BREAK ADDICTION: Why You Feel Lost In Life & How To FIND YOURSELF! | Gabor Mate

to say that i have this disease makes the assumption this disease got a separate life and nature of its own it doesn't what if we saw disease not as the things in themselves that have their own nature but as i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome what i read about your stuff what i see about your content is a lot of people are lost based on trauma and past traumas cause certain addictions or certain behaviors yeah and routines that maybe are some healthy addictions or unhealthy addictions but it seems to be like a lot of unhealthy addiction yes please don't just think it's a healthy addiction no such thing if it's healthy it's not an addiction if it's an addiction it's not healthy there are passions there are habits that are healthy but they're not addictions i i i just like working out like yeah yeah well that can be an addiction or it can be healthy like eating can be healthy but could be an addiction the i define addiction as any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief and therefore craves but then suffers negative consequences and cannot give it up so if you're suffering negative consequences so it's craving relief pleasure and a short-term harm in the long-term inability to give it up that's what addiction is now if if you have a behavior that's ongoing but it has no negative consequences it's not an addiction it's a passion it's a pleasure it's a habit it's a healthy habit it's a healthy yeah so for me it's not an addiction and also a healthy habit a person if it no longer works for them they can give it up so for me there's no healthy addiction there's no healthy addiction yeah in fact the word addiction comes from a word for slavery so there's no there's no healthy slavery interesting so addiction what is the root of addiction the the the word yeah so the in roman times um an addictive was it somebody who was assigned to another person to serve them because they owed them money and they couldn't pay it back an addict yeah this was like a a indentured slave who had to work off the debt so that's what the word actually comes from is is is is slavery is a form of slavery so if you're addicted to something you are a slave to that craving absolutely absolutely you you have no choice you can a slave has no choice wow and there's no free will essentially yeah and i've had my own addictive behaviors and nothing like the patients that i worked with but in insofar as i had them literally even though i was a well-paid middle-class successful doctor i was not exercising any food choice really or all my behaviors no when did you what was the main uh addiction that you were you know tied to and when did you learn yeah how to break free of that well so the in in my life the main addictions have been um to work to work yeah work hard achieve more and more patience more and more success more and more more and more is the essence of addiction it's always more and more and there's a reason why i developed that addiction and that was the hardest that's the hardest one to give up then i was addicted for a long time to shopping for classical compact discs and when i say addicted i mean i would spend thousands of dollars a day on cds yeah really yeah really and i would lie to my wife about it and i would neglect my patients and as soon as i left the store i thinking now i'm complete my collection is full half an hour later i've had to run back and um as i described in my book and addiction in the realm of hunger goes i once left a woman in labor in a hospital to go get a symphony so that's an addiction really yeah yeah and it's like it's like that now the interesting thing about addiction is is that the i wasn't using substances you weren't smoking or drinking or anything drugs but i was looking for a chemical hit dopamine dopamine yeah so i was in a dopamine fiend you might say and i get it through those particular behaviors and uh so that's what my addiction was how did i give it up well the it took a long time really yeah a lot of struggle a lot of you know and finally i just realized that the cost was greater than the in fact you know in fact if i started listening now to all the cds that i have at home and they did nothing but listen for the rest of my life you wouldn't finish i probably put it into this wow so so how long would you say when did you realize okay this is an addiction this is an unhealthy i realized that long before i gave it up like years ten years decades uh years years yeah years how long does it normally take for someone when they realize this is unhealthy this thing i'm doing this addiction is not good for me until they actually give it up is there any data on that i couldn't answer that one i think it's a highly variable an individual issue [Music] it has to do with what resources they have to heal it has to do with what support they have it has to do with what cost their this habit is exacting on their lives it has to do also with some belief that there's a part of us that's actually healthy and we can get in touch with it you know there has to be a cool combination of factors and it's very very individual also it also depends of course the degree of trauma a person suffered and and addictions are always about like you've heard my definition of addiction and i'm sure if i asked you like if i asked for talking to a thousand people put your hands up if according to my definition you've had an addiction virtually everybody in the room will put their hands up maybe there'll be two liars who yeah right but 998 and then i asked them no what was wrong with the addiction but what was right about it what did you get from it so if i asked you that so you had your behaviors if i asked you i don't care what it was too but if i asked you what did you get from it well you get some type of relief you get some type of pleasure you get some type of yeah yeah specifically what do you get from it what did you get from it what did he give you temporarily whatever it was i don't even care what it was just you know you get to you you escape okay right yeah you're not thinking about the pain or the shame or the insecurity so who needs to escape me no but i mean what kind of person needs to escape oh a scared person scared person somebody who's in prison isn't it somebody's not free trapped yeah somebody's trapped exactly and i know in your book on toxic masculinity you talk about being trapped and perhaps the very word you use yes and uh i felt trapped most my childhood that's the whole point so what i'm saying is that addiction is never a choice and it's not some kind of genetic disease which that is total nonsense what it actually is is an attempt to solve a problem in your life in your case you were trying to solve the problem of being trapped which is based on your childhood trauma which you may publicly talk about in my case the workaholism was about trying to prove to myself that i was that had the right to exist but that was important you're worthy of love that is worthy of love exactly acceptance now that also came from each other experience so addiction is never like either a disease as such it can behave like a disease but it isn't a disease as such it's also not a choice anybody makes it's actually an attempt to solve a deep life problem that was imposed on that person by trauma in every case wow is it is it possible for someone to heal a deep wound on their own a trauma from decades past they've had an addiction to trying to escape from is it possible to do it on your own or is it really take support someone someone's a team what's your thoughts on that well i think very rarely it is possible for an individual maybe they have some deep spiritual experience maybe they're out there in nature and all of a sudden they they're one with the universe they feel presence they feel connected yeah exactly so that can happen it does happen to some people and they just to choose i'm going to decide not to do this anymore they realize they don't need to because they're free they fell free interesting yeah very rare for most of us people beings that walk this earth it takes a lot of self-awareness it takes a lot of support connection um guidance so i'd say if you're listening and you've got one of these issues where you're addicted to something in the way that lewis and i are just talking about don't wait for that miraculous moment get the help because you have a much better chance that way yeah so what would you say is the root cause of all addiction then is it feeling a wound is it feeling trapped by something that's happened in the past the the the being trapped itself is a sign of a wound so the in fact the word trauma means wound the greek origin of the word trauma is a wound so [Music] children who are are hurt but they're not supported seen accepted and and helped they get trapped in a wound and being trapped in a wound and being trapped in the behaviors to escape from the wound that's how the trauma shows up in our lives interesting and in our culture and our society you know i talk about this in my book as well about how as a you know young boy growing up in the midwest yeah in ohio i didn't see examples of older men or athletes that i aspired to be like talking about their emotions or talking about healing or talking about you know i had a trauma yeah talking about how to you know navigate the full range of emotions it was more you just get made fun of if you cried yeah you get picked on and called you know things you don't want to be called you're you're kicked out of the tribe you're not accepted in the tribe in your you know boys group growing up yeah and so i feel like culturally there's a lot of pain with men and women obviously but that it seems to be is causing a lot of the stress in the world right now it's just this cultural pain well if i may be self-serving my new book is called the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture so it's just as you say the trauma that people are experiencing massively um isn't just personal to them it's also a sign of a culture that's completely out of whack and uh when i say out of black the things we consider the reason i call the book the myth of normal because what i'm saying is that the things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs they're not it's not healthy it's totally unhealthy so that the addictions and the diseases and and the mental illnesses that people do develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation so that whatever addiction you had um or or even this mask of rigid masculinity that you tried to adopt for a while until it cracked for you right needing to win needing to be the best needed but that was a normal response to survive to survive exactly so that the abnormality wasn't in you it was in the situation that you're in that's what i mean by a toxic culture yeah and i know again in your book you you talk about these public figures that all of a sudden you realize we're talking about their emotions yeah but that's fairly new very in the last like five ten years so these days athletes will talk about their sexual abuse this didn't happen until 10 years ago really and really more three to five years ago right yeah yeah yeah and so now there's why do you feel like people are now starting to open up who are more public figures why do you think that's happening well i think what's happened that the the toxicity of the culture one of my subtitles it talks to culture and it's got so bad um there's a greek playwright that i quote in my book he's aeschylus and he one of his plays he said that the way the gods created us human beings that we have to suffer suffer into truth and i think that the degree of suffering now most people i know who engage in a path of self-exploration and truth they didn't do it because all of a sudden they just made a decision they just suffered so much so the so the suffering can actually wake you up and i think to answer your question this society has got to the point where the suffering is so intense and so widespread that something had to crack open right so i think that's why you know so it it it got so bad that it couldn't be hidden anymore why do you think in you know in our modern society with all the medical and scientific advances and all the the knowledge out there that there's so much chronic pain though so much suffering when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before actually if we don't we have less what we have is a lot more physiological physical science which is great you know i mean if i needed a heart transplant i'd be very grateful for modern medicine and or you know a broken bone or anything but we've forgotten something that human beings have always known and for example um i i write about this friend of mine his name is uh lewis mel madrona and he's a an american physician his lakota background okay and he told me that he's a and he's just like me he's full of respect for western medicine i was trained in it he was trained in it we also see what's missing and he said that in his his tradition when somebody got sick the whole community gathers and thanks the person and says you're carrying some dysfunction in our whole culture so your healing is our healing wow so so they get that the individual represents the culture and the environment and the family and the community now western medicine totally forgets that we separate the mind from the body so we often when i speak the groups i ask people if if in the last five years you've been to a neurologist or an oncologist or a cardiologist or gastroenterologist or a rheumatologist any kind of an ologist put your hand up so people put hands up if you keep your hands up if they ask you about stress in your life trauma in your childhood relationships relationships exactly how you feel about your work how do you feel about yourself as a human being very few hands stay up and those questions which have to do with number one the unity of mind and body which is only scientific fact and the inseparableness of one human being from another western medicine completely ignores which is contrary to science it's not only contrary to ancient wisdom it's also contrary to modern science because we have tens of thousands of studies to show that you can't separate the mind from the body tens of thousands of studies showing our emotions significantly influence the onset of illness how relationships do you know there's a wonderful psychiatrist here in l.a you may know of him or him daniel segal and dan siegel talks about what he calls interpersonal neurobiology which means that our brains are not separate something in you will sense the tension in me and we'll pick up on that and that'll be the intuition the yeah that'll change your brain and i take it a step further i talk about interpersonal biology so that what happens to people's physiologically is very effective i'll give you two examples yes but affected by their culture and and their family so we've known for decades that children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma the parents stresses affect the physiology of the child breathing the breathing that they narrow the air to they cause inflammation by the way how to be treated with stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol you know we know american black women the more experiences of racism then you have to endure the greater the risk for asthma really we know that men who are sexually abused in childhood the risk of heart disease triples um i could go on uh women who suffer symptoms of ptsd severely their risk of ovarian cancer doubles uh why because you can't separate the emotions from the body it's one unit scientifically speaking not just from the point of view of indigenous wisdom but on modern science so when i talk when you say despite all this knowledge i'm saying what's missing from the knowledge the wisdom is the wisdom and not just the wisdom even the science right that's so ironic so i'm a physician and as doctors we always talk about evidence-based practice and i say my god i only wish we had evidence-based practice let's look at the evidence right you know what's the evidence for separating the mind from the body but multiple sclerosis this mysterious illness the guy who first described multiple sclerosis was a french neurologist rajon martin charcoal in the 19th century he said that it was a disease caused by grief and long-term worry since then there's been multiple studies showing the relationship of stress trauma and multiple sclerosis you were the average neurologist with symptoms of ms nobody's gonna ask you about your trauma and nobody's asked you about your stress and why is that significant because if you deal with the trauma and the stress your multiple sclerosis can actually improve significantly wow so there's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine and what we call scientific evidence-based practice is miraculous it's amazing but it's way too narrow what about something like arthritis what is that would you say that's connected to okay that's been studied as well so uh um there was a great canadian physician who actually was one of the founding physicians at johns hopkins medical school his name is william osler he said in 1880 that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by long-term worry and stress long-term worry and stress yeah no since then in 1890 1880 or 90. wow yeah he said this then uh since then multiple dozens of studies showing relationship in trauma stress and rheumatoid arthritis do you think the average rheumatologist knows anything about that wow so that people go to i know people in my book the myth of normal i talk about people with ms or arthritis who once they start recognizing that the flare-ups of the disease actually manifest stresses in their lives if they learn how to deal with those stresses one woman told me that i have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis he said she says it was my best teacher because when every time it shows up i know that i'm out of alignment with myself you're out of somewhere you need to have a conversation with yourself or get back in alignment it's interesting i was telling you this before off camera that and then um a previous relationship that i was in i was feeling a lot of chest pain and kind of tightness in my throat yeah and at one point like i was starting to get like this look there's a rash or some type of flare-up like in my like below my belly button yeah and i was like what is like i've never had some type of like eczema or skin condition or something it was like this kind of bright red flare up and i was like to have a disease like what is this you know and um it's fascinating because i was telling you like the moment after many many months of therapy and and starting to integrate the lessons of healing and really feel it internally i started to feel this sense of peace inside of me for the first time i didn't feel trapped right for the first time right in myself yeah in my heart and in my body and almost overnight like this butter up was there for months and i was like oh maybe i'm having i had like allergy tests and i was like maybe it's peanuts i don't know all these different like foods that i'm eating and i was like eliminating the foods and they're still there it was almost overnight when i felt the peace inside of me the flare-ups went away and they haven't come back and i was like so if you'd come to me at that rash i would have asked you not what are you eating no i wouldn't well that might have i mean those are good questions but i also would have asked you what is your body saying no to projecting that you're not saying no to oh my gosh you know um no a flare-up if you take that word flare-up which is what you used yeah it's inflammation right something's inflamed okay right but where else do you use what else flares up you know what flares up is rage anger but you had anger that you weren't expressing right hence your body flares up yes we know that suppressed emotions cause inflammation so had you come to me not had you come to me when i was out of medical school because i wouldn't know anything about this nobody teaches you this stuff but if you have come to me more recently i would have asked you all what is your body saying no to that you're not saying no to and and that happens in two major areas relationships and and um and and work you know interesting and so the body says those signals we can learn from it and now the problem is that you go to the average physician they're not going to ask those things they're just going to try and collude with you try and get rid of the symptom you know not by the root which is that's okay i mean you don't want to sit there with a rash that's fine but also let's look at the source of it yes and and and the source is always assumed to be something physical maybe they'll think of food maybe they'll think of some toxin they will not think of your emotions even though the mind and body are inseparable how much stronger do you think the emotional weight or trauma is than physical uh toxins you know in terms of affecting the body i can't make that assessment because i don't know what study would even compare the truth so i don't i don't want to speak right off the cuff but what i can tell you is that the emotions are really primary in most chronic conditions and if you deal with them now in this society where there's all these toxins in the environment and junk in the food and all who knows everything but uh what i know is that emotions play a huge role and that um once people begin to realize that and they deal with it that can have impact on their illness and the other thing i've i don't know about you when you write books but i write books as much for myself as for anybody yeah the show is for me yeah exactly so i get to learn a lot when i'm yes writing so one of the things i i learned when i was reading right in the middle of normal was even how we think about disease like you people say i have eczema or i have depression or i have rheumatoid arthritis or i have add now there's an assumption there isn't there the assumption is first of all is that there's this thing called add there's this thing called eczema there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis or there's this thing called depression then there's an eye and the eye has that thing but that thing has got its own separate independent nature so i have this cup i can put it down i can give it away i can break it i can keep it but it's separate from me it's got its own nature but to say that i have this disease makes the assumption this disease got a separate life in nature of its own it doesn't what if we saw a disease of all kinds mental or physical or addiction not as the things in themselves that have their own nature but as processes that manifest our lives and if i live my life differently then i can have an impact on that process so that process will change that's exactly actually how it is so for shorthand language i understand it's helpful to say i have depression right right but how important is the words we choose right it's a bit but it's but if you if we if we buy into that language we're actually missing the point because you don't have it there's no it that's separate from you and that means that if you change yourself and in fact there have been there's a friend of mine now a recent friend dr jeff rediger who's a psychiatrist at harvard and last year wrote a book called cured the science of spontaneous healing that was the subtitle now he studied people who were terminally ill documentaries so there are no prognosis whatsoever and then they get better so they were terminally ill they were not supposed to survive they're not supposed to survive supposed to die in a few years or something or months or a week i i've i've talked to such people myself and they've cured their disease there's a woman called a psychologist called kelly turner who studied the same thing she wrote a book called radical remission so all three of us have looked at these people they've thought they did it in a research kind of way i just did it impressionistically you know but i do check out the histories of people's doctors we all know people who've got supposed to have two months to live or six months to live either medical treatment is failed or they refuse medical treatment then also the disease goes away i think all three of us have found that what makes the biggest difference is that the person changes their relationship to themselves wow and there's always trauma in the background now jeff and kelly have documented people they go on diets they take supplements they start meditating they go in the nature they're yeah they're going to nature the whole thing all those things are great yeah and i think the but i think jeff and i agree and i think kelly would probably agree as well that the biggest shift is in one's relationship with oneself in other words the life changes the process changes now i'm not promising anybody who's listening you can cure yourself i mean you know it's no this is not snake oil i'm just talking about the importance of recognizing the impact of emotions and one's relationship to oneself on one's physiology that's all i'm talking about there's an external environment and then there's an internal environment you know our emotional environment yeah that is connected to our i'm assuming our nervous system our heart our brain the whole body and everything and if our emotional environment is sick then we're probably going to be physically sick as well well that's what you're that's that's what your story actually um illustrates isn't it as soon as you create a an internal environment your physical issue is a obeyed you know by the way speaking of i just noticed i'm getting too excited here um uh this is i'm this is my passion i mean i i just got growing up about this forever but i'm also noticing probably i'm getting a bit too heated here and uh you're getting warmer i just know i don't physically so much i just noticed i need to calm down a bit i don't want to i don't want to talk too fast no i like it this is exciting for me yeah i just feel like this is the what you were just saying yeah emotional repression is a major cause of physical illness it may not be the only cause there's other factors but what we uh you know suppress usually comes to the surface in some ways that's correct that's the whole point and most of us i'll speak for myself i wasn't taught and i think most of us are not taught on how to express the emotional traumas the emotional pains fears insecurities shames guilt where we're not taught the skills it's one of the reasons why i started the school of greatness because i was like i wish i would have learned these skills in school yeah you know most of most people's parents are messed up in some way or have some issues and they aren't taught this and so we're you know i grew up in a household that was very stressful and chaotic and there wasn't stability so did my kids by the way right and you're like the guy right but it wasn't the guy then you weren't the guy yeah so your kids had had some traumas that they had to face because of you and their parents it's not even a matter of skills learning it's deeper than that because you don't have to teach any one day old baby how to express their emotions do you no if they're sad lonely do you hear about it if they're hungry or uncomfortable do you hear about it of course you do there's nothing to teach you have to allow it and you have to um give space for it and you have to hear it and respond to it the the problem with most parents is not that they don't teach their kids these skills is that how they really live their lives because of their own traumas and because of the stresses in the society they actually discourage kids don't cry stop crying yeah f almost natural suck it up well look don't do this don't do that right well well i you know there's a very famous canadian psychologist i don't know if he's been on your program but he um [Music] he says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal in other words angering a two-year-old is not normal and we have to socialize a lot of them no no there's nothing more natural than an angry two-year-old there's nothing more natural yeah yeah they get frustrated you know right they want a cookie they get a cookie before they don't get what they want you know they want a cookie before dinner and if you're a good parent you're not going to give them a cookie before dinner right so when do you teach or when does someone learn how to not express anger every 10 minutes though well here's the point if that toyota then starts screaming or throwing a tantrum getting angry if you say time out and you're not going to be with them now you're presenting a child with a tragic dilemma i can have my authentic emotion or i can have my relationship with my parent on whom my life depends um so i can be authentic or i can be attached in relationship but i can't have both interesting actually because if i'm not authentic or if i'm if i'm authentic then i'm going to be alone exactly i'm going to be on time out or whatever on it and and to the child the time what is life threatening because you might be alone forever right yes chad doesn't know that you see yeah so basically you're throwing the ch threatening the child with depriving of the greatest need which is the connection with you yeah love yeah the love yeah no but this isn't there a point though if you're 21 year old man now and you're you know screaming every 10 minutes because you don't get the cookie but that's not the answer right the answer is the answer is when they're screaming to pick them up you're angry with daddy aren't you you really wish you had that cookie yeah oh i get it you know and then the child relaxes and the anger moves through them and you know what they learn that anger is just something that moves through you you can let go of it if you don't see the child don't accept the child's emotion they're gonna have to repress it you have to stop it what's another way for stuffing it's pushing down trap it yeah but pushing down what's another word for pushing down depressing where does depression come from it's not this disease depression comes from having had to push down your emotions wow literally you had to push down your emotions in other words why did you have to push down your emotions to stay connected to your parents in other words it was a coping mechanism and what i'm saying is that a lot of illness whether the mind or the body or both comes from coping mechanisms there are normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation it's not normal for a child to be banished from the presence of the parent if you look at indigenous people they carry their kids everywhere the kids are always with the parents and the the pilgrims when they arrived in north america they're very upset with how the natives are reared their children you know why because the indigenous people did not hit their kids they didn't hit their kids they didn't hate their kids and the christians couldn't understand this why they didn't uh you know a beat of you know create obedience with them right is it yeah yeah and so what do they do they nourish them and when you nourish a child see nature has got a natural agenda is that you should grow up to be a self-regulated adult in connection with yourself and with other people that's nature's agenda it's like nature is an agenda for an acorn to become an oak tree but an equine doesn't spontaneously become an oak tree it has to have the right conditions so it's not a question of teaching the oak tree the the acorn to be an oak tree just give it the nourishment and the sunlight and and and and the earth and and irrigation that it needs its nature is to become an oak tree right the nature of human beings is to become self-regulated uh socially responsible creatures that's how we evolved given the right conditions that will happen so it's not a question of teaching all these things yeah this i'm teaching about mostly it's the question of meeting children's needs giving them the right conditions and then they will develop self-regulation they learn it because yourself like it aid so they're watching you you're not reactive and explosive screaming you know your eyes oh i'm angry okay i'm angry but you're not screaming at the kid you know so in the right environment these traits spontaneously evolve or develop in a human being so our society is always about how do we teach these skills and those skills well teaching is important but more important is the child's spontaneous growth given the right environment and what i'm saying about this toxic culture we don't give our kids the right environment yeah i mean you hear the number the statistic that 50 of marriages turn into divorce these days and also probably i think when i had esther perel on i was like how many of the 50 that are married are actually happy it's a very small percentage too well so so i've had to marriage that we've had a lot of unhappiness i've been married to three years now 53 yeah we're very happy together now you are but we took took us a lot of work a lot of commitment but here's what i want to say there's two ways you can tell if a marriage is unhappy one is you can ask the parents the other is you can measure the cortisol level of the children oh wow because the parent stresses affect the physiology of the child oh man my my cortisol must have been off the charts but yeah all of us children yeah it would have been and so in this society and this is not the fault of individual parents like it begins in the uterus actually already stresses on the pregnant woman will affect the physiology of the child really yeah oh yeah no inner societies so many pregnant women are so stressed in the states particularly you're talking about more emotional stress because there's physical stress of like the body's expanding and growing and aches and pains but the emotional stress i mean the emotional stress of having to um the nervous system on the job or being in a difficult relationship and in one of the chapters in the book i talk about it begins with the diary of my wife who was writing it when she was pregnant with her one of her children about how unhappy she was and she's talking to the infant saying please don't take this stress personally she wrote that and i quoted it in in the myth of normal and she knew what i didn't know and now she was unhappy because of her relationship she was unhappy because of the relationship she was unhappy because of what was going on in her relationship with me being a workaholic doctor not not being there or not being available emotionally or exactly yeah exactly and even blaming her you know for how i was feeling you know wow so she's talking to this infant inside her and that's why i opened one of the chapters so already in the uterus these stressors starts happening a lot of evidence for that scientifically brain scans blood's work all kinds of stuff then there's labor which in our society is very often mechanical and and and emotionally very difficult and in the united states 25 of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth now that infant is meant to be with the mother for at least nine months i would say years but at least nine months that infant is abandoned at two weeks that's how they experience it oh man even if they're looked after by someone or someone else but the mother the infant needs the mother's body yeah that was my mom was working pretty probably pretty fast after each one of us were born you know had to go back to work and yeah yeah and i'm not blaming the women right they have no choice yes i'm saying but this society puts those stresses on women it then doesn't support them to the pregnancy then it puts a lot and only that we didn't grow up in individual uh isolated nuclear families did we we evolved in small band or hunter-gatherer groups where people supported each other where children were with adults all day where adults collaborated they had to otherwise they wouldn't survive right so that's where our nature actually evolved so when you got to society which tells you that people are by nature selfish and aggressive and competitive which isolates mothers uh in in in in separate homes where the community is more and more you know there's lots of lots of work done by sociologists and others in the states about how communities are breaking down there was that book uh bowling alone some years ago 20 years ago now about the breakdown of community so that people are not getting support and that means they're stressed and the mothers are doing it all on their own exactly right and they're also expecting the husband to you know work and also be at home as opposed to reaching out to peers or family or friends exactly so it's it's a very unnatural culture and no wonder so many kids are getting diagnosed and then and with adhd or oppositional defiant disorder or depression you know this article in the new yorker a few weeks ago maybe a couple of months ago also in the new york times i think about the rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides in the us it's mysterious it's not mysterious these kids are no longer having their developmental needs met they feel alone and they're scared and scared and then drug drug use is on the rise and all that addiction and that's right there's nothing mysterious about it if you look at the cultural setting it's only mysterious if you think we dealing with isolated mental health issues or isolated physiological issues don't you see the connections nothing mysterious so what are the main i guess mental health are they diseases are they not considered a disease like uh depression abd adhd what are the main mental health symptoms out in the world right now could you say yeah so and anxiety are fast growing and and their major challenges more and more kids are being diagnosed with adhd more and more kids are being diagnosed with something called oppositional defiant disorder which what is that opposition that's when the kid uh is um defiant and oppositional and and and goes against adult values and adult expectations yeah but we think there's something wrong with the kid instead of looking at the context of what makes the kids the environment yeah no are these diseases well you can talk about them as diseases to some degree and certainly you know i've had depression and i've taken medication for it in my 40s and it really made a difference for me you might call it a disease but actually that's a shallow way of looking at it because actually what does it go back to it goes back to being a one-year-old infant or being a three-month-old infant in the book the myth of normal the first chapter has a painting in it the painting is by my wife based on a photograph of me and my mother this is budapest hungary 1944 and i'm three months of age and my mother in a photograph is one of my yellow star that jews had to wear my father was away in forced labor and within two months her parents would be killed in auschwitz that was my first year of life oh my gosh and the look on my face the full is full of terror i was absorbing my mother's fear and my mother's anxiety because she had tear on her face and you're mimicking and and she had it in her body you're connected to her eating ten times a day exactly and you're feeling the stress exactly there's probably now no calm in her there's no calm there and but she's already so stressed and she's just trying to make sure that we survive she's not there to really receive my feelings and then when i'm a year old about 11 months old she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life because she didn't think we were staying i would survive for a day and probably i wouldn't have wow so i didn't see her for six weeks five or six weeks and year one that was one thing oh my gosh and now what could i do as a one-year-old i could do two things or is an infant going through all that first of all how do i deal with all that stress i tune out i tune out i become absent-minded as an adopt as an adaptive mechanism a coping mechanism exactly 55 years later i'm diagnosed with adhd which is characterized by tuning out is it a disease the heck it's a disease it started as a coping mechanism i'm also diagnosed with depression why because in an environment i had to push my feelings down in order to not to burden my mother it was already burned enough created more peace and yeah so i took that on so i pushed on my feelings i depressed my feelings then i have this depression so are they diseases well you can talk about them that way but i say they began as coping mechanisms and i'll tell you another story i'm 78 now so six seven years ago i'm in san francisco with a therapist and i've taken mushrooms uh-huh she works with mushrooms and i've i've worked with psychedelics and it's one of the things i write about um and that but this time i'm the patient i'm a client and i'm lying there on the mat under the influence of the cytosim and i know exactly who i am i'm 71 years old i'm a medical doctor i'm a writer i'm a speaker i'm married to such as you know my wife ray this is a therapist so i'm not like hallucinating i know exactly where but at the same time i'm experiencing myself as a one-year-old infant oh my goodness and this therapist then my mom is my mom and i start crying and i say i'm so sorry i've made your life so difficult wow that's my one-year-old self all of a sudden under the influence speaking up i took it on that early that i'm responsible now you talked about my gosh in our conversation before you told me about how you were in this relationship and you couldn't leave it even long after you realized it wasn't right for you because you took on the responsibility of how the other person would feel if you would quote let them down i'm telling you that's your one-year-old speaking that you took responsibility for the suffering of your parents wow and and and how you you mustn't let anybody down because it's your responsibility we take this stuff on so early without without words actually they just become ingrained and then we then we live our lives out of it until something happens as you did for you your body rebelled you have a breakdown or something happens right and you're like you either keep breaking down or you wake you up and say okay why is this happening what is what is off what is out of alignment what is you know where am i out of integrity whatever it might be exactly and um i feel the challenges i was like i want to end this suffering you know i've repeated this pattern many times i'm sick and tired of the suffering yeah i'll do whatever you know i think when you for me i was like i've felt enough of this i don't want it anymore but it took so much courage to face these things for me and i know other people have deeper traumas or different traumas and it's it just seems so challenging to go there i would not compare you to anybody else's well we all have our unique traumas right different experiences that we face why is it so challenging for people to face it and start addressing it i was telling you you know i've been doing pretty intensive therapy for about a year and a half now every two weeks yeah not because i feel like something's wrong with me anymore i'm stressed more because i want to maintain a level of peace yeah and i want to continue to maintain peace good for you so once i realized and started healing i didn't say i'm good yeah i was like i want to go to the next level of exactly peace yeah love you know environment of beauty inside of my emotions but why is it so hard for so many people to face it and actually speak the shame guilt insecurity you know imperfection about them well i think in your own work you've touched upon very accurately on on the way so difficult for one thing if you if you just just the words that you just use peace and love and connection if you had played that to your 20 year old self how would he have responded well he'd been like suck it up or he'd been like what are you talking about you're fine like yeah yeah don't be a little wuss or you know just work harder you know yeah but where would that have come from i mean just my entire conditioning growing up from sports and yeah you know okay so that so this is that's the house so that's one of the factors is the conditioning in this culture okay i i also say it would have come from intense fear oh because if it actually it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself it's terrifying yes terrifying so there's intense fear so there's the conditioning as you say then there's the the fear it really is painful you know you know nobody wants to have pain you know um but that's called growing pains and uh the third factor is we all develop this personality now the personality we think that's us but it's not us right the personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods along with some genuine traits so the personality is kind of a an amalgam of of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities yeah some good stuff but that's them also company yeah yeah because i remember i used to be like i was a fun-loving guy i was like a kind generous but then when there was a trigger like i was angry and you know yeah defensive and guarded and things like or you talk about the various masks the sexual mask or the um or the material mask you know address the aggressive mask you know i when i started reading a chapter on the sexual mask you wrote about some guy whose name i forget but who's sort of the champion picking up women i wouldn't be in his shoes for one split second right poor bastard that was yeah yeah you know that this is what he has to do but what's that it's having to prove to himself that he's lovable where does that come from you know so but we identify with it yes so we think we're the personality i'm this sexually attractive guy or i'm this aggressive guy i'm this material guy who's gonna make it in the world you know and so we think that we are a personality so it comes from i say three sources one is uh the conditioning the other is the fear for the pain and thirdly the identification with the personality we think that's who we are and we don't know who would be without it all of which is all based on trauma yeah it's the identity you know building this identity that you know and i talk about how the identity supported you to accomplishing certain things right or protecting you from certain things by having this identity yeah but it's also not serving us to hold on to that identity if we want the next level of peace and freedom exactly so it's but it's so hard to kill an identity it's like you've had this thing for decades maybe and you've got to let go of this thing yeah i wouldn't even talk about killing i mean i in my healing chapters of this book i talk about let's make friends with it like for example um i have to by the way i have to be honest i said that i wouldn't be in this guy's shoes for a minute that's not true part of me was envying him right you know even here i'm 78 and married 23 years but i read about this guy who slept with all these women well i could not be that girl you know i don't want to go there and i wouldn't i've long ago chosen not to but but there's still something that mm-hmm who doesn't want to be wanted that much right you know something with the ego or the desire yeah so but we but if we didn't kill those parts but made friends with them if somebody came to me with that kind of pattern of i'm not sexual guy but they don't want to but they realize that it's not they might feel high for a moment like any addict will it's not fulfilling it's not fulfilling i wouldn't say kill that part of you i'd say let's make friends with it let's find out what it's really trying to do for you what it's trying to do for you is trying to make you feel wanted making you feel valuable making you feel desirable making you feel loved temporarily make you feel powerful what happened to you that you don't feel lovable that you don't feel desirable that you don't feel powerful you know in other words it's not a matter of getting rid of these parts or these aspects of ourselves the question of actually getting to know them and they all began as coping mechanisms that man that you describe in your book i guarantee is a highly traumatized human being [Music] so when we start to ask ourselves this question that you're asking is what happened to you or when you know when did you feel not powerful or not lovable or not wanted yeah and let's say we're able to someone watching or listening is able to assess themselves and actually be present really reflect on the the painful moments of the past which a lot of people aren't even willing to talk about it to themselves right that's right for 25 years i had a memory of being sexually abused and thought about it almost every day like for for a moment you know it would come you know at least weekly maybe not every day but it was like a memory yeah that's there you know but i never told anyone for 25 years because it was so shameful and yeah i didn't want to be you know made fun of or all these things and um so someone's able to self-assess and say okay i had this pain this trauma i felt not powerful or whatever it might be what's the next step for them once they start to journal about it and be aware of it and they're like i really want to heal you know what would be that next step in the process well i mean it's not that i can prescribe but sure but it should be for everybody and there's many different ways of working but one of the things i would address first of all is the shame like one of the impacts of trauma is shame because children are narcissists by nature when i say narcissist i don't mean in a pathological negative sense i mean they think it's all about them the world just revolves around me exactly so if bad things are happening to me it must be a must be a bad person you know number one number two uh i didn't fight back i couldn't defend myself and like and so that makes me weak and you know and so i'm ashamed of that now actually when you look at it the not fighting back is nature's coping uh mechanism of your nervous system just freezes because if you fought back what would happen it just depends what age you are and no but uh but as a young child if you fi fight back on against the sexual abuser all right what would happen to you who knows i mean it could have been even worse and and were you in a position to run no no no okay so the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated it's protecting yourself you're protecting yourself and the part of the nervous system that freezes you just be still you get through this wait till it passes yeah that takes over so it's actually what you're ashamed about is actually the brilliance of your nervous system that protected you but you're beating yourself up in retrospect saying i i should have ran i should have fought back i should have done this that's the first point man the second point is um if i can ask you how old were you when this happened to you bob and how long did it go on for it's probably 10 15 minutes yeah no but it was only one time one time okay who did you speak to about it no one okay no you don't have kids yet no but if you did have a job five years old and this happened to who do you want them to speak to me yeah now if you found out that this happened to your child and your child never told you how would you explain that how would i explain it to how would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened hmm i would explain it by saying it's something i'm not doing i'm not creating a safe environment to allow this child to speak up and that was your primary trauma yeah so the sexual abuse is a secondary trauma as a matter of fact the abuser like you were bullied in school you said and the bullies can always sense the vulnerable the bullies have like a weakness they have a laser like because there's an insecure weak person yeah which by the way speaks to their own trauma right but but but they have a laser like that like the physicians who abuse their their patients the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers they see a weakness they they laser like they sense it and that's what they pick on and the bullies do the same thing now that weakness as we call it comes from not having the solid support and protection and confidence and security in your family of origin mm-hmm so that's the primary trial right that's that's what that's the first thing that happened yeah i mean that's the case for sure so to answer your question and if somebody comes to me with those issues um well first of all if somebody realizes those things i'd say don't want to do this on your own right it's so hard talk to somebody it's so hard yeah well look um [Music] people with addictions at least they have the 12 step groups where they can actually talk about it and people ideally will not judge them you know it's a safe space to save space or you might have friends or you might reach out to a professional or you might have an intimate partner that that relationship is close enough but you can actually share this you know but you have to bring it out of you by the way um [Music] um that just reminds me uh this is one of the ancient gospels written around the same time as the other gospels is the gospel of thomas image jesus says that what you shall bring out of you will save you oh and what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you he says something like that right right he's a supreme psychologist wow and so you got to bring it out yeah what you suppress becomes more depressed right it's like exactly yeah yeah yeah so it's going to start with that somewhere you've got to bring it out and if and if someone has a what if they say well it wasn't that big of a deal this thing that happened back in the day i was a kid and it only happened a few times whether it's sexual abuse or okay someone screaming at you or you were neglected or put in the corner you know i hear that all the time it wasn't that big of a deal right you know yeah we're coming okay i shouldn't be that concerned about it yeah it was five who cares you know it's like yeah okay what do we okay then that's a very simple way to answer that so why are we so messed up right now no no no no no not at all if a five-year-old kid came to you and you were the uncle uncle lewis this guy did such and such to me and and i'm really scared and hurt would you say to them oh no big deal no think of all the other kids that worst things have happened to would you say that why wouldn't you say that because i'd want to be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen in life and a little bit of the impact if if you did say that i feel like it'd probably affect him for a long time if that was a pattern of yeah that was the response that he got but you see that's what you're saying to yourself right when you say that it's no big deal you're saying to the five-year-old that was hurt it doesn't matter in other words there's no self-compassion there right whether you know what you would never say to anybody else you're saying to yourself and one of the impacts of trauma is lack of self-compassion um and again i if i mentioned my book the myth of normal i talk about that about her this idea of self-compassion and it i see it all the time and so when somebody says to me no big deal you know i say okay take any other child in your position plug them into that situation and tell them it's no big deal of course i wouldn't but people do they do say these things to their kids or to their right their nephews or nieces they're saying like ah you'll be all right you know and i think it's because they don't have the emotional courage to to handle the the wide range of emotions because they probably suppress the emotions themselves i mean that's the whole point right is that they're they're not they're not comfortable with the child's pain because somebody's crying they're like i can't handle it right they can't handle it yeah yeah you know my daddy should be like stop crying you know just yeah stop you know there was no like hugging and like he had a lot of love and affection in other ways but he couldn't handle the crying and the the yeah the emotions well one of the in the book i talk about the essential needs of children and one of them is that they're given the freedom to feel all their emotions particularly sadness and grief and pain also joy and everything else but i don't know if you're comfortable talking about this but what do you know about your dad's childhood oh man yeah it was messed up too yeah yeah so this goes on from general yeah yeah so and i feel like a lot of people listening or watching this can relate and say you know i don't think anyone's like i had the perfect parents right there's some that maybe said man i had a great childhood and my parents did amazing but i would say probably a majority of people had something where they didn't feel emotionally seen or accepted by their parents or some type of challenge and they probably would all say well yeah their parents yeah you know had struggle from the war from this or from the depression and and their parents suffered and it was all about survival it wasn't about thriving yeah so how do we break i guess the generational trauma yeah and not let it pass down to our children so not being seen is a major source of trauma just not being seen in general just not being seen for who you are not being accepted for your abuse yeah yeah yeah expect it to be different than who you actually are you know it's a major trauma for people in the society and it's very common um so let me can i ask you a question before you go on to the next next thing there about that this might be a controversial question yeah but i i feel like i want to talk about this because you know there when i was growing up in the 80s and 90s i was born in the 83 yeah so growing up in the 80s and 90s in the midwest it you weren't really people were still afraid to come out as you know okay right yeah it wasn't fully accepted yeah parents didn't accept their kids when they said you know i'm different i'm i'm gay or i'm not this you know i'm not like you and i'm you know afraid to talk about it because i don't think you're gonna love me and accept me right and now more and more people are coming out that's more i would say it's more acceptable right in most of america in some communities and in america and some communities and it's more talked about and you see it in tv and movies yeah a lot yeah and um but now it's like okay what about people changing genders and people transitioning and all these different things their sexual orientation their identity and things like that and i think people are confused you know parents are like well that's not acceptable right are we can we talk about that for a little bit to see you know sure can parent you know how can parents accept their kids and if kids want to start doing surgeries you know at a younger age and changing their gender yeah is that a is that a symptom of something of a depression is it natural what is all this that we can talk about so human being is a very complex creatures and [Music] with a little spectrum of orientations in every sense and so much of it has to do with not genetics so much but how life acts on those genes so [Music] some people may be male gendered but maybe hormonally [Music] they had different influences acting on the womb or throughout life or whatever you know so they don't identify with those genitalia [Music] is that a personality or identity or is that a temperament or is that an actual like biological identity i i can tell you of one young relative that i have very close about this we knew that it was easy to see as soon as they reached adolescence they just weren't comfortable with the gender the female agenda that they were assigned they hated feminine clothing they just walked and hunched to hide the breasts it was not a surprise to any of us that a year or two ago they said i'm a male mm-hmm and and they chose surgery now they walk with their shoulders back and proud of themselves interesting and now now is that and i'm curious from i guess uh your point of view or your practice is that a were they suppressed emotionally more as children do they have the flourishing environment to be fully seen and express their wide range of emotions or is that a you know no family is perfect and i don't want to talk in detail about this family but but uh they had a very loving parents really loving grandparents i witnessed it right um a lot of the qualities that we need for a good life you know and like in any family there are issues of course no issues in the family would possibly explain this gender issue culture this is much deeper in them you know they weren't you know no this was very hard on the parents of course when it first became manifest and hard on the grandparents but everybody came to terms with it but it was really real and we could see it from adolescence on it wasn't the culture it wasn't anybody giving her propaganda it was just how they were it wasn't bullies it wasn't no they had good friends yes you know there was no issues like that so it wasn't trauma nah gotcha it wasn't drama trauma doesn't cause anybody to change their genders interesting okay what is traumatic is that you're not accepted for for who you perceive yourself to be now that can be traumatic right but that's a different story and in a lot of families like with a lot of gay men that i've known um they may not even have even if they've realized their gayness they suppressed it because of fear they look like they'd be accepted or yeah you know and that's very that's no let me tell you a story um i was in a recent tour of europe i was telling you and in berlin there were showings of this film that features my work which is entitled uh the wisdom of trauma which is available folks on online you don't have to pay any money to see it um you can but you don't need to um so they were showing it in this theater in berlin 500 people two two showings there's a guy that i met online at a webinar who whose name is ben i can talk about this because he's public and ben was a guy in his 20s who um was a very athletic young man and then he had a accident a year ago this august just about a year ago as we were speaking now and broke his spine and became paraplegic and i first met him he wanted to talk to me from his hospital bed from berlin on his webinar in front of a thousand people he was in the hospital he was in the hospital when he talked to me on this webinar and i just want him to be a spiritually amazing person now ben this is berlin so he comes to the showing of the film this year this year just a month or so ago in his wheelchair in his paraplegic and i asked him to talk to the group about resilience so he did and he was eloquent and beautiful and then stayed with the second showing i didn't know why he wanted to stay for the second show he's already seen the film but he stays with a second showing at the end after the q a he says i want to say something so we give him the mic and he says i want to tell all these people here 500 people that i'm not attracted to members of the opposite sex i'm more drawn to people of my own sex and i've never told anybody this he says wow and he says and this is the best compliment i've ever got he says and the reason i'm saying this to you now is because with gabor in a room i can't be inauthentic wow i'm telling you my heart left everybody applauded of course and then i asked the people in the group 500 in the audience anybody here anybody else here who suppressed important aspects of themselves oh my god for fear of not being accepted 500 people put their hands oh my gosh so this gay issue is one aspect of that it's one manifestation of that the people that are really upset about it are people who've got parts of themselves that they're suppressed and they can't they're afraid that's what i say now let me take it more historically since you asked in one of the in a lot of the greek plays there's this uh famous uh prophet called tyresius he's got the wet breast of a woman a lot of the ancients recognized that there's wisdom in marrying masculinity with femininity in the same person because it gives you a more full understanding of the world so it was teresias was this wise man and prophet a lot of indigenous cultures that have been bigendered people and they were seen as i forget there's actually a word for it that some indigenous people had but it was like a sign of respect but these people are something to teach us so what's happening here is not so this has been going on forever now we have surgery and all that that they didn't used to exist but right uh but but the phenomena of being transgendered and so and that's been going on forever as as long as human beings are around right the fact that we have such a problem with it that has to do with this culture why is there such a problem what do you think well partly look at your own work on on on toxic masculinity the last thing you want to admit that there's anything feminine about you um then you're not a real man or you're not you're not man enough or yeah but actually these these categories maximum feminine are totally arbitrary there's nothing in itself feminine about being vulnerable there's nothing matching about not being vulnerable but in this society with these strict gender roles we assign these things to one gender or the other in fact what we want to be is complete people no whole yeah which means that we recognize both aspects and the yang inside of us right well yeah and you know i um like people tell me that if they watch me present for the last 20 years that i believe my presentations have really changed that it's softened somehow you know and um used to be more harder grasping aggressive and intense intense and egotistical egotistical what is that oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah because know it all and it wasn't known it wasn't just about the truth that i was speaking you know i know the truth but it is about the truth that i was thinking yeah yeah but i discovered that yeah exactly you know well that's sort of that toxic masculine side you know um i'm much more peace now just like if you say much more peace i have much more peace now than i used to be um so i think this gender issue is largely a cultural one and it's again it represents a lot of repression so the people that are really upset by it are people who are really repressed and traumatized and i could name some very public spokesperson from that point of view i will not let them be discovered they already have been uh let them speak to those who will listen but they're coming from repression you know um and you said not being seen for what who you are yeah is you know one of the main traumas right that's exactly right it's one of the main sources of trauma not being seen or accepted yeah because when you're not sinful you are like for example in order for them to learn to see themselves they need to be married and then they're mirrored when the parent is attuned when the child when the parent recognizes and accepts and mirrors back the child's feeling in a fee in in a context of safety then the child says to themselves unconsciously oh i can be sad and i can be safe at the same time i don't have to reject sadness i can be vulnerable and i can be safe at the same time i don't have to reject vulnerability when that mirroring is not there the child loses the connection with themselves and that loss of connection to ourselves is the biggest trauma there is that's not my own formulation that's a formulation of a wonderful mentor of mine peter levine who's done extensive work on trauma the biggest loss is the connection to ourselves it all makes sense because if we're not able to express a certain emotion because parents weren't present to it or they said don't do that or give you time out or whatever it was yeah then you say to yourself and your nervous system okay it's not safe to express myself this way therefore in order to stay alive yeah and have say and not get punished or beaten or slapped or yelled at or hurt or hurt i need to not do this this or this thing or i need to not be this or that yeah i'm not going to be that so accepted so i can't be myself and uh in this society um i interviewed jamie lee curtis once and just not long ago and she's in the book as well and she used this very dramatic phrase she said that in this culture there's a genocide of authenticity everyone's inauthentic everybody's programmed to be inauthentic and and and that as we've been talking about that carries its impact on the mind on the body on our relationships and our life satisfaction and everything else and so that's really it's uh really the the task is to become authentic what would you say for every parent or soon-to-be parent uh that they should really focus on in creating for their children uh what would be the three things they that they are would set them up for more greater success emotionally financially spiritually relationship wise if they could do these three things for their children can i say five things give me five things please okay um every parent should do yeah so the first thing is i mentioned the work of dan siegel daniel siegel psychiatrist here in l.a he's written a book called parenting from the inside out and it's about how parenting brings out your own stuff so that so that deal with your own stuff first and and and and continue to deal with it as you have children because you i guarantee you your kids are going to trigger you you know and and i didn't realize that as a parent so i i revisited my own traumas onto my kids wow because i wasn't working on myself at that time you know so do your own work yes that's the first thing do your work this year yeah when you're pregnant or when your partner's pregnant do your work already because already the stresses of the husband during the pregnancy will affect that infant in the womb the husband's stresses will also affect yeah because the mom takes on the stresses of the partner right so if you're stressing the mother you're stressing the child exactly wow okay let's work on yourself that's the first thing okay then there are what a great psychologist friend of mine gordon neufeld and i there's a chapter in this in the book describes as the irreducible needs of children the irreducible that if you take them away the child is going to be hurt what are those needs okay first of all a secure attachment relationship with the parents but the child feels that he's just welcome she's welcome they're just welcome to be in the world in the presence of the parents not because they're pretty smart right just because they are just because they're alive yeah this is their life yeah that's the first one the secondary also needs is what gordon calls rest which means that as a child i don't have to make the relationship work i don't have to be nice prove this i i don't have to absorb the stress of my parents i don't have to take care of the needs of my alcoholic father i don't need to create peace for my parents i don't have to create peace for my parents i can rest from the work of making the relationship work that's the second irreducible need the third one we've already talked about that's the freedom to experience all the emotions joy grief sadness pain anger and by the way if you look at the brain we have circuits for all this the circuits for anger the circuits for for caring we have circuits for grief and so on and we're wired for them and we have to be allowed that wiring to express itself when the situation calls for it so that the capacity to experience all your emotions all your emotions is a third irreducible the fourth one is free unprogrammed play in nature with multiple playmates of different ages no not play with a gadget not play with a computer not giving us a one-year-old a cell phone to occupy them as you're changing their diapers but actually free creative play and play has no agenda it doesn't matter who wins or who loses is not about winning now play is wired into our brains we have a place circuit how do we know that all animals have it all mammals have it you have two cats yeah they play they play dogs play bear cubs play you know but play is essential for you for healthy brain development play is much more important for healthy brain development than intellectual learning uh if a child plays they'll be able to learn intellectually later so free creative spontaneous play kids have no if you look at those four needs our society denies them all no wonder we have so many kids in trouble you know and by the way there's another psychologist i spoke to called darcia narvaez and she taught at notre dame university and she's researched indigenous societies aboriginal societies small band hunter-gatherer groups get what guess what she found they provided their kids all those folks all those things all those lots of time to play out there in nature you know with other kids you know yeah all the full range of emotions all that stuff all that stuff it's interesting so we've lost you know we've kind of we've lost the um we've lost the ball somewhere you know in this culture yeah i know this culture is my many achievements to its credit innovations achieving innovation science science and all that but boy have we lost it when it comes to what human needs are and and and and you can hurt people in two ways hurt or hurt hurt well you can hurt them in many ways i hurt them in two ways you can traumatize people in two ways one is to actually do bad things to them that you shouldn't have done but there is to me is to deprive them of their needs and this society does it both ways by doing bad things to them by doing bad things a lot of kids have bad things done to them in schools and homes and so on a lot of other kids it's not so much that bad things other than them are done to them but that the good things that they need they're deprived of and those are the needs i just talked about is there a fifth one too or not well the fifth one was the the parents working on themselves that was the first one got you okay gotcha so the five if you're a parent or about to be a parent they do these five things if you if you are if you have kids right now and you ask yourself am i doing these five things start adding them if you've been neglecting but the first one is to do the work on yourself first and i think this is uh dr shafali i'm not sure if you know her because she's got a conscious parenting she's incredible i know her very well yeah and i think it's this you know she talks about doing the work yourself as a you know a conscious way to heal so that you can parent in a conscious way as well exactly and i think we talk the same language yes i really like your work so doing that first for yourself and that takes courage and and ongoingly like it's not so it's not a one day and you're done i wish i could yeah one day just day one they spent the day working on your stuff you'll be fine yeah no it's ongoing it goes on until you have kids yeah so do the do the work yourself first uh number two create uh the needs for your kids which is a secure attachment first off so people feel secure yeah the child feels secure that they just exist not to prove that they're pretty enough or talented enough or smart enough or more advanced than other kids to get love but just because they exist yeah yeah uh freed up the second one would be for rest yeah so rest meaning uh when you when you're resting you're not having to work right so not having to work to make the relationship work and with the parent yeah yeah gotcha um the third one is the freedom to express all emotions your full range of motions in a safe environment yeah and then the last one would be uh adding play in nature with multiple playmates without electronics yeah spontaneous spontaneous creative creative play yeah creatively so ask yourself if you're doing these things yeah now um this book the myth of normal i wrote it with my eldest son daniel um who's now 40 about to be 47. he talks in the book about did he have those things did he have those things with you no none of my kids none of my children have had them you know i i've made every mistake in the book literally i made every mistake in every book i've written you know about what not to do about what not to do yeah so diana talks about he used to have his recurrent nightmare as a child of the floor just disappearing the floor not being the floor which meant that he never knew when my wife and i would get into one of our really hostile tense exchanges and he had to sort of absorb and endure all that well when the parents are in that state the child does not feel secure now if we lived in a large community like we used to with those uncles and aunts and grandparents around go next door you hang out with your yeah yeah or you have safety somewhere go to the next cave or go to the next tenth or something you know but we don't so you're trapped in your room yeah yeah so so so then writes about when the floor was not the floor and um [Music] no thank god we've done a lot to heal our relationship and even writing the book together was a a healing exercise sure let me tell you but but you know going back to his childhood yeah so when i point these things out i'm not pointing fingers at anybody i i it's hard and i i certainly had to learn a lot from the many ways in which i showed up that weren't helpful yeah yeah it's interesting i mean i couldn't sleep at night for many probably until i don't even know until i was like in my late teens or late 20s probably i would stay up for hour hour and a half kind of just unable to sleep like i would try to go to bed early i would go to bed late and i would just kind of like anxiousness or worry or just an inability to fully rest yeah kind of always on this like edge yeah and i think you know and i never felt that stability with my parents right it was like there was always some type of tension yeah and and it was like every other week there was an explosion of like the slamming of doors and the screaming in the kitchen and we're in the living room like yeah when is the you know when's the explosion gonna happen next with our parents was there anybody in your life that you could talk to that that there was any kind of a safe haven for you no i was the youngest of four so there my brother was 11 years older and my sisters were four years older than eight years older so i was i kind of always felt like i just gotta you know figure it out and and i left home at 13. so i begged my parents to send me away where most kids get sent away for being bad yeah i was i went to a private boarding school okay because i went to a a christian camp one summer yeah and i met a bunch of kids that went to the school and i was like these kids are accepting these kids are kind these kids are nice these kids have joy they're loving i was like i want to be around these kids it feels safe yes whereas i didn't feel like the school i was at before and kind of the environment home felt safe yeah i was like i begged them when i got back from this campus said please send me here to the school and they're like we're not gonna send you away and i was like every day i was just like please and convince them to send me away i think that was probably like the beginning of feeling like okay i'm more safe now well yeah even though i was in a strict dorm environment with you know yeah wake up and dress code and rules but it was like probably some structure probably something you're welcome to structure i was like i thrived yeah i mean some things i was resistant to but i was also like i felt more safe with the order and the structure and i was able to develop my mental and emotional skills and yeah that discipline gave me a skill set too well you know absolutely and going back to our discussion about that anger issue i'm not saying that parents need to be permissive permissiveness is a kind of neglect what do you mean permissive permissive where the child just have to do whatever they want and you know rage or whatever you know it's not a question of that it's a question of um there has to be structure there has to be rules and the parents have to set boundaries for their children and that's what you probably appreciated in that yeah boarding school because the rules and the boundaries were scary at home it was like discipline you know it was like anger rules exactly rather than like those yeah healthy rules and healthy boundaries where it's like hey you know put me in line if i need to be but yeah not screaming at me for my life you know type of thing yeah that's interesting yeah and so when when when parents when there's tension within parents and there's kids around and it's a pattern whether there's a lack of affection physical affection a disrespect whether it's loud or it's just a low-level sense of arguments what happens then to children if there's that type of bickering arguing anger well first of all a number of things can happen once the child disconnects tunes out as a copy mechanism then the brain gets wired to tune out okay the child pushes down their emotions as we talked about wow all the chat takes on the role of trying to fix things being the peacemaker peacekeeper yeah which is immediately a source of shame because they can never succeed so they are right right at the bat they're a failure they're failing because my parents are still yeah exactly i didn't fix it it's my fault oh my gosh so much weight lots of impacts um [Music] this shows up in so many areas let me tell you a story so if i told you about a four-year-old girl who's bullied by neighborhood kids and she runs into the family home to seek protection from the mother and the mother says there are no room for cards in this house now you get out there and deal with those kids how would you view that interaction with the mom there's no room for what no room for cards in this house cowards yeah the kid comes in the home too call me a coward go defend yourself yeah that's a four-year-old before your google i would say uh how would i view that situation or that home how would you view that interaction with the mother i would view it as that's how that mother was raised yeah she's not creating a safe environment for the child what's that what's the impact on their child suffering pain challenges let me tell you an amazing thing this story was told on public television in front of millions of people and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that wow this is hillary clinton at the democratic convention where she was nominated for presidency and there was a document about her life narrated by the voice of god morgan freeman and uh and this is described an example of good parenting oh this is how my mother helped me become resilient no it didn't this is how the mother taught her to suck it up and to become hard you know and uh 60 years later she gets pneumonia during the election campaign remember what she did with that she collapsed in public she had fever she was dehydrated she didn't tell anybody she sucked it up she said i'm going to be strong i'm going to be talking you know there's no room for cowards in this house wow what amazes me is that and we see this in our politicians all the time and what amazes me is that this is a story told in front of millions and nobody says oh my god that poor little girl everybody says oh this is a great example of parenting that's how the nature becomes a culture yes because a four-year-old girl who goes to mom for protection is not a coward she's a four-year-old what would a little cat run back for protection you know wrong with a little bear i mean yeah yeah you know save me save me exactly help me that seeking help from the adults is the most natural urge of the child so but in this culture we'll be so glorified sucking it up that a presidential candidate can discuss this on in public and nobody even bats an eyelash so how do we how do we teach our kids to have the full range of emotions and come to us for safety and support but also have the courage to manage challenging times in our life yeah so that we're not always reliant on our parent when we're 30 but we're also okay we can take on challenges see here's the thing nature is an agenda we talked about the oak tree before nature's the end is that you develop uh will and self-respect given the right environment and anybody with will and self-respect will stand up for themselves you don't have to teach them you have to just respect them and support them they will develop that way if you respect them they will learn to respect themselves nobody who respects themselves will put up with yeah bullies are being pulled out or you know or disrespect or anything you know they won't they will say no you don't you don't do that to me to me you don't do that how do you teach how do you show that to children how do you respect kids so they feel that and see it well but by all the things all the ways that we we talked about and you know and and anger we have a circuitry in our brain for anger as i said there's such a thing as healthy anger now um [Music] which is very different from uncontrolled rage healthy anger simply says no i mean you're in my space get out right no animals have that yeah you know it's like the gorilla is just like you know you get my space you know under the cats you know that that's healthy anger you know uh you know look at a cat with a ambitious looking dog coming near them think about it forget about it you know right um that's healthy anger what's we don't we don't have to teach it it's there we just allow it what's uncontrollable rage what's the difference when you uncontrollably is different and so here's the thing the suppression of healthy anger promotes autoimmune disease and neurological disease suppression of the health yep yeah because anger is a boundary defense um healthy anger is a body defense suppressing healthy anger suppresses the immune system because of the mind-body unity that again this has been demonstrated yeah so the mind-body entity says you suppress the anger you're suppressing your immune system your immune system may even turn against you right just like your anger can turn against you now so that's not healthy then there's uncontrolled rage which is also not healthy in in people who rage a lot they're more prone to have heart disease and strokes and high blood pressure because all the adrenaline and you know all that unhealthy rage is usually because um you have suppressed emotions and all of a sudden the pressure cooker just balls over and then it splout spews out spills out yeah and i don't know if you've ever experienced rage i have of course but you know what healthy anger is you're on my space get out no once it's done its job it's over you're creating a a barrier or a boundary yeah and it's done its job you move on exactly and the more i raged the more circuits in my brain got recruited to be even more rateful so that's the so the healthy angers are in the present moment bond defense unhealthy rage is usually based on the past yes so when i would rage with my kids it had nothing to do with my kids it it was being triggered that you had unresolved trauma exactly and until you resolve the trauma you're going to keep having the symptoms exactly which for you was rage yeah yeah and when you speak of that word trigger when people talk about being triggered have you triggered me it's an interesting word because um if you look at the weapon how big a part of the weapon is a trigger small small was there is there is uh explosive material explosive charge there's ammunition there's a mechanism to deal out there's wires connected so if i get triggered i could blame you and then just rage at you for triggering me or i could say hmm what was the explosive charge inside myself what's the ammunition here what is that all about and it's got never to do with the present this always has to do with the past healing the memories of the past healing those stories yeah and is you know sometimes we have a something a memory of the past and we could either downgrade the the memory or we could elaborate the memory right so how do we address the memory by allowing the feeling that's associated with it to be present in other words by not being caught up with the story either suppressing the story and diminishing it or enhancing it and dwelling on it but by what happens to me what's in my body when that story comes up for me yeah and just being with the emotions and accepting the emotions which is really what should happen to you as a child you know so it's not about the story it's about what you're experiencing when you're under the influence of that story yes that's how i would say what's the what's the biggest what's the challenge you feel like you're still healing or the the maybe the trauma or the stress that is most present for you that you're still healing um it shows up in my relationship mostly it shows up it shows up in two ways one of them not so much anymore let's say somebody critiques my view of addiction okay now i'm totally open to being critiqued i'm i got no problem if they understood what i was saying right but if they're critiquing something i don't even understand i just can't stand not being understood so so right that's a so that can be a true that's a trigger for you yeah not being understood not so much anymore because i really see that it's about them here's what i'm saying it's very i'm a reasonably good communicator yes if if you read what i say and if you don't get to get it and then you have critically critiqued me for that well you got a problem here you know of perception sure so that that's one but the big one shows up in my relationship with my wife is as if but i'm i'm really letting it go and i've let go of it majorly is there any sense of not being wanted from your wife yeah yeah yeah yeah any sense of not being wanted you know whether it's physically or emotion you know but you know what maybe you're finding this i know you're in a new relationship and i've been in mine now for 53 years i'm married 53 years in a relationship for 55 years now it's been my biggest teacher i'm sure and it's my biggest ground of spiritual and personal growth so if you take away all the therapy i've done the secondary work i've done this still has been none of which will be what i want to do without but this relationship and both of us wanted to find out the truth of things i mean we were as dysfunctional as that relationship was ultimately we were both committed to the truth and not holding on to our little stories what is the truth you know who said that pontius pilate said it to jesus christ when jesus was taken in front of uh the roman governor of judea a pontius you know pilate he said he says well who is that jesus i'm here to speak the truth by the way i'm not comparing myself sure sure jesus no you do punch his father but but he said jesus i'm here to speak the truth and punch that what is the truth you know what jesus did with that answer question what didn't answer him oh the reason he didn't answer is because the question comes from the intellect and an intellect cannot grasp the truth the intellect can grasp the facts but not the truth and for us to grasp the truth um ever read the um the little prince by antoine okay remember what the [ __ ] says to the little prince he says the eyes can but you cannot see with the eye is only with the heart so so truth for me goes way beyond the intellect it has to do with therefore there's no intellectual answer that's satisfying but the truth is actually again as i write about we have three brains we think we have one brain we have at least three there's the one up here then there's the heart which is their nervous system of its own an intelligence [Music] when the three are aligned then we're in a position to apprehend or appreciate the truth when they're not we're not right and so there's no simple intellectual answers to what is true it's an ex truth is not a fact it's an experience you know and uh i know that sounds mystical and i'm not a mystical being i've never had deep mystical experiences i'm not you know if you're a doctor i'm a doctor but you know although as again as i do write about this with certain psychic experiences i've kind of glimpsed it you know but i know people who've had experiences of truth without psychedelics just for some spiritual opening happened sometimes at a time of deep suffering actually judd once said to me that she surrendered to a god she didn't even believe in in a moment of de-suffering so the truth can show up in all kinds of ways but it's not an intellectual experience that's why i can't answer the question yeah how much do you think you suffer on a regular basis these days it's very momentary and when i revisit circuits of my brain that have long outlived their usefulness but i don't but i really i would have told you most of my life i've suffered really yeah um and i'm not saying that as a victim i mean it just felt bad and perceived it as hopeless and and and and myself as somehow irretrievably hurt you know that that was my self-image even as i was helping other people um i suffered writing this book really yeah because of what we were talking about earlier identification so i took on this big project this book 10 years of research i collected 25 000 scientific articles and reports hundreds of books hundreds of people i interviewed and then i started writing it and the first chapter was like the worst piece of junk i've ever produced and uh i said oh my god i've taken on something way bigger than i can possibly deliver now why did i suffer that's not suffering if i take on something that i can't deliver i just say okay i can't do this that's not suffering the suffering is i should do this the world expects me to do this if i don't do the sound of failure because i identified with it the judgment you have on the judgment that's what the suffering was from and i identified with it so you know i've written four books not published in 30 languages this is the fifth one uh it doesn't matter how successful the others are if this one fails i'm a failure and not really exposed my incompetence to the world in other words my mind was identifying myself with the book and it took me some time to realize you know i'm not the book let's say i write this book it doesn't work for whatever reason i mean i think it will but if it doesn't doesn't say a thing about me it's not me i'm still alive earth is still here the sun is you know so is that identification that created the suffering for me and that identification had to do with the childhood sense that had to prove the value of my existence you know so that's so all suffering stems from what specifically do you think for us some false belief that we developed about ourselves as a result of what happened to us so the fastest way to end the suffering within ourselves well it is to recognize that we're suffering which means what in us recognizes that we're suffering something that some awareness or some of consciousness yes yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so then to follow that awareness you know and and um but the buddha you know it's four noble truths life is suffering suffering uh secondly there is a reason for that suffering which actually is the attachment the identification thirdly there's a way out of the suffering yeah and fourthly here's the path you disidentify you just dis identify with the things that you society is yeah and that you've attached to and everything and the society is laid on you so you know that's the buddhist way it makes a lot of sense to me let go of the identity yeah yeah let go of the identity exactly and when he had his enlightenment experience that's exactly what he found that he was not his identity that it wasn't his prince that it wasn't this ascetic you know this this hermit it wasn't any of that so now i have not had that experience but you know what the funny thing is is i talk to you about it and i sense your understanding of it i can only say yeah absolutely that's the truth isn't it yeah i think for i was telling you before we started that last year over last year i've had so much peace in my heart and in my body and i just doesn't mean there's not stressful moments and you know challenges of business and things that maybe i'm disappointed in or frustrated with exactly but it doesn't stick with me like it used to yeah and i'm so grateful for the continual healing journey that i'm committed to creating and cultivating within myself yeah because i want everyone to feel this peace i want everyone to feel this inner peace and again my mission and intention is to continue to cultivate that and stay with me um and i'm sure every parent will say wait till you have kids and see if you have the peace inside of you still but i'm gonna be at the ultimate test i guess if you if you think you're on titans go spend a week with your family exactly exactly yeah um but listen let me say something yeah um you were saying something that was so important and i wish i had kept it what are we saying just now just repeat it oh yeah first of all are you experiencing gratitude all the time did you used to experience gratitude i did yes but i but i would judge myself still for not doing enough yeah okay now i'm like i'm doing enough yeah i'm not judging myself or comparing myself yeah that i should be doing i should i used to use should a lot yeah this is good but i should have done it better so i mentioned the psychologist peter levine who was a mentor and a friend and he and i were just working together in switzerland and peter and i were talking a year ago and he said he's 80 years old now and he says um uh he asked himself this question am i doing enough and he says these days he can say yes have i done enough says yes i've done enough. but then he says there's another question even deeper he says am i enough and recently when i'm working together and and sir i said so peter the second question how are you answering that one he said i'm still working on it wow or am i enough you know how do we fully uh believe that we are enough i don't think there's a how i think it comes when you've done the work it comes you know and the other thing he said is that your your [Music] passion for helping others heal and find peace in their lives as you have funded i'm telling you i used to work in vancouver's downtown east side which is north america's most concentrated area of drug use we have more people there and a few scrawlr radius using all kinds of drugs these people are all terribly traumatized all the women down there were sexually abused as a children many of them are indigenous canadians which is a very traumatized segment of the canadian population as it is here in the states but they all so many of them said to me doc if i ever get over this if i ever beat this addiction i'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure that other people don't have to suffer as i've suffered right no that's what you just said is that as you've dealt with your own suffering you're so committed now that others won't suffer or that others can deal from the suffering what does that say about the true nature of human beings we care about others and we're here for each other yeah we're not selfish competitive aggressive teachers right that's that's not our true nature yeah this is you know now we may do a good job about it we need to sometimes do it well sometimes not so well but our nature wants to express itself i have a few final questions for after like i could talk to you for hours i love this stuff um but when does someone know that there are they are on a healing journey when what is what is healing and when do they know they're on it well um again you're talking about chapters of my new book that's perfect so healing comes from the word wholeness the anglo-saxon origin of the word is whole so healing is not a matter of curing anything you can be cured without being healed and you can heal without being cured um healing is becoming whole in other words integrating all the parts and and and recognizing all these aspects of yourself that you've loved and hated and rejected you tried to run away from so it's becoming whole it's it's coming back to your authentic self which has never went away but you lost contact with it if trauma is the loss of connection to self then healing is the reconnection to self um when do you know on your healing path when you're asking yourself some of these questions that's already a sign of healing because the people that are not healing they don't ask themselves these questions when you find that things that used to trigger you don't get you so upset anymore or when you do get upset you get over it much quicker because you realize over here you know so really it's when the past starts to loosen its hold over your present mmm that's so powerful yeah you know it's i used to get i guess when you use the word triggered i used to get triggered a lot to reacting to yeah my big thing was feeling taken advantage of feeling used abused taking advantage this is exactly what happened to you what happened yeah and so when little things would happen in the world like someone cut me off in a car yeah or flipped me off or something i would like want to go and beat this person up exactly it was like i would come over me of like i need to chase this person down and i remember being like man why is this you know i was addicted to that reaction yeah that anger feeling of like you're gonna abuse me i'm going to make sure it doesn't happen right rage whatever i be right there yeah and uh that addiction of that trigger from what i'm hearing you say is an enslavement exactly yeah to that traumatic experience exactly your the past has power over you exactly you don't have control you are reacting yeah by the way i'm going to ask you a personal question yes this is a curiosity sure so you're a big guy i mean if you decide to beat somebody else 95 of the time you're gonna succeed now yeah i'm 5'7 and you know um and probably you know 134 pounds yeah i can get that kind of rage too but i'm in no position to actually you might get beat up yeah which is probably a good thing yeah but what was it like for you did you use your size that way oh my gosh um i did and this was a big awakening i remember there's two of two experiences i've talked about this before um one time i was driving nearby it's probably 10 years ago yeah and i i stopped at a stop sign but then i kind of rolled to like take a turn right and there was a runner coming and he he had to like stop because i was rolling so i went in the crosswalk area slowly like one mile an hour yeah he had to stop and go around the car as opposed to just going through the crosswalk yeah and he punched my car and went around and said something to me and then one around right yeah i literally chased the guy down in my car and like chased him around the block got out of my car and ran him down until i was like finally my senses came to me like what am i doing are you giving to yourself thankfully yeah but uh maybe like six months after that i i got in a fight on a basketball game i've talked about this in my books and on my podcast where i got in a physical like a fist fight a pretty bad one and um the guy was bigger than me but i'd played football my whole life and you know yeah it was almost like when i had this triggering addictive rage moments yeah i didn't feel any pain right it was like there was so much adrenaline yeah there's so much fight in me yeah that it was like this is life or death feeling and so i got a pretty bad fistfight and afterwards i remember being like like i saw the guy's face and i go oh my gosh i can't believe i just did this even though he hit me first and so it gave me the reason the reason right i was like i would never start it yeah physically yeah but i would make sure i would always finish it if i needed to yeah i remember at that point i was like my my best friend matt who's in the room who i've known for a long time he was there with me and he goes you know what are you doing like later he was like louis like something's wrong with you yeah like we're playing a basketball game we're having fun here yeah why are you getting in this fight this altercation yeah and that was a big wake-up call for me like when my best friend like called me out he's like i don't know if i want to hang out with you like i've never played basketball with you again and you gotta figure out why you're reacting to someone yeah talking trash yeah we're supposed to have fun here yeah yeah what are you so triggered by yeah and that was a big wake-up call this is when i started the healing journey this is when i started doing therapy and emotional intelligence workshops and for the first time opened up about the sexual abuse right which which was kind of the first opening yeah of healing and it's been a ten year journey of what you said uh integrating all the parts there was one part that i started integrate and it started to heal certain things triggers yeah but there were other parts and relationships that i hadn't integrated yet yeah from parents from other things so yeah thankfully that was ten years ago and i haven't got what that story brings up for me is um you had this fit of rage no but i was a loving fun guy unless i felt like i was being taken advantage of yeah which is what happened to the child but what else did we talk about having fits we'll talk about epileptic fits in the epileptic phase the brain is in a different state of of a physiological organization when you're in that fit of rage it's almost like an epileptic fit yeah you're not even there you're not conscious you're not conscious you're like yeah you're like a tiger or like a hunting or something yeah you're like you can't play the wii you have one focus there's you don't see anything else which also speaks to a lot of uh the criminal justice system doesn't understand people yeah we don't we don't understand how often the people who do the worst things i'm not saying is to excuse any bad behavior or not to protect society but how we approach it is these are really traumatized people and they're not actually often the worst things they do they're not even there that i'm aware yeah yeah so i'm grateful that i started to i was aware of it started to you know heal and um yeah and now i see things it's funny because like it's like a completely different person 10 years ago right and then from teenage years and 20s when i'm like i'll see something and i'll just notice it and smile you know kind of okay that's just about them it's yeah and i'll just and i and i'm so connected to it the vision of my future and my present but my vision my values my intention yeah my appreciation for life that i'm just like okay i'm safe yeah i i can protect the five-year-old who is abused i'm the adult in the room i don't need to react because i'm here for that part of myself that didn't feel whole at a certain point you get to realize that life has created me but now i get to create my life you know within limits i'm not going to live forever right you know but but i get to create how i live my life right as long as i'm alive you know and that's actually when you're healed you get to create your life you have this the creative uh freedom to dream yeah to imagine the life you want to create right as opposed to living in survival and stress mode yeah by the way what i don't want to get is to um when i say that when i hear myself say that i don't want to get too um new agey about it because there's a lot of people under difficult economic or racial or political circumstances where not that they're totally helpless but there's a lot of pressures on them externally so it's not like all you've got to do is take it on the other side we also have to look at the larger political economic social um racial cultural issues that keep a lot of people suppressed yeah there's a lot of political trauma and um how does someone who maybe is living in a stressed environment whether it be their home or their city or their culture political you know whatever it might be they're they're more suppressed than others how can they support themselves to getting out of a stressed environment so that they can be more of a baseline to have the ability to thrive and flourish emotionally you know something as a privileged [Music] caucasian identified male 1 with economic freedom and i'm not in a position to say to somebody these are larger political questions these people society has to change and people have to work to change society and it's a question of at some point it becomes a question of advocacy and activism and and and joining with others you know i i don't want to preach to somebody else sure about about that you know my job is to our extent is to support and help but not to provide some kind of but if society let's say society won't change for a period of time for these individuals for certain individuals who are feeling overstressed what can they do as an individual uh whether they get support externally or not what could they start to do anything else besides i mean we've covered a lot that they can start to do and they get your they get your book that's for sure well again you know um i'm not sure i can fully answer that but i can i can give examples so the new yorker a couple years ago within the last two or three years had an article about uh an american black man who was jailed for decades and kept in solitary confinement for decades was this shaka singur i don't remember the name it could happen this guy who yeah was in solitary confinement for decades but yeah well maybe the same man yeah wrote a best-selling book and was on oprah and it might have been the same guy but go ahead all right well my point is that fairness my point is that it didn't that it wasn't destroyed by it right he started to heal in the prison and he he found the inner strength somehow so that it's not for me to tell i don't know if i could stand it for one day never mind for four decades or three decades but but that just shows you that the strength the capacity to heal and to hold on to one servant to find oneself is actually inherent in all of us so even in that unimaginably horrific inhumane cruel and absolutely socially from a sociable despicable way of treating a human being that person still could hold on to themselves they they suffered but they could hold on to themselves and come out of it with dignity yeah you know so that's available to all of us i believe right you know but um again i'm not saying i can't i don't even want to begin to imagine i would handle that situation but i'm just saying it's possible sure sure yeah uh i've got a couple final questions for you before i ask them i want to make sure people get the book because i think this is going to help a lot of people the myth of normal uh they can get it where books are sold or amazon or on your website they can't get it from me directly but they can go there's a link to it somewhere i don't sell books but yeah yeah but if they go to dr gabormate.com.com they can get all the information about where to get it but uh this book's going to be extremely powerful 10 years of research exploring all these things bringing it together there's a research in seven eight years of living yeah personal research i had the uh scientific research yeah and i think um this is the type of stuff people need the most is understanding how to understand their pain their trauma their suffering yeah and find solutions yeah and reclaim their wholeness yeah so they can be in a state of peace under stress in the world potentially and and find that peace and i think it's you know it's something i feel like um i want everyone to experience as i've been experiencing more in the last year and last 10 years some of it but more in the last year and a half internally like consistent piece yeah and it sounds like you've been experiencing for a long time and i feel like um i'm so inspired by your mission and i've been watching your content for a while now and i just think we we need more of these uh i guess it's it's available information to us that we've just forgotten or we're not reclaiming so yeah but i'm so grateful for your doing this so the myth of normal i want everyone to get a few copies and give it to your friends and then to subtitle the trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture exactly which is what we've been talking about you know we haven't even talked about social media consumption and ipads and iphones and all that stuff just being on electronics all day how that's probably affecting traumatizing us in certain ways it's actually distorting the brain development of children by being on the iphone or that all day it changes their brain surface really oh yeah oh yeah that's i talk about that too it's a huge problem what i want to say about the um [Music] question of recognizing trauma is that there's been a sea change in that like the best-selling book in new york times bestseller list is consistently bessel van der kolks um the body keeps the score keeps the score incredible yeah yeah it's not an easy read no it's a very you know it's eloquent but it's also technical and scientific and so on it's been on for like 10 years right or something yeah it's been a little while but in 2015 i think okay 14 maybe 15. something like that um and or and and this year another psychiatrist uh bruce perry wrote a book with oprah called what happened to you the fact that these books are now um so many books in the top 10 bestsellers yeah people are waking up yeah so i'm just glad to be able to contribute of course yeah it's very powerful um this is a question i ask everyone at the end called the three truths yeah so it's a hypothetical question imagine you get to uh live as long as you want to live and you get to live your life creating what you want experiencing life and the relationships you want to be in and making the impact you want to have but it's the last day eventually live as long as you want for whatever reason all of your content has to go with you no one has access to your information your books hypothetically after i'm gone it's all a lot it all goes with you to the next player go somewhere else no we don't have access to it okay got it hypothetical scenario yeah but you got to leave behind three lessons to the world three things that you know to be true okay that you would share with us and this is all we have to remember your yeah your information yeah what would you say are those three truths for you seek the reality of everything don't don't get um seduced by appearances or anything second would be um [Music] don't be afraid of your pain and don't run away from it because that running away is what leads to addictions and illness and so on number three it's all worth it it's worth going through all that suffering uh because this is what life is it's just worth being alive a friend of mine in england recently lost a very close friend to suicide she was just struck by overwhelmed by grief and she didn't know she could handle it and then she's got a favorite forest that she walks in she told me this like two months ago or a month ago she went to walk in this first and she just felt this deep grief our grief is one of the brain circus that we have we have circuits for grief we have to she felt this deep brief and she felt the greatest joy at the same time and asked her well how are the two even compatible she said i felt the grief and if it's such joy at the privilege of being alive to feel the grief wow yeah it's all worth it it's so worth it oh man i want to acknowledge you uh gabbard for i mean your journey i mean the journey of your relationship and what you've experienced from coming together and staying together and all these different things the journey from teaching from a place of suffering because it sounds like for many decades you weren't at peace but you were trying to help others from you i want to acknowledge you for you creating peace inside of yourself and facing the pain and the trauma fully yourself and being on the healing journey and for your com consistent dedication to creating your work so that people can consume it in a way that resonates with them from your books to your content to videos to your posts this is so needed right now and i think it's gonna be needed for a long time until society and culture starts to heal so i really acknowledge you for the way you show up your commitment and your consistency and dedication to this research well i can't thank you enough for first of all creating this platform which by the way means having done all the work yourself and then having a vision to create this platform and then allowing me to speak from this platform of course such a privilege and such a joy so thank you very much yeah you're welcome you're welcome again your book i want people to get it the myth of normal uh make sure you guys go get a few copies of that right now follow you your website we'll have everything linked up as well final question for you what's your definition of greatness don't make it easy you don't make it easier a guy do you i'm gonna challenge you it's a willingness to find your best qualities and to express them in the world that's what i see as greatness and that doesn't have to do with achievement necessarily it might lead to achievement but it's actually the willingness and the capacity to find your own best qualities and to manifest them in the world that's what greatness is love dr martin thank you so much appreciate you you have to think of your thoughts and feelings and the working of your flesh inside your skull as a as a garden as an ecosystem just because you have one weed or one spike doesn't mean the harmony is disrupted so for example one frontal lobe we can surgically remove

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 1,066,899

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: j8t_ir0ogtA

Length: 131min 51sec (7911 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022