Change Your Brain Every Day - Born Into A Cult The Unbelievable True Story Of One Mans Escape From Scientology

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Abandoned at birth and handed over to Scientology's paramilitary wing, Jamie Mustard spent his first years in a slum-like "orphanage" where babies were stacked in bunks, starved of human touch, and bathed only once a week in filthy water. Decades later, he's a celebrated author, artist, and survivor. And now, he's exposing the global network of abuse that destroyed thousands of children's lives.   In this jaw-dropping conversation with Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen, Jamie reveals how he escaped a billion-year contract, overcame illiteracy and shame, and discovered the neuroscience of healing trauma through brain health. This is one of the most harrowing—and hopeful—survivor stories ever told on the podcast.   You'll learn: • What really happened to children inside Scientology's secret compounds • Why he called himself "Child X" • How he survived a pressure-cooker environment "kind of like Lord of the Flies" • How medical neglect nearly cost him his hearing… and his life • How a celebrated author could grow up feeling "stupid" • Why shame kept him silent for decades • How trauma rewires the nervous system… and how to reset it • The radical treatment that erased decades of his anxiety in 20 minutes • Why so many of the kids he grew up with were lost to addiction and suicide   Jamie's new book, Child X: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Slavery-Poverty-Celebrity-Scientology/dp/163774708X

That's one of the reasons we continue to hold on to the shame is because we're told we're crazy after we survive it. What did trauma look like in your life? An anxiety so hard, so turned up, and so deep that it felt like a limb. I was animalized, just unbelievable living conditions. What's a word for shame times a thousand? Right. This occurred to thousands of kids on four continents over 40 years. Jamie Mustard is a conceptual artist.

Futurist and writer, whose work explores perception in the physical world. Through his books, he examines how attention, meaning and visibility, shape the way ideas and people stand out. I overcame something that I shouldn't have been able to overcome, and that has its own feelings to it, almost like surviving a war. And so the reason I wrote Child X is I want people to know that you can be in the darkest reaches of impossibility to come back and still come back. They ask me, okay, well, why would somebody animalize a child like that if they're trying to build a, religious movement. And the answer is that every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day. Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Eamon. I've experienced firsthand the powerful impact that proper supplementation

can have on your brain, your body, and your mind. That's why I founded Brain MD. Our formulas are scientifically created from decades of clinical research designed to help you think clear, feel better, and improve every aspect of your health. Whether it's brain and body power max, the same formula I used in the world's largest study of NFL players to optimize brain performance, to happy saffron, to boost mood and memory, and pro-brain-biotics max to improve the gut-brain connection. Brain MD delivers the highest quality science-backed solutions to help you think and feel better. Tana and I take many of our products every day. And as a special offer, just for our listeners, you can save 20% on your next order. Visit brainmd.com and use the code

podcast 20. With a better brain always comes a better life. Welcome. We are so excited today to welcome such an interesting and fun guest. Jamie Mustard is a conceptual artist, artistic director, cultureist, and award-winning writer, including his work on art, imagery, and the messaging of ideas, as well as his work on human perception in the digital world. Jamie has worked in fine art, music, film and design. He produced the documentary Show Biz is My Life, which was screened by Lincoln Center as one of the best films of the year upon its year of release. His literary memoir, Child X, about being handed over at birth to a dark movement, was released at the end of July 2025 to critical acclaim. His graphic novel, Hybrid, set in a future-adjacent sci-fi alternate reality Los Angeles of his youth, will be published in the late fall of 2025.

His second graphic novel, War Poems, a sci-fi episodic work exploring the darkest reaches of humanity will be published in April 2026. Growing up in severe poverty, illiteracy, abandonment and neglect in inner city Los Angeles, unable to write or even use a comma at age 20. He overcame obstacles to eventually graduate from the London School of Economics. Wow. Welcome, Jamie. That is so exciting. Thank you for having me. You have accomplished a lot from where you started. I have. I mean, it seems like quite a journey. Yes. Yeah. In fact, I was in Yerevan, Armenia. I've been on the road for two weeks five days ago,

four days ago, presenting on brain health and mental wellness or the remediation of trauma through brain health and nervous system remediation. Interesting. Yeah. So from where I started to where I've been, it's sometimes I'm sitting there going, what am I doing here? Well, can you take us through where are you starting? I can. Well, let me just jump in because you and I met through Dr. Faber, who is in our Encino Clinic.

And we were working on your interest in Stellate-ganglin block, which is a treatment for post. traumatic stress disorder. And Dr. Faber, Jay, called me up and it's like, Daniel, you have to meet Jamie. He's amazing. He also wrote the book, The Iconist, which was a huge award-winning book. And so this is going to be a very interesting conversation. Different. Let's start.

I think tell us your story. Okay. And then we'll get into some of the healing aspects of it. Okay. So upon the day of my birth in the 1970s, I won't date myself, literally on the day of my birth, my parents turned me over to a religious paramilitary organization in a slum on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles,

not far from MacArthur Park. People know what that is. and Rampart Police Station where I was raised in a kind of orphanage or a place where they sent all the babies so the parents could work. So there might have been one or two caretakers in a tenement with 30 to 40 babies where I didn't receive really human touch for the first two and a half years of my life. We were bathed once a week using, I mean, I've had caretakers reach out to me since I started speaking out in the last two, two and a half years. Yeah, just unbelievable living conditions. So part of my life is being kind of a mystery as to why and how I became me when I've lost so many of my friends to drug addiction, suicide.

Yeah. So how did that happen? How do I do it? How did you do that? But describe more. Yeah, tell us more. I'm like, I've so many questions. Okay.

Okay. So yeah. And we're talking about Scientology. We are talking about Scientology. Can we say that? The name that will not be named. Yeah. So, yeah, at three years old, I was Trent.

We were all, when I was older, I went to a building on Melrose and Van S, which was probably the worst of it. Just in, you know, three bunks high, military structure. I didn't ever learn to brush my teeth. I was animalized. I didn't have underwear. I did not go to school. So I mean, I pretty much didn't go to school. Did they homeschool you?

No, there was no, there was no education. A few years later, there was a kind of mock effort at education, but no, there was. So you just sort of slipped through the cracks. The idea is a lot of people since I've started talking about it and the memoir came out, they asked me, okay, well, why would somebody animalize a child like that if they're trying to build a religious movement? And the answer is that the movement is very much built on labor and you're keeping your parents busy and you're not really valuable until you're a vessel until you can work for them at 10 or 12

years old. I probably started having child labor at nine. So you have to look at it like, I mean, this is graphic, but say I had a baby piglet. That piglet's not very valuable to me. But if I put it into the minimum environment of a pig pen and I grow it for five years until it's slaughterable, then it can be very valuable to me. So they were basically putting all of us kids into this environment where we're basically being penned or warehoused with the minimum amount of resources until we would be able to work. I signed my first, they make you sign a billion year contract. I saw my first billion year contract with an X at five years old. So hence child X? That's part of it. I mean, the concept of child X is to have your life predetermined for you before

you're even born. So you don't really have. What do you mean by that? You don't have any agency is what I'm Yeah, you don't have any agency. You are, and you're being filled with all sorts of ideas. I mean, one of the incredible ideas that you're hit with at a very young age. I mean, this is after not receiving touch and so many, and just the stress of being, it was like a highly aggressive, a more aggressive version, maybe this is hard to believe, but a very, a pressure cooker environment, kind of like Lord of the Flies.

We ate slop, we, you know, I mean, it's too hard to believe. And it's one of the reasons up until two and a half years ago, I was living in complete shame. I shared it with no one. I was trying to pretend it never happened. No one knew. None of my publishers knew. My agents didn't know. This is like trafficking.

I mean, this sounds like human trafficking. How did this, how are these, how was this not exposed? Are they still doing this? They're not doing it so much to young kids anymore. They banned kids in the late 80s because of what was happening to us. the human trafficking laws that would have maybe saved my life or saved so many of my friend's lives didn't go into effect until 2003. So, yeah, it's wild, but it happened.

And one of the reasons I finally decided to write this book is because this occurred on, it's really the inner core, what they call the sea organization. This is the paramilitary wing that runs Scientology. We had the worst of it. And this occurred to thousands of kids on, four continents over 40 years. So Johannesburg, South Africa, Southern England, Central Florida, Sydney, Australia, Mexico City.

So because of the shame, a lot of them didn't, I wanted to speak up for them. Well, and plus they've been raised in this, so they don't, it's like they're, I would assume, brainwashed. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Maybe this is too much. Are many of, were many of these kids sexually abused?

Um, yeah, I mean, that was probably, that was one of the, you know, few things that, um, didn't happen to me. I don't know. I think that might have put me over. But there was one kid that I was really close to, uh, when I was five in the, uh, in this building on Melrose, which was the worst of him in terms of the way the treatment of the nannies, I was on a third bunk at three years old, with just fighting for, fighting for my survival. And there was, a kid there that was a close friend of mine at five years old. He was sexually abused there. Later, he became a sexual abuser and was so, or it had the longing to do it, had a wife and child, and decided that the honorable thing to do would be to take his own life so that he would not do that.

And so the amount of kids that I have lost, that I grew up with, that I have lost to extreme alcohol abuse and drugs is they're not. here to speak for themselves. And so it's one of the reasons I finally decided that I had to put the shame aside, which I've carried because, you know, I was a baby. I was the day I was born. I mean, I say that to people. And I think, well, when you were three months, no, on the day of my birth. And I'll give you one example. A caretaker reached out to me when I first started talking two years ago. And she said, do you remember how they used to bathe you on 811 Beacon Street near in downtown LA or on the outskirts of downtown.

on the line near Rampart police station. And I said, no. And she said, they would fill the tub with water. There'd be 30 or more babies. They would have two nanny, two caretakers or nannies. One would, they would, one would be putting the diaper on. So they would dip us in the water to do this once a week. This is our only bathing. Wipe us down and then hand us to the other person that would put a diaper on us. They wouldn't change the water. And that was for the first two and a half years of my life. So that I didn't know about. That was somebody that. was a seven-year-old girl that was assigned to take care of me, telling me that, that story. But, you know, harrowing and extreme.

And I, I mean, I'm kind of going, how graphic should I be on this podcast? No, you can be as graphic as you want. But let's talk about the way out. Yeah, well, did you get pushback when you started telling the story? That's another question I have. Well, but let's, before we get there, I want to, I want to. and finish the story. So you're not going to school, but you do have friends, right? You said somebody you were close to. I had a place when I was 19. We had two years off where we kind of,

my mother had a physical condition. We moved to Oregon. And I don't think if I hadn't had that two-year break. I was in school, but I didn't have glasses. And at that point, I was illiterate other than being able to read because I had to study the doctrine. If I hadn't had that break, I don't know that I would have survived it. Went back when I was 16 because I was illiterate. My only choices in life were I was impoverished by my illiteracy. I was going to do manual labor or go work for them. So I went to work for them. And then finally it got to a point where I felt like a slave. And I escaped literally a harrowing escape at 19 years old. I had a relative that said, you can come stay at my house. If you're in school, beauty school, plumbing school, trade school,

I don't care as long as you can be, you can be remit. As long as you're working on your literacy, rent, health insurance, use of a car. It was the only one place I had to go. I went there and I said, I'm going to try. So how did you find family members? I had, once every two years or so, we would go see relatives, which was miserable, because I would go and there would be all this love bestowed upon me. And then all I would be thinking about is.

I have to go back in two weeks. And then there was cases of medical, severe cases of medical neglect. I bet. One of the first times I went, maybe the second time I went when I was four, my grandmother put me in the tub and all smiling and happy, giving me ginger snaps and milk and honey. And she looked down in the tub and she grimaced and screamed, and I was rushed in the emergency room.

And I had such a bad infection to my lower extremities that they thought it would go septic and I could be in serious trouble. So there was actually in the emergency room. And so medical neglect is a huge part of my story. Two years later, I almost lost my hearing. Had we not been on a trip to visit my grandmother. And we saw a doctor, friend of hers in a neighboring town, again, rushed to Manhattan, went into surgery that night, and they didn't know if they were going to be able to save my hearing.

Did you ever find out why your parents turned you over to these people? I mean, I think it was that time in the 60s and 70s when everybody was joining these movements. There were thousands of them. So your parents joined it? My mother joined the paramilitary wing or the kind of naval wing of the of Scientology and worked as one of its counselors. Yeah. So it's, it's, yeah. So at 19, you go live with relative.

Yeah. And then what happens? I start doing remedial classes at Westchester Community College in New York. Just remedial to learn how to write because I could not write a sentence, not a paragraph. It's hard to believe, but it really, you know, it was one of the, at one point my grandmother when I was 16 and said, hey, come here and work on your literacy. I was so numb. I just wanted to get back to L.A. and see my friends.

And I couldn't do it. But at 19, I was so desperate. I found, I escaped in a very harrowing. escaped in Central Florida, switched cabs four times, had to do a whole ruse to kind of get off the property, and then, you know, got into a hotel room because I'd been swirling money away, called my grandmother and said, does the offer still stand? And it sounds like they moved you around, because I've heard you say, like, different cities, like you were in Central Florida.

Yeah, I was in Central Florida. I was in Southern England when I got older. I was in Copenhagen, Denmark. I was in Canada. And so, again, this is the way we were treated. If you go to Sydney, the living conditions were the same. You go to Southern England, the living conditions were the same. Probably the first generation ahead of me to start to receive this treatment was Neil Gaiman.

You know, he was his father, who I met a couple of times, was the national spokesperson, a very close, confident to Hubbard and even the head of Scientology Secret. police and yes, Scientology has a kind of intelligence wing. And in fact, at seven years old, I mean, this story is just so crazy. And it's hard for me to own it because it was just happening to me. I was a twig going down a river. But when I was seven years old, the FBI raided the Scientology, that big blue building in Hollywood. And I was woken up, you know, in the middle of the night. And it was the biggest, and I described this in the book. It was the largest FBI raid in U.S. history at the time, maybe to this day. And, uh, and, uh, and I just described this is the book. And, because the Scientology was conducting the largest domestic spying campaign in

U.S. history on the federal government. Oh, wow. Yeah. And that was, they kept us up all night as the FBI agents were kind of, you know, pouring into the different rooms, moving us around the big building. And what was so wild about that and why I bring it up is when it was over, we went back to our the FBI was unconcerned with us and our yeah like I'm thinking to myself because I'm also child psychiatrist so I'm thinking why is your grandmother not reporting this abuse

why is the FBI not reporting how is this place not busted because this is neglect and abuse and it's like why is the system allowed to continue to continue? I think it was the late 70s and 80s, you know, seatbelt laws were new. I mean, I think it was the time was part of it. I don't know. I started medical school in 1978. I mean, out of when this child's being neglected and abused. I think, okay.

So I'm not sure. It's a really good conversation. It's a really good. The answer to that is really important because it's probably goes to me asking you How did I get here? How did it happen? Yeah. Right.

Yeah. I'm really curious. Part of the answer to that is a major part of the indoctrination, at least for is the removal of, and I explained this in the book, the systematic removal of emotion and empathy. When you're four years old or five years old and you hurt yourself, somebody, a caretaker or what they called a nanny would run over and say, knock off the H&R, which means human emotion reaction. Oh, oh.

Yeah. So human emotion reaction is me dramatize, me kind of dramatizing or acting out one of my past lives. It was frowned upon. So we weren't even allowed to be children. And I think that there's certain drills or training that you do within Scientology that dampens empathy, very systematically dampens empathy in a powerful way. And I think that's one of the reasons that there's a lot of adults watching us go on and they

did nothing because I think their their empathy had been removed. So, and it was about control. Yeah. And also, I think it's very interesting. They woke me up at midnight in this slum across the street from the Big Boop building. And they brought us into the main building where they kept us up all night. And I think part of that has to do with, they didn't see the, you know, they didn't want to see us in those conditions. Yeah, I mean, I'm speculating. So let's go to when you're 19, you're living. You're with someone who cares about you, you start at community college. And my sense is you begin to realize

you're smarter than you think. Yes. Yeah, I pretty much thought I was stupid. I needed eyeglasses and I didn't have them and I got eyeglasses. And I was just going to these tutoring sessions in the community building at Westchester Community College and trying to learn to write

an A and a W and just doing that for a year. And then I took an kind of economics 101 class. And it was probably the first time in my life where I looked at something and I kind of just understood the charts and diagrams. I didn't think that, you know, three years later I'd be go to and graduate from one of the best schools in the world. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah.

But it was just, I put myself through a ringer, I will say, too. I mean, there was probably a two-year period where I didn't leave that. house and I just practiced and read. And I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced and read and read, red. And I almost feel like that had a, that pressure to get literate at such an old age. It felt like it was doing biological damage to my body. But somehow it worked. And it must have felt good to realize you're not stupid.

It did feel good to realize I was not stupid. But it was always, but it was also, uh, it was a pressure cooker because I get into this Ivy League school and all the kids there, they're, they're the smartest. are the smartest that competed to get there. Right. And I'd kind of gotten in there in this like side door, right? And I felt the pressure of the whole time of can I do this? Can I?

Am I good enough to be here? Am I good enough to do this? The first six weeks I was there and I don't think I've ever said this publicly. I literally thought someone was going to come in to the dorm room or to a class, tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, we made it a mistake. Just kidding. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, so, you know, that kind of brings us to, again, this is all very new to me in terms of me facing my recovery. I did this nervous system remediation. I was very nervous to do it. The only reason I do it did it is because I met J. Faber, and he, who runs or works at the Amon Clinic in Encino, right, in Hollywood. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. And I asked him, I'd come across this and I'd asked him to vet it for me. And he gave me a way to look at it and see that it was safe and could be effective. And that led to a conversation with you. Daniel. And in that conversation, I kind of started to understand. And one of the things, and then I got really interested in your work, and then your work became a massive part of a book

that I ended up writing with a scientist on the nervous system. And I remember being a little upset when I came across your work because I was going to Fort Bragg. I'd been invited to Fort Bragg to teach them about communication. And I got interested in post-traumatic stress through my own trauma. and I wanted to do this book on the nervous system, and that every soldier I was coming across had traumatic brain injury. Or they had brain toxicity from drugs and alcohol. Yeah. And I thought it's not responsible for me to address this

without having brain health be a massive component, but also gave me the first insight into my own understanding of survival. And that's maybe a key reason why I'm here. And so the doctrine that we've studied as kids frowned upon drugs and alcohol. Now, that didn't stop a lot of my friends. It didn't stop two of my brothers who have had, you had issues, one of whom became a major addict. And a lot of the kids I grew up with, because they're just trying to manage their nervous system.

That's crazy. You lived in crazy. But when I met you that time, I started, I was terrified of it. I'm growing up in inner city, L.A. So I'm not just dealing with this movement. I'm also dealing with the drug addiction gang infested neighborhoods of Los Angeles. And a neighborhood they call Little Armenian now. But it was really Mexican, Filipino, Armenian.

And I was, I'm going to stay away from drugs and alcohol. I'm not going to touch a thing. Okay. And maybe I started having a beer at 16 if I went to a kegger or something. but I wouldn't go near THC. I wouldn't go near anything. And I do, so when I started life, because partly was because the environment was too hostile.

The movement was kind of pushing us against that and the environment was too hostile. I saw what it was doing to my brother. I had an older brother and I saw what him getting involved in that was doing to him. And I thought, if I'm going to survive this, I need to be clearheaded. And so I...

So you were smart. I was, even though I didn't know it. So, but I do think a matter of, Massive part of my recovery was that I had a healthy brain. So when I was in a position to start studying and improving my life, my brain was pristine. Yeah. Outside of the dietary issues. So you had reserve.

Yeah. For sure. I think that if I had, and when I had that first conversation with you is when I realized how much the kind of almost accident of having a healthy brain saved my life. And it's been just this incredible journey. You know, I just, eight days, I've been on the road for two weeks, eight days ago. I was in Yerevan, Armenia as a guest of state, presenting on brain health and nervous system remediation in terms of trauma, which they'd never heard of before. And I was, I presented to the ministries of health, the ministries of social reform, and gave a lecture at Russian Armenian University with a bunch of Ph.D. students and grad students as well as psychiatrists.

And the only reason I ended up being invited to Armenia to present on this, to present on mental wellness and trauma being a biological injury or being eating biological remediation is because of Amen Clinic. There was a high level bureaucrat there that had a six, six year old. It just wouldn't get better. But this woman had means. So she took her child to Germany. A German doctor was doing everything to help this kid.

And so I think we need to go to the Aeman Clinic in New York. Brought this kid two years ago to the Aman Clinic in New York. Whatever scan and evaluation occurred there, that kid started to recover. And he's a normal kid. I mean, he's right at normal today. This woman was so moved by that. I got a message one day saying, hey, can you recommend a doctor to come here and teach SGB,

which is a nervous system remediation, but also affects brain health. And so it was you and your work that led me to being invited to Armenia. And it was incredible. They'd never, I was talking about trauma as a biological injury, and they'd never heard of it before. That's so interesting. Yeah.

I love that so much. So talk about, they want to open an aiming clinic, in Europe, man, by the way. They told me to talk to you about that. Yeah, no, we get invitations from all over the world. So trauma recovery. I mean, it just sounds like there's so much.

I mean, if you got to know Tanna's story. Not nearly as crazy as works. I thought mine was a really crazy thing. Her ace. I feel normal. Her ACE score is eight. Wow. You can't, but you don't even qualify almost to have an ACE score because it was so unique.

I'm always, the AIS store has bugged me because it hasn't had, you know, born and raised in a cultic environment. Born and raised to be taught that you're a trillion-year-old fallen God in a prison planet in a meat body. Right. No view in emotion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not on the AIS task. No. So maybe we can do something.

That is just hysterical. You don't qualify. Sorry. What if the key to overcoming your pain is, isn't just in your body, but in your brain. My new book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, offers strategies I've used with thousands of patients to break free from physical and emotional pain

and reclaim focus, energy, and peace. Healing is possible, and it starts with your brain. Pre-order my new book now and receive special bonus gifts that change your brain. change your pain book.com. So trauma recovery is so important. But how did trauma manifest in you? Because you graduate from the London School of Economics.

You actually become very successful. What did trauma look like in your life? Shame. Mm-hmm. a kind I can't describe like I felt like it was cellular. And I think that that's part of, but an anxiety so hard, so turned up, and so deep that it felt like a limb. I did not know what anxiety, I just didn't know what it felt like. And so as I started to get successful, as things, you know, really picked up, I don't know, 10 years ago or something.

I was getting more miserable. I would achieve this incredible thing that I dreamed about my whole life. I mean, last week I was in New York at a prominent museum presenting my artwork. My new graphic novel and a projected screen with music at Midtown. I mean, I get to do the most incredible things. And as I was getting opportunities with my art and with the books that I was interested in, it would something would be about to come out or I would sign a deal and I would be miserable and just thinking about all the things that could go wrong. So I was getting less happy with,

I thought if I literally, this was the equation of my mind. If illiteracy, if poverty means, if poverty is illiteracy, if illiteracy and poverty are pain, then education and means or affluence are joy. And so, um, I was miserable. And so I thought, this is one of the reasons I worked this hard. And now I'm really in trouble because I'm getting this and I'm really not feeling good. I'm feeling, you know, maybe a sense of doom. And yeah, so that was kind of where it started going, okay, something's wrong here.

And I went to therapy for the first time. And then what happened? I got diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress, which I laughed at the therapist saying, What are you talking about? That's how much I'd been indoctrinated. I didn't know I'd been traumatized. And then... Yeah, there's a new term I like, too.

It's called persistent stress disorder. Okay. PSD. Okay. Which clearly you had as a child. Yeah. Yeah. So I shared a literary agent with a woman that had a psychologist, a Harvard psychologist,

that had been at TAPS for 15 years. She started to work on this nervous system treatment. And, uh, So I went in the middle of COVID and braved this treatment because Dr. J. Faber helped me vet it. And I did this thing and the anxiety went away. So what do they do? What is the treatment? They inject a small amount of local anesthetic.

Like lytocane? Buficane or ropeivocane? Yeah. The same thing that goes into an epidural. because it wears off fast. And they basically turn off the sympathetic nervous system, which is on each side of your neck and the select ganglanger cluster.

And when it turns back on 20 minutes later, it breaks the fight or fight feed black back loop. I mean, we could talk more about the brain chemistry of it and Daniel could correct me, but the military's been using it for 20 years. Really? Yeah. And so it was my going to Fort Bragg

and seeing what guys were getting out of it there. I couldn't believe it wasn't in the mainstream. So I met the doctor who discovered it 20 years ago, asked me to dinner, and we ended up, I wanted this to be in the mainstream with CEOs, kindergarten, teachers, yoga instructors, whoever. So I wrote a book with him to bring it into the mainstream. And that is when I came across Daniel's work and brain health.

And one of the things that Jay Faber found when he was analyzing, we scanned a bunch of soldiers at aiming clinic in Chicago, treated them on this treatment over two days, and scanned them again. And it really is not just a nervous system remediation. It is a brain health remediation. What Jay saw on the majority of those scans was massive increased blood flow to the frontal cortex in just a couple of days. Yeah. So that became my, that's where I became aware of brain health. And I started to think, oh my gosh, you know, brain health saved my life. And so I'm now a believer in it.

And you just wouldn't believe. I was, you know, in Armenia at their most prestigious museum of manuscripts. And I mean, it was like a UN meeting with these translators and this group of physicians and the ministers in the front row. And I'm sitting there saying, mental wellness, your trauma is biological. And this is how we're starting to view it in the United States. And this is how you need to start with me.

So after the treatment, did the limb go away? After the treatment, that thing of where I couldn't, it was just constantly there, it evaporated. That's so interesting. Yeah. It just, it became completely evaporated. Don't get any ideas. You're not going to stick me in the middle of my neck.

No jabs. It evaporated and, you know, it's a pretty easy procedure. Oh, it's, it's been around since 1925. It was developed for tingling hands. And this doctor in the late 90s started experimenting with it on it. Ironically, he was experimenting with this 19, this 100 year old shot now 100 years old on tingling hands, hot flashes. He was experimenting on women going through menopause

to see if he could treat hot flashes with this treatment from 75 years ago. And he was moving it around in terms of the placement. And these women who were menopause patients started saying, hey, my anxiety's gone. My post-traumatic stress is gone. And then he went down a rabbit hole and then first published on it in 2006.

This is Dr. Eugene Lipoff. That's wild. Yeah. So what I think it's great for is when I, when there's people, so I've been referring so many people to aiming clinic the last four years. But there, when you have people that are, it's something you can do right up front for someone that's really in bad shape to give them that edge to be able to pursue brain health. So what I will typically do, because a lot of the people I meet have brain toxicity from

drugs and alcohol is I'll send them to do what we call the dual sympathetic reset, and then instantly send them to the aiming clinic to get on a brain health program. And that is, yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah, because if you have that limb of anxiety, of shame, of trauma, it's hard to do the right thing. It's so interesting. Because you're always fussing or Medicaid. Right.

But it's so interesting to me how kids who grow up in trauma, like the one thing that I hear consistently and I had myself as shame. It's not your fault. It wasn't my fault. But it's that that is just the consistent theme. It's only the last two years that I've been able to start to see that and transfer it to the people that did it to me where it belongs. Right. Yeah. It's so interesting, isn't it?

Yeah. And really, ultimately, I mean, there's two reasons I'm here. One is because thank you for your work. so I can understand what's going on inside me and that I'm not crazy. I mean, one of the things I was explaining to them in relation to your work in Armenia. I mean, I was talking about this.

The first place I went, I was invited by the most prominent psychiatrist in Armenia. An old woman in her mid to late 80s who to present to her doctors and the reason she's the most prominent psychiatrist in Armenia is because when she was young, she ran the largest psychiatric facility in the USSR. And so she's the most respected psychiatrist in the country.

She was loving it and wanting us to give this information to their psychologists and their doctors. But, you know, and then there's the other part that you're talking about, Tana, which is I overcame something that I shouldn't have been able to overcome. And that has its own feelings to it, almost like surviving a war. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it's like. Yeah. I mean, my friends, I've close friends now in Special Forces, and they say that to me, that, you know, what you've been through is.

not different. But a lot of, I've lost so many. And so the human is part of my story, like why I wrote the book Child X, which has been, I'm still processing. I never, I was living in secret, not telling anyone about it. It's not telling my agents,

not telling my publishers, just so much shame. I cannot describe, I don't even know what's a word for shame times a thousand, right? Just total. Self-hatred almost. Yeah. Yeah, in terms of having been embarrassed by ever being involved in this thing.

And what they did to me and the thought of how vulnerable I was for so long. And so the reason I wrote Child X and why I want people to read that book is everybody asked me, you know, is I want people to know that you can be in the darkest reaches of impossibility to come back and still come back. And that is my, that is my mission, you know, as a. writer and one of the things the themes in what I in my art I love that so as opposed to post-traumatic stress you're flipping it into post-traumatic growth and I love that so much yeah because you turned your pain into purpose you know just for people who are watching guilt is I feel bad about something I did shame is I feel bad about who I am right and I love this acronym shame is shame is self-hatred at my expense. It's not, it hurts you. It's not hurting other people. It's misplaced.

Yeah. And I, and I think the work that you do is a huge part of lifting that shame in this way. When you look at mental wellness, I mean, I'm saying things to the two people that know this better than anyone on the planet, right? But when you look at mental wellness as a physiological thing that can be remediated, that can be treated physiologically without mass. it necessarily with pharmacological drugs, but actually something that you can make better through brain health and through treating the nervous system, you lift the stigma of, not only did I have to live through that.

And when I first go to therapy, I'm told I have a disorder. And all these guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan when I first started going to fourth rag, these guys are broken, and they're really nervous about it they think it's going to affect their ability to retire. They think it's going to affect their ability to get a job when they get out. They're all being told they have a disorder. And it's really inhumane.

And it's really sickening because that's one of the reasons we continue to hold on to the shame is because we're told we're crazy after we survive it. So with the work that you guys do, when you say, hey, no, this is biological. This is brain health. You can make your brain healthy again. And we can treat the nervous system. that stigma. And it's also not you. It's what happened to you.

Yeah. If you say you have post-traumatic, you wouldn't say to someone you have broken leg disorder. Right. Because you can see the broken leg because you can't see the brain. And this is what you said in our first conversation.

That is that you can scan the brain, that when you first started, you thought it was inhumane, that when something with anything else breaks and hurts, we x-ray, except when someone starts to act a little weird or crazy. So if people don't understand, understand that it's brain health.

I mean, even this nervous system treatment, it's a brain health treatment. It's a brain health treatment. Yeah, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, interrupting the feedback loop just like you said, between the amygdala and the nervous system, right? So, and it is then if I, if I, if I think I have a disorder, I'm going to carry that shame till I die.

Oh, for sure. But if I, if I, if I start to understand it as a biological injury, like a broken leg, you can't see. then I'm going into my, I'm not, I'm just a guy that broke his leg. And how do I heal it? Yeah. And so it's crucial for recovery that people understand that they have a biological injury if their brain is affected.

Effective. Yeah. I mean, I often say I don't take broken people and put them back together. So I take awesome people, help them be more awesome. Awesomeer. because they have a healthier brain, right? And I think imaging just changed everything for me. Stop calling people mental.

Like, nobody wants it. Or a disorder. I mean, is that something that you think a lot about in your work, that you're removing a stigma that is destroying people? Yeah. That's why. Like when I first heard the term mental illness, so I became a psychiatrist because my first wife tried to kill herself.

And I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist. And I'm like, oh, if he helps her, it won't just help her. It'll help me. It'll help our children. It'll help our grandchildren. But I hated the term mental illness. It shames people. It's stigmatizing.

And it's wrong. And, but when you think of it as brain health, well, everybody wants a better brain, right? Everybody wants a better brain. Nobody wants a mental illness. So I'm like, oh, we have a marketing. problem. This is like, and you wrote the iconist, right? And you're talking about how to make ideas stick and stand out. It was that it was when Dr. Faber read that book that he contacted me. And I was at this turning point of misery where I had been diagnosed with 2019. I'd been diagnosed he contacted me and I'd been diagnosed six years ago with post-traumatic stress disorder. And I was reeling. that now after all that I was crazy. And so, you know, it's unbelievable.

When I was in Armenia presenting on brain health and the improvement of mental, of symptoms, symptomatic improvements, they were looking at me, there are psychiatr, a lot of, I mean, I'm sure there were some that didn't like it, but there were, but there were, there were, there were, there were, there were half dozen psychiatrists and a lot of psychologists and doctors. and it was like I was bringing them fire.

Because this is a country that has been through so much. They had a genocide in 2017. And then just three years ago, they lost one of their most major territories called Caribba. 90% of their veterans are under 21 after just losing this war three years ago. So this is a traumatized country. And what I find is the more traumatized the environment

when I try to explain biological remediation of trauma or trauma as an injury. The more traumatized the environment, the more they instantly get it. There's no, they don't, they see it. The minute you start to explain, you start to get into the symptoms of it. Do you mind if I ask you,

when you did get out of, when you left the environment you were in. Scientology. Scientology. When you left Scientology, I'm actually afraid to say. I'm afraid to say. No, that word,

just saying that word for years, like just the word, hearing it, I was saying it, I would get... Was there an indoctrination towards psychiatrists? Yes, there's a mass... From the time I was three or four years old, I was taught that in the history of not just this universe, going back a billion or trillion years, which is older than the universe, so that's not even possible, that the reason for all evil in the history of the universe is the psychiatrist. So there were psychiatrists billions of years ago?

Yeah. Maybe they had different names, but they're just... being reincarnated over a billion years and that they're the reason behind the Holocaust. They're the reason behind Jim Crow. Any humanistic does that? So then you get out, you can't get help. Interesting. When I was in the Army. When I was in the Army, when I was in the Army and I'm a child psychiatrist, I'm a board

certified child psychiatrists. I used to drive from Fort Irwin, which is in the middle of the Mojave Desert, to Los Angeles. and I would see these big semi-trucks. And on the side it said, psychiatry kills children. And then they had a number to call. And it used to make me so angry. Did you ever call it?

I didn't. But they demonstrated outside of the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting. Was it Scientology? It was Scientology. Oh, I see. I've done. Psychiatrists kill children. And I was just so offended and horrified by it.

But I'm not a huge fan of psychiatrists. That's because not me, but they make diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data. It's like, and they call me crazy? I was like, I'm not crazy. I took the MMPI and I'm, boringly normal. The system is crazy, but their answer is not the right answer, right?

Joining a cult is not the right answer. The right answer is brain health. Yeah. I agree. And it was funny when Dr. Faber first reached out to me six years ago, and he told me he was a psychiatrist. Because, like, you're indoctrinated from a child. You grow up in it.

I literally got shivers of, ugh. That's okay, because I almost canceled my first date with him when he told me it was a psychologist. So, yeah, so, yeah, so I got shivers. And but what was so incredible, again, back to this trip to Armenia, is how many psychiatrists were at these lectures. And then when they were in the audience, I was like, well, these aren't Daniel Lehman's psychiatrists. These are psychiatrists like you just described. They're, they're diagnosing off of symptoms. And one of them, when I was lecturing at Russian Armenian University, she said, we have drugs.

Right. And I said, yeah, that masks the problem. And I'm not saying there's never necessary for drugs. But why would you mask the problem when you can remediate the, when you can make the brain healthy? So why would you go to Xanax or any of the benzos if injecting an anesthetic into the stella ganglion could potentially interrupt it? And let's just say it works 25% of the time. It works 85% to 95% of the time. Let's just say it works 25% of the time.

Why wouldn't you try that first? Why would you give someone a potentially addictive drug that once you start it, they're not going to stop it? And now we know increases the risk of dementia. Before we do something simple, it's insane what's happening in our society. did you know, 27% of all doctor visits, all kinds of doctors, OBGYNs, internists, nephrologist, somebody's getting a benz-o. And it just, it's the insanity that we live with. This is another part of it, you know, I, when I started sending lots of people for treatment,

working with Fort Bragg, I thought that all the studies were saying, the Navy has studied this. There's been all these, there's been a lot of peer-reviewed studies. But one of the things is 85 to 90% effective in these extreme post-traumatic stress trauma symptoms, which are a lot of the symptoms of mental health that we're all dealing with. The 10 to 15% where I send people and it doesn't work, I've seen, they always have one thing in common. And this is why I got so interested in brain health. They have poor brain health. When it doesn't work, they have severe TBI or severe toxicity of the brain through drugs and alcohol. One for one. And so that's why I have become a believer in this. It's not enough

to treat the nervous system if you don't remediate or find a way to make the brain healthy. It just doesn't work. Yeah. So I need to go back to this question because I'm just fascinated. I have to know. when you left Scientology, I'll say the word. Did you get a lot of pushback? Were you afraid? I'm afraid right now. I'm afraid. Yeah.

I mean, I'm, you know, I, yeah. I mean, they have, because they don't just let people think. No, they have a policy. They will declare me what they call a suppressive person, which is like a fatwa, where they will put their secret police after me. There's been a program written to destroy my life. That's for sure by their Office of Special Affairs. They have, they, every Scientologist, or if you want to call it, so-called Scientologist, I don't even believe that it's a thing, has the right to harm me in some way, my career, you know, in some way.

I just didn't, there was an article on me in the Daily Mail about six weeks ago where they reached out to the local Scientology and they, what they got back was a declaration from my mother, saying, with some denials, you know, like I haven't talked to her in 20 years just because I don't know her. And she's still part of it. And one of the things she said in there was he didn't sign his first billion year contract when he was five. He did it when he was seven and it was adorable. And, you know, just the things that occurred in that building, one of the things, if you did something wrong in that building, they would do public beatings, where they would strip the kid, make the parent, they would do an order and make the parents strip the kid down. And they called it just public spanking, but it was basically a public beating because the kids moving around in front of all of us other kids. That was really heavy because we were, it was so outrageous when you're four or five years old to see this on a stage or a raise in front of you that, um, we laughed. We just rejected it. We just couldn't. And that's the only context we had for our lives. So there was a lot of things that occurred in this building that I would call animalization. You know, what I said to the skeptical psychiatrist when I was doing a lecture to these PhD students and grad students at Russian, a prominent university at Russian-Armenian University on brain health.

One of the things she said, a woman asked a question and said, we have drugs for this. And I said, what do you do? And she said, I'm a psychiatrist. And she was a professor there. And I just gave this example of an animal. I said, take an animal. And, you know, I got this from Frank Ockberg's book,

a chapter on biology and aggression from the 70s, okay, where they say, we know trauma. is biological. Because if you take an animal and you spend a day torturing it. Right. And then you put it up in the Ritz-Carlton

for the rest of its life. It's never going to be the same. It's going to be aggressive, fight, or fearful and timid flight. We didn't just give that animal a disorder. We changed its biology. And we... You actually changed the animal's genes.

And so the children and the grandchildren are going to be affected. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Child X. Jamie Mustard. What a great interview. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me because you've been an inspiration so it feels like a perfect circle. So interesting. We are so excited to support.

I actually, you sent me hybrid and I got to read part of it and it was so interesting. I have an advanced copy for you if you want. One of my first graphic novels that I read. And I could actually sort of sense the terror in the beginning of the book. That book is a sci-fi alternate reality version of Child X. Right? So I was never going to write Child X.

I wrote that book before Child X. And then my agent sold it after I agreed to write this Child X book. So I thought, you know, so that was that, yeah. So thank you very much. And yeah, I was just at the Society of Illustrators last. rejecting it on a large screen with music in New York a few days ago. So, yeah, I'm really proud of that. So what's next for you?

What do you want to do? What I want to do for the next year is promote Child X. I really am in this thing where, you know, when you survive something that you shouldn't survive and you've lost so many people and you're constantly asking yourself that question, why do you survive? And I think, I don't feel like I'm a very altruistic. person. I don't feel like I'm a person that is do-gooder. The books, any of the books that I've written, the kids book about resilience or the invisible machine on the biology of trauma, which includes

a lot of your work in it. I didn't write those things because I was trying to necessarily do good. I was writing those things because I was so fascinated that this information wasn't out there in more mainstream ways that I felt compelled to do it because it takes two to three years to write one of these things. And I, and I, so I typically am motivated by, can I spend two to three years on this? So back to Child X, um, and hybrid. I, I've looked at like, I've just looked at my survival and I've, and I, and I thought, um, I, how did I survive this? Why did I survive this? Uh, and it's kind of like being in World War I and your buddies get shot next to you and your other buddy get shot next to you.

And then your own helmet rattles and you pull it off and there's a hole right through the middle. And then you start touching yourself and nothing's wrong. And then living. That's kind of what my life has been like. And I think that you have to make an existential choice as to why you survive something like that. And for me, it is to speak for the people that aren't around to speak or the people that are too broken. Because so many of the kids I grew up with have autoimmune. They have fibromyalgia.

They have all sorts of autoimmune just from the stress. of their childhoods. So I've given myself a reason to do it. And I really do think not just from a, that Child X is kind of a roadmap. If you've been through something extreme, how did I do it? And I try to tell,

I couldn't tell the whole story of how I did it in this interview. How do you overcome a literacy at 20 years old and then go to an Ivy League school? Well, there's a way that I did that. There was an outlook that I had to do that. And so I want people to, I want to give people,

as I said probably at the beginning I want to give people the gift of maybe seeing how someone else did it in such an extreme way so that maybe they can help someone they know or do it for someone

do it for themselves because I'd never once heard you say oh well my childhood was normal compared to what I just said yeah so yeah so I'm promoting that I've artwork coming out but mostly I just want to, I want to put that message out there for the next year.

Well, we often say taking pain and putting it into purpose, pain shared is pain divided. Or Viktor Frankl says in the Man Search for Meaning you can tolerate any what if there's a reason why. Yeah. Some of my favorite books. Yeah. And so I've just tried to give myself, I never saw it until I started looking at your work, I don't think I ever understood what happened to me. And so now, I mean, it was a few years after coming across brain health and the work of aiming clinics that I started to understand it.

And that all this stuff that I'd been given as a kid was bullshit. And that people are walking around with a biological problem. And psychiatrists did not cause the Holocaust. Did you ever have the feeling, it's okay to be mad? Yeah. I mean, I've mixed feelings on that. I've gone through stages for sure. I mean, I think that anger.

Sort of right. Yeah, not like lingering anger, but like righteous indignation. I'm getting there for sure. I mean, coming on here is an act of massive righteous indignation. Right. Yeah. I mean, in terms of who you guys are, what you represent, how they will take it. Yeah, and they've already started to, yeah, contact people that I know.

And, you know, they've already made emotions against me. but there comes a time in life where you have to stand up for what you believe in. I have a new book coming out in December called Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain. And I actually talk about repressed rage. And I don't know if you've read John Sarno's books on pain, physical and emotional pain and how it's often repressed rage. And so when I read that, I'm like, well, how do you help people get the rage out?

And there's a fascinating form of psychotherapy called interpersonal dynamic, short-term, no, short-term dynamic, ISTDP, intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. It's so interesting. And it's basically a rage therapy that when you learn appropriately how to express it, you hurt less. And I do rage journaling. And in the new book, I talk about the doom loop that something triggers the pain.

And it might be a memory. It might be a disappointment from someone else. It might be... Can I ask you a question? as a psychiatrist. Is it healthy to be rageful? Healthy to get it out.

Not rage full, but it's healthy to be able. Rage empty. It's helpful to be able to express it. Yeah, getting it out is critical. And probably some of your art, it might be there. I think hybrid is an active rate.

If people read that, they would probably see it as an active rage. So holding it in or so let me see if I can explain it. Denying it is another problem. And I'd be interested in your thought in this. When children are little, they see themselves at the center of the universe. And if something good happens, they sort of think it's because of them.

If something bad happens, they think it's because of them. So something bad happens. A lot of bad things happen to you. they feel rage, they feel anger, but they can't express it. Because if they express it, they get beaten like you showed. Or if they express it, the people who help them survive. Adults.

Typically. You're psychologically crushed. Typically their mom or dad. Yeah. It's like, well, no, I can't express it to them because then I'll be abandoned and then I'll So they then feel guilt about the rage and they live with this shame, always feeling like they did something wrong, even though they didn't. But they turn it inward. And I have found when I help people get in touch with it and express it appropriately, and I often do it with EMDR, so I like this combination of go into that.

And what would you do with those feelings if you could? And often it'll come out and rage. It just helps them so much. It helps their nervous system calm down because they're not constantly bottling. What you resist persists. So if you can just let it out in an appropriate way. So I rage journal and then like these are the things that I don't want anyone to see. right? So you burn it, shred it, whatever.

You rage journal. And then I can really focus on my prayer and my meditation and the things are important to me and feeling grateful. But when you have that in the back of you, it's always that noise, that white noise in the back of your head, it's really hard to like feel gratitude and have it stick. So when I figured this out, because Tanna would describe me as Pollyanna. For sure. I'm like Pollyanna's brother. For sure. You know, I love that movie and why do I love the movie? No, he wants to watch it over and over. taught people to play the glad game. Whatever situation you're in,

what is there to be glad about? And when we look at your situation, which was horrific, the thing to be glad about is, well, you survived. And then you thrive. What's that? I mean, that's so interesting, right,

to look at resilience. But then as I'm learning John Sarno's work, I'm like, oh, no. And I remember I'm in a parking lot with her And I'm like, Pollyanna needs to meet Hannibal Lecter. I'm like, what? That's a little extreme. It's like they need to figure out how to be friends.

Yeah, I mean, anger is a force that can move things. Part of my indoctrination, part of the massive, one of the most major, massive pieces in the indoctrination of Scientology, is that anything bad that ever happens to you, you pulled it in. Oh, so it's your fault. Yeah. So if anything bad happens, you carmically did something before in a previous life or in this life to cause that bad thing to happen to you.

That's a very... Well, that's where your shame comes from. Yeah. So that just made it harder and harder to get out. My older brother was angry. He was lashing out. I took the other road. When I was younger, it was kind of like, let me keep my head down and people, please.

because it was survival yeah for you yeah so I don't know I mean maybe after this I would have taken your road but then later I had to figure out how to get the anger out for sure otherwise it just always eats yeah so when I learned how to do this it's like oh it's not about being rageful it's actually about being rage empty right it's about getting it out and it's like okay that was appropriate. I got it out in a healthy way. I didn't hurt anyone. I didn't yell at anyone. I didn't like abuse anyone. I actually got those feelings out. And I can actually question some of them. Some of them probably aren't even that accurate. But I can now shred that focus on gratitude. Well, I'm going to leave here really pissed off. You guys are giving me a reason. I, you know,

I do think that that is, you know, that I probably should be more angry and I probably am more than I admit to myself, what I don't want to do is to act in a way that's going to discredit what I'm saying. Because it's so outrageous what happened to me. It's so hard to believe for people that I feel that if I add too much emotional twang to it, so maybe I need a read journal. Oh, do this by yourself. Okay. Or with an ISTDP therapist. Okay. They're so helpful. Okay. And so those stella ganglion block really could calm the nervous system. But if there's still a lot of rage, well, it sort of builds up and comes back, especially when you get triggered. So just learning systematically to get it out. I talk about this thing I love called emotional freedom journaling.

It's take each five years of your life. And so I'm 71. So that's, what, 20, no, 12, 14 pages. So 14 pages, 0 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, and so on. So you just get a page, draw a line down the middle of the page. And on the left side, what awesome things happened. And on the right side, what awful things happened. And you do it, and if you do it for, so for you it's like maybe 10 pages, you begin to go, oh, these are the things I'm really pissed off about. What do you call that? Emotional freedom journaling. And then for rage journaling, like you write it out and get it out. And this is the stuff. It's actually hard to do at first because most people are good people, they're goodest. And so they have a hard time actually

getting in touch with that. But if you can actually get in touch with the things that are in your head that you would never say out loud, that you don't want anyone to know, that you would never want anyone to know that you ever thought, right? Like, these are like those things. You have to, like, when I first started writing it, I'm like looking over my shoulder, like, okay, and someone's going to find out. But once you get used to doing it, it's like, it's like, it's like someone popped a boil. It's like, it's just this relief. And then it's like I would shred it or burn it or whatever, just get rid of it. No one needs to see it. That's just my thing that I do to get it out. And it's just now it's like cleaning my house, right? I just keep

it clean. I think the writing of the book did that in a lot of ways. I mean, I remember when Glenn Yefeth asked me if I could write a book about my experience, I said, I don't, I don't think I could. And he said, why? And I said, I don't think anybody would want to read a book about a child being strangled for 300 pages, a kitten being strangled. for 300 pages is what I said. But, you know, what's so, that's an interesting slip there, but what's so interesting about that is that one of the moments in the book that I put in there that I'm really ashamed of, you know, that I was ashamed of for a long time. So I put it in the book is when I was at this place across in the big blue building with total, just no, you know,

just slowly eroding with my mind not getting full and having, you know, doing child labor and just living under just the most less than developing country living conditions in the United States of America. There was a basement where I would go down into the basement because no one could ever see me get upset because then I would be in trouble. I'd be sent to ethics for correction, literally. I would go into this basement and scream, where no one could hear me. And the repetitive thought that I had in my head was, and I put this in the book, because

I wanted people to know that I had this thought. I would wish that my parents died in a car accident. And that way, I would be suffering for a reason. And I was very, I carried a lot of shame that I carried that thought. And I would teach you, it's just a thought. It's a thought. And just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true. You're trying to make sense of a something that didn't make sense.

Repetitive trauma, right? And so I love the work of Byron Katie, so I would like, of course, my parents had died in an accident. Okay, is that true? Yeah, maybe. Is it absolutely true now? How does that make me feel awful? How would I feel if I didn't have that thought, fine.

And then you just flip it to the opposite, and you meditate. on that. But learning to take each thought captive is so important. But there's nowhere in school. We teach kids to manage their minds. Instead, they get a thought. I'm a pedophile. I'm not. They get that thought and they go, oh my God, you must be a pedophile because you had that thought. You should die. And it's like, no, it's just a thought. It's just a random thought that has nothing to do with whether or not It's true, right? We have to manage our mind.

And that's why in the emotional freedom journaling, there's the awesome. You know, it's like, because even though it was chronic stress, you probably have fun memories in each of those periods, whether it's playing with someone else or having a discussion or something. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's lots of moments of, you know, angels that came in and saved my life on the brink and lots of moments of joy that you find where. as a child. And most therapists, they focus on the awful. And I'm like, no, you have to focus on both because otherwise therapy makes you worse. Makes sense. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I have a question for you. So going through a gauntlet like that for 20 years, where it was just nonstop crush. I mean, the psychological torment is hard to describe. And as well as the physical

pressure and the physical abuse, which was intermittent. What does that do to your brain? What did that do to my brain? It's a really interesting question. And because you were able to come back from it. So the chronic stress clearly bad for the brain. And what it does is it activates your emotional brain. So I've actually published research on the diamond pattern. It's your emotional structures are busier, but your hippocampus actually becomes smaller because chronic exposure to cortisol damages cells in the learning and memory centers of the brain. And so under that chronic stress, it would have been harder for you to learn. But when you get it. But when you get, out of it, the hippocampus actually,

the rest of your life makes 700 new baby stem cells every day. Can you restore your hippocampus to normal? So you can restore it to normal depends on how damaged it is. But you weren't smoking pot. You weren't drinking, right? So you ameliorated some of the trauma by not escalating the poison. right cortisol chronic exposure to cortisol is poisonous to your brain you didn't add alcohol and marijuana and cocaine and methamphetamines on top of it so make sense yeah yeah well this was so

interesting and i hope everybody gets child acts jamie mustard thank you so much how can people learn more about your work or connect with you uh follow me on instagram uh And send me a message on Instagram. Is it just at Jamie Mustard? It's at J-A-M-I-E-U-S-T-R-D, believe it or not. Yeah, at Jamie underscore Mustard. And I respond to everyone. It was an Instagram message that, from a doctor in Germany,

that got me invited by the state of Armenia because of the work of the AIMCly. So I respond to everyone. It's a trauma zone. So I always make sure that I talk to everyone. I've seen it over and over again. When people change their brain, they change their life. As a psychiatrist and neuroscientists, I've studied more than 260,000 brain scans. And what I've learned is this.

Most people are struggling with a brain that's not working as well as it could, and they don't even know it. That's why I created our app, Brain Fit Life 5.0, to give you the same tools I use with my patients every day. Tools that can help you feel calm or more focused and more in control of your habits. One person told us, this is the first time I felt like myself in years.

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