Do This Before 2024 To Change Your Life. The Only Way To Quickly Make Progress In Life | Gabor Maté

not just why are they using a substance or why they are obsessive pornography or gambling but what is that doing for them what is that giving them that they need what peace of mind what temporary relief I think a lot about what my North Star is what I want in my own life what sort of my ideal life looks like and then when I'm working with other people and trying to help them I think about you know what what is the North Star that somebody's really in trouble I would advise hey adopt this as your North Star do you have something like that that you think that people ought to strive for for their own sake the reason I smirk when you ask that question is because um it puts me in a position of some kind of expert um whereas believe me every day I still work at figuring myself out and finding my direction and and or or refining my direction and so on so it's not like I can say here's this pearl of wisdom take it and run with it then this will you know just not like that for me um well let me turn the question on just for a moment and and as a way for me to think about your question sure um so like I don't know a lot about you you know but but I do understand is that in significant ways you've made a tremendous success in your life a lot of you know achieve things that a lot of people look at my God if I only had that I'd be okay but let me just ask you this I'm just absolutely curious having achieved all that in the material world did you come to saying to yourself oh I'm okay now the quest is over definitely not so what so so what were you looking for so my North Star in the beginning was wealth and that was I showed up every day trying to get rich and at about eight years into that I was absolutely devastated spiritually is probably the right way to think about it I just felt dead inside and I at that point I was worth about two million dollars on paper so my actual life was not the life of a wealthy person but um I had equity in a company and I went to my wife and I said hey I know that I promised I would make you rich one day I'm gonna need to take a step back for a minute because I am profoundly unhappy yeah and she was like hey what I want for is your happiness and so do whatever you need to and so we were going to move to a tiny village in Greece and I was going to go back to writing which was my first love okay and just do things that made me feel alive long story short um my then business partner said hey don't leave um we actually feel the same way so why don't we build something that would give us what we're looking for and so if I had to shorthand what I came to realize I'm looking for which is very much my North Star is fulfillment and I'll Define fulfillment as working really hard to build a set of skills that I care about that serve not only me but other people and in doing that I am addressing what I think are the physics of Being Human now I may be misunderstanding that it is the physics only of humans in this era I'm very open to this is within the context of the civilization that I grew up in here are the things that seem to come pre-built into our hard wiring um and maybe not um historically accurate but given the world that I live in um doing something working really hard is a big part of um I feel there's just a subroutine in my brain that wants me to earn things and when I do that I feel good when I work hard in the gym I feel good when I take a cold shower I feel good when I um you know do something difficult for my wife I feel good about that and I definitely enjoy that Loop and then well let me let me look okay yeah please so if I could find one word to summarize like you what I think I heard you say it's meaning definitely yeah so so that's that's one of those human expectations is meaning I think that's a need okay now how you find that is a very individual thing but let me ask you a very scary question though because it it puzzles me um you identify meaning with hard work well I've seen this happen by the way not God willing it won't but what if you had a stroke tomorrow or some idiot plug into you and you were bicycling and and and and you you became quadriplegic now you couldn't work hard anymore I love that question I obsess about things like that so I thought a lot about that one in particular um so I would give myself 30 days to mourn whether I should or shouldn't uh I would and I would be very I would allow myself to wallow in the sense that it was unfair and that now I have to change um the things that I engage in that bring me joy but then at the end of that it it is what it is and so getting lost in unfairness is not going to serve me so then I would immediately turn my attention to finding a way to have meaning and purpose I think that that nothing that I've ever experienced in life leads me to believe that I would ever feel fulfilled without meaning and purpose okay great so finding a way to tap into that and then I have a sort of safety valve which is my wife and I remind each other of this all the time because we've already had all the financial success at this point to do something for the sake of money would be so crazy so we definitely don't do that and what we remind each other of is you should love your life like just from a joy perspective and if you don't check in with is this joyful because if you're working hard and it's joyful that makes sense to me if you're working hard and it's deteriorating your joy your sense of self whatever then that's just Madness so for even for our employees what we say is look you're an adult I want you to control when you need a day off so you have an unlimited policy use it as UC fit I do want people that are hard workers don't get me wrong but I know there are some times where on a Tuesday I'm just like I'm I'm burning out like this isn't Fun and so I stop immediately because I know what my priorities are in life and joy is extraordinarily high and it is certainly higher than success okay well that's great um that makes it easier for me to answer your question um in terms of my new star um Joy is something that um for me is an ongoing project you know and I really do think that goes back to the lack of play that I received in the first year or two of my life you know on the conditions of wartime and genocide there's just not a lot of cheerful play that happens with the baby um but what really likes my fire is truth I just want to know the truth whatever that is because you like knowing how the world works this is not because you see a truth is its own value I I mean I could give you all kinds of good reasons why truth is a good thing but ultimately uh it's just a value in itself for its own sake and so I'm passionate about truth um both internal truths and external truth and I'm passionate then my work is to as much as I can perceive truth and as much as I can communicate my perceptions that other people have access to truth as well or that they or that their own passion in truth is kindled uh in its own right so that's that's my if you ask for a North star that's what I would say for myself it's really interesting not at all what I thought you were going to say can I interpret when I look at the books you've written and I look at you know your willingness to come and do a podcast like this can I read that all as an exploration of Truth or are these sort of side tangents no purely that's what it's about it just so happens that as a medical doctor somebody would dealt with depression and ADHD myself dealt with terminal illness and palliative care dealt with addictions deals with babies um my path to truth has been to my own experience and through my medical experiment my personal experience what I've been through as a person when I'm going through as a person and what I saw experienced and learned as a physician so the books Express all that when it comes to physical illness or addictions or Child Development or whatever but the lodestar is always the truth and from that point of view I never cared much who agrees with me and who doesn't and to what extent my colleagues value or don't value it you know that's just as I see it folks you know and uh um in this society and this is not a personal event it's just a general comment that um truth is not hard to come by not easy to come by because uh for all the knowledge that's out there and for all the expertise um it's also split and it's also disintegrated so people have a hard time seeing the overall reality of things and so my attempt always is to look at the context and look at the overall reality so not just how do you how do you change a kid's Behavior but why is the kid be having that behaving that way and what is it in the environment that the kid is reacting to or somebody who's addicted not just why are they using a substance or why they are obsessive pornography or gambling but what is that doing for them what is that giving them that they need what peace of mind what temporary relief what numbing of painful emotions and what did those painful emotions come from and what happened to them what's the context thing which should happen so that everything leads back to everything else and so I'm always looking for the larger truth of things which demands a broader look not isolating everything but looking at everything as as one which scientifically and spiritually and materially it is I am obsessed with what is true so I resonate with you there big time what I don't understand and so I'm going to ask you a follow-up question to see if I can isolate um what it is about the the nature of Truth just in and of itself that is Meaningful to you so I'm interested in the truth for one reason and one reason only if I'm really honest with myself and that is it has so much utility once you understand it's like it's like physics to me because we understand physics we can send things to the Moon we can create satellites you know better manufacturing whatever um would the truth be as meaningful to you if you were trapped on a desert island with access to all the information in the world but you could never engage with another human so you could assimilate the truth you could learn what it is synthesize it maybe even have insights that other people are missing and and know to the core of your being that you have uncovered something that is true would that be meaningful or is part of what makes it matter to you that you can put it back out into the world and that ultimately somebody can use it well so first of all that's not confuse truth with information uh interesting so help me understand what I'm missing well there's lots of facts out there but truth is much larger than facts it's it's integrating the facts in a in a in a picture of of reality so that and I I'm maybe putting very clumsy language on what may be a far more beautiful sentiment um so when I when I hear you say that and I take it in totality of how all these things come together I come back to this idea of the truth is that is the way the world works so don't ask about the the addiction ask about what caused the pain like that makes sense to me because now you can actually address it and heal but what makes that capital T truth interesting is the healing for me but that's why but why do you want people to heal um because of my North Star so my North Star which seems self-evident to me and I'm always surprised that it isn't everybody's North Star is that there is uh the only thing that matters to me in the way that I view the world is your neurochemical state and your neurochemistry the only thing that's resilient because Joy comes and goes suffering comes and goes hopefully and the only thing that gives you the resilience to even in the middle of a painful moment a storm to have emotional equilibrium is what I call fulfillment so again meaning and purpose derived from working hard for something um that you have developed a unique set of skills so you really matter in that situation and it it isn't only alleviating your suffering it's helping other people and that to me feels so inherent to the human animal that as a social species we're just never going to be able to escape getting psychologically punished for failing to help others and we're never going to escape getting rewarded for helping others and I think that the more uniquely we can do that so in a way that matters to me right so you're not still a high school teacher you're you're expressing helping others in in a very unique way that I mean literally I've never come across anybody that's got the unique um conflagration of things that you have so that makes your contributions all the more individual and therefore I would imagine precious to you so anyway because of my North Star I want to alleviate that Pain by having worked hard to offer something to somebody that they go whoa like this alleviated my pain and now I can also go do something that helps other people um that's why the healing matters okay so look so then to go back to your desert island question you know I mean metaphorically speaking isolated in the forest didn't see anybody you know he no I'm not talking with me I'm talking about him the way I understand that historical figure he would have been perfectly okay being on his own because he attained a sense of reality that was complete and then he made a decision out of compassion to come back and teach others and you are talking about compassion as well you're talking about not truth is utility you're talking about truth as compassion so it's not just useful because you can build things with it the way you define it is you want to truth so you can alleviate the suffering of others and that's part of the truth and or Jesus said you know he is another great spiritual Avatar and teacher he says you will know the truth and the truth will liberate you he didn't say the truth will liberate you he said you will know the truth and it will liberate you so when you know the truth that's where freedom is so truth goes Way Beyond facts it was ultimately as I understand that then as I've been taught has to do with Liberation and freedom and it has to do with compassion uh in exactly the way you talked about it as well So when you say tell me what truth is well I'm telling you it's got all these aspects and it goes back to our conversation what meaning so that life without truth is not a meaningful life [Music] that is uh that's very interesting as you were talking I was like oh please God let him write a book about truth I would uh hearing you say all that I would definitely sign up for that book I want to talk about the idea of a bodhisattva so this is one of the things that I found super interesting about Buddhism and again hey a guy that understands it at 30 000 feet does not know the specifics but that idea of hey there's two things you can do with Enlightenment you can hey you're enlightened and and now you sort of stand apart from everybody else or you get enlightened and decide to be a bodhisattva to re-engage to go back in to help other people and do you think this is maybe a dangerous question but do you think any body would like knowing what you know about the human mind would anybody ever that attained Enlightenment actually just go peace I'm out it seems like the very nature of that moment would sort of propel you back to other people well first of all the last thing I could I want to present myself as is any kind of an expert on what is I thought that might be your response yeah you know but yeah I mean there have been in the Christian tradition there were saints that went to the desert then they just stayed there and then certainly on the all the Hindu Traditions there are all these people in the Buddhist tradition as well I think there are people who um you know sit in caves and they just contemplate reality and that's what they do um which doesn't mean that what they do has no impact on others but they're not going out but they're not out there trying to recruit others or to teach others they're just doing what they're doing I have extraordinary difficulty imagining myself being one of those people um which I'm not sure is either is an advantage for me I mean I might be more advanced if I could handle the idea of being on my own and and not doing anything and just being and just valuing being period I imagine that for a person like me might be a step forward but I but yeah I think from my limited understanding they have people there have been people who have done that and they're part of the human Spectrum aren't they very well said yeah but what at this point you're 77 yeah you're so productive what is it that keeps you going when most people are like counting the days until they can retire at 64 or whatever um what what keeps you going uh Botox steroid injections um well look I mean you talked about meaning uh there's so much meaning in my life I am I'm so fortunate you know that that and I've never stopped developing not that I've arrived there but I've never stopped developing like I've never stopped being curious um I believe I have a I've finally come to accept that yeah I do have a contribution to make and and and and and and uh and and that that has value in the world and it is value for me so uh at this point it's just it keeps me going it's it's it's like it's just who I am at this point you know is is I'm curious about what I'm doing I'm excited about much of what I do I'm excited about having conversations like this I'm excited about the book I'm writing the teaching that I do I'm excited about spending time with my wife of 51 years now I'm excited about I can still go swimming and bicycling and do the yoga and and just you know my life is just a very blessed one at this point not that I feel like that every moment but since you ask it's not like I'm you know what it is when people talk about work what is work I I think um if I remember right from physics one way to look at work is energy expended against resistance and the more energy is you expand against more resistance the harder you have to work the more fatiguing it is but I'm fortunate enough that I'm free enough in my life right now that I don't have to face resistance internal resistance I want to do what I'm doing and uh there's just so much more and and um and I'm sure that my vision of reality is still very limited and maybe there's more to find out in fact I'm sure there's more to find out so it's just uh it's just an expansion into old age I think if if we're fortunate enough we'll see how that goes and you know one never knows what tonight will bring later on the day after tomorrow might bring but so far it's an expansion not physically because as we get older physically I don't swim as fast as I used to but but there's an expansion that's available to us mentally and spiritually relationally in terms of understanding and that's I don't know if that's I don't know what that sounds like but that's what keeps me going how how do we expand spiritually and that's probably a word that would warrant definition but I'm curious how you think about that well so spirituality is really Beyond Who We Are as bodies in his Minds so it's an awareness that lies underneath all that and it can hold all that but isn't identical with it and this is where it's hard for me to say am I saying anything I truly know am I just repeating what spiritual teachers that I've respected and have learned from have mouth and I'm just repeating what they told me but it's both I think I I do have a sense that there's more to us and that more is I think what we call spirituality and if it's all kinds of shapes and forms and I'm not concerned about that but I do know that um I am not who I used to think I was and that nobody is who they think they are um they're they're beyond that and I that's the common teachings I think of all spiritual traditions which I'm very inadequate and this is not false modesty I'm just telling you uh it's it's I mean adequate at translating because I haven't had that deep experience that other people have had the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description alright my friend back to today's episode it's very interesting and I believe you that you're not just being um falsely humble but as somebody who um works so much with there's two two parts of your background that um probably lean into what I would consider spiritual uh but I think we may Define that slightly differently but um one is the palliative care which I'm extraordinarily fascinated by people that do that um and then your I don't know if you would call yourself a guide of um of hallucinogenic transformation I'm not sure exactly what your involvement is with that but I know that you've um you've explored it enough to to sort of have at least a sideways glance at what's going on there um talk to me first about palliative care I know that you sort of ended up there by accident but what makes that fascinating to me is you've got subtracting out the pain you've got somebody who's there themselves but all of a sudden their future is a known quantity and it's very short and the profound change that that makes in the human mind I find interesting um what did you learn about life about yourself um in your time in palliative care well the the people the nurses and the Physicians and the um the social workers and and the others who work in palliative care tend to be a very special breed um in that they're not afraid of death um so learning not to be afraid of human death and giving up your sense of omnipotence uh array liberating by a sense of omnipotence I mean Physicians are trained to save lives I'm telling you Tom I knew Physicians that would barely visit their patients in palliative care because they couldn't stand what they considered to be their own failure which of course it wasn't but the the their self-images healers or physician curers just couldn't withstand the white Heath of death and so that's very liberating when you just you get to talk to somebody and you get to minister to them and you're not pretending to be able to do anything more than you can do but you can really listen to people and get to know people in their final days and their final hours final weeks it's an absolute privilege uh what what about it is a privilege getting to know people without retention you're not pretending to do anything you can't do in their past pretending if they want to die right they pass pretending that's interesting what do you mean die right well there's ways of dying you can you can resist it you can resent it you can be angry about it or you can uh actually accept it and allow so much of what may be repressed in life to finally arise for yourself because before then you were too busy and you were too intent on your role and your personality and getting this done and getting that done you know in one of my books and the body says no I talk about this guy who who had a company selling shark cartilage as a treatment for cancer that was a total shock but he believed in it and then he developed cancer himself and he was admitted to the value of carrying it and I was looking after him and he was still eating he had terminal cancer all of his body ate a week or two left he was still eating shark cartilage which smelled awful you could when you stepped off the elevator to the pivot carefully you could smell the shark cartilage and I finally said to him what is it smells kind of like the smell what does it taste like does it tastes awful I hate it I said why are you eating it and I said do you think it'll help your cancer he said no I no longer believe that but my business partner would be so disappointed if I stopped eating it and so one of the last things I was able to do for him is to say is to actually convince him to help him see that look you don't have to pretend anything anymore it's not your job whether or not your business partner is disappointed he had to literally walk into the last week of his life before he could let go of his role as being responsible for other people so that coming towards death experience can be a powerful teacher for people and I've seen real love and real Beauty and real inspiration from a lot of these people so it's beautiful work and I I know that everybody who Works in palliative care will tell you the same thing it's a real privilege can you share some of the beauty well I think I just did just people being allowing themselves to be touched to be helped um to be honest with themselves um to share stuff that they maybe never told anybody else before in their lives because they're too afraid to um to accept real lessons and acceptance you talked earlier about how you might use of a month to resent and so on you know so these people are very often past that point but that's a privilege to witness knowing horizontal I can get when life doesn't go my way you know are there things that um would it be a valuable exercise for people to run the thought experiment of you know look I might not make it to tonight like you said let alone tomorrow um do you think that there is uh insight to be had from that or is there another way for us to access um getting Beyond like if if you're defining Beauty as you don't have to pretend anymore you don't have to play a role you can really be who you are and maybe this dips into Big T truth um how do we access that now without needing to be truly facing a terminal illness well again I don't know that I am it's very easy for me to speak from a present position as a healthy active 77 year old and I know what I like I know what it gets like when I get a stop toe and how life is unfair you know why did I don't know I can't get on my elliptical machine you know so again I'm in no position to give you stage advice but I can tell you two things one is I've talked to a young fellow in his 30s he's written a book called blessed with a brain tumor his name is Will pie and this guy's a brain tumor and I said well what's the blessing here I interviewed him he said well for one thing when I'm interacting with somebody now I value each moment because I never know that this might be the last time I ever speak to them um and the Buddha again I'm talking like some of the Buddhist which I'm not but um he had his monks do a meditation where they had to imagine themselves dead in the in in the graveyard and they had to imagine themselves being eaten by worms to the flesh melts off their bones it's a Rotting Flesh and they need to imagine themselves as bones just lying there disarticulated bones and finally even the bones being grown into dust you know I can't say that I've attained any of that I mean I'm just telling you there are practices there's a book on my shelf by Stephen jenkinson who's another fascinating guy it's called die wise and he said you know it's basically about you want to die well start preparing it for it now what's the wisdom if you remember from the book the wisdom is that I haven't read the book yet my son just gave it to me um as a birthday gift a few weeks ago so I'll read it but I haven't read it again that's really interesting um yeah I for me it has been a very useful thought experiment to remind myself that for a long time I focused entirely on um I want to live forever and I was um really trying to uh do all the things that I thought would extend my life to say 120 years believing that in that period of time you know the science would get better and we sort of hit Health escape velocity where every year that I lived there was you know a year and a day added to our ability to cure illness and that really served me for a long time and it allowed me to make long-range plans that other people not might not be willing to make and really made me feel excited and connected and then there was something about probably about a year ago that I started to have this feeling that I would be better served and more motivated by flipping it and to start now thinking about how transient my life is and that almost certainly since none of us know what's going to happen almost certainly I am going to die and I don't get a heaviness from that um quite the contrary there's something about it that I find very motivating that I do see the beauty that people so often talk about that you know you have this life for such a limited time and to waste it playing a role to waste it doing things that don't fill you with joy to wasted chasing somebody else's dream like it just doesn't make sense and that that has been fun and I I enjoyed both sides of the coin and I got something very beautiful out of each and it I didn't even like consciously make the shift I just found myself more and more sort of getting a bigger gust of wind of of elevating wind if you will uh from the side of thinking man this really is like how lucky how transy and how beautiful in its sort of ephemeral nature how wonderful it is um and I think part of that part of what was releasing in that for me is I am very much driven to matter but never at the cost of Joy right so it's like I really want to matter I want to do things that like are going to be felt but I don't think about Legacy I don't think about living beyond myself or doing things that need to outlive me um I just think about like hey what can I do right now that will bring me more fulfillment that will give me more joy and yeah it was very it was very fascinating to see that transition happen where I went from the only thing that gave me that push was thinking of myself living forever and then all of a sudden realizing no it's actually now more advantageous to think of sort of imminent death which trust me I'm not in any way shape or form eager for if we are imperfect and do you agree with I think it was um soldier knitson who said that the evil runs through or the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man which Rings true to me does that ring true to you I would say that the potential for both runs through every person Hitler was a human being as I say this in the book Jesus was a human being at least let's agree that in his Earthly manifestation whether you're a Christian he was a human being um even Jesus was tempted wasn't he you know he was in the desert and he's tempted by power and ego and acquisition foreign the Buddha in the Buddha story he's tempted by lust and by greed and by aggression and egotism so yes the potential for for for that kind of egotistical self-regard which turns out to be evil at its ultimate expression is is that that strain is in us so is the strain for compassion like the Buddha infinite Love Like Jesus humility like Moses that's all within us as well the question is which conditions promote which in his development the Buddhist talks about seeds of which seeds in our minds are planted in which you get watered and which don't so yes I agree that the potentials are there and in an embryo everything is there but the question is what gets nourished and what gets suppressed and I'm saying that in this Society it's the worst of us that gets nourished and the best of us that gets suppressed all right so let's define those what I would assume that loving attachment unconditionally loving attachment certainly towards your children that's part of the best of us yeah what are some other attributes of the best and then we'll move on to some of the worst so let's talk about children and now let's talk about people in general so children's needs are unconditional loving acceptance from everyone or just their parents or their parents or well ideally from the community but certainly they're nurturing caregivers whoever they are and they're meant to me wasn't just a parent by the way we're never meant to be parented in nuclear families okay it's pure that's a modern thing so unconditional living acceptance rest from having to work to make the relationship work say that again rest from having to work to make the relationship work in other words the child should not have to be mold themselves into anything to make the relationship work with their parents they shouldn't have to work they shouldn't have to be good nice pretty to make the relationship work they shouldn't have to take care of the Parents emotional needs to make the relationship work like people that have to work to make their to meet their parents emotional needs end up in deep trouble as adults very often physically ill you go into tremendous detail in the book about that so children should be able to allow to feel all their emotions and I mentioned play before those are the needs of the child as human beings more generally we need a sense of connection a sense of meaning a sense of belonging a sense of transcendence so that there's something we're part of something greater than just our legal egoic concerns these are all the needs of human beings to the extent that they're met we thrive to the extent that they're not met we shrivel and there's lots of shriveled people in positions of great power in this Society no doubt okay so what are What are the as we're creating this soil that we're going to nurture things in yeah how do things start to go awry and how do we begin to prep the soil for something better well we've covered that to some degree so things will begin to override when we lose contact with our pending instincts and we'll and we is it just that like is this would you um uh speaking from experience the book is very broad but if you were going to really like bring it down is this largely an echo of a parenting system that has become dysfunctional it's it's a society that's become humanly dysfunctional that transmits its expectations through the parents and that actually begins before birth because already the the most stressed and troubled the parents are that has a physiological impact on the child's brain development so I'm just talking pure science here so mothers who are stressed and depressed they're infants in the womb were already getting those messages hormonally and through uh nerve conduction and so on so that you can actually um monitor the heart rates of mothers who are stressed and those heart rates will be different than the heart rates of infants whose mothers are not stressed in the book you talk about the uh the crazy ice storm yeah it ends up showing up in the epigenetic markers of kids if you don't mind walk us through that it's pretty crazy well it's only that um in in the laboratory they've shown that the more you stress um parent animals the more troubled and stressed the kids will be so in Quebec there was an ice storm some years ago and the and the parents under when the mothers underwent great stress and you know there was really cold there was no heating a lot of stuff wasn't working um those mothers who experienced that stress their children were shown to have more troubles later on behaviorally and learning wise and and in other ways as well so again the stress of the parent translated into the physiology of the child there's a there's a study that I quoted in the book about they looked at um marriages that were stressed and you could there's two ways you could tell how stressed the marriage was once you could ask the parents and they could they would talk about it the other way is you could marry you could measure the urinary thresh hormone levels of their children wow and the parental conflict was reflected in elevated stress hormone levels in the urine of the children now elevated stress from our levels in the urine means that the immune system itself is under assault and that has an implication for health later on we know for example that the more stressed parents are the greater the risk of asthma for their children and that the degree of stress on the parents is correlated with the amount of medication the kid will need for their asthma amongst other studies lots of stuff studies so in other words there's a correlation between the emotional environment that we grow up in and our physiology yeah I mean that's really the core thrust of the book is hey all these things that you think are maybe just old age or um bad diet they're actually related to trauma or even disease in fact one of the ones you talk about that was the most eye-opening was ALS yeah which you know I would think of as a genetic disease bummer horrible roll of the dice but walk people through the the um there is a predictable personality trait of people with ALS that I was like well so um first of all there's nothing genetic nobody else nobody's ever shown I mean there might be some rare examples of ALS genetically induced tiny infinitely small minority so genes don't have much to do with most chronic illnesses there are some illnesses that are genetic this is one that runs in my family my mother and my aunt had it muscular dystrophy gradually they became weaker and weaker already when I was a child my mother couldn't lift her arm up and in the end she was not immobile at all so if you get that Gene you're going to get the disease but those diseases are very very rare about one in ten thousand most chronic illnesses have very little or no genetic basis to it so for example there's a breast cancer Gene but out of 100 women with breast cancer only seven will have the gene and out of 100 women with the gene not all of them will get the cancer so in many cases even if these genes are implicated it's the it's the interaction of genes and environment now in ALS is to you know the the ALS personality which I noticed in palliative care when I was a part of care physician also in the literature are people that repress their healthy anger and emotionally very rigid and they don't ask for help from anybody um and usually that's based on childhood trauma and Lou Gehrig was like that you Define trauma in you you go to very careful links in the book to make sure that people understand trauma isn't always getting hit with a bat or uh being sexually abused like there's a range that can be wildly impactful well let's think uh Lou Gehrig after whom the name the disease is named in North America his father was an alcoholic and Lou Gehrig was one of these really nice guys that took care of his mother emotionally he had to that's what happens in the home of an alcoholic very often the child becomes the caregiver now he was such a nice guy that you know he's the the the record that he set for uh consecutive games played that stood for so many many decades why did you set that record because even if he was sick he would play because he's too dutiful to his teammates to take himself out of a game is that a healthy thing or not it's not healthy on the other hand when I was a young rookie on the on the Yankees who got sick and he couldn't play and the manager was very upset with this kid says what are you talking about he's sick he can't play took the rookie to his own home we lived with his mother his mother put the kid to bed the rookie nursed him and Luke slept on the couch so that kind of self-sacrificing self-negating emotionally repressed really nice person is the person which is typical of the illest personality and there's been a whole lot of studies on that that show that you know these are the people that get ALS it's just that the doctors don't make the link between that personality pattern and the ls they just basically swallowing your anger swelling your Healthy anger direct yeah sorry swallowing your Healthy anger is directly causative to ALS I think it's a major contributor you never see it you never see it and you never see that the anger in anybody with ALS and you always see this hyper conscientious hyper autonomous self-sufficiency but no I don't need any help no and when you talk to neurologists which has been done in studies they always describe their patients as extraordinary nice ALS patients is extraordinarily nice why they're so nice because if they repress their healthy aggression which is that the neurologists don't make the link between that and the disease I'm saying that that plays a major role because that repression of emotions again the emotions are not separable from our physiology the nervous system and the immune system and hormone apparatus and the gut and the Heart they're all one system when something happens in one area something happens in the other area as well look the analogy in the book is this think of a person with a big beach ball trying to push a beach ball under the water that takes a lot of effort now I've ever been angry of course okay now when you're angry it's not just an emotional state in your head it's a whole body is no how much energy would it take to suppress that energy to suppress that anger can you imagine so that you don't even feel it but not feeling your anger was an adaptation to your childhood where the anger wasn't permitted so that emotional physiological effort of repressing anger takes a toll on the nervous system and on the immune system it's a major role in disease I'm saying yeah it plays a major contribution yeah this is where the book really starts to get into some fascinating territory as you go through all these different diseases and you start talking about okay repressing anger you go into the God is it the natural killer T cells end up being suppressed because you're putting so much energy away from your immune system your immune system can't keep up and so there's all kinds of things like cancer that are afflicted there was one thing where you said like back in the 1800s or early 1900s there was a doctor that was like oh whenever you see somebody with heart disease they have this type of personality and you even talk about in the book the type C you said it's not a personality type but that there are traits yeah that people with type c have that end up being sort of pro disease personality traits yeah what are some of those traits well before I answer that let me go back to something let's talk about a healthy anger for a minute if you could okay um then I'll illustrate these traits okay what is healthy anger why are we given healthy anger so there's a there's a system in our brain for anger not just for us mammals what is it there for is there to protect our boundaries samita invades of space physically or in the case of human beings emotionally used to say no stay out that's the role of healthy anger now you first if I repressed that healthy anger what would happen to you to me in life people would be just trespassing all over me all the time because I Had No Boundaries so healthy anger is a bundle of defense is that clear okay healthy anger is a boundary defense it just seems like one of its uses I'll be honest I don't know that I'd say it's its only use but I don't know if healthy anger that's its only use that's his major use just boundary protection that's his major that's why it came along animals have it you're in my space how far are you extending that to loved ones so now if you encroach upon a loved one well if your loved one includes your space emotionally no I mean if somebody else is intruding on my loved ones oh yeah that too yeah yeah oh yeah yeah you or your loved ones anything you cherish absolutely for sure so that's healthy anger so the role of anger is to set a boundary between what's nourishing uh you know to to let in The Lord of healthy anger is to keep up what's dangerous and unwelcome right what's the role of the emotional system in general is to let in what's healthy and nurturing and to keep what was dangerous and unwelcome is that fair enough seems good what's the rule the immune system exactly it's the same the role the immune system is to keep up with dangerous and toxic alone was nourishing and healthy the immune system and then and the emotional system are not separate systems they're part and parcel of the same apparatus they're Unified when you suppress the emotions you're also suppressing the immune system when you say when you when you when you don't know how to defend your emotional boundaries that also um weakens your immune boundaries physiologically it's that simple or if you oppress the anger that anger doesn't go away it doesn't evaporate into the heavens it turns against you in the form of depression or self-loathing and so on in the same way the immune system turns against you and now you have autoimmune disease and so the traits that were identified with chronic illness most chronic illness like cancers or immune disease or emotional self-suppression inability to experience healthy anger desire to please others to fit in to be acceptable to be nice to be ignoring of your own needs these are the traits that are over and over and again identified in the literature whether with multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or with cancer now there's a not the real per these are not the real person these are adaptive traits in response to the childhood environment but they take a heavy toll or take another so-called illness and by the way the case I'm making is that what we call illness is actually response to life so take a take depression this so-called biological disease of the brain what does it mean to depress something try to push it down to push it down what gets pushed and what's got pushed on in depression well I can tell you I've been depressed what gets pushed on depression is your natural emotions everything is flat nothing matters nothing has any meaning and that starts with people pushing them down that's that's the word that's what the word means it means to push it down it starts in childhood but people having to push down their emotions why do they have to push their emotions to fit in with other people's expectations so and I don't know the literature on this at all so they're oftentimes then the depression will just sort of creep in slowly I always assumed it was tied to something being stuck in um a bad relationship a death in the family loss of a job that there would be some sort of triggering event well the okay fair enough if you're in a bad relationship the healthy response is not depression but to deal with the challenges the nerve in the relationship either by work them out or by leaving the relationship depression is not necessary outcome the response to the death of a closed one of a close one is not depression it's grief grief is the healthy response we have a system in our brain for grief by the way so grief becomes depression when you're not allowing yourself to grieve but you don't know how to grief properly yeah and you don't know how to give properly because your emotions were suppressed as a child and uh so yeah we have uh these healthy systems but they get their activity gets deformed through our natural expectations okay so to stay with depression for a minute so you're pushing all this stuff down it starts in early childhood you're trying to fit in you want unconditional love you're not getting it so you have this directive for attachment and so you begin to oh I see what I can do if I if I don't yell scream if I'm not expressing frustration if I'm the caretaker or whatever that situation demands then all is well so now I've learned this adaptive response to suppress my emotions and over time it begins to numb me I would assume I have not been depressed so but uh so you're beginning to be numbed but now something it gets starts to be very extreme and you what I have heard depression explained as is just like the skies are permanently gray you will never see Joy again and so what what is breaking in that that like the beach ball analogy I like right I'm pushing something under the water but if I stop pushing it will pop back up and so if that thing or my emotions is when you're treating depression let's say non-pharmacologically is it the release of the pressure on those emotions to let them finally come up yeah so the so the the difference between the pushing the beach ball down is that I'm doing it consciously and deliberately but the repression of emotions that a child engages in is not conscious is not deliberate it's an automatic response it's unconscious therefore the child can't just that go like that and then as you say it numbs and and becomes overall a depression now the by the way I'm not against pharmacological treatment I've taken antidepressants they have helped me so I'm not here to Advocate against them I could talk about their misuse but in principle sometimes they're helpful and occasionally they're life-saving and much of the time they're over prescribed for way too long and we're not dealing with the real issues because the pharmacology deals with the symptom but it doesn't deal with the underlying problem so yes the healing of depression and I talk you know the last the the final part and the longest part of the book really is unhealing is you have to reconnect to yourself so you can feel your emotions that's the treatment of depression talk to me about reconnecting how do you reconnect what is that process oh well first of all you recognize that you're disconnected and you notice how that disconnect shows up you know in so many areas of your life uh in your on the job or in the uh in your personal relationships for example on your relationship to yourself so you have to become aware and this is where I talk about disease whether it's physical or so-called mental um as teacher not that I recommend the illness is a way of learning to anybody that's not my I think that happens but if it happens it can actually teach you and you can ask yourself what have you been pushing down and what are the stories why do I push it down Oh I pushed on emotions because I've learned I have the belief that if I'm angry I'm a bad person well is that really true is a personal experiences anger really a bad person um I learned that if I push down my needs uh then people will love me do I really do I really want to be loved at the expense of disconnecting from myself as a child I had no choice because I had to be loved or connected with otherwise I wouldn't have survived is it still like that so basically it's a gradual sorry isn't it like isn't in fact this is my overarching question and somebody that has helped so many people through therapy you probably have the answer or an Insight but as we become adults yeah you don't have like other than your parents should you be lucky enough that they're still alive but man out in the outside world people do want you to act a certain way and if you don't they're not going to be around you like I'll just be honest if somebody's throwing a tantrum as an adult I don't have time for that but an adult doesn't do a tantrum are you sure yeah like I have seen adults throw when I don't have an adult version you've seen you have children in that old body just throw Tantrums interesting okay go on you know so the the adult who throws a tantrum he's a traumatized child who has not developed self-regulation I'm not talking about repression of self but regulation so for example help me differentiate so for example I throw up at the airline counter and uh they've overbooked the airplane okay my healthy response is disappointment and some degree of anger I'd say this is not right that you did this I want you to redress it you do something about it please you're going to get the poor clerk behind the counter who had nothing to do with creating the problem who's just trying to do her job and trying to help me as best she can is that that's not a mature adult that's a child whose Midfield cortex so self-regulation has gone offline and his emotional circuits have taken over believe me I've been an adult child very often in my life as my wife could tell me tell you so uh that's not an adult okay so then the process there goes back to connect to yourself figure out why you're repressing this yeah let go of those things that are keeping it down find a way to be able to regulate yourself so that they're sort of contextually sensical so that we're not in unhealthy anger territory um okay interesting so trauma is um is an imprint that makes you react to the present like you're still a child essentially I mean that's a very narrow definition of terminal that's one of his essential aspects and that the important thing that you said earlier is it's automatic it's automatically it's unwilled it's automatic and it's um and actually when you look at the brand scans of deeply traumatized people the prefrontal cortex is totally asleep and the emotional circuits you know they're the the the the the Primitive emotional responses are active this is why so many of so much of the jail population are traumatized people that's who end up in jail but instead of dealing with the trauma and helping them develop which they could under the right circumstances become adult people self-regulated the jails just make it worse by the way by the way they torment people on the way they traumatize people even further so when I talk about a trauma in for society informed Society what if we actually understood trauma what if you just actually understood it you have huge implications for medical school for medical health delivery what if when you went to the doctor with your depression we weren't just told you got this biological disease of the brain here's a pill but they actually said what happened to you as a child one of the people I quote in the book is the Great pediatrician psychiatrist neuroscientist Bruce Perry who just wrote a book with the Oprah the title of which is called what happened to you now what's wrong with you what happened to you what if we asked that question you know so that would change medical treatment completely in the prison system or in the legal system we didn't just say what did you do but what happened to you that made you do it now that wouldn't mean that we allow or encourage anti-social Behavior but it would mean that we would actually want to rehabilitate people and to help them become who they could be you know that's a very different legal concept what if an education it was kids developmental needs that were put Paramount rather than their performance it's interesting how would you do that functionally what would School look like well I talk about it a bit like schools in Finland there's much more play there's much more freedom and they have much better results than we do so that being in other words we honored what are the right results to look at a child who's curious who wants to learn who's engaged who's respectful of others who is confident um that would be the right results then you don't have to worry about stuff acknowledged on their throats why because they want to learn they want to learn and so you don't have to punish them you don't have to reward them you just present them with the opportunities to learn and they will that's a natural human attribute be killed that in this Society as people we always think we're looking at a reality and our view of it sees reality the way it is but it's been a spiritual teaching for eons that really brother Buddha said it the the very first statement in the collection of his saying the dhamapada is that our thoughts are in the lead and so so whatever our thoughts tell us that's the reality that we see so essentially with our minds we create the world now Johnny Cash on this song says it's all in your mind um one foot on Jacob's Ladder which is The Stairway to Heaven which by the way wasn't originated with Led Zeppelin The Stairway to Heaven is actually from the Bible uh where Jacob dreams that the angels are going up to heaven or one foot in the fire so the cash thing is one uh one foot on the ladder one foot in the fire it all goes down in your mind so the the kind of thoughts that and beliefs that we have create the world that we live in and that's what I get from that song now what the song doesn't say is that before with our minds we create the world the world creates our minds so this is where development comes in that that given our early experiences we create a view of the world and of ourselves and of other people that then governs how we are in the world and how we feel about everything but we will forget those early experiences and those shaping influences and there's a result we mistake our view of the world for the world itself it all goes done in your mind which is what Johnny Sins what's the what's the time period of that profound shaping window of development is it um just a couple years in the beginning is it till we're 15 till the brain stops developing at 25 like what what does that window look like it begins in the Euros um so already the stresses or the experiences of the mother um shape how the infant experiences the world um we know this so that we can talk about it maybe later in detail if you wish but there's lots of evidence now that the child's brain is actually in its development is significantly influenced by the mother's emotional states so it goes back that far and so getting into the what I really want to understand is the the foundation of of that so I've heard you talk before about in Native societies it was always understood that if somebody was angry you would just keep them away from a pregnant person because you didn't want that anger transferring but my question is why not what what is it about um intense emotions or negative emotions what is it doing to the substructures of the brain that then make that disadvantageous as the child grows well so there was a study done after 9 11. UM women who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder while they were pregnant as a result of 9 11. a year later their offspring still an abnormal stress hormone levels so fundamentally what happens is that the brain's capacity to perceive stress and to process it gets impaired so that means people are now more prone to feel stressed when there's no real threat or there may be more prone not to recognize a threat when it is there so our whole perception of the world and safety and our responses to stress the physiological apparatus for handling stress is affected in already by what happens in the womb so thinking about um the gym for instance so you go to the gym and you want a stressor you want a certain level of difficulty in order to in that case you're tearing the muscle slightly and then as it heals it grows back stronger yeah is it that the brain reacts differently to stress and that any amount of stress is bad or is there a certain amount that is um useful and just were going too far well this is where I think the language becomes very important what we mean by we use the word strength so if if you mean by stress the challenge life is full of challenges which will get you adrenaline going and so on that's a good thing I don't know when I talk about stress I talk about a threat that the organism doesn't know how to respond to and it's too much and so that [Music] um the uh the person who actually coined over stress who was a fellow Hungarian Canadian Hans celier uh he's the one who coined the word in his present usage um he really meant pressure on an organism that's too much for the organism to handle so that's what I mean by stress I don't I don't mean the stress of a freely chosen challenge such as going to the gym and working in muscles hard and and going even beyond what you could do before I don't mean that that's not what I mean by stress I mean by stress and and the the biggest triggers for stress according to the research are loss of control uncertainty lack of information and conflict so when you subject people to those circumstances which in this Society happens a lot people are stressed often beyond their capacity to deal with it now that capacity is very much programmed by what happened to us very early in life and where does that so it begins in utero where is the sort of closing of that hyper malleability phase because where where one thing that really drives me is the question of okay damage has been done um you know like in your case where you're born two months after or excuse me two months before the Nazis invade Hungary it's like not a lot to be done about that that is what it is so now the question becomes can we undo it uh is there a window of hyper malleability where the you could sort of reprogram the infant or is it like almost like an imprinting machine where it's like nope you had this heavy amount of stress in utero that's imprinted and no matter what you do in the first three years is never going to undo that it is imprinted uh in many ways biologically which we could talk about the person is not even aware of imprinted in how their genes are turned on and off and printed on how their chromosomes function in printing how their stress their apparatus response to the external environment um imprinted in their cells imprinted in inflammation in their bodies and so on and so on and the earlier it happens and the more it happens and the more temperamentally sensitive the child the greater the effects having said that it's never not reversible it's never not approachable now fact is people can heal people can rewire themselves people can um uh find a equilibrium but the more happened earlier and the earlier it happened the more difficult that work becomes which brings me to my Epitaph that I've designed for my gravestone you know what it's going to say it's going to say it's going to say it was a lot more work than I'd anticipated you know it is a fair assessment I'm it's ongoing work like I'm 77. it's ongoing work and you know um when I don't take care of myself emotionally when I don't do my yoga when I don't get myself into the swimming pool or on the exercise bike um when I take on too much in my life it gets activated so yes it can be dealt with and it can be healed and it can be uh regulated but it takes Consciousness it takes awareness given your perspective with having dealt with a lot of people that have had severe early traumas that have echoed through their adult lives in the form of addiction um what is it if it's identifiable what is it that makes some people able to get in there do the work harder you know than expected though it is and other people that get stuck yeah yeah well that's the important question um first of all let me just say that trauma shows up in multiple ways addiction is only one so-called mental illnesses depression anxiety ADHD PTSD whatever others um physical illnesses chronic physical illness like uh cancer and autoimmune disease very often reflect trauma and in physiological ways which you can talk about and I'm not just giving you a personal opinion I'm talking about the research shows so trauma has multiple manifestations of which addiction is only one now what makes the difference uh I don't think this is one single Factor but there are a number uh first of all has there been anybody along the way that was empathetic and supportive to you if there was that could make it no matter what happened that could make a huge difference um earlier in your life the better but if there was a teacher if there was a uncle an aunt anybody who maybe couldn't change your situation but could listen to you or just validate you or speak to you empathetically that can make a difference um social class has a lot to do with it because um if you can afford to see a therapist and talk to somebody that puts you in an advantage how much stress you continue to be under in your life that has a lot to do with it when people are trying to just to survive it's hard for them to consider transformation so people are under economic pressure or racially oppressed or or um under um economic threat political conflict these make it difficult for people because people are just in survival mode uh people that are highly sensitive they're both in an advantage of the disadvantage they're at a disadvantage in that the more sensitive they are the more it hurts when stuff happens but also the most sensitive they are the more likely they might have to have some insight or awareness or some creative Outlet so that can work both ways I would say the biggest difference is was there some empathetic support in your life at any time and and even if you talk to people who have been addiction for a long time and say well what made the difference somebody talk to me like a human being somebody didn't judge me they accepted me what what window does that open up for them is it uh it begins to allow themselves to stop judging themselves and to develop self-awareness or is there something else at play nice it's the very first thing you said um anybody who's traumatized then like Trump I mean a broad range of experiences from abuse extreme things on one hand too this parents would do stress to pay attention to you or to really see you and deceive you when children are not seen for who they are or when they hurt they can make two assumptions one there's something wrong with the world and my parents are not capable or they don't love me what can I make the or they can make the Assumption and that's why this is happening because I deserve to be loved and I deserve to be treated well but these people are incapable and they don't care you can make that also I'm sure you can make the Assumption I'm talking about unconscious assumption or if you make the Assumption there's something wrong with me those are the two choices now it's much safer for the child to assume that there's something wrong with them otherwise it's a little safer it's a lot safer yeah why safer why is it safer because what what's it like to live with the danger as a four-year-old living in a world where your parents are dysfunctional and they are perhaps hateful towards you how could you endure that for one minute so you have to make the opposite assumption if this stuff is happening to me it's because I deserve it something wrong with me no go back to your question somebody comes along and and treats you compassionately oh maybe I'm not that bad person here's a person who's here's somebody who's treating me like I was a worthwhile human being maybe I'm a worthwhile human being so that compassionate reflection that you get from this other human being subverts your image of yourself as worthless and that's what makes the big difference cool so that points to something that is really interesting maybe a little bit scary um So Lisa Feldman Barrett who you may or may not know uh has really interesting thoughts so I'm always trying to figure out how much of who we are as nature or how much of us is nurture and she told me Tom look you're you're asking the wrong question so the reality is we have a nature that requires nurture and as you talk about this it and I'm I'm going to put words in your mouth tell me if they're accurate it sounds like you're saying our minds are essentially co-created and we are presenting ourselves and looking for an Echo back of or a reflection back of what people think about what they see and we're using both of those things our own sort of sense of who we are Plus what's being reflected back to us to figure out who we are so if something negative is reflected back that's actually going to shape my sense of self and if something positive is reflected back that's going to to shape my sense of self now that to me begs a question I'm so curious to know what you think about this so my response to that is cool I'm going to become totally self-sufficient I'm going to get to the point where I don't need somebody's reflection back but I can feel the danger in that it seems like a risky game to say I'm gonna totally withdraw I'm gonna do all the work internally I'm going to make sure that I know who I am that I don't need that reflection back but knowing how important loving relationships are and things like that I can feel while there would be some upside to totally knowing who you are believing in yourself but you're also Walling yourself off how do you conceptualize handling that well it's a question of who's doing it and why because you can do that Walling off in two ways so the Buddha is another story he goes through all these teachers and he wants to get enlightened and he goes through all these very rigorous self-denying aesthetic practices and he just doesn't the truth doesn't come to me and finally he goes up by himself and he sits under a tree by himself and it just sits there and he meditates and it contemplates everything that arises in his mind and then after a while he has his Nirvana here's this um Enlightenment experience and then he's got a decision to make he understands his own nature he understands the nature of reality and he really does he's on the outstanding Minds in history but that he's got a decision to make so do I just Revel in this spiritual Liberation that I have worked so hard to attain and no he decides he's going to go back and teach other people because he wants to be connected to humanity he wants to Enlighten other people as well what can you articulate what his um sort of breakthrough Enlightenment realization was well um it'll be presumptuous of me to do so because I've not had that realization myself I've only read about it or I've seen other people talk about it um I don't mind a regurgitation of what other people have said I actually so I know Buddhism at a 30 000 foot view so I actually don't know other than life is suffering um I don't know what sort of the key Revelations are yeah life is suffering is I mean his real teaching is that life doesn't need to be suffering but the way we set it up with our minds it is suffering so it really has to do with goes back to the Johnny Cash song it all goes down in your mind you disidentify from your mind and reality is much greater and much deeper and much more Shaker than your mind will ever tell you that's interesting can you say that another way even even I don't know if if this is your own understanding of life or um a reflection of Buddhism but I'm curious to know if life is more profound than your mind what are the elements that make it profound is it Beauty Is It Love is it what is it the problem with the conversation tone is that there's two minds talking about the nature of reality and uh in that we don't use the same words or no it's that we're still in the mind whereas um my very modest understanding of the spiritual teachings not just Buddhist spiritual teaching but Sufi teachings are Jewish spiritual teaching Christian spiritual teaching I'm talking about the spiritual teachings not the religion [Music] um is that there is Essence there's truth that goes beyond what the Mind itself can uh comprehend so far we must have access to it in some way even if only through pure experience otherwise but that's the whole point it is pure pure experience that a great poet like a room you can write about or Hafiz can write about but um I cannot claim to have had that pure experience so if I did I didn't recognize it as such can I give you one of the experiences I've heard you talk about and I'll be curious to know if if you were grazing along the edges uh of something I believe it was your first experience with Ayahuasca you said that um you were there and suddenly had this Rush of just pure love and that you if I remember right you started crying and and you were just overwhelmed with the sense of just just love and it's purest form and in in that moment realize you had closed yourself off to that experience is when I think about people talking about there being something more profound those are the only sort of moments that I can relate to where I think that feeling is so elevated and wonderful that but that's the only thing I've ever touched on in my own life where um that seems like what they can be talking about uh does that is that getting close well it's it's heading in the right direction um I think that real spiritual teachers would say that that way they experienced there wasn't a Feeling it feelings are like activities of our nervous systems and they would say there's something deeper than the nervous system so what experienced was a state of of being uh manifesting in Love no matter love might not be the only manifestation of it might be courage Clarity um compassion um Justice um strength will I know one spiritually just specifically who talks about it in those terms but these are not feelings the feeling of love and the state of Love are not necessarily the same thing but yeah there's more to it than just the mental experience there's the direct the the mental thought um or even the emotional resonance it's it's more like a direct experience of something and um you know it's clear that what the Buddha had was for one he wasn't the only one uh was a direct experience but to go back to your question about isolation so there's a way of isolating yourself as a way of committing yourself to re-enlightenment which doesn't mean that you'll stay away from other people for the rest of your life it just means that you're going to go deep into yourself and not be distracted by all that the world throws at you then is another way of isolate yourself which is a defensive one which is the world is so awful and heck with them all I don't need anybody that will protect you from some kinds of Earth because if you withdraw from relationships you'll never be betrayed well that's true on the other hand that itself is a state of pain that isolation itself is a state of pain so when you talk about isolation it depends who's doing it and where is it coming from and and to go back to the original question and you mentioned um nurture nature it's perfectly true that we're born with certain expectations for the world I mean every creature is like our lungs are an expectation for oxygen if it wasn't for oxygen we wouldn't have lungs so we evolved in response to the availability of oxygen otherwise you would not have evolved the way we did there might be some kind of creatures around it wouldn't be us so our lungs are on expectation for for for oxygen in the same way our nervous systems are an expectation for love for nurturing for being held for being valued for being enjoyed that's what the infant is born with those expectations and whether we develop well or whether we don't depends very much on how fully those expectations are met now we can survive without them my God many of us have but survival and fully being alive and fully living are not the same thing and fully and survival adapting to things I mean you can adapt the human beings are particularly good at adapting to a vast range of environments but that doesn't mean that we thrive in all those environments so one of my arguments one of my points about the culture that we're living in now is that yeah we're surviving but we're hardly thriving and we're not thriving precisely because our expectations I'm talking about a built-in natural expectations I'm not talking about artificial expectations like expect to be foreign expect to be respected by everybody or I expect to be achieving this achieving that no I'm talking about the natural expectations of a human being and the less those expectations are met by the rearing environment in the early years the more distorted it'll be become because the more we have to adapt to something less than what we need and and in my view as I'm sure you're well aware much much of disease physical mental afflictions addictions and so on they all arise out of the ways we had to adapt to unnatural circumstances where our natural built-in expectations were authorted that's a really um useful way to look at things I like that a lot so I use different words to kind of describe something maybe similar if not identical which I call the physics of Being Human so there are just some things we have needs we have compulsions we for instance there there is going to be a voice in your head talking to you there is I've never met anybody that doesn't have a negative voice in their head talking to them and we have we're an active species right but we're an active species that also tries to conserve calories so you get this weird sort of conflict and that Insight that you just gave I find really powerful when I think about early development so this notion that our brain comes with um I like to think of it in a biological way though I'm sure what I'm about to describe will be inaccurate but that there are essentially neurons in the brain that are looking for that love the validation being enjoyed there was something about the way you said that that really hit me um and that our brain is going to it's it comes like lungs expecting the air it comes expecting that love that validation that enjoyment and getting all of that reflected back and you talk a lot about a child being narcissistic and so that's part of the physics of Being Human it just is everyone is and not in a negative way just it's all about me that's where their brain is at in their development and if we sort of run the experiment of saying well that's probably the most advantageous thing at least from a historical context that you so got that it was so prevalent that to think erroneously to think that a parent's happiness means that you're good is such a great way to establish confidence and a sense of worth and you know all these things that are going to propel you forward gabri you're really making me put things together that I've never been able to draw the lines between um that is amazing I bet you say that to all the guys yeah uh I say it to all the good ones how about that um but it's interesting especially when you put it in context of your upcoming book which of course I have not read called the myth of normal and how sort of broken our society is I've always approached it from the the like hey this Society is is like any society in time where you can have a path through it that is pathological or like the Buddha you can find a path that is beautiful and profound and you take I think a more aggressive approach of saying no no there's something uniquely disruptive about the era that we're living through and sort of just walking through what you were saying about the the X the brain has expectations of love the way that lungs have expectations of air and there's something about the way that we have structured society that is breaking that and in Breaking that we're just regulating the immune system and a whole host of other things that is really interesting um walk me through then some of the specifics that you've covered in shattered and in some of your articles and talks how is modern society disregulating us and what can we do to resolve some of that well first of all it's very interesting uh you said shattered I don't have a book called Shadow but it's called sorry sorry scattered I don't know but what's interesting is how many people may say it that way that's interesting that's very what have I just revealed Yeah well yeah and to me it's always revealing something about the person and their self-image you know because I don't think anybody's ever shattered um scattered has to do with the scattered mind the American the Canadian title of scattered Minds it had to do with ADHD and you know the the dispersal of attention [Music] um gosh you say so many things that I'm going to engage with uh come on let me let me jump back to what you said about everybody's got this negative voice in their heads yeah yeah but that's not a given it's just what happens in this Society do you think there are societies where that would not be present or at least not ever present I think we have in this Society is like that for a long long long time but that has to do with what civilization does to human beings so I'm sure that voice has been there since the beginning of civilization but not necessarily in our Aboriginal State as Hunter guy to the small band people now we might have a conscience that keeps us in line but that's not the same as a voice that keeps telling you how bad you are how worthless you are I think that's particularly is a that itself is a product of life experience what what exactly if you have a sense causes that like what in Civilization leads to that kids not being valued and enjoyed and played with for just who they are kids having to live up to expectations in order to meet the approval and welcoming of their parents well if that's the case they better install a little voice in their heads they'll keep them in line otherwise they won't get loved and there's not a conscious process Nobody Does this oh I want to instill a little voice in my head it's not hard it's this this is It's a natural adaptation to an unnatural situation in this society and I'm not blaming fans in this Society it's extraordinarily difficult for parents to give those conditions of what the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard a regard that has no conditions of worth attached to it I accept you just for who you are the Way You Are that's very difficult for parents to deliver even with the best of Goodwill because they never had themselves and only that then there's so much stress so you mentioned my book scattered which is an ADHD and I was diagnosed with it you know in my 50s and I never bought into the idea that it was a genetic disease and even less do I buy into it now but to tuning out that scattered Minds that I wrote about that itself was a coping mechanism so when this when when an infant is under stress because the parents are stressed as I was as a Jewish infant under the Nazis uh there's a lot of stress as you can imagine for a whole year of my first year of life and more than that of course I tuned out as a way of escaping from the unbearable stress that my mother was under because as an infant you just soak in the stress of your parents but this is happening when my brain was developing so that gets programmed into my brain as an adaptation now you don't need World War and you don't need genocide to make an infant stressed you just need parents for under economic stress who've got relationship issues who got unresolved childhood trauma who are isolated themselves who are struggling in their lives who have depression or anxiety in their lives and infants young children pick up on that they make it about themselves it's too much for them some of them will tune out to deal with it the tuning audience program in their brain because that's when the brain develops under the impact of the environment and then five years later or ten years later or in my case 55 years later they're diagnosed with the so-called inherited disease which it wasn't it was an adaptation and it began as an adaptation it becomes a source of a disorder but that's my whole point that these early adaptations have their function but then they're only meant to be temporary but since they become wired in no they create problems later on and that I think is a source of much of illness in our society let me ask what would be a worse or what would be a better scenario depending on how you want to answer it would You Rather somebody be um loved validated enjoyed held touched up until the age of three but then after that they're put into foster care with all of the woes of foster care or would you rather somebody have a very disregulated initial three years um mother is giving the child up for adoption which basically tells you that the pregnancy was incredibly stressed gives the child away it spends the first three years in let's say an orphanage but then gets adopted to a truly loving family that wants them enjoys them validates them hugs them and gives them all those things which of those is the more distressing circumstance well I mean I I find out a tough one time because what you're setting up is um through tragedies and you're asking me to choose the least strategy and um I don't know that I know how to do that I do know I think my BIOS would be that if the child had everything for the first three years they'll probably have some inner resilience to handle what kind of happens later although it'd be still be a terrible scenario that you outlined that total dysregulation in the first three years I think would be very hard to overcome um not impossible but you know it's when you think about it the scenario of somebody getting all that in the first three years and then ending up in a horrible situation totally unlikely I mean why would that even happen what is up my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University until then my friends be legendary peace out yeah but it can give you scenarios but but if your question is designed to um look at the heart of what is the most important developmental period for sure it's the first three years from conception until the end of the first three years not that it's over them but those that's the template that's the template and if our society just understood that just give the kids three good years and and and and do everything you can get do everything you can as a society as a community to support parents giving those kids those first three years whatever that takes we would save so much disease so much dysfunction so much crime so much addiction so much political Conflict for that matter so that's the importance of that question is is if we only my friend the uh children's Troubadour or Rafi I mean you probably remember rafik he he created something called the child honoring Society you know child honoring project and he just says well if this Society honored children what would it look like well guess what we'd pay attention to the environment we would um make sure that parents have the right support that children are treated well that parents who need the help get it so that they don't traumatize their children so that schools um instead of focused on turning up gears and and machines in the form of human beings focused on promoting healthy self-image and selfie self-development and healthy brain development what if that was the focus of the schools it wouldn't take it wouldn't be more expensive than what we're doing now it would be less expensive so yeah those first three years are crucial there's a guy named Jeffrey Canada who introduced me to a concept that I found both intriguing and terrifying which goes along was why I was asking that question and he was looking at kids that grew up in the inner cities and why they end up doing poorly the rest of their lives and kids that grew up in Middle income families and why they end up doing better and he said that he believed it could be boiled down to the number of words a child Hears by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative and I thought oh my God is it really that simple and he was basically saying that you're it's it comes down to the language centers of the brain developing and if in that period where those those parts of the brain are actually being constructed if you know that the construction is going to be based on the environment and you give it a paltry environment where there's very little language to interact with then you get an underdeveloped Language Center of the brain which ends up holding them back later working communication becomes extraordinarily important in today's environment yes and I just thought one that's thrilling news because anybody that encounters that information when they're pregnant or about to become pregnant can do something with it and it will have lifelong positive impact but it's terrifying to think that you catch a kid at age six and it's like [Music] you can do the work and for sure like you were saying you can always like there can be Improvement and I would never want people to hear that and just give up but whoa the road becomes a lot harder to hoe well I have to say I don't agree with you what was the man's name Jeffrey Canada okay well good name I don't agree with um I mean it's not that I disagree with what he's saying but I think there's there's a deeper layer there give it to me because what develops first see the language is the is the left side of the brain okay now what actually develops first if you look at it is the right side of the brain which holds the unconscious and it's the advice that an unconscious template that's most important more important than there's lots of people there with beautiful language development articulate they're called professors and academics who are emotionally infants um and sometimes the left The Language Center is in the left side of the brain can become a refuge from a lack of emotional grounding on the right side of the brain so no what actually matters is how those infants are held how there's some to how they played with there's a great neuroscientist unfortunately died untimely a couple of years ago Jack tanks up his name was and he distinguished a number of brain systems that we share with other animals they include seeking so the exploration of the environment they include lust obviously which is sexuality necessary Rage which is healthy anger to protect your boundaries um caring so that be careful infants and others these are brain systems and what he calls grief and panic which is what happens when we lose their attention relationships so that there should be grief there should be Panic those are healthy where when our attachment relations are threatened and there was also play and all animals play and infants start playing peek-a-boo at two months long before they have language and play is much more important for the development of the brain than languages according to a whole lot of developmentalists and so a sense so so because it sets the um your sense of yourself in the world and so it's not that what this man Canada says about language isn't important it's just that first there has to be this right brain emotionally grounded template for all that and even later on it's not the language skills we have to help people develop not that we don't we do but we have to work on their sense of themselves and and and essentially rewire they right-sided unconscious brain so in La there's a very famous psychotherapist psychologist called um Alan Shore who's not working on what he calls right-sided uh Psychotherapy or right brain Psychotherapy with adults we've got all kinds of language skills but who don't have properly developed unconscious because of what happened to them early on in life let me quickly read you a list um there's a wonderful um psychologist at Notre Dame called darcia narves who by the way you might want to talk to sometime and she studied hunter-gatherer societies um which is how we evolved that was a revolutionary Niche and for millions of years and for hundreds of thousands of years and even for until 15 000 years ago everybody lived in North Society so that's where we evolved and he says what do these people provide to their infants and she lists them soothing perinatal experience prompt responsiveness to the intervention to the needs of the infant none of this business about letting kids cry it out those kids have picked up as soon as they whimper in fact the Navy even put down extensive touch and constant physical presence including touch with movement so the parents are always walking around holding the kids the papoose on the back of the parent frequent infinite initiated breastfeeding up four to two to five years wow with the average winning age at age four now here in North America here in North America we're lucky if women are able to breastfeed their kids for two months and about 25 of American women have to go back to work after two weeks but that's an insult to the infant I'm not blaming the women it's the economy it's the society a community of multiple warm responsive adult caregivers so the whole tribe is there to hold you and to enjoy you um creative free play in nature with multi-age Playmates now how many kids in our society get anything close to any of that then we wonder why do kids have so many mental health issues and behavior problems and so on and then we then we focus on the behavior problems and we try and correct the behaviors instead of looking at well what is this child manifesting through that behavior you know so I think we need a lot we need to look a lot more at not the cognitive developmental stuff but at the emotional developmental side of things so that granted what your fan says about language is very important that not being granted we're barking up the wrong tree explain to people when you say the myth of normal what do you mean and then after that we'll get into what a toxic culture is I mean a number two things we have this idea what that what is normal is also healthy and natural and I'm saying that in this culture the norm is neither healthy nor is it natural in fact the norm I think is making us sick number one number two we talk about illnesses and of body and mind as abnormalities I'm saying that illness in this Society given the conditions is a normal response to an abnormal circumstance so that's what I mean by the myth of normal okay so the obviously you go into great detail about this in the book and I remember at one point stopping and taking the note like wait a second basically everything that we think of like you're saying is sort of a normal result of Aging or oh this is you know just some people have this kind of response and it is what it is it's just natural um It's All Coming Back To trauma and it's all coming back to Childhood trauma and um a specific idea that we'll get to in a minute but I want to push a little bit on that idea so what why is what we see in terms of things that we would categorize as mental health issues or overly stressed lives or all of the Myriad things that we think of rheumatoid arthritis one of the examples that you give how is that an Adaptive response well the rumors of the threat is is not a not an Adaptive response in itself it's the outcome of an Adaptive response so when you talk to people and I've interviewed many or you look at the research literature on who gets rheumatoid arthritis it's people who are super conscientious they have what's called hypo autonomous self-sufficiency in other words they don't allow us for help they looked after emotional needs of others rather than carrying their own caring for their own they tend to suppress their healthy anger and uh they really try to fit in and not make waves and these people that's an adaptation This Is How They adapt it to their childhood they grew up in families where they were not accepted seen for they were they might have been traumatized that adaptation was to make themselves to suppress their authentic emotions and to try and fit in with other people's expectations and to meet other people's needs that's the adaptation but that adaptation was tremendous stress on the person and that stress causes the illness sort of things that the illness is the outcome of an adaptation okay so let's talk about that adaptation so yeah I think a lot about the human mind as having directives there are things that we have been hardwired to do over millions of years of evolution through even you know sort of the non-human part of our evolutionary tree up through where we are now and so these directives get implanted and it seems like your thesis is largely about the way that as a child we go okay this is what our environment is I don't don't have a secure attachment style maybe my parents aren't paying attention to me but what is the directive is the directive to get along is the directive to fit in like what is the core directive that causes this to become pathological the core directive is twofold one is we have to attach we have to be long we have to connect but the other Vector is that we have to do so while maintaining our own autonomy our own authenticity Auto means the self so that means we have to be in touch with our gut feelings and our emotions and to be true to them and so what we need is relationships image can be true to ourselves that's a directive now as soon as the directive changes by because of this is what we're wired for for example authenticity being in touch with the gut feeling out there in the wild there's a hunter-gatherer how long do you survive if you're not in touch with your gut feelings so that's an essential thing but what if you grew up in a home where are your honest emotions are not accepted by your parents let's say your parents have read Jordan Peterson's Book 12 rules for life where he actually says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves till they come back to normal or that parents should be able to hit their kids in order to get them to comply now if a child experiences healthy normal anger of a two-year-old but the message he gets that if you're angry you will not be accepted by us in fact you'll be excluded you'll be given a time up it won't even be with you until you come back to quote unquote normal then the child will adaptively repress their anger so as to maintain their relationship with their parents so they give up their authenticity for the sake of the attachment bad giving of the attachment suppresses not just the emotions but because the emotions are physiologically connected to immune system in fact they're part and parcel of the same apparatus when you suppress your emotions you're suppressing your immune system as well and of you asking why are we seeing a rise of autoimmune disease in this society which we are and as globalization spreads we're seeing more other immune disease around the world is because people are more and more having to suppress themselves to fit in with the false expectations of a society so that's the link all right I'm gonna see if I can hold all this in my head because this is one of the the most interesting core elements of the book is this collision between authenticity and attachment yes used a incredible analogy that really hit me hard and that's you said the lung is not the response to an expectation of oxygen the lung is the expectation of oxygen like it it is the manifestation of that yeah if there's no if there was no oxygen we'd have no lungs our lungs evolved as an expectation for oxygen which makes total sense to me yeah and if the and I'm paraphrasing here but I think I'm pretty close that the human is the expectation of attachment absolutely so that we we exist only in relation to having that attachment well how long would a baby survive without attachment it wouldn't yeah so so the infant is an expectation but not just for physical so that physical attachment but also for emotional attachment of a nurturing and unconditional kind we're an expectation for that we're that's why we evolved as a species the the baby gorilla is an expectation to be loved nurtured held and fed and protected by the mother gorilla now have you ever seen the mother gorilla who ignores their baby's cries can you even imagine one have you seen a mother cry a cat that ignores the the little infant kittens meow infant is an expectation for unconditional acceptance we tell parents to ignore their babies crying veto parents to separate from their kids if the kids behave in a way that they don't like we tell parents to deny children's natural need to play out there in nature so human beings are expect we evolved as you say as hominins over the last couple of million years and as a species the human you know the homo sapiens we evolved his expectations for certain conditions the Lesser Society meets those conditions the more toxic it becomes to the developmental needs and therefore Healthy Growth of the human being okay so let's walk through that so yeah what do you do because you talk about needing to set boundaries and you're you mentioned look I'm a parent and at the end of the day I do have to sub boundaries so how do we set a boundary without and and I'll quote I think it was Plato or Aristotle that said this the only impossible job is raising children one of the reasons that I did not have kids is because I my sister and I were raised in the house the same house by the same parents and we reacted very differently to that but first of all you're not brought up in the same home by the same parents that's interesting why why do you say that because uh the the parent that the child experiences is the parent the way they show up for that particular child your parents did not show up the same way for a female Childers for a male child even if they tried to they couldn't have because their program culturally not to secondly you were different ages you came along at different stages of their parent relationship to one another or their cell phone or their relationship to themselves did not have the same parents you did not grow up in the same house number one number two you might have different sensibilities that is for sure one of you may be temperamentally more or less sensitive than the other so that means even if your parents could have been the same which they couldn't have been but even if they could have been the same for both of you you would have experienced them differently [Music] okay so knowing that level of complexity yeah how how do you do this well like it it seems so my mother disciplined me both physically so I was spanked and well this sort of interrupt on no please this and then you is one way to put it hit you is another way to put it yeah you know so uh which that word doesn't ring weird to me but I know given your area of expertise that it does for you and that's what I'm trying to figure out so how do we set a boundary with without the child feeling that there are conditions around the love because reading that in your book The and again I don't have kids so nobody needs to panic but um unconditional love to me at an intellectual level anyway doesn't seem to break just because you're told to sit on the stairs or be isolated well you see the the love that the child experiences see I don't doubt that your mother loved you but the love that the child experiences is not what the parent feels it's what the child gets from the parent no if you're told that if you're angry you need to be on your own what message are you getting you're getting the message that only under certain emotions are you only when certain emotions are present are you acceptable to the parent the the shot the child will not experience that as love but that um so I will say this this is purely anecdotal and it's just me and I don't want to get lost in that yeah but um I remember I even as a kid I would say that my mom I sometimes get very angry at my mom but I never doubt that she loves me no I I am nor should you doubt that she loved you because she loved you but that doesn't mean that you experience the love is unconditional you wouldn't have any idea you had nothing to compare it to that's the only love you'd ever known so how do you set a boundary without breaking the sense so that's the question of who's setting the boundary you see let's say a parent with uh no no but here's what I mean with children who are naturally lovingly connected to their parents how you set a binder is you say don't do that with a parent that the child is not totally unconditionally connected you have to use more and more Force so when you talk about setting boundaries yes you can't let a kid I live in Vancouver British Columbia it's not Alaska but we get pretty cold there it gets pretty cold in the wintertime a one-year-old doesn't get a choice about do I get to go outside naked into the winter in Vancouver no choice it's not a democracy no you don't go outside naked but how I do that a child who's wanting to attach to the parent warmly will naturally follow the parents advice you see um your mother hit you Aboriginal people hunt together people don't hit their kids when when the Caucasians or the Europeans the Christians arrived in North America they were appalled at the parenting practices of the natives because they didn't hit their kids and yet those kids were far more confident and the capable than the Caucasian kids so that you can set boundaries through just love through relationship through example it doesn't have to involve force and certainly does not have to include physical Force is there so that is one of the things that that doesn't ring true to me now I haven't studied it so who knows so maybe this is just because I've grown up in the system where it's sort of broken already from the jump but is there anywhere where that experiment is being run today where we could see that because kids seem impulsive and their brains aren't developed and they just seem like little messes that need things like like for instance a kid that throws a tantrum because you won't let them go outside into the snow so why can't they throw a tantra that's they're expressing their anger no yeah let's say but but but what were you saying before because I'm going to go back to it just before we talked about the Tantrum oh yeah kids are impulsive um here's the thing um children want to belong to the parent they want to connect to the parent there's a natural range of attachment behaviors that the kid will go through under healthy circumstances one of them first of all it's they want to be physically near you they want to be held by you in fact Aboriginal people carry their kids everywhere they go that's what they do gorillas carry their kids everywhere they go spontaneously number one number two the child wants to emulate you they want to be like you that's a natural attachment Drive so if you show up as a loving nurturing parental figure the parent the kid will naturally want to emulate you and and copy you number three the child will want to be good for you without any coercion whatsoever and uh again I'm telling you uh Hunter gather groups have been studied extensively extensively for how they parent and those even books are being written now about trying to learn the lessons that they teach about how to parent why because we've lost our parenting instincts you're talking like an adult without parenting instincts and that's not a criticism I'm just saying that when you're tweeted like the way you tweeted it's amazing I talk in the book about it look let me just jump back a little bit this is in the book I'm two weeks old I'm still in the hospital with my mother and she she writes her diary my poor little son my heart breaks for you because you've been crying for the last hour and a half to be fed but I don't feed you because I promised the doctor that will only feed you on schedule now what's happening to me this woman loves me my mother desperately loved me I know that in so many ways but she's not listening to her own parenting instincts her heart is breaking but she's letting me cry by myself because she promised some stupid doctor that she'd only feed me on schedule what message I'm getting am I getting the message that I'm being loved or is it two week old I'm getting the message that my needs don't matter and they don't care about how I feel which message am I getting yes she totally loved me but she wasn't listening to your own parenting instincts and that is traumatic for the child and it's confusing because she loves me yet she doesn't even feed me when I'm hungry well that's really confusing and it's traumatizing and we're telling this to parents all the time in this society as a physician I used to tell parents to behave that way I regret that but I did so what I'm talking about is a culture that has lost contact with the parenting instinct or take the example of do you remember Dr Spock is that yeah the data spark was the world's painting expert for decades and he talked about how you deal with kids you put them to sleep you put them to bed and you walk out quietly and you close the door and you don't go back in because you don't give in to the tyranny of the infant he said the tyranny of the infant the infant has an attachment drive that says I need to be held by mommy or daddy the child is crying to express that attachment need because physically that's how they can attach is they can't emotionally connect as a as a one month old they can connect if you hold them if they see you if they hear you what message are you giving to the kid when you don't pick them up when they're crying that their feelings don't matter but they don't matter that's the message you're giving you may love them but you're still giving them a very negative message and so that you may know on some level that your parent loves you because they feed you they hug you that whatever but at the same time these people that love you are deeply hurting you that's traumatic Aboriginal peoples don't do that kind of stuff in under normal circumstances they just don't do it do they have a rite of passage moment where so let me do it again sorry the spanking business yep there's been studies recently published in the American Journal of the journal the American Medical association's Pediatrics publication the kids are spent experience as much trauma as kids are more severely abused that's what the findings are in the long term sorry to interrupt but no not at all uh this topic is a incredibly meaningful for anybody considering having kids raising kids yeah um and certainly even for me somebody that doesn't have kids nor plan to have kids it's it is the thesis of your book is so big and so powerful that it what it does though is it okay so I've grown up in a culture this your hypothesis I've grown up in a culture that is fundamentally sick is stopping um parent many many things the book is way bigger than uh just parenting we just happen to be on that right now but um so it's created sort of parents that are detached from their parental instincts that's right and so they're constantly making these mistakes but it feels normal right so I grew up in it too the the fish is the last one to recognize what water is yeah um and so I can't even see that there could be another way of doing this right but because of that when I look at this I think once you're in the cycle how do you break out of it because a you can't be an infant forever even you know gorillas at some point like the child is distance from the parents needs to be either they break away themselves or they get pushed away or their parents may die also very possible yeah and in the cultures that I have unintentionally encountered rights of Passage rituals because I'm interested in Rites of Passage there's this moment but I don't so the one I'll talk to specifically because I remember it so vividly is in um The Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela's book he talks about how I think it was your 14th birthday you're with the woman and your mother yeah and then you are ceremoniously removed from her physically like they come and grab you and take you away at what age uh I think it was 14. okay and they take you away and then there is this they cover you in mud and then you are actually I think before you get covered in mud I'm getting the order wrong here but anyway they sit you down buck naked in front of the whole tribe or they very sharp Rock they cut your foreskin off and they make you yell a warrior prayer yeah and then they cover you in mud and then another young woman comes in after some time washes the mud off your body I mean it's this whole thing and before reading your work I was like that's so rad like this rite of passage that's dope you're taking the child away from the mother is that is that a necessary moment or is that all part of this like just sort of crazy Detachment from what we should be doing so I think it's a mix of both um let's just step back a little bit um Nature has a natural agenda for any human being like when you plant an acorn what's Nature's agenda for that Acorn grow into a tree go out to be an oak tree so nature is the same agenda for human beings to go to be independent self-mastered Collective connected beings that's Nature's agenda that's how we evolved that means if you meet the right developmental conditions that kid will grow up to be an independent person not because you push them away but because that's Nature's agenda because the parents are going to die at some point or another so at some point or another that infant has to be an independent adult that's Nature's agenda we don't have to make that happen that happens spontaneously so long as the conditions are right now if you plant that Acorn and to drag around with no irrigation and no sunlight ain't going to be any oak tree not because the acorn doesn't have that capacity but because the conditions weren't right same with human beings so I'm saying if the conditions are right that Independence will happen anyway now it's true societies have developed rituals of Passage so there's a Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony which happens at age 13. you know um there's a Vision Quest that that that indigenous people will lead you know but those ritual rights of passages or those passages rights of Passage rituals are conducted by adults to welcome the child into the adult community in the original original environments which is small band Hunter of groups there wasn't circumcision in fact I quote an expert on Aboriginal indigenous or hunter-gatherer groups Dr dunassee and Arvest of Notre Dame University who says that circumcision wasn't a part of that kind of practice so that circumcision came along later with with with more settled tribes and Agriculture and so on so once you get away from the hunter-gatherer familiar we're getting more and more or less on this natural so what Mandela is describing then is a combination of a healthy rite of passage of we're recognizing your adulthood now we're honoring you welcoming you to the community of adults but there was also an element of barbarism in it we're deliberately hurting a child for which there's no reason whatsoever whether it's a male child or it's a female child and we know to what degree female children in some areas of the world are hurt by the rituals of circumcision the male children are heard as well not to the same degree as the females but those are already post hunter-gatherer [Music] additions so yes rite of passage beautiful why is it necessary to hurt somebody it's not hiding in there and I'm so curious I'm so glad that I get to ask you directly hiding in there is a sounds like to me a vision of humanity that is just loving and wonderful and that our natural state is um we would grow into the oak tree that doesn't that isn't my same base assumption but you very much have an expertise that I lack so does your worldview require that belief about humans to be not purely good but certainly default good no nobody's default good we've always had problems as humans because we're flawed beings you know but it's a question again of um what develops under what conditions you know and uh the more our needs are met the more like for example in this Society they believe very much is that we're competitive aggressive even hostile selfish creatures that's not almost that's not how Humanity developed we could never have developed this That's The Way We Were we could only have developed if they were nurturing and communal support and connection and so if you look at all kinds of cultures that are so-called um primitive so-called primitive giving and receiving and connection our values and people gain wealth by giving not by gathering and taking from others so wealth is defined as a set of social connections rather than a set of physical possessions in Canada on the Northwest Pacific Northwest they used to have the plot latch and the Potlatch were denoted yeah yeah so it's an event where people gather and they give gifts which is how they gather wealth of connections that's a very different sense of wealth than Gathering everything unto Myself by taking it away from everybody else one of the first thing that the colonialists did is they forbade their rituals and the spiritual ways of the indigenous people including the potlatch because it's threatened the calling list acquisitive ethic so we went against thousands of years of tradition in order to force people into a cultural mindset that suited the purpose of colonialism that's what happened right now at the age that I'm at it's more useful it's more motivating to realize that I'm going to die when I was saying I'm not rushing towards that I if I actually thought it would work I would cryogenically freeze myself like I would much prefer to live forever um oh yes yeah yeah that that's not even like a a question for me and that may be mental illness I'm perfectly willing to accept that but in terms of what is motivating to me that for sure like one of my great pains and this is one it actually bothers me so much I can't allow myself to think about it um that I can't pursue all the things that I'm passionate about because there just isn't enough time I know that one and that's like that's one of those far more than stubbing my toe would make me think life is unfair that one does and it really messes with my head and so I I just have to put it out of my mind yeah but it only messes with your head because you have a certain belief I mean there's a there's a belief underneath I totally get it I mean I think a lot of us have experienced that I certainly have somebody once said every choice excludes every time you make a choice you're excluding something else you know and that's absolutely true the the question is what part of me or you doesn't want to accept that why do we have a problem with it and there's some underlying belief there that creates pain around it it doesn't need to be painful it's going to be just it's reality you know but so if it hurts so if it bothers us there's some belief there I haven't thought about it but now that you mention it there's some belief there that creates the the pain it's just like why do I have to be everything and do everything why I am a limited human being I'll take a swag at it and let me know what you think so um part of what I do um is so my company actually tells stories so movies TV shows comic books that whole thing and when we're developing a project we need to figure out what the style of that project let's say it's a comic book we have to figure out the style okay so you go and you start you know looking at materials and seeing it and you realize that there's a hundred different ways you could go 200 different ways more and you'll respond so intensely to seven of them and it is very hard to know that I won't get to spend a year in that style right that I have to narrow it down to to just one and it's interesting like what I always tell entrepreneurs is what really trips people up is you're standing in a room with a thousand doors and your job is to close 999 of them right to decide comes from what the Latin to cut it's like to your point about exclusion that there's going back to the physics of Being Human I don't know why and maybe it's a modern society thing but humans have a hard time closing those doors they have a much harder time of closing the other doors than they have walking through one because if I say hey you can walk through that one you can come right back then they'll walk through it but if I say you have to pick one that you were going to walk through forever that they would just stand there paralyzed why doesn't don't we have the same dilemma when it comes to relationships as well you know it's interesting when I was saying that my wife popped into my mind and I don't with relationships I have not struggled with that um I it was a part of the calculus of whether or not to marry my wife that I'll never sleep with another woman again um but it wasn't a hard part of the calculus so I don't know if that's just uh okay that sounds or what sure that's great and what about before you met your wife well Cameron this is interesting and uh any insight you have here will be greatly welcomed I understood very early on the utility of um commitment so I was very bad with women when I was young extraordinarily bad and my mom though gave me a piece of advice which was mind-blowing to me and she said for a woman trust is required for an orgasm and I thought what like that seems so strange to me as a guy I was like let me tell you that trust does not enter into my mind when it comes to whether or not I can have an orgasm and but I thought oh that's really interesting and so then sort of looking at women how they're prized for their beauty and committing to somebody which always struck me as a good idea that the value in a shared life like if you ever watch this interview over again look at my face when you say you've been married for 51 years I was smiling ear to year um because that's something that really matters to me is sharing a life with my wife for as long as humanly possible and all the things that I have to give up pale in comparison to what it means to share a life with somebody like that um so putting the okay women need trust that's interesting their prized for their beauty which means that it's going to go away over time as their partner wanting to give them that love and security and and and to be seen and desired which I think is something that people long for in a romantic relationship I need my wife to know that I will always find other women attractive because it's just hardwired in me but I so covet commitment and and being in a bonded relationship with you that I want you to know no matter what you're going to turn into a bag of wrinkles God willing we get to that stage you're old I'm old we're not physically attractive in the the typical you know cues of beauty and fertility but I'm still going to be into you because we've shared a life so anyway that notion hit me very early and so I've always I haven't struggled with commitment I guess that was a lot of words around that and I and I have been a commitment phob you know really what was the push well which has to do with my own childhood history you know is that to commit something is to invite pain and rejection you know which goes back to being one year old and being given to a stranger by my mother to save my life and I didn't see her for six weeks five or six weeks so to be to open your heart and to be committed means to be hurt you know I'm not making excuses I'm saying that sort of worked for me I've learned commitment so your mother gave you beautiful advice but I've had to learn that over time the good news I can tell you Tom is the beauty does not go away the the should you manage come to 51 years as mine has you'd be looking to your wife's eyes and you'll be looking this you'll be seeing the same beauty that you saw the first day of matter it's going to be amazing so it's not like that it's not like all those wrinkles and stuff they don't take away the beauty it's not where the beauty comes from and so the the that again is our society's um travesty when it comes to defining Beauty [Music] um so I'm telling you I've got good news for you now I love that um I know you're uh very clear about the things you consider yourself an expert in and what you don't and I'm more than happy to hear just your thoughts out loud but I'm curious in 51 years of marriage other than that that beauty remains what are things that you've learned it seems like your marriage is better now than it was before based on things I've heard you say before um what what advice you have for people that are you know much earlier in a relationship than you um it's that the managers um a wonderful opportunity to learn about yourself and about life if you're willing to be curious and um and that it's not 50 50. it's a hundred percent it's a hundred percent so you reach 100 responsible for how you show up every difficulty we've ever had has been a powerful learning experience and this is where the commitment of truth comes in because that's one thing we've shared is that it's not easy to give up your point of view and your grievance and your stance but it's a deep payoff and when you do that so that the marriage is just the most wonderful school there is for development if you're willing to look at it like that then if if you and if when you need the help if you're going to get the help to look at it that way and so how do you open yourself up to that is it soliciting feedback from your partner about what they see and how you are and helping you understand the truth about yourself or is it something totally different well there's a lot there's certainly that that's a very important part of it um it's also which goes back a lot of my work is that any deep pain that you're experiencing is you confusing the present moment for the past so that in the marriage you're gonna get triggered but when you think of a trigger it's a very small little thing and what's much more important is the ammunition and the explosive that the trigger sets off and guess what who's carrying the ammunition the explosive you are so you can focus on the trigger she said this or he said that way they didn't say that they didn't do that or you can focus on oh what's exploding inside me and only ever been carrying this so it takes that Curiosity in the willingness to look at yourselves speaking of trauma and how we're carrying around that explosive charge are there universals to Healing from trauma what do you mean universals things that apply to everybody so um I'm guessing a big part of it's going to be self-awareness you need to become self-aware but when I think about adults trying to heal from childhood trauma that strikes me as a very difficult Road and I'm just wondering um you know I I hope that it's a Hopeful Road certainly from what I've encountered with your work there's definitely a lot of Hope and I'm just curious you know for somebody watching this who's who is just in the grips of you know childhood traumas both sort of known and unconscious um what can they do to begin to heal so there's many healing paths but my own approach can be summed up in two words and it's also the title of a course that I teach for therapists and so on um and those versions of it for the lay public as well I'm not recommending my particular work I'm talking about the name compassionate inquiry so if you can be curious the inquiry part is the Curiosity part I reacted that way oh why did I react that way not why did I react that way that's not compassionate I reacted that way I felt this pain I felt overwhelmed I felt hatred I felt rage I felt despair huh what is that about so you have to have that Curiosity and you have to have the compassion to look at yourself not through that voice that tells you that you're worthless but to say if I reacted that way there must be a good reason for it something in me there's something happen to me that made me react that way at some point so to be so rather than putting oneself down or thinking that if I have problems it means I'm deficient have the Curiosity to look into it and the compassion to not to judge yourself for it and that both can be learned both the Curiosity and the compassion can be learned and any good therapist any any person you work with whether they call it compassion inquiry whether they call it something else whatever they work with those two attitudes will be embedded in their approach if they're going to be helpful to you so companionship curiosity I think is the key and then are there tools so let's say that somebody's doing the passionate inquiry they really begin to understand what happened to them in fact maybe this is a better question so let's say that you had had the upbringing that you had all the things you went through in Hungary in your infancy but no one ever told you about it what does somebody who they clearly are suffering from some sort of trauma um but they they don't know what it is how can they process through that oh yeah uh that's not very difficult because it shows up in the present and I can easily I do that with people all the time so so they don't need the why they just need to know that they are reacting that way well it's not difficult to get them to see um that what they think is your reaction to the present is actually a reaction to the Past this is without any recall because there's all kinds of memory and the body carries memory even if it doesn't carry a recall and a lot of things that people that have happened to people happened before they had conscious recall so uh uh in my work I don't find it difficult to drill down to what is it that people are carrying in the present you know and it's just a simple exercise that I do with people um so that what I'm say but but to make a long story short the past shows up in the present all the time and that goes back to Johnny Cash you're almost done in your mind you think you're reacting to something now uh no you're not you know the uh there's a wonderful um um Italian writer who survived with the Holocaust called Primo Levy who's just the most profound writer on the Holocaust of them all and he went through Auschwitz he survived ended up committing suicide decades later um but he said uh I'm just um looking for the precise code here on my cell phone if I can find it I will give it to you if you can bear with me pre I mean the the setup here I'm more than happy to wait okay I'm holding my breath Levy okay here it is so he says um anguish is known to everyone even children and everyone knows that it is even blank and undifferentiated rarely does it carry a clearly written label that also contains his motivation in other words people are Beyond no suffering but we don't always know what it's about he says in any label that it does carry can be mendacious in other words we can tell ourselves that we're suffering because of this but it's not necessarily true he says one can believe this is the heart of it one can believe or declare oneself to be anguished for one reason and be so for something totally different one can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one's past one can think that one is suffering for others out of pity out of compassion and instead be suffering from one's own reasons and so on and so on and I just don't find it that difficult to speak to somebody and show them their present suffering is actually a memory of fast suffering so that you know so recall is helpful and you know there's ways to get at it sometimes if it's totally unaccessible people do hypnosis sometimes people do EMDR sometimes people do what's the MDR I've heard you mentioned that before but I don't know I've movement desensitization reprogramming it's a way of working with conscious and unconscious memories um the Psychedelic work that sometimes I've seen people under the influences like they like recall things um that are not available to conscious memory usually but none of that is crucial what is crucial is to make the distinction that what I'm experiencing now is a Resonance of the past we want a totally different outcome so we're not going to be judging just based on your math we're going to be looking at inquisitiveness we're going to be looking at how much that you want to learn but you're dealing with large groups people in all different kinds of positions like how do we because the their the punchline of your book is like basically hey we're going to have to overhaul a lot of this yeah I mean you go very specifically into the ways in which the culture is toxic you have to read the book to get into it but it is like in a nutshell is basically we're sort of like this is a ground up restart like there's a fundamental flaw we've already talked about the sort of basic basic first building block of how you actually in fact we haven't because in the book you talk about like even before you get pregnant the things that can create trauma in uh fetus and it's carried on and look I I will tell you dear audience that uh he talks about the science and there really is from what I've seen quite a bit of science that can show I think it was up to five generations you could see an epigenetic marker of trauma and even the father who's carrying that across the sperm into the fertilized egg it has an impact on how the DNA is wrapped and expressed it's insane and that it goes for five generations that's Madness and you begin to realize how easy it is to perpetuate this sort of Wheel of trauma so knowing that there's probably two things we should talk about because right now if mothers are paying attention they're freaking out about all the mistakes that they made that have now traumatized their children uh and so you go into blame in the book I think that's important to touch on and then go into the importance of not blaming exactly exactly so I want you to speak to the the role of blame here and then how do we begin to heal stroke build a society that isn't sick well the good news is that I wrote this book with my eldest son I mean and believe me I've had a lot of guilt as a parent I felt a lot of guilt for the way that I stressed and and passed on my own trauma to my children which I did not because I wanted to I love them I I have always said they would have thrown myself into a fire for them but there was a problem they never needed me to throw myself into a fire they just needed me to be at home self-regulated knowing how to take care of myself and being knowing how to attune with their needs now that is a traumatized survivor of the genocide in Europe and there's a workaholic doctor and as an anxious husband in a conflictual marriage I wasn't able to do and that really did hurt my kids I say that at this point not with Guild just to say that's what happened I know I did my best that just happened to me my best but anyway what I'm saying is is that um I wrote this book with my son and even the writing was a process of working out our issues so the first thing though is that these issues can always be worked out that the the patterns can be reversed we don't get to stay stuck in them so that's the good news as far as blame is concerned um as you say traumas passed on multi-generationally you know the Bible says that the sins of the fathers will be visited unto the third and fourth Generations they're not talking about the sins of the fathers they're talking about the promise of the parents where we passed on to the future generation it's true but if that's true um if I passed on Nitro to my kid my trauma to my kids did I cause my own trauma as a child why would anybody be blamed the end of who you end up blaming Adam and Eve you know you end up blaming some ape living in a tree who was my ancestor at some point I mean blame doesn't make any sense it's also cruel and and and and totally unhelpful so there's no blame in fact it's it's about it's not about blaming it's about understanding but once we understand now we can start to do things differently that's the whole point it's not about blaming so we have to break the cycle self-awareness get in touch with ourselves now let's zoom out a little bit so we know what to do on an individual basis we have to stop the repression let the emotions come up mature into the adult that has the ability to self-regulate that could be there for the next Generation to raise a child in a healthier way exactly at a societal level how do we begin to think about this and what are some highlights of like the the things that you're like yo this is really broken and causing a lot of problems is it the Health Care system is it the education system like where do you think sort of the the real big ones are well the healthcare system and educational system um in any given Society the dominant institutions will reflect the interests of the dominant groups in any society so who are the dominant groups in this Society here's what we know I know I'm talking to somebody who's made a lot of money okay so don't take this personally but but uh the dominant groups in this Society are getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and the rest of society is getting more and more uncertain and insecure that's an untenable situation because when you look at what stresses people are a loss of control uncertainty conflict and lack of information which are precisely the conditions that most people are increasingly living with there's less security there's lessons of a positive future there's more sense of loss of control there's more sense that my little voice I don't matter even doing kovid when a lot of people lost a lot of money and under terrific economic stress the top stratum of billionaires gained immensely well that's a stressful situation for a lot of people that stress translates into physiological illness that's just how it works that's the first point uncertainty loss of control conflict lack of information that's a given condition of globalized capitalism because you never know when somebody a zillion miles away is going to make a decision that's going to change your life completely over which you have no control whatsoever that's a designation well that's a a recipe for stress okay number one number two um you look at well there's a chapter on social sociopathy or strategy now you look at corporations major corporations who make decisions to deliberately concoct products that'll get people hooked and addicted I'm talking about the food companies this has been documented that they actually plan scientifically which combination of salt sugar and fat are going to get people addicted which are going to excite The Addictive circuits in the brain No Doubt thereby killing millions of people the tobacco companies I have to talk about them at all about what they've done the companies that have for decades hired phony scientists to deny climate change thereby creating conditions of ill health and the engineering life itself and these are respectable well to do pillars of society and philanthropists on massive scale um the pharmaceutical companies who sell opiates knowing no I'm not against opius by the way it's a palliative care doctor I love the opiates not for myself but for the patients I was looking after thank God but to sell those products and telling doctors that they're not addictive when you when you know that they are tens and hundreds of thousands of people are dying of opioid overdoses but that's sociopathy by any definition and these are the people at the top still an echo of childhood trauma or do you think there's something else at play well it's a company I I think the people who do it they're the really disconnected from themselves they really are disconnected from themselves uh and they're acting out their traumas in some ways but it's also the nature of this system these are the people that this system raises to high levels of power and Rewards then there's the political system now I'm not talking about political policy here for a moment but in the book in the in the in the chapter on trauma and politics we looked at two opposing candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump now Trump is a is one of the world's trauma experts Bessel vanderkle said to me is a poster boy for Photon the grandiosity the denial of reality the genuine inability to tell reality from lies the aggressiveness Trump said once that um that the world is a horrible place it's doggy dog even your friends want your wife they want you money they want your house and this is your friends now he wasn't making it up that sense of the world being a horrible Place reflected his childhood under a tournament Tyrant of a father who demeaned his kids horribly and the mother who didn't protect them and one of his brothers drank himself to death and as we know his niece wrote a book and when was the family really well and the Trump and the trauma that Trump endured and how it manifests in his adult life now I'm not criticizing the guy I'm not blaming him I'm not even talking about specific policies I'm talking about his personality no that's Trump okay who is he running against so let me tell you this story I you probably read it but let me tell it to you and give me your opinion a four-year-old girl runs into the house to his mother she's upset because neighborhoods are building neighborhood children are bullying her and the mother says there's no room for cards in his house now you get out there and deal with it what's the message to that child at four years old yeah at four years old how would that be read that you're on your own kid yeah you're suck it up and don't be vulnerable in this house that story was told that Hillary Clinton's nomination celebration at the Democratic Convention in 2016. and it was told as an example of wonderful parenting that same election campaign when Hillary developed pneumonia what did she do with it do you remember nothing right she didn't tell anybody she collapsed in the street she sucked it up and she put up of course with the philandering of her husband all those years blaming herself for not meeting his needs typical trauma response what I'm saying is that the American public had the choice of being too traumatized people they chose the more traumatized one the more traumatized yeah yeah that's that's the one that's the one they chose there are all kinds of reasons for that again I'm not talking about policy foreign or domestic I'm talking about personalities here these are the people that we Elevate the public uh High public level and they carry that traumas with them inevitably those traumas show up in their politics Okay so Society healing making things better I know that you consider yourself hopeful as do I I am worried we were talking about this before we started recording there is my audience is going to get tired of hearing me say this but there is a Chinese uh curse proverb in interesting times correct yeah and I would say right about now it's very interesting very interesting times so how do we and I think you've even said that it you know there's going to be a period of of deep unpleasantness but that long term you're optimistic and walk me through one is why are you optimistic I am too but I'm just curious what drives your optimism and then how do we make sure we end up on the optimistic side well look the first of all to speak personally um the imprint on me of um being an infant under clinicians of genocide and War and the conditions of a mother who was really stressed and terrorized in grief struck because her parents were killed in Auschwitz and then who gives me up to a total stranger when I'm a year old to save my life I remember that story yeah was that this is a bad world that I'm on my own that um nothing's ever work out for me and so even when I was successful as a physician and even as a writer and so on my innate belief was I'm basically screwed no I don't feel that way anymore so do you remember when that changed like I'm trying to figure out when that changed so what was the work that you were doing because we have the the thumbnail sketch yeah we understand we have to stop repressing our emotions let them get reattached to ourselves but like if it were that easy then everybody be cured at the end of this podcast which of course they won't be it's not that easy no so in the work that you were doing in yourself were there a string of breakthroughs there was stranger breakthroughs it wasn't like one big Epiphany it was the gradual work overtime do you remember any of the the key moments a lot of it happened in my relationship I'm married to somebody who in my first chapter I say that you know my problem is that my wife understands me you know and she does all too well but she loved me anyway so and and wanted to be in that relationship I had to grow up because a certain point she wasn't willing to live with the child anymore so we grew together I would say that was the Basic Ground of my development but getting therapy learned to know my own patterns and where they came from and learning to get some agency over them was very important for me what I observed as a physician as a clinician Is A Healer was huge fonts of information for me and learning because you start to understand the patterns of human behavior yeah I started to understand human beings sometimes I took antidepressants that helped temporarily by lifting the cloud like his fear more clearly in fact you know again I'm not an advocate for the massive and I think horrendously overdone use of medications but I can tell you that the first time I took antidepressant after a few days I said you mean people can feel like this normally so when a cloud is lifted I could see a bit more clearly now a lot more clearly actually um coming to terms with my ADHD and understanding the patterns not as an inherited disease but as an Adaptive response really helped as well um oh interesting so wait I'm not surprised so everything comes back to trauma so how is ADHD an Adaptive response to a situation so picture me okay as I was that uh first year of my life my father's enforced labor my mother doesn't know if he's dead or alive her parents are killed in oceans when I'm five months of age she has to wear the yellow badge as a Jew under the Nazis that painting of that is going to be in the book um uh she's terrorized she doesn't know if she's going to survive if I'm going to survive how am I feeling I can only imagine give me a few words um afraid yeah lost there's a pediatrician at saw me and said he's never seen such fear in anybody's eyes than in my own eyes lost right all that hopeless stressed okay very how do I cope with that you push it down I dissociate I tune out what is it add all about tuning out really never thought of it well they did the major trade of it it is tuning out the kind of absent-mindedness and unwilled tuning out as an infant what else could I do could I escape could I change the situation I tune out when am I tuning out well my brain is developing the Tunica gets programmed to my brain why are we seeing more and more kids with ADHD these days because parents are so stressed and sensitive kids pick up on that stress they don't know what to do with it they do not as they're as small children when their brains are developing it's not a genetic disease it's an Adaptive response the problem with adaptive responses is they help you at the time but later on they become problems in other words adaptive at one point maladaptive at another point again the problem is that they're not conscious adaptations I mean look if you it was if it was raining in California but it's always good in Los Angeles but let's go back to Canada okay it's um I'm up in the north of Canada it's freezing you know 50 below whatever that even means you know how do I adapt I put on warm clothing that helps me survive but what if I still wore that warm clothing in the winter time when it's really hot that same adaptation would not kill me the problem with these childhood adaptations now with the cold clothing I could take it off there was no cold anymore I can take off the warm clothing these childhood psychological adaptations they're not conscious they're not well they're not deliberate they're automatic they're under the level of awareness therefore I can't just drop them in fact I even associate my survival with them so I'm very reluctant to give them up so something has to happen to wake me up oh this isn't working anymore this is where a diagnosis like ADHD or depression comes in this is where illness comes in it can be a wake-up call again I don't recommend it or a relation or a bad divorce all of a sudden you realize I met somebody who didn't understand me why did I stay with them so long because my parents never understood me so I expect not to be understood but it doesn't work for me anymore so next time I marry I'm gonna marry somebody who is a bit more mature and you know I'm more immature now so what I'm saying is that these adaptations they show up as problems later on in life and then we can learn from them you know in the case of my marriage we learn together I'm curious in in a marriage so parents should offer their kids unconditional love yeah should a spouse offer their other half unconditional love yes but it shows up differently so unconditional love doesn't mean that I have to put up with it doesn't mean that you know in in the case of uh in the case of my wife when I'm throwing a tantrum the healthy response on her part is to say if you're going to be like that I don't want to be in the same room with you but if you keep doing it I don't even want to be in the same house with you so what if she gets changes between childhood and adulthood because in childhood they don't do that the dependency the the the child depends on the parent for very life itself and for healthy development my wife is not responsible for my healthy development she's not my mother anymore as a matter of fact the reason women get so much autoimmune disease is they suppress themselves to take care of the stresses of their men very often yeah you tell a story I think it's in the book I've heard so many interviews as well sometimes I get confused what was in the book uh of a woman who's diagnosed with breast cancer and her husband whose first wife had also died of breast cancer her first thought was oh my God I hope I don't get so sick that I can't take care of him yeah it's in the book who immediately she's the one that diagnosed with breast cancer she's gonna have the chemotherapy or a radiation or surgery or whatever and her first thought is how will I look after my husband's emotional needs well that's culturally ingrained in women that's why they think it's just cultural or is it also an echo of the need to be nurturing to the child it's true that the nurtures Instinct in women is much more developed than in men partly because they have more of the hormone oxytocin which is a nurturing hormone but partly because it's their cultural role and if you take men and look after children they become really good mothers so it's a question of what role are people put in um yeah so you know I forgot what we're talking about right before that last saying you were explaining the difference between um the dependencies of a child oh yeah my life is not responsible to help me go into a healthy adult that's not a job her job is to be responsible for the Healthy Growth of our children if she suppresses her needs and puts all her energy in taking care of the women have a decision to make in our society my life did really in a sense uh am I going to look after the little babies and we're going to look after the big baby and the energy they put into looking after the big baby is taken away from the little babies and children suffer as a result so my wife is not responsible for my maturation and my Healthy Growth um she ex she has the right to expect that I'm going to show up as an adult okay when you're supposed to offer unconditional love and you're not getting what you need from your significant other how do you have people play that out is it is there a point at which they say look I just I can't offer you unconditional love I need to separate from this or you can say I love you I really want the best for you but I can't be with this I can't be with it it's toxic for me it's bad for our children some point that's a result in that way do are you saying that we should have unconditional love for everybody even though that means we'll maintain boundaries we'll have different kinds of relationships it depends what we mean by unconditional love and again it depends on the age of the person and the the needs of that person so um uh having love for a person doesn't mean that you're going to put up with everything that they do but how you like even with children as we said earlier we have to draw our boundaries but the question is how do we draw our boundaries and in what spirit and with what intention that's interesting that's so complicated and makes me despair because it's so hard but I think you're right the spirit in which you make the intention so for instance my wife and I yeah I would never have said that I love her unconditionally just because that doesn't feel true in that I have specifically given her conditions and said um if you were unfaithful to me that would be the end of the marriage that would be the end of my marriage too for sure so but the spirit in which I make that is not meant to be a threat or anything like that it's just Clarity what you're actually saying is honey my relationship with you is so important that I can't bear to share that with somebody else on that intimate basis because my capacity to be intimate with you would really suffer if I had to wonder whether you're choosing somebody else instead of me that's a perfectly normal healthy statement to make to an adult partner it's an expression of Love Actually help me understand that how is that an expression of love because you really want her you're helping them be successful you want that you really want that person in your life you're saying I really want you in my life fully and there's no room for that in that you can have all kinds of friends and I hope you're independent and you have a life that's not all bonded with my own and I want you to have your own activities and find your own meaning and have your own friends and have your own activities but in terms of intimate relationships I can't handle sharing that with somebody else that's an expression of love there's so much depth and Nuance to the human mind to The Human Experience do you all worry that we as a society will not be that here's my thesis we didn't intentionally get it right a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago yeah it was just that was the nature of what we had access to that's right and to sort of co-opt Chris Rock's statement you're only as faithful as your options which I totally disagree with but uh but culturally like when you take it on mass it does feel like a lot of the sort of sickness things are us solving like these minor annoyances that end up snowballing into becoming deep problems like At first it's just like hey we want to be able to control the food supply so we don't starve to death amazing then it's like well we can already do that now I want to make sure that the food that I'm storing tastes good and it's like whoa well if I can do that then I want to be able to sell it and if I want to sell it I want to sell more of it now that I want to sell more of it I want to make sure that it tastes really good and gets into that addictive quality that you're talking about and look not everybody does does it obviously from a food perspective that was the whole reason that my partners and I got into food in the first place was we wanted to make junk food good for you and so using things so explain that I didn't mean junk food good for you so it's good for you it's not junk food well so to your point this depends on how we Define junk food so I'll Define the way that we looked at it is things that you grew up as like craving wanting whether it was chips so we made protein chips now the great thing about protein chips is they naturally kill your hunger so you're only going to eat so many of them and then they stop being funny so doing things like that but anyway I don't want to get lost in that but so I worry that that this isn't a bell that can't be unrung well but let's go back to what we were talking about intention your intention wasn't purely to make a profit your intention was also to serve people while making a profit that's a very different intention than my my own than my only purpose is to make a lot of money and no matter what cost no matter how many people get sick when people develop diabetes become obese become addicted to the stuff that's terrible for them that's the actual intention of many of the major corporations now that wasn't your intention so I'm talking about intention but how do we scale that that's my punchline how do we scale it what do you mean by that so I really I I have I could have retired and never worked again but I really want to help people like get to I wouldn't use your language the word I always use is is a growth mindset I want people to have a growth mindset but I think secretly we sort of have a very similar aim which is we want people to thrive we just happen to be each attacking a different part so that's the attention the intention is that people should Thrive now how do we scale that yeah so if we have a sick society which I'm with you or a sick culture I'm with you how do we how do we get a culture like I mean we're recording this as there is a war going on on the borders of Europe so yeah uh it does make me feel like there's just a nature to humans and it repeats I think we can have to challenge who's in control for one thing at some point we're gonna have to challenge that on some level this is not a book about we talked to do we do touch upon politics and a trauma that's manifested in politics but I hope the answer isn't politics I hope the answer but but this book is not a political Manifesto agreed you know um but I think people have to start thinking about what I'm talking about on a large scale rather than just how do I make my life better how do I make Society better in other words how can we think with the mutual need as Our intention and Our commonalities intention rather than just my personal uh you know aggrandizement I think that shift is going to have to happen for survival number one in terms of what you say about wars and so on well in any War if you examine them closely including this one they're always conflicting interests and power interests and so on I don't think I'd want to get into the politics of this War and what I think about it but it's not just an expression of human nature it's an expression of political systems clashing with each other for very selfish reasons that's what I see happening and I see that in just about everywhere you know so is it in our nature to be aggressive and cruel certainly our potential to be that way but you know here's what I see yesterday I was talking to a a a U.S veteran a Navy SEAL who who came back as many do with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and uh through a psychedelic experience actually he turned it around he was losing his marriage he was there he was throwing Coffee Plus through the window he was terrifying his children his wife no longer recognized him and then he had this experience and he rediscovered his true nature which was loving and and nurturing and so on and now he's that way towards the world he would never go back and do the things again that he did then you know so even during covet you say human nature well in the book I make this point the Alfie corn was a education educator and a writer he says when somebody be is selfishly we say well that's just human nature pop-up must somebody behave generously we never say oh that's just human nature but it is and and so at least in the early days of covet the more stressed we got the more overwhelmed we got by the crisis the more the divisions and the rancor showed up in so many on both sides but what did we see in the beginning we saw a lot of people cooperating collaborating being kind to each other um being communal celebrating the healthcare workers you know supporting one another that that's in our potential as well so why should we settle for the worst versions of ourselves and I say that's us it isn't actually most people want peace they don't want war people usually have to be manipulated into war which they are very often you know so what's our nature that's why I'm optimistic I think it's in US social media is it's an engine of Envy it's making you continually aware of what other people have and what you don't have look at my poor pitiful life well that person who's they're only posting the most positive things they're not showing they're they're kind of unhappy their misery of their daily life