The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Address And Begin To Heal Trauma

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We don't have to continue to live in the effects of the trauma that we've experienced throughout our lives, that we can actually change that. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I often talk about how eating organ meats is so good for your health. Now, I know it can be hard to work them into your diet, but when we don't eat things like liver, kidney, and heart regularly, we're missing out on wonderful sources of essential nutrients. Organ meats are nature's multivitamins and the richest sources of natural vitamin A, B vitamins, and minerals that we have. But liver isn't everyone's first choice for a

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Starting point is 00:02:01 To unlock the full 10-chapter series and bonus videos, simply purchase any InsideTracker plan. And for a limited time, you can get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store when you sign up at InsideTracker.com slash Dr. Hyman. So head over to InsideTracker.com slash Dr. Hyman to save today. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We will all face trauma at one point in our lives or another, and it can be all too easy for our traumas to become our identities. But allowing

Starting point is 00:02:35 ourselves time to heal and room to think differently is the ultimate gift we can give to ourselves and our world. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from The Doctor's Pharmacy on why we need to put time and attention into healing our traumas and how to do that. in our world. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on why we need to put time and attention into healing our traumas and how to do that. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. James Gordon on learning to be with your traumas to heal them, with Lewis Howes on choosing our mindset around past pain, and with Dr. Gabor Mate on resources to help you heal. Let's jump in. We have to understand that trauma affects us all. It's

Starting point is 00:03:06 part of being human. Like we're all, I suppose, a victim of death. Death's going to come to us. Trauma is going to come to us. So we need to understand that and not see it as something that just happens to those other people who have been in a war or have had the most horrible parents. That's number one. And number two, we have to see that it is possible to move through and beyond the trauma, that if we recognize it, we're willing to allow it to appear in our lives, in our imagination, to see its effects. We can deal with it and we can move through and beyond that. And this is an ancient and aboriginal understanding. We have to recover that. The medical model has in some ways, as you're suggesting, has fetishized trauma, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:00 and turned it into these diagnostic categories that we suffer. And I think that sometimes that's helpful in trying to understand what do these symptoms mean. But in the long run, first of all, it defines something as medical that is part of the human condition. And then it seems to dictate that we need to fix that individual. Whereas, in fact, what we need to do is to create the opportunity and the setting and the attitude that encourages people to understand and help themselves and to move that this is possible. And we need to look at it not so much as a medical problem, but as a public health problem. I mean, if in the United States we're so divided with each other, are we going to give a diagnosis to everybody who's got on left or right or center that they have some kind of personality disorder. That's not the point. The point is that this is part of the way that we're living right now. One of the things that I'm doing in Ukraine, and one of the reasons people, I think, are so welcoming, is I'm saying, let's drop the medical model.

Starting point is 00:05:20 This is a universal problem. There are 45 million people in Ukraine. World Health Organization says 10 million people are going to have major depressive disorder. So many people are going to have post-traumatic stress disorder. Why not look at 45 million people who've gone through this incredibly hellacious traumatic experience and let's create opportunities and rituals for everybody to heal themselves and understand that it's possible. So it's coming out of a medical model, which tends not only to be not particularly effective, but also very isolating. One of the things that's most important about healing trauma is having some sense of connection to other people and looking for some and finding some meaning and purpose in our lives. And that doesn't come out of the medical model

Starting point is 00:06:12 very easily, whereas it comes out of an educational and a public health model. So we have to shift the way we look at things and what we as physicians are offering. Yeah, I think that's really true. We are so focused on a medicalization of mental illness and of our psychological issues that it sort of prevents people from actually facing them and dealing with them, owning them. I think one of the most important teachings that you have and it's embedded in your work

Starting point is 00:06:44 is that, you know, we don't have to continue to live in the effects of the trauma that we've experienced throughout our lives, that we can actually change that. And that changing that is key, not only to our psychological health, but to also to our physical health. And I think I'd love you to sort of talk for a minute about the sort of the implications of this trauma and how it manifests for people and how would they notice? Because I can tell you that I did not until really recently self-identify as someone who had any trauma in my life. But I realized as I began to look at, you know, the things that were challenges for me, at the relationship challenges, at life challenges, at, you know, overworking or workaholism or whatever I was struggling with, that their origins were actually quite deep. And I really committed to working on these and to healing them and to looking at it into shifting. So I'd love to kind of share, have you share,

Starting point is 00:07:45 how do this sort of manifest? How do they recognize it? And how do they begin to start to heal these things for themselves? Sadly, or simply realistically, it usually comes just as you described it. Something is causing you pain right now. Trauma means, it's a Greek word that means wound. You're experiencing a wound in the present, and you're wondering, what can I do about this? And the next question is, where did this come from? Why is this? So I think that the first thing is to pay attention to those areas of our lives that are causing us trouble, that are causing us, either causing us to stress or sometimes causing other

Starting point is 00:08:25 people to stress and they're shouting to us, you know, pay attention. And so what is going on? If I'm being overbearing with other people, am I going to keep on arguing about whether or not it's their fault or my fault? Or am I going to look at the fact that, well, maybe that came from something that was in my childhood, and maybe this is something that's working in me, and maybe I need to address it. So I think that's where we begin. And then the whole approach that I've adopted over all these years is really a meditative approach and saying, by which I don't mean anything fancy or anything that has to do with a particular religion. I mean, simply being aware moment to moment of what's happening and paying attention to what I see. And as well as using techniques of meditation to bring me into physiological

Starting point is 00:09:27 and psychological balance. And once I'm in, so we begin all of our meetings at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine by meditating, by doing a few minutes of slow, deep, soft belly breathing, so we're not ready to shout at each other. Everybody's got to respect my opinion. No, be quiet, relax, listen to other people as they're speaking. If we put ourselves in that frame of mind, we're able to listen more openly and more sympathetically to the difficulties that we have. Instead of trying to pretend that it's not there, we're willing to allow those pains, whether they're past pains or present pains, allow them to surface. And then as we're able to use the tools and techniques that I and others teach, the tools and techniques I teach in transforming trauma, we can use our imagination to say, okay, let's say I'm overbearing. What do I do about that?

Starting point is 00:10:28 Well, I can use guided mental imagery. I can ask that part of my mind that knows the answer. The part that doesn't yet know the answer can say, okay, and you can call it a wise guide. You go into a relaxed state and you allow a guide to appear to you. So say it's Desmond Tutu or an eagle or a flower, and then you have a dialogue and you say, okay, flower, you're there. What do I do about being so overbearing? And the flower says, well, what you have to do is open up, open your arms up a little more and be a little more embracing of other people because these are people that you're talking.

Starting point is 00:11:11 I just did that right now and it's good advice for me. I do get overbearing. I need to open up to the people or maybe I do a drawing. We do a set of drawings, draw yourself, draw yourself with your biggest problem and draw yourself with your biggest problem and draw yourself with your problem solved. And it is amazing what people come up with. And this is to be the first time, the first time that I meet with them. We all have this capacity, but we've, we haven't been educated to use this capacity to either know ourselves or mobilize our intuition or unconscious. And it's there, it's there in all of us. And we just need to have a, understand that there is the possibility of healing trauma. There's the possibility that we have the answers within ourselves.

Starting point is 00:11:59 And then we need to learn techniques to use to access those answers. And sometimes it's important to look at the beliefs and how we've developed our beliefs about how to be in the world. I recently was reflecting on one of my behaviors that I struggle with most of my life, which is the trouble saying no. And it's sort of trouble with over-pleasing people by not wanting to set them. And I kind of know where this came from, but I think there's these sort of fight or flight response, which people really are very aware of. And then there's the freeze response, which is another kind of playing possum, which many of us do. But I think there's like a fourth manifestation of trauma, which is a fight,

Starting point is 00:12:49 flight, freeze, and fawn response, which I recently been reading about. And fawning is basically people pleasing and not being able to say no, because the consequences of saying the truth about feel life threatening. For me, it did. As a child, when my stepfather would be upset when I would say something that he didn't like, whether it was that I didn't take out the garbage or whatever it was, that I didn't wash my hands after I went to the bathroom. He literally grabbed me when I was seven years old and I took a soup pan because we didn't have garbage disposals in the sinks back in the day.

Starting point is 00:13:29 And my mom's like flush the soup down the toilet. And I did. And it came out of the bathroom and he asked me if I washed my hands and he went into a rage and he picked me up and he threw me against the wall, screamed at me. I was this tiny little boy. I was, I'm not, I'm six, three now, but I was like a little kid. I was really little. And it just shook me right to my core and got wired into my nervous system in a way that made it really clear

Starting point is 00:13:52 to me it wasn't safe to tell the truth. It wasn't safe to disappoint people or to upset people. And I had to do whatever I could to prevent that. And I even see that still showing up. Even though I've worked on it for years, I still see it showing up. So these embedded patterns are so deep and they're so much that we're doing this all on our own. We all share this common experience of being human and having these traumatic experiences. And I don't even know if there are other ways that are emerging around the psychedelic therapies and mdma i i think all of this are tools that we can use to start to heal this embedded trauma and then create a more you know understanding and connected and um you know more whole society

Starting point is 00:14:59 which we certainly are not in right now what have come to? How are you going to deal with this? You know, it's just, it's a process of different things. You know, it's, it's, it's trying to deeply understand how it shows up and be able to witness it and notice it without judgment. It's around understanding my physiological response, how it feels in my body at the time when this happens to me. Like, I mean, I, I mean, someone sends an email to me about wanting something for me or asking help. And I'm just sort of overloaded. My schedule's full and I get this stress response because I don't want to disappoint them or upset them and said, no, I can't do this for you. Or no, I can't have this meeting or no, I can't do this call or no, I, you know, it's like, and it's like, I manage it by trying to be more aware and to try

Starting point is 00:15:51 to realize that this is something that is not serving me or the people in my life. It's not aligned with the values I have. And so it, I think it's, it's definitely gotten way, way better. So I think I still have more work to do, but I think I hope I'm open to suggestions, Jeff. I know this is a podcast, but we can talk about it. When it, when it happens, try this shaking and dancing for a few. Yeah. And then do the thing with the wise guy. The thing I just did for myself, being overbearing, because I sometimes am. My staff tells me, you know, you're pushing us too hard.

Starting point is 00:16:33 You know, you just because you do this, you want everyone. And the answer to me came just in that moment when I was talking, which is open my arms to them as human beings. Now, the challenge is to remember that every time. I think in that few seconds, the insight that came to me is the vital one, that what is more important than my wanting to get something done or achieve something is to treat the other person as fully human. And so I think there may be little keys in there for you as well. And for all of us, as we look at this and then we have to, you know, as we access what, what is, what is our call it, whatever you want,

Starting point is 00:17:17 higher power, wise guide, imagination. What is it telling you to do? Do it for a moment. Now, what, when you, when you get this feeling of wanting to please, what else? Get some advice from whoever comes to you as a guide. It's a powerful exercise. And I feel like the message is really clear. It's just that you're not serving yourself or them by by doing that and and i can let go

Starting point is 00:17:46 of that behavior and not have to do that anymore yeah and so find out what what it is i might i might you know i might guess it'd be great to get up when you when you feel that get up and not just shake and dance, but yell and scream. Get it out. Yeah, no, I never had permission to be upset when I was a kid. You know, never. It was very clear. It's like all coming together. Thanks, Jim. I'll send you the check for the psych consult after. Well, I think the thing, you know, we can do these. This is part of it. you're not going to hurt anyone you're doing this for yourself you're doing this and we all we all have our issues and we all we all need to find a safe place where we can deal with them and then it it can it can change it can and yes sometimes

Starting point is 00:18:38 it takes a lot of time but not always sometimes change happens very fast. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now the basis of any healing protocol should be whole real food. But with all the GMO foods and long transportation, storage times and monoculture farming methods, depletion of our soils, food's not as nutritionally dense as it once was, even good stuff. And that's why I recommend supplementing a whole foods diet with a high quality multivitamin as a basis for any health-oriented program. And the product I personally use comes from Athletic Greens. Their AG1 supplement has 75 different nutrients that work together to fill out the gaps in our diet. I take AG1 every day, and I've noticed that I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. Plus,

Starting point is 00:19:22 it works with any diet, keto, paleo, vegan, dairy-free, even gluten-free. AG1 is a simple, easy way to optimize your health. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving away 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So many of us struggle with childhood trauma, whether it's big trauma with a big T or a little trauma with a small T with neglect or just not being loved the way we need it or whether it's actual physical or sexual emotional abuse. We all have something. And some people can have really horrible physical things happen and they seem manage, and they don't make the meaning out of it. And others can have sort of what you think would be relatively benign childhood experience.

Starting point is 00:20:10 Maybe their parents just weren't that attentive. And they can be highly traumatized. Exactly. They'll have severe mental illness from it. Whatever the meaning we give it. Yeah. I mean, Viktor Frankl, you mentioned before, he said, between stimulus and response, there is a pause.

Starting point is 00:20:25 Meaning between something that happens to us and how we react to it, there's a pause. And in that pause lies a choice, and in that choice lies your freedom. And I think that's a very powerful idea that is not about not recognizing what happened to you or minimizing things that are going on, but realize that you basically determine the quality of your experience by your beliefs and by the meaning you make of things. And do you want to be free or do you want to hold onto it and be blocked? Right. And then, you know, we make all kinds of justifications because then we get to blame other people.

Starting point is 00:20:56 We get to be the victim. We get to not have to change things. We get to not look at ourselves, but what you did was super courageous. And it's, uh, it's inspiring because you, you have been through a lot and those traumas that you had when you were younger, that you've talked about incest and other things are actually really tough to deal with. I was also a victim of incest and it's like, it's like, it's crazy. Messes with your brain. Yeah. It messes with your brain and how you look at the world. But what you mapped out in your book, The Greatness Mindset, Unlock the Power of Your Mind and Live Your Best Life Today, which is out now. Everybody needs to get a copy right now.

Starting point is 00:21:32 Pause this podcast, get your copy. someone who's even very successful could have things that were unsolved. Yeah. And that you can actually start to heal those things and change the way you're thinking about things. Because we have a thinking problem and a feeling problem, and we don't have a map to sort of work through those things. And your book is an incredible map of how these things can be healed and developed in ways that change our mindsets from somebody who's really stuck and unhappy versus someone who's having the life that they want. Thank you. Yeah. And for me, I wrote this for myself 10 years ago. I wrote this for myself when I was 21 and transition and confused and not sure about why am I feeling this way? Why do I have so much pain? Why do I feel trapped?

Starting point is 00:22:20 Why do I feel emotionally stagnant? Why am I reactive so much? Why do I feel so hurt? Why do I keep abandoning myself? Why do people not understand me? All these emotions that I had, I wish I had the map now that I created for my younger self. And now I have the guide for me 10 years from now when I'm in a new transition, in a new season of life, and I'm going through certain changes. And so that's what I really wanted because I think a lot of people don't have a clear, meaningful mission for their life. And this is step one.

Starting point is 00:22:51 If we are not clear in one sentence, what this season's mission is in a meaningful way, I just think we'll have more stress and overwhelm than we need. We're going to face challenges and adversity, but if we don't know exactly where we're heading, we'll never get there. And so step one for me is identifying, are we in a powerless mindset or a greatness mindset? And if we're in a powerless mindset, how do we move there as fast as possible to greatness?

Starting point is 00:23:23 And step one is defining a meaningful mission. Yeah. So. So it's important. It reminds me of a quote from Marianne Williamson, our greatest fear, right? And most of us don't lean into our light. We kind of lean on our darkness because it's comfortable. It's familiar.

Starting point is 00:23:41 We know how to navigate. And we kind of afraid of actually the greatness that we can have. And your school of greatness, your podcast about greatness, your book, The Greatness Mindset is such a beautiful kind of bookmark in a way that points to how we can actually embrace that greatness. She says, you know, our greatest fear is not, is our light and our darkness that most frightens us. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. So I think, you know, and she goes on to say,

Starting point is 00:24:16 it's not our light, it's our light and our darkness that most frighten us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Yes. Who are you not to be that? You're playing small. It doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

Starting point is 00:24:33 We're born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us. It's in everyone. Yeah, I love this. And the reason I love what Marianne says there is because the challenge is most people live either a good life or a bad life. But both of those are hard to break through into greatness. Because when you have a good life, when you've got a good family, you've got kids, you've got a good job, you've got things that are good, you get comfortable and familiar, like you you said it's hard to break through from comfort and familiarity and people with a struggling relationships call it bad right they're still familiar with the bad and so they stay in the bad it's it's really right and it's because you're from and so some people will stay decades in a relationship or decades in a career that is bad and they don't find joy in it, but they stay because it's familiar. And it's not bad enough yet. And most people –

Starting point is 00:25:33 I call it NEP syndrome, not enough pain. Not enough pain, right? Most people – People don't change because they have NEP syndrome. Most people are not willing to strive for that next step of greatness because it's familiar and comfortable, even if it's good or bad. And that's very few do, but it's hard to say, I want to take a look. I want to go deeper. I want to work on myself. It's just a challenge. But a lot of times it takes some type of extreme pain for us to want to open up and say, I need to make a change. Yeah, it does,

Starting point is 00:26:01 unfortunately, but it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. And I think if we all took a moment to look at ourselves and go, you know, where are the places where we are unhappy, where we don't tell anybody what we actually feel, where we doubt ourselves, where we lack self-love, where we feel insecure, where we're worried about what other people's thoughts are about us and our place in the world i mean it just it's so easy to be kind of knocked off center of who you are by all these sort of sub this unconscious subtext of what's going on in our head and our inner dialogue and you see the real difference in the mindset between someone who's stuck like that and someone who's achieving what they want and are leaning into their greatness like can you talk about the differences in the mindset yes there's a there's a whole page I give on 201 of the book where I give this framework between powerless mindset and the greatness mindset. So if you feel like you're not accomplishing exactly what you want or you're not on the path, because my mission is big and I know it's going to take time, but if you're not feeling fulfilled internally, if you don't feel peaceful, if you don't feel in harmony and alignment with what you're doing, then that means you're more in the powerless mindset versus greatness mindset. And the powerless mindset

Starting point is 00:27:13 includes you lacking a meaningful mission. So you're not clear in one sentence, like, what is the season of life and what am I doing? What's the direction I'm going? So you lack that meaningful mission. So I'd ask yourself in one sentence, are you clear on what you I doing? What's the direction I'm going? So you lack that meaningful mission. So I'd ask yourself in one sentence, are you clear on what you're doing for this year or these five years or your season of life? And it doesn't need to be curing cancer or changing the world. Just what is it for you?

Starting point is 00:27:35 What is this season for you? It could be an exploratory season. Okay, at least you know that you're exploring. It could be I'm trying to graduate from school. Okay, that's your mission right now until the next season. So just being very clear, a powerless mindset is being controlled by fear. When we have a number of fears that hold us back from acting courageously, it keeps us feeling powerless and a victim like you talked about. So being controlled by fear, crippled by self-doubt, conceals past pains that this is a part of the mindset i'm good i'm

Starting point is 00:28:06 fine life is great this is a part of mindset there's over 20 000 books on success and mindset yeah most of them don't talk about the pain of your past they don't talk about you know healing past pain they talk about here are the seven strategies to be more successful and have a growth mindset. Yes. But I feel like you can't just layer on top of pain. Some point it's going to cripple, it's going to topple over. So conceals past pains defined by the opinions of others as a powerless mindset and drifts towards complacency. So when we, we first need to be aware of, am I living in any of these spaces? There's no good or bad, right or wrong here. It's just, let me be aware of it and see, is this supporting me?

Starting point is 00:28:52 Is this serving me? And this is serving the people around me. And when we are aware of it, we can start to make a new decision and commitment towards stepping into the greatness mindset. And the greatest mindset includes that you are driven by a meaningful mission, driven by that, not by fear, not by what everyone else is doing, but by your mission. No Olympic gold medalist did it by accident. They had a mission.

Starting point is 00:29:17 No world champion said, oh, I'm just going to show up and do this by accident. They were clear on their mission and they lived accordingly. They turned fear into confidence. I have an example in the book where I talk about creating a fear list. I did this in my early 20s. I was afraid of a lot of things, but I was scared to even admit it to other people. You were afraid of telling people you were afraid.

Starting point is 00:29:38 Because I was fear of judgment and I didn't want to be looked as weak. Right, right. And by the way, those who don't know what those look like, he's like six foot five, looks like a brick wall. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley. He's a sweet guy. But you turn fear into confidence by making a fear list. And you write down a list of your fears and you start going all in on them. This is scary.

Starting point is 00:30:02 It's uncomfortable. It's hard. I was afraid of a lot of things, but I started going all in on them and it turned into confidence. It turned into a power of mine because I overcame it. You overcome self-doubt as well. So you figure out what those insecurities are. You don't live in insecurity. This is the greatness mindset. You heal past pains. That's the greatness mindset because you're not driven by pain anymore. You're driven by purpose and mission and love and abundance and solving problems. That's huge.

Starting point is 00:30:29 Not driven by pain, but by purpose. Yes. That's a very big idea because so much of the suffering in this world is because people are unconsciously driven by their fear and their pain. And it blocks them from actually getting over it. Exactly. And the part of it is you can be driven by a purpose to solve problems in the world and the problem could be the pain you once experienced you want to make sure that others don't experience that pain i can talk about that in a second but

Starting point is 00:30:56 you create a healthy identity something you talked about in the first three minutes of the show is if people heard the things we said about ourselves, or if we said these things to other people out loud, the way we speak to ourselves at times, they would put you in a hospital. They would call you crazy. They'd be like, something is really off. And they would medicate you for those conversations. They would cancel you online if you said these things. All these things wouldn't work. but we continue to say critical things to ourselves and put ourselves down and degrade ourselves, which is a unhealthy identity.

Starting point is 00:31:32 So we need to create a healthy identity and then they take action with a game plan. This is the greatness mindset versus the powerless mindset. And when we can first be aware of which mindset am I in more frequently. Yeah, no right or wrong, good or bad, no judgment. But how is a powerless mindset working for you? How is concealing these things working for you? How is being crippled by fear and doubt working for you? It might have some benefits, but there's still a lack of something inside of you.

Starting point is 00:32:02 So this takes courage to step in a greatness mindset frequently, but that's the decision lack of something inside of you. So this takes courage to step into greatness mindset frequently, but that's the decision we need to make. For people listening, they're probably wondering, wow, maybe I haven't identified this or that as trauma, or maybe actually I did survive a really traumatic child that I'm aware of, but I'm stuck in these dysfunctional patterns, and I don't know how to break through. I don't know how to break through. I don't know how to rewire. And how do we kind of reconstitute ourselves in this modern world that's a toxic culture?

Starting point is 00:32:33 So if we all got to go off and live in a monastery somewhere, it might be okay. But how do we do that? How do you provide a path for people to think about their own healing? Well, it's very difficult because partly it's a matter of resources like those that are fortunate enough economically to be able to afford a good therapist and I have to emphasize good because there's a lot of useless therapies out there I could talk a great length about that that don't go to the heart of the things but you only deal with the surface yeah so if you can afford to do that by all means you know just as you take your car in for a tune-up take yourself in for a tune-up

Starting point is 00:33:11 and finds out find out what is grinding and what is not working and where it's not lubricated and you know what actually happened there's lots of therapeutic modalities and i've developed one you mentioned that in your introduction compassion inquiry but i don't claim it's a panacea what is that um well at this point i'm only mentioning it as one possible amongst many many others you know there are so many forms of therapy out there and people can find whatever works for them you know so there's my compassion inquiry there's my good friend dick schwartz's internal family systems which is getting increasing attraction and attention for good reason there is peter levine's somatic experiencing body-based therapies body-based therapies that's

Starting point is 00:33:58 right um the cranial sacral work um body work such as massages and so on and very interesting how many times people will get a massage and the thefts will touch it therapists will touch a certain part of their body and all of a sudden the tears come you know because like bessel van der koek says in his best-selling book the body does keep the score the body keeps the score so the sensory motor therapies padogden i could name many many therapies um but but if you're going to find a therapy find one that's trauma informed most therapies are not trauma informed something like cognitive behavioral therapy mostly deal with i i'm not saying it's categorically but mostly deals with the surface of things they don't it doesn't leave with the underlying traumatic

Starting point is 00:34:50 template for why you think the way you do um also but for people uh who can't afford a private therapist well or their community programs programs there's online there's all kinds of information about trauma many of my talks have been uploaded to YouTube not by me but just by others on trauma you can get lots of information not just for me but from others as well there then there are modalities that anybody can do such as meditation and mindfulness like you spent a month on your own and basically uh i've done similar things where you're just alone with your mind yeah and that's a scary thing it can be it can be a very scary thing for sure but that means taking a break from the digital world. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:46 Actually spending time alone with the mind and then writing about it, journaling about it, talking to people about it. There's lots of stuff that people can do. And increasingly, there are more and more books that are really good guides to understanding and working with trauma Peter Levine's work waking the tiger in an unspoken voice that's another one of Peter's work my

Starting point is 00:36:12 various books that you were kind enough to mention including this most recent one vessels the body keeps the score Bruce Perry and Oprah's recent book called What Happened to You about childhood trauma. Yeah. And memoirs like Educated by Tara Westover, which is quite a wake-up call about trauma and its impacts. There's lots of stuff out there now. At least we're living in a world where this conversation, although it's not penetrating the medical profession very much, at least it's happening out there in the world. Yeah. It's true. And I think think you know um

Starting point is 00:36:45 historically illness was seen as a spiritual problem yeah in most cultures you mentioned lakota you know when they someone's sick they bring the community together yeah and the shamans and the medicine men yeah were the healers and there was no division between you know spirituality and disease and health it was all one continuum and I spent you know a lot of time in in very interesting cultures when I was in medical school it was a Hopi reservation and another was in Nepal and it was just this embedded culture of shamanism and medicine men and healers and and and I remember being up in mountains and way in the remote areas near Tibet in the Polar Arena Medical Expedition.

Starting point is 00:37:28 And the Dhammijankris were the Nepalese healers. And there was this incredible ceremony with the whole community around and the ill person. It wasn't like you went to the doctor and you went and sat in an office by yourself. The whole community was there. That's right. And the healer was there working on the person and they were doing whatever they were doing, but activating different healing mechanisms of the body

Starting point is 00:37:53 that we actually can activate through these various different modalities. And many cultures historically have used medicines, plant medicines, to actually heal. And now with the advent of this field of psychedelic-assisted therapy, this whole to actually heal. And now with the advent of this field of psychedelic assisted therapy, this whole conversation is changing. In fact, the psychedelics, and we've had Michael Paul on the podcast, Tony Bossis and others who are doing this work, and they really

Starting point is 00:38:16 have sort of resurrected this body of research that started in the 50s around psychedelics and LSD to look at how we can use these to help heal the mind and and I know you sort of work with this yeah model as well as part of the modalities and like you said there are many but for many people this can be an interruption in their normal view of themselves and their world and great safety you know and I I mean members of my own family who've been able to take advantage of this and actually start to find peace and start to kind of unpack the sort of traumas.

Starting point is 00:38:55 And I have many friends and many colleagues who've used this. And a lot of it's sort of underground now, but it's really emerging. And, you know, whether it's ketamine therapy, whether it's MDMA psilocybin therapy, whether it's ayahuasca or Ibogaine, which is incredibly interesting to me as an addiction treatment. And we want to sort of talk about that a little bit. And even things like stellate ganglion blocks, which are a nerve block in the neck that interrupts

Starting point is 00:39:19 the fight or flight response. These are all technologies, let's call them ancient technologies, some more modern technologies that actually seem to help people sort of take a quantum jump over and leapfrog over a lot of the sort of slogging through the traumas through traditional therapy and traditional psychiatry and medication, which often doesn't really work that well. Well, I wonder if you had like myself often wished or not often wished that if we could just combine the amazing achievements of modern medicine

Starting point is 00:39:53 with some humility to look at the traditional wisdoms teachings of indigenous peoples because it's not a question of one over the other but but boy if we had that kind of wisdom infused into our technological minds we would be so much more powerful as healers and um you know as you as you suggested the the illness is not just as a biological event but as a psychological spiritual event so the the medicine wheel of north american people, which the four quadrants of mind and spirit and body and sociality all have to be balanced. And as regards psychedelics, so my third to last chapter in this book is on psychedelics

Starting point is 00:40:40 because I have worked with them quite a bit. And I spoke with Michael Pollan and I asked him if he was surprised by the success of his work book yeah how to change your mind and he said what he was most surprised was that he expected a lot more pushback pushback within the medical profession but he says people are realizing how thin our toolkit actually is and then we have to have to find some other solutions and i myself have found both individually for me but also as a healing modality for people i work with psychedelics to be a very powerful um potential and more than a potential is a very powerful modality and i'm not a psychedelic evangelist i

Starting point is 00:41:27 don't think psychedelics are going to save the world or save medicine but boy are we nuts not to explore them and and and to employ them yeah because they have so much to potentially to offer in so many conditions in the book i give examples of people healing, not just from mental health, but also from physical conditions based on changing their mindset as it flows from psychedelic experience. So, Gabor, how do these medicines work? And I think they're all different, right? But how do they reset these neural networks and how do they help people metabolize their trauma and well some traditions like say example with ayahuasca it wasn't necessarily the client who would take the plant but the shaman would mm-hmm and the shaman would then get a vision and deep

Starting point is 00:42:21 insight and I've worked with these indigenous shamans in the Peruvian rainforest. Let me tell you, they're penetrating. The Shibobo healers. Yeah, the sheep people, they're deep. And they see things that Western medicine just hasn't got a clue about. I'm talking personally, I had that experience. Yeah. Can you share that? Yeah. And they just saw right into me. They had no idea who I was. They were not impressed. They didn't read all your books? They didn't read my books.

Starting point is 00:42:50 They were not impressed with my credentials. They just saw this human being carrying a lot of trauma. And they just saw it. And they worked with it. And I didn't have to be on the plant for them to see that. I was. But it was their own vision that allowed them to see that. So that's the first point. Is that partly it has to do with who's administering it in what context and what

Starting point is 00:43:09 training they've had yeah the set and setting they call it the settings go to a party um secondly freud segment 48 once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, meaning that in dreams you manifest some of our most unconscious emotional dynamics, which is true. But the interpretation of dreams is notoriously difficult. And I think Freud certainly had his own illusions when it came to interpreting other people's dreams but i think psychedelics are might be said to be a royal rule to the unconscious because they remove the usual defenses of the egoic mind so you get to see both the pain and the possibility that underlies the egoic mindset so people get in touch with some deep agony sometimes. They also get in touch with some beauty

Starting point is 00:44:08 that they had not been in touch with but it's been inside them all along. So you get to see both the traumatized, unprotected, uncovered, traumatized aspect of your personality that's been pulling the strings behind the the curtains for a long time now but you also get to see the possibilities of oneness and unity and love and beauty so that you don't have to keep running you don't have to keep employing these defenses yeah um that's it in a very small nutshell but the potential is tremendous

Starting point is 00:44:43 and i've seen it happen i've experienced some of it myself and i've certainly seen it in a very small nutshell, but the potential is tremendous, and I've seen it happen. I've experienced some of it myself, and I've certainly seen it happen a lot in my work with other people. Yeah, I think it's very powerful. And the sort of addiction space is sort of fascinating because not all psychedelics or plant medicines are the same. And this particular compound, which I don't think we've talked about in the podcast ibogaine yeah derived from the iboga tree yeah one of the things i wish i talked about in this chapter and is it but i didn't and i'm not i'm not even sure why i omitted it and i was probably just want to get the book finished there's only 4 000 pages already uh was iboga because iboga which is a plant that goes in gabon by the retreat people yeah and and it's been used as a spiritual enzyme you might say by those people they're tribally speaking

Starting point is 00:45:34 but it's got the amazing quality of um not just of unearthing traumatic imprints like many of the other psychedelics do but also in the case of opiates actually uh obviating opiate withdrawal so you could be on heroin for 20 years yeah and after two nights of iboga or ibogaine which is the extract you are not going through withdrawal symptoms which is shocking from a medical perspective well an alcoholic you know i work in the emergency room and someone come in with alcohol withdrawal, it's a physiological phenomena. Heroin addiction and withdrawal is a physiological phenomena. So how do you interrupt that?

Starting point is 00:46:13 Well, opiate withdrawal is terrible. The dependence because of the loss of opiate receptors and therefore all of a sudden you don't get the opiate from the outside, your system is in total shock yeah uh ibogaine prevents that now again it's not for everybody there's some medical contraindications and the context has to be really right and pristine both psychologically and medically and and physically but in the proper hands, it's transformative. And there's studies being done now with American veterans with PTSD showing amazing results with using iboga.

Starting point is 00:46:57 Stanford is running such a study. But, of course, in the wisdom of our current society, it's illegal. It's considered to be medically useless. And therefore, it's hard to even get permission to study it. You know, which is insanity to the highest degree. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Starting point is 00:47:29 Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter.

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The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Address And Begin To Heal Trauma

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