More and more people are getting sick, more addicted, more people are dying of overdoses. My guest today, returning for his second appearance on the show, is Dr. Gabor Maté. The problem in our society is there's very little that actually promotes healing, and there's very much that undermines it. He's an expert in a wide range of topics, but is most lauded for his work on the relationship between addiction and childhood development. This society loves you to be addicted, feeling inadequate. This path towards wholeness is not supported by the culture. In fact, it's undermined by it. Dr. Maté's latest and most ambitious book to date, "The Myth of Normal" investigates the true causes of illness and the pathway to health and wellbeing. This addiction that I have is not a disease that I inherited, but it's my attempt to escape from pain. And the more I learn about that pain, the less I'll inflict those imprints on myself and on the people around me. So, please hit that subscribe button. And here we go, round two with Dr. Gabor Maté. All of our afflictions, whether it's addiction, chronic physical illness, what we call mental illness, dysfunctions, they all have a template of childhood wounding and they're not separate biological events happening in discreet individuals, but they are representative of a process inside each of us that manifests our relationship to our environment. Most importantly, our early rearing environment, but also the culture that we live in. So, to give you one example is an obvious example. If you look at the number of kids diagnosed with, say ADHD, the numbers are going up all the time. That can't be an individual thing. That has to say something about the culture, the context. If you look at the rising incidence of autoimmune disease, the rising incidence of addictions, of mental health conditions. If you look at the fact that, say Black American women, the more experience of racism they have to endure, the greater the risk for asthma. It just tells us that it's not just about individual biology, it's about life in a culture. Yeah, and on that idea of culture, you use this petri dish example to illustrate that point, which I thought was really powerful, 'cause I'd never really thought of it in that way. Can you explain that? Sure, so, when we are studying microorganisms in a laboratory, we grow them in a broth. We give them a broth to nourish them. You call that a culture, a culture medium. And if the organisms in this culture medium, in this culture broth were dying off in great numbers or not thriving or ill, we would call that a toxic culture. I'm saying that when in a society like ours, more and more people are getting sick, more addicted, more mentally ill, more people are cutting themselves, more people are dying of overdoses, that's also a representative of a toxic culture. And I'm saying that that's what we live in, hence the subtitle of the book. "Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture." This culture is not one that supports healthy human growth. And when you say toxic culture, we should probably define that because it's a little bit different than what people might suspect. They're thinking of environmental pollutants and the like, and that's certainly a contributor to a lot of this, but you're really talking about what's going on societally and culturally. Yes, so, that is all true that it has to do with the physical stuff. There was an article reported just the other day that half of Americans were exposed to unhealthy levels of lead when they were kids. You know, that's toxic. Right. But you're right, that's not the toxic that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the nature of the culture itself, the very values of the culture, the way we bring up children, the expectations we put on human beings, they're toxic to people's healthy development. It seems so obvious, and in reading the book, it's like, of course, this is an issue and yet it's so highly unaddressed or ignored. And in reading the book, I couldn't help but draw an analogy to what Yuval Noah Harari is doing in terms of how we think about history. Like, telescoping out and looking at everything from 10,000 feet, which is not something we do when we think about and talk about health. We narrow down to the cellular level, to the microbe level, and the scientific method dictates that we control for variables and look at things in isolation. And of course, we've made tremendous progress as a society by dent of the technological advances that we can make by utilizing the scientific method. But it's a method that's myopic to the deep interconnectedness of everything. It doesn't allow us to look at things as holistic systems and the interplay that is leading to so many of these problems. Its like we can't address these diseases and these conditions on their own without looking at what's contributing to them by virtue of external forces. Well, yes, I agree with your formulation, but that would also argue that there's all kinds of science that shows the interconnections of things. So that to talk about human beings in a context, and that health represents life in a context rather than just a biological event, that's science. And we have literally tens of thousands of scientific studies to indicate how emotion and environments affect people's biology. Our immune system and our hormonal apparatus, and our nervous systems, and our guts, and our hearts and so on. And how social conditions, how inequality, how stress, how genderism or racism actually has physiological impacts. They're gonna need the skin, they affect our biology. This is not speculation. My knock on the medical profession is we keep talking about evidence-based practice, but we don't look at a lot of the evidence that's already being published, including in major medical journals. So, I'm not talking about insight and ideology or spirituality on the one hand and science on the other, I'm talking about science that has actually shown the interconnections. But there's such a wide gap between that understanding and the practice of medicine or how we treat people in a clinical setting.
Oh yeah, there's a huge, what we can call the science and practice gap. Right. So, the problem is not with the science. The problem is that we don't put the science into practice. The average medical student does not get it. For example, I talk about trauma in this book. And trauma has many implications. Trauma has been implicated in autoimmune disease, in cancer, in addictions, in every mental health conditions in the book. But the average medical student does not receive a single lecture on trauma, which is unbelievable, but it's true. For the most part, there might be a few exceptions here and there, but generally not. Secondly, doctors are very traumatized people themselves. Medical training is highly traumatic. I talked to many physicians who talked about the assault on their sensibilities by medical school. Biologically, medical students age faster than other people their age 'cause of the stress they're under. So, you got this traumatized population treating the larger traumatized population without any awareness of trauma. So, there's a huge gap. Right, let's define trauma. You have this idea of the capital T Trauma and the lowercase t trauma, and perhaps your definition differs from what people might conventionally think about when they think about trauma. It's true, the average person, when they think about trauma, they think of horrible events like a war, like extreme abuse, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, catastrophes, people dying and so on. And you know, those are traumatic, but trauma is not the events. Trauma comes from the Greek word for wounding. So, trauma is a wound that you sustain, and you can be wounded without catastrophic events. So, those traumas, the big noticeable terrible events that happen to you, we can call big T Trauma. But you can also wound people not only by hurting them badly, but simply by not meeting their needs. And in this society, a lot of children grow up with their essential human needs being met. So, that's what I call small t trauma, where people aren't doing bad things to you necessarily, but the good things that should be happening are not happening. So, you can hurt people by hitting them. You can also hurt people by not giving them water. So, not meeting their needs. In that sense, we have certain emotional needs as human beings, as evolved human beings that this society not only fails to meet, but actually tramples on very deliberately and very chronically. So, a lot of children get traumatized, not just by what happens to them, but by what doesn't happen to them that should have happened. Right, and in that early developmental stage, we develop our attachment strategies and we create these sort of patterns that recur over the course of our lifetime. I mean, you tell a story in the book about landing at the airport after coming back from a speaking engagement and acting like a petulant child because your wife blew you off to pick you up at the airport. Despite everything that you know, there's some level of powerlessness that we have in terms of trying to course correct what has been so cemented. Well, trauma is a wound that if it doesn't heal, it just keeps acting up. So, that airport example is me arriving back from a speaking trip at age 72 or 73, and my wife is not there to pick me up. And I go into a rage, and emotionally, I become very withdrawn, which is a mirroring of exactly what happened to me when I was a year old when my mother gave me to a stranger to save my life and I didn't see her. So, my mother wasn't available to me. And when I saw her again after four or five weeks, this is war time Hungary, I didn't even look at her for several days, which is what an infant does to protect themselves from the pain of being abandoned again. So, that wound on us is healed, will show up again even 70 odd years later when the woman I'm relying on doesn't show up for me. So, that's a traumatic imprint. And what happens is that when trauma acts up, the mid frontal cortex, the part that's rational and can respond in the present moment goes offline. And these traumatic imprints show up and they govern your behavior. So, all of a sudden, just as you say, I start acting like a hurt little child. Healing of trauma is in learning to recognize and cope with these imprints. But the lack of that healing shows up in this society in every realm, in medicine, in health, in mental health, in the pop culture, in politics, in economics, everywhere. Right, and in your previous work, you've drawn this connective tissue between trauma and how it can show up as addiction later in life with certain individuals, but create that connectivity between trauma and, for example, chronic ailments that we're seeing on the rise across the world, or at least in the developed world. Well, so there's a rise in autoimmune disease. Autoimmune disease are conditions where the immune system turns against itself and starts destroying. The immune system which is meant to protect us turns against us and starts destroying our bodies. Now, examples are rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, lupus, chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, ulcer colitis, chronic psoriasis, autoimmune eczema. One could go on. This is rising in the society. And not only is it rising in the society as the globalized economic system takes over more of the world, it's rising internationally. And it is rising, particularly amongst women. Now, when I looked at the people who develop autoimmune disease, it's always related to stress. And particularly, people's coping styles. So, people with autoimmune disease typically repress their emotions. They don't know how to be in contact with their healthy anger. They tend to suppress their real selves to fit in with society and with their families. And essentially, when people don't experience their healthy anger, their anger doesn't go away. It gets suppressed, turns against themselves. Now, our emotional apparatus is very much connected to our immune system. In fact, they're part and parcel of the same system. When our emotions turns against us, our immune system can turn against us as well. In this society, because so many people are not allowed to be themselves, they have to kind of suppress who they are in order to survive and fit in, we're getting more and more autoimmune disease is my view. Lots of evidence for that. Talk a little bit about this idea of disease as teacher. Yeah, so, I've worked in all areas of medicine, from delivering babies to palliative care, looking after terminally ill people. So, I've seen a lot of disease as a physician. What's surprising to me is that some people who should resent their illness, we all would naturally, nobody wants to get sick. They found that the teacher actually be, sorry, that the disease is actually a teacher to them 'cause the disease pointed out to them how they were not living a life that was authentic, how they were living a life of self suppression. An example is a very well known one, Anita Moorjani who wrote a book called "Dying To Be Me." She was literally on the verge of death, and she's terminally ill, she wasn't gonna live. Then she had this near-death experience and she finds out that all her life she had not been herself. That's why the title "Dying To Be Me. At the death's door, she realizes that she needs to be authentically herself, and she actually recovers. And so that the disease taught her to be herself. I give the example of the great dramatist and writer, V, formally known as Eve Ensler, who has stage four uterine cancer. She found her disease taught her essentially to be herself. I've met people even in terminal illness who are not gonna recover, who did not recover who said, "What I learned was so precious, I'm grateful for my disease." I met people with addictions who said, "I wouldn't wish this on anybody, but my God did it teach me." Yeah, that idea, the grateful alcoholic. Yeah.
Notion. It's tricky though, I mean, this is a sensitive thing because to tell somebody or to announce that your disease is your teacher when someone is in grave suffering, it's sort of like how dare you. I don't tell anybody that, I don't tell anybody that. I just give examples of people who have found it that way. But it's not for me to tell somebody else with their illness, "You should be happy. This is a teacher for you." I wouldn't want anybody to tell me that for God's sake 'cause I'd be very angry if they did. So, it's not that we should tell people how they should feel, but it's to point that the possibilities inherent in terms of what an illness can offer people. If people choose to go that way, that's their call. If they don't choose to go that way, I totally understand it. Yeah, baked into this is this idea that we sort of think these things happen by chance randomly, happenstance. But when you, like I said earlier, telescope out and you really closely analyze the environment, the stress, the anxiety, the gestalt of what our kind of modern existence looks like on a day to day basis, there's all these contributing lifestyle factors, the food that we're eating, the lack of sleep, whatever light is coming out of this device that I'm staring into. All of these things are contributing to moving us out of balance with the natural rhythms of how we've evolved to live in the world. And so-- All that is true. And then there's the larger issues of, when you look at the scientific literature on stress. And by stress, I mean emotional factors that affect your physiology, your immune system and your hormones and everything. What are they? The major factors for stress are uncertainty, loss of control, lack of information, and conflict. Now, in this society, how many people are living with loss of control, uncertainty, lack of information, insecurity, and conflict? This system is almost designed to make people feel insecure. And for example, the time of economic crisis, they looked at young people in Greece as compared with Sweden, which wasn't having an economic crisis. The stress hormone levels of the young Greeks were really affected by what's going on economically. And that promotes inflammation. And the researchers actually said that this is gonna affect the future health of these young Greeks. This is a social issue. It wasn't an individual biological problem restricted to a single human being. It was a social issue inflicted by socio-political and economic conditions. And that happens on a massive scale under globalized capitalism to a lot of people. Right, and on top of that, there's this idea of the loss of connection, interconnectivity between human beings. You and I both know Johann Hari, and he has written books about this and speaks about this. But we're in this era in which we feel hyper-connected by virtue of our devices, and yet most of us are suffering from some level of loneliness that is endemic to this period of time. Well, I could speak a whole hour about the impact of the devices, about how the device themselves are designed to keep people addicted, including very young kids, that's a separate issue. The issue of loneliness. So, if you look at the number of people who described themselves as being lonely in the United States, that's doubled within 20 years. And loneliness is a major factor for physical illness as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, or as high blood pressure or obesity. And loneliness has been spreading in the Western world again under the impact of a globalized economic system that pits people against one another, that says that competition and aggression and mistrust of others is the way to survive. And which has in many, many ways, documented ways, evoded communities and extended families and has cut down on people's sense of community. Loneliness is going up, and that's posing a major risk factor. People who are lonely get sicker faster and they die sooner of their diseases. So, that's a major problem in Western societies. (bright music) What catalyzed your interest in writing this book? I mean, obviously, it does feel to me to be a natural progression of the work that you've already done, but why sort of shift your focus away from what was kind of keenly honed on addiction and broaden it? Well, it was a natural progression. For example, I'm a Canadian, I live in Canada. So, when I worked with a highly addicted population in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside which you visited the first time that we met. This is North America's most conservated area of drug use. We have more people using, injecting, inhaling substances than anywhere else in North America. And 30% of my clients down there were Indigenous Canadians. The Indigenous Canadians make up 5% of the Canadian population. 30% of the addicted population, 30% of the jail population, Indigenous women make up 50% of the Canadian jail population amongst women. Now, clearly, there's a link between social, economic and racial status and illness. You can't help but notice that. So then you have to start asking, what are the factors on a social level that promote addiction, that promote mental illness, that promote suicide, that promote physical illness. Now, a First Nations Canadian, an Indigenous Canadian woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than anybody else, six times. Women of color in the US has much higher rates of autoimmune disease than non, people who are considered not people of color. Now, these problems are not genetic. The Indigenous population in Canada had no autoimmune disease before colonization at all. It's social, economic, racial, and historical, so that you can't help but notice these things. And by the way, I'm far from the first one. In the 19th century, there was a German physician renowned in the history of medicine, Rudolf Virchow his name was. And he said that politics is just the extension of medicine. That if we're gonna deal with people's health, we have to deal with the politics. So, this awareness is not new, but it's like that science and the mind-body unity that I was referring to where we have the science, but the profession doesn't take it into account. And it's the same with this link between the individual and society. Again, the medical profession does not take it into account despite the abundant evidence. There does seem to be a growing awareness around generational trauma and the kind of tangential implications of that as well as the epigenetic, which is sort of related, the epigenetic nature of this, which is to say that we have the genetic code and the epigenetics are what kind of toggle on and off these adaptive strategies and behaviors. So, epi means on top of. So epigenetics means on top of genetics really. And what you're referring to is the fact that genes are turned on and off by the environment. They're not independent actors. So, you can have people with the same genes, but different environments that have very different outcomes. And so, that's epigenetics. And to some extent, those epigenetics can be passed on to future generations. We know that from animal studies. So that when you look at one generation, you can't understand it without looking at the previous generation as well. So that the connection I'm talking about is both lateral in the sense that it spreads throughout the whole culture, but it's also vertical in that it spreads across the generations. Right, so, if you were to take a Native American population in North America and just track the incidence of alcoholism, which is known to be higher in those communities, there's a generational trauma piece to that and an epigenetic piece to that. Well, the generational trauma is the genocide and oppression and loss of lands and livelihood, and the deprivation of culture, the deliberate destruction of spiritual ways. All this happened in Canada and in the US. In Canada, Native children were abducted from their homes for 100 years and forced to go into these residential schools where they couldn't see their parents, where they were forbidden to see their parents, and where they were sexually and physically abused, where their culture was denigrated, where they just found thousands of bodies of these children in Canada, who died in these residential schools. Now, those that survived the residential schools and went home, their whole childhood had been robbed from them. Their parenting was taken away. Their nurturing connections were destroyed. They didn't know how to parent the next generation. And this went on for 100 years. So, in the Native communities in Canada, we have much more alcoholism, much more child abuse. This is contrary how they used to raise children. These indigenous people raise children in much more healthier ways than we do. Right, right. I mean, we need to learn for how they raise children. And I could talk about that, but because how they raise children was how we evolved as human beings. We're meant to raise children by evolution. So, we destroyed that for them. And now we wonder why do they have more alcoholism? Why do they have more addiction? Why do they have more illness? Why do they have more violence? It's because we've robbed them of their nature. And so, when I talk about a toxic society, I'm talking about a society in which what is normal is completely unnatural and unhealthy. Yeah, but this, of course, is rampant across all sectors of the developed world. I wrote down some of the statistics that you cite in the book. I mean, 60% of US adults have a chronic disorder. 40% have more than one such disorder. 70% of US adults are on at least one prescription drug. 50% take two. 20% of Canadians have high blood pressure. 30% of Europeans have hypertension. I mean, it just goes on and on and on, right? Yeah. So, nobody's immune from this and something is terribly awry. Like, we are completely out of balance. We're out of balance. Here's the thing. We're out of balance. Now, that imbalance affects some people more than others, but it does affect everybody. There's no stratum of society that escapes the stresses. And where we're out of balance is that we have certain needs as human beings. See, children have four basic needs. The need to be strongly attached to adults who take care of them, and who are with them all the time, by the way, 'cause as we evolved as human beings over millions of years, and for most of our species, existence as homo sapiens. We lived in small communities where the parents were always around the kids. So, secure attachments. And extended family. Extended family, well, community, right? And then children have a need not to have to work to make their relationship with the parents work. They have to be able to rest in a security, that there's nothing they can do to destroy their relationship, and there's nothing they need to do to make it work. That in our society, we make our kids work to be accepted. You have to be good, you have to be smart, you have to be good-looking or you have to be behave acceptably, otherwise you're gonna get a timeout. And we're gonna say to you, "No, you can't be with us. We're gonna deprive you of our contact for a little while." Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. In other words, it's not normal for a kid to be angry. Well, let me tell you, it's very normal for a two-year-old to be angry 'cause they get frustrated. Now, if you give the message to a two-year-old, "You're not acceptable to me when you're angry." Basically you're saying to them, "Don't be yourself. Suppress who you are in order to be accepted." "Love is conditional." Love is conditional, that's the message you're giving. A lot of kids in this society are getting the message that love is conditional. We tell parents not to pick up their crying babies. We tell them that-- Right, that they need to learn how to be okay without that nurturing. That's so crucial in that-- You tell a mother gorilla not to pick up their baby when it's crying. We tell a mother cat to ignore the little kid's miaowing. So that children have the need to be able to experience all their emotions fully. And that be accepted by the parents. Well, we tell parents, "No, your children's anger is not acceptable." So, children get the message that they're not acceptable. You have to work to be acceptable. You have to suppress yourself to be acceptable. And children need free play out there in nature. Free play, not with gadgets, not with cell phones, not with games on the internet, but free play in nature. This is our essential needs of human beings. That goes into the four, they are really six. This six A's that you talk about in the book, right? The agency would be the ability to roam and be outdoors and attachment being important as well. Well, attachment is, well-- Authenticity, agency, go ahead. Anger.
Anger. Acceptance.
Autonomy. These are the healing pathways. What I'm saying is, for people to heal, they have to find their own agency, they have to. Whatever happens to them, they need to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, particularly the health decisions. And it's very interesting. There's a couple of people that I know who have looked at what's called spontaneous remission. Spontaneous remission is supposedly when somebody spontaneously gets better after having been given a terminal diagnosis. And there's a psychiatrist at Harvard, Dr. Jeff Rediger, who, by the way, you might wanna talk to sometime. He's written a book called "Cured: The Science of Spontaneous Healing." He studied people, just as I have, who got better despite giving terminal diagnosis after the failure of medical treatment or even if they refused medical treatment. Dr. Kelly Turner is an oncological psychologist who worked with cancer patients. And she also did a study of people who got spontaneously better, "spontaneously." But when I talk to these people, when Kelly Turner or Jeff Redigar talks to these people, there's nothing spontaneous about their healing. They all did something. And the biggest thing they did is they developed a different relationship to themselves. They became authentically themselves. They stopped pleasing people. They actually consulted what they needed and wanted within themselves. Now, I'm not saying that this is a magic cure all, but I'm saying that the people that do get better on their own with or without medical treatment in the face of terminal diagnosis, they're the ones who took agency over their lives. And in our medical system, people are made to be very passive recipients. "You are the experts, do to me what you need to do." So, agency is very, very important. Healthy anger is very important. Healthy anger is, well, I began chapter two, I think, with the case of a woman who's given a diagnosis of two years to live with metastatic breast cancer. And the doctor's telling her that the statistics means that she's got two years to live. Now, she's got two young kids, and she says to the doctor, "Fuck your statistics." She says that was very rude. I said, "What do you mean rude?" She says I said to him, "Fuck your statistics." I said to her, "Thanks, that's great. That probably helped you survive." She lived another 20 years partly because she stopped being a people pleaser. And she got in touch with her healthy anger. She did die of her cancer, but only after she raised her kids to be successful young men. Yeah, she said like, "I need to raise these boys." Like, "I can't die yet, I have work to do." Exactly. And she did. 20 years and one goes on to Princeton or something like that's. So, she fulfilled that. And in the book, I give examples, and nevermind terminal illness, people with multiple sclerosis who've been told they have to be on medications for the rest of their lives. They're okay without medication now and they have no symptoms. People with rheumatoid arthritis, the same thing, why? Because they got in touch with their real selves, they stopped suppressing themselves. They stopped trying to please everybody else. They said, "Who am I? What do I need? What are my interests? What I need to say no to, what I need to say yes to." And I'm telling you, a lot of these conditions which are considered to be chronic and incurable, they're not, necessarily. And there's a case I give in the book of a woman with scleroderma. Scleroderma is a autoimmune disease. Sclerosis means hardening, derma means skin. Scleroderma is hardened skin. In scleroderma, the connective tissues of your body gets stiff. And this woman aged 29, she said, "I was being mummified alive." She became like a rigid mummy, she could barely move. She could not get out of bed by herself. The medications failed, they didn't work for her. All she wanted to do was die. Now she's walking around hiking, writing her autobiography, winning poetry contests, because she turned her relationship. And because she dealt with her childhood trauma, which none of the doctors asked her about, of course, and she become authentically herself. And these are not fairy tales. I talked to her physician who verified this story. Yeah, Mee Ok. Her name is Mee Ok. And she happened to do it through, her healing happened through an experience with a psychedelic, which allowed her to recognize her true self, and lot of other work besides. But what's the message here. The message here is that illness is a manifestation of a person's trauma and a person's life. And if you turn that life around, you can very often have a positive impact on the illness as well. Right, so, the first step is recognizing that although we think of trauma in a certain way, that on some level we all have experienced a version of trauma that has cemented certain behavior patterns, adaptive strategies, defense mechanisms, that dictate how we perceive the world and behave in the world. And many of us, if not the majority of us, live out the rest of our lives without really ever addressing that or looking inward to unpack why that is and try to find a healthier adaptive strategy. And short of a life-threatening crisis that compels us to do that kind of interior work. Of course, that choice is available to us, but it's much more difficult when you're not in pain. It's the same thing in addiction, of course. So, how does one, like, if somebody's listening to this and they're like, "Wow, I never thought I could take the reins of control over these sorts of things. How would I begin to do that?" Well, first of all, thank you. You summarized the thesis of my book very succinctly. We don't have to wait for illness for us to deal with our stuff there. I quote this Greek playwright, Aeschylus, who said that the way the gods created us, we human beings we have to suffer into the truth. And that's often the way it works. I mean, I tell you, I went through my own stuff. I had my mental health conditions, my ADHD, my depression, my relationship problems, my stressed marriage, the way that I transmitted my own trauma onto my kids. And unfortunately, most of us, until things go sideways, we're not much compelled to do anything about it. We just kind of take life as it goes and I'm okay. Well, but we don't have to wait for serious illness like multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis, or serious mental health crisis or severe addiction to wake us up so we can wake up and recognize that, "Yeah, stuff happened to me. And that's affecting how I conduct my relationship, how I am in my marriage, how I'm with my friends, how I show up for my work, whether I'm addicted to work or whether I'm not, whether I pursue some addiction or not, whether it's sex, pornography, or gambling or substances or shopping or eating." These all represent some kind of traumatic imprint. And I can deal with it, I can learn to deal with it now so it doesn't have to get more severe. So, we don't have to wait for that disease as the teacher to show up. Yeah, I think an honest and thorough inventory, as they say, is more than revealing. If you wanna do a little self-analysis on what makes you tick. And I just know that it's common to witness people who say, "I need to lose weight, I'm gonna try this diet." Or "I'm gonna adopt a meditation practice," or "I'm gonna start an exercise routine," or "I'm gonna go on a 30-day digital detox." And more often than not, you can be successful in those temporary pursuits, but you quickly rubber band and default to your core setting. And that's discouraging for most people, but I think it's also illustrative of just how deeply embedded, how ingrained these patterns are that you reflexively go back to the way you always did it after this little experiment, and should give you a sense of how powerful this patterning is and what you're up against, because it's a beast, right? And as somebody who embarked upon this in 1998 and has been in recovery for a long time, you're continually peeling these layers, and just when you think you have a handle on something, the degree of difficulty continues to increase. And this will be the case till I'm in a coffin. Like, the more I think I have a handle on it, the more baffled and amazed I am at how much work remains and how much, my wife is a great mirror, as I'm sure yours is, the same like, you're behaving like your mother again, like, you're literally developing these, everything that you dislike about how she behaves. I'm seeing it right now. And I was like, "You gotta be kidding me." Like, I've worked so hard to transcend this and yet it continues to show up. Well, yeah, so a number of things, the Budha talked about our habit energies, and they're deeply ingrained. So, it's a question of do you just wanna change behaviors or do you deal with deal with the underlying imprint that drives those behaviors? So, in the first case, we can change the behaviors for a while, but if we don't deal with the underlying imprints, those behaviors are gonna reassert themselves, number one. Number two, it's not as discouraging as all that. I mean, it's true. These patterns can still show up in my life. I'm 78 now, they can still show up, but believe me, they don't show up with the same force and the same dictatorial authority as they showed up even three or four years ago. So, there's such a thing as progress. And as far as the work, you're right, it's lifelong work. I don't know if I told you, but I've written my epitaph. No, I don't know. On my gravestone, it's gonna be engraved. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated. But you know what, what's the alternative? The alternative is to vegetate and rot and to keep stuck in old patterns. The problem in our society is there's very little that actually promotes healing, and there's very much that undermines it, so that this society loves you to be addicted, it loves you to be feeling inadequate so that you're trying to meet other people's expectations. It loves you to try to fit in instead of being authentically yourself. Jamie Lee Curtis said to me once that in this society, there's a genocide of authenticity. This culture kills authenticity so that this path towards wholeness, the last chapter of the book is called pathways to wholeness. This path towards wholeness is not supported by the culture, in fact, it's undermined by it. So, we have to kind of take it on for ourselves, not just necessarily as individuals, but in the face of cultural programming and propaganda. Prophets walk among us. As a writer and podcaster for nearly 10 years, I've become more convinced than ever that our world is populated by scores of beautiful and brilliant people who have amazing stories to share, those that we don't know who can teach us something new and leave us all the better for the experience of their sharing. And so, I've dedicated my career to tracking down the most compelling prophets on the planet, going deep with each of them on my podcast to elucidate the best of what they have to offer and to sharing the insights gleaned for the benefit of all. But the podcast is not the only medium by which to share their stories, which is why I'm proud to announce the release of my new book, "Voicing Change" Volume II. More than mere words on paper, "Voicing Change" is a physical manifestation of the magic, inspiration and timeless wisdom that transpires each week on the "Rich Roll Podcast." The first edition of "Voicing Change" was a beautifully-rendered book worthy of display on any coffee table, and volume II follows in that tradition by showcasing even more of my favorite conversations in an elegant publication replete with interview excerpts, essays, and stunning photography, making for an exquisite companion to the first volume or a satisfying standalone work. Picking up this book allows you to revisit the wisdom of your favorite everyday prophets and physically interact with the life-changing ideas contained with them. "Voicing Change" Volume II available now while supplies last for a limited time. Order your copy today only at richroll.com In that final chapter about wholeness, there's extended discussion about building into our institutions a better understanding of trauma, like trauma-based medicine and how we understand trauma even in the legal system, because yes, culture loves to addict us, but then they also love to tell us that we are afflicted and broken and we must be incarcerated and punished, as opposed to a holistic understanding of the trauma that led to the behavior, and figuring out a way to rehabilitate that person by confronting the underlying condition that's driving the behavior. So, in that last chapter, I do talk about the need for a trauma-informed medical system, which we don't have, the need for trauma-informed legal system, which we don't have. The legal system, if a patient of mine in the Downtown Eastside was caught selling an ounce of cocaine, he'd go to jail. But if you're a corporation that deliberately sells toxic substances that kill hundreds of thousands, you're a successful executive. If you're a pharmaceutical company executive whose products knowingly were addictive and have killed hundreds of thousands of people, you get rewarded with high profits and dividends. If you sell an ounce of heroin, you're in jail maybe for the rest of your life in this country. Now, if the legal system understood that most of the people in jails are actually traumatized people, that the violence and their drug use and so on came out of trauma, then we would really create a legal system that rehabilitates people, that deals with the trauma, that helps them redeem themselves and helps them overcome their patterns. That could be done, we know how to do it. Is there a country that is effectively doing that? Is it Norway or? There's a couple countries that-- There are countries that do it a lot better than North America does, or most of the world actually. So, in Portugal, as you and I know, there's no punishment anymore for possessing drugs for personal use. As a result there's less use and more people are getting treatment. In some of the Scandinavian countries, they have jails that are really designed to rehabilitate people, that treat people humanely. It's not a question of excusing what they did, but it is a question of how to move forward so that they don't do it again. And that's called rehabilitation. So, their jails are much less punitive, much more humane, and therefore much more successful. On this idea of trauma-based medicine, ideally, this would look like, like, if somebody comes into a clinician's office and says, "I have this gut problem, or I have some kind of skin condition or autoimmune disorder," the practitioner would say, "Tell me about your life. What are you going through? What is your day like? What are you eating? How are you sleeping? What is your childhood?" Well, in all fairness, I would not begin with that. I would say, "Tell me about your problem and let's see how we can help you in the short term so that you don't suffer." And when we've stabilized your condition, can we talk about the conditions in your life that may have contributed to the onset of your illness? Now can we talk about your childhood? Can we talk about your relationship? Can we talk about your stress levels? Can we talk about how you feel about yourself? Can we talk about what your marriage is like? We know, for example, that stressful marriages affect people's immune systems. So, these questions are very pertinent. They would be the first thing that I would. If you come into me with an inflamed skin-- Right, if it's in a heightened situation. Yeah, if you've come to me with skin inflammation, you wouldn't thank me if I start asking about your childhood, but-- Deal with the acute nature. But if I said let's deal with the acute problem, and then let's talk about some of the conditions that may have stressed you so that you skin got inflamed, or that your guts got inflamed, or your joints got inflamed, but that would be a healthy conversation. Most physicians don't even know how to ask those questions. Are you sanguine about this changing? I don't have a short term optimism. I think it's gonna take a long time. It's gonna take a lot of work. Yesterday I was speaking at a conference in San Diego on psychedelics and healing, and there was a physician there, an internal medicine specialist from California. And then she said, "I so agree with you. Our profession is so backward. We are so traumatized as physicians. Our knowledge is so limited and we so separate things that are actually connected in real life. How do we move forward?" Well, there's more and more physicians asking those questions. There's more and more physicians being aware. The institutions of medicine have a long way to go. And that's gonna take a long time. When we talk about trauma, one thing that concerns me, and I'm interested in your take on this is the idea that it can be fueling this sense of victimhood that leads to helplessness. Because right now we're kind of celebrating victimhood. Like, it's almost as if there's a contest who's the biggest victim and people are crafting identities around that. And I think the healthy aspect of that is that people are talking about their trauma and confronting it. So, it's become part of the parlance of our mainstream conversation. But the unhealthy part of that is the self-identification with the victim aspect of it that breeds helplessness, but is also something that gets validated in social media, for example. So, how do you parse that? Well, as you say, it's a fine line because a lot of people are traumatized in this society. And the more we recognize that, the better. And I'm very glad when a celebrity comes out and says, "I was traumatized, I was sexually abused, I was hurt, and that really affected my life and it fueled my addiction" or "It fueled my illness," or "It fueled my depression." That's important. But also, as you say, and in the book we talk about this is that that doesn't mean we should identify as victim. So, recognizing what happened doesn't necessarily create a victim identity. The victim identity says this happened to me and I'm helpless in the face of it. Well, that goes against my concept of agency. So, in order to be able to exercise agency, you gotta let go of the victimhood. Yes, I was a traumatized Jewish infant under the Nazis. That's my reality. There's nothing I can do, that that's what happened, but I don't have to live the rest of my life by what I made that mean at the time. And so, that's the whole thing of healing is that you recognize what happened, you fearlessly look at it, you don't deny it anymore, but at the same time, you work not to let that define who you are, how you move forward, how you see the world. Because trauma, again, is not what happened to you, is what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you. And that's the good news. 'Cause if trauma was what happened to you, that somebody sexually abused you or that your parents died in a war, if that was the trauma, there's nothing do to change that that happened. It was never not gonna have happened. But if the trauma is the wound that you incurred inwardly, you can heal that wound at any time. So, actually recognizing what trauma is as an internal psychological wound with manifestations in your body actually allows you to heal it. First, you have to recognize that there is a wound. I mean, one of the things that you did with me that was so powerful when we first sat down was to kind of walk me through my history, because I, like I think a lot of people, am very resistant to point a finger at either of my parents. And you talk a lot about this distinction between responsibility and blame. And so, I think my reluctance to think about culpability in my child rearing has held me in a place where I wasn't able to really honestly inventory what occurred and link it to how I began to behave as I grew older. So, unpacking that and creating a sort safe environment to speak about that, I think is really instructive in helping people understand the relationship between their development and where they are now in life and how those things are inextricably connected. Yes, so in this book, we take a fair bit of trouble to point out that blaming anybody is inappropriate, unscientific and cruel actually, and not helpful. At the same time, we show people that the assumptions they made about their lives were very often based on suppressing their real emotions. So, I've had so many conversations with people that had a perfectly happy childhood. And then I issue what I call the happy childhood challenge which takes me over three minutes. You could get right to it pretty quickly. Yeah, well, it's not that difficult, because for example, if I was talking to you knowing you've had four children, if I just ask what it would be like for one of your children to experience what you experienced, what would you say right away? Yeah, I mean, it would be very painful. And I think, sorry to interrupt, but just to interject one point on that, I think that I find myself parenting in opposition to the way I was raised and perhaps to a fault, right? This pendulum swings too far in the other direction. And even despite that, under moments of duress or stress, I will repeat a pattern that mimics exactly what my parents do. Yeah, those are imprints that you haven't quite worked through yet. Right. Believe me, if I could do my parenting over again... Wouldn't we all? We all would now, but that's the whole point. On the other hand, I can tell you that I used to be so worried about my children about because of the environment that they grew up in as a result of my wife's and I's unresolved traumas. But you know what, they're doing great. And they've dealt with it. So, we also mustn't. Humans are also very resilient. Yeah, and we mustn't project our anxieties and our guilt onto our kids either, that doesn't help them anyway at all. That's one thing. In moments of weakness, I've been known to do that. Yeah. And again, it's my wife who's like, "You're doing that thing." Yeah, well, thank God for our partners. I think I say somewhere in the book that I made my own lie detector. Right, yeah. Do I say that in the book? Yeah, I think it was after you were grumpy and storming around the house for a couple days after your wife didn't pick you up until finally she told, one day, all right, she told you to just get over it and snap out of it. Yeah, yeah, which years ago would've taken me much, many years ago would've taken me much longer to snap out of it. The fact that I could snap out of it after one day, that's a sign of progress. You know what? Now she wouldn't put up with it for five minutes because she knows I can do better. Yeah, and we'd be remiss in not mentioning that you wrote this book with your son. What an incredible beautiful experience to have, or maybe it was terrible, I don't know. What was the collaboration like? Well, it had its terrible moments. My son Daniel and I, he's my eldest child. We had a kind of fraught relationship, but you know what? This book has been a beautiful process. And mostly the problem came from my anxiety. Look, I was really anxious writing this book at times, 'cause I thought this time I've bit enough more than I can chew. Yeah, you're really going out there. Yeah, this time I'm gonna expose my incompetence and ignorance for the whole world to see. And so, in that state of anxiety, 'cause this book was so important to me 'cause it's everything I always wanted to say. So, because of that anxiety, I'd laid sort of my anxiety onto my son, which is the last thing he needs, is to get his father's anxiety he lived without all his childhood. So, you can see we got triggered at times, but we worked it out beautifully. And at the end it was such a friendly and fruitful, productive collaboration. And I'm just so grateful that it went that way. Yeah, well, it's a remarkable achievement. I really do think that this is a quantum leap in your thinking and in your writing. And I have no doubt it's gonna impact a lot of people because it really is, it speaks directly to the heart of what ails us in the broadest sense, and carves a roadmap for a better future. We're not unaware of all of these problems. We all know it's going on, and to better understand it and figure out how to redress it for ourselves and future generations, I can think of no greater expenditure of your time and energy. Well, thank you so much for saying so. If I may come back to analogy that we introduce in the very introduction to the book, the late great writer, David Foster Wallace told this anecdote at a commencement address he gave at a university. And of course, he succumbed, didn't he? He committed suicide in the end. He gave this analogy of two young fish swimming along and they meet an older fish. And the older fish says to them, "Hey, boys, how's the water?" And then two fish swim along for a while and one of them says to the other, "What the heck is water?" And point being is, as Foster Wallace points out, that when something is so close to us, we don't even recognize it. And not recognizing and not dealing with what's going on can have fatal consequences, this is what he said. And so, in our society, this is the water that we swim in. So we take it to be normal and we don't recognize unhealthy or unnatural it actually is. And that is fatal consequences for millions of people and for people's wellbeing and their emotional balance. So, I just think it's essential to recognize not just, as we said right in the beginning, not just individual problems, but to recognize that these individual problems are manifestations of a vast cultural edifice that were all part of and need to address. Later in the book you call it the willingness to be disillusioned. Yeah, when people talk about, well, I give three examples. I grew up in communist Hungary, and I was a good little believer snapping to attention when they mentioned party and leader and applauding in unison with my classmates, and then came the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which was brutally put down by the Russians, or by the Soviet army. The same Soviet army that saved my life as an infant, 'cause I got disillusioned, I lost my illusions. Then I came to the West to Canada and believing in the capitalist system and what they call democracy, which I don't think is that much of a democracy, by the way, it's more like a corporatocracy. But believing that this is the answer, then the Vietnam War happens. And I see the televised slaughter of millions of Vietnamese peasants. So, I get disillusioned with that. And then as a Jew and whose family suffered so much in the Holocaust, I get all excited by the idea of the Jewish state, but this is the answer. And then I realize, yeah, we established the Jewish state, but at whose expense? At the expense of the local population on whom was imposed great killing and great suffering and great dispossession, which is still going on. I get disillusioned one more time. And when people use the word disillusionment, they always talk about it as a sense of loss or betrayal or disappointment. But what I say to people is, would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned? Would you rather believe what is not true, or would you rather see reality? So, I think it's essential that we be disillusioned, that we lose our illusions about the nature of the world that we live in. Because if we don't do that, we can't address the problems. Yeah, so, in the context of this book, it's shattering the illusion that the conveniences of modern life are making our lives better and more fulfilled, when in truth, they are putting distance between ourselves and our true nature and making us progressively more sick. Exactly, losing our illusions. And we keep being told that this is the richest and the best society ever. Look what happened under COVID. The richest, most powerful society in the world, the United States had by far the highest incidents of COVID of anywhere in the world. Now, what does that tell us, that maybe there's a gap between what we believe about ourselves and the reality. That this most functional and best of all societies makes more people sick than anywhere else in the world. I mean, that ought to give us some pause, shouldn't it? (bright music) Switching gears a little bit, 'cause I can't have you sitting across from me without talking about addiction a little bit. I'm interested in how your perspective has evolved or hasn't evolved since the last time we talked. Has any of your thoughts on this changed, matured, evolved on the nature of addiction, how to treat it? What have you learned in the intervening years between "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" and "The Myth of Normal?" Well, it's virtually impossible to say this without being arrogant, but I'll take that risk. Everything I wrote in "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" has only been proven more and more by the science and by experience. What's become even more apparent, when I wrote that book, there wasn't this overdose crisis yet, at least not in the general population. There was, for example, in the Indigenous population in Canada whether or the US. But, of course, it only happens Indigenous people, who cares about it? Right, it doesn't get noticed. Yeah, we don't notice it. Well, that's just those people. Now it's happening in the general society, which only means that there's even more of a need to look at the general conditions in a society that foster addictions. I would say the one thing that's changed for me is that when people say, in general about disease, but also about addiction, "I have a disease," "I have multiple sclerosis," or "I have rheumatoid arthritis," or "I have ADHD," or "I have depression," or "I have addiction," I don't talk about it that way anymore because there's an implicit assumption in that way of languaging things. As I sit here, I have this cup here. I have a cup. I can put it down, I can shatter it, I can throw it away, I can give it away, I can put it in my pocket. It's a thing, it's not me. To say that I have an addiction, or even to say that I am an addict, it assumes that there's this thing called an addiction, then there's me, and I have this thing. This thing is not about me somehow, just something that I have distinct from me, or I have ADHD, there's this thing called ADHD with a life of its own, with characteristic of its own, with a trajectory of its own, and then there's me over here and I have this thing. But actually the ADHD is a manifestation of my life. It's a process that's happening inside me. The multiple sclerosis is not a separate thing with a life of its own. It's a process that's happening inside me. The addiction is not a separate thing that I have, it's a process that's happening inside me, which means that if I change the process, I have a way of affecting this thing that we call disease or addiction or anything else. So, it's more or less of a separation between myself and what's happening inside me. And even the language, "I am an addict." It identifies the person with a particular habit or with a particular dysfunction. Well, there's some honesty to that and there's value to it because it means I'm no longer in denial. So, that's a good thing. So, when somebody at a 12-step meeting stands up and says, "I'm so and so and I'm an alcoholic," well, that's honest and that's taking ownership, and that's good. But there's also a risk in it, is that people identify with a particular set of behaviors and a particular set of imprints and patterns. Nobody is their dysfunction. That's not who anybody is. Nobody is a victim, nobody is an addict, that's not who anybody is. Right, so to follow that logic in the context of 12-step, identifying as an alcoholic, "Hi, my name's Rich. I'm an alcoholic." There is a baked in notion in that paradigm that once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. That you are in recovery, but you will never be recovered. And I think that drives that level of self-identification with the disease using the disease paradigm. But your logic would depart from that, or your thesis departs from that in the sense that if the underlying trauma is resolved, if you heal that inner child and whatever is driving those behaviors, that you can indeed be recovered. And along the way, avoiding self-identification with this can be a tool to aid in that healing process. So, that's your kind of departure line from a traditional 12-step. It's more radical than that, actually. Yeah. Yes, it's true, what you said, but it's also more radical than that. First of all, let's look at this word recovery. What does it mean? It means to find something. When you recover something, you find it. If I talk to anybody who's recovered from addiction or even illness very often, I ask them, "What did you recover? What did you find?" They said, "I found myself," which is the whole theme of the book, is that the loss of self in this culture is the source of pathology. So, that self is always available to be recovered. That's the whole point. I just wanna finish this. Yeah, okay. Because even somebody who's heavily drinking right now, if they say, "I'm an alcoholic," I say, "No, you're not, that's not who you are." You are a person who's in so much pain right now that you're using the alcohol to numb your pain. That's not all who you are. So that it's not just a recovered person who's no longer an alcoholic, even the alcoholic is not an alcoholic in the sense that I'm talking about right now. Yes, they're drinking, yes, they're hurting themselves, yes, they're destroying their lives. That's all true, can't be denied, needs to be acknowledged. But what if we said, what if we outlawed the word addict and you couldn't say about anybody that so and so is an addict. What if you had to say about them, so and so is a human being who suffered a lot in life, and then right now they're trying to escape from their suffering through this particular behavior. That acknowledges the truth without identifying the person with the behavior. Yeah, I get that. I get that. I think the way that I've thought about it in that rubric of like, in recovery versus recovered is similar to the idea, like, to extrapolate or analogize to the idea of pursuing enlightenment. Like, I am in pursuit of something. I will unlikely become an enlightened being in this lifetime, but I'm committed to pursuing higher planes of awareness, consciousness, self-understanding, self-integration, self-actualization, all of those things. So, similarly, recovery is something that happens along a spectrum. You're always pursuing greater and greater recovery, which is self-actualization on some level, but I don't know that I will ever be recovered because that denotes a destination that's really kind of an illusion because there's always more growth and healing that can be experienced. Well, I agree with that. And partly it's a question of how we use language and what do we make words mean? Interesting you should mention self-actualization 'cause that comes up on the very last page of the book. And it was the psychologist, I think Abraham Maslow, who studied self-actualization. And what he found in a famous study, self-actualized people are who authenticate themselves and find satisfaction in that. And what he found is that the people that self actualized actually are not normal by society's standards. In fact, they tend to either implicitly or explicitly resist society's values and expectations. What does that tell us about our culture? That the people who are self-actualized have to actually express some independence from the culture that they live in. Right, and a culture that is driving them towards adherence to a certain set of norms. I mean, you talk about that in this book, how people who are on that path are often at odds with their peers or their friends or what have you. It's interesting that you bring that up 'cause I just had this psychologist in here, Scott Barry Kaufman, have you ever met him? He wrote this wonderful book called "Transcend," and he's obsessed with Maslow, and he just did a deep dive into Maslow's life and extrapolates on his work, which was not complete when he died in 1970, and gets into the higher aspects of that hierarchy when it comes to self-actualization and ultimately, transcendence, which is drawing unison between the self-actualization process and then in turn finding a way to channel it in service to others for the betterment of humanity, which is like the pinnacle, right? And is that not similar to this idea of recovery being on that same kind of trajectory. You can formulate it that way, sure. Yeah.
Yeah. It's interesting though, because, and we talked about this last time, I'm a product of 12-step and AA, and that comes with a certain set of ideas and ideologies. There's an indoctrination to that process. And because I've been in it so long, I find myself resistant, or my back gets up when that paradigm gets challenged because it did save my life and I've seen it save the lives of so many other people. And that's not to say that it should be thought of in calcified terms and we can't iterate on it or improve it, but I still have yet to see anything that would convince me that there's a better way and that we should abandon this thing that is highly imperfect, but also miraculous. Well, so first of all, both in my book on addiction and "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" and in this book, I acknowledge the value of the 12 step movement. Without trying to get you too rankled here-- It's okay, you can rankle me. This is what we're here to do. I'm happy to rankle anybody. I'm a professional rankler. I see limitations that I think that if they move past it, they could even do better work, because I don't know what the statistics are, but the best statistics I've seen about the 12 steps is they help about 20% of the people. Now, I think that's great and it's as good as it gets, but I think it could get better. What if they actually, for example, formally incorporated trauma awareness. Now, I know that the trauma awareness can come up for some people in the 12-step program, but it's rather haphazard. And Bill W. himself was a traumatized child abandoned by his parents. Why don't we talk about that more? It would really help people tremendously. I've had a lot of people tell me who've being through 12 steps who read my book or heard my podcast on addiction and they say, "Thank you. It finally makes sense to me." So, it would take nothing away from the 12 steps to be more trauma-informed. It would also take nothing away from the 12 steps to use the language, so, "I'm Rich, I'm an alcoholic." "I'm Gabor, and I'm an addict," so on, but at the same time recognizing that no, and that's not exactly who I am either. That's just an aspect of who I am. I don't think it would take away from the 12 steps to recognize those things. I'm not rankled. Okay, good. I can hear that. I'm interested in how that would be. Like, if you were gonna update the big book or rewrite the steps, how that could be practiced. Oh, that somewhere, I understand that this addiction that I have is not a disease that I inherited, but it's my attempt to escape from pain that I endured when I was too small to do anything about it. And the more I learn about that pain, the less I'll inflict those imprints on myself and on the people around me. How about that? That's actually beautiful, I like that. Yeah, I'm of two minds on one aspect of it, which is I think it's really important and beautiful and powerful for people to get up and vulnerably and honestly to the best of their ability share their story. And I get a lot of nourishment out of hearing that and I get a lot of nourishment out of sharing it, but I can't help but also think, by continuing to do that year after year, after year, after year, is that not cementing something that need not be cemented. It sounds like I'm over-identifying with this thing that happened and saying this is the most important thing and I can't forget this, and I need to understand that this is who I am by crafting an identity around that that perhaps is at odds with the transcendent state that I seek. Well, first of all, I didn't say you had to keep doing it for year after year, after year. I just have to incorporate it somewhere in the process, number one. Number two, let me ask you a question, if I may turn it around. I've been waiting for you to turn it around. Okay, you said in the very beginning, you've been at a 12-step for 20 years now, is that the case? Oh yeah, over 20 years, since '98. Okay, great, 24 years. I had a relapse. Yeah, okay. Well, okay, that's good. So, all those years you've been pursuing the path. That's good.
Right. Salute you for it. And you said that my work made a huge difference to you in the beginning, I heard you say that. What difference did my work make to you? The difference that it allowed me to think about and confront and begin to deconstruct the childhood trauma piece in a compassionate way. And how did that help you? Well, how it's helped me is it's given me peace and solace. Like, I've been able to make peace with my upbringing, and that in turn has dramatically impacted my relationship with my parents in a very healing way. And how about with children? And yes, and then I wanted to ask you about parenting because that in turn has been very informative in thinking about how I parent my children from a perspective of nurturing and trying not to make the mistakes that could unduly or unnecessarily-- Okay, so, good. Here's my question to you then. Then what's the problem? What do you mean? Well, did it make you stuck in some victim role dealing with that trauma? No. So, it doesn't need to, that's the whole point. Yeah. Actually, what I hear you saying is that you did the 12 steps, they were wonderful for you, they continue to be wonderful for you, but this trauma awareness added another dimension. Yeah, and I'm not resisting that. I told you I think that that would be wonderful-- No, I know you're not resisting, but you're asking me, the question, if I understand you, was asking me, will it make people stuck in the victim role? I'm saying no. Right, I think I was asking more about the self-identification piece, like, in the construct of 12 step where the meetings have a very particular kind of structure to them, right? And it's that one thing that you do, and doing that year after year, after year, does that unduly craft kind of a solidified identity around an aspect of your life that remains kind of untouched. You know what I mean? So, it was less about pushing back on you and trying to better understand the therapeutic dynamic of 12 steps. Okay, yeah, now I understand. Look, I think that's for people in the 12 steps to answer, but it's a good question to raise, is how are we doing things, at the same time, is it helping us gain agency over addictive patterns? Is it also entrenching us in a kind of self-identity? Yeah, that's the part of-- It's not for me to tell you that, 'cause I've not been in the movement, but I think it's a really good question to raise within the, so, that's another question to raise within the 12-step movement. In other words, it's a movement like any other. It can be dynamic. It can both honor its founding principles and at the same time evolve. And I think trauma awareness and discretion of self-identification would be good questions to raise within the 12-step movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's tricky. I mean, when I mentioned a few moments ago that I'd relapsed at over 10 years in, I had a very brief relapse and I was back in the meetings right away, but it was quite the wake up call. And I can tell you that when I picked up, it's that adage of your addiction is doing pushups in the dark just waiting for that moment. It was very much the case. And it was frightening because all the work that I had done and the thousands of meetings and treatment and the like, it was shocking how I could just forget that in a moment and be immediately back right where I was when I stopped thinking... So, in that sense of like, in recovery versus recovered, clearly not recovered. I had come a long way, but it was also a kind of an ego check and a dose of humility to remind me that although I have grown in many ways, that there was still so much growth there that I was in denial over confronting and dealing with. Look, so, yeah, I get it. And it's like people say to me, "Thank you for writing your books, they saved my life." And some years ago my answer would've been, "Gee, that's good, maybe I should read them myself." Yeah, we stumble and we fall and we don't live up to our own best intuitions and understandings, but I would dispute with you. You said you were back where you started, no, you weren't. You were not back where you started, you stumbled. But back when you started, they were taking you much longer to stand up again. Fair enough. And this time it didn't. So, it's not like all that work you did all of a sudden just disappeared and you had to start from the beginning. You did not have to start from the beginning. You just had to stand up again. So, even that relapse and how you dealt with it showed how much transformation is possible. And it did not in any way invalidate the fact that you're still on the path to recovery. Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely upsetting when it happened. Well, of course, it was upsetting. Yeah. Yeah, of course. And believe me, I've been there. Yeah. I think it would be helpful to share a little bit back to the parenting thing for people who have young children, who are trying to consciously guide their kids and sidestep some of these pitfalls that are unduly causing kids problems. So, I think parents are well intentioned. When everybody says, "Oh, you should let the kid cry," it's because that's what doctors and professionals and experts are telling us. I used to myself. Right, so, what are some touchdowns that you could share with people about that? Well, so there is a parenting instinct that we share with other mammals, even birds. It's instinctual. But instincts have to be evoked by the environment. So, the first thing to realize is that our environment doesn't evoke our parenting instincts if I put them to sleep. Like, if you take, for example, the case of children not being picked up when they're crying, what do the parents actually feel when they're doing that? Distress. Their heart is breaking, but to fit in with the culture and to go along with the so-called experts, and maybe for their own convenience, they actually ignore their parenting instincts. Now, the more we ignore our parenting instincts, the more they shut down. So, the first point is, for God's sake, listen to your parenting instincts. Don't listen to the experts. They don't know what the heck they're talking about. Listen to your own parenting instincts first, number one. Number two, human beings and mammals actually are evolved in a way that the most important dynamic in our lives is actually love and connection. And love and connection is the very ocean in which human life evolves. That's much more important than which parenting technique use or what. Now, this society breaks that connection very early because in the United States, 25% of women go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, that is traumatic to the child. If you look at how human beings evolved, children were with their parents all the time, they were held all the time, physically held all the time. They were not hit. And the average age of weaning was between three and five years. So, now, I'm not saying we can go back to being hunter gatherers. But I am saying that recognize that our basic needs have been in this society really denied. So, some people can't help going back to work. That's their economic situation. That's part of the toxicity of our culture. But as much as possible, at least let's see what those childrens are losing and give them as much as loving and connection as possible. Don't make it even worse by parenting practices that undermine the relationship. In this society, children get far too hooked on their peers far too early. I don't know if you read my book, "Hold on to Your Kids." No, I didn't read that one. Well, yeah, your youngest one is 14, so, might be-- Too late. Maybe, I don't know. But our children by default end up developing important relationship with one another at the expense of relationship with the parents. That's why they spend all their time on Facebook trying to connect with each other. 'Cause they're looking for contact and connection that they should have got from the adults, but they're not. And so, now they turn to each other. And each other is a very inadequate replacement for wise, nurturing adult contact. So, be aware of, we just need to be aware of all that's lost in this culture and do as much as we can to restore it within the limitations of our existence. Yeah, beautifully put. And furthermore, so much of the parenting advice to kids is about how do we get this behavior or that behavior? So, in the book, I give the example of, this is a true story of a mother yelling at a five-year-old who doesn't wanna do his homework, five-year-old. Imagine a five-year-old not wanna do his homework. He wants to play, which is-- He shouldn't have homework in the first place. No, by the way, play is an essential developmental need of human beings, as it is of all mammals. We have a system in our brain organizing on play and that has to be honored. That's why little cats and little dogs, they play a lot. It's not just fun and games. It's how their brain develops. Okay, so, this five-year-old is not doing his homework. His mother yells, "You're not thinking of your academic future." And our line in the book is, well, if the kid could yell back, he would yell, "But you're not thinking of my developmental needs." We have to honor children's developmental needs, and we have to put the developmental needs ahead over our agenda for their behaviors. If the development needs are met, they're gonna learn beautifully. You don't have to push them. They'll be curious, they'll be spontaneously interested. They'll wanna find out about things, they'll wanna gain mastery and learning will be a joy for them. That's not what we do. We demotivate them with all the pressure that we put on them. So, there's so many ways in this culture where we could do things better if we only understood what the actual needs of children were. So, what I'm saying to parent is, so, there's this book called "Cribsheet" by Emily Oster, who's a economist, I think. So, with an economist brain, she looks at all these studies and figures out what's best for kids. For God's sakes, it's all backwards. Much of the advice she gives is terrible advice on parenting. It's all designed for the parents' convenience. She's asking what do the parents need, but what the parents need in an abnormal culture, what the parents think they need in an abnormal culture is itself abnormal. And she's not asking what are the developmental needs of the child and how do we meet them? That's a very different question. It's about how to leverage the kids to make the parents feel better about themselves. Exactly. And parents should not be looking to their children to fill that hole or mend that wound within themselves. And I think that's one thing I've been trying to maintain astute awareness of because of my historical patterning and trying to resist that coming up in the way that I parent my kids, trying to love them unconditionally and to remain neutral, to not project my bullshit onto them, any of those expectations or neurosis or anxieties, which is very difficult, I'm not very good at that. And then also trying to figure out the balance or the line between the unconditional love, but not trying to get love from them to meet my own needs, just to love them. It's not the kids' job to love us, it's our job to love them. But also knowing when to have the healthy boundaries and erect the guideposts and when to say no and all of that kind of stuff. And I feel like I want my kid to like me and it's like, all of this baggage comes up that makes it really murky and challenging for me. Well, if I may give you a suggestion, there's two people I would heartily recommend for you to check out. One was Dr. Gordon Neufeld, N-E-U-F-E-L-D. And he's a psychologist in Vancouver. He's the greatest developmental psychologist in the world. And I'm saying that not because he's my friend, but because that's what I truly found. And he's the one who's the main author of this book we wrote called "Hold on to Your Kids" where parents need to matter more than the peers. That book will blow your mind, number one. Number two, Dr. Dan Siegel here in Los Angeles, who's written a book called "Parenting from the Inside Out." And it's all about how not to project all your stuff on your kids, and how to recognize when you're doing it. So, I think that Gordon would be an amazing guest for you. And I think Dan Siegel would be an amazing guest for you. I just wrote both of their names down. Sorry? I just wrote both of their names down. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, check out those books. And I think those be, if you wanna talk to parents and if you wanna enhance your own parenting, you could really learn from those people. Right, final thing, just 'cause I have you here and I have to ask 'cause this is just going on right now. So, I have two teenagers, and part of that phase of life is disconnecting a little bit from the parents and developing their own agency. And there's a little bit of emotional withdrawal going on right now which is natural at some level. But as a parent, it's sort of like suddenly this person who you thought you knew becomes a complete mystery and is less demonstrative about their interior life. And I'm always like, "How do I find a way in?" How can I maintain that open communication and that level of connection when there is a natural pulling back that should be sort appreciated at the same time? Well, that's a very delicate question you just asked, because that withdrawal on your child's part can mean one of two things. It could mean a healthy individuation, which is what nature intends for them. They need to individuate, they need to become separate autonomous people with self-agency. So, it could reflect that, but it could also reflect an alienation from you and a moving deeper into the peer group, which is not a sign of individuation, but a sign of conformity. So, it's hard to know. If you look at, I think reading "Hold on to Your Kids" would really help you with that one. But at the same time, if you look at traditional societies, young people did know withdraw from their parents. They became individuals in connection with their parents. In fact, they were initiated into adult society by the older generations. So, individuation and maturation, becoming your own person doesn't necessarily involve, in fact, does not involve alienation from the parental generation. I think that's very much an artifact of our culture. So, I don't know what's going on with your particular kid, but it could be a healthy sign or somewhat of a not so healthy withdrawal. And I'd have to know more about it to tell you which it is, but it's important to consider which it is. Yeah, I'm gonna think about that. That's actually really helpful. Yeah.
Yeah. I think we have to let you go, which is a shame 'cause I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours, but I really appreciate your time today. I say this in all honesty and earnestness, "The Myth of Normal," I really think is a groundbreaking book. Perhaps your most I impactful book to date, and that's saying a lot because "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts," I know has been so instrumental in my life and in the lives of millions of people. So, you're a gift, my friend, and I wish you well, and I'm at your service if there's anything I can do to help you. In the meantime, everybody who's watching or listening, please pick up "The Myth of Normal," it comes out September 13. Yeah. And if you haven't read "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts," it's mandatory reading for anybody who wants to better understand not just addiction, but humanity really. And I think just to close this out, what we do need above all in this kind of conversation about moving back to a holistic relationship with ourselves or others in the planet, is a return to empathy and deeper understanding, which is at the core of all of your work, right? It's like to understand these things, you can't help but develop a greater capacity for empathy, for the painful human condition that on some level we all experience, and I find you to be a deeply empathetic person, and it's no mystery that this work has become, that is a passion for you is so impactful for so many other people. Well, thank you. And let me end with a quote from one of my mentors. A.H. Almaas is a psychologist spiritual leader. And he says that only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth. And so, my commitment is just to speak the truth as I see it and to see it as clearly as I can. And for that, you both need compassion, and the more you see the truth, the more compassion actually becomes a natural attribute of how you move in the world. Beautiful, thank you. Well, thank you. Come back again sometime. Thank you.
All right, peace. Yeah.
Bless. (soft instrumental music)
