E538 Dr. Gabor Maté

Speaker 1 Don't miss Sebastian Maniscalco's new stand-up special, It Ain't Right, premiering on Hulu, November 21st. Filmed live at the sold-out United Center Arena in Chicago.

Speaker 1 Sebastian goes all in on family chaos, aging, non-existent manners, and life's most relatable and frustratingly funny moments as only he can.

Speaker 1 Watch Sebastian Maniscalco, It Ain't Right, on November 21st, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers.

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Speaker 1 We have some upcoming tour dates there in Colorado Springs in Colorado, Casper, Wyoming, Billings, Montana, and Missoula, Montana, Bloomington, Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, Champaign, Illinois over there, and a fighting a line eye area, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Lafayette, Louisiana, and Beaumont, Texas.

Speaker 1 You can get all your tickets at theova.com/slash T-O-U-R.

Speaker 1 And thank you so much for the support.

Speaker 1 Today's guest is a physician and an author. His works explore such topics like stress, trauma, addiction, developmental psychology, and more.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'll sit and tell you my stories.

Speaker 1 Shine

Speaker 1 on me,

Speaker 1 and I will

Speaker 1 find a song while it's negative.

Speaker 2 I saw your interview with Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Oh, you did?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was actually quite struck. I saw the segment on his brother's alcoholism.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I found him

Speaker 2 unusually

Speaker 2 without bombast and almost tender

Speaker 2 and very

Speaker 2 vulnerable and

Speaker 2 just kind of humble, you know, which is not how usually he comes across. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I was trying to just talk to him about something that felt pretty normal, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 But he's also expressed interest in you and in your brother.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I thought it was sweet of him. Yeah, as sweet as he could be.
Yeah. You know, I think I...

Speaker 2 Well, look, when you read further in the book, I actually talk about him. Really? His childhood trauma, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, you do.

Speaker 2 Him and Hillary Clinton's both.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 1 I'm looking forward to that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 i use a poster boy for trauma yeah in my view yeah i 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 um

Speaker 1 with Donald 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that would have been an interesting conversation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just to let him know that it wasn't something his brother, like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I really wish that if I could go back. But 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.

Speaker 1 So sometimes it's,

Speaker 1 you know, you're learning, you know, you're learning

Speaker 2 on the stove. We're always learning.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're always learning.

Speaker 1 Gabor, that's how you say it.

Speaker 2 Gabor. Gabor.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Theo, nice to meet you today, Mr. Mate.
And thanks for coming.

Speaker 2 Thank you. My pleasure.
Yep.

Speaker 1 And thanks for sharing this book, man.

Speaker 1 This is your book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You believe that we are kind of a sick culture. What makes you

Speaker 1 believe that?

Speaker 1 Well, or like what proof do you have of that?

Speaker 2 Well, so 70% of American adults are at least on one medication. 70%.

Speaker 2 40% are on two medications or more.

Speaker 2 The number of children being diagnosed with all manner of dysfunctions, disorders, mental health challenges like ADHD, self-cutting,

Speaker 2 addictions, anxiety, depression,

Speaker 2 childhood suicide suicide

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 forever, but just statistically,

Speaker 2 there's more and more evidence of illness and dysfunction. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, the the overdosing alone is unbelievable.
You know, the fact that that's that that's even just become a common thing in our society is

Speaker 1 it's heartbreaking for so many.

Speaker 1 And it's heartbreaking for so many and so many people's families. Just the residual effect of suicide or overdose.

Speaker 1 It's like we don't even think about those numbers don't even take into the ripple effect of

Speaker 1 people losing a loved one.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. I mean, the families that are being devastated.
And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we went down on Catchings, is that right?

Speaker 1 Hastings. Hastings, yeah.
We went down on Hastings just to take a drive and see.

Speaker 2 Well, so that's where I used to work. Wow.

Speaker 2 For 12 years as a physician. And

Speaker 2 everybody down there was severely traumatized in childhood and their addictions were all

Speaker 2 a response to immense emotional pain that they didn't know how else to handle,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 individually, the more likely you are to escape in

Speaker 2 the soothing and the relief that drugs or other addictions offer. So, if you look at American society, you've got to be asking, why are so many people having to escape from reality? Yeah.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 I want to make sure that we get the best information that we can for our guests today. I think it's really important.

Speaker 1 One of the things that you talk about in the book

Speaker 1 that's causing a lot of sickness is trauma. Yeah.
And then, more specifically, unprocessed trauma.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Help me define those a little bit for our audience.

Speaker 2 Sure. So trauma is one of these words that everybody throws around.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a buzzword.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So let's just define it.

Speaker 2 So trauma literally comes from the Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a wound, whether it's a physical wound or a psychological wound.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it directly causes inflammation in the body, it affects how your genes function, how your chromosomes function, it stresses your organs, it creates all kinds of physiological problems.

Speaker 2 On an emotional level, it

Speaker 2 instills a lot of pain in you that you try to escape from.

Speaker 2 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, you know, pornography or whatever

Speaker 2 it also makes you suppress disconnects you from your own emotions because as a 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 and you talk about trauma also as not being seen and known.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 here we have to understand

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 being seen rather than being forced to be something that the parents want them to be.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that had an impact on them. And not because I wasn't devoted, because I didn't love them, just because

Speaker 2 of my own trauma, I couldn't even see myself. Oh.

Speaker 1 Man, I can relate so much to what I can relate so much to that. Yeah, it's like,

Speaker 1 it's funny because I work as a comedian and for like, I grew up in a kind of a traumatic home. Like my, my mom was very busy.
We had, she had four children. And

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 and she didn't know how, I guess, you know, it's okay. Yeah, I just always felt like I wasn't seen.

Speaker 2 And how do you, and how do you suppose that affected you?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 something, you know, to get someone to see me because I needed to survive, you know, I needed to feel alive, you know.

Speaker 2 You know, it's funny about comedians. May I say something about them? Yeah.
I looked at the biographies of a number of comedians. What you're talking about is like a common theme.

Speaker 2 I looked at Robin Williams.

Speaker 2 who's this brilliant, brilliant comic. And

Speaker 2 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 ovarian cancer, the same thing.
Wow.

Speaker 2 So that they had the innate talent,

Speaker 2 but then they used that talent to be seen and valued where they should have been valued without talent. No matter what.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Or did I just at some early point

Speaker 1 develop

Speaker 1 having to get attention?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 if I didn't do that? And not saying that,

Speaker 1 not saying that I'm not grateful and I don't love being a comedian.

Speaker 1 It's been a blessing,

Speaker 1 but it's like

Speaker 1 if I created that,

Speaker 1 okay, I have to be this thing for you to see me, then who created that?

Speaker 1 Was there a different me that was supposed to be there, but then I created this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now why did I need to be important? Because as an infant I got the message that I wasn't.

Speaker 2 And so now then

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's just our birthright, that we exist. We have the right to be here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that God chose us or that the energies of the world chose us and said, I'm going to put you here like with a fine pin. I'm going to put you in the world.

Speaker 1 And I did it on purpose. And the world was built to take care of you and to nurture you and to make you feel welcome as you are.

Speaker 2 And if you actually look at,

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 they give their children a deep sense of acceptance. They hold them, they carry them everywhere.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. All the paintings you see of a Native Americans,

Speaker 1 somebody's got a kid on them. They got them in a knapsack, they got them right, they got them.

Speaker 2 And they tend not to hit their kids.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know? Yeah, you've never seen a movie about a Native American beating his children, I don't think.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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 now it's like both parents work in so many cases.
So,

Speaker 1 and that alone just feels like

Speaker 1 it just shouldn't be that way. It's like

Speaker 2 if you look at through our 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, if that's not possible in today's society, at least then we have to compensate for it. But we've forgotten that we shouldn't need that.

Speaker 2 So now when they send them 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

Speaker 2 sense of who they are. So we all end up.
disconnected from ourselves. Then we get to a certain stage in life.
We're wondering, whose life am I leading anyway? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's funny you say like fitting in. It's like, yeah, like you're like, your child's not fitting in because

Speaker 1 it's two puzzle pieces are the parents, you know, or the family.

Speaker 1 That's, and not to say it shouldn't be able to spend time with other children and be in, and that our schools are bad or anything, but it's the fact that

Speaker 1 they need to fit in there first.

Speaker 1 And then I think it's probably easier for children to fit in in other places in the world.

Speaker 2 But that's,

Speaker 2 but the fitting in happens naturally

Speaker 2 when you're accepted. You know, listen, the schools, I'll tell you something.
One of the,

Speaker 2 I'm talking science here, one of the essential needs of all mammals is play.

Speaker 2 In our brain, there's circuitry for play. You can see it.
Dolphins play, little elephants play,

Speaker 2 bear cubs, lion cobs, puppies, kittens, they all play. Why? Play is essential for brain development.
It's far more important than academic learning.

Speaker 2 So in the 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 behavioral control rather than, again,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's just an oh, and that's just part of it. It's like our whole society is, it's, you know, I wonder sometimes where we

Speaker 1 did we go completely off the rails in a direction and or a series of directions, you know,

Speaker 1 that have kind of put us where we are.

Speaker 1 I want to get this statement right right here. Sure.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Great question. So, every

Speaker 2 traumatic event is stressful, but not every stressful event is traumatic. So,

Speaker 2 you invite me on your show, and

Speaker 2 for some reason I don't show up. And you had this studio arranged, that might stress you, but it doesn't traumatize you.
It doesn't leave you with a permanent wound.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 2 hostile to other people,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If it makes a wound, if it makes a wound, that's what makes it traumatic.

Speaker 1 Because a wound is sensitive, even if you think of a wound,

Speaker 1 and if it's not healed properly,

Speaker 1 then it's always a problem.

Speaker 2 Well, there's two, yeah, and

Speaker 2 there's two 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

Speaker 2 70s, or even I'm 80 now, you know.

Speaker 1 Same.

Speaker 1 You look great.

Speaker 2 Well, thanks. It's all the Botox.

Speaker 2 And the adventure.

Speaker 2 No, it's

Speaker 2 and in my 55-year-old marriage with my wife, she might say something

Speaker 2 or react in some way that touches an old wound. And all of a sudden, I'm not this 80-year-old guy.

Speaker 2 I'm this one-year-old kid responding, you know, because that wound is sort of, I'm not giving an excuse here.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying that that's the challenge, you know, so in one sense, a wound is a

Speaker 2 trauma, is an open wound that you touch it, ow.

Speaker 2 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-ending, so it's insensitive.

Speaker 2 So we get hardened.

Speaker 1 Why does you can either get extremely sensitive or very hardened?

Speaker 2 Or both. Or both.
Depending on, you know, and when you talk about hardened criminals, guess what hardened them?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 the question is then, how do we treat each other

Speaker 2 in a society where so many of us carry wounds?

Speaker 1 Let's talk a little bit about unprocessed trauma. So you talk about emotional isolation

Speaker 1 as being

Speaker 1 something that really negatively nurtures

Speaker 1 unprocessed trauma.

Speaker 2 So once you're hurt as a child, you tend not to trust other people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, and that emotional isolation itself then has effects on your body and on your mind. So

Speaker 2 the people who are lonely, and the U.S. 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.

Speaker 2 People are describing themselves as lonely in much higher numbers as they did 20, 40 years ago.

Speaker 2 The loneliness is as much of a risk factor for physiological illness as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 loneliness is both a manifestation of trauma and a cause of tremendous stress, which then undermines physiological and mental health.

Speaker 1 Okay, say that to me one more time. So

Speaker 2 loneliness is both an outcome of trauma.

Speaker 1 So it's an outcome of trauma. So something traumatic happened, it wasn't processed properly, and then now you

Speaker 1 will feel lonely.

Speaker 2 You will feel lonely. You will isolate.
Because look,

Speaker 2 if I

Speaker 2 am always being a nice guy so that you will like me,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Right, that's not really me.

Speaker 2 That's not me. There was a study done in Australia, or at least I used to work in palliative care as a doctor, looking after dying people.
In Australia, there was a palliative care nurse.

Speaker 2 who wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of Dying People. These were people that were dying before their time, like I used to look after, of cancer or chronic neurological illness.

Speaker 2 You know what the top regret of dying people was? That they didn't have the courage to be themselves.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So the question for the rest of us is do we want to 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

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 As children we didn't have much choice as adults can we develop that freedom to be ourselves? Wow

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's

Speaker 1 it's amazing that

Speaker 1 what your feelings or your heart or your mind will like want you to do sometimes. But then this other smoke comes in this

Speaker 1 that feels stronger sometimes, and it

Speaker 1 it clouds, it almost clouds that feeling away. Yeah.
You know?

Speaker 2 But it does. Yeah.
And

Speaker 2 am I interrupting? Sorry.

Speaker 1 No, no, I just wanted to,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then if you can't process it, now you have almost a new trauma of of

Speaker 1 unprocessed trauma.

Speaker 2 Well, that's they have the ongoing wound, which is what trauma means.

Speaker 2 Now look,

Speaker 2 let's take an extreme example. Okay.
Let's say a child is being sexually abused.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what would their instincts tell them to do? Well, their instincts would say fight back

Speaker 2 or run away

Speaker 2 or ask for help for God's sakes.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 by definition, none of those options are available to the child. So the only way they can survive is to disconnect from themselves.

Speaker 2 And that disconnection, they get wired into the nervous system, into their brain. And every time they even think of being themselves,

Speaker 2 as you just described, they get scared. Because being themselves was a because had they fought back, had they tried to escape, it would have been worse for them.

Speaker 2 So that that disconnection from the self was the only way they survived.

Speaker 2 Now every time as an adult, they even think of

Speaker 2 being authentic, that fear comes up.

Speaker 1 And it may not even come up for them like in their

Speaker 1 awake mind. It's almost like it comes up at a level where you don't even realize

Speaker 1 that something's pulling the strings in the distance. That's what's pretty remarkable.

Speaker 2 Well, pulling the strings is exactly the right analogy.

Speaker 2 There's a neurobiologist, neuroscientist quite well known at Stanford University, Robert Sopolsky, who wrote a book recently called Determined, by which he means predetermined.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he's almost right, because what he's talking about is as you say, we're pulled by these invisible strings of our own conscious that were programmed into us even before we were born, even in our mother's wombs.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 it's just a life,

Speaker 2 I find it personally, a lifetime's challenge to cut the strings

Speaker 2 and to actually be in the present moment as an adult person connected to myself. Let me tell you, it's a lifelong work.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no,

Speaker 1 I feel you. It's funny.
Like, I didn't even know that I

Speaker 1 didn't know that.

Speaker 1 It might sound crazy. I didn't even, I existed and everything was fine in my life, but I was having trouble like building relationships.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's because of these, you know, these things that have happened and then I never processed them that

Speaker 1 some of them are still pulling me back, you know, some of them are still holding me.

Speaker 2 And until you did process them, what feeling did you actually have? Right.

Speaker 2 We're like puppets on a string.

Speaker 1 Oh, and yeah, and

Speaker 1 I was almost a figment of, it's funny people say a figment of your imagination.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Persona. Yes.
Did you ever read Pinocchio as a a kid?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, Geppetto, dude.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, do you remember

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But we're also foolish when we're puppets. We're not stupid,

Speaker 2 but we're unaware. Yeah.
You know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, unaware.

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Speaker 1 Let's personalize this a little bit. So what was the trauma in your life that

Speaker 1 started you on this journey?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 what started started me on the journey was well into adulthood.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 My marriage had difficulties, a lot of tension.

Speaker 2 My children were

Speaker 2 facing their challenges and in some ways

Speaker 2 they were even afraid of me, you know, and

Speaker 1 like afraid of your energy, afraid of like...

Speaker 2 Afraid of my sudden outbursts of uncontrolled, I don't mean physical violence, I mean just outbursts of

Speaker 2 rage, you know. Anger, yeah.
You know, I can relate to that. And my son Daniel, who helped me write the myth of normal, he says in the book that

Speaker 2 the floor was never the floor. He never knew when the floor might disappear.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 hurricane sweep through the house, emotionally speaking.

Speaker 2 Well, that doesn't create a basis of trust or security and it's not because we didn't love our kids it's right it's not because we didn't do our best you know so

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 what were you like as a kid what was i like yeah um I was very smart.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I've heard you say, I've heard you refer to yourself as a smart child. You like to rebel.

Speaker 2 I was a rebel, yeah, in

Speaker 2 in communist Hungary

Speaker 2 you really have 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

Speaker 2 I love getting those you know

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 I was very

Speaker 2 I was very thoughtful

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 When I was eight year old, uh

Speaker 2 my mother took me to a psychologist and

Speaker 2 psychologist took my history, you know,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And she said he said to the 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.

Speaker 2 So, on the one hand, I was highly functioning.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 and but on the other hand, I had all this

Speaker 2 unseen

Speaker 2 stuff

Speaker 2 that erupted later on.

Speaker 1 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, um,

Speaker 1 it's almost like a fire that starts when you're young, but you don't, the smoke doesn't show up.

Speaker 1 I mean for me it wasn't until my 30s 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 right and and that's because we pushed down

Speaker 2 all the rage that we never expressed as kids. We pushed down the pain.

Speaker 2 We pushed down the isolation. We pretend.
And we can function in the world in ways that the world can even respect and reward.

Speaker 2 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 100 of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I got 50 of them in my phone.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.
Right.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 sometimes what you go find, even though you're just trying to replicate what you didn't get when you were young,

Speaker 1 can be detrimental to you.

Speaker 2 Which is why people get into

Speaker 2 unhealthy relationships because

Speaker 2 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 uh it's so funny i have this i have this thing that came into my head like

Speaker 1 I could jump off of a cliff, right? Yeah. But if I heard

Speaker 1 a mom come home from from work back on the top of that cliff, I would find a way 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.

Speaker 2 Because you're looking for the mom.

Speaker 1 Because I'm just, yeah, it's like, it may sound crazy, but yeah, just like,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's like, if I can't help but look, I can't help but wonder,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 unfortunately,

Speaker 2 it really gets in the way of male-female relationships. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 a lot of us, I mean, myself included.

Speaker 2 In my relationship with my spouse, in some ways, I just wanted to be mothered.

Speaker 2 You know, not not just loved as an adult but actually mothered on the one hand on the other hand i would resent it you know because i don't want to be controlled right you know

Speaker 2 so it puts the woman into an impossible situation oh yeah you know oh yeah i would never date me yeah oh gee person yeah i wouldn't even now

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I did some ayahuasca ceremonies. People do plant medicine.

Speaker 2 Well, hey, you haven't read the chapter yet on ayahuasca.

Speaker 1 There's one in here?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Fuck yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 I think it's chapter 31.

Speaker 1 So you had experience with it?

Speaker 2 I used to lead retreats with it. No way, bro.
Yeah. And

Speaker 2 what were you going to say about it?

Speaker 1 I was going to say that when I did a plant medicine retreat, that I realized realized one of the reasons why I've had trouble getting relationships is because I'm still waiting for this original relationship.

Speaker 2 The perfect mom. Yep.

Speaker 1 And it's no blame. It's not a blame on my mom.

Speaker 1 I don't do that anymore.

Speaker 1 I lament some of the feelings from my youth, but I don't,

Speaker 1 you know, I love my mother and I'm grateful that she did the best that she could. And I believe that she did.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I realized like I can't,

Speaker 1 there's just a part of me that

Speaker 1 it's just still like, I feel like it's like a kid standing on a dock, like waiting for a boat to come. That's how I envision a lot of times.

Speaker 2 But so there's a deep longing. Yeah.
I totally understand that.

Speaker 1 And then you try to get someone else to fill it, and they don't even know what to do. And you did.
And for years, I didn't even know I was trying to get somebody to fill it.

Speaker 1 It just, nothing, I couldn't figure it out.

Speaker 2 There was that emptiness.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was wild, man. And my life was still okay, but just below, right below the surface level of my life, there was

Speaker 1 a precarious foundation.

Speaker 2 I totally understand.

Speaker 2 I found out about ayahuasca after my book on addiction got published in 2009.

Speaker 2 It's called In the Realm of Hunger 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,

Speaker 2 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 next stop what do you know about

Speaker 2 leave me alone already i mean you 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 it's a peruvian shaman who came up there so i did the ayahuasca

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the baby started cooing and oohing and awing.

Speaker 2 And these tears of love just flowed down my face. Wow.
And my heart just opened.

Speaker 2 And I realized how close my heart had been because it was so bruised so early that I closed it down.

Speaker 2 Not that I deliberately closed it down, but

Speaker 2 as a way of protecting it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 is the way you said okay I can work with this to help people who are addicted now

Speaker 2 I'm not here to advocate its use it's not for everybody it's certainly not a panacea

Speaker 2 you know psychedelics is a whole other conversation yeah same I'm not saying anybody should they have their place

Speaker 2 They're not the answer and they're certainly not for everybody. But in the right context, with the right guidance, the right preparation,

Speaker 2 they can really help people open up to parts of themselves that they weren't even aware that they were there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating.
And I hope that

Speaker 1 the knowledge of that evolves over time, you know. But that can also be scary because some people go and get addicted to that.
I've seen that happen with people.

Speaker 2 I've seen it too, because what people get addicted to is not so much the substances, because

Speaker 2 nobody's going to get addicted to ayahsky. That's nasty.

Speaker 1 Because you can't just have some at a club.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 elevated

Speaker 2 experience that takes them out of their ordinary self.

Speaker 2 And 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 the whole thing is

Speaker 2 the experience can open a door,

Speaker 2 but you got to walk through it. Yeah.
And you have to keep walking through it. Not when you're under the influence of the medicine.

Speaker 1 Right. The integration.

Speaker 2 The integration. It's so key.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
We've lost, that's a huge part of our society.

Speaker 1 That's kind of, now we just kind of get a piece of information and then we're like, oh, we have the information, but we don't take as much time to

Speaker 1 integrate something into our life. Like,

Speaker 1 that's one thing I've noticed for myself anyway. I don't want 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,

Speaker 1 oh, I know this about me now, or this is something I've learned. But unless I integrate the solution to that or the

Speaker 1 information from that, the positive information, instead of just shouting it out that I know it,

Speaker 1 actually integrating it and taking time to integrate it, you know, even taking time, like if you go to a church sermon or a, um,

Speaker 1 or a

Speaker 1 mosque sermon or

Speaker 1 synagogue sermon, yeah, Jewish church. That's why I was going to have synagogue sermon.

Speaker 1 And you can hear a message, right? But then you can just go on about your day. But taking time to integrate a message in your life, well, what did I hear? How does it make me feel? That's right.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 our lives weren't so frenetic.

Speaker 2 Well, I think we're addicted,

Speaker 2 particularly, I think the United States is addicted to the quick fix. Yeah.
You know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that old shab.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The paint, the spray paint it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Have you struggled with addiction before?

Speaker 2 Have I struggled with addiction?

Speaker 1 How do you struggle with work addiction, I think you talked about?

Speaker 2 I've had

Speaker 2 two major addictions.

Speaker 2 One is workaholism.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I was driven to work because I have to keep proving my importance

Speaker 2 and that people should like me, people should respect me. And why? Because I didn't respect myself.
And because I

Speaker 2 got this message early in life that I just wasn't important, you know, and I believed it. The trauma is not,

Speaker 2 for example, the trauma is not, for example, that my mother gave me to a stranger when I was 11 months old to save my life. That wasn't the trauma.
That was the traumatic event.

Speaker 2 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.
Right.

Speaker 2 Because you have to keep proving to yourself. The other addiction I had, and people often laugh, how you can call that an addiction, but it really was.
I was shopping for classical compact discs.

Speaker 1 C D's? C D's.

Speaker 2 Hell yeah. But I could drop $3,000, $4,000 a day on them.

Speaker 2 You know, and I would.

Speaker 1 You can't even smoke them.

Speaker 2 And no, you can't smoke them.

Speaker 2 And no sooner would I leave the store, but I have to run back to get some more. So it wasn't about having and enjoying.
I love the music, but it wasn't about that.

Speaker 2 It was about getting more and more and more and ever enough. And so I would lie to my wife about it.
I would sometimes neglect my work. I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't think I mentioned this in this book, but in my book of addiction, I talk about how I left a woman in labor once to go get a compact disc.

Speaker 1 Wow. What album was it?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 clients? And I said, I don't. I said, the differences are obvious.
It's the similarities that are interesting.

Speaker 2 And when I told my patients in the downtown East Side who were using the heroin and, you know, and the cocaine and whatever, that, you know, I got these.

Speaker 1 These Boys to Men albums, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they said, they never said,

Speaker 2 How can you compare stuff? You know what they said? Hey, Doug, you're just like the rest of us, aren't you?

Speaker 2 And my point is, we are all just like the rest of us.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Running, working out. That's a huge one.

Speaker 2 Extreme working out and all that.

Speaker 2 We're running away from ourselves. Yeah.
And so, and when I ask people, not what's wrong with your addiction, because that's obvious, but what's right about it.

Speaker 2 Like, for example, I mean, you've had alcohol drug issues, I've heard you say,

Speaker 2 what did they do for you in the short term?

Speaker 1 I think it just

Speaker 1 gave me a break from how I wanted to feel. It gave me a break from me.

Speaker 2 It gave you a break from how you felt.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, it gave me a break from my feelings.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it just gave me a break from me. I was just...

Speaker 2 But that's because you were really uncomfortable with yourself. Yeah.
And because you had feelings that were painful.

Speaker 2 So my mantra on addiction, which I mentioned in this book, is don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.

Speaker 2 And if you want to understand why people have pain, don't look at their genes.

Speaker 2 Look at their lives. Yeah.
What happened to them?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you say,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So it's got nothing to do with drugs. Well, it could have to do with drugs.

Speaker 1 It could have to do with any of the things we already mentioned.

Speaker 2 But any of the things we mentioned.

Speaker 1 But why the pain? That's the question.

Speaker 2 The question is, why the pain? Yeah. What are we running away from? Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I had

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 once I, that was the first way that I realized, oh, I can make myself feel good.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it was like the first time that I like,

Speaker 1 yeah, I could make myself feel good. And so then it just became,

Speaker 1 yeah, it became a way that I always, I mean, I would just,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I would take it.

Speaker 2 Should I tell you something scientific about that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 cocaine addicts and crystal meta addicts, or I need stimulant addicts. In fact, all addicts, amongst the things they're looking for is a head of of dopamine.

Speaker 2 Dopamine is the incentive, motivation chemical in our brain. It's what makes us feel vital and alive and, you know, ready to go.
And without it, we can't survive. Now,

Speaker 2 cocaine, crystal matter.

Speaker 1 Without it, we can't survive.

Speaker 2 No, we can't.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. That's cool to hear.

Speaker 2 It's interesting. Oh, no, because

Speaker 2 dopamine flows in the brain when we're

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You can take a mouse in a laboratory and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So it's the motivation chemical. It's absolutely essential.
No, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, crystal meth.

Speaker 2 They literally give you a direct hit of dopamine. So does pornography.
When you do a brain scans on people, pornography, they get repeated spikes of dopamine.

Speaker 2 It's not the pornography they're addicted to. It's that hit of dopamine that they get in their brains.
Wow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 you know, spacing out, absent-mindedness, you know, all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, daydreaming, they used to to call it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 because the dopamine was flowing like crazy. And that's why I needed to go back.
It wasn't because I needed more music.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The trunks full.

Speaker 2 I was after that. I was hiding the discs on the porch and in the attic so my wife wouldn't caught me.

Speaker 1 But I was after that. The ceiling caves in, it's just a bunch of Van Halen.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 and I was after that dopamine. Dopamine, wow, you know, which is what you're after with the pornography.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it just was, and I was a way to make me feel good.

Speaker 1 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, but it was like, this is the safest, closest I can get to interacting with a woman.

Speaker 1 And it being like, okay, because I would get so nervous around women, or like if women looked at me, I would like, yeah my whole body like I just I couldn't handle it yeah

Speaker 1 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 a dopamine no that

Speaker 2 and there's another chemical that's involved in many addictions

Speaker 2 like like the heroin addicts or the opiate addict the fentanyl addicts

Speaker 2 Those are opiates, which come from the opium plant.

Speaker 2 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 receive the opiate molecule.

Speaker 2 Now why do we have receptors from a plant that grows in Afghanistan? We don't. We have receptors for our own internal opiates.

Speaker 2 So we have an internal opiate system.

Speaker 2 And they are called endorphins. Endorphin means endogenous internal opiate.

Speaker 1 So those are our endorphins are our own opiates.

Speaker 1 So we manufacture our own opiates.

Speaker 2 Not only we do, plants do, do, animals do. Everybody does.
Now, the question is, what do the opiates do in the human brain? Well, they do a whole lot of things. But

Speaker 2 importantly,

Speaker 2 they relieve pain, physical and emotional pain, because pain is necessary for life. Otherwise, I could smash my hand on this table.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you jump out of a window and you

Speaker 2 would be painful. But I also have 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,

Speaker 2 they get this high level of endorphins. That's what they're after.

Speaker 1 Ah, that's why they keep doing wild stuff like that.

Speaker 2 That's right. And the third thing is the most important.
The endorphins help to make possible this little thing called love.

Speaker 2 And if you knock out

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So endorphins connect people to each other, especially parents and children.

Speaker 1 So we're each other's opiates in a way.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when I ask heroin addicts or opiate addicts,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What was she talking about? Connection. Connection, yeah.
And in this book, I talk about it. And so many of the addicts, like

Speaker 2 a very well-known recovery leader and, you know, fearless advocate is Jamie Lee Curtis. And she told me.
Is she?

Speaker 1 Siri? She is.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, she's a big 12-stepper. I didn't know that.
Oh, no, she's a huge 12-stepper

Speaker 2 and very forthright

Speaker 2 about her addictions and also her recovery.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 But she told me that

Speaker 2 what the opiates did for her, give her a sense of warmth in the belly.

Speaker 2 That warmth is what we're all after.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So these people that are addicted to opiates, that's what they're looking for. A bunch of hug hunters.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I want to go back a little bit to 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?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I did a

Speaker 2 day-long event here in LA just the day before we were recording this.

Speaker 2 And I worked with a woman called Kimberly Shannon Murphy, who is one of Hollywood's top stunt women. She just got a lifetime achievement award as a member of the.

Speaker 1 Congratulations, Kim.

Speaker 2 And she worked with Cameron Diaz and Uma Thurman and Tom Cruise and all these people. A lot of artists.
No, she was sexually abused by her grandfather

Speaker 2 all throughout her.

Speaker 2 childhood and adolescence.

Speaker 2 And of course,

Speaker 2 the family was in denial. Nobody noticed it.
If they noticed it, they kept silent about it. She was totally alone with it.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So the trauma happens when a child suffers and has nobody to share that suffering with.

Speaker 2 Whether it's through extreme suffering or sexual abuse, all the milder, you might say, suffering of just not being seen for who you are, if you're alone with it, you can't process it.

Speaker 2 So what happens later on, to answer your question,

Speaker 2 when you meet somebody where you feel safe

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Amen. Yeah, I mean, I've gotten even into like the intimacy disorder groups, and those are a lot more

Speaker 1 potent with people talking about

Speaker 1 their emotional disorders and like

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and it's and it's important to learn about and I like to share what I learn about from it you know it's not about people

Speaker 2 victimizing themselves or trying to present themselves as a victim yeah saying this is what happened to me and it's my responsibility responsibility to learn from it. That's the truth.

Speaker 2 And it's my responsibility to grow from it, not to wallow in, oh, look, what happened to me, and I can't help it. That's nonsense.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'll tell you this, Mr. Mate, that a thing I realized I was addicted to a few years ago,

Speaker 1 self-pity. Yeah.
And I didn't even know it. I kept always thinking, man, what's wrong with me?

Speaker 1 I have to fix this. Every day,

Speaker 1 nothing was enough. I kept, and then I realized that even though it seemed like I was trying to make myself better, the truth was that I was always seeing myself as less than

Speaker 1 because those things have to both be present at the same time.

Speaker 1 Because I can only get better if, you know, I have to, there's not, I'm never enough. Well, by never being enough, though,

Speaker 1 it, I'm trying to figure this out. Well, I got addicted to self-pity.
I got addicted to like.

Speaker 2 Can I jump in with a thought?

Speaker 1 Yes, please. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Dear God, please. It did something for you.

Speaker 2 It took away responsibility from you.

Speaker 2 Human beings have a hard time taking responsibility. I mean, you know, I have a hard time taking responsibility.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 we all have a hard time taking responsibility. So when you're in that self-pity mode,

Speaker 2 you're suffering, but you don't have to take responsibility. I'm suggesting that's what it did for you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 1 You know? Like if I never solve this, if I'm never enough, then there'll always be something wrong with me. Yeah.
Does that make any sense?

Speaker 2 It makes sense because, again, it

Speaker 2 takes away the challenge of growth. Right.
I mean, we talk about growing pains.

Speaker 2 Growth is painful.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. People go from damn seven inches to seven feet, so six and a half, six, one, or whatever.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And

Speaker 2 emotional growth is also

Speaker 2 painful. And so when we don't grow,

Speaker 2 at least we avoid the growing pains. Right.
You know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I used to, whenever I used to smoke, I used to be like, part of me didn't want to quit smoking

Speaker 1 because I wanted to have an excuse for why I wasn't doing other things.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 Makes total sense.

Speaker 1 A little sense is enough.

Speaker 2 I'll take it. Dashing through the store.
Dave's looking for a gift. One you can't ignore, but not the stocks he picks.
I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 2 Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list. Oh, scratchers, good idea.
It's an easy shopping trip. We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 1 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 2 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play. Scratchers from the California lottery.
A little play can make your day.

Speaker 1 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 1 Does Blue Chew work?

Speaker 1 I can answer it. Yep.
I chew on them things, baby. Get that diving board, baby.
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Oh, yeah, what else did I want to talk to you? Oh, this is really fascinating stuff here.

Speaker 1 So, trauma fosters a shame-based view of the self. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'd love to talk a little bit about shame, man, because that was a huge part of my life.

Speaker 2 Well, tell me about it.

Speaker 1 I just felt ashamed of myself. Yeah.
I felt ashamed of like,

Speaker 1 yeah, I felt ashamed of how I looked. I felt ashamed of like my ears, my nose, my face,

Speaker 1 the way I stood.

Speaker 2 I felt,

Speaker 1 yeah, I felt ashamed of my family, of my home. I was just, everything I,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I felt like

Speaker 1 I think I felt ashamed of who I was at like the first molecule almost, like the first cell of my,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, and I use the word gross because that's, it felt like gross.

Speaker 2 Now, the only thing I'll say

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 it's not that you felt you were gross, it's you believed you were.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 in that knot, it was in there somewhere. And I couldn't really even access it.
It was a.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But shame, yeah, I want to hear about shame.

Speaker 2 Did you feel it? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 How'd you feel?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 growing up in Hungary, in Eastern Europe, and I lived there until I was 13,

Speaker 2 there was a lot of anti-Semitism. And my grandparents had died in Auschwitz.
I almost died as an infant. My mother, my father.

Speaker 1 That's when your mother gave you to someone else to save you?

Speaker 2 That's right, yeah. Wow.
When I was 11 months of age. But even after the war, there was anti-Semitism.
And so I'd feel ashamed of being Jewish.

Speaker 2 I don't anymore, but...

Speaker 2 But I did as a kid, so I would kind of,

Speaker 2 then I'd have, I was ashamed of my Jewish looks.

Speaker 1 Oh, so you have to hide or you have to feel like yeah, there's something different about me that isn't quite right.

Speaker 2 And you know, there was a lot of anti-Semitism and

Speaker 2 taunting in the school that I went to, you know, when I look back on it now. So, yeah, and then

Speaker 2 I developed body shame. You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 to this day it's kind of, it's interesting.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is too big.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 shame,

Speaker 2 but shame, nobody's born with shame. Really? No infant is born ashamed of themselves.
They're totally there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true, huh? If you saw a little infant that was ashamed of yourselves, ashamed of himself, it would break your heart.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No. They wouldn't even know how to do it.

Speaker 2 How infants get shamed is when they're not seen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and what happens then?

Speaker 2 Well, then 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.

Speaker 2 One is these adults are stupid, they're incapable, they're incompetent, I'm all alone in the world.

Speaker 2 Or the child can believe there's something wrong with me, and maybe if I can work hard enough, I can fix it.

Speaker 2 Now, which belief do you think is more acceptable for the child?

Speaker 1 The second one.

Speaker 2 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 it.

Speaker 2 So, even that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Really? Because it makes us at least

Speaker 2 think that there's something we can do. Ah, it almost

Speaker 1 gives us hope in a weird way.

Speaker 2 It gives us hope in a weird way, yeah.

Speaker 2 But here's the thing. Children are narcissists,

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

Speaker 1 Right, and they don't have any other choice. They're all they know.

Speaker 2 That's all they know. So if the parents are happy and connected, and there's an atmosphere of

Speaker 2 loving acceptance and so on. And the child thinks, hey,

Speaker 2 I must be pretty good. I must be happy.
Yeah, everything's good.

Speaker 1 I'm okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but if the parents are stressed, depressed, traumatized,

Speaker 2 racially challenged, economically challenged,

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 such terrible things as the children in Gaza are experiencing right now with the daily bombings and all this kind of stuff,

Speaker 2 what can they think?

Speaker 2 That there's something wrong with me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, you know what? There was a study done of guys and children.

Speaker 1 Man, that's crazy. I hadn't thought about that.
Like, really look. Imagine that, though.

Speaker 2 There was a study done of children in Palestine

Speaker 2 21 years ago.

Speaker 2 And 95% of those, 95%, this is long before the current horrors,

Speaker 2 long before October the 7th long before the aftermath of October the 7th

Speaker 2 95%

Speaker 2 of those kids showed traumatic symptoms high percentage went their beds like you and I did

Speaker 2 they expressed aggression towards their parents

Speaker 2 they had

Speaker 2 panic attacks anxiety fears can you imagine what's going to 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 uh

Speaker 2 and brain and i know 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

Speaker 1 well when you put it in that sense that a kid imagine a kid like

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 you yeah because what are they gonna think they don't know they just think man something's so wrong with me i deserve to be

Speaker 2 killed yeah you know or something i don't i don't know yeah it depends if the adults are able to hold them and

Speaker 2 keep them

Speaker 2 feeling loved.

Speaker 2 But 19,000 kids 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.

Speaker 2 What's going to be the future of those kids? You know, and

Speaker 2 anyway, it's just a terrible.

Speaker 1 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, from it's like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, I've been there.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 who's the black American writer, Tennahasi Coates?

Speaker 1 Tenahasi Coates?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's just written a new book. And he talks about visiting Palestine.
And he says,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 Tanahisi Coates. Yeah.
In his new book, he says, once you go there and see it, you can't unsee it.

Speaker 2 You know, and

Speaker 2 our media doesn't cover it super fairly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 It's also the truth that it's also happening to kids in Israel. There's bombs and rockets and so on.

Speaker 2 I don't know if this is the time to go into the politics of it. It's not a question of

Speaker 2 valuing or

Speaker 2 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, and

Speaker 1 look, it seems like it.

Speaker 2 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 her, all of a sudden I hear her, I go like this.

Speaker 2 Now this

Speaker 2 is the startle response of an infant.

Speaker 2 If you take a three-month-old who's sitting there, who's lying there and you go like this,

Speaker 2 it's called 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.

Speaker 2 Quite apart from the anti-Semitism 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.

Speaker 2 So when I hear a noise, I still go like this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now this is 80 years later.

Speaker 1 Or when you see a load of laundry go by.

Speaker 1 Man, so we can stay with. So what you're saying is it can stay with you that long.

Speaker 1 It can stay with you, it gets locked in you, in your cells, really.

Speaker 2 It's it's actually literally locked into your cells and into your chromosomes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's heartbreaking for those children on both sides of that. And just anywhere, anytime you think, like

Speaker 1 and even a kid, when they think like

Speaker 1 even in America, it's like in America, it's like we're bombing each other. Like, there's 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

Speaker 1 that we can do

Speaker 2 live.

Speaker 1 All God is asking us to do is be alive

Speaker 1 and do it without war. That seems, it seems unreal that we can't figure that out, man.

Speaker 2 Well, that's unreal. The great spiritual teachers have been addressing that insanity for thousands of years, you know.

Speaker 1 Gabar, how does shame cause us to lose compassion for ourselves?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let me tell you a story.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he said, I really appreciate your book and showing how trauma causes

Speaker 2 is one of the...

Speaker 2 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 I really appreciate all that, but he says, I can't blame my mother.

Speaker 2 It's my own fault that I'm a shit.

Speaker 2 And I thought, oh my God, you poor guy.

Speaker 2 You still see yourself that way? What lack of compassion.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 some drug addiction.

Speaker 2 He's not a shit. He's just a hurt human being.

Speaker 2 But that lack of self-compassion,

Speaker 2 I see it all the time in my workshops when I do therapy work with people.

Speaker 2 One of my main tasks is to

Speaker 2 help them to notice

Speaker 2 not to criticize them for it, but to help them to be aware of how they lack compassion for themselves.

Speaker 1 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, and you can be living in the center of it, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But by trying to constantly help myself figure it out, all I was doing was focusing on my own

Speaker 1 being not good enough, which in a way is really just self-pity, self-pity.

Speaker 2 But it's also lack of self-compassion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not giving myself some grace. I remember the first time somebody said, hey, man, give yourself some grace.
I'd never even...

Speaker 2 I was like, wow. Because

Speaker 2 people find themselves accusing themselves and talking to themselves in ways that they would never talk to others. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But most people wouldn't. Yeah.
Some would. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But most wouldn't.

Speaker 1 Can you notice characteristics or actualities in your life today that you can directly correlate to side effects of childhood trauma?

Speaker 2 My own? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 my

Speaker 2 capacity to get triggered.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 the actual stimulus.

Speaker 2 Now, when you actually look at

Speaker 2 where the metaphor comes from, it comes from a gun. Now, how big a part of the gun is the trigger?

Speaker 2 Small. Small little part.
What makes the trigger work is that there's ammunition and explosive charge. So as long as I'm full of explosive charge, which is my unresolved trauma,

Speaker 2 some of you will say boo and I'll go,

Speaker 2 you know. So my capacity to get triggered, my difficulty

Speaker 2 believing that I was really loved and accepted in my marriage relationship, even though I was. Wow.
You know.

Speaker 2 My

Speaker 2 tendency to blame others from my own reactions rather than taking responsibility.

Speaker 2 We mentioned the addictive behaviors. Certainly,

Speaker 2 the first book I wrote in ADHD is called Scattered Minds. My scattered mind is certainly an outcome of early stress, because I mean, that dissociation, that tuning out, it's just an escape mechanism.

Speaker 2 You know, so

Speaker 2 the way I was unable to see my kids for the beautiful, sensitive creatures that they were,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 in my workaholism, oh,

Speaker 2 it's shown up in so many ways.

Speaker 1 You said that not believing that people love us. Yeah.
That's, dude, that's huge, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What, what is that? Why does that, why,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 we won't believe we're loved, you know, or accepted. Well, Peter Levine, who's one of the great trauma teachers, he talked about trauma being the tyranny of the past.

Speaker 1 The eternity of the past?

Speaker 2 The tyranny.

Speaker 1 The tyranny of the past.

Speaker 2 So we're in the present moment, but we're actually reacting

Speaker 2 to the past. Now,

Speaker 2 throughout the first year of my life,

Speaker 2 given our situation, my mother was really stressed, unhappy, even terrorized.

Speaker 2 She couldn't give me that calm, attuned, loving attention that I needed. She did her best, for God's sakes.
You know,

Speaker 2 what could be greater love than for a 24-year woman to give her baby to a total stranger in the street? You know? But how do I experience it?

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I'm not going to believe that anybody actually loves me, no matter how what they manifest or what they show me.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, and then I'm blaming them

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 my own sense of unlovability.

Speaker 2 This is unprocessed trauma we're talking about. 100%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I've almost even thought it sometimes I thought like,

Speaker 1 oh, you're dumb for loving me.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, but that's the other side of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like Garchomp Marx said, that I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So anybody would love me.

Speaker 2 They can't be very bright, can they?

Speaker 1 You talk also about not parent blaming, which I think is really important.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, look.

Speaker 1 I mean, your story right there about your mother gave you away because it was the, yeah, I mean, imagine the terror, the pain in her of like,

Speaker 1 the only thing, the most loving thing I can do is put my child somewhere else away from me right now for its own safety.

Speaker 2 That's exactly right. Right.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 all parents, we're born with a caring instinct, you know, like we're born with certain emotional systems in our brain. Play is one of them.
Curiosity, seeking, the dopamine circuit is another one.

Speaker 2 Caring, loving is another one. We're just born with that.

Speaker 2 It's instinctual. All mammals are born with it.
Oh, yeah. No mammal infant would survive without it.
Right. You know?

Speaker 2 So I don't, I never doubt that parents love their kids. or that there's at least an impulse in them to do so.

Speaker 2 But the love that the parent feels is not that the love what the parent child receives.

Speaker 2 What the child receives is the quality of the parent's presence.

Speaker 2 Are they calm? Are they attuned? Are they emotionally present? Are they preoccupied, stressed, depressed, traumatized, overworked, whatever?

Speaker 2 Any of those conditions, the child does not experience the love

Speaker 2 in its whole sense.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 in a society where, as you said earlier, parents have to go to work just to put bread on the table.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What's it like to be a parent? It's really, really difficult. And don't forget, we didn't evolve in nuclear families.

Speaker 2 We evolved in groups where kids are around nurturing adults the whole day, including their parents, but not only their parents.

Speaker 2 So in today's society, parenting has become almost an impossible task. Why would I

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But if you look at parents who abuse their kids, what happened to them as kids?

Speaker 1 They were abused.

Speaker 2 It's multi-generational.

Speaker 2 It's not that they grow up. It's not that they...
decide I'm going to abuse my kids. They just act out what happened to them.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I think blame.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 responsibility is one thing, blame is another.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 there's absolutely no room for blaming parents. And

Speaker 2 Theo, what's really interesting to me is after I wrote my book on addiction,

Speaker 2 occasionally some strange person will come up to me and say, my child died of an overdose,

Speaker 2 and I thank you for writing the book. And

Speaker 2 I always find that a bit startling because in the book I'm saying that it's childhood experience and trauma that ultimately results in addiction. And they say, you know what? Because I finally get it.

Speaker 2 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. You know, the question is, in each generation,

Speaker 2 can we take responsibility so we don't pass it on to the next one? But blame,

Speaker 2 there's no room for it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Robert Sopolski, the scientist I quoted, he said there's just no room for blame.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 And you can even be angry. Right.
Without

Speaker 2 without blaming, right?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 saying you did something deliberately that you shouldn't have done and you should have known better and you know, you said terrible.

Speaker 2 You know, it's so there's anger, healthy anger, necessary anger, and then there is

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 expectation that people take responsibility,

Speaker 2 each for ourselves, and then there's blame, which is a whole other

Speaker 2 bag of monkeys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we don't, it's a zoo we don't need to be involved in.

Speaker 2 No, we don't need that.

Speaker 1 What makes you laugh?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 is there like shows you like to watch or a thing you like to laugh?

Speaker 2 Well, sometimes what makes me laugh is my own ridiculousness.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sometimes me too.

Speaker 1 I know it's going to be a good day if I find that I'm laughing at myself.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So we can laugh at ourselves.

Speaker 2 My wife and I laugh a lot.

Speaker 1 Oh, you do? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's one of our,

Speaker 2 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 at each other. That's adorable.
You know,

Speaker 2 what makes me laugh? Usually absurdity.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 When things are absurd, they make me laugh. You know, they're sort of touched with reality.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Those are the things that make me laugh.

Speaker 1 Is there a like a film that you like? Or like, what's a movie that you like? I'm just trying to just know a little bit more about you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 A movie that made me laugh. Or just a couple movies.

Speaker 2 Fish called Wanda. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Talking about Jamie Lee Curtis.

Speaker 2 That I

Speaker 2 roared my head off about that one.

Speaker 2 I don't have such a good memory for that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 A funny book will make me laugh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do you have a favorite

Speaker 1 fiction book that you like?

Speaker 2 I tend to go for the classics.

Speaker 2 So I keep rereading the Iliad by Homer. Wow.

Speaker 2 The Trojan War. I keep rereading rereading

Speaker 2 Dostoevsky.

Speaker 2 I just reread The Brothers Karamazov last year

Speaker 2 because it's

Speaker 2 such a deep understanding of the human soul, the darkness and the lightness, both

Speaker 2 of the human soul.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I tend to go for the classics myself.

Speaker 2 I read some modern novels, but not that often.

Speaker 2 By the way, you know what made me laugh? Catch 22. Yeah? I reread that a couple years ago.
I split a gut.

Speaker 1 Who was it, not John Somak, who wrote that?

Speaker 2 Joseph Heller.

Speaker 1 Joseph Heller, Catch 22.

Speaker 2 I think it was Joseph Heller is his first name.

Speaker 1 We had to read that, I think, in school.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 by modern standards, there's some parts of it that are really

Speaker 2 sexist and misogynist,

Speaker 2 and in some places, even racist.

Speaker 2 So I'm I'm not making the excuse of that.

Speaker 2 It was the zeitgeist at the time. Yeah, sure.
But it's just reboringly funny about the absurdity of war and

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 self-puffery of important people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'll have to check it out, man.

Speaker 1 I think I had to read it sometime, but maybe in college we had to read it. Did you ever read

Speaker 1 John Irving, any of his books? Like The World According to Garp, remember that book?

Speaker 2 You know, I started reading that decades ago. I never finished it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that happened. Some of his books, his latest book is,

Speaker 1 I don't even know what it is. It's very long.

Speaker 1 I mean, you need to bring a tent with you.

Speaker 2 Recently, there was a book that's caught a lot of attention,

Speaker 2 Demon Copperhead. by Barbara Kingsilver.
And she wrote the Poisonwood Bible. That's her most famous book.
But Demon Copperfield, Copperhead is a kind of a modern take on

Speaker 2 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 JD Vance.
Wow. Because she's in Appalachian.

Speaker 1 Right, so they're both from that area. They're both from that area.
Different mindsets.

Speaker 2 And she's saying, buddy, you don't represent us.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Demon Copperhead takes on the

Speaker 2 hillbilly image of Appalachians and plays with it beautifully.

Speaker 1 Wow, I'd love to check that out. She seems like an interesting woman.

Speaker 2 She's a very interesting woman. She's very, very thoughtful, very forthright.

Speaker 1 That'd be cool. Yeah, maybe I can, maybe after I read the book, I could see if she would want to come and visit.

Speaker 1 Sometimes, like, I always

Speaker 1 feel like I have to explain my intentions. There's a part of me that always feels like I'm manipulating somebody.
Do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 That's not a feeling.

Speaker 1 So, what is it? It's a thought.

Speaker 2 It's a belief.

Speaker 1 It's a belief.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 No. And there's there's a reason why you have it.

Speaker 1 Like even if I'm just doing something nice, there's a part of me that's like, oh, you're...

Speaker 2 Yeah, you think you're a fake. Yeah.
Yeah, it's called the imposter syndrome. Okay.
And

Speaker 2 it has to do with the fact that you couldn't be real as a kid.

Speaker 2 In some ways, you had to pretend.

Speaker 2 And.

Speaker 2 It's really hard

Speaker 2 to let go of that, of that sense that I'm still doing it. Yeah.
It's what you grew up with. So you could be kind to that part of yourself.
Okay.

Speaker 2 The part that

Speaker 2 you could actually, because it's not a feeling, you know, Theo, it's a belief. And the beliefs can be, you don't argue with feelings, but beliefs you can challenge.

Speaker 2 Is it really true that you're manipulating? Like when you're talking to me now, Are we having a genuine conversation?

Speaker 1 I believe that we are.

Speaker 2 Or is it true that you're actually manipulating me in any way at all?

Speaker 1 No, I don't think I am.

Speaker 2 And furthermore, give me some credit.

Speaker 2 Maybe you can't manipulate me even if you wanted to.

Speaker 2 That's very fair, dude. So that fear of yours is both

Speaker 2 lack of compassion towards yourself and a lack of...

Speaker 2 In a sense, trust in the other person's capacity to look after themselves.

Speaker 1 That's a good point.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just funny.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And we were talking about that, that sometimes we always feel

Speaker 1 like there's something

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Lack of self-trust. Now, you know what? Have I manipulated? Yes, I have.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 You know, but

Speaker 2 it's just not a question that one never does it.

Speaker 2 But I know when I'm manipulating, and usually it's because I want something that I don't know how to state directly, or I'm afraid that I might not get otherwise, you know, and then I'm afraid to show up with my vulnerable request.

Speaker 1 Which would make sense as a child, there was something you wanted that you didn't think you were going to get otherwise. That's right.
So you didn't show it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Children manipulate out of a sense of weakness. And

Speaker 2 that's pretty much all they can do if otherwise they don't get their knees met

Speaker 1 um a lot of the your book that i've read so far it's about it's getting to the part where it's like uh that western medicine doesn't always take into context as much that

Speaker 1 the body and the mind like us as an entire thing as our society as you know it's almost like

Speaker 1 like if say if like the whole world and time and culture and everything were a car.

Speaker 1 Instead of the doctor looking at the car, they just look at the human, which would just be one part of the car.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 That's the whole point. And

Speaker 2 we have to make a distinction here. There's Western science.
Okay. Then there's medical practice.

Speaker 1 Understood.

Speaker 2 The two are not the same necessarily. Okay.
So I was trained as a medical doctor. Nobody ever

Speaker 2 taught me about the mind-body unity. But physiologically, you can't separate the mind from the body.
So that our emotional circuits

Speaker 2 and the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are actually one system. They're not separate systems.

Speaker 2 So when things happen emotionally, naturally, they have a physiological effect. Yeah.
You know, so I could give you 10,000 examples.

Speaker 2 Children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma.

Speaker 2 Children of what?

Speaker 2 Children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma. Okay.
So the airway is narrow and they get inflamed.

Speaker 2 There's a study that showed that black American women, the more episodes of racism they experience, the higher the risk of asthma. Wow.

Speaker 2 It's been shown that women with severe PTSD have double the risk of ovarian cancer. This is a study out of Harvard University.

Speaker 2 Adults who experience the loss of an adult child have a higher risk of malignancy of the bone marrow and the blood. Grief.

Speaker 2 Grief.

Speaker 2 A Danish study, parents who lost a child have double the risk of multiple sclerosis. There are hundreds of studies showing the

Speaker 2 physiological impact of stress and trauma and loss on the physiology.

Speaker 1 So manifesting itself in our bodies as a disease or contributing to

Speaker 2 contributing to the onset of the disease. Got it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the cancer had been there forever. Yeah.
And it just

Speaker 1 enough had happened, I guess, that it turned over into being.

Speaker 2 Well, we know that stress,

Speaker 2 for example, can

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And we know that people that repress their healthy anger, they're actually suppressing their immune system.

Speaker 2 And this stuff has been studied over and over again. And great clinicians have been recognizing this forever.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 2,400 years ago, Socrates, the Greek philosopher, said that the problem with the doctors of today is that they separate the mind from the body. Wow.
2,400 years ago.

Speaker 2 Now, I can name you any number of great medical pioneers.

Speaker 2 I mentioned some in the book, who 150 years ago, 100 years ago.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Wow, so all of it. It's all one.

Speaker 2 Scientifically, it's all one. The problem is medical practice doesn't recognize that oneness.
So most of the time

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But the doctor is never never going to ask you about any of that stuff. They're just going to

Speaker 2 deal with the physical aspects of it, which they should deal with.

Speaker 2 But they also need to look at the whole. You know, what happened in this person's life and what's stressing them now.

Speaker 2 And how can we help with that part of it? You know, so medical practice

Speaker 2 as a doctor, I don't know if to be told how miraculously

Speaker 2 effective the achievements of modern medicine can be.

Speaker 2 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 piece is a whole that's what they're missing

Speaker 2 they're missing the wholeness now if you look at indigenous medicine yeah there's the medicine wheel which consists of four quadrants.

Speaker 2 There's the physical, our physiology,

Speaker 2 There's the mental, which is our emotions and our thoughts.

Speaker 2 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 our little ego.

Speaker 2 However you define that. And health, they say,

Speaker 2 depends on a balance between those four quadrants. Scientifically,

Speaker 2 That's totally true. But unfortunately, that science is largely ignored in medical training.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I don't know your industry, and I'm not trying to offend it. But it certainly seems like just, you know,

Speaker 1 it's been compromised. Most industries have been a lot of comp, have been compromised, you know, the fact to have better,

Speaker 1 you know, balance sheets than

Speaker 2 well, look,

Speaker 2 if you come to me with depression,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 dismiss them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But if you look at the word depression,

Speaker 2 what does it actually mean to depress something? Hold it back. It's to push it down, yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, what gets pushed on in depression?

Speaker 1 Your feelings.

Speaker 2 Our feelings.

Speaker 2 Why would a person push down their feelings?

Speaker 2 One of the needs of the child, one of the essential needs of the child, as I point 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,

Speaker 2 love,

Speaker 2 playfulness, curiosity,

Speaker 2 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.
No.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 No. Right.

Speaker 2 No, a two-year-old kid gets frustrated, they get angry.

Speaker 2 If you give that kid the message that if you're angry, you can't be with me, the child is in an impossible dilemma.

Speaker 2 Am I going to

Speaker 2 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 going to do? Depress their feelings.

Speaker 2 30 years later, they're diagnosed with this disease called depression.

Speaker 2 Now, if you come to me with depression,

Speaker 2 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, you know, but it's not enough.

Speaker 2 Let's also look at what made you push down your feelings, what happened to you. Now,

Speaker 2 prescribing the antidepressant takes me three minutes. Right.

Speaker 2 Talking with you

Speaker 2 about what actually happened to you. that made you push down your feelings, that takes a long time.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, that doesn't deal with the underlying problem. It deals with the symptom, which may sometimes be helpful, sometimes it isn't.

Speaker 2 But whether it's helpful or not, it does not deal with the underlying

Speaker 2 dynamic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. It's just,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 yeah, back in the day, it's like, it seemed like if you were like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You couldn't hide anything.

Speaker 2 not only that you know what you would do you'd do ceremonies healing rituals yeah you would drum you would dance you would chant you would shake a stick it'd be communal yeah a friend of mine who i quote in the book he's a part lakota

Speaker 2 um 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.

Speaker 2 Your illness represents some imbalance in our community. Wow.
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,

Speaker 2 both scientifically

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that life is lived in an environment, in a multi-generational family, in a certain culture. Let's look at the whole thing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 sometimes you even said roar. Like, sometimes I feel like our whole planet just wants to fucking roar.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like, it just like, I feel like everybody just wants to go in the yard and just scream at the

Speaker 1 sky. It's like, I don't know, it feels like there's just something trapped in us that is.

Speaker 1 Does that make any sense, man?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. And it's had some cultural expression as well.
What was that movie where somebody yells?

Speaker 2 I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore. And he starts yelling, I'm fed.

Speaker 1 Oh, Falling Down?

Speaker 2 Michael Douglas? Is that what 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.

Speaker 2 And everybody starts yelling, I'm fed up, I can't take it anymore. You know,

Speaker 2 I think there's a deep sense of frustration in this culture.

Speaker 1 I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to be able to take this anymore.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's network.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, network. That's a great movie.
If you've never seen it, it's a great movie.

Speaker 2 I'm a mad as hell.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 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. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that scream.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That sense of frustration, that sense of longing that we talked about, it's so universal these days. It is.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, is it? Because

Speaker 1 it feels like this. Are other people feeling this? That's what I wonder a lot.
Are other people feeling the same way?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 some people are not because they escape. And this society is absolutely brilliant at creating escapes through mass media,

Speaker 2 mass sports,

Speaker 2 consumption, and so on. But

Speaker 2 I'll say something here, and this is particularly true of comedians I have found.

Speaker 2 Some people are just born more sensitive.

Speaker 1 That's a great point too, and I have to take that into account.

Speaker 2 We all do.

Speaker 2 And more sensitive means

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So the same thing can happen externally to

Speaker 2 different people. But if one of them is more sensitive, they're going to feel it all the more.

Speaker 2 So it's especially the highly sensitive people who are feeling that

Speaker 2 scream that you talk about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a great point. That it uh yeah, yeah, that's what it's just like I just feel like we've just gone so far off the path of

Speaker 2 but if I can say something

Speaker 2 your sense

Speaker 2 that we've gone off the path what in you knows that

Speaker 1 like what part of me you mean

Speaker 2 What in you? Who in you knows that we've gone off the path?

Speaker 2 It's the part that hasn't gone off the path.

Speaker 2 It's the part that actually sees.

Speaker 2 So that,

Speaker 2 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 damaged goes that way.

Speaker 2 It's always in here.

Speaker 2 It's a question of can we connect with it? Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We might have to start with it as individuals. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 We do begin as individuals, but you've probably realized, I mean, just for example, in your AA group, there's a community there

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 2 have a lot of shared experiences and who are very vulnerably open and sharing their experiences. And that's a source of support.
When you share about yourself,

Speaker 2 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 it by ourselves.

Speaker 2 It begins as an individual process, but pretty soon you find that we're not alone. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you think we can get out of this toxic culture, Yabor? Do you feel like there's a way out of where we are? Or do you feel like that humanity is just...

Speaker 2 I believe in human beings.

Speaker 1 That's a great statement. I do too.

Speaker 2 You know, I believe that...

Speaker 2 There's an essential goodness there, a desire to connect, a desire to belong, a desire to celebrate life. You know, I think that's, we're endowed with those capacities.

Speaker 2 And as difficult as things may look, and especially these days with these terrible

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 People are trying to do their little bit or their big bit to

Speaker 2 reduce the suffering in the world, to speak the truth,

Speaker 2 to offer some love,

Speaker 2 compassion to the world.

Speaker 2 I really do believe in humans. No, we have the potential to be monsters,

Speaker 2 we have the potential to be angels,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 are quite capable of getting there there once they decide that they want to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think

Speaker 1 what scares me, I think, is that

Speaker 1 in order to

Speaker 1 be a human being, we have to have the present moment, right? We have to be able to

Speaker 1 still have

Speaker 1 like the ability to reflect and recognize and think.

Speaker 1 And our society or our culture has created a lot where we're so many 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 yeah

Speaker 1 feel really probably starting with feeling yeah

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 then we'll be trapped forever in a way well does that make sense at all

Speaker 2 It's interesting how you say all these really insightful things, then you keep asking me if it makes sense or not. Sorry.
Don't apologize.

Speaker 1 I can't think and talk sometimes at the same time. I can't feel and speak at the same it's just no, but I'm just telling you that I'm not criticizing.

Speaker 2 I'm not I'm just noticing something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't feel like you are appreciated. Thanks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 here's the thing. We're born as feeling creatures.
Right. We feel before we think.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 then our thinking will be aligned with reality.

Speaker 2 But it's the feelings that

Speaker 2 we're feelings,

Speaker 2 we're feeling creatures before we're thinking creatures. Got it.
So what you said makes absolute sense from the even from the evolutionary and physiological point of view.

Speaker 2 Like animals feel, but they don't necessarily think. In fact, they don't think.

Speaker 2 Some of them don't. But without thinking,

Speaker 2 without feeling, they wouldn't survive. Right.
You know, and we think we can get by our unthinking. We got it backwards.
Yes.

Speaker 1 That's what it feels like these days. Yeah.
It feels like everybody's just thinking. It's like, even with like

Speaker 1 autonomous inventions and technology, I'm like, at a certain point,

Speaker 1 I don't want any more technology if it's not helping us. I know.
Like, stop. Like, you're killing what it means to be me or not me as a human, but just us.
It feels like we don't need to get fast.

Speaker 1 It's just like you're going to take jobs away. If a guy doesn't have a job, he doesn't have a purpose.

Speaker 1 Having a job isn't only your purpose, but it's what gives people some sense of purpose.

Speaker 2 And I mean, a sense of meaning.

Speaker 1 And a sense of meaning, right? And 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.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 first of all, I totally get where you're coming from because when we talk about AI,

Speaker 2 my mind clears 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.

Speaker 1 Man, thank you, dude. That's how I feel.
Yeah. I just care how people feel, you know? And I just like,

Speaker 2 I don't know. And when you talk about meaning, if you look at the

Speaker 2 diminishing lifespan of

Speaker 2 especially white American men, it's that loss of meaning. When they hollowed out the industrial heartland of America and they outsourced all the

Speaker 2 cheap labor to other countries, well, you can see that from the

Speaker 2 profit motive, it makes sense. But from the point of view of human lives,

Speaker 2 you just deprive people of the sense of meaning, you know, and that sense of meaning,

Speaker 2 it's a psychologist friend of mine called dislocation, is a major source of distress and a major source of

Speaker 2 self-harm and addiction.

Speaker 1 Well, I even think like it used to be, and I've say this many times, but like somebody worked in your area and they worked at a factory and they made a thing, like a table, and they brought it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 then, but now you have somebody in another country mailing something over here, they don't care about it that they're making it. Yeah, their kids don't know even what they do, probably.

Speaker 1 You know, and it just, it's just

Speaker 1 like, where is the victor? I don't understand what level of this we're going to get to that is healthy.

Speaker 2 Well, I think now what we're talking about here is the

Speaker 2 good old profit motive because profits don't care about human values, you know, and

Speaker 2 most companies,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 And I don't understand that, though.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's called The Continuum Concept, published 40 years ago or so. This woman goes to the

Speaker 2 Venezuelan jungle six weeks away from civilization and she watches how these Stone Age people bring up their kids.

Speaker 2 That's the book I did, the Candidian concept.

Speaker 2 How they bring up their kids, well they hold them everywhere, like we said, they don't punish them, they don't yell at them. These kids will grow up really happy and comfortable with themselves.

Speaker 2 But the point I'm making is this tribe, they don't have a word for work.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But there's no word for work. In other words, they just do what they do.

Speaker 2 But there's no alienation from it. Right.
Whatever they're into,

Speaker 2 they're just into it. That's what they're doing.
But they're only kids. Now, here we talk about work-life balance.
But look at that phrase. What does that imply? That here's life and here's work.

Speaker 2 And the two are not the same.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's it's almost like we enslaved ourselves well we have

Speaker 1 and then also our society as you're saying creates so much stress and uncomfort because

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 2 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 the zebra in a zoo in a cage

Speaker 2 but if you observed the zebra out there on a savanna or wherever he she lives you'd see a totally different creature oh they're terrent out there and and the human beings in a sense

Speaker 2 we've put ourselves into a zoo we we're so far away from our natural evolutionary environment.

Speaker 2 It's not a question, again, of going back to Stone Age, but it's a question of recognizing what we've lost.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It's almost, and I hate to even laugh at it, but you're saying it's absurd.

Speaker 2 It's absurd.

Speaker 1 We're literally living in a theater of the absurd.

Speaker 1 In your book, you also talk about like the history of humanity, that

Speaker 1 what we call civilization is less than 5% of our existence as a species, right?

Speaker 1 That for the entire span of the human genus, that it represents less than 1%

Speaker 1 of that time.

Speaker 1 Like our civilization, right? We're such a small piece of how long humans have been alive.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 These values were intelligent, time-tested guidelines for mutual survival.

Speaker 1 Yes, there was violence and bad behavior and all the rest. We have never been perfect.

Speaker 1 But we knew something about setting the collective context for our humanists to flourish fruitfully.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That it was a group effort.

Speaker 2 It was a group thing, and people never saw themselves as separate from the environment or from animals or from other human beings.

Speaker 2 And in British Columbia, excuse me, where I live,

Speaker 2 the indigenous people used to have a ceremony called a potlatch.

Speaker 2 And the potlatch is they would invite all these people, neighbors and other tribes and so on, and they'd give things to each other.

Speaker 2 So it wasn't about getting, it was about giving.

Speaker 2 When the British colonialists arrived, you know what they they did? They outlawed the potlatch. Damn.

Speaker 2 Because they wanted to kill that spirit of communality

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And until very recently, decades ago, it was outlawed.

Speaker 2 So people had to do stuff in secret. You know, they outlawed the chanting.

Speaker 2 They had to chant in secret.

Speaker 2 And because they knew the healing power of the chants. And the chants really connected indigenous people to their traditions.
Now the colonists did this everywhere. They did this in the United States.

Speaker 2 They did it in Australia and New Zealand. They did it in

Speaker 2 Canada, of course, parts of Africa. And so that a real effort was made to divorce people from their essential communal

Speaker 2 drives.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what it feels like.

Speaker 1 That's what it feels like inside, like we're not supposed to be doing this. Yeah.
You know?

Speaker 1 One woman that you mentioned, Darcia Narvaez.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Darsha Narvaz.

Speaker 1 Darsha Narvez.

Speaker 1 Said that we have become species atypical, a sobering idea when you think about it.

Speaker 1 No other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, and never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be.

Speaker 2 Or to destroy its own environment. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I still wonder if Mother Nature is 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...

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 We are.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the problem is we haven't learned from it yet. Like actually, I work a lot with Indigenous people in Canada.

Speaker 2 They often invite me to talk about addiction and stress and trauma and so on.

Speaker 1 Oh, some of them, we did a show in Vancouver. Some of them came out to the show.
Did they? And they gave me some gifts.

Speaker 2 Oh, fantastic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's really, really beautiful. Beautiful, isn't it? Yeah, it was awesome, man.
Yeah, it was great. It was really nice of them but but

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 so so i do a lot of that work

Speaker 2 but i get so much from it because there's 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

Speaker 2 but there's still such gentle wisdom there's still such connection i i i remember doing a ceremony ceremony with them,

Speaker 2 some indigenous friends, two years ago, Art and Nature.

Speaker 2 They talk to every plant.

Speaker 2 They're so connected, you know, such deep wisdom. And

Speaker 2 I actually believe

Speaker 2 that when this society starts heading getting its head screwed on right, we'll be very humbly willing to learn from the indigenous people. Yes.

Speaker 2 You know, like, yes, civilization has brought many amazing things, not to forget that. But what if we could

Speaker 2 meld

Speaker 2 our technological know-how

Speaker 2 and scientific brilliance with indigenous wisdom? Yeah. What a world we could actually create.

Speaker 1 And maybe that is where we're headed, right? I think that has to be the hope.

Speaker 2 Well, that's, you know,

Speaker 2 I believe that's certainly a possibility.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that has to be the hope that we take away.

Speaker 1 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 when I was a kid, the power would go out sometimes.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I don't know. All that mattered was just like,

Speaker 1 like you could joke, but it was like,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Like.

Speaker 1 We just all needed each other. You need to know where everybody was.
Everybody here. I don't know.
There was something special about that.

Speaker 2 Well, you can see it even now.

Speaker 2 When there's disasters,

Speaker 2 people really come together. Right.
They tend to come together to support each other. Yeah, yeah.
They'll go out of their way

Speaker 2 to give and to support.

Speaker 1 Oh, for sure. You've seen it with the flooding and stuff in the southeast right now, many places all over the world.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think there's so much to learn from our natives,

Speaker 1 from the indigenous people of the land, you know, just as we learn from animals and all parts of nature.

Speaker 2 Well, Darshan Arvoz,

Speaker 2 the scientist today, psychologist that you mentioned, she's written a book called The Evolved Nest.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's an amazing little book.

Speaker 2 I wrote the foreword for it.

Speaker 2 Darsha has done some amazing work on the actual needs of human beings. Really?

Speaker 1 She's a pretty fascinating woman?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 You Canadians are dang interesting, man.

Speaker 2 Well, Darsha is American.

Speaker 1 Oh, she is? Yeah, yeah, she is. All right, we'll take it.
Oh, no, she's a

Speaker 2 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. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But you should learn about how penguins bring up their kids or her wolves.

Speaker 2 When a mother dies,

Speaker 2 then wolves who haven't even been pregnant start lactating

Speaker 2 to feed the young ones. Wow.
You know, and how, when the baby elephant is born, you know what happens? All the other mothers.

Speaker 1 All the other elephants put their trunks on it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 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

Speaker 2 writing partner, Gay Bradshaw, they really

Speaker 2 show us the lessons we could actually derive just from watching our animals bring up their young.

Speaker 1 We still have a lot to learn. Is that the best message to take away from your book, do you think?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 and that we need to really be curious about what our hearts and our guts are telling us, not just our intellects.

Speaker 1 Amen. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We need

Speaker 1 an emotional revolution.

Speaker 2 That's a good way to put it.

Speaker 1 Before you go, and thank you so much for your time. Oh, my pleasure.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a part, Rafi. There's a guy in the book, Rafi.

Speaker 2 Oh, Rafi. Rafi.
No, Rafi's a children's singer.

Speaker 1 A children's singer. Oh, yeah, that's guy.
That's him. I'd like to be him

Speaker 2 out of the sea.

Speaker 2 Is that him? No, no, that's Ringo Starr. Oh,

Speaker 2 you're singing Octopus's Garden. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 2 But Rafi used to sing Baby Beluga. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Apples and bono knows that song.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. And Banana Phone.

Speaker 1 But he says we discover who we are from the inside. You wrote that on your book.

Speaker 2 And Rafi

Speaker 2 actually played in the White House at the Clinton

Speaker 2 inauguration.

Speaker 1 Oh, sweet.

Speaker 2 And he's like the children's troubadour of the world.

Speaker 1 Yes, when I was a child, we listened to all. Yes,

Speaker 1 they had all of it.

Speaker 2 Mr.

Speaker 2 Rafi's is a friend of mine oh excellent and uh at some point he some years ago he woke us up in the middle wakes up wakes up in the middle of the night and the word child honoring comes into his head and he says what will 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

Speaker 2 singing for children is it's not condescending

Speaker 2 he really plays with kids and really gets them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 his heart is really so childlike. So he says, whatever the quote was, that...

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 that we...

Speaker 1 We discover who we are from the inside.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So already when a mother is stressed, the child already feels that in the uterus and that stresses the child and that interferes with the child's brain development so that

Speaker 2 actually we develop our sense from our feelings first and as I said earlier then the intellect comes in. Right.

Speaker 2 But if the if the emotional circuits are out of balance because of early stress then it's hard for us to even think straight. Right.

Speaker 1 And our society we have is when so many mothers mothers have to work. It's like we, we've just, yeah, we've,

Speaker 1 we're a little misconstrued.

Speaker 2 Well, the United States,

Speaker 2 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth.

Speaker 2 And what nature would prefer scientifically and physiologically is for the baby with the mother for at least nine months. Yeah.
But actually for years.

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 if not the mother,

Speaker 2 but at least I'll be the mother for at least nine months, but ideally, well beyond then, but with other nurturing adults. Right.
So it's not just caregivers who give you food.

Speaker 1 Right, it's the mother, the grandmother, the aunt, the neighbor, the sense of community, your whole genes being right there.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah, there's, how did we get off on such a different tangent then?

Speaker 1 If we were supposed to be in these

Speaker 1 tribes, these groups, these, it's just evolution and there's nothing we can do about it?

Speaker 2 Well, that's,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 that's civilization.

Speaker 1 Right, civilization. Which has

Speaker 2 obviously brought all kinds of benefits, but also look at

Speaker 2 all that we've lost. So again, it's for me,

Speaker 2 can we

Speaker 2 value our achievements and our knowledge and try to remember what we've lost and trying to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that we've kind of got divorced from.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And when you, yeah, and your children, just look into them, pour into them what you want out of them, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Pour into them as much as you can. And yes, some, some, you, kids don't know how to feel sometimes.
You have to also talk to them about their feelings. No.

Speaker 2 You don't. They know exactly how to feel.
They don't have the words for,

Speaker 2 so you,

Speaker 2 they know how to feel.

Speaker 2 It's our job to give them words for their feelings.

Speaker 1 Right, it's Right. It's our job to give them words for their feelings.
Right. So yeah, if you're a child, if you're not doing that, it's not a judgment.
And I don't have any children. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, not even how you feel.

Speaker 2 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...

Speaker 2 We don't have to tell them how to feel. They're feeling creatures.
We have to accept their feelings.

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean we give them the cookie yeah

Speaker 2 but it means that we do understand like hey hey i understand you want that cookie yeah you're right 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

Speaker 2 you're allowed to hate your brother

Speaker 2 but i get that you're angry so so we We're not talking about permissive parenting.

Speaker 2 We're talking about authoritative parenting, not authoritarian.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 never hit their kids. Because the kids trusted the adults for guidance.
Right.

Speaker 2 You know?

Speaker 1 So, which all comes from connection a hundred percent and now we're learning so many things we learn them like

Speaker 1 you know through a youtube video or through we we learn so i mean now most people learn about sex through pornography it's just like

Speaker 1 yeah yeah yeah yeah we need each other

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 yeah we need each other And

Speaker 1 we're creating more and more that we don't.

Speaker 2 That's right. And we're creating more and more

Speaker 2 that if you you have needs, there's something wrong with you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 If you have emotional needs, you're a weakling. You know.

Speaker 1 Oh, one day our feelings will be in a museum. You'll go visit them there.
Like, hey, remember, remember this? They used to have that.

Speaker 1 Dr. Mateo, thank you just for putting all this together.
It's really fascinating.

Speaker 1 I mean, you have so many

Speaker 2 other

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it's not all like Debbie Downer stuff either.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I'm not there yet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I hope hope you get there someday.

Speaker 1 I think I will. Yeah.
I've been reading it a good clip. I'm enjoying it.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you.
It was, if I can boast, can I boast? Sure, Lam.

Speaker 1 Would love to hear it.

Speaker 2 It was 19 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. Let's go.
For a year and a half, it was a Canadian bestseller. It's been published in 41 languages now.

Speaker 2 internationally and it's been a bestseller in a whole lot of countries. So I think there's value in this book.

Speaker 1 Well, I think also that it's good to know that enough people are starting to

Speaker 1 recognize in some of this same thought, you know? Yeah. Because that in itself, those numbers itself and that prolificness gives, is a source of hope, I think.

Speaker 2 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. Yeah.
And they're starting to ask questions.

Speaker 2 And I see that as a good thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I do too. Thank you for letting me ask you questions today.

Speaker 1 Thank you for,

Speaker 1 yeah, just for your time. So many of my friends love you and look up to you.
I had my own therapist was like,

Speaker 1 he's asking, I'm like, well, you're my therapist. But he was excited that I was getting to sit down with you.
So

Speaker 1 yeah, thank you so much for your commitment to curiosity.

Speaker 2 And thanks for your time.

Speaker 2 Now I'm just falling on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be

Speaker 2 cornerstone.

Speaker 2 Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind. I found I can feel it

Speaker 2 in my bones.

Speaker 2 But it's gonna take

Speaker 2 a little while.