The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Being Human and Waking Up: A therapist’s guide for psychotherapy clients and enlightenment seekers by Jonathan Eric Labman LPC

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Being Human and Waking Up: A therapist's guide for psychotherapy clients and enlightenment seekers by Jonathan Eric Labman LPC https://amzn.to/3vJD3dg No one teaches us how to deal with being a human being: how to separate true thoughts from false ones, how to feel and label our emotions, how to track the source of our emotions to discover whether the emotions are useful or useless, and how to interpret the flood of physical sensations that constantly inundate us. Few parents know how to cope with their own thoughts and feelings, so they don't teach their children to do the same. As people, we often end up confused and dismayed. Once we embark on a psychological and/or spiritual journey to healing, wholeness, and better functioning, life can become even more complicated: what is this Awareness or Consciousness that the mystics of all traditions talk about? Among the avalanche of teachings and teachers available, how do we discover a path for us? This book is the refinement of 23 years' experience, from a therapist and teacher of spiritual awakening, to summarize how to heal and wake up spiritually. Its purpose is to guide readers, therapy clients, and spiritual aspirants along a clean, simple and clear path to psychological integration, effective living, spiritual awakening and enlightenment.

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see how that works and brighten enlightened it's not a word chris anyway the title of his new book is called being human and waking up a therapist guide for psychotherapy clients and enlightenment seekers came out august 25th 2023 jonathan eric labman is on the show with us today he is a normal middle class baby boomer okay boomer lifestyle mass complex trauma at home and bullying at school with no education and how to be a human being he didn't get the owner's manual either like most of us didn't he got a lot of emotional and mental health symptoms that arose from his childhood and his his growing up he went on to a 50-year quest to find solutions in his own pain and in doing so found a way to help others with

serious complex trauma to heal from an international high school to a christian hippie commune to an evangelical calvinist cult was that one of the scotus lady i think she went to that training as a method actor and into psychology massage therapy therapy, energy healing, and eastern mysticism. He's focused his practical solutions to problems, and he's also run the Trauma Treatment Project for a large Pennsylvania mental health agency, served on the Bucks and Montgomery Trauma Informed Care Committees. Welcome to the show. How are you, Jonathan?

I'm very well, Chris, and it's really a pleasure to meet you. There you go. It's a pleasure to meet you there you go it's a pleasure to meet you as well boy you sure went on a journey calvinist cult christian hippie did you join the moonies you have to get no but close almost joined the children of god in london in 1971 72 there you go were they were they a suicide cult i didn't forget no no they weren't but they were you know they were a major cult at that time. The Jesus movement was big then. Oh, yeah.

You can still join the Moonies or Scientology. There's still time. Or the Mormons. Have fun with that. So, Jonathan, give us your dot coms. Where can you find people on the interwebs? Basically, just one place, which is simplyawake.com. It's all one word, simplyaw awake.com it's all one word simply awake.com you can also find a sub stack

column for me called wise guy on sub stack.com and that's a lot of fun i do that twice a week so i don't know if you remember the three stooges but you know mo is always saying yeah wise guy so i thought it was a way to be a little humorous at the same time of you know trying to bring some kind of learned wisdom to the world there you go so you help people simplify their life and find peace where's the fun in that anyway it's actually fascinating to work with people because everybody's so different you know that interview people you know that's what i love about this podcast people come on they tell their different stories, and I learn so much. Different paradigms, epiphanies,

different ways of looking at things, etc., etc. So your book, Being Human and Waking Up, give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside there. You know, basically, if I look around at the culture and at my own life and at my clients, nobody taught us how to deal with the basic human skills like, how do I deal with my crazy thoughts that are popping in and out of my head with no apparent reason? How do I deal with my feelings? How do I even name they're from a real source so that I should do something about them,

or if there's some imaginary thought in my head that's creating all this emotion. Because when I studied method acting in New York in the 1980s, you know, you can make up all kinds of stories and get very emotional about them, walk on and do a scene study, which is great, it feels very alive, but unfortunately, your emotion is largely destructive and wasted at that point. The other thing about the culture, and that's what the book is about, is that, you know, people are really living in an extended adolescence when they sit in their egoism or egotism and never get beyond the chattering voice in their mind to the kind of pristine, clear awareness that's underneath of that. That ego gets in the way, something fierce.

You know, we have basically a lot of, you and I were talking about this before the show, we have a lot of narcissists in the world. Now everybody thinks everyone's a narcissist, which isn't true, but we've got a lot of them in politics right now. We're also sociopaths. And, you know, this is sort of ego run amok. And so the book is really about, okay, how do I actually learn what to do with my own thoughts? Do I know that actually 90 to 95% of my thoughts are false, are going to lead to harmful emotions, and will make me either stressed or scared or angry or sad for no good reason at all? No, nobody teaches me that. My teachers don't. My preachers don't. My parents sure as hell don't.

You know, so who's going to teach me how to be a human being we don't learn it in school so the book is really about the basic skills of being human so that people can learn okay let me manage my humanity so i can get beyond the sort of adolescent age of you know egotism and actually maybe even wake up to the fact that I'm part of an infinite universe and I can actually feel connected to it mm-hmm there you go I mean being human who would have thought it should be something everyone should work on I go on Facebook every now and then I'm still trying to figure out who's human to use bonds back to the book and stuff but people always

want to know the history of the author. Tell us about your upbringing and what made you want to get into psychology and help other people. My upbringing, I was raised in a middle-class Reformed Jewish family in the outskirts of Trenton, New Jersey, or Trenton as we call it. And, you know, I grew up in a small suburban area called Lower Macfield Township in Pennsylvania, and then moved to another town called Yardley at age 10. There was, I'm going to just say it, your audience may not hear this very often, there was maternal sexual abuse at home against myself and my brother. My mother was also a victim of trauma growing up of sexual abuse, but it was unconscious for her and she acted it out. And that was all under the surface. And on the surface, you know, I went to school, I did well in school, I was a nerd, I was, you know, an academic, I was a teacher's pet. I was a terrible athlete. I was incredibly uncoordinated.

As I found out later in studying trauma, that can be a side effect of trauma because the body, as you know, this book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, the body gets dysregulated by that kind of trauma, especially from someone you're supposed to trust. So I lived, you know, on the surface, an ordinary life, and underneath I was a miserable human being. I was a wreck. Anxious all the time, depressed, unhappy, traumatized. My parents separated when I was six. My mother remarried when I was 10. I had a stepfather and then a stepbrother. And my stepbrother was every athlete who tortured me at school. And so I was unhappy having him around. Around the age of 15, I just sort of lost my cool one day and almost strangled my stepbrother in the snow. Oh, wow. There was cause.

I mean, he threw something at me that hit me really hard and hurt. And I was not somebody who was going to show any tears because boys don't cry. So I went into the garage, was about to cry, instead came out and almost strangled him in the snow. After that, I cried for four hours and started seeing shrinks at 15. So my first psychologist I saw for about four or five months. At the same time, I started studying the New Testament. And that's part of my journey. I was really questioning whether there was a God at all. How could God make my life so full of suffering if there was a God?

And at the same time, I applied to get out of high school and go to an international school in the south of Wales in the UK in a Hearst Castle, if you can believe it. William Randolph Hearst owned a castle there. And there were kids from 50 countries there, even in the 1970s, early 70s. And I got a place in the school, but I was told that our family was too rich. I wouldn't qualify for scholarship. And I waited a month because there was a postal strike, all the while praying like crazy. There's God, I want to get into this school, even though they say I can't. So prove me wrong that you don't exist. Prove that you do exist. And in fact, I got the scholarship around May 1st in 1971. Wow.

And, you know, it kind of launched me into escape from trauma and into very intensive religious search and spiritual quest, which really was part of my life. There was still a lot of depression and anxiety. There was some dissociative episodes where you kind of don't feel like you're real. They call them derealization, depersonalization. Eventually, you know, I lived at school. I lived on a Christian college campus one summer when my mother divorced her second husband. I eventually lived in a Christian cult for seven years in the town of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, after college. And when I left there, I had a psychologist who really saved my life. And when I was sitting in her office in

1984, I thought, you know, someday I'd really like to be able to help her or help people like she's helping me. And so that's where that interest started. I didn't really get there first. I was doing administrative work in technical writing. And when I left the cult, I also left that job eventually and found my way to New York to study method acting. I had a Broadway vocal coach. I'd always been a singer since the time I was very young. Family of musicians. My dad was a National Symphony Orchestra violist. My brother was a jazz pianist. My stepfather was a jazz singer. So I thought I should be on the stage. But, you know,

when I got there and found out what that life was like and how sleazy it could be, I decided that wasn't for me either. So eventually from there, I found my way into the first healing methodology I could really do with an undergraduate degree, which was I could be a licensed massage therapist in about a year. I've been working with my first eastern mystical spiritual teachers who were both massage therapists and sort of counselors and they did breath work which you've probably heard of a lot and so I was like how would I start to do what they do because they really helped me a lot

and massage therapy was the first thing so I became a licensed massage therapist in New York and eventually you know people are always talking to me face down on the table. I was working on these muscles on their back with my elbows. And they would be telling me about all kinds of traumas and all kinds of difficulties in their, you know, their day-to-day misery. And eventually my partner and a best friend said, why don't you just get a graduate degree and sit down and do this for a living? And so eventually I did that. I went back to graduate school in 98 as a 43 year old and graduated in 2000 as a 45 year old. And so I've been in that ever since. As I told you earlier, I'm now 69 years old. It's quite the journey. You've done a lot of

things, but it's probably given you an insight to a lot of different variations of life and and thinking yeah a lot yeah and and the spiritual search went on of course but you know we don't need to bore your readers with all or your listeners with all of that let me ask you this does does did you grow up with your birth father my birth father was in the picture living with us until I was about five. He was in my life every week until I was about ten. And then he moved away to be in first the Milwaukee Symphony, then the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, then the National Symphony. So after that, I did not live with him. Do you think that your search for, this is a question that I theorize a lot on,

do you think your search for religion and a God and different things like that is a search for a paternal figure that may be to replace the father that you didn't have when you were growing up? I think originally it was a lot about that, and in fact the communities that I was part of, there was always a mother and a father figure. The ones I lasted in, the father figure was predominant because my father was a safe person. He loved us. He never harmed us. He didn't even lay a hand on us. So, yeah, I do think that that was the suffering that was created from the trauma was a big impetus toward, you know, spirituality and God.

But, you know, eventually, I don't really believe in God as a father figure anymore. You know, God to me is a transcendent genderless being because, you know, is the God of this universe where we have hundreds of billions of galaxies does that god take on the gender form of a human being i doubt it probably not yeah it's interesting to me because i'll see people that you know they're always going on about the patriarchy but they they really hold the religion really hard and and women especially. Yeah. And the more I see it, the more, and you'll see it with single mothers and stuff too, and you realize that what they're seeking is they're seeking a patriarchy. And it's very unnatural for us to do that probably in our biological state, to replace that or to fix that or try and fill that hole.

So there you go so we talked about book helps people get a good education on how to be a human being talk to us a little bit more about that let's flush that out what i see in people is that they're the same 10 thoughts go round and round in their heads until it seems like they have a thousand thoughts. And I call that the chattering voice in your head. And they confuse themselves with that voice in their head as if that's all there is to them. When I ask people who are they, they go to that voice and what it says about them. And, you know, even the kind of historical things that we've just been talking about, that's an aspect of who we are. But, you know, also, that's a big source of conflict and emotional difficulty for people.

Because about 90 to 95% of the thoughts that generate automatically in our minds, there's nobody actually pushing those thoughts out. There's no little Jonathan in there with a mimeograph machine cranking them out or the Xerox machine pushing a button, you know. So I start to teach people, hey, you know, look, these false thoughts, whether they're on external speaker and you're speaking to a lie detector machine and the needle's going wacky because you're lying or they're inside of you and you're lying to yourself or you're listening to lies from other people they generate the same bad physiological response in your body whether internal or external speaker so imagine that you're telling a lie to a lie detector polygraph reader and he's saying it's obvious you're lying why because there are physiological symptoms so my palms are sweating.

My heart rate's gone up. My respiration rate's gone up. My blood pressure's gone up. Just like when I am on an exciting podcast and it's the first 20 minutes. It's the same way. All that's happening, but not because I'm lying, just because it's a new situation so if i'm listening to lies in my head all the time that has the same my body has the same reaction to that as it does if i were speaking those lies out loud and i've looked at that for a long time, and it's kind of a personal theory,

and I think it's actually true. You know, I believe you. One of the things I had is when I had ADHD really bad, and it reached a point where I was having an anxiety attack almost on a daily basis in my office, I went in to see a psychiatrist, and he says, you know, you have anxiety and really bad adhd and i was like yeah great whatever and he says he told me he goes he goes i'll bet you're actually repeating the same

thoughts every day at the same time and i was like no i'm a very intelligent person i have two companies dude i you're you're insane you're you're you sound like a quack and he goes i want you to he goes to prove it to me he goes i want you to go home and start to keep a journal of what you're thinking about on the hour throughout your day and you know i mean i was really bad i was i was checking the door 20 times a night to make sure it locked it you know that's sort of insanity shit yeah and son of a gun i was thinking like it was like clockwork i was thinking the same anxiety thought of whatever xyz at 10 o'clock and then a different one but the same one at 11. i mean it was like a broken record that's going around and around

and and and i love how you put it where it's the same 10 thoughts but we built it out to where it doesn't seem like that is that's right i'm thinking about that i'm thinking about something else but it's not the core of it all comes back to that the core is the same when i when i did my long my own course as a as a patient of therapy in the 90s in new york i also kept a journal there was a book book by Julia Cameron called The Artist's Way, and she recommended doing what she called morning pages. And in those morning pages is where I discovered the thoughts repeated day after day after day. But it wasn't until in the 2000s when I read a book, after Spiritual Awakening had already happened for me in the Eastern sense.

I read a book called Loving What Is by Byron Katie that I discovered, in fact, oh, a lot of my anxiety is caused by false thoughts. And then what people will see in the book is that I kind of categorized false thoughts into three basic categories. So I call it the three ring circus of your mind. And that's one of my short books on Amazon. It's called Taming the Three Ring Circus of Your Mind with a really scary clown on the cover. So the three rings are all your thoughts about yourself, most of which were taught to you by others. All your thoughts about what other people are saying, thinking, and doing about you first, but then in general, and then all your thoughts about the future. And if you look at the contents of those three rings, almost every thought in those three rings is a lie. Wow. It's either a fantasy or a wish or a catastrophic thought or an

anxiety-provoking thought, or it's somebody, you know, somebody said something to you when they were mad at you when you were five years old, and you've, you know, you've repeated it to yourself ad infinitum. Oh, Labman, you're so uncoordinated, you know, you can't throw a ball or you can't do anything. And I say to people, first rule, begin to challenge your thoughts. Can you absolutely, and this is Byron Katie language, can you absolutely know that thought is absolutely true? If it's not true, treat it like a lie. And what emotion does that thought produce in you? Sad, mad, scared, generally. You're not generally going to have happy thoughts, I mean, happy emotions coming from lying thoughts.

Now, I use very strong words, so I get people might be offended by the word, yeah, a lot of your thoughts are lies or they're false. But it's very helpful to call them out as just false or true because then you look at any emotion that comes from that thought that might be a distressing emotion and you realize oh i don't have to do anything with that emotion that emotion comes from a lie yeah oh so and basically in my third circle all your thoughts about the future you know look you know the great transcendent almighty didn't die and leave you in charge with a crystal ball you don't know what's happening in the next minute so any catastrophic thought you have about the future is a lie that's true and right you you've seen that in your own life yeah we worry about we worry about so many things that we have we have the

worst perception of fears there's some people who are like you know every day they're worried about a terrorist blowing them up here in america it's like when you look at the odds of that happening you know i mean it's it's it's you know a million to one or something like that it's right you have a better chance of getting hit by a car i think or something oh yeah for sure yeah number to change in any way shape or form yeah you know it's it's interesting what people think about and what we worry about in the future and you know there's books that talk about where you need to stay present you know you can't change the past the past is done i think that's a court toll who turned me on to this oh it's a wonderful book the power of now yeah it really saved my life years ago after the passing of my dog and and being really depressed about it but you you can't

change the past so why worry about it why worry about whatever the people are thinking or saying about you and for all you know they're not that's just your own little paranoid little project you got going on and then the future yeah i mean you you don't know what tomorrow brings i mean i've worried there's there's been times in my life where i've worried my ass off for weeks about some sort of event that was coming up and and it went off fine and everything was fine and there was like and i'm, God, the amount of willpower and brainpower and just worry and physical not sleeping at night. That's right, yeah. And it came out fine. What was all that about?

Why did I have to put myself through all that drama i mean part of that is that that anything new at all any new person any new place any new situation any new job even something that you're looking forward to that's new automatically generates in the animal brain a basic kind of release of adrenaline so you become more alert than usual and then because we make up thoughts to go along with what we're feeling sometimes then we take that sort of natural adrenal response to anything new and we exaggerate it like a hundredfold yeah and then we're freaking out right so this you know you, you mentioned Akrotoli. Before people can really understand what presence is, what meditation is about, what living in the moment is, what spiritual awakening or enlightenment is about, they need to get enough distance from their own thoughts and their emotions so they're not just sort of automatically

ruled by them i mean yanked around by this chattering voice in my head and all these roiling emotions that it creates or you know all these roiling emotions create lots of chatter in my head either way just goes round and round and round in a circle all the time it's really hard to be present in the moment when you're just a little like this all the time running the hamster wheel right exactly put running the hamster wheel and so i mean you know with people i also look at hey you know how much like caffeine are you taking in every day dude because you know if you're anxious and you wonder about you, why you're so anxious, take a look at that. Because, you know, America runs on that.

That's a, you know, that's a slogan for a coffee company. Yeah. For me, it's the crack. No, I'm just kidding. Don't. It is actually the caffeine level of coffee I drink. Yeah. You know, when I was getting licensed, I had to do supervision and I worked in an outpatient rehab center.

And that's where I saw that a lot of people who were traumatized were kind of recreating the emotional condition of their trauma by being addicted to caffeine. They were living in a highly adrenalinized state all the time. They kept drinking coffee. They weren't eating regularly. So when I work with people, I also look at, hey, are you getting regularly eight hours of sleep? Are you going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time? Are you drinking enough water?

How much caffeine are you ingesting every day? That has a big impact on your emotions. You get in your physical exercise you know just the basics you know are you eating three meals because a lot of trauma survivors don't eat right and they run on caffeine because it's so much it's so familiar to them to feel that way to feel like all jazzed up all the time is it a fight or flight thing it's a fight or flight thing they're living in sympathetic nervous system land wow and if they and they they so want to be calm but they're actually addicted to that adrenalinized state they feel like that's what

keeps them safe or that's what they're used to so and i've been learning okay you've got to deal with those things just to even have a moment where you could actually meditate or where you could actually taste the water hmm yeah what does water taste like i have to be out of my thoughts to taste the water that reminds me of something somebody mentioned me recently they said there's a there's a little parable story that goes around it but fish don't know they're in the water basically that's right yeah well you know we talked about that is you know in terms of the spiritual awakening we don't realize we're swimming around in what we would call the transcendent or god all the time and we're part

of that but we don't know it because it's so much it's hidden by scientific materialism now but it's also so much kind of our atmosphere that we don't even realize it there you go one of the things you talk about in the book is trauma flashbacks. I'm very curious about that. What are those and how can a person cope with them when they have them? So trauma flashback, it sounds like what it's going to be is that the person is going to be having hallucinations and imagining that they're right back there where they were traumatized. But it isn't that. It's actually that if you imagine the present as like an aquarium and, you know, you've got your water in your present day and everything's going fine. Something will trigger a memory that brings a whole flood of old water into that current aquarium and that water is deep level of emotion that's related to fight and flight related to grief and anger and feeling helpless and

feeling like you might die and so suddenly people are overwhelmed with that emotion. That's really what a flashback is. There you go. And so a lot of the treatment for trauma is saying, okay, you're feeling all this stuff. Look around. Is anything in your current environment causing this emotion? Is there anything in the, literally in the physical environment, there's one guy named Peter Levine who says, you know, be like a tiger, look around the room, move from the trunk, from the waist, move your head, look around. Is there anything dangerous in your environment? No. Okay. Is anything going wrong with your life suddenly? No. I was eating lunch at 12 o'clock

and at 12 and one, I'm having flashback flashback why because something that I'm eating reminded me of something that happened when I was 3 and I ate this and then after that I was traumatized assaulted whatever it was now suddenly I'm flooded with fear and panic and anxiety so the first thing to do is to say to people, look around, is anything actually wrong now? The answer is no, then you're having a flashback. What do you do with a flashback? You feel it. If you're at all able to feel it in the present moment or, you know, go hide in the restroom or something or go somewhere private. If your body needs to shake, literally shake, some of that flashback is usually like fear responses that have gotten

frozen under dissociation in the past when you're being traumatized. And so the flashback is actually your body's attempt to also release some of that trauma. So I think of it as, you know, you're out in this area, you know, Las Vegas. So you've got the Hoover Dam, you've got Lake Mead behind it. So emotion from trauma is like the lake that's built up behind this dam of dissociation and of not feeling safe to express our emotions when we're being traumatized and so these flashbacks are also a way that the body is trying to release the trauma wow you know we to fall back we talked earlier about the body keeps score yeah do you think that's it's trying to get it out then the it is. And the other thing that happens, and I'm an example of this,

having been in and out of various, I only lived in two cults, thankfully, but been in and out of other communities where there was a sort of charismatic, narcissistic, and somewhat sociopathic leader. Wow. You know, is that you go back. Let me stop for a minute. So it freud who talked about repetition compulsion so in the body keeps the score you keep repeating the trauma in a way to try to remember what happened to you and make sense of all the symptoms in your body and you tend to gravitate toward people who remind you of those who traumatized you as well

so the narcissist who's got control who looks like they're loving and kind but really is controlling you with fear that's a typical trauma perpetrator so i mean i kept putting myself in situations where i was a student of somebody like that. Even in the Enlightenment traditions, there are plenty of those. I'm beginning to help people who are coming out of so-called Enlightenment cults. That's part of the work that I'm doing now. And, of course, a lot of the major religions, I have a lot of former Catholics. I must have been a priest in a former life because one of my favorite expressions is,

Jesus, Mary, Joseph. But I have more Catholics in my practice than anyone else because they've been traumatized often by what happened in the church, the way they were treated in the church, and what they've heard about the sexual scandals in the church. Yeah, yeah. So we tend to be drawn toward people that remind us of those who abused us because that's repetition compulsion. Interesting. I'm thinking maybe it's also because hopefully we figured out that we're not alone and there's maybe other people that can help us too.

That's right. That's also true. Yeah. It's a community of trauma. There are lots of traumatized people. You know, when I was first, when my own trauma was first revealed to me and my brother because my brother's son was being abused by the same person, I discovered, in fact, that a lot of the people that i was working with at the rehab facility had a history of trauma and they were using substances because it was the only way to calm down i think i heard that years ago that 90 90 95 99 percent of people who are in

rehab for drugs usually have some sort of sexual trauma in their childhood yeah at the time i remember hearing a figure of 75 of the women who are iv heroin users had sexual abuse trauma and that one in four women had been sexually traumatized in some way and one in six men but i think that that number is more like actually one in 12 men. So it's not as prevalent for men. But yeah, there is really a correlation between early childhood trauma, the more adverse childhood experiences, the worse the potential addiction problem can be. And the worse the physical health is actually too yeah and and i've heard too that overweight people who especially people that are morbidly obese the they they also probably a

majority of them suffered from that too and making themselves obese is one of the ways they they try and keep from being interesting to anybody that might want to abuse them in the future yeah that's that's documented. It's not the case for everyone who's obese, but it is the case for many. I don't want anybody out there who's listening to think just because they're obese that they're a sexual trauma survivor. But it is true in many cases, and it is something to look for if there's no other reason that somebody can't lose weight.

Yeah. Either way, put the cupcake and the McDonald's down, people. I'm just kidding. to look for if there's no other reason that somebody can't lose weight, you know? Yeah. Either way, put the cupcake and the McDonald's down, people. I'm just kidding. It's battery. Don't do it. Look at me. That's good. I'm walking McDonald's then.

Please, please stop. Don't become me. So there you go. It gives people some tools. Now, do you recommend people take like a journal to track their emotions and these thoughts? Do you just write them down? Yeah, it depends on the person. If they're a more verbal person, because we're all carrying these wonderful devices around,

I tell them to record something on their phone. Oh, there you go. Or if they're an artist, I tell them to draw something. And if they're very verbally oriented, like I was in school, I was an English and pre-seminary major in college, then I tell them, yeah, write. And writing is extremely helpful because once you get it out on paper and, as you said, you see the same thing over and over again, oh, wait a minute, get a clue. All right, here's the clue you need. Here's the evidence you need in front of you about what's really making your life unmanageable there you go i love it too

because you know part of sometimes when people deal with their trauma they deal with the shame of it and so they hide it they don't want to tell anybody they're embarrassed they they sometimes they're in denial that they were a victim that's right they had to tell them some sort of story years ago i remember watching and i think my audience has heard it quite a few times for me but it bears repeating but i was watching leaving neverland with a story of the two boys two or three boys that were molested by michael jackson yeah and afterwards oprah had a show where she interviewed the two of them. And there was a gentleman

in the audience who had been molested by a police officer as a young boy. And I think he'd gone on to the NFL and become a football star. Wow.

And he kept a secret hidden all of his life. And it was destroying him like a poison inside of him, he said. And he said that the most important thing that was killing him all of his life and you know he was probably using alcohol or something to medicate and in the real key was when he

finally admitted to it when he finally started telling people his story that's right and letting it out and he equated to basically you know like a poison a snake bite and until you get that poison out of you it's just inside of you and festering and i think what you're suggesting people do to write this down and and and acknowledge it and bring it into the forward of the present they can they can more easily manage it or assess it and be like hey maybe i need to get some help and especially if they start to see that there's evidence that there's been some sort of major trauma where they felt that their life was threatened or their body was abused or assaulted or threatened.

I think the minute they are aware that something like that happened, they should seek out somebody who's been trained as a trauma treatment specialist. Because you don't want to do that journey alone. It's really scary. And you did it alone the first time. And you know, I actually worked with a woman yesterday who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by her adopted brother. And she's held that shame. She's had a, I'm going to use this word, fabulously successful career, works harder than almost any client I've ever worked with in 24 years, but she's been feeling like that was her fault, that at six years old she should have had the power to stop what was going on.

She knew it was wrong, so she should have had the power. She's lived with that false guilt and false shame for 50 years. Wow. And, you know, I'm working with a guy who's in his 60s. When I started working with him within a year or two, he, and he had never said this to anybody in his family because there's all kinds of trauma and physical and emotional abuse at home and neglect. But he had been sexually assaulted by a man on his way back from a summertime carnival. And he lived with that for over 50 years, never told his wife or anyone else. Wow. And that just ate him alive.

And yeah, he drank himself to sleep every night. Wow. Yeah. You know, and so, you know, and this, this is just like the human being part, you know, the waking up part. The enlightenment part of this whole path gives so much more relief even than the trauma work. Because if the ego really isn't what you are, then being on the defensive and defending yourself all the time and having to hold up your name and argue with people about you being right and all of that, all

of that is also wasted energy. Trying to control life as if your one little mind in this vast universe of quadrillion galaxies has any control over reality, that's a whole lot of effort now especially if you're a trauma survivor you want to think your mind can do that can you know control everything but this is where the spiritual component you know for me doing i did a lot of psychological work you know as a patient before i became a therapist by By the way, folks, if you're looking for a therapist, make sure you've got someone who's done the work, who's been a patient, because they won't empathize with you otherwise, and how hard it's going to be to go through the process.

That's an interesting thing I've never heard before. Make sure that somebody is your therapist has gone through what you went through. That's really interesting. Right, because how am I going to be able to empathize with how difficult what I'm saying is to a client if I don't know what the process is like from the other side? If I haven't been a client, how am I going to be a good therapist? The other thing, if you want to get a plug in here, an advertisement for find someone who's fucking licensed

and professionally trained yeah the amount of coaches that are out there selling crystals and all sorts of things to people just freaks me the hell out i i tell people use a licensed therapist who knows they're doing not some life coach who's 22 years old you know i think to give life coaches their due at a certain point in your development as a person great for you to work with a life coach but if you're dealing with really heavy duty stuff like you've been sexually abused as a child or your husband's beating you up every day you better find yourself a good licensed therapist with some experience yeah coaches are coaches are great for coaching like self-accountability i want a guy who you call every day to tell him what you ate and make

sure your scale is right that's fine yeah there's there's certain things that damage needs to be professional healed i mean most people wouldn't you know wouldn't have have i don't know have an arm cut off and then be like i'm just going to call the local temple and see if they'll pray for me you know that's great i mean the sad part is i know there are people in some cult that will do that so there's that so and you know you know i i want to say to people who are on a spiritual path and are interested in enlightenment, it's a real thing. It's really possible. But, you know, you can also stumble into cults that will promise you that if you give the leader all your money or you go live in a commune, which is what I did in California, that somehow that's going to cure all your problems. Or the other thing in spiritual terms, the leader wants your money.

They want control over you. They want to know all your inside thoughts, and or they want your body. Now, I've worked with a woman out of a Buddhist sect and heard one talking. I don't know if you've heard of the famous spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. I listened to a broadcast.

He was talking to a woman whose teacher actually said to her, if you have sex with me, you'll get enlightened faster. Now, if you're in one of these groups where you're really relying on the guru to get you enlightened, it's very easy to go from this step to this step. So I would also tell people, if you're interested in a spiritual path,

make sure that your spiritual teachers have the highest ethical and moral standards available. And if you find any evidence that they're trying to manipulate you, run screaming from the place as fast as you can. Because the number of people, myself included, who've been damaged in cults, it's another form of trauma. It's that, you know, that, you know, Freudian thing where you're reconstituting your original trauma, but now with a new traumatizing perpetrator. Yeah. I laughed because I went through that with the Mormon cold. Did you? Yeah. And I still suffer through it because half my family's still in it. Oh, wow. I still deal with it. But, you know, it helped me develop some great things for entrepreneurism. So there was that. But yeah. Well, look, all of our suffering has a use,

doesn't it, Chris? Yeah. Maybe it chris i yeah maybe that's the maybe that's the trick maybe that's the turn of the card is you're supposed to take what your your you know your failures are your struggles your trauma and and figure out how to use them for good i suppose that's right and and you know for me the motivation to help others was look what you've through, and there are all these other people that have been through this. You can certainly use your own bitter experience and better experience to help other people to learn how to cope. I've been on a path of enlightenment. Set up the joke, Chris. I've been on a path of enlightenment.

It's called a zempic. I'm trying to get my fat ass to be lighter. Oh, that's actually a wonderful joke. Thank you. You can use that if you want. Thank you. I appreciate that. I might do that.

That or, you know, they might get some booze and people throw things at you and you're like i'm your therapist damn it knock it off these are just jokes i don't know if you could do a lot of comedy in therapy i would probably make a horrible therapist because i mean no you you know in the right at the right moment it's really helpful for people to get to laugh at themselves and at life because it really is a perspective that makes you laugh yeah that's what we need my problem is the therapist i'd be laughing at them and they'd be like why are you laughing at me and i'd be just like because i thought my life was a shit show but you got me beat and i'm just really happy about it if i ever put you on a pedestal mr therapist i'm taking you down now so i i wouldn't make a good therapist So I wouldn't make a good therapist.

I also wouldn't make a good cop because every child molester would never make it back to the precinct without a bullet in their head. And I just would not make a good cop. But anyway, what haven't we talked about that we should tease out in your book before we go out i think that you know the the whole awakening aspect of things the fact that you you know people can live in a sort of quiet the internal quiet that isn't full of you know anxious thoughts and roiling emotions and that traditional psychology doesn't take you that far. I think that's also when I was finished with my deepest course of therapy, which was every week for three and a half years, I still didn't feel like my suffering was done. There was still a lot of tension in my body.

There was still a lot of tension in my mind. So I want to say to people, look, you know, there's more that you can do. You don't have to join any particular group or sect or cult in order to wake up spiritually to figure out that you actually have access to the infinite and the eternal. That's actually something that we all are born with. We're not, I would beg to differ with a lot of the Western religions, we're not born in sin. We're born neutral. What we do with our lives depends on what we're taught. But if you're taught that you're wicked, you're going to feel like you're lacking all of your life. And one of the things that's wonderful in the Enlightenment traditions,

whether it's Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Eastern Enlightenment traditions, is they all figure it out. There really isn't anybody in here to be wicked. There's just a lot of teaching and behavior and patterns. If you believe you're wicked you're going to live out that wickedness or you're going to try damn hard not to and you're always always going to be feeling like you fail but if you see that you're actually neutral that the that the inner space in you isn't either one thing or the other it's just there. That's a path of peace that goes beyond what psychology can offer.

And I took that path because I'm like, okay, I'm still dealing with an ego. Does it really exist? Oh, wait a minute. It's just a bunch of thoughts. What's underneath of that there's a there's an awareness underneath of that that has no sense of time no sense of age the pure pristine awareness underneath your thoughts and feelings and physical body sensations is the same as it ever was when you're 5 or 15 or 50 and if you look for the spatial boundaries of that pristine awareness,

you won't find any. So it feels infinite. If you want an experience of all of the attributes of what we were told was a God that was separate from us and out here, they're all to be found within. And the spiritual awakening path will take you there and can take you all the way as far as you want to go. There you go. I think it's great that you mix, you know, a modern therapy with enlightenment and help people kind of join those journeys, if you will. I love doing that and and my actual my thesis for graduate school was whether is yoga compatible with psychotherapy because i was in a yoga was real how should i say a dedicated yoga student and when i finished graduate work in fact i became a yoga teacher

although i taught meditation only because i herniated a disc during that training. So, but you know, I think the two are very compatible. Some of the great figures in modern psychology like Carl Gustav Jung were practitioners of yoga. It's a healthy thing for you. And sometimes I believe you heard the discussion we have with the heel feel young lady yeah and in the keeping the pain of trauma in the body that that's yoga supposed to be a good way of releasing that out of the muscles and out of the it's it's really wonderful yeah i mean

any any movement that helps the body to get present and it also helps you to release the held tension is great there's a new one that i found recently your listeners might be interested in called trauma release exercises really and there is a way that they help the body to tremble kind of spontaneously to get that held trauma out of the body without reliving the story of the trauma so i you know there's a whole network of trained practitioners again if you've got serious trauma i would make sure that they have a good five or six years of experience before you work with one of them but that's another way there are lots of modern somatic or body-based therapies that help with trauma too there you go get. Get professional licensed help, folks.

Please don't buy crystals and shit. Go see a licensed therapist. Stop it. I hate that shit. So this has been wonderful to have you on, sir, to share with us, John, all this stuff. Give us your final thoughts as we go out. I noticed on your website,

I think people can reach out and work with you. Are you licensed in certain states? I'm only licensed in Pennsylvania. That's going to change within a couple of years that will be cross-licensed in other states but i do work with people out of state as a spiritual mentor or enlightenment guide and that does incorporate all the rest of the work it just goes that step further i got a whole state you can call. It's called Utah. Infinite amount of money. You'll be able to retire off it. Anyway, just dial 1-800-JACK-MORMANS. But it's been wonderful to have you on.

Give us the.coms one last time as we go out and wherever you want people to pick up the book. Yeah, simplyawake.com is where you'll find me. And the book is on amazon.com. All the three current books are there under my name jonathan labman john is just short for jonathan so you'll find me on amazon.com and yeah it's been a pleasure being with you it's been you've made it really really easy to talk and very comfortable so thank you so much there you go we have a sister show where i make it really hard for people to talk that actually might be an interesting podcast like the guest tries to keep getting a word into it you're like

so tell us about the book and he starts telling you and you're like okay great so who wrote this book and you're like what i think what that might be an interesting podcast i don't know it might be that's what we do we've done one or two of these podcasts before so there you go so thank you very much john for coming on the show folks order the book wherever fine books are sold being human and waking up a therapist guide for psychotherapy clients and enlightenment seekers please for the love of god i've dated all my life if you have trauma please do the work and get healed don't stop hopping from relationship to relationship man or woman to woman or whatever your thing is just stop it take some time out heal yourself clean clean out all the baggage and it just makes so much of a difference of how you show up as a

human being how you approach other healed beings. If you have PTSD, which I'm hearing now, or narcissistic abuse or whatever that is, I don't mean to minimize people that might be taking a little too much of an advantage in a victim competition society. But if you're saying stuff like that, go see a therapist, please. A licensed therapist. License is the most important part but get help you know people always ask me they're like what if you go back and talk to your teenage kid or your teenage self what would you tell yourself i want to say get into fucking therapy god damn it um and get help and you know, we talk about this stuff on the show, and you use some examples.

And people will drag this stuff through their lives for 50 years. It will affect their relationships. It will affect themselves, the quality of their life. And sadly, I think there's a certain awakening we mostly, we all do at around 50, where we start to become a little bit more aware. Maybe we've just seen enough, where we start to become a little bit more aware. Maybe we've just seen enough patterns where we put everything together. But most people can look back at that point and go,

holy shit, I've been dragging a dead body around for 50 years. So please go get help now. If you think you need it, go ahead and need it. There's like 1-800 numbers I think you can buy for, you can go to for a psychologist. I don't have it readily available. But if you think you need it please go check it out i mean worst case scenario you talk to a therapist and they go hey

you're you're not really on that bad off just get out of my office you know but other than that you know get help read read books study but you really need to have a professional to to kind of hold your hand and take you down this path you don't want to try and self-heal. It's like getting, I don't know, it's like getting bit by a cobra and you're filled with poison. It will kill you, you know, some black mamba. And you're just like, I don't know, I think

I can heal it all. I'll just walk it off. I think it should be fine. Don't do that. That's all I'm saying. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for us. It's Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com for us. Chris Foss.com fortune's christmas christmas won the tiktokity all those crazy places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time thank you chris thank you