The Medical System Was Like Boarding School | PTSD | Healing | AEM #128 Dr Robin Youngson

Okay, welcome to episode 128 of An Evolving Man podcast. Today I'm excited to be speaking to Dr. Robin Youngson. Dr. Youngson is a certified Havening practitioner and trainer and is a recently retired anaesthetist specialist with a long career in the public health service in the UK and New Zealand. He works full-time as a trauma therapist and trainer helping people transform their lives and careers. He is also the author of the book The Science of Miracles.

Welcome, Robin. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you, Piers. It's a pleasure to talk with you.

Well, thank you so much, uh, for the work you're doing. I think it's, uh, reading your biography over the weekend, it's just fascinating. To hear the journey and, yeah, obviously linking that into the health system as well. So I'd love for us to begin with what drew you into writing the book, into, you know, The Science of Miracles.

Um, I wrote the book in the way I did because, um, the work I do now is, um, just so extraordinary and so far removed from what doctors could imagine would be possible, that I knew that if I wrote it as like a nonfiction book with a series of, you know, published research and arguments and so on, that no one would really believe it. And I thought the only way to convey this in a powerful way is actually to tell my story of how, as an engineer turned doctor turned You know, a high-tech doctor doing anaesthesia, intensive care in our biggest hospitals. How did that man that died in the war, rationalist and scientist and doctor, you know, end up doing this woo-woo strange healing work as a trauma therapist? And that was just the best way I thought to do it, is to tell the whole story and to dramatise it, you know, have it read like an exciting novel. Even though all the stories are true. So that's how it came about. But it's taken me 3 years and I wrote the book 3 times. And it was, yeah, it's been a big piece of work.

It sounds like quite a journey to write it 3 times.

It's been quite a journey to change from, yeah, the rationalist doctor that I was to the work that I do now, yes.

Yeah, yeah, I really found it powerful, you know, the different stories. But then, like I was saying, about the neuroscience and, you know, the practices and some of the case studies as well. I thought that was, was very interesting to read.

Yeah, the work I do now is by far the most gratifying and astonishing work I've ever done as a doctor. Um, after, you know, 40 years of a medical career.

Thank you. Yeah, I find that similar with my work, is it's just so beautiful seeing people transform. Think, people have had these conditions for years and then suddenly they can transform. It just feels such a blessing. I was talking to a friend about this a couple of weeks ago, and she does similar work but somatic therapy. And it's just, yeah, very such a blessing. So I'd love for you to share a little bit of your story. You know, obviously the book begins with stories of the hospital and then moves into boarding school. Yeah, I'd love you to begin with a bit of your background. You know, what happened?

Yeah, so I, I kind of grew up in England because my dad was a doctor in the British Army. So as a consequence, my childhood was spent in many different countries. I went to many schools. We never had our own home, you know, a place where we knew lots of people, where I had friends. I didn't have friends. I was a very shy boy. And by the age of 10, I think I'd been to just, I don't know how many schools. And the headmaster of the primary school said, well, Robin is never going to pass the 11+ exam, so he'll never get into grammar school. So my education was going to be a disaster. And And so my parents decided that the only way to rescue my education was to send me to boarding school in England, and they were posted off to Singapore, and I knew I wouldn't see them for 7 months. So at the age of 10 years, I was sent to this dreadful institution that really was like something out of a Dickens novel. I mean, the level of physical privation and You know, just— and the bullying and the abuse and, you know, what went on in that place was just truly awful. And, you know, I was a very shy boy. I was redheaded. I blushed furiously. I was a natural target for bullies, and I was just horrendously bullied. And there was one person who was kind to me at the school, and that was the schoolteacher who groomed me and sexually abused me. Oh my God. which I can talk about easily now. And, you know, as a response to that experience, I developed a terrible fear of abandonment, which I carried for more than 50 years, and really disconnected from my feelings. So as a teenager, I became a geek, hiding away, inventing electronic circuits and things, and naturally progressed into engineering and got a place at Cambridge and did an engineering degree there. And it wasn't until I was about 20 that the calling to come into medicine kind of got louder in my heart. My dad was a doctor and I began to understand how much satisfaction he got. So I talked to my professors about this idea and they said, well, you should finish your engineering degree because those who bring a dual qualification of very different fields together sometimes do really innovative stuff. And I was loving it. I mean, it was a very exciting degree course to do. So I Completed my degree and got the highest job I could find, which is working in oil exploration. Shame around the world, saving up a great deal of money to pay my way through medical school, which I attended in the UK. And but the medical world was not what I expected because I went into medicine with the idea of being a healer and that compassion and caring being core values. And what I discovered was. It was a system that was desperately dehumanizing, traumatizing. And balanced against that was I discovered I had a profound empathy for the suffering of patients, far more than my peers. And as a medical student, a junior doctor, spent hours and hours just talking to patients and trying to reassure them and explain what the hell was going on. And it was not until my 50s that the penny dropped and I realised why I had that empathy. And that was that at boarding school I'd learned about cruel institutions and about bullies and about matron being in charge and lights out at 10 o'clock and shared bathrooms and shared dormitories. And these are all the features that I discovered in an English hospital. And so in every suffering patient, I was subconsciously seeing myself. as this 10-year-old boy locked in this dreadful institution. And that was the source of my deep empathy, you know, which has really driven my work for 40 years and led me to campaigning to try to bring more humanity and compassion into healthcare.

Wow. Well, let's go into more depth in a moment about the, you know, the medical side of things, because as you say, that lack of empathy sounds very similar to other institutions like boarding school, you know, the medical system. What just come in as I'm listening to you, and I was reading your book about going off doing one of the hardest jobs, you know, oil exploration, just reminded me of Roald Dahl because he did a similar thing himself. You know, I think he worked for Shell.

Okay.

And, and he went to Newfoundland, I think. And did some trip when he was 18, 19. So as I'm listening to you and reading, I'm like, oh wow, that— why is it that we leave boarding school, we go off and do these crazy things?

Well, um, I don't know if you've come across Internal Family Systems as a form of therapy, but it, it basically describes how, you know, the child part carries all these terrible wounds and it carries so much pain that it has to be suppressed and hidden away, otherwise It would overwhelm us. So in order to survive, we reinvent ourselves with a variety of personality roles. And the first of those was intellectualizing. So I threw myself into my studies. So, you know, if you intellectualize everything, you don't need any feelings at all. And I meet clients, male clients, you know, professional people in their 70s who have no connection to their feelings and will intellectualize every question you ask them. So So that's one defense. The second defense was to reinvent myself as a heroic explorer. And I joined the Cambridge University Expedition Club, and we got up to crazy antics. I traveled right across Alaska in an open boat in the Yukon River, all the way across Alaska through the delta and 600 miles up the coast, up to Cape Prince of Wales in the Arctic Ocean in an open boat with a bunch of other crazy students.

And nearly got killed twice.

Yeah, I nearly died 3 times.

3 times, okay.

And then, of course, you think you're invincible and then ended up working in Nigeria, right down in the Niger Delta in the oil industry and having lots of crazy adventures in the Australian outback and places. So yeah, and then I invented myself as a heroic doctor You know, doing the most high-tech medicine, again disconnected from my feelings but saving lots of lives. And then I became a heroic campaigner trying to save the world and bring compassion into healthcare in many different countries. So all of these are defenses against the terrible pain that's held inside from the childhood experiences.

Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, it's interesting how our journeys kind of— it's quite similar because I traveled, didn't do this crazy, you know, go— but I, I traveled after boarding school. I just knew I needed to get out. I just went, went around Australia hitchhiking and things like that.

Mm-hmm.

But, um, I, I could— from when I went from hostel to hostel, it'd be meeting new people. And I would try different personalities. I'd be the really bubbly and quite, oh, hi, how you doing? And I was, and then quite quiet and trying different things out. It's like, yeah, it was like wearing a different mask that I feel that's what we learned to do in these schools, to wear masks. Who am I? Who do I want to be?

Yeah. And for most of my life, I had pretty, you know, serious social phobia. I mean, in social settings, I was incredibly awkward and embarrassed and difficult and didn't know, you know, how to talk to people at a party or whatever. Dinner parties, I'd overcompensate by stepping into hero role and telling all these heroic stories, which sometimes embarrassed my wife.

Yeah, yeah, I used to embarrass my wife as well with stories. Piers, stop talking so much. Thank you, thank you. So, you know, boarding school— anything else which, you know, from writing your story, anything by writing that's come to the surface? And obviously, you know, we connected through you watching the documentary.

Yeah.

What is your sense of boarding school now, you know, 50 years on, you're looking at it?

Well, I mean, I vowed I would never send my children to such an institution. I mean, some people flourish. I mean, if you're socially very confident and you're great at sports, then, you know, and securing yourself, boarding school might be a great place. But yeah, I would never have sent my children at all. But I just, you know, coming into the hospital organisation, you know, I just, I got, I suddenly realised that the archetype of the hospital organisation is an English boarding school. You know, because when you go into boarding school, you're stripped of identity, put in a uniform, you eat dreadful food served at fixed times, there are innumerable rules and regulations, which many of them are arbitrary, you lose all privacy, you sleep in shared dormitories, you have shared bathrooms, you know, or at worst, the place is absolutely full of bullies, it's lights out at 10 o'clock. And get up early in the morning. And the person in charge is a matron, who's not a, you know, who's a scary figure. And I came into hospital, and what did I discover? You know, in an old British hospital with nightingale wards. I mean, just— That's the experience of being a patient in hospital. You're stripped of your clothes and your identity and given a hospital number and dressed in pyjamas or a hospital gown. You sleep in a A dormitory, a ward with lots of other people. There's shared bathrooms. There's all sorts of arbitrary rules. You have to lie in a bed when you actually— you might be perfectly well. And the place is absolutely full of bullies. And the food is awful and served at fixed times. And it's lights out at 10 o'clock. And that was, yeah. We begin to see the patterns that, that go through different forms of institution.

Um, do you feel that they've changed? Because obviously you've worked until recently.

I think, I think medicine has, um, it's changed a little bit. I think there's, there's more emphasis now on the well-being of junior doctors. The working hours are a lot better. I mean, in England, when I started as a junior doctor, I was working 90 to 100 hours a week. And work all day Monday, all Monday night, all day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, Wednesday night, Thursday. You know, just the night shift was on top of the day shift and you were just continuously on duty. Whereas now, with, you know, European working hours and limitation of hours, And so now it's only, you know, 60 hours a week. But, you know, the culture within medicine is that doctors are never allowed to have feelings. They're never allowed to have vulnerability. They're never allowed to have a mental health issue. We never, ever, ever talk about our feelings or things that have gone wrong. And I mean, I've lost a number of my peers to suicide, anaesthetic peers, all at the prime of life, at the peak of their career, excellent clinicians, teachers, family people, sports, lots of things in life, and yet they're killing themselves. And there's so much burnout and stress. But I mean, what we call burnout as doctors is actually PTSD. It's a result of many, many traumatic experiences. And, you know, the things I've witnessed as a doctor in my training, you know, were just beyond humanity. You know, I remember one day as a shift as a junior doctor when I saw a young mother and baby die, and I tried very hard to save them, and they were dead on the floor. And then a 19-year-old motorcyclist died on my operating table. So I'd had 3 deaths in a row. In the middle of a 15-hour shift on a Saturday. And no one suggested that I should take time off work, or that I should have counseling or any kind of debrief. And I was expected to continue the 15-hour shift. And I anesthetized 5 more patients that day. And I went and had a cup of tea and tried to calm myself and went to see my patient to get consent for anesthesia. And the thought through my mind was, I wonder if I should tell him that my last 3 patients are dead and maybe he doesn't want me as his anaesthetist today. And no, I'd better keep quiet. So I didn't confess that. And I anaesthetised 5 more patients that day, you know, probably in a very unfit state to be caring for anyone. And then on the Sunday did a 15-hour shift and then reported for duty 8 o'clock on Monday. And so it went on. No debriefing, no counselling, no support. No acknowledgement that this was a catastrophic tragedy and trauma for me. It was just, you know, well, that's just usual, business as usual.

Just like that dissociation that we learn in these schools is carried on in the medical system.

Yeah, well, it's admired as a great professional value. Clinical detachment is what it's called. It's a euphemism for dissociation. That's held up as a high value in medical practice. You must not have an emotional connection to your patient, otherwise you can't make objective, good decisions. You will be a bad doctor if you have an emotional connection to your patients. So that doesn't allow for compassion.

And that's still the case today?

Very much so, yeah. Really? It's changing a little bit, but it's pretty slow. Yeah. Wow.

That's incredible because, you know, in Bessel van der Kolk's book, which you talk about in your book, uh, The Body Keeps the Score, he says the essence of trauma is dissociation, is the essence of trauma. So here they are teaching doctors to be traumatized.

Yeah, and much— I mean, in my generation, much of the teaching was by humiliation. That was the most common method of teaching, is, you know, in a group of medical students with a senior teacher who would grill you on you know, the 10 different nerve branches of, you know, the axillary nerve or something like that. And if you got any one of those wrong, you'd be humiliated in front of the group. And the theory was that if, you know, if you get enough humiliation, it would be a motivation to do more, you know, study harder and know all the right answers. It was really dreadful.

Which now we know, and I think you talk a little bit about that, and that's what I've kind of noticed about the education system as well, is that when we are in that fight or flight response, the brain is not working that, you know, you've talked about the 3 brains, the reptilian, the limbic, and the, the neocortex.

So the neocortex, which is our executive, our thinking brain, goes offline if you're stressed enough. So it's—

yeah, so really these schools or the medical system, it's not a place at the moment, it's not a place of safety. So you're, you know, that's what I found. I thought I was stupid in boarding school because I was in fear all the time. I could perform on a sports field, yeah, but I couldn't perform in a class.

So that, yeah, the international research on burnout among doctors that, you know, shows depending on the survey between 30 and 50% of all doctors have burnout, which is characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, cynicism, and a lack of personal agency. In other words, the work becomes meaningless. You're not even achieving anything anymore. I call that PTSD, dissociation. As a trauma therapist. But it hasn't had, you know, The trauma, there's no awareness of trauma within the medical profession. No, I mean, I trained for 14 years as a doctor and there was not a single lecture about trauma and how it impacts us. Zero awareness, pretty much. Yeah.

What needs to happen, Robin, that, you know, in this system?

I've spent about 35 years trying to make the healthcare system better by any possible means. You know, I began as an engineer by re-engineering patient care pathways. I became a national and international patient safety expert. I campaigned all around the world in many countries to bring compassion back into healthcare. And all these things have basically failed. And the system deeply resists change. And I think we actually just have to start again from scratch. That, you know, it was Buckminster Fuller who said, never try to change the system, just invent something better and make it redundant. And one of the papers I wrote, which is with a young Māori doctor, indigenous doctor here in New Zealand, and a fellow Hāvena, and she and I wrote a bicultural European-Māori vision of what a truly healing hospital would be like. And we just need to start creating new institutions which are for the healing of the staff as well as the patients. But healing is not a word that's allowed in the medical profession. So some years ago, the British Medical Journal invited me to write and submit an article on the role of compassion in healthcare. And I thought, yes, at last the medical profession is listening. You know, this is a prestigious journal. They want to hear about this after, you know, years and years of silence. So I was excited about that. And because the paper was commissioned by the editors, I thought it would be— I naively thought it was going to get published. But it went for peer review. And one of the peer reviewers said, you should not use the word healing because that has negative connotations, because it's like woo-woo and non-scientific. And another peer reviewer said, haven't talked about the negative side effects of compassion and how dangerous it would be to show compassion to someone with mental illness. And so my paper was rejected. And I mean, these are the kind of deeply embedded values within the profession of medicine. But then the entire evidence base for medical practice is based on placebo-controlled randomized controlled trials, which means that human consciousness is completely excluded from the entire science of medicine. And the only medical science we have describes the workings of a machine that's not conscious. I mean, that is actually fundamentally the basis of medical practice and medical science, which is why it's When you go with a GP with a stress-related illness, the GP is not interested in your emotions or your thoughts or your beliefs or your life experiences or your trauma. You know, this system is designed to give you a prescription to correct the imbalance of chemicals in your brain that's purported to be the cause of your depression.

Mm-hmm.

You know, it's so deeply embedded in the system. And it's taken me, you know, 4 decades to understand that, um, and to realize that every attempt to change it is futile, it fails, you know, and not for want of trying.

I love that vision of setting up. I get that sense as well in the UK because I really see how many— in so many areas, the systems don't work anymore.

Yeah.

Um, one is corruption. I mean, which is interesting. I'm starting to understand that more and more. There's a guy called Roberto Saviano who's a journalist and he has worked with corruption, traveled around the world. He's basically got a bodyguard because the mafioso are trying to kill him. And he was asked, where's the most corrupt place in the world? And You know, I thought I would probably be Nigeria, Uganda. You know, I've lived in Africa. I'm like, oh, these places are so corrupt. And he says, no, it's England. It's Britain, and in particular London, you know, because of the corruption which goes on in the financial sector. And it shocked me. And yet, reading other books, it just, it kind of, Oliver Bullock's The Butler to the World, he says exactly the same thing.

Yeah, and I see it here in medical practice here in New Zealand. The New Zealand medical system is really like a carbon copy of the NHS. I mean, extremely similar. We have all the, you know, all the roles have the same names. But when I first came to New Zealand to practice here and went to see my first patient and filled out the consent form for consent for anesthesia, it was the identical form that I'd used in England. off the same printing press, except on the back cover there was a translation into Māori. That was the only difference, you know, it was the same. But, you know, our medical consultants, surgeons and anaesthetists, they work both in the public hospital and the private hospital simultaneously. They have 2 jobs that overlap. And, you know, I've seen numerous cases of, for instance, surgeons in the public hospital managed to do 3 hip joint replacements or knee joint replacements in a 1-day operating list. But in the private hospital, they do 5 or 6 in the same time, the same procedure using the same implants, you know, identically. And, you know, why is it that they only do 3 in the public hospital and 6 in private hospital? Well, they, you know, work slow in the public hospital to create large waiting lists to supply their private practice. And they see a patient in a public hospital outpatient appointment, someone who needs a hip joint replacement, and said, well, the waiting list for this in the public system is a year and a half, but I could fit you in next week in my private hospital. You've got insurance. It's just, yeah. Very widespread.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I don't have an ethical objection to private practice, but it should be entirely separated from the public hospital system because all the specialists who work in the private hospitals were trained in the public system at the cost of, I don't know, a million pounds a doctor. I don't know what the cost is. And all the backup in the public hospital. So if a patient has an operation, hip joint replacement, in the public— in the private hospital, and then has a heart attack or a complication, they're immediately put in an ambulance and shipped to the public hospital to cater for all the complications. So, and they cherry-pick the fittest patients with the most simplest procedures and do those in private and leave all the more complex and sicker patients in the public hospital. You know, so it's— I mean, there's gross corruption.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And price fixing.

So yeah, so it's basically what I'm hearing is it's like that Buckminster Fuller idea that we've got to create a new system. And I see that in the UK is, yeah, you know, it's like the schooling, we have to bring emotional intelligence in. And I, like I said before we began, my vision is boarding schools close within 10 years, and I feel there's a push for that now because leadership is changing from that command and control, the way that it sounds like hospitals are still run like that, but they're moving into more emotional intelligence. A lot of the leading authors that I'm reading at the moment, they're all saying intuition, emotional intelligence, relationships, that's what's key. And, and I almost feel that's what we need, not only in education but also in Healthcare, childcare.

And the legal system. I mean, in every endeavor.

Every system.

And that's not to say that we can't do that in an existing hospital. I was very fortunate to be, in essence, the medical director of Waitekere Hospital, which is in the western part of Auckland, our biggest city in New Zealand. And there's a population of about 200,000 people, ethnically very diverse, a lot of poverty, a lot of disadvantage. And they didn't have their own acute hospital services. There was a little cottage hospital with a maternity unit and a couple of geriatric wards and some clinics. And that was— there was a political decision to build a 200-bed acute hospital on that location with an emergency department and everything else. And I was, in essence, the medical director of the team that was commissioned to design and build and open and run that hospital. And I worked with a visionary general manager and a wonderful director of nursing. And my job, we had a wonderful team of project managers whose job was to build the hospital on budget, you know, on time. My job was to build a better hospital and was given complete freedom to meet anyone in the world and bring any ideas to figure out what is the purpose, fundamental purpose of a hospital. How does every single staff member add value? How do we create a compassionate hospital? What does healing look like? What's the role of families? How can we envelop people into a supportive environment? And we made huge strides in that regard. We almost completely eliminated bullying from the hospital. We spent days with staff talking about meaning and purpose and how they make a contribution. We built a deeply compassionate hospital. We built into the hospital lots of space for family, accommodation and said that any patient has the right to have one care person stay with them 24 hours, a family member or a friend. And they get a name badge. And they can use the kitchen and make toast and hot chocolate at 2 o'clock in the morning if they want to. And many, many things to create a compassionate care environment. And did some extraordinary work around rebuilding interprofessional trust and— and breaking down silos and things like that. And we were really flourishing and intending that this would become an international centre, you know, for compassionate hospital care. And then a new chief executive was appointed to the health board who decided that our little hospital having its own independent leadership was very inefficient. And that was merged into the big city hospital on the other side of the city on the which is part of town. And we just became a country cousin, the satellite. And I lost my job and all the senior leaders, inspirational leaders, lost their jobs. And, you know, the hospital began to run down. And I mean, we'd embedded a deep culture that lasted for, you know, a decade or more, but gradually got whittled away. And I was very sad to hear stories just yesterday of a patient who had really poor care in that hospital and a lack of compassion. And yeah, so it's certainly possible within existing structures to create a very different kind of culture. But it's really vulnerable to just some new leader coming in who believes that the way to create an organization is command and control and efficiency. has no understanding of culture and relationships whatsoever.

Wow, wow, that's incredible. I'm, you know, it's really heartwarming to hear that you set this hospital up, and it reminds me quite a lot of another of the leadership books I've been reading is Simon Sinek's work. Yes, and his book Leaders Eat Last, and he talks about creating this culture of safety, circle of safety. And that sounds like that's what you did there, and you removed the bullying. You know, they talk about— he talks about in the book about 3M, which does the Post-it notes, etc. And they have this really— there's no bullying. There's, you know, if you make a mistake, great. It's really cherished, and they've just thrived as a company.

Yeah, we did a lot of work around creating a learning organization. Yeah. And, you know, after the hospital, we had to recruit 500 new staff. And there were all the shortage specialists like emergency medicine doctors and neonatal nurse practitioners and people like that that none of the hospitals in New Zealand could get. And we never advertised the job. We advertised an opportunity to work in a community to, you know, give of your best. And said, if you'd like to work in a hospital with these kind of values and these kind of opportunities, you know, register your details on this website. And 14,000 health professionals registered their details and they recruited out of that pool the 500 staff we need.

That's incredible.

We kind of use values-based recruiting. You know, we put scenarios to people. How would you manage this situation? And created a really remarkable culture. After the hospital opened, all the new wards and the emergency department, and a tsunami of patients kind of arrived at the front door from this deprived community. I remember for the first 2 weeks, the director of nursing and myself would walk around the hospital all day, every day, just checking with staff, seeing what's happening. And we came into the emergency department and we heard some raised voices coming from behind the curtains in the resus bay. which was empty. There was no patient there. And it was the chairman of anesthesia was getting very angry with one of the emergency medicine consultants and yelling at him. And he had a concern about safety of patients being transferred in between hospitals. And we were about to intervene because this kind of behavior was not acceptable. But one of the charge nurses, who was this tiny little Filipino girl who was, you know, really about 5 feet tall, and the Director of anesthesia was a great big man, about 6 foot 2 tall. And before we could intervene, this nurse stepped in quietly, walked up to these 2 arguing doctors who were very senior to her in rank and size, and wordlessly took the chairman of anesthesia by the elbow and led him across to the other corner of the room and gazed up at his face and said, I'm sorry, doctor, but that behavior is not acceptable. In our hospital.

Wow.

He was embarrassed and came back to his senses and apologized and went back to his medical colleague and they sorted it out. And we quietly stole away going, yes, you know, did a high five. We didn't have to intervene. You know, someone against the gradient of authority and seniority and size had used her gentleness and her smallness and her Clarity of values to really intervene in a beautiful way.

Wow, that's so inspiring. I'd invite you to write a book about that, about that experience. Yeah, but yeah, I haven't got to— I mean, yeah, I only got the book on Saturday, so I only had a chance to read about the Havening. We'll get into that in a moment, but yeah.

How we really change the culture.

It's so inspiring that— and I think for me, what I feel is changing at the moment is sowing these seeds that there can be change. And it's like the documentary, it's like— and the fact, okay, we're going to close these schools, bring in mandatory reporting, these things, it's sowing those seeds of hope. And you telling the story, it's like, wow, that's just incredible. that's— that another 100 hospitals like that can start across the world because it's possible.

Yeah, but it needs very different values from the leaders. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you feel we need to change regarding the leaders? I mean, that's kind of one of the visions I've had of, you know, creating compassionate leaders. And I've spent the last few years writing a course called The Compassionate Leaders, bringing in meditation, inner work. What do you see? What needs to happen for our leaders?

I think, I think they're all traumatized, and they— I mean, they need healing. So one of the things I offer as a therapist is, um, for a week at a time, I close my clinic and I offer my service to one human being for 5 days. And we have a little apartment in our home with its own entrance. And my wife is very renowned for her cooking and baking and preparing food with great love. And we invite someone into our home and they get 5 days of the Havening therapy and Maris' beautiful food and some of her energy healing and some positive psychology and some teaching about compassion. And so today I just got an email from one of my anaesthetic colleagues, a consultant anaesthetist. Saying, hey, I'm interested in your 5-day healing retreat because I really need to reflect on my own wellbeing and priorities and so on. And I think we just have to start offering healing to these senior people. And then they bring a very different set of values and understandings to their work. Because the senior leaders who act in this command and control, method. I mean, they're acting out their trauma and they're acting out their— hidden underneath that is deep fearfulness and vulnerability, right? They're terrified to make a mistake in front of anyone. They're never going to admit their mistakes or be vulnerable. They're not going to be vulnerable servant leaders. And we actually have to heal their trauma to allow them to come back to their humanity and to think it's okay to make a mistake and to invite, you know, to make it safe for all their direct reports to make a mistake and to learn from errors. And to, yeah. So I'm not, you know, I just think we have to start building new institutions.

Yeah.

Based on fundamentally different values. I've completely given up trying to change the mainstream healthcare system.

Yeah.

And it's extraordinarily slow to change. I mean, even if, let's say, we invent a new method for treating heart attacks. So this would be going back 30 years. So new research showing if you use clot-busting drugs and administer them within so many hours of a heart attack, you can reduce the mortality by, let's say, 50%. And then you have 5 or 6 very large randomized controlled trials showing that this is absolutely evidence-based, very certain. It's a major breakthrough in reducing the mortality of heart attacks. Do you know how long it takes the medical profession to adopt into routine practice something proven to that level of science? 17 years is the research answer to that. 17 years, really?

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm not optimistic about creating change in the mainstream system in my lifetime. That's why I've quit medicine altogether and I'm doing this Havening work. And 6 years ago, there were 2 Havening practitioners, certified practitioners in New Zealand, and now there's 100 nearly. And it's spreading everywhere. And more and more counselors and psychologists and therapists and doctors are coming to my training courses. I'm running a training course this week. One of the people there is a GP from Australia. Another is an emergency medicine consultant from a big public hospital. I mean, they're curious and open. They're going to be the ones that start to create different kinds of institutions.

Wonderful. What wonderful work you're doing, Robin. Thank you.

Well, it's now the most fulfilling work that I've ever done. And it's just, yeah, it's that the medical profession is so radically incurious about how human beings can heal themselves. And, you know, Havening as a practice sounded so utterly bizarre and strange that a very dear colleague and friend of mine in the USA tried for 2 to 3 years to persuade me to take an interest. And I said, well, what's happening? He said, well, you can have the worst traumatic event in the world, like that young mother dying in front of me, you know, with a horrifying traumatic image stuck and seared into my mind. And you can remember that and then start stroking your arms and your hands and your face for about 15 minutes while you distract your mind to something else, a neutral topic. And at the end of that time, your trauma will be erased from your brain. I've never heard Anything so profoundly ridiculous and laughable. So I ignored him. And then he wrote a whole book about it, and I still ignored him. I didn't even buy his book. It was— I was ashamed about that. But eventually, you know, I got curious and I saw a video of it and of a demonstration, and I rewound the video and inserted one of my own traumas and followed the process. And 15 minutes later, my trauma had completely abolished. I couldn't get that horrible image in my mind anymore. All of the distress was gone. So, you know, if I watched, you know, ER, the TV series about emergency medicine, and there was a story about obstetric emergencies, I'd find myself sobbing, you know, in tears with triggering of my own trauma. And that was all completely gone. And I went for a training course And on the first day of their course, they asked for a volunteer to be a subject for a demonstration in front of the class. And I stuck my hand up and I said, yeah, I've got something I want treated. And they said, what's that? I said, it's a terrifying fear of abandonment, which is the result of being sent to boarding school. And I told the story of starting in the middle of the year, so I was the only new student. This big Victorian house with a gravel drive with wisteria growing up it. I mean, an old— an English prep school with beautiful lawns and cedar trees and idyllic surroundings, but a dreadful institution. And I was met by the headmaster and the matron outside on the gravel drive. And my mother and father, very stiff and formal, shook my hand and, you know, be strong, be a man, don't cry, and got in a car and drove away. And the matron had my hand in a tight grip so I couldn't run away. And I was dragged crying and whimpering into this dreadful place. And as a result of that, I had a terrifying fear of abandonment for more than 50 years. And I'd been happily married for nearly 45 years. But if I had the slightest little argument with my wife, I would turn into a terrified 10-year-old boy again. And I couldn't speak. I mean, I just froze. And she said, for God's sake, Robin, talk to me. And I had no words. Alexithymia, no language for feelings. And that was me. So I said, well, thank you, I'd like to have that addressed. So I had 15 minutes of Havening in front of the class, and my distress at the memory went from 10 out of 10 down to 0. And the therapist said, the teacher said, well, has your memory changed? And I started laughing. And she said, why are you laughing? And I said, because this new image story has come into my mind. I did not make this up. It just instantly arrived. And she said, She said, do you mind sharing? I said, I don't mind. I said, the first thing is that I noticed the memory has changed because when you originally asked me to remember it, it was so dissociated. I saw it as a black and white photograph. I couldn't be in that memory. But in the new memory, I'm inside that 10-year-old boy. And do you know what I did? I suddenly and unexpectedly pulled my hand out of the grip of the matron, turned around, kicked her on the shin, and ran away. And that's the new story of my trauma. And the next time I had a little upset with my wife, I remained completely calm. I was able to talk and we could put it right in 5 minutes and have a hug. It was really life-changing. And the human brain has this capacity to erase trauma in a matter of minutes. It has a mechanism to store it and a mechanism to erase it. And that is just one of the most astounding discoveries in medicine. And the founder of that, Dr. Ron Rudin, I mean, he should get a Nobel Prize for this.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just, it's almost unknown. And he's very, you know, elderly and frail now. And this is the basis of the practice that I do. And it's just utterly life-changing. And that's, you know, medicine is so intent on being, you know, doing the therapy, the treatment to the patient and rendering the patient as a, you know, helpless, passive receiver of treatment from the doctor who's the, you know, the figure of power. That there's just a radical lack of curiosity in the medical profession about how patients might heal themselves.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, when I tell this story to doctors, they get, you know, they have the same kind of attitude that I had for several years when told about this, that that was clearly ridiculous. I mean, that's woo-woo. But it's based on a very detailed scientific theory. All the way down to the level of molecular mechanisms in the brain.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah, how, how we can shift so quickly out of that trauma state. And a few things, as you're reading the book, it was like boarding schools being that sepia gray, and then you mentioned the uniforms. I've often heard this either in biographies, is like boarding schools are basically just black and white. I mean, my uniform was black and white. It was yellow socks. Um, but it was like colorless, like a trauma, you know. It's like no life.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I kind of resonated with that.

You know, one of the ways we dissociate painful memories is to make them black and white rather than color.

So with people who are very dissociated Because I often get clients come to me, boarding school, they're very dissociated and their struggle is to reconnect to their feelings again. And I use obviously EFT, which really helps. What do you find with people who come who, you know, they're not only dissociated, but then we get the, um, not, not necessarily the entitlement, but this idea that it's a good thing.

Yes.

And therefore it's this double bind that Nick talks about, that, oh no, it's really good to be dissociated.

Yeah, you know, especially the older male clients that are, you know, professional people, very intellectual, intellectualize everything including all their feelings. They're very good at diverting any personal question into, you know, an intellectual discussion, and very disconnected from their feelings, and very disassociated from their traumas. They may not have any memories of traumas. And indeed, for most of my life, I really didn't believe that the sexual abuse that I had at the hands of this teacher did me any harm at all. I thought it was a trivial event until I started reconnecting to my feelings and learning something about trauma. And then I began to think, oh my God, this is actually, this was pretty serious. And it's had a lifelong impact upon me, which is, I can talk about easily now, it's healed. And I'm very fortunate to have this very beautiful, loving, woman that somehow unaccountably fell in love with me and has cherished and looked after me for all these years. And so the wonderful thing about Havening is it uses these forms of touch that are detected by specialized nerves in the skin, the C-affective neurons, which are hardwired into the emotional and stress centers of the brain and radically change our brain state. And it's like Changing the brain of an adult into that of a 2 or 3-year-old magical mind. And sometimes even, you know, makes me think about the kind of psychedelic state, because people will have some quite extraordinary kind of visual kind of changes in the processing of trauma. So working with someone who's very dissociated, who has a great deal of difficulty, very little language for feelings, Then, I mean, they have presented for some reason, right? They wouldn't come to your clinic if life was swimmingly good. They have some kind of distress. So you work with whatever's presenting. And if they have very little language for emotional feelings, during the process, I get them to focus on body feelings and, you know, start to tune into their inside. And there's always a way in. If you just start Working with whatever presents and create this profound sense of safety in the brain and this human connection with compassionate presence and these particular forms of touch, then things begin to open up. You begin to regulate the nervous system. The defenses start to fall away a bit. You know, a memory pops up, so a traumatic memory. So you work with that. You release a bit of the trauma load. The nervous system recalibrates again, the dissociation lessens, something else comes up. And it's like doing archaeology, digging down through the layers. And in the end, you may have a very full history of, you know, their childhood and their traumas and everything that happened, that in the beginning was completely lost in the subconscious. And you just— and the great thing is that I don't have to figure anything out, because I believe that people have their own healing intuitive intelligence. And the journey of healing will unfold the way it's supposed to be, in the directions it needs to go, and at the pace that's safe for the client. And my job is to pay attention and to, you know, go with that flow. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it can be a fluid process. Yeah.

It's just like that sense of healing, the healing's within the patient. And it reminds me a bit of the word education. It comes from the Latin educere, to draw out. And that's not what we do in education. We force in, you will, you will have this information.

Yeah, and indeed, when, when we campaigned all around the world on compassionate healthcare, I mean, I began that work pretty angry and as an evangelist, and I just pissed people off. And for about a decade, the medical profession ignored me completely. I never got invited to speak at a major medical conference, even though compassion is supposed to be the heart of our practice. And I realized I needed to change myself and that I had to give up always needing to be right. And what we did was step into appreciative inquiry. Instead of lecturing to people about the importance of compassionate care, we'd sit nurses and doctors in a circle and then put them in pairs and said, well, share a story. Piers, tell me a story of one day you had an extraordinary compassionate or human or healing connection with another human being. And everyone's got those stories, especially from early in their career when their hearts were still open. And they tell these profoundly moving stories in pairs, which is safe, and then put them in the circle and breathe together. And whoever would like to share their story, you can tell it again. And these stories will come into the circle and all of us would cry and we'd be reminded, you know, with open hearts why we came into nursing or medicine or whatever it is. and, you know, draw out the personal strengths that people had, that could be, you know, life-changing for people. And we didn't have to teach anything. So it's, you know, that's real education, is drawing out.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, you know, then the medical professions began to, you know, pay attention to our work. And eventually I was given the highest prize of the New Zealand Medical Association in honor of the work, which is a Wow. Beautiful thing after so many years of struggling.

Yeah, that's a really beautiful story about getting everyone to share stories. I, I've always felt that that's one of my, um, issues as an ex-border that I have to deal with is judgment. I either judge people to be better than me or less than me, and I find when someone tells me their story, it draws them up or draws them down. They're human. And I find in circles— I was thinking that'd be a great thing for these schools, is to have sharing circles, that you sit in circle, you check in, how's your day been?

And especially to use appreciative questions, questions about, you know, what's working well, what's good. And, you know, in the circle today on my training course, I'm sitting next to this really inspiring emergency medicine consultant from one of the public hospitals who's used appreciative inquiry in the workplace to draw out all these stories of, you know, what went well and what did you feel good about, and work with all of our colleagues who are, you know, otherwise, you know, an M&M meeting is morbidity mortality where doctors discuss everything that went wrong with cases. And there's a fair amount of judgment, although it's supposed to be for learning. And this is the complete opposite. This is all the stories of things that went well. You know, when the teamwork was great, when communication was fantastic, when the flow through the department was amazing, when, you know, they managed to save a patient that, you know, against all the odds. And when people share the stories of what went well, then they're reminded of their strengths and, you know, the conditions that lead to great practice and great teamwork and great communication. And it's transformative to ask the questions about what went well as opposed to what the problems are. Because Edward de Bono's 6 Thinking Hats, there's the black hat, which is the overly pessimistic and negative thinking style. Well, that's how doctors are trained. They're always looking for the problem, the hidden diagnosis, the risk. So when you put doctors in a workshop and say, well, we need to figure out how to make patient flow work better in the emergency department, they'll go focus on all of the negatives and they'll be blaming everyone else. Well, if radiology would do their job, we could get the scans done quicker and then we can You know, if there was an orderly or if that, you know. But if you ask them to sit down and share stories about, tell us about a day when the teamwork in the emergency department was superb, then they get energized and they think of all these ideas and solutions. Yeah, it's a very different way of framing.

That's a coach who I've listened to a lot over the years. He says you know, use 1 day of the month for problems and 29 days for solution.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and I hear that over and again, over and again from peak performers. Lanny Basham, in his work, is an Olympic gold medal shooter. He talks about this importance of when you, you know, make a mistake, focus on what worked well. Yeah, don't keep going over the mistake because that just grows. And it sounds like a very similar situation there in the hospitals.

So I came across the book called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman in 1994, and I use it pretty much every day of my life. And I had 3 copies and lent it to lots of my colleagues who were failing their exams and not progressing in their careers and whose marriages were falling apart and It was really life-changing in some people. Yeah, the other 3 Ps: perseverance, personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Permanent, that's it.

Yes, I thought I was a real optimist because, you know, I could achieve a great deal, but on the P for personal, I was profoundly pessimistic about myself and blaming myself for just about everything in life. I had no, no insight into that at all. Um, interesting.

I, I often hear that as— and I think that's, uh, for me, uh, almost the response to trauma. And I see a lot of ex-boarders are incredibly hard on themselves. That what, um, Peter— Pete Walker in his book Complex PTSD calls the inner critic, you know, and the outer critic. So we're so hard on ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, I had to learn to be really kind to myself.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, we are therapists, so we always have, you know, we all have sessions where halfway through the session you think, oh my God, this is, you know, turning into a disaster, this is not going well, you're really struggling. And I just quietly, you know, in my mind remind myself, you know, if you just relax and trust the process, and draw on your experience and your intuition. At least by the end of the session, you're going to come to some key insight, or you're going to know what to do next. Or just let go of attachment to a particular outcome and be kind to yourself.

Yeah.

It's just, my practice is so easeful and playful. That's the beautiful thing about healing trauma. It's a playful— most of my clients are laughing through most of the process. I mean, quite literally, and their trauma is dissolving away with no effort. And the more lighthearted and peaceful and playful I make the work, the more powerful it is. It's really counterintuitive.

It is, it is. And yet that's kind of almost our natural state. I, when I've done retreats and I've, you know, led them, if I do retreats for men, they're often in that space. They come in, they're kind of arms crossed, they don't want to play, and I'll just get them to do juggle games or then hide and seek in And after 5 minutes, they are skipping around. It's like, yeah, this is great. It's like, that's our natural state of being, almost, that play, that joy.

Yeah.

And we somehow forget.

Yeah. And that's the beautiful thing about the Havening touch, is it changes the brain state within a minute and, you know, opens up this space for creativity and healing. It's really extraordinary.

Yeah, yeah. So I realize we're coming up to about an hour. Any last things or anything you'd like to share that you've not shared so far that you want to share with—

Yeah, there's one final thing, and that, I mean, the Havening work that I do is truly life-transforming, and it's enabled me to start an entirely new career and set up my own clinic and earn a living doing this as a practitioner, as a trainer. And I've trained a lot of people in it, many of whom are doing extraordinary work. But Havening is framed by the organization as being something you train to health professionals who are deeply embedded in the system. And that's a problem because pretty much all counselors and psychologists and psychotherapists are told you must never ever touch your clients. This is taboo. And yet here's a practice in which you sit really close to clients and you stroke their arms and their faces. So it's pretty challenging. And it's so counterintuitive against all these kind of intellectual models of counseling and therapy and psychology because the healing is occurring in the mind of the person. I mean, you're just a facilitator for that. And that's difficult for many of these professionals to get their heads around. So Havening has been quite slow to spread and it's having a hard job penetrating into the mainstream systems. But I've done it for about 1,000 clients now. And as I've made the work more playful and fun and lighthearted, I've begun to realize that many clients were healing in very extraordinary ways and not very much connected at all to the specific Havening techniques. But a great deal to do with compassionate presence and these forms of soothing touch. So I began to extract those elements of it and put it together in a set of ideas which I call somatic compassion. And this is something you can teach to anyone in 5 minutes. It requires no therapist, there's no training, there's no certification, there's no fee. Just ordinary people in pairs can start to support each other. And help each other heal from, you know, challenging life situations and traumas and difficult feelings. And we've been testing this out in community workshops in our local community, and it's really very remarkable. And it can be taught to anyone. There's no restrictions whatsoever. No copyright, no trademark, no training. So yeah, there's a website now called somaticcompassion.org. In which I share these very simple methods. And that's where my energy is now. That the Havening world will have difficulty expanding into the mainstream system. So let's just bypass it. Let's just teach these methods that anyone can use. Let's change the culture around touch. Especially after COVID and lockdown and no touch. And the English is so terribly a low-touch culture, you know, shake hands politely. Let's get people together touching each other in the ways that we evolved as human beings to do. So that's, yeah, that's my— and, you know, we've just made a film documentary about my Havening work, and the same group are going to make a documentary about this Somatic Compassion work and how it's evolving and developing in our communities. So we're pretty excited about that. So great. That's, that's, you know, what gives me energy into the future as a means of, you know, potentially making a really big impact on the world without any of the professional constraints whatsoever. Yeah.

Well, it's wonderful work. And if I can support you in any way, please let me know. And I'll put a link to the documentary into the description. so people can, can watch it. And I'll put in somaticcompassion.org, robinyoungson.com, and also a link to—

Thank you.

Yeah, which is really— I've, like I said, I've only read probably a third of it so far, but it's really beautifully written and very heartfelt. So thank you.

Yeah. And the last chapter is really about a, you know, a vision of a completely different way of thinking You know, we're just, we're so accustomed to thinking in what we call, you know, the machine thinking world, you know, this kind of logical control and top-down and compartmentalization and so on. We actually need to start problem-solving using a very different kind of thinking style, you know, which I call the living world. Which we do in our own natures and which nature can do. Nature can heal itself. with extraordinary rapidity if we stop poisoning it. Human beings can heal with extraordinary rapidity, but it needs very different strategies. So instead of, you know, I was thinking, well, how can I scale Havening to treat the whole nation of New Zealand? And we're going to need 1,000 practitioners. So we need to rev up all the training courses and whatever. And then I came to the realization, no, actually, that's not what we need at all. Because all of the existing practitioners are burning out and they're carrying all their own trauma. What we need is healing the healers, not training the trainers. It's a very different kind of strategy. So I've been really thinking about how in radically different ways can we start to create system-wide change that's not trapped in machine world thinking.

That's great. I love that you're thinking about that because it's like that vision. And I'm seeing more and more, it's like we have that vision and then we have to have that certainty there that it's going to happen. And that's really my sense, is that it can happen. These beautiful organizations, it's, it's— yeah, my wife, all she does.

Thank you so much for your own work. Yeah, I mean, that, that, you know, Bordering on Insanity, it was an inspired film about a terribly important topic. It's, you know, it's been unspoken How many of our senior leaders are traumatized? And, you know, this sits at the root of many of our problems. Yeah, yeah. We need to start getting the language of trauma into the everyday discourse and an understanding of what trauma is and how it impacts on people.

Yeah, yeah. I'm talking to kind of a senior but kind of thought about ACEs and saying that boarding schools at the moment aren't considered part of the ACEs. You know, it's like we've just got to change this. And I'm talking to, um, the filmmaker who made the film about Dilworth.

Yes.

Yeah. And I was talking to him on Friday, so it's interesting that I connect to you today.

Yeah, but of course, I mean, an ACE, an adverse childhood event, is a very crude measure from the outside because it's The important thing is not what the event was, but how it's interpreted and experienced by the individual. So, I mean, the Havening theory explains why some of us can get through horrifying life events without getting traumatized at all, and other times get traumatized with seemingly minor life events. And that becomes understandable.

Yeah.

The ACE score has been very useful at pointing out the impact of that, but it's You know, it's not a good way of measuring the level of trauma in an individual because those adverse childhood events may not have been traumatizing in some and horribly traumatizing in others.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's similar to what Gabor says. It's not so much what happens to you, but what happens inside you.

Yeah, indeed.

I get a sense we could probably talk for another hour, and I'm aware that it's, uh, It's probably late for you, so I will leave you to get on. But thank you so much for your time.

My pleasure.

And bless you for doing this work. And yeah, I'll have to look up some Havening practitioners locally so I can have a good community in the UK.

And my trainer was from the UK. Yeah.

Right.

Right.

So I will do that. So bless you. And thank you. And take care. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Bye-bye.