The 7 SURPRISING Ways To Heal Trauma WITHOUT MEDICATION | Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk

I wanted to start with a quote from your iconic book the body keeps the score trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself oh that's that's a true statement what did you mean by that um where you get traumatized it's not the external event but your reaction to that external event is that you uh you cannot cope with it and then You're vulnerable to react to other things as if they're catastrophes so you may suddenly find yourself very scared or very angry or very aroused a very panicky or you can

shut down and so you really have no control over this intense emotional reactions that happen after a trauma yeah so in many ways people who are traumatized feel that their lives are out of control that life is I guess happening to them rather than them being in control of their lives yeah they they Keep reacting to stuff and things are disorganized and then oftentimes they start off blaming the people around them for having caused them to be so angry or Panic or something or another but after a while people start realizing oh it's really my

reactions that uh that make life so difficult and so how do I control these reactions becomes a major issue and oftentimes people learn to sort of shut themselves down and learn to not react But with that they they become very uh distant to themselves and the people around them I think what you said there was really quite poignant for me that we often think it's the people around us that are causing us to feel a certain way without that deep realization that actually we're generating those emotions we may not know why we're generating them but

ultimately it's coming from within us Isn't it yeah that the whole story had like because you know negotiating your ways to the world is complex um people will say things that may not be pleasant or they may not respect you as much as you'd like it to be but the core issue is how do I react to adverse issues and I cannot change everybody else I have to actually learn to manage my own arousal and my own reactivity yeah what's the difference between trauma and Stress the big difference is when stress is over it's over

and so when you sit for an exam you're working hard and you may not be able to sleep but once you take the exam you can go for a walk you can go do whatever you want to do and the the stress disappears and stress it's not bad for people because we really are programmed to deal with very adverse Circumstances that people can deal with a great deal of stress but the critical thing is when the stress is over and you've done whatever you need to do to deal with it then your body resets itself

you become calm and you stop being hyper focused or whatever but you get trauma test those reactions don't stop so trauma is almost like a severe stress response that never ends and that starts to Change our nervous system and how we view the world how we react to the world is that is that one way of putting it no it's not it's not as cognitive as view the world as really how we react to the world a reactivity uh changes and we may become too intensely uh aroused by minor issues so actually so Trump we're

talking from a neuro Neuroscience point of view we have some networks in the brain that help us to select what's important what's an Important is called the salience network and after you get traumatized the salience network makes you react to minor issues as if it's a catastrophe yeah how common is trauma would you say oh extremely common and there's of course all kind of radiations but things like being abused by your own parents uh being uh brutalized in your personal Relationships by somebody uh is extremely common and it is really ironic That when we first

defined PTSD we said this is an extraordinary event outside the usual range of human experience and we were completely wrong about it but because when we started to look at it we found out that at least one out of four women but out of five or six men sexual abuse experiences before the onset of adulthood for example that a very large number of women get raped a very large numbers of people are involved in Domestic violence situations so it's in fact it's turned out to be much more common than we ever thought it would be

I mean those statistics are really alarming when you put it like that I imagine uh Dr vandercoat that some people who were listening or watching right now will think wow is it that many people they will think well I know loads of women and loads of guys and I've never heard about this happening to them Which potentially speaks to secrecy shame the fact that many people have suffered this and are continuing to suffer because of the traumatic imprints but they're not talking about it right that is on the mark that uh when you after you

get try if you after you get salted or after you get Vaped you don't go around telling people about it there's always this issue of I I must be to blame for what happens or if you're in the domestic violence situation you Don't tell people oh my my boyfriend or my girlfriend just beat me up because that reflects badly on you and so shame and secrecy is very much part of trauma situations it's very striking when there's a public trauma uh my example in the culture I live in is 9 11 had a technical Trade

Center when there's an over trauma people tend to be very generous in terms of coming to people's helps but these private dramas of abuse Etc uh become hidden and people try to Go on with their lives but they keep reacting as if it's still going on yeah now when I think about trauma and traumatic events I think about the fact that different people being exposed to the same trauma will react in different ways some people will end up becoming heavily traumatized yeah whereas some people won't so what are the factors then that determine if someone

is going to have that chronic imprint of trauma or Whether they're going to be able to deal with it you know deal with that stress response and return back to Baseline do we know what those factors are well there certainly is an issue of temperament anybody who has more than one child knows that we all come into the world with very different reactivity and different responses so that is one factor but the other major factor is the uh is the social environment and who is There for you when something bad happens by and large if

you go through a terrible experience and you have a partner a spouse a parent a boss who says oh my God how can I help you I'll be there for you but in your social environment helps you to protect yourself and to feel safe again that makes a huge difference so the the principle for example after natural disasters or after accident since uh War situation the first thing you do is you Reconnect people with the people they love and care for because that is really what for human beings is the main source of comfort and

so as long as you have people around you who acknowledge the reality of what you went through and who are with you in a very deep way you probably will be okay yeah and that of course is what happens in like wartime situations when people are at War like what's happening in Ukraine right now uh is that people feel very close to each Other and that's sort of a natural biological thing almost that when we are under extreme stress we really become very dependent on each other and we form very close bonds and that's how

people survive but if the people who are your most intimate people are deserved to determine you lose that sense of connection and protection and then they oftentimes that is when people go over the edge yeah it's interesting it's always preparing for this conversation And I was reading in your work the importance of human connection at making us I guess generally more resilient but in many ways insulating us from the likelihood that a traumatic event is going to leave a chronic imprint inside yes it's it's insulin is a bit of an extreme word here okay it

helps it's uh it makes a significant contribution yeah but instead no it's true total a word but overall when your kid for example and you need to go through an operation Or uh terrible things happen to you and your parents are there for you and acknowledge it then that kid is likely to be okay yeah huh yeah really really interesting yeah I think one of my aims with having this conversation with you uh is to try and raise awareness of trauma certainly to my audience and as you've already touched on it's much more common than

we might think I certainly feel that the word is now much more commonly Known about spoken about potentially in settings that you may not regard as trauma like we can maybe talk about that but I do think this affects everyone on some level whether individually or judging from your statistics that you shared there's there's absolutely going to be someone in our life who we interact with who has been traumatized so I think it's imperative that we all have a deeper and more compassionate understanding Of what it is and therefore what we can do to help

people absolutely uh and it's true that people are beginning to it the concept gets inflated people's pin too much on trauma also in some ways at the same time uh a time is a very real issue let me give you an example I I live in a couch in the mountains of Western Massachusetts and they gave a big public talk and after the school principles of this area Invited me to meet with them and they say can you set up a clinic retirement as kids and I asked him so many how many of the kids

in our County see domestic violence witness people overdosing on drugs uh uh get beaten up at home and the School principles said about half of our kids and my response then was then you should not have a clinic for termites kids you should have a school system that helps traumatized because Which is at least about half of your population to really learn to regulate our bodies and to and to you need to have a trauma informed school and not read it as an individual problem because it's largely social problems and so once you understand trauma

you change the workplace you change your schools you change your hospitals and you really start paying more attention to the issue of individual safety and agency to help people to function yeah Now with the same trauma I think most of the public would understand intuitively if someone's been to war let's say we would say that's a traumatic experience yeah but what about something that I think pretty much anyone who's ever been in a relationship will experience something like this at some point when their partner says something to them that may well be on the surface

quite trivial but For some reason the other partner disproportionately reacts maybe they're being reminded of when a parent criticized them when they were five years old and when their partner says something it isn't about what the partner said it's about the feeling that evokes very similar to what you just mentioned that happened when you were a child can we say that is trauma as well well no I would say it's about an experience but I'm glad you borders are Of this example because you know about a third of all couples engage in violence violent interactions

so uh a lot of people carry a lot of trauma and in relationships it comes out and uh but once you get become intimate with somebody else you live with that triggered behavior and some things may be extremely upsetting for your partner who may become very angry or shut down in response to things that you have no idea but was so awful about it and at That point once you become a sensitive you can go like oh my partner is still being just being nasty mean and horrible my partner gets upset by something it has

very little to do with me and you can really just take a step back and say honey let's go for a walk before we address this or let's play some tennis together or let's uh sit in this for a moment or talk to somebody who else about what's going on here so you get the heat of the situation uh you Could you decrease the heat of what's going on but the relationships all the time of course yeah in fact in my experience at least I see this playing out in people's close personal relationships all the

time it's of course it could be about what's happening in their relationship but in my experience it's very rarely about what happened in that moment it's what that is making that other person feel um which is why I think your work is so Important both for people who have experienced trauma but also for people who want to help their loved ones who have been traumatized yeah yeah and indeed it comes out intimidating issues most people are able to to organize themselves pretty well under in neutral conditions have for example I have no idea that whether

you become violent in your personal relationships or not and you don't know about me because we don't have the sort of Relationship where we will get triggers about these very core issues so it's not until you really negotiate very complex issues about that happens in close relationships that these issues come out uh uh so it gets it gets contained within relationships and I keep urging my colleagues who do outcome studies to always not only ask people themselves but how do you react but as their spouses or their loved ones because they oftentimes can be say

more about People's emotional reactions yeah yeah so if we think about trauma we're saying it's very common it's more common than many of us realize as a medical doctor I'm incredibly fascinated stroke frustrated that trauma is not really spoken about that much to medical students because I think about particularly in general practice you know the sort of chronic conditions That often come in to primary care doctors you know anxiety depression addictions uh migraines fibromyalgia all you know a whole host of issues autoimmune problems actually that the scientific research seems to suggest that trauma could well

play a role in a significant number of these conditions absolutely and indeed um you know it's given a temperamental Issue that most people go into medicine want to have clear answers and clear paradigms and we go to medical school we learned about all these diseases and their diseases and we don't to start talking about social context would make it even more complicated so you don't learn about it and actually right now I was meeting with some old friends from my medical school days is that we oftentimes did Terrible Things to patients and did not really

understand How terrified they were of let's say white doctors and how they would be neglected neglecting their physical care because they were too terrified about doctors to actually bring it up with them and so uh yeah I'm very glad that some people in some medical schools and medical settings are beginning to pay attention to it because the title of my book the body keeps the score is not just a cute title actually that it affects your immune System it affects your stress responses and people who have long-term histories oftentimes have multiple medical problems you have

to do with their body they get stuck in uh fear fight and flight and so fibromyalgia is a very good example fibrology is pretty much related to trauma but it's so diffuse that like I am friends with very old men who used to the National Institute for Rheumatology in America and they say so Do you guys study fibromyalgia he says no how does a disease of crazy people yeah and here's the guy who's the top rheumatologist in America who just dismisses this very complex and very debilitating illness because the people who have it are just

too complex to deal with and difficult and resistance yeah and so get nice clean illnesses yeah Hey listen I I'm I want to just pause on this point because I think it's really important first of all I do think Medicine uh for all its benefits for all the conditions that we do manage to help with there's many conditions that we don't do a very good job with and I think we can be quite condescending as a profession sometimes to certain sufferers of certain conditions like fibromyalgia because they don't fit in a neat box that we

can do oh this is the problem this is the pill it's going to get better and so I think doctors often Feel quite frustrated and Powerless as well I don't think they're necessarily wanting to be derogatory I think they thought they were going to learn what they needed to treat these patients and then they're faced with people who keep coming back and they don't know what to do so I think that's one point I wanted to raise absolutely you also mentioned something that I think we should just explore a little bit you said fibromyalgia It's

a condition uh that that is I don't know if you said often or always related to trauma now I think we let's just clarify what we mean there because there will be people listening with fibromyalgia this may be the very first time they've heard it so can we just just broaden that out a little bit so that they can understand what you mean by that yeah but you study fragment and you do a Trauma history on people you usually find a severe trauma history usually within the attachment system often not feeling safe and what happens

I think is very much what happens with all of us to some degree when we come to be scared we become uptight and we start physically becoming defensive and hold on to ourselves and that uptightness and trying to control things made them uh eventually get expressed as fibromyalgia but you become A very anxious and currently upset person and uh the Hardesty for medicine is there is no clear answer it's not like oh let's let me give you a pill and you feel better you really need to go through a whole process uh that might very

well involve body oriented therapy maybe massages maybe really working with bodily reactions which of course in medicine we never do uh that that really need much more intervention that we are capable of Or that our systems allow us to intervene with I know quite a few people who have resources in America with fibromyalgia who find the right people to work with who know about bodily reactions but they're very hard to find yeah I would agree with I've seen many patients with conditions like fibromyalgia and and I found what can be effective is when you take

this multi-pronged approach you do lots of different things it's not just one thing Different patients will need different things different things are going to appeal to them but it's in my experience at least Dr vandika can I appreciate you've got vast amount of experience in this area I have found that you just have to experiment and you need to try different things but I also would say you know I would share with you that if I think back to a lot of my patients who I've seen in the past with fibromyalgia when you explore deep

enough yes it's It's Not Unusual to find some history of trauma there as well I would definitely agree with that see and then you say the right thing here you need to be patient to try multiple times but probably NHS and our insurance system doesn't give us the time to really explore these things because I think all Physicians really are on a video of pressure to alleviate get rid of their patients and move on and so these patients are time consuming And require a team approach and our assistance may not be prepared for that yeah

and then the next thing happens we become frustrated and then we start being mean and nasty to the people who suffer for only aggravating their condition and so I I think the places start for us as caregivers is if we get particularly mad at a particular person or feel frustrated by a particular person to really Mark that and say oh this person is really driving me mad Let's see what's going on with the patient that the patient makes me feel so helpless so the natural sing then is to become somewhat abusive with people like that

yeah because they make us feel bad and they take our time and they they don't follow the rules and so when when you have people like that it's really important for us to have our capacity to step back with our colleagues and to really reassess what's going on here yeah is it so I think our own reactions Are a very important Bell weather of whether we're dealing with a traumatized person and I think as Physicians we have an amazing capacity to help recreate trauma for our patients wow they hear that all the time for people

who go to Medical Systems you know I know people who have breast cancer and heart disease and they tell me about the exquisitely good care they got in our systems and how great the nurses were and how great the doctors Were and then you deal with people with trauma histories who have served these unknown issues and they always tell us tell me how terrible they get treated by the system and I go yep that's what happens yeah that's very very profound because what we're saying is that us the medical system Healthcare professionals as you just

put it on re-traumatizing patients who are already traumatized we may not realize we're doing it but Because of the lack of understanding the lack of knowledge the lack of time those patients who were already struggling these are a lot of the time the ones who they feel lost they don't know where to go they're seeking out books or new information just to see what can I do I don't want to stay like this forever and it's not just you know the conditions you mentioned even a lot of people with autoimmune illness you know I've I've

Found that they also respond very well to this kind of multi-pronged approach um I really want to get to a central uh philosophy of your work that I take from it at least which is about the body keeping the score that's the title of your book but this idea that the body keeps a record of what has happened and that one of the goals of therapy is to help people feel safe in their bodies yeah now I think a lot of People may not understand what that means what do you mean when you say we

need to feel safe in our bodies well you know I think Darwin already back in 1872 wrote a beautiful book in which she talks about trauma actually he calls it getting stuck in fight or flight or stuck in avoidance and defensive reactions which is not a bad definition and he talks about how these experiences are expressed in the course of the vagus Nerve he Darwin goes to pneumogastric nerve back then and that you experience your emotions as God wrenching and heartbreaking physical Sensations and I think we all are familiar with that have been something hurtful

happens we do feel it in our chest and we feel it in our bodies and so our bodies respond to these things and when you get traumatized that feeling of uh of a gut venge and heartbreak really stays with you and there's becomes you become An intolerable person to yourself [Music] ring a bell with you because I you know I I make it a point whenever I travel and I go to a place where I don't know the language I always ask in your language to have a do they have a word for gutwench and

every language has a word for it yeah it's a universal response that you experience deep disappointment and betrayal and fear in your body yeah I think people have experienced that if anyone's ever been through heartbreak before they which we all have which yeah pretty much everyone has been through on some level you feel it yeah in your hearts like you literally can feel it the pain the discomfort there so I think when we start thinking about it it's like oh yeah that's in our body like Something's Happened up here in our mind we've perceived it

a certain Way and then our body is expressing a symptom of that so I think this is a really good point to talk about some of these practical things that people can start doing to help themselves I mean frankly the things you're talking about are helpful for anyone but can we start with yoga right I know yoga is something you talk about as a really fantastic way for many people to start feeling that safety within their bodies how did you come Across yoga and why do you think it's so effective for so many people well

you know these things are usually an issue of accidents that you happen to meet somebody who does yoga and who says come and do yoga class with me and then you do that and then you feel that your body feels calmer and your mind is more focused afterwards you see all this thing so actually so I went to Nationals with mental health and got the money to study yoga as a way of calming that body Down uh but now people say oh yoga is treatment of choice I don't know maybe some other people Qigong may

be better or Tai Chi or some other musical practice has but for me going to yoga was really a way of exploring to what degree people can change their relationship to their bodily Sensations and yoga turned out to be very good for that but certainly It's Not The Only Way Studios still love to do someday is see how Tango dancing works for time Theoretically that would make a lot of sense as being a really good time achieve it actually and so so as and what I see all the time is that the people who are

in my life who are traumatized they go and start exploring different things that help them uh and uh some people find it let's say acupuncture is very helpful other people say it doesn't do his thing for me and so we don't know precisely what is right For whom but it's very important for us to have an open mind about uh and you need to have an open mind for yourself also to really see what can help me to feel alive in the body that they live in to make sure you're taking action after watching this

video I have created a free breathing guide that's going to help you reduce stress calm your minds and boost your energy in this guide I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work Immediately even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference to receive your free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below so is that the commonality then you mentioned a few things here let's say yoga and Qigong for example um you're saying that for many people who are traumatized they

don't feel safe in their body they don't experience everything that's Happening within their body they shut down in certain ways and you're saying one method that may work for some people is through something like yoga or Qigong or martial arts for example um what is it that's going on you're starting to connect to your body you're starting to connect to your breath and how do you put it what do you think may be happening there that's helpful what happens there is that you are stuck in the stress response syndrome and for Example when you start

breathing more slowly and more deeply and you change your breath you change your heart rate variability which is a way of measuring how the heart and the central nervous system relate to each other and then you get a sense of relief and openness once you are able to do things that calm that system down and so initially having somebody work with your breath you go like I don't want to do that and and then if you learn to breathe much more Slowly and much more deeply you get a sense of oh I feel calm I

feel clear and what you do actually at this point is you open up some Pathways in the brain between your parts of your frontal lobe and your insula apart your brain that's connected with your bodily Sensations and you open up new Pathways of self-experience basically yeah it's so fascinating I know when I was reading the section on treatment in your book um after you wrote about what trauma is He said when you're starting to treat trauma there was one part we spoke about this these four things that need to happen one you need to find

a way to become common focused two you need to be able to maintain that calm in response to things and events and people that trigger you to the Past then the third thing I think was being present you had to find a way of being present in your life and with the people in your life and then the fourth thing There was you have to not keep secrets from yourself now the reason I bring that up there thank you that's I had forgot there's four approaches yeah it was it was it was really beautiful the

way you wrote about it in your book and I think what you just said about yoga there speaks to the first one there which is number one you've got to find a way to become calm and focused yeah so for people who are traumatized if you're stuck you won't go into certain parts of Their body who don't want to do certain poses or positions because it doesn't feel good it sounds as though what you're saying is that when people can find some sort of practice that helps them feel safe in their body whether it's yoga

or something else that it's gonna start to help them experience what does calm feel like because I guess many of these people don't actually know what it feels like to be calm even for just 10 or 15 Minutes right I think that people mainly learn is how to cut off their feelings I said some many people learn to not feel and of course Psychiatry is very good at it also because like things like Prozac makes you feel less yeah and so you get less overwhelmed by your feelings but by blunting your feelings you also lose

your capacity for pleasure and enjoyment yeah so so by a very common adaptation to trauma is to just Shut yourself down and becoming that uptight person that manages somehow to make it through your day but uh it's in order to recover you need to open up these Pathways of self-experience and that you need somebody who really gently helps you to to reconnect with yourself I think you published a study did you know on yoga and PTSD from Recollections three of them yeah yeah what do they show they showed us uh if you do yoga for

Eight or twelve weeks that your PTSD scores go down we did some newer Imaging and we see some new linkages in the brain coming online particularly having to do with areas that brain have to do with uh self-experience self sensory experience and what the study showed is that when people do yoga they are more open uh to being with other people less frightened of being with other people and less afraid of themselves most of all yeah wow very very powerful it's Interesting but I want to say it's really then people say oh yoga is the

answer no yoga was a paradigm that helped us to understand how engaging with your body in a particular way is helpful but it's not the final word on the story yeah I love that I mean that is speaking to my heart you're really touching on I think one of the big problems I see around and today in terms of thinking about how we treat people with chronic health Problems whether it's trauma or anything else it's like what does that narrow reductionist study show up oh great oh it works and that's okay great that means that's

the treatment for every patient and it's like if you see real people with real problems you realize that actually there's no one-size-fits all like for someone that might be brilliant but for someone else it may be it isn't the right thing for them but I feel like I I say this a few times on The podcast I think science is important it's very important but I think we make inferences and we draw conclusions that we then think are applicable to all whereas as you say that just simply showed us that this Paradigm here therapies like

yoga which help us experience our bodies more have the potential to help so but you know in my travels I meet a lot of people who claim that they do amazing things by doing Let's say Equine Therapy working with horses and I say interesting and so I collect these people and on my website the term Research Foundation website we had these people talk about their systems sometimes and then we do need the evidence so that the next step is always for me to say so let's help you to do a study where we can really

see which is effective for it who it's not effective for I think evidence is terrible importance but but we've seen Our field oftentimes that we close the Barn Door prematurely yeah we find it if project Works some of the time for some people say oh cheap project is treating of choice no sometimes project works for particular people let's see for whom it's very person for whom it doesn't work yeah I love that I think it's a really nice way of putting it um moving on to another therapy or I know when I've heard you speak

before you talk about theater and movement you Put those two things together and I I first of all I find it interesting that you put theater and movement together when you're when certainly what I heard you talk about it but can you elaborate a little bit on what's so powerful about theater and movement and how it can help people with trauma yeah I'd like to tease this apart a little bit so the movement issue is terribly important and that's not really part of how we think in psychologist Psychiatry or even Medicine but basically uh we

express our aliveness through the body the movements we make and when you work with children for example they explore their movement and their relationship of how their body affects the growth around them and how the world of also affects their body and many hypothesis studies over the past 150 years show the term oftentimes is related to physical immobility when you get attacked by somebody it's Very important to activate your fight flight system and to fight and to punch back but at the core of much trauma is people being unable to do something to change the

situation and so people go into a state of where the agency no longer matters and so and some very good studies in Neuroscience also you're the doors but done some of that as long as you can move in response to a really uh challenging situation and do something You're going to be all right headed at the core of but make something dramatic is oftentimes an inability to do anything and many times there's people as you again probably know as a physician yourself tend to become very passive and tend to sort of ask us for pills

and stuff to make their Fitness go away but it becomes very hard for them to do things and to activate their bodies and so movements and doing something that makes your body feel Alive and capable is a very important part of being alive yeah I've heard you speak previously about hurricanes that have happened you know big natural disasters and you were speaking about the fact that yes a lot of people are affected you know not big natural disaster has happened but the fact that people are coming together they're helping others they're moving you were Saying

that in many ways that helps them to process the trauma can you speak to that a little bit at all please yeah exactly exactly that we are you know we are an extremely resilient species you know we are everywhere we have we're almost as good as cockroaches like human beings are very stressful it's just and so we can adapt ourselves as long as we're doing things with other people and making things happen and we were we're building very homophobic we're people Who do things and as long as you can do something you get a sense

of yep that hurricane sucked and I really miss my house and it's very terrible but my friends came over and helped me to build a house and wasn't it great that I was able to put a roof over my head again and help people to get supplies Etc so doing something to to uh to overcome your helplessness is terribly important actually And and of course the medicine tends to be very passive you have people go to a doctor and they have to be compliant with their doctor's orders I don't like the word compliance very much

because people really need to own what they do and experience what they do yeah a few years ago I wrote a book on stress and when I um talking about stress to companies or to people or groups of people one of the things I often say is that You've got to understand the stress response on one level is preparing your body to move right it's you know the Predator The Lion The Tiger whatever it it was you're getting ready to move but if it's your if you're sat on your bottom and it's your email inbox

that's stressing you out under your workload and the fact that you're on Zooms for 10 hours in a row Your body is is getting primed and ready to move but because you're not moving that it almost gets stuck and you're not processing the stress energy that's built up yeah do you think that's accurate well I I think it's accurate I think it's a very very important issue in our current culture yeah we become more and more virtual living a virtual reality secluding you and me I really enjoy talking with you but if you sat in

the same room together we would actually Have a relationship afterwards yeah we don't really form this sort of bond the ordinary form with other people by interacting the way we do and I I think it's a major challenge for us to uh to really look at at the impact of that and I think it's going to have a major negative impact on us as human beings to become to sitting on our butt and living through a virtual reality and virtual yeah with people it's it's a very big issue I don't think we know very much

About it because it's relatively decent phenomenon but it's something worthy of a great deal of attention yeah it's really interesting as I think about your writings about trauma about movements like yoga for example that can help us feel safe in our bodies and then what we're just talking about the stress response and actually without Movement we can't really discharge that energy it's very hard and I'll be thinking about this for a Few months now it's very hard to not draw the conclusion that movement and exercise whatever you want to call it for many years has

been talked about through the lens of physical health and I think we're now becoming more and more aware that yes movement is very important for our mental health as well but I but actually think it goes beyond that it feels to me as though if we're Not moving our bodies in a whole variety of different ways we can't actually Express and tap into our full potential as a human being right it's that important to who we are I believe yeah I I miss you on that that's something uh that we get that sense of pleasure

from being engaged with our body the pleasure is very somatic response and I think people don't talk much about Pleasure but I think pleasure is a very important part of life you need to have a sense of having a get together with a friend oh like you did this weekend numbers and you have arguments about stuff and you move together and then you get a feeling of wow life is worth living because I really made that connection with that person I distance together with that person and the I I'm very concerned about the virtual world

that we're moving into here in that Regard let's talk about theater yeah I'm good because we've mentioned you know yoga then movements in terms of really practical things that people can take away from this conversation go oh I wonder if this will work for me I wonder if this is useful for someone in my life theater and Shakespeare that I've heard you talk about is fascinating so tell tell us what's going on there what what's you know what how can this be Helpful well you know let's start and we've development of the person hadn't actually

just spent some times with grandkids and they're always playing different roles and now I'm going to be an astronaut and they try it out and now I'm going to be a hunter and try it out and that's how human beings learn uh what it feels like in your body to have different roles but struck me with traumatized people is at some point that Identity becomes an identity of defeat I used to be a warrior but now I cannot move anymore I used to be a sexy woman but now I'm frozen in my body uh or

a sexy man for that matter and and so Thomas of fixates people in a particular role in life of which has to do with helplessness and uh when I look at my kids and then we have this wonderful theater in the area where I live called Shakespeare in the court where uh where they teach juvenile delinquents were all Of terrible trauma histories to six people play Shakespeare roles and they get to feel oh this is what it feels like to be a king this is what it feels like to feel powerful this but it feels

like to be a murderer and then you get to on a visceral level uh experience the very different multi-modality of ourselves and we get to really feel oh I can be powerful and that's what it feels like but you cannot be powerful until you actually hold it In your body and so playing Macbeth gives you a feeling oh that's what it feels like to be a boring and nasty person and then and you can play these different roles and theater helps you to really viscerally experience other ways of moving in the world and you then

you ordinary habitual responses is it right there where you live that juvenile delinquents when they're up before the judge they're often given the choice but between you know jail time or detention Center time and learning Shakespeare that's what's actually happening to act in a play it is doing you learn sword fighting and that's a very very complex thing to do is to learn to all that sort of but when you do that you feel like wow I can defend myself I could really be a powerful person so you need to have a visceral experience of

power and control that has been taken away from you by your trauma are we Seeing that those kids then are improving I mean can you tell us any stories what's happened that the to these kids because I think it sounds I can believe that rationally it's you know I think we we all know maybe we don't think about it but if you stand up tall with your chest puffed out exactly you feel completely differently you feel powerful and strong and if you roll your shoulders and compress your ribs you yeah you feel a bit insecure

and you Know I think we can get that so it totally makes sense to me that as you said a lot of people who are traumatized get stuck they get stuck in I guess certain body positions as well right yes absolutely yeah body positions of of defensiveness of collapse uh and and the way you hold your body and you put it very well because the research shows social exactly what you say is that when you put yourself in a position of let's Say there's a body position uh that denotes Joy every culture in the world

you raise your hands you open your mouth you open your rib cage and when you freeze people in a bodily position of joy and you say to them now I want you to be angry they say I can't be angry as long as it stands like this because in order to be angry and there's steps like that yeah and so it's really important to to honor that piece of knowledge by helping people to experience different States of being by the way you hold your body so on that then what happens like you know I love

the idea that around the world uh people you know juveniles who have committed crimes who've been traumatized are offered this or other modalities as a way of rehabilitating themselves experiencing different feelings and Sensations like how did it get to the point where the judge is now saying this I mean was were trials done was there you know Growing evidence space what happened to make that a reality because that sounds really quite profound these things always start with individuals who are charismatic who convince some other people to work with them on something yeah so we always

this always starts before there's evidence and I see this all over the world that wherever I've gone I see amazing programs done by charismatic and individuals but then when the Charismatic individual dies it becomes old it does something else the programs die yeah and so but I'm very much in favor of and trying to promote is when you have this good method then we do the research and we make it evidence-based but for example I've never been able to get money to do a Tango study I've never gotten the money to uh see what Coral

singing does for people but I have a friend in Russia we studied choral singing yeah and showed was a change how It changes the brain but as long as you're Frozen in that feed that disorder the singing and theater and yoga and all kinds of other things may not cross your mind as being effective say oh there's there's woozy and so I'm very much in favor of people actually studying a whole bunch of different things and see how effective it is yeah it's it's it's kind of what you're saying before about you may hear someone

saying that Equine Therapy is working for this group of Patients so you're going okay that's interesting so you start off open-minded you believe people and go okay that's interesting let's now study that let's let's and I think that's what the scientific method should be really good for is like we we listen to humans and real people who are experiencing things and a set of poo pooing it going isn't that interesting why don't we try and get some real scientific validity behind that so we can expand it out I think That's a really beautiful approach to

take that would help so many more people it's a paradigm issue and so right now if you're a psychiatrist or an other medical person and you start talking about theater your colleagues will go he's gone off to deep end it's amazing how many people how many times my colleague who said oh he used to be quite good but now he's studying in yoga so he's gone off the deep end uh oh he used to be good but he's now Studying EMDR his crazy masturbate your familiar oh he has the gun off the d-pad I've been

accused of having gone off the d-pad so many times by academic career and so most people are most academicians want to be respectable and get money for their research and if you go this route it's not very likely that you'll get lots of financial support on an individual level how did you cope with that kind of criticism because a lot of things you're talking About are certainly things that are not conventionally taught to Western Medical Doctors but how was it for you as a respected academic clinician when you started getting this pushback well I used

to be a respected academic clinicians but I studied drugs I did the first started some Prozac and Zoloft and at that time my star was high but once you started doing other things uh but you know That's a character logical issue I'm just a guy who is curious who likes to explore new things and so respectability was not my most important thing in my life and so characters Destiny and so I'm a person who likes to explore many different things I'm a person who speaks several different languages and so I can think in different paradigms

and so that made it possible for me to look at different options uh and that's just the question Of character Yeah Yeah you mentioned EMDR EMDR of course is another therapy that I've heard you speak about that can be helpful for certain people with with trauma uh what is the MDR and can you explain a little bit about your experience with it you know when did you find out about it what can it be helpful for how do people do it they do it themselves with a therapist maybe speak to EMDR a little bit please

look EMDR is indeed a very strange Treatment where you call ask people to call up the stuff that really bothers them but not to talk about it to just say remember what you saw remember we just felt in your body remember what he was thinking back then so become aware of that and then you ask people so stay there and you ask people to you move your fingers in front of people's eyes from side to side and you say just follow my fingers now if there was a crazy treatment that's a crazy treatment So my

and everybody else first reaction is like that's bizarre don't listen to that stuff and then some of my own patience where it works with start coming back and says I did an EMDR and I see profound transfer informations and some of my colleagues are doing it and they showed me their video tapes and I go that's a dramatic change and so I see my patients I see the videos of my colleagues I say this clearly changes the brain in very profound ways and Being sort of a neuroscientist uh oriented person I was became fascinated by

studying what does eye movements do to the brain it took us 15 years to get enough money together to begin to do that study but it started off by doing a simple study comparing EMDR with Prozac and it turned out that these eye movements caused a very significant change in most people and so that was the first time I studied a method that didn't fit in with the Western Paradigm And the Western Paradigm is you yak or you take a drug and now you did something else and then from EMDR I learned that things that

don't fit it's in our cultural Paradigm may work and certain some other people say tapping acupressure points may be helpful and they say what's the evidence for that there is no evidence for that and maybe study it and it turns indeed turns out that tapping these Chinese acupuncture Parts indeed seems to have An effect on people's physiological arousal and so uh but EMDR was particularly important here for me both because it was my first foray into something that didn't fit for the Paradigm and our results were extraordinary that we had a sixty percent cure rate

with EMDR in a trauma sample now nobody's ever received 60 cure let all the symptoms were gone and I think because it's so strange it doesn't fit with our paradigms uh many People tend to still poo poo it even though the evidence how well it works is very clear but so uh so e and Dr helps you to actually neutralize the memory her part of being traumatized is that certain remembrances certain events freak you out to make you obsess and but EMDR specifically does is there's particular triggers to passive as get get calmed down and

you no longer get freaked out By the memory of particular Thomas uh and then people have a message and then they say oh let's use it for children who are chronically uh abused and orphanages I said no that's probably not the right treatment for them so so it's important to also know for whom it works and for whom it doesn't work and what we showed in our research is that people with long-standing histories of child abuse it didn't work all that well for them at least in the way that we did It yeah you know

in your book which I think was it published in 2014 for the first time yeah it first came out 2014 yeah 2014 right and I've got the page up in front of me while we don't yet know precisely how EMDR works the same is true of Prozac sorry since interrupt if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification Bell and now back to the Conversation and it's it's a very powerful paragraph that at the end of chapter 15

um whereas that was you know what eight nine years ago now when you wrote that so certainly when it was published you probably read it 10 11 years ago that section um do we now know how EMDR Works compared to when you actually wrote that book yes we so my colleague Serene herzarian and ruslanias and I did a Study uh where we put people on the scanner and made and you saw that it activates certain circuitry in the brain and the circuitry in the brain that particularly activates a Sicilians Network the part of your brain

that determines whether something is relevant or not and so but if you see with the people who lie in the scanner is that their their brain organizes the experience in a different way by creating new circuits of experience Yeah and so it is not about understanding or Insight you just sort of tweaked the brain circuits in a way that helps you to not be overwhelmed by it you don't get raises but it becomes a memory yeah so so a traumatic experience is not a memory because the moment you go there you relive it and that's

the nature of traumatic stuff and if if you have been raped you get really upset thinking or talking about your Vape but it is not a memory of something Belonging to the Past it's a you're currently right now recreate the physiological state of that past event and what EMDR and to some degree yoga and neurofeedback and our psychedelics all seem to help us to do is to go there and to reorganize our perception of it and and become aware on a very deep level of this happened to me back then it's not happening right now

and so are some circuits in the brains change that allow you to put it in the Past to say yes it happens it's awful but I'm not feeling it today yeah yeah very clear very clear thank you um would you say EMDR should always be done with a therapist and the follow-up from that is there's a lot of what are called EMDR music tracks available now on streaming platforms which I know people like listening to I don't know if you have any experience of the music what it might do for people is that something quite

different from What you're talking about in terms of seeing a seeing an EMDR therapist to take you through that process I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit please interesting actually I cannot speak about it because I've not studied that and see I'm so aware that time is about shame and about being disconnected for other people that I actually love the work of joining somebody and yeah helping me to deal With it in the context of a relationship with somebody with whom you no longer are ashamed about what happened to you so

I'm not really a fan of mechanical devices because a lot of recovery from trauma is to re-establish Your Capacity connected to people around you and uh but that's that's my particular Prejudice in a way yeah I probably would have that slight bias as well in general and I do want to get to psychedelics and neurofeedback that you just mentioned But just to sort of close that Loop a little bit yoga which we started off talking about when we're talking about the the sort of things that people can do to heal from trauma I guess you

would encourage people to do yoga as part of a group rather than by yourself on YouTube right yeah absolutely I'm really impressed I'm not a natural yoga person but if I'm a Group of other people who are much more limber than I am and do much better job now I sort of absorb their limberedness and I enjoy doing it with other people um I think that's true for many things a psychedelic therapies also these days we sometimes do psychedelics in groups and I like it a lot because you experience this I have one particular experience

and you have a different experience and then you really get to see that I'm part of mankind and I'm holding something That we all hold in different ways and I think the feeling of emotional isolation or the word I used in the previous book a lot not in this one is the the feeling of being God forsaken is very important part of trauma so I I think doing it in groups of other people uh as a dimension of humanity to the whole thing yeah and just before we get to neurofeedback just on that point talking

about the Western Medical system and how it's set up It's very individualistic you know we see a patient in isolation we say this is what's wrong with you and this is what you need to do and I touched on this in my last book a little bit that maybe we've got the whole setup wrong for certain people because there's a movement in the UK called social prescribing that's growing massively where people are healing in communities they're they're going to let's say cooking classes or reading things or you Know there's something called park run in the

UK where people go every every Saturday morning in all the villages and towns you know maybe 50 100 300 people get together and they complete 5K together some walk some run but it's a very Community orientated environment people are healing in communities not in isolation which I think really speaks to what you're talking about we're all watching the British baking show around the world Of people cooking together making food together and it's interesting this point so when Tom was sort of reinvented or rediscovered I'd like to say Boston versus trial mode Vienna wants what's the

music and we had a group of people in Boston like do the Herman you know new burger and turkey another people who all were into deeply into town where you talk to each other and our initial treatment was always group treatments because we didn't know What it had been like to be raped or to be Marine in Iraq or Afghanistan but they did and so we founded getting people in a group who really have been there decreased people's shame and also gave a lot of recognition to people it is actually quite horrifying to me how

group treatment has sort of become a very tertiary treatment of course in the addiction community group treatment and self-step programs is still Central and the sense of community of people who Have had similar experiences is terribly important and and I'm actually sort of pushing people to go back to do much for group treatment where if let's say you have been molested and you deal with it by cutting yourself it's shameful to cut yourself but when you're a group of other people say no but I get really upset I cut myself or I I put a

burning cigarette out of my arm uh you don't go other people don't got it you should never do that you're gonna Like oh yeah I cope it's in the same way and I also feel very embarrassed about it but what does it do for you it actually helps you when I do that yeah so you meet you have the potential of meeting people who are in much more understanding about what you go through then somebody who's gone to medical school yeah no 100 and they can all help each other of course probably in a much

more powerful way than a doctor or Healthcare professional who's never Experienced that um neurofeedback what is it I know you think it's or you've shown that it's a it's a powerful therapy potentially for people suffering from trauma can you explain what exactly it is does it help us rewire our brain who is it helpful for all kinds of things like this so neurofeedback is a method that you can put electrodes on people's skulls and our technology is good enough right now that despite the fact that the skull is Quite sick you can actually Harvest these

electrical brain wastes that are on the Nissan skull and by putting a number of electrodes on people's heads you can project the brain's electrical if the activity on a computer screen and you can sort of see what part of the brain is talking to what part of the brain and what is most active and what's most inactive and we have pretty good ideas about uh what sort of electrical activity helps with optimal functioning And oftentimes when we do this what's called quantitative eegs on termites people my reaction is oh my God how can you have

a life for yourself because your brain is really messed I don't say it to people but you see some very serious disconnection between different parts of the brain which people think can and sometimes compensate for but by having a map of debate you can say okay we can now play computer games with your own brain waves where whenever you bring Creates a sort of brain connections that are good for you uh a little color changes or some music changes so you you play back feedback to people's brains of that's good and if you don't make

the right brain forms and certain forms that uh make you angry or hyper aroused you don't get feedback so you can sort of subtly give people a little sensory feedback through sounds and images of yeah make more of that so you can train the brain to make different connections It's not the trauma treatment it's a brain organization treatment I'm astounded that this is not done more widely and more often because it makes a lot of sense uh from a scientific point of view is that you can actually uh visualize these things and you can actually

sort of nudge the brain to organize itself in a different way and so what's been stunning to me is that uh there's a guy in London uh John kruzelier who has done Good research uh some people in Belgium uh some people in Germany and Ruth lanius and we are among the few people actually have studied this brain computer interface methods and I think it's enormously powerful and uh we have done studies with kids who are just completely off the wall unable to go to school unable to to learn and we can calm their brains down

so they can actually focus and not get out of control so this can be for many of us With depression anxiety chronic stress kids who feel out of control it's just a way of harmonizing yourself a little bit with your brain right yeah right and I you know my dream is that every school in America has a newer feedback system and a neurof capacity so when kids come to school and they're just off the wall and terrified and angry because they have all these experiences they have just had at home that you can help These

kids to calm their brains down so they can actually learn and get along with other kids yeah I wish every Medical Clinic had neurofeedback it is such a nice simple way of just helping you to smooth out your brain functioning yeah I like you I'm a fan of people healing with others in real life you know I get it there's a lot of Great Tech out there to help but I think we've got to be not too reliant on that web hustle make sure we're Experiencing things in the real world but there are some apps

I think now where they help with things like coherent breathing and you can you know they can help you harmonize various parts of your body and your brain through different methods so I think technology is going to potentially revolutionize this have you experienced that as well have you come across apps like that oh absolutely and I know those apps and actually have those apps on my Phone well I'm also impressed with is how I don't use them even though I know how helpful they could be and sometimes I do get a little unfocused or whatever

and I know and but I'm impressed with is that if a feds of my Cosby are you going to come to this class or you're going to go for a walk then that's rewarding enough for me and I will actually do it but apps in and of Themselves most people just don't love their absence to say let me just as I said it's an interpersonal process it's still very rewarding yeah so so doing it in a group of people who say where were you last night when we did this uh uh that's who we are

assuming yeah do you know what's really interesting Dr Savannah Cook is if I this is not relating to trauma at all but a few months ago I spoke to this chap called Elliot kipchogee on this podcast the Kenyan marathon runner the only person to have ever run under two hours in a marathon he's considered the fastest marathon runner of all time and you know it was a beautiful conversation with him about all kinds of things and one thing he said well many things but one particular thing really struck me he never trains alone ever he

never goes to a run alone whereas in the west we often run alone Where you know we do it to de-stress or unwind by ourselves he goes no no we always run together and he says if you're you know if you're not showing up or your motivation's not there for a few days one of your buddies is going to be on the phone and say hey Elliot where are you what's going on is everything okay and it really struck me how much culture plays a role here I thought wow this incredible athlete the fastest marathon

runner on the planet never goes For a run by himself it's always in a group yeah and I think that's who we are you know uh I I just uh uh was lucky enough to go on a to the Serengeti Plains I got to see all these animals yeah they're all living groups you know mammals live in groups human beings live in groups yeah that's how we Define ourselves as our identities our reward system and you know there may be people out there who just love their little apps but they Don't know many of them

they're absolutely quite wonderful yeah but I guess you wouldn't know them because they're at home on their apps so you wouldn't be interacting with them potentially but I I think it's a very very important point we must just briefly touch on psychedelics you mentioned group psychedelic therapy and of course psychedelics are getting a lot of media they're all the rage um they're still illegal of course in Many countries I have to say that um where do you stand at the moment on the use of certain psychedelics as a treatment or as part of the treatment

for people suffering from trauma or other mental health issues you know what where does what does the evidence say at the moment and who do you think it might be useful for and who should be cautious would you say so luckily this is not just an issue of opinion my lab actually does psychedelic studies and I'm really Very happy to be part of this burgundy thing and we do be a part of the studies and uh one of my papers will come out of it specifically about what circular can do all the basic research and

uh so uh I have a license to give MDMA actually to people and part of a larger study that's almost done uh and so I have good data and the only psychedelic like substance that's legal in America right now is ketamine and I'm involved in Training people in ketamine assistance Psychotherapy oh so I know ketamine quite well I know MDMA quite well I don't know psilocybin from a research or personal experience well but we all talk to each other and I see the beautiful work that's been done started at Johns Hopkins um and let me

give you an example A friend of mine who is a very major person in trauma field and the person who we are deeply Love has developed severe cancer eight years ago and he was angry bitter as one could would be but he had the diagnosis he joined the psilocybin study at uh at Hopkins and I visit him and he said he started to cry he said it's an amazing experience my friend doesn't have a mystical bone in his body and he said I was blasted in the universe and I had these visions of little villages

with smoke coming out of these chimneys and all my ancestors were There and they were waving at me and said hi yes could you join us we oh we're all here and we all die and it's part of life and my friend had this mystical experience and he accepted his death except he's still alive eight years after we all thought he was going to die which really makes me very intrigued we really should study whether the psychedelics changed the immune system to actually change some of the bodily Stuff this is an interesting issue but if

it happened to my friend Frank was a very important inspiration for me to look at how psychedelics can be helpful and one of the reasons I got intrigued with it is of course I'm from the 60s generation I I had good experience with the LSD when I was a young man and then it became all straight and have done it for a long time but I do remember from taking LSD back then is how it opens up your minds and Makes you aware of that the reality that I've constructed for myself is just a very

small part of the overall reality that surround us and you become really aware of that your reality is your own personal Construction and by having this academic experience you see that the universe is much larger than the universe that you have that you actually live in and that's actually what we see when people do psychedelic therapy is their mind becomes open to New possibility to become more curious about exploring new things I have a number of friends who are very famous scientists and I've asked all of them they're all about my age I said did

you take our thing in college also I said yeah of course I did I said how do you think it affected your career and every one of them says you know I think I became a good scientist because the psychedelics made me realize that the reality that we have defined for Ourselves is just a small part of butter is and it's making a more open-minded and curious person yeah and that's very much of a PC in our secondary treatments and people oftentimes go into their Obama and it's no picnic it's actually can be very painful

and people may lie there and cry and say oh my God oh my God but it opens them up to actually see themselves and to visit themselves and what our research shows uh will come out before too long is that the secretaries Lead to a dramatic increase in self-compassion other people really feel for themselves and have a feeling of compassion for themselves it also makes people much more aware of who they are it also makes people more aware of how who other people are so they're much better able to negotiate interpersonal conflicts and interpersonal relationships

because they really get exposed through a larger reality than they ordinarily are locked Into so for a person who has suffered trauma when they go through a psychedelic experience let's say in your lab or in your studies you know it opens up their minds they see what that the story they've constructed is is just one story there are multiple other stories they could construct around Dimensions also that visiting your trauma I guess you're always stuck because your body keeps a square and the Moment you go back there you feel that agitation you feel that Terror

and you want to get away from it as fast as you can and there's something about both suicide and ketamine and MDMA because we have seen it in all three the large people to go to these dark places and to not get engulfed by it to not get hijacked by it and to plunge into a dramatic state but to also get a few different dimensions and to understand things in a different way yeah yeah and That self-compassion piece you mentioned of course very very important for any healing is if you come out of that feeling

more compassion for yourself less shame less guilt and of course that's going to help in anything further that you do are there any downsides you know as these things become more and more um in the mainstream and people talk about them and you know more and more people are trying psychedelics and of Course there's plenty of good research showing how helpful it can be can it be harmful for some people you know I'm so glad you bring this up I tell my colleagues we're in the honeymoon phase and so I have a team of people

who I had 20 30 years younger than I am and they say we're part of the Revolution and I say to them you're part of the second revolution because I was I had Timothy Leary's old office at Harvard at some point wow there was a tail end of that Last Revolution and the death Revolution collapsed in part because of politics but also in part because people got way too careless and uh it really got out of control and I'm really afraid these things will get out of control again these are very very powerful substances the

way we do our study is extraordinarily careful we get to know people really well they have two therapists who are with them the whole time uh set and setting is everything uh We have relationships with the people who who we treat and they feel safe with us and so right now in our study we just opened up the second study uh first one I was 891 people the last one is 103 people and again we have no significant side effects but we have no significant side effects because we pay so much attention to certain setting

and what you see already as as there's money at the end our Hills you can go to academy infusion Clinic where you go to little Cubicle get the infusion and nobody is there with you and you can bring a panic battle button if you become really upset that horrifies me yeah because blowing your mind is a potentially very dangerous thing and and very painful and horrible things can become manifested and you need to really create a very careful container for it yeah okay thank you I'm worried it will blow up again yeah yeah I just

would love to um Just think about what can trauma teach us as members of the society because you said something very profound once victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering rage and pain in a world that longs to forget you know when you quoted me I always go like I wish I'd written that it's so good and then in terms I've written like yeah I mean they're your words and I think they are so profound because look Let's be really clear trauma traumatic experience is a horrible they're causing all kinds

of problems to people hopefully the conversation we've had the work you are doing is going to help people first of all become aware of that and then start to make changes maybe some of the modalities we've already spoken about but I do wonder what can we as a society learn from trauma traumatic you know traumatized individuals You know is there any upside is there anything that you know for a society is that I've got a very sensitive how I say this but I'm I'm just saying every every bit of adversity in life tends to have

an upside at some point whether we're ready to see it or not and I just wonder with all your experience are there any upsides and what can we learn as a society from looking at people suffering from trauma I think I Think the big message is people generally do the best they can yeah and that's very important and so one of the things that's very gratifying about work that I do I see a lot of people who have gone through experiences that I cannot imagine having been able to survive and you see what people have

done to survive and they may have done weird things like become addicted to heroin in order to survive but it does their way of survival and so I think but Trauma really teaches us is that people do the best they can to survive and that being punitive and nasty to people who do things that you don't like it's probably not the best way to help them and that you need to really it's very important that that people do get traumatized if you yell at them if you screen them if you uh put them in seclusion

and to become aware of the potential damage we can do to each other but also how being heard and being in Connection with people is terribly important for all of us at every stage of our lives and that uh that that to honor people's reality also I think many of us are familiar with certain pieces of art or songs or some just quite beautiful pieces of music that have come from trauma so yes that individual has had extreme pain and suffering but what has come out of that has brought such joy to so many people

uh I I don't Know I I again I I'm very cautious as I say that because I don't want to at all come across as someone who is undermining how painful those experiences are I'm just trying to maybe at the end of this conversation leave a slightly uplifting uh sort of tone there yeah you know there's not a scientific statement but I think most really truly Innovative things in our world are are Discovered by traumatized people because they live in the world that's unbearable and so they have no choice but to fight new ways of

coping with things that is different from where you live because if they would say keep doing the same thing uh they would die a great example is Isaac Newton uh the greatest physicist who ever lived uh and the uv's biography this guy had the worst possible childhood and so he hid himself into mathematics And physics and that was his safe place that allowed him to create things uh JK Rowling the author of uh Harry Potter uh she was a very traumatized person who I I wrote Don't details I've never met her but she was a

very messed up trying to test person until she started to put it together in these Harry Potter stories that actually come from the visions of A time test person and she gave this unbelievable gift to the whole world of people to him to be able to imagine uh New possibilities and you see this over and over again and part of the of the pleasure of my job is when I really get to know people I get to see how they have found their particular ways of surviving uh they don't all become like Isaac Newton or

JK Rowling you know it's still an exceptional Talent becomes but uh the termites people have new ways of pointing things out to us we can learn from them Dr Monica you are doing a great service To the world all your work the book literally is such a phenomenal read I can see why it keeps selling gear on year and it keeps spreading through Word of Mouth it's absolutely incredible thank you for making time thank you just you know yourself also I'm really impressed with the depth of the questions you asked me I really really liked

it a lot yeah oh thank you I appreciate that just just very very finely Um for anyone who's listening right now or he's watching who feels stuck in their life who feels the way that they are right now is the way that they have to stay the way they have to remain and they feel no hope no possibilities for the future what would you say to them I would talk about might be available Have you tried yoga have you ever seen a choir and in family I always take very careful histories about when these things

work for you what were you doing but you did not feel this way what's the relationships were you in and I tried to help people to not only remember the horrors of the past but also that kid a long time ago who was able to do this and who coped somehow and to really revisit yourself as a Survivor to see what has birth to him what hasn't worked What gave you a glimber of Hope and then to look around in your environment uh would sing in a choir work we're doing martial arts work we'd go

to yoga studio work to really look at what it is in your culture that might help your body to feel uh at home or safe or a feeling of pleasure and engagement that's around the code that's the coming on the show thank you very much it's a pleasure if you enjoyed that conversation I think You are really going to enjoy this one all about addiction trauma and why so many of us feel lost addiction is the most human thing there is all addictions the attempts to gain pain relief emotional pain relief or something or another

then this whole society is so expert at selling us stuff to fill those holes temporarily this is the whole ethic of this culture