twenty five of it, right, instead of
Speaker 1: all hundred, you know, so like blanking the cycle. At
Speaker 1: doubt that that happened. And so I think that's an
Speaker 1: interesting way to look at it too, is that like
Speaker 1: we took what we were given and passed on something better,
Speaker 1: you know, to the best of our ability. But that's great,
Speaker 1: and it's actually it's very much akin to what a
Speaker 1: therapist one said to me, is that if your friends
Speaker 1: gave you this much ship and you only gave you
Speaker 1: kids this much, then you did a good job. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say that in our case, we weren't aware
Speaker 1: of how traumatized you were when we had kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had not done no work yet, you know, I
Speaker 1: had not worked through my own work at all of
Speaker 1: my my anxieties, my eruptions of rage, and my wife
Speaker 1: had not worked through the particular stuff that she brought
Speaker 1: their relationships. So our trauma showed up in a significant
Speaker 1: way after we had kids. Yeah, and not sure because
Speaker 1: we didn't love them, because we weren't devoted to them. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I feel fortunate I had my son, I don't know,
Speaker 1: four years after I got sober from heroin addiction, and
Speaker 1: so I was deeply embedded in my own recovery and wellness.
Speaker 1: And again I'm not saying like if we had a
Speaker 1: ten pound bag of trauma, ship I passed down, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe three because you learn more right the healing journey,
Speaker 1: the nature of it, you say at one point in
Speaker 1: the book, And I absolutely love this talking about the
Speaker 1: healing journey. You say, in my experience, we're never as
Speaker 1: close as we hope and never as far as we fear,
Speaker 1: which I think is a beautiful way of summing up.
Speaker 1: Like this kind of goes on, and we have our
Speaker 1: moments where like I've come so far, and then another
Speaker 1: moment where like I got so far to go, you know,
Speaker 1: but we are where we are on it exactly and
Speaker 1: as long as we're conscious, you know. Yeah, So if
Speaker 1: I have a moment where revisit some old traumatic imprint,
Speaker 1: I can be aware of it. I can very quickly
Speaker 1: transform it and move past it. Yea. So it's the
Speaker 1: consciousness of it that really makes defifience. Yep. So let's
Speaker 1: quickly move through trauma defining kind of what it is
Speaker 1: at a basic level. I think we hear the word
Speaker 1: a lot, but you've got some fairly specific ways of
Speaker 1: defining it. Yeah. So, as a former English teacher, I
Speaker 1: pay a lot of attention to language, and trauma has
Speaker 1: got a specific word origin. It's a Greek word for wounding.
Speaker 1: So trauma is a psychic wound. That's important to understand
Speaker 1: because the wounds can show up as a rough spot
Speaker 1: that really hurts every time you touch it, or it
Speaker 1: can scar over and become thick and hard and unfeeling
Speaker 1: and inflexible. So trauma shows up in both of those ways,
Speaker 1: both of those characteristics of the wound. Number one, it
Speaker 1: also means that trauma is not what happened to you.
Speaker 1: Trauma is what happened inside you. So trauma is not
Speaker 1: the event in my case being given to a stranger
Speaker 1: by my mother when I was eleven, moneths old, or
Speaker 1: somebody might have been sexually abused, or something might have
Speaker 1: been neglected. That's not the trauma. That's the traumatic event.
Speaker 1: The trauma is the wound that we sustained as a result,
Speaker 1: which is good news, because if the trauma was that
Speaker 1: I was given by a stranger to my mother to
Speaker 1: save my life, but I experienced it as an abandonment.
Speaker 1: If that was the trauma, that will never change that happened,
Speaker 1: that will never not have happened. But if the trauma
Speaker 1: is the wound that I sustained, which is the belief,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't loved and I wasn't lovable, that can
Speaker 1: be healed at any moment. So trauma is not what
Speaker 1: happened to you, it's what you sustained internally as a result.
Speaker 1: And we can traumatize people in two major ways. When
Speaker 1: it's been bad, things happened that shouldn't such as my
Speaker 1: code uncle would abandoned them by my mother and the
Speaker 1: conditions of wartime Nancy occupied Hungary. But you don't need that.
Speaker 1: You don't need genocide or or you just need parents
Speaker 1: who are like we were. My wife and I unconscious
Speaker 1: over own traumas we need. Parents are very stressed and
Speaker 1: who are not able to meet the traud's needs as
Speaker 1: I've outlined them, and not having your needs met can
Speaker 1: be traumatic as well. It can wound you as well.
Speaker 1: It can hurt you as well. And then what people
Speaker 1: do with the wound with small kids do they can't
Speaker 1: help it, it's too painful, so they disconnect from their
Speaker 1: emotions and their bodies. So that disconnection themselves is the
Speaker 1: essence of trauma. Yeah. I love that point. That disconnection
Speaker 1: is really you say, it's the most prominent thing in trauma,
Speaker 1: And that's a really interesting thing to think about because
Speaker 1: we can be disconnected from lots of different things and
Speaker 1: lots of different ways. But it's interesting when people ask
Speaker 1: me to define spirituality, I say, spirituality is connecting to
Speaker 1: what matters, right, So it's kind of opposite, right of that,
Speaker 1: it's recognizing what's important to me and how do I
Speaker 1: connect to it? Or spiritual is connected to what isn't
Speaker 1: the matter? Yeah? Yeah, But you talked about recovery. You
Speaker 1: said that by by the time you had your son,
Speaker 1: your your four years and recovery. Let's look at that word.
Speaker 1: What does it mean to recover something? Man means to
Speaker 1: get get something back. What did you get back? I
Speaker 1: guess I got back some of my own agency and
Speaker 1: authenticity to use a couple of your words, that will
Speaker 1: will get to you know. I got back a sense
Speaker 1: of my own ability to control my life within reason,
Speaker 1: and I got some access to, you know, my authentic self.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know I'm still in recovery, right, I
Speaker 1: mean so, I know, but I'm looking at them. So actually,
Speaker 1: what you did is you began to recovery yourself. You know.
Speaker 1: You when we said about trauma as a disconnection from
Speaker 1: the self, Yep, the healing process is the recurvery of
Speaker 1: the self. Yep. That's the whole point. That's what the
Speaker 1: word means. We use the word recovery, but we often
Speaker 1: don't ask yourselves. What is it that we're finding again? Yes,
Speaker 1: but we're actually finding ourselves, that true self that never
Speaker 1: got destroyed, which is why the potential we're healing exists
Speaker 1: in everyone. Yep. Jumping around a little bit here, but
Speaker 1: talking about addiction. I loved this line. You said, all
Speaker 1: addictions and centives can be summed up as in a
Speaker 1: escape from the confines of the self, by which I
Speaker 1: mean the mundane, lived in experience of being uncomfortable and
Speaker 1: isolated in one's skin. So it's ironic that we're recovering ourselves.
Speaker 1: But part of so much of what addiction is just
Speaker 1: trying to escape that self, that damage self. The addition
Speaker 1: is trying to not to escape from the true self.
Speaker 1: It's actually trying to get a taste of the two self.
Speaker 1: To the addictive process, the addiction is an escape from
Speaker 1: the alienate itself. So when Keith Richards, who's the Rose,
Speaker 1: the most famous ex heroin addict, the guitarist of the
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone, has he given it up? He's always give
Speaker 1: it up A long time ago, okay, And I read
Speaker 1: his biography called Life. Okay, one of Keith Richards would
Speaker 1: write a biography and call it life. I mean, what
Speaker 1: narcissistic title, But it's a great title. And he says
Speaker 1: when we talked about his addiction, he said, the contortions
Speaker 1: we go through just not to be ourselves for a
Speaker 1: few hours. And by that he meant the alienated, this
Speaker 1: uncomfortable self. And and what the heroin does, or alcohol
Speaker 1: those or the pornography does or whatever, or the work
Speaker 1: callism as the momentarily if we feel alive and present
Speaker 1: and as seast, which is aspects of the truth self.
Speaker 1: So addiction is an attempt to escape from melli in itself,
Speaker 1: to get a temporary taste of the real self. It's
Speaker 1: a self destructive, self defeating method, but that's the intention totally.
Speaker 1: I've often said, you know, people talk about addiction as
Speaker 1: an escape, and I understand that. But for me, all
Speaker 1: my drug use, it didn't matter what it was, made
Speaker 1: the world come alive for me. It made me feel
Speaker 1: connected to the world. That made me interested in the world.
Speaker 1: It wasn't this internal thing. It was coming to life
Speaker 1: because I didn't know how to do that otherwise. That's
Speaker 1: beautifully said, And that's why the disease model of addiction
Speaker 1: is so shallow. What kind of disease makes you feel
Speaker 1: more connected to life? Yep? Agreed. The problem was the
Speaker 1: disconnect and that's the trauma that we're talking about. Yep.
Speaker 1: So that's why my mentor on addiction is not why addiction,
Speaker 1: but why the pain? What's the pain that's driving the behavior?
Speaker 1: The addiction is only an attempt to solve a problem
Speaker 1: imposed by trauma. Yeah, I've heard that one that you've used.
Speaker 1: You know, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.
Speaker 1: And there's another question that you say about addiction that
Speaker 1: I love, which is another way to think about it,
Speaker 1: is not to ask what's wrong with it, but what's
Speaker 1: right about it? What is it that the person is
Speaker 1: getting from that? And then recognizing okay, that tells us
Speaker 1: something about the nature of what needs healed exactly. And
Speaker 1: then you just said it you wanted connection and yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what it was giving you. And then the question
Speaker 1: we have to ask is how did you lose that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And how can you regain it without that addictive drive? Yea,
Speaker 1: how can you genuinely have those qualities, not just temporarily
Speaker 1: under the influence, but actually in your life? And that's
Speaker 1: that's what the recovery is all about, isn't it. Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I think in my case particularly, that leads us
Speaker 1: well into talking about this clash between attachment and authenticity. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I do think that's the part of my particular wounding was,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't be authentic to how I'm actually feeling.
Speaker 1: I can't deal with what I'm actually feeling without putting
Speaker 1: my need to be close to my family I had
Speaker 1: to choose one or the other, and you say that
Speaker 1: as a young person will always choose the attachment. Talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that clash between attachment and authenticity. Well,
Speaker 1: we talked about the need for attachment, and attachment is
Speaker 1: the drive to be close to another being for the
Speaker 1: purpose of being taken care of, or for the purpose
Speaker 1: of taking care of the other in the case of
Speaker 1: the infant, to be taken care of. In the case
Speaker 1: of the parent, the parents on instinct is to take
Speaker 1: care of the infant. Now, so that attachment relationship for
Speaker 1: birds and mammals, including them things is essential because we
Speaker 1: thought of the young doesn't survive a day, so it's
Speaker 1: not negotiable. Not The human need for attachment is much
Speaker 1: longer than for any other creature because we're immature for
Speaker 1: much longer, and of course it's with us for a lifetime.
Speaker 1: Didn't we just find out during COVID how important attachment is.
Speaker 1: Didn't we suffer because of the social isolation that was
Speaker 1: imposed by the COVID ecademic or their response to it.
Speaker 1: Attation is important throughout the lifetime, but never more crucial
Speaker 1: for survival than in infancy and read childhood. So that's
Speaker 1: one drive that we have. But we have another drive.
Speaker 1: And I've talked about the child's essential need to experience
Speaker 1: all the emotions. Now wise that the case, because the
Speaker 1: emotions came along to support our survival. So we evolved
Speaker 1: out there in nature. How long does the creature in
Speaker 1: nature survive with they're not in touch with their gut feelings,
Speaker 1: they're authentic feelings, not very long, not realized. That's not
Speaker 1: a luxury, it's another survival need. However, when we have
Speaker 1: the experience that I had as a child or that
Speaker 1: you had as a child, that in this culture many
Speaker 1: should not have. But if they're authentically present with all
Speaker 1: their emotions, then not acceptable to the people on whose
Speaker 1: their life depends. They will automatically and unconsciously suppress their
Speaker 1: authenticity for the sake of being attached. And then for
Speaker 1: the rest of our lives we're consumed with pleasing others,
Speaker 1: placating others, impressing others, being attractive to others, being acceptable
Speaker 1: to others, being approved of by others, and we'll forget
Speaker 1: who we actually are. And those dynamics impose both physical
Speaker 1: and mental illness and human beings. And this society feeds
Speaker 1: on people desperation to be accepted the fifty billion dollar
Speaker 1: cosmetic surgery industry. What is it about but people's desperation
Speaker 1: to be attractive to others so they'll be accepted. I
Speaker 1: could give you many examples, but the point is that
Speaker 1: that surrender of authentic should it costs us severely in
Speaker 1: mental and physical health. This would be a good place
Speaker 1: to kind of go into a key idea in the book,
Speaker 1: which is that features of our personality or features of
Speaker 1: our non authentic self. We could also use that phrasing
Speaker 1: can contribute to our disease state. Right. You know, I
Speaker 1: think we all know most people at this point, we'll
Speaker 1: accept to some degree that what we think and feel
Speaker 1: has an impact on our physical health. You talk a
Speaker 1: lot in the book about a type CEE personality, a
Speaker 1: type of person who is likely to get sick. That
Speaker 1: scared the crap out of me, you know, because I
Speaker 1: look at it. I'm like, well, okay, I've got a
Speaker 1: I've got a fair amount of that in there, right,
Speaker 1: So tell me about the type C personality and how
Speaker 1: that contributes to disease states, both mental and physical. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's not quite accurate to call it
Speaker 1: the TYPESI personality because these are character traits, okay, which
Speaker 1: are learned and developed, but then not a fixed part
Speaker 1: of the individual. They can be transformed. And that's the
Speaker 1: whole point. There are a recurring part I love. There
Speaker 1: was somewhere in the book you talked about that where
Speaker 1: these things aren't fixed, but they are recurring, so they
Speaker 1: appear fixed, right, that's exactly the point. Yeah, So let's
Speaker 1: take the repression of healthy anger. Now, healthy anger has
Speaker 1: a purpose in life. You look at an animal. When
Speaker 1: an an animal enters its space, you've got an expression
Speaker 1: of healthy anger. You're in my space. Get out that
Speaker 1: healthy anger be events violence. Actually, so human beings have
Speaker 1: this healthy anger as a boundary defense. So if I
Speaker 1: were to invade your space physically or secondly, healthy responses
Speaker 1: during my space, get out. That's healthy anger. Once it's done,
Speaker 1: its job is over. You don't go into a rage.
Speaker 1: You don't carry it with your resentment for the rest
Speaker 1: of your life. You just expressed your anger. It protected
Speaker 1: your boundaries. Now it's gone. Now. The scientific fact is,
Speaker 1: which is unfortunately completely ignored in medical training, is that
Speaker 1: mind embody are uncircuitable. So just as angry as a
Speaker 1: boundary defense. What is the immune system. It's a boundary defense.
Speaker 1: The job of the immune system is to let in
Speaker 1: what is healthy and nurturing, such as nutriments, vitamins, healthy bacteria,
Speaker 1: and to keep out toxins and unhealthy bacterial invasion. That's
Speaker 1: the same job of the emotions, is to let in
Speaker 1: what's welcoming and nurturing and and conducive to growth and health,
Speaker 1: and to keep out what isn't. That's why we developed emotions.
Speaker 1: Now it turns out that from the physiological and scientific
Speaker 1: point of view, the emotions and the immune system formed
Speaker 1: part of the same system. They're not separate, but the
Speaker 1: part of the same apparatus. When you repress your healthy
Speaker 1: boundaries by suppressing your healthy anger, you're also on demanding
Speaker 1: your immune system. Now, what happens to a healthy anger
Speaker 1: that you don't express. It doesn't disappear, it doesn't evaporate.
Speaker 1: It turns against the self in a form of depression
Speaker 1: or self loading and so on. In the same way
Speaker 1: the immune system turned against you. And now you've got
Speaker 1: aut immune disease or malignancy. As if you look at
Speaker 1: the people who develop autimmune disease and malignancy and This
Speaker 1: has been studied not just by me, but by many others,
Speaker 1: and it's been well documented. These are people who tend
Speaker 1: to ignore their own emotional needs for the sake of
Speaker 1: plaque hating others. I would never do that, oh good,
Speaker 1: never never huh me neither or never or or or
Speaker 1: they repressed their healthy anger. So they're very very nice people,
Speaker 1: always trying to please others. Or they identify with their
Speaker 1: duty and role and responsibility and how they look to
Speaker 1: others and how they serve the world while ignoring their
Speaker 1: own needs. And they tend to believe that they're responsible
Speaker 1: for other people feel and they must never disappoint anybody.
Speaker 1: So I give the case in the book of this
Speaker 1: physician and in Ottawa who died of cancer, and it's
Speaker 1: a bitchy. He actually said that Stanley and his mother,
Speaker 1: or Sydney and his mother had extraordinary relationship, a bond
Speaker 1: that was apparent in all aspects of their lives. So
Speaker 1: as they married men with young children, Sydney at dinner
Speaker 1: with his parents every day, and then he'd go home
Speaker 1: to be followed by another dinner to eat him to
Speaker 1: enjoy with his wife and his four children, until over
Speaker 1: the years a gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions.
Speaker 1: So this guy could not say to his mom, Mom,
Speaker 1: I got incredible news. I've got four kids, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have dinner with them most nights. And he also
Speaker 1: couldn't say to his life sweetheart, my parents are aging.
Speaker 1: They made me once or twice a week I have
Speaker 1: to have dinner with them. He just took on trying
Speaker 1: to please everybody at his own expense. And these characteristics
Speaker 1: lead to illness. Yeah, I've often observed in myself it
Speaker 1: used to show up in early sobrieties. I need a drink,
Speaker 1: I need a drink. I needed and that sort of faded,
Speaker 1: and then it turned into on the surface not a
Speaker 1: better thing, which is I want to die. I want
Speaker 1: to die, I want to die. What I realized was
Speaker 1: that cycle kicked off whenever I was in a situation
Speaker 1: where I had two people in my life who wanted
Speaker 1: different things for me and I was not going to
Speaker 1: be old to please them both, right, And my response
Speaker 1: to that was I want to die. Yeah. It felt
Speaker 1: so psychically overwhelming. And if we call it a character
Speaker 1: trait that's changing, one that's changed the fair amount but
Speaker 1: still recurs. But that speaks so strongly to me that
Speaker 1: that's what would plague me with the most despair. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I would say that not today. I
Speaker 1: don't know in detail about your childhood, but I would
Speaker 1: say it's an imprint of your childhood, which is which
Speaker 1: is the impossible. Like, for example, in a divorce, the
Speaker 1: child has put in an impossible situation. Yep, yep. If
Speaker 1: I please alone, I displease the other. If I displease
Speaker 1: a one, I lose the contact with them, but I
Speaker 1: need that contact. So I don't know if anything that
Speaker 1: could happened to you, but it's something like that that's
Speaker 1: act the best. The first point. The second point is
Speaker 1: in your question, you're not even asking what would please me, right,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's not even on the radar. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the idea here is that this type of submerging our
Speaker 1: own needs for others needs can lead to physical and
Speaker 1: mental illness. Now, part of what happens when we start
Speaker 1: to say my physical illness maybe to some degree caused
Speaker 1: by my emotional state or all that, is that it's
Speaker 1: very easy to go into blame. Right, It's very easy
Speaker 1: for me to suddenly go, oh my god, I caused
Speaker 1: this and now I've got to fix it. Like it's
Speaker 1: almost as if when you think that, oh my god,
Speaker 1: my mental state is causing me to not be well,
Speaker 1: Now I've added another layer of stress onto the whole thing.
Speaker 1: So how do we work with that in a skillful
Speaker 1: way where we don't actually increase our stress level by
Speaker 1: having some of those realizations. Well, the question I would
Speaker 1: ask somebody who was blaming themselves like that is what
Speaker 1: they did. You consciously decided to suppress your emotions. Were
Speaker 1: you one year old or one day old? When did
Speaker 1: you make that decision? You didn't. This is an automatic
Speaker 1: adaptation pattern to shotted circumstances, oh, which she had no
Speaker 1: control whatsoever. So that self suppression actually played a beneficial
Speaker 1: role in your life because they kept your relationships going.
Speaker 1: Without those relationships, you could not survive. So actually that
Speaker 1: self suppression was part of the wisdom of your organism.
Speaker 1: It's just that it's no longer serving you. So it's
Speaker 1: not a question of blaming yourself. It's a question of
Speaker 1: understanding that these patterns are helping to make me sick.
Speaker 1: But I didn't create them. I'm not guilty about them.
Speaker 1: I'm responsible for changing it. Who else can but there's
Speaker 1: no culpability because I had no choice in the matter.
Speaker 1: In order to survive, I had to choose attachment over authenticity.
Speaker 1: That choice saved my life, for my existence at that time,
Speaker 1: it's no longer working for me. Blame has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with it, and that's why so much of the
Speaker 1: healing sections of my book are focused on the need
Speaker 1: for self compassion and how to achieve that. So we
Speaker 1: don't attack ourselves for anything. We understand where these patterns
Speaker 1: came from in order to better transform them. But self
Speaker 1: blame has no role in the matter. Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: a line I love in the book. You say, no
Speaker 1: matter how far back we look in the chain of consequence,
Speaker 1: great grandparents, pre modern ancestors, Adam and Eve, the first
Speaker 1: single cell them, but the accusing finger can find no
Speaker 1: fixed target. And I think that also then applies to ourselves. Right,
Speaker 1: there is no um blame. I love this line. It's
Speaker 1: entirely possible to embrace responsibility without taking on the useless
Speaker 1: baggage of guilt or blame. I think that is so
Speaker 1: important and yet really difficult to do well, especially in
Speaker 1: this society, because this is a society that the worships blame.
Speaker 1: When there's something wrong, we always want to find who's guilty,
Speaker 1: who's responsible? I mean it was guilt, who is responsible
Speaker 1: in the culpable sense, you know, so that we live
Speaker 1: in a culture of blame mentioned in the book. Literally,
Speaker 1: the saddest letter I ever received was from a guy
Speaker 1: who had read my book on Addiction and Around the
Speaker 1: Lunger Goes, in which I talked about sholto trauma being
Speaker 1: the template for addiction and and it wents to me.
Speaker 1: I find a book very interesting, but I can't blame
Speaker 1: my mother. It's because it's my own fault that I
Speaker 1: became a ship, you know, and there's such a lack
Speaker 1: of self compassion. I never blamed the mother in the book.
Speaker 1: I point out that it's not proper to blame parents
Speaker 1: because they were just acting out their own shot at traumas,
Speaker 1: like Mark wool And the family therapist says in the
Speaker 1: title of his book, it didn't start with you. So
Speaker 1: that's why the blaming finger finds no target. But this
Speaker 1: person was blaming themselves so harshly, which kept them from recovery.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, I think it's interesting because when I
Speaker 1: got sober in Columbus, Ohio, and a twelve step program
Speaker 1: in you can't imagine it was not ordinarily trauma informed culture,
Speaker 1: we might say, right. Um, And the idea there which
Speaker 1: was drummed into my head very strongly was it's nobody's fault,
Speaker 1: but yours. You need to take responsibility. There was a
Speaker 1: kernel of truth in that that was helpful, which is,
Speaker 1: I do have to take responsibility for this, and nobody
Speaker 1: else is going to stop this addiction. What I found though,
Speaker 1: over time, is that then I also had to incorporate
Speaker 1: this other element, which says, you know what, what happened
Speaker 1: to me imprinted on me and caused me to be
Speaker 1: the way I am, and no blame, but it still
Speaker 1: needs address. It happened to me and it affects me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so is between fault and responsibility. And I'm not the
Speaker 1: first one to make this point responsibility. If you break
Speaker 1: down the word response ability, nobody else can respond to
Speaker 1: your circumstances about you. Yeah, nobody else can to respond
Speaker 1: to the imprints that you carry. But you you're a
Speaker 1: response able, but you're not at fault. You make a
Speaker 1: point in the book going back to this repression idea
Speaker 1: a little bit. You know that we repress you talk
Speaker 1: about a study where there was a really large gap
Speaker 1: in between what was happening to someone and what they
Speaker 1: reported their response was. So when we talk about well, repression,
Speaker 1: we think, oh, unconsciously, I'm pushing that away. But the
Speaker 1: mechanism is entirely maybe not entirely, but is to a
Speaker 1: large degree unconscious. We don't know we're doing it. Repression
Speaker 1: is unconscious, suppression is conscious. Okay, chronically they're both harmful,
Speaker 1: but repression is even more harmful. For for example, in
Speaker 1: the study, they were studying people's physiological stress responses in
Speaker 1: response to some negative stimulus, and these people who had malignancy,
Speaker 1: actually there were melanoma patients there. She's biological responses to
Speaker 1: stress with the same as everybody else's, but they reported
Speaker 1: that they weren't stressed at all. And that goes back
Speaker 1: to that disconnection that I talked about, is that one
Speaker 1: of the ways you survived child to traumas to disconnect
Speaker 1: from our feelings. Now, if you don't know that you're stressed,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be walking into stress assitiations all the time
Speaker 1: without any capacity to protect yourself. It's like if you
Speaker 1: had no sense of heat, you'd be putting your hand
Speaker 1: in the fire all the time, and that would burn you.
Speaker 1: Suppression is when I am angry, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: suppress it. Now. Sometimes that's necessary. I mean, if I
Speaker 1: had a gun at your head, you might be very
Speaker 1: angry with me, but that might not be the best
Speaker 1: time to express the anger. Yeah, to give a very
Speaker 1: triggering example, you might say, but if you chronically suppressed it,
Speaker 1: that would have a negative back on you. So I
Speaker 1: talked about you know, James Baldwin, the great black American writer,
Speaker 1: It was over that to be a black in the
Speaker 1: States is to live in a constant state of suppressed anger.
Speaker 1: And in the long term, chronic suppression, even if you
Speaker 1: aware of it, can be harmful. Suppression sometimes it's okay,
Speaker 1: chronically it's harmful. Repression is always harmful in the long term.
Speaker 1: And so how do we start to even know that
Speaker 1: we're repressing. Let's take the study. These people were being insulted,
Speaker 1: and physiologically we're seeing stress response. But if you ask them,
Speaker 1: they say, it doesn't bother me. Right, They're not lying,
Speaker 1: they're not lying at all. They're not lying. But there's
Speaker 1: a disconnect, and it's very difficult to even know what's happening.
Speaker 1: How do you start to identify like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: there's repression, you say in the book. And I think
Speaker 1: this is so interesting to say, one of the healthiest
Speaker 1: things about me, my capacity to take it, to survive,
Speaker 1: to bounce back to prosper is intimately connected with my
Speaker 1: biggest neurotic liability, my facility in disconnecting from my feeling.
Speaker 1: So we've got this thing that, on one hand, to
Speaker 1: a certain degree, as a virtue, but taken too far,
Speaker 1: becomes a great enemy of ours. Well, let's put into context.
Speaker 1: That phrase is from student Sontag, who died of cancer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she denied the connection between emotions and physiology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I used that coude to show how ironic it is.
Speaker 1: Here she's actually describing the very mechanism that triggered her cancer,
Speaker 1: and she's describing it as a virtue. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 1: If only poor Susan Sontag haded a physician who could
Speaker 1: have told her, listen, we're going to deal with the
Speaker 1: physiological aspects of your cancer. But once we've done that,
Speaker 1: let's also look at the emotional factors that may have
Speaker 1: contributed to it. And yes, repression is one of them,
Speaker 1: and your repression, as she knew, was caused by the
Speaker 1: fact that she learned to do that in response to
Speaker 1: her mother, who abandoned her. So what I'm saying is,
Speaker 1: the body will send you a segment us. The body
Speaker 1: will make you sick. The body will say no when
Speaker 1: you didn't say no. It will show up in the
Speaker 1: form of mental health condition like depression, or show up
Speaker 1: in the form of anxiety. Will show up in the
Speaker 1: form of back spasms or stomachaches, or chronic colds or
Speaker 1: skin wrashes or dry mouth or migraines. The body will
Speaker 1: give you these signals. The problem is that people not
Speaker 1: not trained to listen to their bodies and to recognize
Speaker 1: that these symptoms aren't random misfortunes, that the body talking
Speaker 1: to you, trying to tell you to pay attention. Now,
Speaker 1: If only the physicians understood this, if only medical doctors
Speaker 1: understood the scientistically demonstrated links between the emotion and physiology,
Speaker 1: if they actually understood that disease and sentence are very
Speaker 1: often the body is signaling of a loss of acting
Speaker 1: to oneself and repression and all that then and these
Speaker 1: is shows up. That could be a learning process, and
Speaker 1: unfortunately physicians are not trying to do that. They only
Speaker 1: do with the biological aspects, but not the whole unity.
Speaker 1: Learn the book. I have a chapter called Diseases Teacher
Speaker 1: and talk too many people who actually, through their illness,
Speaker 1: learned what the body was trying to tell them about
Speaker 1: the loss of authenticity. We also give exercises to people
Speaker 1: like pay attention to yourself, Like at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, just check in with your body. How are
Speaker 1: you feeling? What is your body trying to tell you?
Speaker 1: Make that a regular exercise. No infant is separated from
Speaker 1: their bodies. Have you ever met an infant who says,
Speaker 1: I got the stomach ache, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: bother my mommy and my daddy because they work so
Speaker 1: hard and I don't want to stress them any further.
Speaker 1: You know. So we're born connected. Our bodies keep trying
Speaker 1: to bring that connection back to us by speaking to
Speaker 1: us in a language of symptoms and the illness, so
Speaker 1: we can learn from the body. We don't think it's sick.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to wait for that. We can learn
Speaker 1: to listen to our bodies before some illness forces us
Speaker 1: to wake up. Is your intention here to correct for
Speaker 1: if we're all the way over on this extreme where
Speaker 1: we say, when we're dealing with illness, the only thing
Speaker 1: we're dealing with is you know the body and the
Speaker 1: actual symptoms, and you know our current medical model where
Speaker 1: we don't take these emotional aspects in at all. You're
Speaker 1: not saying that we should go to the other extreme,
Speaker 1: where we go the only reason that anybody ever gets
Speaker 1: sick is because they had a bad thought. You're saying
Speaker 1: that we're so far over to an extreme. We need
Speaker 1: to treat the whole situation. It's all important. The medical
Speaker 1: is important to all that, and so is the emotional.
Speaker 1: We need to make this a more holistic treatment. That's
Speaker 1: the whole point. Look, I'm a trained physician. I have
Speaker 1: nothing but all at the capacity of modern medicine to
Speaker 1: perform miracles. I'm not here to denigrate or deny the
Speaker 1: value of modern scientific medicine. But it's one sided, it's narrow,
Speaker 1: it's shallow, and my knock against medical training is that
Speaker 1: we don't look at all the evidence that challenges are
Speaker 1: purely biological. Outlook all the evidence that shows the relationship
Speaker 1: of personal relationships, trauma, the mind, body, unity, culture and
Speaker 1: their impacts on health or illness. We ignore that completely
Speaker 1: in medical training. So therefore the functioning with have our
Speaker 1: brains tied behind our backs, are capacity to help people
Speaker 1: heal be so much deeper and so much more empower
Speaker 1: it if we looked at the whole picture. That's all
Speaker 1: I'm asking for. Yeah, I wanted to make that important
Speaker 1: clarification because you know, some people would worry that we're
Speaker 1: going too far away from any medicine, and that's not
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the healing path we said earlier. You know, I love
Speaker 1: that line. We're never as close as we hope, We're
Speaker 1: never as far as we fear. You talk about some
Speaker 1: universal obstacles to healing. One of the universal obstacles to
Speaker 1: healing is trauma itself, which imposes the shame, basically the
Speaker 1: of the self, which actually makes you believe that you're
Speaker 1: not even worthy of healing or that you're not capable
Speaker 1: of it. So that me, as a physician and healer
Speaker 1: and wrestling author and somebody that a lot of people
Speaker 1: turn to it for guidance, had this fixed belief that
Speaker 1: I can help everybody else, but I can't hear on myself.
Speaker 1: That my trauma was surly and so deep, so entrenched
Speaker 1: that it was beyond repair. And not intellectually, I always
Speaker 1: knew that wasn't true, but any emotional it's how I operated,
Speaker 1: you know. And so one of the biggest obstacles are
Speaker 1: these trauma imposed self beliefs about our potentials and who
Speaker 1: we actually are. That's the biggest How did you work
Speaker 1: around that? I think that's a really important point. You
Speaker 1: will hear people say, and I know we've all thought
Speaker 1: at that point, I'm too broken. Yeah, yeah, that'll work
Speaker 1: for you. Yeah, but I'm too broken or deeper, I'm
Speaker 1: not worth it. How did you get around that? Because
Speaker 1: you had a ton of knowledge at your disposal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all the intellectual knowledge that I had wasn't enough to
Speaker 1: rid me of that particular emotionally stamped believe. Well, somebody
Speaker 1: once said to me that I have this brilliant intellect
Speaker 1: that knows how to cut through all kinds of nonsense
Speaker 1: to look at the truth. But the same sharp knife
Speaker 1: of mentalect ends up cutting me, so that in some
Speaker 1: ways I had to recognize that I can't just listen
Speaker 1: to my intellect. That's the first point. That's an important
Speaker 1: tool as long as I'm building it consciously. But if
Speaker 1: I'm unconscious, it will turn against me. That's the first thing.
Speaker 1: And then you know, throughout the course of my life,
Speaker 1: in my marriage, there's been a lot of healing, a
Speaker 1: lot of repair. So I've learned, you know, what I
Speaker 1: can heal like would be more present. I can be intimate,
Speaker 1: I can open up, I can be vulnerable and not
Speaker 1: be destroyed. So that's been an important ground of ealing
Speaker 1: from me my relationship with my wife, to whom the
Speaker 1: book is actually dedicated. Then there are healing experience that
Speaker 1: I've had from mentors and healers and therapists and so on.
Speaker 1: Then there's the psychedelic work that I've done. There's a
Speaker 1: spiritual work that I've done. If I had to choose
Speaker 1: one area that's dominant, I'd say it's the relationship. But
Speaker 1: that was all supported by all these other modalities as well.
Speaker 1: So that's how. And also you have to develop I
Speaker 1: think that probably you understand very well, which is patience,
Speaker 1: which is that it does not have to happen all
Speaker 1: at once. It doesn't have to happen as a bug
Speaker 1: epiphonicclismically transformative experience. It's a lifelong process. Some of those experiences,
Speaker 1: which can be so mind opening, there's still an integration
Speaker 1: period that comes after that, like, Okay, I saw this truth,
Speaker 1: but okay, how do I actually start to now live
Speaker 1: this in the moment to moment part of my life?
Speaker 1: I Mean, sometimes those things are so big there's a
Speaker 1: major psychic change and happens kind of right away. But
Speaker 1: my experience has been those things need a lot of
Speaker 1: integration time. I've have known people very fee who had
Speaker 1: those absolute, unitary, transformative experiences. I'm not wired that way,
Speaker 1: at least not so far so for me and most people,
Speaker 1: I know, it's more of a process where we have
Speaker 1: glimpses of the truth and then we have to integrate
Speaker 1: that into our lives. But to who doesn't know doesn't
Speaker 1: automatically start manifesting itself in a way that we fully
Speaker 1: present to it. So it's it's a process, you know,
Speaker 1: And that's why I I've said this before, but you know,
Speaker 1: I've written my own epitaph, you know, and what I
Speaker 1: want engraved on my stone, I will mark my earthly
Speaker 1: Reman's is this is a lot more rook that I
Speaker 1: had anticipated. It's a process, people, and it's a lifelong process.
Speaker 1: Thank god, you just made me think of a song
Speaker 1: I love by a musician I love, Frank Turner, and
Speaker 1: the song is called Eulogy. And at the end, the
Speaker 1: basic thing on his eulogy is, you know, at least
Speaker 1: I fucking tried. But that's really a beautiful sentiment when
Speaker 1: you kind of boil it down, is you know, I
Speaker 1: did the best with what was given to me. I
Speaker 1: made a conscious effort. And I think so much of
Speaker 1: what you're talking about is about bringing conscious intention because
Speaker 1: one of the things this idea of the repression that
Speaker 1: these people who care about the emotional needs of others
Speaker 1: care about duty and responsibility. You know, all these things
Speaker 1: are closely linked to positive traits like compassion, honor, diligence,
Speaker 1: you know, kindness, generosity, And so it's really about that
Speaker 1: conscious question, what's happening here? Why am I doing this?
Speaker 1: You know, have talked about this on the show a
Speaker 1: lot between when I say to myself, I have to
Speaker 1: go see my mother, yeah, versus when I go, I'm
Speaker 1: making a choice to go see my mother based on
Speaker 1: values that I've examined about what's important to me. Now, again,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of work to do that, but that
Speaker 1: conscious intention, like what's really going on here? I love
Speaker 1: the idea in Buddhism of near and far enemies, right.
Speaker 1: You know, if we talk about a term like equanimity, um,
Speaker 1: it's far enemy as being a jerk, right, or being
Speaker 1: a drama queen, it's near enemy is indifference. That's right.
Speaker 1: And to take your example of your mom and applied
Speaker 1: to see my own work with a physician. Am I
Speaker 1: being driven to be wanted by people and to be
Speaker 1: respected by people and to be admired by them? Or
Speaker 1: are you being called to help them? Because that's what
Speaker 1: satisfies me. When I'm being driven, I'm not in charge.
Speaker 1: Something else is in charge. When I'm called. I can
Speaker 1: conscious decide are we being driven or being called? Two
Speaker 1: different propositions, even though the action from the outside i'd
Speaker 1: look the same. Yes, And my experience has been there's
Speaker 1: an element of both, right, and I have to try
Speaker 1: and you have to try and work with that. It's
Speaker 1: never quite so clean, is like, all right, this is
Speaker 1: completely a calling because I'm like, well, yeah, there's still
Speaker 1: those emotional guilt messages that are that are in there too,
Speaker 1: And so you know what's most prominent what's the lion
Speaker 1: share of it? You know, it would be nice if
Speaker 1: it was just that cleanly cut. Well, I think that's
Speaker 1: the work, is to distinguish the two. And to go
Speaker 1: back to your question about wolves, which one are you
Speaker 1: going to feed? The calling or the driven nous? You know,
Speaker 1: and when you're being driven, that's going to have an
Speaker 1: impact not only I knew, but also in a relationship
Speaker 1: because if you're driven to see your mom, are you
Speaker 1: going to feel about it afterwards? You're going to resent her? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 1: And so you go you don't say no because you
Speaker 1: want to be closer to her, and then you end
Speaker 1: up resenting her, which drives you further apart. So the
Speaker 1: driven part will also always have negative consequences. The calling
Speaker 1: part will only have positive consequences. Yeah, so let's talk
Speaker 1: about the four a's that promote healing. You actually add
Speaker 1: two more on at the end, which maybe we can
Speaker 1: get to. But can you share what those are? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I don't know what order I put them in. But
Speaker 1: the first one would be authenticity, which we already talked
Speaker 1: about that need to be ourselves, which begins by noticing
Speaker 1: where by not being authentic and just asking ourselves, well,
Speaker 1: why not what's happening here? What? What belief do I
Speaker 1: have that keeps me from showing up as authentic? So
Speaker 1: that's the first one authenticity agency, which is that I'm
Speaker 1: no one who is in charge of my life. I'm
Speaker 1: the one who decides what happens to me and my
Speaker 1: psyche in my body. Then there is acceptance, which is
Speaker 1: not tolerance for what's intolerable, but accepting this is how
Speaker 1: things are. Now, what do I do about it? So
Speaker 1: as we don't deny reality. You know, if I lose
Speaker 1: an election, I'm gonna accept that I lost the election.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna deny it. You know, That's what acceptance
Speaker 1: will like. I'm not gonna rail and create hostility because
Speaker 1: I can deal with reality. I'm not strong enough to
Speaker 1: deal with reality. If my ego is so weak that
Speaker 1: I have to win every context iver renteer, then you're
Speaker 1: not into acceptance and you're gonna create a lot of
Speaker 1: conflict within an outside yourself. So that's acceptance. The acceptance
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you have to put up with it
Speaker 1: acceptly justice This is how it is? Now? What do
Speaker 1: I do but it? So that's except offense. You make
Speaker 1: an important point about acceptance too, that it's not just
Speaker 1: accepting externally what's happening, it's accepting internally what's happening. I'm angry,
Speaker 1: I'm sad. When we think of acceptance, I think we
Speaker 1: often think of just we have to accept what's out there.
Speaker 1: But you make the really important point that it's also
Speaker 1: accepting internally what's actually occurring. Yes, so if I lose
Speaker 1: the election, I might be sad, and and then I'll say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm very sad that'st this election because
Speaker 1: I really don't wanted to serve you longer, and I
Speaker 1: have certain ideas that I wanted to put into practice
Speaker 1: and I won't have a chance. I also feel sad
Speaker 1: for all the people that supported me. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be with my sadness. I'm not going to deny that
Speaker 1: I'm sad and pretend that i'm somehow instead outraged and
Speaker 1: angry and so on. So I don't mean to keep
Speaker 1: harping on that I'm very obvious example or very traumatized man.
Speaker 1: But that's what acceptance looks like, is you accept the
Speaker 1: internal state. You accept grief, You accept the fact that no,
Speaker 1: I wasn't loved the way I needed to be loved
Speaker 1: and that hurts. I'm going to accept that pain rather
Speaker 1: than to run away from it and to drink or
Speaker 1: opiate or into seeking sexual satisfaction at every turn of
Speaker 1: the page, you know. So that's acceptance and then anger.
Speaker 1: We talked about the points of healthy anger. If I
Speaker 1: were to do the brick again, I would put in
Speaker 1: a fifth one, which is awareness. Uh and I somehow
Speaker 1: I missed that one, but it should be in there
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah. It's almost the meta skill, right that
Speaker 1: makes all of this possible exactly. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it
Speaker 1: was so obvious that I just didn't see it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you could tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about a meeting you had. I don't know that.
Speaker 1: I'm going to get her name right here, be Tina Goring.
Speaker 1: Goring share that I just found that an absolutely fascinating
Speaker 1: thing that happened to you, and a beautiful thing. So
Speaker 1: this is in the first healing chapter of the book.
Speaker 1: And Herman Goreing was Hitler's set and in command. He
Speaker 1: was the head of the Luftwaffe that killed answer tons
Speaker 1: of people of the German Air Force. He was also
Speaker 1: the head of the guest step I think at some point,
Speaker 1: and he was Hitler designated there for a long time.
Speaker 1: He was also an opiate addict and a food addict
Speaker 1: and a highly traumatized person. Now, his grandniece, Bettina Goring,
Speaker 1: was born after the war from a very traumatized family,
Speaker 1: and there are some filmmakers that made the documentary about
Speaker 1: her but also about me, so they thought, you know,
Speaker 1: her and I would have something to say to each other.
Speaker 1: So me as a Jewish infant who almost lost my
Speaker 1: life and certainly was deeply traumatized during the Nazi genocide
Speaker 1: that took place in Hungary where five million people who
Speaker 1: killed him three months, including my grandparents and as I
Speaker 1: said earlier, including almost myself and my mother as well.
Speaker 1: It's very close. So Goring was a big pillar of
Speaker 1: that criminal regime, and his grandniece carried all the guilt.
Speaker 1: She's one of these impacts that just absorbs everything. So
Speaker 1: she had a very dark psyche and she actually knew
Speaker 1: about my work and reached out to me pretty talk.
Speaker 1: So we did, and she told me that she had
Speaker 1: this healing experience where she actually consciously decided to enter
Speaker 1: the psyche of her granduncle. She said it was horrendous
Speaker 1: because she's an impact, so she can do that. But
Speaker 1: she said it was the darkest night of the spirit
Speaker 1: that she could ever have imagined. It was horrible, she said,
Speaker 1: to be inside his psyche, but in doing so and
Speaker 1: in coming to the other side, she cleansed herself as well.
Speaker 1: And that experience and the very contact with her, the
Speaker 1: very fact that I am talking to this human being
Speaker 1: who comes from this terrible legacy of criminal insanity and
Speaker 1: me who are almost victim to my life but certainly
Speaker 1: has been stamped by the same chrominal insanity. No, we're
Speaker 1: talking to each other about healing and about understanding each other.
Speaker 1: I thought, boy disguised the limit. Yeah, I thought it
Speaker 1: was a beautiful part of the book. Also in a
Speaker 1: really touching story. And when you were talking about her
Speaker 1: inhabiting Grand nucles psyche, you know, I got chills about
Speaker 1: how dark it must have been in there to be
Speaker 1: that man and the darkness that he imposed on the
Speaker 1: world as a result. Oh yeah, yeah, it's an awful chapter. Well,
Speaker 1: gab Or, thank you so much for coming on. It
Speaker 1: is always such a pleasure to talk with you. I
Speaker 1: really loved this new book. I got a lot out
Speaker 1: of it personally some things I need to be continuing
Speaker 1: to look at and working on, and I appreciate you
Speaker 1: and your work, so thank you likewise, and it's always
Speaker 1: a pleasure to speak with you. And thanks for the
Speaker 1: close reading of the book you seem to have done
Speaker 1: that allow us to engage in this deep conversation, so
Speaker 1: thank you for that. You're very welcome. It was a pleasure.
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