Jocko Podcast - 352: Fixing Your Mind, Mind Mechanics, and Mental Health, w/ Dr. Karlyn Pleasants and Megan Harrison

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Dr. Karlyn Pleasants is a clinical Psychologist who specializes in adult and adolescent psychotherapy. She is also the Chief Clinical Advisor and a managing partner at Anew Treatment Center, Scottsdale AZ.Megan Harrison holds a master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy with experience in transgenerational trauma and mental illness.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 352 with me, Jocko Willink. I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. you have been in every way all that anyone could be.

I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life that without me, you could work. And you will, I know. You see, I can't even write this properly. I can't read.

What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You've been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that. Everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me, but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

And that right there is the final work of the English writer Virginia Woolf. It was a suicide note that she left to her husband, Leonard. Virginia Woolf was born into an affluent family. She was well cared for as a child. She was homeschooled in English and Victorian literature from a young age. She attended the ladies' department of King's College in London. She was successful by any measure. And she wrote a bunch of successful novels.

She authored more than 500 essays and reviews. She had friends and family and a long, seemingly happy marriage. And yet throughout her life, even with all those opportunities and advantages and benefits and privilege that she had, she suffered from mental health issues. She had mood swings and depression and manic excitement and psychotic episodes. And she attempted suicide twice before she was successful in killing herself in 1941. So how does that happen? What is going on there?

And psychiatrists today, they hypothesized that she had a mental health problem, in particular, likely bipolar disorder, which used to be called manic depression. And we've talked about mental health on this podcast. We've talked about mental health issues facing veterans. We've covered some tragic, horrible suicides, including Chad Wilkinson, Joe Price, Charles White Whittlesley, Lewis Pollard Jr. We've also talked about non-military suicides. We talked about Iris Chang. Iris Chang, who was the author of the best-selling book, New York Times bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking. And she had a nervous breakdown in August of 2004 and was placed on a wide variety of prescription medication.

But over time, the medications only seem to amplify her issues. And she was diagnosed with reactive psychosis and put on even more medication. And on November 8th, 2004, she wrote, when you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you just live by the day, but by the minute. It's far better that you remember me as I was in my heyday as a best-selling author. Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take. The anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know my actions, I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others,

indeed to those who love me the most. Please forgive me. And the next day, November 9th, 2004, she killed herself with a pistol. So these are topics that we've certainly addressed. We've talked about them initially, really, with Jordan Peterson. And focused on them in the most recent podcast, the last podcast we did, 251 with Marcus and Amber Capone but it's an area you know it's an area that I still lack even basic understanding of what mental health disorders are where they come from

what we can do to prevent them or overcome them in some way luckily today we have some experts from that field dr. Carlin Pleasance and Megan Harrison Dr. Pleasant is a clinical psychologist who specializes in adult and adolescent lessened psychotherapy. She's also the chief clinical advisor and a managing partner at a new treatment center in Scottsdale, Arizona. And Megan Harrison holds a master's degree in marriage and family therapy with significant experience working with families affected by transgenerational trauma and mental illness.

And Megan is the CEO and managing partner at a new treatment center in Scottsdale. So thank you both for joining us. Thanks for having us. Yes, thank you for having us. Yeah, it's great to meet you. You know, I mentioned that sort of my introduction to psychology, I would say was having Dr. Jordan Peterson on this podcast. And that's when I realized, I just didn't understand at all what was going on and what it meant to have a mental health issue.

And I realized when he was on the podcast, as he was talking through some of the problems that people have, I realized that the mind, well, this is my simple caveman way of translating what he was saying, was that your mind is like a car. And sometimes the car breaks down or sometimes there's, you know, you blow a gasket or your oil is low. And when that happens, you take it into a mechanic. and the mechanic diagnoses what the problem is, oh, you blew a gasket, here's what we need to do to fix it. And so I realized that in many ways the mind can do that too. You can blow a gasket. And there's people, psychologists or therapists,

that can diagnose what the problem is and have methodologies and protocols to get those things fixed. So I again in my caveman brain realized that Psychologists and therapists are like mind mechanics that have seen That's what that triggered it for me That's what triggered that thought was he was telling me about Oh, I'd see this case

This type of case You know, he'd see it again and he'd see it again And he'd see it again and you develop a protocol and how to deal with it Just like oh your car's making this noise Okay here's what the problem is And you see that over and over again you develop a protocol. So you to welcome and you to our mind mechanics as far as I can tell. Let's talk about how you guys got here just a little bit of background just so we get familiar with you.

So let's start with you. Carlin, where'd you grow up? How'd you end up in this scenario that you're in sitting here right now? Okay. Let's see. Well, I grew up in the Bay Area, California. And one of the things I think is really funny about my story is I didn't understand how I got here until much, much later, looking back and trying to figure it out. For a very long time, I was one of those folks when people would say it. So why did you go into psychology? Why did you become a psychologist? I would say things like, oh, I just like helping people.

I'm a good listener. I'm interested in how the mind works. which are true things. But really going back and taking a more in-depth look at my journey, it started when I was a kid. I had some pretty serious physical limitations and physical illnesses that kept me out of school for a long time. I did not take a single PE class, my entire scholastic career.

Didn't get to participate the same way as other kids. did, was missed a lot of things, was absent a lot of the time. And I remember being really young and thinking, like, is this it? Like, is this it? Can there be some other way of being, some other way of living? Because it's, you know, it was lonely. And as a kid, like, the sense of feeling different, like, I don't really belong. How old were you when these health issues started? Was this like everything? I was diagnosed when I was two, two with like really severe respiratory and lung. problems. And back then, I mean, we're talking early 70s, right? Like treatment was not as it is now. People didn't understand. I mean, my mom talks about how I was sick as an infant, and it took two

years for a doctor to say, oh, I think I know what she has. Talk about a mechanic, right? She's taking me lots of mechanics over the years. And, you know, treatments weren't as advanced as they are now. So growing up all through elementary school, junior high, high school, feeling very separate and different and not included and knowing that people, you know, thought I was kind of weird. How come you don't come to all the things? How come you don't take PE? How come you sit in at recess when we all go outside, right? Which on one hand doesn't sound, I mean, whatever, it's the plight of a kid. But when I really look back and think about it, it was that sense of feeling alone and really misunderstood.

not included in things and wondering, like, there's got to be more. Like, this can't be it. This just cannot be it for me, for people. So early on, I remember thinking when I grow up, like I want to be a doctor. I want to be somebody who helps, basically helps people like me, again, in a young brain thinking, well, if I feel like this, probably everybody feels like this. And I don't want people to feel like this. So maybe I'll help kids or I'll help people. respiratory problems or I'll help people with medical illnesses. And it just kind of developed that way, this idea of wanting to, I don't know, in some way help ease the suffering that other people experience and make sense of what was going on.

Now, again, I don't remember it like this at the time in my mind. I just wanted to help people. So did you apply yourself at school? Were you like, I need to get straight A so I can be a doctor? I was like, yeah, so over a chair. I mean, for what I couldn't do over here, I made up for it way over here. So lots of good grades, lots of degrees, lots of academic awards. Did you go to school with the intent of becoming a doctor?

At what point did you think psychology was the place to go? For a while I wanted to go into medical, medical doctor. And then when I learned that you have to take a class called anatomy and look at bodies, I thought, yeah, this might not be for me. Like you're squeamish? Totally squeamish. So I'm like, yeah, I don't know if that's been going to work out for me very well to go that direction. But also, again, the insight of this came through hindsight is I was so curious about really the mental part of it, right?

The experience of feeling isolated and disconnected and how that left you feeling or me feeling like lonely and depressed and kind of like, wanting more, right? So I got a little bit more curious in the like psychological department of what happens for people who have an illness, what happens for people who feel separate and different from everybody else who are left out, who are bullied, like what happens psychologically. So I definitely made a turn along the way. And was that in college? I would say maybe high schoolish going into college. Just, kind of a fascination with, well, how the mind works. And, and, you know, in some ways, unlike going to a mechanic, a lot of the psychological experiences that a person might have in reaction

or relation to all of these different events, you don't see them. Like, you know, go into a doctor and take a listen to your head and go, oh, I recognize that clicking. I know exactly what to do. There are these kind of invisible unseen experiences that. make it a little bit more challenging to figure out or understand what exactly is going on. So that curiosity, I just remember high school, probably going into college, just curious. Like, how does this work? Like, why do I feel this way? But this person I met also had an illness when she was young and she seems to be okay.

Like, why did I suffer? Or why was I okay over here, but this guy couldn't do grades, you know, do it. So this kind of curiosity about how the mind influences the experiences. And I remember sitting in a, I was probably getting close to getting my first degree and in a kind of a pathology class, kind of a mental illness, class on mental illness and the pathology of illness. The professor said, show a hands, how many in here believe that you're in here to help people? You just want to do good in the world. You know, me, the good student, me, me, me.

along with most of the other class. And he's like, okay, how many of you in here think that you have chosen this field or chosen this part of the field because you've got your own stuff you might need to work out? Everyone's like, not me, not me, not a hand, or maybe like half hand.

And by the end of that class, it was the reverse. Everybody was like, yep, I've got my own stuff. I need to work out. That's partly why I'm here. So that started the, I think, the kind of budding awareness that this isn't just about, for me, it wasn't just about helping people and being a good listener. But it was about understanding myself and hopefully through the process, being able to take that experience and help other people, whether that's not feel so alone, or understand

that there are options available, or that this isn't kind of the fate of. of your life because you have this illness or this experience. So yeah, I definitely have swung from here. Like I'm just really altruistic all the way over here to life is hard sometimes. Life is really hard. And when you factor in, like my experience growing up with an illness, also growing up in a family

where there were a lot of issues. And not just in my immediate family, but generational. I mean, you and I, Megan, have talked about this, of trauma and addiction and loss and wartime. Like you kind of inherit a little bit of that along the way. So my curiosity over time expanded beyond just my own experience. But how does this happen in families? How does this happen through generations?

How do you find, we had a client we saw at the treatment center for a long time who had schizophrenia, two siblings, a sister who did. not have schizophrenia, a brother who did. Parents were really, really lovely, great people, did not seem to have a lot of stuff going on, but the dad's brother, the dad had three brothers. He was one of four. All three of them had schizophrenia. So this idea, right, of like, okay, some of this is passing down through generations, not just at a genetic level, but what you're exposed to and what you're seeing and what you're experiencing and what you're witnessing. So again, for me, the curiosity and the interest was about how do these things happen?

How did they go from here to here to here to here? And what can we do to shift that? So people aren't just kind of living out this emotional inheritance or this traumatic inheritance, depending on what was going on in the family. How do you break that chain? How do you do something different? How do you set your own life up to go? in a different trajectory than maybe how it's been going and then your kids and their kids and

their kids. Yeah, it makes sense that if you were going to get like a personal trainer because you want to get in shape, it would be kind of if you saw that that personal trainer had gone through some sort of transition themselves, you go, okay, this person kind of knows what I've been through. So you kind of got that vibe going. I can say vibe a lot. So you got to forget about that. I do too. It's okay. You kind of have that vibe. So what degrees did you end up with? What'd you end up with? You said you got like degree upon degree. Yeah.

So what did you end up with? So I got a bachelor's degree in psychology, which unfortunately in our field nowadays, that doesn't mean a whole lot other than you went to school for a few years and learned a bunch of things about the brain. Got my master's in counseling, also in California, and then got my doctorate in clinical psychology down here in San Diego. Got it. All right.

Megan, let's talk about you. Where'd you grow up? How'd you end up here? Sure. It feels like a big question. I grew up in southern Wisconsin, really small town, beautiful there. Not much to do in that area. You're probably fishing or hunting. My dad owned a chain of grocery stores, and my mom worked just cleaning houses and working for my uncle's scrap metal business, whatever we could do. And my dad that I'm speaking to came later on in life as well with like the chain of grocery stores. So the first part of my life was just me and mom.

And so she taught me definitely hard work. But there wasn't much to do where I grew up. You were bowling, curling, fishing, hunting, or going to the bar. That was about it. Curling. Curling just made the podcast for a 352 podcast deep and we just got into curling. It's a big deal in Wisconsin. Let me tell you.

It's very cold for about eight months out of the year. So, yeah, I mean, my story, I was born into a family system that had definitely been impacted by just generations of trauma, you know, abuse, addiction, mental health issues on the very severe end. And, you know, I, you know, similar to what Carlin is saying, I don't know that, like, sitting here right now, like, the only intentionality in that for me and coming into this therapy world was just this idea that through life, every step I took forward in terms of overcoming just brought me further into the life that I envisioned for myself. And that was sort of my intention in that way. But I knew growing up in that environment that there was no way I was going to be able to do something different for myself or do something different for the family I wanted to have if I stayed there. And so from a very young age, I sort of started my path towards independence.

I started working at a very young age. The military sort of came into my life as this idea. of like here's an opportunity to go somewhere, to do something. I actually was finishing some high school stuff at a community college and was watching the September 11th occurrences in 2001. And I just remember looking at the screen and being like, oh, this is, this is what I'm going to do. I had entertained the military for a period of time and I had thought maybe this was my opportunity, but it was in that moment that I was like, okay, like this, I feel a sense of purpose, like drawn to something. and in the environment that I grew up, and I kind of always knew that I wanted something different for myself,

but I lacked a lot of direction and people in my life to kind of help me guide in that way. Education wasn't particularly valued or seen as like a possibility. And at that point in my life, I hadn't had enough experiences other than just like surviving in a lot of ways to see that as possible for myself, to see ready to like go to school and do that route. And so the military just felt like, okay, this is what I'm going to go do. and there's like something really important that's happening. I need to go do it. And it was about a year later, August of 2002, that I was on active duty.

And what did you join? I joined the Navy. How'd you pick that being in Wisconsin? You know, it's really interesting. I think it was, it had to do with the recruiter at the time because I was definitely a youth that was, you know, getting, you know, some help from the community and different things. And at that time in the Midwest, you know, recruiters would come into those areas and introduce themselves and such.

And so I just remember him as being somebody that, I was like, okay, like he feels, he seems confident. Like, he carries himself, like, this is like something I want to be a part of. And it sort of seems cliche, but at the time it was everything for me because I didn't, you know, the friends that I had at the time and I had, you know, been living with friends at a very young age and such, like weren't really going a lot of places. Jail. I lost a lot of friends to, you know, death, you know, suicide, overdoses.

There was just a lot of that in my life. And so just being around somebody who just, sort of represented like a possibly different future and like life was was huge for me. It was like a role model mentor. And so I joined. What job did you sign up for? So I came in as a signalman and that's what I went to A school for, but dates myself a little bit because it was already kind of like a dying rate at the time. So I went to A school to be a singleman. And my first orders were actually to the USS Kitty Hawk in Japan at the time. and I was like set to leave about a week later,

and my orders got canceled because there wasn't enough birthing for females at the time, and I was rerouted to ACB1 in San Diego. And I got there, and I was getting issued camees and boots, and like we were getting ready to deploy to quake, because this was like August of, or this was like latter part of 2002, so we were like getting ready to go overseas for everything that was happening during operation and during freedom and during that time. And so I was like, what did I do?

just get myself into because I thought I was going to a ship and then here I am in like a whole different world. I'm sure you're familiar. The CVs are just a whole different realm and such. And so, but it was, it was such a blessing for me because it was like a form of reparenting, like the amount of structure that I went into, I knew exactly what was expected of me. And it was also the first time that I learned how much, I think because of the environment I grew up in, that I, I thrive in crisis in some ways. Like things get crazy. something's happening. Everything for me just kind of calms down. And I wanted to lead. And I found myself in a lot of leadership positions. I found myself an opportunity like volunteer for this,

volunteer for that. I'll do it. And it really gave me the opportunity to just build a sense of self for the first time. The community, the feedback that I was getting was just huge for me. And then all kinds of doors opened up for me. The idea of like, I could go to school. I could do this. My first interest in doing some counseling such, actually, came from I thought originally I was going to go to school to be to do organizational psychology to for leadership like that was really my goal I always wanted to be a leader for me before you do in the Navy or once you got in once I got in you know I and I was just kind of drawn into these situations where I knew

that there was like I don't know if you want to call it a natural leadership quality but there was just like this part of me that I had gone through so much and I had overcome so much that it was like people need need that you know to like hear that story to be a part of that like It was a really powerful thing for me. And I was realizing for other people as well at the time. And so I got offered an opportunity to do some work with families in pre- and post-deployment sort of support. And it was very logistical at the time.

How do you support families and, like, you know, preparing for the logistics of bills or separation or what's going on. But what I realized at that time was that there was a significant amount of support. that these families needed and understand like how much role shifts were happening when one of the partners would deploy and that I'm making this new group of friends while my my husband or my wife has gone and they're making their new group of friends and our kids are getting used to me as playing like both mom and dad and doing these different roles and they just did not have the resources to be able to deal with that and I think because I had gone through what I did as a child I could recognize things related to like mental health or relationship issues or things like that. I didn't really have the skill set yet to

know exactly what to do with that other than just my mindset was always like, you just keep moving forward and one step at a time and you make healthy decisions and you recognize that, you know, I don't exist in a vacuum and the things I do matter and how I treat people matter. And I could support people a lot with that. But it was, that was what first drew me to the idea of counseling. And at the time I was working when I decided to go to school for counseling, I was working as a contractor for HSC3. So how long did you end up doing in the Navy? So I did five years. I did four years on active duty and then I extended for a year.

How was that first deployment to Kuwait? It was intense. We were at the Kuwaiti naval base. We came in during a time where really nothing was set up. Our goal is that being the CBSA, ACB1 and ACB2 were there at the same time. when we got there, we knew we're not leaving for a while. Props to the C-Bs, by the way. C-Bs are awesome.

Yes, they definitely are, and definitely make friends with builders because your camp will be real nice, and you'll get a nice little shelf up there and all the things that you need. And I'll steal you whatever you do, which no one wants to talk about. I learned how to be very resourceful. There was also some aspects of being in the military as a female in that type of environment

and a lot of things that were going on during that time that made it a scary situation sometimes. too. You want to feel safe in that environment, but there was, you know, you're in the middle of the desert and people are going through wartime and we had, you know, incoming missiles coming in, we're running, you know, Taconic's boxes that are buried in the ground for like shelter, like people were on edge during that time for sure. And so, but I learned a lot. And if anything, it was walking away from that knowing that I could, you know, it doesn't matter what life throws at you. If you just keep moving forward, like you'll get through it.

for sure. So if I can interrupt, I remember you telling a story one time making about like having to dig holes to sleep in the ground and having like your gun there because of like how big the scorpions were. And like having to protect yourself and guard yourself from the scorpions while you're in a hole in the desert at 127 degrees and you're like 19. Yeah, I think you can pretty much handle whatever is going to come your way in life. But I mean, this is sort of that where you're talking about earlier where one person can have one situation growing up and another can have an entirely different situation

and how you choose to respond is going to very much so shape the outcome of who you are. And so for me, I just, you know, there was a lot of opportunity to move into fear and have fear make you small. And for me, it was just like I'm just going to keep going. But there wasn't at that time in my life, I can't say, I mean, I was very young that I was intentionally like, this is what I'm doing to overcome or that really was it. there for me. It just like stopping or not moving or going backwards wasn't an option. Just keep

moving forward with whatever kind of presented itself to me. So yeah, I was there for a year and actually didn't find out until the day before we were leaving that I was leaving. So it was like, you know, coming up to you like, here's your plane ticket. You're leaving tomorrow. I'm like, cool. And at the time, you know, cell phones weren't allowed. We weren't, we couldn't have any of that. And so there was two phones in the camp for a camp of, gosh, don't quote me on this, but there was a lot of people. I mean, the Army was there. I won't coach you on a lot of people being super specific like that. The, you know, special operations, special forces were there. The Air Force was there. We had Australian, British, you know, military was a huge camp, Quady Naval Base. And so two phones for

a large group of people would make the line very long that you're waiting, you'd be standing there in hours, and then there'd be an incoming missile. Everybody'd have to run, go take, you know, shelter and then I gave up so I didn't make any photos and also for me I you know I was I was moving for I didn't have a whole lot of connections to the past so I I was just uh yeah so I did so you get done with your Navy career you end up as a contractor and this is so when did you end up like going to school so that was when I was a when I was a contractor I started so I started with my I actually went to school to be a pharmacy tech while I was still on active duty I was um you know single mom at the time and just raising my son and going to school at night and working during the day. And pharmacy

tech seemed like a good option for me at the time to have a job when I got out. So I finished that before I got out. I started working at a compounding pharmacy and very quickly realized this is not what I want to do. Went back to school for my bachelor's in psychology and then started working towards my master's in that contractor work. So my bachelor's and my master's all came after I had separated from the military. So, and so, yeah, I obtained my master's while I was working as a contractor and was introduced for my practicum. So in counseling psychology, you have to do some pre-degree and post-degree hours, about a total of 3,000, direct, like direct and indirect clinical hours in order to obtain your degree. And so you get introduced to various treatment

centers while you're in your school to, you know, get that experience and practice. And that was when I was actually introduced to Humble Chia, which was owned by Carrie. Carlin at the time was a treatment center for clients with complex psychiatric disorders. And again, for me at the time, I was like, this just sounds so interesting, family therapy and all of that. But in my mind, I was going to school because this was the school that I could do at night while I was commuting. I was commuting from Temecula down to Naval Air Station at the time. It was like 72 miles one way. And so I was just kind of moving through life, like, you know, just doing the things that I thought I needed to do to move forward. And then I met Carrie and Carlin,

came to know Humble Chia. And Humble Chia was just this really special place. It was like, I like to call it like a very much all about like small business ownership and like what that means for our economy and such. But Karen Carlin just they just owned this treatment center. And it was not, it was just a small family owned place where like people just 100% threw themselves into helping these families. And I was drawn to it. so much because the families that were walking through there were definitely the types of family. Like, could have been my family, right? And here I was in this place where really beautiful things were happening in terms of supporting these people, suffering through very severe things.

I mean, when you have a loved one who has a chronic, complex psychiatric disorder, something that you're not getting rid of, right? We're like making friends with this. We're learning how to, how to, you know, accept it, grieve what I thought was going to be for my kiddo, you know, whatever it may be, when a family lets you into their life to walk through that path of them, it is a very special thing. And I knew at that point, like, okay, this is what I want to do. I want to work with families. And I started to realize not only in my own life, but in what we were doing, that we were creating generational change. Like, when you can help a family system shift away from abuse or addiction or grief or in a way that allows them to envision a different

identity for themselves. Like life could be different. Like we don't actually have to keep going in this way or continue these patterns. I mean, you think about the impact of that for years and years to come. We're talking about hundreds of people that could be impacted by one person choosing to do something different. That was like everything to me. And that's what I knew I wanted to do. And it's what I realized I was able to do for my family in a lot of ways. And then this sort of became my family when I was there, like just, I was able to be seen in a different way. It was like, oh, we have this new leadership opportunity. Like, you do it. And I'm like, me? And this is an interesting, this is the kind of the intersection between me and you two,

which is, you know, I got a group of friends and we invest in a bunch of different things. And, And at one point, you know, my buddy Joe said, hey, we're going to invest in this. We're going to buy some real estate. And it's going to be used by this mental health facility. And I was like, you know, cool. I mean, literally with them, they just kind of tell me what, like they tell me a three minute. Hey, this is what we're putting money into. I say, cool.

Give them some money. We throw it in there. And at some point, we invested in sort of a branch of Hamletchia. And then that branch got swept into Hamletchia. And the whole thing got bought. And so, you know, it was a cool situation for us. You know, we made money and high-fived. And then that eventually rolled into this new venture, which is a new treatment center,

which, again, I mean, I'm just basically like a, I don't want to say a gambler, but a little bit of a gambler. Like, you're just letting money roll, you know, like, oh, just leave it on the table. And that's kind of what I did. And next thing, you know, I'm invested in this new treatment center. And that's all starting to take place. And so that's kind of how we all know each other was from that connection, you know, from me just kind of letting my money sit on the table and hope it keeps doing well.

That's how we all know each other. But so thank you for your backgrounds. Definitely, I'm sure we could do a whole podcast about like each one of your stories because there's a lot there. But I want to kind of get to the topic at hand, right, which is me trying to get a better understanding of mental health issues and and you know we were talking about before he hit record that just different things can hit people so differently and two people can experience the same literally the same traumatic event and have totally different reactions as

as you were talking Megan I was thinking that like in seal training the people that make it through seal training are are so radically different you've got a kid that grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth and he makes it through no problem you got another kid that makes it silver spoon his mouth and he quits the first day you got someone that grew up on a farm in Iowa and he makes it through no problem and someone else that grew up on a farm in Iowa and they quit the first day and everyone in between you got a kid from the ghetto that that you know didn't have anything and he just makes it through some other kid from the ghetto first day I'm not putting up with this shit and that's so these different lives can have just a radically different outcome

what are some of the main causes of mental health issues? Like what is, and I know there must be several factors. I mean, there must be some that are hereditary. You kind of mentioned that, Carlin, like there are some hereditary things. Then there must be some things that are brought on by the environment that you grow up in or what you see. So what are some of the kind of main causes? There's, well, there's, gosh, there's so many.

It's hard to narrow them down. And like I was saying earlier, so many of these things are unseen, they're invisible. They can't be located so much on a map, so to speak. But things like temperament, you know, like the kind of the traits and characteristics that were born with are going to play a role. Our upbringing, of course. Like I'm thinking when you would share that story about being in Kuwait and dig, I'm like, for sure I would have never made it there.

But like, I don't think I could have done that. Now, is it, do I not have a tenacious personality or persever? No, I've got some of that, but I think about my early upbringing, right, where just living was hard, digging a hole to like survive. That would have been at this whole other level for me. So my history, so people's histories, messages like in the family, like that's a, and this is my opinion. What's a message? What does that mean? Like, for example, I like to ask families or family members sometimes.

So how did you guys do feelings? What were feelings like? Most of the time you're going to have folks say, oh, we don't talk about feelings. We don't actually do feelings. Oh, okay. So when something difficult happens, you know, you get bullied at school,

your boyfriend breaks up with you, grandma passes away. What did you guys do? Oh, nothing. We just had dinner. So right here, right, there's something. A family that doesn't acknowledge feelings, talk about feelings, have a way to process what was happening,

is going to have a certain effect versus the family you ask. And they're like, oh, we talked about feelings all the time. Anytime something happened, we'd sit down and have a big family meeting about it. That person is going to be shaped very differently in terms of managing stress and managing conflict and negotiating hardship. So family messages and family almost like traditions around things like feelings or how you handle hardship. I mean, the book I'm writing right now has a lot to do with the impact of secrets. So and finding that that has a big impact.

Secrets like, yeah, like we don't talk. Like if something happens, we're just not going to talk about that. We're not going to talk about it amongst ourselves. We're not going to share this with the outside world, under the rug, in the vault, whatever you want to call it. So you think about, again, and it's not going to affect everybody the same way, but how easy it would be for a person then to develop, especially if they're young, this idea that like, oh, when bad things happen or when difficult things happen, you're not supposed to talk about that. You're supposed to keep it to yourself. Don't share. So what happens for those folks who are faced with.

something difficult or faced with a hard decision or faced with a stressful circumstance. And then it's also so individual because someone can say, oh, you know, my grandma died and I'm looking at my dad and he looks stoic. That seems like a good thing to do. That seems like a good example, right? Yes. Or, oh, my grandma died and my dad looks stoic. He doesn't care. And so it's like your interpretation, people's individual interpretation. And even when you were talking, Megan, like when you joined the military or even you saw this recruiter and you kind of say, oh, this guy looks put together. And you get the military and you're like, okay, here's what I should be doing. And like your perception of what you're seeing and then your decision to say, oh,

I can step up. I can volunteer for this. I can make this happen. Like just people's own interaction with reality and what's going on is so different. And is there a way that you can take people and show them the positive one? Does that work? Is that a thing to do? Like, let me give you an example. I have a kids podcast that I do sometimes and I'll answer kids questions because I've written a bunch of kids books.

And one of the questions I got one time was from a kid. And I've got in multiple forms of this question is, and this actually reminds me of you, Carlin. And the question was like, oh, sometimes kids don't like to hang out with me and I feel like I'm alone. How can I feel better about that? And I answered the question like, hey, it's okay to be alone. I'm alone sometimes and it's okay.

Sometimes you're going to be alone and you don't always have to have people around you and it doesn't mean they don't like you. It doesn't mean you're not going to have friends. It's just that sometimes you're alone and that's okay. And I mean, that's, to me, is a legitimate answer because, you know, let's say let's say your mom says, why are you alone again? Why don't you have any friends?

That might start to mess you up. You know, as opposed your mom's saying, oh, you know, what are you reading? Oh, here's a book, you know. So how we're interacting and how you perceive the world can be so different that these things, and again, you've got a kid that grew up in Iowa

that quits and you get a kid that grew up in Iowa on a farm, they both grew up in the same exact thing. One of them quits, one of them makes it. Right. So do you as therapist, a psychologist, get to try and guide and open and show those positive things? Is that what we're doing here? Well, I think we're trying to create some reparative experiences

because when you talk about the story of the guy who quit or the guy who went, I would be really curious about his history and past around what happened when he was struggling, when he was having a hard time or needed to move through something or didn't know if he could move forward. What was the response or message that he received in his environment? And the thing about some of these aspects of mental health, very complex, hard to pinpoint exactly what needs to be. But the story that you just told about this child, that response, when someone chooses to lean in and be vulnerable in a way and ask a question or look out for support, how we respond to them is pivotal because it shapes their experience of whether or not that's a safe thing to do again in the future. So we talk about what cultures or what things influence why someone might keep things to themselves or be less inclined to share or kind.

come forward if they're struggling with something is, you know, how we respond is huge. And so, you know, there's so much aspects of what's going on for another person that we don't actually have control over. But what we do have control over is sort of our own reaction to when someone is sharing something with us that appears upsetting, do we want to shut it down and kind of, this should be fine and move past it because that creates an experience for them? Or can we kind of tolerate whatever feelings are coming up for us when we see someone who's or with working through something that I have no idea how to fix or how to respond to,

but can I sit with them for enough time to create an experience for them that lets them know that like if something's coming up for me again or if I need to work through, it's safe to come to this person or this environment is safe enough to be able to share what's going on for me because if it's not and that person goes inside, then when we look at more severe things like suicide or very chronic, you know, psychiatric disorders, that becomes much more debilitating in a way that can, you know, cause someone their life. I think what you said, I also, I so appreciate what you showed. Did I give a good? You did. It was really good.

Very lucky. Of how you responded to the kid, right? To me, I'm like, there it is. Perfect. Right? As opposed to say a mom or somebody else that would be like, well, come on, what are you doing wrong? How come you don't have any friends? Right. Versus like, oh, I'm sorry to hear that bud, but you know what, it's okay. It's okay sometimes to be alone. I'm sorry that you're feeling bad about that today. Okay, it's all right. There's something about the, like I'm just acknowledging what you're going through. I'm not trying to change it. I'm not making it wrong. I'm not telling you you should be doing something different.

And that brings out that safety piece. And in fact, some research into resiliency. So speaking to, how come some kids kind of bounce back and get better? And some kids really flounder over here. some of the research shows that there needs to be opportunities to make mistakes and not be essentially shamed or made in trouble, opportunity to fix them, which means you've got to use new skills and like try and experiment and trial and error, and you need to have at least one adult. If you got more, that's even better, but you need to have one adult that is kind of a safe guide like a somebody that you can feel safe with, that's gonna kind of get ya and say,

you know what, buddy, it's all right. Sorry, that one did not work out so well, we'll try it again tomorrow. Versus the shaming, you're wrong, how come you did that, you should know better, like those kind of things. So resiliency is about having adults, especially as kids, having adults that can say, yep, you know what?

Sometimes it's just like that. I'm sorry, but it's okay, you'll be fine. I had another guy who's a neurolestone, scientist named Andrew Huberman on here. And we were talking about winning and losing his kids. And he said, it's through your whole life, you've got to push yourself, you've got to lose sometimes. And he actually gave the percentage and he's got research or whatever.

He's a Stanford doctor. So I guess he's smart or whatever, Andrew. But, you know, we came down. It's like 80% of the time you want the kid to kind of do well. And then 20% of the time they should like lose. If they start, what I did with my kids was lose 90% of it. of the time like put them in really hard situations and that's not the good way to do it. Luckily my kids turned out pretty resilient but um you know I was just like oh you're going to get beat down it's

going to make you tougher it's going to make you stronger and no what happens is they just start to feel like a loser right so you got to be careful with that but that 80 percent I think it's a good number to okay 80 percent of the time you're winning or you're evenly matched but you're doing well 20 percent in time you know you've got to be pushing yourself into some situations and that's the weird thing didn't like the seal training like I'm talking about about kids that were division one wrestlers right quit division one wrestling is so insanely hard and they they have all kinds of hypothesis you know somebody that was a really good athlete they've never really been they've never lost and when you get to

seal training you're gonna lose like you're gonna you're gonna fail stuff and so that can be a problem with people's mentality because they've just never lost before and then there's you know some kid that's been getting beat down this whole life he's like Oh, cool, I failed. Whatever. I'm going to keep going. So how do you diagnose, you know, again, I made the car mechanic thing. And the cool thing, the interesting thing about this metaphor is even a car mechanic,

you bring a car and there's a whatever, a tapping noise in the engine. He isn't necessarily no 100% what it is. He's like, could be this, could be that. He's got to dig in there. So is that the way diagnosis works? You're sort of like, okay. here's a problem, you're getting super emotional. We don't know what's causing it yet.

That's the tapping, right? You're getting super emotional. And then what are we doing to diagnose? How does it happen? Pretty much. I mean, it is a, let's look over here. Oh, that doesn't really seem to be the problem. Let's try this over here.

Now, personally, what I have found is, and not everybody works this way. This is totally fine, is I like to go into, like, how did you get here? So I'm going to ask all kinds of questions about what happened in the family and how were things talked about and what did you experience and how was that managed in the family because I see those things as they shape. So now we have this tapping that's happening right now where there's something probably that went on back then that has to do with it. Some therapists, some psychologists don't, they look at like what's happening right now and how do we move it forward. They are not going to spend a lot of time in the past. It's a preference. But, I mean, I can't tell you how many times what walked through the door is not what we ended up finding.

Sure. Right? Somebody, I mean, some of my earlier years in private practice, I worked a lot with eating disorders. And because I was also still learning and, you know, didn't have as much experience as I would have within a few years is, oh, it's meal plan. This person is afraid of getting fat. This person thinks they're more popular if they're skinny or whatever. all of these things, so we would kind of target those behaviors. Let's get you on a good meal plan.

Let's talk about self-esteem, et cetera, et cetera. Over the years, it was, I mean, it was kind of insane how much I discovered through looking back, like there was trauma in there, or some kind of really defining event that happened in that young person's life, that the eating disorder behaviors, so to speak, were almost like the manifestation of something else. What kind of, what would be a something else?

Like, abuse. Like often, especially with girls, you'd see like a sexual assault or sexual abuse. Sometimes something that was happening in the family that was not being talked about would be kind of stuffed down and then expressed through these behaviors. So almost psychologically you can interpret that. a little bit is if we're spending all of our time over here on meal plans and weight gain and weight loss, what are we not looking at? The secret over here that nobody wants to talk about. So sometimes finding an origin that then explains the symptoms, then you treat the origin, the issue over here

versus the symptoms, right? Kind of like the analogy I've used a million times, even with clients, is if you come in with like a severe, like with pneumonia, a severe case of pneumonia, and the only thing we're doing is giving you some cough syrup to help your cough. Like that's going to help a little bit. I mean, it's going to help you feel a tiny bit better, but nothing. In fact, you might even get worse if we don't really treat the thing that's really underneath the cough. Like the cough actually isn't really the issue. Well, this is the really humanizing part in terms of what you're talking about,

because I think we have to be really mindful and responsible as clinicians with how we talk about the use of diagnoses. You know, in my private practice, I often get people coming to me that it's their first time they've reached out for mental health services. They've gone somewhere and they spent just a short meeting with someone and they were given a diagnosis bipolar disorder. Something is very severe. You know, they go look this up on the internet. They start attaching all these things to their personality. WebMD. And now, you know, I am bipolar disorder.

I start to attach these things to my personality. And that language is very powerful over time, because if I am something or something is happening to me, I have much less control over how I respond to it as opposed to this idea that I'm experiencing some symptoms associated with bipolar disorder. Or I'm experiencing some symptoms associated with this. Or, you know, after some reflection, I have unaddressed trauma in my past that's showing up like, you know, very volatile outbursts or something like that. So I think, you know, how we talk about it is really important because nowadays, and if you have kids my age, there's plenty of kids walking around self-diagnosed as OCD or depression or these sorts of things because they hear about something and I am this and I can't do this because I have this. And so I think one of the first things we try to do with people to start to talk about like the impact and history because it allows us to create a framework to talk about things that are more humanizing as opposed to, you know, the symptoms in terms of like a label. Right.

So this made me think of something that I said a while ago. I looked up the definition of being insane. And being insane was when your reality doesn't match reality of the world, right? And we have an online training program. And I was telling you, I said, hey, everyone is insane, right? Everyone is to some level insane. Because if the three of us witness an event or participate in an event, it's going to be a little bit different for all of us.

Like our reality is going to be a little bit different. Well, no, you said this. I didn't say that. I said this. So we're going to have different interpretations of reality. So everyone, therefore, is a little bit insane, right? And it's just how insane are you? And when you start looking at that like this, the most horrifying thing, like anorexia,

where the person is so clearly. malnutritioned and so clearly like 100% of people in the world would say you need to eat more and that one person the person that has it just they just don't see that that's got to be the scariest scariest environment like for a parent I can't even fathom what that's what that's doing so as you you're talking about carlin you're talking about a addressing the like finding this original this initial problem and that's what we're able how we're able to address that bring that into the light get that thing solved and it solves the symptom that we're all seeing pretty much I mean and that's the mechanic work right is you're you're kind

of digging and and you know sometimes the person will know like I had this thing happen and I think my symptoms are related to this sometimes they're not aware I had a young girl that I was treating for anorexia. She was a cheerleader and a ballerina. So, so much pressure, right, to maintain this very malnourished, very thin body and all the guilt, like even eating, you know, eating something that had a carb in it, you know, just like, I can't, I'm going to get fat, blah, blah, I'm not going to get picked. I mean, so destructive and interfering with life. So I'm working with her and I'm trying, this thing and this thing, and we're trying over here, and I don't know, your worth isn't wrapped up in your ballerina stuff.

So you were focused on the physical, like, oh, you look fine. Because this is all she was presenting with is like, I know. Like, it's almost like, I know this is not good for me. I just don't really know what to do about it. But there wasn't really much else. Try getting the parents in they didn't want to come in, which really should have been my first clue. And long story short, just to get to this point is months and months of meeting with her and like, well, what about this?

And I don't know. What about this? she says well you know my mom said she didn't want me to talk about this but I feel like I should I think I was molested by

my cousin when I was like 12 I'm like oh so I'm like here we go so I'm asking her all these questions and you know she just tells this really very sad kind of horrible story about

learning that she like learning something at school that made her think, oh my God, I think that happened to me. Going home, telling her parents and her parents like, do not tell anybody about this, this is going to ruin everybody's life. La, la, la, la. Right? Just don't talk about it. Well, no, she's a ballerina. Right? Like, all that got stuffed down and kind of channeled in this way that she could control her environment a lot of time, a lot of the time. So we start unpacking this. And it turns out, as she tells me about this event that made her think that she might have been molested, that's not what happened. She was in some class at school, and they were talking about something, and she almost like misinterpreted.

So this, for years, there was this whole thing that had happened in her family where she said she had been molested, but she really wasn't. They thought she was, shut it down, didn't let anybody talk about it, and now she's coming in for treatment for anxiety and an eating disorder. order, right? As soon as we got there and we got it and she was, I mean, she bought in. She was like, oh my God, I had no idea. At this point, she's maybe 18. I think I started seeing her. She was 15. Like all of a sudden, it was like all that symptomology went away. I mean, it didn't vanish overnight because she'd been doing those behaviors for a long time. But that clarity of like, oh, this is what this was about, this being made to be wrong. You know, I thought this bad thing had

happened to me and I was like essentially punished for it and told that if I tell and something happens to my cousin, it's going to like be my fault. So not being able to talk about it. Being told by her mom, don't go talk about this in therapy. Do you want to go to therapy for? Right. But but it was that like that's an example of you kind of we just had to peel and peel and ask questions. And when we found it, it cleared up because right like you said it like it kind of brought it into the light, we could address what the real problem was, and then the symptoms, the cough, so to speak, alleviated, because the root, the core had been addressed.

So there is a lot in psychological practice and treatment that does involve some... And it took you years, three years to do this. I saw her every week. Because she... And she was really, like, I was told her. not to talk about this. So she kind of knew something was back there. But she was also young and had been directed by her family,

don't talk about this. If you talk about this and she calls the school and your cousin gets in trouble, and aunt and uncle, like, you know, so just. But it was, if you can go into it a little bit, because you said it didn't really happen, but she thought it happened? Well, yeah, so she said she was at school one day

and they were doing one of these assemblies, right, where you're giving like the kids education. on healthy touch or inappropriate touch. Like, you know, maybe she's 15 at this time. She was also a very immature. Only child, a little bit sheltered, so maturity-wise, she was a little behind, I think. And so she said, so this thing was happening,

and I told my friend, oh, my God, I think I might have been molested because this thing happened with my cousin. So I'm like, okay, so can you tell me what happened with your cousin? And she tells me this event, which was really like at a party one night, like all the cousins and aunts and uncles, the kids decided to like play a joke and like skinny dip. Like they all went into the pool house, like stripped off their clothes and like ran into the pool and made a big joke and everyone got in trouble because the parents were there and this kind of thing. And she goes, it was my cousin's idea. He said, okay.

She goes, so he molested me, right? I'm like, what? What? In her mind, she had, because she heard this thing at school and her friend said, oh, my God, it was your cousin that said you should take off your bathing? Oh, I think that's molest. I think that's inappropriate, whatever. Like it grew into this thing, but when she really, when we met back and walked through the event,

she goes, well, no, it was my cousin's idea, but like we all did it. No one touched anybody. It was, we thought it would be funny. So tragic. I mean, this is a, to me, and she did, once we got there, she did beautifully, she's off at college, I mean, doing wonderfully, but the years, right, of a misunderstanding of something that happened. It was like the telephone game, right? She told this person, they told this, they, it just, by the time it arrived at her parents, it was this whole other thing. Scary.

So scary. Megan, something you were talking about when you were talking about, oh, people kind of self-diagnosed at something. point where they get a diagnosis from somebody and oh yeah we had a friend of mine on here there's an ancient uh native american saying that something along the lines of it's not a diagnosis it's a curse like if you get diagnosed with something and you you can hear it as a curse like this is what you are uh how much play does it give to me i mean obviously i wrote a book called extreme ownership, taking ownership of like what's going on in your world. And instead of being, oh, I'm bipolar, that's what I am. It's like, no, I have some symptoms, and here's how I'm

going to get control of this. Is that something that comes into play in getting people moving in the right direction? I would say absolutely yes. I mean, because what we're trying to do is help people, you know, identify differently with what's happening in their life or create a new narrative or story around what's going on in their life. So, I mean, this happens not just with the, you know, individual, but with families, right? Like if I'm, if I hear that my kiddo who's historically done really well, you know, they're talented, they've done it well in music all through high school, all of a sudden they're in their first or second year of college and they're starting to display some really interesting symptoms. They have their first psychotic break. It's like devastating for a

family, like what happened, it's very common around that age frame for something like this to happen. All of these ideas start coming up. My son has schizophrenia. He'll never be able to to get married. He'll never be able to hold down a job. We're never going to see our son graduate from college. We're not going to be able to do the family vacations. You just say it just goes on and on. And so you sit with these families and there's just such a sense of hopelessness. And so what we try to do is come back a little bit to say like, well, you know, why don't you think he's able to live alone? Well, he hasn't taken out the trash all week. His room is a mess. He stays in there all by himself. well, well, how come how is he able to do that?

Like, how is he able to sit in his room all day and, like, not experience the natural consequences associated? If I went in my room all day, stop going to school or work or whatever it may be, like, things would fall apart in my life. How is that able to happen? And so what we can get to, and this takes a lot of time, is essentially the fear associated with, like, if I was to push him towards something, or if he's not capable or because of this illness, now he can't do this. And we have to really unpack, and it's different for every family, but we have to really, unpack that to figure out what it is that they've decided collectively this means for their life, right, these symptoms or this diagnosis, and then help them envision something sort of different for themselves and then create experiences for individuals to play that out. Well, he's been

taking out the trash all week here. And if he doesn't, his peer tells them like, hey, you didn't take out the trash. And so go do that. Or experience some of the natural consequences associated with if I've just leave my stuff everywhere, you know, my roommate tells me, like, hey, you know, room like stinks, can you like clean this up, like some of that peer-to-peer interaction? But we have to create those opportunities for that. And then interestingly, when people start to engage in this, it's not like a cognitive, like, oh, yeah, I'll go do this thing and something will be different. It's usually more like, I act, I have these experiences, I walk through something difficult. My symptoms got really activated when I was going to

go try to learn how to take the bus or do the trolley. But you know what? I had someone with me and I was able to do it and it was like, okay, and it didn't stay that way forever. And so the kind of the insight comes a little bit later with the experience that like I can experience some discomfort or I can let my kiddo struggle a little bit or go through something and I can actually tolerate some of my fear that this could be like devastating for him because you know oftentimes when we get to it especially for families who have you know we're sort of in a good place if a family's coming to us at a first break because we can help them like right there but oftentimes people come to us, 14 hospitals.

Like a Lasternoir type thing. 14 hospitalizations in, multiple short-term treatment centers. What does a break look like? What does that look like? I mean, it looks like a break from reality. It's different for each person. You know, that process sometimes can appear like what you see more often in, like, movies and such sort of bizarre or paranoia or I see aliens.

Sometimes for people with significant personality disorders, and this way, like, delusions can be grounded almost in something like that feels real. Like it could be a real situation, but it's in fact not when you get too down to it. So, but ultimately it's just a disconnect from what's happening in the here and now in a lot of different ways. And it can be auditory, it could be tactile in terms of a person's experience of what they're feeling in their body, maybe visual, just a break from reality. A break from reality. So a family, they got an 18-year-old kid, a 20-year-old kid, they're in college, they're going to college, everything's fine.

And then all of a sudden, just give me an example. What does this look like? So, I mean, for example, what it might look like is they're calling home and, like, my neighbors are, they're listening to me. My neighbors are really bothering me. Like, they're listening through the walls. I know that they're doing these things. Oh, so this is like an obvious.

I mean, it could be, yes, or it could be as a parent you're hearing this. You're like, that's really odd. Like, why would the neighbors be listening to them? Or so sometimes this can go on for a period of time where there's like some things that, you know, you notice some more isolation or not hanging out with friends as much. or maybe there's some substance use that is sort of new. And so it's not always so like in your face obvious. It might not be like, the neighbors are watching me.

It might be like, I'm not doing anything this weekend. Or even how many times we've had like somebody come into the treatment program and the parents say, well, we thought everything was great. He's at college. Like he seems like he's fine. But we started getting calls from his friends. Hey, we think something's going on. It's not really coming out anymore.

Seems to be hanging out in his room. all the time. But then we call him and he says he's okay. So there's this like we don't really know what's going on and how many times we've had family sales. So we just decided to like get in the car and drive up there and see what was going on for ourselves. And they find their kid like disheveled, maybe haven't been eating. So what's going on with that kid? What like what's an example of okay, I get the call. Hey, hey, you know, Billy, Billy's not come out with us for. like three weeks. We haven't even seen him.

We just want to call you and let you know. Like he's really been acting weird. And so I call Billy and Billy says, no, I'm fine. I just been studying really hard. And this has been a pain in school. And I'm really sick of Fred anyways. So I'm just doing my own thing. I go, okay.

And then, you know, I get another call. It's his ex-girlfriend. You know, I just, I saw him the other day. He just looked totally different. So I drive up there and there he is in his room. His room is a mess. What's going on with him? What is it?

Is it something that he saw? Is it something that got triggered? Is it like, what is it? Do we know? Sometimes we do and sometimes we won't. And this is where like the mechanic has to come in, right? And figure it out. Sometimes it's going to be very obvious.

Like a more common scenario that we've experienced is like everything was fine. Star athlete, blah, blah, blah, goes to college, seems to be making friends, decided to start smoking weed a little bit. And then boom. It set something off. Again, some people can smoke weed. That will not happen. You know, there's some theory and hypothesis that some people, you can be like predisposed for schizophrenia or psychosis,

but it not necessarily come out, but it will under certain conditions, and sometimes drug use is one of those. So you can have somebody who's predisposed, like has genetic loading and never kind of becomes, you know. through your whole life and you could be one of these people. And then you've got somebody who has a genetic predisposition and they go to college and they start smoking a little weed and it like cracks something open internally and here it comes.

But it could be a girlfriend breakup. Totally. Could be, you know, they get into the frat or whatever. Disappointment. Just something like that. And this can, in some cases people can just kind of, they're changing. And sometimes it goes away naturally. Sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, he was bummed out for a few weeks.

But, hey, we just saw Billy. He's actually, he's coming over to me. Yeah, sure. And it's, we can get, a person can get through it. Sure. We've had folks come in, like the one person I'm thinking about was, I think he was in his freshman year at college. Again, great student, scholarship football. I mean, just a lot of friends, great girls, like just really kind of all.

around and they got a call the the parents got a call from the police the local police and his their son's town that they found him like running around outside like half naked like kind of kind of crazy screaming and doing weird things and they're like are you did you call the right people that is not my kid well he had smoked he had never done drugs or you know maybe he had it a little bit but smoked weed and he couldn't he's like I don't know someone just gave it to me so who who knows what was in there well it did something to this guy's brain. I mean, it just scrambled him. He did not know what way it was up or down,

went into the hospital, they brought him to us for treatment, never been in treatment, I mean, had never had anything happen like this before. He was, he was back in school, I think, by the next semester. Like he needed, he came in, you know, we got him settled, kind of walked through what happened. Soon as the drugs were out of his system, which didn't take a long time, because he wasn't really a chronic user. He cleared, like he instantly cleared in his mind. So in that case, diagnosis-wise, it was a substance-induced psychosis. Substance-induced psychosis. So as soon as the substances were out of his system, there was no more psychosis. He cleared. So really, it was just helping him almost like recover from, I mean, that was a traumatic event.

And he was embarrassed and had all the shame. There was like a lot of stuff. He had to kind of process and recover from. And then he went back to college. Same school? Well, an early intervention there is huge. Because the further away the intervention, the person starts to find ways to self-sue

or whatever might be. And it becomes much more complex at that point. So if someone has one episode, they're easier to help than someone that's had 28. And the parents were just like, oh, he'll be fine. Oh, it's just Billy. He's just, he acts up sometimes. And then that goes on for three, four, five years. He's going to be harder to treat. Where the brain stays in a constant state of psychosis for a longer period of time. It's hard to know

what it's going to look like when they come out of that, right? Explain what psychosis actually means. I want to go. Yeah, well, it's, well, you had said earlier. It's a break in reality. It's like psychosis typically is defined as a, a, a, break in contact with reality. And what's interesting, though, about psychosis, and I say this in the presentation and in the book, is people can be psychotic,

people can be psychotic, have a psychotic episode, and it not be related to a mental illness. What would that look like? Anesthesia. Like, under anesthesia, people have reported hallucinating, malnourishment and dehydration. Somebody can hallucinate, hear voices, have delusion, sleep deprivation

sleep deprivation 100%. So there are In seal training to keep you awake for a long time And you know We wouldn't be surprised if you are seeing some things

that maybe are not actually there Yeah, I was out in the boat in the middle of the ocean And I thought I saw like Traffic lights And I was like Hey we gotta stop, you know And I actually knew that I was hallucinating

I was like that can't be real because I'm in the ocean But that definitely is a stoplight And I think we should stop But that doesn't make any sense So Head injury So psychotic event is when you're disconnected from reality in a big way.

Yeah, like a break in kind of the contact in reality. Like seeing something that isn't there feeling, hearing something, or delusion, right, like a belief that somebody's following me, somebody's watching me, somebody's out to get me. I was telling one of my friends the other day in supervision that one of my very first patients who had, and he was pretty severe, had a belief that he was like, every once in a while he was reincarnated as somebody else. But like, you know, sometimes he would talk about that, like, funny. He would be like, oh, my God, Carlin, remember last week when I told you I thought I was

Ram Dass? I'm like, I do remember that. He's like, wow, that was really weird. I'm like, uh-huh. Oh, so he kind of knew it. And then he wouldn't. Like, then sometimes he wouldn't. He'd be like so in it and very, like, fixed that you'd be.

you really couldn't kind of talk them out of it, so to speak. So here I'm going to open up just the biggest can of worms ever. What the hell happens when I'm on the internet and social media? And I'm starting to think that I'm a little bit conspiratorial. And I start reading various websites that are just totally, you know, Reddit, which is like a website that has a bunch of different random things. I mean, I guess they all do. I mean, you can go down.

You can do any Reddit, YouTube, any one of these things, you can go watch something on YouTube that if you have a little bit of an indication that the world might be flat, you guys heard of flat earthers? Yep, they're out there. Yeah, the Earth is flat. And there's videos upon videos, upon threads, upon threads of the Earth is flat. So if you have a little bit of paranoia about something, that can't be good for you. You have to be really mindful of that.

The Internet is a dangerous place. I mean like WebMD, self-diagnosing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. How bad is that? Like, I mean, you talk about, oh, somebody can smoke weed. How bad is it if I think, you know what? I really think that there's a world order that's trying to keep me down.

Well, I mean, I think it depends on the person and their ability to sort of like self-moderate their exposure to stuff like that. Because if you're in a healthier place and you can moderate your exposure to that and you realize, gosh, I just spent two hours scrolling through this super unhealthy. I'm not feeling good and I can set some sort of boundaries for myself around that. Then like, well, it's positive. I think we all have the tendency towards indulgence in some ways. But for someone who struggles with that or who's coming to us and like every time they turn on the news, there's a significant amount of paranoia for them and that causes them to act in response to those delusions or thoughts in a way that's like harmful to them or others, well then we help moderate some of that. A lot of the treatment that we do and why it takes

so much time is creating some scaffolding around things like that. So the people, people can develop that insight if it's not readily available to them. Because with something like schizophrenia, I mean, it's a thought disorder. It's impacting your cognition, your ability to think in a lot of ways. And so if someone is not able to self-regulate in that way, we help create some scaffolding for them. So, like, maybe we're not watching the news at 5 tonight because that's not going to end up good, because every time you do, you end up out on the streets or whatever it might be in a very paranoid state. You just don't want me to watch the news because you don't want you know what's going on because you're part of the conspiracy.

Well, a lot of times, which is a lot of times, which is. why it's so important to build a sense of rapport and safety with someone to be consistent in what you're doing and have an environment that's consistent so that people feel safe enough to allow you to support them. And they will in a lot of ways with time. But the work that we do is not a quick fix. People spend a long period of time with us so that we can develop enough safety where they will buy into trying some of the things that we're requesting, or suggesting. Or suggest that we're might be helpful for them. And so that then they can develop some of their own insight.

Like, oh, wow, I haven't had this much paranoia. I haven't been this kind of undone for a period of time. And I also haven't watched the news for this period of time. Like, maybe that is helpful for me. And then usually when they come to the latter part of their time or their journey where they're more in like an outpatient type setting, they can reflect back some of those things. Like, I didn't like the structure that you put me on.

Or I didn't like this particular thing, but I realize now why that was so helpful for me. Do people have to be open to wanting to change in order to change? And if you have someone that's just like the parent put them in there, the 23 year old kid, hey look, you're going in here, you're going to get fixed. That's like all of our people. From our perspective is especially when you're working with something like a thought disorder like schizophrenia, a systemic containment is incredibly helpful. Systemic containment? Meaning that the family is helping to support some sort of boundaries around the options that the child has in a lot of ways because sometimes people will come to us and their their kiddo has schizophrenia that they don't want to come to treatment. They don't want to do these things. They

don't want to do some things that are going to help them. Wait, the kid doesn't? The kid doesn't. But yet and the family's like, I don't know what to do. He doesn't want to come. It's like, well, you know, how does he have this car? How does he have this apartment? He's like not able to work. And so, We help the family really create some structures around like sort of some boundaries in a way of like, I'm here to support you and I'm going to help you on this journey within the context of this realm. But you've got to be helpful for you. Exactly. So a lot of times when folks come, they aren't necessarily happy to be there, but they just don't have a lot of options.

And we really work with family, extended family, grandparents, whatnot, to be like, don't send that $500 check. Because if you do, I know you feel bad and he doesn't have any money, he's probably going to be out on the streets, drinking or whatever it might be. And so we work with as many people as we can to create a nice safe container in some ways, which is the treatment environment. Because with what we do, it's not a locked setting. It's sort of the least restrictive type of environment in a residential setting, but it requires a ton of containment and support from every member of like the community that's working there and the family to make sure that there's a path. And maybe there's a couple options to the path, but it's really clear and they're tight and contained so that the person can actually have some experiences. and we can calm down some of the things that are happening in these symptoms so that they can begin to develop some of their own insider understanding as to why.

And sometimes, you know, the hardest part about the work that we do is that you can want to help someone, you can want to save them, you can want to, and they might not want that, and it might not be the choice that they have for themselves, and we've had to, you know, walk through losses in that way as well, you know. So I do think there is a component of that person wanting some of that, And even if somebody on the surface doesn't want it, families and the people around them can do a lot to create an environment for them where they can grow in that desire for themselves. And, you know, sometimes people don't. So this is like a tough love scenario in some way.

Am I right? Sure. It's like a tough love scenario. So sometimes, you know, I've got friends and they might be having a hard time with whatever, you know, maybe they're, they're, they're, they're, drinking or they're not doing what they should be doing. And I think most of the time what they need is, bro, what are you doing? You're being an idiot. Stop doing that. And they go, man, you know what? I'm being an idiot. I need to stop doing that. It seems like that's a vast majority of the time of what people need. What scares me is, you know, if I say, hey, what are you doing? You're being an

idiot. And they really do have like some significant issue that they don't have any control over it. They can't helping all of a sudden I was just the worst friend ever by saying dude you're being a wimp just get over it and move forward and they think oh jocco saying I'm a wimp that means I really am a wimp that means I'm not good enough that and they go down and I'm worried that they would go down a spiral as opposed to hey man stop acting like that hey quit blaming quit blaming this incident on the way you're acting now you know you you need to go you need to show up to work on time you need to get a job you need to stop drinking. Sometimes, like, that's, and I think actually most of the time people just need like,

bro, what are you doing? And I'm talking bro because these are my friends that are dudes. Even though, oddly enough, my daughters call each other bro. Yeah, and they call all their friends, bro, that are all females. They got it down. Yeah. So, but is there some way to discern whether someone's crossed the line into, okay, listen, and tough love isn't going to help this individual anymore,

and I need to get them some real help. Because that's a scary thing. You know, I'll experience that with a person that I know and acquaintance that I have, a friend that I have that, oh, you know, he's not looking good, right? Stop working out, which to me is a big indicator of, well, stop working out, doesn't, you know, not really eating like crap and seems to be drinking a lot.

And what I want to say, and what I have said to do, guys, is, bro, what are you doing? Why are you not working out? You're getting fat. What are you doing? Like, how much you're drinking? Are you drinking every night? What's wrong with you?

Get back on the path. Like, stop. And oftentimes they're like, yeah, but I've been so lazy. I need to, I've been thinking about this thing, but you're right. I need to keep going. But then I get the feeling sometimes is like it's deeper and worse. Is there any way to discern? Is there any warning signs to look out for between these two individuals,

one of whom needs this good kick in the ass that's, going to get them moving in the right direction. And the other one, I kick them in the ass, they're going to fall down the stairs and it's going to hurt them. I mean, that's a tough question. I mean, discernment is important in knowing people's history and such, especially in the work we do. I think it's different, you know, when you're looking from a clinical perspective, but discernment is huge. And at the same time, I think one of the hardest things in loving or caring about somebody who's struggling with something is that we don't necessarily have control over how they respond to what we try to give them. And so, you know, coming from a place of if my approach is,

is tough love in terms of what you're describing and like what you're being honest and true to yourself and can also add that other part of like there's a part of me that's sort of fearful that if I have tough love on you, this is like this is going to go kind of sideways for you. Does that feel true for you and just sort of being direct and honest with people? I mean, I think people can feel congruency. They can feel care and tough love if it's coming from a place that's like love. It's felt very differently than something that's critical or mean or suggest like, you're going to cut you off from my life if if you don't you know do this thing that's very different so

when we talk about tough love and oftentimes it is working families so you're like this isn't mean this is actually the most loving thing you could do for this person because to say nothing or to let them continue on in a way where their life is just deteriorating well that would be horrible right so like to do nothing would be very harmful and so I don't think I mean this is the hardest thing about severe mental illness is that we can try a lot we can say a lot we can do things we don't necessarily have control over what somebody's going to do with the feedback that we give them. And there's risk too, right? There's definitely risk involved in doing some of those things.

And it doesn't always, you know, have a positive outcome to set boundaries and things like that. And at the same time, I think being congruent is like most important. And I think what you said earlier about rapport, like I think about some of the clients I've seen for the longest. I mean, I have relationships with these folks. I know these guys. You know these guys. Like, I can tell. Like, and I can, because I have rapport, I always joke, like, you've heard me say this in supervision.

Like, I sometimes surprise myself with how much I can get away with saying. Right. Because I have enough rapport where I know the person's going to be able to handle it, even if it's something like I have a client, this literally just happened. I said, you sound like a crazy person right now. And she's like, I know, don't I? I said, you kind of do. No, I wouldn't say that to everybody.

if I didn't have that kind of relationship with a different client, I'm not going to say that. That could be construed as like rude and very not PC, right? But with her, I can say it like, you're doing that thing right now or you just, you kind of sound and look like a crazy person. Can you pull it together? And she'll like, okay, you know, we move on. But if I were to say that to her, say, one afternoon and she can't pull it together or she, how dare you say that to me? Or she, you know, reacts in a way that's different than my experience of her typically. you know, that's going to be my discerning clue of like, okay, this might be something a little bit more than she's just, you know, having a moment.

Like, I know her enough or I know him enough to know, like, oh, I kind of pulled the like, come on, get your shit together. I know you can do this. And it works. And the times when it seems to not really be working, then it's just my clue that, okay, there maybe is something a little bit more happening here. So I'm just going to, like, change my approach a little bit, slow it down and maybe ask more questions instead of say, hey, come on. and get it together and move on. It might be like, so what's happening? Because you seem different to me today than you did last week. What's going on? I might ask a little bit more to see if more comes out. But I think there's a place for both. People really, especially people who are very disorganized

internally, which you will see more with psychosis, or just in a funk, in their depression, in their grief, whatever, whatever. They need actually like the scaffolding on the outside, somebody to say, okay, you know what? You need to get up. Go take a shower, brush your teeth, meet me in the kitchen in 15 minutes. Like that kind of direction actually helps gel

some of the looseness that's happening internally when someone's really struggling. And then there's going to be times, hopefully, when that's not needed, that they can do that for themselves. From this is sort of, I guess, parallel or at least adjacent to the social media stuff we were talking about this the idea that we did a podcast on social contagions right which is and I think one of the best examples that I read

about was bulimia and with the first reported case of bulimia was in 1979 or something like this I forget the dates but you know this guy did or did a article about these girls who were making themselves sick and there was you know three or four girls that he did this report on and after that like the number of cases went completely through the roof um same thing with uh cutting like this happens with young females a lot they cut themselves but it'll spread through a through a community or through a friendship group of girls happens with suicide you know there's this thing where and this is this always scares me because you know doing a podcast like what we're doing today and a lot of people are going to listen to this, when they put up anti-suicide

or suicide help hotline numbers in a community, oftentimes the suicide rate increases because now it's putting it in their mind. How much do you, how much have you all seen of that in the last, you know, 10 years? And I guess it's maybe even less than that, seven years of where people are so connected to social media where, oh, you know what, Billy's depressed. And he seems like he's getting a lot of tension for being depressed. And I kind of, you know, I didn't have anything to do on Friday night. And so I'm probably not that popular. I'm actually going to be depressed too.

How much is that impacting people? Because let's face it, you know, 100 years ago, people weren't talking about this. And so what were they doing? You know, like, oh, I'm depressed, but that's just the way I feel. And they didn't even have a name for it. So guess what they did? They went to work and they carried on. And maybe they didn't feel great, but they carried on.

what role is this total connectedness that we have and and you know we all can't even compare to the young to the 15 year olds that are connected like 100% of the time that they're awake they're connecting and being influenced by everyone else in the world what impact are you all seen from that it's substantial and I think it is um with the onset I in fact I think it around like when smartphones happened. Oh, yeah. That's where I kind, like the internet was already there. You could go online and look at a bunch of stuff.

But at your fingertips. Yeah, yeah. And now with, you know, Instagram and all the things. I mean, you're just constantly looking who's doing what, who's saying what, who's endorsing what, who's against what, and the attachment to all of that. And also the social disconnect, like from other human beings. Versus instead of having a conversation with you

or asking you your opinion about something or going to you to talk about something that might be on my mind, I'm looking to see who's saying what and what are other people doing about it. Which is influencing my feed and all the things that are coming out and what I'm exposed to.

Like how many, I didn't get as many likes as you got, what does that mean about me? In addition to what you were saying earlier about, like the self-diagnosing. Oh, I read it, you know, how many times, especially with the adolescents I see. Oh, I read an article, I think I have OCD in my mind. I'm like, oh, no.

You don't. Let's talk about that. Or, oh, I read an article and this is happening to me, so I think I might have stomach cancer. We'll send you to the doctor if you want to have that checked out, but let's talk about your, that you woke up with a stomach ache. Because you have a job interview this afternoon that you kind of don't want to go to. Let's talk about that instead. But no, I looked online. I looked online. If you wake up with a stomachache, it means this.

Right. So this, whether it's looking up symptoms and diagnoses or what this means or what other people are. doing or what other people are saying about what other people are doing. It's just, it's like it's defined. Right. And self-diagnosis becomes self-fulfilling prophecy as well. Absolutely. Well, and the person's, you know, what their world outside of social media looks like,

their family, how much they can cross-reference the things that they're seeing on there with like a parent who's telling them like, hmm, let's think about that. Let's walk that through. Like if, depending on how much exposure they have to that, outside of that world is going to make a big difference in terms of the impact of being engrossed in the social media world. Because not all kiddos have a family who's willing to talk them through all the things that they're seeing on social media, help them discern what they read, these sorts of things. So definitely a balance outside of that is necessary to combat the influence within social media.

There's also the part of having things just available right now. Right now is like I think about when I growing up, like there were no, there were, I didn't even, we didn't have an answering machine. Like, if you wanted to call somebody, you called them, and if they were there, they would pick up, and if they weren't, they didn't. Like, that was it. You called them back later. There was no texting. There was no this immediacy.

So thinking about not having that immediate gratification, I and people in my generation and people who didn't have access to some of these things, developed patience and tolerance skills. Like, I could wait. even if I really, really, really want to talk to you, like, I can wait and not fall apart. I had a client, well, I still see her, but when she was younger, her parents are fantastic. She is like, very self-diagnose, has no tolerance for delayed gratification or patients because everything, right? Everything is an immediate answer. If I text you and you have not, if I see the dots and then you don't get back to me,

like, you know, this kind of thing. So she did something and got herself in trouble. So her parents took her phone. She said, if you take my phone, I'm going to kill myself. I can't not have my phone. They put her in the car and took her to the emergency room. I thought that was the most brilliant thing ever. And of course, by the time they walk in, she's like,

never mind, I won't kill myself. I'll give my phone back whenever you want to give it to me. But it was that instant, like, I can't live. Like, I cannot not have my phone. And she has no emotional, like, man. at the time, like no emotional management skills. How old? She was probably 15 or 16 at this point, like old enough.

But I think about all the parents that would be like, oh, oh, my, okay, never mind. And so now you just reinforced that if you're upset or you don't think you can handle something, just I'll make it easy for you. So that a delay of gratification, managing anxiety, tolerating waiting. and then what do you do? Like if I want to talk to you and you're not answering the phone, I'm not going to just like sit there. Like right now people sit there, right?

They sit on their phone versus like you go do something to manage your anxiety or your distress at not being able to talk to your person. Like we like I grew up with that. People nowadays they're in a lot of ways are lacking in those skills of just managing their feelings because they don't have to. Have you heard the expression left on red? Have you ever heard of this? Yes.

So it's when... My kids talk about that. So it's when you're... You know, I send you a message, Carlin, and I get a thing that says you read it, but you don't respond to me. So you just left me on you read it, but you don't respond to me. It's devastating. It's catastrophic.

For one, to not get an immediate response. And then to be left on red is like, you might as well have been canceled as the other term. So this stuff is going to impact people. I mean, that's an impact psychologically. Yes, clearly. Because we're just expecting everyone to maintain connection all the time. And soothe me. Like when I'm upset, you need to reply.

So I don't have anxious feelings. And the social media companies are creating these things. Like TikTok is created to be as addictive as possibly as humanly possible. So it's immediate gratification 100% of the time. It's like boom, boom, boom, boom. And you can't put that thing down. This is a nightmare, isn't it? Well, and if you see it show up a lot.

folks coming into work, younger ages, between 20 to 24, and you refer to a lot as like being entitled, right? You hear this term entitlement thrown a lot, like this generation is entitled, entitlement and such. But when you really look at what's going on, there's very poor distress tolerance skills. Like if there's something I need to wait on or I'm waiting for an answer from my manager for something or, you know, something needs to change. It clearly needs to grow in the organization, but, you know, it's taking some time to work through these things. Like there's an immediate sort of narrative that something must be wrong, that this is a really negative thing. People don't care about me or whatever that person goes through and their poor distress tolerance

and it creates all kinds of issues. And then if I can't tolerate it, well, what do I do? I just leave or I check out or stop caring about what I'm doing or, you know, I can justify misusing company resources or not really using my time. I mean, there's all kinds of interesting things that come from it. But at the core, at least I'm not an expert on this at all, but it's just very poor distress tolerance. And watching my kids work. through some of that stuff where if you know someone didn't reply to them like the like it felt sort of catastrophic and helping them think through like what could possibly be some other options as to why someone might not have responded and

usually a few days later it's like oh it's everything everything's cool mom so-ons-o got their phone taken away so oh okay so that's why they didn't respond to you you know and your kids are freaking out I'm thinking that's the end of the world something bad is happening for sure yeah um can we talk through some mental health issues I got I read through a bunch of these. Anxiety disorder, fear and dread. What's a cause for that? And there's so many potential causes for that.

But, I mean, ultimately, it's a state in which you're sort of assuming or maybe anticipating that something very negative is going to happen, right? I have this, I will just use a job interview coming up. and, you know, I really need this job, but I'm definitely going to say something wrong and I'm going to trip out. I mean, it just can sort of roll in that direction with a person's thoughts in a lot of ways. And then in their body can feel sick, sick to my stomach, look like somatic symptoms. So people express it in a lot of different ways. Some you'll see a lot of thoughts related to it that are very sort of negative in anticipating something sort of horrible is going to happen or not work out well.

And in some ways, for some people, it's very physical. They're sick all the time or often getting a cold. or, you know, these sorts of things. And it's like a chain. So, job interview, right? Well, I don't know. What if I say the wrong thing? What if they ask me a question?

Well, what if they don't like me? What if I don't get the job? What if? It's that kind of chaining together. So next thing, you know, like, I might as well just not even, I might as well kill myself. I mean, it can go in a lot of different ways. But this like persistent worry and anticipation. that is not proportionate to the situation.

Like it's one thing to have some nervousness. I have this big job interview. I really want this job. I hope they like me. I'm a little bit. My stomach hurts a little bit. That's one thing. But that disproportion and that chaining together

of all of the things that could potentially happen. So go ahead. I would just say it's like the difference too between, I think most of us experience some level of anxiety around things. It can actually be really helpful, right? Help me to prepare for something. But when it gets to the aspect of sort of clinically significant, it's interfering in such a way that now I just called out of my job interview or I'm choosing not to go or I couldn't even bring myself to study because I was so anxious about the potential exam. And so it becomes almost self-sabotaging in some ways as we move towards like a clinically significant version of that.

So what is treatment like for someone that's in that zone? I haven't been out of my house. I didn't get the job. I didn't go to the job interview. I actually haven't even applied for any jobs. I'm just getting by on whatever savings I had and maybe starting to get some welfare checks because I'm just freaked out.

So what are you saying to me? How do we talk someone through that? Well, I mean, a lot of it has to do with, well, I know we were talking about this before recording, that when somebody is that kind of agitated and in distress, the front part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is the part we use for like weighing pros and cons and anticipating outcomes and kind of making decisions and thinking things through is almost like not available. It's almost offline.

You can think about it like it got knocked offline because my nervous system is a wreck. So the person really can't make really good decisions when they're that kind of escalated. So treatment will like undoubtedly no matter what include helping a person learn skills and techniques to like calm their like literally calm their physical body down it doesn't I always tell people you don't have to be calm that would be lovely but you don't have to be calm you just have to be calm enough for your brain what are some techniques you're going to teach somebody it could be like deep breathing techniques meditation grounding physical activity is really really helpful for a regulated body, like walking, running, jumping, swimming, yoga, polo, whatever, physical activity,

because it's a physical manifestation of the anxiety. So you got to get the body to be able to relax enough for the brain to come online. So now once the brain is more available, now we got to go through all that cognitive distortion, this idea that like if you don't get this job, you're a horrible person. Like let's talk about how realistic that is. Or if you're, If you don't get this job, it means that you're never going to get a job for the rest of your life. Well, let's look at that. So cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive techniques will address some of those really kind of extreme escalated thoughts. So you need both.

I mean, most mental health and illness issues are going to require both. But for anxiety, you really need both. The physical and the cognitive. As I was reading through this, I ended up with these personality. disorders coming into these different categories cluster A, cluster B and cluster C, cluster A is just they had some subtitles here. Cluster A was odd. Cluster B was dramatic and cluster C was anxious. And I was like, well, you could kind of like the stereotypical categories of people, you know, that guy's weird, right? That guy's an

odd guy. Someone that's paranoid. Paranoid is one of the things in cluster A, odd. Paranoid always on guard, believe people are trying to harm them. Schizoid, which I didn't really know the definition of, schizoid is people that avoid people and relationships. So tell me about paranoid. Well, give me a case. Let me read or find that. Let me hear a case.

I want to hear some case studies of paranoid. Hey, you know, the black helicopters are out there flying around. Yeah. Well, you know, what you said earlier actually about like a person who might already be a little bit, say, be predisposed to, like, conspiracy, right? So with personality disorders, it's not, it's more like a part of your, like I can be a shy person, which means I'm probably going to be shy, like, across the board, right? Not just in one or two situations. So with personality disorders, it's one of those, like, kind of in most situations you're going to see. So paranoid, it might be

not the helicopters are chasing me. That's probably you're more in the psychotic, psychosis realm there. personality disorders might be just kind of a general paranoia-like. Well, every time I go to work, I say hi to the girl at the desk and she doesn't say hi to me. I think she doesn't like me. She probably, X, Y, Z, like a leaning or a disposition to thinking. People don't like me. I think people are watching me. I think somebody went into my locker and took something out, I think.

You know, I found it at home later that night. Like my predisposition is paranoid versus psychosis, which is going to be the helicopters are chasing me and the lights are secretly, you know, filming me. You know, I mentioned that thing earlier where I said, I told people in my training course, like, hey, we're all insane. We're all some level of insane because reality looks different. These things are the same too. Like everyone's got some level of paranoia and you can see it come out of people.

You know, got that person I work with leaders a lot. and, you know, a leader that might be like, well, I'm never going to get promoted. Oh, why is that? Oh, they don't like me. Like, it's just a level of paranoia. That's, and it's usually because, well, actually you're not getting promoted because you failed on your last two projects. Has nothing to them do with them not liking you. You're not performing well.

But, of course, for them, it's they don't like me. Why don't they like you? Well, because I used to work at this other company and that guy worked there and they don't like that guy. And so therefore they don't like me. So like all these things and anxiety, you know, right? We talk about, you just mentioned. Megan's like a certain level of anxiety is good. So it's okay.

Hey, I'm nervous about this job interview because I really want to get the job. So I'm there for them to research the company. I'm going to be prepared. Well, I'm going to go over some notes. I'm going to be ready. That's cool. That's great. So everyone has some level of these things going on.

It's just when we start to let them spiral and get out of control, that's when we have problems. So cluster A, we're acting a little strange. Cluster B, dramatic. which is this also known as teenage years a little bit? Oftentimes with some of that you'll find some form of an attachment disruption or something happening during that time period that leads to some of this in more adult life where we're looking at like a pattern of unstable relationships or sort of this real or imagined fear of abandonment that leads me to sort of be dramatic

if that's the word you want to use in relationships and such in response to a perception that I might be losing you, a lot of push-pull, these sorts of things. But I think we can find often in this group that there's something that happened in the attachment that led to this disposition for... What kind of thing is happening? I mean, it can be a wide variety of things. It can be various levels of abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse. It could be a very misattuned parent or maybe not having somebody who could reflect back to you at a young age mirroring sort of like, you know, I feel sad or I feel afraid. It's sort of normal to feel that way instead of like don't feel that way or there's

something wrong with you for feeling that way. And I start to build these beliefs where I sort of lose touch with my map for like an appropriate emotional response to what's happening. You can kind of find that disruption. And sometimes with when you're looking at a personality disorder, something has been so severe that now it is part of the personality in some ways. And so you can shape it and kind of lose some things with a voice. volume of it, but that disposition might always be there to be sort of like, you know,

someone, my friend canceled, you know, dinner on me again. They must really not like me or must not be important to them as opposed to like maybe there's something else going on for them as to why they canceled dinner. But it really does feel that traumatic to the person. And I think that's a really important part of working with someone with a personality disorder is, is recognizing that while it might look sort of irrational and you're like, what's going on for them, it feels very real. So, that's a really important part of. So, this piece of like how do I calm down the body enough to bring the brain online to be able to just consider what else might be possible is a super important part of helping somebody through that.

And you can see with time with like an appropriate level of support and period of time and multiple reparative experiences and relationships where the thing that I feared didn't actually happen that some of this can calm down a little bit. You'll see especially in what's considered cluster B. People who have been adopted, given up for adoption early on, or in a way that left them for some period of time without kind of a secure, like a parent or authority attachment. Clients who, like I have one client who is,

she's the definition of that was neglected, like severely neglected when she was a child. So this anxiety of like being, left or not being wanted or being, like picking somebody other than her, like this felt sense of rejection is so profound. It almost, it's like her lens is. It just, it's like her experience in the world with other people is always through this lens of like, do you like me?

Are you going to pick me? Like, am I safe? Can I rely on you? Can I trust you? So these are, that can be rough. Is this one of these things was called histrionic, histrionic personality disorder, which in one of the categories in there was desire to be noticed.

This is a similar thing where I just want people to see that I'm here. Well, and you know what I would say, and I say this a lot clinically too is this idea that like, oh, that person, she's like seeking attention. She's attention seeking. That's very common, right, term that's used. And but often used in like a judgmental derogatory way. I would say like, oh, they're absolutely seeking.

attention, but not because they're just being like, you know, irritating. It's something is going on for this person internally that they like literally need you to stop and like pay attention to me. So I can, something inside of me settles down. Now this is a huge dysregulation, right? So this is where in terms of therapy and treatment comes in is helping people learn how to regulate their body and like calm some of that agitation down and then do all the cognitive work of helping like reality check, like sort through some of these big extreme thoughts that I have to be like, are they really that realistic? And then like you have said a couple times, Megan, the reparative experiences. Like, you know, how many times did you think? Like I have a client who for the longest

time, she would show up like 15, 20 minutes early to her session because she had this idea that what if she's not out there at the time of our session and I forget we had a session and I leave. which first of all, it would never, ever happen in a million years, ever. But, like, this was the one who grew up with a lot of neglect, grew up with parents saying, oh, yeah, I'll be home. I'll be home in a few hours, and they, like, didn't come home, or they forgot about her, right? So you can see where, like, the early stuff shaped this,

but a lot of our work was, it wasn't just, like, saying, hey, we've had 72 sessions, and I've been here every time. Like, isn't that enough? That wasn't not enough for her. Like she needed to really go through the experience of not relying on me to be there on time so that she felt better. She had to learn how to do that for herself. It's that external scaffolding versus the internal. And was she able to?

Yep, totally. I still see her. She's great. You still see her, but it's more like just checking in? Yeah. And it's more like maintenance. I see her once or twice a month. I used to see her two, three times a week.

Because the level of distress and interference in her life, like she couldn't work. Her relationships were a mess. she was on all these medication. I mean, she had a really, really messy life because this is how she lived it. This is how she approached almost every relationship she had in her world. So now she's working, she's got kids.

She just got back from like, Bali or something. I don't know. She went with her husband. Like her life is great. So things are good. So it's a little maintenance, car maintenance. She's getting her tune-ups,

every once in a while. Yeah, it's weird. Because all these things are, everyone listening can be like, oh, yeah, I can sense. I have a little bit of that. I have a little bit of that. I have a little bit of this. Another one in this category was narcissistic. Which, you know, when we work with leaders, you know, a lot of times people that end up in

leadership positions, they end up in leadership positions, oftentimes because they were stepping up and they thought they could do the job. And if you can think you can do the job, that means you got a little bit of ego working. And if you got a little bit ego working, sometimes that ego can start to expand beyond your own control and you end up sometimes with people that are narcissistic. And what does that look like from like a clinical perspective? I mean, I think when you talk about this from like a clinical where you're ending up in treatment, it moves into a place where you have, you lose sight of, I don't know if empathy is the right word or like my impact on other people. Like my focus becomes

so much on like where I'm at, my vision, whatever I have going on and somehow. along the way I lost sight of like what I do impacts other people and like my behavior has an impact on other people. So that's on the very severe end and I think when you're looking at the actual disorder itself. That word is thrown around a lot. For sure. But where we've seen it often really looks like this person has become significantly self-focused and really lose sight of how their behavior impacts other people. And they just don't care about anybody else. It would appear that way. I mean, I think what's really happening so much is that the ego cannot tolerate any sort of feedback that would suggest, like, wow, I might have hurt someone when I did that. Like, it's just so vulnerable.

Like, it's actually this person, while they might appear like it doesn't matter to them, they're actually so sensitive and vulnerable that they've built up so many defenses in their psyche to not allow for any sort of feedback to crack through an idea of like, oh, in fact, I could potentially fail. or in fact, like, I could, I do have the potential to hurt someone. It's like become so distorted in a way that they can't even see that as a possibility. And so then I come across in my behaviors and such as very disregarding of others. A person with a narcissist personality is very easily wounded with your words. They're not the person that you can give that sort of direct feedback to. They're so wounded, almost catastrophic to the relationship sometimes to be able to give feedback. And what you will see as opposed to some of the other personality disorder,

like the histrionic borderline, and they're easily, easily wounded with words, very, very sensitive. But you're going to see somebody kind of melt down and cry. And, oh, my gosh, I can't believe you said that to me. You know, like kind of collapse a little bit with narcissism. Lash out. Lash out and, like, cut you off out, gone. I just cannot tolerate, like kind of being challenged.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Cluster C, which is anxious. This is when you get in the OCD, the obsessive, compulsive. Let me hear a wild OCD story. Let's see. I don't know if I have a good one. Well, I mean, several.

And I think, like we said before, there's people can have like kind of traits and like leanings and inclinations. And that's one thing versus it being out of a, like a. clinically significant level where you're like your life, like you're having a hard time to live in your life. So somebody who's a little bit more extreme might be, like OCD might be, say, germs, right? So they don't want to touch doorknobs, shake hands, use public restrooms. How do they fare during COVID?

They loved it. Oh, because they're just like, oh. Social distancing, I don't have to touch anybody. And you have to wear a mask in front of me? Sure. Yes. They were stoked. Those are the ones that are going to have a lot harder time,

socially engaging, taking risks, right? Like the idea of, like, well, the only restroom here is a public room and you got to go in there or hold it. Like, you know, that's going to be very distressing for somebody that leans a little bit more towards obsessions and compulsions. What did COVID look like? Because I've done a couple podcasts about deaths of despair during COVID. It's a nightmare from your professional perspective.

How bad was it? Oh, my gosh. I mean, it was significant because I mean already, especially when you're working with very complex psychiatric disorders, resources and like access to hospitals and such is always sort of an issue for our folks because, you know, there is certain criteria related to being able to get hospital support. Somebody has to be very sort of significantly regressed to be able to get hospital support if they need that. And there oftentimes isn't that level of care that allows for that like sort of least restrictive setting in order to be able to support them outside of the

hospital. So does that mean that in order for me to go and get help, I needed to be in really bad shape, which means I'm in really bad shape? Well, and that's in general for folks with mental also sometimes you need to be a danger to yourself or others and meet criteria like significantly be a danger to yourself or others to be able to get that you know kind of inpatient hospitalization unless you're willing to go on your own which oftentimes when someone is in that state they they might not be so then with COVID obviously access to resources and beds became significantly less than you have a significant more isolation which is a huge risk factor for our folks isolation undoubtedly will increase you know symptoms of psychosis depression anxiety because you know when I go

inside my head and I have this internal site of isolation, a lot can happen. And so just being in contact with other people making eye contact with you, these things, they're like grounding to the person. So all of that is impacted. And then how we had to do therapy shifted significantly. I mean, we moved from a residential setting where we're seeing people in person. We're going to outings together. We're meeting in groups together to like, now I'm doing over the computer with you with somebody who may have some significant psychosis around computer use. So they're not even going to get on the camera with you. So it just really impacted our. our ability to provide care during that time.

And people responded, I think, you know, I can't speak for all settings, but, you know, as best as they could during that time to be able to provide services and such and maintain the level of services that people needed. It was definitely a really difficult time. And, you know, telehealth is a super great option. It's not the best option for every client, you know, that in person is so important. And a lot of times for our folks, because a lot of the best option, you know, that in person is so important. of talk therapy is very cognitive. And if you're working with someone with a cognitive disorder or a

thought disorder, you know, oftentimes your sessions look like going for a walk or baking a pie together or like something of that nature that really, like we couldn't do so much during that time. Or if we did, it was, you know, an increased risk to the person and their health, especially during the time of COVID where we didn't really know too much about, right, what was happening and all these regulations came in. And like, you had to have all this distance and couldn't do these things. It impacted a lot. And I think also seeing, especially for people who are, it seemed like in that age range, like maybe middle school going into high school, like right, somewhere in there where a lot of social things are happening. Like your life is kind of socially driven, your friends, access to your friends, what everybody else is doing, you're growing up, maybe starting to think about college, things like that, where there was this instant, you know, kind of a halt. and people were not going to school

and having to do their classes online and not seeing their friends. So I saw a lot, especially in the younger population, almost like an arrested development, of social development. So now, like, yeah, I have clients who are 20, 21, 22, but you're talking to them and you're like, wow, you really sound like 16 or 17 years old right now.

Like they kind of stalled out in the natural progression. I mean, my niece and my nephew, one was, graduating college and one was graduating high school right when COVID happened. So like that may or whatever. So like no graduations, no, you know, the pomp and circumstance that comes with these milestones and rights of passage in life, they didn't have those. They seemed to fare okay. But I think about all the folks that like, well, what did that mean for their lives or the sense of missing out on something important and not having had the same opportunities. And I said a lot of anxiety, a lot of anxiety, depression, isolation.

Fear, so much fear. Actually, I was on a podcast a couple weeks ago where we were talking about how people, like, remember when we were able, like, going to the grocery store? Like, you know, everyone's like head down and you're like not looking at anybody and don't, like, get too close to my car. Like, it was very, like, weird. And this, like, that stayed. Like the people weren't like, oh hey, how's it going? Nice to see you. I haven't seen you in a couple months and give you a half. I was like that for about three days.

I'm going to the store. But it is still like that. I mean, some of that is still happening. So the fear, so when people, again, going back to that nervous system thing, right? So if people's fear is up here and I'm constantly on alert and watching and waiting and who's wearing their mask and who isn't and you're not on the dot in the grocery store. Like people are not using their brains. Like they're not using. the part of the brain that can be like, okay, it's chill, it's cool, we're fine, we're good, because you're keyed up all the time. I think that is still happening. Sure. We have not seen the end of the effect of that. Well, and those who had a propensity towards anxiety prior were struggling through some of that, I mean, significant, more damage. And then you saw it happen when there was the decision of could we take the masks on or off and those who chose to keep it on and those who didn't, you know, it was very interesting when you would listen to folks' perspective on that. But oftentimes it felt, especially for

some of the younger kids like protective to have that over the face in some ways. Very interesting impact. Man, that's crazy. What about addiction? And it's funny because like you can get addicted to anything, apparently, right? Like people get addicted to anything. But alcohol, opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, hallucinogens, PCP, like people, it's crazy. Anything and everything.

TikTok. TikTok. Let's jump to PTSD. So, you know, obviously in the veteran community, PTSD has been a huge news story and it's had a really big impact on, you know, on a lot of people. Sometimes I think, well, some people could actually use that kick in the ass that I talked about earlier. Like, hey, dude, yeah, you saw some bad stuff. awesome friends, but it's time to move on.

And I think some people need that sort of direction. I mean, look, we've been going to wars since the beginning of mankind. I mean, and, you know, you look at the other wars that we've been through in America, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. These were incredibly horrific wars, as all wars are. when when when you guys look at PTSD what do you think from a from like a national perspective of where it's at how it's being handled do you think it's being handled the right way what could we do better I mean you're out there freaking with a in a in a foxhole with a pistol and a scorpion you're scarred from that I should write a book that's the book title right there

I mean, I'm not a public health expert. I don't have the national kind of response to some of this. I mean, what I'll say in my private practice, specifically to veterans, is that whether sort of real or imagine, the military armed forces in general is doing a lot to try to address providing resources, early intervention, when traumatic events occur, having people on site who are trained to be able to help support.

I mean, there's a lot that's happening. But stigma, the notion of stigma is still very present with regard to what it means to have mental health issues. And so I often have both active duty and veterans find me in my private practice knowing that I was previous military. I think they feel a draw to me in that way in that history that I'm a safe person coming to me because it doesn't in that environment feel safe just yet to be able to talk openly about what's going on for me because of, I mean, I think there's two really primary themes, which look like privacy. Like, will what I have to share stay private to me? Or if I talk about this, will my medical officer then know? And now my CEO knows.

And now somebody's having a talk with me about something I shared or this notion of retaliation in some ways. Because somebody heard a story from somebody that they told someone they had depression. They were put on antidepressant. Now they took my wings, which is like my whole identity. So whether these things are actually happening, it's still, very much so part of the culture or suggestion of like, is it safe to like talk about these things? And so I think from that perspective in terms of what we can do is it's amazing all of the resources that are being created in opportunities. I just recently read about like it's referred to

as the sprint team, but it's essential. It's a special psychiatric unit as part of the armed forces where they come on site in response to like a trauma or something. It's very awesome. but engagement in the resource is still a really important factor, especially for veterans who disengage from, like, use of VHA services or anything like that. So, like, getting people to engage. And, like, I, you know, what we know about engagement in general is that, like, that initial response to someone's willingness, and we talked about this earlier, to disclose or talk about what's going on for them, is critical because it's going to shape

whether or not they feel they can do that. And so I think engagement is huge, both. in the active duty and veteran realm, and what we see with a lot of veterans and why they usually end up finding me in private practice, not part of their insurance or anything like that, is the privacy factor. But also, you know, when you're separating from the military, part of your access to resources and disability and these sorts of things is directly connected to your service record, what was disclosed while you were in the military. And so if I'm in a culture, real or imagined, or in my mind, I feel like this is not a place where I can talk about these things.

chosen not to, I've sort of white-knuckled it, I've gotten through, I haven't shared a whole lot. Here I am as a veteran looking towards trying to get some services or disability, or maybe now I'm realizing I'm no longer in the structure of that military environment, and so all this stuff is coming up for me that may be the structure of that environment sort of kept at bay, and I'm being told, well, there's nothing here to suggest in your record that anything significant happened to you, so you have to kind of convince me in some ways as to why you should. should get this disability percentage or why you should be treated for these. And the way it's looked at is based on, you know, PTSD or everything is broken down in parts. Your back is one part. Your PTSD,

your mental health is one part. Your arm is one part of that. And they're all looked at differently in that way. And so it puts a veteran a position where they have to sort of now prove in some ways that they are deserving of this disability can be very retramatizing for someone who's maybe we never shared about something that happened in the sexual assault or something that happened to me while I was deployed or something that's sort of embarrassing or I hold a lot of shame about because I haven't really dealt with. Now I'm in this position where I have to sort of recount all this. I have to get these character references for these things that happen to sort of prove that I'm worthy of this disability, which then opens me up to these like resources in some ways. And so that part, you know, what we can do sort of like as a leader in an initial response to somebody, you know, sailor coming to tell us. something that's going on, how we react in that moment is huge because it's going to set the precedent for whether or not that person is going to re-engage, should something be going on for them or if it's a safe place to talk about the things that are going on. So, I mean, to answer your question a long way around, I don't know about nationally, like, what we're doing

if it's the right thing to do, but I do know, like, engagement and all of the resources that are being put out there is still an issue. And I read something from the Navy, like, it was like a 2021 study around veteran suicide rates and all of these different things. And the suicide rate daily for those individuals who were engaged with the VHA was less than those who were not, right? So engagement is a really important factor in how do we keep people doing that? Well, I think making sure that we understand how important privacy is to someone who's dealing with something like this and the fear of retaliation. Like, will you take something that's important to me? Will you take my Things like, you know, that these are people's full identity.

You know, will I lose my, will I lose my status by spot as part of this group that I've been so connected to? I see this a lot in folks coming through and, you know, special operations or things like that. Like they're more likely to seek services in my experience outside of the military out of fear of those two things. Yeah. I got. being aware of what's going on in the world is such an advantage. And my basic example of that is if you came to my house and I said, hey, I'm going to scare you when you walk down the hallway. And then you walked down the hallway and I jumped out and said, boo, you wouldn't be scared at all.

If I didn't tell you that and you came walking down my house and I jumped out of the doorway and screamed at you, you'd be scared because that's what would happen. So being aware of what's going on just makes you so much more prepared for it. So I realized working with fighters and being in combat, you'd see like a new guy that was on his first deployment and you'd see him before an operation and you'd see he's really nervous. And, you know, maybe feels like a little bit sick to his stomach. He's gone to the bathroom four times in the last 20 minutes and you're like, oh yeah, he's got a little bit of that, a little bit of those nerves going. And you say something to him like, hey man, that's the fourth time. you go to the bathroom. Are you all right? They're like, I'm fine. And you're like, hey, dude, it's fine. Like, you're nervous. You might get killed. It's no big deal to be a little bit nervous.

And I go, oh, okay. Okay. It's okay. It's okay that you're nervous. You should be nervous. If you're not nervous, there's something wrong with you. And then, so I took that and I actually used it when I was training mixed martial arts fighters because they, the same thing would happen. They'd be going, you know, the night of the UFC or a few hours before. They're all nervous. You could see that they're nervous, but they don't know what it is. They don't know why they feel sick, so they think there's something wrong with them. So now they're freaking out. So you go, oh, you're, hey, you just went to the bathroom for the ninth time in the last half an hour.

You feeling a little nervous, and they go, no, I don't know what's wrong with me. Hey, what's wrong with you is you're getting ready to go into combat. You're getting ready to take some chances. And that's your body getting ready, getting rid of all the stuff it doesn't need right now so it can focus on fighting. This is good. And they think, oh, okay. So that's what normal is. It's okay to feel like that.

I had a guy on my podcast named Tom Fife, who was in World War II, Korea, and he got a Purple Heart in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And I was asking him, he was a battalion commander in Vietnam. And so this was, you know, it had been 55 or 60 years since he was in Vietnam. And I was asking him about, you know, what type of operations they were doing. And then I started asking him about what kind of casualties he took in his battalion.

And as he started to address that, he started getting choked up talking about it. And I remember, I'm sitting there thinking it's been 60 years for this guy, and he was a battalion commander, and he lost guys, and he still gets choked up about it. Because that'll happen to me. I'll be talking to someone about some of the guys that I lost, and I'll get choked up. And I said to myself, oh, this is just the way it is, and it's normal, and it's okay. And I think that's a huge part that we missed out on and that we have missed out on is someone going, oh, I'm sad. There must be something wrong with me. And it's like, no, you're sad.

You lost your friend. And now you feel sad. And that's what you're going to feel like. And over time, it'll dissipate a little bit. And then it might come back. You know, it's another thing that I talked about. I talked about losing people and what you go through. And I went through this big dramatic description of being caught in a storm.

And when you lose someone, when one of your friends dies, you're going to be hit with emotions that you can't control. And we as adults were not used to not being able to control over emotions anymore. That happens when you're five years old. It shouldn't happen even when I'm 40. So my friend dies. All of a sudden I get hit with these emotions. I'm not in control anymore.

And I don't like that feeling. and I think there must be something wrong with me. It's like, no, actually, this is what's normal. You're getting hit with these emotions, but guess what? Eventually those waves of emotions will go away, and you'll have a break. Okay, so then you think, okay, well, then I'm fine. But then you get hit randomly. You see something, you hear a song, you smell something, you drive by whatever restaurant,

and you get hit with that emotion again. You don't notice this, but it's not quite as strong. And there's been a little space. And over time, the strength of the emotional waves starts to lessen. And this is what I learned this for myself because I experienced it a bunch of times. And by the sixth or seventh or eighth time, I was saying, oh, yeah, this is that emotion that I'm going to feel right now. And I don't can't control it. And I'm going to sit here and cry.

And then I'm going to stop. And then 20 minutes later, I'm going to be laughing. And that'll seem like I'm okay. But then a week later, I'll get hit with this other emotion again, with this sadness. And it'll knock me, knock me down. but it's going to lessen over time and it's going to dissipate. So I think a lot of this is people don't, people don't understand what's normal.

And I think that everything I just said is totally normal. And now that I've told that to a bunch of people, yeah, this is what you're going to feel. They've been like, that's exactly what I felt. And so getting the word out about, yeah, oh, yeah, you're going to feel sad. This doesn't mean you're depressed. It means you're sad. Your friend died.

Like, that's a horrible thing. But it's okay to feel sad. and it's okay in a little while, it'll dissipate. That's another thing people get caught up in is, oh, the strong emotions that I had are now dissipating. I must be, I didn't really care about them or I'm a bad person. No, you're just processing it and you're moving through this thing. So I think a lot of just the, you know, what you were talking about earlier, Carlin of just not talking about things and I've been very lucky and I and this is another thing

I noticed about loss is when I would lose one of my friends oftentimes I would be the person that would be giving a speech or one of the people that would be writing down my feelings about the situation about who this person was about what they meant to me about how awesome they were I'd have to go through that drill mandatory because you're going to get up and you're going to talk You're going to give a eulogy or one of the eulogies at someone's funeral, someone's memorial service. So that's what you're doing. What a cathartic thing that turned out to be. Then I end up, when I get out of the Navy, I end up writing books.

And oftentimes these things are addressed in the books. And being on this podcast or going out and speaking to groups, people, guess what I'm doing? I'm telling a story over and over again. The same story about the same situation. and each time you tell it, you go, okay, you process it, and it moves you further down that road, and it helps you detach from it, not in a bad way, but in a good way, where you can be truly appreciative of the friend that you lost and say, yeah, it's horrible, but guess what? I had some good times.

We had some great times. We had some incredible times. And I'm going to live a good life and not forget about them, but I'm not going to dwell on the fact that they died. And by the way, guess what that means? That means I'm going to die too. and everyone I know is going to die. And I can't get caught up and dwell on that fact for so long.

So it seems like those are the kind of things that I think we could do better is letting people understand what they're going through. Letting them understand that it's normal. It's normal. It's normal to be like, oh, yeah, what's wrong with Chaco? He just heard a song and he's going to go over there and cry for like eight minutes. And just then he's going to be okay. And Jocco is not embarrassed by it.

It's like, oh, yeah, this song freaking bums me out sometimes. Okay, well, that's not abnormal. You lost one of your best friends. Okay, well, it's going to be sad sometimes. And I think that's one thing that we can do better. And I try and do that as much as I can when we talk about these things on this podcast. But it also sounds like that's the kind of thing that you all would do with people as you talk them through issues that they've gone through in your life. Am I accurate?

Absolutely. Well, and to speak to the example you gave with the gentleman, you noticed he was going to the bathroom. I mean, you also saw him. Like you saw him. You saw he was struggling through something. You chose to engage. You chose to interact. And I think that that, you know, not just from the encouragement or the cognitive part of the conversation,

but to see people, to notice them is huge because, you know, that could have gone completely unnoticed. And in his mind, he could have created a whole different narrative about everybody else seems to be fine and they're doing okay. and they've got it together. And they're a bunch of heels. They're all acting like they're fine. And I'm different in some ways, you know.

So to like to see that person, to make that eye contact. That's a scary thing. Like I must be a coward. Oh my gosh. Why is everyone walking around like a badass? Right. And I'm sitting here like a coward. Yep.

And in the absence of the communication or in the attunement that you gave him, like all kinds of things can happen. So that's huge. Yeah. And I think with, especially in the treatment world and at a new for sure, a lot of our clients come in. The ones who have been in the system for a bit, this is like not their first rodeo, there is that identity that has almost been adopted a lot of the times. Like, I'm schizophrenic. So I need to take these pills. You're cursed? Yeah, I'm cursed. I need to take these

pills. Why are you taking them? I don't know. It's just what they give me, right? There's this kind of, when will my symptoms go away, right? This lack of what you're talking about is like, it's totally normal that that's happening today. I get yesterday you felt great and today you woke up thinking these things that you weren't thinking yesterday. Yes, we're going to move and march toward what can we do about it. What can we do to help you feel better? Sometimes it's just going and having your cry over there and then come back on over. Totally fine. But the idea of validating is what like you're talking about. It's like, yep, that's happening. I get it. And it sucks today. And it may even suck tomorrow. You have schizophrenia. This might be something that you

you deal with on and off your entire life. But by doing these things, having it normalized, people being seen, people supporting versus, why are you doing that? Over time, it gets less and less. Yeah. That's what I was going to say, but the little kid that asked me, like, I feel, I feel like I'm alone. Yeah, you're going to feel alone. That's totally normal.

Sometimes you're going to be alone. Like, that's going to happen. And when you're a teenager and you don't get invited to the party, you're going to be bummed out. That's just normal. That's just like, oh, and when you're a teenager and your boyfriend or your girlfriend dumps you, yeah, you're going to feel sad. And that's just the way you feel. And in a little while, you won't even remember who that person was and you'll carry on with the rest of your life. So being aware of what's going on in these peaks and valleys of life knowing that they're there is such a positive thing.

And a lot of times, and I guess, especially going back to social media, it's like, oh, if all I see on social media is everyone smiling and happy and looks, you know, like they're, doing some awesome thing and I'm sitting at home in my room alone. That's life. You're going to be alone. You're going to get dumped. You're not going to get invited to the cool guy party. All these things are going to happen and they're totally normal and you'll get through them and they're not going to be fun, but that's the way it is.

We get a lot of people that don't even recognize that this is the way life is. Well, actually, we were just talking the other day. you know, my friend Jordan Peterson will say life is suffering, right? And it's like a religious context that Buddhist says life is suffering. And I was like, yeah, you know, I get it. That's a good way. It's a good thing to know. It's a good thing to know that life, that in life there is suffering, right?

But you don't have to go and say life, all of life is suffering. There's going to be some valleys, you know. There's going to be some darkness. We get it. But it's not all of life. And you're going to come out of that. You're going to see some light. You're going to have some fun.

But then you're going to get sucked down into some darkness again. And that's what I think people don't or what I think people need to understand is there's a cycle to life. And you're going to have some good and you're going to have some bad. And that's the same with everybody. No one is just basking in the sun and the warmth for their whole life unless you're only looking at them on Instagram. In which case they're doing it and they're doing it in a G-string bikini. That's the way they're doing it. Yeah.

That's true. And with PTSD, a lot of other things, too, a lot of other conditions or diagnosis. I mean, I've heard this so many times. We definitely hear it at the treatment center for people who've been maybe in an illness for a lot longer. So when is this going to go away? When am I going to not have this anymore? And this idea of like it may not, kind of like with trauma, right? Every time you remember that buddy or hear that song, you're going to have a little something show up.

And, yeah, is it less than before? Sure. But like your whole life, every time. you hear that song, you might feel a little something going on there. And that's okay. Like, it's totally normal. I feel that when I hear the star spangled banner. Yes, every time. Like when I hear the star spangled banner, if I'm not careful, I'll get like super emotional from the start. And that's a song that you hear a lot, right? All the time. I mean, you're at every sporting event. So, yeah, and here's the thing. I guess in my own narcissistic mind, I've thought, hey, that's normal and

that's okay. It's okay. It's okay to feel like that. Yeah. This is the way things go. Where, You mentioned quickly there, you mentioned drugs. And I just had a friend of mine on the podcast who by the time he went and sought help in the Navy, he was in the SEAL teams. By the time he went and sought help, he got immediately prescribed something. By the time he got out a year or two later, he was on seven different drugs. You know, this one to get you amped up for the day. this one to keep you level-headed,

this one to put you to sleep at night, it's like they're all counter to each other. And just a disaster. At what point, where do these drugs come into play? Now, he and I both acknowledged, and again, this is something that I know from talking and reading, is absolutely, there's times like,

oh, this person needs this specific drug to help them get through this situation. where do you all think these drugs come into play and what do we need to be careful of? Yeah, I mean, not a psychiatrist, so it's hard to speak to that part, but generally when somebody's coming in on a bunch of different medications, you know, there's a conversation about like, do you know what you're taking? Oftentimes with folks with complex psychiatric disorders, they don't. It's just this is what I was told to take.

Do you know what it's treating? How do you know that it's helping you and really starting to discern that because I mean I think we you know and this my opinion in some ways been in a culture of sort of instant gratification or seeking something outside of myself to soothe you know there there's a lot of benefit to various you know psychiatric medications they can really help stabilize someone in a place where without otherwise they might not be able to receive some of that treatment and at some point assessing like why I use this I think is really important right do I use it because I think it's going to fix or take this thing away I think this would apply to not just

a prescription drug, but any kind of substance. You know, why do I drink? Do I do because, you know, I enjoy a glass of wine at night or whatever may be? Or do I drink to alter my mood? Do I change just to alter my mood in a way because I don't feel like I can do this independently or on my own? So I think assessing why someone is using the various amount of things and their understanding of it. And, you know, one of the things and the benefits of being able to do long-term treatment

in a structured environment is it gives us an opportunity to sort of unpack some of these things, obviously, with the support of a psychiatrist and somebody. you know, who's medical overseeing their care to see, you know, what, in fact, is this actually treating at this point? Is it helpful? And if it is great, but also, too, does it take us out of the role of, like, the work? Because, you know, therapy is hard work. Like, people might think there is a soft place to come at whatever. Therapy is hard work. Someone who commits to therapy is really willing to do some work. I mean, unless you're in a place where somebody's just like buttering you up and giving you compliments all day long, but when you come to do therapy, you come to do work,

in a residential treatment center, you're not just receiving all these things. But medications often is this notion of like, I'm just taking this thing, but there's no, it's very different than the amount of effort that's involved in walking through a very difficult situation or if I'm afraid of something in particular, I haven't gone to address some of this unresolved grief or, you know, whatever may be, you know, engaging in that behavior is very difficult. It's going to bring up a lot feelings and walking through that can be incredibly healing, a very different approach than if I'm choosing to just take something to get rid of something. I think there's like an agency thing, which I think shows up in a lot of your work.

I mean, even just what you've shared today, is people say like, well, oh, I'm feeling so much, I'm going to call my psychiatrist, I'm going to call the doctor. I need something for this. Is very external, one instant gratification, but also this, whether the person's aware of it, or not, this idea that, like, I don't believe in my ability to manage myself. I need you to give me something to feel better. And a lot of the longer-term work in therapy, definitely in our program, because it's longer-term, is this idea of helping people internalize agency versus just rely on external things to, like, make them be okay.

That seems like a basic principle of success in life. But you'd be amazed with people with some of these complex psychiatric diagnoses that It's the sense of personal agency is so low, whether it's like, I just take these pills because my psychiatrist says I'm supposed to or my mom says I need to. Versus like, do you know what are you taking? Or having conversation with your doctor about side effects or whatever. But the sense of I don't have what it takes to manage myself and my situation and the demands of life. That's a horrible mindset. Horrible.

And it's very, very common. with mental illness. And I mentioned, I talked about SSRIs on some other podcast and, and, you know, I read through the comments and, you know, there was definitely some people that were like, hey, you know, these things really helped me. And there was, of course, you're going to get that side and you, of course, got the side of like, oh, that stuff was a disaster for me.

The side effects, when you read the side effects, you're like, oh, my God, you know, like emotional, blunting, violence, bipolar, switch, suicide risk, from the medicine that you're taking. So there's definite risks that needs to be paid attention to. The other side of the spectrum, as far as I'm concerned, is something that you already mentioned, Carlin. What about just like sleep, diet, and exercise? How often are we blowing that?

Often. Often. I mean, it is amazing. When we bring folks into the program, we try and set aside like kind of the first month, give or take. It may take longer. Because this person maybe has not been sleeping well at all, not eating well. Like maybe they've been using, maybe they haven't.

Poor hygiene. Caffeine. Smoking. I mean, you name it. So just like getting somebody eating well and on a regular basis, getting some physical exercise, getting like their sleep hygiene in order. Structuring some habits. throughout the day.

You would be amazing how much changes just in that little period of time. And we've talked with folks that, and this is also related to the meds, is sometimes when people, they're seeing multiple doctors, or they go in and they see a different doctor every time, and they may not be coordinating. So you're just getting all kinds of meds and things that may not even really go together. So same with diagnoses. We've had folks come in with a laundry list of diagnoses.

I'm like, you can't even have half of those at the same time. same time. But these were all little snapshots of, oh, this trip to the ER and this trip to the hospital. Like, this is what they looked like that day and that's what they looked like this day. It doesn't mean they have all of those things. So let's get them eating and sleeping and in a routine and comfortable, showering. Physical activity. The basic psychological and physical wellness and safety. And guess what, almost all of these diagnoses go away. Maybe we're left with like these couple right here. Yeah, I was on, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast and it was it was the morning of Chris Cornell from Soundgarden had killed himself.

And of course, you know, Joe and I started talking about it. And look, we're just a couple of knuckle draggers talking. But, you know, both of us were kind of like, man, you know, like get a kettlebell to work out. Like, you know, again, like I said, we're just a couple knuckle draggers talking. and, you know, again, reading the comments, people like, oh, you know, you think just working out is going to solve everything. And, of course, I don't think that. But damn, it's a good thing to do. Go get healthy.

Get on a sleep schedule where you're doing, like where you're getting some good sleep. Eat good food. Stop eating trash. Go outside. Move around. This is real, right? Yeah. I mean, it's both and.

I mean, because without the structure that. we create, the therapeutic process that we try to do is not possible. Like without the routine, without the sleep, without the healthy eating, can't actually do that therapeutic part. So there's a lot that can happen in that initial structure and physical activity and all this. And for those folks with those clinical aspects that require a deeper level of like therapeutic intervention or psychiatric support, that's the framework. That has to maintain. That never changes. That structure and stability is the main component that sort of holds the foundation for everything else to be able to be possible. So it's definitely, you know, with any sort of complex human issue, you can't say that one thing

is going to solve anything. Of course. But that is undoubtedly the foundation for which all else sort of occurs for our folks and becomes the thing that they maintain long term. When they move into their own houses, they're still getting up at a certain time. They might pick their day that they go grocery shopping. They might be like because that structure and routine is. is very helpful.

Human beings like that, don't we? And when you live without it, it's just the beginning of possible serious issues. Now, here's another thing that I talked about on a podcast. This was around mass shootings. And as myself and my friend Daryl were looking into the various causes behind these mass shootings, one of the most shocking,

pieces of information that we came across is this right here. So in 1955 in America, there were 340 impatient beds per 100,000 people. So I'm going to say that again in 1955, 1955, for every 100,000 people there were in America, there were 340 inpatient beds for mental health care. Now, here we are, you fast forward to 2007. In 2007, there were only 17 beds for every 100,000 people. And here we are, we talk about mental health all the time. Now, some of the feedback that I got about that episode was that in the 50s and 60s,

there were these really heinous, some really heinous events. that happened inside these psychiatric wards and people were abused. And they pretty much from everything I can tell, threw the baby out with the bathwater and just said, oh, you know what, we're just going to shut these things. Abuse happens in these places. We'll shut them all down. I think about, like, you know, I live in San Diego.

I think about, well, there's a couple million people in San Diego. That means that there would be a few thousand inpatient beds if we were on the 1955 levels. And if you go around San Diego and you go look at the homeless people, many of whom have psychological and mental health issues, if you opened up all those beds, they would probably fill them and we'd be in a much different place. And these people would be getting some kind of treatment that they actually need. What do you think happened with this? Is it just the abuses that took place and we shut them down? Is there anything else?

I mean, there's a lot to this. I mean, you're talking about deinstitutionalization. Like, I mean, some of this started even back into the 1700s, but there's like, at the time, and the time that you're referring to, primarily residential facilities is where folks would be able to take their loved ones with mental health, right? So if people had mental health issues, they went into these residential facilities, and that's where they primarily received treatment or just a place to say. And then as that evolved, you know, sometimes I think the term asylum came along at some point.

this became a place where people could stay and also work and such, and they were having, you know, but what was really happening on the inside was a pretty restrictive setting in some ways. And then there was some, you know, people that had gone in and saw, you know, all this horrific stuff that was happening. And so ultimately all of these sort of things moved towards this idea that a person is entitled to like the least restrictive settings. And there's a lot of stuff that happened over the course of the period of time for this, but that a person should not be chained up. They should be entitled to the least restrictive setting. And so then you also had the notion then coming in of SSDI and SSI and these different things that started reform as federal movements.

What's SSDI? So it's Social Security Disability income or Social Security income that came from like a federal movement. So this part where people who were in inpatient facilities at the time were not entitled to those resources. And so sort of forced this smacks set of exodus as discharge from hospitals for them to be able to receive these services. And what you find at that time, then it also, some of the states created laws that made it much more difficult for people to readmit to inpatient settings, right? So the notion was good, this idea that people will do better in the community, they'll do better in a least restrictive setting. Let's create these resources like SSDI and such like that for them. However, it sort of flipped its on its head in terms of the amount of resources of the community wasn't ready to absorb that.

So what we saw is sometimes in some states, I think California, I can't remember the year. but in the year of sort of discharge of hospitals out into, we saw that jail population double in California. And the homeless population of the, they think what I recently read is something around like 65% of the jails are full of people with mental health issues. I was talking to a police officer a month, month and a half ago, and he was just, he had heard that podcast, and he was like, yeah,

he goes, I 100% have to arrest people. And there's no possible way that they belong in jail. They belong in some kind of a mental health facility, and there's nowhere to take them. So guess where they go? They go to jail. Or they don't go anywhere. Or they might get going to jail for two nights, and then they get kicked back out on the street, and they're just deteriorating. Well, and if you read about this, I mean, depending on where you come from, congressman, rulemaker, they're going to say financial stuff, whatever.

Like everybody has sort of a different rationalist to, you know, why deinstitutionalization, the outcome. But ultimately what we know is that we didn't know anything really around that time around complex psychiatric illnesses. It was just in the mid-50s that the first, like the 1950s, antipsychotic drug was released. Prior to that, it was, you know, people with mental illness, like they'd never be cured, right? There was the myth of mental illness. We didn't know too much about it. And so I think Thorazine was the first antipsychotic that came out in the 1950s. And so at that point it was like, oh, well, people can get better.

and that was a very also pivotal movement in the de-institutionalization of people that historically had been able to be seen. It's like they just will always need to live in some type of facility. It became all we can like do something with this. And today, obviously, there's tons of different things. But yeah, it definitely had an impact on our homeless and jail population. Is there any movement back in the other direction at all? I mean, I don't know too much to speak to that part. But what I will say about like anew and what Humble Chia had been for a bit, very long time is it's a very unique model of care that allows for a full continuum of care

where people can have like a residential setting sort of right out of the hospital for a long-term period of time and then fluidly move through transitional residential for a person to be able to kind of integrate what they need and then also to be able to move back into that inpatient setting if they need to and instead of sort of this pattern of I end up in the hospital I get discharged to either home environment or a place that's just not conducive for me to be able to integrate that treatment episode. I'm out in the streets or I'm not receiving the care I need until I regress again that I've been back in the hospital and utilize all these emergency services. And our model of care really allows people to stay long term in a way that they can move

fluidly through this and avoid really moving into the hospitalizations. But it's also, it's a private pay model. It's a, you know, insurance is not going to pay for that for folks, right? Because, and so folks who are primarily dependent on insurance and such like that will find themselves in more short-term environments. Kind of like crisis intervention environments, which just, it creates kind of a revolving door. I'm in crisis. I come in here for a couple of days, a couple of hours, maybe a week, stabilize, get out. There's nothing available for me once I'm out, so I deteriorate, and then I come back. Or I end up in jail because oftentimes people with mental illness.

versus like the idea with de-institutionalization was this idea of people having more rights, more agency, being out in the community, not being locked up. But then, so they're released to nothing that could hold them. So like what you were saying, Megan, is a lot of our clients come in from a hospital or like could have been in one maybe they've been maintained at home, but like not well. And it takes, it's like this whole arc. It takes a long time to stabilize, all the stuff we just talked about with sleep and food before we can even get into the nitty gritty of like, what is going on here and what needs to happen. Let's get you off these 14 meds.

Let's figure out what this really happened. Like this takes a long time. So the idea was nice. It was like kind of a humane idea, but the outside world was not equipped to receive all of these folks and actually help them. So they got worse, deteriorated in their symptoms, and then they're getting arrested, they're getting picked up. You go to drop them off at some emergency room. They'll sit in the lobby for a day or two, get some meds. There's your meds again, and they're out.

So I would think that the long-term hope is that this model of treatment, which right now is basically for people that can afford it, and it's expensive, is that over time, people start to recognize. this should be a number one a type of treatment that should be covered by insurance and number two at some point it gets to a situation where the public there can be some public offering of treatment centers like this but it's got to be proven for an even long I mean you've already been doing this for how long carlin 25 years you've seen incredible successes over those 25 years and yeah I mean I hope that as people hear this as people learn more about the methodology that you're using. First of all, like just other people in the private sector, will pick up this type of model and start moving with it.

And then eventually, insurance hopefully starts to cover it. And then eventually we start saying, oh, these homeless people on the street that have psychological problems, the worst thing we could do is take them, throw them into prison for, or throw them into jail for two days and kick them back on the street. We're just going to do that. It's a never-ending cycle. To get back to a point where, look,

do we want to have people chained up to walls and having lobotomies and having electroshock therapy no obviously we don't that's that's horrible and i owe an episode on some of those um some of those horror shows that have taken place in the past but to get to a point where there's only 17 beds per 100,000 people i mean you take a hundred thousand human beings with all the fragility of someone's brain and mind and you think you're all only going to need 17 inpatient beds. That's a crazy thought. And yet, that's where we're at. So what my hope is, is this model that you all are executing starts to be seen as the way to actually help people. And it can broaden beyond people that can afford this type of treatment,

because this type of treatment is very expensive. And we can, number one, get insurance to cover it. And number two, hopefully eventually get it to a point where a model like this can be used on a broader public scale that the state can pay for if people need it. And yeah, like affordable and accessible. And by the way, I just want to pause because you have been a great support to us. I mean, not only in the Inuit Treatment Center but in our previous facilities. So like you said in the beginning, coming in is like, oh, just I'm going to invest some money here, some guys. But you know, your contribution and your involvement in that and staying involved, I think about seven, eight, nine years with our group,

has helped make this possible. So thank you. Yes, absolutely. But that would be my hope too, right? Is what are this, you know, if you look at any National Institute for Mental Health or CDC, one in five people has, is considered having like kind of a mental health experience. One in 20 is considered as having like a serious mental health diagnosis or condition. One in 20.

So I don't know the math. and 100,000 people, how many does that turn out to? And we got 17 beds. I mean, it's insane. Yeah, it's horrible. Probably a good place to wrap it up. Did we miss anything? Yeah, the one thing I was thinking about earlier, and you had mentioned scaffolding.

And again, I think this goes with a lot of your work, as my understand it, Jocko, is this idea of there is a need for external scaffolding. Like you said earlier, people like, do they, like, they don't really want to. be there. Nope, they don't. And in the beginning, that's totally fine. We're going to like scaffold them up because internally they're kind of jiggly and not really set, right? So we're going to hold them until things can kind of firm up a little bit. And over time, as they're building, we pull the external scaffolding back because what is happening theoretically is internally, their internal scaffolding is taking shape and taking hold. So it's very much about helping people access their own agency, their own strength, normalizing, and saying, yep, I get it.

You know what? Today is just a rough one. That's fine. Nothing is wrong with you. We're just having one of those days. And help them develop that internal confidence and agency of like self-management, even when you have an illness, even if you have PTSD, even if you lost your friend. Yeah.

Well, this is the title of the book that I wrote, Discipline equals Freedom. It's the exact same thing, right? I mean, it's like you put the disciplines in your life around. waking up around sticking to a structure, around going to get groceries, around showering, which you mentioned it. You mentioned it very quickly. You said, you know, showering.

You get people that aren't showering. Absolutely. That's an issue, right? So we've got to have the discipline to get up, to stay on a schedule, to eat good foods, to shower, to brush our teeth. And once we get that kind of scaffolding, that kind of discipline in place,

then it becomes internal. It becomes self-discipline. and now we can get more and more freedom as time goes on. What are some good tactics, techniques, and procedures for getting someone to want to help themselves? So I got a family member. They, you know, they're not dealing with reality or they're starting to show some of these signs. What's a step to take that might be helpful? So like I have a book called Extreme Ownership and people would say like, well, how do I get my boss?

to read it. And the worst thing you can do is go to the boss and say, hey boss, you need to read this book. You know, so we say, oh, you go and say, hey, boss, I read this book. It really helped me out a lot. I'm trying to hold myself to these standards. Can you just look at it? And if you see me slip and can you type me up? You know, a little indirect approach. Do you have any recommendations around what to do? And maybe some recommendations of what not to do. Yeah, I mean, I think with your example, consistency is huge and patience, too, because oftentimes, times, like, we want people to move at the level of our ability to tolerate what's going on for them. And it's very uncomfortable to see someone struggling. It's very uncomfortable to see someone so

hopeless. You're hearing their narratives. You're like, where are you even thinking at? And often, we want them to move faster than they're ready to move. But what you're describing with the framing around the book is we plant seeds. We create as much structure and consistency as we can. We plant seeds. We help people to kind of be thinking about and, you know, how this will impact them. But every day it's the sort of same conversation until they get it and sort of a loving approach with them until they get it and being able to tolerate what comes up for me when somebody isn't moving at the pace that I want them to. Because when we're talking about, you know, somebody who needs me needs a little pick me up, that turnaround might be a lot quicker than somebody with a

chronic sort of complex disorder. And in that case, like, it might take days or months before that person gets up and go showers on their own. So can I deal with my own frustration, right? Can I deal with my own sense of like helplessness and like sense of powerlessness or even inadequacy and not being able to like shift like all these things come up for someone when you're loving somebody through something like this but consistency is huge and then remembering that you're not hurting someone by trying to hold them in their own discomfort right so if somebody is uncomfortable but you're helping move them through something that's good for them you're not hurting them actually they're experiencing that discomfort is going to be really helpful for them it's a very loving thing to do it's a conversation

I have with parents often about this notion of like hurting in some ways when my child is experiencing discomfort. No, in fact, like experiencing discomfort in this thing is actually really motivating. Yes, and amazing for them. And it's a super loving thing to do. Yeah, and I think it's important to, you know, when I talked about, oh, it's normal to go and like, hey, you're sad. That's normal.

Hey, you feel down when you hear this song. That's normal. Hey, it's also normal. If you've got a kid or a relative that's having some issues that you take them to the engine shop to get checked out and see what's going on. Like this is also a normal thing. So I think that's another stigma to punch through. Anything we should not do. Any warnings like, hey, that that's not a good approach when you're trying to get someone to help themselves?

Well, I think like some of the examples you used earlier, and even like when the kids call and ask you questions, is like the not. the shaming stuff. Like you said, like, well, what a mom who is going to say something like, well, why are you doing that? You're like, those kind of things aren't typically helpful because, nobody wants to be ill. Nobody wants to have PTSD. Nobody wants to have these symptoms. So even on the surface, if it looks like, why on earth would you do that? They're not doing it to like be difficult or willful or to make themselves, you know, worse. So it's easy. It's part of the stigma to move into kind of a shaming, why? Why? Why did you do that? Like, that's ridiculous, or you know better than that, like this kind of thing. I mean, people will sink, right? They kind of cower and sink into

that and in some ways might even come to believe that I'm weak, I'm incapable, I'm stupid, I'm whatever, which is going to suck the sense of agency. So encouragement, still tough love. I mean, it's a blend of all these things. Like, I'm going to be kind and respectful, all. All also a little bit firm, also let you know that I absolutely believe in you. And so we're going to get up right now and we're going to do this thing even though I know you feel really sad. Well, and I would say to not disregard your own intuition, especially when we're talking about suicide, because there's such a, there's also could be a self-stigma in some ways. And so if your intuition has you wondering about something or something seemed off with them,

oftentimes we can talk ourselves out of that, oh, we don't step into other people's business, that's somebody else's kid or it's not my place to do that or, you know, maybe if I bring this up, it'll make it worse for them, you know. And so I think trusting our intuition is huge if there's a pull in some ways to check in with somebody or ask them how they're doing or you notice something that feels off. I can't tell you how many times, especially when we're working in a peer-supported environment because we're trying to get folks when we're bringing them into this like housing and they're living together to sort of notice each other and take care of each other, create their own community and friendships. When we see something go kind of sideways with someone

or they regress significantly or something happens and you start asking their peers sort of what was going on. Oftentimes they noticed something, but their intuition talked them out of it. They'll be mad at me if I hold them accountable. You know, I didn't tell everybody when I didn't see that they were up for meds because I didn't want to like kind of call them out or whatever it might be. And so I think that, you know, trusting our intuition with that

and like really checking in with people and asking important questions and working through our own fears that we have related to addressing some of these things are super important. And your example of like, hey, that's like the fourth time you went to the bathroom in the last half an hour, right? Imagine, like you were saying, if you hadn't said that, like what that person would have done in their head and how that would have. So I think one of the advice, like it's both is say something, say something, call it out, ask a question. Hey, like, again, the person might say, oh, I'm good, I'm good, don't worry about it. Okay.

But at least you saw them and they experienced you seeing them versus like that blind eye. I mean, I think the turning the blind eye, not saying the thing. keeping the secrets under the rug is the worse. From a leadership perspective, I often talk about asking earnest questions and how that's a great indirect way to let people know that you are watching and that you're interested. And the key word is earnest. It's not like, hey, I noticed, you know, you've been sad lately. What's wrong with you?

Which is an accusatory question as opposed to being like, you know, hey, hey, what do you you doing this weekend? Like an earnest question. That's an earnest question. What are you doing this weekend? I'm not doing anything. Oh, well, what about next weekend? I'm not doing anything. Do you want to do something? Like, do you want to go catch a move? You know, so like these kind of earnest questions are a good way to interact with people without being accusatory. And they might be like, yeah, you know, I haven't been doing much lately because I've, you know, I've been sick for the last few weeks and I'm just going to heal up and you go, okay, cool. In which case, cool. You can carry on. They know they saw you notice them.

Yeah, we talk about it as being curious as opposed to accused of approaching everything with a certain level of curiosity. It'll take you a long way. That will do it. Megan, any closing thoughts? Thank you. Yeah. Having us to be here. Extremely grateful to be a part of this.

And yes, I mean, I think in terms of the work that we do, it takes a special type of person to be to have this conversation, to talk about this, to work with this population, to be a part of it. and you're definitely a part of that. So thank you. Likewise. Glad to be here, Carl and anything else? Same. Thank you for your support.

If anybody wants to find you, the latest and greatest, the new treatment center is called a new. It's a good play on words you did there. Anew Treatmentcenter.com. You're on Instagram. So you're on social media. Yes.

With some positivity. Yes. That's at a new treatment center. You're on Facebook. You're on LinkedIn. And you're on YouTube. You got your little YouTube channel going on. I've been running.

Don't pop up a social media part, but I'm really glad that's happening. And all those are at a new treatment center. And I was, I was thinking you too should do a little podcast, by the way. I'm just going to let you know that. You should do it. You should talk about like some cases that you see because people will be interested in it. I think it would be very educational. And I know I was left because Joe Rogan told me to start a podcast.

And at the time, I was like, oh, you know, that's pretty. cool and then you realize Joe Rogan literally at one point in time Joe Rogan told everyone on his podcast because he was super stoked on podcast. Well, he knew he was going to get it right in one way. Yeah. And a bunch of people, a bunch of people have started podcasts, but certainly him and Tim Ferriss both told me to start a podcast and I listened to him. But I think that if you broke it down and did some podcasts about some of the things that

you see, I think it would really be helpful for people and would be cool. So there you go. That's my little recommendation. And thanks for joining us. Thanks for educating us. Thanks for trying to educate me. I know it can be challenging sometimes. Megan, of course, thanks for your service in the Navy.

And thanks to both of you for what you're doing today to help heal people, help get people to a point where they can live productive and happy lives. And by the way, if there's any one out there right now that's listening, you might not feel great today. And you might need to bring the car. car into the shop and get that thing looked at and figure out what's going on nothing wrong with it it's going to make you better thanks for doing that both you thank you appreciate it and with that megan and carlin have left the building and echo charles has returned good evening echo good

evening so you were sitting there listening yes you've been taking the uh what the kind of off camera approach last two podcasts. You've been sitting there observing detached. A lot going on there, isn't there? A lot going on in the mental health world. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really, it's like a slippery scenario, right? Because just like how it's a spectrum. It's not like, oh, you're the, you know, like you compare it to your body. So if you break your arm, it's like, oh, yeah, broken arm. Or maybe you got a fractured arm.

And the Sort of it's kind of a distinct thing. Well, fractured protocol. Broken. Stress fracture. Okay. A spiral fracture. Okay.

You know, kind of a thing. Pretty limited. Like, as far as a bone break, you're kind of, there's a pretty specific protocol you're going to follow. It's pretty easy to diagnose, right? The spectrum isn't this weird. It's, you know, there's scars are gray, you know, this bone compound fracture or whatever. Like, there's some differences.

But we know that a broken bone is a broken bone. Here's how we fix it. Yeah. And then that's not okay and then compared to the mental part where it's like it's just it's it's it's this spectrum and you can fall anywhere on the spectrum and by the way you do fall on like we all fall on that's what makes it even that's what makes it interest that's what really that's part of what makes it interesting to me is like oh you're a little bit of a narcissist I'm a little bit of a narcissist I'm a little bit paranoid you're a little bit how paranoid are you? Are you good paranoid because there's a certain level of paranoia like someone that's not paranoid at all is just like going through life they're just going to get taken advantage of you got to be somewhat paranoid. Delusion. So just like the dichotomy of leadership, like the dichotomy of your mental status is, has to be balanced. Yeah.

And that's so, it makes it so clear how helpful it is to understand and inversely kind of to express that to people who might be in a certain situation that like, hey, that's, that's normal. Like there's nothing, quote unquote wrong. That's normal, you know. and so and that's what makes even harder to where it's like this bad thing this thing that I don't want you know like you break your arm something that you hurt your arm will say you hurt before you go to the doctor or whatever you know something's wrong like this thing is hurting it's not getting better whatever let me go to I know something's wrong so mentally you're gonna feel sad for two days or whatever you feel you have these feelings for two days that are normal so it's like harder to you know after while it's like maybe if I'm behaving in a certain it's like certain symptoms have to kind of arrive or or arise along with the feeling. And it's all like, and if you don't know, you don't know, you know. So it's like just so slippery like that. I took down a note during the catch 22, which which basically means because even with,

with Marcus and Amber on the last podcast, I was kind of like, you know, I feel fine and like, I don't think I need anything, right? So I'm telling them. And then these guys show up today. These girls show up today. These women show up today. And I kind of tell them the same thing. You know, before we get in here, I'm like, you know, I feel like, you know, I'm fine.

But then one of the like notifications of when you're crazy is when you don't think you're crazy, right? So I'm like, oh, I'm that guy that doesn't think he's crazy, but I'm actually totally crazy. So I thought that was kind of funny as I was thinking through that. I was like, wait a second, I'm the guy that's in here. I'm fine. Yeah. But I'm actually crazy. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So got to watch out for that one. Yes. And we all know people, maybe not a lot. But we know people who are like, they obviously, even routine. do things that are just, you shouldn't be doing that. And they're like, no, no, no, I'm fine. I'm fine.

Absolutely fun. So you're like, man, am I that guy? Just not knowing all the things that I'm doing that's not fine, you know? So got to watch out for it. But what a, what a fascinating world. And as I was doing research for that podcast, and we only got to so much. I mean, there's so every one of these things. When you open it up, I mean, there's a story and like a,

a whole world behind being paranoid and what a really paranoid or being anorexic. What a real what that looks like like there's a whole world behind each one of these. That's what's that's interesting like compared to, uh, you know, an orthopedic surgeon. Like sure, there's a bunch of different things that can go on with a broken arm or with whatever, right? But you know, this is just wildness. Yeah. You know, it's wildness. And you remember how you, a long time ago on the podcast, you said working out.

is like the one thing that you can do that will positively impact everything that you do in your life. Well, that proved to be right. But what's interesting is having a broken arm is going to impact some parts of your life, but it's not going to impact like everything. But if you have some kind of a mental health issue,

it's like everything is going to be impacted. And again, it's a spectrum where it's like, oh, you know what? Now I'm kind of like, I don't go out as much. Cool. it's no big deal right but then where does it go like does it I don't go out much to hey I'm not going to go I'm not going to go to the grocery store to I'm going to have people drop my food at the end of the hallway to I'm just going to sit in here and like not eat like

the it gets it's just so it's very strange and the other thing that I find interesting is just how when I when I talked to him about how I had said in the academy like we're all insane Everyone's insane because your version of reality is different than my version. And by the way, neither your version or my version is actually correct. Yeah. Like what your perception is is not 100% correct. My perception is not 100% correct. We hope that you and I have a big overlap.

Like we hope that we have a big huge overlap and there's like a little bit that I think is a little different, a little bit. But that's what we hope. And we hope that with most people in our lives, most of it is relatively close. Yeah. But the fact is, and also, the fact is they're not going to be perfect. and different people. Like you can go meet someone today. You and I have 97% overlap.

We can go talk to someone right now that we only overlap like 20 or 30% of reality. Yeah. Their reality is just different. Yeah. And that's a real thing. That's reality. So it's mayhem out there.

It is, man. It's crazy, man. It's crazy because how they shed such a clear light on like how it really works. And it's like, man, all this is going on right now, like in my head and this person, in everyone's head around us. Holy cow.

And she'll mention like, or they'll mention like certain things, right, where it reminds you that, hey, I didn't really think about this. Where like going outside, right? I think actually you said it. Go ahead. Get outside. And not just outside the building. I mean, I think anyway, outside and talk to people, talk to different people, be around

different people because, you know, now a lot of my work, quote unquote, work. is inside in front of the computer for long periods of time. So then I remember, not recently, but this was like years ago where I remember not going outside for a few days, like not going outside of the building in a few days. That's not healthy. Yeah, and you can feel it too. Like after a while when you kind of are in touch with it, like you can feel it. Or not used to not, or being, not used to being around people when, okay, I used to work in

nightclub where you're around people all the time, all different dynamic spectrum of people. All the time. Positive negative. Everybody. And then, you know, working inside where you're not around a lot of people. Like, I can totally tell the different. Like the idea of me and this might have to do with age too, by the way. But the idea of going down and dealing with the crowd of a nightclub or something.

Doesn't appeal you to you right now. On any night is like that is one of the last things I'd want to do. And I want to compare it, especially when I compare it to like how I was kind of down with that long time ago, you know? And so you take that idea and do it and just apply it to every day. life. I know nightclub and all that stuff is different, a little bit different, but in everyday life, if you're used to going out to the store or going out to this and that, and then you don't go outside for a long time, or you just simply alone, you just don't go outside for a long time, starting to go outside and dealing with, like, people or the public becomes more and more

challenging, just because you're not used to it, just like any kind of exercise you do. That's what I'm saying. And I can understand even more now how that window shuts. Yeah, and how that can jam you up. Mentally. Yeah. It doesn't seem like you're made for that kind of stuff, you know. Just being isolated. And then you're stuck with the internet.

Oh, man. Brother, brother, you got to watch out. Yeah, see, that internet conversation could be a five-hour conversation. Oh, yeah. Because it's, it's mayhem out there on the internet. And if you have that little belief, I mean, look, if you believe that, uh, uh, veganism is the best thing for you, that you can go insane. If you believe that the carnivore diet is the best you can go insane. If you believe, like, whatever weird belief that you want to have and you want to jump on the internet and you want to read into that thing, bruh.

You got to watch out. It's true, man. Don't get off that internet, man. It's going to jack you up. Oh, yeah. And the weird thing is when I tell you, if I'm like, echo, dude, you got to get off the internet. You got to stop reading about, you know, carnivore diet. You'd be like, oh, you just want me to keep eating the mainstream diet and want me to.

It's like that's, you see? It's like it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Oh, yeah. So you've got to get yourself out of the algorithm. Let's watch out. Hey, that being said, one thing that we did talk about today was being healthy, eating the right foods, working out. This is coming from two people in the industry for a quarter. Well, between them, it's probably, I don't know, 50 years or something.

They got a lot of experience in this industry. And I made kind of made fun of Rogan and me saying like, oh, you should work out. Yeah. I kind of made fun of it. And they're like, actually, it's true. Yeah. Workout, eat right. Stay on the path.

It's going to help you and everything that you do. So get yourself some good, let's say, supplementation. Yes. To help with that workout. And that's the thing actually, you're probably in this boat too where you. Segway just occurred. You're welcome everybody. Perfect chance.

But you probably like this to where you pretty much worked out your whole life, probably, right? Yeah. I really didn't start legitimately working out until I was like, first of all, because working out wasn't really a thing. I mean, it really wasn't. Like, there was no, what am I, five years older than you? Yes. So, like, yes. Did we, did we have Joe Wheater's super weight gain back in, like, 1985?

Yes, we did. But we didn't understand, at least where I was. I mean, look, maybe if I'd have been at some bigger school, because I was in like a little school. Like there was a YMCA and there was bumper plates in there. But like I had no idea what. I remember there was a blind guy that would Olympic lift. And I actually thought at the time it was because like that was what he was limited to.

I thought, well, you know, he can't really see. So he just stays in this one spot and just lifts that one bar. He doesn't know how to use the freaking peck deck. You know what I'm saying? So yes, I guess I have been working out for a while. Yeah. So we and so you weren't like a jock. No.

I definitely was not like a jock, although I played soccer and basketball. Every year? Yep. Oh, okay. So yeah, yeah. So to me, that is working out. So especially if you took it even this much seriously. So consider and I'll use myself as example.

So when I was 11 years old, I started actual sports. So you play football But you got into push-ups, right? Push-ups. And so I always thought that having big muscles was cool, yes. So I would do that kind of stuff, yes, for sure. And then when you reach puberty, 13, 14, probably like 15 years old, we started lifting weights.

So, man, from there, bro, it was on. It was all one big program indefinitely. Till now. Till literally right now today. Till this morning. Yes, sir. Yes. So this is how it works.

Essentially, if you care about sports. I care about your performance in sports, which we did. So you go on season, obviously you're practicing every day, football and track. That's what we did. So football is one season. Once football's over, get ready for track. Between that set, you're lifting weights. So yeah, you're just going from one sport to lifting and conditioning to the next sport, lifting and conditioning.

And back and forth years through college. And then after college, it was just lifting. And then when I got into Jiu-Jitsu, okay, now it's lifting and conditioning for Jiu-Jitsu tournaments, all this stuff. So essentially being on the program on the path on a from a physical standpoint is has been decades. Yeah. But as a result, it's it is served as like an anchor. Yeah.

So, you know, the idea of like not working out. It's not a thing. Like, oh, he just quit working out. Like, bro, man, it's hard to relate even though it's so common. So yeah, I think if you can anchor that the workout like my physical health is like an anchor a given and it should be because if your physical health falls apart like it's going to negatively impact everything else now look you can get sick and you guess what when you do get sick if you get sick it is still going to negatively impact everything else but there's sicknesses you don't have

an option on right like you get hit with some horrible cancer out of nowhere like what are you going to do about that well you know you go through the protocol you try and stay positive but a lot of people that doesn't get they don't get hit with something they can't control they hit with the one thing they can control. Yeah. And they let it slide, which is freaking horrible to see. Yeah. So let's not let it slide.

Yep. Get on there. And yeah, take your supplements. That helps it. That helps the physical part. So I'm saying, Jaco has these good so functional. This is the line of supplements I wish I always had. Yeah.

That could have been a game changer, actually. Yes. If we would have these supplements our whole lives. Yeah. The old different story. I'll go down. Let's face it. We navigate our supplements.

experience very ignorantly. The best advertisement wins straight up. Like, hey, you see a buff guy on there saying freaking 100 grams of protein per scoop. You see a guy that's freaking juiced to the absolute gills. Yes. Oh, yeah. And, you know, so

that's what we're going to get. And he's like, yeah, I take freaking whatever. And they come up with these crazy names. Mega mass. I forget the number. By the thing it was 5,000. Brother, that tasted kind of good. It was in a big The dog food bag. Game mega mass 5,000.

Like, just get some. Oh, yeah. And that's, but so, yeah, now we know, Brad's not like that. You got to take the correct stuff made with the correct stuff for the correct stuff. So yeah, we're doing that. We've got joint stuff. Mulk, which is the protein. That's the protein we should have had back in the day.

So good. Not this mega sugar. One million or whatever was before. Same thing. The energy drinks, Jocko, go. Yeah. The first health. Well, maybe not the first.

I don't know. I have no idea. The first. Fully healthy energy drink. Yes. Yeah. The kind of you drink one, you're healthier. You're healthier.

Yes. You just got better. You just got better. You know, like, oh, if good health came in a can, everyone would say, well, it does. There you go. It does. Well, one third of it. Same thing.

One third. Nutrition, exercise, rest. That's the trio. Oh, look at you over there. Don't throw that rest at me. Joccofuel.com. You can get all this good stuff for you. You can support the podcast.

You can support yourself. You can be healthy. You can help your, you can help your mental. your mental health, right? We just did a freaking three hours on mental health. Help your mental health by helping your physical health. You can get the drinks at Wawa. We got October 3rd, I think the Moke RTD hits Wawa.

Get in there. Get yourself some banana, get yourself some chocolate, get yourself some vanilla. The best you can get. The best, the highest quality. Look, we are not cutting corners. And believe me, people want you to cut corners. They want to make an extra seven cents.

No, we could get an extra seven cents out of every sale. Per unit. Yeah. If you don't use a natural sweetener, if you use something that's bad for you, cool, I made more money off your health. No, we're not doing that. We are keeping healthy. Jogglefuel.com, Wawa, vitamin shop, H.E.B. down in Texas,

a bunch of different places. If they don't have it where you shop, ask them for it. We'll get it to you. OriginUSA.com. We're doing jiu-jitsu, which means you need a ghee. You might as well get the best possible ghee in the world. Go to origin-usa.com. Get yourself the best-made ghee.

And it's made in America, just like the jeans, just like the boots. Awesome stuff. The hunt gear. OriginUSA.com. Don't forget that we have a store? We do have a store. And what's that called? It's called Jocco store.

Again, the discipline equals freedom standard issue t-shirt is out. We made the announcement. Made it yesterday to the people. And, you know, good response. It's a good, it's a good standard issue. I saw you put a YouTube video up of the shirt locker. Yeah, kind of updated. Oh, is it an updated one?

A little bit, yeah. It's pretty cool, quite frankly. Yeah, it's a metaphorical, it's a metaphorical. It's a metaphor for the shirt locker. Oh, because my shirt's changing. Yeah, you know, people, I read the comments. That's not the deepest metaphor. I read some of the comments they're like, oh, how do you make a shirt change when you didn't even take it off or whatever?

See what I'm saying? So I'm saying, hey, it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor. You wear a shirt, it changes every month. Boom. It doesn't really change on your body the way it does in the video. See I'm saying. You're wearing one of these shirt locker shirts right now.

Is that not? Yes. Yeah, it is. The G.I. Joe one. G.I. Joe Rip. Most recent one is called toxic productivity. productivity it's a good one it's a good one very good these cartoonish pictures that you're utilizing of me yep by the way yeah cartoonish pictures of me comic book comic book

pictures of me like holding a weapon in each hand you know riding a tank yep yeah that's funny stuff yeah there's actually a lot of good designs on there um you know I don't know they come up for sometimes people request certain types of designs. We go down a rabbit hole looking into it, you know, the viability of certain ones. And some of them is just real obvious that just need to be made into shirts. So, you know, there's fun. Anyway, that's called the shirt locker. One shirt, a new shirt every month.

Cool thing. People seem to like it. Check that out. It's all on Jocco store. Subscribe to the podcast. Don't forget about jocco underground.com. People getting canceled. Yeah.

People getting pulled off of platforms. We don't own this platform. Look, are we talking about some crazy controversial thing? Not really. Do we talk about some things that maybe could get us put in a situation? Yes, we do. We have. We've had warnings on some of our YouTube videos that they had to get fact checked.

Oh, yeah. So that's an indicator that, you know, maybe we're getting looked at. Well, obviously, we are getting looked at. So to combat that, to make sure that we always have the ability to get information you, we have Jocko Underground, Jocco Underground.com. We do an extra little podcast. We put it on there, answer your questions. jocco underground.com, if you want to support there, go support.

We appreciate it. If you can't afford it, it's $8.18 a month. What do they say? Like, like, less than a cup of coffee. Was that what they say? Yeah, sometimes. One, it is. Like about things?

Yeah, well, if you have a cup of coffee every day and you're buying it from one of the, like, more well-known coffee shops, you're definitely spending more than $8.18. Well, yeah, monthly, even if you're having the most, unless you're not drinking coffee at all, you're spending more than $18. Even if you've been to the grocery store, getting, yeah, you're going to spend maybe $8, maybe. So pretty cheap you can get it. If you can't afford it, we still want you in the game.

We still want to be able to talk to you in case things go sideways. Assistant, email assistants at joccoonaguner.com. We have a YouTube channel. Check that out. We have psychological warfare. People have that on their playlist on iTunes. Yeah. It's an MP3 that you can just,

if you're going through life, you might experience a little moment of weakness. This will help get you through it. Flipsidecanvus.com, Dakota Myers Company. It gets cool stuff to hang on your wall, which is nice, keep you on the path. I've written a bunch of books. You can check out those books at some point

if you're interested about the things we do here. Eschlamfront, leadership consultancy. Go to eshlamfront.com. If you need help in your organization, we can help you. We can help you through leadership. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Eshlamfront.

for details on that. We also have an online training academy. I mentioned that a couple times today where we teach leadership. Now, look, leadership doesn't mean that you're the CEO or you're the C-O-O or you're the commanding officer. There's leadership no matter where you are in an organization. Even if you're the frontline individual contributor or the frontline assaulter on a team, you are still in a leadership position.

You're leading your teammates. You're actually leading your boss. You're leading your family. You're leading your friends. Become a better leader and you'll have a better life. Go to extreme ownership.com. Join the academy. And if you want to help service members active and retired,

you want to help their families, gold star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Don't forget about. Also, Micah Fink's organization, Heroes and Horses.org.

Also, check out Marcus and Amber, Capone. They've got vet solutions.org. Check out some of those charities. And if you want to connect, once again, if you want to connect with a new treatment center, A-N-E-W treatment center. Go to a new treatment center.com. They're on social as well. A new treatment center on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram.

They're there. And as for us, we're also in those places. Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocco Willink. Of course, be wary. Be wary of that algorithm. And thanks once again to Megan and Carlin for joining us today to share their knowledge with us to try and educate me. And thanks to both them for dedicating their lives to helping other people.

Also, thanks to all our servicemen and women out there around the globe that are standing. watch against evil and a big thanks to our police and law enforcement, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, firefighters, correctional officers, Border Patrol Secret Service, all the first responders,

thank you for protecting us from evil here at home. And everyone else out there, pay attention to that mental check engine light. Pay attention to your own. Pay attention to people around you. And if that,

check engine light comes on don't just keep driving pull over for a minute call that mind mechanic call that therapist or that psychologist who can help get your mind back up and running the way it's supposed to so that you can go out and get after it and until next time the zecho and jocco out Thank you.