The Impact Of Trauma In Your Life | Feat. Gabor Maté

I want to distinguish two kinds of trauma. So there's overt trauma, then there's what we call developmental trauma. And we have two very great examples of it in the United States. So what does trauma do? It separates us from ourselves. We lose ourselves, like we said. It also gives us a very negative view of the world. So if we have a negative view of the world, then we act accordingly. We are defensive and we're grandiose and we're aggressive. So there's a man who said that the world is a horrible place.

Now, I'm not.

Commenting on anybody's politics here. I'm talking pure psychology, okay? I'm not talking about policy, foreign or domestic. I'm talking about mind states. Please understand that. So how have you voted in this last election? Don't take offense, please, but the man who said that the world is a horrible place is the President of the United States. That's the world he lives in. Why does he live in that world? Because he grew up in a family that taught him that. His father was a domineering, rageaholic tyrant who demeaned his children. His brother drank himself to death. And this man develops all these issues like attention problems and grandiosity, and psychiatrists have diagnosed him with narcissism and all this kind of stuff, which are not false. They're the outcomes of trauma. So there's that overt trauma. And we live in such a traumatized society that these people actually rise to the top. But his opponent was even more interesting. I don't know if you saw the Democratic National Convention and when Hillary won the nomination, there was a video narrated about her life by God himself, Morgan Freeman. Now how many of you saw that video about her life? Now there was something very interesting in that video that I saw. No comments on whatsoever. This anecdote comes from Hillary and what happens is that. And it's presented as an example of wonderful character building, strength building, parenting. What happens is that the four year old Hillary runs into her home to her mother afraid because neighborhood kids are bullying her, threatening her. And the mother says, there is no room for cards in this house. Now you get out there and you deal with it. And this is presented as this made me tough and this made me a fighter, and this is character building. Now the actual message to the child is not that there's no room for cards in this house because the four year old or five year old who runs to mom is only doing what any mammal will do, any young mammal will do when they're threatened is they'll go to their protective figures. It's not cowardice. It's just natural attachment. The message is there's no room for your vulnerability in this house. You have to be tough. You have to suck it up. Now jump 65 years ahead and the presidential campaign, and there's a famous scene where Trump is looming all over, hovering all over Hillary, and she doesn't say a thing. She's just sucking it up. And then she develops pneumonia. Remember during the campaign, she had pneumonia? How did the world find out that she had pneumonia? Because she collapsed and her security people had to pick her up. But she didn't tell anybody about it. She didn't talk about it because she learned at an early age to suck it up and she mustn't be vulnerable. So what I'm saying, and that's what's called developmental trauma, where not when something bad happens to you, but when the good things that should happen don't happen. And the good thing that didn't happen is the mother should have scooped her up and said, oh, boy, you're really scared, aren't you? That's what didn't happen. And so what I'm saying is there's that overt trauma, and there's lots of studies on how overt trauma. If those of you are not familiar with the adverse childhood experiences studies, the AC studies, where they looked at 17,000 Californians, half of them university graduates, and the more adversity that was in their childhood, meaning physical, sexual or emotional abuse, death of a parent, a divorce, parent being addicted, a parent being mentally ill, violence in the family, neglect, a parent being jailed for each of these adverse experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially. And you can download your ACE score just by going to the Internet. It'll give you a lot of insight about yourself. But there's that other kind of problem, which is the developmental trauma, which, which doesn't happen because bad things happen to you, but just because you weren't held in the way you needed to be held. So that's the final thing I wanted to tell you.

Great.

Thank you. And for people to read your books, watch your videos.

I mean, I'm going to put a.

Lot of Gabor's work on GeniusRecovery.com which is the educational platform we're creating. And we'll have him featured in the documentary, the stuff we're doing with Artists for Addicts. Your books. You know, when the body says no in the realm of hungry ghosts scattered. I know you have a new book.

Coming out in my Head.

Yes, in your head.

Okay.

Hey, it's all in our head, right?

It's all in my head.

So how do people find more about you?

Well, my website is www.gabormate.com.

Doctor.

Doctor.

Yeah, Dr. Gabor. It's also. You can just Google me on YouTube. A lot of my lectures are on there. They're free. So both my website and on YouTube.

Great.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure. Thank you.

You know what, Dave? So much of. I think the draw for me originally to Amy and her book was not just love, relationships and things, but it's just relationships in general. Just going through the ending of certain things, or when you're dealing with betrayal and stuff like that. Like, Amy, when someone has been deeply betrayed and they lose faith in humans, they quit. They don't trust. They're just badly wounded. What do you say to them?

Yeah, I think that there's different stages of dealing with the pain and the trauma. And it's important to honor what stage you're at because there's different strategies depending on where you're at. Right. In the very beginning, you want to honor the feelings, right? You don't want to label them as good or bad. I think that especially North America, we label the feelings of sadness or anger like bad, and there's extra shame. And I deal with a lot of overachievers. So overachievers have a tendency like, this is terrible. I want it over. Like, get me through this. And they want to fast forward out of the pain. Thing is the pain needs air to breathe. And if you just shove it down, you know this. You know, you've talked about this in your own work, it's gonna show up in either another relationship, in another behavior, it's gonna come out somehow. So I think the very beginning is just processing and not judging yourself and allowing yourself to go through all of it. Because, you know, I look at it as. Whenever I'm crying, I look at it as tears, as pain exiting my body. And I'm like, oh, I'm just expanding my emotional range. How fortunate am I able to feel all of it? Right? And so I really have reframed my approach to how I look at these emotions versus just going to a shame spiral. So I think there's that in the very first stage. And then I think the second stage is practicing compassion. And I don't mean this in a fluffy, like, oh, just like, think positive. I mean this as, compassion is a muscle that you build, and the more you practice it, the stronger it gets. And compassion Is very necessary because it is a critical ingredient for forgiveness, letting go and acceptance. And you can't just get to forgiveness of someone else or human beings and the world if you don't have compassion for yourself first. There's tons of things you can do. Kristin Neff is an amazing thought leader on this. She has free guided meditations. Do this every day for 30 days. You will feel a difference. So I think that would be the next thing. And the third part, you know, is when you can get into more the cognitive thing, right? Because it's very easy right now for me to look back and be like, oh, the dots all connected. The worst thing was the best thing. But when you are. If you say that to someone who's just right after a trauma or a breakup or, you know, rejection, that is actually shaming. Don't ever say to someone, you know, just be stronger. It happens for a reason, because they can't cognitively get it at that stage. So I think once they've kind of hit a little stage afterwards, that's when you could start thinking about, okay, where am I accountable? What are the patterns here? How can I start shifting this? How can I use this as a catalyst to transform my life? Because pain is an excellent catalyst. So that's how I would approach that. And I just want to leave. One last thing is whether you're dealing with pain from, you know, a professional breakup, a friendship, a relationship, or, you know, you've been betrayed, I think one of our coping mechanisms is too close. And so I say that our greatest lesson in this lifetime is to practice opening our hearts. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. And I remind myself that when I feel hurt, and I'm like, hell, no. Am I going to allow this person or this event have me close up? And I'm like, I'm just going to open it up even bigger. And I really hope that whatever situation you're in right now in your life, that you can take that and remember that. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

I'd like to have you first off define trauma and then the difference between using it as a badge or as a living in woundology, which a lot of people do, versus what is really trauma and addressing it and not just sweeping it under the rug.

Sure. Well, first of all, it is possible to identify with your trauma and make that into your personality, make that into your identification, which means that you're stuck in something that happened in the past, and you can't move beyond it. So that's not. But on the one hand, on the other hand. So trauma can get a bad rap that way. On the other hand, we're not looking at trauma nearly enough. So what is trauma? This is to the point where, even though there is, while human scientific research does not even vaguely controversial that shows the relationship between trauma and physical and mental illness to the point that a British psychologist, a member of the British Academy, Richard Benthall, said that the evidence, for example, linking childhood adversity trauma to adult mental health conditions is as clear as the evidence linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer. But despite that scientific fact, the average medical student never hears a single lecture on trauma, which is almost unbelievable. But they don't. So that means they don't know what they're looking at. So what is trauma? So trauma literally comes from a Greek word for wound or wounding. So trauma is a psychological wound. Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you. It's not the hit that you get, it's the concussion. So trauma is the wound that happens inside you. So trauma. For example, in the very first chapter of the book, I talk about how when I was 11 months of age, I was given to a complete stranger in the streets of Budapest by my mother and I didn't see her for six weeks. The trauma is not that I was given to a stranger. She did that to save my life. As a Jew living under the Nazis, that's the only way she could keep me alive. So I didn't see her for five or six weeks. The trauma is not that she gave me to a stranger and I didn't see her. The trauma is the wound, which is what I made it mean in myself. What did I make it mean? The only thing that an infant can make it mean, which is that I'm not lovable and that I'm being abandoned and rejected. So that wound can show up 70 years later when something touches it.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So a trauma is a wound. It's not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you. And the characteristics of the wound basically are twofold. One, if you touch it, it's very sensitive. That's when you're triggered and by the Way this word about being triggered, I'm being triggered. Good thing you're being triggered because it means you get to examine yourself, because.

The trigger is only a very small.

Part of the mechanism. For the trigger to do its work, there has to be explosive material inside you. Every time you get triggered, you get an opportunity to examine what explosive charge, what ammunition am I still carrying from childhood that has just been triggered? So trauma, first of all is, you know, if you touch the wound, it's very sensitive. The other aspect of a wound is that it scars over. And scar tissue, while it's protective, is not live. It doesn't have growth capacity. So people who are traumatized get stuck at certain levels of emotional development. Scar tissue has no nerve endings in it, so you don't feel. So people who are traumatized to the extent that they're traumatized, they disconnect from their bodies, they disconnect from their feelings, which is not a bad thing. You see, because if you take an extreme example, a child being abused, you can't run away. The healthy response is to fight back or to run away. But I mean, I know your experience, Joe, and could you have fought or escaped at that time? You couldn't have. So that the protective response is to disconnect from yourself. So that's trauma, in a sense, represents the organism's automatic defense mechanisms. But then that disconnection from feeling, it creates all kinds of problems later on in life. Mental and physical illness, or when the pain gets too much and you can't bear it, you have no way of dealing with it because you couldn't deal with this as a child. And now you get into addictions to soothe the pain. So trauma disconnects you from yourself. And that's the biggest impact of trauma. Which means that now you're no longer leading an authentic life. And everybody in this room is committed to being authentic. And isn't it just a challenge? But why is it just a challenge? Let me ask you a question here. I'm just going to ask for a show of hands, how many of you had the experience of having a strong gut feeling about something, ignoring it, and then being sorry afterwards that you ignore your gut feeling? Just raise your hand. It's always the vast majority. You know what you just told me the story of your childhood. Because you've never met a one day old baby who's disconnected from their gut feelings. So something happens that something that disconnects us from our gut feelings is the traumatic experience. Now I define, or at least I describe trauma as having Two major categories. There's the big T trauma. Excuse me, this is the last gig on a seven week speaking tour now, so my voice is rather challenged at the moment. But the big T trauma is when terrible things happen to a child. Such as the sexual abuse that Joe endured, such as the separation from my mother that I endured at age 11 months. Such as poverty or racism, such as being emotionally abused or neglected, or a parent dying, or a parent being addicted, or a parent being mentally ill, or a rancorous divorce. That a child has to live through violence in a family, a parent being mentally ill. These are the big T traumas. At least these are the big T traumatic events. But there's another way you can hurt people. Don't forget trauma means a wound. You can wound people in two ways. One is by doing bad things to them. Or you can wound children not by doing bad things to them, but by not meeting their needs. Human children have evolved with specific needs. They're not just a blank slate on which you can write anything you want. They have certain emotional needs. As adults, we have certain emotional needs. For the healthy development of the human child, certain conditions have to be met. For example, an attachment relationship with the parents where the child feels absolutely secure, absolutely safe and secure. Rest. Which means that the child shouldn't have to work to make their relationship work. He, she, they shouldn't have to be pretty, compliant, smart, any of that stuff. They just have to exist. That's the need of the child. Children have to be given the freedom to experience all their emotions. And our brains are wired for emotions. You see, our emotional brain developed long before our intellectual brain. And in the individual development of the human infant, the emotional brain develops before the intellectual brain. The emotional brain is the scaffolding for the intellectual brain. When the scaffolding is good, the intellect will serve the proper purposes. When that scaffolding is not good, the intellect can go rogue and be very brilliant and create a lot of evil. So that one of the essential needs of children is to be able to experience all their emotions, which we share with all other mammals, by the way, which include caring or love, fear, panic, grief, playfulness, curiosity, rage, anger. In any parenting, and this is a lot of the parenting advice that parenting experts, so called give moms and dads in this society, is that some emotions on the part of the child are acceptable, some are not, and they have to be discouraged and even punished. When you do that, you're forcing the child to make a terrible decision. If I'm myself, I won't be accepted. I won't have the attachment relationship. On the other hand, to have the attachment relationship, I have to suppress aspects of myself. That's why you all put your hands up. Because at some point, you learned that in your family or virgin, it was safer to belong than to be yourself. And then it becomes a lifelong struggle to get back to who we actually are. So trauma, then, is this wound that you sustained either because terrible things happened that shouldn't have, which happens to a lot of kids, or because the good things that should have happened did not, not because their parents didn't love you, not because they didn't do their best, but because they live in a culture that makes it so difficult to be a good parent.

Yeah, very good.

So that's a good sign there, at least resonating with what you're saying. What is the difference between. Because I wrote this down, I want to make sure I say it right. What is the difference between childhood trauma and adulthood trauma? Would the body respond differently to each of them, and would you handle them differently? And if so, how? Because there are things that happen in childhood, but then there's betrayals and things that happen in adulthood.

Well, let me tell you something. I don't quite see it that way. There is a very famous, and rightly so, child psychiatrist and neuroscientist and trauma expert called Bruce Perry, Dr. Bruce Perry, whose book with Oprah, what Happened to you? Is a recent bestseller. And Bruce points out that if you take kids and you get the first few months or years right, and all kinds of terrible things happen later, they'll be okay. But if you take kids and you get the first period wrong and they suffer a lot, all kinds of good things can happen later, and they'll still be in trouble. And when you look at the studies on ptsd, the people who developed PTSD in adulthood were people who were traumatized in childhood. And those adult experiences actually trigger the childhood trauma. So in a particular company of soldiers, maybe hundred, they go into battle, they all experience the same killing, the same cruelty, the same loss of their comrades, the same fear, the same rage, perhaps. And 20, 30 will come out with PTSD. The others will not. It's because those 20 and 30 were already carrying the trauma of childhood. So I'm saying that adult trauma is, in virtually every case I know, manifestation of unresolved childhood trauma.

Okay.

Wow, that's so. Dr. Don Wood, you know, he has the line, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they do what it is that they Do. What have you discovered in. Because you've. I mean, I wish I would have found the video of me and you driving around when you were pointing out in Vancouver's. Because he wrote a book in, I think 2009. You wrote in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

That's right, yeah.

Which is an amazing book. So if you want to go deep into. On addiction, Gabor's written when the body says no, Scattered. And then I think it's called Scattered Minds in Canada.

Yeah. This is my book on adhd, which is my first book after I was diagnosed with it and it was published in Canada with the title Scattered Minds in the US with the title Scattered. I think the thought was the American publisher didn't think the US public would understand the word minds. I don't know. I don't know what the problem was, but lo and behold, my publisher is going to bring out Scattered Mines in the US Again with the actual title Scattered Minds.

You know what I admire about you too, though? You have never been like a marketer, like, let me figure out how to build my YouTube channel and stuff. And you now have millions of people that follow you because you say things that change people's lives and you help guide people. And you are a significant figure in the world. I mean, one of the most important figures. I constantly say to people that you're probably the most in tune, intelligent, articulate person describing addiction and disconnection of anyone I know. You helped Johann Hari, who has the great line, the opposite of addiction is connection. And then your. When you did your first TED Talk, you had a line where the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And so you've really helped me understand that addiction is a response to pain. It is a solution to pain. And so even in my book, what's in it for them? You know, the first chapter is which. Thank you. You gave me a nice endorsement for.

This, deservedly, by the way.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I say be a pain detective, because what I've realized is that pain is a great messenger. And so to go back to Dr. Don Wood, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they do what they do. So I look through the lens of where are they suffering? How can I help? Where am I suffering? What is pain trying to tell me? And right before I came to this conference this morning for day two here, one of the people, one of the members in the audience, said, do you know any good doctor for pain? Plantar fasciitis? I have this pain. I've not been able to get help. And one of the things I said was, I got someone I can recommend, Steve Ozanich, who wrote the Pain Deception, which I know you know, Steve, but I said, listen to my talk with Gabor, because I think there, you know, I think there might be not might be there. I know there's a link between disease and addiction and pain because of unresolved trauma. And in your book, like chapters 27, 28 and 29, you go really deep into compassionate inquiry, which is your process. And I guarantee you, those who have not read Gabor's book, that alone is worth this book. Just those three chapters of giving you a process on how to even just look at your own life. And so my question is, and then I'm going to come to add, because I definitely. We cannot have this interview without talking about that, because there's so many people here that identify with distractibility. So how does one change the atmospheric conditions of their life in a positive way? Because we, you know, there's a lot of people running the world right now that are creating the worst shit storms on the planet. And so I just wanted to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, so the first thing is to recognize that that is a problem. Now. A lot of people don't recognize it. They keep trying to run away from it. And one way to run away from recognizing that there's a problem is that you become addicted. So, for example, we did this the first time you spoke, but let me do it with this audience. Okay? I'll give you a definition of addiction that I don't think is controversial. So an addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences and they have difficulty giving it up despite the harm. So it's pleasure, relief, therefore craving, short term, long term harm, inability to get up. That's what addiction is. I said innate behavior. I didn't say drugs. It could include drugs. Of course it does. Cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol. But it could also be gambling, the Internet, pornography, sex, relationship, work. And in this culture, workaholism is rewarded. Like my workaholism was rewarded. Shopping, any range of human behaviors. The issue is not the activity, it's the internal relationship. Pleasure, craving, relief, harm, inability to give it up. So I'm going to ask you guys a question here. If, according to that definition, you recognize that sometime or another you had some kind of an addictive pattern in your life, just raise your Hand. Okay, again, it's virtually everybody here. Now. The next question I ask is not what's wrong with the addiction, which we know, but what's right about it? What does it give you in the short term? In the short term, what does it give you that you like? Okay. I wonder if a couple of people just raised their hand and then shout out their answer. Okay, what does it give you in the short term? Or what did it give you? I'm not going to ask you what you're addicted to or how long or when. Just what did you. When you were in it, temporarily, what does it give you? Anybody?

Serenity.

Serenity. Okay. Thank you.

Feels good.

Feels a good feeling. Pleasure. Yeah.

Dopamine.

Hit.

Of course.

Which means excitement. Yeah.

Stimulant.

Stimulant.

Escape.

Escape. Thank you. Escape? No. Escape from what? Escape from distress. Escape from emotional pain. Serenity. A sense of aliveness. Escape from pain. Are these good things or are they bad things in themselves? The good things? They're the things we all want. They're the things we all deserve. Actually, they're all the things we should have had as children. Which means that the addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your addiction was an attempt to solve the problem. Therefore, to talk about addiction either as an inherited disease or some kind of a choice that people make. And by the way, there are millions of people in jail in this country because of this social belief that addiction is some kind of a choice for which people should be punished. No, it ain't. It's an attempt to deal with life problems such as emotional pain. And so if you want to understand addiction, you have to look at the atmosphere again, as Don Wood says, that people grew up under and what they're trying to escape from. So first, we have to recognize that there's a problem and not run away from it. Secondly, we have to accept compassionately all parts of ourselves, all aspects of ourselves, whether we like them or not. Because all aspects of ourselves, whether we like them or not, they came along for a reason. And if we ask the question compassionately, you might do something that you're not proud of. If you ask yourself the question compassionately, why did I do that? What need was it serving? What was my organism trying to deal with? You'll find the answer if you ask the question. So you can ask the question two ways. Why did I do that? Or why did you do that? Do you think there's going to be an answer? No, because that's not a question. That's an accusation against somebody else or against the self. And as one of my spiritual teachers says, only when compassion is present will people love themselves to see the truth. Now, if you ask somebody else, why did you do that? But, hmm, I know you're a good person trying to do your best. Any idea why you did that? Now, that's the question. And the same with yourself. If you put to yourself, no, why did I do this? But, hmm, I wonder why I did this. That's what a compassionate inquiry is. And my belief is that the answers are within all of ourselves. They actually are. And if we are compassionate with each other, which is so much of what you talk about, and if we're compassionate with ourselves, then the answers will emerge. So that's the beginning is to recognize it's a problem and to be compassionate about examining the sources of that problem.

How do you treat it, Gabor?

What's the best?

I mean, we're currently, I think we're so much as a society in the infancy stages of even beginning to really understand this as a whole. I mean, if you controlled everything, how would you treat this?

Well, take a very well, tragically well known case right now, Harvey Weinstein.

Who.

Clearly had an addiction to sexual predation. And of course there's all kinds of justified outrage at the system that allowed him, that enabled him to carry on for so many decades. And people are angry with him, which is totally understandable. But if he came to him for treatment, I would not begin with any kind of a judgment that what you did was bad. He already knows it. I would ask him, like I asked you guys, what did it do for you? What did you get from it that was missing from your life? And what was missing from your life? How did you lose it? What happened to you? In other words, whatever else you do, first of all, you have to accept these people as they are and not judge them and understand that they were slaves to something inside them and they didn't willingly make themselves slaves, number one. Number two, something happened to create that compulsion. And that something happened. That's something that happened that created the compulsion was rooted in pain. And so in other words, you have to treat them with compassion and you have to actually get to the core trauma rather than just dealing with the behavior. And the problem. With all the many programs, Betty Ford and elsewhere, people go for all these high end, expensive treatments. Rarely do they deal with the trauma. And Even in the 12 step programs, they rarely deal with the trauma. David Smith, who's a physician in San Francisco who funded the Haight Ashbury clinic back in the 60s. He said to me once that the medical profession is true traumaphobic. So is the whole of society. We're surrounded by trauma and the manifestations of trauma. We show up in the culture, from politics to every other field, and yet we don't talk about trauma.

Right, right.

So treating the trauma, dealing with the trauma.

Yeah.

Gabor, you were referring to trauma that's.

Passed from generation to generation.

Yeah, and if I inferred correctly from your saying, it was based on the behavior. So the behavior, the trauma gets passed.

Through by the behavior of the parents.

To the children, then that results in addiction. But I keep reading about this field of epigenetics, where there may be an actual biological change. So how sure are you that there's not a biological mechanism?

Well, there's no contradiction. So you're quite right. So epigenetics, for those of you that may not know the word EPI means on top of. So genetics. On top of genetics. So it turns out that genes are turned on and off by the environment, and that happens early in life. So that even two people with the same genes, if they have different experiences, they'll have different outcomes. Because in one case the gene was turned off, the other one was turned on.

So.

The traumas passed on, both behaviorally and in the pain that it induces in a child. That's clear, because I can tell you that what I haven't said much about, I referred to it was that if I look at the circuits in the brain that are affected by anxiety or ADHD or addiction or any other mental health problem, these circuits develop an interaction with the environment. You see, the human brain is the least mature of any mammal. The horse can run on the first day of life. We can't do that for a year and a half. And that's because we're born with large heads, comparatively speaking, already at birth, the head is the largest part of the body. And the female, the human female, has a relatively narrow pelvis compared to a horse because we have to walk on two legs. So narrow pelvis, large head, we have to get out of there prematurely. And that means that most of our brain development, 80 to 90% of it, occurs after birth and not before. Very much affected by the emotional environment. So that these are not just behavioral problems. They become physiological problems in the brain based on what happens in the environment. And on top of that, then what you say is also true, that our gene functioning is also affected by trauma, multi generationally, and so that you traumatize grandparents and that still affect the genetic functioning of their grandchildren. So that's true as well. So it's all these things coming together. Having said that, though, the brain can develop new circuits even later on in life. And that's called neuroplasticity, for which I always say, thank God for neuroplasticity, because I'm 73 now, and I would not wish to be as stupid as what as I was when I was 71, you know, so thank God that the brain can change. And that's why the word recovery is so interesting, because when we talk about recovery, what does it mean to recover something? What do you do? What do you do when you recover something? You're fine. You get it back. And when you ask people when you recovered, what did you get back? I got back myself. So in trauma, there's a loss of self, and in recovery, there's a reconnection with the self.

Yeah, the atmospheric conditions is something that I used because I'd meet all these different people and they would have all this guilt and shame about, you know, addiction or things that they've done in their lives. And then what I would say to them is, how could you have been any different?

Right.

If I lived your life the way you lived your life, I would have found the same kind of resource. Maybe not the exact one, but I would have found something to stop that pain. And I always talk to him about. Humans have very unique memory systems. We have two memory systems, explicit memory, where we store billions and billions of bits of information. And we also have associative repetitive memory, the same way animals do. They learn through association and repetition. So if you've had a lot of trauma, that explicit memory is stored in real time and high definition. So your subconscious operates in the present. So when it accesses memory from something that happened to you, maybe as a child, it's going to create an autonomic nervous system response.

It has to.

It's not a choice. So if your system gets activated, then you're going to feel an emotion because the emotion is a call for an action, but you can't do the action because there's nothing happening. And so. So it's doing a Google search through your entire life for how do we respond to this? Then it goes into the second memory system, which is the associative repetitive, which I call coding. And so the more you've used that substance, you. You've built a code, a neural pathway that your mind says, oh, we know what to do when we feel this pain. Go right to the code. And then the code Says, take a drink, take a drug, have sex, whatever it is to stop this pain. And I say, you couldn't have done it any other way.

Yeah, yeah, you couldn't have done any other way. So even if people are doing what's considered good or bad, that just happens to be the current state of their atmospheric conditions that kind of create the outcome. And so the good news, and I'd love to hear your thinking around this, and this is one of the things I've been saying to people, and I think I've always believed this, Don, even when I was in the state of hopelessness, when I was in the worst state of being a drug addict. You know, some people, they just have lost every shred of hope. And that's where suicide and complete, you know, complete just destruction of their, their lives and family and everything surrounding comes in. That there's always been that, that part of me, that flame that even when it was almost completely burnt out, where I actually believed, you know, I could come back. I believed, you know, there was a possibility. And I think the, the framing of atmospheric conditions, I, I believe one can not only alter and change their atmospheric conditions or to reframe and make sense of the past, but if you do that for yourself, you can really, in a very beneficial way, influence other people. So I think every human here has the ability to change their atmospheric conditions, not only how they think about them, but how they actually live out their life. And that you can fashion and design your own future for sure.

So, and that's what I do, is I say we just need to reset the way your mind filters through your set of atmospheric conditions. So if you have, say, a situation you had as a child that's stored in high definition, very bright, very intense, your subconscious mind that's operating in real time sees that as if it's happening now. And so then it's going to call for an action. So every time you have an emotion, your mind is calling for an action. The purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. So when you think about something that happened to you 20 years ago and your heart's pounding in your chest, it's a glitch, it's an error message. Your mind is trying to get you into an action, to make it stop, but you can't make it stop. So the problem for the individual is they keep looping through this trauma, activating their nervous system, and they can't stop it. And so how do they stop that? They stop the mind from Google searching through its memory by taking a drug or taking a drink, and it stops it, and then they keep repeating it. So now the second memory system that codes on how to make behaviors and habits, right, then builds a code on what to do with it. So what we do is go into that explicit memory and reset that memory system. So I take it at a high definition, get it into a low definition, almost the opposite of what they did with the wizard of Oz, where they went from black and white to color. We're going to go from color to black and white. Then when the mind sees that data, it doesn't respond to it because it's just data, right? So when I worked with the Boston Marathon bombing survivors, right, when she first sat down, Rebecca Gregory, she was four feet from the first bomb, and she lost her left leg and five and a half years of post traumatic stress terror nightmares every night. And when she first sits down, starts talking to me, she starts to shake and cry. And I says, rebecca, do you know why you're shaking and crying? She says, well, because I'm talking about what happened to me. And I said, right, but your mind thinks there's a bomb about to go off. It's looking at the information about the bombing in real time, trying to get you to run, but it's an error message. All we have to do is reset that. So. So, Joe, you're absolutely right. Nobody has to live with post traumatic stress, depression, anxiety. You can fix it.

Yeah, it was someone, actually. Why don't you put your information, Don in the chat, too? Because someone had asked, you know, how do you do it? Now, here's what I. What I would say there is. There's a lot of different ways that you can connect with other people. In my. My book will go through lots of different ways that what I've done. The first chapter is about be a pain detective and look for the pain and connect with someone on how you can reduce their suffering and how you can, you know, develop real, you know, rapport and empathy. And it usually comes from a place of pain, although it could come from a, you know, place of pleasure, too, certainly. However, the reason I bring up these conversations about pain and stuff in the book is that if you're disconnected with yourself, it's really hard to be connected with other people. And if you have trauma that's kind of overriding your behavior. You know, one of the things I mentioned in my book is humans are either communicating where you're just talking to each other, and that could be on zoom. It could Be in person. It could be, you know, on the phone, it could be whatever, it could be any form of communication. But if you just take an in person situation, and I'll mention this, at events where you're at an event in person, there's either a few or a lot of people around you. And if you're at a one or two or three day event and you're interacting with everyone, you're either communicating, we're just talking, you're connecting where you're finding common ground and you really feel like you're, you're dancing well with the other person, you're enjoying it. And the third experience is you're trying to escape where you're just like, get me away from this person. There's something about the energy or you're distracted or you're hungry or you're, you know, you're just not there with them or you're frankly don't like them and they don't like you. There's something about what you believe or just sometimes it's this energetic feeling and you don't even know how to explain it, but you just don't. You kind of pick up on it. And what I hope is that everyone can develop their spidey senses to identify the takers in the world and kind of put up boundaries to it. Because the real goal of my book is to help givers be better boundary givers so that they can really spend their, what I call in chapter two, your Tammy, your time, attention, money, effort and energy on people that are worthy of that. But to go back to Don in atmospheric conditions, if that keeps you from being connected with yourself, how the hell are you going to connect very well with other people? And the people that are the biggest con artists is they don't connect, they connect with people. There's connecting where you're connecting by conning people. And that's what a lot of marketers that do it unethically do is they bullshit people. And then there's real connecting where you're actually coming at it from a good place. So the reason I intermingle so much about addiction and so much about, you know, just the human being, you know, the million dollar resource. That analogy that I talk about quite a bit, I'll, I'll go more in detail on that in a little bit is that you know, you, if you don't take care of you, I can teach people connection strategies all day long. But if you're walking around the world constantly trying to escape your own skin or you don't feel comfortable anywhere. You're just not going to do as good of a job leveraging any potential relationships and opportunities that are always available. You know, people that cannot seem to get things to work in their life, I almost want them to look at their life first before the external opportunities that are out there. You know what, the sun is often always there, but there's clouds in the way that are preventing, you know, the sun from coming through. And sometimes that's just the weather conditions, but the atmospheric conditions are the weather conditions of our own lives in our minds. Well, yeah, exactly.

Our minds. That's really the thing I've been working on. I got a riff in the making in the category of imagine if you applied yourself, that the, you know, it's often talked about how Dan Sullivan and I was talking about this on our podcast, but when my mother died, I, she had a box with all of my old report cards and stuff. So I got to look back, like talk about, you know, going down memory lane there. But my third grade report card was summed it all up with the handwritten comments in the comment section was Dean is able to achieve excellent results with what seems like little effort. Imagine if he applied himself. And that's been kind of my life pattern for, for my whole life. And I was, I was talking with Eben or texting with that, but in a couple of nights ago, because it hit me a breakthrough that I think is like something real. And I'm so glad that Dawn's here too, because it's kind of, I think, in the line of what he's saying that it dawned on me that in order for somebody to change something, anything that's not working in our lives is usually there's a breakdown of one of three things. It's either the logic of what you're trying to do, that you're just trying to do something that doesn't make sense, or you're going about it in the wrong way, or the logic is right, this is the plan that will, will work. But the logistics are wrong. You're not doing what you know to do is the logistics problem. But barring a logic or logistics problem, Perhaps the biggest 80% of the reason I think that we don't get the results or get the thing that we're trying to change is a limbic problem that there's going on in our minds that's blocking us from following doing the thing that we know to do. And that's really a, you know, and so I'd love to have that's the, that's as far as I've gotten on the, the riff in the making. But it, I love the, the elegance of the limbic logic or the logic logistics and limbic and getting those in alignment. I came up with Eben. I was saying that you can test the logic and logistics of something by doing a limbic lockdown exercise. And I thought I was talking about weight loss as an example that the logic of eating following a keto diet with, with intermittent fasting is a lot. That's a plan that you're going to do. That would be the logic of what you can do. The logistics of that would be, okay, well, we're not going to eat anything till noon. We're going to eat all the food between 12 and 6 o' clock and we're going to eat this ketogenic plan. These are the meals that we're going to eat. On paper, it's pretty easy logically and logistically to lay it out. But in practice, what happens is you just like Mike Tyson was everybody's got a plan until I punch him in the face is everybody's got a plan till somebody presents you a Krispy Kreme doughnut or something. Right. That your limbic system has linked that Krispy Kreme to delightful memories that will feel the fill you with the dopamine and the wonderful outcome that you're going to do. But if you were to do a little lockdown on that I've said to Epin, if you, there's, there's no doubt that if you were locked in a prison or locked in a room and somebody brought you the appropriate amount of calories, following the exact logic that you've laid out, that you're going to eat between 12 and 6 and it's going to be the right number of calories with the right macros and that was the only access to food that you had, you did a limbic bypass. There's no way for your limbic system to derail that it would be inevitable that your plan would work. You know, and that. So I, you know, there's certain things like I was thinking in, along that lines that if you were to put two glasses on a, you know, on a counter and one is filled with a ice filled glass of windshield wiper fluid and one is filled with a glass of Mountain Dew and they look exactly the same, you don't have to convince your brain, I don't have to convince my brain to not drink the windshield wiper fluid. But if you were presented with the with the Mountain Dew. Even though ultimately it's the same outcome. I mean, it's the same poison. It's just long term acting or short term acting, the consequences linked up differently, you know. So what do you think of that? I mean, that's kind of the.

Well, I would, I would almost default that back to, to, to Dr. Don Wood and see what his thoughts are. I, I guess, you know, let me, let me do kind of a timeout for a minute and think about this zoom that we're having. So we're having an I love marketing live. And you know, there's those shows behind the scenes, how it's made, all that sort of stuff. And you go back a few minutes when I asked Dr. Don Wood about atmospheric conditions. And so I have a great marketing team and I have a couple of, you know, people on my mark. Well, everyone on my, in my company is part of my marketing team from Gina, who's hosting this, to, you know, everyone. But I've got a gal named Lauren and, and her partner Paige, and they have, you know, they, they help with a lot of stuff from articles that are being put out to a lot of the stuff you see on social media and things. And so I asked, you know, I brought up this whole thing about atmospheric conditions and then I asked Dr. Don Wood about it. And so I have a book out that's right, right now. And so what could I have as clips that are supportive of my book and would speak to the things in the book, but we can edit that little section of Don riffing about atmospheric conditions and all of a sudden it becomes a Instagram video or it can become an article or it could become a post. Right? And so oftentimes what we, what want to do as part of I Love marketing is remind people that something as simple as a phone conversation that you're having with a prospect is an opportunity to say, well, how many times do I get this question and maybe I need to start writing, you know, this in my newsletter and I need to have a Q and A section on my website or I need to speak to this. Now I know a lot of you do this and that's how you create quote, unquote content. It's just oftentimes though, I think a lot of people just miss so much of it that's right in front of them. And we have these little vignettes, these little slices, these little thought bubbles that we constantly come up with.

I had a hundred thousand talks in my head and when she asked me, the guy with add at that moment, what do you want to talk about? I did the smartest thing in the world. I asked my wife, what should I talk about? And literally she said, let me think about it for a second. And you. And she comes back, she goes, here's what entrepreneurs deal with. I know you always talk about influence, you always talk about sales, getting people to get their point across, stuff like that. Why not help people with the biggest thing that they deal with, the shit that shows up in our lives. And the majority of you, you're master marketers, you're really great at getting your point across. But how much time are you spending marketing to you to get yourself to be less bothered? Because isn't that what we do in business? Literally, you got a person with a problem, you hit them over the head a little harder, you sell them a Tylenol, and then you get them on auto ship. How many of you know what I'm talking about? That's our job. That's what it is we're here to do. But the question is, when something shows up in our life, how much time and energy are you literally taking? I'm going to question you. Here's question number two that she gave you the ultimate question. I'm giving you a question too, and really ask yourself. This very simplistic question is how often are you spending time rewording and recalibrating things in your life that that may be slowing you down and possibly bothering you? So I'm gonna give you six steps here that are very simple. I use this for high level intervention work. Eunice has been to our event before and she's seen me do this where someone that's been raped or abused has a problem. 30 years of issues, and I get them to see it differently in 10 or 15 minutes to change their emotions. But there's little things that happen in our day that wind up being big challenges for ourselves. So I'm gonna give you a little synopsis real quick. I want you to imagine you're four years old again, okay? You're four years old, three years old, two years old. And don't be that person. That four years old was a bad year for my life. Pick a year. It doesn't matter. You're a little kid and you're walking down the street and there's a little hole in the ground and you step in it. And immediately your parent says to you, or someone next to you goes, you tripped. Are you okay? Now, before that, nothing had occurred. Your foot went in a hole. Immediately you were told that you tripped. Your brain says tripped. When I trip, people get worried. Something must go wrong. Now, when Tucker was talking about earlier about jamming stuff down in our body that lives there for a while, you're starting to develop a little something called a pattern. Tripping is bad, and I get people's attention. Well, you're about 8 years old, and you're with your buddies, and you trip and you fall, and they laugh at you. Now, tripping is bad. You fell, people laugh at you. It's the wrong thing to do. Then you're 15 years old, you're playing ice hockey, and the coach says, we need to, you know, you need to do a drill you're not comfortable with, or you're doing gymnastics, something you're uncomfortable with, or you're in business at 35 years old and you're wondering why you're the person that won't do something that's outside of your comfort zone and what the most stimulating thing for this, for me to think about is all of us have the ability to. To do this with others, but how much time are you spending working on yourself? So my challenge is, I'll do my little seven minutes left of this talk. I'm going to challenge all of you even over the next month, spend seven to 10 minutes thinking about the word choices that you use in your life. And Tony brought up something a little bit ago, and I started reframing immediately because my brain is always in reframe, meaning when you said your challenge, like, my person, my partner died, and I finally made as much money as I wanted to make in my life, and I'm more miserable than I've ever been in my life. I heard that and immediately started to reframe. So I'm gonna use slides, and I'll see how this works. Here's a big sign we have in our office, and it's very simply says your future hinges on your ability to effectively communicate.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can. You can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and.

You can get a copy there.

Now, after reading the book about why I thought about this for a second and why we do what we do is that I truly believe that communication is the most underdeveloped and underutilized asset we have as human beings, most people are miserable at communicating with other people and themselves. And when you communicate with yourself in a weak way, you typically get a weak life. So when I explain this to you all real quickly, I'm going to ask all of you to realize this. How many of you have had some shit happen to you in the last week that's not what you expected? How many of you raise your hands? Okay. How many of you in the last year have had shit happen? Okay. How many of you recognize that immediately when that shit occurred? It happened. And your brain was searching for. What do I actually call this thing? Because you've never actually had that moment before. So, doc, you're going to get this immediately. I'm taking, like, sick man, fraud, Sigmund Freud, forgive me. And I'm taking all of the work. I get that backwards sometimes. And maybe all of you will learn that if you actually put things backwards in people's brains, they'll learn to start seeing things differently. And you'll realize very quickly that one of the smartest things you can do is screw up during your presentation. Say something backwards or use somebody's name backwards. And they start questioning everything else, and they start questioning themselves. So pay attention to this, because it'll make sense. So the first thing that happens is an event occurs. Little boy trips in a hole, or just little boy foot in hole, go on, date. Somebody does something you didn't ask them to do. What happens is an event occurs immediately in our brain. Anytime we have an event occur in our lives that we've not experienced before, the brain almost immediately starts looking for answers. Oh, my God. What is this called? What does it look like? What does it do? And all that happened was an event. If you look the 21st of whatever the hell month this is got circled, there was an event that occurred. Tony made more money than he ever made in his life. His brain said, what do we label that? It's supposed to be a great day. See, my question for Tony is, what Tony did was he set a plan for himself that said he set an event that one day I'm going to make more money than I've ever made in my life. And what that's going to be called is the happiest day of my life. It's going to be called the reckoning. It's going to be called the breakthrough. It's going to be called everything. I invested every dollar, every event ever in his life. And he told himself a story. Am I correct? We do this all the time. We put a Label on something no different than I tripped. As soon as you get a label, the brain immediately gives it meaning. Now, what you said is, Tony said, I'm unhappy. What does that mean when I'm unhappy?

Wow.

Things in my life are not working out the way I want them to. Now, what's fascinating is, let me give you another example here, because I have six minutes. I'm gonna walk a few people through this right now. Who here has had some challenge, something show up recently that's not like super complicated, like a divorce with a narcissist, but has anybody had something happen recently that's a challenge, that wants to jump in, go quick. What's that? You gotta go quick. I wanna jump in.

I have a narcissist stepson.

Oh, geez, the narcissist again. Okay, very good.

Who told us that he wasn't going.

To come for Christmas Eve dinner?

So let's go back again. So what happened is we had an event that happened. Somebody made a promise. Correct. Correct. Very good. And immediately somebody made a promise. So immediately you labeled it and you labeled it and said somebody didn't follow through. Correct. And immediately after that is. What does that mean? That means that that person is a liar. That person lied to me. That person let me down.

Correct.

Now, anytime you label something and you give it a meaning, which we all do immediately. All human beings do this in a matter of seconds. You can slow this shit down. I've learned how to slow this down. I'm out with my wife one day and we ran into a jumping cholla. How many of you ever done that before? A jumping cholla? Let me explain real quickly. If your wife's screaming and she goes, ow, there's something on my leg, don't always grab it because I grabbed the jumping choia off her leg. Now my hand was stuck to her leg, okay? And immediately I'm looking at this thing. I said, wow, maybe this is telling us that we need to be closer, spend more time together, communicate better. And she's like, no, no, it's just a jumping cholla. Our brains, okay? It is a poisoned latent cactus. They call it jumping because they go in the wind. It's like a baseball. They're like, oh, look how cute that is. And I'll tell the story another time how I try to get it off my hand like this. And then we were out for a run, and I tied my key to my shorts. You know how boys do that? And I put it down my pants. So I have like. So I had to like whole nother conversation, a whole nother day. But I created meaning out of it. So the whole thing with Tony, for an example, and I'll explain this in a minute, is what that means is, so what Tony created for himself is I set a goal for myself, just like you. You thought things would be different this time with this guy, so you lied to yourself. And then you start questioning, how often do I lie to myself? I got two minutes and I got to get to the point. So what happened with Tony is Tony goes like this. I'm going to. I'm just going to backtrack and we can. He had an event occur. I'm going to make this ultimate amount of money. He lies to himself, tells himself that this is going to occur. Then what happens is he labeled it, said to be the best day of my life. He added meaning to it, said things are going to work out great. But what then really happened is Tony basically said, but the meaning. What does it really mean is that what else in my life is not working out the way I want it to or what else am I lying to myself about? So my question for you is a little different because I want to switch this back and I want to help you out. A question second is basically, who told you that making more money would make you happier? You did. Me. You came up with that. So basically you were wrong. And you don't like being wrong because accountants don't like being wrong. So really, you're not bothered that making more money, you're unhappy. You're really bothered that you're wrong. Let's step ahead. Another thing. And what happens when you actually become wrong? We're just playing with this. And none of this is true. You feel something, you're wrong, you feel insecure. So then Tony's like, wait a second. Is my whole life bullshit? I told myself, if I finally get to this place in my life, I would be happy. How many of you are resonating with Tony's story of your own life? If you are CIA. Anybody catching this? So what happened with Tony? And I'll be done in like a minute. Okay, so what happened? Or 3. So what happens is. Give me a second. It'll be worth it.

I just told her not to be.

Because I know you're just being.

You're being Michael.

I'm being Michael. And if not, I'm going to be a narcissist for a second. Fuck off. No, I'm just kidding. So what happens is Tony feels something and he says to himself, Tony says to Himself. Wow, this is uncomfortable. I don't like this. And then what happens is he reacts and he goes, I don't know what to do. I go in my shell. This is what I typically do. And after we react for a while, what happens is you get a result, you get an unhappy person. I've watched that. Most of us look to change people's lives. We like to get them to pretend that the event didn't occur and no, no, that didn't happen. It's one of the worst things you can say to somebody. And then we try to change the reaction of what they're doing. Like, stop doing that. I'm going to tell you all of the gem all therapy I have read every. I have a library you couldn't even imagine on everything from psychotherapy to hypnosis. And you would name it Everything that works Out Good. From Virginia Satir, one of my heroes. And all this great work basically comes down to a very simple thing, is you can't change the event and you really can't change the reaction of what's happening. But if you could change the label, the meaning and the emotion behind what happens, you have the ability to change almost anything in your life. See, when we were going over this list of what pisses you off, I use gradient language all the time. It's a term that I use. I don't really have things that piss me off. I have things that bother me. I have things that annoy me. I have things that frustrate the shit out of me. And I avoid the majority of those things. But why I'm bringing this up to all of you to really think about right now is most of you are looking to change your results this year and demand from yourself that you do things differently, or you looking to pretend those things didn't occur. If you could change the label slightly on what occurred, even the label on being here. Ingenious. Even shifting the label that I'm here to understand myself better instead of like, I have to get it. How many of you recognize you were torturing yourself in genius network with the attitude of, I came here because I spent 25,000 bucks and I have to get it. If you're here to. I'm here to improve myself and find a few things that can make my life better. The emotion in your body starts looking for things differently. Your biochemistry changes. Your emotions change in a major way. So why I'm bringing this up is if I were to recalibrate Tony here real quickly, in less than 30 seconds, I would say Tony, basically what happened is you told yourself something was going to happen that didn't happen the way you wanted it to. Correct. And because of that, it made you a little bit upset. So it wasn't that you made more money. That was your problem, is that you actually did. Did something you didn't expect. You actually achieved something you've always wanted and you thought you'd have a different result. Correct. So you were wrong temporarily. And being wrong temporarily is not wrong permanently. So all I'm going to challenge you to think about is from that context by changing that one word. It changes everything after associated with it. So I'm going to ask all of you to play with your brains for the next couple days to think about this in any major way. I deal with this all the time. I had a woman that was held hostage for five days, and literally she was on a bus. And basically she said, four hostages, I'm in Israel, there's four hostages on a bus. And all of you hold yourself hostage from time to time. And she was on a bus in Israel, and there's four hostages. Got her on the bus, kept her there for four or five days. I said, okay, so four hostages on the bus. I said, four got on, five got off. She goes, what the hell are you talking about? I said, what do you mean? She goes, you're not listening, Michael, you're being an asshole. I said, no, no, you don't get it. I'm confused. Four hostages got on the bus and five got off. She goes, is your math bad? Are you stupid? What's wrong with you? I said, I think I'm hearing you clearly. Four hostages got on the bus, kept you captive for five days, and five hostages got off. She goes, no. There was four hostages. I said, no, four got on the bus, you were there, and you decided to join them for the rest of your life. You're holding yourself hostage. You became a terrorist and you joined them. You've been terrorizing yourself for years. When she realized that she wasn't held hostage, that she was terrorizing her herself, her emotions changed immediately. She got back to me. I worked with her 10 years ago, changed her life, changed her relationship by one shift. In one word, it's like marketing. One shift. Joe could change one word in your context of your copy. Or Tucker, one word. Or yesterday, when he was talking about you and your. Changes everything. So my question is, were you terrorized or are you terrorizing yourself?

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy my book. I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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They're over here. Do it now. Come on.

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