Know Thyself - E193 - Dr. Paul Conti: A Psychiatrist's Guide to Understanding Your Mind

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Dr. Paul Conti is a psychiatrist, trauma specialist, and author whose work centers on one deceptively simple idea: that understanding yourself is the most powerful thing you can do for your mental health. In this conversation, we explore how the unconscious mind quietly sets the boundaries for how we think, feel, and move through life, and how much of what we assume is just "who we are" was actually formed long before we had the words for it.What struck me most in this conversation is Paul's insistence that looking inward doesn't have to be frightening. He introduces the concept of the generative drive, the part of us that moves toward creativity, altruism, and genuine contribution, and makes a compelling case that this is what separates a life that feels full from one that simply accumulates. We also get into the myths we build from isolated facts, why the traditional psychiatric model falls short, and what it actually means to bring compassionate curiosity to yourself.BiOptimizers - Best magnesium to enhance your sleephttps://www.bioptimizers.com/knowthyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off at checkoutTry LMNT & get a free sample pack https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfAndré's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________00:00 Intro02:05 Assessing Mental Health Like Physical Health03:04 The Unconscious Mind and Its Hidden Influence06:30 How Identity Forms in Early Childhood08:23 Compassionate Curiosity as a Practice11:02 Empowerment, Agency, and the Healthy Self15:34 The Assertion, Pleasure, and Generative Drives24:26 What Humility Actually Means27:09 Ad: BiOptimizers28:18 Shame, Feelings, and the Lessons We Carry35:10 How Memories Build the Myth of Self42:32 Ad: LMNT43:41 Waking Up vs. Growing Up48:10 The Limits of Diagnosis-Driven Psychiatry51:07 What We're Really Striving For58:18 Self-Worth and External Achievement1:02:12 Anxiety as Adaptive and Maladaptive1:09:52 Defense Mechanisms and How They Shape Us1:16:51 Tools for Self-Inquiry and Lasting Change1:25:52 Repeated Patterns and Relational Wounds1:29:45 Hard-Won Growth and Gratitude1:32:12 Paul's Personal Story: Loss and the Path to Medicine1:37:17 Presence, Suffering, and the Art of Helping1:41:35 Closing Message: Your Mind Is Your Friend___________Episode Resources: https://www.drpaulconti.com/https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Going-Right-Powerful-Optimizing/dp/1538776049https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

So much of what happens inside of us is just automatic. And a lot of that can be defined by negative things. Dr. Paul Conte. Medical doctor and psychiatrist. Expert treating trauma. How much identity really formed before we even have conscious memory of it? If there are very significant experience that are traumatic in those really young years, it can start to shape the lay of the land.

We carry that lesson with us. My brother died by suicide many, many years. ago. I was young. I had very naive views of the world. Life is a lot harder than I had imagined it would be. Hold on one second. The boundaries of how I can even think about it are kind of set inside of me. We have a couple of isolated facts and then we create a story. Once the person attaches to that story, the story moves forward with them and now we start making a myth of self. I'm almost in a straight jacket because I can't move out of this place where I find myself inside. I haven't had eight different bad relationships. I've had the same relationship eight times over. Your mind

doesn't want you to be unhappy. It's your mind. It's your friend. But it's easy for it to get confused. There's this thing that you can do even of stopping and saying. Dr. Paul Conti, first off, happy birthday. I heard it's your birthday today. As it is. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, I think your work is so important and needed now more than ever. I think when we assess the physical health of one's body, it's much more easy to observe. You know, someone has a broken arm, they're in shape, you can measure their heart rate. When it comes to our mental health, often it's way more ethereal, more subtle to assess and assert the status of one's mental health. And so I'm just curious to start off, how do you think about what?

what is the effective way to assess one's current state of mental health? Yeah, yeah. I don't think it has to be more difficult to do it with mental health than it is for physical health, because we have a way of understanding our physical health. Like we all know that we have a heart and lungs and muscles and joints. And we know, we understand that there are these components of physical health, and we can look at them, and we can either look to see where a problem is, as something isn't going the way we wanted to,

or how we can build strong physical health. And I think we can do the same for mental health. It doesn't have to be so confusing or ethereal. I think that we can understand that we all have a brain and the brain has a mind and the mind has similarities across human beings just as our bodies do. So by understanding that there's a structure of self that each of us has and there's a function of self that each of us has, we can do the same thing in analogy to what we do for physical health, for mental health,

and it doesn't have to be less accessible to us than understanding our physical health and building good physical health is. Paying attention to your work over the past few years, it seems like there's this progression, at least with your new book, and the work of understanding, looking through the rear view and through reflection,

what were the formative experiences that shaped our psyche, the unconscious, the subconscious, and then what can we focus on now that has this generative drive? That's like what's going right and to examine that as well. And so to start, a bit more with the part of the iceberg that's under the water, so to speak.

When we think of the self and we think of the psyche, we're often speaking about the personhood, the personality we're looking at life through as if it's a lens. And oftentimes, societally widespread, we don't really give time and wait to examine the experiences that shape that person that now we just assume is who we are and is our identity in which we engage with all life and relationships. How do you articulate the differences between the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind?

Yeah. Really, the differentiation we make is unconscious versus conscious. Subconscious gets used sometimes, but it's basically under the water, the part of the iceberg that's under the water, which is unconscious, and the part that's above the water, which is the conscious mind. And so, so much more is underwater. And that's the unconscious part that sets the boundaries for us. So, for example, If I'm saying negative things to myself all the time, I'm changing the lay of the land inside where, for example, a new opportunity comes my way. The ranges of responses that I may have to that is already kind of set. And I'm more likely to look at that in a negative way or to look at it in an avoidant way or in a fatalistic way. Oh, it won't work out for me, right?

The boundaries of how I can even think about it are kind of set inside of me through the unconscious mind, which is why it is so important to understand ourselves and to realize that, for example, what we're saying to ourselves, what we're telling ourselves about ourselves, is so important because it sets the range of possibilities. So if I go from negative self-talk and I start talking to myself in a way

that's more honest and more constructive, like, okay, here are some of the things I'm up against, but here are the good things that I bring to bear, right? Here's how I've made, I allow myself to take advantage of opportunities in the past. Here's some of the good things I've done it then. If an opportunity comes my way, the range of possible responses is shifted inside of me. So the unconscious mind kind of sets the lay of the land inside of us because so many

things have to happen so quickly for our conscious mind to then navigate on top of that. I think this has been getting increasing attention over the past five, ten years, because you know, Young is quoted, I believe, if until you make the unconscious conscious, it'll rule your life and you'll call it fate. Right. And it can be a painful realization to see the trajectory that our life was set out for before we were even able to consciously make that decision. Now, when we're speaking about the unconscious and sort of the internal motives that are

beneath our conscious level of awareness of having the ability to really articulate why we do what we do, we just feel this pull towards different things. How much of that is shaped before we even have conscious memory of it? You know, before the age of seven, how much in your experience, as identity really formed in that early childhood state? A lot gets laid down then, but it's not deterministic, meaning if there are very significant experiences, say they're traumatic in those really young years,

it can start to shape the lay of the land, so in a way that maybe a person is more defensive and avoidant, for example. But sometimes if there's been trauma and the trauma is understood and addressed, there can be a resilience that comes from that too. So even having negative experiences in those initial years, it doesn't determine anything about us. What it says is that if we're not understanding it, if we're not able to think about ourselves

and investigate ourselves, to bring compassionate curiosity to ourselves, then a lot goes on in us that is just automatic. So that's kind of the negative part of it, right? To say if I'm not really looking at myself and thinking about myself, a lot that happens inside of me is automatic, and a lot of that can be defined by negative things. But if I can be reflective, if I can understand myself and bring myself to bear, I can start to change that.

So if I'm telling myself a negative story about myself, I can look at that and understand. It's like, why am I doing that? Maybe that's some reflex of a lesson I learned a long time ago that isn't real or true. You know, someone or people around me saying negative things about me and I take it inside, And I start saying those things too. And if I realize that I can change that story inside, and then it can shift the lay of the land where I'm no longer sort of almost in a straight jacket

because I can't move out of this place where I find myself inside, which can be a negative place or a restricted place. But by looking at that and understanding, we can sort of take the straight jacket off and say, hey, I can move around here wherever I choose to. It's very empowering. And that's the other side of the coin, and his understanding brings empowerment.

That word that you use, which is compassionate curiosity, I think, is really important. I think it's quite easy to look back into our past and the experiences that shaped us with a lot of shame, guilt, fear, regret, remorse. You want to speak a little bit more into that? How that curiosity, like, it leaves the door open in a little bit of a sense where we're not so sure

about what we make of the experiences. That openness allows us to be able to work with it more closely and intimately. Yeah. Yeah. It allows us to look at ourselves with the same open minds and the same compassion that we would bring to someone else, right? So if you tell me about difficulties in your life and something that may have been hard and gotten you into a negative place, you know, then in general, I'm likely to hear that with a sense of compassion. I'm interested in you. And oh, how did that happen? And like, how can we understand and bring that understanding to bear and you can shift and change? But if it's me, right, I tend to have a very different

outlook and we tend to say negative things to ourselves and then to kind of not want to look because we're afraid of what we're going to find. So it's that, that kind of feeling of being on the back foot of, gosh, if it's about me, there's probably something really bad. It's probably something I'm really not going to be able to change. Like these are things not true, right? But it comes from the lens of fear in us. And the fear comes from not understanding. You know, human beings want to understand things. And if we don't, understandably, we become afraid, we become confused, we become intimidated. But this idea that we can bring this compassionate curiosity to ourselves, just like we would in a good-spirited way to someone else, and then we can understand.

We don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find. You know, we're not going to look inside and find something awful that tells me, I can never have the things that I want. It's the fear of that that makes us look away, and that sometimes creates self-fulfilling profit. You know, if there are negative patterns going on in me over and over again and I don't look at them, it's likely that they'll continue to go on. Then I say more negative things to myself and then I get more down on myself and I feel more hopeless about myself. And then at the end of the day, nothing has changed, but I could have changed it all along if I'd been empowered to look at myself and to sort of bring that courage and that compassion and that ingenuity. Like all of us can think about ourselves and say, how do I bring change? because I want the things that I want,

and I can guide myself in a way that maybe I wasn't even aware of before if I was just kind of hiding away from myself. Would you say that's the core mission of your work is just like that belief that change is possible? How would you articulate your mission these days? I've sort of always thought about this way, and I sort of say it more now, you know, I work with a group of really good people at Pacific Premier Group in Portland, Oregon,

and we all work together and we send people out and people come into us. And I'm often thinking, like, what is it that we're doing? And it's kind of solidified inside of me that we're in the business of empowerment. And knowledge brings empowerment. So that's mostly what we're doing is where we're being collaborative with someone of, hey, let's sit and think together, right, in a way that brings our curiosity to bear so that we can help you understand more about yourself and use that understanding to say,

okay, what is it that I want? What do I want to change? What am I striving for? And how do I get my? there. And it's that empowerment that brings along with the agency. Agency is the exercise of empowerment. So if I might say shift from a place of feeling behind the eight ball and, you know, and feeling down and feeling on the back foot, and I shift to a place where I think, no, like I can bring understanding to bear. In fact, I am understanding things and bringing change now. So I know

that I can do more of that. Now we're on the front foot and it's that empowerment inside that lets this exercise agency and say, no, if I've been going two steps to the left, now, I understand, and I'm changing it, and I'm going to go two steps to the right now. And once we do that, now we start the ball rolling in the right direction. And once we start making healthy change, it then becomes easier to make more healthy change. Yeah. And as a clinician, your role in those settings is to really be able to effectively assess the state of one's mental health. How would you articulate what the constitution or components of a healthy self, like an individuated healthy self, versus a self that's maybe less so healthy.

What are the qualities that that person or that mind would imbibe? Well, if we look at the structure of self and the function of self, and we say, okay, this is our analogy to physical health. So this is like saying, if you present it with a physical health problem, we'd say, okay, well, let's take a history, right? Let's do a physical exam. We might want to get some labs. There's a process to understand and say,

hey, if your body is out of balance, you're having a pain somewhere, for example, let's understand that, and there's this method so that we can understand it and we can bring you back into balance. We can do the same thing through the structure of self and the function of self and the components there so that we can help to bring a person back into balance, or if they're already in balance, make that balance stronger. And what sits on top of that is this empowerment that lets us exercise agency and a sense of humility. And humility isn't what it may often seem, it's the opposite of arrogance, right? Very often humility is just letting myself be human to and to say,

hey, if I've had problems or the things that haven't gone exactly as I want them to, you know, I'm human and it's okay that that's happened or it's okay if I've made mistakes, right? What my responsibility to myself is is to bring myself to bear and not get so down on myself as if I'm not allowed to be human, or I'm afraid of myself and I'm afraid of the world because I've been human and I've made mistakes. And if our structure of self and function of self are imbalance, then we have the empowerment that gives us agency

and the humility that lets us act through gratitude. And agency and gratitude are like this. If we're acting, we're interfacing with the world through agency and gratitude, then we're in balance in the broad scheme of who we are. And what this means is our drives are imbalance. So there's an assertion drive in all of us and a pleasure drive in all of us.

And the pleasure isn't just hedonism. the pleasure of knowing, hey, I'm doing okay in the world. I've got a good roof over my head. I have good friendships around me. And when we're asserting ourselves in the world in a healthy way, and we're getting pleasure from what we're doing, really our lives are governed by the generative drive. And that's the drive in us to make the world around us better than we found it. It's the spirit inside of us that drives literally the species for it and each of us for it. It's what lets us do things that we don't get any credit for, like offering somebody a hand up when no one else is watching, right? Or creating art or music just for the sake of creating

art or music, doing a nice turn for someone, just because it feels good and we like that it makes them feel good. If the generative drive is governing us, that's the ultimate manifestation of us being imbalanced. And just as we can understand our bodies and our physical health and know when we're being robust and healthy and we're setting ourselves up for the future in a good way, we absolutely can do the same for our mental health. Could you... Like, zoom in on someone's personal experience. So the assertion drive and the pleasure drive, what are those, for anybody who's listening right now,

that they could identify a behavior in their life that are being stemmed from those two, and then I want to examine the generative drive after. Yeah, yeah. So classically, it's been thought that human beings have just these two drives. But if there were only assertion and pleasure, it doesn't explain at all how we're still here.

Without a desire to make the world better, without altruism, for example, the species would not have. have survived. So we have these two classic drives of assertion and pleasure, and they have optimal ranges. So it's not that more is always better. So for example, too much assertiveness and people become over-controlling, too little assertiveness, and we just don't make an effort in the world, we don't put ourselves forth. So there's an optimal range, and that'll differ for people. Some people are because of a combination of genetics, of nature, and of nurture. Early childhood is a

and throughout the lifespan, some people are just built or have built themselves in a way to have a level of assertion that's higher range. So it's not an exact point, but maybe it's higher on the range of how assertive that person is going to be. This could be somebody like asserting they want a certain thing for their life, just asserting themselves amongst their peers. How else, like, would that show up that assertive drive in someone's life, practically speaking? It'd show up as we're going after our strivings, right? So, so for example, if I want to do better at my job, for example, I could say, okay, you know, I'm going to apply myself more. I'm going to use more of that assertion drive. I'm going to work harder. I'm going to study more. I'm going to be more collaborative. So therefore, I'm more likely by applying myself more to get better results. But again, if I decide, no, I'm just going to apply myself 24-7, right? Now I'm neglecting my health. I'm neglecting my relationships. So there's an optimal range. And when we're in that range, well, we're healthily asserting

ourselves. We're strongly asserting ourselves. It's not too much, but we're doing justice by ourselves. It's not too little. So maybe some of what I have to give, I leave on the table, right? It's not too little. It's not too much. Then we're in a healthy range where we're being active in the world around us. And instead of being passive and like the kind of world happening to us or life happening to us, we're on the front foot and we're guiding life forward. And the same thing is true with the pleasure drive where we want to get happiness and gratification from the things that we do. So if I work hard, I want to be able to feel good about that. I want to be able to get good feedback and maybe I'm rewarded with the raise, right?

I want to feel good. I want good things to come back to me. If I crave too much of that, then I might get covetous. It may be that now I want too much money. I want to get paid more and more and that's going to make me feel better about myself and I neglect other things, right? Or if we're not getting a lot of pleasure, then, you know, we just don't feel good about what we're doing and we lose our incentive to try.

So both assertion and pleasure, there are different ranges in. each person. But we want to see here, what does that range for me in each of those drives? And how do I run on the higher end of where that range is for me? And that's been really classically understood in humans, but we're just getting, we're moving it another step forward by saying, okay, what sits underneath of it in the structure and function of self? And what sits on top of it, which is the generative drive. So now what sits on top of it, I mean, the way that you've articulated, it sounds like these the more benevolent aspects of human beings, the ones that drives us towards the sense of

cohesiveness and coherence in life, is fundamentally creative. Because, again, it can, oftentimes when the self-reflective and examination towards self can go too far where it's like not taking into account the natural proclivities of how your intelligence wants to express itself and the, and the draw you have towards supporting community and your creative endeavors in life externally. So why is that such an important thing to focus on and is a big theme in your new work and your new book that you think is so overlooked and often needed right now?

It's the generative drive that really makes us human. It's the generative drive that lets us do things that someone else hasn't done before, whether it's how someone sings, or how someone is kind to the person next door to them, or how someone brings ingenuity to their job or to a relationship, and to say, I'm here and there's something about me that's unique. No one else is like me, and I want to be in this world,

and I want to express myself, and I want to be felt in this world, not just in a way that asserts myself and gets what I want, but in a way that makes the world a better place. So an example, we could look at the creation of art, or I read in the book about a person who was on a beach in there had been a storm that passed and the waves were very, very heavy. And the person sees that there are people out in the water who are really in trouble. And that person just takes clothes off, strips down to the box or shorts, it jumps into the water

and really risks himself to help other people, to rescue other people. And you look at that, you can't explain that by a desire to assert yourself in the world. You know, there would have been much safer to stay on the beach and assert himself in a different way that maybe served his own life as opposed to risk losing it or to say, oh, that person wants the pleasure of being able to help someone else. I mean, this is what classical theory has said, and it just doesn't make any sense that there are parts of us that are altruistic, that are creative, that want to make the world around us different. And that might be growing flowers where there was just dirt or, you know, bringing something, bringing cookies to the person next door who doesn't. who's lost family and doesn't have anyone. This is what's in us that leads us to be more than just scrambling for survival all the time. And if you look at what's beautiful about humanity, what do we value?

We value what we create. We value painting and music and the structures that we create and the gestures we show to one another, that this is our humanness. And it's that it's the best part of us. and when it governs our lives, it drives us towards not just success, but success in achieving happiness. And happiness, it's a word that can mean many, many things.

If you look at how have people been happy throughout the lifespan? People have been able to find peace, contentment, and delight. And it's the generative drive that guides us towards this happiness. You know, peace being, I can just find times when I don't have to think about anything. There's nothing on my mind. There's nothing weighing on me. There's nothing I have to do. I can just be and I can feel okay.

I can feel good. Contentment is when I'm aware of my life. I'm aware of the facts in my life. I'm aware of the challenges and the tragedies in my life. I'm aware of the strivings or the achievements in my life. And I feel okay. I feel good about life and the life that I'm leading. And delight is really the capacity for delight,

that we can still as adults, be delighted by things as we were as children. And all studies that have looked at people and what makes happiness in people it's peace contentment in this capacity for delight. And all of that is governed by the generative drive. Why would somebody's generative drive be different in one case versus the other? Like the creative impulses that are unique to us, what's the origins and reason for that? Probably varies genetically, just like many, many things in humans. So our genes don't dictate anything about us, right?

They just dictate probability ranges. So some people have a capacity for a very high generative drive. You know, we see people who are like, wow, like that person is doing five amazing things at once, right? And it's not that all of us have to be that way. We may have a slightly lower capacity for a generative drive, but that's okay too. If I can get up and lead a good life today and be good to myself and good to others and do something good in the world around me for other people.

Like, that's the reason to feel like this has been a successful day. We don't all have to have a generative drive that's running at the highest end of the range, but what we want to do is cultivate as much as we can in each of us. It's not like the assertion and the pleasure drives where too much is not good, too little is not too good. The generative drive, more is always better. Too much is never enough, right? Because it's a drive towards goodness, right? It's a drive towards social harmony.

It's a drive towards giving to other people, which always leads us to give back to ourselves as well. more of that is always better because it's sort of the goodness in our lives, which feeds in a good way into absolutely everything else. Now earlier you mentioned that the generative drive sort of is born from the balance of a healthy amount of the pleasure and assertion drives, and that those give a sense of humility, which leads to gratitude, and empowerment, which leads to agency. I would just like to zoom in on a couple of those aspects a bit more.

So humility, I think, has this, often wrongly attributed notion of sort of meekness or like sort of like negating of self for others and I'm just curious how do you articulate what humility is and the importance of it for the for a healthy psyche yeah yeah I often say selling yourself short or not saying you're great at what you're great at is not humility it's ego eh well it's either ego or or falseness If a person says, well, I'm not really very good at that why, right? It's not egotistical to say, yes, I am great at that.

We're recently talking with a person as a professional athlete, right, who says, I know, I'm pretty good at this. So I'm like, no, you're great at it, right? It's not arrogant to say that one really has skills, talents, abilities that we have. So that's false humility, which people will do sometimes in order to lessen themselves compared to someone else, right? And it may be someone else who doesn't feel good about themselves and doesn't want that person to feel good about themselves.

Whatever the reason may be, selling ourselves short isn't humility, right? And yes, humility can be the opposite of arrogance, but that's not what we're talking about. And the vast majority of people, it is not that. It's that we often don't have the humility to let ourselves be human and to say, look, I make mistakes. So I really messed that thing up. But I've got to pick myself up.

And I've got to, instead of beating up on myself about it, I've got to say, okay, I'm human. I make mistakes, right? And I'm going to get back to the game. I'm going to get back. I'm going to do a better job this time. One might think, well, how is that humility? But it's the humility to let ourselves be human and to say, you know, I'm human too. I make mistakes.

I'm struggling in a world that is often very, very difficult to navigate. I have a right to move forward instead of beating up on myself or hiding myself away because there are things about my life that I don't feel great about it, that didn't go. the way that I wanted them to. So it's humility that along with empowerment lets us be in the world in a real way because we're letting ourselves be human, but we're being empowered humans. A quick one. Did you know that there is one phase of sleep that almost everyone fails to get enough of? And this one phase of sleep is responsible for most of your body's daily rejuvenation. I'm talking about deep sleep. And if you don't get enough, you'll probably struggle with cravings,

slow metabolism, premature aging, and many other adverse effects. A big reason we don't get enough deep sleep is because over 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium. Magnesium increases GABA, which encourages relaxation on a cellular level, which is critical for sleep. So when I first tried supplementing with magnesium, my sleep score was super high, and I did not wake up a single time throughout my sleep. And I tracked this stuff.

I knew I felt great, and it was all the proof that I needed. Not all magnesium, though, is created equally. I personally have been using the one from bioptimizers, and unlike other supplements, they give all seven forms of magnesium. Most give one to two. It's designed to help you calm your mind, help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling refreshed.

Right now, for an exclusive offer, you can go to buyoptimizers.com slash know-thyself and use promo code Know Theyself to save 15% at checkout. I hope you enjoy Sleep Deep. Yeah, it seems like you've drawn a clear-de-stop. between our ability, capacity for vulnerability and humility. And I know you've written and talked about how you grew up in a household, which I don't think is uncommon for money, where there was a bit more resistance to, especially as a man

and the culture in which you were raised in the family and household, were expressing or exploring your feelings and emotional world wasn't like rewarded as a good thing per se, you know? Or even recognized as something people could do. I think that so many people can resonate with that, especially a lot of men. You know, there is sort of the more that you can just suck it up and move on, the more you're seen as like a man, you know? And I'm just curious what you think about that

as it's directly linked to our lack of fulfillment and the, you know, offspring of the contentment and delight and peace that we had the capacity for. Yeah, yeah. We have to confront the lessons that we learn. when we were younger and decide what we think about them now. So like a lot of people, men and women, but as it said, it's more often men who learn that feelings are for the weak, right?

And you should be embarrassed or ashamed of having feelings. All it's going to do is stand in your way and it's not manly or whatever it may be. And then we learn to be ashamed of having feelings. And again, I see so much of this in men and women. It's in everyone that there's a sense of shame that, oh, I have the feelings. inside of me, right? And if those feelings are distressing, like, I need to stop and think about something, I need to stop and cry about something, stop and talk about something, that means there's something wrong with us. And when we learn that when we're young, we don't get a chance to answer the question.

So this is, it takes us back to the unconscious mind. If it's automatic in me that if I have feelings or negative feelings or sad feelings, that I should equate that with shame and not being manly, that's going to happen before I have a chance to decide about it. It's automatic inside of me, right? So what we have to do is then challenge that and say, to be self-aware is to say, whoa, like something really difficult just happened. And I just want to stop and kind of compose myself. I might feel tearful and like, look, like I already feel ashamed of that, right?

So, okay, that's automatic. Like I didn't decide. There were elements in my upbringing. Some of it was good. Some of it wasn't good. But this is inside of me. And right now I'm going to. stop and say, I feel this shame inside of me. But I'm not accepting that. It's like, it's okay that I feel

this way. Then we let ourselves have the feelings that we have. And it doesn't mean the next time we won't have a triggered or a reflexive shame. But it means it's a little less powerful. It occurs a little bit less quickly. We have a little bit more time to intervene. So this is how we kind of reprogram ourselves. It's to be aware of what's happening in us in a reflexive way. And the shame about having feelings. It's just a great example of that to notice that one has negative or sad feelings if it did notice that you immediately become ashamed. That knowledge is very, very powerful. And it's powerful because it gives us direct insight into where on some level we're not okay with meeting reality fully and some level where there's an unconscious drive still running the show.

And again, we talked about this earlier. It can be painful to realize how a lot of what we thought we were living our life as this conscious agent is really being colored and distorted in so many different ways we're not fully privy to. And so when those come up, how do you, I mean, you just gave a bit of insight into it, but when we find those triggers in life, right, we sometimes spiral it and build momentum onto it by being shameful, you know, having shame about what we're ashamed of. Right. Absolutely. How can we meet those triggers fully in a way that's actually fruitful? and like, you know, transforming the energy

and not just get stuck in those cycles. Yeah. The combination of compassionate curiosity and self-determination is incredibly powerful. So the compassionate curiosity is just to notice that. So if I notice, as I have through my own therapy over the years, that, oh, if I have negative or sad feelings, I immediately feel ashamed.

Now we can be curious about that. And so, well, where did that come in to me? And then I can go back and look at the lessons of childhood. And I could say there were a lot of good things about my upbringing and a lot of things I'm grateful for. And there were also things that weren't taught to me in the healthiest way. So I want to go look at that and say some of those lessons that I learned of like, be nice to people, open the door. If someone's behind you, you know what, I want to keep that with me, right?

But to feel ashamed of myself and weak because I have sadness in me, like I don't want to carry that lesson for me. And I say this often, each of our brains is more complex than the most powerful. supercomputer. But also, our brains don't do very simple things that old computers would do. Where, you know, you'd reboot the computer and it finds patches, right? Our brains don't do that. We don't wake up in the morning and our brain reboots me and say, oh, right, that lesson that I learned when I was a kid isn't right. No, we carry that lesson with us. So we have to be intentional about it. We have to go back and look and say, look, I don't want to carry that forward with me anymore. I'm not going to feel ashamed that I have feelings. not what I communicate to the world around me. It's not what I want my children to understand

about the world around them. And I don't want that inside of me. Now I can use self-determination, which might say, if immediately, if I become aware that I'm not sharing sad feelings, say, and, you know, it's really been driving my mood down, or it's been driving some unhealthy behavior, alcohol use, risk-taking, right? And I say, well, why is that happening? It's not because I'm having sad feelings, because that might say, well, sad things are happening in my life. I'm having sad feelings. It's not that this driving me down, it's that I'm hiding it.

So now I can link, right, that I'm worried I'm getting depressed, or now I'm getting down on myself because I'm drinking too much. These are examples where we can say, gosh, that could really spiral in a negative direction, or you could say that unhealthy behavior that I'm looking at, right,

it's coming because I'm shoving down these negative feelings because I'm ashamed of them, but don't really feel ashamed of them, so I'm going to let myself feel them, and maybe I'm going to call a good friend I can talk through. I'm going to let myself sit here and cry. And now that tension inside that drives the unhealthy behavior isn't there, now instead of a

downward spiral, what we're starting is an upward spiral. And that's a combination of compassionate curiosity and self-determination. We start leading much more examined and intentional lives. That's great. I would love to zoom in a bit more on the structure of self. It's fascinating how we have these formative experiences often throughout childhood, going into adulthood, where in many ways, like, we encounter an experience that surpasses our ability to process it and be with it emotionally, and then we make meaning of it. And like that emotional impact stays with us. And I've found it so interesting, studying, like, neurologically, how reconstructive memory occurs and how we have an event, we have our perception of that event, which is already

detracted from what actually happened to some degree. And then we keep on reconstructing the memory from the last time we memorized it. And it's so funny because our identity is shaped by so many of these experiences, which our memory of that thing very much so is different to how it actually occurred. And the meaning that we then for have given to those experiences shape our life, shape our destiny in so many ways. And so when we look at the structure of the self and the memories that are formed

that structure the self, I'm curious what insights you have into how those memories are formed infused with identity. And then, of course, that goes into our experience of our self. But yeah, how do you kind of think of how the structure of self

and our memory interplay as they build? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, very often what we do is we have a couple of isolated facts and then we create a story that doesn't have any grounding in reality, but we accept it as true. So just like the old games where you'd put out a couple of words or phrases, and then a person will put a story together. So we could say, girl, new school, no friends. We could say, no, let's make a story out of that, right?

But very often that's what's going on, say, in the person's mind. And then the story that they create is a story that's negative towards the self. So I'm the girl and I went to a new school and I wasn't popular. No one liked me and I didn't fit in. And because of that, I didn't have any friends and things didn't go well. Okay. It's a story. It's a story.

But once the person attaches to that story, which often happens when the person is very young, then the story moves forward with them. and the story starts to take on additional meaning. You know, I really shouldn't go new places because people don't really like me. And I have to stay with the people who I have friendships with because I'm not going to be able to find new friends. That can come out of that story.

That's why I went somewhere new. I wasn't good enough to have new friends, et cetera. And now we start making a myth of self. And very often that story that was put together just from facts, not from the flow and what they mean, right, then becomes a myth of self. And that is very, very problematic because we then don't go back necessarily and check that and say, hey, is that really true? Right. And the idea of bringing compassionate curiosity to our life narratives is also of the highest level of importance.

So what if we go back and we look at that story and we say, well, okay, that girl went to a new school, they arrived mid-year and there were really difficult circumstances and it was a small school and there were a lot of clicks and people weren't really behaving well and there wasn't a lot of supervision and then you could say well the story could be different is that girl went to a new school and it was a very difficult environment and she got through that year anyway right she got through that year and then the next year things got a little better and she made a couple of friends and some of those friends are still with her in her life maybe that's the true story more often that is the true story but the story that we've carried forward and made into a myth is the false story. And you might say, well, why would we do that? You know, do our brains secretly not like us, right? Do our unconscious minds, like, really want us to be miserable? And no, the story is around creating safety. Because, you know, a child doesn't have the ability to think, well, what's really going on here?

Right? They don't have the brain capacity we do as adults. So the child will often look at just the most obvious answer in front of them. Like, I don't have any friends. I'm not good enough and no one likes me. Right? It's just the reflex of what's right in front of the person. And that it's a narrative we bring forward that we can go look at and challenge and say, you know what, I want the truth. What actually happened then? What have I carried forward with me? What myth have I created? What really happened then? What I want is truth. And we're always after truth. The idea of having a new and different life narrative, for example, it's not about finding something that feels better, right? Or something that maybe if you use it. that way, it can help we make better decisions. And what we're doing is looking for truth.

And very, very often the truth is so, so much better than the myth that we've carried forward. And it could be, you know, men don't get sad or men, only weak men cry. And then, like, that's true, right? Why? Because I carried the myth forward, right? So if I said, well, I'm weak because I cried when I was a child, you know, you can go back and revisit that and say, well, when did I cry?

I got hurt here, like, gosh, I remember this or that. And like, that seemed like anyone would cry because of that. You know, maybe it's not true, this lesson that I learned about myself. And I built a narrative or a myth on top of it. And I'm going to revisit that. And through the lens of agency and gratitude, through the lens of a healthy self, I'm going to decide what that narrative is. What are your favorite tools for externalizing those internal narratives and stories that we've built?

What are some of your favorite tools that you recommend outside of therapy? Right, right. generally we have to put it into words. So, you know, we can think about something over and over again in our brains and not get anywhere, right? And almost all of us. We've had this experience, right? Like, gosh, I've been thinking about that for, you know, two hours now or on and off for three days. I'm not getting anywhere.

Well, that's because when that's happening, we're not really thinking about it. We're not bringing our whole brain to bear and it's just kind of pinging around inside of us. But if we do it in a different way, for example, if we write that down, or if we, if we, we speak words to another person, different parts of our brain come online. So parts, for example, that are involved in error checking, like, oh, is that really true or what does that really mean? So instead of having things knock around in our minds, which is often how we get into negative self-talk, then that negativity or that thing I can't solve knocking around in my mind becomes, oh, what the hell is wrong with you that you can't fix that? Or, you know, that's what becomes, you know, the mantra over and over

again in our in our minds so we can go and look at that and say whoa i don't want that just pinging around inside of me right i want to gain some control over this and by putting it into words and saying what is this thing i'm telling myself over and over again i'm going to go write that down or i'm going to sit down with this friend of mine or you know or a partner a family member whoever i'm going to sit down with someone i'm going to talk about this and this is the compassionate curiosity sometimes it's thinking But a lot of times it's that next step to getting it outside of us because that's very often how we can bring a new light of knowledge, gain new insight, become more intentional, gain agency that we didn't have before. A quick share. If you've been feeling sluggish, you might not need more sleep or caffeine. You could just be dehydrated. And hydration is not just about drinking water. It's about having enough electrolytes that support your body to properly absorb that fluid.

Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium that helps regulate your appetite, curb your cravings, and improve your brain function. There's no sugar or artificial colors, no junk, and they just released their new 12-ounce cans, which I drink almost every single day. I'm a huge fan of them. They are pineapple, orange, black cherry, and lemonade. I love these three right here. If you want to try them out, you can get a free eight-count sample pack of Elements,

most popular flavors with any purchase at drinklmntee.com slash know-theyself. That's drinklmn'tt.com slash know-theyself. And if for any reason, you don't like it, they have a no questions ask refund policy. You don't even have to send it back. That's drinklmentee.com slash know theyself. Everything's linked down in the description as always. Catch you on the next one. That's great. I'm curious how you think of, I love the articulation of waking up versus growing up. So waking up a bit more spiritual of the contemplative meditative practices

that sort of see through thought as a permanent structure entirely. And then the growing up is like we have a self. There is a personality that needs an individuation process and one without the other is incomplete. I'm just curious how you personally think about

because you really support people improving the story of self. How much do you also examine seeing through the story of self entirely, meaning we can see this body, it's physical in nature. Of course, the mind is much more subtle, a bit more ethereal,

and any thought we have, idea, story of ourself, it exists in a certain sense, but in a fundamental sense, we can't say that it's permanent and exists because it's always susceptible to change. And I think that's what, like, Buddhism and a lot of these contemplative traditions

help us see is the, the impermanent nature of all of these stories and fundamental identities that we think are real, but in essence are sort of empty. So how do you think about improving the story of our life versus seeing through the story as a permanent structure entirely? Yeah, yeah. Well, I find that whole concept very, very uplifting. What it says, I think, is if I don't examine myself and examine my life, then there's a lot

in me that just happens automatically. and I end up being driven by these automatic things. The next, one thought leads just to the next. And I have a response to the thought, and that guys me one way versus the next, another, and I'm very then predictable in what I'm doing. And you know, a lot of that's going on in my life now, for most of us, a lot of that is going on in our lives

and some facets of life. We can say, why does that have to be so negative or daunting? You can say, well, look at the opportunity there, right? There's so much I can bring to bear to be more intentional about life and to stop and think, why I'm thinking what I'm thinking, why I'm feeling what I'm feeling.

We can bring a whole self to bear that observes ourselves and is curious about what's going on in us and we don't have to be afraid of that. And I think that's what leads us down one path versus another. If we're not empowered to say, I can bring knowledge to bear,

I can understand, and I can use that to bring the change that I want, to make it more likely that I'm going to get the things that I want, so I'm going to be happier in my life more from one day to the next. Like, I want to go do that, right? And I don't have to be afraid of what I'm going to find.

Like, I'm going to find some terrible mystery and mess that's me, that's dark and twisted. And I don't know what to do about it. Like, that doesn't happen, right, in people. If people are dark and twisted, like, there's already an element that knows. They're not watching this podcast, right? So we don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find inside of us. And even if we find something that we don't like, you know, if we find this, you know, I don't feel good about myself and I want to be healthier.

but like I'm really not doing anything about it. It's like, okay, that doesn't have to be scary. We can go again, why is that? Right? Why is it? Or if I say, you know, I am. I used to be nicer to people. And there was a time I was just more thoughtful and more considerate.

And sometimes I'm getting on myself because, you know, I'm sort of more brusk or rude. I can say, okay, you know what? That can be true about me. And again, here's the humility of, I can accept that. Like, I see that myself. It's not pretty and it doesn't feel good to see. But you know what? I can see it anyway.

and I can make change. I don't have to be afraid of what I'm going to find, which doesn't mean we're just letting ourselves off the hook and pretending everything's great all the time. It means we can bring ourselves to bear to change what's going on inside of us if we don't like it. It's very empowering. We don't have to be afraid of looking at ourselves.

That's how we change parts of our narrative, and sometimes we change the whole narrative of our lives. The whole framing of self arises from that, which is a big part of why would I, I do for a living is really fun. You know, people often think, oh, must be unpleasant. And gosh, you're always talking to people. Have miserable things.

It can't bring any change. I think it's not like that at all. Right? Like, it can be a fun. I mean, it has its hard work and it has times that it's sad or distressing of course. But by and large, it's fun to do because people can bring change to their lives, get happier. We really see the progress towards the health that we're seeking. It sounds like that.

excitement for your work is probably born from your ability to actually get results. If you were just going into your office every day with the understanding that you're just diagnosing people handing them pills and sending them out the door, it's like how effective is that, you know, off for debate? But I'm just curious, what are your gripes with the traditional model of mental health assessment diagnosing through the DSM? And yeah, where does that fall short? I think the field of mental health has strayed very, very far from a position at the table of human leadership and a position that would be helpful to the people that the field is supposed to serve. We've stepped away from prioritizing understanding.

You know, the DSM is a very, very big, thick book, and it's got enough diagnoses to have a whole bunch for me and a whole bunch for you and a whole bunch for everyone else. And I understand there is an importance to labeling, right? There are things that happen as syndromes. They come together, and we want to be able to understand what that is. I'm not against having a taxonomy, a labeling of things. But what we've done is we've taken that and we've glorified it. And that becomes the be-all and end-all. You know, that book says nothing whatsoever about how things actually arise.

All it does is describe things. So it doesn't tell us how to understand them. It doesn't tell us how to understand them. seed. And the field now has stepped so far away that what it's by and large doing is trying to fit in to the world of modern medicine, which on a broad level isn't going so well. So we're just looking to identify, well, what might these symptoms tell us? So if I'm sitting down, I don't have much time with you, like, let me just ask you a whole bunch of questions, a whole bunch of questions. And now, like, you know what, I determine, you check a bunch of boxes and you fit into the depression

category. Okay, I've got six more minutes left, right? How, let's, let's, you know, let's, you know, see, I'm going to give you a medicine because I'm not going to be able to talk to you very much. Let's see how we can try and make those symptoms less and then we'll say your depression is treated. Like that's not real. And I'm not saying there isn't a place. There is a place for medicines in some people in some cases that's important. There's a place for real therapy that's driven by understanding. And there are people in the field, like good people who are trying to do good work, but very often the systems make it very hard to do that.

and then the training paradigms are very much about identify symptoms, try and make symptoms less. And that has nothing to do with understanding, with getting really to the roots of something so that you can bring real change. We're kind of out at the end of the branches, trying to snip things and make things look a little bit better. Instead of saying, hey, if we go down,

if we invest ourselves in going down to the roots, now maybe everything is better and we don't have to be out at the branches now for years upon years trying to stave off symptoms of the, the deeper problem. I think a big theme for why a lot of people start getting interested in this work and examining self is because the things we thought we wanted, we have either gone after or maybe even achieved and accomplished and found a fundamental sense of emptiness and it wasn't

what we thought we were going to feel once we got there. Certainly in the case with high achievers. And you referred to this examiner. like the things that we're striving for earlier. And it seems like so much of what we want is being informed by unconscious drives that we're not fully aware of and privy to. I think you gave an example of this patient Ben in your book.

And it's the case that so many of us, you know, face. And I'm just curious how you examine and think about what we want, what's worth wanting. and yeah and just the difference there between the genuine desires that are being like have a generative component towards our life that are going to be that are true to who we are and how we want to express yourself and connect with the world and the ones that are sort of masquerading as noble virtues that are really being you know driven from a fear of being like your dad for example right right

this is where you know i want to anchor again to how it can be fun to play detect with ourselves. And it can be fun to do it with someone else that we're trying to help. So very often, the link between what we're driving at and what we're doing has been lost along the way. Right? So someone who doesn't feel satisfied about life,

they don't feel good about their life, and they keep wanting to earn more money and they'll feel better about themselves. This is not uncommon in the society around us. So they're trying to earn more money because it's linked to feeling good, about themselves, right? But is that really the way the person is going to feel good about themselves? At some point, society tells us, we should feel better about yourself if you're earning

more money. We say, okay, let me attach, we attach something to that. Now, we think we should feel better about ourselves. So the person then is working and earning more and not feeling better about themselves and wondering like, what's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? If we go and we look at that, we can say, okay, let's take a look at that. It's okay to be strivening. occupationally, it's okay to want to earn more. But if we set that up to be something that it isn't, right? Like, is that what the person was really thinking when they said, I want to have a good life?

I want to do good in the world. What was that linked to? And there may be something else that's overlooked, right? Very often there are other things. People end up doing something in the community around them. I can think very, very recently of a woman who is now, she's doing some tutoring with kids who are really having. a hard time. And you think, how's that changing her life? Well, it's a direct human to human contact,

right, that it gives her something that she can see the impact of her being a good person in the world and giving something of herself. Like at the end of each of those hours, she's with that person. She sees that and she knows that. It doesn't mean that she doesn't want to strive financially and strive professionally. She's still doing all of those things, but she's like, oh, right, that's not the one measure of how I'm building happiness. Right? And she didn't get to that through greed or through arrogance. She just got through life is complicated and it's hard. I often think it's like it being strapped to the front of a fast car that's accelerating, right?

It's moving very fast around us. But when we stop and examine, here we see someone who's very happy with her career and her success. And all that is good in her life, but it wasn't everything. And she had to see, like, there's something I have to do where we're like, there isn't anything that comes back to me other than the knowledge that I've done something. Right. And now you see, oh, let's add that. component. So she's understanding herself better along the way that the education and learning

and fortitude of the professional is important. But gosh, there's another dimension of her life that she wasn't paying as much attention to. Then when we start asking questions about that, we see, oh, like this is someone who did a lot of volunteering, like back in college, right? And she's never even thought about that. You know, she's thought about it until we talked about it, right? And other times in her life where, you know, she would, she got to sneak away from the things were important to do something good for someone else. And we see this is run through her life. It's just at some point in time, the pressures of life,

she sort of lost sight of it, right? And now she has it back again, and she has a more full sense of self, a happier life one day to the next. And this is also preventive medicine too. Now she knows. Like, don't let that go in my life. Like, that part is very important to me.

I have to maintain this balance, because this is how I'm taking care of myself and moving myself into the future. It's just an example of how the know thyself and bringing compassionate curiosity, looking at our history, looking at the automaticity, and it's looking at our life narrative, this is so empowering. And that agency and gratitude, then lets us take ourselves down if we choose entirely different paths. Yeah, there is, in my conversation with Gabramate, I remember him mentioning the difference between, like, the feeling

of being called towards something in life that has a sense of inspiration and like a lightness to it versus being driven by something. It's like the shoulds within us. And often, like, the things we're being driven by are usually tied to some sort of historical, unconscious event that's stored within us. And it sounds like the former is way more fruitful, you know, by listening to the things we feel genuinely called towards. And it sounds like that's what the generative drive essentially is.

Right, right. And the wording, because we're using the same word, but to clarify, it's the generative drive that governs all. And the generative drive is beckoning us to good things. Right? So when something from the past is driving, us. We can say it's pushing us. So we could use the same word, but that's different. It's a push. Totally. So I need to do that and I'll feel better. And maybe that's true. Maybe that's not.

But it's a push towards something. It's not saying, hey, like, here I am. And, you know, I feel so grateful. I have health. I was able to get out of bed today. And I'm in the world around me. And I have the capacity to make some difference. And like, what is it that I want to do? I'm going to work very, very hard today. But you know what I'm going to do at the end of the day? I'm going to get the sketchbook out, right? I'm going to call that person who, I know I haven't called in a while. It's that that's beckoning us towards what the rewards of life really are. And when we talk to people who are older and are happy and can say,

I'm happy with my life, you know, I'm 90-something years old, and I know that I'm probably close to death, but that's okay with me. Look at the life that I've lived. Like, there are people who say this who feel this way and can express it quite eloquently. And when they talk about their lives, this is what they're talking about. Right? They're leading intentional lives. They have peace, contentment, the capacity for delight.

They know that there are things that haven't gone well, but they accept that humanness in them, and they are very intentionally guiding their lives forward. And when you step back and say, what's really running the show here? What's governing everything? It's always the generative drive. How successfully in your life do you feel you've separated your internal feeling

of enoughness with the external outcomes and measures of your endeavors? Not remarkably well. And I think I've done a moderately good job of it. I haven't done a great job of it because it is very hard, I think having built, being built and having been socialized in a certain way where I'm attaching my worth to some external achievement in the world around me, being happy with me.

You know, I'm not entirely free of that. You know, and it's hard then what do I want to attach that? way where I want to have an impact on the world. I want the world to feel good about what I'm doing. Some of that is legitimate and healthy and some of it goes a little bit too far. So it can be a slippery slope and I have a tendency to, you know, to push to places where I want that approval and then I kind of feel good enough until the next thing comes up. Now, that being said, there was a time in life where I didn't even understand that, you know,

that I was anything other than the, you know, than the boxes or achievements I could, that I could check. And I think it shows how working on ourselves is a lifelong, it is a lifelong, we're lifelong projects. And that's okay. I don't feel that, you know, some 57 years old now. And I've had therapy for, you know, how many decades now, and I do this for a living and I'm moderately down that road. You know, I can look at that and say, that doesn't sound great, right? Or I could say, no, like, this is an okay place to be.

When I hadn't made progress, that was not an okay place to be. And like all of us, I'm a work in progress. and if someone figures out how we all live to be 400 years old, I'm going to be working on that at year 390. And that's okay because I'm working on it. And by doing that and by being intentional and circumspect, by bringing compassionate curiosity to myself, I feel good about the life that I'm leading.

I mean, there's stresses and disappointments and fears and all of that, but I feel good about the life that I'm leading. I feel good enough. There's a classic sense where we can feel good enough, which doesn't mean limp over the line. It's just solid approval. We're like, hey, you're good enough. And we need to be able to tell ourselves that.

And if we're doing that, we're doing pretty well. Yeah. No, that's great. I appreciate that share. I think so many of us can relate. I certainly do. I know a lot of people listening probably relate how often we collapse our success

with the validation externally, whether it's money, success, whatever it is. And I know you work with so many prolific individuals, celebrities, influencers, creators, business leaders, musicians. And I think it's a big theme, certainly, with a lot of successful high-performing individuals, is that oftentimes the things that drove us to that place were either a fear of not being worthy or loved or, yeah,

so it's fascinating to examine where that still lives within us. It's such a persistent and enduring illusion, delusion, that our ideal life is someday in the future. Like there will be a point when I finally accomplish X, Y, and Z, and I will satisfy this unending hole within myself that will finally be enough, you know? And it feels like also sometimes one of those lessons that you need to learn the hard way.

Yeah. Like, it's, how many bumper sticker quotes do we need to say before, you know, we realize what a lot of these cliches are saying about it being the journey, the destination, etc. Yeah, I'm just curious how often that that realization needs to be met and experienced firsthand in someone's life before being heard on a podcast and finally get it. But yeah, it just seems like such a big theme for all of us. Yeah, yeah. I think to make this distinction, there's a difference between strivings, right, between striving for things and wanting things in the future and living our lives in the future.

Like, you know, this is not okay now and like things are awful now, but I'm going to be. get there. You know, that's not okay, right? Saying, hey, I'm working, I'm working in the present, and there are things I'm working towards that I want in the future. That's entirely different. We can do that while still living our lives in the only moments we are alive. So, like, we are not alive when we started this podcast. We are not alive when this podcast finishes. We're live right now. And, yes, there's a past we can remember and hopefully we continue to move towards the future, but we're alive right now. And we very often can be confused about that.

And oftentimes if we're worried about the future, what we do is we use fantasy inside of us to project out to a future that scares us or worries us. And then we take it back inside of us as if it's true, as if that's the truth in the future, and we're heading towards us. And we have to be very, very careful that taking care of ourselves

and being prudent and striving towards the future is not a different thing from living life in the present. And we can really lose that. And we do it because we're trying to find safety, right? Just like the person who didn't find approval in the new school, saying, oh, I can't have any friends. That's not because that person dislikes them. The person's trying to keep herself safe, right?

So I'm going to avoid people where they would judge me and laugh at me. We're trying to keep ourselves safe. And very often that we're going to imagine everything that could go wrong in the future. and we're going to plan for it and we're going to prevent it in the present. We do that to try and keep ourselves safe, but it creates endless misery in us and to live our lives in the present while being cognizant that we're moving towards a future.

We want to be healthy and strive. It's a lot of work, which is why, of course we have feelings and of course we make mistakes and of course we get confused. It is kind of like being strapped to the front of that fast car that is then accelerating. It's really, really hard, and it warranted. the time and the effort and the energy that we would put into ourselves. And people will sometimes say, well, an hour, a week of therapy,

or I'm going to write about myself for an hour a week or so. It's a lot of time. But it's our lives, right? Just like Sang-won, you know, 45 minutes a day in the gym. It could make a lot of time. It's our lives, right? It's our minds and our bodies, which really are one thing. And we're worth the time, the energy, the attention for ourselves.

And, of course, lo and behold, when we're taking care of ourselves, that way. We're better for the people we love. We're better for the world around us. It's fascinating to examine how many of our behaviors are being driven for a search of safety, whether it's through the relationships, the type of people we look for when we date, our career, all aspects of life. And in that aspect, I'm curious how anxiety is actually like an adaptive response. How is it an intelligent system? Because from your perspective, about, I just love to hear that as it's obviously an epidemic, right? We have the loneliness epidemics.

We have this anxiety crisis. And amidst the time where we have more external wealth, abundance, and comfort, we have widespread internal poverty, so to speak. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are on anxiety, how it's an adaptive response. Yeah, yeah. Anxiety can be adaptive, but the danger here is it's so, so easily for, it to be maladaptive. Right? So anxiety is there

in a way, we can look at a way that it makes sense. You know, if you see someone new and they seem to be neutral and you walk towards them and they do something very aggressive. Right? And like, whoa, and you have to step back or maybe even get hurt, right? Then you see that person from a distance. It makes sense

to be anxious. Something bad happened last time. The anxiety that's raised inside of us is protective. It says, yeah, if I see that person from 20 feet off, something bad happened the last time we were three feet off, let me back away. I'm worried, right? That's how anxiety, just an example of how anxiety makes sense.

But let's say someone is searching for a new relationship, and they see someone, you know, to whom they're attracted, they go towards them, they have a conversation, and they ask the person out, and the person says no, or, you know, I have a partner, or I'm not, you know, you're nice and I'm not interested. Now the person can say, ooh, that hurt, it stung. So then the next time the person sees someone who, could be a relationship partner, the person avoids that person.

It's the same mapping to where something really aggressive happened, right? But here we're misusing anxiety. It's too much anxiety. We might be better off if we could say to ourselves something like this of, hey, it takes, you know, you have to ask somebody out, a number of people out, maybe before someone says, yes. So like, it's okay if someone says no. It's not a litmus test on my value as a person or as a relationship partner, right?

So it's okay that that didn't go the way I wanted it to. You know, you know what I need to do is do it again. And if the next person says, I'm going to go towards this person. And if that person says, no, then I'm going to do it again, right? You know, this is different than where anxiety equates to real threat and I want to keep myself safe. Here are the anxieties. I want to keep myself safe from something that doesn't feel good. You know, rejection doesn't feel good.

Or I feel ashamed if we're rejected. So I want to keep myself safe. But as I said, if we really want to keep ourselves safe, we'd never get out from under the bed, let alone in the bed each day. So we have to take some chances and what we want them to be smart chances, measured chances. So being aware of what we're anxious about makes it a very, no, it's really important because then the person could say, well, no one ever likes me. And I never meet anyone I could ask out anyway. But it's really they talk to one person. The person said no.

then they're trying to keep themselves safe so they don't ask anyone, then they conclude there's no one to ask. But what if we could stop and look at that and say, well, why do you feel that way? Let's just talk about it. Like, how do you, why do you feel that way? No one ever says yes, no one's ever interested well.

Then they maybe say what happened, right? And you can say, oh, like it's natural to be anxious, right? But the anxiety is telling you to keep yourself safe by avoiding any possibility of the thing that you want. Right? So let's talk about how we can manage anxiety. What are you feeling, for example? What's yourself talk if you're walking towards that person

that you want to have a nice conversation with and maybe ask out, you know? And if it's like, oh my God, the person is going to say no and I'll never be able to show my head even. Like that's not fair. Like it's not even no one can be at their best then. And you say, hey, I'm taking a little bit of a chance. I don't know what will come with this, but like,

it's not a litmus test for me. Let me just bring my best self. And it's okay. And if things don't go well, I'll try and bring a little humor to this situation. Now we're managing anxiety. It's not that there's no anxiety, but I put it in its place. So it's not disabling where I just can't go forward because I don't understand.

All I know is that I'm anxious. And in order to keep myself safe, I'm going to avoid the anxiety. You know, that's not good. That's how we create self-fulfilling prophecies that, well, there's no one for me to go out with, right? Because my anxiety is making me avoid everyone who would go out with me. Imagine how powerful. And this happens, like in real life, understanding that then leads that person to be able to tolerate inside, right, to have an inner world that lets them be less anxious

and now engage in different behaviors, and those behaviors are much more likely to bring success. It makes me think of the whole world of defense mechanisms and the way we meet life with resistance fundamentally. You write that cynicism is more seductive because it's easier to critique the world than it is to change yourself. what are the cascade of potential defense mechanisms

that one might find themselves enacting in any arena of life and why are they important to examine? Yeah. There are many, many defense mechanisms, and it's just a fascinating subject, right? They are the defenses around us that are trying to keep us safe, and each of us has a different array of defenses, and we trigger them rapidly and automatically.

Now, we can influence what they are, just like we can influence the unconscious mind. We can't go in and change it all at once, but we can influence it. So the array that we have is not necessarily the array that we're stuck with, right? And there's some parts of it that are good, and there's some parts of our defenses that we would want to change. So, for example, cynicism is an unhealthy defense. What it tells me is that nothing's going to go well and no one's going to really behave well. So why would I engage anyway? So if the opportunity for something good comes,

let's say a new job possibility. Cynicism can protect a person from the risk of failure at the expense of ensuring that there can never be success. So if there's another, I could possibly get a better job, but I have to apply for the job and I might not get the job. So I could say, look, that does make me anxious. It won't feel great if I apply for the job and I don't get it. it, but I want a better job. I want a better job. So it's not going to be easy to fill out that application.

And I don't know. Maybe the process will be fair. Maybe it won't. I don't know. But I'm going to bring my best self to the process. I've given myself a chance of success. There's a chance that I'll be disappointed, but it shouldn't be awful disappointment, right? Let's say I learn it's not a fair process. I'm not happy about that. But okay, I brought my best self. Or let's say I don't do the best job. Let me learn from that. I'll do better next time. But there's a chance of success. What cynicism does is ensure that there can be no success. If I say, that's never going to work out, right? That job doesn't even probably exist.

Or somebody's already got an inside line to it. And to hell with that. I'm not going to be a sucker and go for that. Right. So in the moment, I'm trying to keep myself safer, right? I'm trying to protect myself from disappointment. But what have I done? Right.

I've ensured that there's no possibility of success. Just like if I said, I want to keep myself very, very physically safe, right? But I also need to go out and get some sunlight. Well, you know, I can't hide under the bed. I'll probably be more physically safe than if I go out the front door, but that's where the sunlight is. So we have to understand how and where to take some chances. So cynicism is an unhealthy defense mechanism,

but because they're deployed so rapidly, you have to know to look at yourself. Otherwise, the person doesn't stop and say, you know, why is it that I want a better job? But the last three possibilities that have come up, I've said, that's not going to work. And I haven't even put myself out. there, right? So we have to be able to stop. Think about our life narrative and talk to someone

else or write it down or go to therapy, it be reflective, right? Say, what am I doing? Because some of our defenses will not be healthy. Humor is a defense. The reason I come to it after cynicism is humor can be very adaptive or can be not adaptive, right? So if all of my humor is cynical, that's not so good. Sarcastic, perhaps sometimes. Yeah, sarcastic. So let's say I apply for the job and I don't get it. And I say, well, there's a bunch of jerks that don't pay attention, right? Like, what have I done? I've ensured that I won't learn from the experience, right? So I've used humor there in a way that's sarcastic or cynical, but we can use humor adaptively too. You know, I can not get the job and say, okay, what did I give up? A couple hours of my time and, you know, and I can learn something

from it. So, okay, I'm not the, you know, I may not be the perfect job candidate for everything, but like, here I am, doing my best, put my hat in the ring, or whatever it may be. We can, we can kind of be lighthearted about it, and then it can be adaptive. So there are defense mechanisms that are good, like sublimating, something negative happens, and we look at like, okay, can I make something good of this, not in a polyana way, but in a real way. So it's called sublimating. That's a good defense mechanism. Cynicism is an unhealthy defense mechanism.

Then there are ones like humor that can cut both ways. And how interesting, talk about playing detective with oneself to say, what are my array of defense mechanisms? What are the ones that are healthy, that are good ones? Like, I want to know that, right? And I want to nurture them. I want more of that. What are the ones that are just plain bad? Because, like, I want to really look at those.

Ideally, I wouldn't do them at all. I can't do that overnight. Let me understand. What are the ones that can cut both ways? How can I make that more good than bad? Like, it's fascinating to think, like, we're our own castle, and there's all these defenses around the castle walls, and we can go around and look at them and say,

how do I want this to be better? Oh. So what would the full list that you see, you know, as a clinician, those that come into your office, what are the variety, the sample platter, if you will, of different defense mechanisms, starting with maybe denial and whatever? Yeah. Again, there are many, many, many of them, but just to some of them. So denial, rationalization, avoidance tend to come together. Sublimating is when we take something negative, we make something good of it.

as we said, humor can cut both ways. Other examples, for example, could be acting out. So acting out is an unhealthy defense mechanism where we kind of tantrum a bit or if someone says something we don't like, even if it's real and true. Like we automatically say something negative back. That's a negative defense mechanism. Altruism is a good one. It's very, very hard to do.

But if someone does you an unkind turn and you resolve that the next thing you're going to do is do someone a good turn, right? See how much better you feel after that. That's altruism. So there's so many of them that span, the ones that are good, the ones that are bad, and the ones that can cut both ways. But that's just a same thing. It's a fun game and puzzle to figure out, I feel like, the different aspects of self

that show consistently. And I think, at least for me, I've really grown the most in relationship. I think having like a mirror to see what's coming up. If you spend a lot of time alone, it can be pretty easy just to be cruising, you know, and not really have as much insight into the things that are there. When you think about self-inquiry as a consistent practice we can employ in our life and the various tools to support that, yeah, what are your thoughts on how we can understand self-inquiry, deploy it in our life in an effective way,

and what you've seen has been really the most effective way to do so. Yeah, yeah. I think the starting premise is to take it very seriously, but to be lighthearted about it. This idea of having interest in ourselves of like, oh, if I'm a castle and there's these defenses around the castle walls, like it is interesting to go around and look at them.

Like, I want to do that, right? I'm curious about myself. I know that it's really important. It's my life. So it's very important, but I'm not going to put pressure on myself. I've got to achieve this much by this time. Like, I'm just going to go one day to the next

and I'm going to take steps up and I'm going to take some steps back too. But what's the key? I'm going to take more steps up then back, right? So with that premise, we can then think about ourselves and how we might go about it.

So if I'm a person who likes to write, and I feel like I can write pretty good and I can capture situations, I can summarize things, I might say, you know, if I don't feel really good now, where is that coming from? Let me just write about it. When's the last time I felt good,

different from how I feel now? How did I feel then? How do I feel now? What's happened in the middle? Let me write about that, right? or I might be a person who I don't want to sit down and, right, but I've got some good friends. And I can say, like, hey, can we just sit down for a bit?

I just want to talk a bit. I'm trying to sort some things out inside of me, right? Another possibility could be going to therapy and saying, hey, let me engage a professional. It's got to be careful who's working with us, but someone who's going to pay attention and really be interested in me. I could bring that to bear.

Or it could be reflective, right? It's hard for us to get ourselves into this place of peace where we're living in the present. And that's why there's such an emphasis on mindfulness, right? Because mindfulness brings us in to the present. So it might be through meditation. It might be through taking a walk and being reflective. Like for some people, you know, one might really be conducive to thought about self.

For another person, it might be being really active. Like, what works for me to, like, really start thinking about myself and being curious and looking at what are the traps I fall into? What am I saying to myself? or even stopping for a little bit and noticing what goes on inside of me, right, when I'm not actually doing anything. What am I saying to myself? Can I notice it?

And we just become curious and then we start deploying the mechanisms that work for us. And, of course, everyone's, you know, we're all different, right? But there's a finite number of ways to get it ourselves. You know, we could be curious about the conscious mind. What am I paying attention to? Right. And do I turn away from things that are uncomfortable to pay attention to? Am I drawn to things that are uncomfortable?

What am I doing with my conscious mind? This is the same process we would do. Again, if you came in and you said, I don't know, I feel really short of breath. I'd say, okay, well, let's start. We're gonna look at you from top to bottom. We're gonna do an examination, right? The same way, if you say, I just don't feel good.

I don't have a lot of energy. I don't feel very hopeful. My mood is down. I say, well, we're gonna do the same thing, except it's not a physical examination. What we're gonna do is we're gonna examine the structure of self. I might be interested.

What's going on in your unconscious mind? Might you have learned some negative lessons are pinging around in there all the time? What are you doing with your conscious mind? Where are you directing your attention? Is that helpful to you? Is it different from what it was before? What are your defense mechanism?

Let's think about them. If you're not feeling as good, have they shifted over time, how they've been when you felt really good? Are you interested in learning more about them? Then the character structure, how are you interacting in the world? Do you feel like the same person you were

when you didn't feel down like this, right? And then ultimately we want to understand the eye There's this person you know yourself to be. How do you feel about that person? What kind of summary statements would you say about that person? How does that fit with how you felt two weeks, two months, two years ago? So what we're doing is we're running through the structure of self. We run through the function of self.

We look at empowerment and humility, how you're interfacing with the world through agency and gratitude. How much or how little of that is there? Are you finding peace contentment and delight? How assertive are you? What's your baseline assertive is? If you're normally a pretty assertive person in the world around you, and now you're kind of shy and retiring for everything, whoa, that's a change, right?

Or if, you know, there's things that you do, and they used to really bring you a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. They're not now. We want to understand those things. And then ultimately, we're always looking at the generative drive that is above and overarching everything. And we're saying, hey, is what you're doing, what's underneath of it, the structure function of self moving up,

is it supporting your generative drive to be healthy? Are you using your generative drive as much as you can? So you're fostering goodness in what sits underneath of it. Now we're getting a conception of you. And if we do that, we're very likely to figure out what's going on in you and how to make it better. Just like if you come in and you're feeling short of breath, you know, we should be able to get at that, right?

It shouldn't be like, oh my gosh, we figured out what was going on and we can make it better. No, it's not that in the physical health realm and it doesn't have to be in the mental health realm either. To take an example of that, I'm curious for somebody that has these patterns that are deeply ingrained, maybe as a child, they equated their mother's love with performance in life. And they've now lived for decades of their life building evidence to support that belief about themselves. And I've heard you've been quoted saying anything that's over learned doesn't go away overnight, you know?

And so for these patterns that are deeply ingrained and embedded as like we fundamentally believe that's who, who we are, how does one go from just the awareness of what the pattern is to true transformation? And what have you seen the progression to truly empower people to make that change? Very often just knowledge, like knowledge is so empowering that I've often thought, if I just tell people get knowledge, oh, now we understand and then didn't do anything more, which wouldn't be right. There are other things to do. That alone, it brings so much goodness into our lives, let alone when we have, say, okay, now that we see it, what do we do about it, right? So in the example that you gave,

let's say you have a person who, when that person was a boy, received affection and approval from their mother by performing, by doing what the mother wanted them to do. Now that person grows up into an adult, and let's say that person is interested in women as romantic partners and finds that I just, I don't have good relationships, you know, and I'm always just, we say, well how is that? And they said, well, I'm always meeting women who just, you know, they don't appreciate me for me and like they want things for me. But then when I do those things, you know, I don't get a lot back and then there's more things to do. And like, that's just me. Usually that'll be accompanied by a bunch of negative words. That's what's wrong with me. I'm never going to

find someone. We say, well, okay, that's interesting. Now let's say we explore a little bit more and we see this person is trying to please their romantic partners, right, in order to get approval. And in fact, they're choosing people who want to be pleased, right? They're choosing people who maybe aren't looking for something that's mutual. And we can say, oh, well, that's kind of interesting. Where might it come from now? In the conversations, we look back and we say, oh, lo and behold, there was a mother that wanted things from this person. Approval was conditional.

So then the person became performative. We can say, well, we can link that. And it's actually that's natural and normal. We always want to say, we're all unique, but we fit patterns, right? So it's okay. Like, and no harm, no foul, no shame. Like, this is sometimes what happens. Is that called trauma bonding when you essentially are playing out that drama later out in life and you find the, you know, the person that is the archetypal representation of your mother and a partner, for example?

Is that what you would say? I think usually it's not how trauma bonding is used. I think here it would be the person is trying to stay safe, right? They want approval. They don't want disapproval. So they say, okay, well, that's the past. pattern that the man has, you know, has inside of him. So he says, okay, that's, that's what happens. Women will approve of me if I do things for them, right? So let me find someone who

want something done for them. That other person may have their own trauma. They may not. They may just be someone who says, hey, you know what? I want to get more than I give, right? So then by understanding the person's own trauma, they can say, oh, that's why my relationships are going wrong. I haven't had like eight different bad relationships. I've had the same relationship eight times over in choosing someone who's not going to be able to meet my needs. Oh my gosh, I understand that. Now the person's setting themselves on a path to success because they're looking for a different kind of partner.

I think very often when people say trauma bond, what they're talking about is two people who have trauma and they come together in a way that's unhealthy, right? Now, again, I think that's not fair because sometimes people can have trauma and they can come together with cognizance of their trauma in ways that can be healthy. So I think the trauma bond is when people have their trauma, there's some awareness of that, and then the two people come together. It's viewed often as unhealthy, but it's not necessarily that way. And so you referred to how important and powerful, the sheer information and knowledge

of what's going on inside can be. And then do you think it's like maintaining, it comes down to really in practice day-to-day when these triggers come up, is it just maintaining an awareness of those drives? and those motivating factors. And how does one go from awareness to like true integration and transformation in that stage? Is there anything else you want to add there? Yeah, yeah.

You know, sometimes that's gaining insight over time. A lot of times change in our lives, it comes from perseverance. You know, as I've done what I do longer and longer across time, I've realized more and more that a lot of healthy change is sort of like, rocking rocks, right? That it is hard work to get insight and knowledge. And that also can be great, right, because there's a gratification of the hard work yielding insight and knowledge. Often once we

have insight and knowledge, what we need to do is keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. And that can be hard to do. We very often get daunted because we don't see results fast enough. And I often find myself in my own life in trying to make change and in trying to make change and in trying to help other people to more and more say, right, like we've got to do it over and over again. That thing I'm trying to change, it was 0 for eight last week. Okay, but you know what? This week, I've got to work to be one for eight, right? And if we don't lose confidence in ourselves, because, you know, we live in a world where

the society around us is set up for very rapid gratification, right? Like, we want to do something. We want the response right away, right? So we're not built if the society around us isn't built to say, hey, you know what, it's really hard. And, you know, you might have to come up empty eight or nine times. And then if the 10th time you get a win, that's great. You know, it might be another five or six before you get another one. That's okay.

That's how it changes. But we often don't set ourselves up that way. And the field doesn't set someone up by saying, you know, you're going to have to work at this over a long time. So many, many times a person has said to me, like an intrusive thought of, oh, you're a loser or nothing will ever work. I want that to go away. And I'll say, it can go away, but not soon. Because if you set it to yourself 10,000 times over,

it's not going to go away overnight. It's the example I always give. If we picked a word and we said it a thousand times, we'll each be saying it later today. Why? Because we said it. So we have to set people up for success by saying, this thing that's been going on in you over and over again, it can change, but it changes across time.

So I'll often say part of my job is helping you see it is going to take time and not getting down on yourself. It's five, six times that it doesn't go well or something that's a law of large numbers, like someone asking someone out, right? Maybe it takes a bunch of times, right? So part of my role is to help you not give up and get down on yourself if the next three times you ask, you get a no. Right? Because, you know, it may take 10 times, right? But we really need that because we're so subject to losing confidence in ourselves,

to feeling dejected, right, or to feeling like we're failures and then trying to protect ourselves by not even trying anymore, right? So a lot of times the work is helping us set what our expectations would be. And, you know, there are things in myself. I thought, like, I really want this to change

in three, four months. And, you know, we're five, six years down the road and I've been able to bring some change to it. But how I wanted it to happen in me just wasn't, you know, it was so over-learned. But that can be okay too. It's not like life isn't getting better

along the way, right? It's just getting better in a way that's slow rate of change, but like, that's okay too. And the field often doesn't help us understand that. I find it interesting that a lot of people who have gone through very hard, challenging circumstances in their life, at some point, tend to develop a level of gratitude for that circumstance in that event. For some reason, beautiful people seem to have just gone through hard things. It shapes you, it forms you, in some way, it's the resistance necessary for you to grow those virtuous aspects of self. Have you seen that to be the case in your life and with the people you work with? Yes, I think, again, we have to be careful because if we're up against really big things,

you know, we're human, we're foul, we don't always get through them. So I think we as a society owe it to all of us, especially to the people who are the most disadvantaged, to help people get through difficult things more because we don't always get through them. But if we do get through them, we almost always come out wiser on the other side with just a greater appreciation for how hard life is. And so many people that get up in the morning, do what needs to be done, do things that don't, you know, the band doesn't come and play for what they're doing. But what they're doing is very, very difficult. And they're winning quiet victories of self. Life is hard. And we need to celebrate more. How,

hard it is to just get up in the morning and get through life until often a person goes to sleep that night so they can get up in the morning and do it again. So so much of what we really should be able to value and celebrate inside of us or just the quiet victories in a life that is so hard. And we gain an appreciation for that, which I think then brings humility. So it can bring the humility that if I then don't achieve something I want instead of to say, oh, you're not good enough anyway or to say, hey, life is hard, right? It doesn't always go the way I want it. Like, you know what, I'll try again. Or maybe there's not a chance to try again. You know, I'll have to feel good about myself even though that didn't work out. I have the humility to accept that.

Or if you and I are interacting and you do something that upsets me or disappoints me, instead of being angry or aggressive to say, like, hey, life is hard. You know, we all make missteps, or maybe I'm even perceiving it, right? But even if I am, let me give this person a little bit of grace, right? So I think we come out on the other side with more humility regarding self and other, and then that's leading us right to the active gratitude that is like this with agency. Is there a predominant event in your life that you feel like did that for you? A challenging circumstance that you felt like down the road you made you more humble, grew you more wiser. Yeah, yeah. I think the loss of my brother who died,

by suicide many, many years ago was an event like that. I mean, I was young and I had a lot of very naive views of the world and how the world was supposed to go if you lived in a certain way and did things in a certain way that results were supposed to come, just to get what you want, much more cause and effect, which we can tend to think when we're younger and experiencing the reflexive just fear of it and the sense of guilt and shame that comes from trauma

that came from such a big trauma and realizing, well, life is a lot harder. You know, it's going to be a lot harder for me than I had imagined it would be. It's a lot harder for other people around me. And it took a long time. It took time to see that across time and across therapy. But I think, yeah, very abruptly shifted me into a place from which I could gain a greater insight into just how hard life is. How do you make sense of how that formed you? Not looking back.

Well, I think, you know, it brought a lot of risk to me because especially as you said, like a lot of people we grow up often in places where getting help or expressing feelings is not okay. So I understood just how much in a society that doesn't reach out to help us and say, hey, there's not like a service that comes around, and then says, you know, we notice this world around us

that you've had a really big trauma in your life. Let's see, can we wrap some helping resources around you and help you understand? You know, I realized I was very fortunate to have good people around me, although they didn't, you know, we didn't, none of us understood how to really make sense of it and go learn through therapy,

but I was fortunate to have good people around me and then to one step after another, to also rely on resilience and, perseverance that I was fortunate to have of saying, I'm not addressing this. I'm trying to stuff it down and like life isn't getting better. It's getting worse. Like this clearly isn't working. And and to realize enough to then navigate myself towards getting some help, you know, and at some point in time, I, you know, I called the 800 number on the back of my insurance card and, you know, I was like, I need a therapist. And, you know, and I felt so embarrassed about it. And, you know,

to go look back and see like how bad something like that is and how it turns our world upside down. how hard it was to let myself get help, that I feel very, very fortunate for the goodness around me and just the blessings of resilience, for example, to get myself to that point. And then, you know, that set me down a path of really trying to take in what I had learned, of realizing, oh, like, there's a lot more around us. There's this bigger world of understanding that I want to live in. And ultimately was just very curious about getting more understanding and being able to help people have understanding. And of course, my brother hadn't had help the system around us. He was

having very big problems. Wasn't able to see that. And I wasn't able to see that. And, you know, to realize it doesn't have to be this way. Like there are tragedies that are avoidable. And, you know, when the light ball went off, like, oh, there's a lot more to learn. I thought, okay, I can maybe help myself and help others. And it set me down a path towards medicine and towards some real and important life change for me. Yeah, I could imagine how that would really stretch your capacity for empathy when people go through challenging traumatic events. Yeah, yeah. Most people have had an experience where, like, you know, life, time just comes to a stop or they're falling through space or, you know, we just come apart from reality and just feel a sense of terror. And, you know, most of us have felt things like that.

I think it doesn't, a person doesn't have to feel that in order to bring compassion, to, others. But to have felt that and to really be open and honest about it, I think that, you know, we're people trying to help each other and I think we're not doing any service for anyone being in a helping place that distances ourselves. You know, we have to be real people with real people and engage in a collaborative process. And I think that makes a very, very big difference. It's made a difference to me over the years of being helped by someone who was showing me their humanity. And then, you know, it, you know, press the buttons of now I feel ashamed, be this person who's trying to help me.

And I think if we bring that openness to mental health work, which the system also doesn't always foster, we can just be better people in the world. It's better for the people we're helping. And of course, you know, this up cycle of goodness means that it's then helpful and good for us too. You mentioned a moment watching your mentor at Harvard and how I'm sure that probably goes hand in hand.

I just love to hear a little bit more how your ability to be present with somebody. I think so many of us in our lives, when somebody comes to us with a problem, we have this tendency to try to give a fix and a solution right off the bat. Instead, when there's a wounded dog who's traumatized, often you just need to be able

to sit in their presence for a little bit, allow that to be in the room. And how have you learned, what have you learned about the importance of being present when you're trying to really support somebody? Right, right. A lot of that starts with learning

about ourselves and how uncomfortable someone else's discomfort can make us. And then there can be an inclination to try and solve that or fix that. And it often comes from a well-meaning place, but it's not helpful. I mean, the stereotype here is that men do more of this and men do more of this of trying to fix, right? But, you know, anyone can do this where we're like, we want to fix something. And what we're really reacting to is our own discomfort. not someone else.

Is it maybe that if something sad or distressing has happened, then it's clearly what's best for me is to just sit with you and for you to feel that, hey, there's someone with me, who really is not trying to hide from what's going on to me, also isn't overwhelmed by it. You know, that person can handle what's going on inside of me, which often helps people think, okay, you know,

then I can get my arms around it too. It's so helpful for someone to just sit with us, but to be aware that inside of us can be a very strong urge not to do that. And then we can trick ourselves into saying, well, I really want to say something because I want this person to feel better. And again, here's what we stop and the inside. Okay, let me look at that. Like, I do want this person to feel better.

But is it that I really want to say something so they feel better? Or is that I really want to say something so I feel better? Right. And I'm serving something different from them feeling better. And it's often realizing that in ourselves and having role modeling from people around us, you know, when clinicians are early, you know, in training to see good people who can do that. and they can role model just being with someone through their suffering

and their discomfort is that's a very big part of what we're here to do and we're able to do that by looking into ourselves. Yeah, well said. What's one thing that you fundamentally change your belief on over the past decade,

especially when it comes to working with individuals? If I think about what I've learned and how I've changed over the last 10 years, it's been in a way that's more hopeful and that has shown me hey there is so much capacity for change and that like really being in there with the person makes such a difference you know they we're taught a lot about boundaries and there are boundaries that are very very important of course to keep with the people that we're taking care of

that we don't want to violate those boundaries because it's harmful to do so then there are boundaries that are there just because they're kind of standard and they don't necessarily make sense right so i can think of someone who's very overweight and that person wasn't losing weight and they've been through so, so much therapy, and they needed someone to walk with them, right? So we did our work while walking together. And it's a different way to do work, but I still remember her eyes lighting up, right? That we're going to go walk together. Like, someone won't care enough to go walk. And then she was able to do more of it on her own. And it's things like that of being very careful and circumspect about what we're doing.

But realizing that if we're in helping roles, like we're the tool of the helping and to think, can I think a little bit more broadly about how to be there, really be there with a person? And sometimes that's self-disclosure. We want to be very careful that if we're sitting with someone, it, of course, has to be about them. But sometimes learning something about us or something that's vulnerable about us or some mistake that I've made that might be worse than what that person is beating themselves up about, like, let's talk about things for real, because then we're coming at what we're trying to do from the perspective of shared humanness. And really, that's good for everything that we're doing.

can lead with shared humanness, then we're really being governed by the generative drive. Yeah. If you had 60 seconds to share a message to everybody listening, one important thing to know about the mind, what would that be? So, you know, your mind doesn't want you to be unhappy, right? It's your mind. It's your friend. But it's easy for it to get confused. And when it gets confused, we get scared and we step further away from understanding. We get more anxious. We get more down on ourselves. And I'll bring the message that what's inside of us can help us be healthier,

be happier, and we can go look at it. We don't have to be afraid of that. That there's this thing that you can do, even of stopping and saying, let me think more about what's going on inside me. Slow down the progress. Look at myself that we don't have to be afraid of it. We can look at what we find, and we can use it for, good. And so often the reason we don't do that is because we're shying away from it.

Well said, I think you do such a great job at articulating the reasons why our mind is our friend. And I keep coming back to what you said about the compassionate curiosity. Like that little bit of openness that we bring to ourselves and others, I think makes a world of a difference. Yes. Yeah, I'm curious, with the cool context of this conversation now with your new book, what's going right. Is there something that you feel like we haven't touched on that would be important to?

When you just said compassionate curiosity, I thought, if I haven't used my whole 60 seconds, I want to add that to the end of. Bring compassionate curiosity to yourself. And I think we've covered, we've talked about the things I think it's so important to talk about. And I think bringing compassionate curiosity,

if we think about the bottom up, it's bring compassionate curiosity to yourself. And if we think about the top down, it's know that this generative drive is in you. Be interested in it. Be curious about it. Be fascinated by it. And bring to yourself, do yourself the service of bringing to you. How can this generative drive guide my life more? Compassionate curiosity from the bottom up, the generative drive from the top down. This is how we make our lives better. Well, Dr. Consey, I think it's been so amazing to see you step more into the author space and sharing

more on podcasts over the past few years. And I think your empathy shines through super strong in the conversations and how much you actually care to support people. And it's really amazing. So we'll leave links down in the description where people can find your work, your new book, and all of that. And I think that's pretty much it.

I feel great about this conversation. Do you have any other last thoughts? Yeah. I want to say thank you for such a great interview that you really helped me to talk about everything I wanted to talk about and really get the message out there. So I appreciate being here and thank you for the interview. Amazing. Well, everybody, thanks for tuning into this episode of the Know Myself Podcast. Thank you so much, man. And until next time, be well.