The Myth of Normal

Hi, everyone. Welcome. We're just going live here. We're setting us all up. Welcome, everybody.

Welcome, all.

Great. So glad everyone's here. And I'm so thrilled that you're here. All right, let me get my record on. I've learned nothing really happens if I don't hit the record button.

Thank you all for being here. I'm so thrilled to be having this conversation today with an amazing person that I just think it's going to be a really profound discussion. I'm hoping. That's what I'm hoping for. By the way, if you're not familiar with me, I'm David Kessler. I'm a grief specialist. And this has been an area that has interest me since my childhood when I was involved in a shooting and trauma and grief came to my world not by choice. And I don't think it comes to any of our worlds by choice. After decades of working in the field of grief, I unfortunately became a bereaved parent when my younger son died. I've certainly known this world. I'm thrilled today to be speaking with trauma expert, addiction, childhood development.

Renowned author Gabor Mate. I'm so glad you're here. And we're going to be talking about this amazing new book that, by the way, I literally finished today. I finished this book today and quite extraordinary. And so just know that it really meant so much to read that book and so I really appreciate you writing it and I think it's going to be so meaningful to the world. I also have known that one of the things I love about you and your work and your style is that you are also open about your own trauma in your life. You are not any kind of teacher on high. You are a teacher among us. And I have just been privileged to actually call you myself when I've dealt with my own trauma coming up. So I'm grateful you're here. I'm grateful for the book. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Gabor.

Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be with you. I appreciate this opportunity to talk about this new book of mine, which, by.

The way, folks, are pre ordering now, coming out September 13th. And I want to start. Obviously we all have this illusion that everyone is normal but us. So I want to start with that title, the Myth of Normal. Tell us about coming to that title in this book.

Yes, there is a sense in which normal is valid usage in that human life, for example, can only be sustained within certain normal ranges of physiological conditions like temperature, blood pressure and blood acidity outside that we don't live. But normal is another more pernicious or insidious meaning, I should say, which is we think that whatever is normal in life is also natural and healthy, which is not necessarily the case. So to give you an egregiously fanciful example, if everybody mistreated their pets, then you'd be abnormal if you didn't mistreat your pet, and yet you would be healthy and natural and everybody else would be sick. So that normal doesn't necessarily mean healthy and natural. And what I'm saying that in this culture, what has become usual and accepted as normal is neither healthy or natural. As a matter of fact, I'm arguing that as a physician. I'm arguing that illness of mind and body very often represent normal responses to. To abnormal emotional and social circumstances. So it's a myth that what is normal is actually natural and healthy. And furthermore, the other part of the myth is that then those who get identified as sick are somehow abnormal. I'm saying no. A lot of physical and mental illnesses, as I've just said, are normal responses to life circumstances and social conditions are actually completely abnormal from the point of view of human needs and human evolution.

And you talk about, like it would be an outlier almost these days to not have some trauma in our life and in our childhood. And I. You even talk about the. The word trauma, and it's a Greek word that I love you shared. It means wounded.

Yes. So trauma is a wound that you sustain. So trauma is not the bad things that happen to you. Trauma is the wound that you sustain psychically, but those psychic wounds that we sustain, either because bad things happen to us as children or because the good things that we need to have happened didn't happen. So we can be wounded. And those wounds then show up with their imprints throughout our lives. And very often they even govern our behavior or our choice in relationships, how we relate to our work.

How we even see politics. So that much of what we see is normal in this society actually carries the imprint of trauma.

And that's something I so appreciated about this book, is it wasn't just about me and my trauma. It was all our trauma and society's trauma and glow and you. There was such a large perspective that it was actually helpful to understand all of that. And I just want to say that again, what you said. Trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside of us, the response that's so important. One of the things around that is many times I see this in my work. I'm sure you do. We want to change the events. We want to start with these events not having happened to us because they shouldn't have happened. The assault, the rape, the death, the tragedy shouldn't have happened. But we can't find our journey from sort of arguing with it, correct?

Well I spent quite a bit of my life arguing with the past. It shouldn't have happened. You know, in a book I give the example of the wonderful non egerian psychotherapist Edith Egger who is like me, a Hungarian Jew. And in fact she probably was sent to Auschwitz on the same train as my grandparents were. Her parents died, my grandparents died, she survived as a teenager. And she goes back at some point to Berchtesgaden in Germany to forgive Hitler. And she says I'm not doing this for him, I'm doing this for myself because I don't want that resentment and anger about the past to interfere with the good life that I created for myself. So I know that I myself have spent many, many decades, until quite recently just resenting the past. And it shouldn't have been. Well, you know what the good news is that if the trauma was what happened to us, there's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing I can change about the fact that I was almost died as an infant, that my grands were murdered and ushered. I can't change that. But if the trauma is not what happened but the wound that I sustained, I can heal that wound in the present moment. If your trauma amongst other things was the shooting that you witnessed.

Then that can't be changed. That never will not have happened. But if the trauma is what you made that mean about yourself in the world, that can change in the present moment.

I want to follow up on that. We've had Dr. Eager on here. She is incredible. And you two are very much linked in so many ways. I'm curious. She talked about going back to Auschwitz. Have you gone back to where all this occurred as an adult? I'm just curious.

Well I haven't been to Auschwitz. Where I was for two months ago.

Was in Budapest, which is where I spent my first year. And I was standing on a very pavement stone where my mother outside this terrible place of refuge for Jews, where the conditions were, where I wouldn't have survived as an 11 month old. Where she gave me to a total stranger, a Christian woman in the street to be taken to some relatives who were living under relatively better conditions. So I stood on the very pavement where my mother as a 24 year old young woman handed me as an 11 month old to this Christian woman and I think she gave her her ring and said, please take this infant to these people. So I stood on that very pavement just two months ago.

Wow. And.

What was that like to have stood in that same spot, being you today.

Versus that moment of tragedy that I'm sure consciously and unconsciously haunted you?

Well, there were two responses. One was I was just kind of moved, you know, but the other, I was also extremely grateful because that event, which is a 1 year old or 11 month old, I could only interpret as abandonment. And who gets abandoned? Somebody who's not lovable, who's not wanted. So those are the meanings that I had derived as an infant. So I was moved to stand there. And I was thinking that my mother is a 24 year old young woman under those circumstances, her parents dead, her husband away in forced labor and not knowing if he's dead or alive, this infant that's ill that she can't look after. So I was moved. But also I had gratitude because there I was all Those years later, 78 years later.

Enjoying life. And even in a position, I was there to teach what I've learned from my life experience. And that was in the country where those terrible events took place. And I was in a position to help heal people. So I had a lot of gratitude as well. I had these two responses.

Right. So I'm curious about that. When we talk about tragedies and the places where they were, the. The origins of them, for example, I tell the story and mine's a little more condensed. There was the place, it's not far from where I live. It was the last place that I hugged my son, the last place I ever saw him alive. Brutal. Brutal. I went so far out of my way to avoid that spot.

Yeah.

And that was probably my first couple of years after he died. And at one point I, without thinking where I was, I accidentally on a walk ended up being there. And I remember and it's like literally on a visible street with traffic. And I got so angry and I got angry at him and I got angry at God and I got angry at the world. And.

That place, over time has begun to change for me now when I go there, it's almost a sweet connection with him. Now that's, that's at five years. And that's not always a sweet connection, but there's moments of that. What do you think about this idea of going back when we are in another place and we're feeling more of the victor than the victim. Do you advise that for people?

Well, you know, my first response to your story is that was no accident that you went back there. Freud said that there are no accidents in mental life, and I think to some degree that's true. So I think something guided you back there that wasn't in your conscious awareness, which also meant that your organism was not ready to handle all the emotions that before them would have been overwhelming for you. You had the anger, you had the rage. You probably had the underlying grief as well, when some. The inner wisdom in you was ready to tell you that, okay, it's time.

And I don't think we can select that time for anyone else. Friends and family often impose that on folks. It's time for you to get over your trauma, your grief, all those things.

No, no, the. The. The time is within us, and our organism is the wisdom that lets us know when we're ready and when we're not. I mean, I have something very similar because my mother kept a diary over those years in a very bad habit, scrawled handwriting. And. And I've had the diary in my possession for decades. You know, whenever I would move to open it, I would almost fall asleep. Purely defensive reaction. I just wasn't ready until I was. You know, something in me says, this is going to bring a more pain for you than you're ready to handle. So the timing wasn't determined by me. It was determined by something in me that I knew better than anybody else could have had known, and certainly better than I do.

Yeah, I think many times, you know, in this work, you know, people will say things like, I can't, I can't, and I'll go, and you don't have to. And it might be. Not yet.

Exactly.

Not yet.

And you know what the other part of it is? When other people are telling somebody that it's time, you know what they're saying? They're saying, I don't know how to be with your grief. I want you to get over it so I don't have to be exposed to it. In other words.

It'S not about the person they're giving the advice to. It's about themselves, that they're not comfortable with something. So they're the ones who need to look at themselves at that moment.

Right. And so many times, I'm sure you've had people come to you, they'll go, please, you've got to help my sister, my mother, my spouse. I just want the old person back. I want who they were before the loved one. Died before the rape, before the tragedy. And I always remind them they'd like that person back too. That's not possible for them or for us. So we all have to adapt to this new post tragedy, whatever we may be dealing with in our life.

Or sometimes people say to me, I'd like the person back that I was before I got ill, right? I got addicted. And I say, you know what? That person that you were before this challenge, whether it's your illness or your mental health breakdown or your addiction, the person that you were, that's the one that got sick, that's the one that got addicted, that's the one who experienced the mental breakdown. Are you sure you want to be that person again or. Or maybe you want to learn from what happened to you? And so that in the book I talk about diseases, teacher, which by the way, I don't recommend for people, but I've also seen very often how when people embrace the lessons in their suffering, then they don't become the same person they were. They become much deeper and more connected to themselves.

And I really love that section. And I think the part where people get confused about that is we are responsible for our health, but we're not to blame for our illnesses. And I think that it's easy to get those things confused.

Go ahead. Sorry.

I'm sorry. Let me allow you to finish, please.

We were talking about the places that we've had trauma and we were talking about Auschwitz and different places in childhood and Edith Eger and all that. And there's one other question I wanted to ask you that I'm so curious about.

Edith revisited. She talked about that. My teacher, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, she was very strict with me. She says, if you're going to do this work, you're going to go to Calcutta, you're going to go to Mother Teresa's home, you're going to go to Auschwitz. And I was the good boy who did all those things she said, and you know, beyond life changing and meaningful. But I also did not have direct trauma in those places.

And I know it's not like, oh, everyone go to, you know, to Auschwitz, but we have a lot of professionals here. Is it important that they go to the Holocaust Museum? They go to, you know, all. Is it important, important that we revisit these places where horrific inequalities happen, whether they're racial or genocide? What do you think about advising that?

Well, I don't think it's for me or anyone else to set somebody else's agenda. I mean, that's the first point. The second point is that the most important places to revisit if you're going to help people and be a therapist is the places inside you. So it's not the external circumstances that you necessarily need to revisit, but you need to revisit their impact within yourself or your. Or the analogies within yourself so that you know. Primo Levi was one of the greatest writers on the Holocaust, Italian man who wrote Survival in Auschwitz and other really luminous books about that experience. He said last night, we created in our families the same conditions that obtained in Auschwitz. In other words, people can be deeply wounded everywhere. You don't need those horrific conditions. And so there's a lot of people that carry deep pain.

If you're not ready to revisit that deep pain within yourself, your efficacy as the therapist is going to be significantly limited. So it's the pain within ourselves rather than the external conditions. Now, if you're going to be politically active, or if you want to create, contribute to social change, whatever, then you want to familiarize yourself with conditions internationally, whether in the Middle east, whether in Europe, whether in the United States or in Canada, for example, the terrible situation over indigenous people. You want to visit those people. You want to find out what's going on. I've done that because that's just an important part of my work. But the most important places you have to visit, I'd say, are internal ones.

And I think that's really interesting because one of the people that I had this discussion with.

Their stance was very much like, I don't want to see bad, I don't want to see unhappy. I don't ever want to see those places. And it's interesting because I thought about. I wonder where that reaction was coming from in them, that I only want to be in the good.

Well, I. I can only make a guess since I don't know the person. But on general principles, I would say there's some deep pain in themselves that they don't. They don't want to face or trigger it because they're not ready for it.

Right.

And nor should anybody. Nor should anybody force them, by the way.

Right, Right. And I think we. We do live in this culture, and you talk so brilliantly about it that it is this productive. Get out there, do it. Make it happen. Versus Is there wisdom in you that, as you say, is telling us when in the book, a number of times, you mention your colleague, friend, Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps score. You talk about the body. I always make sure in my work, I work with Paul Denison to do grief yoga. There's. I see how you always bring the body in. Tell us, when we're talking about grief or trauma, what's the importance of the body? And all this for folks who may not realize that.

Well, first, let me tell you the dramatic.

Point that I make in, I think, the second chapter of the book, which is that grief itself can disorganize the body to the point that it increases the risk of cancer and other diseases. Grieving parents in a Danish study had doubled the risk of multiple sclerosis. In an Israeli study, people who had lost an adult child due to accidental war had increased risk of cancers of various organs and the skin and so on. Now.

In my view, so first of all, no mental event, grief included is simply an abstract mental event. The mind and body are inseparable. It's one of the unfortunate tendencies of Western allopathic medicine is to separate mind from the body, which neither in real life nor in science is a reality. So mind and body are inseparable in that sense. And so whatever happens emotionally, psychically, has a physiological impact. In the case of grief, it can interfere with immunity and it can interfere with natural hormonal patterns and so on. That is, if the people don't get the proper support for their grief. By the way, it's not that grief automatically, because grief is a part of life, isn't it? I mean, you can't have life without grief, as the Buddha found out, you know, and that impelled him on his journey of enlightenment. But it's what kind of how we process that grief and how are we able to be with it? And that depends very much on the support that we receive. So.

What I'm saying more generally is that because of the scientifically demonstrable, unshakable, inescapable mind, body unity that life.

Brings to us, you cannot separate emotional events and emotional experiences from our physiologies. And therefore you cannot understand health or illness by separating the mind and the body.

It's also. I found it really interesting when you were talking about different studies and you were talking about anger and how people who.

Suppress their anger, many cases, did not do as well with their disease as people who allowed their anger.

Well, yeah, the repression of anger is actually a major risk factor for illness, not just according to my. By the way, you may notice about. Might not notice about me, but I used to work in palliative care. I worked with terminally. So a lot of these people were all these really nice people who never got angry. And I found the same thing in family practice, that it's the people who repress their anger who are more prone to autoimmune disease.

And malignancy. I'm not the only one to have found that. This has been shown in multiple studies. Neurologists who look at people with ALS will always report how nice these people with ALS are, which represents the repression of anger. So now why is that the case? Because what is the role of healthy anger? The role of healthy anger is to protect your boundaries. If I intrude on you, you better get angry. No, MySpace, get out. That's healthy anger. Now, what's the role of the immune system? It's the same thing to protect your healthy boundaries. Some things that shouldn't enter into your body, the immune system will recognize a strange and dangerous and will mount a defense against them. Or if a malignant cell is formed in your body, your immune system will seek it out and destroy it. Because it's foreign, it's strange. Now, the emotional, healthy anger, in other words, has the same role as the emotional system, which is to recognize what is welcome and nourishing and to allow it in and to recognize what is dangerous and unwelcome and to keep it out. Given that it's one system, they're not separated system, the emotions and immunity, they're part and parcel of the same apparatus. When you suppress the one, you're suppressing the other. And that's why the repression of healthy anger, which, by the way, again, we have to go back to what you said about blame. Nobody does that deliberately. These are responses to childhood trauma and childhood programming. So people repress their anger in childhood because their environment can't accept them with their healthy anger. So the child, in order to be accepted, represses their anger, not consciously, unconsciously, but that then becomes a lifelong pattern and that.

Deep disconnect from one of the other defenses.

It's fascinating to me and heartbreaking at the same time. In my online groups, they're like big zoom groups. There will be someone who will come on and they'll tell me about how they can't get angry. And everyone's telling them they're angry and they think that there's truth in that, but they can't find it. They don't know how to do it healthy. And we'll talk about how anger was modeled for them. And of course, it was usually either suppressed to the nth degree or people exploded. And they said, I don't know what healthy anger looks like, how do I express this? And I'll talk to people about. I'm going to let out a yell for a moment or I'm going to hit a pillow. And by the way, everyone, just a reminder, we're on Zoom. You can turn this off, you can step away. You're in full control. But I'm just going to demonstrate getting angry about a condition in our life, something in our life, a death, whatever it may be. And it's fascinating to me that when I do a short demonstration with all that instruction before about, you're in control, you can't be harmed, people will share how they felt unsafe on the Zoom. Seeing someone angry.

That'S so telling of the childhoods. That anger was so dangerous in its demonstration.

Yes. You know that Very similar to something that I do. About six months ago, I was leading this webinar for a thousand people online, and there was a man from the Southern United States who had cancer. And as I say, repression of anger is a major risk factor for malignancy. And he didn't know how to get angry. And he had been sexually abused as a child. He got. He finally got in touch with some memories of that. And so I said, well, how about if a thousand people got angry with you at the same time? So 1,000 people on Zoom in about 80 or 90 countries around the world, pardon the language, but we all said, no, fuck you, you know, really loud and repeatedly. Oh, my God, was he liberated? Because now he was safe, and he was joined by a thousand people who felt and wanted to help him express his anger. So that's a powerful. That's a powerful teaching. It's a powerful practice, actually. But I think what you're pointing to is that people need the safety, right?

And it's interesting. I think the judgment on it gets in the way of it. I also, in a physical retreat, in the physical world back then.

There was a couple, and their child had died. Just a horrible situation. And the wife, the mother could not. You could feel the anger, and she could not let it out. And she said, it's just unspeakable. And her daughter had died so tragically at 2.

We encourage her to feel safe enough to speak it. And she finally said, I'm angry. I hate old people. I hate old people. And we're in this room, it was actually a Kripalo few hundred people. And I said, could we all together get angry and say we hate old people? And at first people were like, can we say that? And there were, you know, a number of people in the room who were. We all weren't spring chickens. And so we all yelled it together and it was fascinating. She said, oh my gosh, I just got it. I don't hate old people. I hate the unfairness of life that a two year old dies and some. And all of a sudden the whole room shifted. But we can't get there if we judge our feelings correct.

Exactly. So one of the things I teach in the book is that we have to have compassion for all our feelings, all parts of ourselves and even those dynamics that we see as harmful and self destructive, they've had a reason to come into being and we have to be compassionately curious towards them. By the way, let me tell you, I had a ketamine experience maybe five years ago where I was injected with ketamine and I'm lying there in this particular state that ketamine induces in a room with 12 other people, their reminders for each of us. Had somebody sitting with us and all of a sudden I find myself screaming, I hate the world. And I, I don't know where that came from. But everybody was so glad that I could express stuff, you know, because it was something real that had to come up now that really hit the world. No, but there was a lot of anger there about what the world does and how the world has shown up in my life that I just had to get in touch with and express.

Right, right. And by the way, one of the stories in the book, I'm going to ask you to tell it, if you don't mind.

Yeah.

Is the airport story.

Okay.

So humanizes you. It just, it's like, who can't relate to this airport story? And you're getting picked up.

Yeah. So this opens the first chapter of the book and.

I've already talked the background about the background to it a little bit. But the story in a nutshell is that I arrived home from Philadelphia on a speaking trip about seven years ago now at the tender young age of 71. And it was a good trip. I was well received. I even got bumped up to first class on the way home. So I couldn't have been feeling more happier with my little self in my little corner of the airplane. And then get a text from my wife who was meant to pick me up and it says, I haven't left home yet. Do you still want me to come? And I go into a sullen rage. My good mood disappears. All of a sudden I just full of resentment. I take a taxi home. Can you imagine the.

Indignity of Having to take a taxi home, you know. And.

Of course the point is, and when I get home, I don't even look at my wife. I barely look at her and I grunt at her and I don't talk to her for 24 hours until she finally says knock it off already. So I knocked it off. Now.

I've only been married to my wife Ray, by that time, close to 50 years. I've only known her for half a century. She's an artist. When she's in her studio, everything disappears. If you know any artists, when they're in the flow of the creativity, they don't have husbands or wives or spouses or bladders or hunger or anything. Just have the flow. And, and she's like that. So what am I so upset about? Well, being given to a stranger. When I was 11 months old, the, the wound was that I'm not lovable, that I'm not wanted. So when a woman who, on whom I'm relying for emotional acceptance and being welcomed into the world doesn't show up at the airport, I'm not this 71 year old best selling author, physician, teacher, healer. I'm an 11 month old re experiencing the abandonment. Hence my rage, hence my pain. And that's how trauma shows up, is that. Peter Levine, I'm sure, you know, talks about trauma as the tyranny of the past. And at that moment, literally I was under the sway of the tyranny of the past. I was not in the present moment. And so healing really does have to come through by coming into the present and not having the past run your life.

And it is, sorry, within that present moment that you can bring yourself here. And I love how you played it out in the book. You can bring yourself here to go. The abandonment is not happening. Yeah, my wife is in her studio. I'm just getting a taxi.

That's right, that's right. And, and that does mean working through that traumatic imprint and which by the way, is an ongoing process. And it also means, as you say, being in the present moment. Because in the present moment I'm just a 71 year old guy with a loving wife who got mesmerized by the, the creative process and forgot about the airplane. That's all that happened.

And it's not doing something to you.

Nothing's happening to me. And by the way, this is where this whole idea of being triggered is so important because what I always tell people is trigger is an interesting metaphor. I got triggered. Trigger warning. But for God's sakes, how big and Important, the weapon is the trigger. It's this big, you know, there's, there's a whole mechanism.

Full of explosive charge and ammunition.

No, I could be interested in trying to stop the trigger. Or I could say, what's the emotional charge? What's the explosive material inside me? What is the ammunition inside me? That's much more interesting than what is the trigger? Because if I, if I diffuse.

All this here, I don't have to go around being worried about being triggered.

Along those lines.

I see this grief trauma in all the areas in myself is. It's so easy to be triggered, activated. All those feelings come up and we then turn on ourselves. I can't believe this is up again. And why haven't I healed this? And I love your approach.

And that this is not our enemy showing up.

Yeah, well, so my response to that is.

What we need here is what I call a compassionate inquiry. So when you say to me, why did I do this again? Is that actually a question? What is it really?

It's a judgment.

Yes, a judgment, right. And I think I handled this grief. I thought I handled this trauma. I neatly put it away and now it's back.

Now you're down on yourself for not being complete with the process. Now what if you ask yourself.

I wonder why I did that again? No, the words are almost the same. But there's compassion there, there's actual curiosity there. There's not a judgment. And as ah, a wonderful.

Spiritual teacher says, only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth. So that if you're doing this again, it's only because there's some part of it that's unresolved for you. If you ask yourself that question or if somebody helps to pose that question for you compassionately, then you say, ah, okay, let's get curious about it. So I thought this was resolved, but now I find that it isn't. Okay, let's have a look at it. You say, why didn't I do this again? Well, now who's going to be responsive? Who's going to open up in response to an accusation? So that when we're not compassionate with ourselves, we become defensive in against ourselves. And when there's defensiveness, no truth shows up.

And I think all of that gets mixed with the Hollywood version of trauma and grief that we deal with it. We have our aha moment and it's gone. And if it pops back up, it's not that it's a process, it's we have done something wrong and we layer that story on it. That then just becomes a criticism of ourself too. And I think society is all about neatly packaged. Get over it, get done with it.

Yeah, well, you know, there's a line that I often utter to the point of becoming a cliche with me, but it really is a process. It's a lifelong process of deepening, of getting to know yourself better or reconnecting with yourself. Some people will have an epiphany where it's all accomplished like that. I have never been granted that kind of experience. Most people I know haven't been. It's a process. So that's why I say thank God for the process, because I'm 78 years old now and I would. I wouldn't want to be as young and stupid as I was when I was 77, you know, so that. Embrace it, people. It's a lifelong process and it's beautiful if you recognize the.

We can keep growing as long as we live. That's the whole point. When we talk about growing older, that can actually be true, not in a negative sense, but in a very positive sense that as we get older, we grow.

Right. And, you know, certainly when I get asked that question about how long do we grieve? I always answer, well, how long is a person going to be dead? Because we're going to grieve for a long time doesn't always mean with pain. But this idea that things end, trauma ends, grief ends. One of the things that's interesting, we have both taught in different places. And I now do a certificate program online. And I planned it years ago, this program to certify and teach therapists and people who want to turn their pain into purpose. And I got to tell you, when I first was thinking about this 10 years ago, I probably would not have thought about putting trauma in a grief certificate and in something we must all know. But now it would be shocking to be talking so much about grief and not address trauma. How do the two go together in your world? How do you think of grief and trauma intersecting?

By the way, before I answer your question, let me tell you that somebody that I know quite well here in Vancouver, who lost her husband, I think three years ago now, took your course recently, and she was just thrilled about it. I can tell you her first name. I'm not going to reveal the second name. Her first name is Dawn. And she was so inspired, really by. By your experience with you in your course. She just texted me a week or two weeks ago to tell me that. And I. And I believe, I hope you don't mind me mentioning your name? Because I believe she's watching today.

Thank you. And thank you, Dawn. I appreciate that. I'm so impressed. And as we both know, most therapists, most schools don't give adequate education in grief or trauma. So important.

So a good friend of mine, a psychologist called Gordon Neufeld, who in my mind is the world's leading developmental psychologist, with whom I've written a book in common and who I quote quite extensively in the Myth of Normal, one said that we shall be saved in an ocean of tears.

His line, it's a beautiful line. And what it means by that is that we have to grieve in order to heal. That grief isn't just over or exclusively about somebody maybe dying, but it's about lost. It's about what we thought we would have and we didn't get it. It's about what we thought would happen and it didn't happen, or about things that we didn't expect to happen, but they did happen and were painful. And so all trauma.

Brings along grief. Part of the reason that people get stuck in trauma is they don't know how to experience the grief. And they don't know how to experience the grief. Because to experience grief, if you look at traditionally, of course, society, grief wasn't an isolated experience. It was a shared, communal experience. The Irish keening and the wake, the Jewish Shiva, the, you know, all the Muslim practices, the Hindu practices, communally experiencing grief. People tearing their clothes or, you know.

Now when a child is hurt, traumatized, they have grief. But in order to experience that grief, they need to be held in their grief. If they're not, it's too much for them. So they suppress their grief and they try and compensate for it instead. And that's one of the great impacts of trauma, is the inability to grieve. So that trauma and the healing. The healing of trauma and grief are inextricably linked together. And so a lot of people.

Instead of trying to feel their pain, will try to run away from it by substances, by addiction to certain behaviors, by being nice to everybody, by being accommodating, by being placating because they don't want to feel the pain of not being accepted if they're being their true selves. So there's this tension between authenticity and attachment. If they could just feel the grief that if I'm myself, these people won't like me. And that hurts. But I'd rather be myself than not be myself. So grief is a powerful.

Catalyst for the healing of trauma.

And I'll tell you, I think it's so true about, you know, we're just not meant to heal in isolation. And I think it was so heartbreaking to me to be with so many people in this past few years, people who their spouse of 20, 30, 40 years had died and they're suddenly alone and in a pandemic. Talk about grief is an isolating experience on a good day. And to have so much isolation in our world, it has been shown we do need each other for healing.

Well, loneliness is a significant risk factor for illness, as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to some estimates. And then part of the toxicity of the culture that I talk about in this book is that loneliness itself has burgeoned in the last several decades as a result of all kinds of social influences. And so that there's an epidemic of loneliness in Britain. They've actually appointed a minister for Loneliness. Now.

Of course, they don't look at the social conditions that engender that loneliness in the first place, the atomizing nature of a materialist, individualistic, competitive social ethic and inequality and so on, and the cutting down of the social network and social programs that brought people together. They don't want to deal with all that. They're dealing with effects, as always, rather than causes. But it's such a problem that they've had to appoint a minister for loneliness, if you can believe that. And in American society, according to one survey I read, loneliness has doubled in 20 years between 2000, 1990 and 2010, and it's only got worse since then. What Covid did bring home to us in a very vivid way, is how much we need each other. And I think we got that in the beginning, but I'm not sure. In fact, I'm sure that society has not learned that lesson because I don't see it in practice.

Right. One of the other things you talk about in the book is, and we have so many professionals here who are watching, is you talked about it as clearing our own energy, the. The healers, the helpers. I always think about whatever we upload, we must download, and we don't do very good at that. And you even tell the story about how you were called out for not doing your own work and talk about as helpers, how we take on pain. And I'll tell you, whenever I say the word self care, people are like, well, don't start with that. We're just not good at that.

Well, the incident you described happened in the Peruvian jungle where I was supposed to lead a Retreat with a psychedelic plant. And the shamans working with the plant said to me, buddy, you're not ready to read anything. You're. There's so much trauma in you.

Rethink. They didn't know me. They didn't know my history, who I was. They weren't impressed with the fact that I.

People had gone there for you.

They came there for me. Yeah. From all over the world. And these little shamans said, no, you've absorbed so much trauma in your work. We think we need to clear that out of you before you're ready to work with others. So they did. And now, of course, in medical school, nobody teaches you to deal with your own stuff. You're supposed to grit your teeth, don't. Not to sleep, follow authority and order. Leaders put up with being shamed and ridiculed. Ignore your body, ignore your needs. And the fact that most of the people that you're going to deal with as a physician, whether you're a psychiatrist or a rheumatologist or an oncologist or. I don't care who you are, basically, you're dealing with traumatized people. So you're absorbing their energies. Nobody ever taught us that, and certainly nobody ever taught us that we have to deal with our own trauma and the absorbed trauma that we take in from other people. So.

I did learn my lesson there because. And these shamans said to me that we're working here to save your life. Now, they also said to me very interestingly, and again, I knew nothing about my infancy, but they said, we think you had a big scare at the beginning of your life and you haven't got over it yet. They read that like that. Yeah. So. But this idea of self care. Here's the thing. For those of you that are therapists out there.

As a teacher of therapists and healers, one of my core principles is that to show somebody the possibility of their true self, we have to be a very clear mirror.

Because we're mirrors for people. That's really. If you want people to see themselves truthfully, but also.

In the deepest sense of.

The humanity that we all share. Now, if we're going to be mirrors, we better clear ourselves if we are smudged. Mirror our capacity to help others limited. So a big part of our, at least as big a part of our work is working with others, is working with ourselves. And it's not like, oh, I dealt with that trauma 10 years ago, therefore I'm okay. No, when you're working with traumatized people, it's almost impossible for you not to absorb some of that traumatic energy. And if you don't know how to clear that out of yourself, if you don't make that a conscious intention, your mirror is going to get more and more smudged or you're going to get sick. One or the other.

Yeah. And I think there's a living between. I always think about it. For me to, to feel too much is dangerous and to feel too little is tragic. And I have to.

Yeah.

Try my best to keep that moving within me and not take on others pain but not get too distant from it either.

Yeah. I formulate that same concept is that like a cell has a cell wall which is a membrane. Now if the cell wall is too thick, nothing will come out, not come in.

If it doesn't exist, we dissolve. So there has to be a semi permeable membrane that allows what's necessary to come in and what's necessary to go out. As therapists we have to become those. We have to develop that semipyramidal membrane so that we're both sensitive to the environment but not ruled by it. Or if we become too defensive and hard, then we can't help the people as much as we want to.

You talk in the book about.

Healing is not guaranteed but available. Yeah, Talk to me about what you believe healing is.

So you know, I, as a former English teacher, I pay a lot of attention to language. And so just as trauma has a word origin, so does the word healing have as a word origin. And that's an Anglo Saxon word for wholeness. So I'm certainly not the first one to say that. But healing represents a movement towards wholeness. Now what does that mean? If trauma is disconnection from ourselves and from others, then healing is reconnection and becoming whole again, integrating all our parts, all our dynamics. And so healing is that movement towards wholeness in a psychic sense which often will promote healing in the physical sense as well, but which I give examples of. But the essence of it is that we become the whole person that we're always meant to be but that we lost contact with as a result of our trauma.

And I think that's, to me that's a little bit of that link that so many times in my work someone will really try to convince me healing is not possible for them. They get it for other people, but given what they've lost, what they've been through, it's not possible.

I often think about because their mind is on the grief that they've gone through. But that's what I think is so important about your work that I realize in those moments, they probably can't see it because of past trauma, because of those old wounds. That's why they don't have the ability to see beyond the current tragedy, the grief they're in at that moment.

Well, here's the truth about me, and I write about this in the book, is that for many years, I was actually convinced that I can help heal all the world, but I can't heal myself because I was wounded too deeply, too early, too drastically for healing to be possible. And even though I knew that was intellectually inconsistent, and I knew it couldn't be right, because why would I be the first person in history from healing is not available. But the emotional belief I. I held on to very rigidly for a long time, or it held on to me, one or the other. I no longer believe that. Not for a second, or I should say maybe for a second, but not. Not for much longer, because I know better. So literally, I was one of these people that until not that long ago, I was convinced that healing is available for everybody except me, that I could guide hundreds and thousands of others to healing, but not myself. And part of that experience with the shamans was to.

Dissolve that. That delusion. But that delusion itself was an imprint of trauma, right? Because to the infant, it seems impossible. So whenever you think that you're one of these people that can't be healed, you know what's showing up? Your emotional memory as an infant who was suffering and no help was available. That's what's showing up when that belief shows up.

It is wonderful, as always, to talk with you. You are an amazing human being, and I want to tell you, and an amazing teacher. And I have literally lived with you in this book in the last week, really probably week and a half. And I will tell you, the book was, as I so expected, filled with wonderful stories, insights, nuggets, wisdom, everything I would hope from a book from you. And it covered so much, from addiction, to trauma, to loss, all of it. One of the things is, in the past few days, being immersed in it, I realized a few days ago, I felt just a peace I hadn't felt. And I'm like, what's going on? That there's this peace I'm feeling. And I think a book is the best version of ourselves we put down. And clearly, you did so much of your healing work, and you share your wisdom, and I. The. The healing and the peace seeped into me. And that's my hope for anyone who gets the book, that they find peace in it, too. And I'm pretty sure they will. It's a remarkable book, Dave.

And whatever accolades or compliments I may receive for this book, and I don't mind telling you, I hope I receive many. But I'll never get a better one than the one you just gave me. So thank you so much.

Well, thank you. Thank you for being here with us. We really appreciate it, and I look forward to talking with you.