The Myth Of Normal & The Trauma We Acquire | Gabor Maté | The Art of Charm

Gabor welcome to the show your latest book is titled the myth of normal so what is the myth of normal and why is it so pernicious we use the word normal to imply that something is natural and healthy and unavoidable which in medicine which is you know my training uh it has a certain validity because there's a normal range of blood pressure or body temperature or blood acidity inside which we Thrive outside of which we get sick or die so if I say your blood pressure is normal I'm saying the blood pressure is in a Range that can sustain health so isn't that healthy and natural but in the social sense we also assume that the things that we used to because they're common and because they are what we do and see every day we make the assumption that these are also healthy and normal it's quite normal in a society for example to tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying it's the norm in fact it's with many experts advocate but is it healthy is it natural you ask a mother cat if it's healthier natural to ignore the baby's cries or you ask a mother chimpanzee is it healthy and natural to ignore the baby's distress we see that it isn't it's very harmful actually to human children not to be picked up when they're crying it interferes with their personality development their brain development their sense of themselves their sense of safety in the world yet it's normal and there are many practices beginning with childbirth child rearing schooling hobby work or relate to our work how we are expected to be social norms that we are demanded to comply with gender rules that were expected to fulfill that are considered to be very normal but in fact which are very unhealthy for human beings and hence the my title the myth of normal the other meaning is this that we make an assumption that there's the abnormal people for example with depression or mental health problems or ADHD or whatever then there's the rest of us that are normal in fact what I'm saying is that's a myth as well because I think we're all in a Continuum of mental health or mental dysfunction in this society and to try to draw a sharp line between what is normal and what isn't is just a false exercise so there's several senses in which Norm is a myth and it's a it's a pernicious myth so we look at it from the cultural perspective much of what you're talking about discussing is not natural but we've all adopted it and it's now having a negative impact on our health our well-being our emotional state our relationships our family ties and you talk about it being even toxic so in your view how has culture become toxic to The Human Condition let me give you a simple example people that are very nice and self-sacrificing are much um honored or liked or appreciated if you look at people with autoimmune disease they tend to be people who are very nice and self-sacrificing they tend to not to get angry they tend to put their needs if they're even aware of them much behind the needs of others and so on those traits both statistically and physiologically why they lead to autoimmune disease but they're considered to be not only normal but even admirable so that's the first point because the repression of anger actually undermines the immune system we can talk about that so when you considered very nice and everybody really likes you what a nice guy maybe but if you look at neurologists and you ask them to describe their patients with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease in metatrophic lateral sclerosis they'll tell you these people are always extraordinary nice this has been studied and that's what the neurologists say they don't make the connection between the niceness and the illness I do they don't but they notice it so this niceness that's considered to be so admirable I'm thinking under my health now more broadly speaking how do we create this culture well if you want to study zebras you could say that a zebra is an animal that stands up a few times a day and mostly lies around looking bored and you'd be accurate if you examine the zebra in a cage but what if you really want to study the zebra you wouldn't look at him in the cage you'd look at him out in the savannah where he lives you see a very different creature now human beings evolved over millions of years all human species including our own which has been around for about 150 200 000 years all those millions of years and all those hundreds of thousands of years and almost ten thousand years we lived out in the wild in small band hunter-gatherer groups that's where we evolved that's an environment to which we adapted where children were always with their parents the band traveled together kids had many adults looking after them parents weren't isolated didn't leave their kids to go to work the whole day kids are always around nurturing adults that's how we evolved now well because civilization begins to come along about 12 000 years ago maybe 15 000 years ago but until very recently like if human existence can be summed up in an hour then civilization maybe happened five minutes ago as soon as we began to accumulate property and divide into classes in the rich and the poor the gender dominance shifted to males for the most part we began to get away from the environment in which we naturally evolved and this has been exacerbated tremendously by the terrific achievements of modern industrial capitalism I mean or scientific technological theoretical achievements or I mean the indisputable and they're remarkable but we also began to lose our connection to our essential selves and to our true nature in the process so civilization has conferred all kinds of benefits clearly but it's come at a huge cost and over the last 40 years or so those costs have been exacted increasingly in an unequal fashion so that the rising inequality which itself is a predictor of ill health in a population as has been demonstrated by multiple studies the conflict the races and the economic insecurity that I mean the United States the richest country in the history of the world the average family is two months away from bankruptcy two paychecks away from bankruptcy the insecurity that people most people live with these all stress the body and the mind and they're toxic so for all our achievements we've also created a lot of toxicity and the question is not to go back to run together or nobody wants to do and we can't anyway but how can we regain what we've lost so to borrow that zebra analogy for many of us our job our addiction technology has become that cage in which we're suffering yeah and the expectation that we should fit into social norms that may not actually serve our best interests now you mentioned earlier we talk about this a lot on the show this nice guy syndrome this people pleasing and how culturally it's selected for everyone wants to be around someone who's generous who's kind who's giving but unfortunately when it's at your own expense not only is it at an expense in your relationships but it's also to your health your physiology well that's the whole point niceness and generosity can really emanate from two sources One Source can be just a human compassion and our natural drive to connect with others and to have empathy that that's great but if it's compulsive and it comes from denying our own needs then it can become harmful so what happens is that as I explained in one chapter of the myth of normal human in children have have the need to connect with their adults in their lives that's called attachment attachment is the sense of belonging for the sake of being taken care of well no mammalian infant can survive without attachment that's an inbred genetically determined drive to attach our brain circuits are dedicated to it so that's the need that we have but we have another need which is also dictated by Evolution which is to stay connected to our gut feelings to be authentic to know what we feel and to be able to act on it because out there in all those millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years out there in the savannah or the Thunder Over the forest just how long did they survive if you weren't in touch with our gut feelings yeah very long so we have these two needs attachment and authenticity connection to ourselves what happens in a family where is the case so often in this culture the child gets the message that how they authentically are is not acceptable to their parents because their parents have been told by some stupid parenting expert that a negative two-year-old should be punished so anger is not unacceptable emotion in a child well the child is a decision to make I can be authentic and be angry or I can suppress my anger and be acceptable to my parents now or if your parents are very needy they don't know how to take care of themselves they're addicted perhaps or stressed the child automatically takes on a caregiving role in order to be acceptable to the parents by suppressing their own needs now that we can very nice very compliant always giving always think about other people and ignoring themselves so this tension between attachment and authenticity has huge impacts on health because as I show in this book and other books I've written the suppression of self including healthy anger actually suppresses the immune system and causes the immune system to either become less efficient or in fact even turns against the body and now you've got autoimmune disease and that's because physiologically and scientifically in contrary to Medical Practice you can't separate the Mind from the body so what happens emotionally is an impact physiologically and so these people that are emotionally self-suppressing are going to also mess with their immune systems not their fault that's so they adapted to their childhoods and there's another personality trait you highlight in the book around being external focused and placing all of your value on what you produce what you create your self-worth is tied to this workaholism that many in society are addicted to that also is detrimental to your health for which people are also rewarded so when I was a a young physician and a workaholic everybody thought I was great he's always available he's so generous he's so patient you know and he's always there for us yeah at what cost at the cost of my own mental health and and physical health and at the cost of my own kids who hardly saw me and yet Society rewards these traits there's two kinds of self-esteem there is what's called contingent self-esteem which means that I feel good about myself because I can do this that or the other really well and because people think I'm wonderful that's called contingent self-esteem then there is genuine self-esteem which says I'm not worthwhile because I can do this that or the other but I'm worthwhile whether or not I can do this that or the other my sense of worth is not dependent on other people's evaluation or what I accumulate or or achieve or Attain which doesn't mean that I don't want to achieve or a thing I sure do but I'm not driven by it I'm coming from my own sense of self and and what I value and what matters to me and I'm not going to judge myself based on what the world thinks of me so this Society the whole celebrity culture is all about contingent self-esteem and the whole social media culture is of what contingent self-esteem how many people like me on Facebook how many followers do I have how many people agree with me it's always based on what other people think of you it's very addictive very addictive and very unsatisfying well it traces back to that attachment right our survival depended on being accepted in the group and now we can quantify how accepted in the group we are based on how many people are following us commenting liking us watching this video yeah but on Facebook do people really present themselves as who they are or they present a face it's called Facebook foreign this is a face I'm going to present to the world you know so even if people like you it doesn't satisfy you because I don't know you they like the image that you presented look look how many celebrities there are there out there with millions of acolytes and fans and admirers who are just internally completely miserable it's a common story and then then what they'll do is they'll write a book about their addiction and the Mental Health crisis and so on you know and it's revealed I realized just with social media itself when it first was available it was certainly a lot of fun you were putting all these pieces of your personality out there and and it seemed like everyone was using it with Reckless abandonment but it also now it seems as we've gotten into its teenage years everyone is starting to see the effects of putting yourself out there with Reckless abandonment and at least with either Facebook is dying or people are reeling back but I've caught myself or the minute I want to post something and I have to think about how three different groups would perceive that post and I'm like you know what I'm I'm not doing this and if I have to think about each group and how it will perceive this post then it that I shouldn't be posting it so now I just put up some music that I might be listening to but I don't put too much else into it just because of how it made me feel and now we're seeing the results of how we're being perceived due to this and of course everyone is getting wrapped up in these facades that they are putting out and certainly a younger teenagers who are trying to find an identity are almost it's almost as if it is forcing them into schizophrenic Personalities in order to to deal with all of the different posts that they're putting out or trying to live into these characters that they've built for themselves well so there's a lot in what you say first of all I pay attention to language quite a bit then use the phrase Reckless abandon okay and what does that mean it means that you don't reckon they don't actually consider what you're doing okay secondly abandon who are you abandoning you're abandoning yourself yeah okay one of the things that happened one of the toxicities of modern civilization is kids have lost contact with their parents because kids were meant to be on their parents evolutionary point of view until they grow up in the United States 25 of women have to go back to work within two weeks to giving birth for economic reasons no that's a massive abandonment of children most children from early age on spend most of their time around other kids which means and the Brain will attach to whoever you're around so when you're under the kids all the time your brain creates the peer relationships as your primary attachment which immediately a linear see from your parent and now you give these kids this technology that even when they go home they can still be with their peers on Facebook or whatever programs are available because kids need to attach to connect with somebody and because the adult world no longer provides children with those healthy stable attachments from in many cases kids look to each other and the technology simply enables that to happen in a highly addictive and pernicious fashion not to mention that the technology itself is designed to make people addicted to itself it's called neural marketing they know how to appeal to the most addiction bronze circuits of your brain this is not conspiracy theory this is conspiracy reality it's been documented so there's all kinds of reasons why the technology is amazing as it is and you know it allows conversations like this one and used to be called the information Highway it was designed for mature adults to exchange scientific intellectual information but it's it's what's really become is a instrument of mass hypnosis immature people connecting with each other because they've lost their relationship to mature adults so it's it's pernicious and along with that comes the attention that they get from their peers right if their parents are absent or the can work has been offloaded onto strangers Child Care babysitters then these children are going to Crave that attention from somewhere and social media very quickly provides it absolutely and and if you look at how should I say this uh I I read um about a half a year ago about some social media celebrity who farts into a bottle and then sells it what the heck is that I mean it's it's about the humor of a two-year-old you know that people are actually paying money for this so what do you get famous for you get famous for farting into a bottle for God's sakes you know or um there are kids on Tick Tock who uh as far as I know have billions of followers and made you know more money in a month and then I might in a 10 lifetimes you know I mean and for what for for advertising a certain toy you know right so I'm not saying this resentfully I'm just saying is that the values we want to inculcate in our kids well I think it's a big part of that and and you discuss in the book The Four A's right and that's the acceptance of of reality and what is going on so that we can navigate that in the ways that are are best for us the acceptance doesn't mean tolerance you know it doesn't mean that people want to put up with it feel uh helpless resigned in the face of some unpleasant reality but we have to know the reality and accept that this is reality and so much of the culture is designed to divert our attention from reality this is the war in Ukraine going on right now and America is supporting it with billions of dollars of weapons maybe that is right maybe that is not right there was the Iraq War in which half a million Iraqis were killed and tons of Americans lost their lives and the repercussions are still reverberating throughout the Middle East it's just a mess but yes the average American to put two intelligent sentences together about the history of Ukraine or the history of Afghanistan or the history of Iraq they couldn't but they could sure tell you the defensive strategy of the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl or the Brilliance of a particular NBA player or or the love affair that some famous Hollywood star just had with another famous Hollywood star so a lot of the culture is actually designed I don't have designed nobody sits there and conspires to do this but it the system itself perpetuates Itself by drawing of our attention away from what's important to what is absolutely not important it makes no difference at all who won the Super Bowl who won I mean it's interesting and it's a good game mahomas is certainly a fantastic athlete to watch that's all great but what difference does it make you know as compared to the fact that the Americans on the one hand don't have decent health care and are tooth paychecks away from bankruptcy which is more important than people's lives but the culture designs or at least produces these institutions whose function is to draw us away from reality in those examples you mentioned it's another point to go along with attachment right like if we look at football and sports well that attachment is an identity that we're tying ourselves to that oh I'm I'm from Kansas City I'm a Chiefs guy Bill I'm in my homes or you mentioned also the the celebrity and what's going on there this is somebody that we put attachment towards because they've been there for us and it may be a one way relationship they they don't know we exist but we have so much affection and love for that person well yeah we have your attention and love also for the talent and and the gifts that they give us but we also create a Persona that we love and so that if you look at the the gap between the reality of an Elvis Presley as a celebrity and as a human being or the gap between the suffering of a Marilyn Monroe and the image is the sexiest woman in the world or the gap between and Aretha Franklin as this Avatar of feminine power Arya species and in her actual life she was abused as a child abused as an adult and so we create these avatars that have nothing to do with the actual real person and we attach ourselves to it and they become our ideals and there's an escapism tied to all of this if culture is toxic if we're overworked if we're detached from our loved ones our family members our children well then it's easiest in that suffering to escape to the Super Bowl or the celebrity or whatever is the latest entertainment piece that's being pushed by the mainstream media in a lot of ways they're just amplifying what were psychologically motivated to engage with the salacious the over-the-top nature well absolutely and look not to put myself above any of this like when I'm tired and stressed instead of actually taking care of myself my tendency may be through on YouTube and watch the latest sports highlights or the Rolling Stones singing Give me shelter for the ten thousand times I've been there oh yeah well and that's okay but it's not okay when it takes my mind over I'm not I'm no longer even conscious that I'm doing it I'm just flipping from one thing to the next then I say where the hell is this Arrow gone by I could have been in bed resting could it take a hot bath could have meditated it could have so the blandishments of the culture to escape from ourselves are ever present and very powerful again as I pointed in this book a lot of that need to escape comes from the emotional pain why do we have to escape because we're in pain and a lot of that pain is uh originated in childhood and childhood trauma and this is a highly traumatizing society that hurts a lot of people and then it builds entire Industries on helping people escape from the pain of the trauma that Society imposed on them it works beautifully well part of that celebrity you touched on earlier is also the dramatization of trauma the bringing forward of trauma trauma now is it's part of the popular Zeitgeist everyone is using it in their marketing I went through trauma I have trauma so from your perspective I think it's best to at least help our audience get a deeper understanding since they're inundated with this version of trauma that's that's publicly out there what is the trauma that you're discussing how do we Define it and how do we actually start to heal from it instead of escaping from it because that is clearly not working yeah so the word trauma is used a lot these days is not used nearly enough it's used in a trivial kind of way as as any kind of an upset or you know I'm on a picnic on Sunday and it rained I was traumatized no you weren't you were just disappointed you know went to a movie last night and it was traumatic no it wasn't it was just upsetting so the word is used too trivially and too promiscuously on the one hand on the other hand where it matters is not used hardly enough at all where is it not used in a medical profession the average physician doesn't get a single lecture on trauma and yet scientifically trauma underlies a lot of chronic illness like rheumatoid arthritis multiple sclerosis often malignancy certainly all mental health conditions there's a British psychologist who pointed out that the statistical link between childhood Misfortune and adult mental health challenges is as well established as the link between smoking and lung cancer but you go to the average physician with depression anxiety ADHD OCD whatever you got nobody's going to ask you about childhood trauma they don't even know how to ask they don't they haven't studied the links let alone if you go there with rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis despite all the studies linking Charter trauma adult stress to all these different conditions so that's the place where it's not used at all is the medical profession hardly at all except in a narrow sense of what they call PTSD it's not used in the schools so a lot of the kids that are so-called misbehaving acting out what they're actually acting out is their trauma teachers are not trained to recognize that for the most what they're trained to control and punish behaviors which is further traumatizing their child despite all the scientific literature linking childhood dysfunctions misbehaviors to traumatic circumstances but it's also not used as in the courts most of the people in jail have suffered significant trauma the average lawyer judge prosecutor correctional officer never gets a single lecture on trauma in their education so on the one hand yes we can use it to Loosely on the other hand where it matters we don't use it at all so what is trauma trauma is a wound that's what it means thrall literally means a wound psychological wound that isn't healed and those psychological ones that the Greek meaning the Greek word for ruin this trauma that's the meaning of the word and as long as the trauma is unhealed it's going to affect our Behavior just as unhealed physical wounds were affect our Behavior we'd be more defensive more scared more limited more constricted perhaps more defensively aggressive to keep ourselves from being re-wounded again but the point is that these psychological wounds incurred early in childhood unless they're understood seen and healed they can create a lot of problems in relationships like most of the problems in couples in a couple situation is that one set of traumas is competing with another set of traumas and the Pew the two people are not even present there's two pasts fighting with each other and people don't even realize that and so it shows up in how you relate to work for example the workholism that shows up in my case it shows up in your relationship as it showed up in my marriage you should probably treat your kids it shows up often in your politics for that matter and yet we're not really talking about it in a deep way and we trivialize it on your land be actually ignored is it safe to say that everyone has trauma that they need to resolve well it's probably safe to say that although I might be biased but I have yet to meet too many you know no the degrees of trauma there's degrees of wounding right it's a continuum certainly in my work as a physician or providing therapy to people I don't need people who haven't been traumatized because why would they come to me but I also know that if you look at what people are reading so a best-selling book for in the New York Times for about 250 weeks now as being vessel vandercooks the body keeps the score which is a fairly bends it's very eloquent but it's also deeply scientific not an easy read necessarily but it's a big best seller my book the middle normal has been a New York Times bestsellers for 18 weeks now well another book called what happened to you by wonderful neuroscientists psychiatrist physician Called Bruce Perry written with Oprah what happened to you it's been another 40 50 weeks on New York Times bestsellers since his publication what does that tell you it means that people are actually interested and they're looking for this information because they need it that means there's a lot of people out there then you have books like Matthew Perry's recent book friends lovers and you know whatever it was called well he was an addict based on trauma Pamela Anderson's recent book she was a traumatized child Prince Harry's recent book spare so much childhood trauma on his childhood so this is a book called uh I'm glad my mother died a big bestseller these are all about trauma the public wants to know it and to understand it in fact in that sense the public is way ahead of the professionals so Johnny touched on one of the A's in in healing that you discussed in the book recognizing that we all may have encountered trauma we have unreconciled unhealed wounds that are now impacting our behaviors they're impacting our relationships they're impacting our propensity for chronic illness how do we start to recognize and move forward the healing process from all of this trauma we may have sustained it usually it's as you say AJ it begins with um some kind of suffering a divorce your partner cheating on you an illness loss of a friendship addiction mental health challenges some kind so usually there's some suffering that makes us want to say well why is this happening so that's the first question you know unfortunately when most people go to Physicians nobody guides them to the essential source of their suffering they'll give they'll be given a diagnosis only but nobody's going to say you know this diagnosis doesn't really explain anything it describes it but it doesn't explain it take an example I often use depression so somebody's mood is low and they have poor sleep and they're socially isolating so the word of the doctor says well your social your mood is uh low and you're isolating socially because you're depressed and you can say well how do you know I'm depressed because uh you're socially isolating and your mood is low but why is my mood low and why am I socializing because you're depressed so these diagnosis they don't explain anything they describe them but that's where most of medicine stops is it some description but not an actual explanation even if there's inflammation in your body such as there is an autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis or remove the arthritis why is there inflammation and now you have to look at that person's life what inflames what causes inflammation in the body stress and trauma cause inflammation in the body as the certain chemical agents and so on and so forth so the diagnosis don't explain very much they describe them but so people usually begin on this journey by some kind of suffering and then they have to ask themselves well why am I suffering and then I would ask them what do you believe about yourself what do you believe about you about your life what stresses might you be generating for yourself without even meaning to or knowing that you are what extent are you in touch with your needs what happened to your in childhood what do you believe about the world all these questions pertain to your physiology because scientifically you can't separate the Mind from the body and therefore your emotions and your unconscious beliefs have a lot to do with your physiology so how do people do that well they go see a therapist they read any number of books including mine they they go on YouTube and they listen to I mean in my case there's dozens of my talks and and and uh interviews on YouTube other people I'm not the only one no one I'm saying I'm the best one I'm just saying I'm one of I'm one of the people out there who whose work is very available out there you start looking into it you start talking to your family what happened if you're talking to your family you start asking questions and you don't assume that there's something interesting intrinsically wrong with you I just conducted a workshop this weekend called your illness tells the story and so your illness tells a story and what is the story that my my illness tells that's the question it's fascinating because most of Western medicine is around treating the symptoms and not focusing on any of these underlying beliefs that you have that are tied to wounds that lead to behaviors that lead to choosing the addiction choosing unhealthy patterns and choosing things that don't necessarily support your your full mental and emotional and physical health when we look at recognizing so there's this acceptance this happened to me one of the A's is a little counterintuitive and we've talked a little bit on the show about anger but it's counterintuitive for many in our audience because we're taught from as you said earlier an example from a young age that anger is bad the child we're disciplined for feeling anger we repress our anger it doesn't make for civil society if we're angry we look at the protests going on in Paris and they're not looked upon kindly so anger is often something that we try to avoid but you argue it's something that can be healing well yeah so there's only one phrase I'd use them or cool with equivalent when you say you choose addiction and you choose nobody chooses these things I've worked with the most densely addicted population in North America here in Vancouver is down to an East Side that there's no area in North America like the city's downtown east side people are addicted to heroin fentanyl cocaine crystal meth alcohol nicotine whatever you care to name nobody chooses to be an addict they're trying to run away from intense pain rooted in trauma nobody wakes up in the morning says I'm going to choose unhealthy lifestyle I'm going to choose to be an addict so these aren't choices they're choices only on the unconscious level so that's yeah I will make that distinction okay now in terms of anger nobody chooses to repress anger either have you ever met a one-day-old baby that doesn't know how to get angry try feeding it something that doesn't want to eat you're going to find out what anger is about okay anger's not unhealthy our brains are wired for anger we have a circuitry in our brain for anger we share that with other mammals why but look if I were to um to enter your space right now in your physical space I mean we're far away from each other but if I were into your physical space or your emotional space by being insulting to you what would be a response on your part anger yeah would they be healthy or not you'd be saying you're in my space get out or I will not have you talk to me that way stop it is that good or bad well it's certainly good if you're protecting yourself and it and anger is the emotion that allows us to protect ourselves and I guess the the reality is what we allow anger to allow us to do well so here's well here's the point there's healthy anger such as what I've just talked about which is just a boundary protection it's not evil to hurt somebody else it's just all animals do it they'll they'll General they'll generate an anger response even to the space get out you're almost it's healthy it's a boundary defense you can't live without it when you get the message that your anger is not acceptable to your parents and you repress it no you have lost your boundary defense no you're the kid who's gonna get bullied the bully can always tell it's not random who gets bullied in case you get randomly believe that a case with no boundary protection the kids were bullied are the ones who actually feel very weak inside and they have to make themselves more powerful by dominating somebody else something happened to both the bully and the bullied kid to create that dynamic so healthy angry is just the boundary defense then there's unhealthy anger that's when we're triggered into a reaction by some unhealed wound from the past so um I'm walking towards you in the street and I'm thinking about something and I'm looking at you in a certain way and you get offended hey you're disrespecting me well I didn't I wasn't even know that you only I didn't know you were there never mind I don't know you but then you go into a rage or we do this in a relationship like my wife might disappoint me someone I go into a rage That's not healthy anger that's unhealthy anger so anger is basically three resolutions the expression of healthy anger which is in the moment it's a bonding defense once you express it it's done its job it dissipates it's no longer necessary just an emotion that's there to protect you or there's the repression of anger which can by the way what do we call depression what's depression what does it mean to depress something it means to push it down what do we push down in depression or emotions why don't we push down our emotions because their environment couldn't accept them so we pushed on our healthy anger we pushed on everything we become flat so there's the repression of healthy anger which can lead to autoimmune disease and depression and so on and so forth then there's unhealthy anger which is Rage a reaction triggered in the present by something that resembles the past and you thinking you're reacting to the present when you're acting reacting to the past to this unhealed wound and that's toxic to you and to the people receiving it when I had that on anti-anger that was toxic to my children and very hard on my marriage um so there is that unhealthy anger by the way in the aftermath of a rage episode your risk of a heart attack or a stroke doubles for the next two hours because your blood vessels constrict clotting factors go up and your blood pressure goes on so there's healthy anger there's the repression of healthy anger and then there's unhealthy anger and when people talk about anger It's usually the last one that they're talking about so what role does agency play in our healing because oftentimes we encounter people around us who are suffering and part of that suffering includes feeling like the victim and feeling like everything is out to get them and and this trauma is overwhelming the belief that every result to get you is not false but it's a memory it's a Memory implicit memory when you're small and helpless and you're being hurt and there's no way there to help you so you perceived the world is it hostile dangerous place but early trauma actually shapes the way we see the world so if I said you that there was a man who said that the world is a dangerous place everybody's got to get you even your friends that want your house and your wife and these are your friends it's a doggy dog world what would you imagine about the childhood of that person they were unsafe they felt unsafe yeah so out of that lack of safety they created the world view I've just quoted verbatim a recent president of the United States because he said these words in his autobiography so he's not crazy to believe that but he confuses his own emotional experience with the way the world is the way the world is and as long as he believes that that's the way the world is he's gonna behave like that's the way the world is going to make himself bigger and bigger and more and more grandiose so that nobody can get at him he's gonna have to be aggressive attack others before they get him and he's gonna have to be really selfish and acquisitive because otherwise they're going to take it away from him so that world view which she obtained in the context of very traumatizing family home which has been described very intimately and articulately by his knees whose own father drank himself to death he's going to behave according to those beliefs what he doesn't know is that those beliefs actually bro natural outcome of his childhood trauma and rather than healing the trauma and it can't be very pleasant to be inside that consciousness I mean how pleasant it is to be inside a Consciousness that says I'm totally all alone I'm on my own uh I have to be aggressive selfish uh everybody's against me I mean how does it feel like to be inside a head like that you know and but he's compelled to act it out if he was able to say to himself if you actually listen to his therapist's niece his psychologist niece who said look this is what happened and the beliefs that you have came out of came out as a natural result of what happened you could actually be different you could actually liberate yourself from this world view but of course in this Society he's rewarded for having those beliefs is reinforced and I'm not signing him out by the way you see this almost across the political Spectrum yeah those beliefs are common yeah it's very common and and so agency means I don't have to believe the story that I downloaded when I was a kid right you can rewrite it yeah now I can create my own story based on conscious awareness of what's going on I don't have to be the victim of my childhood so drama awareness is not about the victimhood it's actually about power right that's where the Healing Begins and being able to change that story is something that we work really hard with our clients on because as you mentioned how you view the world will dictate the behaviors that you express in it to navigate it everyone they look for the root cause of certain behaviors and why they act and the way they do and get caught up in some of the loops that they do it's like well there's a belief that is stuck that that forces that that pattern and there's usually a clasp that holds that Loop together and it's it's going to stem from a belief and usually it's that I'm not good enough and and there was a whole part in the book in the belief structuring part of how how that belief runs through so many of us and in fact it's one of the most commonly held beliefs that we all have due to our our growing up well certainly it showed up in my life a lot and it drove a lot of my behaviors and emotional patterns um I wouldn't say it's completely dissipated even now because um but that's okay I'm only 79 so I got time to work on it I often say this but I think it's worth saying I said I'm 79 on and I'm glad I'm not as young as stupid as I was when I was 78. so there's hope for us all folks um but recently I had an event quite a public event where I was made to look really bad in the eyes of a lot of people and in which I had made some mistakes that contributed to that I thought I was immune but I wasn't I went through a real period of several days at least not months or weeks but some days a real despondence and oh my God what did I do and I really screwed up and you know well that goes back to a sense of not being good enough because I mean let's face it even if I made a mistake and partly it wasn't a mistake partly it was just misrepresentation but but even if I made a mistake what's the headline in the New York Times human being make mistakes that doesn't sell any papers shocking human beings makes a mistake you know so we all do why should that undermine our self-esteem unless there's this wound there that I'm just not worth it unless I am successful you know or liked and so on so that one as you say is the deepest wound of all and what's interesting about it even not belief at some point play the defensive function because when you're suffering as a kid either because your parents don't understand you see you because they're too stressed too distracted uh really Embrace who you are exactly as you are or worse if your parents are hurting you or if they're hurting each other or you know there's two beliefs you can adopt one is that the world is um incapable of meeting my needs I'm totally alone defenseless and helpless or this bad stuff is happening because it's my fault and if I work hard enough hard enough if I was good enough I could fix it of those two beliefs which is more palatable for most children the second it's the one that there's something wrong with so so even that belief that is so debilitating that there's something wrong with me actually serves a protective function at some point so you discuss five R's to unpack this limiting belief it's something that we find in our clients and and ourselves to even struggle with what are the five R's and how do we start to move Beyond this limiting belief that's so common this is actually an exercise that was originally developed by Dr Jeffrey Schwartz who's a psychiatrist at UCLA working with OCD and he developed these four steps to work with OCD symptoms these steps have to be done regularly and with conscious awareness and the conscious awareness reshapes the brain that's the essence of what he's talking about but the good news is that with practice we can actually undo the effects of trauma we can develop new brain circuits to regulate the older ones and that's really what this exercise designed to do so now with his permission then I applied these four because I didn't say you know they worked for us today for a lot of people he found but I thought well why couldn't they work for addictions too and so I at least be at least Behavior addictions which have a lot in common with those cities they're not the same but there's a lot of commonality so in my book in the realm of hunger ghosts and addictions I re-configurated these four steps to apply to addiction and then I broadened that let's work with all self-limiting beliefs so those are the four r's I had the fifth one so I'll give Dr Schwartz credit for the first four I'll take credit for the last two months but they become let's say you believe that you're not worth it but you're not good enough so the first one is you relabel relabel relabel means not that I'm not good enough but I have a thought that I'm not good enough I will believe that I'm not good enough now as soon as you relabel it you're getting distance from it because as long as you say I'm not worthy you're identifying with the beliefs right as soon as you say I have a belief that I'm not worth it no you've taken the steps away from it there's a separation between yourself and the belief there's an eye then there's this belief so that's the first step to relabel and this can be applied to any self-admitting beliefs I have to please others no I don't have to please others I have a belief that I have to please others and so on so that's the first step relabel the second one is reattribute which is to say attribute this belief to exactly where it belongs so this is my brain sending me you know this belief that I'm not worthy it's just my brain sending me an old message a message that I self-developed defensively when I was three years old it's not that I'm unworthy this is my brain sending me a message that maybe served a function way back then but not undermines me so that's the second step the third step is refocus and that means if you got this belief that I'm not worthy just take five minutes and this is an exercise you're meant to do it's not just a thought pattern it's a you know take a piece of paper once a day or once a week or three times a week and sit down and do this exercise consciously with conscious awareness not routinely but conscious and do it in writing so they're not typing on a computer but write it out by hand so the third step is refocus okay I'm not worthy but maybe I'll come back to that belief but for five minutes I'm going to focus on the people I've Loved or the people that have loved me or things that I've done well good thoughts that I've had well I'm going to look at a flower I'm going to look at a beautiful photograph or a picture I want to listen to a beautiful piece of music consciously I'm gonna take my mind's Focus away from this belief and put it on something that's nourishing that's called refocus simple little exercise the step four is called V value which is to actually evaluate this belief for what it's really done in your life so this belief that I'm unworthy what is this actual value what is it done oh it kept me a workaholic it kept me feeling bad about myself it kept me desperate they've kept me isolated it's kept me ashamed that's what it's actually done that's its actual value it's got a negative value that's called the B value or re-evaluate the fifth one which I've added is called recreate which is to say up till now largely I've been driven by these unconscious forces by these beliefs I didn't have agency I didn't deliberately take these on these are natural responses to my childhood programming now I can recreate myself what are my actual aspirations what is my heart's desire what kind of world do I want to live in what do I want to contribute or what do I want to experience so consciously we create an image of who you want to be and and how you want to show up in the world so those are the five R's thank you for sharing with our audience I think many of us listening have had those moments in fact for me just recently and in that moment it can be all-consuming and it can lead to behaviors that pull you away from your goals pull you into inaction or to even more negative behaviors that aren't helpful to your health that Recreation step the visualization piece is often I feel the most difficult if we've been in that state and that's been a limiting belief for so long in our life it's come up over and over again how for those in our audience who would struggle to think about what they want to be or what that vision is start to work on the recreation step more impactfully look first of all if you're training somebody as a weightlifter how would you get them to bench press 300 pounds lift the bar first you left the bar first down so just just start simply you know I'm gonna be a loving person period or I want to be a person who experiences love everybody's got some aspiration it's not that difficult to identify something this particular exercise if somebody takes it on it's like lifting weights you got to start somewhere and you got to keep doing it you're not gonna get to 300 pounds if you don't train for it this is training and and the whole point is our childhood kind of hypnotize us into a certain set of beliefs now we have to retrain ourselves this exercise certainly is not the BL and the end-all it's just one way to approach these alternating beliefs but it's in a training exercise if you want to take it on take it on if you go to the gym three times a week do this exercise three times a week it takes 15 minutes you know or do it six times a week whatever the more you do it the more you're gonna develop new brain circuits that can actually hold that message well thank you so much for taking the time to join us and share your work with us we love asking every guest one last question what is your X Factor what do you think makes you unique and extraordinary my absolute commitment to figuring out the truth of things and not just figuring it out but also to speaking it once I think I found it and that's true in my personal life that's pretty much kept our marriage of 52 years vibrant as they were both really committed to the truth we didn't just buy as much as we acted out our stories sometimes in hurtful ways we're actually committed to figuring out the truth and that's true for me in the realm of the human mind human health politics and just really committed to truth because I agree with a very great person who once said that you will know the truth and the truth will liberate you so that in this freedom and Truth and where can our audience find out more about this book and your other writings this book is available everywhere the middle normal trauma illness and healing and toxic culture is published in or will be in 30 languages now month you know over 30 countries bookstores certainly on online um I love it when people patronize their local bookstores by the way but um those that I it's none of it you can certainly get it online I have a website Dr gabromate gabormat.com at my website you can join my email list if you want to um so it's not difficult to find me out there all right I don't thank you so much for stopping by and sharing this book with us thank you very much but thank you it's such a pleasure thank you guys it's been a real pleasure take care [Music]

Channel: Art of Charm

Views: 10,155

Keywords: the art of charm, art of charm, storytelling, confidence, self confidence, how to, how to be confident, charisma, charisma on command, self help, jay shetty, jay shetty interview, dave goggins, vanessa van edwards, coaching, best practice, how to read people, coffee time, coffee time with johnny, coffe with johnny, food for thought, normal, normality, trauma, childhood trauma, dealing with trauma, anger, anger issues, unhealthy behaviors, disconnection, emotional healing

Id: f4tJVDcJCEQ

Length: 57min 30sec (3450 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2023