Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Heal and Let Go of the Past | Julia Samuel #359

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 246 of the podcast with Julia Samuel, renowned psychotherapist and author of the book, Every Family Has a Story, How We Inherit Love and Loss. Our family is wired in us genetically and it shows in our responses to life. In this clip, Julia explains why our present day struggles probably didn't start with us and how finding out more

Starting point is 00:01:45 about our family history can help us heal. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass says, if you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family. That's amazing. That should be in my book. What is your reaction to a quote like that? My reaction is that, you know, our family is wired in us. It's wired in us genetically, in our felt sense, in our responses to life. And we're programmed from our family, and how we go out into the world. So when we go back into our family, whatever age we are, we go straight back to our early roots of family,

Starting point is 00:02:29 but also all of our beliefs, our senses, and our fault lines. So my kind of belief in the book is that you need to know your family if you're really going to know yourself. And I think families are the most interesting, important aspects of ourselves. You know, every client that has ever walked through my door has always talked about the family they're making or the family that they came from. It's an enormous part of us. So, you know, one of the understandings, and I got it through the book, but also from research, is that the unprocessed trauma from one generation, it goes down each generation until someone is prepared to feel the pain. And so part of what

Starting point is 00:03:21 I'm saying in the book is, you may feel that there's something wrong with you, that you were born this kind of vulnerable person or highly sensitive person. And my message, it may well not have started with you. Look up, look at the untold stories, the secrets, the hidden things that have been untold. And you may well discover a suicide, a child's death, a loss, someone going broke, whatever it is that has been hidden. Because in the past, people like my generation said, what you don't talk about isn't going to hurt you. And actually, what we know is that those secrets, and they can be, it sounds more judging saying lies, but they're basically lies.

Starting point is 00:04:11 You know, they hurt you in the present until you allow yourself to hear them, feel the loss of them. And then you protect the next generation. It stops with you. You don't pass it down. generation it stops with you you don't pass it down you say lies i guess some of these patterns or unwritten rules and families may start out as a bid to avoid pain and feeling the reality of what happened so we can move on and get past it but then at point, as you say, they're lies because they're not real, but they may well be unconscious lies. Very much unconscious lies. And, you know, part of the process of adapting to a very difficult truth is denial. You know, when I'm given bad news, my first response is I'm not going to look, turn away. I don't want to deal with it. And you know, I'm a freaking therapist with decades of therapy. And I know that that's my default response. Like, I don't want this to

Starting point is 00:05:19 be true. I'm not going to face it. The bigger the loss, the bigger the denial because it affects you more. But with me, you know, recently there was I found out some news that I was very unwelcome. And it took me probably two months to turn towards it and allow myself to face it and begin to deal with it so that we all go at our own pace. But also, to some extent, we need the luxury of being able to feel the pain. So my parents' generation were, you know, their grandparents fought and survived the First World War. They fought in the Second World War. They didn't have any of the psychological knowledge we now have. And they were under threat. Their main imperative was to survive and get on.

Starting point is 00:06:06 And as you've talked many times on our podcast, our amygdala doesn't care what you feel. All it cares about is that you need to live. And so just push for your survival, whatever the cost psychologically. And that's what our parents and most of us do. But if we have the luxury of the space to reflect and learn stories and grow, then I do feel the pain of it. And I think we becoming less and less common these days, which is sitting with yourself, having a practice of solitude where you're not consuming something on social media or distracting yourself. the ability to sit with yourself and allow yourself to feel in your body what's coming up. For some people, that's a big step, especially these days. Anna Lemke, who came on the show a few months ago, this addiction specialist said,

Starting point is 00:07:16 smartphones are the modern day hypodermic needle. Brilliant. Yeah, which is pretty provocative, but actually there's a huge amount of truth in that. Yeah, which is pretty provocative, but actually there's a huge amount of truth in that. So I know I talk to my patients a lot about even five or 10 minutes a day of solitude where they can sit with themselves and allow things to come up. How important is that for someone if they are going to then change some of the relationships in their lives? How important is that they get to know themselves a bit better first? Or can they simply get to know themselves through their interactions with their family? I think it's both and. You know, you cannot fix what you don't face. So if

Starting point is 00:08:01 you're self-medicating with the hypodermic needle of your smartphone, with busyness, with alcohol, with sugar, with all of the things that are at, you know, within hand's reach at any moment to eat our feelings, to block our feelings, then we have no idea what is the hole in our heart or the overwhelming feeling that we have inside. And that can set up a really massively, as you've seen with your patients, terrible negative spiral where nothing can improve. Because you have to know something is disturbing you to be able to look at it, feel it, name it, and then begin to address it. And you can do that in very small ways, like you say, like five minutes, just, you know, turning your attention in, breathing, being aware of what you feel and naming it.

Starting point is 00:09:01 And that gives you tons of information. You know, emotions are transmitters of information that need to be expressed and allowed through your system. The things you do to block what you're feeling block your system and keep you stuck in a dysfunctional system. Yeah, so powerful. And I think sometimes people think that, you know, I'm eating well, I'm sort of moving, I'm focusing on my sleep, but not spending any time on their emotional regulation and figuring out why they get triggered or annoyed at little things.

Starting point is 00:09:47 It's so, so important. We see so much research now that an inability to forgive, feeling hostile, feeling angry, these things are associated with all kinds of negative health outcomes, autoimmune disease, cancer, heart disease, stroke, right? These unexpressed emotions are not benign, right? If you don't do something with them, they're going to eat you up, aren't they? They do. There's that AA frame, HALT, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. It's a very good trigger warning, if you like. And you could be all of those things at the same time. I don't know if that meets what you're saying, but what I completely agree with is unless you're aware of what is going on inside you and you respond to the messages of what is going on inside you and you meet the needs of

Starting point is 00:10:40 those messages, you will go on feeling as bad. And that increasingly gets worse over time. Yeah. And to answer your question, you can do it in relation to yourself. But you know, I'm a therapist, I definitely believe you learn a lot about yourself from journaling, or from conversations. So sometimes people don't know what they're feeling until they voice it, or until they write it down. And I think walking and talking is a really good way with a really close friend even talking into your phone you know journaling to yourself using your voice memo sometimes voicing it releases your unconscious to say words that you didn't even know that were in you that surprise you

Starting point is 00:11:21 yeah it's so powerful I think that tip you gave about when you have to have a difficult conversation or maybe broaching a topic that hasn't been broached before, do it whilst you're doing something else together. You know, I think about me and my kids, you know, I've learned that actually if we do something together and we're not looking at each other, actually things start to come up and it's just much more non-threatening, isn't it? Much more. So as a family, we have a puzzle that's always on the go. And it's quite a big puzzle that's in the corner of the room.

Starting point is 00:11:55 And my children, my grandchildren, they come in and it's a lovely place where you can be around the table. Nobody speaks. And you can kind of jostle who found the bit and you know the competitiveness but then you can begin to have a conversation about something that's difficult or tricky or that everyone is able to have the space to do because puzzling is slow and that's a lovely way of doing it is there something about that puzzle game that almost, it kind of warms up all the interactions in an unthreatening environment, which then allows you to go deeper? Yes, completely. And you can have conversations with your mum while you're doing a puzzle like, mum, what did your mum

Starting point is 00:12:36 believe about sex? What were your mum's values about money? What was your mum's upbringing? What was the things that she found difficult? And so you can begin to find the stories, the untold stories from the generations before, which may help you make sense of the story that is unvoiced in you, that is disturbing you unknowingly. You know, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And if a value for anyone listening is family and people in their family, one of their questions to themselves is,

Starting point is 00:13:17 am I prioritizing my time to spend with my family? And if I want to have kind of soulful, meaningful conversations that will live on in me decades after maybe my dad has died, I need to create that time. One of the definitions of being loved is being known, known as you find yourself to be, not just the you that you put on, the kind of performance you that you put on. And one of the things that came across in every single family I worked with, this was their family, and yet there were whole aspects of them that they did not know. So you cannot know your family by not having those important, sometimes difficult, but always useful conversations. And that takes time.

Starting point is 00:14:16 Families are complex, they're dynamic, they're fraught with problems for many people what are some of your final words for people who have been inspired by this conversation want to make changes want to get to know their families better but perhaps don't know where to start i think maybe the first step is to turn to themselves with compassion, to be compassionate towards what their feelings are, to let themselves know that probably it didn't start with you, this feeling that something isn't quite right, and to dare to begin to explore, to look up to your parents or across to your siblings or, you know, talk to your children about things that have been bothering you

Starting point is 00:15:10 that you have never dared voice or name or allow and start small. You know, we all live as a family on a spectrum of function and dysfunction. No perfect family exists. And I think particularly now with social media, you see these sort of perfected images of life. But knowing that families are both the source of our greatest joy and strength and this kind of sense of belonging in the world, but also the source of greatest pain and where you hate most and where you make your biggest mistakes, because they're the people that we invest in most and care about most. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful

Starting point is 00:16:00 weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Heal and Let Go of the Past | Julia Samuel #359

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