Dr. Gabor Maté Interview | The Tim Ferriss Show

gobbler welcome to the show Tim it's a great pleasure to be here thank you I have been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time and I wanted to make an attempt at least to do it right so I wanted to have the video and the audio and everything else because I think the work you're doing is very important and we're going to cover a lot of ground which I'm very excited to cover because I think it's a real contribution and you have tools and frameworks can really help people I thought we might start with ebooks and the reason I thought that could be a fun place to start my audience loves books number one but number two in tribal mentors the last book that I wrote or that my guests wrote you were featured and I thought that many of the books you mentioned paint a picture of your life experience and also your life's work in many ways and we can go in any particular order but I thought maybe it would make sense to start with the scourge of the swastika and that was one that you mentioned had had an impact on you or that perhaps you recommended on occasion why is that well so this has to do with my family's history I grew up was born in Budapest Hungary in 1944 in January two months before the Germans occupied the country and hungry at that time was the only country in Eastern Europe where the Jewish population had not been annihilated and now it was our turn so I was two months of age the day after the German army marched into Budapest my mother phoned the pediatrician to say would you please come and see gob oh of course he's crying all the time and the pediatrician said of course I will come but I should tell you all my Jewish days of her crying and of course that's the infant's picking up on her mother's terror and stress and that's how I spent the first year of my life which is had a huge impact on my development and my lifelong struggles with depression and ADHD self Shayne and I know other issues jumping ahead now I knew very little about that history my parents didn't say much about it as I was growing up I knew my grandparents had been killed in Auschwitz I knew my father had been in forced labor and I never saw him for a year and a half but beyond that I knew not much about the details until I was about nine or 10 maybe 11 years old and it was a book on my parents shelf in Budapest with the title the scourge of the swastika wishes were written by a British civil servant and a member of the House of Lords this man had served at the British Army and he was the first book published in the 50s that detailed the Nazi crimes and I climbed up on a chair took down the book when I was I think 10 or 11 began to read it saw photographs of the horrors of the concentration camps and the extermination details in Eastern Europe and all of a sudden I swooned because I got what happened to my family and that question of how can people do such things to other human beings which strike me every day and in almost every day this thought occurred to me for years and years and years almost every day I almost got dizzy with the question so why people suffer and my people make other people suffer and what is the original all that has been a motivating question in my life so that's why that book was so important to me thank you and and I have to say that you know my life's work has been motivated by that question as a medical doctor I'm always looking at what is it that makes people be the way they are why do we come cruel why to become victims why do we become perpetrators what drives us what kind of insanity covers our basic human nature which I believe to be good and and and positive and what happens to us we're gonna spend a lot of time in that territory for sure okay Cement insanity or insanity I'm not sure if that's a good segue to Don Quixote but I'll let you choose the next one so there are a few that came up and you described them in brief in the pages of the book but for instance the background you just gave me it was much more in-depth so we have a few and these are gonna strike folks as eclectic we need the puh the Dhammapada the drama of the gifted child and Don Quixote which one of those would you like to explain next Chloe the bend of the pool let's go with Winnie the Pooh yeah so that was one of the seminal books of my childhood and my parents would have read to me long before I even knew how to read the Hungarian title is mitzi mud school and it was finally Moscow Mitzi Mitsuko Mitzi the bear and the translator is the great hunger and humorist so if anything the Hungarian book is even funnier than the original English which is not something one usually says about translations but what's talking about pool of course was number one that there was this bear of little brains who was some of so much wiser than everybody else so fundamental he found the piece inside despite the fact that his intellect is just under functioning number one number two there was this relationship with the little boy Christopher Robin and there's a passage towards the end of the book where Christopher Robin I don't even know the real story in fact there's a movie there's a movie about it right now but but Christopher Robin his father a EML was a writer and he bought these toys for his son to make stories about them and Christopher Robin actually suffered because he was secondary to his father's career they did not have a good relationship so these characters that the father Mia made up kind of dominated and squeezed out Christopher Robin's own life and himself became a bookseller later in his life and he wrote about his autobiography so there's something about the dysfunctionality and father-son relationship but in the book Christopher is playing with his toys and then he starts to grow up and he has to go to school and he won't be able to play with his toys anymore and at the very end of the book there's a passage where the book ends with but wherever they go in the enchanted forest the little boy as bear will always be playing together and that would just bring tears to my eyes for decades upon decades upon decades until recently I had a an experience actually a psychedelic experience when I realized that there's nothing to mourn because I'm both the bear and the little boy and I was will be playing that nothing is lost but when I read that book there was a sense of loss when I read that passage was always something's being lost childhood innocence is being lost playfulness is being lost which resonated with my own shot because I did lose innocence and and then playfulness very early in life so both for the fun and the humor then of course dizzy or for whom everything always goes badly and it's a part of me that's totally or always expecting the worst and nothing will ever work out for me and never mind leave me alone I'm okay in my own suffering you know that that's sort of determined victim attitude that was also very much too germane to my inner experience so that book just spoke to me and made me laugh and it still does it's one of the funniest books ever written and one of the wisest as well I need to I've only I am ashamed to say this but I've only seen the cartoon oh right I know I know but listen listen one of the sins that Walt Disney is gonna be burning in hell for the rest of existence is what he did with those the stories as he Disney fight them I didn't find them you you you got to read the original do ya and and you you would laugh your head off guard amen amen I wish I spoke Hungarian so I could read the translation which of these would you like to and we can certainly touch on other books but so we have three three remaining on my list the Dhammapada the drama of the gifted child and Don Quixote well let's go to the drama of the gifted child into the drum of the gifted child is by a Swiss German Jewish Swiss psychotherapist named Alice Miller who was for three decades a psychoanalyst but she realized that the Freudian psychical psychoanalytic method wasn't helping anybody get better because it ignored trauma so the drama of the gifted child the German title of which was prisoners of childhood was really all about the fact that stuff happens to us as children negative things happen then we adapted those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being and then we leave the rest of our lives from those defensive modes so we're not actually experiencing the present but constantly reliving the past from a perspective that we acquired when we were helpless and vulnerable children and when she says the gifted shot she means a sensitive child so the more sensitive the child is the more he or she feels the pain and stress of the environment and the more affected they are and the more that shapes their lives and that book came along for me when I was in my 40s and I was a successful doctor and and and and and I was a father but I was depressed I was anxious I was a driven workaholic you wouldn't have known that when you saw me on the job but inside me I was discouraged I had difficulties in my marriage with my children I felt they were afraid of me and they were because of my rages and that book helped me understand it was the first book to help me understand where all that came from so that was for me as for many of the people a seminal read and really my whole work since then has been to help liberate people from that prison the childhood often imposes on so many of us this book has come up repeatedly in my life as a recommendation as a recommended YA book from friends who benefited from it they are very certainly from any outward perspective highly functioning yeah in some cases world-class performers in their fields and I'm in retrospect sad that I ignored those recommendations but it was in part because I didn't like the pairing of gifted child I didn't want to label myself given child we could certainly psychoanalyze that but I was like hmm if this is a book written for people who are in say gifted and talented programs or have some god-given talent for whatever reason I had resistance to that so I didn't read it but the prisoners of childhood makes a lot more sense to me anyway well I think it's a more accurate title but there's two things I would say in response first of all why do you resist your own giftedness you're clearly gifted so why would you not want to find out about that don't know yeah so that's that's something you might want to consider sure number one number two really what she means is the sensitive child yeah so sensitive yeah I that would draw me in because I've had we don't have to necessarily go down this rabbit hole right now but I've had a number of my friends recently asked me when did you know you were so sensitive yeah and not sensitive in a in a hyper reactive way not in a negative way just in a perceptive way and I'd never thought of myself it would never have occurred to me to label myself sensitive and just in the last year I've been thinking about that so this the sensitive child would make make more more sensor be more appealing well yeah you have to think of sensitive in terms of its word origin the word sensitive came so in the Latin word sense here to feel so the sensitive person feels more yeah so the example I often give is and enacting lead to both very positive and very difficult consequences for example if I tapped you on the shoulder right now you wouldn't feel any pain at all but if you're not wearing a shirt and and your skin was exposed furthermore if you're a burn on your shoulder so your nerve endings were close to the surface if I attack you with the same force you'd feel extreme excruciating pain even though the external event was no different right so sensitivity magnifies the pain that we have sensitivity also leads to more creativity so very often the most creative people also have the most pain which is my so many creative people escape from their pain through all kinds of dysfunctions like addictions and so on so there's a real link between creativity and sensitivity and create the video and and sensitivity and suffering at the same time that's the first point that would make no the other thing goes back to what you said about these people that you know of or high performers look at that word performers what does it mean to perform one meaning of it is to put on a show sure that's one meaning and I would have been one of these people who was a high performer in other words look that's from the outside a successful funny doctor director of a palliative care unit at a major hospital national columnist for Canadian newspaper writing medical columns performing at a high level and inside again anxious frustrated depressed discouraged and in my personal life a lot of suffering so a lot of people who perform well are actually deeply troubled inside and of course there's many famous examples of that some of the greatest performers like Presley or melon Munroe and any number of people like a name that's what they were they were performers and even from themselves they hid their own suffering well we are sitting in a venue right now recording this that is is now known as lzr and there is a mural of prints outside because he performed his as I understand at last performance in this venue really before he passed away before he overdosed before he overdosed yeah exactly and we can certainly come back to this but part of the reason I wanted to big piece of the reason I wanted to have you on this show was that I spent I'm in a much better place now for many reasons that maybe outside of this interview but feeling the exact same way you just described yeah outwardly successful inwardly tortured yeah and how do you answer the question if someone meets you and you just have a short interaction what do you do what do I do if someone asks you yeah what do you do I may be self-serving but some people once called me up people whisper people whisper I I do have a gift for seeing inside because I've studied I'm also sensitive and in some ways and I've also studied myself very deeply I've had to because my life just wasn't working and as a medical doctor I've worked with all manner of conditions terminal diseases newborns families physical illnesses mental dysfunctions I spent 12 years working with addictions I spent on exploring my own and other people's ADHD and so I work with people to bring out the truth of their experience so that they're no longer prisoners of their childhood but that they can make a conscious choice about how to live in the present moment not based on how they were programmed and charted and but for that you have to do it in a way that the dog whisperer do in a very compassionate way otherwise people just shut down and and and they they shrivel up and they protect themselves so that's what I do and I know I also write and I speak publicly and so on but the intent is always to bring insight and liberation to people so I'm going to come back to the medicine because I'd love to know when your journey into medicine began but first since I know my listeners will say but you forgot the other two books the other talks the Dhammapada Don Quixote in any order you like well let's go in the order that I discovered them which is Don Quixote which again I read that as a child and then reread many times as an adult and he's my favorite character so Quixote is this deluded Spanish small nobleman who wants to revive the age of chivalry and chivalric knighthood so he guessed his broken-down horse called Rocinante and he is Lance and his sword and his he gets this Squire called Sancho Panza on his donkey and off they go to these adventures and he does not see reality he thinks windmills are Giants and he attacks them and of course he gets hurt and he keeps getting hurt because because he doesn't see reality he but his heart is purely committed to liberating people to truth to justice to to fighting oppressors to liberating the oppressed so here's this guy who really wants to do good in the world and he's just deluded in his vision but he's far truer and deeper and more human than all the people that scoff at him and laugh at him so what a great character and the book is both poignant and very funny and it's he's one of the great creations of world literature and of course again you know that yearning for justice has always burned in my heart owing to what happened to me and what I witnessed in the Dhammapada the demo part is the Buddha's collection of sayings and it begins with basically the idea that we create the world with our minds he says everything is thought in the lead so how we see the world is how it determines the world that we live in so if I see the world as a horrible place according the current president the United States then I will be defensive and aggrandizing and selfish because I want to take before they take from me I want to attack before I get attacked I'll also be too looking out for myself because the world is not to be trusted so if that's the world you live in that's the way you're gonna create and the Buddha was great psychologist immature recognize that our perceptions shaped the world that we live in now what he didn't say and that's where modern psychology comes in is that before with our mind we create the world the world creates our minds mm-hmm so that the kind of world that we live in is very much shaped by early experiences Buddha didn't say that but into certainly enough when you think about his search for truth what happened to him if you read his biography his mother died before he was a week old so he's lost his most important relationship so his life began with suffering and then he spent all his life trying to find a nature of suffering and how to transcend suffering and how to get beyond it and this is how he ended up with this particular method of meditation and contemplation and truth seeking so that book was written twenty twenty five hundred years ago and psychologically we still catch it trying to catch up to the wisdom in it so let's talk about wisdom or perhaps science first yeah and maybe they're related in some fashion although I know we'll dig into certainly some things that might be missing when did medicine enter your life for an interest in medicine interest in being a doctor either of those things well I've speculated on that and there's a number of sources strangely enough or not so strange enough my grandfather who was killed in Auschwitz in his 50s happened to be a writer and a doctor grandson ends up as a writer and a doctor so I think part of it was me trying to fill a hole in my mother's life that was a devastating blow to her this is not conscious but I'm speculating looking back it's not that she ever said you have to become a doctor it's not that she ever said you have to follow in your grandfather's footsteps but I think I consciously I stepped into that role number one number two another reason is that as a Jew in Eastern Europe you had every reason to feel insecure and my mother never failed to tell me that as a doctor you carry your profession in your hands so you don't have to have a business you don't have to have riches you just have to have the knowledge and then you can go anywhere in the world and you'll be okay beyond that healing and and and and and making this world a better place and he'll have people help people lead healthy lives was just an ideal of mine then there was like a testicle reasons that say said doctors get respect they revolve they have a good income people look up to them and they have a sense of authority that I think I lacked in my own life so it was a combination of unconscious reasons and and and and idealistic reasons and legatus typical reasons but but all I know is that all my life I had wanted to be nothing else for the doctor I always grew up knowing I'll be a physician and when you were studying medicine what did you think your specialty or specialties might be well first of all I should say I didn't end up following the dream because uh I in my late teens I just couldn't concentrate and study hard enough to get through the sciences I could get through them but I couldn't get the high marks needed to get to medical school so I actually taught high school for three years I taught English and history for three years and then I would wake up and and this voice in me you could be a doctor you gotta be a doctor and so that I went back to medical school and a lot of hard work already having been an older student in medical school and being interested in history and literature and a larger picture I always wanted to put medicine in the context of history and the context of society in the context of human experience not just as an isolated science but as part of the broader human experience and I was interested right away from the in the beginning between in the connections between emotions and illness between social factors and and health and so on so I was always a larger picture person and so that is that was with me already in medical school so the integration of mind and body as opposed to these Cartesian duality and separation of mind and body exactly not that anything in medical school prepared me for that I mean in medical school users don't get that information at all but that was always my interest and then when I started practicing if your eyes are at all open you just can't you can't help but to see it that who gets sick and who doesn't is an accidental and who gets cancer who gets doesn't isn't accidental and who gets addicted and who doesn't isn't accidental no there was this reasons and those reasons go beyond individual and it has to do with their emotional lives and their relationships and a society in the culture that they live in so more and more over the decades my own personal struggles and my medical experience showed me that these connections are important how did you end up in palliative care and I suppose for those people listen you don't know what palliative care is perhaps you could give just a brief explanation of what that is some people might think of it as hospice care which which I'm not I don't think are necessarily identical but well how did you end up what was the road to palliative care and what is palliative care so I was a family physician and a very driven one and also have a GED which means that you want to move around and have different experiences you know because you get tired of the same thing and really in retrospect I might say that there's some guidance in all this but how it occurred was a series of accidents so I've happened to be walking down the hall of Vancouver's major hospital when the current director of palliative care said I'm quitting how would you like to come and work in palliative care and I said sure you know I didn't think it took me I'm not a moment to think about it he was just looking for someone to grab sure thank you what is that and deeply meaning for a work because when people are facing death they also call come up against the truth of their lives and and and if you can face death you can face life impaler difficulty with the transition with terminal illness these are people with video from nothing curative or healing is going to happen in the sense of physical healing so they need to be helped with their symptoms with their pain or ability or weakness or nausea but also you have to help them go through the psychological process of adjusting to a very short future and the people who get drawn to palliative care work the nurses and the doctors tend to be a special breed it's not because many doctors are not comfortable with death they're not comfortable with not being able to do something to save somebody so you have to develop a lot of patience and a lot of acceptance you have to let go of your power to change things so it's deeply meaningful and deeply transformative work and you also have to work with a lot of people with multiple different attitudes towards life and there's religious non-religious spiritual non-spiritual in denial in acceptance in all the stages in between so it was beautiful beautiful work and I am highlights of my my medical career all the same time I was still doing my family practice in when did when did a focus on addiction or an a an acute interest in addiction start to steer your medical practice so I was a family physician I've always had substantive iyx in my practice it's just a few and again it was an accident I got fired from a palliative care job and my my argument is that I was fired for gross competence just too damn good but also for gross arrogance in other words with my spontaneous and insightful and rather radical non-traditional style I could have great results and often did in palliative care if I may interrupt for one second what would be or might be an example of your approach that others thought was radical or something you would say or something you would do with a patient that's that that got great results but that would seem very radical to others well I would engage them in deep conversations stuff would come up with I'll be painful but would be transformative physically I would just use methods that have not been proven but accorded the right to me and they've seemed to be helpful and helping people out of pain or deal with issues and so on I was very open and and multiple approaches I wasn't just following things by the book so that was my competence the arrogance was that I had a very busy life I was still delivering babies running my family practice so I would get into palliative care and then the nurses said working with me was like working in the eye of a tornado and other physicians who didn't have my attitude or my particular mindset would legitimately question what I was doing but I would regard all such questioning as an attack rather than as an inquiry and I would react like a bulldog who's being threatened and that's the arrogance and that's what ended up letting me be fired and and it was a great firing because as always I learned a lot about myself took me a while but it took and then three weeks after I was fired I got this phone call from from our clinic in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside now the downtown east side of Vancouver is North America's most concentrated area of drug use we have more injection users in this few scrub book radius than anywhere in North America so I get this call saying how would you like to come and work down here and this is three weeks after fired from platter of care had I not been fired I couldn't have taken that other job which then led me to the high point for my career which is working twelve years with addicted population and eventually leaving family practice and doing that full-time so who orchestrated all this I have no idea but it was a beautiful progression something that's come up quite a bit in interviews on this podcast is some variation of sometimes you need life to save you from what you want to give you what you need exactly and I think about that a lot at the very least it's a it's a pain relieving lens through which to view events that unfold how how do you define addiction or maybe a better question is what is addiction and and along with that if you want to tackle it you know what are poor definitions of addiction or misconceptions fair enough so an addiction is a complex psychological physiological process but which manifests in any behavior any behavior that a person enjoys that a person enjoys finds relief in and therefore craves in a short-term but suffers negative consequences in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences so craving pleasure relief in the short term negative consequences in the long term inability to give it up no notice I has said nothing about substances I said any behavior so it could be related to cocaine crystal meth heroin fentanyl marijuana nicotine alcohol whatever could also be sex gambling internet relationships shopping were eating work extreme sports working out for nog Rafi any number of human activities so I said any behavior now the official definition of addiction according to the American Society for addiction medicine is that this is primarily a blink it's a primary brain disorder it arises in the brain role largely due to genetic reasons this is how they see it and I say that's just not true the other popular idea what addiction is that it's a choice that somebody makes that people choose to be addicted which is what the legal system is based on because if people are not choosing what are we punishing them for and and so I although I think the medical definition is closer to the truth I don't see it as genetic it's a genetic disorder and I don't see it as a primary brain disorder so let me perhaps show you why if that's okay so I give you this definition of addiction again craving relief pleasure shorter negative cost of my long-term inability to give it up would you be willing to tell me if you've ever done an addiction in your life I don't care what - what I'm not asking what oh yeah oh I can I can say yes and I can tell you exactly what it was okay all I in high school so I saw I suffered for from that's what I suppose most people would consider depressive periods beginning at latest age 10 right and never found relief from that until I was competing in wrestling very seriously in high school all throughout high school and an older teammate introduced me to a federal so stimulant a federal hydrochloride which for those people who are curious is well at least at one point ephedrine was found at were at the very least pseudoephedrine in something called primatene mist used for asthma right and I think they also mix it with guaifenesin nonetheless the reason you cannot buy in many places large amounts of primatene mist is because people free based it into methamphetamine yes right so you have a federal which is a very strong stimulant combined with caffeine and aspirin and we have combined those three it's not an incremental increase in effect it's I mean it's probably logarithmic it's a very synergistic effect exponentially herbs exactly and he was recommending it for increased endurance and there there is some effect although it's also very highly thermogenic which wasn't good for me so made me really hot which was already a weakness of mine but it ended up providing me with relief it was a very strong stimulant and I began to not only use it for sports but self-medicate using it okay so great so let me quickly ask you what did it do for you relief from what uh it's it's it made me or at least contributed to euphoria optimism energy so I didn't I didn't didn't feel these symptoms of what I in retrospect I would call depression the lethargy the pessimistic lens through which I viewed things fair enough it seemed to magically just erase all of that in about 30 minutes so you folio literally means a good feeling you gave you energy it gave you make you feel good it made you optimistic also improved sports performance my mom sure did yeah all those good things are bad things to feel optimistic those are all good things okay in other words the addiction wasn't your primary problem your primary problem is that you're depressed right like you lacked a sense of well-being that you lacked energy right so in other words the addiction is not the primary problem it's an attempt to solve a problem right and then the real question is how did the problem arise right in other words this is where my theory is that it's always rooted in childhood trauma and that the addiction is an attempt to deal with the effects of childhood trauma which it does temporarily while it creates even more problems in a long-term right I would have one more side question for you given that statement with your drug of choice this may not be true for you but do you think retrospect you might have ADHD is a kid quite possibly because typically people with ADHD self-medicate with stimulants yeah because hardly treat ADHD now we give people stimulants yeah so so a lot of people that choose stimulants of self-medication like nicotine and caffeine and crystal meth and a third man are actually self-medicating IDIA suits very likely yeah and I was punished by teachers for I wouldn't say not paying attention but being interested in other things in class so I remember very distinctly my kindergarten teacher I'll name her by name because it's shameful mrs. MS Bevin or mrs. Bevan hmm I refuse to learn the alphabet because she wouldn't give me a good reason why I needed to learn the alphabet it was just you need to learn the alphabet so she made me eat soap in front of the class and put me at the bad table she got was that too but I was always interested in doing many many many things and in fact the reason one of the reasons that I started wrestling is because I was very hyperactive and as I believe the story goes other mothers recommend it to my mom that she put me into something called kiddie wrestling to drain my batteries before I got home mm-hmm so that makes perfect sense I've never been drawn to depressants we've never been drawn to opiates in fact after surgeries I get very sick if I'm given vicodin or anything like that so I've opted out and have never personally had any issues with alcohol although a lot of people do it's always been a drought of stimulants yeah and once the we don't have to go down this this this path because I want to I want you to be able to focus on on these these definitions but where I got myself into trouble was having never been physically addicted to any substance before mm-hmm I started using the ECA stack once a day my friend was using it twice a day I started using it twice a day and then I start using it three times a day develop a tolerance very quickly right more and more and if you stopped withdrawal symptoms or absolutely something I had never experienced that so I continued after sports to use this and certainly in the long term there are some some very nasty side effects but I didn't stop me for many many years well so there's a great link between ATD and addictions and not just because they both begin with the same three letters and I can tell you about my own ADHD and this is a way to go back to childhood again so that tuning out that absent-mindedness the desire to scatter your attention all over the place that's not a disease they say it's a inherited disease the hell it is that tuning out divided attention is actually but let me give you a personal question again if I were to become abusive towards you right now verbally or otherwise what would be your options right now I could ignore you but that's not what you would do first is it not likely I mean I would right now I would probably just listen and pause my I shut down off and if I get attacked verbally because I don't want to respond with rage which has historically been my response I hear you but but let's get a bit more basic about it the rational response if I were to become abusive would be for you to just assert yourself saying don't talk to me that way right or will be to leave saying this in two years over mm-hmm and if for some reason you had not the strength to do it either of those there's other people in the room here with us you could ask for help right but what if you couldn't escape fight back or seek help then you would shut down or tune out right now there's the tuning out is simply a defensive response on the part of the brain now put me back into my infancy when my mother's so grief-stricken that I'm crying cause she's in pain and I'll read you a quote here if I may yes please and this has to do with the sensitive child the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering and going on its immediate environment the child is aware of his own body and can also feel the tension rigidity and pain in the body of the mother of anyone else he's with if the mother suffering the baby suffers too the pain never gets discharged the organism does not develop the confidence that it can regulate itself that things will happen the way they should hence lack of optimism okay you know mama didn't abuse me she did her best to look after me but she was stressed depressed terrorized geef stricken I'm picking that up as a sensitive infant can I fight back change the situation or escape none of those what can I do nothing I can do my brain will tune out as a way of dealing with the stress so I'm not talking about abuse here understand what stress muttering or parenting the child's brain then we'll tune out when is the trust painting to newing out when the brain is developing so the tuning out then becomes programmed in is the default setting and that's why a DD so not an inherited disease it's not a disease at all it begins as a coping mechanism which then gets programmed the brain and there's a lot of these early coping mechanisms function they you in the short-term create problems in the long-term and that's a TD is one of these examples and of course it also most more poem makes you more prone to be addicted because now when you tune out life becomes less interesting you shut down emotional you protect yourself now you feel depressed what does depression actually means you said you were depressed what a depression mean to depress something is to push it down what do people push it on in depression they pushed on their emotions why would they because the emotions are too painful so even depression becomes as a coping mechanism you push it down so you don't feel the pain but then later on that interferes with your life functioning so it all begins as a coping mechanism and later on becomes a source of dysfunction and all this is happening when the brain is actually developing which we can talk about later so these are the links I began to make including after I was diagnosed with it so I and then despite the fact that a couple of my kids were diagnosed I knew that this wasn't the genetic disease that what it is actually is a coping mechanism and had which got programmed to the brain and then when I read the literature on brain development Wow terms of the human brain is shaped by the environment and particularly by the adult child relationships and so it all began to make perfect sense to me so there's a few things I'd love to underscore or reiterate because I think they're very student very helpful and certainly if I had had some of these reframes I think that I would have been able to be proactive with working on a lot of my own issues much much earlier mm-hmm me too by the way yeah for instance so we can come back to this I'm actually just going to mention two things and then we can we can go where that takes us but the first is rather than asking why the addiction asking why the pain so instead of looking at the the consequences looking at the causes there and not confusing the these symptoms with the causes so instead of asking why the addiction asking why the pain and the the other this this might take a moment for me to read but I think it's worth reading and I should say that compassion for addiction this is an organization co-founded by you yourself and Vicki I'm gonna make a guess I've never actually said her last name but do lie or do lie Vicki just for for context for folks who are wondering I was actually the very first person about five years ago to recommend that we meet and then I took a note of it in a notebook I still have and that's part of the reason that I reached out for the book and just because we may revisit this I met Vicki at a gathering at the home of someone named George Sarlo right who has a lot in cares a lot of common background with you and certainly common interests but what we'll come back to that the part that I wanted to read is is the following and I'm gonna make my make an attempt here alright so the mainstream view of addiction you mentioned this compared to the clinical perspectives that addiction is a matter of individual choice moral failure or weakness which is why so many approaches are based on deterrence and Punishment which includes self-help approaches for that matter that that I've attempted myself the clinical view is that addiction is a disease of the brain with disordered brain circuits and behaviors and accurate yet narrow perspective so I think that's that's a really important aligned and accurate yet narrow perspective so perhaps accurate but incomplete right it is accurate that in the addicted brain that the addicted brain is demonstrably a physiologically dysfunctional brain but narrow because it seeks to explain the dysfunction in strictly physiological and biochemical terms without recognize the emotional and social component of how the brain works and this was really driven home for me recently in the last several years I've gotten to know Tony Robbins yes and I attended an event not too long ago with several of my very close friends called date with destiny and at this event he asks the audience of 5,000 people how many people here know someone who takes antidepressants pretty much every hand goes up how many people here know someone who takes antidepressants yet is still depressed and is probably 80% of the people who raise their hands the first time and I personally know quite a few people who take antidepressants which seem to help on some level yeah although the tolerance for some of these pharmaceuticals can also be developed very quickly and yet if if my experience is anything like the experience of or I should say if the experiences of other people is anything like my personal experience with friends let's say you have depression you witness these thought patterns and verbal patterns that can take them from the highest high or just a baseline of optimism and drive them back into depression and so they're just it seems to be just from an empirical or observational standpoint more to the story and so I really appreciate you putting into words what I've grasped to try to understand and also convey so with this definition of addiction how do you work with patients well mm-hmm let's go back to what I said what you quoted me saying not why the addiction but why the pain so if we understand that addiction in every case is rooted in some painful internal experience and that in when you ask people what does the addiction do for you they'll say it numbs me it soothes the pain it makes me feel connected with other people it gives me a sense of control it gives me inner peace or the lack of inner peace the lack of control the lack of connection they all forms of emotional pain if I ask the question not why the addiction but why the pain then that leads to an examination of that person's life rather than looking just at their brain chemistry so I'm quoted from an article appeared in the journal Pediatrics which is the official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics it's about as pastiches as you can get 2012 the article comes from the Harvard Center on the developing child again a prestigious child development research institution at Harvard University this article did not present new information so much as it elegantly summarized decades of research and notice what they say they say growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity stress or instability can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning behavior health and longevity that's what I was saying before that was really adaptations like pushing down your feelings when the pushing of things are too painful we'll help you as an infant it's young young child but then they cause problems later on the tuning out that you do to protect you from the stress in your environment if you're very sensitive it doesn't take a lot of stress helps you and your but in the long term becomes the problem that's exactly what they're saying now I'll jump a few pages ahead to what they say about brain development then this is so crucial and it's so crucial because they still don't teach this to medical schools even though scientifically it's not even vaguely controversial the human brain develops an interaction with the environment it's not genetically programmed early here's what they say the architecture of the brain is constructed to an ongoing process that begins before birth continues into adulthood and establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all the health learning and behavior that follow not some of the health learning all the health learning no notice what they say first of all the architecture of the brain is constructed through ongoing process that begins before birth which already means what happens in the womb already is an impact on you so if your mother is stressed and she's got high levels of stress hormone that's already affecting your brain development and when you think all the stress pregnant women out there no wonder we've seen so many kids in trouble and we know from American Studies international studies that when mothers are stressed their placenta will naturally have more cortisol and adrenaline the stress hormone those kids will be more likely to have stress issues later on abnormal stress hormone levels even at 1 year of age behavior problems learning problems and so on which tells us a lot as to why adapted kids adopted kids have so many more problems that's another issue but the next paragraph is key the interactions of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and it's critical in critically influenced by in other words the circuitry that chemistry of the brain and which centers and which circuits and which systems develop and which neural chemicals we'll be presenting what quantities depends on the early environment and is quickly influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships particularly in the early childhood years in other words the most important influence shaping the physiological development of the brain is the quality of parent-child relationships now when parents are stressed or distracted or workaholics like I was a young parent if there's instability economic troubles relationship troubles unresolved trauma on the part of the parent loving parents who are just stressed that'll interfere with the child's brain development that's why we're seeing so much weight eh Deena so much more autism and so much of other problems because of stress in society that affects the parenting environment in other words yes there's physiological problems with the brain but it's not a genetic issue it's really at the early experience so when you look at brain scans of adults that are troubled brain scans as you do an addict's you're not just looking at the impact of addiction you're also looking at the impact of childhood trauma and childhood stress and this has been shown over and over and over and over again so there's no separation between the physiology and the psychology so if you come to me as an addict and you say I got such-and-such and I ask you what does it do for you and you say it numbs the pain that my question is where did you develop the pain what happened and then we have an inquiry and not no longer becomes a shameful thing that you chose this note doesn't mean that you're stuck with it because you've got this generating problem we get it as an adaptive response to something that happened and we can heal that the reason why addiction treatment is failing is because physicians don't understand is they keep dealing with the effects which is the addiction and the behaviors which was the effects of the addiction but not the cause which is the childhood distress and the impact to charter distress that carry into adulthood in other words hugs they're prisoners of childhood and so present methods of treatment in psychiatry and addiction medicine in childhood psychiatry deal with effects rather than causes and this is why we're so ineffective at it I've I've many questions yeah so the you know the first is just to to underscore something which is you know the our software in the genetics play a role but but it's it's not a comprehensive explanation for what we're discussing here genes can predispose but they don't predetermine what exactly no there are very few genetic diseases there's one runs in my family muscular dystrophy if you've got the gene you'll have the disease and I pet my mother had it predetermined that just predetermined very various diseases let me tell an interesting study from either Australia in New Zealand they looked at a group of people for aggression they found that the most aggressive people had a certain gene variant do you think they found the gene for aggression no they didn't because the least aggressive people in the group had the same gene so the most aggressive and the least aggressive shared the same gene as compared to the average the gene could not have been for aggression now if you actually looked at the life histories of those people the most aggressive people had been brought up in troubled sometimes abusive but always very stressed homes the least aggressive were brought up in very nurturing homes what was the gene for sensitivity the more sensitive you are the more you're gonna be affected when you brought up in a peaceful home you're gonna be that much more peaceful when you're brought up in a stormy home you're gonna be that much more aggressive so there are these predispositions but they're not for specific illnesses they are for temperament right which means that you're gonna be more or less affected by the environment and so yeah there's some pea disposing genes will be no both from animal studies in monkey studies and human studies that even you find a gene that for similar reasons predisposes somebody to addiction if that animal or if that human being is brought up in a good nurturing circumstances their risk of addiction is no greater than creatures without that gene right so it's just not a genetic disease an effect it runs in families doesn't prove anything because you know as I always point out I'm a medical doctor and if two of my kids become medical doctors or which is no danger whatsoever but if they did that wouldn't prove that the practice of medicine is a genetic disease all right all right it's it's it's not a it's not a catch-all explanation also you have I mean because of a few of the books I've written I hear a lot of stories both successful and unsuccessful about people attempting to lose weight and they'll often say well it runs in my family like my parents are fat my grandparents are fat and they'll say do you have pets I'll say yes I'll say your pets overweight no yeah my pets are fat okay that's clearly clearly not just a genetic issue well may I say something on that yeah but have you heard about the adverse childhood experiences studies the ACA studies the average child adverse child a dress childhood experiences studies you know I haven't but I feel like there's a questionnaire or a series there's a test that you can tell yeah there is so the adverse childhood experiences studies were done in California with I think seventeen fourteen or seventeen thousand adults mostly Caucasians half of them University educated and they looked at the relationship between childhood adversity and adult outcomes and an adverse childhood experience was defined as physical or sexual or emotional abuse a divorce apparent being jailed violence in the family apparent being addicted appending mentally ill apparent dying these were the main ones and for each of these adverse childhood experiences the risk of addiction goes up exponentially the risk of autoimmune disease go up the risk of depression goes up the risk of ADHD goes up the risk of relationship problems STDs everything goes up now you know how these studies started these studies started in obesity clinic the dr. Vincent felitti was a San Diego internist wonderful guy deep thinker and and researcher they noticed that at this clinic with rigorous dietary control and exercise they could help people lose weight but what do you think they couldn't do it couldn't ensure they continue those behaviors when they live exactly they couldn't have them keep it off and then felitti did something that's I have to say is unusual for a medical doctor he listened to his patients and they said don't you get it we're stuffing down our pain this is all based on shelter trauma and so obesity itself is a response to childhood trauma it's just another addiction yeah I could talk about in many ways but and the adverse childhood experiences studies have been repeated numerous times now in other countries always with the same results and so that the obesity epidemic right now is not just an epidemic of junk foods and and and and sedentary lifestyles that is true yeah those are contributing factors but but the underlying basis is people self-soothing their stresses in their lives so it's really an epidemic of stress says let me return to another point or one thing you said in passing which I'd love to dig into a little bit and that was how at the time say the example I think we were discussing well actually before that let me mention one thing so I've had my entire my full genome sequence mm-hmm a predisposition to alcoholism is very prevalent my family from a genetic standpoint just from a software basis however I mentioned earlier I never had issues with alcohols with stimulants so just just as just as a footnote but what I was going to what I'd love to ask you and then I'd really love to hear what you do with patience once you start looking at their pain and the tools you use or the approaches you use but the one of the epiphanies for me in the last very recent year or two hmm has been looking at my coping mechanisms very differently and what I mean by that is for a very long time I had certain behaviors certain defaults that I hated which of course means I'm hating a part of myself that's right and that included anger rage responses yeah use of stimulants you name it a close friend of mine who is a therapist but I've never I've never engaged him as a therapist and there's certainly plenty of bad therapists out there which i think is a separate topic nonetheless he was helping and I'm sure we'll get back to this but in preparation for a very controlled supervised psychedelic experience he was helping another friend of ours mm-hmm prepare this is with MDMA this is with ayahuasca food Iowa's cocaine and this this person had a number of addictions and she hated these addictions and she said I hate these I realized they're they're terrible they've they've ruined my life they're ruining my life and it was all a negative relationship to these behaviors and he said did these ever serve you did these ever help what did these do for you exactly and she and she described how they helped her cope with very difficult circumstances early on and he said perhaps what you should do as an exercise and what we can do is for you to effectively thank those behavior have suffer the role they played and for the necessity they filled and to then recognize you thank them for their duty effectively but to let them go because they're no longer needed and that was a huge eye-opener for me and I began to this is coinciding with a number of things and I want to take us off the rails but began to use something called loving-kindness meditation or Metta my Metta Emmy TT a meditation which I was introduced to by a gentleman from Google actually a formerly Google chade-meng tan and then also jack Kornfield who really reiterate it for me of course but I never applied it to myself I always applied this loving-kindness meditation to other people and what was recommended is that I apply that loving-kindness to these to the younger Tim to the other versions of Tim who had these behaviors that I had grown to hate and resent and to actually thank them for the role they played for instance that rage that anger was the fuel that got me out of Long Island and where I grew up there a lot of serious drug issues particularly with opiates my best friend I had a fentanyl many of my friends are addicted to opiates who I grew up with many have died and I got out because I was angry in part I think that was the fuel but that fuel ended up over the long term being very corrosive but to in a way to reconcile myself with that I had to stop resenting it and I suppose that's maybe more of a confession than a question but your comment brought it to mind and maybe as a segue I just love to hear and we can take it anywhere we want of course but once you have shifted the focus from why the addiction to why the pain and you start to work with someone what approaches have you found to help what tools well so I very much salute your friends approach it's exactly what the approach I would take myself and I call it compassionate inquiry so inquiry in a compassionate way now why did I do this but hmm why did I do this right the first one is not a question it's a statement it's a self condemnation the second one is a question mmm wonder why did this ah he soothed my pain and so what your friend said that it served you so thank it love it but let go of it is absolutely right I call it the stupid friend the stupid founders is the one who helped you in a particular way at a certain time but it can't learn that that way doesn't function anymore right that instead of helping no it's hurting so it's a friend because it's really trying to help but it's stupid because it's not learning that you no longer that three year although that's five year although that's fifteen year old you know so this not this leads to the the question of trauma because it's one thing to recognize that all this originates in shotted pain it's quite another to transform that pain and for that we have to understand what trauma is so people often think that trauma is what happens to you so trauma is a divorce when you were small and your parents fighting trauma is your mother's depression trauma as your father's alcoholism trauma is your parents argumentation traumas physical or sexual abuse or some loss those aren't the traumas those are traumatic but the trauma is not what happens to you the traumas what happens inside you and as a result of these traumatic events what happens inside you is yet you get disconnected from your emotions and you disconnected from your body and you have difficulty being in the present moment and you develop a negative view of your world and a negative view of yourself and a defensive view of other people and these perspectives keep show up in your life in the present because they're the stupid friends and so the issue is not just to recognize what happened at ten fifteen thirty however many years ago but to actually recognize their manifestations in the present moment and to transcend them and all you do that by reconnecting with yourself by restoring the connection with your body primarily and material motions that you lost and once you do when you found these things again then you have what we call recovery because what does it mean to recover something it needs to find it again so what is it that people find when they recover they find themselves and the loss of self is the essence of trauma so the real purpose of of addiction treatment mental health treatment any kind of healing is reconnection for people who are listening and want to reconnect with themselves with their bodies for instance what recommendations might you have whether that's things they can do or resources they can can look to or both or something else what what recommendations I'm sure I could actually I am a hundred percent sure because I've had people come on and for the very first time on this podcast talk about sexual abuse the interns as children and what they did to help recover from that many people listening I am sure have addictions both traumatic past experiences and trauma what what recommendations could you bake for them sure so I want to say first of all that for trauma you don't need therapy traumatic events so there's two ways to look at them one is that bad things happen I shouldn't have we've talked about those but the other way to get traumatized is when good things happen that should have happened so if the good good things didn't happen that should have happened sorry so when you look look at the Shroud of omission trauma connection with the parents not that they didn't love you not that they didn't do their best but they were too stressed traumatize distracted themselves then you didn't get the kind of attention and the kind of acceptance and the kind of attuned being with that you needed that itself can make you disconnect from yourself the child needs that acceptance that connection that attunement our brain development requires that our emotional development demands it and when we don't get it not because the parents don't love us but some people because of their own issues we can also suffer that disconnection so that's what I call developmental trauma and now how do we connect well there are many many forms of therapy it's very difficult for anybody to do this on their own some people do it I certainly couldn't do it on my own I've needed a lot of help in terms of therapy that helps me understand what happened to me and so that there's there's a reason for it so that not as if there's a reason for it then it's no longer me I'm not somebody to be ashamed of I'm just somebody developed on certain lines for some very good reasons but it's not in my deepest character and it's not who I am and I don't have to be that way that's a relief to know it's also not that I'm generically programs I'm doomed to stay that way you know number one number two you have to reconnect with the body there are various body therapies my friend Peter Levine and his somatic experiencing walking Tigers waking the time waking with her waking the tiger was his first book and he's written many wonderful books since then so somatic somatic experiencing his method is called which he develops it's brilliant there is EMDR eye movement desensitization reprogramming which is a way of bypassing the conscious mind and getting to the emotional brain and quicker than talk therapy by itself can do so it's combined with talk therapy but it takes you past just a conscious defensive egoic mind there is the emotional freedom tapping that people do there's race variations on that there is there's motor sensory integration techniques there is then there is the traditional therapies like yoga now yoga was not simply a physical modality when it first developed yoga actually means unity so the very essence of yoga is to regain that unity not just with ourselves but also with the larger creation and so yoga when it's practiced in its intended way not just the hot yoga where you get a good workout that's great and not against it but I'm talking about intentional yoga with a meditative aspect to it which is taught by a number of disciplines bodywork of all kinds can hit pause for one second do you practice yoga and if so what type do you practice so I have always said with my ADHD I'm not a yoga person I can't do it until you now half ago I met actually a yogi his name is Sadhguru and he's Indian yogi with a big following I was very skeptical but I met the guy I know I have a 50 minutes daily yoga practice which I did this morning before coming to the end to you and this made an enormous difference in my life with my ADHD mind I really have trouble just sitting there when I sit on the meditation cushion my mind is like all over the place but with the yoga which is more body based I can stay much more present there is a meditation of component to it and so the answer is yes if you had asked me 18 months ago I would have said no I support it but I don't do it but now I'm actually a very committed practitioner and and its really has made a difference is there particular is it a particular type of yoga that people could Google or learn more about well so I'm not a yoga expert and there's many forms of yoga that other people more knowledgeable than I am could recommend but the one I learned is called inner engineering and it's taught by either said gurus followers and you can look up inner engineering online imagine when I recommended to France and others everybody has been only being grateful so I can highly recommend it typically there's to me what seems to be a cult around the guy which I don't take too particularly but he's the genuine article in terms of having a deep experience and being able to try and submit that experience to others and creating a practical system around it so it's worked for me I'm not here to recruit anybody else but since you're asking no no that's just my fans appreciate yeah well you know I'm not gonna blame it on my fans I like specifics much yeah so inner engineering you can look up online and it's taught here in the States and in Canada internationally actually and I but I did interrupt you you're about to mention I think another technique or modality that can help talked about for instance the somatic experience EMDR emotional freedom technique motor sensory integration technique techniques yoga and then there's something coming up after that well about ten years ago I began to work with psychedelics now if you're 15 years ago you were to ask me will ever be working with psychedelics as a healing modality I would have said you're out of your mind but then through a series of events might became aware of the potential role of psychedelics in healing and I've been doing work with them for ten years and there are another potent method and they're not for everybody and I have to emphasize that whatever modality you choose of a psychedelic nature you have to do it with adept practitioners with deep integrity and deep knowledge and experience but in such hands and in such a context it's can be like a superhighway to the self awareness not in isolation but it opens doors that otherwise might take years and so it's not unusual for me to conduct the psychedelic session at somebody or series of sessions either in a group or individual setting and have them say that was like ten years of psychotherapy in one day and I've had the same experience myself so again it's not to be isolated from other kinds of work and it has to be integrated but it's not a potent way of working and of course as I know you're personally aware there's an increasing movement amongst psychologists therapists psychiatrists medical doctors other healers to find ways of incorporating incorporating psychedelic healing in the larger therapeutic scheme you mentioned as it related to EMDR and some of these other techniques that you that you listed that it is a potent way of bypassing the egoic mind yeah and certainly psychedelics literally mind manifesting that's right in that case our one very potent tool that or they are tools that have been used for millennia in traditional or ceremonial contexts around the world for many purposes but including bypassing the analytical rational prefrontal cortex in many capacities now you mentioned a series of events and I will come back to the psychedelics and ask you which you have chosen and why should work with but if if you can mention any of them what were the series of events that led you sure to miss to psychedelics and 2008 my book on addiction in the realm of hungry ghosts Close Encounters with addiction was published in Canada and very quickly became a number-one national bestseller subsequently published in the States as well and I was in a book tour and people could ask me what do you know about addictions and I was cause the treatment ayahuasca being a Peruvian or Amazonian vine that's made into a brew that has psychedelic properties I knew nothing the next speech the next event somebody else would ask what do you know bruh I was going to another addiction I think started getting annoyed with it like leave me alone I've just written a book I've spent years researching it my life experience and all kinds of scientific exploration went into it asked me about something I know about and then I realized that maybe the universe was knocking on my door and somebody said did you know you could experience it here in Vancouver there was a Peruvian shaman leading some ceremonies up in Vancouver so who might have say no when I jumped right in and I sat in this tent with 50 other people 50 yeah I was that's thought I set it up it's not it's not what I recommend but that's how they set it up they played beautiful music and there was a little baby in the room mother and dad were there for the experience the baby was in the room and the baby was cooing away and tears started flowing down my face and these were not tears of sorrow they were tears of joy and I got in touch with such profound love that I had never consciously experienced before and if there were tears of love and it wasn't love for anybody in particular it was just and then I saw in all the ways that I had closed my heart against love in my life and how I betrayed love in my personal relationship with my spouse and and and and my children and in other ways so I just got this experience of love is something profound and and and universal and and life-defining but something from I've been cut off in so many ways and I got it because I closed my heart against love precisely because when I was wrong about small I've been so hurt I went to my mother states of mind she couldn't respond to me where I needed to be responded to not her fault but she couldn't and then when I was a year old she gave me to a stranger to save my life and I didn't see her for a month which is a huge explain that for a second so again it's Budapest Hungary Seconal or January the Russians are circled Budapest and are not fighting the Germans the government in power is a right-wing fascist anti-semitic military force and even though the deportations of Jews had stopped the Germans had an elated half a million Hungarian Jews in three or four months but now the Hungarian fascists for killing Jews in Budapest and including in the house where my mother I were living so my mother gave me to a stranger in the street a Christian woman because she didn't know she'd be dead or alive next day well or that I would be and I was quite sick so I didn't see her from us which I experiences a deep abandoned house could I experience it so my heart closes against love and I got all this and so I got that if this plant this plant that as you say manifests the mind can show me both the ways in which have closed the off from myself and that I don't need to because the love is still there what healing potential it has now I wish I could say that after that experience I became a loving house and I loving human being I didn't it's not that simple as my wife could tell you nevertheless it opened the door for me and I got right away now however the thought that I had was that I had no induction I had had no introduction I had no processing afterwards ayahuasca is a medicinal plant that has been used in the Amazon basin for hundreds of years maybe longer in its a cultural context in a tribe in a village where people know each other would they know the shaman where they shared the same assumptions in the same history that's not the same as a bunch of Westerner strangers to each other come together for one night drinking the stuff and then going their separate ways agreed so immediately the question that came up for me was how can we create a setting that at least resembles as best we can fashion the original setting so we came up with the idea where we treat where a small number of people get together with properly trained shamans who have integrity and experience deep experience and with me facilitating people's preparation and their post ceremony integration and so I've been doing that now for 10 years and a lot of learning involved we made mistakes but it evolved and the essence of it is that people don't come into it cold they come into the preparation in a safe setting where pretty soon group becomes a family to each other which means that no do they love each other and support each other but they also trigger each other and I mean basically I tell people I guess what you're back and you found your virgin and everything you hated about your film urgent is going to show up here but in the context where it's safe for that to happen right and so I've seen a lot of great healing I've had people with multiple suicide attempts heal from depression I've seen people get much better with the autoimmune diseases I've seen people deal with all kinds of addictions and life issues relationship problems come out of it much more themselves much more able to deal with these issues so long as the proper integration is done afterwards so that was my personal experience now that Dan introduced me to the whole world of psychedelics and I realized that there's a lot of research being done these days that his organization Maps multidisciplinary association association for psychedelic studies which is a group of psychologists psychiatrists medical doctors therapists counselors interested people to study scientifically the role of psychedelics in healing and as you're probably aware interesting studies have been done around psilocybin mushrooms and end-of-life anxiety studies have been done which are revolutionary in using mdma-assisted psychotherapy and they may being the medical name for a technical name for ecstasy again in the right setting with the right leadership these have proven to be very powerful modalities of healing and so there's a whole new resurgence of psychedelic research in a number of different areas some of the manmade some of the plant-based but there's a whole world that I was introduced to and I've learned a lot in the last ten years and again I both practice it in my own healing work and I'm interested in it also as a participant so I'd love to add a few things to your second comment and then ask a bunch of questions about the first yeah so for people who are interested in learning more about the current scientific studies and mechanisms of action related to some of these compounds and what is being done there are a number of very interesting and very competent organizations as far as I can tell Maps is one that you measure and I'll actually be seeing the founder Rick Doblin in just a few days time there is the Hefner Institute which I've worked with primarily run by MDS and PhDs or at least the board and so on is comprised of of scientists and medical doctors it was through the Hefner foundation and also directly with Johns Hopkins so I've had some involvement with the South seventh with psilocybin studies and actually thank you to many of you served with smacking the mic too many of you in my audience who helped through a crowd running funding campaign to raise funds for a study at Johns Hopkins related to treatment treatment resistant depression yes it's all seven so Haftar institute excellent organization organization to look into and then you Sona also which I believe is primarily focused on psilocybin whereas maps at this point has done great work on many levels including helping to facilitate MDMA being designated a breakthrough therapy and effectively getting fast tracked into Phase three trials by the FDA that's right yeah and these are all organizations that I would encourage people to look into and it's really an exciting time and also a fragile time as it relates to these compounds which have certainly demonstrated historically accepting MDMA let's just look at the studies many of which were done starting and say 50s and 60s looking at the clinical efficacy of using these compounds for everything ranging from alcoholism to nicotine addiction to many of the things that you mentioned well in order what is little known but that Bill Wilson dr. bill who funded one of the funders of AAA right actually had some powerful LSD experiences and which helped him is in his spiritual growth listen hey they don't talk about that very much but it's a fact if I'm a parent that usually say as much as I support the 12 steps what a also doesn't tend to talk about is the trauma that first causes the addiction and Bill Wilson himself was a traumatized child he was abandoned by his parents I mean he was very young and so it's interesting that AAA for all the good work that it does do which I support I don't support people being forced into any particular form of treatment but as a self chosen form of treatment it can be very helpful to many people but they don't talk about two very interesting things which is one is the psychedelic part and the other is the Toronto part yeah no it's for me just looking at my own childhood experiences and exploring recovery defined as you defined it yeah in in the last several years especially in the last six months it's been fascinating and frustrating to discover and try to piece together these various elements but the what is the frustrating part that there is well there may it may exist but I couldn't find one-stop shopping that checked all the boxes right ain't any right so so it's it's been an exercise in collecting various tools and piecing them together like you said you a a does incredible work and they they what they have done in terms of a distributed free service with social accountability in support is incredible so they the psychedelic component which bill actually wanted to as I understand it make one of the steps in a needless to say was hard to get widespread leadership support for that and then you have the trauma piece so these are all tools in the toolkit that people can use for their own sort of bespoke approach in some respects coming back to the ayahuasca specifically and I should just as a caveat point out because I do think that these tools I know these tools are very powerful I have first-hand familiarity from past experiences and have have been very engaged with this scientific community for some time now they can be misused there are many charlatans and unfortunately there's more you know there's many there's some very powerful healers shamans who unfortunately exploit people sexually and financially very common yeah and this is of course not just restricted to the Iowa school world it's also happens in a spiritual world from the spiritual leaders with tremendous power tremendous healing influence have at the same time Exploited men and women and created all kinds of further trauma so unfortunately when you have that much power and you haven't totally done your integration work you can start misusing that power and that happens in all the healing modalities as we know but it certainly happens in a psychedelic world as well yeah it's very it's I wish I could say it's rare it's not but it's something to safeguard against especially when you're in that vulnerable state so I would actually recommend that people see a documentary called Kumari which is very much worth watching and the brief overview is it's an Indian filmmaker who begins studying various gurus and healers in the u.s. I in in hopes of I believe the original impetus was to simply do a documentary on charlatans and then he went to India and he said they're just as bad here and he said are just as bad or worse and he decides to make himself a guru as a as an experiment and it's it's a very thought-provoking documentary that I think will actually becomes the kind of fake or right it's right yeah I remember it yeah and he unveils it yeah I don't want to give too much away but it's very well done very worth watching because it helps to prepare you I think psychologically to not lose yourself in a dangerous way and here's the problem you see what I said about the essence of trauma is that you you lose connection to yourself and that means you lose connection to your gut feelings right you know as long as your gut feelings are with you and your honor them they'll protect you but the very sense of trauma is the loss of that yeah which means that when you lose connection to God feelings then you're very vulnerable to being exploited and when you talk to people who were exploited in any context psychedelic or not if you ask them do you have any kind of vague sense that this is not quite right they'll say yeah but I didn't listen to it yep and the fact that they didn't listen to it is already a marker of trauma so since it's traumatized people which is most of us who seek healing it's also vulnerable people who seek healing and this is what some of these people can exploit so the very portal into healing which is opening up the vulnerability that we've shut down against is also the portal for potential loss so people have to do their due diligence yeah and I'm not trying to create paranoia here but people just should be careful you just mentioned something that I'd really love to just pause and emphasize you mentioned a few things so number one is that your your gut feeling / it's like physiological intuition can help you mm-hmm and that's something that for many reasons I completely muted or ignored for a very long time so it's been a process of getting reacquainted with that and I would say two things that that I found helpful and if you have any comments on second in particular I'd love love to hear one was dramatically decreasing my caffeine intake which I found was almost like turning up the volume on static made it very difficult for me to read or feel that's other things it's I was using it maybe for many reasons but it had the side effect at least of muting maybe that was why I did it subconsciously many of these feelings ii was in fact a video that was recommended to me but it corresponds to a book called the gift of fear by Gavin de Becker and who actually owns a company that does protective services and executive security so you have to keep in mind maybe you don't always want to ask a barber if you need a haircut so keeping that in mind it it also in brief points to the benefits of some of these reactions or emotional states that we are prone to labeling negative yeah and the as you said not to make anyone paranoid but rather to inform them these are currently existent risks and one of the hopes certainly with say ultimately better researching these compounds after they've been really unfairly but for understandable reasons politicized and put into the same schedule in the United States as heroin and cocaine to have them rescheduled so that they are prescribed 'el in if then that happens the ability to certify therapists to regulate and to maintain a a broad type of quality control goes up so that's also so one of the hopes is that that will decrease the likelihood of bad actors and allow appropriate punishment for bad actors because mind you as we know even in legalized legitimate professions it still happens this is stuff happen it's the most so ultimately you know gut feelings are still the best response and let me address first why we shut down our gut feelings if I may please so a human being has two fundamental needs apart from the physical needs in infancy in childhood one is for attachment now attachment is the closeness and proximity with another human being for the sake of being looked after or for the sake of looking after the other human beings as mammals and even birds are creatures of attachment we have to connect and attach because otherwise we don't survive if there's nobody that's motivated to take care of us to attach to us that way and we've not motivated to attach to others we just can't survive one additional thing is is that the endorphins which are the body's internal opiate like chemicals which heroin and all the other opiates resemble they have to facilitate attachment so if you take infant mice and you're knock out their and orphan receptors so they don't have endorphin opiate activity in their brain they won't cry for help and separated from their mothers which would mean that they would die in the wild and which goes back to what happens in early in childhood when there's stress and trauma these these endorphin systems don't develop and then when people do heroin it feels like a war soft hug to them they feel love and connection for the first time that's why it's so powerful but so we had this need for attachment without which obviously the human infant was the most helpless the most dependent the least mature of any creature in the universe at birth cannot survive without the attachment and that attachment relationship given that me of the longest period of development of any creature you know well into adolescence and and beyond attachment is not a negotiable need but we have another need which is authenticity now authenticity although the self means being connected to ourselves just knowing what we feel and being able to act on it so that means our gut feelings so let's look at how human beings evolved 400 thousands of years and 400 thousand years or so of this species existing on earth how did we live we didn't live in cities and houses and so on millet they're out there in the wild until very recently in human existence now just how long do you survive in the wild if you're not connected to your gut feelings not very long not very long if you start using your intellect instead of your gut feelings you just don't survive so that's a powerful survival need as well so attachment is a survival need authenticity survival need but what happens if your authenticity threatens your attachment relationships for example is a two-year-old you get angry because you can get that cookie before dinner but your parents can't handle anger because they grew up in homes when there was rage ilysm and they're terrified that the very expression of anger so they give you the message that good old kids don't get angry the message you receive is not that good look is don't get angry but the angry little kids don't get loved because your parents are now sullen they won't look at you they talk to you in a harsh way you're not getting loved not experiencing love at that moment now diversely attached guess what you're gonna suppress the authenticity every time and this is obvious connection to ourselves and to our gut feelings so that strangely enough that very dynamic which is essential for human survival in a natural setting not becomes a threat to our survival in his in this more modern setting where to stay authentic is to threaten attachment and so we give up her authenticity and then we wonder who the hell you are and whose life is this and who's experiencing all this and this life doesn't you know and Who am I really and so that's where the reconnection has to happen that's what the healing happens is with that reconnection but it's because of that conflict the tragic conflict in childhood between authenticity and attachment that most of us face that we lose ourselves in this connection they're good feelings there's so many directions we can go with this and I'm really glad you shared that because I had an enormous that observation has had an enormous impact on some of my close friends and something I was only exposed to really today because our mutual friend Vicky recommended that I asked you to expand on it what I'd love to return to if we can can I say something yeah of course sorry in this building there's a picture of Elvis Presley yes so the song of his that I play at my retreats or and my the events all the time it's called anyway you'll love me remember how it goes I don't I could actually play it for you but it goes anywhere you love me that's the way I'll be in your hands my heart is clay I'll be strong as a mountain or weak as a willow tree I'll be powerful I'll be like a little baby anyway you want me that's how I will be now that's considered a love song it isn't it's a lack of love song hmm it's a song that says chest attached to me I'll give up anything about myself just accept me the way you want me to be so it's a saddest song and when you hear him sing it this deep sadness in it and some of the power of presley actually came from his own suffering he wasn't here singing a song he was actually infusing it with all the emotions of laughs so even though it's presented like a love song it's actually a song about the loss of love and that's the situation of the infant who says just love me I'll be anything you want me to be and that's the that's the tragic conflict there's an attachment and authenticity yeah so this ties into exactly where I was going yeah which is related to your pre and post work with psychedelics yeah and for people who are watching this or listening to it I'm returning to this not because I want to hammer home psychedelics they're not for everyone and in my experience the vast majority I should say in my observation the vast majority of psychedelic use is very responsible and and I would not recommend because you it can it can certainly cause a good amount of harm if not done in a supervised safe fashion but the pre and post work could apply to many modalities I mean it it does in this case this example they were talk about apply to psychedelics but it could in correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like I could very easily apply to going into any intense or unusual modality no like VIP pass on a medication for possible yeah like oh yeah this date with destiny Tony Robbins I I mentioned which is certainly intense and very very different very powerful that's why I'm coming back to this but we can discuss it as it applies specifically to psychedelics and even specifically to ayahuasca that is the primary that's the primary compound we're talking about which is really just for people who are wondering it's one of the reasons ayahuasca is really tricky is that it is unlike say I'm gonna get off the topic for a second but it's still on topic it's not quite like mushrooms and what people consider the primary psychoactive molecule of psilocybin it's a bit different it's more of an old-fashioned it's like if you go to a bar and you order vodka and soda pretty much everywhere you go vodka soda yeah very similar assuming the pour is the same yeah ayahuasca is more like an old-fashioned there are a few ingredients that are almost always there so if you go to let's say I want to say God bow or other parts of Peru it's going to be mostly the ayahuasca vine plus plant called Czech koruna yeah or a psychotria viridis which is a DMT I think I suppose it must be nn DMT campaign containing plant which is made orally active through the MA o inhibitors monoamine oxidase inhibitors in the vine how they figured that out is a whole separate story which is kind of wild the plants told them is the short version I know although I have a science scientific friend who gave me a starting this simple explanation which oh well it's essentially the rest in mind when I was improved they also told me the plants told us which on some level I accept but but I just want to say something here because we're talking in an extended way about the psychedelics I don't create the impression that this is most of my life or work it isn't I do this stuff one or two or three weeks a year so it's not like the major part of what I do but it is a very interesting part because it illuminates everything else that I do in a sense that it goes very deep now this scientific friend when the science friend of mine says actually they were let's say using the ayahuasca and boiling it up because IOSCO itself the vine has some secretary profits on its own without the chacruna yeah very strong auditory yeah yeah so then what happens is some Leafs of sugar gonna fall into it mmm inevitably over the years that's gonna happen or they say oh well this combination is even more powerful yeah so then it need not be as esoteric as it could have been a rather simple discovery you know so who knows what the real story is but in any case the preparation and the processing yeah so and I'm just gonna add welcome to that which is that is one combination you then also have in certain regions of and it's found in other places outside of Peru yes most certainly in the largest ayahuasca as sacrament based churches are actually out of Brazil yeah but the it can also be ayahuasca vine plus yeah hay which is a different plant I'm also DMT containing but a a for some people a substantially different experience yeah and then the only reason I'm mentioning this is so that people are aware of why I am particularly concerned when people are cavalier about hey my friends ordering some ayahuasca from Hawaii and we're gonna put it in a slow cooker and have it at his house this weekend I'm like bad bad idea many many centers even well-intentioned centers in in bid who will also put other things in the brew because they think that foreigners want more of X so the coca leaves they'll put self think cocaine coca leaves they'll put PO way which is even doctora which is even scarier in some respects coca not that scary so just be aware that when you say ayahuasca not you but when people think ayahuasca is not a standardized rose that you were getting and recently I was at a retreat in Costa Rica where really four different nine state ceremonies in each time with a different concoction Oh God so one night with the Peruvian she people tradition preparation one night with the yah-hey from Colombia and you know it's who prepares it how much they bullet for what combination what intention and so on so that's by and large true that that and really the people I worked with they you know this is always not that it's always the same drink every night but it's pretty much the same preparation same preparation yeah yeah and so I took us down a little rabbit hole but the the question I have is with all of your clinical experience in recognizing that this is a therapy but it's an adjunct therapy it's not used in isolation yeah and you've through trial and error and design come to a place now where you have maybe certain best practice is or approaches to the pre pre and post work mm-hmm could you tell us about either or both of those and you know ideally maybe exercises or questions people could think about on their own I know it's it's hard to recommend that in isolation perhaps but I'd love to hear any any details that you're willing to share about the pre and post-show because it's so so important I just it's hard to for me at least in my limited experience even to overemphasize well with Iowa so specifically which is not dealing them with the LD I work with but with that specifically there's a physical preparation for example no caffeine for a period of time no red meat cutting down on salt excluding dairy products so there's a physical preparation just to cleanse the body and and to make it more receptive to the ayahuasca from the emotional and psychological point of view you want somebody to really fund an intention what I actually I want are this experience because intention is everything so it's not like I'm gonna take the stuff and let's see what happens why am I here for why am i coming what is my intention and going there what do I want to find out what issues am i working with so intention setting and and and really considering what is my purpose in undertaking this this experience when people arrive we don't just plunge into ceremony in my Iowa's career treats we have a day and a half of group preparation so everybody articulates their intention why they're there and we deeply explore for that intention arised a role sorry and what in their lives brought them to this point and what issues they need to deal with and my way of working is to get people very deeply to their core issues which they may not be even aware of but again through this process I called compassionate inquiry and this is true whether I'm working with plants or not they get to to see what it is that they're seeking and work what are they seeking they're seeking themselves they're seeing the connection ultimately but there's steps that you go through and then we help them to set a specific intention for that first ceremony and the specific intention is what do I want to learn tonight not just what I want to learn in general but what I've learned tonight some people want to learn about tell me about my fear teach me about my pain show me what love is show me what courage is show me what my strength is see it's not that the Iowas comes with an agenda it works through you and it manifests What's in you so that your intention the more specific it is to you where you are in life at that moment the more effective it's going to be and then the shamans work with you during the ceremony and and they chant to you based on what they're picking up from you at that moment they work with you energetically sometimes they work hands-on as well and you both have your own experience and you share the group energy and then people go to sleep and the next day and then the following day we then process or what happened to you what do what visions came to you now some people hold of visions some people with more prosaic Minds like an evil and all the ever get visions yeah I did originally get visions but it's been years since I've seen anything some people have bodily experiences some people have go to him in intense emotional states which in my view are always memories of maybe forgotten memories but indwelling memories of very early experiences intense some people have beautiful entities coming and teaching them you know Jaguars and anacondas or various angelic entities I've never been blessed with that and I used to get frustrated but actually whatever experience you have that's the experience you need to have and and for me it's not about the visions or anything it's about what is the teaching and the teaching is always there and the purpose of the processing is to help you find the teaching that was imparted to you by whatever experience you had not about comparing your experience to the night before or two nights before or two the experience of other people it's your specific experience what does it mean in your life so this is and now post retreat then again whether you do a program like Vipassana would you do the Landmark Forum or ready to do a hoffman process already do any kind of transformational work or a meditation retreat if you don't integrate what you've learned into your life and you build up some practice around it it's gonna become a memory a nice memory at best right yeah straight back into making hyper critical decisions intensively yeah 12 hours later also absolutely very destructive absolutely so the more integration we can then and and in and the general in the psychedelic work this no question of integration is becoming more and more recognized and and and a more a more practiced so integration means keeping in touch with people that can help you stay on track keeping in touch with the group that you share the experience with putting some practice into your life such as journaling meditation yoga perhaps you're going to return and do some more plant work or perhaps you won't that's entirely up to you there's no prescription to be made there but the point is to go from experience that is discrete and time limited to some kind of integration that is that happens over time how do you format that that integration are you interacting with the people on your retreat once a week for four weeks or you have two sessions in following week what is the actual format well that's evolving and that's different for different people but in general I would say that if you can talk to somebody regularly over time and if you can maintain your contact with the group so they're like a Facebook group Facebook group where people share experiences if you take on certain practices and you do them together or at least you do them simultaneously and then you talk share about practices these are all forms of integration which and we've mentioned this a few times applies to more than just the modality of using plant medicine absolutely so after this that sound like broken record but this is very recent after going to this trendy Robbins event with a number of people including we have photo online so I think he's fine with me saying it Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce was sitting right behind me mmm he wasn't part of the group but he's a friend at least an acquaintance getting to know each other in any case we kept a group text great going afterwards to hold each other accountable and also to set follow-up group calls right and so on a number of things I'd really like to underscore because you mentioned them and and I'd like to reiterate their importance and also how they transcend the present work yeah the psychedelics the first is you mentioned intentions and I'll just I'll just share my experience and also a number of recommendations that helped me tremendously yeah with samisen work but then life which is you set a clear intention but the clear intention is not the same as an expectation that's right and if you go in to and you have an expectation you can't let go of that's right you end up many people end up trying to white-knuckle the experience and that's true in general in life and it's very true for a plant experiences yeah so if you get there that this is gonna happen that's good this should happen and some people sit there the whole night resisting their experience because this it doesn't meet their expectations right so there's there's a there's a card it's a little card that I was given as a gift which I didn't come to appreciate fully until maybe a year to I've been carrying it a long time and it's it was given to me by an ex-girlfriend it's and it says the tax the task which hinders your task is your task and so you mentioned a few things and you said well that is the work for that night and I've come to know a few people I respect as I hesitate to use the word but they're because they're really only two or three people I've personally met I would feel comfortable calling a shaman and they all have minimum 10-15 years experience in a traditional apprenticeship setting and by the way that means deep personal work very that means sitting in a jungle by yourself being bitten by mosquitoes doing that means drinking various plants tobacco and other plants not beyond Iowa's rent and really preparing I know somebody on that path right now let me tell you very deep its deep committed work it's not very faint over here even I would never do it yeah it's very intense a very very intense and I mean there are people do 15 months of isolation dieting various plants no sex an assault a fork in the road man you know you know this really won't get into right now and what's with they've they've shared a few examples with me of say I I've never well that's not true but I I have always in the past shied away from large groups that's why I was taken aback with mentioning 50 people but it is it seems very common in any group especially larger groups and this is true in psychedelics or at the pass on of retreats they actually the nickname for it that was given at the the 10-day silent retreat I did it's spirit rock was the Vipassana Vendetta where you decide that someone who's sitting close to you is coughing too loudly clears their throat too often or whatever and it starts to you start to perseverate and think about it incessantly and maybe get angry about it and since they don't watch any own reaction instead of watching your reaction and you know that they're the example that was given to me by this this this particular I'm just going to say ayahuasca door to simplify things ayahuasca Doyle some works with iOS Conn was told me about this this this Westerner came down I guess guess they're kind of Westerners - they're just south of the border so northern American who came down and was furious that someone in the group wouldn't shut up with their screaming he was just furious about this and there are a number of ways an organizer can handle that but he took the guy outside and he said that person is your work tonight absolutely and if you think about that reframe and how to view something that perhaps historically you would respond to as a problem or an annoyance or offensive to view that and there's certain times where you have to fight and stand up for yourself I'm not saying you shouldn't but I think that in my case and in the cases of many folks we fight too often we were ourselves out we get upset too often how can you view that as a gift how can you view that as your work look can I again give you a quote yes please which I love it's one of my from one of my favorite teachers and his name is aah illness and he says your conflicts all the difficult things they're problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard they're actually yours they're specifically yours designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else the part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself you're not going you're not going to go in the right direction unless there's something freakin on the side saying telling you look here this way that part is you love you so much that part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance it will go to extreme measures to wake you up it will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen what else can it do that's its purpose and I found this to be true of physical illness and mental problems and everything you got to see what is the teaching here so we can look at all these things as problems to get rid of which is what the personality wants to do or we can look at them as learning opportunities which is what your true self wants to do now two things one is you talked about intention in life my wife and I had a holiday recently in Costa Rica a party was a working holiday but partly it was just a holiday traditionally we've had terrible times doing holidays party because my book haul is them and once they go into a holiday I just collapsed and know my wife is dragging a corpse around you know because I'm a workaholic you know and I hadn't clear space so so this time we actually want to do a holiday with intention this is nothing but psychedelics just to do it that we set an intention what is it our intention and if we have an intention I've learned from a couple of very wife's teachers what structures we want to set up to support our intention and how are we gonna handle when there's kind of disagreement or conflict with a beautiful holiday because it was the first intentional holiday that we've had so that intention in life in general is absolutely essential like every morning what is my actual intention I want to do a bit of an exercise sure okay and then you know if you don't like it just tell me when was the last this is something I do in my groups or when I speak or in a song when I teach so yes I ask people to tell me some recent episode whenever said with somebody with their lives and something that they were open to sharing so it doesn't have anything sordid or thing but just sending out whether it's your spouse partner the bus driver I don't care sure a friend okay so I you think about anything okay I can share anything just where you're upset with somebody okay yes okay so what happened describe it what happened yeah alright there were a number of issues in my home broken aspects of the home things that were falling apart or needed to be fixed physically physically okay yeah right and I had hired someone to do these things right while I was gone okay and I came back and none of them were fixed okay and your emotional reaction was anger rage anger okay anything else besides anger mmm I think they're close cousins frustrate personal frustration his anger yeah yep was disappointed disappointed his sadness yeah it's a different feeling so it's disappointed myself also because I started to look at how maybe well disappointed is not so much an emotion as a state of mind and asking what the emotions were I'm like what's inside disappointment something didn't happen I wanted to happen how do I feel there's no sadness there sure yeah there's sadness I'm not talking into it I'm just asking well I suppose um I might be confusing State of Mind and states of mind and emotions I'm not sure I look at the raw emotion yeah sadness so there's anger and sadness those are the emotions let's let's go with that okay so I'm gonna ask you a silly question what were you said in angry about well I suppose the answer which is not the right answer I'm expecting was as angry that someone had made commitments to me and not fulfilled those commitments okay what that's what happened they've made the commitment but that doesn't tell me what you're sad or angry well what does that mean that they didn't fulfill their commitments uh meant that they didn't care about me they didn't say I have that they respect me so they didn't care about you didn't respect you what kind of person doesn't get cared or respected mmm-hmm I might need a lifeline here I don't know someone who doesn't deserve to be cared for a respected exactly somebody unworthy right sure well respect then and and care okay know if two other people here which they usually are when I do this exercise I would ask them okay we just listened to him tell us about this experience are there other reasons why this other person might not have done the work that has nothing to do with him or her not caring about him or not respecting him so what are the reasons might there be a million-in-one format name one yep the he could have he could be in the hospital her cared one could have been in a car accident exactly he had a flight delaying got caught on Puerto Rico during a hurricane him yeah he's got ADHD yeah he and he can't follow through he's under stress and he couldn't write okay okay you know the email that I was supposed to send is sitting in drafts and I thought I'd sent it but in fact you never received it I mean okay and any number of possibilities yep no of all the possibilities that you've just outlined including that he they don't care about you or respect you which is the worst one the one I immediately defaulted to right well I mean the worst no but internally yeah internally the worst assumption that's the one that I immediately made exactly so let's notice something hey you I should say we because we're all like this we don't respond to what happens we respond to our perception of what happens right okay that's what the Buddha said it's with our minds who create the world so that if you'd found that ADHD or he was stressed or you know you might have been sad for him boy would not have been angry and you will not have been sad okay you might you know so first of all we don't respond to what happens we respond to our perception of what happens to our interpretation of times number one number two of all the possible interpretations we choose the worst one yep number two thirdly what I just said isn't true we didn't choose it it's not like you went through all these possibilities option no he doesn't care about me he doesn't respect me you didn't do that your brain jump there automatically right my question is why yep now here's the learning first time in your life that you felt hurt and angry that you when you perceive somebody didn't care about you or didn't respect you where is it happening before this is where the exercise might might might go sideways I'm gonna hit pause on that I think that's probably for more of a conversation over wine but you probably agreed it's not the first time it's not the first time very good and most people I talk to it goes back way back yeah this goes way back and into childhood mmm okay and that's what trauma is we don't respond to the present moment we respond to the past no but along the lines of our discussion it's a beautiful learning opportunity now you get to know now what if you assume for a moment that you're the most lovable most worthy of care most worthy of respect person in the history of the universe and this guy doesn't do your own what's your response any number of the other options which does not trigger their an intense negative emotional stare so there's other options who trigger that so something in use I would argue still believes that you're not worthy of care and respect and that's what gets triggered so who's the one that doesn't care about you and who's the one that doesn't think you really respect you ya know that's a learning notice and this is exactly what you're talking about you're saying how these difficult things how these problems are always teaching opportunities and that's the beauty of healing is that when you reframe things and you and you actually see the source within ourselves all of a sudden that's liberating because guess what if you're feeling that way because this guy did this or didn't do that that makes you a victim yep but if you see that you're the source ya know you're powerful yeah you're empowered they're empowered as Isis you this is something that a friend of mine here in Austin Robert Rodriguez recently said to me in a very similar way I mean it was a completely different context he was actually telling a story about someone else who was constantly blaming people for everything in the film world mm-hmm and he said if you are the victim and you're and it's everyone else's fault you were powerless mm-hmm and he said we keep in mind every time you're pointing a finger at someone and I had never heard this I I know it now after the fact that that there are other people who have said this but he said every time you're pointing a finger at someone keep in mind that there are three fingers pointing back at you exactly and I thought about that I Wow yeah this is just a good that's very sentence to keep in mind no you know this is a recording studio sometime was it this the yeah they do recordings they did they record in the past oh just I just the the Johnny Cash every record here but you know I don't know if Johnny Cash's over here its pop I would say it's possible because it's been around for a long time the reason I ask is because he's got a song that I play at all my events it's gonna in your mind it's called this is it all goes done in your mind it's on the soundtrack of dead man walking and I think he would himself it all goes done in your mind and it goes one foot in the fire one foot on Jacob's Ladder another than the fire it all goes down in your mind so whether you going to hell or I tell you on the way to heaven it all happens up here which is such a powerful teaching because this is what we can work on you know if we've if we're victims of the world ramana maharshi was a great Indian guru he said something like if your foot hurts when you walk outside you can do two things one is the rap the whole world in burlap or you can get a pair of shoes you can see yourself as the victim of the world and trying to change the world so that you'd they won't hurt you anymore or you can actually empower yourself yeah and that's what the healing is all about well I will say the reason I wanted to have you on now is because I've been so focused on trying to navigate these things myself over the last several years but most intensely over the last several months mm-hmm and I wanted to be ready to have this conversation with you and and how you doing so far I'm great I'm great I'm great I'm doing very well I think I'm the the sameness and arguably in the best place I've been maybe ever so I feel that's why very good that's a good which means that that healing just is just available it's just possible yeah you know I I got an email a few months ago a woman called Betty Nagar in the Hermann Goering was the chief of the Luftwaffe under her god that's right types wondering right into that name yeah and and he was head of the Gestapo just a an opiate addict by the way and in a very clever very ruthless man his great niece sent me an e-mail a few months ago to thank me for my work and she's been through her own process imagine the Karma she was carrying yeah and all the healing she has had to do so there was her grant her great-uncle trying to kill me and my people and there's the great niece making contact with me and to me just in your example and my example in the example of so many people I know it's not like I'm a big piece of cake you know it's gonna continue as long as I live but I experienced internally the goodness and the healing that's available to us and I didn't used to and I and I used to think I could help you everybody but but that I was beyond hearing myself that was my core belief you know well let's play my corporate for the last ten years okay it's just ain't true and anybody listening I just want to know it doesn't matter what state of mind you and doesn't matter what you're experiencing it's human it it is transmuted all it is transformable because that too soft that you got disconnected from it's still available to you so it's not a question of just talking about what happened in the past it's a question of how do we connect to ourselves and what you're describing about your own state if I can put it in one sentence you'd probably agree with me that you probably much more connected to yourself than used to be 100 percent yeah that's the s and that's the SP requisite I mean that's that's why I feel the way I described exactly gabor I really want to encourage people to learn more about you and your work and there's there's certainly a number of places they could start where would you suggest people dig more deeply is there particular book of your books you would suggest they start with is there a particular social media handle where they can pay attention and learn various announcements and see what you share of your work and others well thanks for asking the simplest thing is my website www.marykay.co.uk/awilliam visit about my work that's been seen 12 million times now so there's all kinds of ways to discover me on Facebook on YouTube at my website and I would also really hope that people check out my books of which I've written for the first one the American title is scattered and it's about ADHD and I wrote it after my own diagnosis and pretty much what I've said earlier that I don't see it as an inherited disease I do see it as a response to family multi-generational and social stress in sensitive children people say you're blaming the parents I'm not blaming the parents I don't blame myself but I know how stressed my family was when I was a workaholic doctor and so that's my first book and when you say well why are we looking at the percentage of kids with ADHD going up so fast it's not because of any genetic problem genes don't change in a population over five or ten years it's a social problem there's much more stress in the culture now there's much less connection in the culture now and less connected people are and the more stress there is the more pressure there is on sensitive kids so that's scattered another parenting book of mine is the work of a brilliant psychologist friend of mine Gordon Neufeld dr. Neufeld who is the world's leading development psychologist as far as I'm personally concerned say that advisedly and the book is called hold on to your kids why parents need to matter more than peers that's been published in over 20 languages now and it's about the fact that since kidneys attachment the attachment need is the primary drive that we have and we've talked about that it's like a duckling when the duckling hatches from the egg the duckling would prefer to attach an imprint on the mother duck but what will he do if the mother duck is not around he'll imprint on a toy or a dog or a horse our kids because the parents are too distracted and stressed in our society and are not aren't so much anymore physically as during human evolution now find themselves in the company of other kids guess what they imprint on their peer group and now you have immature creatures influencing each other immoderately and this happens through the social media it happens in personal contact and as that happens the parents get pushed into the background they get normal frustrated not they get more authoritarian or they just give up and kids therefore don't grow up they don't mature and they develop all kinds of problems not because the parents don't love them but because simply because in this culture the connection between kids and parents have been really disturbed and how do we store that connection is the subject of hold on to your kids so three of my books are what on my own this one I wrote with Gordon my next book which is on a mind-body unity and health and illness and that's a conversation you know I could have another time but again where I show that cancer autoimmune disease ALS multiple sclerosis Parkinson's colitis Crohn's disease chronic fatigue fibromyalgia are not accidental and separate physical events they had to do with the scientifically proven fact that mind and body can't be separated and when things happen emotionally there will also happen physiologically in fact it can't be any other way and that the emotional system in our brains in our bodies an important parcel of the same system that also governs the immunity no joke neurological response and hormonal response and therefore when our life length patterns of emotional repression when people have to suppress themselves you know what the main their attachments that will have a negative impact on their immune system and their hormonal apparatus and the nervous systems as well and that book is called when the body says no exploring the stress disease connection and that's been published by over in over 20 countries internationally as well including in the u.s. my final and to my mind my favorite book is the most recent in the realm of hungry ghosts close encounters with addiction which explores the diction not from the point of view of disease model or a choice model but how it is a response to a childhood loss stress and trauma and how to address that and also how to deal with like if you look at the United States right now you know what the facts are the most common cause of death under the age of 50 is not overdose and in the US every three weeks you have the equivalent of a 911 in turn every three weeks the 911 in terms of the number of people dying aware is the public outcry where is the resources where is the political will where is the mobilization of the media and and all the public health energies compared to what happened after 9/11 and we have Ennis every three weeks and why because the treatment profession the medical profession and politicians and the legal profession does not understand trauma and its relationship to addiction the average medical student doesn't even hear the word trauma in four years of education doesn't mean hear the word let alone get a lecture on it let her go get a course about it the stuff I told you about brain development is still not taught in most medical schools so we have this response to addiction which is just dealing with the effects the behaviors controlling the the manifestations and not dealing with the causative factors that's why people don't get better and if you look at why right now it's because social stress is increased economic insecurity is increased you don't look at where do the opiate overdose happens more it's where areas where there's despondency and despair totally and so that's the book in the realm of hungry ghosts other than that lots of my talks are on YouTube but I think the best hub to check all the stuff out is my website and I hope to generate a podcast regular podcast fairly soon if the people are on weekend too I am strong enough and and organized me well enough to do it there'll be a podcast and I hope that'll be up soon but knowing myself I don't wanna make any promises but that'll certainly be listed at my website if it happens and could you give your website URL one more time okay dr. Gabbe on that day and dr. Garber Mata calm and to everybody listening and watching there's the camera I will also put that in the show notes so for everyone everything we've discussed the books the resources organizations everything including your website which will be at the very top will be listed in the show notes which you can find at IMTA blog forward slash podcast and it'll be right at the top so all that will be very easy to find just in closing and we may very well end up doing around to at some point it wouldn't surprise me even if it's off-camera certainly would like I spend more time together do you have any final closing words or a request or suggestion to the audience anything for people listening that you would like them to consider after they finish this interview yeah okay I hope people bulla citizen to you in a very personal sense not just as a an interesting experience but it's possibly pertaining to themselves and that the discussion with you will help people look at themselves in maybe a new way with what I call compassionate inquiry so rather than self judgment about stuff that went wrong or they did it to themselves or others they get curious what made me do that they get curious compassionately because we were all born innocent and we're all born just wanted to be loving and loved and then something happens and then is it's a hard road back but I hope that this conversation helps people reconnect with that path or can or encourage them to continue on it and then secondly not to see it as an individual issue it's a social issue we live in a society that really does disconnect people and so it's not just an individual problem or an individual family problem its multi-generational we never even talked about the mochila multi-generational nature of trauma what it is we pass this on from one generation to the next not because we intend to but because we can't help it so it needs to be looked at in deep over the generations and broadly as the function of a whole society now let me give you one quick example if I may a study last year showed that American black women the more experienced the races and they have the greater the risk of asthma and what does that tell us what a gift we give people to to control their asthma we give them inhalers that contain a copy of adrenaline and a copy of cortisol the stress hormones in other words asthma as Evan who would stress I'm not going to the scientific details now it could but it won't but it shows this question is the asthma of an American black woman an individual disease was it a dysfunction of entire society and obviously it's the latter so that the Buddha said that without the many that cannot be the one without the one that cannot be the many and he talked about the interconnected core rising of phenomena so we are social creatures our brains are wired together dr. dan Siegel talks about interpersonal neurobiology we're not isolated creatures so what have you dealing with you have to look at not just the individual internal environment but also the broader social and cultural environment of which your one particular manifestation and as our mutual friend drew polish so firm P wants we need to change the conversation around these issues particular for example on addiction from a blaming and shaming and ostracizing and just medical model perspective to one that takes into account trauma and social issues and which brings compassion into it and that must be the same for all mental health issues as well and whatever we look at we have to look at both the individual and the broader context thank you for that and you mentioned how we all begin loving and wanting to be loved or needing love and then something happens and it's a hard road back and what I'd like to add to that is it's a hard road back but it's a worthwhile road back and it is possible to find your way back if you had told me that a year ago I would have completely dismissed it but I'm in a different place now and I would just like to thank you for helping people to navigate that and it's very meaningful work that you do thank you thank you for taking the time today as well thank you and to everybody listening and watching as I mentioned before definitely also visit the show notes revisit this this is not a one and done something you listen to and then you go on as if you never heard it please look at the show notes look at God boards work and you can find all that at teamed-up log forward slash podcast and to everybody listening I would just say as always thank you so much for joining

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 2,536,991

Rating: 4.8352356 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, forbes, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, best-seller, public speaker, angel investor, ferriss, twitter, Facebook, stumbleUpon, evernote, uber, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, The, Tim, Ferriss, Show, The Random Show, Psychiatry, Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Gabor Maté Interview, Dr. Gabor Interview, Dr. Gabor

Id: H9B5mYfBPlY

Length: 143min 44sec (8624 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 07 2018