Hacking PTSD With Gratitude – Dr James Gordon – #644

So that in fact, our health as a population is getting worse. And I'm sure, as you know, the next generation is likely to live less long unless they pay attention perhaps to some of the things that you're saying and that I'm saying. But in general, the next generation prospects don't look so good. We're spending more and more on health care and healthcare professionals are burning out earlier and earlier. They're more and more dissatisfied, both in the field of health and in mental health.

Bulletproof radio a state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that lab grown organoids are actually more stressed out than your actual brain cells. And brain cells that grow into clumps in labs have ambiguous identities and make more stress molecules than cells taken directly from a human brain, according to new research. And they make these little clumps of brain cells using stem cells from skin or blood, which under the right conditions, form three dimensional clusters of brain cells which are called organoids. And they're useful because they recreate some aspects of very early human and other mammal brain development in a period that you would never be able to study in the womb. And the new results are teaching us things about unappreciated differences between those organoids and our human brains. And this comes from the field called developmental neurobiology, which in my mind is one of the most cutting edge fields of study about what makes us who we are, maybe before we even noticed. And some of the things that have come out in that field are in alignment with my very, very first book called the Better Baby Book, which is all about fertility and what you do even before getting pregnant in order to set your children up for success. In this case, this new science about organoids shows more active genes in stress response and that these are not actually normal brain cells. They're stressed out cells that are neurological. And, and the good news, when they implanted and grew those cells for several weeks in a more normal environment with a blood supply in a mouse brain, the cells were less stressed and not as confused about their identities. So isn't it kind of creepy? Maybe all the cells in your body each have their own little identity and you're just a collection of all those cells and there's a whole bunch of these alien mitochondrial cells that are actually your puppet masters. Well, that's the world I think we live in. Time will tell. In the meantime, now you know what an organoid is, so everybody wins. Today's guest is A guy I'm really excited to interview. He's Dr. James Gordon. He's a Harvard educated psychiatrist and a world renowned expert in using mind body medicine. This emerging thing that, oh wait, what happens in your mind is affected by what happens in your body. But he's healing depression, anxiety and even psychological trauma which is behind a lot of the things you do that you don't like is unacknowledged trauma. And he's the founder of and now executive director of the center for Mind Body Medicine, which is a group that focuses on life changing therapeutic work for individuals, families and groups. For more than 25 years he's led teams in relieving population wide psychological trauma. We're talking during and after wars in the Balkans, the Middle east and Africa, climate related disasters in Louisiana, Texas, California, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and even after school shootings and with active duty US military and veterans. And he's got a new book that I really like. If any of this resonates with you, you really want to read his new book. It's called the Discovering Wholeness and Healing after Trauma that explains trauma is just a human experience. Nothing wrong with you. Having dealt with my own set of traumas throughout my life and just understanding how they've affected who I am, how I developed and what you can do about them, I, I think this is a core part of being bulletproof is just understanding. I got some programming we all did if we're alive. And Dr. Gordon is one of the guys who's put decades into figuring this out with the hardest groups out there. So Dr. James or Jim Gordon, welcome to the show.

Thank you Dave. It's good to be here.

Now I could have gone through a longer list of all the cool things you've done like Harvard Medical School, Maryland in psychiatry and Georgetown Clinical professor. Just like you're a very accomplished guy. And what I'd like to understand first before we get into the details of what is trauma, why is it happening and what is our response to it. It's not that common for a well credentialed Harvard trained doctor to go into mind body medicine. At what point in your career did you decide that you were going to basically flip the bird to your white lab coat colleagues and talk about mind body medic medicine?

Well, you know, it actually I don't know that I flipped on the bird, but I felt a little bit different right from the first days of medical school. And that was because I'd had an education, went to Harvard College and then Harvard Medical School. In college there was Such a range of thought that was possible and use of the imagination. And students in general were treated pretty well, pretty respectfully. I went to medical school and it felt like an extremely, extremely high class vocational high school. Everything was very cut and dry. My classmates were brilliant, funny, interesting people, but the way we were taught felt rather narrow and there wasn't much room to question. And then especially I was troubled by the way patients were treated on the hospital wards. There seemed to be a kind of objectification, condescension and other, you know, kind of, kind of very cool treatment to people instead of warmth and connection that I look for. It wasn't universal, but it felt to me from the beginning like there was something wrong with the system as a whole, something a bit wrong with the way we were being taught, and definitely something wrong with the way patients were being treated. So I felt really, for the first time in my life, I felt kind of alienated. And I identified and some of my professors didn't hesitate to tell me this, that I identified too much with the patients, but I could see that they were feeling. And not always there were some beautiful doctors, but too often they were feeling neglected, misunderstood, that nobody was there really listening to them when they were going through hard times. So it wasn't that I came at a change specifically through mind body medicine, but I came at it from looking at the world, from the point of view of my patients and seeing that how they experience things was different for me. So that opened me in a way to understanding and looking at other perspectives, not just my patients way of looking at the world. But within a couple of years I became interested in how other healing systems understood us.

I've often thought from having studied with or just spent time with and benefited from transpersonal psychology, shamanic things, Chinese traditional medicine, acupuncture, even Tibetan medicine in the middle of nowhere in Tibet. It seems like the variables we're dealing with are what is the patient and the condition, what is the technique for healing and who is the healer? And that if you try to remove the healer from the equation, that you introduce this sort of robotic mindset to medicine that alienates people. And it seems like it was taught in the 60s. I mean, I was born in the early 70s and it's percolated throughout. Are we fixing it? Have we fixed it? Is it better today than it was 30 years ago?

I think it may be. In some ways it's better and in some ways it's worse.

How's it different?

Well, back then I think there was certainly in psychiatry There was much more emphasis on talking with patients. There was the biopsychosocial model which George Engel put forward. That was really very fundamental to my training in psychiatry. You spend a lot of time listening to people. You did psychotherapy. Over time it was important to understand the way patients looked at the world. Now psychiatry has become much more narrow in general and much more focused simply on prescribing drugs to treat diagnosed conditions. And the sense of the richness of the individual and the understanding of the individual in his or her social world is just kind of dropped by the side of the road in medicine. Yes. Now, because a number of us have sort of advanced the cause of mind, body medicine and nutrition and use of movement and exercise and meditation and bringing that into medicine. There are those openings in medicine and in health care. But at the same time, we really haven't made the major shift that we need to make, which is in the direction of focusing on self care as central to all health care, self awareness, self care and group support. So that in fact, our health as a population is getting worse. And I'm sure, as you know, the next generation is likely to live less long unless they pay attention perhaps to some of the things that you're saying and that I'm saying. But in general, the next generation prospects don't look so good. We're spending more and more on health care and healthcare professionals are burning out earlier and earlier. They're more and more dissatisfied both in the field of health and in mental health. So I think there are kind of contradictory forces are at work. There is this progressive emphasis on a wider, more holistic or integrated perspective. There is the interest in functional medicine looking at basic biological processes rather than diagnostic categories. But so far this has not changed the main the sort of mainstream of medical care in this country, which is still very, very much a kind of narrow biomedical view. We're going to find the diagnosis and we're going to focus on that. We're going to treat the symptoms. We're primarily going to use drugs and surgery. And that's still. Although drugs and surgery clearly can be brilliant and life saving in certain instances, they are not the primary way that we're going to deal with most of the problems that most of us have most of the time.

Should we really be going to the doctor for trauma in the first place?

Well, that's a very good question. The premise of the transformation of my book and the premise of the work we do at the center for Mind Body Medicine, we've now trained close to 7,000 people, who in turn have worked with many hundreds of thousands here in the US and around the world. The premise is that what we're teaching about self awareness and self care and also encouraging people to get support from other humans, is fundamental to the understanding and treatment of all trauma. And that other therapeutic approaches, whether provided by physicians or mental health professionals who are necessary for therapeutic approaches, those are often important, but they're secondary, that we're missing the boat. And the boat is that trauma is going to come to all of us. It's not such an exceptional thing. You were saying that in your introduction. You've been through a number of traumatic episodes in your life. I've been through them in mine. All of us humans will go through traumatic events. The problem with focusing on sending people to the doctor is the trauma then becomes a medical condition and it becomes something exceptional that just to begin with, as opposed to being understood as something that is a part of human life. That if it doesn't come early because of poverty or discrimination or because we have an abusive or neglectful home, it's going to come as we become young adults and in midlife as we deal with the real crises of loss of relationships and disappointments and perhaps in our job or our career and loss of parents. And if not, then, as all the wisdom traditions tell us, it will come as we grow older. We have to deal with physical frailty and the loss of loved ones and our impending death. This is a much bigger way of understanding trauma than the medical way of understanding it. So I think in answer to your question, there are times for medical interventions, but we really have to take a step back. And all of us need the basic skills, need to learn the basic skills for understanding where our trauma comes from, for being able to balance ourselves out physically, physiologically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. And then understanding that the trauma comes to us, that comes inevitably to all of us can open the door to greater wisdom and compassion and a clearer sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. That's not a medical, conventional medical way of looking at human beings. And I believe it should be informing. And this larger perspective, that the medical way should be just one piece of this larger perspective.

If there's a trauma vaccine out there, would you recommend it?

I have questions about what would I do. I'd vaccinate myself against life.

Exactly.

Pretty dangerous vaccine to take. I think people do that. They call it addiction.

Oh, wow. That's a strong statement right there.

But that's what it is. I mean, if you talk with people who are addicts. That's what they'll tell you. It's too much for me. I can't take it. I have to, you know, this is the way. I'm self medicating. I don't want to feel. We sacrifice so much of life if we do that.

Wow. So after 40 years of working with patients and you've seen your fair share of addicts among them, I imagine.

Those.

Are very strong words. But it reminds me, there's an episode of Black Mirror which is kind of like the modern day Twilight Zone, where there's a parent who puts little virtual reality contact lenses in her daughter so her daughter never sees anything scary. And it completely, of course, wrecks the daughter's life, as you would expect. But it was, of course done out of love. But it was one of those things going, well, the kid can't see scary barking dogs and like, nothing but Dave.

But that's exactly the story of the Buddha. That's exactly what his parents tried to do.

Yes.

They eliminated any plants that were dying. They made sure he didn't see any sick people or old people and never saw corpses. And, you know, that wasn't the way. That's not the way. And so he went out.

It worked out all right for him. He didn't send you that. And he said, well, this is really a problem. I got to do something about it. I guess I'll just get enlightened. By the way, I just pissed off all of my Buddhist friends. But I'm summarizing his path.

He said, suffering is a part of life.

There you go.

And I need to know what to do about it. I need to know how to deal with my suffering. And that's what I'm about also. I mean, I'm not. And that's what so many of us are becoming about. That is, we understand that suffering is a part of life. There's a question of how to relieve the suffering and how to grow through and beyond that suffering. And that's what my work is about. That's what the transformation is about. And it's possible, as far as I.

Can tell, at what point does it go from. That was a scary, challenging, difficult, problematic experience that I either succeeded at or failed at. Where, when does it switch from that to becoming a trauma? How do we know how far to push our kids or ourselves to not traumatize ourselves but to continue growing?

Well, I think that those scary experiences, those experiences are traumatic.

So anytime you feel fear, it's traumatic at some level?

Well, pretty much. I mean, it depends on. I mean, obviously, if you're just afraid of a. If you're startled by a noise in the house. No, but, you know, the events, the ordinary challenges of our life. Divorce, for example. You know, well over 50% of Americans are divorced. That's. I've never seen divorce not be a trauma. Have you?

Never.

Maybe it happens, but so many of us experience loss of a significant relationship, a parent's death. Also, there are people who are, from very early life, very large numbers of people even, you know, well to do people who are living in peaceful neighborhoods, or at least ostensibly peaceful neighborhoods here in the United States have many of those adverse childhood experiences. They're neglected, they're abused, they're hit, they're bullied. And these experiences are a part of life early on for so many people. I don't know, what's the line you're looking for? Between what and what?

Well, let's take bullying, for example. I had lots of bullying in my life. When you're the tallest and the fattest kid, the smallest kids will always want to prove something. So I had way more than my fair share of bullying in fights. There's also. I look back on that. You know what, there's some value to being able to stand there when there's someone who, you know they're going to hit you and you know you're going to hit them. And to feel like you're going to die. Right. Which is what it feels like when you're in a fight in fifth grade, it really does feel that way. And then to walk away from that with a black eye or having given the other guy a black eye and say, you know what? I survived and I can handle myself. And years later, you'll be able to walk through a dark park and you'll have that energy that says, this is a person who can handle himself. I better not mug him. So it's not like it isn't without value, but I'd rather that my kids not have experienced the little bits of bullying they've had, because I can tell. My daughter once said, in first grade, I didn't feel safe because there was a bullying class. And I'm like, oh, man, that breaks my heart as a dad. And I know that wasn't good for her, because it's not. But how do you know, okay, let your kids feel some pain, because pain is a teacher, both for myself and for my family. How do I know?

Well, first of all, you can't protect.

Them completely, and it doesn't work if you Do.

And second of all, we don't really know My son, for example, who's now 17. When he was about 14 or 15, his football coach committed coaching malpractice and had them run drills full speed. First day without helmets and pads and a running back, crashed his head into my son's side of my son's face. He fractured, had five facial fractures. Oh my gosh, devastating injury. And yet that injury helped him to mobilize himself, to discover who he was, what was important to him, gave him a sense of his own strength and gave him a sense of the direction he wanted to take. Among other things. He didn't want to play football, not because he was so much afraid of being hurt, but because he could see that the football coach was irresponsible and that there was something about football that wasn't quite right for him. So he focused his energy in a different direction. As it happens, he's become a very good basketball player and that's how he's organized and mobilized himself. But he dealt with the pain beautifully, he dealt with the difficulty beautifully, and he really kind of grew up. Now, would I have wanted him to have had this injury? Of course not. But it came to him, and with support from his mom especially and from me as well, he was able to come through it and develop a real sense of self reliance that he had never had before. So I think the idea is, what do we do when trauma comes to us? How do we get the support we need? And then how do we use a variety of different techniques that I write about and teach people to come through the trauma, to rebalance ourselves, to look at things with a different, bigger perspective and to understand that this is something that's happened to us, but it doesn't define altogether who we are, that we can be bigger and grow beyond the trauma we've experienced.

Your son had an unfair advantage. His dad's a world leading expert in trauma. What did you say to him first when he broke his face on the field? If you were there, what were your first words to him?

Something like, holy shit.

That must have hurt.

No, probably less professional. Oh my God. I wasn't there. I just heard on the phone. His mom called me. I was just shocked and worried and I wanted to make sure that you know exactly what are the injuries, that he had the best surgeon, so he needed a medical intervention. There was no question.

Was that traumatic for you then? So you experienced a trauma through your son?

Of course. I think we all do. That's another source of trauma, is when People we love are hurt that we go through another source of trauma. Not in his case. The medical care actually was exemplary in his case. But for many instances I've seen medical care itself be traumatic. So the injury or the illness is traumatic, but the pain and suffering in the hospital and the indifference that's too often there in hospital settings causes more trauma both for the patient and for the patient's family.

So yeah, now, okay, so you experienced your own little, oh my God, you know, my child is interested. You had your own traumatic experience, but then you got to put your head together and then you went and you held his hand in the hospital. What'd you say to him? Like, what are the first things other than are you okay? Like how did you frame it for him?

Well, we're going to be there for you, we're going to do what's necessary for you, we're here for you and here are some things that we can teach you to help you go through this situation.

So it was, it was, you're supported, you're safe and here's tools for you.

Here'S tools for you and, and you will recover. Hope is absolutely critical element. One of the things that I do when I work with people and you know, I did this some with my son as well, but everywhere I go I teach people techniques that give them an immediate experience that they can make a change in how they feel. Simple one being slow, deep, soft belly breathing. Breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth with your belly, soft and relaxed. And what happens is if you do this for five or 10 minutes, just about everybody, 70, 80, 90% of people notice their, they feel a little more relaxed, shoulders relax, maybe heart rate goes down, muscles are less tense. So right from the beginning it's not just me saying, you're going to come through this, they're having a felt experience, I can feel better and I can do something for myself. So right from the beginning, whether it's my son or a nine year old kid, I'm working within a war zone whom I'm teaching the same soft belly breathing or a 60 year old person who's lost half a dozen family members, what they're feeling is, yes, this is unbelievably bad, unbelievably difficult and maybe there's a chance that things can change because I've experienced the change and I've experienced the fact that I can make it change for myself. So right from the beginning, it's not just that I'm saying that there's hope in the transformation. I'm also telling stories of people who will give hope to my readers. But I'm also right away giving people an experience that they can make a difference. So it's not just a matter of theory or science or other people's experience. It's my own experience.

I think that's crucial, that's really profound. So we can take that actually, even before we go there. You're listening to the show right now and you're going to be spending the next, oh, probably 30, 40 minutes.

So.

So for the next 10 minutes or so of the show, you can actually breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and make your belly soft while you do that. So more air goes through your belly. So you can actually do this while you're doing other things. So there you go. You can do twice the ROI for today's show just by doing that, just consciously, as much as you remember while you're listening to the rest of this. Like it's zero cost, but just try it. And at the end of that, you're probably going to want to order transformation, because I think that was just a synopsis of the book, at least a good portion of it that we just talked about right there. So there's something interesting going on here. And if you believe the supposition from a very believable guy with very strong credentials that everyone has experienced a trauma, hey, maybe that breathing is going to do something and maybe it'll change your day. And if not, you didn't really lose anything. Maybe you just got more oxygen. Like the risk is pretty low.

And as you know, as you well know, the science is there. When you breathe slowly and deeply, you stimulate the vagus nerve. It quiets the fight or flight response, decreases fear and anger, mobilizes self awareness and capacity for judgment and compassion. It's an antidote right there to fight or flight and to some of the more disturbing effects of trauma.

What is the definition of trauma? The one that you use to convince someone? I've had people go through the neuroscience EEG feedback program that I started and I don't have any trauma. I'm pretty sure we could see something in your EEG there because you respond differently when you talk about certain things. But there's a denial that, oh, trauma is not something that's for me. So what is our actual definition when we talk about it, even in the context of that sentence?

It's very simple. Trauma just means injury, the Greek word for injury. I'm happy to stay with that. You can call It a significant, disturbing life challenge. But I just call it injury. Injury to the body, mind or spirit. Something that happens to us that throws us off balance, throws us into a state of confusion or forces us to shut and. Or forces us to shut down emotionally and withdraw and distance ourselves. So that's defining it by its effects, but it's simply an injury, whatever you see as a trauma. And one of the things you mentioned at the beginning of our discussion is that sometimes we don't understand why we behave in certain ways, why we're afraid of certain things, why we get angry so easily at certain things. If we take the time to reflect and we have an opportunity to. To go inside and be a little introspective and maybe ask a few questions of our family members, we can find out what the source of the trauma is. So, for example, when I was a kid, when I was about 21 or 22, my girlfriend and I broke up. And I was totally devastated. And I thought it was almost like the world was coming to an end. And that was a trauma for me. And I wondered, well, why is it quite so severe? Why is this so, you know, devastating to me? And seemed to shatter all my notions of who I am. And one of the things, as I reflected at that point, I did go into psychotherapy, is that when I was a kid, my mother was kind of distant from me and she wasn't really there. And I'd experienced early loss, which made me vulnerable to later loss. That understanding helped me to become aware of what was going on with me in the present moment with my girlfriend. Didn't make it all go away. I had to find other ways of helping myself to move through that particular trauma. But I think that if you have an experience, I'm not going to. I don't try to convince people that trauma is. Is there in their lives. It's really a question of opening the door and saying, well, you know, you have. Nothing has happened to you in your life that's been really upsetting, that's thrown you off. Or if you haven't, if you're not interested, that's fine. But you might consider the fact that it's highly likely that someday, if you don't die soon, you're going to die later, and that you're going to go through the difficult situation of becoming frail and dealing with the loss of loved ones. That's there. That's part of human life. And I think people increasingly are recognizing their own vulnerability. We need to create a situation that makes it safe to do that one of the things we're seeing is that people who think they have to be so strong and so tough and that nothing is going to touch them are really, really suffering. For example, more and more first responders, policemen, police, police officers and firefighters are killing themselves. They're becoming depressed, they're becoming suicidal, they're killing themselves. They're coming down with chronic illnesses. So they're beginning, as they see what's happening, to understand that something's going on here that's affecting me, something I need to deal with in my life. Same with health professionals. The numbers of health professionals who are burning out, which is another word for the kind of trauma that comes to caregivers. They don't feel committed to doing the work in the same way. They feel overwhelmed by it, they feel anxious about it, they feel bored by it. The work has become traumatic for them and they've begun to distance themselves from it. They've hardened themselves and they're suffering. So what we find, what I find is that more and more people are beginning to wake up to this suffering that they have that's really there, that's a part of being human. And it's simply a matter of giving them the opportunity to have some time for reflection. I've done a lot of work with US Military, active duty military and veterans. I was just doing a group with veterans. I think it was yesterday and it was amazing. These men and women began to talk about what had happened to them and they began to share the effects of being in the service and being deployed and how they were connecting the things that had happened which they had been told they just had to suck it up and go on and pretend it hadn't happened. Just taking a little bit of time. They were beginning to reflect on what had happened and becoming very interested in how to deal with it in a better way. So I think it's a process of growth and what we need to do simply is to give all humans, especially little humans, our children, children in schools, an opportunity not to focus on their trauma, but just an opportunity to talk about what's going on and to learn basic skills from. For becoming more self aware, for expressing themselves, and for dealing with the stress and the trauma that they inevitably have. It needs to become a part of life. As opposed to the idea that I'm tough, I can tough it out, I can deal with anything. Well, I have to tell you, ain't nobody alive who can deal with anything. And I've worked with some of the toughest people in the US Military who Will say to me, I was the toughest SOB and I had this rank and I did this, and I had eight tours and deployed and I came back and I thought I was fine until my wife told me I was yelling and screaming in my sleep.

One of the things that I do when you talk about these traumas, I keep a list of things where I notice I have an unreasonable stress response. In my mind, these are unresolved traumas. I have a little list in my app on my phone. It says traumas. And so one that I noticed the other day. I have zero sense of direction. I have no idea which way north is, and frankly, I don't actually care which way north is and I never really have. Now, we all know that that makes you less of a man if you're in the boy scouts or something or whatever. I haven't figured out where that one comes from. But the next time I sit down with electrodes on my head and do the form of introspection that I do at 40 years of Zen, or the next time I'm wearing, working with a therapist or any of the kinds of unusual people that I'm lucky to have in my life, I'll take out the list and say, oh, I never figured out where this one came from. And then we'll go back and it'll probably be some time I felt lost when I was three. God knows it's not even that rational. But whatever it is, I'll go in and I'll erase it so that the next time I'm walking around and I have no idea where I am, instead of it being an anxiety inducing experience, it'll just be like, maybe I'll ask for directions.

Yes, exactly, exactly. Take a few deep breaths and ask for directions.

The valuable thing, if you're listening to this and you're saying, what's going on here? Look, we've got Jim here who's 40 years of deep experience saying, yeah, he's got stuff like that that he works on. I'm a successful entrepreneur and a lot of people know my work, but I still have this crap. And it's just like part of the human condition. And if you just notice and write it down and work on it, someday, eventually you become non reactive to it.

And that's the case also the techniques that I teach. Part of it is balancing out the physiology. So whether you're doing soft belly breathing or you get up and you shake your body for five or 10 minutes, which is a great way to shake loose from feeling shut down and Traumatized and frozen, which we feel when we're feeling helpless and overwhelmed, which is the way you may feel when you don't know which direction you're supposed to go, go in. So those two things will bring you back into balance and then you can begin to ask questions. And the techniques that I teach are really sort of how to consult your intuition, your imagination, your unconscious, if you will, and ask, what's going on here? Why is this, why is this upsetting me so much? And there are many ways to do that. You can do it with guided imagery, which you can do with drawings. You can do it with written dialogues. So you could have a dialogue with your confusion that comes up when you're dealing with not knowing what direction to go in. And that fascinating thing, and I teach this in the transformation fascinating thing, is that your symptom in this case the confusion, if you have a dialogue. And I bet this would work with you because you're a very good interviewer. So you said you're interviewing your own unconscious. You would start getting answers back, your confusion would start telling you, hey, Dave, this is what's happening and this is what you need to do.

I did an exercise. This is like 15 years ago. And it was actually, it scared me. And it was in the context of a personal development retreat thing. But they had you write a question with your right hand and answer it with your left hand and, and just kind of relax and see where it goes. It was creepy. But I learned some stuff that I did not know my subconscious was doing. And I don't know that that's going to work for people sitting alone at a desk some night. But there's all kinds of stuff.

But it's the same principle. It's exactly the same principle that I'm describing, is that you're consulting with the left hand. Being your non dominant hand is your unconscious, it's your intuition, it's your imagination, and you're consulting it. And there's so many answers that lie there. And the techniques to access that wise, that wise guide that wisdom. There are numerous techniques and anyone can learn them. We've taught these techniques to 8, 9, 10 year old kids. People of any age, any educational level can use them.

Okay, I teach this stuff to my kids. I remember my daughter must have been five or something and she was just melting down and she didn't know why. And you could tell it was like a new strong emotion. In fact, it was probably around the time that there was bullying going on in her school. And finally I said, well, let's talk about what this is. And can you draw a picture of the feeling? And she draws a picture of this big red ball and all this stuff. But it was one of those, what's my body doing right now? But it kind of took her out of it. And she had the picture hanging up for a little while, like, until she pondered her emotional response in the way that a five or seven year old, however old she was, would do. And it was interesting because I kind of do the same thing myself. I don't really draw a picture of it usually, but some of the therapist types I've worked with will tell you, draw a picture of that. What do you mean? It's a feeling, but you do it anyway. And then there's knowledge in there. Is that art? Perspective? Is that something that you've used in your.

Yeah. Beautiful. We use right at the beginning of the transformation and right at the beginning of work we're doing, whether it's in a war zone or after a school shooting or in an office with an individual person. Have them draw three pictures, draw you. And it's very close to what you intuitively did with your kid. Draw yourself. Draw yourself with your biggest problem. And then the third picture is draw yourself with your problem solved. And sometimes people say at first, well, you know, if I knew, I would solve the problem. Let it come from your imagination, your intuition. And it's amazing what people come up with that there is that capacity that we have even when we feel we're totally up against it. That third picture will often show us a way out. And that's right at the beginning of the work. And you can keep on using drawings as a way of accessing, not only expressing what's going on inside, which is a crucial part of healing, but then finding the answer, what do I do? What's the next step? And it's amazing. So, for example, there's a woman I remember always remember this drawing. Her biggest problem is a woman with ovarian cancer. And she drew. Her biggest problem was a big red blotch in the middle of her belly.

Wow.

And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, well, that's the ovarian cancer. But I'm smart enough to say, I don't know, and to ask her, what's that? She said, that's my anger at my husband. And the third picture, the solution, she's sitting across from her husband and sounds are coming out of her mouth. She's talking to her husband and she's telling him why she's so angry at him. That's the solution. It's not what I might have thought that cancer, that's obvious, but it's not. She came up with the problem and she came up with a solution. And all of us have that kind of wisdom inside us.

That's some profound stuff. And it's pretty far away from a bucket of Prozac.

Yes, it is.

Now, we've zoomed in on children and individuals, but some of your work is in some war torn regions where it's not just an individual who's experienced the trauma of war, but you identified trauma earlier as being an injury that can be a spiritual injury, emotional injury, a physical injury, but the whole community is highly damaged. What is the role of your book, the Transformation or the techniques in it in dealing with a whole school, a whole city, a whole country that's full of trauma?

Well, the first thing, what you're saying is really important in terms of framing the issue. You have to deal with the whole school, the whole city, the whole community, and you can with the whole country. So what we do is we have that understanding. And anytime my center for Mind Body Medicine colleagues and I go somewhere, we're not there to treat everybody who's traumatized. We work in Gaza, for example, there are 2 million people and there are 2 million traumatized people in Gaza. Literally the whole, I'm not saying they all have a diagnosable post traumatic stress disorder, but everybody's on edge, everybody's anxious, everybody's hyper vigilant. There's a lot of irritability, a lot of fear, a lot of emotional withdrawal because of, you know, they're like a shut off from the rest of the world. They've had three major wars in the last eight years. So we go, we teach local people the whole program of self awareness, self care, that's in the transformation. We teach it to them in trainings. They learn these techniques in a small group. They share their experience with each other in the first part of our training, in the second part of our training, we teach them how to use what they've learned with people in the population, in schools, hospitals, clinics, women's groups, all kinds of community based organizations. And then we provide ongoing supervision to them as they use the work with others in their community. In Gaza, I mentioned in Gaza, partly because it's our largest program. We've trained 900 people. They're not all health or mental health professionals. A lot of them are teachers, leaders of women's groups, clergy, community organizers, former combatants, first responders, they in turn, have shared this model with 170,000 people in Gaza. And the work that they're doing is quite stunning. We've published studies, groups that they've run, where they taught the same techniques that are in the transformation. Two people, 10 people in a small group. These people come with diagnosable post traumatic stress disorder. At the end of 10 or 11 sessions, 10 or 11 weeks, 80% or 90% of them no longer have diagnosable PTSD. And the gains hold.

These are just in groups of people, not individuals?

Yes, I think it's really important to. When you're working with a whole population, you can't possibly see everybody individually. And also people need support when they're dealing with psychological trauma. And one of the things that's really important is that people have that support. Now, if they're reading a book and they're learning the techniques from the transformation, they can learn all the techniques, but it makes it even more valuable and more effective if they can share what they're learning with other people. And in a place like a war zone, where everybody feels when we're really traumatized, parts of our brain that make it easy to connect with and identify with other people are kind of shut down. So it feels like we're alone with our trauma. Even though we can see that the whole neighborhood has been destroyed, even though we know other people have had family members killed, it often feels like we're alone. So it's really helpful to have people come together in groups to share with each other their experience. And for readers of the Transformation, part of the sharing is with people whose stories I tell in the book. So you feel like you're connected with them. But I also encourage everyone to get connected with other people, to share what they're learning with others, to share their vulnerability with other people. It makes a huge difference.

One thing you didn't mention about that 80% is that you did a double blind placebo control trial, which is the benefit of being a Georgetown professor on what you did here in order to help these kids let go of their ptsd. So this is a clinically proven, effective thing using the highest standard. And let's see, placebos, 30% drugs that suppress your trauma response have what, a 45, 5% depending on the drug and both. Drugging kids is usually a bad strategy to start with. So this is more effective than anything else we've seen, right?

Well, it's certainly. I mean, I think first of all, for post traumatic stress disorder, there is no drug that has been shown to be clinically effective. Even in the most optimistic psychopharmacologist they might say well some of the antidepressants relieve some of the symptoms of depression, some of the anti anxiety medications relieve relieve some of the symptoms of anxiety. But there's been no good evidence that drugs relieve post traumatic stress disorder. Cognitive therapy can be very helpful. Other therapies can be very helpful. What we're doing and we did do this randomized controlled trial. This was in Kosovo and this was kids who had been in an area of Kosovo called sourca where 80% of the homes were destroyed and 20% of the kids in the high school lost one or both parents. So very significant psychological trauma. These kids participated, high school kids participated in 11 week long groups where they learned the mind body skills that are in the transformation and they had these results. More than 80% no longer had PTSD. After the groups were over those gains held at three months following follow up. Very striking findings, good scientific methodology. Studies we'd done in Gaza were not randomized controlled trials but the results were the same. The important thing also is the people leading the groups were not psychiatrists and psychologists. They were rural high school teachers. So that means big deal. Yeah, these were people who cared about the kids. They were good teachers, good people. They got supervision from us, but they were leading the groups and they subsequently they led groups for all 1,000 kids in their high school and they worked with everyone in their community who had a family member killed. This is very hopeful. This is one of the sort of signs that it is possible to work with population wide psychological trauma and to use community members who are not trained health or mental health professionals to do the work. It's also a very good finding for people who are learning the techniques, that you can learn these techniques yourself and you can use them yourself. This is really all about giving people the power to understand and help themselves. And if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, this is part of what was missing and still to a significant degree is missing from medicine. We don't really value people's capacity to understand and help themselves. This is an answer to that showing in this really significant area of psychological trauma that we can do so much to help ourselves.

How hard was it to screen the people who lead those groups? Is it 1 in 10 people can do that? Is it 1 in 100? How do you know you're not getting like a little monster in there is going to further traumatize the kids?

I'm happy to have the monsters in there. We don't except when we're doing a research study, we don't scream.

Nope.

What we say, no matter where we're going, is, this is a group where you're going to learn skills to understand and help yourself. A lot of people call them. We call them mind body skills groups. So what we say to people is, this is an opportunity for you to learn skills that will help you to help yourself. Are you interested?

Oh, for attendees. That makes sense. I'm talking about the person who's. These high school teachers. We all know that people who are traumatized tend to traumatize others. Like, the more traumatized you are. So how do you know that the person who's standing in front of this group teaching them things isn't going to cause more harm?

We train these people. They come through our training, and every once in a while, the people who come. Some of the people who come through our training are not able. They're so caught up in their own difficulties, they're so troubled themselves that they can't do it. And so we don't encourage them to continue. We say it's not. It's not the right time. So we screen the people who we.

Train, what percentage of people can take the training and use it beneficially.

I would say I've never done it by percentage. But what we see is the vast. I would say 90% of the people who take the training can do the.

Work effectively and could lead another training. So this can go viral. The reason I'm asking this is like, do you need to have a special human being with a halo over their head in order to lead a group of people? Or can you take anyone from the group who's been through it and go, oh, yeah, I'm going to teach you how to teach it. In other words, how viral can we make this?

So the criteria to begin with for people who come through our training are you're willing to learn on yourself, you're committed to taking this work out to work with other people, and you're willing to be supervised as you do that work with others. Now we leave it to our local partners. Wherever we're going, whether it's Gaza or Israel or Kosovo or Haiti or South Sudan, to choose the people. So they pick people who they think will be appropriate. And we ask people to apply and they write a little note about who they are and why they would like to do this work. What's amazing to me is how well people can do it who never believed that they could do it. Sure, every once in a while there's somebody who's so totally caught up in their own ego that they're, you know, they just can't do the work work. But the vast majority of the people who make this commitment, who are chosen by members of their community, who are their leadership in the community, they do quite a good job. And, you know, there are obviously variations, but you have to be willing. When you come through the training, you have to work on yourself. And if you don't want to look at yourself, okay, then you're not right for doing this. If you're willing to be in a small group and learn these techniques and explore what's going on with you, that's a big step. And then we supervise you as you learn to use it with other people in our advanced training. And we see how they do, and not everybody can do it. And sometimes we say, well, you got to go back before you start working with other people. You need to get some more training and some more supervision. But I would say if people who are listening to us are interested in our training and they are committed to taking this work out to other people, they should get in touch with us at the center for Mind Body Medicine and learn more about what they're doing. And if they'd like to be part of our training, we're always open to training people.

You read my mind there. Bulletproof radio gets about 2 million downloads a month. So this is one of the top 0.1% of all podcasts listened to.

And.

And there's a community of people who actually just very deeply give a shit about the world who are attracted to the show. So I know that that probably pushed buttons for a few people saying, hey, maybe I should do more. And we have no commercial thing. I don't even know if the center for Mind Body Medicine is a nonprofit or not. I'm just saying, like, if you're thinking, I want to make a difference, look, this is a drug free, zero cost. You could do it in a traumatized community. In fact, the lower the economic status of a community, the more likely there is trauma, because not having. Not knowing where your next food comes from is traumatic. So there's lots of good work you could do in the world that's very, very accessible. And so I think this is worthy stuff in part because you go into the biology in your book, and it's one thing to sort of say, well, there's magic fairies and we know that people get better. But you go in your second chapter like, look, gut disruption happens. And we know your digestion gets off when you go through trauma and that causes further damage to the brain and then that causes further damage to the gut. And you actually describe this negative treadmill that we get on. And so it's worth understanding its biology. It's not just beating a drum and hugging each other and letting go of trauma. It's hacking your biology by letting go of that.

Exactly. And the point about food is really important. I'm glad you brought it up because there's a long chapter on the trauma healing diet. And it's, you know, it's. In a way, it's so obvious. Of course trauma is going to affect every cell and every organ in our body. And yet I've never seen any other book that's talked about both the effect of trauma on the gut and how you can use, how you can rebuild your gut, you can help to restore the microbiome, you can close the leaks in the gut that come from stress and therefore repair your brain. Just, just as you were saying. So I lay out a program for doing that very clearly. And it's important. The biology is really important and it's important for people to know it and it's so that they can act on it. And it's also important to know that there's science, as you're pointing out, so that you were willing to take some of these steps to make a difference. And every step of the way, the proof is in the results. Does it make a difference or doesn't it? And what I've seen over the last 40 years, and what as well as what I've seen in the research literature, is that all of these techniques and these approaches make a difference. And that when you put them together in a comprehensive program, the difference is really quite striking and sometimes quite magnificent. To see people who've been totally devastated, including people who've been very devastated early in life, who have somehow using this approach and using it wisely and putting together the different techniques, who have really not only restored their life, but have become magnificent human beings. One of the things I want to mention that's really important here is as we deal with our trauma, there is a process not only of rebalancing and of healing, but a process of growth that encourages us naturally to want to reach out and be more generous and compassionate to other people. In the psychological literature, we now talk about it as post traumatic growth. But this is an ancient kind of age old understanding of all traditional societies that trauma is actually the soil in which wisdom and compassion can grow. So as painful as it Is it's also an opportunity and we need to address the biology, the psychology, the interpersonal aspects and the possibility, the spiritual aspects as well.

You go into gratitude in the book, which is a core part of the bulletproof lifestyle. People listen to the show for a long time, have heard me say every night with my kids three things you're grateful for. It's I think in every one of the books I've had and I would say gratitude is pretty much that vaccine for trauma that we talked about before. And you actually cite research in your book about how gratefulness reduces symptoms of PTSD and improves the mood of people who've been traumatized. You talk about the Israeli study where gratitude prevents trauma exposed children from developing ptsd. Can you talk more about how to do gratitude as a preventative for ptsd?

Well, I think, I think what you're doing with your kids is right on. That's exactly so many. There's so much research on these gratitude journals is what they're technically called, but it really, all it is is being thankful for. It's good to write them down if you're able to, if you're old enough to write three or five things for which you're grateful. And there are a whole bunch of studies. Sometimes people have done it for a couple weeks, sometimes they've done it for a couple months. Just that reminder that we're grateful for something gives us a reinvestment in life. One of the difficulties with trauma, of course, is that it overwhelms us and we feel like it's not just a particular event. But nothing, nothing's seems to matter anymore. And yet when we keep a gratitude journal, we're reminding ourselves, oh yes, something matters, there is something that we care about. The other thing we're reinvesting in life and we're looking at the possibility that not everything is so negative. So it's very, very powerful. I think that meditation opens the door to gratitude. Meditation, relaxed moment to moment awareness brings us to acceptance. And acceptance is only is like next door to gratitude. Once you start accepting that is a welcoming of life. And that's pretty close to gratitude. Now some people are very grateful, seem to be grateful constitutionally. They came into the world being grateful. The rest of us, it's not so easy. So the gratitude journal is a very, very useful tool.

And you go in your book from talking about gratitude towards forgiveness. And then the path that I tell people is you're not going to forgive anything until you find something to be grateful for. So you have to start with gratitude. But you have a deeper take on forgiveness in transformation. And so I would like you to define what forgiveness is and then tell listeners how they can access forgiveness.

Well, forgiveness is really. It's a kind of letting go. It's a very deep getting over it.

That's a great. No one's ever said it that way. Okay. I really like that.

It has a ring to it, huh?

Yeah.

And it's like. Like, okay. And it does start with. I would see that. I would say the road goes from acceptance to gratitude to forgiveness. I think the thing about forgiveness, I don't never try to force it on people. I talk about it, as you said, after gratitude, toward the latter part of the transformation, because it's not so easy in the beginning. And I think as we think about forg forgiveness, it's partly about forgiving other people for hurting us. It's partly also about asking others to forgive us. There's a kind of humility in it. And finally, it's about forgiving ourselves, which for many of us is the hardest. The hardest part of it to do. And I teach a very simple Buddhist meditation on forgiveness, which includes just sitting and relaxing and imagining the person who has hurt me, across from me and forgiving that person and letting that person go, imagining someone I've hurt asking for forgiveness, and then imagining myself sitting across from myself and forgiving myself, and then letting that forgiveness expand to the whole world, to all those who need for forgiveness, which is all of us. Every major religious and spiritual tradition understands that forgiveness is essential for us to become peaceful and to become sort of in harmony with who we're meant to be. But we have to start it, you know, step by step. I remember in Kosovo, a guy who came to our training, I think he was a journalist. We did this forgiveness meditation toward the end of the training. And he said, well, he said, I don't know if it was a success or not. He said, I couldn't forgive the man who killed my brother, but I sure as hell don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to take revenge. And I said, that's success. That's a huge step that he's gotten out of that spiral that's destroying his life. When we're unforgiving, when we hold resentment, all we're doing is damaging ourselves physically, psychologically, spiritually, socially. We're just cramped, you know, figures, and we can't be fully ourselves. So forgiveness is, for us, has nothing really to do with the other person to begin with. It may eventually produce that But I know for myself, it's really about how to free myself from any kind of resentment that I'm still holding on to, how to let go, how to get over that sort of nasty connection that's still there. Either seeing myself as a victim or hurting other people and how to come out of that spiral, out of that, that destructive connection.

Are you done with that yourself? Are you still holding on to any of those things?

Not much anymore. A little bit here and there, but no less and less. I have to work on it sometimes the person, in my case, the person I have to forgive is the same person whom I'm asking for forgiveness from. So that's often the case. Somebody in an intimate relationship and I'm really doing much better. I don't feel that it's more. And what happens is there's more of a kind of relaxation and an acceptance and a kind of perspective and almost a sense of gentle humor about the situation. I don't feel so wound up in it anymore. I'm not saying I couldn't be, but it's certainly getting better over the years. Thank God for that, I'd say.

Do you work with a forgiveness coach, a spiritual person, priest, rabbi, therapist, shaman? Is there someone you go to when you need to work on your own forgiveness or gratitude?

No, I just work with the forgiveness.

Meditation, just a straight up meditation.

Because you just the same meditation that I teach, I just do it over and over. I think the first thing is obviously after all. Or not perhaps, perhaps not obviously, but after all these years, hopefully I'm more self aware. So when I do something that I feel bad about, I'm less inclined to try to defend myself and say, no, but this or that or the other thing. There's a wonderful quote, the story about Buddha, that he had a heckler in the audience who keep coming back and saying, oh, this guy's an idiot, he's a phony. What are you trying to do? You're a prince. You're a privileged jerk. Well, you're trying to tell me how to live. And one of Buddha's disciples, so the story goes, says, why do you tolerate this guy? He keeps following you around and he keeps shouting all the stuff at you. And what Buddha says to him is so beautiful. He says, well, first of all, maybe he's right about something and I have something to learn. And if he's not right, he's talking to somebody else, so why should I pay attention? So that story is my teaching story. So when I'm getting wound up and I'M feeling resentful and I'm feeling anger about something. I do my best. I do the soft belly breathing. I think, okay, where's the element of truth? And what somebody is saying that's gotten me angry and wanting to take, you know, wanting to do something or just getting upset with that person or trying to defend myself. What grain of truth is there in it? What can I learn? And if it's not true, why am I getting worried about it? What does it have to do with me? So more and more I'm not saying. The other thing is that I want to say I don't have any formal spiritual teachers now, and I haven't for a number of years. But I do my best to learn from other people. And this is part of what I'm teaching in the transformation is when people appear. And I'm thinking of somebody who felt like I'd done something to her. And I thought, well, she's my teacher. Maybe I did. Maybe it's something I said as I said this to her. I said, you know, I wasn't as kind as I might have been. Thank you for telling me that. I'm sorry. And as for the rest of it, okay, I didn't really, you know, it's not my responsibility, but she's my teacher, no matter who she is. And everybody I encounter, it's great to have spiritual teachers all over the planet. Everybody I encounter is potentially my teacher. Just so this conversation is teaching me always. And that's the idea, is to be open to learning wherever you are.

It's a profound mindset to look at everyone as a teacher, especially the ones who are most IR irritating.

Right. And kids have a knack for.