Dr. Gabor Maté — The Myth of Normal

[Music] hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is tim ferriss and welcome to another episode of the tim ferriss show today's guest is dr gabor mate you can find him online at dr gaboramate.com that's g-a-b-o-r-m-a-t-e.com on twitter at dr dr gabor mate on instagram gabramatemd dr mate is a renowned speaker and Best-selling author he's been on the podcast before and it was a very popular episode he is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics that include addiction stress and childhood development dr mate has written several best-selling books including the award-winning

in the realm of hungry ghosts i highly recommend subtitle close encounters with addiction when the body says no exploring the stressed disease connection and Scattered how attention deficit disorder originates and what you can do about it he has also co-authored hold on to your kids why parents need to matter more than peers his works have been published internationally in nearly 30 languages his new book is the myth of normal subtitle trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture gabor welcome back to the show it's nice to see you tim it's very nice to be back

with you i Thought we would start with a little ketchup because we haven't connected in some time and i would love to just hear how you are spending your time in the last whether it's year or two i know it's hard to normalize things perhaps pun intended with the subject matter over covid but how are you allocating your time these days actually kovid if i may say so Personally did me a favor because i had this book to write and it was a much bigger project than i even had imagined and i had all these

travel commitments which fortunately i had to cancel which allowed me to stay at home and finish the book which took me a year longer than i expected it so the last Three years have been pretty much dominated by book writing but and because of kovic i've been doing a lot of teaching online a lot of webinars now that i'm free again i'll are doing extensive traveling one more time and then with the book lunch as well of course the most exciting thing that happened to me if i can jump right into it was jump right

in Three weeks ago i participated in a plant ceremony with some indigenous canadians here in british columbia they invited me to come and help support their healing process and i'm telling it to him it was a life-changing experience being with these indigenous folks on their land you may have heard the delegation of canadian indigenous leaders went to the Vatican where the pope issued a very to my mind paltry apology for the suffering that had been inflicted on generations of canadian native children in these residential schools where they were tormented and sexually physically abused spiritually suppressed

they died in large numbers their bodies are just being discovered now so working with these people the suffering And the sorrow and the sadness and the pain is unfathomable but the dignity the beauty the connection to nature the honoring of spirit the welcome the love the resilience was also just absolutely humbling to behold so i died i went there to help them but i got helped more than i think i gave it was a profound Profound experience so i'm still glowing with it uh three or four weeks later so that's what's formed up to my

mind these days is is how to embody and apply those teachings in my own life but also in my work well i would love to stay on that for a little bit because you mentioned something that only recently came to my attention i was actually in new hawk tribe territory About six to eight weeks ago and learned for the first time of these mass graves and much of the history that you're describing which is horrifying of course and the ripple effects of that carry over well into today in the case of this particular ceremony this

medicine experience i know you have and for people listening if they don't have the context you have A lot of exposure and experience with use of different medicines including but not limited to psychedelics within that including but not limited to ayahuasca for instance in this particular case was it a sort of a syncretic blend of indigenous first nations practices and then [Music] plants or otherwise that are used in in other places it was a plant that goes Here locally and uh even though there's no artifactual evidence of them having used this plant before but when

they used it they said it's in their dna it feels so familiar to them and it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have used it traditionally because they know every plant every blade of grass Every leaf every bud every flower the medicinal uses of everything i mean the connection to nature is beyond belief so it's also beyond belief that they would not have known about you know the plant that we used which goes on their land and again it felt so familiar to them so for them it wasn't the question of something foreign coming in

it was Something very much aligned with their own experience what i brought to it was sort of western psychology and my capacity to ask the right questions and to delve into the traumatic imprints that they carry because of this tragic history but it was very much in line with their own traditions so a few follow-up questions related to that and you can feel free of Course as with all of my questions to not answer those that you don't want to but yeah in the case of the plant is that something you can describe more specifically

is that something that you prefer not to mention no there's mushrooms mushrooms yeah yeah so yeah you would have to imagine like you mentioned given the sheer density of sort of philosophy mushrooms In that region that they would have had experience yeah almost certainly now it's like peyote and southern western areas of the united states you know it's it's a plant that was well you know how would they not know given that they know every other plant what was your unfolding or the experience why why do you think it was impactful for you personally well

first of all the context Because i'm with people that are just so honest and so raw and so open and so welcoming so that i've never felt more at home with any group of people even though i never met any of them personally before so there was that that was the experience and and we all had to utter some words before the ceremony about what our intentions were And i heard two words love and presence then i experienced them both i experienced love from myself in a deep way which was new for me actually i

can't put it into words because it's not a concept it's not a intellectual exercise it was actually an experience a full body experience is what it was and yeah i experienced presence And it's you've had these experiences that they're ineffable they're they're they're almost you take a a poet somebody with a much more poetic imagination than i have to to actually somehow depict it in words but i i tell you i came out of it and then i sat on the porch outside it was a beautiful sunny evening we're looking at this beautiful mountain Here

in british columbia there were bison in the field below us and and this of course in in the native experience or imagination everything has a story so the mountain itself is a story you know so i'm looking at this beautiful mountain and this bison and the sunset and nobody had to convince me that nature Contains us all you know not at that moment anyway it's for people who have not heard any of your backstory this first-hand experience of love that you mentioned is not being let's just say a common experience for you maybe it's worth

just for a second rewinding if you wouldn't mind just sharing a bit of Why that is in our first conversation you told the story and perhaps you could just fill in some of the gaps of growing up in or certainly being born in hungary having relatives perish in the holocaust and then even after the deportation of jews had stopped jews were still still being persecuted and if i recall correctly murdered by sort of the fascists who were in power at that time and you were handed off to your mother Handed you off to someone else

because she wasn't sure if she would survive is that am i remembering that correctly well let me tell you a story around this so sometimes after i met you i went to peru to take to lead a retreat for medical people with the plant ayahuasca and when i say i lead the retreat i don't Lead the ceremonies i don't hand out the brew i help people formulate intentions beforehand and integrate experiences afterwards but these people 23 people came from all over the world health professionals doctors psychiatrists psychologists to work with me in this jungle setting

with native healers so i did the work the first day went really Well then we had the ceremony the first night now my experience with ceremonies is that everybody else has deep ceremonies and i don't because i have this very thick skull and just nothing gets through you know that's my little self myth you know so these shoe people native maestros and maestras shamans sit down in front of me in turn and each of them and each of them chats to Everybody so there were 24 of us each of them gets chanted to six times

in turn by each of these maestro's meisters they sit down in front of me and i say okay do your worst you know and very little happened for me next morning they sent a delegation to me they said we can't have you in ceremony because you have such a dark dense energy in you that this is affecting everybody else So it interferes in our in our ikaros our chance can't penetrate your darkness furthermore they said we can't even have you working with your people during the day because you're still be affecting them so they fired

me from my own ceremony for my own retweet literally they had no idea they were not impressed with the fact that i've written books or published in how many languages or any Any of that they didn't own my reputation they just know i'm this guy from the north doctor you know and they said here's what happened to you we think you've worked with so many traumatized people that you've absorbed their traumas and you haven't cleared it out of yourself and furthermore they said we think when you're very small you're the big scare and you haven't

got over it yet The first chapter opens with the painting that my wife did of me as an infant this is from a photograph looking at a camera with absolute terror in my face and a pediatrician who came to see me when i was separated from my mother at a year age she said she'd never seen such terror in the eyes of a human being as she saw in my little eyes now these shamans picked that up like That and what they said was we're gonna assign one of you to work with you alone because

we want to heal you so i had five private ceremonies with a shaman all to me and it ended beautifully but when you talk about that early scare that i had these people picked up on it instantaneously and this Maestro chanted to me over five nights three or four hours five hours and by god he cleared so much out of me i couldn't even believe it at the end do you think at some point we will be able to and i'm not saying this needs to happen certainly it doesn't for the therapeutic effects to be

seen do you think the kind of rationalist physicalist western scientific perspective will find some Type of explanation for what you're describing if we assume for the time being that that something is in fact happening it's not purely placebo effect i mean even if it is that's something but do you do you think there will be a point at any juncture in the near future where we'll have some explanatory capabilities so What's frustrating for me and not just for me by the way is that we have so much science already to explain such experiences and uh

many more amazing healing experiences we actually have the western science to prove it or to explain it and what's frustrating is what's been called the science practice gap where on the one hand we have the science But the science hasn't penetrated the medical practice consciousness there's a gap between not only western medicine and traditional understandings but there's even a gap between western science and western medical practice in so many ways so in terms of my own experience there are certain traumatic imprints that are ingrained In the emotional circuits of my brain in the very basic

survival mechanisms of my brain in my lower parts of my brain and uh these are neurological circuits embedded with a certain kind of experience and a certain kind of belief and a certain kind of reactive pattern So the belief that i'm impenetrable and everybody else can heal but i can lead other people to healing but i can't get there myself that itself is an imprint of trauma because an infant or a small child being traumatized they think it's gonna go on forever and then that experience Of being in the moment and not seeing an end

to it then becomes a belief so then i take that belief into the ceremony and i sit there and i'm saying do your worst you can't get through this brain in other words i'm sabotaging my own experience not meaning to but that's why i'm imprinted now these people don't buy my story they see through to the fear in fact they even intuit the experience That it must have been a very early scare that i had so this guy just holds me like a father and he loves me and he chants to me and it's almost

sometimes like a lullaby being sung to a baby well guess what a sense of safety arises in me and when the safety arises my whole visceral body experience changes my heart my breathing My intestines my muscles they're all in the different state much more receptive and this goes on for five nights and by the end of it i come out a different person now when i say i come at a different person believe me i travel home and all of a sudden that different person becomes a memory And you know i have to struggle again

with a lot of the same old stuff but i'm struggling with them from a much more informed perspective and um i know it's no longer my absolute reality which is a huge difference seems like all the difference it's not that hard to understand really yeah because we know that the brain can develop new circuits and new ways of Understanding in response to new experiences was that five nights just just so i understand that was that was five consecutive nights of drinking each night yourself or were you not drinking on each day five nights over ten

days so we had a ceremony and then we had a day of rest when i would just meditate and do my yoga and walk the jungle the the rain the rainforest paths and uh and read my Spiritual books and contemplate and then back into ceremony so yeah it was a 10-day private retweet it's what i ended up having yeah and the rest of them worked directly to the group sounds like everybody won in that situation everybody won and let me tell you an interesting aftermath So afterwards the shamans told me that when they knew that

24 you know healers you know doctors psychologists psychiatrists are coming from the west they thought we'd have an easy job because they said we absorb a lot of trauma from other people as well but we cleared out of ourselves So we expected you would have done the same thing and they said they've never looked at such a heavy bunch of people in their whole lives than these western doctors because we work with all these traumatized people all the time we don't even understand trauma let alone do we know how to clear it out of ourselves

so they had a big job on their hands the shamans And those people that participated had a huge experience and when they went back to their work so many of them it changed completely do you think there will be a point maybe you already can where you can yourself do that self care of clearing whatever you may absorb uh so to speak by say patience in a clinical practice I'm doing it now i have to like i i in the course of my work what do you do oh well i do uh meditation practice actually

when i learned from one of my colleagues dr daniel siegel who's got this wheel of awareness that i'm practicing i have a yoga practice that i do pretty much every day now every day i go swimming i swim 2k every day or or do some other kind of workout and um I pay a lot more attention to my own needs than i used to the yoga is that still i think last time we spoke this some time ago so maybe it's changed but saad guru based is it uh is it still that or is it

something else no it's his yoga i don't want to particularly tie it to his particular personality with which i have some issues concerns I just don't like hero worship or guru worship of any kind but yeah the yoga i learned through his course has been very helpful to me so let's dive into the new book you've written many books you've certainly i would imagine thought of many possible books you could write why spend multiple years on this one tim i hadn't thought of multiple books That i could have written this is the one that's been

calling me and yelling at me for the last 10 12 years and literally took 10 years of research in fact very many times i thought i wasn't up for it i thought it was too big i thought this time there's an expression of a hungarian in hungarian which goes uh having struck your axe into a very big tree you know like this time you've taken on too much You know and many times believe me i i even had the contract for the book five six years ago and i gave the money back i said i

can't do it it's too much for me but it just kept calling me and calling me and calling me and then one day it just woke up and said okay i'm here you got to do it and that's when the new title came to me and That's when i started working on it again and so here it is but so it's it's been a calling it's really been calling me i can't put it in the way nothing else has been calling me this has been calling me so that's why i did it how does that

show up for you is it like insomnia that it's ideas that are coming to your mind how does how does that calling i'd just love to know how that actually shows up or Manifests for you well excitement yeah i i want to do this there's a visceral knowledge that there's something right about this when i say there's something right about it i don't mean that i'm correct about everything i say or i just mean write for me that this is what i need to do the When i see a newspaper article where i see a

new book title right away oh yeah this speaks to us i gotta read that article i have to read that book so the world keeps feeding me information that demands to be metabolized and synthesized and written and spoken and then over the last few years you Know as we've seen crisis upon crisis it just occurs to me somebody's gonna write about how life in this system affects the health of human beings and so it's visual excitement it's ideas it's information that just keeps pouring at me like a lava flow And this just is coupled with

the fear that i'm not big enough to do this you know [Music] so it's a combination of a lot of things but even that fear that i'm not big enough to do this is assigned to me of the importance of what i'm talking about when i say the importance i don't mean to be grandiose i mean the importance to me If it was not important i wouldn't be so afraid of it that's what i mean maybe we can launch into a story i have a few cues here yeah jumping off points in front of me

and tell me if if this makes any sense as a direction to go and what i have in front of me is the story of how trauma can inflict and affect everyday life story of landing in the airport Would you like to grab that baton and run with it well sure and this relates to what i was what you're asking me about before in terms of my early history so this is when i was 72 six years ago i'd been on a speaking trip to philadelphia i spoken on addiction the link that i draw between

childhood trauma and addiction as you And i have talked about this it was well received on the way back air canada bumps me up to first class so i couldn't be more comfortable i land at the airport my wife is meant to pick me up and i get a text as i land saying i haven't left home yet do you still want me to come and from feeling very comfortable and very pleased with myself if i can put it that way i go into a rage i just And i text back never mind and i

take the taxi home so imagine the indignity of having to take a taxi home you know and i arrive home now here's the deal my wife's an artist when she's in the studio painting everything else disappears i've only known this for over 50 years you see she has no she has no bladder she has no husband She has no hunger that's just her and the art and that's what happened you know so so what am i so upset about when i come home i don't even talk to her i just grunt at her and uh

i keep this up for a day and she finally says knock it off already and as i say it's a tribute To decades of progress that i could knock it off after 24 hours because in the past i might have carry on for days like that now what's that all about well my mother gave me to a stranger as you mentioned earlier and i didn't see her for five or six weeks when i was a year old she did this to save my life when i saw her again i didn't even look at her for

several days and that's what small children do on Separation because the brain says that it was so hurt when you abandoned me that i'll never open myself up again to that kind of vulnerability i won't even look at you now that imprint from a year old is what showed up when my wife said i'm not picking you up or at least i'd be late picking you up all of a sudden the woman on whom i'm relying for presence and support and Love is unavailable and what gets triggered is just childhood imprint of abandonment and rage

and despair and so this is how trauma shows up in our lives it doesn't have to be as dramatic as that but it shows up in our relationships and how we feel about ourselves in how we interpret events and how we react to things that happen In our world view so trauma is this sort of invisible dynamic that shapes so much of how we live our lives but we tend not to be aware of it and until we become aware of it it can run our lives it can run our personal lives it can also

run our politics in our culture so let me come back to the rage for a second because i would love to get your Advice or at least hear of some of your learnings over the last decades because i recall from our first conversation that you know in your 40s your successful doctor you're driven workaholic you had challenges in your marriage your kids were at least based on my notes afraid of you at points because of your rages right what have you Learned about rage and anger how do you relate to it or metabolize it and

i ask as someone who has a long history of [Music] running on anger as a maybe a corrosive fuel of sorts so i would i would love to just hear you expand on that in any way that makes sense so there was a great neuroscientist his name was yak pancek pnk scpp who tragically died a few years ago of Cancer and he distinguished a number of brain systems that we share with other mammals they include care he capitalized these so you see a are care then something he calls grief and panic then fear lust seeking

Play and rage these are all brain systems that we have they're all necessary for mammalian life they're all necessary another by raging means the anger that arises when our boundaries are being transgressed if i were to infringe on your boundaries either physically or emotionally The healthy response for you is to mount an anger response no get out stay away that's healthy healthy anger is in the moment it protects your boundaries and then it's gone it's not necessary anymore however if your boundaries were infringed as a Child but you could not express it it doesn't disappear

it gets suppressed it becomes almost like a volcano that's gurgling and and and bubbling inside you but it's had no expression now why did you suppress it because if you're being well are you being very public about this so i'm sure you'll allow me to mention it but you've Sometime after you and i talked you actually publicly acknowledged that you'd been sexually abused as a child yeah it did now when that's happening to a small child the last thing you can afford is to is to be angry because if you get rageful at the boundary

invasion you're going to get hurt even more So suppressing that rage becomes a survival mechanism nothing wrong with it it's the right thing to do you don't do it your brain will do it for you automatically as a way of preserving your life or your your relative safety but the rage doesn't go away what happens then later on as an adult something triggers you and also it just explodes out of you And you have no control over it now it's no longer a response a healthy response to the present moment but it's a response to

the past and just as my hurt and sense of abandonment and enrage was triggered by my wife not picking me up at the airport so a person's rage can be triggered by something relatively minor but all of a sudden this lava flow just explodes out of you And the difference between healthy anger and by the way suppressing healthy anger is also unhealthy for you we can talk about that but just as healthy anger expresses itself does its job and then it's gone rage the way such as i'm describing such as the way i used to

experience it and probably as used to experience it the more it explodes the bigger it gets That's what happens to me it doesn't pass through me sorry no i was just reinforcing that by saying you know i've i've worked with certain therapists who've said you know punch a pillow express the rage let it just pass through you like the wind but that isn't in fact what happens with me and i know i'm not the only one it actually magnifies and intensifies and extends this feeling exactly because it recruits more brain circuits into its service So

that's the difference between healthy anger on one hand which is an essential boundary defense and by the way so much parenting advice in this culture tells parents to force kids to suppress their anger really unhealthy advice and um there's healthy anger then there's that rage that you and i have both experienced That to work with that no it's look if you're gonna punch a human being and there's a pillow to punch instead better to punch the pillow right no question about that but there's a technique of dealing with it no that's not how you learn

to process that rage because it needs to be processed how do you approach The processing what is a more effective prescription or one possible way of thinking about it or approaching it well if i was working with you i would encourage you to fully experience the body experience of rage what's happening in your body and you'll find that it's not just an idea in your head it's something that dominates your visceral experience of Yourself your muscles your breathing your abdomen your entire nervous system and um there's ways of just helping you experience it experience it

by recognizing raising the awareness of of being with it now that there's a wonderful buddhist the lineage spiritual teacher meditation Teacher called tara brach who talks about reign recognize allow investigate and nurture so you recognize oh yeah this is happening in me right now okay i'm gonna allow it not along it in the sense of i'm gonna act it out on somebody else But i'm going to be with the experience and then investigate okay what is this really all about and then nurture that little person that had to suppress all that rage it's a nutshell

view of it but in other words there's ways of working with it through the body that doesn't involve either suppressing it or acting it out but in experiencing it Yeah i'll need to revisit uh tara and range she's been very helpful to me i just want to give her credit where credit is due and maybe i mentioned this in our first conversation as well the radical acceptance as a book yeah as a title it turned me off but a friend of mine who is a very skeptical neuroscience phd or has a phd in neuroscience i

should say Who's generally averse to anything that even rhymes with woo-woo read this book and recommended it to me and i found it tremendously tremendously helpful and it may be time for me to revisit it and you know she also tells this apocryphal story that is is in some ways linked to this conversation That we're having she tells this apocryphal story of a sage who says there's only one question that really matters and that is what are you unwilling to feel and you know because i've also had therapists ask me like do you experience clean

anger and my instinctive answer is no i don't and i resist it because i view it as potentially destructive especially the Way that it can feed on itself an amp and get amplified and i'm not at risk of like throwing a chair through a window or punching someone so because i've become very good at suppression but it's not lost on me that there's a cost to be exacted when you do that yeah by the way i've read radical acceptance recently as well that's why it's in my Mind and i'm also somebody that doesn't do acceptance

or surrender very well so i resist those titles but you know what i find it very helpful and very compassionate actually and and from my perspective from the point of view the therapy that i teach my students no part of us no aspects of us is bad so that rage of yours it came along for a good reason yeah and the suppression of the rage That came along for a good reason as well and so the more we can investigate this and understand it the more we can make friends with all aspects of ourselves which

i think is the key to healing by the way radical acceptance doesn't mean radical tolerance it doesn't mean that you put up with everything right it just means that you accept that this is the way it is right Now now where do we go from here it's not a question of okay i'm going to accept all the injustice and oppression and unfairness that's in the world no it's not about that at all that's a really really good clarification and it's at least as i recall the book i should revisit it it's it's very much focused

also on self-acceptance meaning acceptance of The parts of us that we have disowned including the emotions that we're not willing to feel let me ask you about and this is real this is all related i suppose everything's related at the end of the day but what happens when one seemingly non-negotiable need is pitted against another so so the example i want to ask you about specifically is attachment versus authenticity right so if i think about the the The reaction i had to my significant other this morning which was similar to your taxi experience yeah on

one hand i wanted to be very direct in how i was feeling and then i hesitated in expressing that which would have come with a tone of anger almost certainly because i wanted Her acceptance and support didn't want to hurt her and so i felt this inner conflict of needs that i couldn't reconcile and maybe that's not the best example but i would love for you to sort of help me and the listeners explore this a bit because i can't be can't imagine i'm the only one who experiences this type of thing i don't know

I wasn't there and i don't know what happened but my guess is that you and i did this exercise once before that you very uh i thought rather bravely put on youtube where we went through a certain experience of yours so you haven't been upset the lesson from that exercise and i imagine and very often or take my reaction at the airport And i imagine perhaps your reaction this morning and i can't say this for sure because i wasn't there but very often we don't react to what happens we react to an interpretation of what

happens right so that your partner did or didn't say or do something and then you had a certain interpretation of that and then you react to that Interpretation so i imagine that may have happened but more generally speaking so then you're in this dilemma if i fully express who i feel i'm gonna maybe hurt her and hurt the relationship or hurt them and hurt their relationship but if i don't then i'm not being authentic so what do i do i mean i think that's The dilemma that you're posing here it goes back to very early

in childhood because we have these two needs that i've identified one of them is for attachment attachment being our need for connection and closeness with another person for the sake of being taken care of or for the sake of taking care of the other so when i talked about these brain circuits of dr paksep the care system is Designed for you and i to take care of the vulnerable our young our very old ones our sick ones there's a system in our brain with its own brain chemicals and its own circuits that are designed to

help us care for one another that's essential from no mammal will survive without that we also Have a system for what he calls grief and panic and that's what we experience when we don't get that care you know so we're wired to attach for the sake of survival and no creature is more dependent more vulnerable more immature than a human infant compared to any other animal so our dependence is absolute so need to attach is absolute But we have another need as creatures and then as human beings which is to be authentic now i don't

need any kind of new age who who concept by this i mean knowing what we feel and being able to how to act on what we feel so you know as you know we evolved uh out there in nature how long does any creature in nature survive if they don't know what their gut feelings are telling them Not very long not very long that authenticity which comes from the word auto for self knowing ourselves and manifesting ourselves is an also essential need that's fine but what happens if a child experiences the emotions that the environment

says won't accept you with that that can happen through abuse But it can also happen through well-meaning parents who read the parenting advice of a lot of experts including some that i think you've heard on your program who who will tell you that when a kid is angry they should be made to sit by themselves wait let's name some names here who are we talking about jordan peterson says that in his book twelves rules for life An angry child should be made to sit by themselves until he says they come back to normal in other

words anger in a child is not normal but he's not the only one and the message to the child is you're not acceptable when you have that emotion no not a child is a dilemma i can be authentic but then they're gonna exclude me if that's going to threaten my Attachment relationship or i can suppress my authenticity and then i'll have the attachment now what do you think gets sacrificed 100 of the time authenticity the authenticity gets sacrificed and then we spent the rest of our lives trying to figure out who the heck we are

and uh that suppression of authenticity has severe mental and physical health implications From autoimmune disease to malignancy to depression takes for example something like called depression what does it mean to depress something literally what does it mean push down to push it down depression is not this inherited brain disease it's the result of having to push oneself down push someone's emotions as a child Just to play devil's advocate here i mean there can be and there are appear to be genetic markers that predispose someone again it's not predetermination but there there is it would seem

a genetic component it's not purely in the absence of childhood events something that does not occur right would you say that is fair i'm going to give you an argument on that one i mean Having written this book i've just reviewed the literature nobody's ever discovered the gene for any mental health condition nor have you ever discovered any group of genes that cause any mental health condition nobody has discovered any group of genes that if you have them you're going to get this disease nobody's group has any discovered any group of genes that if you

don't have Them you can't get this condition what people have discovered is there's a large group of genes that the more than we have the more likely you might have any number of mental health conditions from adhd to depression to psychosis to whatever but none of them code for the specific condition so something is being inherited yes but what is being inherited and You you take animals or human beings with those same set of genes and you give them different environments they'll turn out to be very different creatures some of them will be extremely functional

if they were treated very well so what is being inherited then now this is contrary to the medical mantra i'm telling you the science okay what is being inherited are not diseases what is being inherited is Sensitivity the more sensitive you are and you and i talked about sensitivity the first time you met but let's just illustrate it if i tap myself on the shoulder right now i don't know if i did this exercise last time last time i don't feel any pain at all do i but what if i what if my shoulder was

bare and there was a burn there so my nerve endings were close to the surface Which means i was thin skinned and now i touch myself with the same force now what do i feel severe pain so sensitivity from the latin word sincere just means to feel the more sensitive you are genetically the more you feel the more you feel when things go wrong the more pain you have the more pain you have the more you have to get defenses Around that pain and all mental health conditions reflect some defense against pain in fact so

there are many physical conditions so what i'm saying is yes there's some genetic component here but that's not a disease that's being inherited it's sensitivity and therefore vulnerability that's being inherited from there on it depends purely on the environment sure i think we're Largely on the same page the point i just wanted to make is that there are predispositions it's not a binary [Music] transmission of a disease although those may exist with things like pompe disease and so on if you have two recessive carriers but let me come back to attachment versus authenticity for one

second because in the case of this child who's expressing say Anger and if there are people who would take the stance of the prescriptive move is to put that child in the corner until they come back to their senses in that case the child is going to choose attachment over authenticity and you condition the child to behave that way how would you handle that situation right because i suppose if if i wanted To sort of stand in for some people listening and for myself frankly if you don't help a child to learn to regulate themselves

in some fashion you just end up with someone who can't function in society or if they're encouraged to kind of indulges a strong word but embrace every impulse that they have with a strong emotion They'll probably in some way get exiled by their students and peers also so how do you how do you walk that tightrope how do you suggest handling that type of circumstance i agree with you the intent of good parenting or good child-rearing is to help the development of self-regulation absolutely the question is how to get there right no It's not a

question of everybody should behave exactly how they want to and held with everybody else you know it can't be that that's permissiveness that's not healthy parenting either but it also depends what age we're talking about like for example a two-year-old they want to cook you before dinner now if you're doing your job as a parent you're gonna frustrate them because you're gonna say no cookie Before dinner now what do we do as adults as mature adults when we get frustrated you know if we're lucky we know how to handle all frustration but if you're like

me sometimes you'll start throwing a bit of a tantrum so that's what a two-hero will do they'll throw a tantrum nothing wrong with the two-year-old throwing a tantrum that's just what their brain is Programmed to do when they're frustrated so you say oh you're really angry aren't you you really want that cookie yeah and you're really mad at daddy because he won't give you the cookie yeah that allows the child to move through the emotions and to know that emotions can come and go how self-regulation happens is as dr dan siegel points out is that

the immature circuits of the Child's brain use the mature circuits of the adult's brain of the nurturing adult's brain to help regulate it so the way you help a child learn so or not learn but develop self-regulation is by being regulated yourself so if you stay calm you say you're really angry aren't you that'll help the child develop Self-regulation because he's downloading your circuits but if you respond with punishment or hostility and giving him the message that he's just not acceptable you're just frustrating him even more you might get compliant behavior but you're gonna get

somebody whose rage is being suppressed and we've already talked about that and you're going to get somebody who's going to get depressed because they're pushing Themselves down a child who's understood and held and loved they'll move through these emotions very quickly very quickly and that's how you learn self-regulation is that these emotions can arise and they'll go and we're not to be attached to them and we don't have to act them out you know so self-regulation Begins by the adult world being regulated and not reactive yeah that makes a lot of sense let's let's come

back to the myth of normal yeah and if you look back at your many books and maybe maybe i'm just unique in this in this situation but i don't think i am i'll explain what i mean when i look back at each of my books there are chapters or elements or Messages that i wish i'd maybe emphasized more or that i'm sad get skipped over or not given enough attention in the new book are there any chapters or concepts anything at all that you really hope people do not miss i know that's perhaps a strange

way To phrase it but i'll leave it there as a starting point it's almost like i felt i could just print the title the title page the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture and just have people write their own books you know just have a bunch of empty pages so i think the message is reinforced through the whole book what we think is normal in our society From the point of view of human needs and human evolution is absolutely abnormal and therefore what we think of abnormalities in terms of illnesses

and and and dysfunctions and diseases and so on these are normal responses to abnormal circumstances and the biggest laws you and i already talked about this is a society that from the very beginning from in utero onwards Which stresses on human beings that they lose contact with themselves and the essence of trauma is loss of contact with yourself loss of connection to yourself and that's reinforced through parenting practices the parenting advice people get you and i already talked about that it's reinforced in your school system but it's all about competition and evaluation Rather than relaxation

and learning we're judged all the time by by our externals like hobby look what we achieve how smart we are how fast we are we're not accepted for who we are with our flaws and our vulnerabilities society caters to those false needs so that you know for god's sakes people are botoxing Themselves because they've learned that how they are is just not acceptable people are on facebook presenting a false image of themselves because they believe that how they are and who they are is not good enough we sold all these products and um are manipulated

into all these activities That are all attempts to fulfill some deep hunger in ourselves that is missing because we've lost our two cells we are manipulated into buying products and eating foods that are actually toxicly addictively unhealthy and this happens with the full awareness event none of the awareness the The employment of modern science as to how to get people hooked on cell phones or junk foods our politics reflects very traumatized people reaching the top enacting policies that then create more trauma for large numbers of people now there is this is a society that for

all its wealth scientific ingenuity incredible progress in science and and medicine has fundamentally got disconnected from The essence of what it means to be human beings and we suffer there's an article in the new yorker about the alarming rise in childhood suicide the mysterious rise in child there's nothing mysterious about it kids are stressed because of the conditions of this culture all the lonely people as the beatles sang you know all the lonely people the number of people lonely has doubled In the last 30 years britain has appointed a minister of loneliness loneliness kills it's

as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of causing illness or or potentiating illness and death ah there's so many ways in which this culture is abnormal And it's causing people to be not well and so that message that's the essential one that i hope people won't miss but i i kind of doubt that they will if they read the book and the big message is tim is we don't have to be that way it's not our true nature we've been sold a bill of goods about what human nature is human acre is

not like that and Precisely the reason there's so much dysfunction is because we've got disconnect from our true nature we don't have to be we can find our way back we can embrace it and we'll be a lot healthier both as a group and as individuals so what you're saying reminds me of a quote no doubt you've heard it many maybe even used it many times this is from krishnamurti it's no measure of Health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society yeah and my next question relates to what to do because i have

noticed for myself for instance if i'm off in the mountains and the rivers or the jungle by myself for a period of time i come back i feel better attuned i feel much More at ease there are all these positive effects but it at least in that form is opting out of society now maybe that's okay but as i contemplate part of my reason for asking about parenting and anger management or recognition and so on is because i'm contemplating starting a family soon and that's that's at least in the plans and You know disappearing to

the jungle for months at a time may not be may or may not be compatible with that at least in the early stages so recognizing the problem what are some of the things that people can do or what are questions they should be asking how would you suggest they start looking at treatments or solutions first of all i wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the connection with nature I do talk about a woman called clara hughes and claire hughes was the first person to win medals at both the summer and winter olympics she's a canadian

wonderful person and after she retired from sports she became a public speaker and was just stressing herself fulfilling all these demands and then she decided to start walking so every year for six months of the year She just goes walks here she walks she's walked from i think northern canada to mexico you know and she reconnects herself through that wow obviously nobody can do that all the time claire doesn't have children so she can afford to to do that but that doesn't mean that the connection with nature needs to be dismissed so i would say

for you if That's a powerful connection and a way for you to reconnect with yourself for god's just keep doing it you might not do it for as long and as intensively as you might before your children but keep it up because it's an essential part of who you are but beyond that what keeps us disconnected from ourselves are the imprints of trauma and uh I suggest ways of working that through that's not the only way i'm certainly no not unique in offering pathways to wholeness as i call it that part of the book but

people need to realize to what extent their tensions and their unhappiness and the dysfunctions things that they don't like about themselves they all came along for a reason at some point they had a function to Play no they're no longer helpful we can work them through you got to get help either through reading the right books and or finding the right therapist and or engaging in the right kind of spiritual practice or martial arts or something but there's always the way to work it through i can't emphasize enough the importance of communality of Connection we're

wired to connect and in a society that teaches us that our nature is to be aggressive and competitive and individualistic and even suspicious of others that goes against our nature so we have to work our way through those false beliefs and come back to who really are which are Connected beings really here to to be both individuals to both to be authentic and to be attached at the same time so that there shouldn't be this tragic tension between attachment and authenticity we can be both authentic and be connected that's what we have to strive for

both as individuals and i think also as a culture when you think about wholeness and Contending with these traumatic imprints so you mentioned some say parenting approaches that you disagree with are there any approaches or recommendations that you think do more harm than good with respect to contending with trauma or moving towards wholeness yeah any parenting practice or educational practice that focuses on Behavior rather than the child's underlying emotional dynamics is going to be harmful because what we want out of child rearing is at the end of it there should be an autonomous human being

respectful of themselves and of others who can be authentic and connected at the same time that's our goal i don't Think anybody would disagree that that's our goal for human beings now that's a natural developmental process as long as we provide the right conditions for it but nothing in nature develops in the wrong context so you know i could have an acorn in my hand and the nature of that acorn is to become an oak tree but not if i leave it on my desk right it needs you know water and soil and sunlight and

so on a lot of planting and educational Practices focus not on the long-term goal in development but on fixing the kids behaviors in the short term so we talk about kids are acting out what do you do when a kid acts out well look at this phrase acting out what does it mean to act something out but when i say acting out when i say a kid is acting out you will probably think of a kid who's being oppositional or or rude or disobedient or aggressive But that's not what the phrase means acting up means

to portraying behavior that which we haven't got the words to say in language so in a game of charades where you're not allowed to speak what do you have to do you have to act it out act it out if you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you had to portray hunger you'd have to Act it out kids are acting out their emotional needs the question is are we going to respond to the child or want to try try and suppress the behavior so much of what's taught as parenting advice is

designed to manipulate or shape or suppress kids behaviors rather than understanding the child and by the way this is also true of adults as well as we look at human Beings and we don't see what's really driving them we just either approve or disapprove of how they're behaving but we don't make much of an effort the legal system specializes in not understanding why people behave the way they behave just in suppressing it which is why in canada where indigenous people make up five percent of the population they make up 30 of the jail population and

uh indigenous women make up 50 percent of the female jail population in this country it's an absolute scandal same in the us the more oppressed you are the more marginalized you are the more you've been traumatized by history and you know which groups those are in the united states the more you're going to likely gonna have it in jail because the legal system doesn't Understand trauma it doesn't understand human development and it confuses punishment with rehabilitation so as a result in terms of supporting healthy growth of human beings at any level we need understanding of

what's driving this behavior and it's not a question of allowing bad behavior or or permitting it or encouraging it But it's a question of what are we going to do about the phenomena of aggression or drug use or in the case of children rudeness or disobedience or anything else what are we going to do about it are we going to try and just suppress the behavior Then you end up where we are with millions of people in jail and lots of kids with learning difficulties and and and behavior problems and millions of kids being medicated

or we're going to try and understand what's happening what's driving it what are the social cultural dynamics that are driving so much dysfunction and it's not that hard to perceive we Have the science we have the research we're just not applying it let me hop in there a few things i want to mention that come to mind as you're speaking and then i'll i'll end it with a question so the first is on the acting out point how i've heard stories from a number of friends and i don't have kids so i get anyone out

there don't look to me for parenting advice but With respect to baby sign teaching children sign language before they actually have the physiological capability of speaking that you reduce the amount of acting out sort of crying for attention etc when you enable them even with a handful literally of basic sign language symbols right hungry thirsty Potty or whatever it might be and the so that makes sense to me the second is and i like the way that you deconstruct that phrase the second as it relates to incarceration there's a documentary i saw a long time

ago called the work it's called the work it came out in 2017 at the very least everybody should watch the trailer we'll link to it in the show notes And it relates to effectively trauma work within the prison system um and i i say that as kind of in a monolithic sense which might not be perfectly accurate but with within a prison in the united states and it's absolutely mesmerizing and brutal to watch and it highlights how difficult it is in the sense that you know an ounce of prevention is is worth a pound of

of Cure right intervening early and but but let's look at the adult case so coming back to this trauma imprint if you were to take say a thousand people from the population kind of selected at random and they all as adults pursued fixing their trauma whatever they think of as that meaning are there any approaches or techniques or paths that you think are risky damaging ill-advised is there anything you'd like to Highlight in that department well specifically in prisons in the u.s i i sounds this work that you mentioned sounds wonderful i i know a

couple of other approaches there's a film made about my work called the wisdom of trauma that actually people can watch online and there's a scene in it i'm not involved but there's a woman called fritzi horseman she's wonderful you might want to talk to her Sometime she works with these high level offenders and she's got these large number of people in this prison yard standing in a circle all men and she says if you were hit regularly as a child take a step forward everybody takes the stuck in if your parents yelled at you a

lot take a step in if you abused take a step in If you've witnessed violence in your family origin take a step in and the circle just keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller as people kept keep stepping in to the circle and so she does wonderful trauma work in it with prisoners and the transformations are incredible that she witnesses and helps to facilitate i know somebody else who works with something called the prison enneagram Project now i you've probably heard it with anna graham i've never studied it i have it's come up with a

number of ceos yeah toby of shopify and others who who use the enneagram it would be helpful if you wanted to just give a brief overview or explain what uh what you introduce so i've never studied it though that much i don't know the Patience for it really it's a personality typing system that allows you to look at potential interactions of different people with different typing and you can look at the pros and cons of those interactions and it's a lot more to it but those are some of the basics yeah i think that's about

right and and also each enneagram type has got its potential values but also it's Shadow you know hazards so i know somebody who's taken this work into prisons and they do enneagram work and i witnessed it and these are these guys are killers they've killed it's hard to say this and it's gonna draw some maybe raised eyebrows or skepticism from some of your listeners these guys are the loveliest people in the world And they're not pretending they were sensitive kids deeply traumatized nobody ever paid attention to them everybody hurt them very often of course minority

status somebody hears them allows them to work with i quote one of them in the book actually and then he says if i ever get out of here all i ever want to do Is help people love themselves because when i committed that crime i was totally disconnected from myself i didn't know who i was i couldn't respect myself he says so i couldn't respect no one else either and as i've learned to respect myself i now respect all human beings they say i witnessed him saying this this isn't san quentin actually so the potential

of of rehabilitation and and bringing people back to Their human selves is enormous given the right circumstances but we know how punitive and how traumatizing the prison experience is for a lot of people because we equate punishment rehabilitation it's not the same thing so all i'm not saying that we should allow murder or that we should encourage crime what i'm saying is if we apply the light of understanding to what drives people and we're actually interested in Rehabilitating them so that the correctional system really becomes a system that corrects people rather than just punishes them

we could do so much with what we already know and you know what it wouldn't cost more it would cost less yeah you know for people interested i just want to mention i actually did some podcast interviews behind the line inside a maximum Security prison in california at one point uh level four maximum security prison current valley state prison so people can find that 323 if they're interested in kind of getting a peak behind the lines and i would agree with you were you surprised by anything i was surprised by a lot because that is

certainly not my native environment i mean on one hand You had violent events on a constant basis right so there were real threats within the prison and you know sort of riot gear and so on had to be used so you had tremendous potential for violence and then you also had tremendous potential with the right help with the right support and resources i was there volunteering with a with a group teaching entrepreneurial skills Uh because without qualifications or transferable skills to outside civilian life right then the recidivism rate of course is going to be very

high also with with felony or felonies on your record it complicates the entire situation so it's a very very problematic gnarly Puzzle to solve with taking people from inside the system to then outside the system and reintroducing them so that was the context within which i was there but we were also able to have conversations with people who had done a tremendous job with support of rehabilitating themselves and really using introspection and Cultivated self-awareness to turn their lives around even within the confines of a maximum security prison in some cases people who were not eligible

for parole right people who were still turning their lives around yeah despite the fact that most likely they would be restricted to life behind bars until they died yeah everything about it was deeply impactful and Actually participated in a an exercise that's very similar to the one you described where people are stepping forward or stepping backward depending on the things they've experienced and when you start when you start layering all of the abuses and experiences these people have suffered through i don't want to say it's inevitable you know coming back to the maybe the genetic

comparison i think It's not inevitable that these people end up in jail but it sets the conditions such that it is much more likely especially if they're highly sensitive as you mentioned and [Music] it stuck with me it was very emotional for me to witness honestly because i grew up on long island you know in family kind of lower middle class with friends who Came from some very tough households you know a lot of alcoholism a lot of abuse a lot of drugs and some of my friends have not made it you know some have

died of opiate overdoses and drunk driving accidents etc and other issues and some are behind bars at this point also and so it's also striking to me how with one or two Different decisions the trajectory of my life could have very easily gone in a direction that would have made it more likely that i would have ended up someplace very very different let me ask you if if you could no longer write you can no longer i'll stick with writing you can't no more no more writing No more public speaking but you are allowed to

focus on clinical practice and this comes to mind because of what this this inmate you mentioned said about spending the rest of his life doing something yeah what type of clinical practice would you focus on well i hope this rule against me speaking isn't enacted very soon because I got this multi-country trip lined up that i'm really looking forward to but so don't tell anybody okay that's accepted yeah that's accepted okay but it'd be much the same as i'm doing now except more one-to-one it would be that you come to me with an issue and

i would help you to see that there's nothing wrong with you with you with who you are The stuff happened in your life at a time when you couldn't help it and you made a kind of meaning out of that like i made the meaning that i couldn't be helped i couldn't be healed or i made the meaning that i'm being abandoned and you made a certain meaning out of that and you've been living your life out of that meaning that you created at a time when you had no choice in the Matter and if

you can get to be friends with all those aspects of you that at that time helped you survive but now are creating suffering for you and the people in your life and if you can work your way back to getting to know yourself and accepting yourself you'll be just fine And whether your trauma shows up in a form of multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or malignancy and by the way there's a lot of literature linking all these conditions to trauma so i'm not just making this up or whether it shows up as a rage or

whether it shows up as depression or as adhd or as anything else whether it shows up in Difficulty with intimacy in in problems forming relationships no matter how your problems manifest there's a reason why they're there those reasons can be understood dealt with work through and you can find your way back to yourself so that would be my clinical practice almost no matter what people presented with i say almost no matter what because i don't be categorical about it You're right there are some diseases that are genetic one runs in my family it's called muscular

dystrophy if you have the gene you're gonna have the disease my mother had it my aunt had it and they died with it but that's very rare very rare for the most part people we're dealing with the impacts of life experience in a culture that undermines Our connection to ourselves and to other people and that's what we have to realize and and correct well gubber i know we could we could go and go and go and go i mean i feel like that's a powerful place to start to maybe come to a close but i

want to also open the floor to anything else that you might want to mention uh any Thing you might want to add or if apart from closing comments you might have any requests of my audience or suggestions to the audience certainly the the new book is the myth of normal i recommend people check it out i've seen you you know through documentaries but also you know in our interactions in action so to speak and i really respect you as a clinician And a practitioner right not just a theoretician and so i wanted to say that

publicly i'm aware of how much you've rolled up your sleeves and worked with very difficult cases of addiction addiction and trauma in some of the sort of highest density areas in north america certainly with respect to all of these kind of intersecting Health challenges so i wanted to say that but are there any other comments you'd like to add before we bring this to a close i'll tell you personally that running this book has been the biggest challenge of my life at certain times i didn't know if i would finish it or it would finish

me first because and literally i went through panic at Certain times i even became so desperate and that i called a therapist and i had a therapy session once a week for several months in the middle of writing the book which is a good thing you know at least i was smart enough to reach out for help you know it was hard because i took on such a big subject which is the whole of this culture and how that pertains to us as Individuals and as groups but what kept me going was this voice inside

me that's that says you know you honestly you need to do this but you're called to do this and you wouldn't be being true to yourself if you didn't fulfill the calling now That voice in one version another it doesn't have to do with book writing or any other project like that but that voice who we are and and what we can be in this world that's inside all of us and there's such cacophony there's such noise Generated by this culture i mean the radio the tv the internet is yelling at you 24 7. and

we're being pulled away from ourselves in so many ways but the bible talks about the small still voice that's inside of us and the noise around us generated by this culture makes that voice almost impossible to hear but i'm sure you've had the experience yourself and a lot of people have It's in there and if we can just listen to it so that was my biggest takeaway from writing this book is and i'm so glad i did it and in the end i'm just so happy with what i've been able to set down on paper

but by the way with the brilliant help of my son daniel i couldn't have done this on my own and uh if i can pitch forward a bit the Next book dialogue writing is called hello again a fresh start for adult children and their parents maybe in a few years when that's done that's the workshop that we do and maybe in a few years i can come back and talk to you again when that book comes out sure let's do it but anyway the long and short of it is that the lesson that i derived

is that it's not easy to listen to that voice But it's a essential and be so rewarding and that voice is inside all of us so i have to follow up because this is touching a nerve for me right now because i've been sort of sitting in the silence for about a year and a half now i've not committed to any large projects do you have any advice for Attuning to or sensitizing to picking out that small still voice because uh i would love to maybe have a more acute ability to observe that not that

i'm totally deaf dumb and blind but do you have any any recommendations i do But are you willing for a bit of an experiment right now oh man here we go again okay i may end up being the pinata but i'll go with it yes i'm open to it okay oh that's gonna happen and you know it's just an experiment and it may or may not work and it's really okay if it doesn't so there's no i'm not gonna feel like a failure if it doesn't work and you won't be getting a failing grade if

Nothing comes up it's just an experiment right all right let's try it so you say you've been kind of observing some degree of silence and not committing to long-term projects very wise because something inside you needs to work yourself out and you're giving it space and uh so i'm just gonna ask you to just be Silent for a moment within yourself and then i'm going to ask you a question i'm going to snap my fingers ask a question i snap my fingers just say the first thing that comes to your mind if anything does and

if nothing does that's really okay but whatever you do don't try and think about it okay so don't try and figure out the right answer there's no right answer okay we're just gonna see if anything comes Up or not so i might ask two questions okay so just silence for a moment okay you're paying attention to what's happening inside you your chest your belly your head you know you're just being present with yourself i'm going to ask you what's calling you uh animals animal communication okay That's the first thing that comes up okay well i

don't know what that means but i'm sure you do yeah okay great by the way animals have a lot to tell us don't they yeah it's not true that i don't know what you know I know people that work with horses i don't know exactly what you mean but i know there's a lot there okay so if that comes up for you then the second question would be what's stopping you uh what's you know i think what's stopping me is i don't know how to i can pursue it i am actually going to be pursuing

that in the next month especially because i got a sort of a very promising lead okay Involving some indigenous animal trackers okay so that's a whole separate story but i am unsure of how to because i i'm sort of on the periphery of this interest right and the interest i i think is very much an attraction to non-verbal forms of communication So that could be humans but i just find the kind of pure unadulterated naturally selected manifestation of that is seen so clearly in animals and what about that ability there's something about that appeals to

you what's the appeal there for you in a word in a word oh give me a second i'll have to do a little search function for a word You know comes up for me what comes up for you purity yeah i think for me it would be very close right i was i was going to say i mean it's cheating it's not a word but other means of knowing then knowing okay knowing that like other means of knowing right so forget the other means it's knowing yeah and you don't want that knowing Happening through the

intellect yeah i don't want it going through a bunch of filters and abstractions and concepts i think it just gets so clumsy yeah so look damn it sounds to me like you're got a beautiful calling which is pure knowing and you even have a pathway that you've envisioned which is through animal communication i think you're on your way i don't think There's a big mystery here well you know i'm gonna borrow i'm gonna borrow that that confidence if i may you know i'll i'll kind of fake it until i make it here with that i'm

i'm excited thank you for doing the exercise [Music] you know hopefully people yeah maybe they had a chance to try themselves i i'm excited about i think there's part of me that is trying to force it into This maybe false construct of uh a job if that makes any sense and just bear with me as i try to walk through this like right now i do the podcast i love doing the podcast it's basically they're interviews but i'm also very self-indulgent with turning them into my own therapy sessions so thanks for playing along and there's

part of me that really enjoys A commitment to all-consuming projects because i find it so much easier to say no to the noise and to the temptations and the shiny objects when i have a clear focus that consumes much of my days or all of my days and maybe it's just premature but i've i've been trying to figure out all right well how does this interest actually translate to something that i can spend That amount of time on and the answer is not forthcoming so i i think for that reason i've hesitated in taking the

plunge which is probably silly well what if i may say you're trying to bargain with your authenticity here you know and it seems to me you're trying to justify it somehow you know like for me to be authentic and pursue this calling i have to somehow Translate it into some monetized or professionally acceptable or respectable endeavor i don't imagine that financially or constrained to do that oh no yeah it's not the finances it's more like how do i make it something i don't want it to be a disrespected hobby if that makes sense like it's

it's something i feel very drawn to respect so i'm sorry don't drop but are you Worried what other people will think about it no no i'm not i'm not actually i'm worried that i won't have enough to chew on for it to sustain me for a period of time i just won't have i won't be able to sink my teeth into it enough to spend what i would view as a critical mass of time to reach some point of like expertise but no that that's all Internal it doesn't have anything to do with what other

people think okay great so you want to be able to respect it enough with inside yourself but look what's the worst case scenario you hear to me when i hear you speak about it then you said a few words you said animal communication you said knowing pure annoying i would call it To me that's very inspiring that you'd be caught by that it really is from the outside just to tell you how i respond to it that's boy this guy's really got something here you know that's what i'm thinking and what's the worst case scenario

is that you take the next step with this indigenous possibility that you mentioned and you'll see it won't you you know yeah right do you have to Figure it out all in advance or can you just take the next step and trust the process yeah the answer is i can trust the process you know anyway it makes me think of i can't remember who said it but uh you know they're like somebody described writing a novel as driving across the country in the dark with only headlights to guide you it's like you you can get

There you can make it from one side to the other but you can only see 100 feet in front of you at any given point in time so i think i probably just need to sort of take take that and uh and run with it so thank you thank you i will uh i'm gonna be i already have a couple of things on the calendar in the next two months that i'm really excited about so Right i think i just need to stop dipping my toe in the water and really get in i would say

one final thing is that the mind that we develop as kids in response to trauma doesn't trust their authenticity very much for a good reason because authenticity will get us into trouble so i would suggest that quite possibly some Of the self-questioning and hesitation and the the diet around it is still a bit of a an echo where you are programmed to question your authenticity because what you're talking about sounds very authentic to me yeah it could be that wouldn't surprise me yeah i mean i think that's uh as good a theory as any For

me to to recognize is is valid at this point so thanks for the thanks for the encouragement i appreciate it well i'm just reflecting what i'm seeing that's all well thank you for the reflection i look forward to learning how that goes for you one way the other actually yeah me too me too well gobbler thank you so much for the time it's nice to see you again and It has been it feels doesn't feel that long ago that we sat face to face in austin but it's been quite a while remarkably so and you

have been busy i'm very excited about the new book and for people who would like to check it out and i encourage they check it out the new book is the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture you can find more information on the book at dr gabor mate.com that's Dr.gabourmate.com and you can find gabriel on twitter at dr dr gabriel mate and then on instagram gabrielmate md and we've covered a lot of ground and i really appreciate you being such an open book and also maybe helping me to turn a

few pages in the process so much appreciated Gabor thank you for making the time thank you it's a pleasure take care you