Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dr. Gabor Maté: Who Gets Sick, and How to Prevent it

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Dr. Gabor Maté (addiction, stress, and childhood development speaker & bestselling author) joins us to explain which groups of people tend to be most prone to chronic illness, practical ways we can prevent these diagnoses, and the link between childhood trauma and mental & physical health conditions later on in life. He details health conditions you may not know have stress-related causes and explains why healthy attachment and meeting a child’s needs is even more important than we think. Dr. Maté identifies characteristics of those who are prone to chronic illness, reveals why autoimmune diseases predominantly affect women, and discusses the dangers of systematic denial of our emotions. He and Mayim consider the ways well-meaning loving parents can unintentionally create lower level trauma in their kids, how feelings of being unwanted can lead to workaholism, and the limitations of a traditional nuclear family. They discuss Dr. Maté’s time working at a supervised injection site, why most people in the prison system are highly traumatized, and why trauma goes hand-in-hand with addiction. Dr. Gabor Maté's New Book, THE MYTH OF NORMAL: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608273/the-myth-of-normal-by-gabor-mate-md-with-daniel-mate/ BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're very sensitive and you're one of these really talented sensitive people who generate so much in this world. You also have trouble saying no. You see need everywhere and you want to meet all those lights. I want to fix it. Yeah. And I believe I have the power to do so is the balacy. You have the power to make a difference. You don't have the power to fix it.

It's my and biolog's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. Hi, I'm I'm Biolic and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so that you don't have to. And we have an exceptional, exceptional guest today who, in my opinion, has literally helped me break down pretty much everything that I've ever experienced or ever will experience. Dr. Gabor Matte is a highly sought after doctor and specialist. He's sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood

development. First, I'd like to introduce you to the person who's highly sought after for his expertise on just about everything else in my life, Jonathan Cohen. I love, I am. You've been talking to me about Dr. Gabor Mate for years, and I poo-pood it, and I'm publicly apologizing to you for not listening harder, sooner and better. This is a book that has significantly changed the way I'm viewing. my current health challenges and emotional challenges. And it's been an unbelievable journey to read this book with you. And the fact that we get to have this man here is, it's really

unbelievable. And thank you. I'll keep that on repeat. He also breaks down like the causes in our overall society that make us really not understand ourselves. I consider this the theory of everything. Meaning the physics theory of everything, I think the myth of normal, which is his book that we're going to be talking to him about, I really feel like it's the theory of everything. He is possibly most well known for in the realm of hungry ghosts, close encounters with addiction, which some people say is the most definitive description of what addiction feels like and what it does. Also, when the body says no, exploring the stress disease connection and scattered, how attention deficit disorder originates in what you can do about it. He's also co-authored Hold On to Your Kids, Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in nearly 30 languages. I mean, for many people, in those fields I just mentioned, he is the really definitive expert.

And he is also, you know, entered into the most modern and progressive worlds of therapy, healing, trauma work, while also maintaining an incredibly strong connection to our primate, intuitive, and primal existence. He's kind of done it. He wrote this book with his son. He has three children. He's been with his wife, I think, 53 years, and she's here for part of our interview listening in. It is an extreme honor to welcome Dr. Gabor Matay. Break it down.

It's very exciting to have you here. And as Jonathan was just talking about, you've been. in doing the rounds, as it were, talking about your most recent book, which is called The Myth of Normal Trauma Illness and Healing in a toxic culture. I'm going to hold it up to the camera like I do. We debated how to pronounce your name

for about a week or so. I thought Gabor like Jaja Gabor, who was Hungarian. You are also Hungarian, but it is Gabor. In fact, their name was Gabor too. It's just that when they came to America. They Americanized it. They Americanized it, yeah.

And what is the Mate? Mate. Is it Mette? Mette. And Mati actually is the Hungarian version of Matthias or Matthew. Oh, interesting. Yeah. You know, without kind of putting too fine a point on it, I would say, I've recommended this book to more people since I got it than probably any other book that I've ever read with the caveat to these humans that I've mentioned it to.

This is the one book that I believe explains the most things about our experience. And you have written very significant other books about aspects of this book. And what this is is an opus of sorts. It is really start to finish. And I didn't really know, you know, I knew of your work and Jonathan's been talking about you for really for years. But what astounded me about this book is it really kind of does go from womb to cradle to grave. it were. From womb to tomb, that's right, from womb to tomb. I mean, I dog-eared most pages, really. You know, when you when you have that experience with a book, it means that, you know, there's

something obviously that it's touching, you know, very deeply. And I, God's honest truth, I've already started speaking to my children about this book. I've been in a process of, you know, re-analyzing a lot of things about my life, my health, my psychology. Many of these things, this happened to come at a time when I was able to make changes. Not because of the book, but with the support of the book. Some are dietary. Some are in conjunction with an autoimmune disease that I've had for, gosh, 25 years, which recently has reared its head.

And the scope of your experience is incredibly significant. Almost everything that I would read to Jonathan, because basically I would read sections and then I would take it to him and we would kind of go through it. And he would either say, yeah, or we know this, or that's true, or you've experienced that. Of course that's right. In fact, I wrote a book on attachment parenting, which contains a lot of the intuitive kind of things that you discuss. And, you know, I had my head served to me on a platter, you know, for supporting natural birth and breastfeeding and extended breastfeeding.

By who? The same people that, you know, kind of create the culture that I think, you know, you so well encapsulate. So I'm going to turn this just briefly to Jonathan. I don't know where to start and I don't know where to end with this man because I both feel that this is the kind of thing we've been, you know, trying to get to. You know, the reason we created this podcast was to try and bring aspects of the human experience. that trouble us, that we don't always have labels for or that we have too many labels for. And I feel disingenuous just to say, like, everybody needs to read this book and implement it immediately. But that's what it feels like. That's my visceral kind of reaction.

Well, you know, let me just say, first of all, that before we turn into questions, is that just the emotion and the comprehensive sense with which you describe your reaction to the book, it's just the most profound and best kind of feedback I could ever get. You know, I wanted in this book to help people find a map to themselves. And not just to themselves, but to themselves in the context of the world that we're living in. And I wanted people to be moved and touched by the book, you know, because it's really about us as human beings. So you're giving that back to me in spades, and thank you very much for seeing the book for

what I intended it to be. So some people, because I'm head of English to English translation over here, may say, what are they talking about? Right. What is a map to yourself? Yeah. And my most succinct summary of this book to anyone who's out there dealing with, you know, open quote, something in their life.

Yeah. The thing that you think you're dealing with is likely not the thing that you're actually dealing with. Yeah. It's a symptom, not the cause. Yeah. Tell them what I mean. Well, so here's what I think you mean. But maybe...

No, we do reflective listening around here. That's great. Good start. Also, you're both Canadian. You speak the same language. So it's... Sort of. Canadian, eh?

So, speaking on my own life, if at any time you'd ask me why I was doing what I was doing, I was giving you one answer. But later on, with more experience, reflection, and I would say suffering, I realized that what I thought I was doing wasn't what I was doing at all.

so that the levers were pulled by something that I wasn't aware of. And so when I talk about a map to ourselves, I'm talking about a map to the unconscious drives that really motivates so much of our experience, whether we're talking in the realm of politics, the realm of personal relationships, and the experiences that create those childhood, those unconscious dynamics, so largely,

and I'm not the first one to say this. It's like we're living, a dream. And at some point we wake up and we realize that we've been dreaming. And this has happened a lot in my relationship. A lot of times in my political life, you wake up and you say, I've been dreaming. What I thought was reality, wasn't reality. So if anything, this book is an attempt to give people a map to their reality. You know, I felt this many, many times, you know, especially when you talked about pregnancy and when you talked about, and when you talked about, you talked about, labor and when you talked about you know the that first year in particular of a child's life

yeah so that was kind of the first place it hit me and what you say is something that a lot of people do not want to hear and I think that's why people are still not like we still need to keep doing this is that it matters it matters what your pregnancy is like it it matters what what you haven't dealt with that will come up for you emotionally and This is the point of the unconscious, right? You often, quote, don't know. And it matters how you raise your child. It matters what you feel about their autonomy versus yours.

It matters if you hurt them, even if you think it's for their own good. And that was sort of the first wow, because, you know, Jonathan and I both come from, you know, my son was born in that room, Meaning we come from, you know, a parenting style of trying to do what we intuitively believed our species was supposed to do. And it's extremely unpopular, right? So that was sort of the first aha. And then I thought, oh, we're going to get into medical stuff. No, then you tackle childhood and the teenage years, which extends then into adulthood. And what it was was that guess what?

It matters. And this is what I've been, this is what I started talking about with my children. since I'm reading this book. It matters what you eat. Like, it really matters. It matters not just for your body, for your, it matters emotionally. And then it goes to the toxic culture we live in. And a lot of people, I think, already sort of tune out, right?

But, I mean, I can pull up the exact quote, but the notion that consumerist society that we all live in, are immersed in and have come to think is normal, actually matters for the rest of our physiological, hormonal, immunological, and psychological development. In introduction, we quote David Foster Wallace, who gives this little anecdote at a commencement address that he gave before he committed suicide.

These two fish that are swimming along and they're accosted by an older fish who says to the morning, boys, haws the water, and the two fish in them for a while, and one of them turns to the other one and says, what the hell is water? Correct. And David Foster Wallace says that these things

that are so close to us and so big, we don't even see that they're there. And I think that's what you're describing here. There's so many things in this culture that we swim in like fish in the water, but we don't know that we're swimming in water. We think it's just an inevitable reality. But so many things in this culture

that are considered to be normal or criminally abnormal from the point of human needs. Now, there's one more thing I want to come back to. Just as an example, you mentioned an autoimmune condition that you have, okay? Now, you can tell me what it is, you cannot. I have Graves disease. Graves disease, okay.

Hyperactive thyroid. Okay. Here's what I bet. I bet that, and I'd be delighted if I was wrong, by the way, that all the years that you saw specialists about this condition, did anybody ask you about child to trauma? No. Stress is in your life. How you feel about yourself as a human being?

Nope. What I'm saying is that because of the mind body is inseparable, unshakable, scientifically overproven unity, all these autoimmune conditions actually have to do with our emotional lives and how we grew up in this abnormal culture. Okay. So this upsets people because no one wants to, I mean, sorry, I shouldn't say no one. Many people do not want to go there. And one of the most powerful. things you talk about, especially as a woman. Fibromyalgia, endometriosis, multiple sclerosis. Things that we see predominantly, statistically speaking, in women. 70 or 80%. There we go.

Almost 100%, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. And what you talk about is something that many people don't want to look at. So I know it's difficult to go there, but here's what I would say to people. And I tell what my experience is, would you rather hear that you've got this mysterious, so-called idiopathic, we haven't got a freaking clue what causes this condition, there's nothing we can do about it except to try and control the symptoms? Or would you rather hear that this disease that you've got is not the thing with the life of its own, but actually it's a process that's happening in your body in response to your life,

to what happened to you as a child, in response to how you treat yourself as an adult. And if you understand all that and gain some agency over it, you can actually gain some regulation over that process. Which message would you rather hear as a human being? I'll be honest with you. I would like to hear the latter. But I also know that most people do not have the resources that I would like them to have.

And Jonathan hates when I say that. That is not my experience. Because people's biggest resource is internal. Right. MyNBialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water.

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Not only did Superpower reduce their price to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention myambiotics breakdown to help support the show. I've seen people with all kinds of autoimmune conditions who've taken agency, who've recognized, You mentioned multiple cirrhosis. So this was so crazy about it. The first guy who described multiple sclerosis,

French neurologist Jean-Martin-Sherkoe in the 19th century, said that this was a stressed-caused condition. William Mosler, a great Canadian physician, also founding father at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, he said rheumatoid arthritis was a stress-driven condition. an American surgeon James Padget in 1870 talks about breast cancer as related to women's emotional states and particularly depression and so on now these giants of medicine who are all still revered in medical history

they had no science behind their intuition they just had their intuition and observation since then in every three of those cases whether it's breast cancer or whether it's multiple sclerosis or rheumatoiditis, there's been oodles of scientific research showing the relationship between stress and those conditions. And yet most people, they go to a physician, stress, trauma never comes up. Now, what I have found is that when people understand the connection

between what happened to them in childhood, the traumas they endured, the stresses degenerate for themselves, how does their body saying no when they don't know how to say no, either in work or in personal life, And actually they learn to set some boundaries for themselves. There's actually a change in the physiological process. Why wouldn't there be, given that mind-body are one and inseparable? So I don't find that people are that resistant to this message once they understand it.

The real problem is that you can go to physicians trained like me in the Western medical tradition. And despite all the science, you never hear this information. I want to talk about cancer. Yeah. Because I remember the first time I heard someone say that, you know, cancer could be from anger or repressed this. And I remember I said, I mean, this was many, many years ago and I said, that's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard.

How dare you say to someone who is dying and going to leave children and a partner, how dare someone say that? And one of the, one of the closest people in my life who passed from cancer was an incredible woman. And she was so loving. And she was a nurse. And she was this like Israeli Sabra. And I thought, how could anyone say that, right?

And I'm reading your book, and I realize there is a different message about cancer. Can you explain that? Well, first of all, I'd be just as outraged as you are if somebody went to somebody with cancer because you got this, you know, whether they were dying or it, whether they were just dealing with it. You never say that to anybody. You don't push that information on anybody. However. But however, scientifically, it's only true. Like when I worked in palliative care, looking after dying people, or in family practice,

I had an advantage over the specialist because as a family physician, because I saw people before they got sick. So I knew who got sick and who didn't. And I knew their family histories. And I knew their multigenational family histories. Tell us who gets sick. So who gets sick, people who are prone to get chronically ill. And by the way, we have to nail that. We're not talking about causation here.

Yep. Okay? Sure. There's multiple causes. So we're talking about a contributing factor, but a reversible one. Right. And if you reverse it, that can have a positive impact on the condition. That's the whole point. Right.

Okay. Tell us who gets sick. So who gets sick, there's sort of full characteristics. And you tell me if you're Israeli friends. I have all of them. Go ahead. This is not a bingo game. But tell me if you're... Everything's a bingo game.

But tell me if you're... Israeli friend maybe. No, I've, yes. Okay. First of all, people are prone to get chronically ill are ones who tend to put other people's emotional needs compulsively ahead of their own. Ding, ding, ding. Okay, number one.

Number two, they tend to be over-identified with duty role and responsibility rather than the needs of the self. Ding, ding, ding. Okay. They tend to... repress healthy anger. They don't know how to set a clear boundary. I don't even know what anger is.

Yeah, healthy anger we're talking about. Ding, ding, ding. You know about throwing. I throw things. These are the people. I rage. I don't know anger. You heard the expression of God die young?

Yeah. That's what that's what means. Very uplifting. What's the fourth characteristic? These very nice people. I worry about people that are very nice. You know. He knows I can be very mean, but yeah.

Yes. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The fourth is this belief that you're responsible for other people feel, and you must never disappoint anybody. It's not a belief. It's a truth. Ding, ding, ding. No, it's not a truth. I know. I was being, sorry.

You're being your comedian self. Okay. Yeah. No, those are the, no, why do those traits read to wellness? Well, go ahead. We'll let you tell people. It's because, again, as a neuroscientist, you know, and having studied no neuro. neuroendocrinology or neuropsychoendocrinology, you know that the mind and the body can't be

separated and that healthy know, it's a boundary defense. The role of healthy anger is a boundary defense. In fact, our emotions in general, they have one fundamental function, allowing what is healthy and nourishing and supportive, the love, you know, and keep out what is toxic and dangerous. That's the role of our emotional system. Now, I actually, trick question. What is the role of our immune system? It's the same. It's exactly the same. It's to keep out what's toxic and letting what's nourishing.

Letting the nutrients, the vitamins, the healthy bacteria in the gut, keep out, destroy what is... In other words, the emotional system and the nervous system, sorry, the immune system has exactly the same function. And not only do they have the same function, they're part and parcel of the same apparatus. They're not even separated. Right.

So naturally when people repressed themselves emotionally, that's going to have impact on the immune system. How could it be otherwise? I want you to take us back one more step. Pretend like we're not talking about me right now because that's going to get awkward for everyone. Okay. What things in early life lead to those four characteristics? I mean, I read the book, so I know, but I would like you to tell us. But fair enough, but you're both parents, okay?

I'm looking at the list. It's on page 166 and 16. Go ahead. You're hired. You guys have both kids. Have you ever met a one day old baby that represses their feelings? No. Okay.

In other words, we're born with that capacity. So that between the or entry into the world, fully embodied, fully in touch with our gut feelings, fully capable of actually communicating exactly what we're experiencing. not in words, but in gesture and tone and so on. And the time of become adults who repress ourselves, something happens. So what happens is that the child has got these two needs, the need to attach and to belong to the parents.

In fact, without that need being met, the child can't even survive. This is true for all mammalian infants, but especially for primates. But especially for humans, because we're the most, dependent and the least mature, the most helpless for the longest period of time. So that attachment relationship is not negotiable. We have to have it. Do people know what you mean by attachment that sense? So attachment is the drive that pulls two bodies together for closeness and proximity so that one can be taken care of or take care of the other. And that's a hormonal connection also. It's hormonal,

it's emotional, it's neurological, it's an instinctual. Birds have it. You know, the infant bird would not survive without it. When we say attachment, and you're talking about neurological and biological and emotional, the immune system function of that dependent human being is reliant on that attachment. Exactly. Yeah, the healthy development of that organism depends on that attachment. Well, and it's development and maintenance. And both.

I'm a lactation educator counselor, so I speak to women. I just visited a five-day-old yesterday. And, you know, the notion that the smell of a mother is different than the smell of a stranger, the voice of a mother, that a mother regulates her body's, the body temperature according to the newborn's needs. And the smell, the sense of the smell is one of the first to develop. And an infant can tell the smell of the breastbread of her mother, from distinguishes it from other women within a day or two. Right. So that's what we talk about when people ask me, like, why, why, why have to? to keep holding the baby. Why does the baby want to nurse so much? It's trying to attach to you because

it's a primate. It's a, what it's doing. So here's the thing. So you asked what happens. What do we tell parents in this culture when we tell them to sleep train their babies? We tell them not to pick up their kids. That's right. Now, you tell a mother baboon not to pick up their kid. She'll tear your face off. Exactly. You're going to find out what mother rages all about. So human beings are trained to go against their own instincts. Yes. That's, you know. Human beings are trained to go against their own. instincts. That's what, and this is, we're just scratching the surface of what leads to those four characteristics. There was an article in the New York Times two weeks ago that there's no

distinct as mother instinct. Well, you tell a mother bear that there's no such thing as mother instinct or a mother instinct or a mother cat or even a mother. I mean, I will say my, my first son was placed in the NICU right after he was born. Yeah. And I felt, and as did, you know, my husband at the time, I felt a surge of emotion I had never felt when they were. wield that child away. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, I'm grateful I had a vaginal birth and an unmedicated one because I needed to be on my feet as soon as humanly possible to start figuring out

when I could get that baby out of that prison. That I also went, my younger son had a seizure from a fever when he was not even a year. I think that he was not even a year. The feelings that came, it was like I was transported to another level of the existence of trying to keep your human alive. I've had mothers who tried to sleep in their babies, train their babies on the advice of doctors like me because I used to advise this myself.

They told me they had to stand in a shower and put their fingers in their ears. Oh, I know people who go to hotels and leave a husband who does not have hormones of the woman. They go to hotels and leave the husband at home and see what happens. So here's the thing with instincts. They have to be evoked by the environment. They don't automatically work.

They have to be evoked by the environment. This environment doesn't not only not evoke parenting instincts, it actually suppresses them. Correct. Because we're told to separate from a kid's giving them timeouts when we don't approve of their behavior. Now that gives the message to the kid. You can be yourself. You can have one of the essential needs of children is their freedom to feel all their emotions. That's an essential development in need of the child.

All their emotions. All their emotions. Fear. Not just the good ones. When people say, is it a good baby? Yes, it's a good baby because sometimes it's mad and sometimes it's happy and sometimes it's sad. And the infant and the young child needs to have their freedom to have all their emotions.

That's an essential developmental need. You know, you talk about capital T trauma and lower case T trauma, which we do here as well. And you, you know, you use one of my favorite things, one of my favorite examples of people saying, I have PTSD because he didn't show up for dinner. Or, you know, I have PTSD because she dumped me. And it really bothers me also just because, you know, for someone who studied obsessive compulsive disorder, everyone says their OCD if they like their shoes straight. And that doesn't, you know, identify that either. I'm laughing because somebody reviewed this book on Amazon and

Britain and said it was Marxist Psychobabble. And I was traumatized to read it. I said, okay. But you weren't traumatized. Maybe you're upset. Maybe you didn't agree with it. But you were not traumatized. So we use this word trauma a bit too loosely. Correct. I went to this movie and I traumatized me. No, you just had felt some sorrow. You felt feelings. You had emotions.

So tell us, though, about, so besides sort of this systematic, what was it? Systematic. Systematic denial of emotions. Systematic denial of emotions. From the time we are fully embodied as a small baby. Correct. Yeah. The other things that lead to these personality types are things that many of us also don't talk about. They are abuse.

They are abuse that leads to trauma. I mean, those things may be difficult to separate. But people really don't want to hear that something that happened to you when you were a child might lead to these personality kind of traits and eventually might lead you to illness. Tell us about some of those other features. Well, I will, but I just push back a little bit again. You say people don't want to hear it.

Actually, people do want to hear it. So in the book, I give the example of the comedian Daryl Hammond. Who's been on Saturday Night Live a lot. His documentary, I mean, it's absolutely. Oh, I saw it years ago. Yeah. So Darrell had his first mental health crisis when he was a student at university. And he was given this diagnosis and this pill and not diagnosis and this pill or this combination of pills for decades.

Yep. And he saw probably 30 or 40 different psychiatrists. Nobody had ever asked him what had happened to him as a child. And the first time a psychiatrist actually said to him, I don't want to call what you have a disease. you were hurt badly in childhood. He said that was like a hallelujah chorus moment. Wow.

And so people actually, what would you rather hear again that you've got this sort of mysterious biological, maybe genetic brain disorder and all we can do is give you these pills for the rest to your life? Or as a result of what happened to you, you develop certain emotional and psychological ways of being that we call now a disease, but actually if you learn about how you were traumatized

and how to deal with that trauma, you can actually ease those conditions. Like which message would people rather hear? I'm saying that people would rather hear that second message because people rather have some agency rather than just be passive recipients of health care. Now again, I'm not even rejecting the use of medications as I've taken them myself and they've helped.

but I think this whole idea that mental health conditions are simple diseases that are biologically basis, scientific, number one, according to the research, scientific nonsense. Secondly, even worse, they disempower people. I think people would rather be empowered. We're speaking about two different fundamental views of our experience as human beings. One is the world is chaos, anything can happen at any time, and there's no control or answers to anything. The other is we are a natural part of a biopause.

biological system and we develop patterns based on the past. Exactly. And as Maim says, it's painful to look at that. So it's true. It is painful. But it's a kind of noble kind of pain. That's what we call growing pains, by the way. If you want to grow.

That's what I say. You know, you have to have some pain. And not that we impose people in pain, but most of mental health conditions and addictions and so on, the pain is already inside. And in fact, it's the attempt not to feel the pain that makes people sick. So we have systematic denial of our emotions. We have things like... Well, so, you know, then there's the whole adverse shot of experiences list of physical,

sexual, emotional abuse, a parent dying, a parent being mentally ill, a parent being addicted, violence in the family, a parent being jailed, a rancor's divorce, neglect, the link between these adverse conditions and mental health problems later on in life, as in the words of one leading British psychologist, is as well established in the scientific literature as the link between smoking and lung cancer. And yet, you go to most psychiatrists, nobody's going to ask you about that stuff. Go to most Western doctors for just, I mean, and with all due respect to the Western profession and all the lives that are saved

because I can already hear the people saying, like, where are you, I need to see sex. I got a new hip, I love Western medicine. Jonathan had to have a hip replacement. I did think it was emotional, and then we looked at the scan, and there was no cartilage left. So let's establish our shared respect

for the achievements and contributions of Western medicine. We're not talking about that. We're talking about what it misses. Correct. So we're talking about the narrowness of its perspective, and its ideology, and that narrowness limits its capacity to heal. So that's all we're talking about.

I mean, Dr. Sarno revolutionized the way we think about back pain. Back pain. I'm also a Sarno person and I have chronic pain. I'm sure you're not surprised. And so the notion that most people will already feel a lessening of chronic pain when you learn that it's not that it's all in your head, but there may be no physiological basis. It is a vol, I describe it as I turn the volume up on everything that happens.

It's even more complex than that. There is a physiological basis, which is what Sarno calls the tension. Tension myocytic to syndrome. So there's inflammation. Correct. And there's clenching. Tension.

Yes. That's physiological, but that physiology is related to emotions. Exactly. So again, it's the non-separability of emotions and physiology. I mean, that book did. It changed my life. And I grew up with a father whose back was always going out. He was always laying flat.

And he and I have a very similar personality, very similar. sure enough, right after my dad died, my back went out, was flat on my back. And this has happened more than once. And then I was introduced to that book and started therapy in that kind of arena. Great. It's just a party over here. So we talked about those kind of four personality traits. Yeah. So of course trauma. I mean, here's the thing about trauma. In the book I talk about V, the former events. And her father... That was fascinating. Her father raped her. You know. She talks about this in her own book. Can she afford to be angry with her father when this is happening?

What would happen if she got angry? Sure. She'd be hurt badly because the father also physically abused her. Sure. So the child then who's being abused, if they, even so much as evince any anger at all, they're putting us in greater danger. So it's the wisdom of the organism that actually... That's protective.

That's protected, that represses the anger. But that same protection, that same adaptation, later on... There's a price. There'll be a price to be paid later on. So whether it's parents who are following the totally misdirected advice of so-called parenting experts, and there's all these parenting books out there that are tattered by the media, they're toxic, so many of them. I tell people don't even read what to expect when you're expecting. Yeah, yeah.

I just, I, yeah. Well, you and me. You remind me of what Michelle O'Don told me, who is the, Michelle Donne is a. I know who Michelle O'Don. Okay, okay. This is obstetrician and advocate of healthy birthing. And when I interviewed him, he said that ideally a woman wouldn't read any pregnancy books at all. She would just sit outside and commune with the moon, she said. Oh, I like communed with the moon and other women who had had the experiences that I want. But I'd like you to talk about something in the book that's also extremely confusing. Yeah. Well-meaning loving parents

who miss the mark can create the environment essentially for a lowercase trauma of its own sort. And I don't want to compare what many people experience as capital T trauma.

However, this is something that is so fascinating and disturbing that you can have parents who are loving, connected, present, don't abuse, You know, don't abuse you overtly, don't hate you, you know.

And if they are not emotionally available, and I know that's a term that a lot of people are like, when is that? I think we know exactly what it means. If you have parents who are addicted to work or have other addictions, drink to numb out, you know, any of those things, what does that do? So, look, I was one of these parents. I don't question most parents love for their kids. Very few parents don't love their kids.

And very few parents don't do, try and do the best for their kids. But the best is limited, number one, by any traumas that they're still carrying, that they haven't worked out. So my wife and I, you know, when we had kids, we hadn't even known that we were traumatized, let alone work out our traumas, which means that our relationship was very conflicted. My trauma would bump against hers, and of course, there'd be rancor. Our son, Daniel, with whom I are brilliant, eldest son Daniel, with whom I wrote this book, he talks in the book about having this nightmare. is the child, of the floor disappearing from under his feet. What he was talking about is he never knew when the emotional atmosphere in the home would turn very tense,

which for a very sensitive child, is very threatening. So we loved our kids, we would have done anything for them, but just their own traumas and stresses, they couldn't help out absorbing them. And trauma means, doesn't necessarily mean something terrible happening. Trauma just means a wound. That's the actually meaning of the word. Kids could be wounded.

not by terrible things happening, but just by the insecurities and emotional unavailability of the parents. Furthermore, I was a work-collar like doctor. Now, I've talked about this before. Why was I a work-a-like doctor? Because the message is a Jewish infant under the Nazis in 1944. The message that I got from the world through the anxieties and tears of my mother is that I wasn't wanted. Now, if you're not wanted, a wonderful way to deal with it, just try. make yourself important in other people's lives,

so now they want you all the time, whatever tools you got. In my case, that was being a doctor. Right. So I became a workaholic doctor. Workhawism means that I'd rather be on a job than at home, that I fully alive and active and kind of activated when I'm working, but I'm rather listless and depressed at home.

And the beeper is always going. No, what message you have my kids getting? That they're not wanted. And that's the last message you ever wanted to give them. So it doesn't take abuse. Right. just stressed parents, especially in a society where people have become so isolated. Like parenting was never meant to be an isolated couple in a nuclear family home.

You know? I say this all the time. Yeah. I mean, how we evolved as human beings was as communal creatures. And also sticking a man and a woman together and having a man be the recipient of all of the things that happened in your day and all of your emotional things. That's actually not what the species evolved to do. No. We were supposed to share that with other women and other people who,

tend to hold more emotional and social contact. And I mean, this is why when people say, oh, you should have a man in the birthing room and he needs to be an active part, he really doesn't. And like, the experience also of becoming a parent was something that was for women, the work of women. Yeah. It was the work of that social situation. So listen, let me tell you something exciting.

Everything you say is exciting. Oh, great. Okay. Believe me, that's not true. But a scientist that quote quite a bit in this book is a woman called Darcia Narvaez. And she's a professor of Merita at Notre Dame University who studied Aboriginal Indigenous groups.

She's just in the new book. You all want to talk about it to her when she comes out. It's called Evolve Nest. I wrote the forward for it at her request. It's going to be published next year. And it's comparing our parenting practice with those of other mammals. So I read this book.

It's totally fascinating. You know what happens when an elephant gives birth? When the elephant mother goes into labor, all the other elephant mothers stand around in a circle. So she's not too vulnerable.

And when the baby plots to the ground, they all stroke her with their trunks. So that birth was a communal experience. Now, the same thing used to be with human beings. And so that we live so unnaturally. So that the parenting, I should say this,

the stress on parenting in a society is almost unbearable. First of all, because of all the economic and political uncertainty, and then the isolation, then the erosion of community and extended family, so that parents have an almost impossible job in this culture. So it's never a question of blaming parents for anything. It's a question of just recognizing the challenges that we are facing because we've become so denatured.

In Canada, you know, there are not that many places that people live. Yeah. Meaning like if you're in Toronto, you either stay in Toronto or you go to Vancouver. Sometimes you go to Montreal, but otherwise you stay there. And all my friends who grew up in Toronto, they all have their extended families around them. And when I come to the U.S., when we raised our child in Los Angeles, we had no one. Yeah. And there's so many more examples of that where U.S. citizens, they're traveling to different cities,

much more frequently and they don't have that extended family. Yeah. I'd say the same pattern is increasingly present in Canada as well. There's an American political scientist or sociologist, Morse Berman, who said that if the 20th century was the American century, then the 21st century is going to be the Americanized century. And Americanization, the globalization of the corporate capitalist ethic and its consequences is becoming universal now.

When you talk about loving parents who do their best and, you know, who are, you know, attentive and give the children everything they want. There's three things that are pointed out. And you're actually quoting, you're quoting a different study. But the things that can be very disturbing to a child, uncertainty, conflict, lack of control and lack of information. Well, no, wait, no.

This I quote as part of the HPA axis and the... These are the triggers for stress in people in general, not just in children. Correct. Correct. But I'm thinking those things also happen in good families, right? Where there's a lot of, so that's what I was thinking. Well, of course they do. Right. Because if the parents are facing those stresses, it's impossible. There's a psychologist that once said to me that children swim in their parents unconscious like fish in the sea. Yeah. So when the parents are upset and stressed because of all, because of inequality or economic stress or their own unresolved trauma. It's in the water. It's in the water.

That's the water that could swim in. You have a quote. I mean, this is on page 189. Everything the corporate juggernaut foists upon children. Prefabricated play options, video games, mass manufactured toys, gadgets, peer-centric online platforms, and saccharine and superficial television programs targeted at toddlers and preschoolers, along with the mainstreaming of glossy soulless, porn-inflicted depictions of sexuality available to teens

and increasingly even younger kids has detrimental effects. That's like a mic drop because, again, these are things that I'm literally talking to my kids about. That shit matters. Well, I quote a psychiatrist and also psychologists who studied the impact of digital media on young kids, negative all across the board. Of course.

To brain development, to personal development and so on. Either the psychologists or the psychiatrists, I forget which one said that she sees women now changing the baby's diapers while the baby's looking at the screen. Absolutely. I've seen it.

No. That diaper changing isn't just a physical act. It's an act of emotional transaction. It's parent, whether it's father or mother or grand. parent, it doesn't matter. It's the parenting figure and the infant interacting over making a child comfortable. Correct. Especially in a vulnerable situation.

Yeah. I mean, literally. Then you introduce this. All of a sudden, there's no relationship. No. That lack of relationship has an impact on a child's brain development. Period. Can you say that again?

That lack of connection with the nurturing parent has a negative effect on a child's brain development. People don't want to hear that, meaning like moms who are doing that and dads who are doing that. Well, why? Let's explain why. Let's hit this harder. Because here's the thing. The human brain develops an interaction with the environment. And in the book, I forget on what page. I quote a study from Harvard published in 2012, not a study, but a paper from Harvard. Harvard Center in the developing child. But they point out that the human brain develops by an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues. and continues into adulthood

and sets all the conditions for healthy learning and behavior that follow all the conditions. And in the second sentence, they say that the most important quality that affects the circuitry of the child's brain. I'm talking about the neurotransmitters, the biochemistry,

is the quality of parent-child relationships, especially in the early years. So the emotional relationship with the parent actually programs the physiology of the child's brain. So when you look at what's happening, now in our society, with these millions of kids being diagnosed left, right, and center with all manner of diagnosis which you could talk about. Sure.

All spectrums of all spectrums. Yeah. And the first, the doctors are still holding on to this idea that, you know, there's genetic conditions, the health of genetic conditions. You don't see genetics change that quickly. Genes don't change in 30 years, you know, or 20 years or, you know. What's actually going on is that the loss of that attuned, non-stress, relationship with the adults is affecting the healthy development of the child's brain.

And no wonder you're seeing more kids with depression, anxiety, ADHD, and so on. And then you introduce this thing into the mix, which actually has been in study shown to interfere with the development of healthy brain circuits. Then you got what you got. And then there's all this hanging going on. What's going on with our kids? And The New York Times and the New Yorker both have had articles in the past six months about the alarming rise in childhood suicides.

And it's unexplainable. It's not unexplainable people. It's because of despair of children at having lost those healthy essential relationships because of the toxicity of this culture. I want to repeat this because a lot of people listen to audio and they're doing other things. Yeah. And they're not...

Multitasking. They're multitasking. I'm guilty of this. I listen all the time. And if you're listening right now, this is probably one of the most important messages that we have had in over 100 episodes. What you said, as I heard it,

was the neurocircuitary and biochemistry of a growing child's brain is reliant on a safe, present, attuned attachment. And non-stressed. And non-stressed. Yeah. And I want us to talk about what attuned means because I think that is a whole concept

that people don't really understand. And I'm pulling this apart on purpose because I think it's absolutely essential that people begin to at least understand the concepts. Yeah. Well, the tune means that the one person gets the emotional space of the other and communicates that I get it. You mean understands?

Understands and gets it. Now, we do this automatically until we don't. If you ever sit on an airplane with a baby, where the baby starts crying, almost everybody goes, aw, you know, that awe, that sort of pulling of the face, and that sort of empathetic noise that we make, that's attunement. We're saying, oh, kid, you're not, you're having a hard time.

I usually say, can someone put a breast in that baby's mouth? Well, that would be a good advice. But our emotional response to the child is to share the child's emotional space. That's what attunement means. Is empathy? Empathy is a part of it. But it's also the capacity to get what's happening for the other person. Now.

Why am I having trouble with this? Is it being able to reflect it or share it? understand it. It's getting it and reflecting it. And not shutting down in the face of it. Right. Not putting a binky in it, which is what we do. Yeah. So that's essential. When people are stressed,

they can't be as attuned to each other. Like, as a couple, like you would know this. When you're one of you are stressed, it's hard for that stressed person to be plugged into the other person. We're too caught up with our own anxiety. We have no idea what you're talking about. You wouldn't. I do. For example, depressed mothers. can't attune with their kids. Not that they don't want, love the child,

not that they're not desperately devoted to the child, their brains just can't do it. And what happens in the child's brain when it's trying to attune to this unavailable source? You can look at electroencephalograms at six months of age. This has been done. That's his favorite hobby

is looking at electroencephalograms of six-month-old injuries. The kids are six months of age, and this has been done, comparing the EEG, of infants, six months of age, of mothers who are depressed and those or not. And you can tell from the EEG of the child whose mother is depressed and who isn't.

In other words, the child's brain circuitry is programmed by the mother's emotional states. Also, we've seen, I mean, animal studies have shown this, you know, even before we could look at this in humans. We're not that different. I always say this. We're not that different from other animals, especially mammals.

We're not. You can see this in, you can see it in rats. I mean, you can see it, you see it in all systems, right? And we think we're the, because we build buildings and we, you know, create God and we, you know, do all these other things. When you were studying neuroscience, did you ever run across the work of Yak-P-B-N-K-P-S-E-P-P-P? I don't think so? P-A-N-K-S-E-P-P, because he said exactly what you just said.

He pointed out, and I quote him in the book. Yes, I remember. He pointed out that we share emotional brain systems with all mammals. Yep. So we have circuitry for anger and circuitry for love and for grief and panic and for fear and for loss and for play and for seeking. And we see, and we share these. Now, this circuitry is there, but it depends on the environment to evoke their activity.

When the environment is unnatural, in fact, contra-natural, as it is in our culture, then those circuits don't get expressed. Humans are everywhere with tremendous potential. It's when you place people in an environment where they cannot thrive and there are no resources for them to thrive. And also, I mean, in your documentary, incredibly power. to see the work being done in prisons. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that, oh, you know, it was very moving. There's a circle of men in a prison.

And what is the woman's name who does this unbelievable work? Fritzie Horstman. Yes, and she stands in the middle, and she's got a microphone, and I was thinking, why is she shouting so loud? It's so that everyone in this ginormous circle could hear, and she said, if you grew up in a situation where you were hit, where you were beaten, where you were spanked,

spanked, take a step into the circle and everybody steps forward. And she keeps asking all these questions. If there was, you know, if there was not a parent, if you did not believe you were loved, just the numerous systems that have bought into the toxic culture and that are part of it is like a continuing problem that is honestly very overwhelming. And I see why people drink to forget what's going on in the world. Well, when you look at the, um, the prison system, most people there are highly traumatized people. Yep. And so, So what we're fundamentally doing in this society is creating conditions that traumatize people

through the pressure on families, through the stress on parents, through the fact that in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which amounts to a massive abandonment of the child, is what it is. It's the only way the child can experience it, through then, not to mention racism,

and inequality and so on. And then, so we traumatize people, people then act out their traumas, and all we do then is we lock them up and control over the key and we punish them for their trauma rather than using, if we have to isolate people from society because there might be dangerous, rehabilitate them. You do the work that's necessary.

And those, where there are programs in prisons, where there are Fittsies program. There's another program called the EPP, NIAGISN. I'm an enigrant prison project. I'm an enigrant person. I'm trying to get him into it. Well, so the wonderful people doing this, EPP, those killers, they transform. I talk about one of them in the book, but it's trauma that drove them there.

When you hear the trauma, they become different people. So this is, I think, a really good place to lean into what many people know you predominantly for, which is addiction. Yeah. And the study of addiction, a very close friend of mine expressed, that she has never heard her own addiction understood more than the way you describe, the notion that you can get to a place where you literally do not care if you throw away everyone and everything for pursuit of a chemical experience.

And in the same way, when we talk about, for me at least, when we talk about crime. and crime that is, as you just said, often perpetuated by hurt people, right, who often are in a place either of addiction. In many cases, there's drugs or alcohol involved. But the notion that you can be in an emotional environment where you have lost the ability, you've lost that tenderness, that vulnerability, you've lost the ability to care about not only. the life of another person, but about your own life. Yes. So can you speak to that? It's a huge component of this conversation.

Sure. So for the last 12 years of my medical path, I worked with North America's most concentrated area of drug use. And Jonathan, have you been to the downtown east side of Vancouver? I have, yeah. Yeah. So it's shocking to go there. It's shocking from anybody. It doesn't matter where people come from. When they see that area, it's shocking. So there's thousands of people within a few square block radius, injecting. and inhaling and ingesting drugs of all kinds.

And these are people living with HIV, often hepatitis C, poverty, multiple jailings, and so on. You worked in this population for 12 years. I was working with them for 12 years. In fact, that was the physician at what was at that time, North America's first supervised injection site. Right. Where people would bring their drugs and inject under safer conditions

using sterile water and clean needles and all that. which the Americans, by the way, tried to force the Canadian government to shut down, but thank God that didn't happen. Well, it's good we have a Puritan nation to keep you all in order. Yeah. So anyway, I was there for 12 years, and so in those 12 years, I had not a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child. Say that again. I didn't have a single female patient, hundreds of them in 12 years who had not been sexually abused, and all the men had been severely abused. Some of them sexually, some of them other ways.

Now, fair enough, that was my observation. Then you have the large-scale studies that we've already referred to, the adverse childhood experiences studies that show the same thing. And also this is highly underreported, especially for men to report sexual abuse. Highly underreported. So we have to also take all of these statistics with a grain of salt. Yeah. There's so many people also in denial. But for you not.

Yes. Nevertheless, the studies still show that more of those experiences that you have, the greater risk of addiction later on in life. By the way, also the greater the risk of autoimmune disease and mental health conditions and so on. but specifically addictions. So by the time a male child has said six of these, sexual, physical, emotional abuse, et cetera, et cetera, his risk of becoming an injection using drug addict is 4,600% greater than that of somebody else.

A 46-fold increase. Now, why? Two reasons. First of all, as we said, the brain develops the impact of the environment and the circuits in the brain that are prone for addiction. Right. get affected by that early trauma number one, number two,

when I ask people, not what's wrong with their addiction, but what's right about it. So if you guys have an addiction, I'm not going to ask you what or when. We've talked about it. But no, but, you know, I've talked about, I've had behavior addictions. I've never had a substance one.

But I'm not going to ask you what your addictions was. I'm just going to ask you one simple question if you guys are both going to answer it. No, what was wrong with it? What was right about it? What did it give you temporarily? Makes you feel alive. It makes you feel alive.

Good. It numbs you. It numbs you. It numbs you. Okay. Now, who needs to be numbed? Me? No, no, but who?

What kind of person? Oh, a person who's in pain? In pain. Now, here's the thing. Something happened to you. So the addiction wasn't your problem. Your addiction was your attempt to solve the problem. I mean, it's the symptom, right?

Yeah. Well, it's not just a symptom. It is a symptom, yes. But it's also an attempt to solve a problem. Correct. The problem of pain. Or the problem. not being alive. So the question then is, my mantra here is not why the addiction, but why the pain?

Why didn't you feel alive? Because something happened to you that cut you off from yourself. And that's trauma we're talking about. Something happened to you that gave you a lot of pain that you needed to numb. That's trauma. So that's the essence of addiction is trauma. The addiction is not the primary problem. It's not genetic. It's not genetic. The whole idea of addiction being genetic, which is still the mantra. It's just scientific nonsense. This is also one of the things people ask me a lot because I'm a science person. Is this genetic? Is that genetic?

Is anxiety genetic? And here's what I say. We will never find a gene for name a personality thing you don't like about yourself. Name a diagnosis that you've been given. But what we do inherit is coping mechanisms. We inherit an environment. We inherit a whole world that we live in with whatever skills our possibly loving but likely traumatized themselves parents have given us.

There's a group of genes that the more than you have, the more prone you might be to be addicted or to be, have a mental health condition. At the same time, you can have those same genes and have no condition whatsoever depending on what the environment does. So what are these genes then? In fact, you can have a gene that under this has been done. Genes that under certain circumstances make you more violent. Yes. Under other circumstances, it makes you less violent. So what do you think the gene is for?

The gene is for sensitivity. Yeah. Which is it just what you're doing. you're talking about. Which is just what you're talking about. Yes. Our capacity to be affected by the environment, and the more sensitive you are, sincere is from the Latin word sincere to feel. The more sensitive you are, the more you feel. The more pain you feel, the more you have to run away from the pain, the more likely to be addicted. So the only thing that's... Can you say that again? Well, the more pain you have, the more likely you want to escape from the pain by numbing yourself.

And the more sensitive you are, the more pain you're going to feel. Yeah. Also, the more creative you're going to be. The more insightful you're going to be. The more intuitive you're going to be. Depending on the right environment. It also means that the more pain you have, the more you have to harden yourself. By the way, this is where hardened the criminal comes from.

They harden themselves because of the trauma. It's also biblical. Pharaoh hardens his heart. Pharaoh hardens heart, yeah. Then you don't feel, then you have no empathy, and you become ruthless. So that sensitivity can lead you to all kinds of different outcomes depending on what happens in the environment. Well, and this is something also that,

you know, and this is in Dr. Sarno's work, you know, there's some large-scale study where, you know, they took a large variety of patients who all had a diagnosis of herniated disc, but they didn't all feel pain. And they had almost identical scans, whereas if you were to show it to someone, a classical Western surgeon, oh, got to operate, got it, my dad had three vertebrae fused, you know. And what that says is that there are certain people for whom they're going to experience their body differently, their environment. We talk about we are both very sensitive people. You know, there's this sort of joke and it's on sitcoms and in movies that like men are such

babies when they're sick. But there is a different, there's a different perception of, go ahead. So here's where my wife who was here at the beginning of this interview and had to fly home now. If she was here, she would talk to you a lot about this. Men become babies. Now that's a, that's an actual dynamic. And that speaks to why more women develop autoimmune disease.

Because they're more worried about how their husband's going to react when they get cancer than when they get it. And when I read that, I said, that's me. Yeah. That's me. That's my mom. It's my grandmother. The more stress you absorb. And it's this patriarchal culture.

Yes. Women are acculturated to absorb the stresses of their men. Now, there was an article in New York Times during COVID times, just a couple of years ago called Societies, Society's Shopping. shock absorbers. And it was about how women take on the stress of their families and their men are on COVID. And when they can't alleviate the stress, they feel guilty. So let's look at an interesting medical statistic. In the 1930s, the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis is about one-to-one.

In Canada, it was, you know what it is now? It's three and a half women to every man. Now, why should that be the case? Genese, it's not genetic. It's not genetic. It's not the climate of the diet. Sure. Because that hasn't changed more.

I mean, diet doesn't help, but yes. In terms of inflammation and things like that. No, I'm talking about the gender ratio. Got it. Yeah? The diet hasn't changed more for one or one during than the other. What has changed is that women in this culture used to have the job of being the stress absorbers, the shock absorbers. They still have that role.

Then they've taken on an economic role. Sometimes because of the choice to express themselves in the workplace. Yes. Beautiful. And sometimes because of economic necessity. but nobody is taken away from them the responsibility of emotional caregiving. Well, and the notion then that you hire someone

who has to leave their children to raise your children, I'm sorry, I have a really hard time with it. I have a really, and it's very confusing to me. So what's happened is that women have not taken extra stress on in a more isolated society where there's less support. No wonder there's multiple sclerosis amongst them. No wonder there's more divorce, honestly,

because you come home and you just have a pile of work And forgive me, a husband that often needs to be taken care of. My wife could tell you that. Because in our marriage, there's been a real dynamic that she absorbed my stresses. She's the one that takes the antidepressant. Yeah. Or it deals with the anxiety. Yeah.

53 year process of women's liberation because she said to really liberate herself from the gender or the culturally determined gender role that she was programmed to take on as a child. Yeah. And this choice of authenticity and attachment, quite honestly, we quite agree retrospectively that had she been able to be more herself, had trusted herself, she would have left me at a certain point. You know? Many women say that. if I was healthier I would have left.

And that would have been good for our kids. Yeah. Oh. And for her and for me. What does that feel like for you to say that? It's just the truth. But what does it feel like? I've dealt with the remorse already.

I've had a lot of remorse over that. But again, you know, I was the way I was unconsciously. Yeah. Right. But the point is it's women in this culture who have to suppress their authenticity even more than men do. and that's why they have more autoimmune disease. That's why they are more prone to non-smoking-related cancers. That's why they have much more depression and anxiety.

And it's not gender determined. It's a culturally determined gender role that determines it. We're talking about these systemic problems, but as soon as we start to recognize that we are in the water to go back to the beginning of this, then we do have the opportunity to start noticing and to start on a path of healing, which means that we move away from a reactive cycle.

Yeah. And we get to have some agency. But what is it practically? This is something we were fighting about, not fighting about, but this is something we were talking about because, you know, this is very digestible. I think everyone can and should read this.

I mean, I literally said to my almost 17-year-old, we have a book club now, and I am assigning him this after letters to a young poet by Rilke. So I said, this is completely digestible. But the question is that I'm interested in, what is next for people? So you read this book. You get maybe a little, you will, you'll get relief.

There's a tremendous sense of relief and even reduction in some of the pain that you're experiencing. But what do you practically do? You're me. Well, not me. You're someone else. And you wake up and you're like, oh my gosh, everything mattered. Everything they did.

I love my parents, but does it mean you go into therapy? You start digging. You start meditating. You take ayahuasca, which your work on ayahuasca is also fascinating. And we don't have time to get all up into it. Next time. Next time. What do you do?

Okay, look. So let me be specific. Okay. You mentioned your workaholism. Yes. So there's a chapter there on that, if you haven't noticed. She skipped that one. I did.

This exercise, where in your life do you have trouble saying no? Yes. So it sounds like work is an area that you have trouble saying no. Yeah. Well, yeah. Also everywhere. Okay. Yeah, but let's stay with that one.

If that's okay with you. Sure. Okay. So work, you have trouble saying no. And so you are very busy. You're tremendously creative. You're very sensitive and you're one of these really talented sensitive people who generate so much in this world.

You also have trouble saying no. You see need everywhere, and you want to meet all those needs. I want to fix it. And I believe I have the power to do so is the fallacy, but yes. You have the power to make a difference. You don't have the power to fix it.

Okay, just as all of us do. Now, the second question is, what is the impact on you of your difficulty saying no? My health suffers. Okay. And the people closest to me, Jonathan and my children suffer the most. Okay.

I'm being honest. Of course you're being honest. And I would have said the same thing with myself. You know, but as a matter of fact, my wife, Ray who you met, only four years ago, five years ago said to me, buddy, you've written a book called When the Body Says No, not a right one called when the wife says no. Right. Okay. Because of my workalism.

So I get it. I really get it. So this is not an inquisition. I'm just trying to follow. You ask me what we do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Then the third question is,

what is the belief behind my difficulty saying no? That people will not think well of me or... In other words, you lose the attachment. Yeah? So that tension between the attachment and authenticity, something in you wants to say no, right? But you don't say it for the fear of losing the attachment. Here's the thing, Ma'am.

As an infant is a young child. you have no choice in the matter. You have to choose attachment. Right. You don't anymore. Right. You can choose authenticity. You know, and so that's, but anyway, so that's the impact and the belief is, if I say no,

people won't like me. Okay. The next question then is, who would you be if you know how to say no? This is Byron Katie's work. We talked a little bit about this. It's a similar question, yeah. Who would you be if you know how to say no? I'd be myself if I knew who that was.

Yeah. And I mean, I'd have free time. My health would be better. You'd be free. Right. Yeah. Okay. And there's a final question, which is, what are you not saying yes to?

Because when we're so busy not saying no. Right. There's often a yes inside that wants to be expressed, well, we don't make space for it. Now, not saying that yes. Now, by the way, this little word, no. You've had children. Mm-hmm. What's the first word they start saying when they're one and a half?

We didn't use the word no. We said not for. Not what you said, but what the kids say is, you know, no. Why do the kids say, we call it in our ignorance, we call that the terrible twos. Because we want our kids to be compliant. But actually, that's nature's way of helping to develop the child's will. Because if you don't know how to say no, our yeses don't mean anything at all. So what am I not saying yes to?

I'm not saying yes to quiet. I'm not saying yes to really being. in my body. I'm not saying yes to actually feeling my feelings and processing them. I'm not saying yes to play. To free time. I could go on, but you have to get on a play. I got it. Those are huge. Yes. So all I'm saying to is you ask me what to do. Sit down once a week and do this exercise, but really be with it. Right. I mean, you have a very, you have a mind that flies all over the place. sit down with a piece of paper, not with a computer, piece of paper.

Do this exercise with those six questions. Not in abstract, but where this week? Where this week did I not say no? What was the impact this week of me not saying no? What was the belief this week of my not behind on not saying no? Right. Who would I be if I had said no and so on. I'm telling you, if you just do that exercise,

that itself will have to change you. But so when you ask me, what do people need to do? They need to commit to their healing. There you go. Not just to talk about it. I'm very good at talking about healing. I'm much more reticent than actually engaging in it. You know, we all are.

So this is where we have to just actually make a commitment. After you ask yourself, what is important to me? So I think that's the first question. I think it's extremely helpful for people to hear that you don't need a retreat. You don't need a shaman. You don't need to have some mass. intervention, you need to start by asking yourself how you feel and going through that process that you just outlined. There's all kinds of resources out there. And you don't need necessarily

any fancy retreat, any big cathartic experience. Well, I would say you need this book, though. I'm serious. I use this as a guidebook. This literally has been an incredible, I mean, I don't even, there's not words. We're starting a book club. We have all the notes already marked up. It's unbelievable. We thank you for your time. And if you miss your flight, please come back and we can talk more. See you in two hours Thank you for having me It's such a pleasure to meet you both It really is and

Thank you You score very high on the authenticity scale In my books anyway Thank you I think it's important Especially as someone who You know struggled before I got pregnant

Was not a different person When I was pregnant And was not a different person You know After I gave birth I want to be clear that When he talks about depressed mothers and their interaction with babies. You know, the idea is not, A, for you to feel

guilty if you were, are depressed, and if you had impaired, you know, interactions with your child, I also want to say, and I do wish I had asked when he was here, a lot of those studies are severe depression beyond the scope of kind of what a lot of women experience, you know, what we call sort of like baby blues, which can be postpartum depression, but it is normal to have a drop in hormones and a drop in expectation. You've been like looking forward to giving birth and then like, oh, the thing just cries and needs to be changed and nursed all the time.

So he's not talking about that, but a lot of these studies are from, you know, situations where the mother was unable to care for herself and was still trying to care for. And some of these are animal studies. And I hope that that still has, you know, validity. I think Gabor really explained, you know, I think a lot about that.

But a lot of extreme stressful situations. that lead to, again, mothers not being able to care for themselves is some of that interaction that we're talking about. Many of us are not at our best when we give birth, and especially if we had a difficult or a traumatic birth or having trouble breastfeeding or whatever it is, you are not damaging your child irrevocably. And I think especially, you know, what he's saying is that you can intercept a lot of this stuff even, I mean, he's even encouraging me to do so and I'm 47, you know, almost. Anyway, what I was told about him is that he, you know, speaks very definitively and clearly about kind of large categories,

you know, the things that we deal with. And I feel like we got, we absolutely got that. But also, I was really happy to be able to kind of like joke with him and ask things, you know, in a more kind of back and forth for him because he's very academic and there's so many places, you know, but I wanted to have it really feel like he was visiting our podcast, you know. he was visiting like our space. I mean, I literally asked him what it felt like. And he said something like, oh, I said, but what did it? Like, it was great.

Like, I thought it was really, you know, he's very human. I made him laugh. You also wanted to make it very specific. And there was like two key takeaways, if nothing else in this entire podcast. For you, you mean? Well, I think for, for me, yes. But also I think for humanity in general, because why not? The emotional system and the immune system were the same.

functioning systems. That was so cool. So I really do believe in patterns and I know that you like very specific things. I like to sort of think a little bit like a system level, but I think this merges both of them. It's both a system and a very specific. If the role of the immune system is to protect, protect, take in what it needs and keep out what it doesn't. Right. That is the exact same system as the emotional system.

Right. It's the same function. So if one of those systems is off, is it wildly surprising that the other system will also be off? It's amazing. But so much of what he talks about, you know, for him, it's just like he knows it. Like he's read the studies, he's done the work. But for a lot of people, when he says like, well, you know mind and body or one,

a lot of people are still like, well, like that's something you say in a yoga class. You know, it's something that like you hear on one of your meditation apps, right? It's something you put on a t-shirt or a tote bag. This is exactly why that information about the immune system and the emotional system being the same. To me, that's like, oh, the mind and body are the same. Right. Here is the scientific explanation of what that is. And we had a little bit with Joe.

He tried to do that also with us when we had that interview. Joe Dispenza. Yeah. And he tried to explain that. And other people have explained it. But that is so concrete and specific. No, he is other level. Not just because also we didn't even get to talk about this.

I think he was a high school teacher for a year. and then went back to school to become a doctor. He's witnessed, I think, thousands of births, meaning like he's, he's, and I love that he was that doctor being like, take this pill, like, you know, do that, like cry it out with your baby. You know, he was that guy. And now, like, if you watch his documentary, which I highly recommend, I think it's been viewed over like seven million times or something. He talks about the ecstatic transcendental experience of accessing other parts of your brain

that are waiting to be accessed. You had a second point. was a takeaway. I want to know about transcendental experiences that are accessing part of my brain. But what's the second part? That's the second takeaway. The second takeaway was that the neurocircuitry and biochemistry of the brain grows and builds in relationship to an attuned connection. Most people who hear that either are going to dismiss it and say like, that's bull. I don't know. Or they're going to say, oh my God. Everything that I experienced was what my mother's experience was, my father's experience. Whatever was happening in your home, that's this

point. Whatever was going on, not even for you, for the people who are supposed to care for you and be attuned to you. That's what made your brain grow. And chances are, and don't blame me for this, blame this guy, Gamormante, for saying all of that that you experienced when your brain was developing is not done. It is going to keep being compounded by then our culture. Any trauma you may experience with if you're a woman or a vulnerable population, you're going to experience, likely you're going to experience some trauma in your childhood teen years, college years or beyond, right?

So he expands on that and says, the childhood experiences create our unconscious drivers that motivate us. And so if you are a person who, what was the things, puts other people's needs before your own, feels a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility, feels, what were the other things? It's a nice person, a person who's always there for someone. I'll bring you a meal. Oh, you're sick. Let me do it. Oh, you need an ear. I'll listen to you, right? Those people tend to have their bodies start showing that they're struggling. So he goes from. So like brain development, trauma, coping. And he talks about attachment versus authenticity. We're taught at a very young age because our- He's big on that.

Authenticity. We didn't even get to talk about that. There's a systematic denial of our emotional state that we learn from a very young age and we choose attachment over authenticity because we have to sacrifice authenticity in order to survive because attachment is the primary need for us. Well, so, and when I, you know, whenever I talk to people about, for example, the cry-it-out method, which he talks a lot about, when I say to people, a child whose needs are not responded to will stop asking for their needs to be met. People don't like to hear that. No, he learned to sleep through the night. No, he didn't. Or she didn't. No. They learned that if you have needs at hours that are not convenient for a parent,

they're not going to get answers. But also what people say is, oh, but what am I supposed to do? And like that's rushing to the solution. You know, the conclusion of the solution. Like, I can't afford a nanny. It's not about that. It's the structure of our culture that says,

this is how you raise a child. Yes, absolutely. And even beyond sleep. Yeah. If the child is scanning the environment and seeing how stressed the parents are, and recognizing, oh, there's no space. Which can also be unconscious. Yeah. Just scanning. We're all scanning all the time. We're watching, we're observing, we're sensing the emotional state of the people

around us. And if their emotional state is so busy, so full, so distracted, so stressed, confusing, even. That the child can be, well, there's no room for me to have needs right now. And I will choose attachment over actual authentic expression of the needs. And what does that look like? It looks like I will be obedient. I will do whatever it takes to not to not be hurt. Or you have the opposite where it's I will act out, act out, act out, act out in order to create space for myself. And then you'll get the swing response. You know what this sounds like?

It sounds like a lot of grown up relationships, right? If you're being hurt in a relationship, your choice is get as small as you can or act out to get attention. Correct. Or leave and then you're alone. And that's usually why you go back. That's getting withdrawn fully. fully. No, but we're just going to act out all of that. And we were talking, our little gang here, we were talking about attachment, attachment styles. And these are all different ways,

kind of, you know, this same thing, right? How were you responded to? What interaction did you have before you even remember? Guess what? It's probably part of how you interact now. When he talked about children need to be able to express a full range of emotions, what do you understand that that means? Someone who's an extremely attentive, loving, father. Go ahead. When a child cries, what don't you do? You don't shush them. Meaning, shh. It's okay. Don't worry. Stop crying. Why can't you say it's okay? I don't know that it's okay. I don't know what they're actually going through. There we go. My favorite thing that parents do. When a child falls down, it's okay, you're okay.

And you want to reassure them that the universe is fine, but like you just said. The difference between a parent who is attuned and aware and holding space for their child to have their own emotional experience, the kid falls down, you observe and wait. Versus, oh my God, that's such a big fall. Are you okay? Where does it hurt? Et cetera, et cetera. The difference is you try and allow them to have their own emotional experience

and you witness. So the notion of holding space is that you are, I mean, I don't know how to else to say it beyond using the same word to define the term, which, you know, you're not supposed to do. holding spaces as a witness you are literally allowing that other person to exist great no shushing let them have their own experience what else don't you do when my son would fall and we would rush and pick him up he would like start to cry yeah he was reacting as much to our concern for him he was literally react he can feel what you're feeling exactly i say this to breastfeeding moms everything

you're feeling is in your milk so when we learned to wait a second deal with you're with our own, oh my God, is he okay ourselves? He would look at what happened to him. He would pop up. He'd be go, I fell down. Yeah. And he'd point to his knee and then he'd be back playing in two seconds. Sometimes they're hurt.

What happens when they get hurt? Hold them, let them cry. Uh-huh. Or see what they want and let them cry. Often it would be picking them up. And often I would pick him up and hold him because he would come in for a hug. And then he would like wiggle away after less than a minute and he would want to go play again. Tell me about other emotions.

What happens when a child is? sad or disappointed. I mean, again, the best thing that we've tried to do was to allow them to have that. Okay, so what does that mean? What don't you do? Distract. Food. Don't feed it. Yeah. It's very hard. You want to feed it when it's hurt. Feed it, distract it, move it away. What happens when, I think I've told this before, when my children were, when I was, when we call it we, when we were divorced, when we were newly divorced, and they wanted their dad. What did I want to do?

Let's write a letter. Let's do it. And Siggy said, no. You say, yeah, I miss our family too. So we had an interesting experience where when we were newly divorced, we also tried to do that. Yeah. We tried to hold space. Yeah.

And my son threw us a curveball, which was he would keep. himself in a tantrum-like state for like really extended periods of time. And like, I'm talking like multiple hours. And so when we got help and we're like, oh, he's just like, he's stuck in a loop that he can't get himself out of. And so these parents who were like trying to allow him to have all of his emotions, the advice we got was like, okay, allowed that to happen. But if it continues for like 20 minutes. But separate point. No, it's important because people will be like, oh, you have to let them have everything. And then we were thrown this curveball. And so we had to say, we hear you, we acknowledge, we empathize, we say, yes, I know that's hard for you.

You miss your dad. Yep. And we have the next five minutes to be sad. Yep. After that, we're moving on. And so. And sometimes they'll still be upset, but what you show is the ability to move on. So when a child is sad or disappointed, you know, what a lot of parents and again, a lot of well-meaning parents do is they try and explain why you shouldn't be sad, right? My ice cream cone fell on the floor. You can get another one. It's not such a big deal. Maybe in your family you got another one.

We are not buying another one because in many families that was your ice cream cone. And you can share mine or whatever it is. I, maybe. But also, well, that's what happens when you are not looking where you're going. That's not helpful. Right. Well, and again, a lot of parents do that well-meaning. like, I'm teaching consequences, right?

But what a child wants to hear is, oh, your ice cream cone fell on the floor, and that really is a major bummer. That's right. And sometimes you can get a new ice cream cone, and sometimes you can't. But the notion is that that's what, that's, and I'm not trying to say that, like, Jonathan and I did it right, and our kids are perfect. But what this man, who is far wiser than we are, what Gabor is trying to say is that the things that we've been told are the normal ways to go.

about not just parenting, everything. It's actually not normal. And as an adult, if you've ever been in a relationship where someone effectively shushed you, you know what that feels like. It doesn't feel good. I just raised my eyebrow.

If you've been in a relationship where someone has said, I told you so, it feels the same as when you're a child and someone says that. And I was talking to somebody the other day and I was like, We're just children who are bigger.

We're just kids who are bigger. So when I was talking about the neurosurcetry and the brain, I was, you know, I was trying to talk about the growing neurosurcurecurtry and then I started to talk about adults. And you're like, don't, you know, keep those two things apart. But where I was going is that our brains are always in response or in relation to the people around us. And so, again, if there's an openness, if there's an attunement with someone. someone else and they have availability emotionally. If they have availability with attention,

then our literally our brains are going to fire differently in relationship with them. Absolutely. And also, you know, what he would say is that was all, it was program long before. You know, I say to you, I didn't make you this way. I found you like this. Like, that's true. We find people exactly where they are. We may trigger things in them, you know, that they hadn't had triggered in a minute. But that's there. I mean, it's, it's there. And then, the environment and the other things we do around it, you know, can make it sprout up or not. The other thing that we didn't get to talk about, which is extremely important that I should have talked about with him, you know, he supports the field of psychiatry abstractly and also

has a tremendous amount of criticism of the use of labels, which is something that we use a lot here. And it has already started me thinking differently about the way we talk about things, the way I talk about the diagnoses I've been given. And, you know, so much of that is probably for an entire other episode because his notion is not that terms are not helpful. Descriptions are not helpful. They can often, you know, guide us to the next pathway or therapeutics or whatever. But this idea that once you slap a label on it, you know, you get put into a box that does not take into account all of the things happening, you know, outside of that box and what happened before. Boxes even were invented.

And it's a really, really important and nuanced discussion of what psychiatry gets wrong and how we can start to build a larger understanding of what those terms are for, what they do, and how we can, you know, direct our health around them. I don't want to bring everything back to the Michael Singer episode, but we also touch base on attachment to story, attachment to labels in that, and started to say, like, what if that isn't the case? What if there's another perspective to be had? Look, we're going to start the map-to-yourself study group. Yeah, I would like him to move in with us and just tell us things all the time. He said, it takes a village, even to raise adults.

From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and biolics breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience phd or two one fiction one now she's gonna break down