Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Dr. Drew Calls In!

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

I am so excited about today’s episode of “The Language of Love”! I am sitting down with the one and only Dr. Drew! I have known Dr. Drew for 25 years, and I remember sitting in his audience in ���Loveline” way back in the 90’s and just being amazed at how deeply intuitive and wise he was (and still is). Dr. Drew and I are talking about one of the topics that make me geek out the most: Intuition! Our brains are only able to process a tiny percentage of the information that we are being exposed to at any given moment. Our brains have evolved this way to help ensure our survival: To give us the most pertinent information and filter out everything else. But, here’s the thing: If you are an intuitive person, you likely may sense or feel these ‘hidden’ messages all the time. It wasn’t until very late in my career that I realized I had these intuitive powers I could use to help really elevate my clients’ healing. I began tapping into all the signals the universe had been sending me my whole life, signals I have learned to ignore or dismiss because they weren’t easily explainable or ‘rational.’ But in learning more about quantum physics, I found that these experiences actually are deeply rooted in science and what we know to be true about the universe. Einstein himself said “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” On this episode you will learn: • How to engage in ‘whole-body listening’ and really cue in what is happening around you, even beyond the words you are hearing • How to start paying attention to your ‘inner perceivers’ and start picking up on more of the information around you • Ways to use your intuition to improve your love and sex life Listen to this very special episode and let me know what you think! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love sex relationship

questions, and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Dr. Drew, I'm so excited that we could make this happen. I know we could make it happen remotely but it's just such a joy to see you in person which was a priority for me because we have been friends a long time i was thinking about it this morning yeah 20 years 25 years maybe something crazy like that i was brand new in the television scene i remember when i first met you it was you and your sister yes and i came to watch you maybe we were even filming as part of a show i was doing to watch you on love lines with oh my god how funny we were filming that that tv show then you were doing the radio radio show yeah and then i remember i was just

like sitting in and watching the two of you and then and listening obviously and this caller called in that was asking about a relationship issue and you immediately said i mean she had barely gotten her question out and you immediately said you've been sexually abused haven't you Yeah. So I would literally have a bodily reaction. There's an important point to start with is that real listening is not with your ears. It's with your whole body. And I know you know in a therapeutic context, you can get all kinds of crazy reactions and hear things and smell things. And you can kind of learn through time and experience what's mine or yours in your case and what's the patient's, what's coming at me. Not everyone does that and not all clinicians do that. I know. And if you stay in the world of CBT and stuff, though, even that can be done with proper attunement. But generally, that's not taught anymore. It's not. And I didn't learn that. So when you did that, when you said that, probably don't even remember this, but I was like, what? How did you know that? And you're like, I just know. And it wasn't until years later, because up until that point, I would certainly have an intuitive sense when I was working one-on-one with someone, and I wasn't doing what you had been doing for years by then, which was kind of this coaching, counseling, therapy, can't really call it therapy, on air.

No, they're just sort of explicating. But there was another layer to what I was doing that really tuned my body up. Well, first of all, I was in therapy myself. So I was the object of that kind of attunement. And that teaches you something about how that works. So I was in therapy for 10 years and it was the greatest experience. But alongside of that, I was dealing with drug addicts every day. And with drug addicts, you literally have to listen without your ears. And so it's just all obfuscation and nonsense and and i would things would come out of my mouth working with patients where i would trust my feeling and things that would just come out of my mouth would shock the patient yes and you and me sometimes i was like oh oh no oh my god what

have i done where did that and then it works and then it did because the patient particularly drug addicts when you say something no matter how harsh if it's something real they know it too and they feel understood they feel understood and even though through the bullshit yes and the bullshit is what scares them because they can't even tell when they're bullshitting anymore and it's what keeps their drug addict you know the stuff going and to have somebody see them and feel them so being seen being felt is a really important experience for people yeah for everyone for everyone but especially drug addicts who are way a million miles from all that you wouldn't call it this probably, but it is a form of psychic ability. And I always say, because I do the same

thing and it always freaks now at this, you know, for several years now, but it really didn't start until I was doing radio every single day talking to people because it was a very different thing than how I'd been trained clinically. And I remember this intuitive, I'd never really even met an intuitive at the time. This must've been 15 years ago. And this intuitive who's turned out to be a good friend of mine, Robert Ohado, an intuitive life strategist came on my Oprah radio show. He said, okay, we're going to read people and people were calling and he was doing the reading. And then I was getting the same thing he was getting. And I finally said, wait, I think I might be an intuitive too. And he's like, you are. And let's frame it. Our aware conscious brain

is only taken a narrow piece of reality. It's designed evolutionarily to do a specific thing. Help us survive, predict the future, make sense of things, problem solve. It doesn't get everything. No. And interpersonally, there's so much stuff that goes back and forth that our frontal lobes are not aware of, but our bodies are aware of. I mean, we have these huge, you know, people call them chakras, but they're these big complex eye of parasympathetic nerves.

And we've got a huge sympathetic system along our spinal column. We don't know why it's organized that way. We don't really know what it's doing. We kind of know what the downstream effects in sort of what we call the efferent effects are in the body. But what's coming back to the brain, which is the case of the vagal nerve, which is the main parasympathetic input to the brain, it's like 80% coming in. I was always trained in medical school that it's just something that slows the heart down and affects acid production in the stomach. But not that it's an information source. An information source.

And how that information is informing our body, we don't know. And it doesn't just tell you something's off, something's right, something's wrong. It literally, like you said, something comes out of your mouth. I don't recommend that to people, by the way. That's a therapeutic thing you have to develop because you can get yourself in real trouble with that. I will say, though, the thing you can do, anybody can do, is if you feel something in your body, like you have a weird pain or you hear a music or smell something and you're

in an intense conversation with somebody, it's always fair to go, you know, I'm having an experience. I'm wondering if it's meaningful to you. And you'll be shocked. Yeah, what people say. It's amazing. You're psychic, Dr. Drew. No, I don't want to make it seem like that.

I know, I know, you don't want to say that. But I believe, but I suspect that psychics call upon the same thing. Yes, they do. Well, I think we're all psychic. And what has started to happen for me over the past decade or so is that I call it seeing the point of fracture. I'll be working with someone either in person or online or remotely or even when they call into my show.

and it's like i can just after a few seconds and so i can see like i'll see a scene or have a sense of where their core wound started and i'll know that their father abandoned them interesting that you actually see something which is again the patient the person is kind of putting that there interpersonally yes so to speak i don't mean it's some weird you know they're not even conscious they're doing they're not conscious they're doing it my thing back what you saw me do i would often have my eyes closed and i would see that pertinent person at the age that they were they sounded like to me yeah like if they sounded like an eight-year-old they sounded like a six-year-old yeah and that kind of developmental arrest amongst the group we were talking to at the time

was caused by sexual yeah yeah and adam knew it too he got good at it yeah he sort of knew all the earmarks yeah he wouldn't have the kind of clarity that i did we kind of knew the you know what was happening and we weren't always right to be fair we weren't 100 right but we were about 85 right yeah and then the other thing you were doing that i've never forgotten because i i think about it all the time in my own life and with the people i work with this is kind of a segue but still interesting is that you had me fill out a questionnaire you're like i'm doing this little study oh yeah i didn't remember you were part of that and you discovered that people who were in front of the camera like doing media work yes had certain elements of narcissistic

personality disorder which makes total sense you like the grandiosity of being on camera and so and we broke it down into different categories the most severely like overtly narcissist were a reality show people particularly female reality i can imagine and people that had a skill set that they were using in front of the camera were the least so like a news broadcaster a cellist somebody still had some more than average right but because that's what motivated it of course there'd be some motivation from somewhere, but it was not pure narcissism. It was also using that impulse to either share their craft or make a difference. And people stayed in the make a difference zone, not just, Hey, it's me. Yeah. The narcissism was down. Yeah. Okay. So

that was probably me, but I do think it's really important. I talk about this all the time because you hear so much, you know, people are making their careers around bash, especially on social media around bashing narcissists and the narcissist. First of all, there's a continuum and probably, I don't know, you can tell me, but it seems to me like a huge proportion of us fit somewhere in that continuum and a little bit of, a little teeny bit of narcissism ain't a bad thing. Correct. And so the way I explain what you're talking about, so I started working in psychiatric

hospital in 1985. When I arrived there, there was an admission sheet that would have, you know, five different entrants, access one, access two. Access two was the personality disorder. and there were people there, chronic patients, there were acute patients, there was a whole range of stuff there in those days. And the access to diagnoses were all over the place, everything you can imagine. And about 1988, I noticed all of a sudden borderlines started being the predominant thing in the women. And then by the early 90s, everybody, and I mean

everybody, was cluster B. So it's borderline disorder, narcissist disorder, antisocial or sociopathic whatever everybody and it never changed it's been that way ever since and so i watched it evolve and i thought oh this is something and that's why i started looking into it and to be to your point there's no such thing as a particularly personality construct it doesn't have some asset to it and don't look at everything as purely negative even psychopaths can be pro social psychopaths and can be very effective it's it's when the negative part that it's the liabilities of this disorder that people complain about. So lack of empathy, aggression, exploitation, when those elements come in, that's not okay. It's not fun to be a part of that. But to be a

narcissist per se can be very fun to be around, can be exciting to be around. There can be some real qualities that are good. And no one suffers more than the people with the cholesterol disorder. They're very empty on the inside. They have a lot of dysregulation and they're using the environment to try to feel better, which of course is, you know, a never-ending proposition. So what would you say, because I think this is a really important piece of the conversation for people because it is so in the front of people's minds and we want, you know, obviously there's always that intention to educate people if you are in a relationship. It helps to know that you're in a relationship with a narcissist because then you can either get out of it or help them get

help or whatever. Or adjust, you know, sort of adjust your expectations of that person. They're limited yes and so and if that person by the way is a fighter pilot uh you don't want to change that narcissism that much you want that person kind of being that way when they're flying into you mean feeling really confident feeling bigger than life and really fairly confident you don't want to mess with that if that's his or her job and then you can kind of you know raise awareness deal with the liabilities of it and it's it's when it becomes bad where is the tipping point for someone who's let's say in a relationship with a narcissist and they are thinking they've You've been reading the articles and reading the blogs, and they think, oh, okay, here's

the problem. He or she is a narcissist. I mean, we could frame it a lot of different ways. It could be as simple as unhappiness. If you're unhappy in your relationship and you need the other person to change in order to be happy, well, that's not a good situation. No. But I would first look at yourself, see if there's something you, because that's the

only thing we can change, right, is ourselves. And sometimes it's not so much about the person, but about what you guys are doing together. and there may be ways to sort of still let that person be who they are and diminish some of those some of those proclivities and i think people well you know this too and that do are in relationship with narcissists typically tend to be a little bit codependent a little bit so so my dad was very narcissistic and so i do very well yeah so i do very well with narcissists all my bosses were narcissists and i knew when it was happening and i enjoyed being that person's chosen one that's how they make you the best only you can help me they do all these kind of anointing and

stuff yeah i kind of would laugh to myself when it was happening but it still felt good felt feels good until we had a difference until there was a you fell from glory not just the fall from glory came from we had a different set of priorities and then kaboom and then you got to be ready to do war yeah you got to be ready to really go at it and the the really interesting thing i you'd appreciate this if you're if your dad was a narcissist the hard part if you're the codependent is as soon as you start going to war, they're wounded and hurt. And you're so used to taking care of their feelings. It's really hard to do it. Isn't that funny? I mean, somebody who really wishes you harm in this war, you're still like, oh, I got to take care of it. I know. And you

make excuses, but I think it wasn't until the end of my dad's life, probably the last couple of years. So it was a long life as a codependent with a narcissist. Even though I had sort of dealt with my codependence and so many of my other parts of life that one you know it's a toughie but boy did it he god bless him i as soon as i started i thought all hell would break loose when i started setting those boundaries and like holding them firmly yeah and they didn't sometimes they feel uh contained yeah sometimes they feel a little better as long as you're not abandoning or leaving or threatening or you know no no i wasn't doing any of that i was just like no i you know that's not okay to talk to me that way. Or no, I'm not going to do that. That's not okay to ask.

Usually my experience with my own father was what I was met with was confusion. Yeah. They get kind of confused. Like, what do you mean you wouldn't do that? Just because I said so. Yeah. Maybe that's what was happening, but it kept him quiet and he didn't fight with me about it. And he, you know, he begrudgingly. So the point is, that's the point. I mean, you can, I don't like the world we live in where, you know, a certain label, you're all bad. Yeah. That's what's bothering me about this part of the conversation it's just a it's just a way of understanding somebody yeah doesn't mean they're a bad person or a good person it's just a way that they are fitted in a relationship and

it can be okay even when they have liabilities everybody's got everybody has liabilities that's for sure and everybody has wounds it's when you know to me i like i keep finding myself saying that at least as far as relationships go and friendships and people that come really close into my life all i need is for you to be willing to be friends with your shadows like if you aren't right if you're open to me raising the the yeah and just like aware of your shit yes yes and you don't have to be perfect at dealing with it you don't have to have mastered it i mean none of us you can laugh about it you can laugh at it you can acknowledge it yeah but someone who isn't i feel like tends to be more reactive so that's the world we live in right now unfortunately where

all that is pervasive yeah where we're talking about defense strategies here we're talking about emotional defensive strategies and what's happening today is fuck you yeah ad hominem attack or projection so it's you're an idiot you don't know what you're talking about you're an asshole you don't have two brain cells whatever it is they just go as soon as they go ad hominem you know you've triggered yeah this this defense as opposed to an argument they just attack okay that's one side and the other side is accusing people of motivational states that are actually that person's yeah projecting it onto you it's all tons of projection yeah well this is where cancel culture comes in so let's i mean let's discuss that for a minute this is what i'm talking about

that's what this is well i wrote a book about narcissism out of that study that you you referenced and in that book i wanted to write a chapter about historical antecedents where there had been predominant narcissism in the population or at least childhood traumas or sort of I was looking for which leads to the narcissism and I kept really focusing on France and revolutionary France and what was going on I I found a couple other instances where you know this had happened and always mobs break out and those mobs scapegoat every time aggressive mobs with scapegoating guillotines and I kept saying the guillotine I don't know what's going to happen but the guillotines are going to come yeah cancel culture is the modern guillotine that's it yeah and it is like

you are guilty until proven innocent and then maybe afterwards and then people then deny it because they feel guilt you don't really cancel you're still working no no people are having horrific experiences yeah this can i've talked to so many people whose lives have been turned upside down and yes they manage to make it through those are the ones i'm talking to i'm sure they're those that don't manage to make it through so the guillotine does exist the thing they don't understand about the guillotine is that eventually everyone goes up yeah no one's pure enough and by the way resentment starts building in and around the people who are guillotined they'll pull people up too or their families were guillotined or whatever so inevitably this kind of scapegoating

is a terrible process it is and it's some sort of weird so what do you think to me there's been a continuum kind of point like with everything that you know as people get more anxious and there's been all of this disruption and we're going to talk about some of the covet effects and the economy and the protests and george floyd and ahmed aubrey and all these things and all these injustices coming to light and the election and like there's all these catalysts right i mean is that is it just that we're all so freaked out and agitated that in order to get some sort of control we're moving to the dualistic thinking of like you're either good or bad and if you don't agree with me or if you don't agree with the politically correct term or if there's the

slightest inclination or indication you have to be destroyed you must be destroyed it is us as people tend to do when stressed reverting to primitive states yeah it's very primitive to be like that and when the reality of course is always somewhere between extremes it's always a navigation between it's rarely all this or all that all black all white the reality is a is a messy situation and when you become primitively preoccupied aggression of all type comes out and then when you have opportunity for mob formation then you have with social media which allows for mob it's a virtual mob formation but it's a mob formation so do you think it's going to get worse before it gets better i think it's getting better i'm that's what my instincts want to say it's

really what my body said because i wasn't sure i was going to say that but it's what came out of my mouth because i think i'm seeing people say things like just this morning oh good an ad hominem attack that means okay i've triggered cognitive dissonance that's a defense we're not making an argument becoming aware yeah what freaks me out is that it's taken two years to get here and it may take another year and a half before we're going to get to full awareness of what we're doing but people are beginning to sort of speak the language that you and i are talking about right now rather than just gratifying the aggression. Good. Yeah, I think, I think, I hope, I hope it gets better. Well, let's talk because obviously there isn't an individual on

the planet who wasn't affected by the pandemic, whether it was getting ill yourself, losing someone or someone you love getting ill, shut the lockdowns, businesses, all of it. What it feels like to me is that there is sort of this, not even low grade, I would say medium grade residual anxiety and stress that you hear a lot about the medical aspects and getting over COVID syndrome and the implications of the vaccine. Yes, no vaccine, all of that. But nobody really is talking about the residual anxiety that I see and how it's playing out. And I was wondering if you could speak a little to that. I have no expertise with this, but I know exactly what you're talking about and there is a construct out there that i'm not advocating for i'm just

raising as a construct of this idea of the mass formation psychosis which includes at its core free-floating anxiety and i think at very minimum we could say that as long as people feel really unsafe they will gravitate to to primitive kinds of impulses and extremes now why why the in-group out-group stuff is really the really kind of a moment of of our time and the guy that developed this mass formation thing had a really interesting observation which i thought was accurate where he said that what you start doing is developing the behavioral strategies of one group or another let's just say mask wearing or not mask wearing just as a just for a case and the more the information and science and and reality reflects that your particular ritual becomes now a ritual

as a way of signaling your participation in a group yes the more that gets away from reality the signal the more you cling to those signals so driving in here this morning there was a woman in the car next to me with in the car by herself with a mask that always is a surgical mask nonetheless not even in 95 and let me be clear on my position all the studies on on large-scale mask mandates have been negative they have not shown that there's a utility to it probably because the way we do it we eat and we take them off some of that also surgical masks very limited utility they're designed to prevent bacteria from coming out of somebody's mouth into a surgical field bacteria spit not a virus from getting in or a virus from getting out viruses are a

whole different matter. Not to mention the newest incarnations of COVID are aerosol. Highly aerosolized, highly infective. They come into your eyeballs. And breathing into a mask may increase the aerosolization. Who knows? But anyway, so protecting other people is a no. We can't really do that. That doesn't seem to be a thing. But you can protect yourself with an N95 mask, just like a doctor going into a room with an infectious disease patient. We put those masks on and they do help protect us with high probability, but it must be worn the entire time we are in exposure. Not take it off on the plane for meals.

So as soon as you take it off, that's not useful. Okay, so let me ask you this because I had the same thought this morning and I didn't want to create drama with him or with the school or anything else. But my son, who's now a senior in high school, gets an alert from his school because this is what they do now. He was with someone who now has COVID, so he's been exposed. right and so their requirement if you have been exposed five days out no you have to wear a mask oh yeah which he hates but what's interesting is i guess that's better than making everybody

else wear a mask and it's better than keeping him home i guess but it's like a weird ritual sense of security it's like a mind screw it's kind of like a minute it's a manipulation well i i don't know i mean i don't think they're intentionally manipulating right it is a it is people who don't understand the data trying to do something and thank god not keeping them home and not masking yeah i would have been really because the real the real strategy if they really want to keep people everyone else got to wear an n95 everybody and maybe him too but everybody else for sure so but here's the other thing that's other screwball about this there really does not seem to be a thing particularly the omicron of asymptomatic

spread it does not seem to be a thing so you have to have symptoms symptoms and so even if you had it. I'm not saying that's categorical, but generally that's. So if you had it and you were with someone and you didn't have symptoms. By the way, we started talking about psychiatric and psychological stuff, but I always feel like I need to tell people my training and pedigree because people get very confused about what I do. So I'm trained as an internal medicine doctor. So I do everything non-surgical. So I was trained at a time when doctors could, internist could work in the intensive care unit, could do hospital patients and outpatients, which I did. I did a lot of intensive care. I actually was going to go be a cardiologist, but I got sidetracked working at

the psychiatric hospital. And that became another big part of my career. I'll tell you about in a second. So I'm doing internal medicine. I'm board certified internal medicine. I'm a fellow at the American College of Physicians. I became an assistant clinical professor of medicine. I taught medicine all alongside of it though. And I was, interestingly, when I signed up to be a volunteer in the New York physician sort of volunteer group. And it was interesting when I went through the interview process for that, they were like, oh, you know, to put an arterial line Yeah, I do so all the time. You don't have to intubate?

Yeah. You don't have to manage a ventilator? Yes, I've done all that. How about shock? Yes, I do all that. So this is when COVID, you went to help. This is COVID, I wanted to go to New York to help. And they were asking me about these questions about the things I, and they were like, are

you a hospitalist? I go, no, I'm a general internist. And we used to do all that. People don't know that. Yeah, they don't know what it used to be. And a lot of people don't know that about your history because they know you from the psychiatric addiction side. Exactly.

So that's where I feel when we talk about COVID, I have to push this out. And fellow with the American College of Physicians is a big deal to me. I protect that as much as I can. It's a very high standard. And I was an assistant clinical professor. Then, because of the work in the psychiatric hospital, that became much more a part of my life. I became board certified in addiction medicine. And I also fell with the American Board of Addiction Medicine and became an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry.

So I started teaching addiction through the Department of Psychiatry. So I was doing a lot of stuff. And I was the clinical director of the whole program at the hospital. very very we had a reputation for dealing with the most severely problematic patients polydiagnosed seizures psychiatric psychotic unstable medical problems we could handle it all and we did really well we had a good outcome but anyway and i've treated hundreds of covid patients now i've treated a lot of it so i have a lot of experience and people have to understand something i found myself talking a lot lately about the importance of clinical impressions everybody's out there on

twitter and everyone else talking about the data the data you're not reading the data it's like oftentimes the data doesn't keep up with the clinical you i'm sure you've had this experience where you know the data was treat borderline personality disorder this way and you're like i think dialectical behavioral therapy is working and and it takes a year or two for the literature to catch up with that and so now that's happening clinically you know one of the controversial things is ivermectin hydroxychloroquine that is so silly to me these are medicines i've used for decades and there are nothing and there are nothing with covid too they don't do very much they really don't as as compared now when we had nothing to offer i have no quarrel with that at

least people were following their patients and treating them with something but but now we have paxlovid and molnupiravir and monoclonal antibodies the difference between giving somebody like something like ivermectin going i'm not sure it helped maybe it helped they did okay but they probably gonna do okay anyway versus giving somebody a real therapeutic that we have right now and they get better the next day i mean it's and it's every time you have that experience a few dozen times and you're like maybe versus boom it works right away in dangerous situations too and i don't think most people understand that there are now clinical medical so many and they're free for the most part you can get these things and they were purchased them all and you can get

them for free you get monoclonal antibodies infused in your home you there's and you can even take pre-exposure prophylaxis with multiple there's a million things you could do but doctors have not been trained treating it's been weird this is what happened from the beginning of COVID I saw my peers freeze in place and essentially just tell people to go home until they got sick like dangerously sick that is the most extraordinary thing in the history of medicine I've never seen anything like that that was where I started going home and call me when you're really really that's one of the reasons I became so exercised about this whole thing I just saw the panic everywhere destroying things and being the thing that was going to end up being the problem and i became

too aggressive in my saber rattling and that was a mistake it was an error why did people get mad at you oh my goodness no i was totally canceled did they cancel you oh i still get people physically assaulting me out of you killed my grandma no i did not your grandma never heard of me and i'm sorry she died of covid i'm sorry about that i really that it's dangerous i'm sorry that happened to you. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit. Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty. Your donations help the United Way fight poverty in thousands of ways

like providing food, shelter, and crisis prevention. Donate today at unitedwaygt.org. Anyway, that's why I apologize for where I got things wrong. My impulse was correct. Yes. Trying to fight the panic back. Yes. I mean, in what world does the press determine medical policy?

Never. And that was the craziest thing to me. New York Times editorial boards demanding lockdown? Who are you? Yeah. That is a medical intervention. Where did you get that notion from even? A lot of this stuff was made up out of whole cloth.

the social distancing that was made up wow there's no textbook that talks about social distancing there's no textbook that talks about lockdown either that was made up by the chinese communist government and then we and we adopted it we adopted it because we thought oh it's working there we got to do this wow and this is bringing me up to another point sort of in the post-covid anxiety realm yes which i don't think only applies to covid it applies to all the craziness happening in the world right now the media right like they're fueling it they're fueling it but then social media fuels it too and that's sort of an autonomously functioning that's not the journalist but what drives me crazy like okay i get us doing it you know your average joe jane

whoever being you know being triggered and or being dualistic in your thinking or or posting from your wounds or whatever but what really freaks me out is the journalists and it's both sides, if you're watching CNN, they are completely biased and dysfunctional and dualistic in their approach. And on the opposite end, you have Fox, who's doing the same thing in the opposite way. And all of them are wrong. What do you say to people? Because obviously we can't, I mean, I sort of do. I've evolved to the point where I live in a vacuum when it comes to the news. And I just asked my husband to give me the rundown every day, which he graciously does because i get so i mean i still see the stuff on social media so anxious i get so anxious and i get

so angry and but i i get anxious not for me because i can see through it i get anxious for the millions of people who aren't seeing through it and what that's going to mean the worst part is to stay siloed in one team or another yeah because that it very quickly becomes detached from reality here's one of the solutions i uh was very concerned about this california ab 2098 where doctors are now going to be encumbered, their license revoked for COVID misinformation. That was the way the bill is written, that if you deviate from the standard of care, you can have your license encumbered. That's the bill. It's called AB 2098. Physicians are freaking out about it. I was freaking out about it. And mostly because standard of care can often

be terrible that doctors need to stand up against opioid prescribing, something I went through for 10 years telling this is insane the standard is giving my drug addict patients 90 of vicodin when they leave the office are you kidding me this is terrible you're you're an opiophobic standard of care is patient oh i was called that all the time you're opiophobic and pain is what the patient says it is and pain controls what the patient that says it is you're old-fashioned you're interested in patients i was investigated by the department of mental health it was it was crazy that was the standard of care at the time that's how bad standard of care it can kill people a lot of people and it does so not being able to stand up against standard of care lest you be

called somebody advocating for misinformation justifies misinformation well so so i tweeted about it and the president board of medical quality assurance said i i hope to even understand what the spirit of this is and maybe we could talk about it went great let's talk i'm available right now well four hours later we were on the phone for about an hour she was a very bright attorney dad dad was a doctor she was interested in advocating physicians she was very reasonable she listened to my concerns we talked about this standard of care issue and uh she said look we already have the authority to do this that's the reality which i thought god she's right that's true uh and trust me we're this is not going to go the way you guys think it is it's very different

and i was really reassured talking to her but the point being of the whole story is human contact make contact go off on a tangent and go crazy and refuse and when that woman reach out to you said screw you you're you're the establishment and i do this all the time when i have physicians that attack me i always find that so weird so i go let's get on the phone and some of them get on the phone and we're fine some of them will not and those people are freaking cowards you are a coward if you're not you're a peer we're trying to be collegial maybe we'll still disagree maybe with the same degree of intensity but at least we'll hear each other out you're a fucking coward i don't know if you can say that you can say you're a fucking coward if

You're not getting on the phone with a peer for fear of not being able to maintain your- Your own beliefs. Your anger. Not the beliefs. It's the anger they want to maintain. You're right. So anyway, so lots of cowards out there. It turns out I didn't know that.

So I walked away from that conversation feeling very, very assured. I thanked her publicly for it and stuff. And I really do appreciate it. But this morning, particularly, I started thinking, oh, what happens when she leaves and somebody else comes in and isn't that reasonable? So your anxiety is bubbling up about it. You know what I mean? You're like the what ifs.

Yeah, and I understand. Well, what if? What if it's going to happen? She's not always going to be there. Maybe I'll be gone by that point, but she's going to leave. And then what? Yeah. So this is the world we live in right now.

And why is it, you know, a lot of my anxiety is about the government. Why should I? I just want the government to leave me alone. Why should I be thinking about that? Why should that be part of our life so much? It was not what a republic was meant for. And it's new. It's not what a republic was meant for.

I know it's happened at other times in history, but in our human history- Has it happened in America before like this? Maybe in the 20s or something when they were fighting communism and stuff and they did the same thing? Yeah, yeah. Or in the 50s. The 50s again, yeah. So maybe this is a different form of it, but I do feel the censorship, the control. And if you look at, there are lots of data out there about what leads to a quote unquote, not that we're going to become a dictatorship i'm not at all implying that but if you look at dictatorships they start

by instilling fear right and then they use the fear to control and to isolate us from one another and to create this dualistic thinking so by no means am i saying we're gonna end up in a dictatorship i agree with you but but this has happened before is the point and we you know as And Santayana and Churchill both said, those who did not study history will live to repeat it. So I think what you're saying is that one of the things we can do is just contact, talk to people who you disagree with. You can still disagree with them after you talk to them. Contact is a solution to racism. Yeah.

Because when you contact the human being that you've got this stereotype about, suddenly they become a human being, everybody. Yes. There was a book in the 50s that was trying to wrangle with, deal with racism. And the book was called Contact. Because once they studied it all, they thought that's the solution. But right now, it's also the solution to the tribalism. Yes. And the aggression and the acting out and the defensiveness and all that.

Just make contact. And with the contact thing, I'm segueing here, but it's related to contact. The four to 12-year-olds that were shut down and not going to school for two years. Oh, my God. right i worried about the 8 to 15 year olds that was the group i really worried about i don't know why i kept seeing them they look so miserable and i thought that's such a critical developmental phase and oh yeah so i'll take it down to four younger ones like you're learning limits and boundaries and social negotiation and social cues and this is the piece that everybody does not get

that whole thing we open talking about this exchange that happens on a subconscious level between bodies and it also happens on the face yes and the tiny mask the tiny muscles of the face are what what trans maybe the whole story right when we and i are working with the patient we're not looking at their bodies we're focused on their face and they're focused on ours many times too and we are showing a reflection on our face of their emotions that's that way that people build emotion regulation is through pushing it out to another person the other person doesn't just verbally reflect it back but seize it on the mirror of some type and i was talking to a group of teachers and i was expressing this and i and they go what do we do i go we'll get down on their

level and they pay close attention to them and focus on their fate let them reflect back there and the one teacher goes put the mask i thought about that every time when i'd be in the grocery store having to wear the mask and i always look at little babies and look them in the eye and smile at them and have a moment and i noticed i was like oh my god this little baby can only see my eyes what is going to happen to it not because i can't see my face no it's never been tried in history yeah it's not been tried yeah presumably you know there is enough time at home when people are without masks to get some exchange but but it's those older kids you know that normally rely where the peer becomes more important than the parent yeah where they're not they're not even

being exposed to their peers the user developmental process just is aborted and if they are exposed like my kids were during the pandemic they are not facetiming and and looking at each other they're playing games and they're not looking at each other's faces and having an exchange like they would in school or hanging out together they are playing their game together as a form of socialization and it's i hope people understand now that the population that was clearly at greatest risk from this illness are the elderly and by the way they're getting the most benefit from the vaccines i'm super clear about vaccine therapy and over 65 it's very clear benefits they're clear clear clear and treatment benefits so these age groups that we could have focused

our protection we did a horrible job and by the way it subjected them to exposure rather than protection so we shut everybody down just to really protect this one population that we did a shitty job of protecting and now we have good treatments and therapeutics and vaccines and stuff for them. Clearly, the data's not out yet, but clinically, I'm here to tell you, I've seen that they benefit. We shifted the burden of protecting people that are at risk to the younger and the vulnerable, the at-risk, the socially, the economically distressed. We put it all on them. And what do we think? What do you think's going to happen? It's all going to get worse. It's so obvious. I don't know how we get those people back. I don't know what we do for them. And our

educational system in many areas is so inadequate to the moment. And when they all came back to school if they did if they did yeah after not after being gone for two years i see the school system i read the literature and they're like we're going to come up strategies to deal with this and stuff really where's where's the strategy what's the strategy what's the evidence for that strategy where has this ever happened before schools have always been dismal about social are you sure you're sure always a bummer no not at all i think it's important to highlight what is going on, but also what we can do about it. And so there are all of these problems, right? And the schools have always sucked at the social-emotional support, supporting the social-emotional

connection between their students and facilitating that. I'll never forget one of my kids' school counselors when he was being really severely bullied, and this was like in third, fourth grade, said, I wanted her to intervene with the kids. And she's like, that's just going to make it worse. And so she wouldn't intervene. And I thought, wow, if the school counselor is saying if she intervenes, it's going to get worse. Something is really messed up here. But as far as for parents at what we can do at home, how we can advocate for our kids,

support our kids, we're not going to change these systems overnight. That's the point. And the parent participation education is always what determines the outcome of education. and everybody's got to step up and help their kids focus on them get the homework done you know really participate and i i have a lot of friends that have taught in circumstances that are difficult and they always say when the parents are in doesn't matter about the circumstance it matters that the parents are on top of the kids that they're engaged that they're participating and if we could get that going that will make a difference calculating route to avoid seeing

poverty turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away then take the next exit let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty your donations help the united way fight poverty in thousands of ways like providing food shelter and crisis prevention donate today at unitedwaygt.org and so if a parent doesn't know what that means correct which is often the case because they weren't raised that way we got to get that to them yeah so what what are we i don't know i really i i don't i don't know really that's a that is a almost community by community question yeah but if we don't focus on that we're missing the point

now we'll see if those strategies that they're talking about include stuff like that i imagine it will. I mean, how could it not? Well, to me, it was like in the beginning of COVID, it was really easy, but then they got sick of me. I got my kids, we were playing croquet, like I got these silly croquet kids and we were doing science experiments and we were playing with dry ice and doing all kinds of stuff to get cooking and baking and whatever. My youngest and I would just like put a whole bunch of ingredients together and see how it came out and you know they were in probably ninth tenth grade at this point so they weren't young but they were game out of complete boredom yes and then I eventually as school started it was

starting back up and they weren't going back my rule with them was like okay the only way I'm thinking the only way they can socialize is through social media so I'm not going to limit that my rule with them was like look as long as you're doing well in school and you're getting your work done you can't go to a football practice you can't hang out with your friends you can't go to school so okay go ahead and do as much social media as you want as boy was that a mistake well first of all i was going to say my friends that work in the field of adolescence and social media limit their kids to one hour a day yeah no these were not limited to one hour a day and it was their only form so i felt like yeah i would have done the same thing

and they were unequivocally refused to hang out with me you know because they now had this other a thing they got lost in it and it's also now as i'm sure you know as as well as i know all too well associated with depression and drugs that these dealers are now so on the social media when they're hanging out with their friends the dealers are finding them on social media and approaching them and that's what happened to sammy he was on social media all the time talking to his friends playing games whatever and a drug dealer sent him a really colorful menu where i'll deliver one Percocet for $1 to your door, you know, it was all these different things. And it's not just him, but it was counterfeit Percocet or Xanax or whatever it was he took. We'll never know,

but it was pure fentanyl. The leader in Singapore, he would like to have drug dealers die a hundred deaths for what, for not just what they do to the patient, but to the families. And I want to talk to you about this because this is something, I guess it's personal because it pisses me off when people say that my son died of an overdose because he died of fentanyl poisoning. He did not mean to take fentanyl. He did not know he was taking fentanyl. He sure as shit didn't want to die and didn't want to take too much and was very careful with his health. Although he was also a teenager and a good kid and good kids make stupid decisions like we all did. I was wondering what you think about this, because as this fentanyl crisis, I get it that there are lots of recovering

addicts. I hear from the thousands of parents. I mean, I have probably like 15,000 parents on my Facebook support group that I had to start because I was hearing from all these parents whose kids have been murdered this way. And it is murder. It's not an overdose. And many of them were recovering addicts who had a slip and thought they were taking an opiate and it was fentanyl we're losing six a day on the streets here in los angeles yes that's murder also it's murder not just what they've been that's what i'm asking leaving them out there untreated and being duplicitous and that is also because that's what they're doing i've heard this story a lot that's like a dealer comes gives them the fentanyl and may even be there when they pass out or maybe

i've heard from parents whose kids have died that they were with other kids and the kids got scared and ran away or they throw them in the shower and wait too long and all this bullshit and let them die yeah and that's a whole other ball of wax but i just wanted to just get a quick sense from you because you have such tremendous expertise in addiction and substances how do we like change the dialogue that this isn't something that is affecting. I said this to Dr. Phil when I was on his show. I think they edited it out. But he was saying, you know, this is he was creating the story about Sammy. This was not a kid who was addicted to drugs, which is all true. But it kind of bothered me because like, why do we have to clarify that if you are poisoned by fentanyl,

you didn't mean to take it? I'm really bothered by that construct because people have no empathy for drug addicts and and because somebody have a brain condition or just made a bad choice it's still inadvertent death due to poison and they think oh he did it to himself because he was doing he was a drug addict am i because the addiction is where i live you know with those those patients the piece that everybody misses with addiction when they advocate for letting people live their best life i you know live on the street wherever you want man who are you to say addiction is a progressive illness that ends in death yeah period whether it's because those addicts get exposed to something like fentanyl that accelerates things or they just get strung out on meth and eventually

die it ends in death and we're losing six a day and people that prevent you have out open air asylums here right this is a is a hospital it's a hospital filled with patients with no walls and no doctors and no nurses and they're not allowed to participate until they break into the er and then they're forced to put them back out on the street if you just put walls around the same people yeah and said this is a hospital call it a hospital but only social workers are allowed in are you kidding me these are very complicated brain diseases people are terribly ill and they're being exposed to this horrible compound that is accelerating their death so you have people look people are taking think they're taking xanax they get fentanyl they think that's

what happened to my son yeah that's very common it's and it's awful and and our government does not seem to be doing anything about no and it's coming in in huge amounts and the meth and the fentanyl that's coming in and they're making it and i mean i just like one drug bust and that's one of them of a million they didn't catch right but one drug bust they're finding enough fentanyl to kill everybody in the united states just one and it's just pouring in through the borders and then they're even making them in kid-friendly rainbow colors and i mean it's really spooky and it's the number one killer of people between 18 and 45 right now think about that think about that and what are we doing about it oh we're leaving them on the streets and we're doing

nothing with the supply okay and we're doing nothing with social media regulation and we're doing nothing with the incoming supply yeah so it's very yeah i have the same exact reaction like i'm so tired of fighting it i'm so tired i've been saying what do we do with being so tired i guess just keep going yeah homeless is another version thing i've been focusing on and i did a documentary i think it's called beyond homelessness remember right and i was for the salvation army and i was went to sort of a release of this film at a film festival for them and the woman that spearheaded it i said i'm just so tired i go what what is going on she goes it's a religion it's a religion in california you're fighting a religion what is the religion the religion is let

people do whatever they want to do and it's nobody's business what anybody does with anything under any circumstances yeah where you live what you put in your body whatever it is the idea of a brain disease or bad or an adolescent development with poor judgment not something that they would even contemplate as compared to this religion of it's not even freedom uber alice right it's weirdly intolerant i mean here's the thing i always say again i'm just looking at the homeless thing why if a demented patient ends up on the street confused talking to himself psychotic and i don't treat that person i'm guiltier of elder abuse but if a schizophrenic is walking around with the exact same symptoms i can't touch him he's living his best life or a drug addict has

complete denial and anosognosia can't see what's happening to him i can't touch that because that person's doing what they want to do believe me when they get better they are furious with the people that left them in that condition for so long and those are just a few that get better yes there's so many and all i i've hoped for all of them because i've seen people get better that shouldn't get better and we just got it you have to do something you have to do a treatment and to do nothing is like just it's manslaughter in my opinion and it trickles all the way down into young kids making bad choices yeah which we used to be able to do big bad choices yeah yeah didn't have the terrible consequences i mean we might

worse i mean obviously you could end up addicted which would be a terrible you know it would end up it would end up with addiction it would end up with accidents fights pregnancies unwanted sexual contacts and stis yeah that's where it would go but not death but not death yeah and from where this mama sits all of that would have been preferable of course let's think about a really high note to end like a more positive note to end on you get positive towards the end here so uh i love you it's great to see you really i love hearing your story and your your sense of things that is very similar to mine and that's very reassuring i hope people understand the spirit that we have sort of come across this landscape it is based on our experience and

we do have a bit of training behind us we do have maybe something worthwhile that people can learn from if somehow things we have talked about run afoul of your religion or belief systems or whatever good fine i'm sorry i have no i'm not no no offense intended no offense intended and i am between the extremes yeah you know more of us need to be there and make contact with each other because most of us are there in reality we get spun on one side or the other it's easy for us to get spooled up like i was saying that ab 2098 i was i was pretty excited about that when i before i talk to somebody and you know when you make that contact it it's a healthier place yeah it feels better believe me and no decision made from fear is ever panic never makes things better it

always makes things worse and that's what i knew in the oncoming pandemic i kept screaming for the press to shut up they're going to make things they're like no we want ratings we're going to scare the shit out of people they did and they continue to really like they that's the only that sells. They can't get enough of the fear mongering. Until we stop reinforcing their fear mongering by eating it up and fueling it. And it's natural for us to go there. So here's on the positive. Focus on the things that you are grateful for. We all have a lot to be grateful for. I know it feels weird and awful. There is a ton to be grateful for. Things are far better than we feel like when we go on social media and watch the news and things. Gratitude. Focus on

relationships i've noticed that i have a brand new oh i should i should tell you about all the things i'm doing but one of the things i'm doing is i went to the wadi rum desert in jordan and trained with special ops forces it's going to be on fox in january not fox news fox network uh and i was there with 15 other celebrities and we became trauma bonded frankly and we were are now deep friends and that and that experience of really enjoying these relationships reminded me of that priority so let you know make contact with old friends focus on your family spend time make some new friends and that's what i'm saying i that's why i opened with how much gratitude i have seeing you again and being here with you and my admiration and love for you is immense it's

mutual and so the express and express these things express love my wife last night goes you never do say i love you anymore oh yes i do and i go like when you had your colonoscopy I mean, you were asleep, and she goes, I tell you why, because you always go, why? She was being funny, but you go, why? Or, no, you don't, that kind of thing. I go, I'll start again, stop that this morning. No, you don't, same thing. I went, come on, let's do this.

So people have to give and receive love. That's an important part of this relating. Yes, receive as well as give. Yes, and so that's what I'm coaching my wife on that. but gratitude gratitude have faith have some sort of spiritual program and i would urge you to easy way to find that as service service to other people uh and let's do the things that we know work and get back to those basic what's your spiritual i mean you don't have to tell me your religion but just what do you do to create that i know i'm not good at it i'm not good at it and

i've always experienced it in context of relating to other people so i try to spend more time doing that i really feel awestruck and sometimes about relationships and what i see and feel in other people yeah and so you feel a lot you come across not right now but when i've watched you work you have your clinical hat on like the rest of us yeah you can come across as like stoically professional not emotionally stoic but you actually are very psychic and spiritual whether you admit it or not so what you see me on tv doing oftentimes is you know what radio or whatever it's i gotta do something fast i gotta get to it and i'm not trying to do anything except give you a little direction on something like celebrity rehab i have a big job in addition to attuning to them

is keeping them contained yes yes and containment and on track i've got to contain them and keep them and then really judge carefully they can't they're very fragile like you know their brains aren't right for a year and the end and they can only take so much of the real stuff and so i have to kind of parse that out into all the quantities so but i don't think people know how not that they need to but i want them i'm announcing that dr drew is extremely sweet fuzzy and very psychic whether he portrays himself that way or not and i am one of your greatest fans and i thank you so much for being here one of my motivations for being here was just to spend time with you so thank you for that what do you want to tell us about what's coming there's that crazy thing in

the desert and i would appreciate your guys showing up for me uh on drdrew.tv we do a streaming show tuesday wednesday and thursday at 3 p.m and some of those days pacific time yes thank you yeah and some of those days i'm just taking calls off twitter spaces just answering your questions uh other days like wednesday i have a woman named kelly victory she's an er doctor in there with me she has very different opinions than i do like she's in her you know she would bristle when i talked about hydroxychloroquine and that kind of thing but i like that difference and we've been talking to outliers we've been demonstrating contact correct correct of course vilified for it you know so i'm giving platform to the end and i just want to hear what they have

to say yeah so mccullough and malone and reish and all these guys we were talking to and it's it's expanded my understanding i've been so confused about what we've just went through it was hard for you to make sense of it and these guys had a certain experience of it where i'm like Okay. I think Jay Bhattacharya, if you want to look up somebody interesting on Twitter, he's going to be the poster child for the excesses of the early period of COVID. This guy's a brilliant epidemiologist, a Stanford professor, and they destroyed him for nothing, for nothing. But anyway, also drdrew.com. I'd appreciate you there. I do a lot of different podcasts. I do one with Adam Carolla. I do one by myself. I do a YouTube channel over at a place called Your Mom's House, which is sort of an incarnation of Loveline. And it's sort of more, I interview comedians and things. It's a little wilder. It's not for you faint of heart folks, but anybody younger listening, you'll find something you'll like there, I'm sure.

Okay. So they can find all of that, including Dr. Drew TV at drdrew.com, right? Yes. But if you want those streaming shows, it's better to go directly to drdrew.tv. drdrew.tv. So we'll put all of this in the show notes. Thank you. Thank you.

And send this to many people. And watch for that show in January, man. What's the name of it? It's right now called Special Forces The Ultimate Test I saw you posted something about it Follow you on social media

Thank you It's at Dr. Drew on Twitter And at Dr. Drew Pinsky on Instagram And the show is going to be on Fox Fox Network And I think it's going to be following football Like the Super Bowl and things like that And it was such an intense experience

I'm not sure they can ever do it again Really? You mean once we see what happened no one will sign up not only will no one sign up they'll wonder what's wrong with us for having done it number one and and it is as dangerous as it looks wow did you get in shape and yeah i i and it still wasn't enough i didn't last for i can't talk about it but right but but i was running hills i really sprinting hills and running with packs on and weights and i and it's how i got into it they came to me and i was like come on and i go where am i going utah or something they go no the middle east i'm like oh come on and and so then i started training because i was a little depressed

then i was i covid made me depressed yeah like a lot of us not just for what part of my life was taken from me but i was i to me the symbol of loss was the businesses around disneyland i kept going florida's open just open disneyland a little bit it's outside let those businesses come to life again it just depressed the hell out of me anyway uh so i started training and it gave me elevated my mood and got me focused on that maybe this is another good advice yes physical physical activity sleep and physical activity hungry angry lonely tired watch out for all those things but anyway i i thought oh maybe this is what i need i started then i started fighting for it then i went and i was by far the oldest person there it is a young person's competition let me just say that

and um but i would go again but i would go again i would go again that's a testament we'll have to watch. I'm looking forward to that and to seeing you sooner than two years from now, since relationships are so important. Thank you for joining us and for all you are in the world. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit.

Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty. Your donations help the United Way fight poverty in thousands of ways, like providing food, shelter, and crisis prevention. Donate today at UnitedWayGT.org. Where some see heroes and others see egos, Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.