The Real Reason You Can't Stop Your Addiction | Dr. Gabor Maté

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Speaker 2 Explore more with Facebook today. The things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs.

Speaker 2 The addictions that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation. Dr.

Speaker 2 Mate is a world-renowned physician, best-selling author, whose work dives deep into childhood development and the impact of trauma. Dr.
Gabor Mate.

Speaker 2 You were the average neurologist with symptoms of MS. Nobody's going to ask you about your trauma.
There's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how you practice medicine.

Speaker 2 Why do you think in our modern society with all the medical and scientific advances that there's so much suffering when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before? Well,

Speaker 2 what I read about your stuff, what I see about your content, is a lot of people are lost based on trauma.

Speaker 2 And past traumas cause certain addictions or certain behaviors and and routines that maybe are some healthy addictions or unhealthy addictions, but it seems to be like a lot of unhealthy addictions.

Speaker 2 Can I interrupt right there? Yes, please. No such thing as a healthy addiction.
No such thing. If it's healthy, it's not an addiction.
If it's an addiction, it's not healthy. There are passions,

Speaker 2 there are habits that are healthy, but they're not addictions.

Speaker 2 Like working out, like

Speaker 2 that can be an addiction, or it can be healthy.

Speaker 2 Like eating can be healthy, or it can be an addiction.

Speaker 2 I define addiction as any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief and therefore craves,

Speaker 2 but then suffers negative consequences and cannot give it up. So if you're suffering negative consequences, so it's craving, relief, pleasure in the short term,

Speaker 2 harm in the long term, inability to give it up, that's what an addiction is. Now if you have a behavior that's ongoing, but it has no negative consequences, it's not an addiction.

Speaker 2 It's a passion, it's a pleasure, it's a habit. It's a healthy habit.
It's a healthy habit. So for me it's not an addiction.
And also

Speaker 2 a healthy habit, a person, if it no longer works for them, they can give it up.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 for me, there's no healthy addiction. There's no healthy addiction.
In fact, the word addiction comes from a word for slavery. So

Speaker 2 there's no healthy slavery. Interesting.
So addiction, what is the root of addiction?

Speaker 2 The word? Yeah. So in Roman times,

Speaker 2 an addictus was somebody who was assigned to another person to serve them because they owed them money and they couldn't pay it back. An addictus.
Yeah, addictus was like

Speaker 2 an

Speaker 2 indentured slave who had to work off the debt. So that's what the word actually comes from,

Speaker 2 is slavery, is a form of slavery. So if you're addicted to something, you are a slave to that craving.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Absolutely.
You have no choice.

Speaker 2 A slave has no choice. Wow.

Speaker 2 You have no free will essentially yeah and i've had my own addictive behaviors and

Speaker 2 nothing like the patients that i worked with but in insofar as i had them literally even though i was a well-paid middle-class successful doctor

Speaker 2 i was not exercising any free choice really over my behaviors no when did you what was the main uh

Speaker 2 addiction that you were you know tied to and when did you learn yeah how to break free of that

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 so the in my life the main addictions have been um to work.

Speaker 2 To work. Yeah.
Work hard, achieve

Speaker 2 more and more patience, more and more success, more and more. More and more is the essence of addiction.
It's always more and more.

Speaker 2 And there's a reason why I developed that addiction. And that was the harder that's the hardest one to give up.

Speaker 2 Then I was addicted for a long time to shopping for classical compact discs.

Speaker 2 And when I say addicted, I mean I would spend thousands of dollars a day. On CDs.
Yeah. Really? Yeah, really.
And I would lie to my wife about it, and I would neglect my patients.

Speaker 2 And as soon as I left the store,

Speaker 2 thinking, now I'm complete. My collection is full.
Half an hour later, I had to run back. And

Speaker 2 as I described in my book, An Addiction and the Realm of Hungarios, I once left a woman in labor in a hospital to go get a symphony. So that's an addiction.
Really? Yeah, yeah. And it's like the...

Speaker 2 Now, the interesting thing about addiction is that I wasn't using substances. You weren't smoking or drinking or things like drugs.

Speaker 2 But I was looking for a chemical hit. Dopamine.
Dopamine, yeah. So I was in a dopamine fiend, you might say, and I'd get it through those particular behaviors.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so...

Speaker 2 So that's what my addiction was. How did I give it up? Well,

Speaker 2 it took a long time. Really? Yeah, a lot of struggle, a lot of, you know, and finally, I just realized that the cost was greater than the, in fact, you know,

Speaker 2 in fact, if I started listening now to all the CDs that I have at home and did nothing but listen for the rest of my life, you wouldn't finish. I probably wouldn't finish.

Speaker 2 Wow. So how long would you say, when did you realize, okay, this is an addiction? This is an unhealthy.

Speaker 2 I realized it long before I gave it up.

Speaker 2 Like years, ten years, decades?

Speaker 2 Years. Years.
Yeah, years.

Speaker 2 How long does it normally take for someone when they realize this is unhealthy, this thing I'm doing, this addiction is not good for me, until they actually give it up? Is there any data on that?

Speaker 2 I couldn't answer that one. I think it's a highly variable and individual issue.

Speaker 2 It has to do with

Speaker 2 what resources they have to heal. It has to do with what support they have.
It has to do with what cost

Speaker 2 this habit is exacting on their lives.

Speaker 2 It has to do also with

Speaker 2 some belief that there's a part of us that's actually healthy and we can get in touch with that. You know, there has to be a cool combination of factors.
And it's very, very individual.

Speaker 2 It also depends, of course, the degree of trauma a person suffered.

Speaker 2 And addictions are always about like You've heard my definition of addiction and I'm sure if I asked you, like if I asked if I'm talking to a thousand people, put your hands up if according to my definition you've had an addiction, virtually everybody in the room will put their hands up.

Speaker 2 Maybe there'll be two liars who,

Speaker 2 but 998 would. And then I asked them, not what was wrong with the addiction, but what was right about it? What did you get from it? So if I asked you that, so you've had your addictive behaviors.

Speaker 2 If I asked you, I don't care what it was too, but if I asked you, what did you get from it? What would you get? You get some type of relief, you get some type of pleasure, you get some type of

Speaker 2 specifically.

Speaker 2 What do you get from it? What do you get from it? What did it give you temporarily or whatever it was? I don't even care what it was. You know, you get it, you escape.
Okay, escape, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're not thinking about the pain or the shame or the insecurity. So who needs to escape?

Speaker 2 Me. No, but I mean, what kind of person needs to escape? Oh, a scared person.
Scared person is somebody who's imprisoned, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Somebody who's not free. Somebody's trapped.
Yeah, somebody's trapped, exactly. And I know in your book on toxic masculinity, you talk about being trapped.

Speaker 2 Trapped is the very word you use. Yes.

Speaker 2 I felt trapped most of my childhood. That's the whole point.
So what I'm saying is that addiction is never a choice and it's not some kind of genetic disease which that is total nonsense.

Speaker 2 What it actually is, is an attempt to solve a problem in your life. In your case, you were trying to solve the problem of being trapped,

Speaker 2 which is based on your childhood trauma, which you very publicly talk about. In my case, the workaholism was about

Speaker 2 trying trying to prove to myself that

Speaker 2 I had the right to exist,

Speaker 2 that it was important. That you're worthy of love.
That I was worthy of love, exactly, acceptance and all that. Now that also came from a childhood experience.

Speaker 2 So addiction is never like either a disease as such.

Speaker 2 It can behave like a disease, but it isn't a disease as such. It's also not a choice anybody makes.
It's actually an attempt to solve a deep life problem.

Speaker 2 that was imposed on the person by trauma in every case. Wow.

Speaker 2 Is it possible for someone to heal a deep wound on their own, a trauma from decades past that they've had an addiction to trying to escape from? Is it possible to do it on your own?

Speaker 2 Or does it really take support? Someone, some ones, a team? What's your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2 Well, I think very rarely it is possible for an individual, maybe they have some

Speaker 2 deep spiritual experience. Maybe they're out there in nature and all of a sudden they're at one with the universe.
They feel presence, they feel

Speaker 2 connected, yeah. Exactly.
So that can happen. It does happen to some people.
And they just choose, I'm going to decide not to do this anymore. Well, they realize they don't need to.

Speaker 2 Because they're free. They feel free.
Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Very rare.

Speaker 2 For most of us,

Speaker 2 people,

Speaker 2 beings that walk this earth, it takes a lot of self-awareness, it takes a lot of support, connection,

Speaker 2 guidance so I'd say if you're listening and you've got one of these issues where you're addicted to something in the way that Louis and I are just talking about don't wait for that miraculous moment get the help because you have a much better chance that way yeah so what would you say is the root cause of all addiction then is it feeling a wound is it feeling trapped by something that's happened in the past that the the being trapped itself is a sign of a wound so the

Speaker 2 in fact, the word trauma means wound. The Greek origin of the word trauma is a wound.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 children who are hurt, but they're not supported, seen, accepted, and helped, they get trapped in the wound.

Speaker 2 And being trapped in the wound and being trapped in the behaviors to escape from the wound, that's how the trauma shows up in our lives. Interesting.
And in our culture, in our society.

Speaker 2 You know, I talked about this in my book as well, about how as a a, you know, a young boy growing up in the Midwest in Ohio, I didn't see examples of older men or athletes that I aspired to be like talking about their emotions or talking about healing or talking about, you know, I had a trauma, talking about how to

Speaker 2 navigate the full range of emotions. It was more

Speaker 2 you just get made fun of if you cried. You get picked on and called, you know, things you don't want to be called.
You're kicked out of the tribe.

Speaker 2 You're not accepted in the tribe in your boys group growing up.

Speaker 2 And so I feel like culturally there's a lot of pain with men and women obviously, but

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 it seems to be is causing a lot of the stress in the world right now. It's just this cultural pain.

Speaker 2 Well, if I may be self-serving, my new book is called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. So it's just as you say,

Speaker 2 the trauma that people are experiencing massively

Speaker 2 isn't just personal to them. It's also a sign of a culture that's completely out of whack.

Speaker 2 And when I say out of whack,

Speaker 2 the things we consider, the reason I call the book the myth of normal, is what I'm saying is that the things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs.

Speaker 2 It's not healthy.

Speaker 2 It's totally unhealthy. So that the addictions and the diseases and the mental illnesses that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation.

Speaker 2 So that

Speaker 2 whatever addiction you had

Speaker 2 or even

Speaker 2 this mask of rigid masculinity that you tried to adopt for a while until it cracked for you. Right, needing to win, needing to be the best, needing to...
But that was a normal response.

Speaker 2 To survive. To survive, exactly.
So that the abnormality wasn't in you, it was in the situation that you're in. That's what I mean by a toxic culture.
Yeah. And

Speaker 2 I know again in your book, you talk about these public figures that all of a sudden you realize we're talking about their emotions. Yeah.
But that's fairly new.

Speaker 2 In the last like five, ten years.

Speaker 2 So these days, athletes will talk about their sexual abuse. This didn't happen until 10 years ago, really.
And really more three to five years ago, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And so now there's why, why do you feel like people are now starting to open up who are more public figures? Why do you think that's happening?

Speaker 2 Well, I think what's happened that the toxicity of the culture, one of my subtitles is toxic culture, and it's got so bad.

Speaker 2 There's a Greek playwright that I quote in my book. He's Aeschylus.
And he, one of his plays, he said that the way that God's created us, human beings, that we have to suffer, suffer into truth.

Speaker 2 And I think that the degree of suffering, now most people I know who engage in a path of self-exploration and truth, they didn't do it because all of a sudden they just made a decision.

Speaker 2 They just suffered so much.

Speaker 2 So the suffering can actually wake you up. And I think to answer your question, this society has got to the point where the suffering is so intense and so widespread that something had to crack open.

Speaker 2 So I think that's why, you know,

Speaker 2 it's got so bad that it couldn't be hidden anymore.

Speaker 2 Why do you think in our modern society with all the medical and scientific advances and all the knowledge out there, that there's so much chronic pain, though, so much suffering when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before.

Speaker 2 Not sure if we don't. We are blessed.

Speaker 2 What we have is a lot more physiological and physical science, which is great.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, if I needed a heart transplant, I'd be very grateful for modern medicine and/or a broken bone or anything.

Speaker 2 But we've forgotten something that human beings have always known. And

Speaker 2 for example,

Speaker 2 I write about this friend of mine, his name is Louis Mel Madrona, and he's an American physician. He's Lakota background.

Speaker 2 And he told me that

Speaker 2 and he's just like me, he's full of respect for Western medicine. I was trained in it, he was trained in it.
We also see what's missing. And he said that in his historian, when somebody gets sick,

Speaker 2 The whole community gathers and thanks the person and says, you're carrying some dysfunction in our whole culture. So your healing is our healing.
Wow.

Speaker 2 So they get that the individual represents the culture and the environment and the family and the community. Now Western medicine totally forgets that.
We separate the mind from the body. So we

Speaker 2 often when I speak to groups, I ask people if in the last five years you've been to a neurologist or an oncologist or a cardiologist or gastroenterologist or a rheumatologist,

Speaker 2 any kind of anologist, put your hand up. So people put hands up.
I say keep your hands up. If they ask you about stress in your life, trauma in your childhood.
Relationships. Relationships, exactly.

Speaker 2 How you feel about your work, how do you feel about yourself as a human being? Very few hands stay up. And those questions

Speaker 2 which have to do with, number one, the unity of mind and body, which is only scientific fact, and the inseparableness of

Speaker 2 one human being from another. Western medicine completely ignores, which is contrary to science.

Speaker 2 It's not only contrary to ancient wisdom, it's also contrary to modern science, because we have tens of thousands of studies to show that you can't separate the mind from the body.

Speaker 2 Tens of thousands of studies showing how emotions significantly influence the onset of illness, how

Speaker 2 relationships do, you know.

Speaker 2 There's a wonderful psychiatrist here in LA, you may know of him or him, Daniel Siegel, and Dan Siegel talks about what he calls

Speaker 2 interpersonal neurobiology, which means that our brains are not separate.

Speaker 2 Something in you will sense the tension in me and will pick up on that. And that'll change your...
Intuition will be.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that'll change your brain. And I take it a step further.
I talk about interpersonal biology so that what happens to people physiologically is very affected. And I'll give you two examples.
Yes.

Speaker 2 But affected by their culture and their family. So we've known for decades that children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma.

Speaker 2 The parents' stresses affect the physiology of the child's breathing. The breathing, they narrow the air tubes, they cause inflammation.

Speaker 2 By the way, how do we treat asthma with stress hormones? Adrenaline and cortisol.

Speaker 2 We know

Speaker 2 American black women, the more experiences of racism then you have to endure, the greater the risk for asthma. Really?

Speaker 2 We know that men who were sexually abused in childhood, the risk of heart disease triples.

Speaker 2 I could go on.

Speaker 2 Women who suffer symptoms of PTSD severely, the risk of ovarian cancer doubles.

Speaker 2 Why? Because you can't separate the emotions from the body. It's one unit, scientifically speaking, not just from a point of view of indigenous wisdom, but on modern science.

Speaker 2 So when you say, despite all this knowledge, I'm saying what's missing from the knowledge

Speaker 2 is the wisdom. And not just the wisdom, even the science.
That's what's so ironic. So I'm a physician, and as doctors, we always talk about evidence-based practice.

Speaker 2 And I say, My God, I only wish we had evidence-based practice. Let's look at the evidence.

Speaker 2 You know, what's the evidence for separating the mind from the body? But

Speaker 2 multiple sclerosis, this mysterious illness. The guy who first described multiple sclerosis was a French neurologist called Jean-Martin Charcot in the 19th century.

Speaker 2 He said that it was a disease caused by grief and long-term worry. Since then, there's been multiple studies showing the relationship of stress, trauma, and multiple sclerosis.

Speaker 2 You go to the average neurologist with symptoms of MS, nobody's going to ask you about your trauma.

Speaker 2 Nobody's going to ask you about your stress. And why is that significant? Because if you deal with the trauma and the stress, your multiple sclerosis can actually improve significantly.
Wow.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 there's a huge gap

Speaker 2 between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine. And what we call scientific evidence-based practice is miraculous.
It's amazing, but it's way too narrow.

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Speaker 2 what about something like arthritis what is that would you say that's connected to okay that's been studied as well so the

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 There was a great Canadian physician who actually was one of the founding physicians at Johns Hopkins Medical School. His name is William Osler.

Speaker 2 He said in 1880 that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by long-term worry and stress. Long-term worry and stress.
Yeah. Now, since then.
In 1890? 1880 or 1990. Wow.
Yeah. He said this then.

Speaker 2 Since then, multiple dozens of studies showing a relationship between trauma, stress, and rheumatoid arthritis. Do you think the average

Speaker 2 rheumatologist knows anything about that? Wow. So that people go to...

Speaker 2 I know people in my book, The Mythonormal, I talk about people with MS or arthritis who once they start recognizing that the flare-ups of the disease actually manifest stresses in their lives and if they learn how to deal with those stresses

Speaker 2 one woman told me that I have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis

Speaker 2 he said she says it was my best teacher because when every time he shows up I know that I'm out of alignment with myself yes

Speaker 2 Somewhere you need to have a conversation with yourself or get back in alignment. It's interesting.

Speaker 2 I was telling you this before off camera that in a previous relationship that I was in, I was feeling a lot of chest pain and kind of tightness in my throat.

Speaker 2 And at one point, like I was starting to get like this, I don't know if it was a rash or some type of flare-up like in my and like below my belly button. Yeah.
And I was like, what is that?

Speaker 2 Like, I've never had some type of like eczema or skin condition or something. It was like this kind of bright red flare up.
And I was like, do I have a disease? Like, what is this? You know?

Speaker 2 And it's fascinating because I was telling you, like, the moment after many, many months of therapy and

Speaker 2 starting to integrate the lessons of healing and really feel it internally, I started to feel this sense of peace inside of me for the first time. I didn't feel trapped for the first time

Speaker 2 in myself, in my heart, and in my body. And almost overnight, like this flare-up was there for months.
And I was like, oh, maybe I'm having, I had like allergy tests.

Speaker 2 And I was like, maybe it's peanuts. I don't know.
All these different like foods that I'm eating. And I was like, eliminating the foods and it was still there.

Speaker 2 It was almost overnight when I felt the peace inside of me. The flare-ups went away and they haven't come back.
And I was like, so if you had come to me after a drunk, I would have asked you.

Speaker 2 Not what are you eating? No, I wouldn't. Well, that might have.
Those are good questions.

Speaker 2 But I also would have asked you, what is your body saying no to? It's rejecting that you're not saying no to. Oh my gosh.
You know,

Speaker 2 now a flare-up,

Speaker 2 if you take that word flare-up, which is what you used. Yeah, it's inflammation, right? Something's inflamed.
Okay, right.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 where else do you use? What else flares up? You know what flares up? It's rage, anger.

Speaker 2 But you had anger that you weren't expressing. Right.

Speaker 2 Hence, your body flares up. Yes.
We know that suppressed emotions cause inflammation. So had you come to me,

Speaker 2 not had you come to me when I was out of medical school, because I wouldn't know anything about this. Nobody teaches you this stuff.

Speaker 2 But if you have come to me more recently, I would have asked you, well, Louis, what is your body saying no to that you're not saying no to?

Speaker 2 And that happens in two major areas, relationships

Speaker 2 and work.

Speaker 2 Interesting. And so the body sends those signals.
We can learn from it. And now the problem is

Speaker 2 that you go to the average physician.

Speaker 2 They're They're not going to ask those things.

Speaker 2 They're just going to try and collude with you to try and get rid of the symptom.

Speaker 2 Not find the root. Which is, that's okay.
I mean, you don't want to sit there with a rash. It's fine.
But also, let's look at the source of it. Yes.

Speaker 2 And the source is always assumed to be something physical.

Speaker 2 Maybe they'll think of food. Maybe they'll think of some toxin.
They will not think of your emotions, even though the mind and the body are inseparable.

Speaker 2 How much stronger do you think the emotional weight or trauma is than

Speaker 2 physical

Speaker 2 toxins, you know, in terms of affecting the body?

Speaker 2 I can't make that assessment because I don't know what study would even compare the two. So I don't want to speak off the cuff, but what I can tell you is that

Speaker 2 the emotions are really primary in most chronic conditions.

Speaker 2 And if you deal with them, now in this society where there's all these toxins in the environment and junk in the food and all that, who knows? Prostitution.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 what I know is that the emotions play a huge role and that that can have an

Speaker 2 impact on their illness. And the other thing I've

Speaker 2 I don't know about you when you write books, but I write books as much for myself as for anybody else. 100%.
Yeah. The show is for me.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 So I get to learn a lot when I'm writing. So So one of the things I learned when I was writing A Myth of Normal was even how we think about disease.

Speaker 2 Like, people say, I have eczema, or I have depression, or I have rheumatoid artritis, or I have ADD. Now,

Speaker 2 there's an assumption there, isn't there? The assumption is, first of all, is that

Speaker 2 there's this thing called ADD. There's this thing called eczema, there's this thing called rheumatoidritis,

Speaker 2 or there's this thing called depression. Then there's an I.

Speaker 2 And the I has that thing. But that thing has got its own separate, independent nature.

Speaker 2 But to say that I have this disease makes the assumption that disease has got a separate life and nature of its own. It doesn't.
What if we saw disease of all kinds, mental or physical, or addiction?

Speaker 2 not as the things in themselves that have their own nature, but as processes that manifest our lives.

Speaker 2 And if I live my life differently, then I can have an impact on that process, so that process will change.

Speaker 2 That's exactly actually how it is. So for shorthand language, I understand it's helpful to say I have depression.

Speaker 2 How important is the words we choose?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 if we

Speaker 2 buy into that language, we're actually missing a point because you don't have it. There's no it that's separate from you.

Speaker 2 And that means that if you change yourself, in fact there have been, there's a friend of mine now, a recent friend, Dr. Jeff Rediger, who's a psychiatrist at Harvard.

Speaker 2 And last year he wrote a book called Cured, the science of spontaneous healing. That was the subtitle.

Speaker 2 No. He studied people

Speaker 2 who were terminally ill, documentedly so, they had no prognosis whatsoever, and then they get better. So they were terminally ill, they were not supposed to survive.
They're not supposed to survive.

Speaker 2 They're supposed to die in a few years or something. A couple months or weeks.

Speaker 2 I've talked to such people myself. And they've cured their disease.
There's a woman called a psychologist called Kelly Turner who studied the same thing. She wrote a book called Radical Remission.

Speaker 2 So all three of us have looked at these people.

Speaker 2 They did it in a research kind of way. I just did it impressionistically, you know.
But I do check out the histories with people's doctors.

Speaker 2 We all know people who've got supposed to have two months to live or six months to live.

Speaker 2 Either medical treatment has failed or they refuse medical treatment, then all of a sudden the disease goes away.

Speaker 2 I think all three of us have found that what makes the biggest difference is that the person changes their relationship to themselves. Wow.
And there's always trauma in the background.

Speaker 2 Jeff and Kelly have documented people, they go on diets, they take supplements, they start meditating. They go into nature.

Speaker 2 They go to nature, the whole thing. All those things are great.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think the, but I think Jeff and I agree, and I think Kelly would probably agree as well, that the biggest shift is in one's relationship with oneself.

Speaker 2 In other words, the life changes, the process changes. Now, I'm not promising anybody who's listening, you can cure yourself.
I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 this is not snake oil. I'm just talking about the importance.
of recognizing the impact of emotions and one's relationship to oneself on one's physiology. That's all I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 There's an an external environment and then there's an internal environment, you know, our emotional environment

Speaker 2 that is connected to our, I'm assuming, our nervous system, our heart, our brain, the whole body and everything. And if our emotional environment is sick,

Speaker 2 then we're probably going to be physically sick as well. Well,

Speaker 2 that's what your story actually

Speaker 2 illustrates, isn't it? As soon as you create

Speaker 2 an internal environment, your physical issues abate.

Speaker 2 By the way, speaking of, I just noticed I'm getting too excited here.

Speaker 2 This is my passion. I mean,

Speaker 2 I just could grow on about this forever, but I'm also noticing probably I'm getting a bit too heated here.

Speaker 2 You're getting warmer.

Speaker 2 I don't physically so much. I just noticed I need to calm down a bit.

Speaker 2 I don't want to talk too fast. No, I like it.

Speaker 2 This is exciting for me. Well, I just feel like this is the,

Speaker 2 what you were just saying, emotional repression

Speaker 2 is a major cause of physical illness. It may not be the only cause.
There's other factors, but

Speaker 2 what we

Speaker 2 suppress usually comes to the surface in some way. Isn't that correct? That's the whole point.

Speaker 2 And most of us, I'll speak for myself, I wasn't taught, and I think most of us are not taught on how to express the emotional traumas, the emotional pains, fears, insecurities, shames, guilt.

Speaker 2 We're not taught the skills. It's one of the reasons why I started the School of Greatness because I was like, I I wish I would have learned these skills in school.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 most people's parents are messed up in some way or have some issues and they aren't taught this.

Speaker 2 And so we're, you know, I grew up in a household that was very stressful and chaotic and there wasn't stability. So did my kids, by the way.
Right. And you're like the guy, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I wasn't the guy then. You weren't the guy then.
Yeah. So your kids had to have some traumas that they had to face because of you and their parents.

Speaker 2 It's not even a matter of skills learning.

Speaker 2 It's deeper than that. Because you don't have to teach any one-day-old baby how to express their emotions, do you? No.
If they're sad, lonely, do you hear about it?

Speaker 2 If they're hungry or uncomfortable, do you hear about it?

Speaker 2 Of course you do. There's nothing to teach.
You have to allow it. And you have to

Speaker 2 give space for it. And you have to hear it and respond to it.

Speaker 2 The problem with most parents is not that they don't teach the kids these skills, is that how they really live their lives because of their own traumas and because of the stresses in the society, they actually discourage kids from don't cry, stop crying, yeah, from what's natural, suck it up.

Speaker 2 Well, look, don't do this, don't do that, right?

Speaker 2 Well, well, you know, there's a very famous Canadian psychologist. I don't know if he's been on your program, but he

Speaker 2 says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves

Speaker 2 until they come back to normal. Interesting.
In other words, anger in a two-year-old is not normal, and we have to socialize it out of them.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 2 No, there's nothing more natural than an angry two-year-old.

Speaker 2 There's nothing more natural than an angry.

Speaker 2 They get frustrated.

Speaker 2 They get a cookie before...

Speaker 2 They don't get what they want.

Speaker 2 They want a cookie before dinner. And if you're a good parent, you're not going to give them a cookie before dinner.

Speaker 2 When does someone learn how to not express anger every 10 minutes, though? Well, here's the point. If that two-year-old then starts screaming or throwing a tantrum or getting angry

Speaker 2 if you say time out and you're not going to be with them

Speaker 2 now you're presenting the child with a tragic dilemma.

Speaker 2 I can have my authentic emotion

Speaker 2 or I can have my relationship with my parent on whom my life depends.

Speaker 2 So I can be authentic. or I can be attached in a relationship, but I can't have both.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 2 Because if I'm not authentic, or if I'm authentic, then I'm going to be alone. Exactly.
I'm going to be on timeout or whatever.

Speaker 2 And to the child, the timeout is life-threatening.

Speaker 2 Because you might be alone forever, right? Yeah, the child doesn't know that, you see.

Speaker 2 So basically, you're

Speaker 2 threatening the child with depriving them of their greatest need, which is the connection with you. Yeah, love.
Yeah, the love, yeah.

Speaker 2 But isn't there a point, though, if you're a 21-year-old man now and you're screaming every 10 minutes because you don't get the cookie. But that's not the answer.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 2 answer is when they're screaming, you have to pick them up.

Speaker 2 You're angry at daddy, aren't you? You really wish you had that cookie. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh I get it.

Speaker 2 You know? And then the child relaxes and the anger moves through them. And you know what they learn? That anger is just something that moves through you.
You can let go of it.

Speaker 2 If you don't see the child, don't accept the child emotion, they're going to have to repress it. You're going to have to stuff it.
What's another another word for stuffing? It's pushing down. Trap it.

Speaker 2 Pushing down.

Speaker 2 What's another word for pushing down? Depressing.

Speaker 2 Where does depression come from? It's not this disease. Depression comes from having had to push down your emotions.

Speaker 2 Literally, you had to push down your emotions. In other words, why did you have to push down your emotions? To stay connected to your parents.
In other words, it was a coping mechanism.

Speaker 2 And what I'm saying is that a lot of illness, whether of the mind or the body or both, comes comes from coping mechanisms.

Speaker 2 There are normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation. It's not normal for a child to be banished from the presence of the parent.

Speaker 2 In fact, if you look at indigenous people, they carry their kids everywhere. The kids are always with the parents.
And the

Speaker 2 pilgrims, when they arrived in North America, They're very upset with how the natives reared their children. You know why? Because the indigenous people did not hit their kids.

Speaker 2 They didn't hit their kids. They didn't hit their kids.
And the Christians couldn't understand this. Why they didn't, you know,

Speaker 2 create obedience with them, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So what do they do? They nourish them.

Speaker 2 And when you nourish a child, see, nature has got a natural agenda, is that you should grow up to be a self-regulated adult in connection with yourself and with other people. That's nature's agenda.

Speaker 2 It's like nature has an agenda for an acorn to become an oak tree. But an acorn doesn't spontaneously become an oak tree.
It has to have the right conditions.

Speaker 2 So it's not a question of teaching the oak tree, the acorn to be an oak tree. Just give it the nourishment and the sunlight

Speaker 2 and the earth and irrigation that it needs.

Speaker 2 Its nature is to become an oak tree. The nature of human beings is to become self-regulated,

Speaker 2 socially responsible creatures. That's how we evolved.
Given the right conditions, that will happen. So it's not a question of teaching all these things.
Yeah, this is some teaching about.

Speaker 2 Mostly, it's the question of meeting children's needs, giving them the right conditions, and then they will develop self-regulation.

Speaker 2 They learn it because you're self-regulated, so they're watching you. You're not reactive and explaining.
You're not screaming. You know, your eyes, oh, I'm angry.
Okay, I'm angry.

Speaker 2 But you're not screaming at the kid.

Speaker 2 You know, so

Speaker 2 in a right environment, these traits spontaneously evolve or develop in a human being. So our society is always about how do we teach these skills and no skills.

Speaker 2 Well, teaching is important, but more important is the child's spontaneous growth given the right environment.

Speaker 2 And what I'm saying about this toxic culture, we don't give our kids the right environment.

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Speaker 2 Yeah, and I mean, you hear the number, the statistic that 50% of marriages turn into divorce these days. And also

Speaker 2 probably, I think when I had Esther Perel on, I was like, how many of the 50% that are married are actually happy? It's a very small percentage too.

Speaker 2 So I've had a marriage that we've had a lot of unhappiness. I've been married 53 years now.
53? Yeah, we're very happy together. Now you are.
But it took us a lot of work, a lot of commitment.

Speaker 2 But here's what I want to say.

Speaker 2 There's two ways you can tell if a marriage is unhappy. One is you can ask the parents.
The other is you can measure the cortisol level of the children. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 Because the parents' stresses affect the physiology of the child. Oh, man, my cortisol must have been off the charts.
But I was

Speaker 2 all of us children, yeah. It probably would have been.
And

Speaker 2 so in this society,

Speaker 2 and this is not the fault of individual parents, like

Speaker 2 it begins in the uterus, actually. Already stresses on the pregnant woman will affect the physiology of the child.
Really? Yeah, oh yeah. No.

Speaker 2 In this society, so many pregnant women are so stressed.

Speaker 2 In the States particularly... I'm talking about more emotional stress because there's physical stress of like the body's expanding and growing and aches and pains, but the emotional stress.

Speaker 2 I mean the emotional stress of having to

Speaker 2 come on the job or being in a difficult relationship.

Speaker 2 In one of the chapters in the book, I talk about

Speaker 2 it begins with the diary of my wife who was writing it when she was pregnant with one of our children about how unhappy she was.

Speaker 2 was and she's talking to the infant saying please don't take this stress personally.

Speaker 2 She wrote that and I quoted it in the myth of normal and she knew what I didn't know and no she was unhappy because of our relationship. She was unhappy because of the relationship.

Speaker 2 She was unhappy because of what was going on in her relationship with me, being a workaholic doctor.

Speaker 2 Not being there, not being available emotionally. Exactly.
Exactly. And even blaming her, you know, for how I was feeling.

Speaker 2 Wow. So she's talking to this infant inside her and that's how I opened one of the chapters.
So already in the uterus these stresses start happening. A lot of evidence for that scientifically.

Speaker 2 Brain scans, bloods work, all kinds of stuff. Then there's labor, which in our society is very often mechanical and emotionally very difficult.

Speaker 2 And in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth.

Speaker 2 Now, that infant is meant to be with the mother for at least nine months, I would say years, but at least least nine months that infant is abandoned at two weeks that's how they experience it

Speaker 2 even if they're looked after by

Speaker 2 someone someone else but the mother the infant needs the mother's body yeah that was my mom was working pretty probably pretty fast after yeah each one of us were born you know had to go back to work and yeah and I'm not blaming the women right they have no choice yes I'm saying but this society puts so stresses on women, it then doesn't support them to the pregnancy, then it puts a lot of...

Speaker 2 And not only that, we didn't grow up in individual

Speaker 2 isolated nuclear families, did we?

Speaker 2 We evolved in small band hunter-gatherer groups where people supported each other, where children were with adults all day, where adults collaborated, they had to, otherwise they wouldn't have survived.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 that's where our nature actually evolves. So when you get this society which tells you that people are by nature selfish and aggressive and competitive, which isolates mothers

Speaker 2 in separate homes, where the community is more and more, you know, there's lots of work done by sociologists and others in the States about how communities are breaking down.

Speaker 2 There was that book, Bullying Alone, some years ago, 20 years ago now, about the breakdown of community, so that people are not getting support. And that means they're stressed.

Speaker 2 And the mothers are doing it all on their own. Exactly.
Right. And they're also expecting the husband to, you know, work and also be at home as opposed to reaching out to peers or family or friends.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So it's a very unnatural culture and no wonder so many kids are getting diagnosed.

Speaker 2 And with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder or depression, you know, there's an article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago, also in the New York Times, I think,

Speaker 2 about the rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides in the U.S.

Speaker 2 It's mysterious. It's not mysterious.
These kids are no longer having their developmental needs met. They feel alone and desperate and scared.

Speaker 2 And the drug use is on the rise and addiction. That's right.
So

Speaker 2 there's nothing mysterious about it if you look at the cultural setting. It's only mysterious if we think we're dealing with isolated mental health issues or isolated physiological issues.

Speaker 2 But when we we see the connections? Nothing mysterious.

Speaker 2 So, what are the main, I guess,

Speaker 2 mental health?

Speaker 2 Are they diseases or are they not considered a disease? Like depression, ABD, ADHD? What are the main mental health symptoms out in the world right now, could you say?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 depression and anxiety are fast growing and they're major challenges. More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD.

Speaker 2 More and more kids are being diagnosed with something called oppositional defiant disorder, which

Speaker 2 opposition.

Speaker 2 That's when the kid is

Speaker 2 defiant and oppositional

Speaker 2 and goes against adult values and adult expectations.

Speaker 2 But we think there's something wrong with the kid. Instead of looking at the context of what makes the kid diagnosis.
The environment.

Speaker 2 No. Are these diseases?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you can talk about them as diseases to some degree, and certainly, you know, I've had depression and I've taken medication for it in my 40s and it really made a difference for me.

Speaker 2 You might call it a disease, but actually

Speaker 2 that's a shallow way of looking at it. Because actually,

Speaker 2 what does it go back to? It goes back to being

Speaker 2 a one-year-old infant or being a three-month-old infant.

Speaker 2 In the book The Myth of Normal, the first chapter has a painting in it. The painting is by my wife based on a photograph of me and my mother.

Speaker 2 This is Budapest, Hungary, 1944, and I'm three months of age. And my mother in a photograph is wearing a yellow star that Jews had to wear.

Speaker 2 My father was away in forced labor, and within two months, her parents would be killed in Auschwitz.

Speaker 2 That was my first year of life. Oh my gosh.
And the look look in my face is full of terror. I was absorbing my mother's fear and my mother's anxiety.

Speaker 2 Because she had terror in her face and you're mimicking and

Speaker 2 her body.

Speaker 2 And you're connected to her

Speaker 2 bleeding 10 times a day. Exactly.
And you're feeling the stress. Exactly.
There's probably now no calm in her. There's no calm there.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 she's already so stressed and she's just trying to make sure that we survive. She's not there to really receive my feelings.

Speaker 2 And then when I'm a year old, or 11 months old, she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life.

Speaker 2 Because she didn't think where we were staying, I would survive for a day, and probably I wouldn't have. Wow.
So I didn't see her for six weeks, five or six weeks.

Speaker 2 And you're one? I was one then, yeah. Oh, my gosh.
And

Speaker 2 now.

Speaker 2 What could I do as a one-year-old? I could do two things

Speaker 2 as an infant going through all that. First of all, how do I I deal with all that stress? I tune out.

Speaker 2 I tune out, I become absent-minded

Speaker 2 as an adaptive mechanism. It's a coping mechanism.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 55 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by tuning out. Is it a disease? The heck, it's a disease.
It started as a coping mechanism. I'm also diagnosed with depression.
Why?

Speaker 2 Because in that environment, I had to push my feelings down in order not to burden my mother who was already burdened enough. Create more peace and more.

Speaker 2 So I took that down. So I pushed on my feelings.
I depressed my feelings. Then I have this depression.
So are the diseases?

Speaker 2 Well, you can talk about them that way, but I say they began as coping mechanisms.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'll tell you another story. I'm 78 now, so six, seven years ago.

Speaker 2 I'm in San Francisco with a therapist. And I've taken mushrooms.

Speaker 2 She works with mushrooms. And

Speaker 2 I've worked with psychedelics and it's one of the things I write about.

Speaker 2 But this time I'm the patient, I'm the client.

Speaker 2 And I'm lying there on the mat under the influence of the psilocybin.

Speaker 2 And I know exactly who I am. I'm 71 years old.
I'm a medical doctor, I'm a writer, I'm a speaker, I'm married to such, you know, my wife Ray.

Speaker 2 This is a therapist, so I'm not like hallucinating. I know exactly where I am, but at the same time,

Speaker 2 I'm experiencing myself as a one-year-old infant. Oh my goodness.
And this therapist in my mom is my mom.

Speaker 2 And I start crying and I say, I'm so sorry I've made your life so difficult. Wow.
That's my one-year-old self. All of a sudden, under the influence, speaking up.

Speaker 2 I took it on that early that I'm responsible. Now you talked about, you

Speaker 2 know, in our conversation before, you told me about how you were in this relationship and

Speaker 2 you couldn't leave it even long after you realized it wasn't right for you because you took on the responsibility of how the other person would feel if you would quote let them down I'm telling you that's your one-year-old speaking that you took responsibility for the suffering of your parents

Speaker 2 and and and how you you mustn't let anybody down because it's your responsibility we take this stuff on so early without without words actually

Speaker 2 They just become ingrained and then

Speaker 2 we live our lives out of it until something happens as it did for you. Your body rebelled.
You have a breakdown or something happens, right?

Speaker 2 And you're like, you either keep breaking down or you wakes you up and say, okay, why is this happening?

Speaker 2 What is off? What is out of alignment? What is, you know, where am I out of integrity, whatever it might be. Exactly.
And

Speaker 2 I feel

Speaker 2 the challenge is. I was like, I want to end this suffering.
You know, I've repeated this pattern many times. I'm sick and tired of the suffering.
I'll do whatever.

Speaker 2 You know, know i think when you for me i was like i've felt enough of this i don't want it anymore

Speaker 2 but it took so much courage to face these things for me and i know other people have deeper traumas or different traumas and it's it just seems so challenging

Speaker 2 i would not compare your trauma to anybody else's well we all have our unique traumas right different experiences that we face

Speaker 2 Why is it so challenging for people to face it and start addressing it? I was telling you, you know, I've been doing pretty intensive therapy for about a year and a half now, every two weeks.

Speaker 2 Not because I feel like something's wrong with me anymore, I'm stressed more, but because I want to maintain a level of peace. Yeah.
And I want to continue to maintain peace. Good for you.

Speaker 2 So once I realized and started healing, I didn't say, I'm good.

Speaker 2 I was like, I want to go to the next level of peace,

Speaker 2 love. you know, an environment of beauty inside of my emotions.

Speaker 2 But why is it so hard for so many people to face face it and actually speak the shame, guilt, insecurity, you know, imperfection about them? Well, I think in your own work you've touched upon very

Speaker 2 accurately on why it's so difficult. For one thing,

Speaker 2 if you just

Speaker 2 the words that you just use, peace and love and connection, if you had played that to your 20-year-old self, how would he have responded?

Speaker 2 He'd been like, suck it up, or he'd been like, what are you talking about? You're fine. Like, yeah, don't be a little wuss.
Or, you know, just work harder. You know, yeah.

Speaker 2 But where would that have come from?

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Speaker 2 I mean, just my entire conditioning growing up from sports and

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 so there's that. So the house, you know, so that's one of the the factors is the conditioning in this culture okay

Speaker 2 i i also say it would have come from intense fear oh because if you actually it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself it's terrifying yeah it's terrifying so there's intense fear

Speaker 2 so there's the conditioning as you say then there's the the fear it really is fear painful you know you know nobody wants to have pain you know

Speaker 2 um but that's called growing pains

Speaker 2 And the third factor is we all develop this personality. Now, the personality, we think that's us, but it's not us.
Right. The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods

Speaker 2 along with some genuine traits. So the personality is kind of an amalgam of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities.
Yeah, some good stuff, but then some also coping. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I remember I used to be like, I was a fun-loving guy. I was like a kind, generous, but but then when there was a trigger, it was like I was angry and

Speaker 2 defensive and guarded and things like that. Or you talk about the various masks, the sexual mask or the

Speaker 2 material mask,

Speaker 2 the aggressive mask.

Speaker 2 When I started reading your chapter on the

Speaker 2 sexual mask, You wrote about some guy whose name I forget, but who's sort of the champion picking up women. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for one split second.

Speaker 2 But what's that? It's having to prove to himself that he's lovable.

Speaker 2 Where does that come from?

Speaker 2 But we identify with it.

Speaker 2 So we think we're the personality. I'm this sexually attractive guy, or I'm this aggressive guy, I'm this material guy who's going to make it in the world, you know?

Speaker 2 And so we think that we are a personality. So it comes from, I'd say, three sources.
One is...

Speaker 2 the conditioning, the other is the fear for the pain, and thirdly, the identification with the personality. We think that's who we are.
And we don't know who we'd be without it.

Speaker 2 All of which is all based on trauma.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's the identity, you know, building this identity that, you know, and I talk about how the identity supported you to accomplishing certain things or protecting you from certain things by having this identity.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But it's also not serving us to hold on to that identity if we want the next level of peace and freedom.
Exactly. So it's, but it's so hard to kill an identity.

Speaker 2 It's like you've had this thing for decades maybe and you've got to let go of this thing. Yeah, but you see I wouldn't even talk about killing.
I mean

Speaker 2 in my healing chapters of this book I talk about let's make friends with it.

Speaker 2 Like for example

Speaker 2 I have to by the way I have to be honest. I said that I wouldn't be in this guy's shoes for a minute.
That's not true. Part of me was envying him.
Right.

Speaker 2 You know, even here I'm 78 and married 53 years, but I read about this guy who slept with all these women. Why couldn't I be that guy?

Speaker 2 I don't want to go there and I wouldn't. I've long ago chosen not to.

Speaker 2 But there's still something that...

Speaker 2 Who doesn't want to be wanted that much? Right.

Speaker 2 Something with the ego or the desire, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 but if we didn't kill those parts, but made friends with them,

Speaker 2 if somebody came to me

Speaker 2 with that kind of pattern of I'm that sexual guy,

Speaker 2 but they realize that it's not they might feel high for a moment like any addict will it's not fulfilling it's not fulfilling I wouldn't say kill that part of you I'd say let's make friends with it let's find out what it's really trying to do for you what it's trying to do for you it's trying to make you feel wanted making you feel valuable making feel desirable

Speaker 2 making you feel loved temporarily, making you feel powerful.

Speaker 2 What happened to you that you don't feel lovable, that you don't feel desirable, that you don't feel powerful?

Speaker 2 You know, in other words, it's not a matter of getting rid of these parts or these aspects of ourselves. It's a question of actually getting to know them.
And they all began as coping mechanisms.

Speaker 2 That man that you describe in your book, I guarantee, is a highly traumatized human being.

Speaker 2 So when we start to ask ourselves this question that you're asking, is what happened to you? Or when, you know, when did you feel not powerful or not lovable or not wanted?

Speaker 2 And let's say we're able to, someone watching or listening is able to assess themselves and actually be present,

Speaker 2 really reflect on the painful moments of the past, which a lot of people aren't even willing to talk about it to themselves, right? That's right.

Speaker 2 For 25 years, I had a memory of being sexually abused and thought about it almost every day, like for a moment.

Speaker 2 You know, it would come, you know, at least weekly, maybe not every day, but it was like a memory. Yeah, that's there.
You know, but I never told anyone for 25 years because it was so shameful. and

Speaker 2 I didn't want to be, you know, made fun of or all these things.

Speaker 2 And so if someone's able to self-assess and say, okay, I had this pain, this trauma, I felt not powerful or whatever it might be.

Speaker 2 What's the next step for them once they start to journal about it and be aware of it? And they're like, I really want to heal.

Speaker 2 What would be that next step in the process?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, it's not that I can prescribe, but sure, but it should be for everybody and there's many different ways of of working. But one of the things I would address, first of all, is the shame.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 one of the impacts of trauma is shame.

Speaker 2 Because children are

Speaker 2 narcissists by nature. When I say narcissists, I don't mean in the pathological negative sense.
I mean they think it's all about them.

Speaker 2 The world just revolves around me. Exactly.
So if bad things are happening to me, it must be a bad person.

Speaker 2 You know.

Speaker 2 Number one.

Speaker 2 Number two,

Speaker 2 I didn't fight back.

Speaker 2 I couldn't defend myself.

Speaker 2 And so that makes me weak,

Speaker 2 so I'm ashamed of that.

Speaker 2 Now, actually,

Speaker 2 when you look at it, not fighting back is nature's coping mechanism.

Speaker 2 Part of your nervous system just freezes. Because if you fought back, what would happen?

Speaker 2 It just depends what age you are.

Speaker 2 No, but as a young child.

Speaker 2 If you fight back on.

Speaker 2 Against the sexual abuser. Oh, right.
What would happen to you? Who knows? I mean, it could have been even worse.

Speaker 2 And were you in a position to run? No. No, no.

Speaker 2 So the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated.

Speaker 2 It's protecting yourself. You're protecting yourself.
And the part of the nervous system that freezes you, just be still and you get through this. Wait till it passes.
Yeah. That takes over.

Speaker 2 So it's actually what you're ashamed about is actually the brilliance of your nervous system that protected you.

Speaker 2 But you're beating yourself up in retrospect saying, I should have ran, I should have fought back, I should have done this. Exactly.
That's the first point. Man.
The second point is,

Speaker 2 if I can ask you, how old were you when this happened to you? Five. And how long did it go on for?

Speaker 2 It's probably 10, 15 minutes, yeah. No, but it was only one time? One time.
Okay, who did you speak to about it? No one. Okay, now

Speaker 2 you don't have kids yet. No.
But if you did have a child five years old, and this happened to, who would you want them to speak to?

Speaker 2 Me. Yeah.
Now, if you found out that this happened to your child and your child never told you, how would you explain that?

Speaker 2 How would I explain it to... How would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened?

Speaker 2 I would explain it by saying it's something I'm not doing. I'm not creating a safe environment to allow this child to speak up.
And that was your primary trauma. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So the sexual abuse is the secondary trauma. As a matter of fact, the abuser, like you were bullied in school, you said,

Speaker 2 and the bullies can always sense the vulnerability. The bullies have like a laser.
The weakness in you. They have a laser like...

Speaker 2 You're an insecure, weak person, yeah. Which, by the way, speaks to their own trauma.
Right.

Speaker 2 But they have a laser, like,

Speaker 2 like the physicians who abuse their patients, the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers they see a weakness they they laser like they sense it and that's who they pick on and the bullies do the same thing now that weakness

Speaker 2 as we call it comes from not having the solid support and protection and confidence and security in your family of origin

Speaker 2 so that's the primary trauma that's that's what that's the first thing that happens Yeah, I mean

Speaker 2 the case for sure. So to answer your question, if somebody comes to me with those issues,

Speaker 2 well, first of all, if somebody realizes those things, I'd say

Speaker 2 don't try and do this on your own.

Speaker 2 It's so hard. Talk to somebody.
It's so hard. Yeah.
Well, look,

Speaker 2 people with addictions, at least they have the 12-step groups where they can actually talk about it and people ideally will not judge them.

Speaker 2 It's a safe space to see a space. Or you might have friends.
Or you might reach out to a professional.

Speaker 2 Or you might have an intimate partner that relationship is close enough where you can actually share this you know but

Speaker 2 you have to um bring it out of you by the way um

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 that this reminds me uh this is one of the ancient gospels written around the same time as the other gospels is the gospel of thomas in which jesus says that what you shall bring out of you will save you.

Speaker 2 And what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you. He says something like that.
Right, right. He was a supreme psychologist.
Wow.

Speaker 2 And so you got to bring it out. Yeah, what you suppress becomes more depressed, right? It's like.
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So it's got to start with that somewhere.
You've got to bring it out.

Speaker 2 And if someone has a

Speaker 2 what if they say, well, it wasn't that big of a deal.

Speaker 2 This thing that happened back in the day, I was a kid, and it only happened a few times, whether it's sexual abuse or someone screaming at you or you were neglected or put in the corner.

Speaker 2 I hear that all the time. It wasn't that big of a deal.
I hear that all the time. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I shouldn't be that concerned about it. It was five, who cares? You know, it was like

Speaker 2 what do we

Speaker 2 okay? Then that's a very simple way to answer that.

Speaker 2 But why are we so messed up right now? No, no, no, no, no, not at all.

Speaker 2 If a five-year-old kid came to you and you were the uncle,

Speaker 2 Uncle Louis,

Speaker 2 this guy

Speaker 2 did such and such to me,

Speaker 2 and I'm really scared and hurt.

Speaker 2 Would you say to them, oh, no big deal? No.

Speaker 2 Think of all the other kids that worse things have happened to. Would you say that? Why wouldn't you say that?

Speaker 2 Because I'd want to be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen and loved. And what would be the impact if you did say that?

Speaker 2 I feel like it'd probably affect him for a long time if that was a pattern of

Speaker 2 that was the response that he got. But you see, see, that's what you're saying to yourself.
Right. When you say that it's no big deal,

Speaker 2 you're saying to the five-year-old that was hurt, it doesn't matter. In other words, there's no self-compassion there.
Right.

Speaker 2 What you would never say to anybody else, you're saying to yourself. And one of the impacts of trauma is lack of self-compassion.

Speaker 2 And again,

Speaker 2 if I may mention my book, The Myth of Normal, I talk about that, about how this idea of self-compassion. And I see it it all the time.

Speaker 2 And so when somebody says to me, no big deal, you know, I say, okay, take any other child in your position, plug them into that situation and tell them it's no big deal. And of course, I wouldn't.

Speaker 2 But people do. They do say these things to their kids or to their

Speaker 2 nephews or nieces. They're saying like, ah, you'll be all right, you know.

Speaker 2 And I think it's because they don't have the emotional

Speaker 2 courage to handle the wide range of emotions because they probably suppress the emotions themselves.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's the whole point. Right.
Is that

Speaker 2 they're not comfortable with the child's pain. When they're crying, they're like, I can't handle it.
Right. I can't handle it.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, my dad used to be like, stop crying.

Speaker 2 You know, just stop.

Speaker 2 There was no like hugging and like, he had a lot of love and affection in other ways, but he couldn't handle the crying and the

Speaker 2 emotions. Well, one of the

Speaker 2 In the book I talk about the essential needs of children, and one of them is that they're given the freedom to feel all their emotions, particularly sadness and grief and pain, also joy and everything else.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this, but what do you know about your dad's childhood? Oh man, yeah, it was messed up too. Yeah.
Yeah. So this goes on from generations.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So and I feel like a lot of people listening or watching this can relate and say, you know,

Speaker 2 I don't think anyone's like, I had the perfect parents, right?

Speaker 2 There's some that maybe said, man, I had a great childhood and my parents did amazing, but I would say probably a majority of people had something

Speaker 2 where they didn't feel emotionally seen or accepted by their parents, or some type of challenge.

Speaker 2 And they probably would all say, well, yeah, their parents, you know, had struggle from the war or from this or from the depression, and their parents suffered. And it was all about survival.

Speaker 2 It wasn't about thriving. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So how do we break, I guess, the generational trauma

Speaker 2 and not let it pass down to our children? So not being seen is a major source of trauma.

Speaker 2 Just not being seen in general. Just not being seen for who you are.

Speaker 2 Not being accepted for yourself.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Expected to be different than who you actually are.

Speaker 2 It's a major trauma for people in society, and it's very common.

Speaker 2 And how does someone... who maybe is living in a stressed environment, whether it be their home or their city or their culture, culture, political, you know, whatever it might be,

Speaker 2 they are more suppressed than others.

Speaker 2 How can they support themselves to getting out of the stressed environment so that they can be more of a baseline to have the ability to thrive and flourish emotionally?

Speaker 2 You know, something as a privileged

Speaker 2 Caucasian-identified male, with

Speaker 2 economic freedom, and

Speaker 2 I'm not in a position to say to somebody

Speaker 2 these are larger political questions these people

Speaker 2 society has to change and people have to work to change society

Speaker 2 it's a question of at some point it becomes a question of advocacy and activism and and and

Speaker 2 joining with others you know

Speaker 2 I don't want to preach to somebody else

Speaker 2 about that.

Speaker 2 My job is to what extent is to support and help, but not to provide some kind of but if society, let's say society won't change for a period of time for these individuals, for certain individuals who are feeling over stress,

Speaker 2 what can they do as an individual?

Speaker 2 Whether they get support externally or not, what could they start to do? Anything else besides, I mean, we've covered a lot that they can start to do, and they can get your book, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 Well, again, you know,

Speaker 2 I'm not sure I can fully answer that, but I can give examples.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the New Yorker a couple of years ago, within the last two or three years, had an article about an American black man who was jailed for decades and kept in solitary confinement

Speaker 2 for decades.

Speaker 2 Was this Shaka Singhor? I don't

Speaker 2 remember the name. It could be.
I may read this guy who was in solitary confinement for decades, but... Yeah, well, maybe the same man.

Speaker 2 Wrote a best-selling book and was on Oprah, and and it might have been the same guy but go ahead all right well my point is that

Speaker 2 fair enough my point is that it didn't that he wasn't destroyed by it right he started to heal in the prison in he found the inner strength somehow so that

Speaker 2 it's not for me to tell I don't know if I could stand it for one day and never mind for four decades or three decades

Speaker 2 but but

Speaker 2 That just shows you that the strength, the capacity to heal and to hold on to oneself and to find oneself is actually inherent in all of us.

Speaker 2 Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

Speaker 2 You don't make it easy on a guy, do you? I gotta challenge you.

Speaker 2 It's a willingness to find your best qualities and to express them in the world. That's what I see as greatness.

Speaker 2 I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

Speaker 2 Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links.

Speaker 2 And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2 Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review.

Speaker 2 I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. forward.

Speaker 2 And I want to remind you of no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter and now it's time to go out there and do something

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