EP082: Standing In Your Truth with Dr. Kelly Brogan and Sachin Patel from Perfect Practice LIVE 2020

Welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine and success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Without further ado, may I present to you Dr. Kelly Brogan. Kelly Brogan, ND is a holistic psychiatrist, author of New York Times bestselling book A Mind of youf Own, Own Yourself and the children's book A Time for Rain, and co editor of the landmark textbook Integrative Therapies for Depression. She's the founder of the online healing program Vital Mind Reset and the membership community Vital Life Project. She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical center after graduating from Cornell University Medical College and has a BS from MIT in Systems Neuroscience. She is specialized in root cause resolution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. Today, she is here to share with us. Standing in youn Truth. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Kelly Brogan.

Hey Kelly, how are you?

Hey, I'm great. I'm super honored to be here, really.

Well, the pleasure is all ours to host you and you know, you've been a fan favorite. Actually, if Facebook ad spend is any indication, your ads were converting at the lowest possible price. So interesting fun fact for you, in case you wanted to know.

Some energy from Facebook, there you go.

Yeah. So people are excited to hear from you. I'm excited to have the opportunity to interview you, just admire you from so many different perspectives as a mom, as somebody who stands in their truth, as somebody who is looking to advance healthcare and share information that allows people to become the best absolute version of themselves. And you know, you've questioned the way things are done and not only question them, but created solutions that are working. So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about, you know, what inspires you, what makes you tick. And I also want to discuss because a lot of the practitioners who are tuned in today, the majority of them are here to learn how to create more impact, more freedom, you know, beyond the brick and mortar. And you've done that so elegantly. So. So let's get right into it. For those people that are hearing you speak for the first time, tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Well, first of all, just as you were giving that very generous introduction, I was thinking I could say the same exact thing about you. I'm so excited that you are in this position of influencing clinicians, because I just. I'm not sure there are many as operating at the level of integrity that you are and as courageous as you are. I consider you one of the few colleagues out there that I relate to on a heart level in that way.

Thank you.

Really, really an honor, truly. And, yeah. So I would love to know how many of the clinicians that you work with had this kind of polarity shift that I have, because I know it's not uncommon to bump up against the glass ceiling of what conventional paradigm has to offer, either through one's own health experience, which is pretty typical for many of us, I think, especially MDs, or a loved one or a child, let's say, and to really see that it's at best a poison apple that we're being offered in the form of conventional treatment and to set out into the wilderness to find this better paradigm, or one that at least resonates on a deeper level. And so that was my story. I trained, hugely a believer in the conventional framework. So much so I always say that I specialized in my fellowship in prescribing to pregnant and breastfeeding women psychotropic medications. So everything from Haldol to Klonopin to lithium, Effexor. And I did that because I didn't know that there was not only an alternative, but an approach that made true sense for the individual's narrative, so that rendered meaningful something that otherwise would be perceived as random misfortune. And I only woke up because I was postpartum about nine, ten months, and I began to develop symptoms of Hashimoto's. I was diagnosed not because I sought treatment, because so many of those symptoms can be chalked up to new motherhood, but because I was at a routine physical and I didn't want to take Synthroid for the rest of my life, because I knew so many of my patients just mysteriously never felt well, no matter how much we tinkered with the dose. It was because of that that I went to a naturopath, and I had read a book at the time because there's always this confluence of factors when the universe is really tapping on your shoulder, inviting you forward to exactly who you are. And I read a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, who's an intrepid journalist. And I never prescribed a psychotropic medication again after that book. And that was in 2010. And so I applied myself rather obsessively to mastering this alternative paradigm and kind of lived in that realm of translating a lot of my neurotic tendencies from the conventional kind of thought process and mindset into the holistic realm and particularly functional medicine realm. And then I started to really do deeper spiritual work. And that's when I saw, at least for the population that I treat, that there are potentially limitations to getting stuck in that. I don't know what else to call it other than neurotic kind of loop. And that's when I worked with really a protocol that I think is, I mean, you understand this, it's a ritual, right? There's not really anything magical about it. It's just now a well worn path with a very, I think, robust field to hold this possibility and potential for others to step into. And that's really what the protocol offers. It's just like a portal that you pass through so that you can have this experience of self initiation and ultimately begin the process of adultification and becoming the you that for most of us adults is latent in the cage of our unprocessed childhood traumas. And I do believe that that is the underpinning of so much of what we call chronic illness. But specifically, of course, my area of expertise is so called mental illness. And so that's really what I've devoted myself to. And I consider my own spiritual work, my own self work, my own personal growth to be ultimately now my greatest credential.

I love that. That's so powerful. And as you were saying that what I'm gathering is that we all have this innate potential unrealized. And it's never too late, right? It might be latent, but it's never too late. But what I'm also hearing is that it's not just something you learn. You don't just learn it, you earn it. And that's what it means to be an adult, right, Is to know that just reading something or having an awareness of something isn't having it, right? It's doing it that actually brings it into existence. And that's one of the things I admire about you, is that you don't shy away from us having to do the actual work that's required to be who we need to become. What was some initial resistance that you faced? Because this is like a big, you know, this is very unconventional thinking and I'm sure you came up against a lot of resistance.

So it's interesting because I am still the same person who was not only a vehement defender of the allopathic paradigm, but also derisive and dismissive about anything that would be characterized as so called alternative. I'm still that person. And so, you know, I think that I was somehow a very interesting foil, you know, because I am a science, I was a scientism loving individual and I'm healing from that. And I still am a lover of science. And in many ways I still play the game. You know, I work hard to publish cases and case series and we just publish a randomized trial and it's almost like for fun at this point, it's almost like a sport because it feels a bit disruptive to me to have some of these outcomes on PubMed in index journals. But I also certainly recognize that science can tell any story. And so having been on the other side for whatever reason, my colleagues, many of whom were and some still are friends, they never really messed with me. I don't know why. Other than that, I think a lot of my shadow is an intense aptitude around being right that can be very, very destructive in interpersonal relationships, but very, very adaptive in the setting of scientific debate. And that was really how I began to learn the futility of debate. And I think many of us are encountering that now in the world as we are seemingly being split into different ideological camps. We might have all of the science behind us and still find that exposure to information does not result in transformation of thoughts, ideas or beliefs. And why is that? What is that about? And so that's when I think I began to focus more on the reasons that we believe what we believe. And not that I have any great or grand insights into that, but I have found that the relationship to authority as a parentified projection, meaning that when you relate to medicine or an institution of any kind, or in my case it's often been relationship to government, we relate to that either as the rebellious adolescent demanding that things be done our way, or as the compliant child. We are fundamentally disempowered. This process of personal reclamation requires that we stop fighting ultimately that we walk the walk, we take personal responsibility, and we begin to see how we represent that which we judge right. And so the resolution of this victimhood ultimately is what it is. That is what my advocacy around that has garnered a lot of criticism. I've been, you know, described as somebody who shames victims. Had a whole website devoted to me called the ugly ableism of Dr. Kelly Brogan. And I didn't know what that word meant, but when I researched it, I thought, you know, in every criticism there's sometimes a small grain, sometimes a big chunk of truth. And I thought, you know, that's really true. I do believe that people are able to, I know you do too, able to heal and experience self ownership, bodily sovereignty in ways that we are not told that we are capable of as we are coddled, you know, by the powers that ultimately, you know, profit and grow stronger through our dependency. Right, so, so that is where I've, I've encountered the most resistance. It's not in the scientific realm. And interestingly, you know, when I publish these papers, it's almost like they're going into the void. Nobody seems to care. You know, it's not like people are writing smear pieces on me about, you know, my, my publications, but it seems to be more about the implication that I have made publicly that anyone, for example, can live a pharmaceutically free life, you know, whether it's birth control or antidepressants or whatever it might be, that there or any woman can have a home birth if the conditions are right for her psychospiritually and otherwise. And that seems to be very problematic for a lot of folks out there. But who knows how many of these folks are actually, you know, pharma funded themselves or you know, in mainstream media that is ultimately represented as different factions of independent media, but comes from, you know, this multi headed monster. So it's never really bothered me because I recognize that, as I know you do too, this is not for everyone. It's just not for everyone. I wish it was because I would feel safer in the world if everyone shared a perspective on what health is. But we don't. And it's not just because we don't have all equal access to information, because sometimes we have full access and we're just still not ready. So I've become very interested in the readiness factor. What is that? Right? What made me ready 11 years ago? And in so many of the cases of my patients, it's even more elusive. You know, what, what is it that at this moment, as opposed to the year previous or 10 years, you know, in advance that makes them ready to do this, you know, to take this hero's journey. And the closest I've come to defining it, is that it is an experience of relief that comes through change, because most of us resist change, right? But if you feel relief moving in the direction of change as opposed to staying firm where you are, then you're Ready. And who knows what other alchemy lies therein. But it's become very interesting to me and really, I think disarmed me around this mission I was on in the early years of my advocacy to just get this information into everyone's hands because once they had it, they'd never touch conventional medicine again. And that's just not how it works.

I mean, it's a beautiful vision, isn't it?

Yes. Sweet.

It's difficult to know you can help so many people, but you realize that it ultimately depends on how much they're willing to help themselves. And in the end, that's what gets us where we want to go, is us. And that's what holds us back. And you mentioned something that has been mentioned several times this weekend is childhood trauma. Do you want to talk a little bit about that from your perspective? Like, how does that show up for us as we become adults?

Yeah. So, you know, we, I think universally, although perhaps there are exceptions, I haven't encountered any, are programmed in our childhood through the experience of conditional love. Right. And what I mean by that is that we were raised by care caregivers who withdrew love when we did not behave the way that we want, that they wanted us to behave. Right. And sometimes it was just, you know, like something I've done, you know, many, many times, you know, to my own children, like, it's just a cold. Like you can see my breath in the room. It's like things get kind of cold and I withdraw and I get quiet and I just wait for them. This is when they were toddlers, let's say, to stop doing what I don't want them to do. Because as a mom, I was very committed never to yelling or that kind of a thing because of my upbringing. But there are other ways that we can express unconditional love beyond violence or aggressive acts of neglect, et cetera, sexual abuse. So we experience these traumas and sometimes they are seemingly benign, so we dismiss them. Right. Like, I've had patients who experienced sexual molestation, but it wasn't rape, Right. Or penetrative. So they dismissed it as what's the big deal? Get over it. Everybody's had these kinds of experiences sometimes, you know, we have an experience of being, you know, catching our dad on a bad day and he says something shaming to us about our math exam results or whatever. And it spanned hugely to heinous experiences of multi year, you know, emotional, psychological, sexual and physical abuse, which characterized many, many, many of the upbringings of the patients that I worked with. Right. And so what happens is that these programs become the dominant influence on what we call our personalities, but also on our coping strategies. They are very effective for the most part. I'm someone I don't believe, for example, in alcoholism as a disease, because from my perspective, if you are drinking alcohol to excess, it's because it's working for you. And then there will come a time when it doesn't work and you are invited to walk down one or the other path at that fork in the road. But our seemingly maladaptive patterns exist because they keep us afloat, they keep us in survival until they don't. Of course, these defenses can be more or less aligned with the dominant orthodoxy. For example, the defenses that I developed because of my own childhood experiences happen to be very adaptive. So I mentioned one debate, right? Or intellectualism. So when I feel afraid that I'm going to be judged or rejected or worse, that existential terror comes up, right? And I can feel it in my body. It's a racing, hard or tightening, you know, in my shoulders. And it's a feeling often of urgency to respond, right? So I can get a triggering email and I need to respond immediately. I can't do anything else. And that defense is so effective in my case that I feel sometimes emotionally nothing. I don't feel fear, shame, I just feel a body sensation and then I go up in my head so I don't have to feel this stuff, right? And in my case, because we are a society that prizes, you know, mentalism and intellectualism, I have not suffered many consequences for that. But if your defensive structure, let's say, is withdrawal and avoidance, then it might be difficult for you to navigate interpersonal conflict, and it might be difficult for you to hold down a job, and it might be very difficult for you to know what to do when you have tremendous amounts of energy moving through your body. When you are feeling at an intensity that is the childlike intensity, you know, of three or four year olds, and you cannot function in the world that way. And we live in a society that says, oh, something's wrong with you. And in fact, something is so wrong with you that it's your brain chemistry that is disordered. It's going to be like that for life and go ahead and be a good patient and take your medication. So in the psychiatric realm, as we pathologize and marginalize these highly sensitive people who don't have necessarily the kinds of defensive structure that I might, you know, where I get to navigate the world with a good amount of Functionality and ease, even though I am just as injured and wounded inside, right? What happens is that these individuals get captured by this system, and the system says, you know, I. We will take care of you as long as you comply. And sometimes what's referred to as like a Stockholm syndrome develops, where those who ultimately, from my perspective, are abused by this system end up defending it themselves, right? So these are the people who get upset at me when I suggest that maybe a lifetime of Prozac may not, in fact, be necessary for a given individual's human experience. And so the underlying message. It's different with psychiatry because if you have diabetes and you're like, oh, my pancreas messed up, but if you are diagnosed with a psychiatric label, there is implicitly and explicitly perhaps something wrong with you, with the totality of you, with what you feel, with how you are, there's something wrong with you. So that's why the recovery and the reclamation from the psychiatric system is a very, very harrowing journey that involves, in my opinion, necessarily the dark night of the soul where these individuals confront the limitations of the illusory self that they've been conditioned to believe through the match of their traumas and a system's pattern control, right? They've been conditioned to believe they are. That has to literally die. And what emerges is like, the baby of themselves, right? It's this. This vulnerable, delicate newness that also, ironically, was always them. It's always been them. I mean, you know, you speak too about this, you know, the universal self that spans from the moment you're conceived until the moment you die in beyond that self is always present. And peeling back these layers is, in my opinion, what healing is, you know, but we are working in a system that says, you know, I've said that health is, you know, basically anything, you know, other than death. So we have vastly different definitions. And so I think. Because as Americans, but I think this is now a more universal phenomenon because we don't have an initiation to adulthood where we confront the limitations of that illusory self, right? So for women, it could be childbirth. Very often, that's. In many ways, we participate in giving that opportunity away. For men, there's basically nothing that I've ever observed in dominant American culture that can serve to initiate them into adulthood. Because of that, we carry all of our stuff, all of our programs and conditioned behaviors that give us this feeling of hiding our authentic self because it's not acceptable and wasn't to our pitch, we carry that into adulthood, and we end up running around like Little kids, right? Parentifying all over the place, parentifying our partners, parentifying our doctors, and certainly parentifying the government and even the media, where we do things simply because we're told to do them on TV and never because we know how to critically think or check in with ourselves or even have any sense of who we are, what we feel or what's best for us. So that is a process of reclaiming the inner compass and identifying that intuitive connection that can really only come when we have done the work of recognizing the impact of these traumas and beginning to heal from them, which in my estimation is best summarized as so called shadow work, where we understand all of these parts of us that acknowledging it's like cringeworthy. It's cringeworthy and it's very shameful. Often that's the dominant feeling is, oh God, what if anyone ever sees this aspect of me? So it's owning that which resolves the victimhood. Because there's no blaming anymore, right? There's no finger pointing, not at anyone else, not your brain chemistry or anything. And meaning comes in, it infuses everything, right? So now everything that has ever happened to you and everything that is happening and everything that will happen is for you to learn about yourself and to shed these illusory layers of what you're not and to understand this core essence of who you are, even if you change completely all the time, right? So my patients would say. I remember one patient said to me one time, she's, this was years ago, she said, wow, I used to think I was a liberal and, and a feminist and a vegan, and now I have no idea what I am. So it's like, that's really uncomfortable because we've been so conditioned to hang on to our labels as surrogate sense of self and going through that process of confusions like that in the chrysalis, you know, and the caterpillar melts before the imaginal cells take shape and form. It's very uncomfortable and very disorienting and it's worth every second of it because what comes out on the other end, and there always is another end, is this kind of emotional mastery without which every single day can feel terrifying in the ways that childhood, I think, was for most of us, like a white noise of fear that if we don't do just so, something horrible is about to happen. And that's really not how we should be navigating the world as adults.

Yeah, it's really interesting because as I start paying attention to this a little bit More I see how generations prior to me, like my parents, my in laws, how they communicate to my son and how we communicate to him is so radically different because their communication is very fear based. Whereas, you know, for example, like if he's, if my son's riding his bike, instead of saying ride carefully, they might say, don't fall, right? You're basically allowing and facilitating through your words for that to happen. But then you're instilling that fear into the child, right? And so then the same that echoes in so many other areas of their life, right? Like don't screw this up is essentially what you're saying. And they go through their entire life repeating that. You know, one thing my father said to me when I was very young, I share this story often. I don't know if you've heard it or not, so I'll share it. When I was young, I used to be a barber. I still cut hair. I still cut my son's hair and my father's hair and my in laws, my father in law's hair. So it's one of my natural gifts, is cutting hair. So the irony that I don't have hair, but at least I have my beard, right? So my mom came home from school one day, my mom came from work, I was already home from school. And there's this big like party in my garage. I converted my garage into a barber shop. And so I'm there cutting people's hair. And then I'm like 16 at the time. And my dad tells me the next morning, she's like, you know, your mom cried herself to sleep last night. And I said, why? What did I do? And he's like, she thinks you're going to become a barber when you grow up. And like all of the visions and dreams that she had of you were shattered. And I'm like, dad, come on, seriously, right? So not there's anything wrong with. I love. Like, that was still my favorite job, being a barber. People tell you that people tell their barber more than they tell their doctor, which is something interesting. But my dad said something under his breath. He said, at least I know you'll never go hungry. And by him saying that, it instilled in me that no matter what I do, I will succeed or I'll have some sort of backup plan. Whether I end up cutting hair, I'll still always be able to put food on my table. And so sometimes there's experiences like that that actually inspire us or allow us to take risks. And sometimes we're told something where Fear is instilled inside of us and as a result of that, we're fearful in everything that we do. You know, I have some clients and as we go through the coaching process with them in our mentorship, what we uncover with them is that it's not their funnel that's broken, it's the, they haven't peeled back all the layers that they need to, to do the emotional work because it's showing up in so many different ways. It shows up in every dimension of your life when you don't heal this stuff 100%.

And it's such big work. And we're seeing it again on a grand scale right now. This concept of safety, which is all we want is to feel safe on every level from the physical to the psycho emotional, and that it could ever be achieved through control of external variables. Right. Including like that your mom could. And that's referred to as a narcissistic extension. Right. And not to diagnose her is extremely common, especially my mom is an immigrant and it's extremely common for second generation kids. I don't know if you are one, but that kind of thinking of like, no, you have to make it worth my having come to this country kind of a thing, you better become a doctor or a lawyer. But the idea that if this happens this way, then I will feel safe, right? It's that same conditionality. And then we seek to control so many aspects of our external life, including our children. We want to fix it so that we can finally get that hit of okay, now it's okay, but of course it's an oasis on the horizon. And this redefinition of safety as something that already exists, it's already there. And how do we access it, how do we tap into it rather than architecting it from the outside in. But in parenting it comes up all the time. And I think, you know, I had an experience just the other day with my 8 year old who, you know, we're going through a lot of transitions as everybody is right now, including merging families, you know, between Sayer and my daughters. And a lot's coming up for her and she wrote me this really amazing letter of all of the things I've done to ruin her life. And there's of course this impulse to say, to defend myself and to justify and to say, well, you know, that's not how it happened or that's not fair. So my child self is. Starts to have a tantrum, right? And so can I be the adult who soothes my child self that's getting upset and wants to be right and feels hurt and not seen so that I can allow my own daughter to have her experience without fixing it. That is ultimately the experience of adult emotional mastery. That is extremely difficult. What I just described so simply, it's some of the hardest work I have ever done in this lifetime, literally, is traversing the span of 10 minutes where I can allow someone in my life to have an individuated experience from me and not need it to be in conformity to what would make me feel empowered and comfortable. So it's really pretty revolutionary, this concept of healing these traumas. And I do think it involves a practice. That's why I love that word and how you've operationalized it as well. It's a practice of self regulation. And that can come through the physical, through accessing the nervous system, through daily meditation and contemplative practices. It can come through regulating your blood sugar and eliminating neuroinflammatory foods. And it can also come from whatever works for you psychodynamically to interact with yourself in a way that gives you control over what otherwise would be the toddler, your inner toddler, in the backseat of the car, grabbing the wheel and trying to drive the car. No, you're the adult. You drive your car, you know where it needs to go. Just be cool, right? But it's not the same as suppression. And I think that's the subtle but important difference of relating to ourselves without reactivity, so old activity, but instead responding from that place of equanimity. It's some of the hardest work there is.

So, speaking of that work, what does that look like for you?

So for me, it has primarily looked like relationships. And primarily my relationship with Sayer has been the greatest teacher in this lifetime for me. And the one area, you know, my daughter can write me that letter, or I can have a challenging conflict with a friend recently or, you know, all sorts of work with my family of origin. And the one thing that can bring me to my knees, you know, functionally, is when things with me and Sayer, you know, we have what's described as an imago dynamic where he has all of the qualities, positive and negative, that are most prominent in my image of my parents, right? And the same goes for me with his. And so when we upset each other, we upset each other so perfectly that. That it's a stalemate, right? And it's so destabilizing that we could go weeks and hours and hours of couples therapy and feel so disconnected and so Far from love, that it's almost been this training camp over years of learning that love is not control, it is not manipulation, and it's not merger, it's not even agreement. It's actually accessing the love that's already there, that we know is there at times when we cannot otherwise perceive it. And our story would tell us that he's the enemy or I'm the enemy. So this has been transformative to a great extent because now I know and recognize when I'm telling my victim story, my poor me, wah, wah, not fair story. And I can begin to learn how to love myself so that he doesn't have to be the one to feed me that like throwing little papers on the fire all the time. And you know, I think that in the practice of our relationship, my daily meditation commitment has served because in those moments where I might otherwise, you know, swirl into an old pattern, I have growing capacity to be the witness, right? To be that never disturbed awareness and to at least know it's there, right? So I can watch myself being myself doing the me, you know, the me thing. And that I do believe there. And I think you would agree that there's a, you know, there's a psychobiological, a neurobiological signature for that, you know, that, that you can, you can access through healing, physiologic healing. And, you know, that's a part of why meditation matters. You know, I'm not somebody who's ever had mystical experiences in meditation. I'm not even so sure I've ever really felt super relaxed or anything. I do it like brushing my teeth, like it's like a hygiene branches. And over time, I do believe that the commitment has allowed me and afforded me a different relationship to stress and fear. And so, you know, I think that's a big, big part of it. But also doing this work, same work with my parents and with my brother and then any of my deeper friendships and then even, you know, it's like my whole landscape of my life is opportunities for me to see how it is that I am blaming someone else for something I'm creating. And that practice of taking personal responsibility, seeing where my programs are operative, it's never going to end, obviously, until I die. But that's been really where I have grown and changed the most.

So how can somebody who's watching this as a practitioner learn to start implementing some of these strategies with their, with their existing patients?

So I believe in a kind of Maslow's hierarchy. And I don't know that this is true for even the majority of people. But it's been the lens that I've looked through that there's an order of operations and that the first thing to take care of with patients or oneself is the low hanging fruit of physiologic imbalance. So if there's gluten or dairy intolerance or B12 deficiency or blood sugar imbalance, or an obvious side effect or adverse effect from a recent medication exposure, that these physiologic imbalances be resolved, which of course you and I both know often takes a month. This is not necessarily a multi year process through lifestyle change. So diet detox, you know, meditation and mindset work, because that's also part of the physical healing is that you believe that you can. Right. It's maybe even the most important prerequisite.

Absolutely, yeah.

So that, that happens first and then I have found that there's this liberated space and energy for beginning to take an inventory of relationship dynamics and other lifestyle choices. You know, the home you're living in, your marriage, your job, just sort of assess like, have I been avoiding something here? You know, is there a monster in the closet over there? And when the timing is right, when that readiness surfaces, you'll know, right? Because you're over time healing that experience of your body as an intuitive instrument, right? So where your body literally says yes now, or you know, somebody's like, you should really talk to your brother. And you're like, no, it's not time. You know, you'll get that yes or no. Just it's like it's a quiet, very stable voice. And I know you know it as well. You can tell when people have contact with that, right? Because they're beyond influence and manipulation, you know, by the outside world. And so they confer this sense of like, you know, like it's a feeling I've always gotten from you, for example. It's like you confer this sense of like you don't need or not need something from me. You know, it's like I trust everyone and I trust no one. And I, you know, that's how I operate in the world. You know, I don't give anything away, then I'm going to resent giving and I don't hold anything back that I'm going to resent holding back. So there is an access that grows to intuition and includes even navigating diet. Right. So my mentor, Nick Gonzalez, always said that patients prefer to eat the diet that heals them, whether that's fatty red meat three times a day or 100% fruit. They prefer it. But how do you know what you prefer when you're getting yanked around by addictive foods all day long? You have no clue. You have no access to that compass. So as you clean things up on that lower level of Maslow's hierarchy and that physiologic healing level, you'll begin to develop these sometimes funny preferences. I mean, in my process there was probably like nine months where I would walk around with a bunch of radishes in my backpack at any given time because that's what I felt like eating. And then it transitioned to beets and then it was broccoli rabe. And now I'm in like a weird eggplant phase, you know, and you just, your body begins to tell you how to heal it and you know, then you can start to understand how to navigate the healing of interpersonal relationships. And then I think the later stages involve often, you know, these more cosmic tools or divinity oriented tools, you know, and so whether that's shamanism or, you know, kundalini or different types of breathwork or plant medicine, that many people then at that point are guided intuitively to these ancient technologies to help them really begin digging into their lineage, to their ancestry, and to patterns that have probably existed for hundreds of years in certain family lines. And many of those are repeated traumas, because these traumas, whether it's sexual abuse or otherwise, they perpetuate in order to be ultimately brought into the light of love, brought into the light of healing. And that's true for also patterned behavior around fear, control. And some folks, obviously, I know you believe this as well, have such an acceleration, you know, of their experience of access to the divine order of all of this through these technologies. But that deeper psychospiritual work, I do believe is facilitated when you have ownership over your body, when you have self mastery around your emotional terrain. Because, you know, for example, I had some folks who completed my program and got off of all these meds and then when everything came up around the current crisis, really, really lost stability and got into deep victimhood. And I really marveled at that because I thought, okay, it's a long on ramp of healing that inner child of healing that victim consciousness before you develop resiliency around the fear that can come up. And not to say that I am not struggling with those same things, a lot of victimhood has come up for me around relating to authority and governmental structures at the current moment. But you know, I'm aware of it. So hopefully I'm not propagating and perpetuating that on the public sector, just paying it forward. So I do think that kind of order can help. And then if you're doing the work, you know it's going to show. It's going to show. And the work is really as simple as every time you're upset by something. It's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for you to learn how to soothe yourself without self repression or invalidation.

I love that so much. To unpackage there, Tell us about the vital mind reset.

So I mentioned earlier that I translated a lot of my garbage from conventional medicine straight into functional medicine, right? And I got trained in functional medicine and I thought, all right, so we're just going to figure out what's wrong with everybody on paper and we're going to deliver all of these supplements and we're going to fix them right up and then they're going to be fine. And I also developed a lot of my activist propensities at that time where I felt very angry about all of the misinformation that I had invested blood, sweat and tears in into being indoctrinated by in my training. And I wrote a book called A mind of your own where I dumped a lot of this information and science into. And it was at that time that I began to apply the protocol that I had used essentially for myself and healing my own Hashimoto's to what it was that I was doing in practice to help discontinue psychotropic medications for my patients. My wait list, as somebody who was offering that service grew to multi year wait list. Here I am recognizing that I'm barely doing much of anything other than reflecting to these individuals that they indeed were right all along, that nothing is wrong with them. That's literally I've, you know, I've had patients who've come public talk about the fact that that's all that I ultimately did. And so I decided to translate it online into, you know, a program. It's exactly what I did in clinical practice. So, you know, it's just PDFs and videos and written text of the ways that I would explain, you know, different things. And I know this is what you teach in terms of scaling. If you're going to say the same thing day in and day out to patients, how can you render this accessible at scale to the masses? I will say that one very big mistake that I made was something you alluded to earlier, which is that I grew too large a team too quickly because I had a lot of folks who had recovered through, you know, my information. And I felt like, oh, wow, I'm so touched, you know, that I would offer them a job. It felt like a way to further support them or validate them. And it was a lot of this unexamined, you know, childhood programming that I am only worthy if I can provide value to someone. And so I took on a lot of employees that, you know, of course, seemingly on the surface, made my life easier in creating this product and making it operationalized at a, you know, a high level. And then I ended up getting into trouble. I mean, There was probably 18 months where I didn't pay myself, and I was almost unable to pay my employees. So I think that looking at the emotional aspects of your employee dynamics, employer employee dynamics, and how you might be establishing, like, a surrogate family out of your team, you know, because you finally feel seen and validated and people appreciate that you have something to say. And especially if you're coming from an energy of having been marginalized for stepping out of the, you know, the mainstream thinking, just kind of be aware of that, you know, and look at that. And how can you keep it as lean as possible as you few people involved as possible for as long as possible? Because that's what Sayre did. And I have seen the comparison of investing over a million dollars in just labor unnecessarily, probably relative to keeping it kind of more bare bones. And so that's a little piece of advice I would give on the emotional tenor of things.

Yeah, I think that's. That's really important to understand because I was actually a victim of that myself. So before I started the Living Proof Institute, I was working for a company where they expanded and grew too quickly. And it came to the point where, yeah, you know, the entrepreneurs eat last. So it's not like they were getting paid. But neither. It came. There came a point where we couldn't get paid either, and that was not a good scenario or situation. So I can only imagine the anxiety and frustration and all those things that come with that. So I always encourage people to be efficient and focus on creating systems and processes. And don't be like, it's important to hire other people to do things that you're not really good at and get those systems and processes set up. But once you start bringing on huge labor costs, then the burn rate for your company becomes so significant, it's hard to. You become essentially a prisoner at times. Right. Because if you want to take a month off, well, you still have to. The business still has to operate.

Right. And you're serving two. Exactly. You're serving two masters. Right. Because it corrupts your sense of why you're doing it and who you're doing it for providing this service. Because you have to make all these payrolls and you have to then market a certain amount. And often the creative individual at the head is also the marketer. And so it just corrupts the soul of the offering. And so the less pressure you can put on yourself financially, even if it means that you're just kind of in a little echo chamber with one or two other folks for a while, the better it's going to feel ultimately.

Yeah. And sometimes I feel like when people see individuals like yourself who have had great success on social media and building a large following and having an influence, I don't, I don't think they necessarily understand what's happening behind the scenes sometimes to make that happen. And they perhaps envy or are curious about how to create this result, not realizing the work effort and time and all those things that are required to make it happen. So efficiency, especially right now, I think that's what wins, is how we can be as efficient as possible and that allows us to be more effective as well because we're operating out of the right reason.

Absolutely.

Awesome. So Kelly, what would you like to end with? What do you want to share with everyone? What's the message, aside from everything that you said today that we really need to hear right now to move our businesses forward, to move practices, to move medicine forward, to move the healing of our, our whole planet forward.

I think that it's very common that those of us who find our way into the healing arts and this kind of service, we have particular kinds of wounds, right. And we feel when we identify as the savior that we are suddenly in the safe realm of worth and value. And we, we feel like we can kind of get the hit over and over again of that worth from these surrogate sources. So I would offer that your greatest gift to the world, to your loved ones, and to anyone who might ever interact with you as a client, as a patient, as a customer, is working on yourself, your self care. Let that never, never, never, never under any circumstances fall by the wayside. No work is more important than that. None, no interview, no project, no meeting, no, nothing is more important than however you define your self care. Because if that anchor is not in place, then what you are contributing is more of this energy of externally sourced validation that ultimately ends up being a kind of manipulation and a control based dynamic that we certainly need less and less of in the world today.

I actually want to unpack a little bit of what you said there. And if it's. I'm sure you're okay that I share this. We were actually going to have you yesterday morning at our event, but you said I can't do Friday morning because I've got to dance. So you're not just. You're literally. You were. You're holding your ground, right? The easy thing to do and perhaps. And I totally understood.

No, you honored that because I know you get it and it's not, you know, for me, in this window, I fell victim. Right. My victim story to my dance studio closing and then reopening with all of these kinds of draconian interventions necessary to dance literally in a group setting. And because I took my energy from that victimhood is. And as Bucky Fuller says, tried to create a new system. I co manifested my own place. Right. And we have all these teachers. It's great experience and it is not just exercise for me. It's non optional to put anything before that. And for me, movement has become the most important pillar of my personal balance. Without that, every single day I get into very, very dark places and. And I begin to pay that forward into my dynamics, my relationships and probably my team. And it's just, it's really an aggressive act of self neglect, you know. And so. Yeah, so nothing is more important than that. My kids know that. Everyone in my life knows that. And ultimately it's also a way of me holding myself accountable because then if everybody knows that about me, then I got to walk the walk. And it does make a huge difference.

I love that. So you're living your truth, standing in it, living it, not just preaching it. And it's very admirable. It's so great and beautiful to witness and I love you for it. Keep doing it. Don't change. It's not even about changing. It's about becoming right. Allow this unfolding to continue to take place because it's beautiful. And one thing I wrote down is that the healing is in the peeling. I love that we gotta peel these layers back.

Your quotes, Sachin, wherever you divine these from are next level. Every time Sarah and I see a mirror, we're like, damn, how does he always just beat everyone to this wisdom? It's really, really an amazing gift of articulation and wordsmithing, which I'm a huge admirer. I love that the healing is negative.

Thank you.

So good.

Thank you. Amazing. Well, you've got lots of love in the chat. So again, thank you, thank you, thank you. We appreciate you. Where can we learn more about you for those that want to dive deeper into your ecosystem? We've got a link below with the Vital Mind Reset. But where else can people find you?

Yeah, so I, you know, obviously my website, kellybergenmd.com, but I am in the process actually of moving off of mainstream media of all kinds. So Instagram, Facebook and heading over to Telegram and Miwi until better, more interesting options come along. So that's been interesting. I like the feeling. It feels really good to be again walking the walk, you know, because it's always the case that we are waking up to the little areas that we're still asleep. And for me, there's been many that I've woken up to recently and that's one of them. So.

All right, so I'll get that link from you and we'll post it in the links below so people can access that information as well. Kelly, once again, thank you so much. So appreciate it.

Thank you. No, it's truly an honor and I'm such an admirer of your work that I really, I'm like a fan girl. So it's, it's really, really exciting to be here and be a part of it.

Thank you. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Kelly Brogan at kellybroganmd.com thank you, Kelly Brogan, so good to hear you and meet you. Love this conversation once again, what a powerful day here at Perfect Practice Live. And we have a powerhouse coming up. Dr. Terry Walls, living legend, a legend in these halls.

Majeed, what was your biggest takeaway from that conversation?

Childhood trauma and the imago. The matching of the imago. I'm familiar from the works of Harville Hendricks and his book Getting the Love youe Want, which in my home has been modified. The COVID of the book, I got a label maker and I printed it out and I put the word pooty Tang over the word love. So in my house, it's getting the pooty tang you want by Harville Hendrix.

He.

It's a, it's an inside joke in my family. So the imago and the healing and the childhood trauma and the theme of this Covid and this time this window. There's so many interesting ways it's been described today and how so much trauma is being processed and so much healing and multi generational healing. As you know, I thought that was really interesting.

You, have you uncovered any traumas in your journeys that you care to Share.

You know, I had an interesting question at a journey. This is what they call a journey in Utah. And there's this journey community and there's some plant medicine to drop in and do the work and process and heal the traumas and sometimes from other ancestry healing ancestral traumas in these processes.

And.

And I go to the facilitator and I say, you know, here I got a bit of an issue. I'm so happy, I'm so in flow, I'm feeling so good. And I feel like I have. I'm not in the club of like, something terrible happened to me in my childhood, should I go looking for something? And he referred to this as trauma digging. He said, I don't recommend it. He said, I don't recommend you do it. It'll present itself when it needs to be presented. But my traumas have been around. Some of the things that I shared with you, Sachin, and some of the things of immigrant parents, money mindset issues, pursuing the approval, love, respect of my parents and the aberrations in my behavior that that has created, which have also become my greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses. So, you know, money mindset stuff. Those were some of the traumas in my family that actually in my childlike mind, is that if I had so much money, I would not have those problems, just the bathtub full of the cash of small unmarked bills. But indeed, it's been quite a journey that I've enjoyed uncovering, peeling, and healing with you and my clients and my business. A lot of money mindset, traumas.

I think there's a lot to unpack there, especially for me my entire life, and I believe I've shared this with you. Anytime I went shopping, I would immediately dart to the clearance rack and what was what. The things I wanted to buy were not based on if I actually wanted them or not. They were based on the price.

Pride of the deal, baby.

Pride of the deal. Exactly. And I was known to be like a master clearance rack shopper. So my friends would come shopping with me because they knew I would find all the deals. And so really interesting to kind of unpackage that and process that and work through that, because that can show up in a lot of people's businesses, you know, and when I started cutting hair, that was my first journey in entrepreneurial adventures is becoming a barber. I was actually, check this out. I was selling pre. I was selling packages of haircuts, okay? I would not sell one haircut at a time. I don't think anyone's ever been to a Barber where they were sold a package of haircuts.

Nope. Nope.

So I had to overcome that really quick. And my journey in overcoming the clearance rack trauma was actually going into Harry Rosen, which is a men's shop here in Canada, and going in, and I told my wife, I said, listen, I'm going to need you to hold my hand through this process. You're going to have to sit with me through this. And, you know, when I do this, like, I don't know what's going to happen, because it's never been done before. And I went in there and I picked out the exact pair of shoes I wanted without looking at the price. So that was. And so I went in, bought the shoes I wanted, and then just went to the cash register and paid for them, and nobody died. And, in fact, it had no impact on me financially whatsoever. And I was able to, like, erase that trauma after that realization that, wow, and I still have those shoes. And they're shoes that I will cherish and take good care of because I take good care of all the things that I own. And it allowed me to realize that, hey, I do deserve these things because I'm grateful for them and I value them. So that was one of my traumas, you know, the clearance rack trauma.

Interesting. Interesting. Well, you know, I love how you deck out in Lululemon, which ain't cheap, but when you put it on, you're like, oh, so this is what I've been missing all my life. It's lovely. I'll tell you a quick story. With all due respect to my Persian father, who prides himself on a good deal, one day it was homecoming dance, junior year in high school. This is the third year of high school, very important dance. I'm bringing my girlfriend, and I go to the mall, and I'm gonna get myself a purple shirt and a silver tie. Cause that's how I dressed with homecoming dance in high school. And I come home and I show my dad, and it's a $40 shirt. And he loses it. And he says, what makes you think you deserve a $40 shirt? I've never spent $40 on a shirt before. And he just, like, lost his mind. And I thought in that moment, one, I did not get a good deal. This was not on sale. You know, he would have been much more excited and very proud of me if I would have got it at the thrift store. Two is, I can't. Apparently, I can't trust myself to make financial decisions. And so I started to believe about being thrifty. And not overspending, and I need to get someone else's permission or approval to make a purchase. And so those are the things I've slowly become aware of and start to reprogram. One of my favorites from Mike Dooley is when something's expensive, I exclaim, good thing I'm rich. Good thing I'm rich.

I like that. Thank you.

I liked your get rich quick strategy on day one yesterday, when the fastest way to get rich is to realize the riches that you have now. Love that insight.

Thank you.