Gabor Mate on How We Become Who We Are | Conversations with Tom

this episode is sponsored by north one to learn more about business banking with north one visit north one dot com slash impact now enjoy the episode [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with the legendary thinker and best-selling author gabor mate gabor thank you so much for joining me today it's a great pleasure thanks for having me man i'm really excited about this you've got such a cool breadth of work that focuses in on an area that i care deeply about which is i'll sum up in a way that i don't know if you'll agree with but when i look at your work it seems to all slot into how we develop and how we become who we are and that is an area of deep fascination for me and especially with your lens of looking at things through childhood trauma having worked so much in addiction um it i think you have a really unique understanding of sort of how we're put together and i would love to start with something that you begin a lot of your um your in-person sessions with which is the song by johnny cash in your mind which i had never heard so i had to i went and listened to it and i loved it what is it about that song that's going to teach us about who we are well as people we always think we're looking at a reality and our view of it sees reality the way it is but it's been a spiritual teaching for eons that really brother buddha said it the the very first statement in the collection of his saying the dhammapada is that our thoughts are in the lead and so so whatever our thoughts tell us that's the reality that we see so essentially with our minds we create the world johnny cash in this tongue says it's all in your mind um one foot on jacob's ladder which is the stairway to heaven which by the way wasn't originated with that zeppelin the stairway to heaven is actually from the bible uh where jacob dreams that the angels are going up to heaven or one foot in the fire so catch things one uh one foot on the ladder one foot in the fire it all goes down in your mind so the the kind of thoughts and beliefs that we have create the world that we live in and that's what i get from that song now what the song doesn't say is that before with our minds we create the world the world creates our minds so this is where development comes in that that given our early experiences we create a view of the world and of ourselves and of other people that then governs how we are in the world and how we feel about everything but people forget those early experiences and those shaping influences and as a result we mistake or view of the world for the world itself it all goes down in your mind which is what johnny sings what's the what's the time period of that profound shaping window of development is it just a couple years in the beginning is it till we're 15 till the brain stops developing at 25 like what what does that window look like it begins in the uterus um so already the stresses or the experiences of the mother um shape how the infant experiences the world uh we know this so that we can talk about it maybe later in detail if you wish but there's lots of evidence now that the child's brain is actually in his development is significantly influenced by the mother's emotional states so it goes back that far what i really want to understand is the the foundation of of that so i've heard you talk before about in um native societies it was always understood that if somebody was angry you would just keep them away from a pregnant person because you didn't want that anger transferring but my question is why not what what is it about intense emotions or negative emotions what is it doing to the substructures of the brain that then make that disadvantageous as the child grows well so there was a study done after 9 11 um women who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder while they were pregnant as a result of 9 11. a year later their offspring is still at abnormal stress hormone levels so fundamentally what happens is that the brain's capacity to perceive stress and to process it gets impaired so that means people are now more prone to feel stressed when there's no real threat or they may be more prone not to recognize a threat when it is there so our whole perception of the world and safety and our responses to stress the physiological apparatus for handling stress is affected in already by what happens in the womb so thinking about um the gym for instance so you go to the gym and you want a stressor you want a certain level of difficulty in order to in that case you're tearing the muscle slightly and then as it heals it grows back stronger yeah is it that the brain reacts differently to stress and that any amount of stress is bad or is there a certain amount that is useful and just were going too far well this is where i think the language becomes very important what we mean by we use the word strength so if you mean by stress the challenge life is full of challenges which will get you adrenaline going and so on that's a good thing when i talk about stress i talk about a threat that the organism doesn't know how to respond to and it's too much and so that the uh the person who actually coined over stress who was a fellow hungarian canadian hence celie uh he's the word they were the one who coined the word in his present usage um he really meant pressure on an organism that's too much for the organism to handle so that's what i mean by stress i don't i don't mean the stress of a freely chosen challenge such as going to the gym and working your muscles hard and and going even beyond what you could do before i don't mean that that's not what i mean by stress uh i mean by stress and and the the biggest triggers for stress according to the research are loss of control uncertainty lack of information and conflict so when you subject people to those circumstances which in this society happens a lot people are stressed often beyond their capacity to deal with it now that capacity is very much programmed by what happened to us very early in life and where does that so it begins in utero where is the sort of closing of that hyper malleability phase because where one thing that really drives me is the question of okay damage has been done um you know like in your case where you're born two months after or excuse me two months before the nazis invade hungary it's like not a lot to be done about that that is what it is so now the question becomes can we undo it uh is there a window of hyper malleability where the you could sort of reprogram the infant or is it like almost like an imprinting machine where it's like nope you had this heavy amount of stress in utero that's imprinted and no matter what you do in the first three years is never going to undo that it is imprinted uh in many ways biologically which we could talk about that the person is not even aware of imprinted in how the genes are turned on and off and printed on how their chromosomes function imprinted how their stressor apparatus responds to the external environment imprinted in their cells imprinted in inflammation in their bodies and so on and so on and the earlier it happens and the more it happens and the more temperamentally sensitive the child the greater the effects having said that it's never not reversible it's never not approachable now fact is people can heal people can rewire themselves people can find a equilibrium but the more happened earlier and the earlier it happened the more difficult that work becomes which brings me to my um epitaph that i've designed for my gravestone you know what it's going to say it's going to say it was a lot more work than i had anticipated you know it is a fair assessment it's ongoing work like i'm 77 it's ongoing work and you know um when i don't take care of myself emotionally when i don't do my yoga when i don't get myself into the swimming pool or on the exercise bike when i take on too much in my life it gets activated so yes it can be dealt with and it can be healed and it can be uh regulated but it takes consciousness it takes awareness given your perspective with having dealt with a lot of people that have had severe early traumas that have echoed through their adult lives in the form of addiction what is it if it's identifiable what is it that makes some people able to get in there do the work harder you know than expected though it is and other people that get stuck yeah well that's the important question um first of all let me just say that trauma shows up in multiple ways addiction is only one so-called mental illnesses depression anxiety adhd ptsd whatever others physical illnesses chronic physical analysts like cancer and autoimmune disease very often reflect trauma and in physiological ways which we can talk about and i'm not just giving you a personal opinion i'm telling you what the research shows so trauma has multiple manifestations of which addiction is only one now what makes the difference uh i don't think there's one single factor but there are a number uh first of all has there been anybody along the way that was empathetic and supportive to you if there was that can make it no matter what happened that can make a huge difference earlier in your life the better but if there was a teacher if there was a f uh uncle an aunt anybody who maybe couldn't change your situation but could listen to you or just validate you or speak to you empathetically that can make a difference um social class has a lot to do with it because um if you can afford to see a therapist and talk to somebody that puts you in an advantage how much stress you continue to be under in your life that has a lot to do with it when people are trying to just to survive it's hard for them to consider transformation so people don't under economic pressure or racially oppressed or under economic threat political conflict these make it difficult for people because people are just in survival mode uh people that are highly sensitive they're both in an advantage at a disadvantage they're at a disadvantage in that the more sensitive they are the more it hurts when stuff happens but also the more sensitive they are the more likely they might have to have some insight or awareness or some creative outlet so that can work both ways i would say the biggest difference is was there some empathetic support in your life at any time and even if you talk to people who've been addiction a long time and say well what made the difference somebody talked to me like a human being somebody didn't judge me they accepted me what what window does that open up for them is it uh it begins to allow themselves to stop judging themselves and to develop self-awareness or is there something else at play no it's the very first thing you said um anybody who's traumatized and by trauma i mean a broad range of experiences from abuse extreme things on one hand to just parents who are too stressed to pay attention to you or to really see you and receive you when children are not seen for who they are or when they hurt they can make two assumptions one there's something wrong with the world and my parents are not capable or they don't love me or can make the or they can make the assumption and that's why this is happening because i deserve to be loved and i deserve to be treated well but these people are incapable and they don't care you can make that assumption you can make the assumption i'm talking about unconscious assumption or you can make the assumption there's something wrong with me those are the two choices now it's much safer for the child to assume that there's something wrong with them otherwise it's safer it's a lot safer yeah why safer why is it safer because what what's it like to live with the danger as a four-year-old living in a world where your parents are dysfunctional and they are uh perhaps hateful towards you how could you endure that for one minute so you have to make the other opposite assumption if this stuff is happening to me it's because i deserve it something wrong with me now go back to your question somebody comes along and and treats you compassionately oh maybe i'm not that bad person here's a person who's here's somebody who's treating me like i was a worthwhile human being maybe i am a worthwhile human being so that compassion that reflection that you get from this other human being subverts your image of yourself as worthless and that's what makes a big difference who so that points to something that is really interesting maybe a little bit scary um so lisa feldman barrett who you may or may not know uh has really interesting thoughts so i'm always trying to figure out how much of who we are as nature how much of us is nurture and she told me tom look you're you're asking the wrong question so the reality is we have a nature that requires nurture and as you talk about this it and i'm i'm going to put words in your mouth tell me if they're accurate it sounds like you're saying our minds are essentially co-created and we are presenting ourselves and looking for an echo back of or a reflection back of what people think about what they see and we're using both of those things our own sort of sense of who we are plus what's being reflected back to us to figure out who we are so if something negative is reflected back that's actually going to shape my sense of self and if something positive is reflected back that's going to shape my sense of self now that to me begs a question i'm so curious to know what you think about this so my response to that is cool i'm going to become totally self-sufficient i'm going to get to the point where i don't need somebody's reflection back but i can feel the danger in that it seems like a risky game to say i'm going to totally withdraw i'm going to do all the work internally i'm going to make sure that i know who i am that i don't need that reflection back but knowing how important loving relationships are and things like that i can feel while there would be some upside to totally knowing who you are believing in yourself but you're also walling yourself off um how do you conceptualize handling that well it's a question of who's doing it and why because you can do that walling off in two ways so the buddha know the story he he goes through all these teachers and he wants to get enlightened then he goes through all these very rigorous self-denying aesthetic practices and he just doesn't the truth doesn't come to him and finally he goes off by himself and he sits under a tree by himself and he just sits there and he meditates and he contemplates everything that arises in his mind and then after a while he has his nirvana he has this um enlightenment experience and then he's got a decision to make he understands his own nature he understands the nature of reality and he really does he's one of the outstanding minds in history but that he's got a decision to make so do i just revel in this spiritual liberation that i have worked so hard to attain and no he decides he's going to go back and teach other people because he wants to be connected to humanity he wants to enlighten other people as well what can you articulate what his um sort of breakthrough enlightenment realization was well um it'd be presumptuous of me to do so because i've not had that realization myself i've only read about it or i've seen other people talk about it i don't mind a regurgitation of what other people have said i actually so i know buddhism at a thirty thousand foot view so i actually don't know other than life is suffering um i don't know what sort of the key revelations are yeah life is suffering is i mean his real teaching is that life doesn't need to be suffering but the way we set it up with our minds it is suffering so it really has to do with goes back to the johnny cash song it all goes down in your mind you disidentify from your mind and reality is much greater and much deeper and much more sacred than your mind will ever tell you that's interesting can you say that another way even even i don't know if if this is your own understanding of life or um a reflection of buddhism but i'm curious to know if life is more profound than your mind what are the elements that make it profound is it beauty is it love is it what is it the problem with the conversation tone is that there's two minds talking about the nature of reality and uh in that we don't use the same words or no no no it's that we're still in the mind whereas um my very modest understanding of the spiritual teachings not just buddhist spiritual teaching but sufi teachings or jewish spiritual teaching christian spiritual teaching i'm talking about the spiritual teachings not the religion is that there is essence there's truth that goes beyond what the mind itself can uh comprehend so far we must have access to it in some way even if only through pure experience otherwise but that's the whole point of this pure pure experience that a great poet like rumi can write about or hafiz can write about but um i cannot claim to have had that pure experience so if i did i didn't recognize it as such can i give you one of the experiences i've heard you talk about and i'll be curious to know if if you were grazing along the edges of something i believe it was your first experience with ayahuasca you said that um you were there and suddenly had this rush of just pure love and that you if i remember right you started crying and and you were just overwhelmed with the sense of just just love in its purest form and in in that moment realized you had closed yourself off to that experience is when i think about people talking about there being something more profound those are the only sort of moments that i can relate to where i think that feeling is so elevated and wonderful that but that's the only thing i've ever touched on in my own life where um that seems like what they could talk about uh does that is that getting close well it's it's heading in the right direction um i think that real spiritual teachers would say that that what i experienced there wasn't a feeling it was the feelings are like activities of our nervous systems and they would say there's something deeper than the nervous system so what i experienced was a state of of being manifesting in love no matter love might not be the only manifestation of it might be courage clarity um compassion um uh justice um strength will i know one spiritual theater specifically who talks about it in those terms but these are not feelings the feeling of love and the state of love are not necessarily the same thing but yeah there's more to it than just the mental experience there's the direct the the mental thought or even the emotional resonance it's it's more like a direct experience of something and you know it's clear that what the buddha had was for one he wasn't the only one was a direct experience but to go back to your question about isolation so there's a way of isolating yourself as a way of committing yourself to enlightenment which mean that you'll stay away from other people for the rest of your life it just means that you're going to go deep into yourself and not be distracted by all that the world throws at you then there's another way to isolate yourself which is a defensive one which is the world is so awful and heck with them all i don't need anybody that will protect you from some kind of hurt because if you withdraw from relationships you'll never be betrayed but that's true on the other hand that itself is a state of pain that isolation itself is a state of pain so when you talk about isolation it depends who's doing it and where is it coming from and and to go back to the original question and you mentioned um nurture nature it's perfectly true that we're born with certain expectations for the world i mean every creature is like our lungs are an expectation for oxygen if it wasn't for oxygen we wouldn't have lungs so we evolved in response to the availability of oxygen otherwise we would not have evolved the way we did there might be some kind of creatures around it wouldn't be us so our lungs are an expectation for for for oxygen in the same way our nervous systems are an expectation for love for nurturing for being held for being valued for being enjoyed that's what the infant is born with those expectations and whether we develop well or whether we don't depends very much on how fully those expectations are met now we can survive without them my god many of us have but survival and fully being alive and fully living are not the same thing and fully and survival adapting to things i mean you can adapt human beings are particularly good at adapting to a vast range of environments but that doesn't mean that we thrive in all those environments so one of my arguments one of my points about the culture that we're living in now is that yeah we're surviving but we're hardly thriving and we're not thriving precisely because our expectations i'm talking about our built-in natural expectations i'm not talking about artificial expectations i expect to be wealthy or expect to be respected by everybody or i expect to be achieving this achieving that no i'm talking about the natural expectations of a human being and the less those expectations are met by the rearing environment in early years the more distorted we become because the more we have to adapt to something less than what we need and in my view as i'm sure you're well aware much much of disease physical mental afflictions addictions and so on they all arise out of the ways we had to adapt to unnatural circumstances where our natural built-in expectations were thwarted that's a really um useful way to look at things i like that a lot so i use different words to kind of describe something maybe similar if not identical which i call the physics of being human so there are just some things we have needs we have um compulsions we for instance there there is going to be a voice in your head talking to you there is i've never met anybody that doesn't have a negative voice in their head talking to them and we have we're an active species right but we're an active species that also tries to conserve calories so you get this weird sort of conflict and that insight that you just gave i find really powerful when i think about early development so this notion that our brain comes with i like to think of it in a biological way though i'm sure what i'm about to describe will be inaccurate but that there are essentially neurons in the brain that are looking for that love the validation being enjoyed there was something about the way you said that that really hit me um and that our brain is going to it comes like lungs expecting the air it comes expecting that love that validation that enjoyment and getting all of that reflected back and you talk a lot about a child being narcissistic and so that's part of the physics of being human it just is everyone is and not in a negative way just it's all about me that's where their brain is at in their development and if we sort of run the experiment of saying well that's probably the most advantageous thing at least from a historical context that you so got that it was so prevalent that to think erroneously to think that a parent's happiness means that you're good is such a great way to establish confidence and a sense of worth and you know all these things that are going to propel you forward gabriel you're really making me put things together that i've i've never have been able to draw the lines between um that is amazing i bet you say that to all the guys uh i say it to all the good ones how about that um but it's interesting especially when you put it in context of your upcoming book which of course i have not read called the myth of normal and how sort of broken our society is i've always approached it from the the like hey th this society is is like any society in time where you can have a path through it that is pathological or like the buddha you can find a path that is beautiful and profound and you take i think a more aggressive approach of saying no no there's something uniquely disruptive about the era that we're living through and sort of just walking through what you were saying about the the ex the brain has expectations of love the way that lungs have expectations of air and there's something about the way that we have structured society that is breaking that and in breaking that we're just regulating the immune system and a whole host of other things that is really interesting um walk me through then some of the specifics that you've covered in shattered and in some of your articles and talks how is modern society dysregulating us and what can we do to resolve some of that well first of all it's very interesting uh you said shadow i don't need to look called shadow but it's called sorry sorry scattered scat i don't know but what's interesting is how many people may say it that way that's interesting that's very what have i just revealed yeah well yeah and to me it's always revealing something about the person and their self-image you know because i don't think anybody's ever shattered um scattered has to do with the scattered mind the american the canadian title was scattered minds it had to do with adhd and you know the the dispersal of attention um gosh you say so many things that i want to engage with uh tom let me let me jump back to what you said about everybody's got this negative voice in their heads yeah yeah but that's not a given it's just what happens in this society do you think there are societies where that would not be present or at least not ever present i think we have in this society is like that for a long long long time but that has to do with what civilization does to human beings so i'm sure that voice has been there since the beginning of civilization but not necessarily in our aboriginal state that's hunter guide to the small band people now we might have a conscience that keeps us in line but that's not the same as a voice that keeps telling you how bad you are how worthless you are i think that's particularly is a that itself is a product of life experience what what exactly if you have a sense causes that like what in civilization leads to that kids not being valued and enjoyed and played with for just who they are kids having to live up to expectations in order to meet the approval and welcoming of their parents well if that's the case they better install a little voice in their heads that'll keep them in line otherwise they won't get loved and there's not a conscious process nobody doesn't say oh i'm going to instill a little voice in my head it's not right it's this this is a natural adaptation to an unnatural situation in this society and i'm not blaming fans in this society it's extraordinarily difficult for parents to give those conditions of what the american psychotherapist carl rogers called unconditional positive regard a regard that has no conditions of worth attached to it i accept you just for who you are the way you are that's very difficult for parents to deliver even with the best of good will because they never had it themselves not only that then there's so much stress so you mentioned my book scattered which is an adhd and i was diagnosed with data you know in my 50s and i never bought into the idea that it was a genetic disease and even less do i buy into it now but to tuning out that scattered minds that i wrote about that itself is a coping mechanism so when there's when an infant is under stress because the parents are stressed as i was as a jewish infant under the nazis uh there's a lot of stress as you can imagine for a whole year of my first year of life and more than that of course i tuned out as a way of escaping from the unbearable stress that my mother was under because as an infant you just soak in the stress of your parents but this is happening when my brain was developing so that gets programmed into my brain as an adaptation now you don't need world war and you don't need genocide to make an infant stressed you just need parents who are under economic stress who got relationship issues who got unresolved childhood trauma who are isolated themselves who are struggling in their lives who have depression or anxiety in their lives and infants young children pick up on that they make it about themselves it's too much for them some of them will tune out to deal with it but tuning up becomes programmed into their brain because that's when the brain develops under the impact of the environment and then five years later or 10 years later or in my case 55 years later they're diagnosed with the so-called inherited disease which it wasn't it was an adaptation and it began as an adaptation it becomes a source of a disorder but that's my whole point that these early adaptations have their function but then they're only meant to be temporary but since they become wired in now they create problems later on and that i think is a source of much of illness in our society let me ask what would be a worse or what would be a better scenario depending on how you want to answer it would you rather somebody be loved validated enjoyed held touched up until the age of three but then after that they're put into foster care with all of the woes of foster care or would you rather somebody have a very dysregulated initial three years mother is giving the child up for adoption which basically tells you that the pregnancy was incredibly stressed gives the child away it spends the first three years in let's say an orphanage but then gets adopted to a truly loving family that wants them enjoys them validates them hugs them and gives them all those things which of those is the more distressing circumstance well i mean i i find that a conflict because what you're setting up is um through tragedies and you asked me to choose the least tragic and um i don't know that i know how to do that i do know i think my bias would be that if the child had everything for the first three years they'll probably have some inner resilience to handle what happens later although it would still be a terrible scenario that you outlined that total dysregulation in the first three years i think would be very hard to overcome um not impossible but you know it's when you think about it the scenario of somebody getting all that in the first three years and then ending up in a horrible situation totally unlikely i mean why would that even happen let's talk about business banking with north one with north one you can manage your money from anywhere whether you're working from home or on the go everything you need to manage your business finances is at your fingertips with north one north one makes sure that you never step foot inside a bank 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take care guys and be legendary you know yeah i can give you scenarios but but if your question is designed to um look at the heart of what is the most important developmental period for sure it's the first three years from conception to the end of the first three years not that it's over then but those that's the template that's the template and if our society just understood that just give the kids three good years and and and do everything you can do everything you can as a society as a community to support parents giving those kids those first three years whatever that takes we would save so much disease so much dysfunction so much crime so much addiction so much political conflict for that matter so that's the importance of that question is is if if we only my friend the children's troubadour rafi i mean you probably remember rafi he created something called the child honoring society child honoring project and he just says well if this society honored children what would it look like well guess what we'd pay attention to the environment we would um make sure that parents have the right support that children are treated well but parents who need the help get it so that they don't traumatize their children so that schools um instead of focused on turning with gears and and machines in the form of human beings focused on promoting healthy self-image and healthy self-development and healthy brain development what if that was the focus of the schools it wouldn't take it wouldn't be more expensive than we were doing now it'd be less expensive so yeah those first three years are crucial there's a guy named jeffrey canada who introduced me to a concept that i found both intriguing and terrifying which goes along it was why i was asking that question and he was looking at kids that grow up in the inner cities and why they end up doing poorly the rest of their lives and kids who grew up in middle income families and why they end up doing better and he said that he believed it could be boiled down to the number of words a child hears by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative and i thought oh my god is it really that simple and he was basically saying that you're it's it comes down to the language centers of the brain developing and if in that period where those those parts of the brain are actually being constructed if you know that the construction is going to be based on the environment and you give it a paltry environment where there's very little language to interact with then you get an underdeveloped language center of the brain which ends up holding them back later where communication becomes extraordinarily important in today's environment yes and i just thought one that's thrilling news because anybody that encounters that information when they're pregnant or about to become pregnant can do something with it and and it will have lifelong positive impact but it's terrifying to think that you catch a kid at age six and it's like you can do the work and for sure like you were saying you can always like there can be improvement and i would never want people to hear that and just give up but whoa the road becomes a lot harder to hoe well i have to say i don't agree with you what was the man's name jeffrey canada okay well good name i don't agree with um i mean it's not that i disagree with what it's saying but i think there's there's a deeper layer there give it to me because what develops first see the language is the left side of the brain okay and what actually develops first if you look at it is the right side of the brain which holds the unconscious and it's that right-sided unconscious template that's most important then there's lots of people there with beautiful language development they're called professors and academics who are emotionally infants um [Music] and sometimes the left the language centers in the left side of the brain can become a refuge from a lack of emotional grounding on the right side of the brain so no what actually matters is how those infants are held how they're sung to how they're played with the great neuroscientist unfortunately died untimely a couple of years ago yak pank step his name was and he distinguished the number of brain systems that we share with other animals they include seeking so the exploration of the environment they include lust obviously which is sexuality necessarily rage which is healthy anger to protect your boundaries um caring so that we care for infants and others these are brain systems and what he calls grief and panic which is what happens when we lose our attachment relationships so that there should be grief there should be panic those are healthy when our attachments relationships are threatened and there's also play and all animals play and infants start playing peek-a-boo at two months long before they have language and play is much more important for the development of the brain than languages according to a whole lot of developmentals and so so because it sets the um your sense of yourself in the world and so it's not that what this man canada says about language isn't important it's just that first there has to be this right brain emotionally grounded template for all that and even later on it's not the language skills we have to help people develop not that we don't we do but we have to work on their sense of themselves and and and essentially rewire the right-sided unconscious brain so in la there's a very famous psychotherapist psychologist called um alan shore who's now working on what he calls right-sided psychotherapy or right brain psychotherapy with adults who've got all kinds of language skills but who don't have properly developed unconscious because of what happened to them early on in life let me quickly read you a list there's a wonderful um psychologist at notre dame called darcia narvaez who by the way you might want to talk to sometime and uh she studied hunter-gatherer societies which is how we evolved that was our revolutionary niche and for millions of years and for hundreds of thousands of years and even for until 15 000 years ago everybody lived in our society so that's where we evolved and he says what do these people provide to their infants and she lists them soothing perinatal experience prompt responsiveness to the invention to the needs of the infant none of this business about letting kids cry it out those kids are picked up as soon as they whimper in fact they never even put down extensive touch and constant physical presence including touch with movement so the parents always walking around holding the kids the papoose on the back of the parent frequent infant initiated breastfeeding upped for up to two to five years whoa with the average weaning age at age four now here in north america here in north america we're lucky if women are able to breastfeed their kids for two months and about 25 of american women have to go back to work after two weeks but that's an insult to the infant i'm not blaming the women it's the economy it's the society a community of multiple warm responsive adult caregivers so the whole tribe is there to hold you and to enjoy you um creative free play in nature with multi-aged playmates now how many kids in our society get anything close to any of that then we wonder why do kids have so many mental health issues and behavior problems and so on and then we then we focus on the behavior problems and we try and correct the behaviors instead of looking at well what is this child manifesting through that behavior you know so i think we need a lot we need to look a lot more at not the cognitive developmental stuff but at the emotional developmental side of things so that granted what your friend says about language is very important that not being granted we're barking up the wrong tree what so i i think a lot about what my north star is what i want in my own life what sort of my ideal life looks like and then when i'm working with other people and trying to help them i think about you know what what is the north star that somebody's really in trouble i would advise hey adopt this as your north star do you have something like that that you think that people ought to strive for for their own sake the reason i smirk when you ask that question is because it puts me in a position as some kind of expert whereas believe me every day i still work at figuring myself out and finding my direction and and or or refining my direction and so on so it's not like i can say here's this pearl of wisdom take it and run with it then this will you know just not like that for me um um well look let me turn the question on just for a moment and and as a way for me to think about your question sure um so like i don't know a lot about you you know but what i do understand is that in significant ways you've made a tremendous success in your life a lot of you know achieve things that a lot of people look at my god if i only had that i'd be okay but let me just ask you this i'm just absolutely curious having achieved all that in the material world did you come to saying the quest is over definitely not so what so what were you looking for so my north star in the beginning was wealth and that was i showed up every day trying to get rich and at about eight years into that i was absolutely devastated spiritually is probably the right way to think about it i just felt dead inside and i at that point i was worth about two million dollars on paper so my actual life was not the life of a wealthy person but um i had equity in the company and i went to my wife and i said hey i know that i promised i would make you rich one day i'm gonna need to take a step back for a minute because i am profoundly unhappy and she was like hey what i want for is your happiness and so do whatever you need to and so we were going to move to a tiny village in greece and i was going to go back to writing which was my first love okay and just do things that made me feel alive long story short um my then business partners said hey don't leave we actually feel the same way so why don't we build something that would give us what we're looking for and so if i had to shorthand what i came to realize i'm looking for which is very much my north star is fulfillment and i'll define fulfillment as working really hard to build a set of skills that i care about that serve not only me but other people and in doing that i am addressing what i think are the physics of being human now i may be misunderstanding that it is the physics only of humans in this era i'm very open to this is within the context of the civilization that i grew up in here are the things that seem to come pre-built into our hardwiring um and maybe not um historically accurate but given the world that i live in um doing something working really hard is a big part of um i feel there's just a sub routine in my brain that wants me to earn things and when i do that i feel good when i work hard in the gym i feel good when i take a cold shower i feel good when i um you know do something difficult for my wife i feel good about that and i definitely enjoy that loop and then well let me let me work okay yeah please so if i could find one word to summarize what you what i think i heard you say it's meaning definitely yeah so so that that's one of those human expectations is meaning i think that's a need okay now how you find that is every individual thing but let me ask you a very scary question though because it it puzzles me you identify meaning with hard work well i've seen this happen by the way not god willing it won't but what if you had a stroke tomorrow or some idiot plowed into you and you were bicycling and and and you you became quadriplegic no you couldn't work hard anymore then i love that question i obsess about things like that so i've thought a lot about that one in particular um so i would give myself 30 days to mourn whether i should or shouldn't uh i would and i would be very i would allow myself to wallow in the sense that it was unfair and that now i have to change the things that i engage in that bring me joy but then at the end of that it it is what it is and so getting lost in unfairness is not going to serve me so then i would immediately turn my attention to finding a way to have meaning and purpose i think that that nothing that i've ever experienced in life leads me to believe that i would ever feel fulfilled without meaning and purpose okay so finding a way to tap into that and then i have a sort of safety valve which is my wife and i remind each other of this all the time because we've already had all the financial success at this point to do something for the sake of money would be so crazy so we definitely don't do that and what we remind each other of is you should love your life like just from a joy perspective and if you don't check in with is this joyful because if you're working hard and it's joyful that makes sense to me if you're working hard and it's deteriorating your joy your sense of self whatever then that's just madness so for even for our employees what we say is look you're an adult i want you to control when you need a day off so you have an unlimited vacation policy use it as you see fit um i do want people that are hard workers don't get me wrong but i know there are some times where on a tuesday i'm just like i'm i'm burning out like this isn't fun and so i stop immediately because i know what my priorities are in life and joy is extraordinarily high and it is certainly higher than success okay well that's great um that makes it easier for me to answer your question um in terms of my new star um joy is something that um for me is an ongoing project you know and i really do think that goes back to the lack of play that i received in the first year or two of my life you know under conditions of wartime and genocide there's just not a lot of cheerful play that happens with the baby um but what really lights my fire is truth i just want to know the truth whatever that is because you like knowing how the world works there's no because you see it truth is its own value i don't i mean i can give you all kinds of good reasons why truth is a good thing but ultimately uh it's just a value in itself for its own sake and so i'm passionate about truth both internal truth and external truth and i'm passionate but my work is to as much as i can perceive truth and as much as i can communicate my perceptions that other people have access to truth as well or that they or that their own passion in truth is kindled uh in its own right so that's that's my if you ask for a note star that's what i would say for myself that's really interesting not at all what i thought you were going to say can i interpret when i look at the books you've written and i look at you know your willingness to come and do a podcast like this can i read that all as an exploration of truth or are these sort of side tangents no purely that's what it's about it just so happens that as a medical doctor somebody dealt with depression and adhd and myself dealt with terminal illness and palliative care dealt with addictions delivered babies [Music] my path to truth has been through my own experience and through my medical experiment my personal experience what i've been through as a person when i'm going through as a person and what i saw experienced and learned as a physician so the books express all that when it comes to physical illness or addictions or child development or whatever but the lodestar is always the truth and from that point of view i never cared much who agrees with me and who doesn't and to what extent my colleagues value or don't value it you know that's just as i see it folks you know and uh um in this society and that this is not a personal lament it's just a general comment that um truth is not hard to come by not easy to come by because uh for all the knowledge that's out there and for all the expertise [Music] it's also split and it's also disintegrated so people have a hard time seeing the overall reality of things and so my attempt always is to look at the context and look at the overall reality so not just how do you how do you change a kid's behavior but why is the kid be having that behaving that way and what is it in the environment that the kid is reacting to or somebody's addicted not just why are they using a substance or why they are obsessed with pornography or gambling but what is that doing for them what is that giving them that they need what peace of mind what temporary relief what numbing numbing of painful emotions and where did those painful emotions come from and what happened to them what's the context in which it happened so that everything leads back to everything else and so i'm always looking for the larger truth of things which demands a broader look not isolating everything but looking at everything as as one which scientifically and spiritually and materially it is i am obsessed with what is true so i resonate with you there big time what i don't understand so i'm going to ask you a follow-up question to see if i can isolate what it is about the the nature of truth just in and of itself that is meaningful to you so i'm interested in the truth for one reason and one reason only if i'm really honest with myself and that is it has so much utility once you understand it's like it's like physics to me because we understand physics we can send things to the moon we can create satellites you know better manufacturing whatever would the truth be as meaningful to you if you were trapped on a desert island with access to all the information in the world but you could never engage with another human so you could assimilate the truth you could learn what it is synthesize it maybe even have insights that other people are missing and and know to the core of your being that you have uncovered something that is true would that be meaningful or is part of what makes it matter to you that you can put it back out into the world and that ultimately somebody can use it well so first of all let's not confuse truth with information oh interesting so help me understand what i'm missing well there's lots of facts out there but truth is much larger than facts it's it's it's integrating the facts in a in a in a picture of of reality so that and i'm maybe putting very clumsy language on what may be a far more beautiful sentiment um so when when i hear you say that and i take it in totality of how all these things come together i come back to this idea of the truth is that is the way the world works so don't ask about the addiction ask about what caused the pain like that makes sense to me because now you can actually address it and heal but what makes that capital t truth interesting is the healing for me but it's like why do you want people to heal um because of my north star so my north star which seems self-evident to me and i'm always surprised that it isn't everybody's north star is that there is uh the only thing that matters to me in the way that i view the world is your neurochemical state and your neurochemistry the only thing that's resilient because joy comes and goes suffering comes and goes hopefully and the only thing that gives you the resilience to even in the middle of a painful moment a storm to have emotional equilibrium is what i call fulfillment so again meaning and purpose derived from working hard for something that you have developed a unique set of skills so you really matter in that situation and it it isn't only alleviating your suffering it's helping other people and that to me feels so inherent to the human animal that as a social species we're just never going to be able to escape getting psychologically punished for failing to help others and we're never going to escape getting rewarded for helping others and i think that the more uniquely we can do that so in a way that matters to me right so you're not still a high school teacher you're you're expressing helping others in in a very unique way that i mean literally i've never come across anybody that's got the unique conflagration of things that you have so that makes your contributions all the more individual and therefore i would imagine precious to you so anyway because of my north star i want to alleviate that pain by having worked hard to offer something to somebody that they'd go whoa like this alleviated my pain and now i can also go do something that helps other people um exactly why the healing matters okay so look so then to go back to your desert island question the buddha put himself in the desert island you know i mean metaphorically speaking isolated in the forest didn't see anybody you know he no i'm not talking with me i'm talking about him the way i understand that historical figure he would have been perfectly okay being on his own because he attained a sense of reality that was complete and then he made a decision out of compassion to come back and teach others and you are talking about compassion as well you're talking about not truth is utility you're talking about truth as compassion so it's not just useful because you can build things with it the way you defined it is you want to truth so you can alleviate the suffering of others and that's part of the truth and like jesus said you know he is another great spiritual avatar and teacher he says you will know the truth and the truth will liberate you he didn't say the truth will liberate you he said you will know the truth and it will liberate you so when you know the truth that's where freedom is so truth goes way beyond facts truth ultimately as i understand it and as i've been taught has to do with liberation and freedom and it has to do with compassion in exactly the way you talked about it as well so when you say tell me what truth is well i'm telling you it's got all these aspects and it goes back to our conversation about meaning so that life without truth is not a meaningful life that is uh that's very interesting as you were talking i was like oh please god let him write a book about truth i would uh hearing you say all that i would definitely sign up for that book i want to talk about the idea of bodhisattva so this is one of the things that i found super interesting about buddhism and again hey a guy that understands it at 30 000 feet does not know the specifics but um that idea of hey there's two things you can do with enlightenment you can hey you're enlightened and now you sort of stand apart from everybody else or you get enlightened and decide to be a bodhisattva to re-engage to go back in to help other people and do you think this is maybe a dangerous question but do you think any buddy would like knowing what you know about the human mind would anybody ever that attained enlightenment actually just go peace i'm out it seems like the very nature of that moment would sort of propel you back to other people well first of all the last thing i could i want to present myself as any kind of an expert on what it is i thought that might be your response yeah you know but yeah i mean there have been in the christian tradition there were saints that went to the desert and they just stayed there and then certainly on the other all the hindu traditions there are all these people in the buddhist tradition as well i think there are people who um you know sit in caves and they just contemplate reality that's what they do um which doesn't mean that what they do has no impact on others but they're not going out but they're not out there trying to recruit others or to teach others they're just doing what they're doing i have extraordinary difficulty imagining myself being one of those people um which i'm not sure is either is an advantage for me i mean i might be more advanced if i could handle the idea of being on my own and not doing anything and just being and just valuing being period i imagine that for a person like me might be a step forward but i but yeah i think from my limited understanding they have people there have been people who have done that and they're part of the human spectrum aren't they very well said gabor what at this point you're 77 yeah you're so productive what is it that keeps you going when most people are like counting the days until they can retire at 64 or whatever um what what keeps you going uh botox steroid injection um well look i mean you talked about meaning uh there's so much meaning in my life i am i'm so fortunate you know that that and i've never stopped developing not that i've arrived there but i've never stopped developing like i never stopped being curious um i believe i have a finally come to accept that yeah i do have a contribution to make and and and and and that that has value in the world and it is value for me so at this point it's just it's not keeps me going it's it's it's like it's just who i am at this point you know is is i'm curious about what i'm doing i'm excited about much of what i do i'm excited about having conversations like this i'm excited about the book i'm writing the teaching that i do i'm excited about spending time with my wife of 51 years now i'm excited about that i can still go swimming and bicycling and do the yoga and just you know my life is just a very blessed one at this point not that i feel like that every moment but since you ask it's not like i'm you know what it is people talk about work what is work i i think um if i remember right from physics one way to look at work is energy expended against resistance and the more energy you expend against more resistance the harder you have to work the more fatiguing it is but i'm fortunate enough and i'm free enough in my life right now that i don't have to face resistance internal resistance i want to do what i'm doing and there's just so much more and and um and i'm sure that my vision of reality is still very limited and maybe there's more to find out in fact i'm sure there's more to find out so it's just uh it's just an expansion into old age i think if if we're fortunate enough we'll see how that goes and you know one never knows what tonight will bring let them know the day after tomorrow might bring but so far it's an expansion not physically because as we get older physically i don't fast soon as fast as i used to but but there's an expansion that's available to us mentally and spiritually relationally in terms of understanding and that's i don't know if that's i don't know what that sounds like but that's what keeps me going how do we expand spiritually and that's probably a word that would warrant definition but i'm curious how you think about that well so spirituality is really beyond who we are as bodies in his minds so it's an awareness that lies underneath all that and can hold all that but isn't identical with it and this is the way it's hard for me to say am i saying anything i truly know am i just repeating what spiritual teachers that i've respected and have learned from have mouth and i'm just repeating what they told me but it's both i think i i do have a sense that there's more to us and that more is i think what we call spirituality and it's all kinds of shapes and forms and i'm not concerned about that but i do know that i am not who i used to think i was and that nobody is who they think they are um they're they're beyond that and uh that's the common teachings i think of all spiritual traditions which i'm very inadequate and this is not false modesty i'm just telling you uh it's i'm inadequate at translating because i haven't had that deep experience that other people have had so it's very interesting and i believe you that you're not just being falsely humble but as somebody who works so much with there's two two parts of your background that um probably lean into what i would consider spiritual uh but i think we may define that slightly differently but um one is the palliative care which i'm extraordinarily fascinated by people that do that um and then your i don't know if you would call yourself a guide of um of hallucinogenic transformation i'm not sure exactly what your involvement is with that but i know that you've um you've explored it enough to to sort of have at least a sideways glance at what's going on there talk to me first about palliative care i know that you sort of ended up there by accident but what makes that fascinating to me is you've got subtracting out the pain you've got somebody who's they're themselves but all of a sudden their future is a known quantity and it's very short and the profound change that that makes in the human mind i find interesting what did you learn about life about yourself in your time in palliative care well the the people the nurses and the physicians and the um the social workers and and the others who work in palliative care tend to be a very special breed um in that they're not afraid of death so learning not to be afraid of human death and giving up your sense of omnipotence are very liberating by a sense of omnipotence i mean physicians are trained to save lives i'm telling you tom i knew physicians that would barely visit their patients in palliative care because they couldn't stand what they considered to be their own failure which of course it wasn't but the the the their self-image as healers or physicists just couldn't withstand the white heath of death and so that's very liberating when you just you get to talk to somebody and you get to minister to them and you're not pretending to be able to do anything more than you can do but you can really listen to people and get to know people in their final days and their final hours final weeks it's an absolute privilege um what what about it is a privilege is there an interest getting to know getting to know people without pretension you're not pretending to do anything you can't do and they're past pretending if they want to die right they pass pretending that's interesting what do you mean die right well there's ways of dying you can you can resist it you can resent it you can be angry about it or you can actually accept it and allow so much of what may be repressed in life to finally arise for yourself because it because before then you were too busy and you were too intent on your role and your personality and getting this done of getting that done you know in one of my books when the body says no i talk about this guy who um who had a company selling shark cartilage as a treatment for cancer that was a total shock but he believed in it and then he developed cancer himself and he was admitted to the valley of carrying it and i was looking after him and he was still eating he had terminal cancer all over his body a week or two left he was still eating shark cartilage which smelled awful you could when you stepped off the elevator to the palette carefully you could smell the shark cartilage and i finally said to him what is that smell i don't like the smell what does it taste like does it taste awful i hate it i said why are you eating it and i said do you think it will help you cancer he said no i no longer believe that but my business partner would be so disappointed if i stopped eating it and so one of the last things i was able to do for him is this is to actually convince him and to help him see that look you don't have to pretend anything anymore it's not your job whether or not your business part is disappointed he had to literally walk into the last week of his life before he could let go of his role as being responsible for other people so that coming towards death experience can be a powerful teacher for people and i've seen real love and real beauty and real inspiration from a lot of these people so it's beautiful work and i i know that everybody who works in palliative care will tell you the same thing it's a real privilege can you share some of the beauty well i think i just did just people being them allowing themselves to be touched to be helped um to be honest with themselves um to share stuff that the navy never told anybody else before in their lives because they're too afraid to um to accept real lessons and acceptance you talked earlier about how you might use of a month to resent and so on you know so these people are very often not past that point but that's a privilege to witness knowing resentful i can get when life doesn't go my way you know are there things that um [Music] would it be a valuable exercise for people to run the thought experiment of you know look i might not make it to tonight like you said let alone tomorrow do you think that there is uh insight to be had from that or is there another way for us to access um getting beyond like if if you're defining beauty as hey you don't have to pretend anymore you don't have to play a role um you can really be who you are and maybe this dips into big t truth um how do we access that now without needing to be truly facing a terminal illness well again i don't know that i am it's very easy for me to speak from her present position as a healthy active 77 year old and i know what i like i know what it gets like when i get a stopped toe and how my life is unfair you know why why did i stop my toe no i can't get on my elliptical machine you know so again i'm in no position to give you stage advice but i can tell you two things one is i've talked to a young fellow in his 30s he's written a book called blessed with a brain tumor his name is volpai and this guy's a brain tumor and i said well what's the blessing here i interviewed him he said well for one thing when i'm interacting with somebody now i value each moment because i never know that this might be the last time i ever speak to them um in the buddha again i'm talking like something a buddhist which i'm not but um he had his monks do a meditation where they had to imagine themselves dead in the in in the graveyard and they had to imagine themselves being eaten by worms so the flesh melts off their bones it's a rotting flesh and they had the imagine themselves as bones just lying there this articulated bones and finally even the bones being ground into dust you know and he had them contemplate this as a way of bringing them to present day reality present moment reality no i can't say that i've attained any of that i mean i'm just telling you there are practices there are practices there's a book on my shelf by stephen jenkinson who's another fascinating guy it's called die wise and he said you know it's basically about you want to die well start preparing it for it now what's the wisdom if you remember from the book the wisdom is that i haven't read the book yet my son just gave it to me um as a birthday gift a few weeks ago so i'll read it but i haven't done it again that's really interesting um yeah i for me it has been a very useful thought experiment to remind myself that for a long time i focused entirely on i want to live forever and i was um really trying to uh do all the things that i thought would extend my life to say 120 years believing that in that period of time you know that science would get better and we sort of hit health escape velocity where every year that i lived there was you know a year in the day added to our ability to cure illness and that really served me for a long time and it allowed me to make long-range plans that other people not might not be willing to make and really made me feel excited and connected and then there was something about probably about a year ago that i started to have this feeling that i would be better served and more motivated by flipping it and to start now thinking about how transient my life is and that almost certainly since none of us know what's going to happen almost certainly i am going to die and i don't get a heaviness from that um quite the contrary there's something about it that i find very motivating that i do see the beauty that people so often talk about that you know you have this life for such a limited time and to waste it playing a role to waste it doing things that don't fill you with joy to waste to chasing somebody else's dream like it just doesn't make sense and that that has been fun and i i enjoyed both sides of the coin and i got something very beautiful out of each and it i didn't even like consciously make the shift i just found myself more and more sort of getting a bigger gust of wind of of elevating wind if you will uh from the side of thinking man this really is like how lucky how transient how beautiful in its sort of ephemeral nature how wonderful it is um and i think part of that part of what was releasing in that for me is i am very much driven to matter but never at the cost of joy right so it's like i really want to matter i want to do things that like are going to be felt but i don't think about legacy i don't think about living beyond myself or doing things that need to outlive me um i just think about like hey what can i do right now that will bring me more fulfillment that will give me more joy and yeah it was very it was very fascinating to see that transition happen where i went from the only thing that gave me that push was thinking of myself living forever and then all of a sudden realizing no it's actually now more advantageous to think of sort of imminent death which trust me i'm not in any way shape or form eager for um but just interesting that that change happened i don't know if that's just sort of a natural thing about you know getting into my mid-40s and everybody is going to have that sort of same realization but no everybody will not have the symbolization i think everybody might feel the knife pricking of that question but not everybody would resolve it the same way and some people resolve it by getting botox injections and life enhancing ageless supplements and if they're if they're wealthy enough they'll and they'll invest in cryotechnology so that they can be frozen and then who knows miraculously resurrected and which i think is personally a total scientific nonsense but um uh not everybody's and some people will just ignore it and and they'll try to escape from it by trying to keep their lives busy and and and follow all kinds of compulsions so i think the question the pain of that question is inside everybody but i don't think everybody resolves resolves it the same way and um [Music] and i i you know you're much more younger than i and you say you have resolved it and maybe you have or maybe it's just something that you're still quite comfortable telling yourself at your young age and who knows how you feel about it by the time you get my age yeah i don't i don't actually wouldn't characterize it that i've resolved it i i am making only one statement that right now at the age that i'm at it's more useful it's more motivating to realize that i'm going to die uh when i was saying i'm not rushing towards that i if i actually thought it would work i would cryogenically freeze myself like i would much prefer to live forever um oh yes yeah yeah that that's not even like a question for me and that may be mental illness i'm perfectly willing to accept that but in terms of what is motivating to me that for sure like one of my great pains and this is one it actually bothers me so much i can't allow myself to think about it that i can't pursue all the things that i'm passionate about because there just isn't enough time i know that one and that's like that's one of those far more than stubbing my toe would make me think life is unfair that one does and it really messes with my head and so i just have to put it out of my mind yeah but it only messes with your head because you have a certain belief i mean there's a there's a belief underneath i totally get it i mean i think a lot of us have experienced that i certainly have somebody once said every choice excludes every time you make a choice you're excluding something else you know and that's absolutely true the the question is what part of me or you don't want to accept that why do we have a problem with it and there's some underlying belief there that creates pain around it it doesn't need to be painful it's going to be just reality you know but so if it hurts or if it bothers us there's some belief there i haven't thought about it but now that you mention it there's some belief there that creates the the pain it's just like why do i have to be everything and do everything why i am a limited human being i'll take a swag at it and let me know what you think so um part of what i do um is so my company actually tells stories so movies tv shows comic books that whole thing and when we're developing a project we need to figure out what the style of that project let's say it's a comic book we have to figure out the style so you go and you start you know looking at materials and seeing it and you realize that there's a hundred different ways you could go 200 different ways more and you'll respond so intensely to seven of them and it is very hard to know that i won't get to spend a year in that style right that i have to narrow it down to to just one and it's interesting like what i always tell entrepreneurs is what really trips people up is you're standing in a room with a thousand doors and your job is to close 999 of them right to decide comes from what the latin to cut it's like to your point about exclusion that there's going back to the physics of being human i don't know why and maybe it's a modern society thing but humans have a hard time closing those doors they have a much harder time of closing the other doors than they have walking through one because if i say hey you can walk through that one you can come right back then they'll walk through it but if i say you have to pick one that you were going to walk through forever that they would just stand there paralyzed but don't we have the same dilemma when it comes to relationships as well you know it's interesting when i was saying that my wife popped into my mind and i don't with relationships i have not struggled with that um it was a part of the calculus of whether or not to marry my wife that i'll never sleep with another woman again um but it wasn't a hard part of the calculus so i don't know if that's just uh okay okay that's meant or what fair enough and that's great and what about before you met your wife camera this is interesting and uh any insight you have here will be greatly welcomed i understood very early on the utility of um commitment so i was very bad with women when i was young extraordinarily bad and my mom though gave me a piece of advice which was mind-blowing to me and she said for a woman trust is required for an orgasm and i thought what like that seems so strange to me as a guy i was like let me tell you that trust does not enter into my mind when it comes to whether or not i can have an orgasm and but i thought oh that's really interesting and so then sort of looking at women how they're prized for their beauty and committing to somebody which always struck me as a good idea that the value in a shared life like if you ever watch this interview over again look at my face when you say you've been married for 51 years i was smiling year to year because that's something that really matters to me is sharing a life with my wife for as long as humanly possible and all the things that i have to give up pale in comparison to what it means to share a life with somebody like that um so putting the okay women knee trust that's interesting their prize for their beauty which means that it's going to go away over time as their partner wanting to give them that love and security and and to be seen and desired which i think is something that people long for in a romantic relationship i need my wife to know that i will always find other women attractive because it's just hardwired in me but i so covet commitment and and being in a bonded relationship with you that i want you to know no matter what you're going to turn into a bag of wrinkles god willing we get to that stage you're old i'm old we're not physically attractive in the the typical you know cues of beauty and fertility but i'm still going to be into you because we've shared a life so anyway that notion hit me very early and so i've always i haven't struggled with commitment i guess that was a lot of words around that and i and i have been a commitment phobe you know really what was the push well which has to do with my own chocolate history you know is that to commit something is to invite pain and rejection you know which goes back to being one year old and being given to a stranger by my mother to save my life and i didn't see her for six weeks five or six weeks so to be to open your heart and to be committed means to be heard you know i'm not making excuses i'm saying that's how it worked for me i've learned commitment so your mother gave you beautiful advice but i've had to learn that over time the good news i can tell you tom is the beauty does not go away that that should your marriage come to 51 years as mine has you'll be looking to your wife's eyes and you'll be looking this you'll be seeing the same beauty that you saw the first day you met her it's going to be amazing so it's not like that it's not like all those wrinkles and stuff they don't take away the beauty that's not where the beauty comes from you know so that the that again is our society's um travesty when it comes to defining beauty um so i'm telling you i've got good news for you no i love that um i know you're uh very clear about the things you consider yourself an expert in and what you don't and i'm more than happy to hear just your thoughts out loud but i'm curious in 51 years of marriage other than that that beauty remains what are things that you've learned it seems like your marriage is better now than it was before based on things i've heard you say before um what what advice you have for people that are you know much earlier in a relationship than you um it's that the marriage is um a wonderful opportunity to learn about yourself and about life if you're willing to be curious and um and that it's not 50 50. it's 100 it's 100 so you're each 100 responsible for how you show up and every difficulty we've ever had has been a powerful learning experience and this is where the commitment to truth comes in because that's one thing we've shared is that it's not easy to give up your point of view and your grievance and your stance but it's a deep payoff and when you do that so that the marriage is just the most wonderful school there is for development if you're willing to look at it like that and if if you and if when you need the help if you're going to get the help to look at it that way and so how do you open yourself up to that is it soliciting feedback from your partner about what they see and how you are and helping you understand the truth about yourself or is it something totally different well there's a lot there's certainly that that's a very important part of it um it's also which goes back a lot to my work is that any deep pain that you're experiencing is you confusing the present moment for the past so that in a marriage you're gonna get triggered but when you think of a trigger it's a very small little thing and what's much more important is the ammunition and the explosive that the trigger sets off and guess what who's carrying the ammunition the explosive you are so you can focus on the trigger she said this or he said that they didn't say that they didn't do that or you can focus on oh what's exploding inside me and how long i haven't been carrying this so it takes that curiosity and a willingness to look at yourself speaking of trauma and how we're carrying around that explosive charge are there universals to healing from trauma what do you mean universals things that apply to everybody so um i'm guessing a big part of it's going to be self-awareness you need to become self-aware but when i think about adults trying to heal from childhood trauma that strikes me as a very difficult road and i'm just wondering um you know i i hope that it's a hopeful road certainly from what i've encountered with your work there is definitely a lot of hope um and i'm just curious you know for somebody watching this who's who is just in the grips of you know childhood traumas both sort of known and unconscious what can they do to begin to heal so there's many healing paths but my own approach can be summed up in two words and it's also the title of a course that i teach for therapists and so on um and these versions of it for the lay public as well i'm not recommending my particular work i'm talking about the name compassionate inquiry so if you can be curious the inquiry part is the curiosity part i reacted that way oh why did i react that way not why did i react that way that's not compassionate i reacted that way i felt this pain i felt overwhelmed i felt hatred i felt rage i felt despair huh what is that about so you have to have that curiosity and you have to have the compassion to look at yourself not through that voice that tells you that you're worthless but to say if i reacted that way there must be a good reason for it something in me there's something happened to me that made me react that way at some point so to be so rather than putting myself down or thinking that if i have problems it means i'm deficient i have the curiosity to look into it and the compassion to not to judge yourself for it and that both can be learned both the curiosity and the compassion can be learned and any good therapist any any person you work with whether they call it compassion inquiry whether they call it something else whatever they work with those two attitudes will be embedded in their approach if they're going to be helpful to you so conventional career ethic curiosity i think is the key and then are there tools so let's say that somebody's doing the passionate inquiry they really begin to understand what happened to them and in fact maybe this is a better question so let's say that you had had the upbringing that you had all the things you went through in hungary in your infancy but no one ever told you about it what does somebody who they clearly are suffering from some sort of trauma but they they don't know what it is how can they process through that oh yeah uh that's not very difficult because it shows up in the present and i can easily i do that with people all the time so so they don't need the why they just need to know that they are reacting that way well it's not difficult to get them to see um that what they think is your reaction to the present is actually a reaction to the past this is without any recall because there's all kinds of memory and the body carries memory even if it doesn't care you recall and a lot of things that people that have happened to people happened before they had conscious recall so uh in my work i don't find it difficult to drill down to what is it that people are carrying in the present you know and it's just a simple exercise that i do with people uh so that what i'm saying but but to make it long story short the past shows up in the present all the time and that's goes back to johnny cash it all goes down in your mind you think you're reacting to something now uh no you're not you know the uh there's a wonderful um italian writer who survived the holocaust called primo levy who's just the most profound writer on the holocaust of them all and he went through auschwitz he survived ended up committing suicide decades later [Music] but he said i'm just um looking for the precise code here on my cell phone if i can find it i will give it to you if you can bear with me pre i mean the the setup here i'm more than happy to wait okay i'm holding my breath levy okay here it is so he says um anguish is known to everyone even children and everyone knows that it is even blank and undifferentiated rarely does it carry a clearly written label that also contains his motivation in other words people are we all know suffering but we don't always know what it's about he says and any label that it does carry can be mendacious in other words we can tell ourselves that we're suffering because of this but it's not necessarily true he says one can believe this is the heart of it one can believe or declare oneself to be anguished for one reason and be so for something totally different one can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one's past one can think that one is suffering for others out of pity out of compassion and instead be suffering from one's own reasons and so on and so on and i just don't find it that difficult to speak to somebody and show them that their present suffering is actually a memory of fast suffering so that you know so recall is helpful and you know there's a ways to get at it sometimes if it's totally unaccessible people do hypnosis sometimes people do emdr sometimes people do what's cmdr i've heard you mentioned that before but i don't know eye movement desensitization reprogramming it's a way of working with conscious and unconscious memories um there's psychedelic work that sometimes i've seen people under the influence of psychedelics recall things um that are not available to conscious memory usually but none of that is crucial what is crucial is to make the distinction that what i'm experiencing now is a resonance of the past and i don't have to keep having that same resonance if i can reinterpret the meaning that i gave to that past experience now without demonstrating it live i can't say more about it except again to say that we don't have to worry about recalling because the past shows up in a form of physiological and emotional memory every day in your life and particularly when you're upset so that it's not that difficult to to get at it and usually what happens you see is not so much that people don't remember suffering no it's not so much that people don't remember what happened is that they don't associate with suffering because already when they were expressing it they had to repress their emotions so when you say a lot of people have told me i had a happy childhood uh i still had mental illness and addiction later on but i had a heavy childhood it takes me three minutes of just a few questions turns out that that childhood wasn't so happy at all and it's not that they didn't remember events is that they didn't associate it with the pain because they already suppressed the pain that's how they survived it so that's not difficult work it's worth you do extraordinarily well um and i encourage everybody to follow you where would be the easiest place to get a hold of you is it books first is it social media well i don't personally post or read social media which is life is too short um uh yeah there's my four books out there there's a website dragomate.com have all kinds of events happening a lot of like for example in march i'm doing an event with a california-based organization called spirituality and non-duality and i think it's called the wisdom of trauma it'll be a four-day online workshop very intense last time there was about a thousand people who took it probably will be that many again in a few weeks that's a four-day immersion into my work it's not for the faint-hearted um because it'll take you deep and it'll be difficult at times but um i think it'll be liberating as well so there's all kinds of stuff that i do online it's all at the website at my website there's my books and if you don't spend money in books you don't have to for one reason or another people have posted all kinds of stuff of mine on youtube so lots of my talks on youtube none of that costs anything any money to access nobody have to sign up for anything so there's youtube there's my website there are my books um perfect there's lots of stuff out there a lot of amazing stuff i've seen a a whole lot of it and i can just say it's absolutely incredible uh gabor thank you so much for taking the time man i have wanted to sit down with you for a very long time so i'm very grateful that you made the time guys trust me when i say that this is somebody who has a lot more to offer than can be fit in two hours so by all means check out the books look at the other stuff you can find you'll be richly rewarded and speaking of being richly rewarded if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 355,839

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Gabor Mate, The Myth of Normal, Conversations with Tom, impactheory, tombilyeu, childhood trauma, trauma, traumatized, traumatic, development, stress, survival, adaptable survival, addiction, buddhism, enlightenment, marriage, suffering, compassion, healing, conversation, childhood development

Id: c2cJb1QeMIQ

Length: 110min 34sec (6634 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021