Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Science Of Personality: How To Transform Your Life, Find Inner Peace and Become a Better Parent with Dr Dan Siegel #489

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Are you living your life intentionally, or are you simply reacting to the world around you? Do you feel a sense of wholeness and contentment, or are you constantly striving for something more? In today's episode, I dive into these fundamental questions about the nature of human existence with Dr Dan Siegel.   Dan received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in Paediatrics and Child, Adolescent and Adult Psychiatry. He has spent decades studying family interactions with an emphasis on how our attachment experiences influence our emotions, behaviour and autobiographical memory.   He is also an award-winning educator, who was previously Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine in UCLA, and he’s the author of five New York Times bestsellers and over fifteen other books, including his very latest, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy.   In this conversation, Dan shares insights from his ground-breaking 20-year project on personality development. We discuss the difference between temperament and personality and explore how our innate tendencies interact with our life experiences to shape who we become.    Dan introduces his theory of ABC (Agency, Bonding, Certainty) as fundamental motivational networks influencing our personality and explains how understanding these can lead to greater self-awareness and personal growth.   We discuss the impact our childhood experiences have on our adult lives. Dan shares his ‘4 S's’ of parenting - a brilliant framework which helps us build emotionally resilient children. We also go through Dan’s ‘Wheel of Awareness’ practice - a powerful tool that helps us move - from a reactive state to a more intentional, receptive way of living.   Dan's message is one of hope and it reminds us that it's never too late to work on ourselves and find that sense of wholeness within. This conversation is not just about understanding ourselves better - it's about finding a path to true contentment and inner peace. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://airbnb.co.uk/host https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://calm.com/livemore https://www.eightsleep.com/livemore   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/489   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

Why can't we wake up to the possibility that modern culture has been a case of mistaken identity? That by telling you, okay, who you are is just that body you're in. It's all about you, you, you, you, you. Because if self is thought of as an identical term, a synonym, for individual, we are sunk. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Are you living your life intentionally, or are you simply reacting to the world around you? Do you feel a sense of wholeness and contentment, or are you constantly striving for something more?

Well, in this week's episode, we dive into these fundamental questions about the nature of human existence. Dr. Dan Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child adolescent and adult psychiatry. He spent decades studying family interactions with an emphasis on how our attachment experiences influence our emotions, behavior, and autobiographical memory. Dan is an award-winning educator. He was previously clinical professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine in UCLA, and he's also the author of five New York Times bestsellers and over 15 other books, including his very

latest, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy. In our conversation, Dan shares insights from his groundbreaking 20-year project on personality development. We discuss the difference between temperament and personality And explore how our innate tendencies interact with our life experiences to shape who we become Dan shares that by understanding how his ABC, agency, bonding and certainty Influence our own personalities, we can develop greater self-awareness and grow. We also discuss the impact our childhood experiences have on our adult lives. Dan shares his four S's of parenting, a brilliant framework which helps us build emotionally

resilient children. And we also go through Dan's Wheel of Awareness practice, a powerful tool that helps us move from a reactive state to a more intentional, receptive way of living. Dan's message is one of hope and reminds us that it's never too late to work on ourselves and find that sense of wholeness within. This conversation is not just about understanding ourselves better. It's about finding a path to true contentment and inner peace. If we look out across the world today, there appears to be a lot of unhappiness, a lot of struggle, and a lot of division. Based upon what you know about human beings and our inner worlds,

why do you think there's so much struggle in the world? And are you optimistic about the future? I think there's an incredible potential that we as a human family have with awareness to make intentional choices that are different from what we do on automatic. And so that's why I actually have a deep sense of hope, a realistic hope, an active hope, that is based on scientific reasoning

and based on clinical practice and just being a human, thinking about where have we gotten ourselves, that I'm very much optimistic. And the reason even, I think, to dive deeply into your important question of why is because if we can figure out accurately what the truth of why is,

then we can figure out how to work with that why in a very productive and effective way. So here's what I think is going on. If you go back in time and you basically look at what has happened with our human species, how we've evolved in modern times, we became number one, mammals. So we became very social. Number two, we became humans, which our formal name is Homo sapiens sapiens. The sapire is the word for the knowing. So not only do we know, we know we know, which is

where the hope lies. Because we can actually take this capacity for awareness, for self-awareness, and awaken ourselves from automatic pilot. But what is the automatic pilot we've gotten into? When you follow human evolution, one way to understand it is that we survived based on in-group versus out-group distinctions. So we said, if you're in my cave, you're my family, you're my friends, we're going to protect each other. We're going to cooperate, collaborate. We're going to get some creative unions that are allowing us to not only survive, but we thrive. That's beautiful. We're an incredibly collaborative species. But if we deem that you're in cave B, not the cave A members where we live,

and there's the cave B members, if we can discern that these are not us, we can keep them away and they won't threaten us. We can keep our stuff once we started accumulating stuff. And in this distinction, then we could keep the outsiders out, the insiders in. And if we needed to, unfortunately, we could shut off our circuitry of empathy and compassion that we're using for the in-group,

shut it off and sometimes injure, if not kill the out-group. Yeah. And that's basically human evolution in the shortest version you'll ever hear. But if you now expand the population where there's an experience of insufficiency, where people are wanting to own land, own things,

and you have modern culture, unlike land-based indigenous cultures that teach the relationship of you as a human to the land is essential. The relationship of you to generations that came before your ancestors and generations that are coming in the future, the descendants, they're all a part of who you are. There's an expanded definition of yourself. That larger self connected to all people and to all of nature starts to become very narrowed down into what you can call a solo self.

This isolated separate solo self in indigenous teachings is something to be watching out for that as they say be careful of the vulnerability of thinking you're a separate self. But in modern culture we take that word self and we equate it with the individual. Yeah. And if you like me grew up in a modern culture you'd say of course self means an individual. But if self is really looked at as a center of experience, it doesn't mean it has to be your skin and case body. It could be your relationships with your family,

with your friends, with all of humanity, and even all of nature. So we have a relational self and we have an inner self. Sure, you have a body. So I think what's happened is this inner self being equated with the only self that matters, even if it's about a plural inner self, like just my family or people who are like me,

my similar race or nationality or religion, all the ways we divide ourselves up, that's created this separation of people from each other that leads to genocides, wars, continual fighting social injustice and racism and it even has us differentiate ourselves from other species so if we're building a factory to get more stuff for our in-group we don't care if we destroy the environment around the factory because we're building the stuff to get the money that we want and so we start destroying earth and this is what i think is happening this solo self view has been i think

a source of all the pandemics we face not just causes for the viral pandemic but these assaults on climate and assaults on our humanity i really appreciate those answers. You know, in your first response to my question about optimism and the state of the world, I really felt that there's almost two choices we can make as humans. We can either be intentional about our lives and create the lives that we want, or we can be reactive. And so, you know, I've been absorbed in your previous book, Interconnected, for the last few weeks,

which I've really enjoyed reading. Thank you. And I sort of think a lot about who are we really as humans? Because as you say about in-group and out-group, it's fascinating because it seems to be certainly the online world at least seems to really drive people into choosing their tribe. Who actually are we? Can we transcend some of our base level patterns of trying to other other people? So if you don't mind, I just want to read a phrase that you wrote in your book. The world is not always kind, not always compassionate,

not always integrative. Our human history of survival-based evolution leads us towards tribalism. And adding to this tendency is our genetically inherited, neurally mediated, socially reinforced propensity towards in-group and out-group evaluation. Yeah. So first of all, I think it was a beautiful bit of writing there. Thank you. But who are we? Like at our core, who are we? Are we this reactive species who's just trying to

protect what's ours and make sure that we're okay and the people around us are okay? Or are we this more loving, compassionate species who wants to thrive. But as I thrive, everyone around me also thrives as well. You're beautiful. Well, thank you for pointing out that passage. And that was a challenging and incredibly powerful experience to write that book, to try to articulate coming from a culture of individualism why i thought individualism was actually the splinter in the soul of the modern psyche that was making us limp forward in life so the optimism i feel is embedded in that not only passage you wrote but your response to it it, which is that, yeah, I do think with intentionality,

with an awakening of the mind to the lie that it's been told, which is that the center of experience that we use the word self to indicate, when that is being told to us as being the individual, that's a lie. Of course, you want the center of experience to be something you put energy into, take care of it, protect it, nurture it, allow it to thrive. Absolutely.

And here's the strange thing. If self is thought of as an identical term, a synonym for individual, we are sunk. So the reason I spent all those years writing that book, Interconnected, was a plea to our fellow human beings to say, why can't we wake up to the possibility that modern culture has been a case of mistaken identity. That by telling you, okay, Rangan, who you are,

is you are just that body you're in, or Dan, I'm just this body. And then do what you can to make sure you're keeping the body healthy and happy. And if you wanna get connected to other bodies, call your family, great, and your friends, great, and protect them and nourish them, but be careful of the ones that are not you,

whether that's a not you human or a not you species, it's all about you, you, you, you, you, where you is considered your body or your body plural, people in this in-group. So my hopefulness actually, especially after writing Intra Connected was, you know, when I had been in a forest and, you know, with some colleagues alone for three days

and then had this experience of incredible openness of my identity to being a part of the forest and aspect of all of nature, when my colleagues came out and said, oh, we were interdependent and interconnected and interwoven all the I-N-T-E-R prefixes to those terms, which means between, it came time for my turn to speak. And I said, I really understand what you're saying,

but for me, the experience was not interconnected. I was, I don't know, I was like, and I couldn't find the word. So I said, I was intra-connected. There was a connectedness within the whole that this body called Dan was just a part of. And the body didn't disappear. My identity as Dan didn't disappear.

I knew there was a Dan, but I knew I was as much the trees and the creek as this body called Dan. So I said interconnected. And when I went back to the place where we had technology and I could type out some of my notes from the three days, quote, alone in the forest, which is really more like all one in the forest, the word processor would not allow me to type interconnected without changing it to interconnected. And I realized there was no word in English for this connectivity within the whole.

So the notion that yourself is yes in your body and also your relationships with other people, even those that don't have the same skin color, religious beliefs, nationality, geographical location, all that stuff that you were part of a larger human family. And then if you expand that relational self even larger to expand it out to,

I'm all of living beings. So that when you see a tree, you don't look at it as, oh, something I'm just gonna cut down, I don't care. But you see it almost like you would see your leg and you wouldn't cut down your leg don't care. But you see it almost like you would see your leg and you wouldn't cut down your leg. So then when you start feeling that you realize, wow, okay, I am the earth.

And I say, I am using the word I in a broad sense. So people wanted to know, well, can I hold on to the individual that's me? And I go, yeah. They said, well, I don't need to get rid of me. I said, no, no, no, no. The idea is integrations, you differentiate your link. So this is where another word came up. Yeah. Me plus we is this funny word in English, we, M-W-E. And what's funny about that is people

realize they don't have to choose between an inner self and a relational self. You are both. And we is just a fun way to remind ourselves that mui are both a me and a we. So you can be working on yourself, expressing yourself authentically, trying to master certain passions and pursue certain things, but that doesn't have to come at the expense

of the people around you. Yeah. You can do that and you can support the people around you. Other people don't have to lose in order for you to win. Beautifully said. And that's one of the problems, I think, and that's one of the things I feel that I developed as a child is this idea that, which I feel I've mostly, if not all, let go off now through, you know, practices we can talk about perhaps, but this realisation that I can win and people around me can win. Yeah. Which is very freeing. It's very liberating. So a couple of questions, which, and some of these, I guess, relate to your upcoming book, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, which I haven't read yet and I'm looking forward to reading. But this idea of

intentionality, are we living an intentional life or a reactive life, some of that I imagine comes down to how you were raised as a child. If you were raised in an environment of danger, if you were raised in an environment where safety wasn't felt, you may have developed the worldview that the world's not safe, the world view that the world's not safe, okay, I need to make sure I sort myself out. Whereas if you were raised in an environment of love and safety and there were people around you there to support you, your world view is that, hey, listen, world's good, world's safe, like, it's cool, like, I can win and people around me can win, right? So that childhood piece must be important, I would imagine. I know you've written so many books on parenting

and you have some, I'd love to know some of your advice for parents because the 4S's framework, I think is really, really powerful. But perhaps can you just speak to that idea first? How much does your childhood upbringing influence whether you live life intentionally or reactively? Yeah.

So having just finished this 20-year project called Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, I'm going to try to make this as succinct and directed toward your question as I can. But let's just start with the fundamental view that when your body is developing in the womb and as a fetus you're growing, you are developing a nervous system.

Part of the influence on how that nervous system will be shaped is your genetics, determining that you're a human and not an elephant, for example, but also shaping in part certain propensities of your nervous system. Some are just random experiences that happen during gestation of how your nervous system develops.

So now let's come to the moment where you're born. You are born and at the moment you're born, you have something called temperament. And in this book, I actually propose with my colleagues, nine different kinds of temperament. So then depending on the temperament, for example, it looks like about a third of the population has a temperament which pushes towards agency

where you really wanna make sure you're asserting, you're embodied empowerment, you're asserting your embodied empowerment, you're having a sense of competency. And if it's frustrated, you feel irritated, angry, furious even. That temperament may make your experience of being in the world, when you're talking about how is it, can you give to the larger good, one way,

especially now we're getting to the second layer. If your attachment is not secure, then you'll have a kind of a more rigid way in which temperament turns into personality. And then your anger may come out more readily and you'll be more likely to wanna have your own things done your own way, this kind of thing, depending on, there's lots of variations that I talk about in that book,

but just say that anger is your emotion that's generated when you feel threatened. And we'll talk about that reactive state versus what you're calling the intentional state, which is kind of receptive open state. Another group is more the bonding group. And that temperament makes you more oriented towards having separation distress and sadness so when you're getting reactive you might get filled with

this distress about i'm not connected i'm not connected because your drive is for relational connection so that would be a different way especially with non-secure attachment you know then you have a more rigid way your personality is and you get more threatened with a sadness and separation distress. And then the third broad grouping that we've observed is that it's about basically a drive for certainty and predictability so you can have safety. And in that predictability and certainty,

when it's not there and you're frustrated, you get anxious and you get fearful. Okay, so let me put something to you. Something I have realized and experienced in my own life is that certain things, certain aspects of who I thought I was were not actually who I was, they were who I became. Okay. And I'll give you a concrete example. Now, listeners of this podcast may have heard this example before, so I'll try and sort of summarize the essence because I really

love your take on this. I was brought up, two parent family, older brother. My parents were Indian immigrants to the UK. Dad came in 1962, mum came in about 74, something like that, okay? So in a lot of immigrant families, and I can speak for an Indian immigrant family in the UK, a huge emphasis is put on academic excellence. So I can remember various incidents as a child when I'd come back from school, maybe at five or six or seven, I can't remember the exact age, with 19 out of 20, let's say. And there would never be a well done. It would always be, what did you get wrong? Oh my. Okay. Yeah.

If I wasn't top of the class, it would like, who came top? You know, why weren't you top? Okay. Now that may sound really toxic, but, and maybe when I first came across this and started to unpick my childhood, I may have considered it as toxic as well, but I don't anymore because I believe there's multiple perspectives on every situation. So my parents facing the discrimination they faced when they came to the UK back then, in their heads, the way that they avoid their children facing the same problems is by academic excellence because academic excellence equates to being a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer, which equates to a good, secure job, right? The problem for me was, and I, of course, wasn't aware of this at the time, and this is the story I now tell myself as I reflect on my life and try and use what I've learned from my childhood to help make me a

better, a more calmer, a more enlightened adult, I realized that I took on the belief at a young age that I was only loved, or I felt I was only worthy of love, when I got full marks, when I was top of the class. And so for much of my life, I consider myself very competitive. If you talk to any one of my close friends, they will tell you, Rangan is one of the most competitive people you will meet. I would not lose at something, be it snooker, pool, run, whatever it is, I would make sure somehow that I won, right? It's not a very calm place to live from. And what would happen if you didn't? Yeah, this is really interesting. And I only really discovered this when writing my last book,

Happy Mind, Happy Life, when I sort of realized I actually didn't enjoy winning. I just couldn't stand the thought of losing. It's very, very different. But here's the interesting thing, Dan, for me. I would have said I was competitive. My friends would say I was competitive. I thought, oh, that's who I am. I'm competitive. But it's not who I am. It was who I became. I am no longer competitive, genuinely. Like by doing a variety of different things, including internal family systems and all kinds of different things, which I've spoken about before, I've realized where that came from. I've moved beyond it. So in terms of personality, some people would have said, oh, your personality wrongness to be competitive. And I guess we can talk about the difference between personality and temperament. But in

essence, what I'm trying to say is, and what I try and explain to people is that who you are today is not necessarily who you are. It may be, or a large part of it may be who you became. I find that very empowering because I now go, oh, well, what else about me potentially could I change if I wanted to? So I could tell you a lot more, but I'd love to. Please do, please do. Well, in essence, I feel a lot of people, a lot of my patients in the past feel that the way they are is just the way they are. Well, this is just who I am. And maybe part of it is who they are, but maybe a huge part isn't. Maybe a huge part of who you think you are is an adaptation to your childhood for very good

reason. And so I always like to empower people. So I believe that we can change a lot more about our lives than we give ourselves credit for. I think a lot of people feel that they're stuck with what they consider to be their personality, but how much of their personality is actually changeable and was a response, an appropriate response. Because if you take my competitiveness, it's a genius adaptation. If I think I'm only getting love when I'm top, well, developing the traits of being competitive is going to help push me to be the top. So I'll be loved, right? But as I've realized, oh, actually I'm loved anyway. I don't need that, right? And that's a long story of how I got to that point. But today I actually do genuinely,

I just feel bloody fantastic, Dan. I feel calm. I feel non-reactive. I feel that I see joy everywhere in the world. I feel that I try and operate from a place of love rather than fear in most of my interactions. So I share that because I want people to know that you can change so much about who you think you are.

You know a lot about personality. You said this book is a 20-year project you've tried to summarize in a book. Yeah. Do you have any comments on what I've just shared with you? Oh, lots of comments. comments on what I've just shared with you. Oh, lots of comments. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb. With the winter rolling in, some of you, I'm sure,

will be thinking about a trip away to escape the cold. And for many of you, you will no doubt be looking at staying in an Airbnb. In fact, whenever my family and I go away, our first choice is always an Airbnb over a hotel. And we have stayed in many fantastic Airbnbs over the years in places like Greece, France, America, and Egypt. For us personally, we love the convenience and the fact that we have our own kitchen to use when we're not at home. Now, if you've ever stayed in an Airbnb and thought, I could do this, maybe my place could be an Airbnb, you're probably right. It can be as simple as starting with a spare room or even your whole place when you're next away. room, or even your whole place when you're next away. Whether you use the extra money to pay for some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host. Just taking a quick break to give a shout

out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one convenient daily serving that makes it really easy to fit into your life, no matter how busy

you feel. It's also really, really tasty. The scientific team behind AG1 includes experts from a broad range of fields, including longevity, preventive medicine, genetics, and biochemistry. I talk to them regularly and I'm really impressed with their commitment to making a top quality product. 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 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. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. I think the message you're trying to give to everyone that be careful when you think some aspect of who you are, and that's in quotes, is fixed. Yeah. Then your own belief that it's fixed may make it so, right? So there's beautiful work by the scientist Carol Dweck on growth mindset versus a fixed mindset where one of the things you can study is personality.

And when you believe that's changeable, then things are changeable. On the other hand, there are ways of understanding, for example, how the brain forms early in life, so in utero, to create these things we call temperament. And you have kids, I've got kids who are now adults. You know, our two kids had very different temperaments. Likewise. You know, for the first two days, you knew they had very different temperaments.

And we can study that. There's some fabulous books. There's a beautiful book called Parenting with Temperament in Mind that some colleagues wrote that's just exquisite. And the key thing about temperament, if you're a parent listening, is to know that it isn't that one temperament is better than another. As a parent, your invitation is to just tune into who your child is in quotes, and allow them to thrive given their temperament, rather than projecting your expectations onto your kid. I want an outgoing, energized kid

who's able to take on any kind of new thing. And if that's not your kid's temperament, it's gonna be a problem. That child is not gonna really be seen by you, won't be easily soothed by you, won't particularly feel emotionally safe with you. And so that non-attunement to who they actually are, quote, temperament-wise,

will actually intensify their very feelings of nervousness because they won't be seen by you. So that's one way of seeing how attachment experiences, which are your relationships with important caregivers in your life, how it actually shapes the regulatory circuitry of the brain, which would include, for example, you getting the message from your parents that says, hey, you got one out of 20 wrong. Why'd you do that? And just their nonverbal communication to you, or maybe they're explicit about it. Why didn't you get 20 out of 20?

You know, it makes you feel like, I want the love of my parents. And so I'm going to really do well. In fact, I'll not just do well in academics, I'll do well in everything. Can I just jump in there just for a second? Because I think it's a really important point that perhaps I didn't make clear when explaining.

I dearly love my parents and I think they did a great job in raising me. Like I really do believe that. Yeah, I hear that. And I believe they were doing that from a place of love. I really do. I believe that their intention, and this is quite a common immigrant type story. And certainly in Asian immigrants, you will hear this. Ever since I started sharing this story, the amount of people from immigrant families who get in touch with me and say, oh my God, thank you for verbalizing that. That was my experience as well. And I hope we get to talk about your wheel of awareness at some point. I feel that real evolution of our personal growth really comes when we actually no longer try and blame.

So maybe when I initially came across this, I might have been frustrated. I remember I actually popped around to mums years ago when I was starting to come around. So I said, hey mum, you know, why did you say that to me? Or dad, you know, why did you say that to me? that to me? Or dad, you know, why did you say that to me? And A, they don't even remember, right? And B, it was very clear to me that they just wanted the best for me. Like my mum once said to me, hey, look, we know how talented you are. We just wanted you to be the best that you could be. So this, I think a lot of the time with our, it's not necessarily what happened, it's the interpretation we give to what happened. So now I look back on that with love. I go, hey, mum and dad, I get why you did that. You wanted

me to have the best life I could possibly have, right? So you were driving me to be the best I could be. The problem for me, and it's not blaming them, the problem for me was that I interpreted that, I think, as a sign that I'm not loved unless I get top marks. And so that has massively influenced my own parenting style with my children because I don't want them to feel that. Right. And I hear you're being really wonderfully respectful of your parents and really honoring them, which is really beautiful. The research, you know, that Carol Dweck and others have done, looking at how parents reward in their comments, you know, a child's efforts, for example,

rather than the outcome of what they do, show that kids actually do better when parents really recognize the efforts. You really put a lot of energy into this. You really cared. I could see how thorough you were. Wow, you did like that, right? Whereas kids who are only rewarded for the outcome,

a result on a test or whatever, they develop this fixed mindset where they think, okay, it's all just about what I, what, what I result in, not what I'm experiencing. Because with a growth mindset, Carol Dweck has shown, you know, what you have is you have resilience. You know, you were really fortunate. You have all these gifts. And so your parents' alignment and, you know, really pushing for results, you know, worked out fine. But imagine if it didn't.

Yeah. And I know people, probably many people, where parents tried the exact same thing and their kids were not capable. Agreed, me too. And whoa, the outcome for those children is really sad. They feel horrible about themselves because they couldn't get the marks their parents said,

keep on striving, striving. Imagine if that child just had a parent said, wow, I saw you really put your effort in. You got 14 out of 20. Last time you got 10 out of 20. Yeah, remarkable. Keep on with that effort, that's beautiful. Not beating them up for got 10 out of 20 yeah remarkable you know keep on keep on with that effort that's beautiful not beating them up for getting 14 out of 20 instead of 20 out of 20 so

it worked out well with you and your parents so i just want to say for anyone listening you know the research is pretty clear you know let's focus on the effort that a child exerts rather than the outcome of what they result in. I completely agree. And also just to add there, I think it's worked out well, not because of any achievement or success as defined by society that I've had in life. It's only ended up okay because I've gone in

and explored my inner world and processed a lot of this because I think for many years it wasn't okay in the fact I was achieving, but I felt incomplete. So what feel that whenever I achieved, and yes, I am by society's metrics of success, sure, I've achieved a degree of success, definitely. But I think in many ways, achieving that success taught me that it doesn't make you happy, right? I got the outcomes that, you know, my dad would have loved, but he never got to see, right? But getting those outcomes didn't lead to contentment. So going back to your original question, I feel one of the key things I learned was that

you can achieve perfect or what you consider perfect outcomes and it's still not fill the hole that you have inside yourself. So for some, I think for me, it was very beneficial to get these high levels of success to teach me that. And it's kind of forced me or it's encouraged me to go inwards and go and figure out, well, what does contentment look like? Because external validation sure as hell didn't do it for me. And so I really was set on this path, Dan, when my father died in 2013, because I was a huge part of, you know, a huge part of my adult life was spent caring for dad, along with my mum and my big brother, so, you know, I live very near my family house, still now, mum's still there, you know, I live five minutes away. And so dad dying was the, it was the first time where I started to go inward. Until dad died, everything was outward for me, I think. When dad died, it was the first

time I went inward to examine my life. Where did my beliefs come from? Where did my desire to become adult to come from? What am I doing? So that's me trying to summarize a very, very long journey. Did that make sense? It makes total sense. And you used two words, the idea that there was a hollowness inside and something felt very incomplete. Can you just try to illuminate for us what did that feel like, hollowness? It's so hard to put words to this because I feel that I've, it's been years now since I moved beyond this.

So in some ways, that's a really nice thing to go, oh, I can barely remember what that used to feel like. Right, so I think that's a good thing. Nothing ever felt enough. I think going back to how we started this conversation, I think I felt reactive. I think part of it was also this, I've got everything you could possibly have wanted as a child, yet I still want more. You know, I'm trying to put words to something that I used to feel. I guess the contrast would be,

last year I was in Sweden, my book and happiness came out there a year after it came out in the UK and the US. And I was there doing some promo for it. And I remember a Swedish journalist asked me in Stockholm, well, how do you know if you're happy? And it was a great question. And I was thinking about it.

And then I think what came to mind in that moment was, I think, you know, when you're happy, when you have this kind of sense of inner peace and you don't really want for anything, like I feel I have enough and I am enough. Is this making sense? Totally makes sense, yeah. I mean, it's really powerful to hear this.

And I really so deeply appreciate us being able to talk at this level of vulnerability and openness and rawness. There's, I think, a way that we can put a frame around this that might be a good way to connect with you and then I want to know what happened after your dad died. We have a very similar history in certain ways. My dad died 12 years ago

and I live seven minutes from my mom who's 95 now, you know, and our adult daughter lives, you know, four minutes away and our son lives 12 minutes away, you know, so we have a pretty tight family. And I love hearing that because that's quite rare these days.

Yeah, it is. So it's really nice to hear that for me that other people do that as well. Yeah, yeah. It's important thing to have that feeling the opposite of, you know, hollowness is I think wholeness to feel whole and have this feeling of coherence

rather than fragmentation or incompleteness. So can I give you a little just a download of this 20-year project? So picture the experience that we have when there is no separation, when there is no separation, when there's nothing you have to do, when, you know, there are no emergencies like a siren we hear in the distance tells us there's some emergency. Someone has to go from being receptive to reactive, fighting, fleeing, freezing,

or collapsing in a faint. You know, you're just receptive, effortless being. And imagine, though there are variations of this, but imagine that we have a nervous system when we're in the womb that can remember, in what's called implicit memory, a feeling of just effortless being, of being not separated, of being whole. When in the womb, especially the last trimester, the last three months, you know, you don't have to eat. You don't have to breathe.

You don't have to make sure there are caregivers aware of where you are. All those things are taken care of in the womb. And sure, there are variations if your mother's stressed or you're hearing, you know, painful things in the womb. And sure, there are variations if your mother's stressed or you're hearing painful things outside the womb, but in general, there's an effortless state of being that let's just call that the experience of wholeness. You could go even further back if you wanna go

in terms of cosmically to the big bang and when all we were were potential in the universe and then potential spread out into all this mass and stars and planets and moons and our bodies. But the point is that in the womb, and just like before the Big Bang, all there was was just being. Then what's the difference between this sense of wholeness

that we all experienced at some level in the womb and now you're out, you've been born, however you got out here. What's the difference in your state of existence? Well, when you're born and you're outside the womb, you are reliant on certain things. You need people, caregivers, parents, siblings, whatever it is, you need people to look after you, to bring you food, bring you food, maybe your mother to breastfeed you if she's able to, warmth, shelter. And if those things are not there, you're going to feel isolated. You're going to feel that the world is not safe and that there's something wrong. Wrong. And what if those things never show up? What's going to happen? Well, at one extreme of those things never show up, what's going to happen? Well, at one extreme of those things never show up, you're probably going to end up dying. Right. So you are now in a do or die situation.

Okay. We call it working for a living, right? You've got to make sure all those things you powerfully just said are there and you achieve them by doing in various ways, right? You're just a baby, but there's a complete contrast of the effortless being, which we're going to name as wholeness, in the womb, that because you have a nervous system that's remembering stuff in something called implicit memory, which means the bodily sensations, the perceptions, the emotions, and even the behaviors. In this case, the perceptions,

the emotions, and even the behaviors, in this case, no behavior, you don't have to do anything. Those are remembered in an implicit memory. And here's the amazing thing about pure implicit memory. Research shows that when you take an implicit memory that's in storage and now retrieve it, it's activated and you don't know it's coming from the past. So what our hypothesis is, is that there's a feeling of restlessness when you're born because

you know something that you implicitly are familiar with, that you implicitly can sense once was there is not there, even though you don't feel it's coming from the past, you just feel the contrast of this oomph, this sense of wholeness that's missing now, as you powerfully point out, right? We've never talked about this before, have we? But you articulated, you know, exactly the setup, right?

So now, depending on your temperament, whether it's about agency in one sensitive grouping, bonding in another sensitive grouping, certainty in another, we think that your experience is going to be, I'm going to be really frustrated or angry with this new non-wholeness setup. I'll have separation, distress, and sadness with this new non-wholeness setup, or I'm going to be anxious and fearful in this new non-wholeness setup. Is this for everyone? For everyone. No matter their attachment. Yeah. So what you're saying is, if we really think about it, is deeply, deeply profound.

Because the way I'm hearing the information and the way it's sort of filtering through my brain and my existing beliefs and perceptions I'm thinking well are you saying that a default state of being human is that you experience a separation from wholeness and therefore is the journey, the real journey of being a human to get back to the wholeness that we previously experienced. The mental wellness app Calm are sponsoring today's show. There's a lot happening these days. It can feel especially stressful or hopeless when things feel outside our own control, but Calm can help you restore your sense of balance and peace amidst the chaos. Calm is the number one app for sleep and meditation, giving you the power to calm your mind

and change your life. Calm recognises that everyone faces unique challenges in their daily lives, and that mental health needs differ from person to person. And since self-care practices are so deeply personal, Calm strives to provide content that caters to your own individual preferences and needs. Their meditations range from focusing on anxiety and stress, relaxation and focus, to building habits, improving sleep and taking care of your physical well-being. Calm also has sleep stories, sleep meditations, and calming music that will help you drift off for some restful sleep. For listeners of my show, Calm is offering an exclusive 40% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com forward slash live more and new content is added every single

week. Go to calm.com forward slash live more for 40% off unlimited access to Calm's entire library. That's calm.com forward slash live more. Today's episode is sponsored by 8Sleep. Now, as you probably know, sleep is a crucial ingredient for our overall health and longevity. Yet these days, many people struggle. Now, 8sleep have a technology called the pod, which can be added to your existing mattress, like a fitted sheet, and it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed, which can be especially helpful if you sleep with a partner, as you can both have the ideal temperature that you want. Many athletes and business leaders swear by it. The pod can also detect snoring and automatically lift your head to improve airflow and hopefully

stop you snoring. If you want to give the pod from 8sleep a try, all you have to do is go to www.8sleep.com forward slash live more, that's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P.com forward slash live more and use the code LIVE MORE to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. It currently ships to the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, and Australia. You've just given the best summary of that book I've ever heard.

That was a 20-year project that you just summarized beautifully. That personality is the different ways we're trying to get back to wholeness. I literally can feel tingles all over my body at the moment. What about the journey through the birth canal? Well, we need to do research on that, but of course that can shape things too. What we feel is your temperament is set up in the subcortical, that is in the brain, you have a cortex and areas below the cortex

we call sub for below cortex. The subcortical areas of the brain are what grows and mature to a very full extent in utero, in the womb. So that now you're going to have experiences that shape you that are going to be cortically responded to. So that's an experience that certainly can shape you and we should study that. How you get out by cesarean section of vaginal delivery. Yes, we should study that. That brief period will certainly impact memory in a certain way. But the larger picture is you have a temperament,

a little sensitivity in one of these motivational networks for agency versus bonding versus certainty is going to set up more activation in that particular network for the first day, two, three, four, five. And then the way neuroplasticity, how the brain changes in response to experience is that your own initial sensitivity or intensity or response to novelty,

the classic ways we define temperament, if it's distributed across these three motivational networks in a slightly different way, by a week of age, a month of age, five months of age, your own initial small sensitivity is gonna become a larger set of neural connections because it was just firing off more. Neurons are fired together, wired together.

So now you're six months of age and you've got a temperament going. Not that you have a, you're temperamental, that classic way we use it, but more you have a feature to your nervous system. So we think, my colleagues and I, that this contrast of being whole in the womb, effortless being, is embedded in your implicit memory. And that embedding in the womb is so different from your actual ongoing, online, real-time experiences of being out here in the world for the rest of our lives,

that this temperament is then activated, especially when we're challenged in certain ways, but in general in life, and then you have the attachment experiences you get, things your parents say or do for being seen, soothed and safe, are going to then shape whether these temperament features become intensely molding your personality in a certain direction or kind of more mildly molding it. So we don't think it determines whether you're ABC, agency,

bonding, or certainty, but that it intensifies the rigidity of your personality if your attachment's been not secure. Okay, so temperament and personality. Yeah. These are separate things. Well, let's not call them separate. Let's call them distinct things. They are distinct.

They're not separate in that personality emerges from temperament. That's our theory. So they're distinct. Temperament would be the subcortical proclivities that you're born with. They're not learned. For someone who doesn't understand the term subcortical, can you just break it down for them? Sure. doesn't understand the term subcortical can you just break it down for them sure so the brain if you take your hand and put your thumb in the middle if you're not driving you know take a hand

put your thumb in the middle put your fingers over the top where your fingers are folded over your thumb that's the cortex the higher part of the brain that's the part of the brain that will develop in a huge way after you're born and it responds to learning from experiential immersion, including what happens with your parents or what happens in school. If you lift up your fingers and see the thumb and palm, let's call these the subcortical areas. This includes regions that used to be commonly called the limbic area. People don't like to use that term anymore for complex reasons, but amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus are the formal names.

But the more primitive parts of our brain. The more primitive parts of the brain. We don't need to call them old mammalian because some people don't want us to use that name anymore, but that's fine. But they're more primitive and they develop earlier in development. So in the womb, if you lift up your thumb,

you're now down to the brainstem. And in this limbic, what used to be called limbic and brainstem area, there are other areas too. Let's just call the whole region there beneath your fingers, sub, meaning beneath cortical. And the importance here is that research has shown that you have many distinct motivational networks that are basically taking basic needs like a need for agency that is embodied empowerment. You know, I have a sense of competence, autonomy. That's one network. It's very different in the subcortical regions

to a distinct motivational network, anatomically and functionally very distinct for bonding. This is for relational connections, for me being accepted by you when I arrived here. That deep network in me is activated. But then, you know, when I'm walking to see you, I have a third motivational network we think is really important for personality and its origins are in temperament. So we'll get to that in a moment. And that's for certainty, that is for predictability. Why is predictability important in life? Because if there's prediction, there's protection.

So if I can know where I'm walking to get there in a certain time, I feel a certain kind of ease and I get here, that's fine. Then when I meet you, my bonding network is activated. Is Rangan gonna really accept me? Am I gonna be okay? Am I wearing the right things? Am I saying the right things?

For agency is, when I come, do I need to go to the restroom? I'm too hot, let me take my jacket off. I take care of my bodily needs. So all these things, what's fascinating about it is these are three very distinct networks in the subcortical regions. And we have thousands of narratives from people in a system called the Enneagram that my colleagues are immersed in.

It's not really my area, but we've been working together for 20 years to take those thousands of narratives and basically say, why do people speak in such different ways about their inner life? And then we went to my field, interpersonal neurobiology,

where we put all these different fields together, especially neuroscience and developmental science. And what we think happens is that temperament is what you're born with, not learned. And that the reason people have all these very distinct narratives that fall into nine different patterns is because you have what we call adaptive strategies

to your own temperament. That's personality. And that's how you get personality. It's your adaptive strategy and that you experience outwardly in, well, you experience in your emotions, thought and behavior. So the simplest way of defining personality,

just to give a definition of it, is persistent patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior that exist across conditions, that is situations, and time. So it's not just a state of mind, I'm in this particular moment, and it'll never come back. It's persistent, it's recurrent, it comes back. Okay. Yeah. That's the simplest way of defining personality. So we think

personality can be more like a prison, especially when your attachments are not secure, or can move more like a playground. But it may be we always have personality. That's a big question we can get to. And maybe you can go beneath personality to just open receptive awareness. We'll get into that. But temperament may always persist. So they're distinct, but temperament we think gives rise to personality.

It's a helpful analogy. A lot of the time on this podcast, we talk about how much genetics play a role and how much our lifestyle and environment plays a role, okay, in terms of our risk of getting sick or Alzheimer's or something like that, okay? And so in the world I operate in, we commonly talk about, well, you know, you have a genetic predisposition, or you may have a genetic predisposition to something, let's say type 2 diabetes. But that's probably 5 or 10% of it, because 90% or so of your risk is going to come from how you live your life, what you're exposed to, what's the environment, okay? So, which is, I think,

hugely empowering for people who are able to make different choices. Of course, not everyone is able to. Can I look at what you've just said through a similar lens? Not quite the same thing, but you're born and once you're born, that process or some process, I don't know where genetics sort of feature here, but you have a temperament like your genetic predisposition for targeted diabetes, right? And then it's your lifestyle that determines what actually happens. Is it similar in the sense that we're born with a temperament, with a tendency, but then our personality develops on top of the temperament in response to various environmental inputs, including the way we were brought up? Exactly. Okay. Yeah.

So that works. including the way we were brought up. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So that works. That works totally. And to build on that, number one, it's not just genetics. It can be just, let's use the word innate. That is, you can have just the way you were leaning in the womb.

For example, I just did a workshop where there were identical twins and they had different personalities, and they have identical genes, but one was leaning to the left and one was leaning to the right and the brain developed. So the initial sensitivity that we call temperament may not have that big a genetic component,

but it's still innate that it was inherent when you were born, you didn't learn it. That's the important thing. Okay, so just as you can't change your genes, although you can change the expression of them and that sort of phenomenon of epigenetics and in terms of how we live our life, what we're exposed to, if we look at what you've just said through the lens of the story I relayed to you about my competitive personality traits that I no longer have. Yeah. Okay. Are you saying that I was born with an innate tendency?

And because of certain experiences in my life when I was a young child, those experiences shaped me to develop the personality traits of competitiveness. the personality traits of competitiveness. I'm first of all interested whether you think that's a reasonable assertion that I'm making based on all the study in science that you've written about and been going through for many, many years. But also that definition of personality,

persistent patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior. I'm just trying to look at that through the lens of competitiveness. I think it was a persistent pattern in my life. I certainly would say my thoughts, I had competitive thoughts, I had competitive behaviors. Is what I said to you, does it feel accurate to you based upon your study? Yeah, well, in academia,

the main view of personality is called the big five. This is the accepted view. And this is what we're gonna even get even a little further beyond what we're talking about, just to say are observable traits personality traits and they include things that spell the word ocean so it's openness o versus closeness c is conscientiousness versus carelessness that's o c e is extroversion versus introversion, which is really referring to your sociability. You know, do you like to go out and hang out with people or you'd rather be by yourself, introverted? Then O-C-E-A is agreeable or not agreeable. And N is neuroticism, meaning

are you kind of neurotic or are you kind of cool as a cucumber? And do you have to pick one of the five? No, no, no, you get all five. You get various degrees. So this is not, we don't think there's something called a personality type, so we don't use the word type anymore. We talk about patterns,

meaning you can have all sorts of degrees of each of those five. Now that's the classic view from like the last 30 years of formal university-based academic research on personality. Now, when you go beneath those five factors, and we've been doing that with our approach. Carol Dweck came up years later with a different approach now that um that uses the exact same notion that i'm describing to you here so it's a very exciting moment um i just learned about this a couple days ago oh wow yeah so it's super exciting but consiliently that is independently it's this

emergence of this notion that you're born with a temperament, that she uses this great acronym called BEATS, that there are beliefs, emotions, and what she calls action tendencies that are equivalent to what we're calling adaptive strategies that are basically how your temperament comes into your personality. And she shows the relationship of those things to the ocean, big five personality traits.

So that's a thing you can look up for her. For us, we're looking at how attachment can intensify the non-functional ways your particular combination is. And I haven't demonstrated why the three get into nine. And that's another interesting thing because we think another aspect of temperament and a research colleague of mine actually found this

in the brain independently. So another form of conciliance is some people are very inward, different from introversion, not about your sociability, just their energy is kind of inward, they're focusing inward. Other people focus outward, their energy is outward. Some people are kind of a shimmering

between inward and outward. So you're both inward and outward at the same time. We call that dyadic, meaning it's a dyad is a pair. So it's pairing inward and outward. When you put those three orientations of attention, which I've made up a term, a tendency, the tendency of attention is an a tendency inward, outward or dyadic as both.

When you combine that with the ABC, agency, bonding, and certainty, you get nine. We now have tens of thousands of narratives that beautifully fold into these nine patterns when people tell the story of their life. So when Carol Dweck came up with independently, just theoretically, this model that's virtually identical to our model, it was so exciting because our model was derived from listening to tens of thousands of people talk about their lives. So, you know, it's an exciting moment.

And in this view, to get to your point, competitiveness is not in the big five. So if I were a university researcher, which I'm not, and was trying to put the big five on there, I would say, listen, we don't see competitiveness. Certainly it's a feature of who you are, but it's not a formal listing in the academically accepted big five. It's not about whether you're open, conscientious, extroverted, it's not about your agreeableness, depending on how you use your competitive, it's not about whether you're neurotic or not. You could have any variation of ocean,

an academic would say, and still be competitive or not competitive. So we don't look for competitiveness was what they would say, I'm sure. What would you say? So for me, I would say that my best friend, for example, in high school was incredibly competitive. He loved playing tennis.

I would play with him and I would just laugh when I'd miss the ball and he would go, come on, come on, try, try, let's beat each other, whatever. I just didn't care. I never cared about that. For him, he's always watching the sports page in the paper. I said, why do you do that? He goes, you kidding? I want this team to win. I really want them to beat the other team. I never had a moment in my body where I cared ever about that. It felt like it was a temperament thing. You know, I know his family. I think he had secure attachment.

I did not have secure attachment in my family. You'd think I'd be the competitive one trying to achieve something. So it could be that your competitiveness, and this is a question I'm gonna ask you, and maybe in general, but let's look for you in particular. If we take this notion that personality

in all its dimensions is a lifelong journey to wholeness, that could it be that for the temperament you, which we haven't figured out yet, but could it be that competitiveness was a way of getting some sense of wholeness if you won? And that, as you said, it wasn't that I really wanted to win, I just didn't wanna lose. And that you got a wholeness when you won, and that now you found in ways that I'd love to know about

what happened 10 years ago after your dad passed, something may have happened where you found another route to wholeness, so it made competitiveness not necessary. Yeah. So that's my question for you. It's so fascinating. I do believe that competitiveness was, through that lens, yeah, I can make a case

that it was an attempt, I would say a misguided attempt to get wholeness. So if part of wholeness is love, then yeah, I think competitiveness was a way to receive love. Mm-hmm. Competitiveness was my way of thinking I was going to get love, but I don't think it brought me that. Yeah. So it may have been an attempt, but it was a failed attempt. And so the competitiveness that led to straight A's in medical school and excelling at all kinds of different things, which was how I was brought up, that I need to excel. And this is another thing, and you may have come across

this to some of your clients. One thing a lot of Asian immigrant kids get told in the UK, and I'm pretty sure it's the same in the US, and it's not with any discrimination or racism. It really isn't. It's you've gotta be better than your white counterparts. Right, so that's drilled into, I can't speak for every family. That's a culturally learned thing, right? So we learned that at a young age.

And I know about the discrimination my parents face and my dad face only in the weeks leading up to his death. He never, ever told me once. He never complained. He got on with life. He just, honestly, I only learned about this right towards the end about various things that happened. And I have a lot of compassion for mum and dad and how they would have tried to bring me up because, you know, they dearly loved and love me and my brother. And their desire for us to excel as best as we could was a desire for us to be accepted

and not face the struggle that they faced, right? So I get it. And also, if you really want to look at this in a very zoom zoomed out big picture way i'm actually glad they did because i don't feel i would have learned the lessons that i've learned in life and had the realizations that i've had without that experience yeah I'm glad I had the competitiveness, the emptiness, the wholeness. I'm glad because now I can really appreciate the wholeness, the calm. And I don't think I would have. Was competitiveness an attempt back to wholeness? Yes, probably. Although a misguided

attempt. I don't know how this seems to you. You talk about your friends and how we look at the sports pages. Well, I used to. I don't anymore. I don't care about competitive sport anymore. But for much of my life, I was a diehard Liverpool Football Club fan. I would go to games. I'd travel around Europe to watch them. I was all in. And I can remember being at university in Edinburgh. It was either 98 or 99. Liverpool's arch rivals, Manchester United, ended up winning the Champions League. And I was out in a bar in Edinburgh with my friends watching it, hoping like hell United lost. They were 1-0 down, right? And in injury time, they scored two goals. Oh my. I was devastated. I was literally devastated that United had won. That's who I was back then,

right? I still think I was a nice guy, but I think that shows how my wiring was at that point, where why should whether Man United won or not affect me? I was a Liverpool fan, right? But it did. I was really, really pissed off. I can remember it. But what's interesting, as I no longer am competitive, because I'm not, I'm also no longer interested in sport

in that way. I'm interested in playing sports myself and getting better, but I don't care what Liverpool or Man United or Man City are doing. And those desires I had fit the person who I was back then, but I'm not that person anymore. So therefore those hobbies don't fit anymore. So what do you notice right now in your body

when you are reflecting on this change through the lens of somehow I was trying to get to wholeness by identifying with the Liverpool team and when United won, it just was so meaningful to me. And now with whatever has happened in all these years, you feel the difference. What do you notice in your body? Well, when I was describing that story, I felt a tightness. And as I think about my relationship to achievement and sports and these things now, I feel,

I kind of feel loose. Loose, mm-hmm. I feel loose and it feels free. It feels free, yeah. Yeah, so as you just let that freedom be there, right now, the energy that was put into two big things, belief, some belief that Liverpool, them winning would mean something in my life and identity is who am I?

Well, I'm a Liverpool fan. That's who I am. That's my team. That's my in-group. We come back to kind of where we started, right? So there was something about identity that is not just in our bodies. It can be a sports team as you're seeing.

And that identity gave us something we haven't mentioned, which is belonging. You could belong and if your team wins, you win. Yeah. Because you belong, cause that's your identity. Now, this ABC business, agency, bonding, certainty, they're all about belonging, all of them. They do it in different ways.

You know, we can go into the nine patterns and we can just name them briefly. But just to say this, that someone might experience a little bit differently because you were speaking of being loved and having a connection that would happen somehow if things were right, you know, and getting things right when you know, in getting things right when you'd be achieving these things.

Other people might feel they had a competence and empowerment, not just acceptance, right? And still others would feel like they were safe. If I get 20 out of 20 on a test, I'm safe. You know, I'll go ahead in university or whatever. But what I've heard you say in a beautiful way is that it really comes down to relationships for you. had in university or whatever. But what I've heard you say in a beautiful way is that it really comes down to relationships for you.

So it'd be interesting if we ever take time to actually go through the nine patterns to see where you ultimately find is your kind of baseline, kind of what you lead with in life. And these I think are changeable. And ultimately, here's what I think goes on. When people grow, like whatever the growth process you did for me it was the wheel of awareness and all sorts of things we can talk

about about that if you want but this way of entering open awareness where the things you're aware of on the rim of this metaphoric wheel are seen as very distinct from the experience of awareness in the hub we we can get into that. But just to say that that experience allows a person to realize that there's even something beneath temperament, which is underneath personality itself. And when you start feeling that, it's the wholeness that we seek.

And that can be experienced in lots of ways. So for my particular patterns, it may be needing some kind of predictability, needing some kind of certainty. And so, however that might happen, a routine, doing something with my wife, being a certain way I'm connected to my mom, there's a certain certainty to that

that gives me a sense of wholeness. Maybe for you, it'd be more relational. Other people might need to just make sure I'm competent at what I do. And I have this sense of, you know, empowerment, you know? And what's interesting when you do that is that beneath all those three things, the ABC, you know, is this pure sense of wholeness.

And my experience in working with people over these many years in this model of personality is it's just kind of like what you're suggesting. Personality traits, like let's say competitive is one, or, you know, meeting to be the best on something or meeting to do this or do that. When we relax that rigid prison of a personality through developing secure attachment, number one,

but also accessing what I call a plane of possibility, this open spacious ease of being and being whole, then all those things that come up, whether it's this drive for agency or drive for, you know, bonding or a drive for certainty, you breathe beneath them, you may see them come up. And it's almost like your personality, which was built on top of your temperament,

instead of being a really imprisoning set of restricted ways of being, becomes more like a playground. So for example, if I go camping, I'm in the certainty vector is what I call it. So you can be sure when I go camping with my family, it's a sunny day, but you never know, it's autumn. I'm going with four family members.

I bring a jacket for myself. I said, does anyone want a jacket? They go, no, they don't have jackets on. I bring four extra jackets. We get in the car, we drive to the place, a storm comes, it's freezing and wet. And they go, oh my God, we don't have the right gear. We have to go back.

Dan, and they know. You got it. I got it. I said, here are your jackets, even though they told me not to bring them. I don't have to make them wear them. It's not like I push them on them, but you know, because I'm in a pattern of personality that always goes to the worst case scenario.

And then I once, when I was a prison for me, when I was, you know, doing physical medicine. Did you say prison? A prison. Yeah. That totally rings true. Living like that. Yeah. For me was living in a prison.

Yeah. Say more. Mental cage. Yeah, exactly. A mental cage. But you don't know you're in until you're not in it. And then you're like, oh, wow. Exactly.

That's a constricted way to live. Yeah. So this whole, you know, approach of this PDP business, Patterns of Developmental Pathways, is to allow your personality built from your temperament and intensified by your attachment insecurity to become from that constraining prison more like to a playground.

So then, you know, the worst case scenario goes, I go, oh, there might be a storm. You guys want jackets? No. And I go, you know, I'm going to bring them anyway. I throw them in the back of the car. Then we're going, the storm shows up. So I'm happy that I was a kind of questioning pattern, that I questioned the

weather person and whether they were right or not. I questioned even my relatives saying they didn't need it. When I was doing physical medicine, this personality pattern, when I was in pediatrics, for example, if I got a referral from another pediatrician, I never believed that the diagnosis that they had come to was accurate. And I would not necessarily test the kid again, but I would go over the test findings, make sure the exam that was done was accurate, make sure it was quality and repeat it if I needed to.

And there were many times when I would find things that my colleagues wouldn't, because I'm in what I would call the questioning pattern. That's my personality. Another person would say, hey, that was an esteemed expert in X, Y, or Z. Why would you question them? Well, I'm a questioning pattern, that's what I do.

So if you're going on a camping trip, each of these nine patterns has a great positive feature. I'm gonna bring the extra jackets and you're not gonna have to go home. There are other patterns where if we go through all nine, you know, and it would be fun to see where you might lead from. That's what I say. And ultimately, when you tap into all nine of these patterns,

you start feeling this freedom of wholeness. And it's an ease of being where, you know, you're not imprisoned by it anymore. Yeah. It's fascinating this for me. A few things just to share with you through the lens of this competitiveness. And I've thought a lot about this because for me, it's been really night and day to see I was competitive, now I'm not. Hmm, this is interesting. I thought it was who I was, but it isn't because I'm no longer it. It was an adaptive strategy that you could relax and release.

I really believe that to be the case. It was an adaptation. So one thing I've noticed with my children is, and look, the most important thing to my wife and I is how we bring up our children. There's nothing more important. And we spend a lot of time and energy and intention thinking about it and trying to be there, be present with them, do things with them,

praise effort, not outcomes, all these kinds of things, right? And we must cover your four S's before we finish today's conversation at some point for sure. But what I've noticed is that they seem to really enjoy doing various things or various sports and music and other passions in a way that I don't think I did. Like, I had to be really good at them to enjoy them. I had to be able to excel at them. good at them to enjoy them. I had to be able to excel at them. And I've been really conscious to not put that onto my kids. So I see my kids just enjoy them for the sheer pleasure of doing them. They don't have to win. They don't have to push themselves. And it's been really interesting for me to try and process this because this is not how I was. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, Rangan, as you're saying this, it's so interesting.

I think my wife, who's also a barrister like your wife, we have very parallel lives. When we were raising our kids, we wanted them to experience this kind of enjoyment of stuff. And so when our son was young and he took piano, he was really enjoying just playing with the keys, he was playing it. And his teacher, I overheard him one of the lessons said, when he came in one day after he'd been practicing,

during the week, he did it well, he did the piece well. He goes, she goes, you did it perfectly. Oh, I knew you were a good boy. And he quit. Yeah, he quit. And we could not get another piano teacher to just let him have the joy of music. So he quit. a teenager, you know, he had to pick up music again. And that's just a family tradition, you know, which it wasn't, but we said it because we wanted somehow from five onward and we could see he liked music. So he picked up, we were doing a lot of skateboarding and we were at the skateboard shop next to a music store. He goes, I'm almost 13. I said, yeah, yeah. He goes, I guess I have to do that instrument thing. I said, yeah. So we go into the music store, he picks a guitar. It turns out he falls in love with the guitar. He has a guitar teacher, the head of the school, who just lets him love playing. No saying you got to

do it right or wrong, no competitive performances, nothing. And we couldn't get him to stop playing. Now he's a professional musician. You can listen to his music, Alex Siegel. When he was done with high school, he was so amazing. People thought he was an amazing musician. He applied to music school, got in with a scholarship to the most competitive music school, and he turned it down. So I called my best friend's father who was a musician.

I said, I'm so confused. He loves music. He got into this incredible program, and he's turning it down. He wants to just study regular educational stuff. And my friend's father goes, that's brilliant. And I go, what's brilliant about it? He goes, if you want him to stop loving music,

have him go to music school. I said, I am so confused. He goes, just let him find who he is as a person and let the music be expressed through him, not to impress some music teacher that he's doing it right and all these other competitive things. Let him find his own way, which is what he did. And you can listen to the outcome.

So for Alex Siegel, the musician, what Caroline, my wife and I, were always interested in developing, and Alex and his sister Maddie, was an inner compass where they could find out what really mattered to them and then let that inner compass stay with them no matter what was going on. So Maddie also has an artistic capacity. She wanted to be literally a drawing artist.

She tried that out in high school. And she said, you know, I think I love science more. And now she's getting her doctorate degree in environmental science. And that's her thing. But an inner compass allowed the two of them to find their way in life as adults. So I say this because what you're doing with your kids

by focusing on their inner experience of effort really lets them build this inner compass. And that's what we want to do. You know, the wheel of awareness practice that you mentioned earlier, it's a way of developing an inner compass for us as adults, but even for adolescents, you know, it's a drawing for younger kids. But what it does is it allows you to say, look, you're a human being in a human body, and you have a mind that has this amazing thing called consciousness. Consciousness allows you to have choice and to facilitate intentional change.

So we're gonna integrate consciousness with this practice called the Wheel of Awareness. Integration means we're gonna differentiate the rim of things you can be aware of, like what you hear or smell or see from the actual experience of knowing, we call awareness in the hub. And you'll see Maddie's drawings actually in this book, Aware, because she's my artist for all my books.

You know, and what we're able to do is then, I did this with tens of thousands of people in person before the viral pandemic hit, collected their experiences in the wheel, and to summarize that 100 pages that we put in that book, aware, I'll say this, it looks like pure awareness is a state where energy, which moves along what's called

a probability distribution curve. So when I think a thought and I say ocean, you know, it's way up here as a certainty, a hundred percent certainly I said ocean, but if I drop down to all the words I could say, and you and I share, let's say a million words, it's in a pool of a million words sitting there before I say them, there in pure awareness is what I'm going to suggest to you is where it comes from.

In that space of what's called pure potential is where awareness arises from. Now you have a one out of a million chance of guessing it. So now I say Pacific Ocean or Atlantic Ocean and all these things I might say. Here's the issue. hey, here's the issue. With the Wheel of Awareness practice, people drop into this timeless state where they feel whole, they feel love, they feel content, they feel complete.

The Wheel of Awareness is useful for minor to medium levels of depression, anxiety in various forms, trauma if it's used carefully, even patients I've had who have terminal illnesses, who have the panic of dying, they do the wheel. When they can access the hub, which is part of the practice where you're moving this singular spoke

around the whole rim, part of it is you bend the spoke of attention, it's a metaphor, but an attentional focus into the hub itself. You experience pure awareness. The wholeness people experience there, the love they experience there, frees them from the previous belief that,

oh my God, all I am is my body. And if this body is dying, then I, in quotes, am disappearing. When in fact, they come to feel I'm part of a much larger wholeness to the universe. This body gets a hundred years perhaps to live in, in this existence, but I'm just much bigger than my brain,

bigger than my body. And that's what happens when you get to this state of massive openness. Now I'll say, when you look at what pure awareness is, it's a state of brain firing that is extremely not committed. It's uncertain. And in that sense, the brain becomes more like a hose, more like a conduit, rather than a constructor of previously learned configurations. So you enter this state of kind of beginner's mind and openness, maybe more like the effortless being we had in the womb. And so what happens, I think, is that when you come out of the wheel of awareness practice, and your quote personality of you're Rangan, I'm Dan, you come back, you know, when you come back to these states of

old identity, if you're doing an integrated process of therapy or reflection after the wheel, what happens is you relax those, I call them plateaus, these plateaus of learned identity. You relax those, I call them plateaus, these plateaus of learned identity. And instead of just being a me, you become more a living me, M-W-E. And that feeling of contentment that you're talking about, I think, is where identity as a separate self relaxes. Yeah. This wholeness starts to suffuse. It starts to fill every moment when you're living.

And sometimes, of course, you enter back into personality and I can get fearful, maybe someone else gets angry, someone else gets sad. Sure, we live in a body, so temperament continues to activate that, but with practice and a life, you can live with this access, I call it the plane of possibility where all those possibilities are.

So with a colleague, Lissa Epple, and two of my interns, we wrote a chapter for a textbook of why does mindfulness, why does being present, why does this open acceptance, why does it lead to a change in telomerase levels, the enzyme that repairs the ends of the chromosomes? Why does that state of openness and kindness, why do those lead to a change in the epigenetic controls that reduce inflammation?

Why does it lead to cardiovascular improvements in health? Why does it lead to improvement in immune system function? Why does it lower stress? In that chapter, you'll see this in the book, Aware, what we write about is that when you can access that open awareness, you call that living with intention. I would say it's living with intention with receptivity. That this receptive state allows this whole field within your body to achieve these five physiological changes. And even your brain becomes, in ways we can study structure and function,

more integrated, differentiated areas are more linked. And that's, in some studies, been shown to be the best correlate of every measure of wellbeing we have. So the wheel of awareness, just to sum that up, includes the three pillars that research shows lead to these five physiological changes and integration in the brain, the changes and integration in the brain,

the growth of integration in the brain. And those are, you strengthen attention to be more focused. You have awareness become more open and you make intention kinder. So focused attention, open awareness, kind intention, those three pillars of mind training allow you to cultivate this deep sense of wellbeing that I think is, if someone says,

oh, I've listened to Rangan and Dan, what do I do? If you do the wheel of awareness practice, what my colleagues, my students, my patients, what people in workshops have experienced when they do this on a regular basis, they start feeling a shift in their personality. So instead of being a prison, it moves towards a playground.

So instead of all the insecurities we have, they start feeling this wholeness, which I think is what the whole journey of personality is all about. Yeah, I mean, I love it so much to reflect on. Yeah, I mean, I love it. So much to reflect on. The way I think about things, Dan, I'm always trying to think of root causes and I'm always trying to simplify concepts. And so for a little while now,

And so for a little while now, I've come to the conclusion, the belief that if you're coming from this place of open awareness and intention and compassion, it feels to me that in essence, you're operating from a place of love instead of operating from a place of fear, which goes back to how we started this conversation. You're operating from a place of intention or you're operating from a place of reactivity. I don't mean to oversimplify the complexity of your work because I know it's much more than that, but does any part of that ring true?

Yeah, well, here's what I would like to ask you about. A lot of it rings true and one part of it, I want to really do a little inquiry with you about. Okay. When you use the word intention, what do you mean? I guess I mean the opposite of being reactive. Okay. So other people are doing certain things.

I woke up feeling a certain way, therefore I'm going to act in a certain way. When I say intention, I, for example, one sort of practical thing might be, like I always have a bit of routine in the morning about, I do various things, meditation, breath work, some movements, journaling, you know, I have a series of practices that I try and do each morning. And one of the things I try and end with is thinking about how I want to show up in the world that day. And I find that when I'm

intentional about my mornings, and if I say to myself that I want to be a loving, kind, and compassionate person today, I'm much more likely to be that person. Does that answer your question? It does. And so I'm going to push back a back a little bit if I could on your use of the word intention. I totally hear you and I resonate with it completely. You know, the brain does have these two states, a reactive state and what's usually called a receptive state. In the reactive state, you go to the five Fs, fighting back, fleeing, freezing, meaning you temporarily paralyze yourself, fainting or flopping, meaning you feel helpless, there's nothing to do, you collapse.

And then higher up in the brain, those are all subcortical. In the cortex, you have fawning, where you try to take care of your aggressor, right? So those are the five S, fighting, fleeing, freezing, flopping or fainting, and then fawning. So those are reactive. That's when you feel threatened. You can't think clearly. And here's my pushback on you.

The flopping, no, it's not intentional. The other three first ones are intentional, meaning the brain is activating a set of firing patterns that have a goal-directed behavior to them. That's a way of defining intention. Okay, interesting. A goal-directed behavior. So I have a sadistic relative in our family

and he intentionally hurts people. Okay. This person has stated, I'm intentionally trying to hurt you. Yeah. So it was a goal-directed behavior to cause pain. That's called a sadist. Well, yeah, first of all, I love that and I welcome that.

I genuinely do. And so I think perhaps it's more accurate to go as you use reactive versus receptive. Receptive and within receptivity, and this is maybe my own bias and you've said it beautifully in so many ways today, receptivity, I think access is plain of possibility. And I've done this now literally with over 50,000 people.

And when people get in that hub of that wheel, one of the most common terms they say is love. So I think when people get receptive, they're dropping into that plane of possibility, the hub of the wheel. They're accessing the love, which as a scientist, as a physician, a fellow physician, what I'll say is this. I think the reason people use the linguistic term love

when they get into the plane of possibility is all potentiality is linked there. And like when you love your wife, you're linked to your wife. When you love your kids, you're linked to your kids. When you love a sport or you love a book, you love music, you're linked to the music, the sport, the book. Linkage maybe it sounds reductionistic,

but I think we use the linguistic term love for that. So there's massive linkage in that plane of possibility, the hub of the wheel. Now, if we can assume that when you become receptive, you open up to the love that is like the fabric of the universe. Yeah. And you let that kind intention become the form of intention that arises,

not the sadist knowing I'm gonna, I don't care, I'm not kind, I'm gonna hurt you. That's my intention. Yeah. How does that feel for you? Well, it feels great and it totally resonates. And I can see what you mean about a kind intention

versus a toxic intention, right? So you can be intentional in many different ways. So I thought that was a beautiful explanation. We've gone into so many different areas I wasn't anticipating us going into. Just to make sure that this is really practical for people who've sort of hopefully been inspired and they've found something that's connected with them and thought, wow, I want to learn more. So I have a few questions for you. Yes. You mentioned the

wheel of awareness a few times and you've touched on some of the concepts within it. If people want to learn more about the Wheel of Awareness, where would you direct them? Yeah, so you can go to my website and do it for free, drdansiegel.com, and just go to resources and you'll find the wheel. Great. And then there's a little companion book

called Becoming Aware, that's an extract of the bigger book, Aware. Those would be the two books to get. Okay. So for people who want to learn more. Learn it. It's like a 21-day challenge. Like here's learning the wheel of awareness in 21 days. Okay. So I can go there. Before we get to the three or the four S's of parenting, with the understanding that everyone's different and we all respond to different things, are there some practices, daily practices, routines that you have seen time and time again help people tap in to that more open and aware state? Yes, yes, absolutely. And can you sort of briefly share some of them

so people can really understand what we're talking about here? Well, the wheel of awareness is something I encourage all my patients to do. I do it every day. You get this incredible integrative process and accessing the spacious receptive state. It's like a 20 minute meditation basically.

And then there's a beginning one and then an intermediate one and an advanced one. And if you want to do it like slowly over 21 days, if you're new to it, that Becoming Aware book would be a good one to do. And although I keep trying to get to the four Ps, there's just too much gold everywhere else. Yeah.

Did you not at one point share an experience that was in Baltimore when you took some black skin folk and some white skin folk and put them together? Yeah, can you just share that and how powerful the wheel of awareness was there? Because when I heard that, it was profound for me. Yeah, and I think I talk about that in the book, Intra-Connected, I think that's where it is.

And that, I think I talk about that in the book, Intra-Connected. I think that's where it is. Yeah, there was a beautiful, beautiful senior congressman from Baltimore, worked in Washington, DC, named Elijah Cummings. And I had the deep, deep privilege of Elijah asking me to come to Baltimore where there was a lot of murder going on and asked me to meet with a group of people

who were African-American, black skin, European descent, white skin, who had never met with each other before to see if we could allow these leaders in their communities to have some kind of collaboration. So we brought them into a space and you could feel the tension. People didn't trust each other.

They were looking with very suspecting eyes and it didn't feel very comfortable. So I guided people through the wheel of awareness practice in the room. Most of them have never meditated before in their life. And in the practice, two things came out when people finally discussed it, was bending the spoke around into the hub itself,

which has experienced this pure awareness, this sense of wholeness, this sense of love. And the other was the fourth segment of the rim, which you do after you basically have done this bending of the spoke business, you then go to the fourth segment. It's a relational sense where you start to feel the connections with other people, people in the room, people in your community, people out in the country, and then to all living beings.

And so it builds this kind of connection and kind intention. So afterwards, the feeling in the room was completely different. And Elijah at that meeting said, what did you just do? It's magic. And people could now talk to each other. And there was this openness and people were really vulnerable across the racial divides. And he was like blown away. And I said, Elijah, I don't think it's magic. I think that people live on their rims with what they've been taught in society. And some of it's just in-group, out-group distinction. But when you get to that hub,

when you get to pure awareness, when you get to the wholeness that we're all seeking. Receptiveness. Receptiveness, exactly. Yeah. Then you see, just like this forest, Pando Populus, that I also talk about in the Interconnected book,

you see that we're just, in that forest, there's 48,000 quaking aspen trees. But when you go six inches beneath the surface, you realize there's one root ball, you test the DNA, you realize it's one tree. So that metaphor really, it's an actual forest, but is that all of our bodies are just manifestations like panda populace of the same root ball. And once they do the wheel of awareness and they get receptive, they look with love to the face of the person

sitting next to them, sitting across the room from them. That they previously saw with hate. That they saw with hate or fear and were terrified of. And Elijah and I just did the rest of the morning, working with people now when they came from this place of connection. I do this with parliaments who are having fights about things

and people can get into that receptive space relatively rapidly. Not everybody does, but when you get just enough people getting there, they bring the love into the room. And I say, it's like candlelight, you know, if you have one candle that's lit, then it can light up another one

and it doesn't make the light go away from the first one. And you can start to spread the light. I love it. I absolutely love it. I hope everyone goes and actually checks it out and does the Wheel of Awareness meditation on there. The four Ps of parenting. Yeah, the Ss, yeah. The four Ss.

No, but there are four Ps. Caroline Welsh, my wife, wrote a beautiful book called The Gift of Presence, parenting yeah the s's yeah the four s's no but there are four p's there are caroline welsh wrote my wife wrote a beautiful book called the gift of presence which talks about the four p's okay so let's get to the s's so yeah that's that's that's funny she'll she'll probably think you were channeling her um yeah so to give like a very short background so people understand you know i used to be in pediatrics. I then trained in psychiatry and child psychiatry. Then I became an attachment researcher.

So I'm trained to study parent-child relationships through the scientific lens of a form of developmental science where we study attachment. And one of my main areas of focus was parent states of mind. And what that means is you can dive into the mind of you as a parent with something called the adult attachment interview. And with the most

robust power over anything else, even someone watching you at home for a year, we can predict how your child will be attached to you, whether it's securely or non-securely. And that security of attachment of your child essentially predicts all sorts of things like your child's emotional resilience, their capacity for mutually rewarding relationships with others. We call it an attachment stance or attachment strategy. And security is what you want to aim for as best you can. The great news from this field of attachment research, which I'm trained in, is that it isn't what happened to you that will determine if your child is securely attached to you. It's how you've made sense of what happened to you. And the importance of that

finding cannot be overstated. In other words, people sometimes come to me and say, oh, terrible things happened to me in my childhood and I'll never get over it. I'll never be a good parent. I'll go, wait a second, wait a second. The research shows that I know you're concerned about that. But if you can make sense of your childhood experiences and how they affected you,

you can liberate yourself from perpetrating that which was done to you onto your kids. So that I wrote up in a book with my daughter's preschool director, Mary Hartzell, called Parenting from the Inside Out. And once I wrote that book, which starts with the science of attachment, and now we'll talk about the S's,

I could write all the other five or six or whatever parenting books I've written, where I always say, start with parenting from the inside out because that's what the research shows. Make sense of your own childhood experiences first and then figure out what do I do with my kids? Yeah, ain't that the truth. When that book was first coming out,

one of my first teachers is Barry Brazelton, a pediatrician back a while ago, he passed away recently. And when I said to Barry, when should we give this to parents? He said, right away, even when they're pregnant. And I'm not sure pregnancy is the best time, but definitely- Before pregnancy.

Yeah, yeah, you wanna read it. So that being said, as an educator and as a therapist for families, what I needed to do is take this entire field of attachment and make it really understandable, not just for the academics I was working with, but for parents. So basically my summary of the entire field of attachment comes down to four S's and here they are. it comes down to four S's and here they are. When you get the first three S's, and if you don't get them, any of them, the parent recognizes there's a rupture,

there's a disconnection and readily and reliably makes a repair. So there's no such thing as perfect parenting. There's only showing up and being present as a parent with good intention and being aware, being mindful. So I say that because people freak out and go, oh my, I haven't been doing it. If you haven't been doing it, fine. Now you can make a repair.

It's never too late to make a repair. So that's the important place to start. And if you can be kind to your inner experience, because we're all coming through a hard road. You know, and parenting is one of the hardest things to do in general and these days, especially. So the first S is the word seen, S-E-E-N. And when a child feels seen,

it isn't just that you're using your eyes to see their behavior. It means you're using what I call a mind sight lens to see their feelings. What has meaning for them, what was their intention, what were they remembering. The inner nature of their mental lives is what I mean by the word seen.

And it's very clear from the research, parents who take the time and develop the skills because they're learnable skills to see the inner life of the child have children who develop secure attachment okay second s soothed what this means is your child could be distressed they've gone through what i call a window of tolerance they're in chaos they're in rigidity they're shut down you know those moments they're not in this kind of integrated flow and at that moment you yourself

because of a set of neurons in you called mirror neurons, which should have been called, I think, sponge neurons, you sponge in your kid's distress. So their distress may make you distressed. So if you don't have your presence there where you're receptive, you may become reactive even as they become reactive, which just amplifies all the reactivity.

So soothing your child is more than, oh, let me just try to put a bandaid on their wound. It's really giving them the comfort that allows them to see that I, as your son, can be as distressed as I can be, and you don't leave me. You stay present with me. You're able to hold a space for my distress. And in that connection, you establish,

ah, my nervous system, which is immature, is able to calm down, and that's what we mean by soothing. And don't forget, there's no such thing as perfect parenting. You may not see your child all the time. We don't, don't sue them all the time. But to be able to do that and say, wow, that pushed my hot button. I was having a hard time when you were screaming and yelling like that.

Let me try to come back and soothe you. I'm so sorry I couldn't do it then. You can make a repair, repair, repair. And the third S before the fourth of security, the third S is safe. So safe, of course course is keeping your child protected from injury, but it's also not being a source of emotional fear where, and I say this in all my books,

there are times when I would flip my lid and start screaming or say ridiculous things or whatever. And I would terrify my kids. I had to make a repair after that. Kids are meant to be kept safe by their attachment figures, their parents. And if we have unresolved trauma or unresolved loss, the research is very clear.

We're more prone to doing things that we don't even wanna do, that are unintentional, that terrify our kids. And even when we alter our own state, cause we're flipping out, that can be terrifying. If we get drunk, that can be terrifying. We're yelling at our spouse, that can be terrifying. And other ones that are obvious like abuse, neglect.

Yeah. So there's a wide range of what creates non-safety. And I don't mean a kid wants ice cream before dinner, you say no, and they go, you make me mad. You make me, I want, I,ety and i don't mean a kid wants ice cream before dinner you say no and they go you make me mad you make me i want i know you don't this is not about just giving them everything they want it's about not terrorizing them yeah setting limits is extremely important for kids when they have this and when they're not there there's a repair made when there's a rupture in a reliable and relatively rapid way then a child develops security which is

this sense of wholeness a sense of resilience a sense of i can do this and you know we still on a life of you know do or die you know in this world outside the womb so no matter how great our parenting is life is still hard but security of attachment gives the best kind of resilience that we can give our kids. And the great news is that if you've had a really hard childhood yourself, dive into parenting from the inside out. Mary and I wrote that to be a big hug.

And it's a guide to saying, how do I actually make sense of my life? Do that book. It's a workbook, basically. And the great news is, and this is, you know, I was trained as a narrative scientist. When our narrative process literally makes sense

in the two ways that we mean it. Makes sense meaning what's the logical way my childhood affected me, but makes sense as in I sense my body. I feel these things. You're able to integrate memory into things that were terrifying before and you integrate it and you make sense of your life.

And that's how you come to allow your personality to relax and stopping a prison become more like a playground. It allows you to be more receptive with kind intention. So intention for sure that's kind. And that's how we wanna bring our presence to our kids. And I love that Dan, I mean, you just set the stage for a second conversation at some point in the future. Cause I'd love to dive into parenting,

but I think that's really helpful. You wanna help your kids feel seen, soothed, safe. And when you can do that, they will also feel secure feel secure absolutely i love that message that there's no such thing as perfect parenting if you make a mistake you can take responsibility and own up and apologize and repair i think that's a really nice message yeah and then really broadening it out really this idea that if you can make sense of your life history in the ways that you've described yes that helps you become a better parent but frankly it helps you become a better human being you're going to be a better partner a better friend a better colleague you You're gonna be less reactive and more receptive.

Absolutely. That's exactly it. So Dan, for the person who heard us talk and who's interested in exploring more, yes, there's your brand new book, "'Personality and Wholeness in Therapy', "'Integrating Nine Patterns of Developmental Pathways "'in Clinical Practice.'" yes, there's your brand new book, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, integrating nine patterns of developmental pathways and clinical practice.

We've touched on some of the concepts. I know it's a lot deeper in that. But for someone who feels lost in life, who doesn't know where to go next, who feels that they're struggling, but senses some hope from our conversation today, what words of advice would you give to them? Words of advice. some hope from our conversation today. Yeah. What words of advice would you give to them?

Words of advice. You know, there's a great quote from the wonderful poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen that I took Alex Siegel, my son Alex, you know, to see one of my heroes, which is also one of his heroes. And it was fortunately, obviously, before he passed away recently. And the lines go like this. Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's where the light gets in.

Dan, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. It's been really wonderful to be here with you, Rangan. Really great. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them,

it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com

forward slash Friday Five. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, eBooks, and as audio books, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without

any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.