Episode 198: Gabor Maté - Renowned Addiction Expert, Bestselling Author, and Speaker

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Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits and Hustle, Gresham.

Today on the podcast, we have Gabor Mate, who is a multi-best-selling author and a world-leading expert on trauma and how it affects us throughout our whole lives.

He's also a Holocaust survivor and a first-generation immigrant.

So, Gabor's knowledge and wisdom on the scars trauma leaves behind is deep and drawn from his personal experience.

In our conversation, we explore so many things that are burning questions I'm sure you have about trauma.

We cover ADHD, why authenticity is so important.

How do we find our self-worth?

We talk all about becoming more aware and what actually is the definition of trauma.

His new book is called The Myth of Normal, and it's one phenomenal read.

I really resonated with the book, and I really highly suggest you guys read it.

I think you're really going to get a lot out of today's podcast and conversation.

So leave me a comment.

Let me know what you think, how it helped you.

Here we go.

Enjoy.

You know what I remember from the beginning of the book or like around the beginning of the book that like just kind of started off on a great, on a great path for me?

You talked about, you had this analogy about these fishes, like two small fish and one big fish, right?

Water.

And the water.

Well, the water.

Okay, so you know what?

Let's pretend we're like, you know, We were, I was going to, I'm going to do a whole other intro, but since we're like talking, just start it because I loved that analogy.

And I think it's a really great way to start this podcast.

So can you tell everyone what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

So the great American writer, David Foster Wallace,

gave a

commencement address to the university once.

And he gave this anecdote of two young fish swimming along.

And this older fish accosts them and says to them, hey, good morning, boys.

How's the water?

And the two young fish swim on for a while, and then one of them turns to the other one and says, What the hell is water?

And Foster Wallace was making the point that something that's in front of us and so big that we're so used to it, we don't even distinguish it.

But he says, Not seeing what's in front of us can have fatal consequences.

And that's what I'm saying about the culture.

This culture what I call a toxic culture in the subtitle of the book, we swim in it, we think it's normal, we're used to it, so we accept it, And we don't realize just how fatal it is to our physical and mental health.

So hence that analogy.

And so

the title of the book, The Myth of Normal, is exactly in line with that anecdote, is that what we're used to and we accept as average and just as inevitable is actually

as normal, is actually...

from the point of view of our needs and our desires and our true selves, unhealthy for us.

So that's that, hence the anecdote.

I love that.

So I wanted to say something about that actually, because you said this.

So

the myth of normal.

Normal, what is considered to be quote-unquote normal

in today's world is very much admired.

Those traits are very admirable strengths that we all, people think, like

you were asking me earlier a little bit, like, what is who listens to this podcast?

You know, like, you know, and i was explaining it's like people who are overachievers people who like who strive and go and go and work a lot and work a lot and the reality is like that's kind of counterintuitive to you you know what you talk about um in the book as what's really good for someone's health and their well-being right so

um can you just expand on all of that a little bit Well, look, so if I can get personal here for a moment, I used to be a workaholic.

I used to be a workaholic doctor.

I just couldn't say no.

And it doesn't matter how many patients I had, how many babies I was due to deliver, I would always

expect somebody else.

As a result, I was much admired and well paid.

But personally, I got stressed.

And I needn't tell you, my family life suffered, my marriage was in conflict.

My wife felt abandoned all the time.

And my children were strangers to me.

I was a strange to them.

So while it was normal that I was working so hard, especially in the doctor, and not only normal, but even considered laudable and admirable, the impacts were very unhealthy for my personal life and for my emotional and mental health.

So, that which is considered normal in this society is often actually toxic to people.

And I know a lot of, I've met a lot of entrepreneurs.

I was recently with my friend Joe Paulish at a conference called the Genius Network that he runs for entrepreneurs.

And a lot of these characters are very successful, very creative, very original, intuitive thinkers, but they drive themselves so hard

in order to succeed, in order to be accepted, in order to make a name for themselves, they pay a significant cost.

And therapists that I know who work with such people tell me that for all the external success, there's a lot of internal emotional agony, depression, sometimes addiction, relationship problems, and so on.

And yet out there in the world, they're seen as very successful and even admirable.

And so, while on the one hand, we want to express ourselves, we want to

follow our passions, and we want to create something that's original to us

and give it to the world,

at the same time, we forget to ask ourselves, what is the cost?

And in this society, what we get praised for and admired for very often is toxic to our health.

And you look at some very successful people.

I mean, you're in LA.

If you look at the successful people in the entertainment world, just how miserable their personal lives very often are.

You know, because they get wanted and admired for the wrong reasons.

And

they drive themselves to the wrong reasons.

I think that's very common in the world of entrepreneurs as well.

That's what I've heard anyway, and I've witnessed it personally.

So the question is: can we balance our personal passions and creativity creativity and

just

entrepreneurial spirit with

who we are, who we authentically are as individuals and what our personal needs are?

So that's the big dilemma for a lot of people in this society.

So what is the,

like, so I've got a bunch of, I've got lots of questions, but

what then becomes the alternative, right?

Because it becomes very much like a rat race, right?

Like you get stuck on a hamster wheel.

And, right.

And like you said, to your point, you get

a lot of external rewards for that behavior, right?

And so it perpetuates this behavior, even though inside, internally, you're miserable,

you feel vapid, your relationships are all in distress.

You know, what like, what would you say?

How do people find balance in this world, you know, in this environment?

Especially when you're on like a path and momentum.

Life is really about momentum, right?

Like

I can give you a theoretical answer or a practical one.

The practical one is if I'm an example and a lot of other people are, we suffer.

And at some point, we start asking ourselves, well, why am I suffering?

You know, here I've got all my goals either achieved or on the way of being achieved, and yet I'm not happy.

In fact, on the contrary.

So usually, people are shocked into reality by some degree of suffering that the gap between their authentic selves and how they are in the world presents with them.

Because when we disconnect from our authentic selves, which is, by the way, the essence of my definition of trauma, and this happens fairly early in life for no fault of our own, but we end up

disconnected from our authentic selves, then our actions become beginning, are not driven not by who we are, but by our need to be accepted by the external world.

And that will impose some suffering.

And

so when you say how, well, the first question is, do we recognize that we're suffering?

And are we curious about the source of our suffering?

Because if we get the source of our suffering,

we'll find ourselves on a pathway towards healing.

But if we as long as we just just keep running on that wheel that you mentioned,

we're stuck.

Right.

And then how, so what do you

when people are feeling stuck and not not they are stuck, when people feel stuck and not sure how to

do what to do about it, what to do next,

what are some key things that they can do?

Like, what do you recommend they do to get unstuck?

Well,

being an entrepreneur myself, I suggest I read my book.

Well, of course.

I mean, that's obvious, right?

In that book, one of the things I recommend is something very simple.

Ask yourself once a week, where am I not saying no?

And by that, I mean, what is a no that wants to be said, but you're not saying.

And that usually shows up in two areas, in work and in personal relationships.

So let's say i was in uh

los angeles

and

i phoned you up and i said hey do you want to go for a walk

you didn't feel like it because you were tired or you just needed to spend some time on your own

um

but you don't so there's a no that wants to be said But you don't say it because you're afraid of displeasing me or you feel responsible for my feelings.

So you say yes.

So we go for this walk.

Well, what is the impact?

The impact is you're going to be tired and you might even be resentful and you might even be a bit ashamed of yourself for not having had the strength to say yes.

So, or in work,

let's say there's another project you want to take on or somebody wants to impose on you.

And you're tired and you haven't seen your children enough.

You haven't spent enough time with with your friends or your spouse or you haven't spent enough time looking after your body, whether in exercise or meditation or eating healthy or whatever.

But you don't say no because success is more important to you.

So write down.

Where this week did I not say no, but there's a no that wanted to be said.

And second, and this is an exercise.

from the book and the second is what was the impact on me of not saying no well the impact's is going to be I'm going to be tired, I'm going to be resentful, I'll lose sleep, I'll be anxious, I'll be out of shape,

my relationship will suffer.

That's a huge price to pay for that little word that you didn't say, those two letters, no.

The third question then is,

what belief, what story kept me from saying no when it wanted to be said?

Oh,

because success is more important than my health.

Success is more important than my children's well-being.

If I say no, I'll disappoint other people.

If I'll say no, they think I'm a weakling.

Write it down.

What's the story?

Number five, where did you learn this story?

Where did you develop these beliefs?

Well, this goes back to childhood trauma in every case.

And so,

I could go on with these questions, but the point is, you conduct what I call a compassionate inquiry with yourself about why am I behaving the way, and you know the way I'm behaving

and and and then if you do this regularly what you'll find is you'll start having a choice in the matter the behavior won't be so automatic and so compulsive anymore and finally

I mean I can ask you this I don't know if it means anything to you at this moment but at some point it probably did if I said well

where in your life have you not said yes where there's a yes that wanted to be said but you kept yourself too busy and too preoccupied.

So you didn't say yes to some creative.

Okay, what's the cost of that, of not saying yes?

What is the cost of that?

Get exasperated.

No, it's 100%.

What the cost is, is, I believe, living a very myopic, limited life in one area only because you're afraid that if you take this, do that, it will take you off track of this.

pseudo-life.

But you were saying something about compassion and inquiry.

So what would you say the definition of that would be?

Well, compassion means that you're not judging somebody, including yourself,

but you're just interested in their reality.

But you're not going to make them wrong for it.

So, if you made the choice that didn't work for you, rather than beating yourself up for it, you'd be curious and compassionate about, well, why did I make that choice?

You know, not why did I make that choice, but hmm, I wonder why I made that choice, you know.

And like, if I said to you, for example,

why did you do this?

What state am I putting you into right away?

Defensiveness.

Exactly.

Anxiety.

Exactly.

But if I said to you, hmm, I'm curious why you did this.

So

when you approach yourself with judgment and blame, lack of compassion, in other words, you're going to put yourself into a defensive mode.

But when you approach yourself or anybody else with what I call compassionate curiosity, you're much more likely to arrive at the truth.

Then, you know, if I say, why did you, you know, I wonder why you did this, then you might say, hmm, I wonder why did I do that?

Well, let's look at it.

You know, so

the very tone of the question, whether it's judgmental or compassionate, will elicit a completely different response.

The one will guide you to the truth, the other will lead you to deny the truth.

That's just how it works.

I agree.

I want to talk about you, actually.

You're fascinating to me because you

I'm fascinating to myself as well.

So let's do that for sure.

Good.

Because you are by,

I guess, by education, whatever.

You're a general practitioner.

You're an MD, right?

And you've worked with, like you said, delivering babies to working with people who are, you know, on their deathbed, the elderly.

How did you get into this space of a lot of this feels like a lot of like psychology,

a lot of it was like very psychological, right?

You don't have, you're not a psychiatrist, right?

So how did this kind of like,

yeah, I know, right?

But how did you kind of, like, what's your, what's your evolution?

Like, how did this become what you've become known for when you started over here as a GP?

And now you're writing books that are all super

psychologically based that have such impact.

Well, I'll answer your question, but can I try a bit of an experiment with you?

Sure.

Just to illustrate what I want to talk about, if I screamed at you right now, what would be your emotions?

I would feel

upset and jarred and

uncomfortable.

And maybe angry.

And sad.

And angry, maybe.

And angry.

Yeah.

I would be more shocked because I don't know you that well.

Yeah, fair enough.

Shocked is a a good response.

Would those emotions only be sort of abstract concepts in your head or would they exist in your body at the same time?

In my body.

What would your body be like in that situation, do you imagine?

I think

I would feel uncomfortable, like discomfort.

Yeah.

In your chest, in your belly, what might there be there?

Like empty, I would feel badly, like I'd feel like discomfort of some kind.

Fair enough.

There'd be tension there, there'd be discomfort, and so on, right?

Right.

What I'm saying is that you can't separate emotions from the body.

Emotions exist in the body.

So when you say to me, how did I get from being a medical doctor to psychology?

You can't separate people's psychology from their physical health.

The mind and the body are one unit.

So therefore,

unfortunately, most physicians are only trained to look at the biology of the body.

They don't understand the simple scientific fact because they're not taught it that people's physiology reflects their emotions.

And sometimes people's emotions reflect their physiology.

For example, if you get a virus and you're ill with it, you might feel very depressed.

So there's no separation of mind and body.

And so when I was in family practice, I began to notice that people who got sick with chronic illness or people I was looking after in palliative care who were dying with chronic disease before their time, they had certain emotional patterns.

And those emotions affect their physiology because as a great American doctor said in 1977,

that human beings are biopsychosocial creatures, which means that their biology is inseparable from their psychology, excuse me, and therefore their social relationships.

So in this

hypothetical example, when I asked you, if I screamed at you, what was going on?

You were experiencing an emotion because you're in a relationship with me right now.

I mean,

in the fact that we're conversing with each other and we are intent on delivering some useful information to your listeners, so there's a kind of an alliance here, you know.

We're both Canadian, and we're both Canadian and

Jewish, and we're both looking, you know,

I keep going on.

Exactly.

There's so much, there are so many similarities.

Yeah.

So we're in a relationship, and therefore, how I speak to you affects your emotions, and that immediately affects your physiology.

So that all this stuff is one.

So if you actually understand health from a scientific point of view, you can't separate the mind from the body and the individual from the environment.

Therefore.

When I see people with chronic illness like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue,

endometriosis, autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or depression or anxiety or ADHD, I immediately have to say, well, what happened to them in life that created those processes that these diagnoses represent?

So it was a very simple step from getting to know my patients and then seeing what conditions they developed to realize that you can't separate the mind from the body and the individual from the environment.

Now, what I didn't know, and this is what's so frustrating, is that there's decades, multiple decades of, in fact, hundreds of years of scientific insight and

modern scientific research that shows the unity of mind and body, that shows the relationship of personality factors to illness, that shows the relationship of childhood trauma to adult illness of mind and body.

I mean, for example, a British psychologist, member of the British Academy, said a few years ago, very accurately, he said, that the relationship between childhood adversity, trauma, and adult mental health conditions is as well demonstrated scientifically as the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Now, I couldn't help notice those links in family practice.

I just didn't know about the scientific research that supported my observations until I found out.

Most physicians still don't know.

So if you go to a physician with depression, most of the time all that's going to happen is they're going to give you a pill,

which may or may not be helpful.

They can be sometimes helpful, but they're rarely going to ask you about what happened to you in childhood.

So take something like depression.

I mean, it's just so obvious.

What does it mean to depress something?

It means to push it down.

What gets pushed down in depression?

Your emotions.

So you're flattened.

In medicine, we talk about the flat affect, the flat emotional demeanor of the depressed person.

Why did somebody push down their emotions?

Because in childhood, their environment forced them to.

We're talking about trauma.

And so that the link between trauma and mental health conditions is scientifically clear.

That affects not just your emotions, but also the physiology of your brain.

But the average physician will only give you a pill.

They'll never talk to you about your life.

Same with multiple sclerosis.

Same with rheumatoid arthritis.

There's all kinds of scientific evidence, both historically and physiologically linking trauma and stress to the onset and flare-ups of those conditions.

But the average doctor doesn't know that because they don't study in medical schools, which is amazing given all the science that's behind what I'm talking about.

So

that's a long answer to your question, but I began to notice these links and once I did, I had to research them.

And that's the first point.

The second point is, as I aluded to earlier, I had my own stuff.

I had my own depression, I had my own ADHD, and I had to get curious about where that came from.

And that led me to therapy.

And the more I learned about myself, the more I recognized about my patients as well.

So, I mean, so there's a bunch of things here.

The first thing is you talk about the link between trauma and chronic illness.

And if I were, can you tell by the type of trauma you talk about, a small T, big T trauma?

I guess let's start with how do you define trauma?

And then what I'd like to understand, because I think this is what I think is super fascinating, is that what type of diseases happen to certain people is not accidental.

So

if I were to say to you, this is the type of trauma that, you know, Jane got or John got, would you be able to see how it manifest?

Would you be able to know how it would manifest itself later on based on the type of trauma they had?

No, I couldn't, not necessarily.

There are some people who claim they can do that, medical medical intuitives, like Louise Hay, for example.

I can't.

What I can tell you, but I don't need to, actually.

Because,

for example, I worked with a highly addicted population here in Vancouver.

If you've been to Vancouver and the downtown east side, North America's most egregiously drug-ridden area, and it's shocking what you see in the streets there, people with drug addictions of all kinds, HIV, hepatitis C, often homeless, and so on.

It's a terrible situation.

um

it's like skid row basically in los angeles yeah

and

in my 12 years of work in that area i didn't meet a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child

and all the men had been severely traumatized and their addictions are a response to their traumas and I can talk about how that works.

But the point is,

all addicted people were traumatized.

But that doesn't mean that all traumatized people become addicted, because trauma can show up also in the form of physical illness or mental illness or success.

You could be the head of a corporation and be one of these really controlling, almost sociopathic individuals that people are afraid of, and you're making a whole bunch of money and you're miserable inside.

You know, so

I can look at all these people and know that they're re-traumatized, but I can't predict on which kind of trauma will lead to what kind of...

All I can say is the more trauma, the worse the outcomes are going to be now what I can tell you and women specifically that

irritable bowel syndrome is always tied to childhood trauma of some kind pelvic diseases endometriosis the more sexually abused there were the more likely you are to have endometriosis a study out of Harvard University four years ago showed that women with severe PTSD have double the risk of ovarian cancer.

So

I can show the links between personality patterns and adult illnesses and childhood trauma and adult illnesses, but I can't tell you for the most part which specific trauma will lead to which specific illness, but then I don't need to.

Because if somebody comes to me with multiple sclerosis or whatever they threaten is depression, anxiety, ADHD, or addiction,

I can talk to them.

And I can say, well, what happened to you?

And what's the trauma that you're carrying?

And how do we heal that?

So I don't need to have the specifics of does this trauma lead to that and so on.

That's not so important as knowing that it's all trauma-based.

And the healing of all those conditions must involve the healing of the trauma.

So what's interesting, though, to me is to that same point, you can have somebody who's been sexually abused, and I see it all, I see it.

And you can have someone who goes down the path of being a drug addict and maybe

living in, you know, living on skid row because mentally they couldn't cope or they repressed it.

And

then that same person could become a major CEO, founder of a major company, and have

like what's out on the outside, true success.

They like channel it, they channel their pain as fuel and just charge ahead, right?

Yeah.

Well, partly that is is that?

Well, partly that depends on social circumstance.

You know, like if you're an indigenous, like in Canada, 50% of the women that we have in our jails are indigenous.

Why?

Because they're the most traumatized segment of the population.

An indigenous woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid artisan than that of somebody else.

Why women and why indigenous?

Because of the stresses that are laid upon

those two groups.

And if you have even intersectionality, if you're both indigenous and a woman, your risk of rheumatoid threat has become six times greater.

Now, so partly it has to do with race, partly it has to do with class, economic conditions, and partly it has to do with circumstance.

There's some very famous people I talk about in my book.

who are at the very top of the American political ladder.

And I talk about two people, and this is where people get triggered.

They think I'm attacking people.

I'm not attacking anybody.

But if you read

the biography of

Donald Trump, any of his biographies, or his autobiography, well, his biographies, or the work, or the book written by his niece, Mary Trump, who's a psychologist, about the family history.

That's a very traumatized family.

Now, in saying so, I'm not talking about his politics, policies, or his foreign policy, or domestic policy.

You can agree with them all you want.

But I'm telling you, he's a traumatized person and that trauma shows up in his demeanor.

His opponent was also traumatized.

Hillary was a traumatized child.

And I talk about her trauma,

which is not even a secret, except nobody recognizes it as trauma.

You know, the time she ran into her mother's home looking for protection from neighborhood bullies and she was told, get out of here.

There's no cards in this house.

She was four years old.

The message was, you suck it up.

Six days later, she's running for the presidency.

She has pneumonia.

What does she do with it?

She didn't tell anybody.

She sucked it up until she collapsed in the street with dehydration and fever.

And her father used to beat the heck out of her.

You know, and this is talked about publicly as a wonderful way of parenting.

telling a kid to be resilient.

Actually, a four-year-old looking for the mother's protection is just being a healthy child.

You tell a mother mother gorilla or a mother dog to ignore the distress and fear of her child.

You'll find out what mother age is all about.

But in this society, trauma is so normalized.

So I'm not talking about the policies of Hillary versus the policies of Donald.

I'm just talking about they were both traumatized people, and you can tell their traumas by how they behave and how they carry themselves and their emotional responses to things.

That's all I'm saying.

And trauma is so ubiquitous.

And so,

it's like the water that we swim in, to go back to your initial question.

So, that Hillary story of a four-year-old

was told on public television in front of millions of people, and nobody noticed that what was being celebrated was the trauma of a four-year-old child.

No, I think that's so valid, and I understand that.

I feel that, though, the word trauma,

is it overused?

Because, well, isn't everybody traumatized to some level?

Like nobody,

I mean,

I mean, what is a small T trauma and what's a big T trauma?

Let's, let's define that.

Okay.

To begin with, you're right.

The word is overused.

It's trivialized.

Because it's used to refer to things that it doesn't apply to.

Somebody will say, I went to this movie last night and it was traumatic.

No, it wasn't.

It was just upsetting.

Or

my picnic got rained out.

You know, I was there in the picnic and enjoying my sandwich and all of a sudden it started to rain.

I was traumatized.

No, you weren't.

You were just disappointed.

Or I had a terrible date last night.

It was traumatic.

No, it wasn't.

It was just boring.

So

not every upset is traumatic.

Not every upset is traumatic.

But every trauma is upsetting.

So on the one hand, the word is used too promiscuously, too loosely.

But on the other hand, where it matters, it's not used enough because the average medical student, despite everything I've said about the relationship of trauma and adult physical and mental illness and addiction, doesn't get a single lecture on trauma and its adult outcomes.

They don't.

They don't even hear about it.

It's unbelievable what they don't.

The average lawyer doesn't hear about it, despite the fact that most of the people in jail are traumatized people.

The average

teacher doesn't hear about it, despite all the facts that the kids with

so-called bad behaviors acting out are all traumatized kids.

So on the one hand we use it too loosely.

On the other hand we don't use it nearly enough where it matters.

So what is trauma?

It comes from a Greek word for wounding or a wound.

A trauma is a psychological wound that you endure in childhood that has ongoing effects because it's imprinted in your physiology, in your brain, in your nervous system, in your conscious and especially unconscious memories.

And, you know, I gave the example in the first chapter of my book of what happens to me as a successful, respected physician and author in my 70s when I come home to Vancouver from a speaking trip and my wife dares not be there at the airport to pick me up.

And I go into a rage and I withdraw emotionally, which is an imprint of what I did as a one-year-old, but my mother separated from me for six weeks to save my life.

And when I saw her again, I withdrew in a sullen rage and I wouldn't even look at her for several days.

And so these traumas get imprinted in our nervous system.

And as long as we don't resolve them and heal them, they keep controlling our behaviors.

And very often, human beings in this culture or any culture are like puppets on a string.

And those strings are pulled by the unconscious.

We think we're free, but actually

We are still controlled by unconscious dynamics that we're not even aware of.

And that's why we get into trouble.

We think we're free.

We're making conscious choices.

You know, I made a conscious choice to take on, you know,

I already had 10 women pregnant to deliver in a particular month, but I made this choice to take on five more,

which meant that I didn't sleep for half the month because these deliveries took all night very often.

Now, why did I make that choice?

Because as an infant, I got the message that I wasn't wanted.

My mother gave me to a stranger to save my life.

The message I got was, the message that I downloaded, was that I wasn't wanted.

Now, if you're not wanted,

become a successful businessman or go to medical school, they're going to want you all the time

for your expertise, your services, your money, your ideas.

But it's addictive because you can never get enough.

Because you can never prove to yourself that you're lovable if fundamentally you don't believe that you are.

So

that trauma shows up in how I behave and then that has an impact on me and my family and I pass it on to my kids.

And so trauma is this wound that you don't realize it, but it's these traumatic imprints are pulling the strings like you're a puppet

until you

cut the strings.

So before you tell me what the small T, big T is, to what you just said then,

you had to have enough self-awareness to know that it was because of what happened to you when you were one years old, the feeling of being not good enough, abandonment, that that's what's triggering you with your wife not picking you up at the airport, right?

Like to make that connection, connecting point, you have to have the ability to put two and two together, right?

Where do people, I mean, and you're obviously very intelligent and you're emotionally intelligent, so you can do that.

When there's so many people running around doing all these like aberrant behaviors and unhappy,

what do they do if

they don't have that self-awareness, right?

Like, like you said,

you need to have

that first thing to even get, to fix it,

to heal.

Well, but that's just the whole point.

Despite the fact that I was this...

successful physician and I'd already published four books published you know all over the world and I had all this insight at the moment of upset all that fled and

the front part of my brain, I'm pointing at it, the mid-frontal cortex, well, self-regulation and insight

is modulated, went offline.

And in the traumatic moment, all that arises are the emotional circuitry imprinted with the original wound.

And so, despite all that work, this wasn't that many years ago.

I was still capable of being triggered like that.

So here's the thing.

Now, what is true is I was able to give it up much quicker.

So after 24 hours of the silent, sullen treatment, my wife said, knock it off already.

And I was able to knock it off.

Years ago, it might have been taken me days or longer.

So it's a slow progress.

You know, it's a slow process sometimes.

But how do you start it?

Well,

in the middle of the upset, you're just stupid, you know.

in the sense that your

thinking and adult circuits are like offline and the emotional circuits stamped with those traumatic imprints take over.

But now the question is what are you going to do with it?

Are you going to then continue to blame the outside world or your partner or your friend or whoever triggered you?

Look at this whole triggering.

It's an interesting word.

Trigger.

How big part of a weapon is a trigger?

It's a small, tiny little thing.

For the trigger to set anything off, there has to be ammunition there and explosive charge so when i get triggered once i've calmed down

i can ask myself not just you triggered me it's your fault i can ask myself what was the emotional charge that i was carrying what was set off in me so you have to have some curiosity

so in the beginning you will not have the self-regulation you're gonna have to forgive yourself for that and get go back to being curious, you know.

But

once we start the quest, once we start asking ourselves in these moments of upset, so if I can't say no, if I already have 15 projects and somebody suggests 16 and I can't say no because it's so exciting for me and it makes me feel wanted and it makes me feel like I'm respected and I can't say no.

So I take on the 16th project, which may be the

straw that breaks the camel's back.

Then I get depressed and fatigued and burnt out.

If I can ask myself, well, why couldn't I say no?

So you've got to begin somewhere.

And so you have to begin with that curiosity.

It's not, you know, and, you know, then you get counseling, you do meditation, you start looking after your body and all that kind of thing.

But it's got to start somewhere.

So you've got to start with the recognition that what I'm doing right now

It's not working or it's working in ways that I don't want it to.

You've got to start with that

Okay.

And then

from there, I mean, you said yourself, like you were a workaholic and this and that.

Then what happens to you now?

Like you said, you're in your 70s and it's still a process.

But how did you,

I guess, overcome it?

Well, I mean, meditation,

it's a nice thing, but meditation isn't really enough, in my opinion.

Maybe it was for you.

Maybe I'm wrong, but.

No, no, it was never for me.

And, you know, I have one of these ADHD brains, so meditation is sheer torture for me.

Torture for me, too.

For ADHD people, meditation is torture.

Believe me.

Yoga is also torture for us.

Yeah, I joined the club.

I learned

transcendental meditation, so they give you a mantra.

I can sit there for two minutes reciting the mantra and my mind is not even there.

You know?

Exactly.

So

you're thinking about a million things while you're just saying it over and over again.

Exactly.

And in one of my books, I said that I have a profound relationship with meditation.

I think about it every day, you know?

So

I don't hold out meditation as some kind of a panacea.

Not for me.

It's helped a lot of people, of course.

Not me or you.

I have a friend of mine.

I think he's from another planet.

He meditates two hours a day.

If I do five minutes, I'm totally proud of myself.

Well, for me, it took a lot of psychological work and self-work, self-awareness, insight, counseling, sometimes psychedelic work.

It also took a lot of struggle in a very positive sense in my marriage relationship where a lot of my issues got triggered.

And my partners, of course, and her and I, we've had to work a lot.

And so

I think life provides you the...

template wherever in your life you're having issues where you think that it's getting away for you somehow away from you somehow, you need to look at your relationship to it.

Whether that's a relationship, whether that's your work or whatever.

So you've got to start with recognizing that something in you is impelling you to make the wrong choices.

And through therapy,

through quieting your mind, through music or nature or sports.

through working on your relationships or your lack of relationships, that's how it is for you.

You'll get there.

But you got to start with the recognition that

this life of mine is not the life that I would like to envision for myself.

I know that your next book is, you know, you talked a bit about that and about how, you know, how to get what you want.

But as we also discussed, the issue is not just what you want, but which part of you wants it.

You know, if it's the desperate, addicted, traumatized part of you want it, even if you get it, it's going to make you more unhappy.

You know,

On the other hand, if it's the authentic part of you that wants it,

then the work towards getting what you want and expressing your passion and your calling, that's going to make you that much more happy.

So we have to look at ourselves.

I mean, I really want to talk to you about this authenticity versus,

was it authenticity versus in your book?

Attachment.

Attachment.

Attachment, right.

And when they're like, when they're against each other or they're pitted against each other.

Which they shouldn't be,

but they are.

They are, right?

Can you just talk a little bit about that?

And then from there,

you just said something about psychedelics as maybe like a healing mechanism,

which I want to touch upon that after.

The whole authenticity, yeah, you said they shouldn't be the authenticity versus the attachment.

Can you just talk about what you talk about in that way?

Because I found that very interesting as well.

Sure.

So that

birds and mammals, including human beings, have not a desperate, but an essential need to be attached to.

And attachment means

to be in close proximity, emotional and physical proximity, with a nurturing adult who will look after you and protect you and nourish you physically and emotionally.

This is true for mammals, including human beings.

So that's the attachment relationship, which is the the attachment is just the drive for closeness and proximity to another being for the sake of being taken care of or for the sake of taking care of the other.

So parents have an attachment drive towards their children.

As long as they're healthy,

they'll be attached to your, they'll be in love with their babies, basically.

And that's a good thing because

literally parents have to put up with a lot of shit so that, you know, if there wasn't that attachment drive,

if it wasn't for that attachment drive, parenting would be very difficult.

It's still difficult.

Yeah, but it would also be onerous and unpleasant, you know, which it doesn't need to be.

You know, it's more difficult in this society than it needs to be, which is a whole other subject.

But parenting wasn't designed by nature to be onerous.

It was designed to be a natural process.

So parents and children have this attachment drive.

And the child can't survive without it, obviously, because the human infant is the most vulnerable, helpless, and immature creature of all mammals.

A horse can run on the first day of life.

A human infant can't do that for a year and a half.

So our brain development is far behind that of other mammals.

At birth, we have to attach.

So does the horse have to attach to survive.

So that's the attachment drive.

Then we have another need, which is what I call authenticity.

And that comes from the word auto, the self.

So authenticity means to be in touch with their emotions.

Children have an essential need to be able to experience all their emotions and to have that received and accepted by the parents for them to develop in a healthy way.

That's just a non-negotiable need of the child.

Why?

Because where did we evolve?

Until very recently, until like a few minutes ago, if human existence, the existence of our species can be expressed in an hour, until five minutes ago, we lived out there in nature.

Now how long does any creature in nature survive if they're not in touch with their gut feelings?

Not very long.

So being in touch with ourselves is an essential thing for survival as well.

So we have the need for

attachment and we have the need for authenticity.

Terrific.

But what happens if you're a mom or a dad

and your two-year-old gets angry?

And you've read the books of one of these stupid psychologists who tell you that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves till they come back to normal.

Like it's not normal in a two-year-old to be angry.

What message does the child get?

That their emotions are not acceptable.

And that if they want to be acceptable to their parents, they have to give up their authentic feelings.

So they have to choose the attachment or authenticity.

Now, even worse, a child who's abused, which happens all too often in society, or a parent whose child is addicted and not available, or

just stressed and upset a lot of the time, that child will have anger, that child will have fear, that child will have

upset.

But if that's not acceptable to the parent,

The child has a decision to make.

Not on a conscious level, but the organism is a decision to make.

Am I authentic?

Am I going to express my feelings and act on them?

Or am I going to repress them, push them down for the sake of the attachment relationship?

Well, guess what gets sacrificed every time?

We sacrifice our authenticity for the sake of the attachment, and for the rest of our lives, until we figure this one out, we keep trying to fit in with other people's expectations, impress other people, make ourselves attractive to other people, impress other people, please other people, propitiate other people

for the sake of being accepted, all the while giving up our authentic feelings, our authentic thoughts, our authentic being.

So, this choice, now that has all kinds of implications, as I argue in this book,

it promotes physical illness, it promotes mental illness, it promotes alienation.

Ultimately, it's the source of addictions.

And

so, the price is huge.

But we didn't have a choice in the matter.

So

the question for adults is, once they realize this pattern,

what am I going to choose now?

You know, there was a study out of

the States

in the last 15 years, sometime.

They looked at 2,000 women over a 10-year period.

Those women who were unhappily married and didn't talk about their feelings, in other words, they were not authentic.

They were four times as likely to die as those women who were unhappily married, but they did express their feelings.

So this separation from, yeah, so from the separation from authenticity carries a huge physiological cost.

And if you ask why is it that women get 70, 80% of autoimmune diseases, you know why?

Because which is the gender that's programmed by this culture to propitiate, to make peace, to repress their healthy anger, to please the other, to take care of everybody else's else's needs ahead of their own.

That's why they get more autoimmune disease.

And everybody with autoimmune disease, male or female, has got those characteristics.

But women are, in this culture, are more likely to be acculturated that way.

You know?

That's so interesting.

The separation from authenticity for the sake of attachment

exacts a huge price.

in terms of health.

But what happens when they are, like I said, pitted against each other because you're then, you know, I guess it's back to the hamster wheel, right?

Or circumstance, right?

You're living your life and you have to do things because either you have kids and therefore, I'm just going with the marriage thing because you're talking about it.

So you repress feelings of unhappiness because you have kids, you got this, you got to do this.

So everything that becomes your needs gets put to the back burner, right?

For more like for circumstances more than anything, right?

What's your advice?

It's not just what you do.

It's not just circumstances.

It's not just circumstances.

It's your interpretation of your circumstances.

Like, for example,

one of my children said to me once when they were fairly small, less than 10 years old,

they said, Dad, I wish you and mom would get a divorce.

And I said, why do you say that?

And they said,

I don't know, but I think my life would be better.

And

my wife and I have discussed this.

Had she been authentic, had she been in full touch with her own needs, for the sake of the children, she would have left me because the way I was

imposed so much stress.

Not that she didn't bring her own share of issues to our relationship, but I was the one that was

the emotionally absent, workaholic, and often

raged

father

and husband.

What would have been right for her was not to be with me.

And that would have been right for the children as well, because if she would have been much less stressed and much more available for them.

Now, we've worked it through.

And we've just had our 53rd anniversary.

Very happily married.

Congratulations.

But at that time, it came at a cost to the children.

So when my wife said to her then, I can't leave him because of the kids, she was basically saying, I don't have the authentic strength yet.

I still need the attachment more than I need the authenticity.

I'm not blaming my wife.

I'm just saying that's what happened.

So

no.

Especially.

It's courage.

You need courage.

You need that capacity to accept your aloneness.

You need the capacity to choose your authenticity.

Now, sometimes that's totally impossible, I agree.

But in many cases, it's not so much a physical, but an emotional impossibility because of your early programming.

How do you change that programming, though?

I mean, we talked, we laughed about the, you know, the meditation, the yoga.

Let's talk about the psychedelics a little bit.

Do you believe, like, there are people I've known,

some friends of mine who've done a lot of, they've done like

MDMR.

No, wait, hold on.

I don't know.

MDMA,

ayahuasca,

MDMA, ayahuasca, lots of things.

And they've said great things, right?

I wasn't, I was invited a couple years back to go on this ayahuasca retreat for a week to Costa Rica.

They reached out to me.

They're like,

you know, do you want to come?

May I ask if that was rhythmia?

Yes, it was.

How did you know?

I don't recommend it.

It's a carnival.

Okay, I'm going to tell it.

Okay.

It's a huckster show.

I've known people, I've been there.

I've been on the advisory board, but I resigned because it's so inauthentic and such an emporium.

You know, that guy is a carnival barker.

He's not a healer.

And some people have had good experiences there because of the ceremonies, but I don't recommend people go there.

I have much better places than that.

I have no financial stake in anything, so I'm not saying this to make a a profit.

I don't recommend that place.

It's the best known place.

But I don't recommend it.

I have to say something.

I have to interject here because I thank you for saying that.

Because

I went.

I took my sister with me.

Because

I thought, why not?

They were kind enough to offer me this complimentary trip.

And I'm always, I'm very open-minded.

I'll try anything once.

And so I went.

And I got to be honest with you, it was not a good experience for me because

I, A, it didn't work.

So I go into this room with a bunch of people and everybody is like vomiting and there's diarrhea and everyone's pooing and pooping and barfing in front of me.

And I was not even, I took the ayahuasca.

It didn't even, it didn't even like nothing happened.

So now I'm stuck in a room for five days, five ceremonies.

I tried it five days in a row and I was stone-cold sober every time.

And I took the amount, the allotted amount.

I didn't go over the allotted amount.

They could give me more, but I was just not happy.

I don't know why I wasn't into it.

And I was made to feel on that trip like such a pariah because I was not able

to

experience it.

But more than that, the other part that I found was really upsetting to me was that I felt like it it

basically took people who were really fragile and in a bad place and kind of exploited it and

kind of create they people became worshipers of some kind to this place and to the to what do they call it to the to mother like they called the ayahuasca something I don't know what the the madre the madre the mother the

the mother yeah

and i saw people on my trip from day one to day seven, like, like change before my very eyes.

And not in a way that I thought was like positive.

I thought it was like very much like a cult-like feel

where I literally was a pariah because I was the only person

that was like, I don't get it.

I don't see it.

You didn't have this miracle that you're supposed to have, you know?

No miracle.

I was just like sitting in the room wanting to go back to my hot my room.

They wouldn't allow it because of the fact that they were not, I think, legally not allowed to let you do it.

And, you know, I come back and I tell some people and I was literally like, they're like, what's wrong with you?

How can you not?

I mean, the guy is a carnival barker.

That is who he is.

He is like,

and people are leaving that place thinking like it's like a panacea of health.

Yeah, so look, here's the deal.

The vomiting, the diarrhea, that doesn't concern me.

That's just your body purging stuff.

Nothing wrong with that.

That's something that I'm not.

Right, no, no, no, I understand that.

Not always,

but often it's the part of the ceremony, you know?

And they call it La Prime.

No, but my point was I'm stuck in the room with these people, the only ones just sitting there.

Oh, I get it.

And even at Rhythmia, I've known people to have some positive experiences.

But part of you...

Didn't get into it because you didn't trust it.

And you had good reason not to trust it.

Because why would you trust a carnival barker?

So you couldn't relax into it.

You know, so

I've been working with ayahuasca for 13 years now.

I've led retreats with it.

We get incredible results.

In this book, there's a chapter actually on psychedelics.

And if you haven't got to that chapter yet, chapter 31, read my experience in Peru at one of these temples working with shamans in the jungle.

You know, I think you'll find it a fascinating episode.

And

I'm not going to go into it now, but they saw right through me is what I'm saying.

Oh, I know that.

You got kicked out.

I got kicked out, yeah, out of my own retreat.

Because they saw that I needed help.

So

it can be very powerful, very healing

in the right context.

So that's the deal with psychedelics in general.

They can be very powerful healing agents.

They're no panacea.

I'm not any kind of an evangelist for them.

But amongst all the things that we can do, they belong amongst the modalities that can help quite a few people if the ceremony or the healing session is conducted in the right spirit by people who are trained and who have integrity.

You know, if not, you can get into trouble.

So I don't know if you've seen the film based on my work called The Wisdom of Trauma.

And that's available online.

You can just watch it.

You don't have to donate money and

you can if you want to the filmmakers so they can make their next project but you don't have to but it's in here www.wisdom of trauma.com you can see me working with somebody with MDMA and this man has prostatic cancer metastatic to his bones

and

in my work with he's taken MDMA and in my work with him he realizes that all his life he's repressed his anger and he's repressed his authentic self

and all the malignancy is it is in many ways a manifestation of that and he's done very well since then so

whether or not ultimately

he will outlive his cancer i don't know but he's lived longer than he ever expected to and but what i can tell you that even if he didn't the quality of his life is immeasurably better than it ever would have been without that experience

and so the psychiatrist can be why

Why?

Because he's himself now.

And he's following his own passions,

not what the world expects of him.

He's being himself,

which has an impact on his physiology.

So you can watch that film, and it's, you know, the segment is about three minutes long, and you can see me working with him.

So the psychiatrist, and not just my experience, not to toot my own horn, there's been a lot of research with ayahuasca, with MDMA, mushrooms and so on, and their potential

beneficial effects.

There's a film called Dosed

and now Dosed 2 by some British Columbia filmmakers.

The second one is about a woman with metastatic breast cancer.

She does mushrooms.

She comes to all these realizations.

It's an amazing film.

I'm in it briefly.

There's lots of research and anecdotal and experiential evidence that these things can make a positive difference in the right hands, in the right context, with the right guidance, with the right intention.

And if not, they can be negative experiences.

So that's what I've got to say about psychedelics.

But what's the difference between doing, like, how does someone know when to do MDMA, when to do mushrooms, when to do ayahuasca?

You don't make that decision.

You talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about.

Right.

So, like, does one work better for anxiety or one work better for...

Is there like some, is there like kind of a yeah if a situation where

if i was talking with you um

offline i would ask you a bunch of questions about where you're at in life what you're looking for what your challenges are and then i'd make a recommendation so it's not like it's it's not like there's a cookbook you know and um

it's also a bit arbitrary but generally i can send people in the right direction given my own experience with psychedelics um

and and and if if there's any doubt, I'll start with something mild.

Like I'll, you know, ayahuasca is pretty strong stuff, you know, as you've experienced.

I might not begin with that.

I might suggest, well, if you're working on certain issues in your life, how about you begin with MDMA, which is fairly gentle and there's no visions and there's no, you don't lose control of yourself like you might with ayahuasca, which is a good thing in itself, but you might not want to in the beginning.

So you might want to begin with something gentle like MDMA or mushrooms, a lot of those mushrooms.

and then then if you want to carry the journey and the exploration further then you might want to explore ayahuasca or something else but again you know like in my work they make up a very small part of what I do I mean it's it's important work and it's very exciting work but it I don't put my focus on them they're just some they're just one more thing in the kit bag you know

Right, right, right.

In your toolbox.

So how do you spend your time besides writing books and speaking and doing all of these things?

Like, do you see patients still?

Not anymore.

I just don't have the time to see people individually.

Occasionally,

if I meet somebody and I feel like helping them and they ask me, I will spend an hour.

I will not take them on as clients, but I'll spend an hour and then I'll send them in whatever direction I think is most advisable for them.

But I don't have a practice anymore.

I don't carry my medical license anymore.

I don't prescribe medications.

I do what I do, which is to speak to a lot of people, write for a lot of people,

webinars, all these YouTube talks of mine that people can watch, no cost, of course.

So that's what I do.

My mission is now larger than just individuals.

Occasionally, I'll spend time with somebody

if I think that I can make a contribution and that they'll be able to take that contribution and use it.

Then I'll do that occasionally.

But I'm not looking for clients, referrals.

If you write to my website asking to talk to me, the answer you're going to get is no.

Well, yes.

I mean, I figured as much, but I know that I'm taking up a lot of, well, it's only been not only, but I have like, there's a couple of things that are really, I feel are things if you don't mind.

Well, let me interrupt you for a second.

Yeah.

Okay.

If you don't mind.

No, I don't mind.

I'm just picking up on what you just said.

You said you are taking up my time.

Is that the case?

Or is it the case that we've agreed to talk to each other?

And you're not taking it.

You know what?

It's funny you say that.

I knew you were going to say that.

And I was trying to be polite because

I was trying to be polite.

But I am very...

Oh, yeah.

I know.

I recognize that I said that.

You don't think I enjoy talking with you?

And you don't think I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the audience about my book?

I mean, that's why I'm here.

So I'm just saying that this taking up your time, there's kind of an assumption there, you know, which I'm not going to go into that.

Yes, you're right.

you know no you're right you're right i was trying to be polite because i was looking at the clock and i was like you know it's been open about an hour a little bit over an hour and i have tendency to drone on i go on for if if i'm interested in the person it would like i am with you i just wanted to be uh respectful of your time okay well i appreciate that it is i appreciate that thank you but i'm you're welcome i'm here by choice is what i like to tell you well thank you i appreciate that do you find it interesting this is a side note before I go into my question, that there's so many Canadians that are who've,

because it's an, I guess, environment.

Like there's you, you've become very, you've become so popular with your work, Malcolm Gladwell, Jordan Peterson, all Canadians.

You don't find, is that like, is there something, is there something there between the, and by the way, also in Canada in the in the entrepreneur, lots of entrepreneurs, me, you know, but it's like, I find it, do you think there's a reason why Canada has kind of bred a lot of successful minds?

Is there something to be said about the environment there or the way we were brought up differently there versus in the other countries?

Well, the first two name you mentioned are not particularly people I'd want to be that much associated with for my own reasons.

I know.

But but that's the whole other story.

They're certainly successful in their own right, and they're very much their own individual personalities, aren't they?

I think Canada in some ways is a freer society than the U.S.

There's less pressure to sort of melt into the mainstream.

But also, you know,

When you're looking at the United States from the outside, you see things that the Americans can't see about themselves because they're swimming in the water.

You know?

And from the outside, we can sort of see things, whether it's a Gladwell or a Peterson or myself.

You know, we have very different points of view on all kinds of things, but we can maybe see things that Americans can't see so clearly about themselves.

It's also interesting that quite a few of the leading comedians are Canadian, Jim Carrey and I was going to say, you know, tons.

Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers.

I mean, we've had, we have so, music people, there's been so many, that's what I was saying.

It's not just in this space of like psychology or leadership or

I'm talking in

every area, like in entertainment and

in general.

Like I wonder if there's something in how we were brought up there or how we were educated.

Because I'm sure you get this all the time.

People always say to me, oh, you're so nice.

Like, I love Canadians.

Canadians are so nice or we're much more down to earth or this or like whatever this, you know, whatever the thing is.

Don't you think there is, because you talk so much about environment being a key piece of you know how what happens with your life right like you do you think that there is something to be said that like I don't know I just figured I would ask you since yeah it's a good question

I don't have a good answer for you and by the way I don't so much identify as a Canadian I mean I am but I was also Hungarian until I was 13 years old so I was very much shaped by my experiences in Eastern Europe and then being an immigrant in Canada.

So I don't know the answer except there's the old cliché and I don't know how true it is that

America functions more as a melting pot whereas Canada the differences are more acceptable.

But I don't even know whether that's true because Americans, see, I find Americans nicer than Canadians.

I find when I'm in New York,

people, you know, if I ask for directions, people are very nice.

And Canadians are very nice in the surface sense, but I also find them rather surfacy in their niceness.

you know.

Right.

Yes.

I may totally disagree with an American opinion, you know, or Americans' opinion on foreign or domestic policy or abortion rights or anything else, but they're so nice.

They're so nice much of the time.

And I really like them so much.

You know, so I don't know that I can talk too much about these differences.

I find

Americans in many ways more interesting than Canadians.

Except me, of course.

Well, but you've become an American now.

Come on.

I've been here for many, many years.

I was just teasing you anyway.

But

this is what I wanted to talk to you about because

the things I've seen, you talk,

the interviews I've seen, the books I've read, it's the parenting stuff, right?

About the resilience for kids and how to parent.

Because, you know, I've got two small kids and I'm very conscientious of these things, right?

Because you want to have a kid that I want my kids to be resilient.

I want my kids to have confidence.

And I want my kids to

really

be bold, really, and not be fearful of going after what they really want.

And

I don't want my parenting style to hurt them in any way, like no parent does, right?

That's obvious.

No.

And there's so, right?

And there's so much

conflicting things, especially in my line of work, right?

About how to build a child, how to get a child who that has a work ethic, resilience, all these things that that we kind of touched upon.

And you said something earlier about, and you're, I think you're referring to what Jordan Peterson was talking about, about when a kid is

angry, you put them in the back and you like, you know what I mean, you kind of let them cry it out and you don't kind of

show them compassion.

And then you have other people like yourself saying, no, no, no, that's not what you do.

So there's

so many experts out there, not even the two of you, I'm talking in general, who have conflicting things.

So what does someone do?

Like what, how do you parent to make a child thrive?

I mean, we're all going to make mistakes.

Okay, so let me ask you a question.

How old are your kids?

How old are your kids?

Nine, nine and seven.

Now, were you ever told not to pick them up then when they were crying?

See, I was never able to let them cry, right?

I would always like run to the room.

Were you ever told not to pick them up?

Yes, I was.

When you even thought about it, what did your heart tell you?

How did you feel?

Oh, it was terrible.

Like, you know, for the sleep training, you know, you were told, let them cry, they're never going to learn to sleep on their own.

And so I would sit in my room and

I would cry because I'm letting my kid cry.

Okay, now look, have you ever seen a mother bear or a mother gorilla that doesn't hold their infants?

No.

Do gorillas learn how to sleep?

Do they learn?

Yes.

Do bears learn how to sleep?

Yes, everybody eventually does, right?

You don't have to teach anybody to sleep.

The child doesn't need to be picked up because that's an emotional need they have.

You meet their needs, they'll become confident, self-believing, resilient beings.

So

if you plant a garden

and if you wanted to plant a certain flower or tree, what would you have to ask yourself?

What conditions does this particular organism require for healthy development?

Irrigation, sunlight, soil, minerals, whatever.

Same with human children.

So the first question to ask is not how do I want the kid to behave, but what is the child's needs?

for healthy development.

And one thing they need healthy development is connection with the parent.

And your heart is telling you that when you let your child cry your heart is breaking and your every cell in your body is aching to pick them up now who are you gonna listen to those idiotic experts or your own parenting instincts

and the problem with this society is it denatures people so that they no longer even know what their parenting instincts are now they have to rely on these experts and you know i don't blame others peterson or anybody else because i used to tell parents the same thing until I found out better.

You know, I used to, as a physician, I delivered a lot of babies and, you know, sleep trained them.

What nonsense.

Babies know how to sleep.

If they cry, it's because they need to be picked up.

Not just a physical need, but an emotional need so they can feel understood, connected with, accepted, supported, nourished.

When you do that for them, they become strong, resilient, and independent beings.

Why will they become independent?

Because nature's agenda is what?

Is that the child should become an independent adult.

You know why?

Because you're going to die.

And they better be independent by the time you do.

So you don't have to make them independent.

Nature will do that.

You just have to nourish them, not over-nurch them, not spoil them in that sense.

I'm not talking about indulging them.

I'm talking about nurturing their genuine needs, taking up the resilient, strong creatures.

Does the mother bear have to teach a work ethic?

their health?

But listen, but I will say something to that point, right?

Because I see it a lot where I live.

And I think there's something to be said.

Bless you.

Did you sneeze or is that a cough?

Sorry?

Do you sneeze?

Bless you.

No, no, I coughed.

And the reason I'm coughing is because I've been on this endless book tour for the last almost three months now.

And I've talked myself almost out of a voice.

So

this is self-imposed.

No, not your fault.

This is a self-imposed.

This is what happened.

No, but that's why I said to you, that's why I said to you,

you know, do you mind if I take up more time?

And because you are a workaholic or you're a recovering workaholic, you said, yes, it's okay.

We can go for as long as you want, even though you're tired and want to like hang up the phone and stop talking about the book already.

But listen, I spent 10 years.

I spent 10 years researching this book and three years writing it.

If I have to cough a little bit at the end of a book tour,

I'll take it.

You know,

that's exactly true.

Okay.

Now I forgot what I was going to say.

Oh, yeah.

So I was going to say something about there's the culture here, in my opinion, you obviously may not agree, is that

we're in a world right now where everybody wins a trophy, a participation, there's a participation trophy for everybody, right?

Helicopter moms and helicopter parents

who are not allowing the kids to really evolve into like human beings because they're so like they're like on top of them with everything.

I find the pendulum, right?

Like the pendulum is swung now where that's really like, to me,

I have a hard time with that.

I feel like to build resilience and for the kids to learn that they are capable

creatures, you have to let them fail.

You have to let them kind of struggle.

You got to let them kind of be on their own a bit and figure shit out,

as opposed to just some of these people like

always know, okay, here's a trophy, even though you're shitty at soccer, you also won.

Like, to me,

that's where I'm talking about.

No, no, you have to let when kids fail, you have to let them fail.

And you have to have them learn that failure doesn't personally reflect on their worth as human beings.

They're just not very good at soccer.

But that doesn't mean that

or basketball.

Yeah, or that doesn't mean that they're failures.

Look, the helicopter parenting comes from what?

It's not what I'm advocating.

Helicopter parenting comes from parental anxiety.

Now, the helicopter parent is not meeting the needs of the child.

They're meeting their own needs for the child to be something else other than what they are.

So helicopter parenting is just as bad as that kind of punitive parenting, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not recommending helicopter parenting.

I'm recommending parenting that is attuned to the need of the child.

And one of the things we have to do as parents is is to help our children deal with futility and frustration.

So, you know, if a two-year-old is going to, you know, if you're a good parent, you're going to frustrate your child.

Like a two-year-old wants a cookie before dinner.

If you're a good parent, you're not going to give the kid a cookie before dinner.

You're going to say, no, cookie.

They're going to get upset.

Now, the question is,

are you going to be upset because they're upset?

Are you going to punish them for it?

Are you going to say, oh, you're upset with mommy.

She didn't want to give you a cookie.

I get it.

Come here.

You know, that's very different from you, go sit in the corner by yourself because you're angry with mommy i mean so of course we have if we're good parents we're going to frustrate our kids and not try to anticipate their every desire and and and and meet their every um uh impulse need yeah

well we're going to meet their genuine needs i mean that i yeah we're going to meet the genuine needs but not their false needs and

So I'm not advocating helicopter parenting because that comes from the need and anxiety of the parent.

It has nothing to do with the needs of the child.

But if you meet them,

in the book, I talk about the child's genuine needs.

I won't repeat them here now.

But if you meet the child's genuine needs, you can be assured that the child will develop into somebody who respects work, respects themselves, respects other people, and is grounded and connected to themselves, which is what nature's agenda is.

Yeah, that is actually a good point.

But you said also environment's a big part, right?

So there's only so much you can do as a parent, right?

If they are, their peers are important, their environment's important, but you're more saying that you don't have to be, the pendulum doesn't have to be

severe in one direction or in the other, right?

No.

No, you got to find it.

And if the peers are too important, there's a reason for it.

That's because the kids are looking for attachment somewhere and they're missing it.

Have you read my book, Hold On to Your Kids?

No, I haven't read that one.

I beg you to read that book.

It's called Hold On to Your Kids, Why Parents Matter More Than Peers.

I wrote it with this brilliant psychologist friend of mine.

Here's his work.

I just did the writing with him.

It's been published in 30 languages, including in the States.

Hold on to your kids.

Really?

If you have a, did you say 9 and 13?

You got to read that book.

No, 9 and 7.

9 and 7.

9 and 7.

Yeah.

Perfect time for you to read that book.

Hold on to your kids.

I will.

I will read it, actually, because

I always think about these types of things.

And I love that.

This is the thing.

I loved your other book, like I told you, Scattered Minds, ADHD.

And I feel because

we're living in a time also where I feel that's like the word trauma, that's like the word of the word of the decade.

Everyone's like, oh, I've got ADD.

I got ADD.

It's like a throwaway.

It's like an excuse for having zero focus, not getting shit done, being irresponsible.

Kids are constantly being

labeled with this.

And I really want to talk about this.

I think think this is a really big issue.

Well, so look,

it's true kids are over-labeled, over-diagnosed, and way over-medicated.

That's absolutely true.

It's also true that alert kids have difficulty focusing these days.

Now, why is that?

It has to do with the stress in the environment.

And when people are stressed, they tend to tune out to protect themselves from the stress.

So a lot of more kids are being diagnosed these days.

It's not because parents don't love them, but it's also not because there's some genetic disease going on, because there's so much stress in this culture and kids are just tuning out.

And furthermore, then,

then there's these little devices that destroy kids' brain development.

And there's a new book, I talk about it in the myth of normal.

There's a new book just on that subject about how the tech companies target the brain, kids' brains to addict them.

And that on brain scans, as I mentioned in the myth of normal, shows deleterious effects on child's brain development.

So my friend Johan Harry has written a book called Lost Focus,

which is about

another New York Times bestseller, which is about the

loss of focus in its culture.

So both in my book of Scattered Minds and this book of the myth of normal, Johan's book Lost Focus, it's not just about individual brain physiology, it's also about the impact of the culture on kids' brains.

And that's a negative impact.

And

so when we treat these kids, it's not just a question of here's a pill for your symptoms, but what environment can we provide for you so that your brain can develop in healthy directions?

And today's culture really undermines the conditions on which healthy brain development depends.

I mean, I think it's how do you, how do you escape it, though?

Because the phones,

the video game, like my kid, I mean,

he'll go to any length to watch his iPad, to play video games.

And it's a total, it's an addict.

He's an addict.

And when you try and peel him off his device,

he behaves like an addict that you're trying to take his drug away.

Resistance.

That's what I say all the time.

Yeah.

Well, you got to read hold on to your kids.

We talk about that in there.

Okay.

Okay.

But what do I do?

Give me some, give me a quick, give me, give us, not, I'm asking for a friend.

No, I'd like to know two ways that we can help our kids, how we can help our kids, because it's honestly so difficult because every parent struggles with this.

Well, here's the thing.

The fact that you have such a hard time with the child, influencing the child, is due to two factors.

One of them is the very addictive nature of this technology, which is deliberately designed by the tech companies.

But the other is the loss of parenting power that you exercise.

So

you need to be more powerful in that relationship.

Parenting is not a democracy.

It's a hierarchy.

I'm bigger, more experienced.

I'm the one with the duty and responsibly.

I'm in charge.

But you can't impose that by force.

You can't be authoritarian about it.

So the question is, how do you become authoritative without being authoritarian?

Now, a lot of parenting advice is about being authoritarian, force, timeouts, punishments, withdrawal privileges, all this nonsense.

That just makes the kid more resistant.

So what you need to do first before you can, if you want to influence your child, as Gordon Eufeld, my co-writer and hold on to your kids, says, you collect them before you direct them.

So your first job is to look at the ways in which you've lost that parenting power because your kid is looking to the peer group more than they're looking to you.

You have to really seduce them in a very positive way into a relationship with you.

And now you're going to have some power to influence their behaviors.

So that's how it begins.

It doesn't happen overnight.

And believe me, I'm talking as a parent who made every mistake in the book.

I mean,

when I say that I've made every mistake in the book, I mean I've made every mistake in my own books.

You know, that's how I've learned so much.

You know, so

I really do suggest you should read that book and you work on a relationship which will give you the power.

And you have to be patient with it because it doesn't happen overnight.

No, I think that's a, would you come on the podcast again just to talk about that book?

Oh, I'm happy to.

If you read that book, and if it appeals to you, I would invite you to invite myself and Gordon, the main writer of that book, who's in my

world, and I know the world of psychology inside out.

He's the world's most adept child developmental psychologist.

He understands kids like nobody does.

And so you read that book.

And if you're impressed, invite us back.

I'm so happy to return.

Oh, no, I'm serious.

To me, I think this is something that this is a universal struggle that I don't care where you're from, every parent has this problem with their children.

I mean, this is the connecting point when I have to go, when I meet with my, you know, when I have to be with my kids', you know, friends, the friends' parents, this is what we can talk.

This is one thing we have in common.

You know what I mean?

It's...

It is,

that to me is an epidemic.

This is an epidemic

and it's unbelievable because then my kids, who are very, very athletic already,

if they're on that iPad too long, their brains and neuroplasticity changes to a point where they don't even, they're so lethargic, they don't want to even extra, they don't want to go and do their sports.

That's right.

They freak out, right?

Like it changes their entire being.

To me, that's the real crisis.

Certainly, you can talk to Gordon and I.

And I know another couple of people that you'd be very

pleased to speak with who really specialize in how to deal with that technology and children.

I'm happy to put you in touch.

Yeah.

I would love that.

I mean, okay, well, listen, I think I've covered, I've taken up a lot of your time, which I know you've been gracious enough to give me and vice versa to make you happy.

Like I said, I really enjoyed.

Thank you for coming on the podcast.

I feel like

your work, your books, you,

I just really love everything that you talk about, and you do it in such a way that's very uh, it can it resonates and it's very, it's very easy to understand to the common folk.

So, thank you.

Thank you.

It's been a great pleasure for me as well.

Um, you take care.

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