Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Trauma Expert

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a clinician, researcher and teacher in the area of posttraumatic stress.He has spent his career studying how people adapt to traumatic experiences, and has translated emerging findings from neuroscience and attachment research to develop and study a range of potentially effective treatments for traumatic stress.You might be thinking, “Well I don’t have PTSD, how does this conversation apply to me?”What you might be surprised to learn is how many of us are affected by trauma but just don’t realize it.According to Dr. van der Kolk’s research, 75% of Americans suffer from some type of past traumatic experience.In this conversation, he shares strategies for getting to the root of the trauma.Trauma comes in many forms and so do people’s responses to it.What’s important to remember is just because someone looks like they have it all together on the outside doesn’t mean everything’s ok on the inside.In Dr. van der Kolk’s words:“Some people adapt amazingly well and win Nobel Prizes or MacArthur Grants because of all the energy they put into just pushing things aside. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily resilient even though they may accomplish amazing things. They may go to bed feeling devastated, lonely, and bereft. Or they may still drink or cut themselves or do other things to manage their body's protesting against stuff. So what you see is not necessarily what you get.”_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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where they're extremely stressful, where they had to find their own way that was not the way of the people around them. I think that people growing up in perfectly safe and predictable surroundings probably get safe and predictable brains in a way. Okay, welcome back to the Finding Mastery podcast. And if you're new, welcome to the community and these conversations. My name is Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to

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you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now this week's conversation is with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. He's a clinician, a researcher, and a teacher in the area of post-traumatic stress. And he spent his career studying how people adapt to traumatic experiences. And he's translated emerging findings from neuroscience and attachment research to develop

a range of potentially effective treatments for traumatic stress. And you might be thinking like, well, okay, why would I listen? I don't have PTSD. And how is this conversation going to apply to me? Well, first and foremost, it's about insight and it's about growth. Secondly, what you might be surprised to learn is how many of us are affected by trauma, but don't

realize it. According to Dr. van der Kolk's research, 75% of Americans suffer from some type of past traumatic experience. So in this conversation, he shares strategies for getting to the root of the trauma and how to change the relationship, the story, and the skills to grow. And trauma comes from so many forms, and so do people's responses to it. So it's complicated. This is not simple.

But what's important to remember is that just because someone looks like they have it all together on the outside, it doesn't mean everything's okay on the inside. In Dr. van der Kolk's words, some people adapt amazingly well and win Nobel Prizes or MacArthur Grants because of all of the energy they put into just pushing things aside. But that doesn't mean that they're necessarily resilient, even though they may accomplish amazing things. They may go to bed feeling devastated, lonely, and bereft, or they may still drink or cut themselves or do things to manage their bodies protesting against stuff. So what you see is not necessarily what you get. Powerful insight. It's a powerful reminder for all of us that what you see is not what you get. And so with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.

Dr. van der Kolk, thank you for spending some time for this conversation. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Thank you for having me. This is a lot. Yeah, good. Okay, good. So you've spent your entire life efforts working to understand Thank you for having me. This is a lot. that shaped your worldview and potentially how it's, it has impacted millions of people. So you're right at the epicenter of defining it for the diagnosis and statistical manual, the, the, the Bible,

if you will, of disorders, like you've been right at the epicenter of this very stressful mind, body, and brain altering experience for people. So again, thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom here. Again, a delight. Okay, good.

So let's jump into it. Why PTSD? Why have you spent your life efforts studying trauma and stress and the responses to the two of those? Oh, that's a very difficult question. You know, you fall into what you fall into, and then the spirit catches you, and you fall down, and then you see a lot of stuff.

It resonates internally. But also there's a lot of external validation. Like a lot of people go like, yeah, that explains what's going on. It has been an enormous journey of discovery, you know, that to so many ways mental health and psychiatry has been so stuck and to understand and has to be looking at all the chemistry of mental illness and into the genome for mental illness,

but to know how people drive people crazy and how we are so at the core social creatures and that our history so much shapes who we are has been enormously reinforcing, you know, and then all this new knowledge comes out about how experience shapes the brain and a lot of research on attachment patterns and what it does to how people organize their realities and form their maps of the world. I mean, it's all the cutting edge of brain science and mental science. And also, of course, it has a deep resonance inside because we keep, I, like people around me, keep doing stuff that doesn't make sense from a

rational point of view and we all have parents who do things that don't make sense and then we start looking where it comes from you say oh yeah that was an adaptive response back then but too bad that this adaptive response continues until today when it messes up your life. And in one of your most recent books, The Body Keeps Score, I love it. For those who are listening that haven't read it, I think it's really important to read. And your subtitle is important. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma. So so you've separated which i do as well but i link them as well and i and you do as well so brain mind and body can you talk about why you've separated them out and how you link those three together well you can only combine them after you separate them in a way that much of psychology is still in your, it's all in your head.

And then very quickly did I realize that now we carry our trauma in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations. You feel it in your body. Your body reacts. It's a very sensory experience that your brain registers or it doesn't want to register or tries to do something with so to some degree trauma is about a struggle between the mind

and the body uh about listening and not trying to listen because trauma means that you get overwhelmed by something terrible and your body feels terrible and helpless and crunched, and your mind says, forget about it, let's go on. And your body keeps putting you back to, yeah, you'd like to go on, but look, I'm feeling freaked out, I'm feeling nervous, I'm feeling angry all the time, I'm feeling beaten down, I can't get up in the morning. And so your body keeps you from your mind that wants to so desperately wants

to be rational and reasonable um it won't let you why is that is trauma so traumatic and i'm not sure that that is clear enough because traumatic things happen but for some people it's not it's not traumatizing it is just an event that they register yeah people say that but you know the people who come to see me when i listen to the details of their stories i never have the reaction of oh you silly you how can you be all upset about it but you really hear the details of what happened to see your kid being run over by a drunk driver, by having your best friend blown up in front of you, being responsible for other people's death in a car crash,

being gang raped, being molested, and finding yourself in situations where you feel utterly helpless to do anything. It really is a, I hope I can say this on the air, it's a real oh shit experience, oh my god. It's really like, oh, there's

nothing I can do to make this go away. It really is an experience that, oh my God, I wasn't prepared for this. I will never get better. I'll never live this down. And so it's a situation of being overwhelmed

by what's happening. And as Shakespeare pointed out, at that point people become dumbfounded and struck with speechless terror. It's like a whole part of your brain shut down of, I can't handle this. Yeah. Okay, so is it fair to thin slice trauma in maybe two or three ways, like PTSD T with a big capital T, which are some of the events you just described, and then PTSD with a small T? Yeah, I've never liked that.

Because what people describe as small T experiences can be so devastating. And I don't want to minimize it. Growing up with parents who don't see you, who don't validate you, who don't respond to you. Having a partner who keeps their eyes on the screen and doesn't respond to you when you have something to say. People who space out are very bad experiences. Being ignored as a person is a terrible experience. Not being seen, not being known, being ignored, being disregarded goes at the core of who we are. We are social creatures, we need to be validated,

we need to be part of it. A relevant part of a team and when we are being treated as being irrelevant, that is a devastating experience. I took one of your lectures and I was struck by the poetry in which you see the world

and the depth that you resonate. And so you're hitting on both of those in this conversation already. Now, when, okay, so what you just described are potentially small T categories, but when you describe it, it's like, no, of course there's no such thing as a small T. Like it's, it is a complete disregard for the human experience. And that is traumatizing in those moments. Yeah. Right.

If you don't respond to my fearful face and keep screaming at me, I would become increasingly shut down and terrified and trying to stay in control as you completely ignore the signals that I'm giving you like, stop this, stop this, you're hurting me. That's very much a very big part of trauma is that whatever you need at a particular point is completely not regarded by circumstances or people or whatever is going on. I've heard you talk about that three quarters

of the American population experience trauma. Yeah, that's about the figure that they meet criteria a and on the scale of of ptsd actually when we started off with ptsd it was defined as a experience outside of normal human experience then we started looking at what people experience and it is just stunning how much people actually get exposed to that uh yeah yeah so how do you make sense that if three quarters have experienced trauma that maybe i don't know what the actual numbers i'm sure you do that five percent of the population actually do the work to sort it out and i'm making that number five percent yeah i don't know i think it may be a little bit higher

it might be um yeah what would you guess what is your guess around there i i don't i wouldn't dare to go there the figures when i give figures like them to be fairly accurate yeah and i'll tell you where why i'm being sloppy with that is i just want to create a dramatic uh storyline that if three quarters have experienced my my personal experience as a psychologist is that so many people or so few people are actually doing the deep real work to deal with it. It can't be three quarters of the population. So it's far less than that. So how are people doing well in life that have experienced trauma? Well, well you know people always like to talk about that and you know what has been very gratifying during this work is that when you

deal with trauma there's people who are eager to do the work you meet the essence of the life force and that people have had horrendous experiences and they keep trying they keep going on they keep fighting for having a life and so we as human beings are survivors and people survive in any way they can some people survive by shutting down some people survive by taking drugs some people try survive by going to live in the woods. Some people survive by becoming chronic medically ill people and getting a lot of care for their bodies while the rest of themselves is being ignored. But people make some sort of adaptation.

And what for me is so fascinating is all the different ways that people adapt. Some people adapt amazingly well and win Nobel Prizes or MacArthur grants because of all the energy they put into just pushing things aside and concentrating on things. But that doesn't mean that they're necessarily resilient, even though they may accomplish amazing things, they may go to bed feeling devastated, lonely, bereft, or they may still drink or cut themselves, do other things to manage their bodies protesting against stuff. So what you see is not necessarily what you get.

Cool thought. Really cool thought. So if we use a classic example of somebody who's been through trauma and has come through the other side, Victor Frankl, Dr. Frankl, how would you imagine that that story makes sense? Well, you know, Victor Frankl was a great inspiration for me as a student to become a psychiatrist. Yeah, me too.

And, you know, I was a young boy and I believed everything I read. And then as an adult, I'm not sure what to believe. About Dr. Frankl's... Yeah, about his story. Oh no, I don't want to hear this. No, no. You know, I've heard too many concentration camp stories too.

I believe that people are generous and warm and giving under extreme circumstances. So after having seen a lot of trauma, I've become somewhat skeptical about it. That doesn't mean that a few traumatized people become extraordinarily generous and become real consciousness carriers in our society. Maya Angelou, possibly Oprah Winfrey herself, are people who have been traumatized who really have dealt with it and then can change the culture. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for

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Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to felixgray.com and use the code findingmastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. Okay. So you have a bright line through your thinking, which is until you address how the body stores and uses trauma maladaptively or in adaptive ways, until then you are captured by the body. Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say. holds it, the mind plays the loops, the video loops over and over again when it smells, sees, thinks it's getting close to the original trauma, and then the brain lights up and shuts down in particular regions that protect basically the body. Is that close?

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, but see the mind does something else. I think the mind says, don't be stupid. Don't pay attention to it. I think the mind tries to go on and has a different role in survival than the survival brain. So your mind says just don't whine, don't

cry, don't feel bad about yourself. Go on and be clear. So you try to continue to be a normal member of your tribe so that people will not extrude you. So you're trying to live up to people's expectations. But when you get traumatized, your survival brain keeps sending messages to you that you are in danger.

And so there's an internal conflict between who you want to be and how you want to present yourself and the messages you get from deep inside, like this person is going to hurt me, this person is going to victimize me, or this person is untrustworthy or whatever. So you live with a lot of internal conflict between the different messages in your brain, mind and body. And the most common reaction to that is just to shut the system down. And that's what we see in our latest brain scans is that the area of the brain is called the insula. And the insula is the part of the brain

that tells you what your body needs and whether to, in regard to whether you need an umbrella or whether you need to wear sunscreen. So you get this message of anticipation of what your body needs. It has to do something with the salience. It's called the salient center of the brain that lets you know what's what's important to

you what's not and when the salient center uh runs away with you and forces you to pay attention to stuff all the time you learn to shut it down and say no this is not important let's ignore that let's ignore it and if you learn to ignore stuff you learn to ignore everything else also so the price for ignoring is that important things in life start passing you by oh geez i'm familiar with research that with military operators and they took a look at their insular cortex as it relates to mindfulness as um as part of an adaptive training program and interesting yeah and so i'll push that research over to you i think it's i think i'd love to see it yeah it's how about you find yeah so basically that mindfulness had a positive impact on insular functioning and that keeps showing up yeah it showed up in our

yoga research also and i've seen this in other people's mindfulness research is that that awareness of what your body is feeling comes start finding all that coming online and that's why meditation can be so hard for trauma survivors yeah yeah that's it's an important thing to keep in mind like yes meditation to a large degree is an important answer but people think that trauma is an event that happened a long time ago that's not really what the trauma is the trauma is that your body right now keeps feeling as if that past event is happening okay so let's let's hold hold that thought as best we can and map it on something that I'm confused by. Okay. And so I'm fortunate enough to work with some of the best of the best of the best and across a variety of domains.

And if we use – you could pick any sport or any art really. And let's use sport for example. I was part of a team that had a dramatic loss. It was a Super Bowl loss at the last moment. It was the Seattle Seahawks against the New England Patriots. And it was, we're on the half yard line. And on the half yard line, there was a series of events that took place. We lost the game.

And there were some people three years later, despite best efforts to care, to challenge, to support, that some people were not able to let go. And, okay, so if we map it on what we're talking about now, it certainly was traumatic. The way that they engaged in relationships from that point forward was just really hard. Let me ask a question. How was it hard? How did it get stuck in them? Relationships became

fractured. The conversations became about they shifted from trust to mistrust. They shifted from I'm in control to feeling out of control. It exasperated

other stuff that they had kind of dormant inside of them. And their identity began to fracture. And so their identity prior to that moment was I'm an elite athlete. And when I apply great volitional effort, things work out for me. And I apply great effort. And how could this happen? And the health of the persons, the people that I'm thinking of began to deteriorate. But now that being said, let's say that there's a hundred and some people that were part of that, intimately part

of that loss, not including fans that were possibly traumatized as well, but like inside of the locker room, there's a hundred and some men. I'd say, you know, 95% of them got through it with some time. And then there was 5% that just got stuck. So can, would, would that be fair to say that you could take a dramatic loss? And where I'm thinking is that there's no redundancies in the brain. That grief centers and loss of, I don't know, car keys maybe in a stressful event can operate in similar fashions. And I don't want to minimize anything, but if there's no redundancies, that loss of an important event could have triggered or got caught in a loop? You know, nothing is ever simple or linear.

So we come into situations with our prior background. And if we have prior experiences of being helpless and seeing, let's say, domestic violence as a child, you stand by and you say, why am I that big enough to do something about this? And they're probably fighting because I'm a terrible child, that sort of thing. So you have that little indelible thing in your mind and you don't think about it and it sits there. And then later on you have an experience that makes you once again feel helpless and

like, why didn't I do something? Then that old attitude, that old orientation to the world gets revived. And so these adult traumatic incidents, and we very deliberately ignored it when we first put PTSD diagnosis together because it's too complex. But the earlier childhood perceptions of the world do impact on how you see further changes. So if you come into a dramatic loss like that with a lot of background of the world is safe, the world works out, I've always had parents who are there for me, then it probably will be much easier to tolerate such a thing than if you come into that with a background of traumatic exposure.

That may not have led to PTSD in and of itself. Right, okay. So it's always cumulative. Okay, so if there's two threads on that, one is how do you help that person? And I know you spend a lot of time on treatment and studying potential treatment effects. And so you said something so eloquent early on, which was the man or woman I'm trying, the person I'm trying to become, there's a conflict with that image and the way that I'm actually representing myself. Right? So that tension.

Or experiencing myself. Experiencing myself. Right. So I am experiencing myself to be tense and tight and agitated, but I want to be fun, loving, fluid and fully present and engaging. Right? And performing well. And I'm tense and tight. Okay. So some sort of tension in there. but I want to be fun, loving, fluid, and fully present and engaging, right? And performing well. And I'm tense and tight. Okay.

So some sort of tension in there. How do you help the person who their adaptive response to the trauma is to blame their environment as opposed to take some sort of internal inventory and say I feel helpless. So they're saying I feel helpless. I feel out of control. It is not my fault. I am a victim of this circumstance. And if you guys just didn't or would do or whatever, then I'd be okay. How do you help that? Yeah. These are all really very relevant questions

because this is the reality I deal with every day. Is that, yes, to some degree you need to allow yourself to know that you are helpless, but this tends to be retroactive. Like I just saw this morning again in my office um a person right now feels completely helpless when effectively could do all kinds of things but what we go back to and like and so i go back to what would happen if you would start i i suggested this person to take uh to do tai chi and she said, but I cannot take care of myself. That's too self-indulgent.

And I say, how old is that thought? And she said, this probably goes back to age six, after her mother's suicide attempt, where she blames herself for her mother's suicide attempt for having to be too self-indulgent. And if she just would have looked after her mother, her mother's suicide attempt for having to be too self-indulgent. If she just would have looked after her mother, her mother wouldn't have committed suicide. And that feeling stays with her for the rest of her life so she can never do anything for herself

because deep down her map of the world is, my mother will commit suicide if I do something for myself. And what you do at that point with that particular person is to go back to how that little girl felt back then and that somebody should have helped her. So you go back. You go back.

Sometimes I go back. Not always. Not always. Because my first reaction to the Super Bowl loss is I would start with doing EMDR. The Eye Movement Desensitization. You know, when I read would start with doing EMDR, the eye movement desensitization. When I read that you were researching EMDR, I was blown away because for so long it's been this hokey pokey thing.

And I think the research is trending in the right direction. Well, more than trending. Our latest data are sensational, actually. Okay, yeah. So give me some research on that. And I don't want to forget the second question, so I'm going to say it out loud for the two of us right now which is how would you get better at the selection process because right now i'm going to make a guess better than 50 would be a safe number better than 50 probably somewhere more like 60 75 of people um in american sport traditional sport

especially basketball and football have suffered trauma in their early experiences well i'm sure yeah you know and then they do they explode in the locker room and they explode in various places and people say how can this amazing basketball player do such terrible things on the side you go like he's an amazing basketball player who has a trauma history who does blows up yeah that's not surprising no it's not and and it's taken incredible risk to put all of their eggs in one basket we missed that we missed that part of the conversation that these young kids their identity becomes i am an athlete and every time they go out their complete identity is at risk that's an incredible amount of tension to carry around. Yeah. Well, most of us don't have that. It's true.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I think a lot of people do actually. But not as visibly so, you know. Yes, yeah. A lot of invisible heroes and stuff. But anyway, so let's talk about EMDR for a second. Yes, it's hokey. And for years people said, and they may still say it,

what's new about it is not good and what's good about it is not new. But then we did a research fund by the National Institute of Mental Health and we found that 80% of people who had trauma for the first time as an adult, the memory melted away. They just said, yes, this really sucked. Yes, it's really awful to see people being blown up in front of me. And that happened last June. And now it is a year later, and I have a memory of having had a bad thing happen to me a year ago. But it no longer is in the life thing right now. And so what we thought was extraordinarily effective for well-put-together adults

who have a one-time horrendous event. We had a bargain, 80% cure it. But what we found is that people who have earlier histories of childhood trauma, it was not nearly as effective because the old stuff kept intruding into things as well. And then we just finished, it took us forever to get the resources together to do the study. We finished the study on neuroimaging and an EEG study on neurofeedback. And what we find is that these eye movements do allow the sensory parts of the brain to communicate to each other, to have the visual and the auditory and the somatosensory parts of the brain, start communication networks.

And once those networks get established, the mind-brain is able to say, oh, this is what happened back then, and to not experience it as if it's happening right now. So what for me is so fascinating is you start off with a hokey treatment like doing eye movements and then you go like, oh, why is this working so well?

And then as you do the study, you find out much more about how the brain actually fundamentally works. So you learn from these strange examples in your practice that sounds so hokey on the surface, and from that you learn more about how the brain processes memories. That's what keeps me going in this field. Just recently, there was an amazing athlete. I'll keep all of the titles out of the conversation for an amenity.

And I mean, I'm talking about amazing. And there was some trauma that was experienced. And I was stuck. And I said, okay, one of my early supervisors is really great at EMDR. So I punched over or I made the introduction. One session. One session. 30 minutes.

Yeah, it can be astoundingly, miraculously effective. So for folks who are not familiar with EMDR, and this is not meant to be any sort of training, this is just like the basic frames. Could you just walk through the basic frames of what- The basic issue with EMDR is that you encourage somebody to evoke the sensations of the event. What did you see? What did you hear? What do you feel in your body?

Do you remember what you were thinking? Do you remember what that person said to you? But you don't ask them to talk about it, because once you talk about it, it becomes a social issue. And this is about your relationship to your own sensations. So you just encourage people to evoke the sensations of that event in their minds. But you keep yourself out of it as a therapist.

And then you ask people to go to a state where they follow your fingers from side to side, or apparently other alternating movements can also do the same thing, although I love the eye movements. And then something happens in the brain, and what for me has always been so intriguing is what happens in the brain,

and the people who can report it, like I myself am aware of that, but I am the recipient of it, is that you go through in a dreamlike state, very much like what you might experience on Sunday morning when you sleep late. And as you lie there just before you really wake up, you have all these thoughts floating through your head. They're not logical, they're not linear.

And then you wake up and basically the thoughts disappear. And indeed what happens during this state this hypnopompic state that EMDR is able to induce also your brain is able to make connections that it has not been able to make before and once you make this connection you go like yeah this really happened to me. But, you know, why should I pay attention to it right now? Because I know it happened to me when I was small and it really happened. That's where, okay, amazing. I've seen results.

I've read your research on it. And that point that you just described is where I get confused. Like how? How does that work? It doesn't. So our latest data, which I haven't seen all of them yet. I'm waiting actually for my collaborators to send some of the details of some of the latest work. These brain tracks get activated that allow your brain to say, yes, this is an event that actually happened.

So you make internal connections in your brain that allow you to put it in the past. So the nature of trauma is that the memory becomes fragmented and gets stuck. And I think we have not studied enough what is it about these traumatic memories that gets people to be stuck. And because in memory research, people always talk about, how do you remember this movie you just saw?

How do you remember events? The memory people are not trauma people. They actually have an astoundingly little interest in how traumatic memories are different from the memories of you and I talking to each other. Right. But what's so stunning about traumatic memories is that while ordinary memories are always sort of disappear and get reconstructed and become vague

and get contaminated and are always inaccurate in a way because mind doesn't take pictures. The nature of traumatic memories is that something happens in the brain where things get stuck, and you don't form associations with other things. And so you see the same damn thing again, or you have the same damn feeling again,

even though it happened 20 or 30 years ago. And so the great intriguing thing about trauma is how does it not follow the laws of normal human brain functioning, that everything changes normally. I thought that it did follow the survival tactic of like a pungent smell, is that I need to know and recognize if that is bad food because i saw my family die and right so when they ate that bad whatever yeah raw meat that was this tainted so i thought it worked in the same way like okay when i hear the screeching of a car or i smell the burning of something flesh or whatever or or i feel the intensity of the lights where i was so humiliated last time

that that my body goes whoa whoa whoa whoa this is exactly so i thought it did follow like an almost an evolution no it followed it follows those conditioning lines but but you know i don't think your my conversation is going to be traumatic for either of the two of us and when people ask either of the two of us, what was it like to talk to each other? Yes, yes. It was sort of nice, and we talked about this, and what we report on what we were talking about

is probably going to be wildly inaccurate. Yeah, right, right. We don't remember things, and the brain isn't interested in the details of day-to-day experience, except when it becomes really, really frightening. I say that to my wife all the time, but she does not appreciate it. See, that doesn't work. We always try to explain it.

I do this to my wife all the time, too. Explaining how irrational her beliefs are somehow doesn't get the response of, oh, thank you, honey, Now I know how it works. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have

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It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's Caldera Lab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash Finding Mastery. Okay. You've said something that is, I'm not going to forget that second point about football in a minute, but being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most aspect of mental health. Yeah. Safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying

lives. And you said earlier in this conversation that we are social creatures. And so when you talk about being connected, what are some of the ways that you help people be more connected? One of the things that has always intrigued me is the pleasure of doing things in silence with other people. I mean, anybody who meditates knows how being to meditate together with other people is a very different experience from meditating by yourself. Singing with people, playing volleyball with people, moving back and forth. In our workshops, we very much focus, we help people feel safe. First of all, people need to know each other's name. They need to name each other.

And then we do exercises where you move together. Actually, exercises we learned from taking advanced theater classes ourselves where we took actors training. And when people move together and they get in sync with each other and they throw beach balls at each other and they move each other through a room while they're being blindfolded and they fall into each other's room while they're being blindfolded and they fall into each other's arms. So a lot of somatic experiences of what it feels like to be seen, to be known, to have your body be carried by other people, stuff like that.

God, that's so good. Okay, so I'm going to use your insight and map it onto something that I'm currently doing. And, and I want to share this with you just because if I'm excited to share this. So the last 18 to 20 months in that range, uh, my, myself and my team, we've trained 30,000 people at eight hours a person. So that's 240,000 men and women hours on how to train and condition their mind based on what we've learned from the science and pulling back the curtain of how elite performers work. So 240,000 human hours. It's like this outrageous thing. And I feel like we're just getting started.

But in that, this is what I want to share with you. In that, in each session, we meditate once or twice. And that's like small rooms and large rooms. And we make sure that we, during a meditation process or a mindfulness training, we just ask them for a moment of gratitude to thank the person to the next to them. And so something happens. I can't put my pin on it or my finger on it. We don't know what's happening in those rooms. But when our eyes come back open, it literally is a funky room.

It turns different and weird. And it's wonderful. Yeah. To be safe in silence with other people is an astounding phenomenon. But it's very social. And to my mind, what I think you're describing is what I wish would be a very substantial part of every school curriculum. I wish people would pay less attention

how the Koreans are beating us in test scores and more attention to maybe the Koreans are beating us in helping kids to feel safe in the classroom and to have fun. For people to feel safe with other people and to learn to regulate themselves and to be calm with other people is a life skill that should be taught in kindergarten and beyond in every class.

How would you do it? Oh, I would make meditation, yoga, tai chi, and singing, and some form of fairly low-level activity, a core part of every quick. If you were to have eight hours with high-performing people in Fortune 100 to 50 corporations, global corporations, what would you do? What would be one thing? And I'm asking you for some guidance to take all your incredible body of work and insight. And if there was one thing – so we've got mindfulness in anywhere between 6 to 15 minutes is kind of what we do together. So what would be one thing that you would do? I think I might start with

just asking people to sit still. And to just notice the bums and what it's like to sit in silence and what I do then is have people write little notes to themselves. This is what came up for me. For most people at the beginning sitting in silence is boring and they're waiting for something else to happen. And so I really want people to draw people's attention inward because we know from neuroscience research

that the only way we can change our brain is by going inside and activate what are known as the midline cortical structures, which are the structures of the brain devoted to self-observing. So I would start off with the self-observing and really cultivated in people. And then what I might do next is something like doing beach ball competitions between people and see what it's like to be in sync with other human beings, what it does for their sense of pleasure and joy to just tap your beach ball around and to feel what it's like to be in sync with other people. And then I would very much explore the notion of synchrony.

I think the issue of synchrony between people, like talking with you, for example, I have a feeling that maybe it's by your such a successful interviewer that you and I are in sync with each other. When you say something, I think I know what you're talking about. And so that sense of, oh, I'm being heard, I'm being seen, I'm being understood, this person is playing this ball in the right direction for the two of us to connect with each other is where pleasure comes in. Whenever people feel in sync with other people,

you have a sense of pleasure and joy. And so that's something I would really like to cultivate in whatever non-stressful way as you can possibly do it yeah so there is a phenomena that's not well researched around group flow so flow has some research around it that's trending and it feels good and in the right direction and we're still young on from neuroscience perspective, but group flow is like all of a sudden an exponential return on insight on performance. And I think that's what I'm hearing you hit on is like, how could you take people from

a safe environment and an introspective environment to maybe even amplify their insular cortex back to thought one from us and then, and harmonize of um you know between each other in a in a supportive way first before an overly challenging way yeah harmonize i think that's a that's an incredibly good word i like to say that nobody has ever committed suicide within 24 hours after we singing handel's messiah singing, handles Messiah. That may not be true, but I'd be really surprised. Because if you really are able to really harmonize with the people around you,

that gives you both a sense of joy, a sense of meaning, and a sense of purpose in your life. Is that why dogs howl? You know, I wonder if, you know, hey! Good association. So, do you okay what how do you measure success for you yourself throughout the day like what are your ways because we're talking about

harmonizing we're talking about synchronicity we're talking about introspection i think i think I think success to me is staying focused on what you want to focus on and moving your field to the next area when it's done. Not to get distracted, not to get hijacked, and to be totally involved in whatever you're doing. Not totally, but very involved in what you're doing. And having your whole being engaged in what you're doing. Not totally, but very involved in what you're doing. And having your whole being engaged in what you're doing. Yeah, okay. So when, this goes back to now that question that I had about if you were to help select talent,

to select people to be part of a difficult working environment. No, no. no yeah the conditions are difficult for in elite sport which there's an assumption that the best of the best of the best are actually born out of some sort of neurotic experience or orientation in life just enough OCD just enough neuroticism just enough anxiety. Just enough trauma. Yeah. Right. So would you select the traumatized? And I know you might say, well, three-fourths of people are traumatized.

So, okay. Well, you know, I don't – that's not really what I do. I'm a clinician who likes to help people to not get stuck in all the old stuff. In our neurofeedback, of course, we very much are into optimal functioning. So one of my main areas of research is on neurofeedback and how we can help people who are bewildered and fearful and who live with a terror-driven brain to just become calm enough so they can become focused. And indeed, as a side effect, or the main effect would be fine,

much to my surprise, is that we start off making people less terrified. But what comes up in our research is there's a dramatic improvement in executive functioning, being able to focus, being able to be flexible, being able to adapt yourself to circumstances. But that's still not genius. And this exceptional talent is still a function of being able to find an extraordinary solution

where other people just see the humdrum. And I always suspect that the two geniuses in the world have all been traumatized. These extraordinary solutions come from people who have grown up under circumstances that were extremely stressful, where they had to find their own way that was not the way of the people around them. I think that people growing up in perfectly safe and predictable surroundings probably get safe and predictable brains in a way. Oh, God, I'm nodding my head right now going, a thousand percent? Yeah. It's very complex. I mean, you read the biography of Isaac Newton, for example.

I mean, that's a total trauma story. This kid is as abused as any kid in America you ever get to see. And then he comes out of it, and he becomes this mathematical genius. He was pretty crazy for the rest of his life also. I mean, he was a weird man, but boy, he had exceptional talents. He came out of trauma. This is one of the things that I think and I have a preamble about, is that I'm not sure we're ready to talk about the dark side of becoming one's best.

We aspirationally hold up the thought that becoming your best is um is noble and is a worthwhile cause and to embrace the inner craziness to embrace the inner to use maybe you're mapping uh the traumatic experience we've had there's a dark side there is a real dark and i'm not sure we're ready to look at it as a nation or as a global nation. And I'm not sure that we're also on the other side. I want to ask you this question. Is there a dark side for you being recognized as the guy or one of three or five people in the world around PTSD? Has there been a cost to you? Well, there's both an external and an external cost. The internal cost is that

when you get met with idealization, that you actually become an impossible person, you know? And you become entitled, and actually people pay more attention to you than anybody else about you. So I need to have my regular setbacks

on a regular basis to keep me on the straight and narrow. And they come, so we don't have to worry about it. Because you're married, and your wife will help you out there too. Well, another thing. You really start believing, there's a risk of believing that you're above it all and that your own laws

are different. And the other thing is that other people don't make real connections with you. Because you get put in a pedestal and I've learned in a variety of ways that being put on the pedestal is a terrible thing for a person because once you fall off that pedestal

you don't exist anymore. And so the whole notion of idealization is very, very hard thing to live with and in. Because I once was in couple therapy. There's a couple therapist who was also very well known in this field. And he would talk about adulation as junk food. You know, it sort of feels sort of good, but it's not real. You know, you're just a projection of people. Yeah, it's so good. It's so good.

I mean, Bessel, I love how your brain works, and I love the honesty you have around. So here I'm doing adulation, the thing you said is so dangerous. But I want to say also what I love is the humility you have and the courage you have to say, hey, listen, there's a loneliness to this. And I felt it. I see people feel it. And it can be scary. you have and the courage you have to say hey listen there's a loneliness to this and i felt it i see people feel it and it's um it can be scary and i i love it like i'll come home like high on my horse sometimes and i'm like having fun with my wife here but you know and she'll go i don't know what people have been saying to you but you better get real quickly. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Here we go.

Just last night, I remember he said, so you finally emptied the dishwasher for the first time in three weeks. Who do you think you are? Are you one of the brightest people in rooms? And I don't know how you answer that, honestly, but the way you work is amazing. So do you find that that happens for you? Generally, not when I sit with my patients. I find my patients incredibly bright and interesting. So many of them are just these unusual thought processes that they came by honestly also.

That's fascinating. My wife also has very unusual thought processes that they came by honestly also. That's fascinating. My wife also has very unusual thought processes. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. And sometimes you think that the bureaucrats I deal with, they just don't get it. Because they live in a very much narrower reality than this, of course. But I try not to go in the direction that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, right.

That's a self... The snake that eats its tail. I mean, that's a trap, for sure. Oh, for sure. It'll bite you in the ass. Oh my God, quickly. What are you most hungry for? Interesting.

I think there's so many layers in which I can answer it. Yeah, let's play. What comes to mind is consciousness, that people live consciously, that people see things for what they are, that people stop telling lies to themselves in a way. People can really say to each other, no, you don't see it. Much more honest relationship between people, yeah. Okay, we've never met. I'm telling you, we have to meet at some point. It's much more honest relationship between people. Okay. We've never met.

I'm telling you, we have to meet at some point. I feel the same way. Yeah, like that is it. And so what I've come to understand is that the natural state of our mind is very sloppy. Our brain is trying to figure out how to survive. The linking between the two requires some conditioning and the courage to be in the present moment, to embrace the unpredictable, unfolding unknown, and to live in that space and not be burdened by anxiety, but to stay curious and honest about the difficult nature of what might unfold requires an incredible commitment to explore. And when we do that, life becomes this

amazing adventure and none of us can do it alone. So the intimacy required to bond and connect, to explore potential that we have within us, it requires full consciousness, full awakeness. And it's hard. And people, when I say it's hard, they look at me like, well, I don't want to do hard. I want to have fun. It's like, well, I don't know. I mean, there's a deep joy in this. But for you and me, fun is being curious.

That may not be true for everybody. I'm an explorer by nature. I like to tell people, I mean, Dutchmen, these poor Dutchmen, they cut down their trees and built little ramps, little boats and then went out in the ocean and half of them croaked at sea. And a few of them went up there and found new colonies and discovered Australia and stuff like that. It's a character issue.

You get turned on by curiosity and feeling is it okay to feel stupid is it okay to um uh to say i don't know you know it's awesome what did your parents give you if they each like let's let's butcher like the experience but like what did they what what did they drop inside of you what did they install as a belief system? How have they helped you? That's a very good question. Wow. I was very much intrigued and upset as a kid with the contradictions between what my parents did and what they said. And so my father was in a German camp,

and he came back and had a dictum in the family of obedience without talking back. I must have been three years old when I said to my dad, but that's where the Nazis put you in a camp because you rebelled against them, and here you're being like a Nazi in your own family. And, you know, I think it's the contradiction that kids pick up with their parents that becomes the fuel of their energy much of the time. And so that I picked up.

I also picked up that everybody played music and everybody read books and everybody was always studying. Nobody ever said to anybody you should study because that's what you did. And nobody ever said you should do your music because everybody did do music. There was no ambiguity about it. You just cultivated your talents. And that was the given of the culture in which I grew up. So I left Holland to go to Hawaii at age 18 and started supposedly a new life.

But as I grew up, I became exactly what my parents trained me for. I became a professor and a researcher. It's always a question, does life teach us any any new stuff i i grew up like like being upset you know and a bit lonely that my dad traveled so much and now look at my life i'm ripping all over the globe doing you know and so it's like okay I see what's happened here and so gee whiz but I'm also impressed

is that we live in different worlds, that my parents live in a completely different world than I live in I'm already impressed that my kids live in a completely different world than I do and my kids are just beginning to have kids now and I can see how their kids are going to live in a completely different world that they live in also.

It is different. Yeah. Is there a phrase that cuts to or that guides your life? Do you have a philosophy or a phrase or a set of guiding principles? What comes to mind is what you and I talked about before the broadcast started, is allowing yourself to know what you know and feel what you feel. I think that internal sense of self-awareness and honesty is really the foundation of having a life

and also having a direction in your life. You really need to know your internal language of your body and what's happening inside of you because if you ignore that, you lose your sense of direction, you lose your sense of purpose. Are you more introverted

or extroverted? I would put myself on the extreme in both. I mean, I really love hanging out with people. I love to talk with people. But I also think it's very important to, and I value, deep internal experiences. I think I know this answer.

Risk-taking or rule-following? Oh. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, but it's again both you know it's risk taking your life without risk it's completely boring but you don't need to know what the rules are because if you take risk and not know what the rules are you lose every step of the way and so i think much of life is learning what the rules are and i wish i had learned many rules that I learned along the way much earlier, because I think I would have been more productive. Yeah, okay.

But figuring out what the rules are is quite a complex task. It is, yeah, especially the internal rules that people make up as they go. Yeah, yeah. If you were to fall on one side of the spectrum, anxious or depressed, which side would you fall on? Probably more anxious than depressed. And then optimism and pessimism? Oh, I think I'm a very optimistic person. Yeah, for sure.

And I don't know if you're mapping, but I'm going through the big five, right? Okay. And I'm just kind of thinking about the big five traits for you and to organize it. Yeah. And how do you answer this? Like pressure comes from? Pressure comes from wanting to solve puzzles, really figuring out how things work, how to make things happen. Yeah.

I love complex challenges. So for you, mostly pressure comes from an internal drive to think quickly or to solve something. It's more inner. Yeah, but it gets very quickly translated into running a center, running a research program and stuff. They quickly get to be externalized challenges, yeah. Okay, how about this? It all comes down to?

Oh, well, probably most people say it's all about love at the end, isn't it? Yeah, it's about synchronicity in love is what human life is about, yeah. Oh, God. Okay, that's part of synchronicity in love, it's what human life is about. Ah, God. Okay, that's it. I'm done. This was a great conversation. So seriously, where can people find you? So my website, bestofvanderkoog.net, is probably the best way of getting a hold of me. Okay, brilliant. And that's B-E-S-S-E-L-V-A-N-D-E-R-K-O-L-K. Yeah, that's great.

I encourage people to pick up your book. Okay. Yeah, for sure. And then how do you think about the concept of mastery? How do you articulate it, or what words would you give to that concept? I do think it's important to really know your stuff. To really, yeah, the satisfaction comes in being able to say, I know this. I have studied this.

I've looked at all angles of something. You can trust me that when I say something about that, that comes from a very well-trained, a very well-lived position. Mastery is really exploring all the angles of an issue. You just brought up the concept of trust. Is it about trust of self or trust of others first? What orientation does that have? I think you start off with being able to trust other people. And that's why those early years are so important to have people there who you can trust, who are predictable, who are safe.

And so I think that continues on. It continues on in the workplace. Can I trust the people who pay my salary? Can I trust my colleagues with whom I do research? The issue of trust is very, very important. But I think it may be hard to trust other people if you cannot trust yourself also. So oftentimes I'm in the business of helping people

go further towards or come closer to their potential. And the concept of trust is ground zero. And the way I've been thinking about it, and I'd love you to push back if you think I'm off course here, is ages zero to two is where we start to really work trust. And it's pre-verbal. And so it's beyond communicative domains. And so oftentimes we just act it out. We don't really have a way to even articulate why we trust somebody. And so we'll back into some behaviors. But it really is born out way to even articulate why we trust somebody. And so we'll

back into some behaviors, but it really is born out of this framework we have from early on. And when I meet adults, I don't want to try to undo or add to. I take them to figure out better, how can they trust themselves? And then once they trust themselves better, then they don't have to rely so much on trusting others but they do need to trust others to go the distance does that seem counterintuitive yeah no i agree with both of what you're saying but you know i believe this throughout life having people you can trust is terribly important yeah yeah And, you know, one of the things we do is run psychodrama workshops in which we sort of reconfigure people's early lives

through psychodramatic techniques. And the big thing is to really instill that early sense of trust retroactively with people, holding people and say if I'd been there for you at that time I would have done this for you and to have a very deep somatic sensory experience of if I'd been three years old and I would have had this degree of protection I would have felt my life would have been different and once that feeling comes into you of what it feels like, then you can start reorganizing your life. So as long as you have a deep feeling

of skittishness and fear, it's very hard to create a sort of relationships that you need to continue to have trusting imprints. Golly. Where do you drive people for EMDR training? People go to EMDR, they just go on the net and

type in EMDR, the EMDR International Association. You're not connected with a particular group that you... No, no, no. That's not the sort of thing I do now. I love practicing it, but... Vessel, you are deep and rich,

and the tone and the texture of the way that you articulate thoughts, I really appreciate. So thank you again for this time. Thank you for having me. Let's stay connected. Okay. Let's do that. And with that, thank you, everyone,

for staying connected with us during this conversation. I hope that there are very applied ways that this conversation has led you to a deeper insight or at least an appreciation for the value of connecting deeply with yourself and with others. So just, God, I love this. I love, I love the fact that we're able to have honest, real conversations with some of the most genius people that see the world just a bit differently. And that's us. That is who we are. And if you want more of these conversations, head over to findingmastery.net. And there's lots of them, people that are world-class thinkers and doers that see the world just a bit differently. And if you want to be part of our community, we encourage you to do that, findingmastery.net forward slash tribe. And we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are supporting and challenging each other

to become better towards mastery. You can also find me on Twitter at Michael Gervais, G-E-R-V-A-I-S. LinkedIn is the same. And as well as Instagram is finding mastery. So Instagram is that finding mastery. Okay. Wishing you the absolute best wishing you deep connection to loved ones and

to yourself. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already,

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