This Is Making Us SICK! - The Connection Between STRESS, TRAUMA & DISEASE | Dr. Gabor Maté

it's inevitable that whatever happens emotionally is gonna show up physiologically furthermore we know that childhood trauma elevates the circulation of inflammatory particles in the blood cytokines how come we're seeing despite you know the best healthcare system in the world in north america despite advanced medical science despite innovations in medication why are we seeing more and more illness more mental illness more addiction more obesity more chronic disease more autoimmune disease it seems like we're bailing a a ship that's sinking with a teaspoon yeah well by the myth of normal i mean that conditions that in our society be assumed to be abnormal that we believe are normal from the point of view of human evolution and human needs are totally abnormal um so that this we're living in a world that doesn't meet our needs yeah we think this is the normal world and it may be the norm statistically but it's not normal in terms of it's not natural healthy in terms of what human beings actually need number one number two in this society physical illness and mental illness so actually normal responses to abnormal circumstances yeah so it's not in the disease the so-called disease that we have to find the abnormality but in the conditions that cause the disease yeah and you know this is where medicine completely fails yeah because when we can identify the cause of an illness as some external agent like the novel coronavirus or we can point to the preponderance of lung cancer among smokers appropriately then we think we've found a cause for something but for chronic illnesses that don't have such an obvious external agent as the triggering or causative factor we just call them idiopathic which really means we haven't got a clue what causes them yeah and yet if you look at the actual lives of anybody with with autoimmune disease or anybody with malignancy or anybody with um depression or anxiety or adhd or or or bipolar illness you'll find that these illnesses manifest people's life experiences they don't come out of nowhere and furthermore we make this elementary mistake of thinking that by diagnosing something we've explained something but let me show you how circular and actually nonsensical it is yeah yeah so so i've been treated for depression yeah you know and there was a time when i gladly took antidepressant medication and it helped me so i'm not here to militate against medical practice i'm a practitioner of it but say gabor is sad and he's isolating and he's morose why because he's got depression how do we know that he's got depression because he's sad and he's isolating and he knows uh why is he sad isolating him because he's got depression how do we know that you know so this this diagnosis don't explain anything they describe things same with adhd same with bipolar for that matter the same with a lot of physical analysis absolutely the diagnoses describe something but they say nothing about the origins yeah i mean that you just described functional medicine in a nutshell which is yeah you know i always say because you know the name of the disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you it's just the name we give to people who share a collection of symptoms that's right and and depression isn't the cause of you being sad hopeless and helpless and have no interest in sex or can't sleep and all these different symptoms and yet the doctors always fall into this trap of thinking that the name of the disease explains the cause the cause of the symptoms is rheumatoid arthritis that's why your joints weren't swollen no it's not because of that yeah because of childhood trauma because because of gluten it could be because of mercury or a million other things and so just because you know the name of the disease it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you and i think this is never more rampant in any other field of medicine than psychiatry and then mental health issues because you know we we just sort of label people and put them in groups and then we treat the label instead of the cost and then your work has really been about treating the causes that are mostly invisible and that are you know not really even talked about and we've really kind of pushed mental illness off in this sort of dark category in in some ways it's very stigmatized and we blame the victim and we don't really understand the context in which it arises and i you know i've really not thought of myself as someone who's actually experienced trauma and i didn't i didn't really connect to it i didn't really make sense to me and i as a doctor obviously i encountered many people who experienced horrible traumas but for myself i was like ah my childhood you know my parents were divorced and yeah i had you know issues with my family and my parents and there was conflict my parents hate each other but like yeah it happens to a lot of people what's the big deal and then i began to look at some of my own dysfunctional patterns of workaholism of people-pleasing of overdoing of over-caring which you know got me to be very successful in my career but had really negative consequences for me as a human being and and led to many failed relationships led to many illnesses of myself and i think your work has really helped me to understand that having a deeper conversation about these traumas really matter and i'll just share a little bit about my own story and then we'll get into the bigger context of everything and i think you know my my mother grew up in a deaf family in new york city in the 1930s her parents were deaf so if anybody's seen the movie coda which won the best picture this year it's about a young girl who grew up in a deaf family and there was a line in that movie where the mother is lamenting her daughter is going off to college and saying she can't go she's our baby meaning we need her but the father said she was never a baby and you know my mother had a word for her childhood which was a parentified child in other words she was her parents parent she took care of them she had to be their voice in their ears and they were very loving and beautiful people but it robbed her of her own childhood her own innocence and she thought then that loving was caring for somebody who was broken then she picked my father who was broken and that didn't work out and then she picked my stepfather it was broken and that didn't really work out and that was the environment in which i grew up and my mother became very depressed and she used me as her emotional crutch as her therapist if you will and that uh led me to have the behavior that you know love was also about fixing broken people and my first wife was an alcoholic and had bipolar disease and had experienced uh horrible sexual trauma as a child which she didn't even remember her childhood before she was 16 and we kind of later uncovered this and i and i began to think about you know how these patterns were really originated in my childhood of my behaviors that were really not creating a life for me that actually made me fulfilled and happy and good and and i sort of by doing the work by actually excavating i call it soul archaeology i was able to really understand how my brain was working how my love software was corrupted and it allowed me to really be very different and rewire everything about myself in such a beautiful way but it was not an easy process and i used a lot of different approaches including different kinds of therapy psychedelic work which now is sort of emerging and i know you work with a lot in terms of your your work on trauma and patients and that really helped me to kind of move through a lot of this and i know i probably saw a lot of work to do but it really taught me that each of us even if we don't conceptualize what happened to us as trauma as a child that it really does inform who we are and how we are so i asked for us to want to take off with your work because you know what you say in your work is that trauma isn't what happens to us it's about the meaning we make about what happens to us or something like that yeah so so where can you talk about how you first came to understand this concept because you know you yourself were traumatized you were born in hungary in world war ii and it was a time of the nazi regime and you were jewish and that itself was a drama can you talk about how you first came to understand that this pattern of your own trauma was linked to the greater cultural pattern of trauma and mental illness and struggle and and how you came to understand your work well first thank you uh for having me um just reflecting on your story um and the parentified child the child who has to become apparent to the parent and essentially loses the parents so not what you know whether you know it or not you're a motherless child yeah that's maybe why i like that song so much you know yeah and uh john bolby who's the great british psychiatrist uh pioneer of developmental research attachment research and i quote him in the book he says that reversal of roles between parent and child is always a sign of pathology in the parent and invariably a source of pathology in a child yeah so that we pay a lot even but of course you as a child had nothing to compare it to that was the childhood that you knew that's right and most people when they think of trauma they think of big disasters like a tsunami or a parent dying or severe abuse sexual emotional or physical and so on but really the word trauma itself simply means a wound yeah and people can be wounded in all kinds of ways and so it doesn't take the big um ticket um big t events to wound a child you can wound a child especially if they're very sensitive just by not meeting their needs yeah their essential needs for being understood and respected for who they are being seen being heard being unconditionally welcomed into the world a lot of kids are wounded without the terrible things happening to them that people think of as trauma and as you said trauma is what happens inside us not what happens to us so trauma is the wound that we sustain not the event that caused the wound which is a good thing yeah because if trauma was the thing that happened to me as an infant the jewish infant under the nazis that'll never not have happened yeah but if trauma's the meaning that i made made out of that that i wasn't lovable that it wasn't worthwhile well that that wound can be healed um how i came to this work was both through my work as a family physician um and also a palliative care doctor so i looked after people from birth to death and i began to see that people who got chronically ill not just with mental illness but also physical illnesses like malignancy and autoimmune disease and so on invariably there was a backstory of trauma in childhood and a lifelong pattern of what you describe yourself as uh uh manifesting of of people pleasing of trying to be nice of trying to do everything for everybody or being a compulsive helper which of course i did as well as a workaholic doctor a copycat isoholic yeah yeah a nice yeah i wasn't i was that nice but i was certainly a workaholic and an alcoholic you know and as a way of justifying your resistance and so i began to notice these patterns in my medical work that behind chronic illness of all kinds there was trauma and ongoing stress and furthermore in my 40s i was a successful doctor maybe like yourself but with all kinds of personal challenges i was depressed and anxious and um i've been i was in a conflictual marriage um and my kids were actually sometimes scared of me so i had to actually start asking myself what's going on here and so i began to go for my own therapy and reading the literature and the combination of my observations as a physician um my personal experience and personal self-exploration and then i just mentioned finally the vast body of scientific literature linking trauma and stress to physical illness to mental illness and here's where our profession mark is just so behind the times yeah you know physicians the medical profession claims to be a scientific discipline but they ignore all kinds of science yeah that doesn't fit into their very narrow biological point of view and so i to wake up to my own reality to the reality of my patients and also the reality of what science and research is actually telling us about human beings yeah that's true i mean there's just an enormous literature about this and it's always surprising to me and i'd say this with functional medicines there's so much evidence it's so much science but it doesn't fit the model yeah it's sort of ignored yeah whether it's on the microbiome or toxins or stress or trauma it's like there's plenty of data out there and you talk a lot about it in your book for example about women who have breast cancer and how you could predict who is going to have breast cancer based on their personality type and how they repressed anger and were too nice and yeah you know the same with autoimmune disease women have such a higher rate of autoimmune disease which yeah women have 80 percent of autoimmune disease and and this is a big mystery and or if you take something like multiple sclerosis which in the 1930s the gender ratio but was not equal and now it's about three women to every man which right away tells us it can't be genetic because genes don't change in a few decades can't be uh the the weather or the food per se because that hasn't changed more for one year than any other what has changed is that women are facing more stresses than they used to by didn't of having to still carry the brunt of the emotional work of their families and carry the emotional stresses of their spouses very often and having to work at the same time yeah so when you get more stress and also people are more isolated now than it used to be so what i'm really saying is that illness in a particular person is not a manifestation of individual biology but as a consequence of multiple factors which include the social and cultural environment the economy the politics yeah once personal relationships and one's personal multi-generational history that's true and just to separate the mind from the body as western medicine does and to separate the individual from the environment it's completely unscientific and though not very helpful no it's true and i think i think you know medicine is starting to kind of tiptoe around this with the conversation about the social determinants of health you know what are the yeah they are they're beginning to talk about um yeah there's a canadian public health expert who said if you want to stay healthy um be able to afford uh vacations in the sunshine and eat organic food and don't live in a poor neighborhood you know the doctors shouldn't be prescribing pills they should be prescribing uh sunfield so there is some conversation now about the social determinants of health and in chicago in some areas of chicago the life expectancy is 30 years less yeah than in the wealthier parts and this is these are the social determinants but even the social determinants of health is a narrow view yeah because it looks at only the most obvious well what's so beautiful about your book is that you talk not only about the you know what happens in the personal microcosm of a person's family and the developmental phases that they go through and the yeah the traumas that happen within the family either the little t traumas which are more of the invisible traumas or the big t traumas like incest and abuse and so forth yeah but you also talk about the the social traumas and the societal traumas and the expectations and the toxic culture we live in you know paul farmer talks about structural violence you know the social political economic conditions that drive disease and we tend to ignore those the late and the lamented right yeah who died before his time maybe maybe because he took on too much i don't know maybe i don't know what happened i mean i i i need to find out because he i knew him and he's he's exactly my age yeah and he um but yeah he did talk about these things and of course he put himself on the line he worked a lot in haiti with a very oppressed and impoverished population and he was very clear about how power um creates pathology yeah in this society when i talk about a toxic culture just you know like in scientific terms in a laboratory if we're culturing organisms if in a in a particular brew broth we call that a laboratory culture and if a lot of the organisms the microorganisms we were growing happen to die or get sick in large numbers we would call that a toxic culture right and and and that's what the assertion i'm making about our culture and it's not just the social determinants are one important aspect of it like racism for example is a risk factor for aging and for inflammation and for malignancy and for asthma and for premature death so that's a definite social determinant independent poverty yeah independent of poverty erased quite apart from economic considerations so that the if you measure the biological aging of um black american women of a better of a higher social class it'll be more advanced than white women of a lower social class now if you combine race and poverty now you've got a double whammy you know in fact there's a triple whammy because being a woman also puts you at high risk for chronic illness um but but even for those that are privileged relatively speaking a society that thinks that people have to be competitive and aggressive and selfish and individualistic actually uh denies the very nature of human evolution and human needs yeah so it'll create pathology even without the social determinants yeah it's so true when you talk about in your book um this sort of crisis of separation yeah that um both on an individual level and a social level we we're disconnected yeah and how that gives rise to disease and you know the the beautiful frame that paul farmer talked about when he talked about healing was accompaniment which is the opposite of separation how we have to accompany each other to health yeah i i tell the story of um that was told to me by lewis mel madrona lewis is a lakota part lakota right now yeah do you know i met at me and many years ago yeah yeah yes he's a physician psychiatrist yeah trained in the western model yeah like you and i both are but he says in the local tradition when somebody gets ill the community says thank you you're manifesting the dysfunction of the whole community so your healing is our healing yeah it's all about connection scientifically that's absolutely correct western medicine doesn't get it no i mean we're social beings and i think you know one of the one of the interesting things to me when i look to sort of literature around you know disease you think oh it's smoking it's diet it's obesity and yes it's all that but more predictive than that was a sense of a loss of disconnection and a loss of control yeah and a sense of isolation and loneliness which is a more relevant predictor is an independent risk factor for uh for getting ill faster and for dying of illness faster you know and it's it's probably as significant as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and going to some of the research i mean do you think this is like a modern phenomena this crisis of separation or just been there throughout human history and and what is the cause of this the root cause of the separation that we're seeing well if you look at the the literature and loneliness the number of people in the u.s who say that they're lonely went from [Music] 20 to 40 percent in a couple of decades not that long but it's a lot worse yeah it's a product of this particular system for example walmart okay so walmart um opens a store in a community and the local developer developers are happy the local politicians are delighted to have this facility people might even be pleased to have this big convenience department store available to them at lower prices but what's the what's the price that we pay local businesses have to shut down they can't compete yeah um the local baker the local butcher and candlestick maker they all have to close down people no longer walk to the where they show up in the neighborhoods seeing each other meeting their friends and neighbors uh in the store dealing with the merchants they personally have known all their lives that the mr hooper of uh sesame street yeah yeah they drive each of them gets into a car all by themselves and drive to this windowless soulless facility where they're looked after by total strangers yeah so yes you've gained a few pennies here and there yeah and uh developers are happy because they sold the land what happened to the community and this is an inevitable product of globalized capitalism it's happening all over the world hence the crisis of loneliness is is burgeoning all over the world yeah so it's sort of a product of sort of the globalization and of the way in which our profit motive has sort of driven systems in society that disconnect us from each other yeah once once profit becomes the um the prime motive and and is even justified as the highest possible endeavor which it is in this society yeah then what are you going to get they need companies that this is your field i mean sometimes you must be so frustrated because you're so adapted and understanding the the essentials of human nutrition yeah but these companies the profit of delivering poisonous and developing and planning and concocting poisonous products and uh i heard you talk yesterday sugar sugar has been called the most addictive substance in the world yeah and in that sense uh america is the center of the world's drug trade yeah when it comes to spirits you know as somebody once pointed out and they push these sugary products into the developing world where more and more people are dying as a result you know and so let alone the pharmaceutical companies that as is publicly known now created opiates that they told physicians were not addictive or less addictive knowing full well that that wasn't the case yeah and look at the tens and hundreds of thousands of opiate deaths now not that i'm making them fully responsible but they sure profited off it and they drove and they drove the dynamic as well so once profit becomes the ultimate motive then human health becomes a byproduct and a an um you know a sunk cost as it were like which is it's not a concern anymore yeah it's so true and i think you know we we have such a negative view of addiction and in some ways we we blame the victim yeah just like we blame the victim for being obese we blame the victim for addiction and say well you know you need to do with your problem you need to admit you have a problem i mean in fact that's the you know that's the first step of a 12-step program which is you know i realize i'm powerless over alcohol you know i think there's some higher power i have to give up to well you know that that may be a little perverted in a sense because it doesn't take into account the truth of why addiction happens which is out of some injury to our soul injury to our mind to our bodies that happens when we're young that is a source of discomfort and pain that we're trying to deal with and medicate well the um the very famous ace adverse childhood experiences studies that looked at the correlation between childhood trauma and adversity and the later onset of addiction actually began when a physician acquaintance may be both of us dr vince felide was working at an obesity clinic and they found that they found they could help people lose weight but couldn't help them keep it off and then they started actually they did something that amazing for medical doctors they started listening to the stories of these patients yes and the stories that all had they have had been traumatized abused in childhood suffer significant loss the eating was their way of suiting themselves yeah which is any addiction is a way of soothing yourself and that then gave rise to the ace studies which showed indisputably the connection between childhood trauma and loss and the adult onset of addictions but also of mental health conditions also autoimmune conditions also of cancer relational issues and so on so heart disease there's so much research now that and and when i worked in the downtown city of vancouver which is east side of vancouver which is um north america is the most concentrated area of drug use and i don't know if you have had a chance to visit vancouver but if you walk through the downtown east side there's this open-air drug market people are shooting up in the back alleys yeah it's quite the scene and i worked there for 12 years in those 12 years i did not have a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child not a single female patient had not been one out of hundreds and that's also what the literature shows so it's not just my anecdotal um observation it's also what the studies over in a vegan show and yet despite that society still insists on looking at addictions as a choice that some people make for which they are to be blamed and as you pointed out stigmatized or exercised or in the medical profession we have a more humane and somewhat more forward-looking but still completely inaurious perspective that we're dealing with brain diseases with a large genetic component no we're not we're dealing with people's response to human suffering yeah and there's a whole field of medicine now emerging called narrative medicine which is listening to people's story what a novel concept right so we should actually elicit a person's story and it's one of the most important things i do as a functional medicine doctor and i think that you do is we we actually excavate and we start to dig you know what was your childhood like where were you born what was it like and were your early life experiences and you start to unpack things and and i have like trick questions in my questionnaire about you know yeah trauma or abuse or wait little things to poke around and it's amazing what you find when you start digging and you see the correlation between that and and the breakdown in the body and i always say that disease is the body's best attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances exactly and that's exactly what you're saying i'm saying that very much and i'm also saying that therefore the disease and i have a chapter on this the disease can actually act as a teacher now as a teacher who which who guides you back to your reality now i'm not recommending it i don't recommend anybody get rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis or for that matter of depression or anything there's a way of learning anything all i'm saying is i've talked to so many people who once they developed these conditions they used it to learn about what dynamics in their lives triggered it and when they change those dynamics those illnesses have a very different course other than the usual um ones if they're just treated biologically and so the diseases is it can act as a big wake-up call for a lot of people again i don't recommend it one of my intentions and i'm sure one of yours is as well is to wake people up before disease comes knocking at their door but once it does it's astonishing what people are able to learn about themselves and this has been documented as well well you know this is the thing that i think you know was shocking to me personally as i began to work with my patterns of emotional relating and beliefs and what i call my sort of corrupted love software i i i didn't think i could change the inner dialogue the inner narrative i called the internet you know and and as i kind of went through this process of healing in my mind i actually started to change that and and it was shocking to me because i remember hearing ramadan speak years ago and and he said you know you never really get rid of your neuroses you just become friends with them and you you tell them like you know annoying cousins or uncles to go away and leave you alone but they they're always there and i thought i had that belief but i think in your work you talk about you know the the beauty of the fact that because these insults happen to you and you made meaning of it that you can kind of rewire your neural circuits and rewire your brain and your emotional framework in a way that actually gets you free and this is really you know you talk about one of your favorite books being the dhammapada and i studied buddhism in college and yeah and through the buddha's aphorisms and sayings and i think the buddhist framework is really about the liberation of the mind yeah and it's really what your work is about and so how how do people um uh you know how can people come to understand this work from a perspective of a rewiring and and the healing because it you know we can all identify things that happen to us and and we can all sort of relate to that and and and yet it's very difficult to kind of reset and i found myself for years just trying to reset and until i really kind of had this sort of almost somatic experience of resetting through a bunch of different things i did and through you know a lot of emotional breakthroughs and a lot of crying i was like yeah able to kind of kind of get and particularly was really around this movie was such a catalyst for me i don't know if you saw the movie but it was such a catalyst because it was my mother's story and it was my story embedded in her story and i began to sort of understand it all and it was just like like a what they call a shakti experience it sort of went through my nervous system and i came out of it feeling very different how do people get there well there's a big clue in what you just said because you said there was a lot of crying and there's a lot of crying there's a psychological psychologist friend of mine with whom i wrote a book together hold on to your kids and his name is gordon neufeld and he's really the world's leading developmental psychologist not as nearly as well known as it might be because he is more interested in working with people than in publishing in academia but he said once to me that you should be saved in an ocean of tears and what that means is that you have to grieve what you've lost yeah rather than just defend it against it pretended it happened didn't happen you have to grieve it so some of the process of healing is actually a process of healthy grieving creeping yeah and that's what it felt like you know the you mentioned the dharma part of the buddhist collection of sayings it begins with that everything is mined in the lead so basically with our minds we whatever we believe what do we think we create the world that we live in so that um if you believe for example that the world is a horrible place that is dog-eat-dog that is every person for themselves against everybody else that your neighbors um even your friends want your wife and i want your house and i want your dog then you know you're gonna be you'll be president united states because a recent president of the united states wrote that in his audio biography that's his worldview yeah now how did he arrive at that worldview so the buddhist says that with our minds we create the world but he didn't say which is what modern psychology says that before with our mind with our thoughts our beliefs we create the world that we live in the world creates our minds through our childhood experience and so minds create the world but our world creates our minds before we create the world with our minds the mind creates our world yeah based on our childhood experience and so that um we really have to look at the forces that shaped us and gave us the particular view like that i have to be a compulsive helper or that you had to become a compost developer and people pleaser nobody's born like that those are childhood patterns to adaptations to fit into our environment when that environment demands it then with that mindset we create the world not everybody's so clear on that what's what's striking for me is often i run across somebody who says but you know doc i i was addicted by a really happy childhood you know and then that's when i issue what i call the happy childhood challenge [Laughter] it takes about three minutes of conversation just asking a few basic questions and like you said you have these trick questions that you ask people i i have my own bag of tricks as well and and that happy childhood story never stands up to any kind of scrutiny you know uh and it's really important that it doesn't because otherwise people blame themselves i had this you know one of the saddest letters i received uh i mentioned this in in the myth of normal it was a guy in seattle who read my um book on addiction in which i point out and argue that addiction is a response to trauma and particularly trauma incurred in childhood many rights back he wrote me a letter saying uh i found your book very interesting but i can't believe my mother i'm ash because of myself yeah i just felt so bad for the guy yeah because he didn't get it first of all he didn't blame his mother i don't blame parents at all parents do their best it's just that his mother like maybe i as a parent and perhaps use a parent our best wasn't good enough yeah because at that time we still haven't worked our stuff but there's no blame in recognizing that but more than that in that statement that i mean because of me he was expression starts self-loathing and self-rejection which are the hallmarks of trauma yeah but but with that mind that's the world he lives in in which he is worthless yeah and and that mind was created by his childhood but he can't see it yeah it's so true i you know i recently had this incident about myself as well because i you know i had this father and a stepfather who were very disapproving very judgmental i was never good enough never i mean my stepfather would say when i said you know dad i got you know 98 of my tests he's like what up put the other two points and he wasn't kidding yeah yeah uh and you know and and and i think that left me with a sense of lack and void that i always try to fill and always trying to be seen and known and acknowledged and it sort of i've actually built a career on that and it worked but now i'm sort of reorganizing all that in my mind and what matters and how i want to live and how i relate to my work and other people and the need for validation and i never if you would have said mark you know um do you love yourself i was of course i do i do have high self-esteem yes i do do you have a lot of self-worth of course i do but the truth was i don't think i really did well you did based on external conditions yeah i was like i really didn't yeah and i've really been cultivating yeah the same way that was a level of of you know self-worth and self-love and i and i knew and i actually went to a retreat for myself i just i wanted to sort of lock myself away for a month when i went to vermont and i just stayed in a cabin i pulled out all the distractions no phone computer books uh you know tv nothing and i just sat with myself and i walked and i you know ate and i i was in nature and i wrote that was one thing i did do and i was just sort of amazed to sort of begin to realize that i was enough you know like those and and and i had this feeling it was after this work around my mother and this trauma that i began to kind of have this insight about what was driving me and driving my behavior that you know had a lot of good results but that actually left me not feeling that great and also sacrificing my health and doing all kinds of things that weren't in service of you know my soul and what really mattered yeah and and i was like it was such a shock and a friend to myself you don't love yourself you don't have self-worth i'm like what do you mean like of course i do but actually i realized i didn't no and the cultivation of that has really changed my whole internal architecture yeah yeah it wasn't for me um and then of course the way the society works is as you pointed a couple of times in this conversation it rewards us for self-betrayal yeah you know and so that i was this respected doctor always available and he's so kind and all this and my wife was going to a supermarket and they see the credit card and are you the wife of the great so and so on and she would grate her teeth yeah because they're great at home because they're great so-and-so wasn't available at home it was too busy working all the time it wasn't available for his own kids for his own self-care for the relationship you know but the world externally rewards us for that so as much as we grind some people down um it elevates some people um for the wrong reasons and for reasons that the which then reinforces um and it's very addictive because if my value depends on how much i'm helping others it becomes addictive and the reason becomes addictive is because there's always a niggling doubt inside which is maybe unconscious but says okay they want me but do they want me or do they want what i'm giving them yeah so that that satisfaction of getting that praise and valuation from the outside is a temporary hit like somebody's temporary hit from heroin yeah and then you have to have it again and again and again and our culture rewards that i mean it doesn't matter a culture rewards it so our culture rewards that kind of addiction big time values it and and and and esteems it meanwhile the soul is being grown to dust inside yeah and that's one of the that's another example of the myth of normal yeah that's so true i i think uh and it's you know the stories we tell ourselves are often so distorted and yeah you know one of my closest friends i thought for 20 years he had had a happy childhood because he always had a happy childhood and once until he went away on and did a workshop with his sister we were at the same place and i started sharing about this and she's like what are you talking about my mother was crazy and she did this and she did that and it was awful and i'm like what and it was in shock and it and i it explained so much about his behavior and his patterns and and i i think a lot of us do that we we we kind of uh prematurely transcend in a way our our trauma and instead of actually going through it we try to go past it and end up having all these maladaptive patterns of living and being and not functioning in a way that brings us joy and happiness and peace which is what we're all after anyway and as you mentioned earlier then you go to a physician and i've often done this in um in talks that i gave um i asked people well if you've been to a cardiologist or a respirologist or oncologist or a dermatologist or a neurologist any kind of an ologist in the last five years just raise your hands so you know out of a 500 people in a room half of them at least will put the hands up sure maybe more and then i'll say now keep your hands up if they asked you about any childhood trauma yeah your current relationship any stresses that work how do you feel about yourself as a human being yeah you know um the hands mostly go down yeah and yet yet i'd say to people and i say this with full scientific backing that those questions that are not being asked are what drove you to that doctor in the first place whether that trauma manifested in chronic physical illness or or mental health conditions or addictions that's the source and unless you deal with that source you're only dealing with symptomatology and not actual cause so so for people listening um for people listening they're they're probably wondering wow you know maybe i haven't identified this or that as trauma or maybe actually i did survive a really traumatic child that i'm aware of yeah but i'm stuck in these dysfunctional patterns and i don't know how to break through i don't know how to rewire and in you know how do we kind of re reconstitute ourselves in this modern world it's a toxic culture because it's so if we all got to go off and live in a monastery somewhere it might be okay but yeah how do we do that how do how do you provide a path for people to think about their own healing well it's very difficult because partly it's a matter of resources like those that are fortunate enough economically to to be able to afford a good therapist and i have to emphasize good because there's a lot of really useless therapies out there i could talk great length about that that don't go to the heart of the things but you only deal with the surface yeah um so if you can afford to do that by all means you know just as you take your car and for a tune up take yourself into a tune-up and finds out find out what is grinding and what is not working and where it's not lubricated and you know what actually happened lots of therapeutic modalities and i've developed one you mentioned that in the introduction compassion inquiry but i don't claim it's a panacea what is that um well at this point i'm only mentioning it as one possible amongst many many others you know there are so many forms of therapy out there and people can find whatever works for them you know so there's my compassion inquiry there's my good friend dick schwartz's internal family systems which is getting increasing attraction and attention for good reason there is peter levine's somatic experiencing body-based therapies body-based therapies that's right cranial sacral work um bodywork such as massages and so on and very interesting how many times people who get a massage and their therapist will touch the therapist will touch a certain part of their body and all of a sudden the tears come you know because like bessel van der kolk says in his best-selling book the body does keep the score the body keeps the score so the sensory motor uh therapies pad ogden uh i could name many many therapies um but but if you're going to find a therapy find one that's trauma-informed most therapies are not terminal forms something like cognitive behavioral therapy mostly deal with i i'm not saying it's categorically but mostly deals with the surface of things they don't it doesn't deal with the underlying traumatic template for why you think the way you do um also but for people uh who can't afford a private therapist well or their community programs um there's online there's all kinds of information about trauma many of my talks have been uploaded to youtube not by me but just by others on trauma you can get lots of information yeah not just for me but from others as well um there are then there are modalities that anybody can do such as meditation and mindfulness like you spent a month on your own and basically uh i've done similar things where you're just alone with your mind yeah and that's a scary thing it can be it can be a very scary thing for sure but that means taking a break from the digital world yeah um actually spending time alone with the mind and then writing about it journaling about it talking to people about it um there's lots of stuff that people can do and increasingly there are more and more books that are really good guides to to understanding and working with trump peter levine's work waking the tiger in an unspoken voice that's another one of peter's work my various books that you were kind enough to mention including the most recent one bessels the body keeps the score bruce perry and oprah's recent book called what happened to you about shout out trauma yeah and memoirs like educated by tara westover yeah which is quite a wake-up call about trauma and its impacts there's lots of stuff out there now at least we're living in a world where this conversation although it's not penetrating the medical profession very much at least it's happening out there in the world yeah it's true and i think you know um historically illness was seen as a spiritual problem yeah in most cultures you mentioned lakota you know when they someone's sick they bring the community together yeah and the shamans and the medicine men yeah or the healers and there was no division between you know spirituality and disease and health it was all one continuum and i i spent you know a lot of time in in very interesting cultures when i was in medical school one was a hopi reservation another was in nepal and it was just this embedded culture of shamanism and medicine men and healers and and and i remember being up in the mountains and way in the remote areas near tibet in the polar and medical expedition and the dummy john crees were the were the nepalese healers and and and there was this incredible ceremony with the whole community around and the ill person it was like it wasn't like you went to the doctor and you went and sat in an office by yourself like the whole community was there that's right and the healer was there working on the person and they were doing whatever they were doing but activating you know different healing mechanisms the body that we actually can activate through these various different modalities and you know many cultures historically have used medicines plant medicines to actually heal and now with the advent of this field of psychedelic assisted therapy uh this whole conversation is changing in fact the psychedelics and we've had michael paul in the podcast tony bostis and others who were doing this work and and they they really have have sort of sort of resurrected this body of research that started in the 50s around psychedelics and lsd to look at how we can use these to help heal the mind and and i know you sort of work with this yeah model as well as part of the modalities and like you said there are many but for many people this can be an interruption in their normal view of themselves and their world and great safety you know and i i the members of my own family who've been able to take advantage of this and can actually start to find peace and start to kind of unpack the the sort of traumas and i and i have many friends and many colleagues who've used this and a lot of it's sort of underground now but it's it's really emerging and you know whether it's ketamine therapy whether it's mdma psilocybin therapy whether it's ayahuasca or ibogaine which is incredibly interesting to me as an addiction treatment we don't want to sort of talk about that a little bit uh and even things like stella ganglion blocks which are a nerve block in the neck that interrupts the fight or flight response these are all technologies let's call them ancient technologies some more modern technologies that actually seem to help people sort of take a quantum jump over and leapfrog over a lot of the sort of slogging through the the traumas through traditional therapy and traditional psychiatry and medication which often doesn't really work that well well i i wonder if you had like myself often wished or not often wish that if you could just combine the amazing achievements of modern medicine with some humility to look at the traditional wisdoms teachings of indigenous peoples because it's not a question of one over the other but but boy if we had that kind of wisdom infused into our technological minds we'll be so much more powerful as healers and um you know as you as you suggested the the illness is not just as a biological event but as a psychological spiritual event so the the medicine wheel of north american indigenous people which the four quadrants of my mind and spirit and and and body and and and sociality i'll all have to be balanced and as as regards psychedelics so my third to last chapter in this book is on psychedelics and uh because i have worked with them quite a bit and i spoke with michael pollan and and i asked him if he was surprised by the success of his work book uh yeah how to change your mind and he said what he was most surprised was that he expected a lot more pushback within the medical profession but he says people are realizing how thin our toolkit actually is and then we have to have to find some other solutions and uh i'm a self have fun both individually for me but also is a healing modality for people i work with psychedelics to be a very powerful um potential and modern potential is a very powerful modality and i'm not a psychedelic evangelist i don't think psychedelic is going to save the world or save medicine but boy are we nuts not to explore them and and and to employ them yeah because they have so much to potentially to offer in so many conditions in the book i give examples of people healing not just from mental health but also from physical conditions yeah based on changing their mindset as it flows from psychedelic experience so so so gabor how how do these medicines work and i think they're all different right but how how do they how do they reset these neural networks and how do they help people metabolize their trauma and some traditions uh like for example with ayahuasca it wasn't necessarily the client who would take the plant but the shaman would and the shaman would then get a vision and deep insight and i've worked with these indigenous shamans in the peruvian rainforest let me tell you they're penetrating the cherbobo healers yeah the sheep people are they're deep and they see things that western medicine just hasn't got a clue about i'm talking personally i had that experience yeah you know you share that yeah and and they just saw it right into me they had no idea who i was they were not impressed they read all your books they were not impressed with my credentials they just saw this human being carrying a lot of trauma and they just saw it and they worked with it so and i didn't have to be on the plant for venom to see that i was but it was their own vision that allowed them to see that so that's the first point is that partly it has to do with who's administering it in what context and what training they've had yeah the second setting they call it the senator just go to a party in the comic books um secondly freud sigmund freud once said that dreams are the royal rule to the unconscious meaning that in dreams you manifest some of our most unconscious emotional dynamics which is true but the interpretation of dreams is notoriously difficult and i think freud certainly had his own he had his own his own delusions when it came to interpreting other people's dreams but i think psychedelics are might be said to be a royal rule to the unconscious because they remove the usual defenses of the egoic mind so you get to see both the pain and the possibility that underlies the egoic mindset so people get in touch with some deep agony sometimes they also get in touch with some beauty that they had not been touched with but they've been inside them all along so you get to see both the the traumatized unprotected uncovered traumatized aspect of your personality that's been pulling the strings behind the the curtains for a long time now but you also get to see the possibilities of oneness and unity and love and beauty so that you don't have to keep running you don't have to keep employing these defenses um that's it in a very small nutshell but the potential is tremendous and i've seen it happen i've experienced some of it myself and i've certainly seen it happen a lot it might work with other people yeah i think it's very powerful and and you know the sort of addiction space is sort of fascinating because you know not all psychedelics or plant medicines are the same and this particular compound which i think we've talked about in the podcast ibogaine yeah derived from the aboga tree yeah one of the things i wish i talked about in this chapter and is it but i didn't and i'm not i'm not even sure why i omitted it and i was probably just want to get the book finished there's only four thousand pages already uh was it boga because the boga which is a plant that goes in gabon by the returns temple it's been used as a spiritual enzyme you might say by those people they're tribally speaking but it's got the amazing quality of um not just of unearthing traumatic imprints like many of the other psychedelics do but also in the case of opiates actually uh obviating opiate withdrawal so you could be on heroin for 20 years yeah and after two nights of the boga horrible gain which is the extract you're not going through withdrawal symptoms you're not shocking from a medical perspective right an alcoholic you know i worked in the emergency room and someone come in with alcohol withdrawal it's a physiological phenomena yeah heroin addiction is a yeah and withdrawal is a physiological phenomenon so how do you interrupt that well opiate withdrawal is terrible the the the dependence because of the you know the done the loss of opiate receptors and therefore all of suddenly also you don't get the opiate from the outside your system is in total shock if again prevents that now again it's not for everybody there's some medical contraindications and the context has to be really right and pristine both psychologically and medically and and and physically but in the proper hands it's like it's it's it's transformative and there's a studies being done now with with american veterans with ptsd showing amazing results with using iboga yeah stanford is running such a study but of course in the wisdom of our current society it's illegal and it's considered to be medically useless yeah and therefore it's hard to even get permission to study it yeah you know which is there is i mean there is a highest degree yeah there's a woman who's uh spoken to and i've heard her speak deborah mash who's a scientist has worked with nih funded studies and it's done a lot of the key work in this area of my boga and and and talks about the development of derivatives of iboga like nori began and other derivatives that actually may not have some of the adverse effects but can kind of benefit people we've actually had conversations about food addiction you know mentioned sugar being the most addictive compound in the world and i think you know i've talked about it with my books that you know rats will work eight times harder to get sugar than to get cocaine if they're already addicted to cocaine they'll switch over to sugar and and she's and i sort of had said hey maybe i don't know if this is anybody even looked at this but wouldn't it be interesting if if a lot of the sort of maladies we have now which related to food which are driven by food addiction could be treated with this plant medicine it would be kind of a fascinating line of inquiry and and what does that make kelloggs with the sugar frosted flakes or or coca-cola drug pushers they make them they're the biggest drug pushers in the world yeah and yet you know they're respectable brand name companies yeah talk about the myth of normal you know that's true i mean the first the first podcast i ever did is doctor's pharmacy with michael moss on sugar salt and fat and oh yeah he documented the ways in which the food industry deliberately created addictive foods they have taste institutes they hire craving experts to create the bliss point of food i know and and and if one of my patients in the downtown eastside got caught with an ounce of cocaine that he might have tried to be sell to feed his own illegal habit and i could talk at length about why these habits are illegal and others are not but if one of my clients got caught with the nazi cocaine he'd go to jail and these corporations they kill millions oh yeah and they're just respectable citizens respectable entities you know i mean the absurdity of it and the injustice of it just cries to the heavens that's true you know addiction no kill let's say 70 000 people lower dose in america guns maybe seventy thousand probably seven hundred thousand die in america a hundred thousand last year more than a hundred thousand last year yeah but still i mean still like seven or maybe ten times that are caused by oh yeah you know and yeah we don't really of course national conversation about this yeah even with cobit you know where diet played such a huge role in predisposing people to hospitalizations and yeah it still isn't part of the national narrative i mean in other countries it is now but i think and again kovid um i mean we used to say in the beginning and we're all in this together no we're not people that are are of color people that are poor people that are driven by stress into obesity uh these people are significantly higher risk yeah than people that were more privileged so no we're not on this together in this society um we're all in this together is is a real lie is what it is yeah i mean i find it really you know despite the depressing nature of this conversation i actually find it very hopeful because you know when you kind of identify and name a problem yeah and you understand the root cause of it yeah and you can map out a series of strategies to help yeah treat the problem is actually very reassuring well you know what so in the last chapter i talk about the values of disillusionment and uh it's really good to be disillusioned like i asked people would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned would you rather would you rather believe in a false universe that doesn't actually exist would you rather things the way rather see things the way they are so you can do something about it so i wouldn't have written this book if i had if i saw no possibility if i saw no redemption if i didn't see the healing capacity within individuals or even within a society so in that sense um you might call me an optimist yeah but i do think that in order to get there really have to look at how things are unflinchingly and not pretend to ourselves that what we think is normal is actually normal it isn't it's not no that's the myth of normal i mean it in a way it's a book of redemption it's like how do we redeem ourselves from a toxic culture from toxic families from a toxic environment and and how do we heal that and that that's a that's a conversation that's so invisible that hasn't been brought forth by many doctors i think you know you're one of the few well as physicians we're not trained to do that and for trained actually to look away from it and you know there was one study on on on physicians uh actually on residents medical residents without going to the details when they looked at markers of biological aging they aged faster than other people their age which has to do with the tremendous stress and trauma that physicians are grown through in order to make it and so that they just they have to ignore their own stuff their own stress and their own trauma you know to be successful then when they get out there to practice that's the last thing they think about that's true i mean i remember i remember being told by residents uh who were older than me basically we were on rotations like basically lunch and sleep were weaknesses you know yeah i'm like what i was 50 years old when i found out that you can actually sit down to have lunch [Laughter] you don't have to do it running between offices that's true um this is such a good conversation i have a few more things i want to sort of dive into one is um the biology of psychology yeah you know carol mace talks about how our biography becomes our biology yeah i mean our biology also can become a biography right so yeah physical things can cause mental illness but also psychological stresses can cause physical illness and you know candace purr you talk about in your book i had the chance to meet her who worked for the nih and studied the mind body effect you called the body mind and then the molecules of emotion and you know can you explore a little bit about the science behind how these traumas and these psychological stresses manifest in the body as physical illness so here's the let me let me begin with the frustrating thing so um in 1860s jean-marie charcot the father of modern neurology who first described multiple sclerosis said that it was caused by long-term vexation and grief ah william osler a great physician at johns hopkins one of the founding physicians at johns hopkins he said rheumatoid arthritis was caused by long-term stress he also said that it's more important to know the person who has a disease and the disease the disease itself that's right yeah um an american surgeon called paget um wrote about breast cancer that it allowed to do with depression and so on you know so that uh in 18 in 1938 there was a hungarian american physician at harvard called soma weiss who was so revered that there's still a research day in his honor at harvard to this day and he said in a lecture to the medical school class another hungarian jew another hungarian jew published in uh published in the journal of the american medical association he said that mental and emotional factors are as important in the causation of illness as physiological ones and have to be at least as important in the treatment yeah in 1977 the great american physician and psychiatrist george engel called for a bio-cycle social approach which recognizes that biology is inseparable from our psychological uh dynamics and social relationships so not new so this is nothing new now what is new is that these great pioneers what they recognized uh intuitively now we have proven by means of hard science so in terms of hard science the body and the mind can't be separated that the emotional centers in the brain are connected with the nervous system with the hormonal apparatus with the immune system with the gut and with the heart in other words they're not even connected because even to stay connected creates the impression that separate entities are somehow worthless these are not separate they're the one system yeah one system the justice candy spirit called it the body mind it's one system therefore it just stands to reason that whatever happens emotionally will have its manifestation physiologically and sure enough you know when people get emotionally stressed um that's not just a psychological event their hormonal apparatus goes into gear they secrete stress hormones uh cortisol and adrenaline now here's a interesting little fact when you go to a dermatologist for inflammation of the skin or rheumatologist inflammation of the joints or a neurologist or inflammation of the intestines or respirologists for inflammation of your lungs and i could go on what medicine are you gonna get you're gonna get some analog of cortisol which is the stress hormone now you think as physicians we might ask ourselves gosh we're treating everything with stress hormones could stress has something to do with the onset of these conditions maybe just perhaps yeah and of course the research is indubitable that it that's actually the case yeah and the physiological pathways had to do with these connections that what happens emotionally affects the immune system that what happens or what happens in the immune system can actually affect the emotions yeah so if you get a viral infection that can release hormones from the white blood cells that would make you depressed yeah when i had covet i was so depressed and i'm never really depressed like that and i was like i understand why people want to kill themselves yeah so i knew it was coveted but i was like holy cow yeah so it goes both ways so it's not just the so the physiology so because it's one unit and it's one system it's inevitable that whatever happens emotionally is going to show up physiologically furthermore we know that childhood trauma elevates the circulation of inflammatory particles in uh in the blood cytokines so-called which can turn on cancer genes which can reduce the body's defenses which can support the growth of blood vessels to support tumors so on we know that stress uh even in utero if your mother experiences stress that will show up in your physiology at age 45 by mechanisms i write about in the book but i won't go into now but in other words it's just a this constant dance between our psychological lives and our physiology and it's unscientific to ignore it and um i've only mentioned a few mechanisms then there's the impact of of stress and emotions on the functioning of our genes yeah which is studied by epigenetics um oh one could go just on and on you know microbiome your your bacteria are listening to your immune cells are listening to your thoughts your telomeres your like you said your journey and and one study one study like that was a stress on the mother during pregnancy will interfere with the infant's microbiome yeah you know so it's just so that these dynamics are inseparable and inextricable they're just the unit and once we under this this is this is a scientific fact so when our profession talks about scientific medicine and evidence-based medicine you know you know if there's one phrase i could delete delete from the medical lexicon it would be evidence-based because i only wish that we were evidence-based yeah yeah i think i i often say you know we're reimbursement-based not evidence-based we do what we get paid to do now what the right thing to do is right and i think that's one of the flaws and a lot of the evidence is ignored because it's not large randomized clinical trials which are only one form of evidence and which is one form of evidence and mostly to the benefit of the pharmaceutical exactly and then population studies are another form of evidence but again those don't necessarily prove cause and effect and you know it's another form of evidence i know i'm heretical to say so just listen to people's stories let them tell you about their lives that's evidence exactly it's only not evidence to the people who are terminally cut off from their heart you know well i think i think the advent of um systems biology quantum computing artificial intelligence and quantified self-metrics which are how we measure our own biology are going to revolutionize the way we understand all this because it's not too far in the future that we're going to plant a chip in our skin and come up with everything that's happening in our body and have it read by some super computer and make sense of all these connections and patterns and see how it works but it's so true and i think you know the the the thing that you mentioned that i want to dive a little bit deeper into is this concept of epigenetics and for people listening just a little background you know your genes are fixed you know you can edit them maybe with crispr and these new technologies but basically you've got 20 000 genes you've got a lot of variations in those genes but those genes are regulated by something called the epigenome which sits on top of your genes and those epigenetic marks let's call them like bookmarks in your book of life which is your genome determine which pages get read which genes get read and that determines your health or determines what diseases you're going to get and what's really striking to me and there's some interesting literature around the holocaust which you were in many ways sort of represented of the trauma from that generation is is that that that generational trauma is real it's not just an abstract idea but you know the biblical idea that you know the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons i mean there's actually scientific evidence now that we know how our are imprinting in our grandparents or their grandparents is transmitted generationally through these little tags or bookmarks on our genes that determine what happens to us so can you talk about that and what we know about how that works and what we can do about it can it be can you change those marks so it's a very interesting new field a relatively new field epigenetics did you see on top of jane's um i'm certainly no expert on it but i did interview expert people who are uh moshe siff in montreal and dr rachel yehuda and at mount sinai actually in new york and these people have done elegant research that show exactly what you're talking about that that that experiences in life can change how genes are turned on and off by the environment and those effects can be transmitted into new generations without any change in genetic structure yeah and there's this tremendous um mis belief in the power of genes in the general public and certainly in the medical profession there are very few genetic diseases there's very few genetic diseases that if you have the gene you're going to get a disease one runs in my family muscular dystrophy if you got that gene you're going to have the disease through the generations and that's shown up in every generation of my family [Music] that's very rare it's like one percent one percent maybe or less less right huntington's korea things that it comes to breast cancer for example everybody talks about being genetic no it isn't out of 100 women with breast cancer seven have the gene and our honeymoon with the gene not all of them will get together exactly in other words the genes themselves even in case of breast cancer like angelina jolie very famously yeah and um mastectomies and oophorectomies their ovaries are taken out and she did a made a calculated decision because an aggressive form of of of of that gene runs in her family and so i understand that but that's very rare comparatively comparatively speaking and so most illnesses the genetic effect if any is minimal and not at all decisive and what is decisive is how the environment acts on the genes yeah which is the epigenetics and we believe in genes because it's so convenient first of all it's simple secondly it allows us not to deal with our stuff so that is a society um we have to look at all the ways in which society stresses and oppresses or really pathologizes people or or and venoms makes them sick toxifies them and so on so if it's genetics well i don't have to worry about that yeah if addiction is genetic we don't have to look at the trauma right that so many people suffer and the way in which the system itself traumatizes people you know so genetics kind of takes us off the hook but scientifically it's absolute nonsense yeah and i think the epigenetic conversation is is to me really important because you know just in ways that our genes can be marked for disease they can actually be unmarked that's right that's right and and and and genetics there are geneticists who say that they say that you know genetics may confer certain sensitivities sensitivities on people but after that it's the environment yeah so you can have the same set of genes different experiences and uh have completely different outcomes you can have identical twins who've got the same set of genes with totally different outcomes yeah if you're subjecting to different experiences that's true i mean when they looked at actually eighty-eight thousand twins forty four thousand twin pairs in cancer yeah they found there was only a ten percent correlation i mean ninety percent of cancers in those twins yeah were not genetically related yeah which is kind of a striking thing in twitch and by the way even that ten percent is probably not as much as it looks you know why because they both had similar dramas maybe they spent nine months in the same uterus right so we already know lots of studies have shown that stresses on a woman during pregnancy has an impact on the fetus so you can stress pregnant animals in the laboratory just by exposing say a mother rat to an hour of loud noise once a week in the second trimester yeah their offspring would be more likely to drink alcohol and use cocaine as adults yeah yeah so that even those twin studies they ignore the fact that those twins they might be even if they grew up in different environments they still spend nine months in the same uterus yeah that's so true and i think you know we we uh we had the human genome project which in around 2000 yeah he coded the human genome and it was this great event that yeah was an advance that was promising to end disease bill clinton said something like refining out the language in which god wrote life something like that you know what i found out nothing of the sword well right and and so it's been a massive failure in many ways although it has has led to many discoveries because it ignored the story that hasn't been really told which is of not the genome but the exposo which is what our genes are exposed to whether it's the toxic environment psychologically or whether it's a literal toxic environment pesticides and chemicals or bad diet or stress all these things are the real determinants of health so 90 of chronic diseases are determined by the exposure not the genome that's right well only i would slightly demure from your assertion that was that the epigenome was a massive failure it was a massive success for all the billions of dollars that it generated for all kinds of companies and researchers failure in terms of benefiting human health yes and some of his most favorite advocates have admitted as much yeah they said you know they're ashamed of themselves now but it's not that it's bad too bad to have done that and decoded it but i think it's it's like what what we now need to understand is how those genes are regulated yeah that's right how those genes are expressed and that's what we have really a lot of control over yeah and i and i wonder even some of these psychedelic therapies if they work on some of these pathways and if they work on some of these ways i i i don't understand how for example the iboga works around addiction it just it's such a fascinating yeah i think biological phenomena not just a psychological we don't know the physiology it does something to um there's a psychiatrist in in new york called ken alpert that you might want to talk to about it he's kind of a world expert on iboga and how it works but i don't think anybody really knows fully how any of these things really work on the brand people have theories and we can show on scans how they light up certain parts of the brain but you know what i don't care yeah the reason i don't care it works because it works so um for people listening and i sort of want to look back this before we close you know um i imagine people are paying attention to their own stories their own narratives their own origins their families and sort of their own behaviors addictions mental health challenges and and trying to sort of figure out a map for how do we sort of go forward and you mentioned a lot of the potential therapies but you know i think the the the question for me that i want to keep coming back to with you is how do we really rewire these patterns and is it really possible because you kind of tell the story in your book of coming home from a trip getting the airport expecting your wife's gonna pick you up and for some reason she was busy and you went to this you know kind of tail spin about it totally and we're kind of giving her the cold shoulder for a week no she let me get away with for a day or a day a day and then she said knock it off already but but what happens was that yeah i'm aged at that time 72 i was just young and stupid you're young as stupid as 72. yeah listen i this is a line i use because i'm 7 8 now and thank god for rewiring on neuroplasticity because i would not wish to be as young and stupid as i was when i was 77 you know never mind that to the calo age of 72. but the point is i had a meltdown i became an abandoned infant you know because that's the trigger that's the circuit in my brain stamped with the sense of abandonment that got triggered yes we can rewire um with practice and with attention you can rewire the brain and the last eight chapters of the book is really all about how do we rewire how do we to go back to what you said in the beginning how do we make new meaning and let go of the old meanings that trauma imposed on us so it's entirely possible i proposed some ways in various chapters in the last section of my book and i said earlier there's other modalities as well so yes it can be done and i think that healing capacity really is an inherent quality of human beings yeah which again as physicians were not learning how to line up with and support and and and and enliven um if we did we would be so much more powerful as healers you know so what we can do mechanically is brilliant and it's miraculous i'm i never cease to marvel at what can be done sure you know but at the same time there's so much that we miss yeah and so much more that we could do if we could align with people's natural healing capacities if we're a bit more humble a bit more inclusive open-minded and if we just look at the science yeah yeah and it's true i mean the body has its own innate healing system and capacity that we've really ignored international medicine because we think we're the doctors and we're going to fix people yeah but actually all we need to do is get out of the way and let the body do the healing if very often that's what i have to do now you know look if i broke my fever femur in three places i wouldn't want someone to play just to get out of the way i wanted to get in there and yeah and nail me together you know exactly but but for most chronic conditions of body and the mind what we're saying is absolutely true yeah so just to close uh you know we've been talking a lot about the personal story and the personal journey but but a lot of your book is about the toxic culture we live in yeah and and the the ways in which our policies and our corporations and the structure and our education all perpetuate a world that keeps perpetuating the trauma the last chapter of the book i begin by asking well how do we change this culture that is so determined to even destroy the earth rather than to give up its prerogatives you know which is how it is yeah you know and and we're quite willing to ignore causes of illness that kill millions yeah we we generated a very powerful and very urgent response to the kovid uh situation some people might not agree with someone some of how that went down but there's no question that resources and ingenuity were mobilized to tackle this public health threat but there's ongoing public health threats that kill many or more people annually that have to do with the environment that has to really poor food that has to do with poverty as it would racism has to do with inequality has to do with just the stress on even successful people in this culture that we don't address so when i ask the question how do we address all that my honest answer is i don't know i mean i do have my own political views i do have a vision of a society that's very different than the ones we're living in but what does it look like it's certainly based on our evolutionary needs for communality and connection and cooperation rather than aggression and and competition and rugged individualism um and this belief that we're isolated cells but right now in an immediate sense we could simply listen to the science and infuse some trauma awareness into the medical profession including how doctors are trained not just in what they're taught but how they're treated yeah so that they're not traumatized in doing their training so infusing trauma awareness into the medical profession would go a long way inducing traumas introducing trauma awareness into the legal profession most people in the jails of traumatized the united states is the most richest country in the world it's also the one with the largest percentage of its population in jail disproportionately colored people of color which is just a or can i say it's a reprise of slavery yeah it actually is um most people who are in jail are there because of trauma you you know the predictions of people going to the foster care system ending up in jail or extraordinarily high yeah but what if even if you had to isolate people from society to protect society even if you had to do that what if you did so with compassion with trauma awareness we know the impact of trauma-informed programs in jails they're miraculous huge but they're so rare and so poorly funded and not at all part of the mandate of what we call the correction system and you know i think for a good reason we call it a criminal justice system this is a criminal system right and and it because it hurts the innocent it hurts people that don't deserve to be hurt it hurts people that even if they did bad things they still deserve to be treated by human beings and to be corrected so we've had a real correctional system that would have to be a trauma-informed system the average physician does not get a single lecture on trauma in all the years of training which is incredible but neither does the average lawyer or the average judge or correctional officer or policeman they don't know anything about it which is insane because that's all they do deal with day in day day out exactly the educational profession needs to be trauma-informed because all these kids with learning difficulties and behavior problems and so-called bogus diagnosis like oppositional defined disorder um with diagnosis like adhd they need to be told educators do that we're looking at is kids who are stressed and troubled at home and that's what needs to be dealt with one of the points i make is that in our society we've become alienated from own parenting instincts so we parent our kids under stressful conditions following the wrong advice we could go so far so far in the right direction if you just recognize what the irreducible needs of children are yeah for unconditional loving acceptance for free play in nature for not having to work like you did to make the relationship with your mother work yeah to have rest from that uh for children to be allowed to feel all their emotions not punishing a kid for being angry but by helping them express the anger in a in a in an acceptable way you know just just meeting kids basic needs if parents were just informed if parents were supported in the united states 20 or 25 percent of women had to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth which amounts to an abandonment of the child yeah so a quarter of kids are being abandoned by their mothers not because their mothers don't love them or trying to do their best but because economically they're forced to do so because of lack of child support that's what happened to you in the holocaust your mother had to hide you like christian family because you were jewish but that was special circumstance here in north america now it's normal in america that's a common circumstance um so there's so much you know childbearing so much in our education in our healthcare in our legal system we could do if we just embrace the evidence that we already have so we're not talking about miracles here we're talking about what's known what's possible what's available and what would cost a lot less you know so then the economic costs of ignoring human needs and it's it you know you mentioned the economics of it but it's staggering uh the economic impact of this in terms of the cost of society in fact uh there was a an economic analysis of the impact of chronic disease over the next 35 years and its economic impact it was going to cost 95 trillion dollars which is you know considering our gdp is about you know 20 trillion it's that's a lot of money and and healthcare is you know is a huge part of that and the majority of that believe it or not was depression was the what they call the loss of quality of life years yeah the quality adjusted life years lost right or the the lack of productivity or effectiveness as a citizen or as a member of society because you're depressed that's just a staggering amount and that again all that arises from exactly what we've been talking about on the podcast and you know you know i think as you've been talking it's really clear to me we need to sort of reimagine society in a way that brings connection not separation in a way that creates safety around these conversations in a way that reimagines education reimagines social discourse reimagines our policies to support these reimagines our criminal justice system our medical system really every area has to actually be trauma informed trauma conscious as you talked about it and your work is so important gabor and i thank god you know your mom saved you because this maybe it's uh you know i don't know how many years later 70 something years later yeah but we we uh we're i think now ready as a society for this conversation if i just made a big comment about the story of my mother because it it it speaks to the theme of healing um so yes i arrive at the airport and my wife is not there to pick me up and my abandonment trauma gets triggered but you know as in one year old i could not interpret my mother give me to a stranger to save my life is anything other than abandonment but you know what once i heal i realize what it was a great act of love can you imagine for 24 year old young mom whose parents had been killed in our church her husband was dead or alive she didn't know than to give their baby to a stranger and what an act of love it was for that strange christian woman to take this little jewish baby and take him to safety you know so that what all my life i had emotionally interpreted as abandonment actually was a tremendous act of love and i think this is where the healing and the wiring yeah rewiring that we've been talking about can actually take place it's it's not just the event it's the meaning that we give them yeah and uh when it comes to healing we can create our own meanings going forward if you loved that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here i don't want to be unhappy i don't want to be angry i don't want to talk trash about t people i don't want to complain i want to blame i don't want to make excuses i don't want to feel lack i don't want to have an attitude that's telling me i can it's too hard that's the

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

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Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: 2MjONzZs1wo

Length: 91min 36sec (5496 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022