We're Out of Time - Why Childhood Trauma Isn't Your Fault | Dr. Alex Howard

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

On this episode of We're Out of Time, host Richard Taite sits down with Dr. Alex Howard, internationally recognized trauma therapist, author, and founder of the Optimum Health Clinic, for a raw, deeply personal conversation about childhood trauma, emotional neglect, and the long road to healing.Dr. Howard opens up about his own teenage years living with a debilitating chronic illness, the conversation with his uncle that changed the trajectory of his life, and how that experience shaped two decades of work helping people heal from trauma and nervous system patterns. Richard and Alex dig into the difference between the trauma that happened to us and the patterns we built to survive it, why "it's not your fault" doesn't mean "it's not your responsibility," and how even loving, well-meaning parents can leave emotional needs unmet.The conversation moves through both men's complicated relationships with their own fathers, what it means to parent differently than you were parented, and how healing as an adult means learning to give yourself what you didn't receive as a child.Dr. Howard is the author of It's Not Your Fault: Why Childhood Trauma Shapes You and How to Break Free, and his work has reached millions through his books, online programs, and his YouTube series In Therapy with Dr. Alex Howard, where he films real therapeutic sessions. Learn more about at alexhoward.com.If someone you know is dealing with life's hardest challenges, share this episode — the right conversation at the right time can change everything.

As a child, we were dependent upon our caregivers to meet our needs for ourselves, and then we developed these strategies to replace that. One of the greatest blessings of being an adult is we can learn to meet those needs for ourselves. If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call one call placement. That's 8888-8-3-1-1581. And if we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, we're out of time.

One Call placement is affiliated with Carreira Treatment, Wellness, and Spa, and One Method Treatment Centers. The best is when I'm talking to a guest and we end up taking the conversation down a path. I didn't realize it could go. That happened today with Dr. Alex Howard. We dig deep into why it's not your fault, also the name of his newest book. And we hit points that almost bring me to tears. Alex is an internationally recognized therapist, author, founder of the Optum Health Clinic,

and someone whose life's work came directly out of his own suffering. After overcoming chronic fatigue syndrome himself as a teenager, he spent the last two decades helping people heal from trauma, nervous system, dysregulation, chronic illness, and emotional struggles. His work has reached millions through his conferences, programs, on the content and his book, It's Not Your Fault, Why Childhood Trauma Shapes You and How to Break Free, which explores how early life experiences continue affecting mental, emotional, and physical health well into adulthood. Let's get right to it.

Alex, your entire journey started with your own health struggle as a teenager. Tell us about that and how that experience shaped the work you do today. Yeah. This wasn't my life plan. I wanted to be a rock star, and I failed. Well, I've had, you know, I think like a lot of people that end up doing this work, life had a different plan. And I suffered for seven years from my mid-teens to my early 20s with M.E, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome. And, you know, the first couple of years was really waiting for someone else to find the answers. and going to see many different medical experts and in time also people who specializing

in sort of mind-body and psychology and so on. I then sort of reached a point. I wasn't as far as practically planning how I was going to end my life. I reached a point that I was so desperate that it didn't feel like life was worth continuing. And I think like... What got so bad? Hold on. Let's back that up.

What got so bad to where you wanted to kill yourself and how old were you at this point? Yeah. So I was 18 and I was two years into this chronic illness that I was suffering from. M.E. or known as chronic fatigue syndrome and primary symptoms of that are totally debilitating fatigue, muscle pains, dizziness and, you know, like a fatigue that is so debilitary. that you can't function, but then often what happens is.

Like a Gillian-Barray type thing? Yeah, some ways. You know, one way I sometimes describe it is that it's how you would feel if you hadn't slept and you hadn't stopped working for days on end, but that's how you feel after a full night's sleep. So like you feel after a crack run. Yeah, I mean, I don't have personal experience, but yes, I imagine that's pretty much how that might feel. Okay. So you and I went through the same thing and I want to kill myself.

But maybe, but maybe you had more fun along the way, Richard. But what I would say is one of the things which is also super challenging with, I think perhaps with many chronic illnesses, but particularly with chronic fatigue, is that you have all of those symptoms, but you don't know why. And it's not like you have done something like you've had some, you know, some like, massive thing that's happened and then you feel like you've climbed a mountain or you've climbed, you know, Everest and you're completely wiped out for a few days after. Like that's how you feel as your baseline, you know, day after day, week after week, month after month.

And the other thing that I think is worth adding is no sense of hope that it's going to be different. That's right. Right. And I think that's the important piece, right? I think if one is going through an extremely difficult situation, but there's a sense of I understand this is going to last for a certain

amount of time or I understand that if I do these things then I can change the outcome How'd you pull yourself out of that? What, what, how'd you, why didn't you go through with killing yourself? But I think that the heart of it was a conversation

and it was a conversation with my uncle who asked me really a series of questions which actually that, they're interesting now in reflection. Because basically the questions he asked me were, how badly do you want to be well? Right? Like, on a scale of naught to 10,

like, how committed are you to the fact that you want this to be different? And, you know, as I was thinking about at the conversation at the time, I was like, well, there are things I wouldn't do.

Like, I wouldn't kill someone and I wouldn't chop off a limb. But that seemed pretty much, apparently everything else was game of what I was willing to do to get well. And then he asked me, well, okay, what are some of the things that you yourself believe could improve your situation? And at this point, I had been to see a number of different naturopaths and nutritionists and, you know, psychologists. And I understood that there were things like meditation and yoga.

I hadn't really done them, but I understood these things existed. So I had this list of things I thought I could do. He then says to me, okay, so you're a nine and a half out of ten. You say you want to get better. You want to change the situation more than anything else in the world. And you've got these things that you say that maybe might make a difference. How many hours a day do you spend doing those things that you say you think might make a difference? And the answer was virtually none.

What happened to get you to start moving forward and doing the things that were going to to support your mental health? Well, there was one more question I've got to come to, which was how many hours a day do you spend watching television? Now, this was 1998, right? This was, in the UK, there were five channels on, there was no, like, cable TV, there were five channels that mostly played rubbish game shows

and, like, Australian and a few American soap operas. I was, you know, the equivalent, I say to people these days, if you're going to have a chronic illness, this is the best time in history. Like, you have the whole of HBO, you have Netflix, you have social media. So I was spending seven hours a day watching pointless, terrible television. The realization was that if I wanted the circumstances of my life to be different, the thing that, to answer your question, like, the thing that happened was, I realized that if I wanted things to be different, I was going to have to be the one to do. do something different. And in a way, it was, it was this, this realization of my narrative is I don't have time and I don't have any energy and this is never going to change. And then it's this

realization that I have time because I'm spending these seven hours watching television. I have these things that might work. And then it was, for me, it was, it was almost like this kind of hero's journey. Was the first thing you did to start moving forward? and change your state? I started meditating for 30 minutes every day. Excellent. Non-negotiable. What was the second thing you did?

I started doing five minutes of extremely gentle yoga Tai Chi Chi Chi-Gong, which sometimes was literally lying on in, lying on my back and raising arms up and down whilst doing a breath practice. Good, good. What was the third thing you did? I started reading books. Good. reading stories of people that had been in worse situations or seemingly impossible situations

and they had found ways to turn them around. So the fourth thing was really was changing my belief that it was possible to turn around the bad situation. That's great. That's beautiful. And that was part of it. The real part of it was is that you replaced doing nothing but being stuck in bullshit and you replaced it with little winds.

Little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins. You filled up your, you had, you had consistency, and it became habitual. And as you did these things, little by little, at the end of a year, your life was completely different. It was beautiful what you did. Is your uncle still alive? He's still alive, but I want to say it was five years. So from that point, but how long it was.

You know, five years going to be here, whether we wanted it to be here or not, where you want to be in five years. Call your uncle, man. Tell your uncle, your uncle saved your life. Your uncle is like my grandfather. I mean, you're just a beautiful man. Your book, it's not your fault, explores how childhood trauma shapes adult behavior and emotional health. What do you think people are finally starting to understand about trauma today? I think one of the things that I think people are starting to realize is trauma's not the thing that happened. Trauma is the things that we learned to do to survive the thing that happened or the things that happened that we still do today.

Right. Like people talk a lot about how trauma lives in the body, lives in the nervous system. That's all true. And that's, that's a big part of my work as well. But the biggest way that trauma from the past impacts us now is the walls of defense that we built to survive become the walls of the prison that trap us in our life now. What I mean by that is, you know, let's take an example. You know, my father left soon after I was born. My mom worked three jobs.

My sister had serious mental health issues. I learned that I got safety and I got love by rescuing and taking care of other people. I like to say that my training as a therapist started at a very young age, right? And I can joke about that, but also that was a major impact in my own life and in my, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. It's soul crushing. Go on.

Right. It's like we do what we have to do to survive, and then it becomes who we think we are. Right. So we become so normalized with the strategies that help to survive that the price we pay is we lose our true self in that process. Right. And how I look at it in a big part of my work with people is the way that we hear. heal trauma is not by treating the symptoms, you know, the anxiety, the addiction, the depression, you know, whatever the symptoms are. And we can't change what happened in the past.

It's already happened. What we have to heal is the strategies and the patterns that we learned to do to survive, where as a child, we were dependent upon our caregivers to meet our needs for ourselves and then we develop these strategies to replace that one of the greatest blessings of being an adult is we can learn to meet those needs for ourselves the little boy the little girl that lives inside of us we can learn how to heal you have children i have three daughters yeah how old are they uh they are nine at 12 and 14 okay that's how you healed yourself yeah well it's also how i learn that family can be a place a place of love and positivity, not a place of suffering.

Right. Right. This is, you know, I always tell people, you don't, you think you know what love is, but you don't know until you have a child. You think you do. You don't know. And really the way that I healed my inner child is, you know, in the beatings that I got at five years old, is I'm looking at my children at five years old and had the realization

there are no bad five-year-olds. I thought I was bad, right? I mean, you always think you're bad. If you're not getting the love that you need, you're not getting your basic needs met, you're getting the shit kicked out of you and all this other stuff, you must be bad because if five years old, it's too scary to say they're bad.

They're the ones who are supposed to take care of you. They're the ones who are supposed to protect you and feed you and shelter you. And, you know, we don't have the frontal cortex to say, my parents are scumbags. Well, I think the other thing that's important here is that when we're young, we're egocentric. And what I mean by that is the world. Healthy, healthy, healthy narcissism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. We just haven't separated fully yet. But what that means is when we're egocentric in that way, the world revolves around us, therefore everything's our fault. So when things go wrong in the environment, like mom and dad separate or we're being beaten or whatever it may be, the only explanation for that is that it's our fault. I'm bad. Right.

I'm bad. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. And then that becomes the core narrative that then we work incredibly hard through our life trying to defend against, hide from that, compensate. And so much of the, again, to go back to my point and really answers your question here. It's like the suffering is not.

not just what happened. The suffering is how we continue all of these cycles in the ways that we learned to navigate what happened. You've got a 45-year-old man being run by a five-year-old, and you don't even know why. You have no idea until someone sits down with you, shows you from a 30,000-foot view of exactly what happened and says, you aren't bad, you are five, there are no bad five-year-olds. There are only five-year-olds with bad haircuts, no bad five-year-olds. Right. And I think just, if I can just, I want to just make a point here that I think is important,

which is that when the trauma is what I would call overt trauma, like, you know, you're describing physical beatings. Like, it's, when as one gets older, it becomes somewhat easier to go, that definitely shouldn't happen. That was definitely abused. was definitely trauma. But it isn't only that kind of trauma that shapes us. It's also what I call covert trauma,

which is the things that hide in plain sight. And another piece of that is... Give me an example of that. That's an example of not getting your basic needs met as a child, right? Right. In fact, let's put it a slightly different way. We could put it that maybe trauma's the things that happen, but childhood emotional neglect is the things that didn't happen

that we needed to happen. No, no, no, no. The childhood neglect did not happen, but we needed to be neglected? No, no, no, no. The childhood emotional neglect is the things that didn't happen that we needed to happen.

Let me give an example. Let me give an example. So we come home from school one day and we put our hand up in class. We tried to answer the question. We got it wrong and everyone laughed. and we were devastated. And then perhaps we started to cry.

And everyone laughed at the fact that we're crying. We come home and we start to tell mom, dad, grandma, whoever the caregivers are around there. And what we needed, like the core emotional need, was a sense of safety, like a well-regulated caregiver

and a sense of love. A sense of, you know, it's okay. I love you as you are. You did your best. You know, they're just idiots. like a sense that we've seen and we're loved.

And maybe what we got was that the caregiver dismissed the feeling and said, well, you just get over it. Or what are you wishing about? Or you think that's a problem? I had to deal with this or, you know, whatever it may be. And here's the real kicker here is that, you know, sometimes it's because we had narcissistic, abusive, you know, horrible parents. But in a lot of cases, people grow up with parents that genuinely loved them.

And we're basically like good people. They just didn't know how to meet these core emotional needs that we all have. Right. One of the examples that I gave in, you know, mentioned my book, it's not your fault. One of the examples I gave there was a guy that came to see me in his late 20s suffering from various chronic illnesses. And he was like, but I had a wonderful childhood.

Like my parents loved me. And I was like, okay, well, let's unpack it. it, what walked me through. He said, yeah, you know, I was, I was sent to one of the best schools in the country. You know, I thrived at sport. I thrived academically. And then we sort of unpack it a bit more. And it turns out that he was sent to boarding school at eight, nine years old. And by the way, boarding school has a place. I know there are people in my profession that say boarding school's always wrong. I think it's often not great at a young age. And this is an example of that. So he goes to boarding school and he's devastated. And the first week, he's crying himself asleep every

night, all he wants is to go home because he has a loving home. He wants to go home and be with mom, be with dad. And he's just hanging in there to the fact that he knows at the end of the first, like, two weeks or whatever, he can write his first letter home. And he's like, once mom knows how unhappy I am, like she's going to be here, she's going to pick me up, she's going to rescue me. So he writes the letter. And the next morning, his housemaster comes in and says, hey, we can't send the letter to your mother because it may be too upsetting for her to read the letter. Right. So in that moment, what do you do? Like he has, the only way he can survive is to split, to shut off the feelings and the emotions. Because it's too devastating to feel the longing, the sadness, the hurt, the rejection and all the feelings that, of course, he's feeling. And so he splits the emotions and he starts to thrive. He starts to perform academically. He's, performs on the sports field. By the time he goes home for holidays at Christmas, like 12 weeks later or

whatever, he's completely forgotten about the little boy that's been split off and shut down. Now he's getting positive reinforcement for the fact that he's doing great, he's doing well. Now, the other thing about this story, which I think is important, his parents were not particularly wealthy. It was a significant financial pressure to pay for the fees to send him to this school. They were suffering because they loved their son and they believed that this was how you make him a man and this is how you give him the best opportunities in life. And then there he is, you know, 20 years later, can't understand why he's disconnected from his body, why he's got chronic illness and various things that are going on. This is a perfect example of, yes, there are instances of

narcissistic, abusive parents and horrendous things that are so obviously trauma. But there are many other examples of basically loving, caring parents, doing the best they can with children not getting what they need. The heartbreaking part about the story for me was the school not letting him send that initial letter. He would have sent the initial letter. There would have been no problem. His parents didn't cause the problem.

The school caused the problem, which is why you never let anybody raise your children but you. But hey, I get that there are certain elite families that send their children to specific schools to meet the next secretary of state and head of the IRS and, you know, ambassadors. to the EU. I get it. I get it. That's, but that's, you know, you, everything has got a give and take to it. You want somebody like that. You're not going to get somebody emotionally adjusted. You're going to get a cyborg. Okay. And I think that helps, that helps run the world. And that's fine. There's a place for that. Okay. But that ain't, that ain't mental health. That's for sure. Those people aren't, running around with a joy of living.

I know these people. Right. And I think that's a really important point, Richard, that it's, I think, life, to me, life is about compromises. And we sort of solved this narrative that you can have everything all the time in all the ways that you want, right?

You can have amazingly happy, adjusted children going to the very best school with all the best opportunities that are top of their class and top of the sport, sports field or whatever. But it's like every choice has a consequence to that choice. Sending children away from a loving home has an impact. By the way, there are also examples of children in abusive homes being sent away to boarding school, and that being the thing that helped them survive.

Of course. It's like, you know, the thing that I always say to people is my work, you know, primarily my work is about healing the impacts of childhood trauma, but it also comes into conversations about how do you prevent childhood trauma? Like parents that have young kids are like saying, well, like, how do I prevent this? I'm like, if you want your child to go to the Olympics and be the greatest on earth at something, if they have the talent, maybe they can have that. You just have to understand the things they're going to have to compromise along the way to do that.

And for some children, that might be the right compromise. But for a lot of children, getting up at, let's say it's swimming, getting up at 4 o'clock every morning and going swimming, going to school, coming home, swimming again, being away from friends, being away from, like, obviously it depends upon the child. But my point is that there are basic, to develop a well emotionally adjusted human, there are basic needs that need to be met consistently through childhood. And if you meet those needs effectively, you will raise a basically well-eastern, you will raise a basically well-eastern, adjusted human. If you don't, you probably won't. Now, you may raise a financially successful human. You may raise a human that can go and do extraordinary things in the world, but you won't necessarily, but the fundamentals are the fundamentals. You know, for my kids, it was very simple. You know, I could have sent them to the finest boarding schools, right? I couldn't do it.

I couldn't do it. Not because I wanted to take their opportunity from them. I put them in a very excellent position to create that opportunity for themselves. But I just couldn't be away from my kids at that point when they were small. I just couldn't do it. And so, yeah, I mean, all I ever wanted was my children to have a joy of living. okay because that's the part that I struggled with the most and we only have one go around here okay we're all on loan so but let me let me ask you a question that's something that I wrestle

with and I'm interested in your thoughts on this sure the things that I value most in my life have typically come from my own struggle from your what from my own struggle okay so I've had to deal with, like it sounds like you have as well. Hard things that have then shaped me and I've grown through those things. My instinct as a father is I want to protect my children from going through hard things. That's right. And then I wrestle with the fact that I don't want to give them unnecessary hard stuff by being a bad father. That's not my point. But it's like kids need to struggle. They need to grow their sense of self. So I talk about they're being. three core emotional needs in our development. And we've touched very lightly on safety and love.

But the third is boundaries. And it's really through pushing against edges that we grow our, we grow our self-esteem, we grow our sense of our personal strength, that like I can meet struggle and I have the will and I have what it takes to push against that struggle and survive that. So one of the challenges that I see is a generation of parents that grew up with boundaries that were too rigid, that were too hard, that then go, I don't want that for my kids. And the danger is there's an overswing. And I'm not saying, it doesn't sound that's what's happened for your kids. But there are situations where there's an overswing.

And then these kids have no edges, no boundaries. And they're totally free. But they're narcissistic. They're self, they're kind of entitled. They're often more neurotic because they haven't had those edges and they haven't grown that sense of personal strength. So I'll tell you how I deal with that. Okay.

I'm very lucky. My kids are not entitled. Okay? My daughter has never asked me for anything, not ever. She asked me to grab her a dress one day because she didn't have time to grab one for a prom that she was invited to. That I did.

Okay. But that's the only thing she's ever asked me for, ever. and she just not motivated by things. That's just not her thing. She's motivated by friendships and family and connection and loyalty. And she's funny and she's smart and she's beautiful, right? And so I'm really lucky. My son is the best kid.

I've never met a kid with more discipline in my life. My son has more discipline than I do. The only other person I know with more discipline than my son, and I don't think he's got more discipline, but he's the guy that I go to for all, for anything that I need. He's my guy, okay, is my buddy Stewart. Okay. So my kid is, my kids, I'm actually in awe of them. They get A's, they speak Spanish, they play piano, they do whatever. They play sports. They do it all. And I'm lucky now. I've never said no to my kids. Never. Sometimes I go, I'm not into that. Just why, right? And we'll go through it.

Okay. But nothing really significant because they're respectful, they're kind, they're good, decent people. Now, if I would have raised them alone, they'd be spoiled, rotten, entitled brats. Okay? Because nobody gets in the way of their children's development

more than I do. But I got lucky because I chose well. Okay? And she hung in with me just long enough to make certain that these kids were perfect. Thank God. She is a saint. Okay. Anyone who spends nine years with me goes straight to heaven.

Okay. So she did really good and she gave me good kids. But I think, I think that because she taught me. how to be a dad. Look, she'd go to talks every, we'd go to talks every, every week when we were pregnant. Early childhood development talks. I mean, one day we, one day I missed it. And she's like, I saw the best guy ever. He was the greatest guy in the world. I go, what was his name? He goes, Daniel Siegel. I go, oh, you got a chance to hear Danny Siegel talk. That's amazing. You know who he is. Oh, honey, our whole treatment center is based on.

on what he's done. Yeah, I know who he is. Okay? It's like she was so mindful. She taught me how to be not just a better man, but a good father who would put his phone down and get down on their level and really connect with them. And then when they were, you know, independent play

over there in the corner, instead of picking up my phone, right? She'd say, don't. Because when this kid turns around, because she gets scared and she wants to know where's my dad she wants to know you're the most important I'm I'm the most important thing in his life not that I'm on a phone she wants to look feel safe know that I'm there and then get back to playing yeah okay now you can't explain that to our parents our parents didn't know this they did the best they could as a general rule

sometimes they were they were monsters sometimes they weren't I don't know what your situation was, mine was different. But as a general rule, you're correct. They did exactly what they thought was best at the time. But with my children, man, you know, I was told no to everything. I don't tell my children no. Okay. My kid and I, I insist we play ball in the house. I was not allowed to play ball in the house. If I broke something that was held to pay, it was all, I mean, there are things, man. Who gives a shit if you broke the lamp? It's a lamp. Don't get crazy. Okay.

My son and I are playing ball in the house. He breaks a lamp. He goes, I'm so sorry, Daddy. I go, what are you sorry for? I said, it ain't even fun until you start breaking. Let's go. Right?

We're having dessert. Right? We go to a restaurant. I go, let's have dessert first. I always wanted dessert first. Who doesn't want dessert first? What do you want to fill up on your meal so you can't enjoy dessert? that makes no sense to me at all.

Okay? My kids won't play that game. My kids are looking at me. My children parent me. They're like, Daddy, no dessert first. That's crazy. You know, it's interesting. One of the points that you're making here that I think is also super, super important.

And I'm going to make a bridge here to how it helps on the healing path as well is it's the quality of the contact. Right. So, you know, what their mother did was really important. and my wife does the same. She confiscates my phone if it's being used at times that are not. She takes it and I'm like, I get it. One of the biggest sources of trauma is not the things that happen. Going back to this point,

it's the things that didn't happen that we needed to happen. That's right. It's that quality of contact. It's that sense that to this person right now, I am the most important thing in the world. Like that sense of deeply feeling seen and being loved. Now, where this is also important is trauma comes from not getting what we needed in childhood. Healing comes from learning to give ourselves what we need in adulthood.

And that's why I said, I learned to do that with my son. And then once I was treating my son the way I wish I would have been treated, I simply did this mental shift where I superimposed me onto my son. And now I was parenting myself. I was healing myself. I mean, isn't it that simple? It's that simple in theory and it can be challenging in practice, right? Because part of this as well.

It was challenging in practice. I didn't get it until I was 45 and I'm 59. Right. And a big part of this is how are we in relationship with our own feelings and our own emotions? What I mean by that is when we feel something, like we feel anger, we feel sad, we feel pissed off, we feel frustrated. Can I tell you, can I interrupt you for a second? Can I tell you where the real damage is for somebody who does this? The real damage is when you're stuck in your child and you bring it to a relationship,

instead of being able to give and be there for somebody and complete somebody's life, okay, she's your mother because you're a little. That's that, that, no, no, that's the damage because you don't realize it. What ends up happening is, yeah, you're stuck in your child and then everything becomes, if it's hysterical, because everything's hysterical, because it's all historical, right? So we've gone ahead and I can't show up for a relationship the right way. I can't because I didn't get to heal myself until it was too late. So you lose your family.

Right. And then you're like, oh, I get it. If this is the way it's got to be, if you're always going to be, you're never going to have a successful love relationship if you're stuck in your child. That is not possible because these women want a man and not another child. That's true. And I think there's another piece here as well, which is that this often gets worse, not better at the beginning of people's inner work. Right.

So what happens is we go just to get people's obviously to look forward to. So, you know, this goes from like unconsciously expecting, you know, someone else to take. care of us to realizing, holy shit, like, I didn't get what I needed in childhood. No, that's not your first thought. Your first thought is, this doesn't love me just like my parents didn't love me. That's true. And then it's, hopefully, it then evolves to the fact of going, oh, I didn't get what I needed. And then we become hyper attuned to those places inside of us that didn't get what we needed.

And if we're in the wrong kind of therapeutic work, we're basically then told, oh, well, it's, or it's your parents' fault and you know, you need to make sure you really advocate for your needs and make sure. And I think one of the pieces that is really important to understand here is it's not your fault, but it is our responsibility to do our healing work. Thank you. Thank you. Say it again, please. I didn't mean to talk over you. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I want to put it aside differently to hopefully land the point a bit more. as humans we're looking for simplistic explanations for enormously complex things. So we hear, oh my God, it's not my fault.

Oh my God, well, I'm vindicated. Then it's everyone else's fault. It's the government's fault. It's my ex-wife's fault. It's my mother's fault. But two things are simultaneously true. One, it's not your fault because you're a child and therefore you were a victim of the circumstance. But what's also true is you're now an adult and your responsibility is

adult is whatever hands you got dealt, it is now ultimately your responsibility to do that healing work. That's so hard. That's so hard to hear at the beginning. I mean, remember when that, remember where we were at that point in our lives? Do you remember how hard that was to hear? It was like being punched in the stomach. You're stuck. You can't move. And now you're being told essentially, it's your response. I'm sorry what happened for you. It sucks. But now you're responsible for getting this right.

I mean, and you don't know how to do it. It's like just hearing that put me back right in that moment. And I want to add something else there, which is that it's also a message of enormous hope. Because there is one person that we can learn to rely on because it's the one person. and that's most invested in our suffering, becoming less, and that's us. Right? So you're right. I was going to say, that's your mother.

I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Well, we have a joke in psychology. If it's not one thing, it's your mother. That's so good. Where the hell? Babe, I've been here for 59 years on this earth. I've got the most successful treatment facility in the world now two times over, right?

And I've never heard that. How the hell did that get past me? If it's not one thing, do it again? If it's not one thing, it's your mother. Right? Let me put that down. If it's not one thing,

it's your mother, I want to use that today in our clinical meeting and sound all smart. Go on. I'm glad that landed. But, you know, it's like, the thing is that,

the pathway of I'm a victim because it's someone else's fault. Yeah, it feels like, you know, I don't have to take responsibility. But there is something that often happens. And it's, it's often a few more steps down the path. But there's something that happens where people start to, we start to realize that actually we can change. And often it's small things initially, right? But when we start to get the realization, that holy shit, like, I can rely on myself.

to make better choices. I can rely on myself to start to take care of my needs. But this place inside of me where I feel so deeply unloved and I feel so deeply wounded in her and angry and all of those things, what that place needs is what you beautifully described of being with your children to be seen, to be validated, to be allowed to be where we are. so often we're so quick to try to change how we feel to fix it to mask it to hide from it to state change that to me a lot of the work that we need in our healing journey is simple but not easy but the simplicity is we need that same loving attention from ourselves that we craved and didn't get from our caregivers and the only way and let me just put put the little something on that

because we're never ever going to be able we can heal ourselves we come to that realization but the way i came to that realization was with time management okay and but and you did the same thing right you did the first thing you did the meditation and then you did uh i forgot the second thing and then you did the third thing yeah yeah right and for me it was a morning routine okay and i wrote like eight or so things that I wanted to do, move your body, eat better, better sleep hygiene, drink more water, wake up in the morning and take a shower and then have, do the stretching in the shower and then get the cold water for a couple of minutes afterwards to wake up and then go work out. And then, you know, I like being gentle with myself in the morning. So I'd have

coffee and a cigar and relax because I think that's that's I mean that's why I've done what I've done right in my life even up to that point right to really enjoy and be gentle with yourself in the morning in a certain part of the morning I mean I knew what I was supposed to do at all times and each thing was about self-care and and and and growth so I knew that it was until that started becoming habitual. And it wouldn't be habitual if I didn't have a contract with myself, right? Which you don't break contracts with yourself ever because then you don't trust yourself. Then at that point, okay, you start to heal.

And the reason I brought it up is because, you know, we can skip steps, right? Because we get it. But for the viewer, I wanted them to know, yeah, you can heal yourself, but you got to do the work. It's one right action after the next right action after the next right action until the neuroplicity is just, it's habitual. And that's... But I think there's just a jigsaw piece here as well that I think we should touch on, which is that to make that contract, to make that commitment with yourself, there also has to be movement in the sense of realizing that you deserve that, right? That's self-love, like that recognition.

Oh, for sure. For sure. You know, often part of it is we treat ourselves the way that we were treated. No, if you think you're a piece of, then you're not going to go the self-love route. Right. Right. So that's often part of the healing that has to happen, right? And that's where this point of it's not your fault is important, right?

you can't skip skip the step like the recognition of like this happened and it shouldn't have happened right and then this understanding that your parents can love you and they can hurt you right and the fact that they hurt you doesn't necessarily mean they didn't love you and the fact they loved you didn't mean that they didn't hurt you and and then I think another piece again I just I'm jumping around a bit here but I also just want to bring in which is that part of the healing work here as well is we have to be able to hold to seemingly contradictory truths, which is that our adult self can rationalize and it can understand that it can make sense of our parents' circumstance and their struggles and their difficulties

and so on. But we have to be super careful to not gaslight the younger part of us that still has all of the feelings that we have. Right. So one of the things that I see people do is a lot of cognitive work and rationalization to make sense of, but actually what they're doing is they're still avoiding the feelings that they have, which may not be rational and logical, but the feelings of I'm rageful, I'm angry, I didn't get what I needed, it hurt, it's painful. And then what often happens is, why not, let's stop. Let's stop there. Let's unpack that part. Why not just hold your child, right? Your inner child, just like you would hold your child at that age because when you're holding your child, you're in it. You're not thinking about anything

else. Your only thing is, I want you to be okay and I'll just sit here and hold you until you are so that you know you're cared for. I just do that with myself, okay? And I literally have a face of my son. He looks half my son and half me. And I, and then I'm all better. Yeah. Well, that's really what I'm speaking to you, right, is how do we get to that place? But I think the point I'm wanting to make is that often what gets in the way of getting to that place is the narrative that, well, my parents are good people. They did the best they can. I had a better childhood than so and so. And so we need to hold the space for the feelings of that child and to recognize that one of the ways I put it is the feelings are always valid, even if the story we tell ourselves about the feelings is not true.

True. Right. Can I tell you, you want to hear a great story? So I started going to my therapist years ago, 18 years ago now. And one of the first sessions we had was with my mother. I just brought my mom in. I don't remember why. After, and it was a three-hour session. I said, dude, we need three hours. My mom, you don't know, understand my mother. Right. He has no problem. And I was in the camp of I love my mother. She did the best she could. She's and you don't realize what these women are, what these mothers are doing to you. Right. So I'm sitting there and I'm and I'm my mother's defense attorney in in the in the session. And John stops after a couple hours and he looks at my mother and he says, you know, the only I said, he said, I've heard mothers sit here for hours and beat the shit out of their kids

the way you just have and boo him. He called it booing and booing their child the way you did. Only they were in treatment centers at the time and they were drug addicts. They didn't own the finest drug and alcohol treatment facility in the world. So, right? And so, right? And so, So it shifted. He goes, he looks at me and he goes, you understand this isn't normal, right? Like, would you treat your kids like this? Like, it wasn't, it was more than just the times, Rich, right? And he got me to see, right, the heartbreaking nature of how I grew up.

Right. And that makes all the difference. Right. Your turn. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you're right. It's like the younger place in us, there's something very.

very important that happens when it feels truly seen. And sometimes that being seen is just for a moment, right? Like I said, just to give a bit of a story on this side. So I mentioned my father left soon after I was born. And then I got to my early 30s and my wife was pregnant with our second daughter. And I was like, I'm a father, but I've never met my own father. I was like, I just want to sit in the presence of my father. Like, I have no expectation beyond that.

I just want to have that experience. And I tried to find him like a decade before and had got nowhere. In fact, it looked like he might have been dead. Anyway, I started again. And through a sort of strange set of circumstances, within a relatively short period of time, I tracked him down. And I had an address, which was about two hours away from where we lived in, London at the time. And initially I was, me being quite an impulsive, but I was just going to get in

the car and drive there now. And then I was, how old were you at this point? I was like 33, I think, at the time. And, you know, part of my thing as well have been, I realized this could be a big thing in my life. And I wanted to have enough of my own stability and my own support. And, you know, at this point, I'm in a loving marriage. And I got, you know, second kid on the way. I got a lot of good close friends and done a lot of therapy and a lot of my own work. And so in the end, I decided to contact some of their old friends that went down and initially, because he'd cut everyone off. He'd cut his own family of origin off. He cut my mom off. He'd cut obviously us off. Anyway, they go down. When did he leave, just real quick, when did he leave the family?

When I was like three, four, five months old, I was, I was an attempt to save the marriage that didn't work. Right. Well, that always, that always works. Sorry, go on. Yeah, let's have another kid because that'll fix the problems, right? And so, some, you know, that they go down, they meet him. I then go down three, four, five days, four, four, five days later. And my wife at this point is heavily pregnant. And like, this is not a journey you normally make on your own. The problem is she's so heavily pregnant at this point. It's like, we don't want her to be a from the hospital and the consultant in case suddenly that. So at the same time, I'm like, I need to do this now.

Like I can't wait for, you know, so I go down and I sit with him. And how did he greet you when he opened the door? It was, he hugged me awkwardly. You know, it was, there was definitely a sort of standoffish, but like, we were both, like, fully in this, like, what, like, we want to know what this is going to be. And as we were talking and, you know, and the point I wanted to make, and the reason why I'm sort of sharing the story was that initially there was a fair bit of defensiveness on his side, right?

He's like, he's got his story. He's got his reasons. He's got, you know, what he's been telling himself for the last. He's got shame. He's got shame. Yeah, and he's also got shame because he's never paid a penny towards the family. So my mom had to work three jobs and had enormous financial. stress and pressure and so on. He'd also married and had two more kids and then he'd

broken that marriage and so he had had another two kids. And anyway, here's the point I wanted to make. He's giving his bullshit, giving his sort of narrative. And then there's this point where he realizes that it's bullshit. And he looks at me and incredibly sincerely, he looks me in the eye and he says, son, I'm sorry. And like, I was in that moment, I was like, that was all I needed. That's right. All I needed was to have the sincerity of father to son, I f*** this up. Now, just to complete on the story, we were very close for a while and then it got a bit bit more real and I realized that, you know, this is

a kind of fantasy narrative, we're not actually being in truth and I started to be a bit more direct. And he then basically off again. And you know, and then, you know, he, you know, it was, it was tricky. But I

realized that I got what I wanted in that 10 seconds. That's right. Right. Like, father to son, in that moment, the acknowledgement, I see you son, I f*** this up and I regret it. And the fact that he couldn't hold his shit together just showed you that you surpassed your old man, that you had the resiliency to stick in and he didn't. And that's okay because he gave

your child what he needed and that's all you needed from him. And he gave it to you and for that you're grateful, but he just couldn't, he couldn't keep it up because that's not who he is. But that's who you are because you showed up for your family. And that's who I am. I showed up for my family. Right. We did good. You know, I, did you hear what I said?

We did good. Yeah. Yeah. But then there's another piece I want to add here actually as well, just as I'm just thinking about it as we're talking about it, which is that goes about something we touched on a bit earlier, which is if my father hadn't left when I was a child, I wouldn't have had to become the man of the house from a young age. Oh, we're getting back to how I'm destroying my kids, right? Go on. Go on. Well, we're going, we're getting, we're getting. No, no, no, I just like,

you're like a Jedi mind trick guy. You just went ahead, you got, you just turned me all around, and you're bringing me right back. Go on. Yeah, there we go. The, do I do I regret the life circumstances of my life? And actually the better way of answering that is my about nearly six years ago my father died. And one of the blessings that came was I mentioned he had two other children.

And one of those half-brothers has become one of my, has become the closest relative, I have from my family of origin. Wow. Right. He was, he is 15 years younger. He was struggling in ways. I've been able to support him.

Yeah, he's been a friend to me. I'm not, I'm not trying to paint it like I'm some perfect, you know, kind of God sent thing. But that blessing that my uncle gave me, I have definitely been for him in his life in, in some different ways. Right.

But as, but as I was sat there in my father's funeral, it was like, it was very, like if this was a movie, like, it was perfect in the sense that it was a COVID funeral. So everyone's in masks.

Everyone's like social distancing. There's like almost no one there in this funeral because we're only allowed to have 30 people in that like it was, you know, it was like a movie script and sort of strange way. But like I'm sat there. And, you know, and it's worth saying I had done years of work in therapy on my hurt and my rage and the impacts of my father leaving. So this was not an easy place to get to. This was the fruit of many, many, many years of personal therapy and work with that. But, you know, when I sat there in his funeral, I was able to feel the little boy in me that was, you know, no longer raging and wounded, but was like disappointed. Like this was a painful experience.

But also to see the struggle of his own life. Like he had not had an easy life in a number of different ones. ways, but also the blessing of the sense of I get to choose what this means. I get to decide, is this narrative of I'm the victim that all the things that shouldn't have happened that happened? Or do I get to choose and say, I became a loving, attentive father because I didn't have one? I became a empathetic, passionate therapist because that's what I needed when I went through the tough times I went through.

I became someone that was not going to live life on someone else's terms because I'd realized that I'd been through an enormous amount of suffering I'd recovered and I was going to live the life that I wanted because I knew what it meant to not be able to live the life that I wanted. And so, you know, when I think about pain, suffering trauma, one of the ways I think about it is maybe it doesn't have any meaning apart from the meaning that we give to it. And often the problem is the meaning we give to it is that we're the victim in our story. And certainly for me, I think I have enormous blessings, but those blessings are the result of making the choices that are often the hard choices in the short term, but they're the ones that then mean that we get to decide what it means. You know, did you cry at the funeral? I was emotional.

I don't know if I had tears down my face. Why do you know why you were upset? First of all, how old were you with during the funeral? Like 39. Okay, good. So you were like 10 or 11 years younger than me at the time. Yeah. Okay.

So when my dad died, so do you know why you cried for why you were so upset? I mean, I wouldn't say I was so upset. I would say that I felt tender. You know, actually, funny enough, one of the things that impacted me the most was my wife sitting next to me, squeezing my hand, feeling the love and the presence of her in this tender moment. Yeah, that's. beautiful that's beautiful that's what it was I didn't cry either I didn't cry either um do you know why um why I didn't cry um I never thought about it but I'll tell you my experience was different than yours in that my my father also left our home left us with

nothing um we lost the home the sheriffs came and you know threw me out to give me a few minutes to leave or they're going to take me away i'm 17 at the time he finds a new family i find out he dies i'm not even alerted by the family but it's l.a and i've lived there for my entire life and the chances of that guy dying in my town are like and me not finding out about it are slim and none so i find out about it immediately and I show up to the funeral. Now, my best friend at the time wants to go with me. He's also my lawyer and he don't want me to go alone. I told him I was fine, but he wanted to come support me. My father and I look exactly alike. His children look nothing like him.

So when I walked into this funeral thing, it was like an E.F. Hutton commercial. Okay? Everything went silent, you could hear a pin drop. They thought he walked through the room, right? And he asked me if I was okay as if, you know, it's so funny, you know, he felt like if I walked in there, I would feel like uncomfortable. And the reason I went is because I wanted to see what he did with the second half of his life. See, I love my dad very much. He was my best friend, but he treated my brother's life. And he gave me the beatings and that's okay. Okay.

I both deserved him and didn't deserve him. Okay? So I'm cool with it. Those were different times. But he treated my brothers like, and I wanted to see what the hell happened to him. And naturally, no one spoke for him because he had no friends. Other than his daughter, his son. and his brother-in-law, but the children were destroyed.

Destroyed. When it was over, his daughter was sitting in a limousine. I put my head in there and I said, sweetheart, I am so sorry for your loss. Your father would have been so proud of the way you delivered that today. And she looked at me and I was really, reading her mind. And this is what she was saying, but she didn't say it.

You don't know anything. That was my daddy. That's all I needed. He did it right. He did it perfect. That's what my daughter would have done. He did perfect. And so I was happy for that man.

And I was thrilled that he didn't hurt two more children. Like your father hurt his two new children. Wow, I didn't see that coming. It's powerful. Right? Well, I want to say one thing in response to that. You know, it's interesting. I've had many conversations with my half-brother that I mentioned

that I've become very close with over the years. And one of the conversations we've had a few times is who got messed up the most? you play the game who got who got messed up the most he got screwed up in the car wait wait wait wait wait wait wait do that on the car on the road trips well we we're both actually funny enough we're both really big boxing fans and it turns out that my father loved boxing

and so I sometimes learn things about my father because we're watching fights together you know this is dad's favorite boxer and I'm like I didn't know that but so the way the conversation goes which is really interesting is it's like I got wounded by my father leaving but he got wounded by our father staying because he had to stay he grew up in the presence of this complex man that embedded these destructive narratives that he's had then to work to get free from I had the pain of the absence but in a way that was a cleaner pain it's like it's the pain that I've been abandoned

but it's a void, right? And that's painful and it has all kinds of things that go with it. And so it's just an interesting reflection. It's like, you know, and I think, you know, we have to be careful not to get into a whose trauma's worst dialogue. Like that's not a very fruitful path to go down. But it's just, you know, it's a kind of recognition sometimes that it's like maybe it was grace that my father left, you know?

And it's like there are qualities in myself that I realize. that have been very important to my, like, one of the things that was also fascinating meeting my father was, I understood myself in a way that I hadn't done before. Because I'd look at my mother and go, I can see I get my empathy and I get my kindness from my mother, right? I can see that I get my care for other people. But like, where did all this other come from?

Right. And it's like, wow, like, I see me in you, but it's less crazy in me. It's because it's got the stability of elements of my. mother right and so anyway yeah i just was an interesting no you got you were definitely you were definitely it was definitely grace that you didn't have that modeling okay because then i haven't had to work so hard to get free from that that influence yeah that's right because for me i was like you know i would have my kids if i didn't know if i didn't have a woman to teach me that you don't even raise your

voice to your are you insane right and And if I wouldn't have had that hard no, this is, no, no, babe, that's a hard no. Okay. If I wouldn't have had that because of the modeling I had, I would have hit my kids. We, we, you skated. Do you know how hard it was to unpack, to unlearn all the bullshit I saw? Right. You got, you got lucky.

for someone listening right now who feels emotionally exhausted disconnected anxious or stuck what's the first step toward beginning to heal that's it's a good question let me i want to be thoughtful of the answer i think let's let's let's frame it back to some of the places we've gone in in in the conversation right i think the play starts with the realization that it's not our what happened, but going back to where we were earlier, it is our responsibility to do the healing, right? And going back to right where this conversation started. In my journey, it's like I've been ill for two years.

Like, I'm waiting for someone else to find the answers, and then it's like, you've got to do the work. Right. And I look, in all the work, you've probably seen this more than almost anyone else on earth in what you're doing with addiction and so on. if someone's reason to change is that they're doing it for anyone other than themselves ultimately it is hard for that commitment to sustain right if someone's there because difficult wait wait wait because this is my lane difficult but not impossible go on

fair fair because we have to be showing up to ourselves right like we have to have that commitment to I am here for me and I am going to learn to regulate, to give myself the safety, I'm going to learn to care, I'm going to give myself the love, I'm going to learn to give myself the boundaries where I say, that ain't going to fly anymore, I'm stopping that, I'm committing to this, and I start right now. And you're right, actually, you're right to interject because, yes, maybe the healing work has been done because we have a loving partner

that's had to put up with too much for too long, or we have kids that we realize we have. to change them. I think maybe to clarify the point I was meaning to make is that we have to do the work. That's right. Right. And as you know, as you pointed to earlier and I think it's an important moment, it's that yeah, that's terrifying initially. And it is the path to liberation. Because we can like if you're waiting for someone else to do it, you are always dependent upon someone else. If you realize that you can commit to doing it, that is someone you can learn to rely on. That is beautiful. We are going to leave it there unless there is anything we have left unsaid

that you want to talk about or you've got a book to promote or anything, whatever you want. Well, yeah, the thing I like to mention, if people can find me in the usual places, my website's Alexhauer.com. It's not hard to find. But there's something that I do like to mention. I have a series on YouTube where we film people's therapeutic journeys. So you can just go to YouTube and search in therapy with Dr. Alex Howard and it will come up. We've got over 100 hours of film sessions of me working with people. And, you know, one of the stories that I'm particularly proud of was a guy in a 60s called Paul.

And his daughter had taken her own life about four months before we started filming. And a lot of the themes we talked about in today's interview are beautifully illustrated by him in the work that he does in that process. But I like to mention it because for a lot of people, either the idea of doing therapy is terrifying and they never make that commitment. And I think it bridges that place of like, well, what actually happens in therapeutic work. But also a lot of people don't have the financial resources to really commit to quality therapy over a period of time.

So it's just a beautiful way of showing it. And often people say they feel like they're doing the work, watching other people doing the work. Well, of course they are because it's like they're like in a process group. When somebody's in a process group, you know, nine-tenths of the group is talking and they're listening. I really like people that just get in there and have a real conversation. So I appreciate the fact you threw the questions out and we just went for it, man. That was much more satisfying. Me too, man. Me too. See you next Tuesday. We're out of time. Please subscribe on YouTube, click the thumbs up, and leave a comment.

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