Doctor Gabor Mate: The Shocking Link Between Kindness & Illness!

70% of the adult population is at least on one medication quarter of women are on anti-depressants the rate of childhood is going up worldwide there's this epidemic of distress what can we do about that so the first step would be to Dr Gabor mate legendary thinker celebrated speaker and best-selling author highly sought after for his expertise on addiction trauma childhood development and stress people Pleasers these are the people that tend to develop diseases when people don't know how to say no the body will say no for them that niess is a repression of healthy anger and that repression of healthy anger has huge implications to your health and when you repress your immune system you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you people emotionally repressed are more likely to have cancer and emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma we interrupt this film to tell you we are getting reports that the people's princess is dead here was a traumatized child how he's told about his mother's death is that it was an accident your mother didn't make it his father touches Harry on the knee and says but it'll be okay and leaves the room this 12-year-old nobody held him and children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them but just by not having their needs met by not being seen not being heard not being held those are wounding for a child but my interview with Prince Harry I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to do at the interview it really got to me I lost myself what happened [Music] gabble there's a question we often ask each other in flippant conversations which we usually kind of brush away because it's the convenient thing to do yeah that question is the question I wanted to start by asking you which is how are you yeah um so that question is uh for me brings up you know two Dimensions one is how am I at this present moment which is you know how am I at this moment you know which is all there is I'm well I'm I um I'm feel rather peaceful inside um I'm very happy to be here with you if You' asked me two days ago I wouldn't have said that I would have said I was feeling somewhat anxious and uh and kind of troubled you know so um as a in the moment answer I'm well and I also know how to keep well as long as I stick with what I know and when I forget what I know then I can be very not well and so the last year since we've met has been in many ways a tough year for me um also one of deep learning so if the question is how have I been I'd say I've been up and down and I've had real challenges that I've had to learn from how am I right now I'm really well thank you two days ago if IID asked you that question your aunts would have been anxious and troubled yeah why I gave a talk on Monday night to 2100 people and uh I just didn't think I did my best here in London and I thought oh boy I could have done better I let people down um I I allowed my self judgments and self-d to really um dominate my my thinking and um you know as much as I think I'm immune to that kind of self-doubt evidently I'm not um so that's what happened with you say um you let it Cloud you're thinking what are this what were the symptoms of that so you gave a talk two days ago to 2100 people yeah and you didn't feel you did your best you went home that night what was going on in your head what are the symptoms of that feeling um constant [Music] um cyclical self-criticism of I could have been more present I could have been more grounded more attuned with the audience perhaps but you know just all these self-criticisms which then are accompanied by certain feelings in the body like kind of a a roiling in my belly and so on and uh that's what I went through and what was the remedy for that because we can all relate yeah earlier this year um also feeling in a state of discombobulation uh just a few months ago I did something radical I did a two we total sabatical from the internet no cell phone no emails no no checking on Amazon on my D books are doing you know all the self-referential uh ego enhancement stuff and it just really made a difference uh by the end of two weeks I was a different person and so I'm keeping it up and one of the things you learn is you start noticing these body states that you're in and the mental Hoops that you jump through but you don't identify with them so what's the worst case scenario I didn't do the best possible job okay what's the headline in the newspaper human being fails to do his best on a particular occasion what's the big deal you know so it's a matter of observing this all all this stuff and not identifying with it not letting it take you over as it tends to I was reading something that said when we vocalize or share our stress it moves it from the emotional center of our brain to the much more rational center of our brain yeah where we can kind of step outside of the video game and hold the controller per se exactly yeah it's the um um mid-frontal cortex of our brain um that has insight and um um social connection and uh awareness you know which so often goes offline as soon as some emotion takes over some anxiety or anger or resentment takes over uh the midfrontal cortex tends to go offline and uh the more trauma you experience as a child the more likely that is to happen so that your insightful capacities the executive functions get taken over by some deeper emotional Dynamics and so um one of the benefits to me of meditation is is it restores that executive function so that I'm not taking over or too long taken over by emotional dynamics that just sweep me away for two weeks this year you said you went offline yeah why sometimes people say to me uh I I written this book that I know that you have on your desk when the body says no and and my contention is when people don't know how to say no the body will said in the form of illness and uh I can tell you hundreds of times people have said to me your book has saved my life and my response has always been maybe I should read it myself because the fact is I'm quite capable of giving advice and dispensing wisdom that I don't follow myself and that was the case so I became quite stressed and my relationship with my wife Ry became very fraught and she said enough enough of this gap between who we are there in public and how you are in private so that was a big incentive for me Cu uh we're coming up to a 54th anniversary and on the whole I'd rather stay married than not everything else being considered but also for myself I don't be that I don't want to be that guy anymore who who can speak the truth a lot of people consider to be a truth so articulately but not follow it myself so I just don't to be that person and that takes practice and that's why we that's why I take the to the break from the internet and what was interesting is I had my cell phone on airplane mode so nobody could get through me couple days a couple times a day I'd still pick up the cell phone and I say what are you doing there's nothing on it because you it's on internet but the the compulsion to try and get something from the outside to fill some some Gap within I just kept noticing it by the end of two weeks it wasn't so strong anymore um so I did it because I needed to for the sake of my own mental health an up and down year for you you said yeah yeah yeah is that is that the the down you were talking about well I remember a conversation my conversation with you and I and and I think I remember you telling me that you had this goal of becoming a million millionaire when I was younger yeah when I was younger and then it's when you achieve that goal that you realize that that ain't all there is that you still left very much with your internal demons and that's a very common lesson I mean there's two ways to to wake up one is failure where you keep asking yourself you know but but but success is even more because you think that once you get something then you'll be happy and you know so I thought okay well geez that you know so this book the methan normal you know bestseller internationally and published in 35 languages I should be happy no the more I got involved with it and the more I toured with it and the more engaged with the outside became the more Miser miserable I became inside so the very success of the book and it alled to seep it swept me away and I lost myself you know so that was one thing and I did this very long exhausting tour I wasn't taking care of myself and then there was the my interview with Prince Harry and all the um uh frer arounded before it and after it and allowed that allowed that to take me over as well really yeah yeah yeah I mean in retrospect I can see what happened but at the time I was too caught up in it to notice you know so what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what I know if I don't pay attention rigorous attention to what's going on inside and if I keep looking to the outside to give me meaning and give me um validation then I Can Lose Myself and that's what happened your interview with Prince Harry how did that cause you to lose yourself well in two ways one is um I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to doing it the way they set it up because because the way it was set up is in order to watch it people have to buy a copy of Harry's book and I thought this is not fair 4 million people have already bought the book why can't I watch this into you do they have to buy another copy in other words I believed that this should be a free public service on a part of two people who can have a very interesting conversation but out of sheer opportunism I agreed to it so I didn't follow my gut feelings I lost myself even in agreeing to the format and afterwards har and I both wanted it release to the public for free but the lawyer said you can't do that because this was advertised as a one-time only event and you could there could be a class action suit so um the result was that I agreed to something that I didn't really like not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him I didn't like the idea of putting this behind the pay wall so I lost myself just in agreeing to it number one number two then there was the incredible social media and British media re reaction to it that was for the most part so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted that I barely even know how to talk about it I thought by this age I would know better but you know what it really got to me it really got to me I mean uh I can give you examples but um eventually what happened was that I was really in a negative state of mind and have you read the book the um the fo the mold the hor the boy and and the horse I bought it last week it's upstairs in my bag wonderful so great it's a great little book great big book although very few words in it mostly just these wonderful drawings Charlie mcky um he's really channeling wisdom in that book and the horse is the most grounded of the four characters of the four friends and he's asked what's the most courageous things you've ever said and the horse says help so it's so difficult to ask for help but I did you know in the middle of all this frua and my upset and I called a friend of mine a psychiatrist um and I said I'm just in a bad State and he said what's going on for you and I said well there's all this bad press and all the social media Distortion of who I am and my motives he said what is the what that bothers you so much and they said not being seen not being seen is one of the needs of the child but he said to me okay look gabo when you were an infant you're not being seen for who you are as a human being almost cost you your life which you did as soon as he said that I said yeah this isn't about the present this is an old unresolved not yet fully resolved wound age 79 I'm still upset at not being seen I don't care if people agree with me um or they refute my ideas but I want them to see me and what what I'm actually saying not some distorted version created by their own minds and and when he said that that not being seen really threaten your life I said yeah that's what's going on and then I could relax this so what what somebody else says I don't live in the British press I don't live in somebody else's mind here I am you know let them think and say what they say but it took somebody to wake me up to that so that's what happened you said you could share examples of how it got to you of yeah well oh boy um they called me a Stern overbearing Merchant of pain you know uh at some point in the interview you know when Harry was um and the other thing was see Harry was a traumatized child um and you when you read his book you you can see why you know he and people couldn't understand how is this possible How could somebody so privileged at the very Apex of society and guilded palaces be traumatized total misunderstanding of trauma um it's true uh people have it much tougher in many ways but as an infant as a sensitive infant to be born into um a Loveless marriage with the father's having an affair even before he's born but the mother is a troubled very sensitive very creative warm-hearted but very imbalanced young woman so Harry describes in his book spare that he's 12 years old when his mother is killed how he's told about his mother's death is that his father then Prince Charles comes into his room early in the morning and says something terrible happened there was an accident your mother didn't make it then there's a few moments of awkward silence and finally Charles touches Harry on the knee and says but it'll be okay and leaves the room and this is how this 12-year-old was told nobody held him um Charles himself was only doing what happened to him when when Queen Elizabeth went on a International four five month Royal tour leaving the 5-year-old kid behind when she returned to England she greeted him by shaking his [Music] hand and now what I said to Harry was that even animals hold and touch their kids their infants mammals that's what they do because mother rats when the baby's born they lick their babies and the way the mother rat uh Rat licks the baby this has been shown in laboratory influen the brain development of the child and those babies that get the right kind of licking it's called grooming they have better brains as adults premature infants used to be put in incubators and nobody used to touch them then it was found out that if by just by stroking their backs 10 minutes a day that promotes healthy brain development and the Great British American uh Anthropologist Ashley monu wrote a book called Skin the human significance of touch so I was saying that touch is important you're not being held and not being touched was a deprivation and I said mammals monkeys you know what happens when a baby elephant is born this is fascinating the mother ele I read this in a book called The evolv Nest for which I wrote the preface by a wonderful psychologist called Dar narz when when an infant element elephant is born and the mother goes into labor all the other mother elephants stand around in a circle when the infant plops on the ground they all stroke them with their trunks so touch and being held is so important for mammals and I was saying animals do that this journalist who I don't know what she was listening to said I said the royal family tweets like kids like animal I said no I wish they'd had so I mean the Distortion is just laughable if it wasn't if I hadn't taken it so personally for the reasons I already explained for you to take it so personally which led you to call a psychiatrist yeah a man like you with the knowledge you have that writes books about the mind and stress and the body and all these things you must have been in a pretty dark place I was in a dark place and I wasn't but look I'm a human being like the rest and what Charlie mcki says in in that book is that the most courageous thing he can do is ask for help it's true you know does that I don't if you remember the Beatles song help I need somebody and and John lenon sings when I was younger so much younger than today I didn't need anybody's help in any way but now those days are gone I'm much less self- assured he's actually saying that when he was younger he believed he didn't need help but the reason he believed he didn't need help that he has to make it on his own cuz he was so traumatized as a child his uh father left him when he was born um his mother left he was bought by an ant and Lennon Gres up feeling abandoned that I can do this on my own I don't need anybody you know and uh later on he realizes I need help but after fact we all born needing help we all born uh needing to be understood to be attuned with to be seen to have our emotions received and validated that's one of the essential needs of children as I make the point in the Mython normal and children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them but just by not having their needs met by not being seen not being heard not being held those are wounding for a child which is what the meaning of the word trauma means so you don't need terrible things to happen it's so difficult for people to understand that you know they they they think for trauma you need horrific events well horrific events can be very traumatic but you can wound people sensitive people the sensitive child or any child can be hurt just because the parents are too stressed and unavailable emotionally to really see them for who they are I've struggled with that in my life especially being um a CEO I think I've struggled to ask for help when I need it because you kind of see yourself as the helper and also I've struggled with the idea maybe I don't know where I got this story from that people like me maybe because I'm a man maybe because I'm um the head of businesses we have to figure it out on our own and the cost of repr repressing how I feel has become more and more evident over time yeah how so just like I think I when I was younger I never experienced anxiety before and then as I had more difficult moments in business where I tried to solve the problem in my mind for the first times at like 25 26 27 28 29 30 that I experienced like fully-fledged what I'd call anxiety where I just couldn't get a thought out of my head and I felt it in my body my breath was short this constant state of like angst yeah um and and yeah I just thought I could deal with it myself I thought I could think my way through it yeah um was that the hardest the the hardest moment in terms of your own psychology in your adult life in recent times let me answer that question a moment but let me ask you a question that occurs to me if I may yeah please um it's like with beautiful women they sometimes have a very hard time because they can never know that somebody want me for who I really am or they just attracted to my physical features so for somebody who at a young age becomes quite well healthy and successful um how do you know when somebody's approaching you are they approaching you because they want something from you or because they really care about you I mean that must be a problem for you I imagine 100% 100% you never really know understand what your relationships are yeah you know yeah huh it must be confusing sometimes it is and you I typically fall back onto the relationships I had before yeah yeah cuz I can trust those ones yeah so I have the same my best friends people I spend my time with on my birthday there's five you know five people there are the five people that were there 10 years ago yeah unless I think we get reconnected to our gut feelings then our gut feelings will tell us what is real and what isn't but the problem for many of us is that we get disconnected from a God feelings very early in life like in a in this room of 2100 at the try on Monday night um I think I asked this question I always do uh have you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something and not paying attention to it ignoring it and being sorry afterwards almost everybody puts a hand up that's a child sign of childhood wounding because we're born connected to our gut feelings no baby is disconnected from the gut feelings something happens to make us disconnect what is a gut feeling from a physiological perspective because gut feeling is used as a word to describe you know an Intuition or you know well real gut feelings really happen in the gut uh the in the western way of looking at it we tend to look upon the intellect and and and the intellectual brain is the only brain that we have but actually our brain is a far more complicated um structure and our heart has a nervous system which is connected to the brain up here and there's a kind of knowing in the heart sometimes people say I knew in my heart and they did if they're connected gut feelings are what all animals possess it warns them of danger or when it's safe and when it isn't safe not in the brain um the gut is connected to the brain right the the gut sends more connection to the brain than the brain sends to the gut and the gut has more of the neurotransmitter serotonin in it than the brain does so that the gut things are here to tell us about what is safe and what isn't and when the brain in the gut and the brain in the heart and the brain and up here in this in the head are connected then we're grounded and present and very alert and very aware of what's going on but when childhood trauma interferes with those connections which it does then we start to just work from up here and we can think we can figure things just from up here but actually when you think about human beings where did we evolve we evolved for millions of years out in nature how long does any creature in nature survive if they don't pay attention to they got feelings so to go back to your question about me I used to believe I really used to believe into my 40s that I everybody else could be stressed but I couldn't be and it's like you and your anxiety um I think the reason you I didn't feel the stress CU I had coping mechanisms like working hard and um getting people's attention or using my smarts and and uh having status and all this kind of stuff you know and then that broke down I realized I I could be stressed like everybody else but literally I had to I I had this belief Ian it's almost unbelievable to me now that I used to believe that I couldn't everybody else could be stressed but I couldn't be that's what I thought yeah your wife when you went through that dark moment if I was her what would I have observed well first of all and I talk about this in the Myan normal and Reay my wife came on stage at the troxy on Monday night and talked about this I asked her to women have 80% of autoimmune disease in the society so that um diseases where the immune system attacks the body happens to women much more than to men things like rheumato arthritis systemic lupus chronic fatigue fom myalgia um inflammatory disease of the gut um and and so on why so um those diseases tend to happen to people not just according to my own observation although it's very much my own observation when I was working in family practice and paliative Care before I did addiction medicine I noticed that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental um as the subject of my book when the body says no and then again in the methan normal people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own identified with Duty role and responsibility so their their work in the world rather than their own um true selves they tended to suppress healthy anger so they tend to be very very nice and peacemakers and they tended to believe that they're responsible other people feel and then they must never disappoint anybody two fatal beliefs so these are the people that according to my observation but according to a whole lot of research as well that I didn't even know about but have since found elegant research these are the people that tend to develop autoimmune disease now in this society which gender is more acculturated programmed to suppress their healthy anger to be the peacemakers to be the caregivers women the this is a function of a reality that a lot of people deny but it's a patriarchal society which we can talk about but it's not a conspiracy it's just how it works so me in my marriage expect my wife to absorve my stresses and if I'm unhappy guess who I blame and who do I take it out on so she would experience somebody who's um can be hostile for no reason and blaming and she has to walk on neck shell no um thank God she's not the type to do that for too long and at some point she'll call my bluff and then I either wake up or she says thank you very much but enough for this you know and so she would experience somebody who was irritable and um unreasonably blaming and not taking care of their own needs and then expecting her to take care of them for me and um we both had to grow up and she was programmed that way as a child her parents had a lot of problems and she became The Peacemaker and a caregiver emotionally and then she cares that role into her marriage with me and here's what the bad news is for people we always marry somebody at the same level of emotional development or trauma resolution as we are so when we met we were too traumatized people not even realizing it and then we played out our traumas and I played it out in a typical male way which is to be aggressive and demanding and resentful if she wasn't around to Mother me and um that's what she would have seen and this Dynamic can still arise except when it does she puts a stop to it right away and I have the grace and the wisdom I know to understand yeah I'm doing it again in fact I haven't done it since then because I just don't want to be that guy you know but that's what she would have seen and what was going on inside your head were you anxious were you depressed I was anxious and um then I want her her soothing I want her how should I say this um there's an interesting sexual dynamic between men and women that men very often expect unconsciously expect their women to Mother them to give them the mothering that they didn't fully receive his kids and the women take on that role because they're acculturated in this Society to do that but then what happens sexually no healthy guy wants to sleep with his mother and no healthy woman wants to sleep with her son so that the the ardor and the you know the the passion kind of drains out because of this unconscious Dynamic of women mothering men and and men men demanding that they do so then I become frustrated and then who do I blame for that I blame her rather than looking at how did I contribute to how did I help create this situation so um all that stuff played out in our marriage and we've had to learn a lot from what didn't work in my relationship when I was most anxious it's also when my relationship nearly ended um with my partner because like you said I inadvertently took it out on her because I felt that she should understand how I'm feeling and basically adapt to me exactly and she didn't and so there was conflict because I felt like she was misunderstanding me yeah and wasn't like acting in the right way to meet the needs that I had like she couldn't you know and and so that I think I wore her down and then there was kind of like as you say that ultimatum moment where she's basically saying listen shall I just go yeah and what you probably didn't do and what I did do for a long time is just to go to her and say you know what I'm feeling anxious yeah that was that's what happened after you know you know and I'm feeling unsettled and I realize that I have resentful feelings towards you you know instead of owning it we act it out yeah and then we why don't they understand us you know and actually so what we're actually demanding is that we can be children emotionally and they be the mothers who without any effort on our part will understand stand and see us you know and this is a strong Dynamic um in men female relationships and what tends to happen is is that men then women at some point get to the if they're healthy enough now if they're notal if they're not strong enough to assert themselves you know what happens they get sick and uh I know this is a mouthful but a lot of women's Cancers and auto immune diseases are precisely because of the self depression and I could talk about that at Great length the physiology of it but either the the body will somehow say no for them that's why women are much more likely to be in anti-depressants cuz they're taking a medication for both of them you know and so either the woman gets ill somehow or she asserts herself and says I'm not doing this anymore at which point the guy will go seeking a younger mother who's not yet mature enough to assert herself and this happens all the time in relationship the cost of self-repression the cost of sort of emotional repression I think everybody is guilty at some point in their life of repressing their emotions I think men do it a lot as well I mean if you look at the Su suicidality in the UK among men tend to act it out on themselves like that yeah what is the cost of self-repression now you talked about the physiological mechanism of what's going on when we repress our emotions and how we feel it's it's been well studied not just by me but others and documented that repression of healthy anger um disturbs the immune system now why should that be the case now healthy anger is simply when somebody is intruding on your space and they won't desist you say you're in my space get out that's healthy anger it's in the moment one it's done its job it's finished with it's different from chronic Rage which is a whole other thing no in other words anger is a boundary defense that's all it is animals do it ah get out of my space you know now the emotional system in general has the job uh the human emotional system in general has the role of allowing in what is nurturing and loving and healthy and welcome and to keep out what isn't that's the job of the emotional system let me ask you a trick question what's the job of the immune system okay I'll answer is to keep out what is unhealthy and unwelcome and toxic and to let in what is nurturing and healthy so the immune system is like it's been called a floating brain it is memory it is reactive capacity and um it um re allows in New nutrients and vitamins and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and unhealthy invading organisms and so on in other words the immune system and the emotional system have exactly the same role that's the first point the second point is they're not separate systems physiologically speaking emotional system the nervous system hormonal apparatus and the immune system are all one system and there's a whole new science when I seen you 60 70 80 years old called psycho neur neuroimmunology that studies the unity so it's not even that all these things are connected they're one so therefore when you're suppressing one aspect of it you're also suppressing the other so people that repress healthy anger they have diminished immune activity and this has been demonstrated so so the repression of emotions has a physiological function and when you repress your immune system you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you or to fail you when it comes to malignancy the immune system like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day because nature makes mistakes that's not a problem the immune system recognizes them as cancer cells don't have on their surfaces markers that our normal cells do so the immune system says this is a foreigner it's an enemy I'm going to destroy it but when you repress your emotions you can also undermine your immune system and our immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it and allows it to to proliferate there was a British surgeon in the 1960s who operated on am I talking too much no you're not there's no such thing on this podcast okay because I just get so passionate about this stuff uh and the reason I get so passionate about it is because it's so important in healing and we as Physicians could do so much more for people if we understood these scientific facts but we don't as a profession anyway there was a d there's a British um thoric surgeon called David kissen in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice that um people emotionally repressed are more likely to get lung cancer now it's true that most people who get lung cancers are smokers but out of 100 smokers only about 10 or 15 gets lung cancer which doesn't mean that lung smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer it is but he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking and the more repressed they were the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer this is this guy noticed this in the 1960s so emotional repression has huge implications physiologically and emotional repression is one of the uh impacts of childhood trauma why the child is born with some fundamental needs one of them as I've articulated earlier is for attachment for closeness proximity unconditional loving acceptance by um caring adults not just the human child all Myan children have that need without that they don't survive so that that's called attachment seeking of closeness and proximity for the purpose of being taken care of or to take care of the other and our brains are wired for attachment we have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships and that's so important all through our lives but especially when we're infants and young children now but we have another need we've already talked about it I just haven't named it the other need is for authenticity which is to be ourselves connected to our bodies and our gut feelings because again without access to our gut feelings we don't survive out there in nature where we evolved and where we lived until 15,000 years ago you and so that authenticity is very important to be connected to yourself so that you know when you're safe and when you're not uh you know what you want and what you don't want you know how to say no when you don't want something you know how to say yes when you do that's authenticity Auto the self being ourselves and to go back to Harry his challenge all his life was that he wasn't allowed to be authentic he had to play a certain role and fit into a certain set of expectations of how to be and who to be and he could never figure out who am I really you know in that context but that's so General so many of us face that challenge of who are we really who are we authentically as opposed to what's expected of us now so we have these two needs attachment on the one hand authenticity in the other ideally the two are not in Conflict ideally you can be in a relationship or I can be in a relationship where we can be ourselves and be accepted and connected with and that's ideal all our lives but what happens to a young child where if they're authentic they're not accepted so for example um certain psychologists recommend that angry children should be uh punished for their anger rather than their anger being understood as to what it's all about and the child being taught different ways to express it they just to be punished for it and by different ways by the way if you're a parent over two-year-old and if you don't frustrate your child you're probably not doing a good job cuz your 2-year-old may want a cookie before dinner and you say no cookie before dinner I want a cookie you know in a minute they're thrwing a tantrum cuz what do even adults do when they're frustrated they throw Tantrums children that's just what they do they have no self-regulation yet so the 2-year-old gets upset now you punish them you give them a message you're not acceptable to me when you're anger when you're angry you have to be a certain way for me to accept you or you mustn't be sad cheer up what's you know what's wrong with you you you know so when children are given this message of conditionality that you're acceptable to me only if you behave in ways that I approve of otherwise the attachment relationship is threatened then the child is faced with this Choice which is not a choice at all do I stay attached to my parents if my par if my father's an alcoholic and uh the only way I can find acceptance is by repressing my emotions and not show my sadness and my fear then do I show my sadness and my fear or my anger or do I threaten the relationship well there's no choice at all the child will choose the attachment and therefore they give up connection to themselves which is the essence of trauma that disconnection from ourselves not in my own words in the words of other trauma theorists um who I agree with the worst aspect of trauma is the disconnection from ourselves and we do that for the sake of making maintaining attachments which means for the rest of our lives we'll be afraid to be ourselves is this what they call people pleases people exactly so um cherl Crow the American singer musician um developed breast cancer and she said that since my breast cancer I've been a different person until then I was was always trying to please others and now and there was used to be voices in my head that always telling me that I was wrong I don't listen to them anymore you know so that uh people Pleasers are the ones who gave up not by conscious choice but as a matter of survival their authenticity in order to stay liked and accepted and attached to it but then they carry that on in the rest of their lives and they're at risk I always wor for the very nice people I think this is fascinating I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so I have a favor to ask you if you've ever watched this Channel and enjoyed the content if you're enjoying this episode right now please could I ask a small favor please hit the Subscribe button helps this channel more than I can explain and I promise if you do that to return the favor we will make the show better and better and better and better and better that's the promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the Subscribe button do we have a deal you always worry for the very nice people yeah you talk a lot about that in when the body says no yeah why is being nice a potential risk to one's Health well there's two there's two places to be very nice from one is just genuine human compassion and concern for others but you're still grer than yourself that's great but a lot of people are very nice because they afraid not to be because they weren't liked who they were they weren't love for who they were being nice was their way of getting the love and the attention they needed let me tell you a story in the uh in 1870 there was a French neurologist called Jean martan shco who was the first one to describe multiple sclerosis which is an inflammation of the nervous system very debilitating and Sho said in 1870 without any scientific research Arch but just from his own observation that this was a stress-driven disease okay now since then there's been a lot of research to show how stress and Trauma potentiate multiple sclerosis uh it's not even controversial not that any neurologist knows that they don't get taught this stuff in medical school but the research is there and I present it in in my books in any case when I was writing when the body says no a group of a self-help group of multiple scos patients phoned me and said would you come and talk to us cuz we understand you're working on stress and and illness and I said yeah sure I'll come and talk to you and there's about 25 people in the group this in Vancouver Canada and I gave them very tentatively apologetically apologetically I said look I don't know this for sure but the sense I get from my work in family practice and paliative Care is that the people that Des develop your condition and other conditions tend to be people be Pleasers that they that they tend to have difficulty saying no they tend to be very nice people and I I said you know I'm sorry if I've offended you I don't mean to I'm just giving you something very tentative I haven't done a research yet I'm just giving you my observations they said you just described us and they all said that and there's a woman who says in the group who says I don't even know how to say no I said terrific give me $100 right now she says well I don't I don't I don't have $100 with me right now I said it's not a problem I said outside the outside this building there's an ATM machine we can go on after the meeting we can go out you can get $100 and give it to me she says uh I'm not comfortable doing that I said listen I'm just trying to get you to say no to a ridiculous Demand by A Perfect Stranger To whom you you owe nothing whatsoever she said I can't say the word because in childhood now by the way when you have kids you're going to find out what the word no means because age one and a half all kids start saying no they say that long before they say yes why because that know is their boundary defense of I'll figure out who I am I'm not going to exceed to your demands I need to figure out what I want put your shoes on no and the parent think this is something wrong there's nothing wrong it's nature individuating the when families punish that the child will be repressed to no and the body will say in the form of multiple sclerosis for example Ness ALS amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or known in Britain as Mor neuron disease um Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with that at age 21 he was told he'd be dead within 10 2 years he lived another 55 years doctors don't know everything you know um but there's been studies on ALS patients they're extraordinarily nice so um there was a from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio a major referral Clinic two neurologists published a paper at an international ALS or motor neuron Congress why are ALS patients so nice and what they describe was that when people came to their office for diagnosis before they met the physician they had underwent edx Electro diagnostic testing of the nerves and the technicians who perform the test would write on the side of the test this person can't have ALS she's not nice enough or I'm afraid this person has ALS they're too nice and the Physicians the neurologist Specialists said despite the shortness of their contact with their patients and the obviously unscientific nature of their observations invariably they turned out to be right and then I called Dr Wilburn who did this study and I said what did the other what did the other neurologist say when you presented this they said all said yeah we all noticed this we just can't explain it since then there's been a study where they've asked neurologists about their patients and the answer is all our alist patients are extraordinar nice now what the neurologists don't do is they don't make the connection that that re that that that that niess is a repression of healthy anger and that repression of healthy anger plays a role in the onset of that disease so it's not a accidental connection so why do I ever about very nice people CU they're putting themselves at risk again niceness can come from genuine concern for others but that's not accompanied by an ignoring of yourself you also care for yourself then you can be as nice as you want but you also know how to say no and you also know how to set boundaries you know how to and you know how to be angry if you need to be but the niceness that comes from self- repression that's the one that hurts there's clearly going to be a lot of very nice people hearing that now that know they're nice that know their people pleases that know they've experienced in their lives the consequences of putting everyone else before themsel yeah I can it's funny as you were talking I was thinking about the person that I know who I think is nicest yeah and that individual is sick all the time yeah and I just connected that dot in my head that I remember making a joke to her about oh you're sick so like whatever you're sick a lot and then also thinking oh my God she is probably the nicest nice is an interesting word because that can be misconstrued as like ha well like you know saying nice things to someone else but it's really at a deeper level from what I've observed in that person putting everyone else before them or chronically serving other people's needs before their own well so my contention is as I said earlier when people don't know how to say no the body will say no for them in the form of illness and and for a lot of people with serious illness the illness is the wakeup call yeah and they actually learn and when they do that can make a difference to the course of their illness sometimes not always but I've seen examples of remarkable healing when people learn to say no and stop being people Pleasers and I just only wish that Physicians understood this so when somebody comes to them with chronic eczema and all these other chronic conditions they will not just provide the physical treatment but they will also talk to the person about how much stress do they taking on it's very stressful to take on everybody else's issues and ignore on your own it's very stressful that stress is a physiological impact on the body how does someone who is a people pleaser how do they turn that ship around because it's they'll hear that but because their niess or their people pleasing is so deep within them and it's started so early they're not going to they're not going to change most of them won't change well they may change if they get sick you know and if they learn something from it I've had a lot of people tell me that um but it is happens very early uh but it's everybody's second nature not their first nature that's it's a very interesting phrase second nature it means that a first nature now no baby is born as a people pleaser no baby lies there no one day old baby lies they're thinking gosh um I'm hungry and wet and and and and lonely but gosh Mom and Dad have been worked so hard I better not bother them you know babies will Express their needs very valuably and very articulately and very loudly that's how we're born we're meant to be born that way so that this suppression of that is our second nature and that first nature never goes away we can always retrieve it but you have become conscious of of it so and when the body says no I lay out certain principles of healing um in the myth of normal I actually teach this exercise ask yourself this question where in your life are you not saying no where where no wants to be said but you're not saying it like let me ask give me give you an example let's say I come to London and and and we're friends and I call you up a Stephen here I am de enough coffee um but you've been up all night helping a sick friend or otherwise you're just too stressed to want to meet me right now your desire is to say no but what if you suppress that no and you say yes for the fear of displeasing me or disappointing me or losing my friendship if I say no gabo won't like me anymore what's going to be the impact on you if you keep behaving that way physically what's going to the impact I'm going to be I'm going to be more time more exhausted probably going to be more stressed all that yeah you can be disconnected from yeah exactly you know so so it's not this so this person they need to I teach this exercise in the book about where am I not saying no and what is my belief behind saying not saying no I don't upset gabo if he's coming exactly and and and I and I depend on gabor's liking yes you know uh which means as a child you depend on your parents liking and you had to suppress your nose to be liked thirdly where did I learn this belief that if I say no I'm not likable or I'm guilty or I'm not worthwhile you know and the fourth question is um who would I be without that belief you know um and so if your friend does this exercise regularly believe me she can turn it around but it takes some practice who would I be without that belief yeah when I put myself in hushes or I put myself in a people Pleasers shoes I wouldn't I'm a people pleaser in in certain environments but I wouldn't say I am generally yeah um I can imagine someone would respond to that and say well I'd lose all my friends she'd find out who her friends really were because the real friends would celebrate they'd say oh finally we're so glad to see you being yourself the friends that were just using her or weying on her to be their supporter um unconditionally uh will turn away and I say this to people this contest between attachment and authenticity can be a painful one but you can decide which kind of pain you want as a child you have no choice as an adult it's true if you're authentic you might lose some attachment relationships that's going to be painful but which pain would you rather have the pain of being authentic and losing some friendships that were no friendships at all or the pain of of of of losing yourself self and all this implications and all its impacts on the body so um it it would be difficult for her and true some relationships that she has now that would fade away but my God she would also attract much more genuine and authentic relationships and her true friends would really celebrate her you know now let me tell you something that just occurred to me forget it there was a um book written by an Australian nurse about 12 years ago and she this nurse like I used to work in paliative care with dying people she works with in hospice with dying people and these are people who tend to die of of malignancy and chronic illness well before their time and she wrote a book called The the top five regrets of dying people for you why and uh you know what the top regret was that I wasn't being myself that I wasn't true to myself I wasn't being authentic that's a top reget of dying people and and the um the third one was that I didn't express my feelings for fear of disturbing or or displeasing others so authenticity is not just a new age concept it's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings oh one more thing so yesterday I was in Westminster Abby and I was looking at all these beautifully articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and despoiled native people all over the world they're the heroes of the British Empire and I think one of the reasons there's such a strong push back against the idea of trauma in this Society is if you recognize trauma which exists not only on the personal individual level but very much on the collective level the ruling Elites in this country would have to come to turns with the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of forign peoples which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry is that he pointed that out that that that let's face it the royalty the wealth that I was born into was achieved at the Des spoilation and oppression of people around the world so trauma is not just a personal issue it's very much a social and Collective and historical issue what's the cure you know CU if we're if we're many of us are byproducts of generational trauma and we're seeking different ways to ease our pain through through the means of addiction whether it's pornography or heroin or alcohol um we can't all afford expensive therapists but we exhibit those self-destructive Behavior patterns maybe every single day maybe with social media addictions or whatever yeah what do we do unfortunately uh the Health Care Systems around the world um have very poor appreciation of the emotional contribution to people's physical or mental ill health and most Physicians and most psychiatrists are not trained in it unfortunately there's a huge um gap between science and research on the one hand and Medical Practice on the other it's maddening sometimes to contemplate it um so the first step would be to educate the the caregivers just educate doctors about the actual science of the Mind Body Connection and the impacts of trauma educate them so when you go to a physician with um say chronic fatigue or um inflammation of your joints they don't just give you the necessary medication which I'm not against but they also ask you what's going on you know so that's the first thing thing second thing is let's prevent the problem so let's support young families to be really there for their kids so that families don't have to struggle economically and their parents are so stressed um as I may have mentioned I forgotten now when parents are emotionally stressed economically stressed according to a number of studies the kids stress horal levels are [Music] abnormal and that is a Harbinger or future disease and so let's look after young families let's make people feel secure uncertainty lack of control uh lack of information these are some of the drivers of physiological stress so let's create a society where there's a more sense of mutual acceptance and communality and and and social support you know let teachers be educated that the kids who are so-called misbehaving or kids who are actually troubled troubled because of stuff at home and that the solution is not to exclude them or to punish them but to actually give them emotional support in the classroom and in the schools let the schools be the human brain I'm quoting a Harvard study develops um from before birth it's a ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood the necessary conditions for human brain development is safe uh supportive emotional relationship with adults let everybody who deals with children from social workers to teachers to daycare workers to kindergarten um supervisors to to parents understand the emotional needs of kids and and provide that safety uh let the justice system so-called about which there's very little just um uh in Canada 50% of the women in jail are indigenous they make up 6% of the population 50% of the jail population you call that Justice you take the most traumatized people who then act out their traumas and then you punish them for it so let the medical system let the educational system let the legal system understand Child Development and Trauma now in terms of the adult to answer your question more specifically so there's a social answer mhm but then there the individual answer yeah a lot of people can't afford good therapy it's true it's expensive and and and even there's a lot of people who are get therapy but not getting appropriate therapy well if you can't afford therapy go to the library read some books my own but not just my own I could rattle have five other books you should read read dick schwarz's uh book on internal family systems called no bad parts read Bessel Vander CO's book on trauma called the body keep score read Peter lavine's book waking the Tiger on trauma read Oprah Winfrey's and BR Perry book what happened to you read boo prayers book uh called uh the boy who was raised as a dog um I'm interviewing pet Laine oh you have oh good oh good wonderful I'm glad to hear that he's one of my mentors and friends and we often work together uh so there and and and all of these books will have some advice about how to help yourself including my books then there's a lot of stuff on internet so this uh the interview that you and I had a year ago I checked this morning has been seen by two and a half million people I'm sure it's helped a lot of people is a lot that you can get just you know freely nobody's going to get charged you know on the YouTube um lots of my talks are available lots of Talks by other really good people are available do that there are self-help groups of all kinds um is there a risk here this is what the the one side of the narrative sometimes argue that you can kind of over traumatize your life in terms of over overlab everything that you do as a trauma so you know and I mean that that always happens right when when people become aware of something they become over aware and they start overlab and saying that's a trauma response that's a trauma response that's a trauma response and they kind of live with a feeling that they are inherently broken yeah but my point is that nobody's broken um actually I talked about our first nature that's always there when people recover it's an interesting word recovery what does it mean to recover when you recover something what are you doing going back to you're finding it oh yeah I'm true yeah that's the definition of the word isn't it what do people find when they recover they find their true selves that's what they'll tell you that two yourself never went away nobody's damaged goods nobody's broken to talk about trauma is not to disempower people but to empower them if I learn that my response to the British media and the hairy issue was actually it's nothing to do with the present moment it's actually some old programming oh okay now I can drop it are you glad it happened I'm glad that everything happened cuz everything is learning nothing in this this life is wasted if you know how to use it properly and um so what I'm saying is that to to to be aware of trauma is not to lose power but to gain it because it's not an excuse I can't keep going to my wife and saying I'm being resentful of you and and punishing you because my mother didn't take good care of me when I was a baby because she was too stressed you know I mean that that that's lack of responsibility but for me to understand that my demands on my wife to take care of me me like a motherhood of a baby actually is my trauma response then I can drop it cuz I'm not a baby anymore I don't need I'm not that helpless I'm not that resourceless um I'm not that um ungrounded so that when you recognize trauma it's not in order to use it as an excuse but to actually to overcome it that's the whole point when we talked about the suppression of our emotions and anger you use the word healthy anger yeah when you you know cuz there's a there's a risk isn't there when you're saying that anger can be a positive thing that people will then assume that berating someone behind a counter or a waitress in a restaurant because they got one item on your order wrong is standing up for your boundaries I've done it no it's not so healthy anger is in a moment and it's just the boundary defense it's not outrage it's you're in my space get out that's its purpose that's its only purpose or to protect something like a um you want to see anger um try and tell a mother bear not to uh be close to their ba to their cubs you know you'll find out what healthy mother anger is all about you know that's just healthy the kind of Rage you're talking about have you ever had that kind of Rage definitely on a spectrum I've got I've got so the reason I struggle with the answer is because I've got a friend that's fully shown me what the that's the extreme side of that is where we used to call it the Red Mist with him where he would literally lose control which is incidentally what ha used to call his anger oh really yeah yeah yeah my friend so my friend um my friend one of my best friends in the world he talks about this all the time is he had you could trigger him by saying something usually by saying he was wrong about something yeah or something like that and then he would just lose it so I remember the first the last time it happened was when the pandemic rolled in I was staying with him uh in his apartment because the lockdown and I was living in America at the time and we were discussing the virus and I said to him um I think people that are older and that have certain Health um situations are more at risk and he said to me no people that are younger are more at risk and I said and I showed it an NHS um website which said no it's people that were older at more at risk yeah and he just went into this Red Mist okay where he was totally triggered and lost control of his emotions okay so if you observed them then what you would have noticed is remember what I said about healthy anger it's in the present moment once it's done his job it's gone yeah your friend the anger he gets the anger he gets yeah so the the rage just keeps building on itself now we talk about a fit of anger it's a good word you know where else we talk about fits is epileptic fits in epileptic fits certain electrical miswiring in the brain then recruits other brain circuits and it gets more and more and more until hold the whole body shaking and the person may even lose Consciousness and soil themselves and so on that's an epileptic fit a fit of anger is the same that that a fit of rage is the same so that the more severe it gets the more brain circuits it recruits so rather than expending itself doing its job and then being gone it actually gets worse and worse and worse that's unhealthy anger and triggering is a good word because look at what the word triggering means now if you look at a weapon how big a part of the weapon is the trigger this big for the trigger to set off anything there has to be ammunition there there has to be um explosive material there so your friend is carrying a lot of explosive material I can tell you your friend never felt understood or validated as a child and he's still carrying the Rage of that so you trigger him and then by disagreeing with him and all the pain of invalidation and All the Rage of not being understood now gets triggered and recruits more and More's brain circuit now I can tell you something healthy anger is essential for our physical Integrity that rage in the Abode in the in the aftermath of a rage episode your risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles for for the next two hours according to studies because what happens your blood pressure goes up your blood vessels narrow and the clotting factors in your blood increase so of course you're at more risk so the repression of anger can lead to chronic illness but so can rage lead to uh heart attacks and uh and strokes and so on so anger is a delicate thing should I tell you something about my friend that we found out because he then went to a childhood psychologist oh good understand himself and that's why I said that was the last time so you can imagine that was three years ago the pandemic two three years ago he went to a childhood psychologist and what they uncovered through their work was that as a kid he he was not only um a foot shorter than all the other kids yeah but he was both dyslexic and struggled a lot intellectually so um the people around him and on his report card basically called him stupid as a child and then he actually found a I think he found a text message at some point between his mom and his Nan where they were diminishing his chances of success and he grew up with this deep sense of like I am not intelligent a deep deep sense of it and it's come out in all of these ways as an adult and that you're right that's what was coming out in that moment I was challenging I was taking him back probably well and you know what again to come back to Harry that's what happened to him they called him stupid and thickle and naughty and he was none of none of those things he just had trouble of concentrating and paying attention because of all the stress my friend has ADHD as well yeah yeah and and so in his book he describes that he''s been told he had post-traumatic stress I didn't diagnose him with all this stuff it's in this book I said you know what but I think given the how you you were distracted as a kid you trouble paying attention um they called you stupid this is ADD and um I wasn't saying he's got a disease I was saying you actually that was a normal response that you had to an abnormal situation where you under a lot of stress and they made you wrong for it they call you naughty they call you stupid they called you thicko you're not any of that now the whole bunch of British psychiatrists got their knickers tied in a knot CU I made that diagnosis you know um my God people I was saying to the guy you don't have a disease you have a normal response to have no circumstances you were not stupid ever but but children and undergo this character assassination like you offended and imagine the rage inside him so when when you disagree with him you're triggering all that it's just that's just how it works now interestingly enough people calls me stupid that's not a trigger for me yeah it's not for me because I know I'm not you know I I always grew up with a sense of my own intelligence not to overstate it but I know never had any doubt about it but certain things you can do yeah like not see me and that'll trigger me and for context for anybody that doesn't know why you not being seen triggers you well look I was born you know may have mentioned this last year so I was born two months before the Nazis occupied Budapest then they started Exterminating all the Hungarian Jews so literally my life was under threat because they didn't see me as a human being they saw me as Vermin you know now not that I knew that directly but my mother can you imagine what it was like for her to have a two-month-old and living under the risk of death all the time for a whole year and then as I mentioned before she gave me to a stranger to save my life and I didn't see her for five weeks well that's not being seen and my father's not there to see me cuz he's in forc labor so literally not being seen threatened my life so no wonder when people uh when that happens now you know that for me is the trigger no the of course the answer is is to see myself if I fully see myself it doesn't matter whether you see me or not you know so if you see me if you're not seeing me if you're distorting who I am in your mind and in your words bothers me it's only because I'm still on you uh at other people to see me because I don't know how to see myself if I'm fully confident in myself I say gee it's too bad you know uh Stephen doesn't see me well maybe could talk it talk about it or maybe he'll never understand it but I don't live in his mind how do I fully see myself it's hard to do right it's it's it's hard to do because when you were seen it's not hard to do because you children see themselves through their parents' eyes yeah but when you were not seen then you have to learn it this is one of the things to go back to meditation that's not the only way first of all notice all the ways that you're not seeing yourself like two days ago when I had this anxiety about how I may I didn't give my best talk on Monday evening you know what I did my best may not have been perfect but I prepared for it I put myself out there for two hours and um I spoke a lot of Truth might have been the best but so what but but but at that moment I wasn't seeing myself you know I can still lose it so meditation which is really the form of meditation that at least I am learning is about just noticing and seeing what's going on inside without judgment so being aware so it's practice and do you also suggest removing the things from your life that will stop you from seeing yourself like social media well because that can be a lot of I can't remove social media from my life but what I can remove is my attachment to it for example I don't have to look at the comments on all my Talks on YouTube who says what who likes it who doesn't like it you know I'm not on Facebook I don't have a I have a professional Facebook page but I don't administer it um but people go on Facebook and who says what who likes me who doesn't like me you know they can wean themselves off that so we may not be able to stay off social media um to write my books thank God for the internet but I don't have to be attached to it so it's it's it's it's using it but not letting it use you which is very hard a new podcast sponsor that I'm super excited to talk about with all of you is LinkedIn jobs hiring as I would know is one of the most important steps in your business without good people there is no company trust me I found out along the way that your business is nothing without good people you want to be 100% certain though that you have access to the best candidates available and that's why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs LinkedIn jobs helps you to find the right people for your team faster and for free so when I'm expanding my team LinkedIn is my first Port of Call I'd highly recommend it on LinkedIn jobs posting a job is super easy and you can add a purple hash hiring frame around your LinkedIn profile to spread the word LinkedIn jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster post your job for free at linkedin.com doac that's linkedin.com doac to post your job for free terms and conditions apply as you may know this podcast is sponsored by hu if you're living under a rock you might have missed that I discovered hu's RTD about four years ago hueles RTD is basically a meal in a bottle it is nutritionally complete it contains 26 of your essential vitamins and minerals it's got your protein in there 20 gram of prot protein it's got slow relase energy in there in the form of those slow relase carbs it's just nutritionally complete not only have I got a good relationship with it in terms of health but it saves my life in terms of those busy days where there's a higher probability of me reaching for something I might regret if you haven't tried heels RTD you could probably seen it in a couple of supermarkets but you can order it online and the link is in the description below let me know which flavor is your favorite and also tell me if it ends up adding value to your life in the form of making you nutritionally complete on those difficult days the other so social media and all of these things these stimuli they I feel like they've I'm concerned that many of us are living in a state of chronic stress mild background stress yeah and I say that a lot because the amount of times that I catch myself I spoke to James Nester who talks a lot about breathing in breath um and the amount of times that I now catch myself very shallow in breath after just looking at my my phone or thinking about something yeah get my SK SM back into me in bed at 1:00 a.m. as I'm trying to sleep Catch My Breath being shallow during this podcast when I start thinking about something my breath gets really shallow looking at my phone my breath gets really shallow I live in this I feel like I'm living in this state of like constant subtle background stress yeah well I'm I'm glad you mentioned breath because um it's one of the to go back to the question of what people can do for themselves they can learn to breathe and eart to was a spiritual teacher um he said says that um rather than go to Retreats and therapists just take a few conscious breaths several times a day if I mean not that not to dismiss the other but that's more important than anything else and interestingly enough the Buddha when he was teaching his monks in fact one of the Buddha's assistants Ananda asked him um oh holy one do you still meditate and he said yes and what kind of meditation do you practice says and and uh Buddha says observing the breath so in Buddhist Meditation I'm not here to advocate for any particular pathway and I'm not a practitioner of any religion but hey this this this is very wise man um he thought awareness of breath is the most important portal into into reality what do you think the the antidote is for the way we've designed Our Lives to be con Conant in this sort of stressful stimulation and cuz we're clearly I was just wondering if human beings are supposed to enjoy this much constant stimulus and stress in their lives and with you know chronic inflammation and all these kinds of things are now killing people at alarming rates that the you know the the diseases that are caused by inflammation what can we do about our stress and is is it okay maybe it's okay well um it's the norm so you can say it's normal is it okay well the the question question is to be answered by looking at what the impacts are and what are the impacts you know the impacts are very serious for um you can see it on the individual level in terms of mental health conditions as I said earlier are burgeoning internationally um a imun conditions are uh but if you look at on also on the social level there's more conflict there's more um division there's more uh intolerance in our culture than it has been for quite a while these are the impacts of the stressful culture that we live in so is it okay yeah if you want if you want this it's okay but if you don't it's not okay it depends what you want relationships yeah romantic relationships yeah um thought a lot about the role that our trauma plays in our ability to form relationships obviously society's changed quite profoundly in the last couple of decades different sort of gender transformation have caused certain mismatches and difficulties with people connecting the world has gone very digital now so dating apps run run a lot of dating I think 50% of people originally meet online that's their first point of contact dating is very very hard for people and there's a lot of people that are kind of giving up on it um attachment dating trauma um I've come to learn that we are mirrors I think I found love in my life when not when I discovered anything externally but when I did a lot of work to figure out the the barriers that were standing in my way of connection well you just answered your own question oh really yeah we can't form proper relationships until we have the capacity to be alone and be comfortable with ourselves you know and the more comfortable you can be alone which is different from being lonely by the way um the more capacity to be at you to be to be allow to be with yourself and to gr yourself in your own truth the more likely able to form meaningful and positive relationships and rather than asking the a lot of people run into relationships to solve their problems then there's the initial in love phase where everything is just ideal you know and then reality hits and then all of a sudden that person who you're so infatuated with becomes your enemy and you hate them so much you know I mean I've experienced such hatred for my wife over the years and uh when I've been disappointed or dissatisfied you know because I was looking to her to fill me with and nobody can fill you from the outside so so once you no longer need it um once you no longer are dependent on it then you can enter into a healthy relationship or to put it more positively a relationship can be a real ground for Mutual growth both so you can enter into a relationship you're not going to be perfect you're never going to be perfect um Carry certain degree of trauma certain degree of dysfunction certain things that trigger you as we said earlier but you but if both people are committed to the truth which my wife Ray and I have been I mean that's one thing you can say about ourselves you know for all the stuff that we've been through ultimately the truth mattered more than who's right and who's wrong so if you're committed to the truth and working it out and if the fundamental love is there then you can grow together and so for me the relationship has been the most important growth growing ground of my life not the therapy that I've had or the reading that I've done uh not that I'm dismissing any of that but the actual relationship has been my um most important schooling in in in in how to become authentic there's no real chance of a good relationship if one or more parties in that relationship aren't committed to truth and they're committed to being right or to Victory or it happens all the time as I said earlier people always meet at the same level of of of of um emotional development or trauma resolution so that water finding its own level but when one person starts growing and the other doesn't it becomes impossible either the person that does the growing gives it up and goes back to their previous selves which is almost impossible or the other person is challenged to start growing themselves or they're going to split that that's just what's going to happen and again to go back to the situation between men and women this is what tends to happen and I've seen it in my own marriage I've seen it in as a physician as an observer of human beings the couple are kind of getting along but then the children come along now the mother's caring energy has to go towards the children where it needs to go the father may feel now a bit of a their NOS is a bit out of joint cuz now they're not getting the attention and now the woman has a decision to make do I look after the 3-day old baby or the three-month old baby or do I look after the 35y old baby and to the extent that the mother chooses to look after the 35y old baby she's depriving the 3-month-old a lot L of women then make a choice that I need to look after my kids and I can't put all this caring energy mothering caring energy into my husband anymore and then relationships get into trouble because the guys can't stand it I've seen this over and over and over I'm not saying it's Universal but it's very common sex in your practice I imagine you've come across this quite quite often where there's a sexless relationship and that's causing issues what is typically the true cause of that um that disconnect in the in the with intimacy with sex in the bedroom because a lot of people are struggling with that yeah well first of all I think um today we jump into sexuality way too early in other words um we talk about intimacy but intimacy really means the innermost and we tend to have physical intimacy before we have emotional intimacy so that um people jump to bed rather quickly I'm not being PR I'm not being prudish here I'm not prescribing that you should only get have sex when you get married or anything like that but when we enter into sexuality early without the emotional intimacy and emotional authenticity then the sex become divorc becomes divorced from our uh our real needs and especially for women who tend to I can't speak of everybody but in general women tend want to have more intimacy emotionally um that becomes very hard and if the emotional intimacy doesn't follow sex becomes rather mechanical becomes mechanical yeah um so that's one big reason the other reason we already talked about this sort of parenting dynamic between the genders yeah uh no I know we're only talking about the two major genders now there's all kinds of gender variations these days and uh but these Dynamics exist in all kinds of contexts so that when my partner is doing all the emotional caring or most of the emotional caring this is parent child relationship that really deadens the sexual drive you know Marissa Pier sorry Marissa Pier she's a a psychologist she actually said to me the other day never call your partner mommy or daddy yeah for this very reason yeah well oh good that's that's a good way to put it I I think it's because we um we put sexuality um in this Society of course just glorify sexuality you know and if you look at some of the most famous sex symbols who were they um Abused Women you like a Marilyn Monroe deeply traumatized child and abused as an adult by President Kennedy and just about everybody and she was the the woman every want to sleep with you know so that this really distorted sexuality here here and for women especially uh safety is so important for sexuality yeah um we talk about frigid women um but when do people freeze it's a fear response it's nobody's true nature it's just a response and usually something happened to them or something is happening now so that that unmelting can happen in a condition of safety and then the intimacy the emotional intimacy is there which creates the safety for the sexual opening and that's the dynamic in my marriage as well you know uh you know what my wife what my wife says she says truth is sexy such a good point yeah is there anything in your practice that you're increasingly being confronted with in the last couple of years that you weren't seeing as much as when you first started what I see out there is increasing distress in this society and and people are more confused and young people are just so challenged and uh in the United States the the rate of childhood suicide is going up you know uh suicide you know um more and more kids are being medicated for all kinds of conditions um in the US 70% of the adult population is at least on one medication um um quarter of women at least in the US or on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications those numbers are growing Europe in Britain as well from all the statistic that I see so I see is a a growing um manifestations of of of distress what I call a toxic culture I see that all the time and look uh I mean the fact that this book The Mython normal is being published in North Macedonia and Thailand in Vietnam and in northern Europe and in Eastern Europe and it just worldwide there's this epidemic of distress that's what I'm seeing and I'm saying saying people either we can look upon this as some unexplainable Misfortune and bad luck or we can actually look for the actual causes of it in the way that relate to each other in a way that we raise our children in a way that we approach ourselves and I'm saying that Solutions are possible but yeah the world is getting more and more difficult for a lot of people I do see that and I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon you're not optimistic so n Chomsky once said that uh when he was asked if he's optimistic or pessimistic he says uh he says strategically I'm an optimist and tactically I'm a pessimist which means that in the long term I do believe in people I mean and I understand the same way I do believe in human beings I do believe in the human capacity to to grow to transform to to come to a deeper grounded sanity in themselves both on individual and a social level I do believe in that that if I didn't believe that I would just stay at home and read books and listen to music um I do believe in that I'm optimistic in that sense but at the same time I think in the short term it's getting darker and darker and you can see that Sony manifestations of that so yeah I am optimistic I believe in humanity and human beings and I think we have a hard road to to travel before we get to our better sense of self and I have to close this conversation by seeking some solutions you use the word Solutions there and you talked about this better sense of self on we've talked about this from a social level what governments can do to change education systems and on an individual level on a family level what can what can I do well um first of all you you need to Define what your actual goals are okay so let me try I want to be I want to do work that serves others I want to do work that I um I find fulfilling and that keeps me challenged yeah and I want to which incidentally serves your health because it's been shown that people that live a life of purpose and meaning they're physiologically healthier I want to be healthy because I want to do all of these things for longer yeah um I want to have relationships that are full and true and raw and honest okay um and I want to I think that's it that's the work in personal and then I want to raise a family that is beautiful and pure and free of as much trauma as I can possibly make them be and I want to be close to my children in a way that I wasn't close to my parents yeah well then the question you're going to you have to ask yourself is um what factors in your life support those goals and what don't what activities are you engaged in that will support those aims what will undermine them and uh seek to diminish or eliminate the ones that are undermining your goals and uh and and strengthen the ones that are supporting it you know that's what it is and um you know and your intentions by the way are not only superficially the ones you articulate if I want to know your real intentions I have to look at how you live your life not what you say about it so when I was a young parent if you had asked me what is your goal what's your intention I would have said it's the happiness of my children and I would have said that totally sincerely if you have looked at how I live my life as a workolic doctor not available to my kids always out there looking for being important and serving others and and and and and you know being at the center Center of people's lives because I was so essential to them my actual intention was self-importance my stated intention the the the happiness of my children as much as I would have meant it sincerely did not jve with how I was living my life so what you need to ask yourself is what anybody needs to ask themselves is look at your intentions both the conscious ones and also the ones show up when you look at how you actually live your life and bring the two into alignment so look at again what serves your intentions and what undermines it and look at that seriously that would be my answer it's so difficult to distinguish between the two sometimes because I mean on the surface the the the system you gave there are actually looking at how I'm allocating my time and is my time being allocated towards things that would further what I'm saying my intent are it's a very useful exercise to run but you know as I said those things that I said as my stated goals I do find a disconnect I think I think those things have been handed to us when we when you ask them when they're goals they will say things that will make the person asking the question think well of them because there's one goal that you didn't state which is I stayed away from the selfish goals no what's what what's the one I didn't say inner peace because without inner peace you're not going to be able to serve any of those goals properly or if you were you do it at some risk to yourself and so um how would that be for you as a goal inner peace and then if running around serving others in the name of this so-called higher goal undermines you ear a peace then you're not on the right track and you know I'm talking to I'm talking to myself MH talking to me as well yeah yeah yeah inner peace is not a selfish goal uh it's from position of safety sorry a position of inner peace that we can speak compassionately and truthfully to others that we can um serve our other goals but you know echar toally talks about our inner purpose and our external purpose and you stated a bunch of external purposes and that's why there's the dis I believe if I the diagnosis but or the analysis but but that's why that disconnect that you mentioned cuz the goals that you stated were largely external mhm and what are the internal goals in a pieace very good yeah now you have to put that into the mix and once once you do I don't believe that now nobody handed that to you I just I think this is the issue with Workaholics is we think that the path to Inner Peace is just by aiming at the external goals like I think I think maybe at some level that's what I believe Workaholics think they can work their way or validate external validate or trophy their way or number one book their way too in a piece because temporarily when your book shows up as number one on the bestsellers list or shows up at all you feel some inner peace but it's addictive and uh there's a wonderful physician and researcher Vince fiti um who studied childood trauma quite a bit and um showing its relationship to adult negative outcomes and he said it's hard to get enough of something that almost works and uh so yeah you can get that temporary inner peace but look at the long-term consequences of the work holism it's not inner peace I can tell you that you know I can tell you after a long experience doesn't matter even how successful you are there we started to conversation with this it's never going to give you inner peace inner peace doesn't come from the outside that's not a goal anybody have handed to you that's something that you have to come to yourself you know this how are you acting in line with what you know are you are you doing it well you know what um I'm not going to give myself 100% by any means I mean just look at this week but I'm doing so much better than I ever did and I'm so much more comfortable about it and so much more comfortable about the future as well you know I am what is the uh one thing that we didn't discuss that maybe is the most important thing for my audience that are listening right now that not that we should impose suffering on any children or anybody in order to teach them anything life will bring its own suffering but when suffering comes along there's two things we can do with it um we can try and just get rid of it not to feel it to numb ourselves or we can actually learn from it so suffering and pain can be big teachers if we know how to relate to them so when illness comes along when a crisis comes along in your life you might notice that the Chinese word for for crisis is made up of two character letters meaning uh danger and opportunity really so when there's a crisis there's danger but there's also opportunity to learn and to grow and um there's such a thing as growing older in other words not just getting older but actually growing older and actually still keep growing as you get older and that growing older actually has to do with becoming more and more authentic to yourself so sometimes I do that successfully sometimes I don't but that's really the journey and I'd recommend that journey to everybody you can actually grow older in in other words you don't have to shrink you can actually grow when you said the word growth there it reminded me of something you said in a topic we haven't actually talked about which I did want to speak to you about which was vulnerability yeah I remember you making this interesting connection I saw it somewhere online between vulnerability and and growth yeah and vulnerability is a risk for a lot of people it's always felt like a risk for me so vulnerability comes from the Latin word vulnerary to wound to wound yeah that's vulnerary to wound and so as human beings or is any living creature we're all profoundly vulnerable from the moment that we're conceived to the moment we die we can be wounded we can be wounded physically we can wounded emotionally that's just a given um when children are safe and seen and understood they can accept their vulnerability because they have the confidence that they can um deal with it but when children are traumatized or um not understood not seen the vul and they're alone emotionally the vulner becomes too painful to bear so be shut down our sense of vulnerability you know not to feel the pain but when you look at life nothing Gres without vulnerability so a tree doesn't gr where it's hard and thick does it it goes where it's tender and soft and there's these shoots that are very vulnerable they can be eaten by animals or insects a a a crustacean animal like a crab cannot grow inside a hard shell what does it have to do when it needs to grow it mols and becomes this soft creature that's very vulnerable but without that vulnerability there's no growth without emotional vulnerability there's also no growth and so much of our culture is designed to deny vulnerability and to shut it down or to somehow distract ourselves from it and what's the cost and the cost is that we we stay immature and that we lose ourselves that's what the cost is so I also think vulnerability is the is and I've just learned this from doing this podcast that vulnerability is a great connector yeah when I much of the reason why I have good conversations on this podcast I think is because I'm willing to be open myself yeah which which then allows your client your your your guest the safety to open up themselves and in your personal life with your friends I mean what's more I you can talk about the scandal of Newcastle beating Manchester City in the in some game recently by one to nothing which is not I don't say to talk about it if that's interesting to you but which is more meaningful to you that or when you actually share share a struggle struggle in you and what's going on for you I mean it's no contest but so much of this culture is designed to distract ourselves from our vulnerability G we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for Yeah question that's been left for you it's quite a long one um today is your last day on Earth yeah you're allowed to make two phone calls one phone call to the person you love the most and the second phone call to the entire world what you say on both of those phone calls what John lenon Sang all those years ago All You Need Is Love and the phone call to the person you love the most to the person I love the most I don't have to say anything at all why cuz she knows but if you were calling her on that last day I say thank you what for for everything and uh you know what I may even say that to the world I might even say thank you you know I mean for um for all the struggles and the trails and troubles and tribulations of childhood and adulthood and parenting and career and all this thank you you you've given me so much that's what I would say I mean if if I wasn't giving you advice which is all you need is love which is advice no forget that I'd say I just say thank you how do you want to be remembered as somebody who did his best to make a difference and who made a difference which I know I have by the way so um not that everybody agrees with me but I also know I've made a difference what difference do you think you've made how to say this without Sonic egotistical um but I get so many messages from around the world I mean literally from around the world that reading my books have transformed people's relationship to themselves have made them understand themselves um I think um I mentioned maybe in a different interview that the best review I ever had of the myth of normal was that um some young guy said to me thank you I read that book and I remembered myself so um my work for those who are open to it really helps to connect them to themselves and to see themselves clearly and that's that's a gift in a world where it's increasingly hard to see who we really are yeah and it's hard for people to see themselves and so people don't see themselves as broken or as irretrievably damaged but actually they can begin to see their capacity for wholeness which incidentally is the root of the word health is wholeness and uh so um that's the difference I'm making is that people can see themselves not as broken damaged but as actually fundamentally whole with some stuff to work through that's it we can learn so much from children can't we so much of your work brings us back to the first nature as you describe it of children yeah well a lot of parents will tell you and you'll find out is that the greatest teachers are your are your children if you're willing to learn Gabel thank you thank you so much I it's a difficult question to ask someone else about the impact they've made on the world but I but even what you said I think is a huge understatement because the people that I know close to me like my partner who um like my partner who just I mean her life I think has been changed personally but also professionally much of the reason she does the work she does she's the reason why she's not here to meet you because she would have FL she would have got on the next flight to fly here is because she's doing a retreat in the south of France with a big group of women and much of the work she does there is built on the work that you've written about in your books and taught online um so not only have you impacted people personally but you've impacted the next generation of teachers and therapists um which is going to be a generational it's like a Domino's effect it's was counteracting the generational trauma is the generational healing that has come about because of people like you um who are Wizards in our culture and that are willing in the face of often great um you know adversaries who take a different stance to persist with truth but thank you and and one of the things that most enhearten me is that when I go about London or any city in the world just about these days it's all kinds of young people coming up to me thanking me it's not people my I mean people of all ages but I'm just so enthused by how young Generations that people one quarter of my age are coming up to me to thank me well that shows me that it's making a difference 100% if she could have been here she was so annoyed she realized she'd booked a retreat on the same day that you were coming to to London cuz she didn't get to meet you last time cuz she was in barley so oh well some of the time she'll be watching this trust me probably watching live right now but but thank you so much Gabor again for your generosity and your wisdom it's changed my life and it continues to change many other people that are listening to this but all around the world so thank you thanks so [Music] much as you guys may know this podcast is sponsored by one of my favorite brands in all the world which is whoop AI is a topic I've spoken about various times on this podcast and it's a topic that I'm pretty obsessed with but we don't often talk about how it could be used as a force to make our lives even better whoop is using the power of AI to drive meaningful positive change my whoop doesn't leave my wrist and their new feature which is called whoop coach uses the power of advanced AI to synthesize all of your health and fitness data and to provide you with personalized recommendations to support you on your health and fitness journey you can literally ask it questions like why am I so tired or can you help me build a strength training program and it's Advanced AI system will provide you with answers that are unique to you so if you would like to check it out and love up your health and fitness journey in the process go to join. whoop.com CEO to get a free months whoop [Music] membership ah

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO

Views: 2,489,524

Keywords: The Diary Of A CEO, steven bartlett steve bartlett, podcast, the diary of a CEO podcast, life lessons, CEO

Id: L7zWT3l3DV0

Length: 112min 29sec (6749 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023