BREAK ADDICTION: Why You Feel Lost In Life & How To FIND YOURSELF! | Gabor Mate

To say that I have this disease makes the assumption that disease got a separate life and nature of its own. It doesn't. What if we saw disease not as the things in themselves that have their own nature, but as I think you.

Gotta have a dream.

The school of greatness. Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howis what I read about your stuff, What I see about your content is a lot of people are lost based on trauma and past traumas cause certain addictions or certain behaviors.

Yeah.

And routines that maybe are some healthy addictions or unhealthy addictions. But it seems to be like a lot of unhealthy addictions.

Can I interrupt right there? Yes, please. No such thing as a healthy addiction.

No such thing.

If it's healthy, it's not an addiction. If it's an addiction, it's not healthy. There are passions, there are habits that are healthy, but they're not addictions.

Like working out.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that can be an addiction or it can be healthy. Like eating can be healthy, but could be an addiction. I define addiction as any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences and cannot give it up. So if you're suffering negative consequences, so it's craving, relief, pleasure in a short term, harm in the long term, inability to give it up. That's what an addiction is. Now, if you have a behavior that's ongoing but it has no negative consequences, it's not an addiction. It's a passion, it's a pleasure, it's a habit, it's a healthy habit, it's a healthy habit. So for me, it's not an addiction. And also a healthy habit. A person, if it no longer works for them, they can give it up. So for me, there's no healthy addiction.

There's no healthy addiction.

In fact, the word addiction comes from a word for slavery. So there's no. There's no healthy slavery.

Interesting. So addiction, what is the root of addiction?

The word.

Yeah.

So in Roman times, an addictus was somebody who's assigned to another person to serve them because they owed them money and they couldn't pay it back.

An addictus.

Yeah, dictus was like an indentured slave who had to work off the debt. So that's where the word actually comes from, is a form of slavery.

So if you're addicted to something, you are a slave to that. That craving.

Absolutely, absolutely. You. You have no choice. You can. A slave has no choice. Wow. And they have no free will.

Essentially, yeah.

And I've had My own addictive behaviors and nothing like the patients that I worked with. But insofar as I had them, literally, even though I was a well paid, middle class, successful doctor, I was not exercising any free choice, really, over my behaviors. No.

When did you. What was the main addiction that you were, you know, tied to? And when did you learn.

Yeah.

How to break free of that?

Well, so that in my life, the main addictions have been to work.

To work.

Yeah. Work hard, achieve more and more, patience, more and more, success more and more. More and more is the essence of addiction. It's always more and more. And there's a reason why I developed that addiction. And that was the hardest. That's the hardest one to give up. Then I was addicted for a long time to shopping for classical compact discs. And when I say addicted, I mean, I would spend thousands of dollars a day on CDs. Yeah. Really? Yeah, really. And I would lie to my wife about it, and I would neglect my patients. And as soon as I left the store, thinking, now I'm complete, my collection is full. Half an hour later, I had to run back. And as I described in my book, An Addiction in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, I once left a woman in labor in hospital to go get a symphony. So that's an addiction.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. And it's like that. Now, the interesting thing about addiction is that I wasn't using substances.

You weren't smoking or drinking or things like that.

Drugs. But I was looking for a chemical hit.

Dopamine.

Dopamine. Yeah. So I was on a dopamine fiend, you might say. And I get it through those particular behaviors. And so that's what my addiction was. How did I give it up? Well, it took a long time. Really? Yeah. A lot of struggle, a lot of, you know. And finally I just realized that the cost was greater than the. In fact, you know, in fact, if I started listening now to all the CDs that I have at home, and they did nothing but listen for the rest of my life.

You wouldn't finish.

I probably wouldn't finish. Wow.

So how long would you say, when did you realize, okay, this is an addiction, this is an unhealthy.

I realized it long before I gave it up.

Like, years. 10 years. Decades.

Years. Years, yeah, years.

How long does it normally take for someone when they realize this is unhealthy, this thing I'm doing, this addiction is not good for me until they actually give it up? Is there any data on that?

I couldn't answer that one. I think It's a highly variable and individual issue. It has to do with what resources they have to heal. It has to do with what support they have. It has to do with what cost this habit is exacting on their lives. It has to do also with some belief that there's a part of us that's actually healthy and we can get in touch with it. You know, there has to be a co. Combination of factors, and it's very, very individual also. It also depends, of course, the degree of trauma a person suffered. And addictions are always about like. You've heard my definition of addiction. And I'm sure if I asked you, like, if I asked for talking to a thousand people. Put your hands up. If, according to my definition, you've had an addiction, virtually everybody in the room will put their hands up. Maybe there'll be two liars who. But 998. And then I asked them not what was wrong with the addiction, but what was right about it. What did you get from it? So if I asked you that. So you've had your behaviors. If I asked you. I don't care whether it was two, but if I asked you, what did you get from it? What would it be?

You get some type of relief, you get some type of pleasure. You get some type of. Specifically, what do you get from it?

What do you get from it? What did we give you? Temporarily. Whatever it was. I don't even care what it was.

It's just, you know, you get escape.

Okay. Escape. Right. Yeah.

You're not thinking about the pain or the shame or the insecurity.

So who needs to escape? Me. No, but I mean, what kind of person needs to escape?

Oh, a scared person.

Scared person. Somebody who's imprisoned, Isn't it? Somebody who's not free.

Trapped.

Yeah, somebody's trapped. Exactly. And I know in your book on toxic masculinity, you talk about being trapped. Trapped is the very word you use.

Yes, and I felt trapped most of my childhood.

That's the whole point. So what I'm saying is that addiction is never a choice. And it's not some kind of genetic disease, which that is total nonsense. What it actually is is an attempt to solve a problem in your life. In your case, you were trying to solve the problem of being trapped, which is based on your childhood trauma, which you publicly talk about. In my case, the workaholism was about trying to prove to myself that I had the right to exist. That was important.

That you're worthy of love.

That I was worthy of love. Exactly. Acceptance and all that. Now, that also came from a childhood experience. So addiction is never like either a disease as such. It can behave like a disease, but it isn't a disease as such. It's also not a choice anybody makes. It's actually an attempt to solve a deep life problem that was imposed on the person by trauma in every case.

Wow.

Is it.

Is it possible for someone to heal a deep wound on their own? A trauma from decades past they've had an addiction to trying to escape from. Is it possible to do it on your own, or is it really take support someone. Someone's a team. What's your thoughts on that?

Well, I think very rarely it is possible for an individual. Maybe they have some deep spiritual experience. Maybe they're out there in nature and all of a sudden they. They're at one with the universe.

They feel presence, they feel connected. Yeah, exactly.

So that can happen. It does happen to some people.

And they just to choose. I'm going to decide not to do this anymore.

They realize they don't need to because they're free.

They fell free.

Interesting. Yeah. Very rare. For most of us, people, beings that walk this earth. It takes a lot of self awareness. It takes a lot of support, connection, guidance. So I'd say if you're listening and you've got one of these issues where you're addicted to something in the way that Lewis and I are just talking about, don't wait for that miraculous moment, get the help, because you have a much better chance that way.

Yeah. So what would you say is the root cause of all addiction then? Is it feeling a wound? Is it feeling trapped by something that's happened in the past?

The being trapped itself is a sign of a wound. So the. In fact, the word trauma means wound. The Greek origin of the word trauma is a wound. So children who are hurt, but they're not supported, seen, accepted and helped, they get trapped in the wound. And being trapped in the wound and being trapped in the behaviors to escape from the wound, that's how the trauma shows up in our lives.

Interesting. And in our culture and our society. You know, I talk about this in my book as well, about how as a young boy growing up in the Midwest, in Ohio, I didn't see examples of older men or athletes that I aspired to be, like talking about their emotions or talking about healing or talking about, you know, I had a trauma. Talking about how to, you know, navigate the full range of emotions. It was more. You just get made fun of if you cried.

Yeah.

You get picked on and called, you know, things you don't want to be called. You're, you're kicked out of the tribe, you're not accepted in the tribe and you're, you know, boys group growing up.

Yeah.

And so I feel like culturally there's a lot of pain with men and women obviously, but that it seems to be is causing a lot of the stress in the world right now. It's just this cultural pain.

Well, if I may be self serving, my new book is called the Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. So it's just as you say, the trauma that people are experiencing massively isn't just personal to them. It's also a sign of a culture that's completely out of whack. And when I say out of whack, the things we consider the reason I call the book the Myth of Normal is what I'm saying is that the things that are considered normal in society are not at all normal from the point of view of human life and human needs. It's not healthy, it's totally unhealthy. So that the addictions and the diseases and the mental illnesses that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation. So that whatever addiction you had or even this mask of rigid masculinity that you tried to adopt for a while until it cracked for you. Right.

Needing to win, needing to be the best, needing to.

But that was a normal response to survive. To survive, exactly. So that the abnormality wasn't in you, it was in the situation that you're in. That's what I mean by a toxic culture. Yeah. And I know again, in your book, you, you talk about these public figures that all of a sudden you realize we're talking about their emotions. Yeah, but that's fairly new. Very.

In the last like five, ten years.

So. So these days athletes will talk about their sexual abuse.

This didn't happen until 10 years ago.

Really?

And really more three to five years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so now there's. Why do you feel like people are now starting to open up who are more public figures? Why do you think that's happening?

Well, I think what's happened that the toxicity of the culture. One of my subtitles is Toxic Culture and it's got so bad. There's a Greek playwright that I quote in my book, he's Aeschylus and he, one of his plays, he said that the way that gods created us human beings, that we have to suffer, suffer into truth. And I think that the degree of Suffering. Now, most people I know who engage in a path of self exploration and truth, they. They didn't do it because all of a sudden they just made a decision. They just suffered so much. So the suffering can actually wake you up. And I think, to answer your question, this society has got to the point where the suffering is so intense and so widespread that something had to crack open. So I think that's why it's got so bad that it couldn't be hidden anymore.

Why do you think in our modern society, with all the medical and scientific advances and all the knowledge out there, that there's so much chronic pain, though, so much suffering, when we have more information and knowledge and tools than ever before?

Actually, we don't. We have less. What we have is a lot more physiological, physical science, which is great. You know, I mean, if I needed a heart transplant, I'd be very grateful for modern medicine or, you know, if a broken bone or anything. But we've forgotten something that human beings have always known. And for example, I write about this friend of mine. His name is Louis Mel Madrona, and he's an American physician. He's Lakota background, okay? And he told me that. And he's just like me. He's full of respect for Western medicine. I was trained in it, he was trained in it. We also see what's missing. And he said that in his hij tradition, when somebody got sick, the whole community gathers and thanks the person and says, you're carrying some dysfunction in our whole culture, so your healing is our healing. Wow. So they get that the individual represents the culture and the environment and the family and the community. Now, Western medicine totally forgets that we separate the mind from the body. So often when I speak to groups, I ask people if in the last five years you've been to a neurologist or an oncologist or a cardiologist or gastroenterologist or a rheumatologist, any kind of an ologist. Put your hand up. So people put their hands up. Keep your hands up. If they ask you about stress in your life, trauma in your childhood.

Relationships.

Relationships, Exactly. How you feel about your work, how do you feel about yourself as a human being? Very few hands stay up. And those questions which have to do with, number one, the unity of mind and body, which is only scientific fact, and the inseparableness of one human being from another Western medicine completely ignores, which is contrary to science. It's not only contrary to ancient wisdom, it's also contrary to modern science because we have tens of thousands of studies to show that you can't separate the mind from the body. Tens of thousands of studies showing how emotions significantly influence the onset of illness. How relationships. Do you know, there's a wonderful psychiatrist here in la. You may know of him or him, Daniel Siegel. And Dan Siegel talks about what he calls interpersonal neurobiology, which means that our brains are not separate. Something in you will sense the tension in me and we'll pick up on that and that'll.

The intuition.

Yeah, that'll change your brain. And I take it a step further. I talk about interpersonal biology so that what happens to people physiologically is very affected. And I'll give you two examples. Yes, but affected by their culture and their family. So we've known for decades that children whose parents are stressed are much more likely to have asthma. The parent stresses affect the physiology of the child.

The breathing.

The breathing that they narrow the air tubes, they cause inflammation. By the way, how do we treat asthma? Stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. You know, we know American black women. The more experiences of racism then you have to endure, the greater the risk for asthma. Really. We know that men who were sexually abused in childhood, the risk of heart disease triples. I could go on. Women who suffer symptoms of PTSD severely, the risk of ovarian cancer doubles.

Why?

Because you can't separate the emotions from the body. It's one unit, scientifically speaking. Not just from the point of view of indigenous wisdom, but modern science. So when I talk, when you say despite all this knowledge, I'm saying what's missing from the knowledge is wisdom is the wisdom and not just the wisdom, even the science. That's what's so ironic. So I'm a physician and as doctors we always talk about evidence based practice. And I say, my God, I only wish we had evidence based practice. Let's look at the evidence. What's the evidence for separating the mind from the body? Body, but multiple sclerosis, this mysterious illness. The guy who first described multiple sclerosis was a French neurologist, Jean Martin charcot, in the 19th century. He said that it was a disease caused by grief and long term worry. Since then there's been multiple studies showing the relationship of stress, trauma and multiple sclerosis. You go to the average neurologist with symptoms of ms, nobody's going to ask you about your trauma, nobody's going to ask you about your stress. And why is that significant? Because if you deal with the trauma and the stress, your multiple sclerosis can actually improve significantly. Wow. So there's a huge gap between the scientific evidence and how we practice medicine and what we call scientific evidence based practice is miraculous. It's amazing, but it's way too narrow.

What about something like arthritis? What is that? Would you say that's connected to?

Okay, that's been studied as well. So there was a great Canadian physician who actually was one of the founding physicians at Johns Hopkins Medical School. His name is William Osler. He said in 1880 that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by long term worry and stress.

Long term worry and stress?

Yeah. Now since then, in 1890. 1880 or 90. Wow. Yeah, he said this then, since then, multiple dozens of studies showing a relationship between trauma stress and rheumatoid arthritis. Do you think the average rheumatologist knows anything about that? So that people go to. I know people. In my book the Myth of Normal, I talk about people with Ms. Or arthritis who once they start recognizing that the flare ups of the disease actually manifest stresses in their lives, if they learn how to deal with those stresses. One woman told me that I have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis. He said, she says it was my best teacher because when every time it shows up, I know that I'm out of alignment with myself.

Yes, you're out of somewhere. You need to have a conversation with yourself or get back in alignment. It's interesting, I was telling you this before off camera, that and then a previous relationship that I was in speaking a lot of chest pain and kind of tightness in my throat. And at one point, like I was starting to get like this, a rash or some type of flare up, like in my, like below my belly button.

Yeah.

And I was like, what is. Like I've never had some type of like eczema or skin condition or something. It was like this kind of bright red flare up. And I was like to have a disease, like, what is this? You know, and it's fascinating because I was telling you like the moment after many, many months of therapy and starting to integrate the lessons of healing and really feel it internally, I started to feel this sense of peace inside of me for the first time. I didn't feel trapped for the first time in myself, in my heart and in my body. And almost overnight this flare up was there for months. And I was like, oh, maybe I'm having, I had allergy tests and I was like, maybe it's peanuts, I don't know. All these different, like foods that I'm eating. And I was like eliminating the Foods. And it's still there. It was almost overnight when I felt the peace inside of me. The flare ups went away and they haven't come back. And I was like, so if you.

Had come to me at that rash.

I would have asked you not, what are you eating?

No, I wouldn't. Well, I might have. And those are good questions. But I also would have asked you, what is your body saying no to? Rejecting that you're not saying no to.

Oh, my gosh.

You know, now a flare up, if you take that word flare up, which is what you used.

Yeah, it's inflammation. Right. Something's inflamed.

Okay, right. But where else do you use what else flares up? You know what flares up is rage, anger. But you had anger that you weren't expressing.

Right.

Hence your body flares up. Yes, we know that suppressed emotions cause inflammation. So had you come to me, not had you come to me when I was out of medical school, because I wouldn't know anything about this. Nobody teaches you this stuff. But if you come to me more recently, I would have asked you, well, Louis, what is your body saying no to that you're not saying no to? And that happens in two major areas, relationships and work, you know?

Interesting.

And so the body says, the signals, we can learn from it. And now the problem is that you go to the average physician, they're not.

Going to ask those things.

They're just going to try and collude with you, try and get rid of the symptom, not find the root, which is. That's okay. I mean, you don't want to sit there with a rash. It's fine. But also, let's look at the source of it. Yes. And the source is always assumed to be something physical. Maybe they'll think of food, maybe they'll think of some toxin. They will not think of your emotions. Even though the mind and the body.

Are inseparable, how much stronger do you think the emotional weight or trauma is than physical toxins in terms of affecting the body?

I can't make that assessment because I don't know what study would even compare the truth. I don't. I don't want to speak right off the cuff, but what I can tell you is that the emotions are really primary in most chronic conditions. And if you deal with them now in this society where there's all these toxins in the environment and junk in the food and all, who knows? Yeah, everything. But. But what I know is that the emotions play a huge role and that once people Begin to realize it and they deal with it. That can have a impact on their illness. And the other thing I've. I don't know about you when you write books, but I write books as much for myself as for anybody else.

100%.

Yeah.

This show is for me.

Yeah, exactly. So I get to learn a lot when I'm writing. So one of the things I learned when I was writing the Myth of Normal was even how we think about disease. Like, people say I have eczema or I have depression, or I have rheumatoid arthritis, or I have add. Now, there's an assumption there, isn't there? The assumption is, first of all, is that there's this thing called add, there's this thing called eczema, there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis, or there's this thing called depression. Then there's an eye, and the eye has that thing. But that thing has got its own separate, independent nature. So I have this cup. I can put it down, I can give it away, I can break it, I can keep it, but it's separate from me. It's got its own nature. But to say that I have this disease makes the assumption that disease got a separate life and nature of its own. It doesn't. What if we saw disease of all kinds, mental or physical or addiction, not as the things in themselves that have their own nature, but as processes that manifest our lives. And if I live my life differently, then I can have an impact on that process. So that process will change. That's exactly actually how it is. So for shorthand language, I understand it's helpful to say I have depression, but.

How important is the words we choose?

But if we buy into that language, we're actually missing the point because you don't have it. There's no it that's separate from you. And that means that if you change yourself. In fact, there's a. A friend of mine now, a recent friend, Dr. Jeff Rediger, who's a psychiatrist at Harvard. And last year he wrote a book called Cured the Science of Spontaneous Healing. That was the subtitle. Now, he studied people who were terminally ill, documentedly. So they had no prognosis whatsoever. And then they get better.

So they were terminally ill. They were not supposed to survive.

They're not supposed to survive.

They're supposed to die in a few.

Years or something, four months, or we. I've talked to such people myself, and.

They'Ve cured their disease.

There's a woman called, a psychologist called Kelly Turner, who studied the same thing. She wrote a book called Radical Remission. So all three of us have looked at these people. They did it in a research kind of way. I just did it impressionistically, you know. But I do check out the histories with people's doctors. We all know people who are supposed to have two months to live or six months to live. Either medical treatment has failed or they refuse medical treatment. Then all of a sudden the disease goes away. I think all three of us have found that what makes the biggest difference is that the person changes their relationship to themselves. Wow. And there's always trauma in the background. Now, Jeff and Kelly have documented people. They go on diets, they take supplements, they start meditating, they go into nature. Yeah, they go. Nature, the whole thing.

All those things are great.

Yeah. And I think the. But I think Jeff and I agree, and I think Kelly would probably agree as well, that the biggest shift is in one's relationship with oneself. In other words, the life changes, the process changes. Now, I'm not promising everybody who's listening, you can cure yourself. I mean, you know, this is not snake oil. I'm just talking about the importance of recognizing the impact of emotions and one's relationship to oneself of. On one's physiology. That's all I'm talking about.

There's an external environment and then there's an internal environment. You know, our emotional environment.

Yeah.

That is connected to our, I'm assuming our nervous system, our heart, our brain, the whole body and everything. And if our emotional environment is sick, then we're probably going to be physically sick as well.

Well, that's what you're. That's. That's what your story actually. Yeah. Illustrates, isn't it? As soon as you create a. An internal environment, your physical issues abate. You know, by the way, speaking of, I just noticed I'm getting too excited here. This is, this is my passion. I mean, I. I just could go on about this forever, but I'm also noticing probably I'm getting a bit too heated here. And you're getting warm. I don't physically so much. I just notice I need to calm down a bit. I don't wanna. I don't wanna talk too fast.

No, I like it. This is exciting for me. Yeah, well, I just feel like what you were just saying, emotional repression is a major cause of physical illness. It may not be the only cause, there's other factors. But what we suppress usually comes to the surface in some way. Is that correct?

That's the whole point.

And most of Us. I'll speak for myself, I wasn't taught and I think most of us are not taught on how to express the emotional traumas, the emotional pains, fears, insecurities, shames, guilt, where we're not taught the skills. It's one of the reasons why I started the school of greatness because I was like, I wish I would have learned these skills in school.

Yeah.

You know, most of most people's parents are messed up in some way or have some issues and they aren't taught this. And so we're, you know, I grew up in a household that was very stressful and chaotic and there wasn't stability.

So did my kids, by the way. Right.

And you're like the guy.

Right. But I wasn't the guy then.

You weren't the guy.

Yeah.

So your kids had to some traumas that they had to face because of you and their parents.

It's not even a matter of skills learning, it's deeper than that because you don't have to teach any one day old baby how to express their emotions, do you? No. If they're sad, lonely, do you hear about it? If they're hungry or uncomfortable, do you hear about it? Of course you do. There's nothing to teach. You have to allow it and you have to give space for it and you have to hear it and respond to it. The problem with most parents is not that they don't teach their kids these skills, is that how they really live their lives? Because of their own traumas and because of the stresses in this society, they actually discourage kids.

Don't cry. Stop crying.

Yeah, from what's natural?

Suck it up. Well, look, don't do this, don't do that.

Right. Well, you know, there's a very famous Canadian psychologist, I don't know if he's been on your program, but he says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. In other words, anger in a two year old is not normal and we have to socialize it out of them. Now there's nothing more natural than an angry 2 year old.

There's nothing more natural than an angry 2 year old.

They get frustrated, they want a cookie, they get a cookie before they don't.

Get what they want.

They want a cookie, they want a cookie before dinner. And if you're a good parent, you're not going to give them a cookie before dinner. Right.

So when does you teach or when does someone learn how to not express anger? Every 10 minutes though.

Well, here's the point. If that 2 year old then starts screaming or throwing a tantrum, getting angry, if you say time out and you're not going to be with them now, you're presenting the child with a tragic dilemma. I can have my authentic emotion or I can have my relationship with my parent on whom my life depends. So I can be authentic or I can be attached in the relationship, but I can't have both.

Interesting. Because if I'm not authentic or if I'm authentic, then I'm going to be alone, I'm going to be on timeout or whatever.

And to the child, the timeout is.

Life threatening because you might be alone forever, right?

Yeah. The child doesn't know that, you see? Yeah. So basically you're threatening the child. Threatening the child with depriving them of the greatest need, which is the connection with you.

Yeah, love.

Yeah, the love. Yeah. Now, but isn't there a point though?

If you're a 21 year old man now and you're, you know, screaming every 10 minutes because you don't get the cookie.

But that's not the answer. Right. The answer is. Answer is when they're screaming to pick them up, you're angry at daddy, aren't you? You really wish you had that cookie. Yeah. Oh, I get it. You know, and then the child relaxes and the anger moves through them. You know what they learn that anger is just something that moves through you. You can let go of it. If you don't see the child, don't accept the child's emotion, they're going to have to repress it, they're going to.

Have to stuff it.

What's another word for stuffing? It's pushing down.

Trap it.

Yeah, well, pushing down. What's another word for pushing down? Depressing. Where does depression come from? It's not this disease. Depression comes from having had to push down your emotions. Literally you had to push down your emotions. In other words, why did you have to push down your emotions to stay connected to your parents? In other words, it was a coping mechanism. And what I'm saying is that a lot of illness, whether of the mind or the body or both, comes from coping mechanisms. There are normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation. It's not normal for a child to be banished from the peasants of the parent. If you look at indigenous people, they carry their kids everywhere. The kids are always with the parents. And the pilgrims, when they arrived in North America, they're very upset with how the natives reared their children. You know why? Because the indigenous people did not Hit their kids.

They didn't hit their kids.

They didn't hit their kids. And the Christians couldn't understand this, why.

They didn't, you know, create obedience with them. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

So what do they do?

They nourish them. And when you nourish a child, see, nature has got a natural agenda, is that you should grow up to be a self regulated adult in connection with yourself and with other people. That's nature's agenda. It's like nature has an agenda for an acorn to become an oak tree. But an acorn doesn't spontaneously become an oak tree. It has to have the right conditions. So it's not a question of teaching the oak tree, the acorn to be an oak tree. Just give it the nourishment and the sunlight and the earth and irrigation that it needs its nature to become an oak tree. The nature of human beings is to become self regulated, socially responsible creatures. That's how we evolved. Given the right conditions, that will happen. So it's not a question of teaching all these things. Yeah, there's some teaching involved. Mostly it's the question of meeting children's needs, giving them the right conditions and then they will develop self regulation. They learn it because you're self regarded aid.

So they're watching you, you're not reactive and explosive screaming.

You know, you realize, oh, I'm angry, okay, I'm angry. But you're not screaming at the kid, you know. So in the right environment, these traits spontaneously evolve or develop in a human being. So our society is always about how do we teach these skills and no skills. Well, teaching is important, but more important is the child's spontaneous growth given the right environment. And what I'm saying about this toxic culture, we don't give our kids the right environment.

Yeah, I mean you hear the number, the statistic that 50% of marriages turn into divorce these days. And also probably, I think when I had Esther Perel on, I was like, how many of the 50% that are married are actually happy? It's a very small percentage too.

So I've had a marriage that we've had a lot of unhappiness. We've married 53 years now. 53, yeah. We're very happy together now.

You are.

But it took us a lot of work, a lot of commitment. But here's what I want to say. There's two ways you can tell if a marriage is unhappy. One is you can ask the parents. The other is you can measure the cortisol level of the children. Oh wow. Because the parents stresses affect the physiology of the child.

Oh man, my cortisol must have been off the charts.

But I was, yeah, all of us children. Yeah, it probably would have been. And so in this society, and this is not the fault of individual parents, like it begins in the uterus, actually already stresses on the pregnant woman will affect the physiology of the child. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. Now in this society, so many pregnant women are so stressed. In the States particularly, you're talking about.

More emotional stress because there's physical stress of like the body's expanding and growing in aches and pains. But the emotional stress, I mean the.

Emotional stress of having to the nervous system perform on the job or being in a difficult relationship. In one of the chapters in the book I talk about, it begins with the diary of my wife who was writing it when she was pregnant with one of our children, about how unhappy she was. And she's talking to the infant saying, please don't take this stress personally. She wrote that and I quoted it in the Myth of Normal. And she knew what I didn't know. And she was unhappy because of our relationship.

She was unhappy because of the relationship.

She was unhappy because of what was going on in her relationship with me. Being a workaholic doctor.

Not being there, not being available emotionally.

Exactly. And even blaming her for how I was feeling. So she's talking to this infant inside her. And that's how I opened one of the chapters. So already in the uterus these stresses start happening. A lot of evidence for that scientifically. Brain scans, blood work, all kinds of stuff. Then there's labor, which in our society is very often mechanical and emotionally very difficult. And in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. Now that infant is meant to be with the mother for at least nine months. I would say years, but at least nine months. That infant is abandoned at two weeks. That's how they experience it. Oh man. Even if they're looked after by someone else. But the mother, the infant needs the mother's body.

Yeah, that was. My mom was working pretty, probably pretty fast after each one of us were born. You know, had to go back to work and.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not blaming the women. Right. They have no choice. Yes, I'm saying, but this society puts those stresses on women. It then doesn't support them through the pregnancy. Then it puts a lot. And not only that, we didn't grow up in individual isolated nuclear families, did we? We evolved in small band. Hunter Gatherer groups where people supported each other, where children were with adults all day, where adults collaborated. They had to, otherwise they wouldn't have survived. Right. So that's where our nature actually evolved. So when you get to society, which tells you that people are by nature selfish and aggressive and competitive, which isolates mothers in separate homes where the community is more and more. You know, there's lots of. Lots of work done by sociologists and others in the States about how communities are breaking down. There was that book Bowling Alone some years ago, 20 years ago now, about the breakdown of community. So that people are not getting support and that means they're stressed and the.

Mothers are doing it all on their own.

Exactly right.

They're also expecting the husband to, you know, work and also be at home, as opposed to reaching out to peers or family or friends.

Exactly. So it's a very unnatural culture. And no wonder so many kids are getting diagnosed with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder or depression. You know, there's an article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago, also in the New York Times, I think, about the rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides in the U.S. it's mysterious. It's not mysterious. These kids are no longer having their developmental needs met. They feel alone and desperate and scared.

And the drug. Drug use is on the rise and addiction and.

That's right. So there's nothing mysterious about it. If you look at the cultural setting, it's only mysterious if we think we're dealing with isolated mental health issues or isolated physiological issues. But when you see the connections, nothing mysterious.

So what are the main, I guess, mental health. Are they diseases or are they not considered a disease like depression, add, adhd? What are the main mental health symptoms out in the world right now? Could you say.

Yeah, so depression and anxiety are fast growing and. And they're major challenges. More and more kids are being diagnosed with adhd. More and more kids are being diagnosed with something called oppositional defiant disorder, which.

What is that?

Opposition? That's when the kid is defiant and oppositional and goes against adult values and adult expectations. But we think there's something wrong with the kid. Instead of looking at the context of what makes the kids the environment. No, all these diseases. Well, you can talk about them as diseases to some degree. And certainly, you know, I've had depression and I've taken medication for it in my 40s, and it really made a difference for me. You might call it a disease, but actually that's a shallow way of looking at it. Because actually what does it go back to? It goes back to being a one year old infant or being a three month old infant. In the book the Myth of Normal, the first chapter has a painting in it. The painting is by my wife, based on a photograph of me and my mother. This is Budapest, Hungary, 1944 and I'm three months of age and my mother in a photograph is wearing a yellow star that Jews had to wear. My father was away in forced labor and within two months her parents would be killed in Auschwitz. That was my first year of life.

Oh my gosh.

And the look on my face is full of. Is full of terror. I was absorbing my mother's fear and.

My mother's anxiety cuz she had terror in her face. And you're mimicking and, and she had.

It in her body. Body. You're.

You're connected to her eating ten times a day.

Exactly.

And you're feeling the stress.

Exactly.

There's probably now no calm in her.

There's no calm there and. But she's already so stressed and she's just trying to make sure that we survive. She's not there to really receive my feelings. And then when I'm a year old or 11 months old, she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life because she didn't think we were staying. I would survive for a day and probably I wouldn't have.

Wow.

So I didn't see her for six weeks. Five or six weeks. And you're one? I was one then. Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

And now what could I do as a one year old I could do two things. Or as an infant going through all that. First of all, how do I deal with all that stress? I tune out. I tune out. I become absent minded as an adopt as an adaptive mechanism.

A coping mechanism.

Exactly. 55 years later I'm diagnosed with ADHD which is characterized by tuning out. Is it a disease? The heck it's a disease. It started as a coping mechanism. I'm also diagnosed with depression. Why? Because in an environment I had to push my feelings down in order to not to burden my mother who was already burdened enough.

Create more peace and warmth.

So I took that on. So I pushed down my feelings, I depressed my feelings. Then I have this depression. So are the diseases. Well, you can talk about them that way. But I say they began as coping mechanisms. And I'll tell you another story. I'm 78 now. So six, seven years ago I'm in San Francisco with a therapist and I've taken mushrooms, she works with mushrooms. And I've worked with psychedelics and it's one of the things I write about and that. But this time I'm the patient, I'm the client. And I'm lying there on the mat under the influence of the psilocybin. And I know exactly who I am. I'm 71 years old. I'm a medical doctor, I'm a writer, I'm a speaker, I'm married to such, you know, my wife Ray. This is a therapist. So I'm not like hallucinating. I know exactly where I am, but at the same time I'm experiencing myself as a one year old infant.

Oh my goodness.

And this therapist is my mom. Is my mom. And I start crying and I say, I'm so sorry I've made your life so difficult. Wow, that's my one year old self all of a sudden under the influence, speaking up. I took it on that early that I'm responsible now. You talked about, oh my gosh, in our conversation before, you told me about how you were in this relationship and you couldn't leave it even long after you realized it wasn't right for you because you took on the responsibility of how the other person would feel if you would let them down. I'm telling you, that's your one year old speaking. That you took responsibility for the suffering of your parents and how you mustn't let anybody down because it's your responsibility. We take this stuff on so early without words, actually. They just become ingrained and then we, then we live our lives out of it until something happens. As you did for you, your body.

Rebelled, you have a breakdown or something happens, right? And you're like, you either keep breaking down or you, wakes you up and say, okay, why is this happening? What is off? What is out of alignment? What is, you know, where am I out of integrity, whatever it might be.

Exactly.

And I feel the challenge is I was like, I want to end this suffering. You know, I've repeated this pattern many times. I'm sick and tired of the suffering. I'll do whatever. You know, I think when you, for me, I was like, I've felt enough of this, I don't want it anymore. But it took so much courage to face these things for me. And I know other people have deeper traumas or different traumas and it's, it just seems so challenging.

I wouldn't go there. I would not compare your trauma to anybody else's.

Well, we all have our unique traumas.

Right.

Different experiences that we face. Why is it so challenging for people to face it and start addressing it? I was telling you, you know, I've been doing pretty intensive therapy for about a year and a half now, every two weeks.

Yeah.

Not because I feel like something's wrong with me anymore. I'm stressed more because I want to maintain a level of peace.

Yeah.

And I want to continue to maintain peace.

Good for you.

So once I realized and started healing, I didn't say I'm good.

Yeah.

I was like, I want to go to the next level of exactly. Peace, love, you know, an environment of beauty inside of my emotions. But why is it so hard for so many people to face it and actually speak the shame, guilt, insecurity, you know, imperfection about them?

Well, I think in your own work you've touched upon very accurately on why it's so difficult. For one thing, if you just, just the words that you just use, peace and love and connection. If you had played that to your 20 year old self, how would he have responded?

He'd been like, suck it up. Or he'd been like, what are you talking about? You're fine. Like, yeah, don't be a little wuss. Or you know, just work harder, you know.

Yeah, but where would that have come from?

I mean, just my entire conditioning growing up from sports and.

Yeah.

You know.

Okay, so that, so does that. So that's one of the factors is the conditioning in this culture. Okay. I, I also say it would have come from intense fear. Oh. Because if you'd actually, it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself.

It's terrifying.

Yeah, it's terrifying. So there's intense fear. So there's the conditioning, as you say. Then there's the, the fear. It really is painful, you know. You know, nobody wants to have pain, you know, but that's called growing pains. And the third factor is we all develop this personality now. The personality, we think that's us, but it's not us.

Right.

The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods along with some genuine traits. So the personality is kind of an amalgam of, of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities.

Yeah, some good stuff, but yeah, some also coping. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I used to be like, I was a fun loving guy. I was like a kind, generous. But then when there was a trigger, like I was angry and, you know, defensive and guarded and things like that.

Or you talk about the various masks, the sexual mask or the, or the material mask, the aggressive mask you know, when I started reading your chapter on the sexual mask, you wrote about some guy whose name I forget, but who's sort of the champion picking up women. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for one split second. Poor bastard. I was thinking, you know, that this is what he has to do. But what's that? It's having to prove to himself that he's lovable. Where does that come from? You know, so. But we identify with it.

Yes.

So we think we're the personality. I'm this sexually attractive guy, or I'm this aggressive guy. I'm this material guy who's going to make it in the world, you know, and so we think that we are our personality. So it comes from, I say, three sources. One is the conditioning, the other is the fear for the pain, and thirdly, the identification with the personality. We think that's who we are and we don't know who would be without it. All of which is all based on trauma.

Yeah, it's the identity, you know, building this identity that, you know. And I talk about how the identity supported you to accomplishing certain things or protecting you from certain things by having this identity. Yeah, but it's also not serving us to hold on to that identity if we want the next level of peace and freedom.

Exactly.

So it's. But it's so hard to kill an identity. It's like you've had this thing for decades maybe, and you've got to let go of this thing.

Yeah, we'll see. I wouldn't even talk about killing. I mean, in my healing chapters of this book, I talk about. Let's make friends with it. Like, for example, I have to, by the way, I have to be honest. I said that I wouldn't be in this guy's shoes for a minute. That's not true. Part of me was envying him. Right. You know, Even here I'm 78 and married 52 years. But I read about this guy who slept with all these women. Why couldn't I be that guy? You know, I don't want to go there, and I wouldn't. I've long ago chosen not to. But. But there's still something that. Who doesn't want to be wanted that much?

Right? You know, something with the ego or the desire.

Yeah, yeah. So. But. But if we didn't kill those parts, but made friends with them, if somebody came to me with that kind of pattern of I'm that sexual guy, but they don't want to, but they realize that it's not they might feel high for a moment, like any addict will.

It's not fulfilling.

It's not fulfilling. I wouldn't say kill that part of you. I'd say, let's make friends with it. Let's find out what it's really trying to do for you. What it's trying to do for you. It's trying to make you feel wanted, making you feel valuable, making you feel desirable, making you feel loved, temporarily making you feel powerful. What happened to you that you don't feel lovable, that you don't feel desirable, that you don't feel powerful. You know, in other words, it's not a matter of getting rid of these parts or these aspects of ourselves. It's a question of actually getting to know them. And they all began as coping mechanisms. That man that you describe in your book, I guarantee, is a highly traumatized human being.

So when we start to ask ourselves, this question that you're asking is what happened to you? Or when, you know, when did you feel not powerful or not lovable or not wanted? Yeah, and let's say we're able to. Someone watching or listening is able to assess themselves and actually be present.

Really.

Reflect on the painful moments of the past, which a lot of people aren't even willing to talk about it to themselves.

Right? That's right.

For 25 years, I had a memory of being sexually abused and thought about it almost every day. Like for. For a moment, you know, it come, you know, at least weekly, maybe not every day. But it was like a memory. Yeah, that's there, you know, but I never told anyone for 25 years because it was so shameful. And yeah, I didn't want to be, you know, made fun of or all these things. And so someone's able to self assess and say, okay, I had this pain, this trauma I felt not powerful or whatever it might be. What's the next step for them once they start to journal about it and be aware of it and they're like, I really want to heal. What would be that next step in the process?

Well, I mean, it's not that I can prescribe butcher, but it should be for everybody. And there's many different ways of working. But one of the things I would address, first of all is the shame. Like one of the impacts of trauma is shame because children are narcissists by nature. When I say narcissist, I don't mean in a pathological, negative sense. I mean they think it's all about them.

The world just revolves around me.

Exactly so if bad things are happening to me, it must be. Must be a bad person. You know, Number one. Number two, I didn't fight back. I couldn't defend myself, so that makes me weak. And so I'm ashamed of that now, actually, when you look at it, the nut fighting back is nature's coping mechanism. Part of your nervous system just freezes. Because if you fought back, what would happen?

I guess it depends what age you are. And.

No, but. But as a young child, if you fight back, on. Against the sexual abuser.

Oh, right.

What would happen to you?

Who knows? I mean, it could have been even worse.

And. And were you in a position to run?

No.

No.

Trapped in a bathroom.

So the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated.

It's protecting yourself.

You're protecting yourself and the part of the nervous system that freezes. You just be still and you get through this.

Wait till it passes.

Yeah. That takes over. So it's actually what you're ashamed about is actually the brilliance of your nervous system that protected you, but you're beating.

Yourself up in retrospect, saying, I should have ran, I should have fought back, I should have done this.

Exactly. That's the first point. And the second point is, if I can ask you, how old were you when this happened to you and how long did it go on for?

It's probably 10, 15 minutes. Yeah.

No, but it was only one time.

One time.

Okay. Who did you speak to about it?

No one.

Okay. Now, you don't have kids yet.

No.

But if you did have a child, 5 years old, and this happened to, who would you want them to speak to? Me. Yeah. Now, if you find out that this happened to your child and your child never told you, how would you explain that?

How would I explain it to.

How would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened?

I would explain it by saying, it's something I'm not doing. I'm not creating a safe environment to allow this child to speak up.

And that was your primary trauma. Yeah. So the sexual abuse is a secondary trauma. As a matter of fact, the abuser, like you were bullied in school, you said, and the bullies can always sense the vulnerability.

The bullies have, like a laser, the weakness in your.

They have a laser.

Like there's an insecure, weak person. Yeah.

Which, by the way, speaks to their own trauma. Right. But they have laser. Like the physicians who abuse their patients, the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers. They See a weakness, they laser like they sense it and that's who they pick on. And the bullies do the same thing. Now, that weakness, as we call it, comes from not having the solid support and protection and confidence and security in your family of origin. So that's the primary trauma. That's the first thing that happened.

Yeah, I mean, that's the case for sure.

So to answer your question, if somebody comes to me with those issues. Well, first of all, if somebody realizes those things, I'd say, don't try and do this on your own.

It's so hard.

Talk to somebody.

It's so hard.

Yeah, well, look, people with addictions, at least they have the 12 step groups where they can actually talk about it. And people ideally will not judge them.

It's a safe space to.

Or you might have friends, or you might reach out to a professional, or you might have an intimate partner. That relationship is close enough where you can actually share this, you know, but you have to bring it out of you. By the way, this just reminds me, this is one of the ancient gospels. Written around the same time as the other gospels is the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus says that what you shall bring out of you will save you, and what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you. He says something like that.

Right, right.

He was a supreme psychologist.

Wow.

And so you got to bring it out.

Yeah. What you suppress becomes more depressed. Right. It's like.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's got to start with that somewhere.

You've got to bring it out. If and if someone has a. What if they say, well, it wasn't that big of a deal. This thing that happened back in the day. I was a kid and it only happened a few times. Whether it's sexual abuse or. Okay, someone's screaming at you or you were neglecting it or put in a.

Corner, you know, I hear that all the time.

It wasn't that big of a deal.

I hear that all the time.

Yeah.

Okay.

I shouldn't be that concerned about it.

It was five.

Who cares? You know, it was like, what do we.

Okay, then that's a very simple way to answer that.

Why are we so messed up right now?

No, no, no, no, no, not at all. If a 5 year old kid came to you and you were the uncle, uncle le. This guy did such and such to me and I'm really scared and hurt, would you say to them, oh, no big deal. No. Think of all the other kids that worse things have happened to. Would you say that why wouldn't you say that?

Because I'd want to be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen and loved.

And what would be the impact if you did say that?

I feel like it'd probably affect him for a long time if that was a pattern of that was the response that he got.

But you see, that's what you're saying to yourself when you say that it's no big deal. You're saying to the five year old that was hurt, it doesn't matter. In other words, there's no self compassion there. Right? What you would never say to anybody else, you're saying to yourself. And one of the impacts of trauma is lack of self compassion. And again, if I may mention my book, the Myth of Normal, I talk about that, about how this idea of self compassion and I see it all the time. And so when somebody says to me, no big deal, you know, I say, okay, take any other child in your position, plug them into that situation and tell them it's no big deal. And of course I wouldn't, but people.

Do, they do say these things to their kids or to their, right, their nephews or nieces. They're saying like, ah, you'll be all right. You know, and I think it's because they don't have the emotional courage to, to handle the, the wide range of emotions because they probably suppress the emotions.

I mean, that's the whole point, right, Is that they're, they're not, they're not comfortable with the child Spain.

Because they're crying, they're like, I can't handle it.

They can't handle it. Yeah, yeah.

You know, my dad used to be like, stop crying. You know, just, yeah, stop. You know, there was no like hugging and like, he had a lot of love and affection in other ways, but he couldn't handle the crying and the scream. Yeah, the emotions.

Well, one of the, in the book I talk about the essential needs of children and one of them is that they're given the freedom to feel all their emotions, particularly sadness and grief and pain, also joy and everything else. But I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this, but what do you know about your dad's childhood?

Oh, man. Yeah, it was messed up too.

Yeah, yeah. So this goes on from generations.

Yeah, yeah. So. And I feel like a lot of people listening or watching this can relate and say, you know, I don't think anyone's like, I had the perfect parents. Right. There's some of them maybe said, man, I had A great childhood, and my parents did amazing. But I would say probably a majority of people had something where they didn't feel emotionally seen or accepted by their parents or some type of challenge. And they probably would all say, well, yeah, their parents, you know, had struggle from the war, from this or from the depression, and their parents suffered. And it was all about survival. It wasn't about thriving.

Yeah.

So how do we break, I guess, the generational trauma.

Yeah.

And not let it pass down to our children?

So not being seen is a major source of trauma.

Just not being seen in general.

Just not being seen for who you.

Are, not being accepted for yourself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Expected to be different than who you actually are. You know, it's a major trauma for people in the society, and it's very common.

Let me. Can I ask you a question before you go on to the next. Next thing there about that? This might be a controversial question, but I feel like I want to talk about this because, you know, when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was born in the 83.

Yeah.

So growing up in the 80s and 90s.

Yeah.

In the Midwest, you weren't really. People were still afraid to come out as, you know, gay.

Right. Yeah.

It wasn't fully accepted.

Yeah.

Parents didn't accept their kids when they said, you know, I'm different, I'm gay, or I'm not this, you know, I'm not like, you know, and I'm, you know, afraid to talk about it because I don't think you're to love me and accept me.

Right.

And now more and more people are coming out. That's more. I would say it's more acceptable. Right. In most of America. In some communities in America and some communities, it's more talked about. And you see it in TV and movies a lot.

Yeah.

And. But now it's like, okay, what about people changing genders and people transitioning and all these different things, their sexual orientation, their identity and things like that? And I think people are confused. You know, parents are like, well, that's not acceptable. Right. Can we touch. Talk about that for a little bit to see? You know?

Sure.

Can parent, you know, how can parents accept their kids? And if kids want to start doing surgeries, you know, at a younger age and change in their gender.

Yeah.

Is that a. Is that a symptom of something. Of a depression? Is it natural? What is all this that we can talk about?

So human beings are very complex creatures and. With a little spectrum of orientations in every sense. And so much of it has to do with not genetics so much, but how life acts on those genes. So some people may be male gendered, but maybe hormonally, they had different influences acting on the womb or throughout life or whatever, you know, so they don't identify with those genitalia.

Is that a personality or identity, or is that a temperament or is that an actual, like, biological identity?

I. I can tell you of one young relative that I have very close relative. We knew that it was easy to see as soon as they reached adolescence. They just weren't comfortable with the gender, the female gender that they were assigned. They hated feminine clothing. They walked and hunched to hide the breasts. It was not a surprise to any of us that a year or two ago they said, I'm a male, and they chose surgery. Now they walk with their shoulders back and proud of themselves.

Interesting.

And now.

Now is that. And I'm curious from a. I guess your point of view or your practice is that a. Were they suppressed emotionally more as children? Do they have the flourishing environment to be fully seen and express their wide range of motions, or is that a.

Well, no family is perfect. And I don't want to talk in detail about this family, but they had a very loving parents, really loving grandparents. I witnessed it. A lot of the qualities that we need for a good life. And like in any family, there are issues. Of course, no issues in the family would possibly explain this gender issue.

Gotcha.

This is much deeper in them. They weren't, you know, now this is very hard on the parents, of course, when it first became manifest and hard on the grandparents, but everybody came to terms with it. But it was really real, and we could see it from adolescent son. It wasn't the culture. It wasn't anybody giving her propaganda. It was just how they were.

It wasn't bullies.

It wasn't, you know, no. They had good friends.

Yes.

You know, there was no issues like that.

So it wasn't trauma.

No. Gotcha. It wasn't trauma. Trauma doesn't cause anybody to change their gender. Interesting. Okay. What is traumatic is that you're not accepted for. For who you perceive yourself to be. Now, that can be traumatic, but that's a different story. And in a lot of families, like I, with a lot of gay men that I've known, they may not even have. Even if they realize their gayness, they suppressed it because of fear.

They may feel like they'd be accepted.

Yeah. You know, and that's. That's. Now, let me tell you a story. I was on a Recent tour of Europe, I was telling you. And in Berlin, there were showings of this film that features my work, which is entitled the Wisdom of Trauma, which is available folks online. You don't have to pay any money to see it. You can, but you don't need to. So they were showing it in this theater in Berlin. 500 people, two showings. There's a guy that I'd met online at a webinar who. Whose name is Ben. I can talk about this because he's public. And Ben was a guy in his 20s who was a very athletic young man. And then he had a accident a year ago this August. So just about a year ago, as we're speaking now, and broke his spine and became paraplegic. And I first met him, he wanted to talk to me from his hospital bed from Berlin on this webinar, in front of a thousand people.

He was in the hospital.

He was in the hospital when he talked to me on this webinar. And I just found him to be a spiritually amazing person. Now, Ben, this is Berlin. So he comes to the showing of the film this year. This year, just a month or so ago, in his wheelchair, and he's paraplegic. And I asked him to talk to the group about resilience. So he did. He was eloquent and beautiful and then stayed for the second showing. I didn't know why he wanted to stay for the second showing. He's already seen the film, but he stays for the second showing. And after the Q and A, he says, I want to say something. So we give him the mic, and he says, I want to tell all these people here, 500 people, that I'm not attracted to members of the opposite sex. I'm more drawn to people of my own sex. And I've never told anybody this. He says, wow. And he says, this is the best compliment I've ever got. He says, and the reason I'm saying this to you now is because with Gabor in the room, I can't be inauthentic. Wow. I'm telling you, my heart leapt. Everybody applauded, of course. And then I asked the people in the group, five in the audience, anybody here, anybody else here who suppressed important aspects of themselves.

Oh, my gosh.

For fearing of not being accepted, 500 people put their hands on.

Oh, my gosh.

So this gay issue is one aspect of that. It's one manifestation that the people that are really upset about it are people who got parts of themselves that they suppressed and they can't. They're afraid that's what I say. Now, let me take it more historically, since you ask. In a lot of the Greek plays, there's this famous prophet called Tiresias. He's got the wet breast of a woman. A lot of the ancients recognized that there's wisdom in marrying masculinity with femininity in the same person because it gives you a more full understanding of the world. So was Tiresias was this wise man and prophet? A lot of indigenous cultures, there have been bigendered people, and they were seen as. I forget there's actually a word for it that some indigenous people had, but it was like a sign of respect. But these people are trying to teach us. So what's happening here is not. So this has been going on forever now. We have surgery and all that, that didn't used to exist. But the phenomena of being transgendered and so on, that's been going on forever as long as human beings are around. The fact that we have such a problem with it, that has to do with this culture.

Why is there such a problem with it, you think?

Well, partly. Look at your own work on. On toxic masculinity. The last thing you want to admit that there's anything feminine about you, then.

You'Re not a real man. You're not man enough.

But actually, these categories, masculine, feminine, are totally arbitrary. There's nothing in itself feminine about being vulnerable. There's nothing masculine about not being vulnerable. But in this society with these strict gender rules, we assign these things to one gender or the other. In fact, what we want to be is complete people. No, whole. Whole, yeah. Which means that we recognize both aspects.

Of the yin and the yang inside of us, Right?

Well, yeah. And, you know, I like, people tell me that if they watch me present for the last 20 years, that I believe my presentations have really changed, that I've softened somehow, you know, and used.

To be more hard or aggressive.

Hard.

Aggressive and intense.

Or intense and negotiated. Egotistical.

Egotistical, you said.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Because know it all, know it all.

It wasn't just about the truth that I was speaking.

No, I know the truth, but it's.

About the truth that I was speaking. Yeah.

That I've discovered.

Yeah, exactly. You know, well, that's sort of that toxic masculine side, you know, I'm much more at peace now. Just like if you say much more at peace, I have much more at peace now than I used to be. So I think this gender issue is largely a cultural one. And it's, again, it Represents a lot of repression. So the people that are really upset by it are people who are really repressed and traumatized. And I could name some very public spokesperson from that point of view. I will not let them be discovered. They already have been. Let them speak to those who will listen. But they're coming from repression, you know.

And you said not being seen for what, who you are.

Yeah.

Is, you know, one of the main traumas, right?

That's exactly right. It's one of the main sources of trauma.

Not being seen or accepted.

Yeah. Because when you're not seen for who you are, like, for example, in order to. For them to learn to see themselves, they need to be married. And then they're mirrored. When the parent is attuned, when the child. When a parent recognizes and accepts and mirrors back the child's feeling in a context of safety, then the child says to themselves, unconsciously, oh, I can be sad and I can be safe. At the same time, I don't have to reject sadness. I can be vulnerable and I can be safe. At the same time, I don't have to reject vulnerability. When that mirroring is not there, the child loses the connection with themselves. And that loss of connection to ourselves is the biggest trauma there is. That's not my own formulation. That's a formulation of a wonderful mentor of mine, Peter Levine, who's done extensive work on trauma. The biggest loss is the connection to ourselves.

It all makes sense because if we're not able to express a certain emotion because parents weren't present to it, or they said, don't do that, or give you time out or whatever it was, then you say to yourself and your nervous system, okay, it's not safe to express myself this way. Therefore, in order to stay alive and have Satan and not get punished or beaten or slapped or yelled at or hurt or hurt, I need to not do this. This or this thing, or I need.

To not be this or that.

Yeah. Not to be that accepted or love.

So I can't be myself. And in this society, I interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis once and just not long ago, and she's in the book as well, and she used this very dramatic phrase. She said that in this culture, there's a genocide of authenticity.

Everyone's inauthentic.

Everybody's programmed to be inauthentic. And that, as we've been talking about, that carries its impact on the mind, on the body, on our relationships, on our life satisfaction and everything else. And so that's really, really. The task is to become authentic.

What would you say for every parent or soon to be parent that they should really focus on in creating for their children, what would be the three things that would set them up for more greater success emotionally, financially, spiritually, relationship wise? If they could do these three things for their children.

Can I say five things?

Give me five things, please. Every parent should do.

Yeah. So the first thing is I mentioned the work of Dan Siegel. Daniel Siegel, psychiatrist here in la. He's written a book called Parenting from the Inside out. And it's about how parenting brings out your own stuff so that, so that. Deal with your own stuff first and continue to deal with it as you have children because you, I guarantee you, your kids are going to trigger you. And I didn't realize that as a parent, so I visited my own traumas onto my kids because I wasn't working on myself at that time. So do your own work. That's the first thing.

Do your own work.

When you're pregnant or when your partner is pregnant, do you work already? Because already the stresses of the husband during the pregnancy will affect that infant in the womb.

The husband's stresses will also affect.

Yeah, because the mom takes on the stresses of the partner. Right.

So if you're stressing the mother, you're stressing the child.

Exactly. Wow. Okay. So work on yourself. That's the first thing. Okay. Then there are what a great psychologist friend of mine, Gordon Youfeld and I, there's a chapter in this, in the book describes as the irreducible needs of children. The irreducible that if you take them away, the child's going to be hurt.

What are those needs?

Okay, first of all, a secure attachment relationship with the parents where the child feels that he's just welcome, she's welcome. They're just welcome to be in the world in the presence of the parents. Not because they're pretty smart, just because they are.

Just because they're alive.

Yeah. This is their life. Yeah. That's the first one. The secondary that we need is what Gordon calls rest, which means that as a child, I don't have to make the relationship work. I don't have to be nice, prove this. I. I don't have to absorb the stress of my parents. I don't have to take care of the needs of my alcoholic father.

I don't need to create peace for my parents.

I don't have to create peace for my parents. I can rest from the work of making the relationship work. That's the second irreducible need. The third one we've already talked about that's the freedom to experience all the emotions, joy, grief, sadness, pain, anger. And by the way, if you look at the brain, we have circuits for all this. Circuits for anger, circuits for caring, we have circuits for grief and so on. And we're wired for them. And we have to be allowed that wiring to express itself when the situation calls for it. So that the capacity, the experience all your emotions, all your emotions is a third irreducibility. The fourth one is free, unprogrammed play in nature with multiple playmates of different ages. Not play with a gadget, not play with a computer, not giving us a one year old a cell phone to occupy them as you're changing their diapers. But actually, free, creative play. And play has no agenda. It doesn't matter who wins or who loses. It's not about winning. No play is wired into our brains. We have a play circuit. How do we know that? All animals have it. All mammals have it. You have two cats. Yeah. They play, they play. Dogs play, bear cubs play. You know, play is essential for you for healthy brain development. Play is much more important for healthy brain development than intellectual learning. If a child plays, they'll be able to learn intellectually later. So free, creative, spontaneous play kids have. Now, if you look at those four needs, our society denies them all. No wonder we have so many kids in trouble, you know. And by the way, there's another psychologist I spoke to called Darcia Narvaz, and she taught at Notre Dame University and she's researched indigenous societies, aboriginal societies, small band, hunter gatherer groups. Get what, Guess what she found. They provided their kids all those things.

Lots of time to play out there.

In nature, you know, with other kids, you know.

Yeah, all that full range of emotions, all that stuff.

All that stuff that's interesting. So we've lost, you know, this kind of. We've lost the, We've lost the ball somewhere, you know, in this culture. Yeah. No, this culture has many achievements to its credit. Innovations, achievements, successes, science and all that, but boy, have we lost it when it comes to what human needs are. And, and, and, and you can hurt people in two ways.

Hurt or hurt.

Hurt.

Hurt.

Well, you can hurt them in many ways.

Hurt them in two ways.

You can traumatize people in two ways. One is to actually do bad things to them that you shouldn't have done, but it is to meet is to deprive them of their needs. And this society does it both ways.

By doing bad things to them, by.

Doing bad things to you. A lot of kids have bad things Done to them in schools, in homes, and so on. A lot of other kids, it's not so much that bad things are done to them, but that the good things that they need, they're deprived of. And those are the needs I just talked about.

Is there a fifth one too, or no?

Well, the fifth one was the parents working on themselves.

That was the first one.

Gotcha.

Okay, These are the five.

Got it. Gotcha.

So the five, if you're a parent or about to be a parent, they do these five things. If you, if you are, if you have kids right now and you ask yourself, am I doing these five things? Start adding them if you've been neglecting. But the first one is to do the work on yourself first. And I think this is Dr. Shefali. I'm not sure if you know her, but she's got a conscious parenting.

She father, Tsuburi. She's incredible. I know her very well. Yeah.

And I think it's this, you know, she talks about doing the work yourself as a, you know, in a conscious way to heal so that you can parent in a conscious way as well.

Exactly. You know, we talk the same language.

Yes.

I really like her work.

So doing that first for yourself, and.

That takes courage and ongoingly.

So it's not a one day and you're done.

I wish I could. Yeah, it was one day. Just they want. They spend a day working on your stuff, you'll be fine. Yeah, no, it's ongoing. It goes on till you have kids.

Yeah. So do the. Do the work yourself first. Number two, create the needs for your kids, which is a secure attachment, first off. So people feel secure.

Yeah.

The child feels secure that they just exist. Not to prove that they're pretty enough or talented enough or smart enough or more advanced than other kids to get love, but just because they exist.

Yeah, yeah.

Freedom. The second one would be rest.

Yeah.

So rest, meaning when you, when you're.

Resting, you're not having to work. Right. So not having to work to make.

The relationship work with the parent. Yeah, yeah, gotcha. The third one is the freedom to express all emotions, your full range emotions in a safe environment.

Yeah.

And then the last one would be adding play in nature with multiple playmates without electronics.

Yeah. Spontaneous, spontaneous, creative play. Yeah, creatively.

So ask yourself if you're doing these things.

Yeah. Now this book, the Myth of Normal, I wrote it with my eldest son Daniel, who's now 40, about to be 47. He talks in the book about, did.

He have those things? Did he have those things? With you?

No. None of my kids had them. Well, none of my children have had them. You know, I've made every mistake in the book. Literally, I made every mistake in every.

Book I've written, you know, about what not to do.

About what not to do. Yeah. So Daniel talks about he used to have his recurring nightmare as a child, or the floor just disappearing, the floor not being the floor, which meant that he never knew when my wife and I would get into one of our really hostile, tense exchanges, and he had to sort of absorb and endure all that. Well, when the parents are in that state, the child does not feel secure. Now, if we lived in a large community like we used to, where there's uncles and aunts and grandparents around, Go.

Next door, you hang out with your safety somewhere.

Go to the next cave. Go to the next tent or something, you know, but we don't.

So you're trapped in your room.

Yeah. So Diane writes about when the floor was not the floor and. No, thank God. We've done a lot to heal our relationship. And even writing the book together was a healing exercise. Sure. Let me tell you. But. But, you know, going back to his childhood. Yeah. So when I point these things out, I'm not pointing fingers at anybody. I. It's hard. And I certainly had to learn a lot from the many ways in which I showed up that weren't helpful. Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I couldn't sleep at night for many, probably until I don't even know. So I was, like, in my late teens or late twenties, probably. I would stay up for our hour and a half, kind of just unable to sleep. Like, I would try to go to bed early, I would go to bed late, and I was just kind of like anxiousness or worry or just an inability to fully rest.

Yeah.

Kind of always on this, like, edge.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, and I never felt that stability of my parents. Right. It was like there was always some type of tension.

Yeah.

And. And it was like every other week there was an explosion of, like, the slamming of doors and the screaming in the kitchen. And we're in the living room, like.

Yeah.

When is the. You know, when's the explosion going to happen next with our parents?

Was there anybody in your life that you could talk to that there was any kind of a safe haven for you?

No. I was the youngest of four, so there. My brother was 11 years older, and my sisters were four years older than eight years older. So I was. I kind of always felt like I just gotta. You Know, figure it out. And I left home at 13. So I begged my parents to send me away. Where most kids get sent away for being bad.

Yeah.

I was, I went to a private boarding school.

Okay.

Because I went to a Christian camp one summer and I met a bunch of kids that went to the school. And I was like, these kids are accepting. These kids are kind. These kids are nice. These kids have joy, they're loving. I was like, I want to be around these kids. It feels safe.

Yes.

Whereas I didn't feel like the school I was at before and kind of the environment at home felt safe.

Yeah.

I was like, I begged them when I got back from this campus, said, please send me here to the school. And they were like, we're not going to send you away. And I was like, every day I was just like, please and convince them to send me away. I think that was probably like the beginning of feeling like, okay, I'm more safe now.

Yeah.

Even though I was in a strict dorm environment with, you know. Yeah, wake up and dress code and rules.

But it was like probably some structure. Probably something you welcome to. Structure.

I was like, I thrived.

Yeah.

I mean, some things I was resistant to, but I was also like, I felt more safe with the order and the structure and I was able to develop my mental and emotional skills. And yeah, that discipline gave me a skill set too.

Well, you know. Absolutely. And going back to our discussion about that anger issue, I'm not saying that parents need to be permissive. Permissiveness is a kind of neglect.

What do you mean permissive?

Permissive where the child just have to do whatever they want and, you know, rage or whatever. You know, it's not a question of that. It's a question of there has to be structure, there has to be rules, and parents have to set boundaries for their children. And that's what you probably appreciated in.

That boarding school because the rules and the boundaries were scary at home. It was like discipline, you know, it was like anger rules.

Exactly. Rather than like rules.

Yeah. Healthy rules and healthy boundaries where it's like, hey, you know, put me in line if I need to be.

But yeah.

Not screaming at me for my life type of thing.

Yeah.

That's interesting. Yeah. And so when, when, when parents, when there's tension within parents and there's kids around and it's a pattern, whether there's, yeah. A lack of affection, physical affection, a disrespect, whether it's loud or it's just a low level sense of arguments, what happens then to Children, if there's that type of bickering, arguing, anger.

Well, first of all, a number of things can happen once the child disconnects.

Tunes out as a coping mechanism.

Then they brain gets wired to tune out. The child pushes down their emotions as we talked about. Wow. Older child takes on the role of trying to fix things. Being the peacemaker.

Peacekeeper.

Yeah. Which is immediately a source of shame because they can never succeed. So right off the bat they're a failure.

They're failure because my parents are still.

Yeah, exactly.

I didn't fix it.

It's my fault. Wow. My gosh. So much weight, Lots of impacts. This shows up in so many areas. Let me tell you a story. So if I told you about a four year old girl who's bullied by neighborhood kids and she runs into the family home to seek protection from the mother and the mother says, there are no room for cards in this house. Now you get out there and deal with those kids, how would you view that interaction with the mom?

There are no room for what?

No room for cowards in his house.

Cowards.

Yeah, cowards. The kid comes in the home too.

Don't be a coward. Go defend yourself.

Yeah.

How would you as a four year.

Old, four year old. Go, go.

I would say how would I view that situation or that home?

How would you view that interaction with the mother?

I would view it as. That's how that mother was raised.

Yeah.

When she's not creating a safe environment.

For the child, what's the peak that, what's the impact on the child?

Suffering, pain, challenges.

Let me tell you an amazing thing. This story was told on public television in front of millions of people and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that. Wow. This is Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention where she was nominated for presidency and there was a document about her life narrated by the voice of God, Morgan Freeman. And this is described an example of good parenting. This is how my mother helped me become resilient. No, it didn't. This is how the mother taught her to suck it up and to become hard, you know. And 60 years later, she gets pneumonia during the election campaign. Remember what she did with that? She collapsed in public. She had fever, she was dehydrated. She didn't tell anybody she sucked it up.

She said, I'm going to be strong.

I'm going to be tough. You know, there's no room for cards in this house. What amazes me is that, and we see this in our politicians all the time. And what amazes me is that this Is a story told in front of millions and nobody says, oh my God, that poor little girl. Everybody says, oh, this is a great example of parenting. That's how denature becomes a culture.

Yes.

Because a four year old girl who goes to mom for protection is not a coward. She's a four year old. What would a little cat do?

Run back for protection?

Run back to mom, you know, run with a little bear? I mean, yeah, yeah, you know, save me, save me. Exactly.

Help me.

Seeking help from the adults is the most natural urge of the child. So. But in this culture, we've so glorified sucking it up that a presidential candidate can discuss this in public and nobody even bats an eyelash.

So how do we teach our kids to have the full range of emotions and come to us for safety and support, but also have the courage to manage challenging times in our life so that we're not always reliant on our parent when we're 30, but we're also okay, we can take on challenges.

See, here's the thing. Nature has an agenda. Abby talked about the oak tree before. Nature's agenda is that you develop will and self respect given the right environment. And anybody with will and self respect will stand up for themselves. You don't have to teach them. You have to just respect them and support them. They will develop that way. If you respect them, they will learn to respect themselves. Nobody who respects themselves will put up.

With, yeah, bullies are being picked on.

Or disrespect or anything. You know, they won't, they will say, no, you don't, you don't do that to me. To me, you don't do that.

How do you teach, how do you show that to children? How do you respect kids so they feel that and see it?

Well, by all the things, all the ways that we talk about and you know, and anger, we have a circuitry in our brain for anger. As I said, there's such a thing as healthy anger now, which is very different from uncontrolled rage. Healthy anger simply says, no. I mean, you're in my space. Get out right now. Animals have that.

Yeah.

You know, it's like the gorilla is.

Just like, you know, in my space.

You know, and the cats, you know, that's healthy anger, you know. You know, look at a cat with a ambitious looking dog coming near them. Don't even think about it. Forget about it, you know? Right. That's healthy anger.

What's.

We don't, we don't have to teach it. It's there. I just Allow it.

What's uncontrollable rage?

What's the difference when uncontrollable is different? And so here's the thing. The suppression of healthy anger promotes autoimmune disease and neurological disease.

The suppression of the health.

Yep. Yeah. Because anger is a boundary defense. Healthy anger is a boundary defense. Suppressing healthy anger suppresses the immune system because of the mind body unity. Again, this has been demonstrated. So the mind body unity says you suppress healthy anger, you're suppressing your immune system. Your immune system may even turn against you, just like your anger can turn against you. So that's not healthy. Then there's uncontrolled rage, which is also not healthy. In. In people who rage a lot, they're more prone to have heart disease and strokes and high blood pressure because all the adrenaline and, you know, all that unhealthy rage is usually because you have suppressed emotions. And all of a sudden the pressure cooker just boils over and then explode. Spews out. Spills out. Yeah. And I don't know if you've ever experienced rage. I have.

Of course.

But, you know, healthy anger is. You're in my space. Get out. No. Once it's done his job, it's over.

You're creating a barrier, a boundary.

Yeah. And it's done its job.

You move on.

Exactly. And the more I raged, the more circuits in my brain got recruited to be even more rageful. So that's the. So the healthy angers are in the present moment. Burn defense. Unhealthy rage is usually based on the past.

Yes.

So when I would rage with my kids, it had nothing to do with my kids. It had to do with being triggered.

That you. Unresolved trauma.

Exactly.

And until you resolve the trauma, you're going to keep having the symptoms, which for you was rage.

Yeah. Yeah. And when you speak of that word, trigger, when people talk about being triggered. Have you triggered me? It's an interesting word because if you look at the weapon, how big a part of the weapon is the trigger?

Small.

Small. Was. There is. There is explosive material. Explosive charge. There's ammunition. There's a mechanism to develop some wires connected. So if I get triggered, I could blame you and then just rage at you for triggering me. Or I could say, what was the explosive charge inside myself? What's the ammunition here? What is that all about? And it's got never to do with the present.

It always has to do with the past.

It always has to do with the past.

Healing the memories of the past. Healing the stories yeah. And sometimes we have something, a memory of the past, and we could either downgrade the memory or we could elaborate the memory. Right. So how do we address the memory?

By allowing the feeling that's associated with it to be present. In other words, by not being caught up with the story. Either suppressing the story and diminishing it or enhancing it and dwelling on it. But by what happens to me, what's in my body when that story comes up for me. Yeah. And just being with the emotions and accepting the emotions, which is really what should happen to you as a child, you know? So it's not about the story, it's about what you're experiencing when you're under the influence of that story.

Yes, that's what I would say. What's the. What's the biggest. What's the challenge? You feel like you're still healing or the. The. Maybe the trauma or the stress that is most present for you, that you're still healing?

It shows up in my relationship, mostly it shows up. It shows up in two ways. One of them, not so much anymore. Let's say somebody critiques my view of addiction, okay. Now I'm totally open to being critiqued. I got no problem if they understood what I was saying. But if they're critiques, something I don't even understand, I just can't stand not being understood. So that can be a trigger.

That's a trigger for you not being understood.

Not so much anymore, because I really see that it's about them. Here's what I'm saying. I'm a reasonably good communicator. If you read what I said saying if you don't get to get it, and then you have critically critique me for that, well, you got a problem here, you know, of perception. Sure. So that's one. But the big one shows up in my relationship with my wife is if. But I'm really letting it go, and I've let go of it majorly. Is there any sense of not being wanted from your wife? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any sense of not being wanted, you know, whether it's physically or emotionally, you know. But you know what? Maybe you're finding this. I know you're in a new relationship, and I've been in mine now for 53 years. Well, married 53 years in a relationship for 55 years now. It's been my biggest teacher, I'm sure. And it's my biggest ground of spiritual and personal growth. So if you take away all the therapy I've done, the psychedelic work I'VE done this still has been. Which none of which would I want to do without, but this relationship. And both of us wanted to find out the truth of things. I mean, we were as dysfunctional as that relationship was. Ultimately, we were both committed to the truth and not. Not. And not holding on to our little stories.

What is the truth?

You know who said that? Pontius Pilate said it to Jesus Christ when Jesus was taken in front of the Roman governor of Judea. Pontius, you know Pilate. He says, who are you? Jesus says, I'm here to speak the truth. By the way, I'm not comparing myself to Jesus. No, you do. Pontius Pilate. Okay. But Jesus said, I'm here to speak the truth. And Pontius said, what is the truth? You know what Jesus did with that answer? Question. What? Didn't answer him. The reason he didn't answer him is because the question comes from the intellect. An intellect cannot grasp the truth. The intellect can grasp the facts, but not the truth. And for us to grasp the truth. Ever read the the Little Prince by Antoine? Okay, remember what the fox says to the Little Prince? He says, the eyes can. You cannot see with the eyes, only with the heart. So truth for me goes way beyond the intellect. It has to do with. Therefore, there's no intellectual answer that's satisfying, but the truth. Actually, again, as I write about, we have three brains. We think we have one brain. We have at least three. There's the one up here. Then there's the heart, which is a nervous system of its own, an intelligence of its own, and then we have the gut. When the three are aligned, then we're in a position to apprehend or appreciate the truth. When they're not, we're not.

Right.

And so there's no simple intellectual answers to what is truth. Truth is not a fact. It's an experience. You know, and I know that sounds mystical, and I'm not at all mystical being. I've never had deep mystical experiences. I'm not, you know, you're a doctor. I'm a doctor. But, you know, although, again, as I do write about this, with certain psychedelic experiences, I've kind of glimpsed it, you know, But I know people who've had experiences of truth without psychedelics just for some spiritual opening. Happened sometimes at a time of deep suffering. Actually, Jodh once said to me that she surrendered to a God she didn't even believe in in a moment of deep suffering. So the truth can show up in all kinds of ways, but it's not an intellectual Experience. That's why I can't answer the question.

Yeah. How much do you think you suffer on a regular basis these days?

It's very momentary. And when I revisit circuits of my brain that have long outlived their usefulness. But I don't. But I really. I would have told you, most of my life I've suffered. Really? Yeah. And I'm not saying that as a victim. I mean, it just felt bad and perceived as hopeless and myself as somehow irretrievably hurt. You know, that was my self image. Even as I was helping other people, I suffered writing this book.

Really?

Yeah, because of what we were talking about earlier. Identification. So I took on this big project, this book, 10 Years of Research. I collected 25,000 scientific articles and reports. Hundreds of books, hundreds of people interviewed. And then I started writing it. And the first chapter was like the worst piece of junk I've ever produced. And I said, oh my God, I've taken on something way bigger than I can possibly deliver. Now why did I suffer? That's not suffering. If I take on something that I can't deliver, I just say, okay, I can't do this. That's not suffering. The suffering is, I should do this. The world expects me to do this. If I don't do this, I'm a failure because I identified with it.

The judgment you have on yourself, the.

Judgment, that's what the suffering was from. And I identified with it. So, you know, I've written four books now, published in 30 languages. This is the fifth one. It doesn't matter how successful the others are. If this one fails, I'm a failure. And I really expose my incompetence to the world. In other words, my mind was. I didn't find myself with the book. And it took me some time to realize, you know, I'm not the book. Let's say I write this book. It doesn't work for whatever reason. I mean, I think it will, but if it doesn't, it doesn't say a thing about me. It's not me. I'm still alive. Earth is still here. The sun is. You know, so it's that identification that created the suffering for me. And that identification had to do with the childhood sense that had to prove the value of my existence, you know, so that's.

So all suffering stems from what specifically do you think for us, some false.

Belief that we developed about ourselves as a result of what happened to us.

And the fastest way to end the suffering within ourselves?

Well, just to recognize that we're suffering. Which means what in us recognizes that we're suffering something that.

Some awareness or.

Some awareness. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then to follow that awareness, you know, and, and. But the Buddha, you know, it's four Noble Truths. Life is suffering. Secondly, there is a reason for that suffering, which actually is the attachment, the identification. Thirdly, there's a way out of the suffering. And fourthly, here's the path. You disidentify.

You disidentify with the things that society is.

Yeah. And that you've attached to. And evidently. And society is laid on you. So, you know, that's the Buddhist way. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Let go of the identity.

Yeah, yeah. Let go of the identity. Exactly. And when he had his enlightenment experience, that's exactly what he found, that he was not his identity, that it wasn't his prince, that it wasn't this ascetic, you know, this hermit. He wasn't any of that. Now, I have not had that experience. But you know what the funny thing is, as I talk to you about it and I sense your understanding of it, I can only say, yeah, absolutely. That's the truth, isn't it?

Yeah. I think for. I was telling you before we started that last year, over last year, I've had so much peace in my heart and in my body. And I just doesn't mean there's not stressful moments and, you know, challenges of business and things that maybe I'm disappointed in or frustrated with.

Exactly.

But I. It doesn't stick with me like it used to.

Yeah.

And I'm so grateful for the continual healing journey that I'm committed to creating and cultivating within myself.

Yeah.

Because I want everyone to feel this peace. I want everyone to feel this inner peace. And again, my mission and intention is to continue to cultivate that and stay with me. And I'm sure every parent will say, wait till you have kids and see if you have the peace inside of you still. But that'll be the ultimate test, I guess.

Or as Ram Dass said, if you think you're on Titans, go spend a week with your family.

Exactly. Exactly.

But listen, let me say something.

Yeah.

You were saying something that was so important and I wish I had kept it. What were you saying just now? Just repeat it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. First of all, are you experiencing gratitude all the time? Did you used to experience gratitude?

I did, yes. But I. But I would judge myself still for not doing enough.

Yeah. Okay.

Now I'm like, I'm doing enough.

Yeah.

I'm not judging myself or comparing myself that I should be doing. I should. I used to use should a lot. Yeah, this is good, but I should have done it better.

So I mentioned the psychologist Peter Levine, who's a mentor and a friend. And I. Him and I were just working together in Switzerland. And Peter and I were talking a year ago and he said he's 80 years old now, and he says, he asked himself this question, am I doing enough? And he says these days he can say, yes, have I done enough? He says, yes, I've done enough. But then he says there's another question even deeper. He says, am I enough? And recently, when I'm working together and, and Zurich, I said, so, Peter, the second question, how are you answering that one? He says, I'm still working on it. Wow. Or am I enough?

You know, how do we fully believe that we are enough?

I don't think there's a how. I think it comes when you've done the work, it comes, you know, and the other thing he said is that your passion for helping others heal and find peace in their lives as you have found it. I'm telling you, I used to work in Vancouver's downtown east side, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more people there in a few square block radius using all kinds of drugs. These people are all terribly traumatized. All the women down there were sexually abused as a children. Many of them are indigenous Canadians, which is a very traumatized segment of the Canadian population as it is here in the States. But they all, so many of them said to me, doc, if I ever get over this, if I ever beat this addiction, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life making sure that other people don't have to suffer as I've suffered right now. That's what you just said, is that as you've dealt with your own suffering, you're so committed now that others won't suffer, that others can heal from the suffering. What does that say about the true nature of human beings?

We care about others and we're here for each other.

Yeah. We're not selfish, competitive, aggressive preachers. Right. That's not our true nature. This is. Now, we may do a good job at it, we may sometimes do it well, sometimes not so well, but our nature wants to express itself.

I have a few final questions for. I feel like I could talk to you for hours. I love this stuff. But when does someone know that they are on a healing journey? What is healing? And when do they know they're on it.

Well, again, you're talking about chapters of my new book.

That's perfect.

So healing comes from the word wholeness. The Anglo Saxon origin of the word is whole. So healing is not a matter of curing anything. You can be cured without being healed, and you can heal without being cured. Healing is becoming whole. In other words, integrating all the parts and recognizing all these aspects of yourself that you've loathed and hated and rejected that you tried to run away from. So it's becoming whole. It's coming back to your authentic self, which has never went away, but you lost contact with it. If trauma is a loss of connection to self, then healing is the reconnection to self. When do you know on your healing path? When you're asking yourself some of these questions, that's already a sign of healing. Because the people that are not healing, they don't ask themselves these questions. When you find that things that used to trigger you don't get you so upset anymore, or when you do get upset, you get over it much quicker because you realize, oh, here, you know, so really it's when the past starts to loosen its hold over your present that's so powerful. Yeah.

You know, it's. I used to get. I guess when using the word triggered, I used to get triggered a lot to reacting to.

Yeah.

My big thing was feeling taken advantage of, feeling used, abused. Taking advantage.

Exactly. What happened to you?

That's what happened.

Yeah.

And so when little things would happen in the world, like someone cut me off in a car.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or flipped me off or something. I would like, want to go and beat this person up. It was like I. It would come over me of like, I need to chase this person down. And I remember being like, man, why is this? You know, I was addicted to that reaction.

Yeah.

That anger feeling of like, you're going to abuse me. I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen.

Right.

Rage, whatever I be. Right.

That. Yeah.

And that addiction of that trigger, from what I'm hearing you say, is an enslavement.

Exactly.

To that traumatic experience.

You're.

The past has power over you.

Exactly.

You don't have control. You are reacting.

Yeah. By the way, I'm gonna ask you a personal question.

Yes.

This is a curiosity. Yeah. So you're a big guy. I mean, if you decide to beat somebody up 95 of the time, you're gonna succeed now. Yeah. I'm 57 and you know, and probably, you know, 134 pounds.

Yeah.

I can get that Kind of rage, too, but I'm in no position to actually.

You might get beat up, which is.

Probably a good thing. Yeah. But what was it like for you? Did you use your size that way?

Oh, my gosh, I did. And this was a big awakening. I remember there's two. Two experiences. I've talked about this before. One time I was driving nearby. It's probably 10 years ago.

Yeah.

And I. I stopped at a stop sign, Then I kind of rolled to, like, take a turn, right. And it was a runner coming, and he. He had to, like, stop because I was rolling. So I went in the crosswalk area slowly. Like one mile an hour.

Yeah.

He had to stop and go around the car as opposed to just going through the crosswalk.

Yeah.

And he punched my car and went around and said something to me and then went around, Right.

Yeah.

I literally chased the guy down in my car and, like, chased him around the block, got out of my car and ran him down until I was like, finally my senses came to me. I go, what am I doing?

Well, you came to yourself, thankfully. Yeah.

But maybe like six months after that, I. I got in a fight on a basketball game. I've talked about this in my books and on my podcast, where I got in a physical, like a fistfight, a pretty bad one. And the guy was bigger than me. But I played football my whole life, and, you know.

Yeah.

It was almost like when I had this triggering addictive rage moments.

Yeah.

I didn't feel any pain. Right. It was like there was so much adrenaline.

Yeah.

There's so much fight in me.

Yeah.

That. It was like, this is life or death feeling. And so I got a pretty bad fist fight. And afterwards, I remember being like. Like I saw the guy's face and I go, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I just did this. Even though he hit me first. And so it gave me the.

The reason. The reason.

Right. I was like, I would never start it physically, but I would make sure I'd always finish it if I needed to. And I remember at that point, I was like, my best friend Matt, who's in the room, who I've known for a long time, he was there with me. And he goes, you know, what are you doing? Like, later, he was like, louis, something's wrong with you. We're playing a basketball game. We're having fun here. Why are you getting in this fight? This altercation? And that was a big wake up call for me. Like, when my best friend called me out, he's like, I don't know if I want to hang out with you. You like I'm never playing basketball with you again. And you gotta figure out why you're reacting to someone talking trash.

Yeah.

We're supposed to have fun here.

Yeah.

What are you so triggered by?

Yeah.

And that was a big wake up call. This is when I started the healing journey. This is when I started doing therapy and emotional intelligence workshops and for the first time opened up about the sexual abuse, which. Which was kind of the first opening of healing. And it's been a 10 year journey of what you said, integrating all the parts. There was one part that I started integrate and it started to heal certain things, triggers. But there were other parts and relationships that I hadn't integrated yet. From parents, from other things. So yeah, thankfully that was 10 years ago and I haven't got a fast.

Well, that story brings up for me is you had this fit of rage.

No, but I was a loving, fun guy. Unless I felt like I was being taken advantage of.

Yeah. Which is what happened to the child. But what else did we talk about having fits? We talk about epileptic fits. In epileptic fits, the brain is in a different state of. Of physiological organization. When you're in that fit of rage, it's almost like an epileptic fit. You're not even there.

You're not conscious.

You're not conscious. You're like.

Yeah, you're like a tiger or like a hunting or something. Yeah, you're like.

That's.

By the way, you have one focus. There's. You don't see anything else.

Which also speaks to a lot of how the criminal justice system doesn't understand people. Yeah. We don't. We don't understand how often the people to do the worst things. I'm not saying this to excuse any bad behavior or not to protect society, but how we approach it is these are really traumatized people and they're not actually often the worst thing they do. They're not even there that I'm aware. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm grateful that I started to. I was aware of it. Started to, you know, heal and. Yeah. And now I see things. It's funny because like, it's like a completely different person 10 years ago. Right. And from teenage years and 20s, when I'm like, I'll see something and I'll just notice it and smile, you know, kind of. Okay. That's just about them. It's.

Yeah.

And I'll just.

And I.

And I'm so connected to the vision of my future. And my present, but my vision, my values, my intention.

Yeah.

My appreciation for life that I'm just like, okay, I'm safe. Yeah, I can protect the 5 year old who was abused. I'm the adult in the room. I don't need to react because I'm here for that, that part of myself that didn't feel whole.

At a certain point you get to realize that life has created me, but now I get to create my life, you know, within limits. I'm not going to live forever.

Right.

You know, but. But I get to create how I live my life. Right. As long as I'm alive, you know, and that's actually when you're healed, you get to create your life.

You have these. The creative freedom to dream, to imagine the life you want to create.

Right.

As opposed to living in survival and stress mode.

Yeah. By the way, what I don't want to get is to. When I say that, when I hear myself say that, I don't want to get too new Agey about it because there's a lot of people under difficult economic or racial or political circumstances where not that they're totally helpless, but there's a lot of pressures on them externally. So it's not like all you got to do is take it on. We also have to look at the larger political, economic, social, racial, cultural issues that keep a lot of people suppressed. Suppressed? Yeah.

There's a lot of political trauma. And how does someone who maybe is living in a stressed environment, whether it be their home or their city or their culture, political, you know, whatever it might be, they are more suppressed than others. How can they support themselves to getting out of a stressed environment so that they can be more of a baseline to have the ability to thrive and flourish emotionally, you know, something as a.

Privileged Caucasian identified male, but economic freedom. And I'm not in a position to say to somebody, these are larger political questions. These people. Society has to change and people have to work to change society. It's a question of at some point it becomes a question of advocacy and activism and joining with others. You know, I don't want to preach to somebody else above that. You know, my job is to what extent is to support and help, but not to provide some kind of.

But if society, let's say society won't change for a period of time for these individuals, for certain individuals who are feeling overstressed, what can they do as an individual? Whether they get support externally or not, what could they start to do? Anything else besides, I mean, we've covered a lot that they can start to do and they can get your book, that's for sure.

Well, again, you know, I'm not sure I can fully answer that, but I can give examples. So the New Yorker a couple years ago, within the last two or three years, had an article about an American black man who was jailed for decades and kept in solitary confinement for decades.

Was this Shaka Senghor?

I don't remember the name. It could be.

I interviewed this guy who.

Yeah.

Was in solid tech environment for decades, but.

Yeah, well, maybe the same man. Yeah.

Wrote a best selling book and was on Oprah and it might have been the same guy, but.

Good. All right, well, my point is that fair enough. My point is that it didn't. That he wasn't destroyed by it. Right.

He started to heal in the prison.

He found the inner strength somehow. So that. It's not for me to tell. I don't know if I could stand it for one day, never mind for four decades or three decades.

I know that's crazy.

But that just shows you that the strength, the capacity to heal and to hold on to oneself and to find oneself is actually inherent in all of us. So even in that unimaginably horrific, inhumane, cruel and absolutely socially, from a social point of view, despicable way of treating a human being, that person still could hold on to themselves. They suffered, but they could hold on to themselves and come out of it with dignity. You know, so that's available to all of us, I believe. Right. But again, I'm not saying I don't even want to begin to imagine how I would handle that situation, but I'm just saying it's possible.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

I've got a couple final questions for you before I ask them. I want to make sure people get the book because I think this is going to help a lot of people. The Myth of Normal. They can get it where books are sold or Amazon or on your website or.

They can't get it from me directly.

But they can go there. There's a link to it somewhere.

I don't sell books, but yeah, yeah.

But if they go to Dr. Gawarmate.

Com. Yeah.

Dot com. They can get all the information about where to get it. But this book's going to be extremely powerful. Ten years of research exploring all these things, bringing it together.

There's a research in 78 years of living. Yeah.

Personal research and scientific research. And I think this is the type of stuff people need the most, is understanding how to understand their pain, their trauma, their suffering and Find solutions and reclaim their wholeness so they can be in a state of peace, under stress in the world potentially, and find that peace. And I think it's, you know, it's something I feel like I want everyone to experience as I've been experiencing it more in the last year And a last 10 years, some of it, but more in the last year and a half internally, like consistent peace.

Yeah.

And it sounds like you've been experiencing for a long time. And I feel like I'm so inspired by your mission and I've been watching your content for a while now and I just think we, we need more of these. I guess it's, it's available information to us that we've just forgot or we're not reclaiming.

So.

Yeah, but I'm so grateful for you're doing this. So the Myth of Normal. I want everyone to get a few copies and give it to your friends.

And the subtitle, the Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

Exactly.

Which is what we've been talking about. You know, we haven't even talked about.

Social media consumption and the iPads and iPhones and Apple stuff. Just being on electronics all day, how that's probably affecting. Traumatizing us in certain ways.

It's actually distorting the brain development of.

Children by being on the iPhone or iPad all day.

It changes their brain circuits.

Really?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's. I talk about that too. It's a huge problem. What I want to say about the question of recognizing trauma is that there's been a sea change in that. Like the best selling book in New York Times bestseller list is consistently Bessel Van der Kolk's the Body Keeps the Score. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. It's not an easy read. No, it's a very, you know, it's eloquent, but it's also technical and scientific and so on.

It's been out for like 10 years. Right. Or something.

It came out in 2015, I think. Okay, 14, maybe 15, something like that. And, or, and, and this year another psychiatrist, Bruce Perry, wrote a book with Oprah called what Happened to. And the fact that these books are.

Now so many of these books on the top 10 bestsellers.

Yeah. People are waking up.

Yeah.

So I, I'm just glad to be able to contribute.

Of course.

Yeah. You know, it's very powerful.

This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the Three Truths.

Yeah.

So it's a hypothetical question. Imagine you get to live as long as you want to live and you get to Live your life. Creating what you want, Experiencing life and the relationships you want to be in and making the impact you want to have. But it's the last day. Eventually. Live as long as you want. For whatever reason. All of your content has to go with you. No one has access to your information, your books. Hypothetical.

So after I'm gone, it's all a lot.

It all goes with you to the next place. It goes somewhere else, but it's. No, we don't have access to it.

Okay. Got it.

Hypothetical scenario.

Yeah.

But you got to leave behind three lessons to the world. Three things that you know to be true.

Okay.

That you would share with us. And this is all we have to remember. Your.

Yeah.

Your information.

Yeah.

What would you say are those three truths for you?

Seek the reality of everything. Don't. Don't get seduced by appearances of anything. Second would be, don't be afraid of your pain and don't run away from it, because that running away is what leads to addictions and illness and so on. Number three. It's all worth it. It's worth going through all that suffering because this is what life is. It's just worth being alive. A friend of mine in England recently lost a very close friend to suicide. She was just struck by. Overwhelmed by grief, and she didn't know if she could handle it. Now she's got a favorite forest that she walks in. She told me this, like two months ago or a month ago. Anyway, she went to walk in this forest and she just felt this deep grief. A grief is one of the main circuits that we have. We have circuits for grief. We have to. She felt this deep grief and she felt the greatest joy at the same time. And I asked her, well, how are the two even compatible? She said, I felt the grief and I felt such joy at the privilege of being alive to feel the grief. Wow. Yeah.

It's all worth it.

It's all worth it.

Oh, man. I want to acknowledge you, Gabber, for. I mean, your journey. I mean the journey of your relationship and what you've experienced from coming together and staying together and all these different things. The journey from teaching, from a place of suffering, because it sounds like for many decades you weren't at peace, but you were trying to help others from you. I want to acknowledge you for you creating peace inside of yourself and facing the pain and the trauma fully yourself and being on that healing journey. And for your consistent dedication to creating your work so that people can consume it in a way that resonates with them from your Books to your content, to the videos, to your posts. This is so needed right now. And I think it's gonna be needed for a long time until society and culture starts to heal. So I really acknowledge you for the way you show up, your commitment and your consistency and dedication to this research.

Well, I can't thank you enough for, first of all, creating this platform, which, by the way, means having done all the work yourself, and then having the vision to create this platform and then allowing me to speak from this platform, of course. Such a privilege and such a joy. So thank you very much.

Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. Again, your book, I want people to get it. The Myth of Normal. Make sure you guys go get a few copies of that right now. Follow you your website. We'll have everything linked up as well. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

You don't make it easy on a guy, do you?

I gotta challenge you.

It's a willingness to find your best qualities and to express them in the world. That's what I see as greatness. And that doesn't have to do with achievement, necessarily. It might lead to achievement, but it's actually the willingness and the capacity to find your own best qualities and to manifest them in the world. That's what greatness is.

Love it. Dr. Mata, thank you so much.

Appreciate you. You have to think of your thoughts and feelings and the working of your flesh inside your skull as a garden, as an ecosystem. Just because you have one weed or one spike doesn't mean the harmony is disrupted. So, for example, one frontal lobe we can surgically remove.