E538 Dr. Gabor Maté

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Today's guest is a physician and an author. His works explore such topics like stress, trauma, addiction, developmental psychology, and more.
He has a new book called the Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing

in a Toxic Culture. I'm grateful today to spend time with Dr.
Gabor Mate. I'll sit and tell you my stories Shine on me And I will find a song I'll be singing I'll be singing I saw you interview with Donald Trump.

Oh, you did?

And I was actually quite struck. I saw the segment on his brother's alcoholism.
Yeah. And I found him unusually without bombast and almost tender and very uh vulnerable and and just just kind of humble you know which is not how usually he comes across yeah yeah i yeah i was trying to just talk to him about something that felt pretty normal you know yeah but he's also expressed interest in you and and your brother and yeah i thought it was sweet of him.
Yeah, yeah. As sweet as he could be.
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think I...
Well, look, when you read further in the book, I actually talk about him. Really? His childhood trauma, yeah.
Oh, you do? Him and Hillary Clinton's both. Oh, wow, I didn't know that.
Yeah. Oh, that's cool.
I'm looking forward to that. Yeah.
Yeah, I just, yeah, it's like, especially like just as a regular person in the world, you kind of, you want to try to get a feel for somebody. I use a poster boy for trauma.
Yeah. In my view.
Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot, if there's a lot of it there.
I mean, his brother had addiction and like, and even him, I think trying to learn about addiction, I wish I could, I wish I would have stayed in that conversation a little bit more with Donald and, and tried to share some thoughts and things that I had not thoughts, but a little bit more explanation about addiction from my own perspective. Yeah.
Well, that would have been an interesting conversation. Yeah.
Just to let him know that it wasn't something his brother, like it wasn't like his brother just couldn't stop drinking.

No.

You know,

that he had other things inside of him that prevented him from doing that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I really wish that if I could go back,

but the,

one of the things that's been tough for me is just,

you get into certain conversations and I'm still learning how to be in

conversations sometimes.

So sometimes it's,

um,

you know,

you're learning,

you know,

you're learning on the stove. We're always learning.
Yeah. Yeah, we're always learning.
Gabor, that's how you say it? Gabor. Gabor.
Yeah. Theo, nice to meet you today, Mr.
Mate, and thanks for coming. Thank you, my pleasure.
Yep, and thanks for sharing this book, man. This is your book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and healing in a toxic culture yeah um you believe that we are kind of a sick culture what makes you believe that well or like what proof do you have of that well so 70 of american adults run at least on, 70%.
40% are on two medications or more. The number of children being diagnosed with all manner of dysfunctions, disorders, mental health challenges like ADHD, self-cutting, addictions, anxiety, depression, childhood suicide keeps going up.
In the United States, annually, twice as many people die of overdoses as died in the Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghan wars put together. This is every year.
Wow. The life expectancy, particularly of white men, has gone down due to suicide and drug overdoses.
I mean, I could go, the number of autoimmune, I could go on on it forever, but just statistically, there's more and more evidence of illness and dysfunction. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the overdose and alone is that that's, that that's even just become a common thing in our society is it's heartbreaking for so many, uh, it's heartbreaking for so many and so many people's families, just the residual effect of suicide or overdose.
It's like, we don't even think about those numbers don't even take into the ripple effect of, um, of people losing a loved one, i mean the families that are being devastated and um i mean i used to work with what is north america's most concentrated area of drug use in vancouver british columbia and i know you were there a month ago yeah we went down on catchings is that right the hastings hastings yeah we went down on hastings just to take a drive and see. Well, so that's where I used to work.
Wow. For 12 years as a physician, and everybody down there was severely traumatized in childhood, and their addictions were all a response to immense emotional pain that they didn't know how else to handle.
Not to mention the racial aspect, like 30% of my clients were indigenous, whereas they only make up 5% of the Canadian population. So the more you suffer, either socially or individually, the more likely you are to escape in the soothing and the relief that drugs or other addictions offer.
So if you look at American society, you really got to be asking, why are so many people having to escape from reality? Yeah. And we're going to get into good stuff.
I have a good plan today. I'm prepared some stuff.
I have some questions that I even wrote down that are on cards, just because I want to make sure that we get the best information that we can for our guests today. I think it's really important.
One of the things that you talk about in the book that's causing a lot of sickness is trauma. Yeah.
And then more specifically, unprocessed trauma. Yeah.
Help me define those a little bit for our audience. Sure.
So trauma is one of these words that everybody throws around. Yeah, it's a buzzword.
Yeah. So let's just define it.
So trauma literally comes from the Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a wound, whether it's a physical wound or psychological wound.
In this case, we're talking about emotional wounds that haven't healed. So trauma is an unhealed wound that you sustain in childhood, but then it stays with you and it it directly causes inflammation in the body, it affects all your genes function, all your chromosomes function, it stresses your organs, it creates all kinds of physiological problems.
On an emotional level, it instills a lot of pain in you that you try to escape from. And one of the ways you try to escape, for example, is through drug use or to other kinds of addictions, or through self-cutting or bulimia or any pornography or whatever.
It also makes you suppress, disconnects you from your own emotions because when a child is being traumatized, it's too painful to connect to themselves. So they disconnect.
And that disconnect then causes all kinds of problems in terms of illness, mental and physical. So the impacts of trauma are vast and quite under-recognized.
Indeed. And you talk about trauma also as not being seen and known.
Yeah, so here we have to understand what are the needs of the human child. So everybody understands that the child needs to be physically cared for, cleaned up, fed, and sheltered, and so on.
Children, according to evolution, also have emotional needs that they're born with. One of them is being just accepted and valued for exactly who they are and being seen rather than being forced to be something that the parents want them to be.
And a lot of parents in this society, not because they don't love their kids, but because they're so stressed, have just a hard time seeing their kids. I had trouble seeing my kids wow and that had an impact on them and not because i wasn't devoted because i didn't love them just because because of my own trauma i couldn't even see myself oh man i can relate so much to what i can relate so much to that yeah it like, it's funny, because I work as a comedian,

and I grew up in kind of a traumatic home.

My mom was very busy.

She had four children,

and yeah, I feel like she never looked at me.

I feel like she never kind of put her hands on me.

I feel like she just,

and she didn't know how, I guess.

It's okay.

Yeah, I just always felt like I wasn't seen and how do you and how do you suppose that affected you well i ended up being becoming a comedian i felt like i started i had to find some way to be seen i had to do something you know to get someone to see me because i needed to survive you know i needed to feel alive you know you know it's You know, it's funny about comedians. May I say something about them? Yeah.
I looked at the back of a number of comedians. What you're talking about is like a common theme.
I looked at Robin Williams, who's this brilliant, brilliant comic. And one of the reasons he developed his humor was to make his mother laugh as a way of having his mother pay attention to him.
Gilda Radner, who died of a brain cancer, the same thing. Wow.
So that they had the innate talent, but then they used that talent to be seen and valued where they should have been valued with or without talent. No matter what.
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, a few years ago, I thought it's like, I'm kind of a late bloomer.
Like I only realized that like I go to recovery meetings and stuff like that. I'm in AA.
And I only realized a few years ago, it started to hit me like, did I even want to be a comedian? or did I just at some early point develop having to get attention yeah because I need you know and then so if that's the case then who did I really want it what you know who would what would I have been yeah if I didn't do that and not saying that not saying that I'm not grateful and I don't love being a comedian. It's been, it's been a blessing, but, but it's like, if I created that, okay, I have to be this thing to, for you to see me, then who created that? You know, like who, like, was there a different me that was supposed to be there, but then I created this new me? That's the dilemma for so many of us, is that as a result of childhood wounding, we have to make ourselves into something that the world will accept and value.
Like, look, in my case, I love having been a physician, and that's my calling, but the big part of it wasn't just that I wanted to help humanity or heal people, it's also I needed to be important. Now why did I need to be important? Because as an infant I got the message that I wasn't.
And so now then, and that creates a kind of an addiction, because you have to keep proving to yourself how important you are and how valuable you are. But nobody should have to prove how valuable they are.
That just our birthright that we exist we have the right to be here yeah that god chose us or that the energies of the world chose us and said i'm going to put you here like a with a fine pen i'm going to put you in the world yeah and and i did it on purpose and and the world it was built to take care of you exactly and to nurture you and to make you feel welcome as you are. And if you actually look at, and this has been studied quite extensively, how indigenous people or tribal peoples close to the land rear their kids, that's exactly how they rear their kids.
Like they give their children a deep sense of acceptance. They hold them, they carry them everywhere.
Oh, yeah. All the paintings you see of Native Americans, they all, somebody's got a kid on them.
They got them in a knapsack. They got them.
They got them. And they tend not to hit their kids.
Yeah. You know? Yeah, you've never seen a movie about a Native American beating his children, I don't think.
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so what you're describing is actually how we evolved.
And part of the toxicity, in my view, of our culture is we've gone so far away from our nature when it comes to how we rear children. And again, not because of lack of parental devotion, but because of so much parental stress.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think that was it.
My mom couldn't see us because she had other things she had to see first yeah and you know and uh yeah and not just me but so many people it's like yeah we've created a society or our society has created a way of life where um now it's like both parents work in so many cases so yeah and that alone just feels like it just shouldn't be that way it's like well if you look at throughout evolution through millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution children were always with their parents that's how nature designed it now if that's not possible in today's society at least they may we have to compensate for it. But we've forgotten that children need that.
So now when they send it to daycares and schools, it's all about behavior and it's all about fitting in, not about accepting the child and nurturing the child innate sense of who they are. So we all end up disconnected from ourselves.
And then we get to a certain stage in life and wondering whose life am I leading anyway? Yeah. Wow.
Yeah, and it's funny you say like fitting in. It's like, yeah, like your child's not fitting in because it's two puzzle pieces or the parents, you know, or the family.
That's not to say it shouldn't be able to spend time with other children and

being in that, that our schools are bad or anything,

but it's the fact that they need to fit in there first.

And then I think it's probably easier for children to fit in,

in other places in the world.

But that's, but the fitting in happens naturally when you're,

when you're accepted, you know, listen, the schools,

Thank you. in the world.
But the fitting in happens naturally when you're accepted.

Listen, the schools,

I'll tell you something.

I'm talking science here.

One of the essential needs of all mammals is play.

In our brain,

there's circuitry for play.

You can see it.

Dolphins play,

little elephants play, bear cubs, lion cubs, puppies, kittens, they all play. Why? Play is essential for brain development.
It's far more important than academic learning. So then in schools, there ought to be a lot more play, a lot more freedom for the kids to be themselves, a lot more freedom to move around.
And then those kids will be naturally curious and interested in learning. But here we try to put the cart before the horse.
We try and stuff them full of knowledge, skills, and behavior or control, rather than again promoting the conditions for healthy brain development. So the schools actually, they intend well, but they really don't get it when it comes to what do children actually need? Well, I think it's just an, and that's just part of it's like our whole society is, it's, you know, I wonder sometimes where we, did we go completely off the rails in a direction and, or a series of directions, you know, that have kind of kind of put us where we are.
Um, I want to get this statement right, right here. Sure.
Um, why is a trauma event different from other stressful events? Like what makes it a trauma? Like some events could be traumatic for some people and the same event, not traumatic for others. What exactly is it about the mind, body, soul that makes the event traumatic? Or like, what is the mechanism? Right.
Great question. So every traumatic event is stressful, but not every stressful event is traumatic.
So, you invite me on your show, and for some reason I don't show up. And had this studio arranged that might stress you but it doesn't traumatize you right it doesn't leave you with a permanent wound so it's traumatic if it leaves you with a wound and if that wound leaves you more constricted and more afraid and more suspicious and less comfortable with yourself more more hostile to other people, less comfortable in the world, then it's traumatic.
Now, not every stressful event will have that effect, but if it does, then it's traumatic. If it makes a wound.
If it makes a wound, that's what makes it traumatic. Because a wound is sensitive.
Even if you think of a wound, and if it's not healed properly yeah then it's always a problem well there's two yeah and and and there's two ways ways a wound can show up one is just an open wound and if you touch it oh so i have certain emotional wounds and well into my 70s or even i'm 80 now, you know.

Say my little-

Oh, you look great.

Well, thanks.

It's all the Botox.

Yeah.

And the adrenaline.

No, it's, and in my 55 year old marriage with my wife,

she might say something or react in some way

that touches an old wound,

and all of a sudden I'm not this 80 year old guy'm this one-year-old kid responding, you know, because that wound is sort of, I'm not giving an excuse here. I'm just saying that that's the challenge, you know.
So in one sense, a wound is, a trauma is an open wound that you touch it, ow. That's the one thing.
But then the other thing that happens to wounds is they scar over. Now scar tissue is thick, it's hard, it doesn't grow, it has no nerve-inning, so it's insensitive.
So we get hardened. And that- So you can either get extremely sensitive or very hardened? Or both.
Or both. Depending on, you know, and when you talk about hardened criminals, guess what hardened them? Is that they were so wounded in childhood.
Again, I'm not making excuses. I'm just telling you what the science shows.
Yeah. And so then the question is then how do we treat each other in a society where so many of us carry wounds? Let's talk a little bit about unprocessed trauma.
So you talk about emotional isolation as being something that really negatively nurtures unprocessed trauma. So once you're hurt as a child, you tend not to trust other people.
So you could be in the middle of a crowd and be laughing and interacting, but still feel quite alone emotionally. Maybe you've had that feeling.
Oh yeah. And that emotional isolation itself then has effects on your body and on your mind.
So the people who are lonely, and the US Surgeon General, Dr. Admiral Vivek Murthy, just issued a paper on loneliness in the United States.
And loneliness, and there's an epidemic of loneliness. People are describing us as lonely in much higher numbers as they did 20, 40 years ago.
Now, loneliness is as much of a risk factor for physiological illness as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Really? Yeah, so loneliness is both a manifestation of trauma and a cause of tremendous stress, which then undermines physiological and mental health.
Okay, say that to me one more time, so? So loneliness is both an outcome of trauma. So it's an outcome of trauma.
So something traumatic happened, it wasn't processed properly, and then now you will feel lonely. You will feel lonely, you will isolate, because look, if I am always being a nice guy, so that you will like me, but inside I'm feeling all these emotions that I'm not sharing with you, that's pretty lonely.
Even though you might like me because I'm showing you this nice side of myself. Right, that's not really me.
That's not me. There was a study done in Australia.
Wow. I used to work in palliative care as a doctor looking after dying people.
In Australia, there was a palliative care nurse who wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of Dying People. These are people that were dying before that time, like I used to look after, of cancer or chronic neurological illness.
You know what the top regret of dying people was? That they didn't have the courage to be themselves. And the third top regret was that they didn't have the courage to express their emotions.
They pretended to be happy when they were not and so on. So the question for the rest of us is do we wanna wait till some terminal illness wakes us up? Or should we just confront the fact that in so many ways, we're afraid to be authentic because we're so afraid of being rejected.
And as children, we didn't have much choice. As adults, can we develop that freedom to be ourselves? Wow.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's amazing what your feelings or your heart or your mind will like want you to do sometimes. But then this other smoke comes in this.
Yeah. That feels stronger.
Yeah. Sometimes in it.
It clouds it almost clouds that feeling away. Yeah.
You know. Well, it does.
Yeah. And am I interrupting? Sorry i i just wanted to um you said that in the book that if you have a trauma that you can't process you essentially have the trauma of unprocessed trauma yeah so now you've had a trauma that's happened yeah and then if you can't process it now you have almost a new trauma of of unprocessed trauma well that, they have the ongoing wound, which is what trauma means.
Now look, let's take an extreme example. Okay.
Let's say a child is being sexually abused. So what would their instincts tell them to do? Well, their instincts would say fight back, or run away, or ask for help for God's sakes.
But by definition, none of those options are available to the child. So the only way they can survive is to disconnect from themselves.
And that disconnection then gets wired into the nervous system, into the brain. And every time they even think of being themselves, as you just described, they get scared.
Because being themselves, because had they fought back, had they tried to escape, it would have even worse for them. So that disconnection from the self was the only way they survived now every time as an adult even think of being authentic that fear comes up and it may not even come up for them like in their weight awake mind it's almost like it comes up at a level where you don't even realize that something's pulling the strings in the distance.
That's what's pretty remarkable. Well, pulling the strings is exactly the right analogy.
There's a new biologist, neuroscientist, quite well-known at Stanford University, Robert Sapolsky, who wrote a book recently called Determined, by which he means predetermined. He basically says, there's no such thing as free will,

because we're so conditioned by our biology,

our culture, and our early experiences.

And he's almost right, because what he's talking about is,

as you say, we're pulled by these invisible strings

of our unconscious that were programmed into us

even before we were born, even in our mother's wombs. And so it's just a life, I find it personally, a lifetime's challenge to cut the strings and to actually be in the present moment as an adult person connected to myself.
Let me tell you, it's a lifelong work. Yeah, no, i feel you it's funny like i didn't even know that i i didn't know that might sound crazy i didn't even i existed and everything was fine in my life but yeah i was having trouble like building relationships there were just things that i didn't have any real tools to to make my life evolve and so i started to think well what is going on here and then um you know with a lot of therapy and different modalities of therapy i went more into like my past and i started to see like oh i see yeah it's because of these you know these things that have happened and then i never process them that uh some of them are still pulling me back you know some of those them are still holding me and until you did process them what freedom did you actually have right you were like they were like puppets on a string oh and and yeah and and and I was a almost a figment of it's funny people say a figment of your imagination that's almost what I was sometimes I felt like I was something that my mind or that my soul or whatever had created to best face persona yes did you ever read pinocchio as a kid oh yeah geppetto dude yeah yeah yeah now do you remember what when pinocchio becomes a real boy and he looks at his puppet self and he says i was so foolish when i was a puppet but we're also foolish when we're puppets we're not stupid right but we're unaware yeah you know yeah unaware man i've been taking this all weekend when i'm touring on the road and in and out of buses and airports and stuff i get dehydrated that.
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So what was the trauma in your life

that started you on this journey?

Well, what started me on the journey

was well into adulthood.

For a long time, I didn't realize I was traumatized,

just like you didn't.

I just was a puppet on a string in some ways, you know?

And I was successful. I was a well-respected family doctor, but I was unhappy.
I felt I had potential that I hadn't even nearly touched, and I had no idea how to get there. My marriage had difficulties, a lot of tension.
My children were facing their challenges and in some ways they were even afraid of me. Like afraid of your energy, afraid of like? Afraid of my sudden outbursts of uncontrolled, I don't mean physical violence, I mean just outbursts of rage.

Anger, yeah, I can relate to that.

And my son Daniel, who helped me write

The Myth of Normal, he says in the book

that the floor was never the floor.

He never knew when the floor might disappear.

In other words, when the loving and devoted and playful parents might all of a sudden erupt in one of their dramas, and the kids are there watching this hurricane sweep through the house, emotionally speaking. Well, that doesn't create a basis of trust or security.
And it's not because we didn't love our kids right it's not because we didn't do our best you know so looking at all that at some point i had to start asking like you had to start asking well what's going on here and that's when i started looking at what happened to me as a kid what were you like as a kid what was i like yeah um i was very smart um you refer to yourself as a smart child you like to rebel I was a rebel yeah in communist Hungary you really had to follow the rules and the teacher at some point sent a warning to my parents saying that he better watch it because he agitates his classmates i loved getting those you know um i uh i was very i was very thoughtful i wet my bed till i was 13 dude i wet my bed i think till i was 26 oh wow okay and that does go back to childhood trauma early childhood trauma yeah When I was eight year old, my mother took me to a psychologist and psychologist took my history, Jewish infant born under the Nazis, or living my first year under the Nazi occupation and all the horrors, and then the separation from my mother for six weeks. And he said to my mom,

Madam, if the only problem this kid has is that he wets his bed,

you're very fortunate.

Well, I can tell you, that's not the only problem that I had.

So on the one hand, I was highly functioning.

But on the other hand, I had all this unseen stuff that erupted later on. Yeah, it's funny.
You don't even know it's there, especially when you're a kid, you don't know. You don't know.
Yeah, you don't know. You don't know that it's there.
And then later you have to, it's almost like a fire that starts when you're young, but you don't, the smoke doesn't show up. I mean, for me, it wasn't until thirties.
And I was like, where the is all this smoke coming from? That's exactly right. That's what happened to me.
And then I had to go back and look at it. Yeah.
It's like, yeah. Unprocessed trauma.
It's like, yeah. It's like a fire, like imagine starting a fire, but no smoke comes out of it.
Yeah. That's unprocessed trauma.
Well, the, does that make sense or it doesn't? No, it makes total sense because what happens is, like when you said earlier you were fine, the heck you were fine. You thought you were fine.
And that's because we push down all the rage that we never expressed as kids. We pushed on the pain.
We pushed on the isolation. We pretend.
And we can function in the world in ways that the world can give you respect and reward. I mean, look at, we're talking here in Hollywood, look at all the figures here that were great successes, idols to millions, and they had these miserable inner lives.
I mean, you can list a hundred of them. Yeah.
I got 50 of them

in my phone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's,

and it's,

yeah,

it's funny that

if things,

if,

if,

if it's not,

the foundation isn't there,

then you'll go find it

in the world.

Yeah.

Right.

And,

and sometimes

what you go find,

even though

you're just trying

to replicate

what you didn't get

when you were young, it can be detrimental to you. Which is why people get into unhealthy relationships because where did we most want love when we were kids? When we most wanted to be seen, by whom? By the people that couldn't do it.
Therefore, we will repeatedly look for people who can't see us and hoping that this time they will. They will.
You know, and... It's so funny.
I have this thing that came into my head. I could jump off of a cliff, right? Yeah.
But if I heard a mom come home from work, back on the top of that cliff, I would find a way to to get Or if I heard like high heels If I heard a woman's footsteps I'd find a way to get back up there And look towards her Cause you're looking for the mom Cause I'm just Yeah it's like It may sound crazy but Yeah just like Yeah it's like if I can't help but look I can't help but wonder does is that woman accept me you know even with dating and all my relationships i see it now it's like you know i'm always kind of i'm all even even in just any relationship i'm just or any moment i'm just looking do you accept me i can feel this do you accept me yeah you know and And unfortunately,

it's I can feel this, do you accept me? Yeah. And unfortunately,

it really gets in the way of male-female relationships. Oh yeah.

Because a lot of us, I mean myself included,

in my relationship with my spouse,

in some ways I just wanted to be mothered.

Not just loved as an adult, but actually mothered the one hand on the other hand i would resent it you know because i don't want to be controlled right you know so it puts the woman into an impossible situation yeah oh yeah i would never date me yeah oh jeepers yeah i wouldn't even now i it's getting better but it's still we still we're it's getting better yeah you know yeah those relationships are tough you know yeah i have trouble committing in a relationship you know i did i did i did some ayahuasca ceremonies people do plant medicine well hey you haven't read the chapter you're on ayahuasca there's one in here? Oh, yeah. Fuck, yeah, dude.
Chapter, I think it's chapter 31. So you had experience with it? I used to lead retreats with it.
No way, bro. Yeah.
And what were you going to say? What were you going to say about it? I was going to say that when I did a plant medicine retreat, that I realized one of the reasons why I've had trouble getting

relationships is because I'm

still waiting for this

original relationship. The perfect mom.

And it's no blame. It's not a blame on my mom.

I don't do that anymore.

I lament some of the feelings from my

youth, but I don't,

you know, I love my mother and I'm grateful that

she did the best that she could and I believe that she did. But yeah, I realized like I don't, you know, I love my mother and I'm grateful that she did the best that she could.
And I believe that she did. Um, but yeah, I realized like, I can't, there's just a part of me that, that's, it's just still like, I feel like it's like a kid, like standing on a dock, like waiting for a boat to come.
That's how I envision a lot of times. So there's a deep longing yeah i totally understand that and then

you try to get someone else to fill it and they don't even know what to do and you and for years

i didn't even know i was trying to get somebody to fill it it just nothing i couldn't figure it out there was that emptiness oh it was wild man and my life was still okay but just below right below the surface level of my life there was it was a precarious foundation i totally understand um I've

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I've below the surface level of my life, there was a precarious foundation. I totally understand.
I found out about ayahuasca after my book on addiction got published in 2009. It's called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and it's about how addiction is not a genetic disease, it's a response to trauma, as it affects the brain and the psyche.
But after I published that book, I go on book tour and people got asking me, what do you know about addiction and its healing with ayahuasca? I know nothing about it. Next visit, next stop, what do you know about it? Leave me alone already.
I mean, I just spent three years writing the book and you're asking me about the one thing I don't know anything about. And then finally said, somebody said, you know, you could experience this up here in Vancouver because there's a Peruvian shaman who came up there.
So I did the ayahuasca. And I experienced pure love for the first time in my life.
There's a little baby in the tent whose father had done a plant and the mother was there with the baby and the baby started cooing and oohing and aahing and these tears of love just flowed on my face. Wow.
And my heart just opened. And I realized how close my heart had been because it was so bruised so early that I closed it down, not that I deliberately closed it down, but as a way of protecting it.
And that, right away, he said, okay, I can work with this to help people who are addicted. Now, I'm not here to advocate its use, it's not for everybody, it's certainly not a panacea.
You know, psychedelics is a whole other conversation. Yeah, same, I'm not saying anybody should.
They have their place, they're not the answer, and they're certainly not for everybody, but in the right context, with the right guidance, the right preparation, they can really help people open up to parts of themselves that they weren't even aware that they were there. Yeah.
Oh yeah. I mean, it's fascinating.
And I hope that the knowledge of that evolves over time. But that can also be scary because some people go and get addicted to that.
I've seen that happen with people. I've seen it too because what people get addicted to is not so much the substances because nobody's gonna get addicted to Iowa.
Yeah, it's nasty. You can't just have some at a club.
Yeah. But what they get addicted to is the heightened experience.
And if they don't know how to integrate what they've learned into their lives, then they keep looking for that elevated experience that takes them out of their ordinary self. So I really think that that's one of the risks of psychedelic use, is that you start looking for that elevated, heightened, or deepened experience that's missing from your life, where whole thing is the experience can open the door but you gotta walk through it and you have to keep walking through it not when you're under the influence of the medicine the integration it's so key that's a huge part of our society now we just kind of get a piece of information and then we're like oh we have the information but yeah we don't take as much time to um to integrate something in our life like uh that's one thing i've noticed for myself anyway i don't want to pin on everybody but i'll notice that sometimes i'll learn something i'll learn a fact or i'll learn like a way that i've oh i know this about me now or this is something've learned.
But unless I integrate the solution to that or the information from that, the positive information, instead of just shouting it out that I know it, actually integrating it and taking time to integrate it. Even taking time, like if you go to a church sermon or a mosque sermon or a – Yeah, synagogue.
Synagogue sermon, yeah, Jewish church, that's what I was thinking of. Synagogue sermon, and you can hear a message, right? But then you can just go on about your day.
But taking time to integrate a message into your life, well, what did I hear? How does it make me feel? What do I think about it? I think we used to have a lot more time to do that Just because our society wasn't so Our lives weren't so frenetic

Well I think we're addicted

Particularly I think

The United States is

Addicted to the quick fix

Yeah

Yeah that Earl Scheib

The spray painted

Yeah

Have you struggled with addiction before?

Have I struggled with addiction?

I know you struggled with work addiction I think you talked about

I've had

Thank you. Yeah.
Have you struggled with addiction before? Have I struggled with addiction?

I know you struggled with work addiction,

I think you talked about.

I've had two major addictions.

One is workaholism.

And again, I have to make a distinction here.

I mean, I did good work, and I did work that had meaning

and made a contribution. That's good.
That's the calling. But then there's another part of it, which is being driven.
I mean, you're being driven, you're not in charge. You're like a leaf being driven by the wind.
And I was driven to work because I have to keep proving my importance and that people should like me, people should respect me. And why? Because I didn't respect myself.
And because I got this message early in life that I just wasn't important. And I believed it.
The trauma is not, for example, the trauma is not, for example, that my mother gave me to a stranger when I was 11 month old to save my life. That wasn't the trauma, that was the traumatic event.
Trauma is what happens inside you. The trauma inside me was that I concluded from that that I wasn't lovable, I wasn't important.
Now, that drives the work addiction. Because you have to keep proving to yourself.
The other addiction I had, and people often laugh, and I can call that an addiction, but really it was. I was shopping for classical compact discs.
CDs? CDs. Hell yeah.
But I could drop $3,000, $4,000 a day on them. Gosh.
You know, and I would. You can't even smoke them.
No, you can't smoke them. And no sooner would I leave the store, but I'd have to run back to get some more.
So it wasn't about the having and the enjoying. I love the music, but it wasn't about that.
It was about getting more and more and more and never having enough. And so I would lie to my wife about it.
I would sometimes neglect my work. I mean, I don't think I mentioned this in this book, but in my book, The Addiction, I talk about how I left a woman in labor once to go get a compact disc.
Wow. What album was it? That I don't remember anymore.
I think it was a Mozart symphony, but I don't remember anymore. But, so I'm talking about, I'm not talking about my passion, I'm not talking about my passion for music.
I'm talking about my drivenness. And sometimes people say, well how can you compare your addictions to your heroin addicted, cocaine addicted, HIV ridden clients? And I said, I don't.
I said, the differences are obvious. It's the similar areas that are interesting.
And when I told my patients in the downtown Eastside who were using the heroin and the cocaine and whatever, that I got these- These Boyz II Men albums, yeah. Yeah, and they said, they never said, how can you compare yourself? You know what they said? Hey, doc, you're just like the rest of us, aren't you? Yeah.
And my point is, we are all just like the rest of us. Right.
We all find some chronic escape, not all of us, most people, whether it's drugs, pornography, sex, internet, cell phones. Gambling, there's so many.
Gambling, self cutting, eating, shopping. Running, working out, that's a huge one.
Extreme working out and all that. And we're running away from ourselves.
And so, when I ask people, not what's wrong with your addiction, because that's obvious, but what's right about it. Like, for example, I mean, you've had alcohol and drug issues, I've heard you say.
What did they do for you in the short term? I think it just, it gave me a break from how I wanted to feel. It gave me a break from me.
It gave you a break from how you felt. Yeah, yeah, it gave me a break from me it gave you a break from how you felt yeah yeah it gave me a break from my feelings yeah yeah and it just gave me a break from me i was just but that's because you were really uncomfortable with yourself yeah and and because you had feelings that were painful so my mantra on addiction which i mentioned in this book is don't ask why the addiction ask why why the pain.
And if you understand why people have pain, don't look at their genes. Look at their lives.
What happened to them? Yeah. Yeah, you say, or I've heard you, in your book you talk about addiction, if you recognize the harm it's, or I think it might have been in an interview you did, if you recognize the harm it's doing and you keep doing it.
Yeah, so addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences and they don't give it up. So pleasure, craving, relief in the short term, harm in the long term, refusal and inability to let go of it, that's what an addiction is.
So it's got nothing to do with drugs. Well, it could have to do with drugs.
It could have to do with any of the things we already mentioned. But any of the things we mentioned.
But why the pain? That's the question. The question is why the pain? What are we running away from? Right.
Yeah, I had, like, once I saw, like, pornography and stuff like that, it was, like, and I could do masturbation or jerking off or whatever people call it. But once I, that was the first way that I realized, oh, I can make myself feel good.
Yeah. And it was, like, the first time that I, like i like yeah i could make myself feel good and so

then it just became yeah it became a way that i always i mean i i would just

i and i would but yeah i would just that if the only way i knew how to make myself really feel

good even though it's just for a moment well listen i would take it should i tell you something

scientific about that yeah so cocaine addicts and crystal meth addicts, or any stimulant addicts, in fact, all addicts, amongst the things they're looking for is a head of dopamine. Dopamine is the incentive, motivation, chemical in our brain.
It's what makes us feel vital and alive and ready to go. And without it, we can't survive.
Now cocaine crystal matter without it we can't survive no we can't that's into that's cool to hear oh yeah oh no because uh dopamine flows in the brain when we're um exploring a novel object or a novel environment when we're seeking food when we're seeking a sexual partner.

We can't survive without that stuff. You can take a mouse in a laboratory and put food in front of him and he's hungry but he won't eat.
Why? Because genetically you knocked out his dopamine receptors and he doesn't have the motivation. So it's the motivation chemical.
It's absolutely essential. No, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, crystal meth, they literally give you a direct hit of dopamine.
So does pornography. When you do a brain scan of some people, they get repeated spikes of dopamine.
It's not the pornography they're addicted to. It's that hit of dopamine that they get in their brains.
And all addictions, shopping, I mean, when I went to the record store, it was the dopamine. Like I've been diagnosed with ADHD.
The first book I wrote was on ADD. And spacing out, absent-mindedness, you know, all this kind of stuff.
Oh yeah, daydreaming, they used to call it. Day they did yeah um and but when i was in the record store i was present wow i was focused i could almost remember which records i bought at which store at what time you know like yeah because the dopamine was flowing like crazy and that's why i needed to go back it wasn't because i needed more music yeah yeah yeah the trunk's full i was i was after that i was hiding the discs on the porch and in the attic so my wife wouldn't call me you know but but i was after the ceiling caves in it's just a bunch of van halen yeah and i was after that dopamine dopamine wow you know which is what you're after with the pornography yeah yeah it just was it was a way to make me feel good.
And it was the first way that I could interact with a woman where it felt like I could, and I know it's not real interaction. Yeah.
But it was like, this is the safest, closest I can get to interacting with a woman. And it being like, okay, because I would get so nervous around women.
Or like if women looked at me, I would like my whole body,

like I just, I couldn't handle it.

But yeah, that dopamine is,

it's interesting to hear.

So yeah, no matter what it is,

it's the dopamine behind it.

It's the dopamine.

No, and there's another chemical that's involved in many addictions

like the heroin addicts

or the opiate addicts,

the fentanyl addicts. Those are opiates, which come from the opium plant.
But why do they work in the human brain? Why would an opium plant work in the human brain? Because we have receptors for them. We have molecules that receives the opiate molecule.
Now why do we have receptors from a plant that grows in Afghanistan? We don't. We have receptors for our own internal opiates.
So we have an internal opiate system. And they are called endorphins.
Endorphin means endogenous internal opiate. So our endorphins are our own opiates.
Opiates. So we manufacture our own opiates.
Not only we do, plants do, animals do. Now.
Now, the question is what do the opiates do in the human brain? Well, they do a whole lot of things. But three importantly, they relieve pain, physical and emotional pain.
Because pain is necessary for life. Otherwise, I could smash my hand on this table.
Yeah, you jump out of a window and you wouldn't care. But I also have to some pain relief.
That's the endorphins, number one. Number two, what they do is they give you a sense of pleasure and reward.
So when people go bungee jumping, they get this high level of endorphins. That's what they're after.
Ah, that's why they keep doing wild stuff like that. That's right.
And the third thing is the most important.

The endorphins help to make possible this little thing called love.

And if you not caught the endorphin receptors of little mice in the laboratory,

they will not cry for their mothers on separation.

But what would that mean in the wild?

It would mean their death.

So endorphins connect people to each other, especially parents and children. And so we're each other's opiates in a way.
We're each other's opiates, especially in a healthy parent-child relationship. And they both have endorphins flowing in their brain when they're looking into each other's eyes.
And when I ask heroin addicts or opiate addicts, a sex trade worker I asked once, what does the heroin do for you? She said, when the first time I did heroin, it felt like a warm, soft hug. What was she talking about? Connection.
Connection, yeah. And in this book I talk about it, and so many of the addicts,

like a very well-known recovery leader

and fearless advocate is Jamie Lee Curtis.

And she told me.

Is she?

Sorry?

She is.

Oh, yeah, she's a big 12-stepper.

I didn't know that.

Oh, no, she's a huge 12-stepper.

Oh, that's awesome.

And very forthright about her addictions and also her recovery. Wow, that's fascinating.
I'd love to talk with her. Yeah, I've seen her eating lunch in the Palisades before, Pacific Palisades before.
But she told me that what the opiates did for her gave her a sense of warmth in the belly. That warmth is what we're all after.
Yeah. That comes from human connection.
And when we didn't have the connections we needed early in life then we keep looking for that warmth from other sources so these people that are addicted to opiates that's what they're looking for bunch of hug hunters yeah um i want to go back a little bit to um trauma and isolation yeah and i wanted to ask, what is it about not being emotionally, about not being emotionally isolated that

allows? go back a little bit to um trauma and isolation yeah and i wanted to ask what is it about not being emotionally about not being emotionally isolated that allows one to process a trauma yeah so i did a a day-long event here in la just a day before we were recording this and i worked worked with a woman called Kimberly Shannon Murphy, who is one of Hollywood's top stunt women. She just got a lifetime achievement award.
Nice, congratulations, Kim. And she worked with Cameron Diaz and Uma Thurman and Tom Cruise and all these people.
A lot of hotties. No, she was sexually abused by her grandfather all throughout her childhood and adolescence.
And of course, the family was in denial. Nobody noticed it.
If they noticed it, they kept silent about it. She was totally alone with it.
So that's what induced the wound. And had she been able to talk to somebody and say, this is happening to me, please help me, she would not have been traumatized.
So the trauma happens when a child suffers and has nobody to share that suffering with. Whether it's the extreme suffering or sexual abuse, or the milder, you might say, suffering or just not being seen for who you are, if you're alone with it, you can't process it.
So what happens later on, to answer your question, when you meet somebody where you feel safe, and now you can express what's happening with you, that's what helps to process the trauma. Got it.
So it requires compassion and safety. And ideally, I mean, I criticize the 12-step groups, not for what they do, because I love what they do, for what they don't do.
I don't think they talk about trauma enough. That's my view.
But a 12-step group that's properly run will offer you support and safety so now you can share yourself and be seen by others amen yeah i mean i've gotten even into like the intimacy disorder groups and those are a lot more uh potent with people talking about um their emotional disorders and like yeah like you know traumas and things that happen and it's not a crybaby group either you know like sometimes we talk about trauma but i don't talk about it from like a crybaby place i like to talk about it from like this is important and um and it's and it's important to learn about and i like to share what i learn about from it. It's not about people victimizing themselves or trying to present themselves as a victim.
It's saying, this is what happened to me and it's my responsibility to learn from it. That's the truth.
And it's my responsibility to grow from it, not to wallow in all of what happened to me and I can't help it. That's nonsense.
Oh, I'll tell you this, Mr. Mate, that A thing I realized I was addicted to A few years ago Yeah Self pity Yeah And I didn't even know it I kept always thinking Man what's wrong with me Yeah I have to fix this Every day It wasn't Nothing was enough I kept And then I realized That even though it seemed like I was trying to make myself better Yeah The truth was that I was always seeing myself as less than because those things have to both be present at the same time because I can only get better if, you know, I'm never enough.
And by never being enough, though, I'm trying to figure this out. I got addicted to self-pity i got addicted to like can i jump in with a thought yes please thank you dear god please it did something for you it took away responsibly from you now human beings have a hard time taking responsibility i mean you know i i have a hard time taking responsibility.
So when you're in that self-pity mode, you're suffering, but you don't have to take responsibility. I'm suggesting that's what it did for you.
Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe there was a part of me that wanted to keep it around because it always let there be something wrong with me, too. That's right.
You know, like if I never solve this, if I'm never enough, then there will always be something wrong with me. Yeah.
Does that make any sense? It makes sense because, again, it takes away the challenge of growth. Right.
I mean, we talk about growing pains. Growth is painful.
painful oh yeah people go from damn seven inches to seven feet so six and a half six one or whatever yeah and and and emotional growth is also oh yeah painful and so when we don't grow at least we avoid the growing pains right you know yeah i used to whenever i used to smoke I used to be like part of me didn't want to quit smoking yeah because I wanted to have an excuse for why I wasn't doing other things right does that make sense? makes a little sense little sense is enough I'll take it yeah does blue chew work? I can answer it. Yup.
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Oh yeah, what else did I want to talk to you? Oh, this is really fascinating stuff here. So trauma fosters a shame-based view of the self.
Yeah.

I'd love to talk a little bit about shame, man, because that was a huge part of my life. Tell me about it.
I just felt ashamed of myself. Yeah.
I felt ashamed of like, yeah, I felt ashamed of how I looked. I felt ashamed of like my ears, my nose, my face, the way I stood.
I felt yeah I felt ashamed of my family

of face my the way I stood I felt uh yeah I felt ashamed of my family of my home I just I everything I I've I just felt a ton of it I'm not I'm not whining about it right now I'm just thinking back but yeah I just felt a ton of shame you know I felt like I felt like I think I felt ashamed of who I was at like the first molecule almost like the first cell of my, you know,

you know, I felt like, I think I felt ashamed of who I was at like the first molecule almost,

like the first cell of my,

you know, the dirt under the roots. It felt like I just, there was a part of me that felt like I was, me or anything that had to do with me was gross.
I understand. You know, and I used the word gross because that's, it felt like gross.
No no the only thing i'll say is um it's it's not that you felt you were gross it's you believed you were right yes yeah you're right i didn't feel it it wasn't like a feeling on the surface of me it was like a knot someone had tied a long time ago in the beginning of my time and in there it in that knot it was in there somewhere and i couldn't really even access that it was a yeah but shame yeah i want to hear about shame did you feel it oh yeah oh yeah um how'd you feel well um growing up in hung in Eastern Europe, and I lived there until I was 13, there was a lot of antisemitism. And my grandparents had died in Auschwitz.
I almost died as an infant, my mother, my father. That's when your mother gave you to someone else to save you? That's right, yeah.
Wow. When I was 11 months of age.
But even after the war, there was antisemitism. And so I'd feel ashamed of being Jewish.
I don't anymore, but I did as a kid. So I would kind of, then I'd have, I was ashamed of my Jewish looks.
Oh, so you have to hide or you have to feel like, yeah.

Yeah, there's something different about me

that isn't quite right.

And there was a lot of antisemitism

and taunting in the school that I went to

when I look back on it now.

So yeah, and then I developed body shame.

To this day, it's kind of interesting. But every day I judge aspects of my body.
Oh, yeah. You know, like this is not big enough, or this is too big, or whatever, you know? Yeah, this is too big.
Yeah, so shame, but shame, nobody's born with shame. Really? No infant is born ashamed of themselves.
They're totally there. Yeah, that's true, huh? If you saw a little infant that was ashamed of yourselves, ashamed of himself, it would break your heart.
Yeah, no. They wouldn't even know how to do it.
How infants get shamed is when they're not seen. Yeah, and what happens then? Well, or if they're mistreated.
Well, let's say a child is not seen, or worse, is being hurt. Now they can make two assumptions.
One is, these adults are stupid, they're incapable, they're incompetent, I'm all alone in the world. Or the child can believe there's something wrong with me and maybe if I can work hard enough, I can fix it.
Now which belief do you think is more acceptable for the child? The second one. The second one.
So then they develop this deep sense that there's something wrong with us. We just have to work hard enough or look good enough or something,

and then maybe we can fix.

So even that shame, which comes out from being cut off from,

it comes from being cut off from human contact

the way we need it, has a kind of protective value.

Really?

Because it makes us at least think

that there's something we can do. Ah, it almost, it gives us hope in a weird way.
It gives us hope in a weird way, yeah. But it just, but here's the thing.
Children are narcissists, young children. When I say narcissists, I don't mean in a pathological sense.
I mean in a sense they think it's all about them. Right, and they don't have any other choice.
They're all they know. That's all they know.
So if the parents are happy and connected and there's a atmosphere of loving acceptance and so on, then the child thinks, hey, I must be pretty good. I must be okay.
Yeah, everything's good. I'm okay.
Yeah, but if the parents are stressed, depressed, traumatized, racially challenged, economically challenged, or such terrible things as the children in Gaza are experiencing right now with the daily bombings and all this kind of stuff, what can they think? That there's something wrong with me. Oh, imagine some kid over there in Gaza looking up and there's a bomb, and they think, man, I'm so horrible, I deserve to be bombed.
Well, you know what? There was a study done of guys and children. Man, that's crazy, I hadn't thought about that.
Like really, imagine that though. There was a study done of children in Palestine 21 years ago.
And 95% of those, 95%, this is long before the current horrors, long before October the 7th, long before the aftermath of October the 7th. 95% of those, 5% of those kids showed traumatic symptoms.
High percentage with their beds, like you and I did. They expressed aggression towards their parents.
They had panic attacks, anxiety, fears. Can you imagine what's gonna happen to that generation? Years from now? Years from now.
I mean, it just breaks my heart every day when I think about it. And I know a lot of my fellow Jews don't agree with me,

but as a Jewish person, I'm not the only one who feels that way.

It especially breaks my heart.

Yeah.

Well, when you put it in that sense that a kid, imagine a kid like, you know,

yeah, because what are they going to think?

They don't know.

They just think,

man, something's so wrong with me,

I deserve to be killed.

You know, or something, I don't know.

Yeah.

It depends if the adults are able to hold them

and keep them feeling loved.

But 19,000 kids have been orphaned.

And when I say orphaned,

I don't mean just that their parents have died,

The extended families have been orphaned. And when I say orphaned, I don't mean just that their parents have died, their extended families have been wiped out.
What's gonna be the future of those kids? You know, and anyway, it's just a terrible- No, it's heartbreaking. I mean, it feels like a genocide is going on over there and you don't know what to do, you know, for me.
It's like, you know, I mean, you can pray, you can speak up about it. And I know that there's like a more political aspects of it.
And we've had different people come on to talk about Israel and Palestine on here. And it was very knowledgeable for a lot of our listeners, because you hear about it a lot, but you don't know the history and everything.
But well, I've been there. I went there two and a half years ago to work with Palestinian women tortured in Israeli jails.
Wow. And they had post-traumatic stress disorder.
I've seen it with my own eyes. And who's the black American writer, Tanahasi Coates? Tanahasi Coates? Yeah, he's just written a new book.
And he talks about visiting Palestine. and he says yeah ta-nehisi quotes yeah he in his new book he says once you go there and see it you can't unsee it you know and um yeah our media doesn't cover it super fairly yeah i feel like our media doesn't cover it super fairly that'd be interesting to speak with him then thank you for bringing his name up oh yeah yeah i mean it's heartbreaking anytime something's happening to a child you know that should be the one thing that we can all figure out this shouldn't happen no it's also the truth that it's also happening to kids in israel there's bombs and rockets and so on i don't know if this is the time to go into the politics of it.
It's not a question of valuing or sort of esteeming one suffering over another.

We don't compare traumas, but the degree and the scale of suffering in Gaza is unprecedented. You know? Yeah.
Look. It seems like it.
it when my wife walks into a room i'm 80 i'm typing away i'm reading a book she walks into the room and i don't hear all of a sudden i hear i go like this the not this is the startle response of an infant if you if you take a three-month-old who's sitting there he's lying there and you go like this it the startle reflex. That's built into me, because when I was three months of age and throughout my first year, Budapest was being bombed by the allies.
Wow. Quite apart from the antisemitism and the genocide, there was the war going on.
So I'd be thrown into a laundry basket and they'd rush me down to the basement. So when I hear a noise, I like this yeah now this is eight years later or when you see a load of laundry go by yeah man so we can stay with so so what you're saying is they can stay with you that long it can stay with it gets locked in you in your cells really it's it's actually literally locked into your cells and into your chromosomes yeah i mean it's heartbreaking for those children on both sides of that.
And just anywhere, anytime you think like, and even a kid, when they think like, even in America, it's like, in America it's like we're bombing each other. We can't figure out a way.
There's a huge planet here. We can't figure out, how can we not figure out a way that we can do, live, all God is asking us to do is be alive and do it without war? That seems, it seems unreal that we can't figure that out, man.
Well, that, I mean, the great spiritual teachers have been addressing that insanity for thousands of years, you know. Yeah, but how does shame cause us to lose compassion for ourselves? Yeah.
Let me tell you a story. I mentioned this in The Myth of Normal.
After my book on addiction came out, In the Realm of Hunger Ghosts, I got an email, not an email, a letter from a guy in Seattle. And he said, I really appreciate your book and showing how trauma causes.
Addiction is not the only outcome of trauma, but it's one of the outcomes of trauma, one of the potential outcomes of trauma. And he's really patient of that, but he says, I can't blame my mother, it's my own fault that I'm a shit.
And I thought, oh my God, you poor guy. You still see yourself that way? But lack of compassion.
Because if he actually understood, fully understood, that he was just a baby at some point, needing and wanting to be loved and held and seen and valued just for being a human being and that didn't happen to him and that caused so much pain in him that he escaped into some drug addiction, he's not a shit, he's just a hurt human being. But that lack of self-compassion, I see it all the time in my workshops when I do therapy work with people.
One of my main tasks is to help them to notice, not to criticize them for it, but to help them to be aware of how they lack compassion for

themselves. Yeah.
And, um, it's hard to even notice that you're getting in the shame circle.

It's so hard to even notice that you're in it. You can be living in the center of it.
Yeah. You

know, that's how I was with self-pity. I was living it.
I just didn't realize it. And the

self-pity was manifesting itself like, oh, you can figure this out, you know, but by trying to

constantly help myself figure it out, all I was doing was focusing on my own being not good enough, which in a way is really just self-pity. But it's also like with self-compassion.
Yeah, not giving myself some grace. I remember the first time somebody said, hey, man, give yourself some grace.
I'd never even, I was like, wow. Because people find themselves accusing themselves and talking to themselves in ways that they would never talk to others.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That most people wouldn't.
Yeah. Some would.
Yeah. But most wouldn't.
Can you notice characteristics or actualities in your life today that you can directly correlate to side effects of childhood trauma? My own? Yeah. Well, my capacity to get triggered, but you see, triggered is an interesting word because we keep using it, but what does it mean? Well, it means a reaction that's way out of proportion to the actual stimulus.
Now when you actually look at where the metaphor comes from, it comes from a gun. Now how big a part of the gun is the trigger? Small.
Small little part. What makes the trigger work is that there's ammunition and an explosive charge.
So as long as I'm full of explosive charge, which is my unresolved trauma, some of you will say boo and I'll go, ooh. Yeah.
So my capacity to get triggered, my difficulty believing that I was really loved and accepted in my marriage relationship, even though I was. Wow.
You know, my tendency to blame others for my own reactions rather than taking responsibility. In there.
We mentioned the addictive behaviors. Certainly, the first book I wrote in ADHD

is called Scattered Minds.

My scattered mind is certainly an outcome of early stress

because that dissociation, that tuning out,

it's just an escape mechanism.

The way I was unable to see my kids

for the beautiful, sensitive creatures that they were, you know, and my workaholism. Oh, it's shown up in so many ways.
You said that not believing that people love us. Yeah.
That's, dude, that's huge, man. Yeah.
What is that? Why does that, why do we sometimes, you'll be in a marriage, in a relationship, and we'll still believe that person, they don't love me, or we won't believe their affections. What did you say? Yeah, we won't believe we're loved or accepted.
Well, Peter Levine, who's one of the great trauma teachers, he talked about trauma being the tyranny of the past. The attorney of the past? The tyranny.
The tyranny of the past. So we're in the present moment, but we're actually reacting to the past.
Now, throughout the first year of my life, given our situation, my mother was really stressed, unhappy, even terrorized. She couldn't give me that calm, attuned, loving attention that I needed.
She did her best, for God's sakes. You know, what could be a greater love than for a 24-year-old young woman to give her baby to a total stranger in the street? You know, but how do I experience it? I experience it as a rejection.
Right. So the person that ought to be loving me is giving me away.
I can only conclude from that that I'm not lovable. Ah, I see.
Now once I don't think I'm lovable, I'm not gonna believe that anybody actually loves me, no matter what they manifest or what they show me.

Yeah.

You know, and then I'm blaming them

for my own sense of unloavability.

This is unprocessed trauma we're talking about.

100%.

You know?

Yeah, I've almost even thought it,

sometimes I thought like,

oh, you're dumb for loving me.

Yeah. Yeah, but that's're dumb for loving me.
Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's the other side of it.

Yeah.

It's like Garcho Marx said, that I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member.

Yeah.

So anybody would love me.

They can't be very bright, can they?

They want to be out of their minds.

You talk also about not parent blaming, which I think is really important. Yeah important can you tell me a little bit about that yeah well look I mean your story right there about your mother gave you away because it was the imagine the terror the pain in her of like the most loving thing I can do is put my child somewhere else away from me right now for its own safety.

That's exactly right.

Right.

Well, all parents, we're born with a caring instinct.

We're born with certain emotional systems in our brain.

Play is one of them.

Curiosity, seeking, the dopamine circuit is another one.

Caring, loving is another one.

We're just born with that. We are.
It's instinctual. All mammals are born with it.
No mammal infant would survive without it. Right.
You know? So I never doubt that parents love their kids or that there's at least an impulse in them to do so. But the love that the parent feels is not that the love what the parent child receives.
What the child receives is the quality of the parent's presence. Are they calm, are they attuned, are they emotionally present, are they preoccupied, stressed, depressed, traumatized, overworked, whatever.
Any of those conditions, the child does not experience the love in its whole sense. So even though you might know that your mother loved you, and I'm sure she did in her own way, and she did her very best, but she was not able to give you those qualities that you would really in your heart experience as love.
And so, in this society where, as you said earlier, parents have to go to work just to put bread on the table, and where so many people are economically insecure, where there's so much stress, so much division, so much angst, so much aggression, so much suspicion. What's it like to be a parent? It's really, really difficult.
And don't forget, we didn't evolve in nuclear families. We evolved in groups where kids are around nurturing adults the whole day, including their parents, but not only their parents.
So in today's society, parenting has become almost an impossible task. Why would I blame any parent? And I'll even say this, and I'm not trying to excuse anything because there's no excuse.
That's not the point. But if you look at parents who abuse their kids, what happened to them as kids? They were abused, for sure.
It's multi-generational. It's not that they grow up, it's not that they decide I'm gonna abuse my kids.
They just act out what happened to them. So I think blame, now responsibility is one thing, blame is another.
I think blame is totally unscientific, it's cruel, and it's totally inappropriate. So as much as I point out the impact of early experience, there's obviously no room for blaming parents.
And Theo, what's really interesting to me, is after I wrote my book on addiction, occasionally some strange person will come up to me and say, my child died of an overdose, and I thank you for writing the book. And I always find that a bit startling, because in the book I'm saying that it's childhood experience and trauma that ultimately result in the addiction, And they say, you know what? Because I finally get it.
I finally understand what happened. And I get it that it's multi-generational.
That it's nobody's fault. There's nobody to be blamed here.
The question is, in each generation, can we take responsibility so we don't pass it on to the next one? But there's no room for it yeah and robert sapolsky the scientist i quoted he said there's just no room for blame yeah it's not it's not yeah you can have you can have discussions about responsibility and things like that and share hey i think you could have been more responsible about this or seeing something that was somebody's responsibility but yeah and you can even be angry right without be angry without blaming right because why wouldn't you be angry yeah when those things happen to you so it's not a question of telling people don't be angry but having anger and owning it is not the same as saying you did something deliberately that you shouldn't have done, and you should have known better, and you know, you said terrible, you know. So there's anger, healthy anger, necessary anger.
And then there is the expectation that people take responsibility.

Yeah.

Each for ourselves.

And then there's blame,

which is a whole other bag of monkeys.

Yeah, we don't,

it's a zoo we don't need to be involved in.

No, we don't need that.

What makes you laugh?

Like, is there like shows you like to watch or a thing you like? Well, sometimes what makes me laugh is my own ridiculousness. Yeah, sometimes me too.
I know it's going to be a good day if I find that I'm laughing at myself. Yeah, yeah.
Well, there's so many. You know, like the little human ego is, I mean, on the one hand we can be compassionate towards it, but on the other hand it's so ridiculous.
So we can laugh at ourselves. My wife and I laugh a lot.
Oh, you do? Yeah, yeah, that's one of our, that's one of our savings. It's been 55 years in a month, and I tell you, we've laughed so much together at ourselves, at each other.
That's adorable. You know? What makes me laugh? Usually absurdity.
Yeah? When things are absurd, they make me laugh. They're so out of touch of reality.
Yeah. Yeah.
Those are the things that make me laugh. Is there a film that you like? Or what's a movie that you like? I'm just trying to just know a little bit more about you.
Yeah. A movie that made me laugh.
Or just a couple movies. Fish Called Wanda.
Oh yeah. Talking about Jamie Lee Curtis.
That, I roared my head off about that one. I don't have such a good memory for that kind of stuff.
A funny book will make me laugh, you know? Yeah, do you have a favorite, one, just a fiction book that you like? I tend to go for the classics. So I keep rereading the Iliad by Homer.
Wow. With the Trojan War.
I keep rereading Dostoevsky. I just reread The Brothers Karamazov last year because he's such a deep understanding of the human soul, the darkness and the lightness, both of the human soul.
It's fascinating. Yeah.
So I tend to go for the classics myself. I read some modern novels, but not that often.
By the way, you know what made me laugh? Catch 22. Yeah? I reread that a couple years ago.
I split a gut. Who was it? Not John Steinbeck who wrote that? Joseph Heller.
Joseph Heller, Catch 22. I think it was Joseph Heller is his first name.
We had to read that, I think, in school. Well, by modern standards, there's some parts of it that are really sexist and misogynist, and in some places even racist.
So I'm not making any excuse for that.

It was the zeitgeist at the time.

Yeah, sure.

But it's just reproingly funny about the absurdity of war

and the self-puffery of important people.

Yeah.

I'll have to check it out, man.

I think I had to read it sometime, but maybe in college we had to read it. Did you ever read John Irving, any of his books? Like The World According to Garp, remember that book? You know, I started reading that decades ago and never finished it.
Yeah, it happened. Some of his books, his latest book is, I don't even know what it is.
It's very long. I mean, you need to bring a tent with you.
Recently there was a book that's got a lot of attention, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. And she wrote The Poisonwood Bible.
That's her most famous book. But Demon Copperhead is a kind of a modern take on David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens, and it takes place in Appalachia. Wow.
And I just saw an interview with her yesterday, how she goes after J.D. Vance.
Wow. Because she's in Appalachian.
Right, so they're both from that area. They're both from that area.
With different mindsets. And she's saying, buddy, you don't represent us.
Interesting. And Damon Copperhead takes on the hillbilly image of Appalachians and plays with it beautifully.
Wow, I'd love to check that out. She seems like an interesting woman.
She's a very interesting woman. She's very thoughtful, very forthright.
That'd be cool. Yeah, maybe after I read the book, i could see if she would want to come and visit um sometimes like i always like feel like i have to explain my intentions i there's a part of me that always feels like i'm manipulating somebody do you know what i'm talking about that's not a feeling so what is it's a thought it's a belief it's a belief yeah no and there's a reason why you have it.
Like even if I'm just doing something nice, there's a part of me that's like, oh, you're. Yeah, you think you're a fake.
Yeah. It's called the imposter syndrome.
Okay. And it has to do with the fact that you couldn't be real as a kid.
In some ways you had to pretend. And it's really hard to let go of that, of that sense that I'm still doing it.
It's what you grew up with. So you could be kind to that part of yourself.
The part that you could actually, because it's not a feeling, Theo, it's a belief.

And the beliefs can be, you don't argue with feelings,

but beliefs you can challenge.

Is it really true that you're manipulating?

Like when you're talking to me now,

are we having a genuine conversation?

I believe that we are.

Or is it true that you're actually manipulating me

in any way at all?

No, I don't think I am.

And furthermore, give me some credit. Maybe you can't manipulate me even if you wanted to.
So that fear of yours is both lack of compassion towards yourself and a lack of, in a sense, trust in the other person's capacity to look after themselves. That's a good point.
Yeah. Yeah, it's just funny.
I was just talking with my brother yesterday because we had similar childhoods and we were thinking of, well, what are some things that I could think about to talk with him about? And we were talking about that, that sometimes we always feel like there's something,

like we're manipulating ourselves or that our ability to manipulate would be so powerful

that we wouldn't even know what we're doing,

which is pretty crazy too.

It's a lack of self-trust.

Lack of self-trust.

Now, you know what?

Have I manipulated?

Yes, I have.

Yeah, sure.

You know, but-

Same.

It's just not a question that one never does it,

but I know when I'm manipulating.

Right. And usually it's because I want something

that I don't know how to state directly,

where I'm afraid that I might not get otherwise.

And then I'm afraid to show up with my vulnerable request.

Which would make sense as a child,

there was something you wanted

that you didn't think you were gonna get otherwise.

That's right.

So you didn't show up.

So it makes sense.

Children manipulate out of a sense of weakness. And that's pretty much all they can do if otherwise they don't get their needs met.
A lot of your book that I've read so far, it's about, it's getting to the part where it's like that Western medicine doesn't always take into context as much that the body and the mind, like us as an entire thing, as our society, as, you know, it's almost like, like if, say if like the whole world and time and culture and everything were a car, instead of the doctor looking at the car, they just look at the human, which would just be one part of the car. And so they're always just working on this one part instead of looking at the whole car, which could also be a cause of why the part isn't doing well.
That's the whole point. And see, we have to make a distinction here.
There's Western science. Then there's medical practice.
Understood. The two are not the same necessarily.
Okay, thank you. So I was trained as a medical doctor.
Nobody ever taught me about the mind-body unity. But physiologically, you can't separate the mind from the body so that our emotional circuits and the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are actually one system.
They're not separate systems. So when things happen emotionally, naturally they have a physiological effect.
Yeah. So I could give you 10,000 examples.
Children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma. Children of what? Children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma.
Okay. So the airway is narrow and they get inflamed.
There's a study that showed that black American women, the more episodes of racism they experience, the higher the risk of asthma. Wow.
It's been shown that women with severe PTSD have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer. This is a study out of Harvard University.
Adults who experience the loss of an adult child have a higher risk of malignancy of the bone marrow and the blood. Grief.
Grief. A Danish study, parents who lost a child have doubled the risk of multiple sclerosis.
There are hundreds of studies showing the physiological impact of stress and trauma and loss on the physiology. So manifesting itself in our bodies as a disease or contributing to- Contributing the onset of the disease.
Got it. Yeah, because cancer, it's like, you know, you say in the book, like people get cancer.
A lot of times you hear like, the guy got cancer, he died three weeks later, right? You hear that all the time. But the cancer had been there forever.
And it just, enough had happened, I guess, that it turned over into being- Well, we know that stress, for example, can turn off genes that protect you against cancer and turn on genes that can cause cancer. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not even controversial.
And we know that people that repress their healthy anger, they're actually suppressing their immune system. And this stuff has been studied over and over again, and great clinicians have been recognizing this forever.
And 2, years ago Socrates, the Greek philosopher, said that the problem with the doctors of today is that they separate the mind from the body. 2400 years ago.
Now, I can name you any number of great medical pioneers, I mention some of them in the book, who 150 years ago, 100 years ago, 80 years ago, 40 years ago, pointed out that mind and body can't be separated, that in fact we are biopsychosocial creatures, which means that our biology is inseparable from our psyche or emotional apparatus and from our social relationships. Wow, so all of it.
It's all one. It's scientifically, it's all one.
The problem is medical practice doesn't recognize that oneness. So most of the time, you go to a physician with rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, for both of which there's plenty of evidence about the role of trauma and stress, but the doctor's never gonna ask you about any of that stuff.
They're just gonna deal with the physical aspects of it, which they should deal with, but they also need to look at the whole. You know, what happened in this person's life, and what's stressing them now, and how can we help with that part of it? So medical practice, as a doctor, I don't know if to be told how miraculously effective the achievements of modern medicine can be.
But at the same time, there's a huge piece that we're missing, and that piece is not just intuitive or spiritual woohoo, it's science. But they don't teach that mind-body unity science in the medical schools.
Yeah, in fact, the peace is a whole. That's what they're missing.
They're missing the wholeness. Now, if you look at indigenous medicine, there's the medicine wheel, which consists of four quadrants.
There's the physical, our physiology. There's the mental, which is our emotions and our thoughts.
There's the social, which is our relationships with other people and other creatures. And then there's the spiritual, which is our connection with something greater than just a little ego, however you define that.
And health, they say, depends on the balance between those four quadrants scientifically that's totally true but unfortunately that science is largely ignored in medical training i'm sure yeah well especially now a lot of our medicine has kind of been compromised or i think our industry has you know oh yeah maybe i don't know and i don't know your industry and i'm not trying to offend it but it certainly seems has, you know? Oh yeah. Maybe, I don't know, and I don't know your industry, and I'm not trying to offend it, but it certainly seems like just, you know, it's been, most industries have been compromised, you know, the fact to have better, you know, balance sheets than- But look, if you come to me with depression, by the way, that's another diagnosis that I've had.
So I've actually taken medication for depression. So I'm not here to...
You're not just guessing. You know, to dismiss them.
Yeah. But if you look at the word depression, what does it actually mean to depress something? Hold it back.
It's to push it down, yeah? Now what gets pushed on in depression? Your feelings. Our feelings.
But why would a person push down their feelings? One of the needs of the child, one of the essential needs of the child, as I pointed out in this book, I don't make this stuff up, I just report it, is to be able to experience all their emotions, anger, grief, fear, panic, love, playfulness, curiosity, lust for life and just hunger for life. The child doesn't need to express all those emotions when they arise and have that understood, accepted and validated by the adults.
Now, if I'm in an environment where the parents can't do that, you've had guests on this program, I won't mention them by name, who teach that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. No.
A two-year-old kid gets frustrated, they get angry. If you give that kid the message that if you're angry you can't be with me, the child is an impossible dilemma.
Am I gonna separate myself from the person on whom my life depends, or will I push down my anger? Well, give that message to the kid often enough, what are they gonna do? Depress their feelings. 30 years later, they're diagnosed with this disease called depression.
Now, if you come to me with depression, I might decide that temporarily it might be a good idea for you to be in antidepressants. And I've taken them.
They helped me for a while. But it's not enough.
Let's also look at what made you push down your feelings, what happened to you. Now prescribing the antidepressant takes me three minutes.
Talking with you about what actually happened to you that made you push down your feelings, that takes a long time. And doctors are not even trained to raise that question.
So even if as a physician I don't have the expertise to deal with that question, at least I could refer you to somebody who does. But no, most of the time, it's just the industrial model.
You come in, I got five minutes with you, here's the prescription, goodbye. Well, that doesn't deal with the underlying problem.
It deals with the symptom, which may sometimes be helpful, sometimes it isn't, but whether it's helpful or not, it does not deal with the underlying dynamic. Yeah.
Oh yeah, it's just, and it's just where our society is too. We've gone so far down this road and it's just like, how do we, yeah, back in the day, it's like, it seemed like if you were like, maybe this is crazy, but if you were like just a small group around a campfire you could you could see if somebody was hurting you there was everything was right there you couldn't hide anything not only that you know what you would do you do ceremonies healing rituals yeah you would drum you would dance you would chant you would shake a stick he'd be communal a friend of mine who I quote in the book

he's a part Lakota physician and psychiatrist. His name is Luis Mel Madrona.
And he said in the Lakota tradition, when somebody gets sick, the community says, thank you. Your illness represents some imbalance in our community.
You're like the canary in the mind. So your healing is our healing.
So let's do this together. Now that makes so much sense.
Both scientifically and emotionally. We don't do that.
We sort of isolate the individual, then we separate the mind from the body. So we say it's just a brain problem.
No, it isn't. It's a life problem.
And that life is lived in an environment, in a multigenerational family, in a certain culture. Let's look at the whole thing.
That's all. Do you think we can start to head more in that direction or how do you think this changes? Because we are pretty far down the well here.
I think- Because sometimes you you even said roar like sometimes i feel like our whole planet just wants to fucking roar you know it's like it just like i feel like everybody just wants to go in the yard and just scream at the at that sky it's like i don't know it feels like there's just something trapped in us that is, does that make any sense, man? Oh, yeah. And it's had some cultural expression as well.
What was that movie where somebody yells, I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore? And he starts yelling, I'm. Oh, Falling Down, Michael Douglas? Is that it was? I don't know which movie it was but it was somebody just starts

yelling i'm fed up and i can't take it anymore and everybody starts yelling i'm fed up i can't take it anymore you know i think there's a deep sense of frustration in this culture i'm mad as hell and i'm not gonna be able to take this anymore yeah it's network how are oh yeah network that's a great movie if you've never seen it it's a great movie i'm a No, that was decades ago.

I think the level of frustration in our society has increased. Why are people frustrated? Because their needs aren't being met.
And that scream, look, I travel all over the world. I just came back from a three-week, six-country tour of Europe.
Wow. I talked to 12,000 people.
That sense of frustration, that sense of longing that we talked about, it's so universal these days. It is.
Yeah. Yeah, is it? Because that's what it feels like this.
Are other people feeling this? That's what I wonder a lot. Are other people feeling this same way? Well, some people are not because they escape

and this society is absolutely brilliant

at creating escapes through mass media,

mass sports, consumption, and so on.

But I'll say something here, and this is particularly true of comedians I have found. Some people are just born more sensitive.
That's a great point too, and I have to take that into account, we all do. And more sensitive means, sensitive is from the Latin word, sincere to feel.
Now some people are genetically born more sensitive. They feel more.
That means when things go wrong, they feel it more than the others. So the same thing can happen externally to different people, but if one of them is more sensitive, they're gonna feel it all the more.
So it's especially the highly sensitive people who are feeling that scream that you talk about.

Yeah, that's a great point.

That it, yeah, yeah, that's what, it's just like,

I just feel like we've just gone so far off the path of.

But if I can say something,

your sense that we've gone off the path, what in you knows that? Like what part of me you mean? What in you, who in you knows that we've gone off the path? It's the part that hasn't gone off the path. It's the part actually sees so that i mean i don't want to create too much doom and gloom here no there is this self here there's this trueness here that's never been damaged never been destroyed there's nobody's damage goes that way it's always in here it's a question of can we connect with it right you know and that yeah how do we get back to connecting with that sort of thing? Because our society, our culture is not going to do it for us.
It doesn't feel like. We might have to start with it as individuals.
Does that make sense? We do begin as individuals, but you probably realize, I mean, just for example, in your AA group, there's a community there. Right.
Who have a lot of shared experiences and who are very vulnerably open in sharing their experiences. And that's a source of support.
When you share about yourself, that's a source of support to others. When they share about themselves, that's support for you so that ultimately, no, we don't have to do that by ourselves.
It begins as an individual process, but pretty soon you find that we're not alone. Yeah.
Do you think we can get out of this toxic culture? Yeah, or do you feel like there's a way out of where we are? Or do you feel like that humanity is just- I believe in human beings. That's a great statement.
I do too. I believe that there's an essential goodness there, a desire to connect, a desire to belong, a desire to celebrate life.
I think we're endowed with those capacities. And as difficult as things may look, and especially these days with these terrible wars going on and the suffering that we've talked about, I still believe that there's so many examples.

Everywhere I go, I meet such good people.

People are trying to make a difference.

People are trying to do their little bit or their big bit to reduce the suffering in the world, to speak the truth, to offer some love, compassion to the world.

I don't know. to reduce the suffering in the world, to speak the truth, to offer some love, compassion to the world.
I really do believe in humans. Now, we have the potential to be monsters.
We have the potential to be angels. But that good side never totally disappears.
Some people, it's covered over so much that they might never get in touch with it. Most people, I think, are quite capable of getting there once they decide that they want to.
Yeah, I think what scares me, I think, is that in order to be a human being we have to have the present moment right we have to be able to still have like the ability to reflect and recognize and think and our society or our culture has created a lot where we're so many distractions so that if we never even take the time, if they can distract, if we can be distracted enough from being able to really think or feel, feel really probably starting with feeling, then we'll be trapped forever in a way. Well, does that make sense at all? It's interesting how you say all these really insightful things, then you keep asking me if it makes sense.
Sorry. Don't apologize.
I can't think and talk sometimes at the same time. I can't feel and speak at the same time.
It's just. No, but I'm just telling you that.
Yeah. I'm not.
I'm just noticing something. I don't.
Yeah. I don't feel like you are.
I appreciate it. Thanks.
Yeah. So here's the thing.
We're born as feeling creatures. Right.
We feel before we think. Yes.
The feeling apparatus is present in us before we're even born. The thinking apparatus doesn't start developing until much later on.
That's true. So that if there's a scaffolding of healthy feelings, then our thinking will be aligned with reality.
But it's the feelings that, we're feelings, we're feeling creatures before we're thinking creatures. Got it.
So what you said makes absolute sense even from the evolutionary and physiological point of view. Like animals feel, but they don't necessarily think.
In fact, they don't think. Some of them don't.
But without thinking, without feeling, they wouldn't survive. Right.
You know, and we think we can get by our own thinking. We got it backwards.
Yes Yes That's what it feels like these days Yeah It feels like everybody's just thinking It's like Even with like Like autonomous inventions and technology I'm like at a certain point I don't want any more technology If it's not helping us I know Like Stop Like Yeah You're killing what it means to be me or not me as a huge but just us it feels like we don't need to get faster it's just like you're going to take jobs with a guy doesn't have a job he doesn't have a purpose having having a job isn't only your purpose but it it's what gives people some sense of purpose and i mean a sense of meaning and a sense of meaning right and once you once you don't feel like you have any of that, then what are you? It's like we're almost just, I don't understand why our society wants that. Well, first of all, I totally get where you're coming from because when we talk about AI, my mind glazes over.
I don't care. Yeah.
I don't want one more piece of technology.

I'm much more interested in what happens with human beings.

A hundred.

Man, thank you, dude.

That's how I feel.

Yeah.

I just care how people feel, you know?

And I just like, I don't know. And when you talk about meaning, if you look at the diminishing lifespan of especially white American men, is that loss of meaning.
When they hollowed out the industrial heartland of America and they outsourced all the cheap labor to other countries, well you can see that from the profit motive, it makes sense. But from the point of view of human lives, you just deprive people of the sense of meaning.
And that sense of meaning, it's a psychologist friend of mine called dislocation, is a major source of distress and a major source of self-harm and addiction.

Well, I even think like it used to be, and I say this many times, but like somebody worked

in your area and they worked at a factory and they made like a table and they brought

it and you even had one of the tables at your house and you were proud of your dad because

he worked there and he made it.

And then, but now you have somebody in another country mailing something over here. They don't care about it, that they're making it.
Their kids don't know even what they do probably. You know, and it just, it's just like, where is the victim? I don't understand what level of this we're going to get to that is healthy.
Well, I think now what we're talking about here is the good old profit motive, because profits don't care about human values. And most companies, that's what they're interested in, is what will maximize profits.
And if they have to throw a thousand people out of a job in some town, they'll do it. Yeah.
You know? I don't understand that, though. Well, work, I think, is very important to people.
I mean, we're creatures who work. Yeah.
I just read a really interesting book, by the way. It's called The Continuum Concept, published 40 years ago or so.
This woman goes to the Venezuelan jungle, six weeks away from civilization,

and she watches how these Stone Age people

bring up their kids, that's the book

I did, The Conduion Concept, how they bring up their kids,

what they hold them everywhere, like we said,

they don't punish them, they don't yell at them.

These kids grow up really happy and comfortable

with themselves, but the point I'm making is, this tribe, they don't have a word for work. They have a word for cutting wood.
They have a word for planting. They have a word for fishing.
They have a word for washing. But there's no word for work.
In other words, they just do what they do. But there's no alienation from it.
Whatever they're into they're just into it that's what they're doing but they're only here we talk about work life balance now look at that phrase what does that imply that here's life and here's work and the two are not the same yeah it's almost like almost like we enslaved ourselves. Well, we have.
And then also our society, as you're saying, creates so much stress and uncomfort. Because, like, say if you took something that's supposed to be somewhere and you put it somewhere else, it's going to always feel stressed because it's not, like, in its home, right? It's not in its natural spot.
Funny you should say that because I often say you can study a zebra and you could conclude that the zebra is an animal that mostly lies around all day, gets up a few times to eat or to defecate or something, and then lies down again, walks around a little bit. And it would be true if you observed a zebra in a zoo, in a cage.
But if you observed a zebra out there on a savanna or wherever she lives, you'd see a totally different creature. Oh, they're turnt out there.
And the human beings in a sense, we put ourselves into a zoo. We were so far away from our natural evolutionary environment.
It's not a question again of going back to Stone Age, but it's a question of recognizing what we've lost. In a certain sense, we've put ourselves into a zoo and we're studying ourselves totally out of our elements and then we're wondering how come things are going so badly.
Yeah, that's crazy. It's almost, and I hate to even laugh at it, but you're saying it's absurd.
It's absurd. We're literally living in a theater of the absurd.
Yeah. In your book, you also talk about like the history of humanity, that what we call civilization is less than 5% of our existence as a species, right? That for the entire span of the human genus, that it represents less than 1% of that time.
Like our civilization, right? We're such a small piece of how long humans have been alive. And we have learned that such groups a long time ago held values emphasizing hospitality sharing generosity

and reciprocal exchange for the purpose not of personal enrichment but of connection these

values were intelligent time-tested guidelines for mutual survival yes there was violence and

bad behavior and all the rest we have never been perfect but we knew something about setting the

collective context for our humanist to flourish fruitfully. That it was a group effort.
It was a group thing and people never saw themselves as separate from the environment or from animals or from other human beings. And in British Columbia, excuse me, where I live, the indigenous people used to have a ceremony called a potlatch.
And the potlatches, they would invite all these people, neighbors and other tribes and so on, and they'd give things to each other. So it wasn't about getting, it was about giving.
When the British Colonials arrived, you know what they did? They outlawed the potlatch. Damn.
Because they wanted to kill that spirit of communality that the indigenous people thrived on. So they knew how to do it.
So they forbade a lot of the practices that gave the indigenous people meaning, including the giving. And until very recently, decades ago, it was outlawed.
So people had to do stuff in secret. They outlawed the chanting.
They had to chant in secret. Because they knew the healing power of the chants.
And the ch chance really connected indigenous people to their traditions. Now the colonists did this everywhere.
They did this in the States, they did it in Australia and New Zealand, they did it in Canada of course, parts of Africa. And so that a real effort was made to divorce people from essential communal drives.
Yeah, that's what it feels like. That's what it feels like inside.
Like, we're not supposed to be doing this. Yeah.
You know? Yeah. One woman that you mentioned, Darcia Narvaez.
Yeah, Darcia Narvaez. Darcia Narvaez.
Said that we have become species atypical, a sobering idea when you think about it. No other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be.
Or to destroy its own environment. Yeah.
You know? Yeah, I still wonder if Mother Nature's mad about, like, if some of the diseases we have now are because of, like, what happened to the indigenous cultures, you know? If some of that just, like, is, like, you know, because Mother Nature remembers, you know? And so it's like, are we still just suffering the sins of like what's happened a long time ago we are yeah and uh the problem is we haven't learned from it yet like actually i work a lot with indigenous people in canada they often invite me to talk about addiction and stress and trauma and so on oh some of them we did a a show in Vancouver. Some of them came out to the show.

Did they?

And they gave me some gifts.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, it was really, really beautiful.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Yeah, it was awesome, man.

Yeah, it was great.

It was really nice of them.

But, so I do a lot of that work,

but I get so much from it

because they have such deep wisdom. Like even with all their trauma, and all the dysfunction, all the addiction, and mental illness amongst them, which is strictly a result of colonial trauma, but there's still such gentle wisdom.
There's still such connection. I remember doing a ceremony with some indigenous friends two years ago, Art and Nature.
They talk to every plant. They're so connected, you know, such deep wisdom.
And I actually believe that when this society starts getting its head screwed on right, we'll be very humbly willing to learn from the indigenous people. Yes.
You know, like, yes, civilization has brought many amazing things. Not to forget that.
But what if we could meld our technological know-how and scientific brilliance with indigenous wisdom? What a world we could actually create. And maybe that is where we're headed, right? I think that has to be the hope.
Well, I believe that's certainly a possibility. Yeah.
I think that has to be the hope that we take away. Yeah, because if I were ever a leader, I think we would get back to some of the things that were important, you know? You know, one of my favorite times a kid the power would go out sometimes yeah and so we'd all have to like mom would put a couple candles out and so we'd all have to be right there together yeah and it was just like yeah i don't know all that mattered was just like um like you could joke and but it was like i don't know it like we just all needed each other you need to know where Where everybody was Is everybody here I don't know.
Like, we just all needed each other. You need to know where everybody was.
Is everybody here? I don't know. There was something special about that.
But you can see it even now. When there's disasters, people really come together.
Right. They tend to come together to support each other.
Yeah, yeah. They'll go out of their way to give and to support.
Oh, for sure. You're seeing it with the flooding and stuff in the southeast right now, many places all over the world.
Yeah. Yeah, I think there's so much to learn from our natives, from the indigenous people of the land, you know, just as we learn from animals in all parts of nature.
Well, Darsha Narva, the scientist, the psychologist that you mentioned, she's written a book called The Evolved Nest, and she's talking about our commonality with other animals and how they rear their young and what we could learn from them. Oh, wow.
Yeah, that's an amazing little book. I wrote the foreword for it.
Darsha's done some amazing work on the actual needs of human beings.

Really, she's a pretty fascinating woman?

Well, she's very interesting.

Very interesting.

If you ever want to talk to her,

I'm happy to connect you.

That would be really cool.

You Canadians are dang interesting, man.

Well, Darsha is American.

Oh, she is?

Yeah, yeah.

All right, we'll take it.

No, no, she's a retired professor

at the University of Notre Dame.

Wow. And she's still very active.
And this book is called The Evolved Nest. It's just a slim little volume.
But you should learn about how penguins bring up their kids, or wolves. When a mother dies, then wolves who haven't even been pregnant start lactating to feed the young ones.
Wow. You know, and how, when the baby elephant is born, you know what happens? All the other mothers.
Elephants put their trunks on it. All the other mothers, you know, they stand around and they touch the baby.
They know the need for touch. I mean, there's incredible wisdom in animals as well.
And Darsha and her writing partner, Gay Bradshaw, they really show us the lessons we could actually derive just from watching our animals bring up their young. We still have a lot to learn.
Is that the best message to take away from your book, do you think? We still have a lot to learn and we need to be humble. We need to realize that for all our achievements and our intellectual brilliance, we've come disconnected from our hearts, from our gut feelings, and that we need to really be curious about what our hearts and our guts are telling us, not just our intellects.
Amen. Yeah.
We need an emotional revolution. That's a good way to put it.
Before you go, and thank you so much for your time. Oh, my pleasure.
Yeah. There's a part, Rafi, there's a guy in the book, Rafi.
Oh, Rafi. Rafi.
No, Rafi's a children's singer. A children's singer.
Oh, yeah, that guy? That's him. I'd like to be him.
I'm under the sea. Yeah.
Is that him? No, no, that's Ringo Starr. Oh, damn.
You're singing Octopus's Garden. Yeah.
Oh, Jesus. But Rafi used to sing Baby Beluga.
Oh, yeah. You know, and- Apples and Banone knows that song? Yeah, yeah, and Banana Phone.
Yeah, but he says we discover who we are from the inside you wrote that on the book and and raffi actually played at in the white house at the clinton um inauguration oh sweet and he's like the children's troubadour of the world yes when i was a child we listened to all yes they had they had all of it um so raff is a friend mine oh excellent and uh at some point he some years ago he woke us him in the middle wakes up wakes up in the middle of the night and the world child honoring comes into his head and he says what would the world look like if we honor children and the needs of children so he started this child honoring institute. Now the thing about his singing for children is it's not condescending.
He really plays with kids and really gets them. And his heart is really so childlike.
So he says, whatever the quote was, that we... We discover who we are from the inside.
We discover who we are from the inside. And he's actually talking about how human beings develop, which is through our feelings first.
And those feelings begin in the uterus. So already when a mother is stressed, the child really feels that in the uterus, and that stresses the child,

and that interferes with the child's brain development.

So that actually we develop our sense

from our feelings first, and as I said earlier,

then the intellect comes in.

But if the emotional circuits are out of balance

because of early stress, then it's hard for us to even think straight. Right.
And our society we have is women, so many mothers have to work. It's like we've just, yeah, we've, we're a little misconstrued.
Well, the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. And what nature would prefer, scientifically and physiologically, is for the baby with the mother for at least nine months.
But actually for years. Now, or if not the mother, but at least up with the mother for at least nine months, but ideally well beyond them, but with other nurturing adults.
Right. So it's not just caregivers who give you food and- Right, it's the mother, the grandmother, the aunt, the neighbor, the sense of community, your whole genes being right there.
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, there's, how did we get off on such a different tangent then if we if we were supposed to be in these these tribes these groups these it's just evolution and there's nothing we can do about it well that's you know um that's civilization right civilization which is god obviously brought all kinds of benefits but also look look at all that we've lost. So again, it's for me, can we value our achievements and our knowledge and try to remember what we've lost and try to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that we've kind of got divorced from.
Yeah, and your children, just look into them, pour into them what you want out of them, you know? Pour into them as much as you can. And yes, kids don't know how to feel sometimes.
You have to also talk to them about their feelings. No, you don't.
They know exactly how to feel. They don't have the words for, so they know how to feel.
It's our job to give them words for their feelings. Right, it's our job to give them words for their feelings, right.
So yeah, if you're not doing that, it's not a judgment. And I don't have any children, but that's what I could have used when I was young.
It was like, how do you feel? Let me help you with this. Oh, not even how you feel.
You're really angry with daddy right now because you wanted a cookie before dinner and daddy said no cookie. So now you're really angry, aren't you? Yeah.
You know, so it's not even, we don't have to tell them how to feel. They're feeling creatures.
We have to accept their feelings. Okay.
That doesn't mean we give them the cookie yeah but it means that we do understand hey hey i understand you want that cookie yeah you right now you're really mad at daddy okay i get it i get it yeah you know that's all yeah yeah that doesn't mean you're allowed to hate your brother but i get that you're're angry. So we're not about permissive parenting.
We're talking about authoritative parenting, not authoritarian, authoritative, where the child is understood and held and guided and we give them words for their feelings, but we don't ask them to suppress themselves. We may not accept certain behaviors or put limits, but we know how to do that.
If the child trusts you and is looking to you, like natives, the indigenous people, like we said earlier, never hit their kids because the kids trusted the adults for guidance. Right.
You know, which all comes from connection. A hundred percent.
And now we're learning so many things. we learn them like, you know so which all comes from connection a hundred percent and now we're learning so many things we learn them like you know through a youtube video or through we we learn so we i mean now most people learn about sex through pornography it's just like yeah yeah yeah yeah we need each other to yeah we need each other and are we.
And we're creating more and more that we don't. That's right.
And we're creating more and more that if you have needs, there's something wrong with you. Yeah.
If you have emotional needs, you're a weakling. Oh, one day our feelings will be in a museum.
You'll go visit them there. Like, hey, Like hey Remember this They used to have that Dr.
Monte Thank you just for Putting all this together It's really fascinating I mean you have so many Other Like Therapists And scientists And philosophers And doctors And everything That you've quoted in here To really put together a beautiful piece of work here. Thank you.
It's really fascinating. And it's not all like Debbie Downer stuff either.
And I don't mean to be, and I don't think we were that much in this conversation. It's just looking at things and saying, hey, well, let's take a look at where we are, possibly how did we get here? Well, that's my intention.
And my intention is to promote healing, actually.

It's not just to spread doom and gloom.

And actually, the healing part of the book

is the longest part of the book.

I'm not there yet.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, yeah.

I hope you get there someday.

I think I will.

Yeah.

I've been reading that a good clip.

I'm enjoying it.

Well, I'm glad to hear that.

Thank you.

It was, if I can boast, can I boast?

Sure, I would love for you to.

It was 19 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. Let's's go for a year and a half it was a canadian bestseller it's been published in 41 languages now internationally and it's been a bestseller in a whole lot of countries so i think there's value in this book well i think also that it's good to know that uh enough people are starting to um recognizing some of the same thought you.
Because that in itself, those numbers itself and that prolificness is a source of hope, I think. I think what's happening actually is that as society in some ways goes more into crisis, also more and more people are waking up.
And they're still not asking questions. And I see that as a good thing.
Yeah, I do too. Thank you for letting me ask you questions today.
Thank you for, yeah, just for your time. So many of my friends love you and look up to you.
I had my own therapist was like, he's asking, I'm like, well, you're my therapist, but he was excited that I was getting this down with you. So yeah.
Thank you so much for your commitment to curiosity.

And thanks for your time.

Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.

I must be cornerstone.

Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found.

I can feel it in my bones, but it's gonna take a little while.