Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This is part two of my conversation with Dr Rachel Yahuda on this special bonus episode of Family Secrets. Can you explain for the listener? I think epigenetics is now like this word that gets tossed around a lot that I think a lot of people don't understand in terms of just what the term means. So epigenetics refers to the study of how genes are regulated, and that is a very broad category, and epigenetics describes a lot of things that make a lot of sense once you think about them. So, for example, every cell has the exact same number of genes in it. There in, your genes are very different than someone else's genes. That is the basis for looking at your genetic code and for searching for your ancestors. You're going to have a unique set of genes, and you're probably going to be able to figure out who has some of those genes and that they're related to you. Right, But when you start out in life, you start out as a single cell, right, So two gamets or sex cells and eggon to sperm unite and form as eyegoat and the way that you develop is that that from that very single cell, that cell keeps dividing and dividing and dividing, dividing and dividing and dividing. Right now, at some point those cells need to differentiate. They have the recipe through your genes for everything that needs to happen over the next few months. So contained within each and every cell is the code for differentiating that cell into a skin cell, or a liver cell, or a brain cell or a hard cell. Now how does how do those cells know what cells they should be? Well, it's because of epigenetic mechanisms that switched genes on and off, allowing for developmental processes to occur. So so epigenetics was first described in nineteen forties, even before we knew the structure of DNA or could even look at every genetic marks, because when you think about development, there had to have been something that explains how these cells differentiate. But what became new in kind of much later than that in the nineties, in the late nineteen nineties was the idea that it's not just an inner program that UM causes epigenetic marks to regulate gene The environment also can contribute to gene regulation by also permitting, under certain circumstances, different epigenetic marks on the gene, so that the environment then becomes a really important factor because it too has the potential to result in epigenetic changes that change the way your genes function. It's so mind blowing. I mean, it blew my mind the first time I heard you speak about it, and it continues to blow my mind because it just expands so much of what makes us us. But it makes so much sense because we are our memories and we are our lived experiences, and when you have a conversation that is restricted to genetics, you're discounting the things that make us us. And you just have to look at someone that has lost their memory to know that we're more than our genes, right, We're we're about our lived experiences, and our lived experiences change us. And every genetics just really offers that language or the mechanisms that allow us to understand how that happens. And it does make sense. Now. Of course, it's complicated. Everything always is what sells, what genes exactly are subject to epigenetic regulation and under what conditions. It can get very scientifically wonky, but the big picture view here is that the things that happened to us change us, and the things that we decide should happen to us will also change us. And this is actually a very hopeful thing. Um. And not only do every genetic mechanisms help us understand kind of very important questions, certainly the question I had going in about the low cortisol, which was why do effects of trauma and door um. Stress theory will have you believe that after you mount a fight or flight response, it takes a little while, but your body kind of equilibrates and goes back to what it was. We called this in the textbooks achieving homeostasis, biologic homeostasis, So your stress hormones aren't activated a few hours after a trauma, your heart's not pounding in your chest anymore as it was when you were confronted with terror. Everybody who's had the experience of terror knows that eventually your heart rate goes back down. Right. So that's why stress and stress theory has all these mechanisms to explain why that happens, with cortisol being center stage as one of the hormones that helps you shut down the sympathetic nervous system response to stress. So my question was, well, why twenty years later are you still affected by something that happened in the past. What is the biological mechanism of that. It's got to be a different biologic mechanism than the mechanism that is associated with fight or flight. Now, it took me twenty years to make that conclusion. Um. But again, you know you asked earlier on when you see data that don't um fit with your theory, like, what do you do? Do you just accept your data as full proof? No, you fight like hell against the data because we like to prioritize our theories, right. We want our data to prove our idea of not the other way around. And we will hold on to an idea almost at any cost. It takes a very very long time when someone puts out there the idea that PTSD is a continuation of the stress response, right, I have another idea, which is, no, the stress response is over. But then the event took a life of its own in your mind, aided by your biology, because that's what actually happens, and that this you know, when we think this is a mental process, we don't also think that there's a simultaneous biologic process going on. With our mental process. But there is and so again years down the road, and then also there's you know, the snowball that keeps gathering more snow as it continues to be rolled down the mountain. Right, other things happen, and it's a dynamic process. So here you are much later, and you're some of all the things that have happened to you and that, and you have kind of biologic mechanisms that have been helping you cope and adapt and sometimes have been also increasing your vulnerability to um environmental insults and maybe even increasing your vulnerability to mood and anxiety disorders. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. I'm also thinking about what you're describing is the brain and the biology, and I'm thinking about the body, and I'm thinking about it as someone who's a long, long, long, long time yoga practitioner. And the way that it seems that stories, which is the way that I think because I'm a writer, continue to live in the body. They feel lodged, you know, like in yoga, if you do a hip opener, and if you sit in it for long enough, one will start to cry. Why, you know, where is that coming from? Now, that's that's a beautiful thing to point out about yoga, identifying that things are lodged in the body. But what yoga also allows you to do is move energies around. Especially some forms of yoga are much better at that than others. But the most important part of yoga, and I am also someone that loves to do yoga, is that yoga is about the breath, and the breath is about the moment, and the moment is not about the past. And being able to control your breath in the moment is the way that you prove to yourself that you can disconnect from something unpleasant for the moment and in a moment and also be able to accommodate it um when you come back to it. So, yes, our bodies, ourselves, I like to say, are carrying memories for us, some of which we may actually end up transmitting in some way. But we carry these memories because it's important to carry them. It's important to learn from experience. How else will we learn if we couldn't carry something permanent that outlives the event with us. But what's equally important is to not be dominant needed by those lessons, to have control over them, as opposed to them having control over us or hijacking us back to the past and back to a time when we feel when we felt helpless or vulnerable. So the idea is to carry trauma memories forward, being complete acknowledgement and peace with them, and understand that the formation of new memories through new experiences will help contextualize those prior experiences and allow us to grow not only despite traumatic experiences, but maybe sometimes also because of them. That's beautiful, Um, it's actually a perfect segue to talk about the the new work that you're doing. But before we do, I just want to go back to epigenetics for one more question, which again has to do with my own experience of discovering your work while I was dealing with really the question of literally, who who am I? If I'm not who I'm not made of biologically who I thought I was, and there's this whole world of people that I who, who I don't know who? Actually, you know, my biological father was a total stranger, and his his family, his ancestors, my ancestors in fact um, were such a complete abrupt shift in the narrative that I had always understood, and I wondered regarding epo genetics and the environments and the memories and the lived experiences of ancestors, how far how far does that go back? Well, nobody knows, that's for sure, but what what seems to have been? You know, I've read Inheritance, which I thought was one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time, and also, um, just looking at some of the other things that you're writing about, and there's no way you could really claim you're not your father's daughter. That is, the father who raised you, your sensibilities, um, your affectations, your you know, how you deal with with your upbringing and Judaism and spirituality. I mean, the shock of learning that those weren't his genes makes the point that the environment he created for you was so powerful to your identity, because it's not like you woke up and realized, oh, actually I'm not I must not be Jewish, I don't feel Jewish anymore. I mean, you didn't necessarily feel a denial of who you are through your upbringing. It was just a shock that there was a mismatch between that upbringing and the genes that you always thought were you. But the fact that you might still feel so connected. Two, the father that raised you, I think really does speak to the power of who raised you and the fact that being raised creates experiences. Those experiences last in us, and those experiences are also available for us to bequeath or two you know, shape the next generation with. So it is a shock to the system. So how much of the epigenetics of your biological father do you have. It's a really good question, um, whether whether what you have is not just the genes of a sperm donor, but also the lived history of that donor and his ancestral line. So these are some really interesting questions that unfortunately most people don't get to answer because they don't get to have on the relationship to learn about all those shames right right. So it would be a really interesting to be able to see whether you could actually process some of those ancestful memories of a lineage that you only have genetically, as opposed through through culture or family or through those things that matter exactly exactly. And you know, it's so interesting because as you as you said that to me about my dad, um, I write an inheritance that he has always come to me ever since he passed away as kind of literally a series of chills that move up and down my body. And I'm going into the from the scientific to the woo woo right now. But it just it just happened when you when you said that, It just happened as I'm sitting here in my basement of my home. There it was. It just felt like this enormous sort of hug from from the beyond. And and the other thing is that I received an email today from a rabbi who I don't know, who was reading my book and he referred in his letter to my father as he said, your spiritual father. And I loved that so much. Um, you know, it was so much better than any other term we have for these things, social father, adoptive father, you know, all these terms that we have. Spiritual father felt really right. And he also spoke about the jcidim having um a way of thinking of certain kinds of secrets, as you know, and here I am on my own podcast where I really kind of contend that no secrets are good secrets. He really spoke about secrets that um where the legacy of them is not pain and trauma and and um, you know, kind of asundering but rather a kind of illuminating, and he actually wrote, um, the fact that you got the information that you needed on the second your site, the second anniversary of your father's death is no accident. And I was like, whoa, it's there's there's so much and I and I don't want to hijack this conversation with my experience, but but but really, I mean, I do feel like I do feel a sense of purpose in the fact that this is my story and that I am who I am and I do what I do, and I think the way that I think to try to understand as much as I possibly can about it because as you as you said, I can, um, yeah, yeah, there there's a lot to process that is more than just what we can do on the surface, because a lot of the facts that we hold in our bodies are not facts that can be spoken. They're not written, there, not words, They're there lived experiences that are not nameable or not they're not or or maybe ineffable in some ways. So I think that these are a lot of the things that you were really struggling within the book, and it was very very moving and to me, the idea of biology or epigenetics really being able to record and hold our experiences. It's so valuable, you know, it's it's so it's it's valuable, and it's precious and and it means that what happens to us matters, and it's something that we have known and now we can know in a different way. Yeah. I love that we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. I think that really brings us beautifully too. I would love for you to talk a little bit about the work that you're now doing, which is new and exciting and important and very grounded and real and rooted in science. Um of this psychedelic assisted sarapy and research that you have embarked on. Yes, so this is a very new direction for me, but it absolutely pertains to the question of intergenerational trauma. But we just started a center at Mount Sinai that is called the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research because a few years ago um I was introduced to the idea that psychedelics may be very helpful for the processing of traumatic events, and um they be very helpful specifically for PTSD. So I'm you, I've never done psychedelics and actually thought that it sounded like a crazy idea, and it first was very skeptical of it. But as I as I opened myself up to learn more about this and I did UM the training to become a Psychedelic psychotherapist UM, I was profoundly struck by the power of it. And I also got to participate as part of the therapist training and an f D A approved study where I too could take the psychedelic in the context of psychotherapy, and it was very meaningful and powerful, and it taught me as much about psychotherapy as it taught me about psychedelics and the real work that has to be done. But what happens in a psychedelic psychotherapy journey with the right intention in setting is that people process not only their own experiences, but it's very much in the context of a connection, of being part of a chain, of being linked to the past, and also in my case, since I have children grown up children to to to them, and a lot of people who take psychedelics often talk about the fact that parental traumas come to them and that they learned things about ancestors or ancestors speak to them, and depending on the type of psychedelic that they take, This could be very disembodied UM or it could be more kind of with yourself intact. But almost everyone has this kind of experience that there was this tremendous before about them that matters. And also for those who have children the after and seeing fathers or and mother's and grandparents and being able to get reassurance or being told that some of the struggles you're having now I had them, says you're maybe grandmother or or father or grandfather, or you have the wisdom to cope with it, or you know some secret. Usually a very comforting message, even if the disclosure is traumatic. But the overall experience is that of you can survive this, and that you are not alone, and that you are part of the universe that holds you and that carries you, and you're not like this isolated individual particle, but you're part of this network and that your experiences, good or bad, are part of that network too. And so I thought, this is a lot better than the treatments we have to offer trau of survivors today. UM that you know work for many people. I don't. I really want to be very careful to not disparage what we currently have, but for many trauma survivors with PTSD, they've had a lot of therapy, They've gone to a lot of UM, different kinds of therapeutic approaches. UM. The ones that are most recommended, which are cognitive behavioral therapy UM and UM antidepressants UM. You know leave something to be desired. I mean with the cognitive behavioral therapy, you have to narrate your traumatic experience, and many people don't want to do that many many times because of the avoidance, because they get distressed, and so that's not helpful. I mean, if you if you happen to be someone that did cognitive behavioral therapy and found it helpful, that's great. But a lot of people haven't. And antidepressants are just not right. I know that they're wreck of mended in the guidelines UM, but unless uh, for many people, they're probably treating a depression or an anxiety disorder that is co occurring with PTSD. PTSD, you've got to confront what happened, and sometimes confronting it in an altered state can be very gentle. You have a lot of compassion for yourself. UM. Psychedelics often make you want to bond with your therapist more. You feel more trusting, you feel ass afraid to confront UM things that might be very painful. So I'm very excited about doing this kind of research and as always figuring out why it works. And I actually believe that this will be something that up be genetics explains the kind of transformation that people report when they do try psychedelic I want to actually say to your audience that right now these treatments are not legal, and they will be in the very near future hopefully UM. The f d A has given breakthrough status to m d m A for PTSD and philocybin for treatment resistant depression. People are working really hard to do the science that will make these UM therapies available legally. And again, participating in research is one way UM that you can get this treatment in a very safe way, and so I wanted to just make sure people know that because if you go to your provider and say I'd like to try some psychedelics in my therapies, they may not be able to offer it to you. Yeah. And also one of the things that you that you note that I've read is that UM this kind of therapy, when it does become UM legal and more readily available, can can often be a one time or you know, a couple of times, as opposed to you know, taking antidepressants for you know, for years, or that it's a that it's something that you do that doesn't promote the feeling of oh gosh, I can't wait to do that again. It's more of a synthesizing. Um, it's a tool, I guess it's it is a tool, and that is why I'm so excited about it because it will really revolutionize mental health right now. What we try to do in mental health is we try to dampen symptoms that are problematic. Um, if you're depressed, we can dull you a little bit so maybe you don't feel it, or same with anxiety, or maybe if you can't sleep, give you a medicine to sleep. And I'm not knocking those things that can be very very important to people that have those symptoms. What if you could have an experience that gives you insight and um. The psychologist stand Graff said about psychedelics that they are to psychiatry what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy. And I absolutely love that description because how you make progress in therapy is that you learn how to see something differently, you don't have to keep looking in the microscope and looking in the telescope, and then once you know it, you don't have to keep knowing it all over again. And I've drawn an analogy between a traumatic experience and a psychedelic experience and that both are generally very transformative to people. And so the initial question that I had when I entered the field, which was how can an event that happened in the past continue to pack so much punch? And the answer to that turned out to be because the epigenetic changes that occur as a result of that experience that then take out a life of its own. The same could probably be said about psychedelic psychotherapy, that it's an event that packs such a punch. But what's important is not only what happens at the moment phy a flight aspect that this is you know, your brain on drugs aspect, but the insights that are then gleaned that you continue to work with um but for the positive and so really we're talking about a very parallel process in so to me, there is such an aesthetic quality about that that feels so true and so real that when you when you've learned the wrong thing following trauma, the thing that's holding you back. You have to have an experience that will help you learn the right thing and then you can get back on track or go to a different, better place. And I think that that is what I'm hearing from so many people who have really done this work and and it just really resonates. So our center is going to be not only about trying to do the clinical trials for trauma survivors, not hopefully not only trauma survivors with PTSD UM, but also really trying to kind of make the scientific observations where we can understand what the biology of healing and resilience are all about. And this is a narrative that's really been missing from our our dialogue in psychiatry. We've been talking a lot about, you know, the biology of depression, in the biology of anxiety or eating disorders or or PTSD. What if the fact that people have those biologic changes doesn't mean that those changes need to be reversed per se, but that a completely different process of healing needs to happen that can really overcompensate for the fact that those changes are present, right, and so I'm drawn to yoga also um certainly in the context of trauma, because one of the things that's accomplished with yoga really is to accept your body and also the places that you carry tensions and traumas in your body and be able to just breathe through it and regulate it. So what if healing really involves being able to do things for your body that really helps your body through the tough times that are associated with traumatic reminders or addictions or anxieties or other kinds of things that have cropped up probably for very good reason, be be they environmental or genetic. I love what you said to about about the experience being as part of a chain. You know that there's a before that, there's a before you, and there's an after you. There's something so expansive about that that. I mean, to me, it feels calming and healing even to hear that, because it's because there's no question that that's true. There's a before us and there's an after us. And to be able to actually access that, it's like it's like increasing the field, like just increasing the energetic field all around us. Look, you're born into a party that's happened without you, party before it's over, and then that's and that's the way it is, right right, Rachel Yohoda, this has been such a pleasure and provocative and and just illuminating talking with you. I'm really grateful to you for taking the time and giving so much of yourself. Oh it was fun for me to really really was. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Rachel Yehuda, and please keep in mind that season five of Family Secrets will drop on April one, with ten all new episodes. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This is part two of my conversation with Dr Rachel Yahuda on this special bonus episode of Family Secrets. Can you explain for the listener? I think epigenetics is now like this word that gets tossed around a lot that I think a lot of people don't understand in terms of just what the term means. So epigenetics refers to the study of how genes are regulated, and that is a very broad category, and epigenetics describes a lot of things that make a lot of sense once you think about them. So, for example, every cell has the exact same number of genes in it. There in, your genes are very different than someone else's genes. That is the basis for looking at your genetic code and for searching for your ancestors. You're going to have a unique set of genes, and you're probably going to be able to figure out who has some of those genes and that they're related to you. Right, But when you start out in life, you start out as a single cell, right, So two gamets or sex cells and eggon to sperm unite and form as eyegoat and the way that you develop is that that from that very single cell, that cell keeps dividing and dividing and dividing, dividing and dividing and dividing. Right now, at some point those cells need to differentiate. They have the recipe through your genes for everything that needs to happen over the next few months. So contained within each and every cell is the code for differentiating that cell into a skin cell, or a liver cell, or a brain cell or a hard cell. Now how does how do those cells know what cells they should be? Well, it's because of epigenetic mechanisms that switched genes on and off, allowing for developmental processes to occur. So so epigenetics was first described in nineteen forties, even before we knew the structure of DNA or could even look at every genetic marks, because when you think about development, there had to have been something that explains how these cells differentiate. But what became new in kind of much later than that in the nineties, in the late nineteen nineties was the idea that it's not just an inner program that UM causes epigenetic marks to regulate gene The environment also can contribute to gene regulation by also permitting, under certain circumstances, different epigenetic marks on the gene, so that the environment then becomes a really important factor because it too has the potential to result in epigenetic changes that change the way your genes function. It's so mind blowing. I mean, it blew my mind the first time I heard you speak about it, and it continues to blow my mind because it just expands so much of what makes us us. But it makes so much sense because we are our memories and we are our lived experiences, and when you have a conversation that is restricted to genetics, you're discounting the things that make us us. And you just have to look at someone that has lost their memory to know that we're more than our genes, right, We're we're about our lived experiences, and our lived experiences change us. And every genetics just really offers that language or the mechanisms that allow us to understand how that happens. And it does make sense. Now. Of course, it's complicated. Everything always is what sells, what genes exactly are subject to epigenetic regulation and under what conditions. It can get very scientifically wonky, but the big picture view here is that the things that happened to us change us, and the things that we decide should happen to us will also change us. And this is actually a very hopeful thing. Um. And not only do every genetic mechanisms help us understand kind of very important questions, certainly the question I had going in about the low cortisol, which was why do effects of trauma and door um. Stress theory will have you believe that after you mount a fight or flight response, it takes a little while, but your body kind of equilibrates and goes back to what it was. We called this in the textbooks achieving homeostasis, biologic homeostasis, So your stress hormones aren't activated a few hours after a trauma, your heart's not pounding in your chest anymore as it was when you were confronted with terror. Everybody who's had the experience of terror knows that eventually your heart rate goes back down. Right. So that's why stress and stress theory has all these mechanisms to explain why that happens, with cortisol being center stage as one of the hormones that helps you shut down the sympathetic nervous system response to stress. So my question was, well, why twenty years later are you still affected by something that happened in the past. What is the biological mechanism of that. It's got to be a different biologic mechanism than the mechanism that is associated with fight or flight. Now, it took me twenty years to make that conclusion. Um. But again, you know you asked earlier on when you see data that don't um fit with your theory, like, what do you do? Do you just accept your data as full proof? No, you fight like hell against the data because we like to prioritize our theories, right. We want our data to prove our idea of not the other way around. And we will hold on to an idea almost at any cost. It takes a very very long time when someone puts out there the idea that PTSD is a continuation of the stress response, right, I have another idea, which is, no, the stress response is over. But then the event took a life of its own in your mind, aided by your biology, because that's what actually happens, and that this you know, when we think this is a mental process, we don't also think that there's a simultaneous biologic process going on. With our mental process. But there is and so again years down the road, and then also there's you know, the snowball that keeps gathering more snow as it continues to be rolled down the mountain. Right, other things happen, and it's a dynamic process. So here you are much later, and you're some of all the things that have happened to you and that, and you have kind of biologic mechanisms that have been helping you cope and adapt and sometimes have been also increasing your vulnerability to um environmental insults and maybe even increasing your vulnerability to mood and anxiety disorders. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. I'm also thinking about what you're describing is the brain and the biology, and I'm thinking about the body, and I'm thinking about it as someone who's a long, long, long, long time yoga practitioner. And the way that it seems that stories, which is the way that I think because I'm a writer, continue to live in the body. They feel lodged, you know, like in yoga, if you do a hip opener, and if you sit in it for long enough, one will start to cry. Why, you know, where is that coming from? Now, that's that's a beautiful thing to point out about yoga, identifying that things are lodged in the body. But what yoga also allows you to do is move energies around. Especially some forms of yoga are much better at that than others. But the most important part of yoga, and I am also someone that loves to do yoga, is that yoga is about the breath, and the breath is about the moment, and the moment is not about the past. And being able to control your breath in the moment is the way that you prove to yourself that you can disconnect from something unpleasant for the moment and in a moment and also be able to accommodate it um when you come back to it. So, yes, our bodies, ourselves, I like to say, are carrying memories for us, some of which we may actually end up transmitting in some way. But we carry these memories because it's important to carry them. It's important to learn from experience. How else will we learn if we couldn't carry something permanent that outlives the event with us. But what's equally important is to not be dominant needed by those lessons, to have control over them, as opposed to them having control over us or hijacking us back to the past and back to a time when we feel when we felt helpless or vulnerable. So the idea is to carry trauma memories forward, being complete acknowledgement and peace with them, and understand that the formation of new memories through new experiences will help contextualize those prior experiences and allow us to grow not only despite traumatic experiences, but maybe sometimes also because of them. That's beautiful, Um, it's actually a perfect segue to talk about the the new work that you're doing. But before we do, I just want to go back to epigenetics for one more question, which again has to do with my own experience of discovering your work while I was dealing with really the question of literally, who who am I? If I'm not who I'm not made of biologically who I thought I was, and there's this whole world of people that I who, who I don't know who? Actually, you know, my biological father was a total stranger, and his his family, his ancestors, my ancestors in fact um, were such a complete abrupt shift in the narrative that I had always understood, and I wondered regarding epo genetics and the environments and the memories and the lived experiences of ancestors, how far how far does that go back? Well, nobody knows, that's for sure, but what what seems to have been? You know, I've read Inheritance, which I thought was one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time, and also, um, just looking at some of the other things that you're writing about, and there's no way you could really claim you're not your father's daughter. That is, the father who raised you, your sensibilities, um, your affectations, your you know, how you deal with with your upbringing and Judaism and spirituality. I mean, the shock of learning that those weren't his genes makes the point that the environment he created for you was so powerful to your identity, because it's not like you woke up and realized, oh, actually I'm not I must not be Jewish, I don't feel Jewish anymore. I mean, you didn't necessarily feel a denial of who you are through your upbringing. It was just a shock that there was a mismatch between that upbringing and the genes that you always thought were you. But the fact that you might still feel so connected. Two, the father that raised you, I think really does speak to the power of who raised you and the fact that being raised creates experiences. Those experiences last in us, and those experiences are also available for us to bequeath or two you know, shape the next generation with. So it is a shock to the system. So how much of the epigenetics of your biological father do you have. It's a really good question, um, whether whether what you have is not just the genes of a sperm donor, but also the lived history of that donor and his ancestral line. So these are some really interesting questions that unfortunately most people don't get to answer because they don't get to have on the relationship to learn about all those shames right right. So it would be a really interesting to be able to see whether you could actually process some of those ancestful memories of a lineage that you only have genetically, as opposed through through culture or family or through those things that matter exactly exactly. And you know, it's so interesting because as you as you said that to me about my dad, um, I write an inheritance that he has always come to me ever since he passed away as kind of literally a series of chills that move up and down my body. And I'm going into the from the scientific to the woo woo right now. But it just it just happened when you when you said that, It just happened as I'm sitting here in my basement of my home. There it was. It just felt like this enormous sort of hug from from the beyond. And and the other thing is that I received an email today from a rabbi who I don't know, who was reading my book and he referred in his letter to my father as he said, your spiritual father. And I loved that so much. Um, you know, it was so much better than any other term we have for these things, social father, adoptive father, you know, all these terms that we have. Spiritual father felt really right. And he also spoke about the jcidim having um a way of thinking of certain kinds of secrets, as you know, and here I am on my own podcast where I really kind of contend that no secrets are good secrets. He really spoke about secrets that um where the legacy of them is not pain and trauma and and um, you know, kind of asundering but rather a kind of illuminating, and he actually wrote, um, the fact that you got the information that you needed on the second your site, the second anniversary of your father's death is no accident. And I was like, whoa, it's there's there's so much and I and I don't want to hijack this conversation with my experience, but but but really, I mean, I do feel like I do feel a sense of purpose in the fact that this is my story and that I am who I am and I do what I do, and I think the way that I think to try to understand as much as I possibly can about it because as you as you said, I can, um, yeah, yeah, there there's a lot to process that is more than just what we can do on the surface, because a lot of the facts that we hold in our bodies are not facts that can be spoken. They're not written, there, not words, They're there lived experiences that are not nameable or not they're not or or maybe ineffable in some ways. So I think that these are a lot of the things that you were really struggling within the book, and it was very very moving and to me, the idea of biology or epigenetics really being able to record and hold our experiences. It's so valuable, you know, it's it's so it's it's valuable, and it's precious and and it means that what happens to us matters, and it's something that we have known and now we can know in a different way. Yeah. I love that we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. I think that really brings us beautifully too. I would love for you to talk a little bit about the work that you're now doing, which is new and exciting and important and very grounded and real and rooted in science. Um of this psychedelic assisted sarapy and research that you have embarked on. Yes, so this is a very new direction for me, but it absolutely pertains to the question of intergenerational trauma. But we just started a center at Mount Sinai that is called the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research because a few years ago um I was introduced to the idea that psychedelics may be very helpful for the processing of traumatic events, and um they be very helpful specifically for PTSD. So I'm you, I've never done psychedelics and actually thought that it sounded like a crazy idea, and it first was very skeptical of it. But as I as I opened myself up to learn more about this and I did UM the training to become a Psychedelic psychotherapist UM, I was profoundly struck by the power of it. And I also got to participate as part of the therapist training and an f D A approved study where I too could take the psychedelic in the context of psychotherapy, and it was very meaningful and powerful, and it taught me as much about psychotherapy as it taught me about psychedelics and the real work that has to be done. But what happens in a psychedelic psychotherapy journey with the right intention in setting is that people process not only their own experiences, but it's very much in the context of a connection, of being part of a chain, of being linked to the past, and also in my case, since I have children grown up children to to to them, and a lot of people who take psychedelics often talk about the fact that parental traumas come to them and that they learned things about ancestors or ancestors speak to them, and depending on the type of psychedelic that they take, This could be very disembodied UM or it could be more kind of with yourself intact. But almost everyone has this kind of experience that there was this tremendous before about them that matters. And also for those who have children the after and seeing fathers or and mother's and grandparents and being able to get reassurance or being told that some of the struggles you're having now I had them, says you're maybe grandmother or or father or grandfather, or you have the wisdom to cope with it, or you know some secret. Usually a very comforting message, even if the disclosure is traumatic. But the overall experience is that of you can survive this, and that you are not alone, and that you are part of the universe that holds you and that carries you, and you're not like this isolated individual particle, but you're part of this network and that your experiences, good or bad, are part of that network too. And so I thought, this is a lot better than the treatments we have to offer trau of survivors today. UM that you know work for many people. I don't. I really want to be very careful to not disparage what we currently have, but for many trauma survivors with PTSD, they've had a lot of therapy, They've gone to a lot of UM, different kinds of therapeutic approaches. UM. The ones that are most recommended, which are cognitive behavioral therapy UM and UM antidepressants UM. You know leave something to be desired. I mean with the cognitive behavioral therapy, you have to narrate your traumatic experience, and many people don't want to do that many many times because of the avoidance, because they get distressed, and so that's not helpful. I mean, if you if you happen to be someone that did cognitive behavioral therapy and found it helpful, that's great. But a lot of people haven't. And antidepressants are just not right. I know that they're wreck of mended in the guidelines UM, but unless uh, for many people, they're probably treating a depression or an anxiety disorder that is co occurring with PTSD. PTSD, you've got to confront what happened, and sometimes confronting it in an altered state can be very gentle. You have a lot of compassion for yourself. UM. Psychedelics often make you want to bond with your therapist more. You feel more trusting, you feel ass afraid to confront UM things that might be very painful. So I'm very excited about doing this kind of research and as always figuring out why it works. And I actually believe that this will be something that up be genetics explains the kind of transformation that people report when they do try psychedelic I want to actually say to your audience that right now these treatments are not legal, and they will be in the very near future hopefully UM. The f d A has given breakthrough status to m d m A for PTSD and philocybin for treatment resistant depression. People are working really hard to do the science that will make these UM therapies available legally. And again, participating in research is one way UM that you can get this treatment in a very safe way, and so I wanted to just make sure people know that because if you go to your provider and say I'd like to try some psychedelics in my therapies, they may not be able to offer it to you. Yeah. And also one of the things that you that you note that I've read is that UM this kind of therapy, when it does become UM legal and more readily available, can can often be a one time or you know, a couple of times, as opposed to you know, taking antidepressants for you know, for years, or that it's a that it's something that you do that doesn't promote the feeling of oh gosh, I can't wait to do that again. It's more of a synthesizing. Um, it's a tool, I guess it's it is a tool, and that is why I'm so excited about it because it will really revolutionize mental health right now. What we try to do in mental health is we try to dampen symptoms that are problematic. Um, if you're depressed, we can dull you a little bit so maybe you don't feel it, or same with anxiety, or maybe if you can't sleep, give you a medicine to sleep. And I'm not knocking those things that can be very very important to people that have those symptoms. What if you could have an experience that gives you insight and um. The psychologist stand Graff said about psychedelics that they are to psychiatry what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy. And I absolutely love that description because how you make progress in therapy is that you learn how to see something differently, you don't have to keep looking in the microscope and looking in the telescope, and then once you know it, you don't have to keep knowing it all over again. And I've drawn an analogy between a traumatic experience and a psychedelic experience and that both are generally very transformative to people. And so the initial question that I had when I entered the field, which was how can an event that happened in the past continue to pack so much punch? And the answer to that turned out to be because the epigenetic changes that occur as a result of that experience that then take out a life of its own. The same could probably be said about psychedelic psychotherapy, that it's an event that packs such a punch. But what's important is not only what happens at the moment phy a flight aspect that this is you know, your brain on drugs aspect, but the insights that are then gleaned that you continue to work with um but for the positive and so really we're talking about a very parallel process in so to me, there is such an aesthetic quality about that that feels so true and so real that when you when you've learned the wrong thing following trauma, the thing that's holding you back. You have to have an experience that will help you learn the right thing and then you can get back on track or go to a different, better place. And I think that that is what I'm hearing from so many people who have really done this work and and it just really resonates. So our center is going to be not only about trying to do the clinical trials for trauma survivors, not hopefully not only trauma survivors with PTSD UM, but also really trying to kind of make the scientific observations where we can understand what the biology of healing and resilience are all about. And this is a narrative that's really been missing from our our dialogue in psychiatry. We've been talking a lot about, you know, the biology of depression, in the biology of anxiety or eating disorders or or PTSD. What if the fact that people have those biologic changes doesn't mean that those changes need to be reversed per se, but that a completely different process of healing needs to happen that can really overcompensate for the fact that those changes are present, right, and so I'm drawn to yoga also um certainly in the context of trauma, because one of the things that's accomplished with yoga really is to accept your body and also the places that you carry tensions and traumas in your body and be able to just breathe through it and regulate it. So what if healing really involves being able to do things for your body that really helps your body through the tough times that are associated with traumatic reminders or addictions or anxieties or other kinds of things that have cropped up probably for very good reason, be be they environmental or genetic. I love what you said to about about the experience being as part of a chain. You know that there's a before that, there's a before you, and there's an after you. There's something so expansive about that that. I mean, to me, it feels calming and healing even to hear that, because it's because there's no question that that's true. There's a before us and there's an after us. And to be able to actually access that, it's like it's like increasing the field, like just increasing the energetic field all around us. Look, you're born into a party that's happened without you, party before it's over, and then that's and that's the way it is, right right, Rachel Yohoda, this has been such a pleasure and provocative and and just illuminating talking with you. I'm really grateful to you for taking the time and giving so much of yourself. Oh it was fun for me to really really was. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Rachel Yehuda, and please keep in mind that season five of Family Secrets will drop on April one, with ten all new episodes. 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