The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Doctor Gabor Mate: I Regret My Interview With Prince Harry! The Shocking Link Between Kindness & Illness!

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Being nice is bad for your health, while being angry is healthy, Dr. Gabor Mate unpacks the inner depths that lie beneath the personality you show to the world. In this new episode Steven sits down again with world-renowned trauma and addiction expert, Dr. Gabor Mate. Dr. Gabor Mate is a physician and an expert on addiction, stress and childhood development. For 12 years, Gabor worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by drug addiction, mental illness and HIV. He has over 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience. His books include: ‘When the Body Says No’, ‘In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction’ and most recently, ‘The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture’. In this conversation Gabor and Steven discuss topics, such as: His tough year His biggest self-criticisms Why you don't have to identify with emotions The importance of saying ‘no’ Why he can't follow his own advice Losing himself with success His interview with Prince Harry Why he regrets this interview What he learned about Prince Harry How Prince Harry was a traumatised child The importance of asking for help The need to reconnect to our gut feelings Why gut feelings are everything How we play out our traumas Why women take the pain for both partners in a couple How repressing anger makes you sick Why you need healthy anger The ways that repressing emotions makes you sick The worst part of trauma How being nice hurts your health Why people need to be angry Why people pleasers are unhealthy How you can inherit stress The power of knowing your trauma The need to learn how to breath Why people are having sex too soon How success will never give inner peace The goal you should chase in life You can purchase Dr. Mate’s most recent book, ‘The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture’, here: https://amzn.to/40unjpo Follow Gabor: Instagram: https://bit.ly/46vt340 Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RSjGYo Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to amazon music who when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you

that listen to this show let's continue 70 of the adult population is at least on one medication quarter of women are on antidepressants. The rate of childhood is going up. Worldwide, there's this epidemic of distress. What can we do about that? So, the first step would be to... Dr. Gabor Mate. Legendary thinker.

Celebrated speaker and best-selling author. Highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and stress. People pleasers, these are the people that tend to develop diseases. When people don't know how to say no, the body will say no for them. That niceness is a repression of healthy anger, and that repression of healthy anger has huge implications for your health. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you. People emotionally repressed are more likely to get cancer. And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma. We interrupt this film to tell you we are getting reports that the people's princess is dead. Harry was a traumatized

child. How he's told about his mother's death is that it was an accident. Your mother didn't make it. His father touches Harry on the knee and says, but it'll be okay, and leaves the room. This 12-year-old, nobody held him. And children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them, but just by not having their needs met. By not being seen, not being heard, not being held. Those are wounding for a child. But my interview with Prince Harry,

I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to do the interview. It really got to me. I lost myself. What happened? Gabbo, there's a question we often ask each other in flippant conversations, which we usually kind of brush away because it's the convenient thing to do yeah that question is the question i wanted to start by asking you which is how are you yeah

so that question is uh for me it brings up you know two dimensions one is how am i at this present moment which is you know how am i at this present moment, which is, you know, how am I at this moment, you know, which is all there is. I'm well. I feel rather peaceful inside. I'm very happy to be here with you. If you'd asked me two days ago, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said I was feeling somewhat anxious

and kind of troubled, you know. So as an in-the- in the moment answer i'm well and i also know how to keep well as long as i stick with what i know and when i forget what i know then i can be very not well and so the last year since we've met has been in many ways a tough year for me also one of deep learning so if the the question is, how have I been? I'd say I've been up and down and I've had real challenges that I've had to learn from. How am I right now? I'm really well, thank you.

Two days ago, if I'd asked you that question, your answer would have been anxious and troubled. Yeah. Why? I gave a talk on Monday night to 2,100 people. And I just didn't think I did my best here in London. And I thought, oh boy, I could have done better. I let people down. I allowed my self-judgments and self-doubts to really dominate my thinking.

And as much as I think I'm immune to that kind of self-doubt, evidently I'm not. So that's what happened. When you say you let it cloud your thinking, what were the symptoms of that? So you gave a talk two days ago to 2,100 people. Yeah. And you didn't feel you did your best. You went home that night. What was going on in your head?

What are the symptoms of that feeling um constant um cyclical self-criticism of i could have been more present i could have been more grounded more attuned with the audience perhaps but you know just all these self-criticisms which then are accompanied by certain feelings in the body like kind of a roiling in my belly and so on and that's what i went through and what was the remedy for that because we can all relate yeah earlier this year um also feeling in a state of discombobulation. Just a few months ago, I did something radical.

I did a two-week total sabbatical from the internet. No cell phone, no emails, no checking on Amazon how my books are doing, you know, all this self-referential ego enhancement stuff. And it just really made a difference. By the end of two weeks, I was a different person. And so just really made a difference. By the end of two weeks, I was a different person. And so I'm keeping it up. And one of the things you learn is you start noticing these body states that you're in

and the mental hoops that you jump through, but you don't identify with them. So what's the worst case scenario? I didn't do the best possible job. Okay, what's the headline in the newspaper? Human being fails to do his best on a particular occasion. What's the big deal? You know, so it's a matter of observing this all,

all this stuff and not identifying with it, not letting it take you over as it tends to i was reading something that said when we vocalize or share our stress it moves it from the emotional center of our brain to the much more rational center of our brain where we can kind of step outside of the video game and hold the controller per se exactly yeah it's the um um midfrontal cortex of our brain um that has insight and um social connection and uh awareness you know which so often goes offline as soon as some emotion takes over some anxiety or anger or resentment takes over, the midfrontal cortex tends to go offline.

And the more trauma you experience as a child, the more likely that is to happen so that your insightful capacities, the executive functions get taken over by some deeper emotional dynamics. And so one of the benefits to me of meditation is it restores that executive function so that I'm not taken over or too long taken over by emotional dynamics that just sweep me away. For two weeks this year, you said you went offline. Yeah. Why? by emotional dynamics that just sweep me away. For two weeks this year, you said you went offline. Yeah. Why? Sometimes people say to me, I've written this book that I know that you have

on your desk when the body says no and my contention is when people don't know how to say no, the body will say it in the form of illness. And I can tell you hundreds of times people have said to me, your book has saved my life. And my response has always been, maybe I should read it myself. Because the fact is, I'm quite capable of giving advice and dispensing wisdom that I don't follow myself. And that was the case. So I became quite stressed. And my relationship with my wife, Ray, became very fraught. And she said, enough, enough of this gap between who we are there in public and how you are in private.

So that was a big incentive for me, because we're coming up to our 54th anniversary, and on the whole, I'd rather stay married than not. Everything else being considered. But also for myself, I don't want to be that guy anymore who can speak the truth that a lot of people consider to be the truth so articulately, but not follow it myself.

So I just don't want to be that person. And that takes practice. And that's why I take the break from the internet. And what was interesting is I had my cell phone on airplane mode so nobody could get through to me a couple days a couple times a day I still pick up the cell phone and I say what are you doing there's nothing on it because it's on internet but the the compulsion to try and get something from the outside, to fill some gap within, I just kept noticing it.

By the end of two weeks, it wasn't so strong anymore. So I did it because I needed to for the sake of my own mental health. An up and down year for you, you said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. that the the down you were talking about well i remember a conversation my conversation with you and i and i think i remember you telling me that you had this goal of becoming a millionaire when i was younger when i was younger and then it's when you achieve that goal that you realize that that ain't all there is, that you still left very much with your internal demons.

And that's a very common lesson. I mean, there's two ways to wake up. One is failure, where you keep asking yourself, you know. But success is even more, because you think asking yourself you know but but but success is even more because you think that once you get something then you'll be happy and you know so i thought okay well jeez you know so this book the myth of normal you know bestseller internationally and published in 35 languages i should be happy no the more i got involved with it and the more i toured with it the more engaged with the outside i became the more I toured with it and the more engaged with the outside the more miserable I became inside

so the very success of the book it swept me away and I lost myself so that was one thing and I did this very long exhausting tour I wasn't taking care of myself then there was the my interview with Prince Harry

and all the frou-frou around it before it and after it. And I allowed that to take me over as well. Really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, in retrospect, I can see what happened. But at the time, I was too caught up in it to notice.

So what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what i know if i don't pay attention rigorous attention to what's going on inside and if i keep looking to the outside to give me meaning and give me validation then i can lose myself and that's what happened your interview with prince harry how did that cause you to lose yourself well in two ways one is um i had a gut feeling all along that i shouldn't agree to doing it the way they set it up because the way it was set up is in order to watch it people have to buy a copy of Harry's book. And I thought, this is not fair. Four million people have already bought the book. Why can't I watch this interview? Do they have to buy another copy? In other words, I believed that there should be a free public service

on the part of two people who can have a very interesting conversation. But out of sheer opportunism, I agreed to it. So I didn't follow my gut feelings. I lost myself even in agreeing to the format. And afterwards, Harry and I both wanted it released to the public for free, but the lawyer said, you can't do that because this is advertised as a one-time only event and there could be a

class action suit. So the result was that I agreed to something that I didn't really like. Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him. I didn't like the idea of putting this behind the paywall. So I lost myself just in agreeing to it, number one. Number two, then there was the incredible social media and British media reaction to it that was, for the most part,

so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted that I barely even know how to talk about it I thought by this age I would know better but you know what it really got to me it really got to me I mean I can give you examples but eventually what happened was that I was really in a negative state of mind. And have you read the book, The Fox, The Mole, The Horse, The Boy and the Horse? I bought it last week. It's upstairs in my bag. Wonderful. So great. It's a great little book, a great big book, although very few words in it, mostly just these wonderful drawings. Charlie McKeezy, he's really channeling wisdom in that book and the

horse is the most grounded of the four characters or the four friends and he's asked what's the most courageous things you've ever said and the horse says help so it's so difficult to ask for help but I did you know in the middle of all this frou-frou and my upset. And I called a friend of mine, a psychiatrist. And I said, I'm just in a bad state. And he said, what's going on for you? And I said, well, there's all this bad press and all the social media distortion of who I am and my motives. He said, what is it about that bothers you so much?

And I said, not being seen. Not being seen is one of the needs of the child but he said to me okay look Gabor when you were an infant you're not being seen for who you are as a human being almost cost you your life which it did as soon as he said that I said this isn't about the present. This is an old, unresolved, not yet fully resolved wound, age 79. I'm still upset at not being seen. I don't care if people agree with me or they refute my ideas, but I want them to see me and what I'm actually saying,

not some distorted version created by their own minds. And when he said that, that not being seen really threatened your life, I said, yeah, that's what's going on. And then I could relax. So what? What somebody else says. I don't live in the British press. I don't live in somebody else's mind.

Here I am. Let them think and say what they say. But it took somebody to wake me up to that. So that's what happened. You said you could share examples of how it got to you. Of, yeah. Well, oh boy. They called me a stern, overbearing merchant of pain. You know?

At some point in the interview, you know, when Harry was, and the other thing was, see, Harry really was a traumatized child. And when you read his book, you can see why. You know, he, and people couldn't understand

how this is possible. How could somebody so privileged at the very apex of society in gilded palaces be traumatized? Total misunderstanding of trauma. It's true. People have it much tougher in many ways. But as an infant, as a sensitive infant, to be born into a loveless marriage where the father's having an affair even before he's born, where the mother's a killed. How he's told about his mother's death

is that his father, then Prince Charles, comes into his room early in the morning and says, something terrible happened. There was an accident. Your mother didn't make it. Then there's a few moments of awkward silence. And finally, Charles touches Harry on the knee and says but it'll be okay and leaves the room and this is how this 12 year old was told nobody held him um Charles himself was only doing what happened to him when when Queen Elizabeth went on an international four or five month royal tour leaving the five-year-old kid behind when she returned to England she greeted him by shaking his hand and now what I said to Harry was that even animals hold and touch their kids their infants infants. Mammals, that's what they do.

Because mother rats, when the baby is born, they lick their babies. And the way the mother rat licks the baby, this has been shown in laboratory, influences the brain development of the child. And those babies that get the right kind of licking, it's called grooming, they have better brains as adults. Premature infants used to be put in incubators and nobody used to touch them. Then it was found out that if by, just by stroking their backs 10 minutes a day, that promotes healthy brain development. And the great British American anthropologist,

Ashley Montague, wrote a book called Skin, the Human Significance of Touch. So I was saying that touch is important. You're not being held and not being touched was a deprivation. And I said mammals, monkeys. You know what happens when a baby elephant is born? This is fascinating. The mother elephant,

I read this in a book called The Evolved Nest, for which I wrote the preface by a wonderful psychologist called Darcia Narvez. I read this in a book called The Evolved Nest, for which I wrote the preface, by a wonderful psychologist called Darcia Narvez. When an infant elephant is born and the mother goes into labor, all the other mother elephants stand around in a circle. When the infant plops on the ground, they all stroke them with their trunks. So touch and being held is so important for mammals and i was saying animals do that

this journalist who i don't know what she was listening to said i said the royal family treats like kids like animals i said no i wish they'd had so i mean the distortion is just laughable if it wasn't if i hadn't taken it so personally for the reasons I already explained for you to take it so personally which led you to call a psychiatrist yeah a man like you with the knowledge you have that writes books about the mind and stress and the body and all these things you You must've been in a pretty dark place. I was in a dark place and I wasn't, but look, I'm a human being like the rest.

And what Charlie McKee says in that book is that the most courageous thing you can do is ask for help. It's true. You know, there's that, I don't know if you remember the Beatles song, "'Help, I need somebody'." And John Lennon sings, "'When I was younger, so much younger than today,

I didn't need anybody's help in any way. But now those days are gone, I'm much less self-assured. He's actually saying that when he was younger, he believed he didn't need help. But the reason he believed he didn't need help, that he has to make it on his own, because he was so traumatized as a child. His father left him when he was born. His mother left. He was brought up by an aunt.

And Lennon grows up feeling abandoned, that I can do this on my own. I don't need anybody. And later on, he realizes, I need help. But actually, we were all born needing help. We were all born needing to be understood, to be attuned with, to be seen, to have our emotions received and validated. That's one of the essential needs of children, as I make the point in The Myth of Normal. And children can be traumatized not just by terrible things happening to them,

but just by not having their needs met. By not being seen, not being heard, not being held. Those are wounding for a child, which is what the meaning of the word trauma means. So you don't need terrible things to happen. It's so difficult for people to understand that. They think with trauma trauma you need horrific events well horrific events can be very traumatic but you can wound people sensitive people the sensitive child or any child can be hurt just because the parents are too stressed and unavailable

emotionally to really see them for who they are i've struggled with that in my life, especially being a CEO, I think. I've struggled to ask for help when I need it because you kind of see yourself as the helper. And also I've struggled with the idea, maybe, I don't know where I got this story from that people like me, maybe because I'm a man maybe because i'm um the head of businesses we have to figure it out on our own and the cost of repression repressing how i feel has become more and more evident over time yeah how so just like i think i when i was younger i never experienced anxiety before. And then as I had more difficult moments in business where I tried to solve the problem in my mind,

were the first times at like 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, that I experienced like fully fledged what I'd call anxiety, where I just couldn't get a thought out of my head and I felt it in my body. My breath was short, this constant state of like angst yeah um and and yeah i just thought i could deal with it myself i thought i could think my way through it yeah um was that the hardest the the hardest moment in terms of your own psychology in your adult life in recent times? Let me answer that question in a moment, but let me ask you a question that occurs to me, if I may. Yeah, please. It's like with beautiful women,

they sometimes have a very hard time because they can never know that somebody want me for who I really am or they're just attracted to my physical features. So for somebody who at a young age becomes quite wealthy and successful, how do you know when somebody is approaching you? Are they approaching you because they want something from you or because they really care about you? I mean, that must be a problem for you, I imagine.

100%. 100%. You never really know or understand what your relationships are. Yeah know yeah huh it must be confusing sometimes it is and you i typically fall back onto the relationships i had before yeah yeah because i can trust those ones yeah so i have the same my best friends people i spend my time with on my birthday there's five you know five people there yeah are the five people that were there 10 years ago yeah unless i think we get reconnected to our gut feelings then our gut feelings will tell us what is real and what isn't but the problem for many of us is that we get disconnected from our gut feelings very early in life like in a in this room of 2100 at the troxy on monday night

um i think i asked this question, I always do it. Have you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something and not paying attention to it, ignoring it, and being sorry afterwards? Almost everybody puts their hand up. That's a sign of childhood wounding because we're born connected to our gut feelings.

No baby is disconnected from their gut feelings. Something happens to make us disconnect. What is a gut feeling? From a physiological perspective, because gut feeling is used as a word to describe, you know, an intuition or, you know. Well, real gut feelings really happen in the gut. In the Western way of looking at it,

we tend to look upon the intellect and the intellectual brain as the only brain that we have. But actually, our brain is a form of complicated structure. And our heart has a nervous system, which is connected to the brain up here. And there's a kind of knowing in the heart.

Sometimes people say, I knew in my heart. And they did. If they're connected gut feelings are what all animals possess it warns them of danger or when it's safe and when it isn't safe not in the brain um the gut is connected to the brain the the gut sends more connections to the brain than the brain sends to the gut and the gut has more of the neurotransmitter serotonin in it than the brain does so that the gut things are here to tell us about what is safe and what isn't and when the brain in the gut

and the brain in the heart and the brain in up here in this in the head are connected then we're grounded and present and very alert and very aware of what's going on but when childhood trauma interferes with those connections which it does then we start to just work from up here and we can think we can figure things just from up here but actually when you think about human beings where did we evolve we evolved for millions of years out in nature how long does any creature in nature survive if they don't pay attention to their gut feelings? So to go back to your question about me, I used to believe, I really used to believe into my 40s that everybody else could be stressed, but I couldn't be. And it's like you and your anxiety um i think the reason you i didn't feel the stress

because i had coping mechanisms like working hard and um getting people's attention or using my smarts and and uh having status and all this kind of stuff you know then that broke down i realized i could be stressed like everybody else but literally i had to i i had this belief i mean it's almost unbelievable to me now that i used to believe that i couldn't everybody else could be stressed but i couldn't be that's what i thought yeah your wife when you went through that dark moment if i was her what would i have observed well first of all and i talk about this in the myth of normal and ray my wife came on stage at the troxy on monday night and talked about this i asked to. Women have 80% of autoimmune disease in this society. So that diseases where the immune system attacks the body

happens to women much more than to men. Things like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, inflammatory diseases of the gut and so on. Why? So those diseases tend to happen to people not just according to my own observation, although it's very much my own observation. When I was working in family practice and palliative care,

before I did addiction medicine, I noticed that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental. That's the subject of my book, When the Body Says No. And then again, in the myth of normal, people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own, identified with duty, role, and responsibility, so their work in the world rather than their own true selves, they tended to suppress healthy anger. So they tend to be very, very nice and peacemakers. And they tended to believe that they're responsible for how other people feel

and that they must never disappoint anybody. Two fatal beliefs. So these are the people that, according to my observation, but according to a whole lot of research as well, that I didn't even know about, but have since found elegant research, these are the people that tend to develop autoimmune disease. Now, in this society,

which gender is more acculturated, programmed, to suppress their healthy anger, to be the peacemakers, to be the caregivers. Women, this is a function of a reality that a lot of people deny, but it's a patriarchal society, which we can talk about, but it's not a conspiracy. It's just how it works. So me in my marriage expect my wife to absorb my stresses.

And if I'm unhappy, guess who I blame? And who do I take it out on so she would experience somebody who's um can be hostile for no reason and blaming and she has to walk around on eggshells no um thank god she's not the type to do that for too long and at some point she'll call my bluff and then i either wake up or she says thank you very much but enough of this you know and so she would experience somebody was irritable and um unreasonably blaming and not taking care of their own needs and then expecting her to take care of them for me and um we both had to grow up and she was programmed that way as a child

her parents had a lot of problems and she became the peacemaker and a caregiver emotionally and then she carries that role into her marriage with me and here's where the bad news is for people we always marry somebody at the same level of emotional development or trauma resolution as we are so when we met we were two traumatized people not even realizing it and then we played out our traumas and i played it out in the typical male way which is to be aggressive and demanding and resentful if she wasn't around to mother me and that's what she would have seen. And this dynamic can still arise, except when it does,

she puts a stop to it right away. And I have the grace and the wisdom right now to understand, yeah, I'm doing it again. In fact, I haven't done it since then because I just don't want to be that guy. But that's what she would have seen. And what was going on inside your head?

Were you anxious? Were you depressed? I was anxious, and then I want her soothing. I want her... How should I say this? There's an interesting sexual dynamic between men and women that men very often unconsciously expect their women to mother them, to give them a mothering that they didn't fully receive as kids. And the women take on that role

because they're acculturated in a society to do that. But then what happens sexually? No healthy guy wants to sleep with his mother and no healthy woman wants to sleep with his mother and no healthy woman wants to sleep with her son so that the the ardor and the you know the the passion kind of drains out because of this unconscious dynamic of women mothering men and men demanding that they do so then i become frustrated and then who do I blame for that? I blame her rather than looking at how did I contribute?

How did I help create this situation? So all that stuff played out in our marriage. And we've had to learn a lot from what didn't work. In my relationship, when I was most anxious, it's also when my relationship nearly ended with my partner. Because like you said, I inadvertently took it out on her because I felt that she should understand how I'm feeling and basically adapt to me. And she didn't and so there was conflict because i felt like she was misunderstanding me yeah and wasn't like acting in the right way to meet the needs that i had like she couldn't

understand you know and and so that i think i wore her down and then there was kind of like as you say that ultimatum moment where she's basically saying listen shall i just go yeah and what you probably didn't do and what i didn't do for a long time is just to go to her and say you know what i'm feeling anxious yeah that was that's what happened after you know you know and i'm feeling unsettled and i realized that i have resentful feelings towards you you know instead of owning it we acted out yeah and then we why don't they understand us you know and actually so what we're actually demanding is that we can be children emotionally and they be the mothers who without any effort on our part will understand and see us you know and this is a strong

dynamic um in men-female relationships. And what tends to happen is that men then, women at some point get to the, if they're healthy enough, now if they're not strong enough to assert themselves, you know what happens? They get sick. And I know this is a mouthful, but a lot of women's cancers and autoimmune diseases are precisely because of

this self-repression and i could talk about that at great length the physiology of it but either the the body will somehow say no for them that's why women are much more likely to be an antidepressant because they're taking a medication for both of them you know and so either the woman gets ill somehow or she asserts herself and says i'm not doing this anymore at which point the guy will go seeking a younger mother who's not yet mature enough to assert herself and this happens all the time in relationships the cost of self-repression the cost of sort of emotional repression i think everybody is guilty at some point in their life of repressing their emotions.

I think men do it a lot as well. I mean, if you look at the suicidality in the UK amongst men. Yeah, men tend to act it out on themselves like that, yeah. What is the cost of self-repression? You talked about the physiological mechanism of what's going on when we repress our emotions and how we feel. It's been well studied, not just by me,

but others and documented that repression of healthy anger disturbs the immune system. Now, why should that be the case? Now, healthy anger is simply when somebody is intruding on your space and they won't exist. You say, you're in my space, get out. That's healthy anger. It's in the moment. When it's done its job, it's finished with. It's different from chronic rage, which is a whole other thing. No, in other words, anger is a boundary defense.

That's all it is. Animals do it. Ah, get out of my space. Now, the emotional system in general has the job, the human emotional system in general has the role of allowing in what is nurturing and loving and healthy and welcome and to keep out what isn't. That's the job of the emotional system. Let me ask you a trick question. What's the job of the immune system? Okay, I'll answer.

It's to keep out what is unhealthy and unwelcome and toxic and to let in what is nurturing and healthy. So the immune system is like, it's been called a floating brain. It is a memory. It is a reactive capacity. And it allows in nutrients and vitamins

and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and unhealthy invading organisms and so on. In other words, the immune system and the emotional system have exactly the same role. That's the first point. The second point is they're not separate systems. Physiologically speaking, emotional system, the nervous system, hormonal apparatus and the immune system are all one system.

And there's a whole new science, when I say new, 60, 70, 80 years old, called psycho-neuroimmunology that studies the unity. So it's not even that all these things are connected, they're one. So therefore, when you're suppressing one aspect of it, you're also suppressing the other. So people that repress healthy anger, they have diminished their immune activity. And this has been demonstrated. So the repression of emotions has a physiological function. And when you repress your immune system,

you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you or to fail you when it comes to malignancy. The immune system, like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day, because nature makes mistakes. That's not a problem. The immune system recognizes them as, cancer cells don't have on their surfaces markers that our normal cells do. So the immune system says, this is a foreigner, it's an enemy, I'm going to destroy it.

But when you repress your emotions you can also undermine your immune system and now your immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it and allows it to to proliferate there was a british surgeon in the 1960s who operated on am i talking too much're not. There's no such thing on this podcast. Okay. Because I just get so passionate about this stuff. And the reason I get so passionate about it is because it's so important in healing. And we as physicians could do so much more for people if we understood these scientific facts,

but we don't as a profession. Anyway, there was a British thoracic surgeon called David Kisson in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice, that people emotionally repressed are more likely to get lung cancer. Now, it's true that most people who get lung cancers are smokers, but out of 100 smokers, only about 10 or 15 get lung cancer, which doesn't mean that smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer. It is.

But he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking. And the more repressed they were, the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer. This guy noticed this in the 1960s. So emotional repression has huge implications physiologically. And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma.

Why? The child is born with some fundamental needs. One of them, as I've articulated earlier, is for attachment, for closeness, proximity, unconditional loving acceptance by caring adults. Not just a human child. All mammalian children have that need. Without that, they don't survive. So that's called attachment. Seeking of closeness and proximity for the purpose of being taken care of or to take care of the other. And our brains are wired for attachment. We have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships. And that's so important all through our lives, but especially when we're infants and young children.

Now, but we have another need. We've already talked about it. I just haven't named it. The other need is for authenticity. We just to be ourselves, connected to our bodies and our gut feelings. Because again, without access to our gut feelings, we don't survive out there in nature

where we evolved and where we lived until 15,000 years ago. And so that authenticity is very important to be connected to yourself so that you know when you're safe and when you're not. You know what you want and what you don't want. You know how to say no when you don't want something. You know how to say yes when you don't want something you know how to say yes when you do that's authenticity auto the self being ourselves and to go back to harry his challenge all his life was that he wasn't allowed to be authentic he had to play a certain role and fit into a certain set of expectations of how to be and who to be and he could never figure out who am i really you know in that context. But that's

so general. So many of us face that challenge of who are we really? Who are we authentically? As opposed to what's expected of us. Now, so we have these two needs. Attachment, on the one hand, authenticity in the other. Ideally, the two are not in conflict. Ideally, you can be in a relationship or I can be in a relationship where we can be ourselves and be accepted and connected with. And that's ideal all our lives. But what happens to a young child where if they're authentic, they're not accepted. So for example, certain psychologists recommend that angry children should be punished for their anger. Rather than their anger being understood as to what it's all about, and the child being taught different ways to express it, they're just to be punished for it, and by different ways. By the way, if you're a parent of a two-year-old and if you don't frustrate your child

you're probably not doing a good job because your two-year-old may want a cookie before dinner and you say no cookie before dinner cookie yeah in a minute they're throwing a tantrum because what do even adults do when they're frustrated? They throw tantrums. Children, that's just what they do. They have no self-regulation yet. So the two-year-old gets upset. Now you punish them. You give them a message. You're not acceptable to me when you're angry. You have to be a certain way for me to accept you. Well, you mustn't be sad. Cheer up. What's wrong with you? So when children are given this message of conditionality, that you're acceptable to me only if you behave in ways that I approve of, otherwise the attachment relationship is threatened, then the child is faced with this choice, which is not a choice at all.

Do I stay attached to my parents? If my father's an alcoholic. And the only way I can find acceptance is by repressing my emotions and not show my sadness and my fear. Then do I show my sadness and my fear then do i show my sadness and my fear or my anger or do i threaten the relationship well there's no choice at all the child will choose the attachment and therefore they give up connection to themselves which is the essence of trauma that this connection from ourselves not in my own words in the essence of trauma, that disconnection from ourselves, not in my own words,

in the words of other trauma theorists who I agree with, the worst aspect of trauma is the disconnection from ourselves. And we do that for the sake of maintaining attachments, which means for the rest of our lives, we'll be afraid to be ourselves. Is this what they call people pleasers? People, exactly.

So Sheryl Crow, the American singer and musician, developed breast cancer. And she said that since my breast cancer, I've been a different person. Until then, I was always trying to please others. And now, and there used to be voices in my head that always telling me that I was wrong. I don't listen to them anymore you know so that uh people pleasers are the ones who gave up not by conscious choice but as a matter of survival their authenticity in order to stay liked and accepted and attached to it but then they carry that on in the rest of their lives and they at risk. I always worry for the very nice people. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end

of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button,

I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button i will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better i can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this that would mean the world to me that is the only favor i will ever ask you thank you so much for your time back to this episode you always worry for the very nice people yeah you talk a lot about that in when the body says no yeah why is being nice a potential risk to one's health well there's two there's two places to be very nice from one is just genuine human compassion and concern for others,

but you're still grounded in yourself. That's great. But a lot of people are very nice because they are afraid not to be. Because they weren't liked who they were, they weren't loved for who they were. Being nice was their way of getting the love and the attention they needed.

Let me tell you a story. In 1870, there was a French neurologist called Jean-Martin Charcot, who was the first one to describe multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammation of the nervous system, very debilitating. And Charcot said, in 1870, without any scientific research, but just from his own observation, that this was a stress-driven disease. Now, since then, there's been a lot of research to show how stress and trauma potentiate multiple sclerosis. It's not even controversial.

Not that any neurologist knows that. They don't get taught this stuff in medical school. But the research is there, and I present it in my books. In any case when i was writing when the body says no a group of a self-help group of multiple sclerosis patients phoned me and said would you come and talk to us because i understand you're working on stress and an illness and i said yeah sure i'll come and talk to you and there's about 25 people in the group this is in vancouver Vancouver Canada and I gave them

very tentatively apologetically apologetically I said look I don't know this for sure but the sense I get from my work in family practice and palliative care is that the people that develop your condition and other conditions tend to be people to be pleasers that they have a they tend to have difficulty saying no they They tend to be very nice people. And I said, you know, I'm sorry if I've offended you. I don't mean to. I'm just giving you something very tentative. I haven't done the research yet. I'm just giving you my observations. They said, you just described us. And they all said that. And there's a woman who says, in the group who says, I don't even know how to say no. I said, terrific. Give me $100

right now. She says, well, I don't have $100 with me right now. I said, it's not a problem. I said, outside this building, there's an ATM machine. We can go on. After the meeting, we can go out. You can get $100 and give it to me me she says uh i'm not comfortable doing that i said listen i'm just trying to get you to say no to a ridiculous demand by a perfect stranger to whom you you owe nothing whatsoever she said i can't say the word because in childhood now by the way, when you have kids, you're going to find out

what the word no means because age one and a half, all kids start saying no. They say that long before they say yes. Why? Because that no is their boundary defense of I'll figure out who I am. I'm not going to accede to your demands.

I need to figure out what I want. Put your shoes on. No. And the parents think this is something wrong. There's nothing wrong. It's nature individuating the child. When families punish that, the child will repress the no, and the body will stay in the form of multiple sclerosis.

For example, niceness, ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, are known in Britain as motor neuron disease. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with it at age 21. He was told he'd be dead within two years. He lived another 55 years. Doctors don't know everything, you know. But there's been studies on ALS patients. They're extraordinarily nice.

So there was a, from a Cleveland clinic in Ohio, a major referral clinic, two neurologists published a paper at an international ALS or motor neuron congress. Why are ALS patients so nice? And what they described was that when people came to their office for diagnosis before they met the physician, they had underwent EDX,

electrodiagnostic testing of their nerves. And the technicians who performed the tests would write on the side of the test, this person can't have ALS, she's not nice enough. Or I'm afraid this person has ALS, they're too nice. And their physicians, the neurologist specialists said, despite the shortness of their contact with their patients and the obviously unscientific nature of their observations, invariably they turned out to be right. And then I called Dr. Wilburn who did this study and I said, what did the other neurologists say when you presented this? They said, yeah, we all noticed this.

We just can't explain it. Since then, there's been a study where they've asked neurologists about their patients and the answer is all our ALS patients are extraordinarily nice. Now, what the neurologists don't do is they don't make the connection that that niceness is a repression

of healthy anger and that repression of healthy anger plays a role in the onset of that disease so it's not a accidental connection so why do i reward very nice people because they're putting themselves at risk again niceness can come from genuine concern for others but that's not accompanied by an ignoring of yourself you also care for yourself then you can be as nice as you want but you also know how to say no and you also know how to set boundaries you don't know how to and you know how to be angry if you need to be but the niceness that comes from self-repression that's the one that hurts there's clearly going to be a lot of very nice people hearing that that know they're nice that know their people pleases that know they've experienced in their lives the consequences of

putting everyone else before themselves i can it's funny as you were talking, I was thinking about the person that I know who I think is nicest. And that individual is sick all the time. And I just connected that dot in my head. But I remember making a joke to her about, oh, you're sick, so I'm like, whatever, you're sick a lot. And then also thinking, oh my God, she is probably the nicest. Nice is an interesting word

because that can be misconstrued as like hiya or like you know yeah saying nice things to someone else but it's really at a deeper level from what i've observed in that person putting everyone else before them or chronically serving other people's needs before their own well so my contention is as i said earlier when people don't know how to say no the body will say no for them in the form of illness and for a lot of people with serious illness the illness is the wake-up call yeah and they actually learn and when they do that can make a difference to the course of their illness sometimes not always but i've seen examples of remarkable healing when people learn to say no and stop being people pleasers and i

just only wish that physicians understood this so when somebody comes to them with chronic eczema and all these other chronic conditions they will not just provide the physical treatment but they will also talk to the person about how much stress are they taking on it's very stressful to take on everybody else's issues and ignoring your own. It's very stressful. That stress has a physiological impact on the body. How does someone who is a people pleaser, how do they turn that ship around? Because they'll hear that, but because their niceness or their people pleasing is so deep within them

and it started so early, they're not going to change. Most of them won't change well they may change if they get sick you know and if they learn something from it i've had a lot of people tell me that um but it is happens very early uh but it's everybody's second nature not their first nature that's it's a very interesting phrase second nature it means that with the first nature now no baby is very interesting phrase, second nature. It means that there's a first nature. Now, no baby is born as a people pleaser. No baby lies there, no one-day-old baby lies there thinking, gosh, I'm hungry and wet and lonely, but gosh, mom and dad have been working so hard,

I better not bother them. You know, babies will express their needs very volubly and very articulately and very loudly. That's how we're born. We're meant to be born that way. So that this suppression of that is our second nature. And that first nature never goes away. We can always retrieve it, but you have to become conscious of it. So when the body says no, I lay out certain principles of healing. In the myth of normal, I actually teach this exercise. Ask yourself this question.

Where in your life are you not saying no? Where no wants to be said, but you're not saying it. Let me give you an example. Let's say I come to London and we're friends. And I call you up, hey, Stephen, here I am, do you have enough coffee? But you've been up all night helping a sick friend or otherwise you're just too stressed to want to meet me right now. Your desire is to say no. But what if you suppress that no?

And you say yes for the fear of displeasing me or disappointing me or losing my friendship? If I say no, Gabor won't like me anymore. What's going to be the impact on you if you keep behaving that way? Physically, what's going to be the impact? I'm going to be more tired, more exhausted, probably going to be more stressed. All that. Yeah. You're going to be resentful. more exhausted, probably going to be more stressed. All that. Yeah. You're going to be resentful.

Disconnected from. Yeah, exactly. So this person, they need to, I teach this exercise in the book about where am I not saying no? And what is my belief behind not saying no? I don't want to upset Gabor if he's coming to me. Exactly. And I depend on Gabor's liking. Yes. belief behind saying not saying no i don't want to upset gabbo if he's coming exactly and and i and i depend on gabbo's liking yes you know uh which means as a child you depend on your parents

liking and you had to suppress you know to be like thirdly where did i learn this belief that if i say no i'm not likable or i'm guilty i'm not worthwhile you? And the fourth question is, who would I be without that belief? You know? And so if your friend does this exercise regularly, believe me, she can turn it around. But it takes some practice. Who would I be without that belief? Yeah.

When I put myself in her shoes or I put myself in a people pleaser's shoes, I wouldn't, I'm a people pleaser in certain environments, but I wouldn't say I am generally. I can imagine someone would respond to that and say, well, I'd lose all my friends. She'd find out who her friends really were because the real friends would celebrate it.

They'd say, oh, finally, we're so glad to see you being yourself. The friends that were just using her or relying on her to be their supporter unconditionally will turn away. And I say this to people. This contest between attachment and authenticity can be a painful one. But you can decide which kind of pain you want. As a child, you have no choice. As an adult, it's true true if you're authentic you might lose some attachment relationships that's going to be painful but which pain would you rather have

the pain of being authentic and losing some friendships there were no friendships at all or the pain of of of losing yourself and all these implications and all its impacts on the body. So it would be difficult for her, and it's true, some relationships that she has now, they would fade away, but my God, she would also attract much more genuine and authentic relationships, and her true friends would really celebrate her. Now let me tell you something that just occurred to me,

but forget it. There was a book written by an australian nurse about 12 years ago and she this nurse like i used to work in palliative care with dying people she works with in hospice with dying people and these are people who tend to die of of malignancy and chronic illness well before that time and she wrote a book called the the Five Regrets of Dying People. Bernie Y. And you know what the top regret was? That I wasn't being myself. That I wasn't true to myself. I wasn't being authentic. That's the top regret of dying people. And the third one was that I didn't express my feelings

for fear of disturbing or displeasing others. So authenticity is not just a new age concept. It's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings. Oh, one more thing. So yesterday I was in Westminster Abbey. And I was looking at all these beautifully and articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists,

to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and despoiled native people all over the world. They're the heroes of the British Empire. And I think one of the reasons there's such a strong pushback against the idea of trauma in this society is if you recognize trauma, which exists not only on the personal individual level, but very much on the collective level, the ruling elites in this country would have to come to terms with the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of foreign peoples, which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry, is that he pointed that out. Let's face it, the royalty, the wealth that I was born into

was achieved at the despoilation and oppression of people around the world. So trauma is not just a personal issue, it's very much a social and collective and historical issue. What's the cure? You know, because if we're, many of us are byproducts of generational trauma, and we're seeking different ways to ease our pain through the means of addiction, whether it's pornography or heroin or alcohol. We can't all afford expensive therapists, but we exhibit those self-destructive behavior patterns maybe every single day, maybe with social media addictions or whatever. What do we do? Unfortunately, the healthcare systems around the world have very poor appreciation of the emotional contribution

to people's physical or mental ill health. And most physicians and most psychiatrists are not trained in it. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap between science and research on the one hand and medical practice on the other. It's maddening sometimes to contemplate it. So the first step would be to educate the caregivers. Just educate doctors about the actual science of the mind-body connection and the impacts of trauma.

Educate them. So when you go to a physician with, say, chronic fatigue or inflammation of your joints, they don't just give you the necessary medication, which I'm not against, but they also ask you what's going on. So that's the first thing. Second thing is let's prevent the problem. So let's support young families to be really there for their kids so that families don't have to struggle economically

and their parents are so stressed. As I may have mentioned, I've forgotten now, when parents are emotionally stressed, economically stressed, according to a number of studies, the kids' stress hormone levels are abnormal. And that is a harbinger of future disease. And so let's look after young families. Let's make people feel secure. Uncertainty, lack of control, lack of information. These are some of the drivers of physiological stress. So let's create a society where there's more sense of mutual acceptance

and communality and social support. Let teachers be educated that the kids who are so-called misbehaving are kids who are actually troubled, Troubled because of stuff at home. And that the solution is not to exclude them or to punish them, but to actually give them emotional support in the classroom and in the schools. Let the schools be. The human brain, according to a Harvard study, develops from before birth. It's an ongoing process that begins before

birth and condenses into adulthood. The necessary conditions for human brain development is safe, supportive emotional relationship with adults. Let everybody who deals with children, from social workers to teachers to daycare workers to kindergarten supervisors to parents, understand the emotional needs of kids and provide that safety. Let the justice system so-called, about which there's very little just, in Canada, 50% of the women in jail are indigenous. They make up 6% of the population. 50% of the women in jail are indigenous. They make up 6% of the population, 50% of the jail population. You call that justice? You take the most traumatized people who then act out their

traumas and then you punish them for it. So let the medical system, let the educational system, let the legal system understand child development and trauma. Now terms of the adult to answer your question more specifically so there's a social answer but then there's the individual answer yeah a lot of people can't afford good therapy it's true it's expensive and and even though there's a lot of people who are get therapy but not getting appropriate therapy well if you can't afford therapy, go to the library, read some books. My own, but not just my own. I could rattle off five other books you should read. Read Dick Schwartz's book on internal family systems called No Bad Parts. Read Bessel van der Kolk's book on trauma called The Body Keeps the Score. Read Peter Levine's book,

Waking the Tiger, on trauma. Read Oprah Winfrey's and Bruce Perry's book, Waking the Tiger on Trauma. Read Oprah Winfrey's and Bruce Perry's book, What Happened to You? Read Bruce Perry's book called The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. I'm interviewing Peter Levine. Oh yeah. Oh good. Oh good. Wonderful.

I'm glad to hear that. He's one of my mentors and friends. And we often work together. And all of these books will have some advice about how to help yourself including my books then there's a lot of stuff on internet so this uh the interview that you and i had a year ago i checked this morning has been seen by two and a half million people i'm sure it's helped a lot of people there's a lot that you can get just you know freely nobody's gonna get charged to you know on the youtube um lots of my talks are available lots of talks by other really good

people are available do that there are self-help groups of all kinds um is there a risk here this is what the the one side of the narrative sometimes argue that you can kind of over traumatize your life in terms of over over labeling everything that you do as a trauma so you know and i mean that that always happens right when when people become aware of something they become over aware and they start over labeling and saying that's a trauma response that's a trauma response that's a trauma response and they kind of live with a feeling that they are inherently broken yeah but my point is that nobody's broken um actually i talked about our first nature that's always there when people recover it's interesting word recovery what does it mean to recover?

When you recover something, what are you doing? Going back to... You're finding it. Oh, yeah, I'm sure, yeah. That's the definition of the word, isn't it? What do people find when they recover? They find their true selves. That's what they'll tell you.

That true self never went away. Nobody's damaged goods. Nobody's broken. To talk about trauma is not to disempower people, but to empower them. If I learn that my response to the British media and the Harry issue was actually nothing to do with the present moment,

it's actually some old programming, oh, okay, now I can drop it. Are you glad it happened? I'm glad that everything happened because everything is learning. it's actually some old programming. Oh, okay, now I can drop it. Are you glad it happened? I'm glad that everything happened because everything is learning. Nothing in this life is wasted if you know how to use it properly. And so what I'm saying is that

to be aware of trauma is not to lose power, but to gain it because it's not an excuse. I can't keep going to my wife and saying, I'm being resentful of you and punishing you because my mother didn't take good care of me when I was a baby because she was too stressed.

You know? I mean, that's lack of responsibility. But for me to understand that my demands on my wife to take care of me like a mother would of a baby actually is my trauma response, then I can drop it because i'm not a baby anymore i don't need i'm not that helpless i'm not that resourceless um i'm not that

um ungrounded so that when you recognize trauma it's not in order to use it as an excuse but to actually to overcome it that's the whole point When we talked about the suppression of our emotions and anger, you used the word healthy anger. Yeah. Because there's a risk, isn't there, when you're saying that anger can be a positive thing that people will then assume that berating someone behind a counter or a waitress in a restaurant

because they got one item on your order wrong is standing up for your boundaries. I've done it no it's not so healthy anger is in the moment and it's just a boundary defense it's not outrage it's you're in my space get out that's its purpose that's its only purpose or to protect something like a you want to see anger um try and tell a mother bear not to uh be close to their to their cubs you know you'll find out what healthy mother anger is all about you know that's just healthy the kind of rage you're talking about have you ever had that kind of rage

definitely on a spectrum i've got i've got so the reason i struggle with the answer is because i've got a friend that's fully shown me what the that's the extreme side of that is where we used to call it the red mist with him where he would literally lose control which is incidentally what hair used to call his anger oh really yeah yeah my friend so my friend um my friend one of my best friends in the world he talks about this all the time is he had you could trigger him by saying something usually by saying he was wrong about something yeah or something like that and then he would just lose it so i remember the first the last time it happened was when the pandemic rolled in i was staying with him in his apartment because

the lockdown and i was living in america at the time and we were discussing the virus and i said to him um i think people that are older and that have certain health um situations are more at risk and he said to me no people that are younger are more at risk and i said and i showed an nhs um website which said no it's people that were older at more risk yeah and he just went into this red mist okay where he was totally triggered and lost control of his emotions okay so if you observed him then what you would have noticed is you remember what i said about healthy anger it's in the present moment once it's done his job it's gone yeah your friend the anger he gets the anger he gets yeah so the rage just keeps building on itself now we talk about a fit of anger it's a good word

you know where else we talk about fits is epileptic fits in epileptic fits certain electrical miswiring in the brain then recruits other brain circuits and it gets more and more and more until hold the whole body is shaking, and the person may even lose consciousness and soil themselves and so on. That's an epileptic fit. A fit of anger is the same. A fit of rage is the same.

So that the more severe it gets, the more brain circuits it recruits. So rather than expending itself doing its job and then being gone, it actually gets worse and worse and worse. That's unhealthy anger. And triggering is a good word. Because look at what the word triggering means.

Now, if you look at a weapon, how big a part of the weapon is the trigger? This big. For the trigger to set off anything, there has to be ammunition there. There has to be explosive material there. So your friend is carrying a lot of explosive material. I can tell you, your friend never felt understood or validated as a child.

And he's still carrying the rage of that. So you trigger him, and then by disagreeing with him, and all the pain of invalidation all the rage of not being understood now gets triggered and recruits more and more brain circuits now i can tell you something healthy anger is essential for our physical integrity that rage in the absolute in the in the aftermath of a rage episode your risk of a heart attack or stroke doubles for negative for the next two hours according to studies because what happens your blood pressure goes up your blood vessels narrow and the clotting factors in your blood increase so of course you had more risk so the repression of anger can lead to chronic illness but so can rage lead to heart attacks and

and strokes and so on so So anger is a delicate thing. Shall I say something about my friend that we found out because he then went to a childhood psychologist to understand himself. And that's why I said that was the last time. So you can imagine that was three years ago, the pandemic, two, three years ago. He went to a childhood psychologist

and what they uncovered through their work was that as a kid, he was not only um a foot shorter than all the other kids yeah but he was both dyslexic and struggled a lot intellectually so um the people around him and on his report card basically called him stupid as a child and then he actually found a i think he found a text message at some point between his mom and his nan yeah where they were diminishing his chances of success. And he grew up with this deep sense of like, I am not intelligent, a deep, deep sense of it.

And it's come out in all of these ways as an adult. And that, you're right, that's what was going on in that moment. I was challenging, I was taking him back probably. Well, and you know what, again, to come back to Harry, that's what happened to him. They called him stupid and fickle

and naughty. And he was none of those things. He just had trouble concentrating and paying attention because of all the stress. My friend has ADHD as well. Yeah, yeah.

And so, in his book, he describes that he'd been told he had post-traumatic stress. I didn't diagnose him with all this stuff. It's in his book. I said, you know you know what but i think given how you were distracted as a kid you had trouble paying attention they called you stupid this is add and um

i wasn't saying he's got a disease i was saying you actually that was a normal response that you had to an abnormal situation where you're under a lot of stress and they made you wrong for it. They called you naughty. They called you stupid. They called you a thicko. You're not any of that. Now, the whole bunch of British psychiatrists got their knickers tied in a knot because they made that diagnosis. My God, people, I was saying to the the guy you don't have a disease you have a normal response to have no circumstances you were not stupid ever but but children undergo this character assassination like you fended and imagine the rage inside him so when you disagree with him you're triggering all

that it's just that's just how it works now interestingly enough people call me stupid that's not a trigger for me yeah it's not for me because i know i'm not you know i always grew up with a sense of my own intelligence not to overstate it but i know never had any doubt about it but certain things you can do yeah like not see me, and that'll trigger me. And for context, for anybody that doesn't know why you not being seen triggers you. Well, look, I was born, you know, I may have mentioned this last year. So I was born two months before the Nazis occupied Budapest. Then they started exterminating all the Hungarian Jews.

So literally, my life was under threat because they didn't see me as a human being. They saw me as a vermin. Now, not that I knew that directly, but my mother, can you imagine what it was like for her to have a two-month-old and living under the risk of death all the time for a whole year?

And then, as I mentioned before before she gave me to a stranger to save my life and i didn't see her for five weeks well that's not being seen and my father's not there to see me because he's in forced labor so literally not being seen threatened my life so no wonder when people uh when that happens now, you know, that for me is the trigger. Now, of course, the answer is, is to see myself. If I fully see myself, it doesn't matter whether you see me or not.

You know, so if you see me, if you're not seeing me, if you're distorting who I am in your mind and in your words, bothers me, it's only because I'm still counting on you, at other people, to see me, because I don't know how to see myself. If I'm fully confident in myself, I'll say, gee, it's too bad. You know, Stephen doesn't see me. Well, maybe we talk about it it or maybe he'll never understand it

but i don't live in his mind how do i fully see myself it's hard to do right it's it's hard to do because when you were seen it's not hard to do because you children see themselves through their parents eyes yeah but when you're not seen, then you have to learn it. This is one of the things to go back to meditation. That's not the only way. First of all, notice all the ways that you're not seeing yourself. Like two days ago, when I had this anxiety about how I didn't give my best talk on Monday evening, you know what, I did my best.

It may not have been perfect, but I prepared for it. I put myself out there for two hours and I spoke a lot of truth. Might have been the best, but so what? But at that moment, I wasn't seeing myself. You know, I could still lose it.

So meditation, which is the form of meditation that at least I am learning, is about just noticing and seeing what's going on inside without judgment. So being aware. So it's practice. And do you also suggest removing the things from your life that will stop you from seeing yourself, like social media?

Well... Because that can be a lot of... I can't remove social media from my life, but what I can remove is my attachment to it. For example, I don't have to look at the comments on all my talks on YouTube. Who says what? Who likes it? Who doesn't like it?

You know, I'm not on Facebook. I don't have a... I have a professional Facebook page, but I don't administer it. But'm not on Facebook I don't have a professional Facebook page but I don't administer it but people go on Facebook and who says why who likes me who doesn't like me you know they can wean themselves off that so we may not be able to stay off social media to write my books thank God for the internet but I don't have to be attached to it so it's it's it's using it but not letting it use you which is very hard the social media and all of these things

these stimuli they i feel like they've i'm concerned that many of us are living in a state of chronic stress mild background stress yeah and i say that a lot because the amount of times that i catch myself i spoke to james nester who talks a lot about breathing and breath yeah and the amount of times that i now catch myself very shallow in breath after just looking at my my phone or thinking about something yeah let's get some oxygen back into me. In bed at 1 a.m. as I'm trying to sleep, catch my breath being shallow. During this podcast,

when I start thinking about something, my breath gets really shallow. Looking at my phone, my breath gets really shallow. I live in this, I feel like I'm living in a state of like constant, subtle background stress. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned breath because it's one of the,

to go back to the question of what people can do for themselves, they can learn to breathe. And Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher. He says that rather than go to retreats and therapists, just take a few conscious breaths several times a day. I mean, not to dismiss the other, but that's more important than anything else. And interestingly enough, the Buddha,

when he was teaching his monks, in fact, one of the Buddha's assistants, Ananda, asked him, O Holy One, do you still meditate? And he said, yes. And what kind of meditation do you practice, says Ananda. And Buddha says, observing the breath. So in Buddhist meditation,

and I'm not here to advocate for any particular pathway, and I'm not a practitioner of any religion, but hey, this is a very wise man. He thought awareness of breath is the most important portal into into reality what do you think the the antidote is for the way we've designed our lives to be constant in this sort of stressful stimulation and because we're clearly i was just wondering if human beings are supposed to endure this much constant stimulus and stress in their lives and with you know chronic

inflammation and all these kinds of things are now killing people at alarming rates that the to endure this much constant stimulus and stress in their lives and with you know chronic inflammation and all these kinds of things are now killing people at alarming rates that the you know the diseases that are caused by inflammation what can we do about our stress and is it okay maybe it's okay well um it's the norm so you can say it's normal is it okay well the question is to be answered by looking at what the impacts are and what are the impacts you know the impacts are very serious for you can see it on the individual level and in terms of mental health conditions as I said earlier are burgeoning internationally autoimmune conditions are but if you look at it also on a social level,

there's more conflict, there's more division, there's more intolerance in our culture than there has been for quite a while. These are the impacts of the stressful culture that we live in. So is it okay? Yeah, if you want this, it's okay. But if you don't, it's not okay. It depends what you want.

Relationships. Yeah. Romantic relationships. Yeah. I've thought a lot about the role that our trauma plays in our ability to form relationships. Obviously, society has changed quite profoundly in the last couple of decades. Different sort of gender transformations have caused certain mismatches and difficulties with people connecting the world has gone very digital now so dating apps

run that run a lot of dating i think 50 of people originally meet online that's their first point of contact dating is very very hard for people and there's a lot of people that are kind of giving up on it um attachment dating trauma um i've come to learn that we are mirrors. I think I found love in my life when, not when I discovered anything externally, but when I did a lot of work to figure out the barriers that were standing in my way of connection. Well, you just answered your own question.

Oh, really? Yeah. We can't form proper relationships until we have the capacity to be alone and be comfortable with ourselves you know and the more comfortable you can be alone which is different from being lonely by the way um the more capacity to be actually to be to be allowed to be with yourself and to ground yourself in your own truth the more likely you're able to form meaningful and positive relationships and rather than asking me a lot of people run into relationships to solve

their problems then there's the initial in love phase where everything is just ideal you know and then reality hits and then all of a sudden that person who you're so infatuated with becomes your enemy and you hate them so much. I mean, I've experienced such hatred for my wife over the years. And when I've been disappointed or dissatisfied. Because I was looking to her to fill me with... And nobody can fill you from the outside. So once you no longer need it once you no longer are dependent on it then you can enter into a healthy relationship or to put it more positively a relationship can be a real

ground for mutual growth so you can enter into a relationship. You're not going to be perfect. You're never going to be perfect. Carry a certain degree of trauma, a certain degree of dysfunction, certain things that trigger you, as we said earlier. But if both people are committed to the truth, which my wife, Ray, and I have been,

I mean, that's one thing you can say about ourselves. For all the stuff that we've been through, ultimately the truth which my wife Ray and I have been I mean that's one thing you can say about ourselves you know for all the stuff that we've been through ultimately the truth mattered more than who's right and who's wrong so if you're committed to the truth and working it out and if the fundamental love is there then you can grow together and so for me the relationship has been the most important growth growing ground of my life, not the therapy that I've had or the reading that I've done, not that I'm dismissing any of that, but the actual relationship has been my most important schooling in how to become authentic.

There's no real chance of a good relationship if one or more parties in that relationship aren't committed to truth and they're committed to being right or to victory or it happens all the time as i said earlier people always meet at the same level of of of emotional development or trauma resolution so that water finding its own level but when one person starts growing and the other doesn't it becomes impossible either the person that does the growing gives it up and goes back to their previous cells which is almost impossible or the other person is challenged to start growing themselves or they're going to split that's just what's going to happen again, to go back to the situation between men and women,

this is what tends to happen. And I've seen it in my own marriage. I've seen it as a physician, as an observer of human beings. The couple are kind of getting along, but then the children come along. Now the mother's caring energy has to go towards the children, where it needs to go the father may feel now a bit of their nose is a bit out of joint because now they're not getting the attention and now the woman has a decision to make do i look after the three-day-old baby or the

three-month-old baby would i look after the 35-year-old baby? And to the extent that the mother chooses to look after the 35-year-old baby, she's depriving the three-month-old. A lot of women then make a choice that I need to look after my kids and I can't put all this caring energy, mothering caring energy into my husband anymore. And then relationships get into trouble because the guys can't stand it i've seen this over and over and over and i'm not saying it's universal but it's very common sex in your practice i imagine you've come across this quite quite often where there's a sexless relationship and that's causing issues what is typically the true cause of that um that disconnect in the in

the with intimacy with sex in the bedroom because a lot of people are struggling with that yeah well first of all i think um today we jump into sexuality way too early in other words um we talk about intimacy but intimacy really means the innermost. And we tend to have physical intimacy before we have emotional intimacy, so that people jump to bed rather quickly. I'm not being prudish here. I'm not prescribing that you should only have sex

when you get married or anything like that. But when we enter into sexuality early, without the emotional intimacy and the emotional authenticity, then the sex becomes divorced from our real needs. And especially for women who tend to, I can't speak of everybody, but in general, women tend to want to have more intimacy emotionally, that becomes very hard.

And if the emotional intimacy doesn't follow, sex becomes rather mechanical. Becomes mechanical. Yeah. So that's one big reason. The other reason we already talked about, this sort of parenting dynamic between the genders. Yeah. No, I know we're only talking parenting dynamic between the genders yeah uh no

i know we're only talking about the two major genders now there's all kinds of gender variations these days and uh but these dynamics exist in all kinds of contexts so that when my partner is doing all the emotional caring or most of the emotional caring this is parent-child relationship that really deadens the sexual drive you know marissaisa Peer? Sorry? Marisa Peer, she's a psychologist. She actually said to me the other day, "'Never call your partner, mommy or daddy for this very reason." Yeah, well, oh good.

That's a good way to put it. I think it's because we put sexuality, and this society of course just glorifies sexuality and if you look at some of the most famous sex symbols who were they? Abused women like Marilyn Monroe deeply traumatized child

and abused as an adult by President Kennedy and just about everybody. And she was the woman everyone was asleep with. So that is really distorted sexuality here. And for women especially, safety is so important for sexuality.

As we talk about frigid women, but when do people freeze? It's a fear response. It's not really its true nature. It's just a response. And usually something happened to them or something is happening now so that unmelting can happen in a condition of safety.

And then the intimacy, the emotional intimacy is there which creates the safety for the sexual opening. And that's the dynamic in my marriage as well. You know what my wife says? She says, truth is sexy. Such a good point.

Yeah. Is there anything in your practice that you're increasingly being confronted with in the last couple of years that you weren't seeing as much as when you first started what i see out there is increasing distress in this society and and people are more confused and young people are just so challenged and uh in the united states the the rate of childhood suicide is going up you know uh suicide you know, more and more kids are being medicated for all kinds of conditions. In the U.S., 70% of the adult population is at least on one medication.

Quarter of women, at least in the U.S., are on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications. Those numbers are going up in Britain as well from all the statistics that I see. So I see these growing manifestations of distress, what I call a toxic culture. I see that all the time. And look, I mean, the fact that this book, The Myth of Normal, is being published in North Macedonia

and Thailand and Vietnam and in Northern Europe and in Eastern Europe. It's just worldwide, there's this epidemic of distress. That's what I'm seeing. And I'm saying people, either we can look upon this as some unexplainable misfortune and bad luck, or we can actually look for the actual causes of it in a way that relate to each other, in a way that we raise our children,

in a way that we approach ourselves. And I'm saying that solutions are possible. But yeah, the world is getting more and more difficult for a lot of people. I do see that. And I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon. You're not optimistic? So, Noam Chomsky once said uh when he was asked if he's optimistic or pessimistic he says uh he says strategically i'm an optimist and tactically i'm a pessimist

which means that in the long term i do believe in people i mean and i'm the same way i do believe in human beings i do believe in the human capacity to grow, to transform, to come to a deeper grounded sanity in themselves, both on the individual and the social level. I do believe in that. If I didn't believe that, I would just stay at home and read books and listen to music. I do believe in that. I'm optimistic in that sense, but at the same time, I think in the short term, it's getting darker and darker. And you can see that, so many manifestations of that.

So yeah, I am optimistic. I believe in humanity and human beings. And I think we have a hard road to travel before we get to our better sense of self. And I have to close this conversation by seeking some solutions. You used the word solutions there and you talked about this better sense of self. We've talked about this from a social level,

what governments can do to change education systems and on an individual level, on a family level, what can I do? Well, first of all, you need to define what your actual goals are. Okay, so let me try. I want to do work that serves others.

I want to do work that I find fulfilling and that keeps me challenged and i want to which incidentally serves your health because it's been shown that people that live a life of purpose and meaning they're physiologically healthier i want to be healthy because i want to do all of these things for longer yeah um i want to have relationships that are full and true and raw and honest. Okay. Um, and I wanna, I think that's it.

That's the work and personal. And then I want to raise a family that is beautiful and pure and free of as much trauma as I can possibly make them be. And I want to be close to my children in a way that I wasn't close to my parents. Yeah. Well, then the question you're going to have to ask yourself is what factors in your life support those goals and what don't?

What activities are you engaged in that will support those aims? What will undermine them? And seek to diminish or eliminate the ones that are undermining your goals and uh and and strengthen the ones that are supporting it you know that's what it is and um you know and your intentions by the way are not only superficially the ones you articulate if owner know your real intentions, I have to look at how you live your life,

not what you say about it. So when I was a young parent, if you had asked me, what is your goal, what's your intention, I would have said it's the happiness of my children. I would have said that totally sincerely. If you had looked at how I live my life as a workaholic doctor,

not available to my kids, always out there looking for being important and serving others and being at the center of people's lives because I was so essential to them, my actual intention was self-importance. My stated intention, the happiness of my children, as much as I would have meant it sincerely, did not jibe with how I was living my life. So what you need to ask yourself is, what anybody needs to ask themselves is,

look at your intentions, both the conscious ones and also the ones that show up when you look at how you actually live your life and bring the two into alignment up when you look at how you actually live your life and bring the two into alignment so look at again what serves your intentions and what undermines it and look at that seriously that would be my answer it's so difficult to distinguish between the two sometimes because i mean on the surface the the system you gave there are actually looking at how I'm allocating my time

and is my time being allocated towards things that would further what I'm saying my intentions are. It's a very useful exercise to run. But, you know, as I said those things that I said as my stated goals, I do find a disconnect, I think. I think those things have been handed to us. When you ask someone their goals, they will say things that will make the person asking the question think well of them.

Because there's one goal that you didn't state. Which is I stayed away from the selfish goals? No. What's the one I didn't state? Inner peace. Because without inner peace, you're not going to be able to serve any of those goals properly. Or if you were, you'd do it at some risk to yourself.

And so how would that be for you as a goal? Inner peace. And then if running around serving others in the name of this so-called higher goal undermines your inner peace, then you're not on the right track. And you know who I'm talking to? I'm talking to myself. Talking to me as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Inner peace is not a selfish goal. It's from a position of inner peace that we can speak compassionately and truthfully to others, that we can serve our other goals.

But Eckhart Tolle talks about our inner purpose and our external purpose. And you stated a bunch of external purposes. And that's why there's this, I believe, if I may pardon the diagnosis or the analysis, but that's why that disconnect that you mentioned. Because the goals that you stated were largely external. And what are the internal goals?

Inner peace. Very good. Now you have to put that into the mix. And once you do, I don't believe that. Now nobody handed that to you. I think this is the issue with workaholics, is we think that the path to inner peace is just by aiming at the external goals.

I think maybe at some level that's what I believe. Workaholics think they can work their way or external validate or trophy their way or number one book their way to inner peace because temporarily when your book shows up as number one on the best sellers list or shows up at all you feel some inner peace but it's addictive and uh there's a wonderful physician and researcher vince feliti who studied childhood trauma quite a bit and showing its relationship to adult negative outcomes and he said it's hard to get enough of something that almost works and so yeah you can get that temporary

inner peace but look at the long-term consequences of the workaholism it's not inner peace i can tell you that you know i can tell you after a long experience it doesn't matter even how successful you are there we started the conversation with this it's never going to give you inner peace you know i can tell you after a long experience it doesn't matter even how successfully you're out there we started the conversation with this it's never going to give you inner peace inner peace doesn't come from the outside that's not a goal anybody ever handed to you that's something that you have to come to yourself you know this how are you acting in line with what you know are you are you doing it well? You know what? I'm not gonna give myself 100% by any means. I mean, just look at this week,

but I'm doing so much better than I ever did. And I'm so much more comfortable about it and so much more comfortable about the future as well. You know, I am. What is the one thing that we didn't discuss that maybe is the most important thing for my audience that are listening right now? That not that we should impose suffering

on any children or anybody in order to teach them anything. Life will bring its own suffering. But when suffering comes along, there's two things we can do with it. We can try and just get rid of it, not to feel it, to numb ourselves, or we can actually learn from it.

So suffering and pain can be big teachers if you know how to relate to them. So when illness comes along, when a crisis comes along in your life, you might notice that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of two character letters meaning danger and opportunity. So when there's a crisis, there's danger, but there's also opportunity to learn and to grow.

And there's such a thing as growing older. In other words, not just getting older, but actually growing older and actually still keep growing as you get older. And that growing older actually has to do with becoming more and more authentic to yourself. So sometimes I do that successfully, sometimes I don't, but that's certainly the journey.

And I'd recommend that journey to everybody. You can actually grow older. In other words, you don't have to shrink certainly the journey and i'd recommend that journey to everybody you can actually grow older in other words you don't have to shrink you can actually grow when you said the word growth there reminded me of something you said in a topic we haven't actually talked about which i did want to speak to you about which was vulnerability yeah i remember you making this interesting connection i saw it somewhere online between vulnerability and and growth yeah and vulnerability is a risk for a lot of people it's always felt like a risk for me so vulnerability comes from the latin word vulnerare to wound to wound yeah that's vulnerare to wound and so as human beings or as any living creature we're're all profoundly vulnerable. From the moment that we're conceived to the moment we die,

we can be wounded. We can be wounded physically, we can be wounded emotionally. That's just a given. When children are safe and seen and understood, they can accept their vulnerability because they have the confidence that they can deal with it. But when children are traumatized

or not understood, not seen, and they're alone emotionally, the vulnerability becomes too painful to bear. So we shut down our sense of vulnerability, you know, not to feel the pain. But when you look at life, nothing goes without vulnerability. So a tree doesn't go where it's hard and thick, does it? It goes where it's tender and soft. And there's these shoots that are very vulnerable. They can be eaten by animals or insects. A crustacean animal, like a crab, cannot grow inside a hard shell.

What does it have to do when it needs to grow? It molts and becomes this soft creature that's very vulnerable. But without that vulnerability, there's no growth. Without emotional vulnerability, there's also no growth. And so much of our culture is designed to deny vulnerability and to shut it down or to somehow distract ourselves from it. And what's the cost? And the cost is that we stay immature and that we lose ourselves.

That's what the cost is. I also think vulnerability is, and I've just learned this from doing this podcast, that vulnerability is a great connector. Yeah. Much of the reason why I have good conversations on this podcast i think is because i'm willing to be open myself yeah which which then allows your client your your your guest the safety to open up themselves and in your personal life with your friends i mean what's more you can talk about the scandal of newcastle beating Manchester City in some game recently by one to nothing.

I don't say to talk about it if that's interesting to you, but which is more meaningful to you, that or when you actually share? Share our struggle. Your struggle and what's going on for you. I mean, no contest but so much of this culture designed to distract ourselves from our vulnerability okay but we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for. Yeah. Question that's been left for you. It's quite a long one.

Today is your last day on Earth. Yeah. You're allowed to make two phone calls. One phone call to the person you love the most and the second phone call to the entire world. What do you say on both of those phone calls? What John Lennon sang all those years ago, all you need is love. And the phone call to the person you love the most?

To the person I love the most, I don't have to say anything at all. Why? Because she knows. But if you were calling her on that last day... I'd say thank you. What for? For everything. And you know what?

I may even say that to the world. I might even say thank you. I mean for all the struggles and the trails and troubles and tribulations of childhood and adulthood and parenting and career and all this.

Thank you. You've given me so much. That's what I would say. I mean, if I wasn't giving advice, which is all you need is love, which is advice. No, forget that. I'd just say thank you. How do you want to be remembered?

As somebody who did his best to make a difference. And who made a difference. Which I know I have, by the way. So not that everybody agrees with me, but I also know I've made a difference. What difference do you think you've made? How to say this without sounding egotistical? But I get so many messages from around the world,

I mean literally from around the world, that reading my books have transformed people's relationship to themselves and made them understand themselves. I think I mentioned maybe in a different interview that the best review I ever had of The Myth of Normal was that some young guy said to me, thank you, I read that book and I remembered myself. So my work for those who are open to it really helps to connect them to themselves and to see themselves clearly. And that's a gift. In a world where it to themselves and to see themselves clearly and that's that's a gift in a world where it's increasingly hard to see who you really are yeah and it's hard for people to see themselves and so people don't see themselves as broken

or as the retrieval be damaged but actually they can begin to see their capacity for wholeness which incidentally is the root of the word health is wholeness and so um that's the difference i'm making is that people can see themselves not as broken damaged but there's actually fundamentally whole with some stuff to work through that's it we can learn so much from children can't we so much of your work brings us back to the first nature, as you describe it, of children. Yeah. Well, a lot of parents will tell you, and you'll find out,

is that the greatest teachers are your children, if you're willing to learn. Gabor, thank you. Thank you so much. It's a difficult question to ask someone else about the impact they've made on the world, but even what you said, I think think is a huge understatement because the people that i know close to me like my partner who um like my partner who just i mean her life i think has been changed personally but also professionally much of the reason she does the work she does

she's the reason why she's not here to meet you because she would have flight she would have gotten the next flight to fly here is because she's doing a retreat in the south of france with a big group of women and much of the work she does there is built on the work that you've written about in your books and taught online um so not only have you impacted people personally but you've impacted the next generation of teachers and therapists, which is going to be a generational, it's like a dominoes effect. It was counteracting the generational trauma is the generational healing that has come about because of people like you, who are wizards in our culture and that are willing in the face of often great, you know, adversaries who take a different stance to persist with truth

but thank you and one of the things that most and heartened me is that when i go about london or any city in the world just about these days it's all kinds of young people coming up to me thanking me it's not people my i mean people of all ages but i'm just so enthused by how young generations that people one quarter of my age, are coming up to me to thank me. Well, that shows me that it's making a difference. 100%. If she could have been here now,

she was so annoyed. She realized she'd booked a retreat on the same day that you were coming to London because she didn't get to meet you last time because she was in Bali. Oh, wow. Some other time. She'll be watching this, trust me.

She's probably watching live right now. But thank you so much, Kabur, again for your generosity and your wisdom. It's changed my life and it continues to change many other people that are listening to this, trust me. She's probably watching live right now. But thank you so much, Kabur, again, for your generosity and your wisdom. It's changed my life and it continues to change many other people that are listening to this, but all around the world. So thank you. Thanks so much.