Dhru Purohit Show - Healing Your Body, Mind, and Spirit in a Toxic World with Dr. Gabor Maté

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Birch Living. How is it possible that, in a culture so obsessed with wellness, we’re dealing with more chronic disease, mental illness, and addiction than ever before? Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Dr. Gabor Maté about his new book, The Myth of Normal, and our crisis of separation, disconnection, and loneliness. They discuss the link between addiction, our profit-driven culture, and trauma and the first steps we can take toward health and healing. Dr. Maté is a renowned speaker and bestselling author and is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It and has coauthored Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, was just released. In this episode, we dive into:    -What we’ve gotten used to in our toxic culture and the consequences of it (2:31) -How society shapes our mind (11:37) -The crisis of separation we’re living in and how it has played a key role in our toxic culture (17:25) -The role genes play in human health and behavior (32:41) -Gabor’s childhood trauma and the impact it’s had on his life (36:43) -Understanding trauma and how it shapes the way we live, the way we love, and the way we make sense of the world (44:04) -What society is getting from living in this toxic culture (51:11) -Why women suffer from more anxiety, depression, and autoimmune disease than men (1:07:27) -Personality traits and coping mechanisms (1:14:01) -Psychedelics and healing (1:18:18) For more on Dr. Maté, follow him on Instagram @gabormatemd, Facebook @drgabormate, Twitter @drgabormate, YouTube @drgabormate, and through his website, drgabormate.com. Get his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, here.  This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Birch Living. Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. The Birch Mattress by Helix is made out of organic latex, organic cotton, New Zealand wool, and American steel springs. To get $200 off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to birchliving.com/dhru. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

70% of adults are on one medication or another. 50% are on two medications. A lot of the children are being medicated. Well, we can say this is some mysterious accident. It's a glitch. Or we can say there's something about this culture that's toxic. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness, medicine and mindset.

This week's guest is Dr. Gabor Mate, and we have him on the show to talk about his new book, the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture in the book dr mate helps us understand that this world that we live in a world with all its technological advances and new information and access to free-flowing information that we can get from anywhere is actually quite sick and genuinely genuinely not doing okay a couple of big picture statistics for you 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30% of the population.

And everywhere, all around the world, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. Dr. Monte asks us if our society is so advanced, why does it seem like we're going backwards in many areas? and why is it so hard for us to admit it as a culture? And if we are becoming sicker, which we are, both physically and mentally, how can we identify the key drivers that are responsible so we can actually create a path for true healing? Now, a little bit more about Dr. Mate,

he's a renowned speaker and best-selling author who's highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Mante has written several best-selling books, including the award winning in the realm of hungry ghost when the body says no and hold on to your kids to name a few. His work has been published internationally in 30 languages. He's been a past podcast guest and it was one of our top episodes for that year.

And if you care about the topics of healing from trauma and breaking free from a toxic culture, today's conversation is for you. Stay tuned. Gabor, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure and an honor to have you here. I spent the last three days diving deep into your book, and it's a masterpiece, if I might say that. I'd love to jump right in.

And I want to start with a quote that you had in the opening. And you said, for better or worse, we as humans have a genius for getting used to things, especially when the changes are incremental. What have we as both individuals, and more specifically as a society, what have we gotten used to? And what are the implications and consequences of this familiarity? Well, yes, you're speaking to the very theme of my book, the title of which is the myth of normal.

And what I'm saying is that what is normal in our society will be become used to and in your two is actually abnormal from the point of view of human needs and human aspirations. so that what is norm in this culture, from the point of view, what human beings actually require for healthy existence, is totally abnormal. And so we've become used to believing that we're competitive, selfish, aggressive creatures, each of us are for ourselves. We've become used to be manipulated, being sold, and, in fact, induced to desire products and food, and ways of being that actually undermine our health. We've become used to being passive in the face of dire threats to our existence, like for example, climate change. We've become used to rearing children in ways that run counter to the needs of children.

There was an article in New Yorker just this last week about the mysterious rise of childhood suicide. There's nothing mysterious about it. It's only mysterious because we think that how we live is normal, and that we don't understand when things go wrong. But if we realize that the environment in which children are being raised today and how they're being raised, and the parenting advice that parents get and the conditions, the stress conditions under which families must live, then there's nothing mysterious about the rising tide of childhood mental health.

of child and mental health conditions, including the rising ties of suicides. So in other words, what I'm saying in short is that we become used to ways of being that are inimical to our well-being. And I think it's an introduction that I quote the great late writer David Foster Wallace, who talks about this metaphor of these two young fish swimming along and his older fish comes along and says to them, hey, boys, how's the water? and the two fish swim on a bit longer and one of them says to you that one, what's water? In other words, when we're surrounded by something and we're in it all the time,

we don't recognize that it's there. And we don't recognize the many ways in this culture undermines human health, well-being, mental and physical health, and relationships. You know, one of the core themes building on top of that is this idea that so much of the suffering we see in the world, you alluded to the recent article about increased suicide amongst young adults and teens. And like that, we have an explosion of chronic disease. We have so many ailments that people are growing through. Everything is basically on the rise, Alzheimer's, autoimmune conditions, cancers, et cetera, et cetera. And a core part of what you're sharing here with the audience

day is that this isn't a bug, this isn't a glitch. No. This is a part of how the system, whether it was designed on purpose or not, this is part of the exports of a toxic system. Can you talk about that? Yes. So the analogy I give is if in the laboratory you're growing microorganisms in a broth, we call that a culture, a laboratory.

laboratory culture. Now, if that broth is healthy, nutritious, then those microorganisms will multiply and they'll thrive. But if many of them got sick or we're not doing well or we're actually dying, we would think this is a toxic culture broth. Well, that's, as you point out, is what's happening today. So you have the United States, which is the richest culture in the history of the world, and 70% of adults are on one medication or another. 50% are on two medications. A lot of the children are being medicated. Well, we can say this is some mysterious accident.

It's a glitch. Or we can say there's something about this culture that's toxic. And I'm saying that. We're like laboratory microorganisms living in a toxic culture broth, so that the illnesses that we see, when you properly understand them and their sources, they're not mysteries, they're not glitches. They're actually in outcomes of the culture that we live in. And sorry, we can understand their sources and we can actually do something about it,

both personally and socially. So that's the good news. You know, one of your favorite books is the Damapada. And inside of air, and the Buddha is known for saying, our life is shaped by our mind. We become what we think. Now, you've expanded on that quote and shared that, yes, that's part one, but actually a prequel to that is understanding that before our mind even develops into what we have an understanding of our mind, society is actually shaping our mind. Can you talk about that?

A great American physician and psychiatrist, Dr. George Engel said in 1977, I think, that human beings are by, biocycosocial creatures, biocysocial, which means that our biology is inseparable from our psychology, our emotions, and our thinking, and from our social relationships. Now, that begins before birth. So already, the emotional states of the mother during pregnancy are affecting the physiology and brain development of the fetus. So when mothers are stressed, fetuses are stressed. And when fetuses and embryo are stressed, even decades later, you can see the impacts of that stress in how they respond to stress as adults.

So this process begins very, very early and even in the womb. And this has been documented meticulously. Then there's the birth experience. Now, what I'm saying, which itself can be either supportive or traumatizing. Because we've medicalized birth, and to give modern obstetrics is due, yes, it's very important. It saves lives and the lives of children and lives of mothers. But it's become so interfering and disrespectful of natural processes that a lot of children born in ways that actually are traumatic for them. high rate of cesarean section, instrumentation, noises, interference.

When that's necessary, it can be life-saving. When it's not necessary, which often it isn't. As a physician, I've seen that often, it becomes life blighting. It hurts life. And then how we raise children. Let me give you an example. A lot of parents these days are taught to sleep train their children. Now, sleep training a child, an infant, means not to pick them up when they're crying.

Now, as we evolved as human beings over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years, that was never the practice. Hunter-gatherer groups, when a kid cries, they pick them up. In fact, you know what, they never even put them down. They kill the kids everywhere they go. A mother cat, a mother orangutan, will never ignore a baby that's crying. But we are told by sleep experts not to pick up the baby. The baby's crying because they need to be held.

That's the physiological need of the child. The baby's brain needs to be held. The baby's emotional system and nervous system needs that holding. When we ignore that, we're actually hurting the child. And that's just the beginning. So a lot of parents get parenting advice that tries to make the parents' life a bit easier in this modern, crazy world where parents are not getting proper support. So there's a natural desire for the kid to sleep through the night, so the parent can sleep through the night.

But from the child's needs point of view, those needs are being trampled on. That affects the child's brain development. That gives the child the message that his emotions, her emotions, their emotions don't matter. That they don't matter. And that's just the beginning. And so in Aboriginal societies, when you study them, you see that babies are breastfed till about three or four years of age. Not exclusively, but the weaning happens around, the average age of weaning is about four years.

Now, in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which from the physiological evolutionary point of view amounts to, on abandonment of the child. The mother's not doing this deliberately. She's doing this because she's economically forced to do so. And there's not enough support to allow her to be with her infant. But what does the infant experience? And so infants in this society experience abandonment

by parents who are actually doing their best and who love them, but where the culture doesn't support the parenting. And I could go on and on and on. And I'm only talked about pregnancy so far in the first months of life. And then this kind of culture that ignores the child's needs, and then what we do, then we have companies that figure out how to people's, how to appeal to young children's addictive circuits

by getting them hooked on machines. So we're getting our infants and our young children addicted to technology which displaces human relationships. And those human relationships are essential for healthy brain development and psychological development. And that affects the brain. We know this from studies, that the more children spend all the devices, the less their brain circuits work. So then we wonder why there are so many problems.

So, you know, and you know, so far do, I've only screen. scratch the surface. Well, we'll continue to go deeper as you have in your book. And I think one place for us to open that up in, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but a core theme that I've picked up inside of the book and your writings is this idea of the crisis of separation that we're living in. And can you talk about that crisis and how it's been a key part? of what has created this toxic culture that we're living in today. Yes. So again, we have to understand. Human beings are very adaptable.

We can adapt to more environments than any other mammal. We can live near the North Pole. We can live near the equator. We're very adaptable. We're also adaptable emotionally, that we can survive in many environments. But that doesn't mean that we'll do our best in all the environments. So if you look at how did human beings evolve? We evolved in small band hunter-gatherer groups.

So if our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for say 150,000,000 years, and if that can be represented in one hour, then until five minutes ago, we lived in small-band hunter-gatherer groups, which means we had a close-knit community connected to other people, where people knew each other,

supported each other. They all parented the kids together, so children had many adults parenting them, where everybody knew who their cousins and aunts and uncles were, where there was a social unity until very recently. So now we have a society under globalized capitalism, where the extended family to a larger stand has been eroded for a lot of people, where communities are no longer communities where people live in isolated homes. They commute long distances to work. They don't see the children their whole day. There's an epidemic of loneliness. So between, I think it was the 1990s to the 2010s or something like that, I have to look up to a statistic. But the number of Americans who said they were lonely doubled from 20 to 40%. In Britain, they have appointed a minister of loneliness.

that's how bad the problem is. Now, because we're bio-sacosocial creatures, and we need other people to connect with for a physiological and emotional well-being, loneliness itself is as much of a risk factor for ill health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. People are lonely, they get sick faster, and they die quicker of their diseases.

So there's a huge problem with loneliness, And this has been documented for decades now by the book Bowling Alone, for example. And Vivek Murthy's recent book on Loneliness, he's the American Surgeon General. But that loneliness has got major mental and physical health implications. And this society, because it fosters this individualistic, competitive, aggressive, everybody against everybody else kind of ethic. And because it makes people so insecure in so many ways, it fosters isolation and loneliness. And that has significant health implications.

When you walk through your layout in the book of what a toxic culture is and how we've gotten so used to it and we even think that it's normal, there are going to be individuals that are only listening to the first part of this conversation that have not had a chance to go deeper or yet read the book. that are asking themselves, well, aren't we living in the safest, most progressive time? People are living longer. There's less extreme poverty. Less people have, you know, more people have access to clean water compared to like a decade ago. So these advances that we are noticing inside a society, how are they layered on top of the central landscape that you paint out inside of the book?

Yeah. Well, it's a question of whether we're willing to look at the whole picture and the actual lived lives of human beings or they would use them to take certain statistics and hold them up as kind of the counterpoint. Now, first of all, we have to put this into a global context. So no country lives on its own. And on a worldwide scale, there's immense poverty. The real question is, why is it that amongst wealth, there's still such poverty? Why is there a single? poor person in the United States or Canada. Why? When we have all this wealth? I mean, that's the real question. And that economic insecurity is actually increasing for people. People are less and less economically secure. People are less and less sure that their children are going to be okay. As far as violence, I mean, do I really have to talk to you about violence in the world, either on the international scale or on the individual scale, particularly in a country like the United States. We may be living longer because we have more food and better medical services

and better hygiene. That's true. But why are more people getting sick? And why are more people who are living longer with chronic illness? I mean, why is it that 70% of American adults are on one medication or another? So to me, this argument about how things are better than ever, it's pure pie in the sky. And the real question is, why, given all the resources, all the science, all the medical wonders that we're capable of, all the wealth, why are we doing so badly? That's the real question is.

and only people that want to justify the status quo would point to statistics that look different. Because I would say to them, okay, even if you're right, how do you explain all the misery that people are experiencing? How do you explain the fact that the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, had the highest rates of COVID deaths? I mean, something was driving that. And I'm not being anti-American here. I'm just stating a statistical fact. So to me, that argument doesn't cut much water. And surely the task of intellectuals.

And a certain intellectuals, I could name them, have made a career out of the right bestselling books on how everything is just fine and things that have never been better. Well, that's not the job of an intellectual. The job of an intellectual is to question what the heck is going on and to try to understand the sources of our difficulties, not to keep telling ourselves that we're doing better. So what if we're doing

better than people 10,000 years ago? By the way, I'm not sure that we are, but so far if we're doing better than people 100 years ago. So what? The real question is, given all that's available to us, all that we know and all our resources, why are we doing so poorly? And why are there more illnesses than ever used to be? And by the way, this isn't only true amongst old people. it's also true amongst young people. You know, when a patient comes into a doctor's office, the first hope, really, and obviously we live in a little bit of a crazy situation

when it comes to how we treat health, we're going to get into that in a little bit, is that before the physician can decide what to do, there really must be a deep understanding of the problem. And the first section of your book is exactly that. It's taking people through this deep understanding because we've gotten so normalized. We don't even know we're the fish that don't realize that we're in the water. We don't even know what water is. What are some of the top things that you think that society is not understanding

that are deep contributors to the problem that we're in today? So we talked about separation. Yeah. When you mentioned separation, something occurred to me. So one of the things that Western medicine does, it separates mine from the body. So my books have been, my previous books, have been published in 30 languages now. And so I travel all over the world, give a lot of talks. And I ask people a simple question. Have you in the last five years been to a respirologist, a rheumatologist, a gastroenterologist, a rheumatoist, a neurologist, cardiologist, A lot of people who put the hands up. And then I'll say, did anybody ask you about child trauma for your multiple sclerosis or

rheumatoid arthritis or colitis or Crohn's disease or fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or whatever you got? Chronic asthma. Did they ask you about child to trauma? Did they ask you about stress in your life? Did they ask you about how you feel about yourself as a human being? Did they ask you about your relationship with friends or significant others? they ask you about stress at work.

At this point, the vast majority of people put their hands down. And yet I say to people, those questions had everything to do why you got sick in the first place. Most chronic illnesses, not all, but most chronic illnesses, whether of mind, so-called mental illness, is I say so-called for a good reason, which we can talk about, so-called mental illnesses or physical illnesses are connected to chronic stress and in many cases to childhood trauma. properly understood. Now, the average medical student doesn't get a single lecture on trauma. So how would they understand these relationships? Let me tell you a fascinating vignette. In 1938, it was, it was a very famous physician at Harvard. His name was Dr. Soma Weiss.

He was so famous and so revered that at Harvard every year, they still have a day in his honor. a research day in his honor. He was that revered. And he gave a talk in 1930, I think it was, to a medical school class, which was printed in the journal of the American Medical Association. And some of why he said in 1938 that emotional and psychological factors have as much to do as physical factors in the onset of most disease, he said, and they have to be at least as an important the part of the treatment. He knew this. This is decades before there was all the research proving her right he was. In 19777, there was an American physician, again, very famous in his time, not so much anymore, called George Engel, who said that human beings are biococytosocial

creatures. In other words, we can't separate the emotions from the physiology from the social relationships. In other words, these insights have been arrived at time and time again by clinicians and physicians. There's been tens of thousands of research papers in those decades showing the mind-body unity, how emotions and social conditions and relationships affect our physiology. And the average physician never hears a single lecture about any of this. So the Western, a lot of doctors begin to figure it out after they go into practice, but they can't have to do it on their own like I had to. And then I discovered, oh my God, there's all these other people saying the same thing, and they've even researched it, and there's all the proof.

So when you mentioned separation, what occurred to me was that the Western medical ideology separates mine from the body, and it separates the individual from the environment. So that's why you not get these questions asked. You might say, so what? Well, the so what is that if you ask these questions and people start understanding their own mind-body unity, it means they become much more empowered to heal from their conditions and to live with them and to deal with them in a powerful way. So these aren't just theoretical questions. They're practical ones, but they're never asked, hardly ever asked. So people are left bereft of some essentials of healing because of the physical.

the medical separation of mind and body and separation of the individual from the social and cultural environment. Now let me give you a quick example. So telomeres are structures on our chromosomes. They're like the aglets on our shoelaces like glue that keeps the strands from unraveling. So our chromosomes have these structures called telomeres that keep the chromosomes from unraveling. And when we're born, they have a certain length, and as stress and aging happens, they get shorter and shorter until they unravel and then we unravel as well. And our life is over. So telomeres are a kind of a way to look at biological aging. Now, if you measure the telomeres of black Americans, there is a way.

years shorter than Caucasian Americans. Not for any genetic reasons, but because of the social stress of racism produces stress on their chromosomes that they age faster. Now, that's an example of what I mean by biocococosocial. So are we going to look at all that or are we just going to ignore it and believe that diseases are simply physiological, isolated events? I'm saying If we're going to deal with them both personally and on a social level, we have to look at the whole social, cultural picture that we're a part of. And I'd love you to contrast this with the idea that a lot of people still are living with today. We've had many episodes in this podcast about is that so much of these things are driven by genetics. Tell us how we don't that genetics are not the full picture when it comes to.

to this idea of what's creating disease today? I'm going to be more radical than that. Not only of the not the full picture, they're not even half the picture. So there are very few diseases. There are some that are purely genetically driven. One of them is runs in my family, muscular dystrophy.

If you have the gene, you're going to have the disease. And it's in my family. My mother had it. My aunt had it. But those diseases are very rare. Now, most diseases have very little genetic component. This is contrary to everything you read. I'm just talking about what the research shows.

So, take something like breast cancer. Yeah, there are breast cancer genes. There are such genes. But out of 100 women with breast cancer, only 7 have the gene. 93 don't. And of 100 women with the gene, not all of them, the risk is increased for sure, but not all of them will have the disease either, for the reason that genes are turned on and off by the environment.

And there's a whole new science of epigenetics that studies our genes are turned on and off by the environment. And so that even if there's a genetic predisposition, which in most cases there's nothing or very little of, it still depends on the environment to turn those genes on or wrong. So genes explain very little about diseases. For the most, about diseases represent a person's life, not a person's genetic background. A genes can in some cases increase the risk for some conditions, but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.

You can have two people with exactly the same genes, put them in, or two animals, put them in different environments, they'll have very different outcomes, the genes are turned on and off by the environment, by multiple mechanisms. So for the most part, the idea that mental health conditions or physical health conditions are generally determined is completely false, there might in some cases to be to some degree be genetically influenced, but that doesn't cover even half the picture in most cases. So I'm saying, besides, here's the thing, Drew, like even if a disease was 20,

genetically determined, which most disease is not even close to that much. But let's say 20% was, and 80% wasn't. There's nothing I can do about that 20%. It's there. But that 80%, the environmental stuff, that I can work with, I can give children a better environment that supports healthy growth. We can provide adults with healthy environments that support healthy physiology, regardless of their genes.

But what I'm saying is, so even if it was as high as 20%, you know what? I would say even if it was 99% genetic and 1% environmental, I don't know what that 1% was and how to work with it. But in most cases, it's nothing like that even, not even close. So what I'm saying is that the most important determinant of people's health is actually the lives that they lived. that's and you mentioned the Buddha

yes the Buddha says that with our minds we create the world that how we see the world how we see ourselves determines how we will behave and treat ourselves and other people but it took modern psychology to point out that before with our minds we create the world the world creates our minds so when my mom when I was two weeks of age

writes in her diary. I was two weeks of age and she writes in her diary, my poor little gabour, my heart is breaking for you because you've been crying to be fed for the last hour and a half by the promise to the doctor I would only feed you on schedule.

What message am I getting? Your message that you're getting is that you're on your own. I'm on my own. My needs don't matter. Four years later, five years later, I have a severe earache it's four in the morning and I have a really bad air infection.

I'm not crying. I'm whimpering to myself. I'm not calling my parents. That's unnatural. The natural thing is for me to scream with my earache to get help. That self-suppression happens to so many people in this society. So that if my needs are ignored, then the world I'm living in is the world in which I'm I must fight or either ignore my needs or fight for them like crazy.

Well, that's a worldview that was shaped by my early experience. And my poor mom, her heart was breaking, but she had to suppress her own parenting instincts to comply with the doctor's advice. And then I get the message, okay, you're on your own. And that has affected my whole life, by the way. It has affected my marriage relationship and how I relate to my work. And I have had to do a lot of healing to overcome that early messaging. And just to add to that, you know, we talked about this a little bit in depth when you were on the podcast last time.

But there's multiple journal entries that you share so beautifully of your mom inside of the book. And one of the journal entries your mom is writing now began the most dreadful five or six weeks of my life when I couldn't see you. So just to add that too, it wasn't, you know, just that you weren't in that moment not being breastfed. there was a very sort of crazy circumstances. If you could just chat about those for a moment here, for those that are not familiar. So there's a chapter in this book on psychedelic healing. And I went to the Amazon jungle to work with some shamans.

I'm not going to tell you the whole story here. It's in the book. But these shamans said to me that when you were very, they didn't know anything about me, by the way, or my personal history or who I was. I was this guy from the north, you know. They said to me after one ceremony, you had a big scare when you were very small

and you haven't got over it yet. Now, when I was a year old, as you mentioned, being a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in Budapest, Hungary, Second World War, my mother was living under circumstances where she couldn't ensure my survival. So she gave me to a strange Christian woman in the street and said, please take this baby to this address.

Well, they'll look after him because I can't feed him. I can't assure that he live another day. So I didn't see my mom for five or six weeks. A pediatrician came to see me during that time of separation. And a pediatrician said that she's never seen touch terror in the eyes of a human being if she saw in my eyes as a one-year-old. These shamans, 76 years later, picked up on that fear. That's how deep it went. And that, of course, again, has affected how I've been in work,

and my relationship, and how I parented my children, and my mental health, of course. So these early experiences do shape how we see the world, but we're not conscious of them. Then we live out of these early experiences and by doing so we create more stress for ourselves and that stress then acts on our physiology and then we go to a doctor with an illness they'll deal with the physical aspects of it but then that deal with the historical and human aspects of it no doctor has ever asked me about what was my infancy like and and maybe you wouldn't even known and actually you found out much later on because you stumbled upon a book at your parents and library are on their desk. And that's when you started asking questions about what was my childhood like?

And I think for a lot of people, they weren't even taught to even think about what was my life like growing up. And what are the foundational experiences that have shaped me into who I am today, which, by the way, it's not just, you know, addictive behaviors, which we went into detail on our last podcast, but it's also some of the beautiful things that we are today, too. Yeah. Is that an accurate statement? Well, for most people, childhood is the mixed thing.

You know, there's the mixture of the loving and the neglectful, a mixture of the accepting and they're rejecting, and everything has an impact. People are also born with certain qualities like joy and curiosity and engagement. and if we're lucky enough, those are not totally driven out of us. In fact, they never are totally driven out of us, although we may lose contact with them as a result of what happens in childhood. But certainly, we're not just talking about addictions here. What I'm saying is that these days, if I talk to anybody with any chronic health condition,

whether it's depression or anxiety or ADHD or ADHD or addictions, or rheumatoid arthritis, or multiple sclerosis, or malignancy, or any other conditions I mentioned, I will talk to them about their lives. And what's interesting is, just as you say, people only have the one childhood to recall. They don't recall. Some people believe in past lives,

my mind doesn't go there, but even people that believe in past lives, they're not recall what was it like to be a child in some other life, if there was another life. They only know this childhood. And so to them that seems to perfectly normal. And I've talked to so many people, who tell me, I had a perfectly happy childhood.

And I talk about this in the book. After three minutes, it turns out that what they thought was a happy childhood had a lot of pain in it, that it suppressed or not recalled. They pushed it below the surface. So in every case of chronic illness, virtually every case of chronic illness or chronic mental health conditions, there's always a history. and that history always includes significant emotional losses in childhood, whether that person is aware of it or not. And it's not that difficult to excavate, by the way, once you ask the right questions.

Part of the messaging of this book is that this idea that there are the traumatized, which is usually our version of like the other, right? So there's a group of people that have been traumatized. There's different versions of trauma, the big T and the little T trauma. but when we think of that there's other people that have gone through trauma and that we are quote unquote normal we're missing the understanding that everyone has experienced some degree of this and that can often lead to these behaviors in our life that are either filled with addiction, fear, obsessions over things.

So it's when we understand that because we don't live in a trauma conscious society, we don't see where our own trauma could have lived out. We missed the boat on really understanding who we truly are. And not to figure out who is to blame, as we've talked about before, but to actually get a better, sense of letting go what's not useful so that we can move forward and focus on all the things that we were brought on earth to be able to do.

Yes. So it's a question of how we understand trauma. And most people naturally, when they think of trauma, they think of catastrophic events like a war. No question that children in Ukraine right now are being traumatized. No question that children in Gaza are traumatized whenever they get bombed by the Israeli Air Force. no question as children living in poverty under condition of racism or being traumatized on a regular basis

but to think of trauma only as catastrophe is well it's understandable it's inaccurate so the word trauma itself comes from a Greek word for wound so trauma is a wound and people can be wounded in many many ways and to different degrees but the point is that the degree to which wounded, those wounds are going to be affecting how we live, how we think, how we handle ourselves, how we relate to others, how we relate to the world.

So these childhood traumas, and in our society they're very common. Now there's the catastrophic kind, like physical or sexual or emotional abuse or severe neglect, the death of a parent, violence in a family. Those are significantly traumatic events. But you can also hurt kids, wound kids, just by not meeting their needs for being held, for being seen, for being understood, for being accepted, for being celebrated for who they are. These are needs of the child. We can hurt children by forbidding their expression of emotion.

A lot of parents are told, if your kid is angry, give them a time out. Which means anger is not, if you're angry, you're not acceptable to me. you're forcing the child to make a decision. Do I stay a relationship with my parent, or do I express what I feel? Because if I express what I feel, I'm going to be banished. Well, guess what decision most kids will make? Not that it's a conscious decision. But what I'm saying is that we can traumatize or hurt or wound children in many, many, many ways.

I've already talked about some of the ways that we hurt children in our society. and those traumas will show up later on in life and will say, well, I was never traumatized because I was never beaten or sexually abused. Thank God you weren't. But that doesn't mean you weren't wounded. And it doesn't mean that your wounds aren't showing up. And it doesn't mean that if you understood those wounds

and you dealt with them and you healed them, you couldn't have a more satisfying and meaningful and more connected life. And just to be clear, every parent will wound their child. And every child that grows up to be a parent one day, if that's part of their path, will wound their own children.

So part of this is that there is a degree of just the human experience that wounds will. It's not just a human experience. And it's the human experience in certain conditions because, again, we were not meant to be parented in isolated nuclear families with stressed parents who are absent most of the day and who are having to worry about,

making a living and whose relations may be in shambles. That's not how we evolved. How we evolved for millions of years was in small communities with the nurturing environment holding each child. That's how we evolved. So it's not necessarily part of the human condition to be traumatized. It's been part of the human condition for many, many thousands of years. That's true. And it's this society didn't invent trauma. But then no society has known as much disconnection as the society knows. So in some ways, we're sophisticated or traumatization of children. But you're right. In this society, there are very few children who don't get wounded. And you're also right, it's not a question of blaming parents. Parents do their best. They love their kids. I love my

kids. Did I pass my trauma onto them? Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote this book with one of my sons and thank God because I would not have been able to do this one on my own. And even writing the book, we had to work through our stuff, you know. So we had a much better relationship by the end of the book than we did at the beginning. So yeah, we passed on our traumas unwittingly without meaning to do so, sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in major ways. And the thing is to understand that, not to blame ourselves and not to blame others either, but okay, now that we get it, what do we do about it? It's not a question of feeling sorry for ourselves or making ourselves victims. Let's just say that in this society, at least, this is the human condition,

and how do we address it? Now, it would help tremendously if the institutions in this society, such as the educational system, such as the daycare system, such as the medical system, such as the legal system, understood these traumatic imprints, but they don't. Average teacher, doctor, lawyer, daycare worker, never gets a single bit of introduction into understanding children's wounding. And so many of the practices that are followed in daycares, that are followed in schools, not to mention the legal system, might as well be designed to traumatize kids or adults.

Because they do. You know, off that topic, you know, the idea inside of the book is like as the individual goes, is as society goes, so goes the individual. And one of the things that you have talked about in the past is that you say, ask not what is wrong with an addiction, but what is right about it? What benefit is the person deriving from their habit? What does it do for them? What are they getting that they otherwise can't access?

So if we apply that thinking and those questions to our culture, what is our culture getting from continuing to play out these addictive behaviors that keep the cycle of trauma life? Well, whole industries are based on manufacturing and conveying goods that don't do anybody good, but they make for good profits. So, for example, junk food. Now, in this case, the vast majority of obesity is rising around the world. The food, sugar and pop drinks industries, no full well. They conspire, actually.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy reality that's been documented. How do we get the right combination of sugar, salt, and fat that will make people most addictive? Now, junk foods are very addictive because they actually suit stress in the short term. Eating junk food is like getting a hit of opium as far as their brain circuitry is concerned. Well, they have scientists figuring out how to maximize the addictive hit of junk foods. And this has been documented and published in papers and books and so on. Well, in this case, it's a very simple reason why they do it.

It's profit. Or take another example, specifically addictive, you know, the opiates. So, you know, the whole scandal about the Sackler family and, is it, Pfizer, you know, pharmaceuticals who manufactured Oxycontin, and they sold it to doctors as non-addictive opiates. when they knew better. And we have had tens and hundreds of thousands of people dying of overdoses and the court cases and all this. Did they care?

No, it's profit. When companies deliberately hire phony scientists to write articles about the non-existence of climate change, as they did for decades, and they lobby politicians even now to inhibit forestall climate protective legislation. They do that in full knowledge of the science. So that's why I have a chapter in a book called sociopathy as strategy.

What do you call entities that are willing to see millions of people die? and millions of people are dying because of drugs, because of obesity, because of junk foods, because of climate change. Well, because of cigarettes. Why would people do that? It's because profit is more important. So the system works beautifully. Like on one hand, the way of this culture goes, it stresses people. to the max. People are just very, very stressed. This is recognized by everybody.

The more stressed people are, the more they want soothing. So they want soothing with, you know, by diverting their attention to sports. The average person can tell you a lot more about the quarterbacking strategy of the New England Patriots. Then they could tell you about the war in Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of people died, including thousands of Americans. So there's all this culture to divert us from paying attention to what's important. There's all these products that prey on our stressed lives to give us temporary stress relief. So consumer goods and foods, entertainment becomes addictive because precisely they're diverting us from our stress. So the system works with elegance.

Number one, to create the stresses and then to profit off those stresses that the stress. system creates. Now, there is some conspiracy involved, as I've mentioned, you know, like on climate change, yeah, they conspired. Cigarette companies, they conspired. That's not controversial. I'm just stating a fact. Junk food companies, they conspired. Pharmacirical companies, yeah, they conspired. But it's not the conspiracy that runs the world. The conspiracies simply take advantage of the way this culture works. So there's a beautiful elegance to it. As I said, on the one hand, we live in a society that by its very nature

stresses people from in-euro onwards and then creates industries that are based on trying to take advantage of those stresses. So it's a self-generating system, is what I'm saying. And then, of course, these same companies will hire politicians that will enact policies that will protect their interests. Now, that's not disputable. It's just demonstrated fact. So the system works on every level to maintain itself, like any system does.

So we're not looking for villains here, not that there aren't any, but we're not looking for them. What we're looking to understand is the nature of the system itself. And I think it's so good to talk about the nature of that system, because as goes, society, also there's those parallels that happen in the individual as well. And when we find and we see a system that's out of whack, it's easy to see the dysfunction in that. It's harder for individuals to see the dysfunction themselves, but both are super key, right? Both are super key because they're both part of the solution. I would love to return back to you talking about your son and you and him working on this book together. How did some of those early experience?

experiences that you had where you were talking about your mom and the circumstances that she was trying to raise you in and the trauma that that created. What adaptions did those create in your life? And would you feel comfortable sharing about how maybe some of those, one or two adaptations that you were bringing in impacted your relationship with your son? Sure. Well, actually, my son Daniel, between I wrote this book, the next book we're going to write together, co-write it, is going to be called Hello Again, A Fresh Start for Adult Children and Their Parents.

And that's a workshop that we do together, including we'll be doing it at Omega in New York and at the end of October. So we've had a lot of stuff to work through. And he's 46 now. So for one thing, because I was heard so early, one of the adaptations you make emotionally when you're being hurt, is you shut down your heart, so it won't be so hurt. When you shut down your heart, it means that when you see somebody else suffer,

you're not as open to them as you might be. So I was capable of being very harsh with my son, with all my children. Not because I didn't love them, but because my heart wasn't as open as it needed to have been. And that shutdown of the heart was a protective device on my part as a small child. not that I knew that. That's why I showed up. The other way it show up, of course, is that when we get married, or we form a relationship, a significant relationship,

we always do so with somebody else at the same level of trauma that we were at. Might not have taken the same form, but it's at the same level. That means that I'm on almost 25 and my wife was 21. And we've been married 53 and a half years now. were two young people at the same level of trauma and it took a lot of growing up to work through those traumas and our children grew up in a war zone, you might say. And my son Daniel talks in his book

about how the floor was not the floor, like he never knew when things would just collapse emotionally speaking. So it was a volatile environment. Plus, the message that I got from the world is that the world didn't want me. Because my mother gave me away, didn't she? Well, if the world doesn't want you, then you have to compensate for it.

So if you want to compensate for not being wanted, make yourself needed. Now, if you want to make yourself needed, go to medical school. Now they're going to need you all the time. When they're being born, when they're dying, and at every moment in between, very addictive.

Because you don't love yourself. You have to keep proving to your, yourself that you're lovable and you're being wanted, which means that is never enough. So I was a workaholic doctor, which means I was very comfortable being on call on the weekends, day and night delivering babies, looking up to dying people, the beeper going all the time, going to the emergency ward. What message do my kids get? The daddy's not available because they're not wanted. I love my kids. I didn't know about these dynamics, but what message did I give them? same one that I got.

So my son and I and my children and I have had a lot to work through. You know, even as an adult and a leading figure in the space with this level of awareness that you have, is it not fair to say that even with the best intentions and even with the best awareness, that there will still be times that you contribute to the wounds of other people? And how does repair play a role in that process? I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Well, yeah, that can still happen. And for example, in my marriage,

I'm much quicker to recognize it now. I'm much quicker to acknowledge it and to own it. Also, I've done a lot of healing. I'm not the same person I was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Thank God, I'm not even the same person I was a year ago, in some ways. I have a regular practice. If I meditate, do my yoga,

if I pay attention to myself, I'm much less likely to sink back into old patterns. But for most of it, it's ongoing work, and it's a lifetime's work, and that's okay. That's what it means to be a human being. But I've done a lot of healing over the years in all kinds of ways. I worked with many others.

their healing. So I'm very aware of these dynamics, but is it ever perfect? Well, I don't think anybody demands perfection. We just require, I think, a willingness to be, to reflect on ourselves, to examine ourselves, to keep looking at how we're showing up in the world. But, you know, when you think about it, it's basically the moral inventory that they teach in the 12 steps. You just look at yourself. How are you behaving? How are you showing up? What is the impact of how you speak and how you act on other people? What is the impact on yourself? What is driving that behavior?

What are those patterns? What did they come from? What can you do to change them? I think these are key questions that people who want to heal and be kind to themselves and to others need to ask themselves. You know, the reason that I ask is that even many of us who do the work, And as you mentioned, the work is ongoing. And you have a beautiful story inside of your book

where you talk about how you had just landed back in Vancouver. And I think you were waiting for your wife to pick you up at the airport. And she had texted you, you know, I haven't left yet. And there was agitation that developed inside of you. And you were kind of running a story. You were running a story in your head and playing out a pattern that led to silent treatment, if I can remember correctly. That's what you're talking about.

That opens the way. That opens the very first chapter of the book. And so I arrived back from his speaking trip, and she is supposed to pick me up at the airport. And when I land, I get a text saying, I haven't left home yet. Do you still want me to come? And I go into her rage. And I take a taxi home, and I'm barely even looking at her. I'm just withdrawn.

Well, for God's sake, at age 72, you think I could handle my wife forgetting to leave home on time? So what? It took me 15 minutes. is to get home by taxi. But it's an imprint of being abandoned by my mother that showed up. So that imprint of the woman on whom I'm relying is not being there for me. All the pain and anger and with defensive withdrawal that it triggered, that's what showed up. And that's what I mean, that until we deal with it, these early imprints can run our lives,

or at least show up in our lives with uncomfortable frequency. And one of the things that, why I brought up that story, one of the things that I took away from that story is then you go on to talk about how your wife wasn't having any of it and kind of like checked you a little bit and was like, look, get over your stuff. It's time to move on or whatever, right? There was a little bit of that. And part of the messaging that I got from that is the beauty of, again, we're going to mess up. Things are going to happen, even with level of awareness, even sometimes if we teach this things, and I'm pointing at myself because I interview experts on this, I write about these different topics that are there. and what we can do in our own lives and our own world is we can begin to implement a trauma, trauma conscious society, which is where the book talks about at the end, you know, yes, we can talk about and say how we want to implement it for the greater world. And yes, we do want to do that. And we want to work towards that in our respective fields to do that. And the way that we get started is actually doing it with our own household as a part of that.

Is that if you have a partner, you have a kid, you have somebody around you, what are some tips that you have of creating a trauma conscious society within your own little household? What does that look like? Well, so just as you say, my wife said to me, knock it off already after 24 hours of silent treatment. But you know, she won't say that anymore. She expects not to be that way in the first place. She expects me to take responsibility when I find that arising in me. not to go there. And I don't want to be that.

Do I don't keep showing, I'm in my 70s, do I want to keep showing up as a little baby for the rest of my life? I don't. It's not a great place to be in. By the way, what I do point on in one of the chapters

is that the women, the reason women have so much more anxiety and depression and autoimmune disease, 80% of autoimmune disease, immune disease happens to women. I think because they take on the stresses of their men and they play the mothers to their big babies at the risk of suppressing themselves. And my wife doesn't want to do that anymore. That's her soul. So what are the some of the tips? Well, the first thing is

just to recognize it. To recognize that when I'm in an intense emotional state, it's never about the present, virtually never about the present. There's some traumatic imprint showing up. And one of the meditation teachers that I respect, Tara Brahe, talks about her program called Rain, Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. So she says, when you notice the states in yourself, recognize that you're in a state. So when I came back from the airport, alienated from my wife, I was in a trance. I wasn't present as an adult. I was in a trans.

So when you're in that intense state, recognize it. That's a huge step forward. Rather than saying, it's all you felt that I'm this way. Ah, I'm in the state. Recognize it. Okay, let me experience it. Let me allow that. Let me just accept that.

That's how it is for me right now. But then let's investigate it. What is it really all about? And then nurture that part of yourself that felt so hurt. I can do that. You can do it. Most people can do it with proper training and support. So it's the recognition that's so important.

In the book, I think I have eight or nine chapters on healing, in each of which I point to different aspects of healing, of the essentials of seeking to be authentic with ourselves to experience our genuine emotions, to recognize when our body is sending us signals. Because our body is sending us signals all the time. And when we don't listen, it's going to keep us sending us stronger signals. And one of the stronger signals that people get is disease.

So this is a chapter called Diseases Teacher. We're actually talk about people who have significant illnesses, sometimes life-threatening, but who took this disease not just as an unfortunate calamity, but as a wake-up call. how have I been abandoning myself? How have I been stressing myself? What's been my life pattern? How can I be different? So the disease can actually be.

You can actually learn from my misfortunes that way. We can learn that when, if you're depression or anxiety or an addiction or chronic physical health condition, maybe there's a message that I would pay attention to. Not that I would wish that on anybody. I wouldn't. The chapter is called a dreadful gift, diseases, teacher.

But do I've talked to so many people who are grateful for their illnesses for what they learned from them, even at great cost to themselves? There are spiritual practices, of course, there are meditational practices. There are ways of working with some of our worst enemies, the self-loathing and the guilt and the self-rejection, the shame. There are positive ways of working with all that. And I talk about them in various chapters. So there's many, many ways of working. The first and the primary condition is that we recognize that we have an issue, recognize them when that shows up. And rather than just acting it

out and indulging in it, finding creative ways of working with it. I think there's also a beauty to do this work with the people that are in your household. Of course, it's a lot. It's a always has to start with you because that's the only person that we can ever, you know, control to some degree is we have our own actions. But as we start to get into it, we can explore this with our partner, our wife, our husband, whoever it may be. And create an open dialogue where everybody understands that, that largely we all have different things that shape. We've all had experiences that shape who we are today. And, and, and,

There's times where we're going to forget. There's times where we're going to forget that it's the story. It's the pattern, the old pattern that's running our behavior. But as you mentioned, it's never about really what's going on right now. It's always that old, old wound that is controlling the story. The better that we get a handle on that, the more that really we get a chance to step into freedom, which is really what everybody's looking. Absolutely.

Apropos what you've been talking about and just reading this book called Us. by the therapist Terry Riel. The subtitle is getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship. That's a subtitle. It's just being published, I think, in a month or two. And this is what Terry talks about, is that in all these relational issues,

it's always the past showing up. And it's all about getting into the present, which is what I teach as well. And there's a book called Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendricks, bestseller, has been on Oprah many times. It's about how we, marry somebody who actually mirrors to us some of the best, but also some of the worst aspects

of our childhood, and how to use their relationship to grow from as a template for mutual growth. So in that, from my perspective, from Terry Real's perspective, from Harville-Handor's perspective, it's no longer a question of how to be trying to get the other person to change, but how to we learned together to be in the present rather than coming from the past. And that's beautiful work so that relationships, they can be hell, but they can also be the pathway out of hell if there's sufficient willingness and mutual support to do so. Yeah, and it seems like that framework is the framework that allows us step into this phrase that you have in the book and you say, your personality is not you.

you are not your personality. Why is that recognition so key when it comes to unwinding the past? Well, so, for example, I point out both, excuse me, based both on my own, excuse me, perceptions and observations and clinical experience, but also a lot of studies as well, that people with chronic autoimmune conditions tend to be people who are people-pleasers. They suppress their anger. So they're very, very nice all the time.

They take responsibility for the people's emotions. Rather than their own emotional needs, they're afraid to disappoint anybody. These traits create a lot of stress, and that stress creates a lot of illness. So that's their personality. But that's not who they are. These personality traits are simply coping mechanisms,

suppressing their anger, pleasing others, being more worried about others than their own. emotional needs. No infant is born like that. People develop those traits when a family environment demands it in one way or another. And those traits then become their personality. But that's not who they are. Who they are is somebody who, in your words, wants freedom. And freedom means not being programmed to any particular way. But to respond spontaneously with a full awareness of your own needs to the needs of others in this situation, not to be programmed to be self-limited and self-suppressing.

Those are personality traits that you adapted in order to survive your childhood. Then you believe you're your personality. You think, I'm just this way. No, you're not that way. And very often it's illness that comes along and makes people have been saying, you know, if you're going to stay like that, you're going to get very sick. And people do get very sick when they stay like that. So we shouldn't take ourselves to be our personalities.

For example, if you weren't liked for who you were, like children need to be liked for who they are unconditionally. If they're not, they'll try to be very nice. If they weren't made to feel important, they will try to be a helper, so now they can be important. If they weren't loved, they might become very charming as a personality trait. But these are just adaptations. These personality traits are significantly adaptations to a child environment, and they're limiting.

So we're not our personalities. We think we are, but the personality is sort of an imposter pretending to be us until we get the difference. So that begs the question, and again, you talk about this inside the book. If we're not our personality, then who are we? Well, that's a good question for everybody to ask. I mean, rather than me answering it, how about everybody just ask themselves? If I'm not my personality, who am I? If I'm not this nice person, if I'm not this angry person, if I'm not this or that, then who am I?

I think that's a really useful, necessary question. As a matter of fact, there was a great Hindu spiritual teacher, Romano Maharshi. He only asked one question. He just said to people, tell me who you are. He didn't say, tell me what profession you have, what characteristics you have, tell me who you are. That's a profound question. And rather than me answering it, people need to ask themselves that. Who are you?

It's a very, it's disconcerting to ask it, but illuminating. So if I'm not this doctor, author, and speaker, then who the heck am I? It's a scary question. Because we get attached only to our roles and to other people see us. And then we kind of forget, that stuff is fun, but it's not who we are. As we start to wind down, there's a few more topics that I'd love to give your thoughts on. You mentioned your experience with psychedelics that you had. And that area is increasingly garnering more and more attention, both through research as well as just general

interest from lay people who are hearing stories about it being a very strong pathway, potentially, to healing. If there's somebody here that is thinking about embarking down that road, what are some important things for them to be considering in the context of the work you have and that you've dedicated your career to talking about how addiction can take us over when we don't understand really the source of the pain that's there. How much sort of introspection, how much self-work, et cetera, should we think about having gone through before we pursue that path, if any? Well, so in the book, as you know, I have a chapter on psychedelic healing.

now I have I think eight or nine chapters on healing, eight, I think. One of them is in a psychedelic healing. So by no means am I a psychedelic evangelist. I don't think psychedelics are going to save the world, but I think they can be very useful for a lot of people. And not just in addictions. I mean, I tell stories in the book of people healing from significant medical illness with the help of psychedelics.

By getting to know themselves, by transforming their relationship to themselves, that changes their physiology, that allows them to overcome their illness. in some cases, in one case, very dramatically, a nearly terminal illness. So, but psychedelics can do that. They can penetrate below the surface level, and they can really get out of our unconscious stuff, where our trauma is, and also where some of our best qualities are. Some people don't realize how courageous there. They don't realize how beautiful they are.

They don't realize what clarity they have, but they can recognize it under the influence of psychedelics. They also don't know how hurt they are, how much pain they carry, how much fear they have. They can all show up in a psychedelic experience. So I would say that they can be useful in almost any chronic condition. And I give some examples of that in the book. Again, there are no panacea. There are books exclusively devoted to psychedelics such as Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Minds, How to Change your mind, and I interviewed Michael for the book, from my book. A lot of research has been done on it. There's been increasing clinical experience with them. They're no panacea. They're not for everybody. And practically speaking, they will

not be available for most people in any kind of affordable way in a reasonable future. They just won't be. But that doesn't mean that there aren't some lessons to be learned, that they couldn't be powerful allies in healing for a lot of people. And I wish they were much more readily available, not to buy in the stores, not for people to use them indiscriminately on their own, but in the proper setting, with the proper support, with the adept guidance. They could literally be transformative for so many people. Part of the problem is that, again, our culture is so suspicious of anything that goes beyond its limited perspective, it's going to be a while before that's going to happen in the big way.

But I've already seen enough and experienced enough personally to know how powerful they can be. When one gets a proper understanding of how deep the toxic culture runs that contributes to so much of the traumas that people are experiencing today, there's a natural sense to feel a little bit pessimistic about the future. And yet in your book, one thing that you're very clear about is that you don't feel pessimistic about the future, that you feel that there actually is a path for healing. What gives you that sense of solace that the future has that

potential. You know, Drew, three weeks ago, I spent three days with some indigenous leaders here in Canada, actually at a special ceremony. Now, you wouldn't believe the trauma these people have experienced. In fact, a delegation of Canadian indigenous people just was at the Vatican where the Pope apologized for the appalling treatment of indigenous children in church and residential schools for 100 years. These children were abducted from their homes. They had pins stuck in their tongue if they spoke their tribal language. They were physically abused, sexually abused. Thousands died. They're just discovering their bodies now.

They were made to feel ashamed of who they were. The trauma in these communities is incredible. The number of addictions as a result, suicides, mental health issues, lateral violence, sexual abuse of children. Addictions, of course. 30% of the people in jail in my country are indigenous origin that make of 5% of the population. An indigenous woman has six times the rate of getting rheumatoid arthritis. These people didn't have rheumatoid arthritis at all until 100 or so years ago.

All this is a result of trauma. So when I was with these leaders in the specials family, oh, the sorrow and the pain is unfathomable. because it's multi-generational but so is the dignity and the hope and the confidence and the love

and the connection to spirit and a connection to nature it was one of the most moving experiences of my life I'm saying to myself if these people can still manifest those qualities there's hope for all of humanity and I've learned through my own experience that healing is possible

I've seen healing. I also believe that, well, Norm Chomsky once said that he was strategically an optimist and tactically a pessimist. So I asked him about that and he said, well, he calls it optimism of the will that in the face of all the challenges, the wars and the climate change, the inequality, the hatred, the divisions, the hostility. Basically, there's something in us that wants to connect, that wants to be free to quote you again. And I believe in that part of human beings. So I believe in those possibilities. I think in a short term, we're in for a lot of trouble. But at the same time, more and more people are waking up. They're asking these questions. And more and more people are doing research or doing work to try and find the answers

and to create institutions and practices that will help us all heal as a society and as individuals. So as dire as sometimes things may look. And I'm not one of these positive thinkers that thinks everything is tiki-de-boo. And I mention these books that are meant to reassure us that they're expense of being realistic. I'm very much a realist. But in the face of my realism, in the face of my very tough diagnosis of this society, I still believe in human beings. So that's for my optimism concern.

I'm grateful for you. And I'm grateful really for also the internet and the fact that there's not gatekeepers that are there to decide what content. You know, we as people, you know, that so many people are suffering and they're just looking for answers on YouTube, on podcast, on other stuff. And when ideas spread, culture changes. So I'm grateful for all the things that have allowed for your work and your message to, spread because that gives me hope because sometimes we're, I feel that we're in a perfect storm of things getting so bad that the yearning for truth and things that actually address the root cause are so strong. Unfortunately, and you wouldn't wish it upon anybody because things are so

bad. Now it's up to us, all who are listening. And if you're listening to this, you have some version of privilege or another. You have a computer, you have a phone, you have something. So now it's up to us to all get a chance to go do something with it in our own lives, but then also for other people. So thank you for giving that to us. And thank you for joining us back on the podcast to share your new book, which I hope everybody picks up, the myth of new normal. And this lasting message that everybody, no matter how broken you think you are, Nobody's broken. We can heal moving forward from here.

Well, I couldn't have said it better myself, so thank you very much for spending the time with me. I really enjoyed talking with you.