Financial stress on the parents

translates into physiological stress in

the children. They didn't inherit

anything in terms of a disease. They're

just reacting to the environment. People

call Dr. Gabor Mate the people whisper,

legendary thinker and best-selling

author.

He's highly sought after for his

expertise on addiction, stress, and

childhood development.

The evidence linking mental illness and

childhood adversity is about as strong

as the evidence linking smoking and lung

cancer. And the average physician

doesn't hear a word about that. It's

astonishing. I can give you the example

of Donald Trump. I mean, his father was

a psychopath.

You are the enemy of the people. Go

ahead.

For him, these were not choices so much

as survival techniques. And that's the

mark of a traumatized child, the denial

of reality.

What do I have to understand about your

earliest years to understand you?

My grandparents were killed in

Auschwitz, and my mother and I barely

survived. And then my mother, to save my

life, gives me to a stranger. The sense

I get is that I'm being rejected and

abandoned cuz I'm not good enough. How

did that rear its ugly head throughout

your life? Any number of ways. See,

trauma, as I define it, is not about

what happens to us. It's about what

happens inside of us as a result of what

happens to us. It's costing us in terms

of our physical health, our

relationship, our mental health, and so

on. How does one go about correcting

that?

It's a multi-layered answer. First of

all,

Before this episode begins, I just want

to say a huge thank you to all of our

new subscribers. 74% of you that watch

this channel didn't subscribe before.

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ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is

The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's

listening, but if you are, then please

keep this to yourself.

My dear little man,

only after many long months do I take it

in hand, the pen, so that I may briefly

sketch for you the unspeakable horrors

of those times, the details of which I

do not wish you to know.

Those are words that your mother wrote

into her diary in the 1940s during the

Holocaust.

She wrote those words in April of 1945,

3 months after the

Soviet Army expelled the

Nazis from Budapest, where which is

where we lived. So, she was referring to

the previous year and the beginning of

that year, late 1944 and early 1945. And

in those diary entries, she's addressing

many of them to you directly as a baby.

She wrote the diary to me directly

as if it was like a account of my life

addressed to me.

You talk so much in in your in all your

books, um and much of your work about

the importance of that early context.

It's really been I mean, the center

point of all the writing that I've read

recently. And I know, because it's

it's so evident in everything that

you've done, that that's been a key your

own early context has been a key

inspiration for why you've taken such a

an interest in these topics. What was

your early context? What do I have to

understand about your earliest years to

understand you?

So,

it's just a fact about human beings that

the template that forms us will affect

how we see the world, how we understand

ourselves,

how we relate to other people. And um

that early template is our earliest

months, even in utero, already in the

womb, we're being affected by

the environment, but certainly in the

early years when our brain is being

formed and our personality is taking

shape.

And so, that forms our worldview.

Now, my worldview was and my sense of

self was shaped by the fact that

at 2 months of age, when I was 2 months

of age, the German Army occupied

Hungary.

Hungary was the last country in Eastern

Europe where the Jewish population had

not been exterminated, and that was our

turn.

The day after the German Army marched

into Budapest, which was March 19th,

2000 1944, the day after my mother

called the pediatrician to say, "Would

you please come and see Gabor, cuz he's

crying all the time." And the doctor

said, "Of course I'll come, but all my

Jewish Jewish babies are crying."

And so that the fact is that when

mothers are stressed or in pain, the

infant feels all that and takes it

personally, and it becomes part of their

template for how they view the world.

So, that was that year that's when that

year began in which my grandparents were

killed in Auschwitz and my father was

away in forced labor, and my mother and

I barely survived. And

it's a story I've told many times, but

that's when my brain is developing and

that's when I'm forming my sense of

myself.

And then my mother,

to save my life, gives me to a stranger,

and I don't see her for 6 weeks.

The sense I get is that I'm not wanted

and I'm being rejected and abandoned and

cuz I'm not good enough.

That's

how my life began.

So, your mother gives you away for 5 to

6 weeks Yeah. in order to sort of save

you from starvation in in a

ghetto that that she was going to,

right? That's right.

This is after after your grandparents

were killed in Auschwitz by Yeah. the

Nazis. Um how do you know in hindsight

that that that moment of those 6 weeks

created that sense of abandonment in

you?

I I wouldn't say it's just that one that

one moment. Children very much view

themselves

through the interaction with their

parents.

Now, first of all, I had no father cuz

he was gone. Hadn't Hadn't seen him

except very briefly when I was a month

old, but there was no father in the

picture.

My mother was grief-stricken

and full of woe and worry about what's

going to happen to us and just the the

task of surviving each day.

She's not playful with me. She's not

smiling at me very much. She's

worried-looking. She's stressed-looking.

The infant takes everything personally.

That's just the nature of the infant. As

infants, we're narcissists. We think

it's all about us. So, when things are

great, hey, we're great. But when my

mother's unhappy,

it's because she she doesn't want me or

I can't make her happy or I'm

inadequate.

So, that separation from my mother

certainly set a template for some of my

relationship interactions with my spouse

decades later, but the sense of not

being good enough and and and and and

being responsible,

um that was inculcated in me throughout

that whole first year of life.

So much so that in this book, The Myth

of Normal, I I actually talk about a an

experience with the psychedelic

mushrooms

at at the with a therapist. This is not

that long ago, 7 years ago, maybe.

Um

when I'm at least 70 years old, and

I'm in this therapeutic session with the

psilocybin, the the medicine,

and the therapist,

and I know that I'm 70 70 years old, and

I know this is a therapy session, and I

know her name, and I know

who I am in the world, but at the same

time I'm experiencing myself as a

1-year-old baby.

And she's my mother.

And I start crying. Tears coming down to

my my face. And I say, "I'm so sorry I

made your life so difficult."

Now, that was an unconscious memory of

my sense of myself as a 1-year-old, that

I made my mother's life so difficult,

because that's the way the baby

interprets it.

So,

even if your mother loved you, which

mine did infinitely, not that she always

treated me the best way possible, but

she did love me. And um

can you imagine what a great act of love

even giving me to a stranger in the

street would have been for her, you

know?

But, because of her own unhappiness, I

can only conclude that I'm not good

enough.

It's It's my fault.

At At 70 years old, having that

psilocybin experience, coming to that

realization, or having that sort of

um having that response to your

therapist where

they take the role of your mother and

you're a 1-year-old, how does somebody

at 70 years old go about correcting

that?

That sort of interpretation you had of

that traumatic early early event.

Well,

by bringing up to the conscious level.

Then when I notice that sense of guilt

or responsibility in me, I say, "Oh,

that's what it's about." So, it's it's

it's a meaning

See, to trauma, as I define it, is not

about what happens to us. It's about

what happens inside of us as a result of

what happens to us.

And so, the wound in my in trauma means

wound. So, the wound in this case is my

sense of deficiency or not being good

enough, not being worthy enough. Once I

realize that, "Oh, this has got nothing

to do with anything except this

interpretation that I made of my own

experience all those years ago," then

when I notice it, I can no longer

believe it. I don't have to any longer

be a

subject

to that interpretation of myself and the

world. So, awareness is one step It's

not adequate, but it's an essential step

towards um letting go.

That that one um belief that you weren't

good enough, yeah, how did that

rear its ugly head throughout your life?

It um

made me a workaholic physician cuz I had

to keep proving my worth.

And it doesn't matter. Now,

I don't know if you've ever had an

addiction, but the nature of it is that

we're trying to get from the outside

something that only can

arise and fulfill us from the inside.

So,

when you're looking at it from the

outside, it's addictive because you get

it temporarily, but then that internal

emptiness, that hole, never goes away.

So, it has to be filled over and over

and over again, and it can only be done

so temporarily. So, it becomes runaway

addictive. So, then, you know, work

becomes an addiction because I keep

trying to prove my worth.

And doesn't matter how many times,

you know, I I I may show up in a

positive way at the beginning of

someone's life or the end of somebody

else's life or anytime in between,

it never fills that emptiness that my

sense of lack of worthiness creates.

So, that's one way it shows up.

Another way it shows up is if

in my relationship,

I don't feel as satisfied,

my wife doesn't

please me the way I like her to,

um

then I get angry. But what am I getting

angry?

I'm getting angry because it's my sense

of not being good enough. That's being

now revealed.

It it gets uncovered. This this this

this self-accusation.

Um but I get angry at her because her

job isn't to make me not feel that.

You know, we we we get into this

relationship

for all kinds of reasons. Some of them

are conscious, some are not, some are

positive, some are come out of trauma.

Well, in my case,

I want that relationship to prove to me

how good I am.

So, when it isn't proving that, then I

get upset at my partner, you know. Well,

except the gap is inside me, not inside.

It's not coming from her.

So, it shows up

it shows up in my parenting, it it shows

up all over the place.

I mean, I think both of those examples

sound a lot like me, especially the

first one.

Yeah. Um the second one as well, but the

In what sense? In the sense that I I'm

definitely a a workaholic and I thought

in the earlier phases of my life, I like

sacrificed everything in this pursuit of

becoming a millionaire and and having

all this stuff and really getting this

validation. Sacrificed meaningful

connections, everything in the pursuit

of this one thing. Well, part of the

toxicity of the culture that I

talk about in this book is that it

actually rewards that kind of emptiness

or that or that desperate

uh seeking to

to to to fill that emptiness because

because you know, you get rewarded. You

make a lot of money, a lot of people

admire you, uh

you get to feel good about yourself.

Mind you,

my guess is that good feeling is only

temporary, at least if my example is any

uh guide, you know, that that feeling

good cuz somebody from the outside

values you is only a temporary salve for

the

for the wound that's inside.

But the world actually rewards it, you

know, so you're a workaholic doctor,

great, you make more money and all these

people respect you. Meanwhile, you're

hollowing yourself from the from the

inside and you're not available for your

family. You know, so that that's part of

the craziness of this culture. And it's

like the it's like the hedonistic

treadmill in a in a sense because you

just never

enough is never enough, as you say. So,

the last achievement needs to be

surpassed by a greater achievement for

me to get an applaud or a clap. I've

never really made the connection that

the reason why I'm a workaholic is

because

I I'm trying to prove to the world that

I'm enough, but I think that it's

entirely true. Yeah. So, in your case,

like like race and class

in this society of inequality are

certainly traumatic, potentially

traumatic inputs, as I pointed in this

book and and you know, to to to the

degree that it affects people's

physiology,

you know, but also then, I don't know

your family origin or what kind of

relationship you have with your parents,

but there also may have been a sense

like I got with my mom for, you know,

reasons and and and for whatever it

might have happened in your family,

maybe you got the sense as well that

even in your family of origin, you

weren't

good enough somehow. So, So, my mom

would scream at my dad for like 7 hours

a day. And my dad would just sit there.

Okay.

And so, my early memories of like

looking at my mom and dad are this kind

of

violent verbally, not like physically.

This incredibly stressful screaming, one

person screaming at the other. That's

what I remember, but from reading what

you've written in this book and from

what you've said now,

I actually might have learned a

sort of learned to that I was the

problem to some degree. You tuned into

it that way. That's just the whole

point. That's what I mean about kids

being narcissists. The I don't mean that

in the negative sense. I just mean

actually they think it's all about them.

So, if your mother is unhappy,

it's your fault.

You know, and you're not good enough.

So, then you have to go out there and

work to prove yourself to prove to the

world and to yourself that you're good

enough. So, that

going back to your first question about

how these things show up in our lives,

that's how they show up.

And so, at 12 years old, you you

emigrate to Vancouver. Yeah. Um by 28,

you join the medical profession. Yeah.

And you spend the next 32 years,

roughly, working in medical practice.

at 28, I went back to medical school,

actually. I I I took a detour. I was a

high school teacher for

and um

and then I was 27, 28 when I started

medical school. At age 33, I think I

began my medical

career of 32 years. And in those 33

years, what what was your practice? What

did you specialize in? What did you

focus on?

So,

I was a family physician,

which meant I delivered a lot of babies

and I looked after people's problems

from beginning to the end of life.

I also worked in palliative care.

I was the director of a unit at the

hospital which looked after people with

terminal disease.

And I did

that was 22 years or so of my practice,

20 22 years.

And then then I switched

gears altogether and I went to work in

the downtown east side of Vancouver,

British Columbia, which is North North

America's most concentrated area of drug

use. We have more

people coming from anywhere in the world

are shocked by what they see there,

thousands of people in the streets

injecting, selling, using, inhaling

uh ingesting drugs of all kinds and

people are suffer the consequences of

drug use in a society that doesn't

understand drug use, so that punishes it

and excludes it, ostracizes it. So,

people get HIV from dirty needles and

and and hepatitis C. So,

this is the population often they're

homeless. So, that's the population I

worked with for 12 years

till the end of my medical work.

That experience working with patients

that were in palliative care. So, that's

for anybody that doesn't know, that's

patients that are approaching the end of

their life that have terminal illnesses

and that are aware that they're going to

to die.

What did that experience teach you?

It took an acceptance of one's

lack of

lack of omnipotence as a physician cuz

you go into the you want to cure people,

you want to you want people to heal.

And that takes a tremendous acceptance

to say, you know, we've reached the

limit of our knowledge.

And that doesn't mean we can't help

people, but we certainly can't cure

them.

You know,

and so, it taught me how to be with the

inevitable.

And and and when you're working with

people who are

in the process of dying, but I mean, by

the way, who isn't in the process of

dying, you know, but but people whose

time is more limited than the rest of

us,

acceptance, you learn a lot of

acceptance.

It challenges you to do your best

when you know your best isn't going to

be

saving anybody's lives, but it's to help

people live a life of

as little suffering as possible and as

much dignity as possible.

So, it really challenges the best parts

of you to to show up.

Patience, acceptance,

um intuition.

Personally, it taught me a lot to listen

to people.

Interesting enough,

people really want to be heard when

they're dying.

Uh they want to make sense of their

lives.

They want to tell their stories and they

want their stories to be heard.

And so, um I listened a lot. I just sat

by the bedside and I listened.

Um all that.

When you listened, did you

did you hear any themes relating to

regret or things that actually mattered?

Cuz I always imagine in if I was given

such news that my life was coming to an

end and there was an approximate date,

it would be quite a powerful way of

finally realizing what truly matters and

what never did.

You know, people react to their

impending death in different ways. So,

there were some people who just

fought it to the end, you know, didn't

really want to accept it.

But most people

were more along the lines that you

describe

where they really get to see what's

important. And so,

I mentioned this a number of times, it

sounds strange and I don't recommend it,

but I've had patients say to me,

"Doctor, I don't know how to tell you

this and I can't even explain it,

perhaps, but this illness that's going

to take my life is the best thing that

ever happened to me."

And what by meant they meant a couple of

things by it. They meant what you just

said about finding out what's really

important in life. In this book, The

Myth of Normal, I interview a young man

called Bill Pike who wrote a book called

Blessed with a Brain Tumor.

And how

what kind of blessing is that?

So, I said I asked Will, "What's the

blessing?" And he said, "It made me

appreciate every moment.

It meant every time I talked to

somebody, this I knew this might be the

last conversation I'm going to have with

them. So, it better be a human, genuine

interaction."

So, there was that aspect of it.

The other aspect of it was that

again, my view is as I pointed in this

book and in previous works, who gets

sick and who doesn't isn't isn't exactly

accidental. There were certainly

personality patterns based on traumatic

experiences in childhood that make

disease more likely.

And people very often realize that

throughout their lives

they had abandoned who they were. They

lived a life that didn't wasn't

meaningful for them.

And

around death they reconnected with

themselves in an

authentic way and that seemed to be

worth a lot to people.

Again, I don't recommend that way of

going to reconnect with yourself, but

people have certainly I certainly saw

it. So, those are the two big lessons.

After your 33 years in medical practice,

um

you you described that you had a bit of

a you kind of tuned into a creative

calling which was writing. Well, I began

to write when I was a physician. So, my

first book on ADHD after I was diagnosed

with it was published in 1999 now. So,

that was 23 years ago now. So, I began

to write and even before then I wrote

because I wrote columns for newspapers.

But yes, there was a time in my life

where the writing impulse which had been

with me all my life was stifled and and

and and and

stymied.

And so was I cuz I had this frustration.

In fact, I had the sense that there's

something I needed to express.

But I

didn't know what and didn't know how.

And at some point I realized, oh yeah, I

need to write. So, that began before I

finished medical practice, but it

certainly

um

has been essential to my ongoing

unfolding as a human being.

I I was so compelled by that when I when

I read about that because um

I started to really understand the value

of creativity in all of our lives

regardless of whether we have the luxury

of being called an artist or not.

And so, what in your view is the

importance of

Well, you're you're singing my tune here

if I may say that way because um

I quote in this book there's a great

Hungarian-Canadian stress researcher

called Janos Selye, S E L Y E and Selye

is the one who actually coined the word

stress in the sense that we use it

today. And he's the one that showed in

the laboratory how stress diminishes the

immune system and this

disorganizes the hormones and and also

eats the stomach lining and all this

kind of stuff, but

Selye also said and I quote him here,

what is in us must out. What is in us

must out.

That we all have to follow our creative

urges in the way that nature prepared

for us, otherwise we can be hopeless

hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. I'm

paraphrasing it very closely.

So,

we are created in image of God. I mean,

as you know,

what your religious views are, but that

sense that we're created in images of

God means that we are creators cuz the

essence of God is creation.

In fact, we call God the creator and we

call the result of that creation.

If we're created and if we're if we're

offshoots

of that creative dynamic in the

universe, then it means that it's in us

to create. And whatever form that takes,

I mean, you know, you don't want to see

me

do art, you know, unless you

I can do a pretty good stick figure, you

know, but but I'm married to an artist.

Um

So, that creativity doesn't have to take

the form of formal art, but it does have

to take some flow of something that's

inside you that needs to come out.

Otherwise, as Selye says, you get

hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. And

so, in that sense, everybody's got that

creative urge and that may take the form

of social intercourse. It might take the

form of gardening. I don't care.

Communing with nature, uh

athletic expression, I don't care what.

But it but but there's somebody

everybody's got it. And if people don't

realize they have it, it's only cuz life

has hemmed them in and they're too busy.

And sometimes they are trying to make a

living or trying to survive or too

disconnected from themselves.

But it's in all of us and to the extent

that we don't give it expression, we

suffer.

One of the things that really hems it in

is um

is the prospect that we might not be

good at it because we think to express

ourselves creatively we kind of join a

competition of sorts.

And that's that's a trap we can fall

into. So, if I'm going to DJ, I need to

become a good DJ, but in social

comparison or else I don't want to but

but what I've come to learn is in fact

the act of DJing alone in my kitchen at

midnight is is the reward regardless of

outcome or whether there's a crowd

there. It's just me and my dog

listening. That is the expression is the

reward, not the achievement or the medal

that I might get or the

Yeah, not the external. Well, look, I

went through that in the writing of this

book. So, here I am this, you know,

writer who writes about, you know,

trauma and you know, healing and all of

a sudden I'm in a panic cuz I'm writing

a book and I realized that the problem

was that you you talked about

identifying with your work. So, I had

identified with this book. So, the

problem wasn't the book.

Cuz let's say I write the book and it's

not a success. I mean, okay,

big headline in the Sunday Times, book

not a big success. You know,

how big a big deal is that in the

history of the universe?

But if I identify with the book

and it's not going well, then if the

book fails, then I'm failing as a person

which then goes back to my very earliest

concern about not being worth it, you

know? So,

once I disidentified,

once I said, no, this is just a book. It

may be a good book. It may be an

important book. It may be a book that

doesn't hit the mark,

but it's only a book. And how it goes

says nothing about me or my worth.

Once I could decouple that, then I could

confidently and much more comfortably go

back to the writing of it. But I went

through that crisis. Mhm. It seems like

a bit of a paradox that this the the

lack of self-worth would would motivate

someone to to create great things

because they want the approval, but at

the same time make the process so

agonizing because their self-esteem

seems to be on the line. Yeah. Or their

sense of self-worth is on the line.

Well, that dynamic was in me. Once I

realized it, I let go of it, you know?

So, it didn't it didn't dominate me in

the end and

honestly to God by the time I finished

the book,

I'm not just saying this in retrospect.

It's it's a best-seller now in several

countries, but

I actually said to myself and I meant

it,

now I've done the book,

that's what matters.

I've said what was in me to say.

How the world reacts,

I can't control and it doesn't actually

matter at on a fundamental level. It's

not that I don't want this book to be a

success. I mean, success, of course I

want it to sell 10 zillion copies, but

that doesn't define my self-worth or how

I function in the world or how I feel

about myself. Honestly, it does not and

I

I I understood that by the time I

finished working on it.

So, once it's done, it's out there doing

its work or

not doing its work,

but I don't have to hang my own sense of

self on how the book does.

Because at that point that's an outcome

you can't control, right? So, trying to

control that would be

Yeah.

anxiety Uh and Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course

you can't control it, no.

10 years this book

took you to write. Took me to prepare.

It took three took about 3 years to

write, yeah. You describe it as

a calling. Yeah. The myth of normal.

Yeah.

What four words to

to sort of pull people in and to in some

way summarize a 550-odd page book. Why

why those four words? Why that phrase?

Uh can I pause for a moment to find a

quote on my cell phone? 100%.

Yeah. I just

So, this is um

are you familiar with the work of

Eckhart Tolle? Uh Eckhart Tolle, yes.

Okay, yeah. So, Tolle lives in Vancouver

like I do. And

in one of his books he says, the normal

state of mind of most human beings

contains a strong element of what we

would call dysfunction or even madness,

you know? So,

um

in medical um

parlance, normal means healthy and

natural. So, there's a normal range of

blood pressure, normal

temperature.

It's a range. Outside that range there's

no life. There's no health. Either too

high or too low, you're gone.

So, normal means it's it's equivalent

with synonymous with healthy and

natural.

However, we make that same assumption

that

our in society what we used to, what we

call normal, is also healthy and

natural, which is a myth cuz I'm saying

that in this society what we consider to

be normal is neither healthy nor

natural. In fact, it's heart hurtful to

us. So, that we're using the word normal

in in a way that

doesn't apply.

In the narrow medical sense,

it's accurate, but in the broader sense,

that which we used to in this society we

consider normal is just not good for us,

you know? And norm is kind of a

statistic or it's a kind of a

um average. So, if everybody have a dog,

if everybody in London mistreated their

dogs

and if you didn't, then you'd be

abnormal.

You know? So, it's a myth to say that

what is normal is healthy and natural.

That's what I mean by the myth of

normal. That's one one thing I mean. The

other thing I mean is

if we understand that the actual science

of the unity of everything, I'm not

talking about spiritual insight here.

I'm talking about, you know,

physiological science that our

physiology and psychology is very much

affected by our life experiences, being

in utero, childbirth, early childhood,

and throughout the lifetime.

It also follows that illness and health

are not individual attributes. They're

actually manifestations of our

relationships and our situation in the

world and and and our history.

That also means when the circumstances

are abnormal,

you expect people to be sick.

You know, just as if

you gave animals something that wasn't

healthy for them, they'd be sick. That'd

be what you'd expect.

So,

this idea that the people who are ill

either physically or mentally abnormal,

I say no. These are normal responses to

an abnormal set of circumstances.

And

rather than being sort of those abnormal

ones and then the rest of us,

it's really a spectrum

that we're all pretty much all on. It's

one of those three senses.

This idea of normal is is is a myth.

Uh and and it's one that keeps us from

seeing reality.

And we're all abnormal

in some way. Yeah. So, if you maybe

might might maybe my attention is

different, maybe my, you know, my my

interpersonal relationships are

abnormal, but in some way I'm going to

be abnormal. As it relates to

treatments, how do you think that the

medical profession and the psychological

profession would respond differently if

we remove this idea that there is a

normal? Mhm. How would how would our

approaches change to treating people?

Mhm.

Well, that's

it's it's a multi-layered answer. Um

first of all, we would recognize that

our diagnoses are not explanations for

anything.

So, you know,

I've been diagnosed with ADD, you know,

legitimately so. Uh my first book was on

it. Um

but but it

doesn't explain anything.

So,

so I tune out easily, very easily, you

know, and sometimes when I don't often

when I don't want to, but, you know,

unless I'm highly motivated.

So, so you might say this person has

ADD. How do we know? Cuz he tunes out a

lot.

Why does he tune out a lot? He's got

ADD. How do we know he's got ADD? Cuz he

tunes out a lot. So, the the the

So, first of all, we have to understand

that our understanding of normal and

what's outside the normal, they don't

doesn't explain anything.

They they can

they can describe, if you describe my

mental functioning as that of somebody

who's got an automatic tendency to tune

out, you'd be accurate.

So, as a description,

it's helpful. As an explanation as to

why this person isn't behaving, quote

unquote, normally,

it's doesn't explain a thing. No, if you

understood

that I spent my infancy

under very difficult circumstances where

I was very stressed because of all the

stuff I already talked about, and that

tuning out was a normal response

to to those circumstances as a way of

protecting myself from the stress of it

all.

And this is happening when my brain was

developing.

Then you'd understand there's nothing

abnormal about my my tuning out. In

fact, it is the normal response to a set

of abnormal circumstances.

So, that's the first point. And I could

go to the same kind of

dialectic with all manner of physical

and mental diseases, by the way,

so-called.

The

second point is Why do you say

so-called?

Um

Well, look, the disease model is

as long as we understand it's a model,

it's okay.

When we think it's describes reality

fully,

it doesn't. So, um

for example, um

we call we talk about mental illnesses.

And we're assuming that there's a kind

of definite pathology there just as in

rheumatoid arthritis, you can describe

the inflammation of the joints and

the blood levels of certain antibodies

being abnormal and

hormonal levels

being disturbed, you know.

We're making the same assumption in

mental illness. There's no such evidence

in mental illness.

There's no physiological parameters that

you can say somebody's got mental

illness.

There's just been a study

a few months ago of thousands of brain

scans

of people with mental illness diagnoses.

There's nothing diagnostic about them

about the brain scans.

It's not like I can take an x-ray of a

lung and say that this is this lung is

got what we call consolidation or or or

fluid

indicating inflammation.

There's nothing like that in mental

diagnoses. There's no blood test you can

do and so on. So, illness

is a is is a

is a model. I mean, it it might

if somebody's really depressed, um

even suicidal, perhaps, and they might

need pharmacological intervention, which

could really save their lives.

That may be true.

And in that sense, you may say that

they're ill.

As long as we realize that this is a

construct that we're applying here, but

that there is no actual measurement of

that that's at all similar to what we

call physical disease.

But even in physical disease, we make

certain assumptions.

Um

for example, somebody has rheumatoid

arthritis.

Now,

that nothing wrong with that statement

on the face of it, but there's an

assumption there.

The assumption is that there's this

thing called rheumatoid arthritis.

And there's this person called me.

And this person has this thing. Now, you

know, the example I often give. Here's

my cell phone. I'm holding it in my

hand. I have a cell phone. It's not part

of me. It says nothing about me.

It just it's it's a discrete object.

Its nature doesn't depend on my nature.

Nothing.

Is that true about rheumatoid arthritis?

Or is it more true to say, as I found

out, that this is a condition that shows

up in people with certain life

experiences and certain ways of

functioning in the world?

And that because of the

science document the unity of mind and

body and the

impossibility

of separating the activity of our

emotional apparatus from say our immune

system, cuz it's all one

organismic unit,

therefore, the when the immune system

turns against the body, as it does in

the rheumatoid arthritis, the immune

system actually attacks the body,

is that a thing that's got a life of its

own, or is it a process that's happening

inside that person because of certain

aspects of their lives?

Now, if I say it's a thing that happens

to you, then that thing has got a life

of its own. And that's how most doctors

see it. They see somebody with

rheumatoid arthritis, they say, "Okay,

this is the kind you've got. This is

what's going to happen. This is what

This is the only thing we can do is to

is to mitigate the symptoms."

I find that's not true.

I find that the rheumatoid By the Not

just I find it. The science finds it.

That rheumatoid arthritis is very much

related to stress and trauma.

And the more stress there is, the more

likely it is to flare up. And if people

deal with that stress, if they know how

to prevent it, their illness abates.

Which means that it's not a thing that's

separate. It's a process that happens

inside them.

This is a subtle concept, though. I'm

wondering if I'm explaining it clearly

enough.

No, you are. And it's And it's really

making me question how much we

misunderstand the the relationship

between the mind and the immune system.

Yeah. Because

that's the real That's the important

connection to understand if you if you

are to accept all the things you've just

said.

Yeah. Which we don't we don't understand

I don't think typically we understand

that my mind and my immune system have

such a close relationship. Well,

the There's a whole new science that

studies those relationships. It's called

psychoneuroimmunology,

which studies the interlinked unity of

the emotional apparatus of our brain and

body with the immune system, with the

nervous system, and with the hormonal

apparatus.

I mean, it's just so obvious.

I could change your hormonal state in

the split second right now without

touching you. Just by screaming at you

and threatening you.

That would necessarily create a change.

I mean, it's just clear that emotions

are inseparable, you know, and and the

other funny thing is Well, several funny

things.

How do we treat most conditions in

medicine? Right away, inflammations. If

you go to a dermatologist with inflamed

skin,

if you go to a rheumatologist with

inflamed joints,

if you go to a gastroenterologist with

inflamed intestines,

if you go to a respirologist with um

inflamed lungs, uh if you go to a

neurologist with inflamed nervous system

as in multiple sclerosis, they're going

to give you steroids

to settle the inflammation. Now, what

are steroids? They are stress hormones.

And you would think that as physicians,

we would ask ourselves, "Gosh, we're

treating everything with stress

hormones. Does stress maybe have

something to do with this condition?"

And when you look at the scientific

literature, yes, yes, yes, and yes. So,

the

um There's a great Canadian physician,

actually knighted by Queen Victoria, one

of the great medical teachers of all

kinds, Sir William Osler, and he said in

1890 that rheumatoid arthritis is a

stress-driven disease.

The the French uh neurologist

Jean-Martin Charcot, who first described

multiple sclerosis, he said, "This is a

stress-driven condition."

And since then, there's been so much

research.

So,

what what I'm saying is that this this

way of looking at

what we call disease as a process

is so much more accurate scientifically,

actually, in understanding the mind-body

unity. And then, you know, naturally,

when people are traumatized, that has a

huge impact on their physiology. Their

psychological trauma is a huge impact on

their physiology. It's just science.

But it's science that's not taught to

medical teach medical doctors. It's just

for some strange reason. Well,

the average physician never hears a

single lecture about, say, trauma and

its relationship to illness. And yet,

there's studies internationally,

thousands of them,

showing those relationships.

So, there's this strange gap between

science and and medical practice. But it

would it would change medical practice

for the better.

Because what would happen if you went to

a physician and you presented with your

symptom, and they'd they'd say, "Okay,

look, we'll give you such and such

medication to deal with your symptoms.

And then, let's look at your life

in the context that you live it and see

how that the stresses that you may be

taking on, the traumas you may be

carrying might be affecting the

physiology of your body."

Now, they don't have to be all trauma

therapists to do that. They just have to

raise the question

and to start and and to begin the

inquiry. That'll make a huge change to

that person's life and to their disease

process.

And clearly to their kids' lives as

well, because I remember reading in your

book about the the study with the rats.

Yeah. Um and how they Could you tell me

about that study? How the stress study

with the rats and how the parents um

treatment of a child

impacted their stress response and then

also they passed that on, which I

thought was stunning. Yeah, that was a

very interesting study. It was done in

Canada at McGill University.

Um I think maybe sometime in the last 20

years,

early 2000s, I think.

And

they looked at how mother rats

interacted with their infants, their

newborns.

And some and there's a process called

grooming

in which the mother rat licks the

infant around the perineal

perineal or perianal area, you know, on

the genitalia.

This is shortly after birth. These

mother rats just start licking their

infants.

Some mother rats did it in a more

efficient and caring kind of way than

other mother rats.

Those that had the better kind of

caring, the better kind of grooming,

grew to be calmer

and responded to stress in more

functional ways than those little rats

who

as neonates had not been given that same

kind of

efficient and quite as

caring

grooming.

And what they found that in the brains

of those adult rats who had been groomed

one way or the other

as infants, the stress apparatus was

different. Certain receptors for the

stress hormones. So, one of them could

calm themselves more easily than the

other.

What was interesting is you might say,

"Well, so what? That's just genetic. The

calmer mothers passed on their genes to

their infants." No, they didn't. Cuz if

you took the infants of mothers who

groomed beautifully

and put them with mothers who didn't,

and conversely, you took the infant rats

of mothers who

um didn't groom so well, but you put

them with mothers who did,

it changed. It changed the brain and

it's for for the adult. It changed the

brain?

Yeah, it changed the genetic

functioning, not the genes,

but the genetic functioning. This is

called epigenetics, how genes are turned

on and off by the environment.

And then, those mother and those rats

who were groomed well as infants,

doesn't matter

what their original mother was, but

those rats who were groomed well, they

went on to groom their infants

in exactly the way they'd been groomed.

So, this is how we pass on our parenting

stuff

from one generation to the next, both

behaviorally, but also through the

turning on or off of certain genes.

So, in essence, the how nurturing our

parents were has a big impact on our own

ability to handle stress positively or

negatively. Oh, absolutely. And then we

pass that down to our

How stressed our parents were,

how they reacted to our own stresses as

infants, you know,

uh that has everything to do with how

our brains handle stress later on.

And so, some people just don't handle

stress very well. They don't handle

frustration very well.

You should have seen me this morning at

the hotel when the swimming pool didn't

open in time, you know?

But I I was a lot better than I might

have been years ago, you know? Uh

but yeah, our stress response is very

much programmed by our early

developmental experiences.

Speaking about our early experiences,

the first word in this sort of subtitle

of your book is the word trauma. Yeah.

Um it's a word that I've I've talked

about a lot on this podcast and I've,

you know, I've had a lot of people here

that have opened up about their traumas.

How How do you define trauma? I know

society's defined it in its own way, but

how do you define it, the word?

I define it very specifically. Um

it's not something bad that happens to

you. It's not some It's not that way.

You know, I went to this movie last

night and I was traumatized. No, you

weren't. You were just sad or you were

had some emotional pain, but you weren't

traumatized.

Trauma means a wound. That's the literal

meaning of the word. It's a Greek word

for wounding.

So, trauma is a psychological wound that

you sustain.

And um

it behaves like a wound. So, on the one

hand,

a wound, if it's very raw, if you touch

it, it just really hurts. So, if if I

have a wound around not being wanted,

then

or or the belief that I'm not,

then decades later, if anything reminds

me of that, it hurts as much as it did

when I originally incurred the wound.

So, in in one sense, trauma is an

unhealed wound that touched, we get

triggered. That's what triggering means,

by the way. So, an old wound wound

that's

activated or touched. The other thing

that happens to wounds is that they scar

over.

And scar tissue has certain

characteristics. It's thick.

It has no nerve ending, so there's no

feeling in it. So, people traumatized

disconnect from their feelings.

Um scar tissue is rigid. It's not

flexible. So, we lose kind of response

flexibility. So, when something happens,

we tend to react in typical,

stereotypical, predictable,

dysfunctional ways cuz of the rigidity.

And scar tissue doesn't grow like

healthy flesh. So, people who are

traumatized tend to be stuck in

emotional states that characterized

their development when they were

traumatized. So, when somebody says to

you,

"Don't be such a baby."

Uh

doesn't sound very pleasant, but there's

some truth to it. It means that you're

probably reacting according to lines of

some wound that you sustained as an

infant. And now you're you're reacting

as if that wound was happening all over

again. This is what one of my friends in

the trauma world, Peter Levine, calls

the tyranny of the past.

So, something happens in the present

and we react

as if we're back there in the past when

this first happened.

And we're not in the present moment at

all.

And I was I was trying to figure out how

many people um as a percentage of the

population have a

have trauma.

But then I I I you know, I read this

stat that 60% of adults um say that

they've had a sort of a traumatic early

upbringing whatever or traumatic events

from their childhood. But then I

thought, maybe everybody has trauma.

It depends on um how we understand

trauma.

So, if we understand trauma as only the

really terrible things that happen to

people, which do happen to people,

you know,

in the book I talked about

a British friend of mine who was now

living in Canada.

Um they are a yoga teacher and a

meditation teacher

and a psychologist

and an artist, actually.

And they grew up in some orphanage here

in Britain where they were racially

taunted every every morning, you know,

words that are in the book by her

permission, which I'm not going to cite

here publicly.

And that gave her a sense of deficient,

a sense of self that I'm just not good

enough, that I don't belong, and so on.

There's those obvious traumas or the

obvious trauma of being sexually abused.

So,

men who are sexually abused, according

to Canadian study, have triple the rate

of heart attacks as adults,

you know, and all kinds of physiological

reasons. But that should be the case.

So, there's those

self-evident large big T traumas that we

call big T trauma, okay, T with a

capital T, trauma with a capital T.

There's a certain percentage of the

population, much larger than we think,

subject to that. If you include

um

all the known factors such as physical,

sexual, or emotional abuse. Spanking, by

the way, has not been shown to be as

traumatic as

harsher forms of physical abuse.

Spanking, which is still recommended by

so-called experts who shall remain

remain unnamed for the moment. Uh the

death of a parent, violence in the

family, violence parental violence

against each other,

um a parent being jailed,

a parent being mentally ill.

Did I say a parent being addicted? A

rancorous divorce. These are the

identified big traumas, big T traumas.

Not not to mention poverty,

not to mention extreme inequality, um

war, and so on.

But then,

if you remember that trauma is not what

happens to you, but what happens inside

you,

it's the wound. People can be wounded

not just by bad things happening to

them, but small children can be wounded

in loving families

where they don't get their needs met.

I mean, that's obvious in a physical

sense.

If a child doesn't get proper nutrition,

their their body will suffer. Their mind

will suffer.

We we're also creatures with emotional

needs as important as our physical

needs.

So, when the child's emotional needs are

not met, that child is wounded.

That's what we call small t trauma,

which is not the big ticket events such

as I described, but just a child's need

to be loved unconditionally, to be held

when distressed, to be responded to, to

be seen, to be heard, to be allowed

their full range of emotion without them

being stamped on in the name of

so-called discipline. Um

the right to play

creatively,

spontaneously, out there in nature, not

with these damn digital gadgets that

subvert and uh

hijack the child's imagination,

but spontaneous play that's essential

for brain development.

So, what I'm saying is that when these

needs are not for the

unconditional loving attachment

relationship, when those needs are

frustrated, children are also hurt. And

I call that trauma as well because it

shows up later in life as the impact of

painful wounds.

So, trauma in this society, for all

kinds of reasons, is far more common

than we imagine.

From sitting here and speaking to, I

don't know, somewhere over a hundred

different people that come from all

walks of life, but specifically people

that are successful in their industries,

and you talked about, you know,

how um

an anomalous early upbringing can create

sort of abnormality in an adult. A lot

of people I sit here are successful

because of some kind of abnormality, or

at least their interpretation of some

kind of early event that caused them to

have some sort of abnormal belief about

themselves that they're not enough, so

they become a billionaire or a gold

medalist or whatever it might be. Yeah.

One of the things that I thought I could

predict is

I thought I could, if they told me, I

thought after doing a hundred episodes,

if they told me the traumatic event

they'd been through, I could predict the

the outcome in them. Mhm. But there's a

disconnect there because, you know, I'd

sit here with a guest who went through

one of your tall um capital T traumas

like domestic violence.

Yeah.

And

one of them might become incredibly

angry. Yeah. And one of them might

become the most peaceful, loving person

I've ever met. Yeah. And that taught me

that there's this thing in between the

event, which is what you call

interpretation. Yeah.

And I found that really I found that as

that kind of makes it really difficult

to diagnose. Well, now look, so the two

examples you gave, um

that really peaceful person, maybe

really peaceful for genuinely good

reasons such as they found

the milk of human love flowing through

their veins and they've had some

spiritual mm reconciliation with the

world, or they may have lit genuinely

learned compassion for themselves and

others.

But they could also be very nice and

peaceful cuz they're suppressing their

healthy anger.

Because they're actually sitting on

their rage unconsciously,

which is going to show up in the form of

some kind of health manifestation, I

guarantee you, later on. So, you can't

tell from the outside

without asking some questions.

Uh

Or I can give you the example of of a

Donald Trump

who

had a really traumatic childhood. I

mean, his father was a this as described

by his psychologist niece, Mary Trump,

his father Trump's father,

who is Mary's grandfather,

was a psychopath.

And who really uh demeaned and harshly

treated their their children.

So, Trump decides unconsciously

that, by the way, I'm not talking about

his policies here. I'm not this is not a

political debate.

And in the book I point out that his

opponent was also traumatized, uh

Hillary Clinton. So, this is this is a

uh

ecumenical uh view of trauma and

politics. I'm not choosing sides.

I'm just saying that you can see his

trauma in every moment he opens his

mouth.

His grandiosity, his need to make

himself bigger, more powerful,

aggressive, and he has much as said in

his autobiography that the world is a

horrible place, a dog-eat-dog place

where everybody is after you. Everybody

wants your wife and your house and your

wealth, and this is your friends.

Never mind your enemies. That's the

world he lives in. Now, that world that

he lives in reflects his childhood home.

He developed that world view.

He came to it honestly, you might say,

cuz that's the world that he lived in.

And he gets to be really successful in

this crazy world.

You know, financially, although people

question,

you know, was he really as big a success

as he says he was?

But he certainly was successful

politically if by success you mean the

attainment of power.

His brother, on the other hand, Mary

Trump's father, Trump's niece's father,

drank himself to death.

And they were both responses to the same

You can never say it's exactly the same

for two kids, but there was that there

was that toxic home environment. One of

them ends up dead as an alcoholic.

The other ends up at the pinnacle of

power.

Um

And when I look at them both,

I see dysfunction there, significant

dysfunction there.

So, one of them one of those the

consequences of that early upbringing

was it materialized itself as sort of

addiction.

And the other got the same psychological

reinforcement or the thing missing from

power and work and money.

Well, well, well, well, well, Donald

Trump learned that the way to survive is

to be aggressive and harsh and

competitive and to get the other before

they get to you,

which is a faithful reproduction of his

early childhood experiences. So, for him

these were not choices so much as

survival

techniques and uh

when they talk about his

lying,

well,

I don't know when he's lying or when

he's not, but my sense is that often he

actually believes what he's saying.

And actually his biographer or the

person who

co-wrote his

quasi-autobiographical, The Art of the

Deal, this this writer says that he's

never met anybody who's so capable of

believing something that's not true to

be true if he wants it to be true.

Now, that's the mark of a traumatized

child.

You know, a denial of reality.

It is an inauguration, there was a

certain number of people that came to

the

He couldn't stand it that there weren't

as many people there as came to Barack

Obama's

inauguration. There were much smaller

number of people there.

He created this reality where many more

people came to his inauguration.

Now, what age behavior is that?

That's a four-year-old with more kids

came to his party than my party. That

can't be true.

But that's Donald's way of dealing with

reality.

It's not a moral failing as such. That's

how he survived.

And these survival um mechanisms for

then be get to form our personalities.

And

again, in this world, sometimes they pay

off

in certain ways.

Is that is that often the case with

pathological liars? They've learned to

lie as a way to survive.

Oh, absolutely. The the the German

philosopher writer, Nietzsche, Friedrich

Nietzsche, said, "People lie their way

out of reality who have been hurt by

reality."

And so,

I've lied,

you know, like when I had my shopping

addiction,

I lied every day to my wife.

You know, and even afterwards,

when she tried when she stopped trying

to change my behavior,

I said, "Just tell me

if you're going to shop, you're going to

spend another thousand dollars on music,

just tell me."

I still couldn't.

Cuz

I was so ashamed of it.

And so, the lying became like a

a way of survival for me. Defense

against reality.

It's a defense against reality and it's

defense against

um being judged.

You know?

Well, that says something about my

childhood, you know? Nobody's born a

liar. As we say in this book, there are

congenial liars, but there there are no

congenital liars. No one-day-old baby

tells any lies. No one-day-old baby

pretends anything. If we end up

pretending in any way at all to the

extent that we do, it's because we had

to learn that's what we must do to

survive.

You said something at the start when I

gave the example that I have this I sat

with a guest here who went through

domestic abuse.

Yeah. And they are the calmest person.

And then you said, "Well, maybe they're

suppressing it." And in fact,

the minute you said that, it reminded me

of something they said, which is they

they said to me on this podcast that

they had um

angry outbursts all the time.

So, sometimes their child will come up

to them Yeah. um and want to play when

they're working, and they'll snap. Yeah.

And they're trying to they're trying to

deal with that. Yeah. That's what I

meant, that they're sitting on this

mm

crater of

volcanic crater of anger, which

sometimes bursts out of them. So, their

their demeanor is like a really

developed, suppressed

um way of handling rage,

which rage, when they were children, had

they expressed, would have gotten them

into more trouble. So, suppressing it,

repressing it,

became their survival It's all about

survival, you see. So, it became their

survival mechanism. Now,

that person, as long as they keep it

that way, they're

at risk.

They're at risk for

mental health diagnosis like depression.

Cuz what do we what is depression? It

means you're pushing something down.

That's what it means.

What do we push down?

Our natural emotions. Why do we push

them down? Cuz we have to to survive. So

that that person I I I don't know. I

can't prognosticate what's going to

happen to them, but if they don't work

it out,

in general,

they're at risk for some kind of mental

or physical manifestation. That's my

experience.

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You talked about expressing one's

emotions. And something you've talked

about in this book, but also previously,

is this idea that there is such a thing

as healthy anger. Yeah. Um it's one of

the seven A's of your of healing, as you

say. The first being the topic a topic

we've talked about already, which is

acceptance.

Yeah.

Um

the next being awareness.

Well, awareness that we should have put

into this book, but we didn't.

Not into this book. Uh in this book I

put four A's, and uh I left out

awareness, and that was an omission on

my part. Really? Yeah, it was. I'm

sorry, but it was.

So in the book you have authenticity,

anger, acceptance, A- A- A- acceptance

and and agency, yeah. Yeah, and yeah,

acceptance.

Yeah. So

awareness you've said before before this

book that awareness is the starting

point.

Yeah.

I found that to be so true in my life,

but it's not very easy. I feel like

awareness is a is a luxury or a

privilege that is very hard fought.

Yeah. Because you're guessing. Yeah.

You're guessing ba- based on pattern

recognition. So I was guessing 25 years

old I can't get into relationship.

Anytime a girl comes near me, even af-

I've pursued her, I run off. Mhm. And to

figure out why I was doing that, to even

identify the behavior pattern go that's

not helpful. That's not going to lead me

to feeling whole. Yeah.

Um where does that come from? Took 25

years and a lot of like introspection.

But but most people they're living

unaware of the puppet master of trauma

that is driving their life. That's a

really good analogy. It's the trauma

really is like a

a puppet master behind the scenes so in

the unconscious pulling your strings,

and you're not aware of it, you know?

Do you remember Pinocchio? Yeah. So you

remember what

Pinocchio says at the end where he when

he finally becomes a real boy? Yeah,

yeah, yeah. He says, "How foolish I was

when I was a puppet."

And to the extent that we're being

activated by these

unconscious strings that are traumas

pulling behind the scenes,

and we're acting in our lives and we

think we're autonomous free beings, but

we're actually being controlled by

something in the past that we haven't

worked out, we're puppets.

We're actually puppets.

And and and and there's not there's not

much freedom in that.

There's no there's no freedom in it at

all.

So I mean

I suppose the opposite of trauma, if you

want to revisit that question, is is

liberation.

Interesting.

Liberation and and by reconnection. By

reconnection, but liberation from the

from the inexorable power of the

unconscious. Which is like cutting the

strings in a in a way. Kind of brings me

to I there's kind of two ways I want to

go with that. The first question I have

about about trauma and the puppet master

analogy is

do we ever do we ever really cut the

strings? Or do we just kind of learn to

pull against them when they try and tell

us to do something with more force than

they're exerting in the opposite

direction?

Um

that doesn't work very well.

Pushing against it because they're still

reactive. You're still not in charge.

You're just in automatic resistance mode

to something. There's no freedom in that

either.

You know? It's a still a So yeah.

Um

but awareness that you mentioned is huge

because once you're aware that there's

this

See, the thing about these strings may

not fray right away.

But once you're aware that ah

this reaction of mine

it's not about what's going on right

now. There's something old being

activated here. That awareness alone

weakens the it slackens the strings a

bit. Now you're no long- they're no

longer as taut. They're no longer as

automatically um

capable of pulling on you.

So it does have to begin begin with

awareness of them.

Ultimately,

if we realize that this puppet master is

just a desperate little person trying to

get you to survive the only way

he she they knew how when you were small

when they were small, if you make

friends with it,

but we relieve it of its duties,

saying thanks very much, but I can

handle it now.

It it eventually becomes a friend rather

than sort of our

master, you know?

On that first step of just

acknowledging, just understanding that

there is a puppet master that

controlling us, and exactly what strings

that puppet master is is pulling in our

lives, how does one go about

awareness, the process of awareness? Is

that I mean is it introspection, keeping

a diary, therapy? What what is it? Well,

all of that. I mean it all or any. But

even when you ask how you go about it,

what is the it? Well, for you to say how

to go about it, you already must have

some degree of awareness. If you didn't,

you wouldn't even be asking the

question.

So that's the very first step

of realizing that there's something here

to work on. There's something here to

work through. It does not need to be the

way it is. That already is the biggest

step. The Buddha said that that that

to to recognize the source of your

suffering is the first step towards

relieving the suffering. And so

as soon as you ask how you go about it,

you've already taken a huge step. Cuz