WEBVTT

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I've proven how helpful EMDR can be for PTSD and depression.

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Why and how?

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Well, trauma is a reliving and whatever you're feeling is real.

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As opposed to feeling like a memory.

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But in our research, you discover that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you recall a traumatic experience, your brain is able to say, this is what happened to me in the past.

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And 78% of the people we studied who had adult ulcer trauma were completely cured.

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Can you do it on me?

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I could.

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What do you see?

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Bessel van der Kolk has been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century.

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And for over 40 years, his clinical research has revolutionized how we understand trauma and its impact on our brain and body.

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Your early childhood experiences create who you are.

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And how many of the people that you treated in your practice have childhood trauma?

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About 90%.

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And it's very difficult to change.

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Are they changeable?

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Yes, that is the great news.

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But the problem is the focus is not on helping people.

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The focus is on running successful financial organizations.

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And even though I was the first person who studied yoga for PTSD, which was very effective.

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And then there's psychodrama and neurofeedback, where our results were stunning.

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We already know the answers, let's not explore anything new.

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But let's do the science and see how it works and for whom.

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And what about psychedelic therapy?

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It's very effective.

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Have you ever done the psychedelic drug?

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Yeah, of course.

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What did you learn?

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That my quest for understanding trauma had to do with my own childhood trauma.

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All the pain is suffering.

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Earlier on, I asked if people could heal from their trauma.

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Have you healed from yours?

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The diary of a CEO is independently fact-checked.

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For any studies or science mentioned in this episode, please check the show notes.

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Quick one before we get back to this episode.

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Just give me 30 seconds of your time.

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Two things I wanted to say.

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The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.

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It means the world to all of us.

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And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

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But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

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And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.

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Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.

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I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

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We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.

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Thank you.

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Thank you so much.

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Back to the episode.

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to Bessel van der Kolk.

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You've been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century by the Financial Times.

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What is the mission you've spent your life pursuing?

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I have been interested in how people survive extreme situations, how people can overcome the history of people doing terrible things to each other.

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and how we can create a better world in that regard, actually.

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So the mission has been rather social, but the investigation has been very much based on what we're learning about brain science, what we're learning about psychological functioning, et cetera, et cetera.

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And this word trauma seems to be central to your work.

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And when I looked before this conversation at the rise in the use of this word online and people searching this word, it's pretty staggering what I found.

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There's this graph that shows a huge jump in people using the word trauma.

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What is your view on the subject matter of trauma, specifically how we've misunderstood what it is?

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Well, there has been evolution, which is quite striking.

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And when I first started to study trauma, I was on the research floor at Harvard.

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And my colleagues said, why are you studying trauma?

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Bessel, when you croak, nobody will ever talk about trauma again.

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Like, this is a completely alien subject.

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Yeah.

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And now everybody talks.

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Everything is a trauma.

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And so from being non-existent has become a total explanatory mode.

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And so we have gone, as we always do, from one extreme to the other.

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And my primary interest these days is not so much into trauma.

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Trauma started it, but somewhere along the line,

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I got to realize that trauma is, to a large degree, a breakdown of connection between human beings and synchronicity between other human beings.

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And these days, I'm much more focused on how we can help people establish a relationship to themselves and to the people around them.

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When people are suffering from some kind of psychological disorder, whether it's depression, anxiety, PTSD, what is it that you disagree with, with the traditional view of how to treat them?

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People are being taught methods that they say can cure people in eight sessions, which they can't.

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And so there still is this, but people learn in school these days, although no good clinician I know actually practices that, is to help people thinking out.

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to straighten out people's thinking and to make them not think these crazy thoughts like.

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And there really is no evidence that we can do that.

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Is that cognitive behavioral therapy?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Cognitive restructuring sort of thing.

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Or do you get people better by blasting them with trauma and then before long they get desensitized with trauma.

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And I think both of these methods are just, they don't get it.

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That completely doesn't get the issue at hand actually.

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Why?

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I cannot talk you into being a reasonable person.

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People are not reasonable people.

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And trauma is as unreasonable as you can be.

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That's really at the core of, if you understand trauma, is that your brain and perceptual system gets rewired.

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So you see things.

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almost entirely through the past experience rather than current experience.

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Okay, so if I'm traumatized, talking about my trauma doesn't necessarily fix my trauma.

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Trauma is a speechless experience.

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So we did the first neuroimaging study about people reliving their trauma, and we saw that the entire cognitive part of their brain disappears, that when you're in your trauma, you're just one ball of emotion, and there's no thinking.

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So you're confused, you're befuddled.

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It is, as Shakespeare says, you suffer from speechless terror.

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You become dumbfounded.

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So the whole traumatic experience is just beyond belief

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And so you stay in a state of confusion and agitation.

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And then finding language for yourself at this point is terribly important to help you to begin to organize your relationship to yourself.

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It's not enough, but language and defining your experience is terribly important.

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The word trauma, as you say, has been thrown around a lot.

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And it's become a bit of a cultural joke to some people.

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When you say, you know, something happens to you, you go, oh, I feel triggered.

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I'm traumatized, et cetera.

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What actually does count as trauma?

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Trauma really is an overwhelming experience of, oh, my God.

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when something happens and you're completely helpless and there's nothing in you that knows how to deal with it.

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People talk a lot about small T trauma and big T trauma.

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Yeah, I'm not a fan of that.

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Okay.

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So explain why not.

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Well, you need to be more accurate.

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But the small T trauma is a very real trauma when your environment about you doesn't acknowledge your existence.

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Most people, for example, after natural disasters do very well.

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Because people get together after natural disasters.

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I've seen it.

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We have a cabin in Northern Vermont.

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We've had terrible floods.

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The neighbors get together.

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They help each other.

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And you get a sense of cohesion, actually, and a sense of meaning.

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We're doing this together.

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The small T traumas have to do with not acknowledging what's going on with you.

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Saying to kids, stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about.

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No, you don't matter.

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No.

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No, actually, your dad is a drunk because you are such a difficult kid that your father was doing okay until you came into the family and you were too much for him and you caused him to be the person that he is.

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I think that people mean small t trauma.

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It's relational trauma, which is a very big deal for most of the people I get to see in my practice.

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Most people come in not because of big T traumas.

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It is because nobody saw me.

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Nobody heard me.

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I was irrelevant.

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We always had to take care of my mom or my dad, but there was no room for us.

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So if you get fired from your job and it's a traumatic event for you because you get, I don't know, you get, you lose your friends, you lose the job, your parents are embarrassed about you.

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Can that become trauma, something like that?

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Yes, you could, depending on how you define it.

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For some people it doesn't, for some people it doesn't.

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No, it depends, again, on the context.

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For some people, you get fired, you go like, well, I didn't like those assholes anyway.

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I ask this because I'm wondering if there's a lot of people listening now that I'm trying to understand if their small experience, which other people think is trivial, actually could have resulted in some kind of deeper trauma response.

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Absolutely.

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At the end, the issue is the perception.

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Your perception.

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Your perception.

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The issue is not the event itself.

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You and I may have the same events happening.

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And for me, it reminds me about my brother torturing me or it reminds me about my mom being sick and not paying attention to me or whatever.

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And for me, it becomes a very big deal.

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And for you, it goes like, yeah, you know, but I have so many talents.

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Why not try something else?

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And can you give me an overview of the work you've done in your life that have fed into all of the knowledge and information that you have?

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Just for anyone that might not know who you are, what is that sort of body of work?

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I had a very good psychiatric training in one of the Harvard hospitals.

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And then I was, I ran the last state mental hospital in Boston, which was also interesting.

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I, it was a sanctuary for very disturbed people.

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And so that institution gets closed.

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I go work at the Veterans Administration Hospital.

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I met these guys who,

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were people who I looked up to.

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They were good athletes, competent people, helicopter pilots all my age.

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And these guys had broken apart.

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And they had fallen apart.

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And they go, oh.

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And they reminded me of some of my relatives who I grew up with, who also had been concentration camp survivors and Japanese camp survivors.

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And then I learned much else after that.

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But that really opened up my eyes to that people can be

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And that really intrigued me tremendously.

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This is central to your story, is this early experience.

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You said earlier that you were born in 1943.

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1943, very important.

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When you're born, it has a huge influence on who you become.

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So my early age imprint was...

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is of my father at some point was detained by the Germans.

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He was not in the illustration camp, but he was supposed to go off there.

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My mom is by herself, raising small kids in hiding, right next to the place where the Nazis are launching their rockets to go to.

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London, so half of the rock is fell into our backyard.

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And I have no conscious imprint of that, but I grew up like a kid growing up in Ukraine today.

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And a lot of kids my age died.

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I was a very sickly child.

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There was a lot of hunger and misery.

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Half my generation died of starvation.

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And so I grew up with incredible pre-conscious

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imprint of what gets in Ukraine and Gaza going through right now.

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And that must have left a trace in my curiosity and my being, including a trace of having a body that's very sickly.

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You were born in 1943 in Nazi-occupied... Netherlands.

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Netherlands, okay.

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And you're the middle children of five.

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That's right, yep.

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You were very sick as a child.

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Yep.

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What were your parents like in terms of love, affection, all those kinds of things?

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My mother was more or less broken by the pandemic of 1919, in which her father developed Parkinsonism and became one of those all-over-sex type people.

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So my mother was a very frozen person, which had a very impact on me.

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My father was very conscientious, loving.

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You described your mother as being a frozen person.

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Yeah.

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And it had an impact on you.

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Yeah.

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Having a frozen mother has an impact on you.

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What was that impact?

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The impact is that if you have a mother who is not available to love you and care for you, that becomes part of your perception of the world.

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And that means that there's a lot of work to be done about learning about affection and intimacy and closeness and vulnerability and all those sorts of things.

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Your mother would faint whenever Bessel would ask her what her life was like when she was a little girl.

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No, no.

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I asked her only once.

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I was already a junior professor at Harvard, had two kids and my parents came to visit me.

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And here's an example of, sorry, parents I had.

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I left at age 18 for the US because I wanted some distance between me and my parents.

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10, 15 years later, quite a few years, I wrote to my parents and said, it's customary for parents to come and visit their children sometimes.

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We should be interested in coming to visit me.

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That never crossed my mind.

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And so they came.

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And we actually had a very pleasant time, very civilized.

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And so on the last day that my parents were visiting us, I said to my parents, you know, you probably don't really know what I do for a living, but a lot of my work has to do with incest.

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And I wonder where does that come from?

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And I turned towards my mom and I said, you know, I wonder if something happened to you that I've picked up, that you were, were you ever sexually abused?

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And my mom fainted, fell off her chair, and my father said, look what you did to your mother.

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And my dead wife and her, my father carried my mother into her bed.

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So I don't know if my mother was sexually abused.

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She just fainted when I asked her the question.

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But that's how it goes.

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you barely get a straight answer to any of these things.

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You said that child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.

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That's true.

226
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And in your book, you say that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.

227
00:16:01.408 --> 00:16:02.328
That doesn't come from me.

228
00:16:02.348 --> 00:16:08.630
There's data from this very big CDC study run by Vincent Fennetti.

229
00:16:09.270 --> 00:16:11.970
So this is data on 25,000 people.

230
00:16:13.170 --> 00:16:19.432
People have got increasingly interested in their early childhood experiences as a lens to understand who they are as adults.

231
00:16:19.652 --> 00:16:22.532
Is that overblown or is it important to understand?

232
00:16:23.373 --> 00:16:25.133
It's not overblown to be curious about how.

233
00:16:25.872 --> 00:16:30.995
how you became who you became and what the internal ingredients of your cake are.

234
00:16:31.535 --> 00:16:39.820
And I think that's very good for people to be aware of how they have become the creatures who they are.

235
00:16:40.160 --> 00:16:47.504
I think being curious about yourself is very necessary also to be curious in order to be curious of other people.

236
00:16:48.104 --> 00:16:55.048
When you said about your mother and the incest thing, you'd realized as an adult much of your work focused on incest.

237
00:16:56.088 --> 00:16:59.570
And then you turned to your mother and asked her if there was an experience she had had and she fainted.

238
00:17:00.751 --> 00:17:03.152
Do you believe that there's a part of you that knew?

239
00:17:03.773 --> 00:17:05.754
No, but I don't know if my mother was incested.

240
00:17:06.634 --> 00:17:09.096
I know that my mother was very uptight about sex.

241
00:17:09.936 --> 00:17:11.517
And I wonder what happened to her.

242
00:17:12.297 --> 00:17:13.158
And her fainting...

243
00:17:14.143 --> 00:17:18.985
And my response to that means that I triggered something, but I don't know what I triggered.

244
00:17:19.645 --> 00:17:22.406
I would not jump to conclusions that my mother was an incident victim.

245
00:17:23.066 --> 00:17:26.487
Something happened to her, but I don't know what it is.

246
00:17:27.127 --> 00:17:29.908
Okay, but the indicator was that she was always uptight about sex.

247
00:17:29.928 --> 00:17:30.448
It wasn't that you?

248
00:17:30.488 --> 00:17:32.129
Unbelievably uptight about sex.

249
00:17:33.149 --> 00:17:34.009
Terrified about sex.

250
00:17:35.430 --> 00:17:35.610
Yep.

251
00:17:37.178 --> 00:17:45.987
How many of the people that you treated in your practice have, could you trace their adult dysfunction back to an early childhood experience?

252
00:17:48.750 --> 00:17:52.273
Pretty much 90%, let's say, yeah.

253
00:17:52.373 --> 00:17:52.533
90%?

254
00:17:52.814 --> 00:17:53.755
But that's me.

255
00:17:54.315 --> 00:17:58.960
I mean, people with autism or people with OCD...

256
00:18:00.088 --> 00:18:00.969
don't come to see me.

257
00:18:01.870 --> 00:18:06.135
And so I have a very narrow filter in a way of who comes to see me.

258
00:18:06.776 --> 00:18:09.760
And what's the crux of what happened to them as a child, if you had to simplify it?

259
00:18:10.210 --> 00:18:19.095
The crux is not being acknowledged and honored for who they were as kids.

260
00:18:19.575 --> 00:18:31.162
That's the big thing is they were unseen and people did terrible things to them and nobody seemed to bother the protectors.

261
00:18:32.502 --> 00:18:33.722
When you say terrible things.

262
00:18:34.123 --> 00:18:38.824
Terrible things is being beaten up, being sexually molested, having their bones broken.

263
00:18:39.184 --> 00:18:40.145
What if it was just words?

264
00:18:41.485 --> 00:18:42.145
Also words.

265
00:18:43.726 --> 00:18:48.367
One of my patients, mother, et cetera, all the time, oh, you'll never have friends.

266
00:18:48.447 --> 00:18:53.669
If people really get to know you, they will all reject you because you're such a terrible person.

267
00:18:53.789 --> 00:18:54.349
That's pretty good.

268
00:18:54.689 --> 00:18:55.170
Who said that?

269
00:18:57.350 --> 00:18:59.331
Well, mother of one of the people I'm treating.

270
00:18:59.711 --> 00:19:01.792
But it would not be an unusual thing to say.

271
00:19:02.826 --> 00:19:04.388
People do terrible things to kids.

272
00:19:04.928 --> 00:19:06.530
Intentionally and unintentionally?

273
00:19:08.412 --> 00:19:08.993
Automatically.

274
00:19:09.573 --> 00:19:10.154
Automatically?

275
00:19:10.354 --> 00:19:10.554
Yeah.

276
00:19:10.935 --> 00:19:12.236
Is that people hurting people?

277
00:19:12.437 --> 00:19:12.637
Yeah.

278
00:19:13.798 --> 00:19:17.542
No, you see it in supermarkets and parking lots and stuff like that.

279
00:19:17.762 --> 00:19:18.223
What do you see?

280
00:19:18.643 --> 00:19:22.027
You see people abusing their kids, saying terrible things to their kids.

281
00:19:24.073 --> 00:19:36.582
I guess it's difficult for parents because they sometimes think, well, I've got to raise a child that's not dysfunctional, so I'm going to have to punish them and I'm going to have to discipline them as a way to make sure that they grow up to be healthy and well-rounded.

282
00:19:36.842 --> 00:19:37.003
Yeah.

283
00:19:37.283 --> 00:19:39.224
There's an interesting cultural issue.

284
00:19:40.865 --> 00:19:46.830
That is sort of how my parents' and grandparents' generation saw their kids and

285
00:19:47.332 --> 00:19:51.554
And then people who grew up in Northern Europe completely changed their attitude.

286
00:19:51.654 --> 00:19:55.616
Now you go to jail if you hit your kids in Sweden, for example.

287
00:19:56.297 --> 00:19:58.578
I think me in Holland also, not in the U.S.

288
00:19:59.118 --> 00:20:00.679
So people have really changed their mind.

289
00:20:00.999 --> 00:20:06.442
But in the U.S., when they talk about the downsides of...

290
00:20:07.142 --> 00:20:21.590
of physical punishment of their kids, oftentimes particularly black people will say, I want to raise my children, knowing about right and wrong, and the Bible says I need to punish my children, and that's what I'm doing, and you should not subvert the teachings of my church.

291
00:20:23.576 --> 00:20:27.718
And they don't argue with that because at least not straight on.

292
00:20:28.418 --> 00:20:38.103
I grew up in a household where I was punished physically in pretty significant ways, ways that I probably can share because it's just quite, you know, significant.

293
00:20:38.183 --> 00:20:39.063
Quite horrendous.

294
00:20:39.103 --> 00:20:39.743
Yeah.

295
00:20:39.903 --> 00:20:41.624
And they are horrendous stories, actually.

296
00:20:41.804 --> 00:20:45.586
I was born in Africa, so I've got an African mother and an English father.

297
00:20:45.606 --> 00:20:46.366
Yeah.

298
00:20:48.027 --> 00:20:56.833
It's funny because I look back on it and I go, and this is just me rationalizing in hindsight, I go, I'm happy that I had a home where there was discipline.

299
00:20:57.433 --> 00:21:03.697
Because if I didn't have that home, then I wouldn't maybe have left the city.

300
00:21:03.998 --> 00:21:09.081
We're one of the few families that actually left the city, the fairly small town, relatively small town to some of the towns I live in now.

301
00:21:09.641 --> 00:21:31.255
and went and did a lot of things with my life and i was i didn't get caught up in drugs like some of my friends i wasn't dysfunctional and my mother couldn't read or write as well so i feel somewhat thankful but i'm doing i'm like rationalizing in hindsight because it somewhat ended up okay in certain measures of my life in other areas of my life there's dysfunction you know and your perception may change

302
00:21:31.875 --> 00:21:32.135
Really?

303
00:21:32.596 --> 00:21:40.342
My perception about my life and who I became has changed quite a bit over time as layers come open.

304
00:21:40.662 --> 00:21:45.346
But what you talk about, that things were predictable, is very important.

305
00:21:45.706 --> 00:21:47.067
My parents also were predictable.

306
00:21:48.265 --> 00:21:54.871
which is enormously helpful for at least for you to anticipate, to know what you are supposed to do, et cetera, et cetera.

307
00:21:55.572 --> 00:21:56.953
Chaos is a terrible thing.

308
00:21:57.453 --> 00:22:02.899
I think that point is really interesting because although there was, I was physically punished a lot.

309
00:22:02.919 --> 00:22:03.299
Yeah.

310
00:22:04.360 --> 00:22:05.100
it was predictable.

311
00:22:05.640 --> 00:22:05.821
Yeah.

312
00:22:06.101 --> 00:22:07.422
So I knew that if I...

313
00:22:07.502 --> 00:22:08.763
I understood why I was being punished.

314
00:22:08.803 --> 00:22:09.463
So I kicked...

315
00:22:09.543 --> 00:22:12.845
I was playing football in the house and broke ornaments or something like that.

316
00:22:12.905 --> 00:22:14.026
It was never unpredictable.

317
00:22:14.106 --> 00:22:15.027
Right.

318
00:22:15.047 --> 00:22:20.650
But something comes to my mind as you're talking is that same visits that my parents finally came.

319
00:22:21.711 --> 00:22:23.933
I had a three-year-old daughter at the time.

320
00:22:23.953 --> 00:22:29.757
We were staying at a house and put my parents on the first floor right next to the main bathroom.

321
00:22:30.477 --> 00:22:31.718
And then my three-year-old daughter...

322
00:22:32.078 --> 00:22:35.299
went to that bathroom that was next to my parents' bedroom.

323
00:22:35.960 --> 00:22:40.962
And my mother came out and yelled at me, said, how dare she use our bathroom?

324
00:22:41.542 --> 00:22:42.442
You should punish her.

325
00:22:43.903 --> 00:22:44.903
And I almost did.

326
00:22:44.923 --> 00:22:46.784
I had an immediate impulse.

327
00:22:47.424 --> 00:22:50.025
I'm saying I should punish my three-year-old.

328
00:22:51.326 --> 00:22:55.427
And I started to walk to her and go, oh, my god, I'm about.

329
00:22:55.628 --> 00:23:01.230
I feel like, oh, my god, I feel I'm about to reenact what my parents did to me.

330
00:23:02.150 --> 00:23:06.113
And I made a physician, no, mom, she is allowed to use his bathroom.

331
00:23:06.153 --> 00:23:16.741
And I said, the limit on my mom, which is a transformative experience for me to actually realize that I'm about to repeat what's done to me, which people do routinely.

332
00:23:17.322 --> 00:23:18.643
And I was about to beat my daughter.

333
00:23:19.043 --> 00:23:23.026
And I said, that's the end of the story.

334
00:23:24.647 --> 00:23:24.787
Yeah.

335
00:23:26.188 --> 00:23:27.549
It still causes you a lot of emotion.

336
00:23:28.270 --> 00:23:30.752
It's actually, I'm surprised how much emotion comes up talking about it.

337
00:23:30.772 --> 00:23:31.152
Yeah.

338
00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:36.341
Why do you think so much emotion comes up when you talk about that?

339
00:23:37.601 --> 00:23:38.261
Good question.

340
00:23:38.521 --> 00:23:46.122
It's an interesting question.

341
00:23:48.543 --> 00:23:50.423
Because it allowed me to have a life.

342
00:23:51.343 --> 00:23:57.384
You know, much of life is automatic, but you can make a choice to do things differently.

343
00:23:58.404 --> 00:23:59.565
You start owning yourself.

344
00:24:00.065 --> 00:24:02.125
And that's the moment I started to own myself.

345
00:24:03.602 --> 00:24:04.923
I'm responsible for my kids.

346
00:24:05.423 --> 00:24:08.345
I'm going to follow what I think is right.

347
00:24:08.665 --> 00:24:13.287
It's a really moment of liberation, but also a moment of separation.

348
00:24:14.588 --> 00:24:15.749
Like, I will not be like you.

349
00:24:17.209 --> 00:24:21.652
It's tremendously hard to do that because it's going against your...

350
00:24:22.072 --> 00:24:22.392
Right.

351
00:24:22.652 --> 00:24:26.154
I think that's a big thing for all of us because we want to belong.

352
00:24:26.174 --> 00:24:28.255
We want to be a member of a tribe.

353
00:24:29.136 --> 00:24:31.117
And if you do things differently...

354
00:24:32.640 --> 00:24:37.343
You lose your tribe, and you become a lonely traveler.

355
00:24:37.684 --> 00:24:43.628
So this is incredibly complex because people want to be part of a tribe.

356
00:24:43.668 --> 00:24:45.489
We cannot do without a tribe.

357
00:24:46.030 --> 00:24:53.435
And so the act of actually leaving your tribe is a very, very major pilgrimage to make, yeah.

358
00:24:54.977 --> 00:25:02.041
There's parts of me that manifest sometimes, and I understand that this is the behavior that I learned.

359
00:25:02.701 --> 00:25:03.562
Yeah.

360
00:25:03.822 --> 00:25:18.690
And I think there's a part of me that's worried, actually, because I learned, I grew up in a home where physical discipline was the response to most kind of forms of unwanted behavior, that I'm worried that if I become a dad, that will be my natural...

361
00:25:19.631 --> 00:25:20.491
Probably will be.

362
00:25:21.071 --> 00:25:22.032
Yeah, I don't want it to be.

363
00:25:22.052 --> 00:25:23.032
But you don't have to follow it.

364
00:25:23.052 --> 00:25:24.013
Yeah, yeah.

365
00:25:25.048 --> 00:25:27.573
Your kids will drive you crazy because kids do.

366
00:25:27.973 --> 00:25:28.254
Yeah.

367
00:25:28.554 --> 00:25:34.304
And at that point, I think having kids has found a great learning experience in life, you know.

368
00:25:35.727 --> 00:25:36.248
We all...

369
00:25:38.276 --> 00:25:46.801
None of us knows what we're doing and then the kids teach us how to, very important teachers for how do you deal with this.

370
00:25:47.642 --> 00:25:48.962
It was very challenging.

371
00:25:49.463 --> 00:25:51.164
What did you learn from your children?

372
00:25:51.184 --> 00:25:52.865
Oh, I learned a lot from my kids.

373
00:25:53.925 --> 00:25:58.968
For one thing, so my firstborn was just easy and loving

374
00:26:05.221 --> 00:26:15.624
girly, and she now is gender ambiguous, and just divorced her husband to be with a woman.

375
00:26:16.104 --> 00:26:19.225
So that was completely transformed in her case.

376
00:26:19.906 --> 00:26:24.767
And to see go through that journey with her, like, wow, wow, wow, wow.

377
00:26:25.407 --> 00:26:31.429
And my son was a neurotypical child, very out of control much of the time.

378
00:26:33.611 --> 00:26:36.990
Many physical reactions, very bright but wonderful.

379
00:26:39.675 --> 00:26:44.976
reactive, staying in bed, only playing computer games.

380
00:26:45.476 --> 00:26:52.318
And he's grown up to be one of the most loving, thoughtful adult parents you can hope to meet.

381
00:26:53.358 --> 00:27:04.621
So both my kids have become very different people who I saw they were, but I have a very good relationship with both of them, even though I really don't quite understand either of them.

382
00:27:06.537 --> 00:27:16.181
When we see dysfunctional behavior in children, I think one of the natural reactions is to give them some kind of medication or to attach some label to them and say that they're broken in this way.

383
00:27:16.862 --> 00:27:17.842
How do you feel about that?

384
00:27:17.922 --> 00:27:19.963
Well, that is what saved my son.

385
00:27:20.904 --> 00:27:21.224
Because...

386
00:27:22.204 --> 00:27:31.809
I am a psychiatrist, and I know about how these labels are little crutches that never quite capture what somebody is suffering from.

387
00:27:31.829 --> 00:27:37.552
And people started wanting to put my son on medications.

388
00:27:37.772 --> 00:27:39.432
But I was a psychopharmacologist.

389
00:27:39.533 --> 00:27:41.854
I really studied drugs and what I can and cannot do.

390
00:27:42.494 --> 00:27:48.017
And it was very clear that they were not helping him, and I didn't have to submit to authority as most...

391
00:27:48.937 --> 00:27:52.521
Parents would do and say, oh, my doctor says this and this and this.

392
00:27:52.601 --> 00:27:54.042
I say, I'm a doctor.

393
00:27:54.843 --> 00:27:57.345
I know about brains and I know about kids.

394
00:27:57.986 --> 00:27:59.888
And I don't know what the hell is going on with my kids.

395
00:28:00.188 --> 00:28:04.892
But he doesn't have bipolar disorder and he is not going to respond to lithium.

396
00:28:05.433 --> 00:28:13.120
And so both my kids were major inspirations for really exploring what was good for them.

397
00:28:14.161 --> 00:28:29.754
And I'm particularly grateful for my son, who was such a really, very scary kid in many ways, that my wife, whom I'm now divorced from, she was really great also in terms of exploring what might be helpful.

398
00:28:30.354 --> 00:28:42.564
And so what I really got to also be aware of is the issue of privilege, that I made enough money that we could spend a lot of time trying to find things that would help my son.

399
00:28:43.630 --> 00:28:44.950
We had lived in a housing project.

400
00:28:46.271 --> 00:28:49.191
My son would have been a terrible misfit.

401
00:28:49.912 --> 00:29:01.875
But because we were able to give him so much support and care by exploration, that he actually found a way of regurgitating his mental state.

402
00:29:02.515 --> 00:29:10.877
I mean, just on that point, there's a stat I read that children from low-income families are four times more likely, as the privately insured, to receive antipsychotic medicines.

403
00:29:10.977 --> 00:29:11.297
That's right.

404
00:29:13.356 --> 00:29:14.923
That's true.

405
00:29:16.716 --> 00:29:20.197
400% more likely to receive antipsychotic medications, if you will.

406
00:29:20.218 --> 00:29:21.218
Yeah, and that's a very big issue.

407
00:29:21.478 --> 00:29:33.723
It's not really my area of expertise, but giving drugs to kids is potentially very dangerous because you interfere with natural processes of brain growth.

408
00:29:34.203 --> 00:29:34.683
Brain growth.

409
00:29:34.823 --> 00:29:35.044
Yeah.

410
00:29:35.744 --> 00:29:42.687
So if you give people medication that changes certain chemicals in their brain at the developmental phase, it may actually

411
00:29:43.727 --> 00:29:55.941
change the way that your brain gets formed and may not allow, as happened to my son, who was able to compensate for many things and his brain was able to learn how to react differently.

412
00:29:56.021 --> 00:30:00.766
If you suppress all that, your brain may not learn these new adaptations.

413
00:30:02.448 --> 00:30:05.091
You think we should be looking at social conditions before we look at

414
00:30:05.942 --> 00:30:12.108
social conditions, physical conditions, movement, touch, synchrony, music.

415
00:30:16.092 --> 00:30:23.200
So in our world, we got stuck in, Western people are allowed to do things.

416
00:30:23.240 --> 00:30:26.703
They can do one thing, is they can, what I call, take a swig.

417
00:30:30.201 --> 00:30:31.621
And that makes you feel better.

418
00:30:32.002 --> 00:30:36.703
So that's part of our respected tradition is taking a chemical to change the way you feel.

419
00:30:37.303 --> 00:30:41.144
And anybody who says you should take that chemical, nobody ever say, you're crazy.

420
00:30:42.684 --> 00:30:45.025
And the other thing that Western people are very good at is yakking.

421
00:30:45.505 --> 00:30:49.426
So let's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and understand things.

422
00:30:49.546 --> 00:30:52.607
And then I like to tell people a story that the first time we happened to

423
00:30:53.652 --> 00:31:07.258
Beijing in 1992, and China was still very poor and deprived and miserable and coming back from this cultural revolution, and nobody could talk about anything.

424
00:31:07.898 --> 00:31:10.499
No, nothing happened on the mile, no, nothing happened.

425
00:31:10.539 --> 00:31:13.000
No, Gentleman's Square didn't happen, it didn't happen.

426
00:31:13.541 --> 00:31:20.444
And China was filled with every park then as now is filled with people doing qigong and tai chi.

427
00:31:21.184 --> 00:31:23.585
And I go down into the park and do tai chi,

428
00:31:23.905 --> 00:31:24.645
with the Chinese.

429
00:31:24.786 --> 00:31:25.386
What's that?

430
00:31:25.646 --> 00:31:29.788
Qigong, the Chinese movement stuff.

431
00:31:30.508 --> 00:31:41.793
And I do that and I go like, oh my God, that's how they survive by making these Qigong Tai Chi movements, which if you do it in Boston, people say you're crazy.

432
00:31:42.493 --> 00:31:43.874
But in China, you cannot talk.

433
00:31:44.454 --> 00:31:46.515
You can calm that body down by the way you move.

434
00:31:47.537 --> 00:31:57.659
And I became very interested in how cultures around the world actually have very different ways of helping people to regulate their physiology and their synchronicity.

435
00:31:58.239 --> 00:32:02.200
I want to talk about all of that, specifically this idea of movement and the role it plays in healing.

436
00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:04.721
Just to close off on the part about childhood trauma.

437
00:32:05.181 --> 00:32:06.041
Yeah.

438
00:32:06.441 --> 00:32:11.582
Why is it so important for a child to grow up with a secure attachment to a caregiver?

439
00:32:12.402 --> 00:32:14.663
You become how people see you.

440
00:32:15.948 --> 00:32:17.188
You become how people see you.

441
00:32:17.208 --> 00:32:17.388
Yeah.

442
00:32:17.588 --> 00:32:26.711
So if you're a kid and most people, most kids, their parents find me cute or you have at least a grandparent, they say, oh, you're cute.

443
00:32:26.731 --> 00:32:27.231
You're lovely.

444
00:32:27.251 --> 00:32:27.831
You're so sweet.

445
00:32:28.352 --> 00:32:31.633
And no kid is able to say, I'm just average.

446
00:32:31.693 --> 00:32:36.274
Look at building kids in the world and I'm not any cute than anybody else.

447
00:32:36.294 --> 00:32:36.454
No.

448
00:32:36.614 --> 00:32:39.735
When the kids get told you're really cute, that is your reality.

449
00:32:40.435 --> 00:32:45.619
And if your kids get told, you're really ugly and nasty, I mean, that becomes our identity.

450
00:32:46.200 --> 00:32:49.542
So you really become how people treat you early on in your life.

451
00:32:50.003 --> 00:33:01.452
And there's a very big legacy that I, as a therapist, deal with, is these imprints of early experience, which are very difficult to change.

452
00:33:03.133 --> 00:33:06.075
Imprints of early experience, are they changeable?

453
00:33:06.976 --> 00:33:08.737
Yes, that is the great news.

454
00:33:09.839 --> 00:33:14.641
And also the amazing news that even though we know how to do some of that, we're not going there.

455
00:33:16.022 --> 00:33:17.663
So you can heal from your childhood trauma?

456
00:33:17.843 --> 00:33:18.403
Absolutely.

457
00:33:19.143 --> 00:33:19.443
Everyone?

458
00:33:21.925 --> 00:33:23.745
That's my assumption when I see people.

459
00:33:24.586 --> 00:33:28.408
In your experience, you've dealt with patients your whole life, your whole professional life.

460
00:33:28.968 --> 00:33:31.589
How many of those patients do you think were healable patients?

461
00:33:32.114 --> 00:33:40.561
I really think that if given a chance and given the resources, you can pretty much do something for everybody.

462
00:33:42.362 --> 00:33:43.203
One of the other...

463
00:33:43.923 --> 00:33:59.396
But the problem is, again, we go back to where we started before the microphone was on, is that our focus these days is on productivity and behavioral change and not in how do we find out how to help you.

464
00:34:00.376 --> 00:34:17.850
All the things that I describe in my book, almost most of the things that I describe in my book as being helpful, and that was 10 years ago, I know some other things since that time, are unconventional methods that do not get practiced in mainstream psychology and psychiatry.

465
00:34:18.771 --> 00:34:25.957
Because they need to be productive, and they need to be cheap, and whether you get better or not doesn't matter, but you're cheap.

466
00:34:27.598 --> 00:34:28.579
It's the main motivation.

467
00:34:32.543 --> 00:34:38.624
I think the profit point is killing good practice.

468
00:34:38.764 --> 00:34:56.288
Your book was very interesting because when I read the cover and then I watched a video you'd made talking about the sort of six sort of treatments and stuff that exist within the body, things like yoga, you talk about theater and acting and how that helps you to get out of your trauma.

469
00:34:57.228 --> 00:34:58.648
The body keeps the score.

470
00:35:00.347 --> 00:35:03.790
This was a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma.

471
00:35:03.910 --> 00:35:07.273
And it became a meme, which is an interesting thing to see.

472
00:35:07.394 --> 00:35:10.516
Well, I use it in my everyday language with my partner.

473
00:35:10.576 --> 00:35:10.757
Yeah.

474
00:35:11.678 --> 00:35:14.860
And I've heard people say the body keeps the score, the body keeps the score.

475
00:35:14.880 --> 00:35:21.647
When we're talking about how our body is holding on to those traumatic memories, traumatic things that have happened to us.

476
00:35:23.017 --> 00:35:32.682
For someone who has never read your book and doesn't even understand the, like, base premise here, what is the, like, base premise of your, of the title there?

477
00:35:33.502 --> 00:35:37.584
It's really that trauma is a visceral experience.

478
00:35:37.624 --> 00:35:38.624
What does visceral mean?

479
00:35:38.805 --> 00:35:40.105
It's in your body.

480
00:35:40.906 --> 00:35:42.346
Heartbreak and gut wrench.

481
00:35:43.287 --> 00:35:44.287
You stiffen up.

482
00:35:45.428 --> 00:35:45.768
You've...

483
00:35:47.131 --> 00:35:48.734
Surrender, you lose your power.

484
00:35:49.616 --> 00:35:50.939
You tighten up.

485
00:35:51.300 --> 00:35:53.164
That's really where trauma is lived.

486
00:35:53.702 --> 00:35:54.923
I kind of see it as two approaches.

487
00:35:54.943 --> 00:35:59.084
You can either go, let's try and change the mind, which will then change the body downstream.

488
00:35:59.484 --> 00:36:02.866
Or you can say, let's change the body, which will then change the mind.

489
00:36:03.266 --> 00:36:04.166
But you could.

490
00:36:04.967 --> 00:36:08.748
But I do a lot of CBT with my wife, let's say.

491
00:36:08.968 --> 00:36:09.148
Yeah.

492
00:36:09.548 --> 00:36:18.092
I point out her irrational behavior and that she should really see things from a different angle and that I should really see things correctly.

493
00:36:18.692 --> 00:36:21.213
And I barely have much success with that.

494
00:36:23.227 --> 00:36:30.894
And I'm a bit surprised that psychology does things that most spouses have failed in using very well.

495
00:36:31.574 --> 00:36:34.777
This somatic approach, I've only recently heard this term from my partner.

496
00:36:35.338 --> 00:36:36.299
And she says it's amazing.

497
00:36:36.319 --> 00:36:41.123
And she told me to speak to you on this podcast because she says, you know, you'll really help to change her opinion on this.

498
00:36:41.523 --> 00:36:43.205
What is this somatic approach to healing?

499
00:36:43.305 --> 00:36:46.408
Somatic approach is to really experience what your body feels.

500
00:36:47.742 --> 00:36:58.943
And also allowing your body to do things that it has been afraid to do and to explore how your body moves to the world in some ways.

501
00:36:59.707 --> 00:37:03.371
Why are women just to seem to be so much better at this stuff than men?

502
00:37:03.391 --> 00:37:04.452
Because they're doing like Pilates.

503
00:37:04.512 --> 00:37:05.173
I'm not sure.

504
00:37:05.333 --> 00:37:07.756
Pilates, yoga, these are all things, dancing.

505
00:37:07.996 --> 00:37:10.058
These are things typically women do more than men.

506
00:37:10.078 --> 00:37:11.099
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

507
00:37:11.339 --> 00:37:13.742
And it seems women are just more in touch with it.

508
00:37:14.142 --> 00:37:18.827
Yeah, I think it's an intriguing question because it's not exclusively women.

509
00:37:18.848 --> 00:37:21.570
Of course, men have always done it in armies.

510
00:37:21.630 --> 00:37:21.771
Yeah.

511
00:37:22.815 --> 00:37:24.857
and basic training, and the military.

512
00:37:25.597 --> 00:37:39.188
And what's intriguing to me is that, you know, when people join the military, they oftentimes are not very well put together people, and they go through basic training, and they really march together, they sing with people,

513
00:37:39.308 --> 00:37:45.356
and they climb barricades and they go through composite physical experiences with other people.

514
00:37:45.816 --> 00:37:52.705
At the end of 12 weeks, they feel competent and they feel connected and they have found a band of brothers.

515
00:37:53.246 --> 00:37:53.946
How do they do it?

516
00:37:53.986 --> 00:37:58.372
Not by yakking, but by having very deep shared physical experiences.

517
00:37:59.201 --> 00:38:15.138
One of the interesting things that you write about, which I found particularly interesting, because I saw little flashes of myself in the words, is you said, I found that the more traumas your patients have in their background, the more creative and successful they often become.

518
00:38:15.518 --> 00:38:16.960
Often, huh?

519
00:38:17.020 --> 00:38:17.340
Often.

520
00:38:17.500 --> 00:38:17.761
Often.

521
00:38:18.161 --> 00:38:21.204
And we don't know how often that is, but I get to meet quite a few.

522
00:38:21.344 --> 00:38:21.805
Yeah, yeah.

523
00:38:22.005 --> 00:38:30.228
It's the people who have had to struggle, who often see new possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options.

524
00:38:30.288 --> 00:38:30.728
That's true.

525
00:38:31.288 --> 00:38:31.648
That's true.

526
00:38:31.988 --> 00:38:32.188
Yeah.

527
00:38:32.729 --> 00:38:38.791
But, you know, but those are the people who managed to get into my practice.

528
00:38:40.091 --> 00:38:46.478
The people who don't find their solutions don't have the wherewithal and the capacity to make it into therapy with me.

529
00:38:46.858 --> 00:38:49.541
They might be outside with a drug addiction.

530
00:38:49.641 --> 00:38:52.064
Getting drugs, lying on the streets, et cetera, et cetera.

531
00:38:52.424 --> 00:38:56.088
And to a large degree, I see it as an issue of accident.

532
00:38:56.868 --> 00:39:04.074
You know, this past year I visited a program in Los Angeles called Homeboy Industries.

533
00:39:05.115 --> 00:39:13.281
It's a program for formerly incarcerated, largely Latin men who had no fathers who had been criminals.

534
00:39:14.361 --> 00:39:19.685
And it's a spectacular program where they say, what do you need?

535
00:39:19.765 --> 00:39:20.766
How can we take care of you?

536
00:39:20.806 --> 00:39:23.127
How can we make a safe place for you?

537
00:39:23.647 --> 00:39:30.652
And I saw real treatment there, St. Quentin Hospital, St. Quentin Prison, famous prison in California.

538
00:39:31.372 --> 00:39:32.593
It's now trauma-based.

539
00:39:32.613 --> 00:39:34.815
They use my book as a protector.

540
00:39:35.496 --> 00:39:46.565
And they're transforming people's lives by acknowledging the reality of what they're dealt with, helping people to be part of the healing system, working in groups, working with movement.

541
00:39:48.406 --> 00:39:51.269
Like it's in Quentin, they have hula dancing classes.

542
00:39:51.529 --> 00:39:52.630
I go like, yeah.

543
00:39:54.257 --> 00:39:58.344
together with other people, gives you a sense of connection, a sense of pleasure.

544
00:40:00.227 --> 00:40:01.910
They're really beginning to understand you can do it.

545
00:40:02.931 --> 00:40:04.634
At the Harvard Hospital, you wouldn't do the whole thing

546
00:40:10.195 --> 00:40:20.701
I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment community that says you'll get better returns if you invest in someone, an entrepreneur or a founder, that is a little bit traumatized.

547
00:40:21.402 --> 00:40:28.006
And I actually think, I don't want to misquote her, but I had Barbara Cochran, who's a shark on Shark Tank in the USA here on the show.

548
00:40:28.146 --> 00:40:29.407
And one of the things she said to me was,

549
00:40:30.047 --> 00:40:37.572
with all of her investments, the ones that tend to do the best are those that have a little bit of a trauma in their past.

550
00:40:37.952 --> 00:40:44.276
And she says, because when they call me with a problem, they call me with the solution attached versus people who have never had trauma.

551
00:40:44.537 --> 00:40:45.857
They call me and just tell me the problem.

552
00:40:46.718 --> 00:40:50.661
So they'll call me and say, listen, Barbara, this has happened and this is what we're going to do about it.

553
00:40:51.461 --> 00:41:00.784
And that was her, you know, she said it in a slightly humorous way, but I wondered if you thought there was any truth in this idea that... Yeah, I think that's, again, a selection bias of people she worked with.

554
00:41:01.004 --> 00:41:15.710
I know certainly plenty of people have had plenty of people working for me who really get paralyzed in the face of challenges and who don't have a solution and become very dependent on getting them action.

555
00:41:15.750 --> 00:41:19.671
So I think she has a bit of an unusual sample, actually.

556
00:41:20.285 --> 00:41:27.747
Because I wondered if you've had an anomalous early upbringing, does that make you an anomalous adult?

557
00:41:27.907 --> 00:41:31.388
Does it increase the probability that you become an anomalous, slightly different adult?

558
00:41:31.408 --> 00:41:31.868
Oh, absolutely.

559
00:41:31.988 --> 00:41:33.288
Okay, and that can go everywhere.

560
00:41:34.348 --> 00:41:37.969
You develop a mind and brain to fit with that particular situation.

561
00:41:38.509 --> 00:41:41.990
And if that particular situation doesn't help, you need to find new solutions.

562
00:41:42.370 --> 00:41:50.132
And so trauma and abuse really forces you to try to find other solutions, but many of them are not successful.

563
00:41:52.173 --> 00:41:53.935
Is trauma a story in your brain?

564
00:41:54.055 --> 00:41:56.597
No, trauma is a perception in your brain.

565
00:41:56.857 --> 00:41:57.958
A perception, what's the difference?

566
00:41:57.978 --> 00:42:06.765
So the issue is something happens and your brain and mind takes it in and then makes an adaptation to that particular event.

567
00:42:06.985 --> 00:42:10.207
That depends on how old you are in the circumstances.

568
00:42:10.547 --> 00:42:11.989
And it's very different for different people.

569
00:42:12.169 --> 00:42:13.810
Give me an example of a perception.

570
00:42:14.551 --> 00:42:18.874
If you would beat me up right now, I'd go...

571
00:42:21.457 --> 00:42:26.281
I can call people and ruin your reputation, et cetera.

572
00:42:26.441 --> 00:42:31.605
If I'm three years old and you start hitting me as a kid, I don't know what the hell to do about it.

573
00:42:32.166 --> 00:42:42.714
And I'll likely think I did something wrong that I caused the guy to beat me up and I'm a terrible person and no wonder that he beat me up because I'm a horrible creature.

574
00:42:43.275 --> 00:42:46.738
And that's what almost everybody I know who was beaten as a child.

575
00:42:47.358 --> 00:42:49.859
That's the internal understanding of it.

576
00:42:50.359 --> 00:42:55.321
Not when you're eight years old or 15 years old, but when you're very young, that becomes your experience.

577
00:42:56.382 --> 00:42:58.062
Because you're still forming your perception of the world.

578
00:42:58.162 --> 00:42:59.123
Yeah, yeah.

579
00:43:00.343 --> 00:43:02.224
Your brain creates a map of the world.

580
00:43:03.356 --> 00:43:04.837
In very deep ways.

581
00:43:04.897 --> 00:43:13.263
And so your experiences form an internal roster of the world that makes you expect certain things at certain times.

582
00:43:13.944 --> 00:43:25.653
So if I walk into a room and I see a person who looks like my old uncle who he has to play with, I start signing up to you because you're on a deep level of that very nice uncle that I once had.

583
00:43:26.093 --> 00:43:31.719
I don't know that, but my brain is set to interpret the world in a particular way.

584
00:43:31.979 --> 00:43:40.308
So one of the things, most profound research experience I had was purely accidental.

585
00:43:40.688 --> 00:43:42.690
We started to do Rorschach tests on people.

586
00:43:42.851 --> 00:43:43.231
What's that?

587
00:43:43.832 --> 00:43:44.532
Ink blood tests.

588
00:43:45.093 --> 00:43:48.436
So you show some formless ink picture and we showed it to people.

589
00:43:49.157 --> 00:43:55.644
And we saw that people had completely different interpretations of what they projected on that inkblot test.

590
00:43:56.264 --> 00:44:00.909
And that really brought home to me that we all are living in different worlds.

591
00:44:02.190 --> 00:44:11.760
And that like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those cards.

592
00:44:12.990 --> 00:44:14.891
People who had never been in combat didn't see that.

593
00:44:16.191 --> 00:44:18.953
Rape victims saw torn vaginas and torn bodies.

594
00:44:19.373 --> 00:44:20.433
Other people didn't see this.

595
00:44:20.853 --> 00:44:31.318
So once that becomes lodged into your perceptual system, you continue to interpret the world in that particular way having to do with what you have done through in the past.

596
00:44:31.943 --> 00:44:35.985
And an inkblot test, for anyone that doesn't know, is basically just a piece of paper with random ink.

597
00:44:36.005 --> 00:44:36.665
That's all it is.

598
00:44:37.185 --> 00:44:37.385
Yeah.

599
00:44:37.745 --> 00:44:41.507
But it's been analyzed on about 100,000 people over the years.

600
00:44:42.287 --> 00:44:44.488
So there's certain patterns you can detect in it, yeah.

601
00:44:44.548 --> 00:44:46.529
I've never done an inkblot test.

602
00:44:46.569 --> 00:44:47.850
I feel like I should do one.

603
00:44:47.870 --> 00:44:51.611
I learned as much from my inkblot test as I learned from my brain imaging.

604
00:44:52.572 --> 00:44:56.994
But the brain imaging is respectable, and the mind has sort of disappeared.

605
00:44:57.014 --> 00:44:59.795
But, for example, in our psychedelic research,

606
00:45:00.595 --> 00:45:07.223
I still very much hope to do in-blood tests because, as Michael Pollan says, how do you change your minds?

607
00:45:07.944 --> 00:45:09.806
But we're not measuring how people change their minds.

608
00:45:11.108 --> 00:45:19.938
How many people do you think, I mean, this is maybe a ridiculous question, but how many people, what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form?

609
00:45:20.198 --> 00:45:20.859
How you define it?

610
00:45:21.778 --> 00:45:36.054
You know, the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused, one out of five people get sexually abused, one out of eight kids witnesses, violence being their parents, etc., etc.

611
00:45:36.114 --> 00:45:37.115
So, you know...

612
00:45:38.153 --> 00:45:42.155
If I sit in a room, it's not a binary issue.

613
00:45:42.215 --> 00:45:43.575
It's not either you were traumatized.

614
00:45:43.595 --> 00:45:44.636
You didn't get traumatized.

615
00:45:44.656 --> 00:45:54.940
But when I talk to a room of professionals, which I do a lot, I assume that at least half the group viscerally knows what trauma means.

616
00:45:56.101 --> 00:45:57.822
And what is trauma doing to my brain?

617
00:45:57.842 --> 00:46:00.763
You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans.

618
00:46:00.923 --> 00:46:04.905
If I was traumatized and you scanned my brain, is there something you could see?

619
00:46:05.606 --> 00:46:11.269
Not necessarily, I can see how your brain may be different from other people's brains.

620
00:46:11.369 --> 00:46:22.995
I may take a particular population, you can average it out and you can say, oh, there's a little more activation of the periacidotric to gray, a little bit less of the bite insulin.

621
00:46:23.275 --> 00:46:27.917
So you see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain.

622
00:46:29.083 --> 00:46:36.489
But to some degree, you know, I think we learn a lot about the brain, but we don't know much about the brain.

623
00:46:36.569 --> 00:46:41.273
And I think people tend to overstate how much the brain pictures can teach us.

624
00:46:42.454 --> 00:46:45.837
You know, I love the Hubble telescope or the Webb telescope.

625
00:46:46.337 --> 00:46:55.164
You know, our brain is like a universe, and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably complex connections the brain has.

626
00:46:55.505 --> 00:46:57.326
But we have learned a few things in the last 20 years.

627
00:46:57.955 --> 00:46:59.396
So how does trauma affect the brain?

628
00:46:59.956 --> 00:47:02.318
It affects the brain that you tend to...

629
00:47:04.259 --> 00:47:13.624
There's one part of your brain that I call the cockroach center of your brain, the periacal gray that lights up underneath the amygdala.

630
00:47:13.644 --> 00:47:15.365
Everybody knows the word amygdala these days.

631
00:47:16.205 --> 00:47:19.127
So the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger.

632
00:47:20.077 --> 00:47:27.722
When you're traumatized, you're likely that that little part of your brain, way back in your brainstem, is firing all the time.

633
00:47:29.343 --> 00:47:32.145
All the time you go like, I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm in danger.

634
00:47:33.165 --> 00:47:38.469
And that's where it starts, in a very elementary sensory level.

635
00:47:39.546 --> 00:47:44.607
You don't know what the danger is, but you just feel that you should be scared.

636
00:47:45.207 --> 00:48:06.873
And then there's certain other parts of your brain, for example, your insula, which makes the connection with your physical sensations and your body awareness, that for many people get shut down, because the experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gut venge.

637
00:48:07.533 --> 00:48:08.633
And if you have a load of that,

638
00:48:08.993 --> 00:48:13.994
You can learn to shut that part of your brain down so you don't feel your body so much anymore.

639
00:48:14.014 --> 00:48:16.255
Or you don't feel your body so much.

640
00:48:16.275 --> 00:48:18.256
You don't feel very alive either.

641
00:48:18.836 --> 00:48:20.496
You don't feel so scared all the time.

642
00:48:21.157 --> 00:48:26.158
But it's likely that you will want to take some drugs to make yourself feel alive sometimes.

643
00:48:27.779 --> 00:48:28.379
Stuff like that.

644
00:48:29.819 --> 00:48:33.121
So the part of my brain, you said just around the amygdala?

645
00:48:33.482 --> 00:48:34.182
Below the amygdala.

646
00:48:34.202 --> 00:48:35.023
Below the amygdala.

647
00:48:35.363 --> 00:48:38.225
People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically?

648
00:48:38.865 --> 00:48:40.546
The dysfunction is that it keeps firing.

649
00:48:40.746 --> 00:48:41.267
It keeps firing.

650
00:48:41.987 --> 00:48:43.108
And how does that make you feel?

651
00:48:43.188 --> 00:48:48.151
And then the amygdala, so there's a constant sense of subliminal dread.

652
00:48:48.391 --> 00:48:49.172
Is that anxiety?

653
00:48:51.231 --> 00:48:54.353
Exactly, it's already too high of mental functioning.

654
00:48:54.734 --> 00:48:54.994
Okay.

655
00:48:55.014 --> 00:48:56.135
It's more elementary.

656
00:48:56.255 --> 00:48:58.797
It's like your dog shaking.

657
00:49:01.419 --> 00:49:03.981
My daughter has adopted a dog.

658
00:49:04.421 --> 00:49:07.644
And two years later, the dog still walks from my house.

659
00:49:08.184 --> 00:49:10.006
You've adopted a dog and it shakes in your house still?

660
00:49:10.046 --> 00:49:10.466
Yeah, yeah.

661
00:49:10.606 --> 00:49:12.568
But still never quite comfortable.

662
00:49:13.949 --> 00:49:17.471
And that's how many times you meet are never quite comfortable.

663
00:49:17.912 --> 00:49:19.153
So when someone says they're triggered,

664
00:49:19.882 --> 00:49:21.503
Now trigger is in the higher level thing.

665
00:49:21.803 --> 00:49:22.043
Okay.

666
00:49:22.703 --> 00:49:27.566
So then the next level is indeed the trigger that is in part mediated by the amygdala.

667
00:49:28.046 --> 00:49:32.669
If your amygdala is your smoke detector, that tends to become hypersensitive.

668
00:49:33.584 --> 00:49:36.548
so that minor things get blown up.

669
00:49:37.389 --> 00:49:42.596
And a minor thing that you may say to me, I take it as the most insulting thing in the world.

670
00:49:43.297 --> 00:49:46.862
And so you're constantly triggered by things.

671
00:49:46.982 --> 00:49:50.787
And that makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me.

672
00:49:52.133 --> 00:50:00.879
And it's not like I'm hypersensitive, and when you have an off day, that is your issue and not my issue.

673
00:50:00.919 --> 00:50:05.742
No, when you have an off day, I feel your off day, and we start getting into trouble together.

674
00:50:06.262 --> 00:50:11.485
I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector goes off.

675
00:50:11.525 --> 00:50:13.226
Is that what it looks like on the brain?

676
00:50:13.246 --> 00:50:17.569
That is one particular guy, and nobody is exactly the same as everybody else.

677
00:50:17.729 --> 00:50:18.570
Can you explain this to me?

678
00:50:18.710 --> 00:50:21.051
But basically, what you see here is...

679
00:50:22.952 --> 00:50:28.294
This is a guy who is reliving a terrible car accident he was involved with.

680
00:50:28.554 --> 00:50:39.856
What you see here is that the right posterior part of the brain, this temporal parietal junction on the right side of the brain fires, and that's the feeling part of your brain.

681
00:50:39.896 --> 00:50:42.177
So you go, oh, my God, oh, my God.

682
00:50:42.877 --> 00:50:43.517
I'm terrified.

683
00:50:43.878 --> 00:50:44.978
But there's no cognition.

684
00:50:45.378 --> 00:50:47.959
Basically, the left side of the brain shuts down.

685
00:50:48.079 --> 00:50:52.261
So when you're in your trauma, you're not a reasonable person.

686
00:50:52.941 --> 00:50:56.663
You actually become a little bit of a blubbering idiot.

687
00:50:56.743 --> 00:51:01.024
All of us, when we really are angry, upset, are not very articulate.

688
00:51:01.204 --> 00:51:02.345
But we have a lot of feelings.

689
00:51:03.445 --> 00:51:07.087
And then the piece that I showed is that...

690
00:51:07.887 --> 00:51:12.850
As this guy is reliving his trauma, these two parts of the brain go offline.

691
00:51:13.791 --> 00:51:15.992
This is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

692
00:51:16.392 --> 00:51:19.794
That's the part of the brain that's the timekeeper of your brain.

693
00:51:19.814 --> 00:51:29.920
So if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say, I'll go, oh, it's not a half hour and I'll be okay, so let me just put up with this.

694
00:51:30.240 --> 00:51:32.682
But when you get traumatized, the timekeeper disappears.

695
00:51:33.322 --> 00:51:34.784
And this is all there is.

696
00:51:35.084 --> 00:51:36.566
You lose your sense of perspective.

697
00:51:37.027 --> 00:51:39.429
And that is what happens when you're in your trauma.

698
00:51:39.830 --> 00:51:45.176
You don't know the difference between the past and the present because the timekeeper of your brain goes offline.

699
00:51:45.696 --> 00:51:48.179
And whatever you're feeling is real.

700
00:51:48.900 --> 00:51:50.602
As opposed to feeling like a memory.

701
00:51:53.115 --> 00:51:53.816
Do you get it?

702
00:51:53.976 --> 00:51:54.276
Yeah.

703
00:51:54.297 --> 00:52:00.563
So for people that can't see it in this brain scan, what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated.

704
00:52:00.924 --> 00:52:02.205
The left side looks like it's off.

705
00:52:02.686 --> 00:52:03.046
Off, yeah.

706
00:52:03.206 --> 00:52:08.352
And then there's these two blanks, empty spaces that aren't activated called the doors.

707
00:52:08.712 --> 00:52:10.114
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

708
00:52:10.134 --> 00:52:11.355
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

709
00:52:11.375 --> 00:52:14.598
So that's part of the system in the brain that gives you a sense of time.

710
00:52:15.319 --> 00:52:15.679
Okay.

711
00:52:16.200 --> 00:52:20.542
And as long as you have a sense, it's like little babies only have a sense of time either.

712
00:52:21.002 --> 00:52:22.703
Whatever happens, it happens totally.

713
00:52:23.143 --> 00:52:26.745
And you see a child slowly grow and they get a sense of perspective.

714
00:52:27.305 --> 00:52:30.587
It's happening right now, but tomorrow it will be different.

715
00:52:31.007 --> 00:52:31.327
Okay.

716
00:52:31.347 --> 00:52:33.508
So that's when, I mean, presumably that's when you get anxiety, right?

717
00:52:33.528 --> 00:52:34.609
When you start thinking about the future.

718
00:52:35.329 --> 00:52:38.371
It is about having the perspective of,

719
00:52:39.249 --> 00:52:47.097
of this is happening right now, right now I'm really scared, but the moment I go home, the moment I call my friend, I'll feel better.

720
00:52:47.298 --> 00:52:56.728
So you need to have that capacity for perspective, and that perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma, and you become a trauma-desperate.

721
00:52:57.328 --> 00:53:02.112
So this particular person, this brain scan that I have here, this guy was in a car accident.

722
00:53:02.132 --> 00:53:14.683
And the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in an FMRI scanner and he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain.

723
00:53:14.863 --> 00:53:17.025
So he was shown maybe a car accident or something.

724
00:53:17.045 --> 00:53:17.605
No, no.

725
00:53:18.106 --> 00:53:19.407
Specifically his car accident.

726
00:53:19.587 --> 00:53:20.408
Oh, you showed him a picture of his.

727
00:53:20.428 --> 00:53:21.289
What did you see?

728
00:53:21.909 --> 00:53:22.750
What did you hear?

729
00:53:22.830 --> 00:53:23.710
What did you smell?

730
00:53:23.971 --> 00:53:24.671
What were you thinking?

731
00:53:25.052 --> 00:53:27.033
Very specific sensory details.

732
00:53:27.233 --> 00:53:27.694
Okay, so you asked.

733
00:53:27.714 --> 00:53:28.814
Not somebody else's sensory details.

734
00:53:29.155 --> 00:53:30.155
Your sensory details.

735
00:53:30.416 --> 00:53:31.957
And the right side of his brain was illuminated.

736
00:53:31.977 --> 00:53:35.640
Yeah, the right side of his brain became very active.

737
00:53:36.080 --> 00:53:36.260
Yeah.

738
00:53:36.300 --> 00:53:41.284
But what got inactivated was the timekeeper of his brain.

739
00:53:42.365 --> 00:53:47.729
So he could not lie there and say, oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday.

740
00:53:48.249 --> 00:53:50.271
He's reliving what happened yesterday.

741
00:53:51.758 --> 00:53:52.198
Instantly?

742
00:53:53.079 --> 00:53:54.400
You feel like it's happening right now.

743
00:53:55.181 --> 00:53:56.421
And that's the nature of trauma.

744
00:53:57.602 --> 00:53:59.023
Trauma is not a memory.

745
00:53:59.324 --> 00:54:00.044
It's a reliving.

746
00:54:01.365 --> 00:54:03.987
Are you consciously reliving it or is your subconscious reliving it?

747
00:54:04.007 --> 00:54:05.348
You feel like it's happening right now.

748
00:54:06.088 --> 00:54:07.069
With all forms of trauma.

749
00:54:07.409 --> 00:54:11.332
But not, it's happening right now, but my feeling is happening right now.

750
00:54:11.712 --> 00:54:12.293
And my body.

751
00:54:12.413 --> 00:54:17.757
You don't know that the feelings actually belong to the time that your dad used to beat you.

752
00:54:18.991 --> 00:54:23.074
It is now I feel the same way because I disagree with you.

753
00:54:24.355 --> 00:54:32.020
So I've been triggered in the past, and I felt that sort of instant fight or flight response because something's happened or whatever, and it's instantaneous.

754
00:54:32.700 --> 00:54:37.123
So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's back there.

755
00:54:37.543 --> 00:54:39.505
And so people are confused about it.

756
00:54:39.525 --> 00:54:41.366
They say, oh, you relive the past.

757
00:54:42.047 --> 00:54:46.830
No, actually, you're not aware that you relive the past because the past is the present.

758
00:54:47.710 --> 00:54:52.791
So you don't think, oh, this reminds me about a time that my dad used to beat me when I was four years old.

759
00:54:53.071 --> 00:54:55.352
No, it feels like you are beating me right now.

760
00:54:57.372 --> 00:55:03.113
And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering?

761
00:55:03.553 --> 00:55:04.373
Yeah, he's done quite well.

762
00:55:05.514 --> 00:55:06.194
He's done quite well.

763
00:55:06.214 --> 00:55:08.354
He did EMDR, actually.

764
00:55:08.374 --> 00:55:10.615
Eye movement desensitization.

765
00:55:10.855 --> 00:55:11.755
And what was his results?

766
00:55:11.775 --> 00:55:11.935
Yes.

767
00:55:12.431 --> 00:55:14.454
He's an all right guy.

768
00:55:14.494 --> 00:55:16.597
He's functioning.

769
00:55:16.617 --> 00:55:17.077
He's fine.

770
00:55:17.157 --> 00:55:18.920
He's no longer a traumatized person.

771
00:55:19.320 --> 00:55:23.887
What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice?

772
00:55:24.905 --> 00:55:26.607
Oh, really, people really coming to life.

773
00:55:26.727 --> 00:55:28.309
People just saying it's over.

774
00:55:28.529 --> 00:55:31.532
Give me the most, the best example.

775
00:55:31.852 --> 00:55:41.943
A good example is the videotape I showed people yesterday of a woman, again, terrible coaxing, freezing, upset, freaked out.

776
00:55:42.564 --> 00:55:45.167
And then three sessions later, we go talk about it.

777
00:55:45.187 --> 00:55:45.727
She says, yeah.

778
00:55:45.747 --> 00:55:45.867
Yeah.

779
00:55:46.528 --> 00:55:47.829
This shitty thing happened to me.

780
00:55:48.089 --> 00:55:52.532
I was in this car accident and I was jolted for it and my head was swollen.

781
00:55:52.632 --> 00:55:55.034
And boy, it was terrible back then.

782
00:55:55.834 --> 00:56:00.217
But now I have a granddaughter and I drive my car to my granddaughter and I'm fine.

783
00:56:00.537 --> 00:56:01.458
Three sessions it took?

784
00:56:01.478 --> 00:56:02.159
Three sessions, yeah.

785
00:56:02.479 --> 00:56:04.440
And we saw it in psychedelic therapy all the time.

786
00:56:05.761 --> 00:56:07.122
What did you do in those three sessions?

787
00:56:07.828 --> 00:56:10.009
So wiggle your fingers in front of people's eyes.

788
00:56:10.449 --> 00:56:15.811
I mean, for me, EMDR was really the gateway drug.

789
00:56:17.332 --> 00:56:19.053
I've written three books about PTSD.

790
00:56:19.113 --> 00:56:25.496
I actually wrote the very first book in which the word PTSD exists in 84 or something.

791
00:56:26.416 --> 00:56:27.597
But they didn't know how to treat it.

792
00:56:28.018 --> 00:56:34.804
So I'm a world-renowned expert, but I have no idea how to treat it because people keep reliving their trauma and they don't know how to stop that.

793
00:56:35.605 --> 00:56:40.309
And somebody starts telling me about EMDR and I don't believe a word of it.

794
00:56:40.970 --> 00:56:44.333
And they say, yes, you move your fingers in front of people's eyes.

795
00:56:44.674 --> 00:56:49.118
You move your eye from side to side as you relive the trauma.

796
00:56:49.878 --> 00:56:51.839
And I go, that's crazy.

797
00:56:52.539 --> 00:56:54.160
Everybody who hears it, that's crazy.

798
00:56:54.760 --> 00:56:58.342
And then people start doing it, and they show me how it works.

799
00:56:58.442 --> 00:56:59.763
I go like, wow.

800
00:57:00.343 --> 00:57:12.748
And people, indeed, a certain subsample of people we studied, indeed, after a few sessions of EMDR, go like, yeah, that really sucked.

801
00:57:13.308 --> 00:57:13.969
But it's over.

802
00:57:14.409 --> 00:57:15.249
It belongs to the past.

803
00:57:15.269 --> 00:57:16.270
It's not happening right now.

804
00:57:16.890 --> 00:57:20.412
You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal their trauma?

805
00:57:20.432 --> 00:57:29.338
Well, then of course we had to do a little research, which took us 15 years to get enough funding to do it, to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth.

806
00:57:30.098 --> 00:57:42.386
And then we discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you, we call it traumatic experiences, you activate certain pathways between the temporal-priotal junction, which gives you a sense of self,

807
00:57:42.986 --> 00:58:05.358
and you're in the life of your son's your body so your brain is able to say oh yeah this is what happened to me but it happened to me in the past so these are pathways that makes it possible for your brain to make that distinction and in the research that's been done on this what does the what did the outcome what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy

808
00:58:06.425 --> 00:58:23.569
Oh, in terms of, in our research, 78% of the people who had adult onset trauma, so being assaulted or raped by a stranger, 78% of them were completely cured.

809
00:58:25.710 --> 00:58:33.592
But that's not the majority of people we see, because most people we see have early childhood trauma, which is much more complicated as the tree.

810
00:58:34.313 --> 00:58:37.936
early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment.

811
00:58:37.976 --> 00:58:42.660
Yeah, because your early childhood experiences create who you are.

812
00:58:45.348 --> 00:58:55.196
So if you go to a fancy college when you're 18, you do become identified with that college, but it doesn't radically change you into a new person.

813
00:58:55.817 --> 00:58:57.478
How about it becomes part of your identity.

814
00:58:57.518 --> 00:59:03.223
But if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life, you actually become that.

815
00:59:03.603 --> 00:59:05.965
And the imprint is very deep early on, yeah.

816
00:59:06.730 --> 00:59:13.672
So it's called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing treatment.

817
00:59:14.072 --> 00:59:15.513
I was just looking up some stats about it.

818
00:59:15.533 --> 00:59:19.514
It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions.

819
00:59:20.054 --> 00:59:30.357
With PTSD, a 2014 meta-analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size.

820
00:59:31.217 --> 00:59:41.102
A 2024 systemic review and meta-analysis encompassing 25 studies and more than 1,000 participants reported that it alleviated depressive symptoms.

821
00:59:41.663 --> 00:59:49.627
The same 2014 meta-analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect.

822
00:59:50.707 --> 01:00:06.530
And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data meta-analysis concluded that EMDR is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates.

823
01:00:08.151 --> 01:00:10.071
So can you show me how it works?

824
01:00:10.091 --> 01:00:10.811
Can you do it on me?

825
01:00:11.511 --> 01:00:15.472
I could.

826
01:00:15.792 --> 01:00:16.632
Can I move my chair?

827
01:00:16.992 --> 01:00:17.433
Of course you can.

828
01:00:17.453 --> 01:00:19.353
You're going to come closer.

829
01:00:19.778 --> 01:00:26.744
So can you bring to mind a really unpleasant experience you've had not too long ago?

830
01:00:27.004 --> 01:00:28.185
Yeah.

831
01:00:28.205 --> 01:00:32.369
And can you bring to mind what you saw at that point?

832
01:00:34.791 --> 01:00:35.011
Yeah.

833
01:00:35.712 --> 01:00:40.576
Can you remember what the voice sounded like at that point?

834
01:00:42.378 --> 01:00:43.178
Or whatever it was.

835
01:00:43.438 --> 01:00:44.720
Any sounds come to mind?

836
01:00:46.161 --> 01:00:46.361
Yeah.

837
01:00:47.705 --> 01:00:50.466
Do you remember what your body felt like back then?

838
01:00:53.008 --> 01:00:53.208
Yeah.

839
01:00:53.648 --> 01:00:53.848
Okay.

840
01:00:54.688 --> 01:00:59.050
Can you remember what you were thinking or bring to mind what you were thinking?

841
01:01:05.833 --> 01:01:06.033
Yeah.

842
01:01:06.493 --> 01:01:06.673
Okay.

843
01:01:07.454 --> 01:01:12.356
So how vivid is your feeling right now of recollecting it?

844
01:01:13.320 --> 01:01:14.561
Like a six, seven out of ten.

845
01:01:14.701 --> 01:01:14.941
Okay.

846
01:01:15.722 --> 01:01:16.363
So stay there.

847
01:01:16.803 --> 01:01:19.786
Now follow my finger with your eyes.

848
01:01:19.826 --> 01:01:20.886
So look at me right now.

849
01:01:20.906 --> 01:01:21.287
Deep breath.

850
01:01:46.850 --> 01:01:48.891
So what comes to your mind right now as we're doing this?

851
01:01:51.291 --> 01:01:51.832
I feel calm.

852
01:01:52.292 --> 01:01:52.472
Uh-huh.

853
01:01:54.853 --> 01:01:56.113
Yeah, I just don't feel calm.

854
01:01:56.513 --> 01:01:56.673
Okay.

855
01:01:57.793 --> 01:02:03.995
So when you go back to what you were just feeling, what's it like now?

856
01:02:05.216 --> 01:02:05.676
It's...

857
01:02:10.006 --> 01:02:11.387
It's hard to recall why I was bothered.

858
01:02:12.468 --> 01:02:14.150
It's the best way to describe it.

859
01:02:15.431 --> 01:02:16.993
That is the weird stuff.

860
01:02:17.093 --> 01:02:17.633
Why is that?

861
01:02:17.653 --> 01:02:18.734
Is that just because, why is that?

862
01:02:18.894 --> 01:02:22.297
No, see, that is what's so great about this work.

863
01:02:23.038 --> 01:02:24.660
We don't know the linearity.

864
01:02:26.001 --> 01:02:30.305
And we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint has gone now.

865
01:02:30.765 --> 01:02:31.306
But it is.

866
01:02:34.143 --> 01:02:42.706
And, you know, of course, if we bring up something much worse than what you had going to, it takes it much longer and a lot of other stuff comes up.

867
01:02:43.347 --> 01:02:49.069
But what somehow EMDR seems to do, it creates new associative processes in the brain.

868
01:02:50.669 --> 01:02:51.170
So let's say,

869
01:02:53.476 --> 01:02:55.337
First time people did EMDR on me.

870
01:02:56.617 --> 01:02:58.938
Something really very, very nasty had happened to me.

871
01:02:59.718 --> 01:03:01.199
And I started off being very upset.

872
01:03:01.799 --> 01:03:08.482
And then during the EMDR, I don't know if that happened to you, I had images of sitting at my dining room table as a kid.

873
01:03:09.262 --> 01:03:12.603
And I had images of playing in a playground in primary school.

874
01:03:13.323 --> 01:03:15.604
Something don't come in mind.

875
01:03:16.125 --> 01:03:17.685
And then we stopped it.

876
01:03:17.845 --> 01:03:21.086
And indeed, so yeah, that really sucked.

877
01:03:21.487 --> 01:03:21.987
Time to go on.

878
01:03:22.889 --> 01:03:26.485
An important part is you did not tell me what you were going through.

879
01:03:27.595 --> 01:03:27.695
No.

880
01:03:27.955 --> 01:03:33.437
Because I'm suspicious of language, because language is always an interactive process.

881
01:03:34.178 --> 01:03:43.781
And if I were to ask you to tell me what happened, you will filter yourself, because certain things may be embarrassing, or you don't want me to know about it.

882
01:03:44.481 --> 01:03:55.745
And so we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it, and we organize some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this.

883
01:03:56.345 --> 01:03:59.487
So you saw a little bit of this in a minor way.

884
01:03:59.987 --> 01:04:05.031
For me, when I first saw this, I was blown away by it and thought I need to study this.

885
01:04:05.511 --> 01:04:09.333
So when they quoted studies, the main study was done by me.

886
01:04:10.934 --> 01:04:11.935
NIH funded it.

887
01:04:12.455 --> 01:04:17.339
But it was also the last time that somebody got funded for EMDR.

888
01:04:18.219 --> 01:04:18.820
Breathwork.

889
01:04:19.340 --> 01:04:19.440
Yeah.

890
01:04:19.460 --> 01:04:19.560
Yeah.

891
01:04:20.787 --> 01:04:23.268
What role did, breathwork's become a really big topic.

892
01:04:23.308 --> 01:04:25.829
My partner runs a business called Barney Breathwork, hashtag ad.

893
01:04:26.209 --> 01:04:26.630
Yeah.

894
01:04:27.110 --> 01:04:28.230
And she takes women away.

895
01:04:28.250 --> 01:04:30.791
She does these breathwork retreats all around the world, has a studio, et cetera.

896
01:04:30.931 --> 01:04:31.632
Yeah.

897
01:04:32.592 --> 01:04:34.513
What do you think of breathwork as a way to really draw?

898
01:04:34.533 --> 01:04:35.413
It makes perfect sense.

899
01:04:35.854 --> 01:04:36.034
Why?

900
01:04:36.774 --> 01:04:41.436
For one thing, it's been used since time immemorial in certain cultures.

901
01:04:42.416 --> 01:04:44.337
And people always discover it.

902
01:04:44.777 --> 01:04:45.998
In India, people know it.

903
01:04:48.060 --> 01:04:49.882
Northern Europe, nobody knows about breathwork.

904
01:04:50.202 --> 01:04:53.665
And so these are culturally dependent things.

905
01:04:54.005 --> 01:04:57.167
I think the closest may know it.

906
01:04:57.968 --> 01:04:58.288
I don't know.

907
01:04:58.729 --> 01:05:01.151
Go out there and see people.

908
01:05:01.851 --> 01:05:07.876
And so people are so conformist to be approved of by their teachers and their peers.

909
01:05:09.381 --> 01:05:16.672
that when people do something innovative, they tend to very quickly be, or they're cookie, they're crazy.

910
01:05:16.993 --> 01:05:24.324
I've like, I really got into body work, and I've not done breath work myself, but I hear about it from people,

911
01:05:26.482 --> 01:05:27.903
So it's perfectly legitimate to me.

912
01:05:29.143 --> 01:05:40.028
But when we do something new, like I was the first person who studied yoga for PTSD, and people go like, putting your butt in the air and twisting your spine and the breast for trauma.

913
01:05:40.128 --> 01:05:42.609
I said, well, let's find out.

914
01:05:42.790 --> 01:05:47.752
And so we did the study, and it turned out that yoga was very effective for treatment of PTSD.

915
01:05:48.372 --> 01:05:54.435
But the overwhelming reaction of my academic colleagues was, oh, there he goes again, he's gone off the deep end.

916
01:05:56.826 --> 01:06:01.130
And now yoga is pretty well accepted as a routine.

917
01:06:01.270 --> 01:06:04.493
So you can use yoga to treat trauma?

918
01:06:04.973 --> 01:06:06.314
No, you don't treat trauma.

919
01:06:07.395 --> 01:06:10.838
Yoga to treat your relationship to your body.

920
01:06:12.645 --> 01:06:16.427
It's not the same thing, but trauma really distorts your relationship to your body.

921
01:06:17.227 --> 01:06:27.352
And what our research also shows is that when you start doing yoga, certain brain areas that tend to get dampened by trauma come to life.

922
01:06:28.832 --> 01:06:29.873
What did you find in those studies?

923
01:06:29.893 --> 01:06:32.134
I've got one particular sort of screenshot here.

924
01:06:32.174 --> 01:06:33.976
Yeah, that's a little story.

925
01:06:34.016 --> 01:06:36.217
So explain here what's going on.

926
01:06:36.237 --> 01:06:40.120
This is a tiny study.

927
01:06:40.740 --> 01:06:45.504
What you see here is that after doing yoga, your insula gets more activated.

928
01:06:45.524 --> 01:06:47.045
Your insula is the...

929
01:06:48.445 --> 01:06:52.087
the place in your brain that makes you know what your body feels.

930
01:06:52.667 --> 01:06:57.229
Like when it rains and you have no raincoat on, you go, I better get an umbrella.

931
01:06:57.449 --> 01:07:01.611
So that you need to know what your body experiences, it needs and anticipated.

932
01:07:02.031 --> 01:07:06.433
And that dimension of self-experience tends to get very damaged by trauma.

933
01:07:08.558 --> 01:07:15.002
The reason for that is it's an adaptive thing because trauma is so relived in visceral experiences.

934
01:07:15.222 --> 01:07:19.945
As Darwin said, heartbreak and gut venge is the visceral sensations.

935
01:07:20.646 --> 01:07:29.372
And so if you're constantly heartbroken and gut venge, you touch it, pull it down, and so you lose contact with your body.

936
01:07:30.632 --> 01:07:34.736
as a defensive maneuver of feeling overwhelmed by these physical sensations.

937
01:07:34.876 --> 01:07:36.357
So I want to make sure I understand this.

938
01:07:36.378 --> 01:07:42.363
So the insular part of the brain is the part that links what we do with how we feel.

939
01:07:43.551 --> 01:07:46.272
how we viscerally feel, yeah, what's happening in our bodies.

940
01:07:46.572 --> 01:07:53.495
Okay, so it links how we're feeling in our bodies to... To what we know about ourselves, yeah.

941
01:07:53.595 --> 01:07:55.576
The stories we have in our head about ourselves.

942
01:07:55.596 --> 01:08:01.638
So that's what the insula does, and trauma interrupts that, which causes what kind of dysfunction on a day-to-day basis?

943
01:08:01.658 --> 01:08:04.340
Because you are out of such ways, you feel numbed out.

944
01:08:04.740 --> 01:08:05.280
Or disconnected.

945
01:08:05.300 --> 01:08:11.202
You don't feel alive, you don't feel connected, you can't feel pleasure.

946
01:08:11.562 --> 01:08:12.783
Or you feel hypersensitive?

947
01:08:13.156 --> 01:08:14.277
And you feel hypersensitive.

948
01:08:14.397 --> 01:08:18.039
Because you talk about the two sort of responses being disconnection or hypersensitivity.

949
01:08:18.319 --> 01:08:21.901
There's always these two contradictory things that coexist.

950
01:08:22.541 --> 01:08:24.743
Remembering too much and remembering too little.

951
01:08:25.343 --> 01:08:26.964
Feeling too much and feeling too little.

952
01:08:28.125 --> 01:08:29.725
There is no happy medium.

953
01:08:30.586 --> 01:08:32.207
You go from one extreme to another.

954
01:08:33.027 --> 01:08:35.869
You're agitated and numb down at the same time.

955
01:08:37.220 --> 01:08:41.144
And I bet you know what it's like, because we all have been there.

956
01:08:41.184 --> 01:08:45.187
We feel agitated, and at the same time, we feel completely nothing at all.

957
01:08:46.428 --> 01:08:48.430
And there's almost no mind there.

958
01:08:49.151 --> 01:08:52.313
And I think it's a very uncommon human experience.

959
01:08:52.474 --> 01:08:53.735
And the insula is playing a role.

960
01:08:53.775 --> 01:08:57.558
The insula plays a big role in that, and many other brain structures.

961
01:08:58.027 --> 01:09:03.151
So if I start doing yoga, what is that then doing to that hypersensitivity disconnection?

962
01:09:03.171 --> 01:09:13.660
Yoga makes it possible for you to reconnect your senses in a way, to feel what you feel and to make it safe what you feel.

963
01:09:13.700 --> 01:09:15.722
So as we go to a yoga studio with a

964
01:09:16.322 --> 01:09:26.590
teacher with a nice voice who really helps you to now take a deep breath, stretch out your arms, feel that warrior three pose, and then you start feeling it.

965
01:09:26.790 --> 01:09:32.935
And for many people, doing yoga can be actually quite agitating, scary actually in a way.

966
01:09:33.675 --> 01:09:38.439
For traumatized people, we see it all the time, is that something gets triggered.

967
01:09:39.393 --> 01:09:43.415
And you start getting upset just doing a simple down dog, let's say.

968
01:09:44.556 --> 01:09:52.921
Or certainly the yoga pose that all sexual abuse victims have great trouble with is the happy baby pose.

969
01:09:53.741 --> 01:10:04.588
Happy baby pose is when you put your feet in the air, you lie on your back, you hold your toes, and you spread your legs wide so your pelvis is up against the air.

970
01:10:05.508 --> 01:10:08.990
For most of us, that's a very pleasant part, makes you relax.

971
01:10:09.491 --> 01:10:12.553
If you're a sexual abuse survivor, that's going to trigger a lot of stuff.

972
01:10:13.293 --> 01:10:13.574
Really?

973
01:10:13.594 --> 01:10:14.094
Yeah.

974
01:10:14.914 --> 01:10:16.616
And you have to be very careful doing that.

975
01:10:18.657 --> 01:10:19.137
Because it's?

976
01:10:19.798 --> 01:10:20.358
It's triggering.

977
01:10:21.419 --> 01:10:30.345
And so because these positions may be triggering, you may hold your body in a frozen position in order not to trigger those feelings of sexual abuse.

978
01:10:32.378 --> 01:10:40.661
I was just thinking as you were speaking about a friend of mine who tends to go through life with a sort of crumpled up body.

979
01:10:40.941 --> 01:10:43.142
In their low self-esteem, they're quite low confidence.

980
01:10:43.182 --> 01:10:44.823
I don't know if they're traumatized in any way.

981
01:10:45.083 --> 01:10:46.043
Can't pass judgment on that.

982
01:10:46.503 --> 01:10:51.545
But they started doing yoga and it really has helped their mental health in a profound way.

983
01:10:51.565 --> 01:10:56.527
And I'm just wondering what you think the link is between someone who, I'm just telling you on the surface, is like crumpled up through their life.

984
01:10:57.087 --> 01:10:57.908
Oh, absolutely.

985
01:10:58.108 --> 01:10:58.328
Yeah.

986
01:10:59.368 --> 01:11:00.928
I told you I was a sickly child.

987
01:11:00.948 --> 01:11:06.130
I was really sickly until I had asthma when I was 13.

988
01:11:07.490 --> 01:11:10.131
And I think the most helpful thing I ever did was rolfing.

989
01:11:10.451 --> 01:11:15.892
Rolfing is a very intense form of massage, really to tear your muscles from your fascia.

990
01:11:16.692 --> 01:11:19.753
And I came to live in a new body.

991
01:11:20.559 --> 01:11:25.546
I no longer live frozen in that body of this little child who almost died.

992
01:11:25.566 --> 01:11:29.871
It had a profound effect on me as much as anything I've ever done.

993
01:11:31.113 --> 01:11:31.834
Why and how?

994
01:11:32.575 --> 01:11:33.957
Because you get stuck in habits.

995
01:11:34.838 --> 01:11:36.801
In a way, trauma becomes a habit.

996
01:11:37.997 --> 01:11:42.178
My habit is that when I see a phone guy in the room, I get scared.

997
01:11:42.798 --> 01:11:43.918
Hypothetical situation.

998
01:11:44.498 --> 01:11:46.759
And so you have habitual responses.

999
01:11:46.899 --> 01:11:54.760
And part of what you do therapy for is to get to realize your habitual responses and become curious about it.

1000
01:11:54.800 --> 01:12:00.501
Like, you know, whenever a person like that comes to the room, I freeze and I sound like an idiot.

1001
01:12:00.681 --> 01:12:04.421
And your therapist says, so what happens to your body?

1002
01:12:05.562 --> 01:12:07.402
And how long have you felt this way?

1003
01:12:08.528 --> 01:12:12.411
You feel this way when you were six or three or eight.

1004
01:12:12.971 --> 01:12:18.034
And then at some point, people get a narrative that may begin to explain it.

1005
01:12:18.855 --> 01:12:22.077
And that narrative may say, oh, I was bullied by somebody.

1006
01:12:22.757 --> 01:12:26.580
And that feeling comes back when I meet somebody who reminds me of my bully.

1007
01:12:27.300 --> 01:12:32.564
And then you go like, have you ever tried martial arts?

1008
01:12:34.320 --> 01:12:38.885
see what it would be like for you to actually learn to use your body to fight somebody.

1009
01:12:40.466 --> 01:12:44.550
And that's, for example, a treatment that I have never studied.

1010
01:12:45.231 --> 01:12:49.895
But I was amazed how many of my close colleagues who were very much into trauma

1011
01:12:51.076 --> 01:12:54.158
tell me at some point, oh, and now I have to go to my martial arts class.

1012
01:12:55.539 --> 01:13:00.482
And nobody sees that as a legitimate way of dealing with what they're dealing with.

1013
01:13:00.923 --> 01:13:05.626
But I think people are doing their martial arts because they have memories of being victimized.

1014
01:13:06.986 --> 01:13:11.730
And it gives me a visceral experience of my body can defend itself.

1015
01:13:12.330 --> 01:13:15.532
My body, I can use my body to take care of myself.

1016
01:13:16.633 --> 01:13:18.194
And that's not the intellectual process.

1017
01:13:18.234 --> 01:13:20.095
That's the visceral experience.

1018
01:13:21.327 --> 01:13:24.948
People often describe meeting somebody and their body just being off.

1019
01:13:25.308 --> 01:13:25.508
Yeah.

1020
01:13:25.688 --> 01:13:33.590
So they say, I met this person and my body was just, I just felt something in my body that they can't consciously articulate, but they just feel it in their body.

1021
01:13:33.610 --> 01:13:34.530
This person's a bit off.

1022
01:13:34.850 --> 01:13:35.030
Yeah.

1023
01:13:35.290 --> 01:13:36.811
What do you think they're describing there?

1024
01:13:37.911 --> 01:13:39.711
I think they're describing two things.

1025
01:13:40.772 --> 01:13:42.212
We pick up each other's energy.

1026
01:13:43.177 --> 01:13:55.766
There's such a thing as the mirror neuron system, which hasn't received much attention in the past few years, but I think it's a very important invention, that I pick up your energy.

1027
01:13:56.607 --> 01:14:02.872
And if, let's say, you're depressed, but you have a job to do some, to talk with me today,

1028
01:14:03.392 --> 01:14:06.553
It's very likely that I, on some level, will pick up your depression.

1029
01:14:07.373 --> 01:14:08.974
And it will affect our conversation.

1030
01:14:09.554 --> 01:14:10.395
I'm not saying that I do.

1031
01:14:10.435 --> 01:14:11.915
That's a hypothetical thing.

1032
01:14:12.795 --> 01:14:14.296
But we pick up each other's energy.

1033
01:14:14.896 --> 01:14:21.278
And so we may be somebody who is very angry, but who's trying to behave themselves and behave very well.

1034
01:14:21.618 --> 01:14:22.879
But you may pick up that anger.

1035
01:14:23.899 --> 01:14:27.641
And that's really the very complicated stuff in psychotherapy.

1036
01:14:28.101 --> 01:14:31.562
Am I picking up your energy or am I picking up my energy?

1037
01:14:32.830 --> 01:14:40.395
And so if I feel uncomfortable in your presence, is that because you're triggering something in me about my past,

1038
01:14:41.335 --> 01:14:42.696
Or am I picking something up about you?

1039
01:14:43.776 --> 01:14:47.178
And that is the complexity of our interactions.

1040
01:14:47.598 --> 01:14:47.798
Yeah.

1041
01:14:47.998 --> 01:14:53.501
And from an evolutionary standpoint, as you were speaking, I was thinking, where has this come from?

1042
01:14:53.861 --> 01:15:02.945
You know, this ability to subconsciously just get a read for someone and then form a pattern of, okay, this type of person hurt me in the past.

1043
01:15:03.385 --> 01:15:07.226
And 20 years later, I meet someone in the street and I immediately feel the same.

1044
01:15:07.866 --> 01:15:09.146
Is that just a survival thing?

1045
01:15:09.166 --> 01:15:10.846
I think that makes perfect sense to me.

1046
01:15:10.866 --> 01:15:13.467
Like, because we are primates.

1047
01:15:15.227 --> 01:15:17.688
It's something that came up in your interview with Trevor.

1048
01:15:18.168 --> 01:15:24.409
The deep degree to which we're interconnected creatures, that we really don't exist as individuals.

1049
01:15:25.009 --> 01:15:29.090
So we are meant to live, troops, we're meant to be with other people.

1050
01:15:29.210 --> 01:15:30.710
And so what is...

1051
01:15:31.590 --> 01:15:35.737
safe with other people becomes a critical issue of our survival.

1052
01:15:36.456 --> 01:15:45.760
The reason that humans have survived is not because of your individual gifts or mine, it's because we can band together and build buildings and airplanes and all sorts of stuff.

1053
01:15:46.060 --> 01:15:48.361
It's all communal things.

1054
01:15:48.381 --> 01:16:00.647
So it's not central in our science anywhere today, but it's at the core, if you understand human beings, we are a collective bunch of creatures who collectively create something.

1055
01:16:00.707 --> 01:16:05.369
And so knowing how to do that and how to adjust to each other is at the core of who we are.

1056
01:16:07.391 --> 01:16:08.431
Are we losing that a little bit?

1057
01:16:08.451 --> 01:16:10.932
You know, people are getting lonelier and lonelier and more individualistic.

1058
01:16:11.212 --> 01:16:12.412
Huge, huge issue.

1059
01:16:12.552 --> 01:16:17.113
Screens as virtual realities is our biggest challenge, I think.

1060
01:16:17.133 --> 01:16:19.114
Yeah.

1061
01:16:20.354 --> 01:16:20.554
Why?

1062
01:16:21.835 --> 01:16:33.157
Because screens give you a virtual reality of pleasure, et cetera, et cetera, but it's not real and it's not a product of your efforts of doing something.

1063
01:16:33.757 --> 01:16:34.898
You get a cheap reward.

1064
01:16:34.938 --> 01:16:35.058
Yeah.

1065
01:16:36.278 --> 01:16:38.300
But ordinarily it takes a lot of activity.

1066
01:16:38.560 --> 01:16:47.768
And so you get your little dopamine rush and it feels like you had experience, but you don't learn how to get along with other people.

1067
01:16:47.808 --> 01:16:52.512
You don't learn that visceral reaction of pleasure of we are friends.

1068
01:16:53.873 --> 01:16:57.796
What role does community and social connection play in trauma?

1069
01:16:58.056 --> 01:16:58.497
Everything.

1070
01:16:59.498 --> 01:16:59.758
Critical.

1071
01:16:59.778 --> 01:16:59.978
Critical.

1072
01:17:01.397 --> 01:17:04.700
And there's another thing that is troublesome about the development of our field.

1073
01:17:05.220 --> 01:17:13.047
Namely, in our generation, Thomas, who started with experiences like mine, worked with combat veterans.

1074
01:17:14.388 --> 01:17:15.489
I'm not a combat veteran.

1075
01:17:15.690 --> 01:17:17.892
I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

1076
01:17:19.963 --> 01:17:21.684
I don't know anything about the US Marine Corps.

1077
01:17:22.404 --> 01:17:31.410
And so I couldn't have told people what it was like, but I made groups and I talked to each other and I learned about what it's like to be a combat veteran from each other.

1078
01:17:31.911 --> 01:17:36.834
And the moment they made this connection with each other, they were becoming a band of brothers.

1079
01:17:38.235 --> 01:17:41.437
And that's how people survive trauma, by bonding with other people.

1080
01:17:42.592 --> 01:17:45.073
It seems that women are better at forming those connections than men.

1081
01:17:45.093 --> 01:17:45.833
Yeah, I think so.

1082
01:17:47.114 --> 01:17:49.595
Although, no, that's not entirely true.

1083
01:17:51.715 --> 01:17:54.636
I learned a lot about love from my combat veterans.

1084
01:17:55.697 --> 01:17:56.457
To some degree...

1085
01:17:58.067 --> 01:18:04.833
I think most human beings don't know what love is until you know what it's like to be in combat together with other people.

1086
01:18:04.853 --> 01:18:08.977
It creates an enormously deep, deep bond between people.

1087
01:18:10.638 --> 01:18:15.243
So I know something about male love more from working with combat wrestlers than anything else.

1088
01:18:15.623 --> 01:18:18.525
When you're in great danger, guys are there for each other.

1089
01:18:19.366 --> 01:18:20.928
They really protect each other.

1090
01:18:20.948 --> 01:18:22.409
They really look after each other.

1091
01:18:24.838 --> 01:18:29.300
What is it about that environment that forms what you're describing there as real love?

1092
01:18:30.181 --> 01:18:31.401
And how do we- It's danger.

1093
01:18:32.181 --> 01:18:41.786
The natural instinct when you are in danger, you know, you and I will become much better friends than we are if something bad happened to us right now.

1094
01:18:42.086 --> 01:18:44.047
We'd start clinging to each other.

1095
01:18:44.087 --> 01:18:45.708
Is that because we would probably need each other?

1096
01:18:46.008 --> 01:18:46.908
You need each other, yeah.

1097
01:18:46.988 --> 01:18:50.109
You need each other and you count on each other and you have each other's back.

1098
01:18:50.850 --> 01:18:52.570
And you're saying to me, I have your back.

1099
01:18:54.211 --> 01:18:57.712
Us making commitment to each other is a very profound human experience.

1100
01:18:58.252 --> 01:18:59.633
You don't get that from a screen.

1101
01:19:00.493 --> 01:19:04.955
Well, also in an individualistic society, you're almost trained to not need anyone else but yourself.

1102
01:19:05.635 --> 01:19:09.036
Well, but, you know, I have friends who went to Eton.

1103
01:19:10.307 --> 01:19:18.871
Actually, so the definition for me of many Englishmen is, your mother hates you and sends you off to boarding school when you're six years old and never looks after you anymore.

1104
01:19:19.532 --> 01:19:24.534
And what helped my friends who went to the public schools in England was sports.

1105
01:19:25.975 --> 01:19:27.095
Enormously powerful.

1106
01:19:28.176 --> 01:19:34.259
People felt really close to each other, moving together, throwing balls together, fighting in the fields.

1107
01:19:35.199 --> 01:19:38.741
That traditionally has been the way that guys get close together.

1108
01:19:40.039 --> 01:19:40.359
Yeah.

1109
01:19:40.419 --> 01:19:41.720
That may ring a bell with you somewhere.

1110
01:19:42.080 --> 01:19:42.600
Of course, yeah.

1111
01:19:42.620 --> 01:19:48.343
I was thinking back to playing football growing up and just, you know, you're one unit effectively.

1112
01:19:48.543 --> 01:19:51.985
And if there's a problem in this part of the pitch, then it's my problem too.

1113
01:19:52.505 --> 01:19:54.366
If you're in trouble, I'm there to help you.

1114
01:19:54.986 --> 01:19:59.608
But you still make easy contact with your friends who you played football with 20 years ago.

1115
01:19:59.628 --> 01:20:00.429
No, 30 years ago.

1116
01:20:01.629 --> 01:20:06.172
It's really interesting because as you were talking, I was wondering how we can bring that back into our lives in the modern world.

1117
01:20:06.592 --> 01:20:06.873
Yeah.

1118
01:20:07.053 --> 01:20:11.416
In a modern world where we live on screens and white walls alone.

1119
01:20:11.456 --> 01:20:11.696
Yeah.

1120
01:20:12.276 --> 01:20:22.202
You know, the studies say that the average, I think it said something like the average American has an average of zero people that they feel they could turn to at a time of crisis, which is down from like three, I think two decades ago.

1121
01:20:22.222 --> 01:20:22.543
Is that right?

1122
01:20:22.803 --> 01:20:23.223
I'll have a look.

1123
01:20:23.243 --> 01:20:24.024
I'll have a look at the stats.

1124
01:20:24.044 --> 01:20:24.644
Yeah.

1125
01:20:24.804 --> 01:20:29.346
I'll pull up the stats, but the general idea of like us being lonelier than ever before.

1126
01:20:29.846 --> 01:20:35.648
And how do we, in a society that's like designed to be lonely, how do I on an individual level fix that?

1127
01:20:36.709 --> 01:20:38.429
I think that's the big challenge.

1128
01:20:38.469 --> 01:20:41.310
Actually, we have a foundation now.

1129
01:20:41.871 --> 01:20:47.293
And the main thing that brings us to is in finding funding for projects like that.

1130
01:20:48.315 --> 01:20:52.397
of how do you help people to connect to each other, be in sync with each other.

1131
01:20:52.417 --> 01:20:59.720
We're very much into people making music together, making theater together, creating projects together.

1132
01:21:00.320 --> 01:21:01.460
That is who we are.

1133
01:21:01.480 --> 01:21:04.261
That is our glory as human beings.

1134
01:21:04.361 --> 01:21:08.943
It's this collaborative, active, physical creation of things.

1135
01:21:10.004 --> 01:21:12.465
That has not been part of mental health.

1136
01:21:12.925 --> 01:21:17.987
We talk and we give pills, but we don't really connect people on a very deep level.

1137
01:21:20.088 --> 01:21:21.188
Are you optimistic about this?

1138
01:21:23.650 --> 01:21:25.072
Not after the last election, no.

1139
01:21:26.072 --> 01:21:26.292
Really?

1140
01:21:27.153 --> 01:21:29.295
I'm very desperate after the election.

1141
01:21:30.776 --> 01:21:32.357
You're very desperate after the last election.

1142
01:21:32.838 --> 01:21:33.018
Why?

1143
01:21:33.858 --> 01:21:37.021
Because the last election was based on uttering.

1144
01:21:39.405 --> 01:22:05.008
you are different projection you're evil these immigrants come and kill us and they project their own discomfort themselves on people from different religions and different skin colors etc etc it's all projection of people's own discomfort with themselves and there's no honesty about the problem is inside of me and not you yeah so i think you're not a fan of trump

1145
01:22:10.405 --> 01:22:11.305
Let's leave it at that.

1146
01:22:12.726 --> 01:22:16.769
No, I think, no, you're an obvious psychopath who doesn't give a shit about anybody else.

1147
01:22:18.170 --> 01:22:20.171
Are you able to point at anything good about him?

1148
01:22:21.092 --> 01:22:24.634
And when I've had people on this show that are pro-Trump, I ask them the same questions.

1149
01:22:24.674 --> 01:22:26.755
I say, can you point at anything bad about him?

1150
01:22:29.277 --> 01:22:30.177
Because he's got a family.

1151
01:22:30.277 --> 01:22:37.182
Anybody who goes to China and says, I've been received better than anybody else in Chinese history, is a fool of...

1152
01:22:40.713 --> 01:22:42.855
The guy's gone bankrupt any number of times.

1153
01:22:43.335 --> 01:22:45.436
He says terrible things to other people.

1154
01:22:45.757 --> 01:22:47.618
He insults other people all the time.

1155
01:22:48.819 --> 01:22:50.200
I'm sure there's something good about him.

1156
01:22:50.640 --> 01:22:53.983
Ivanka seems to have loved him at some point.

1157
01:22:56.965 --> 01:22:58.186
He's a terrible person.

1158
01:22:59.681 --> 01:23:04.384
Going back to this point of trauma, you say that there's three broad ways to reverse the damage of trauma.

1159
01:23:04.504 --> 01:23:04.664
Yeah.

1160
01:23:05.064 --> 01:23:13.229
So if I came to you and I was a traumatized person, whatever that trauma might be, what would step one be if I came to you for support with my trauma?

1161
01:23:13.629 --> 01:23:15.350
Step one is tell me about yourself.

1162
01:23:15.730 --> 01:23:16.211
Who are you?

1163
01:23:16.231 --> 01:23:16.771
Okay.

1164
01:23:17.852 --> 01:23:18.552
What do you value?

1165
01:23:19.573 --> 01:23:20.233
What is working?

1166
01:23:21.669 --> 01:23:24.031
what you want to work, and what gets in the way.

1167
01:23:24.912 --> 01:23:29.175
So at start of, really, language is terribly important.

1168
01:23:29.896 --> 01:23:32.598
I don't make a list of how screwed up you are.

1169
01:23:34.200 --> 01:23:41.986
I helped to create a DSM at some point in a very minor role, but the DSM is not a good way of starting off.

1170
01:23:42.386 --> 01:23:43.948
Namely, how sick are you?

1171
01:23:45.443 --> 01:23:51.647
I want to know who you are, what is working, what isn't working, what has helped you, what hasn't helped you, what gets in the way.

1172
01:23:52.468 --> 01:24:01.134
And so we create a map together of who you are and to some degree who you are in relation with me.

1173
01:24:03.335 --> 01:24:06.737
And I would check a lot with people about, is this helping you?

1174
01:24:08.439 --> 01:24:09.880
So I don't prescribe anything.

1175
01:24:12.182 --> 01:24:16.864
At some point I may say, well, have you thought about doing some martial arts?

1176
01:24:19.286 --> 01:24:22.147
Would you be interested in going to a yoga studio?

1177
01:24:22.447 --> 01:24:24.728
But by and large, I give very little advice.

1178
01:24:25.669 --> 01:24:32.192
But I help people to discover what's going on and where that leads them in a way.

1179
01:24:34.313 --> 01:24:41.737
And then once you've done that, say you find out that I had some early traumatic experience, how do you know, what treatment would you give me?

1180
01:24:42.146 --> 01:24:43.747
That is another tricky thing.

1181
01:24:43.807 --> 01:24:47.448
And that is something in my book, I tried to do that and I failed.

1182
01:24:47.648 --> 01:24:49.689
And in my new book, I'm not doing very much better.

1183
01:24:50.429 --> 01:24:55.050
I would see how agitated you get, how much can you stay in focus.

1184
01:24:55.651 --> 01:24:59.512
And if I would see that whenever a particular subject comes up,

1185
01:25:00.232 --> 01:25:05.335
I see you're getting agitated or shut down, I would focus on that particular experience.

1186
01:25:06.355 --> 01:25:15.900
And if I would see that you are sort of chronically agitated and unable to focus, I would say, let's just do something.

1187
01:25:16.020 --> 01:25:19.922
You should do something that's helped to calm your body and your brain down.

1188
01:25:19.942 --> 01:25:25.725
And I'd say when you're sort of overall overwhelmed, let's start with yoga, let's start with yoga.

1189
01:25:25.965 --> 01:25:29.347
or qigong or whatever makes sense to you in terms of how to move your body.

1190
01:25:29.868 --> 01:25:31.569
And I'd probably do neurofeedback.

1191
01:25:32.349 --> 01:25:33.230
What's neurofeedback?

1192
01:25:33.250 --> 01:25:41.015
Neurofeedback is you hook your skull up to electrodes that can harvest underlying brainwaves.

1193
01:25:41.655 --> 01:25:51.141
So you can project your brain activity on a computer screen and then you can play computer games with your own brainwaves to...

1194
01:25:54.047 --> 01:25:58.129
Organize your brainwaves in a way that you can be more focused and pay more attention.

1195
01:25:58.509 --> 01:26:05.272
So I've got a graph on the screen for anybody watching, and it shows five different types of brainwaves.

1196
01:26:05.673 --> 01:26:07.633
Gamma brainwaves, which are very close brainwaves.

1197
01:26:08.174 --> 01:26:09.074
Beta, less close.

1198
01:26:09.294 --> 01:26:10.015
Alpha, less close.

1199
01:26:10.555 --> 01:26:11.755
Beta, less close.

1200
01:26:11.855 --> 01:26:14.177
And then delta, which is when you're sort of sleeping, dreaming.

1201
01:26:14.717 --> 01:26:16.057
The waves are very, very far apart.

1202
01:26:16.237 --> 01:26:16.858
Almost flat.

1203
01:26:17.935 --> 01:26:27.432
So looking at these different types of brainwaves, if we just categorize them from one being when the brainwaves are really tight and close to five, which is delta, when they're really far apart,

1204
01:26:28.792 --> 01:26:32.515
Is one gamma, is that like anxiety or something?

1205
01:26:32.555 --> 01:26:34.537
No, no, anxiety is very focused thinking.

1206
01:26:34.797 --> 01:26:35.637
Okay, fine.

1207
01:26:35.657 --> 01:26:36.878
But it depends on where it is.

1208
01:26:37.839 --> 01:26:46.146
So the back of your brain is supposed to have these slow waves because your back of the brain is dealing with the housekeeping of your body.

1209
01:26:46.866 --> 01:26:53.271
The back of the brain tells you you have to breathe a little bit more, you have to go to the bathroom, you have to eat, you have to...

1210
01:26:54.712 --> 01:27:01.538
So a very large part of your brain is about your body regulation, which gets messed up in a major way by trauma.

1211
01:27:02.038 --> 01:27:12.147
So for example, when you close your eyes, the back of your brain is supposed to develop nice, slow waves to tell you, I'm feeling peaceful.

1212
01:27:12.787 --> 01:27:23.654
When you're traumatized, when they ask you to close your eyes, it is very likely that the back of your brain will get agitated and create much faster waves than you should.

1213
01:27:24.095 --> 01:27:31.299
And so you get a sense of agitation the moment you close your eyes, which, of course, is very detrimental to your health.

1214
01:27:31.860 --> 01:27:38.304
So my job then becomes how to train your brain so that when you close your eyes, your back of your brain becomes very calm.

1215
01:27:39.385 --> 01:27:39.825
It works out.

1216
01:27:40.967 --> 01:27:42.649
Again, this is not about trauma.

1217
01:27:43.109 --> 01:27:47.993
It's about brain organisation.

1218
01:27:48.554 --> 01:27:53.858
So trauma leads to brain organisation, but you don't treat the trauma, you treat the brain organisation.

1219
01:27:54.058 --> 01:28:01.364
So for the average person that comes to you, what do you typically end up telling them to do, the average person?

1220
01:28:01.464 --> 01:28:05.988
Some people these days, I say, I think it would be very good for you to have a psychedelic experience.

1221
01:28:06.910 --> 01:28:07.931
A psychedelic experience.

1222
01:28:08.351 --> 01:28:12.173
And you found yourself telling people that more and more recently.

1223
01:28:12.233 --> 01:28:17.757
Well, because I have done research now and our results were really quite stunning.

1224
01:28:18.057 --> 01:28:20.698
Much better than I ever expected, actually.

1225
01:28:21.519 --> 01:28:24.060
But I may tell you, no, you're not ready for psychedelics.

1226
01:28:24.561 --> 01:28:31.745
I think you should really do some neurofeedback and some body practices to live more in your body before we start blowing your mind open.

1227
01:28:32.005 --> 01:28:39.188
When you say body practices, we'll get on to psychedelics, but body practices, these are the things you're talking about, like the yoga, the martial arts.

1228
01:28:39.588 --> 01:28:40.228
Massages.

1229
01:28:40.488 --> 01:28:41.088
Massages.

1230
01:28:41.749 --> 01:28:42.409
Any massage?

1231
01:28:43.389 --> 01:28:46.470
Well, I happen to know some very good body people.

1232
01:28:47.431 --> 01:28:48.251
Okay.

1233
01:28:48.291 --> 01:28:51.032
So if you have been beaten up or molested,

1234
01:28:52.857 --> 01:28:54.978
human touch tends to become very complicated.

1235
01:28:55.779 --> 01:28:59.140
And so you may not feel comforted by human touch.

1236
01:29:00.080 --> 01:29:07.323
And other humans may not have a calming effect in your body, which is really what we're supposed to have in each other.

1237
01:29:07.843 --> 01:29:11.165
So learning to live in a body that can be touched

1238
01:29:12.145 --> 01:29:12.966
It's quite important.

1239
01:29:13.386 --> 01:29:14.247
Is touch healing?

1240
01:29:14.847 --> 01:29:15.527
Oh, absolutely.

1241
01:29:16.228 --> 01:29:17.089
You don't have kids yet?

1242
01:29:17.349 --> 01:29:18.289
No.

1243
01:29:18.690 --> 01:29:20.811
Well, you have a girlfriend.

1244
01:29:20.831 --> 01:29:21.191
You know.

1245
01:29:21.872 --> 01:29:23.433
Yeah, it's true.

1246
01:29:23.453 --> 01:29:26.215
Touch is an elemental human comfort thing.

1247
01:29:26.675 --> 01:29:32.079
You described these three broadways of reversing trauma, the top-down approach, which is, I guess, talk therapy?

1248
01:29:32.179 --> 01:29:32.920
Yeah, yeah.

1249
01:29:33.200 --> 01:29:34.901
It's understanding, insight, et cetera.

1250
01:29:34.941 --> 01:29:35.942
And are you a fan of that?

1251
01:29:36.672 --> 01:29:43.338
No, basically, I'm such a cerebral person, so I'm very suspicious of that piece.

1252
01:29:43.358 --> 01:29:48.563
That's, you know, explaining things, understanding things is not my greatest handicap.

1253
01:29:49.564 --> 01:29:52.147
So I tend to downplay that, the importance of that.

1254
01:29:52.167 --> 01:29:54.129
Number two is taking medications.

1255
01:29:54.649 --> 01:29:54.910
Yeah.

1256
01:29:55.310 --> 01:29:57.872
Which is to shut down the body's alarm signals, essentially.

1257
01:29:57.892 --> 01:29:58.733
Yeah.

1258
01:29:59.474 --> 01:30:00.475
Are you a fan of that?

1259
01:30:00.979 --> 01:30:04.001
Well, that's how I started life off as a psychopharmacologist.

1260
01:30:04.522 --> 01:30:08.505
I did the first studies ever on Prozac and Zoro for PTSD.

1261
01:30:09.145 --> 01:30:10.807
And so they're not bad.

1262
01:30:11.707 --> 01:30:13.109
They can be helpful to people.

1263
01:30:13.489 --> 01:30:19.674
And the third approach, the bottom-up approach, is allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the helplessness or rage or trauma.

1264
01:30:20.294 --> 01:30:25.999
And this is really what you focus on, which are called somatic therapies, which target the body rather than the mind.

1265
01:30:26.799 --> 01:30:28.881
Well, it's a very important piece of...

1266
01:30:29.966 --> 01:30:40.990
And I very much think that's a very big missing piece in the therapy, mental health, and medical field in general to give people experiences of connection and pleasure.

1267
01:30:41.110 --> 01:30:42.630
That's terribly important.

1268
01:30:42.930 --> 01:30:59.036
But when I wrote this book before I got into psychedelic therapies, I would add another dimension of experiences that really blow your mind, that really allow you to have an alternate reality experience also.

1269
01:31:00.500 --> 01:31:05.083
In terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I'm a big matcha fan, if you don't already know by now.

1270
01:31:05.183 --> 01:31:09.366
And so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading matcha company called Perfect Ted.

1271
01:31:09.446 --> 01:31:19.332
And one of my favourite Perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavour from salted caramel to peach flavour to mint flavour to berry flavour.

1272
01:31:19.352 --> 01:31:22.855
One of my favourites is this vanilla flavour, which I'm going to make...

1273
01:31:23.655 --> 01:31:24.576
in just two seconds.

1274
01:31:24.596 --> 01:31:31.844
You just take this mixer here, get a little bit of the powder, pop it on top of the shaker like that, put the lid on.

1275
01:31:31.864 --> 01:31:35.748
Shake, shake, shake.

1276
01:31:39.552 --> 01:31:39.913
Delicious.

1277
01:31:40.450 --> 01:31:48.913
If you haven't tried this yet, you can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores or online where you can get 40% off with my code, Diary40.

1278
01:31:48.993 --> 01:31:54.354
Head to perfectted.com and put in code Diary40 to try this delicious multi-flavoured matcha now.

1279
01:31:54.695 --> 01:31:55.215
Highly recommend.

1280
01:31:55.235 --> 01:31:57.495
And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online.

1281
01:31:58.816 --> 01:31:59.636
Can the gym help?

1282
01:32:01.517 --> 01:32:02.057
Yeah.

1283
01:32:03.076 --> 01:32:06.745
But that tends to become a very solitary experience also.

1284
01:32:06.765 --> 01:32:09.111
You're sitting in your little treadmill watching Fox News.

1285
01:32:09.652 --> 01:32:11.316
It's not my ideal of trauma treatment.

1286
01:32:14.204 --> 01:32:15.646
Because I go to the gym, I lift weights.

1287
01:32:15.886 --> 01:32:18.709
And so I'm wondering if that's going to help me.

1288
01:32:19.390 --> 01:32:20.231
That's interesting.

1289
01:32:20.251 --> 01:32:25.536
Like one of my close colleagues, former friend, is a weightlifter.

1290
01:32:25.897 --> 01:32:31.763
And she really is very committed that lifting weights can be extremely helpful for trauma.

1291
01:32:32.224 --> 01:32:33.145
And when she says that...

1292
01:32:34.140 --> 01:32:35.141
I'm sure that's true for her.

1293
01:32:35.621 --> 01:32:37.623
And I wonder for how many other people that's true.

1294
01:32:38.364 --> 01:32:44.149
The trouble is that in their current system, you're not going to get the money to study weightlifting for trauma.

1295
01:32:45.250 --> 01:32:53.378
Even though you say it's helpful for you, my friend Mariah says it's helpful for you, I go like, interesting, let's see for how many people it's helpful.

1296
01:32:53.398 --> 01:32:53.658
It's helpful.

1297
01:32:54.646 --> 01:33:01.610
Yeah, one of the ways I think about it is actually a lot of the people that I've interviewed that are weightlifters are bullied kids.

1298
01:33:02.430 --> 01:33:10.254
I think about Mike, who I had on the show, Chrissy Cello, who I had on the show, both of them speak to, even Lane Norton, actually, I think he speaks to some early trauma as well.

1299
01:33:10.554 --> 01:33:17.638
They're kids that were bullied in some form or had a traumatic early upbringing, and they are just massive now.

1300
01:33:17.678 --> 01:33:21.260
And I wonder, you know, some people on the surface go, or even Leverking, actually,

1301
01:33:22.380 --> 01:33:25.782
You're that way because you're learning to defend yourself and to build your self-esteem.

1302
01:33:26.022 --> 01:33:28.963
But there's some... Yeah, but that gesture is not the right gesture.

1303
01:33:28.983 --> 01:33:31.084
Like, oh, you're just doing that because.

1304
01:33:31.224 --> 01:33:31.404
Yeah.

1305
01:33:31.704 --> 01:33:39.127
As if you're being dismissive, instead of saying, good for you, you're doing that because you felt so helpless and you want to build up your body.

1306
01:33:39.487 --> 01:33:39.907
Interesting.

1307
01:33:40.988 --> 01:33:46.130
My association is that I testified on behalf of many people who were abused by Catholic priests.

1308
01:33:47.170 --> 01:33:50.732
And almost to a person, they had become weightlifters and bodybuilders.

1309
01:33:51.811 --> 01:33:52.111
Really?

1310
01:33:52.151 --> 01:33:54.873
Really for the reason that you also mentioned.

1311
01:33:54.893 --> 01:33:59.817
They were just trying to bulk up to feel a sense of agency and power.

1312
01:34:00.317 --> 01:34:02.819
And it didn't work well enough for them.

1313
01:34:03.660 --> 01:34:05.741
So that alone wasn't enough.

1314
01:34:07.323 --> 01:34:10.805
I think you also needed to make a connection with the helplessness.

1315
01:34:11.165 --> 01:34:12.206
Psychedelic therapy.

1316
01:34:12.366 --> 01:34:12.566
Yeah.

1317
01:34:14.308 --> 01:34:15.889
What's your view on psychedelic therapy?

1318
01:34:15.909 --> 01:34:16.009
Yeah.

1319
01:34:16.554 --> 01:34:18.134
There's my own personal background.

1320
01:34:18.194 --> 01:34:19.715
Of course, I'm a child of the 60s.

1321
01:34:19.975 --> 01:34:23.075
So I knew about LSD.

1322
01:34:24.156 --> 01:34:35.898
And I think LSD for me at that time, I became a good medical student and came with the culture, stopped taking drugs.

1323
01:34:36.358 --> 01:34:38.799
But my memory of taking LSD was...

1324
01:34:39.952 --> 01:34:47.179
very positive in that at that time I got to see that I'm a very small part of a very large universe.

1325
01:34:47.440 --> 01:34:54.086
And whatever constructs I make in my mind are just very small constructs of a much larger reality.

1326
01:34:54.867 --> 01:35:01.454
And over time I've had quite a few of my friends have become very, very good scientists.

1327
01:35:02.095 --> 01:35:09.271
And they say the same thing about our early LSD experiences of really truly having opened up their minds to many possibilities.

1328
01:35:09.612 --> 01:35:11.476
But then the culture changed dramatically.

1329
01:35:11.798 --> 01:35:16.681
And they became illegal, criminalized, and people stopped doing it.

1330
01:35:16.821 --> 01:35:22.504
And then Rick Doblin and Michael Mithoffer started to open up the world of psychedelics.

1331
01:35:22.744 --> 01:35:26.807
And they asked me about it 50 years ago or something.

1332
01:35:27.527 --> 01:35:33.611
And I said, I think it's a great idea because when you are traumatized, you live in a very constricted world.

1333
01:35:34.391 --> 01:35:42.495
Basically, the trauma dominates your perceptions and regularly interferes with your exploring larger realities.

1334
01:35:42.975 --> 01:35:50.558
And I think in theory, having a psychedelic experience, a mind-opening experience, would be very helpful.

1335
01:35:50.858 --> 01:35:56.341
But I discourage them from doing it because they thought you'll never get by the regulatory practices.

1336
01:35:57.001 --> 01:36:16.786
And then they raised enough money and asked me if I wanted to run the Boston side of a very large study, which I was eager to do, where we compared very good psychotherapy by people who I largely had trained with psychotherapy plus MDMA, and the results were stunning.

1337
01:36:17.406 --> 01:36:17.946
You described?

1338
01:36:18.106 --> 01:36:18.866
Stunning.

1339
01:36:18.886 --> 01:36:22.807
I thought the therapy would be very helpful in many regards,

1340
01:36:27.068 --> 01:36:34.730
A little bit, but the MDMA vastly changed the situation.

1341
01:36:35.290 --> 01:36:42.132
And I wrote up the paper, but I'm actually astounded by how little that paper gets quoted.

1342
01:36:43.493 --> 01:36:50.635
I mainly focused on the so-called secondary data of the study, which was how trauma changes you experience of yourself.

1343
01:36:50.655 --> 01:36:51.595
Okay.

1344
01:36:51.795 --> 01:36:55.897
And what we saw is that people became much more aware of themselves.

1345
01:36:56.657 --> 01:36:58.838
People had compassion for themselves.

1346
01:36:59.638 --> 01:37:08.081
So people oftentimes went into their traumatic experience and had this sense of time of, oh my God, this happened to me.

1347
01:37:08.521 --> 01:37:09.561
That was so awful.

1348
01:37:09.581 --> 01:37:16.884
It happened to me personally also, actually, on psychedelics, of things coming up that you were unaware of.

1349
01:37:18.261 --> 01:37:20.223
were so vivid deep down inside.

1350
01:37:20.843 --> 01:37:24.347
And I think, oh, this poor kid, look what he went through.

1351
01:37:24.367 --> 01:37:25.348
He was so little.

1352
01:37:25.408 --> 01:37:26.288
He was so small.

1353
01:37:26.709 --> 01:37:27.910
He couldn't defend himself.

1354
01:37:28.390 --> 01:37:36.057
And so you get this very deep sense of self-compassion instead of the usual response of self-hatred and self-blame.

1355
01:37:37.078 --> 01:37:46.424
And then the next thing that we saw happen all the time is, and I was such a beautiful kid, and I had this alcoholic, violent father.

1356
01:37:46.444 --> 01:37:49.325
I'm not talking about myself, but good.

1357
01:37:50.766 --> 01:37:55.109
And my poor dad, he never got to really enjoy this beautiful kid that he had.

1358
01:37:55.969 --> 01:37:57.590
And they have compassion for their perpetrators.

1359
01:37:58.387 --> 01:38:05.395
Like, it's an astounding compassion-opening drug, which is what we have been looking for in so many areas in life.

1360
01:38:06.076 --> 01:38:09.039
You call psychedelics a true revolution?

1361
01:38:09.359 --> 01:38:10.481
Yeah, it is, yeah.

1362
01:38:10.801 --> 01:38:14.125
And you say it's a particular revolution because we don't know how it works, and I was looking at some stats.

1363
01:38:14.145 --> 01:38:15.827
No, we don't know how anything works, you know.

1364
01:38:16.986 --> 01:38:18.086
We just have a bunch of hypotheses.

1365
01:38:18.166 --> 01:38:25.508
I was looking at some stats that say MDMA therapy assisted, which is an important point.

1366
01:38:25.528 --> 01:38:26.208
Yeah, that's what we did, yeah.

1367
01:38:26.388 --> 01:38:30.609
Assisted with a therapist there or someone who's a practitioner there.

1368
01:38:31.189 --> 01:38:44.853
A phase three clinical trial reported that 67% of participants who received MDMA-assisted therapy no longer met the PTSD criteria compared to 30-odd percent in the placebo group,

1369
01:38:47.213 --> 01:38:48.734
drastic change.

1370
01:38:49.114 --> 01:38:52.415
That is the main paper on which I'm also an author.

1371
01:38:52.835 --> 01:38:53.835
It gets quoted.

1372
01:38:54.996 --> 01:39:02.058
But what I think is more important, not whether the PTSD did so well, but people's relationship to themselves changed.

1373
01:39:03.878 --> 01:39:08.280
And my other paper describes that actually, but it doesn't get quoted as much.

1374
01:39:08.920 --> 01:39:10.661
People can focus on the PTSD.

1375
01:39:12.021 --> 01:39:14.682
The real issue is, do you love yourself?

1376
01:39:15.798 --> 01:39:16.579
Is your heart open?

1377
01:39:17.541 --> 01:39:19.264
Are you open to new experiences?

1378
01:39:19.584 --> 01:39:28.799
You know, not do we have this little list of symptoms in the PTSD scale, but are you a human being who embraces himself as a human being?

1379
01:39:30.115 --> 01:39:33.998
So really interesting studies around treatment-resistant depression as well.

1380
01:39:34.959 --> 01:39:49.292
One with psilocybin, which is what people know as magic mushrooms, a treatment-resistant depression study in 2021 showed that a single dose of psilocybin led to a significant reduction in depression, with effects lasting up to six weeks for many participants.

1381
01:39:49.652 --> 01:39:52.735
30% of participants were in remission after three weeks.

1382
01:39:52.755 --> 01:39:52.835
Yep.

1383
01:39:53.215 --> 01:40:08.079
And a study by Johns Hopkins University showed that 71% of participants experienced a more than 50% reduction in symptoms after two psilocybin sessions, with 54% achieving remission four weeks after the treatment.

1384
01:40:08.439 --> 01:40:16.520
And the last study that I'll share is a follow-up study found that nearly 60% of participants maintained reductions in depression symptoms one year after treatment.

1385
01:40:16.841 --> 01:40:21.242
But these compounds aren't even legal in America and the UK yet.

1386
01:40:21.282 --> 01:40:21.962
That's right.

1387
01:40:23.302 --> 01:40:23.863
Ketamine is.

1388
01:40:24.384 --> 01:40:27.629
And we do a fair amount of ketamine-assisted therapy these days.

1389
01:40:28.170 --> 01:40:37.523
And I'm intrigued that ketamine seems to have similar effects to psilocybin and MDMA, even though they're completely different chemical substances.

1390
01:40:38.084 --> 01:40:40.025
Have you ever done a psychedelic drug?

1391
01:40:40.345 --> 01:40:40.905
Yeah, of course.

1392
01:40:41.506 --> 01:40:45.988
As part of my being PI of this MDMA study, I had to do MDMA.

1393
01:40:46.728 --> 01:40:53.952
But for example, I thought MDMA was ecstasy and gave you a place of pleasure

1394
01:40:55.350 --> 01:41:00.837
As part of my job, I had to take MDMA myself, and I was ready for my magical experience.

1395
01:41:00.857 --> 01:41:01.918
I'd never done it before.

1396
01:41:02.499 --> 01:41:06.504
And instead, I'd always poo-poo the issue of vicarious trauma.

1397
01:41:06.704 --> 01:41:09.928
No, it didn't really hurt me all that much to see all this trauma in the world.

1398
01:41:10.509 --> 01:41:14.273
And while I was having my MDMA experiences, all the trauma test people

1399
01:41:15.154 --> 01:41:17.735
pain that I had experienced over the time came back.

1400
01:41:17.875 --> 01:41:22.998
I lied there for eight hours in agony going, oh my God, oh my God.

1401
01:41:23.118 --> 01:41:29.241
And I got in touch with that, hearing all these trauma stories did have had a profound effect on me.

1402
01:41:30.282 --> 01:41:31.723
And so I was really changed by that.

1403
01:41:31.823 --> 01:41:35.545
And the May experience, I became a much sadder, but somewhat wiser man.

1404
01:41:36.525 --> 01:41:37.466
You became a sadder man.

1405
01:41:37.986 --> 01:41:38.566
Absolutely.

1406
01:41:38.686 --> 01:41:39.947
I really felt all the pain.

1407
01:41:41.183 --> 01:41:42.484
Much more deeply, yeah.

1408
01:41:43.564 --> 01:41:49.888
I was able to sort of ball it off onto that point, and the ball came down, and it was quite painful.

1409
01:41:51.249 --> 01:42:01.275
But what helped me is that my guide, Michael Mithoffer, when I told him how I felt like a failure, having had such painful experience, he said, yeah, I know.

1410
01:42:02.035 --> 01:42:09.680
I used to be an emergency room physician, and one of my psychedelic experiences, all the patients who died in my hands, came to visit me.

1411
01:42:13.391 --> 01:42:19.523
So that was helpful for me because it made me feel like I had a connection with another human being.

1412
01:42:20.064 --> 01:42:22.829
And that context is terribly important.

1413
01:42:23.390 --> 01:42:24.753
And that's really what Martin did.

1414
01:42:26.357 --> 01:42:30.401
issues are about right now, and I think we may very well lose that.

1415
01:42:30.581 --> 01:42:40.632
And that is that clearly you need to do psychedelics in very safe conditions with a lot of support.

1416
01:42:41.653 --> 01:42:48.440
And that the set and setting of psychedelics, which the Hopkins study also took very good care of all the studies you mentioned.

1417
01:42:49.200 --> 01:42:51.881
did it, is that the context is terribly important.

1418
01:42:51.962 --> 01:42:58.224
And while you're in these experiences, the environment needs to be completely supportive and safe and be there for you.

1419
01:42:59.045 --> 01:43:08.109
And what our world, profit-driven world, is looking for is to give people sake of advice, give them one pill and go off by yourself and then deal with it.

1420
01:43:08.629 --> 01:43:16.933
The majority of the people in our study said to us when the study was over, I couldn't have done this if you guys hadn't been here with me.

1421
01:43:17.448 --> 01:43:20.871
Did that experience with psychedelics, the MDMA experience you had, change you?

1422
01:43:21.552 --> 01:43:22.193
Yeah, I think it did.

1423
01:43:22.413 --> 01:43:28.639
It made me a much more humble person and much more compassionate to people in general.

1424
01:43:29.339 --> 01:43:30.060
Just one dose?

1425
01:43:30.460 --> 01:43:32.442
Well, I've had some other experiences.

1426
01:43:32.583 --> 01:43:36.346
Also, I've had a number of other really painful experiences on psychedelics.

1427
01:43:36.386 --> 01:43:36.767
Yeah.

1428
01:43:37.627 --> 01:43:39.469
And it made me much more...

1429
01:43:40.009 --> 01:43:43.732
So, you know, people say, oh, how's your life gone?

1430
01:43:44.172 --> 01:43:53.238
I became much more aware to what degree my quest for understanding trauma had to do with me than... And I learned more after age 70, actually.

1431
01:43:53.879 --> 01:43:54.199
Really?

1432
01:43:54.239 --> 01:43:55.340
Yeah.

1433
01:43:56.300 --> 01:43:58.362
Earlier on, I asked if people could heal from their trauma.

1434
01:43:58.662 --> 01:43:58.882
Yeah.

1435
01:43:59.422 --> 01:44:00.363
Have you healed from yours?

1436
01:44:01.764 --> 01:44:03.205
No, healing is a complex word.

1437
01:44:03.325 --> 01:44:05.747
I would say, yes, I'm doing well.

1438
01:44:07.118 --> 01:44:10.380
as do many people I've worked with.

1439
01:44:10.521 --> 01:44:15.624
But I think the real power of my book is that it's a very hopeful book.

1440
01:44:16.785 --> 01:44:26.052
Every chapter tells stories about people who are better, and as much science as I've been able to do, I've proven how helpful EMDR can be.

1441
01:44:26.092 --> 01:44:27.473
I've proven how well yoga can be.

1442
01:44:27.473 --> 01:44:29.814
We have proven how well neurofeedback can do.

1443
01:44:29.834 --> 01:44:38.797
That's really been my mission, is to not only be an advocate, but really say, let's do the science and see how well it works and for whom.

1444
01:44:40.518 --> 01:44:40.698
Yeah.

1445
01:44:41.878 --> 01:44:49.881
What is the, of all the things that you've tried in your life to help you with your own personal trauma, what are the things that have personally helped you the most?

1446
01:44:51.342 --> 01:44:56.604
There's another thing that's really helped me and that got me into theatre is the issue of psychoparmer.

1447
01:44:57.057 --> 01:44:57.737
Psychodrama.

1448
01:44:58.398 --> 01:45:03.440
Yeah, the chapter in the book, and I've never done the science behind it, but I still love doing it.

1449
01:45:04.020 --> 01:45:11.603
And that is when you act out things in three-dimensional space, it becomes a completely different phenomenon.

1450
01:45:11.683 --> 01:45:14.884
If I tell you, let's put your family in this room.

1451
01:45:15.124 --> 01:45:16.485
Yeah.

1452
01:45:17.345 --> 01:45:22.868
And I say, when you choose somebody to play the role of your dad, where would you put your dad?

1453
01:45:24.808 --> 01:45:26.189
You know where you would put your dad.

1454
01:45:27.426 --> 01:45:29.147
I'd put my dad in this room right now.

1455
01:45:29.367 --> 01:45:30.048
I'd put him there.

1456
01:45:30.288 --> 01:45:30.608
Right there.

1457
01:45:31.089 --> 01:45:31.309
Yeah.

1458
01:45:31.929 --> 01:45:32.750
Not there, but there.

1459
01:45:33.010 --> 01:45:33.350
Yeah, yeah.

1460
01:45:33.750 --> 01:45:35.692
So that's what the hell is happening here.

1461
01:45:35.752 --> 01:45:37.073
You know precisely where you want him.

1462
01:45:37.573 --> 01:45:42.616
And if somebody would play that role for you, the feelings to which your dad would come up.

1463
01:45:43.237 --> 01:45:49.521
Maybe even in your imagination to some degree right now, if you imagine your dad there, that's the first thing that comes to your mind.

1464
01:45:51.638 --> 01:45:58.561
Well, I put my dad at the head of the table that we're at because he was always at the head of the table in my household.

1465
01:45:59.001 --> 01:46:02.823
He was always the one when we're at a table who was in charge of us eating.

1466
01:46:03.263 --> 01:46:05.584
And what sort of reaction would you have as you see him here?

1467
01:46:09.722 --> 01:46:20.470
It's complicated because one of the reactions is like, one of the reactions I had is when he sits there, he's in charge.

1468
01:46:21.230 --> 01:46:26.234
But now as an adult, I have this other feeling, which is like, no, I'm in charge now because I'm the head of the table.

1469
01:46:26.254 --> 01:46:27.835
I'm the head of my household.

1470
01:46:28.335 --> 01:46:31.297
So it's just this authority thing of like, yeah.

1471
01:46:31.337 --> 01:46:32.058
Does it come up?

1472
01:46:33.533 --> 01:46:37.397
It doesn't come up abstractly, but concretely when you're sitting there, it comes up.

1473
01:46:37.457 --> 01:46:39.980
And you may say, actually, Dad, I'm the boss now.

1474
01:46:40.901 --> 01:46:41.141
Yeah.

1475
01:46:41.181 --> 01:46:43.543
Or I hate that you're being the boss.

1476
01:46:43.564 --> 01:46:45.906
Or something, something comes up.

1477
01:46:45.926 --> 01:46:46.487
My freedom.

1478
01:46:46.587 --> 01:46:54.074
And what is striking is that for everybody, when they put that virtual person in the room, the feelings towards that person become very vivid.

1479
01:46:54.094 --> 01:46:54.775
Yeah.

1480
01:46:54.895 --> 01:46:58.497
And it overlaps quite different from what the story that people tell actually.

1481
01:46:58.617 --> 01:47:00.197
It brings up the three-dimensional.

1482
01:47:01.598 --> 01:47:05.820
And oftentimes, people have had harsh and neglectful fathers.

1483
01:47:06.400 --> 01:47:12.983
And then what I say, at some point after you do things with him, I may even say, you want to hate your dad?

1484
01:47:15.384 --> 01:47:16.585
Possibly, I might actually.

1485
01:47:18.845 --> 01:47:19.806
Do that, actually.

1486
01:47:19.866 --> 01:47:24.310
Have you hit your dad, put a pillow in front of him, and have some people hold him.

1487
01:47:24.691 --> 01:47:28.294
But to feel it, oh my God, if I could have done that, would it be so great?

1488
01:47:28.434 --> 01:47:29.775
Or how guilty I feel.

1489
01:47:29.795 --> 01:47:33.939
So you do something virtually, but you could never do it in your words.

1490
01:47:34.680 --> 01:47:41.226
And then I would say, would you like to pick somebody in this room to play the role of the dad that you always wanted?

1491
01:47:42.147 --> 01:47:43.008
The dad you always wanted.

1492
01:47:43.520 --> 01:47:50.182
And then you choose somebody, and I encourage you to see how you would like that person to hold you.

1493
01:47:52.043 --> 01:47:57.825
And when you have that, you usually have a very deep emotional release.

1494
01:47:57.845 --> 01:48:08.249
And say, oh my God, if my dad would have helped me like that when I was three years old or five years old or eight years old and I needed this, my life would have been completely different.

1495
01:48:09.449 --> 01:48:12.210
And so you make a virtual new reality.

1496
01:48:14.112 --> 01:48:16.954
that is physical and visceral with other people.

1497
01:48:17.634 --> 01:48:21.716
And the memory of what it feels like can be very profound.

1498
01:48:23.316 --> 01:48:25.077
And you're doing this with a group of people?

1499
01:48:25.097 --> 01:48:27.938
I do this about four times a year with a group of people.

1500
01:48:28.438 --> 01:48:34.321
It's my favorite clinical activity because I'm always just so astounded by what comes out of it.

1501
01:48:37.502 --> 01:48:40.025
It's almost role playing your past.

1502
01:48:40.245 --> 01:48:45.451
Role playing, but you really, because you work in three dimensional space, it feels much more real.

1503
01:48:46.632 --> 01:48:57.885
And so, but therapists usually, they have this hope that if I'm respectful and caring towards you, I'll give you a reparative emotional experience.

1504
01:48:58.806 --> 01:49:04.231
that will give you the feeling of what it would have been like if you had gotten that in the past.

1505
01:49:04.891 --> 01:49:09.035
And what my old teacher said was, it's a mismatch.

1506
01:49:10.036 --> 01:49:18.664
I, as an 18-year-old guy, cannot give you, as a 30-something-year-old guy, the feeling of what it would have been like if your mom would have loved you at age three.

1507
01:49:20.165 --> 01:49:20.926
We cannot do that.

1508
01:49:21.686 --> 01:49:30.710
But in these theoretical enterprises in three-dimensional space, very physical, you do get an imprint of, oh, that is what it felt like.

1509
01:49:30.730 --> 01:49:31.891
That's what I was missing.

1510
01:49:32.251 --> 01:49:36.813
So it's a very powerful way of creating a virtual reality.

1511
01:49:38.598 --> 01:49:43.923
So the subject matter of ADHD has become very popular in culture.

1512
01:49:44.243 --> 01:49:52.171
In 2022, approximately 11% of children aged 3 to 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD, up from 9% roughly in 2016.

1513
01:49:52.211 --> 01:49:55.154
And in the UK, between 2000 and 2018, ADHD diagnosis in adults rose 20-fold.

1514
01:49:55.334 --> 01:49:55.474
What?

1515
01:50:01.159 --> 01:50:06.501
with a 20-fold increase in medication prescriptions among men aged 18 to 29.

1516
01:50:06.941 --> 01:50:08.442
And that's from the NHR.

1517
01:50:08.522 --> 01:50:18.405
And in Australia over the past decade, ADHD medication has surged nearly 300%, with more than a 450% increase among adults and a significant rise among women.

1518
01:50:19.665 --> 01:50:20.646
What is going on here?

1519
01:50:21.446 --> 01:50:23.887
I really see that somewhat differently from...

1520
01:50:24.767 --> 01:50:26.428
the way you guys talked about it before.

1521
01:50:26.969 --> 01:50:30.691
And that is all these things are on a continuum.

1522
01:50:31.832 --> 01:50:36.755
You don't have PTSD or you don't have ADHD or you don't have ADHD.

1523
01:50:37.055 --> 01:50:38.496
These are no binary issues.

1524
01:50:39.136 --> 01:50:42.699
And so there's a capacity to focus, to pay attention, to...

1525
01:50:43.359 --> 01:50:47.180
be flexible in your attention is a dimensional issue.

1526
01:50:47.820 --> 01:50:49.141
A dimensional issue.

1527
01:50:49.161 --> 01:50:50.941
So some people have it better more than others.

1528
01:50:51.021 --> 01:50:55.783
Some people cannot sit still at all, and other people can sit still under certain conditions.

1529
01:50:55.843 --> 01:50:56.803
Other people can't.

1530
01:50:56.823 --> 01:51:00.304
So it's not like you have ADHD or not.

1531
01:51:00.724 --> 01:51:06.566
You may have some issues staying focused or staying still or paying attention.

1532
01:51:07.766 --> 01:51:10.207
There may be many underlying issues.

1533
01:51:10.387 --> 01:51:10.807
It may be,

1534
01:51:11.387 --> 01:51:15.730
that your mom took some toxins while she was pregnant with you.

1535
01:51:16.070 --> 01:51:18.972
It's possible that it is in your genes.

1536
01:51:19.812 --> 01:51:27.737
Just about every traumatized kid I've ever seen met criteria for ADHD because trauma really messes up your capacity to focus and concentrate.

1537
01:51:28.137 --> 01:51:29.738
So this is not an entity.

1538
01:51:29.778 --> 01:51:31.959
It is a fictitious entity.

1539
01:51:32.760 --> 01:51:34.881
It's not like cancer of the gallbladder.

1540
01:51:36.003 --> 01:51:40.106
is not having astrocytoma in your brain.

1541
01:51:40.126 --> 01:51:46.790
And these mental phenomena are networks of complicated ways of organizing your mind.

1542
01:51:47.470 --> 01:51:49.872
And our diagnostic system just sucks.

1543
01:51:50.837 --> 01:51:53.300
When I spoke to Gabor Mate, do you know Gabor Mate?

1544
01:51:53.360 --> 01:51:53.840
Yeah, sure.

1545
01:51:54.060 --> 01:51:57.224
Yeah, he was describing what ADHD was to me.

1546
01:51:57.424 --> 01:52:04.711
And he said he reviews it as a response to early childhood stress and trauma rather than purely genetic or neurological.

1547
01:52:04.832 --> 01:52:05.933
Well, but I wouldn't say that.

1548
01:52:06.273 --> 01:52:08.375
I'd say it could be genetic.

1549
01:52:08.876 --> 01:52:09.777
It could be toxic.

1550
01:52:09.857 --> 01:52:10.658
It could be trauma.

1551
01:52:11.378 --> 01:52:12.900
This is the surface behavior.

1552
01:52:14.187 --> 01:52:15.949
of not being able to focus and concentrate.

1553
01:52:16.369 --> 01:52:19.792
Like my son certainly had criteria, met criteria with ADHD.

1554
01:52:21.033 --> 01:52:26.737
My son, other than that he disappointed me, was not a particularly traumatized kid.

1555
01:52:27.458 --> 01:52:29.380
No, he really had real issues

1556
01:52:30.617 --> 01:52:33.940
organically based, but that he outgrew also at some point.

1557
01:52:34.361 --> 01:52:36.382
So these things are not stable.

1558
01:52:36.403 --> 01:52:40.326
These are configurations that you can grow with over time.

1559
01:52:40.747 --> 01:52:43.129
And they're not multi...

1560
01:52:43.289 --> 01:52:44.690
They're multifactorial.

1561
01:52:46.152 --> 01:52:47.313
They're surface phenomena.

1562
01:52:47.793 --> 01:52:50.155
Because I was diagnosed with ADHD, but the way...

1563
01:52:52.271 --> 01:52:57.494
other people that have ADHD have just like drastically different symptoms to me.

1564
01:52:57.614 --> 01:52:58.694
Like drastically different.

1565
01:52:58.874 --> 01:53:00.195
Like we're not the same people at all.

1566
01:53:00.215 --> 01:53:01.635
We're not even close to the same ballpark.

1567
01:53:01.655 --> 01:53:05.577
Like, for example, I'm really good at focusing on something for quite a long time if I'm interested.

1568
01:53:06.038 --> 01:53:11.160
Whereas I often hear people with certain types of ADHD be very unfocused on things.

1569
01:53:11.720 --> 01:53:18.423
And so I have struggled with understanding what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD when there can be so many types.

1570
01:53:18.884 --> 01:53:19.424
Yeah, that's right.

1571
01:53:19.624 --> 01:53:21.265
So it almost makes me feel that...

1572
01:53:21.765 --> 01:53:29.488
the label, the singular label which we share, although there's all these subtypes, isn't necessarily helping me to understand myself in any way.

1573
01:53:29.608 --> 01:53:30.489
Yeah.

1574
01:53:30.769 --> 01:53:38.072
I would really... Everybody who is serious about this stuff knows that our diagnostic system totally sucks.

1575
01:53:38.712 --> 01:53:38.932
Really?

1576
01:53:39.152 --> 01:53:39.913
Yeah.

1577
01:53:39.933 --> 01:53:42.994
It's just a total artifact of...

1578
01:53:43.614 --> 01:53:47.317
I was sitting in a room 40 years ago making up a little list of diagnoses.

1579
01:53:47.337 --> 01:53:49.438
There's no scientific validity to this.

1580
01:53:49.518 --> 01:53:55.042
Actually, PTSD is one of the more scientifically reliable diagnoses of all the diagnoses.

1581
01:53:55.462 --> 01:53:59.344
There are just very primitive ways of categorizing human mind.

1582
01:53:59.905 --> 01:54:02.907
And we know so much more and we should move beyond that.

1583
01:54:02.927 --> 01:54:06.789
And everybody who knows something about science knows that we should move beyond it.

1584
01:54:07.149 --> 01:54:07.810
But we are not.

1585
01:54:08.070 --> 01:54:08.250
Why?

1586
01:54:08.971 --> 01:54:12.253
I think we're not doing it because our focus is not on helping people.

1587
01:54:12.955 --> 01:54:16.508
Our focus is on bonding successful financial organizations.

1588
01:54:19.306 --> 01:54:28.291
You know, I teach neurofeedback, and there's a chapter on neurofeedback there, and there's serious research on neurofeedback, and we do neurofeedback trainings.

1589
01:54:28.371 --> 01:54:38.976
And so the head of an insurance company took a training with me in neurofeedback, and he pulled me aside and said, Bessel, of course, you know, as a head of an insurance company, I'm not interested in getting people better.

1590
01:54:39.817 --> 01:54:43.419
I'm interested in having as many subscribers to my plan as I can.

1591
01:54:44.052 --> 01:54:49.236
You know, if we really went back to being real doctors, we'd say, how do I get you better?

1592
01:54:49.576 --> 01:54:50.657
What is wrong with you?

1593
01:54:51.317 --> 01:55:11.792
And we know so much about neuroscience these days, about how the brain organizes information, that it's time to actually update ourselves to 2024 and start thinking about networks in the brain and what part of the brain is connected with the butt and mental functioning at different ages and what kids understand at age three, which is different than age five,

1594
01:55:12.452 --> 01:55:17.879
And think in terms of how well is your brain able to filter out a relevant information?

1595
01:55:18.941 --> 01:55:22.546
How well is your brain able to be still and quiet?

1596
01:55:23.106 --> 01:55:25.830
And how well are you able to take on a task and complete it?

1597
01:55:26.870 --> 01:55:29.112
How do I not raise a traumatized kid?

1598
01:55:29.132 --> 01:55:31.594
Because I'm going to have kids probably quite soon, hopefully.

1599
01:55:32.935 --> 01:55:35.697
And I don't want to raise traumatized kids.

1600
01:55:36.598 --> 01:55:39.160
Be sure to listen to people in your environment.

1601
01:55:39.180 --> 01:55:40.301
Don't raise them by yourself.

1602
01:55:40.361 --> 01:55:47.587
I think raising a kid by yourself, you'll give the full brunt of your own pathology.

1603
01:55:47.928 --> 01:55:50.350
So it's very important for a kid to be raised by a number of people.

1604
01:55:50.850 --> 01:55:56.932
So the kid gets to see, oh, my dad is a little bit reactive, but my neighbor across the street is much calmer.

1605
01:55:57.052 --> 01:56:06.754
And so the kid gets to see multiple perspectives as all of us idealize African villages as people having many different parents who look after you.

1606
01:56:06.914 --> 01:56:07.594
It takes a village.

1607
01:56:07.654 --> 01:56:08.394
It takes a village.

1608
01:56:08.434 --> 01:56:15.616
I think kids need to be really part of a large environment where they can see their parents as safe people, but also flawed people.

1609
01:56:16.787 --> 01:56:24.471
And the more nuclear you get, the harder it gets to keep your pathology out of your kid's life, actually.

1610
01:56:25.012 --> 01:56:28.774
So community is everything, also in terms of raising a child.

1611
01:56:29.834 --> 01:56:34.437
Is there anything that you think is healing towards trauma, childhood trauma, all forms of trauma that we haven't talked about?

1612
01:56:36.068 --> 01:56:45.895
Well, the critical issue is that trauma is about being helpless and not nobody coming to your rescue.

1613
01:56:47.035 --> 01:56:55.841
And so it's very important to have the experience that if you really cannot do something or get scared, that somebody comes to your help at this point.

1614
01:56:56.562 --> 01:57:02.486
And you get an imprint that even when I feel really bad, somebody will come and be there for me.

1615
01:57:03.767 --> 01:57:05.228
And that is what many people miss.

1616
01:57:06.494 --> 01:57:16.463
When you have a drunken parent, we see this all the time in our practice, people have a violent parent, usually defile, but not always.

1617
01:57:17.223 --> 01:57:24.870
And then mom or dad, in my case more my dad than my mom, turns a blind eye.

1618
01:57:26.335 --> 01:57:31.358
and doesn't say, I'll take care of you, even though the other parent is hurting you.

1619
01:57:32.079 --> 01:57:44.326
And the betrayal of a parent to let the other parent do terrible things to them and not really say, no, you cannot do this to my kid, is a huge thing for many people.

1620
01:57:45.747 --> 01:57:46.547
That's interesting.

1621
01:57:46.707 --> 01:57:46.948
Yeah.

1622
01:57:48.589 --> 01:57:53.071
And it's having bystanders who do not come to your help.

1623
01:57:53.712 --> 01:57:54.332
Very big deal.

1624
01:57:55.812 --> 01:57:59.796
And the way to recover from that is to contract it with adult information.

1625
01:57:59.816 --> 01:58:00.376
Yeah.

1626
01:58:02.999 --> 01:58:05.181
Have life experience where people come to your help.

1627
01:58:05.241 --> 01:58:11.847
And I think being part of a sports team, being part of a theater group, being part of a musical group.

1628
01:58:12.708 --> 01:58:14.889
How people really feel, now it's your turn, come in.

1629
01:58:14.989 --> 01:58:24.914
And you know, I think the issue of rhythmicity and synchronicity is really at the core of our internal sense of safety and belonging.

1630
01:58:26.595 --> 01:58:31.337
Vessel, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

1631
01:58:32.057 --> 01:58:40.621
And the question that's been left for you is, what do you believe is the question that the audience have just heard this conversation or screaming down the camera?

1632
01:58:42.114 --> 01:58:45.557
The question is, where do I get the help I need?

1633
01:58:45.577 --> 01:58:50.922
I think that's really the big thing, because it is so hard.

1634
01:58:51.042 --> 01:58:53.324
It is such an exploration.

1635
01:58:53.865 --> 01:58:55.326
Almost everybody who I know

1636
01:58:56.269 --> 01:58:59.871
who have found a way of getting better, has been an explorer.

1637
01:59:01.312 --> 01:59:05.154
And quite an accidental explorer.

1638
01:59:05.895 --> 01:59:09.117
And then I found this karate teacher.

1639
01:59:09.177 --> 01:59:10.858
And then I found this yoga teacher.

1640
01:59:10.898 --> 01:59:13.839
And then I found this psychodramatist.

1641
01:59:14.640 --> 01:59:17.842
But it's very largely accidental.

1642
01:59:18.582 --> 01:59:21.644
I think the mainstream is not on the white road.

1643
01:59:23.953 --> 01:59:26.399
So you have to discover what works for you.

1644
01:59:26.419 --> 01:59:30.750
And that's a very tough one because you'll feel stupid and ignorant.

1645
01:59:31.351 --> 01:59:32.775
And if something is not helping you,

1646
01:59:33.821 --> 01:59:35.682
It is very hard for yourself.

1647
01:59:35.843 --> 01:59:41.447
This is not helping me because this person is not helping me.

1648
01:59:41.807 --> 01:59:46.570
Rather than blaming yourself, there must be something wrong with me that is not helpful for you.

1649
01:59:47.131 --> 01:59:50.633
And making that distinction is a very tough one.

1650
01:59:51.214 --> 01:59:52.214
I know it from my experience.

1651
01:59:52.575 --> 01:59:59.200
I've been in treatments for long periods of time, despite all my qualifications, where it took me a long time to go like...

1652
01:59:59.960 --> 02:00:01.503
I'm wasting my time and my money.

1653
02:00:02.524 --> 02:00:06.871
And if you don't have my education and background, it's even harder to say I'm wasting my time.

1654
02:00:08.706 --> 02:00:11.628
It's interesting as you're speaking, I was reflecting on the things that...

1655
02:00:12.148 --> 02:00:17.110
I was thinking a lot about this idea of community and you're talking about how being in sports teams helps.

1656
02:00:17.390 --> 02:00:29.116
And I was thinking about in my adult life, in some of my most difficult times, when things were difficult and I went and played football or some kind of sports with a group of people, I just felt radically better.

1657
02:00:29.136 --> 02:00:33.479
And I think actually I put it down to, oh, well, because, you know, I did some exercise.

1658
02:00:33.959 --> 02:00:35.199
But I actually think there's something deeper.

1659
02:00:35.320 --> 02:00:35.580
Oh, no.

1660
02:00:36.300 --> 02:00:37.161
It's that connection.

1661
02:00:37.681 --> 02:00:39.382
Passing that ball, somebody catching it.

1662
02:00:39.402 --> 02:00:41.023
You know, I made a difference.

1663
02:00:41.803 --> 02:00:42.464
Playing music.

1664
02:00:43.204 --> 02:00:46.366
My little piece of music that I made, made a better place.

1665
02:00:46.526 --> 02:00:48.227
Being in a theatre group.

1666
02:00:48.947 --> 02:00:49.488
Being a cook.

1667
02:00:50.348 --> 02:00:53.610
You know, there's many dimensions along which you can do that.

1668
02:00:53.650 --> 02:00:57.592
Many of us, especially, I think, adult men don't have these kind of things.

1669
02:00:57.612 --> 02:00:59.854
I mean, we go to watch Manchester United play or something like that.

1670
02:00:59.874 --> 02:01:01.234
We go to football ground.

1671
02:01:01.254 --> 02:01:03.736
But maybe we need to fill our lives with more of these things.

1672
02:01:04.087 --> 02:01:04.487
Yeah, we do.

1673
02:01:04.648 --> 02:01:04.908
I think.

1674
02:01:05.588 --> 02:01:08.331
And we should say it to ourselves because I need to do more of that also.

1675
02:01:08.751 --> 02:01:09.052
Yeah.

1676
02:01:09.092 --> 02:01:13.015
Well, we kind of just assume that society is designed in such a way where it'll give us what we need.

1677
02:01:13.055 --> 02:01:13.255
Yeah.

1678
02:01:13.436 --> 02:01:13.616
Yeah.

1679
02:01:14.136 --> 02:01:23.064
But in fact, if you think about the loneliness stats and the way things, even like the pub is less pubs on the high street, shutting down across the UK and less community centers.

1680
02:01:23.084 --> 02:01:23.765
The church is.

1681
02:01:23.925 --> 02:01:26.908
A good example is I grew up singing all the time.

1682
02:01:28.049 --> 02:01:30.250
And people around me made me sing in schools.

1683
02:01:30.810 --> 02:01:32.311
And now then we got iPods.

1684
02:01:32.671 --> 02:01:34.292
Aren't we lucky we got iPods?

1685
02:01:35.012 --> 02:01:38.234
And then before too long you stop singing and you start listening to your iPod.

1686
02:01:39.754 --> 02:01:45.497
And so technology has been an unbelievable blessing and what a curse it has been for us.

1687
02:01:46.137 --> 02:01:46.317
Yeah.

1688
02:01:48.144 --> 02:01:52.387
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, thank you so much for the work that you do.

1689
02:01:52.588 --> 02:02:08.621
As I said to you before we started recording, you have so many extremely passionate followers, advocates, fans, because your work has made them completely rethink and understand their lived experience and also given them a much more optimistic, hopeful cure.

1690
02:02:09.461 --> 02:02:36.427
or treatment for their lived experience one of which is my partner who when she she's been telling me for three years to get you on this show and was so extremely excited i think it's the happiest i've made her in the last three years when i said that you'd agreed to come on but that for me is such a personal and sort of local um sign of evidence of the impact you have on people it is tremendous so thank you on behalf of all of those people for the work that you do and please do keep on doing it because it's opening all of our eyes and you too thank you

1691
02:02:41.310 --> 02:02:42.751
Isn't this cool?

1692
02:02:42.911 --> 02:02:51.658
Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO.

1693
02:02:52.098 --> 02:03:00.705
And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home.

1694
02:03:01.285 --> 02:03:12.497
So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question.

1695
02:03:12.677 --> 02:03:18.323
We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.

1696
02:03:18.783 --> 02:03:26.248
The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com.

1697
02:03:26.408 --> 02:03:28.189
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1698
02:03:28.229 --> 02:03:34.373
So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.