The HoneyDew with Ryan Sickler - Dr. Drew - DrewDew

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

My HoneyDew this week is Dr. Drew! (Dr. Drew After Dark) Dr. Drew Highlights the Lowlights of what trauma really is and how it affects us. SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE and watch full episodes of The Dew every toozdee! https://youtube.com/@rsickler SUBSCRIBE TO MY PATREON, The HoneyDew with Y’all, where I Highlight the Lowlights with Y’all! You now get audio and video of The HoneyDew a day early, ad-free at no additional cost! It’s only $5/month! Sign up for a year and get a month free! https://www.patreon.com/TheHoneyDew What’s your story?? Submit at [e-mail] CATCH ME ON TOUR https://www.ryansickler.com/tour July 7 & 8: Appleton, WI August 18 & 19: Tampa, FL September 1 & 2: Springfield, MO September 15 & 16: Tulsa, OK SUBSCRIBE to The HoneyDew Clips Channel http://bit.ly/ryansicklerclips SUBSCRIBE TO THE CRABFEAST PODCAST https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-crabfeast-with-ryan-sickler-and-jay-larson/id1452403187 SPONSORS: Betterhelp -The HoneyDew is sponsored by BetterHelp, get 10% off your first month at https://www.Betterhelp.com/HONEYDEW

The Honeydew with Ryan Sickler. Welcome back to The Honeydew, y'all. We're over here doing it in the Nightpan Studios. I'm Ryan Sickler, ryansickler.com. I'm Ryan Sickler on all your social media. And again, thank you guys. Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for subscribing, supporting, all of it.

Whether you're new here, whether you've been here, thank you so much. Go watch my special Lefty Son. I keep saying YouTube pulled it from the algorithm. It's still doing well, so you got to go find it. Please go support that. Share it, like it, comment, all that good stuff. If you got to have more, then you got to check out the Patreon, listen to me. It's five bucks a month. You get the honey do a day early. You get it ad free. You get it at no extra cost. And it's the wildest. I'm telling you, it's the

best deal on Patreon. It's five bucks and you're hearing stories from y'all. We just had a lady who was the victim of a murder-suicide attempt. I believe it was husband at the time. Shoots her. She ducks, gets hit once in the carotid artery. The other bullet, Dr. Drew, goes through her mouth, out of her cheek and neck. She's now paralyzed in a wheelchair. Her mom is in the house, sees this. Dude blows his brains out in front of her, and she runs out and plugs the carotid artery with her hand, saves her daughter's life. $5, y'all.

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Subscribe to that. And this weekend, I believe it's this weekend, July 7th and 8th, Appleton, Wisconsin. I'm going to be there, y'all. Get your tickets for that. August, we got some new dates to announce. August 18th and 19th, we're in Tampa. September 1st and 2nd, Springfield, Missouri. And September 15th and 16th, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

All right, that's all my back and lungs can handle right now. And that's the biz. Go get your tickets at ryanciclo.com. Now, you guys know what we do over here. I always say we highlight the lowlights and these are the stories behind the storytellers.

I'm very excited to have this guest back on the Honeydew, ladies and gentlemen. Please welcome Dr. Drew. Yeah, buddy. Here we are. So why did YouTube

put you in jail? I want to know more about that. Well, they never tell you. They just say we have- You can call and get a person sometimes if you're diligent. We have a contact

who also tells us she can't help us with that and keeps pushing us off. So I've talked to Nadav about theirs. They don't tell you. They just say we manually reviewed it. And then my question would be, how many people? One person? Complained. Does one person decide the fate of everything that goes out there to all people?

What everybody else can listen to. Right. And then they give you their bylaws. They give you their algorithm, and it says nothing. You can look at it and go, I didn't do any of these things. What are you talking about? So disturbing. Also, I think they don't like – well, this show is – I mean, please subscribe to this show and help the show.

Because the words on this show, and I'm going to say them now, so this will be a demonetized episode. But when we talk about trauma and abuse and molestation and rape, those are words- You're not allowed to talk about those things? Those are words that the algorithm doesn't like. Oh my God. We're demonetized in the queue. When Kirsten posts and Annie posts an episode on Sunday for a Tuesday release, it's already limited. I don't know if they're using AI to search words or what it is.

Of course. It's my guess because how could you possibly – we just uploaded it five seconds ago. How in the hell did someone listen to it? Well, it's of course AI. But it's literally the most significant and common medical issues of our time. Yeah. I glorified weed in their opinion, which, I mean, I technically do. Over alcohol, I do.

I didn't glorify it in general, just comparing it to the one thing. And they don't like weed or marijuana on YouTube at all. That seems counter to their culture. Even though it's legal, even though it's medicinal, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the thing about weed, though, I have no problem with people smoking weed. I don't give a shit. But we are seeing some stuff now. Tell me.

Because of the concentration. The concentrations, as you know, are so intense. Oh, you mean the power of these things? Oh, boy. And so we are seeing people whose brains can't handle that. We're seeing psychoses. We're seeing mood disturbances. We're seeing anxiety disorders. And we're seeing anxiety disorders, and

we're seeing addiction too. Particularly if you're getting onto the dabs. If you're doing that, you're in that threshold. I don't even think my lungs can handle that. It's really like crack. It's the crack of weed. I don't even do the they also have infused ones where they're taking the keef and everything and putting it

back in. I'm like, I just give me some flour. Just some flour. It's because people get tolerant and they need more and more, and that's a problem if you're getting into that sort of zone. Not that, you know, plenty of people smoke weed every day are fine. I'm not saying that at all, but I'm saying we've got to get honest about given the concentrations of THC that are in there,

it is starting to affect people's lives and brains. This is in the weed from the Vietnam era. No, you're not. They don't even know about it. You're not even old enough to remember taking seeds and sticks out of the weeds. Dr. Drew, are you talking about the lid? I would sit down and put an album

in front of me with one on and I would sit there and an hour of seeding my weed so I didn't get the pops and the cracks and the sticks. Oh, my God. So funny. They eat the seeds. Remember that?

Yeah. My brothers used to chew them. And then we'd read things or hear things that there were cyanide in them and stuff. Is that real, though? I don't know. It was all the rumors I heard that, too. Look, I wanted to talk to you about this. So this show is people coming on and talking about the worst times of their life.

They're talking about their trauma, the things they've overcome. What I don't think we've ever really discussed is actually what trauma is, what it does to the imprinting of a person, especially at the age that it happens. I know listening to, again, I'm old, listening to Loveline back in the day when you guys would talk about, especially a young lady who had a voice that was high-pitched in her 40s or 50s. And also, I've smoked a lot of weed. I feel like there was a correlation to about the time that trauma happened to them, maybe the age-ish. Am I sort of in the ballpark on that? Yeah. So one of the things that trauma does is arrest development. And we started noticing that we would close our eyes and listen to somebody's voices. We would immediately – I could literally picture the age of the trauma. Like I'm talking to a six-year-old.

That's what comes to mind or an eight-year-old. The voice would trigger an image in my head of the age of that individual I was speaking to. Never wrong. Never. to speaking to never wrong never we were never wrong and there was another thing because just because we were sitting there you know headphones listening all night uh we also would get other kinds of feelings from people if they had sort of personality disorders from the traumas because they would immediately we'd get you know adam would have a certain reaction i'd have a reaction and that's how things work i mean back in the psychiatric when i ran programs in the psychiatric hospital, we would

sort of confirm our diagnostic impressions based on how people responded to the patients. In other words, or how they responded to us even. In other words, I had a nurse, my charge nurse, loved sociopaths. And if she would say, and when the patient would come in, she'd just go, oh, I love him, he's so entertaining. We'd just go, oh, shit, here we go, sociopath. If the patient – You knew off of her reaction.

And we were never wrong. And if the patient liked me like a lot, it was a female, borderline. The borderline is like me. And my partner, my physician partner, if they liked him, bipolar disorder, all the bipolars, it was just very, and so that's why you have to have a team because how we respond to other people and how they respond to us is protean. It's all over the place. And some people don't like or don't respond to others. And so you have to have somebody that you can reach them with. So that was that. So then back to trauma. So trauma, we really, when you're talking about trauma, you're, there's adult trauma, right?

Being in an earthquake or the military trauma, that kind of thing that results in all sorts of symptomatology around PTSD and anxiety disorders and sleep disturbances and intrusive images and all the things we know about the veterans struggle with, right? That is a certain kind of trauma. That's an overwhelmingly, overwhelming experience in adulthood. If you've had earlier trauma, those overwhelming experiences in adulthood tend to be more likely to trigger PTSD. So that's sort of adult trauma. It doesn't really affect your personality development or anything like that. Early trauma has a whole different thing to it. So really the trauma that we're most concerned with is childhood trauma, right? And we in this country have lived through many years of massive denial about what harms children. I mean, there's now finally in the 90s, they came up with the adverse childhood experiences, the ACE scale. If you have three or more of those experiences in childhood, that is sort of chronic trauma. You have a higher

probability of- And what percentage of people is that? Oh, it's very high. 90%? Well, let me tell you something- Is there anyone that goes, there's no one that goes unscathed on this rock in outer space. Well, they're boring if they do. Fair enough. People are very interesting when they've had pathologies and things. But let me tell you some of the things that are on the A scale and you'll see how common they are.

Divorce. I mean, Jesus Christ. A drug addict in the family. A family member in prison. I mean, you don't have to have overt physical or sexual abuse. Of course, those are on the list too. Domestic abuse, not necessarily violence, just fighting in the parents. So just add substance, divorce, and fighting.

I would say you're lucky if you only have three. Right. To be honest. And when you get five, then you really are likely to have very serious long-term problems, both medically and psychiatrically. And it you get five, then you really are likely to have very serious long-term problems, both medically and psychiatrically. And it's very common to have all. And there are some that sort of obviously are heavier, so to speak, are more likely to impact.

And when you do have things like physical and sexual abuse, usually you have some of the other things going on as well. So- See, I like talking to you. How old are you now, Dr. Drew? 64. God damn, you look good, you son of a- God bless you.

You look good. What are we planning here, Ryan dr drew 64 god damn you look good you said god bless you good um what do you what are we planning here right i noticed those guns as soon as you got out of the car i was like look at you son of a bitch i you're you got me by um 14 years but still i feel i always say i'm part of the walk it off generation like you go to your parents back then and it's like just walk it off yeah walk off yeah you know that little and by the way we thought it was horrible and abusive but wasn't so bad relative what they were going on these days you're right so i told you what's on my mind today is i watched the arnold documentary on netflix and uh he was just like get busy do stuff do things make a difference get involved just gotta do things yeah your whole life should be busy and you won't be so disturbed by these things.

And he had a physically abusive father, alcoholic, and all kinds of horrible shit happened to him in childhood too. But let's get back to what trauma is. So trauma – Time to say this real quick, and this is why I wanted to ask you this. And I don't want to interrupt, and I'll shut up after this. Well, I don't want to drag on. So if you interrupt, it's no problem. Back at the YMH days before pandemic and all that good stuff happened, I had talked to you about my mother and the physical, mental, emotional abuse I suffered, all that.

And you said something interesting to me. You said, you know, if you're going to – because I maybe even toyed with having her on an episode or something. You said it's interesting, but how old is she now? And I said, yeah, she's probably 70 or whatever. And you said, you got to be careful with something like that because at some point when you see that old, feeble, whatever person, you end up looking like a bully who's still attacking this person. Yes, you could feel bad. And the funny thing to me is I've worked on it. We have a relationship now. But up until I was 40, I could have said to you easily, I could live another 40 years and still be like, fuck you, lady. So that imprinting in every fiber of me from early on lives underlying everything I do out there.

So – Forgiveness. and then working it. Forgiveness and owning it and all that is really, really important. Yeah. But it'd be interesting. Can we talk about how something that young, whatever your trauma is, it's everlasting. We'll get there. It's not, I mean, it leaves its mark.

It doesn't have to destroy you. Would you agree it's not going anywhere, especially or getting any better if you don't work at it? Oh, boy. Yeah, no. I mean, different people have different ways. I mean, I watched a documentary from both Steven Spielberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger,

and both of them talked about how their work was their sort of process. But they also worked with therapists over the years, I'm sure, or somebody did around them and maybe they sort of how people around us and how we fit with them changes you know who we are too so anyway um so i had an abusive mom too emotionally abusive unavailable all that kind of stuff and um we towards the end of her life, she never came around. Never. No. And in fact, you know, she was leaning on me hard late in her life for medical stuff. And then every time I'd offer her an opinion, she would fight with me, like abusively fight with me. And finally I go, don't come to me for this stuff. She goes, just because I fight doesn't

mean I'm not going to listen to you. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. I just have to bust your balls because that's what I do. And I finally thought, I'm never going to get anything out of this relationship other than I have to do what I need to do to be a good son. And that's it. And that's how it ended. I never got anything from that relationship. It's almost funny. But what was a good son in your eyes to that person? To answer her medical problems, to show up and visit regularly, and to be available.

Just be there. And not fucking pop off any of this bullshit when she started firing at me. And it's funny. She used to yell a lot. And we arranged a caretaker for her and i felt vindicated when this woman said to me she she goes no i you know it's great we're gonna put the yelling the yelling my god the yelling and i thought imagine you're three and that's going on how long did it take you to get that vindication? How many years? 55. Some people die before they ever get it.

You know what I mean? Some people die. Yep. So trauma is essentially the experience of at least psychically, if not physically, the organism, the person, has a sense that they will not go forward. They will not go on being. It is a total destruction either of the soul or the body. Like I'm going to die or this experience is just destroying me psychically. And that experience of – we're not set up for that in childhood.

We can't manage that. If you're a Navy SEAL, you can manage that. You're trained to do it. It still affects you, right? You still have symptoms later down the road. But as a child, it literally shatters the upper limit to the brain's regulatory capacity. And so the brain floods with cortisol. It shuts down the vagus system.

The parasympathetic system kicks in overdrive. You have both hyperstimulation because you're in sort of a fight or flight and hyperinhibition because you can't go anywhere. You're stuck. You're being abused. And hyperinhibition is probably what does all the damage. And in that state, you know, our vagus nerve evolves with three distinct nuclei. And one of the nuclei is linked into higher functions to as, so it has to kind of develop. And it develops as a key component of the brain's regulatory system. So the vagus is turned out

is very embedded, as we said, in the parasympathetic system. And that happens to be embedded also, those vagal offshoots with the parasympathetic input are embedded in what are called the branchial pouches. And the branchial pouches are what develop the muscles to the ears, vocal cords, all the facial musculature. So when we feel something, we can literally attune our ear to vocal prosody and the other. We can use vocal prosody to express emotion ourself. And the tiny movements of our facial muscles have deep communication potential to particularly

children who may be pre-verbal, for instance. That's how moms communicate with babies, with the tiniest input. And so that system gets shattered. It doesn't develop the normal inputs to the higher functions in the brain, and it stays in this sort of more primitive system of dissociation and shutdown. So dissociation both from the feelings and from your body, also dissociation from the higher functions of the brain. So shutdown, dissociation, either, and that dissociation can't even be a somatoform dissociation. So if- What is that? So if the body is the source of the misery, the shattering, physical abuse, sexual abuse, source of the misery, the shattering, physical abuse, sexual abuse, people will actually kind of dissociate from their body. And the body becomes a source of disorganized information

that they never can regulate. So oftentimes you get chronic pain and all kinds of physical complaints that they can't explain because they're disconnected from the normal inflow of information that gets regulated with the whole of the brain. Question so far. I'm with you. Is it fit? Makes sense? Yeah. So it begs the issue.

So this is all work of a guy named Alan Shore and Stephen Porges. Stephen Porges has something called the polyvagal theory where he talks about this socio-emotional exchange system, which is the vagal system that we evolved with as primates and humans in particular, particularly to communicate with mom. That's really what early pre-verbal communication, but we retain it the rest of our life. All right. My question is this. What made doctors, science start studying this what was what was the final tipping point where they're like all right some shit's going on in this

these humans let's look at this the the kaiser adverse childhood experience score was like in the 90s or something maybe even the 2000s and you know adam and i were talking to traumatized people every night it It's obvious when you work in general medicine or in psychiatry, all the impact of trauma, because it's always what you see. There was no agreement in the medical community that had a thing. I don't know if- Even that late? Oh, yeah. I think some of it is the history of psychiatry, and some of it is the lack of willingness to look at the social, what was really going on in our country

because we had all these divorce is good. Kids are little adults. They're fine. They're just, they look how resilient they are. They're out playing. They seem fine. We just, we were in massive, massive denial about this. And the Kaiser study on ACE scores was really just somebody noticed that all these people

with all these medical problems also seem to have this trauma. I wonder if childhood experiences impact on our medical well-being later. It seems to do that. But no thought of how it does it yet. No thought. The other problem, I think, was people don't appreciate, there's a book out there called Shrink by a guy named Lieberman that chronicles this history very beautifully,

how much American psychiatry was captured by psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis minimized trauma in many in sort of generally and trauma was something sort of imagined right you imagined having sex with your mother and you imagined that somebody physically abused it's all like it was going and sometimes it is let's be. Sometimes these are distorted memory and false memories, things like that. How do you decipher that? Oh, you can't.

It's almost impossible. It is. Because they believe it so much. They experience it. The selling of it is. Yeah. I mean, oftentimes I deal with the parents, these people that have these vivid experiences

that I have to sit and process with them because they're their experiences. And the parents just go, that just didn't happen. I don't, okay. But, you know, I remember of all things, Maria Bamford's mom saying some of that stuff. I heard her saying like, Maria has a lot of memories of me and I'm, but maybe it did. You know, maybe it's the mom's distorted memories. It doesn't matter. What matters is the person has, with them and you've got to process it with them.

So it begs the issue of how do you do that? And the question – let me just finish my comment about American psychoanalysis. They just didn't really want to deal with trauma as a separate thing. They knew it was there but they didn't know what it was. And they didn't have a full theory about the impact. And it was guys that developed the world of interpersonal neurobiology developed, like how brains affect other brains.

And Alan Shore was the sort of the, he wrote a book called Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. And that was really the breakthrough. And that's probably 30 years ago now. And he developed a whole bunch of followers and people who did their own research and developed their own stuff. And now there's a whole discipline in that area. And it just has bled into everything. Even though a lot of doctors don't really know it in the detail I'm sharing with you guys, they understand that that's there. We've gotten away from the single

skull notion of psychology and psychiatry. The central nervous system, the brain, the 90s was the decade of the brain. We moved onto that to realize, oh my God, the brain is embedded in a body. And that body is actually the source of feelings. Feelings are things that come from the body. We still don't know how that really happens because we have these huge nervous plexes. People call them, what are the chakras? But they're actually nervous blocks in here. We don't know what they're doing. They're like little mini brains laying down in our body that process information coming out of our body and send it up through the

vagus nerve and if that vagus nerve is disconnected from the higher function then again you're not really hearing your feelings you're not you know processing for you know regulating feelings it's that integrated system of brain body we think of more now but of course that brain body is embedded in relationships those relationships are embedded in a socio-historical context. So you see how these impacts, they're waves that spread out from the individual experience. And you have to think about all of this shit, especially in today's world now. So it begs the issue of how people develop emotional regulation at all, right? And it turns out brains heal other brains.

I think we've known that for a long time, right? People sit with another person in therapy and how that brain healed other brains is something that really wasn't that well understood until interpersonal neurobiology came along and we start to understand more now of how this this thing of closeness of two brain bodies uh communicate in ways that are well beyond words and you know just just experiences there's something awesome about the experience of two bodies in space when the one body needs help and the other body is willing to attune to that and capable of attuning deeply to that experience. And the other person, the patient, can tolerate the closeness. Most people can't tolerate closeness when they've been traumatized because the closeness was the source of the trauma.

The people they trusted oftentimes. And so they just won't ever go back. I mean, if they would go back, they could have sort of developed it with their own family and friends and things and sort of help process that. But they don't. Closeness is sort of something they have to manage rather than something they experience. resulted in their personality stuff comes into the room in the relationships, whether it's projective identification or manipulation or shutdown or lack of ability to connect with feelings, all comes into the room with people's therapy. So we have to go back and look at what humans were just meant to do to develop emotional regulation. So a guy named Peter

Fonagy figured some of this stuff out. And he has something called the mentalization process. And he studied moms and babies. And we can argue all day about, you know, should it be. Where are the dads coming into this?

Do we come into this at all? We do. We actually do. And of course, some, you know, babies don't have moms, right? They have dads. Dads can do this. We just don't do it as automatically. if you've had babies you'll it's not father nature it's

mother nature it it we literally don't have the the big corpus callosum that gives us the connection to the right side of the brain where all this is happening this is why women are better people because we literally well i used to say that i used to say that adam gives me shit about that now because i don't know he's angry at female politicians so so i used to say that was a better brain because it's more connected and more but it comes with liabilities like everything in humans uh but but it um so it's a right brain phenomenon and we can do it as men if you've've ever been a father, you will notice you end up sort of following behind your wife going, how did you know that? How do you know he's hungry? How do you know he's – I just know it.

I'm tuned. I'm attuned. That right brain to right brain communication before there's any verbal. So what is that made up of? What is that process made up of? So when they observe this interaction with babies, of course, there's eye contact, there's vocal prosody created by the mom, but mostly she does something very interesting with her face. So the baby is approached by the mom and the mom, the babies then learn my mind

has content. People can look at me and understand me. I have content. They're designed to look out into the world first to phenomenon that is totally contingent on them. So they are everything body function for the first six months of life is all the babies attuned to. You notice they don't make eye contact or anything. In about six months of age, they shift to partial contingencies, things that are sort of dependent on their behavior. I cry and people do things in response to that. I pull the cat's tail. The cat does something. They have mobiles.

I like getting mobiles and seeing them do things. But there is a huge part of our brain that's dedicated to the face, other faces. And we have already this interest in the social world we have the attunement of the mom who's always in our face making eye contact exchanging with us and that is very satisfying to the baby and what that exchange is made up of is the child has an experience has an emotion uh and the mom approaches studies like att, like what is going on here? What does my body tell me this body is experiencing? And she'll arrive at something with a right brain message that comes over to the left side via her vagus nerve.

And she will automatically on her face show a representation of what the child is experiencing. It will sometimes be with the subtle eye musculature or the corners of the mouth. It's not something you would necessarily even notice as an adult, but the child is very interested. If you've ever been in deep therapy, I'll tell you when I was in deep therapy and I noticed I was I felt started feeling bad for my therapist because I was so I mean her face I was I was aware of every every muscle and I thought this poor woman I said she can't smile I can't even like show without me like in on it and I thought well there's that exchange thing again um so the child learns that that representation is a second order representation of their feeling. Like somebody understands my feeling and they're showing it back to me. I don't have, I don't have

words yet. I don't have verb. I don't have language. It's pre-language stuff, this all starts. And so that's my feeling. And then the mother offers alongside that feeling, vocal prosody, soothing affects, and in that exchange of body to body helps the baby then regulate that feeling. It's not so scary because mom understands it and other adult experiences it with me, and we co-regulate it. Of course, the baby's hippest, their eye movements, our pupils normally do this. I'm moving my fingers up and down. Our pupils normally do this. I'm moving my fingers up and down.

And the baby and the mom's hippest times together, as well as their heart rates and all these things. It's profound the way our bodies attune, particularly as caretakers of children, especially women. Or whatever we're calling these biological entities that are able to do this now. I don't even know. Right, yeah. So there it is. That's the fundamental aspect of the change, the exchange. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Sometimes in life we are faced with tough choices,

and the path forward isn't always clear. Whether you're dealing with decisions around your career, relationships, or anything else, therapy helps you stay connected to what you really want while you navigate life. So you can move forward with confidence and excitement. You know this is a mental health show, right? And we preach therapy on this show. So if you're thinking about it and it's something you haven't tried yet, try it. If it's something you're looking to get back into, try it, all right. If you're thinking of starting therapy at all, give BetterHelp a try.

It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapist anytime for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash HoneyDew today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash HoneyDew. BetterHelp.com slash HoneyDew. Now, let's get back to the do. You mentioned deep therapy. So I want to talk about this for a second because you introduced me to EMDR therapy, which incorrectly for a while I called EDMR therapy. And I've passed that gift on to so many people in my personal life. And I preach it on here because I have never,

I didn't even know it was called talk therapy until I was introduced to EMDR therapy. I'm like, oh, this is just me talking to someone. And like you say, brain-to-brain, getting some insight, some hindsight, whatever it is. But this EMDR therapy, man, I originally had gone for – my daughter almost got hit by a car, and all of a sudden I became terrified to fly. EMDR is perfect for stuff like that. A little ridiculously scared of heights all of a sudden. Not – when I'm in a plane, I look out the scared of heights all of a sudden. Not, you know, when I'm in a plane

and I look out the window, that looks like a cartoon. Classic, dude. 200. Classic. 300 feet. And within, I mean,

two months, eight sessions maybe, I was done. I can sleep on my flights now. Now I look at other people when turbulence hits and they're like,

oh, and I just like oh and i just like man but you may want to go deeper again to deal with some of the childhood stuff too because that can be managed the same way i don't know if you did do a lot of stuff but we got the sum of it but my main focus was like let's get me i need to fly to work yeah i get it no no it's perfect for that and and i it worked and i was doing therapy back before emdr was sort of a standard kind of way of doing this it it really gets your brain when it's been traumatized right i've described you know how the vegas thing is sort of set up uh when it dissociates right from

trauma you're shut down your body so all these things dissociate it leaves that part of the brain disconnected, wiring-wise, from the regulation of the whole. It's just a piece that's off in the distance there. And the individual experience is adaptive. It's a survival thing that the human brain does. But the individual experience to that is, well, I don't think about that anymore. That's done. It isn't done with you it's in the background they're always needing so it's a part of you and it needs attention i had and it will find it that shit was laying in a hammock just wait it will get you it will find a way to get it like you said at age 55 you felt vindicated that that popped up for i loved flying if i felt like a rock star taking off into the sky.

Then all of a sudden I was like, and I was like, how? What is going on? And I couldn't get over that it worked. Let's talk about the buzzing in the hands and just sort of what it literally does to your brain. We literally don't really know. That's the thing. It was all been discovered very serendipitously it was a woman originally yeah it was a woman walking through the forest and notice when she

moved right back and forth she was able to she started experiencing things she'd been trying to get at for a long time and couldn't get to and all of a sudden there it was and so it does it it's i think of it as kind of a releasing like a frontal releasing uh experience like there's they're repetitive things you can do that tend to kind of slow down or shut down parts of the brain that get in the way of us experiencing things the defensive structure our cognitive structure all that stuff gets in the way uh and when you do emdr all that kind of slows up or shuts down and what comes up is what's been sitting there needing some attention for quite some time typically and uh it will cause people to do behaviors and do drugs and all kinds of things is that right even later in life like that oh my god yes that's why people say i i feel

comfortable for the first time they didn't even realize they were uncomfortable but that part has been there driving stirring things up and uh it's often if you've had you know bad abuse it's often pain it's really a feeling of pain had bad abuse, it's often pain. It's really a feeling of pain all the time that you're walking around in the background with and don't even know. So I'm going to go back to the baby and the exchange. Let me see if I finish that.

So if you've been traumatized, particularly by the person or the people that are supposed to be the source of the regulation, that is such a a violation of trust it is so shattering that you can't trust anybody after that so trust becomes a major issue closeness becomes a major issue and think about how vulnerable children are you know that think about they they're open and vulnerable they just right they're just there and then all of a sudden you can tell them anything santa claus this happens and it just, they can't, it shatters their ability to tolerate and they will not come back.

It's no go anymore. And that's what you're trying to overcome. That's what I deal with in the addiction field all the time. Trying to get them into the frame of just being able to rebuild that regulatory system. Why does it lead us to things like addiction though why because you're in pain and these things are you don't realize it and all of a sudden you feel okay you tell a 17 year old or 15 year old who's just felt good for the first time in his or her life and been carrying a lot of pain around wasn't aware of it it's hard

to get them not to do those things and then if you have the genetic potential for addiction well now then that kicks in so you have the genetic potential for addiction, well, now then that kicks in. So you have two problems. You're trying to regulate trauma and you have addiction, which is a common combination. Yeah. And what do you think, let's talk about men especially, because this is a generation I feel like, I always say we're an interesting generation of men because my grandfather was World War II. My father was Vietnam era. And then I'm like, I want to be a clown. You know what I mean?

It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know what I mean? So we're a weird sort of generation of men who also are trying to stop this train of trauma moving on. And really sort of Frankie Keones, who was on here, called our parents professional suppressors. And I was like, it's a great term. They just pushed everything down. And now we're trying to figure out what the hell is going on to stop these cycles and all this. But I don't think enough men are comfortable enough to still sit and talk about mental health and what they're going through i think it's still a lot of that machismo bullshit like i'm i'll walk it off i'm fine i'm well

remember we're wired for that i mean that's how the brain that's what the brain wants us to do just forget about it move on and survive survive is that men or anyone anyone but men have a little more of that because we're not connected to that part of our brain very well. The corpus callosum is smaller. So, you know, it's a pendulum always, right? I mean, when you look back at some of the parenting we had, some of that now starts to look good compared to the helicopter parenting. I agree with that. And the self-esteem bullshit. We did a generation a disservice trying to undo what we thought our parents had done. Everyone gets a trophy generation.

Terrible. I mean, I had kids late, but that is basically the people I went to high school with is that's their generation. Terrible. Really? And being perfect parents because our parents were so shitty. I'm not going to do that to my kid. And kids need adversity. They need challenges.

They have to come up against reality. That's what mental health is, is managing reality on reality's terms. Yeah, they don't need abuse. Yes, they need more emotional openness. But they do need a certain amount of fucking get on with it and just go try out for the football team. If you fail, try harder. Right. Not because you need to deserve a trophy.

You're the best. Let me go tell that coach something because you cut my kid. Coach doesn't like me. Right, right. It's like, no, get your shit together. Watch that Arnold documentary, everybody. It is all about this. Just go do stuff.

The guy was dedicated to to you know improvement uh and so yeah i think now we've done another disservice to another population by overdoing our sort of involvement and engagement and sacrifice for kids uh it's because it's our own vulnerability our own feeling of pain that we are trying to avoid in them but that's our pain not theirs right we can't make them responsible for that so as always the pendulum goes back and forth it's never a perfect parent it just doesn't exist i i would argue that we have moved forward in terms of uh our ability to manage you know really significant things and understanding significant things as it pertains to the impact of parenting on human development.

We're kind of getting better at all that. But damn, take a bunch of nine-year-olds and tell them they have to hide under their bed, shelter in place, and if you go outside, you're going to kill your parents and your grandparents. And oh, by the way, no contact with your peers for two years, or if you do, I'm going to shove a swab up your nose, and here's school on this pad. Oh, the porn, don't pay any attention to that. What the fuck did we think we were going to end up with?

I mean, it was so predictable. I kept saying we were going to destroy 8- to 15-year-olds, and we did. So the mental health stuff there is just intense now. It is, huh? Oh, my God. But in your field, are you seeing at least more and more, in particular, men coming forward to talk about things?

Yeah, I mean, look. And also, what race of people do you see least in therapy? Two questions. Tell me about men first. So I'm not working so much in day and out mental health. I'm doing general medicine now. So I'm going to speak sort of generally. In great, great, great.

Generic numbers. Yeah. What do you call it where you generalize about people? Yeah. What was that last thing you said? What race of people? No, no. Before that you said something else.

Are you seeing more men these days come forward to talk about i think men have benefited from the zoom revolution in health and mental health care because we don't want to run into somebody in the waiting room there's no waiting room we don't want to turn our camera on don't fucking turn your camera on that's fine uh you know we got to get them in the door you can remain anonymous you can do whatever you want just get in the door and that is a lot of the struggles getting them in and of course men with all medical stuff you are more likely to come in because their female partner brought them in then i mean that's how i get my prostate cancer diagnosis my mom my wife was like so i'm't i'm making you an appointment all right boom prostate cancer and uh you know that's

that's definitely my experience in practicing out there it's the men particularly younger you know like middle-aged man we don't want to come in that no uh if we we die. We'll find out soon enough if this is a bad problem. So we're so nutty. We're so stupid. So, all right. So what race? I'm not sure I can really generalize. I would say, of course, I would say it's more about, there are definitely cultures okay certain asian cultures are about you know don't it's actually anathema to share your feelings you just keep it

shut down uh so certainly that culture bears out many times on people's ability to come in and share and do the work of treatment um in my experience, the African-American community has, well, reasonably has had a horrible experience with mental health in this country and so doesn't trust it. And if they have trauma, now they're doubly not trusting it. And I say that's not only is that healthy, that's real. I was going to say that sounds. It's reality.

Yeah. But we have lots of African-American practitioners now and people that are culturally trained and they should open up. They'd rather go to the church. And people do go there and I think the church is slowly moving towards understanding they got to refer back. I mean, generally, and plenty of white people do that too, trust me, that church is a reasonable place to go for certain kinds of spiritual experiences. And oftentimes they'll have people trained there that will help them more with the mental health piece. And I've seen more and more they're more willing to refer back to when it's outside of their ability. So that exchange is starting to happen, which is good.

I worry about the lack of acknowledgement of trauma and intergenerational, you know, trauma transmits intergenerationally. It doesn't happen. Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah. Is it, it really does? Is it in our DNA? Yeah, I don't, we don't, there are people that theorize that, that it's an epigenetic phenomenon. Of course, intense experiences we do know does affect our genes. Whether that can be passed epigenetically, I'm not sold. You don't need that to pass trauma. All you need is somebody who is physically abused, for instance, and felt that that was something they needed for discipline. And then they do it to their children.

That's it. It's on then. And it's the odd thing about trauma. There's several odd things about trauma. One is we not just normalize it, but we make it good, right? That's a way of sort of feeling okay. As opposed to feeling like I was nearly destroyed by this and I'm a little thing, I'm a little being that was so dependent on this big person and that person really destroyed me. We identify with the perpetrator and say, they're doing what's right for me. I needed this. And therefore, I'm going to be that big person and do that for my children.

Oh, man, is that fucked up thinking. That is the exact opposite of how we should go in our brains. And yet we do it that way. The other thing we do, the odd thing that humans do, is that we recreate the traumas of the past, when they're childhood traumas in particular. So dad is an abusive alcoholic who abandons the family. You automatically are attracted to abusive alcoholic men if you're a daughter of that guy.

And you do it over and over and over again. And of course, because if you're attracted to some guy who's an abusive, abandoning alcoholic, he will oblige you and be an abusive, abandoning alcoholic. That's what he does. And yet you do it again. And even when, you know, I hear people saying this all the time, I am never going to be around a guy or a woman like that again. The men are often more than the codependent size. I know I got it. I see what they are. I know it now. I'm never going to do that again. Here's the extraordinary thing. They always do it again because no one talks about attraction.

They talk about you learned your lesson cognitively, which they have, but they're still attracted to those kinds of people. And even though cognitively that person seems not to have all those features and I'm not going to be around anymore, the fact that I'm attracted to that person tells you it's that kind of person again. Unless you – you either have to do one of two things when you're in that pattern of repetition. You have to either not go for people you're so attracted to. So we tell people think butterfly is not lightning bolts. If it's a lightning bolt attraction, it's going to be the abuse of banning alcohol.

Even though it doesn't look like that, it's going to be that. I promise you, it's you. You're a perfect instrument. You're having lightning bolts. So if you can find somebody who maybe is a recovering alcoholic or maybe had an alcoholic parent also and shares that with you, and you're sort of attracted but not lightning bolts, and you can build a closeness there you'll find it much more satisfying if you can't do that you got to go to therapy or you will

keep doing the same damn thing so let me ask you this then how do we especially as parents um if we do need to correct some but not too much what's the balance of not overcorrecting and not being the helicopter, everybody gets a trophy? I don't know. Because I'm the same way. Like my daughter gets a participation trophy. I'm like, no. The award or, excuse me, the reward is participating. Yeah.

Okay. We can't – how the hell does anybody know what bad is if we don't know what good is? This team also over here, they stepson used to get trophies. I'm not kidding you. Come up to this. I'm like, and they'd be broken in his room and stuff. I had my trophies until I was in my 30s. I probably did the same thing. And I did a photo shoot with them, and then I just sent them off to the dumpster after that. But I will tell you the one thing that we had back in those days that they got rid of

that I thought was very meaningful most improved remember that most improved had the same status as most valuable yeah because the guy or gal that really put in the effort and it was shitty to begin with and really started to perform with the team that was awesome i got most improved when i'm choking up really it's weird. And it was the most important thing ever happened to me. And I thought an acknowledgement for having gone from a benchwarmer to a player was a big deal to me. And that was overcoming adversity, which is what we all need these experiences doing. We need to be challenged with stuff. And we can be present for our kids. So here's the balance. Be present for your kids as a refueling station, but do not co-sign any of their stuff.

Do not rescue them from anything. We rescue in this parent group. Yeah, talk about that. No rescuing. Rescuing is I see the pain in the child. I have to make it stop. Okay? Why do you need to make it stop? I mean, I understand you

want to go help a child, but the reason you have to make it stop is your pain was mobilized. The pain left behind from your childhood, you don't realize the distinction between that child's pain and your pain, and your pain is mobilized. It's a very deep psychological experience that most people can't differentiate. It's most of what i worked in therapy myself does it work the other way where like i see my daughter like she had a dance recital okay saturday was rehearsal we're leaving the rehearsal she's in her little dress and tights and she's got crocs on and she's doing a balance beam on the curb and i hear and i look back on the ground tights knee ripped knees bleeding and i saw her look at me with the panic it wasn't even about the knee ripped it was holy shit these tights are ripped recitals tomorrow we don't have any and i felt the panic and i said hey

you're good she's like oh my knee and i'm like i I grew up very boy. It was beat my brothers. We're constantly wrecking bikes, no helmets, idiot shit back then. But when I see my daughter's knee and she's going, I'm the other way with it. I'm like, it's a scrape. Well, not only that, but now let's go back to the early childhood exchange. So the child comes up to the mom and go, I hurt my finger. And the mom goes, oh my God, oh my God, I need a drink. You made me crazy. I can't, you know. I need a drink. That child then is. It's not you need a bandaid. Right. So that child learns that when I have a feeling, my mom catches the feeling and evokes something that I don't want. Right. That's where codependency comes from.

So now I have to – I can't show her my feelings. I have to suppress my feelings to manage her feelings, make sure she doesn't go get loaded again or to make sure she doesn't yell at me again. And that's not good. What the child needs is you to be present, not feel their feelings, but appreciate their feelings, which is a different thing. That's what I try to say. Attuned to the feelings.

I know. I know that hurts. If your feelings are invoked, then you have a feeling that is the opposite of what the child needs, right? You get that? And so this is what boundaries are about. I'm bad at boundaries. I'm learning.

I'm learning boundaries. And so is our generation of parents generally. Yeah. And that's where the rescuing kicks in. We have to, because our boundaries are shitty and we evoke these things that we should be just being with and just differentiating my feelings from your feelings. We're not. We are evoked and we have to rescue. And that keeps a child ever in need of rescue.

Now, let's say you've been pretty good at those boundaries a lot of the children's life and you've been letting them be challenged and letting them fall down and stuff. There is still, I've noticed something about our parenting style that these kids, even in a young adulthood, remain awfully preoccupied with us. In our day, the parents, we wanted to get the fuck away as fast as possible. We just get the hell out of here. I can't stand to be around these people. I'm on my bike. I'm going to play anything. But then as soon as you're 18, you're like, that's it, man.

I may be around them a little bit, but I'm not going to stay here. The bouncing back stuff is us. That's us. That's why kids are still 20. Well, we can get into how expensive everything is these days too. But I don't even – right. There's a legitimate piece to their bouncing back. Especially in California, it's impossible.

It's insane. It's insane. And so, and humans have lived in multifamily, in households forever. So maybe this is a low-K thing. Maybe this isn't a good thing. And our desire to get out, because, man, at 17, I left for college at 17.

That was it. I couldn't even imagine. I couldn't college at 17. That was it. I couldn't even imagine. I couldn't even imagine going back. My parents left me before 17. There was no going back. There you go. But I was raised in an extended family. My grandmom was like a mom.

And I feel like what that really did. Today, I still have a very – if I see an elderly lady, especially, or someone, I'm right over there to help them out. I try to do things like that where my grandmom would be proud. You know what I mean? But also, I got to learn what... I'm living with this lady who's... It's my father who died, but that's her son. And more and more now, I start to see and feel what she possibly could have felt you know like i'm over there going grandma let dad rest in peace you know what i mean like it's always you're crying about him whatever and now i'm like parent i couldn't even imagine you know and i she would say i'm never gonna see him come up that hill again and I think of those lines have stuck with me and I replay them.

What? 30 years later as a parent now that I didn't even remember. I remembered that damn thing. And I'm like, God, you're, you lost a son. I lost a dad. They're both devastating, but I don't know which one's worse. The one thing, no, it's the parent be in this in these kinds of losing the child because let me just say this yeah is that when your parents have been abusive and never really fully healed that they do you a favor at the end of their life because you're like that's okay i i see people with they were very close say that like the mom thing for you and I very close to their moms who just suffer forever. They lost their mom. And I'm like, I didn't I didn't have one.

Yeah. Thank you, mom. I don't really have any deep feelings about it because there was nothing there. You know, 50 years of destroying a child's bond. Well done. Yeah, you succeeded. Yeah, I succeeded. a child's bond well done yeah you succeeded yeah you succeeded so i'm more attached to my therapist my wife and my daughter yeah that way so i you know i i it's interesting because my daughter

knows my mom as her grandmom to be a good grandma yeah at some point someday she'll listen to these episodes and hear the relationship we had. And I don't know what's going to happen when that happens. And I'll address it honestly because the relationship she has with her grandmother is not the relationship I have with her. That's one of the things I was struggling with when we tried to reconnect. I'm like, things I was struggling with when we tried to reconnect. I'm like, is their relationship my business? So you've mentioned now connection. I said attachment or attach. And I misspoke a little bit when I said, you asked where the trauma understanding came from. It really came out of attachment stuff, attachment theory. And what was noticed, was um some famous theoreticians back

now 40 50 years ago who came up with adult attachment styles there are four different attachment styles let's hear this well there's insecure there's just organized there's avoidant there's secure healthy i was gonna say right yeah but's rare. You don't see it that much anymore. But in therapy, people reestablish secure attachment with people. That's what sort of happens. And each of these has its own sort of style to it. And the original researchers were like, well, how does this happen? What's going on in people's brains?

And that's how they got to all the stuff I've been talking about today. And attachment is another system operating in the brain. It's sort of a way of navigating closeness, let's say that. And, you know, there is, you know, closeness and regulation and attunement. There is attachment and there's love. And each of these are their own little system. And we don't have a lot of understanding on on the two yet we got to the regulation part because that i think we got there

quick because it had therapeutic value but uh and attachment does have there are people trying to categorize what's going over on at the regulation side with the attachment stuff and that's that's and then love is its own kind of bird uh it's over here and then there's spirit too which is another kind of right sort of sort of hard to go onto the microscope stuff uh and i love that stuff it's meaningful it's real but it's it's um it's something that people experience in different ways. And it's all, though, love and attunement and attachment, and it's all about me with you, this thing we call relationship. And that is where I experience the spiritual. And that is where I experience the spiritual.

Yeah. You know, at first when my daughter's mother and I split, I was just so worried about the back and the forth. And we say, you know, kids are resilient and all that. And I don't know. There are times where I wonder if going back and forth isn't actually good for her to see different parenting style, different lifestyle over here. These people in this world, these neighbors, this whatever versus this over here? Is it a little more, do you think that could be a little more helpful in sort of like being well-rounded, so to speak? Yeah. I don't want to use words like more and helpful. Fair enough.

But there might be something to it provided that it may give more breath to her understanding of herself and her experience. Whether it's more, better, helpful, I'm not sure. But it certainly has that potential to give more breath. The problem is there's something called splitting. Do you know what splitting is? Okay. Splitting is a problem in parenting and it's a problem in personality development which is what children naturally do which is mommy i want an ice cream no it's an hour before dinner no daddy mommy

mommy's daddy i want ice cream dad says all right sure get an ice cream mommy dad said i can get this is splitting this and when people when humans children especially and adults too to some extent can pit one person against another they often feel split internally there's no consistent hole in themselves because there's this relationship and there's this relationship over here and i split the two of them so i don't get the hole that i need so that's what you got to watch out for all right yeah the splitting and if she starts splitting's what you got to watch out for all right yeah the splitting and if she starts splitting you guys you know it's on yeah now it's on daddy i have way more fun over here with you mommy's such a bitch and so and and again back to my

i hear that's coming in the teen years oh hell oh yeah oh yeah yeah. We'll have another conversation then. But that's why we started this conversation talking about my team that I built to treat drug addicts and alcoholics. That's another thing the team has to be unsplittable. We have to know each other so well that when they go and said, Dr. Blum said, Dr. Pinsky, Dr. Blum said, I can have that Xanax. I just go, no, he didn't. he didn't i i know i know him i know we just just go back get back to the group just shut up right you know and we are a unified without exception no one ever doubts what the other person is judgment is and we just know each other and how we how we respond yeah that's great now dr drew thank you so much for coming on here

great i hope they people use this as a bit of a it's kind of like a resource like yeah this is a different podcast yeah i know it's in the comedy world but we do really sit down and talk about real things yeah and this what i what i feel like we really um ran the cycle you know we really covered this topic. So if people want to visit this topic, revisit this pod, listen to this thing, because there's a lot of material in here. I was going over very quickly.

I don't expect anyone to kind of get it all at once. But this is sort of the... I'm going to be re-listening. This is sort of the... There are books out there on this. People that try to write books help people understand these things. But this was a pretty good synopsis of the landscape of this topic.

So. Hell yeah. Thank you very much. Plug, promote everything, please. So go to dr.tv, please. My wife does a streaming show Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at three o'clock where we have been interviewing

all the doctors and scientists who have been canceled during COVID. And you will learn a shit ton. All right. I've learned so much. I don't agree with everything they say. Some of the stuff I understand why they were canceled, but they all have stuff in there.

I'm like, well, hell, you were there when this happened? Oh, my God. What were they thinking? Oh, whoa. So the whole pandemic, I was just sitting there going, what is going on? That is what I'm slower answering is what happened? How did this incredibly obvious misadventure happen to us? And what are the consequences going to be? And then also After Dark, which you've been on several times,

over at your mom's house, Dr. Drew After Dark. And I do a podcast with Adam on a regular basis still, Adam Carolla, and the Dr. Drew podcast, all at drdrew.com. Thank you, Dr. Drew. As always, ryansickler.com, Ryan Sickler on all social media. We'll talk to you all next week. I'm out.