Responsibility. If you break down the word response ability, nobody else can respond to your circumstances about you. Nobody else can respond to the impacts that you carry. But you. You're a response able, But you're not at fault. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other will keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us on this episode. We are happy to welcome back Gabor Mate, a highly sought expert on a range of topics such as addiction, stress, and childhood development. He's written many books, and several of them are best sellers, including the award winning in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, and When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress. Gabor's works have been published internationally in more than thirty languages. On this episode, the topic is his new book, The Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing and a Toxic Culture. Hi, Gab, we're welcome to the show. Nice to be with you, Eric, Thank you. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to have you back on. I don't know when we talked last, but it's been a number of years. You've got a great new book called The Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness and Healing and a Toxic Culture, And we'll dive into that in a second. But we'll start like we always do, with the Parable and the Parable. There's a grandparent talking to the grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. How you'll answer the question today, it will be very different how I might have answered it some years ago. Yeah, but as then now is that hungry wolf is the part of you that was denied and hurt and scared and traumatized. So then rather than starting it, we have to befriended and remove its me there to be that aggressive and to be that destructive. So we have to be friends all aspects of ourselves. So I would say we have to be friends and feed both wolves in the right way, because it's not in the nature of the wolf to be that way. Something made him that way. Well, that certainly speaks to a lot of your work summarized pretty succinctially there. Let's talk about the new book and tell me about the Myth of normal. Why did you title the book the Myth of Normal? Yeah, it has two meanings. We tend to assume that what is normal is healthy and natural rich and human evolution was also the case because what was healthy and natural was also the norm. That's how we evolved as as creatures. No creature can evolve against its own nature. But in modern society, what is normal in other words, what passes for daily life and daily human exchange and interaction and social structures that may me the norm in a sense that they represent the average, but they're no longer healthier and natural. So that's the first myth of normal. The other is that as a physician and also as an individual, when I understand people's illnesses, including their addictions, including their mental distress, including their physical illnesses, we see these people as a normal, but actually their illnesses, their addictions, their ailments are normal responses don't have normal society, so that the normality is not an individual. The pathology is not an individual. It's in the social conditions and the personal relationships and the context that evoke those um ailments. And they can give you one example, the more episodes of racism and black American woman experiences, the greater the risk for asthma. Now asthma is a streuss it in condition. That's a normal response towards that normal, which is that one human being should be considered less than the other. Yeah, you say, chronic illness mental or physical is to a large extent a function or a feature of the way things are, and not a mysterious aberration exactly. And so I would say that a lot of what you're proposing in this book, and again, correct me if anything I say as a misstatement, is that it is the traumatic experiences. And we're going to get into what trauma means in a minute, But it is traumatic experiences, big T, little T trauma that are a big part of why are mental and physical health is deteriorating, and we need to treat that trauma, both collectively and individually, exactly. So there was an article in The New York Times four days before this interview, fun page headline article, there's a teenager on ten different psychiatic medications at age seventy. You knowing now that's an increasingly common phenomenon. And there's been articles recently in The New Yorker and the New York Times about the mysteriously rising rate of childhood and adlas and suicides and the number of children being diagnosed with depression, anxiety, self cutting, so called oppositionality a d h D, etcetera, etcetera, is going up and up and up. Now, what that tells us that these conditions can't be genetic because geez don't change over ten years or twenty years or ever in a hundred years. So there's something we have been in the environment. And what's going on in the environment is that more and more young human beings are growing up on the conditions that don't meet their essential needs. And so the anxiety and the depression, and the self cutting, and the addictions and even the desperation that will drive a young person to enter their lives, these are responses to have normal circumstances. And that's why I that our culture is a toxic culture because it actually poisons people psychically. So I want to get into some of the trauma that happens within a family system or to a person. You know, they are sexually abused, they are assaulted. We'll get to that in a second, but let's talk broadly, more broadly culturally. What are the broad cultural things that are making the environment toxic. Well, let's begin with conception, so that we know that the mother's emotional states during pregnancy have a hormonal impact on the child's brain, physiology, and even on the child's genetic functioning. And these effects can be traced for decades after the pregnancy. Scientifically speaking, No, when you think of all the stress that's on women these days as they're trying to hold on a job and take care of a relationship, and in a very stressed and fractured culture, that's affecting the children and the unus already. I mean noticed, so are kinds of physiological studies now. As a physician, I was never trained when I was looking at the pregnant women. Nobody ever trained me to ask her about her emotional states or the mental states, about the states of our relationship. Just pay attention to the body weight gain measurements, alto sounds, blood tests, But they don't ask how are you feeling as a human being? What's your life like, what's your job like, what's your relationship like? So already the toxicity begins in unal. Yeah, then there's childbirth. Nature evolved human beings is that childbirth isn't just a mechanical event of getting the infant out of the womb and into the world. It's also an event that, on the national circumstances, promotes bonding and the release of a whole love cocktail of chemicals and both mother and infant that prepares them from the bonding experience that must be present for health each other development. Now moderner stat pricks can do miraculous feats and saving maternal and infant life and hell, but in a small minority of cases, about ten to fifteen at the time. Now the caesarean section rate here in bellsh Coombia where live is close to and it's going up internationally, especially in the developed world, which means that a lot of infants no longer have the experience of the birth that nature intended for them. Then we get into parenting. A lot of parents these days are given advice such as ignore the baby's crying, let them sleep it out, or a two year old child, if they're angry, make them sit by themselves. Now you tell a mother bat boon or a mother bear to know the baby's cries. You tell a mother elephant to know the baby's cries. So human beings are now increasingly divorced from their own paranting instincts because of the pressures of the culture. That means children are not getting their development on these met Children have certain basic needs like any creature like an acorn, the nature of an acorn is to become an oak tree, but not unless it's given the right soil and nutrition and irrigation and sunlight. Same with human beings via essential needs. The human child has the need to be accepted and loved exactly who they are unconditionally. They have the need not to have to work to gain the esteem and love of the parents, but for that to be there naturally. They even the need to experience all the emotions, whatever they happen today, joy, pain, grief, anxiety, anger. In modern world, parents are often programmed or taught to deny the right of the child to have all their emotions. That is traumatic for kids. So then I could go on about the way schools schools deal with kids. Yea. Then there is the stresses of modern life that impose the three essential triggers for stress, uncertainty, conflict, and loss of control that characterizes so many people's lives. Yeah, those are physiologically stressful. That physiological stress undermine the immune system. So I could just go on forever. But there's so many features of modern life that actually are toxic to help human life. You mentioned the let the baby cried out model. I certainly experience that as a baby. I know you did. It's a horrifying sort of thought, but it seems to me and maybe it's just the circles I travel in, Right, this is what I never know, like what is more broadly culturally happening and what is just in the small circle I'm in. But there seems to be a real knowledge now of children's attachment needs, and there's less of that than there seems to have been maybe in nineteen seventy. Do you see, broadly speaking, some aspects of our culture getting better? Yeah, I agree with you. I mean I think much more many of our parents are aware of the child's attachment needs. And in the nineteen fourties and the fifties, the dominant influence of parenting was Dr Spark. Dr Benjamin Spark, who told parents to leave the child alone in his room, shut the door, and don't go back. And he talked about the chronic resistance to sleep of the infant. If it wasn't resistant to sleep, infant resistant to being left alone. No animal leaves their infants alone. Yeah, a mother baboon will not do that. And he talked about the tyranny of the infant. Now we've seen the consequences of that, and so there's been a certainly great reaction against that, but it's not broad enough that reaction. And although there are more parents or recognizing that now, thank god, the dominant advice of psychologists and parenting coaches and so on is still along those behavioral models which ignore the child's needs and focused instead on what the parent wants the child's to be like, So the emphasis is not on the child's developmental needs but on parental convenience. Would you understand parents wanting desperately in the stressed world, but be forgotten the needs of the child, right? I think so much of what you just talked through, and you point out in the book is that all this stuff is so interdependent that the modern stresses of our world to parents working, having to work essentially in an environment where their work is coming at them constantly twenty four hours a day via phones, you know, that then impacts their ability to be a good parent. If we look at the way my mom parented me, so much of that came from her experiences she was going through how she was parented. So all this stuff becomes really interdependent and very difficult to tweeze apart absolutely. And I wrote this book, The Middle of Normal with my son Daniel. In the book, Danielle talks about how he was traumatized by his parents and he's had his mental health challenges, and I know where they came from. They came from here from me. I'm the last person to be able to deny the impact of my parenting on my children, given that this is the work that I have studied in pursuit for so many years. Daniel talks about how when he was small, used that there is your current nightmare of the floor disappearing. All of a sudden, the floor disappears himuner this sheet, when the floor was not the floor. What that had to do with was that too stressed parents who had not worked through their own traumas before they had kids would create an environment of pension and conflict in their home which the small child experiences the floor disappearing. Yea. And so we loved our kids, who did our best as all parents to, but inevitably we passed our traumas onto them. So this is not pointing fingers or blaming anybody, is to recognize the larger picture. Yeah, how in the stress society, we almost invariably passed on or inevitably passed on our traumas to our kids. Oftentimes people talk about from generation to generation, like breaking the cycle. I'm going to break the cycle. My son's twenty four now, and so I look at what I did well and what I didn't do well, and you know, I think breaking the cycle might be a little too buyinary, which seems to me is it's like maybe if there was a hundred units of trauma flowing down through the generations, he only got twenty five of it, right, instead of all hundred, you know, so like blanking the cycle. At doubt that that happened. And so I think that's an interesting way to look at it too, is that like we took what we were given and passed on something better, you know, to the best of our ability. But that's great, and it's actually it's very much akin to what a therapist one said to me, is that if your friends gave you this much ship and you only gave you kids this much, then you did a good job. Yeah, yeah, I would say that in our case, we weren't aware of how traumatized you were when we had kids. Yeah, we had not done no work yet, you know, I had not worked through my own work at all of my my anxieties, my eruptions of rage, and my wife had not worked through the particular stuff that she brought their relationships. So our trauma showed up in a significant way after we had kids. Yeah, and not sure because we didn't love them, because we weren't devoted to them. Yeah, exactly. I feel fortunate I had my son, I don't know, four years after I got sober from heroin addiction, and so I was deeply embedded in my own recovery and wellness. And again I'm not saying like if we had a ten pound bag of trauma, ship I passed down, you know, maybe three because you learn more right the healing journey, the nature of it, you say at one point in the book, And I absolutely love this talking about the healing journey. You say, in my experience, we're never as close as we hope and never as far as we fear, which I think is a beautiful way of summing up. Like this kind of goes on, and we have our moments where like I've come so far, and then another moment where like I got so far to go, you know, but we are where we are on it exactly and as long as we're conscious, you know. Yeah, So if I have a moment where revisit some old traumatic imprint, I can be aware of it. I can very quickly transform it and move past it. Yea. So it's the consciousness of it that really makes defifience. Yep. So let's quickly move through trauma defining kind of what it is at a basic level. I think we hear the word a lot, but you've got some fairly specific ways of defining it. Yeah. So, as a former English teacher, I pay a lot of attention to language, and trauma has got a specific word origin. It's a Greek word for wounding. So trauma is a psychic wound. That's important to understand because the wounds can show up as a rough spot that really hurts every time you touch it, or it can scar over and become thick and hard and unfeeling and inflexible. So trauma shows up in both of those ways, both of those characteristics of the wound. Number one, it also means that trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is what happened inside you. So trauma is not the event in my case being given to a stranger by my mother when I was eleven, moneths old, or somebody might have been sexually abused, or something might have been neglected. That's not the trauma. That's the traumatic event. The trauma is the wound that we sustained as a result, which is good news, because if the trauma was that I was given by a stranger to my mother to save my life, but I experienced it as an abandonment. If that was the trauma, that will never change that happened, that will never not have happened. But if the trauma is the wound that I sustained, which is the belief, but I wasn't loved and I wasn't lovable, that can be healed at any moment. So trauma is not what happened to you, it's what you sustained internally as a result. And we can traumatize people in two major ways. When it's been bad, things happened that shouldn't such as my code uncle would abandoned them by my mother and the conditions of wartime Nancy occupied Hungary. But you don't need that. You don't need genocide or or you just need parents who are like we were. My wife and I unconscious over own traumas we need. Parents are very stressed and who are not able to meet the traud's needs as I've outlined them, and not having your needs met can be traumatic as well. It can wound you as well. It can hurt you as well. And then what people do with the wound with small kids do they can't help it, it's too painful, so they disconnect from their emotions and their bodies. So that disconnection themselves is the essence of trauma. Yeah. I love that point. That disconnection is really you say, it's the most prominent thing in trauma, And that's a really interesting thing to think about because we can be disconnected from lots of different things and lots of different ways. But it's interesting when people ask me to define spirituality, I say, spirituality is connecting to what matters, right, So it's kind of opposite, right of that, it's recognizing what's important to me and how do I connect to it? Or spiritual is connected to what isn't the matter? Yeah? Yeah, But you talked about recovery. You said that by by the time you had your son, your your four years and recovery. Let's look at that word. What does it mean to recover something? Man means to get get something back. What did you get back? I guess I got back some of my own agency and authenticity to use a couple of your words, that will will get to you know. I got back a sense of my own ability to control my life within reason, and I got some access to, you know, my authentic self. I mean, you know I'm still in recovery, right, I mean so, I know, but I'm looking at them. So actually, what you did is you began to recovery yourself. You know. You when we said about trauma as a disconnection from the self, Yep, the healing process is the recurvery of the self. Yep. That's the whole point. That's what the word means. We use the word recovery, but we often don't ask yourselves. What is it that we're finding again? Yes, but we're actually finding ourselves, that true self that never got destroyed, which is why the potential we're healing exists in everyone. Yep. Jumping around a little bit here, but talking about addiction. I loved this line. You said, all addictions and centives can be summed up as in a escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane, lived in experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one's skin. So it's ironic that we're recovering ourselves. But part of so much of what addiction is just trying to escape that self, that damage self. The addition is trying to not to escape from the true self. It's actually trying to get a taste of the two self. To the addictive process, the addiction is an escape from the alienate itself. So when Keith Richards, who's the Rose, the most famous ex heroin addict, the guitarist of the Rolling Stone, has he given it up? He's always give it up A long time ago, okay, And I read his biography called Life. Okay, one of Keith Richards would write a biography and call it life. I mean, what narcissistic title, But it's a great title. And he says when we talked about his addiction, he said, the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours. And by that he meant the alienated, this uncomfortable self. And and what the heroin does, or alcohol those or the pornography does or whatever, or the work callism as the momentarily if we feel alive and present and as seast, which is aspects of the truth self. So addiction is an attempt to escape from melli in itself, to get a temporary taste of the real self. It's a self destructive, self defeating method, but that's the intention totally. I've often said, you know, people talk about addiction as an escape, and I understand that. But for me, all my drug use, it didn't matter what it was, made the world come alive for me. It made me feel connected to the world. That made me interested in the world. It wasn't this internal thing. It was coming to life because I didn't know how to do that otherwise. That's beautifully said, And that's why the disease model of addiction is so shallow. What kind of disease makes you feel more connected to life? Yep? Agreed. The problem was the disconnect and that's the trauma that we're talking about. Yep. So that's why my mentor on addiction is not why addiction, but why the pain? What's the pain that's driving the behavior? The addiction is only an attempt to solve a problem imposed by trauma. Yeah, I've heard that one that you've used. You know, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And there's another question that you say about addiction that I love, which is another way to think about it, is not to ask what's wrong with it, but what's right about it? What is it that the person is getting from that? And then recognizing okay, that tells us something about the nature of what needs healed exactly. And then you just said it you wanted connection and yep, yeah, that's what it was giving you. And then the question we have to ask is how did you lose that? Yeah? And how can you regain it without that addictive drive? Yea, how can you genuinely have those qualities, not just temporarily under the influence, but actually in your life? And that's that's what the recovery is all about, isn't it. Yeah? And I think in my case particularly, that leads us well into talking about this clash between attachment and authenticity. Yeah. I do think that's the part of my particular wounding was, you know, I can't be authentic to how I'm actually feeling. I can't deal with what I'm actually feeling without putting my need to be close to my family I had to choose one or the other, and you say that as a young person will always choose the attachment. Talk a little bit more about that clash between attachment and authenticity. Well, we talked about the need for attachment, and attachment is the drive to be close to another being for the purpose of being taken care of, or for the purpose of taking care of the other in the case of the infant, to be taken care of. In the case of the parent, the parents on instinct is to take care of the infant. Now, so that attachment relationship for birds and mammals, including them things is essential because we thought of the young doesn't survive a day, so it's not negotiable. Not The human need for attachment is much longer than for any other creature because we're immature for much longer, and of course it's with us for a lifetime. Didn't we just find out during COVID how important attachment is. Didn't we suffer because of the social isolation that was imposed by the COVID ecademic or their response to it. Attation is important throughout the lifetime, but never more crucial for survival than in infancy and read childhood. So that's one drive that we have. But we have another drive. And I've talked about the child's essential need to experience all the emotions. Now wise that the case, because the emotions came along to support our survival. So we evolved out there in nature. How long does the creature in nature survive with they're not in touch with their gut feelings, they're authentic feelings, not very long, not realized. That's not a luxury, it's another survival need. However, when we have the experience that I had as a child or that you had as a child, that in this culture many should not have. But if they're authentically present with all their emotions, then not acceptable to the people on whose their life depends. They will automatically and unconsciously suppress their authenticity for the sake of being attached. And then for the rest of our lives we're consumed with pleasing others, placating others, impressing others, being attractive to others, being acceptable to others, being approved of by others, and we'll forget who we actually are. And those dynamics impose both physical and mental illness and human beings. And this society feeds on people desperation to be accepted the fifty billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry. What is it about but people's desperation to be attractive to others so they'll be accepted. I could give you many examples, but the point is that that surrender of authentic should it costs us severely in mental and physical health. This would be a good place to kind of go into a key idea in the book, which is that features of our personality or features of our non authentic self. We could also use that phrasing can contribute to our disease state. Right. You know, I think we all know most people at this point, we'll accept to some degree that what we think and feel has an impact on our physical health. You talk a lot in the book about a type CEE personality, a type of person who is likely to get sick. That scared the crap out of me, you know, because I look at it. I'm like, well, okay, I've got a I've got a fair amount of that in there, right, So tell me about the type C personality and how that contributes to disease states, both mental and physical. So, first of all, it's not quite accurate to call it the TYPESI personality because these are character traits, okay, which are learned and developed, but then not a fixed part of the individual. They can be transformed. And that's the whole point. There are a recurring part I love. There was somewhere in the book you talked about that where these things aren't fixed, but they are recurring, so they appear fixed, right, that's exactly the point. Yeah, So let's take the repression of healthy anger. Now, healthy anger has a purpose in life. You look at an animal. When an an animal enters its space, you've got an expression of healthy anger. You're in my space. Get out that healthy anger be events violence. Actually, so human beings have this healthy anger as a boundary defense. So if I were to invade your space physically or secondly, healthy responses during my space, get out. That's healthy anger. Once it's done, its job is over. You don't go into a rage. You don't carry it with your resentment for the rest of your life. You just expressed your anger. It protected your boundaries. Now it's gone. Now. The scientific fact is, which is unfortunately completely ignored in medical training, is that mind embody are uncircuitable. So just as angry as a boundary defense. What is the immune system. It's a boundary defense. The job of the immune system is to let in what is healthy and nurturing, such as nutriments, vitamins, healthy bacteria, and to keep out toxins and unhealthy bacterial invasion. That's the same job of the emotions, is to let in what's welcoming and nurturing and and conducive to growth and health, and to keep out what isn't. That's why we developed emotions. Now it turns out that from the physiological and scientific point of view, the emotions and the immune system formed part of the same system. They're not separate, but the part of the same apparatus. When you repress your healthy boundaries by suppressing your healthy anger, you're also on demanding your immune system. Now, what happens to a healthy anger that you don't express. It doesn't disappear, it doesn't evaporate. It turns against the self in a form of depression or self loading and so on. In the same way the immune system turned against you. And now you've got aut immune disease or malignancy. As if you look at the people who develop autimmune disease and malignancy and This has been studied not just by me, but by many others, and it's been well documented. These are people who tend to ignore their own emotional needs for the sake of plaque hating others. I would never do that, oh good, never never huh me neither or never or or or they repressed their healthy anger. So they're very very nice people, always trying to please others. Or they identify with their duty and role and responsibility and how they look to others and how they serve the world while ignoring their own needs. And they tend to believe that they're responsible for other people feel and they must never disappoint anybody. So I give the case in the book of this physician and in Ottawa who died of cancer, and it's a bitchy. He actually said that Stanley and his mother, or Sydney and his mother had extraordinary relationship, a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives. So as they married men with young children, Sydney at dinner with his parents every day, and then he'd go home to be followed by another dinner to eat him to enjoy with his wife and his four children, until over the years a gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions. So this guy could not say to his mom, Mom, I got incredible news. I've got four kids, and I'm gonna have dinner with them most nights. And he also couldn't say to his life sweetheart, my parents are aging. They made me once or twice a week I have to have dinner with them. He just took on trying to please everybody at his own expense. And these characteristics lead to illness. Yeah, I've often observed in myself it used to show up in early sobrieties. I need a drink, I need a drink. I needed and that sort of faded, and then it turned into on the surface not a better thing, which is I want to die. I want to die, I want to die. What I realized was that cycle kicked off whenever I was in a situation where I had two people in my life who wanted different things for me and I was not going to be old to please them both, right, And my response to that was I want to die. Yeah. It felt so psychically overwhelming. And if we call it a character trait that's changing, one that's changed the fair amount but still recurs. But that speaks so strongly to me that that's what would plague me with the most despair. Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say that not today. I don't know in detail about your childhood, but I would say it's an imprint of your childhood, which is which is the impossible. Like, for example, in a divorce, the child has put in an impossible situation. Yep, yep. If I please alone, I displease the other. If I displease a one, I lose the contact with them, but I need that contact. So I don't know if anything that could happened to you, but it's something like that that's act the best. The first point. The second point is in your question, you're not even asking what would please me, right, Oh yeah, it's not even on the radar. Yeah. So the idea here is that this type of submerging our own needs for others needs can lead to physical and mental illness. Now, part of what happens when we start to say my physical illness maybe to some degree caused by my emotional state or all that, is that it's very easy to go into blame. Right, It's very easy for me to suddenly go, oh my god, I caused this and now I've got to fix it. Like it's almost as if when you think that, oh my god, my mental state is causing me to not be well, Now I've added another layer of stress onto the whole thing. So how do we work with that in a skillful way where we don't actually increase our stress level by having some of those realizations. Well, the question I would ask somebody who was blaming themselves like that is what they did. You consciously decided to suppress your emotions. Were you one year old or one day old? When did you make that decision? You didn't. This is an automatic adaptation pattern to shotted circumstances, oh, which she had no control whatsoever. So that self suppression actually played a beneficial role in your life because they kept your relationships going. Without those relationships, you could not survive. So actually that self suppression was part of the wisdom of your organism. It's just that it's no longer serving you. So it's not a question of blaming yourself. It's a question of understanding that these patterns are helping to make me sick. But I didn't create them. I'm not guilty about them. I'm responsible for changing it. Who else can but there's no culpability because I had no choice in the matter. In order to survive, I had to choose attachment over authenticity. That choice saved my life, for my existence at that time, it's no longer working for me. Blame has nothing to do with it, and that's why so much of the healing sections of my book are focused on the need for self compassion and how to achieve that. So we don't attack ourselves for anything. We understand where these patterns came from in order to better transform them. But self blame has no role in the matter. Yeah, you have a line I love in the book. You say, no matter how far back we look in the chain of consequence, great grandparents, pre modern ancestors, Adam and Eve, the first single cell them, but the accusing finger can find no fixed target. And I think that also then applies to ourselves. Right, there is no um blame. I love this line. It's entirely possible to embrace responsibility without taking on the useless baggage of guilt or blame. I think that is so important and yet really difficult to do well, especially in this society, because this is a society that the worships blame. When there's something wrong, we always want to find who's guilty, who's responsible? I mean it was guilt, who is responsible in the culpable sense, you know, so that we live in a culture of blame mentioned in the book. Literally, the saddest letter I ever received was from a guy who had read my book on Addiction and Around the Lunger Goes, in which I talked about sholto trauma being the template for addiction and and it wents to me. I find a book very interesting, but I can't blame my mother. It's because it's my own fault that I became a ship, you know, and there's such a lack of self compassion. I never blamed the mother in the book. I point out that it's not proper to blame parents because they were just acting out their own shot at traumas, like Mark wool And the family therapist says in the title of his book, it didn't start with you. So that's why the blaming finger finds no target. But this person was blaming themselves so harshly, which kept them from recovery. You know. Yeah, I think it's interesting because when I got sober in Columbus, Ohio, and a twelve step program in you can't imagine it was not ordinarily trauma informed culture, we might say, right. Um, And the idea there which was drummed into my head very strongly was it's nobody's fault, but yours. You need to take responsibility. There was a kernel of truth in that that was helpful, which is, I do have to take responsibility for this, and nobody else is going to stop this addiction. What I found though, over time, is that then I also had to incorporate this other element, which says, you know what, what happened to me imprinted on me and caused me to be the way I am, and no blame, but it still needs address. It happened to me and it affects me. Yeah, so is between fault and responsibility. And I'm not the first one to make this point responsibility. If you break down the word response ability, nobody else can respond to your circumstances about you. Yeah, nobody else can to respond to the imprints that you carry. But you you're a response able, but you're not at fault. You make a point in the book going back to this repression idea a little bit. You know that we repress you talk about a study where there was a really large gap in between what was happening to someone and what they reported their response was. So when we talk about well, repression, we think, oh, unconsciously, I'm pushing that away. But the mechanism is entirely maybe not entirely, but is to a large degree unconscious. We don't know we're doing it. Repression is unconscious, suppression is conscious. Okay, chronically they're both harmful, but repression is even more harmful. For for example, in the study, they were studying people's physiological stress responses in response to some negative stimulus, and these people who had malignancy, actually there were melanoma patients there. She's biological responses to stress with the same as everybody else's, but they reported that they weren't stressed at all. And that goes back to that disconnection that I talked about, is that one of the ways you survived child to traumas to disconnect from our feelings. Now, if you don't know that you're stressed, you're gonna be walking into stress assitiations all the time without any capacity to protect yourself. It's like if you had no sense of heat, you'd be putting your hand in the fire all the time, and that would burn you. Suppression is when I am angry, but I'm going to suppress it. Now. Sometimes that's necessary. I mean, if I had a gun at your head, you might be very angry with me, but that might not be the best time to express the anger. Yeah, to give a very triggering example, you might say, but if you chronically suppressed it, that would have a negative back on you. So I talked about you know, James Baldwin, the great black American writer, It was over that to be a black in the States is to live in a constant state of suppressed anger. And in the long term, chronic suppression, even if you aware of it, can be harmful. Suppression sometimes it's okay, chronically it's harmful. Repression is always harmful in the long term. And so how do we start to even know that we're repressing. Let's take the study. These people were being insulted, and physiologically we're seeing stress response. But if you ask them, they say, it doesn't bother me. Right, They're not lying, they're not lying at all. They're not lying. But there's a disconnect, and it's very difficult to even know what's happening. How do you start to identify like, oh, you know, there's repression, you say in the book. And I think this is so interesting to say, one of the healthiest things about me, my capacity to take it, to survive, to bounce back to prosper is intimately connected with my biggest neurotic liability, my facility in disconnecting from my feeling. So we've got this thing that, on one hand, to a certain degree, as a virtue, but taken too far, becomes a great enemy of ours. Well, let's put into context. That phrase is from student Sontag, who died of cancer. Yeah, and she denied the connection between emotions and physiology. Yeah, so I used that coude to show how ironic it is. Here she's actually describing the very mechanism that triggered her cancer, and she's describing it as a virtue. Now here's the thing. If only poor Susan Sontag haded a physician who could have told her, listen, we're going to deal with the physiological aspects of your cancer. But once we've done that, let's also look at the emotional factors that may have contributed to it. And yes, repression is one of them, and your repression, as she knew, was caused by the fact that she learned to do that in response to her mother, who abandoned her. So what I'm saying is, the body will send you a segment us. The body will make you sick. The body will say no when you didn't say no. It will show up in the form of mental health condition like depression, or show up in the form of anxiety. Will show up in the form of back spasms or stomachaches, or chronic colds or skin wrashes or dry mouth or migraines. The body will give you these signals. The problem is that people not not trained to listen to their bodies and to recognize that these symptoms aren't random misfortunes, that the body talking to you, trying to tell you to pay attention. Now, If only the physicians understood this, if only medical doctors understood the scientistically demonstrated links between the emotion and physiology, if they actually understood that disease and sentence are very often the body is signaling of a loss of acting to oneself and repression and all that then and these is shows up. That could be a learning process, and unfortunately physicians are not trying to do that. They only do with the biological aspects, but not the whole unity. Learn the book. I have a chapter called Diseases Teacher and talk too many people who actually, through their illness, learned what the body was trying to tell them about the loss of authenticity. We also give exercises to people like pay attention to yourself, Like at the end of the day, just check in with your body. How are you feeling? What is your body trying to tell you? Make that a regular exercise. No infant is separated from their bodies. Have you ever met an infant who says, I got the stomach ache, but I'm not going to bother my mommy and my daddy because they work so hard and I don't want to stress them any further. You know. So we're born connected. Our bodies keep trying to bring that connection back to us by speaking to us in a language of symptoms and the illness, so we can learn from the body. We don't think it's sick. We're gonna have to wait for that. We can learn to listen to our bodies before some illness forces us to wake up. Is your intention here to correct for if we're all the way over on this extreme where we say, when we're dealing with illness, the only thing we're dealing with is you know the body and the actual symptoms, and you know our current medical model where we don't take these emotional aspects in at all. You're not saying that we should go to the other extreme, where we go the only reason that anybody ever gets sick is because they had a bad thought. You're saying that we're so far over to an extreme. We need to treat the whole situation. It's all important. The medical is important to all that, and so is the emotional. We need to make this a more holistic treatment. That's the whole point. Look, I'm a trained physician. I have nothing but all at the capacity of modern medicine to perform miracles. I'm not here to denigrate or deny the value of modern scientific medicine. But it's one sided, it's narrow, it's shallow, and my knock against medical training is that we don't look at all the evidence that challenges are purely biological. Outlook all the evidence that shows the relationship of personal relationships, trauma, the mind, body, unity, culture and their impacts on health or illness. We ignore that completely in medical training. So therefore the functioning with have our brains tied behind our backs, are capacity to help people heal be so much deeper and so much more empower it if we looked at the whole picture. That's all I'm asking for. Yeah, I wanted to make that important clarification because you know, some people would worry that we're going too far away from any medicine, and that's not what you're talking about. Let's talk a little bit about the healing path we said earlier. You know, I love that line. We're never as close as we hope, We're never as far as we fear. You talk about some universal obstacles to healing. One of the universal obstacles to healing is trauma itself, which imposes the shame, basically the of the self, which actually makes you believe that you're not even worthy of healing or that you're not capable of it. So that me, as a physician and healer and wrestling author and somebody that a lot of people turn to it for guidance, had this fixed belief that I can help everybody else, but I can't hear on myself. That my trauma was surly and so deep, so entrenched that it was beyond repair. And not intellectually, I always knew that wasn't true, but any emotional it's how I operated, you know. And so one of the biggest obstacles are these trauma imposed self beliefs about our potentials and who we actually are. That's the biggest How did you work around that? I think that's a really important point. You will hear people say, and I know we've all thought at that point, I'm too broken. Yeah, yeah, that'll work for you. Yeah, but I'm too broken or deeper, I'm not worth it. How did you get around that? Because you had a ton of knowledge at your disposal. Yeah, all the intellectual knowledge that I had wasn't enough to rid me of that particular emotionally stamped believe. Well, somebody once said to me that I have this brilliant intellect that knows how to cut through all kinds of nonsense to look at the truth. But the same sharp knife of mentalect ends up cutting me, so that in some ways I had to recognize that I can't just listen to my intellect. That's the first point. That's an important tool as long as I'm building it consciously. But if I'm unconscious, it will turn against me. That's the first thing. And then you know, throughout the course of my life, in my marriage, there's been a lot of healing, a lot of repair. So I've learned, you know, what I can heal like would be more present. I can be intimate, I can open up, I can be vulnerable and not be destroyed. So that's been an important ground of ealing from me my relationship with my wife, to whom the book is actually dedicated. Then there are healing experience that I've had from mentors and healers and therapists and so on. Then there's the psychedelic work that I've done. There's a spiritual work that I've done. If I had to choose one area that's dominant, I'd say it's the relationship. But that was all supported by all these other modalities as well. So that's how. And also you have to develop I think that probably you understand very well, which is patience, which is that it does not have to happen all at once. It doesn't have to happen as a bug epiphonicclismically transformative experience. It's a lifelong process. Some of those experiences, which can be so mind opening, there's still an integration period that comes after that, like, Okay, I saw this truth, but okay, how do I actually start to now live this in the moment to moment part of my life? I Mean, sometimes those things are so big there's a major psychic change and happens kind of right away. But my experience has been those things need a lot of integration time. I've have known people very fee who had those absolute, unitary, transformative experiences. I'm not wired that way, at least not so far so for me and most people, I know, it's more of a process where we have glimpses of the truth and then we have to integrate that into our lives. But to who doesn't know doesn't automatically start manifesting itself in a way that we fully present to it. So it's it's a process, you know, And that's why I I've said this before, but you know, I've written my own epitaph, you know, and what I want engraved on my stone, I will mark my earthly Reman's is this is a lot more rook that I had anticipated. It's a process, people, and it's a lifelong process. Thank god, you just made me think of a song I love by a musician I love, Frank Turner, and the song is called Eulogy. And at the end, the basic thing on his eulogy is, you know, at least I fucking tried. But that's really a beautiful sentiment when you kind of boil it down, is you know, I did the best with what was given to me. I made a conscious effort. And I think so much of what you're talking about is about bringing conscious intention because one of the things this idea of the repression that these people who care about the emotional needs of others care about duty and responsibility. You know, all these things are closely linked to positive traits like compassion, honor, diligence, you know, kindness, generosity, And so it's really about that conscious question, what's happening here? Why am I doing this? You know, have talked about this on the show a lot between when I say to myself, I have to go see my mother, yeah, versus when I go, I'm making a choice to go see my mother based on values that I've examined about what's important to me. Now, again, there's a lot of work to do that, but that conscious intention, like what's really going on here? I love the idea in Buddhism of near and far enemies, right. You know, if we talk about a term like equanimity, um, it's far enemy as being a jerk, right, or being a drama queen, it's near enemy is indifference. That's right. And to take your example of your mom and applied to see my own work with a physician. Am I being driven to be wanted by people and to be respected by people and to be admired by them? Or are you being called to help them? Because that's what satisfies me. When I'm being driven, I'm not in charge. Something else is in charge. When I'm called. I can conscious decide are we being driven or being called? Two different propositions, even though the action from the outside i'd look the same. Yes, And my experience has been there's an element of both, right, and I have to try and you have to try and work with that. It's never quite so clean, is like, all right, this is completely a calling because I'm like, well, yeah, there's still those emotional guilt messages that are that are in there too, And so you know what's most prominent what's the lion share of it? You know, it would be nice if it was just that cleanly cut. Well, I think that's the work, is to distinguish the two. And to go back to your question about wolves, which one are you going to feed? The calling or the driven nous? You know, and when you're being driven, that's going to have an impact not only I knew, but also in a relationship because if you're driven to see your mom, are you going to feel about it afterwards? You're going to resent her? Yes? Yes, And so you go you don't say no because you want to be closer to her, and then you end up resenting her, which drives you further apart. So the driven part will also always have negative consequences. The calling part will only have positive consequences. Yeah, so let's talk about the four a's that promote healing. You actually add two more on at the end, which maybe we can get to. But can you share what those are? Yeah? I don't know what order I put them in. But the first one would be authenticity, which we already talked about that need to be ourselves, which begins by noticing where by not being authentic and just asking ourselves, well, why not what's happening here? What? What belief do I have that keeps me from showing up as authentic? So that's the first one authenticity agency, which is that I'm no one who is in charge of my life. I'm the one who decides what happens to me and my psyche in my body. Then there is acceptance, which is not tolerance for what's intolerable, but accepting this is how things are. Now, what do I do about it? So as we don't deny reality. You know, if I lose an election, I'm gonna accept that I lost the election. I'm not gonna deny it. You know, That's what acceptance will like. I'm not gonna rail and create hostility because I can deal with reality. I'm not strong enough to deal with reality. If my ego is so weak that I have to win every context iver renteer, then you're not into acceptance and you're gonna create a lot of conflict within an outside yourself. So that's acceptance. The acceptance doesn't mean that you have to put up with it acceptly justice This is how it is? Now? What do I do but it? So that's except offense. You make an important point about acceptance too, that it's not just accepting externally what's happening, it's accepting internally what's happening. I'm angry, I'm sad. When we think of acceptance, I think we often think of just we have to accept what's out there. But you make the really important point that it's also accepting internally what's actually occurring. Yes, so if I lose the election, I might be sad, and and then I'll say, you know what, I'm very sad that'st this election because I really don't wanted to serve you longer, and I have certain ideas that I wanted to put into practice and I won't have a chance. I also feel sad for all the people that supported me. So I'm gonna be with my sadness. I'm not going to deny that I'm sad and pretend that i'm somehow instead outraged and angry and so on. So I don't mean to keep harping on that I'm very obvious example or very traumatized man. But that's what acceptance looks like, is you accept the internal state. You accept grief, You accept the fact that no, I wasn't loved the way I needed to be loved and that hurts. I'm going to accept that pain rather than to run away from it and to drink or opiate or into seeking sexual satisfaction at every turn of the page, you know. So that's acceptance and then anger. We talked about the points of healthy anger. If I were to do the brick again, I would put in a fifth one, which is awareness. Uh and I somehow I missed that one, but it should be in there as well. Yeah. It's almost the meta skill, right that makes all of this possible exactly. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it was so obvious that I just didn't see it. Yeah, yeah, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about a meeting you had. I don't know that. I'm going to get her name right here, be Tina Goring. Goring share that I just found that an absolutely fascinating thing that happened to you, and a beautiful thing. So this is in the first healing chapter of the book. And Herman Goreing was Hitler's set and in command. He was the head of the Luftwaffe that killed answer tons of people of the German Air Force. He was also the head of the guest step I think at some point, and he was Hitler designated there for a long time. He was also an opiate addict and a food addict and a highly traumatized person. Now, his grandniece, Bettina Goring, was born after the war from a very traumatized family, and there are some filmmakers that made the documentary about her but also about me, so they thought, you know, her and I would have something to say to each other. So me as a Jewish infant who almost lost my life and certainly was deeply traumatized during the Nazi genocide that took place in Hungary where five million people who killed him three months, including my grandparents and as I said earlier, including almost myself and my mother as well. It's very close. So Goring was a big pillar of that criminal regime, and his grandniece carried all the guilt. She's one of these impacts that just absorbs everything. So she had a very dark psyche and she actually knew about my work and reached out to me pretty talk. So we did, and she told me that she had this healing experience where she actually consciously decided to enter the psyche of her granduncle. She said it was horrendous because she's an impact, so she can do that. But she said it was the darkest night of the spirit that she could ever have imagined. It was horrible, she said, to be inside his psyche, but in doing so and in coming to the other side, she cleansed herself as well. And that experience and the very contact with her, the very fact that I am talking to this human being who comes from this terrible legacy of criminal insanity and me who are almost victim to my life but certainly has been stamped by the same chrominal insanity. No, we're talking to each other about healing and about understanding each other. I thought, boy disguised the limit. Yeah, I thought it was a beautiful part of the book. Also in a really touching story. And when you were talking about her inhabiting Grand nucles psyche, you know, I got chills about how dark it must have been in there to be that man and the darkness that he imposed on the world as a result. Oh yeah, yeah, it's an awful chapter. Well, gab Or, thank you so much for coming on. It is always such a pleasure to talk with you. I really loved this new book. I got a lot out of it personally some things I need to be continuing to look at and working on, and I appreciate you and your work, so thank you likewise, and it's always a pleasure to speak with you. And thanks for the close reading of the book you seem to have done that allow us to engage in this deep conversation, so thank you for that. You're very welcome. It was a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. 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