How To Address And Begin To Heal Trauma

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

We don't have to continue to live in the effects of the trauma that we've experienced throughout our lives that we can actually change that. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I often talk about how eating organ meats is so good for your health. Now, I know it can be hard to work them into your diet, but when we don't eat things like liver, kidney and heart regularly, we're missing out on wonderful sources of essential nutrients. Organ meats are nature's multivitamins and the richest sources of natural vitamin A, B vitamins and minerals that we have. But liver isn't everyone's first choice for a delicious meal, which is why my friends at Paleo Valley created their grass-fed organ complex supplement. Paleo Valley grass-fed organ complex contains three different organs from healthy grass-fed pasture raised cows. So you're getting a wide array of nutrients, and each ingredient is sourced from a family-run farm in the US. It's then gently freeze-dried in order to preserve as many of the nutrients as possible. The end result is an odorless, tasteless, burpless supplement that offers all the benefits of organ meats in an easy swallow capsule form. If you're struggling with brain fog, low energy levels, or if you just want to optimize your health and vitality, try paleo Valley grass-fed organ complex. And right now, paleo Valley is offering my listeners 15 off their entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hymen to check out all their clean paleo products and take advantage of this deal. No two people achieve optimal health in the same way. Age, genes, nutrition and lifestyle all play a part. That means in order to truly understand what's going on with your body, you have to start on the inside. And that's why inside tracker takes a data-driven approach to health optimization based on your body's own signals. And now you can gain an even deeper understanding of your health with InsideTracker courses. InsideTracker courses explore the science of your health span, giving you the knowledge you need to live a longer, healthier life. And best of all, the first three chapters are available for free. Plus, you'll get access to an exclusive interview with Dr. David Sinclair that takes a deep dive into the science of healthy aging. To unlock the full 10 chapter series and bonus videos, simply purchase any InsideTracker plan. And for limited time, you can get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store when you sign up at insideTracker.com/DrHyman. So head over to insideTracker.com/DrHyman to save today. And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We will all face trauma at one point in our lives or another, and it can be all too easy for our traumas to become our identities. But allowing ourselves time to heal and room to think differently is the ultimate gift we can give to ourselves and our world. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on why we need to put time and attention into healing our traumas and how to do that. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. James Gordon on learning to be with your traumas to heal them, with Lewis Howes on choosing our mindset around past pain, and with Dr. Gabor Maté on resources to help you heal. Let's jump in.

We have to understand that trauma affects us all. It's part of being human. Like we're all, I suppose, a victim of death. Death is going to come to us. Trauma is going to come to us. So we need to understand that and not see it as something that just happens to those other people who have, you know, been in a war or have had the most horrible parents. That's number one. And number two, we have to see that it is possible to move through and beyond the trauma, that if we recognize it, we're willing to allow it to appear in our lives, in our imagination, to see its effects. We can deal with it and we can move through and beyond that. And this is an ancient, an aboriginal understanding. We have to recover that. The medical model has in some ways, as you're suggesting, has fetishized trauma, it's made it, you know, and turned it into these diagnostic categories that are suffering. And I think that they, you know, sometimes that's helpful in trying to understand, you know, what do these symptoms mean. But in the long run, first of all, it defines something as medical that is part of the human condition. And then, It seems to dictate that we need to fix that individual. Whereas in fact, what we need to do is to create the opportunity and the setting and the attitude that encourages people to understand and help themselves and to move that this is possible. And we need to look at it not so much as a medical problem, but as a public health problem. I mean, if in the United States, we're so divided with each other, we're gonna give a diagnosis to everybody who's got on left or right or center, they have some kind of personality disorder. That's not the point.

No.

The point is that this is part of our, part of the way that we're living right now. One of the things that I'm doing in Ukraine and the people, one of the reasons people I think are so welcoming, is I'm saying, let's drop the medical model. This is a universal problem. There are 45 million people in Ukraine. World Health Organization says 10 million people are going to have major depressive disorder. So many people are going to have post-traumatic stress disorder. Why not look at 45 million people who've gone through this incredibly allacious traumatic experience and let's create opportunities and rituals for everybody to heal themselves and understand that it's possible. So it's coming out of a medical model which tends not only to be not particularly effective, but also very isolating. One of the things that's most important about healing trauma is having some sense of connection to other people and looking for some and finding some meaning and purpose in our lives. And that doesn't come out of the medical model very easily, whereas it comes out of an educational and a public health model. So we have to shift the way we look at things and what we as physicians are offering.

Yeah, I think that's really true. We are so focused on a medicalization of mental illness and of our psychological issues that it sort of prevents people from actually facing them and dealing with them, owning them. I think one of the most important teachings that you have, and it's embedded in your work, is that, you know, we don't have to continue to live in the effects of the trauma that we've experienced throughout our lives, that we can actually change that and that changing that is key not only to our psychological health, but to also to our physical health. And, and I think I'd love you to sort of talk for a minute about the, sort of the implications of, of this trauma. assistant: and how it manifests for people and how would they notice? Because I, I could tell you that I did not until really recently self-identify as someone who had any trauma in my life. But I realized as I began to look at, you know, the things that were challenges for me, at the relationship challenges, at life challenges that were, you know, overworking or workaholism or whatever it was that I was struggling with, that, that, that, that, that was, their origins were actually quite deep and I really committed to working on these into healing them and to looking at it and to shifting. So I'd love to kind of share, have you share how do this sort of manifest for people? How do they recognize it and how they begin to start to heal these things for themselves?

Sadly, or simply realistically, it usually comes just as you described it. Something is causing you pain right now. Trauma means, this Greek word that means wound. you're experiencing a wound in the present and you're wondering, what can I do about this? And the next question is, where did this come from? Why is this? But I, so I think that the first thing is to, is to pay attention to those areas of our lives that, that are causing us trouble, that are causing us, either causing us distress or sometimes causing other people to stress. And they're, they're shouting to us. Pay attention. And so what is going on if I'm being overbearing with other people? Am I going to keep on arguing about whether or not it's their fault or my fault, or am I going to look at the fact that, well, maybe that came from something that was in my childhood, and maybe this is something that's working in me, and maybe I need to address it. So I think that's where we begin. And then the whole approach that I've adopted over all these years is really a meditative approach and saying, by which I don't mean anything fancy or anything that has to do with a particular religion, I mean simply being aware moment to moment of what's happening and paying attention to what I see. and as well as using techniques of meditation to bring me into physiological and psychological balance. And once I'm in, so we begin all of our meetings at the Center for Mind Body Medicine by meditating, by doing a few minutes of slow, deep, soft belly breathing so we're not ready to shout at each other. But my, everybody's got to respect my opinion. No, be quiet, relax, listen to other people as they're speaking. so if we put ourselves in that, that frame of mind, yeah, we're able to listen more openly and more sympathetically to the difficulties that we have instead of trying to pretend that it's not there. We're willing to allow those pains, whether they're past pains or present pains, allow them to surface. And then as we're able to use the, the tools and techniques that I and others teach, the tools and techniques I teach and transforming trauma, we can use our imagination to say, okay, let's say I'm overbearing. What do I do about that? Well, I can use guided mental imagery. I can ask that part of my mind that knows the answer, the part that doesn't yet know the answer can say, okay, and you can call it a wise guide. You go into a relaxed state and you allow a guide to appear to you. So say it's a, say it's Desmond Tutu or an eagle or a flower. And then you have a dialogue and you say, okay, flower, you're there. What do I do about being so overbearing? And the flower says, well, what you have to do is open up, open your arms up a little more and be a little more embracing of other people, because these are people that you're talking. I just did that right now, and it's good advice for me. I do get overbearing. I need to open up to the to the people. Or maybe I do a drawing. We do a set of drawings. Draw yourself. Draw yourself with your biggest problem and draw yourself with your problem solved. And it is amazing what people come up with. And this is to be the first time, the first time that I meet with them. We all have this capacity, but we've, we haven't been educated to use this capacity to either know ourselves or mobilize our intuition or unconscious. And it's there, it's there in all of us. And we just need to have a understand that there is the possibility of healing trauma. There's the possibility that we have the answers within ourselves. And then we need to learn techniques to use to access those answers.

And sometimes it's important to look at the beliefs and how we've developed our beliefs about how to be in the world. You know, I recently was reflecting on you know, one of my behaviors that I, I struggle with most of my life, which is the trouble saying no and the sort of trouble with, with, with over pleasing people by, you know, not wanting to set them. And, and I, I kind of know where this came from, but, you know, I think there's, there's, there's these sort of fight or flight response, which people really are. very aware of. Then there's the freeze response, which is another kind of playing possum, which many of us do. But I think there's like a fourth manifestation of trauma, which is the fight, flight, freeze and fawn response, which I've recently been reading about. And fawning is basically people pleasing and not being able to say no because the consequences of saying the truth feel life-threatening for me, it did as a child when my My stepfather would be upset when I would say something that he didn't like, whether it was that I didn't take out the garbage or whatever it was that I didn't wash my hands after I went to the bathroom. I mean, he literally grabbed me and when I was seven years old and I took a soup pan because we didn't have garbage disposals in the sink back in the day and my mom's like, flush the soup down the toilet. and I did. And it came out of the bathroom and he asked me if I washed my hands. And he went into a rage and he picked me up and he threw me against the wall, screamed at me. I was this tiny little boy. I was, I'm not, I'm 6'3 now, but I was like a little kid. I was really little. And it just, it just shook me right to my core and got wired into my nervous system in a way that, that made it really clear to me it wasn't safe to tell the truth. It wasn't safe to disappoint people or to upset people. And I had to do whatever I could to prevent that. and, you know, I even see that still showing up, even though I've worked on it for years, I still see it showing up. So this is kind of these embedded patterns are so deep and they're so powerful that, that, you know, it takes a lot of work to work through them and, and the techniques of meditation, of journaling, of drawing, of breathing, maybe even things like, you know, group support and talking about these things and, in settings that sort of normalizes it and sort of makes it, makes it not.

So.

Much that we're doing this all on our own that, you know, we all share this common experience of being human and having these traumatic experiences. And, and, you know, I don't even know if, you know, there are other ways that are emerging around the psychedelic therapies and MDMA. I I think all of this are, are tools that we can use to start to heal this embedded trauma and then create a more, you know, understanding and connected and. you know, more whole society, which we certainly are not in right now.

What have you come to? How are you going to deal with this people?

You know, it's just, it's a process of different things. You know, it's, it's, it's trying to deeply understand how it shows up and being able to witness it and notice it without judgment. It's around understanding my physiological response, how it feels in my body at the time when this happens to me. I mean, I mean, someone sends an email to me about wanting something from me or asking help and I'm just sort of overloaded, my schedule's full and I get this stress response because I don't want to disappoint them or upset them and say, no, I can't do this for you or no, I can't have this meeting or no, I can't do this call or no, I, you know, it's like, and it's like, I manage it by trying to be more aware and to try to realize that this is something that is not.

Not.

Serving me or the people in my life. It's not aligned with the values I have. And so I think it's definitely gotten way, way better. So I think I still have more work to do, but I think I'm open to suggestions, Jeff.

I know what I'm getting myself into.

I'm not sure when that happens, but we can talk about it.

When it happens, Try this shaking and dancing for a few minutes. And then do the thing with the wise guy, the thing I just did for myself, being overbearing. Because I sometimes am. My staff tells me, you know, you're pushing us too hard, you know, you just 'cause you do this, you want everyone. And the answer to me came just in that moment when I was talking, which is open my arms to them as human beings. Now the challenge is to remember that. every time. All right. I think, I think in that few seconds, the Insight that came to me is, is the vital one that it, what is more important than my wanting to get something done or achieve something is to treat the other person as fully human.

Yeah.

And that's, and so I think there may be little keys in there for you as well, and for all of us as we look at this, and then we have to as we access what is our call it whatever you want, higher power, wise guide, imagination, what is it telling you to do? Do it for a moment now. When you get this feeling of wanting to please, what else? Get some advice from whoever comes to you as a guide.

It's a powerful exercise. I feel like the message is really clear. It's just that, you're not serving yourself or them by doing that. And I can let go of that behavior and not have to do that anymore.

Yeah, and so find out what it is. I might guess it'd be great to get up when you feel that get up and not just shake and dance, but yell and scream, mother, get it out.

Yeah, no, I never had permission to be upset. when I was a kid, you know, never. It was very clear. And it's like, oh, coming together.

Thanks, Jim.

I'll send you the check for the site console after. Well, you know, Jimmy, I think the.

Thing, you know, we can do these. This is part of it. You're not going to hurt anyone. You're doing this for yourself. You're doing this. And we all, we all have our issues, and we all, we all need to find a safe place where we can deal with them, and then it, it can, it can change. it can. And, yes, sometimes it takes a lot of time, but not always. Sometimes change happens very fast.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

So many of us struggle with childhood trauma, whether it's big trauma with a big T or a little trauma with small T with neglect or just not being loved the way we need it or whether it's actual physical or sexual emotional abuse, we all have something. And some people can have really horrible physical things happen and they seem to manage and they don't make the meaning out of it. And others can have sort of what you think would be relatively benign childhood experience. Maybe their parents just weren't that attentive and they can be highly traumatized. Exactly. You'll have severe mental illness from it. And, whatever the meaning we give it. Yeah. I mean, Viktor Frankl, you mentioned before, he said, you know, Between stimulus and response, there is a pause. Meaning between something that happens to us and how we react to it, there's a pause. In that pause lies a choice. And in that choice lies your freedom. And I think that's a very powerful idea that is not about not recognizing what happened to you or minimizing things that are going on, but realize that you basically determine the quality of your experience by your beliefs and by the meaning you make of things.

And do you want to be free or do you want to hold onto it and be blocked?

Right. and then, you know, we make all kinds of justifications because then we get to blame other people. We get to be the victim. We get to not have to change things. We get to not look at ourselves. But what you did was super courageous. And it's, it's inspiring because you, you've been through a lot. And those traumas that you had when you were younger, that you've talked about incest and other things are actually really tough to deal with. I was also a victim of incest. And it's like, it's like, it's.

It messes with your brain.

Yeah, it messes with your brain and how you look at the world. But what you mapped out in your book, the Greatness Mindset, unlock the power of your mind and live your best life today, which is out now. Everybody needs to get a copy right now. Pause this podcast, get your copy. It's such a powerful story of how someone who's even very successful could have things that were unsolved. and that you can actually start to heal those things and change the way you're thinking about things. Because we have a thinking problem and a feeling problem, and we don't have a map to sort of work through those things. And your book is an incredible map of how these things can be healed and developed in ways that change our mindsets from somebody who's really stuck and unhappy versus someone who's having the life that they want.

Thank you. Yeah, and for me, I wrote this for myself 10 years ago. I wrote this for myself when I was 21 in transition and confused and not sure about why am I feeling this way? Why do I have so much pain? Why do I feel trapped? Why do I feel emotionally stagnant? Why am I reactive so much? Why do I feel so hurt? Why do I keep abandoning myself? Why do people not understand me? All these emotions that I had, I wish I had the map now that I created for my younger self. And this now I have the guide for me 10 years from now when I'm in a new transition or a new season of life and I'm going through certain changes. And so that's what I really wanted because I think a lot of people don't have a clear, meaningful mission for their life. And this is step one. If we are not clear in one sentence what this season's mission is in a meaningful way, I just think we'll have more stress and overwhelm than we need. We're going to face challenges and adversity, but if we don't know exactly where we're heading, we'll never get there. And so step one for me is identifying, are we in a powerless mindset or a greatness mindset? And if we're in a powerless mindset, how do we move there as fast as possible to greatness? And step one is defining a meaningful mission.

Yeah. So it's so important, you know, it reminds me of a quote from Marion Williamson, our greatest fear, right? And most of us don't lead into our light. We kind of lean on our darkness because it's comfortable, it's familiar, we know how to navigate, and we kind of afraid of actually the greatness that we could have. And your School of Greatness, your podcast about greatness, your book, the Greatness Mindset, is such a beautiful kind of bookmark in a way that points to how we can actually embrace that greatness. She says, our greatest fear is not our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. So I think, you know, and she goes on to say, it's not our light, it's our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Who are you not to be that? You're playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We're born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone.

Yeah, I love this. And the reason I love what Marianne says there is because the challenge is most people live either a good life or a bad life, but both of those are hard to break through into greatness. because when you have a good life, when you've got a good family, you've got kids, you've got a good job, you've got things that are good, you get comfortable and familiar, like you said, it's hard to break through from comfort and familiarity. And people with a struggling relationships call it bad, right? They're still familiar with the bad. And so they stay in the bad. It's really needed that, right? And it's because you're from, and so some people will stay decades in a relationship or decades in a career that is bad and they don't find joy in it, but they stay because it's familiar and it's not bad enough yet.

And most people, I call it any peace syndrome. Not enough pain.

Not enough pain.

Right. Most people don't change because they have any peace syndrome.

Most people are not willing to strive for that next step of greatness because it's familiar and comfortable, even if it's good or bad. And that's very few do. But it's hard to say, I want to take a look, I want to go deeper, I want to work on myself. It's just a challenge, but a lot of times it takes some type of extreme pain for us to want to open up and say, I need to make a change.

Yeah, it does, unfortunately. But it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. And I think if we all took a moment to look at ourselves and go, you know, where are the places where we are unhappy, where we don't tell anybody what we actually feel, where we doubt ourselves, where we lack self-love, where we feel insecure, where we're worried about what other people's thoughts are about us and in our place in the world. I mean, it's so easy to be knocked off center of who you are by all these unconscious subtexts of what's going on in our head and our inner dialogue. And you see the real difference in the mindset between someone who's stuck like that and someone who's achieving what they want and are leaning into their greatness. Can you talk about the differences in the mindset?

Yes. There's a whole page I give on 201 of the book where I give this framework between Powerless Mindset and the Greatness Mindset. So if you feel like you're not accomplishing exactly what you want or you're not on the path, because my mission is big and I know it's going to take time. But if you're not feeling fulfilled internally, if you don't feel peaceful, if you don't feel in harmony and alignment with what you're doing, then that means you're more in the Powerless Mindset versus Greatness Mindset. And the Powerless Mindset includes you lacking a meaningful mission. So you're not clear in one sentence, like, what is the season of life and what am I doing? What's the direction I'm going?

So you lack that meaningful mission.

So I'd ask yourself in one sentence, are you clear on what you're doing for this year or these five years or your season of life? And it doesn't need to be curing cancer or change in the world. Just what is it for you? What is this season for you? It could be an exploratory season. Okay, at least you know that you're exploring. It could be I'm trying to graduate from school. Okay, that's your mission right now until the next season. So just being very clear, a powerless mindset is being controlled by fear. When we have a number of fears that hold us back from acting courageously, it keeps us feeling powerless and a victim like you talked about. So being controlled by fear, crippled by self-doubt conceals past pains. This is a part of the mindset. I'm good. I'm fine.

Life is great. This is a part of mindset.

There's over 20,000 books on self-help. success and mindset. Yeah. Most of them don't talk about the pain of your past. They don't talk about, you know, healing past pain. They talk about here are the seven strategies to be more successful and have a growth mindset. Yes. But I feel like you can't just layer on top of pain. Some point it's gonna CR, it's gonna topple over. So conceals past pains defined by the opinions of others is a power this mindset and drifts towards complacency. so when we, we first need to be aware of, am I living in any of these spaces? There's no good or bad, right or wrong here. It's just let me be aware of it and see, is this supporting me? Is this serving me? And this is serving the people around me. And when we are aware of it, we can start to make a new decision and commitment towards stepping into the greatness mindset. And the greatest mindset includes that you are driven by a meaningful mission. driven by that. Not by fear, not by what everyone else is doing, but by your mission. No Olympic gold medalist did it by accident.

They had a mission.

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

You were afraid of, because I think.

People you were afraid. Because that was fear of judgment and.

I didn't want to be looked as weak. Right, right. And by the way, those who don't know what Louis looks like, he's like six foot five, looks like a brick wall. Yeah. And you wouldn't want to meet him.

In a dark alley. He's a sweet guy. But, but you, you turn fear into confidence by making a fear list and you write down a list of your fears and you start going all in on them. this is scary. It's uncomfortable.

It's hard.

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

That's huge. Not driven by pain, but by purpose. Yes. That's a, that's a very big idea because so much of the suffering in this world is because people are unconsciously driven by their fear and their pain and it blocks them from actually getting better.

Exactly. And the part of it is you can be driven by a purpose to solve problems in the world. And the problem could be the pain you once experienced. You want to make sure that others don't experience that pain. I can talk about that in a second, but you create a healthy identity. Something you talked about in the first three minutes of this show is if people heard the things we said about ourselves, or if we said these things to other people out loud, the way we speak to ourselves at times, they would put you in a hospital. They would call you crazy. They'd be like, something is really off and they would medicate you for those conversations. They would cancel you online if you said these things. All these things wouldn't work, but we continue to say critical things to ourselves and put ourselves down and degrade ourselves. which is a unhealthy identity. So we need to create a healthy identity and then they take action with a game plan. This is the greatness mindset versus the powerless mindset. And when we can first be aware of which mindset am I in more frequently? Again, no right or wrong, good or bad, no judgment. But how is a powerless mindset working for you? How is concealing these things working for you? How is being crippled by fear and doubt working for you. It might have some benefits, but there's still a lack of something inside of you. So this takes courage to step in a greatness mindset frequently. Yeah, but that's the decision we need to make.

For people listening, they're probably wondering, wow, you know, maybe I haven't identified this or that as trauma or maybe actually I did survive a really traumatic child that I'm aware of. Yeah, but I'm stuck in these dysfunctional patterns and I don't know how to break through. I don't know how to rewire. and, you know, how do we kind of reconstitute ourselves in this modern world that's a toxic culture? So if we all got to go off and live in a monastery somewhere, it might be okay, but how do we do that? How do you provide a path for people to think about their own healing?

Well, it's very difficult because partly it's a matter of resources, like those that are fortunate enough economically to be able to afford a good therapist. And I have to emphasize good because there's a lot of really useless therapies out there. I could talk a great length about that. That don't go to the heart of the things, but you only deal with the surface.

Yeah.

So if you can afford to do that, by all means, you know, just as you take your car in for a tune up, take yourself in for a tune up and finds out, find out what is grinding and what is not working and where it's not lubricated and, you know, what actually happened. There's lots of therapeutic modalities. I know I've developed one. You mentioned that in your introduction, Compassion Inquiry, but I don't claim it's a panacea.

What is that?

Well, at this point, I'm only mentioning it as one possible amongst many, many others. There are so many forms of therapy out there and people can find whatever works for them. So there's MICE, Compassion Inquiry. My good friend Dick Schwartz's Internal Family Systems, which is getting increasing traction and attention for good reason. There is Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing.

To body-based therapies.

Body-based therapies, that's right. Cranial sacral work, body work such as massages and so on. And very interesting how many times people will get a massage and a therapist will touch Therapists will touch a certain part of their body and all of a sudden the tears come. Because like Bessel van der Kolk says in his bestselling book, the body does keep the score. The body keeps the score. So the sensory motor therapies, Patrick Ogden, I could name many, many therapies. But if you're going to find a therapy, find one that's trauma informed. most therapies are not trauma informed, something like cognitive behavioral therapy mostly deal with, I'm not saying it's categorically, but mostly deals with the surface of things. It doesn't deal with the underlying traumatic template for why you think the way you do. Also, but for people who can't afford a private therapist, well, other community programs, online there's all kinds of information about trauma. Many of my talks have been uploaded to YouTube, not by me, but just by others on trauma. You can get lots of information, not just from me, but from others as well. Then there are modalities that anybody can do, such as meditation and mindfulness. Like you spent a month on your own and basically I've done similar things. where you're just alone with your mind.

Yeah. That's a scary thing.

It can be a very scary thing for sure. But that means taking a break from the digital world.

Yeah.

Actually spending time alone with the mind and then writing about it, journaling about it, talking to people about it. There's lots of stuff that people can do and increasingly, There are more and more books that are really good guides to understanding and working with trauma. Peter Levine's work, Waking the Tiger, in an unspoken voice. That's another one of Peter's work. My various books that you were kind enough to mention, including the most recent one, Bessel's the Body Keeps the Score, Bruce Perry and Oprah's recent book called what Happened to youo? About Childhood Trauma.

Yeah.

And memoirs like Educated by Tara Westover, which is quite a wake-up call about trauma and its impacts. There's lots of stuff out there now. At least we're living in a world where this conversation, although it's not penetrating the medical profession very much, at least it's happening out there in the world.

Yeah, it's true. And I think, you know, historically, illness was seen as a spiritual problem in most cultures. You mentioned Lakota, you know, when someone's sick, they bring the community together. and the shamans and the medicine men were the healers. And there was no division between spirituality and disease and health. It was all one continuum. And I spent a lot of time in very interesting cultures when I was in medical school, when it was a Hopi reservation, and then there was in Nepal. And there was this embedded culture of shamanism and medicine men and healers. And I remember being up in mountains and way in the remote areas near Tibet in Nepal, we're in a medical expedition. And the Dami Jancris were the Nepalese healers.

And.

There was this incredible ceremony with the whole community around and the ill person. It wasn't like you went to the doctor and you went and sat in an office by yourself. The whole community was there.

That's right.

And the healer was there working on the person and they were doing whatever they were doing, but activating you know, different healing mechanisms, the body that, that we actually can activate through these various different modalities. And, and, you know, many cultures historically have used medicines, plant medicines, to actually heal. And now with the Advent of this field of psychedelic assisted therapy, this whole conversation is changing. In fact, the psychedelics, and we've had Michael Paul in the podcast, Tony Bossus and others who are doing this work, and, and they They really have.

Sort.

Of resurrected this body of research that started in the 50s around psychedelics and LSD to look at how we can use these to help heal the mind. And I know you sort of work with this model as well as part of the modalities. And like you said, there are many, but for many people, this can be an interruption in their normal view of themselves and their world. and great safety. And I have members of my own family who've been able to take advantage of this and actually start to find peace and start to kind of unpack the sort of traumas. And I have many friends and many colleagues who've used this. And a lot of it's sort of underground now, but it's really emerging. And whether it's ketamine therapy, whether it's MDMA, psilocybin therapy, whether it's ayahuasca or ibogaine, which is incredibly interesting to me as an addiction treatment. We want to sort of talk about that a little bit. And even things like stellate ganglion blocks, which are a nerve block in the neck that interrupts the fight or flight response. These are all technologies, let's call them ancient technologies, some more modern technologies that actually seem to help people sort of take a quantum jump over and leapfrog over a lot of the sort of slogging through the traumas through traditional therapy and traditional psychiatry and medication, which often doesn't really work that well.

Well, I wonder if you had, like myself, often wished or not often wished that if we could just combine the amazing achievements of modern medicine with some humility to look at the traditional wisdoms, teachings of indigenous peoples, because it's not a question of one over the other. but boy, if we had that kind of wisdom infused into our technological minds, we would be so much more powerful as healers.

And.

You know, as you suggested, the illness is not just as a biological event, but as a psychological, spiritual event. So the medicine wheel of North American indigenous people, which the four quadrants of mind and spirit and body and and sociality all have to be balanced. And as regards psychedelics, so my third to last chapter in this book is on psychedelics. And because I have worked with them quite a bit, and I spoke with Michael Pollan and I asked him if he was surprised by the success of his book, How to Change youe Mind. And he said, what he was most surprised was that he expected a lot more pushback. within the medical profession, but he says people are realizing how thin our toolkit actually is. And then we have to have to find some other solutions. And I myself have found both individually for me, but also as a healing modality for people I work with. Psychedelics to be a very powerful.

Potential.

A modern potential is a very powerful modality. And I'm not a psychedelic evangelist. I don't think psychedelics are going to save the world or save medicine. But, boy, are we nuts not to explore them and, and, and to employ them. Yeah. Because they have so much to potentially to offer in so many conditions. In the book, I give examples of people healing, not just from mental health, but also from physical conditions.

Yeah.

Based on changing their mindset. as it flows from psychedelic experience.

So Gabor, how do these medicines work? And I think they're all different, right? But how do they reset these neural networks and how do they help people metabolize their trauma?

Some traditions, like the example with ayahuasca, it wasn't necessarily the client who would take the plant, but the shaman would. and the shaman would then get a vision and deep insight. And I've worked with these indigenous shamans in the Peruvian rainforest. Let me tell you, they're penetrating.

The Shipibo healers.

Yeah, the Shipibo people are deep. And they see things that Western medicine just hasn't got a clue about. I'm talking personally, I had that experience.

Yeah.

Can you share that?

Yeah. And they just saw right into me. They had no idea who I was. they were not impressed with me. -They didn't read all your books. -They didn't read my books. They were not impressed with my credentials. They just saw this human being carrying a lot of trauma, and they just saw it, and they worked with it. So, and I didn't have to be on the plant for them to see that. I was, but it was their own vision that allowed them to see that. So that's the first point. Is that partly it has to do with who's administering it, in what context.

And what training they've had?

-Yeah, the set and setting they call it. -The set and setting. -You just go to a party and teach stuff. -It works. Secondly, Freud, Sigmund Freud once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, meaning that in dreams you manifest some of our most unconscious emotional dynamics, which is true. But the interpretation of dreams is notoriously difficult. And I think Freud certainly had his own, he had his own delusions when it came to interpreting other people's dreams. But I think psychedelics might be said to be a royal road to the unconscious because they remove the usual defenses of the egoic mind. So you get to see both the pain and the possibility that underlies the egoic mindset. So people get in touch with some deep agony sometimes. They also get in touch with some beauty. that they had not been touched with, but they've been inside them all along. So you get to see both the traumatized, unprotected, uncovered, traumatized aspect of your personality that's been pulling the strings behind the curtains for a long time now. But you also get to see the possibilities of oneness and unity and love and beauty. so that you don't have to keep running, you don't have to keep employing these defenses. That's it in a very small nutshell, but the potential is tremendous and I've seen it happen. I've experienced some of it myself and I've certainly seen it happen a lot in my work with other people.

Yeah, I think it's very powerful and the sort of addiction space is sort of fascinating because not all psychedelics or plant medicines are the same and this particular compound which I don't think we've talked about in the podcast Iboga gain derived from the Iboga tree.

Yeah, one of the things I wish I had talked about in this chapter, but I didn't, and I'm not even sure why I omitted it. I was probably just want to get the book finished.

There's only 4,000 pages already.

Was it Iboga? Because Iboga, which is a plant that goes in Gabon by the indigenous people. Yeah, and it's been used as a spiritual enzyme, you might say, by those people, they're tribally speaking, but it's got the amazing quality of not just of unearthing traumatic imprints like many of the other psychedelics do, but also in the case of opiates, actually obviating opiate withdrawal. So you could be on heroin for 20 years and after two nights of Iboga or Ibogaine, which is the extract, you are not going through withdrawal symptoms.

Which is shocking from a medical perspective. An alcoholic, you know, I worked in the emergency room and someone come in with alcohol withdrawal. It's a physiological phenomena.

You know, heroin addiction is a. Yeah. And withdrawal is a physiological phenomena. So how do you interrupt that? Well, opiate withdrawal is terrible. The. The dependence because of the, you know, the. The loss of opiate receptors. And therefore, all of a sudden, you don't get the opiate from the outside. your system is in total shock. Ibogaine prevents that. Now, again, it's not for everybody. There's some medical contraindications and the context has to be really right and pristine, both psychologically and medically and physically, but in the proper hands, it's transformative. And there's studies being done now with American veterans with PTSD. showing amazing results with using iboga. Stanford is running such a study. But of course, in the wisdom of our current society, it's illegal and it's considered to be medically useless. Yeah. And therefore it's hard to even get permission to study it.

Yeah.

You know, which is. I mean, there is a way to the highest degree.

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