Gabor Maté in Conversation with Tara Westover: The Myth of Normal

foreign testing everybody hear me so far so good all right we are here to talk about your book which was published we're on day two day three three days ago three days you're still here so this book I read this book and um what I was thinking about it when I read it is it kind of reminded me of this period in my own life when sort of looking around at the world and trying to figure out why everything felt so much more challenging and weirder and exploitative and confused than I remembered it feeling before that was a whole set of things I was trying to figure out but also with myself like what was going on with with my own mind and my own body why did I say that I wanted some things but I everything I was doing was taking me the opposite direction and what's kind of amazing about this book is it really is about both of those sets of questions and I wanted to just talk to you about probably the most obvious question which is the title tell me about this title and and why you chose it well first of all reading your book educated what struck me is that as you were going through that life that for so many people would seems so strange for you it seem totally normal so your isolation at the base of the the mountain your families your father is paranoid view of the world the defensiveness the values they try to inculcate they seem to you perfectly normal because that's what you know you know nothing else it's the same with our culture so that in an introduction of the book we quote David Foster Wallace the great writer um so great that it's hard to even understand what he's talking about some of the time but but he gives us at a college graduation ceremony he gives this talk where he said he gives his anecdote of two fish two young fish swimming along and and older member of the species meets them and greets them and says good morning boys how's the water and the tubo and the two young fish swim on for a while and the motherland turns to the other one and says what the hell is water and David Foster Wallace makes the point that when something is so big and so close to you you don't even recognize it and what I'm saying is that trauma is so normalized in our society that we don't even recognize it anymore in fact what we we think that it's normal which is a myth because from the point of view of human evolution and human needs the values and the practices and the the child raising the education that people receive the way we relate to each other the what we believe about our nature or completely abnormal for no point of view of human evolution and human needs so this is a myth and we thought in the beginning I will bring on my brilliant co-writer and Son Daniel who read a short segment from the book the indication or the the purpose of which is to indicate just how normalized trauma is become in our society So Daniel if you're within hearing here shot please come out this is my co-writer Daniel hi folks this is from chapter 24 called we I think the Americans you know we're Canadians here but I feel like you're this crowd of all people is going to get this title we feel their pain our trauma-infused politics the subliminal beliefs leaders hold about human nature the world and their position in it and the unconscious impulses that motivate their actions are of great consequence for their politics which is to say for our lives and for our world the world view they developed early in life under the impact of misfortunes they did not choose and could not control imbues how they feel about interact with and act upon the universe and their fellow beings decades later and yet as the British psychotherapist Sue Gerhart points out quote we rarely address the underlying psychological and emotional dynamics of our public figures or our culture as a whole let's briefly examine two Paras but we're going to skip one of the pairs because it's Canadian and we don't need to go there of political Nemesis all four of whom all two of whom in this case have convinced millions of people to entrust them with their great power what makes each of them so appealing and so appalling depending on who's observing owes much to personality traits forged in The Crucible of early trauma and then we talk about Stephen Harper the former pm and Justin Trudeau of the current pm according to the popular narrative there could have been no more diametrical opposites in American politics whether gauged by demographic appeal ethical values or personality then 2016 presidential opponents Donald J Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton the differences are easy to spot the similarities subtler but instructive it may come as a surprise to supporters of both for example to read a Scientific American analysis published in 2016 that pointed out how many qualities that define psychopathy are routinely found in top politicians one was cold-heartedness a trait on which Trump and his then opponent Clinton scored in the upper quintile Donald Trump's cartoonishness the Havoc he wreaked on the U.S political system and the cultural tumult around his ascendancy can too easily obscure What a Sad thoroughly wounded person he is it took one who knows him better than most his psychologist niece Mary Trump to cut through both the hoopla and the opprobrium to the dark heart of the matter we now know from Mary is revealing 2020 biography too much and never enough how my family created the world's most dangerous man that the young Donald had plenty of cause to push reality out of mind and sight to become grandiose narcissistic combative and utterly opportunistic deep down I have no problem describing him as a sociopath Mary has said of Donald's Father Fred the Potter familias quote he has no real human feeling and he treated his children variously with contempt end quote her own father Fred Jr Donald's older sibling was driven by childhood trauma to alcoholism and an early death at age 41. the world has seen what Donald was driven to it oughten to have required Mary Trump's Revelations to uncover the suffering behind the huckster president's persona but in our trauma blind World it did he is a poster child for trauma the psychiatrist Bessel vanderkolt told me is there any water around it would help me get through only if that's the only option oh thank you I have natural immunity the journalist Tony Schwartz got an up close view when he ghost wrote Trump's best-selling the art of the deal lying is second nature to him Schwartz told the New Yorker years later more than anyone else I have ever met Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true or sort of true or at least ought to be true second nature as we have noted before is nobody's real nature no one's original nature impels them to lie there are plenty of congenial Liars but no congenital ones Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote Somewhere wrote Somewhere that people lie their way out of reality when they have been hurt by reality and this is eminently true of Donald Trump's origin story lying automatic or deliberate first insulated him from the devastating from devastating rejection in childhood and later served him in the realm of political power Hillary Clinton is still admired and pined for by many as a tenacious Survivor and the rightful winner of the 2016 election compared with Trump at least she is a paragon of poise Grace empathy hard work and reason what almost never gets asked is where do such Relentless ambition and tenacity come from and at what cost ought we really to celebrate it or is it in its own way also an unhealthy Norm even if not to the same degree as Trump's bloviating Bluster such questions were completely bypassed in the hagiographic haze of Clinton's campaign in ways I found literally incredible One Moment in particular stuck with me it demonstrates how readily we normalize and lionize the winning personalities of our leaders on the evening of her nomination a video celebrating Hillary's life and achievements was broadcast to an international audience narrated by the actor Morgan Freeman the voice of God in it the candidate quoted A Life Lesson imparted to her in childhood by her Stern exacting father don't whine don't complain do what you are supposed to do do it to the best of your ability by all indications this was a whitewash as we know from biographical accounts the father could be capricious and cruel quote from the biography he hurled barting excuse me he hurled biting sarcasm at his wife and his only daughter and spanked at times excessively his three children to keep them in line end quote in the video secretary Clinton also shared my mother wanted me to be resilient she wanted me to be brave she then related an instance of how this quote-unquote resilience was inculcated I was four and there were lots of kids in the neighborhood I would come out and have a bow in my hair and the kids would all pick on me it was my first experience of being bullied and I was terrified one day I ran into the house and my mother met me and she said to me there is no room for cowards in this house you go back outside and figure out how you were going to deal with what those kids are doing that isn't a call to resilience but to repression the message that the young child receives in such a circumstance is vulnerability is shameful in this house there is no room for your fear do not feel or show your pain suck up your feelings you are on your own don't expect any empathy here and yet no one in the arena seemed to find this blow to its small child's sensibility disturbing no media commentator so much as registered that this hand-picked example of supposedly inspiring parenting was in fact a public celebration of trauma no Observer suggested that a little girl seeking the safety of the parents Embrace is hardly a coward she is a normal four-year-old in any case the life lesson about pushing through the pain did its work more than six decades later a campaign in Clinton was ill and dehydrated with pneumonia but hid her weakness from everyone until she collapsed in the street I'm feeling great she unconvincingly assured the public the same day it's a beautiful day in New York no doubt the same self-suppressing Dynamic compelled her to tolerate her husband's philandering proclivities described by the late writer John Didion as the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent in stereotypical trauma impact fashion Hillary blamed herself for her spouse's infidelity he was under great stress and she had not sufficiently tended to his emotional needs she told a friend thus aligning with women's assigned role in the culture of patriarchy she thinks she was not smart enough not sensitive enough not free of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying this close Confidant summarized Hillary's views the internalized lack of empathy showed itself during the election campaign when she carelessly but all the more tellingly dubbed half of Trump's base a basket of deplorables revealing to a wide swath of America what they already knew in their bones that many Urban Elites view them with smug contempt as people whose economic political and moral grievances can be ignored the deplorable's retort came that November in the form of a stunning political upset Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the conservative columnist David Brooks wrote discerningly in 2016 both ultimately Hue to a distrustful stark combative zero-sum view of Life the idea that making it in this world is an unforgiving slog and that giving other given other people's selfish Natures vulnerability is dangerous end quote that sense of danger I would only add started long before their forays into Political life although their respective supporters would likely shudder at the thought of them being remotely similar Trump and Clinton were a match made in childhood suffering [Applause] I think water is going to be a theme tonight yeah um so I think it's a good segue from there to ask you about uh small tea traumas you write about small T traumas in your book and I was really interested when I read that because I have people come up to me in my events and people who clearly suffered you know they're struggling with something real and they read my book and they say well I can't really I have no right to have any problems because of what you went through and then they they think oh because because somebody wasn't able to go to school or something then it must invalidate what they experienced and one of the things I really liked about your book was taking seriously the notion first off there's almost nothing to be gained in comparing but also there's there's different kinds of ways that people can be heard and I really like you quote John Bowlby who's the attachment kind of um most founding father who defines these kinds of small traumas as nothing happening when something profitable might have happened yeah and uh I just wonder if you talk a little bit about what we what we what we what you mean by small T traumas and why they're why they're so crucial sure so that was actually DW winter card oh did I confuse it a fellow britisher of a fellow British contemporary of John Bulby and so Toronto we often think of it as a terrible dire things happening to people such as Tara describes in her own book educated identifiable abuse and those events are traumatic for sure but the word trauma itself or derives from a Greek origin meaning a wound a wounding so trauma is a psychic wounding and there's two ways you can wound people you can hurt people children especially first of all by doing really bad things to them and those are clear the sexual the physical the emotional abuse when there's violence in the family where there's an addiction in the family when a parent is jailed or parent dies severe neglect so these events are traumatic and those are what are called Big tea trauma but there's another way you can hurt children which is by not meeting their needs so the human child is born with certain needs these needs are not arbitrary they are not culturally determined they're actually determined by Evolution this is our nature and we share by the way these needs with other mammals when these needs are not met we can be wounded now people can easily remember or more easily remember the difficult painful things that happened those are the big teeth traumas people have a tendency not to remember what didn't happen and what didn't happen is that their needs weren't met and so I've often had people come up and say you know I've been addicted or I've had an autoimmune disease or had cancer or I've had a mental health issue but I had a happy childhood and that's when I issue what I call the happy childhood Challenge and I say give me three or four minutes and it never fails within three minutes we can identify the pain in their childhoods that they never thought about because it was so normalized in their experience and that usually has to do with some essential need not being met primarily the need to be seen and heard and accepted just for who you are that's an essential human need when I see an essential human need in the book there's the chapter on irreducible needs irreducible meaning that if those needs are not met the child will suffer pain and a wound that means they'll be traumatized and in this culture very few children have their needs met because of all kinds of influences we can talk about but the small teeth trauma is when the needs that are essential for healthy development are not met and the child especially the sensitive child suffers the wounding and most people have trouble recognizing those because as in this case of Hillary Clinton being told to get out there and deal with the bullies it's so normalized it's so normalized that you can talk about it in front of millions of people and nobody's going to even bat an eyelash so that's what I mean by small tea drama of quoting winokot when something could happen but it doesn't happen something that should have happened but doesn't happen and that means the child's needs not having been met I find personally at least those are the most difficult to get hold of it's it's sort of easier to look back at your life and say oh that happened and that should not have happened but to try to come to terms with you know what sort of person would I be not if that hadn't happened but if I had had the sort of life where I could have told someone that was happening well it's a much harder question it's just it's almost impossible to imagine you didn't have it it was very difficult to imagine what that would be like or to feel even know if you're allowed to feel upset about it you know there's nothing to compare it to yeah you don't have another life to compare this life to so you don't know like so in your case when you I mean in educated there are plenty of instances of you know traumatic inputs but when but when you were hurt by your brother who did you talk to about it yeah nobody yeah now you ask any anybody who is abused as a child sexually or physically or emotionally who did you talk to and the answer is invariably nobody which means that by the time the traumatic event the abuse happened a a more significant trauma had already happened which is the child feels cut off from help any of you who are parents if you ask yourself if your child experienced physical or sexual abuse or even the hint of it from anyone who would you want them to talk to you do naturally say I want you to talk to me and then my next question would be and if your child did experience such things and didn't talk to you how would you understand that the only way to understand it is by the time the abuse happened the child had already learned that he she they were alone and those more support which by the way allows the abuse to happen because the abuser always knows that laser-like accuracy who's got defenses who's got support and who's all alone so the bully can always hone in on the victim they have laser awareness of who is boundary less and defenseless and unprotected and that's why a kid can be bullied in one school they go to another school they'll be Beluga over again because the body can always pick up on that helpless vulnerability and that comes from the original trauma of being cut off from nurturing support about the clash between those two essential needs authenticity and attachment and why is it that attachment when you're young at least always wins yes so this is a theme throughout the book the child has an irreducible need for attachment which means attachment is a drive that pulls put two bodies together gravity is an attachment drive it pulls two bodies together it pulls me to the Earth but it also pulls the Earth towards me now in psychological terms in child developmental terms attachment is the force that pulls two bodies together for the sake of being taken care of or for the sake of taking care of the other so parents have a natural attachment drive built into their brains there was an article in the New York Times three weeks ago or two weeks ago about it there's no such thing as mother in Instinct the hell there isn't try and tell a mother baboon that there's no such thing as Mother ending Instinct we'll try and tell a mother rat that there's no such thing as mothering instinct in this culture we're cut off from our instincts which is very different from not having them in the first place for for these instincts to work they have to be evoked by the environment and one of the toxicities of toxicities of our culture is that it actually undermines and distorts and even blunts the parenting instinct but what question I'm answering right now or the attachment in authenticity yes thank you it's wonderful having an add brain you know so we have this need for attachment the parent has a need for attaching to the child as a matter of fact research seems to indicate that the mothers need to attach for the first several months is even greater than the infants which is really interesting so we have this attachment drive without which and yeah why do we have that well because without it we can't survive if the mother bird didn't have a an attachment drive to the incident that in defend bird wouldn't so humans are kind of uniquely helpless foreign let me tell you a great story about attachment um a few years ago when British Columbia where I live there was a film there was somebody filmed um Eagles feeding in their nest the little red tail hawk now that's unusual because Eagles feed red tail hawks to their babies for breakfast but in this case they were feeding it and treating it one of their own children and so when somebody went to an ornithologist and say well what are these Eagles particularly compassion and empathetic what's going on here you won't believe this but you know what the ornithologist's name was Dr bird and uh and Dr Byrd said no no it's not compassion it's attachment instinct when the mother bird or the father bird sees a little bird going like this with their with their you know beak they start feeding it so that these these equals were acting out of attachment Instinct so we have this needful attachment for the sake of survival without which we can sustain life so that's an absolute need we have another need as well though one of the irreducible needs of children is the freedom to feel all their emotions from grief to anger to Fear To Joy playfulness all that that's a need that's a developmental need of the human child determined by Evolution because exactly let's face it we didn't develop in Civilization we developed out there in nature for hundreds of tons of years millions of years actually how long does a creature survive in nature without being connected to their gut feelings so it's another survival need and That's What I Call authenticity simply from the word Auto for cells so being in touch with oneself being in touch with themselves and one of the most dramatic passages in your book which I quoted in my book which is about how when you came to believe that um I don't forget how you put it but you said that it you thought that your brothers violence towards you didn't affect you until you realized that the very belief that it didn't affect you that was the effect we got so caught up from your authentic feelings yeah of what authenticity is this is knowing what it is because the word gets gets thrown around a lot I sort of cringe a bit about authenticity because yeah people are trying to sell me something but um uh which is also a topic you you write about but I I like your definition here which is just knowing our gut feelings when they arise and honoring them exactly and there's a lot of ways you can get cut off from your gut feelings it can something dramatic happening like what happened with my brother where you maybe need to need to dissociate but there's also uh more subtle ways that I think people learn who they are the example that you read uh from Hillary Clinton's campaign I'm bringing home a fear that I have and it's it can't be here there's not space in this house for it so I have to leave it outside and I have to be a brave person and the problem is then she is a brave person but it's also a lie because she is this other person and the question is what happens to other person does she know that she's both does she forget uh what's occurring when that happens so there's a loss of something there but it's hard to know what it is well exactly so what actually happens is that the child is forced into this tragic tension between if I'm authentic which is in the case of Hillary I'm afraid I'm four years old and I'm afraid that's the authentic feeling fear is a natural brain circuit we have it for a good reason we thought it we wouldn't survive and the natural Drive of the human child when they're afraid is to seek help from their attachment figures now if that attachment figure says you can't have fear well you can't have anger which a lot of parents are advised by so-called planting experts to to suppress or or ostracize or banish the child's anger one very famous psychologist says that an angry child should have made to sit by themselves that they come back to normal but there's nothing more normal than a two-year-old kid who's angry you know when the child gets the message that in order to be attached they have to disconnect from their feelings then there's the loss of authenticity so the price that we pay for the attachment relationship is in this culture to give up our authenticity now we get disconnected from ourselves and then 34 years later we start wondering who the heck are we anyway and who's life am I living because it's not coming from me it's coming from my need to be accepted and loved and valued by other people at the cost of not being myself so that's what gets given up but what I think is so interesting about that is almost no one will have will have escaped this fully I mean every person I've ever met no matter how wonderful no matter how loving they'll say to you I don't my kids can be anything they want to be except everybody has an accept yeah every single person you know and and kids know that they get a sense of I'm all right and I'm a part of this family as long as I am whatever and in some families that's that's a big box and in some families this is a really little box yes my family is a little bit of a small box and um but but they know and so you leave parts of yourself out and and what you're saying is that in itself is a kind of fragmenting experience that you go through life and something is missing you've learned to let go of your own reactions your own gut feelings exactly and so the essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves that's the essence of trauma so to remind you trauma is not what happened to you it's not the events that happen those are traumatic but the trauma itself is the disconnection from oneself and I'm not the first or the only one to formulate it that way but it makes a lot of sense to me and then we spend the rest of our lives living out of aspects of ourselves but not our food through full selves as a matter of fact we developed these coping mechanisms to compensate for a loss of self and those coping mechanisms are the source of pathology of Mind and Body later on so you have this provocative thing you say where you say you like saying provocative things I think uh but one of the many wonderful provocative things you say is that personality a lot of time is is is a cover what we think of as our personality is actually a cover and I have a quote from your book that says it's sobering to realize the many of the personality traits we've come to believe are us and perhaps even take pride in actually Bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves yeah so if a child is for example not valued for who they are just for who they are they'll want to keep proving their value and so for example they go to medical school like I did you know and then you're going to be valuable all the time if you're not light for who you are just for who you are not for what you do but for who you are you might become very nice you become this one is very nice people who's always trying to please everybody else if you don't get the attention that you need that you do need children need attention not for anything they do but just for existing then you might become consumed by attracting your attention and then you'll be all your life will be worried about being attractive hence you have a 50 billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry where people are trying to make themselves attractive so because they didn't get the attention they needed the children or if you are not made to feel important you might become very demanding and um all these personality traits we think they're us but they're not us there are coping mechanisms so what we call the personality is actually an amalgam or some genuine traits with coping mechanisms that are compensations for the loss of authenticity and we confuse them with ourselves and we live out of them until they lead to some kind of pathology or crisis in our lives and then we have to start wondering well who are we anyway so you wrote a book called when the body says no yeah and I was talking to a friend last night we were having a drink and we were talking about why it's so hard to say no to people why you feel so bad when you say no to somebody why is it somebody says can you do this thing for me and everything in you is like no I don't want to I don't like you that much I don't have the time and yet what you write back is absolutely send it over and um why do we do that what is that well it's very interesting just asking for a friend it's very interesting it's pretty interesting because anybody who's had children you know exactly what word the child starts saying vociferously and compulsively at age a year and a half it's not yes no time for dinner no trying to put our shoes on no I had a friend of mine Harold whose son name was Ben Ben was two years old and Harold said to Ben do you want an apple and Ben said no I want an apple [Laughter] and what that has to do with is that the child has to individuate at some point from the parent Nature's agenda is not that we should remain cute and cuddly and compliant to our lives this is gender sure I'm positive story but I am Nature's agenda is that we should become an independent creature knowing our own will now given the you know there's a psychologists a Canadian psychologist who will remain unnamed in this particular context but he says that parents can impose their will on the child because we're bigger and stronger and smarter than we are a complete backward understanding of and for that kind of stupidity he gets rewarded with mass Fame and all kinds of media attention but actually the child's need is to be an independent person and so that no is actually a little fence that nature puts up if you were growing a plant in your backyard you would and there were deer or rabbit around you put a little rabbit fencer on that plant that no is the child's little fence around his incipient little will behind which he can develop his own preferences if we don't know how to say no or yeses don't mean anything at all if I invite you out for coffee and you don't know how to say no then you just doesn't mean anything at all it doesn't mean you want to be with me that you like me you might even hate me but you don't know how to say no so that in order to be able to say it true yes we have to say no no that's okay where does the inability to say no what is the belief you think when someone asks well so what happens is the child learns if I say no to the parents expectations then I won't be accepted so the child suppresses the no in order to be accepted it's that same authenticity attachment dilemma that we're talking about so we suppress our no now when we don't know how to say no we've taken a lot of burdens a lot of stresses those stresses have a physiological impact on the body those physiological impacts result in disease I mean you look at let's look at this question of autoimmune disease in this culture uh 70 or 80 percent of people with autoimmune disease are women not men it's not 50 50. it's about 70 80 percent and it's worse in the case of minority women in Canada an indigenous woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than that of anybody else this in a population that never used to have any rheumatoid arthritis at all prior to colonization now what's that about in the 1930s the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis was a one-to-one you know what it is now three and a half women to every man which proves that it can't be genetic because genes don't change in a population over 80 years and it's not the climate or the diet it's the acculturated Demand on women that they don't say no to the expectations of men and society and so during the covet crisis the New York Times had an article Society shock absorbers so this is the title of a chapter in our book and what that meant was that women took on the stress of not only their own suffering during covid but also the emotional travails of their children and their spouses and their families and their families suffered they felt guilty that's not a gender issue per se certainly not a biological issue it's an issue of cultural demands placed on a certain segment of the population now when you don't know how to say no and you take on the stress of other people's burdens that burdens your immune system your neurological system your hormone apparatus and you get autoimmune disease that's why the ratio so much in against women so that little know that you don't say has huge physiological consequences by the way there's all kinds of research supporting what I'm talking about I'm not just talking about Insight or or conjecture here I'm talking about scientific research so do you encourage everyone to get in touch with their two-year-old and just really find Joy saying no yeah when the kid says no no problem you know oh you don't want to have dinner now okay I get it well it's still time for dinner you know but you don't get upset about it right you don't you you don't stifle the child's no you don't stifle the child's uh desire to individuate and and to express their own being you know in our stupidity what do we call that we call that the terrible twos there's nothing terrible about it It's Perfectly Natural it's Nature's agenda that this kid should become an independent person you should celebrate it if kids could have always said that if kids could be to be Arbiters or language instead of talking about the terrible tools we'd be talking about the terrible 30s you know whatever [Laughter] um I wanted to sweep out a tiny bit and you've said that we have a kind of exploitative shall we say toxic culture and there's a lot of directions we could go with that but the one that really caught my interest when I was looking through my notes this morning was this definition or distinction between happiness and pleasure and how we have exploited the one and may possibly neglected the other I wondered if you'd illuminate us on that yeah well consumer culture which is the might say the bread and butter of a capitalist economic system is is that we have to keep buying more and more you know it's and then newer and newer and I I remember being in San Francisco once with my wife Ray and um be walking on the street and there's several layered line up around the block like people are lined up around the block I mean you know four blocks you know lined up three or four people in a row so I went up to one guy and I said what's the big deal here like why are people everything is lining up he says oh it's the new iPad and I said okay I get it the iPad is um it's a great instrument I'm sure but why do you have to get it today and he said you don't understand man it's the iPad you know and so in this culture uh thrives on confusing people's needs with their desires I think the way you had is it what's his name Rob lustig the head defined happiness is um well pleasure is uh I like this this feels good I want more yeah happiness is I like this this feels good I'm I'm content yeah and I was right I read some books uh on ads and psychology a couple years ago and I remember one thing really stood out with me is that it's a staple of advertising that you have to create and need in people you have to create a sense in people that they are insufficient in some way that they they need this to be satisfactory it's very similar to what we were just talking about with what you need to be you know accepted in your family you have to leave certain parts of your personality way and to accept it in the world you need to have these kinds of thighs and you really need to have all these things done to you and you need to wear these kinds of clothes and um I mean I actually heard someone say last night that they don't even like going on Instagram anymore because they feel like it's just messing with them you know like all of the advertising which has always been like that we've always had advertising and we've had it for a long time but it does seem to have there's a gamification of it in some new way where it it feels more more like psychological warfare to me than it used to it feels it does not feel like a culture that is making its its money by trying to make people well it does not feel like that no the culture depends on people not being well the culture depends on people being empty and thinking they can fulfill themselves through the purchase or the of this product or the engagement in this activity and so on and this goes way back for his son-in-law Edward Bernays was one of the ones that developed the modern techniques of advertising it was all about making people feel that they need something that they only desire and now there's a class of people who confused their needs with their desires they're called infants okay and and young children and essentially the function of this culture is to infantilize the enthalpa entire population to make them believe that they need what they desire and to create these artificial desires that's the as I said the bread and butter of this culture what if we all stop buying all kinds of things that we need we think we need but we don't really need but what happened to the economy so that the culture deliberately infantilizes people making them believe that what they want is what they need and just as you quote Robert lustig the is an endocrinologist a pediatric endocrinologist and he wrote this book called The hacking of the American mind the you know there's a lot of talk about conspiracy theories but there's such a thing as conspiracy realism and and some of the biggest companies conspire and this has been documented left right and Center to create products whether the digital kind or whether junk foods that are designed to appeal to those segments of the brain that are most prone to be addictive you know what this is called it's called neural marketing what a beautiful phrase neuromarketing targeting your nervous system to make it addicted to things you don't need by the way that's the essence of addiction is that you keep craving things that temporarily soothe you and then they cause you harm and that's the culture not such a bright light head-hearted fellow right there well I don't really know anybody who doesn't feel at least a little bit that way about social media and yeah probably the internet writ large I don't know anybody who doesn't I don't know anybody who spends a couple of hours on Facebook or Instagram and then comes and says that was so good for me it's like don't I feel rejuvenated you know and yet there is a quality where uh there's this kind of cost if you're not if you're not playing the game and you're a writer and you know I mean kids in school that don't have it they feel isolated they feel like they don't know what's going on and so there's this insane trade-off you're asked to make where you either participate in a thing that is run by a company that is trying to game you one way or the other to get you to spend 30 minutes one day and 40 minutes the next day and four hours the next day and eight hours the next day and ten hours and and you know you can feel it you know that they're figuring you out you are a puzzle there figuring out what does this person need to become completely reliant on our product that's exactly and you want to get away from it but their cost to that and uh it does feel like this arm wrestle with the with the world I just don't I don't think this was hot when I was a teenager I mean I had my problems but I didn't have this and it's happy about that it's uh the toxicity is almost infinite in this case we actually know that kids young kids who spend more time on digital media their brain circuits are affected by it in a negative way the brain circuits of emotional intelligence and of cognitive sense are affected by spending time but those companies don't care we have iPads for one-year-olds now if you look at actually the social media it's designed to supplant without meeting genuine human needs so what happens on Facebook it's actually designed to meet in a false way people's attachment needs what do people do on Facebook they like each other liking is an attachment dynamic they have friends that's an attachment dynamic Facebook itself the name itself Facebook think about it you're presenting a face to the world my friend the psychologist Peter Levine talks about mothers who Botox themselves which means that the muscles relax so they can't smile at their kids in a in a responsive way he says that Facebook is the botoxing of the masses because we all present this phony face to the world that we concoct and we hope people who like our phony face which even if they do it doesn't satisfy the inner sense that they don't even know me they don't even see me so even lots of people like us it doesn't satiate it just creates more of an addictive need to get more and more likes so it's a Botox culture there's a great book by Jeff you heard of this called you are not a gadget and he makes an argument that and the heroes were ages ago are so prescient but he basically said one of the problems with the Internet or any any digital manifestation of yourself any attempt to live is your avatar whether that's your Facebook avatar your Instagram Avatar yeah any any he's a computer scientist is any time that we represent reality digitally we always underrepresent it we never can get all the richness even of a single musical note we have to pick like a very specific thing we we always have to compress and underrepresent he said there's a problem when people start living their social lives online which is that it's it's just flat boring colorless like you are much more interesting than your avatar exactly uh and and the issue I think is people start to identify I think more almost with their Avatar than with their real life do you know the joke about they're bored because it's boring Facebook's a quite boring place if you think about it it's like you know the joke about the old guy who says uh you know I'm not good with media I'm not good with gadgets and computers I don't understand them but you know I started my own in-life Facebook project so I go up to stranger in the street and I say I had a muffin this morning for breakfast you know and or I or I show them pictures of my Vacations or or I go up to total strangers and I say will you be my friend and he says I also I already have six followers he says three psychiatrists and three policemen you know it's nuts and and yet you know ing everything I know I find myself very easily drawn into that Vortex of of just coasting on YouTube you know it's totally addictive and it's totally unsatisfying and yet look how many people are suffering because of somebody what somebody says about them on social media it's as if it was real by the way let me read you something uh this I'm sorry I I just got to read this this is um since you're going to read your Amazon review aren't you the amendments are in review yeah so if I can find it I just I just want to read this to you because uh you might all want to go home and uh and and not pay any attention to because this is a review on Amazon of my new book now it's the book is already you know doing very well on Amazon as you can see but it's had three reviews already and one of them gives one star and this guy says filled with conspiracy theory is the bigotry pseudoscience and misinformation based on feelings political propaganda and DNT dementia so you may not wish to get this book the best time so you should put it on the cover you can move my quote that right but but how many people actually live by what other people say about them and uh the the Catholic monk uh Thomas Merton talked about what a strange world it is when we actually live in other people's imaginations I have some questions for you please that aren't my questions um so what is that from the audience are they okay yeah I'm not making it up wrote an amazing book body keeps the score and he said to me um he said I bet you have a lot of people telling you that you are resilient and I said yes I do have a lot of people telling me that and he said you know the thing is you never know if someone is resilient until you are married to them which is maybe which I think is so true uh anyway that's just that's Preamble for the question um how can attachment benefit a partner a wife or husband or hurt a partner what are some resolutions uh to dealing with partner attachment with I think maybe this question is trying to get at how maybe how couples work with attachment disorders and inside of a couple or what you do maybe when your partner is strong so here's my experience my observation and also a lot of evidence that we always find as a partner somebody at the same level of trauma resolution as Europe you may think you're marrying somebody who's more traumatized than you are uh-uh if if they were more traumatized than you you wouldn't have anything to do with them if they were less traumatized than you they wouldn't have anything to do with you the the trauma may show up in different ways so that it might be hard to distinguish you might think oh my God all these terrible things happen to them none of that happened to me I'm not talking about the external events I'm talking about the internal wound so you always marry somebody who's just as wounded As You Are whether that wound is partially healed or unhealed they're at the same level of woundedness that you're at which means that don't diagnose your partner because in the animals your partner you're diagnosing yourself the question is it's a given that we married somebody or we get into a relationship with someone at the same level of woundedness as we are the question is is there ground between the two of you for an honest examination of Self in the context of relationship and can we make room for that Mutual growth and is there a partnership so you know as I say in my book in the first chapter that my problem is that my you know you know the old joke about the the guy sitting in the bar and it's late at night and it's closing time and the bartender is looking this bored expression on his face cleaning the bar there's one guy still sitting there deep in his drink and he says you know my problem is that my wife doesn't understand me well my version of that is see I'm sitting in the bar at three in the morning eyes glaze the barter and there's cleaning the the bar and I'm saying to him my problem is that my wife understands me I I I I I'm married I married somebody exactly at the same level of wounded and this is me and we've had a difficult time of it over the years including this morning but we're committed to the truth of ourselves we're committed to figuring out what's going on no but the other but with ourselves so this year we're going to celebrate 53rd anniversary and it's because [Applause] if you knew how hard it had been you'd be giving us a standing ovation but but that's the point so that don't worry about diagnosing your partner look at yourself to see what you bring to the relationship it's much more difficult but much more rewarding question here that says is inner work therapy May meditation or urgent to heal our toxic culture is inner work selfish well I'll tell you um so I've been a political activist before I was I got into psychological work I mean I was one of those 60s University radicals and we're going to save the world and change the world and they used to be filled with so much rage and I don't have to mention the issues but a lot of range and there were these psychologists around who said you know you're this rage that you're exhibiting is just you're angry at your parents well on the one hand they were just trying to justify the system and dismiss their legitimate concerns about the Injustice the inequality the murderous Vietnam War and all that that we're angry about but on the other hand they were right so that the rage that I brought to the political activity didn't have to do with the causes that I believed in passionately as I did it had to do with the rage that I hadn't worked out in myself so the most selfless thing you can do is to work on your issues you'll be that much more effective when you do your political work there's no con there's no contradiction between the two and we've seen this people in the most Justified causes behave in ways that are undermining their own work because they haven't dealt with their personal issues there's no contradiction you don't do the one without the other so that it's nothing selfish about it it's actually selfless to work on yourself to better to serve the public good which is by the way it was typically something that politicians just refused to do I mean it's amazing when you read the biography of politicians the biographies of politicians just how resistant to self-reflection they are it's it's chronic it's consistent so no self-reflection in fact you know what it was Karl Marx who was a bit of a political activist you'll agree with me he said that self-reflection is the first condition of wisdom how do you recommend one to reconnect with themselves in adulthood well you don't go around trying to reconnect with yourself because if you're not connected to yourself then any concept of yourself is just a concept so how do you reconnect with the concept you can't but can I ask you no that's okay okay no no just you answer first then I'll jump in yeah I think so here's my question to you have you noticed in yourself throughout your life that you do something or you say something and then later on you say well that wasn't me that wasn't authentic yes I have done okay yeah interesting I don't know if I would put it that way but I'll have to say yes well who's the one that notices that um so that that true self is there so it's not a question of trying to find the true self the question is to notice when we're not being true to ourselves and then to ask well why not what was I afraid of not being liked not being respected not being accepted being rejected being judged and you do those and you do that questioning compassionately for yourself not why wasn't I being myself I wonder why I wasn't being myself what was my belief that kept me from stating my honest opinion of saying what my real feelings were what kept me from that that's the compassion inquiry which is you know one of the themes of the book in the healing chapters so it's not a question of trying to reconnect with yourself it's a question of noticing um and and and and and observing where we're not being true to ourselves who's the Observer who's don't know this sir that's your true self that's interesting I mean I was thinking when you were talking about um what that experience was like for me and I think I I think I was very surprised I always imagined that I had a set of good attributes these are my good attrib good attributes these are them and I have a set of bad attributes that if I could just get rid of these ones and have more of these ones then I would be better yeah that seemed kind of obvious like I wouldn't have understood why that wouldn't be true and it was surprising for me when I did a lot of therapy and spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I was living in such an insane way that um it was the opposite actually and I found more not that I got better when I started being more of an ass that wasn't it but um let me try to explain this it was more like when I became all right with the fact that sometimes I'm selfish yeah sometimes I have a desire to do things that are rude sometimes I do those things that are rude even but I have the desire a lot that I don't do it and sometimes I have the desire to take things sometimes I have a desire to say obnoxious things or I don't want to clean the kitchen even when I know it's my turn uh like all these things and as soon as I was sort of okay with it just okay that they existed it's you know like I'm not going to live there all the time I'm not going to do it necessarily but I'm all right that that impulse is a part of me as a being I've stopped freaking out every time it even gets into that yeah I found I calmed down quite a bit and I also found I was a nicer person because when other people did those things I wasn't just incensed that the world wasn't exactly the way I wanted it to be and everyone wasn't living to this perfect standard and I found myself just calmer you know someone to cut me off in traffic and I would have a second of like oh how could they and then I was like well I did that a week ago like I can't get I can't get that I'm out about it like maybe they're in a hurry maybe they're having a bad day day like and then you go on with your life and there's something that was very confusing and I can't articulate it but I actually found it was in accepting the bad list that I became a calmer nicer person because I had a lot more tolerance for other people's bad lists yeah once I had dealt with my own well absolutely I mean what you're talking about is self-acceptance and uh um even that phase of Badness is a loaded one isn't it there's already a judgment there um and so what I recommend there is is noticing when we're judging ourselves and noticing my rejecting parts of ourselves and and we think some aspect of ourselves is acceptable some isn't well remember what I said about the irreducible needs of the child is to be fully accepted for exactly how they are well when the environment doesn't give that to us we don't develop that self-acceptance either and that lack of self-acceptance itself is one of the impacts of trauma so that what I hear you describing is a gradual very welcome welcoming of yourself and you might well we get these standards they can come from social media they can come from religion they can come from our families and I think what's interesting is we're all sort of we're animals really we're sort of working it out but yeah we're all we all have these old brain systems really natural I mean your friend Bessel also said this to me he said you know healing is about your relationship to yourself as a creature yeah and I thought that was that last sentence that is so interesting to just have the ability to look at yourself not as this perfect upstanding mother that you're supposed to be you're supposed to be perfect you're supposed to be a perfect colleague you're supposed to be but just as a creature you're you're a thing with a really old brain that's responding to a lot of stimuli with a you know and just having a little bit of a sense of these standards what are they and they don't seem to apply here necessarily like where did we where did they come from and why do we put so much weight on them well let me find a quote from the book um from from A Brave New World all the success brand new world and here it is um and he said this is you know a fictional world where people are gested in test tubes and they're programmed to be certain ways to serve the needs of the elite and then in Social expectation and so here's the quote and that put the directors sententiously that is the secret of happiness and virtue liking what you've got to do all conditioning aims at making people like their inescapable social destiny a vessel who are you talking about says at some point in his book the body keeps the score that we're told all the time that we're individuals but actually we barely exist as individual creatures and in the book I give the example of uh of the ant colony where surprisingly enough all the ants have the same genetic inheritance the queen ant is no different genetically from the worker ants is the needs of the colony that determines her kingdom and when if you take the queen ant out of the Colony the worker ants will some of them will start This ferocious fight as Siddhartha Mukherjee described in a wonderful New York or article of years ago and then one of them will become the queen and Physiology which he changes she starts ovulating she becomes bigger and she has more longevity and she achieves dominant status all because of the needs of the colony genetically she's the same as everybody else and so we live in a culture you know we're not like ants we don't have the same in genetic inheritance in our particular communities or societies but in terms of our development we very much develop in terms of what Society expects from us just like they do in Brave New World and again there's this tension between attachment to our society or being authentic to ourselves and in the very last pages of the book I go back to Abraham Maslow the psychologist who studied self-realization self-actualization which is people who felt okay about themselves and felt worried about themselves and accepted themselves and fulfilled themselves despite or independent irrespective of social expectations and he says that these people were healthier than their unhealthy Society and he says he points out there were neither automatic compliers or automatic Rebels they just followed their own calling and instinct or Intuition or or this or or sense of self-guidance so they weren't reflexively hostile by any means at all but they were all distinct from their less healthy culture so that this sense of having to belong and having to comply and conform it's culturally imposed we don't even realize it and we don't realize the extent to which we conform to it in this culture of rugged individualism we're very much programmed to comply and to conform I have one more audience question for you and then I have one more of my own questions sure please that will be then uh what is the Hope for families where parents have made mistakes does recognition and apology help you should ask my kids they're sick of my apologies kids don't want to be seen as manifestations of their parents guilt they want to be seen as individuals with their own possibilities capabilities in their own particular path now if anyone recognizes the formative influence of Early Childhood experience it's I'm certainly one of them because of the work that I've done so I've done a lot of guilt-ridden parenting with my kids and apologizing and explaining they're sick of it they need to find their own path so it's not a question of having made mistakes factors we all do we all can't help to the extent that we're traumatized when we have before we have kids and to the extent that we haven't worked it out before we have kids we're going to almost invariably pass it on to our kids unwittingly and given the best of Will and the most devoted love we're still going to pass on our traumas it's not a mistake it's just a natural outcome of life just how it is by the way a therapist once said to me pardon the language if your parents give you this much and you give your kids only this much you've done a great job okay so the best gift give the best gift we can give to our kids is not to apologize and Mia culpa and all that um my son Daniel go to my wrote this book and we thought it was brilliant help I couldn't have written it we've been through our stuff in fact our next book is entitled hello again a fresh start for adult children and their parents which is a workshop that we're going to do at Omega here in at the end of October we've been doing it for a few years my kids know the mistakes that I've made but it's on them now they're the ones that have to take responsibly for themselves there's nothing I can do to undo what happened in our family were never small what we can do as parents now is to continue our own healing as an example and be present for them now in a supportive fashion as they face and deal with their own challenges so drop the guilt it's not merited it's not helpful and it's not respectful for your children because nobody wants to be seen as somebody else's mistake they need to be seen as individuals in their own right and I can tell you myself that the more my own healing has preceded the less uh tragic I've become with my own kids so that's what I recommend it's got you would be so healthy for be familiar to constantly having a dynamic where they're probably apologize but I also think I you know I come from a family where a lot of things are just sort of denied and they happen and almost while they're happening they're denied and it's very difficult to function in that and then there'll be one or two people my sister-in-law is one of them who they just like this is happening what is going on and having things acknowledged it seems is pretty crucial acknowledging yes and and some degree of Health remorse is is is necessary and beneficial but sort of an ongoing sense of guilt yeah and an endless apology is actually undermining yeah yeah you have some really uh interesting thoughts in your in your book about um anger and rage and why you don't necessarily want to suppress and the the ways that people can actually be quite angry if you measure their their skin reactions but they don't have a conscious awareness that they're in yeah unfortunately we didn't have time to go into all the things about anger but imagine that we did and we talked about how anger is really can be helpful and it's like a natural phase that you might want to go through but I wanted to end on the phase that comes after anger which is um hopefully I think forgiveness we forgive others we forgive ourselves and you have a really beautiful story in your book um I thought the point of it to me was how we forgive other people really for ourselves we don't we don't forgive them for them and you tell the story of Dr Edith how do you say her last name Edgar Edgar and so she is a Jewish woman from Hungary her parents were taken to Auschwitz and they were killed there as she was herself yeah she was also taken there but she survived and she wrote a book called the choice about how she chose to travel to the Bavarian Alps and there she decided to forgive Adolf Hitler for what he had done yeah and you quote this passage I'm just going to read it so I stood on the side of Hitler's former home and forgave him this had nothing to do with Hitler it was something I did for me I was letting go releasing that part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting mental and emotional energy to keep Hitler in Chains as long as I was holding on to that rage I was in Chains with him locked in the damaging past locked in my grief to forgive is to grieve for what happened for what didn't happen and to give up the need for a different past to accept life as it was and as it is yeah that's a beautiful teaching for me this by the way who probably traveled to Auschwitz on the same train that my grandparents did because they came from the same small town in southern Slovakia um and what she's talking about there is not she's not making it okay for Hitler to have murdered all those Millions that's not what she's talking about she's talking about letting go of her own resentment about the past that the past should have been different than the way it was and that's been very important in my own Journey it was basil vanderkov who said to me once here in New York we're living uh both speaking at the conference together at Omega actually and Bethel we were having lunch and Bessel peers over to me it over his glasses and he says gobble you don't have to drag Auschwitz around it with you everywhere you go and I wasn't quite sure at the time I knew sort of what he meant but I didn't quite get it it took some time for that lesson to sink in and and for me to experience what that meant and what that meant is that the past doesn't have to be any different because it can't be any different it'd never be the case that my grandparents were not killed in Auschwitz it'll never be the case that I wasn't given to a total stranger in the street of Budapest by my mother so I didn't see her for six weeks you know to save my life that'll never be the case but the meaning I make out of that which is the traumatic imprint that therefore the world is a horrible place that therefore I have to resent the world that therefore I'm not lovable that therefore I'm being rejected all the time and they can expect rejection or abandonment I can't let go of that and that's what vessel meant and when Edith forgave Hitler she just let go of all the all that meaning that she had given the past and I think that's the essence of healing and so when I talk about trauma being the not the events that happened to us but the wound that we sustained those meanings that we created out of those early experiences and we couldn't have created any other meaning is that a one year old is 11 month old I could not have made any other meaning from my mom giving to a stranger than on that she was rejecting me and I was being abandoned healing is giving the freedom to create new meaning out of our lives and to let go of the meanings that we created out of those early experiences when we had no choice in the matter so that's what Edith was doing there and I think that's the beautiful lesson in her story thank you everyone for coming out [Music] thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The 92nd Street Y, New York

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Id: UOrE7N7FGf0

Length: 78min 56sec (4736 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023