Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Now. If you
Speaker 1: look at the word healing and it's word origins, it
Speaker 1: comes from an Anglo Saxon word for wholeness. So yeah,
Speaker 1: literally is the process of ephole, which begs the question
Speaker 1: I mean whole hole in the first place? Well, yes,
Speaker 1: the nessence you are, but as a result of trauma,
Speaker 1: you get cut off from parts of yourself. That's Doctor
Speaker 1: gobor Mate, physician, renowned speaker, and best selling author of
Speaker 1: five books, including most recently The Myth of Normal. Doctor
Speaker 1: Matte is a leading expert in the field of trauma, addiction,
Speaker 1: and childhood development. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is a
Speaker 1: special bonus episode of Family Secrets. The secrets that are
Speaker 1: kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. Early in your book, you
Speaker 1: recount a moment from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace,
Speaker 1: the parable of two young fish who encounter an elder
Speaker 1: fish on their aquatic paths, and the elder says to
Speaker 1: the younger fish, morning, boys, how's the water? And the
Speaker 1: elder fish says, what the hell is water? What does
Speaker 1: this story mean to you? Well, it means the exactly
Speaker 1: what David Foster follows what was intendedive to me, which
Speaker 1: is sometimes there's things that we were most used to
Speaker 1: and really swimming, and we don't recognize if we used
Speaker 1: as Summing's normal, we are not even related to it.
Speaker 1: We just carry on our merry way without actually being
Speaker 1: aware of the mel You that we're in, of the
Speaker 1: impact of the Melians. So those they know the everyday thinks,
Speaker 1: he says, have the greatest consequences for our lives. He
Speaker 1: himself is a tragic example because, as you may know,
Speaker 1: he committed suicide. You know, it was this incredible talent,
Speaker 1: but I don't think either was able to fully metabolize
Speaker 1: your suffering until all he could do was to escape
Speaker 1: from it. Yeah, that reminds me. Elsewhere in your book,
Speaker 1: you describe Elizabeth Wurtzel, who wrote fairly late in her
Speaker 1: All Too Brief Life, she wrote about having discovered that
Speaker 1: her father who raised her wasn't her biological father, and
Speaker 1: she writes about her depression. And there's something that you
Speaker 1: write about this kind of suffering that can go along
Speaker 1: with a glittering career, and yet underneath that there is
Speaker 1: this trauma that is either not understood or certainly not healed. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there are all too many people out there with glittering
Speaker 1: careers who have suffered tremendously, and many of them in
Speaker 1: the entertainment world. And we know these figures who are
Speaker 1: at the very top of their profession and adulated by millions.
Speaker 1: And look at the riches that Elvis accrued and that
Speaker 1: were stolen from the actually by his manager. And he
Speaker 1: was a suffering person. He had a twin brother who
Speaker 1: died at birth, and lots of other trauma, and much
Speaker 1: of his corriginal came from his suffering. Also as incredible talent,
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe the same thing. Lots of examples of this
Speaker 1: Aretha Franklin as another one, you know, incredible iconic singer.
Speaker 1: She sings the song always BCP about respect, and in
Speaker 1: her life she was never respected. She was traumatized as
Speaker 1: a child, abused as an adult, and didn't have the
Speaker 1: self respect to set boundaries for herself because of her
Speaker 1: childhood trauma. These people are suffered to trauma their childhood,
Speaker 1: and that trauma shows up even in their successes. That's
Speaker 1: part of the toxicity of our culture. It's sometimes reward
Speaker 1: people's desperate hoping mechanisms. That's really fascinating. Do you think
Speaker 1: that there's some correlation between talent or perhaps ambition or
Speaker 1: what makes somebody strive for that kind of worldly success,
Speaker 1: whether it's in art or it's in politics, and you
Speaker 1: know the initial wound or is that coincidence or do
Speaker 1: we only know these stories because these people are famous.
Speaker 1: To give my own personal example, before I wrote books
Speaker 1: and worked in trauma of a family physician and very successful.
Speaker 1: I had endless demand for my services and I never
Speaker 1: said no, I was a pure workaholic, and that work
Speaker 1: hasn't really hurt my family whood, my kids have hurt
Speaker 1: my wife that calls and was rewarded by the world.
Speaker 1: Everybody said, what a great doctor is always available. And
Speaker 1: of course the more I made myself available day or night,
Speaker 1: the more gratitude came my way, and the more money
Speaker 1: I made, so the world rewarded my Workhals and Bobbo
Speaker 1: was driving. It was a desperation to prove my value
Speaker 1: as a un being, because as an infant that value
Speaker 1: was not affirmed given the historical circumstances under which I
Speaker 1: was born and the suffering of my mother and my
Speaker 1: family and so on. I had no sense of birth
Speaker 1: that was the independent of what I do know. Now
Speaker 1: you can go to the autabagasies of a lot of
Speaker 1: famous people, including any number of US presidents, and see
Speaker 1: the same dynamic. And you know what, anybody's well versed
Speaker 1: in trauma, you can see the trauma in the demeanor.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at so many politicians anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: They hate giving up power because they don't think very
Speaker 1: much of themselves deep down, unconsciously. There's a part in
Speaker 1: your book that I found extremely difficult to read. It's
Speaker 1: in this chapter called a sturdy or a fragile foundation,
Speaker 1: And I really wanted to unpack this with you because
Speaker 1: you quote Raffi, So Raffie says, we discover who we
Speaker 1: are from the inside. What's forming is no less than
Speaker 1: how it feels to be human. And then later in
Speaker 1: that same chapter you quote a book called the Secret
Speaker 1: History of the Unborn Child. This whole idea of long
Speaker 1: term influence, this was something I mean, I literally was
Speaker 1: writing exclamation points in the margins. But long term influence
Speaker 1: of the intrauterine period on emotional health and in my
Speaker 1: own history, and the reason that I started this podcast.
Speaker 1: I discovered in midlife that the dad who raised me
Speaker 1: had not been my biological father, That my parents had
Speaker 1: experienced infertility as a couple in the nineteen sixties, that
Speaker 1: they had used was a sperm donor, that they had
Speaker 1: been told to never tell a soul, to certainly never
Speaker 1: tell the child, right. I mean, I have a really
Speaker 1: successful and wonderful life, But in terms of early childhood intrauterine,
Speaker 1: my mother, I am convinced now must have been absolutely
Speaker 1: petrified the entire time she was pregnant. Fortunately, on the
Speaker 1: biology side, my biological father, who I was able to
Speaker 1: find and identify, has a constitution that is very, very stable,
Speaker 1: and I actually think that that had a lot to
Speaker 1: do and also with the way that I was surrounded
Speaker 1: by various adults who loved me and helped me. But
Speaker 1: I'm saying all this because what does it mean. We
Speaker 1: can't change where we started. We can't change the stories
Speaker 1: that were told that form our identity from the time
Speaker 1: that we're sentient beings. And there's so much that we
Speaker 1: can do, but there are things that we can't do.
Speaker 1: And your book is full of both. It's full of
Speaker 1: you know, the bad news and the good news, and
Speaker 1: there's so much about healing in there, but there's also
Speaker 1: the ways in which we can never alter or if
Speaker 1: we were formed in this way very early on, with
Speaker 1: a kind of lack of maternal connection with fear, even
Speaker 1: in the uterus, what do we do with that in
Speaker 1: our lives. There was a quote that so speaks to
Speaker 1: your situation, and she writes a certain kind of silence
Speaker 1: that which comes from holding back to truth is in
Speaker 1: itself abusive to a child. The soul has a natural
Speaker 1: movement towards knowledge, so that not to know can lead
Speaker 1: to despair. In the posity of explanation for a mood,
Speaker 1: a look, a gesture, the child takes on the blame
Speaker 1: and cares, thus a guilt for circumstances beyond childish influence.
Speaker 1: And that would have hurt you because the chot can
Speaker 1: sense that there's something wrong, there's something not being said,
Speaker 1: but it's so confusing, and all the chot can do
Speaker 1: is to develop a sense of lack of safety and
Speaker 1: self blame, and that's what happens. One of the things
Speaker 1: that I came to realize is that whole idea of
Speaker 1: the kind of trauma big t trauma you know as
Speaker 1: you write about in the myth of normal in which
Speaker 1: the person is trapped and powerless and there's nothing to
Speaker 1: be done as opposed to actually being able to make
Speaker 1: meaning out of it, do something with it, and that
Speaker 1: changes the game. That's right, So to forget your question
Speaker 1: about what to do about it all. Here's the good
Speaker 1: news about trauma. Trauma is not what happened to you.
Speaker 1: Trauma is what happened inside you as a result of
Speaker 1: what happened to you. Your trauma wasn't that they would
Speaker 1: have the truth from you. The trauma is the emotional
Speaker 1: psychological wound being green in your body and your nervous system.
Speaker 1: In terms of what to do about it, if the
Speaker 1: trauma was what happened to you, which is the circumstances
Speaker 1: are on your gestation and birth and child, trauma is
Speaker 1: what happened to me as a Jewish infant under the
Speaker 1: Nazis in hungry. If that was the trauma, there's nothing
Speaker 1: you can do, nothing I can do because it happened,
Speaker 1: it will never not at But if the trauma is
Speaker 1: what we made it mean about ourselves, which is that
Speaker 1: I didn't have value as it in being. But that's
Speaker 1: summer you were, you were faulty or not worthy or
Speaker 1: whatever you made it mean, that can be healed at
Speaker 1: any time. You can help heal what we made the
Speaker 1: past mean. And that's the actual journey. And so this
Speaker 1: is why I called the Buddha as well. He says that,
Speaker 1: you know, he points out that with our minds to
Speaker 1: create the world, Like, if my mind tells me that
Speaker 1: I'm not worthy, then I'm living in life. I'm living
Speaker 1: in a world where I was at the pool. My
Speaker 1: worthiness and how do people feel about me is hugely important.
Speaker 1: If I live in a world where I know that
Speaker 1: I'm worth a lot because I exist, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: so much for any big things and what success you achieve,
Speaker 1: but what success I don't achieve, you know. So the
Speaker 1: Buddha said, every the minds, you get the world. What
Speaker 1: Buddha didn't say is that before with our minds you
Speaker 1: create the world, the world creates our minds, so that
Speaker 1: the mind and the brain which we interpret and interface
Speaker 1: of the world is created by our early circumstances, under
Speaker 1: conditions we had no control about whatsoever. And the whole
Speaker 1: idea of hearing them resigns in gaining agency. We were
Speaker 1: helpless in our origin story, but we're not helpless in
Speaker 1: the present moment. So whatever I believe or you believed
Speaker 1: as a result of all that, they can drop those beliefs,
Speaker 1: and we can drop the physical patelilogical reactions that those beliefs.
Speaker 1: That's a liberation that we're in a present form. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. Do you think that the dropping of
Speaker 1: those beliefs is something that we can do and then
Speaker 1: be done with or is life a little bit more
Speaker 1: like a game of shoots and ladders where you know,
Speaker 1: you write in the myth of normal about the real
Speaker 1: meaning of triggers, not the way that it's often used
Speaker 1: in the culture today. And this may be a rhetorical question,
Speaker 1: but is there a kind of place that you get
Speaker 1: to where it's like, no, you're good, You're done, and
Speaker 1: that history no longer has the power to haunt. I'll
Speaker 1: let you know when I get though. I sometimes talk
Speaker 1: about my epitask. I've created my own it's going to
Speaker 1: be carved on my great STONI what's gonna say. It'll
Speaker 1: say it was a lot more work than I had anticipated,
Speaker 1: you know, and that work goes down forever. It's not
Speaker 1: that I can't get a triggered now, and we can
Speaker 1: talk about the meaning of trigger, but when I do
Speaker 1: get upset. Let's take a very personal example of the occasion.
Speaker 1: I talked about this with my explanation. So let's say
Speaker 1: one night in a long distance panse twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: I want to sleep with her and she says no,
Speaker 1: and my response typically would be occurred into a fetal
Speaker 1: ball and be in despair and being a rageful state,
Speaker 1: and my body would really be like this, sir, It
Speaker 1: would really be tense and constricted. You know, wow, what's
Speaker 1: that about. It's not the response of a mature adults
Speaker 1: who says, oh, too bad, I'm onder what's going on
Speaker 1: for you, or maybe you're too tired, or I'm disappointed.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about it tomorrow. You know that'd be immature.
Speaker 1: My response to go until field ball is literally the
Speaker 1: response of an infant. I'm being rejected by mother, which
Speaker 1: was my experience. Not that she rejected me, but she
Speaker 1: gave me to a stranger and I didn't see her
Speaker 1: for six weeks to save my life. But I experienced
Speaker 1: it as a rejection and that response is still ingrained
Speaker 1: in my body now. These days should have happen, it
Speaker 1: doesn't trigger the same reaction because I dealt with it.
Speaker 1: At most, I might feel a disappointment. You know, I
Speaker 1: wanted something I don't get it. Well, that's disappointed, you know. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm overstating my healing here. I can
Speaker 1: still feel some tension around it. So if you look
Speaker 1: at what a trigger is, a trigger is a metaphor
Speaker 1: drawn from weaponry. No, in a weapon, how big a
Speaker 1: part of the weapon is the trigger. It's a tiny
Speaker 1: little thing. The only reason the trigger works is because
Speaker 1: there's a whole weapon there with ammunition and explosive charge. Now,
Speaker 1: if you say something that triggers me, I could say,
Speaker 1: what was the explosive material inside need that got set
Speaker 1: off here? And that's by far the more interesting question.
Speaker 1: So triggers, I think are really useful. If you get triggered, boy,
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of beautiful material to learn from
Speaker 1: about yourself if you ask the right questions. The anger,
Speaker 1: if I cost your boundaries or hurt you some way,
Speaker 1: or let you down in stificant ways, you should be
Speaker 1: angered with me, you know, and you should say you
Speaker 1: don't do this to me. I will not interact with you.
Speaker 1: That's healthy anger, that's not being triggered. That's a healthy
Speaker 1: response to a present boundary violation. Do you means that
Speaker 1: we lose consciousness of what's driving us and we put
Speaker 1: all the blame externally and even you not even know
Speaker 1: where that were triggered. A body literally changes, and I've
Speaker 1: been in that state plenty of time, and whenever that
Speaker 1: happens to a person, rest assured that it's something about
Speaker 1: the past, not in the present. This is a present
Speaker 1: somehow resemble the past, and that's what the little trigger
Speaker 1: is well. And you also you also write quite a
Speaker 1: bit in the Myths of Normal about blame and one
Speaker 1: of the things in this lexicon of triggering, if you're
Speaker 1: triggering me, then I blame you instead of what is
Speaker 1: it in me that has just gotten set off by
Speaker 1: this little trigger? That is this seismic thing that's happening
Speaker 1: in my body or in my psyche exactly. Yeah, from
Speaker 1: that point of view, my marriage has been my biggest
Speaker 1: institution of learning, because that's why we have learned about
Speaker 1: myself to I mean, I've done a lot of learning,
Speaker 1: you know, in all kinds of platforms or venues, but
Speaker 1: the biggest transformation is always in relationship that you really
Speaker 1: have to do. If you want to, you've got to
Speaker 1: deal with your own stuff. Either that or you expect
Speaker 1: the other person to suppress themselves to suit you. And
Speaker 1: when that happens, more stuffering happens. Well. That leads me
Speaker 1: to something that I found to be this really provocative,
Speaker 1: interesting idea, This idea that you put so succinctly and
Speaker 1: beautifully about attachment in family and the ways that we
Speaker 1: are our laboratories in a way, like a family is
Speaker 1: its own kind of laboratory for all of it, for growth,
Speaker 1: for triggers, for whatever it is we do to each other,
Speaker 1: and for each other. Also being stunted. Both can happen
Speaker 1: even to the same person. So the thing that you
Speaker 1: write about that I found really fascinating is the idea
Speaker 1: that we want to feel attached. It's essential that we
Speaker 1: feel attached to the people that we love and the
Speaker 1: people who are closest to us. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: it's possible when that goes awry that when we are
Speaker 1: our author centic selves, we are putting that attachment at risk. Somehow,
Speaker 1: it took me a lifetime and perhaps even the death
Speaker 1: of my mother to fully inhabit my authentic self because
Speaker 1: it was going to deeply threaten whatever that attachment was
Speaker 1: that I needed so badly. That at tension between attachment
Speaker 1: and authenticity is a major seeming in a lot of
Speaker 1: people's lives. There's no bargain between parents and child. Ideally speaking,
Speaker 1: here's what I have to do that my mother loved
Speaker 1: me or my father accept me. You know, there's no bargain.
Speaker 1: There's only a one way responsibility. That responsibility is I'm
Speaker 1: going to accept you as you are, no matter who
Speaker 1: you or who you are, because you are, and there'll
Speaker 1: be no conditions on that acceptance. Don't have to be pitty, smart, compliant,
Speaker 1: to sweet, healthful, obedient, anything. You just accepted for who
Speaker 1: you are because you are. No bargain and without that
Speaker 1: attachment relationship will being taken care of. We just can't survive.
Speaker 1: No mammalian infant can survive. So attachment is like wired
Speaker 1: into our biology. That soul is authenticity wired into abology,
Speaker 1: the capacity to know what we feel and to be
Speaker 1: able to act on it. I mean, as we evolved,
Speaker 1: these creatures are in nature, how long would be have
Speaker 1: survived if we weren't in touch with our good feelings?
Speaker 1: You know? And so that's another need a lot of people.
Speaker 1: If you really might be accepted, you have to hold
Speaker 1: up your end of a bargain. Then the child will
Speaker 1: suppress the authenticity of their genuine series who their view
Speaker 1: you are for the sake of being accepted, and that
Speaker 1: tragic tension between authenticity and attention, and it's wired in
Speaker 1: and they will let spend the rest of our lives
Speaker 1: living out of it. So then in our future relationships
Speaker 1: we hide our deepest desires and our deepest fears and
Speaker 1: who media are really think and on a job there
Speaker 1: not express ourselves, and to our friends will not be there,
Speaker 1: not be authentic, and to our partners who are afraid
Speaker 1: of being authentic for being rejected, because that was your
Speaker 1: experience as a child, that when you're authentic, you will
Speaker 1: not give an acceptance, but your poor parents couldn't give
Speaker 1: it to you because they themselves never had it. You know,
Speaker 1: part of what you're saying, I feel thrumbs beneath so
Speaker 1: many of the stories that my guest share with me
Speaker 1: on this podcast, because when you're talking about secrecy, you're
Speaker 1: automatically and instantly talking about a lack of authenticity. If
Speaker 1: you're keeping a secret, it's very often or almost always,
Speaker 1: out of shame or out of the fear that it
Speaker 1: will destroy an attachment that feels important. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that happens in the
Speaker 1: stories that my guests share, it's me because if they've
Speaker 1: come on this podcast, it means very often they've already
Speaker 1: dealt with a lot of this, And it really has
Speaker 1: to do with, well, what is the liberation that is
Speaker 1: available when a secret is finally voiced, spoken, metabolized, understood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think you had the same experience that I
Speaker 1: had as a writer. Like you begin to write a
Speaker 1: book because you think you want to tell people something,
Speaker 1: and then you actually find out that you were writing
Speaker 1: about what you have to learn yourself so that you
Speaker 1: write the book. And I just thought I wanted to
Speaker 1: tell the world stuff. But in the posts of writing,
Speaker 1: the stuff emerged about me that I had to learn,
Speaker 1: or about the ideas that it was expanding on. It
Speaker 1: took them much deeper than I would have had I
Speaker 1: not written about them. And so in that sense, I
Speaker 1: think what you and I have in common is that
Speaker 1: any secrets we have don't stay secrets well, and that
Speaker 1: discovery is always at the heart of what makes what
Speaker 1: makes a book a good book is what's alive on
Speaker 1: the page. Is you actually feel the writer discovering something exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I want to ask you a little bit
Speaker 1: more about healing and the ways in which we can
Speaker 1: understand our wounds intellectually. What can you say about this
Speaker 1: ongoing process of moving through life and actually the difference
Speaker 1: between the gaping wound, the scar tissue that you write about,
Speaker 1: and perhaps the true healing. It's a process that occurs
Speaker 1: over time. Now, if you look at the word healing,
Speaker 1: and it's the word origins, it comes from an Anglo
Speaker 1: Saxon word for wholeness. So yeah, literally is the process
Speaker 1: of beginning being whole now, which begs the question, what
Speaker 1: I mean whole? Are going whole in the first place? Well, yes,
Speaker 1: in essence you are. But as a result of trauma,
Speaker 1: you get cut off from parts of yourself. So the
Speaker 1: essence of trauma is actually a disconnection from ourselves, which
Speaker 1: also means that the healing means connecting with ourselves. But
Speaker 1: hearing is the process of connecting with all answerts of ourselves,
Speaker 1: which takes compassionate dance of judgment, and it stakes curiosity.
Speaker 1: If I'm triggered, I could not judge myself and say,
Speaker 1: what an idiot you did it again? Or I could say, huh,
Speaker 1: what in me was set off by that trigger That
Speaker 1: hasn't looked at yet. So the therapeutic approach I've developed,
Speaker 1: it's called compassionate inquiry, and we've had about three thousand
Speaker 1: students nor in eighty countries in the last three years
Speaker 1: studying it. So it's a process. It has many different dimensions.
Speaker 1: I don't claim that either my book or my method
Speaker 1: is the answer. There's no doubt answer. There is all
Speaker 1: kinds of healing adalgies, but in general I would say
Speaker 1: that healim ofdalogies that don't allow you to get to
Speaker 1: know your trauma and to befriended and to learn from
Speaker 1: it don't work. So whatever healing needs, it needs becoming whole,
Speaker 1: and that means confunding, defending, dealing with all the wounds
Speaker 1: that we carried, and doing so in a compassionate man.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zakour is
Speaker 1: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: Please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
Speaker 1: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 1: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.